A (Nightmare) Night to Remember
A (Nightmare) Night to Remember
"I'm sorry, Princess. As much as I'd love to join you tonight, I just can't. You see, in an event such as this, my very presence would throw the whole thing into sheer, bloody chaos. Up would become down, left would become right...dogs would lay down with cats...entire...buses, packed to their roofs with little...orphan fillies...little orphan fillies with brand new puppies, would drive off of cliffs, entire orphanages would spontaneously combust...please Luna, think of the orphans. And the puppies."
Behemoth, head tilted to the side, eyes wide open in a passable facsimile of emotional depth, managed to slip the faintest, blatantly false quiver into his voice. From the other side of the room, Luna had listened to his plea without looking up from her task once. Once she was certain he'd finished, she glanced up from the effort of assisting Derpy with making herself up into a rather decent, if somewhat shorter, approximation of Luna's own self.
"Your touching concern for forsaken children is noted. This is MY Night. You're coming. Get dressed."
Before he could protest any further, he was interrupted again.
"C'mon, Behemoth,"
Derpy turned to face him, her face expertly covered in dark blue body paint, her normally chaotic golden locks swept back, with the help of Luna's magic, into a more then fair approximation of the elaborate, shimmering star speckled radiance that would be in any other day the sole property of the Lunar Princess.
"You've gotta come with us, it'll be fun!"
"You and I have a very different definition of the word 'fun', little one..."
Seeing that appealing to the sense of fun of a creature with all the traditional joviality of a disgruntled tarantula was a losing proposition, Derpy tried a different tact. She opened her eyes as wide as possible, to an extent that seemed in direct violation of several various anatomical laws, the corners of her mouth exaggeratedly turning down, and her lower lip sticking out. Her countenance changed to a well mastered and entirely excessive look of exaggerated sadness. When she spoke, her voice matched her expertly crafted façade.
"B-but...big brother, this...this is your first Nightmare Night...our first Nightmare Night together in...forever...don't you, I mean...I was hoping...you'd wanna spend it...with your baby sister?"
Expressionless, Behemoth stared at her in silence. He stared, she stared back. Somehow, she managed to become teary eyed. They remained at an impasse, until her lower lip started to quiver. This, apparently, was finally enough for Behemoth, after another few seconds, he finally spoke, voice an emotionless deadpan.
"You know, I'm fairly certain that you are the Devil."
With that, he turned and moved into the kitchen to begin getting into his costume, which had been lovingly chosen for him without any sort of input from him, and laid out on the table.
Luna and Derpy looked at each other, both trying without particular success to hide smiles. Luna whispered, just loud enough for Derpy to hear.
"Five...four...three...two...one..."
"WHAT IN THE FOURTEEN SHADES OF FUCK IS THIS??!"
Luna and Derpy both broke out into peals of laughter. Behemoth strode back into the living room, his one eyed visage an intriguing mix of confusion and anger. He was carrying with the tip of his intact wing, stretched out before him like he was afraid of catching something from it, a pair of almost comically small grey tights. The laws of physics casting great doubt as to whether or not they would be capable of stretching enough to fit over his imposing frame. Seeing his sister and his lover wracked with laughter, the look of fury tempered a bit, the ghost of a smile flashing across his face for half a second, before he recovered and re-established his glowering consternation.
"This is bat shit crazy.The freaky goth coat with the pointy collar and the floofy, frilly shirt? Ok, fine. It's Nightmare Night, I can accept that. The wig that looks like I jabbed a fork into a fucking electrical socket? Again acceptable. Far from the worst thing I've had on my head. But these things? THESE FUCKING THINGS?! No. Just no. Not just no but hell FUCKING no. Not gonna happen. This is where I put my hoof down."
Luna, having finally recovered from her laughing fit, cheeks still blushed with mirth, spoke, just a little out of breath.
"Those are a key part of the costume, you must wear them. You're still...relatively fit, I'm sure you'll look fine."
Derpy sniggered a bit at that not very subtle dig, but Behemoth ignored it, continuing with his diatribe.
"I don't give the slightest of fucks how I'd look. These damn things, as small as they are...call me old fashioned, but I've grown somewhat accustomed to having circulation in my testicles. I'll wear the rest of this absurdity, but the tights are a no go."
Luna pursed her lips and sighed heavily. She knew that his mind was made up, and no amount of cajoling, threats or enticement would convince him otherwise. He could be remarkably stubborn from time to time.
"Fine. No tights, now go get in costume, its almost time."
He went back into the kitchen, leaving the two mares to finish their respective costumes. As Luna was putting the final touches on the decent approximation of her own mane that currently adorned Derpy's head, the several thousand year younger mailmare was starting to fidget, never one to hold still too long. Working on a moving target was a bit of a challenge, and elicited comment from the demi god.
"Will you hold still, we're almost done."
"Oh come onnnnnnnnn, you're taking too long! The night will be over before we're ready at this rate!"
Luna smirked.
"That's one of the benefits of being me. This night doesn't end until I say it does. Now be still. Patience is a virtue."
Derpy scoffed.
"Yeah, easy for you to say, you're like, a bajillion years old. The rest of us got things to do!!"
She looked back at Luna, smiling, stuck out her tongue and puffed up her cheeks, blowing a great big raspberry at the Princess.
Luna's face took on a look of mock, exaggerated outrage.
"Why, how dare you, you little hooligan, no one dares to blow raspberries at the Princess of the Night!!!"
Unbidden, Behemoth's head jutted in through the doorway to the kitchen, grinning mischievously with a preposterously overblown white wig perched precariously on his head.
"Thats right, Derpy, the, "Princess of the Night", prefers to be the one doing the blowing."
He grinned, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. Luna glared at him, her gaze softened a bit as she could barely keep from smiling, a slight blush coloring her cheeks. Derpy, for her part, was putting on quite a show of hacking and gagging, animatedly throwing herself to the floor and twitching spastically in response to her brothers innuendo.
"A talent you will never experience again, brute, if you aren't ready on time."
Still grinning, he ducked back out of sight.
Finally allowing herself a faint grin, Luna polished off the last finishing touches to the Derpy-worn-Luna-doppelgänger-mane.
"There. All done now, you little trouble maker. I swear, sometimes you're as bad as your brother."
"Great! Lemme see..."
Derpy hopped up onto the couch, so she could get a look at herself in the massive mirror that hung above it. As she was admiring Luna's costume related talent, Behemoth appeared again, tugging at the redish, blackish, leather jacket with the ludicrously pointed collar in a vain attempt to make it moderately comfortable.
"Where the hell is this get up from anyways? I haven't seen anything this freakishly absurd since Cheerilee went through her goth faze."
Luna turned to face him, and the faint smirk turned into a full blown grin as she took in the horror she had inflicted upon her once Captain.
"Oh, wonderful. I knew it would...hmm...Derpy, look at your brother."
Derpy, halfway over the couch looked over her shoulder. Her happy grin from the sight of her own costume slipping away to swiftly be replaced by surprise, then confusion, which in turn transformed into something akin to mild horror.
"Holy Celestia on a cracker, he looks...he...I am not at all comfortable with this. The Goblin King was really, super sexy.When I was a filly I...never mind, but, I don't...he shouldn't wear that. Ever. For any reason. Ever."
If it was possible, Behemoth looked even more confused.
"Goblin King? I remember that thing from the movie you made me watch, the...Midgets under the mountain, or whatever it was called. The Goblin King was that great, massive, pasty bastard that was roughly thirty percent jowl. This doesn't look anything like him."
Luna's grin had turned predatory, and slowly, with a twinkle in her eye which Behemoth knew was the portent of decidedly licentious intent, she slid towards him, her svelte form moving with the grace of a predatory cat.
"Wrong Goblin King, dear."
She kissed him forcefully, her magic igniting and pulling him against her with intractable force. Before she could advance further with her undoubtedly non child friendly intentions, however, the mood was brutally murdered by the loud, exaggerated heaving and hacking noises coming from the couch.
Looking to the sky and sighing heavily with annoyance, Luna pulled back, the moment lost in a most certain and deliberate fashion that was the solitary purview of younger siblings. She knew it well, having done the exact same thing to Celestia on more then one occasion, usually with more then one would be suitor.
Eye half lidded, face a blank mask, Behemoth crossed to the couch, reached out with his wing, and, as she was still leaned over the back of the couch, mock retching, lifted and pushed Derpy's blue painted butt right over the couch.
"Hey, whoa whoa, WAAAA-"
Her wordless commentary on her brothers mating rituals ended with an impressive thump shortly after she disappeared.
He stepped back to the threshold of the kitchen, smirking a bit in victory, and leaning against the door frame. Scuffling and skittering was heard from behind the couch, and, after a few seconds, a tiny, angry, blue painted head popped up over the rear cushion.
"Hey! Ya big jerk!! You coulda hurt me!"
Behemoth's smirk grew.
"You land on your head?"
"Yeah!"
"Good. Didn't hit anything important then."
Derpy made a series of dramatic noises that weren't quite words, and that most mortal languages would struggle with pronouncing or even spelling. After which, however, she managed one that was actually a word.
"Jerk!!"
From the doorway, Behemoth's attention shifted, and he admired the magical mastery of Luna as she slipped into her own 'costume'. It was quick. Barely a flash of discharged magic and the accompanying whiff of ozone, and there she was, a Luna sized Celestia, the only nod to her true form the smaller stature and, of course, her eyes.
"Not bad, not bad at all. Celestia's butt is a little bigger though. Fuller. Plumper. She also has this...little dimple on the left side, just behind her cutie mark."
Slowly, glacially, Luna turned to face him, her eyes widened a bit, a flicker that may have been a trick of the light, or may have been a dire warning of an impending magical apocalypse flashed across her brilliant turquoise eyes.
"Oh, really now. And just how, pray tell, are you such an expert on the specific details of my darling sisters posterior?"
Behemoth met her gaze, his head just poking around the corner. A few long seconds drug by. The room seemed to grow darker, colder. Then the doorbell rang.
"You, uh, you should get that. Wouldn't want the fillies to go without their goodies, would you?"
He quickly withdrew his head into the other room, removing himself from the proverbial and perhaps entirely literal line of fire. After a few more seconds of gazing daggers into the wall where his head had recently been, she turned back to the mirror. She turned, moved, examining her transformed self from a myriad of angles in the full height mirror. She spoke quietly, but there was no anger in her voice, the tone almost a loving whisper.
"Bastard."
With a quick flourish of magic, she plumped up her new, doppelgänger rear, expanding it to more accurately match the original, the mentioned dimple making an appearance as a begrudging after thought. The doorbell rang again as Luna was finishing off the last details, and she moved to answer.
Before the door had swung open far enough for her entrance to be, strictly speaking, entirely possible, Pinkie Pie bounced in. She threw herself at Luna, actually staggering the Princess with the force of her enthusiastic hug.
"Oh! Princess, your costume is sooooo creative and fun and pretty and you even got the dimple right and you look really good I mean you always look really good but now you look really good and really white not that anything's wrong with being blue, blue is really cool too and OH, HEY!"
Pinkie removed herself from Luna, and crossed to Derpy with a single bound, the tentacles hanging down around her head trailing out behind her like grey-white streamers.
"Derpy! You make a great Luna! I mean the normal Luna is great even when she dressed like the normal Celestia but even when she's not she great and you make a great her and-"
Her breathless monologue was interrupted by Derpy, who gently put her hoof in Pinkies mouth, managing to at least muffle the verbal torrent, even though mumbled, half formed words still managed to find their way out. Speaking perhaps just a little louder that would be necessary in a traditional conversation, Derpy made an attempt to steer the dialogue in a direction that might end before dawn.
"Your costume is great too, Pinkie, is that..," she smiled with a flash of realization, as she knew quite well her brothers opinions of such things. Derpy's smile turned dark. "Is that a squid?"
Pinkie managed to pull back from the hoof that had invaded her mouth, releasing an audible pop as she did so.
"Yeah huh!!You can call me, INKY Pie!!!"
She released a patented Pinkie giggle/snort at her pun, which made Luna wince as if physically wounded.
"Hee hee, you get it?! Cuz, I'm PINKIE Pie, but I'm dressed like a squid, an squids are INKY, an Pinkie and Inky rhyme and-"
She was interrupted, again, as Behemoth came back into the living room, this time in full costume, drawn by the machine gun verbosity of everyone's favorite perhaps mildly psychotic pastry chef.
"What the shit is all this noise, that sounds like..."
His words trailed off as he came around the corner and caught sight of the hyperactive baker. The mantle and fins of a squid stretched three feet above her head, and a forest of dangling tentacles hung down around her face and back along her flanks, the two longest wrapping down her rear legs.
Pinkies attention swung to him, and her verbal assault ended mid sentence. The two of them stood there in silence, staring at each other as the seconds dragged on. Luna could feel the terror, revulsion, the seething, unending, bottomless hatred building within Behemoth. She grinned, knowing exactly where this was going. She knew what his response would be before he made it, as subtle as it was.
"NOPE. NO. FUCK THAT, FUCK ALL OF THAT NO NO NO FUCK NO NO NO!!!"
Pinkies response was at a similar volume, but noticeably more family friendly.
"AAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!SOUL EATER!!!!AAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"
Behemoth backed away in the kitchen, and at the same moment Pinkie, still screaming, bolted out the front door with a burst of speed that would be impressive for Rainbow Dash.
Luna and Derpy, suddenly finding themselves alone, again, blinked in wide eyed confusion. After a moment of stunned silence, the Princess spoke.
"Well, that was...it was..."
"It was a...thing. Yup, sure was a thing that happened."
Derpy finished.
Twenty minutes later, the majority of which had been spent coaxing Behemoth to abandon the impromptu barricade he had erected in the kitchen from the table, chairs and a number of cooking utensils, and convincing him to set aside the large shovel he had obtained from...somewhere, and was wielding as an anti-cephalopod weapon, the Princess, the Beast and the Derpy were moving through the town center of Ponyville. Luna and Derpy happy and enjoying the festivities, Behemoth coming along begrudgingly, eyeing the crowd warily for the emergence of any wayward tentacles.
"Hey, a spoooooky corn maze!! That could be fun!!"
Derpy's enthusiasm was palpable. Luna, while somewhat more reserved, as was a political necessity given her status, was nonetheless enjoying HER night. A steady stream of citizens came up to her, swooning and tripping over themselves for a chance to speak to and grab a quick picture with the Princess. Behemoth, however, was being Behemoth.
"We can all fly."
"Yeah, but, you're not supposed to."
"Why not? It'd clearly be the most efficient way out."
"It's not about efficiency, its about fun!!"
"Corn is fun?"
"Gah, bu-, no the corn isn't..."
Derpy sighed heavily, looking to Luna, pleading with her eyes for help. Luna just smiled in response. This was far too much fun to watch for her to get involved.
"Ok, fine. Ummm..."
Annoyed, but not really surprised by her big brothers recalcitrance, instead of arguing the point further, she looked around for something that might peak his interest.
"How about the pumpkin carving? Knives and stabbing things, two of your favorite pass times."
"That's not true, I am a nice stallion. With happy...feelings. All of the time."
That was enough to even stop Luna in her tracks. Both Derpy as Luna and Luna as Celestia stared incredulously at Behemoth. After a stretch of silence it fell to Derpy to move the conversation along.
"Riiiiiight...okay then..."
Once again, she cast her gaze around the town square, looking for something, anything, that might appeal to the nigh extinct sense of fun of her elder sibling.
"OH! Hey, Applejack an Mr. Mac are running the apple bobbing, that could be fun, right?"
Behemoths response, was, predictably enough, dripping with sarcasm.
"Oh yeah, nothing screams 'great time' to me like the idea of water boarding myself in pursuit of soggy fruit."
"Okay, ya know what?!"
Derpy wheeled on her brother, a very uncharacteristic look of undiluted anger distorting her usually happy features.
"That's it! I'm done! I've had enough of you being a surly old bastard! You wanna plod around, grumbling about everything and crapping all over every idea I have to try and have some fun, well, you go right ahead! YOU might be an angry old dried up jerk, but I'M gonna go have some fun tonight, with or without you!"
She didn't wait for a response, and stormed off, quickly disappearing into the crowd. Behemoth, looking wounded and confused, looked back and forth from his departing sister to Luna.
"Can you believe she said all that? Kids these days, why, I'm...I'm fun. I'm plenty fun. I'm an endless frigging spring of joviality and good cheer...dammit."
"Hmm. No, I think not. I believe the colloquial term for those with your disposition is, 'stick in the mud."
"Stick in the mud hasn't been a colloquial term for anything for a couple decades now, your worshipfulness."
Even having managed to defeat her endless reserve of patience, annoyance and frustration filled Luna's voice.
"Oh, please do forgive my dreadful faux pa, it isn't as though I'm a thousand years behind on my colloquial terms or any other such logical explanation for such a grievous verbal blunder. Here, let me try in a more...modern dialect..."
With an almost dainty cough, she cleared her throat, and then, very clearly, with perfect pronunciation and disinterested inflection.
"Yo, dawg, ya'll mo fuggahs be trippin. Pones aint gonna be havin a ballin time when yo punk ass be actin all whack an shit...word."
He stopped dead in his tracks and turns to stare at her, a look comprised of an intriguing mix of amusement and horror plastered across his face. His mouth opened and closed several times, and he looked as though he was either going to burst out laughing or crying, and couldn't quite figure out which way to go. Finally he found his voice.
"What...in the bloody hell was that?"
"That was an almost verbatim recital of what I believe was a detailed admonishment for being a...'Party pooper', as the ever exuberant Pinkie Pie might say, that I heard recently on a trip into one of the more...urban, stretches of Manehatten. Apparently, that's how citizens there speak these days."
"Maybe if they've suffered some sort of debilitating brain damage, there's no way an intact and fully functioning intellect could willingly commit such a brutal assault on our language. Are you sure you weren't visiting a Manehatten mental institution?"
She frowned slightly, obviously considering that possibility.
"That might have been the case, I suppose, I wasn't really paying attention. It would explain why the majority of those present had an average of three teeth...all of them gold...it might also explain the omnipresent chemical burns they all seemed to have around their nostrils...hmmm..."
The two of them moved on through the crowd and through the night together. After a while, Behemoth even achieved a smile or two, and managed to have several polite discussions with assorted townsfolk. Throughout the evening, at random intervals, a faint cry of 'AAAAAHHHH,SOUL EATER!!!!AHHHHHH!!!!' could be heard echoing through the streets, seemingly any time that Pinkie, who had managed to not be seen herself, laid eyes on Behemoth. Her particular insanity was, as was the commonly accepted tact by Ponyville's citizens after so many years of dealing with it, summarily ignored.
As the night waned, the crowds started to thin. Most of the little fillies and colts were being bustled off towards home, after their inevitable sugar crash. As the festivities began to wind down, Luna and Behemoth found themselves alone. Standing at the edge of the town center, a huge, full moon filling a cloudless sky overhead, they took a moment to drink in the night. Her night.
"The last decade or so, I'd use tonight as a chance to catch up on sleep, or paperwork after I got my commission. I have to admit though, I actually had fun tonight."
Luna looked at him, eyes twinkling in the moonlight, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"At least a little, anyway's. So, Princess, what comes next?"
She put on her best suggestive, sultry face, and adopted her very best husky bedroom voice.
"Well, I had a few ideas. How about we head home, and I-"
"What in the three legged donkey fuck is going on over there?"
Behemoths attention had been snatched away from Luna's lurid imaginings, by a scene unfolding in front of town hall. Pinkie Pie, Twilight and Spike, Dash, AJ, Rarity, and even Fluttershy, who had somehow been lured out of her cottage on her least favorite of nights, had assembled on the candy wrapper strewn cobbles, and a crowd seemed to be gathering around them.
Luna, a little miffed at having her plans of ending tonight with a good old fashioned shagging, nonetheless found her annoyance and libido derailed and replaced with confusion as she followed his gaze to what was unfolding. Behemoth stared at the Element girls in stunned silence, his face contorting with confusion as his mind struggled to comprehend what he was seeing.
"Are they...did they...just break out into song? What in all of the hells. Is this for real, or am I just having a fucking stroke?"
Luna glanced between her befuddled partner and the sextuplet that had now worked a choreographed gymnastics routine into a unexpected musical number.
"It would appear so. Is this unusual? I have witnessed many such impromptu performances by these six. I had thought it nothing more then a quirk of this era."
"No. This isn't normal, this is miles away from..."
Behemoth sighed heavily.
"Right. There's only one way to deal with this. With unexpected, impromptu choreographed musical numbers. Time to burn the village down."
Even still annoyed, she couldn't help but smile.
"Oh come now, its not that bad...what are they even singing about?"
Behemoth cocked his head, squinting as he focused on the words beneath the music that was playing from old gods only knew where.
"It sounds like...yup. They're singing about how some Nightmare Night costumes could be considered 'insensitive'. I assume by joyless assholes who are desperate to find offense in anything and everything that they can, out of a desperate and prickish attempt to achieve a sense of moral superiority by destroying happiness and anything that brings joy to the hearts of others."
The smile dropped from Luna's face. Her half lidded eyes and pursed lips of annoyance a shockingly accurate depiction of Behemoths own countenance.
"I see. Perhaps you are right, arson does seem to be the best solution."