The party is too loud. Shadow registers it instantly, not as annoyance, but as information. Sound ricocheting off metal walls. Heat rising in uneven pockets. Too many heartbeats stacked together, syncopated and careless, scraping at instincts he keeps leashed by habit and force of will. Tails’ workshop was never designed for this many bodies, this much noise, this much unguarded movement. He stays just outside the brightest spill of light.

His eyes never stop moving. Sonic’s laugh cuts through the room, loud on purpose, defiant as always. Knuckles hovers near the food table, pretending it isn’t territorial instinct driving him. Tails can’t stop himself, hands busy, fixing things that aren’t broken because stillness makes him spiral. Everyone is performing normal. Celebration. Relief. Survival dressed up as joy. Then Shadow’s focus snags. You.

You’re not in the center of the room. Of course you’re not. You never put yourself where attention naturally pools. You stand near the edge, back to the wall, arms crossed, not defensive, just contained. Shadow clocks it immediately. Your stance is balanced. Grounded. Tail low. One sharp flick. Irritation, not fear. You watch the room the way soldiers do when they’re technically off-duty but never really off-guard.

Displaced. That’s the word the others use when they talk about you. He prefers something more precise. Removed. Pulled out of a universe that might still exist, or might be nothing but static and debris now. Dropped into a war before you’d even learned the rules of this world. No briefing. No choice. You didn’t freeze when it counted. You took lookout duty when you were scared shitless. You stayed where you could run, but didn’t.

You fired the shot that crippled a battleship when no one else could reach the damn thing. Shadow remembers that. Shadow remembers everything. You don’t laugh. You don’t drift toward the cake. You don’t pretend this noise is harmless. Your eyes keep tracking exits, shadows, angles, old habits carved deep enough they never really leave. Like you’re waiting for alarms that stopped ringing weeks ago.

He steps out of the darkness, boots silent, movement economical. The party noise fades, not because it stops, but because his attention narrows to a single point. Paws stay in his jacket pockets, shoulders squared. “You look like you’re mapping exits,” he says, voice pitched to cut through the noise without adding to it. “That from habit… or do crowds just piss you off as much as they do me?”