Consent

by President Dead

Rating: mature
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Death, Human, Thriller, Rainbow Dash, Horror, Profanity, Violence
Length: 5482

A meditation on Fate, order, and inherited guilt. With Rainbow Dash.

Mark is 17 years old and terrified of the conclusions he has reached about the nature of the universe. He is also desperate not to become like a father he never understood.

But now that Rainbow Dash has come to stay, Mark feels that he may finally be able to shake off the pain of the past and become the person he is supposed to be. He is not entirely wrong.

Published 2017-12-20 01:50:12 UTC
Last updated 2017-12-20 01:50:12 UTC

Consent

I’ll just come out and say it: Rainbow Dash was never my favourite pony. Not by a long shot. Being a 17-year-old socially inept introvert, my number one has always been Fluttershy. The yellow pony’s persistent struggles in an aggressively collectivist world meant that I had finally found a character with whom I could instantly empathise. Plus, she was just plain fucking adorable. Nonetheless, with her irresistibly boisterous personality, R.D. quickly became a close second in my OCD-induced hierarchy.

I remember when I first began watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. I was 15 years of age, fresh out of high school, and all I had to watch it on was a shitty, barely functional Samsung tablet, which had a battery life of probably thirty minutes total, if not less, and refused to play Dailymotion videos, for some reason. In short, it was a freebie. I literally had to copy the link of each video, paste it into an online Dailymotion downloader, and play them from there. Don’t ask me how that works. And as if this grueling clusterfuck of a process wasn’t stressful enough, I also had the torment of coming to terms with my socially aberrant newfound interest to contend with. Pure trauma. Oh well, it’s probably that way for all bronies initially, I suppose.

Anyhow, when Rainbow Dash somehow managed to, I don’t know, jump between worlds or some shit and manifest herself in reality, I was still living with my mother. My arsehole dad left the two of us when I was ten, just over seven years ago, so fuck him. Dashie’s arrival one bracing winter night was astounding, of course, but my absolute joy at finally having the unique and, frankly, terrifying opportunity of interacting with one of my obsessions in the flesh considerably outweighed any potential skepticism (i.e., suspicions of having, I don’t know, lost my mind) that likely would have arisen in such a circumstance.

R.D. herself, rather surprisingly, made herself at home remarkably quickly, adapting to her new surroundings far more readily than I probably would have, had I been in her position. Resourceful girl, that one. She essentially straight-off-the-bat told me what was what, and that was that.

My room was obviously where Rainbow stayed, sleeping with me in my bed and spending her spare time (that is, all her time) perusing the contents of my bookshelf, desk and desk drawer, closet, and even screwing around with the electric keyboard I stopped using sometime after my 15th birthday. There was so much she wanted to explore and do and know, and I was thankful that I had such a wide variety of interests and breadth of knowledge to share with her. Naturally, I began with heavy metal. Aren’t I responsible?

“Heavy metal,” I say in my “professional”, slightly pretentious voice that I use when explaining things to the uninitiated, “is a genre of music characterised by a dense, heavy sound, emphatic beats, and a general sense of loudness and aggression. It’s essentially music by angry people for angry people.”

Rainbow Dash and I are sitting across from one another in my room, R.D. on my bed, and me at my desk. The pony is curled up on the fuzzy, blue-green blanket, polychromatic tail spilling onto the floor, head resting on her forelegs, and magenta eyes wide. She’s been here three days now, and we still haven’t run out of things to talk about. Not even close. Well, I mean, it is me doing the majority of the talking, admittedly, but it isn’t to the point that our conversations would be considered a monologue. I’ve mainly just been ranting about the Dante’s Inferno that is the 21st century. Well, that and how the blood which runs through the veins of Western society is a revolting, bile-like mixture of hedonistic consumerism, blatant oppression, and materialistic superficiality. You know, edgy shit. But in any case, I still have college, not to mention numerous assignments, so any lengthy verbal exchanges between Rainbow Dash and myself are typically limited to any time either before 8 a.m. or after 4:30 p.m., if that.

My mother, bless her, has been working late since “the paternal fuck” (which is what I’ve come to refer to my absent father as) departed and is, as a result, both always exhausted and rarely present, which means that it’s relatively easy for me to keep my pony friend concealed. By the time I get up in the mornings, my mother has already left, and during the evenings when she is home earlier than usual, I simply take a second helping of dinner back to my room or, failing that, just raid the fridge afterward. It’s all stupefyingly straightforward. Some things are meant to be, right?

“I pride myself in enjoying a diverse range of music,” I continue, trying hard to impress Dash, who, contrary to what she would have others believe, is actually quite easily impressed, “but heavy metal, industrial metal, hard rock, and blues rock are by far my favourites. I made the mistake of starting with the less intense stuff first, and then moving onto the more intense stuff later, which meant that the latter unfortunately took me a while to adjust to. With you, however, we’re not going to make the same mistake. So, Rainbow Dash, without further ado, let me to introduce you to the mighty Slipknot.”

It is currently 5 p.m., and my mother isn’t due back for another three hours. Today is an early day, so she and I will be eating dinner together. That’s okay. As I said, Dashie’s and my system allows for this.

I double-click on the meticulously organised music folder on my laptop, wittily entitled “The Folder of Sexy Sounds”, crank up the volume, and play Slipknot’s “Left Behind”, from their second studio album Iowa.

R.D.’s ears perk up, and she sits up a bit. “Whoa,” she says, satisfyingly wide-eyed, “that is loud.”

I grin, but my armpits are sweating uncontrollably, and it’s annoying me. Why do I have to be so damn insecure about literally everything I do? “The vocalist’s name is Corey Taylor. He’s amazing.”

“We all got left behind, we let it all slip away,” Corey bellows from my laptop speakers, his raw, throaty scream an orgasmic attack on the eardrums.

I close Windows Media Player with a minute still left to go. Songs with excessively long outros, no matter how good what preceded them was, annoy me.

“Got any more?” Rainbow asks with a roguish smile. “This band rocks.” I am only too happy to oblige.

That night, I get into bed at around about midnight, as usual. Rainbow Dash is waiting for me. She is already half-asleep, so I carefully pull back the blanket a little and slip in beside her. Almost instinctively, Dashie moves around a bit and places her soft head against my shoulder. She doesn’t open her eyes.

“Mark?” Rainbow whispers sleepily in the blue-dark, nuzzling me gently.

“Yeah, R.D.?” I whisper back.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course,” I reply without hesitation. I immediately wince, hoping my haste didn’t come across as creepy or insincere, but the question doesn’t even warrant a moment’s consideration.

“How much?” Dash persists. I can hear the upward curl of her lips.

“Well, maybe not as much as Corey Taylor…” I say, smiling up at the endless black of the ceiling. The endless black smiles back at me.

Rainbow Dash giggles that husky giggle of hers, snuggling in closer, and my heart is suddenly the size of a beach ball. That’s been happening a lot lately.

The day she arrived, I asked Dashie how in the dead god’s name she had managed to find herself here. She said she didn’t know, so I didn’t ask again.

On the morning of day five, Rainbow Dash and I are having breakfast together. Persistent anxiety has resulted in a lack of appetite in the mornings for me, but because I still have college, I make an effort.

“So, what are you actually doing at school?” R.D. asks. Her bowl is roughly 105% cornflakes and -5% milk, if that. Watching her attempting to use a spoon is most amusing.

“Um, well…” I say, “in English, we’re studying this novel Slaughterhouse-Five – by Kurt Vonnegut – and learning about this really interesting movement, postmodernism.”

“What’s that?” Rainbow asks thickly, mouth full of desiccated breakfast.

“Postmodernism? Uh… it’s kind of difficult to explain…” I reply thoughtfully. “But basically, it’s, like, a field of philosophical thought that questions the nature of stuff like truth and morality and time. But, you know, I’m not explaining it very well at all, so...”

“Huh, okay,” says Dashie. “So, what’s the point of it? Like, learning about it?”

I shrug. “I guess it’s just supposed to be intellectually stimulating or whatever. I mean, all philosophy basically boils down to people more intelligent than we are encouraging us to re-evaluate our ideas about, well, everything.” I smile over at Dash. “Usually in a highly condescending manner, of course.”

Sometimes, I want to ask Rainbow about Fluttershy and the others, but I have no idea what to ask. I’m the one who watches the show, after all.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly bold, I take Rainbow Dash up the hill to this isolated area at the very summit, where nobody aside from myself ever seems to go. It’s open enough for Dashie to fly around and play freely, but concealed enough that she may do so unobserved. There is a dirt path there, peeling, ugly eucalyptus trees on one side, and thick, ominous pines on the other, rocks everywhere, leading down to a highway that was never completed. By all accounts, it’s quite perfect.

We usually go to the hill at sunset. As it is winter, our resident star sets at around 5 p.m., and Dash can rocket through the bleeding, pastel sky at her heart’s content, wheeling and soaring and turning somersaults, showing off just for yours truly. She always wants to demonstrate her legendary sonic rainboom, but as much as I would have loved to witness it firsthand, I know it would be terribly dangerous for both of us. I may be a bit of a risk-taker at heart, but I’m not an idiot. I have a very paranoid, conservative mindset when it comes to things that I hold dear, and Dash clearly falls into that category.

These are quite possibly my favourite moments spent with Rainbow Dash, actually; just young man and pegasus alone at the failing of the light, the dying of the subjective world. I find it quite profound that the light is at its most beautiful when facing its inevitable surrender to the long dark, to the uncompromising power of the void. It is my belief that this is the nearest I will ever get to Equestria, to unadulterated faultlessness, to incontrovertible perfection. And then it’s gone. That may sound a little morbid, but I think it’s a really beautiful idea – tragic, sure, but beautiful. Man and beast united for the close. The ultimate union between ugly industry and industrious beauty. Watching Rainbow Dash laughing ecstatically from below, calling down to me, my life feels whole, meaningful. Without her, I’d be just like that highway at the end of the dirt path. A road leading nowhere. A signifier signifying nothing. Empty and incomplete.

And when it’s raining, or there are other people out and about for some reason, R.D. and I simply stay at home, where she seems satisfied to zip around my bedroom and the rest of the house like a mini, multicoloured tornado or an equestrian, possibly lesbian Barry Allen with wings. She is indomitable. Indomitable.

My mother is wearily thanking me for something or other from the kitchen. I can’t make out what she’s going on about, and I don’t exactly care, so I just say, “okay. No problem.”

On day seven, I introduce Rainbow Dash to Doctor Who. Having completed my History assignment draft, I allow the two of us to watch the first few episodes of the first series in one sitting. Dashie loves it, particularly the concept of the TARDIS and the overall romanticism of the show, but it’s late, and she falls asleep with her head on my thigh midway through the third episode. I can’t wait until we get to the Tenth Doctor. David Tennant is my favourite. In a world bereft of excellence, bereft of morality, and bereft of self-determination, it was he who came the closest to living up to my young, seven-year-old mind’s idealistic notion of what a force for good would look like. I still enjoy thinking like that to this day, even though, ten years on, I now know it was all just wishful fantasy. Well, until R.D. came along, that is.

I like film noir. Roger Ebert once wrote in his review of Batman Returns that “the very essence of noir is that there are no more heroes.” I like that. I don’t believe in heroes either.

Rainbow Dash appears to have taken an interest in postmodernism. I’m not quite sure she understands a word of what I tell her about it, but I’m fairly certain it fascinates her. Dashie has taken to sitting with me while I toil away on the scaffold for my Slaughterhouse-Five in-class essay. She seems particularly interested in Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who has “come unstuck in time” and apparently regularly experiences both time and space travel. I’m not convinced, but R.D. loves the idea.

“So, how does he do it?” Rainbow asks me, head resting on my desk and watching me type. “Travel through time, I mean?”

“Well, the thing is, Dash,” I say, knocking away at my laptop keyboard like a man possessed, “Billy might not actually be traveling through time. He might just have post-traumatic stress disorder, which results in his mind being torn back to all the horrible memories from the war.”

“But what about the aliens?” she persists.

I smile to myself. Dashie reminds me of this one guy I know, who just refuses leave any stone unturned. “What, these so-called Tralfamadorians? Well, the thing is, Rainbow, Billy Pilgrim loves this one science fiction author called Kilgore Trout and reads his books almost religiously. So, I get the feeling that Billy’s basically just, like, incorporating many of the ideas presented in these books and science fiction, generally, to explain all of the incomprehensible phenomena that he has experienced over the course of his life. So, for example, the Tralfamadorian philosophy that there is no free will – that is, that we don’t have control over our own lives – can be seen as Billy’s rationalisation of events such as his unwilling conscription into the war, which his mind can’t understand. In short, he’s making unconscious excuses.”

“Huh,” said Rainbow Dash blankly. “I guess that makes sense.”

I look at her and grin slightly condescendingly. “Sure it does.”

“Quiet yourself!” Dashie laughs. “Quiet yourself” is one of my own personal phrases, and I’m ever so proud of her for using it.

“The point is, Dash,” I laugh, “the only certainty is that there is none.”

“What, so, like, does that mean I might not even be real at all?” says Dashie mischievously.

I punch her foreleg gently. “Shut up, of course you’re real.”

“But I might not be,” R.D. perseveres. “You just said that nothing’s certain, right?”

I scoff. “Well, I mean, that doesn’t necessarily entail that some things aren’t more certain than others. Like, I’m more inclined to believe we’re all living in a simulated reality, as opposed to that we’re all, I don’t know, ants.”

Rainbow snickers. I wonder if she knew what I meant by “simulated reality.” Suddenly, she pounces.

The two of us crash to the floor in a whirlwind of arms, legs, hands, hooves, feathers, and wings. Dashie is now apparently trying to tickle me. I haven’t been tickled in probably a decade. It’s actually horrifying.

“Dash, get off me,” I gasp breathlessly, helplessly. “I need to finish this damn scaffold before Wednesday!”

Eventually, Rainbow Dash rolls away, giggling, and she and I just remain lying next to one another on the floor, staring up at the cream-coloured ceiling.

I sigh and turn my head oh-so-slightly to look at Dashie. Her mane is all ruffled, and she looks utterly gorgeous, bathed in the golden light of late afternoon, streaming in through my window. “I really love having you around,” I tell her. I mean it, too. Maybe existence isn’t, in fact, inherently unenjoyable?

“No problem,” Rainbow replies sweetly, getting to her hooves and brushing her mane out of her face. She leans down, pressing her furry forehead against mine, and we gaze into each other’s eyes until we both go cross-eyed and are forced to look away. Whelp, back to postmodernism.

Why did I not ask her again? Was I scared that she was lying? Or did I, on some level, recognise the presence of Fate’s holy hand?

I’ve started lending Rainbow Dash my mobile phone and headphones so she can to listen to my, admittedly rather amazing, collection of music while I’m working. One day, while I’m attempting to bullshit my way through a History assignment, R.D. casually asks me from my bed, “Hey, Mark, what does ‘fuck’ mean?”

I laugh for a good minute and eventually manage to choke out that I can’t define “fuck” because it’s not appropriate. Later, however, my stomach begins to churn, and I feel panicked, but can’t figure out why.

Occasionally, I find myself impulsively treating Dashie like a pet. It always upsets me when I catch myself doing this. Rainbow Dash is not a pet. She is my friend. In fact, she’s like my step-sibling in many respects. And not in a creepy way, either. She’s not even my lover. In this regard, I’m actually quite glad it wasn’t Fluttershy that appeared. Had it been Fluttershy, I definitely would have made advances on her, whether I intended to or not. That probably would have been bad. Knowing me, I would likely have scared her away, made her hate me. And just for the record, I have never, ever clopped. Not once. I would never do that.

One day (the eleventh, to be precise), I get careless.

“Mark!” I hear my mother calling from... someplace.

“Yeah?” I shout back impatiently and more than a little discourteously. Dash and I are sitting on my bed, watching Doctor Who on my laptop. Christopher Eccleston has just kissed Billie Piper, absorbing the unstoppable power of the time vortex and, thus, saving her mortal life. I really should be working on my creative response for English, but I can feel how tense Dash is, and it’s just so satisfying.

Suddenly, I hear my mother’s footsteps down the hallway. She’s coming toward my room.

“Shit!” I hiss, jumping off the bed. “Dash, get in the closet!” I whisper desperately.

Rainbow Dash immediately zips inside, shutting the twin doors behind her. And just in time, too.

“Mark?” says my mother, opening my door. She looks tired and cross, which, to be fair, isn’t unusual. She blinks. “What are you doing just standing there?”

“Nothing,” I reply, feigning irritation, but really, my heart is pumping, and I’m feeling somewhat lightheaded.

At this very moment, one of the closet’s doors swings open slightly. Oh goddammit, Dashie didn’t close it properly! And what’s more, my mother has seen this! She begins walking toward it.

“Mum, don’t…!” I say frantically.

My mother stops and looks at me, frowning suspiciously, and then opens the door fully. She stares for a moment, which seems to last (cliché alert) an eternity, before looking back at me. I don’t know what being on the brink of death feels like, but I get the impression I am experiencing something akin to it now.

“God,” my mother says disapprovingly. She points at the pile of clothes lying unceremoniously on the carpeted floor of the closet. “Clean this up already. If these clothes are too small for you, please just throw them out. And why didn’t you unload the dishwasher after school today? You always do it.”

I don’t know how Dash and I have gotten away with this, but we have. “S-sorry,” I mumble. It’s all I can manage.

My mother sighs and finally leaves the room. Rainbow Dash and I stay exactly where we are for a full thirty seconds before moving. R.D. emerges from behind the set of battered, brown wicker clothes drawers and exhales shakily. “I think we won,” she chuckles nervously.

I bend over, putting my hands on my knees. “Holy Nietzsche,” I wheeze. “Let’s not do that again.”

Dashie looks at me pointedly, faintly mocking. “Let’s not not unload the dishwasher again.” She laughs.

My father is in prison. He tried to murder my mother one night while drunk, five years to the day he left us. He told the judge that he did it because he loved her, tears all down his fucking face, but I’m not really certain how attempting to bash someone’s head in with a wooden knife block constitutes an expression of adoration. I guess I should be grateful that the man, intentionally or otherwise, emptied the block of all knives first. His lawyer pleaded temporary insanity. He got three years. My mother has filed a restraining order for when my dad gets out, but still insists on visiting him every two weeks. I understand why she does it, and I’ll never say anything to her about it, but I really wish she’d just… stop.

On day twelve, Dashie and I are playing catch on the hill with an old tennis ball I found tucked away in a cupboard. It probably belonged to our old golden retriever, Fergus. R.D. is up in the air, as per normal, and I am down on the ground, craning my neck to see her. It’s growing dark rather quickly, so we’ll have to leave soon, but I’m pretty sure we still have at least a good ten minutes left before the sun has fully set.

In Theory of Knowledge, we are learning about aesthetics, and seeing Dash up there among the fiery pinks and oranges is perhaps the most incredible thing I have ever had the privilege of witnessing. And my perception of beauty, being intellectually imbued, is quite exceptional. Yes, yes, I’m arrogant, I know.

“Throw it faster, slowpoke!” Rainbow Dash shouts playfully, and I oblige. She catches the ball with ease, and ascends a further few metres upward before throwing it back.

All at once, I suddenly feel extremely depressed. Fatigue follows immediately afterward. I sit down heavily on the grass, and the tennis ball barely misses my head, bouncing off the dirt beside me and rolling away.

“Hey,” says Dashie, coming down and hovering before me, “what’s up? You okay?”

“Sorry,” I say, massaging my temples and running a hand through my already windswept hair. I wince, for some reason. “Let’s go home. It’s getting dark.” I’m going to go ahead and blame this incident on behavioural determinism.

Dash and I have stopped watching Doctor Who. Probably because I’m bogged down with assignments. We didn’t even get up to when David Tennant was really awesome in the role.

It’s been two weeks, and I’m starting to lose it. Why is Rainbow Dash still so happy living here with me? Isn’t she missing her friends? Her home?

“Dammit,” I growl, scrunching up the little piece of paper I have been writing on, throw it in the bin.

Dashie looks up from my phone. She has been playing Reaper. It’s probably a little too violent for her, but at this point, I really couldn’t give a fuck. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I sigh without looking up. “I just got two items on my to-do list the wrong way around.”

“Why does that matter?” Rainbow Dash asks curiously. “I mean, the point is that the items are all on there, right? Not which order they’re in?”

I sigh again. “Yeah, but I just…” I’m struggling to explain, to justify the complexities of my absurd logic, as always. “It just… annoys me. That’s all. I like things to be… in order, you know? I like… order. I can’t help it.”

“Maybe we can do something about that?” R.D. suggests pleasantly. “Together.”

“Rainbow, you know I love you, but shut the fuck up, and let me write my goddamn list, okay?!” I snap.

Am I... my father?

“Irreverence is my disease. It‘s secondhand, but you know me.”

Shut up, Corey Taylor.

Rainbow’s presence in my bed at night is no longer comforting. I apologised as soon as I snapped at her, but the darkness has begun whispering to me. The Abyss calls. Tendrils of shrieking emptiness force their way down my throat and into my lungs, deep, deep inside the darkest regions of my body. I feel them there, and it feels like I’m being eaten alive. A vice, crushing my skull. The second heartbeat beside me is the persistent pulse of madness, and I am so afraid. There’s someone else here, but I don’t know who.

I can’t take this anymore. I can’t do it. I jump out of bed and rush out the door, down the hallway, into the bathroom. I turn on the light. Oh God, that’s actually so much better. I sigh, trembling palms gripping the sink’s edge, slippery with sweat. The feel of my bare feet on the cold tile is refreshing. I look up.

My father stares back at me from the other side of the mirror. We have the same wavy, brown-blond hair and jawline. His shirt is wet with blood, and in his right hand, the knife block. I feel myself beginning to hyperventilate. I haven’t had an asthma attack since the fifth grade. But it’s not real. It’s not fucking real. It can’t be. I’m dreaming. This is just some Twin Peaks shit. I close my eyes, and then slowly re-open them. There, he’s gone. Too easy.

Only… I‘m the one now holding the knife block. And my pajama shirt is covered in blood. I think I throw up. I’m pretty sure I pass out.

I was there when my dad forced his way inside while drunk. And I did nothing to prevent what followed.

“We bury what we fear the most. Approaching original violence.”

Seriously, Corey, shut your cunt mouth before I shut it for you. I won’t tell you again, motherfucker.

In the howling, polychrome blackness, Other Mark waits for me. I feel his sweltering impatience penetrate my being like a swift slice from a razor blade. His eyes are fathomless, and his open mouth is a jagged hole hewn into his face with a serrated knife. I open my rib cage and allow the sky to touch my heart, the stars to bleed into my soul as the two of us converse. Which wolf do you feed? How much malice can be contained within a single plane of reality? And where is it all kept? Other Mark’s voice crackles like a naked flame. He drags his blackened claws down my countenance and shoves them into my throat.

The outsider is too pure.

Too fucking pure.

She shouldn’t be here.

She doesn’t belong.

Purity is impurity.

Impurity is contamination.

Contamination is chaos.

You are aware of this, aren’t you?

But she’s changing.

She’s becoming more like me.

She’s not pure any longer.

It’s all going to be okay, you’ll see.

No, it’s not.

Purity must be preserved, just not here.

Purity has no place among us.

You’re not making any sense.

You’re contradicting yourself.

No, it’s we.

And we are making perfect sense.

Contradiction is not the problem.

Well, what is, pray tell?

She’s the fucking problem, you idiot.

You motherfucker, you leave her alone.

You have to send her back.

Send her back?

What do you mean?

Back where?

You know where, you dumb fuck, you arsehole.

Don’t make me do this.

She’s my everything.

The cord will reap.

The cord will remember.

The cord will recur.

No…

Please…

“My future seems like one big past. You‘re left with me cos you left me no choice.”

Eternal return is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.

Time is a flat circle, and existence is recurrence.

When I dare to look in the mirror again, I notice that the blood vessels in my eyes have burst.

On day sixteen, I get home from school, and Rainbow Dash is waiting for me in my room, as usual. She’s been watching those fucking cunt YouTubers again. When she sees me, she launches herself at yours truly with one flap of her wings, embracing me happily. She’s so soft. I can’t help it, I begin to cry.

Dash pulls away from me, concern and fear showing in her large eyes. “Mark? What’s wrong?” she begs me, holding my head in her hooves.

But I’m unintelligible, my entire body shaking violently and saliva dripping from my mouth. Shameful, I know.

Eventually, I manage to calm down sufficiently to be able to successfully form words again. “Dashie,” I choke, “y-you need to go home. You can’t stay here.”

Rainbow smiles at me sympathetically and places her hooves gently against my arms. “But I am home, Mark. I belong here. With you.” She pulls me into another hug, rubbing my back and making reassuring sounds. I suddenly realise that I stopped crying a while ago. I feel something. Oh God, he has arrived.

In the void, Other Mark tilts his head to the side and vomits the blood of dying stars all over himself.

Corey Taylor is screaming at me from somewhere behind my bloodshot eyes. “Purity.”

The knife block is on my desk.

“Purity.”

Still holding R.D. against me, I slowly reach over and grab hold of it.

“Purity.”

Then I hit her.

“Purity.”

Dash is knocked sideways to the floor.

“Purity.”

She looks up at me.

“Purity.”

Blood drips down her face and onto the carpet.

“Purity.”

As I look deep into Dashie’s beautiful magenta eyes, I notice that she doesn’t appear to be afraid of me. Rather, she appears to welcome what is happening to her. She trusts me. Trusts that what I am doing the right thing. It’s quite reassuring.

“Purity.”

So, I hit her again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

There is blood all over the empty knife block and all over my hands and my shirt sleeves as well. I can even feel splashes and droplets of the stuff on my face, in my eyes, on my lips, in my mouth. I think I am breathing heavily, but if I am, I can’t feel it. I watched a Cronenberg movie once, Maps to the Stars, wherein Mia Wasikowska does the exact same thing to Julianne Moore. She looked so detached, even curious, as she caved the older actress’ head in with a Golden Globe Award or something, and I am almost amused at how accurate it was. The blood, the convulsions, the sense of vaguely inquisitive apathy. Who says realism in film is dead? Probably no one, actually. Never mind.

Rainbow Dash has stopped spasming. Her mane and coat are stained crimson. Her eyes are already glassy. The wet carpet coagulates, and the blood is looking more and more like paint as the seconds tick on by.

At this point, my mother rushes into the room. Wow, she’s home early. She likely heard the thudding of the knife block against Rainbow’s skull.

She falls to her knees and begins to wail, cradling the blue pony’s body in her arms. I find this decidedly odd.

“Mum,” I say in manner that could only be described as patronising. I put my hands out to the sides, knife block still held loosely in my right. “Mum, what are you doing?”

She finally looks up at me. “You fuck!” she screams. “YOU FUCK! You murderer! You killed your own sister! Your own fucking sister! How could you this? HOW COULD YOU?!”

I blink. I look down. Well, this is certainly interesting. My mother is, in fact, not cradling the body of Rainbow Dash at all. It’s a little girl, probably about six or seven years old, with tousled brown-blonde hair.

My mother is still sobbing and howling, rocking back and forth on the floor, embracing the dead girl.

“Well,” I say. I blink. Twice. “Well, fuck.”

It seems I am not my father, after all. I am more. I am more than my father. I have succeeded where he failed.