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sonicfandomsecretsanta · 5 months

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Secret Santa

@w0lp3rtinger submitted for @silence-caravan:

A cold winter sun hung low in the sky the day Amy decided to wrap her Christmas gifts. It turned the white snowflakes silver, the ribbons in her hands glinting like the tail of a comet, and all the bits and scraps across the floor…

Well, she wasn’t that much of a romantic. They were still just scraps on the floor. She’d really need to clean up after this.

That didn’t matter though. The day was good. Thank goodness. She needed a good day.

Once more, she had gone overboard with the gifts, as she did everything. The Secret Santa had been designed in part so that they could all avoid breaking their banks, but Amy couldn’t help it. There was something so wonderful about finding just the right gift, and well, she was lucky. She had the ability to spoil her friends, and so she would do so to the fullest. Tails had his brick kits bundled neatly, individually wrapped before being lumped together with bows and tape. Cream got a new dress and a matching bowtie for Cheese, made by Amy (with a significant amount of help from Vanilla) tucked inside of a box made to look like a chao’s head. There was also the gift for Vanilla herself, an apron to replace the old one that got scorched. Knuckles got mitten warmers and a quartz Amy found in her garden that looked like a dagger, and Rouge would receive a barrage of orthotic inserts and cute thigh-high socks. Amy had got Tails’s help to burn DVD’s of the original Dragon Ball for Omega after borrow copies from the library (to which she gave a donation). Lastly, as always, she made jars upon jars of chili for Sonic, shelf-stable and locked tight in shatter proof jars, for him to use through the year.

Amy sighed, stretching from her place on the floor before leaning back into the footboard of the couch. She let her eyes close, head falling back atop the cushion while a blind hand drifted back and forth across the carpet looking for her hot chocolate.

There was only one more gift to wrap, and it was the one she had been worried about all year.

The dark chao-head mug sat atop her coffee table. She had bought it way before Christmas was even on her mind, had even told Shadow she had gotten it for them, but when by sheer dumb happenstance she got him again, even after Rouge was barred from drafting the Secret Santa list, well, it felt like fate. It was, by all accounts, adorable. The mug was round, perfectly shaped for a chao head, and thankfully, the lip of the mug was actually well-designed, so it wouldn’t be difficult to drink from. Its face was split into a sharp-toothed grin of mischief, on the other side of which sat the handle shaped to be the wings. Inside the mug, at the bottom, sat the little red spike ball, like a fun surprise at the end of a long sip.

It was perfect. The person she had worked with to custom-make it did a fantastic job.

So why was she so afraid to give it to Shadow?

Amy swallowed, breathing deeply before she opened her eyes to stare at her ceiling. After a moment, she let her head loll to look out of the window, up and into an endless grey sky.

A smile crept up her face. Shadow had already told her she would be receiving a pasta maker attachment for her mixer. She knew he wouldn’t wrap it. He wouldn’t even put a bow on it. He’d just hold the box with its scribbled-out price tag quietly off to the side until he’d hand it to her, not making eye contact, not saying a word, and yet…

Amy’s brow slowly knotted itself.

And yet.

She shook her head. This was stupid. She was looking way too hard into this. They were her friend, just like everyone else was. Shadow was sweet, and kind, and it was perfectly normal for a friend to get another friend a gift. Heck, that was why this whole orchestrated gift exchange thing was set up, and they’d been doing it for years. Why did it matter now? And what did it matter at that?

But Shadow didn’t do Christmas, ever. He only did the Secret Santa when Amy begged him to, all those years ago, and he didn’t even really like the party until Amy started hosting.

Amy shut her eyes, watching as the blue sphere that took the place of the sun dance there in the darkness.

She would not look deeper into this than she needed to. That lesson had been learned with Sonic, and really, she was lucky that they were still good friends. It had taken years to get to this point and in no way, shape, or form was she about to go and mess everything up by assuming things about people, least of all Shadow.

Besides, if Shadow wanted to tell her something, he’d tell her. She knew this, didn’t she?

But then… would they?

Amy ran her nails along the inside of her palm.

Would they really be honest with her? Would they sit down and pour their heart out, say how they feel, tell her what she meant to them, if she meant anything to them?

She shook her head. That didn’t sound like something Shadow would do.

No. If she had to guess, with something like this, Shadow would probably just keep doing what they were already doing. Maybe there would be small changes, but they’d be hard to catch, because Shadow didn’t just change for anyone. It might be that they would go out of their way a bit more, but just a bit, or maybe, they’d make some small concessions to try things they normally wouldn’t, but they’d never outright say why.

Yeah, that was more like them.

Maybe that was why this whole thing about the Secret Santa sat oddly with her.

Amy opened her eyes, lips pursed. It’s not like she was dumb. When Shadow said they’d be at the Christmas party, everyone was shocked, even more so when he agreed to do the Secret Santa. It had been years since that first one and he hadn’t let up yet, not even the one year he was going to be away in Holoska. He still Chaos Controlled home just long enough to give Amy her gift.

Oh yeah, they had been Secret Santa partners that year too. Damn, how long had Rouge been allowed to be in charge of that thing? How did nobody notice sooner?

Well, then that solved that one. It wasn’t like he was going out of his way to give ‘her’ a gift; he was just making sure to fulfill the promise he made when he signed up for the gift exchange.

Why did her heart sink at that thought?

Amy blinked back the prickling of her dry eyes as she sat up and reached for her mug of hot chocolate, now cold chocolate, from the table. She sipped it as she eyed the Dark Chao mug.

It’s not like any of this mattered. It’s not as if she-

Amy paused, then, she took in a sharp breath.

“Nope!” She downed her hot chocolate before rushing to stand. “We’re not doing that! We are nooot doing that. Nope nope nope!”

She moved to the kitchen and rinsed her mug out in the sink, setting it on the drying mat before looking out the window to the city street below. It hadn’t snowed yet, not enough to stick anyway. Instead, the streets were flooded with last night’s rain, the snowflakes that hung from the telephone polls and traffic lights swaying morosely in the chilly December air.

Shadow would have something to say about it. Or rather, he’d make a face, and Amy would understand, and she’d laugh, and then they’d get those little wrinkles around the corners of their eyes, and that’s how she knew they were happy.

Amy caught herself smiling and shook her head. “Don’t do it,” she muttered. “It’s not a good idea.”

Even as she said it, she could see in her mind exactly how those little wrinkles would crease their skin. Maybe there would be this little twitch in their lip- sometimes that happened, especially if they were trying to not laugh. Maybe they’d look at her with that twinkle in their eye and-

Amy gave a growl of frustration before stomping off to her room.

Fine. Whatever, stupid brain. Two can play this game.

Her tarot cards were in the drawer of her bedside table, kept in a nest of odd beads, pretty rocks, and the crumbling remains of flowers. She snatched them, catching her knuckles on the lip above the drawer as she did so, and hissed as she slammed it shut once more. Her hands shook as she flopped onto her bed as she furiously shuffled.

“This is dumb.” she muttered, drawing the first card. “I know this is dumb.”

Staring back at her was the high priestess, reversed.

Amy shook her head. “Don’t you start too. I’m not repressing anything.”

She shuffled the cards again. The next card she pulled made her snarl. It was the Ace of Cups, also in reverse.

“I’m not resisting anything!” She hit her pillow hard enough to pop some of the stitching. “Just give me a real answer! You’re not being fair!”

Amy took one breath, then the next. Her fingertips tingled as everything in her screamed to pull one more card, just one more.

So she did.

It was not the Lovers. That was good, had it been, she might have died. What she found in her hand as the star, upright. It showed a person sitting on a rock looking towards the sky. Above their head shone a brilliant star against the backdrop of inky darkness.

“Hope.” Amy said quietly, turning it as she did so that it caught the light from her window.

She lay there for a moment, watching the silver foil of the card flash in the soft darkness of her room. Amy gathered the other cards she had pulled and made them into a neat stack without looking. She could feel their weathered edges, little fraying pieces of paper that had come away with time, and she thumbed them gently as she stared into the ceiling.

And there, again, in her mind, against the backdrop of white paint, she swore she could see Shadow’s smile.

Amy took a deep breath.

The scream she gave startled the birds from their telephone wire outside. They took to the sky in a flurry, eyes wide, wings powered by a hundred furiously beating hearts.

#gift #amy rose #shadow the hedgehog #shadamy #silence-caravan

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