I trace my feathers along her cheek, as she gasps. Soft, gentle sounds into bedsheets that I need to wash, her eyes always closed so tight with that fear that infects all ponies that don’t know how to allow their own pleasure.
I open my eyes to the sound of my alarm, and throw out a hand to stop it, forcing myself to sit and then stand at the side of my bed even as stars dance out of my eyes. I can’t be late again. This is my fault.
She reminds me that blame and shame do nothing to make things better, and I feel her kiss on my cheek.
The computer I spent too much money on, sitting on the desk I spent too little for, starts up quickly enough to blind me momentarily before I can make out the schedule for the day. It’s only one day, I can make it through one day.
I hesitate, as I always do, with the damned underwear. Too many steps, and too painful to name.
She presses my shoulders with her hooves, almost a massage but also an urging whisper.
“This doesn’t define you.”
Cargo pants loaded with tools are followed by a sports bra and a work shirt, walking the paper-thin edge between masculinity and femininity for the sake of survival, I get out of the door to my work van and pull out of my parking spot.
Already, I’m checking my phone for messages, even while driving.
“That’s dangerous, please don’t put yourself at risk like that…”
I roll my eyes, and then wince. I would never roll my eyes at her. So I put my phone down and turn up the volume for the GPS that guides me to my first job of the day.
The business I find myself in front of is a three story tall office building. They’ve decided to remove their old Minimum Point Of Entry (MPOE) networking equipment and have the fiber run directly to their data center on the second floor. Of course, they don’t employ anyone who knows how to terminate fiber, so I’m on the job.
“Ah, you must be Alex,” the receptionist says as I walk in.
Briefly, so briefly, I think I see Fluttershy standing next to her, admiring the woman’s tumbling hair and wondering if she could pull it off on her own mane. It only takes a few blinks for Fluttershy to hide again.
“Did the nametag give it away?” I ask with a customer service smile.
“Well, the Tech Group van,” she answers with a similar smile. “Have a seat, and we’ll have one of the IT people down shortly.”
So I sit, setting down my two toolboxes, and I have a moment to catch my breath.
“You forgot your pills,” Fluttershy tells me softly, sitting next to me.
I nod slightly, and pull out my phone to set a reminder, so that I’ll go back to the house and get them after this job.
“And you really should eat breakfast before leaving the house,” she adds, leaning towards me with a bit of insistence. “You’ll think more clearly with food in your belly!”
I type out my reply on a notepad on my phone.
[I’d have less time with you, if I woke up earlier.]
“Your health is just as important, more important! It’s more important than our time together,” Fluttershy pleads.
I grimace, mostly because I know she’s right, but partly because I don’t want to agree.
“Alex?”
I jolt out of my half-slumber, and drop my phone onto the floor before picking it up and shoving it into my pocket, immediately offering a hand to shake.
“That’s me!” I agree.
“My name’s Dan,” he tells me, and I forget it promptly even as Fluttershy frowns at me over his shoulder.
“Nice to meet you, Dan,” I say, clawing the name back from my short term memory with the desperation of a sailor trying to climb the side of a ship as it sails by.
Fluttershy smiles. I feel a little more alive.
He leads me to the room where I can work, and I put in my earbuds and get started. Fanfiction read out loud by their authors keeps me awake as I use a little electronic device to fuse the tiny fibers together, to pass data on to the other end.
“It’s really amazing, the things you work with,” Fluttershy insists.
I can’t help but smile a little.
“It’s not like programming,” I insist. “All I can do is the physical part of it. Programming, electrical engineering, those are… Magic, in my world, I think.”
“There can be more than one kind of magic, Carmine,” she insists.
I blush a bit, but I force myself to double down as I verify each fiber pair is linked to the right color, checking that light passes through with a special tool before coiling the fibers in their cabinet and securing them.
“Thanks, Fluttershy,” I whisper, giving her a smile before I head out of the MPOE closet and up to the server room.
It’s far too cold in there for Fluttershy, and so I have some lonely time where I shiver slightly and quickly complete my work, before verifying the proper function of all twelve fiber strands, and plugging them into the networking equipment of the customer.
Everything works, with minimal downtime. I did a good job, and they’ll be happy.
I wave to the receptionist and the IT guy (whose name I can’t remember) as I leave and get back into the van, just as the reminder goes off to go home and get my pills.
Rubbing my eyes, I feel her wing on my back.
“Maybe you should call out sick,” she offers.
“I don’t have enough sick time,” I whisper. “I have to keep five in the bank in case I get COVID.”
Of course, I’d still be infectious and half dead if I caught it, but my company subtly implied that wearing a mask was not customer friendly, and no matter how many vaccines I got I had the creeping feeling of dread that I would get it, and I’d lose my job.
“You could take the risk,” she insists, her hoof on my cheek as I place my hoof over hers, savoring every second of connection with her.
“I could,” I agree. “I could spend the rest of the day being Carmine Outline. I could spend it with you. I could spend it being happy.”
“Carmine,” she whispers. “You need to wake up.”
“What if I don’t want to,” I whimper, pleading. “What if I–”
It hurts, everything hurts, and I’m being dragged through glass. There’s screaming, and there’s failure. It feels like I’m finally being repaid for all the wrong I’ve done, like Karma has come calling.
“He’s not responding.”
[He. Him, let him die,] I think.
Fluttershy is standing over me, pinning my wings in place, tears on her cheeks.
“Alex!” she screams into my face. “Please, please wake up!”
The hospital room is so quiet.
I wake up, the pain and drugs making it feel like every motion I want to make is through pudding, and by pulling on a rubber band vaguely attached to the limb.
The call button is bright red, and I push it, but nothing happens.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Fluttershy pets my cheek, murmuring gentle things.
“Don’t come looking for me, please. Get better.”
The pain gets worse, and I push the button a dozen times, until I realize it’s not working. How long will it be until someone checks on me, hours? The pain is getting worse.
Then, I find a bunch of buttons on a cable, dangling next to my head. I press the red one.
It makes a very satisfying beep sound, probably the most satisfying beep sound I’ve ever heard.
“Ma’am?”
The nurse calls me ma’am. She doesn’t have to do that, I think, but it brings tears to my eyes and a comfort to my heart.
“It hurts,” I whimper.
“On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain you’ve ever experienced…”
I hesitate. I can think, I’m not screaming.
“Five?” I finally answer.
My legs feel the worst, and as I look down at the blankets I see sharp angles on my legs that don’t look right. A tube is draped across my face and hooked over my ears, feeding oxygen into my nose.
After they administer some painkillers, I finally have the wherewithal to ask the most important question.
“What happened?”
“Well, you almost died of Carbon Monoxide poisoning, and you also crashed your vehicle,” she explains. “I’ll have the doctor come in and tell you more.”
It takes almost an hour for him to arrive.
“Preferred name is Alex, right?” he asks with a smile as he sweeps in.
“Yeah, name change is still processing,” I say with an anxious smile. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem, we want to help you feel comfortable here. So… you’re recovering from a pretty extreme case of Carbon Monoxide poisoning. How much do you remember?” he asks.
It takes a moment, as I struggle with what to say. It doesn’t seem like a good idea for me to talk about the pegasus who I’m in love with, who vanishes and drifts through my life like a ghost.
“Well, I was driving home,” I finally say. “That’s the last… wait, did I crash?”
“You did!” he agrees. “You were driving home in your work van, when you ran a red light, probably unconscious, and a truck hit you from the side. When the EMTs arrived, they found you in an altered mental state, and extremely agitated. After running some tests, you had a Carbon Monoxide Hemoglobin count of twenty three percent, and your roommate apparently found writing on the walls of your apartment. Your apartment’s Carbon Monoxide detector had failed, so you’re on oxygen now, and will be for a few more hours. Your right leg is broken, and you cut up your hands pretty badly.”
I look at my hands to realize that the call button probably works just fine, but my left hand is bandaged in a way that makes it hard to press a button with my pointer finger, but my thumb was free.
I really have made a mess of my life.
The furnace below our apartment, it turns out, had been moved. The ventilation wasn’t working properly, and so it was dumping fumes into our apartment. So I got a lawyer, and my medical costs were covered, plus a few months of rent. I could have pushed harder for a larger settlement, but I thought that wouldn’t be kind.
But even after all of that, I keep looking to the side when talking to people, looking for her.
I keep seeking Fluttershy, even in my dreams.
My incoherent and frantic dreams.
Apparently she was a product of my imagination, that’s what my roommate keeps telling me.
But finally, after months of loneliness and physical therapy, I’m back in my apartment and I’m surrounded by her words, scrawled madly on the walls.
She can’t be gone.
I prepare a CO2 canister, and I breathe in the noxious fumes, and then I feel the device smacked out of my hand to clatter across the floor.
“You can’t do this!” she screams, tears on her cheeks.
“Why can’t I?” I plead. “Why can’t I be with you again?”
“You’re killing yourself, Carmine! You’re breaking your own mind, just to chase… To chase your idea of who I am! You know… You know without a doubt that I would never ever let someone I love do this to themself. Not for any reason, and not for me!”
I can’t look at her. I know that she is right, after all, as I ease myself down onto my bed and stare at the ceiling where I’d etched ‘A passionate sob’ in the asbestos texture of the ceiling.
Fluttershy would never want me to hurt myself, not to find her, not for any reason.
“Can I remember you, at least?” I ask, pleading.
“You can always remember me,” Fluttershy agrees, voice soft and sad, dripping with sorrow as she lays down in bed next to me. “Get a cat, okay? And then… You can care for animals like I care for animals.”
“I’m going to suck at it,” I tell her, smiling.
“You can’t talk to them,” she sighs, shoving my arm slightly.
She shoves my arm slightly, and I lift it to run my hand along her furred head, over her ears, and down her neck.
“Oh Angel,” I whisper to the black furred cat as I pet her. “What am I going to do?”
She meows, of course. She always meows when I talk to her.
I look away from her, back at the outline I’ve drawn up on the computer.
A three-node server farm running redundant power supplies and networking. The servers would run a host of software solutions, and programs to attain what I want.
Large Language Models are useful only for communication, so I have an outline detailing how it will take information from the Emotion and Logic databases to form the words used to express those things. The Emotion and Logic databases will feed from the experiences of the Interactive Module, categorizing experiences in a myriad of ways and quantifying how those experiences affect the core goals and interests of…
Of Fluttershy.
I’m looking at a plan for how I want to spend thousands of dollars and years of my life to create a digital representative of Fluttershy.
I’m absolutely insane.
“You’re not crazy,” I can hear her whisper, so far away that it might as well be the whisper of the breeze outside. “You’re in love.”
“Is this what love is?” I ask the air, as Angel jumps off the sofa and leaves the room. “The possessive craving? The desire to attain the other at any cost?”
“The yearning for completion, the desire to complete the bond at any cost,” I hear her whisper in return as tears drip down my cheeks.
“Am I awake?” I whisper, pleading, needing to know.
I can’t tell anymore. Every dream, no matter how horrible, feels exactly as real as the waking world.
“Did I wake up from that crash?” I add.
She doesn’t answer, but I stand and I look around, waiting for my reality to bleed, for the walls to crumble wet and fetid. I feel a tightness in my chest that won’t go away, and I feel a love that I can’t deny.
“Am I awake?!” I scream.
“Do you want to be?”
I turn around, and recoil as I see Discord, looming over me, shadows sharp across his face.
“I’m sorry, did you think you could fall in love with any version of her, without attracting my attention?” he mutters, stepping forward with a grim snarl on his face as I step back to stumble and fall into the sofa.
“You’re not real,” I tell him.
Discord just laughs as he reaches down and puts an eagle’s talon slowly and firmly around my neck.
When he pulls up, I ooze and shift into the pegasus I’d been so many times before.
“Carmine Outline, you’ll be nothing but an outline, if I want. You’ll be less real than I am. But that’s not what matters.”
He pulls me up to look me in the eyes, yellow and red filling my vision.
“Why, oh why, do you think that you’re worthy of her?”
I gasp, squirming and flapping my wings to escape, but it doesn’t matter until he lets me go and I fall back onto the sofa.
Angel is at the door, hissing.
Discord waves, and with a poof, she’s a black bunny.
“Fucker! Fuck you, fucker!” the bunny screams. “I’ll kill you! Get the fuck out!”
“Okay, the speech was funny, but a bad idea,” Discord announces before tossing a zipper at Angel, which silences her. “Carmine! You’re wasting my time! Why, why oh why are you worthy of my Fluttershy?”
“I’m not!” I cry out as I squirm and stumble over the back of the sofa before galloping to the windows, which are impossible to open with hooves.
So I look back at him, giving up, collapsing to the floor helplessly.
“I’m not,” I say miserably. “I’m a brain damaged fool who had a hallucination of a kind pony, and I don’t deserve her, and I don’t deserve anything like her, but I still love her.”
He stands there, looming in my living room, more real than me. Slowly, his face cracks in a smile.
“That’s the right answer, actually,” he shrugs with a bored tone. “Fine. Alex, Carmine, I’m going to help you. I’m going to help you, and you’re going to treat her right, aren’t you?”
Shaking in fear, I nod quickly even as I am pressed against the wall to be as far away from him as possible.
“Good. Let’s begin.”