Work Text:
Sonic comes to with the sensation of something sharp combing through his quills.
It doesn’t feel bad. If anything, Sonic leans into it a little. It’s unfamiliar; he’s always taken care of his quills himself. Or, ‘taken care of.’ This is different. He feels a little out of his head, and there’s a barrier between him and being fully awake. It probably has something to do with the gross taste in his mouth. He hears music with heavy bass blasting from the other side of Club Rouge, and he thinks, vaguely, that if the room is going to spin this much, he’s not going home tonight. It’s rare Sonic indulges, rare he has a true night off from heroing where he couldn’t go save the world even if he wanted to. Nineteen is, in his opinion, just right to start slacking off. He’s given the world a full decade of heroics. They can figure out one night.
For now, he just feels… nice.
Still. Sonic’s distantly aware that he’s vulnerable. He should at least try to get a sense of what’s going on around him. Probably. Get a feel for what strange happenings the gods (and their plentiful pantheon) decided to send his way today.
Those same sharp somethings scratch the underside of his jaw, and Sonic loses all his will to investigate. He fully leans in, eyelids so stubbornly heavy that he doesn’t even care to wake up, so long as it doesn’t stop.
Then finally, a voice.
“Oh, honey,” Rouge coos. Her voice sounds far away, but he’d recognize that drawl and cadence anywhere. “You really are out of it, aren’t you?”
There’s nothing in the world that could convince Sonic to open his eyes and cross the rest of the way into wakefulness. He doesn’t make a sound, just tilts his head a little closer to the direction of her voice. His cheek ends up on something soft, and he doesn’t think for a second about what it might be.
Nails, he realizes. Rouge has long nails under her gloves. Acryllics, he thinks.
They feel nice.
Rouge scratches along his scalp. She doesn’t make the mistake of scratching along the full length of his quills; he really only has feeling and sensation where they meet his head. She knows her way around hedgehog grooming.
Shadow, he half-thinks. She must have done this for him a time or two.
Shadow’s like a dramatic little brother to her; it’s hard to picture him getting groomed, but not impossible. But Sonic doesn’t know enough about her love life to rule out the possibility of her knowing a different, nameless hedgehog intimately. But he also doesn’t have enough presence of mind to really think it through.
She scratches behind his ears. Sonic shivers with his whole body. She chuckles a little, then moves back to scratching his scalp where she was before.
“Going to throw a hissy fit if I call someone for you?” she asks.
Sonic’s ears feel like they’ve been replaced with fabric. Feels like he can hear the ocean. Feels like he’s not attached to his own body. This might be a dream; he’s sleepy enough, it’s strange enough.
So he doesn’t answer.
“You’re not making this easy. You know that?” Rouge huffs. But there’s a slight rustling around him, movement from the soft, warm something he’s laying on. Somewhere, Sonic understands the concept of a dial tone. That place isn’t here.
The scratching continues. He thinks he falls asleep, just for a minute.
Rouge is in the middle of a conversation when he half-wakes again. Still in that strange place between being awake and asleep.
“Mm… no, I already thought about calling him. But this doesn’t really seem like the right, ah…” She scratches his scalp, chuckles when his head lays heavier into her lap. “I think it would be inappropriate for me to leave this to a twelve-year-old.”
Sonic’s ear twitches. She scratches behind it again, and his brain goes pleasantly numb.
“...No,” Rouge continues, a beat later. “He’s really out of it. I’m not sure how- No, don’t blame me. He’s welcome here any time but that doesn’t mean I babysit him. He’s old enough, he looks after himself. Usually.” Another brief pause. She switches from nails, to tracing curled knuckles against his forehead and brow. “...I’m as surprised as you are. But that doesn’t help me, darling.”
Another long pause. Sonic feels himself drifting back off.
But he does hear a faint, “An hour? You swear?” before he’s asleep again.
0000000
At some point, Rouge is no longer around. Sonic doesn’t know when that changed.
There’s a different hand stroking his quills. No nails this time. Not nearly as good at scratching between his quills in just the right way.
It still feels nice.
“Hey, pincushion,” Knuckles says, voice gravelly-smooth. “You awake, or do I need to carry you?”
“He’s too out of it,” Rouge says – and oh, good. Rouge is still here. “If he was awake at all I’d trust him to find his own way home, but…”
“And you didn’t offer him a place with you tonight?”
“He’s never taken it before, I didn’t want to overstep.”
“Oh, great, so you called me instead. Glad to know you think I’m a babysitter-”
“Sorry, what it is it you do all day?”
There’s a brawl about to brew, but Sonic doesn’t stir at the tension. If anything, it’s calming. He feels like dropping off again.
Strong fingers rub against his forehead and scalp. And then, gently, rub just behind his ears. That’s it, that’s what he’s been needing-
“Mh…” he tries.
“Hey, is he awake or not?” Knuckles asks – Rouge, instead of Sonic himself.
Rouge chuckles, then hard nails scratch the underside of his cheek and jaw. Sonic sleepily angles his head for a better vantage point. Much, much better…
“Ah. Gotcha. If he was awake-”
“Not a chance in hell,” Rouge agrees, and there’s a grin in her voice. She continues scratching his chin a moment, and when she pulls her hand away, Sonic misses it with his whole chest.
But he doesn’t have much of a chance to miss it. There’s other affection to replace what he’s missing. Slowly, with a gentleness not native to Knuckles’s usual bravado, Sonic finds himself being scooped up into strong arms. His head lolls onto a shoulder, quills only just avoiding poking his friend’s arm.
“...going to be alright?” someone continues, and Sonic thinks he might have drifted off a moment, his ears and brain and everything in-between feeling like cotton.
“Oh, this? He’ll be fine. I only called you because…”
There’s a long pause, but this time, Sonic isn’t asleep. He’s sure of it, because he hears a steady heartbeat against the side of his face.
“...Yeah,” Knuckles says, as if that’s enough of an answer. “I get it. Just for tonight. And then next time he comes here, yell at him for me, would ya?”
Those wonderful nails scratch against his scalp and behind his ears one last time. “I will,” Rouge says. “Believe me, you have no idea how many strings I had to pull to make sure no one else noticed him. He’s lucky he chose to lay down back here instead of somewhere more public… Showboat that he is, I’m a little surprised.”
Knuckles lets out a soft laugh, and it only just shakes his frame. Sonic still feels steady, even as the world feels a bit like it’s spinning. “Nah, he’s not shy. But he’s good at finding the quietest places to sleep.”
A bigger, warmer hand replaces Rouge’s nails. Rubs curled knuckles against his chin.
“Get back safely,” Rouge says.
Knuckles adjusts him easily. “Mh. Call me if this happens again. It’s…” He trails off a moment. “Well. He’s my favorite kind of problem. Don’t tell him I said that.”
“Aw, Knuckles, here I thought I was your favorite problem-?”
“Go to hell,” Knuckles says, but it’s with a soft laugh.
Sonic falls asleep again; doesn’t stir in the slightest.
This time, he’s asleep until morning, but there’s something beautiful about falling asleep to his friend’s laughter, as the distant bass of Club Rouge fades into oblivion, never quite drowned out by his friends’ kindness.