“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
Habit is a funny thing. It will make or break you over time, and some things can become a habit without you even realizing it until you quite literally can’t imagine your life any other way, even though you know, at least intellectually, that you once didn’t have the habit.
Such was the case when I woke up, mourning the loss of my wife. When she walked out and took our daughter with her I was devastated, and the next three months were the nearest I’d ever come to taking my own life. When she sued for divorce and used the divorce process to accuse me of abusing her and our daughter, it ripped those wounds wide open, and I knew that I’d lost my wife. That the courts called her out on her false accusations was only a mild salve on the wounds in my heart, and that I’d be able to have my daughter with me in a shared custody arrangement softened the blow, but she was dead to me, and I woke up to that knowledge every day. Sure, she might still be living, but she may as well have been a zombie to me. Every morning since I would wake up, either to an alarm or because my depressed mind just didn’t want to stay asleep, and see my wife wasn’t in bed with me, and mourn the loss all over again.
Thus it was it took me several minutes to remember that I’d actually died on the freeway.
The memory of that moment was actually a little hazy. I suppose that, in combination with the physical trauma, the sudden and brief nature of the event, plus the fact that I wasn’t using that particular brain anymore all contributed to the apparent mental disconnect to my death. It was rather like trying to remember a scene from a movie you’d seen once that really hit you hard while you were watching it, but you only kinda recall vague details and knew it was super important to the plot.
I suppose it was some relief that my divorce was more traumatizing than my death. Having two such experiences to carry into the eternities would...kinda suck.
Speaking of the remainder of my afterlife, I thought I’d better get things going. Clearly, alarms were going to be a thing of the past, or at least given my very small sample size of a single morning.
Was it morning? I lifted my head and looked around and realized that there wasn’t a single ray of daylight coming into the room. In fact, save for the obvious signs that someone had taken a stab at making it a fairly nice living quarters, it was clear I was in a cave of some sort. Light was being provided by small nooks emitting a green tinted light, but not so green as to make the environment look like the results of one of those video games that try to look like you’re a Navy SEAL on a night stealth mission. It was downright mild on the eyes, actually.
I went to get out of the fairly comfortable and absolutely ridiculously oversized bed I was in, making it to the edge before gently pushing my feet out from under the covers I was tucked into, made to sit up, and promptly ate floor.
Was there supposed to be pain in the eternities? Because my nose was feeling some pain right now.
Gingerly, I pushed myself up and took stock.
My body was definitely different than what I was expecting. First, of course, in that I had a body. My understanding from Sunday School was that after you died you didn’t get a body until the Millennium. Of course, this one might be a loaner, given that I was looking at something not human. Hell, it wasn’t even humanoid. In fact, it was...equinoid? Yes, we’ll go with that, because it sure as hell wasn’t equine. I had chitin, and there were wings. Thank goodness I didn’t have six legs, just the regular horsey four. Speaking of legs, there was something off about them, beyond the fact that I had them. I looked closer, and there were holes in my legs. They were clearly meant to be there, as there was no sign of trauma in the very smooth chitin.
“Wait…” I vocalized. It was the first time I heard my new voice, and it had the double-whammy of being very high pitched and having some sort of buzzing, double-voice action. “Ahem, testing testing, one-two-three, testing...do, rey, mi…” Yup, and I sounded juvenile.
Holey legs, equine shape, check on the back for...yup, wings and a saddle-shaped armor carapace. Shifted, vocoder voice, and a touch of a hoof-like appendage to my head proved I had a horn. Oh, hey, hair! Long and green…
“I’m a changeling queen from My Little Pony, because why not?”
Whether it was in reply or not, I wasn’t sure, because it came to me in a combination of thought and spoken word, “Welcome reiltas t’ai-ntwist wavire life, tupacase daughter.”
Blinking in confusion, I turned to the source of the voice and looked up. And up. And up. Standing above me with something resembling a buggy smile was a much, much larger version of me, or at least the parts of me I could see. I’m just guessing by this point that the face is similar, but given how everything else is the same or nearly so, I’d say…
“Wait, daughter?”
There was a sudden spike of happiness, and the larger changeling queen scooped me up in her forelegs and started cuddling me. And babbling. I have a daughter, I know what baby-talk sounds like when adults just gotta do the dumb thing where they speak absolute nonsense in a high-pitched voice. Hell, I’d done it enough, and even as I was doing it I recognized it was damn stupid...but the hug was nice. The overflowing, effervescent joy that accompanied it was nice, as well.
It was about this time I realized that this queen was the source of the bubbly happiness. And that I was her daughter. And she’s trying to nuzzle my tummy and from this angle she looked jUsT LIKE A BUG-OH-GOD-THIS-IS-FOR-THAT-BUG-PHOBIA-I-DEVELOPED-FOR-NO-DAMN-REASON-GROWING-UP-OH-GOD-THIS-IS-THE-UNIVERSE-LAUGHING-AT-ME-OH-GOD-MAKE-IT-STOP…
Apparently, the emotion exchange worked both ways, because even if I couldn’t understand a word she said and had pretty much started frantically scrambling to get out of her grip, her happiness dropped right into motherly worry. “Daughter? Mizule's happening? Mizule's frightening sislaf?” Thankfully, she also used her horn to increase the lighting, which allowed my panicked brain to see that I wasn’t dealing with an insect, just a changeling, which happened to share many traits with insects. For a moment, she held me at a distance, watching me cool down from a phobia-based panic attack, then cuddled me close, this time more calm and intimate.
“Sinpad roinad gleblu sislaf're going reiltas olielle a wavefire alerassa unique challenge,” she was saying with a smile, “Gorealm vasagle's ok, chillpal mommy loves sislaf alerassa always plakill.” Some more of that maternal love came bubbling over whatever emotional connection we shared.
“OK, lady,” I said, “You’re clearly doing your best to take care of your child, but just to let you know I’m gonna freak right the fuck out later on.” I felt her love blending in with the same confusion I experienced when my daughter started making her first sillibances.
Language barriers are such a bitch.
-~<^>~-
As near as I could figure, I wasn’t possessing anyone’s body. This was good, as I didn’t relish the thought of explaining to Dear Old Mum that her actual daughter had been checked out the entire time I was having to learn the language.
“Mommy” decided to give me a tour of home, having me ride on her back as she walked me around the hive. This introduced the first shock to the system, as the moment I crossed the threshold to my room, my mind was filled with the mental and emotional equivalent of a small city’s worth of voices all whispering at once. It didn’t matter if they’re all whispering, that many different voices at once is going to create a din. After scrabling at the changeling equivalent of ears for a bit and realizing that the cacophony was literally in my head, I started attempting to simply tune it out. Easier said than done, of course, and when I turned to face “mom,” the only clue I had that she was trying to talk to me was seeing her mouth move.
“Lady,” I said, doing my best to overcome my instinct to shout to be heard, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” She just smiled at me and nuzzled me again before proceeding with the tour. I really needed to learn the language. And figure out how to quiet down the hive-mind.
At some point about halfway through the tour, “mom” showed me the throne room, and I was able to recognize the magic absorbing throne from the Season Six finale. Whelp, I muttered to myself, That confirms who I’m with and gives me a starting point on when I’m at in the timeline. So apparently “mommy” is Queen Chrysalis, and I’ve got at least a little bit of foreknowledge of what’s going to happen. I still needed some other timeline points of reference.
Of additional concern was; how much of her behavior was because I was her newest favorite, apparently a queen specially hatched (if my somewhat limited knowledge of insect hives was anything to go by), or was this how Chrysalis treated her changelings because they were changelings? Also, how much of what we saw in the show was just her being nasty to be a villain? It was a show aimed at little girls, and as much as I love the work of Faust, Thiessen, et al., they really weren’t a Whedon or Straczynski. Chrysalis’ character was never developed in the show to the point where we got to see her as anything other than the “bad guy” for the Mane 6 to defeat.
I spent enough of my human childhood in the hands of an abuser in the form of my step-mother, I didn’t need an abusive changeling mother in an enforced second childhood, thank you very much.
It was about then that I realized, I was a child again. A changeling child, but a brand new, fresh off the line child. I had a whole new life spread out before me, which meant…
“Oh, quiznak!” I exclaimed, thumping my muzzle against Chrysalis’ back and covering my eyes with my forelimbs, “I’m gonna have to go through puberty all over again!”
-~<^>~-
By the time the tour ended, I realized I was still in shock. The emotional impact wasn’t hitting me at all, and further I hadn’t gone through the grieving process. I recognized the symptoms from experiencing the same sort of world-shaking blow that my wife leaving me delivered; at first I was practically numb. I was walking around in a sort of “living dead” daze, only reacting to events and the only real emotion I was showing during that time was when I was permitted to be in my daughter’s presence. Even then it was a tiny little bubble of what my normal emotional response was.
As I was being tucked back into my bed (either for a nap or for the night, I wasn’t quite sure), I recalled just exactly how...bad coming out of that emotional, walking coma was, and how long the process took for me to finally get through all the heartbreak and emotional upheaval.
As “mom” closed the door to my room and the lighting dimmed to twilight levels, I sighed. “This,” I said into the empty room, “Is going to suck.”