Somepony who loves you

by Nonagon

Painkiller (part two)

Painkiller (II)
A Somepony who loves you Story

Fourteen painkillers. Six little pills. Two more nights of restful sleep.

Cheerilee stared at the unmarked bottle for a while before putting it back in the drawer. Not for the first time, she was tempted to get rid of it. Having it around felt unsafe, somehow, even when under lock and key. She thought about hiding it somewhere more secure, somewhere outside, but had the feeling that its mere presence would haunt her no matter where it was.

Just before the three groups had parted ways, Twilight Sparkle, the nice librarian who had united the Elements, had pressed the bottle into Cheerilee’s hoof. They’d looked at each other, and they’d both known exactly what this meant. But before the teacher could protest, they’d been whisked away in opposite directions by the parting crowd. That had been the last they’d seen of each other.

The days seemed to be getting shorter. Which was absurd, of course. The days were only ever as long as she said they were. Though there was no proper way to tell the time any more, Cheerilee did her best to keep her little ponies on a twenty-four hour schedule. It wasn't enough to eat when they were hungry and sleep when they were tired; they couldn't trust their own bodies any more. That's why they needed the pills.

At first, sleeping had been easy. The first night, exhausted from the frantic journey across Ponyville and covered in the eternal darkness, their tiredness had allowed them to sleep through their fear until well into the next day. Without the sun to wake them up there was a constant haze over their minds, a subconscious warning pulling them back to their beds. But not long after, that had changed. The night stopped having the calming effect it had had before. Darkness became the norm, not the night, and in days the easy drift into slumber had turned into long nights of tossing and turning. The same subconscious impulses that had drawn the ponies to their beds were now striving to keep them awake. It's been night for far too long, their bodies were saying. You can't sleep for any longer. It must be time to wake up.

And then the nightmares had started.

Cheerilee shuddered as she swallowed her pill. She felt the loss as it entered her, felt the chance of one more night of sleep flood through her system. Her students needed it more than she did, she knew. Their sleep was more important than hers, and not just for sentimental reasons. They'd been lucky before, but now that Ponyville's silence was absolute, having one of them wake up screaming would be a death sentence. Their happiness kept them alive.

One more night, Cheerilee begged, recapping the bottle as drowsiness built up in her once again. I just need one more night. I'll get some more pills, and then I'll stop taking them. I just need to make it to the clinic. I just need one night of rest.

Just one more night.

---

Leaving wasn't the difficult part.

The foals were asleep when Cheerilee walked out the door. It was strange how easy it was to accept, how routine the actions had become. Sliding the bar across the door was simple. More than that, it was comforting. She'd spent a large chunk of her life watching her students walk away from her, leaving the schoolhouse for their own homes. It had never bothered her before, in the same way that reversing the situation didn't truly bother her now. She'd always known, with an instinctive certainty, that by the very next day they would be together again.

The walk into town was no different than usual. She resisted the urge to look around, taking the long-familiar route to Sugarcube Corner. It was only when she approached the first unfamiliar junction that Cheerilee began to slow. With the bakery in view, the tortured crawl across the final stretch lengthened from five minutes to nearly twenty. At long last her hooves dragged to a complete halt at the place where she’d decided she would turn, and with a heart heavy with dread she turned to face the darkened road ahead.

The road was empty. Not abandoned-empty, with discarded carts and broken wood strewn here and there, but truly empty, as though it had been swept clean. The buildings on either side were silent, houses on the left, stores on the right, locked up as they would have been on any other night before. It wasn't difficult to imagine that ponies might be sleeping inside them, tucked up warm and safe in their beds, dreaming of seeing the sun rise again.

Cheerilee shook these thoughts off angrily, but she still couldn't bring herself to move. Memories flooded back, of the night so long ago — she'd stopped counting by accident, and the numbers slipped further away from her with every passing day — when she'd had to make the journey into town for the first time. She'd prayed to Celestia that she wouldn't need to. Twilight Sparkle had told her to wait in the schoolhouse until the caravan came. But the caravan never came.

She remembered the exact moment she'd decided that venturing outdoors would be unavoidable. Diamond Tiara had gotten a splinter in her gums from chewing on wood, and it had been up to the teacher to carefully extract it. But the filly had refused to sit still, wriggling back and forth in discomfort as Cheerilee reached down time and time again with a needle, until she'd had to lie down and cradle Diamond Tiara close to her chest as she gently dug the splinter out. Holding her that close, feeling the filly's frailness as she struggled weakly, having her knee brush against every one of her protruding ribs, that had been the final straw. The moment the pesky splinter had been removed, Cheerilee had stood up, walked to the front door, and without saying a word, left to find some food.

The same needs motivated her now. Cheerilee gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, visualizing the pill bottle that she needed. The faint whimpers of unrest haunted her, the screams of nightmares past even more so. That wasn't a fate she would wish upon anypony. She knew what lay behind those sleeping eyes.

That push was all it took. Breathing silently, Cheerilee lifted her front hoof and set off down the unexplored street.

The first time she'd forged ahead like this, making her way to Sugarcube Corner, then later to the hardware store nearby, she'd compared it to walking into a manticore's den. Over time, she'd realized how inaccurate this analogy was, and she was glad that she hadn't seen it earlier. A killer beast could be waiting behind any rock or shadow, it was true, but the den she traversed was far from full of manticores. If a manticore was woken by a stranger in the night, it would roar. There would be the thundering of paws and a great flapping of wings and a warning, a chance to flee, some way of knowing that she'd made a mistake. They would offer no such respite. If one of the dark ponies of the night caught sight or sound of her as she crept through their home, there would be no warning. If she was very, very lucky, she might catch sight of a pony making its way towards her, perhaps galloping, perhaps at a crawl like hers; she had no idea. Then, all she would feel was the unforgiving grip of a set of once-friendly teeth upon her neck.

She knew this because she'd heard it before. On that first and final night, the night when they had run from the library, when the ponies around her had vanished into the darkness one by one, she hadn't heard anything at all.

Slowly, with more care than ever before, Cheerilee forced herself to put one hoof in front of the other. She counted down the number of steps until her destination, alternately squeezing her eyes shut and keeping them fixed on the ground. Silence swallowed her, the threat of searching eyes and listening ears holding her back like a physical barrier that she had to push through with every step. Keeping her students always in mind, she crawled ever onwards, always — always — staying out of the shadows.

---

The clinic had been torn apart.

Cheerilee stared at the building in shock. She'd almost missed the small white building, muscle memory carrying her further to the library a few streets over, but she'd come to an abrupt halt as her hoof nearly collided with something lying in the road. It was a pill bottle, the cap off and the label scratched beyond recognition. Cheerilee picked it up. It was empty. She stared up at the building on her right, her destination, and her heart stopped. The clinic's door was open. Everything inside was chaos.

A new kind of anxiety rising, Cheerilee approached the building and peered inside. The lights were off, and the position of the moon meant that no light shone through any of the windows, but the teacher's eyes had grown accustomed to this level of darkness. The room within was in disarray. The waiting room where ponies could see the nurses in town was intact, but the attached pharmacy was in ruins. The shelves close to the door had collapsed, releasing a cascade of boxes and bottles that had rolled all the way out to the street. As Cheerilee slipped inside, her flank brushed against the open door, resulting in a short but deafening creak. She instantly ducked and cringed, waiting for the grim molars of death to descend upon her. After a minute of any ravenous undead ponies failing to materialize, she forced herself back upright and shakily continued.

A closer examination of the disaster convinced her that the damage hadn't been caused by a violent outburst or deliberate sabotage, but simply by ponies in a hurry. Whoever had come this way had been untidy, but thorough; everything had been taken, from bandages to novelty toothbrushes, apparently without regard to whether or not it would be of actual use. Cheerilee walked back and forth across the room glumly, stepping carefully around empty boxes and sticky patches on the floor. Nothing left that we can use, she decided with a sigh. I hope that whoever took these supplies was able to put them to good use.

With the possibility of salvage out of the question, Cheerilee turned her attention to the desk at the rear of the room. Beyond the counter where she normally picked up her migraine pills, similarly stripped bare, there was a closed door leading back to the innards of the building. She’d only seen occasional glimpses through it, but the setup had looked straightforward enough. She’d committed the complex label on her bottle to memory. So long as she could find a drawer with the same name, she could guarantee her little ponies restful sleep for as long as they needed.

Except the door was jammed.

Cheerilee immediately stepped back and took a deep breath. She’d kept herself composed in far worse situations than this; she wasn’t going to give in to panic now. Bracing herself carefully, she placed one shoulder against the door and turned the handle, gradually and gently increasing pressure. Slowly, something started to give. The door swung open, accompanied by the silklike slide of something on the linoleum floor beyond. As soon as the crack was wide enough Cheerilee slipped through, quickly catching the chair that had been propping the door closed just as it started to overbalance. A sigh of relief nearly escaped her as she set it down soundlessly, confidence rising for the first time since she’d set out. Then she turned to the rest of the room and her heart leaped back into her throat.

A single window high up on the wall, this one turned towards the moonlight, illuminated chaos. Virtually everything in the once-pristine room had been overturned. Two whole walls of pillboxes and drawers had collapsed over a pair of broken desks. A set of filing cabinets had been toppled and emptied, their contents burned to ashes in a set of metal bowls nearby. A hallway could be seen at the far end connected to the clinic, debris continuing along it. But worst of all, every last pill in the building, large and small, had been gathered up and heaped into a pony-sized pile in the very middle of the room.

Cheerilee’s veins filled with ice. “Oh no,” she breathed, mouthing the word to herself even if she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. “No, no, no.” With unusual haste she scrambled over to the pile and knelt down, searching in vain for any kind of pattern or label. There was none. The mass before her was simply a lump of white, dotted with specks too dimly-lit to make out, much like the treats she served to her students every day.

A kind of frenzy overtook her. Cheerilee thrust both her front hooves into the mix, for once deaf to the faint clattering as pills were shifted. She pulled out hooffulls of white and held them up, weighing them and measuring them with her eyes. After all, she’d counted these pills out one by one five times a day, hadn’t she? She should know them by their size and weight, shouldn’t she? She couldn’t let something like this stop her. Not when her little ponies were depending on her. Not when she knew what waited in their dreams. She couldn’t let them dream. She couldn’t let them dream.

Something slipped under her hoof. That one wasn’t a pill. She held it closer, squinting. It was a tooth.

Cheerilee gasped and scrambled back, dropping the pearly object to the ground. It bounced and spun before coming to a halt. The mare stopped when her tail hit the wall, raising a hoof to her chest to calm her quickening breath. What— How— What? Her eyes widened as the full realization of what she’d picked up sank in. She started to wipe her hoof on her side but then stopped, trembling in place. There was no telling what kind of mouth that had been in. There was no telling what it might have been infected with. She needed to find a sink, fast.

Keeping her front hoof carefully raised, Cheerilee started forward again, then halted. In the hallway leading to the clinic, amidst what she’d overlooked as mere debris, there was another tiny shape in the middle of the floor. Another tooth. And further on, another. Cheerilee gulped. Then, as if in a trance, she started walking.

The chaotic pill room quickly turned to sterile corridors and closed, unmarked doors. The teeth continued in an unbroken trail, each about two feet from the last, that Cheerilee followed in her awkward, three-legged gait. The fifth tooth had a spot of black next to it, a once red liquid hardened into a dark and clotted stain on the linoleum. The following tooth was surrounded by three of these. This pattern continued with each successive tooth, occasional droplets turning into a steady stream of smears that began to weave back and forth as Cheerilee followed, keeping her hooves well away from the mess.

The thought occurred that whoever was responsible for this was probably also the one who had caused the destruction in the room before. The thought occurred that she might not be alone in the building after all. The thought occurred that if there was another pony here, there was very little chance that they would be the living kind. Still she went on. An ancient instinct drove her; the only thing worse than going forward would be going back. She simply, irresistibly, needed to know.

At the twenty-third tooth, the trail abruptly came to an end. It rested before a door at the end of the hallway, the broken tip pointing almost invitingly. Cheerilee stopped and stared, willing herself not to breathe. This door was cracked slightly open. Inside she could see moonlight, and the corner of an examination table. Fresh paper lay across it, waiting for its next patient. Beyond the door, all was silence.

Cheerilee held her breath and listened, straining her ears for another pony doing the same. She counted seconds as they went by; up or down, she couldn’t tell. Her heart screamed at her to turn back. Her eyes hungered for the darkness beyond. In one swift movement, she stepped forward and pushed open the door.

The room was empty.

The desk within had been cleared out with the same thorough haste as the shelves out front, its drawers pulled out and piled in the corner of the room. The frosted window on the far side had been broken, apparently from the inside, and looked out onto an empty street. Unlike the hallway, the floor was unmarked.

The small sink near the door appeared functional. Cheerilee rushed over to it, then gagged; more than a dozen more teeth filled the basin. Still, she turned on the tap to a thin, silent trickle and waited for the water to warm until it was nearly scalding, then with a generous helping of hoof soap she washed every part of herself the tooth and her hoof had touched.

Stepping away, her eye caught a piece of paper that had fallen to the ground beside the sink. She picked it up, holding up to the light to read three lines of unfamiliar writing.

For my family.

I’m so sorry.

We will see each other again.

Cheerilee stared at the note for a long time. She traced the shaky writing, wondering in the back of her mind if it had been written with a mouth, horn or hoof; whether the author was one of the nurses at the clinic, or some poor passer-by who had gotten trapped at the worst possible moment; whether they had been a stallion or a mare, whether they had any children, whether there was any hope that this last promise would ever be fulfilled. She only moved again when a faint splash startled her out of her trance. Unbidden, tears had started to run down her face. She put the note gently on the rim of the sink and, seeing as her body wasn’t cooperating anyway, allowed herself to lurch into the corner and curl up into a ball to cry.

While her outer self shook to silence her gasps for air, Cheerilee’s mind hardened in its resolve. Sadness was a luxury she didn’t have time to afford, not with four little ponies depending on her. Searching for a fifth had only been a waste of time. Silently she tied another knot around her heart, tightening the armor of what she chose to call optimism against any future tears that tried to escape. She permitted herself to cry just this once, while nopony was watching, but told herself that it wouldn’t happen again. There were things at stake more important than her own feelings. She knew what could happen when she let herself lose control.

Clearly, the clinic was a dead end. Even if by some miracle she did get lucky with the monstrous pill-pile, she would never find enough medicine to justify the time it would take. Searching house to house might have been worth the risk, if only she had more time. There was always the hospital—

No. The closer she got to it, the more the idea repulsed her. The hospital wasn’t an option.

There has to be another way. Cheerilee shifted in the corner, swallowing the last whimpers of her moment of weakness. Moonlight fell across her face, leaving her half in shadow. She stared up and out over the world beyond. Pills aren't the answer to everything. Nurse Redheart always said so. What else can stop a living Nightmare? Laughter? Memories?

Friendship?

Several streets away, towering loftily over the buildings around it, Cheerilee could see the branches of Ponyville's library.

Moving again was difficult. Cheerilee slowly uncurled herself from the corner and stood up. She felt strangely light, as though her body was being held together with nothing but string, but when her legs began to move again they stepped with confidence. Not trusting the window, she began to retrace her steps back through the clinic, a new route forming in her head. While she had no desire to return to that haunting place, a memory of something captivating seemed to tug her onwards. After all, she reasoned, trying to paint over her dread with positivity, didn’t we always say that Harmony would save us?

Comments

[Bronyhood of steel]

glad to see an update love the story

[Merlok13]

I reacted with honest dread when I saw 'Painkiller' updated. Bravo! Even when I haven't read it for several weeks, the mere thought of this story-line gives me the willies.

[journcy]

I saw this in my updates, and just sort of stared at it.
Oh, do we need more of this piece of fiction.

[SirusAstro]

You sure have a way of making Equestria from a land of Harmony, to a land of dread and no hope whatsoever. Simply fantastic work you're doing here, keep them coming.

[Hindenburg]

Holy shit dude. I kid you not, I started shaking when I saw this update. Even more, you updated it on the EXACT day I finally convinced myself to read chapter 3, VERY shortly after I read it.

Freaky shit dude. Keep it up!

[pinkiepie4th]

WHY DO I CONTINUE TO TORTURE MYSELF BY RETURNING TO THIS PLACE AGAIN! ARRGH!!

However, This is a truly captivating story.