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At sea, the nights are a whole lot lonelier.
Sonic can’t exactly remember how long he’s been on this boat, drifting across the ocean with strangers who look like old friends and steered to nowhere by a captain who looks like home. It was a lot less lonely back home, even on nights just like these when Sonic sat on tree branches with no one but himself, because he would look past the moon and see a little island floating up there. Here, at sea, he looks up at the sky and he sees nothing but clouds that block out the moon and stars that don’t shine. There is no island, and there is no Knuckles.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever get over seeing the captain’s face, because Dread is just as much like Knuckles as he isn’t. He’s got the same red quills and the same amethyst eyes and the same sharp fang as Knuckles’s, but Sonic can’t say he has the same smile. When Knuckles smiled, it was bright and bold and his eyes would crinkle at the corners, and Sonic would catch the sparkle in his eyes if he was lucky. When Dread smiles, he’s no less bright or bold, but his eyes don’t crinkle at the corners and all that Sonic can see in his eyes is arrogance.
They’re different in other ways, too. To many, Knuckles seemed harsh and aggressive and he yelled a whole lot, but if one were to ask Sonic, he would say that Knuckles was all of those things but he was also earnest and humble and really just everything. At first, Dread was a bit like Knuckles, like the side of him that Sonic wished he had gotten to see more often, but that little glimpse of Knuckles slipped away before Sonic could cling onto it. Dread is harsh and aggressive and yells a whole lot, too, but he also cheats and steals and does lots of things that Sonic knows Knuckles never would have done. It stings a lot more because Dread looks so much like Knuckles and yet he’s so drastically different from him, and the fact has struck Sonic more times than he’d like to admit.
What’s more is that Dread sounds absolutely nothing like Knuckles. Sonic can’t close his eyes when Dread speaks and pretend that he still has Knuckles because Dread’s voice is fiery and rough in his ears and it’s nothing like the low voice that would tell him quiet secrets at night, back when it was just him and the echidna he really knew sitting miles high where the clouds met the sun.
It’s a little difficult to get used to nights without those quiet secrets, without the entire world beneath him, without Knuckles, because now he’s forced to get used to nights with crushing waves in his ears, with nothing to see and nowhere to go but the water that scares him, and with a captain who’s so close to yet so far from home.