My Final Confession: Relapse

An image appears. A trio of young ponies stand on the cobbled street in front of the boarded up Sugarcube Corner. The evening light cascades over them and ignites the stones of the street in a deep red. Their attention is drawn to ice cream cones, the ultimate refreshment for young ponies in the middle of summer. The camera wobbles in a familiar pattern, indicating Cozy is hovering. The edges of dark boards wander in and out of the sides of the frame and the dirty window pane augments the colors of the ponies.

“Look at them.” Cozy whispers to the camera before chuckling to herself. The trio appear to be about the same age as Cozy before her petrification.

One of the group turns and looks up at the house. She finishes her ice cream and turns to her comrades, saying something to them and laughing as they shrink away and shake their heads. The one speaking brushes her hoof down her puffed-up chest and points at the house.

“Oh! She wants to come in. She won’t like what she finds if she does,” Cozy talks to herself.

The filly outside steps closer to the house but her bravado begins to fade as she nears the steps to the main door. Still, pushing forward, the filly begins to climb the stairs. A tile falls from the roof right in front of the window and clatters loudly against the ground. The filly jumps and her muffled shriek is picked up through the glass. Dashing back to her friends, all bravery nullified, the other two laugh at her.

An adult pegasus walks up, orange coated with short purple mane spiked forward and chastises the three fillies who then run off. The adult’s cutie mark is a tri-colored shield with a purple wing in the center. She watches the three dash away and then faces the building. Sadness fills her features and she shakes her head softly before going on her way.

“That one looked kind of familiar. Oh, well.”

“Did you find them yet?” Pinkamena calls from the next room.

“What happened to being quiet? You can’t just yell at me like that,” Cozy chides and begins swinging the camera around piles of rubbish and dilapidation.

Pinkamena steps into the field of view from around a corner. “Oh, I should have known. Goofing off instead of looking for them.”

“I AM looking! It’s not easy to find something that you hid when you used to live here.” The room is empty and covered in thick dust. “There’s nothing to look at anyway. There’s nothing left but filth and broken pieces of drywall.”

“The keys wouldn’t be out in the open, Cozy. I put them … somewhere.” The mare takes her head in her hooves and clenches her eyes, trying to recollect. “In a hiding place. I just can’t remember where it was.” Pinkamena pulls her head up, a serious expression on her face, biting her lip with furrowed brows.

“Okay. I’ll just magically know where your hiding place is. Don’t you worry, Pinkamena, I’m good at finding things with only vague directions of where they are.” Her words are upbeat and bubbly.

“Being snide isn’t going to help.” Pinkamena looks from one doorway to the next and growls to herself. “It was definitely in the house.”

“In the house. Great! We’ve eliminated the rest of the world. Should be easy now.”

Pinkamena glares at the camera. “You are not helping.”

The camera turns to the floor and a small hoof juts out to scratch at the ruined floorboards. “I am! Look! I’ll just check every floorboard in the whole house to see which one is loose. Just like in that story by Edgar Allen Pony. I’ll find the thing you hid.” There’s a bite to Cozy’s words this time, the bubbly act dropped.

“Good. I’ll stuff you into it when you find it. Keep looking,” Pinkamena retorts. Her hooves grow distant and Cozy drifts over the floor, hoof prodding and prying on each board while she grumbles under her breath.

“How creative, ‘I’ll kill you’. Get some new material,” Cozy complains quietly. The floor is scratched and beyond repair. Cozy’s small hoof tests the corner of each plank for security as she slowly makes her way across where the counter of the confectionary stood. “This is so boring.”

Cozy continues checking, each new tile greeted with throaty lamentations. After several minutes, Cozy flutters to the floor and complains, “I’m getting hungry! What are we going to do about food?”

From another room, Pinkamena answers with a disgruntled sigh, “We’ll have to go steal something to eat. Flour doesn’t have a very good shelf life so the bags of flour in the basement are worthless. The sugar is still good but we can’t just eat sugar.”

“When do you want to do that? Aren’t you hungry?”

Pinkamena steps back into the room and nods gently, casting her eyes from one side of the room to the other probingly. It’s clear she is aggravated. “We will have to wait until it gets late. Walking around in cloaks is suspicious so we can’t really afford to be out at times others will see us. You might be able to get away with just combing your mane a different style. Young ponies don’t attract a ton of attention and I doubt your colors are going to be remembered so vividly that you will get recognized just walking down the street.”

“Are you saying nobody remembers me?” There’s hurt in Cozy’s reply but also a sharpness that is indicative of challenge. “I almost took over, you know. What did you do? Kill a few ponies and cook them up? That doesn’t seem so bad.”

Blue eyes roll and Pinkamena shakes her head in indignance. “I’m not boasting or trying to make you feel like what you did wasn’t impressive. I’m just saying that appearances favor you. You’re innocent-looking, young, and rumors of ‘Cozy Glow’ don’t exactly spell out what you look like. I have pointed teeth… it was stupid to do that… a scar where my cutie mark should be, and ‘pink’ is in my name.”

“Uh-huh,” Cozy dismisses Pinkamena’s statement.

Pinkamena gives a look of contempt to the filly. “Why do you cling to this, Cozy? Can’t you see that it’s not fun or ‘cool’ to be like us? It’s hard and … and lonely.”

“Maybe I want to be just like you.”

“Please, nobody wants to be like me. A ruined party pony whose name is synonymous with cruelty and derangement? Some of us have no choice. I used to make others so happy… Why are you proud of what you did? Of deliberately being so evil?” Pinkamena sags and turns away from the camera.

“I want to make everybody respect me, even if that means fearing me, because I’m the best! They’ll look at me and smile, by force if necessary! Everybody will know me and love me!” Cozy nearly shouts, emotion welling in her voice. “I’m better than you, Pinkamena! I don’t regret the things I have done even though I didn’t have a choice either! I didn’t choose to be abandoned by my parents! I didn’t choose to always feel empty like I’m missing something important! I didn’t choose to be isolated and clueless about what friendship is!” Cozy’s voice is like a piece of unrefined granite, hard and rough. It wavers almost imperceptibly at the end.

Spinning to face the camera, Pinkamena gnashes her teeth and glares angrily. Her emotions a tornado, Pinkamena’s demeanor rapidly melts into an expression of pity and her lip finds a familiar perch between triangular, razored teeth.

“Put the camera down and come here.” A drop of blood rolls down her muzzle leaving a dark, black trail.

“No!” The tiny voice cracks.

Pinkamena closes the distance, absorbing the view of the camera. The picture shakes and the sound of struggle fills the audio. It presses into the darker coat of the mare and slips free, clattering to the floor. Flashes of various pink colors as legs and haunches appear on the screen momentarily while the ponies wrestle. Truncated, stressed cries mix with the scraping of hooves and strained grunts. A tiny image appears in the lower right hand corner of a battery encircled within a no symbol. Type words appear on screen spelling out ‘check connection’.

“Don’t touch me, you hag!”

“Just stop! Stop fighting! It’s alright, Cozy.”

“I hate you!”

“Hate me all you want, just stop!”

A long pink leg stretches out in front of the camera with a smaller, lighter-colored one inside of it and rearing to kick out. Soft sobs can be heard filtering into the audio and the smaller leg slides up to rest against the larger one.

“I’m here, honey. It’s alright. It’s going to be okay. Shhh…You are better than me. I want you to be. You’re my little filly.”

The camera cuts out completely.