The nightmare isn’t over. It’s far from done with me, and perhaps all of Equestria feels just the same. Perhaps there’s a part of everypony that still feels like they’re trapped fighting within it, and I couldn’t understand more. After all, it has only been a matter of weeks since the land of the moon creatures dissolved suddenly and without explanation, if even that. My mind’s been so absolutely blurred, time just seems to flow together lately and for the first time in what seems like forever, I am completely unable to control anything. Not even myself.
Not even the nightmares that had reigned inside me and imprisoned me within another to the point where I’m not even sure if my old self still exists out there. Those close to me have held out so much hope on this subject, but honestly…I just feel like I don’t know anymore.
I had become so used to playing that pony called Rarity for so long that when something else pushed her out, it was like it also pushed out every ability to shake myself back to before. Before, when being my past self was instinctual and radiant, no more effort needed to maintain it than a simple splash of polish on a sparkling diamond.
Nightmares really can rust your heart like nothing else. But I’m not quite sure dreams are any better. If I’ve learned anything over these past few months from what little I can recall of them, it’s that they have more in common than anypony could imagine.
For one thing, neither really knows to stop with waking, and both will eat at you until there’s next to nothing left. That’s the utterly weakened, barely existent state I live in right now, confined to my boutique with nopony coming in or out except for those kind enough to assist me. Without their guidance, it would be little more than a prison. How ironic that the one place that once brought me such inspiration and happiness now gives me only restlessness, serves only as a reminder of just how weak I really was after all. How weak I still am.
It’s been over a week, and my body still hasn’t recovered from the nightmare possession enough to continue with any semblance of my business. Anytime I even try to make any movements beyond simple twists and twitches, I’m pushed back now that the strings that’ve controlled me for so long were cut so abruptly. How long was it even? A few months? Several years? Or could it have been even longer?
All I know right now, all that keeps me going is that I could have had it worse, far worse. Currently, Celestia has opted to rule the kingdom alone and take on moon-rising duties just as she had when the nightmare first ruled with a different host, a decision which at first baffled me but one I grew to appreciate. Now, Luna visits on nearly a daily basis to check up on me and is one of the few guests allowed inside. She, above all, knows how being cut off from the magic that once nourished both of us can pay a heavy toll on one’s health.
The science of the whole thing still isn’t something that anypony understands or wishes to understand, but somehow, part of the way the nightmare manages to exert such control over the ponies it chooses for its main hosts is by creating some sort of dependence. It removes free will, all the little moral ambiguities and decisions that plague everyday life, puts the soul in a dream while the body lives the nightmare. After a while with it, it becomes exceedingly difficult to mend the two back together once they’ve been divided between host and parasite. It’s all very complex, a bit too much so for my already muddled brain, but what I get out of it is an illness that doesn’t just go away after a few days. Supposedly, it only gets worse with time and when years go by without coming back to reality, that’s when it really wreaks its havoc.
All I know about how long it had control of me comes from the fact that, quite simply, what happened to Luna didn’t happen for me. If I’d been under its spell for as long as she had, time spanning past the lifetimes of most ponies, I would have ended up as a filly for Celestia knows how long. Something weird about how it can warp age if it’s stuck in there for a millennia. Or maybe that has more to do with how Luna was in space during it and I wasn’t. Yet another thing I don’t know. Yet another thing I shove to the side as I try to focus on the far more important matter at hand: the fact that, for all I want to get anything related to the weird miasma and their followers out of my life, one of them still insists on staying by my side. Supposedly to help me through, but for all I know, she could just want to pull me straight back. Can’t trust the likes of them, not anymore, not now that I know all their tricks.
When Luna comes, she always hides. I’m not sure if she does it out of timidity or fear that the moon princess will finish what she started to do to all the rest of the nightmare forces, but it nevertheless makes her more than a little suspicious in my eyes. She came without warning the immediate day after I was cured, claiming to be one of my companions in the old kingdom, claiming that my friends allowed her to help with the rehabilitation efforts. White as an eclipse with her nightmare bat wings still firmly attached to her back, this almost ghostly presence in my life roams the halls of old dresses whenever she’s not by my side, claiming that had life been different, had she not been caught up in the dark forces, she might have made similar art.
She calls herself Coco Pommel, and she claims that I saved her life. If it is true, it sure would be nice to remember that.
Then again, it’d be nice to remember anything. After all, as Luna advises me time and time again, the sooner I regain my memories, the sooner I can finally move on, away from this dreadful cloud of uncertainty. Sure, I’d have regrets, but at least it’d be better to have some conception of what I’ve done. At least it’d be better to have the blood on my hooves flow out so it can heal for once. Once it heals, maybe I can finally wake up from this dreadful nightmare after all. It would be nice to remember, or so I think. Something, anything, no matter what the cost may be. Just a single voice to urge me on, maybe Luna, maybe Coco, maybe anypony.
And as the days pass, as realizations flow through my mind and jolt me out of my stupor, I begin to finally see where I’ve gone wrong. Everything in the world is telling me that it’s my time to wake again, but I’ve grown too accustomed to the dream.
So accustomed to it that when it hits me, a part of me never really goes back to before. Because the dream, the nightmare, is lodged within me now, far too deep to recover at this point.
****
I’d always imagined the faces the nightmares wore would be completely unrecognizable. After all, fear comes from the unknown on all too many occasions. But when another of Coco’s kind barges into my life, I realize they could be all too familiar too. Coco, I can at least dismiss as a strange occurrence that I can’t even begin to explain, but this one is another story. She walks in and all I can think is, “I’ve met her before.” Not in the weird kingdom I once possessed when I was outside of my body, but in the real before.
Now, I can’t claim I had known her for a long while or that I’d even come across her more than once. If Sweetie Belle had been at home then rather than at school continuing with her life, she would’ve been a great deal more flummoxed by the sight. After all, this oddly familiar thestral had always been more a friend of hers than of mine.
But I still can’t shake the weird feeling of confusion I feel when I see Coco embracing her small filly companion that’s just now begun to accompany her in my house, never once chalking it down to coincidence. I’ve spent enough time with my friends at family reunions to know an Apple when I see one. And this thestral is certainly one.
Well, if Coco didn’t have enough riding against her already, now she does. Seeing one of Applejack’s own beloved relatives taken by the nightmare is enough for me to finally work up the courage to push her out of the house that was never her own to begin with.
“I can explain,” Coco pleads as I edge her out the door, never once breaking the stern glare on my face. If I trusted her at all to begin with, the knowledge I have now is about to violate it.
“From what I see, it’s perfectly clear,” I respond. “I don’t know how, but you’ve been infecting other ponies to make them like you. Including my friend’s baby cousin. That may have been your past, but I’m not standing for it. As soon as I get you out of her, I am getting that dark magic on her removed and that is—“
“But it doesn’t work that way,” Coco protests. “Babs asked for the change.”
“Yes, the same way I did. The same way the nightmare taints everything—by digging deep inside a pony and exposing the weakest parts of themselves. Maybe you’ve forgotten what it did to you.”
“No,” the cream-colored nightmare answers, showing opposition in her heart for the first time since I’ve known her. “You’re the one who’s forgotten. Forgotten that you weren’t all bad when you were in that form. If you want to leave it behind completely, that’s fine by me. If you want me to leave your side, that’s okay too. But please, just get your facts straight before you go around insulting the one I loved more than anypony else. Alternate version or not…nopony has the right to do that in my eyes.”
Watching the situation unfold, I’m still not quite sure of many things. I’m still not sure if Coco’s even somepony I should trust to begin with, for one. But seeing what I see, I can’t help but if dreams and nightmares are really that different after all.
As she flinches away, tears in her eyes, clinging to her memories just as much as I try to avoid them, I realize that even a nightmare can be cut under the force of her own feelings.
****
Who can possibly love a nightmare?
That is the thought that streams through my head for the remainder of the week, one that somehow I lack words to fully express. It plagues the gaping hole of my mind, perhaps as a way for it to function with some level of normalcy in the absence of any real memories. But I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s something more, some greater reason why I’ve become so obsessed with the way Coco defended my nightmare self back there.
I’ve made it clear to myself innumerable times that I have no sentiments towards her one way or another. She’s been trying to extend herself to me, and I still can’t help but wonder why. Sure, I may have saved her life, but I feel like there has to be something more to it. But then again, she’s an ex-nightmare who for some reason or another wants nothing more than to be my friend. How is that anything but suspicious?
I try my best to refuse her efforts, but lately…it gets harder and harder to do so, especially after seeing just how loyal she was to my former self. If she would’ve stayed by her side because she’d wanted to hurt other ponies, wouldn’t I have been able to tell by now? As I keep her on near-constant watch, I see that she has yet to do anything really all that malicious.
Is it really as easy as saying that she did all those things for me, even if it was some warped version? And even if it was, that just takes me back to the same question, my thoughts circling around aimlessly once more.
Who can possibly love a nightmare?
Except this time, it only spurs more questions.
What happens when the nightmare changes? Is the love still there?
****
While my memories of my life as Nightmarity have yet to return and Luna’s visits have started to become less frequent, my bodily condition is improving, at least. While I am not anywhere near being able to create designs again, I can move around a little, even walk through town occasionally. The citizens seem to have forgiven me, from what I can see, as I am greeted only with smiles or, in the worse of cases, a few looks of hesitation. I suppose that’s one of the benefits to having saved Equestria so many times that a slight turn to the opposite side comes across as a minimal issue; they seem more glad to have me back than anything else. It’s always limited to just my friends from before, though, my outings—as much as I may feel ambivalent about Coco, I still don’t want to see how unfavorably they might treat her. I can imagine it going badly enough in my head.
One issue, at least, has been resolved: after some discussion with Applejack, I found out that she knew about Babs’ conversion into a thestral, which as she explained, was done as a desperate measure. While it took some convincing on Babs’ part to explain her current guardian’s innocence, it turns out that she had requested to come to my boutique a short while after Coco did so she could have enough time to brief her cousin on the new situation.
That is when I receive my first doubts about whether or not the nightmare had fully corrupted me. According to Applejack, Babs had been a homeless filly left in squalid conditions when I came across her in Manehattan. Later choosing to ask the foal in question and finding genuine panic on her face when I do so, I conclude that such trauma cannot be accurately faked and question it no further.
“I’m very sorry she couldn’t have told you more about it,” Coco replies, gently stroking Babs’ side with a tenderness I could never have imagined before from a being of her kind. “The wounds are still too recent on her. I know you’re curious, since she’s your sister’s friend and all, but—“
“It’s fine,” I answer back. “I just find it weird that I’d do something like that under the nightmare’s control. Saving her, I mean.”
“You really weren’t as bad as you think you were back then.” A nostalgic smile sweeps across her face and her gaze meets the ground, almost as if she could bring my old self back just by staring at it. “If it means anything to you, I feel like you were fighting from the inside even then. If I’d been chosen as the host, it would’ve consumed me a lot faster. I would’ve gone berserk, because I’m nowhere near as shining and unbreakable as you are. My heart would surely have been too weak to bear it.”
“Then I guess you don’t know anything about me. If I was really as strong as you think I am, then I would have resisted it. None of this would have happened. I know you think highly of me, or perhaps it’s just the love you feel for my other self speaking, but I just want to get my own facts straight. I’m not the pony you think I am. And honestly, whether you look at me and see my past self or just some idealized form of me, I can never be that pony for you. I can’t even be that pony for myself.”
Being in this room, encountering the same repeated situation innumerable amounts of times, I just want it all to stop. I no longer care if the memories never return. It’s not as though anything good could come out of them anyway. In a way, dealing with the fact that I might have fought the spell from inside is even worse, because that just reminds me that I used to have strength. Both parts of me did. But somehow, when the nightmare dissipated, I lost that.
Better yet, if the nightmare wasn’t even a full nightmare to begin with, what does that make me? Somepony who can’t let the past stay that way? Somepony who just keeps holding herself back?
As the darkness, the other darkness, the one of self-doubt that cuts even deeper than the curse, appears to overwhelm me, it gets harder than ever for me to control myself. Over the past few weeks, I had found the idea of self-control to be one that I no longer even possessed, but there’s an impulse that crosses my mind, a dim one that barely breaks the shadows, but one that I’m still compelled to follow regardless.
“Tell me what really happened,” I whisper to Coco with more intensity than I’ve been able to muster in a long time. “Tell me who I really was back then. I can’t reach that other part of myself, no matter how hard I try; all the other memories just keep blocking it out. Did I really become a monster back there like everypony else would have me think? And if I did…why did you come here? Why would you defend somepony like Nightmarity?”
“Because you really were a monster,” Coco replies with a strange soothing edge to her voice. “You really were.”
“That’s probably the last thing I want to hear right now, you realize.”
“Yes, but it’s what needs to be said. You were a monster, but not quite in the way most would see it.”
Coco gazes at the wall, looking to the slight window of moonlight that illuminates it. Strangely enough, I realize that neither of us really cast a shadow, even with its presence around. Maybe it’s a little bit of my old self that’s still there, able to control the shining beams. Or maybe it’s something that doesn’t even really need to be explained, something that just is.
“It depends on what you think a monster really is, Rarity. Because, the way I see it, a monster is just something we refuse to accept. We claim it’s because it looks a certain way, acts a certain way, whatever. But really, if you look hard enough, there’s a bit of ourselves in each and every monster. The real reason why we’re afraid of them is because they can warp reality, show us what we don’t want to see. They can take us to places we think we don’t want to be, but if we let them show us the way, sometimes they might still try to consume us, attack us, whatever. Sometimes, they aren’t misunderstood; sometimes, we’re right to be afraid. But a lot of times, the world they take us to can be a lot better than what we might be able to see otherwise. And in that respect, you were a monster, and still are.”
Just as I’m about to respond, Coco, for once really focused on casting aside her nature of hiding behind the shadows, finally pours out her heart.
“I know it’s all too easy for your mind to make a bigger monster out of what you did. Once, I felt that way, too, when I worked in the city doing things that weren’t exactly the best for me. I spent all this time battling the guilt in my mind and was never quite able to conquer it. That’s why I gave into the nightmares. Because you extended your hoof to me and showed me that there was a better world, even if it was one shrouded in darkness. For all of that, I’d be willing to do the same for you. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you know that you never let yourself be tainted by the things the other nightmares did. That’s because I love you…both of you. Because you really were just different sides of the same coin. Even if you never return these feelings, there’s no way I’ll ever let you stay like this.
“Right now, you’re going through the real nightmare, that of finding yourself after you swore everything was lost. But please…let me be the one to break it this time.”
I’d like to say that I fell in love with her right that instant, that all my doubts dissipated in that very moment. That would make a sweet dream, that’s for sure, knowing that I will always be better than I think I am. But dreams aren’t reality, and I know I still have a long way to go.
But dreams, and even nightmares, are nice things to strive for anyway. They put reality in perspective, make you realize that you have the power to change things for the better or to be grateful they haven’t gotten worse. So from now on, I’ll try my best to keep fighting those nightmares that still stay within me, deeper than those that I once ruled over. Because those weren’t even the real things to begin with.
They’re just pieces of guilt that go away with time, eventually.
They’re just hurdles that tried to impede true happiness, ones that never really succeeded to begin with, because I know now that even the worst of encounters can shine the brightest of lights.
Just remnants of the past that I can now, finally, control for my own advantage.
Just daydreams, dressed as nightmares.
Author's Note
Happy Nightmare Night. Hope you enjoyed. I really don't have that much more to say for once, other than a shout-out to an amazing fan of mine, Kestrel, who's stuck with me for quite a while and whose birthday it was yesterday.
