The silence in the saloon rang like a dinner bell, the remnants of what preceded it still reverberating in Buttercup’s ears. Through the blue-tinged haze suffusing the room, she shuffled on hooves and knees towards what was left of the bar, fragments of shattered glass tinkling under every step.
“Y’alright?” she breathed, as much an affirmation for herself as a question for Bright Mac. The last volley had shredded the saloon’s front windows and most of the furniture within, but she herself felt fit as a fiddle—tuned up like one too, sharp and clear-headed even with particles of vaporized gunpowder burning in the back of her nose. If anything, the scent was what kept her so focused, so sure of every motion before she made it. Just as it always did. Just a part of her—especially now—wished it didn’t.
“Been better,” Bright Mac grunted, his trademark smirk twisted into a grimace. Though his oversized hoof stayed clutched overtop it, Buttercup could tell the wound in his side was plenty big enough to bother him. If it hadn’t been, she knew he wouldn’t have gone to such trouble pretending that it wasn’t.
“What d’ya need?” she asked him. It’d been set swinging by the frenzy before, but the lamp hung from the ceiling still shone enough to let her see a fair bit of the bartender’s stock. Moonshine or worse was all she’d hoped to find this far west of Appaloosa, but a few stoppered bottles with familiar labels stood out as her gaze passed over them.
“Whiskey,” Mac said. “A rag if it’s clean.”
Buttercup was already moving by the time he answered, head ducked low as she shimmied around the bar’s squared-off bend. Moments later, she returned with her supplies: a fresh fifth of whiskey in one hoof, two nips of vodka clutched in her teeth, and a dishcloth wrapped around her soot-streaked neck.
“Green label?” Mac chuckled, his eyebrow cocked at the bottle Buttercup passed his way. “And here I was thinkin’ you loved me.”
“Believe me, sugar,” Buttercup shot back, the cap of one nip trapped in her teeth as she scrubbed its contents over her hooves, “’f I didn’t love you, you wouldn’t hafta think about it.”
Bright Mac chuckled again, then hid the wince that motion provoked with a generous mouthful of firewater. Once the resulting shudder worked its way through his shoulders, he set the bottle aside and unclipped his belt with his free hoof, sliding the nylon between his teeth before nodding to his wife.
The moment he lifted his hoof from his side, the second nip of vodka filled the space. He twitched and jerked as the alcohol did its job, a low growl vibrating through his clenched teeth. When Buttercup pressed the dishcloth against his dampened skin, Bright Mac sucked a deep breath in through his nose, but otherwise made no sound to indicate his discomfort—another sign for Buttercup of how bad the hit he’d taken really was. He’d need real care sooner rather than later, and walking before that happened would be a real tough—
Buttercup ducked back down a moment soon enough. A trio of shots tore through the saloon’s decimated façade, showering her and Mac both with wood splinters as they peppered the bar’s back wall.
Throwing herself into a roll as the bullets whizzed over her head, Buttercup rose again with her right forehoof raised and ready, the trigger of the bracer strapped to her ankle instinctively slipping between her teeth. For every shot the crew outside just took at her, she sent double that roaring back, six thumping bursts of fire that rippled through her foreleg with each tensing of her jaw, until the chambers in her sidearm were empty and a pained yelp from outside told her at least one round has found its mark.
“Think they’re partial to our terms by now?” Bright Mac asked as Buttercup crept back over to sit by his side.
“Don’t get the sense they’re real keen on negotiatin’,” Buttercup said, rooting around in her saddlebag for a fresh chain of ammunition. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought she might come up empty-hooved, but with some digging she scrounged up a full band—the last one she had to spare. As she raised her hoof to slot it into place, Mac raised his own and brushed it against her fetlock—a tacit symbol of concurrence with the conclusion she’d just reached.
“This one’s a pickle,” Bright Mac murmured.
“Yep,” Buttercup sighed. “Looks that way.”
The pair sat together in silence, each leaned against the other, hearts pounding as one adrenalized unit. As she watched smoke swirl through sunbeams streaming in through the saloon’s walls, a grim sense of inevitability weighed down Buttercup’s chest. One way or another, she always knew things would end like this for both of them. She just wished she’d known well enough to wonder what she might do when that moment finally came.
“You got a pen?” Bright Mac asked. From his own bag, he’d extracted a roll of bone-white parchment, hidden within a secret compartment that Buttercup had never seen him open before. A quick glance at the scroll’s protruding edge told her all she needed to know: his mother’s name was already written at the top, and there was no mistaking the faint whiff of ozone that all magically charged objects carried.
“’Fraid not,” she said. “I’ll check the bar.”
But Bright Mac beat her to it, his lip curling over gritted teeth as he reached over his head towards a pocketbook abandoned near the lip of the bar. Amid crumpled-up receipts and the scent of perfume sullied by the saloon’s clouded air, he found a portable quill in a hoof-carved case, ink to spare still drawn up into its nib.
“I wrote my bit a long time ago,” Bright Mac murmured, unfurling the scroll enough to show a short message scrawled in his unmistakable hoof. “Figured I might not get to send it myself. There’s space for you left, and for… for them.” He paused a long while, every second tearing at Buttercup’s heart just as she knew it was ravaging his. “Something for ‘em to… remember us by.”
Buttercup swallowed, closed her eyes, pressed her lips together till she felt them flush white. One way or another, this could only ever end one way. She just wished she’d known how much it would hurt when it did.
“Do you think they’ll understand?” she asked him, a solemn whisper all she could manage while keeping her tone from wavering. “You think they’ll… forgive us for this?”
Bright Mac shuffled closer, pulling Buttercup’s head in to rest under his stoic chin. “They’ll understand,” he said. “Granny’ll help ‘em. The whole family will.”
Buttercup allowed herself a hard swallow and a shaky breath, then straightened upright and looked her husband in her eye. “Get that thing ready. I’m only gonna say this once.”
Once Mac was prepared, Buttercup’s lips parted again, her eyes shut tight against the burning sting welling up inside them. “Little Mac,” she began, “one day you ain’t gonna be so little anymore. You’re gonna be as big as the sky and strong as the sea… and no matter what, no matter where you choose to go and who you choose to be, you remember each and every day how proud your daddy and I are of you. You take care of your sisters, and you take care of yourself too.”
Dutifully, Bright Mac copied each sentence, his own gaze stony and locked on the paper flattened against his hoof. “Applejack,” Buttercup went on, “you got a fire in you that’s gonna set the world alight one day. So long as you live, so long as you got a drop’a Apple blood left in you, don’t you ever let that fire burn out. You stay tough, you stay hungry, and you take this world for everything it’s got. And someday, when it’s all said and done and you’ve made your mark on Equestria, you always remember that it was you who made it, baby. And we’re both so happy we got to help.”
Bright Mac paused halfway through to cock his head and sigh, but his pen never faltered from the first letter to the final period. “Apple Bloom… I’m so sorry, sugarcube. I’m so sorry about all of this. It might be a long time ‘fore you read this, and longer still before you understand why you had to, but just… I want you to know that everything your daddy and I did, it was for you. For you and your brother and sister, and everypony like you who oughta grow up the way you didn’t.”
When he finished writing, Bright Mac’s hoof darted to his eye. The paper stayed dry, though, and had plenty of space left for Buttercup to finish. “And to all of you, all my sweet babies…”
She stopped—she couldn’t go on. What could she possibly say to them? What could she do to make sure they wouldn’t follow their lead, that they would never have to write this letter to their own family one day?
But with that thought came another one, a whisper from somewhere far beyond herself that told her exactly what the three greatest things she’d ever do with her life needed to hear her say. “There’s gonna be a lotta hurt you go through in your lives, a lotta hard times where you’re gonna wonder what the point’a trying to be good ponies is when so many others seem to do so well bein’ bad. And I want y’all to know that’s normal. Everypony has those feelings, those doubts—in themselves, in their family, in the whole damn world.
“But you promise me somethin’ now. You think it to yourself, you whisper it real quiet so nopony else can hear… whatever you do, wherever I am, I’ll hear it. I want you to promise me that for all your lives, whenever you find trouble or trouble finds you, whenever somepony does somethin’ wrong and you think you oughta do something to make it right…”
Buttercup sat back against the bar, her whole body attuned to every detail of the end of her natural life: the stale, seedy stink of the frontier watering hole they’d holed up in, the dull throbbing in her head that a hundred fights and change had left behind, the pit carved out of her stomach by the knowledge that she and Bright Mac would die here—alone, hardly heard of, for reasons most ponies would never understand.
But their children weren’t most ponies. They would understand. She knew they would, because they were strong enough and brave enough to try.
“… you do it,” she said. “You be the change you wanna see in the world. You do whatever you can to look out for ponies who can’t look out for themselves, and no matter how it all ends, just know that as long as you’re helpin’, you’re doin’ the right thing. Your daddy and I love you so much… most of all, promise me you’ll always believe that.”
A moment passed between them, its finality palpable as the weight of three whole worlds on each of their shoulder. With a nod from Buttercup, Bright Mac dropped his quill, rolled the letter back up, and swiped his hoof once across its coiled edge. With a flash of magical green fire, the parchment evaporated from his hooves, leaving pensive, dusty silence in its wake.
“Well, then,” Mac said, rolling onto his side as a precursor to gingerly standing up. “Up for a dance, m’lady?”
Despite everything, the sight of him—face blanched, tear tracks trailing from his eyes, and a cheeky grin stretched across his lips—almost made Buttercup burst out laughing. Of all the stupid stallions in all the world, she had to fall for this one—and she knew now, just as she always had, that they’d never be apart. Just like the old song went…
If you go before I do, gonna tell the gravedigger…
“I suppose I could oblige,” she said. “Just one more thing…”
From the depths of their saddlebags, Buttercup pulled out two matching badges, each cast in dented gold and fashioned into a five-pointed star. With pantomimed solemnity, she pinned one to Mac’s vest and the other to her own as a final show of rebellion, a confirmation to both themselves and the gang waiting outside—the one that had defied every attempt by the Appaloosan Minutemares to bring them in, whom the two of them had stalled for long enough now that the rest of the force could surely handle them within the day—that they would go out of this world as they wanted their children to live in it: unafraid. Undeterred. Knowing what was right, and willing to fight and bleed and do whatever it took to make sure it triumphed over wrong.
When Bright Mac had first suggested they join his cousins in ridding Western Equestria of cutthroats and thieves, Buttercup had thought he was out of his mind. Now, twelve years later, after countless successful missions plus one that went a little too far awry, she reckoned she was crazy too. In the end, that was just what love was wont to do to ponies. And even to her own end now, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Ready, Buttercup?” Bright Mac said—bent into a fighter’s crouch, loaded bracer at the ready. Buttercup checked her own weapon, made sure a round was chambered, then leaned forward and kissed him—full-on and powerful, tasting of gunsmoke and sweat and the love of her entire existence.
“When you are, sugarcube,” she said once she pulled away, the lingering pressure of his lips still clinging to hers. Smirking and nodding, Bright Mac mouthed a countdown. Three, two, one…
They moved as one—never apart, forever together. Hearts entwined and faces set, they dove out of cover and raised their bracers, advancing out of the saloon and into the light to raise heavenly hell under the Appaloosan sun.
Author's Note
If y'all don't listen to The Band Perry already then I frankly don't even know what to do with you.
