Crippled, Beaten and Broken.

The party was the best that he’d attended in a long time. The lights were low, the music was perfect, the drinks were cold and the women looked almost too hot to be real.

It was the perfect night, one of the very few that Ryan had been able to recall having all year.

At least, that’s what he had thought until he had seen THEM.

Two people, a guy and a girl, talking adamantly about something, both wearing shirts with those damned ponies on them!

Ryan felt his mood sour instantly. Those pony-loving dweebs were contaminating the party with their stupid, prissy bullshit!

His father had, from Year Zero, taught him that boys were to keep to things boys liked: Transformers, G.I Joe, guns, swords, secret agents, space ships, tits and ass, explosions and women who didn’t talk too much.

And My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, went against everything that is father had taught him, and the men who liked it with such reverence as they did seemed to be heretics against the Gospel of Testosterone.

“I mean, what the hell is wrong with them!” he’d often yell to himself, “There aren’t even any guns or blood or-or Humans in it for fuck sake! How could anyone like that stupid, prissy, too-safe bullshit?”

It was only much later, and in another world, that Ryan realized how utterly un-safe Equestria was, and how unbelievably tough the ponies who inhabited it really were.

He had, of course, gone over to the two bronies and started hassling them.

“Hey, sweetie. Why don’t you ditch this pussy and get out of those stupid clothes?” he had said to the girl, smirking at her disgusted reaction and her partner’s clenching fists.

He had fully expected the guy to try and act all polite and friendly before he swung. But he didn’t, he just lashed out and caught Ryan full in the nose.

The sound of his nose breaking and the warm blood that flowed into his mouth made him expel the vile concoction of beer and chips that had been resting in his gut. There had been a scuffle, then he had blacked out and awoken in a hospital to the angry face of his father.

“You let yourself get beat up by one of those freaks.” he had hissed with no trace of a question in his tone. To this day he still didn’t know how his father had known that, but the shame had been enough to make him wish he were dead, or at least comatose.

The realization that he wasn’t nearly as tough as he thought he was haunted him, and he retreated into the anonymity of the internet, attacking bronies and the show with the kind of hatred usually reserved for murderers and lawyers.

He even started a Youtube channel devoted to insulting bronies in a disguised voice and masked face.

It wasn’t until a month into his torment that he realized just how much of a coward he was.

Fluttershy stared at the strange creature that lay before her with awed and frightened eyes. It had taken her a few minutes to regain her composure enough to return to the room, the memories of that night at the gala and the terror that followed in its wake was enough to make her bones feel leaden.

But then she had actually looked at him and had been floored by what she had seen.

Zap-or Ryan as he asserted his true name was-looked like a shell of his former self. His skin, now scrubbed clean, was pale and covered with so many scars it was hard to tell if there was any inch of his skin that was unmarred.

His hands were gnarled claws with nails filed to the quick. his eyes were sunken in and surrounded by darkened flesh that bore the signs of unnatural stress and, perhaps, suffering.

“What happened to you?” she whispered aloud, getting a bit closer.

“I fell…” he said suddenly, startling the yellow mare into silence, “I fell so far, I’m still falling, but there’s no bottom.”

He turned to look at her and his eyes were wet, "It's so, so far to fall, don't you think?"

Tears welled up and tricked from his eyes to roll down his hollow cheeks as he bent double, a high, keening sob tearing from between his lips.

Fluttershy ran from the room with Ryan’s hysterical sobbing following her like a bloodhound, not hearing when the tears turned to screams.

Plummeting….falling….plunging into darkness again.

Where do I live?

In the Weak and the Wounded.

Weak: the punch at the party, his screams of pain when his father’s belt met his flesh, his low weeping in the shower after this happened, his inability to fight off the shrouded ponies, even with his powers, and his whining and begging in the face of more abuse and torment.

Wounded: beaten, used, repeat, a never-ending cycle. Just a toy, just a toy, but now he was the Pony’s toy. They’d use him and beat him and then do it all over again.

Did his deserve this?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Did it matter?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Would the madness really heal him?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Would he ever get better?

HAH! Now you’re kidding yourself.

The black tide is a-comin’, but will it finally pull him all the way under, to its inky depths? Could it numb his pain and make him forget? Wasn’t the World already one big madhouse?

Maybe.

Maybe not.