Author's Note

So this was a... rather disturbing piece for me to do. It was completely unplanned and completely out of the realm of anything I normally do or am typically comfortable doing. But this is what I get for watching true crime TV shows all day XD I got the title for this this morning but I had no plot to match it until later on tonight. Even then, I only believed it would be a story of someone dying. Not... This. Still, it wrote itself fairly quickly and was done well enough in my opinion to be posted.

Let this be a warning to all who are in the dating game right now: Always tell somebody where you're going and who you're with. You never know if it could save your life. Guys and gals, stay safe out there.

The Name On Her Lips

In, out. In, out. In, out.

Air being choked down a throat. A wet cough that colored the air red. Stillness of a body, and panicked eyes flinging themselves wildly around a room for somepony, anypony to come and help.

She knows the old adage, You can’t save anypony if you can’t save yourself. But she cannot save herself this time. If she moves, the floor will be dyed scarlet, and her life will be drained. All she can do now is remind herself to breathe slowly, so that she will not hyperventilate and pass out. Of course, she knows that she may pass out anyway from blood loss, but she has to have some small amount of control.

She has never been in this position before. She’s faced so many evils, from a madmare trying to bring eternal night, to a chaos lord attempting to turn her world upside down, to a centaur trying to steal magic, and lastly to a ram trying to take over her country. But the difference between then and now was that her friends had been there. Now, she was completely alone.

Being a romantic had it’s downsides. One of them certainly had to have been going to dinner with a stallion in a dimly lit area. He’d been charismatic, friendly, and highly romantic. She’d nearly been swooning all evening. Had she a chaise, she may have used it to faint on in a dramatic fashion because he was so charming. But, as it were, she had been duped. The moment he’d gotten her down a darkened alley (Oh, what romantic fantasies entered her mind in being with him in such a dark place!) he’d hit her over the head, and she’d woken up here.

Her hooves had been bound, and her horn’s magic had been nullified. The moment she had tried to scream, she’d been smacked across the muzzle to remain silent. She hadn’t tried to scream again, but she had tried to squirm away. That had been useless.

He’d come on top of her, and violated her. Her mind had gone into a sort of far away land. She’d felt lifted out of her body, watching it from below as more pleasant things tried to dance through her mind. From that lofty place above herself and him, she saw her own eyes, completely blank and devoid of any sign of herself.

There came a point where the assault ceased. She found she had the time to slowly slide back into her body, but it was not easy. It was like trying to make a mare fit into a dress made three sizes smaller than her. She had to squirm to fit into it, and might have benefited from some butter to help her slide in. But eventually, she was back in, and experimented with movement. She twitched a leg. Stiff, perhaps. A bit sore. Her eye was likely black as it was throbbing intensely. Her pain was mostly centered in her bottom half. She dared not think of what had happened to her in that dreamy, half-lucid state. She couldn’t think about it, because if she did, she might never gain the wit she needed to figure out what to do next.

She was in the midst of planning when the glint of silver flashed before her, and scarlet vines began to come out of her. A gasp, the removal of a blade, a choking sound, the sound of hooves galloping away from her, and the sound of a door slamming shut. It was as though the door was closing on her hope itself.

Nopony will ever know what became of me.

The thought circles around in her head like angry vultures, pecking at her constantly. Her family, her friends, her clients. They’ll say she ran away, got so swept up in the romance that she ran of with the stallion to Trottingham to marry. They’ll be angry with her for abandoning them. They’ll be heartbroken when they find her body here, and likely spend the rest of their lives blaming themselves for being so angry with her. But she doesn’t want that for them. They deserve so much better than that. She deserved so much better than that. Even Prince Blueblood himself would have been several steps up from the lowlife who was attempting to take her life.

She hadn’t given his name to her friends. She had a policy with herself that she’d recently enacted to tell her friends if she was going on a date and where, but not who the date was in case it didn’t amount to anything. Since she’d never really dated outside of Ponyville before, it had never been a questionable choice since everypony knew everypony. Now, here in a Manehattan warehouse, she knew it was a foolish choice. She’d sacrificed personal safety for the anonymity of whomever her date was. Generous as she was, she had chosen not to humiliate them and put herself at risk.

The saying “Generous to a fault” was a saying for a reason, and this had proved it.

Her vision is tunneling a bit now, blackness beginning to spot in her eyes. Soon, she will pass out or hemorrhage. She has to do something now, but she is too weak to get up, and bound aside from that. She tries screaming now that her attacker has fled, but her voice is weakening alongside her.

The blackness wins her for a moment, maybe two, before she, and the world, come back into focus. A sound pierces her ears. The sound of hoof steps racing to her.

“Rarity!”

The voices of her friends. She smiles a little now, a bit too weak to do anything more.

Hoofsteps running. Voices sounding all at once.

“What happened?”

“We need to get you to the hospital.”

“Who did this to you?!”

Name. Give them the name. It may be the last gift you can ever give them.

She takes in a breath, tries to speak, when the blackness wins out and she grows very still. Her chest does not rise and fall anymore.

The name on her lips would never be revealed to another soul.