Sunset Shimmer was drowning.
She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling of her flat. She groaned at her own melodramatics; she knew she wasn’t literally drowning, but it felt like it.
She squinted through the inky darkness to see the clock on her nightstand and sighed. She’d slept through another day. Just more time wasted.
Her empty heart filled with rage and she growled. With a crash, she saw red. With deep breaths, she saw her clock in pieces on the floor. As quickly as the rage came, it left. With the fleeting anger gone, she felt emptier than before, like another piece of her soul was carved away.
Her mind was foggy, but she realized another consequence of her blind rage. She braced herself with one hand against the mattress as she stumbled to her feet, cursing her stupidity; she knew sitting up—even unintentionally—meant she wouldn’t be getting back to sleep. Sunset grabbed onto the rail of the loft with one hand, the other wiping at her bleary eyes, and began cautiously fumbling down the stairs.
Flipping on the lights revealed her barren apartment. The only comfort of monetary value left was her guitar, which was gathering dust in the corner. Everything else had been sold after she got fired—it turned out that bosses don’t generally like when you sleep for over seventy hours a week and miss half your shifts.
She trudged to the corner where her phone was plugged in. Crouching, she checked her notifications. Reading the ‘how are you?’s and the ‘we miss you’s made her nauseous. She pulled up a picture of all of them together and traced her thumb above it, lingering on Pinkie. She dropped her phone and hit her head against the wall.
Her whole life she had been fighting against some nameless, formless force of nature, like swimming against the current, or struggling upstream. Along the banks or the shore, she could see her friends, her rivals, her idols, all walking along, leaving her in the dust. It was exhausting.
After the Formal, things had been looking brighter. For the first time that she remembered, she was walking on the bank with her friends. She felt light and happy and free. Her friends were wonderful at brightening her day, especially Pinkie.
But it couldn’t last.
The tide pulled her back in with a vengeance, as if reclaiming a debt. She tried to keep up, she tried so hard, but she was so tired.
She shot to her feet and walked to the center of the room in a daze. There were piles of mail by the door. Takeout ads and bills, mostly. She used to have a counter on how many days until the gems she stole from Equestria ran out and she wouldn’t be able to afford living, but that had accounted for her keeping her job, and she didn’t have the energy to adjust it. She thought of grabbing her journal and asking Princess Twilight for help, but she shook her head to clear the thought away. Living off of pity would be worse than death.
Death. It always seemed to come back to death and dying. Half her thoughts these days were about it. What would it be like? Would it be painful throughout, or would the pain be fleeting? Would she feel at peace, or regret? Would there be anything after? What would be the best way to go? What would be the worst?
Sunset Shimmer walked to a window, opened it, and leaned out over the street. In the distance, a song played. She shivered from the cold gusts of wind rushing through the streets, and with a sigh closed the window and let her head hit the glass with a thunk. She’d looked it up, the distance to the ground was too short for it to be a sure thing even from the roof of her building, let alone her window. She’d rather be spared the humiliation of yet another failure and the potential cherry of paralysis on top.
She stumbled into the bathroom and opened up her medicine cabinet, taking stock of the contents even though she knew painfully well what awaited her. Pills which her stomach was too weak to hold down. Razor blades which were good for living—she traced the scars and scabs along her arms and grimaced—but for dying they felt juvenile. There was nothing else of note, and she slammed it shut and stumbled back into the wall, slumping to the ground along it.
It was stupid how she always did that, going over all of her options even though she knew her thoughts on them beforehand. She chuckled briefly, but the hollow sound disgusted her into silence.
Her gaze drifted to her bathtub and a thought—and an option she'd never considered—burst through the fog clouding her mind. One of the first pieces of art she had loved after coming here was Hoofelia. Once, she had even wanted to visit the beautiful setting depicted in the painting, but of course that was impossible given her financial and residential situation. And maybe she couldn’t visit the place, but she could connect in another way.
She walked to the bathtub with her shoulders straight, gait even, eyes focused. She turned the knobs, waiting for it to fill. What must Hoofelia have felt? Water splashed against the dirty porcelain. Had she committed suicide, or had it truly been an accident? The water rushed to the quarter mark and slowed as it left the curve. Either way, she didn’t struggle; she accepted her fate. Sunset shut off the taps as the pool reached the top.
She had been struggling against the current for so long, and she was finally letting herself be pulled in. It was almost poetic, in a way. She idly wondered if Hoofelia had felt the same.
She climbed into the tub, opened her mouth, and inhaled.
Sunset Shimmer was drowning.
