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autisticshadowthehedgehog · 3 years

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Give Me a Task to Do

Sally is busy.

She’s the leader of the Freedom Fighters, she has to be busy. She has to keep everyone in check, make sure their missions go smoothly, try to get everyone out alive. She has to get survivors to safe, hidden villages in the woods, she has to work all night on her programming, trying to figure out a way to hack Robotnik’s drones or to reverse the roboticization process. She has to keep the little ones from realizing how awful the world is while at the same time keeping them from running into battle headfirst.

Even in a small, secluded place like Knothole, she has work to do. She has to be contacting the other resistance bases, keeping an eye open for messages from hideaways. She has to repair houses, work on new weapons designs, check the tunnel system underground in case Robotnik finds them. She has to fix the walls Bunnie crashes down on accident, she has to pry Antoine off of the roof and convince him that the others were just trying to scare him and the floor is not lava. She has to help Rotor with his tinkering, update him on her findings and listen to his. She has to find a better landing place for Dulcy to prevent another roof from caving in, she has to read bedtime stories to Tails with a silly voice so he doesn’t think about what’s happening outside the forest. And, of course, she has to keep up with whatever problem Sonic has gotten himself into, catch up to him and drag him back down to reality. She has to send that message out to Lupe and hook Nicole up to the supercomputer to charge and try to decipher the jumbled code she thinks might be from her dad but could be another red herring, just like everything in the last ten years.

Sally doesn’t mind, though. She’s never liked to sit around and do nothing, not when there was work to be done, and there was always work somewhere. She hummed while fiddling with tech, and laughed while helping Rotor fix a shield. And, well... most of the resistance found missions into Robotnik’s territory to be tense, terrifying even, but Sally was never too afraid. She kept her mind in a sharp focus, her brain hardwired to pay attention to the mission, only to the mission, and think about the details later.

She doesn’t fear missions, no, and really, she doesn’t fear Robotnik, either. She knows getting caught by him would mean death, would devastate the rebellion, but honestly, it all seemed like a distant thought, the idea that she could be held captive. She’d always broken out or been rescued every time, before anything bad could happen, and no matter how many times Antoine warned her that one day they might not be able to reach her, no matter how many times Bunnie told her if she didn’t stay home she’d tie her to a chair, how many times Tails wandered into her hut at night to make sure she was still there, or how many times Sonic would hold her close after a rescue, nearly refusing to let go... it just never seemed like something she should be worried about. It had always worked out before, it would always work out in the end. She had to believe that, she guessed, otherwise she would’ve broken long ago.

What could break her was silence.

She was good at working. She was good at double-tasking, triple-tasking, doing whatever it took and doing it well. She could focus on anything, on several things at once, or at one thing so much that she blocked out the rest of the world. But if there was nothing? Nothing to do, nothing to fix, nothing to distract her...

I need a task to do, she’d often thought, upon waking up in the middle of the night. But this night, she couldn’t find anything. Nothing needed repaired, everyone else was sleeping soundly. There were no messages, no alerts, no robots hovering dangerously close to their location. She’d set up her computer to update its range overnight, so she couldn’t program with that. Rotor wouldn’t want her working on his stuff without him there.

She tried to go back to sleep, but she’d always been a bit of an insomniac, so just returning to a dream was a whole other challenge. She didn’t want to just lay in bed, alone with her thoughts, so she got up, going to a bench at the corner, looking through plans, re-sorting her books. She went outside and checked the garden, made sure there were no pests and that all the food was growing alright. She checked everyone’s huts, and checked the perimeter twice, and then sat by the extinguished campfire and stared at the stars.

She could catalogue the stars. She and Sonic had done that when they were seven, still too young to wander out of Knothole (not that it stopped them). They’d made star charts, maps, listed constellations and made their own. She looked up at the sky, but... ugh, too many clouds, it was hard to really even see them. Maybe it would rain, and she could collect water. Maybe she could fix their water purifier. Maybe she could upgrade something? Maybe...

Her foot kicked the ash surrounding their campfire spot. She had to think of something. She couldn’t just do nothing. She couldn’t do nothing. She’d been moving and working as long as she could remember, ever since she was six years old and watched her kingdom burn behind her. She always knew that she had to keep pressing on, keep her head high, and be the leader. If she didn’t look back, didn’t think back, she didn’t have to feel. Feelings got in the way of her work. That was why she had those flowers whose scents were supposed to ward away nightmares, why she only talked about the past in order to inspire the others, why she preferred working with machines- machines couldn’t hurt, machines couldn’t die.

Sometimes she wondered if that made her like Robotnik, to prefer technology to emotions. She would remind herself that no, she wasn’t trying to take over the planet, but oh how she could fall there, she could feel it. In another world, maybe she’d be like Robotnik, wanting to make everything metal and cold.

But that wasn’t this world, in this world she had to do right by her people. She’d had to take over her dying kingdom when she was six, and now she was sixteen, and she needed to do something before she drove herself mad.

Sally checked the garden again, and then the perimeter, and each hut. Nobody was in danger, nothing was broken, and there was no sounds at all. Just the occasional cricket in the distance, or the wind rustling through the leaves. It was a petrifying silence, and Sally did her best to keep it from breaking her. She ran her hands through her vest, swung from a tree branch, hummed to herself quietly enough that nobody would wake. But it felt like that quiet was pushing into her ears, trying to deafen her so that silence would be the only thing she could ever hear again. Whatever she did, she could still hear the silence, she could still feel the stillness, she could still feel.

I need a task to do.

SOMEONE give me a task to do.

I need a...

Sally sat once again by the campfire, curled in on herself, and cried.

#sally acorn #rally4sally #sonic satam #sonic the hedgehog #sonic fanfiction #mine #connie writes #//#wrote this at 1am yolo amirite #did 0 editing before i posted too so good luck y'all #also yes i WAS listening to broadway musical playlists how could you tell

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