Author's Note

*Unless you're ophidiophobic, in which case, trigger warning: SNAKES! Also, beware if you're thalassophobic, claustrophobic, or generally sensitive to anything.

This is Not a Nightmare*

Torque "opened his eyes" to find that his bed was standing in cool, murky water-like fluid that might very well have been at least half tar up to his knees. The other half of the fluid appeared to be snakes. Cobras, to be precise. And they weren't just in the water. They were everywhere. They swarmed over his bed and his body, periodically baring their fangs as they hissed and made as if to try and bite him. He reacted with the kind of calmness only manageable by a pony whose life was already desolate and whose soul was already just tired of everything, with the potentially fatal threats being shaken off to the tune of mutters of mild disdain.

"Hey! No. Knock it off. Don't you even think about biting me, you little bastards!" Much to his surprise, however mild it may have played, the snakes were cowed and parted just enough to let him move around.

They were still everywhere though. He shook half a dozen tiny ones off his brush before using it to brush more out of his mane. They hissed at him, and a couple that had been framing his bathroom mirror lunged at his face. The first missed entirely, whereas the second succeeded in sinking its fangs into his front left hoof. Instead of the burning pain he was expecting, its venom instead felt like a dull ache.

Kind of like a regret, really. Regret like the expression on the cobra's face when it noticed that he wasn't screaming in horror and agony as the death it promised seized his heart and sealed his fate. The snake slowly pulled its fangs back out of his forehoof and was about to retreat back to its place when he caught it with his magic aura, pulled it up to his face, and bit its head off. How he had not yet learned he was dreaming at this point eluded him; especially as he made a point of making eye contact with each nearby snake in turn as he chewed on the head and noisily swallowed it before tossing away the body. It tasted like a peach, of all things.

None of the other snakes ever opened their mouths in his direction again.

Torque trudged in the direction of his old Guard post, not the least bit hindered by the midnight blue tarry snake-water. This was in spite of its height ranging from his chest to his pasterns, depending on some arbitrary ruling he couldn't begin to guess at. All around him, ponies were screaming in horror and agony as the snakes piling onto them bit them to death, or as the tar sticking to their bodies pinned them in place while the chill of the water sucked all of the life and warmth out of their bodies. He was actually just starting to feel abysmally lonely being the only pony unaffected by the goings on when-

"Hey! You!" A rough, but not unattractive female voice called out, but before he turned his head enough to look, he felt a pair of somethings slamming into his right side with cosmic force. Somethings small and decidedly reminiscent of hooves. He was getting really tired of ponies hitting him out of nowhere, and for no readily apparent reason. Then again, he was often fatigued in general, so drops of water and buckets and all that.

He skidded a good distance to his left in spite of the knee-deep water, and then toppled over with a splash that somehow cleared all of the water and snakes from his- their immediate vicinity. He felt his ribs making a sharp protest as his body hit dry land that wasn't there a second ago. Picking himself up, he turned to glare at his assailant.

"What do you want?" he inquired, though his tone and body language effectively shouted 'Go away!' She didn't get the latter message.

"You look like you can do something about all these snakes, and the flooding." the fire-colored winged mare said as she gestured about them, and her tone carried a demand that he suit action to ability.

Torque noticed that though the snakes were giving him a wide enough berth to avoid her by extension, the ichor she was standing in clung to her body like black taffy. It stretched with her movements, then tried to pull her back down. She seemed to resist it by pure obstinacy, which come to think of it was how he fought depression when he was younger.

"That's a rather strong assumption you're making there, miss."

"Really?" She stamped her free hoof, making the tarry water flee its impact site briefly before rushing in to reclaim the limb. "I don't know who you think you're fooling, but it isn't me. Now get to work!"

"Fine." He replied after a few moments of considering defiance, rolling his eyes as he reluctantly got started. The absurdity of approaching the cleanup of a global catastrophe like a teenager being ordered to take out the trash managed to click into the barely-present conscious part of his mind. "Anything else you want me to handle while I'm at it? Groceries, maybe?"

"Close. Her Royal Majesty, the White Queen also commands that you retrieve your fellow pawns and return them to post."

"Let me guess, they're-"

"At the bottom of the ocean, last I heard."

"Outstanding! I was guessing inside a volcano." Torque smiled that not-smile one could only really justify bringing to bear when using black humor.

"Don't be ridiculous. That's where your post is." the fire-maned pony scowled back, trying to shut down his smile and thus demonstrating her ignorance regarding how it worked.

"I'm going to get started before this gets any more ridiculous."

"Good. You'd-" Bamf! "-better. Damn unicorns." Spitfire hissed and muttered as she suddenly found the two of them in another location.

She was about to ask how he knew this was the ocean, until she saw the moon hovering just a short distance over the horizon, lighting both the bleak clouds blanketing the sky above and the even bleaker waters below it. At which point she wondered how that clued her in that this was the ocean. Especially since the shore was littered with marsh grasses. In fact, half of her experience was trying to piece together how anything was relevant to anything here. She was definitely not a fan of either snakes or things that restricted her ability to move, and was certain she would be terrified right out of her mind if she wasn't so Celestia-forsaken confused about the whole deal. "A million is a statistic" apparently also applied to sources of fear.

"If I were you, I'd be careful with my distribution of cursed words in this place." Torque said cheekily as he surrounded himself in a dome barrier, then started walking into the deeper water.

"Hey! Wait!" Spitfire shouted after him, indignant that he neither included her in his dome nor made one for her. That was until she noticed that the water was not falling in his wake, even once he'd gone far enough in that his bubble was completely under the surface.

"Why would I wait for you? You're not helping, and you haven't given me the slightest inclination to like you."

"I'm helping!" Spitfire insisted, to which Torque wheeled on her, then scowled slightly and cocked his head just enough to the right for the inclination to be visible. "I helped... I told you what you needed to do and where you needed to go."

"Well!" Torque snapped as he wheeled back. "Do let me know if you need somepony to be contracted for the creation of your medal."

"Excuse me!" Spitfire shouted as she galloped forward until she was just behind Torque, but didn't lower her volume once she was within range of a whispered conversation. "Who do you think you are? Do you have any idea who I am?"

"Judging by your appearance and voice, I'd peg you for Spitfire. Commander of the Wonderbolts' Canterlot Branch, and the primary face of the organization. Also, in spite of your comparatively low rank within said service, you are somehow responsible for making a lot of decisions that would ordinarily be well above your pay grade, perhaps in part due to your association with the nobility. We've only met about twenty times in the past half year. Now, I absolutely hate this game thanks in large part to the aforementioned nobles, but since you started, it's your turn." He glared down at her, the bags under his eyes intensifying the expression. "Do you have any idea who I am?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I obviously can't be bothered to remember every whimpering sycophant who comes crawling to beg me for patronage and endorsement." Spitfire sneered, then stopped suddenly when she realized that there was more to this conversation than a contest of wills, and she had just talked herself into a corner. In hindsight, she had never bothered to attempt to learn more about who this pony was, and learning that he was formerly of the Guard should have been a wake-up call. "Wait... wait. I recognize you now. You... you used to be Number 64 of Her Majesty's 100, didn't you? Iron Driver."

Her delivery of the nickname he'd received in the Royal Guard opened an emotional floodgate... -for Spitfire. Unbeknownst to him prior to this point, she had been extremely attached to the image of who he used to be. But he could tell by the way she was "winding up" that she was about to thoroughly inform him.

"You used to be the poster colt for the personal integrity in the Guard! You used to be an icon! A role model for colts to aspire to and a dream for fillies! I even have your trading card for pony's sake!" To punctuate this outburst, she tucked her head back and pulled a card from one of the pockets which pegasi sometimes mysteriously had under their wings and threw it down onto the ground in front of him, face up. Apparently the photographer had caught him in a bad mood. Albeit, not nearly as bad as that afflicting the mare now pointing an accusing hoof at it as she continued to bellow at him while her eyes welled up and eventually started overflowing with tears. "I touched myself to that! But then you had to go and let me and everypony whoever looked up to you down! Now, you're nothing but a quitter! A self-made loser! You abandoned your team! And I..."

Spitfire's tirade broke down at this point, her hate taking her down as it turned inward. Only now that she'd stopped shouting at him was he able to register the tendrils of black tar snaking their way up her legs and over her body to ensnare it like a net. He wanted to free her, but had no idea what to do, since trying to blast the ichor carried the risk of hurting her. So for a time, he could only watch.

"I'm a stupid hypocrite..." she sobbed.

"I really am a disgrace to this uniform," she muttered as she reached for her left shoulder with her right hoof and tore off that portion of her Wonderbolt body suit. Incidentally, that also freed her of that portion of the "net", despite her seeming unawareness of its presence.

"I tried to wall out our best prospect with red tape even though I owed her my life and those of my wing-mates, all so I wouldn't have to let her see the truth of what we were." she mirrored the action on the other side.

"I abandoned one of our members when he was injured and replaced him with the aforementioned prospect just to preserve our image in the public eye." she tore off the left half of the midsection now, leaving the right to dangle off the corresponding wing.

"I tried to treat the Wonderbolts like a military even though we've never really contributed anything to the defense of Equestria's sovereignty." she tore off the right half, leaving only leggings.

"I promoted an environment of ruthless pursuit of greatness, then I shot down the pony who suited it best when our Corps' new hero called me out on it. Like a coward, I threw our most capable Cadet under the chariot because I couldn't stomach what she revealed about me." Spitfire kicked off her leggings, then trampled them and tore the large pieces of her uniform into smaller ones. There was something cathartic about destroying the thing she'd realized that she'd been sacrificing other ponies to preserve. "I didn't see her again for months, and the whole time, I almost couldn't sleep because I was afraid that she... that she did what I might have done, if I'd been on the receiving end of what I did to her."

The mare looked up at the stallion with the expression that was almost his trademark, had it not already been copyrighted by Celestia: a smile that was not a smile, but which existed nonetheless because admitting the emotional pain would have only made it worse.

"I guess in the end... you were right about this, too. About quitting when you no longer serve your purpose. I should have done it sooner myself, you know, before I started ruining lives and trampling dreams. I just have to know: how do you do it? How are you always so right all the time, even when your rightness looks so wrong?"

A long moment stretched between them as Torque processed all of what she said. After closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he opened them again to take and hold her gaze.

"Well, it's simple really." he walked over to Spitfire and pulled her into a hug identical to the one he gave Lightning not too long ago. "I've never had a choice. Whenever I reached a point in my life where I faced a conundrum between personal happiness and the well-being of other ponies, I've always strongly felt that the decision has already been made for me."