Ash was a pony mood ring. Sixteen years old, and she was a cauldron of emotions- frothing, bubbling, and volatile. She never heard of "bottling it all up inside". She was as transparent as the air itself.
And she loomed over her combatant in the dusty Ponyville Highschool dirt road, it didn't take an answer key for the gathering crowd to decipher her mood Du jour.
Ash was pissed.
Firefly touched her split lip and gazed with a mixture of fury and awe at her bloodstained hooves. One right hook from Ash had laid the skinny blond mare flat out on her ass.
"What the hell, Ash?"
"What's the matter, Firefly?" Ash massaged her hooves. "You couldn't find your own coltfriend?"
"Oh, I could" Firefly brushed the dirt off the seat of her pink coat as she used a nearby fence to rise to her feet.
"He just happened to be yours at the time."
A chorus of "ooh" echoed around them.
"With all the stallions who come in and out of the revolving door to your cloud house, you had to get your hooves on Firebreaker, too?" Ash asked.
The crowd hollered again. Summoned by the promise of bloodshed, students flooded out of the high school's back doors, the circle around the two mares growing thicker every minute.
"Ash, wait" a deep voice called. Somewhere in the sea of hoodies and popped collars, a varsity letter jacket wormed its way through the crowd. Firebreaker finally elbowed in to the periphery of the inner circle. He stopped dead when he caught sight of Firefly's bloodied face. At six-foot-four he stood a full twelves inches taller than Ash, but he still shrank back when his soon-to-be-ex-marefriend turned around. His sandy mane bobbed as he searched for an emergency exit, but the crowd that had been so eager to let him through had now knitted together to block his escape.
It was the first time she'd seen him since Tessa had reported the horrible news to her in last-period chemistry. As Ash stormed out of mid class, she'd imagined all the awful things she would say to him, do to him even. Faced with the stallion who had abruptly tossed their three months together out the window like an apple core to the freeway. she couldn't even pretend to be anything but hurt. Maybe it was so naivete that came with having your first relationship, but nothing about their romance screamed "summer fling" to Ash.
"Really, Fire?" she said finally, her voice sounding far more pathetic than she intended.
"It's bad enough that you cheated on me, during school...but Firefly was the best you could do?"
"Hey!" Firefly protested behind her.
"Shut up, bitch, the grown-ups are talking!"
Firebreaker shifted his bag from his hooves to his shoulders. At one point or another every stallion dreamed of two mares fighting over him, but this clearly wasn't what Firebreaker had imagined.
"I don't want to talk about this here"
"I'm sorry" Ash said quietly, unconsciously twisting the necklace that Fire gave to her. its heart was pointed inward.
"Is there some place quieter you had in mind to humiliate me?"
For the moment, when he tugged at the hair that was starting to grow over his ear, when his posture slouched as if he were deflating, when his front hooves shuffled restlessly in place, Ash thought she saw a specter of old Fire, the same Fire she'd seen in his cellar the day his parents announced they were having a divorce. For a moment she felt like maybe it was just the two of them, alone again, lying in his bed.
But then the world around him seemed to coalesce and the crowd snapped back into place. His eyes hardened.
"The only pony who's humiliating you, is you!" he said. His hooves settled on the zipper of his jacket as if it were a holstered gun. Ash leveled him with a stare that could harpoon a marlin from a hundred yard. She pointed at his bag.
"What are you going to do, coward? Swat me with your man purse?"
Momentarily girded with courage, Fire turned and smirked at Hot Springs, co-captain of the hoofball team.
"If only she'd been this passionate when we were dating."
One second Ash was standing in the middle of the circle. The second Fire was curled in the fetal position on the ground, howling in pain, holding his bag in front of him like a shield to prevent further irreparable injury to his groin.
"You have something to say too, butler" Ash asked.
"No, ma'am," Hot Springs said, and after once glance down at his squirming friend, he held up his left front hoof.
"Personally, I think he deserved it!"
"Traitor" Fire rasped from the ground.
"Christ, Ash" Firefly came up beside Ash, who had temporarily forgotten about her. Firefly planted her hooves firmly on Ash's hips and peered down at Fire with no particular touch of concern.
"Didn't your parents teach you any manners?"
Ever so slowly Ash rotated her head to the left, her eyes piercing out behind her bangs.
"Ooh,right!" Firefly said. "You're just some crazy bush filly that your parents came home from vacation with."
Ash raised her hoof and touched the skin over her coat, at once painfully, self-conscious of how her coat, the hue of earthen clay, clashed against the backdrop of her school. She spent the better part of each day feeling like a manticore in the Everfee Forest, and now Firefly was poking her with a stick through the trees.
The crowd had fallen uncomfortably quiet as well. Oblivious to the silence around her, or perhaps driven by it, Firefly wiped the blood from her still-bleeding lip.
"Where do you think your parents are right now? Chanting a circle in their hut? Poking you with needles into a little voodoo doll, controlling you, and that's why you're acting such a-"
It wasn't really Ash's intention to knock out anyone's teeth during this altercation. But Firefly's hadn't even finished her verbal portrait of Ash's birth parents, when, in a blur, the Polynesian's hooves wrapped around Firefly's skull and threw her across the circle. The momentum carried Firefly uncontrollably toward a familiar pony's jacket.
It was one of those genuine oh-shit-what-did-I-just-do moments when everything slows down. Firefly's face smashed into Fire's side-so hard, in fact, that the lower pocket was torn off and slowly floated to the ground. Meanwhile Ash watched with a cocktail of glee and guilt-ridden horror as the light flickered from Firefly's eyes and her eyelids drooped. Firefly was three quarters of the way to Canterlot by the time she landed on the pavement, her outstretched arm mercifully providing a pillow for her head as she went down.
And, there, spilling out of her mouth and onto the ground like it had just popped out of a gumball dispenser was one of Firefy's incisors. One end covered in blood, it skittered across the pavement until it landed at Ash's hooves.
"My jacket!" Firebreaker helplessly reached into the lower pocket of his now torn jacket.
Ash wasn't really looking at Fire or the bloody tooth in front of her. Instead the sounds of the crowd around her died away, fading into a void, replaced by a ringing in her ears. In that silver time Ash was frozen, looking at her split reflection in the mirror.
A wind picked up from the west, and the already overcast sky instantly grew darker. The temperature plummeted to frosty levels. The short-sleeved students rubbed their exposed arms. Hoodies were zipped in unison.
Then, on that September afternoon, it began to snow. Just a few flakes at first, carried like dancing ash by the growing west wind. But as a murmur rumbled through the crowd, the snow began to fall in blizzard proportions. Ash finally severed eye contact with her broken reflection and tilted her face to the sky, her cheeks quickly powdered by the storm.
On cue a loud grunt echoed from behind Ash.
"My toof...." Firefly moaned, sitting up. Then again louder, "My toof!!" She touched her mouth in horror, and her hoof explored the space where her left incisor used to be. She frantically raked her hooves through the snow, the fragment of her previously beautiful smile helplessly concealed by the white blanket on the ground.
Meanwhile, the world war of snowball fights had erupted all around the school grounds. The silhouettes of its soldiers danced with delight through the impromptu snowstorm, using fences as cover from the returning fire. The shrieks of mirth echoed through the eerie dark of the afternoon.
But another sound overtook the school grounds. From behind the thick curtain of snow, a dark blue chariot picked up, distant from those of the factory-fresh roller skates and hand-me-downs that were slowly making their way out of the sidewalks and onto the slippery snow. The snowball fight and the cheerful shouts of its participants faded to nothing as the sound grew louder.
Ash knew exactly who was on the back of the chariot before the outline of the chariot emerged through the white gauze. The old rusty chariot chugged threateningly as it rolled toward them, its blue armor like a spot of the sky in the otherwise virgin snow.
The stallions drifted to a stop between Ash and her fallen adversary, who has finally located her tooth. Firefly had it pinched betwen her hooves and squinting at it in a half conscious daze. The arrival of the chariot caused her to drop it again.
The rider, clocked in a dark ape and a matching necklace that made her look like a floating vision in the falling snow, dismounted the chariot. Her short chin length hair curved around her face into two elbony spikes that pointed forward like tusks. Her dark white coat, even richer than Ash's, betrayed her roots to an island far, far away from this suburban jungle. It was as if she and Ash had been excavated from different layers of the same clay.
The older mare glanced briefly at Firefly, perhaps noting the blood on her lip and the conclusion-induced disorientation in her eyes.
"Way to go, little sis."
"What are you doing here, Lustfal?"
Lustful pouted mockingly at her little sister.
"Can't a big mare check in on her little sister from time to time?"
Ash cleared her throat.
"Not on the school grounds from which you have already been expelled."
"Oh please, a couple of unwanted comments in biology class, and one teensy little cafeteria hoof fight, and you kick a mare out of school? Hardly seems fair."
"Three, three teensy little cafeteria hoof fights, and one restraining order." Ash corrected her.
"See?" Lustfal exclaimed as if this proved her point.
"Six months out of school, and I can't even count straight anymore. And I was so eager to learn."
Behind Lustfal, Firefly climbed unsteadily on her feet, tottering from side to side. She massaged her head and squinted at the new arrival.
"Christ, Ash. Did you hit me hard enough that I'm seeing double? Or are there two Tahitian bitches strutting around the sidewalk?"
"Firefly, please shut up." Ash said, this time pleading, not hostile. Lustful had been missing three months now, ever since her seventeenth birthday. But three months wasn't nearly long enough for Ash to forget that when Lustful got involved, things never failed to get out of hand.
"Didn't you learn your lesson the first time?" Lustful said over her shoulder; the peon behind her wasn't worth the energy of turning around. Firefly opened her mouth to reply, but Ash darted between the two of them. She experienced a pleasurable surge of victory when Firefly flinched, but wanted to telepathically say, I'm trying to protect you, moron.
"Forget about this one." Ash said to her sister.
"I've already invested enough energy in her, and Firebreaker isn't worth the fight."
"Firebreaker?" Lustful scoffed, and swept the snow out of her mane.
"That gangly twerp? Baby sis, I thought I taught you better than that. You certainly didn't inherit your taste in stallions from me"
Ash forced a laugh, waiting for the tension in the air to melt. Her mind was no longer fixated on the threat of school
suspension. Now she was focused on getting Firefly and Lustful to go in separate directions.
Mustering up all the sisterly warmth she could for a sibling who was as frightening as she was predictable, Ash slipped an arm around Lustful's waist and guided her to her chariot.
"Let me worry about this, I'm just going to go inside and collect my detention slip, then I'll meet you back at home. We can catch up then."
Lustful narrowed her eyes, like some sort of menacing ice witch with the snow collecting on her brow.
"Why? Why do you just be content yourself to go along with the status quot when you know you're intended for much greater things?"
She jabbed her hooves roughly on Ash's cheek.
"I know that you feel it in you, the same way I did when I gave you the hoof to this place and rode off into the sunset. Do you really feel like you belong in this Wonder Bread town? Have you ever felt like you belonged here?"
Ash dropped her eyes on the pavement.
"Then, why don't you stop acting like you do! Do you really want to waste your time sitting for hours in some vomit-colored detention hall just because you showed this whorish colt-stealing bottom feeder, who has terrible split ends, a little bit of street justice?" Lustful said while pointing her hoof at Firefly.
"Are you kidding me?" Firefly screeched behind her.
"Shut it, cupcake, it's called conditioner-use it sometime!"
"Just go home!" Ash said yo her sister, more firmly this time
"I can take care of myself!"
The wind picked up with increasing ferocity from the west. Ash's mane billowed around her like a sail. Lustful got on the chariot.
"Got on the chariot, Ash." she ordered her sister.
"I'm not leaving this school without you. It's for your own good."
"No!" Ash replied.
"Get on the damn chariot!" Lustful growled. Her face contorted with such vicious line that even Firefly took a few steps back.
"Get on the chariot, or so help me..."
Ash was summoning the courage to refuse a second time when fate-in form of Firefly's stupidity-intervened. The pink pegasus with the dark blue mane snorted behind Lustful.
"I guess I wasn't off target when I said crazy runs in the family. But I can't really blame you, Ash. If my older sister was a chariot-riding whore, I guess I'd be rough around the edges too."
The wind died, and the only sound that could be heard throughout the school was the distant call of thunder. Everypony held their breath, frozen somewhere between meditating and screaming. Lustful's eyes were still fixed with smoldering fire on her little sister, and for one blessed, relief-filled instant Ash actually thought Lustful was going to let the comment slide. Everything happened so fast.
When Ash arrived home after her meeting with the principal, the police was already waiting in the garden. The female officer sitting inside the house with her parents looked alert and self-important, stoked at the prospect of finally being able to dispense some sweet justice. Ash couldn't particularly blame her. With Ponyville having one of the lowest crime rates in Equestria, the cops rarely saw much excitement.
Curled up in her bedroom window seat with the lights off, Ash watched the rain splatter against the glass. For the second time that day, the weather matched her mood precisely-first the freak afternoon snowstorm, and now this midnight thundershower. She had left the window open just a crack so that the patter of raindrops against the leaves could wash over her. She hoped she could cull some sense of relaxation out of the white noise, be cleansed by it, but Lustful's absence and her own week long suspension loomed over her instead.
Isolation. Ash knew that being confined to the four cranberry-colored walls of her bedroom for the next month wasn't the end of the world. The truth was that even she had her run of the town she would still be numbingly alone. What few friends she had retained from middle school she'd lost so quickly during the brutal transition from freshman to sophomore year. She'd been replaced like an old tube of mascara when the social tectonic plates that made that great shift. Firebreaker, despite all his visible egocentricity, had served as a much-needed bandage, bringing with him an entourage of substitute friends in the form of his fellow hoofball players and their plus-ones. But now the bandage had been ripped off with a single flick of the wrist-or, in this case, Firefly's tongue- and the wound of loneliness had sprung open anew.
And when romances and friendships went to hell, weren't you supposed to fall back on family? She scoffed. If family was supposed to be her safety net as she walked the tightrope of life, then Ash's "support system" currently consisted of two parents appalled by the life choices of their children, and a sister who was wanted for assault and battery.
Ash sighed and opened her window wider. Moisture spattered her face as the raindrops splashed through the screen. It felt good just to feel anything at this point. Considering that she had knocked out one of Firefly's teeth, there certainly were worse fates than a school suspension and a substantial grounding at home, but the loneliness was settling in.
Soon her adrenaline levels faded, and Ash's eye fluttered closed. She hugged her back legs to her chest and placed her head near the window as she drifted off, lulled to slumber by the kiss of the raindrops against her cheek. She hadn't been asleep more than five minutes when the sound of female laughter echoed through the window from the front yard.
Ash's eyes shot open.
"Lustful?" She said aloud, and peered through the window. The rain still came down in a steady drizzle, but she could see a silhouette at the end of the sidewalk, obscured in the darkness of the trees.
"Lustful?" She repeated.
But then she heard a chorus of giggles and discerned two additional shadows darting among the bushes that lined the front walkway. It was the excited chatter of mares lined in the thrill of doing something illicit and enjoying it far too much. And as one of the mares stepped into the halo light of the moon, Ash caught sight of her battered but unmistakable mug.
Firefly.
As her vision adjusted to the dark, Ash observed that Firefly was carrying something-a field hockey stick-that she tossed playfully from hoof to hoof. If Ash's ears could be trusted, then Firefly's partners in crime were her friends Misty and Lexi.
They probably weren't here to sell Foal Scout cookies.
With a shout of glee Firefly pranced up to her mailbox, with a wooden bird feeder that Ash's mother had refashioned with a hinge door and repainted the pastels. Firefly wheeled around, and the club end of the hockey stick struck the mailbox with a sharp crack that responded across the yard. Channeling all of her rage from being knocked out once on the same day, Firefly made quick work of the refurbished bird feeder. Again and again her weapon came down, splintering the wood. Finally Firefly launched a fierce kick that separated the mailbox from its post, and the already devastated bird feeder crashed to the sidewalk pavement.
Misty joined Firefly in dancing around the fallen mailbox, but Lexi lingered back. Ash undid the clasps holding the screen window in place and pushed. It swung up and out, and she leaned out of the window as far as she could without falling to the bushes below. If she filtered out a whisper of the rain against the leaves, she could just make out what the mares were saying.
Alexis kept looking frantically in the direction of the sidewalk.
"Let's get out of her, the neighbors probably heard that."
"Oh, grow some balls, Lexi!" Misty said.
Firefly tipped her field hockey stick up to her wings like a solider cradling her rifle.
"I haven't even begun to claim my revenge yet, Ash and Lustful brought this on themselves." Firefly said.
"Lustful and Ash both deserve the worst, I just want to make sure I don't get booted off the team if we get caught. Besides, their parents live here too." Lexi agreed, tugging nervously at her mane.
"Their parents clearly raised two out-of-control self-entitled daughters from hell. They should be grateful that my dad is a doctor and I don't need to sue!" Firefly snapped.
The mares disappeared out of Ash's view, vanishing somewhere in the direction of the shed. Ash ditched her shoes and jacket and tiptoed out of the room, letting her socks mask her hoofsteps. Before she headed down the stairs, on whim she grabbed a bottle of aerosol hair spray from the bathroom, wielding it front of her like a gun. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she could hear the faint sound of giggling from the side of the house. Across the living room three shadows flickered past the windows, accompanied by a faint grating as one of the mares dragged her hockey stick along the siding. They were heading toward the backyard.
As soon as Ash heard their hoofsteps travel across the stone patio, she ducked behind the kitchen counter so they wouldn't catch a glimpse of her through the slider door. She wasn't ready to forfeit her element of surprise just yet. Ash crawled across the floor until she reached the door that opened out in the side yard. With one hoof perched on the doorknob and the other still clutching her can of hair spray, she gave herself a once-over and realized that her pajamas weren't doing much to up her intimidation factor. Nothing she could do about that now...and getting caught should be enough to startle the mischievous mares.
Ash counted to three and marched out into the yard with cool intensity. The murmur of the heavy drizzle against the grass buffered the creak of the opening door and for a few seconds Lexi remained oblivious to the angry mare crossing the yard toward her. She sat at the picnic table, a can of spray paint in one of her wings and her field hockey stick across her lap. She wore a miserable pout and was visibly sickened, either thought of spraying graffiti on the wall in front of her or because was now soaked to the bone outside instead of tucking into her safe, dry bed.
Ash stopped a good five yards from Lexi, who with a flinch finally realized she was no longer alone. She was so startled that she fell off the picnic table, landing on her back in the muddy grass.
"You don't wanna be here, I'll give you five seconds to pick up your sorry ass up off my lawn and run home. But you better run. One-"
Ash hadn't even counted to two when the timid freshman pounced off to her feet like a gazelle with a lion in hungry pursuit. She barreled off across the lawn, abandoning both her field hockey stick and her can of spray paint in the grass. Ash wriggled with enjoyment watching Lexi stumble and fall to her knees and sprinted off into the night. There was a good possibility Lexi would either cry or throw up by the time she got home. Maybe both.
One down, Ash thought. She scooped up Lexi's forgotten can of paint and tucked it into her mane. Then she rounded the corner of the house. In the backyard Ash found only one of the two remaining mares. Crouched on the patio tiles, Misty was just wrapping up a graffiti portrait on the back wall-an enormous drawing of a penis. The field hockey co-captain had just begun to scrawl Ash's name beneath it. She'd made it only halfway through the h. She cursed and shook her can vigorously, but only air came out of the nozzle as she tried to complete the name.
"Damn it!" Misty mumbled, then she heard Ash's hoofsteps approaching across the patio. Mistaking Ash for her teammate, she didn't look up from her masterpiece.
"I'm out of paint, Lexi. Can I borrow your can? It won't have the same effect if it looks like I just wrote 'ass'"
Ash stopped right next to Misty and leaned over. Misty must have finally caught sight of Ash's socks and shirt, because she snapped her head around in horror.
"Sure, I'll give you a spray." Ash replied.
She let loose a long blast of hair spray past Misty's eyes, purposely just missing her face. Misty shrieked anyway and dropped onto her back like a turtle. The spray rolled out of her hoof and across the patio. Clutching her eyes, which began to stream with tears, Misty fumbled onto her knees. But Ash seized hold of her letter jacket before Misty could get too far, and heaved her off the patio and into the mud. Ash knelt over Misty and held her firmly by the lapel, bringing the other mare's face toward hers until they were muzzle to muzzle.
"I don't give a rat's ass about you, Misty. So I'm going to do you a favor. Tell me where Firefly is, and I'll let you stumble out of here. I won't tell your parents, and when I pass you in the halls from ow on, this didn't happen."
Misty gazed up at her with bleary eyes, blinking furiously. Then she resignedly pointed up toward the roof.
"Is this what you call team loyalty?" Ash snorted. She released the mare and pushed her back into the mud.
"Now, get the hell out of my yard."
Misty cast a last torn look at the roof, toward the teammate she was leaving behind. And then she took off-if it were possible, even more quickly than Lexi had departed minutes earlier.
It only took a few second to figure out how Firefly had made her way to the roof. Ash had to give her credit Either the mare had tremendous cojones or she just hated Ash and Lustful so much that she was willing to throw caution to the wind. Ash spread her wings and flew up to the roof, the rain splattered her face like confetti and landed onto the top of the slippery roof. Firefly, who was at the other end of the roof and had her back to Ash's, was concluding work on the exclamation point in "SLUT!". She had painted the word in enough to be read by passersby on the sidewalk, possibly by pegasi as well. The rain had caused some of the paint to ooze toward the gutter like runny eggs. Firefly was already done with her first draft, but had apparently decided that the letter were neither wide or bold enough to sate her thirst for retribution.
Ash plucked her bottle of spray paint from her mane and clambered down the roof.
"Let me help you with that exclamation point." Ash said, and before Firefly could turn around, Ash fired a stream of paint onto the back of Firefly's checkered London trench coat. By the time Firefly could shy away, Ash had tagged her with a slime green bull's-eye. Firefly extended her spray paint wing, as if the electric blue paint would protect her somehow. Her cheeks and eyes were a swollen mess of black, violet, blue, and tinges of green where Ash and Lustful had made a Celestia painting on her face.
Ash smiled acidly.
"I figured I'd tag you, so that animal control would know there's a bitch on the loose."
With a growl Firefly stripped off the now destroyed coat and tossed if off the roof.
"That was my favorite Burberry!!"
Ash shrugged.
"This was my favorite roof."
"What are you going to do? Push me off it?" Firefly asked, trying to sound fierce, but Ash caught her glancing nervously to the ground below.
"No" Ash chucked the spray paint can to the side and took a deep breath, trying to quell the flames that this mare was so talented at fanning.
"All I want is for you to go home. We don't have to be friends at school, or even civil in the hallway. I don't want to borrow your algebra homework, and I don't expect you to come over and braid my hair while we watch VHI. I just want to go sit in my room alone, wait out of suspension, and forget this bullshit ever happened."
"Don't act like you didn't bring this on yourself, I'm not the villain here." Firefly said, though she sounded like she only half-believed it.
Ash bowed her head.
"I don't know who deserves what anymore. I just know that all this isn't worth a lowlife like Firebreaker." She gestured around, to the roof, then to Firefly's bruised face.
Firefly wiped the rain from her eyes and looked up to the heavens. The rain seemed to be coming down with renewed intensity, working its way from a drizzle up to a full-blown downpour. The mares regarded each other coolly in the rain. They were far from establishing a rapport but were perhaps coming to a truce, neither one fully understanding the events that had brought them up onto this slippery roof in the dead of stormy night.
"So that's it?" Firefly said. "I just head home, you don't call my parents. I don't sue you for knocking out my tooth, and we don't speak of this again?"
"I'm afraid it's not that easy." another voice shouted through the rain.
Lightning flashed over the trees int he backyard, illuminating the dark figure straddling in the summit of the house- Lustful. With a vicious grace Lustful slid down the shangles until she came to a stop behind Firefly. Before the field hockey captain could react, Lustful wrapped her arms around the sophomore's neck and squeezed.With super strength Lustful lifted Firefly off the roof. There, with her eyes bulging and her blotchy bruises darkening to a more sickening shade, Firefly dangled helplessly with her legs flailing a full hoof from safe harbor.
"This is the last time you screw with us!" Lustful said to the mare clutched to her talons.
"Put her down, Lustful, everything will be okay. Firefly will drop the charges against you. Won't you, Firefly?" Ash ordered.
Firefly was attempting to pry Lustful's arms off her throat, her face all the while turning crimson, but she managed a single frantic nod in response.
"Too late, this is bigger than law now. This is about respect." Lustful said to her sister and narrowed her eyes at Firefly.
In a moment a number of things happened . A strange sensation blossomed in Ash's stomach, the feeling of an approaching fall as if she were cresting the hill of a roller coaster. Her ears flicked, once, twice, and there was a series of rapid clicks; she experienced the same phenomenon every time she traveled by airplane. The pressure around them on the roof was plummeting at an alarming rate. Most frightening of all, the hair on Firefly's head stood upright. Ash watched as each of the mare's wet strands of hair rose skyward, pointing up at the hidden moon, until a circular mane of blue hair had surrounded her face like the rays of a Mayan Sun. Static electricity visibly crackled everywhere- though the ends of her blue locks, between her hooves. from the tops to the bottoms of her eyelashes.
Ash took a frightened step back.
"Lustful, are you...are you doing this?"
But then Lustful turned to look at Ash, her eyes shone fluorescent white, and the smile on her face told Ash everything she needed to know.
"Didn't your parents tell you not to play outdoors during a thunderstorm?" Eve taunted Firefly in her clutches.
"You might just find yourself playing with the lightning rod."
With a crackle from above as if fabric of heaven itself were tearing in half,Firefly's head snapped back, and a bolt of lightning shot from her mouth up into the clouds. The flash was blinding. Ash had to throw her hooves up to her to protect her face as the air around them heated up so rapidly mist. But through the slat of her hooves, Ash could only watch, petrified, as Firefly's body shuttered violently, her wings, arms, and legs rigid out to either side.
Then, as soon as the lightning had come, it was gone. The mist cleared and Lustful dropped Firefly's lifeless body to the roof. Firefly rolled limply down the slope of the A-frame, followed by a trail of smoke from where the lightning had burnt holes in her wings. Her body reached the gutter and dropped to the grass below.
"Oh my god, you killed her!" Ash covered her mouth.
Lustful had been admiring the spot where Firefly's body had tumbled off the roof, dreamily appreciating her own handiwork, but Ash's voice snapped her out of it. Her fluorescent eyes blazed when she turned to face her sister.
"You're defending that monster?"
"Monster?" Ash repeated. She searched Lustful's face for any sign of the sister she once knew.
"Lustful, that monster made out with my asshole ex-coltfriend. For something like that you put peanut butter between the pages of her textbooks or.....spread a rumor that she has herpes. You don't....you don't.." But she couldn't finish the sentence because her nose had discovered the scent of burnt flesh, she gagged.
"I won't even know the name Firefly if you hadn't gone and punched her in the face!" Lustful shouted.
"Here!" she said, and dipped her hoof into the paint of the T in "SLUT!" Lustful drew a line of electric green paint across her face. Then she crossed the roof and smeared the paint on Ash's shoulder and down her neck.
"Now, neither of us is cleaning this. Now her blood is on you too."
Ash touched the paint and held it in front of her face, just as Firefly had done her own blood that very morning after Ash punched her in the mouth.
But then she opened her mouth to say something, what come out was, "Why did you have to come back now?".
Lustful's face softened, and the afterglow behind her eyes flickered and dimmed gently like a firefly dying in the night. When she spoke, Ash could hear some phantom affection of the Lustful who years ago would walk her to the playground when their parents were working late at the practice.
"I came back to Ponyville for you, Ash. To tell my baby sister all the places I've been."
"Yeah, and now I'm chock-full of answers."
Lustful gestured to the sidewalk with a big sweep of her arm. The rain had picked up again.
"You think I was really out on the road for three months? While you were canoodling with Firebreaker, I was traveling to a place you can only dream of. I can take you there too, Ash. We can find out what gifts you have waiting for you here." She pressed a hoof to Ash's chest. A trail of sparks blossomed her touch.
"Let me and my friends help you unlock it. Let us show you that we were all meant for a greater destiny."
Ash gritted her teeth, trembling as she gazed up at her taller sister.
"I will never go with you, you freak." She said.
Lustful's hoof shot up and fixed itself around Ash's face, squeezing until Ash felt like her jaw was going to pop loose. A screech erupted from the back of Lustful's throat. She cocked her other hoof back and then struck her sister so hard that Ash went tumbling across the roof. Disoriented and picking up speed, Ash attempted to reach out and grab the gutter.
The next thing she knew, the world had opened up underneath her and she was twisting and falling. After a stomach-churning plummet, Ash hit the ground back first so hard she thought her head would break right off her body and roll onto the sidewalk. Everything went still. She lay there, unmoving, watching the troubled night clouds billowing overhead, like the writhing gray matter of a brain come to life. Her vision grew bleary as a pool of rain and tears filled her eyes in a thickening sheen. There was a thud in the grass somewhere next to her, and the blurred image of Lustful appeared in the foreground.
"I thought family meant something to you, you are no sister of mine. Don't come looking for me." Eve said. She spit on the ground next to Ash's face. Perhaps it was Ash's increasingly soggy vision, but in the moments that followed, it appeared as if the wind itself swept down from the trees and whisked Lustful's body away. A few dazed minutes passed before Ash had the presence of mind to pull her hair. Ash lay still in the grass, letting the rain cascade down around her, hoping her mind would take her somewhere else- any place- other then on the lawn with a dead mare.
