Ask Me To Promise

It's been a year.

It's been a year and nothing's changed.

She isn't better. She isn't over it.

Her friends get on without her. The rift seems to grow between them. Every missed call, unanswered text pushes them apart a little wider.

They were friends before Sunset. She was the one to break them up in the first place. Equestria's Twilight glued them together, tacked Sunset on, and her Twilight hitched the ride.

Natural then, that they'd fall apart.

Sunset realized, one day, that she died when Twilight did. She wants to end it, but she doesn't. Because she's weak, and afraid of what death really feels like.

Would she go to Heaven, like some of the human religions say? Hell? Tartarus? Or would she, as she suspects, simply cease to exist.

It would be peaceful, if she was conscious for it.

But she wouldn't. And so it terrifies her.

Fear isn't the only reason, anyway. After all, she did this to herself.

She hopes when she dies, if a higher power exists, that she can beat them bloody. Life has put her through so much shit, and she's just so fucking done with it all.

Sometimes, late in the evening, after one too many puffs of leaf, the anxieties roar screaming through her skull. She finds herself drifting in a haze, limbs pushing through air like jello. She finds her smallest knife, the one she and Twilight used to slice the little things when they would cook meals together.

She brings it to the bathroom, and rolls down her sleeve if she has one. She holds the blade to her skin. Sometimes, there's no pressure. Sometimes, enough to form an indent.

She never actually does the deed. Her heart races, and breathing turns sharp and shallow. Before she knows what she's doing, the knife is across the room, her face in her palms, hunched over the toilet as her cheeks become a blazing, waterlogged mess.

Why? She asks that question every day, multiple times a day.

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Why couldn't it be her? If anyone deserved to die, it sure as shit wasn't Twilight.

She was always the better woman. Kinder. Smarter. Whole. Not the broken stitched up disaster that was Sunset Shimmer, the failed scum of two realities.

She hates life. She hates people. She hates the world.

Most of all, she hates herself.