Turnip Sprout locked eyes with the enemy across the table. Or, really, her one uncovered eye, the one not covered by bandages. Today it was all going to end, once and for all. She grinned wolfishly.

“Scared?” she taunted the figure across the table.

“Naw,” her enemy replied, returning the grin.

All around then, the ponies of the hospital ward crowded around, shouting encouragement or booing, although who both were directed at was anypony’s guess. Some enterprising ponies were even taking bets, with cigarette and chocolate rations the main stake.

Their battlefield was a crate-turned-table set up in the middle of the cots and sleeping-places of a long and tall army tent, a handy place to send casualties and then forget about them. The heavy canvas walls admitted nothing through the material, and what little light managed to permeate the curling wisps of cigarette smoke came under the edges and from the entrance flaps at either end of the long space, leaving its residents in dim twilight most of the time. For now, burning some of the limited oil supplies, a lantern hung up on a nearby support pole cut through the gloom like a beacon.

Getting into the casualty ward with shrapnel wounds from an enemy shell from that last mission a week ago just might have been the best thing to happen to Turnip lately. Sure, it was boring, and she only had one eye to see with, but the rations were better, and there was no shortage of fine company. Best of all, in here, nopony had to get shot at.

And anyway, Turnip thought, whoever said the hospital was boring clearly wasn’t trying hard enough.

Turnip’s enemy tonight was a strong young stallion about her age, with a washed-out, desaturated-looking green coat and an uncombed brown mane. His cutie mark was a brown button with a silver thread and needle running loosely through two of its four holes.

Turnip flicked her head, sending her blonde braid to the other side of her neck. “Y’all ready fer me to take you down, Buttons?”

“Do yer worst, Sprout.”

“Then let’s do this.”

She dropped her smile, and he did the same. They stared each other down, bodies taut and ready for action. He rose slightly on his haunches. She spat to one side through the gap in her teeth. The crowd hushed. Then they both slammed their elbows on the table and locked hooves together, and the cheering resumed.

Turnip had met Buttons when she first arrived here at the hospital. He had been her bed neighbor, and, having nothing better to do on that first day, she struck up a conversation. That neighbor had turned out to be mighty good company indeed, and the rest was history. It helped a lot, too, that he was from her home county, and they were able to share in a great many little in-jokes about home. This latest activity of theirs was honestly just the end result of two bored country ponies without enough liquor.

Turnip had an early advantage in the contest and managed to push his foreleg down quite a ways, but then her advantage was gone, and his strengths began to show. Or rather, his lengths, since his legs were much longer than hers, average for a stallion though they may have been. Turnip had many times cursed her small stature – barely bigger than a filly, really – but this time she cursed perhaps more than usual. She could not lose; her reputation and her pride was at stake.

Sweat beaded on her brow and her tongue stuck between the gap in her front teeth as she tried to make her prodigious strength do the work of two ponies, no, three. Her elbow hurt.

Buttons strained, too, but not anywhere as hard. Like her, he was also quite strong for his size, and he had leverage; it was all Turnip could do to keep him from pushing her past the critical point. Turnip took her eyes off her hoof and glanced up; the look she saw on Buttons’ face as her struggles began to really show themselves angered her beyond reason. He needed to be taught a lesson, he needed to be kicked right in that smug face, he needed…

“Raaaaahhh!” Turnip screamed a war cry, flushed with rage and adrenaline. Slowly, she pushed the stallion back, gaining lost ground. Her straining muscles stood out in sharp relief on her glistening tan coat. Now she was past the halfway point; if she kept this up, she could-

“May I have all of your attention, please?” interrupted an authoritative voice behind her. Her ears swiveled involuntarily; what?

Her brief lapse in concentration was all Corduroy needed. With a redoubled effort, he pushed back, and by the time Turnip realized it, it was already too late. Her hoof slammed to the table, defeated.

“I win,” he announced to a suddenly very silent tent. Somepony coughed, and several others followed suit. This was the casualty ward, after all.

But all the rage seething through Turnip’s veins had nowhere to go, having been denied its release. She got up slowly, deliberately, her face flushed. Of course, she was mad that Buttons had beat her, but for a second there, she had been on the way to winning, and then…

She turned on the one who had distracted her, vision filmed over with red. Her nostrils flared and she snorted. She pawed the ground with one hoof.

“Sprout, don’t…” said Buttons from behind her, but she wasn’t listening. She charged.

The officer looked surprised, but she recovered quickly and sidestepped Turnip. Thwarted, Turnip spun and tried to kick out at the officer, who slipped inside her blind side. She bit out at where she suspected the mare to be, and her teeth clacked in empty air. The tackle that brought her to the ground came completely out of nowhere.

She roared and tried to push the pony off of her, but her tired right foreleg gave out on her and she crashed to the dirt underneath the weight. She thrashed around and tried to rise again.

“Dag nab it, Sprout, cut that out!” came the voice of the pony holding her down. It was Buttons’ voice.

“Git offa me!” Turnip yelled, trying in vain to get her hooves under her again. The officer she had attacked – oh, Celestia, had she just attacked an officer? Walked into her field of view.

“Sorry, sir, she’s – well, she’s…” Buttons started to say, apologetically.

“…Very lucky I took hoof-to-hoof classes at the academy,” finished the officer. “Let her up; it’s quite alright.”

Buttons’ weight disappeared from her back, and she shakily got to her hooves. From the officer’s expression, it was pretty far from “alright”. Briefly Turnip wondered if it would be worth trying to apologize. She hawked in preparation to spit, then thought better of it and swallowed. The officer’s face tightened, but she turned slightly to address the tent at large.

“Now, if that matter is quite finished, I’d like all of your attention, please,” she began, again. “I am Lieutenant Mudskipper, and I am looking for able-bodied ponies to join my unit for proactive and productive exercises for the good of the camp.”

No one spoke. A few ponies not already bedridden laid back on nearby cots, and everyone tried to look as injured as possible. Turnip tried swaying slightly in place, as if she had been more tired out by her struggles than she was.

The lieutenant’s mouth tightened even more. “Very well, then. I asked for volunteers, and as Celestia is my witness, I’ll have them. Starting with you –” she pointed at Turnip. “– You –” she pointed at Buttons. “If you’re well enough to hoof-wrestle, you’re well enough for me.”

“But I’m not –” Turnip began, meaning to raise her status as tank crew, but she was overridden.

“When I choose you, you are to form up in ranks before me,” the lieutenant barked authoritatively at the crowd at large. “Now then. I’ll also take you, you, you, and...” she pointed to more ponies from the crowd. Amputees and ponies obviously too ill or weak to move weren’t chosen, but everyone on their hooves who looked like they were capable of holding a rifle, the lieutenant selected. The center of the tent rapidly lost all standing room as it was occupied by walking casualties.

One pony she selected tried to walk over to join the condemned, but his legs gave out and he collapsed. “Up!” the lieutenant commanded. “Up, you ingrate!”

She walked over and kicked the pony several times, and though he tried, he was unable to rise again. That, or he was very good at acting. The lieutenant gave up and stopped selecting ponies.

“You will all go to the quartermaster to be armed and equipped,” she barked. “Form lines!”

With a terrible sinking feeling, Turnip dutifully shuffled around into the line, although she was careful not to be the first. What was she going to do, disobey a direct order from a lieutenant? This whole thing had to be against some order or another. She just had to hope someone noticed that the troop of casualties was out of the ordinary and raise the point with someone higher up the chain of command.

“March!” the lieutenant commanded, and they did. They all marched out of the hospital, the officer bringing up the rear, making sure none of them slipped off.

It didn’t take long for the little column to thread its way through the headquarters to arrive at the lieutenant’s destination, where the quartermaster ponies were responsible for doling out equipment, usually to replace lost or damaged items. The lieutenant explained what she wanted, keeping half a suspicious glare on her group of rounded-up patients. Then, they received their new equipment, such as it was, starting with the first pony in line.

Each was given a rifle, a bandolier of ammunition, a helmet, and nothing more. Turnip surmised that they couldn’t be going far, and that she would probably have a chance to slip away soon and fetch her pack. Then it came her turn.

She stood on her hind legs, to see properly over a desk made for ponies of a more normal size, her forehooves braced on the wood. The pony at the desk took one look at this unusually small, green-eyed mare, and dropped a standard medium-sized helmet on her head, a bandolier over her neck, and shoved a full-length rifle at her. The helmet promptly fell over her eyes.

Turnip pushed the helmet back, licked her lips nervously, and looked to see if the lieutenant was watching. She was to the side, arguing with a camp aide who had appeared, probably about this whole business. Now was Turnip’s chance. She leaned in confidentially to the quartermaster pony behind the table and asked, in a stage whisper, “Hey, you got any tobacco for a wounded pony?”

“Like this?” the pony said, holding up a pack of premium cigarettes.

It probably helped that half her chest and head were wrapped in bandages. Turnip checked on the lieutenant again, confirmed she was still busy, then turned back and shook her head slightly. She hawked and spat on the ground to one side. Even after a week, her saliva had a blackish tinge to it.

The pony’s eyes darted to the lieutenant, then back to her, and winked. “Say no more,” he said confidentially, sliding a round tin about the size of a tuna ration across the counter. Turnip quickly swiped it off the counter and stashed it in a pocket, and when the lieutenant sent the aide packing, she had already joined the first ponies along with her “new” gear, fighting to find some way of wearing the bandolier in a way that wouldn’t tangle in her legs.

While the rest of the group, including Buttons, received their gear, Turnip managed a solution that mostly involved letting both the bandolier and the rifle rest upon the shallow curve of her back, and the helmet strapped well behind her jaw. If she moved too much, her carefully balanced items would fall down and bump into her forelegs as she walked, so she tried to stand still and not upset things too much.

Once everypony had been equipped, they were marched through the gathering dusk of the evening through the camp, and shortly left it behind for open ground.

Turnip shuffled around in the march order until she was no longer being observed by the officer, then stealthily pulled out the tin with a little three-legged hopping gait, prized the lid open with her teeth, and tried grabbing a plug of the stuff with her tongue. She accidentally got enough for two, but that was fine; she shut the lid and shoved it back in her pocket. She chewed, and sighed. They didn’t let you have this stuff in the hospital – something about the stained gums getting in the way of properly assessing health.

Darkness had almost completely fallen by the time they reached a hill some distance out from the headquarters, where a full platoon of infantryponies were busy digging new trenches in the virgin soil. Turnip couldn’t tell, but it seemed like the same was happening on the neighboring hills to the east and west as well. A line of unused shovels stuck in the ground near the working ponies.

“If you can dig, join your unit and help dig!” barked the lieutenant, in a tone that brooked no argument. Reluctantly, ponies moved to pick up shovels, and Turnip, feeling the officer’s eyes on her, picked one up as well.

She had no idea things were this bad. Drafting wounded ponies, not telling them what for, exactly? What did they think it would accomplish, avoid a panic? Clearly, they felt they needed every pony on the ground for this one, so why didn’t they just say so? Turnip felt that would go down much better than randomly abducting a bunch of ponies from the hospital and marching them through the camp by the figurative scruffs of their necks, like they were on penal duty or something. She sighed and bit the tip of the shovel into the soil, shoulder-to-shoulder with a burly dark red stallion with enlisted tabs.

The work was hard, but her body was strong and well-fed, and she was up to the task. Others were not so lucky; a few ponies down the line, she heard the sound of a body hitting the ground. A sergeant came over and chewed out the unfortunate pony, but when it was clear that he really was incapable of returning to work, he was sent to go get his rifle and wait. Lucky guy, Turnip thought.

Much later, in the small hours of the morning, they had dug a trench sufficiently deeply around the front of the hill so that a pony could stand up in it without being exposed to fire from below, as well as a rear trench about six meters behind it, connected by a shallow communication trench. The communication trenches should be deeper, but they had dug them just deep enough to crawl through without being exposed in the interest of time, and now the lieutenant, who was apparently also the pony in charge of this platoon, ordered a halt for rest.

“We shall finish this work and make dugouts in the morning,” she had said, and Turnip gratefully left to go find Buttons.

“Whew,” he said, stretching his back slowly as she approached. “I been worked like a dawg, and I’m tired as one, too.”

“Ya got any rations in yer pockets?” Turnip asked, and Buttons shook his head. “Awright, I’ll go git some. You jest set tight.”

With a glance around her to see if anyone was watching in the moonlit darkness, she left her rifle and bandolier and slipped away from the platoon and made her way into the camp. It didn’t take long for her to locate her hospital ward and retrieve her pack, along with her carbine and a bandolier that actually fit her (standard extra small size). On her way out, she paused, then walked up to the first nurse she saw that wasn’t busy.

“Hey,” she said, confidentially leaning in close and glancing around, “If I was you, I’d keep my kit close to hoof. A li’l bird told me somethin’ big’s gonna be happenin’ very soon. Ya get me?”

The nurse’s eyes darted around for spectators, then she nodded and murmured, “Got it.”

Turnip clapped her on the shoulder with a forehoof. “Attagirl. Tell yer friends.” She left the nurse and slipped away through the camp, having done her good deed for the day. And this early in the morning, too!

Back at the periphery trenches, she found Buttons again after some searching. He was lying with his hooves tucked under his body in the rear trench, a meter or so away from another sleeping infantrypony. She found the full-length rifle she was issued earlier and prodded him with it.

Instantly, he came awake in a flurry of motion, drawing his knife and surging towards her. “You won’t take me alive, ya crystal fleabag!” he shouted. It was lucky for him that everypony around them was too tired to care about the disturbance. She fended off his advance with the barrel of the thankfully unloaded rifle until he recognized her in the darkness, probably by her uncommon stature. “…Oh. S’ jus’ you, Sprout. Why didn’t ya jus’ use a hoof?”

She propped up the rifle on the back wall of the rough-dug trench and nodded to the knife held in his teeth. “Fer the fun of it, ya old warhawk. Here, have some o’ this.” She got out two tins of field rations and passed him one of them.

“I’m not old,” Buttons muttered, sheathing his knife and accepting the tin. “Thanks fer this, though. This ain’t a time to go hungry.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” she agreed, and they dug in. When they had finished, they sat with their backs against the other, sharing warmth, and looked at the stars.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

“Say, d’you s’pose we’re cousins?” Turnip said, eventually.

“Dunno. I got a lotta cousins,” Buttons replied.

“So do I,” Turnip chuckled. “Can’t hardly keep ‘em straight, y’know?”

Buttons laughed softly; she could feel it more than hear it. “Yeah. I know it. Why’d ya ask, anyway? Worried ya might be fancyin’ yer cousin?”

Turnip snorted derisively. “Hay no. I jest never expected to meet somepony from Turnpike, is all.” Well, somepony else, anyway. There was one other pony she had her suspicions about, but that pony wasn’t here.

“Long as that’s all that’s eatin’ ya,” Buttons said with a shrug. “Let’s try and get some shuteye, awright?”

“Awright,” Turnip answered, but the night was cold, and her mind was set buzzing with a horrible suspicion, one she hadn’t allowed herself to contemplate since she had found a bed neighbor who shared her hometown, accent, and culture.

“Buttons, you awake?” she asked, after a long time spent watching the stars move across the sky.

He stirred against her back. Though his breathing didn’t change, he said, “Yeah, I’m awake.”

“Can I ask ya somethin’?”

“Shoot.”

“Buttons isn’t yer full name, is it?”

He was silent for a moment. Then he answered, “Is Sprout yers?”

She sighed. “Point taken.” Then, a horrible thought occurring to her, she took a plunge. “My name’s really Turnip.”

“Turnip Sprout, huh?” he said, and she held her breath. Surely he knew now what she was, if he was indeed from her hometown. “Well,” he said, after a long pause, turning around and presenting his hoof, “Pleased t’meetcha, Turnip Sprout. I’m Corduroy Buttons.”

Turnip froze, reeling, one hoof hesitantly raised from the ground. He was one of them. It was exactly as she had feared. Exactly the answer she hadn’t wanted to hear.

Turnip’s family, and Corduroy’s, had bad blood going back generations. Her great-uncle Turnip Goulash had been swindled on a deal with the old crone, Taffeta, so he’d done her the turn she deserved, and then they had killed his favorite dog… Well, things escalated, and her father had hammered into her head as a filly that a member of the Turnip family could not, as a matter of clan honor, show their rivals anything less than the treatment they deserved. But Buttons – no, Corduroy, wasn’t really a bad guy, in the time she’d known him…

“You… stay away from me, you textile two-timer!” she growled, and she spat right in his face.

Corduroy recoiled from her, a look of shock on his face that turned to hurt. He slowly reached up and wiped the blackish goo from above his eyebrow and flicked it aside. Turnip waited for him to attack; she welcomed it. To her surprise, though, he only turned his head away and swallowed.

“Have it yer way,” he croaked. He snagged up his rifle, looked at her one last time, and marched around the corner of the nearest communication trench.

Was that a raindrop the moonlight had glinted on just now? Turnip checked the sky for more unscheduled rainclouds and found the predawn sky black and empty.

She sat back down and hung her head; she hadn’t wanted him to run away, she had wanted… she didn’t know what she had wanted him to do. How she wanted him to react. She was angry at herself, but herself was no fun to be angry at, since she couldn’t just beat herself up and put herself in her place. Well, she reflected, she could, but it wouldn’t make her feel any better, the way beating someone else up might.

She pulled a blanket off her pack and draped it over herself. “And stay away,” she muttered, halfheartedly, in the general direction he had disappeared.

Though she was bone-tired from spending all night digging, sleep was a long time in coming.

Author's Note

And I am BACK, baby, with another set of chapters for you fine ponies!
I consider this part of the story to be months late in coming, but, well, I'll just say that a lot of things came up in my life and leave it at that. I swear, I'm not TRYING to appear dead...

Same upload schedule as last time, by the way.