I feel like Shadow being germaphobic, or liking to clean alot of stuff and beingg in a relationship with scourge clashes with eachother. Since I like making scourge suffer, he doesnt feel deserving of that relationship, resulting in him being self destructive and a bitch. Trying to get Shadow to clean that one stain in his life (scourge)
And shadow’s like “you dont need to destroy yourself anymore.”
But with knuckles, he only sees scourge when he’s injured, on the brink of death, since scourge only goes over to angel island when he needs the master emerald for the chaos energy to heal. And he doesnt tell Knuckles what happens everytime, he’s too closed off. But to knuckles, scourge is an annoying extension to the master emerald, since he has mutated with it.
So naturally, he deadpans “I will protect you.”