FO:E
The Dashite
(Much praise and awe is due AwSweetHolyHell for his wonderful job. You sir, are a genius.)
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It was a beautiful and utterly arresting sight: this Pegasus with the sun at her call. Her wings spread to slow her swift ascent towards him and in doing so it seemed as if she was on fire, the sun behind her a halo. A few raider rifles went off in the streets, and he imagined he could see the bullets shy away from her, as stones thrown at a goddess might refuse to fly. Even from afar, through this great hole in the wall, he could almost imagine that he was back home, seeing that old, beautiful image again. If she wavered, he didn’t notice. He had lost track of time, to some extent. All he was aware of was her hanging far off in his sight. The next thing he knew, she was landing right beside him, as if space too had lost any meaning. In his dry delirium, it had ceased to mean much to him, distance.
The young stallion attempted to speak despite his parched throat. He was barely aware of what he was saying as this beautiful creature touched down next to him. He simply knew it was right to say something, to beg that she forgive him. It was all true after all, all so very true. A Goddess come down finally from the sky because he was dying. He just wanted to touch her… he held out a hoof. He heard his dry words hang leave him and he wondered briefly, in a strange detached way, whether they really made sense at all. I’m really sorry… I didn’t mean to mess it all up. I tried but there were too many and I thought I could get way but they were faster and there was no food and the dirty water was making me feel too sick to run and there was no radawayandmyleghurts can you…
Lightning Flash came down as quick as she could while still being safe. It felt more like the ruined office building below was rising swiftly to meet her than it did that she was descending upon it. The tiny— but growing— form of the pony she’d seen was still, frighteningly still. She thought that perhaps he looked up, but he was so far away that she wasn’t sure.
She’d seen him on her way home. It had been a miracle, really: she had no idea how she’d spotted him. One moment she was singing a half-remembered song from the DJ’s radio station, and the next there he was, lying on the gray floor surrounded by destroyed and decaying office space, next to a hole that some ancient artillery piece had made. She’d known somehow, instinctively, when she saw the raiders in the streets: they were closing in on the lone pony. Lightning had almost passed him by, and with good reason too, as she had no weapons. All she had was medicine food, water, and a pair of wings.
She had her saddlebags off quickly, as soon as all four hooves touched safely to ground. Sweet goddesses he looks even worse than I had thought. Celestia’s… that leg isn’t going to hold him up for a while. He was trying to groan something about being sorry and water. The medicine was out of the bag, but she searched again. “I’ve got ya, I’ve got ya,” she murmered, pulling out a canteen of clean water. Before she did anything, she let him have some. He sucked at it like he was dying— for a moment she was convinced he was going to die. There was just so much panic in his movements. She counted to five in her head and then took it away from him. The way he flailed weakly at her and the empty thirsty look in his eyes both scared her badly. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, please be still… I’ll let you have some more in a moment… I need to get this off you, so you can breathe a little better maybe… please,” he whimpered something at her that she guessed was another request for water. “Potion first, okay?” He stopped and laid there and she was sure for a moment, a terrible moment, that he was about to leave her right then.
But she knew, deep down, that those thoughts were foolish. He was incredibly dehydrated and bleeding, yes, and he was in serious condition, but he wasn’t going to die right that moment. He might if she kept panicking. Determined to act a little more her age and less like a frightened foal, she moved to free him from his gear.
He had a ragged battle saddle with only one gun attached to him, and she marveled that it was still in one piece with the obvious lack of proper maintenance. She undid the fastenings and had it off of him, whispering apologies. The thing was old, but the wear on it had come from years of use. Lightning, with wide eyed wonder, surveyed scores of bullet holes. By all rights, he shouldn’t have been alive. All these bullet holes… every one of those bullets an individual moment that he could’ve died, some of them perhaps moments that he should have died.
She tore her attention from the mysterious stallion’s battle equipment. His back was heavily scarred, and new cuts and wounds were spread throughout the patchwork of older hurts. The legs were unbroken, thank any possible combination of possibly existing Alicorns, because she knew she was totally incapable of setting bone. Lightning couldn’t help but feel foolish. She had gawked over an old gun, leather, and some rusted armor when there was a pony who needed help. “I’ve never seen…” her voice faltered before she could finish, and she realized he wasn’t really paying attention to her words that much anyway.
As soon as she had the healing potion to his lips and that liquid touched his lips, he reacted. He took the little metal container with both hooves and drank greedily. This stallion had more energy than she’d thought. When he was done, she looked once more at his back and noted with approval that the magic was beginning to take effect. Her patient closed his eyes and sighed.
“There aren’t that many of them out there… sun’s startin’ to go down.” She spoke to herself, just thinking aloud. When his eyes opened back up and focused on her, she spoke to him directly. “I’ve never been down on the ground in this particular spot before. I don’t know the neighborhood. I’m afraid they’ll be able to sneak up on me while you’re resting and I’ll never see ‘em. I don’t suppose you have any mines? Barring that, grenades? Anything that can go boom?”
He blinked in apparent confusion, but before she could restate her question, he began to nod. Her new companion worked his jaw for a moment, as if his face was sore, and he spoke in a hoarse voice.
“I tried to set up a grenade with a tripwire but my head hurt and I kept coughing and couldn’t keep… a… hold of anything. There’s stuff in my bag.” He gestured with his head. She retrieved the bag from the floor and rummaged through it to retrieve the explosives in question and she made the stairwell safe for her and her new friend, as well as leaving a nasty surprise strung between two cubicles ready to pull the pins off of two grenades. Goddesses, but she loved tripwires. What a clever invention.
Relieved at her immediate safety, the pegasus finally let her mind wander. That one-sided saddle just tugged at her memory for some reason.
It came back to her.
She spoke with an even tone as she stepped back into the ruined cubicle-strewn main room. “You’re the Crusader, aren’tcha?”
He sighed as she stood in front of him, her face unreadable. She studied him, stopping a bit aways, looking him over. “Yes, or at least, that’s what the stallion on the radio calls me.”
“Wow. He never said you were this young.” This made for a troubling development. This was the most famous pony in Lunangrad. The only thing DJ-PON3 had ever talked about in the Lunangrad region was him. The Crusader was the one pony that the Authority and the Factory trusted equally. The Crusader: young earth pony paladin who galloped all about the ruins of the once-embattled city doling out punishment to the wicked and preserving the lives of the innocent.
That was the story the DJ told, after he finished reports of strange happenings on the Big 52, or the adventures of Security and the Stable Dweller. The Lunangrad Crusader was the Defender of the settlement of Mosaic’s beautiful pre-war monument, Preserver of the farming ponies of Hope, Friend of Zebras and Ghouls, the stallion who crossed the great river and walked out of Raider City in once piece, without any help, and no wings or magic to aid him. He was also apparently down on his luck and from what she could tell, had only been old enough to be considered a Stallion for perhaps a year at the very most.
“I… thought there’d be more… you, kid. No offense.”
“I’m not a colt, ma’am— and what’s that supposed to mean?” he retorted, obviously displeased through his hazy weariness. His voice sounded more cultured than she’d expected from a rough and tumble, gun slinging earth pony vigilante.
Authority, maybe? She wandered to herself.
She almost said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” but she figured that the remark would go over poorly, so she did her best not to say it. Instead, she tried a different track. “How’dya end up here, in this shape? Last time I heard, you crossed the river to do… whatever it is you did. Dad told us when he came back from Hope that you’d gone off alone and that the next day the raiders were gone.”
He dropped the subject quicker than she’d hoped, though he didn’t settle down completely. “Yes, but that was three days ago. I remembered one of the gangs from earlier in my travels. I fought them once in north Lunangrad. They’re all really heavy Dash and Stampede users, and they brew their own special chem that’s enough to knock a pony with weaker constitution flat on his plot, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“So you what, blew up their… you did blow up their stash, didn’t you?” She couldn’t help but grin gleefully at the thought of it.
“I blew up their stash of chemicals, yes. With it went a good deal of other things. Do you have any idea how flammable some of the addictive chems floating around in the wasteland are? It happened to cause a fire in the river camp that promptly wiped out the entire invading party’s supplies. The Moon Fiends blamed the Red Crescents, and Big Momma’s crew didn’t even bother with talking before they executed the remaining guards.” He had started with a smile of his own, but it began to fade. “It was a blood bath. Patrols came in to find the camp in ruins and the survivors fighting, and they started tearing each other apart. Those reinforcements from the raider crews closer to the Zebra Fort took one good look at the proceedings and simply turned around. It was effective.”
“Sounds like a complete success, like Hearth’s Warming come early. Why the long face?”
He frowned at her. “I hardly call the slaughter of oblivious guards, slaves, and camp followers, nor the putrid smell of rotting flesh a holiday. What happened is that a lot of ponies died and there was no other way around it. At the time, I tried to sneak back, but I completely botched it and wound up being pursued. They’ve hunted me off and on since, different crews on their way home to lick their wounds. I tried crossing the river again, but the radiated water was starting to make me feel sick and the bridges were held against me by that point.”
Lightning studied the pony before her, processing all this new information. Both the DJ and the Free Market mercenaries who’d been hired by the Authority to fight in the south at Hope had mentioned the strange dissolution of the attacking raider force, but until now she’d only heard that somehow the Crusader must be involved. She supposed she could add this to his long litany of victories, but something gave her pause.
“How are you feeling? I’ve got some food if you feel up to it,” she said in a more subdued voice than her previous interruption. The ‘Lunangrad Crusader’ took her offer of pre-war junk food gratefully and she left him to eat happily. Lightning cautiously looked out the large hole in the wall. In the dying light, she could see movement and not much else. At first, this worried her: were they planning to strike soon? But no, she decided that the movements she saw were too small and too brisk to be ponies. Rats? She had no idea, nor did she care because when she did finally find the raiders again, they absorbed much of her attention. They’d abandoned the street, perhaps assuming that she was armed, and had taken to watching from the windows across the street, two buildings down. The lot directly across from the office building she shared with the young stallion was empty as it had been since the war; the raiders had left it. Briefly, she feared that they’d been reinforced, and she counted.
Lightning was relieved with the result of her final tally. She commented dryly to the younger pony, “For someone who single-hoofedly turned back the raider menace, you sure aren’t a high priority target. I saw only four ponies, two of them unicorns with hunting rifles, on my way in. Didn’t even shoot until I was close, and even then it was sort of half-hearted. Looked tuckered out, y’know? I only see three now out there.”
“It’s been three days. I’m exhausted and so are this raider crew, and they know that I’m wounded, so I’m in no danger of escape. Raiders have two guiding instincts, it seems: bloodlust and laziness. More importantly, the situation’s changed and they’ll be even less likely to attack now that they have an unknown in the mix. I have you to thank for that last bit, Miss…?”
“Lightning Flash. Call me Lightning.”
“Ah. A bold name, Miss. But like I was saying, there’s no need to flush me out of my hole from their point of view. They’re thinking about now that I’ll eventually bleed out from the gunshot wound, and my back leg is still too weak for any sort of escaping. If they came in here, I wouldn’t be able to abscond and they’d have me, but I also might be conscious and they fear my gun. The Sword’s fast gaining a reputation on the west side of the River Lunaga.”
She assumed by this, he meant his somewhat strange battle saddle. It was fitting: an odd, archaic sort of name for an odd, half-complete sort of weapon. After returning to the younger pony, she sat beside him and looked him over, checking to see how well the potion had done its work. She had another, but using it unless it was absolutely necessary would waste something precious. His cuts and the shallow bullet wounds had mostly closed up, which she was glad for, but she knew that appearances could be deceiving with Authority-manufactured medicine. Their potions were good, but were definitely not as effective as those of the old world. The worst part, she knew, was the weakness that came with the healing. She asked him if he could try and stand. He struggled a bit and then somewhat predictably fell.
“They’re right about one thing— you’re not quite ready to leave yet. Did better than a pegasus would’ve, if it makes you feel any better.”
“Thanks,” he murmured and lay down, obviously tired and uncomfortable. Lightning felt tongue-tied and awkward. What could she say? What could she do? She knew that the Crusader needed to rest for at least a few hours, and she was willing to stay with him, but that was it. Her family in Loft would be worried about her: she had gone out to get food and medicine—most of which the almost-colt in front of her had just consumed!—and it never took this long for her to return. Her father wouldn’t start the search until tomorrow, knowing the dark would make any efforts fruitless, but she still feared that the raiders looking for the Crusader might get lucky and hurt one of the Dashite tribe, like her. To be honest, though it didn’t really stop her from worrying, they were much more able in combat than she was.
And then… there was the Crusader. Lightning felt unbelievably foolish. She’d hung on every word of the DJ’s stories, and imagined a gallant adult earth pony, a stallion. She was ashamed to say she’d had a strange sort of crush on the idea of him that she'd built up so earnestly in her head. To find that he was so young, and so different from the laconic action hero she had imagined… it was like having a crush on a child. She shook herself.
“So… how did you find me? If you didn’t know who I was, then you couldn’t have known I was out here, trapped…” the Crusader spoke up, surprising her. The way he said it, she could almost hear an unspoken question: Why had she risked her life for him, when he could’ve been anyone? He could’ve been dead, or been a raider playing the part of bait in an ambush.
“Oh. The hole, here.” She gestured towards the great gash in the wall, not willing to answer the unspoken question quite yet. “I was flying back home from Free Market, towards Loft. I was watching the Raiders wandering around below because they were making me nervous. I just happened to see you down below and I put two and two together and realized they were looking for you. A Dashite never misses a chance for action.”
She didn’t tell him that she had almost passed him on by at first, figuring he just wasn’t any of her business. She also didn’t mention that it was the ideal of the Crusader in her head that had shamed her into returning. With the recent revelation of the Crusader’s identity, she wasn’t sure what she believed anymore. He was the same Crusader, wasn’t he? She’d imagined a stallion who was, well, honestly, more of a stallion… but was what she’d found so bad? The crusader who’d she’d dreamed about… Life is so strange and unpleasant sometimes, she thought a little sullenly, hoping her embarrassment wouldn’t show.
For the moment, the tired earth pony accepted her reply and laid his head down. Their conversation following this was brief: no escape was possible today. He wasn’t in any shape to do any fleeing quite yet, she couldn’t carry him, and it was going to get dark soon. Escape would come with the sun. Deciding that they were a little too exposed, she carefully moved him inside of a cubicle, underneath the desk. She leaned against the divider, guarding the entrance. Within moments the Crusader had drifted off into a dreamless, uneasy rest.
She hadn’t known he was awake until he spoke up, startling her. Wings flaring out, Lightning repressed a shrill cry before turning swiftly. The now equally surprised Lunangrad Crusader, eyes wide, put his hooves up in a motion of surrender. “Friend, friend, not a raider! Don’t worry.”
Irritated, Lightning rolled her eyes and with no small amount of embarrassment folded her wings back against her sides. “I know that. You just… look, what did you say? I was distracted.”
The earth pony let the topic slide and asked his question again. “What time is it?”
She shrugged. “Does night time count? Elsewise, you’re out of luck, ‘cause I don’t have a watch or nothin’ on me.”
It was dark, and from where she lay, the younger pony was a silhouette against the floor, a stain perhaps. And while he dozed the hours away peacefully, sleep had eluded her completely ever since she’d holed them both up in the cubicle. It had all been incredibly boring and fairly unpleasant, and he murmured in his sleep and flailed a little bit and the raiders had gone silent. She hadn’t tried looking for them at all since he’d gone to sleep— no point in giving them a head to shoot at, after all.
It wasn’t like they would just let them go, anyhow. She knew there were raiders watching out there in the ruins, probably with a high-caliber rifle set on some windowsill below, trained on that opening, with a very sober and fresh pony ready to use it. She imagined it, saw it in her head, thought about how it was probably a unicorn using that strange magic force to manipulate that trigger and how his horn was probably glowing now as he held the rifle up to glance through the scope to see if she had taken the obvious sucker bait—
“Hello, Miss Lightning?”
“I’m sorry, what?” she blinked rapidly and managed to answer coherently.
“You just sort of went silent. I wondered if you were asleep… which I suppose you were. I’m sorry I woke you, I know you’re tired. That was foolish of me.”
That was childish of me, She corrected in her head, and then scolded herself.
“No, I wasn’t asleep. It’s fine.”
Like a kid without a nightlight, that’s what he’s like. I think he just can’t handle the dark alone. The comparisons were just going to keep coming weren’t they?
“Good.” There was another pause and the dark remained thick and unmoved.
“Miss—“
“Just use my name,” she said, more gruffly than she’d intended.
“Oh. Lightning, I was thinking, before I spoke up, that perhaps it would be wisest for us to leave as soon as daybreak comes. I would assume that this raider bunch have ponies watching us below, and they’ll probably be replaced around dawn. If we go out the back door as the guard is changed, we may perhaps be able to gain quite some distance before anything is noticed to be amiss.”
“You talk strange,” she said in an awkward non sequitor. He didn’t answer, probably bewildered, though she couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “Sorry, it’s late. Yes, you’re right. New guards will be groggy and old guards will be all tired. I’m okay with that.”
A short pause followed, in which Lightning guessed he was nodding to himself, before the earth pony spoke again. “My father used to work for the Authority, as you’ve perhaps guessed. We may have lived in Mosaic, but I wasn’t born there. I was born south of there, in Station Five… you’d know it as Friendship Station. When my mother died while working as an Authority caravan guard, he left in the middle of the night and took me with him. I was just a foal.”
“It’s tough,” she said in sympathy, nodding despite the fact that it was rather too dark for the gesture to be seen. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, but it has been long, and memory fades. Time heals all wounds,” he said, his voice giving her pause. He continued, however. “There were a few Authority-born traders in Mosaic. It’s a town that the Authority approves of, and so when they inevitably found us, they just left us alone. We were no danger to them in Mosaic.”
“But they didn’t approve enough to help those ponies out when raiders showed up, that’s it? That’s stupid. Mosaic’s on the same underground lines as the Authority StationTowns are!”
“They did send ponies. A platoon of Authority Guardians came down that line of theirs and fortified the entrance, guns waiting for some raider to be predictably moronic. But they weren’t going to lose any Authority ponies on something as trivial as a mosaic of Luna and Celestia, were they? They told us in no uncertain terms that such an action was frivolous. They wouldn’t even lean out of the door to shoot at them. That’s the problem with the Authority, at least for me. They do so much good— and they do good, honestly, they do— but they go about it the wrong way sometimes. They endear themselves to few and look down on just about everyone, even other Authority ponies. My father said, before he died, that they were just xenophobic enough to resent anyone not born in a Station, but good-hearted enough for it to not matter enough to make them abandon someone.”
“But they’ll be jerks while they do it. Hold on there a moment, kid: your dad is dead? You didn’t mention that.”
“Disease,” he said, shortly.
After this he was silent for a long time. Lightning wondered if she’d angered him, but when he spoke again it was in a voice that dripped with pensive carefulness. “At the time, I was convinced it was Authority foul play. I was so caught up in my thoughts of petty revenge… it took a-awhile and I’d rather not talk about it.”
The words had come quicker and quicker as he continued until the last words were all stuck together as a great sonic ball. Lightning decided that she’d let that be and ask him about something else. She could understand, after all: losing her own father was an unsettling thought. “So you took matters into your own hooves, then.”
“That I did, madam, that I did. My mother’s old, strange battle saddle lovingly cared for by my father and passed on to me. I snuck out through the maintenance walkways, because the Authority’s soldiers were certainly not going to let me ‘throw my life away’ for something they deemed ‘sentimental’. I suppose that, ultimately, they were wiser than I was about that, but you must understand that unlike myself, most Mosaic residents are very religious and that work of art… it means a lot. If that still seems foolish, then I guess for me it was just as important as it was to them. It was just… it was good. It was something I could say was wholeheartedly good and there wasn’t anything evil or twisted in. That’s rare in the wasteland. I didn’t want to lose it.”
It seemed a little silly to her, but she accepted that it made sense to him. The Dashite could understand wanting to defend something even when others told you doing so was stupid.
So this real Crusader was certainly different from the one in her imagination— but she liked this one too. She didn’t fault him for courage and he was certainly intelligent. He was competent enough to stealth his way past a platoon of soldiers and ballsy enough to charge out into the open all by himself.
“So your dad taught you how to use the battle saddle, I guess? What’s the idea with only having one gun?” She had kept him talking to keep herself from going stir-crazy, but now she was intrigued.
“Oh, no, Celestia, no!” he laughed and then coughed before continuing. “No, I’ve never been one for guns and fighting. I hate it, I think. I had to figure it out as I went along by trial and error. It is rather simple, really. You just point and bite down on the button to fire, you run a lot, and when you run out of bullets you push the other button to load another clip in.”
There was no way to answer that, really. “What?”
“Hm? What do you mean, ‘what’?”
He was an idiot. That’s why he had charged out there. He was an absolute idiot who knew nothing about nothing. “The DJ said that there was a whole crew at Mosaic, twelve or fifteen with assault rifle saddles and rockets. You ran out there with no knowledge of the finer points of your gun or even a little bit of advice? I thought that you were smart, kid!”
“I’m not a kid! I haven’t been a colt for… awhile now. Not really— and look, I didn’t exactly have time!” he sounded hurt and angry and she felt bad for that, but she couldn’t contain her outburst.
“I mean, maybe I misjudged you, but you seem more… calculating, I guess.”
He coughed several times before he spoke again. “Sorry, dust. I am, usually. Life has been… strange,” he said vaguely.
“Strange.”
“Yes, strange. Look, you wouldn’t understand, Lightning. I was stupid, but I’ve learned since then.”
I hurt his feelings. Way to go, Miss Brash and Crash Lightning. Way to be a jerk to a kid. Except, she wasn’t totally sure if he was a kid, really. Physically, he wasn’t. Was he? She supposed that perhaps her first assessment had been harsh on that point. He wasn’t that small… But mentally and emotionally? Maybe he still had a ways to go. “I can see that. Sorry I called you stupid.”
“… You didn’t call me that, actually.”
“Sorry I thought it, then.” Well that wasn’t my finest moment, she thought with a quick grimace and continued, “Try me, though. I’ve seen strange. Trust me— strange is being one of the only things with wings around. I can listen, and I won’t be a jerk, ‘kay?”
“It really isn’t that important. I was brash.”
Oh heavens no, he wasn’t getting away that easy. Lightning considered the best way to approach this. He wasn’t going to be appreciative of prying into it too directly, obviously. She’d have to go slow, ask in pieces, try to deduce from what else he said about life there, perhaps?
That would take forever. “C’mon? Please? You can’t just leave me hangin’ like that, Oh great Crusader!”
She couldn’t see his face still, but she could feel the glare in his voice, the venom lacing his words. Perhaps that last bit had been unwise? “Look, Miss Lightning, it is a tale that I’d rather not tell.”
“I mean, is it embarrassing, becau-“
“Yes, it is humiliating. Please?”
She didn’t say anything in response. She would try again, of course, but not quite yet. If he was really going to be that insistent, he wouldn’t have said anything at all. She sensed that he would talk. It was only a matter of time.
Minutes passed. In the dark, time flowed strangely. She couldn’t tell if the day was near or far away, and only by counting the seconds could she even begin to keep up. 1… 2… 3… 4… 55… 56… 105… 140… She always lost count or became distracted before she could hit three minutes. After a while, she was unsure how many times she had done this counting. Had it been three times, or four? If that was 2 and a half minutes, roughly, each time, would that be 12 minutes? No, it wouldn’t be.
Words couldn’t explain how glad she was when he finally spoke up again.
“Why do you want to know, Miss Lightning?”
“I’d say… curiosity. A little because of how you’re acting… but mostly, I think I want to know why you, who weren’t trained for war, would do what you did. You probably should’ve died.” She thought about those holes in the old saddle and about the patchwork of scars on his back.
“If I tell you the story, will you not spread it around? I mean,” his voice faltered. She was once again reminded of his youth in how he began to stutter and speak hurriedly. “I just don’t want it to get out among the general public that the ‘Lunangrad Crusader’ started out on this quest because he’s… he was a lovesick foal.”
This was going to be good.
“There is this fill- erm, there’s this mare back home in Mosaic. She’s a unicorn named Sparkler. She was always a strange one, you know? She played with the colts more than she did with other fillies, but in all honesty, I think she would’ve done that anyway… I’m getting ahead of myself. I... thought I loved her, Miss Lightning. A few years ago I developed a coltish crush on her. I’d watch that cute blue and white filly wander around with her friend Amethyst and sigh like a moron. I was absolutely, utterly smitten.”
She couldn’t help it. She chuckled. “You sound like a cute little colt!”
“Hush,” he admonished, obviously not appreciating it, but he continued. “It’s about to get a lot less cute. Well, as we grew up, she changed. All the other fillies were always ogling the colts in Mosaic and whispering in every corner and such. She and her friend and occasionally I were probably the only ones of our age group to not at least dabble in love, at least not openly. I of course, had eyes only for her… and she had eyes only for ‘Amy’, which I found out the hard way.”
Lightning didn’t laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, feeling a little sorry indeed that she had goaded him into talking.
“Yes, well, it was a bad week or two, like I said earlier. I finally worked the nerve up to slowly, carefully speak to her and she saw through me. She cared about me enough to be gentle about it, but she… ‘shot me down’ so quickly that my head was spinning. She just wanted to be friends. I was devastated, but I accepted it. I made myself feel better about it, told myself later that maybe it just wasn’t the time, that I could just go about continuing our friendship and maybe one day she’d warm up to me, or I’d get over it or something. In retrospect, I cannot even begin to fathom how I saw any coherency in my own thoughts back then. I was all hormones and hurt pride.
“Regardless, it all became a moot point three weeks ago. I walked in on the two of them. I will not be living that particular moment down for some time. Visual proof that she was a filly-fooler. I’m not sure she’s forgiven me completely yet, though she knows it was an accident. I was humiliated— I’m Authority raised, so I found it… vaguely distasteful, but I felt no ill will, just a mild disinterest. But, as a foalish young colt is wont to, I turned it into a personal affair. I felt like perhaps, if I’d been more of that typically brawny sort of colt, she’d have been more interested in me, instead of looking to another mare. I was stupid and heartbroken.”
Lightning frowned and scooted closer. Carefully, she reached out and laid a hoof on his head. He didn’t reject the gesture. “I think I can piece together the rest. You wanted to prove yourself as strong and brave so that she would love you.”
“That’s roughly ninety percent of it, yes. I will admit that some of it was my own cowardice. I also wanted to flee in general. So I lept out of my hole in the ground, gun blazing like some sort of ridiculous knight in some old pre-war story, and somehow the DJ watched it all and as I continued on, I began hearing reports of a Crusader… and found out it was me.”
“So… this whole time, you’ve been doing this for a mare… who is more interested in mares.”
“I hope not! I don’t think so. I don’t know.” With each revisal, he seemed less sure, more miserable. “I can’t seem to remember thinking about her past the first week away from home. I was so… distraught. But could I always have been doing it for stupid childish infatuation? I don’t want it to all have been for that. Ponies died, Lightning.” She was glad that he had dropped the “miss” but somehow it seemed worse that way. Less him.
“Hey, cheer up. I mean, if you didn’t think about her—“
“But look,” he interrupted, obviously upset, “that’s what I’ve been thinking about this whole time: did I do it for her? If I did, was that bad? I mean, I don’t think I really love her. I was infatuated, yes, but it was just a crush that ended very, very badly. I don’t want my wandering about and ponies dying and raiders whispering my name in the dark to frighten little half-mutated bloodthirsty bastards to be over a crush for a filly-fooler who is simply not interested in the slightest!” By the end, his soft voice had become a threatening hiss that scared her in the darkness. She fervently regretted having not brought along any way of making light.
They were both silent. Somewhere in the distance, something small skittered and knocked a piece of concrete from a building. The silence accepted the noise of the fall with a sort of malevolent spider grace, swallowing it whole.
“I don’t know,” She said, more in an attempt at breaking the silence than anything else. She hated the silence and how it dragged on and on and never quite went away.
“I just wanted to do good like my mother did,” he said at last.
Tick, tock. She counted again in the silence, having nothing to say but not wanting her mind to go blank again in the dark. She tapped her hoof softly to make some kind of noise to battle the abyss of noiselessness.
“I’m sorry, miss Lightning,” he said after she’d lost count at around one hundred and thirty seven for perhaps the third time. “You didn’t deserve that. I am sorry I spoke in anger. It is simply upsetting to think about. Was it wrong of me, to keep going? I’m not sure of my own intentions.”
“No,” she said quickly, no thought going behind the answer. Words simply tumbled out. “You give ponies hope. I mean, I guess deep down, we all know that heroes like you or Security or the Stable Dweller aren’t perfect, but we don’t care about that. I mean… if you’re too imperfect I suppose it would bother us, but it’s the idea. Ah, Celestia, look kid— I think you’re alright, alright? I mean, you ain’t gonna be perfect, because you’re a kid who has led a somewhat sheltered life in a happy little underground almost-vault away from Raiders and poison and such, and your life is a lot harder outside of the transit tunnels.”
“But,” he countered, his voice still even, “I’m not sure I’m really all that cut out to be a hero. I mean, they probably would’ve won at Hope without me. I didn’t exactly kill hordes of Raiders. I just wanted the fighting to stop and got very, very, very lucky. All my successes are mostly to be credited to a prodigious abundance of luck and my own enthusiasm. For someone who prides himself on his intelligence, I have mostly acted the fool here in the Wasteland. I’ve perhaps done some good here and there, but I’m just not a hero. Not like the DJ says.”
“Maybe not.”
He didn’t answer right away, probably taken aback by how quickly she’d agreed. She continued, explaining herself. “Maybe you aren’t Security or the fabled Stable Dweller, but you’re not a bad pony. You’re a good pony. You helped people, made friends with every good pony and even a few zebras in downtown. I mean, the fact that you can be worried about having dishonorable intentions shows how truly good you are, to me. Can I be honest? I know we don’t really know each other that well, not really, but I don’t think the DJ was wrong to single you out. You’ve got a lot of time to grow into heroism, and I think compared to Security and such, you’ve got a pretty good headstart. I didn’t hear about them defeating an invasion singlehoofedly right after they reached adulthood.”
Lightning was surprised as she felt him nuzzle the hoof still resting on his mane. “Thank you, miss.” He said quietly. She said he was welcome, and noticed with some amusement that her heart had started beating a little faster with that little speech. I got all worked up… But the young earth pony seemed to be doing better. She contented herself with stroking his mane like she might her little sisters’ after a bad dream or on a cold night In the dark. Lightning began considering the soft sound of hoof and mane as a slow cadence to beat back the shadows.. She decided that it was effective.
Dawn would come soon, she was sure of it. The largest building left standing, the H&H building, was just up ahead and at the top of it was Loft, her hometown. All they had to do was clear the five blocks between here and there. With some of the buildings destroyed, she was sure they could find a shortcut or two to cut down on time. If they could make it to the lobby, than she could fly up and get help for both of them. Raiders taking potshots may have been a little dangerous for her, but for her father, taking on any resisting raiders would be like spanking a foal. Of course, they had to make it first, and it was a rather long way to walk for two ponies who were very tired and perhaps a bit hungry, and who also had a lot of very angry raider ponies looking for them.
In all of her thinking and planning, it struck her like a lightning bolt: she had no idea what the Crusader’s real name was. She asked, and that voice, quiet and still clinging to that crisp and cultured Authority accent, answered:
“Swift Balm, ma’am. My father was Gilead Balm, mother was Soothing Balm. We’ve had doctors and healers as far back as Discord.”
She figured it fit.
They waited for Dawn.
