By the time morning rolls around, I’m exhausted.

That’s a little odd for me but then again, I did just spend the entire night watching over Applejack of all people, so I guess I'm just a little more high-strung than usual.

Nothing interesting happened all night. She had a few more bouts of night terrors which gave us some good readings, enough for Doctor Wellborn to act on my suggestions. He trusts me more than most and if I say this person needs therapy as much or more than she needs pills, he’s usually pretty good about taking that into account.

Now, though, it’s near the end of my shift and Applejack still hasn’t woken up.

“Come on, Hayseed, I’m not staying here all day,” I grumble as I lean back in my chair and rub at my eyes.

It’s times like this I’m thankful that my office is underground. I don’t have to deal with the dawn or anything like that. I hate bright lights. I never used to have a problem with them, so a part of me can’t help but wonder if it’s a side-effect of my Killer biology. We’re beings of darkness and Fog. Getting a flashlight to the eyes is a painful experience for a normal person, but to a Killer it’s agonising. Our optics are coded for being able to pierce the thin light and thick Fog of the Trials, not to deal with clear skies and sunlight and all these quill-damned fluorescent lights.

“Come o~n,” I groan as I drop my head to my desk with a quiet thud. “I’d prefer not to wake you up myself,” I grumble into the desk, “but I’ll do it.”

A knock at the door interrupts my thought process and I sit up sharply before carding my fingers through my hair to make myself a little more presentable.

“Come in!” I call, leveling my voice out again to the recognisable alto of ‘Scarlet Dream’.

The door opens and a slightly care-worn Twilight Sparkle steps through. She’s wearing a thick sweater the same color as her hair, and a pair of thick grey pants to ward off the cold outside, and her glasses are still foggy from the temperature change.

As she brushes snow from her hair and wipes off her glasses, I take a closer look at her, and it only leaves me more certain that this Twilight Sparkle is definitely the human one.

For one, she’s awkward.

Not in the way that Princess Twilight was, where she wasn’t quite able to get the gist of walking on two legs for a good while. She's awkward in that, as she wipes off her glasses and takes a step into the sleep clinic, she catches her sleeve on the doorknob and nearly falls on her ass when the stray garment jerks her backward.

I have to hold back a laugh as she yelps and stumbles. I can see why Applejack finds her charming. She’s endearing in a goofy kind of way.

“Good morning, Miss Sparkle,” I say with more cheer than I’d been feeling a moment before. “Hope the morning commute treated you alright.”

“Oh, it was fine,” Twilight says, waving a hand dismissively. “I listen to audiobooks in traffic, I actually like getting caught in jams since I never have time to read anymore.”

“A funny way of viewing traffic jams, but I follow,” I say.

“Uhm, where’s Applejack?” Twilight glances around, mostly focusing on the back near the changing room, but I direct her attention back to the observation room with a chuckle and a pointed finger.

“Turns out she was a lot more tired than she thought,” I reply with a laugh. “Normally people are up and ready to go by about seven or so, but she’s still snoozing.”

“Oh!” Twilight looks pleasantly surprised. “Well, that’s good… she’s been having so much trouble sleeping lately that I was starting to get worried.”

I stand and crack my neck back and forth as I look over at Applejack and frown.

“I don’t know if this is cause not to worry, honestly,” I admit. “She’s clearly going through some rough stuff. My guess is some kind of past trauma surfacing through her dreams… it’s not that uncommon, honestly.”

Twilight frowns but she doesn’t refute me, instead she just looks pensive as she turns to stare over Applejack’s slumbering form with a kind of sorrowful expression.

“You don’t seem surprised,” I add, and Twilight nods.

“Her friend committed suicide two years ago,” Twilight says softly. “She never forgave herself for it… she blames herself, and it’s destroying her.”

I’d come to roughly the same conclusion. I won’t lie, a part of me had hoped the girls really had just fucking moved on.

“Can I ask you something?” I look over at Twilight who meets my eyes with a curious tilt to her head. “You two are together, I assume?”

She nods, then scowls. “Is that a problem?”

“If it was, then my powerlifter girlfriend and I would be having a really awkward conversation tonight,” I say with a laugh, and a look of relief passes over Twilight’s face. “No, I only ask because technically sharing medical details of any kind is a HIPAA violation, but—”

“I’m in her file as an emergency contact,” Twilight breaks in. “And I have a paper somewhere in there that says it’s okay to share the details with me, per her family and herself.”

I raise my eyebrows at that. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. The Twilight of this world is apparently just as fastidious and careful when it comes to properly filing paperwork as the one from my own dimension.

“Fair enough,” I allow. “I put a note in her file to refer her to a psychiatrist and a therapist, both. The former to assess her for antidepressants, and the latter to help talk her through her issues because one or the other probably won’t be enough.”

“Thank you, I was hoping for that, actually,” Twilight replies.

“Here’s the bump in the road, though,” I continue, drawing a look from Twilight. “You said you had a lot of trouble convincing her to just come in for this sleep study, right?”

She nods at that, then pauses, and sighs.

“I see where you’re going.” Twilight turns to look over Applejack and shakes her head. “You’re afraid she won’t take the meds or go to therapy.”

“We can recommend and refer until we’re blue in the face, but we can’t force her to go without committing her,” I say.

The Applejack I knew would probably have fought tooth and nail against going to any kind of therapy. Mental health isn’t exactly a comfortable topic when it comes to her family, and as far as I know, none of them have ever seen any kind of therapist despite having something of a history of family tragedy. I wager the odds of her actually going to therapy once it was set up as being less than thirty per cent.

“Is… is she in danger?” Twilight’s tone is fragile, and it’s not hard to see the strain on her face. “From… y-y’know.”

I shake my head. “I couldn’t say, I’m not her friend.”

A truer statement, there never was.

“I do suggest that, if possible, she get a good support group,” I say. “There’s plenty of grief counselors here at Canterlot General, and from what you say it sounds like she never processed any of her feelings.” I turn to Twilight as a thought occurs to me. “Does she have any friends she can talk to about this? A solid social structure can be a huge difference.”

To my absolute shock, Twilight shakes her head.

“No, not really,” Twilight says quietly. “She had some close friends once, but they’ve all drifted apart since she graduated and she doesn’t like talking about them.”

That caught me badly off guard.

‘Drifted apart’? They were supposed to be bound together by literal magic! How do you drift apart from that?

“What about family?”

Twilight sighs and shrugs. “That’s… kind of complicated.”

That’s not good. Applejack was all about her family back when I knew her. It was actually a little uncomfortable for me since I’d never had one of my own. Having her talking about her mass of cousins, aunts, and uncles, and all their reunions and parties always made me feel like shit, although I never said anything about it.

It always felt too petty to mention.

“Applejack and her brother run the farm, so she rarely leaves it,” Twilight continues. “Her grandmother passed early this year, and her sister?” Twilight grimaces sighs. “That’s… a completely different can of worms. They don't really get along.”

“I see,” I say quietly.

Granny Smith is dead? I mean, she was ancient, so I’m not too surprised, but that must have broken Applejack’s heart. Between that and whatever is going on with Apple Bloom, all was clearly not right in paradise.

I’m not going to lie. The notion that my death inflicted this kind of damage, or at least some of it, has me feeling… conflicted.

I hate them, I’m not sure I have anything left in me but hate for them. Not anger, not rage, just a cold, ugly, ember of poison that flares up in my gut every time I think about them. It’s the same way I feel about Princess Celestia, even if I know intellectually that she probably kept me from walking the path of the Warlock by trying to ascend when I didn’t deserve it she still fucking disowned me.

Every instance where I might have found a family, a home, or even just a place to call my own, has been ripped out from under me. Maybe I did sabotage myself here and there, but everything fell apart so badly this last time that I’m not sure there’s anything worth salvaging.

But this isn’t about me, and it doesn’t matter that this job I’m in is just glorified cover for me to keep a closer eye on what comes in and out of Emergency with Aria. I’m still responsible for the people who come in here.

“Well, that part isn't my business,” I continue finally. “Doctor Wellborn will want to see her again in a few days once he’s had time to go over the results of the study, but I’ve basically told you what he’s likely to say.”

“Thank you,” Twilight says quietly. “And thank you for keeping an eye on her tonight, too… it means she finally got some sleep. The Doctor did say he was putting her with his best sleep tech.”

I chuckle wanly at that. Doctor Wellborn has far too high of an opinion of me for the kinds of bullshit I get away with under his nose.

Twilight goes silent as she watches Applejack sleep through the glass wall of the observation room, and rather than follow her lead I find myself watching her instead.

‘She’s pretty,’ is my first thought.

It’s a humanising kind of prettiness; the kind where her hair isn’t quite all in place, leaving some of the lavender strands to fall over her glasses. The kind of pretty that you see when you wake up at eleven at night, look down at the woman in your arms and realise that you both fell asleep halfway through the movie you decided to watch for date night, and rather than wake her up, you just… watch.

Twilight looks tired, and a little careworn which I wager is probably from looking after Applejack, and she certainly looks worried.

But she’s also pretty.

Applejack is a lucky girl. I hope she realises that soon enough to snap out of wherever she is before she loses everything, or worse, takes this world’s Twilight down with her.

“Can I ask how you two met?” I say. At this point, I’m just satisfying idle curiosity. “You say she never leaves the farm, so…”

“I said ‘rarely’, actually,” Twilight replies, chuckling. “We met on her farm, though, so I guess that’s fair.” She tears her gaze away from Applejack to look back at me with a soft smile. “I was doing a self-directed study and my project involved testing soil samples from the surrounding areas of Canterlot, Sweet Apple Acres is one of the largest and most distant, so I saved it for last because I knew it would take a few weeks.”

“Ah,” I say, and can’t help but laugh a little, myself. That’s a very ‘Twilight’ set of circumstances. “I guess there was paperwork?”

“Mhm,” Twilight nods. “I needed permission from the landowner, and Applejack was very accommodating. She even let me stay at the farmhouse for the duration of my study so we spent a lot of time together… I’m a little surprised myself, but I really did fall for her.”

“Nice meet-cute,” I say with a grin, and Twilight blushes. “Better than mine, anyway.”

That’s a subterranean bar considering that I met Tempest in a rotting cornfield while running from a chainsaw-wielding mutant freakshow called ‘The Hillbilly’.

“She’s thoughtful, helpful, and… and she’s a good woman,” Twilight says quietly, her voice trailing off as she turns back to Applejack and sighs. “I really love her, you know?”

“I can tell,” I say.

I’m not actually sure if what I’m feeling is jealousy or pity. On the one hand, it’s a little irksome that Applejack found a normal, stable relationship with someone who cares this much about her wellbeing. On the other hand, it’s honestly sad to see how incapable she is of appreciating it.

Or… maybe it’s not that she doesn’t appreciate it. Maybe it’s that she’s too damaged to be capable of appreciating it like she ought to.

Well, I can relate to that, at least.

“Looks like she’s coming to,” Twilight says a bit more brightly, and sure enough, on the other side of the observation glass, Applejack is stirring.

I wince a little as she sits up. Applejack looks pretty bad. I’ve had a few occasions, especially when I was homeless, where I knew what it was like to hit the hay and actually sleep after a long time of not getting a full night’s rest. Her body probably feels like ten miles of bad road because her brain is still desperately trying to make up for the debt of sleep it feels it's owed.

Still, the daughter of Pear Butter and Bright Mac swings her legs off the side of the bed, yawns cavernously, then forces herself to stand up, albeit a bit shakily.

Before I can move, Twilight is past me and through the door to the room where Applejack had been asleep, and I follow her through a moment later with a wry chuckle on my lips.

“Okay, cowgirl, holdup,” I say, putting a hand up and gesturing for her to stop. “You’re still wired up to half the hospital, and I need you to answer a few questions before you go anywhere.”

“O-Oh, right, sorry ‘bout that,” Applejack says groggily as she looks down at herself, picking at the wires.

She sits back down and Twilight joins her on the bed, moving up next to her as I pull the nodes off of Applejack one by one. As I do I go through the boilerplate questionnaire, asking her the usual exit survey, mostly they’re just questions that boil down to how she feels now versus how she normally feels waking up at home so we have some variables to control for.

Once that’s out of the way it takes the industrious farmer all of about fifteen minutes to wash up, dress, and be ready to go.

“Thanks again, Doc—uh, Scar,” Applejack laughs quietly, then holds out her hand, and gives me that wide, guileless grin I remember so well. “Ah really appreciate y’all helpin’ me out here, and Ah’d like it if y’all’d come visit the farm some time fer dinner.”

I suppose that offer was probably inevitable, knowing the famous hospitality of the Apple clan as well as I do.

“I’ll definitely consider it,” I reply, as noncommittally as possible, then take her hand and give it a firm shake. “Just… take care of yourself, Jackie, okay?”

She blinks as the words come out of my mouth, and for a moment I see the shadow of grief fall over her again as her hand tightens considerably around mine.

Damn it. That was too much. That was too close to ‘Sunset Shimmer’, not ‘Scarlet Dream’. It’s hard to remember when I’m around Applejack that I’m supposed to be dead.

Sunset Shimmer is dead and Applejack killed her.

She and Rarity, and Pinkie, and Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy all killed Sunset Shimmer. Or at the very least, they looked the other way while she died on her own, and maybe one is better than the other, but if that’s the case I don’t know what the difference is.

I’m still a corpse. A nightmare haunting a body that looks like someone that some people once called ‘friend’.

“Have a good rest of your day,” I say, forcing the words out as casually as possible. “I’ll forward your results to Doctor Wellborn, and his office should contact you to set up an appointment in the next day or two, okay?”

“Babe?” Twilight looks up at Applejack with concern etched on her brow. “Are you—?”

“Ah’m fine,” Applejack says a little too sharply, and she visibly reins herself in, sighs, and looks back down at Twilight. “Sorry, Twi’, just had some bad dreams, that’s all… Ah promise, Ah’m fine.”

Twilight frowns, but nods, then goes up on her toes again to kiss her girlfriend lightly on the cheek.

“Okay,” she says softly, and I’d bet neither I nor Applejack thinks she actually believes the young farmer, but none of us say a word. “Let’s go home.”

“Yeah, that sounds mighty fine t’me,” Applejack says.

Then she tips her stetson to me, smiles, and she’s gone from my office.

I wait a full sixty count to be sure she won’t come back after having forgotten something before collapsing back into my chair, smacking myself in the face with the clipboard, and loudly revisiting every single blasphemy and invective in my vocabulary.

It takes me a full ten minutes.

I have an extremely rich vocabulary.

“FUCK. ME!” I snarl the words as I slump over my desk. I’d chosen to end on an old favorite. “That was the most stressful night of work I’ve ever had… fuck!”

Forcing myself to my feet, I card my fingers through my hair and groan as I head back into the observation room to tidy everything up. Generally speaking, it’s the custodian’s job to take out the linens and everything but I usually do it just to make sure it gets done. Besides, I never have many people, and it’s not like it takes a long time… that’s probably one of the reasons Wiseline actually likes me so much.

I do his job for him.

All that’s left is to file my report and email it to Wellborn, which takes me all of about ten minutes since I’d done ninety percent of it while I was waiting for Applejack to wake up. I’m just shutting down the eldritch beast of aeons that is my computer, which runs on what I think is a cracked copy of Windows ME, when a knock sounds at the door, followed by Aria Blaze who’s toting a heavy-looking messenger bag.

“You ready to go yet, Red?” She asks, stifling a yawn of her own and adjusting the bag’s strap. “Because I’ve got a six-pack and two frozen pizzas calling my name back at Redhearts’.”

“How are you still so skinny?” I grumble as I stand up and kick my chair into place at my desk. “Seriously, I’ve got a literally demonic metabolism, what’s your excuse?”

“I dunno, wanna come over and do some cocaine while we try and figure it out?” Aria asks with a broad grin.

“Hilarious.” I elbow Aria in the ribs as I move past her, and she cackles while we walk out to her car.

“Anything new with the Fog collection scheme?” I ask, mostly to try and distract Aria from her own shitty sense of humor.

“Nah, it’ll take a couple days for ‘Hearts to work up a system,” Aria says, waving off the question. “But I do have some super exciting homework!”

“Why do I get the feeling this will be neither super nor exciting?” I groan as Aria opens the messenger bag revealing an absolute mass of thick manila folders.

“These,” Aria says proudly, “are redacted autopsy reports for every victim of the three suspected Killers from the past eight months.”

“Why?” I ask as I take a few and start thumbing through them.

“Well, we didn’t know what we were looking for before,” Aria says. “Now that we know for sure there’s a triplet of honest-to-Nodens Fogborn Killers out there, we can go through this shit and maybe get some new clues.”

“Is this legal?” I pick out a folder and eye it cautiously.

“Oh hell no,” Aria replies with a laugh. “But shit’s getting real so… fuck it?”

I laugh bitterly as we reach the car, and as I get into the passenger seat I open up the first folder and start paging through the contents.

“Fuck it, indeed,” I reply as I settle back for some gory late-stroke-early reading.

Author's Note

Regroup and reassemble.

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!