Unbecoming

by RepentInReprise

Introduction: What Remains To Be Seen

I awoke. I saw nothing, and everything. Darkness enveloped and engulfed around me. I looked around, seeing nothing, and still everything at once. I blinked. I rubbed my eyes. Nothing changed. Except one thing… I closed my eyes, seeing nothing. I opened them, and saw nothing. Blindness… where darkness becomes everything where it is nothing.

Nothingness! Nothing is around me! I… I don’t where I am! I flailed and kicked both my front and hind legs. My wings spread and flapped in futility. I hit something metal with both my appendages. Having now a sense of something, anything, that was this metal, I came to a halt. Still breathing rapidly in abject terror, sweat upon my coat, and a feverish sense of myself, I began to consciously slow my breathing, still taking in deep breaths, sinking, at the reality before me… or around me… I could no longer tell a sense of dimension. Only up and down are what I seemed to feel as I looked forward and downward, only to see an endless abyss, and fall, skyward or downward.

I heard the hum of what sounded to me like a machine… it hummed softly, and along with it, played a beep that now sounded occasionally, and with a short duration, when, I had noticed beforehand it was beeping rapidly, and with split-second durations, when I came to be. I thought I had heard voices, sounding faint, and hooves, clopping distantly… but for now, I was still without ground. I was merely floating in space. I uplifted my front leg and reached out my hoof, trying to even realize if I was moving my hoof at all, and touched an object with enough force in my feeling, that it made a metallic clang. I moved my hoof across the metal, running along it so that I wouldn't fall back into darkness. In feeling, I sensed the coldness the metal gave me, with my hoof warm, and the metal cold, the coldness spread through my hoof to my front leg in shock. I sighed in relief and terror, shivering.

Holding onto the metal railing, I had now already felt the soft cushioning beneath my body, especially from the felt sense of having flapped my wings helplessly just now, and the soft fluff beneath my head… I was in a bed.

I screamed again, crying for help, in desperation, for the stability of my own organism, begging for something tangible, something real I could believe in to hold onto. I suddenly felt a gentle, soft, and furry touch upon my cheek. It felt… loving. I stopped screaming. I breathed in-and-out heavily. Tears down my face, I turned my head in the direction of where I assumed this being was. I… I knew that hoof. I knew that voice, as she spoke.

“Dashie… I’m here. I -- I’m sorry.”

I felt quick successive pings of wetness against my muzzle, and soon I felt the dampness soak and sink upon my muzzle. She… she’s crying. Had she… had she been here this whole time? She knows how to handle situations like… mine… especially when not to interrupt someone in their panic. I sobbed, shattering while simultaneously reassembling the reality I was experiencing, I scrambled to move my hoof to hold hers, to hold onto that very thing that is real and that which I believe… I felt softness and gentleness grip around my hoof, knowing now that I had felt was real…

Twilight Sparkle.