ZONE WARS: INTERVENTION

                   A Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic

                       by Daniel J. Drazen


PAUSE FOR BOURGEOIS LEGALITIES: This story is copyright (c) 2000
by the author.  The characters and situations are the property of
Sega, Archie Comic Publications and/or DiC Productions.  The
story itself is inspired by Dan Slott's "Zone Wars: Giant
Robotno" which appeared in Sonic Super Special #12.  
Reproduction and distribution of this fanfic is rabidly
encouraged unless you try ripping me off and taking credit for it
yourself.  All the normal restrictions under U.S. copyright laws
(Title 17, U. S. Code) apply.

TIME FRAME: Shortly after the events of "Zone Wars: Giant
Robotno."


     Sally was standing on the bridge, leaning forward against
the railing.  She'd gotten into the habit of spending time out in
the middle, watching the river slip beneath.  It was a good place
to think, to just get away from the responsibilities of being a
Freedom Fighter, if only for a handful of moments.  And, she had
to admit, sometimes she also needed a break from Sonic.  As much
as she cared for him, his impatience and bravado could be a
serious pain!
     But as Sally watched a dead leaf floating under the bridge
on the surface of the water in the early morning calm, she found
herself wishing that the situation with Sonic was even THAT good.
     "There room for one more, Sally-girl?"
     Sally looked up at Bunnie, who had walked to where she was
standing.  Then she looked back at the water without saying a
word.  Bunnie leaned back and rested her elbows, one made of fur
and bone and blood and the other made of metal, on the railing. 
She didn't speak, and neither did Sally for another minute.
     "I'm worried about Sonic," Sally said finally as she
continued watching the water.
     "Ah think ever'body feels that way."
     "This just isn't LIKE him!" she said, her voice a mix of
passion and frustration.  "In the past, I'd have to practically
throw him out of Knothole myself to get him to take some R&R. 
And he'd always come back two days later complaining like a cub
about how bored he was and how he wanted to go right out...."
     "...and kick some bot butt!" Bunnie said, finishing Sally's
thought.
     "But this time he was gone FOUR days, he returns all sullen
and moody, and won't say anything to anyone."
     "Except when he snaps your head off for no reason.  There
ain't a soul in Knothole he hasn't yelled at since he got back. 
He had Tails pretty near close to tears the other day!"
     "Bunnie, something happened to him out there, something he's
not telling me.  I've tried being nice, I've tried pulling rank
on him, he still won't tell me anything."
     "But what in the hoo-ha could've happened?"
     "I just don't know!  I had Sparticus retrace Sonic's steps. 
They ended at a pond where Sonic fishes sometimes.  He says there
was nothing unusual about the site.  I...I just wish I knew," she
said as she sank back into her confusion and returned to watching
the river.
     "Well, he ain't doin' himself or anyone else any good by
goin' around actin' like a pasha's patoot!"
     "At least he won't be bothering anyone for the next couple of hours.  
He volunteered to stand watch at the far outpost."
     "Sugar-hog?  Volunteer to stand watch?  Sally-girl, you KNOW
somethin's wrong when he does that!  He says that's the most
borin' duty there is."

                       *        *        *

     It was several hours later when Sally found Tails sitting
alone picking at the plate of food in front of him.  Neither of
them spoke of Sonic.  Neither needed to.  Sally suggested that it
was close to the time when he's have to relieve Sonic as look-
out, and maybe he'd want to go there a little early.  Tails
shrugged and set off into the Great Forest.
     He arrived at the far outpost a short time later.  It was a
place that the Freedom Fighters usually approached with caution,
for just about a hundred yards from the post was where the forest
ended.  Beyond, plainly visible, was Robotropolis.
     Tails flew up to the observation post, which consisted of a
simple platform close to the top of one of the trees, carefully
hidden by a network of leaves and branches.  "Sonic?" Tails
called out.
     There was no answer.  The outpost was deserted.
     Rather than call out again, Tails looked around.  That's
when he saw it: a plume of dust rising from the outskirts of the
city.  It was like reading Sonic's signature.
     Tails revved up, preparing to head back for Knothole and
report this to Sally.  Then, a second later, he'd turned around. 
Another second later he was on his way out of the forest,
following the trail of dust toward the city.
     By the time Tails had managed to come close to Sonic, he
could sense that something was wrong.  Sonic wasn't running at
top speed, nor was he darting from shadow to shadow, as he'd told
Tails to do dozens of times.  He was in the open where anyone
could see him.
     Curious but not so much that he forgot where he was, Tails
stayed in back of Sonic.  He HAD to have something in mind, Tails
told himself.  He had to have some sort of plan.  And the cub
wanted to find out what it was.
     Then, close to the heart of the city, in the center of a
broad intersection, Sonic stopped.
     Tails waited for Sonic to do something.  He kept waiting. 
So did Sonic.
     Taking a quick look around for orb-bots, Tails flew out of
hiding and landed near Sonic who just stood there, his gaze fixed
at the ground.
     "Sonic?" Tails asked.
     At the sound of Tails's voice, Sonic's head jerked upward. 
"Who said you could follow me?" Sonic demanded, his voice heavy
with anger.  "Get out of here!"
     "Sonic, what're you doing?  You don't want to get caught, do
you?"
     "Maybe I do."  There was a quietness, a resignation about
the way Sonic spoke.  It made Tails's stomach hurt.
     "Sonic, we can't stay out in the open!"  The cub reached out
to grab Sonic by the arm, only to have Sonic pull it away while
shoving Tails away from him with his other hand.
     "I told you to get away from me!  I'm...Just beat it, will
ya?"
     "No!  Sonic, I...."
     Anything else Tails might have said was cut short by a burst
of light from above.  A hover unit was shining a searchlight on
the two.  And from a loudspeaker on board came a too-familiar
message: "HALT, FREEDOM FIGHTERS.  YOU ARE UNDER
ARREST. BY ORDER OF ROBOTNIK."
     Tails was frozen to the spot, but not by the light.  Instead it was
because of what he saw Sonic doing.  The hedgehog was
just standing there, his face an emotionless mask, his arms
raised in a gesture of surrender.

                       *        *        *

     Dr. Robotnik refused to consider putting Sonic and Tails in
the same cell.  He wouldn't even put them in different cells in
the same cell block.  "That would be too much of a good thing,"
he chortled as he tugged on his white gloves.  Instead, promising
 to deal with both of them, he had them taken to cell blocks on
different floors.
     Sonic didn't lie down on the cell's metal slab of a bed. 
Instead, he sat down with his back against a side wall of the
cell, his legs drawn up and his arms around his knees.  His head
was lowered.  He was alone.
     "So what's the plan?"
     The voice, familiar and yet just different enough, echoed
only within Sonic's mind, momentarily crowding out his dark
thoughts.  Sonic looked up.
     Someone else was in the cell with him, standing at the other
end, his arms folded across his elaborate, high-tech uniform,
watching him reproachfully behind a tinted visor.  His feet were
firmly planted on the wall opposite from Sonic.
     "Go away," Sonic said as he looked back down.
     "C'mon, you've GOT to have a plan!  That's what you do,
isn't it?"
     "I said go away."
     "I mean, you don't usually let yourself get captured unless
you've got a plan going..."
     "OK, you wanna hear the plan?" Sonic shouted angrily.  "The
plan is to walk into the roboticizer and let Robotnik pull the
switch.  End of plan!"
     "You're kidding, right?"
     "I'm kidding, NOT!"  Sonic jumped to his feet.  "And you
know WHY I'm not kidding!"
     "Sonic, I explained to you...."
     "Yeah, you explained it to me, all right.  AFTER
I...I...Will you just leave me alone?"
     "You know I can't do that.  You're Sonic Prime.  You're the
hero at the heart of the nexus."
     "Oh, yeah?  And how do you measure who's a hero, pull a body
count?  Well, mine's at one, and it's not gonna get any higher!"
     "Sonic, you're over-reacting...."
     "'Over-reacting'?  I...I KILLED someone!" Sonic screamed the
words, and they echoed across the cell block.  He then sat back
down on the floor, his face buried in his hands.  Sonic's visitor
said nothing.
     "And you set me up!" Sonic looked up at Zonic, who had
strolled to the adjacent wall and was standing there with his
hands on his hips, his visored expression unreadable.  "You knew
what was gonna happen and you didn't tell me!"
     "Would you have gone if you had known?"
     "Hey, you know killing isn't my style!"
     "Even monsters?"
     "That 'monster' was my Dad!  Or the dad of my...you're
giving me a headache.  Leave me alone!"
     Zonic started to reply, but just then there was a heavy
clanging noise at the end of the cell block.  "Sonic, they're
coming for you.  Are you gonna escape or not?"
     The sound of SWATbots walking echoed down the corridor
toward them.  Sonic looked at the zone cop.  His expression was
hard and cold as the metal cell.  "Not."
     "You can't be serious.  If you let yourself get roboticized,
that'll start a chain reaction all across the space-time continuum.
The cascade effect will wreak havoc in every other Zone with a
Sonic in it.  Do you know what that means?"
     "No.  Now ask me if I care."
     Just then two SWATbots stopped in front of the cell.  "THE
PRISONER WILL STAND UP."
     Sonic glanced up.  The zone cop was gone.  "Figures," Sonic
thought to himself as he stood up.

                       *        *        *

     "Decisions, decisions, decisions!" Dr. Robotnik cackled as
Sonic was escorted into the room where the roboticizer was
located.  "Your surrendering yourself alone would have made
matters so much simpler for me.  But since you brought your
two-tailed friend along, that complicates things."
     Sonic saw that Tails was already inside one of the
transparent roboticizer chambers.  Its material, clear as glass,
was so thick that he couldn't hear the cub's pounding on the side
wall or his cries for help.
     "Should I roboticize you both at once?" Robotnik went on. 
"Or should I roboticize you one at a time?  And in which order? 
I could have roboticized you first, because you've caused me so
much more trouble.
     "But instead I decided on roboticizing your little friend in
there in your sight.  Just to give you a taste of what will
befall all of your comrades once I get hold of them.  What do you
think of THAT, hedgehog?"
     Sonic stood with his head bowed, silent.
     "What?  No japes?  No snappy comeback?  No sarcasm?  You
disappoint me, hedgehog.  What about your friend?"
     With that, Robotnik opened a speaker connected to the inside
of the tube that contained Tails.  The cub had by now exhausted
himself pounding against the tube.  In a voice broken by sobs he
said weakly: "Sonic...please...help...."
     "I think not," Robotnik said as he turned off the speaker
and started powering up the roboticizer.  "So, this is the way
our warfare ends: not with a bang, but a whimper."  He reached
for the activator switch.
     That was when the silence of the room was ripped apart by
someone screaming: "NOOOOO!"
     It was a long, drawn-out scream that went right through both
Sonic and Robotnik.  Looking around, Robotnik saw a figure
standing on a wall of the room.  Not against the wall, but ON the
wall, at an improbably perpendicular angle.  Robotnik
only had a brief moment to gawk at the figure as it drew a
sidearm from a holster and started firing wildly, pumping plasma
rounds into everything around him, screaming all the while.  Robotnik
dived to the floor for cover; so, too, did Sonic, shaken out of his
depression and self-loathing.  The firing and screaming went on
until over two dozen plasma rounds had slammed into the roboticizer
and shattered the top of the container that held Tails.  The cub
slowly stood up, fragments of the tube falling down off of him. 
Sonic looked up at Zonic, who was panting heavily as if he'd just
run a marathon.     
     "Get him out of here," the zone cop ordered Sonic in a husky voice.
     "But..."
     "GO!"
     Startled, Sonic raced over to Tails, pulled him out of what
was left of the tube, and with Tails in his grasp raced out of a
hole that Zonic had made in a nearby wall.  Just then a door
opened and two SWATbots entered the room from a corridor.
     "SWATbots!" Robotnik roared.  "Get that...."
     Robotnik then witnessed Zonic disappear without a trace.  He
shakily got to his feet, walked to the spot on the wall where he
had seen Zonic standing, then surveyed the damage around him.
     "AWAITING FURTHER ORDERS, SIR."
     "Get...get busy and clean up this place," he finally said
weakly, "and get to work rebuilding the roboticizer.  I have
to...."  He glanced around into the dark corners of the room,
then walked out.  He spent the rest of the day looking over his
shoulder and speaking in incomplete sentences.

                        *       *       *

     The group that was gathered around a campfire in Knothole
that evening was not just subdued, they sat in stunned silence. 
They had first listened to Tails's description of Sonic's and his capture
by SWATbots, of his having come within a hair's breadth of being
roboticized, and of the sudden destruction of the roboticizer by
a mysterious figure.  Before anyone could ask what it all meant,
Sonic started speaking.
     He told them the truth.  The whole, terrible truth.  He told
them of his accompanying Zonic to a zone where their counterparts
had been turned into giant, rampaging, nightmarish monsters.  He
told them of his mission that was supposed to result in his
recovering a part of a Chaos emerald in that world.  And he told
them of how that involved tearing it out of the chest of the
creature that had been Jules, Sonic's father, in that world. 
Several of those gathered glanced toward Jules and Bernie as
Sonic told that part of the story.  No emotion registered on the
metallic faces of the two roboticized hedgehogs, but they did
notice Bernie taking Jules's hand and holding it tightly.
     Sonic stopped as he came to the end of his story.  For
several silent seconds his confession hung heavy as fog in the
air.  Then someone spoke up, her voice calm and steady.  It was
Rosie.
     "Sonic, have you ever heard the saying 'The only thing
uglier than a scar is a wound that refuses to heal'?"
     Sonic didn't even look up from where he sat on a log, his
hands folded.  "Sounds like one of those lame-o things Julayla
used to say."
     "You're right, it is one of those...lame-o things...she used
to say.  Do you understand what it means?"
     Sonic shrugged his shoulders.
     "It's time you learned.  You took a life, whether you meant
to or not.  There is nothing more serious in all of Mobius than
that, and there's nothing that can undo what has happened.  You
might have thought that allowing yourself to be roboticized would
somehow make up for it, or at least it might have driven it from your
memory.  We both know it would have done neither.  Instead, you
would have been trapped with the memory in your consciousness as
long as you lived."
     "So what?" Sonic asked moodily.
     "So there's only one thing you can do: learn to live with
what happened.  And it won't be easy."
     "Thanks for nothing!"
     "I'm not finished.  It won't be easy, but you won't have to
go through it alone.  Look around you, Sonic."
     Sonic kept his gaze fixed on the tips of his sneakers.
     "Look around you, Sonic," Rosie repeated, her voice still firm.  Sonic
jerked his head up.
     "Sonic, we may never understand what you went through, but
that doesn't mean that any of us are going to abandon you.  Not now,
not ever."
     "Gimme a break!" Sonic shouted as he jumped to his feet.  "I'm
the one with blood on my hands, not you!  Maybe you can forget
this nightmare, but I LIVED it!  I...Why is everyone so worked up
about what happens to me, anyway?" he said as he turned on his
heels and started to walk away.
     That's when Tails spoke up: "Because we all love you,
Sonic."
     Nobody was sure how Sonic would react to that.  The cub's
words, spontaneous and sincere, stopped Sonic in his tracks.  He
stood there for half a minute, his fists clenched, trembling.  Then
he ran the back of one glove across his face before turning to face
Tails.  "You HAD to use the L-word, didn't you?"
     "Well, I think it's high time SOMEBODY did!" Rosie replied.
     "Sonic," Jules said as he stood and walked over to Sonic, "I
haven't been here very long, certainly not as long as your
friends here, but from what I've seen they ALL feel that way to
one extent or another."  Even though the fire had started to die
down, Sally suddenly felt her face get very warm.
     "Sonic, whatever happened in that world, I'm still very much
alive in this one.  But I'd gladly have taken myself offline if I
thought that could have spared you the pain of what you went
through."
     Sonic looked in Jules's metallic face, then threw his arms
around him.  Jules held his son close, as the others rose and
approached the two.  Each got close enough to Sonic to place
 a hand on his shoulder, however briefly.  It was primal
communication, a memory of the time ages ago before
Mobians had words.
     Eventually, Sonic looked up.  "So now what?" he asked.
     "Now you heal," Rosie said.  "And it will take time.  And
patience."
     "Not my best event," Sonic said, managing a half-smirk. 
Rosie smiled broadly.  If Sonic had attempted to joke about the
matter, that meant that the cure had in fact begun.  "And the
next time Zonic shows up, I'm gonna tell him to take a hike!  The
universe can solve their problems without me."
     "Good for you, Sugar-Hog!"  Bunnie said, adding, "Ah'm more
partial to the company in this here world, anyway."  She took
Antoine's hand and gave it a squeeze.
     "Moi aussi," Antoine said dreamily as he gazed into Bunnie's
eyes.
     "I guess we'd better turn in, then," Sally said.
     "Yeah," Sonic said, then added, "Rosie, can you come by for
a few minutes?"
     "Of course," she said warmly.  With that, the group began to
go their separate ways.
     "There's one thing Ah don't get, Sally-girl," Bunnie said as
the two of them walked away.
     "What's that?"
     "Well, Ah only saw that Zonic fella one time, when he busted
up that picnic we were havin'.  And he seemed to me like he was
kind of a cool customer."
     "So?"
     "So to hear Tails tell 'bout how he shot up the roboticizer,
it sounds to me like he went and blew a serious gasket."
     "Bunnie, we don't know why he did what he did."
     "Yeah, an' Ah reckon we're better off NOT knowin'."

                       *        *        *

     The figure moved sideways down the hallway on his sideways
world.  The uniform, however, was gone.  The blue hedgehog that
was Zonic was dressed in civilian clothes: a light windbreaker,
jeans and sneakers.
     "'Ten days suspension,'" he muttered half aloud, "'pending a
formal inquiry,' 'unauthorized interference.'  So what?  The way
I feel now, getting kicked off the force doesn't sound half-bad. 
At least everything is all right on Mobius Prime.  Not like...."
     He paused.  He was standing in the spacious foyer of Time
Police headquarters.  He looked to his side, turned up the collar
on his jacket, then hurried out into the cold, wet night.
     He had looked, as he had looked before leaving for Mobius
Prime to rescue Sonic and Tails, at a small metallic plaque which
bore the name "Prower, Miles, Cadet."  Above the plaque and the
dozens more like it were carved the words: "IN MEMORY OF THOSE
WHO HAVE FALLEN IN THE LINE OF DUTY."

                             The End