“And Whatever Was Lost Thenceforth Never Mattered...”
Carrot Cake stood at the edge of the counter, peering over at the pony waiting on the other side. The mare’s mouth was clearly moving, but no sound came out; Carrot twitched his ears. The mare continued her order, and his head turned sideways.
Her mane bounced and bobbed with enticing, inescapable energy; the rest... it was something he could never escape from. The rest of her body followed suit, the brilliant neon fur of hers shining like a fluorescent sea. He gritted his jaw and turned back towards the mare whose order he was supposed to be taking.
Her mouth moved once more, and his brow furrowed—where was that noise coming from? It was small, and sharp: a tiny fleck of metal tearing and burrowing its way into his eardrum as his hoof pounded on the side of the counter.
She stepped in front of him, and he moved backwards slightly to let her take his place. Her mouth moved as well, but it was slower, glossier... he licked his lips, his breathing heavy, his stomach growling.
He turned away, 45º perfectly. His hooves shook, and his tail swiped at his side. A bead of sweat snaked down his temple as he caught a glimpse of his wife in the kitchen with Pumpkin gripping her mother’s mane.
He turned back, the brightest smile in all of Equestria meeting the mare, who departed with her eclairs. He could not stop her; he wanted to raise a hoof and push it against her chest, and whisper shout at the top of his lungs
“STOP BEING SO BEAUTIFUL, DAMN YOU!”
Of course, he could not say anything like that, at any volume. He would always be resigned to silence, an endless battle of temperance vs. ignorance, and he could not feel the same way about how Cup Cake kneaded the dough, or mixed the cake batter, or gave him those tired little smiles at the end of the day. To justify his darkest desires, he could only hold one reality to be true. And in this world, the one that was impossible to tell what had been constructed and what had always been, the two of them running side by side in the fields was as distant a dream as a beautiful palace overlooking the lonesome, crowded countryside.
In silence, he managed to imagine some of the most ludicrous things; that’s why he liked her so much. All she would do is spit white noise, jabbering and cackling like a lame mynah bird. She was young, but not so young she had left his reach, and—
The scream that shattered the silence sent him toppling over sideways, the mare beneath him scattering once he slipped and hit the floor. Pushing himself, he heard her wailing—and a deep impulse, a primal instinct he could control no more than his metabolism, shot through him as he crashed into the kitchen.
Cup Cake was sobbing and trying to lift the poor foal up, her hooves splashing through the hot water and sending sprays of steam in every direction as she did so. The screaming grew louder, and even as Carrot pushed himself further and further through the room, closer and closer to the two of them, he could only hear her desperate cries of agony beginning to subside. There was no time for speculations in this moment, so he plunged his hooves into the boiling mess and fished around until he pulled up the searing, wriggling mass.
He did not see, in her eyes, what he had expected to see. There were not glossy, glinting orbs, nor were there full of a fire of passion; it was only fear/there was only fear, her pupils pinpoints the size of marbles and her irises thin rings surrounding them. The sound echoed off the back of the metal speck digging through his head, sending the screams ripping through his memory as he closed his eyes and felt her slam her entire body weight against his at the same time.
They had been standing on the edge of a river, the one that snaked along the side of Ponyville; the two of them had been let out of work early, and they always loved to head down to the water. He would splash around in the shallows, spraying her until she decided she was dampened enough to join him. And the two would leap and play like fillies and colts on a weekend, smiling and hugging and kissing and partaking in all that frivolous adolescence that is always talked down about but remembered fondly by the cynics and sages.
They had both seen the riverbank less often than they wanted to as the days wore on; one sleepless night became two, and then five; there had never been a chance for them to begin with, had there been?; he had always wondered that in the back of his mind, even as present tense moved past him; and there had never been another doubt such as that which possessed his heart with such fervor.
It then became apparent what he had to do and what she had done, for she rarely spoke or looked at him for a matter of months before halfway through she began to bloat and distort with a zealotry inspired by a nature no one could control and in his invisible agony he always wondered if he only made these messages in his head to impress her into staying beside him as the twin peaks that parted into sunlight settled down into his life.
That was neither here nor there; the feeling, the thought, the notion of him carrying the weight of some indescribably masculine presence who stalked the wrong side of the altar throughout Ponyville was simply too sexy of an idea for him to abandon. It perfectly absolved him of all blame, of all care, of all love, and would allow himself to surrender to apathy and agnosticism towards the day-to-day aspects of his relationships.
And yet, represented in this passage, he still reacted in time as if he were certain she were his own, a reflection of himself through some bizarre, ever-twisting genome that evolved faster than he could force himself to blink. He had brought her into his carrying arms, he had resisted the hysterics of his wife as he rushed past the heavenly pink temptress and down the dirt path, the harmonies of their screams crashing in an atonal thunderstorm directly down the middle of his mind; he had felt the deep tear, he had felt the movement of the atmosphere as it was sucked away from the ground around him, and he had felt his heart break as if there had never been a doubt sealing it shut in the first place.
But even as he galloped backwards (through hallways), he could not ever reach the door he so desperately wished for, he could never hold his hoof out and touch her cheek, and he would never hear her scream louder than she had back in that room. And as the red gave to blue, and then to white, her despondent wailing couldn’t be any more sickening and parodical. And he would never hear her scream louder than she had back in that room.
He could no longer distinguish between the two—they were both so distant from him. Carrot Cake slumped against the side of the window, his eyes rolling up towards the bright, shimmering light, the hospital collapsing into splinters and shards as the sun spread across the sky in brilliant arcs, centering down upon his body and lifting him into the air.