One Is the Loneliest Number
Or Scootaloo's Soul-crushing Story
Today was looking to be a great day for Scootaloo. She rushed out of bed that morning, nabbed her scooter, and zipped off in a blur to Ponyville Park. As she passed through the morning crowd, her face beamed with an ecstatic smile, almost like a headlight lighting her way through the sea of ponies. Why was she so excited? Well, why wouldn’t she be? Her awesome hero and big sister was home from her mysterious trip up north.
And with Rainbow Dash back, that meant they could spend some super cool quality time together while Dash told her all about the trip. While zooming along the pathway, she caught sight of a rainbow streak in the sky. Flapping her little wings with all her might, her scooter carried her right next to her idol’s leisure pace.
“Hey!” Scootaloo chirped. “Rainbow Dash, wait up!”
The multicolored blur whirled around and came to a stop. “Heya, squirt!” She dropped down to the ground rippling a small tremor out around her.
When the dust settled, Scootaloo hopped off her scooter and rushed to Dash. “How was your trip?”
“It was pretty cool,” Rainbow Dash let a sly smirk slip as she sat down on her haunches. She brushed some loose dust off her shoulder, and then looking at her hoof. Once sure of it’s perfection, she shot her glance back to Scootaloo. “I mean, if you call taking down a millennia old bad guy cool.”
“Whoa!” Scootaloo’s eyes almost exploded from the sheer awesome. Already her mind was a tizzy with epic battles. Rainbow Dash soaring through the air, and delivering a mighty kick to some towering shadowy figure. Her and the rest of her friends standing as the lone bulwark against the apocalypse, with Rainbow Dash standing at the front, head down, shoulders up, and ready to fight. Scootaloo’s wings buzzed, lifting her a foot off the ground. A huge grin grew as she rose, until she finally plopped down on the ground. “You gotta tell me!”
“Alright, so there was this old evil dude named Sombra—”
As soon as the words left Rainbow Dash’s mouth, Scootaloo’s giant grin faded into a disheartened frown.
Rainbow Dash took note of Scootaloo’s pain. “What’s the matter, Squirt?” She placed her recently-check-for-pristine-ness hoof and placed it on Scootaloo’s shoulder.
“You said Sombra, right?” She looked up at Dash with tear-filled eyes.
“Yeah…” Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow.
“Then he’s dead, right?” Scootaloo wiped the tears from her eyes.
Rainbow Dash pulled her hoof from Scootaloo’s shoulder and rubbed the back of her head. “Well, I guess.” She looked off to the side. “I mean, I didn’t see, but he got blasted by a laser heart beam thing.”
“He’s totally dead then!” Scootaloo couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. They exploded from her eyes like tidal waves, roaring down her cheeks with the force of Niagara Falls.
“What, kid?” Rainbow Dash jumped back from the splashes of tears hitting the ground. “He was a bad dude who wanted to take over all of Equestria. What did you want us to do? Not stop him?”
Scootaloo sniffled. “I didn’t want you to kill him!” she wailed out.
Ponies in the park started to notice. There stood a grown mare and a crying child who looked nothing like her. Glares soon burned into Rainbow Dash. She looked around waving her hooves defensively. “What are you crying about kid? We stopped a bad guy!”
“You killed my dad!” She managed between cries.
Suddenly, Rainbow Dash felt like a ton of bricks had just been dumped off on her head. She ran her hooves through her mane, and actually saw red dust fly out. After a quick shake of her head, she grabbed Scootaloo by the shoulders. “Wait, what?”
“King Sombra! He was my dad!” she wailed.
She couldn’t help it; Rainbow Dash burst into laughter. “You almost had me, Squirt.” She continued to laugh, until she realized Scootaloo wasn’t laughing with her. She slowed to a chuckle, and then a giggle. When she saw the tears still flowing from Scootaloo’s eyes, she stopped. “There’s no way, right?”
“Sombra was my dad.” Scootaloo sniffled. “He got with my mom and had me.”
Dash couldn’t do anything. All she managed was to blink absently. “What?” she finally asked after a few minutes of silence. She shook her head violently before locking her eyes on Scootaloo. “He ruled the Crystal Empire like a thousand years ago!”
Scootaloo nodded.
“Are you trying to tell me you’re a thousand years old?” Rainbow Dash stood up on her hind legs pointing down at Scootaloo with wide eyes.
Scootaloo shook her head.
“Then how?” Rainbow Dash yelled much louder than she anticipated, judging how she shrunk down and covered her mouth after.
Scootaloo traced her hoof in the dirt. “Well, Mom always called him, Nighty Night. They got together at a bar one night when they were really drunk. Then about eleven months later, I came along.”
“That’s not what I’m asking!” Rainbow Dash pinched her head between her two hooves. “I don’t care about that, damn it!”
The filly looked off to the side, distantly. “Oh, how did he become Sombra? Well, that’s another story entirely.”
“Then tell me that story!” Dash jumped at the filly, but kept her hooves hovering just off of her. It took every ounce of willpower to not shake the little tart right then and there until she had a case of late-onset shaken baby syndrome, but she held off.
She nodded. “Okay. My dad and mom weren’t trying to have me. But, my mom refused to give me up, which lead to a court battle over the most basic of things—”
“Money?” Dash rolled her eyes.
“Money.” Scootaloo nodded again. “He lost the case, which meant he had to pay child support.”
Dash rolled her head. “Oh, for the love of—this is so boring.” Suddenly she shook back to attention. “So he owed your mom money to raise you?”
“Dad was stingy.” Scootaloo paused to take a deep breath. “He always cursed my mother for being Catholic. There was no other choice for her, but to have me.”
Rainbow Dash raised a hoof to interject, but quickly dropped it in defeat. Her ears fell flat as she lowered her head. With a limp hoof, she urged Scootaloo to continue.
“He’d have rather died than see his money go to waste on some kid he didn’t even want to have. So, he came up with a plan to escape into the past,” Scootaloo ended in a tiny voice, one that would have put Fluttershy to shame.
But Rainbow Dash had heard, and it was all too much. She pinched her eyes just as she flung her hooves out at Scootaloo. “What?” she yelled as her hooves flopped down to her side.
“I know.” The little filly sniffled again. “I couldn’t believe he was so selfish too.”
She shoved her hoof in Scootaloo’s face. “That is the least of my concerns with that story!”
Scootaloo looked up at her with big, puppy dog eyes. “What do you mean?”
Smacking her hoof against her other, Dash listed the reasons. “I mean how did he go to the past? And when? And how?”
“Oh,” Scootaloo spoke as if it was some minor detail that could be brushed over, or simply forgotten. When she looked up, the impatience on Rainbow Dash’s face told her all she needed to know. She laughed under her tears. “I was already born by this point. I think I was six.”
“That is not what I was asking!” Dash ran her hooves frantically through her mane. If she had fingers, surely she’d have grabbed clumps of mane and ripped it out. “Did your mom just happen to hook up with some super powerful unicorn at that bar or something? And how did he even get to the past?” She took deep breaths, slowly working her frustration out until her legs fell down at her side.
Scootaloo waved her hoof dismissively. “You should have asked that earlier.”
She couldn’t help it; Rainbow Dash let out a furious groan that caused the whole park to come to a standstill. “Kid!” she bellowed.
“He wasn’t that powerful, I guess. He just put his mind to things. He was really late on his payment, so my mom went to his house right as he was finishing the spell.”
“And what do you think you’re doing?” A dark-orange pegasus with a teal mane burst through the door of a tiny shack in Ponyville. Standing in the center of the room was a tall stallion with a dark grey coat and black mane. In front of him was a swirling vortex that illuminated the room in an eerie blue glow. Thunderous winds roared as the portal sucked in everything that wasn't tied down, with the two ponies standing against the torrent.
“And the succubus returns!” Sombra bellowed.
“Nighty, you can’t do this!” The mare—Scootaloo’s mom—rushed to his side. “You can’t leave your daughter without a father!”
He shoved her back. “There’s no way I’m paying a hundred and fifty bits a month for that little soul sucker.” After she fell to the ground, he turned his attention towards the portal.
“You can’t get away from this responsibility!” She reached up to him, but he ignored her.\
“Watch me,” he muttered as he took a step towards his fate. But before he walked through, he stopped. “Want a quickie before I go?”
“And she never saw him again,” Scootaloo said as she wiped a tear from her eye.
Rainbow Dash’s eye twitched with a disturbed look on her face. “How do you know about the parts you weren’t there for?”
“Because my mom resented me for making him leave!” Scootaloo wailed.
Dash rolled her eyes and placed a hoof on the crying filly’s shoulder. “There, there, kiddo. It’s—uh—” Dash paused as she looked around. Ponies were still glaring at her. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not! My dad’s dead! Now I’m all alone!” Scootaloo wailed again.
“What about your mom?” Dash looked down with concern as Scootaloo blew her nose on a tissue she pulled out of nowhere.
“She died. After dad left, she didn’t know what to do with her life,” the filly managed between sobs.
“She really loved him, huh?” A small smile broke across Dash’s face; she patted Scootaloo on the back.
“No, that hundred and fifty bits paid for her cancer meds.”
Her arm locked in place as Dash fought the urge to smack Scootaloo upside her head. “You’re really pushing my suspension of disbelief here, kid!”
“Scootaloo looked up at her with big, crocodile tears. “It’s the truth.”
A jab to Dash’s heart told her the filly wasn’t lying. She loosened her foreleg and pat the kid on the back once more. “So, how did you find out Nighty was Sombra?”
“A history book last year.”
Dash’s jaw clenched, and her foreleg locked once more. With the way the urge to strike this kid was coming and going as quick as it did, a stabbing pain hit her in the back of her neck. She might have to get treated for whiplash at this rate. "That’s not how time works!"
“What do you mean?” Scootaloo tilted her head to this side, her eyes still overflowing with tears.
“If he went to the past, he would have always been there!” Dash snatched her hoof from Scootaloo’s shoulder and smacked her forehead. “You wouldn’t suddenly find out!”
“Well, I showed the book to mom, and said ‘doesn’t this look like dad?’ And then she said ‘Sombra? Son of a bitch, he used that lame roleplaying name he made me call him!’ And that’s how I found out it was true.”
It took every ounce of willpower not to smack Scootaloo right across her face. “Why would she tell you that?” Dash tried to keep her voice down, but it didn’t happen.
“I guess a cancer patient who resents you just doesn’t have much of a filter.” Scootaloo’s eyes were glued to the dirt.
Dash rolled her head before sighing. If any of this was true, she’d be a downright monster if she hit the kid. “Couldn’t it have been someone else?” she asked in a defeated tone.
The little still couldn’t manage to lift her head even a smidge. “There was a picture in the book. And it looked exactly like the one she had of dad on the mantle at home.”
“So, let me get this all straight. Your dad traveled into the past to get away from paying child support and took over a country?”
“Probably to invade Equestria and change its child support laws.” A small smile came across Scootaloo’s face, almost like she was reminiscing. “That would be so him.” It was short lived, however. Soon Scootaloo’s small smile turned back into a frown. “But now he’s dead!”
Dash shrugged. “Listen, Squirt. If he fled to the past, then he’s basically been dead this whole time. It’s not like you’re just now an orphan.”
“Yeah, but now it’s for real! He’s really dead!” Tears started to flow again with renewed vigor. “It was always kind of nice to know he was still out there somewhere…” her words turned into incoherent sobs.
“Oh, for queen’s sake…” Rainbow Dash muttered to herself.
“But at least I still have my big sister, right?” Scootaloo looked up at Rainbow Dash, her small smile coming back.
“I literally cannot do this anymore,” Dash pushed the filly back.
Scootaloo furrowed her brow in confusion, which quickly turned to terror as Rainbow Dash erupted into green flames. From the fire stepped a giant black figure as tall as Celestia. “R-Rainbow Dash?”
“Nope!” Queen Chrysalis said. “At a certain point, it’s not worth it.”
“W-what? Where? H-how?”
“Now you know how I felt, kid.” Chrysalis rolled her eyes and plopped down on her haunches. “You just kept laying that sad crap on thicker than thicker, I seriously thought I was going to have an aneurysm. Is that some schtick you and the loud one have?”
Scootaloo just stared, horrified. “B-but… What about my dad? Did you make all that up?” Her ears perked up only slightly from where they had been planted the whole conversation.
“Oh, no.” Chrysalis laughed. “He’s super dead.”
When Scootaloo fell down onto her haunches, her shoulders slumped, something happened to Chrysalis. Where she would normally laugh at a filly’s pain, this one seemed different. She tilted her head to the side as she stroked her chin with a hoof. “Say, kid. Since your mom and dad are dead and all, why don’t you come with me? I could be your mom.”
Scootaloo’s ears shot up. Hope boiled to the surface in the soup that was her emotions. “You mean it? It wouldn’t be a problem?”
“What’s another mouth to feed out of a few million, right?” The queen shrugged.
The filly’s wings buzzed, pulling her off her haunches and into the air. “I’d love for you to be my mom!” An awkward frown spread across her face. “The orphanage here doesn’t feed us much, or love us at all,” she added in a mumble.
Chrysalis put on a devilish smirk. “Ha! Yeah, right, kid.”
Scootaloo’s hope sank in an instant, dragging the little filly right down to the ground with it. “Wait, what?”
“I just wanted to see if I could feed off disappointment instead of love.” She took a deep breath, then sighed. “And it turns out I can’t, which is a pretty big bummer. Oh, well.” She shrugged.
Suddenly Chrysalis lifted into the air from her insect-like wings. “Anyway, later, little orange baby horse.” She then took to the sky, leaving Scootaloo behind.
“Mommy?” Scootaloo called after her, her heart thoroughly stomped judging by the leaking tears coming from her eyes dead eyes.
“Your mom’s dead!” Chrysalis called back with a sharp laugh.
The End
