//------------------------------// // Chapter Seven: The One Where Things Get Really Boring and Lifetimey // Story: I Met a Pony In Hell (And We Kicked Ass Together) // by shortskirtsandexplosions //------------------------------//         When I awoke, it was to the noise of Applejack kicking metal debris and shattering rubble over the rusted steps that flanked the door.  I sat up, startled, but it was Kelly's voice that was gasping instead.  I saw her pivoting—wincing—to look at her collared partner.  Her left leg was covered with tight bandages, but that didn't stop her from trying to sit up and reach for her companion.         “AJ?!”  Kelly wheezed, winced, and finally found a comfortable position.  “What's wrong?  What's gotten into you?”         “I'm stupid, alright?!”  Applejack spat, stomping in angry circles.  Her freckled face turned scorching red as the armored plates rattled around her pacing form.  “I'm a stupid, thoughtless, apple-buckin' country buffoon!  Why am I even here?!  Why am I even pretendin' to be of use to anypony?!”         “The heck are you going on about?”  Kelly exclaimed.  She shuffled a few feet over in spite of her wounds.  “Applejack, please, talk to me!”         “What's the point?”  Applejack slapped her front hooves into the floor and seethed.  “I'll mess things up!  I always mess things up!  I couldn't even be a decent pack-horse!  The simplest job a pony knows, and I even plum ruined that!”         “Will you just tell me what you did already?!”         “Don't you see?”  Applejack frowned, spun, and showed off her front hooves.  Both of them were barren.  “I lost my shoes!  I lost my horseshoes like a dumb little filly, frolickin' her way to school!  How could I be so senseless?  I didn't even notice until now, on account of my brain havin' leapt out of my skull five hours ago!”         “Applejack, we just came out of a living hell!  Seriously!” Kelly exclaimed between winces.  “I'm still amazed that we made it with our lives intact!  I think losing a few things is forgivable!  Shawn lost a crossbow, but you don't see any of us grieving over it?”         “Did he also leave behind our entire saddlebag full of supplies?!” Applejack roared.  “Or our rations or our tools to fix yer leg up somethin' proper?”         “Applejack,” Kelly sighed.  “We've been over this.  We had no choice but to run.  That incubus was gonna cook us alive—”         “There's no excuse, Kelly!” Applejack shouted.  “There just t'ain't no excusin' it!  I'm a dumb mare!  Why can't we be in the Apple Underworld where I might be of real use to y'all?!”         “Oh Applejack,” Kelly cooed.         “Don't be usin' them puppy dog eyes on me!”  Applejack pointed, her breath reaching a fever pitch.  She sat on her haunches and grumbled, “I know when I'm useless!  I should have been more careful!  What good are my buckin' legs without them fancy cleats Sisyphus gave me when I got here?  At this rate, I'll never get y'all home, or myself neither!  I'll never make it out of this place alive!  I'll never get to where...”  Her face retched in a painful heave.  “G-get to where... Get t-to where ponies need me...”         “Applejack...”         “All this time,” Applejack ran a hoof through her mane as her face scrunched up.  “I've been gone for so long.  They must think I've run off.  They must think I don't love 'em no more.  Maybe it's just right that I never come back.  Nopony needs to know what I know, to hear what I have to say.  Nopony should ever know of this place, especially not... especially not...”         “Shhh...”  Kelly slid over and wrapped her arms around the mare.  “They wouldn't think that, AJ.  They love you as much as you love them.”         Applejack was hyperventilating.  She surrendered into Kelly's embrace, staring into the abyss that surrounded our immediate platform.  When the tears came out of her eyes, they were moving just as quickly as her breathless words.  “I miss them somethin' awful, Kelly.  Things have gotten so nasty-like.  I r-reckon I may never see them again.  Granny... Big Mac... Apple Bloom.”  She sniffed and held a hoof over her face.  “Oh poor lil’ Apple Bloom.  She's already had to go through havin' no Ma or Pa.  How can she get along without her b-big sister as well?”         “It's okay to be scared,” Kelly smiled and gently stroked Applejack's back.  “Nobody can be perfectly strong forever.”         “I just hate this pl-place, Kelly,” Applejack sobbed, burying her face into the woman's shoulder.  “I hate it so dang much.  I hate what it's made me b-become.  I might as well be just as d-dead as Fluttershy.  I've become somethin' horrible.  Soon I'll be another m-monster that lives in this place.”         “No, Applejack.  No you won't,” Kelly quietly said.  “We're not gonna let the likes of Sisyphus and Babellyon win, you hear me?  We're gonna get you home, AJ.  We're gonna get you home to your family.  It's just a matter of time.”         Applejack had completely collapsed at this point.  Nothing intelligible came out of her mouth, except for the occasional “I miss them so much” in increasingly fragmented cadence.  Kelly held her close, stroking her gently, all but cradling the weeping pony like a toddler.         I thought I was the only audience to this melancholic display, but then I heard a shuddering sigh to my left.  I turned to look and my head nearly collided with Lyra's horn.  How long had she been sitting right there?  The whole time I was unconscious?         “I never thought I'd ever see Applejack cry,” Lyra said in a low voice.  Her helmet was off as she sat peacefully, gazing at the scene.         I blinked stupidly at our allies, and then even more stupidly at Lyra.  “What, is that a big deal or something?”         She exhaled, bearing the most exhausted of smiles.  “You...”  She paused.  “I-I guess there's no point in explaining it...”         “Yeah.  Guess not,” I muttered without thinking.  I suddenly did a double-take, for there was something very different about my collared companion.  “Holy shit.  Your hair.”         “Hmmm?”  She glanced at me, then chuckled slightly.  “Oh, my mane.”  She bit her lip as she ran a hoof over a buzzed neck of lightly-colored stubble.  “I lost it sometime in the last few hours.”         “How and what for?” I asked.         Lyra pointed.  “Kelly's leg.”         I turned to look.  I studied the bandages on Kelly's wound for the first time.  “Huh.  Weird.”  I looked back at Lyra.  “I thought I overheard Applejack saying she left the supplies back in the chamber behind us.”         “Yeah.” Lyra nodded, but then smiled sweetly.  “Thankfully, though, I remembered some spells that Twilight Sparkle taught me back at home about basic transmogrification.  But I needed something long and flexible if I actually wanted to 'make' bandages.  So, Applejack did the snip-snip to my mane and... there you have it.”         I looked back at Kelly.  I smirked.  “Heh.  That's a nifty trick.”         “Mmmm...”  Lyra sighed and squatted low, hiding part of her face behind folded forelegs.  “No it isn't.  You're just saying that.”         I gulped and uttered, “No.  Seriously, I mean it.”  I shrugged.  “Hell, if I could spontaneously turn my back-hair into latex on a Saturday night, I would—”  I stopped in mid-sentence.  My eyes darted over.         Lyra was glancing up at me, blankly, innocently.         I cleared my throat.  “You know what?  Forget it.  I'm... not even gonna finish that one.”         She merely nodded and gazed down at the quiet pair.  “Applejack still has her mane hair.  Now that some of my magic's recharged, I could transmogrify some more bandages that we can put over your burns.  I chose to help fix Kelly first, though.  Because... well... erm...”  She squirmed nervously.         “Say no more,” I muttered with a nod.  “Dames before dudes.  Besides, she needed the medical attention more.  Me?”  I rubbed my reddened arms, winced slightly, but still managed a smile.  “Hell, I've lived with worse.”         “This is going to be followed up by a joke, isn't it?” she said with a knowing smile.         “Yeah.  One that involves a drunken dinner date in Key West that went south... in more ways than one.”         “Heehee...”  Lyra's ears flicked as she rested her chin on her hooves once more.  “I'm kind of glad Kelly joined us.  That means there's someone around who actually gets you.”         “Heh, as if.  Besides, it doesn't matter, really,” I said.  “You laugh at me all the same.”         “Only because I don't know how to respond to you half of the time.”         I wasn't entirely sure why at the time, but that hurt.  Still, I couldn't fault her.  “Well, I can't fault you, Lyra.”         She blinked curiously at me.  “Why do you do it?”         “Hmmm?”         “Joke around?  Get angry all the time?  Is it your way of trying to distract yourself?”         There was no way it could have been that simple... could it?  “I dunno,” I blurted.  “There's just so much absurdity in life.  I can't help but ramble about it out loud like a psychopath, especially when being absolutely quiet is the truly insane thing to do.”         “Is the world where you come from really that terrible?”         I glanced at her.  “Do I make it sound that way?”         “When I was first dropped in here, before I was paired with you, Sisyphus was trying really hard to convince me that all humans were inherently evil,” Lyra said.  “I think he wanted us ponies to think that—by being collared to your kind—we were being given a moral crutch, that we had to think doubly-hard before judging everything we did in this place as wrong or right.”         I raised an eyebrow at that thought.  “Huh.  That's an interesting way of looking at it.”         “Why?  What did Sisyphus tell the likes of you and Kelly about ponies?”         I thought about the moment I first arrived in Tartarus.  When I wasn't trying not to throw up or scream like a baby, Sisyphus was convincing me that ponies were weak, childish, naïve, and incapable of understanding pain.         “He told us that humans were miserable too,” I eventually said.  “In his own way...”         Lyra slowly nodded.  “Do you believe that?”         I took a deep breath, sitting up straight beside her.  “Well, the world I know is hardly pretty.  There's the Big Three: war, poverty, and the Black Eyed Peas.  You've got a tiny group of rich assholes exploiting the fuck out of a whole bunch of starving saps all across the globe.  The oceans are drying up, the forests are disappearing, honeybees are going the way of the dinosaur—just about everything horrible that you could imagine, plus the death of Andy Griffith.”         “Who?”         “Never mind; too soon.”  I coughed.  “Anyways, I kinda sorta guess I'm at that age when I'm most snarky about it.  It can't be helped, really.  College tuition, blind dates, alcohol: they're all the firm ingredients for a tall bottle of cynical fuck-me-please.  At some point—I dunno when—I gave up and just started believing that there was nothing worth believing in, what with all the ugliness and all.”  I sighed and gazed up at the cavernous ceiling of the rusted place.  “And then I get Commander Scotty'd to this hellhole, and it was like nailing the head in the nihlistic coffin, ya dig?”         Lyra's tail flicked.  She smiled helplessly.  “I guess I 'dig.'  Though... I really don't understand it all, Shawn.”         “Yeah, well...”  I leaned back against the wall behind us.  “Nobody expects you to.”         “Because I'm a pony?”         I merely bit my lip.         Lyra fidgeted slightly.  She looked down at her hooves and murmured, “All my life, I guess you can say that I've been happy.  I grew up in Canterlot.  It's a luxurious place, full of beautiful gardens and wonderfully educated stallions and mares.  Then, once I was older, I moved into Ponyville.  I'd never seen a more gorgeous town.  You can wake up in the morning and smell the flowers without even opening the windows.  Everypony you meet in the streets is nice.  Everyone wants to shake hooves with you and share stories.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with leaving your front door unlocked at night.  Then, when the seasons change, there are countless celebrations.  We plant seeds, we feed animals, and we help the world grow.”         “Sounds like you live in either Disney World or a Thomas Kinkade painting.”         “It's a very nice, safe place—is what I'm trying to say, Shawn,” Lyra said.  “But...”  She bit her lip.  “I'd be lying if I said that it didn't feel like something was missing.”         “Like what?”         She searched the place with her eyes as she transformed her thoughts into words.  “You speak so terribly of your world.  Have you ever thought that maybe all of it is in your head?  That things can't possibly be that bad?”         “Uhhh...”  I scratched the back of my neck, but winced from a patch of burned skin.  “Ahem.  Yeah, I guess I have.  Just a little bit.”         “Well, sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I would think to myself...”  She shuddered briefly and avoided my gaze.  “I-I would think to myself that life in Equestria—that everything I cherished so deeply—was a little too good to be true.  I felt that there was a place where nightmares belonged, where there were frightening things that made everything we held dear worth holding onto all the more.”         I leaned my chin on my knuckles.  “Do... Do you think that you've found that place now, Lyra?”         “I've f-found things,” she said with a painful expression.  “And as ugly as it all is, it only makes me want to return home all the more.  It's... It's like I finally know that all the stuff that made me happy is truly, truly precious.”         “Well, that's a good thing, isn't it?  I guess?”         “Does it have to work in one direction, though?”  She looked at me.  “Is something about this whole experience—something about meeting ponies like me and Applejack and Rainbow Dash and... a-and Thunderlane—going to make you appreciate life once you're back home safe?”         I glanced away.  I saw a shadow of myself lying beside the door, a weeping Lyra holding him close and not letting go.  “Hell,” I said with a smirk and a shrug.  “Who knows?  Maybe what Sisyphus planned all along is backfiring.”         “Oh?”         “Yeah.  Like—when he threw us all together, thinking we'd clash, he was only slapping together... uh... two opposites of the universe that could only benefit from the mutual ass-kicking of trolls.”         “So, in the end, we have ponies tasting of a little bit of humanity and humans tasting of a little bit of ponydom?”         “Hey, crossovers work in comic books at least.”  I rested my arms behind my head and leaned back.  “Perhaps what our two worlds needed all along was... I dunno... some sort of diplomacy bureau... or a conversion cabinet.”         Lyra squinted quizzically.  “I'm afraid I don't read you.” "Yeah, well.” I rolled my eyes. “That's because it's not something worth writing about.”         “Heeheehee.”  Her cheeks warmed as she gazed past Kelly and Applejack.  “Well, I don't know about you, but when I get back, I'm going to count every second in Ponyville a blessing.”         I glanced at her sideways.  I studied her eyes.  I remembered the tears that had once squeezed out of them.  In so doing, I was too distracted to stop the words coming out of my mouth.  “Who do you have to return to, Lyra?”         Lyra blinked at me.  “You... You really want to know?”         I answered her by not answering her.         After such graceful silence, she took a deep breath and smiled placidly into the shadows.  “Bon Bon,” she spoke, almost hummed.  “I've been gone for so long.  Bon Bon will be worried sick.  I... I simply can't begin to imagine...”         “'Bon Bon,' huh?” I asked.  “That's kind of a quirky name for a stallion.”         Lyra's cheeks instantly went red.  “Uhm...”  She smiled bashfully past me.  “She's a mare.”         I blinked.  “Oh.”  I blinked again, then looked at her.  “So, does the WNBA have many franchises in Ponyland?”         “Huh?”         I coughed.  “Never mind.  Tell me more about Bon Bon.”         “Well...”  Lyra kneaded the floor with her hooves and breathed dreamily.  “She's tolerated me this long, that's an amazing thing.”  The unicorn chuckled dryly, then continued, “She knows just the right thing to say to me in the morning so that the rest of the day shines all the more.  When I'm trotting through town with her, it's like the rest of the world just slows down and lets us pass by, like we're two forgotten queens of yesteryear.  Egads, if only she was here to listen to me say such nonsense.  She's such a romantic.”         “Heh, I'm guessing so,” I said.         “She's... she's so very romantic,” Lyra murmured, her face becoming deadpan.  “She knows how to make every second spent together count.  She... she makes me feel like I'm somepony worth smiling at, and not just another face in the crowd to wave at and pass by.  At night, she even snuggles up to me and hums a little tune, as if trying to sing this musician she's in love with to sleep.  And... and I'm awake and I hear her, but I pretend to be asleep and...”  She paused, whimpered, and spoke next with a cracking voice.  “I don't know why I've always done th-that.”  Lyra shuddered.  “As Celestia is my witness, I'm never g-gonna pretend around Bon Bon ever again...”         The air grew thin, punctuated in a few places by Lyra's occasional sniffles.  I looked down at our two allies.  Applejack had just about sobbed herself to sleep.  As for Kelly: she was looking up at me over her companion's shoulder.  Her expression was soft and gentle, even bearing the tiniest hint of a smile.         I almost made a face, but then Lyra spoke again.  “Th-Thank you, Shawn.”         My body nearly jolted at that.  “Uhhh...”  I glanced down at her.  “For what?”         “For t-talking to me,” Lyra said with a glossy-eyed smile.         “But...”  I squinted.  “I thought you hated it when I talked.”         She sniffled and shook her head.  “This time it was different.  This time you listened as well.”         “Hmmph... Yeah, well.”  I waved my left arm in front of her.  “I'm burned all over.  It's not like I can fill the time doing naked cartwheels.”         “Heeheeheehee...”         I sighed and looked away from her.  I felt something soft against my shoulder.  I glanced over and saw her leaning against me, gently nuzzling my bicep.  I was burned there, but the curious thing was that it didn't hurt so much.         “We're going to get you home, Shawn,” she murmured.  “And maybe you too will meet someone like my Bon Bon.”         Groaning, I folded my arms and looked away.  “You're a goddam fruitcake.”         “Mmmmhmmmm.”  And then she merely giggled.