What Do You Mean?
B_25 & Harmonic
Twilight Sparkle walked through the doors of the Golden Oak Library to find a body on the floor. It was a stallion. Blue coated with streaks of red—and his eyes probably hadn't been scarlet before this. Her mouth opened when she saw a corpse. Shock. Fear. And confusion coursed through her.
Her eyes travelled across the body and to the feet that were standing before it. Its talons wiggled in the blood, creating a little splash. The stains of sin carried up the stubby legs with a bucket dropped over the roll of the scaly belly.
In the arm that hung to the side, a claw held a gun, which smoked.
Twilight looked at her assistant, who continued to stand there. He looked at her the same way she looked at him. Her raised eyebrow became his raised eyebrow. A turn and a tilt of the head were the same with him. The dragon had become a mirror as their eyes fixated confusedly on each other.
"S-Spike..."
"Uh-huh."
"There's a body... on the ground... dead...." Twilight blinked as if processing this information for the first time. None of this was making sense. Things were supposed to make sense. It was the rules and nature of the universe. When reason and logic ceased, so too did she. "And... you killed him. Did you kill him?"
Spike scrunched an eye and rolled his shoulders. "What do you mean?"
Twilight blinked and nearly couldn't stop herself from doing so. Her breathing was heavy as it burned her lungs coming up. Her chest was set to collapse from the mounting weight of absurdity. It wasn't even a matter of her safety. It was just the lack of... anything.
"Wha..." Twilight lifted her jaw and swallowed the contents of her maw. "What do you mean, what do you mean?" A spazz attack shook her at once as she steadied herself a second later. Straightened, she tried again. "When you asked 'What do you mean, what did you mean by that?"
Then her voice growled in the apparent obviousness in all of this.
"What do you mean, though?"
Twilight blinked and then closed her eyes in a struggle to figure out all of this. Spike was standing before a body and its blood stained her hooves in the most scarlet of colours. It was warm, so the murder was fresh. A spray of the same coated him as well. It was so obvious to confess.
To go and do what was logical.
"Why do you keep on asking me that! What I mean is—did you kill this stallion!? Did you murder him?"
Spike's head leaned to the side, and his eyes narrowed in a way that really proved he didn't understand what she had meant. His shoulders rose faintly before dropping sharply. "What do you mean?"
Twilight reared onto her back legs and curled her forelegs until they tensely compressed. Her growl grew into a yell that barged into a scream at his idiocy. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT DO I MEAN? I MEAN DID YOU KILL HIM? WHY DID YOU KILL HIM? AND HOW CAN YOU PLAY AROUND IN A SITUATION LIKE THIS!?"
Winds tore in circles around the home as their source was from Twilight's horn.
Spike clenched an eye at her. "But what do you mean, though?"
Then the winds exploded, and from inside the oak tree, barks shot out from the scene.
Twilight shot forward, through the restraint of her excellently tucked blanket, and heaved as one escaping death at the last second. Sweat glossed down her skin, and her coat darkened and damped in colour.
After a few seconds of breathing, her mind rolled back to the dream. Her eyes looked around for a body, for an absurd assistant, but found no such thing in her room. It was simply her mind teasing her in revenge for all she put it through.
As she thought back to the dream which burned within her lungs, her features narrowed together, concentrating on the sole problem that had presented itself.
What DID I mean, though?
Pinkie blasted out from her bed and floated to the ceiling, smacking into the wood, and finding herself tucked within the niche. After a few moments of returning to life, she knocked a hoof on the wood, and gravity reversed once more.
Her body pelted and bounced on the mattress, one squeak, then two, before being launched onto the floor. Pinkie stuck the landing and rose on two legs, spreading her forelegs in the air for all the nothing that was watching her.
She blinked as she was pulled back into the dream and had to think about it. So much was wrong about it—even to a girl like Pinkie. Though, out of everything, one question burned more than the rest.
What did Twilight MEAN, though?
Princess Luna sipped her coffee angrily in the wonder of how someone not trapped on the moon for a thousand years could be more twisted in her dreams than Luna herself. She narrowed her eyes angrily at the bubble of vision into the pink girl's head.
Such absurdity! Asking what the other pony had meant in such a clear and logical context! Who would respond in such a way? Is it bait? Distraction? Or has that pony finally kicked her final marble?
Luna sipped her coffee even though it would cost her another odd bit of laying in bed but not being able to sleep. Lowering her shoulders and sighing, with the dream she'd just witnessed, not sleeping too quickly wasn't all that bad thing. Though her mind caught on to the strange dream. It didn't make sense. Therefore, there was nothing to be found within it at all.
But the hint of something, no matter how small, was what brought her into this mess.
She would not ask the same strange question that had been carried on through that strange tale. Oh, no. Luna would bring sense to all of this nonsense. One got to the right answers by asking the right questions. Ask like a fool, and the answers you receive will cause you to be more foolish.
No, oh no.
Princess Luna had one hoof up on the other... three?
Her question was as so.
What HAD it meant?
