Birds chirped and wind blew. It was almost a pretty day—the prettiest it could get on South Island in its present condition, anyway, as early-day sun shone down, piercing through a smoggy sky, which looked just a little yellowish, casting everything in the warm glow of an old photograph. An old, flat-looking house, paint peeling just a little and sidewalk slightly overgrown, sat on an old street of similar homes, lined with towering palms. Not old enough to be quaint, and not dirty or ill-maintained enough to be slummy, the home merely sat in a state of comfortable, lived-in mediocrity.

A pair strolled down the sidewalk. They looked kind of odd wearing their red, militaristic uniforms, but walking so close and looking so informally comfortable as they did. No one was really around to see it, anyway, though; while the taller, fancier, cleaner commercial buildings of Spring City were visible, towering proudly overhead, the hustle and bustle was far enough to be out of earshot.

The primates veered off the sidewalk and corner-cut their way across the house's lawn toward the front stoop. The white one stopped abruptly and looked uncomfortably at the front door from a distance.


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The other managed to walk another full step or two, her hand pulling conspicuously from the sheath of the other's, before she noticed his hesitance, and stopped, herself. As she turned back, her head fell to a cant, and she smiled at him beneath subtly furrowed brows, re-offering her open palm.

"Laz?" she asked with an uncomprehending blink.

"Sorry," Rock replied with a shake of his head, as if coming to. "I'm just..."

He considered his words carefully.

"I'm wondering if we should be stoppin' by yet," he said lowly.

Jam looked, if anything, more confused by the explanation.

"What, you think..." the redder primate frowned, and the sidewalk momentarily drew her eye while she tried to choose some kind of wording that didn't seem ridiculous as soon as she thought of it. As the silence dragged on, she apparently decided anything was better than staring stupidly.

"You think they'd not wanna see you, or something?"

"No, no," he shook his head, "just... We gotta lot left to do."

His tone of speech almost sighed more than it spoke, and his eyes shifted to the door again.

"They probably think I'm dead or something," he explained in a whisper. "I'm sure my parents wanna see me, but, we're about to go in there, say hi, and turn around and leave to go do more... dangerous stuff."

He scratched at his brow.

"I dunno. Do you think it'd be better to come back after we're done, instead?"

The girl watched intently as Rock spoke, her expression appraising his. She actually looked to be considering his question, too, as she folded her hands quietly in front of her, and looked down at her feet, standing neatly side by side, and immediately opposite Rock's.

"If it were me," she said slowly, after a significant pause. "I would want to see you when I can see you. ... because... if you waited until after you did some dangerous thing... well, I might not be able to see you then, anyway. Y'know?"

Before Rock could debate it any longer, the front door swung open. There stood a be-mohawked red monkey—a man of clearly questionable taste, but caught off-guard such that he was not prepared to fully display it, instead only wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

"Rock!"

It was a monosyllabic blurt that barely sounded like the word it was intended to be (perhaps landing closer to "blrloch," owing to its suddenness). Jared, Rock's dad, shouted a hasty "It'sRocky'n'Laylee!" over his shoulder to the inside of the house, somewhat ineffectively as he was in the process of bounding off the stoop and into the lawn while he did it.

"What?!" came a shout from inside, from a feminine voice. Rock meanwhile just smiled with clenched teeth, the decision having long been made for him. Make no mistake, he was genuinely happy to see them. It was just his awareness of what was coming next.

...

Aaand, there it was: family hug right there on the front lawn.



***


"So how did you two end up in the Eggman Army already?" asked Kara.

Pleasant dinner discussion. After they eventually pried apart and went inside, there was a pizza to eat and talk over. (It was just a frozen oven pizza; Rock's folks were a couple of meager means, but they tried.) Rock tried to not let his face sour any when the question was issued, but a little color did drain.

"We joined up about as soon as we landed," Rock answered.

"But if you've only been home for four days, how are you... already... y'know," she swirled her finger around in the air, and vaguely pointed it toward Jam's jumpsuit. "Wearing the red? Everybody starts off in grey."

"Your boy got prestige, Kara," grinned the pinker of the primates, sitting astraddle her back-to-front oriented chair. Jam looked just a little proud as she gave the neighboring simian an amiable nudge with her shoulder.

She picked up a stray bit of sausage, flicked it into the air, and caught it in her open maw (which, it should be noted, continued to remain so, even after catching its prey).

"Hones'ly," continued Jam, thoughtfully, "After gettin' the lay of the land, I was just a little insulted 'e didn't go straight to black, but." She shrugged briefly, in a que sera, sera sort of way, before lunging across the table for slice number four.

"With me, they jus' didn' have the grey in my size."

And there was brief laughter around the table. Then:

"She bull%#*$s good," declared Jared to Rock with a proud nod.

"But, no. Really," he then said more flatly. "What the heck did you guys do."

Rock glanced uncomfortably at Jam, then the ceiling, then the table, and then took a few seconds chewing his pizza.

Chew.

Chew.

Chew.

...

Gulp.

"I turned all my crew and passengers over in exchange for amnesty and a job," he said.

"... Oh," said Kara and Jared in unison. Kara added positively, "Well, I'm sure they must've... deserved it. For you to do that, I mean!"

"Yeah, all crooks," chimed Jared.

Rock sniffed once for no particular reason other than to fidget, then scratched above his upper lip a couple times. "Mostly injured refugees," the white primate divulged quietly while his hand was still blocking his mouth.

"... Oh," said Kara and Jared in unison.

Jam was still taking a drink. Still. This particular swig had been going on since around Rock's initial bomb-drop, and progressed efficiently towards "ridiculous," especially as her glass ceased to actually have anything in it. She then proceeded to take her plate to the sink, which could immediately be filed under never normally happens.

"Some were asshats," bristled Jam defensively, as she returned to the table. "Like that butt-nugget hedgehog, or that backstabbing llama that blew half your head off."

Both of his parents' brows creased deeply and they glanced at one another, puzzled.

"On that note," Rock suddenly interjected, "this is..."

He paused. His parents both blinked at him, still too blank-looking for comfort.

"This is kinda what I wanted to talk to you two about. That is to say," he expounded, drawling on that last syllable as he thought up his next words, "that you're probably gonna see... a lot of bad stuff about me. Maybe. I don't know yet — how everything's gonna turn out. But you might hear about it. And I just want you to know—"

Jared held up a hand in a stop motion and shook his head.

"Don't."

He inhaled slowly, exhaled, and shook his head again. Kara blinked at him.

"You don't hafta explain," said Jared gravely. "Don't think we haven't noticed... the kind of... work you do. But we know you." Kara, though silent, nodded in agreement.

"Do you?" asked Rock almost challengingly, brows flattened in a genuine kind of concern.

"I think we do," Kara chimed in. "Well enough... Well enough to know it's for some kind of a reason."

Jam's lips retreated between her teeth, as she exchanged a dubiously knowing glance with Rock. Whatever staggering evidence to the contrary she had floating around between her ears, she evidently decided not to press it, and forced a reluctant grin.

"Awright, we warned ya," responded the reddest of the bunch with an impish smirk, as she settled back into her chair. "Just don' go writin' us outta the will once the bad PR starts pourin' in."

"Oh. No," deadpanned Kara with a face so emotionless it must have been on loan from Death. "The Lochert Estate will all be yours one day."

Jared, not holding quite as straight a face, but playing along anyway, leaned back and pulled a chip of peeling paint off the wall and flipped it onto the table. "Oh, oh- yeah, here's an advance on the inheritance!"

Rock grinned and shook his head and huffed an appreciative snicker out his nose. "Yeah, no, look." He pulled a flat, semi-circular metal device out of his pocket and laid it on the table. "I actually wanted to drop this off for you guys. I know things have been kind of tight, so..."

Jared picked it up curiously. Kara glanced between it and Rock suspiciously. "That's not a ring wallet, is it?"

"It's a little somethin'," said Rock cryptically. His chair scraped backward as he stood and stretched.

Jared's eyes very nearly bugged out. Kara glanced at him, then did a double take and leaned over to snatch the device. She promptly dropped both it and her jaw to the table (literally and figuratively, respectively).

"Nooooo, no, nonono, that's, no. No, Laz, that's—"

"It's seriously okay," he said with a forced-looking smile.

"You 'ave no idea," Jam concurred, following Rock's lead, and relieving the chair of her weight. "I ain' never seen this much scratch in my life, but we'll be damned if we got time to make good use of it, predisposed with our thuggery, as we are."