“ It was the harshest of times. It was the wildest of times. It was the time of our most violent vibes. The time of our most conceited caprices. The time of our less well-thought fuck-ups.
And you know… We never cared. It was, without a doubt, the best of times.
We did think we would never die.”
[ α Ω α ]
“When everypony disappeared, for you it was a disaster…” The pale Earth Pony mare whispered as her hoof prodded the wound. “For me, it was freedom.”
She coughed violently and her breath died into a raspy complaint. Her backlegs hacked on the snowy ground and, while she held her mess of a flank from which spurted long trails of red, she whimpered. The blood stained her rose hide. She could only cast a hazy glance at the hooded Pegasus mare, now towering over her dying body.
“We must go,” another hooded pony came forth, reaching out at the Pegasus. “The blizzard is buildin’ up. We gonna to die if we stay here.”
As the clouds spewed whiter and bulged darker, the second hooded pony mare lit her horn, casting a faint white light across the frozen clearing. The leaf-less trees were still standing proud, like a series of bleached ribcages trying to fork out at the sky.
“Just…” The Pegasus sighed. “Gimme a sec’. I have something to do.”
The Pegasus’s friend nodded and walked afar. As the crunching of hooves over the snow fainted away, the Pegasus glanced back at the dying Earth Pony. Her lungs were hissing and the snow slowly drank her blood, taking bit by bit the same colour as her fur.
“I’m cold,” the Earth Pony mare muttered.
“I know,” was the answer. “But it will be over soon.”
The tears were crystallising on their cheeks and the whistle of the wind accompanied those last shared moments.
“It’s sad,” the dying mare said. “After all those years, you still give me a bit of… friendship… I don’t know. I’m hurting.”
The Pegasus put her hoof on her lips, hushing her.
“Just. Stay put, please. It will be over soon.”
The Earth Pony mare pushed back the foreleg and coughed.
“I remember what the teacher said just before… before she went away… Can’t remember her name…” She said with a sad voice graveling down slowly as death gradually made its path.
“Cheerilee!” the Pegasus cut off, her voice uneven and hesitant. “Her name was Cheerilee. Please stop.”
“I don’t know… Don’t remember. It’s been so long since it happened. How long has it been…?”
The Pegasus looked at her hooves and counted, muttering her way to the right number.
“Five years,” the Pegasus replied as her head slowly hung down, quivering. “Please, no more.”
Time dawned on the Earth Pony mare. Her sullen blue eyes watered even more. Her nose leaked slightly faster and sobs filled the freezing air.
“I don’t want to die,” she pleaded.
“It’s too late,” the Pegasus bubbled back. “I can’t do… anything. You’re a lost cause. You’ve always been one.”
The Earth Pony stretched a hoof out and tried to reach the Pegasus. She stepped back to avoid contact with the dying mare. As a result, the hoof dropped and sunk a little in the snow.
“Do you think that I’m going to see Cheerilee again?
“Just stop,” the Pegasus hissed, arching her body. “Please, just die now… I… Can’t hear anymore.”
“Do you think I’m going to see everypony? Even father?” the Earth Pony continued. “Do you think I’m going back home?”
Too weak to rub her icing eyes, the Earth Pony gasped as her eyelids pained her. Dignity faintly departed. She grunted and tried to roll aside. A wounded stray dog was the only thing the Pegasus could think of as she watched.
“Please, stop!” the Pegasus cried.
Unable to take it anymore, the winged Pony shivered and her rump dropped on the grizzling cold ice. Now crying, she stretched her hooves and went for one very last, animalistic hug.
“You never understood, Diamond Tiara. Didn’t you…? Why did you follow us?” Scootaloo asked, pushing her hood back on her shoulders as her lips trembled, white from the cold. “Why… did you try to kill us… again?”
Heavy tears rolled on Tiara’s cheeks along with one single stream of blood, hanging from the side of her mouth. The fallen mare sobbed, coughed, and jerked sideways in the process. The large piece of rebar was hurting, going straight through her back and protruding from out of her flank.
“I was hungry,” she whined. “I was just… hungry.”
She was rachitic, her skin playing mountains and valleys over her frail ribs. Scootaloo could now feel it as her hooves clawed in and closed around the Earth Pony’s neck. She was small, so malnourished she had had no real adolescent growth. She couldn’t have prevailed… One against three. What had she been thinking? She had been crazy and she had paid for it.
Diamond Tiara coughed, her eyes rosy as she spewed peeps of red over her face, “Can… Can we still be friends…?”
No answer came.
“If… If you see Silver Spoon,” she continued, her voice now just a ghostly whisper. “Tell her… I’m sorry.”
The cold kiss of death came as she slumbered away in Scootaloo’s hooves. She coughed one last time, her blood tainting slowly her white and indigo mane. She hacked one last time, until her whole body finally lay unmoving, prey to the snow that had never stopped falling.
When everypony disappeared, for you it was a disaster… for me, it was freedom… The word echoed in Scootaloo’s blurry mind. Diamond Tiara was wrong. Not everypony vanished; it was just the adults. It had been a free-for-all ever since… Time spent fighting, fleeing, and scavenging. The orange mare thought about the hurting past, especially about her foster sister. She went for her face and rubbed the large scar running from her left ear to her muzzle just under the eye. After all this time, it was still hurting so bad.
“You’re wrong,” Scootaloo whispered, sniffing back the snot rushing out of her nose.
Still hugging the limp pony that she had vowed as her arch nemesis a long time ago, she tried to repress the cry but failed.
“For me, it was freedom as well.”
“Scootaloo?!” Apple Bloom’s voice called out through the blizzard.
“I’m coming!” she replied. “I’m coming…”
With a last glance at the body’s glassy eyes, Scootaloo gently dropped the wobbly head down the ground. There, snow would soon bury the misdeed and she will be long gone when the spring would come and claim its due.
Scootaloo walked away, followed the voice trail until a large, decrepit home appeared in the white. The roof had been blown off by the harsh wind and one single yellow light was filtering through the crack of the first floor window shutter. The door was open and a shadow of a Pony was waiting.
“Close the door, Apple Bloom,” Scootaloo grunted. “We’re not warming up the outside...”
“Ah Ah… you know ah don’t like sarcasm. Fer yer good sake, ye could ha’ been killed outside.”
Scootaloo shrugged it off and stumbled across the room. She went down crashing on the mattress they had dragged from the only room of the place. Apple Bloom sighed and walked silently towards her partner. She sat next to the fire and soon lost herself in looking at the ever-changing flames.
“Look at you, dear!” Sweetie Bell said as she finally looked away from the stew she was preparing.
She rushed at her Pegasus friend’s side and, using her own brown and torn up hood, she started brushing the blood off her fur and barding.
“Are we there yet?” Scootaloo sighed. “I’m tired of walking.”
“Tomorrow if the storm is down,” Sweetie Bell answered, scrubbing the red paint off Scootaloo’s face.
The Pegasus ticked as her friend went far too close to the scar. She tut-tuted and pushed the friendly hoof. Awkwardness settled between the two.
“Sweetie Belle?” Scootaloo broke the silence. “Am… Am I a bad Pony?”
Scootaloo swallowed and turned her head towards her friend, avoiding eye contact.
“No, you’re not,” Sweetie Belle comforted, rushing out to hug her winged friend.
Scootaloo’s eyes fluttered. Her lips blubbered and her febrile hooves went into a frail commonly shared hug. She broke and sobbed out loud, her hooves suddenly crushing over her Unicorn friend’s back. Sweetie Belle winced but said nothing as she stroked over Scootaloo’s mane with a faint smile.
“It hurts,” Scootaloo whimpered. “It hurts so much.”
Apple Bloom, ever so silent, joined in for the hug, resting her face over Scootaloo’s right wing.
“I know it hurts,” Sweetie Belle said. “But, you remember the message, don’t you?”
Slowly, Scootaloo nodded and her face took refuge in Sweetie Belle’s messy and dirty mane. With a warm smile, Apple bloom dropped a hoof in the saddlebag hidden under her makeshift barding. She ransacked it and pulled out a compact cassette reader. Even old and battered, it still had a print of an electric blue double music note with a light blue outline on its side. Apple Bloom pushed a button and after a sizzling crack of static burst out of it, a mare’s voice tuned.
“Hello Scootaloo. I don’t know where you are right now or if you can hear me. I’m in Manehattan right now. If you can hear me, please let me know. I’ll be waiting. I hope you can reach me. Please, Scootaloo, for Celestia’s sake please… Come back.”
As the end of the recording crackled with the sobbing of a mare, Scootaloo’s ragged breath came to a halt. She closed her eyes and inhaled one long breath, kept it for ten full seconds before releasing it.
All three tightened into a hug, they could hear each other heartbeat. And, for once, they weren’t cold.
“Hey, girls?” Apple Bloom broke in with a grin.
“What?” Scootaloo coughed, stripping her reddened eyes from their tears.
“Regardin’ this hug session, it’s no homo, right?”
The trio laughed silently as the night trailed out and, ever so stronger, the blizzard screamed outside. Tomorrow would be another day, for the voice on the recording had been Rainbow Dash’s voice.
“Look around you and tell me what you see. Now look again and tell me once again what you were seeing. Now do it one more time and repeat what your words exactly were. Repeat them, and let me laugh… Repeat them, and make me cry…
There is a lesson in all this mess, young lad.
Believe no one.
Don’t even trust yourself.
The best of liars are your own eyes.”
[ α Ω α ]
“Are you sure it is safe, Scootaloo?” Sweetie Belle asked, her voice shushed by the dim of the blaring wind. “Really sure?”
In the wind’s harshest gusts, unable to see farther than a hoof throw, three hooded forms were shuddering in the numbing cold. A sky as white as the ground drizzled with millions of snowdrops, sharp and cutting in all their coldness. Tartarus could have frozen that it was its icy bits that were raining on the three crusaders.
“It’s this or there,” the Pegasus pointed out, swiping her hoof across the vast and invisible white no-pony’s-land that stretched beyond her sight. “Now… or never.”
“I think I peed…” Sweetie Belle sniffed. “…on myself.”
“It’s the cold,” Scootaloo snapped an explanation. “Compress the bladder.”
“Alright…” Sweetie Belle murmured shakily. “If you say so…”
Apple Bloom grunted loudly and rolled butt over head as a screech of metal wracked in the air. The massive ponyhole that had blocked the three survivors’ escape route now lay aside with its locks broken. A round and ominous black maw contrasted out of the snow. The white dust whirled and screamed through the orifice, down to a rotten place that exhaled putrefied fumes.
The three looked at each other. Though Sweetie Belle pleaded them with tearful, widened eyes, her two companions crawled in and went down the hole on a rusty and unsteady ladder.
“Don’t tell me I warned you,” she howled down, her head the only thing she let squeeze in the ponyhole.
Sweetie Belle fidgeted, rubbed her forehooves together, felt the coldness between her legs, and heard a scream in the far distant nether. Biting her lips, she mumbled in apprehension and followed in her friends’ stead. Gulping down, she strained on her muscles and dragged the piece of metal back over her head. As it closed down in a shattering and echoing screak, she felt a bursting tingle in her chest. She felt trapped.
“I’ve got a bad feeling, girls,” the Unicorn mumbled, pocking her horn repeatedly until the sparks cracking out of it became a steady whitish light.
“Welp,” Apple Bloom mentioned, a hoof on her forehead. “Ah’m sure we ain’t gonna freeze down here.”
Scootaloo grumbled, scrapping the thin icy stalactites that had enveloped her feathers’ tips.
“Hey,” Sweetie Belle bellowed, receiving a bit in her eyes. “Careful!”
Scootaloo groaned back.
“What’s happening to you today,” Sweetie Belle noticed with a hiss, trudging up on her backlegs and hitting down the ground.
A dirty splash answered her reckless move and Sweetie Belle froze. With shot-open eyes, she slowly hung her head down and stared at a thin, semi-stagnant stream of sludge running between her hooves.
“I’m not feeling very well, girls,” she mumbled. “I don’t… want to be here.”
“Pony up,” Scootaloo said, rolling her eyes. “We’re not going to stay in the sewers for long.”
“Why did say you so?” Sweetie Belle challenged crossing her forehooves until she grimaced, seeing she’d spread some murk on her chest.
“It’s close to a metro station,” Scootaloo said, pointing at the information plate cast into the wall next to the ladder. “We’ve entered the…”
While Sweetie Belle tried to sweep the shallow water off herself with a cross-eye look, Scootaloo squinted her eyes and washed a thick piece of dust off the plate with the back of her hoof.
“… Greater Manehattan Area,” she finished.
Apple Bloom walked up to her left side and scrutinised the map on her own.
“Damn, that seems to be a heck of a walk from here to… well…” She was lost. “Sweetie Belle?”
The pale Unicorn’s ears perked up at the mention as she shook off the last bit of sludge of her left forehoof. She was not so white now.
“Yes?” she smiled ruefully.
“Ye’re the one who went to the Big Apple with yer sister back in the time. Where did ya say the signal must be coming from?”
Sweetie Belle sniffed, frowned, and slipped in between Scootaloo and the unheeding Earth Pony.
“Like I told you dozens of time,” she said, pointing at a location on the map, “the radio station was on top of the Diarchy State Building, hmmm… there!”
Apple Bloom stared closer, rumbled, grabbed her friend’s horny head and shook it up to get some more light.
“Hey!” Sweetie Belle whined. “It doesn’t work like that!”
A whisper echoed on the disgusting walls of the tunnels, reaching the trio’s ears like the distorted whistling of a thousand centipedes scurrying legs. A gust of wind whistled above their heads and a rasping scrap of metal cackled in the air. For a mere second, the trio looked at each other in silence.
“Sounds like an echo,” Apple Bloom advanced looking at Scootaloo with a forced nod. “T’is nuthin’.”
“Definitely,” Sweetie Belle approved far too quickly with the same dishonest nod. “Do you agree, Scootaloo?”
The Unicorn squinted her eyes at the Pegasus as her face drew closer, soon joined by Apple Bloom.
“We. Don’t. Wanna. Know,” Apple Bloom whispered. “Got me?”
Scootaloo smirked grimly, turned away, and showed her rump to her two companions.
“There is no wind inside,” Scootaloo stated.
The orange Pegasus swept her nose and reached for a fold of her hood just below her left wing. The edge of a knife gleamed in the light of Sweetie Belle’s horn.
“Follow me,” she intoned as her backside slowly vanished in the darkness of the tunnel, her hoofsteps the only sound that carried backward.
“Wait for us,” Sweetie Belle hissed, scurrying towards the Pegasus with Apple Bloom behind.
The old sewer, smelly and swamped by the gut-wrenching sound of the shallow water dripping down its walls, whistled again. It was closer this time.
“My little pony…”
The trio stopped, petrified as the singing marish voice crawled over their head.
“… Why aren’t you with me?”
“You heard?” Sweetie Belle called slowly, getting a deadpan stares from her two friends. “I… don’t want to be here.”
“My little pony…”
“Sweetie Belle,” Apple Bloom urged as the Unicorn slid and rested tight next to her. “Stop talkin’, you gonna summon ghosts.”
“Why are you crying…”
“It’s a bit farther,” Scootaloo warned, biting harder on the handle of her long, smeared, and rusty knife.
“…when you can trot freely?”
Sweetie Belle’s light crawled over the walls, denuded of everything but troubled water streams, murky moss, and scrapped and unreadable old markings.
“My little pony…”
A crack on the right side of the tunnel was large enough to let pass a small river of dirty murk, pushing out the opening like claws in a closing door. The trio walked around it and though Scootaloo eyed it with ill-feeling pinching her heart, they still faced an unending loneliness.
“Don’t you cry…”
Drops of water fell off the ceiling, hitting the round-shaped tunnel’s walls and the three Ponies’ hide in a gloomy musical cycle.
“Tell me you’ll be brave…”
A cry erupted in the settling silence as a poorly kept light crept out of a far fork in the tunnel. The crusaders’ path slowed down as the three kept the distance tight between each other.
“Tell me you’ll be strong…”
The clatter of a rock falling through a tube reverberated in the tunnel, sending a chill down the trio’s bones.
“When your core shines brightly…”
A sheet of metal being torn up. Wet papers sploshing down a small steep. Invisible bugs buzzing over and around the ears. The ill sensation of miasma obstructing noses and throats. The psychic unease from feeling absent insects crawling beneath the skin…
The three young mares’ manes crawled, and Sweetie Belle whimpered as they finally reached the fork. Scootaloo sheathed back her knife in a hiss that startle her two friends.
“… over the darkness and the fury,” whispered the voice one last time before falling silent.
The light came from an old but still working greenish diode, still flashing inside an exit sign. It was the maintenance tunnel of the metro they had been looking for. A yellow plaque above an unending group of pipes running across the curved wall of the alleyway told them so. The silence was, as always, deafening.
The trio stopped and, upon seeing the walls of the maintenance, they scampered back away in the sewer. They were covered in writing, uncannily white. Hooves had scratched those words to life.
Those were testimonies… witnesses’ last words… testaments… prayers. So many words scratched up like the memories of a long gone world. Scootaloo was the first to enter the tunnel, avoiding eye contact with the writings. She was far more interested in a plaque screwed to one of the pipes, holding a worker’s plastic map.
Sweetie Belle, her horn still lit up, went in a corner and sat down, breathing hot hair on her chilled hooves.
“Hmmm,” Apple Bloom rumbled, looking left and right in the darkness of the tunnel. “Ain’t no singing pony down here.”
“Hush now,” Scootaloo called with a dagger-throwing glare before she looked closer at the map.
Apple Bloom frowned and cast her glance away from her friend right at the writings. She neared towards the writings until her nose touched the cold concrete. She gulped as her eyes streamed past words, sentences, and paragraphs, always ended with a name. Her hooves started shaking. She sniffed loudly and her backend slid in a loud thump.
“Apple Bloom?” Sweetie Belled said as she raised her head. “Are you alright?”
Even Scootaloo’s focused reading session stopped. She stepped backward and caught her friend’s state of mind. Apple Bloom’s rear rested on the floor and she was crying, on the edge of collapsing. With a hoof hung on the wall just below a text, the young mare’s whimpers echoed and lost themselves in the vastness of the underground. The text itself was scribbled, probably written in a hurry, a few years old and attacked by the ambient derelictness and humidity.
Scootaloo drew closer and watched over the small bit of text. As she started reading out loud, her heart fell in her chest, an anchor of repressed emotions finally called her back to memories she had buried in the depths of her mind.
“For all I know, this message will probably get lost. I can’t talk to you directly at the moment. I was just going to hope that, if you find this, just know that your big sis’ love you out of her all heart. And that I’d have given all I own just to see you once again.” Scootaloo stopped, swallowed, and blinked a few times as small plundering tears formed on her cheeks. “I’m so sorry I can’t be with you… right now. But I’m watching over you while you’re out somewhere I can’t go to. I am sorry I can’t be there by your side. What a bad big sis’ I am. But I still love you. And I’m waiting. Please. I pray every night Luna’s making you’ll be back soon.”
Scootaloo broke away and strolled down the left part of the tunnel until the pipes on her right resonated, bellowed, vibrated… and finally screamed out. The trio screamed, scared with hot sweat crawling down their backbone. They plundged, tried to hide, and shielded themselves from the scream. Only when the shattering, high-pitched, and heart-wrenching cry died in a gurgled that a tiny, broken, and raspy voice whispered in the echo.
“I still love you, lil’ sister. Despite what you did…”
Sweetie Bell had crooked into a ball under the pipes, uncaring for the drips of mud falling in her dishevelled mane. Scootaloo held her face in between her hooves and pressed on her ears to shush out the voice. She would have enjoyed the silence if her Earth Pony friend’s voice had not trudged in.
“Look…” Apple Bloom voice shakily called.
She got up hesitantly, stumbled across the tunnel in Scootaloo’s opposite direction. Apple Bloom nearly disappeared in the darkness for a second. When she came back, her hooves had closed on something she dearly held against her chest. She was crying, not even trying to hide it as her complaint replaced the whispering voice in the tunnel and echoed through the pipes, shafts, and ventilations.
She was holding a hat, torn up, rotten, and scrapped…
Applejack’s hat.
