Ribbon shifted nervously, pawing at the strap across her chest, and knocked again. This was the right place, she was sure of it. She could still feel the colt's pain. In the hour since the commissary, he didn't give his injuries any sort of treatment.
She brought a medical kit for just that reason, but if he didn't open the door, then it wouldn't matter. She knocked again. To her surprise, a mare's voice answered with an exasperated sigh, "Who is it? This isn't really a good time."
Ribbon sighed. The colt was blocking everything out for her, just as effectively as the limiter did. It wasn't the same as the limiter. With that, everything was blocked away from her telepathy, like trying to look at something behind a wall. With this, it seemed like her abilities were being pulled towards one single point, like staring at a breathtaking piece of art, and realizing you don't see the frame. "Is Mezzo here?"
The door slid open, revealing the mare who yelled at Ribbon in medical yesterday. "Oh, um..." The worried grey earth pony floundered for words for a moment, then settled for stepping out of the younger mare's way and waving her in.
Ribbon cautiously accepted the invitation, immediately noticing the rag and bucket of water left nearby. The cloth was streaked with red, and there still a few drops of blood left to be cleaned up.
The mare saw the nurse stare, and returned to her work, wiping up the floor. "I'm trying to get this cleaned up before Minuette sees it. She adores Mezzo, and I don't want her to panic. I think I'm panicked enough. He locked himself in his room, he won't talk to me, and he left this." She scrubbed at a stubborn red smear for a second before looking back at Ribbon. "Is he ok? What happened?"
Ribbon looked down. There was another drop of blood in front of her. "This may be my fault. Knowing that, may I stay here and speak with him?"
"Your fault?" Octavia repeated. "How?" The mare quickly held up her hoof. "No. I don't need to know. I have one question, and I want an honest answer." She met the telepath's eyes and held the gaze. "Can you help him?"
Ribbon hooked her hoof on the strap of her medical kit. That was what she came here to do, help him with his hoof. Beyond that... "I don't know."
The mare closed her eyes, nodding. "Do what you can, the override for his room is three-five-four-seven."
Ribbon bowed her head slightly. "Thank you." Without another word, she followed the trail of freshly cleaned floor to his door. A work schedule taped to it with, "Mezzo Forte Melody," across the top only confirmed it.
The door panel was the same as every other panel on the station, and Ribbon brought her hoof up to it. She closed her eyes and keyed in the overide, not giving herself a chance to change her mind or back out. The door slid open, and she slipped into the room, turning and locking the door from the matching inside panel before it was even shut.
"It's my past," said a voice behind her in the dark, a coarse whisper, ragged, tired, pained, "as terrible as it is, why won't you let it stay mine? Why can't you leave me alone?"
Ribbon looked over her shoulder. Her eyes weren't adjusted yet, but his probably were. "Because I'm the only one who hears you screaming."
There was no answer.
Ribbon closed her eyes. She listened for the colt. His thoughts were suppressed, solely focused on the pain in his hoof. There was nothing for her to listen to except his ragged breathing. She followed the sound until her hoof bumped one of his. She reached for where his shoulder should have been, but it was a neatly made mattress, blanket folded and undisturbed.
She let her hoof slide off the bed, and it came to rest against the colt's side. "Sharing your past doesn't make it any less yours." She sat down beside him. "I wish you could choose to share it with me, but that doesn't change the fact that you're hurt, and need help."
"Why do you care?" She heard him grunt in pain, and felt the searing flash, when he moved his injured hoof. "What am I to you, that you keep digging into my pain?"
"Strong." Ribbon lifted her first aid kit with her magic, opening it. She saw the colt in the faint glow, eyes pressed shut against tears, and his bloody hoof clutched to his chest. She set the case down, releasing her magic and restoring the darkness. "I see, and feel, amazing strength all the time, from so many unexpected places, but you are among the strongest I've ever felt. Your presence isn't something I can ignore, even if I try."
"What's strong about me?" He pulled away from her, moving for the first time since she entered the room. "What's strong about an injured colt who can't even crawl into his bed to cry?"
"That this whole time, you were worried about me." She reached out and took his hoof, warm and wet though it was against her fur. "You told me to stay away so your memories couldn't hurt me. You were willing to hurt yourself to avoid inflicting your past on anypony else." She wrapped his hoof with magic, a gentle, numbing energy, lighting the space between them with a pale white glow. "Let me prove that I'm strong enough to take it."
He looked up at her, meeting her eyes in the soft light as his pain faded. He could only think of one way for her to prove herself.
She looked up at the nightstand, immediately seeing a familiar velvet box. "Are you sure?" She looked back at him. "You know what that would mean?"
He nodded once. "That you would experience everything I do. Every memory, every fleeting thought. If you want them that badly, take them."
She shook her head. "That's not what I want. That's never what I wanted. I just want to talk to you, to get to know you, to be normal. I don't get you. I don't understand you, and I want to, but... I also want you to understand me. I don't want to just read your mind, but my brain and my magic are wired wrong. They always have been. I hear thoughts, and feel emotions, and see memories, even if I don't want to. I can't change that! And when I tried... "
He winced, remembering his reaction to her wearing the limiter. But, he didn't regret it, and he wouldn't apologize for what he did to the infernal thing. "I shouldn't have been so rough about it, but I couldn't let you keep wearing that. Those rings have hurt too many, and even though I don't know you, I didn't want you added to the list." He put his good hoof on hers. "If you want to understand, do it however you need to. Don't be ashamed of what you can't control."
"You really mean that." Ribbon started looking over his hoof, blinking away her own tears as they started to cloud her vision. "I... Even after everything I put you through?"
"What did you put me through?" He flexed his numb, bleeding hoof. Now that pain was fading, and his earlier adrenaline gone, he could think clearly about what he did. "This is my own fault, and Tankra had nothing to do with you."
He moved to stand up, but Ribbon kept hold of his hoof. "No, don't. You can't feel it now, but your hoof is cracked. It's going to to take a while to treat."
He glanced down at it, then back up at her.
Ribbon reached into her medical pack. "Probably a week? Maybe a bit more?" She pulled out a towel, and started wiping the blood away. "You can't just seal it up, or the blood will pool up behind the hoof, bruising for sure, abscesses likely, and if infection sets in, you could become permanently lame."
He sighed.
"No, I haven't, contacted security." Ribbon looked up from her cleaning with a small sigh. "I know it's standard procedure to report injuries. But, I can tell Growl later. No, she would have to- What? How would I even- Slow down, I can't... Wait, you're testing me."
"Yes, I am." He let himself relax against the bedframe. "I told you to get to know me however you needed to, don't be surprised if I do the same."
"But," she pointed out, rubbing her head, "you're the one that's surprised right now. And don't do that."
"I am a bit surprised," he confirmed. "I was expecting... I don't know what I was expecting, I just know that wasn't it. How could you not know what I was doing?"
Ribbon shrugged. "All you were doing was asking questions. Testing me may have been the reason behind it, but thought processes aren't always that clearly defined. It's not like I completely understand how it all works. I hear what I hear, and see what I see. If I try really hard, I can make somepony else hear my voice. The other pony plays a big part in how strongly my abilities manifest."
"And how do I affect those abilities?"
Ribbon pulled the hoof away from her head. "Right now, you're like a black hole. You pull everything in, and I can't escape. I can't hear anypony else, but it's still overwhelming. I'm confused, and a little scared."
Mezzo nodded. "Then I'll be as clear as possible. I'm going to put you through one last test."
Ribbon's brow furrowed. She didn't like the sound of that. He wasn't thinking about what he was going to do either, only that he was going to act and was willing himself to remain calm. "Mezzo, what are you-"
He bit down on his good leg, hard and fast, and she cried out in pain, grabbing her own.
The surprise wore off quick, and she was on top of him in less than a second, trying to pull his hoof out of his mouth. "Are you stupid?" she cried as she fought him. "Do you want to be lame in both legs?"
Both ponies stopped. The words stopping him, and his shock stopping her. He slowly released his good leg, and she kept her grip on it. They stared at each other for a moment, a single, unspoken word echoing between them.
"Lame?" Mezzo finally asked. "You said..."
Ribbon winced. She didn't mean it like that. "You won't be able to walk until the treatment's finished. When the spell wears off, the pain will come back, and if you walk while it's numb, you can cause more damage."
"Only for a week, right?" He asked cautiously. Until it's treated?"
"Yes, mostly," she answered with some hesitation. "It takes almost a month for something like this to heal completely. It takes a whole week just to be able to patch the hoof. You can't walk on it at all during that time. After that, you'll be able to walk, but you'll need special shoes for a while, a special diet to help keratin growth along, and most of all, you'll need rest. You can't be straining the hoof. But it will heal completely if you take proper care of it."
His hoof tightened around hers, asking one last question.
Her hoof tightened around his, answering it. "If you'll let me."
Mezzo looked down at their entwined hooves. "Take the pendant, but I want to tell you the story myself."
Mezzo sighed and wiped the sweat from his brow. Ribbon had helped him into the bed, then he started telling her about life on Tankra. He couldn't remember exactly when, but at some point, he had fallen asleep.
"This is what happens to those who refuse to work!"
The whip snapped across his back, its bite far more dull than he remembered. The taskmaster lectured anypony nearby, threatening all who dared glance up from their assigned task. Mezzo looked back at the armored unicorn, and received the butt of the whip across the face for making eye contact. He defiantly made eye contact again, noticing that he didn't have to look up to do it.
This was a dream then, not merely a memory.
The taskmaster dropped his whip and drew an energy weapon from a hidden holster. "Angry?" he asked, pressing the cold metal to the colt's head. It was a stark contrast to the furnaces burning around them, being fed their fuel by long lines of ponies in chains. "With that white fur, perhaps you feel yourself a descendant of the goddess as well? If you meet her, why don't you ask?"
"Report!" High on a catwalk, above the furnaces, overlooking crucibles of molten metals and glass, another unicorn yelled down at the taskmaster. Large. Fat, but with a once powerful build beneath. With snow white fur and green mane, this pony was dressed in the flowing, decadent robes of nobility, and carried a ceremonial blade openly displayed on a leather sash.
"Is that?" Older slaves murmured amongst themselves as the taskmaster teleported away. "The king? Here? What's going to happen?"
As soon as he reappeared on the catwalk, he bowed low. "Production is proceeding as scheduled, my King."
The other pony looked down on him for a moment, then cracked a smile. "When is it not?" He broke into a hearty laugh. "The smelters run well, I would think the mills and factories could come here for advice." He glanced over the catwalk's rail, meeting the eyes of the only pony who dared to look up. That colt stared straight at him and spit on the ground. "Well," his laughter faded to a chuckle, "I think I will make time to drop by more often."
"You honor us, sire." The taskmaster straightened up. "The foreman deserves the credit. He harbors no sloth in his workers, and punishments are swift and public. If you care to stay and observe, I was just handling a young colt with a rebellious streak."
"Ah, yes, I saw." The king looked over the edge. "About that..." He took the taskmaster's weapon from him and tossed it over the catwalk railing, into a vat of molten bronze. The weapon sunk, and the power cell burst from the heat, sending the ponies below scurrying from the splatter. The king saw the damage and shrugged. "Don't shoot the foals," he told the taskmaster. With a tired sigh, he turned and started walking away. "The elderly have far less work left in them."
Mezzo looked down at the shackles around his hooves. They were small, wooden, held together by a lock and a crude hook. He was a young colt when all this happened, no more than four or five, Minuette's age. The shackles reflected that. They barely closed around his hooves.
He broke them with ease, his surroundings falling away with the restraints, leaving nothing behind.
If only he could have done that so long ago.
He started walking through the darkness, a faint twinge of pain reminding him that he was supposed to be lame. In a dream, did that really matter?
He walked for miles, taking only a few steps. The mind turns in silence, considering, calculating, rehashing and grinding the mish-mash of experience and desires.
He never wanted to share what happened to him in the smelters, but now that he had, he wished he had done it sooner. Simply putting it into words for Ribbon made it easier to sort out in his own mind. Like the taskmaster's whip, the memories hurt slightly less when put into perspective. He was alive, and that particular taskmaster, if he recalled correctly, was dissolved in a batch of glassware that was probably distributed across half of Tankra right now. Supposedly, it was an accident, a slippery catwalk. But looking back, he had to wonder if one of the other slaves managed to loosen their limiter.
If sharing the past made it this event easy to look back on, maybe he should tell Ribbon about the rest of it.
The blackness around him shifted, taking on loose shapes, but not color. Formless beings walked past, ignoring the colt, and the little filly next to him. He glanced down at the blurry grey foal. "Go play with momma," he told her, before pushing on into the slowly resolving shapes.
"I can't find her."
Mezzo stopped. Black was now grey, varying in intensity, and fading in to color. That wasn't Minuette, was it?
"I can't find mom."
He turned around, and a door opened.
A pony in uniform, accompanied by a higher ranking human stopped in their tracks when they saw the unicorn before them. Brief flashes, images partially remembered, and embellished by the subconscious mind played out as they backed up, slamming the door. Streaks of blood across a bulkhead, dark and ominous under the strobe of warning lights, sparking, torn wiring, the carcass of some slimy, alien monster pierced by debris.
A doctor walking down the hall dropped his clipboard. "Are you mad?" He asked someone behind the foal. "Bringing her here? Now?"
He caught the unicorn's eyes, and before he turned away, a clear image of an injured pegasus pushed away everything else. She shared Ribbon's colors, and had a peaceful smile on her face. Tears and gashes through fur and skin covered her limbs, like she was attacked and bitten by many creatures at once. Worse than that, a ragged laceration ran from her neck back, terminating in a shard of metal still embedded in her torso- the same shrapnel that killed the monster.
The filly screamed.
She ran down the hall, past the doctor who unwittingly showed her such a horrible image. "No! Mom!"
The security guard caught her outside the last door in the hallway.
"No! Let me go!" She kicked and struggled, a filly against a much larger stallion. "Mom!"
Mezzo held her back, keeping her from the door. "Is this your pain?" He saw the pendant the filly wore. It wasn't hers, not in this memory. It didn't exist when these events took place, not in that form anyway. He put a hoof to it, the pendant he made from his limiter and a shock-blue sapphire. "I always wondered why I gave it wings."
Mezzo woke with a start. His hoof was still resting on the pendant, and the pendant was still around Ribbon's neck. He carefully took it off of her as she twitched and twisted in her sleep, still fighting her nightmare.
He grabbed her, holding her as tight as he could with his injury, to fight against her struggles. "It's ok," he whispered. Should he wake her? Should he pull her out of that hell she was reliving, or like him, did she need to see it through to the end?
He waited until she started to calm down, then pulled her close. "I'm sorry," he whispered in her ear. Sleep was pulling him back, and he wasn't fighting it. "I'm so sorry."
"Mommy? You're drooling."
"Huh?" Octavia groaned. It was too bright. She lifted her hoof to provide some shade while her eyes adjusted, and the biting scent of cleaning chemicals snapped her out of her drowsiness like citrus-scented smelling salts. "Minuette!"
The mare sat up quickly. She had fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of her cleaning! She looked past her daughter in a panic, inspecting the floor around them. No? Good. The tension sank out of her, and she let herself sink into the couch. It looked like she managed to clean up all of the blood before passing out.
"Mommy? Are you OK?"
"Yes," she answered quickly. She shook her head and sighed. She needed to calm down. Everything was clean, everything was in order, and Ribbon didn't know that anything was ever wrong. "Sorry, honey," she picked the filly up and set her down on the couch beside her, "I'm just a little tired. Mommy was very busy last night."
Minuette nodded her understanding. "Is that why the floor's all shiny?" She craned her neck to look off the side of the couch. She could see a faint reflection past the carpet. "Aunt Scratch doesn't use soap when she does the floor." The filly looked up at her mother. "She doesn't use water either."
"I know." Octavia draped her hoof around Minuette's shoulder. "Just the vacuum, right?"
The filly nodded. "Did you clean up because Ribbon was coming over?"
"Sure did," Octavia lied. "It's nice to make things look presentable when you're expecting company." She wasn't about to tell her daughter that she spent most of the night scrubbing her brother's blood out of the tile. "So, you met Ribbon already? Did you thank her for helping you yesterday?"
Minuette shook her head. "She's still sleeping."
"Sleeping?" The mare blinked. That sounded like a really good idea right about now. "Where is she sleeping?"
"With Mitso," the filly answered happily. "You were sleeping, so I was going to see if he could make breakfast. But, they were sleeping too, and you looked less comfortable, so I woke you up instead."
"Logical decision. You are a very smart filly," Octavia told her, trying to keep a neutral face. Just how comfortable did they look? "Then, how about we go out for breakfast, just the two of us, and let Mitso sleep?"
"Ok!" Minuette was running to the door before her mother was even off the couch. "Where are we going?"
"Um..." Octavia glanced back at Mezzo's door. She would have a good long talk with him later, and probably with Ribbon too. "Anywhere you want, honey, how does that sound?"