Sour Sweet

“Welcome to Sunbucks! What can I get you?”

Your overly peppy tongue on a silver platter you high-waisted, candy-ass—

“Medium Peppermint Mocha,” I say. “You want anything, babe?”

Starlight smiles up at me and while the white noise in my head doesn’t fade, it does switch gears.

Starlight Glimmer.

True to her name, her smile is starlight and it puts sparkles in my chest and in my head, and I can’t help but smile back at her. After having spent the last two hours getting covered in gravedirt and snow digging up the not-body from an empty casket, I figure we both deserve something sweet, and this is one of the few twenty-four-hour places nearby.

“Gingersnap Chai,” she says as she molds herself against me. “Thanks.”

“Large Gingersnap Chai for the pretty lady,” I say, grinning. “And snap to it!”

The barista’s smile crumples and she jumps at my tone. I have to bite my lip to keep from swearing, but Starlight moves between us before anything else unfortunate can get out of my howling swear-craw.

“Sorry, it’s a tic,” Starlight says as she deftly picks my wallet from my pocket, pulls out my credit card, and taps it on the reader. “Thanks!”

“Uh, s-sure, names for the drinks?” She asks shakily.

“Sour Sweet,” I say, straining to keep my tone neutral.

I don’t really do neutral.

Giving the arm she has captured in the crook of her elbow a small tug, Starlight pulls me away from the register toward one of the rearmost tables, and the whole time she stays as close to me as possible. She and I learned early in our relationship that the pair of us, for all of our fascinating cocktail of disorders, actually balance each other out fairly well.

Not because one is the positive to the other’s negative pole or anything.

At least that’s not the case for me.

This isn’t a case of opposites attracting or equals balancing out. It’s a lot simpler than that.

It’s because being with Starlight makes me want to be better. It’s easier to rationalise trying harder to not be a heinous bitch a square fifty percent of the time when she’s beside me. I don’t want her to see me like that so I do more to keep that part under control.

As for Starlight, I think it’s pretty much the same.

We settle into the seats, and Starlight leans her head against my shoulder before turning to stare out at the snow-dappled windows and across the lamplit evening streets of Canterlot.

Following my impulse, like I usually do, I lean down and press a soft kiss to Starlight’s head right where her green beanie meets her violet and turquoise locks, and she giggles softly.

“Stop that.”

“No,” I reply with a chuckle.

“Mm… alright.” Starlight looks up at me for a brief moment before pecking a small kiss to the underside of my jaw. “I love you.”

“Love you too.”

And I do.

If one good thing came from getting sucked into those insane Trials and losing God-only-knows how much sleep to horrific nightmares of butcher’s hooks and bear traps, it was meeting Starlight. My absolute favorite person in all the world.

As I mentioned, I don’t really do neutral.

Out of nowhere, Starlight’s grip tightens, and she buries her face against my shoulder as she starts taking deep breaths.

“Star?”

“Heartbeat.”

She doesn’t need to say anything more. It’s her most common auditory hallucination. As far as I can tell there’s no specific outside thing that triggers it. It’s just a misfire in her brain triggering the auditory cortex and flicking a few synapses awake in the hypothalamus that react easily and quickly, and the memory of the Heartbeat is one that no Survivor will ever forget.

“It’s not there,” I say quietly. “And it never will be again.”

Starlight nods while forcing herself to take long, slow, deep breaths as she tries to keep her nerves in check. It’s a habit she got into that I taught her along with a variety of meditation techniques which ended up mitigating much of the intensity of her episodes, if not the frequency.

“Chai and Mocha for Sour!”

I look up at the register, then back down to Starlight who just nods as she reluctantly lets go of my arm.

“It’s okay,” she says weakly. “I know it’s not real.”

“You sure?” I ask, putting a hand over hers. “The drinks can wait.”

“It’s fine.”

I grimace, but I don’t push the issue. Starlight is proud. More so than most people realise, and besides, treating my girlfriend like an invalid is a really good way to get couched, I found out. So I just nod, stand, and walk over to the register to sweep up the drinks.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

“Is she okay?” The barista asks.

“Oh she’s fine,” I say with a shrug. “She’s just got a bad case of mind your own fucking business.”

The barista stiffens again.

“Tch.” I click my tongue and look away. I start to walk away too but a different impulse overcomes me and I turn back to look at the terrified food worker. “Sorry… it’s… it’s a tic.”

The apology comes out like a rotten tooth, and better yet is that I don’t think it even went over that well. The look the barista is giving me is the kind usually reserved for people that you suspect might eat puppies in their downtime which is pretty unfair considering how gamey dogs are and the fact that chihuahua’s are more like rats than canids.

That train of intrusive thoughts puts a smile on my face, and the barista’s expression face only grows more concerned.

I click my tongue again and turn away, making my way through the holiday crowds to the table where Starlight is looking a little more even-keeled than when I left her.

“Gingersnap Chai for the prettiest girl in Canterlot,” I say with a broad smirk.

Starlight smiles back and, for the life of me, I still don’t know why. She once told me that my smile looks like a knife wound because, as best I can figure, it’s just too wide and too straight at the same time.

She also told me she loves my smile though, so I guess there’s that.

“Thanks,” she says softly as she takes it and breathes deeply of the fragrant steam coming off of it. “That smells amazing.”

“You smell amazing,” I say as I slip in beside her, and she flushes.

“Down girl.” Starlight bumps my hip with her own before taking a sip of her drink. “Did they treat you okay? The baristas I mean.”

“Eh, same old,” I say with a shrug as I slug back my too-hot mocha. I don’t know why I do it. It burns my tongue but at the same time, I can’t help it. I like it hot but it hurts but—“Ah! Ow! OW! HOT!”

“You knew it would happen,” Starlight mumbles around her drink.

She’s long since lost any sympathy for me, which is fair. I’ve also lost sympathy for me.

“I know,” I say around my scalded tongue. “Tho whatcha wanna do now?”

Starlight starts laughing as I stick my tongue out to try and cool it down, and shakes her head.

“You’re such a disaster,” she says before leaning in kissing my cheek. “Hold on, I’ll go grab some ice water.”

I nod as she takes another sip of her Chai, then walks over, drink in hand, to the barista. Watching Starlight Glimmer move and talk and smile and just… just exist is one of my favorite things to do. Maybe it’s part of my disorder, but I really don’t care. Just like I don’t care that the divisions in my personality got worse after we got out of the Trials. The contrasts are starker; the dark shades are darker and the light shades are almost blinding.

She’s blinding.

And I’m like a sinkhole for her light; I’m sucking it in and destroying it, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. I know that’s not right because it’s not fair to her or me.

Star and I both have our issues, but we’re good together.

I have to believe that.

“YEAH WELL FUCK YOU, COFFEE THOT!”

The sound of a drenching impact precedes a scream, and I jerk out of my malaise of thought to blink and orient myself in time to see Starlight standing furiously over a barista who’s down on her ass and covered head to toe in hot Chai with a positively livid Starlight Glimmer standing over her.

I practically leap from my seat, cross the dining room of the cafe in a flash, and grab her by the arm. She briefly whirls on me, her eyes blazing, but her expression softens the moment she fixates on me. Then I’m pulling her out of the Sunbucks and onto the frigid streets of Canterlot as I’m buttoning my coat and hooking our arms together.

“Jesus, Star!” I say as I drag her down the sidewalk towards the lot where I parked the Corvette. “Did they poke your crazy too hard or what?!”

I flinch the moment the ‘c’ word escapes my lips.

“Shit, sorry, I—”

“No, I know,” Starlight says bitterly as she grips my arm and buries her face against my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sour, I didn’t mean to—shit—I guess we can’t go back there either now, huh?”

“Not for another six months at least but the turnover at those places is pretty high,” I say dryly. “So they’ll probably be fired come Spring.”

Starlight laughs quietly at my tic surfacing, and for once at least it isn’t barbed in her direction. I hate that the most; when I accidentally say something that cuts at her.

“So uh,” I start awkwardly. “That’s like… what? Six cafes-stroke-restaurants we’re either officially or at least probably banned from?”

“I think so,” Starlight replies as she clutches at me a little more tightly.

“Do you wanna talk about what happened?”

She doesn’t reply at first. She just settles against me and walks, so I keep our pace slow but steady as I lean my head against hers. Starlight is kind of the perfect height for me because she’s about half a head shorter than me, meaning that while we walk she can lay her head on my shoulder while I lay my head against her soft hair.

Which smells perpetually of lavender, by the way.

I’m not sure if that’s always been my favorite scent, but it sure as hell is now.

“She asked me if she should call the police,” Starlight says suddenly.

I turn my head a little to look down at her.

“Why?”

Starlight chuckles a little bitterly, then looks up at me briefly before leaning up to press her lips to mine in a fleeting kiss.

“She thought you were…” Starlight trails off for a moment before shrugging and settling her head against my shoulder again. “She thought I was in trouble.”

“Oh.”

Maybe it’s naive of me, but I’d never considered that someone on the outside might look at me, then look at Starlight, and think something like that. I mean, we’re both pretty crazy but, if I’m being honest, Starlight passes as neurotypical with a lot more grace than I do. I have BPD shaken and stirred with a verbal tic like Tourettes butt-fucked an open mic roast night at a bad comedy club.

The truth is that I can see it.

I’m kind of a massive bitch, even if it’s not intentional, and my tic comes out so nasty most of the time that I can’t blame people for thinking I might be treating Starlight poorly even if just the idea of that makes me sick to my stomach.

“Sorry,” I say quietly. “I… I tried to keep a handle, but—”

“Don’t be!” Starlight grabs hold of me, stopping me in the middle of the sidewalk and turning me to face her. “They don’t know how… how bad I can get! They have no idea what I’m like, they just hear you say some mean crap and suddenly assume you’re abusing me when I’m so much worse!”

We’re getting looks from passersby, and normally it doesn’t bother me, but this is probably not a conversation we should be having in the middle of an open street, so I just readjust my hold on Starlight and guide her out of the mass of people and into the small parking lot.

My Corvette is my only real indulgence in terms of Adagio’s offer to buy us random and insanely expensive crap since she and her sisters barely touch their savings. It’s a professionally restored, black-and-gold, classic nineteen-sixty-nine Stingray, and when I asked Adagio how much it cost she said ‘some hundred grand for the restoration’, but nothing else.

It took me until I got the registration signed over to my name that I understood why it was she said it only cost her for the restoration because the signatory on the agreement was listed as Serenata Dazzle.

Adagio had given me her car.

“C’mon.”

I move around the passenger side door, pop it open, and help her in before joining her around the other side a moment later.

The engine turns over with a throaty, asthmatic roar that settles into a comfortable rumble as I flip the heater on. This old codger is a relic that’s better than twice my age, so it takes a lot of specialised care just to keep the basic crap running. Fortunately, there’s a couple of old Marexican mechanics in the Commons who know their way around the classics that I take it to a couple of times a month for a checkup.

Starlight holds her hands up to the vent to take in the heat, and I reach out to wrap her hands in mine and rub at her cold fingers.

“You’re so sweet to me,” Starlight says quietly.

I look up at her with a quirked eyebrow.

“I hate that everyone assumes that, between the two of us, you’re the less stable one,” she continues in a low voice. “I hate it. I really, really hate it.”

“Yeah well, I don’t mind,” I reply. “Since I’m pretty fucking broken.”

Starlight frowns, then sighs and shakes her head.

“You know I’d be completely out of my mind without you, right?” she asks.

“Well, at least you’d still be alive.”

I clap my hand over my mouth as the words fall out. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud but this fucking tic is like the opposite of impulse control. It’s a verbal shotgun that my stupid brain keeps reloading and then firing on automatic.

The total lack of response is more worrying than anything, so with an effort of will, I tamp down my sudden panic and turn my head to look over at Starlight Glimmer.

She’s staring at me, eyes wide and mouth open.

“Why…” Starlight starts shakily. “Why would you say that?”

I lower my hand from across my lips and sigh in annoyance.

“Sunset isn’t the only one whose life was uhm, saved—” I make air quotes as I grimace through the word—“by the Entity, alright?”

Starlight moves her hands out of mine, then she shifts closer and puts her arms over my shoulders as she leans in.

“Tell me?”

Damn it. Those stupid pretty eyes of hers always get me. All she has to do is stick out her lip a little, look up at me, and I instantly cave in. Starlight has me wrapped around her little finger and she knows it, and frankly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It still gets annoying sometimes, though.

“I… lied,” I say after a moment. “Back at the campfire, back in the Trials? However long ago that was… years, days, decades… fuck, I don’t remember anymore, but I lied.

“Back then, I told you all I was out at the Everfree for a country retreat, and that was true. I used to go to Crystal Preparatory Academy and we had a weekend retreat thing for all the sports clubs, so naturally, mother dearest insisted I go, and it was a real… a real low point for me. I was miserable, I hated everything and everyone and especially myself, and so I made a decision.”

Starlight watches me with a kind of worried caution. I can see the fear in her eyes, not of me but of what I’m about to tell her. We both know what it means to not want to know something and I get the feeling this is something she probably doesn’t want to know.

But it might be something that she needs to know.

“I was hopeless, I was so beaten and broken after spending all my life having my brain full of shattered glass get shoved into a perfect little box over and over,” I continue quietly, and I hate how my voice is starting to shake. “I hated everything and everyone!” The words come out in a brittle snarl, but Starlight doesn’t flinch, she just holds on as I get control again. “My bow and quiver were the only things I brought with me. I went into the forest and… and I don’t even know what I was expecting to do… hang myself by my bowstring? Slit my wrists with my arrowheads? All I know is that I went in there and I… I wasn’t planning on coming out, okay?”

Rather than try to say anything—and frankly, I don’t even know what there is to say—Starlight just tightens her arms around me in a warm embrace.

“It’s funny,” I say with a hollow sob. “I left the campgrounds ready to die and that readiness lasted right up until I stepped in a bear trap. Then, suddenly, I was screaming my head off.”

Tears are rolling down my cheeks and into Starlight’s hair, and I wrap my arms around her middle as I bury my face in her shoulder. I wanted so bad to just have it all end back then. I was so tired of my parents beating me into the shape of something I would never be; the perfect straight-A student. The perfect gold-medal athlete. The perfect daughter.

I was tired of all the competitions and the snide remarks behind my back about my ‘little issues’ that my mother would talk about in the same breath as she’d say she expects me to go to the Olympics one day.

That’s all I was to her. Just a pretty little ball of expectations.

“It’s sick, but I’m really grateful to Sunset, you know?” I mumble. “The Entity saved me so it could eat me. She saved us all because that’s just who she is. And now, thanks to her, I get to live some part of my life as me, and even better—” I pull back and brush a strand of purple hair from Starlight’s face. “—I get to live it with you.”

“I love you,” Starlight says wetly as she wipes away the tears on her cheeks, then wipes at the ones on mine. “I really, really do.”

My throat is all closed up with something I can only describe as happy grief, and I nod as I lean in to press my lips to hers. She melts against me, and I fall in love again. Black and white. Blinding in all ways. That’s my whole life. But if it’s with Starlight Glimmer, then I think I’ll be able to deal.

So long as we're together.

Without warning, Starlight stiffens in my arms, pulls back, and presses a hand to her head, and I start to open my mouth to ask if it’s the noises again when I hear it.

I hear the sound that I know has been slowly driving Starlight insane since she got back. The nightmare sound that comes to her in waking hours and dreams alike, and my chest constricts with primal, animal terror.

“Sorry,” Starlight says. “The heartbeat’s back, and I know, I know, okay? It’s not—”

Her words die as her fair complexion pales several shades further at the look on my face.

“—real?”

“Trunk. NOW!” I snarl out the words as I kick the door open and punch the button that releases the trunk lock before scrambling out of the driver’s seat.

God damn bucket seats.

The murderous heartbeat pounds distantly at the edges of my hearing as I skid around the rear of the car and pry open the trunk.

Ever since we got back to the real world, I’ve compulsively kept up on my triathlon training and focusing heavily on my archery in case this scenario ever cropped up. The funny thing is, somewhere in the back of my mind I never thought it would. Even knowing there were murders happening and Killers running loose, a tiny, crazy part of my brain was praying that it would never come up and that, once more, Sunset Shimmer would take care of it.

We should be so lucky.

Either way, for the past year and a half, Starlight has been joining me in that training. She’s never trusted herself with anything like my bow or a firearm because of her occasional inability to tell when something is real or not at range. But the closer she is to it the more certain she can get, so me being the romantic girlfriend I am, I got her a machete as a gift to celebrate our third date.

Aren’t I just a peach.

Since then, my go-to gifts for her have been various types of sharp, deadly melee weapons, because I’m charming like that, and she’s developed perhaps an unhealthy obsession with mastering them.

“Bow!” Starlight shouts as she throws my black, carbon-fiber compound bow out of the trunk at me followed by a slim quiver of arrows.

I snatch both out of the air and secure the quiver just below the small of my back with the speed of long practice as I circle around and join Starlight at the trunk, nock an arrow, and start panning for threats while, behind me, Star arms herself.

We never go anywhere without being well-armed, maybe because both of us knew somewhere deep and dark that we’d be pulled back into the Fog one day.

Maybe that’s why I keep buying Starlight weapons, and why she keeps training with them, and why the trunk behind me has more in common with your average medieval arsenal.

The machete is there in its oiled leather sheath, and Starlight straps it to her waist at the same place my quiver rests on me. Across her back, she fastens a half-sheath that carries the Yakyakistani broadsword I’d bought her last Christmas, a heavy, hacking weapon made to inflict maximum trauma even against dense, heavy targets.

And gripped in her hand is the weapon she favors most of all: a genuine Neighponese Muramasa.

The blade catches the dull moonlight with a hungry flash of silver, and I shiver at the sight of it. There are legends that say those weapons are supposed to be cursed, and when I look at it, I understand why that is. There’s something deeply unsettling about the color of the blade, and the way that it gleams.

Aria owned the weapon originally, and she passed it on to Starlight as a token of goodwill, but she admitted something to both of us when she did it.

“I never liked holding that thing,” Aria had said one evening over drinks. “It felt too much like being back home.”

Whatever the case, Starlight demonstrated a class of skill with the weapon that left me breathless after only a handful of months. That’s part of how Aria and Redheart discovered how different we are from boilerplate humans.

We learn fast. Adapt fast. And violence is second nature now.

“Which one is it?” Starlight hisses as the knuckles of one hand go white around the grip of the blade while the other digs into her pocket.

“Dunno,” I mutter.

The Fog is closing in around us, thick and cloying and stinking of ash and blood. The heartbeat is getting closer and closer, slowly but surely, but it could be coming from anywhere.

“I can’t get a signal,” Starlight says as she looks down at her phone before cussing and tucking it away.

“How surprising,” I reply around a thin smile. “Or not.”

The Thief had clearly learned their lesson after Sunset called for backup, so they thickened the Fog ahead of their lackey enough to block outgoing or incoming signals.

“Up top,” I say, jerking my head back towards the car.

Together, we clamber up onto the roof of the old Corvette, and as we settle onto the high ground, we see it.

We see death in the Fog, and it’s wearing a stained denim jacket over a thin grey hoodie. If it weren’t for the pale, crudely cut mask, with its rictus grin and carved eyeholes, it wouldn’t be nearly as unsettling.

The Killer—the Legion—doesn’t move like a human. There’s a weird, languid grace to them that’s vaguely unsettling and reminds me of a leopard or some other lean, violent hunting cat approaching in the darkness of the jungle.

Fear of a violent and bloody death is a primal thing in the human mind and it always has been since we were huddled around campfires wearing furs and telling stories about the lights in the sky being gods.

Too bad the only god I’ve met wants me worse than dead.

“Can we win?” Starlight asks.

“Probably not.”

She lets out a brittle chuckle at my answer before looking over at me and nudging me with her elbow.

“Hey,” she says softly, prompting a raised eyebrow from me. “Smile for me.”

I snort, then shrug, and give her that wide, slash-mouthed grin that everyone else finds so unsettling, and that she seems to think, for whatever reason, is charming enough to love.

Then she moves.

Before the Legion can reach the Corvette, Starlight Glimmer bolts forward, flourishing her blade and catching the thin light of the Fog-drenched lamps across its wicked edge.

She’s fast—my Starlight is faster than most living humans. It’s the nature of being a Survivor. None of us realised just how strong and fast we were until we got back to the real world and got measured up against bog-standard folks.

Starlight’s blade snaps and bites at the air with whipcrack force as she lunges into a straight, killing jab at the Legion and if it had been human, it would have been skewered.

Instead, the half-born Killer moves with a sickening, frictionless grace as it side-steps the blow and strikes out. Between heartbeats, the Legion’s hand goes from empty to gripping a heavy hunter’s knife and suddenly they’re inside Starlight’s reach and guard, lashing out with a broad stroke at neck level, a throat-cutting strike aiming for vein and artery both.

But Starlight and I aren’t really human anymore either.

Star kicks her own legs out from under herself and drops to her back, prone and vulnerable.

No, not vulnerable. Never vulnerable.

Not so long as I’m here.

Two arrows sprout from Legion’s chest, burying themselves halfway into where their heart and liver should be and driving Legion back three steps as tainted blood spills from under the mask. They recover fast, though, as if two mortal wounds were barely an inconvenience, and pitch forward, but Starlight is already back on her feet and weaving a veil of cutting whispers in front of her.

I draw another arrow, then another, and another. The first two come to rest against the sight of my bow, and the last one hangs down between my pinkie and ring fingers, ready to be nocked the moment its sisters sing from the bowstring.

Counting the beats between Starlight’s steps with my breathing, I follow the measures until I find the pattern. One-two-three, one-two-three. This fight is a waltz of flickering steel and my Starlight is Terpsichore playing with knives.

Impossibly, Legion darts through Starlight’s guard, earning only a pair of shallow cuts on their chest and shoulder for the audacious move. Starlight doesn’t flinch, though. She backsteps, drops her guard, and kicks off from the ground before turning and twisting in midair, baring herself to the Legion’s blade.

My arrows leap from the bowstring, and the first one slams into Legion’s shoulder, stunting their attack, but the second isn’t so lucky.

Legion snatches the arrow out of the air a hairsbreadth from their chest, snaps the modern fiberglass shaft, and in the same movement they twist and spin with the blow of the first arrow and end with the heel of their foot planted hard in Starlight's gut as she lands.

“STARLIGHT!”

The blow plucks her from the ground and sends her straight back through the Corvette's windshield with a deafening crash. The glass shatters around her as she lands sprawled between the front seats, her arms bleeding freely from dozens of thin cuts.

That’s all I have time to see before the Legion is over the hood and in my face, its sharp, shallow, and ragged breathing muffled and phlegmy through its mask.

I flip my third arrow up, nock it, and release in a single snap of pressure that buries the arrow to the fletching in Legion’s stomach. It comes on heedless of the damage, furious and unstoppable as it buries its knife to the hilt in my shoulder and bears me down to the roof of my car.

We clatter off of the roof in a brutal embrace and slam into the asphalt. Legion lands atop me as my breath wheezes from my beaten lungs as the Killer twists the knife, then drags it out and slams it down into my other shoulder, nailing me to the ground before grabbing me by the forehead, and—stars burst across my eyes and blackness swallows me for a moment as the Killer slams the back of my head against the ground while they shriek in a raw, manic frenzy.

By the time they stop, I can barely move and I can’t rally enough coherency to think straight. My vision wags and swims and it takes me a moment to realise that they’re heaving me over their shoulder. The ground shifts drunkenly beneath me, and their boots make metallic crunches as the world jags while they clamber up on top of the hood of the Corvette.

Starlight is still on her back and groaning as Legion kneels and grips her by the throat, and from under the mask a voice, drawn reedy and ragged by abuse, hisses: “You’re coming with me.”

It kicks out the rest of the glass of the windshield and drags Starlight out of the ruined car.

Damn it.

Adagio is gonna kill me

Author's Note

If you want to know more about Starlight and Sour Sweet, check out their standalone story: The Crazy Girl.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!