Megan sighed as she patted her old girl on the snout. The horse snorted gleefully, and gingerly pressed her soft nose against the shaking touch of Megan's fingers. The young woman stroked the animal, desperately tried to focus on the texture of her fur and luscious mane, instead of on today. Because today, familiar and nostalgic, beat down on her back. As soon as she looked at the calendar this morning she wished she hadn't. So now she was just trying to... ignore it.
Megan sighed again.
It had been years. Years, and she still couldn't stop thinking about what happened to her. Or, more accurately, what hadn't happened to her.
She wasn't even supposed to be thinking about it. She knew that. Whenever she did it just... confused her, by how vivid it had all seemed at the time. How real and haunting it was now that it was really gone for good. It wasn't good for her to reinforce this lie in her head. So she didn't think about it. She forced herself not to, despite how much the nostalgia ached in her chest here, despite the dream she had again last night, for the third night in a row.
-- And oh, it had been a wonderful dream. A soft pink body with an electric blue mop of hair; all of her real friends sitting by her as she brushed them; the feeling of soft manes beneath her palms. It had been so bright, so wonderful and calm...
She woke up from that dream tense and soaked with sweat.
Megan shook her head. No. Don't think about it. She was a young woman now. All of that was behind her.
There was also a scream and a splashing sound behind her.
Megan dropped her hand as her horse snorted and jerked in fear. Both of her arms fell heavy to her sides, heavy and numb. Her hearing cut out to a ring, to the frantic jump of her pulse. She sucked in a ragged breath, shook her head-- it was just a bird, or some sort of animal, it couldn't be anything else. Realistically, it couldn't be her again, it--
"Hey, little help?! Hello?!"
Megan blinked. Cleared her throat. Breathed.
When Megan was little, she had been kidnapped. Or at least, that's what they told her.
Her parents came outside one day to find their daughter gone. They searched for her days, weeks, months... over a year went by, with the entire town desperately trying to track down the bright little girl who went missing. When she did finally come back, it was to worried faces, the flash of police lights, and then to a group of men speaking to her at her house.
Megan told them everything. About how she saved the ponies from the terror of the demon Tirek, who wanted them to pull his chariot, and then plunge Ponyland into an eternal darkness. She told them about how Firefly was the one to take her there, and about how she quickly befriended all of the ponies in the castle, to the point where she loved staying with them. Megan described every adventure in vivid detail; she explained about sea ponies and dragons and wizards, and the hundreds of other forms of magic she had experienced with her pony friends. Her pony friends who, as she had insisted, were her very best friends. She hadn't thought she was gone from home for so long, and she was sorry... but she still missed the ponies.
Her mom and dad had only crushed her into a sobbing hug. She heard one of the men she was talking to call her delusional.
For months of her life following coming back home, she was dumped from small blue room to small blue room, from smiling man to smiling woman. They thought she was lying, no matter how much she promised she wasn't; no matter what she did or what she said, all of them told her that she was either lying or mistaken, clearly having twisted this fantasy to cover the trauma she had experienced. They studied her, examined her thoughts, forced her to draw pictures, gave her medication.
Eventually she figured out that the only way to make them happy was to pretend to agree with what they said. Eventually she didn't need to pretend, because she'd convinced more than just the doctors.
And then, years later, just three days prior to now, it came back into her life. She had forgotten. She really had. Megan's family never brought it up because they didn't want to think about it, which made it easy for time to whisk her childhood memories away. Until the dreams came back, she was almost normal.
Now, there it was. Behind her. They were here again.
She couldn't do this. She was better. They weren't real.
"Hey! You're Megan, right? I know you're up there!"
She was sweating. She couldn't breathe.
Megan numbly turned around and tried not to vomit. She stared at that damn well, at the sounds of sloshing water and the raspy voice rising from its depths. Behind her, her horse fidgeted in its stall.
She walked slowly up to the well. She couldn't feel her legs. When she peered over the stone edge, she felt her world cant to the side, and her vision go faint.
It really was one of them. Not the one she expected. She thought for sure she would stare down into that well and see a familiar shock of pink fur and blue mane, smiling like a doof at her from the water pail. But now the water pail wasn't down there, and the pony who was, wasn't Firefly.
The blue coat practically burned her eyes, and the rainbow on her head and behind weren't any better. Those big cute bug-eyes, like two fish bowls in the ponies head, gazed up at her in a vibrant magenta glint.
Megan shivered, and her hands twitched. She resisted the urge to scream.
"What do you want?" Megan whispered.
"It is you!" the pony exclaimed. Her voice echoed off the stone. "Listen, I don't have time to explain, but Equestria is in big trouble! Princess Celestia and Twilight sent me to get you. They said you'd be able to help us, somehow. We have to go like, right now."
Megan blinked at her. Equestria? Princess Celestia?
God... she really was crazy, wasn't she? Megan shook her head. She couldn't do this.
"I don't care. Get away from me and never come back," she mumbled.
The pony narrowed her thick eyelashes and glared at her. Her hooves sloshed at the deep water below her. "Yeah, yeah, nice to meet you too. Celestia said you might be like this. Look, I didn't like flying all the way out here either, but my friends are in trouble. I don't know what the hay a monkey-thing like you would do, but apparently you know a lot about friendship."
Megan shook her head again. She turned around stiffly, slowly. Her whole body ached and shivered.
"Um, excuse me, Megan," the pony barked. "but I didn't fly all the way from Equestria just for some girl to be a jerk! What happened to the loyalty you had to your pony friends? The Princesses told me you used to help ponies all the time!"
Megan didn't stop walking.
"Hey! I'm Rainbow Dash, Element of Loyalty, okay? And even with all my awesomeness, I can't do this alone. I don't know what the hay is wrong with you, but we need you to save Equestria! My friends could be getting hurt right now!"
She kept on going, with her twitching hands shoved over her ears, until she reached the closest tree. An apple tree, the ruby red fruits glistening in the light. Megan focused on their colors, the shining of their skin, as she sat down at the tree's base. Anything but the pony in her well. This wouldn't happen again. It couldn't.
"Fine. I'll find somepony else to rescue my friends!"
There was some more sloshing, and he clicks of hooves clawing at smooth stone.
"Ow! Uhh.... I might have a problem."
Megan leaned against the tree.
"Hey! Are you there?! Come back! I-I think my wing might be busted or something. I can't fly. Hello?!"
She stared up at the sky and rubbed her shaking hands to her blue jeans.
"Hey, so maybe I was kind of a jerk to you, since you weren't expecting a flying pony and all, but I kind of really need your help! How deep is this thing? I... I can't keep myself above the water for too long. Hello? I... please! Help!"
When Megan was little, she had been kidnapped. A man drove up to her ranch and desperately pleaded for her to go with him, to help put out a fire that was threatening his pets. Megan, a brave little girl, had of course gotten into his car, and was stolen by a sick, disgusting, lying man. She didn't know where he took her, or what exactly he did to her while she was with him -- they never told her that. All she knew was that she was taken from her home, from her loving and caring parents for over a year while they chased to find their daughter, hopefully alive. When Megan escaped her captor late one night and returned home, she blocked the memory of the traumatic experience by twisting it into a fantasy scenario, where she was a hero surrounded by cute equine friends. It was a way of coping, they had told her parents.
Maybe, just maybe, if she let herself go through this fantasy, she would finally believe those people. The dreams would stop, and she could finally stop being that lonely girl who wished for friends so badly that she had to create her own. Maybe it was just because she was avoiding it before, and now they would finally be gone for good.
Megan smiled. Her face hurt.
Maybe.
"Help me! Help me, please! My friends will die if I don't get out of here!"
Megan sat, her back to that apple tree, until the screaming and splashing turned to a cold, final silence.
