Disclaimer: All characters are copyright Sega Enterprises, Ltd, Dic, and Archie Publications, and NOT of the author’s own creation.

Author’s Note: I have set this story in the year 3236, in a SatAM timeline well into the prospective Third Season (after Snively’s successful defection to the Freedom Fighters—yep, he’s now a “good guy”), utilizing a few characters and plot contents from the Archie comic.  As the reader, please assume that Naugus and the original Robotnik, rather than “Eggman,” have taken Agnes and Colin Kintobor, Sr. and his team of Overlanders hostage as outlined in issues #.  “Rated PG.”

A portion of conversation between the characters “Hope” and “Snively” (“I see a naïve child/I see a mean man”) is inspired by a picture by Allison M. Fleury.

This is a story about mending wounds, physical AND spiritual.  I am not ashamed to call it a “warm-fuzzy” fic:  While I have written many “grittier,” less “rose-tinted” tales, I am of a firm conviction that we need more happiness in today’s world, and I hope to provide at least a taste of it here.  After all, there’s a pessimistic, fatalistic Snively in us all, but there’s also a child in us all, somewhere inside that earth-weathered, cynical exterior, that still loves to chase fireflies—and to believe in the impossible. J

Discovering Hope

“Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without words,

And never stops at all

And sweetest in the gale is heard.”

--Emily Dickinson

February 1, 3236 (After Naugus’s Coup)

“Girl child

You’re dancing with the stream,

Growing with the silver trees.

Your young questions,

You ask me what it means,

Oh, but I am not at ease.

For these broken wings won’t fly,

These broken wings won’t fly at all.”

--Dougie MacLean

          She knew the day would come, eventually.  The day in which the sole human inhabitants of Knothole--one innocently oblivious to the situation and the other, skilled at cynicism, and quite conscientiously balking—would have to be desensitized to each other.  The day in which Princess Sally Acorn, who held her breath every time the two Overlanders were even in the same general vicinity, would have to moderate a cataclysmic confrontation.

          She knew the day would come.

          After all, Hope the sweet ingénue and Snively the surly criminal were siblings.

          So they claimed, at least.  The identical surname, despite Sally’s severe skepticism, indeed gave testimony to the proclamation made by the latter human, whose unabashed disgust of his sister upon her arrival in their forest haven had given yet more doubt to Sally’s belief in his penitence for his deeds under Robotnik’s control.

          “How can you hate a little child so dreadfully?”  Bunnie Rabbott, his advocate throughout his redemption to the Freedom Fighters, had asked him in a tactics meeting one Friday, voicing Sally’s thoughts.  “Your own sister?”

          “Step-sister!” he had harshly corrected her, thrusting his arms over his scrawny chest and sinking into a deep sulk.  Those frostbite-inducing blue eyes began to glitter, and the brooding nephew of Julian offered no further explanation. 

And was not, after one look at his predatory facial expression, further challenged to do so.

          But now the time had come, because they both had caught an illness unique to Overlanders—the Rhinovirus, or, as Snively irritably termed it, the “Cold”—and there was only one licensed doctor, Horatio Quack, who could treat them.          

Hope had begged Sally’s father, King Maximilian, for shelter with the Freedom Fighters only a month ago.   An explosive battle with Naugus was followed by a rip in the thread of time and “zonal” boundaries; caused by the sorcerer’s tampering with the dynamics of Void magic, the ripple in chaos magic had grabbed the whole remaining human civilization—including Hope, her stepfather and Snively’s father Colin, and her grandmother, Agnes—from their space shuttle orbiting the planet . . . into peril. While Naugus labored to rectify the situation, Robotnik had been opportunistic—behind his new master’s back, the fat tyrant enacted Colin and Agnes’s roboticization. 

Out of pure spite—for he had always detested being in Colin’s shadow. 

To Hope, following the surviving Overlanders home without a family would yield an empty, soulless future.  Their earthbound home had been burned to the ground and ravaged by Mobian troops after the victory in the Great War; their space shuttle, in which Hope had lived since birth, had been a desperate attempt to find another habitable planet—in vain.  Now, Hope’s life with humans brought the prognosis of a barren heart and a barren home.  Thus, having grown attached to her rescuers, the Freedom Fighters, she felt staying in Knothole to be the only comforting solution.  Max had readily agreed, making provisions for her protection from the less hospitable Mobians, whose memories of the Great War had festered into a hard-hearted hatred for all humans. 

Especially for those with the surname of the general of the opposing military, and that of the despot who ravaged their homeland for a decade afterward.  The name equivocated with “Death,” or “Plague,” or perhaps “Satan.” Kintobor.

          The only other resident of Knothole bearing that name, when he caught wind of the news of Hope’s citizenship through Dulcy, paled like a specter, retreated hastily to his hut, and vomited.  The dragon stood outside his door blinking in puzzlement for a considerable time.  Finally offering to help him to his bed, she was thanked with a flood of foul language and an order to “bugger off.”  That afternoon the bizarrely vexed Snively would not set foot outside his room, not even for the weekly campfire, his favorite pastime, or for Antoine’s accommodating toasted marshmallows, his favorite food.          

          Now Sally was standing, hands on hips, at the side of the exam table on which the lean and wiry Overlander nervously perched, demanding an explanation.  “She’ll be escorted inside this very room any minute, Snively.  Whatever your reasons for resenting the child, you’d better resolve them quickly or you’ll be stuck in here together for two hours of misery.”

          He scowled at her.  “Too late for that.  I feel like bloody dying.”

“Why?  Why this discomfort?”

“Princess,” Snively moaned, slouching plaintively over and casting his eyes into hers in desperate appeal, “let’s just say she makes me remember things that . . . that I’d rather forget. Things that I’m not exactly proud of.”

She probed with the only guess of which she could conceive. “Something about your family?”

The mournful pale eyes widened with alarm, and she knew she’d hit her mark.  “Snively, why are you so tight-lipped? All I ever knew about your family was your atrocious uncle.  Is there more?”  She stared at him intensely, perceptively.

Snively’s lips formed several desperate cop-outs, several verbal dodges, but none seemed adequate enough to render audible.  He coughed.  His gaze roved the sterile room in an attempt to buy time. Thankfully for him, he was saved by a violent sneeze.  His eyes acquired a fatalistic, doomed glaze, and he pretended to be carried into partial incoherence by the illness that plagued him.  He groaned, covering his face melodramatically with a bony hand.

          Sally realized she had reached a dead end of communication, that he had dropped the subject decidedly.  She would never get anything now besides fibs and white lies.  “Bless you,” she grunted.

          “Princess Sally!”  An angelic voice flooded the room, and in bounded the ten-year old Hope, her lush waterfall of golden hair flying about her perfectly crafted little face.  Her upturned nose, tiny and delicate, was reddened by the excessive use of tissues.  Still her eyes shined.  “How did you know about that Overland custom?” 

          Sally grinned.  “What, saying ‘Bless you’? I know every manner of etiquette in the book, Sweetie.  That’s simply Diplomacy 101!”

          “And that kid,” Snively growled, with a self-righteous roll of eyes and a peevish jutting of the lip, “is simply Advanced Placement Annoying.”

          Sally elbowed him sharply.  “Quiet or I’ll send you back without your antibiotics.”

          But Hope already heard him.  Her face crumpled with youthful, uncomplicated rage.  She spoke with simple, plucky resolve.  “I remember you.  You’re him, aren’t you?  You’re my stepbrother—the pukeface.  You’re the one who never does nice stuff or thinks about anyone but himself, who always blamed my daddy for the things that went wrong.  Well, you know what I think?  I think we’d be better off if you left all the nice people here alone.  And you know what else? Your mean, silly words don’t hurt me one bit!” 

Sally gaped at the child, both shocked and impressed by her courage and bravado.

          Snively was massaging his temples; through the cracks in his fingers he thrust her a look that could send the devil himself cowering.  His voice was a flat sheet of ice.  “Kid—you just be careful, that sounded dangerously like a threat.  And right now, I’m easily inspired to come over there and smack you across the ass a couple of times for your trouble, just like our ‘daddy’ used to me—since, after all, I’m the ‘man of the house’ now, right?  The house that no longer exists!  But, hey, I’m really not so bad once you get used to me—at least I won’t use a belt on your derriere.”

          The girl glowered back.  “You just try it, you big jerk!  When Daddy gets back, I’ll tell on you.”

          “ ‘Daddy’ is not coming back, Hope,” the elder Kintobor sneered.  “Not ever!”

Now the child’s face began to truly fall and to wither with grief, but it only seemed to encourage her brother, whom, Sally began to realize, was hurting inwardly with his gnawing resentment and fury just as much as Hope was outwardly with her slowly gathering tears.  

Suddenly it dawned on the Princess—Snively was jealous of their father’s affections for Hope.  And so he raged on.  “He’s a robot now!  He doesn’t give a damn about us!  He’s forgotten us both! He forgot me a long time ago!  I was his great disappointment, you see!”  Spittle flew from between his gritted lips.  “Couldn’t turn on the cutesy charm like you or wield the old butcher’s knife and gun like him, so I was as good as dead to him from my birth! Well, now he’s as good as dead, probably scrap metal soon if old Julian has a hand in it, and more power to the wicked fat old brute, because I just wish more than anything that ‘Daddy’ would rot and rust and turn into maggot food!”  

          Hope, her thick skin peeled by her brother’s infamously cruel tongue, let out a wail and fled bawling.

          “Snively!” Sally hissed.  “That is enough!”  She left the room pursuing the girl. 

          Dr. Quack, having witnessed the whole outburst at a tactful distance, waddled up to the seething human boy and, resting a condescending hand on Snively’s head, smirked, “Hey, don’t sweat it.  It’s not like you need to pull any punches for the sake of an innocent, vulnerable little girl’s heart.  Yeah, just go ahead, shatter her psyche--you have my blessing!”

          Snively tore away from his grasp.  “Are you patronizing me?”

          “No, master Kintobor,” and Quack’s voice, the voice of a father of many, a devoted father who once relied on the Overlander’s fickle mercy during the incarceration of his children—who had falsified Princess Sally’s death when Snively, still Robotnik’s lackey, had blackmailed by threatening their well-being—became ferocious.  “No, I am expressing my disgust towards you.  And until you shape up your attitude towards kids like Hope, you can just kiss these antibiotic pills goodbye.”  He rattled a jar of medicine over Snively’s head; the Overlander struck out for them but the doctor pulled them smugly away.  “Ah, ah, ah.  Apologize first.” 

          Snively pouted.  “You’re just like that smelly bigot, St. John.  You’ve just got something against Overlanders.”

          Quack cackled suddenly, thrusting the boy off guard.  “You moron,” he chortled, “don’t try that with me!  I took the Hippocratic Oath when I became a doctor.  What species was Hippocrates, Snively?”  He grinned and strolled out the door before the ashen, sputtering human could respond. “Shape up!”

          Twenty minutes later Hope limped into the room supported at both shoulders by the comforting hands of Sally.  The monarch craned her neck protectively downward over the girl’s face, her auburn hair brushing across Hope’s tear-blotched cheek.  “Let’s try again, okay, sweetie?”  Her eyes, piercing with danger, darted in Snively’s direction as she led the child to a cot barely ten feet from his, and shrouded Hope’s small body in white sheets.  “You’ll have to forgive your brother,” she hissed, a warning—a warning directed at him-- rushing like an undercurrent below the gentleness of her voice. “He’s something of a misanthrope.”

            Snively, sprawled luxuriously in his cot, just snorted, stretched, and rolled his eyes.  His glossy, unkempt chestnut locks, having tumbled over his face during the catnap from which they’d roused him, barely concealed his disgust. “Whatever.” Always the gentleman.

          Hope’s sky blue eyes grew hard with scrutiny.  They drilled a hole in her brother’s face, straight through his wild hair.  Snively squirmed and tensed under the stare, unused to having his evasive façade of apathy penetrated. 

“Alright.  I forgive you,” the child spoke, and the second-in-command of Robotnik’s vast dark empire was taken aback:  When he’d believed he’d heard it all, calloused to every means of slander, he was caught off guard not by cruelty, but by grace.    He had been holding his breath; it flew out his lips an embarrassing wheeze, a squeal.  He wanted to kill her for exposing his cowardice.  And, damn the little brat, she had an eager look on her face, as if he might requite the sentiment—now he would seem twice the cad to the princess, a chicken and a miser of compassion. 

Hope.  Hope was on Hope’s face—hope for him.  He would have laughed at the absurd irony were he not so enraged.

“Don’t expect me to apologize,” he snarled.  “I only spoke my mind to you!”

          “I don’t need your apology,” Hope spat back.  “So don’t expect me to ask for it.  I expected you to thank me.” Her face barely changed with the words; it lacked hate, gaining only more intensity.

Snively blinked, flabbergasted.  He had met his match in the art of verbal sparring . . . in a ten-year-old girl. He mustered the old scornful smirk--stunted, though, empty and weak, under Hope’s confident glare. Words fought their way up his tightened throat, vengeful words meant for scathing.  “For what?”  He sat up and crouched on the cot, ready for the pounce.   Sally made a warning noise in her throat, but he ignored it.  He was cornered—and it made him mad.

“I see you,” he sneered.  “Yes, indeed.  I see what stands before me.  Nothing more than a naïve, chubby-cheeked child.  A sickeningly sweet Snickers candy bar. Why doesn’t this petite saint just sprout wings now, one asks?  Ha.  Ignorant child.  Yes, I see a naïve little girl, a girl who knows nothing about this damned world and its condemnations and its filth and its cruelty and what it can do to a man’s soul, and I am not impressed.  What can you offer me, Snickers bar?”  On and on he rambled, buoyant with his false arrogance, convincing himself of his superiority.

Until she spoke, and again simple, honest logic prevailed.  “You know what I see?  I see a mean man.  I see a mean, blind man who hates people before he even knows them.  Who looks for the worst in them.  Who’s too caught up in hating people to realize how much he’s hurting them, thinking his hate is the same thing as being smart.  And I’m not impressed either.  A little courage—I think I have plenty for you.” 

And with that she rolled over on her side away from her sibling, dismissing him, leaving him gawking.  “By the way, I liked the thing about the candy bar,” she yawned.  “If I ever had a nickname . . .”  Slumber took hold of her, leaving the statement hanging incomplete.  

Sally crossed her arms over her chest.  She was struggling not to allow the edges of her lips curl upward.  Her cautious gaze swept over Snively, who still stared slack-jawed at the dozing girl.  He eased dejectedly back under his covers.

“I don’t think I’m needed here any longer.”  The monarch’s voice was wry as she departed.  Snively wanted to tell her to shut up, but he was far too tired—and humiliated.  His head felt like a hot-flushed rock against the pillow.

His falcon eyes caught a figure stirring in the shadow of the doorway after the princess left. 

Dr. Quack. 

The physician wagged his index finger scornfully.  “Not good enough,” he breathed, flipping off the room’s lights and strolling away. 

The Overlander groaned in the darkness.  He allowed unconsciousness to overtake him, but the child’s words—like fleas, they lingered on the skin of his brain, nibbling and biting discomfort into his thoughts and drawing something like red, dripping shame.

And thus began the mending.

“Hope has conspired with the wind

And blown away

The demons of despair.”

--Maya Angelou

“Guess what.”

It was spoken loud and shrill, a delightful mixture of warbling fire alarm and nails on chalkboard, through the serene blackness of 3 am. 

Snively jumped a mile off his cot.  He fumbled for an invisible intercom switch, thickly grunting, “Wuh-wuh-what’s afoot? Fire? Coming, Dr. Robotnik, I’ve some water!”  He shot ramrod straight in the cot until his wild, bleary eyes processed his location, far from the time and place of his uncle’s wrath, and he flopped back against the pillow basking in relief.  “Good God . . .”

“I said, guess what!”  Again the noise hailed him—he realized it was a voice, accosting him with gleeful words.

If Sonic the Hedgehog were a female of ten years. . .

“Bloody hell, girl!”  Snively roared in the general direction of Hope’s cot.  “Does the term ‘pre-ulcer condition’ mean anything to you?” 

“Who are you yelling at?” More tempered, gentle, queried right by his ear, quivering with mirth.  “I’m right here.”  An infuriating giggle followed.

Snively squinted in the shade—yes, indeed, there the round, elfin face, with its halo of golden hair, peered around his pillow, grinning impishly; Hope was standing beside his cot, on her tiptoes.  “Hello.”

“Hello yourself, kid,” he growled.  Why did he feel so odd looking at her?  So exposed?  So . . .purged?  “Don’t you think you should get back to sleep? You’re ill.” Then, pointedly, gesturing at himself, “We’re ill.”

“But I just woke you up!”  She protested, giggling all the harder.

“Don’t make a habit of it.”

She laughed outright. “You’re so weird!”

“I’m weird?”  He pulled away from her, scowling.  “You’re the one babbling at people at three in the bloody morning, damn it!”  He fluttered a dismissive hand in her face.  “Off with you, now!”

“You shouldn’t swear.”  She rested a rosy cherub hand on his skinny arm.  Her face frowned with a child’s deep concern for what adults dismissed, sometimes unwisely, as trivial. Melodrama seized her tone.  “I’ll pray for you when you swear.  Maybe it’ll nurture your imm-mooortal soul!”

Snively set his jaw and sighed.  As his irritation increased, he bleakly observed, so, it seemed, did her interest. 

So he tried to be stern and impassive, adjusting a poker face to his countenance, that of a prim elder.  If I survived old uncle Julian, if I pacified him out of tantrum after tantrum, I can certainly persuade a little girl to screw off.  “What was it you wanted to share with me . . .dear?”  Thinly.  Sharp, narrow knives replaced his eyes, hair fell savagely disheveled about his ashen white cheekbones and angular jaw.  He should, he knew, appear a promising candidate for a lunatic asylum, or perhaps a poltergeist tale.  It was his best weapon, that look.

 “Well,” to his shock she grabbed his pillow, dropped it on the floor, and settled her hindquarters on it, as if it were her own tailor-made cushion.  “Yesterday, I overheard King Max telling Princess Sally how sad he was about the things Uncle Julian did to his people. It made me remember, just now, what Grandma Agnes once told me.” She spoke slowly, with contemplation, ponderous, tedious contemplation.  

Snively wanted to shoot himself—at least, that way, he’d get some shut-eye before the sun rose. 

“Which is?” he prodded testily. Not only was this taking forever, but by mentioning Julian’s reign, the brat was also digging up feelings of remorse in his chest, guilt for wicked past deeds he’d believed had finally stopped haunting him.  She was proving him wrong for the third time that day.

  Hope continued, unaware of his annoyance.  “She’s a scientist, you know—a psychologist.”  Anger was replaced by faint sorrow in Snively, when he noted the poor girl still referred to her grandmother in the present tense—as if Agnes had escaped the metallic shell that was to be her eternal cage.  She had been a soft, kind woman, Agnes—she hadn’t deserved such a fate. 

He listened more attentively.  “She said that when you pretend to be happy, you trick chemicals in your brain into thinking you really are happy.  For instance, if you smile, even when you’re sad, you’ll feel joyful!” She thrust her arms upward as if to illustrate joy to someone who could not comprehend it.  Silently Snively acknowledged that she was right again—he had never experienced such a feeling.  It must be glorious.

“Try it,” she ordered. 

His eyes studied her shrewdly, trying to read her motives.  Had that arrogant skunk commander put her up to this? Perhaps there was a hidden camera somewhere in her shirt or hair headband and all of Knothole was cackling at his expense.  “You first.”

 She obliged, grinning like an absolute ham, eyes bugged out and tongue wagging, and exploded in a burst of giggles.  “Oh it works, it works!” she shrieked.

He heaved a deep breath, and lashed arms across his chest.  This is absurd.  But something about her eyes, as before, made him feel exceedingly vulnerable, and cornered.  He would have to do it if she were ever to leave him alone. 

“Fine, here I go.”  Clumsily his pouting lips twitched, pulled, yanked, and finally curved into a lopsided grin.  However unpracticed, it was genuine.  And it felt great.  Something equally as alien to the youth bubbled up his throat.  He tried to restrain it.  “You were right,” he admitted, in a voice that trembled with the effort of that restraint.  He hoped his eyes weren’t shining too brightly.  Absurd.  It’s still absurd.

She threw him a look of wicked mischief, making him lean curiously closer to her face.

Absurd.    The girl feigned solemnity, and spoke in a tone signifying something profound: “You have a really big nose.”

And Snively laughed.  He curled into himself, sides shaking with the relief, the exhilaration of it: It wasn’t his grating, spiteful cackle—but a real, building, almost melodious noise, beginning a snicker and ending a gutteral crow.  Robotnik’s nephew covered his mouth, mortified, as if having belched, and glared around the room stricken.  Did that come out of me? His face reddened violently.  “Wow,” he mumbled, trying to muster a little sarcasm.  “Thanks a lot!”

“So anyway,” Hope concluded proudly, “I decided just now that I’d tell the king about this little tip tomorrow—it might help him, even if only a tiny bit. But I thought I’d tell you first, Snively. You looked like you needed it most of all. ”

Snively felt something ripping at his innards—shockingly potent and aching.  It was his heart trying to beat again.  Someone cared about him—about him.  He hoped his hair was hiding his face from her now.

I was cruel to her.  She didn’t deserve that fate, either.  

But admitting one’s feelings was much harder than just possessing them.  “I . . .” he croaked, casting his specter blue eyes away, for he feared they might also regain their capacity to produce and shed wet, flowing emotion.  “I don’t care.”

Her small voice could not be drowned out by denial.  “Yes, you do.  You care a lot.  That’s why I wanted to tell you.” 

Quickly he changed the subject.  “Why aren’t you in bed, child?”  Grudging but earnest concern filled his words.

She shrugged.  “I can’t sleep.  I haven’t slept well since I came here.” 

Snively frowned.  “But it’s so peaceful—so safe.  Trees and water and birds and. . . and such.”  He cringed.  Never did fancy waxing poetic.

Hope’s response distracted him swiftly from his self-consciousness.  “It doesn’t matter.  Not when, even among friends, you’re really all alone.”  And for the first time true sadness came alive in her face.  She crossed her legs and arms and rested her chin on them.

Again the ripping in his chest.  But now it catalyzed action, action that seemed to occur by instinct and not thought.  Snively rose from the cot and tapped Hope’s shoulder.  She stood, he retrieved the pillow and gestured at her bed.  “Go on, now, no time like the present to . . . to try again.”  She cocked her head but obeyed, and he followed her, placing his pillow on the floor near her.  He lingered awkwardly beside her cot as she lay down, hands wriggling at his sides.  She stared at him.  “What?”

“Just . . . just go on, try and sleep.”  Why am I doing this?

Hope nodded.  “Okay.” Her eyelids fluttered shut. 

And Snively plopped down on the pillow beside her bed, with no intentions of moving.  For the rest of the night.

Why am I doing this? He sat up on his haunches, stared into the child’s face.  “Hope.”  His voice came out a half-audible squeak.  “I . . .I’m sorry.”  Why?

The child smiled in her sleep.  Satisfied, Snively settled down, his back pressed against the cold steel legs of the cot. 

Again the shadow in the doorway.  Snively had just begun to drift off when a throat was cleared. He awoke and found himself looking into the face of Dr. Quack. It was approving.  There was a pill in one of the duck’s hands and a glass of water in the other.  “Good enough,” the physician said, and winked.

“Who says family values are dead?” –Dr. Robotnik, from “Sonic Conversion”

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW!!