Ugly freedom and the pair from stallion-grad

Chapters

prologue
one
two
three
four
five

prologue

As is the strange way with the world, the start of it all was a last stand.

When the last guard fell a silence was taken down and then a different silence was raised.

On a pole flags exchanged places.

The attack had come at dawn and ended in three hours. Afterwards the sun had come up reluctantly. Afraid of what it might see.

Toward the steps of the palace the blood was smothered in smears and layers. Like the steps had pulled it on, as if pulling on a red stain. Trails of broken armor formed a foundation for it all. Pinched dying gasps escape the leftovers of the fight, hollow ponies shattered across the red. Those that watched agreed that, yes, it was both a little messy, a little breathtaking and that they would do their best to smother the memory of it.

The absence of guards was total. Many that saw the spectacle remarked at how the black and gold armor of the fallen guard seeped into each other, that it could only be described as black and gold snow melting into one.

It was called the dawn of broken armor. A pretentious name, almost a joke, the punch line being the corpses on the steps.

Five hundred guards were left dead, from both the solar and lunar guard. The attack was fast enough to knock out all centralized leadership and organization. Another three thousand were found in the later months, the rest fled west, submitted to the new authority or buried their armor. A few drops of them haunted the cracks of the forest, patient and hateful.

The aggressors move through the inner doors and tug their shadows behind them. They cling to each other and their weapons, unsure if they are scared or disciplined.

Celestia was recuperating from the changeling invasion in her chambers. A coma had slipped into her body and has stayed there for a good three days. For now an exhausted Luna, tired of pulling both the sun and the moon around each other, is the only demi-god awake in the palace.

Yet it didn't seem it.

Her hair had peeled its luster and dark eyes are pulled into bags. Her haunches have halfway slumped into each other. A loud and depleted smile is left on her face. She would close her eyes and mumble to herself.

She seemed more asleep then awake.

And in a way it was almost perfect because no one could stop them now. The instigators of the coup part crawling, part limping, part bleeding through the palace were nearing the end. Their timing is impeccable.

They billowed through the door.

In a homogeneous sweep they had entered Luna’s room. They held steel in shaking limbs. As a collective handful they hurled their stares at the Alicorn. She was too tired to stare back.

To Luna it was as though Equestria had finally stopped treading water and let itself drown. The return of the chaos cults of discord, out of control dragon populations and migrations, the endless horrors from the Everfree forest and the changelings. It had added a weight to everything in Equestria.

Now it had fallen through. Now the guards are gone and a random nervous crowd has conceived itself in her room. Although to her they were less of a crowd and more of an indicator. That something else was coming.

Soon enough something came. It came through the crowd and was a head shorter then Luna.

It was a pony.

It was a pony who’s main quality was that she was forgettable. She conformed so well to normality, she could’ve been a walking piece of the background. She neither had a wing or horn, and as an earth pony she didn't even look particularly strong. Her brow was softened and her face contained no sharpness. A relentless, enviable peace seeped out of her.

The way the others flowed around her suggested she was the leader. Indeed when she came to Luna they all stared at the pony expectantly. In the pony’s eyes there was none of the expected anger. None of the righteousness that usually flutters around the leader of a revolution (She would know). The pony only had a deep conviction in her eyes, which would slowly reveal an undented tenderness. Compassion is loud on her face.

The pony held a great presence among the crowd.

In-explicitly Luna felt a little smaller when the pony stared at her.

“Where are the guards?”

Luna toppled over her words and the pony looked a little bemused. A puckered smile is strapped to an obviously exhausted face. Although torn and tired the pony’s face said something completely different. Let me show you how it’s done. That’s what it said. Let me show you how to entertain a crowd.

“The guards have fled or died, so that our voice can be heard for only a few minutes. The guards have fled so we count our friends’ corpses. The guards have fled to no longer feel our grief or pain”

She took a breath disguised as a thoughtful pause. She seemed to breathe in the agitation she made.

“So yes. The guards are gone”

Notice the flecks of feeling she could drag into everyone present. They couldn't stop listening even if they wanted to.

“The guards aren't here. Neither are the comrades we lost.”

The pony juggled them, the words that is. Words that had spent a long time on the run and a long time being sharpened. Words that that had been handed out at secret rallies and midnight meetings. Luna had a feeling that the pony could curve words around all the arguments that the god could think of.

A massive crowd of faces now charcoaled into a restless misery. She turned to face the god in the room.

“Please. Listen to us”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes”

It was clear she was tired as well. A sort of starving fatigue. An understanding of sorts was passed between them. Behind them, the sun started to climb showing the three entities in the room. Luna to one side, the crowd on the other and the light standing in the middle. Then her words came again.

“You always had a choice and you always ignored us. You and your sister. We waited and loved both of you for too long and too much.”

Luna heard of this pony before, but was always too occupied to follow her properly. Before the unity party came to power Luna's night guard said this pony was the most dangerous creature in Equestria. They pinned words to her like “revolutionary”, “anarchist” or "Nationalist". It was a lie or a generous exaggeration because it was only a mare standing on the floor striking out words.

But it took her a distinctive silence before she struck out the next set of words.

“They said patience is a virtue, but I watched her die for four days. We watched the guards march to a wedding so I could bury my sister while fireworks flew over Cantorlot.”

The voice was sticky with desolation.
It was horrifying how quickly her peace had sickened into a rage.

“Patience is a virtue. But there is nothing virtuous about how she died. Waiting for changelings to kill your family while you sob and weep for gods that will never help us. The patience has left your majesty. There is only us left”

Anger had started to strangle the room. Although of course it had nothing to do with anger. Luna would always know with the vehement ponies that would hate because they had loved. Could you imagine it? Hating someone as hard as you had loved the corpse of your sister, broken and un-alive despite how hard you held her.

It was a strong feeling.

“Can we talk privately citizen?”

A pale furious smile wrapped around a jaw. She shook her head.

“No. This a democracy Luna”

Finally the picture meshed itself together in front of her. The word “democracy” acted as a beautiful unifying clarity. Firstly the crowd consisted of a list.

• International workers in solidarity.
• Young Church of titans of harmony.
• Restorers of the Republic.
• Front for the advancement of the forgotten.
• The old guard.
• New dragons for the reclaimed lands

Lastly and most importantly the crowd consisted of staggeringly massive diversity. Diverse in the feelings of revenge, misery, idealism and inspiration. Diverse in race with griffins, ponies, minotaurs, donkeys and bat ponies. Finally diverse in ages, the child soldier from the bat colonies, the adolescent new dragon party and the war veterans from the old guard. An impassioned group, they were all in the right shape and size to start a revolution.

It was heart-breaking because she remembered doing such a thing with her sister against discord. She remembered doing such a thing herself against her sister.

For three days, the dissenters were silenced and the votes were counted. Fear and pride was passed out to the crowds. It took a week for Luna’s sister to wake.

When Celestia did there was nothing she could do against the reckless power of a one hundred thousand vote petition and a dead heap of guards.

one

He woke with the small morning.

His eyes were a tarnished grey, tired and apathetic. His limps gave a small moan when he moved them. He drifted out then woke again and his mouth felt dry with the small curses he made.

Why do we always curse the damn morning?

The curses were stale and colorless. For a while he lets them hang there in the air wondering how many times he’s done it at this patch above the bed.

The bed was a rectangle of rotten wood with piles of an old mattress on top. Small bottles garnish the top of the mattress in blinks of white and green. For a while it was this familiar collection of objects stacked messily on top of each other. The mattress, the bottles, the silence, and the hangover.

Clarity struck him in the head and he moaned as the pain he’s meant to feel caught up.

There was a groan. Then he hoisted himself up.

To most ponies his room was completely unspecial, another pokey flat in a long list of pokey flats in Staliongrad. In a twisted way it’s often these rooms where the most interesting ones live.

He picked himself up and fell again for three separate occasions. He brought himself up a fourth time and laughed since it seemed like a dance to him. If you saw him you couldn't see it (because he hides it well) but he was struggling on the last fumes of a headache. Apart from the stench of alcohol he smelt of wet hair and bad decisions.

Bad decisions. It was strange but alcohol always seemed like a distant acquaintance not a friend. It was stranger still since he always detested drinking. He hated the stereotype of the strong drinking ponies from Staliongrad. Yet there he was fighting with the last shards of Unity standard vodka at a startling 80 proof.

For a while he had to do with the frozen thinking in a head rotted with alcohol. Despite it, he thought that the steadily rising strength of alcohol (another phrase for completely unregulated) that the unity party had allowed for over four years was a good thing.

To give him credit he only managed to drink at night and alone. He was too self-conscious to do it anywhere else at any other time. Well he would use the word “self-conscious”, but really he’s too quiet approaching boring.

Too polite a stranger would say, too polite.

But if anyone has spent any time with him he has a friendly biting demeanour. A coldness that is charming. He only fumbles for his manners when in the presence of strangers.

A little more light bled into the room. As always he squinted at the invader from the window then threw away any bottles left on the mattress. Staliongrad tried its best to push its smell through the window.

Now imagine a patch of silence.

He stood up and reached for his armour.

Alone he struggled in the glaring light and the armour. The colour red perched itself on the window sill. In contrast to the light, the room was unkind in its smell and unkind in its appearance. A struggle of clothes take the centre of the room. Tinned goods occupied the dirty corners. A picture of him and a mare is the only thing that emerges as noteworthy in the mess. The morning slowly cooked into an early noon and apart from the pain he was surprised at how gentle the morning was.

He let a hoof through his mane, and stamped down on riots of hair (yes it is hair, ponies don’t have fur). It was a shame it achieved nothing, but the hair appreciated the thought. In a heap he moves to the only mirror in the room.

As is the nature of mirrors, this one owned several cracks and a film of dirt.

When he looked in the mirror he was still a gaunt pony suffering from a hangover, no matter how he had pulled and rearranged himself. A crumpled piece of paper sat on an old table and reminded him that his name was “Watchful Eye” and that his rank was sergeant.

Watchful eye was a brown earth pony. He had grey eyes that opened into frowns. There is a frustration, confusion and patience packaged with those eyes. Those timid unfrozen orbs often surprised ponies expecting a match to go with his badly kept body.

A loose bunch of ponies, with looser mouths call him “Watch” on account of them being somewhat friends with him. For a pony with such a personality, he has a large amount of them.

A battered helmet strangles his head and sheets of metal are strapped to his limbs. Any youthful hope of change seems to have evaporated and left the starts of wrinkles on Watch’s face. A tidy shave contrasts with the messed mane. When he moves, it seems as though he’s dragged. Muscles are packed on to bones, but you could say they’re shrivelling.

The brown of his hair is more dirty than vivid.

A cracked face is crowned with a dull brace of red lines. A loud scar screams from his snout to the jaw. The scar was caused by the teeth of changlings, and had the tang of metal left on them. With both the scar and his soft eyes he's recklessly beautiful, in a dangerous sort of way, but only when he smiles. Which isn't often.

He makes his way to the mirror and as usual he frowns at the pony he sees, nothing can change that wonderful, demented face of his. Watch gives himself a closed off stare. The measure of his grey eyes collides with its twin. He never liked looking at himself.

He avoids the mirror and sets the kettle to boil. He tolerates it until it whistles. He takes it off the hob before it properly boils. Watch drinks his warm water because he has no tea or coffee left, the unfairness of the lack of tea or coffee stirs a dull frustration in his chest.

For a second his practiced apathy had deserted, and he stood drowning in the brown carpet and the sharp light.

The only thing he could think of was how predictable his day was going to be. To the time of the hooves hitting concrete, he counts. He waits for the most predictable pony in the world.

Watch stood there drinking the hot water he wished was tea. His legs were stubborn and unyielding. His gaze was made of something that used to burn. For a few moments he was fruitlessly hoping that the pony wouldn’t come. He hoped so hard for that shape not to smudge its way between the door and the sharp sunlight. Hoped so hard he could feel the edges of the shape cut-out in the air.

She came at exactly ten past seven.

She came as a gust of air. As a tidy bun of hair. As a smile.

The solid blocks of pony that make her is fastened into tightly cut blocks of white fur. A blue uniform and a red book fight to tangle themselves around her. A smoothed down face, wide-eyes and blunted cheekbones had meshed together on her head. A tilted officer's cap occupies her head in what she hopes is a jaunty, jovial manner.

She smiles a lot but doesn't own the distinctive smile lines you’d expect. She had pokey blue eyes that could blink between two watery or too sharp. She wasn't muscular but trim.

Overall, attractive in the same way that people find symmetric lines pleasing.

She had a boring and comforting name. Alice. She had a surprising lack of surname which suggested an orphan (he’s made many speculations but they usually hang in the air untouched while she quickly makes a new conversation).

Alice’s smile is so goddamn curved it’s shaped like a question.

“Morning Sir!”
“Come. Do it”
“Sir?”
“You’re going to say it”
“…Sir?”
“I wrote it down. What you’re going to say. So say it”

Her maddening flash of red and teeth has hardened into a confused grin. A small moment. Then a flood of recognition. Great.

“Another glorious day on Celestia’s green earth to do the Unity party's great work!”

Right now in that small piece of space from this line to the last, Watch had never been filled with such an urge to carry on drinking. The phrase itself wasn’t so bad. She just said it every day.

“That’s the one. Get me a damn coffee”
“Yes sir!”

Because life is cruel like that Alice managed to pack a grin between “yes” and “sir”. For a few seconds rays eclipsed off her obtuse rump, then her legs, then the door.

The day he had tried to ignore had finally fallen into the room.

Author's Note

I saw you fave me templar22! you jumped up rascal you. I'd give you a hug if I wasn't a bunch of words right now.

two

It’d be better if she would lie sometimes. But she doesn't. She’s a pathological truth teller. The pair trot among the pavement and the truth is dribbling out Alice’s mouth. She froths it and spits it. Watch ignores the speckles of it on him.

“The internationals only need to take one hundred yards after the sixth parallel and we’d be fine.”

She was talking about the war obviously.

Behind them the day filtered through Staliongrad favellas. It all came out as handfuls of scrubbed light.

“And then what?”
“Well the diamond dogs can’t get to their last diamond supply. We hold that position and screen all of our defenses because we have the numbers. They surrender and BAM! (She moved her hooves when said this) We control the diamond standard and its trade value”
“And we would've killed most of the diamond dogs”

The statement slapped her rant to the ground. But it didn't stop her.

“Oh, that’s another good thing. Sweet”

Damn her. Damn her truth. But she was right. A lot of dead diamond dogs are on the whole, a good thing for Equestria and her holdings.

Many had doubted that the Liberated provinces would have a credible land based expeditionary force. This almost unshakable train of thought results from the inheritance of the previous equestrian military, a force that over relied on an obsolete air force and paid little attention to any ground assets.

He wasn't sure how, Alice knows more about the endlessly ugly details, but he remembered the words harmony reforms, dead night conversations and rumors of a massive military purge disguised as a trial.

Whatever happened it had worked.

Diamond dogs from the west have had their rugs pulled out under them and everyone keeps staring worryingly at the chunk of land between equestrian controlled land and changeling contested land. With the majority of diamond dogs from the western hills subdued the politicians in Canterlot were one step closer to delivering their ostentatious promise of reducing the changeling capital to a “smoldering blackened ruin”.

Even when he said that in his head he couldn't stop rolling his eyes at the broken gaudiness of that phrase.

Apart from Alice. Rascal that she is. To her and the other youth in her generation the broken gaudiness was held as the words of a messiah. Like most of the well taught youth she expresses a sort of impulsive, dangerous, glee in following the unity party. Traits Watch could never emulate or understand (A particular one being the joy she gains from hearing that a bunch of strangers from far away had died).

“You’re messed up in the head kid”

He bites out the words while she stops to roll smoke weed in rice paper. Caked in indifference and taking a drag she clumped together a comeback and hurled it at him.

“At least I’m not a balding, aging, furious drunk pony”
“I’m not balding”
“Uh huh”

Her face was the beginning of a smile. A rumor of smoke whispered its way out of her cigarette.

His face was a journey. A face that travels and wonders and reveals nothing. He worries her.

“And I’m not aging you know?”
“Yes”
“I’m kind of hip”
“You’re the hippest pony I know sir”

She didn't mean it, but it took another of her smiles and she punched him with a memory.

Watch remembers her. Alice had joined the ranks of troubled individuals when she cut through the night and queues and rain with that horrifying glorious smile. The teeth are white, her fur is white but there is something very dark and very alive in her head. The ESA signed her in straight away.

Watch remembered how young she was. How she was going to die. Because they never lasted long. It was a bad thing to think. That this smiling grinning mare would die in a pokey alley with a string of red being pulled out her stab wound. He remembered her dead in that made up alley.

As with all his poisonous daydreams it only existed because of his excessive thinking.

He never wanted her to work in the ESA. Selfishly (and with a lot of affection that hes reluctant to claim) he wanted Alice to be a nurse, or a secretary, or an engineer. He wanted her to flash that smile when she was helping someone, making something. Not working with the ESA. Not dragging in a naked changeling on the first day and sending the poor bastard north to Celestia knows where.

Not starting that terrible habit of smoking.

“You got a stallion yet?”
“No sir”
“Okay a mare then? I’m pretty hip so I’m cool with that”

The loose silence suggested a secret that didn't want to be told. For a few more seconds she smelt less of smoke and more of denial. He had always guessed.

“No sir - I don’t have a fillyfriend”
“A cat”'
“No”
“Kid I bet on my balding head that you need somepony in your life”
“I got my job. I got you sir”
“Yeah. You really lucked out on both of those”

He said the last words timidly and they seemed to empty out of his mouth in a slightly alcoholic fog.

Watch wished it a lot. It can’t change anything. He wished that Alice had a nice house, somepony special waiting for her and that Equestria wasn't how it is.

Living in Equestria now was different. Something nameless has been spread around far too thin. It meant a lot of the bad and a lot of the good started appearing.

It usually meant strange sharply dressed ponies, sometimes even minotaurs, coming around at night with a piece of paper and tightly wrung lips. Cold blooded things that move like cut-out shadows. When they came, others frequently leave or disappear. Often, although not always two suckers from the ESA had to be sent to clean up their bizarre messes (mainly convoluted suicides or ponies spontaneously turning into changelings without any tests).

The two suckers continue to patrol down the streets.

The ponies he passes are mostly young. Sharp looking creatures with the weight of discipline on them. Some of them hold unity party badges on their clothes, and carry sheets of paper bound in card. Most of them are conscripts on patrol, ready for the next mixed unit brigade. Most of them are the same feather as Alice. Impulsive, indoctrinated and loyal. The sticky smell of ignorance and nationalism comes off them.

An officer from the greater internal security administration ticked and toked her way past the two. Alice gives the officer a proud straight edged salute, proud and honest. Watch forces his limbs together into a semblance of respect, a block of wood in the shape of a salute. Although different they speak of the same thing. Submission.

Eventually the stream of young and severe ponies trickled out. Replaced by clumps of engineers and scientists. Busy, arrogant words spat out from them. Efficient, pale ideas released from their lips. If you could understand it, their ideas, their words, their thoughts formed a cage that kept some things in and other things out.

The unity party had done their work on the crowd, a multi colored assortment of Pegasus, Earth ponies, unicorns, donkeys, goats, cows and a Minotaur.

There were no changelings among them. Not that you could tell.

Yet the entirety of Staliongrad was pointing to towards it. The absence of changelings that was. The signs painted in BOLD CAPITALS and violent red, with a changeling drawing crossed out then perched in the middle. The political officers holding blood testers, red books and the lazy racism that leaks off them. The stifling crowds that densely slid through each other avoiding the others eyes.

A great big finger which pointed to an almost aching absence of changelings.

Unknown to both the worrying absence of changelings was going to end.

three

They cross the street towards the second citizen district. Jagged flakes of dirt pepper the streets. The occasional refugee or immigrant they pass all appear fused to the pavements and buildings, faces fixed in a numbness. The comforting smell of unwashed bodies is accompanied with the sound of foreign words tucked underneath it. A stench.

Immigrants, prisoners of war, refugees. Most often completely displaced creatures from a country or a city that took stage right and exited as soon as the air-force rolled in. All of them pulled in by the first regulated free market, the hunger for cheap labor and a starving lack of country (as well as families).

They all stand or sit with teeth and fists clenched, a constant and reassuring tide of frustration oozes from the cracks in the street. The dignity and strength of the immigrant spirit tested.

Eventually they reach a familiar sight, a marker that shows where the new citizen district truly begins. The marker consists of three things. A trio of quiet, well-trimmed and polite changelings. All three of them well matured with good color on their scales. All three the remains of a hanging.

Tight cords of rope that bind their legs together ends in a chocked noose around their necks. Hung upon the entry gates well above the ground, they are dead set on appearing dead. Unsurprisingly the corpses drift around in lifeless friendly circles. A set of plaques is pinned to their hardened skin.

In rounded heavy letters they say this:
“I was part of a poisonous, corrupting and repulsive race of abominations. Fear of me is only matched by disgust of me. No god or creature will miss me or my races’ passing.”
A severe and worrying set of words. Everyone’s got used to it. A couple of fillies have laid flowers under them. It was consoling to see that the unity party hasn’t got rid of everyone’s bad habits.

"Wow. They posted the same words three times. Trying too hard"

He waved a smudge of smoke away from himself. She threw it. She killed it. The cigarette was burning low and her eyes were fixed on something.

“Woah”
“What is it now Alice?”
“Sir, look at this”
“Never knew you liked flowers so much Alice”
“No underneath the third plaque!”

Right there a series of strikes and circles were smeared to the chest underneath the plaque. Coloured in copper based paint. Still sticky. The significance of these markings for the changeling sacred dead they would never understand. The two ESA officers did understand something else. The marks were done intricately and with time, from someone that cared for this changeling corpse. They also understand what a trail of green paint meant.

It meant an Idiot. Or a trap.

They didn’t see it at first because the hanging trio blocked the view of the tracks left behind. Spaced out at about twenty feet between each splash of green, it was easy to follow.

Tracks this easy and this early meant they were the first to find it.
“We’re going to have to follow this sir. What are we waiting for?”

Another aching morning lost. Already the laborers and the bakers cut their way through the city. Piles of them moving and the voices rising. A crime in the color of green hoof-prints. What are we waiting for?

“I don’t know”
“Someone’s in trouble?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go Alice”

They followed the trail for another half hour. Deeper into the second citizen district and its collection of halfway houses and parole offices. The trail coiled around the grayed remains of a small box-like building. As one of the houses on Amendment Street it had both a flat roof and barley enough space to suffocate with your roommates. Whenever the air force flew over, both the tiles and the pipe rattled to each other.

But both were silent now. Belated sunlight struggled to filter itself through the shabby street. The loudest thing in this still, semi dark landscape was the loud taste of salt. Of metal. The taste and stench spread itself in the static air. It meant that something had been crying or bleeding.

Within the space of two breaths they were on either side of the ramshackle door that marked the entrance to the house. They stare at each other across the splintered wood.

Another moment.

The door was kicked down.

A dripping stain of green was in the middle of the room, to the side of it a colossal idiot stood with its back to them. The idiot didn’t move. It stayed there. The idiot rooted to the ground. Paint and light smeared around it.

“Why did you touch the body?” Watch coarsely gifted these words to the idiot.
“Are you a sympathiser?” Alice shot these words at the idiot.

The idiot remained Silent. But then the idiot moved. Although more accurately the idiot dragged itself as if attached to something unseen.

Which of those words got her moving?

The light peeled away her anonymity. The idiot was a middle aged pony. She was tall, taller than both of them and suspicious enough to test if she was a changeling. Her mane is straight. It flows down her shoulders and ends in ragged bursts of red.

She has a short cut coat coloured a starving white to collide with her red hair. Two dark tracks cut down her face because she had been sobbing severely and quietly. Thin beautiful lines etched themselves together to make a weightless set of eyes, mouth and nose. Misery sits on her like a sickness.

They never asked her but her name was Trudy.

All around her the grief has settled on the room in ashy piles. Again she moves as if dragged. As if dead. She was mostly silent. But her crumpled muted face was too loud for the officers. Her eyes.

She spent a long time looking past the two before she nodded her head.

Disturbed by the softness of her grieving, it took several moments but they repeated each of their questions.

Fortunately she answered “Yes” this time round. Her answer was neither blunt nor soft. The word was said a long time ago, somewhere else. On top of that she also gave them a wet painful smile.

But it seemed like a pretence to something bigger. Something humming and massive and unseen. Something that could be felt in that room but not observed. Fortunately the officers pushed this thought down.

Unfortunately Watch fell into his old habit of thinking and Alice lit another one up. She was tapping her hooves.

The more he watched the idiot, the more a scratching thought managed to burn a hole in Watch’s head. It fell out his head and hit the floor at the same time the idiot managed to choke another mouthful of tears down. The thought is this.

“This grieving idiot is going north and there’s nothing I can do.”

What about Alice? What about that plain pony with the dripping artificial smile? For now she was safely wrapped in righteousness and anger at the sympathiser. Her loyalty and stubbornness is saving her from what the unity party calls a “conflicted state of mind”. She’s already made up her mind and whispers into Watch’s ear “Guilty”. She said it quickly like the word would burn her. All around, her personal smoke coiling. Heaving.

But the officers did what officers did and tried to ignore certain duties and certain feelings.

“Were you coerced ma'am?”
“No”
“As in forced to pursue an action?”
“No”
“Okay. Okay Alice don’t say anything”

Watch takes off his officers cap. His words were soft enough to crumple into the stone floor. Remarkably for a few seconds his playful malice was stowed away. Instead a deep and intense patience flowed out of him. Alice was reminded of how a doctor approaches a dying patient.

“Alright you’re clearly in trouble”

He was answered with vacant eyes.

“You’re meant to say yes to being coerced. So I can lift a lot of charges on you. Okay? You don’t need to make it hard on yourself. There’s a process, an unofficial one you see, and we will help you through it.”

She spoke with a choking shortness. This was expected though. The sobbing had a reasonable amount of time to coax some coarseness into her vocal cords.

“Okay sir.”
“Okay. Alice just, just calm down, just calm down.”

She was bouncing from hoof to hoof, nodding her head and agreeing with the world at how goddamn guilty this pony looks.

“Were you coerced?”
“No. I loved him”

A massive shapeless silence glides across the room.

Rage had started venting out of her. She was stabbing one hoof at the idiot and another hoof into Watch’s arm. Her face was in a halfway house of puerile glee and righteous fury. A kind of grinning face with widened eyes and flayed out brows.

Alice attempted to go for professional pride but tripped and landed on fanaticism.

“I told you sir! I told you, I told! You-why-the-goddam-fuck-do-you-not-listen-to-me!”
“Celestia’s sake Language you pyscho! Just because- no let me – just because – Celestia’s sake let me finish! – Just because you said that one word doesn’t mean you have to act like a brainless zealot!”
“A zealot! This is loyalty! This is what’s needed to clear out the wrong and build a future!”
“Do you want it? Do you want it? Do you want me to drag my heels and shout about absolutely nothing I know about?”

Luna above he wanted to wring Alice’s neck.

Alice was prancing around shouting at the ceiling. She was waving her cigarette around and making pictures with the smoke. He was struggling with the red engulfing his face. It was hard to breathe with the accusations and smoke that filled the room . “Luna above me” he thought. We look like idiots to the idiot.

Eventually it ended in a verbal stalemate, with Alice threatening to report on his “conflicted state of mind” and Watch threatening a demotion. As before, they never mean it. (As before they drink and make up ). It was nothing new. Really just a repeat of an argument.

They cooled down and asked her again. But watch leaned down and his question was handled softly.

"Were you coerced?"

This time there was a statement wrapped in the question. You could guess it from the way he lent down and pleaded with his eyes. The way his desperation had stretched his sentence out slowly. Please don’t do this to yourself. That’s how the statement went. Please don’t do this to yourself idiot. Please don’t die.

"No"
"I don't think you understand. There is something that needs to be done"
"No"
"You have to think. Please think."
"You know I've thought about it. I've said the answer three times"
"You're saying the wrong answer. Celestia above I'll pay for you to move out."
"I could move out."
"You could"
"I could"

His words eased itself out in a whisper. Celestia above nothing could be done.

"You're going to die if you don't"
"I'm going to die"
"Please"
"I'm going to die"

Alice come in with the deal breaker.

"He gave you too many chances. You're under arrest"
"Yes. Yes I am."

It stabbed him like a heartbreak. Indifferent despite his efforts, she stood like a tall beautiful death-wish. Alice maneuvered around the prisoner with a hoof of shackles.

“You want to die? You want to go north? Fine. You only had to do one thing. One."

The idiot and the stallion took a while to glare at the other. He broke it off and howled out a laugh. The bitter laugh. Like the clunk of pebbles in an empty bucket.

"You wanted to get caught the moment you left that trail"
"Yes. Yes I did."
"You won't find him when you die. All changelings go to hell"
"I'm going to hell"
"Enjoy it"

He walked out like a corpse, frustration stabbed into him. Watch left first. Alice killed another cigarette. She followed it by a hoof to the idiot's face. The twisted kind of smash that digs out teeth. Alice put the shackles on the idiot and the pair of them followed Watch upstairs.

The idiot and Alice reached Watch staring at the street. Yet still the idiot stood tall. A tear of blood from the mouth. Shackles smothered around her hooves. Apparently some sort of justice was done but he couldn't see the proof. He watched Alice lead the prisoner a little while out. She came back and offered an understanding smile. A small respite of tolerance despite herself.

“I know sir. I know”
“You don’t. Are we clear?”
“Yes”

But nothing was clear. For a while they had stood there like puzzles that needed solving. Him endlessly bitter and her endlessly honorable.
“I wonder what its like”
“To go North?”
“Yeah”

But we both know don’t we? We both know.

“We’re going to coffee later”
“Yeah, we are”
“Goodbye grandpa”
"Goodbye Alice"

It wasn't the first time she suggested a coffee. Whenever she did she never argued, she always payed and she always listened. No matter how hard Watch tried to save ponies from the prisons and the camps in the north. She was always there and she always listened. You can love her for that if you like.

For now she lead the prisoner across the streets.

He watched the pair rise and fall across the road. Silently he stepped back into the tiny room. Undoubtedly there would be paper work. Reams of it. Before the work, he'd like to have another look at the room shaped like a heartbreak. Where the end of two lovers had probably began and ended.

Beneath the floor boards the eyes watched him.

four

Alice and the idiot had left. He moved out of the road that coughed and spluttered into Amendment Street. He opened the only door to the house and followed his hooves inside. For now there was a cramped room and a stallion nested inside of it.

The stallion wanted to drink. The thirst of it battered him and was dragged across his shoulders. It fell to his hooves and if he held them up they would shiver and shunt. The door was open and the sky had become overcast. All along the street, light fell down in bruises through the clouds. Dimness.

There was a silence. He paced inside and struck the door so that it bounced off the frames. There was a bucket of paint, so he kicked it over and put his hooves through his mane. He struck the wall and a dent bloomed out of the cheap wood. There was no sound and no frown on his face. It was only a stallion and his failure.

Although it came hard to him a distant anger was dripping over him.

Nothing to be done. Ah well. Nothing to be done.

He said the words in his head and then to himself aloud. He wished it hard but the words didn’t lessen anything. He reached over to make the bucket upright, and then silently closed the door to the room. He carefully made the bed sheets on a ruined mattress on the floor and sat down on it.

He took off his officer cap and stared at the dent in the wall. A stare that lurched further than the walls. To where? Dark rooms. The camps in the north. Somewhere else.

Nothing to be done. Still the words hang in the empty room. Those words always followed him. Ever since his first raid the words grew larger and larger. It was there when he watched them herd a group of them north and it was there when the idiot left with Alice. In the tiny room the words were pressed up next to him. Nothing to be done.

A bumping underneath him. The unmeasured quiet then another thumping. Finally a frown was found and stamped to his face. He rose in a cloud of dead air and ruined mattress. He lifted the mattress above and then spun it to a corner. Panting.

The floorboards lying dead. A polite quiet followed by the smallest of creaking. The boards crawling across a crack, then the boards peeling open. There were hooves and they would be bent over the edge of the hole in the floor, the planks heaped on either side. A tremor of dust came from the empty floor.

The hooves were black on the end of a black leg and shining in the dimness. A changeling.

The silence became a dull panic. Lazily it reached out, wrapping itself around the stallions head.

The hooves moved up and doubled into a body. Only smaller than expected, with a frame that we could only describe as tiny. The changeling hobbled out and was limping between hunger and exhaustion. But of course something was wrong. More wrong than it could be.

Because it was a child.

It must have been his imagination because he’s never seen a live child changeling. It must have been.

The changeling was small and its carapace was an inconsistent black and grey. It wore a sweater and a coil of worry. The child held a knife to itself and its breathing melted around what it held tightly to its body. The eyes were green and they were large and they were beautiful. There were tears, but they’re long passed, and they leaned into tracks on the young ones face. It’s sweater groaned into dirt and wool all around it.

The blade and the child shriveled and waned.

“You going to kill me child?”

The words were blank, corrosive and tossed at its feet. Except it was obviously more a she than an it. She had the larger eyes and the slender neck that can betray such a thing. The parts of her are curved and they point to the beginning of adulthood. The potential of beauty. A wolfish sorrow hangs around her hooves and occasionally strays into her eyes.

“You going to stab me with that knife child?”

The child made no moves. The brevity of his words still tumbled around their ears.

She trembled again, although now it is at the eyes. It soon tore down to the mouth, the lips if you like. It was five seconds of this then her face was still. The loud taste of dried paint smeared on the floor and on the air. A moment of stillness then she nodded her head. She had answered yes but they both knew she had no intention of killing the stallion.

The stallion crumpled up his voice and threw it out his mouth.

“I’m very bloody tired about this”

She answered in a clenched stare. Despite it the stallion had come to a decision.

“Alright. Alright. This house is empty” A voice that hollowed and filled.

He circled around the mattress then straightened it out. He sat down and picked his cap from the floor. Once again he had gotten into the bad habit of thinking. He followed it up by taking out the notepad and sighing inwardly. He sucked the air sourly and in chunks. To the child it seemed as though he had decayed into the mattress. A funny cap discarded on the mess of him.

I can assure you that he’s alive even if his spine was spectacularly slack. He’s just tired.

“This house is empty. No one here”

Again he seemed to slump and again he sighed. He had one hoof full of notepad and another hoof full of his face. The hoof slid down and he tried to pinch the headache in his skull. The child loomed over him.

“This house is empty. You understand kid?”

She did. She kept the knife to her and opened the door. A creak of light and then the door was half closed, and then opened in the wind. As is the nature of these things she was crying but silently, with her head bowed, so no one could see or hear it. Her body was hunched as much as a young body could while standing.

It was late noon. It was dour. It was the last time she will hide in the floor. It was a green flash and she was the shape of a filly with a burnt out blackness good enough for hair. There was still a girl and there was still a sobbing. The water falling. Blueness scattered from a sky and laid upon the tiles and the roofs and the strands of smoke from chimneys.

He watched through the half open door. He scribbled a note and swore to himself. He managed to untangle himself upwards and he went to the changeling. He was sweating and the note was heavy. Amendment Street was silent and fearful.

Above them a sparse sea of clouds started raining.

He was breathing through his worry and the water kept falling.
“It’ll end soon”
It wasn't known if he was talking to the girl or talking to the rain-clouds. Both of them stayed silent.

Slowly little pieces of her emptied out with the rain. In a strange hunched choking the last of the weeping had thrown itself from her. She stood solid now, against the puffed red eyes she held in her sockets. Soon, he realized it was less of a child in the rain and more a question.

The question was a growth. It grew out of wetness of her tears, the stillness of her body and the shaking of her hooves. It wasn't sorrow he felt for he knew of that creature and he had trod over its path, but a question. The child. The rain. The question. Will one be left with the other?

The stallion shuffled with his cut down conscious. He thought of the idiot and Alice and strange disappearances in the night. He thought of a child conjured away and buried. The thoughts hummed, then buzzed, then cut. Oh let me think. Please. Let me think. Let me live my small life with my small sins and my small things away from this.

He had the note in his hoof. He spat out a curse and the note was pressed into the child’s hooves.

“There are steps and they go upwards to a door. There is a flat. There is dinner.”

It was his only answer. He loosed then tightened the cap then walked across the street to sieve out of Amendment Street. That was that.

The house’s door was open and spewing it's stale taste of spilt paint. There would be teams, one for processing and one for political forensics. There will be a handling of the small things that made a home. The there will be a fire and these things will be sacrificed in a strange way to the new gods of society.

For now the girl was alive and hungry.

Behind her it rained and ahead of her the stallion swayed into falling drops.

five

The changeling girl hung around the edges of a frayed carpet and a wind burnt door. Sticky stains buried themselves into cheap carpeting and dragged her hooves into the floor. Around the door were bags and they were filled with bottles. Alcohol spluttered and bled out in yellow spikes although Watch tried to hide them.

The girl still had her previous disguise. Black mane, black hooves, black coat. Black on black on black. The only blue is in the eyes. She could have had a good chance passing off as one of the dark coats in the south that lived on the rivers.

It was close to seven since she shadowed the apartment he lived, either too afraid or too intelligent not to trust the stallion for a while.

The apartment was older than her with scratches and dirt perched upon the wallpaper. When she isn’t staring at the door she would sometimes trail a hoof through the coarseness of the wall. Through the walls you could hear cramped families, left behind grandparents and first time immigrants. From the sounds, they shout and move like you would expect.

But the girl was hopelessly soaked in rain. She was hopelessly soaked for thirty minutes because that’s how long she was staring at the bell.
She hit the bell.

Buzzing. Tapered off with a harsh humming croak of static.

A door was opened and a stallion filled it. It was the same one with the same despair venting out of him. He seemed more sharpened than his drab presence at Amendment Street, with a more open more painful face. Although the girl hit the bell she didn’t seem at all invested in the stallion’s existence. She had the carpet in her attention and her body groaned for food.

The smell of salted cabbage was deafening. Behind the stallion uneven stalks of steam break out of a pokey room that wants to be a kitchen.

I think you know this already but the shivering child was bathed in sorrow. She was far past hunger and into pain. To the stallion he could only see a starving sorrow. A starving sorrow that haunted the carpet with a self-sorry face. She had probably waited a while because a small pool was forming around her.

“You’re hungry. I made cabbage. Salted cabbage with potatoes. Don’t stand there like an animal. Move.”

Despite her pale nature she bowed her head and limped slowly into the room. She had given up on a hello and stepped into her home for the next seven years. All of it heaved with salt and alcohol and hunger. It reeked of ruptured time and paranoia. She closed the door behind her.

Compared to our last visit his flat is much better. He had cleaned and scrubbed and sprayed. He had put a scented ball of alkaline in the pipes. He had pursued all the other rituals needed to clean a flat. Despite it, in the unknown nature of homes, decay can still be felt between the walls. In the bones of it.

The soft plodding to the table. Then a chair. Then him facing her with the food in between. By now you can see the haze of starvation above her. Smog made of worry.

“Eat”
“I need to ask a question”
“You don’t need anything. Eat”
“You said my Ma was going to hell”
“I said you need to eat. Now eat.”

His voice stuttered and stilted in the air. They shunted and slotted. Less a string of words more a halting that fit together. By now she had taken the potatoes and he was muttering. The poisonous muttering that follows you. His hooves raked through his mane. Again the guilt in that shape of a girl in front of him.

“Her ma. Gods above. Her mother. The idiot was her mother.”

He retreated into his frown like he said an unspeakable word. She was glad to retreat into overcooked salted cabbage.

Of course it made sense. It wasn’t an idiot in the house with a changeling. It was a mother, a father and a daughter. It was a family in a bad place but in a good way. Unfortunately, now it was a hanged father, a disappeared mother and a depressed daughter shovelling cabbage into her mouth.

Safe in his stare she ate like a moving shipwreck, all silent groans and creaking and smelling of salt.

Like her mother she was quiet. There was almost an art to how she sat there quietly, something you could appreciate in how she did so little to break his head. He (despite his gruff eloquence) could only have described her as Howlingly quiet. Screamingly silent.

He also decided to stop drinking while in front of her this evening, the result being a torturous withdrawal that started from his scalp and finished at his hooves. But also a product of his foresight since he knew she would come.

“Alright that’s enough with the cabbage. I’ve got you something else.”

He also knows she needs love to survive. Changelings are weird like that.

He bends downwards and undoes a small fastening in the floor. He fiddles and something clicks. A little trap door yawns open to reveal oil cloth covering floorboards. He had already moved everything important out of his little vault in the floor, but had a surprise for the changeling.

“Here it is child.”

It was a crack beneath the oil cloth. It was a mare and stallion beneath the crack. It was a foal beneath the mare and stallion.

The room underneath the crack was more spacious and at the same time much cosier. The pair would watch their child sleep then kiss each other and head towards their own late dinner beyond the sleep of their first child. They’d watch each other eat and are content that this is the world and all it should hold.

She fidgeted and pressed her eyes closer to the crack. Her mouth was open because she was feeding.

Although unseen and unheard, love was deeply settled and deeply held in the room below them. And the changeling drank the smell and ate the love and tried not to remember its own family to spoil the taste of her meal.

When she rose, the stallion was at the table with papers and the dishes cleared. The smell remained. As does his scowl.

She will understand this later but the scowl isn't directed totally to her. It’s also directed to the papers for it explains his complicated relationship with the world and why he would take her in for no reason. For now the papers are as unexplained as the secret crack in his floor. As unexplained as his addictions. His hate.

The stallion puts a hoof to the papers and she leaves the crack, replaces the cloth and moves towards him.

“I know you hate me child”

Not true.

“But for this part of the plan to work, you will have to call me papa for the rest of your life. You’ll hate that”

True.

“You will need to do a lot of things you will hate. But you will live. And unlike your mother you will have to do as I say”

So underneath the smell of cabbage, in his painful stare, he told her of his plans for her. His words were cold and fell into her ears like ice and she knew she would loathe calling this drunkard papa. But her mama always told her that the ones hardest to love would need it the most. And he was hard to love.