//------------------------------// // Aria // Story: Apples & Eyeballs // by forbloodysummer //------------------------------// Lush, verdant grass strewn across the land in front of her. A soft breeze brushing the tips of her ears. A cloudless sky, eager to provide all the sunlight she could ever want to bathe in. A sparking pool of water soothing her scales. A thousand or more eyes of many colours staring at her from the bottom of a lake of brine and formaldehyde. Life was good for Aria Blaze. Until, that is, a rugged brown hat popped up from behind a ridge, riding atop a freckled orange earth pony and bringing Aria’s lazy reverie to an end. Aria hissed softly and moved to haul herself back into her pool, hopefully in time to submerge and duck an awkward conversation Naturally, no such luck. “Howdy there, neighbour!” Applejack exclaimed, waving her hoof. “Twi wanted me to stop by, see how…” The frown was almost audible. “Um…” Applejack stopped at the edge of the lake. “Are those…” Aria stuck her head up just high enough to be seen. “Eyeballs. Yes.” “Ah… Ah see.” No sense trying to avoid it anymore. Aria grumbled, anchoring her pointed hooves on the shore and hoisting herself up until a good portion of her brobdingnagian bulk rested on dry land. She peered down at the bite-sized pony before her. “It’s a farm. I’m growing them.” “Now what in tarnation is that supposed to mean?” Aria covered her brow with her hoof. “Okay, keep on thinking of growing apples for a second.” “Okay. Now what?” “It’s kind of like that. Except they’re eyeballs, not apples.” “You lost me.” Aria rolled her eyes, sighing. “So, on the other side of this mirror, some really clever people came up with this thing called ‘cloning.’ Turns out, if you take one of their machines and zap it with some magic, it can grow eyeballs.” She craned her neck and gestured to a large shed not too far off, where a line of ponies slowly marched inside and a steady stream of ponies holding eyeballs in jars came out another door. “And then I sell them.” Looking back to Applejack, Aria cocked her head. “Talking of which, maybe you can help me out. At the rate these saps are buying my stuff, this plot I’ve got isn’t gonna cut it. Do you think you can—” “Woah, hold on for a second there. Why in the blazes are ponies buying disembodied eyeballs?” “You really want to know?” Without waiting for an answer, Aria bowed her head and grumbled. “So, in this other world I used to live in, there was this place called Mexico...” That was where it all began. The great ‘get away from it all’ vacation of 1994 had seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, barring the part where the main two things (or ‘people,’ as they insisted on being called) in her life that she would’ve liked to get away from for a while were the two who went with her. And so the only true form of escapism available to Aria on the trip was at the bottom of a pile of bottles. That wasn’t so bad, though: the tequila had been cheap and plentiful, sunburn was hardly an issue when you healed at five times the human speed and were already kind of pinkish in colour, and bar fights just felt so much more cinematic when the majority of the locals had moustaches. But that last bit caused problems anytime she got the horn, as happened quite a bit when she was three sheets to the wind. Mainly that when she was looking for people to fuck, the sight of all those hairy upper lips made her want to poke her eyes out with a cactus. All good things, though, and other tired clichés, and after a few months the constant deluge of drinking and fighting had taken its toll on the Mexican economy, so they’d dragged their aching-in-a-good-way bodies home again, and each of them had taken something back with them from the trip. Thanks to how friendly Adagio had been with an entire family who owned some historic sombrero-making business, she finally had a custom-made hat that could actually fit on her head without squashing her ridiculous hair. Which was great, unless she also planned on going through any doorways. And Sonata, fuck, half the internet knew what Sonata picked up from south of the border, since she still goes on about it incessantly to this day. But Aria? She’d found that when she was bored, drunk and wanting to shag something, then yeah, she did kind of get off on impaling cacti through her eyes. What? There are weirder fetishes out there. Adagio might have called it ‘sexy headbutting spiky plants,’ but Jesus, at least Aria had never fucked a whole family just for a hat, grannies and all. Not that Aria wasn’t a tiny bit impressed by that – for centuries she’d been known as the one to beat when getting drunk and stupid, and sure enough, Adagio had come along and shown her how it was done. There’s nothing like massive retinal haemorrhaging to wipe the smirk off a smug bitch’s face. At least, Aria thought not; truthfully it wasn’t like she’d been able to see anything at the time, no eyes and all. She’d reclaimed her crown, though, as top plastered idiot. And come like a fucking waterfall in the process. Of course, gaping wounds were still likely to get infected, even with siren healing abilities, but necking tequila from a bottle in each eye socket to disinfect them had been satisfyingly brutal, to the point that everyone else had just cleared out of the bar after that, and left her to it for the night. Eventually there’d been no avoiding it, though: she needed a pair of new eyes. And naturally, getting hold of that was pretty tough when you couldn’t bloody see. ‘With your tail between your legs’ wasn’t really something that suited siren physiology in Equestria, since their bottom halves were all tail, with no back legs to speak of. But she’d experienced it fully when having to grovel to Adagio to find her some new eyes. Aria had been too trolleyed to be afraid, waiting there in the bar helplessly with only Sonata left to guard her, but she’d absolutely felt the shame of it. Still rubbed herself raw while waiting just remembering the sensation, but who would have thought that raising your heart rate with your fingers and thinning your blood with alcohol would make eye wounds fountain like that? Poor, traumatised Sonata... Anyway, what Mexico lacked in first-world healthcare, it had more than made up for in people who wouldn’t be missed, and a couple of hours later Adagio had returned with a selection of half a dozen sets of eyes, in case the blood types didn’t line up or something. Happily, siren healing made surgery to replace body parts straightforward, with the new eye fitting in and connecting up like a USB stick. The only problem was, Aria soon found out, that the optic nerve would still take a few days to regrow and connect to the new eyes. And only then did she learn the other problem. They were yellow. Her new eyes were yellow. Which meant that once they’d got back home, she’d had to throw out her whole fucking wardrobe and start again from scratch to suit the entirely new colouring, since none of her old stuff looked right with them. Even yellow eyes in a pinkish-skinned face had been weird to see. That had definitely taken some getting used to. The first time she’d woken up still-drunk and caught a glimpse of her own reflection she’d tried flirting with the hot girl with weird golden eyes who was in her bedroom and kept copying Aria’s movements, and it had taken longer than she’d normally care to admit for her to realise where she’d gone wrong. And then, a few months later, she’d been fucking hammered one night. She couldn’t now remember if she’d had a shit day and got drunk or had a brilliant day and got drunk; ultimately it didn’t really matter. Either way, she’d ended up singing a phrase or two, and soon enough she was bent over the bar being seen to by the barmaid’s boyfriend, while the barmaid herself fed Aria the next round of shots. A stray glance in a fleeting moment of drunken clarity had revealed the errant, wispy whiskers on the barmaid’s top lip, and, together with the tequila slammers Aria was powering through, it was all brought back in a loin-aching wave of need. Shortly afterwards, she and her thralls for the evening had broken into a garden centre. The next day Aria had needed another new set of eyes. Much harder to get hold of back home, it had turned out. Adagio had had to visit three different orphanages. And, amazingly, hadn’t elected to leave Sonata behind in any of them. That time around, they’d been a pale blue, bringing to mind those of a snow leopard. Again a new wardrobe had followed, and she’d bleached and dyed her hair, too, settling on a strawberry blonde colour. And, God damn, she’d looked fucking stunning! Over the centuries, she and Sonata had just accepted that Adagio would always be the sexy one, whatever either of them tried. Suddenly, that had all changed. Not that it really mattered to anyone else – with their songs, they could have walked through the Playboy Mansion in unwashed tracksuits and still left no one there sparing a glance for its usual occupants. And yet the three of them always looked on top form, so, figure it out: it mattered to them. It might even have been tied into how Adagio ended up as their de facto leader; there was something to be said for the most seductive siren being the one best qualified to lead. But with the blue eyes of a cold spring morning, and hair just a shade closer to ash blonde than Adagio’s own, Aria had suddenly got it. Sonata had started looking to her first when Aria and Adagio walked into a room together. And the way Adagio herself had looked at her... They hadn’t even been that drunk when they’d slept together. Certainly not enough that they’d had trouble remembering the details the next day. Though, even if they had, the injuries sustained might have made it pretty obvious what had gone down. Or, you know, who. And, on the one hand, holy cunting pissbuckets, no sex before or after had ever compared. On the other, though: injuries. She and Adagio knew no restraint in the throes of pleasure. They were both immortal creatures of pure desire, each with thousands of years’ experience. Nothing had ever been sacred, but, Jesus, boundaries were transcended that night. Agony and ecstasy became identical. The cacti didn’t just go in her eyes. The week after had not been fun. Even with siren biology, walking became something that other people did; not Aria. Seeing, too, of course, but for once that had been a lesser priority. She had a sneaking suspicion that Adagio even felt guilty, which would unquestionably have been a first. New eyes were brought to her the very next morning, along with breakfast in bed, which Adagio hand-fed her, because getting bacon, eggs, sausages and beans onto a fork and then into your mouth when you’re not used to being unable to see is fucking hard. They both knew that their first time together had been their last. The eyes Adagio had brought her were orange, which somehow went with her skin tone a lot better than she’d expected. Once they were all connected in, and she had yet another dozen new sets of clothes, she’d admired herself both with and through her new irises, and told Adagio she had a good eye for choosing them. ‘That’s because mine are original,’ Adagio had replied, though without the scathing tone she might have used any other week. A few months later, the irises in Aria’s mirror were sea green. After that, cyan. Then a sapphire blue, followed by a dull brown (which lasted only three weeks), and then a deep ruby red which made her look a bit possessed. It wasn’t like they couldn’t get anything they wanted with minimal effort, so after a while Aria had taken out a self storage unit or two and taken to storing all her favourite clothes from previous colourings, just in case she ever ended up having similar eyes another time. She did hate having to completely rethink her look every time she got an itch she couldn’t scratch any other way, but there weren’t many other options available (no, not a literal behind-the-eyeball itch, it didn’t really work like that. It was more like a yearning she couldn’t otherwise sate that would simply grow stronger until she indulged it). Hunting down specific eye colours would have made obtaining them surreptitiously far more problematic, and left her blind and vulnerable for much longer periods. Ideally she’d keep a box of spares in her underwear drawer – she figured the nosy blue twit was less likely to get her hands on them if she had to dig through a pile of panties to get there – or something, but they had a habit of spoiling if they weren’t acquired fresh from the source, and she never had managed to get the stains out of the carpet. She could keep a stash of whole humans secreted away somewhere, kept unconscious but alive until their bodies were needed, like the larder of some gargantuan eye-eating crab, but that would have brought with it a host of other problems, like increased risk of discovery, space and power requirements, and far too much effort. Sooner or later, she needed to find a more organised long-term solution. “... So somewhere down the line I got the idea of farming them. Somewhere between ‘brilliant’ and ‘pretty fucking brilliant’, if I do say so myself.” “Wow. Ah… really don’t think Ah needed ta know all that. Ta be honest, Ah was really just wonderin’ why ponies would be buying the darn things.” “Oh, didn’t you hear? It’s a lovely option for all those mares who need to go an extra mile in colour coordination, and there’s a new optician in town. Old buddy of mine.” Aria stuck out her hoof to the side. “Pound it.” A second later, a lion-like paw appeared in a flash of light, obligingly bumped the offered hoof and then vanished. “Crazy S.O.B., but damn he’s good at his job.” Applejack started to turn and walk away, only to cock her head to the side and raise her hoof. “Question for ya.” “Shoot.” “If you need to farm eyeballs so that you can, um…” “Indulge my perverted hedonistic ways by sexually headbutting cactaceae?” “Uh… that. Yeah. Anyway, if y’all keep poking your eyes out, why in the blazes are you growing pony eyes?” Aria muttered under her breath, rolling her eyes. She opened her mouth, began with a low, predatory roar, and then let loose a delicate, ethereal melody. The music took form as it left her mouth, encircling her in lacy, gently wafting curtains of magic. They dissipated a moment later, and Aria stood with all four compact, disappointingly blunt hooves firmly on dry land. “You ever tried finding a cactus big enough for that kind of eye? It’d be like trying to get your rocks off with a thimble.” Applejack rubbed her neck. “So you’re telling me that you can magic yourself into a pony whenever you’re… how did you put it?” “Itching for a good skullfuck, yes.” “An’ you can’t just magic y’urself new eyes when ya change form lahke that? That seems kahnda hard ta believe.” “You wouldn’t think it” – mostly because you’re a literally motherfucking mud pony – “but magic here is kinda batshit crazy. What, you think I would’ve dug myself a bloody lake if I could just bang out some new eyes every time someone bangs mine?” Aria snorted. “On the bright side, at least one good thing came of it.” Aria turned to face the shed and called out, “Hey, Starlight! Could ya come here for a sec?” Applejack covered her brow with her hoof. “Oh, horseapples…” A moment later, Starlight Glimmer came prancing out of the side of the shed. “Hey Applejack,” she said, beaming as she came up next to Aria and draped a hoof over her. “How’s it going?” With a heavy groan, Applejack regarded the two mares quizzically. “Do Ah want to know what your part in all this is?” “I needed a smart magic babe to help me get the cloning machine sorted out,” Aria explained, making a sideways glance at Starlight. “And seriously, it’s like we were meant for each other: See, I like stars–” She gestured to her star-shaped hairclips for emphasis. “Where did those even come from? You didn’t have them when you were a… y’know.” “Batshit crazy, remember? Anyway, I like stars, she is a star, I brainwashed ponies, she brainwashed ponies – ” “That’s, um… that’s enough, I think.” Starlight nudged Aria with her front knee, smiling sheepishly. “Ugh, fine,” Aria groaned. Then, with a broad leer, she crept up to Applejack. “But you wanna know what the best part is?” Without waiting for a response, she leaned in and whispered in Applejack’s ear. Applejack’s cheeks flushed bright red and she backed away hurriedly, stammering, “W-well, Ah better be, uh… getting back to the farm, now! Got some apples to buck or something or other. See ya!” Aria waited until Applejack went out of sight before breaking into cackles. “Did you–” “Oh yes.” Starlight groaned. “You are such a creep. Let’s get back to selling some eyeballs.”