After Sunset

‘One, two, Sunny’s coming for you~’

“She’s coding! Get the crash cart!”

‘Three, four, better lock your doors~’

“Shit, what did this dumbass do to herself?”

‘Five, six, grab your crucifix~’

“We’re losing her again! Kindheart get me EPI and another pair of hands for pressure! She’s hemorrhaging!”

‘Seven, eight, try and stay up late~’

“Here, Doctor Blaze!”

“Apply pressure and don’t let up! I’m applying EPI now!”

‘Nine, ten, never sleep again~’

Pain erupts in my chest and lightning roars through my veins as I gasp and jerk. Several sets of hands are grappling me, pushing me down, and a familiar voice is cussing viciously and shouting orders from somewhere above me.

“Hold her down!”

“We’re trying!”

There’s a painfully bright light searing down from directly above my head. I can barely breathe. It’s like there’s a vice around my lungs. I’m burning up and freezing and my world is spinning.

“Rainbow Dash, hold still!” The voice snarls, and suddenly the light is eclipsed by a face that I know.

Her eyes are furious amethyst stars, and the hard lines of her face are sharp with fury and framed by a bob of purple hair shot through with aqua strands that taper to a widows peak at her brow.

Aria Blaze.

“Doctor, we need to sedate her!” A soft, female voice says from somewhere to my left.

Aria turns to glare at the speaker.

“The hell we do!” She spits. “Look at her arms!” Her face immediately curdles. “No! Not the cuts, numbnuts, look at her veins!”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, ‘oh’ is right,” Aria snarls. “She’s a junkie, we are not giving her anaesthesia until we know how bad it is!”

“Yes, Doctor,” the voice says weakly.

Aria groans and rolls her eyes before looking back down at me and scowling. “Rainbow Dash, if you can hear me I need you to hold still, got it? Hold as still as you can!”

I bob my head slowly. I feel dazed and confused. There’s a plastic mask over my nose and mouth, and my whole body hurts. The figures moved around me are doing… something. I can’t tell what. I look to the side and watch as Aria swaps out a clear bag that looked like it might have held blood and set it on top of three more empty bags.

“Doctor Blaze, she’s…” the voice trails off in disbelief. “I think she’s starting to stabilise.”

“Good, now start mopping up the cuts and disinfecting. I’m going to have to suture all five of these bastards simultaneously.” Aria gives her orders in harsh, clipped tones, and the people around me hustle to obey.

“How-?”

“We’re doing an interrupted stitch,” Aria speaks so quickly it’s hard to follow, and her voice is drifting in and out like she's on a boat bobbing in the ocean. “We go sequential, left to right. One stitch at a time, otherwise we run the risk of tearing her right back open! Now clean. Her. Up!”

“W-Where-?” I croak. I’m barely able to keep my eyes open, but I do my best to turn my head towards the last place I heard Aria’s voice coming from. “Ar… ria?”

“What’s up, Blue?” Aria says coldly from my periphery before moving a little closer and staring down at me furiously.

She’s dressed in bloodstained scrubs, she’s glaring at me over the top of her surgical mask, and she looks absolutely livid.

“Pardon me, Doctor.” A nurse slides between us and lowers herself, and a moment later I feel a distant, stinging pain on my arms and sides.

“If you’re conscious, Dash, then boy have I got some bad news for you,” Aria says briskly. “Thanks to your extracurricular activities, I’m going to have to stitch you up sans anaesthesia, got it?”

I glance down at my arms. Everything is washed out in a cloying, gray tunnel. My cuts, the ones that Fluttershy accidentally reopened when she hugged me, are oozing steadily, though.

“Secondly,” Aria continues, “I’m going to have to do this in the slowest way possible, because having multiple long, deep cuts side-by-side are almost impossible to stitch up right, so thanks for that.”

The nurse stands and nods to Aria, who sighs, then gestures for her to move before taking her place, sitting down on a low stool and picking something up from below me.

“If you bleed out and die while I’m doing this, it is not my fault, got it?” Aria says grimly as she starts. “Because either I do it this way to make sure none of the stitches tear, and maybe you die, or I risk repeatedly mangling your whole left arm and side and you definitely die, got it?”

I nod slowly. I think I understand but it’s hard to follow.

“Good,” she says calmly before turning to the nurse. “Stardust, keep the wounds disinfected and be ready to swap the IV. Watch her veins, too… there’s no telling what damage she did to herself, I don’t want her throwing a clot or something.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Okay, then let’s get to work.”

Aria is hunched over me for what feels like hours. The needle goes in and out of my skin with a constant, machine-like regularity, piercing flesh, weaving the surgical stitching, and then coming out. Every pass has a nurse swoop in with a foul-smelling swab to dab at the wound.

The whole time, I watch over Aria’s shoulder as Sunset leans against the wall, smirking at me and occasionally wiggling her fingers in a teasing ‘hello’, the silver blades rasping against one another as she did.

As Aria finishes my shoulder and moves to my left side, she gives quiet instructions to elevate my arm. It takes them a few moments to suspend my arm in some kind of canvas sling attached to a robot arm that they wheel up beside me, and the whole time Aria is pressing a pad to my side to keep the bleeding down.

“Noden’s Oath, Dash, you really fucked yourself,” Aria mutters as she pulls her hand back from the wound and grimaces before looking back up at me. “She saw’em y’know? Your friend? She saw the damn scars when they brought you in. I thought she was gonna fucking lose her mind.”

I barely register that. I’m still staring at the far side of the room where Sunset is leaning, grinning lazily around the coils of Fog that drift around her. Aria narrows her eyes at me, then turns her head to follow my gaze.

There’s nothing there for her to see. Just an empty wall.

Only I can see her.

“I… r-remember,” I mutter, and the Sunset’s smile widens fractionally.

“Remember what?” Aria turns back to me, confused. “Damn it, Rainbow, are you still high?”

If only.

Shaking her head, Aria just curses again. “Well, if you are then I guess that takes care of the anaesthesia problem, and if not you probably deserve whatever piece of her mind your friend gives you.”

Deserve? Yeah, I deserve that, and a whole lot more.

It takes Aria longer to finish my side than it did for her to stitch up my shoulder, but the cuts were probably worse there. When she finally stands, she sighs heavily and leans against the operating table for a moment before turning her head to glare at me again. I don’t have the energy to glare back. I’m barely clinging to consciousness now.

“The stitching is holding,” the nurse from before says with a tone of awe. “Doctor that’s…”

“It’s nothing, get some orderlies in here and transfer her to ICU,” Aria says, waving off the nurse’s wonderment before turning her back on me. “And you, stay still or so help me I will stitch you to a gurney, got it?”

I nod vaguely, still unable to focus. Once Aria is gone, though, the orderlies start to move me around gingerly. I’m partially aware of being cleaned up, then shuttled from the table to the gurney, then from room to room before being settled on a bed that’s marginally more comfortable than the cot back in the station office. All I can do is I watch with detached interest as the nurse affixes the various wires and needles to me.

“Try not to move,” the nurse says as she finishes covering my stitching with pads of soft linen and bandages. “You need to remain as still as possible or you’ll risk taking out the stitches, and if you do that Doctor Blaze will…” the nurse trails off with a frown, “well, she won’t appreciate it.”

“Yeah,” I grunt. “She’s kind of a bitch.”

The nurse narrows her eyes at me. “Doctor Blaze is a hard woman to like, but she’s the most capable Doctor in the department outside the Director herself, and you’re lucky she was the one on duty.”

Her voice is hard-bitten and angry.

“If it had been anyone else you almost certainly would have died, so show a little respect,” the nurse finishes before turning on her heel and storming out of the room.

As the nurse leaves, Fluttershy bustles into the room looking terrified. There are bags under her eyes and her face is pale and drawn. Her eyes widen as she spots me, and she moves as quietly as she can to my side before sitting and wringing her hands as she looks me up and down.

I take shallow breaths as she makes several aborted attempts to reach out and take my hand. Each time she draws back like she’s afraid she’ll hurt me.

“I’m not made of glass,” I mumble around the plastic mask the nurse had fitted to my face.

“You almost died!” Fluttershy sobs as she looks up at me. “I… I almost…”

She reaches out and takes my hand, linking her fingers with mine and holding on as if I might fall apart if she squeezed too tight. In fairness, the last time she hugged me I kind of had, so I guess that’s fair enough.

“You’re my oldest friend, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy continues wetly. “You can’t just… just do this to yourself!” Her hand hovers over the bandages on my arms, and I know what she must have seen beneath them. “After Su-" She chokes on the name, maybe because it's too hard to think about anymore. "After th-that? No! That’s too cruel, Rainbow! I won’t just watch you do this!”

“Then look away!” I snap.

“I won’t do that either,” Fluttershy says with an iron bite to her tone. “I’ve… we’ve already lost-” she chokes on her words again and tears well up, but she doesn’t look away as she wipes them on her sleeve. “I’m not going to lose you like I lost her, okay? I'm not letting that happen! I’m going to get you through this, whether you like it or not!”

‘She’s wasting her time,’ Sunset’s specter hisses as she settles in beside me, with her blue-ember eyes and nightmare features taking up the other side of my vision. ‘You know it, I know it, and even she knows it… your friendship is a poor woman’s lie, Rainbow Dash, and it a~lways has been.’

I clench my eyes shut and shudder as her fever-hot breath brushes over me. I want to go back to the station, to my stash, to the blades. I run the fingers of my good hand over the raised ridges of scars on my right side, and shudder.

“You don’t get to decide that,” I say finally in a voice weak from blood loss and delirium.

“I’ve already called Applejack,” Fluttershy says quietly, ignoring me. She isn't floundering or shuffling around like she normally does. The awkward girl I grew up with is nowhere to be seen and in her place is someone deadset and determined. “You’re going to stay with her for a while until I get my place near CCU.”

“Make me!” I snarl, jerking limply as I snap at her.

Fluttershy doesn’t flinch. She still doesn’t turn away or fold in the slightest. She just looks down at me, hardens her gaze, and after a moment she braces herself on the railing of my bed and leans in close until her bright blue eyes are inches from mine and my heart feels like it’s freezing in my chest.

“Watch me.”

Her reply is so tight and strained that it catches me off-guard. Then she stands, wipes at her eyes, gives my hand a gentle squeeze, and nods.

“I’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the one after that until you’re out of the hospital,” she says quietly. “I also told Aria not to sign off on your discharge papers unless I’m here, and she smiled when I asked so I think she’ll do it.”

“I can leave whenever I want to,” I say back with a scowl, but I can’t get a strong enough breath in to give my words any punch.

“And I told her to let me know if you try,” Fluttershy replies. “If you do, she’s going to have you put on suicide watch and forcibly committed.”

My eyes widen.

“I am not kidding, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy says with a flat stare betrayed only a little by the tightness around her jaw. “I’m not giving up on you like… like I… I’m just not! So whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”

‘And she’s stuck with you.’

Sunset’s voice slithers over me and I shudder.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Fluttershy blows out a slow, quiet breath, then moves a little closer and gives my hand a gentle squeeze.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Rainbow,” she says again, maybe more for her benefit than mine, before leaning over me again and pressing her lips to my forehead, then brushing a hand over my filthy, sweat-matted hair. “I love you, now try to get some sleep, okay?”

Sleep.

Right.

Sunset is humming melodically from somewhere behind me as Fluttershy runs a hand over my face one more time and gives me a small, weak smile, before she turns and walks out of the unit. I close my eyes and try to push away the memory of her touch. Only Sunset gets to touch me like that.

The last thing I hear before I drift off to sleep is the sound of fingerblades rasping together.

Fluttershy was good to her word and came by every day to stay for hours at a time. The day after I was admitted, she sat with me quietly and read a book, breaking from it occasionally to look up to ask me how I was doing or if I was thirsty or hungry. The second day I’d been moved to a regular room in the hospital, and when she came by it was with a small basket of flowers from her family’s garden and a vase to ‘brighten up the place’.

I knock it to the floor a few hours later when the really bad shakes start to hit, and my withdrawal symptoms kick into high gear.

That crap won’t kill me. I know because it’s not the first time I’ve had to go through it. This is the fifth time I’ve done this, mostly because I don’t bother to ration out my shit, and thanks to Flutters it’s somehow both the easiest and the worst.

The worst part is, I know Fluttershy hopes it will be the last time it happens, and I don’t know how I’ll look her in the eye when I disappoint her. Hopefully by then she’ll have given up on me.

Fluttershy sticks with me through the whole thing though.

She sticks through the nastiest part of it, which amounts to about half a fucking day of sweat, nausea, and alternating between burning and freezing from the inside out while I try not to claw my own goddamn skin off, and the whole time Fluttershy is there.

She holds my hand, washes my face, and talks me through it.

As for Aria? She’s just as hard-nosed as all the nurses warned me.

It’s two goddamn weeks before she even talks about considering giving the orders for my discharge, and by then I’m practically crawling out of my skull.

“I want out,” I say, sitting up as Aria swings by to check in. I wasn’t in the ICU anymore, but she’s refused to sign me over to another Doctor that might’ve been willing to listen.

I have no idea how she’s managing it either.

“Too bad,” Aria says without looking up from my charts. “Unless you want me to call in three burly orderlies to muscle your ass into securement straps, you’re gonna stay right there. Believe me, you do not want to be put on watch.”

“You can’t do this!” I snap.

Aria glances up finally, meeting my gaze for a moment before trailing her eyes down the stitches on my shoulders and along my side. Every inch of exposed skin shows some sign of having been touched by those blades. To my surprise, she doesn’t look at me with pity or grief like Fluttershy does.

It’s more like frustration.

“I can, actually,” She says after a moment. “In fact, I’ve had to argue with some pretty pissed off nurses about why I haven’t already put you on watch.” Aria lowers my charts and hooks them to the foot of my bed. “If it weren’t for me, you’d already be committed, dumbass.”

As much as I want to call bullshit on that, I know she’s probably telling me the truth. Between my scars and the track marks I haven’t got a particularly good argument for being mentally stable enough to take care of myself, which is fair. I’m still hearing Sunset’s voice every so often, and seeing her here and there when things get too quiet.

“Why do you even care?” I ask after a moment. “You hate me.”

Aria doesn’t answer right away. She just crosses her arms and sighs quietly before shaking her head and shrugging.

“She… Sunset gave up everything to get us out,” Aria replies in a subdued tone. “And I mean all of us, including your ungrateful ass, so maybe this is me just trying to make sure it wasn’t for nothing.”

“What does it matter?” I ask shakily. “She didn’t get out… so what does it matter?”

How can it have been worth anything to begin with if the one person who deserved to make it out of there the most had to trap themselves? That’s what I can’t wrap my head around. It’s so unbelievably unfair that I got out, but Sunset didn’t.

“Why did I get to leave but… but she…” I grit my teeth, I try to keep my voice steady but it falls apart and the tears come with it, hot and fast, staining my cheeks with warm salt.

“Because that’s the type of person Sunset was.” Fluttershy’s voice comes from the hall, and Aria and I both look up and back to see her stepping into the room.

She’s carrying a fresh bouquet of flowers and wearing a long, heavy, ankle-length skirt that’s a gentle shade of yellow to keep out the biting chill of the Canterlot Autumn season. Her jacket is dark green and buttoned up, which she loosens as she steps into the room.

Fluttershy brushes a few strands of pink from her face as she moves to the side table and changes out the flowers that had begun to wilt from the last batch.

“Sunset never gave up and never gave in,” she continues quietly as she moves the flowers around. “She always had a plan, and once she decided on something there was no one who could change her mind.”

She settles the last flowers into the vase and smiles as she looks up at Aria.

“Can I talk to Rainbow alone?” She asks softly.

Aria eyes her suspiciously for a moment, then looks over at me, sighs, and shrugs. “Yeah, sure, just make sure the idiot doesn’t try to escape.”

“I will,” she promises, with all sincerity.

Once Aria is gone, Fluttershy moves to my bedside, sits down, and takes one of my hands in hers, and uses the other one to wipe away some of my tears.

“How are you feeling today, Rainbow?” She asks with that gentle smile of hers.

“Why won’t you give up?” I ask bitterly, rather than answering her question.

Fluttershy sighs, running her hands over mine repeatedly as if she's trying to remind herself that I'm there. After a few awkward starts and stops, she just shakes her head and smiles sadly.

Maybe it’s because it’s Fluttershy, but I don’t think I could have stood anyone else touching me. Not with my scars. Not after everything I’ve done. But Fluttershy has never flinched away from what I’ve done to myself. Not when they brought me into the ED, and not any hour or day since. She’s just sat beside me, unwavering, and taking my hand like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Scars or no. When the nurses come in and try to change my bandages, I want to crawl out of my own skin. But with Fluttershy it's almost like nothing has changed since we were kids and she was mopping up my latest skinned knee.

Fluttershy is always the one cleaning me up after I fuck up and... and get hurt.

“I uhm… I don’t know how to say it differently,” Fluttershy says. “But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not giving up, and that’s not changing.”

The taste of copper spills over my tongue as I bite my lip. Anger floods my chest, and I grip Fluttershy’s hands tight as another wave of wracking sobs rolls over me, and a fresh wave of tears comes with it.

“Why couldn’t we have done this when she was still here?” I cry. “Why couldn’t we have fought this hard for her? Why did we give up on her?!”

Gentle arms encircle me, careful of the bandages that are still on my shoulder and side.

Fluttershy hugs me like she’s afraid she’ll break me. Her hand rests on the back of my head and pulls me in until my face is buried against her shoulder, and after a moment I wrap my arms around her and let her hold me while the tears come back with double the force.

“We made a mistake.” Fluttershy rubs calming circles over my back while she rests her head against mine. “But I won’t make that mistake again, Rainbow… never again, okay?”

I hate to admit it, but having Fluttershy hold me and tell me she won’t give up on me… it feels good. It’s like acid in my chest, though. I keep thinking: why couldn’t we have done this for Sunset. Why did she have to go the way she did when all it would have taken was us just living up to our word?

We promised Princess Twilight we would take care of her.

We promised Sunset we had forgiven her.

It’s not fair.

I tighten my grip on Fluttershy’s jacket as she holds onto me. I want to stop crying but I can’t. All I can do is shake and sob and try not to think of Sunset the way I saw her last: as a living Nightmare.

I don’t want to remember her like that.

I want to remember her the way she was when she was happy. The way she looked in that photograph.

The photograph.

“W-Where’s my picture?” I ask raggedly as I pull back from Fluttershy’s shoulder and wipe at my eyes. “The one of, uh… of all of us with Sunset.”

Fluttershy frowns and for a second I don't think she's going to answer, but a moment later she nods and reaches into her bag, fishes around for a moment, then pulls out the picture frame.

She doesn’t hold it out to me, though. She backs up.

“Rainbow,” Fluttershy says as I hold my hand out for the picture. “I don’t… the way you are with Sunset? You, uhm… you know it’s not healthy, right?”

“It’s all I’ve got left of her, Flutters, so... so give it over,” I say shakily, then, after a moment, I swallow hard and say: “please?”

Fluttershy sighs quietly and passes the picture to me. I turn it over and instantly feel lighter at the smile on Sunset’s face. I run my fingers over the glass plate, right over where she and I are holding onto each other. It’s almost like we’re holding each other up.

“I can’t lose you like I- like we- lost Sunset,” Fluttershy says, and I look up as her voice cracks with tears. “Please, Rainbow… please go stay with AJ,” she reaches out and takes my good hand, gripping it tight. “W-We can make this better, okay? Please? For me?”

I look down at Sunset. I don’t want to go to Sweet Apple Acres for a lot of reasons, not the least of which would be that I’d have to be around Apple Bloom and be civil. The thought of being surrounded by Applejack’s family, having them ask questions, ask about the scars…

“Please?” Fluttershy links her fingers with mine and pulls my hand up until her lips are pressing against my knuckles.

I sag back against the bed and groan.

“Fine.”

Her quiet cry of happiness nudged the caked-on apathy that’s been building around my heart for the past year. The smile on her face is better. I want to go back to where I was, but I can’t just say no to Fluttershy like that.

No, I’ll do this, and I’ll probably fuck it up like I always do, but I’ll try.

For Fluttershy, I’ll try.