You know what sucked for Sunset lately?

Everything. Everything had sucked.

Sunset began the week by having some of the worst back pain of her life, in addition to the usual pain in the rest of her, because she hadn’t slept on a comfortable or warm surface with better back support than the average block of wood in months. She also hadn’t slept in the same place twice for this entire week because her “bedroom” made a better walk-in freezer than a place to lay one’s head at night. To no one’s surprise (despite how hard she tried to be surprised), Sunset Shimmer was also sick. She had picked up a cough after the library episode, and that cough had not only failed to get better, but also got substantially worse. Good timing, because she was just thinking to herself the other night how she was having far too easy a time sleeping and needed to fix that in order to meet her misery quota. Thank goodness.

In pain at all hours, already generally low on sleep, drained of energy, and now periodically forgetting how to breathe, it could be said that Sunset Shimmer’s already shitty quality of life had reached a new all-time low.

And then she looked down at her feet as she walked to school one morning and found the edge of a twenty dollar bill sticking out from under her shoe. She had nearly slipped on it, mind, but it was, indeed, a whole-ass, honest-to-Harmony, authentic twenty dollar bill just sitting there on the ground, the minted green face on the front staring up at her where she had flattened it to the sidewalk.

Sunset had lived in the human world for the last four years. She had walked a lot of places in Canterlot, high foot traffic and low, in places of business and in places where the only reason anyone had to be there was because they were on their way to somewhere else. The largest denomination of money that she had ever found on the ground up till then was a single dollar bill, which had immediately been picked up by the person who had dropped it in front of the vending machine they had been trying to feed it into. The largest sum of money that she’d ever found unattended was a pair of quarters. This was a twenty dollar bill.

She almost didn’t know what she was looking at. Her eyes saw it, sure, and her hands felt it as she picked up the thing and straightened it out, flattened out its wrinkles, and rubbed her fingers across it as though trying to be certain beyond certain that this was what it appeared to be, and…it all seemed authentic. It looked like a twenty dollar bill. It felt like a twenty dollar bill. It had no business being a twenty dollar bill, and certainly not one that had ended up in her hands in that exact moment, but no one stormed up to her and demanded it back, and the only thing that came off on her fingertips when she rubbed them across it was some of the dirt from the sidewalk.

After a few seconds of standing there staring, the shock of it passed just enough for Sunset to grin to herself so hard that it threatened to split her face in half. She was about to do a cheer when the coughing fit cut her off, which she took as a sign to immediately stuff the bill in her pocket and scramble out of there, just on the off chance that whoever lost this thing turned their head and saw some scrawny kid about to do a song and dance about their lucky find.

No one stopped her. No one followed. No one even really seemed to notice. She was just…twenty dollars richer. Immediately. Out of nowhere.

Suffice it to say Sunset was over the moon with this find. She had twenty dollars worth of problem solving to throw at any number of the vast quantity of problems she had in her life, and to her that felt enormous. There were so many things that twenty dollars could cover, and the sheer number of options that had just opened up to her at that moment felt dizzying in breadth. It was enough that she had almost started to cry, and not because of how her eyes hadn’t quit leaking fluid since she woke up that morning.

Okay, first things first: school. She was on her way to school when she found that bill on the sidewalk. Upon consideration, Sunset made the call then and there that she had better things to do than go to school, because she had twenty bucking dollars to figure out what to do with. Forget school, she was rich.

Secondly: what did she spend this on? She had a lot of options, certainly, but only twenty dollars to cover any of them, and she did not have much faith that she’d get this lucky once, nevermind twice. Once she spent it, it’d be gone, so she had to make it count.

Sunset broke away from her route to school to find a laundromat - it wasn’t what she was specifically looking for, per se, but it would suit her purposes just fine. There weren’t many people inside, and it was both warm and relatively comfortable enough that she could devote as much focus as she possibly could toward this incredibly important decision. She managed to pawn a pen and a piece of printer paper off of the attendant there and then sat down at a table in the far corner of the room, scribbling away her thoughts and scratching out some basic math as she weighed her options as though lives depended on them.

Twenty dollars seemed like a lot of money, after having gone without much of anything since the start of fall, but upon more meaningful consideration, Sunset realized that twenty dollars was not all that much. It was a fairly large chunk of cash to just end up with, sure, but there wasn’t a lot she could think of buying that she needed which would go especially far.

Twenty dollars could get you a fair amount of groceries, if you knew what to buy and where to shop for it. It didn’t take her very long to rule this out, however - as much as it would be nice to have more than a single thawed meal a day at the school cafeteria five out of seven days a week, food was actually not the biggest concern that Sunset had. The food situation was not good, but it also wasn’t going to kill her. The same could not be said about the levels of warmth that she had access to, something that had long since been insufficient to keep her health from deteriorating (she had to pause that thought as her respiratory system chose that moment to one again tie and untie itself in a knot, seemingly as though just to emphasize the point). The cold absolutely would kill her, and it would get worse, and she would not make it unless she did something about it. Throwing some money at the issue seemed like a pretty good idea, all things considered.

But did she want to throw money at this problem? Anything she did buy was a lost opportunity to spend it on something else, and that itself was enough to make her pause from an otherwise obvious course of action, because she did have options here. Most pointedly, Rarity had offered more than once to go shopping with her, and whenever Rarity offered something like this, there was an unstated offer to foot the bill on whatever expenses were accrued. Sunset had never liked the idea of someone spending money on her, even when she needed it - especially these days, and especially when the person who’d be paying was someone she had recently wronged. It left a bad taste in her mouth at the best of times, but the injustice of it went from a bad taste to nausea-inducing. Even just toying with the idea now made her already unsteady stomach twitch a little.

…but all she had was twenty dollars. If she got clothes herself, she’d have little money leftover for any of her other needs. It’s not as though Rarity would mind, either - hell, she’d probably thank Sunset for the opportunity.

And where would that leave her? Warmer, safer, able to do more of what she wanted while someone else paid for it? Profiting from the generosity of people who cared about her while she thought only of herself? Exploiting her partner for her own benefit again?

Sunset clenched her fists and shoved the idea from her mind hard enough that, were it a person, it would have been knocked from its seat and across the laundromat floor. She felt like less of a person for even having seriously weighed the option like that, because it wasn’t an option. She did this to herself, so she’d get herself out of it or die trying. Nothing else was right and she’d hear no alternatives - not from her friends, and certainly not from that opportunistic little voice in the back of her head reminding her of how much easier it would be if she offloaded her burdens onto the people around her.

…clothes it was, then. She’d blow her money on a sweater or something and if that was that, then so be it. She’d deal with what came after.

Pants would also be nice - maybe nicer than a sweater. She had a jacket, even if it wasn’t the thickest jacket ever, and even if she wore every pair of jeans she owned all at once, it still probably wouldn’t be good enough to keep her warm enough to sleep through the worst this winter would bring…nevermind that by this point half of them were falling off her ass without a belt. And hell, even with a belt. She’d lost a lot of weight since CHS became her main source of food. She was rapidly turning her skinny jeans into regular jeans, and it’s not because the jeans were shrinking.

Maybe it should be a blanket, actually - a properly warm blanket, one she could huddle up in while a hard snow came down outside as January bore its teeth. Sleep was her biggest consideration for warmth anyway, since she could alw- oh shit, winter break. She wasn’t even going to have CHS for much longer, and that was both her most readily available source of food and water as well as a heated interior to spend half a day in for most days of the week. What was she going to do when winter break came? Maybe she did need the food…but what good was the food going to do if she froze to death? She’d starve in a few weeks, but she’d freeze in a few hours.

…shit, and power, too. On top of everything else, it would be a lot harder to keep her phone charged up and able to contact anyone if she didn’t have somewhere like CHS that would be cool with her using their power outlets. She could probably get away with it elsewhere, but…did that matter? …no that probably mattered, she needed to keep that microscopic friend circle she’d stumbled into circulating, because she got things out of them that she needed. Rarity might be her only source of food here coming up soon, and while she wasn’t super clear on how buddy-buddy she and Fluttershy were anymore, any stop at her house was a stop out of the cold and into somewhere with hot water that had already been presented as accessible to her. And power.

Maybe the power thing was taken care of, if she leaned a bit more on Fluttershy…could she get away with that? Should she do that, even? It wasn’t obvious, and it was…somewhat uncomfortable, thinking on it. It felt a little opportunistic, but it was a little different cuz it was Fluttershy…was it though? Wasn’t that just taking advantage of her? She didn’t seem to mind it, but did it need to be something she minded for it to be wrong? Did it count as wrong, if she was doing it for survival?

What an unclean thought. Sunset hated thinking it, but she couldn’t not think it, either.

Maybe she couldn’t do this righteously at all. Maybe she was going to have to start seizing advantages if she expected to make it through the winter…so what, start stealing shit? From people around her? Because that was fair. Yes her life could depend on it but so bucking what? What was the point of survival if it meant adding tallies to the laundry list of crimes she’d already committed against the community here that had already gone above and beyond what it should do by suffering her existence? Was that the legacy she wanted to leave? A parasite to the bitter end? Was a corpse the legacy she wanted to leave, though?

So many things to consider. So many options, and none of them as clear-cut as they seemed at first.

Sunset sat hunched forward in her chair, leaning over the laundromat table as she stared at the notes she’d made, regularly pausing to cough on the sickness already afflicting her. She didn’t know how long she had been there, but it had been at least an hour, all the while agonizing over her options…and they were agonizing. There was so much to do, and she had so little ability to do any of it.

Twenty dollars. That’s all she had, and all she might ever get this winter. That was her survival budget: twenty dollars.

After sitting there for a while more, Sunset had a stray thought about the time, then glanced up in the direction of the laundromat attendant. Said attendant was an older woman currently more preoccupied with her phone than any of the three or four people in here, much less Sunset specifically, so it didn’t seem like her loitering here had done much. The momentary fear had dislodged her from the spiraling thoughts, however, and Sunset took the opportunity to step back slightly.

She had intended to skip school today, but Sunset was having second thoughts about that. It didn’t feel like any conclusions she’d reached so far had been helpful at all to figuring out what to do, and it didn’t take long for her to realize that she needed a break. Something else to focus on, even mundane activities like schoolwork, seemed welcome compared to the all-important task of trying to figure out how to spend her newfound fortune and the stress that had so far brought her. She’d be late to first period, but…whatever.

Sighing to herself (and then breaking into another coughing fit), Sunset pushed her aching body up out of her chair and shuffled out of the laundromat, zipping her jacket the rest of the way up and tucking herself into it as much as she could before shoving the door open with a shoulder and hitting the streets once more.

Sunset had been about two thirds of the way to school when she’d happened upon her little find, then ducked into more or less the first establishment she could find that was open and which would suffer her sitting there for an extended period. As a result, she didn’t have long to walk before she made her way up the street that led more or less straight to the school’s front door.

On impulse, Sunset glanced down the rows of the crammed parking lot to find Fluttershy’s usual parking spot, halfway expecting to see her in the driver’s seat, waiting for her. It was a little late in the day for that, though, so even if she could see into the car, she wouldn’t see Fluttershy there.

It had been a couple days since she’d sat with her. They hadn’t spoken since Sunset had snapped at her. She’d considered apologizing, and in a way still wanted to, but by this point she assumed that she’d missed her chance to. Just another fuckup to the pile.

She tried not to think about it. No point now.

Sunset yanked open the heavy front door to the school, had another coughing fit as she stepped inside, and kept her hands tucked in her pockets as she walked in from the cold. Her first period was across the school, so she had plenty of time to decide if she wanted to bother showing up to what remained of it or if she wanted to loiter a little and go straight to second period afterward.

She was in the process of making this decision when the chime of the intercom turning on pierced the silence filling the hallways, followed shortly after by vice principal Luna’s voice:

“Sunset Shimmer to the office, please.”

Sunset stopped mid-step, eyes slipping closed as she pursed her lips together. She recognized her mistake more or less immediately: she wasn’t paying attention to the path she was taking. She hadn’t walked directly in front of the office, per se, but she had taken a route that was in direct line of sight to it. Given that she was less than half a hall’s length from that spot when she’d been summoned, it didn’t take a lot to figure out what had happened.

Oh well. At least she knew what it was about.

Sunset turned on her heel and retraced her steps a short distance, then back towards the hall she really should have done a better job of avoiding. Sure enough, as Sunset was about halfway down the hall, vice principal Luna was in the process of stepping out of her office and, upon seeing Sunset Shimmer approaching, gave a light smile in greeting and held the door open for her. “You seem to be running a little behind this morning, miss Shimmer.”

Sunset put on her friendliest smile and gave a lackadaisical shrug as she strode up. The last of her steps leading into the vice principal's perpetually shaded office made up something of a strut, though it was undermined by the coughing fit she broke into when she went to reply. “Oh you know,” she finally managed. “These things happen.”

“From time to time, they’ve been known to.” The door closed behind Sunset with a soft click. “And it would appear that you’ve tracked something in along with you.”

Sunset paused to force a light cough to clear her throat, settling into the chair in front of Luna’s desk without invitation. It was familiar, which wasn’t great, though it was a comfortable chair, so that helped. Sort of. “It followed me home. Can I keep it?”

“That is entirely your prerogative,” Luna chuckled lightly. She pulled out the chair from her desk on her side of it and settled into it, posture relaxed. “I’d ask that you do what you can to keep it to yourself, however.”

“I’ll do my best, but you know me: deeply caring individual. Something something sharing, something something caring.”

“Last I checked, the transmission of sickness was not a part of that particular saying, miss Shimmer.”

Sunset shrugged both arms out with a good-natured smile. “Probably a regional dialect.”

“Ah, yes. I see.” Luna nodded along in apparent understanding, expression betraying nothing of whether it was in jest or not. “It must be from a region where transmitting airborne pathogens to one’s peers is a sign of great respect.”

“That’s the one.” Sunset aimed a finger gun at the vice principal as she said this, which she retracted to begin snapping lightly to herself in faux-thought. “Can’t think of the name, though…tip of my tongue.”

“Pox Romana, perhaps?”

Sunset started saying something, though it was then that her A in history kicked in and the joke landed. She snorted, which resulted in another coughing fit seizing up her airways.

The vice principal regarded this response for a moment with that statuesque expression of hers, then gave a light shrug. “Perhaps not. Geography was never my strong suit.” A beat. “Do please cover your mouth, however.”

“Sorry,” Sunset wheezed, trying (and failing) to bite off the tail end of it through the side of her fist. A box of tissues was slid across the length of the vice principal’s desk closer to her, and she accepted by plucking one or two from the box to cough a bit more into. She concluded with a heartfelt, slightly guttural, “Uck.”

“‘Tis the season,” Luna solemnly replied. “If you’d like a silver lining to appreciate, then at least you contracted it now. By the time you’re free of it, you’ll have ample time to enjoy the holidays in good health.”

“Assuming it doesn’t kill me.”

“I’m reasonably confident in your odds of survival.”

Sunset let out what she herself couldn’t quite decide was intended to be more of a scoff, a chuckle, or a half-hearted clearing of her throat. It was now that her gaze drifted, taking in what little of the room was visible; something about the room itself seemed to absorb light, and that was when the sun was fully up outside the window’s constantly closed blinds. As it was, those blinds were about the only thing that could be made out in this room. “Guess one of us has to be the optimist.”

Luna did not reply to this. The silence closed in through the shadows, though they were apparently deep enough that even the vice principal deemed it necessary to find an alternative light source. The gentle click of the lamp on her desk marked the moment when a dull orange glow filled the room, still barely enough to illuminate its full length but at least providing something else to see besides a wall of darkness.

Sunset kind of preferred the darkness, truthfully. The room wasn’t much to look at: a desk, a chair on either side of it, a phone, a name plate that read “Vice Principal Luna,” a shelf in the corner, and a bookshelf beneath the window with its blinds always shut. That was it. Everything was color-coded roughly the same shade of green, and it reminded Sunset of a dentist’s office, or plastic lawn chairs. It was clear that the vice principal had little love for this room by how little was in it and how it lacked much in the way of personal effects, or…really any kind of evidence that this place had any more time spent in it than was absolutely necessary. The utilitarianism was on par with that of a cubicle in an office tower downtown, and sometimes Sunset wondered if that was on purpose. Maybe she had no sense of aesthetic; maybe she did but couldn’t be bothered to put it into practice. Maybe she just hated the room and kept the place perpetually basked in shadows so that she didn’t have to look at it. It wasn’t clear.

Sunset’s arms crossed over her chest lightly as she inspected the side of the room opposite to the door, mainly because it was something to rest her eyes on that wasn’t the woman at her desk. Much like how Sunset couldn’t decide whether or not this room was kept as soulless as it felt on purpose, she also couldn’t ever decide whether or not Vice Principal Luna’s gaze could be rightly described as “piercing.” Whether or not it could, it definitely had weight, and she could feel every ounce of it beaming into the side of her head like a finger was pressing against her temple.

The atmosphere had shifted. At this point Sunset didn’t want to be the one to speak up, but she also didn’t really want to be here at all, so she’d speak if it meant getting this over with faster. “I’m assuming you didn’t bring me in here to keep you company.”

“Not quite,” the vice principal admitted. She maintained the quiet for another second or two, then went on. “I’ve noticed that you’ve been accruing a lot of tardies lately.”

Sunset merely shrugged. Her gaze remained on the bookshelf under the window. “Daylight savings. Sleep schedule. You know how it goes.”

“You’ve been accruing a great deal of unexcused absences as well.”

“I’m a deep sleeper.”

Luna’s eyebrow arched. “Several of the absences were after some classes had already been attended that day.”

“Sleepwalking.”

“Sleepwalking,” Luna repeated, disbelief plainly audible. “You’re blaming this on…sleepwalking.”

Sunset shrugged. She had no particular interest in sounding believable here, and she didn’t try. “Medical condition.”

“An intermittent sleepwalking medical condition.”

Sunset nodded.

“Which pertains specifically to daylight savings time.”

Sunset nodded again.

“And which has insofar never once been cited nor noted before this moment.”

Again, Sunset nodded. Midway through a coughing fit struck her, brief though it was.

“...and you’re certain that this is the story you mean to keep?”

Sunset looked at Luna, though she only met her sea green eyes for a few moments before she looked away again, crossing one leg over the other as she did. “Doesn’t really matter what I say here, so…”

Luna didn’t say anything to this. A few seconds later, she let out a quiet, tired sigh.

“Just get on with it,” Sunset muttered in a low voice. The vibration from it provoked the tickle in her throat, and she coughed again a handful of times. “We don’t get anything from talking about it, so just do the vice principal thing and we can get back to stuff we sort of halfway want to do.”

“That,” Luna began slowly, “is more difficult an ask than I believe you understand.”

At this, Sunset looked at Luna. She didn’t ask the question, but she waited for the explanation all the same.

“Normally, yes,” Luna gestured at Sunset where she sat. “This is where the conversation would broach such topics as sanctions and disciplinary action. Detention, in all likelihood, given the…well.” She rolled her wrist in Sunset’s direction and let it go unsaid. Luna’s hand then went back over her other hand atop her desk. “However, circumstances being what they are, I don’t believe such measures would be wholly appropriate. Perhaps as far as policy is concerned, the way forward is very clear, but…I believe we are well and truly beyond the conditions that school policy was ever meant to operate under.” Luna paused, her gaze settling securely on Sunset’s eyes. “You understand, yes?”

Sunset Shimmer said absolutely nothing. She was sitting up straight in her chair, staring unflinchingly back into the vice principal’s eyes, and when Luna maintained the look, Sunset matched it.

There were many people who found Vice Principal Luna to be an intimidating figure. Much like her sister, Vice Principal Luna had a great deal of self-control, and everything she did was done with intent. Even at ease, her presence was large enough to fill any room she entered, because she just had that kind of aura about her. She was merely second in command at a measly little high school in a city of generally little import, but Luna carried a power about her that went well above her station, and it wasn’t hard to see. More than a couple of students in the school and even other members of faculty knew Vice Principal Luna as a woman that you did not want to cross, irrespective of that normally gentle demeanor, because the potential was there. She could move mountains if she set her mind to it, and everyone knew it. Everyone saw it. Nevermind a stare, even a prolonged look from Luna could be withering.

Unlike most times in her life, however, Sunset had little to lose, and precious little left to be afraid for. Sunset thus had little trouble meeting Luna’s gaze and answering it with a defiance cast in steel. A coughing spell tickled at the back of her throat, but she swallowed it like it was nothing. You could have stabbed her with a knife and she’d have swallowed it. In that moment, she’d eat any amount of discomfort if it meant not being the one to break eye contact first.

So yeah, she understood. And no, she wouldn’t back down. Not here, not now. Not over this.

The seconds seemed to last for minutes at a time. After what could have just as well been hours, it was Luna who backed down first. Her gaze softened at some point, and after holding that gaze with Sunset for a few more moments, she sat back in her chair, hands slipping off the desk and into her lap. The creak the chair emitted was soft, but a pin dropping would have likely been fully audible right then, so this was practically rattling the room by comparison. “May I be candid with you, miss Shimmer?”

Sunset was silent. She just stared.

Luna took this in for a few seconds, then went on. “This is,” she began, slowly, “an awkward situation, for both myself and my sister. A lot has transpired lately which…” She paused as though taking great care to select her words. “...strains the limits of one’s verisimilitude, as it were. These are things that…” She had begun to gesture with one hand, though as her words hung, that hand’s fingers loosely curled, and the hand was lowered to her lap again. “They’re things I would not know how to begin to explain. Rather, I could, now that my sister and I have had time enough to…to formulate an explanation, but it would likely leave a listener…unsatisfied. There would be questions. More than I could afford to answer.” Several beats of silence. “More than you could afford to answer, especially.”

As before, Sunset said and did nothing. Her fists were clenched, and nary a muscle on her face so much as twitched.

Luna took in a breath, then released it quietly through her nose. Her fingers tapped rhythmically in her lap - the room was so quiet that her fingertips could be heard impacting the fabric of her pants beneath her desk. There was some manner of emotion on her face, but Sunset couldn’t identify it right then. “My sister and I both don’t want what happened to get out. It’s something we have been fortunate enough to be able to control up until now, but that control is in peril of being compromised. As it stands…” She brought one hand out of her lap to gesture at Sunset with it. “One untimely glance from a member of the board of education would result in their making note of a rather egregious lack of follow-up with a student that has been missing a lot of school lately. State funding is contingent on attendance, and this would compel them to question. If our explanations failed to satisfy them - or, perhaps, even if they did - there would likely be an investigation.” Her hand went back to her lap now. “If there is an investigation, I’m not confident in my ability to keep them from seeing some things that I’d rather they not see, nor my ability to impart the…particular understanding that I would rather they reach before they did.”

Sunset let loose a quiet scoff from the back of her throat. The coughing spell she’d been restraining seized that moment to escape, and Sunset turned her head to cough into a fist she brought to her mouth. Once it stopped, she lowered the fist, though she failed to re-establish eye contact. “And what understanding would that be?”

“That you’re not a danger.”

“You don’t know that,” Sunset spat back. There was something black in her voice, acrid and hot like tar. “I learned a lot from what happened. I could do all this over again if I wanted to. Differently. Better, even. I have options. I could do anything I wanted, and you couldn’t stop me. None of you could stop me.”

Luna’s tone was almost casual with the way she replied, “I don’t think it would come to that.”

“You don’t. Know that.”

“No?”

Sunset’s face had since contorted into a scowl. She aimed it where she had been staring, jaw clenched as she willed the bookshelf to catch ablaze with nothing but her gaze. Maybe if there was magic in the world, it would have. In her mind’s eye, she was emitting ribbons of smoke from all across her body. The chair was being peppered with embers, and the fabric was starting to smolder. Nothing could reach her without getting burned. Nothing could touch her.

“Sunset, look at me.”

Sunset absolutely did not do that.

Luna’s voice was at once soft yet firm. “Look at me when I ask you this, Sunset Shimmer.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“Sunset.”

Sunset’s scowl only deepened. Her already clenched fists tightened.

“Look.”

It was not compliance, and the venom with which Sunset whipped her head about to face Luna made it absolutely clear, at least in her mind.

Rather than wither like Sunset would have preferred, Vice Principal Luna’s slightly hardened features softened, and kept softening. In perhaps the most sincere voice that she’d ever been asked anything in her life, Luna asked her: “Do you want to hurt me, Sunset?”

Sunset could have said a lot of things, right then. She meant to, right up until she opened her mouth and felt her eyes sting and water. She mouthed something she couldn’t manage, and as suddenly as the will to fight had rushed in, it left her. The unfinished words escaped her throat as a single, malformed breath, and Sunset no longer had the ability to meet those eyes across the desk from her.

Not yet receiving an answer, Luna asked again, just like before: “Do you want to hurt me, Sunset?”

She almost hated herself for it, but Sunset did answer, and when she did, her voice was shaking: “No.”

The only response to this was the soft creak of Luna sitting back in her chair.

Sunset’s fists remained tightly clenched as she sat hunched forward, staring down at her hands in her lap. One of the joints of her fingers cracked lightly as they tightened further - it hurt a little, where her fingernails were digging into her skin, but she did not care. She did not care about pain. If anything, she welcomed it.

She was angry. She didn’t know what at, exactly, but Sunset was angry. She was furious. Tears burned her eyes, and she kept tightening her fists in the hopes that she’d find a way to clench them even harder, or even break them. She kept on trying, but all she managed to do was start to make her hands cramp. Even then, she continued to try up until the pain was unbearable and her hands were so tightly locked up that she almost couldn’t physically open them again. Embers burned where her fingernails had dug into her palm enough to break the skin. She hadn’t even realized she’d been clenching her jaw until she unclenched it, and her teeth ached from the shift in pressure. Her jaw hurt. Her hands hurt. Her arms hurt, her legs hurt, her back hurt, her neck hurt. Her head hurt. Her face hurt.

She was so sick of pain. Everything hurt, everything always hurt. She was always uncomfortable. If she didn’t hurt, then she was cold. Even the cold ended up hurting.

She wanted to break something. A primal craving gnawed at her, reaching up from out of her soul like a set of gnashing teeth of something unlovable and starving, craving for something to be ruined.

If she was holding something, she’d have crushed it. If her hands didn’t hurt so much, she would have grasped for something, twisted it, bent it, snapped it, flung it. If she had her magic, something would burn. This room would burn. The school would burn. It’d all burn. Everything would burn. The foundation would shake, the walls would crumble, the ceiling would crash down on her head, and it would all fucking burn. The whole goddamned world would burn to the ground around her, and she’d cast, and cast, and cast, until her horn gushed blood and her eyes sloughed from her skull, and it still wouldn’t be enough because it could never be enough. It could never be enough. Harmony itself would brand her, strip her cutie mark and replace it with the words of creation that spelled “violence,” and it still wouldn’t be enough.

Sunset didn’t notice the sound of the bell ringing outside the door. She didn’t notice her own hands in her hair, pulling on handfuls of it as hard as she could as her scalp burned. She didn’t notice Luna leave her seat to crouch down next to her on her knees, kneeling at the level where she could have looked into Sunset’s eyes if she’d ever thought to look up. She didn’t notice how she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t notice the tears on her face, or the sobs that wracked her entire body from head to toe, and how they wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop.

In that moment, and for many moments after, Sunset wasn’t a person. She was a pile of broken glass beneath a layer of skin that wasn’t even her own, and as the weight of the world shifted where it laid across her shoulders, so too did the glass. Everything fell out of alignment in a cascading chain reaction, and right there in that chair, Sunset shattered. She was bawling before she even knew what had happened, choking on her own sobs as her lungs continued their conspiracy against her, barely able to breathe past the swollen walls of her windpipe that squeezed inward like an invisible fist was trying to crush her throat.

There weren’t thoughts. There weren’t actions. There couldn’t be. All that there could be were tears, and a primal pain that leaked out of the shattered pile named Sunset Shimmer expressed through guttural, wordless sobbing.

Time had lost all meaning, but at some point or another, Luna had taken hold of Sunset. She had her arms tight around her, stroking her back. Sometimes she would tell her in a voice that sounded like love, “It’s going to be okay.”

Maybe that would mean something to her later. It didn’t matter right then.

Unfortunately, Sunset’s condition - both physically and mentally - caught up to her before it could. Between the coughing fits from her sickness, her failure to regulate her own breathing, and the hunched-over position that she had locked herself into, Sunset Shimmer ended up starving herself of air. Her crying came to a stop as her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she passed out.

Sunset didn't remember waking up.

The next thing she knew, she was in a room that she didn't recognize. Her thoughts were moving at rates of hours per mile, so it took her entirely too long before she recognized the nurse's office for what it was. Viewing the room from the unfamiliar spot she was at in it - sitting on the examination chair like you'd find in a doctor's office - was sufficient to scramble Sunset's ability to identify her surroundings for what felt like minutes.

She couldn't feel her limbs particularly clearly. Her hands felt like television static where they pushed against the chair to swing herself sideways in it, though when she did, she found herself being peppered with a pair of gentle swats to the arm and shoulder as she tried to rise. "Quit it, sit back," Nurse Redheart scolded. "You'll faceplant if you start moving like that."

Sunset lacked the bearings needed to put up any kind of resistance, so she stopped moving. As she did, she felt the entire room spiral around her, like she was at the bottom of a coffee mug that someone had just gotten done stirring.

Sunset could, theoretically, see everything that the nurse was doing. Her thoughts were as a slurry, however, and even as she watched Nurse Redheart move about, the information and conclusions sloughed off of her, leaving her feeling a greasy and cloudy sensation rather than anything vaguely resembling clarity. It wasn't until Nurse Redheart walked up to her that Sunset found her eyes able to focus, and that was only because several objects were presented more or less directly in her face, one at a time. "For the cough," the nurse told her, holding up a plastic bottle containing a deep red fluid, which was placed into a small white paper sack as she watched. A pill bottle was raised, and given a gentle shake - several dozen tiny capsules rattled inside. "Anxiety. As-needed." One slender finger tapped the label, which she read one particular line of emphatically: "Two to three times a day maximum. Alright? No more. Don't play."

Sunset nodded numbly. She went to take the bag, but the nurse gently swatted her hand, and she waited.

A small square container with an orange label was raised next, and held in front of Sunset. She managed to read the word 'Dayquil' on it. "Daytime." Into the bag it went. Then a similar box was raised, this one green. "Nighttime. If you take this with the cough syrup, you're going to be out, so be cool. Alright?"

Again, Sunset nodded numbly.

Nurse Redheart then put the last container into the paper sack. She rolled up the top of it and plucked a single narrow strip of tape from a dispenser on the table, stuck it on the rolled up part so that it would remain closed, and presented the sack to Sunset. Sunset less accepted the bag so much as she found her hands instinctively moving to take the thing that had been presented to her. "Take that home with you. Right now, just sit back and take it easy. Breathe deeply."

The instructions were comprehensible to Sunset, though she wasn't fully paying attention to it. The gears in her head were still in a semi-fluid state, but they had enough substance to them that she was able to start to parse the situation. After staring down at the bag in her hands full of medications, she looked at Nurse Redheart, who had started turning away when Sunset finally thought to speak up: "This seems like a lot."

Nurse Redheart gave a noncommittal noise in response. She kept her back to Sunset as she began to close several drawers and cabinets that had been open up till that moment.

Sunset watched her for a second or two, then looked back at the sack she'd been given. The simple movement of her head was enough to make the room dance, and she brought one hand to the side of her head, which still felt like it was made of static. The situation was off, and it took her a little longer to be able to articulate why. "Are you giving me medication?"

"Yes."

Another second or two was needed to process this. "A student? You're not a-"

Nurse Redheart delivered another gentle swat to Sunset's shoulder. "Sit back. I'm standing here watching you sway."

Sunset did as she was instructed, but she didn't let this go yet. "This doesn't seem very by the books."

"Yeah, well, uh..." Nurse Redheart placed one hand on her hip as she turned in place, giving the door to the office a thorough inspection to assure it was closed before turning back to Sunset with her response: "Fuck the books. Take your medicine, feel better."

"Y-"

Nurse Redheart threw up a hand to silence this as she sharply yet levelly informed, "Don't want to hear it. Take your medicine, feel better."

Sunset...wanted to refuse. She thought to do so, but she was still reeling from having woken up to this, and frankly she didn't know how to. She wasn't even sure she could refuse, when it was coming from the nurse who'd looked her in the eye and informed her to her face, "Fuck the books." What do you even say to that?

Evidently, you said nothing. Sunset ended up doing just that, simply holding the paper bag filled with medication she was not supposed to be given as Nurse Redheart stepped out of the room, citing some reason or another that Sunset didn't quite catch.

Sunset's focus was completely shot from that point on. Time passed, but she tracked little of it as the day more or less ran her over. At some point she laid down - on a bed, on a chair, on a table...didn't matter. Nothing mattered. She was out before her eyes had finished closing, and that was that.

Author's Note

Well, it started looking like it was gonna be a good day. Then her passive activated.

Fun fact: this chapter happened because my friend told me in a Discord call, and I quote: "So I got this new anime plot: Sunset Shimmer looks down and finds 20 dollars on the ground."

I laughed. Then I blinked and realized I was 2400 words into a chapter right after I'd said things were probably going to slow down, writing out this new anime plot. And boy, is it ever an anime plot.

Probably. I don't watch anime.

My friend says she'd watch the Sunset Shimmer Finds 20 Dollars anime, but I think she's biased.

Anyway, hope you liked the read. Everything about this chapter took me completely by surprise, but in that way like I'm not sure why I was surprised by any of what happened. Felt like I was cooking on this one, too. No idea where it came from but I'm very happy with how this chapter came out.