Rarity

My head is pounding when I wake up, but that’s been the manner of things for a good while now. I feel like I never sleep right anymore—it’s the dreams, they wake me up more often than not, so I rarely sleep more than a few hours at a time, and only after long periods of staying awake. With that said, the fact that they wake me up is a mercy, really.

It’s so much worse when they don’t.

I stumble as I stand and my head swims. At the same time, my stomach chooses to make it known to me that I haven’t put anything meaningful in it besides those horrendous energy drinks in about a day and a half.

Neighponese takeout, I think, was the last thing.

“Oh, dear.”

My stomach flips and I clap a hand over my mouth as I sprint for the bathroom, shoulder the door open, collapse in front of the toilet bowl m, and dry-heave spatters of bile into the water.

Agony rips through my guts as my stomach twists and turns, clenching and unclenching as it seizes and searches for something to bring up, there’s nothing there but acid.

So that’s what I get.

Back when the only time I threw up was when I was sick with the stomach flu or something like that, I’d always feel a little bit better after having to throw up. It was never a positive experience, mind you, but it served a purpose. I had something in me that needed out, and I got it out, and then I felt better.

It was comforting to look at it that way, as a child.

Now, I’m not a child anymore, and I feel so much worse than before I’d finished retching and collapsed to the floor of the bathroom.

At least the bathroom tiles are nice and cool.

“I… really should drink more water,” I mumble dazedly as I stare at the outside porcelain curve of the u-bend. “Or stop drinking those dreadful things.”

I won’t, though. Coffee isn’t enough anymore. Neither is soda. Most energy drinks aren’t even strong enough. Every time I close my eyes, I see either Sweetie Belle or Sunset, and I’d rather drink nothing but Hellion for the rest of my life than have to face those stares every night.

At least when I find Sweetie, I’ll be able to apologise.

That’s what I tell myself; as if she hasn’t been missing for months.

My phone rings, blessedly distracting me from my own head, and I force myself up onto my knees, then onto my feet, and stagger out of the bathroom. Maybe it’s just a spam call, or maybe it’s the police telling me they found her. I can’t really afford to take that gamble.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming,” I groan as I slap the light switch, and then cuss viciously as the fluorescent lights stab at my eyes.

It’s pitch black outside, and the oven light in the kitchen marks the time as a little after four in the morning as I sweep up my phone from the counter, look at the caller ID, then freeze, and reread it.

Rainbow Dash

I can’t think of a single positive reason that Rainbow Dash would be calling me at six in the morning. But I also can’t imagine she’d be drunk-dialing me to weep over fractured friendships, especially since Fluttershy has been so vocal about how Rainbow’s improvement had really stuck.

So I swallow my dread, tap the answer call at the last second, and lift the phone to my ear.

“Rainbow, darling it’s early, are you alright??”

The sound of sniffles and harsh breathing precedes her raspy voice.

//I uh… h-hey Rares, uhm, n-nope, I’m not.// Rainbow’s voice is thick with tears, and it puts a knot of ice in my chest to hear it.

Mostly it’s because I can’t think of any reason she’d sound so shattered unless something had happened to Fluttershy.

“Talk to me, darling,” I say, and I’m reasonably impressed that I’ve kept the quaver from my voice.

//Sh-She’s in the hospital, Rares.// I swear my soul freezes over. //And uhm… shit… Rarity, Sweetie is here, too.//

My mouth goes utterly arid, and I can’t even taste the backwash of sick that had been painting my tongue and gums a moment ago as my brain reels and processes those words.

Sweetie. My Sweetie. My sister.

The phone clatters out of my hand as I bolt out of the door, barely pausing to grab the keys to the car. Vaguely, I’m aware of Rainbow Dash calling my name over the phone, but I can’t focus. I can’t process. I can’t tell where it’s coming from or why I should even care.

My sister is alive, and that’s all I can grasp.

If I’m being fully honest, I have no idea how I got to Canterlot General in one piece. Have you ever been so tired after a double shift, and you know you still have to drive home, and just the thought of making the drive is like an anchor around your neck? But you have to do it. If you want to get to bed you have to drive.

So you roll down the window, max out the volume on the radio, and struggle to keep your eyes focused on the road, and then…

Bam.

You’re home.

You have brief, firefly-flash memories of stoplights and making some familiar turns here and there, but that’s all. Past that, there’s nothing, and if you really, really stopped to think about it, it would probably—and reasonably—scare the shit out of you that you actually drove in that state.

I don’t even remember the stoplights.

What I do know is that I park sloppily in the lot in front of the Emergency Department, half-fall out of my own car, and scramble for the doors looking like an absolute maniac.

Fortunately, this is the lobby of Canterlot Emergency Department, so I don’t stand out enough to warrant being ejected by security.

“My sister!” I gasp the words out like they’d been lodged in my throat for six months as I stumble up to the front desk. “S-Sweetie Belle, h-her name is Sweetie Belle, please! I g-got a call that she was here and—”

“Miss, please.” The poor young woman at the desk puts a hand up with a fearful look in her eyes. “I need you to calm down and take a breath.”

“I don’t need to breathe!” I shriek. “I need my sis—urk.”

Whatever air I have in my throat cuts off hard under a steel-corded grip of fingers wrapping around my throat, while another hand seizes my arm, wrenches it behind my back, and hauls me bodily away from the desk.

“Okay, Bipolar Barbie, let’s go.”

What I expect is one of the two burly security guards who’d been at the front door to be pulling me away. What I get is a familiar flash of violet hair cut into a sharp bob with a widow’s peak like a blade’s edge, and bitter, furious eyes like amethysts.

Aria Blaze, wearing a long white doctor’s coat drags me through the lobby, getting a few odd looks from both staff and patients.

“Don’t mind me,” Aria snaps at one of the approaching guards. “This one’s going to Behavioral and no, I don’t need help.”

One of the guards clears his throat. “Uhm, D-Doctor Blaze, that’s really not—”

“Did I stutter?!”

I get a brief glimpse of the guard stepping back before I’m hauled through the doors of the Emergency Department’s patient access and all but thrown on the hallway floor.

“I have had a really shitty night, powderpuff, okay? So I’m gonna need you to Pull. Yourself. Together.” Aria snarls. “Or so help me, I will kill you myself.”

My vision doubles as I drag air into my lungs, and massage my bruised throat. The woman standing in front of me isn’t the one I remember from CHS. It’s not even the one I remember stumbling out of the portal the day Sunset stole souls from the mouth of Hell.

This woman is grimmer, harder-edged, and angrier. There’s something boiling under her skin that I can’t put a finger on and it chills me to the bone.

Aria takes two steps back and leans against the inward-swinging doors of the hallway and crosses her arms. Her eyes are cold enough to bite, but I force myself to stand. As I do, Aria’s eyes flick up and down.

“Pajama pants, huh?” Aria asks calmly.

“W-What?” I look down at myself, and despite the situation, I flush.

I’d forgotten that I’d dashed out of the house wearing nothing but what I’d fallen asleep in, which truthfully wasn’t much. A pair of lavender and white striped pajama pants, socks that were soaked with snowmelt and mud from the outside—God, I’d forgotten to even put on shoes—and a top sheer enough to put my father in his grave if he knew I’d gone out in public in it, and it’s only then that I realise how absolutely freezing I am.

“Oh.”

A flutter of fabric ripples through the air and a shadow falls over me, and a moment later a white coat, warm from body heat falls across my shoulders. With the heft and length of the coat, I hadn’t realised how Aria was dressed back in the lobby—most likely, she moved too fast for anyone to register it.

A dark muscle shirt clings to her torso, and her fatigue bottoms are tightly secured with straps. At her waist is a heavy knife, and all I can think about that is that they really don’t check the employees of the hospital well enough for a so-called weapons-free medical campus.

None of that is what startles me, though. See her now, like this, I realise how dangerous she really is. Her arms and shoulders are tense, and in their tension, I can see pound after pound of corded muscle straining, and suddenly I understand why I could barely move once she got her hands on me.

Aria has the muscle structure of a boxer or an MMA fighter.

“P-Please,” I start, my voice cracking slightly. “I wa—I need to see her!”

“No can do, Miss Belle, because you have a few questions to answer before I can do that, and believe it or not, this is me doing my job,” Aria says grimly.

My stomach flips again. I don’t need to ask what the questions are. I can guess. “Please, I didn’t know.”

“It’s cute you think I’d take your word on that, or that I care even if you didn’t,” Aria says flatly. “So let me lay it out for you, your sister was brought in by Lifeflight, and she's down the hall, third door on the left, in room forty-one, waiting for transfer to third-floor med-surg, and in room forty is Apple Bloom, who came with her.”

I blink as her words sink in. “W-Wait… Apple—so she did know!”

Of course, I suspected she knew where Sweetie was, but I had no way to act on it. The few times I managed to talk to her, to ask if she’d heard from Sweetie, the answers were always a variation of ‘no’ with the occasional ‘why d’you care?’ which hurt mostly because it was a fair question.

“Wait, why is Apple Bloom in here?” I ask, a tell-tale itch scratching at the back of my head as I tried to piece everything together. “What happened?”

Aria gives me an arch look that makes my blood simmer. Something about her classical beauty really gives her a grade-A snobby smugness when she wants to show it.

“Because we put her here, just like we did to your sister,” Aria explains quietly, and the simmering feeling hits a boil for a brief moment before— “after all, someone had to stop them from killing.”

My stomach plummets.

“Stop… w-what?” I stammer. “You’re not—”

Something clatters in front of me, and I look down. A mask, cracked in three large sections and bound together with corded steel wire, lays on the ground in front of me stained with blood, and beside it is a metal ruler stake with what looks like…

“S-Sewing needles?” I mumble staring down at the horrible implement.

I put a hand on it and shiver at the chill that goes up my arm.

“Careful, one cut from that and you’ll bleed like a Czar,” Aria says calmly.

My mind pieces together the clues from what I’ve been gathering. Everything regarding the serial killings had been tertiary to finding her. I’d only really kept track of them because I’d been desperate to make sure Sweetie’s name didn’t end up on the list of victims. Every time a new killing was reporting, my heart had plummeted as I imagined Sweetie’s face decorating a headline, only to rise with grimly vertiginous satisfaction when I would see it was someone else’s loved one, and not mine who had been murdered.

“Legion,” Aria says. “Sweetie and Apple Bloom.”

“Why?” I ask quietly as I slip my hands under the mask and slowly lift it. I imagine, somehow, that I can feel Sweetie Belle in it like I’m hearing an echo of her voice from far, far away.

Blowing out a breath, Aria cards her fingers through her hair and sighs.

“They were infected by the Fog, like me and the others who got out the Trials, but that’s not really why,” Aria replies.

She kneels and gets an arm under me to start pulling me away from the door until she finally gets me through the doors of an empty room and drops me next to the exam bed.

“That’s why I need to know…” Aria continues. “See, there’s a reason some went apeshit and started murdering people, and others stayed chill… it’s because the Fog is like a loudspeaker for your despair, and for a Survivor to go full Killer? Well, you’ve basically gotta have nothing left in you but despair.”

That’s when she draws her knife. It’s a whisper of a sound, and the gleam of it draws my eyes to the wickedly sharp edge.

“So I’m going to ask you this once, and I’ll know if you’re lying when you answer me… were you abusing Sweetie Belle? Or did she put all those cuts on herself?” Aria’s grip went white-knuckled on her knife.

I hate that it’s taking me so long to answer. I should be able to say no, of course not. I would never, and did never, lay a hand on my sister. Except, I know the truth, don’t I? Don’t I know that that’s not all there is to the matter?

“Will you still kill me if I say that… I think the answer to your questions is simply, ‘yes’?” I say hollowly.

A bitter laugh escapes me, and tears come hot on its heels.

“Did I beat her? Put out cigarettes on her arms? Did I take sewing needles to her arms and use them to dig into her skin the way she did?” Every word tastes worse than the vomit I’d just sicked up, but I force them out anyway. I need to say it all. I need to. “Of course not, darling, I’m not so crass as that. I’m much worse, I think. What I did was look away from the bruises on her face and arms every day she came back from school. What I did was fail to offer her even a scrap of comfort even as I watched the light die in her eyes.”

It had been so easy, too. To just do nothing. To tell myself that Sweetie was just reaping the rewards of ruining so many lives, so many relationships, and so many friendships. All I had to do was ignore her and pretend she was a stranger in her own home until I finally made her understand that she wasn’t welcome anymore.

“I caught her, you know,” I say quietly after a long stretch of silence. “Months after the fact, it was a little after Scootaloo died, I came home abruptly and found her in the bathroom—” my stomach lurches, and I dig my fingers into my scalp, gripping the strands of my hair as I see it again, that image burned into the back of my eyeballs “—with her arms full of sewing needles as she pushed them in and then dug them out with her b-bare fingers…”

I’d thought I was having another nightmare at the time, to be honest. It was grotesquely fascinating for the brief moment that I wasn’t sure it was real, and then the smell hit me. Copper and antiseptic. That’s when I knew it wasn’t just another awful dream. That was when I snapped.

“God, I screamed at her… I screamed such horrible things, I c-called her such horrible things,” I sob. “B-But I was just scared… I d-didn’t mean them!”

“And let me guess, the next time you went to look for her…?” Aria ventures

“She was gone.”

“Tch, fuck,” Aria clicks her tongue and sheathes her knife. “Well, at least you’re just a moron and not a monster, because honestly after the shit you all pulled on Sunset it was even odds in my head.”

I press the mask to my forehead; it’s so cold. The material feels like smooth plaster that had been left in the freezer overnight. I don’t have to ask to know that this is her mask—Sweetie Belle’s mask.

Aria sighs and curses under her breath.

“Look, powderpuff, I know you’re going to be asking yourself a lot of questions, so I’ll save you some time, but don’t hold it against me, alright?”

Aria kneels and brushes the mask away from my face. I hate how infuriatingly calm she looks. I hate it because it feels like every inch of my insides is on fire.

“The answer to that soul-gnawing question in your head is ‘yes’,” Aria says. “You and the hayseed could have stopped this from happening, all you had to do was treat your sisters like fucking human beings, okay? Give them some hope to counter the despair. It would’ve been hard, and it would’ve sucked, but that’s how we’ve kept ourselves sane… well,” Aria’s expression shrouds grimly for a moment, “—most of us, anyway… some people don’t want the help.”

But I could have tried. That’s what she’s saying. All I had to do was try to extend a hand of pity to my sister, and it could have stopped all of this. I try not to think of the sheer number of victims the Legion accounted for.

All of those people.

They were all victims of my cruelty.

“This is how it works,” Aria says quietly as she stands. “This is how it’s always worked—misery and hatred are one big, stupid circle until someone breaks it… I swear, you humans never learn.”

She doesn’t say another word, Aria just watches me for a moment, then scoffs, turns on her heel, and walks away.

Miserable. I feel so miserable. I feel like all I can do is reach into my gut and pull everything out and yet it won’t ever, ever be enough. All this time I really believed that if it came down to it, my better angels would win out and I would be the bigger person.

How absolutely galling it is to have that faith so utterly shattered.

I don’t know how long I sit there on the floor of that emergency room, but by the time I get up my legs are aching and I have pins and needles in my extremities. I feel drained as I finally stand and look down at myself, and take a moment to appreciate what a miserable sight I make.

My skin is dull and patchy with scratches and nicks where I’ve picked at it, and there are rashes in places too, thanks to a few too many missed showers. My hair is lank and oily, and my throat is so raw that it aches.

I’m probably getting sick, but honestly that’s not much of a surprise.

Stumbling out of the room, I dredge my memory for the room that Aria said she was in—forty-one, I think.

The memory is confirmed as I turn the corner and spot Applejack sitting outside room forty, where Apple Bloom had been settled, wearing a haunted look on her face that I half-suspect is neatly mirrored on my own.

I don’t acknowledge her as I pass her by, and she doesn’t react, but I know she knows I’m there. Maybe it’s a mutual understanding. We can’t. Not yet. The look on her face is all the proof I need to know that Aria has already spoken to her and probably given her the same dressing down she gave me.

In a way, I am grateful to her. The constant asking of that question: ‘could I have saved her’ would have eaten away at my sanity. Of course, the truth of it is that when someone is asking themselves that question, they’re doing so in the desperate hope that the answer will be ‘no’ because the alternative suggests a failure on a scale most people simply aren’t equipped to deal with.

So now, rather than a gnawing madness, it’s a cancer. A rot eating slowly and inexorably at my insides.

I push the door open, forcing myself to face the weight of my decisions, and to my surprise, I find I’m not alone. A woman is inside, and for a moment I think she’s a doctor, but her casual clothing immediately puts that to a lie. She’s short and a little scruffy—although I’m hardly one to talk—wearing a thick sweater, worn jeans, and scuffed boots, and her purple hair is done up in a messy bun.

And she’s standing over Sweetie Belle.

“Uhm, p-pardon me, but are you in the right room?” I ask wearily, wincing at how my voice cracks.

When she turns, I swear I lose ten years off my life.

Her name is almost past my lips before I remember myself. Before I remember the last few times I talked to Applejack before I lost myself in my search for Sweetie, and she told me she’d met the human version of Twilight Sparkle.

“Oh, uhm, hello,” Twilight says shyly, and I can’t help but smile a little.

She’s a little frumpier than her Equestrian counterpart. There’s nothing Princess-ly about her at all. Thick glasses sit perched on a button nose over eyes that are wide and curious, although right now all they look is sad. Her cheeks are full and soft, and even with her sweater I can tell she’s a little on the heavier side—but only a little—and she carries it well.

It’s cute on her.

“You’re… Rarity, right?” Twilight asks after a moment. “I’ve seen a few pictures, but…”

“I suppose Applejack doesn’t talk about her old friends that much,” I venture.

Twilight shakes her head, and the worried frown that flashes over her face tells me more than any amount of explanation could. Applejack wears her pain poorly, she always has, and now there’s so much of it that I’m truly afraid it will kill her one day, the way it did her father.

At least she has Twilight.

“May I… ask what you’re doing in here?” I say, and I know I’m just stalling. It would be easy to go to her side and see the figure lying on the bed behind her, but I’m not quite ready yet.

Soft lips press to a thin line as Twilight glances back behind her briefly before she returns her gaze to me.

“I told Applejack I’d check on her, she’s…”

Of course.

“She doesn’t quite have it in her?” I ask, and Twilight nods.

She’s not the only one, but needs must. I’m all Sweetie has, and it’s about damn time I start acting like it. Swallowing thickly, I force myself to take another few steps forward to the bedside and look down.

If it weren’t for the quiet chime of the EKG machine attached to the bed, I would have thought she were dead. Sweetie’s face is sunken and pale, and the skin is so dark around her eyes it looks like she’d painted them with kohl. She looks like she hasn’t slept right in weeks, if not longer, and certainly hadn’t been eating.

“The uhm… the situation, I guess, is the same as with Apple Bloom,” Twilight explains softly. “The surgeon, Doctor Blaze, says they’re both in a coma, but that they’re lucky they’re not dead.”

Aria is a surgeon? It’s news to me, but then I suppose it has been years. Plus, those three, the Sirens? Weren’t they immortal? A medical doctorate wasn’t out of the question then, although it surprises me that it’s Aria who holds it.

“Did she say when they would wake? Or…” I trail off.

I don’t have it in me to ask the last part of that question, but fortunately, I don’t have to. Twilight just frowns again and shakes her head.

“I’ll… I’ll leave you alone, okay?” Twilight says after a moment, and as she turns she puts a hand on my shoulder and grips it tightly. “I’m sorry this happened, but everything is going to be alright, I promise.”

I scoff, but rein in my derision. She doesn’t deserve that. She’s so kind, and I hardly deserve it, so instead I turn to her and try for a smile. I think I almost succeed.

“That’s very good of you to say, darling,” I reply. “Thank you.”

It’s only after she leaves that I collapse. I fall to my knees, finally letting my legs give way under the weight of my grief as I reach out carefully to put a hand on Sweetie’s thin arm. I brush the skin gently, feeling my gorge rise again as my fingers find old, ugly ridges of scar tissue beneath them. They’re bitter, brutal things, those scars—symbols not only of despair but of my own failures as both a sister and a human being.

Aria was right. All I had to do was treat my own flesh and blood like a human being, show her a little compassion, and all of this could have been avoided.

Sure that hadn’t been asking for too much?

How can I explain to her, to any of them, that every time I looked at my baby sister, all I could hear was that awful sound of meat and gristle and bone striking concrete? How can I explain that in the deepest, bitterst, and ugliest parts of my heart, a very small part of me thinks that Sweetie Belle deserves this.

For the second time that morning, I lose time, maybe half an hour, but I’m not sure. The seconds tick away on the tinny chime of the EKG until I can’t stand it anymore. Maybe a better person would have found something meaningful to say to their comatose sister in that time, but I think I’m coming to the realisation that I’m not a better person.

I don’t even know if I’m a good person—or even an okay person.

As I push the door open, a faint echo reaches my ears. Arguing voices, and on instinct, I stop. I’m an awful gossip, and if I’m being honest this isn’t the first time I’ve let my curiosity get the better of me and listened on somewhere I probably ought not to have been, but, well… hm, I suppose maybe that should have clued me in to my nature sooner, but we’re all blind to our worst flaws, as they say.

So I listen, I pick out Aria’s voice most clearly.

“…you think it’s funny? Coming here? We know what you are now.”

Hearing Aria threatening someone doesn’t surprise me, what surprises me is the voice that answers back. It’s one I had been speaking to just a little while ago, but the tone and timbre to it is completely different.

Twilight doesn’t just sound cold… she sounds almost alien.

“Are you sure you want to start this here?” Twilight asks softly, and there’s a strange quality to her voice. “We’re in a hospital, there’s a lot of despair in places like this.”

“You—!”

“Call it a truce for now,” Twilight says, her voice still oddly thin and tinny. “I’m here for my girlfriend, and then we’re leaving, that’s all.”

“That’s ‘all’?” Aria’s tone is tight with fury. “After what you did? After everything you’ve done?”

A low, ripple of laughter filters through the door I’m pressed against, and while intellectually, I know the laugh belongs to Twilight, my mind can’t really match up that weird, chittering quality of it to the woman I just spoke to.

“Hospital, remember? I’m in no condition to do this and neither are any of you, but if it comes to it I think my odds are good.”

I can actually hear Aria choking on her own rage. Part of me is horribly curious about what those two have between them that’s so contentious, and the rest is truly afraid to find out.

“I know where you sleep,” Aria hisses, finally.

Another laugh. “Bold of you to assume that I sleep, but by all means, come by for dinner, I’m sure picking a fight with me where I’ve been living and setting up for the past year is a perfectly safe and logical plan.”

“Enough.”

My blood absolutely freezes at that voice.

Impossible.

I know that voice. I hear it in my dreams every night that I can’t stave off sleep with stimulants and work. It’s different now, but not different enough. It’s a little older and a little more tired, but I would know that warm husky voice anywhere.

“Nightmare.” Twilight says the word like both a name and a greeting.

“Thief.”

“Call off your dog, I’m not here to fight.”

A scoff echoes faintly, and beneath that is an undercurrent of rage. It’s all I can do to keep from cracking the door open to take a look. I want to see her, and at the same time, I don’t. I’m terrified.

“Aria, let this one go,” the voice says softly. “This isn’t the time or the place.”

“Tch, fine.”

I hear Aria stomp away, and silence reigns for a few moments before…

“I will kill you, eventually.” A chill rolls down my spine at the deadly intent in those words. Is this really her? It can’t be, right? Right? It can’t be… Sunset?

Twilight laughs again, and I’ve heard enough derision in my time to be able to picture the condescending smirk on her face. For some reason, it both fits and doesn’t. That kind of look on Twilight, though? In my head, she almost becomes a different person.

The laugh, though, is nothing compared to the voice that comes next.

“You can certainly try.”

My stomach twists and I stumble back from the door. That… was Twilight? It couldn’t have been. That could not have been Twilight. No, moreover that voice could not have possibly even been human.

I bump into Sweetie’s bed and brace myself there, unwilling to approach the door again and risk hearing that voice again.

Human voices don’t chitter and echo like that. They don’t sound like a thousand centipede legs brushing together in just such a way that you can make out words.

There’s no suppressing the shiver that rolls through me.

Slowly, I turn and look down at Sweetie Belle, still pallid and breathing in weak, hollow swells. She truly does look dead.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

I clap a hand to my mouth, pinning in a scream, as I whip around to face Twilight, who’s standing in front of the door with her hands tucked into her pockets, and an oddly thin smile on her face.

“Is everything alright, Rarity?” Twilight’s face is doll-like—cold and unmoving—as she takes a step, then two, into the room.

Wrong. She’s wrong. Something about her is very, very wrong. “N-No… I…” I swallowed past a lump in my throat. “Everyth-thing is fine, daring,” I say shakily as I lower my hand.

Twilight’s eyes flick down to Sweetie Belle, and when they come back up to me there’s something dark lurking behind them. Something hungry.

“Don’t you want to know what that was about?” twilight asks casually as she walks over to me and stops at Sweetie’s bed, right beside me. “And who I was talking to?”

“I s-sure I don’t—“

Her doll-like smile stretches a touch wider, and my words die on my tongue.

There are a variety of things wrong with her and the absolute worst of it is that I really can’t put a finger on even one of them. Her expression, yes, but why? Her eyes? Her posture? The tilt of her lips? Yes, yes, and yes… but why? None of those things were there when I walked in on her standing beside Sweetie before, and that, I think is the worst part.

She was hiding them.

My heart lurches as she reaches out and brushes a strand of hair from Sweetie’s face, and I choke on air as I snap a hand out to slap hers away.

She catches my wrist before I can touch her, and my heart drops from my throat all the down to somewhere near my navel as goose flesh erupts across my arm.

What on earth is wrong with her hand?

It looks normal but it feels… cold. Cold and smooth and glassy, with enough give that it's undeniably organic but equally undeniably… not flesh. If anything, it feels almost like the shell of an insect.

Her fingers tighten around my hand, and I hate that I start to shake immediately.

“Sshhh, it’s okay?” Twilight hushes gently. “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to ask you something.”

“Y-Yes?” I force myself to stay still even as the primal quarters of my brain are sounding raid sirens that I’m about to be eaten.

“Do you want her back?”

That question put a wicked shadow over my heart. What a question to ask… did I want my sister back? I hate that it takes me more than a moment to answer—I should have been able to say ‘yes’ without a second’s hesitation, but hesitate, I do.

At the very least, I take some solace in the fact that when I do answer, it’s with a shaky, but resolute nod.

“Do you know what’s wrong with her?” I ask weakly as Twilight lets go of my wrist.

“I do.” Twilight turns back to Sweetie and begins idly stroking her brow. “Memories are funny things. Physically, they’re just sparks between the synaptic gaps of the hypothalamus and, barring certain genetic neurological deviations, they’re not even all that reliable.”

She looks up at me then, and there is nothing remotely human in those black, black eyes with their pupils of molten gold.

“But what are we when they’re gone? Memories make us who we are. They bleed into us. Change us. They drive us, strengthen us, weaken us… and through us they can change the fabric of reality.”

I swallow thickly. “I… I don’t understand.”

Twilight shakes her head and laughs. “I know, but you will, my point is that your sister’s been emptied of her memories. It looks like fog, did you know that? Memories? They look like fog when they’re outside of us.”

“W-What?”

She lays her palm over Sweetie’s forehead carefully. “We all have it in us, memories laced with hope and despair… she had so much of the latter when I found her that it was killing her—eating away through her insides so much so that she was trying to dig it out of herself.”

My guts twist and lurch again. I want to throw up. In that instant I can see her again, standing with her back to me, digging and tearing, with blood dripping freely from open wounds into the sink as she mutilated herself.

“I took the Fog and made it something new,” Twilight continues. “But then they stole it… they took her despair away and left her empty. Just meat on a slab.”

“Magic… it’s magic,” I mumble, before turning to glare furiously at Twilight. “What did you do to her?”

Twilight’s lips curve into a vulpine smirk.

“I made her strong with what was already there, Rarity, so the better question might be—” she turns so fast I don’t even see her move, and grips my chin with those unsettlingly cold hands of hers “—what did you do to her?”

I open my mouth. Maybe to defend myself. Maybe to confess my sins. I don’t know. It all vanishes before I can catch any of it, and in the end I know it’s not necessary.

“Trick question,” Twilight says thinly. “I told you, I already molded her Fog… so I know what you did. I know everything you did—or rather, that you didn’t do.”

Tears trickle down my cheeks as the strength leaves my legs, and I sink slowly to my knees. My pajama bottoms are thin, and do nothing to keep my knees from scuffing on the cold tile, and a sob escapes my lips.

“I didn’t mean to.”

Her hand comes to rest on my head, brushing the messy tangle I’d left it in with gentle strokes.

“I know,” she says. “But it’s killing you isn’t it? The memories of those things you didn’t do?

“All the glanced-over bruises, and the little spots of blood on the bathroom sink that Sweetie missed when she was cleaning, and that you told yourself were from a nosebleed or a nicked finger? All the extra bandages in the cupboard, and the missing sewing needles? All the long-sleeved sweaters and hoodies that she never took off, even when it got too warm…”

Another sob rips out of me. It’s a wretched noise, but I don’t have the strength to care. My chest is burning and my stomach is roiling.

She’s right. Of course she’s right. I saw all of those things and I chose to ignore them. I chose to let her suffer because I was petty and ugly and sick inside and part of me hated her for her part in Sunset’s death. But it wasn’t just that. It was because in the process of killing Sunset, she’d shown me just how awful of a person I was capable of being, deep down.

“You can help me make it right, though.”

A hiccup catches in my throat as I look back up at Twilight with eyes that are burning with tears and exhaustion.

“H-How?”

Twilight kneels and presses her finger to my chest.

“There’s a light in you, a power, that’s orders of magnitude beyond powerful… and right now, that ache? It’s eating at the edges of that light like a corruption.” Twilight prods me on the chest again, a little harder.

“And you’ll f-fix it?” I ask hopefully.

Her laughter is such an ugly thing.

“No,” Twilight says flatly. “No, there’s no fixing it. You poisoned yourself, but I can take that pain and make you numb to it—make you stronger than it, see it’s not the hate that’s killing you, it’s the false hope.”

She splays her fingers and lays her palm over my heart, and for a moment that alien look on her face fades, and in its places there’s something like true sympathy.

“You still hope, even though you know it’s pointless, and that war inside you between despair and hope is the agony you feel,” Twilight says, in a gentle, and painfully human tone of voice. “Hope is the cancer that’s killing you, and if you let me, I’ll cut it out, and you’ll be free.”

I lay my hand over hers and this time I don’t flinch away from its unnatural texture. “Hope is the cancer…” I mumble, then let out a brittle laugh, “hope… hope is all I have left!”

Twilight sighs quietly and removes her hand only to cup my face gently. I shiver at the touch. You can’t really blame a girl. It’s… it’s been a little while since anyone’s held me like this.

“No, it’s not, because hope is a luxury and you can’t afford it,” Twilight says. “But pain? That’s free—and without hope killing you over it, pain and spite can animate you for a long, long time. Long enough to make hope redundant.” She traces her thumb over her cheek, and smiles. “Hope is just a wish, but if you let me darken that light we can turn that wish into a reality. It will hurt, and it will be a lot of hard work, but I can do it… we can do it, you, me, and Applejack.”

Applejack. My eyes snap open wide. “Y-You mean she—?”

Of course. They’ve been together for months, over a year actually. Over course Applejack knew. Of course she’d already said yes. What was I thinking?

Slowly, I lean into her touch. “It hurts so much, every day hurts. I spend every single day with my guts in knots… I can’t sleep… I c-can’t eat…”

“I know,” Twilight coos. “It’s because you’re sick.”

“H-Help me,” I sob.

“I will,” Twilight says, as she cards her fingers through my filthy, matted hair. “I’m just going to ask you a question, and all you have to do is say ‘yes’, okay?”

I nod frantically, and she smiles, and even though it’s strange and doll-like, and not even remotely human… it makes me smile too. Then she pulls me in, resting my fevered head against her shoulder, and she presses her cheek to mine and I shiver again as her lips brush my ear.

And she asks me the question.

“Will you be mine?”

“Y-Yes!”

Thunder claps above and around us as her arms go around me fully.

No… no not arms… something else, something cold and unpleasant like insect legs! My eyes snap open and the hospital is gone! All around me is darkness—illimitable darkness and Fog. God, but there’s something inside that darkness, though. Something shaped like a person but it’s not a person! It’s not! It’s not! Not a person! It’s legs and stingers and blowfly mandibles and twitching, spasming spinnerets all meshed together to look… like Twilight Sparkle.

And God. My God.

She’s smiling!

“Poor Rarity… I should have started with you, that was so much easier than Fluttershy,” she chittered.

I open my mouth to speak but I can’t. There’s no air. No words! I can’t breathe! And—what?!

“Ssshhh… it’s okay,” Twilight’s not-hand slithers across my face in the darkness, and settle on my abdomen. “You’ve got a corruption deep inside, and your hope is trying to fight it, but there’s no fighting despair. Despair is the perfectly logical reaction to the world as it is, and hope is just a mental sickness masquerading as a defensive mechanism, but I’m going to fix you just like—” I jerk and spasm as she digs her the stingers that are where her fingers should be into my flesh, and I can feel myself unspooling like a dropped roll of yarn “—that!”

When she grabs onto it, I feel it. It’s cold, like the first lick of ice cream on a hot day, or a wet rag on a brow slick with fever-sweats.

“Your corruption is powerful.” Twilight’s cicada susurration fills the air around my mind as darkness closes in. “It’s a sickness in your soul, and… oh… what’s this?” The smile in her voice grows wider. “How perfect… you’re absolutely perfect, Rarity, you’ll be able to weaken that two-bit anomaly, you’ll just have to be close enough to share your corruption, but that won’t be a problem will it?”

I feel her again, her lips like two centipedes pressed together as she comes close.

“After all, you’re just so generous.”

Another wrenching twist, and my world spirals, and the darkness recedes for a moment. Just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the horror standing over me gripping a fistful of coruscating opal light. Her eyes are pools of darkness with sparks of gold like burning coins in the center, and her hair wavers with burning, impossible teal fire. From her back, wings like scorpion stingers and spider’s-legs stretch out, and the worst of it all is her chest.

A gaping, pulsating wound, hemorrhaging Fog like blood cleaves her almost in twain, from hip to shoulder, and I can see her twisting, shattered insides trying to hold her together.

Then she raises her free hand to her chest, and I realise for the first time that there’s something else there. Something around her neck. It’s like a pendant or an amulet… no, it’s too big. It’s more like a large purple locket, and unlike the rest of her grotesquely organic body, this thing is clearly made from metal, and by hand if I had to guess.

Twilight taps the center of the locket and a seam splits down the middle, and from inside, a pure golden-amber light flashes from within, and I get a glimpse of something—a crude, uncut gemstone, I think—and then the opal light is gone, swallowed by the amber light.

The locket snaps shut, and the light goes out, and all that’s left is the dark and the Fog.

“Now, time to finish you up.”

As she lays her hands on me, I realise, for the first time, that I’m not hurting. Nothing hurts. I don’t feel… anything. Just the lack of pain itself is almost like euphoria. It’s practically a religious experience. I don’t care that I’m swallowed by a hellish darkness surrounding a thing made of beetles and madness. All I care about is that it’s finally stopped hurting.

“Of course it has,” Twilight says, her voice a multi-toned, insectile whine. “I promise, didn’t I? And it’s going to get better… so much better… and when I’m finished, your corruption will be your strength, and when I’m done—?” I jerk in place as that unspooling feeling starts up again, and my whole body begins to unravel.

“You’re going to spread it like a Plague.”

Sunset

I tug at my collar and rub at my eyes as I lean my elbows on the table of the little Emergency Department break room. It’s the closest one to the Sleep Center, so I’m more than familiar with it, and even though I’m not on shift, none of the nurses have said a word.

The few that have been in anyway.

In the Canterlot ED nursing staff is a skeleton crew, and that skeleton is missing a few bones. It’s a tough job in a tougher city and takes a lot of gumption or a serious disregard for personal mental and physical health to do this job for any amount of time.

So I have a moment to breathe.

Ormond was only twenty four hours ago, if that, and I still feel like my body is about to fall apart. I slept for a few hours after Ghostface saw me home, but it wasn’t much. I couldn’t make myself go into the room that Tempest and I used to share—I didn’t have it in me.

I slept on the couch, which wasn’t what you’d call comfortable, but it was better than lying on that bed where everything still smells like her, and every single sight in the room reminds me of when she would hold me through the throes of my dreamwalking.

“Here.” Aria set down another styrofoam cup of crappy coffee in front of me before seating herself across from me, then more tersely: “I cannot believe the brass ones on that bitch.”

I shake my head. “She’s right… we can’t fight her here, not in the middle of all these people. It would be a bloodbath.”

“So what? We just let her walk around free?” Aria snaps.

The coffee is bitter and burnt, but I sip at it anyway. The caffeine helps a little and I need it. Everything hurts and it’s hard to concentrate. I need all the help I can get.

“No,” I reply after a moment. “She’s in a corner now, so to speak… plus, there has to be a reason she hasn’t gone all ‘eldritch horror’ on the whole of Canterlot, too…”

“That wound, you think?” Aria ventures.

Yeah, I do think that. When Ghostface and I confronted her in Ormond after Tempest’s ambush, I saw the brutal wound in her chest. Something had hurt her, and badly. Anything else would be dead about a dozen times over but she was holding herself together, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t by a wide enough margin that she’s willing to take risks.

She’s not the Entity. Not yet. If she takes enough damage from the right kind of weapon, I’d lay good odds that she’d come apart at the seams. Of course, saying that and doing it were two very different things.

“Hey.” Aria’s hand settles on mine, startling me out of my thoughts. Her eyes are so soft right now. Softer than they are for anyone but Redheart. “Talk to me, Red… don’t bury it, I know you’re hurting so please, talk to me.”

“I just don’t know how I missed it,” I say bitterly.

“We all missed it,” Aria says.

I scoff and shake my head. “Yeah, well, I was a little more up close and personal than everyone else—for fuck’s sake, Ari’ I was sleeping with her, and I somehow missed it!”

Aria grips my hand tight as she shakes her head.

“You know that’s not how it works! We can’t tell until they shift, you know that!” Aria takes my hand in both of hers and runs her thumb over my knuckles. “She was hiding it from everyone! You, me, the girls, everyone! And we let her do it because no one wanted to push anyone on what happened back in the Trials! That’s not your fault! You hear me?”

Her chair clatters as she stands and moves around to my side and kneels beside me. “Look at me, Red, okay? Look at me.”

I do, I turn to look at her, because I can’t tell Aria no. I don’t have it in me. She’s too important to me. I love her far too much. More than I ought to, considering she’s taken. Written’s Quill, there are a lot of days I wish I didn’t fall as easily as I do. It’s so easy for me, and it hurts so badly most of the time.

Especially with Aria.

Moreso with Tempest.

“What happened… and what she did? It wasn’t your fault, Red.” Aria stands and leans in to pull me against her. “She chose this, okay? Tempest chose to let go. She chose to stop fighting the despair that was eating at her and just… slip away. That isn’t on you, Red, you did the best you could all while you were fighting your own battles and half of everyone else's, okay? So please, please, don’t—”

Aria’s words dissolve in sobs without warning, and shock rolls through me as the strength goes out of her and she slowly slips to the floor. I let her, and I go with her. I lower myself with Aria and we cling to each other, and I can’t keep the tears in either as we just sob messily against each other’s shoulders.

“I can’t lose you too, Red,” Aria wails. “I can't, okay?! So please don’t go like she did! Please! I c-can’t lose you like that! I can’t do this w-without you, so p-please, if you’re… if you’re slipping, if those whispers get too loud, just talk to me!”

“You won’t lose me, Ari’, I promise,” I sob as she grips the collar of my shirt and buries her face in my hair.

“I love you so much, Red,” Aria cries. “You mean so much to me, okay? So please don’t make me watch my sister die!”

There’s nothing else in me to say, so I just nod and stroke her hair. There are times I forget that buried under all that steel resolve and fury is a surprisingly caring heart. Aria has a lot of love in her. It’s why she’s so angry most of the time. She’s angry at herself, and at the world, and at other people for always failing to do better. Love becomes anger so easily when there’s this much pain and injustice in the world.

But it’s still love, for all that.

Seeing Tempest twist herself inside out like that. Seeing her give up in Ormond? It shook something inside me. That, along with everything else.

Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and…

And Scootaloo.

Written’s Quill, poor Scootaloo. She deserved so much better than to die in the arms of a woman with knives for fingers while a ghost drove a knife into her heart. What an absolute fucking nightmare. Just remembering it makes me sick.

I push those thoughts away as I hold onto Aria, and we stay there on the floor of the brake room for a good while until Redheart walks in on us. The expression she gives is one of pain, and she’s a woman who shows pain so very seldom. We share a glance, and I nod, and Redheart settles in beside Aria, coaxing her girlfriend and lover into her arms as I stand and wipe at my face with the heels of my palms.

“I’m going to take a walk,” I say softly. “Is Rarity still…?”

Redheart grimaces. “I thought she went into Sweetie’s room, but she wasn't there when I checked. Considering what Aria confronted her about, I’m not too surprised.

“What about Twilight?”

“The bitch and her murderess are gone, too, thankfully.” Redheart looks genuinely relieved at that. I’m not surprised. The longer Twilight and Applejack were here, the more likely it was that tonight would end in blood.

Better for us all that they left.

“Take care of her,” I say as I turn away.

“I always do.”

She does. Far better than I would.

I move slowly through the hall down towards the rooms where Apple Bloom, Sweetie, and briefly consider going up to check on Fluttershy. I don’t, though. If I tried, Rainbow Dash would probably end me, and I don’t blame her. I made a call, and I still think it was the right one.

Without breaching the Thief—Twilight’s—hold on the Ormond Trial and shearing through her barrier, we would never have gotten everyone out.

If there had been another way, I would have taken it, but there wasn’t.

So instead, I reorient, and stop in front of Apple Bloom’s door.

I don’t know if I need to know what happened, in the strictest sense. Yeah, maybe there will be some information to glean about Twilight and company, but this isn’t really about that.

Taking a deep breath, I push the door open and step inside. The air is cool, and the EKG is chiming its faint and thready metronome as I walk over to Apple Bloom’s bed and settle in beside her.

“Hey Bloom,” I start. “Guess we both got ours, huh?” She’s silent, and that’s how she’ll stay. Whatever Ghostface took from her, it broke her. Maybe there isn’t enough human left in her to come back, but I can hope. “I… I wish I could ask for your permission, but let’s be real, that’s not going to happen, so I’m just going to have to say sorry in advance, because I… I need to know.”

I reach out and brush my hand over her cool forehead. At least her skin is cool now. No more fever-hot flush of the Legion Killer burning away under her skin like a sickness. Apple Bloom is now, for better or worse, just human.

“It’s selfish and I won’t deny it, but I want to know how it happened.” I raise my hand and concentrate.

It’s hard. Harder than it’s ever been before. It’s like forcing a migraine on myself to summon a vestige of the Nightmare into my hand until finally, a slender silver blade extrudes from my finger.

The tip of the Fog-forged blade presses to Apple Bloom’s forehead, and I sigh quietly. “Sorry, kiddo… but someone should remember, even if you don’t.”

I press my blade into her forehead and tap the well of her dreams. Ghostface may have taken her Fog from her, and the memories with them, but the ‘Cloud Save’ is still there. The Dreamtime remembers every nightmare. Every memory.

You just have to find the right door—I twist my fingerblade and feel myself connect—and the right key.

The dreams and memories flood my mind, and I see everything.

Author's Note

END OF ACT I - DARKNESS AMONG US