I blew a hole in the exposed bunker, emerald in my hand and Metal's head perched under my arm. If only I hadn't let him do it himself, then we'd never be in this situation.

I couldn't let my anger get the best of me, though. Metal was probably just trying to be helpful. No, I couldn't be the idiot I used to be before I met Sonic.

Blasting a hole in the bunker let out some of my aggression. Good. It then occurred to me that I could have destroyed some of the parts I needed to fix him, although I was done with caring about minor damages. I needed to fix him and I couldn't waste time mourning, like I did with Sonic.

I walked into the darkness in front of me, the metal exterior peeled inwards from the blast. My throat clamped shut from fear, a certain heaviness grabbing me by the chest. What if I couldn't learn? The earth's resources were nearly decimated. If the learning was gone, then would Metal really be lost?

No. I couldn't think that way. Coldness was sometimes the best form of love. I used my emerald and shone light upon the hanging corpses of Metal Sonic. They were all brainless copies, of course, merely a shell to put his brain inside. At least there were plenty of exteriors at my disposal, lest I break him apart again once more.

I felt his cool head in my hand again. Those blank eyes stared up at me in silence.

There was a computer at the center of the room. The screen was much smaller than Eggman's usual computers although the body of the machine was huge. Ahh, a database. That was why it was so large.

Using my chaos powers to turn it on, I began scanning through the archives. It would have taken me decades if not for the crude search bar included at the top of the archive. I searched "Metal" and was greeted with hundreds of thousands of folders. I opened a few to see what I was working with, and a lot of them were neatly typed scientific entries on the improvements Eggman had made to metal–all down to the smallest wire.

I glanced at the decapitated head next to me. Why did Metal flinch when I mentioned his creator's name? Clearly, Eggman put a lot of time and care into Metal to ensure he would be the best he could be; why did Metal seem afraid?

Ahh, he was a tool. Just like me.

At once I absorbed the pages of diagrams and infographics explaining every little detail about Metal. I tried to sort through the documents to see the parts that were just about his "brain," although Robotnik hadn't sorted it as thoroughly as I thought. Perhaps he believed that only he would use such a vast archive of information. Still, who was crazy enough to try to remember where they put thousands of almost identical documents?

It took me weeks of research, never stopping for rest, to learn everything I needed to fix Metal. Luckily there were pre-built bodies, but there was tons of work to do–adhesive that had attached components of Metal's motherboard together had deteriorated and left sticky residue all over the board. I had to remove all of the components, extra careful with the disk to ensure that Metal would still remember me once he was put together.

I decided to back up Metal's disk on a different, unused disk. Apparently computer storage could only last so long before the charge would weaken to the point of data loss, so I figured backing it up would help him last longer. It took literal days to get everything over, although I made five copies–which was probably excessive but seemed necessary at the time. I wanted to rewire Metal's memory so that any new memories would be put onto a separate disk, to make backing his mind up easier, although I was mainly using diagrams and what little knowledge I had of circuitry to compile everything together, so I decided not to risk destroying him altogether.

The hardest part was the voice box. I decided to leave that for last, as there were no clear instructions for it. At one point, Eggman had written a detailed journal entry about plans for a voice box, although he decided to scrap the idea, so it had never left the conceptual plane. It required very specific changes to Metal's code–something I was terrified to do. I knew nothing about coding, and the code Eggman had written had never been tested in conjunction with the rest of the code. There was a chance I could break him... although the backup drives were nice, in case I messed up one irreparably and had to start over.

After a months of trial and error, the bunker was littered with print-outs and random tools and parts. The smell of burning metal was still left from carving speaker lines in Metal's muzzle just half an hour prior. I sat down at the desk I had taken out from a random storage closet, breathing a deep sigh. Metal lay on the tabletop, his body still and his eyes shut off.

One last step. I uncoiled a charging plug from a secret compartment in his back and powered him on with my Chaos energy.

I held my breath.