Instead of watching the days go by on the calendar, Babs liked to measure the passing of time by the color of the water in her smoke pipe. Clear and flecked with the remnants she couldn't clean off was day one. Half-yellow and filmy was day two. On day three, when the water had begun to grow the same grimy shade of brown as the rest of the pipe, she emptied it out, dislodged what chunks she could from the down-stem by poking them with a toothpick and bit of toilet paper, and then filled it back up, clean and ready to go for another three day cycle. That was all under the assumption that her consumption remained regularly and unadjusted, as well as her supply. Lately, instead of three or four times a day, she'd been using the thing once, maybe twice if she could scrape together enough resin to feel worth an attempt, and even then, it left her hacking and coughing with a black wash on her lips that felt like it was still on even after she'd wiped her mouth off several times. It stained the toilet paper, after all. The inside of the pipe. Maybe it was staining her inside, too deep to notice or ever clean out.

She liked to watch out the window too. Not for anything in particular—just to be occasionally overwhelmed by the sensation that the entire world would spin regardless of who or what she was, and that if tomorrow meant another pack of dehydrated noodles and a mid-afternoon toke that was more twigs and ash than smoke, the sun that would rise in the morning didn't care one bit. It greeted her every morning just the same, creeping in through the window on which she always left the blinds up and the glass half-open to let in the night air as she slept.

Nothing seemed to fashion or propel itself in the same way since she'd moved to Ponyville. Talents she'd banked on for certain in Manehattan, storing them in her repertoire safe with the knowledge that they could never be improved, now feeling like a filly who had missed years of spelling lessons and was now being asked to write a master's thesis.

It turned out, that a lot of ponies could suck dick. A lot of ponies had underage butts that seemed designed by Celestial forces specifically to tempt the gullible and easy-spending. A lot, a lot, a lot of ponies, could give you a version of whatever you wanted for a lot cheaper than Babs was asking for.

Even cutting her prices hadn't helped. Nor had cutting herself. The razor felt like an old friend's handshake, but the blood seemed to real now, screaming little voices seeping from her skin, reminders that she was defacing her 'merchandise' for the little jolts of serotonin that the simulacrum self-control provided. Even when she kept the lines to the insides of her legs, or places mostly tucked away in her normal posture, they'd always surface again to somepony who was looking close enough under the light.

Like talking to two different ponies over her shoulders at once, Babs found herself interrupted by flashes and different angles of the scenery and its slow-moving occupants. When she awoke in the morning, bitless and knowing that no meal would come unless she earned it with the same service that would necessitate washing out her mouth in the first place. And even though there was a silent web choreographing everything, where she would stand in the alley or roam around town, the looks she would flash and the ponies she would pay the closest attention to—somehow, it all felt more pure than anything, and certainly more than being alone in her apartment following the wisps of grey as they dissipated into the sunlight and swirled around her head. She wondered sometimes if it was only the smell that mattered, that would throw her memories somewhere they could only tread with the scent of the smoke wreathed around their bodies. The first time she had ever inhaled, wondering why anypony would want something to come in through their head and chest and change everything they thought and saw and heard, and then how words could only really paint around the moment of it, it, like a pillow that encompassed her entire body, or the sensation of time stopping not in a lurch, but a decelerating crawl, creeping by inches, and then finally held above your head to flicker like a shard of mirror under the sun.

She could steer in any direction, but she couldn't change the inherent nature of water. It would always flow downward, and time was more of a stream than a highway. When she closed her eyes, a tiny mote of hope whispered inside her chest, wondering if the weightlessness could just continue, just for a moment, and her mind would be free, and empty, and as clear as water.

Music helped a little. Ponies who would sing about love and souls and a time in Neighbraska they'd slept in a car parked beside the venue of their show. Water helped a little too, though she had to remind herself to drink it even still. Reassure herself every time she went to the sink to top off her bottle. It is a joy to refill water.. Somehow, the most absurdly true lie she'd ever uttered.

Something has to change. It will, whether or not you want it to, but it has to anyway, and wouldn't it be better to go along with it?

Babs downed the last of her water, then went to the sink to refill it. Muttered the mantra in her head, took a sip before she went back to her bed and put the bottle on her bedside table.

"I know," she said out loud to the empty room. "But I don't think I can change. Would anypony really want to be stuck like this? Running through the same cycle over and over again until their body decides none of it is worthwhile and gives up spontaneously overnight? And that's just if I'm lucky." Babs ran a hoof across her forehead and brushed her bangs behind her ears. "More likely some pissed-off stallion will choke me to death in a fit of passionate rage, or because he's got a snuff fetish, or maybe both." Babs yanked the blankets up on the bed and curled herself inside them, hiding away in the warm, artificial darkness.

And you're saying that's a bad thing?

"No. I'm just saying."

It's not impossible for you to get up. You've done it before.

"And once I get up, what then? I do something to get money, which is to get food, which is to get [smoke], or [dust], or whatever the chemical of choice is to give me enough willpower to push out every piece of memory I have left, everything that makes me 'me', and pretend I'm a blank slate that barely qualifies as a conscious being." Babs sat up, looked around the room, then fell back onto the bed, throwing her forelegs up amongst the pillows. "All value is meaningless. All forms of art and love and beauty are excuses to fuck."

You're doing the nihilism thing again.

"So? You do it all the time."

Right, but when one of us does it, the other one is allowed to let them know.

"Fine. Let me sleep on it."

I always do.

The period before unconsciousness was the most special waiting room of Tartarus that Babs could have envisioned with a lifetime of preparation. Only [smoke] made the haze come quicker, the flashbacks vanish more expediently into the fog of dreams. And there was none left for today. Not even a bag of twigs.

So, instead, Babs grabbed the small, squishy stuffed-animal frog she'd bought over the weekend as an impulse by. It meant halving her [smoke] purchase for the day, but the frog had remained in her bed since she acquired it, while the [smoke] had been ground up and inhaled into a place that could no longer be counted. The frog was very soft and smooshy. Babs had named him 'Rutger'. She didn't know why. She didn't remember ever having heard the name before.

Babs cuddled Rutger as she waited for sleep, alternating between squeezing him close with her eyes shut, and staring out the window, thrashing underneath the blankets, deciding every few seconds whether the sound of hissing insects and your mother's howling voice was a threat that needed to be addressed immediately. Hitting yourself in the head with the same fact, over and over, that you could never trust an impulse, that your own body had been programmed to lie to you in a way you could never untangle and rewire.

When sleep finally came, it was half-past three, and Babs slept until the evening, when the growling of her stomach could no longer be ignored even in the gentle smog of her dreams.

You have to get up and do the thing.

I know.

If you get up and do the thing, you can smoke.

I know. I don't really care.

If you get up and do the thing you can eat.

I know. Don't care about that either.

Can you at least get up?

Why bother?

She got up anyway. The apartment smelled like burnt candles and dish-soap. Fresh air was supposed to be better anyway.

"I'm just going out there to put myself on display," she said to herself, putting on her jacket and straightening her skirt, which hadn't been washed in three days. Not impossible as long as you took it off first or got them to aim somewhere else. "I'm a fucking genital display case. A piece of meat conveniently shaped like sexual repression and power dynamic issues. Ponies pay me to rub their genitals inside me until they arbitrarily fall over an imaginary line and land face-first in some stupid euphoria that's supposed to be a back-end evolutionary reward for procreating. Their body is lying to them, and it's doing it with chemicals stronger than anything I can buy on the street."

Are you angry at orgasms again?

"Yes. Why do I come attached to a set of buttons that stop me from doing anything else when you touch them? Why does everypony in existence seem to have a switch in their brain that turns them from compassionate, rational individuals into slobbering fetish-monsters, detached from all reality as long as they can get their hands on whatever it is a corner of their brain has twisted into their sexual spectrum?"

We may as well have the 'why do I need to breathe air' conversation again.

"Don't even get me started on breathing," Babs said. She slammed the door behind her for good measure, and locked it extra hard as well, turning her key so fiercely it was a miracle it didn't snap off inside the lock.

Then it was downtown to evening Ponyville. A town so small, the only red light district was yours if you brought a set of strong candles with you. Babs had tried setting up shop everywhere—outside bars, inside bars1, she'd even pulled in a few customers standing in front of the local church... but eventually, maybe just because she liked the place the most, the nightly prowl became a stroll past the train station to the market district, which was always closed at night. Nevertheless, Babs found not only more than occasional clientele, but also competition, in the form of other fillies who would leer at her from their corners or places in the shadows, sometimes showing off their own goods back at her for good measure. Sort of like butterflies flashing a false face to ward of predators, it seemed to Babs.

Tonight, however, would require a reroute. The Ponyville market district was blocked off for repairs on every side.

"Pretty big fucking construction to block off every damn entrance," Babs said. She kicked one of the 'DO NOT CROSS' signs and winced as her hoof bounced off the hard metal. But the jolt of pain came with a different type of jolt between her legs, and she clenched them together even as her hoof began to throb smartly from the agitated collision. She wished for the razor instead, but it was all the way back home.

Whatever. There was always somewhere to work if you had the willpower to find it. That particular currency was Babs' most persistent worry—that whether she had the bits, or the smoke, or the food and drink and anything else she could by that would numb the rusty saw-blade of existence as it sliced dully into her skull, that she would somehow still find herself without the force of will to simply stand up. That every time she would ask her body to move, the force behind her eyes would answer 'no', and she would lie like a paralytic corpse, decomposing out of sheer inability to bring herself to live another second under her own control.

But she made her way to the bar. There was always somepony drunk and lecherous there, as long as the place was open. Even if it was the owner. And Babs could stomach another hoof-in-ass play if it meant something to dull the sensation that came when she had no purpose. Not that she could find what was truly a 'purpose' in any of this—just that, when she had something to do, something that was agreed upon, or felt necessary, everything fell into place much more easily. Dishes would wash themselves when they needed to be washed. As long as somepony, herself included, could assure and reassure her that they needed to be cleaned, she would clean them. When they piled high in the sink and began to collect standing water and the fruit flies migrated in and multiplied in the thousands over hours, if still nopony had settled it for her, there the dishes would remain. When she refused to listen to her own voice, whether it was in the mirror or just between her ears. When, blessed, the blackouts came, which were less and less all the time these days.

Enough. She was going to wait inside the bar. Fuck, she may as well spread her legs on the bar itself and start shaking her ass for tips, or maybe just to get a few mouths watering before one of the old codgers watching spilled over into insatiable lust and paid her for an hour in the hotel upstairs but only used ten minutes before his wiener went limp. That was a best case scenario, and even still, Babs felt like the bits she'd earn were just as worthless as she was holding them. No substance or sustenance she could buy would erase another memory for good. Only hold them at bay with barricades that were crumbling more every day. The ocean was getting in.

"Hey." A voice from behind. High, and soft.

Babs spun around with enough speed to shake away the pony's hoof as it reached for her shoulder. Just as quick, Babs' hoof went to her saddle-bag, the crisis kit for a street-pony in any delicate situation.

"Woah, chill. I'm just saying hi." The pony who had come from behind held up their forelegs as a sign of peace, showing they were holding nothing. In the mix of street, star, and moonlight, Babs could see a green mane atop an orange coat, and a unicorn's horn standing atop their head like a point to guide the stars. Their makeup looked like something Babs would have worn a few years ago, when she'd had worse taste but put in more effort: purple eye-shadow, matching lipstick, dark and heavy eyeliner, and... well, not makeup, but, was that a choker? With studs?

"What's your deal sneaking up on me?" Babs asked. She took her hoof out of her bag and studied the unfamiliar unicorn with narrowed eyes, ready to snap back into her bag if the need arose.

"Sorry, I wasn't trying to... I just, uh, have seen you around here before, and I was wondering if, uh—"

"Fifty bits a throw," Babs spat instantly. She took a pack of gum out of her bag and popped one piece, then another into her mouth and began chewing instantly, smacking the gum loudly and getting it loose and ready for bubble blowing. "Fifty extra if it's raw. Anything else we can talk about after we get started." Hard times required innovative pricing structures, in Babs' experience.

"—what? No, no! That's not what I was going to ask at all! Actually, I, uh... well, you see, I've been, kind of in your, uh, position, before..."

"Can you just say what you're gonna friggin' say? You talk like you're impersonating an anime character or something."

Visible even under the haphazard light combination, the orange unicorn blushed, and held a hoof to her mouth bashfully. "Really? An anime character? I do?"

"Either tell me what you want or leave me alone. I've got work to do."

"But you don't have to work," the unicorn blurted, then covered their mouth, as though they'd suddenly cursed without meaning. "I mean... that kind of work. Do you?"

"I'm leaving," Babs said. She turned back towards the bar and started towards the door.

"You could stay at my place. No charge. While you... figure something out."

"No such thing as a free lunch," Babs countered, stopping and spinning around to face back towards the unicorn. "Besides, I just met you. How do I know you're not gonna kill me and bake me into cupcakes or something?"

"I'm either a really good actor, or you're really gullible then."

Babs eyed the pony up and down. Sure enough, there didn't seem to be a dangerous bone in front of her. The way she'd blushed about being called an anime character was an indicator, for a start...

"Alright. I'll come with you. But if your place is wack, or you try to feel me up, or it's a fucking sex dungeon or something, I'm bailing."

"Does one set of handcuffs count as a sex dungeon?" the unicorn asked. She smiled as she turned and began to lead Babs away from the bar, towards the residential area where her house was ostensibly located.

Babs laughed. "Pfft! No! If it did, you'd be looking at the world's first portable sex dungeon and then some." She shook her saddlebag to let its contest clunk and clang against each other for demonstration. If you listened closely, you might just make out the sound of delicate chain on chain.

"So this is the place. It's, uh, kind of messy at the moment—"

"It's a fucking pig sty," Babs interjected as she opened the door and pushed her way inside the small apartment. It wasn't much bigger than hers in the entrance room... but then, there, it had an actual kitchen, and what looked to be a living room, a hallway, maybe even to bedrooms and a bathroom... alright. She was decidedly outclassed. Maybe that's what had made it necessary to jab.

But she was being honest. The place was filthy.

A sink full of dirty dishes was one thing. But dirty dishes piled up on the kitchen table, plates and bowls and spoons and remnants of lunch and dinner and at least three meals with cheese still stuck to them? Flies, miraculously, seemed absent, but the smell was overpowering, and it was joined by urine-soaked cat litter and the perpetual funk of unwashed carpeting. A small layer of cat hair seemed to cover every available surface that contrasted the dark black accents. And a goldfish bowl, so murky its occupant (if there was one) was entirely invisible. A thin film of fish-food-flakes floated on the surface of the water, a few of them soaking up the water and dribbling to the bottom of the bowl in a steady stream.

"Uh, well, I was gonna clean, uh, but then Pipsqueak, my roommate—"

"Your roommate's name is Pipsqueak?" Babs turned her head and raised an eyebrow, but the unicorn just shrugged and nodded back. "They sound like a real winner." Babs rolled her eyes and began to search for somewhere to sit. She eventually turned up a relatively clean portion at the end of the couch, while the rest was overflowing with dirty laundry and what seemed to be empty DVD cases. The unicorn took a seat awkwardly at the other end of the couch, sitting a bit up on the arm and on-top of the neighbouring laundry-pile as a cushion.

She smiled nervously at Babs, looking away whenever she noticed Babs looking back at her directly.

"Did you even tell me your name, or did I just forget that already?" Babs asked. "I mean... fuck it, I may as well tell you this. I haven't had anything to eat today, or smoke, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm starting to black out for the not-as-fun reason."

"You can help yourself to whatever you want from the fridge. I think we still have leftover pizza, and like half a jug of milk for cereal."

"What's the cereal?"

"Honey Nut Cheerilee-O's—"

Babs got up from the couch and immediately went to the kitchen, beginning her search for one even moderately clean bowl and spoon amongst the detritus of two weeks worth of accumulated meal debris.

When she found a clean spoon, she held it in the air like an ancient sword pulled from the earth. The bowl was a compromise, finding the one that looked the easiest to clean, which was the remains of somepony else's cereal left over from (hopefully) this morning. Babs drained the warm milk into the sink before scooping the mushy obliterated 'O's into the nearby trashcan, which was, as well as being almost completely empty, the cleanest item in the entire kitchen.

"My name's 'Glitter Shell', by the way," the unicorn said, raising his voice to make sure it carried to Babs, who had her head buried in the pantry cupboard. She emerged with the bowl of 'O's in question, and poured them into her bowl with a hungry smile that bordered on delirious. Milk. She yanked open the fridge door, seized the carton and poured the whole thing into the bowl, overflowing at the edges and dripping onto her hoof as she held it. She lowered her face to the bowl and, finding a place for her lips amongst the dancing circle shapes, began to suck up some of the milk, draining it until the fill line was below the rim of the bowl. When she raised her head, she let out a satisfied 'ahhh', her lips white until she licked them off a moment later.

"Glitter Shell?" Babs said absentmindedly. It didn't sound like a cereal brand. Oh. Or it was a pony name. That made more sense. "Right. Thanks for the, uh, cereal. And milk."

"No problem," Glitter Shell said. She pushed the crumpled laundry pile into itself a bit and managed to squeeze her way onto one of the couch cushions beside it. "I could tell you need some help, and I feel like I'm in a position to pay back what somepony else gave me once."

"A bowl of cereal?" Babs was halfway done her bowl and already eyeing the box for seconds. She'd take three or four spoonfuls to her mouth before crunching them up, leaving as much milk as possible for her sugary sacrament at the end.

"Well, yeah, I guess. But more like a place to stay, and not have to work, um... out there." Glitter Shell turned her head away and brushed her hooves together anxiously. "You know."

"You used to do what I do?" Babs asked. She slurped up the final, delicious aftermath of her super-sugary 'O's and sighed as it ran down her throat and into her stomach, filling it up with a warmth something like the exaggerated sensation she imagined her customer's believed she was actually feeling. The dirty talk didn't do much to convince them of the truth, anyway.

"Yep. Pretty much. I didn't work by myself, but I know what it's like." Glitter Shell adjusted herself on the couch, trying to find a suitably comfortable sprawled out position, but eventually settling just for cramming back in next to the laundry pile, using the top-most collection of garments as a makeshift pillow to rest her head on.

"That still doesn't really explain you just offering to let me live here and shit rent free," Babs said. She filled up her bowl with more cereal and dumped another waterfall of milk over-top. Spoon to mouth occurred instantly, as did the crunch-a-munching.

"I already asked my roommate—"

"Pipsqueak," Babs interjected, wiping a hoof across her chin to get a spot of milk.

"—right, Pipsqueak... I asked him already, and he said it's okay. He knows what it's like too. Ponyville's not the nicest town when you're young and... yeah. Anyway."

"Listen, this is real nice and all, but I don't think I can really accept your offer." Babs finished off the second bowl of cereal and rinsed her utensils in the sink, doing her best to avoid the moldy-looking towers standing intermittently like landmines. She even managed to find the soap, which she dolloped under the water, praying that science didn't need to be understood to work.

"Why is that?"

"Because I'm a nut-job, for one," Babs said. She raised her skirt not to show off the usual goods, but to point her hoof to one of the few parallel lines she'd carved a few night's previous in her thigh. They were easy enough to hide when clothed, but bare, under the apartment light, they glowed red, ghastly, like they were threatening to burst into a stream of fresh blood. "This gets apartments messy. And I have a smoke habit like you wouldn't believe." Babs sighed, doing her best to bury the ticking timer in her chest that was already screaming twelve hours past overdue. It had been that long since she'd lit and inhaled anything. Probably longer. Where was the rush of abstinent self-empowerment and sublime sobriety? It just felt like crawling through the contents of an outhouse without a nose-plug.

"Pipsqueak has you covered for that. He's who I get all my stuff from anyway." Glitter Shell kicked her hooves against the couch, bouncing them up and down in a vague rhythm. "Do you just need smoke? Not dust? Shiny? Orbit?"

"What the fuck is orbit?" Babs asked. She'd returned to the living room and was standing next to the table in the center of the room, pacing in small circles and refusing to sit.

Glitter Shell shrugged.

"It's just another name for shiny, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe with like, softer edges? If that makes any sense?"

"Shiny makes me feel like the back of my brain has a wisdom tooth-ache," Babs said, rubbing the back of her head. "It feels like chewing a battery with your sinuses."

"Pipsqueak loves the stuff," Glitter Shell said, and shrugged. "But he likes eyefire, and that's about as much fun as it sounds, in my opinion." She shuddered. "Should have called it 'fricking needles in your eyeballs."

"I'm just interested in smoke right now," Babs said, "unless anything in there has a guarantee of removing the last fourteen and a half years of my memory, and then letting me rewrite the last half a year."

Glitter Shell studied Babs, searching for her beneath the hurt. Wondering if anything she said was true, or just the dark side of a coin she had turned up in her hoof beforehand.

"If you could really do that, do you think it would help?" Glitter Shell asked.

"I'd do it anyway."

A gun. What you're thinking of is a gun. And we both know you're too much of a wuss for that.

"I'm not. Give me one right now and I'll pull the fucking trigger. The 'go-to-sleep-forever button'. Fuck me."

"Uh, Babs? Are you talking to me?"

"What?" Babs' eyes snapped in and out of focus, grabbing onto points in the invisible horizon and flinging her back into the foreground, aiming in Glitter Shell's direction, but unable to hold on to the outline of her for more than a second. "Huh? Oh yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking about something."

"You can have some smoke if you want. You can sleep here too, I'll clear off the couch—hey!"

Babs had pushed Glitter Shell onto the couch, tumbling atop the pile of laundry, and landed directly above her, body planted square on Glitter Shell's crotch underneath her own black-and-purple skirt.

"Lemme lick you," Babs said, grinding herself into Glitter Shell's body and rocking herself back and forth with her pussy pressed against as hard as she could. She held Glitter Shell down against the laundry pile with her forelegs as she began to lower herself, face over Glitter's chest, then the waistline of her skirt, pulling at it with her teeth—

"Hey! Stop it. You don't need to do anything like that—"

Babs was still moving, ears deaf to the hysterical tone ringing in her ears like the specter of death. Shame, shame, shame on you. Give up yourself and everything, to take pity on you, to be worthy of even a tiny scrap of what you have been given.

"Come on, yes I do, I owe you, just lemme make you cum a few times..."

Glitter Shell began to struggle, kicking her legs up as Babs pushed up underneath her skirt, raising it and reaching with her hooves to her tight, violet panties, stretched against her front and back, even as Babs attempted to push them away. Glitter Shell swatted with her hooves, but it was no use, Babs was already in place, already feeling with her hooves what there was to feel.

"Huh," Babs said, her head still under Glitter Shell's skirt. "So you've got a... one of those." Babs didn't move her head, but fiddled a bit with her hooves, running them just a little up and down the sides of the shaft she'd found hiding in Glitter Shell's panties.

"Yes," Glitter hissed, glaring down with her eyes half-full of tears. "I do. Let's have your stupid overreaction."

"No, it's—"

Glitter Shell took advantage of the distraction to finally pull herself away from Babs, regaining a shred of her composure and pulling her panties back into place, flattening her skirt and wiping some of the tears from her eyes.

The room was quiet for a bit. The hushed silence filled only with breathing, alternating between the two ponies, and Glitter's soft sniffles, wiping her tears away as they came onto her hoof, and then the couch.

Babs pulled herself to the opposite end of the couch and sat for a while, hooves bunched between her legs, head staring down to the unwashed carpet.

"Hey," she said after a while longer.

"Yeah."

"I'm really sorry."

"Okay."

"No, like... I mean it. Really. And I'm not... I'm not grossed out or anything, I just... I felt bad, because, I was, you know—"

"Right."

"Oh, for fuck's sake. I can't do this right. I'm fucked up. I fucked up, big time. I should probably just leave."

Glitter Shell sighed and turned to face Babs at the other end of the couch.

"No, listen... I understand, you were feeling scared—"

"—I was, and I felt like I owed you so much—"

"—right, so you tried to show it in the wrong way, I get it, but that still—"

"—still doesn't excuse how I acted, I know, so if you wanna kick me out—"

"—not gonna kick you out, but like... ugh."

The two of them both stopped and stared at each other.

"Do you wanna go for a smoke?" Glitter Shell asked, gesturing with one hoof towards the deck door, which Babs hadn't noticed yet, nor the deck behind it, with what looked to be a table set up for smoking, covered in scattered implements and ashtrays.

"Yes," Babs said. She got up off the couch and dusted her skirt pointlessly. Some stains you couldn't see, and were even less likely to clean.

It was her voice, in the back of her head, when she'd fallen into place like a broken marionette. Using her body for the only thing it was good for.

Stupid bitch.

Glitter Shell opened the door to the deck and stepped outside. Babs followed her after a few seconds, and she slid the glass door closed behind them, leaving only the chilly outside air and the starlight high above.

"You do realize you haven't even told me your name yet, by the way," Glitter Shell said as she unscrewed the lid of a small container and fished for the crystal-shimmering green substance inside. She scooped out a small portion onto her hoof and shuffled it with her other hoof into the bowl of a small pipe, which she offered to Babs.

"It's Pix—actually, it's Babs," she said. She took the lighter Glitter handed to her next and used it to light the pipe, torching the bowl and inhaling the stream of hot smoke in a single drag. When she blew it out into the night's sky, the wisps vanished like flickers of starlight, leaving only the dim scent of trees and chemical magic behind. "Babs Seed."

"I like it. Sounds cute."

"Speak for yourself."

Babs passed the pipe back, and Glitter Shell refilled it and passed it again, offering the second helping to Babs without having taken her own hit.

"You sure?" Babs raised an eyebrow as she took the pipe, but Glitter smiled at her and nodded, and the second drag came as easy as the first, just as hot, just as sweet, just as white and blurry and memory obliterating.

Babs exhaled, her eyes closed. When the last tendril of smoke had left her lips, she turned to Glitter Shell and smiled, her first genuine one in what felt like weeks.

"Thanks," she said.

Glitter Shell's smile seemed as bright as the stars.

"Don't mention it."

Author's Note

1: Bouncers tended not to ask questions when Babs gave them a dose of her best 'ain't I sweet enough to let through without ID?' face, usually a flash of her ass for good measure.