Chapter 4: Rays of Hope

Chapter 4

Rays of Hope

Fluttershy felt as if she had been walking for hours. She was thirsty and hungry, but every stream she passed had long ago dried up, and nothing grew here that she could eat – not even grass. Death and emptiness seemed to consume the world around her, and in some strange way, she could feel them creeping into her heart, as well.

The thought had occurred to her, of course, that she might starve here, but for some reason, she found it harder and harder to care. Every time she flew upward, she could see nothing. No landmark stood in any direction; only this endless forest of death. Even if she flew, she could do so for as long as her wings would carry her without seeing anything at all that hinted of escape. She grew increasingly certain that she would die here, and yet she felt no fear; only numbness.

After some time, she heard a sound in the distance. At first, she thought it was the strange voice she had heard before in the wind, but it persisted. It was a hollow, creaking, clacking sound. Desperate for anything that might break this cold monotony, she began to move towards the sound.

After several minutes, she emerged into a clearing, and what she saw there made her feel the first real emotion she had felt in what must have been hours: fear. Beside a dry stream bed, there lay the skeleton of a deer, some fragments of its hide still present, sucked down tightly to its brown-white bones. Its rear left femur was caught in some kind of colossal, rusty trap that reminded Fluttershy of a cruel set of teeth, and which was chained to a tree. The skeleton was struggling to escape the trap as if alive, and it seemed to see her with the empty eye sockets of its skull.

Its jaws moved, as if to cry for help, but no sound came. A pang of pity dug into Fluttershy's heart momentarily, but it was quickly squelched – partially by fear, but more so by indifference. Why should she care about some animal stupid enough to let itself be caught in a trap? Especially a dead one?

She stood there, eying the unsettling scene for several seconds. She felt no pity for the undead animal. It wasn't pretty or cute the way a deer was supposed to be; it was just another abomination in a landscape of abominations. Fluttershy only wanted to be away from it.

“I may end up dead like you, but I doubt I'll need company when I am,” she said.

As Fluttershy turned to leave, she heard the clacking and creaking of the deer's bones grow faster and more frantic. It struck her then that she was the only hope of escape this weird, dead thing had. She stopped, and blew air outward through clenched teeth, frustrated.

“I'm still Fluttershy, aren't I? Goddammit.”

She turned and moved slowly towards the deer-thing in the trap. Much to her surprise, it responded to her approach by growing calmer. Oddly, something about this made her feel genuine pity for the strange creature. As she came close, it stretched out a leg toward her, and a tiny fragment of dried-up hide sloughed off of it. At first, the pegasus shied away from its reach, but realizing that she would have to get closer to do anything, she forced herself to continue her approach, allowing the bony appendage to rub against her side as she stepped towards the trap. She trembled, and had an urge to scream. Instead, she gritted her teeth, and looked towards the skull's empty eye sockets.

“It's okay... baby.” She forced the last word of her sentence. "It doesn't look like it broke your leg... bone... leg bone.” She paused, and raised an eyebrow in thought. “I guess if it had, you'd be loose, wouldn't you?”

Fluttershy looked at the trap. It was enormous. She couldn't imagine for a moment that she would be able to open it.

“I don't even know if I can do anything to help you,” she said.

The skeleton lowered its head to the ground, and grew still, as if resigned to its fate.

Fluttershy felt a pang of pity stab at her heart. How long had it been here? She couldn't even guess. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath.

“I'll try, though.”

The deer lifted its skull, and looked back at the tiny pegasus. The wind picked up for a moment, and whipped through Fluttershy's mane. Then, it died down, again.

Fluttershy forced her forehooves between the trap's rusty jaws, and pushed against them with all her might. The trap's hinges groaned and squeaked, and Fluttershy herself squealed like a teapot as she poured out every ounce of her strength against the merciless resistance. Finally, some of the rust around the old hinges crumbled away, and it opened slightly. The deer skeleton jerked its leg free, and only a moment later, Fluttershy lost her grip. The trap snapped shut on thin air.

The yellow pegasus pony fell backward, huffing and puffing. She shut her eyes, and rolled over onto her side, exhausted. She lay still, and breathed in the chill, dry air.

After a moment, something tickled the side of her face, and she opened her eyes. It was grass; green, living grass.

She dragged herself to her hooves quickly, and looked around. The deer skeleton was standing upright now. Muscles and other organs were growing from around its bare bones, and from the few remaining fragments of its hide, skin was expanding outward to surround and contain them. The grass was growing outward from the deer's hooves, and as the first sprigs of it touched the rusted, ancient trap, it crumbled away as if a hundred years had passed in a few moments . As the chain that bound it to the tree likewise crumbled away up to its roots, the tree itself began to come alive again, sprouting leaves and new bark. From that tree, grass also began to grow, spreading outward. As it touched the trees, each one came alive and renewed itself. The stream bed began to flow with clear, cool water, and Fluttershy, her throat parched from hours of wandering the dead forest, bent her head down and began to drink.

After awhile, she raised her head, and came face to face with a pair of deep brown eyes. They belonged to the deer she had rescued.

“Follow me,” came the voice in the wind, and the deer turned and dashed away through the undergrowth. Fluttershy flew upward, and saw that not only had the forest returned to life, but the land itself had somehow pitched upward into beautiful, low, rolling hills. The deer stood atop the nearest of these, and seemed to beckon to the pegasus.

She flew towards it, and it began to run through the forest, leading her onward. After some time, the forest opened up into a barren, cratered landscape that seem to stretch on to the horizon. Here, the deer stopped, and looked up at Fluttershy.

“From here, you will find your own way.” As these words echoed on the wind, the deer turned, and disappeared into the brush.

As Fluttershy turned back to the lifeless, gray landscape that lay beyond the forest, she felt a weight around her neck. She noticed that somehow, she was wearing the amulet of kindness, and as she became aware of this, a ray of yellow light shout outward from it, and arced over the horizon.

Fluttershy flew towards it without a moment's thought or hesitation. Years later, she would realize that the voice in the wind had been her own, but it was as well that she could not yet perceive that or even guess at what it might have meant. For the moment, all that mattered was that bright, strong beam of yellow light, guiding her towards where she knew her friend must be.

* * *

“Your father never wanted to believe it.”

“I don't believe it.” Pinkie said, her speech subdued and cold.

“You were always back and forth as a filly, Pinkamena,” her mother replied. “You were up one minute and down the next. I wasn't really all that surprised. I was sad, of course, but never surprised.”

“Your father said it must have been an accident, but I knew better. You were always silly, but you were never stupid. Deep down, I think he knew it, too. I think that's what killed him.”

Pinkie's face streamed with tears.

“Pinkamena,” spoke the gray mare. “I don't know if this is a dream or if you're a ghost or what, but as much as I loved you, I can't take this. I saw your body. I saw you buried. I cried right alongside your friends and your father and your sisters. I let you go years ago, and I don't want you here, anymore. Please, go.”

Pinkie hesitated, looking at the old mare as tears continued to run down her pink face. She wanted to hug her mother, but she realized that in doing so she would only intensify the old pony's misery. Finally, she turned and walked slowly out the door. Then, she did the only thing she could think to do: She turned north, toward Ponyville, and began to walk. The sky was overcast, and in the distance, she saw pegasi positioning even more clouds. A gentle rain began to fall, slowly soaking her mane so that it hung low and straight around her head and neck, the way it always did when she was sad.

“Just what I need.” Pinkie sighed deeply, and kept putting one hoof in front of the other.

After the longest few miles she could remember walking in her entire life, Pinkie arrived on the edge of Ponyville. She smiled to see at least this place seemingly so unchanged. Everything looked just as it should be as she moved into the town. Everything, that was, except the ponies. They all moved about glumly in the slow, drizzling rain, looking cold and disinterested in whatever they were doing. Nopony was laughing. Nopony was smiling. The whole town seemed hopeless and lifeless.

In desperation for something familiar, she went straight to Sugar Cube Corner. To her surprise, it had been totally remodeled. Its shape was basically the same as it had always been, but it now lacked its former, whimsical ornamentation. Going inside, she found that it had been converted into a more conventional bakery. Simple loaves of bread and rolls and such filled the racks that had once been covered in cakes, cookies, and other sweets. A beige earth pony mare with a loaf of bread for her cutie mark stood behind the counter.

“Hi. What can I get you?” she asked in a monotone voice.

“I'm looking for the cakes?” Pinkie Pie scanned the lobby, overcome with feelings both of familiarity and estrangement.

“No cakes here. I can make you one special order, but I gotta warn you my cakes aren't much good. I mostly just bake bread.” The mare gestured at her cutie mark.

“No, I mean Mr. and Mrs. Cake,” said Pinkie.

“Oh! You must have been out of town for awhile. I bought this place from them years ago. Nice couple, but Mr. Cake said he didn't want to raise his foals in the same house where that girl killed herself. Or do you not know that story?”

“I... I know it.” Pinkie sighed. “Thanks, anyway.”

Pinkie Pie felt that she had never needed a friend, as desperately as she did at that moment. She stepped out of the door and was greeted by a cross-eyed, gray pegasus.

“Oh, hello, Pinkie Pie,” said Derpy Hooves, stepping past her towards the doorway. “PINKIE PIE!?”

The pegasus spun on her rear hooves, and stared at the pink pony.

“No, no. It's got to be my eyes, again. Lots of pink earth ponies in the world. I'm sorry; you just look like somepony I used to know; somepony I miss. She always made the best muffins.” The pegasus paused, and looked up at the building that had once been Pinkie's home. “And if you were crying, she could make you laugh.”

“Oh, don't worry about it,” Pinkie said. She sniffled, but the rain concealed her tears. “You're on the weather patrol. I know she's probably busy with the rain, but could you maybe tell me where I could find Rainbow Dash?”

Derpy cocked her head to the side.

“Rainbow Dash moved away several years ago.”

“Did she join the Wonderbolts?” asked Pinkie, excitedly.

“No, she gave up on that after a friend of hers... had an accident. It sort of took the heart out of her. She moved back to Cloudsdale and works in a lightning factory, now. I see her from time to time, when I go home to visit.”

“Well, what about Fluttershy? Does she still live over near the Everfree Forest?”

“Nope. She moved too. Nopony really knows where she went. That same friend of Rainbow Dash's... Fluttershy spent a lot of time just sitting at her grave, singing old songs to her. I guess she felt like she had to get away from here or her heart would just... break down.”

“Does Twilight Sparkle still live at the Library?” Pinkie's hopes were becoming fainter and fainter.

“Oh, no. When everypony else started moving away, she went back to Canterlot. She always felt responsible for what happened to Pinkie Pie... That was that friend of theirs, by the way... Goodness you look a lot like her, but Pinkie would be older than you, by a bit, I suppose. Anyway, Twilight said she should have seen Pinkie had a problem; said she felt like a failure as a friend. I guess she just couldn't take living here, anymore.” Derpy sighed, and looked up the street towards the library.

“Applejack? Tell me Sweet Apple Acres is still the way I remember it.”

“After her Granny Smith died and her little sister grew up and moved away, she and her brother decided that Ponyville was just too full of sad memories. They sold the farm to the Flim Flam brothers, and moved to Dodge City to work at the cherry orchard. Nopony around here has heard from them since.”

“How could Ponyville be that full of sad memories!? Why does everypony look so miserable?”

“Ponyville's just a miserable town, I guess. Wasn't always this way. It used to be a happy place. I suppose it just lost its heart, somehow. You have a good day, anyway, though, and try to stay dry.” Derpy turned to head inside.

Pinkie's eyes lit up slightly.

“Wait! What about Rarity?”

* * *

Rainbow Dash awoke in a hospital bed. Slowly, the memory of her previous awakening came back to her. She was laying on her side, and frantically, she turned to try and look at her wings. She felt a horrendous stab of pain, and as her body shifted, she caught sight of the edge of the stump where once her right wing had been.

“AAAAAAAAHHH!!” She roared in a mix of anger and despair, her voice cracking as her head dropped onto the pillow.

Hearing her mournful cry, a white earth pony burst into the room. Rainbow Dash recognized her as Nurse Redheart.

“Are you okay? Do you need morphine?”

“I need my wings back!” Rainbow dash sobbed, watery mucus already beginning to pour out of her nose.

“Oh, sweetie, I know.” Nurse Redheart's face was full of genuine pity, and Rainbow Dash despised nothing more than being pitied. She rolled away from the nurse, an act which produced even more pain and left two bloody spots on the center of the mattress.

“You're an earth pony! How could you know!?” Rainbow Dash hiccuped and winced.

Nurse Redheart's look of pity metamorphosed into one of obvious shame. Of course she couldn't know.

“Well,” said the nurse, gently, “we couldn't let the necrosis spread to the rest of your body. It would have killed you.”

“I wish you would have LET IT!” The crippled pegasus screamed.

“What... the hell... am I, now?” She growled, sucking air through her teeth as she hiccuped her way through the sentence. “I'm not even a pegasus, anymore!”

Rainbow Dash rolled her face into her pillow and bit into it to stifle the scream of rage and anguish that blasted its way outward from between her clenched teeth.

“Sweetie,” said the nurse, stroking Rainbow Dash's mane with her fetlock, “we told you this would be hard when you signed the consent form. I'm going to turn up your morphine drip, and you just go back to sleep. You'll be okay. I promise.”

“I don't remember signing a consent form,” Rainbow Dash said, her eyelids growing heavy. “In fact, I don't even remember being sick or checking into the hospital. The last thing I remember is waking up on the operating table, and then being put to sleep, again.”

“That's probably just mild amnesia from the fever the infection gave you, and maybe a little from the anesthesia. It'll come back to you. If you want to see the form, I can show it to you,” said the nurse.

“I wanna... sleep,” she replied, and as Nurse Redheart walked out of the room, that's exactly what she did.

After awhile, Rainbow Dash awoke for the third time in a haze. It was night, now. The pegasus looked around the room. She was totally alone.

She lay there for awhile, weeping until her pillow was soaking wet beneath her face. She was horribly nauseous, partly from the drugs, but even more from the sickening thought of never being able to fly, again.

“I'd honestly rather be dead,” she whispered into the darkness.

Then, an idea came to her; a terrible, terrible idea.

She got to her hooves, still light-headed and out-of-sorts from the influence of the morphine. She walked towards the door, and heard the drip stand on which the I.V. was mounted fall over as a tube, still jutting out of her foreleg, pulled against it.

“Shit.” She took the tube in her teeth, and pulled it loose, along with several wires attached to her chest. Blood oozed from the hole the tube's removal had opened in her foreleg.

The machine to which the tubes had belonged began to emit a singular, piercing tone, and she heard hoofbeats in the hallway. She tried to move for the door, but she felt a wave of nausea hit her as she did so. She resisted it for a moment, gritting her teeth and breathing in sharply through her nose as the room wavered in and out of focus, but despite her best efforts, she felt a lump begin to rise in her throat. Finally, she vomited onto the floor.

Nurse Redheart and two orderlies burst into the room. There stood Rainbow Dash, knees wobbling and coughing downward into a pool of bile that had gathered around her forehooves.

“Sweetie, there's a bedpan if you feel sick.”

“No,” said Rainbow Dash, her breathing still hassled and uneven. “Not big enough; feel really sick.”

“This is a really bad reaction,” said Nurse Redheart to an orderly. “It may just be from too little oxygen, but go get the anesthesiologist, if he hasn't gone home.'

“And you,” she said to the other orderly, “help me get her to the bathroom. Then, we need to get her on some oxygen.”

The nurse and the orderly positioned themselves to either side of Rainbow Dash. Each hooked a foreleg under one of hers, and used their remaining three to slowly hobble her towards the bathroom. Rainbow Dash felt weak, but it didn't matter.

“What's the worst that could happen?” she whispered. “I die? Ha.”

“You're just having a bad reaction to anesthesia. It happens all the time. You're not going to die.” Nurse Redheart had good ears, apparently.

“Yes, I am,” Rainbow Dash whispered.

They were near the door, now, and Rainbow Dash summoned up what little strength she had to wrench herself free of the other ponies' grasp. Running into the hall, she could hear Nurse Redheart calling out behind her.

“Please, Rainbow. I know you're upset, but hysterics won't solve anything,” the nurse called down the hallway, toward where Rainbow Dash now stood.

The wing-bereft pegasus felt her stomach lurch, then deposited another small pool of bile between her hooves. Its image swayed back and forth, splitting into multiples of itself. She snorted through her nose and shook her head violently. The images consolidated together, and a rancid scent curled her snout.

She lifted her head sharply and scanned the hallway for a stairwell or elevator. There was none to be found. As she turned to go the other direction, she saw that Nurse Redheart, a security guard, and two large orderlies were blocking her path. There was also a doctor approaching from behind them at quick but wary trot.

There was a hypodermic needle clutched in his teeth.

She looked back over her shoulder, and caught a glimpse of something she had overlooked before: There was a window at the end of the hallway.

She ran towards it as fast as her condition would allow, and threw herself into the air. Muscles in her back contracted instinctively in an effort to move wings that were not there, and she growled in pain even before she struck the glass. She fell from the second story and landed in the bushes below the window amidst a shower of glass and speckles of her own blood.

She stood. None of her legs were broken, and for once in her life, her legs were all she needed. She heard several frantic voices coming from the main entrance on the adjacent side of the building.

“Hmph,” she laughed bitterly, wiping blood from her nose. “Just like old times.”

She ripped the hospital gown off her body and broke into a gallop. Mercifully, the rush of oxygen and adrenaline seemed to be clearing her head. After a little less than half an hour at a near all-out sprint, she reached her goal.

“There it is,” thought Rainbow Dash. “Ghastly Gorge.”

The chasm cut through her field of vision, a swath of black across a landscape of dark greens and browns. She'd always known she might die here one day. Now, she intended to.

She didn't give herself time to think or reconsider. However she had come to be as she was now, she had no wish to continue living. She screamed with every ounce of her pent-up rage, and hammered at the earth beneath her hooves with all her might. As the edge of the gorge rushed towards her, she gave a mighty heave and hurled herself aloft.

As she sailed through the sky, she shut her eyes, and made every effort to soak in the feeling of the wind rushing over her face for what she knew would be the last time. It stole the tears away from the corners of her eyes, and new ones sprang up to replace them. Her heart felt a sense of heaviness and dread, but also an eerie sense of calm and satisfaction. Finally, she opened her eyes to see the ground rushing upwards to embrace her with its finality and absolution.

Her forelegs struck first, buckling underneath her so that she went into a wild roll that ended with her laying in a heap, somehow still alive, conscious, and throbbing with tremendous pain throughout her entire body. Laying there, her chest heaving, she tried to understand what had happened. She was bitterly disappointed that the fall hadn't killed her.

Then, she noticed a strange thing: There were no rock walls anywhere around her. Nor was there any river. Haltingly, she came to understand that she wasn't at the bottom of the gorge. She dragged herself to her hooves, and looked around. After a few moments, the reality of the situation became apparent: somehow, she had actually cleared the width of the gorge, and landed on the opposite side, still alive.

In the silence of the night, she sat there on her haunches, staring eyes half open across the gaping, empty void over which she had hurled herself in a maddened death rage. What she had just done was an impossible feat. Even crippled; even broken and with the essence of what she had thought she was torn from her physical body, she had done something that defied even her own imagination. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, leaping to the earth, one droplet at a time, and there, alone in the silence, she let loose a ragged, coarse laugh that filled her mouth with thick, foul-tasting fluid from her belabored lungs.

“I... am… fucking... awesome,” she growled.

She coughed violently, hanging her head in exhaustion. A lacework of saliva, mucus, and blood grew wider and more intricate in the dirt before her eyes with every wet, hacking exhalation. There was no part of her that did not ache. Her legs were on fire. Her lungs felt like they were full of broken glass. Her heart was still pounding, filling her ears with the sound of her own blood pounding through her skull. Her skin was covered in cuts and abrasions from the window she had jumped through and from numerous thorns and brambles she had brushed past in her crazed run through the woods. Most of all, absent of morphine, the two stumps where her wings had been throbbed in agony. She collapsed to her knees.

"Rainbow Motherfucking Dash," she whispered, and she slumped forward, her face pressing into the soil. "Maybe she was more than a pair of wings."

Then, in a shower of blood and feathers that glistened in the light of a strange, fading moon, two perfect new wings burst from Rainbow Dash's bandaged stumps. All her pain faded. All her cuts and scrapes began to close, and Rainbow Dash looked up to see a blue ray of light pointing towards the horizon from the amulet of loyalty that she only now noticed she was still somehow wearing.

* * *

Applejack stood on the porch, shouting into the flames.

“Momma! Daddy!? Come out!!” Her voice was beginning to become strained and hoarse, and she was growing more afraid by the second. The adult mind inside the filly's tiny body seethed at its own helplessness. Why did this dream always come back? Why could she never change anything or do anything differently?

After some time, she heard her adult voice speak, cold and stolid, as it always was when she spoke to herself inside her own mind. “Cause it ain't just a dream, AJ; It's a memory.”

Somehow, she was suddenly standing next to the apple tree where Macintosh and Granny Smith were huddled. She was a full-grown mare again, but the filly she had once been still stood screaming on the porch. The fire had already spread into the branches of the enormous old apple tree, and would ultimately consume it along with the house. She looked up at it, and felt a pang of guilt and sadness.

“This tree'll burn," she said. "Daddy'll come down the stairs with Applebloom tied up in a blanket in his teeth and push me out into the yard. He'll put her down in the grass, and then he'll collapse and die right there. The roof'll cave in, and I'll realize Momma ain't coming out of there. Then, I'll start screaming like a goddamn banshee, and Big Mac'll have to drag me away so's I don't run inside what's left of that ol' house and get my fool little self killed.”

She said these things flatly, with almost no emotion except mild melancholy. “I'll lay across Daddy and cry and scream. Then, Macintosh'll finally pull me away while Granny gets Applebloom.'

“That's the way it's gonna happen because that's the way it did happen. I couldn't do a damned thing about it then, and I sure can't do a damned thing about it now.”

She sighed.

“You know what?” she said, resolutely. “Fuck you, dream. I done been through this a thousand goddamned times, and I ain't never gonna be able to change it 'cause it's already been done. I'm sick of this bullshit. I ain't nothing but a tired-ass orange earth mare who grows apples, for fuck's' sake. Been lying on my goddamn back for years over this shit, and I'm sick of it as all HELL! I don't care if I gotta crawl, I'm getting over this bullshit! I'll roll over and climb the goddamn floor before I'll lie here and die like some weak-ass little PUSSY!! Can't do a goddamn thing about this, and I'm GONE, you hear me!?”

She turned away from the burning home of her childhood, and began to walk. As she did so, an orange ray shot out of the amulet she was wearing, arcing over the horizon.

“Reckon I can do a thing or two about that, though."

She broke into a gallop.

* * *

Rarity was lying on her bed again, staring across the room at the haggard, scarecrow-like pony in the mirror. She was totally numb, consumed with the joy of being utterly disconnected from herself. She watched her reflection only to mock it with the fact that it could not harm her. The syringe hung from her foreleg, seeping blood from around where its needle was still embedded. Surgical tubing hung limply above it. All these things stared at her from inside the mirror across the room.

“I may be ugly,” she smiled, “but I feel beautiful.”

There was a knock at the door of her room. Rarity did not so much as notice it. She was too busy listening instead to the slow, rhythmic sound of her own breathing. After a few moments, the knock sounded again.

“Rarity?” came a bright but muffled voice. The knob rattled as somepony tried to open the locked door.

“Go away,” said Rarity, not even lifting her head.

“She said you'd say that,” came the voice, again.

“I don't want to see anypony,” she replied.

“She said you’d say that, too,” came the the bright, muffled reply.

“And I don't want anypony to see me,” said Rarity.

“And that,” said the voice.

“Go away,” Rarity repeated, this time more firmly.

The voice sounded again. “But it's Pinkie Pie!”

“Now, you're just being an asshole,” Rarity said. “Pinkie's dead. She overdosed on sleeping pills. I should know; I gave them to her. If I'd have known that was what she was going to do...” Rarity's words trailed off.

There was a long pause, then Pinkie's voice came from beyond the door, again. “Do you really believe that?”

This set Rarity to thinking about the bizarre nature of her situation and exactly how she'd gotten there for the first time since her awakening a few hours previous.

“Come to think of it,” said Rarity, “It never did make any sense. Fuck me; you don't make any sense. Pinkie had a very distinctive voice, and whoever you are, you certainly sound like her.”

Rarity rolled over and tossed her head to get her mane out from under it. Locks of the violet mass flopped over and lay limp across her face. She did not bother to move them. She weakly pushed the syringe out of her flesh with her free hoof. The voice on the other side of the door said nothing for over a minute, and Rarity assumed that whoever it was had gone.

“That's not even why it's always bothered me,” she said, talking to herself aloud, as her seclusion had put her in the habit of doing. “Pinkie Pie had no restraint whatsoever, and I would never have given her enough of anything for her to overdose on it; especially not after that incident with the Vicodin. Goddamn, that was funny.”

The voice came from the opposite side of the door once more, rising through an octave as it spoke. “You really are Rarity! My Rarity!” On the other side of the room from where the voice had just been clearly audible through the door, a tinfoil-covered window smashed into pieces. Pinkie Pie rolled inward across the floor, then scrambled to her hooves. Rarity’s only reaction was to squint her eyes at the light that washed inward from the broken window.

“That's why you never buy a bargain bin grappling HooOLY SHIT!!” Pinkie's jaw landed on the floor as she stared at Rarity's ghoulish face and ragged, malnourished body.

Pinkie Pie physically picked her lower jaw up off the floor with her hoof, and forcibly closed her own mouth.

Without sitting up or even raising her head, Rarity cocked a heroine-addled eyebrow at her erstwhile friend. “That's weird. Your mane isn't curly. Also, you're dead.”

Pinkie Pie sighed. “Everypony keeps saying that.”

Rarity licked her lips in an effort to moisten them, but it was largely ineffective, given that her tongue itself had no moisture to offer. She sat up and tried to reach for the bottle of gin on the nightstand. She only succeeded in knocking it to the floor. It did not shatter.

“This is so fucked up. I don't usually hallucinate on horse. That shit must have been laced with acid. Last time I buy from... where did I score that batch, anyway?” She paused for a moment. “And why the fuck would somepony call heroine 'horse,' anyway?”

She shrugged. "Whatever; it shouldn't be making me see things like this."

Pinkie Pie stepped towards the bed. “You’re not seeing things, Rarity. I'm real. I promise.”

“Fuck you,” said Rarity.

Pinkie dropped her head, and her ears drooped. “But I'm your Pinkie,” she said. “For real.”

“My Pinkie? Now, there's a good reason that can't be true. My Pinkie left me, without saying goodbye, or even leaving a goddamned note.” Her voice cracked with bitterness and grief. ”Then, my Fluttershy left me. Then my Twilight, then my Rainbow Dash, then my Applejack!” Rarity's voice grew louder with each name, and she rolled onto her hooves. She stumbled towards the dresser, but stopped halfway, and turned her head towards Pinkie Pie, who had backed several steps away from the seething unicorn.

“And, let me tell you what happened, then. My Sweetie Belle grew up and left, and never so much as writes a letter. My parents disowned me, and moved away out of shame. My Opal got old and died. My business fell apart at the seams, right along with all my dreams and everything I used to believe was mine.”

Rarity swayed for a moment, staring icepicks at Pinkie Pie. Her voice wavered as she spoke, but now her eyes did not glisten with even the faintest indication of tears. She was too dehydrated for her body to produce them.

“And what do I have left? This ugly face in the mirror.”

She turned her head towards the mirror and stumbled towards it. When she reached it, she placed a hoof against it to steady herself.

After several seconds Pinkie Pie's image appeared in the glass next to her own. Rarity paid it no attention for a moment, until she felt the gentle touch of a hoof on the side of her face, pushing it to face the pink pony. Pinkie had something in her teeth that Rarity hadn't seen or used for a long, long, time: an eyeshadow applicator.

Pinkie's face leaned in close to her own. Rarity felt a gentle touch against her half-open eyelids, and the warm breeze of Pinkie's breath on her forehead. She shut her eyes, and made no effort to resist. In a few moments, she felt Pinkie pull away, and opened her eyes. The pink pony was smiling at her through tears.

“Is that better?” asked Pinkie Pie, with a sniffle.

Rarity turned her head towards the mirror. Her whole body was still ragged and disgusting, and her face was still gaunt and drawn tight to her skull. Her eyes, however, were much as she had known them, once, though she could not remember when.

“Pinkie,” asked Rarity,” How did I get like this?”

Pinkie Pie stepped back, and looked around in confusion. “I don't know,” she said. “All I know is that everypony thinks I killed myself, and Ponyville has turned into... well... a shithole.”

Rarity looked around, dazed. “But Ponyville...” She paused for a moment, staring into the mirror image of her own eyes.

At that moment, something --maybe the makeup, maybe Pinkie Pie’s undeniable presence next to her, maybe something inside herself that she didn’t fully understand -- caused a wave of memory to wash over her.

“Nightmare Moon,” she said. “She's responsible for this.”

Rarity's mind began to clear, and her body grew gradually more strong and healthy. As she saw Rarity returning to normal, Pinkie Pie's mane suddenly puffed out into its usual, curly shape, and her eyes hardened as she locked them into those of the white unicorn. “Oh, we are going to kill that bitch.”

“I get her face,” growled Rarity.

Both ponies felt pulled towards the broken window, and as they looked out of it, they saw a pair of light rays, one white and one pink, shooting outwards toward the horizon.