Equestrylvania Adventure

by Brony_Fife

Memories ~ Fluttershy

---

She hears his shuffling hoofsteps just before he comes in, and cocks her head towards the door. The knob turns with a squeak, the door slowly swinging open to reveal his tired cyan face and his shaggy black mane and his thin lips. There is a heaviness in his purple eyes that purloins the serenity from her room.

For a few seconds, nothing. No action is taken, not even breathing. Finally, he releases a sigh he’d been holding, and nods. “Follow me,” he says, his baritone stumbling out sleepily from his mouth.

She nods. Her animal friends, their tiny faces pursed with worry, observe her as she gets up on all fours, vacating their tea party. She follows him out of the guest room.

The halls in this house are dimly lit, but still easily navigated. The air outside is chilly and wet, an audience of dark clouds above producing precipitation that threaten to become freezing rain before much longer. The autumn leaves crunch beneath their hooves loudly, with no birdsong or cricket-chirp to interrupt it. There’s a scent that denotes the outdoors, a mixture of stench and sweetness that tempts one to poke their tongues out to see if the smell has a taste.

Their trek takes them past the animal cages, currently covered in tarps. The animals that tenant them, normally happy to have shelter when it’s about to rain, look upon the two with solemn eyes and hunched backs. Their unusual silence implies an uncomfortable expectation—as if they all know something terrible is about to happen, simply because it must.

There, at the end of this dirt path, stands the old shed. Its red paint has aged into a dull pink, the wood chipped and warped by years of fickle weather breathing fierce winds of hot and cold upon it. The dark sky above colors the shed ominously, its single window a sinister black eye staring into her soul. She steels herself as they both stop just in front of the shed.

There’s a few seconds of silence, interrupted only by the quiet dancing of leaves and whispers of September’s wind. She realizes at some point—perhaps it’s his lowered head staring at the ground or maybe it’s the awkward way he shuffles his hooves—that he is merely thinking over what it is he should say.

Finally, he turns around and kneels before her, a mountain going down to look a young sapling in its eyes. He breathes solemnly, that same heavy look in his eyes from before, and slowly, fatherly, brushes a stray strand of her mane from her face.

“Okay,” he says in a sturdy tone, “it’s time. You know what to do?”

“The neck. And do it quick.”

He nods. “That’s, that’s good,” he says, his eyes beginning to water. “That’s my girl. You ready?”

She draws in a deep, shaky breath and gulps, but nods. “Yes,” she lies, “I am.”

Another pause. He then turns to the shed and opens its door. It opens with a long and ominously muted creak, revealing a darkness penetrated by only a single lightbulb. Perhaps most disturbing is the small dog lying on a pillow under the light.

It used to be a strong, sturdy creature not even as far back as one year ago, with a healthy brown coat of fur and deep, happy eyes. The lightbulb sheds its melting light upon the husk of that creature: shivering and scrawny and gnarled and shaggy and blind. Weakly, it lifts its knobby head to look up at the sound of the door opening.

The dog warps as an uncomfortable warmth builds in her face and a lump constricts her throat. She breaths deeply, shakily exhales, and with her head held high she trots inside.

“I’ll give you five minutes,” he tells her. “After that, if you haven’t done it, I’ll do it myself.” His last four words sound almost like a threat.

But the door doesn’t close. She turns slightly, finding her own eyes caught by his. The heaviness in them grows. “All right,” he says after another strange pause, “I’ll leave you to it.”

The door closes with a kind of finality that pinches every vein in her body.

She looks into eyes that can no longer see her, into a face that cannot bear to smile anymore. He’s been in so much pain. Both student and teacher had done all they could do—except this. They’d done everything they could to avoid this, going from one medicine to another. After all the money spent in pointless treatment, after her teacher became impatient and angry with her, and after many hours of argument, and many more hours of tears, it has come to this.

Her next steps forward are quiet and slow, pulling her along reluctantly to the ailing, dying animal lying on the pillow. It looks up at her blankly, its long tail struggling to wag. Her lips, up to now a thin frown, begin to quiver as she stops in front of the dog.

“Hello, Alfred,” she greets.

Alfred flicks an ear in response—the same way he always does when someone calls him by name.

She raises her hoof and, slowly, demurely, she gives him one last petting. The five minutes drain away slowly as she reminisces: about how she’d assisted in his birth, about how she was sad when his mother and siblings were given good homes and he never got that chance, about how much fun it was to run by the meadows with him in tow, how she felt the day they discovered he was already so sick...

By the time she reaches the end of their memory lane, her face is damp with tears. The hoof that had been petting Alfred rises to her muzzle, wiping the snot that streams from her nostrils. Finally, she takes one last deep breath. Now she is ready.

One hoof goes around Alfred’s face, touching his too-warm, too-dry nose. The other touches the base of his head, where it meets the neck. Despite his continued shaking, Alfred reaches a strange sense of calmness. Peacefulness. As if he’d been expecting this to happen.

She gulps. Steels herself. She closes her eyes with a grimace on her face.

“I love you,” she whispers.

A single sharp movement is followed by the sickening pop of something breaking. Alfred has no time to yelp, to feel anything. His body ceases its shaking, ceases its constant, constant pain. She holds onto his body as he becomes limp. She folds over onto it.

He can hear her sobs from outside the shed.

---

It’s not a place he likes taking her, but the animal graveyard—not too far from his house—only takes them a three-minute walk to reach. They’d been here once this week already, a task he’d taken to steel his student for her odious assignment. It was as silent and dotted with grave markers as it was the last time. A murder of crows fly away as they enter its grounds, cackling as they take flight.

On his back is the sack that carries Alfred’s body, bobbing and rocking as he weaves through the graveyard. She casts her eyes on the sack, observing it the way she has this whole trip, the lump still in her throat, the dams threatening to burst again at any moment.

Up ahead is a hole. It is rectangular and deep and silent.

They stop. He sets down the sack and looks to her. “Do you have anything left to say?”

“No,” she answers quietly. “I already said it when he could hear me.”

She’s no longer looking at the sack, or at anything really. Her eyes focus on nothing, settling on a distant, lonely stare. A single tear rolls down, glittering just as it falls to earth.

He nuzzles her.

The dams burst.

She buries her face into his strong shoulder, her wailing muffled by his body as one sinewy foreleg wraps around her tiny body. She shivers from the force of her own cries, holding tightly to this sturdy rock of a stallion, as waves of sadness crash all around her.

It takes a while, but the tides recede eventually, and Alfred is buried swiftly and respectfully. She helps with the lowering of his makeshift coffin into his grave, and she helps cover it with earth. The whole time, the clouds above grow darker and thicker, the precipitation’s threat of rain becoming more real. By the time they finish, the sound of thunder rolls across the grass along with the wind.

“We better go back,” he says.

The trip back to the house is faster, but the rain still catches them before they make it to the door. Inside, they meet in the kitchen. Now does not feel like a good time to eat, so instead, he warms her some cocoa—and coffee for himself. They sit opposite to one another at the table, steam rising and curling from their cups as the rain batters the old windows.

Her entire form is slumped over. The cocoa sits neglected. The lightbulb above cascades upon her pink mane and her teal eyes and on the tears that still dot her butter-yellow face.

“…I think I already told you before, Fluttershy,” he says after taking a draw from his coffee, “when you told me you wanted to be trained to raise animals. This isn’t an easy job.” He pauses, letting the last five words sink in.

“There are many parts of caring for animals that are going to hurt, at least for a while. But you just need to remember, animals live by nature’s rules like anyone else. They survive by acting on their instincts. And the strongest always win.

“We can bend the rules for them a bit—give the runt of the litter a fighting chance or nurse the wounded in an environment safe from its predators.” He swallows. “But in the end, you have to accept that just as everything has a beginning, everything has an ending. The newborns grow into young and soon become old and die. It’s nature. And nature is cruel and futile.”

The pause that follows is dreadful. He drowns it with a gulp of coffee.

“Doctors put animals to sleep using medicine,” she says quietly. Slowly, she looks up at him. The sadness in her eyes is traded for betrayal. Anger. “Why did you make me do something so barbaric?”

There it is. In the last year and a half of training her, she’d already witnessed the death of animals. It’s not the what, it’s the how that bothers her. He can see the anger—the years’ worth of it that had been festering inside her—bubbling just beneath her eyes. He still recalls the first time she’d physically lashed out at him, and how it ended with her with a black eye, lying flat on her back in a mud puddle… and a lot of lies they had to tell her parents.

He takes a slow draw from his coffee and just as slowly replaces the cup on the table. He leans forward, scowling as his next words slither out of his mouth. “Last I recall, somepony in this room wanted to keep Alfred alive as long as she possibly could. And because the other pony in this room was dumb enough to humor her, he invested in medicine after medicine that in the long run did nothing. I chose this method for two reasons—the first being that you selfishly wasted my funds to prolong Alfred’s suffering.”

She grimaces.

He taps the table gently with his hoof, not breaking eye contact. “Second and most important is that this really is something you needed to learn how to do. You’re gonna find yourself in situations where you’re not gonna have that fancy equipment, especially when you’ve only just gotten your license and don’t have the money to afford it. This way’s much more barbaric, sure… but in a lot of cases, it’s the only way. Either that, or just let the poor things keep suffering until the Pale Horse is done taking her sweet time in showing up.”

Silence. Her anger fizzles out. The hardness in his eyes and face softens. He puts a hoof on hers. “Fluttershy,” he says quietly, “I’m teaching you what you need to know about animal care. You already know it isn’t easy, and that some of it isn’t pleasant. It’s better you learn this now while you’re small so you can handle it better as an adult.”

Fluttershy’s lips tremble as she forces a smile and nods. “I understand.”

“Not yet you don’t,” he says with a wry smile as he lifts his coffee to his lips. “But you will, someday.”

Comments

[Moongaze14]

That flashback was intense. Still, glad to see Fluttershy's character be developed.

[Razalon The Lizardman]

Not sure how this directly relates to the story, but it's still great and I look forward to seeing what else you do with the other ponies.