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Seasons’ Beatings

Dingo drifted the finger frame toward the table, toward Sleet. Scratching at a canine tooth with his pinky, the wolf was slow to notice. When he did, he flinched and ducked away, then frowned, realizing his overreaction. He played it off with a disdainful snort becoming of an aristocrat, turning up his muzzle and placing his hands in his lap primly. Once again the words adorable and hilarious came to mind. And pretty. And periwinkle. But mostly pretty. Even in his cruder moments, there was always an elegance to Sleet.

Word Count: 6,789

Characters: Sleet and Dingo, brief nonspeaking appearances from Manic and Sonic

Pairing: Sleet x Dingo

A/N: rated G, no crude humor this time around. Well, this took far longer than I wanted. This was supposed to be a side quest, but I hit a few roadblocks along the way. Pretend it’s still December. Finally I’m freeeee

I don’t know if I’m super happy with this, but I figure I can always go in and edit. I caught strep writing the latter half and was feeling altogether bleh. Happy Slingo Holiday Special and to all a good night

Seasons’ Beatings

As much as Dingo enjoyed getting straight to walloping, the thrill of the chase had its merit too.

He preferred charging headlong through crowded bazaars and port cities, sending market stalls and their contents flying, making his presence well-known. Stalking on a cool, starless night from the trees in the form of an arboreal apex predator and striking when the target least expected it offered a different buzz. No matter the approach, it was all good fun seeing the terror flood their eyes when they realized they were cornered and the two bounty hunters were only pretending to listen to their babbled appeals and excuses.

Sometimes, they’d get a fighter, someone who really knew how to make the chase worthwhile, the type who’d whirl on Dingo mid-step and dare a glancing blow. Never much of a challenge, but refreshing nonetheless. Dingo liked to let them think they had him on the backfoot before quashing their hope and a great deal of their bones, if the client allowed.

The thing with chases though was that they were more enjoyable when you weren’t on hooves. And you weren’t in snow that went up to your weird, jutting reindeer ankles.

And you weren’t providing transport for Mobius’ worst backseat driver.

“For the love of—Dingo, I’ve seen you move faster for the ice cream truck! Get up! He’s getting away!” Sleet’s heel connected with Dingo’s downy underbelly twice. “Yah, yah!” His spurring didn’t hurt, but it sure was annoying.

With a huff, Dingo clambered wobblily out of the steep snowbank he’d sunken into, flung the rapidly piling snow that’d fallen onto his velveted tines off, and broke into an uneasy gallop onto hopefully less engulfing ground. His legs felt a hair’s breadth away from turning into icicles. Maybe he should have suggested a penguin form instead. Sliding down the Northern Tundra’s slopes on your belly sounded much less taxing than charging down them on hooves.

“Come on!” Sleet persisted, albeit with a touch of chattering teeth. “Eyes on the prize!”

What do you think I’m doin’? Dingo would have said, but his tongue was decently warm inside his mouth, and he didn’t want to risk a draft. Even in this heavily insulated form, the cold was managing to seep through. The froth that leaked from his fuzzy, cowish muzzle crystalized within seconds of exposure, and his tusks were starting to rime.

Sleet was holding up well, all things considered. No doubt due to Dingo’s woolen craftsmanship. Winter was sweater weather, and Dingo fancied himself a pro at knitting sweaters. Sleet was wearing one beneath his armor, over his undersuit, both of which already conserved heat passably. His grousing when presented with the sweaters, among other handmade winter apparel, had decreased over the years. He still made an attempt—oh, did he try—but his efforts to avoid wearing them weren’t nearly as long-lasting, and his tough guy excuses were all used up.

The prize of which the moody jockey referred looked like nothing more than a little green dot in the freezing fog and stretching white expanse.

Sleet shooting Manic’s hovercraft out of the sky hadn’t slowed the hedgehog. As soon as the bounty hunters disembarked the Red Whiptail, expecting to retrieve the unconscious, if not dazed, royal pain, they found out he was very much still alert. The improvise and use your downed hovercraft as a snowboard type of very much still alert.

“Move it, Dingo! Yah!” Another jab in the side. Dingo tossed his antlered head and grunted in warning.

If only there were a low branch around to humble him.

A humorous idea, but an ill-advised one. While Dingo wasn’t against ill-advised ideas, capturing Manic was a win they both needed. Sacrificing their chances for a fleeting laugh, that’d be one of his biggest blunders ever.

As the little green dot grew nearer, Sleet’s weight leaned forth. Blaster bolts whizzed over Dingo’s antlers. The volley lit the fog up enough for them to see Manic’s quilled shape serpentine with barely any difficulty, dodging every scintillating beam and vanishing into wintery obscurity once more.

“Agh!” Sleet let out a growl of frustration and hammered a fist onto Dingo’s withers. “Confounded pincushion!” His shouts were drowned out by a passing gale of icy wind.

Freedom Fighter activity in Mobius’ polar regions had increased ever since the Empire began installing refueling outposts and garrison bases there. With construction underway on a secret major oil rig operation, and a group of nosy Arctic Freedom Fighters at large, His Pinkness had all his subordinates scattered high and low.

On any other day, in any other biome, Dingo would have been pleased by the diversion Manic’s appearance brought. It didn’t snow where Dingo was from. The driest of Mobius’ continents, Trailus was warm year around. Before becoming a bounty hunter, he’d only experienced snow inauthentically, by way of depictions in media and decoration for festive storefronts. Those holiday specials he grew up watching never emphasized just how blisteringly cold the stuff could get.

Extended exposure to freezing temperatures also made his body feel a bit . . . starchy. Weaker even, although he didn’t like to think about that. Sleet once hypothesized his unique molecular structure would solidify at an extreme level of frigidity, such as the conditions found at the Ice Cap. Although the Northern Tundra wasn’t extreme, it wasn’t particularly cushy either.

Why’d those Resistance wimps have to go and make a big fuss now? Couldn’t they have waited until after the holidays? Better yet, why couldn’t Robotnik have waited to build the rig until after the holidays?

It’s the one thing this whole bleedin’ season is good for! thought Dingo.

The abundance of seasonal sweets, the banquet halls to raid, the unattended banks, the carolers to throw water at, the parade floats to pop, the decorations to sabotage, the gift heists, the family-friendly icons to crudely imitate and subsequent children to frighten! There was no shortage of mischief and mayhem to be had. Or there would have been, if Robotnik hadn’t essentially criminalized any sort of revelry that wasn’t venerating him. The elite and subordinates like the bounty hunters had certain allowances, of course, but any gift-giving that wasn’t to him was strictly prohibited and, after the Urchino incident, Sleet was hesitant about going behind Robotnik’s back. Meaning no time-honored Sleet and Dingo gift exchanges!

Anger at both his employer and adversaries compounding, newfound strength and speed surged through Dingo, cold-numbed legs accelerating, his hooves great pistons punching in and out of the compacted snow. A rumble built deep in Dingo’s throat, then exploded out as a forbidding bugle loud enough to rival the howl of the wind. There was such force behind it his head careened back. The cry rushed from his lungs, breath streaming out and billowing like white fire. Sleet, snickering, gave Dingo’s fluffy neck a companionable slap, evidently very pleased by the potent shift in energy.

Mid-bound and mid-reverie about pulling Robotnik limb from limb however, right when the slope began to bottom out, Dingo’s four-chambered reindeer stomach suddenly tightened. At once, he jammed all his hooves deep into the packed snow. His back and hindquarters canted low and hard while he slammed the brakes. Snow kicked up behind him in an impressive shower as he slid, like dust beneath screeching wheels. When his momentum stopped, he thudded heavily onto his haunches with a grunt.

Dingo was a firm believer in going with his gut, his instincts. Sleet pooh-poohed this, but Sleet was an incorrigible pooh-pooher. If he wasn’t loudly naysaying something, he must have been out of sorts.

“I have a six cents,” Dingo had once tried to explain.

“A sixth sense,” Sleet had replied in his grousing I’m too tired for this voice.

“Whassat?”

Presently, his six cents were giving him a bad feeling about what laid up ahead. He took a few investigative sniffs of the air, the last of which being the deepest. The large snowflakes he accidentally inhaled on this turn made him hitch and sputter. Once he recovered, he stared into the wintery haze beyond. Far too murky to identify any obstacles or enemies. Dingo crept forward, keeping his antlers low and at the ready. He noted Sleet’s quiet. Perhaps he felt it too.

Soon, he discovered just what it was: a gaping crevasse in the ice. Edging closer to its cliff, Dingo peered down and made an awed, distinctly Trailian noise as he admired the vivid blue of the chasm’s jagged walls. When he had his fill, he lifted his chin and said in a tone not the least bit hiding the smugness that swelled within him after all the kicking and yah-ing and unwanted, unconstructive critique, “Heh, good thing my mutant super senses felt that, eh, Sleet? What was it you were sayin’ about my steering again? About my tragee . . . trajuct . . . whatever smarty-smart word you said?” There was no nasal and grudgingly accepting reply to validate him. “Sleet?” Not even a defeated huff or grumble. “Sleet?”

He realized his back suddenly felt a lot more cold, more bare. Dingo turned his head as far as his bulky reindeer neck allowed and took stock of his fussy rider’s absence. Inwardly, Sleet’s outlined afterimage winked at him like a neon sign. “Where’d ya go?” Dingo looked around, making a small circle in place. At the same time he completed his pivot, he heard a muffled groan from up ahead. Dingo squinted and focused in.

The fog abated enough for him to see Sleet’s lower half sticking out of a snowdrift. Dingo jolted with panic . . . and then it hit him, the recollection of that one fancy science concept Sleet told him about whenever he feared he’d misplaced his tail: object permanence. Panic quickly gave way to barely smothered, full body spasming laughter.

He hadn’t bisected his partner in some horrible, strangely bloodless accident. Sleet had merely gotten an icy cold faceful of comeuppance, flung off when Dingo stopped at the crevasse.

“Hold—” An explosive ‘snrk!’ breached Dingo’s muzzle, and he had to take a moment to gather himself. “Hold on, Sleet! I’ve got ya!” He wheeled, bounded a few paces, turned back around, and primed his muscles for a running leap. Pawing the ground, he took a snorting breath, twin clouds of misty condensation blasting from his nostrils upon his exhale before he barreled forward and launched himself. “Hup!”

He soared with a practiced ease. This form might not have had any flying magic like in the tales—he had tried once before, there was a lot less whimsy and a lot more crashing—but Dingo had history jumping cliffs and canyons in the Badlands as a horse, which was basically just a less poky reindeer.

His dismount was even cleaner than he could have hoped. The feat stoked his conceit higher. Tail raised, he took on an exaggerated trotting bearing, hooves lifting loftily. “Did you see that?” He paused, realizing the comedy of the question. “Oh, right. You couldn’t, ‘cause your head’s—”

Giggles slipped out from him as he reared and pressed his forehooves into the snowdrift, returning to his fours as it gave way. How it crumpled apart reminded Dingo a little of the breakable chocolate desserts the aristocrats enjoyed. He found the mallets given to break the treats far too puny and ineffectual, though he supposed those qualities complemented the nobility well.

Mumbling concussed nothings, Sleet sloughed out on his front.

Alongside one unmoving Manic the Hedgehog.

“Sleet!” Dingo tore backward in surprise. “Sleet! You got ‘im!” Excitement laced his voice.

“Wha?“ Sleet’s gaze was unfocused, eyelids asymmetrically shuttered. He spoke with a thick dizziness.

Dingo thrust a hoof towards the vermin, pointing as best he could. “The hedgehog! You got ‘im! We did it!”

A brief silence passed between them as Sleet registered this. His once woozy eyes lit up, and the wolf sprung to his feet, lifting Manic by his wrist and giving a breathless, ecstatic laugh. “I-I must have collided with him when you threw me!” The when you threw me part held none of the usual Sleet sneer. Nothing like a captured quarry to smooth things over.

They whooped and cheered and Dingo trotted a little victory jig in place, the soul-crushing atmosphere and all work-related misgivings peeling away in the face of their electric jubilation. They’d done it! The Freedom Fighters’ morale would no doubt weaken when they saw one of the prophesied children roboticized. Robotnik could call this whole thing off! They could go back to the fortress in Robotropolis and make some pitiful small business fork over all the sweet treats they can carry and heckle a community theater play!

And maybe, just maybe, they’d wander under a mistletoe.

“Before we roboticize him,” Sleet was explaining, jogging Dingo from his moony pining, “we use him as a carrot to draw his accursed siblings out.”

“Yeah! . . . Uh, what’s the carrot for?”

Sleet raised the limp hedgehog higher. “He’s the carrot.”

Dingo scrutinized the boy, brows and nose wrinkling. He hummed an indecisive noise. “I think I’d make the better carrot. Manic’s more of an artichoke, I reckon. Maybe asparagus?” Dingo quickly amended after giving Manic another glance over. “No, wait! Definitely an artichoke.”

Just as Sleet opened his mouth, there was a booming sound, almost like a miniature thunderclap, as if the air itself had shattered.

Then, WHOOSH!

A meteoric gust of wind and a glowing javelin of blue sped between them, the force of the blur’s passage slamming into them and bowling them over. Before the geyser of snow the interloper kicked up could settle, Dingo angrily leapt to his hooves and struck out with his antlers. Nothing connected. He’d only been attacking empty space, space where the impossibly fast Sonic had just been.

Sleet’s hand, too, was empty. The only evidence of Manic’s short-lived nabbing were the scattering of green quills on the ground.

Dingo bristled, nostrils flaring, blood burning. He made to pursue, but a steadying arm caught him in his chest. Dingo fixed the now standing wolf a pleading stare and uttered a desperate moo. His body went nervy and twitchy, like a housecat’s after seeing a bird they can’t reach. If he just pushed a little harder, if he funneled every ounce of his rage and hatred and anguish in the run, maybe he could catch him.

Sleet said nothing though. His face was one of weary acceptance, a familiar sight. He turned his attention from Dingo’s shuffling and reindeer whines to the horizon. Dingo followed.

There was no blue dot. There was no green dot.

Sonic had cleared the Northern Tundra’s vastness in milliseconds. He and Manic were gone.

“But I . . . we . . . ” said Dingo quietly.

Sleet sounded half bored. “Come on, Dingo. It’s not worth it.”

The fight drained from the mutant’s cervid muscles. His ears slunk. His tail drooped. He stilled. Sleet placed a hand on Dingo’s shoulder. The way it lingered before he vaulted and climbed aboard, Dingo wondered briefly if it wasn’t just to mount up, but a rare show of comfort.

With Sleet astride, Dingo turned away from where the hedgehogs vanished. He took a few plodding steps forward, setting course for where they’d left the Whiptail. Dingo hesitated almost as soon as he’d started however, eyes falling upon the loosened spines. The clouds overhead, once blanketing and unconscionably opaque, had curtained somewhat. Bright sunlight pooled over the quills, and the snow beneath them glittered. As Dingo considered them afresh, his rounded deer ears bobbed curiously. They looked almost like pine needles.

The image made him hearten. His mouth twitched into a small smile, the first stirrings of inspiration purling in his mind. He could still salvage this.

Dingo walked over and, gingerly, picked one of the quills up in his mouth.

Living in the Northern Tundra base Robotnik had arranged for them felt a bit like living in a big sardine can.

For something so recently built, there was a palpable aura of dinginess and dilapidation to it. Robotnik spared expenses whenever he could, and ensuring the bounty hunters’ quality of life was clearly something he didn’t worry himself with. That much was obvious by the low ceiling and door frame Dingo had to duck and sidestep to enter; no matter how many slapstick injuries he accrued, it took a mighty conscious effort on his part to remember to be size-aware.

Bleak, minimalistic, and perfumed by the industrial fustiness ever-present in the emperor’s handiwork, the station was a true exercise in function over fashion. It was toasty at least. The hum and rattle and whir of the heating system went on day and night.

The circumstances in which they found themselves reminded Dingo of a monster movie he once saw, about a group of scientists fending off a shapeshifting creature. As a shapeshifting creature himself, the irony was not lost on him. Only, he was far more handsome and charismatic than the space invader featured, and the scientists’ accommodation had more than three rooms. When the duo first arrived, Dingo jestingly promised Sleet that he’d never ever “assimmilatize” him, on his Quokka Scouts’ honor.

The wolf, alas, didn’t get the reference.

Returning from their not-so-fortuitous hedgehog hunt in the Red Whiptail, Dingo, biped body plan restored, had been pleased to see an imperial freighter touch down with them. The robots that disembarked carted a large hovering dolly heaped with crates. Crates that held very special, very precious cargo of the jolly persuasion: Dingo’s extensive collection of holiday decorations. He saw to replacing the base’s gray upon gray upon gray with colors of a more lively mood posthaste.

“Don’t you think you’re going overboard with . . .” Sleet began, sitting cross-legged at the thinly-cushioned circular booth in the middle of their measly kitchenette slash living room. He, now wearing his sweater true, waved the bitten end of a jerky strip he’d been gnawing on in Dingo’s direction. “All this holiday hullabaloo?”

Their food options were limited to sledging biscuits, canned meats, and the unglamorous like.

Definitely nothing he would swipe from a banquet hall, Dingo thought. What he wouldn’t do for some glazed ham right about now.

The portions allotted sustained Sleet fine but they never filled Dingo up, hunger quick to wake him in the middle of the night from his bunk. How did Robotnik expect him to aid in world domination on a near empty stomach? If he was half the genius he boasted to be, surely he’d have created a food replicator by now, like the ones in the space serials on TV.

“This place is cramped as is,” Sleet continued. “When you said you were expecting a shipment, I was hoping you meant something useful.” He added under his breath conspiratorially. “Like libations.”

Indeed, Dingo had considered using his imperial entitlements further, such as requesting an hourly delivery of frozen pizza. But he could only pull rank so much. Turning Robotnik’s logistics personnel into pizza delivery men was apparently a step too far. If they’d been given more time to prepare, Dingo would have stocked up his rucksack. As it was, he’d eaten all the snacks he packed already.

Dingo gave a small shrug before extracting a red tablecloth from a crate and unfurling it in one big shake. “It gives the room some life.” Dust and glitter flew off, causing Sleet to grimace and squinch his snout in a manner Dingo found both adorable and hilarious. Dingo turned his head slightly to hide his enjoyment of the pulled face, since Sleet wasn’t fond of being thought of as adorable or hilarious. “Some feng shui.” He wasn’t sure he was using the word right, but it felt nice rolling off his tongue.

Sleet made a growly noise in his throat as he bit into the jerky and yanked off a piece after much effort. He gave it a few vigorous chews before saying low. “You’ve been watching those house renovation programs again, haven’t you?”

“Heh,” Dingo’s cheeks heated. Not with shame for enjoying yet another traditionally un-bounty hunter-y activity, but from the knowing tone of Sleet’s voice, from being read so ablely, so easily caught. Man, he’s good. “I-I just think it’s fun to imagine wreckin’ the really fancy ones, y’know?”

Sleet sighed. Dingo got the feeling it wasn’t true annoyance. “Do me a favor and get it out of your system before we return to Robotropolis,” Sleet said through chomps of his leather-tough snack, having popped its entirety into his mouth. “Robotnik doesn’t care for others questioning his judgement. I imagine that includes fortress design decisions.”

Bit of a drab thing to imagine, Dingo thought, when one could imagine something more incredible like bagpipe-playing giraffes. “Okey-doke!” Dingo assented with a cheerfulness. He draped the cloth over the booth’s table. Not made for small surfaces, most of it spilled over and bunched at the floor. Dreamily, Dingo clasped his hands to one side, head following suit in a tilt. “Beeeautiful,” he said, then looked to Sleet with great anticipation, lower lip bitten and tail awag, whipping excited arcs.

“It sure is . . . something.”

Pleased with Sleet’s speechlessness, his dreamy pose deepened into a silent squee, a full-toothed, face-splitting beam scrunching his eyes.

“Ugh,” Dingo opened his eyes to see Sleet shielding his own. “Don’t do that in front of me. I just ate. Your wrinkles have wrinkles.”

Oh, Sleet. Dingo would have rolled his eyes if he were better coordinated. The last instance he tried Sleet claimed he looked like a drunk chameleon, and the sensation felt odd.

Taking a step back, Dingo appraised all his much-needed renovations thus far through a finger frame. His tongue poked out as he focused, scanning over the silvery tinsel and lights, the plastic garland and the big, red ribbons. It was no traditional Dingo family getup—he hadn’t his siblings here to help, and like Sleet said there was only so much he could unpack before things became hazardous—but considering what the room looked like before it’d more than make do.

Dingo drifted the finger frame toward the table, toward Sleet. Scratching at a canine tooth with his pinky, the wolf was slow to notice. When he did, he flinched and ducked away, then frowned, realizing his overreaction. He played it off with a disdainful snort becoming of an aristocrat, turning up his muzzle and placing his hands in his lap primly.

Once again the words adorable and hilarious came to mind. And pretty. And periwinkle. But mostly pretty. Even in his cruder moments, there was always an elegance to Sleet.

Dingo admired him and his proud, terribly kissable-looking snout a moment longer before skirting off to their sleeping quarters. There was more crashing than he’d intended.

He returned shortly after with his tome of a scrapbook and an assortment of stationery supplies nestled close to his chest. He grinned at Sleet, who had risen in reaction to the clangor and squeaks of boot soles against aged metal.

“Ah, yes,” said Sleet flatly as he resettled into his seat. “More essentials.”

“Uh-huh!” Dingo dumped all the items onto the table. Out of everything in the accumulation, Sleet stared most incredulously at the scrapbook, mouth agape as he beheld it. Heavy enough to qualify as a bludgeoning weapon, thick enough to jam a titanium blast door, the whopping composition was several years worth of recorded memories, a highlight reel of roguish escapades, bashed skulls, juiced up sidearms, double-dealing and ill-gotten Mobium.

Dingo plopped down close next to Sleet. The wolf bounced slightly from the new weight on the shared seat. “And you’re gonna help me finish this!” said Dingo, opening the album to an empty two-page spread. Sleet looked at it, then back to Dingo, then back to the book, as if not comprehending. Dingo gave him a giddy and encouraging nod. Sleet, not for lack of Dingo’s trying, hadn’t seen the scrapbook up close before. It only made sense he’d be taken aback by its awesomeness.

When he spotted a certain green spine amongst the table’s clutter however, his expression curdled. “What's that doing here?” he said in a voice like he’d smelled something foul. “Don’t tell me you’re . . . ” Sleet cut himself off with an irritated huff, looking to the ceiling and muttering. Then he whipped his head towards Dingo. “What’s the use in memorializing such a humiliating failure?” he snapped, gesturing indignantly at the memoiric cause of complaint. “I thought your scrapbook was for triumphs, for trophies.”

Dingo blinked and shrank in on himself somewhat. He expected Sleet to be reluctant, sure, but not upset. Upsetting Sleet was the last thing Dingo ever wanted to do. He just thought this’d be a fun activity, something to do other than wait on pins and needles for another command from Robotnik. Perhaps Sleet had been more annoyed by their conditions than he’d let on.

Ears edging back, Dingo averted from Sleet’s glare and tightened jaw. He grimaced and put a hand to his burly arm, rubbing there and holding himself uneasily. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

No, Dingo thought, quickly recouping his nerve.

He had to try.

Dingo drew a breath, then admitted. “It was sad.” His eyes turned downcast. “Yeah.” Despite himself, there was an ache in his voice. His hand clenched unconsciously into a fist as he thought back to their defeat. A mental image of Sonic and Manic’s sneering faces apparitioned. Dingo’s heavy brow lowered, but only for a moment. He stopped himself from imagining thrashing them. There was a more important matter to attend to. His gaze lifted. “But,” he put extra emphasis on the word, brightening, “as my hero Tommy—”

Sleet interrupted with a groan. Dingo, recognizing the comparison concerned a multimedia action-adventure franchise Sleet couldn’t be further from being a fan of, winced. Nevertheless, it was the first example that came to mind and, considering the wealth of box sets and comics in Dingo’s quarters back at the fortress, this was assuredly one reference the pop culture ignorant Sleet was familiar with.

“—Thunder said in Tommy Thunder and the Citadel of the Ancients, y’gotta take the good with the bad. It was bad Manic got away. But we made it out without gettin’ spindashed, yeah? And that rush when we had him? I know you felt that.”

Sleet appeared to, albeit grudgingly, consider Dingo’s words. His snarl lines softened, as did his disparaging glower.

With this, Dingo’s resolve strengthened even more. “Things could’ve gone worse. There coulda been a snownado. I hear those exist. We coulda woke up a yeti, or fallen down that crack and gotten captured by creepy ice hermits who’d force us to perform for their entertainment.” Sleet arched a brow at him. “Well, y’know. Just a thought,” said Dingo innocently, venturing a smile. “A hypothetical. That’s what it’s called, right? Hypo-thet-ical.” His nose scrunched. “Feels weird. Why so many letters? The time it takes to say it, y’could go ‘round the world and back again.”

A corner of Sleet’s mouth quirked, and a soft ‘hm’ escaped him. Amusement. Faint, but there all the same. Seeing Dingo’s smile broaden in turn, Sleet caught himself and endeavored to reharden his face. Dingo understood Sleet’s mannerisms too well for that to fool him. The mutant felt relieved his joke landed. He was starting to get the hang of these hyper-bollies and speech figures.

Dingo let his triumph sink in for a moment before speaking again. “A failure’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it.”

Sleet, who’d taken to rolling a pen up and down the table with the flick of an idle finger during the lull, seemed to start at this. He stopped his distraction, and his ear twitched.

“That’s why I record every job, bad or good,” Dingo patted one of the pages, “in this book.” When he turned to Sleet, proud of his craft, Sleet somehow looked at him even more bewildered than he had the book. Dingo frowned. What’d he done now?

Sleet’s eyes creased, disbelieving, almost accusatory. “Where’d you get that from?”

“Get what from?”

“That proverb? The thing you just said?”

“Uhh . . . ” Nervous, Dingo’s eyes flitted left and right, searching for help where there was none. “. . . ‘What’s a proverb?”

“No, the—” Another ‘hm’, and a slow half shake of his head. He inched forward, laying his arms on the table, the tenseness in his shoulders ebbing away as he regarded Dingo with a sort of mellow wonder. Their eyes held, longer than Dingo had been expecting.

Was Sleet still waiting for an answer? “Can I, uh,” Dingo lowered his head in appeal and tapped his forefingers together, “get a hint?”

Another beat, then Sleet mused softly at last. “Always the optimist.” As he said this, a small smile crept over his face. He let it remain.

Small, but more nourishing any banquet hall raid, Dingo thought, heart dancing. His tail thrummed the cushion as he drank in the hard-won expression, a pleasant warmth blossoming in his chest and radiating outward. The aw-shuckness of it all overwhelmed him so much all he could do was smile back, rub the back of his head, and stammer little waving off noises. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what an optimist was. From the way Sleet said it, how he looked at him, it must have been a great compliment.

“Awh, well, y’know,” Dingo began once his tongue untied, feet moving in slow kicks beneath the table. “I like lookin’ on the bright side, too. Oh, and hey,” he put in, giggling, “we might’ve lost Manic, but now we know you make a great projectile.”

“Don’t push it.”

“Right.”

Sleet’s eyes found the book once more. He reached over, grabbed a corner of the album’s front cover, and closed it.

Dingo’s dancing heart sank. Was the projectile joke too far?

He knew Sleet had a dislike of revisiting his past. ‘Never look back’ was a maxim he’d hardwired into his very being.

But the past in the scrapbook is different. I’m in it. I’m there for him, thought Dingo, feeling his ears sag. He swallowed his disappointment and steeled himself for Sleet to rise and walk away.

And then Sleet began slowly tracing a hand over the album’s cover. Dingo’s ears lifted as he watched Sleet. The way the wolf contemplated it, if not for the puffy stickers, water damage, and yellowed photographs of their mugshots, one could have been convinced it was some hallowed, priceless artifact.

“You put everything in this?” he asked after a stretch of silence, gaze still rapt. Sleet’s voice was thoughtful, barely above a whisper. He passed the tips of his lithe fingers over the title, which Dingo had lovingly, heavy-handedly markered.

BOWTEE HUNTOR BFFS

“Everything.” Most everything. He’d sooner wear shirts for the rest of his life than immortalize the arrow incident. “I’ve been wanting to show you, but you . . . well, you were always busy. With things like ironing and filing reports and ironing reports and filing ironing reports.”

Sleet stiffened, and his face paled a little at the mention of his unusually frequent postponements. If Dingo didn’t know any better—and he was often told he didn’t—he’d say Sleet looked as if he’d just realized he’d forgotten to turn in one of those pesky ironing reports. Hopefully Robotnik wouldn’t notice.

“Sometimes all on the same day! I don’t know how you do it!” Dingo amiably bumped his shoulder into Sleet’s. “It’s like, are you a worker bee or a wolf?” He chuckled at his own joke.

Sleet cleared his throat before agreeing fast. “Yeah. Busy.” The sudden discomfort on his face began to abate. “I was busy. Very busy,” he said, and it almost sounded like he was saying it as much for himself as for Dingo.

“Ah, it’s no problem. Really. Nothing to be sorry for. Better you than me! Haw!” Dingo laughed again, clapping a hand to Sleet’s back. “Robotnik’s never asked me to do any of that beep-boop ‘puter stuff.”

Sleet pawed at his shoulder blade, then leaned back to survey a bulge between the album’s text block. He opened the scrapbook there, a section in the middle.

“Oh!” Dingo piped up. “This is the poisoned knife of that Raiju Clan assassin that tried to kill me! Remember that? My gains were too thick for her noodly arms to yank it out, haha! Best sleep I ever had.

Oh, and that’s my medal for eatin’ all that Spagonian ice! Remember? When we were tracking that runaway Mazuri prince for the reward money? Oh, oh,” he bounced in his seat when Sleet turned to the next page, “and this is a scrap from the robe of that Meropian city official I mugged! The one who looked at me funny! The pattern’s real nice. Oh, oh, oh, and these are the teeth of those Jackal Squad jokes what tried to poach our poached quarry! I kept the blood an’ gums on ‘em, it adds a little splash of color to the page, y’know?”

They continued like this, Sleet turning pages, Dingo commentating. Unprompted, he would point out the little flourishes he’d added to border his scrawled captions and detailed what material he used to produce his hand-drawn recreations of events. Occasionally Sleet would go beyond a monosyllabic reply, reminiscing along with him in his own way by critiquing the veracity of the accounts.

“That’s us making up our debt to Torque after you pushed me into that lever,” said Dingo, tapping a vignette with caricatured versions of themselves holding wrenches and looking sooty. “When we put her and her crew months behind on work. I didn’t know a monkey that small could be so angry, gahah-ha! I was gonna make it a sorta flipbook, so the ships could crash into each other like they did in real life, but I, er, couldn’t figure it out. Check this out!” He held the scrapbook up and jostled it lightly. The rendering of Torque had googly eyes, and they shook below her big, angry eyebrows.

The interactive feature evoked a genuine snicker from Sleet. It was a sound Dingo wished he could bottle up and listen to on repeat.

Luck shone upon them. At least half an hour had passed with nary a pinging communicator to answer.

Dingo had been so occupied retelling exploit after exploit that he’d almost forgotten about the blank spread. It was Sleet who’d reminded him.

“What would I do without you?” Dingo had said.

“Flounder.” Sleet had replied. “Well, more than usual.”

At first, Sleet seemed intimidated by the wide-ranging assortment of crafting supplies. He was very precious when using them, holding them like scientific specimens rather than tools to free one’s imagination. Dingo thought it was sweet he cared so much about not using up his things, but Sleet was being much too cautious. It took a while for him to unrestrain himself and indulge, although his manner of design was more controlled than Dingo’s. He was especially taken with the bottles of glitter glue, praising the adhesive’s efficiency and cleanliness.

Soon enough, they eased into a comfortable rhythm, cutting and pasting and drawing away. Dingo continued to hark back to past vistas and wrought havoc aloud all the while, but slower, less gushingly.

“Are we still banned from Emerald Coast? The staff was real huffy about my shark fin prank, the buncha snobs.”

“No, Dingo, they were ‘real huffy’ about you uprooting the resort’s ornate marble fountain and throwing it at the mob of heavily-armed bounty hunters that were tailing us.”

“Hah, yeah. Good times.”

It was when Dingo began coloring in the page’s piece de resistance, the grand pine tree that Manic’s quill would adorn, that he felt his eyelids growing heavy. He fought it, blinking his eyes determinedly and completing another swathe of green, but the pull came to him once more, stronger. Somewhere between recounting the Chaos Cola security gig and their time in the Mercian dungeons, Dingo had helped himself to a mug of hot cocoa. The warmth of the beverage, the soreness of his reindeer-worn muscles, it was all beginning to sap his energy.

Maybe if he just rested his eyes, just for a moment . . .

“Dingo.”

“Mwuh?”

“You’re smushing me.”

Dingo cracked his eyes open. Sure enough, he was slumping heavily against Sleet’s side, one weighty arm draped across the slighter canine’s shoulders. He jolted with a snort and removed himself. “Sorry!” Dingo blurted and dusted orange fur off from around Sleet’s collarbone.

How could he have dozed off during something so important as BHBFF bonding? He wiped his mouth with a forearm and sniffled. Shame faintly panged at him. “I wasn’t asleep,” Dingo denied preemptively, removing his glasses for a moment to scrub his eyes. “I was . . . ” A yawn threatened to interrupt him. He stifled it the best he could, face screwing up. “I was inspectin’ your . . . work.”

“Mm, of course. Snoring while inspecting. What a novel idea.”

Dingo stretched his arms upward. In doing so, he almost cuffed Sleet with an elbow.

“Watch it!”

“Sorry! Again!” More heedful of his dimensions, Dingo brought his arms back down and, blinking off-kilter, smiled lopsidedly. “I’ll inspect less closely.” His BHBFF remained skeptical. “Agh, okay, okay! So maybe I’m a little tired. Not much of a cardio guy.” Dingo raised his unbraced knee and massaged a small circle into it. “Still kinda achy from that run.”

Something that looked a little like sympathy set on Sleet’s face. Dingo couldn’t quite tell. His eyes felt like they had a film over them, and even if they weren’t currently beset by rheum he doubted he’d be able to recognize a sympathetic Sleet, since he wasn’t demonstrative when it came to certain emotions.

“You should get some rest,” Sleet said.

“What? And let you have all the fun? Not,” Dingo spoke around a yawn bigger than the one before, “a chaaance.” He frowned, realizing the grogginess in his voice was undeniable. Pesky biological need, ruining the moment. “Just a fluke. I’m up. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!”

To illustrate, he grabbed hold of his tail and tried shifting it into that of a squirrel Mobian’s. With a dull heat, the appendage distended and rippled promisingly for a few heartbeats before sagging like a deflated balloon. The air trapped within sputtered out, squeaky and indecorous.

“Th-that’s supposed to happen. The molecules are, er, moleculing. Warming up.” Sleet’s unimpressed expression redoubled as Dingo protested. “It’s a real thing!”

“Dingo.”

Eager to prove he still had it in him to scrapbook, Dingo reached for a sequin on the table.

Sleet’s hand intercepted his. “Dingo.” There was a firmness to his voice.

Dingo stiffened in surprise, ears shooting up. A fluttery feeling stirred in his stomach as Sleet’s hand coaxed Dingo’s away from the sequin. It intensified when Sleet used both hands to clasp Dingo’s transgressing one. Dingo was more than strong enough to pull free from his grasp, but why would he ever want to? The sequin was a distant memory.

Their gazes lifted at the same time.

“I insist,” said Sleet, in that hushed, velvety tone only he could muster.

To Dingo, the trappings behind Sleet seemed to dissolve into an ethereal scene, a peach-pink sky with clouds as round as cotton balls. A welcoming, warm and radiant glow ebbed around Sleet’s form.

Dingo barely realized he was purring. “Hhokay,” he said, sounding like he’d taken a lungful of nitrous oxide, feeling lighter than air.

“Good.” Sleet nodded once, then withdrew and shooed at him. “Off with you. If we’re going to catch those insurgents, you need as much energy as you can get, and I can’t work if you’re going to be snuffling and puffing and mumbling about penguins right in my ear. Your jowls flap like old shingles in the wind.”

Dingo blinked, and the Aphroditic backdrop vanished. “Y-yeah.” He was late to pull his hand away, returning it to his side as haltingly and awkward as a SWATbot. If Sleet noticed, he didn’t say, having delved right back into stenciling snowflakes, just as committed to their detail as he would when creating a blueprint. “Shouldn’t you get some sleep too?”

“Later. I have some reading to catch up on.”

“Oh, did a new fashion mag come in?”

“I’m talking about the scrapbook, Dingo.”

“Right, right,” Dingo said as he stood up, “I knew that.” He thought he heard another ‘hm’ of amusement from Sleet as he shambled off to their quarters.

As soon as he saw his bed, the buzz of the day’s unexpectedly long leisure and Sleet’s open affection waned.

Eyelids already shuttering, he crashed onto his too small mattress and drifted into sleep, dreaming of new adventures, new floggings.

New memories to record with his best mate Sleet.

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