Peachy Keen could feel her heart breaking as she looked at Spit Polish.
“You don’t understand!” he had said only a few moments ago. “I was trying to protect everypony!” Those words – his confession that he really had tried to kill that other pony, the one who had given them hope for the first time in weeks – echoed in her ears, replaying over and over. With each remembrance, anger and sadness washed over her, as bad as when she’d lost her parents in those terrible days after the floodwaters had receded.
No, this is worse, she decided. Losing her parents had been awful, but watching her oldest friend slowly turn himself into a monster had been even more horrible to watch. The pony she had grown up with had been funny and kind, always talking about opening his own shoe store one day and rushing to clean up any messy hoofwear that caught his eye. One of her happiest memories had been the time he’d made a set of boots for Sprinkles, her dog, and they’d laughed themselves silly when the beagle had taken one look at them and immediately tried to bury them in the backyard. As recently as six months ago, she’d been teasing him about how it was the nature of boots to always get dirty no matter how often they were cleaned, to which he’d simply laughed and said that was why his talents would always be needed. But now…
“P-Peachy, please…” Laying on his belly few dozen feet in front of her, Spit Polish reached a bloody hoof out towards her, a desperate look on his face. “I did it for you. For you and everypony here. I only wanted-, the only thing I’ve ever wanted is to help-”
“SHUT UP!” she screamed, so loudly that she felt her throat ache. His words tore at her heart, and she couldn’t bear to hear anymore. “I SAID SHUT UP!” She lowered her face to the ground, unable to stop herself from sobbing for a moment, lifting her head only when she’d regained a measure of control over herself. “‘Help’?!” she asked him incredulously. “You want to help?! You just tried to murder somepony!” She pointed at the shadow that other mare had said was Lex. “He came here with doctors and food and was making things better and you tried to kill him! And you say you want to help?!” She felt almost nauseous, as though all the food she’d just eaten was going to come rushing back up, but she didn’t – she couldn’t – stop. “Is this the same help you gave those ponies you threw rocks at when they tried to leave Vanhoover?! The same help you gave those farmers when you stole their food?! What about the help you gave those ponies that made Block Party angry?! Were you helping when you beat them up on his orders?!”
“It was necessary!” Spit Polish’s voice was still begging her to understand. “Desperate times required desperate measures! I didn’t like doing any of those things, but they had to be done!” He waved his injured hoof at the crowd. “If I didn’t help the commander keep discipline here, things would have completely fallen apart, and all of Equestria would have been like this!”
“You’re wrong! Why can’t you see that?!” She wished he’d get angry at her, that he’d scream curses at her and act hateful and cruel like somepony else altogether. That would have been easier than listening to him the way he was now, still recognizably her best friend even as he tried to persuade her that what he’d done was acceptable. “We could have found another way! It didn’t have to be like this!”
“Yes it did!” yelled Spit Polish. “YES IT DID! If there was any other way the commander would have done it! I would have done it, but there wasn’t! We did what we had to do for the good of Equestria, and we weren’t wrong!”
He really believes that… Peachy wanted to scream at him to shut up again, to cover her ears and shake her head and make him stop saying those things, but suddenly she didn’t have the energy. For a moment the world swayed dangerously, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she almost collapsed, a single thought filling her mind then: I can’t do this anymore.
She had been trying to stop Spit Polish from going down this road for a long time. She’d tried many times to reason with him, to tell him that what Block Party was doing was wrong, but he hadn’t listened. She’d tried to comfort him in those increasingly rare moments when he’d admitted to feeling guilty about what he’d done in the other stallion’s service, hoping that she’d be able to persuade him to stop, but it had always been in vain. She’d even offered her own services to Block Party, hoping to replace Spit Polish and so prevent him from having to do anymore awful things. But that plan had failed spectacularly when she hadn’t been able to bring herself to attack ponies trying to leave the city, earning herself a severe beating at Block Party’s hooves. When Spit Polish had found out what happened, she’d briefly hoped that he’d finally see what a monster his “commander” was. But although she’d seen the conflict in her old friend’s eyes, the only thing he’d said to her was “you shouldn’t have made him angry.” It had filled her with shock and disappointment at the time, but that was nothing compared to now.
When she opened her eyes a moment later, her only response to Spit Polish was a mournful look. She wanted to say so many things to him in that moment – that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to save him, that it terrified her that he’d become someone so different from the pony she knew, that it hurt too much for her to keep reaching out to him – but she couldn’t find it within herself to do so. Instead, she turned her gaze toward the freestanding shadow that was Lex Legis. For a brief moment she couldn’t help but appreciate the irony that a pony who looked as unintimidating as Spit Polish would do such grotesque things, while the pony who had changed into such an intimidating form had done so much for them while asking for nothing in return. Maybe that’s what Equestria’s become now, she thought tiredly, though the significance of that was more than she could bring herself to dwell on at the moment.
Instead, she took a single step forward. “Lex Legis,” she called, though she needn’t have bothered, since all eyes were already on her. “My name is Peachy Keen. I’ve known Spit Polish all my life, and I just…I wanted to say-”
“If you’re going to ask me to show him leniency,” interrupted Lex, his eyes narrowing, “then y-”
“No, I’m not.” Peachy shook her head wearily. “I just wanted to say that, whatever you do to him…he deserves it.”
A stricken look crossed Spit Polish’s face at that, but Peachy Keen didn’t see it, turning and walking away. “Peachy!” he called after her, his voice almost a sob. “Peachy, you can’t do this!” He tried to crawl after her, but was barely able to move, dragging himself forward along the ground with his undamaged foreleg. “Peachy, please, don’t! You know me!”
“I used to. I don’t anymore.” Her voice only barely carried to his ears as she walked away, the crowd parting like water before her. “Goodbye, Spit.”
He screamed her name one last time, then, and although she didn’t show any outward sign of having heard it, she knew that the sound would follow her for a very long time.
“Wow…”
Sonata wasn’t sure what else to say as Peachy left, glancing at where the orange mare had disappeared into the crowd before turning her eyes back to Spit Polish. He had buried his face in his forelegs, weeping bitterly. And I thought me and Lex had problems, she grimaced, before turning back to look at her boyfriend. “So, um, what now?”
Lex was silent for a long moment. He wanted to simply curse the wretched pony right there, but as much as he loathed the sight of that pathetic stallion, he couldn’t ignore what he knew was the moral course of action to take in such circumstances. “Use your magic to put him to sleep, and then have the doctors drag him to the medical tent and patch him up. When they’re done, I want him thrown in that cage that we used to transport Garden Gate here. Until then, tell C. Shells to have some of her crew stand guard over him while the doctors patch him up. I won't have him waking up and attacking anypony else before he's imprisoned.”
Sonata blinked at that, tilting her head. “Um, C. Shells isn’t here. She went into Vanhoover with Cloudbank and the others.”
Lex’s eyes widened just slightly, before turning upward, cursing as he noticed the position of the sun. “They weren’t supposed to leave before I had a chance to speak to them again! There were other preparations I wanted to make!”
“Aw, don’t stress out over it,” shrugged Sonata. “They looked super prepared already, plus I used some magic to help them out. And besides, Cloudbank had Severance with her, so I bet they’ll be fine.” She gave him a reassuring smile before singing a brief spell, glancing at the crying Spit Polish as she did. A moment later his weeping trailed off as the tension went out of his body, passing out as her magic took hold. Satisfied, she looked back at Lex, canting her head toward the medical tent. “I’m gonna go fetch those doctors.” She didn’t wait for him to respond before turning and trotting off, humming to herself happily. That all went great! After how bad everything had gone since they’d arrived in the camp, it was about time that things started to turn arou-
“Sonata.”
She paused in mid-trot as she heard him call her name, turning back to glance at him. “What’s up?”
“As soon as the doctors collect this pathetic excuse for a pony, I want you to come to my tent.” He floated closer to her then, his green eyes filled with displeasure. “Spit Polish isn’t the only pony that needs to be punished for what they’ve done.”
She winced at that, biting her lip as she folded her ears back. So much for things turning around.
Nosey watched silently as the crowd began to disperse, talking amongst themselves about what they’d just witnessed. From what she could overhear, virtually all of them were of the opinion that Spit Polish was getting what he deserved. None of them seemed to think that Lex had gone overboard; quite the contrary, the sight of several doctors picking up the defeated stallion and taking him into the medical tent seemed to cement that he wasn’t being unreasonable in his reactions, at least so far.
First the doctors treating everyone here. Then the extravagant banquet this morning. Now this. The atmosphere at the camp was more optimistic than it had been at any time since its founding. For the first time in weeks, the ponies here were daring to believe that their misery was coming to an end, and the despair that had permeated the place was steadily eroding.
That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all. If this kept up, everything she'd worked for would come undone, and that couldn't be allowed to happen. Fortunately, she knew how to manage the situation. After all, hope was a fickle thing; if it was suddenly snatched away, it could result in a sense of hopelessness even greater than if it had never been there in the first place.
A small smile crossed Nosey’s face as she turned her awareness back towards Cloudbank and the others.