He didn't even get a chance for the sun to set on the day. Eggman was on the lamb once more, his younger alternate self had returned to his dimension, and Knuckles and Amy were organizing the celebration. Tails was the only one that hadn't gone off to do something once the initial fervor of victory subsided, instead clinging to Sonic's side (almost literally) as if he would vanish for another half year if he let Sonic out of his sight.
It took most of the rest of the day to convince Tails to go home and rest. The fight was over, and after months of searching for Sonic nonstop, of never giving up hope that he was still alive, he needed rest. Convincing him to go to sleep had been a chore, and it had required Sonic promising he wouldn't go off on a run into the wilderness for a few weeks of traveling where the wind took him, as he was usually wont to do.
It wasn't a hard promise to make. Not with the tremor in his legs he had barely been keeping concealed from his little bro or the echoey, distant quality every sound had taken on. No, he wasn't going to be running very far for a while.
Tails was asleep before he could even finish saying, "Good night," and with that, Sonic was in the clear. The only question remaining was where he would collapse. And he didn't have a lot of time to answer it, or even get there. The moment he closed the door to Tails' bedroom behind him, a tsunami of vertigo crashed over him, and it was all he could do to stay standing even with both hands propped against the wall to hold himself up.
The only sound left was his own heartbeat and his ragged breathing. Darkness encroached on the edges of his vision, quickly consuming his sight until all that remained was a narrow pinpoint at the center.
He staggered through Tails' home more by memory than sight, his feet feeling heavier with each step. A destination took hold in his mind, clouded and fading as it was. It was far from ideal, but it was the best of what he had left as choices. He wasn't making it off of the property, that much was certain.
He stumbled through the front door. The next second, he found himself falling, and in an increasingly distant part of his mind he realized he had forgotten about the porch steps. When he slammed into the ground though, he didn't even feel it, not with how numb he realized he was.
But he couldn't stop here, where anyone could see and find him. And he wasn't far. All he had to do was go about twenty feet further.
He crawled, manually forcing himself to breath and stay conscious, despite every cell of his being screaming to let him go to sleep. In his sliver of vision, he spotted the loose panel on the siding of Tails' house. One hand over the other, each knee dragging through the dirt and grass under him, he moved towards it with agonizing slowness. So close, he was so close.
It was harder to move the panel than it had been to pull Mobius back together in Dark Gaia's wake, but he only needed to move it enough that he could fit through into the crawlspace under the house.
Blessed coolness and only partially-disturbed dirt--from his previous retreats here on similar occasions--greeted him as he pulled his limp body into the comforting darkness. He almost let himself pass out then and there, only holding it off long enough to move the loose panel back into place.
Once he was closed in, he didn't even make an effort to pull his arm back to himself, letting it fall lifeless to the dirt.
"Gonna be out for a while this time," he thought. "Hopefully nobody will still find me."
Oblivion claimed him. But for the first time in much too long, at least he felt safe.
