Chapter Text
“You’re turning brown.”
The comment from his wife was met with a raised brow as he did up the buttons on his dress shirt. She was sitting in the rocking chair behind him holding their middle child, and was letting her eyes wander over his frame.
“I beg your pardon?”
With a wave of her hand, she summoned him over and pulled his arm into a beam of sunlight. With the sleeve tugged up, there was a clear difference between the pitch-black shirt and his quills, which were a more reddish brown.
“When we bought this for you it blended in with your quills perfectly. I think being in the sun with the kids so much has caused your quills to bleach themselves. I think in your case it's called rusting.”
He turned back to the mirror, inspecting himself. Given his immortality, he had anticipated he would look the same forever after they realized he had stopped aging in his late twenties. Like marble, never changing.
Then again, even marble yellowed with age.
Further inspecting his features, he looked for other possible changes. His cheeks had grown a fair bit fluffier than they had been as a teenager, something he knew his wife was ever so fond of. There were wrinkles at the corner of his eyes and mouth that he’d never noticed, and when Amy came up to rest her head on his shoulder she smiled.
“You've got laugh lines. And the matching wrinkles around your eyes. And white quills.”
“I do not have white quills.” He protested.
Amy giggled, moving to slide a hand against his scalp, rubbing it gently. He sank into the affection, only to jump when she plucked a quill without warning.
He would have said something if it hadn't been for their sleeping child in her arms and the single white quill she was holding up.
It wasn't fully white, he noted. At its base, it was pitch black, then a warm brown that faded to a pale beige at the tip. He took it from her, marvelling at the single piece of evidence that he could age at all.
It’d been bothering him. He didn't want to admit it, but when Amy had lamented her first white quill years before when she was pregnant with their oldest, it had pained him. He couldn't offer her any comfort beyond holding her. As much as they both tried to deny it, he knew it would become a greater and greater cause of stress as she continued to grow and change when he remained the same for the rest of time.
It had driven her to a breakdown once before, a memory he didn't like thinking about. They’d watched a movie about a time traveller, unable to control when and where he jumped. He was visiting his wife in her old age when she was a gracefully aged woman in her eighties and he was only just in his forties. The time traveller was mistaken for her son.
Amy had seen that and sobbed for hours afterwards, never able to fully articulate just what she was feeling. Shadow had kicked himself for not checking the movie's premise earlier, but the damage had been done. He’d done his best to comfort her, but he knew that it had not left her thoughts as they discussed the future.
“Well… guess that solves that problem?” he suggested, tail wagging. He wanted so badly to scoop his wife into his arms and kiss her senseless, but his watch beeped indicating he needed to leave for work, and he could hear their other children starting to stir in their bed and crib.
“We can talk about it later. Have a good day at work.'' She moved to press a kiss to his cheek, but he turned to catch her mouth with his own, a passionate but fleeting kiss all he could offer before the child in her arms squeaked in protest for being squished between them. He planted a kiss on her forehead too, and teleported off to give the same affection to the other two before he grabbed his things and left for the day.
“You seem chipper. Did Sonic face-plant into a wall again?” Rouge asked as Shadow took his seat at their conjoined desks.
He merely shrugged, opened his laptop, and tried his best not to wag his tail too much.