Insomnia

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Beta

Pinkie rarely thought about the rock farm, not if she could help it. She'd spent the better part of her foalhood there, and hated every second of it right up to the sonic rainboom. There were so many better things to think about—like her family. Which she thought about much more, especially with Maud living in Ponyville.

"Pinkie! Move your fat flank and stop prodding at every rock that sticks out of the walls. I know you know better."

Family being the reason she was at the farm today. After years of unsolicitied persistence and promises; Pinkie got far enough into Limestone's decades-old emotional barriers to convince her to use the vacation days she had stored up to occasionally leave the dismal farm she called home. Well, by 'vacation days', she of course meant days Pinkie convinced her to take off before she collapsed in exhaustion. In exchange, Pinkie had to come back to the farm whenever Limestone asked for help, with no complaints.

Really, Pinkie suspected that Limestone actually missed her and was desperate for company whom she could ask about the outside world—not that she'd ever admit it.

Even Cranky wasn't as stubborn as her.

"Sorry, I guess I'm still used to checking all the rocks for gems. They're just all so…" Pinkie rubbed a hoof over a rock jutting out of the wall, trying to remember how Igneous taught her to tell if they were hollow or not. She never quite got it, spending hours at a time on the field inspecting all the identical rocks. Sometimes she'd get lost and cry, or just cry out of sheer frustration that she couldn't find any gems like all her sisters could.

"Gray."

"Everything's gray here; I'm gray." Limestone put her hoof against her chest as if to point to herself. "You were used to it once."

She glanced at Pinkie with a raised eyebrow, the lantern they were using as guidance hanging from her neck.

"I don't think I was ever really used to it."

Pinkie caught up to her sister, slapping her hooves against her own cheeks mid-bounce to cheer herself up. She reached into her saddlebag, checking to make sure the oil, matches, and the spare lantern were still in there and ready to go. Her 'work' today was to have all that stuff in case Limestone's lantern ran out of fuel or stopped working, which wasn’t likely to happen considering how thorough Marble tended to be in maintaining them. As menial a task it was, it was all she had to do today and made it easy to talk to Limestone while she did it.

There was no doubt in Pinkie's mind that was what Limestone wanted.

"So, I heard you got a coltfriend." Limestone broke the preceding silence with a clearing of her throat. "Cheese Sandwich, right? How'd you guys meet?"

"Ohhh." Pinkie stopped her energetic bouncing, nudging her shoulder against Limetone's and wiggling her eyebrows. "I see what's going on here. You got your eye on someone, Limey? Is it that blacksmith you talked to about getting better tools? I should have known the macho earth pony's your type."

"Who, Red Iron? Gross. He's too much like Father." Limestone stuck her tongue out of her mouth. "No, it's just that you've got a coltfriend, Maud's got a coltfriend, and Marble had a crush on she's still getting over." Her hooves dragged against the rough ground, making a muffled pulling sound before she shook her head and made herself stop. "Besides, Father and Mother are getting old. They've got maybe half a decade before hard work becomes, well, harder for them, and the workload on me and Marble is just going to get worse. I'm the oldest and the future of the farm is my responsibility, so I have to be thinking about kids of my own sooner or later. Might as well start now, right?"

"Limestone." Pinkie's signature grin fell into a worried grimace. "You know you don't have to have any kids if you don't want to. They're supposed to be something you gotta have for yourself, not so you can forc—" she bit her lip, trying to think of better wording. "Have someone to inherit the farm after you. If you need others to help keep the farm going, you can always ask me or Maud."

"And, what, pull you away from your perfect lives so you can be miserable with me for a few days until you go back to your friends?" Limestone didn't even try to hide the thick layer of bitterness in her voice, tightly clenching her jaw and furrowing her eyebrows. "No thanks. I'd sooner spend Igneous' couch fortune— the one he thinks we don't know about than— drag you here every other month. Especially with how busy you must be as an Element of Harmony and all that."

"Nah, nothing's been happening since Cozy tried to take over the world, so I'm not really busy with anything other than parties. Besides!" She placed a hoof around Limestone's shoulder, embracing her in an awkward yet intimate side hug. "You're family. You know Maud and I are always happy to help our family, it's no biggie."

"Yeah, yeah. That's what you always say. I'm not blind and deaf, you know. I can tell how you act here when you're not talking to one of us." Once again, Limestone shrugged her off, adjusting the lantern on her neck as she stretched. "We've arrived. Put your safety stuff on and stay behind me."

"Limestone, I'm not—" Pinkie paused as she reached into the saddlebag for a mining helmet and goggles. Somehow, despite her mane being bouncier than most rubber, she managed to get the helmet on her head. "Ok, yeah, coming here makes me a bit sad. Everything's so dull and dusty and—"

She stopped, closing her eyes and recalling the countless days of numbing labor. Sun shrouded out by gray clouds, all while she searched gray rocks for gems that would have given her just a taste of actual color. Not that it mattered, since all that waited for her after a day of work was a gray rock-soup supper.

"And gray. But it's worth it to spend time with you."

"No, it isn't. I'm not—" Limestone froze, standing with her front hooves pressed against the dirt wall. "I don't want you to suffer for me. I'm not worth it."

"Of course you are." Pinkie moved forward to hug her, only for Limestone to tense up and sharply suck air through her teeth. She pulled back her hooves, grimacing as she tried to come up with something to say that'd make her feel better. "I love ya, Sis."

Limestone flinched, her cheeks darkened as she fidgeted and muttering something that vaguely sounded like 'love you too'.

The awkwardness after that grew more tense. Pinkie tapped her hoof against her chin, trying to come up with something to say as Limestone's earlier question repositioned itself to the front of Pinkie's mind. As she did, her eyes wandered, counting the unlit lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

"Oh yeah! We met at a party! Well, I meet everypony at parties, but this is one he threw instead of me! This wasn't just any party, either. It was huge! Cakes, balloons, and even inflatables. It impressed me."

"Who? Oh, Cheese." Limestone continued mining, resuming their conversation with only a slight pause. "A stallion after your own heart then, if he throws your brand of party."

"I know! And get this: he started throwing parties because of me! Isn't that serendipitous?! Then we got into this whole goof-off, and I realized how crazy I was about the whole thing and we became best friends! He gave me Boneless, and then he left to throw other parties."

"'Boneless?' Is that what he named his junk or something?"

"Limey!" Though Pinkie's tone was intentionally chastising, there was a hint of a smile on her face as she held back a snort. "No, it's a rubber chicken. He got it at my first party for me to remember him by; it was really sweet.

"Oh, so he gave you his fake cock."

That time Pinkie failed to stifle a chuckle, covering her mouth and shaking her head.

"You're worse than Rainbow."

"I doubt that. Last time we talked she told me a joke so dirty I felt like I had to clean my ears afterwards." Limestone paused, hitting a particularly sturdy vein of granite. With a grunt, she shattered it into jagged shards with her hooves. "That does sound nice. Is that when you fell in love with him?"

"Probably. I don't think I realized it until after I visited him at The Amusement Factory. He took a long sip from the depresso espresso, and couldn't laugh! So I helped him cheer up! After that, he started cheering up everyone in Equestria. He's almost good enough to replace me!"

"You weren't worried he'd replace you?"

"I was at first. Not anymore, no one can replace me! I'm too Pinkie for that."

"No adjective describes you better." The sarcasm, while obvious, was also well meant. "Speaking of assuming the mantle… Have you thought about kids? I know you love those 'bundles of shining joy' the Cakes have. Remind me to hire you as a nanny when I have some."

"Will do, I'm pretty cheap; you'd only have to pay me in hugs!" Pinkie was about to embrace her to demonstrate, only to feel a stray rock from Limestone's path of destruction shoot past her ear. Limestone's occasional grunting made it clear she was more involved with her work than affection. "Later, I take payments up front. Thinking about them, yeah. We haven't really had a chance to talk about it though; Cheese has been busy setting up the next line of pranking toys. He's even asked me to be the 'assistant consultant toy and prank item supervisor', which is a lot of words for just basically somepony who comes up with toy ideas. I asked Rainbow to help since she's so good at pranking, but apparently she's too busy training the next generation of Wonderbolts or something lame like that."

"Fantastic. Now I know what she’s going to brag about next Winter Wrap Up."

Limestone's digging decelerated, then ceased entirely. She swept aside her bangs, huffing a sigh.

"The soil is soft around here."

"Doesn't that mean we're getting closer to the surface?" The ground was less like dirt and more like partially dried cement. Pinkie firmly pressed her hoof, stamping the ground with her hoofprint.

"Yeah, but I've been digging straight this entire time." Limestone narrowed her eyes. "I think. Maybe we're near a cave?"

She resumed drilling through the rock at maximum velocity—fast enough that Pinkie had to bounce like a ball to keep pace.

"What about Maud? Is she doing well? We don't talk as much as we used to."

"Oh yeah, she's doing super! Mudbriar moved in with her recently. Which, you'd think would mean we'd see him in town more, but apparently he has everything he needs in Maud's cave and doesn't really leave if he can help it."

"Good for them. Does she plan to bring him to the farm and introduce him to Mother and Father? I know their approval means a lot to her."

The ground beneath Pinkie began to shake. Limestone glanced at the spot, but shrugged her shoulders before moving on, a bit faster than Pinkie and creating more distance between them.

Which caused the shadows they were leaving behind to lap at Pinkie just a little more.

"Yeah!" Pinkie cleared her throat, hopping forward with a bit more vigor." She's planning on visiting with him in the falLLLLL!"

The ground beneath Pinkie caved in as she fell through. She plummeted, her voice contorted into an unrecognizable shriek in her throat, which was abruptly interrupted by her sudden stop. Darkness encompassed her vision, above shone the dim light of Limestone's lantern—a single, lonely beacon of salvation.

"Pinkie!"

To Pinkie's disoriented senses, her sister's panicked shout sounded distant. A throbbing pain pulsated in her head, causing her to count each breath to make it just a little more tolerable.

"Are you ok? Did you break anything?"

"Ugh." With a groan, she got up one hoof at a time. Carefully putting weight on each one before finally standing up. "I don’t think so? If I did, I won't be feeling it until tomorrow."

While Pinkie could see herself thanks to Limestone, anything in front of her might as well have been invisible. She reached out into the shadowy darkness before her, waving her hoof around and finding nothing. It was like playing a game of pin the tail on the donkey, except she couldn't take the blindfold off and there was no one to give her directions.

"Alright, that's good. I—" There was a crumbling noise as Limestone leaned forward, causing specks of dirt to fall into Pinkie's face and mane. "Can you light up the spare and tell me what you see? I need to know if you're in a cave or what before I hop in."

"Yep!" Pinkie shook her head back and forth, striking a match from the box and igniting one of the last lanterns. The inside of wherever she found herself was shrouded despite the light, and held next to nothing aside from a few rocks. After half a minute of rigid silence, she spotted an end. "It's not a cave. There's nothing in here, it's more like a room. Actually, sort of reminds me of Dad's shack after he was cl—"

She was wrong. There was something down here.

It went unnoticed at first, being such a faded white it bordered on gray, blending in perfectly with the bland walls and rocks. Once the lantern had illuminated exactly what it was, the figure became obvious to her. The ribs stabbing upward resembled some kind of twisted stalagmites, tattered pieces of cloth clinging to them that had long lost their color. Eye sockets that, regardless of being empty, were staring at her. Begging to be saved, not knowing it was far too late.

Somepony had died down here.

"Limestone, there's a body." A brittleness etched itself into every word she'd uttered. It didn't scare her, but seeing somepony's corpse just lying in some middle-of-nowhere hole was unsettling to say the least.

"A body of what? Water? I guess I'm glad we didn't start a little lower or else we'd be flooded right abou—"

"It's a corpse. Somepony's corpse."

"Oh."

Pinkie kept waiting for words of reassurance, for her sister to tell her something that would make her feel better like she always did when they were younger. A joke, a single line of compassion, something.

Only for an unbearable silence to take its place.

"Please get me out."

Pinkie didn't recognize her voice as her own. So weak, so brittle, so small.

She hated it.

The lack of noise amplified every one Limestone made: the awkward shuffling of her hooves, the way she loudly swallowed. Even her ragged, deep breathing might as well have been right beside her ear.

"I can't." Her sister's voice cracked, shattering her façade of composure and competence. "If there's a pocket, that means the structural integrity of this entire place is in question. Going in one wrong area could cause a collapse and leave us stuck under a mountain of rocks with no one coming to help us for hours. We'd be just as dead as th—"

"Can't you get me a ladder?!"

Limestone took far too long to respond, leaving only passing seconds of nothingness. Seconds came with growing fears. Murmuring that somehow, the body would come to life and hurt her in some way. Or that she'd get stuck down here with them, left to her own demise.

An eternal party of two.

She couldn't stand the thought of being down there a minute more.

"I will. Thing is—" The pauses between Limestone's words were agonizing. It was clear she already had in mind what she wanted to say. Something was preventing her from just outright saying it, and waiting for her to articulate it was torture. "I didn’t bring one with me. The closest one is at the farm, which, even if I go full throttle, will take me at least five minutes to get there. Five more minutes to get back. So."

She trailed off, unable to say what both of them already knew.

"You'd have to leave me for ten minutes."

Pinkie couldn't stand that. Couldn't stand that their work, which was really just an excuse to spend time with each other and both of them knew it, had turned into this. Stuck in somepony's tomb, with only a single light source, sore hooves, and a saddlebag that was suddenly much heavier even though it had less in it.

"Are you going to be ok?" The gruffness of Limestone's voice did little to mask the way it shook.

"I think so?"

She wanted to close her eyes, to sleep while someone else made the problem go away so she wouldn't have to deal with it when she woke up. Thing was, if she did that every time there was a problem, Equestria would have fallen at least a dozen times. Granny Pie had taught her all those songs exactly for situations like this, and she was the last person Pinkie ever wanted to disappoint.

"I don't really have a choice either way. Just." Pinkie closed her eyes, blocking out everything except for her own erratic heartbeat. The stale smell, the sight, the lack of sound, all didn't exist for those precious few seconds of mostly darkness when she counted each breath. "Hurry. Please."

"Will do, just stay put." Limestone groaned, muttering something to herself. "You can't go anywhere anyway. Nice job, Limestone. I'll be right back."

Her rapid hoofsteps got more distant by the second, inevitably becoming nothing more than echoes. Soon enough, not even that. Leaving Pinkie in a parasitic pit, sapping all noise in this hollow trench with silence in its wake. When her heartbeat didn't resemble the music that often played at her parties, she opened her eyes, finding the beam had been left in The Skeleton's direction.

The strangest thing was, she couldn't look away from it. It revolted her, more than any failed pastry or even those cupcakes Applejack made. But, in spite of that, her head and hoof were locked in its direction. Paranoia made its home in her ears, informing her that the very moment her attention wasn't on it, it would move towards her and…

And what? Clack its teeth at her? Slap her with its decomposing hooves? The absurdity of those worries became more obvious the longer they hovered in her mind. She'd run into things much scarier than a skeleton; most of those things at least had claws or something that could actually hurt her.

This? This was gross and scary, sure, but it couldn't actually do anything even if it somehow got up and moved. The best thing she could really do was shine her lantern somewhere else and pretend that it wasn't there.

"So, giggle at the ghostly."

The song had brought her comfort so many times, and had even helped save Equestria from eternal night in a roundabout way. It would be a tradition she'd teach her foals to get through all the scary shadows and monsters under the bed, and something she should start teaching Pound and Pumpkin sooner or later.

"Guffaw at the grossly, crack up at the creepy!"

Gradually, she moved the light away from the cadaver, and shone it on the wall behind her. Pinkie let out a sigh of relief once the last bone was out of sight, bringing the lantern around much faster and painting a canvas of white on the black wall.

It'd been far too long since she'd practiced her shadow puppets. She had a chart somewhere that she'd started working through, but only really got to show them off during camping trips. Thanks to her fantastic memory, it was as clear to see as a picture hung up in the lining of her brain.

With a flex of her hooves, she started with the basics: a cat! Fortunately for Pinkie, Rarity had one and let her use Opal as a reference when she was getting stuck on it. Just as well, Applejack let her use Winona for the dog and Twilight owliswhat'shisname for the bird! The only struggle would be anything more complex like rabbits or monkeys. If only she had hands like Lyra often talked abo—

Pinkie's ears flickered.

Something moved.

There was a rattling noise behind her, right where The Skeleton was. Pinkie held the lantern desperately to her side, a sickening chill went down her spine. She felt stuck, incapable of moving a single inch of herself that might put in view whatever was there. It couldn't be the corpse. Corpses didn't move. That was what made them corpses.

So then...what moved?

Had she imagined it? Was her mind playing tricks on her? It had happened before when she was afraid her friends didn't like her anymore. This was a very different, and much more potent, type of fear.

Or.... maybe.... she was just going stir crazy. How many minutes had passed? One? Five? An hour? She couldn't tell, she'd never been somewhere like this. No light, no sound, no way to know how much time gone by. Something could have gone wrong with Limestone, the ladder might not have been where it was supposed to be and she was trying to find one. Who knew how long that could take?

"H-hello?"

There was no response. Of course there was no response. Nothing else was there with her. It must have been something hitting the ground. Something had shaken loose from her dropping in. That must have been it.

Then why did she have this aching desire to check the body? To know with unwavering certainty that it hadn't moved? The darkness was getting to her, the not knowing, the lack of reassurance or any sound.

"Crack up at the creepy."

Like a mantra, she continued the song. Only for no comfort to come, no alleviation of her worries; she was still scared.

"Ok Pinkie, just take a peek at the body. Like raising the blindfold to see how far away you are from the donkey: one glance and that's all you need. Whoop it up with the weepy!"

After forcing her body to move, she finally broke her hooves free from the unseeable glue that kept her stuck in place. The lantern creaked with very little movement; just her luck the lantern she was holding was the one Marble hadn't oiled yet. She gritted her teeth, clenching them painfully tight as her muscles begged for her to relax.

In a frantic swing, she pointed the lantern to the spot she'd found the body. Only for nothing to be there.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't there!

Only rocks took its place, not even an outline to inform her it was there in the first place. Was it ever there? Maybe, in her worry, the rocks looked like a body. If she squinted her eyes just right, it somewhat resembled bones in the proper light. Tilting her head, she could sort of see it.

Of course, she could have been trying to convince herself that was the case. It was far more comforting for Pinkie to believe her eyes had tricked her into seeing a corpse. The alternative being that it wasn't as dead as they tended to be and had moved whenever her attention was off of it for a few seconds.

Pinkie couldn't even bring herself to say the next lyric of the song, holding her breath and waiting for that rattling noise again. If she heard it, then she knew it'd be real and that she hadn't imagined it.

It was hard to say which possibility scared her more.

She brought the lantern over the rest of the pocket, scanning it once more just to make sure. Nothing had changed, not a rock out of the many had fallen from how she saw them just a few minutes ago.

With the relief came a sapping of whatever energy she had left, collapsing onto the ground with the lantern beside her.

"Ohh, Pinkie. Better check under the couch because you are losing your marbles!"

She closed her eyes as she realized how tired she was, a raspy chuckle slipping out. By now, she'd usually have enough pastries to keep her going, but the closest thing the farm had to that was a salt lick.

All she had to do now was try to keep herself preoccupied. The matches weren't exactly something to play with, neither was the safety gear that was just annoying to her now that she wasn't moving around and had Limestone to keep her distracted. Pinkie took off the helmet and glasses, fitting them back into the saddlebag and letting her mane finally free.

She was content to sit there, waiting for Limestone to save the day like her knight in shining mining gear.

If it wasn't for another rattling sound.

Pinkie's eyes sprang open, freezing at that growingly familiar sound. It was closer this time, eerily so. She frantically put her hoof back under the lantern's handle, scrambling to get on her tired hooves again as she searched desperately for the source. The room was still empty, except for that sound.

Something moved out of the corner of her vision. Something pale white, and not dead.

It was above her, blending in with the dozen or so stalactites that dressed the top. Its ribs stabbed into the roof, hanging from it like a ceiling ornament. It didn't shift an inch at first, as unmoving as when it was on the ground a few feet away from her.

Then it started crawling.

Its bones scraped against stalactites and rocks; the noises with each movement were as grating to hear as it was to watch. It was undeniably coming towards her, or the light like a moth from Tartarus.

Pinkie could only watch in abject horror, trying not to make any noise at all. A coldness stuck to her very bones, leaving her muscles rigidly held in place. She'd seen so many things since that Summer Sun celebration: a tyrant made of shadows, bugs that stole the faces of loved ones, a child that wanted to steal magic from the world.

This was a far cry from any of that, carrying something so innately disturbing and wrong.

All at once, it yanked its ribs out, dropping in front of her with a light thud. Pinkie yelped once it hit the ground, watching it splay and remained unmoving. It stayed that way for a minute, and she desperately hoped that wouldn't change.

It did.

With a trembling effort, The Skeleton got to its hooves with the same persistence, that rattling noise so painfully loud now that it drowned out her own thoughts. She held the lantern in place, trembling so powerfully the handle jiggled on her hoof and threatened to slip off. It fell on its side, the beam left displaying the corpse. The patches of flesh just beneath the flaps of clothing that had faded long past any color that could be made out, clinging to the bone in bunches.

its entire body wobbling as it struggled to stand with no muscles or tendons. It didn't walk towards her at first, staying in place and staring in her direction with its eye sockets as its front hung imply to its sides, Celestia, how did it know where she was without its eyes? Not on all four of its hooves like ponies did, instead The Skeleton stood on its back legs, quivering with the effort to stay that way

Then it began approaching her.

Every step took noticeable effort and care, like it was a marionette being controlled by some invisible strings. Pinkie tried moving away, shaking her head back and forth with her mouth hung open as she attempted to make any noise other than helpless croaking. It didn't take her long for her to hit a wall, pressing every inch of her body against the dirt in a desperate attempt to get as far as possible.

It opened its jaw, lacking in any teeth or vocal cords. Clearly trying to say something, with no tongue to speak. Perhaps it wanted to scream, but didn't have the mouth to do that as well. It couldn't communicate with her at all. Reaching forward with its hooves, like it was attempting to embrace her.

For once, this was a hug Pinkie could not accept.

"Chortle at the kooky."

Pinkie's own voice didn't sound right to her, lacking in that tangible cheeriness it always had. In its place was a meek, shaky mess that threatened to devolve into a sob with every word. The spiky grip of fear had her heart in its grasp, spreading to every inch of her and locking her in place. She couldn't even manage to think, scream, or beg for just the slightest of movements. Her body wouldn't listen to her, and neither would this thing that stood before her.

The rancid stench of death emanated from its mouth, so putrid bile was rising in the back of her throat that threatened to spew into the walking abomination. Her mouth tasted sour, and it took her few shreds of willpower not to vomit. Deep down she knew that with one kick or even a particularly hearty shrug it would completely fall apart; whatever was making it walk was obviously struggling to do so.

Pinkie couldn't bring herself to move at all. No matter how much she wanted to, all she could do was force out the song that she wanted with every iota of her being to save her.

"S-snortle at the spooky."

It was inches away from her. She tried to turn away from it, squeezing her eyes shut and hoping it would lose interest or Limestone would come and save her or something would happen. Pinkie could only wait for whatever fate it had intended for her.

"Pinkie!"

Limestone's voice came from the hole, forcing Pinkie to open her eyes. Only to find that she was on the ground, resting her head on her forearms with the lantern unmoved a few inches beside her. It was pointing straight to the body, which hadn't moved at all.

The ladder Limestone retrieved had been put down the hole and firmly shoved into the ground beside her, waiting to take her out of that grim place.

"Lime?" she whispered as she got to her feet, dazed and fighting back a headache that hurt with every pulse of her heart. Pinkie picked up the lantern and stared at the corpse, half expecting it to get up or say something to her. As a corpse does, it did nothing at all.

"Yeah, come on. I told Father and he's writing a letter as we speak. Just get up here and go home, we've done enough for today."

With some careful hesitation, Pinkie began to climb up the ladder, keeping the cadaver in the corner of her eyes at all times. Not once did it move, whisper, or anything of the sort. She must have passed out or something while waiting, and dreamed it happening.

Right?

The corpse said nothing to confirm her fears.

______

Her bed was bigger than normal.

Or, at least, it felt that way.

After she'd gotten out of the tunnel, she broke down and just had a good cry. It was stressful, even if she was never once in danger. She was pretty sure of that.

Authorities came and took the body, presumably to try to find out who it was and who it belonged to. Twilight and the others comforted her as soon as she told them what happened; Rainbow even offered to throw her a party to cheer her up. As nice as that was, it was already late and the whole situation had left her exhausted. That was saying a lot considering how much it took for Pinkie to get tired.

When she had entered her bedroom, she wanted to just collapse into the soft mattress and rest.

But the bed seemed bigger than normal.

It must have been how dark the room was. She knew the room head to hoof, and could point out any object wherever it was; even the outlines weren't foreign to her. Regardless, there was something about the dark parts of her room that left her deeply unsettled tonight. Nothing was in the room except for Gummy, which didn't explain the overbearing sensation of being watched wherever she went.

In the bathroom, in the kitchen, in her room.

It was there.

Nothing relieved this irrational fear. No amount of flicking the lights on and off or checking every square inch was enough to erase the worry that something was going to come out of the dark as soon as she glanced away. That, against all reason, the corpse had followed her and hid in the darkness like a living-dead shadow.

Gummy didn't share in her paranoia, and she'd become pretty astute in all things Gummy. Either he was blissfully unaware of whatever was hiding in the dark of her once-familiar room, or it was all in her mind.

Neither of those possibilities were particularly comforting.

Out of a lack of energy and patience, Pinkie decided to leave all of the lights on, even the ones in the bathroom. When there was no darkness, there was undeniable proof that nothing was hiding from her. Twilight told her that something like this could happen after a traumatic event, something along the lines of 'her brain staying in a state of hyperawareness and searching for threats', regardless of whether there are any threats or not. Twilight also mentioned that if it did happen, she should go see her the following day.

That was future Pinkie's problem. Present Pinkie's problem was trying to get some sleep with the lights on.

For tonight, she would tolerate that. In the morning when she woke up, everything would become a bad memory, then eventually a bad dream, then forgotten.

All she needed was a good night's sleep to feel better.

Alpha

It was gray.

Pinkie hadn't got any sleep, and her mane was gray.

Luckily not all of it; only a single strand in the center. Still, it stuck out in an otherwise sea of pink, a rock among gems. Just as well, it'd lost most of its poofiness. A curl or two here and there, but most of it had fallen flat as a curtain and stuck to the sides of her face. No amount of mane care, pins, clips, or even a curling iron fixed it. Which, after Rarity's numerous attempts to force it straight, Pinkie should have known nothing would work.

Yet, after staring at her reflection for what seemed like hours while trying recognize herself, she had to try.

The bags under her eyes weren't exactly an appealing sight, either.

She'd lain in her bed for hours, waiting for sleep to take her and give her the solace she'd been seeking. Instead, it never came, leaving her way more tired than before. At one point, she'd gotten desperate enough to try the sleeping aids in the Cakes' medicine cabinet, which served the single purpose of making her more tired rather than put her to sleep. Like being hungry with no appetite. Brushing her teeth and taking a bath helped only marginally, and the lights she'd left on in her room only ended up being an annoyance that worsened her frustration.

It was hard to say why. That inability to relax had dug its way deep into her, leaving Pinkie sick with that gut-wrenching dread that something was hiding in the sprinkled shards of shadows that all the lights in her room just barely didn't cover. It didn't give her that assurance she craved, only burning her eyes more than sleep deprivation already was.

Gummy sat on her messy bed, having made his way up there at some point. Staring at her with his beady, occasionally blinking eyes. A blot of jealousy swelled up in the back of her throat, threatening to choke her with how annoying it was that he was able to get so much sleep and she didn't get even one second.

Then he gave her that classic blink of his where the right eye closed and then the left one.

"Oh, I can't stay mad at you!"

His sunbathed scales helped in shaking off her grogginess, at least for a few seconds. She had to put him down at some point so he could eat and do Gummy things.

Before leaving, Pinkie tried one more time to fix her smile. Peering at her reflection in the window as she passed it, taking a few seconds to recognize herself. She pressed her hooves against her cheeks, raised her mouth and tried to get her lips to reach her eyes.

"Come on."

It looked incredibly wrong, like one of those fake smiles she always put on for family photos: all teeth and no joy.

"Ugh, fine, be that way."

With a grunt and roll of her eyes, Pinkie flicked the lights off and left her room, making her way to the kitchen which held the key to getting through today: coffee. It was black, bitter, and perfectly barftastic. As much as she hated it, it never failed to give her energy she occasionally lacked. Twilight had mentioned multiple times that it was an acquired taste, and that it was better experienced as a whole than a drink.

She'd mixed it with sugar, milk, and cream multiple times as she tried to get used to it, and she just couldn't ignore that underlying hot-water texture that no amount of additives really got rid of.

Since she hadn't slept, she went down earlier than the Cakes usually did, finding that the oven hadn't even been preheated for the day, nor were any of the cooking utensils set out. It should have been expected since the Cakes hadn't gotten out of bed yet, but she'd seen it so rarely it still felt odd. If she was going to be up so early, might as well be productive with all the extra time under her hooves.

After putting in coffee grounds and scrunching her muzzle at the strong odor of brewing, Pinkie started setting out all the things they used for baking throughout the day. She'd tried bouncing like she often did in the morning, but there was an aching in the ends of her hooves that made it hurt; maybe she sprained something when she fell down that hole?

That hole…

Somepony's friend had died down there, abandoned and alone until she found them. How long had it been before she found it? How long would she have been down there if Limestone couldn't find a ladder. If she'd been left with that corpse?

Pinkie stared into the coffee pot, watching it slowly fill with the dark liquid she'd need throughout her day. Maybe if she just closed her eyes for a few minutes, that fatigue deep in her bones would fade away.

She could still remember that dream, so vivid and easy to bring forward it may as well have just happened. The creaking of its bones as The Skeleton moved, made worse by being the only sound there. The stench was just as putrid, so disturbingly vile even when standing right beside the pot she could practically smell it. Rancid and strong enough to make her stomach coil, pushing down any appetite she had out of fear it'd come right back up.

Even now, after almost an entire day had passed, she couldn't help but question if that was really a dream. She'd had so many of them, the majority pleasant and that Pinkie rarely wanted to wake up from. Those were always vague and foggy, but this one was so detailed.

Is it possible it wa—

Pinkie felt a hoof on her shoulder. She couldn't bring herself to look at whose it was.

"Good morning, dearie!"

Pinkie startled a shriek as she jumped away. Pinkie pressed a hoof against her chest as her heart bounced into her throat and back down like it was using a trampoline.

"Oh no, did I scare you?" She reached forward to touch her, only to retract as she checked Pinkie over, gaze hovering on her face and then to her mane. "Are you ok, Pinkie? You look exhausted. Were you not able to get any sleep after," Mrs. Cake pursed her lip, briefly glancing to the side. "What happened?"

"I, uhm." Pinkie counted her breaths one by one, waiting for the time between them to stop being so short. "I didn't really. That's ok, though! It's not the first time; I used to pull all-nighters when Pound and Pumpkin first showed up, so I'll be fine. Just need some of that sweet caffeine and sugar!"

Pinkie got one of the many larger mugs in the cabinet, pouring the fresh coffee as carefully as she could and trying not to spill any of it as her hooves shook.

"I thought you hated coffee?"

"I do." Pinkie poured in an abundance of sugar, followed by two or three different flavored coffee creamers until it was hardly coffee anymore. Closer to some of the many concoctions she and Rainbow used to create when they were trying to come up with new flavors. "But it works!"

She raised it to her lips, heavily blowing on it and giving it a tentative sip. There was some wonderful creaminess, just not thick enough to pretend it was something other than coffee she was drinking. It wasn't good at all, but it was tolerable.

"Well, if you're sure." Mrs. Cake walked around the kitchen, keeping her eyes on Pinkie. "Do you have any plans today? Any parties?"

"Yes! I have one for..." Pinkie blanked, failing to come up with whom the party was for. She knew for certain there was one today, a birthday maybe? It'd never taken her more than a few seconds to remember before. "Piña Colada! It's her birthday today, and I was going to bake her a cake. Though she told me she likes cupcakes more than whole cakes so I was going to make a cake out of a bunch of smaller cupcakes."

"That sounds nice. Would you like me to help you bake it? There actually aren't a lot of orders today, so I should have plenty of time."

"Really? Yeah, that'd be super! Thanks, Mrs. Cake."

"Of course."

Pinkie rubbed whatever grogginess hid in her eyes, placing the mug on the counter and grabbing the ingredients she needed. Cupcakes were the simplest thing to make, and baking was one of her favorite hobbies. No amount of sleep deprivation could take the joy out of that.

_____________

"Twilight?"

Pinkie knocked on the door of Twilight's castle, in a stupor as she stood waiting for someone to answer; It took more energy to raise her hooves than she expected it to. The day felt much longer than it normally did, which she would typically consider a good thing since they were often far too short. However, the sheer exhaustion that clung to her—no matter how much coffee she chugged—made it drag on painfully slow. She found herself wishing for night to come sooner, just for the hope that tonight would be different, that she'd be able to sleep.

Beneath that desire was untethered fear that she wouldn't be able to. Like all that awaited her in her room once the sun fell would be an empty bed, and shadows she could only hope were as empty.

"Pinkie? Twilight's rearranging the library right now, wha-whoa." Spike's words hitched in his throat, standing under the other side of the opened door, staring up at her with widened eyes and an agape mouth. "You look like Twilight when she tries to get through her reading list in one night. Are you okay?"

With an exasperated sigh, Pinkie opened the thermos full of coffee that'd allowed her to chug along. Taking a drawn-out sip from it and nearly gagging at how lukewarm it'd become, just drinking whatever was left as she tried to power through what she needed to until—

"I'm just a little tired, Spike. I haven't been able to sleep at all after I got back, which hasn't happened since Pound and Pumpkin first arrived."

"Oh, well, that sucks." He was blatantly staring at her mane, clearly bothered by it, without a doubt specifically the gray part. "What happened anyway? Twilight won't tell me about it, though she's talked about it around me plenty."

As grumpy as she was, it was hard for Pinkie to blame him. The first time he'd seen her like that, she forced him into a confession that wasn't true, and afterward wasn't exactly a joyride either.

"That's probably for the best, I—" She made the mistake of blinking for a few seconds longer than she should have, the image of that skeleton's ribs stabbed into the dirt roof sending a shudder down her spine. "Saw something I shouldn't have. I'll be okay after some sleep, so can you take me to Twilight? She must have a spell or something that'll help."

"I mean, she probably does; Twilight has a spell for just about anything. If there isn't one, she'd make it." Spike started walking down one of the hallways, slowly at first to make sure Pinkie was following. "Did you try some sleeping medicine stuff? There's a stash of emergency NightMarequill under my bed that has knocked me out every time I've needed it to."

"That's—" the umpteenth groan lurched out of her throat and pried her jaw open, making the soreness painfully prominent "—the first thing I tried. Nothing worked; plus they all taste gross."

"Not if you get the candy versions."

"There are candy versions?"

"Yeah! Bubblegum, cotton candy, blueberry, all kinds of stuff." Spike opened the door, eyes darting between Twilight in the room and Pinkie. Twilight pulled out dozens of books at a time and moved them around in seemingly random order. "Don't tell Twilight, but when we lived in Canterlot I used to give her them whenever she was focused on something and trying to avoid sleep."

"And it worked?"

"Every time."

Twilight glanced at them, placing the last few books on the shelf and giving herself a nod of satisfaction before pivoting on her hooves towards them. Her pleasant smile slipped as she hovered on Pinkie far more than Spike.

"Oh Pinkie, you look exhausted. Were you not able to get any sleep?" Twilight frowned as she shifted her attention to Pinkie.

A sting of annoyance bloated up in her chest. She'd heard that question so many times today it was becoming a mockery. It was irrational and dumb; she knew they were only asking because they cared. She swallowed it, just like she had all day.

"Nope, not a wink."

"Is it because of—" she brought a hoof up to her chest, flickering her eyes between Spike and Pinkie "—what you saw?"

He scowled, crossing his arms and half pouting as he muttered something to himself. The façade of a smile Pinkie had creased her lips into just as spontaneously disappeared; each time she tried to make it stay was growing more challenging.

"Yeah, I think so."

"I was afraid this was going to happen. Uhm." Twilight stopped herself, nervously tapping her hoof. "Spike, can you leave us alone for a bit?"

"I'm not a baby anymore, you know. I can handle whatever she saw."

"I know you can. That doesn't mean you have to. Pinkie will get through this, but it's still awful that she has to in the first place. Please, for me?"

He made a droning noise, chest rising and nostrils flaring as he exhaled, tossing up his arms and walking back through the door.

"Alright. I'll be busy doing…something."

"Thank you."

"Yeah, yeah."

With a shutting of the door, Pinkie and Twilight were alone, trapped in a stasis of tension and anticipation. Pinkie knew that with coming to Twilight, she'd have to think about The Skeleton when she'd been trying to avoid doing just that all day. Blinking brought it in flashes; her burning eyes made it nearly impossible to stop herself from doing so.

Even so, she couldn't go another night without sleep.

"So." Twilight placed one hoof over another, rigid wings twitching. "Why can't you sleep?"

"Don't know," she muttered, burying the frustration at answering the same question over and over. "I laid in my bed for hours and only got more sleepy, and then it was morning."

"Did you try sleeping medicine?"

Pinkie felt a headache coming on, a pulsating pain in the back of her mind that reached forward a little more with every beat of her heart.

"First thing I tried; none of them worked. Just made me more sleepy."

"Wait, none of them worked? Pinkie, did you use multiple at once?" Twilight moved closer, eyebrows drawing together." Don't do that! That's how you go to sleep and never wake up."

"That sounds pretty nice right about now."

She grimaced as soon as that intrusive thought left her mouth, realizing how dark that sounded far too late. Pinkie hid behind her mane; something she hadn't done for years. It didn't make her feel better, or make the world go away, but it helped make her feel just a little less alone.

Instead of asking if she was okay like she feared she would, Twilight extended her right wing and embraced her in a hug, giving an intimate comfort she needed far more than she'd admit. It was warm, sincere, and sucked out all the cold rigidness that had lingered in her very bones as soon as her hooves had swung over her bed.

It was nice, it was genuine, and it was what she'd been needing all day.

She melted, letting out a breath she'd been holding all day and shutting her weary eyes. For once, that black behind her eyelids didn't cloak the outline of a bony figure. Only a darkness that was empty of anything, as it should be.

Of course, it was temporary. Perhaps that was what made it so meaningful. Twilight pulled away, wing retracting to her side as she took a few tentative steps back.

"Feeling any better?"

"A little." Pinkie rubbed her face, trying to ignore the tingle of a lie on her lips. "Thank you."

"Of course, you looked like you needed it." Twilight walked over to one table in her library, yanking two seats with her aura and placing them on either side as she gestured for Pinkie to sit. "Do you want to tell me about it? I might be able to help a bit; I've had my fair share of sleepless nights."

"I have too, just—" she sat in the chair opposite Twilight, having done so for the first time today "—not like this. I didn't really sleep a lot before going to the farm, so I'm running on a few hours, caffeine, and as much sugar as I can eat."

"And you haven't crashed?"

"No, I have. Just earlier today I was throwing a party, and in the middle of it I got really tired and it was harder to move. I ended up just laying on a picnic table while I waited for it to pass."

"What?!" Twilight jumped, her wings springing out to her sides. "And you didn't tell anyone?"

"No. I didn't—" The happy face in her mind of Piña Colada brought a tiny joy for Pinkie, easily the highlight of her day. Despite how sleep-deprived she was, she made herself throw that party the same way she always had and it was worth it. "—Want to ruin her birthday."

"Pinkie." Twilight's voice trailed off, her eyebrows relaxing as she shook her head. "You've got to care about yourself too." With her magic she brought up a notepad and a pencil, writing something on top and then underlining it with a satisfied nod. "And you weren't able to fall asleep then, either?"

"Not really." Pinkie raised an eyebrow, staring at the notepad in Twilight's grasp. "Whatchya writing down?"

"Oh, you know, just—" she twirled the pencil, nervously giggling as she avoided eye contact "—stuff. It helps me compartmentalize everything if I write it down, that's all."

"Okie dokie then." Her usual mantra had no enthusiasm, sounding more like an obligatory greeting. Pinkie shifted around in the chair, catching a glimpse of the outside through one of the windows. It was already getting dark when she started her trek to Twilight's, now the blue sky had become a tainted orange and soon the streetlights would be the only source of light.

She'd have to walk home through that, with only patches of light to guide her. It didn't matter that she could navigate Ponyville with her eyes closed, or that some part of her knew that there couldn't possibly be anything in the dimly lit corners that was watching her no matter where she went. As many reasons as she could come up with to try reasoning with herself, not a single one soothed the sickening sense of foreboding that had wrapped itself around her heart.

"I have to ask: are you experiencing any visual or auditory hallucinations? Those often coincide with sleep deprivation, admittedly usually only after seventy-two hours but sometimes they start earlier."

Twilight did a terrible job at hiding the concern in her voice.

"Hallucinations?" Pinkie quickly turned back to Twilight, placing one hoof over another. "Like things I see that aren't there?"

"Well, you wouldn't know they aren't there if someone doesn't tell you they aren't there, but yeah. Usually really minor things, like seeing a shadow move out of the corner of your eye or hearing your name called when nopony is around."

"That's—" She recalled the 'party' she'd had when she thought all her friends hated her, and how convinced she was of her new 'friends' existence. It was harrowing and shameful to think back on it now. Considering they never brought it up, hopefully Rainbow never told them about who her 'friends' were when she walked in.

Of course, maybe they just didn't want to talk about it around her.

"Nothing like that, I'm pretty sure. Although..." Pinkie ran a hoof up her side, pressing her lips together as she swallowed. "It does sometimes seem like something is watching me."

Twilight straightened in her seat, the aura around her pencil growing smaller. "All the time?"

Pinkie shook her head, attention drifting to the slabs of dark spread out in the library. Behind the crystal pillars, on top of the bookshelves where the light's salvation couldn't touch, under her chair. It was everywhere if she searched for it, and that was far too easy to do.

It wasn't lurking in the dark. Not now, at least.

"No, just when I'm alone. Or trying to sleep."

There was a distinct scribbling noise as Twilight wrote that down, doing so without having to look.

"Is that why you can't sleep?"

"I don't think so." She concentrated on Twilight, listening to the sound of her pencil on the notepad and voice. "On the other hoof, it doesn't make it easier."

"Hmm," Twilight muttered to herself, flipping her notepad and wrinkling her forehead. "That could be paranoia, also a semi-common thing with sleep deprivation. Especially if it's happening as you're trying to sleep; except it doesn't explain why sleeping aids didn't work. That's really odd, even for you. More so with the fact that caffeine is working."

Pinkie tilted her head, reaching back and grabbing the thermos. "What does that have to do with it?"

"Contrary to popular belief, caffeine doesn't give you energy. What it's actually doing is suppressing a chemical called adenosine that's responsible for making you sleepy. If it's making you less sleepy, that means your brain is producing it as it normally should, and presumably is working as intended."

"Uh." Pinkie's eyes bounced back and forth, taking a few seconds longer to decipher Twilight's explanations than she usually would. "You're saying my brain is producing all the chemicals it should be for me to sleep, yet for some reason I'm not?"

"In simple terms, yes."

"Can you fix it?"

"Sort of?" Her response lost its touch of confidence, accompanied by a loss of eye contact as she awkwardly tapped her hooves together. "There's plenty of spells that could put you to sleep guaranteed. Problem being that's just treating the symptoms; that wouldn't tell me why you can't sleep in the first place. I'll have to research some stuff. Which isn't too bad since It'd keep me busy."

"But you can help me sleep?" Pinkie leaned forward, placing her front hooves on the table with a darting gaze.

"Assuming whatever it is isn't secretly magic-resistant, yes."

Pinkie wrapped her forelegs around Twilight, hugging her for a second time while thanking her feverishly. The notepad and pencil clattered to the table, Twilight's horn growing dim until the magic had faded.

"You don't have to thank me." Twilight shook her head with a warm smile. "We're friends, that's what we do for each other."

"I know, it's just." Pinkie moved back into her seat. "A huge relief. Can you cast it on me now then? I could really use some shut-eye."

"Oh, I guess if you don't have anything else to tell me. Give me a sec." Twilight stepped away, effortlessly picking several books off the shelves with her and placing them in a constantly moving circle around her.

"Let's see, I need something that can be timed; most of these are instant. Do they all have the same matrix?" The spinning of literature halted once she'd centered her excited gaze on a passage. "Oh, this is perfect. Assuming you head to Sugarcube Corner right after, fifteen minutes?"

She tapped her hoof against her chin, staring at Pinkie expectantly. Did she want her to agree? Or correct her? Or was it a rhetorical question?

"Yes?"

"Yes! Ok, this spell it is then."

All of the books were neatly put back where they were except for one, leaving it hovering in front of Twilight as she wordlessly read something. Pinkie took this pause to check the outside once more, finding that the sun had sunk far beneath the horizon. Hardly a glitter of its beautiful rays could be seen and Ponyville's residents went about their nights and entered their homes while barely paying attention to it.

A longing to be like that again sat heavily on her chest.

"Twilight? Do you think you could, I don't know, make me able to glow in the dark?"

Twilight's narrowed gaze relaxed, ears flickering as she turned to Pinkie. "Like a toy? Uh, I think so? There's a spell for that, just intended for objects, not ponies. There's no reason to think it'd be dangerous or not." She traced Pinkie's stare, craning her head forward in search to find what had captured her attention. "Pinkie, are you afraid to walk home alone?"

Pinkie's chin fell to her chest, hooves clacking against the ground as she stood out of the seat. Batting away the stray gray strand that had perched itself between her eyes, reminding her of its taunting existence.

"A little."

Twilight placed a hoof on her shoulder, shrouding Pinkie in a raspberry cover of magic that stuck to her fur. It spread to a circle around her, dispelling any particle of darkness.

"There, that should last right up to the sleeping spell. I can walk home with you if it helps?"

Pinkie giggled to herself; a tiny tickling came with the magic that was hard not to smile at.

"Yeah, it would." She peered out into the dark once more. That dread untangled by the pleasantness of Twilight's spell.

"Thank you."

________

The glow had worn off as soon as she'd waved goodbye to Twilight and started walking up the stairs, which was also when the sleeping spell kicked in. A crippling dose of nausea hit her, leaving her woozy and her limbs wobbly like they'd been replaced with jelly. Pinkie had to prop herself against the railing as she walked up the stairs so she didn't fall over and sleep on the floor, as tempting as that was.

Once she'd fumbled into her room, she collapsed onto her bed, sinking into its welcoming pillows and blankets. The bed was numbingly warm, filling her senses only with softness and tranquility. It felt so incredibly right to close her eyes, a sureness fluttered in her mind that the tentacles of unconsciousness would finally enrapture her.

Pinkie deeply inhaled, letting the weariness that'd burrowed in her bones fade away. The only sound left in the room was the ticking of a clock, counting each one as the seconds passed.

One.

Two.

Three.

Fou—

Creaking.

There was a creaking noise on the other side of her room.

She'd lived in her room for the better part of a decade, and it only ever creaked in the first year when everything was settling. It hadn't made that noise since.

So then what was creaking?

Pinkie reluctantly opened one eye—burning more than usual—and scanned what she could see without moving. Gummy was in his bed, asleep and unbothered. The lights had been flicked on when she came in and left that way, leaving sparsely anywhere in her room unlit.

Then what made the creaking?

She remained unmoving for sixty clicks of the clock, fighting the unbearable weight of her eyelids with growingly shorter blinking. It became impossible to resist, giving in for the second time.

The creaking started again.

This time much closer.

This time much longer.

Both of her eyes opened, a cold sweat drenching her back. She clutched the blankets, raising her head out of the pillow she'd buried it in. It was difficult just to bring herself up, to fight the need to rest that she wanted so vehemently to give into. Familiar terror had gripped her heart, leaving it desperately struggling with every pump. Painful adrenaline coursing through her that conflicted with the spell, causing an aching in her muscles that demanded she sleep and a throbbing that screamed just as loudly to stay awake.

It was torture, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Pinkie gritted her teeth, sucking in cold air as she lay with her hooves pressed into the bed. Her throat was so agonizingly dry, each atom of air morphed into shards of glass in her lungs.

Then the creaking happened once more, directly above her.

Gummy didn't move.

Was it in her head? A hallucination? He was always a deep sleeper; it might not have been loud enough.

She had to check what it was.

With a grunt, Pinkie flipped herself over, splaying her forelegs as her chest rose with every raspy breath. The lights shredded her eyes, coming off much more intensely than before. She winced, moving her head away and squeezing her eyelids shut until it was tolerable.

Once she finally opened them, the dreaded awaited her.

The Skeleton wasn't obvious at first, blending in with the variety of party decorations her room was adorned with. The pale white of its bones glistened in the corner of her vision, embedding itself into the roof of her home the same way it had that cave. Sharp ribs stabbing into the wood and piercing it with ease, hanging like a chandelier of decay. That 'creaking' was it swinging back and forth, as unmoving as Gummy in its version of 'sleep'.

Deep down, she knew it wasn't an eternal one.

So many pointless questions drove themselves into her mind, all drowned out by a skewered ringing that doubled in intensity with every throb. The creaking became distant and muffled, a drop in a wave of reverberation. It centered in her brain, sparking a searing flame that ignited everything into an inferno.

Pinkie opened her mouth, failing to make any noise other than something between a croak and a whimper. The exhaustion in her body was a euphoric breeze in comparison. She curled into the fetal position, her hooves against her ears in a futile attempt to block it out.

Then it fell.

The same way it did in the cave: collapsing at the end of her bed with a light thud. She tried to get as far up on her bed as she could, knocking her pillows aside as she climbed to the headboard of her bed. That might have been asking too much, as the consequence of forced movement was a crushing pain that felt like dozens of Holder's Boulders had been pushed onto her.

A single, decrepit forehoof reached over the end of her bed. Its weight, while light, could be felt as it lifted itself. Its second followed, and soon its eyeless head. Bits of mostly decayed flesh clinging to its bones with its far faded clothing, jaws once more opening and threatening to fall off as it desperately clung to the rest of the skull.

It was impossible to move away from it, no matter how much she told her body to. In her flailing she hit her head against the back of her bed, worsening the aching to a blinding pain that overcame all her senses but sight.

Long, dragging movements scraped across her sheets. Arms and legs pointing upward stiffly like a stickbug, everything else wobbled and on the cusp of falling over. The closer it got, the more she could taste a whiff of that gut-churning stench of death. It was putrid, and emanated from the unliving abomination.

As it got closer, thanks to actual lights being in her room she could make out tiny marks coming from its sockets. They resembled tallies, or maybe eyelashes? They were black, deeply engraved into the bone and reaching into the holes of the skull.

She soon got a much closer look as it towered over her, standing with a fearful balance. Inch by inch, it brought its jaw down to her. Pinkie shut her eyes, sucking air through her teeth and waited for it to do whatever it intended to. Focusing on the ringing instead of the rattling of its carcass.

"G-giggle," she whispered with a shudder, attempting the only thing she could do. "At the ghosties."

With bated breath, she accepted her fate.

Only for nothing to happen.

The weight vanished.

One eye, then two opened. It was gone. Not even its odor was left behind, or imprints in her blanket.

She saw it out of the corner of her eye, back in the ceiling of her room. It creaked as it swung back and forth, holding itself up by the fractured ribs. The pain had faded away somewhat, hiding in the back of her mind and reminding her it was there in tolerable whispers.

Pinkie stayed silent, barely even breathing. She wanted to close her eyes—or just blink—for a second. Something in her chest convinced her that, the moment she did, it'd drop back down and claw its way on her bed again.

So she didn't.

She watched The Skeleton swing from her ceiling, too struck to reach for a pillow to hold or move at all.

Gummy remained asleep.

And another night passed without her joining him.

Theta

The Skeleton had vanished at some point.

That should have brought Pinkie some relief, or allowed her to relax just a smidge. Instead, it made her question where it'd disappeared to, if it had crawled to some other corner of her room, waiting for her to stumble across it once she thought it was gone. Maybe it had fallen at some point and she'd somehow missed it, eventually realize her folly when she'd bump into it.

All of which assumed she could muster the energy to get out of bed, of course.

Her lamps weren't the primary light source for long, quickly outshone by the sun herself as she pierced through the numerous windows, letting her know that another day had passed without her getting any sleep.

She saw Gummy wake up one eye at a time, turn to her, and lick his eyeball.

With huge strain, she rose, bringing her hooves to her face and tugging at her eyes. Pinkie felt gross on top of her exhaustion. Her coat was matted and sticky, and a sensation of dirtiness seeped into her bones. She'd bathed yesterday, but that didn't seem to matter.

These past two days—Celestia, had it only been two days?—had taught her how lengthy a day could truly be. The passing night, filled with a fear bordering on despair, had dragged on with every second.

She glanced at her bathroom door, furrowing her brow in contemplation as she asked herself whether she should bother with her usual routine. A shower would wake her up just a little, unless it was a warm one.

Then it would pass, and she'd somehow end up more drained than before. Why should she even bother? Was there a party today? She sat there and trudged through the fog that obscured her mind, hoping to reach out and grab somepony's birthday or some other party-spurring occasions.

None came to mind.

Pinkie placed a hoof on her chest, airing out her tension with a sigh. She couldn't throw a party with how tired she was; Pina's party was already pushing it. Tartarus, the idea of going downstairs filled her with such dread she wasn't sure if she'd be able to get out of bed.

Fear of not just The Skeleton, but also of her appearence kept her there. The grayness of her mane terrified her, and the weight of fear crushed her with thoughts of it spreading. Not to mention how downright awful her coat must have been from lying drenched in her own sweat all night; how she didn't smell was another unanswerable question for the pile.

What was even waiting for her downstairs? More stares? More questions about how she was doing and if she'd tried all the things she'd already tried multiple times to get to sleep? As good-intentioned as they were, hearing it over and over and giving the same practiced answers was agonizing.

Then again, staying in her bed would just make them more concerned. There was nothing for her outside today, yet even less inside.

She ran her hooves through her mane, making a half-baked attempt to poof it up in a fleeting wish for normalcy. It didn't work, of course; it still draped over her back like a cape of seaweed yanked straight out of the ocean. In a window she passed, she saw that more of it had faded to gray, two more strands at least.

Seeing it made her heart fracture, even though some part of her knew it was the only sight that awaited her. What disturbed her even more about it was that, when she was younger, she wanted to be gray like the rest of her family was. Marble, her twin sister, had a mane identical to hers in all ways but color. They both got it from their mother, Cloudy. Who had a mane as long and straight as any Pinkie had ever seen.

That was before she desired to be different, when she wanted to be the same as the only ponies she'd ever known. Now, when she'd come to love her uniqueness, that long-dead foalhood wish was coming true.

She hated it.

_______

After filling her thermos to the brim with creamer-blended coffee, she tried to help get everything ready for the Cakes like she had the day before. About halfway through setting things, Mrs. Cake pointed out that she'd misplaced some stuff—utensils not cleaned or set out, ingredients not opened properly. It was all easily fixed, barely even an inconvenience.

But she'd never messed up like that before.

Not even when she first started first being taught how to do everything had she made so many mistakes, as small as they may be.

She needed to see Twilight again. Even if the sleeping spell didn't work, there had to be something that did. It was Twilight Sparkle, after all! The protégée of Celestia, the embodiment of magic, the Princess of Friendship, a genius problem solver!

If Twilight couldn't help her, then nobody could.

"Twilight?"

Pinkie knocked on the doors to Twilight's castle, fighting the urge to peek over her shoulder. The entire way there, dozens of ponies had kept her in their concerned attention. It was the same as yesterday, but today she had a little less patience for it.

The worried whispering.

The staring when they thought she wasn't looking.

The same question they pestered her with every time: 'Are you okay?'

It was because they cared, and she knew that deep down; it was becoming something she needed to keep reminding herself. She was friends with each and every creature in Ponyville, so of course they wanted to know how she was doing.

And if she said no, what then? Would they magically remedy a solution? Say exactly what she needed to hear to feel better? No, they wouldn't. They couldn't.

Then they'd be left feeling as bad as she did.

So she lied, telling them she was fine and was just having a bad mane day. Not explaining the gray in her mane, or the bags under her eyes, or how poorly groomed her coat was. They looked at each other a certain way, gave her a nod, and trotted away. Joining the others in giving her awkward stares, like they were expecting her to break down at any given moment.

If things kept going like they were, she just might.

"Pinkie?"

Spike's voice was the distraction from her rumination she needed, opening the door just enough for her to slink her way in, shutting it behind her and startling the little dragon. The inside of the castle was cool, empty, and most importantly: well lit.

No dark corners.

No creeping shadows on the edge of a wall.

No bony hooves reaching from the black veil.

No Skeleton.

"Holy crap, are you okay?"

She sucked in cold air through her teeth, closing her eyes and ignoring that hot sourness in her mouth.

"I'm fine."

She wasn't. Neither was she under the guise that he'd believe her, tilting his head and pressing his lips into a fine line.

"Are you sure? I can make some hot cocoa with extra sugar if you—"

"Spike!"

He flinched, ears drooping as he took a step back like he'd just been scolded. Guilt impaled her heart, leaving her stuck to the wall. She grimaced, dropping her chin to her chest as she turned away from him.

"Just take me to Twilight, please."

He shrank, nodding and shuffling over into one of the hallways. With dragging hooves she followed, occasionally darting her eyes up to the ceiling. Nothing was there, of course. No bony figure hiding behind the chandeliers.

No creaking.

Spike led her to the kitchen, where Twilight was trying to cook an omelet while reading something. The door had been left open, leaving the sound of eggs sizzling audible from just outside. Without having to be asked, he shut the door behind them. The suddenness of which startled Twilight and caused her to drop her book, catching it in her magic inches before it hit the ground.

"Spike, I told you not to distract me while I'm—" Once her eyes landed on Pinkie, the aura holding the book lost its grip as it clattered to the ground. "Oh, Pinkie. Are you—"

"Don't."

The brittleness of her voice was painfully unfamiliar to her own ears, more grating than an out-of-tune melody. At least her mess of a mane covered half of her face, preventing Twilight from seeing how bloodshot her eyes had become.

"I don't want to be asked that anymore. Just..." Pinkie sat on the stool, not having realized how much every inch of her body ached with fatigue until she let it rest. She placed her forelegs onto the counter and buried her head until all the light was gone, closing her eyes to stop that incessant burning for a few precious seconds.

It was waiting for her there.

Behind her eyelids, in the blotches of darkness. Its jaw open and crooked, hanging on by the splinters of ligament which decay had yet to rot. Somehow, the marks carved into its skull stuck out amongst the black. Shining, as if they had some profound importance. A whistling noise caressed her ears, wordless whispering from a corpse that wished to tell her something.

Unfortunately for Pinkie, she was a clairvoyant reliant on her body's whims and signals, not a medium.

"Pinkie?"

She yanked her head out of the hole she'd made for herself, hissing at the returning inflammation in her eyes.

"Twilight, I need your help."

Within a few moments, Twilight opened the fridge and poured milk into two empty mugs, casting a spell on them that caused steam to irradiate. Pinkie hesitantly touched it, but the mug itself remained relatively cold while the milk was just barely hot enough not to burn.

"I can tell. Did the spell not work?"

Pinkie shook her head, tapping her hoof against the mug. The warmth spread to her face, letting the tension drain and the muscles rest.

"No, I think it just made everything worse. As soon as I got home, it just made me so exhausted that sleep was all I cared about. Then, I got this awful headache, so bad I couldn't move. It—" she cringed at the memory, trying not to reflexively press a hoof against her temple "—really hurt."

"Hmm, that sounds like Manstra's Feedback." Twilight magick'd a pencil and notepad over, scribbling something at the top of it and then underlining it without breaking eye contact. "I'm sorry. I was certain it was a biological cause, some underlying health condition caused by severe stress maybe. If I thought it was magical, I wouldn't have tried a sleeping spell."

She placed her right hoof on Pinkie's, gently giving physical comfort. It hardly registered with her, the ringing in her ears becoming her only focus as her entire body went slack.

"It's magical? So, someone did this to me?"

The warm gaze Twilight had dropped as she turned her head. "I don't know what else it could be. Your reaction is typical of Manstra's Feedback, which is what happens when two conflicting spells are cast on one individual. It causes migraines, nausea, and often partial, if not total, paralysis." She listed off the symptoms in a clinical tone, clearly having them well memorized. "You've somehow caught a spell that prevents you from being able to sleep. To my extensive knowledge, such a thing doesn't even exist. Or at least not one that last more than a few hours for obvious reasons. If it does, it hasn't been written down anywhere."

Pinkie's mind drifted to the hole, struggling to grasp that that had been only three days ago. When the corpse cornered her, it was clearly trying to do something. Fear had convinced her it was wanted to hurt her, but maybe that was never its intention.

Maybe it wasn't trying to tell her something.

Maybe it was trying to give her something.

It wasn't a dream.

"What if it's not a spell?" The fur on the back of Pinkie's neck stood straight, an icy wind creeping its way down her spine. Was that creaking coming from her fidgeting on the stool, or from the ceiling? She couldn't bring herself to look up. "W-what if it's a curse, like Poison Joke?"

"A curse that prevents you from sleeping? Where have I—" Twilight narrowed her gaze, tapping the tip of her pencil against the notepad. "Something about that rings a bell. Yes, with curses just about anything is possible. They aren't very common, though. Poison Joke is only really abundant in the Everfree, and every other known curse has come from artifacts. What makes you think it's a curse? They're exceedingly rare nowadays."

Pinkie held on tightly to the mug, trembling as she chewed on her lip. She slowly lifted her head, peeking through the mess of her mane to the ceiling above her. Twilight's castle ceiling didn't have much hanging from it, only occasional tree roots and lamps that had been attached to the walls.

Had the Skeleton attached itself like a parasite to the ceiling, she couldn't find it.

It wasn't there.

For now.

She couldn't take it anymore

"I've been…"

Then why was it so hard for her to bring it up? Her teeth chattered in spite of how warm the room was. The words lodged right in the back of her throat, afraid to come out in fear of provoking it. Would it show up when called, like The Boogeypony?

Maybe it was always around. Hiding in the shadows of her eyelids, waiting to stick itself into a ceiling or lying on the ground like a pile of leaves.

And it would continue to haunt her with its existence till she died—which, if she didn't tell Twilight, that might not be very long.

"Seeing The Skeleton."

"As in..." Twilight leaned forward, ears flickering as she furrowed her eyebrows. "Hallucinating it?"

Was it hallucinations? It felt so incredibly real: its stench, the same as when she first encountered it. Just its weight as it pushed on its bed was tangible. It didn't feel like a hallucination.

Then again, neither did Mr. Turnip, Sir Lintsalot, or Madame Le Flour

"I don't know."

The way Twilight wrote that down on her notepad was grating for a reason she couldn't quite place. Pinkie gritted her teeth, swallowing that gross taste of frustration she'd been getting used to.

"Are you seeing it right now?"

Pinkie reluctantly closed her eyes, awaiting the bony figure painted there. Only to find that it wasn't there. Not an inch of its pale death could be seen.

"No, for once."

"I really hate to ask this of you, Pinkie." Twilight brought the mug of milk to her muzzle, just letting it hover there as she moved it around in a circle. "Describe it to me? Is there anything about it that stands out?"

"Yes, actually. There are these weird marks on its eye sockets that I don't think were there when I saw it. They're like..." She tried picturing them, begging that doing so wouldn't summon the entity. "Tally marks?"

"Tally marks? That's… wait a minute."

Pinkie heard the sound of a book opening—presumably the one she had been reading earlier—and being placed on the counter.

"How many?"

"Uhm, ten?" She mentally counted again, opening her eyes. "Yeah, ten."

"Pinkie." Twilight flipped the book around, showing that it was actually a report of some kind. Paragraphs separated by headlines, dotted and formatted to an organized perfection. The right side holding a catalog of photos, various angles taken from the cadaver she'd been forcefully acquainted with. "This is a report of the autopsy they performed on the pony you found. I had them send it to me. They discovered those same ten tally marks under its eyes. Are you sure you didn't see them when you first fell down?"

Did she?

She didn't stare at it any longer than she had to. Just a few seconds enough to recognize it for what it was. At least, that was the case right up to when it started walking towards her. There were so many things about it she found herself stuck paying attention to, its eyes. Soon, nothing at all when she made herself turn away from it.

Try as she might, she couldn't recall seeing those marks. Not then, anyway.

"I'm pretty sure. I would have remembered that."

"Hmm." Twilight skimmed over the report, letting the mug float next to her like she wasn't sure if she wanted to drink any more of it or not. "I see. It might just be a curse then."

"What are they?"

"I don't know." She got off the stool, leaving the mug on the counter. "The mortician explained that they couldn't be postmortem, so was it something they did to themselves before they passed away? And if they're tallies, what are they counting? Ten of what?"

Pinkie followed her, chugging the rest of her milk and taking the mugs over to the sink. A warmth filled her for a few seconds as it made its way through her and was just as suddenly gone, leaving her with only the chill of lethargy.

"Can you fix it if it's a curse?"

"It's hard to say. Curses can't usually be 'fixed'; Poison Joke is an outlier. They typically have certain conditions that must be met to stop them. In some cases, the only way to get rid of them is to pass it to someone else through just as complex rituals."

Several books floated in from the room next to them, Twilight only reading the title of one book before moving to the next one, going through a couple of them before settling on one and opening it.

"Those complex rituals, often following some obscure condition, are why curses are so strictly forbidden; there's no such thing as a good curse. They are magic at its cruelest."

"Then…" With each word, Pinkie put less energy in her steps. Scraping her hooves against the ground until eventually stopping. Sitting on the cold floor with her mane over her face, lacking the motivation to push it out. "I'm stuck like this? I can't ever sleep again?"

"Of course not!" Twilight pivoted, wings spreading as she placed a hoof on her chest. "Pinkie, you're one of my best friends. I can't let you go through this, and absolutely not by yourself. Not after everything we've done together, and that you've done for me."

She placed a hoof on Pinkie's shoulder, offering her right wing for a hug. Pinkie didn't accept this one, as much as she wanted to. She felt too gross, too tense, too tired.

Twilight saw her reluctance, opening her mouth to say something, only to pause and shake her head.

"You know what? I Pinkie Promise I will help you sleep again." She smiled, sitting down beside Pinkie. "Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye."

As expected, Twilight did each gesture with the sacred rhyme. It was comforting to see her friend trying so hard for her, but it didn't make her any less tired. She forced herself to her hooves, cranking out the best smile her body would allow.

She could only hope it didn't look as painful as it felt.

"Thank you, Twi. Really, it means a lot."

Pinkie attempted a side hug, only for her muscles to make that difficult. She ended up just sorta smooshing herself against Twilight, leaning against her like a pillar for support.

"You mean a lot to me, silly." Twilight stood up, her wings receded to her sides as she walked towards the doorway. "Come on, I think I know a good place to start. Do you remember the device I used to try to measure your Pinkie Sense?"

"Uhm, the—" Pinkie started to follow her, only to find her limbs were sluggish and heavier than usual. She managed to open her thermos and take a hefty swig, still being hot enough to wake her up with temperature alone. "Brain-wave scan thingy?"

"The electroencephalogram, yes. I think looking at your brain waves right now can tell me a lot, since there are at least four different waves associated with the sleep cycle. Magic, even curses, always carries some physical effect that can be measured. That should give me a direction if nothing else."

Pinkie nodded along, more concentrated on keeping her balance than Twilight's explanation. It was such an odd sensation for each of her limbs to feel a different weight, making her question every step she took. Getting down the stairs was more challenging than walking had ever been. On more than a few occasions she nearly tripped over herself and rolled her way down the rest of the stairs. Twilight had her horn lit and watched her out of the corner of her eye, muzzle scrunched in worry.

It wasn't until she got to the bottom of the stairs did she realize something was wrong.

"T-Twilight—"

No longer was it restricted to her limbs, coiling her entire body in a rigid inertness. Her knees buckled beneath her, collapsing to the icy floor of the basement. Her jaw was weak and face what she could only describe as 'droopy', as her body and senses stopped listening to her. Bones became brittle branches of wood trapped in the muck of her dead muscles.

She slammed headfirst into the floor, a crushing pressure crashing into her muzzle and spreading to the rest of her face; just raising her head was more effort than that time she'd tried to swim through a pond of honey. Tilting to where she was resting on the side of her face was the most she could manage.

"Pinkie!"

It was so bizarre: feeling everything that happened to her body, but being unable to move it. The familiar tickle of Twilight's magic encompassed her as she was flipped over, now facing the ceiling.

The Skeleton had embedded itself there.

No creaking noise came with it.

It was just…there. So deeply lodged into the crystals its chest wasn't even visible, fleshless limbs dangling as they waited to detach like everything else had. It pressed its body against the ceiling, pushing up with all the unholy might it had. With a revolting pop, it lurched out leaving holes where its ribs had been.

Then it started crawling.

"Pinkie, please listen to me."

Pinkie had started hyperventilating, begging for one of those breaths to revitalize her so she could get as far as possible.

"Whatever you're seeing is not real. The Skeleton is in Manehattan, and there's nothing else here."

It clattered onto the stairs, taking only a few seconds to stand up. The patter of its bare hooves was louder than Twilight's voice, making any other noise effectively mute. No matter how much she tried to move, the only thing that complied was her heart beating against the inside of her ribcage.

It tried to open its jaws, only for the tendons that kept it connected to the skull to come loose. Clutching on for a few seconds until giving out entirely, dropping and clattering to the ground like a piece of a broken toy.

Even from where Pinkie was, she could smell its rot. Each time it spread into the room it got worse, corrupting the air and making it so thick and stale with decay that inhaling it put her on the cusp of vomiting.

Her gruff breathing devolved into a shallow whimpering, stuck trying to will a body that had given up on moving. Twilight's touch and magic hardly registered, a single ember of warmth buried in ice. She knew it wasn't real—it couldn't be real—yet it was there. As visibly visceral as anything else in the room, taking every bit of her attention.

It soon towered over her, a whispering noise coming from its mangled mouth. Hushed, indistinguishable, closer to multiple ponies whispering at once than just one. Different tones, deep and high, masculine and feminine, all impossibly loud. It was all she could hear, despite the fact that it wasn't saying anything.

Was it trying to tell her something? No matter how close it got, it didn't make a syllable of sense. Her eyes grew blurry with tears as its stench skewered her every sense, stuck staring at a mark on The Skeleton's forehead. It was ebony and stood out among the barren white, identical to the ones etched into its eye sockets. Instead of being vertical, this one was horizontal and new.

She got a closer look as it lowered its head to meet hers, so close it very nearly touched her. The whispering didn't become coherent, only more concentrated and morphing into a blaring screech of disembodied murmurs. If she could just move her hooves to cover her ears, maybe it'd be bearable. Without that, all it did was stab her ears with an array of acoustic agony.

All Pinkie could do was close her eyes and hold her breath for as long as possible, just so she wouldn't have to inhale that putrid stench anymore. Wordlessly praying that it would vanish before touching her like it had all the times before, or that Twilight would cast some spell that would give her the ability to move again.

Something to save her.

Please.

A few seconds passed before the odor dissipated, and the cramp of her muscles loosened as her limbs twitched. She opened her eyes, expecting The Skeleton to have vanished like before. It didn't, standing just a few inches in front of her.

The unknown voices had gone mute, vanished along with the decay. It stared at her, dragging its head from her and retracting its entire body as it started casually walking backwards until it reached the point it dropped to. With a disgusting crunching noise, its ribs cracked and curved backwards, defying physics by not snapping no matter how much they bent.

As if it was falling in reverse, it ascended to the ceiling, piercing it with its malformed bones and staying there. Swinging like all the times before, only now being cradled in a cot of its own decomposition.

The moment she could turn her head, Pinkie cried. Cried until her chest hurt, until the pressure in her stomach was gone, until the fur of her face was matted with tears and snot. She desperately held on to Twilight, who stayed silent and unmoving, her magic having been long dispelled. Stroking Pinkie's splayed heap of a mane.

It didn't take long for her to run out of energy to sob, lying on the ground and trying to wipe away the stickiness of dried tears. Some morbidly curious part of her wanted to check if The Skeleton was still dangling there, but the answer either way was terrifying.

"I'm so sorry, I wish I could help. There's just—" Twilight sucked air through her teeth, chin falling to her chest. "There's too many variables, too many things that could go wrong if I cast a spell, especially if it's a curse."

"What was that? I, I couldn't—" Pinkie pushed herself up, hooves quivered as her muscles were filled to the brim with tension. "I couldn't move."

"Was it your muscles? Did they..." Twilight clenched her jaw. "Gradually get heavier, then so heavy you couldn't move them?"

Pinkie rubbed her forearm, hoping to crease out the leftover rigidness.

"I think so."

"Then it's likely cataplexy."

"Catawhatsy?"

"Cataplexy. It's—" Twilight grabbed a piece of paper from a random pile on a desk. "Like sleep paralysis, except it happens while you're awake. It starts as abruptly feeling really tired, then it gets harder to move, soon you can't move at all. And, well, like with sleep paralysis you tend to—" She raised a hoof, biting her lip and glancing away. "Hallucinate. Like you have been. I knew a pony in Celestia's school who had narcolepsy, and she'd function normally most of the time. Before she'd suddenly get really slow, start slumping, and then stop moving entirely."

"Narcolepsy? But Twilight, I don't—" Pinkie gritted her teeth as a tinge of pain punched her right in her brain, pressuring her back on her knees. "I don't have narcolepsy!"

"I know; that's what worries me most. The worst part about narcolepsy is what causes the cataplexy itself. Chemically, it happens because the orexinergic neurons degrade during the shift to adolescence, so the medulla starts struggling with what initiates sleep in the brain. Any extreme excitation could cause it, or any particularly intense emotion. Anger, depression, even—"

She hung her head, moving away from Pinkie as her wings hugged her sides.

"In some cases, joy can trigger it."

"Joy?"

The word was incredibly foreign on her lips, distant from her thoughts in any way but a memory. Like sleep, it'd become such a core part of her life that she missed more than anything.

Pinkie dropped back on her flank, hooves resting on the cold ground.

"So, if you're right, I can't cry? I can't get upset? I can't even—" All her tears had been dried up, leaving a pained grimace as she squeezed her eyes shut. "I can't be happy? I can't laugh!?"

Twilight stepped back, lip trembling as she tried not to look Pinkie in the eye.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She rushed over to her desk, frantically lifting all of the papers off her desk and tossing them aside as they piled on the floor. Twilight eventually stopped when she came across a faded yellow scroll, scribbling something on it.

Pinkie watched her do so, seeing her mutter what she was writing as the pen made its descent.

"What are you—" She sniffled, rubbing her muzzle as she once again tried to clean her face. "What are you writing?"

"A letter to Luna. Sleep is her specialty, and no pony has more experience in it than her. I'll tell her it's an emergency and she'll come see you tonight. Meanwhile, I won't sleep until I figure this out."

"You don't have to lose sleep over me, Twilight. I can—"

"Of course I do!" Twilight's eyes watered as she shouted. "I'm The Princess of Friendship! I should be able to help my friend's problems with ease. Especially when they're suffering because of it! You can't sleep, you can't party, you can't—" She choked back a sob, tears streaming down the sides of her face. "You can't laugh! I miss your laugh, Pinkie. I can't fix it this time, and I won't be able to sleep soundly knowing you can’t."

"Twilight..." With a suppressed grunt, Pinkie wobbled over to her. Embracing her in a hug that contained a fraction of the passion they usually did. "It's ok."

"No." She returned it with vigor, wrapping Pinkie in her gentle wings as well as hooves. "It's not."

_____________

After Twilight scanned her brainwaves, Pinkie decided she couldn't even scrape together the gusto to put on a facade of composure. She always used to enjoy talking to ponies no matter where she was going, catching up with them and being as friendly as she'd always been.

Now, if she heard one more pony say how sorry they were for her, she was going to scream.

She needed to keep herself busy until nightfall, preferably in a way that didn't involve being around ponies prodding her with pointless concern.

Her party cave was as good a chore as any. It was in constant need of cleaning, reorganization, and double-checking for any upcoming parties. Celestia knew her memory wasn't reliable in that regard.

It took her most of the day to sort through it all, leaving her as mentally fatigued as she was physically. Pinkie struggled to accept how she used to do it nearly every day with such contentment, and then went on to throw parties on top of making time to hang out with her friends.

The longer she stayed without motivation to do anything, the more she came to realize how absurd the energy she had before was.

She didn't bother getting in her bed once the sun vanished from the horizon. If she did, she knew deep down that she wouldn't be able to convince herself to get back up. Pinkie would just stay there, eyes closed and begging for sleep to forgive her and once more hold her in the unconscious sanctuary of rest.

And it would never come.

So she sat in the center of her room, having a staring contest with Gummy. Against her will, she'd come to live with the constant wall of fire on her eyes. It burned all the time, even when her eyelids were closed.

On the plus side, that let her win.

Luna came in through her window, though Pinkie was fairly certain she hadn't left it open. The nightlight from her moon made her glow like a majestic beacon, illuminating her midnight blue figure as she landed on Pinkie's bed. Luna pulled in her spread out wings as she hopped off the bed.

"Ah, Pinkie. You are—" her wonderfully sincere smile faltered as she got a better glance at Pinkie, hovering her stare on Pinkie's mane "—less jovial than we recall."

She sucked on her teeth, struggling to swallow that wad of frustration hanging in her throat.

"Sorry, three days without sleep took the bounce right out of my hooves."

"Three days?!" Luna's head jerked back, voice briefly hitching. "Well, that would explain why I have not been able to view your dreams these passing nights. Hmm." Luna's horn lit up in a cobalt blue, circling Pinkie as she lowered her chin. "I see. This is quite severe insomnia; Twilight's urgency was well warranted. I can cast a sleeping spell if tha—"

"No!" Pinkie swiveled around to face Luna, shaking her head and putting up her hooves. "Please, no. Twilight already tried that and it didn't work. I think it's—" She slumped, fidgeting her hooves. "I think it's a curse. It would explain everything."

"And what have you done recently to think someone would curse you?"

"Nothing, I hope." Her face tightened. "Desecrate a grave, maybe."

"You desecrated a grave?"

"Not on purpose!" Pinkie's voice cracked. Just raising it was exhausting now. "Now I see it everywhere, and it won't let me sleep. So, please, can you help?"

"If it's a curse..." She narrowed her eyes, averting her gaze. "Then you may not wish for my help."

"What? But you can break curses!" Pinkie found herself questioning the bits of everything she knew about curses, and how little she really could say for certain about the Princess. "Can't you?"

"Can, yes. However—" Luna made a humming noise, tapping her hoof rhythmically against the floor. "Tia has told me metaphors make explanations much simpler. Perhaps lockpicking would be the most appropriate. Twilight informed you that curses have conditions, yes?"

"Uhm, yes?"

"'Breaking' a curse is attempting to use stronger magic to trick it into thinking that condition has been filled, similar to how lockpicking a door is tricking the tumblers into believing you used the key. That being the case," she trailed off, and her magic came together in a cloud, shifting into a shape that resembled a doorknob. A separate thin rod was inserted into it. "If that lockpick were to break, it would get stuck. Preventing the key from being able to unlock the door in the first place. I have not tried breaking a curse in over a thousand years."

The magic thin rod snapped in half, causing the doorknob to vanish.

"You're saying..." A shudder went down her spine as she realized what Luna was implying, leaving her shaking like a foal without a blanket. "That if you try to fix it and mess up, then I'll be stuck with the curse even if I figure out what the condition is? For the rest of my life?"

Luna bowed her head, her chest caving in as she exhaled.

"I'm sorry."

Those words again.

She was so tired of hearing them.

A shriek bubbled out of her stomach and into the back of her throat, rising to her mouth with a hot fury. She dug her hooves into the floor, chin quivering as she tried to keep it down.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to break everything in this room just to feel better. But she couldn't do any of those things, or she might find herself paralyzed and helpless on the floor.

Instead, she sat in silence.

Luna made no effort to break it.

She had no idea how long she sat there before opening her eyes, finding Luna had stayed in the same place. Waiting patiently for her.

"Can you—"

Creaking.

Right above them.

Not that Luna heard it, because of course she didn't.

Pinkie didn't look up, there was no point. She knew what awaited her. The second Luna left, it would come to the ground to meet her.

Just for one night, it'd be nice not to have to deal with that.

"Stay with me tonight? Please? I don't..." She tore herself away from Luna, pulling her hooves closer to her chest. "Want to be alone. I know you have hundreds of other ponies' dream problems to take care of, so I get it if—"

"Say no more. I have no complaints."

"Really?"

"Certainly. You've risked your own life to save Equestria numerous times; a single night is a trivial request."

A genuine smile threatened its way on her lips.

"Thank you."

She stood up, pursing her lips as she tried to think of what they could even do all night. Pinkie hadn't expected Luna to actually say yes.

"Do you like board games?"

"Bored games?" She raised an eyebrow. "Why would one wish to play a game that makes them bored?"

"They don't. They play them to avoid being bored."

"Oh." Luna awkwardly rubbed her hoof against the ground. "That makes more sense."

Pinkie reached under her bed, retrieving the box of emergency board games she kept there.

For tonight, the creaking was a lot easier to ignore.

Delta

The night feeling much longer was one of the first things she noticed about the curse. Without sleeping, it dragged on. She was awake to witness the moon in the sky and how the darkness changed as the hours ticked by. Alone, it was painful. But with somepony else? It actually made their time together feel like it'd never end.

It was the only thing the curse had done good for her.

They played board games; they told stories. Pinkie made a joke about Luna surviving on the moon because it was made of cheese, she laughed. There was creaking. She ignored it, which was easy for once.

Pinkie found her mind drifting to her parents. She tried not to think about them if she could help it. They loved her, of course they did. She knew that. They just didn't express it at all when she grew up, so she thought they didn't at the time. They never hugged her, never told her how much they loved her, none of the things the Cakes did to their foals every day.

She told Luna about how old-fashioned they were. How minimalist. About how she was born from a rock, The Choosing Stone. More so, about how they spoke the same tongue Luna had when she'd first returned.

Luna actually became ecstatic at that revelation. Something about her reaction hurt Pinkie. She hated it.

She found herself hating a lot of things recently.

It wasn't until after Luna left did she realize what had changed about the creaking. There had always been moments of silence between them, leaving her waiting for when it'd pick up again.

Only to notice that there wasn't a pause anymore.

The creaking had become constant, like somepony sitting in the world's oldest chair and rocking it back and forth to their heart's content. She could drown it with other noises: humming, tapping, talking, even if just to herself. However, the moment she stopped, it was there.

Nor was it alone.

Whispers, too, had intruded her moments of peace. The same whispers she'd heard from the depths of The Skeleton's throat, mutters saying nothing at all sprinkled among the creaking, begged Pinkie to listen to them.

She tried so desperately not to. Standing as still as she could manage, watching the coffee pot churn and fill with the disgusting hot water she'd become dependent on to function.

Drip.

Creak.

Whisper.

Drip.

Her mane was mostly gray now.

It was hard for her to ignore that as she leered into her distorted reflection, counting the few strains of pink that hadn't converted just yet. They didn't bother her anymore. Or more accurately, she'd reached a point where 'unsettled' didn't quite cover it. The sleep deprivation had reached a similar point, where 'tired' wasn't how she'd describe her exhaustion.

She'd reached a constant feeling of lethargy that she really could only label 'torture'.

Why hadn't any of them commented on her gray mane?

As much as she might have liked to, she couldn't hide it. Many had pointed out how straight it'd become, but none had mentioned so much as an off-hoof comment about its change in color. Why was that? Were they being polite, each and every one of them? Why bother bringing up its shape but not the color as well?

Maybe they were talking about it, just not while she was around. By now she had no doubt every pony in Ponyville had at least heard about the slump she found herself in, and how little party throwing she'd been doing recently. One party in the past few days? That was unlike her. She usually threw three or four times that many.

They must have been saying so many things about her when she wasn't around.

About how 'not herself' she'd been.

About how rude she was to ponies.

About how much she was starting to look like her mother.

Abou—

"Pinkie?"

Mr. Cake interrupted her ruminating, drop-kicking the train of thought right off the rails.

She opened her eyes, struggling to recall when she closed them, and glanced at him through the shroud of rigid gray that was her mane.

"The coffee's been done for five minutes, and you've just been standing there. Are you alright?"

Don't do it.

Don't snap at him, Pinkie.

He was asking because he cares.

They all are.

"Sorry. It's just..." She tugged her thermos off her side, pouring the coffee straight in and chugging it. Taste didn't matter anymore. Most of her senses were dulled under the numbness of fatigue, so what she put in her mouth to keep going hardly registered anymore. "Getting harder to track time recently. I'm working on it, really."

"Oh, well that sounds worrisome. What if you put something in the oven and forget?" As if to emphasize, he opened the oven door and checked inside. "You should really talk to Princess Tw—" he coughed "Twilight about that. I'm sure she can help."

"I already—"

She bit her tongue.

He was just trying to help.

It was not his fault.

It was no one's fault.

"I will. I was planning to after I got some coffee." Pinkie topped off her thermos, attaching it to her side and reaching for the donut with the most absurd amount of sugar. She wasn't able to taste it very well, but she knew sugar was still working. "Are you sure you don't want me to help you today? There's—"

A strange void sat in her mind. An absence of something, but she didn't know what. It didn't exactly hurt, closer to a deep itching sensation in the back of her skull she couldn't quite reach. It bothered her, that emptiness.

"—nothing I have to do today." Uncertainty inserted herself in her voice as she glanced down, forehead wrinkling as she tried to ignore it. "I'm pretty sure."

"Pinkie, please, you don't have to overexert yourself for us." He placed a hoof on her shoulder, a tight half-smile on his face. "Pound and Pumpkin have really calmed down. we can handle today’s workload no problemo. Just use one of your vacation days; Celestia knows you've earned them."

There was something familiar about that tone of his. That faux-smile, that awkward touch, that polite way of dismissing her.

It was pity.

He was pitying her.

He was pitying her.

A disgusting sourness sat on her tongue, spreading to every corner of her mouth. There wasn't silence in the time she took to respond, only various sounds that had stolen its place.

Creaking.

Whispering.

Drip.

"Ok."

She backed away, a lot rougher than she intended to. Shoving his hoof off of her, hiding her shaking scowl. Immediately, this urge to apologize came over her. He didn't deserve that.

But she'd seen that look before.

When she was younger, she went with Father to get groceries from a nearby village. Or when they had occasional outside workers, who needed bits and thought rock farming was a lot easier work than it was. They always looked at her with those half-smiles, never meeting their eyes or staring at them for longer than a few seconds. It wasn't until Limestone told her why that she realized they were pitying them.

It'd been so long since someone pitied her.

She had forgot how much she despised it.

______________

Pinkie made her trek to Twilight's much earlier than usual, meaning there were a lot fewer ponies out than the other times. Fewer eyes to stare at her, fewer mouths to whisper things about her.

However, that also meant less noise to muffle the creaking. Its sound always depended on how much other noise there was. If there was a lot, it was distant and faint like it was coming from the room beside her. If there was very little sound, it was more like it came from a dark corner getting louder every second.

For whatever reason, the whispering had paused. Leaving her with only the creaking. That wouldn't last long, she was sure.

She didn't wait for Spike to open the door this time, doing so herself without even a knock. He was probably still asleep anyway, and she only had fragments of patience left to stitch together.

Twilight was in the library, which was, for once, completely unorganized. Most of the books sat on the ground instead of the shelves, left open to seemingly random pages. A tipped-over bottle with white powder coming out of it, labeled 'Powdered Lighting', sitting beside a bag of 'Afterlife Desire' instant coffee.

Her eyes had obvious bags and her mane was disheveled, every feather on her wings was ruffled and in desperate need of preening. She hardly noticed Pinkie walk in. Twilight scribbled something on a sticky note and attached it to a whiteboard in the middle of the room. A cornucopia of them plastered the whiteboard. Nothing really tied them together.

Pinkie trotted up to the whiteboard, squinting and trying to decipher the hastily written scribbles. Some of them were fairly legible, others devolved into something closer to hieroglyphs than letters. She could make out the occasional word, like 'zebra' or 'sickness', but anything else was more effort than she was willing to put in.

"Oh, Pinkie! You're here, great!" Twilight took a sniff from her mug, which burned the fatigue right from her face as she perked up. "I think I've finally tracked down what curse this is."

Pinkie opened her mouth to respond, only to get cut off by Twilight pulling the board toward them. Plucking all of the sticky notes off and rearranging them in some order known only to her, organizing them in the curviest line she'd ever seen.

"I kept finding mentions of something like it, but most of it was apocrypha. That is, until I found something linking back to Farasi: the land of the zebras!"

"Zebras?" Pinkie raised an eyebrow. "Like Zecora?"

"Yes! Exactly like Zecora! Who, after I found stories of it, I popped in on to ask about on the off chance she knew something about it. Turns out, she did! It was actually a folktale from the early era right after Nightmare Moon was banished, and when Celestia had to start helping ponies with their dreams."

The enthusiasm in her voice was unsettling, incredibly disingenuous and off-putting. Several red flags stood out to Pinkie: Twilight's mouth remained slightly open even when she wasn't saying anything, chest noticeably heaving every time she took a breath, which in itself was erratic.

Some of her coat even looked wet. Was she…was she sweating?

"Twilight?" Pinkie pulled her head back, reaching a hoof forward to touch Twilight but struggled with how strenuous it was proving to be. "Are yo—" She bit her cheek. "How much coffee did you drink?"

"Coffee? Oh, you know, just a teensy tiny liter or two." She let out a nervous chuckle, awkwardly rubbing her muzzle. "Smelling salts too. Nothing too strong, so don't worry! Just needed some stimulants to put me at peak cognitive efficacy. Usually, it'd take me a few days to track down something like an unknown curse. One night on the world's strongest coffee and calling in some favors made that a lot easier."

Twilight didn't stay in one place as she explained, pacing back and forth, so frequently she was leaving trails in the ground. Her wings twitched in spasms of movement, tail flicking just as randomly.

If it weren't for the creaking and whispering, Pinkie had no doubt Twilight's heartbeat would be as clear as her own.

"I think you need to sleep. I know a thing or two about substance overstimulation, and the longer you keep it going, the worse the crash is going to be. There's no rush t—"

"But I've got it all figured out! Right here, right now!" She tapped the board, doing so with enough energy for it to scrape a few inches across the floor. "Just..." Twilight went to drink from her cup, hesitating as she glanced up at Pinkie. "Let me tell you what I learned so far and I'll stop, ok?"

"Hmm." Pinkie made a droning noise, failing to hold back the scowl that her face had been stuck in since Luna left. "Alright."

"Great!" She moved the mug over to her desk, yanking the whiteboard back over. "So, in the span of about a month and a half, nine zebras caught what's been referred to as—with lots of transcribed alternatives— 'waking nausea'. Not only could they not sleep, they began to develop symptoms of sleep disorders. Like—" She pointed to a sticky note with one word on it in bold, underlined, and italicized. All of which made it difficult to read. "Cataplexy!"

"All of them?"

"No, just some of them. How it progressed was extremely inconsistent from victim to victim. What is consistent is they all experienced drawbacks of sleep deprivation much sooner than they're supposed to: hallucinations, severe lethargy, short-term memory lapse, and paranoid delusions."

"Did they—" At least two of those symptoms applied to her. She didn't remember forgetting anything, and she hadn't reached paranoid delusions quite yet. "See The Skeleton? Or something else?"

"Hrng." Twilight grunted, hovering over a book from one of the many on the floor and flipping its pages. "None of them would say. They mentioned multiple times that they were seeing something, and most of them were aware they were hallucinating, but the shaman who was recording this never managed to get them to say what it was before they..." She leaned away from the book, leering at it with a painful grimace. "Passed away."

"Passed away?" The idea of this curse being her end had crossed her mind more than a few times. Even Pinkie knew that she needed to sleep, despite the numerous times she avoided doing so because she wanted to be productive. Now, every day she went without sleep the idea of dying came just one step closer. What unsettled her most was every time that idea of dying came to mind, it was a little less horrifying.

"So the curse killed them?"

Twilight took too long to answer, leaving creaking and whispering in her wake. Pinkie tried not to show it, scratching her ear and scraping her hoof against the ground to make any kind of sound. "In a way. After about five days to a week, seven of them—" she shut the book, carefully placing it on the desk "—took their own lives. The shaman suspected that they'd rather be dead than go on living that way, and so they did what she describes as 'the eternal sleep'. Zecora told me that they likely consumed a poison they made back then for the terminally ill, so it was painless if nothing else."

She knew what she was supposed to say. That it was terrible they did that, That it was tragic; That they could have been helped.

That she couldn't understand why they'd resort to that.

But those thoughts carried little weight. She couldn't say them with any resolve, with absolute certainty. Without certainty, what would make it different from a lie?

Pinkie didn't like to lie.

"If it's a curse from Farasi, then how would it have gotten here?"

"Well, that has to do with how it's passed." Twilight gathered all of the books on the floor, skimming through them before shutting them and stacking them onto a pile. "The shaman only went there initially because a relative of theirs caught it, but they don't know how they got it originally. Fortunately, since she recorded everything, she was able to tell that it passed via them sleeping with someone else. That was the only way they ever managed to sleep in the first place. Unfortunately, they sometimes slept in groups. Which is how it spread so effectively."

"Sleeping with them? As in..." Pinkie blinked a few times, swallowing loudly. "Sleeping in the same bed as them, or sleeping with them?"

"What, no! No, no, no." Twilight's voice briefly spiked to a higher pitch, face tinted a bright red. "Sleep in the same bed, or just beside them, not intercourse. I would guess that that's this curse's condition. At least, it's the condition to pass it on, not to break it."

"Curses can have multiple conditions? That doesn't..." Pinkie tried to rationalize this in her mind, struggling just to crawl through the mind fog and actually think. "But it can't be that curse. You said seven, right? Then the ninth one broke the curse?"

"Not..." Twilight grimaced. "Exactly. He went missing. Three days went by after it was passed to him, and then he disappeared. I think he must have passed it to somepony else who ended up in Equestria, and that they ended up in that pocket at The Rock Farm. Which would explain what the tally marks are: they're the number of people inflicted by the curse. Assuming the relative of the shaman was the first, of course."

"There's a lot of assuming and guessing, Twilight. How do you know it's this curse? There has to be something else it could be, right?" A sense of dread creeped its way to the forefront of her mind, painting her thoughts in a thick layer of doubt. She wasn't sure what it was, but a lingering skepticism questioned everything she heard. "Right?"

"Yes, but it's unlikely. I haven't found any other curse or affliction of any kind that would explain this, not to say that another couldn't exist and is waiting to be discovered. I could be wrong here. But..." she took a tentative step towards Pinkie "just answer me, and I'll know if we should run forward with this theory or not: when you were down there with that Skeleton, did you fall asleep?"

The skin around Pinkie's eyes bunched.

Her head jerked back.

The creaking peaked in her ears.

The room became uninviting and cold.

She opened her mouth to reject the notion, never being uttered into words.

It'd been four days since she encountered the corpse that haunted her, and so many hallucinations had danced in her mind since then. Thinking back to it now, it was impossible for her to say what was real and what was tainted in sleep-deprived madness.

Her first encounter with The Skeleton was a dream, and the last time she was able to sleep. Waking up was easy to recall, but trying to pinpoint when she slipped into unconsciousness was much more difficult. Practicing her shadow puppets to distract herself from the corpse, then hearing a—

Creaking.

She needed to make noise.

It was getting worse.

"Yes." Her words made the creaking stop, if only for that fleeting moment. "I did."

"Then I have to run under the assumption that it's this curse, and that being able to spread it via sleep proximity is not limited to them being alive. Don't worry, this is good news!"

The whiteboard was pushed to the side, pressed against a wall and left in obscurity. In a poof of magic, a pair of sleeping bags with blankets and pillows appeared.

"It means you can just pass it on to me and you'll be able to sleep! I should be able to figure it out before things get too bad."

"Should?"

Pinkie's voice cracked, raising her hoof to step forward only for it to wobble and hit the ground again. She broke contact with Twilight, eyes drifting to the sleeping bag with an irresistible tug. Despite its small size, it was so inviting compared to her bed. Coupled with the hope that, by resting her empty bones in it, she could finally sleep.

Oh how desperately she wanted to sleep for as long as her body would allow.

The curse spreading to Twilight being the price of doing so was the only thing stopping her.

"Even if you're right, I don't want to do that to you. Nopony deserves to have to go through this. It's..." She ignored the urge to look up, making a groaning noise to dull the creaking however she could, biting hard enough to taste that familiar copper tange of blood just to keep the fatigue at bay. "Torture."

"That sounds like more of a reason to pass it to me." Twilight approached her with wide steps, puffing her chest out as she spread her wings. "You're four days in and you're miserable. It's only going to get worse; sooner or later you'll be seeing hallucinations all the time and won't be able to tell what's real anymore. I'm worried you'll—" She whimpered, tearing her eyes away as she pursed her lips. "End up taking your life like the others did."

Twilight's words hung in the air, laced with fear. There was a breathlessness to what she said, or just a weakness to everything she did. As firmly she placed her hooves into the ground, they trembled under their own weight.

It was all too familiar for Pinkie to see: a mirror that doubled as a window into the future if she gave in.

"I'm not going to kill myself, Twilight, no matter how bad it gets. I couldn't do that to the Cakes, to Maud, or to my friends. I promise the option hasn't crossed my mind, and it never will."

Her lips tingled. Maybe Pinkie was a liar after all.

"I know; I just worry. After reading some of the reports of how they degraded as the days passed…" Twilight glanced at the books on the desk, horn flickering with aura as she teleported them somewhere. "Whatever the case, I don't want you to go a second more without sleep. Rainbow is going to be coming back today after a week of intense Wonderbolts training for their upcoming performance. Are you even going to be able to throw a party for her coming back like you said you would?"

There it was. That blank in her mind that appeared when she was talking to Mr.Cake. It was a hole in her memory, where something important was supposed to be.

She'd forgotten a party. Not just any party, but one for one of her best friends in the world. One she promised to throw, and that Rainbow was undoubtedly looking forward to. All because of this curse.

"No."

She was knocked back on her haunches by dejection, whimpering to herself and trying desperately not to close her eyes entirely. The tears were on the edge of her vision, threatening to overwhelm her into another breakdown. Pinkie fought it, terrified of being paralyzed like that again.

Not that she could sit there and bear it in silence, of course. The creaking, the whispers to give in, did not abate. Unwilling to give her the privilege of a merciful silence. It was impossible to tell if they were getting louder, or she just focused on them the less sound there was.

"I didn't even prepare for that. I—" She buried her face in her hooves, grinding her teeth together until it made noise. "Forgot."

"Pinkie." Twilight sat down inches from her, placing a gentle hoof on her shoulder. "That's okay, I'm sure Rainbow will understand. You've thrown more than enough parties to be able to take a few days off. Listen, if you're that worried about me, then how about after a day or two I sleep with you and pass it back? That way it stays manageable."

Pinkie hesitantly peeked up at her, lowering her hooves and grazing them against the floor.

"Did any of the zebras try that?"

"Well, no, but—"

"Then you don't know if that would work. I know you're smart, Twilight, but I'm not risking you on something that might work! You're a princess: what if you have to go to some friendship-related emergency? Or something happens with The School of Friendship? You're on one night without sleep and I'm worried you're going to have a heart attack!"

"I'm not going to—" Twilight rubbed her chest, groaning to herself. "Ok, maybe that's founded. I understand what you're going through, bu—"

"You understand?"

It came out as a question, polluted by vitriol and an accusatory tone. Something red-hot crawled out of her chest, anger burning her words with an intensity she despised.

Twilight's head jerked back, eyes widening as her mouth fell open.

Pinkie got to her hooves, clenching her jaw so tightly the muscles threatened to stay that way. It was painful for her teeth to dig into each other with such grit, soreness initially concentrating in her face before beginning to spread. "Do you think just because you read the symptoms on paper that you get what it's like? That you can deal with it no problem? That it's easy?"

Some small part of her was trying to coax her into calmness, buried deep under the irrationality of frustration. She knew that Twilight wasn't implying that, that she was genuinely trying to help as her friend.

It didn't matter.

It was the last brick in a cracked wall, and she didn't know how close she was to collapsing until it gave out.

Even those little breaths of silence were invaded by incessant sounds that only further contributed to her irritation.

Creaking.

Whispering.

Drip.

"I don't like closing my eyes, but keeping them open hurts so much. It gets harder just to move every day. Breathing isn't much easier. Light burns, but The Skeleton hides in the dark and I don't know when it'll come out. It's—" Pinkie tried to block out the noise by placing her hooves against her ears, only seeming to amplify it. The sounds weren't coming from the room itself, instead rising from inside her ears. No amount of covering them made it stop, only succeeding in making it the one thing she could hear.

She tried desperately not to scream.

"Always making noise, Twilight. It's always whispering to me, trying to tell me something. Constantly—"

There was a particularly loud creaking, as if it was coming from directly above her. She made the mistake of slightly lifting her head, glimpsing through her gray mane at the ceiling. She caught just a small flash of it, then dragged her gaze back to the ground.

It was there, hanging from the ceiling, more decayed than the last time she'd seen it. Still holding itself in its cot of bones, many of which had been chipped at and no longer whole. Any remnant of flesh that was stuck to it before was gone, leaving only bones held together by the memory of structure it used to be.

Every time she saw it, The Skeleton became just a little less scary, turning instead into something that existed only to provoke her ire. The bane of each waking moment. Knowing it was watching her even now added fuel to the flame she was trying to swallow.

"—Creaking! I can't even talk to ponies anymore. They always ask me if I'm okay and stare at my gray mane—which I've heard dozens of times—and it makes me want to scream!"

Twilight furrowed her eyebrows, pressing her lips together as her jaw clenched. She tried to say something, only to be cut off by Pinkie slamming her hooves against the ground, gritting her teeth in a closed-mouth shriek.

"I'm tired, Twilight. All the time. I don't want to get out of bed, I don't want to talk to anypony because it's too much work; being alive is too much work sometimes. I would never kill myself, but—" The anger simmered, and with the departure of adrenaline came unbearable exhaustion. It weighed down on every vertebra of her spine, crushing her into submission. "I get why they did it. This is agony, and it's happening all the time. You don't understand, or you wouldn't be asking me to give it to you." Her forehead hit the cold ground, the rest of her body soon following. Pinkie could feel every square inch of her skin stretching as she sneered, trying desperately to hold back the tears. "I hope you never do."

Pinkie stayed there in tepid silence, waiting for her muscles to get heavier and lose her ability to move.

It never came.

"Then what? I-I'm just supposed to..." Twilight's chest caved in, her breathing becoming loud and shallow. "Watch you suffer?"

Pinkie staggered to her hooves, limbs shaking like brittle branches under a winter's breeze. Twilight was so fragile, her knees quivering and the bags under her eyes were concerningly prominent. She was barely standing up, leaning one way or the next before jerking herself back into position.

Was that what Pinkie looked like all the time? No wonder everypony kept asking her if she was ok.

"You don't have to watch." Pinkie made herself move forward, gesturing towards one of the sleeping bags. "I think you're crashing. Listen, I'll be fine. I'll be able to keep going because I know you're trying so hard to help me. So, please, take care of yourself. For me. You can sleep, and I'll go back to Sugarcube Corner and help the Cakes. That way, you'll be at your best. Alright?"

Twilight bit her lip. The skin began to tear and blister from how often she did so. Twilight opened her mouth to argue, closing it just as quickly and nodded her head.

"Only if you Pinkie Promise me that if you even think about..." She paused, shutting her eyes for a few seconds. "...Ending it, you'll come straight to me. Or just the Cakes, or just somepony. You're not alone, Pinkie. No matter how much it might feel like it sometimes."

She knew that.

Of course she knew that.

She reminded herself of that very fact a countless number of times a day.

Sometimes, it just seemed like knowing others were there for her didn't matter. No matter how much they wanted to, they couldn't help.

Regardless, it was reason enough to keep going.

At least, until it wasn't.

"Cross my heart, hope to fly," Pinkie muttered, wincing as the effort to do the motions was more than she expected. "Stick a cupcake in my eye."

Even after doing the motions, Twilight was clearly reluctant to agree. However, she did let out a deep breath as some of the tension left her.

"Okay, I'll try to get some rest. Although, I don't imagine that'll be very much since Rainbow will be eager to talk to me once she gets here. A new Daring Do book came out and I'm the only pony she knows who's read it as thoroughly as she has."

It felt like a shard of glass that had embedded itself in her heart sunk a few inches deeper, fresh pain reminding her it was there. She faced away from Twilight, hiding her face from her friend.

"Twilight, can you do me a favor?"

"Yeah." Twilight lay down, fitting snugly in the sleeping bag. "What is it?"

"Can you tell Rainbow Dash—" A glob of something placed itself firmly in her throat, making it difficult to get out a syllable more. The apology sat on her tongue, sticking there like a prickly thorn. Trying to say it hurt, but leaving it unsaid would have hurt more. "That I'm s—" Pinkie covered her whimper by trying to clear her throat with little success. "Sorry I couldn't throw that party I promised."

"Of course I will. Pinkie—" Twilight yawned, soon devolving into a groaning noise. "She'll completely understand. Rainbow wouldn't be upset about something like this."

No, Rainbow wouldn't.

"I know. Just don't tell her about the curse, please? I don't want anyone else worrying about me."

Twilight didn't say anything, so Pinkie assumed she nodded. She didn't want to turn around to look at her again.

As she made her way back to Sugarcube Corner, a strangling sensation deep in her chest choked her heart; no amount of rubbing eased it in the slightest.

Her mind couldn't help but drift towards how much distaste she'd grown to have for things since she'd unwillingly stopped sleeping. 'Hate' wasn't something she would have ever used lightly; it was too strong to drop casually.

it was becoming a lot easier to hate things.

Hate how her mane was changing to gray.

Hate how she couldn't throw parties or even smile anymore.

Hate how many of her friends wanted to help her, but couldn't.

And now, just a little bit, she hated herself.

_______________________

The Cakes didn't let her help them.

Not that she could blame them. If she forgot to throw her best friend's party, why wouldn't she forget other things? She also couldn't hold anything steadily—in her hooves or her mouth—no matter how much she tried. Eventually, with the gentleness of a loving mother, they told her to take the day off.

They pitied her again.

It was disgusting.

She spent the day in her bed, doing nothing at all. Although it wasn't particularly cold in her room, Pinkie decided to bundle herself up in every pillow, blanket, and plushie she had. Piling it into a bundle of warmth and softness, with her placed firmly in the middle. Like any other nap, she rested her eyes and counted her breaths. Pretending that, for once, she'd be able to fall asleep.

That never happened.

She didn't get less tired, nor did she get more. Really, that was all she could have asked for at that point.

Her period of solace didn't last very long, as the creaking and whispering grew louder and louder until it was exigent. With a snarl, she pushed her way out of the cocoon of comfort she'd crafted for herself.

The Skeleton clung from her ceiling, staring down at her in its eyeless leer. The whispering from its gullet, though it should have been dispersed in her large room, was geared towards her. Every bit of it had gone past the point of frightening.

It was nothing more than a constant nuisance.

"I'm so tired of you." She muttered out, having no doubt it'd hear her regardless of how quiet she was.

The whispering stopped for a few seconds, as if contemplating whether it should respond, before continuing on without respite.

Pinkie got into a staring contest with it, waiting for the creature to fall like it always had when she looked at it for long enough.

"Night by night, second by second, you're there to, what, scare me? Is that your point? To be scary?"

She climbed off the bed, her limbs numb from the total lack of movement. Her back leg briefly gave out right as she stood, barely catching it in time so she didn't end up on the floor.

"What do you get out of this? Watching ponies suffer, watching them die?!"

As she pounded her hoof against the ground, the vibrations seemed to travel up to it and knock it loose. The twisted rib cage came out with a pop, leaving it to drop to the ground and its entire frame gave out as it hit the floor. Bones separated from each other, some rolling away and others resting where they were.

Pinkie stepped back, hitting the front of her bed as soon as she tried. Maybe provoking it wasn't such a good idea.

She waited for it to reassemble, to be put back together again by whatever power gave it false life. To stand in front of her, and approach at a snail's pace.

That didn't happen.

It stayed broken, pieces spread out on the floor and mostly unconnected like a jigsaw puzzle someone gave up on halfway through.

The head stayed whole, resting on the ground right under her. The whispering coming through its mouth didn't hitch for any of that, continuing even though it wasn't connected to its neck anymore.

It was bent on ruining her life.

"I hate you."

She raised her hoof, tempted to kick it as far as she could muster. The problem being, that wouldn't be a lot right now. It'd likely just skid a few inches across the floor.

"You want me to spread it, so you can make as many ponies as you can suffer, right? Living off the days of sleep they lost, like the parasite you are."

Again, the whispering and creaking ceased, if only for a few moments. Pinkie waited for its response, expecting it to speak to her for once. There'd always been this nagging feeling in the back of her mind that it was trying to tell her something, lacking the capabilities to do so.

She wanted to know what that was.

What it was so desperate to say.

The words didn't come.

"I won't do it."

Another pause.

"I won't give this curse to someone else. I won't let you keep living off others." Pinkie's voice seethed through her teeth, coated in frustration and indignation. "You should have stayed forgotten and buried."

It didn't make any noises for a long time. Minutes, at least. All of which dragged as she waited for it to respond, picturing it speaking in that conglomeration of raspy voices.

Instead, it started to screech.

'Screech' wasn't the right word. It was something else, a noise no living creature could make. A concentrated scream of voices funneled through one mouth, no attempt to articulate it in any language. A sound of an emotion so purely intense it was tangible.

Loud was a poor descriptor.

Any word she knew wouldn't fit, but 'screech' came the closest.

There wasn't a point in trying to cover her ears, no matter how firmly she tried. Visually, it was coming from what was left of its mangled jaw. In reality, it was coming from inside her brain, making her tremble as it brought her to the ground. It made her blood vessels cry, ramming against her skin in an attempt to escape.

She couldn't tell if anything was coming out of her mouth. The screech was all-encompassing, ensnaring her senses and piercing her very soul with its ringing.

Pinkie had enraged it, and she would live to regret that.

Would it do this from now on? Constantly until she listened? She couldn't take that, not for long.

She couldn't imagine passing this curse on to someone else. Try as she might, there was no one she could think of that she would be content with giving it to. Not even Cozy if she were to come back.

...It had stopped screeching.

The skull remained silent as she stared at it. Her thoughts drifting away from the curse brought the sound back, distinctly more severe than before.

It was forcing her to pick someone, to choose a candidate. If she didn't, it would keep screeching.

She wouldn't be able to keep her promise to Twilight if it did.

With growing desperation, Pinkie grasped at names. Anyone she could think of that had wronged her, or that whom there was no forgiveness. No one came to mind. Not at first, anyway.

As she trudged through the muddy pool of her memory, the outline of a figure appeared. Not clear in the slightest, but it was there.

She made the mistake of trying to reason with it, to steer her mind somewhere else for just a few seconds. That made it worse.

She might have screamed, it was hard to hear.

Something warm trickled down her ears, dribbling down the sides of her face and mixing in with her tears. Soon hitting the floor.

Drip.

It stopped once she'd started thinking of that figure again.

There was one name that approached her out of the fog. Familiar, and poisoned with buried bitterness. They were the cause of this. They dragged her back to that farm, time and time again. To remind her that, as much as she tried to run from it, she'd always end up back there. Sapping the life out of her, leaving her as gray as it was. They did this to her.

Pinkie got to her hooves, gaze sticking on the skull; her ears were wet with warmth. It didn't screech anymore.

"Limestone."

REM

It never really got easier being on the rock farm.

After Pinkie left, Limestone had convinced herself growing up that she would eventually get used to how depressing everything on the farm was. That the anguish embedded into her soul would become less like a boulder weighing her down, and closer to a fly on the wall that she'd learned to ignore.

Instead, she was somewhere in the middle.

When doing nothing—a rarity on the farm where something always needed doing—that nagging anxiety consumed her, making her wallow in the misery she had to keep swallowing.

However, keeping herself busy—a much easier goal—left her distracted enough to be in a tolerable state of neutralness.

Limestone had found herself much more busy than usual lately.

She never got to see the skeleton, not even when it was wrapped up and extracted to be taken to Manehatten. It didn't particularly surprise her that a corpse was hiding deep under the farm. The farm itself was older than sin, with dozens, if not hundreds, of families having lived on it previously. Not to mention all the travelers who tend to pass through. One of which was an annoying stage-magician sticking around for pay.

Maybe that was just what she was telling herself to feel better about the entire ordeal.

It didn’t matter. Not really.

She was much more hung-up on how Pinkie was taking it. She'd been down there for around fifteen minutes, by herself, and she wasn’t as hardened as Limestone was. Just being in the dark with it for that long must have bothered her, judging by how unsettled she looked once she climbed out of that pit

And it was her fault.

She asked Pinkie to come back to the farm to 'help', even though Limestone could have easily handled it all herself— like she tended to anyway. Really, she just wanted that taste of the outside world Pinkie always brought with her. Telling her little things, like how Pinkie's friends were doing or how her last party went, gave Limestone a flicker of joy.

Thanks to her indulgence, Pinkie had fallen down a hole and had been alone.

Pinkie hated being alone.

If Limestone hadn't asked her to come, it wouldn't have happened. Limestone would have fallen down that hole instead, if at all. She would hav—

"Stop that."

Limestone smacked herself in her head, inhaling through her teeth. Being able to ruminate and linger on her guilt meant she wasn't working hard enough. She'd gotten up early today specifically so she could think less.

That was what she'd been doing since Pinkie left, made worse by the fact that she was not a morning pony.

Regardless, it meant she could get more done and spend less time sitting in her bed getting annoyed and angry at herself.

The sun had just barely poked its head over the horizon. Not that the light it provided did very much, with the clouds having decided to gang up and block out as much of it as their bodies could. Which resulted in a sort of dusty filter covering the farm.

It was depressing, but that was just how it usually was.

Father and Mother hadn't gotten up yet, though they would soon. Marble always woke up when Limestone did, despite how quiet she tried to be. After four days since Pinkie left, Marble didn't try to stop her anymore and just went back to sleep soon after she left.

Her morning work didn't comprise a lot, really. She checked the rocks on all four fields of the farm, seeing if any gems had sprouted up or any interesting formations had, well, formed. That didn't happen often on their unchanging land, which made it something she hoped for every day.

Only to be disappointed when her near-impossible expectations weren't met.

None of the rocks proved fruitful, either. They hadn't the last four days, and that likely wouldn't change the next four.

"Because why would anything work out for me?"

She sighed to herself, kicking a random pebble to the side. The east field had always been the most barren of the four, yet it was the one she always found herself spending the most time in. It must have had something to do with it being the field she was always assigned to when she was younger, certainly. Back when there were four of them, and they were each responsible for their own field.

'Nostalgic' wasn't quite the word she'd use for those times. Still, she found herself thinking back on them a lot, for better or worse.

With a shake of her head, she marched on to the rest.

It was always so quiet. Even though there was a forest on the outskirts of the farm, Limestone couldn't recall the last time she'd even heard an animal, much less seen one. The lack of flora would have been her guess as to why. You can't eat rocks after all.

Well, unless you were a Pie. Then you can eat rocks.

The lack of light and life led to Limestone developing a sort of tunnel vision when she worked, anything going on around her taking a backseat in her perception. All that mattered was her work. The more she got done, the less Marble would have to strain herself.

That focus was why she didn't notice something was barreling towards her until it was already too late.

Something tackled her right into the ground, skidding a few feet into gravel and hitting a particularly big rock. Limestone stifled a yelp, tensing her body as she pushed away whatever it was. She watched it tumble from her as Limestone got to her hooves.

"You chose the wrong day to mess with—"

She didn't recognize it at first, vision still blurry from being knocked on her flank. It was drained of any color, resembling the farm itself. Its coat was matted, covered in speckles of dirt and grime. Mane was a complete mess, splayed, split, and straight down the sides being just as messy as its coat. Dried blood ran in a trail from its ears down to its chin.

It dawned on her what she was looking at, and did so too late. It'd been so long since she'd seen her sister like that it was almost unrecognizable.

"Pinkie? What are you…" Her eyes fell to Pinkie's hooves, covered in patches of mud hardened and wet. "Did you run all the way here?"

Pinkie slowly got up, mouth ajar as she took loud, heaving breaths. Her eyes were barely visible through the drapes of her mane, but prominent for how bloodshot they were.

There was something behind Pinkie's eyes that Limestone didn't recognize. It made them tremble with intensity, concentrated entirely in her direction. Not a single other thing in the world had a fraction of Pinkie's attention.

It unsettled Limestone in a way nothing she'd seen on the farm ever had. The taste of fear perched on her tongue.

"Are you alright? You look…" Limestone sucked on her teeth. It wasn't often she found herself lacking something to say. "...rustled. I thought this place made you miserable? What was so important that you ran here instead of waiting for the trains in the morning?"

The calm in Limestone's voice was so forced it took conscious effort, almost as much as watching sister's every reaction was.

That ferocity never left her eyes. Not once did Pinkie so much as glance as anything else, tunnel-visioned on Limestone. Seeing only her, in front of her, before her, just her. Surrounded by gray.

"Limestone, sleep with me."

"What?"

"I'm tired, Sis." Pinkie extended her right hoof, other legs wobbling as she struggled to keep balance. "I haven't been sleeping well since I saw that Skeleton. We used to sleep a lot together, bundled up in one bed." There was a quiver in her words. She brought her hoof to her chest, then back to the ground. "I missed that. I didn't realize how much until recently."

"You ran all the way here overnight because..." Limestone scratched her cheek, uncertainty creeping its way into her voice. "You haven't been sleeping well recently? And you think taking a nap with me like when we were kids will help?"

Pinkie flinched, chewing on her tongue. Opened her mouth to say something else, producing only a gasping sound as the words stuck in her throat.

"Nah, I'm not buying it. You're an awful liar." Limestone narrowed her eyes, digging her hooves into the ground. "I can't help you if you don't talk to me, Pinkie. What's this about?"

Silence.

The wind whistled in Limestone's ears, leaving her stiff in tight tension. Pinkie hung her head, hiding her face in the vines of her mane. She breathed with her mouth open, heaving like each inhale was a huge effort.

Eventually, she took one sharp and audible breath, holding it in her chest until exhaling with just as much volume.

"I've had a lot of time recently." Pinkie's voice was a brittle whisper. Hoarse and just barely loud enough to make out. If the farm hadn't been so quiet all the time, and Limestone didn't have another sister who talked with just as much mildness, she wouldn't be able to make out a word. "Time to think about me, about us, about this farm. What we talked about before I fell down, what we talk about every time you ask me to come over."

She took a few steps closer, her hooves dragged against the ground like weights with each one. Something about the way she moved was deeply unsettling, leaving Limestone with a desire to take one step back for every one forward Pinkie took. If only a body-sized rock wasn't in her way.

"The same questions, the same expressions you make when I answer them. All the excuses you make when I ask you to come visit. You haven't changed at all since we were fillies, Lime."

For a solid minute, Pinkie just stood there and took heavy breaths. On occasion, her head would drop and her eyes would close. Only to just as quickly shoot back up. Limestone watched carefully this entire time, moving closer when Pinkie's eyes closed and stopping when they snapped open again.

"Y-you've always—" Pinkie's voice didn't sound right as she raised it along with her head. Croaky, guttural and broken up in between spats of coughing and stuttering. "You've always hated—" She went into a coughing fit, slapping her hoof against her chest. "You've always hated me. Even when we were little, you could barely look at me. I didn't blend in, I wasn't gray like you, and you couldn't stand that!"

Pinkie took a wobbling step forward, left hoof pressing firmly into the ground as she tried to remain standing. It was hard for her just to move, clenching her jaw with strained effort. Every few seconds, she would twitch her head, making an uncomfortable cracking noise with her neck.

"What are you talking about? I never—"

"Liar!"

Her brittle scream echoed on the empty farm, ringing in Limestone’s mind long after the reverberations had faded.

"You think I don't see the way you s-scowl when I'm talking about my friends? Or how grouchy you always are when you come over to Ponville for the holidays? Marble told me about how you always shut her down the second she tries to tell you about what I told her in my letter, that you 'don't want to hear it'."

"I'm not..." Limestone broke eye contact, stepping back and trying to recall if she really said that to Marble. Was she that dismissive? That angry about it? All the times she'd visited, was she really that upset? She could have sworn she smiled at least once or twice. Limestone thought of those few times fondly, so she must have enjoyed them.

Right?

"I might have done that," Limestone admitted, the gruffness of her voice waning. "But I don't hate you, I think. It's just, I don't..." She fumbled over her words. Stuff like this had always hovered in her head, never to leave her mouth.

Just like Mother and Father.

"Then you're jealous."

Pinkie said it with such piercing certainty, lifting her head and taking a firm step forward.

"I left the farm, but you never did. I made friends, but you never did. I saved the world, but you never did. I..." She placed a hoof on her chest, eyes dropping to the ground as she panted. "Was happy, but you never were. Even Maud had the resolve to leave this place. You stayed with Marble, and I'm grateful for the company you've given her, but you won't even try to make friends or be anything but miserable."

"What? You think I like being miserable?" Limestone scoffed, sneering as she rubbed some of the dirt off her face. "I've never tried to hide how much I fucking hate this shithole. What the shit makes you think I wouldn't drop this place for something better, the second I could?"

"Because you've always had that opportunity, and you've never taken it." Pinkie pounded the ground, her voice cracking. "All you had to do is ask and I would have let you and Marble live with me until you could get on your own hooves. We'd share my bed just like we did growing up, and you'd actually smile sincerely for once in your life!" She got in Limestone's face, frustration coloring every word. "But no, you can't bring yourself to leave here. You're so dead set on suffering in this place that you're thinking about having foals just so you can put them through what we did!"

"We're the ponies we are because of what we went through!"

"And you're okay with that?!" Pinkie shouted.

Limestone held her tongue, the rock she'd been slammed into keeping her from moving an inch backwards. She tried to stammer out a response, to tell Pinkie she was wrong in every way. To have some rebuke that would stop this confrontation in its place.

Of course, that wasn't possible. Pinkie was completely right. She was too perceptive not to be.

It was stupid for Limestone to think Pinkie didn't notice any of that. More so that she'd never bring it up.

"Then..."

Limestone felt something she hadn't in an exceedingly long time. Not since she was young, feeble, and didn't even know what a 'party' was.

She felt small.

"What am I supposed to do?" Limestone hung her head, sinking her body into itself as she closed her eyes. Her own words hardly felt like her own, almost as meek as anything Marble tried to say. "Just leave Father and Mother alone? Trying to keep this farm going by themselves would kill them, you know. They're too old to have foals now, and there are at least a dozen places that rely on our gems and rock shipments. If this farm stops working, they'll have to find somewhere else to get them, and who knows how long that would take and how bad things would get before they do! They might not have been the best parents, and maybe a lot of our shit could be blamed on them. But they're still..."

She dropped her trembling chin to her chest, eyes half-lidded.

"They're still our parents. Our family. I can't just leave them to die like that. They don't deserve it no matter how I look at it. Especially Marble. She..." The anger quickly dissipated from Limestone's face, contorting into a rigid grimace. "Couldn't function outside of the farm for long. It's your fault she's so scared of anypony outside of the family, you know? You were the only one who knew how to get her out of her shell and try new things. When you left..."

Pinkie winced at Marble's name, with her eyes flickering to their home on the farm.

"She completely shut down. Wouldn't talk to anypony, wouldn't talk to me. She missed you so much; your letters are the only thing she looks forward to any more. I can't help her."

Limestone squeezed her eyes shut, her chin trembling as she sucked air through her teeth.

"I…"
_______

Pinkie glanced away, just listening to the wind of the farm. It was quiet, so terribly noiseless. It used to be something that constantly crushed her, made it impossible for her to speak.

Now, with just a few seconds of that silence, she found herself missing it.

Creaking.

Whispering.

Dripping.

Screech.

Marble.

She'd forgotten about Marble, maybe on purpose.

Hearing Limestone blame her for Marble should have made her angry. Instead, it hurt. It hurt because it was true and Pinkie knew it. Every time she saw her twin sister shrink away from others and struggle to speak above a whisper was a reminder of that.

"I know that, ok? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry about Marble. I shouldn't have left you to take my place like that, expecting you to make everything work. I just—" Pinkie pushed her hooves into the ground, trying so desperately to push back the screeching. It only bounced back louder. "You didn't have to keep bringing me back here. I got out! I made friends, I was happy! I could move past this place, I could forget if you just didn't..." Her voice rose with every word, scratching the inside of her throat. "Drag me back. Being here hurts, no matter why. It chips at me, and it makes it hard to smile. When you brought me here a few days ago, I..."

Pinkie lurched back, bringing her hooves to her ears and slapping them against her face a few times for the blinks of quietness that came with it. The pain helped her focus too, if only a bit.

"I'm cursed, Limestone." She traced the outline of her face, leading up to her temples as she pushed up her mane. "This place cursed me. Now yo—"

"You're cursed? What horseshit!" Limestone cut her off, waving her hoof. "If anything you're blessed. I didn't get to see that magical rainboom you keep talking about, I didn't get Father's permission to abandon us so you can go throw parties with strangers! You became a fucking Element of Harmony for fuck's sake!" Limestone gritted her teeth, walking forward out of her corner. "You have friends who would die for you, a second family who gave you a place to live just because they love you that much. And you have the gall to say you're cursed? You didn't even go through half the shit we did when you were here."

Pinkie tried to interrupt her, to clarify what she meant, but she couldn't even get in a syllable. The screeching was getting worse with every few seconds she let Limestone speak. Sooner or later, Pinkie would have no choice but to scream.

"We didn't have Granny Pie doting on us, giving us songs to make all of our fears go away. Telling us stories about the Mirror Pool or whatever other fairy tale sh—"

The Mirror Pool.

It was so obvious to her now. So much so that it was something she would have expected Twilight to suggest days ago. If so, she wouldn't have run from Ponyville to The Rock Farm in one piece.

"I-I don't have to—" Relief spread from her chest to the rest of her body, leaving her hooves trembling as they fell out from under her. The ground was hard and unforgiving, scraping her skin and dirtying her coat more than it already was. "I need to get back to Ponyville."

"What?" Limestone tilted her head, furrowing her eyebrows into a half scowl. "You ran all the way here, and now you need to go back? So, what, you came here just to tell me off and now you want to fucking dip as soon as I—"

"Limey, please." Pinkie managed to get back up, unable to bring herself to look at her sister whom she was ranting to just moments prior. "I'll explain everything later, I promise. Right now I'm running on five days of no sleep and I need to get back to Ponyville to fix that. Just help me get there."

"Five days?! What the shit, Pinkie?!" Limestone rushed forward, letting Pinkie lean on her as she shifted her in a different direction. "Alright, sure. Trains should be running soon, I've got enough to get you there and me back. But five days? Really? I thought you took care of yourself better than that."

"I usually do." Pinkie couldn't help but rest her entire body against Limestone's, barely putting any effort into moving at all and letting her guide them.

Right now, Limestone was her rock.

"I love you, Sis."

There was a falter in her next step, a sharp inhale as she opened her mouth to say something. Limestone didn't stop moving, but her trotting became more tense and slow. She swallowed so intensely Pinkie could see it.

"I love you too."

It was muttered, like a secret not meant to be told.

Pinkie chose to believe it.

She needed to.

__________

The train ride back to Ponyville was abundant in awkward silence.

Limestone couldn't stay still for longer than a few seconds, fidgeting in her seat and glancing at Pinkie. It couldn't be more obvious the string of questions she was leaving tied up in her mind. The only thing stopping her from unknotting them on Pinkie was her sibling pretending to be asleep.

Once she got to the cave, Maud and Mudbriar were conveniently not present. They nearly never left. For once, something was going Pinkie's way.

She saw her reflection in the pool, as clear as any mirror. There was no color left in her mane at all, having given way to a complete gray. Most of her coat matched, or at least what could be seen beneath the layer of dirt that she was wearing. Along the trail of blood down her ears, and the mud on her hooves.

She was ugly.

Pinkie didn't recognize herself.

But she didn't have any more tears to shed. They were all on her face.

As she stared into the reflection of the cave, she saw what she should have expected: The Skeleton hanging from the ceiling. Pinkie froze at its appearance, stuck in place and unable to do anything but watch as its reflection collapsed to the ground.

This time, it didn't remain disconnected bones or even a broken body on the ground. It actually landed on its hooves, moving towards her with some macabre purpose. The convolution of whispers poisoned her ears again, this time much more concentrated but somehow still just as indistinguishable.

Even after closing her eyes, she could make out each step it made as it got closer. Pinkie shuddered, waiting for it to stop her however it intended to. She was hoping she could clone herself before it had a chance to try to stop her.

Unfortunately, she wasn't fast enough.

Soon, it was right behind her. Moving to her side and just standing there. Judging by the increasing volume of the whispers, it was craning its neck and moving to her ear. The sounds it made became easier to make out, yet Pinkie couldn't make out anything at all. It was nothing but almost-words. Gibberish that vaguely resembled a language.

Then it all stopped once its teeth were inches away from touching her, she could tell by the growing closeness of its chattering. The vile stench made her thankful she hadn't eaten anything recently.

"You will not be the last."

It didn't talk. It had no voice, no timbre, no sound. It was more like the words had been inserted into her mind and formed in her memory, rattling her entire being.

She shrieked, opening her eyes and preparing to jump as far away from it as her fatigued body would allow.

Except it wasn't there, reflection or no.

The Skeleton had vanished. Hopefully, for the final time.

Pinkie stared at her own reflection, taking loud breaths as she teetered on the edge. Its words repeated in her mind over and over, in a feeble attempt to decipher the meaning. That single line held so many implications, so many questions. She could stand in front of the pool all day trying to figure it out and never come close.

Or she could pass the curse on. Dispelling it from her mind.

The simple rhyme hovered in her mind, burned deep in her foalhood brain. It stayed right on her tongue as she leaned forward, poking the water that carried her reflection. The ripples did little to mess with her reflection, stagnant despite the water around it changing with the image.

"And into her reflection she stared, yearning for one whose reflection she shared, and solemnly sweared not to be scared." It was such an odd feeling to walk into the pool. There was an instance before contact where her brain telling her dropping headfirst into a body of water would result in nothing but a watery demise. Then she passed through, which was a sensation like being doused in water and drying in that same second.

"At the prospect of being doubly mared."

There she was.

Upon opening her eyes, the other her was there.

But it wasn't her, not exactly. A Not-Her.

It was a perfect clone of her, when she was happy. A poofy, perfectly pink mane vibrant with life; not a speck of gray to be seen. Bright blue eyes with no dark circles, and a smile so sincere it was borderline contagious.

It was like she was being mocked.

"Hiya other me!" Not-Her stated with exuberance to every word. "Oh! What should we call each other? Pinkie two? Pinkie the second? Pinkie squared? Though I don—"

"No." Pinkie put a hoof against the Not-Her's mouth. "We're not doing this; I don't have the patience." She retracted her hoof, seeing that Not-Her's muzzle had been pushed in and then bounced back out like it was made of rubber.

Pinkie snorted, shaking her head and turning around as she made her way to the entrance.

"Follow me. We're going to go visit Twilight."

Without having to look, she could hear Not-Her begin to bounce on the ground. Practically exploding with how much energy she had.

"Oh, who's Twilight? Does she have fun?"

"Loads," Pinkie deadpanned.

"Okie Dokie Lokie!"

Every single bounce was audible. She could count each one if she really wanted to. It was a constant in a sea of noise, sticking out to an annoying degree. The joy she radiated just behind Pinkie stood out from anything else, and would have spread to her if she wasn't so deeply sapped.

Was this how Limestone felt like every time Pinkie came to help?

The stares from the townsfolk were there as usual, though this time many of them weren't focused on her. Attention was grabbed by the clone pursuing right behind her, waving to the ponies despite not knowing any of their names.

A few times on the way to Twilight's castle, Pinkie had to stop Not-Her from blasting off to the nearest thing that looked 'fun' to her, taking whatever bits of willpower she had left just to ensure Not-Her was following.

The fact that a guaranteed sleep awaited Pinkie at the end of this trek was what encouraged her to take the next step, and the next one, and the next one, until finally Twilight's castle was in sight.

Poor Spike jumped when she opened the door, yelping as his eyes darted between Pinkie and Not-Her. He stammered something as Pinkie shut the door behind them, Not-Her walking up to him and asking if he was Twilight and where the 'fun' was.

"That's not Twilight." Pinkie placed her hoof on Not-Her's shoulder, tilting her in the direction of the library. "She's in there with all the fun."

"Yipee!"

She shot off, leaving only a smoky outline of her likeness. Pinkie exchanged a stare with Spike, dozens of things going through her mind: an apology, something dismissive, a smile. All of which stayed ideas. They would be empty gestures if she bothered.

So she didn't say anything to him at all.

Twilight was in her library, which was much more organized than when she last saw it. Not-Her was zooming around the room, searching every nook and cranny for 'fun'. Twilight was smiling for a few seconds, under the impression that the Not-Her was Pinkie who had somehow cured her curse.

That illusion vanished as soon as she laid eyes on Pinkie.

"Pinkie? What did you—" Her eyes widened. "You cloned yourself with the Mirror Pool? Why?"

"To sleep with myself." Pinkie sat on the ground, rubbing her eyes and trying not to groan at how gross she felt. Her desire to take a bath was second only to the deep yearning for sleep. "If the curse has to be passed by sleeping with another pony, then it can be a clone of myself."

Twilight's gaze was locked on to Not-Her, who was rapidly making the library into an even worse mess than what Pinkie saw the day prior. With a narrowing of her eyes and a tsking noise, Twilight lit her horn up in an aura of magic and shot to the clone, trapping it in a sort-of cloud of magic that stopped her from zooming around.

"I don't want to undersell how good of a solution that is, but there's a reason I never came up with it myself." As usual, Twilight brought over a seemingly random book from the shelves, flipping it open and skimming through the pages. "Using magic paraphernalia, especially something related to the Everfree Forest, is a terrible idea. There hasn't been a single time in recorded history that's gone well, and that's been with artifacts we understood. There's next to nothing known about the Mirror Pool aside from the rhyme and this spell that sends the duplicates back to the pool."

She closed the book, setting it on her desk and shaking her head. Took few steps over to Not-Her, who was blinking rapidly and bouncing her eyes back and forth like ping-pong balls, evidently trying to convey a message in some code.

"I don't know anything about the pool aside from that. How it works exactly, if the clone is really a clone of whoever uses it, if the spell really sends them back to the pond or if it just—" Twilight cut herself off, wings tightly hugging her sides as she hung her head. "There's just so many unknowns. It might be riskier than trying to pass it between us."

"So you don't think it'll work?"

"Oh no, odds are it will." Twilight turned to face her, rubbing her hooves against her face. "I'm worried what the consequences might be. What if every clone afterwards has it? What if it causes the pool to dry up? Curses are tricky, getting rid of them with mysterious magic is asking for something to go horrifically wrong."

"Then we'll deal with it!"

She didn't mean to scream, but she did.

It stopped Not-Her from trying to move, coiling into a rigid stiffness. Twilight took a single step back, leaving a hoof just a few inches off the ground.

There was silence. No noise of any kind, and it was awful. The Skeleton had been quiet ever since the Mirror Pool, not making a single sound all the way here. It was odd and without reason. Leaving her only with what it told her, and nothing more. Making no attempt to stop what she was trying to do.

That terrified her.

"I can't wait anymore, Twilight. Last night, I told The Skeleton that I wouldn't pass it on to someone else, and then it started screeching until I..." Her lips trembled. Anxiety pierced Pinkie's heart and began to spread through her body like a poison.

Speaking of it may just bring the noise forth.

"Selected somepony. Then it forced me to move towards them until I almost—" A tinge of sour flavored her mouth, leaving a disgusting quivering in the back of her throat that made her want to vomit. "Twilight, I nearly gave it to Limestone: I convinced myself she deserved it. If she hadn't brought up the Mirror Pool…"

She would have done it.

Pinkie would have passed it on to her own sister.

So much shame filled her at that realization she couldn't bring herself to utter it.

Twilight didn't react, at least not in any obvious way. She nodded her head, stepping over to the clone and craning her neck upward. Not-Her met Twilight's gaze with a colorful intensity, bouncing her pupils up and down like she was trying to wave with her eyes.

"The problem, Pinkie, is that we might not be the ones who have to deal with the consequences of this. Curses do not like being cheated." A beam of magic shot to the clone, lowering it to the ground as the field of raspberry vanished.

"Hiya!" Not-Her began to bounce. "You're Twilight, right? Where's the fu—"

Twilight shot her with another spell.

This one caused the clone to go cross-eyed, pursing her lips together in an 'o' shape as her tail went limp.

"Well that's not fun at all."

She collapsed to the ground, eyes closing as she took deep breaths. Twilight carefully lifted her, floating alongside her and curling comfortably in the air.

"You can sleep in one of the dozens of guest rooms we have. After I send the clone back, I'll drain the pond; it's probably what I should have done in the first place."

Pinkie dragged herself upright, getting up was harder and harder each time she had to. Even with her best efforts, her exhausted body limping along like a...wounded animal. Twilight noticed over her shoulder, pulling back to where they were side by side.

"Thanks, Twilight. For everything."

"You don't have to thank me, Pinkie." Twilight shook her head, wearing a solemn smirk. "I barely did anything."

"That's not true. You've been here for me." Pinkie bumped her flank against Twilight's. "That's what friendship is all about, isn't it?"

"Doesn't always feel like enough." She sighed, tilting her head to the right. "Hey, I think Rainbow's still going to be in town for the next few days. It's not too late to throw that party for her."

"Really?" Pinkie's voice went up a pitch as they entered a room. "I'd like that a lot."

Twilight laid the clone on the bed, adjusting the blanket to where Pinkie could easily slip under it. Pinkie approached it, placing a shaking hoof on the bed and applying pressure on the mattress. Its shape morphed to match, and was beyond soft to the touch— must have been an Echo Stratus.

"So I just..." Pinkie swallowed repeatedly as she rubbed her hoof. "Go to sleep like I normally would? And I'll just be able to?"

"That's how the shaman described it, yes. There shouldn't be any hallucinations or such. I can cast a sleep spell on you to help if you need it."

Pinkie made a droning noise, climbing the bed and just trying to relax under the blanket. Her clone was unbothered, sleeping peacefully with a chest that rose and fell. She could feel Not-Her's warm breath with every exhale, lacking any smell or sensation.

It was peaceful.

"No, I don't—" She interrupted herself with a yawn. How odd, she hadn't yawned a single time since she'd become cursed and she hadn't noticed that until now. "Think so. Thank you."

"Again, you don't need to thank me. The bathroom is right across the hall if you need it." Twilight walked to the door, opening it and standing in the doorway. "Sleep as long as you need, Pinkie. You deserve it."

As soon as that door was shut, she was left alone with Not-Her. No sound other than its breathing, and the distant chirps of birds.

No creaking.

No whispering.

No dripping.

No screech.

Pinkie closed her eyes inch by inch, the darkness encroaching on the vision of her own cheerful face. Second by second, it became less visible. Until all she could see was that same unpierceable black.

This time, there was no Skeleton.

_____________________

Eleven years had passed since that day. To date, Pinkie considered it the best sleep she'd ever had. Every night since she looked forward to nightfall, when before she dreaded it. Those days without being able to sleep created an appreciation for it. One she likely never would have gotten otherwise.

In retrospect, her suffering only resulted in things getting better for her long-term.

Because of the argument she had with Limestone, they ended up sitting down and having a genuine talk for the first time in their life. It didn't 'fix' their relationship by any stretched definition. But it got them to start talking and the results resembled something of a functional sibling relationship.

With Marble too, there was improvement. Pinkie convinced Marble to visit more, and with every visit Pinkie helped her be less scared of everything. Talk to more ponies, be less shy. Even to this day, she hadn't gotten over all of her problems, but she was much better and would keep improving still.

'Happier' wasn't what she'd describe it as. 'At peace' fell much closer to how she felt.

"Pinkie, are you alright?" Cheese asked as he trotted up to her bed, squeezing her hoof with his. "You've been awfully quiet after all that screaming. Feels like a joke's been told, but I'm still waiting on the punchline."

His touch was far off, just barely registering on the precipice of her perception. She tried to blink away the blurriness in her vision, her memory just as hard to comprehend. The lights above her were dulled, yet still hurt to stare at directly. She shuffled in the bed, so sedated by the medicine she'd been given it was hard to recall where she even was.

Maybe that was why she was thinking back to eleven years ago when it was something she tried not to think about. Pinkie had never been even close to that tired until this.

She had given birth.

"I'm..." Pinkie attempted to pull herself higher up on the bed, halted by a dull pain in her...everything. Medication made it much more tolerable, but moving still hurt more than even the roughest hug piles she'd been in. "Super. Nurse Redheart said the worst parts are over and that I did great. Best birth she's seen in—" She stifled a groan. "Years. I should be up and partying again in a few days."

The forced enthusiasm in her voice was nearly as painful as the throbbing in her legs. Cheese awkwardly held Boneless Two in his arms, a festival of balloons tied to his elbow in a rainbow of colors.

"I know, I was there when she told you. It's just, well..." He frequently glanced at the doorway, clicking his hooves together. "I'm worried about the baby. Healthy birth or not, there's so many things that could go wrong: something didn't form properly, or maybe the brain didn't develop well or something happened with the chromosomes or—"

"Cheesy, stop."

"Sorry." He hung his head. "I'm just scared."

"I know, me too. But the baby's been born, we talked about all of this every other month. How much you care means a lot to me; just not right now. The nurses have done this before time and time again and I'm sure they're doing their best."

"I'd hope so. That's what they'ye being paid for," Doctor Horse stated as he walked into Pinkie's room, shutting the door behind him and skimming something on a clipboard.

"Doctor! Is everything alright?"

"Yes, I'm doing quite fine. Thank you for asking," he said nonchalantly as he wandered over, wearing a patient smile with a glance. "Oh, you meant about the foal. Yes, everything's healthy with the foal, I believe. Let me check my..." His eyes descended as he read the board, flickering wider as his mouth half opened. Staring first at Pinkie, then at Cheese, then back to Pinkie.

"Mrs. Pie, do you have any relatives with a silver mane?"

"S-silver mane? Um..." She narrowed her eyes. "My father Igneous has a silver-ish mane."

"Ah. Then it's likely recessive. Very well. In that case, everything looks dandy." He began to flip through the pages on the clipboard, whistling a tune to himself. "Blood's fine, heart's good, senses are good. And it—oh."

"Oh?" Cheese repeated.

"How peculiar. Did they double-check for—yes they did. Huh."

"What is it? Is something wrong with the baby?"

Cheese's voice quivered as he spoke; She'd never heard him so incredibly afraid. It was infectious. Pinkie tried not to let it get to her, but she soon found herself hanging more on the doctor's next words than her own heartbeat.

"Well, on paper, no. It passed every test with flying colors. It's just it hasn't..." A blob of magic grabbed the clipboard, floating it over to the front of the bed. "Slept yet."

"The baby hasn't slept?"

This time, it was Pinkie who asked. Something cold dragged itself up her spine, and she shuddered in her bed.

"Not yet, anyway. Which is odd but not unheard of. Heard about some cases of babies being born and not sleeping for a few days after birth back in medical school, something about the babies being particularly choleric? Or was it the opposite? I might have to do some cramming."

"Wait, wait, wait. So, the baby hasn't slept, but they should soon?"

"Absolutely. I just wish there was more I could tell you. Actually, any minute now one of the nurses—"

With a knock, Nurse Redheart came in with the baby in question. Holding it in her hooves while it was wrapped up in a pink cloth, unmoving and not making a sound. That in itself came with a certain wrongness to Pinkie, as it was a stark contrast to every newborn she'd ever been around.

Redheart brought the baby to Pinkie, gently giving it to her who took it with rigid hooves. She carefully lifted the cloth around its face, revealing to her what she so desperately didn't want to see.

"Wow, I thought it'd be more… loud and crying? Look at them, their eyes so big and moving around."

Pinkie was looking, but not at its eyes. She stared at its mane, incapable of caring about anything else at that moment. The pain had become distant and forgotten, numb under the realization that gutted her to her core. Grip so tight around the baby she couldn't let go even if she wanted to.

It was gray.

Her baby's mane was gray.