Have You Passed Through This Night?
Is This Darkness In You Too?
Lyra had not slammed the door. She had opened and closed it with exactly the right amount of force because she knew how to be tactful and considerate. She was both of these things and more, whatever the standards and mores of Ponyville might say contrariwise to that. She was a mare of Canterlot, and Canterlonian manners were impeccable.
Bon Bon was behind her, and Lyra was careful not to clip her with the door, because even as her heart seethed within her, she would not be petty. She would not stoop so low. Or perhaps one did not slam doors on precious things.
They did not speak. Not right away. Lyra knew somewhere deep inside her that they would talk. She longed for that to happen. She also dreaded it for the same reasons.
The house was dark, the only illumination being the weak starlight that streamed in through the windows. Lyra stared down at the floor, at how the light rested there unmoving, while Bon Bon skirted around her and stormed beautifully though the house. She was doing something. Probably removing the dress. She wouldn’t want it on for what was coming.
Lyra’s stomach turned over on itself. Was she angry? Yes. Was she beginning to be afraid? Also yes. She had a quick mind, and she thought a few steps ahead. It mae playing chess easier. It made living with another pony sometimes more difficult, because you knew exactly how badly you had messed up before the other horsehoe even dropped.
The best way not to follow every contingency down into a thousand rabbit holes and from there into spasming panic was to be busy. Lyra took a deep breath and lit the candles Bon Bon kept around. She bought these for the smell more than the savings on electricity. Lyra found them amusing. One by one she lit them.
Bon Bon returned with a furrowed brow and stood in the door way.
“What are you doing?”
“Light,” Lyra replied softly, trying to school her voice.
“Why?”
“Seemed like a good idea,” she said, and then grit her teeth. “We both know you want to talk, and I thought it would be better not to do it in pitch black.”
“Oh, there you go, knowing everything. How much you know, Lyra,” Bon Bon spat. She did not, however, look at Lyra. “Why the candles?”
Why did she care? Because you like them and I like that you like them and it was just sort of automatic because I’m upset. “Saves on electricity,” she said because she was an idiot.
Bon Bon was silent. “Lyra, you were awful to my parents.”
And Lyra bristled at last. “They weren’t exactly friendly to me.”
“What do you mean? Lyra, my parents were polite and interested all dinner long and you just… every question made you angrier. What the hell?” she asked, growling. “Why? Why would you snap at them like that? About a question like that? It was a joke!”
“It’s not a joke!” Lyra snarled. Her chest heaved. “It’s not a joke. If you weren’t so blind you would see it. You’re too busy fawning over your smalltown family stuff to see how they think about you!”
“What?”
Lyra stamped her hoof. “You don’t know. Ponyville has you convinced the world is just… that they’ll just be on your side but they aren’t. You aren’t seeing how not happy they are with what you’re doing. I know how this will go. They’ll pressure you and push you. And it’ll always end up being about foals.”
“What is wrong with foals?” Bon Bon asked, taking a step out of the shadow of the hallway.
“We can’t have any,” Lyra said bluntly. “I’m so tired of ponies treating that as if its the only reason you get together. ‘Why’d you get married if you don’t want children!’” she mocked, screwing her face up into something almost masklike. “Trying to push me into some kind of damn breeding factory, like I’m just expected to pop out foals every couple of years! Like I’m some kind of machine.”
Bon Bon retreated back into the hallway shadow. “There’s nothing wrong with having children,” she said, her voice even. Strangely even.
Lyra wanted to say a lot of things. Of course it wasn’t. She wasn’t even opposed to the idea. She thought adoption was beautiful. She thought children were fun. She wanted a big family. Or a small one. Two ponies or nine. She wanted to say that it wasn’t having a family that made her mad. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “This is new for you. You don’t know anything.”
“What?” Bon Bon’s voice was even stranger.
Lyra felt exhausted. She turned away, but her heart did not turn away. It saw a hoof that had been outstretched, and it wanted to bite. So it bit. “You just wouldn’t get it. Bons, you’ve been sure about liking mares for like, what, six or seven months? Honeymoon period. You don’t know how ponies react. You just see how they smile on the outside and you really, really don’t get it.”
“Then maybe you should just find somepony who isn’t new to this,” Bon Bon hissed. In the darkness, the sound made Lyra shiver and she stepped back. “Maybe before you went around seducing poor, stupid country breeders with their stupid families and their ignorance you should find yourself somepony who can really appreciate you. Maybe think next time before you convince those country fillies to take a chance on mares and tell them children are stupid afterwards.”
Lyra stiffened. “What?”
“Maybe if you hadn’t come along, I might have been introducing my parents to a nice stallion,” Bon Bon murmured from the shadows. “Maybe I would have just… gotten over it. We could be friends, anyway, and sex is sex, right?” she asked, her voice cracking a bit. “But I bet he wouldn’t have treated my parents like that for just being curious, and he wouldn’t say having children is stupid before ever wondering if I wanted any. And he probably wouldn’t treat me like I’m stupid because I was too shy to think too much about… about…” She made a little strangled sound.
Lyra wanted to approach. More than anything in the entire world, she just wanted to walk across the living room, stand in the hallway, clutching Bon Bon, and beg her for forgiveness. She wanted to say that no, no you don’t get it, I didn’t mean that. Or just… or just be over there. She wanted to do something, anything.
“Bon…” Lyra began to speak. She didn’t know what she would say.
“Just don’t,” Bon Bon said.
So she didn’t. And she didn’t know what she would say even then, and she never would. Lyra turned stiffly, and even while she screamed at herself in her head, she stalked back out the door in a confused daze. She did not slam the door.
It was an hour after midnight and Bon Bon wandered the streets of Ponyville.
Lyra had not come back. Bon Bon and cried. Several times. She had laid in her bed and cried, and she curled on the couch and cried. She had sniffled about the candles and she had teared up looking at pictures and she knew one thing very, very clearly.
She was sorry.
She didn’t know what she was sorry about. Lyra had been awful to her mom and dad. The question about foals hadn’t been serious. It was a joke, and nopony had expected Lyra to snarl at them that she wouldn’t have any mewling spawn until she was damn well ready. Said the right way, it could have been funny. It had taken her aback. At first, she had thought it had been a joke that had come out wrong, an accident of tone that Lyra would try to cover quickly. But she didn’t. She just stood and said she should leave, and Bon Bon had excused herself quickly and sped after her.
She still didn’t understand. Was she wrong? She didn’t think so, not really. Was she missing something really, really important? Probably. Lyra wasn’t mean. She didn’t have a nasty bone in her body, it felt like some days. Bon Bon was the one with the earthy humor. Lyra was always… always smiling, all the time, whether she was chatting or playing her lyre or just sitting around. But she had been strange all night.
Which made sense, or had made sense at the time. Even in her stunning lack of firsthoof experience she knew that meeting your special somepony’s parents was something to be nervous about. You wanted to make a good impression! Right? Except that Lyra had done absolutely everything she could to do just the opposite.
Lyra wasn’t on this street either. Bon Bon said nothing. She gave no great, dramatic sigh. She simply moved on to the next lane with the legendary forbearance of her earth pony ancestors and she kept looking.
Lyra sat on the edge of the bridge. It was a small bridge, and she’d always thought it was cute. Lovely under a full moon, awfully romantic how you could see the light bounce off the creek. She liked it. Bon Bon liked it. The fucking fish liked it. She guessed. She didn’t know how to ask the fish if they liked it and if they didn’t then who cared. She didn’t. Care.
Lyra wasn’t crying. She hadn’t cried. Mostly she stared at things for awhile until she couldn’t make herself stare at them another minute and then she found something else to stare at.
She also thought. Lyra was, surprisingly, something of a thinker. Ponyville thought of her as a slightly-odd chatterbox, and she was to an extent, but even when she was rambling, Lyra never stopped thinking.
One main thought: what happened now? Well, objectively, she saw a few things happening. She would go home and sleep on the couch. They would have a terribly awkward morning. She would try to explain. That could go well. It could go terribly. Eventually she would try to apologize to Bon Bon’s parents. Maybe.
Or perhaps, she would go back and the door would be locked.
Or maybe she wouldn’t go back, and the door would be locked or not, and it wouldn’t matter.
But that wasn’t likely. For one, she was tired, and exhaustion at last douses the flame of all anger. It is hard to be excited about one’s own bitterness when one’s attention is focused fully on staying awake and not falling into the water blow. Or back on her flank. Either.
Of course she was going home to Bon Bon. Why wouldn’t she? Because despite the malaise that twisted her insides in knots, she wasn’t a fool. She had not simply forgotten the last half of a year. The cold feeling in her hooves and heart did not erase the warmth of her joy. They in fact sat side by side, like chessponies, only the color of the squares was different.
And she felt in her gut that twisting and she could not ignore it. She considered herself.
This great evil, she thought with something that was almost a sardonic grin. “Where does it come from?” she asked the night. Predictably, it did not answer.
What she wanted to do, she did not do. What she did not want to do, she did. Something scratched so she kicked. And then that thing would kick--her, or somepony else. Over and over and over. Lyra was afraid because of an old wound. So she kicked. Which hurt Bons. Which caused her to question and feeling the pain of that Lyra kicked. And then Bon Bon kicked back. Over and over.
Lyra sighed and stood in the center of the bridge a moment before she began to walk back towards Ponyville. She looked up at the waning moon, stars around it in perfection, and continued to ask her questions. “How’d it steal into the world?” she asked of the moon, thinking of the coldness, the darkness which sneered at Bon Bon.
Bon Bon stood by the new castle where Princess Twilight no doubt slept soundly. She thought about the emptiness in her chest and in her head.
What seed, what root did it grow from? she thought, another strange thought bouncing around. It was probably two in the morning now. Lyra was gone. She thought that perhaps her love would not come back, and she was too exhausted to feel anything about it but an empty finality. She had said the wrong thing. She had done the wrong thing.
Time had given her opportunity to think. Lyra almost never talked about her parents. Bon Bon assumed it was due to being a unicorn, who didn’t have the same large boisterous families or close knit clans, not in the same way. Or she had chalked it up to being from the city, where she had always imagined things were less personal, less warm as you were swallowed up in the crowds.
Bon Bon felt dull certainty. Lyra’s parents had said or done something to her. She had feared it would happen again. She had not been nervous about making a good impression. She had been nervous in the way a wounded animal in a trap was nervous. And Bon Bon hadn’t noticed at all.
It was really too late--or too early--to be assigning blame. She turned towards home, but did not move immediately. She just… lingered.
“What if she isn’t home?” Bon Bon asked the night, and predictably, it did not answer.
They wandered through the night, like ships turned around by storms. A vessel adrift with no destination in mind and a variety of ports finds that none of them are favorable. So, too, two ponies with a bed or couches, homes to sleep in and floors to walk.
Lyra was ready to be trod upon and would be a spike in the hooves of those who would touch her. Bon Bon was an open flower in a gale. But they were similar still. A thing which is struck across the cheek responds in kind.
Bon Bon arrived first and slept on the couch. Lyra arrived second. She gazed down with a hollow sort of stare only the exhausted can muster, and then lay beside her. Bon Bon woke, and she felt a stab of irritation. But she killed the old mare and she stayed still. They lay close together.
“I’m sorry,” Lyra said in her ear. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I just don’t understand,” Bon Bon said. “Is it me? My parents? You parents?”
“It’s me. It’s my problems and my hangups,” Lyra whispered.
Bon Bon yawned and shook. “I’m cold.”
Lyra wrapped her up even tighter and searched for the blanket on their bed with magic. She brought it into the living room and wrapped both of them up in warmth.
“I shouldn’t have left,” Lyra said. “I should never leave you. I don’t know how to fix that.”
“You came back,” Bon Bon said, sounding a little drunk.
“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about… everything. In the morning. Whenever you want.”
Bon Bon was slipping away. Lyra was comfortable, if a little cold from the chilly night air. Her eyes remained closed.
“I want kids,” she said sleepily.
Lyra kissed her ear, which flicked, and then Bon Bon’s breathing began to smooth out into the mundanity of sleep.
Lyra held onto her. Bon Bon had stayed up. She saw her in her mind’s eye, waiting by the door, looking up and down the street. And all because of that little grain, that little seed. That darkness in her gut that made her say the things she didn’t want to say.
Except she did. Which was worse.
Who’s doing this? she thought. Me? Someone else? She wondered sometimes what words like “me” meant. Usually when she was lying awake at night. She breathed in Bon Bon’s soft, sweet scent. She was still using the new shampoo. As she did so, she saw Bon Bon smiling at a soft looking stallion. Maybe heavy with child. Maybe what ponies assumed she would be. Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known, she thought sourly.
And why should it be this way? Why should anypony expect anything of her at all? Or anypony? Why? To ruin her? Did her ruin benefit the earth? Did it help the grass to grow or the sun to shine? Did it wrap up winter or make the sunflowers pop up a few weeks early?
And then she thought to herself that perhaps she was no different. Who was she, to look for the bite that would not come and strike back at nothing? Who was she to push herself onto Bon Bon, to make some other pony carry their own heart and Lyra’s bleeding and needy mess on top of it?
She thought of the feeling in her chest. She thought of the desire to bite an outstretched hoof.
And she kissed Bon Bon’s ear again softly.
Was this darkness in her too?
Would she pass through this night?
Author's Note
This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?
Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.
From The Thin Red Line which is both a book and a movie. The first is also used in a Explosions in the Sky song of the same name as this story.
