Tough. As. NAILS!

[Tangent]

Tough. As. NAILS!
Yet another SI fic by Tangent.
This time as Anti-Rouge!

O o O o O​

Waking up in a hospital is never fun. Drifting in and out of consciousness as pain and painkillers warred across your body even less so. But it allowed me to catalogue my body without actually having to move much, because I could periodically feel my everything.

Which…

Well, either wasn't my original body, or whatever happened to me had driven me insane, but as weird as my sense of humor was, I liked to think of myself as being reasonably questionable sanity.

Not that this explained why I felt like someone had grafted functional batwings just under my shoulder blades and then beat them like drumskins.

Just like the rest of me—an abused drum set of aches, including an impressive set of sore boobs. And… lacking something else much lower. Whatever I was now, I was apparently either a eunuch or female, because there was something that just wasn't there anymore.

I'd worry or complain about that, but I just couldn't bring myself to care.

Too sore all over.

Also exhausted.

I let myself drift off to sleep again…

O o O o O​

Anti-Fiona moved quietly through the ward, clipboard in hand. The faint smell of antiseptic made her nose wrinkle, but she forced herself to focus. She wasn't a trained nurse—just a volunteer—but she could at least read vitals, take notes, and notice when something was wrong. That had to be enough.

The bat on the bed looked like she had been through a blender. Wings awkwardly splayed, fur mussed, ribs rising and falling unevenly with shallow breaths. Anti-Fiona paused, swallowing a sigh. Whoever had done this had not held back.

Not that it was hard to guess who had wiped out Anti-Rouge's gang. That the bat herself had survived the beatdown was a miracle. Many of the initial examples made as King Scourge reasserted his dominance over the newly renamed Moebius had not.

She leaned slightly closer; pen poised above the clipboard. Heart rate, temperature, breathing… all within acceptable ranges. Nothing she needed to call a nurse for; she was here to record, observe, and keep track. That was all she could do.

Her mind drifted. The decree from Scourge kept nagging at her: no more Anti-names. Not Anti-Sonic, not Anti-Rouge, not her. She had tried to think of something appropriate, something that sounded like her but wasn't… wrong. Nothing stuck. Each option felt hollow, or silly, or too serious. She had given up—at least for the moment.

Glancing back at the bat, she murmured under her breath, mostly to herself, "Stable… for now." The unconscious bat didn't know the chaos outside the clinic. She didn't know how quickly danger would come looking for her.

Anti-Fiona jotted down a few more notes, eyes flicking between numbers and the patient, hands steady even as her mind raced. There was only so much she could do here. Whatever came next, she would have to face it—and she would have to do it soon.

O o O o O​

"You, Young Lady, are very lucky to be alive," a looming skinny bald guy with a wild mustache and round-lensed glasses spoke to me the next time I woke up. He kinda reminded me of Jim Carrey for some reason that escaped me at the moment.

"Lucky? Heh," I croaked, testing my ribs with a cautious twist. Pain shot up like tiny, angry lightning bolts. "Sure. If surviving feels like being flattened by the world's worst percussion section, I guess I'm lucky."

Kintobor's round glasses slid slightly down his nose as he gave me a faint smile. "You are the only one from your group to make it through the initial sweep."

I blinked. The words hit harder than my ribs. "The only… one?"

He nodded solemnly, pen hovering over his clipboard. "Yes. Everyone else… didn't make it. You survived when no one else did."

I tried to sit up straighter, ignoring the chorus of pain radiating through my wings and torso. That… sounded pretty horrible, really. People died. Possibly people very close to whoever I was now. I didn't know, because all I got were vague impressions, blurry forms, and a general sense of camaraderie that was suddenly cut short.

I felt bad that I couldn't remember whoever they had been.

"If it makes you feel any better, I don't think he actually meant to kill anybody. He just hasn't gotten used to his new power yet."

Say what now? "Who?"

"King Scourge," the tall, bald, skinny guy informed me. "Although, come to think of it, you probably haven't heard his new name yet—or if you had, the concussion dislodged it from your short-term memory. You probably knew him better as Anti-Sonic… and blue, instead of green."

What the fuck!?

O o O o O​

Moebius…

Even a week later, it still threw me.

I was on the antithesis version of Mobius Prime, formerly known as Anti-Mobius. Now renamed Moebius, to better suit the aesthetic sensibilities of the same ass who had once decided that calling our world Anti-Mobius and slapping "Anti-" onto everyone's name was edgy and cool.

Gotta hand it to Doc Kintobor though. Pacifist he may be, he never went along with the Anti-movement. Just kept on keeping on, providing what health care he could to everyone he could, whether or not anyone actually appreciated it.

I appreciated it though, even if I'm not sure that Anti-Rouge, whose life I had apparently taken over, would have. I'm not sure how much of her is still in here with me. My memories of my other life were far more clear than my memories of this one.

Doc just put it down as an unfortunate side effect of the severe concussion I had suffered along with all of my other injuries I had received from the spiny green edgelord. I remembered some things from this life, but most of it was hazy and indistinct. Some places, a few names, a bit of my former attitude.

I'd been a thug.

A gang enforcer for a gang I couldn't even remember beyond the ache of knowing they were all dead now.

Doc called it Trauma Blocking.

I called it wrong.

Sure, we may not have been great. We may have thrown our weight around a bit because we could. But nobody in our territory suffered because of us.

Nobody went hungry.

We were, according to Buns Rabbot, actually one of the nicer gangs out there.

Or we had been.

I was the only one left now, and I couldn't even remember what Mobian subtypes any of them were, let alone their names. I couldn't even honor them properly.

And now this new decree Edgy McEdgelord had announced over the news.

The reason Buns was now Buns and no longer Anti-Bunnie.

No more Anti-names.

Fine then.

Just call me Cyan the Bat.