This is what we do

by Foxgear


Extra Chapter: Maddie

This is what we do 39 Maddie’s chapter
By Foxgear


“AGGAHGHH!”
Maddie screamed in pain as she was held to void less white floor of wherever the hell she was. On top of her was a flaming girl, pinning her down and choking her with burning digits. She cried as the fire girl’s own burning tears fell on top of her.
“I’m sorry!” She choked out as the fire girl screamed and gripped her throat tighter. Maddie fought back grabbing the fire girl’s wrists and pushed them back enough to speak. “I deserve this! I’m not asking for forgiveness, but for your own sake! Move on! Take everything out on me if it helps, just please find peace KEROSENE!”
Kerosene, the Flaming girl, one of her father’s experiments and a girl she enslaved. If there was no better indication, she was dead, it was her demons coming back to haunt her.
(I must be in hell, but yet this doesn’t feel hellish enough.)
After being slammed into a lamppost, her spinal cord shattering and blasting through her organs like shrapnel Maddie found herself in a white fog. She walked through the mist until she lost track of time, and suddenly, she saw a light! Salvation seemed to be at hand, only for it to be Kerosene, who rightfully attacked her. She of course was killed, burned to death, only she reappeared completely healed seconds later and was mulled by Kerosene again.
This happened more than a dozen times before Maddie realized she probably had to do something, so she began trying to talk to Kerosene, who kept trying to kill her. The fire girl was going for kill thirty now.
“Listen! This really hurts, and I know it’s probably nothing compared to my father swapping out your blood vessels for dragon’s, but I just really want you to know how sorry I am!” Arms burned black Maddie wrapped Kerosene in a hug, she didn’t know if it would achieve anything, but it felt right. Is what she thought until she died again.
“Just please stop and listen!” She screamed, only to blink when she saw a non-flaming red-haired girl crying on her knees in front of her. Maddie reached out to touch her but pulled back when she noticed her hand was now on fire. A quick pat-down told her more of her body was burning, some parts the skin was burned away with bones exposed. Half of her left cheek was gone, and she had a horn on right side of her forehead and a broken one on the left. In the reflection of the other girls’ eyes she could only describe herself as a demon.
“Thank you,” The crying girl said her body disintegrating into light fragments.
Maddie looked around, still standing in the white void and shouted to the sky. “What the hell is going on?”
There was no reply.
But the ground suddenly froze beneath her feet. She has to be really stupid not to know who was coming. The flames of her body flared and a fireball formed in her skeleton hand. “Tundra…”
Her former ice minion emerged out of the fog bringing a blizzard with her. She flared her flames pointing her flaming hand at the ice girl. “Do you need a hug too?”
Tundra’s response was to skewer her with a giant icicle, severing her in two. Like before she revived, the flames around her body burned hotter as more of her flesh was eaten by the fire. “Is that what you want? You want to fight? Well, I’ll give ya a fight!”
(Don’t give in!) A mysterious voice shouted from the ether. (Violence will only breed more violence!)
Maddie growled unintelligently snuffing out the fireball and spreading her arms wide. “Whatever you need to do to feel better… do it…”
Tundra formed an ice sword and cut off her head! On the revive the ice girl made a club and bashed her into the ground, breaking bones and taking her sweet time killing her. Tundra’s stoic face showed a marginal twinge of emotion as she brought the club down on Maddie’s head.
Maddie revived again, taking a moment to catch her breath as Tundra loomed over her in thought. The ice girl reached down and grabbed her by the throat and begone freezing her.
“You… destroy…life…” Tundra uttered so softly it was as if she didn’t speak.
“I know… I’m not a good person!” Maddie croaked out her throat, becoming solid ice.
“Don’t… want to… hear…excuses…”
“I’m not making any!” Maddie screamed rematerializing once again. She smacked Tundra’s hand away and got some distance. “I’m really am sorry, I know what I did was wrong, but look at us! We’re both here in this strange place! Like I told Kerosene, you don’t have to forgive me, I don’t deserve it, but its time to move on! You deserve to be in a better place than this!”
Maddie flared her flames, her skin rapidly burning away, she was half skeleton now. “Let me help you…”
“No…” Tundra protested weakly, as Maddie grabbed her in a hug. The heat of her body melting the icy shell around the frozen girl. A tuff of blue hair appeared, and Maddie cradled the real Tundra in her arms.
“I forgot how small you actually were…” Maddie muttered, she had forgotten, or maybe she didn’t care before, but Tundra had probably only been twelve or thirteen when she changed her. Without the ice shell to project a more imposing figure, the real Tundra was no more than a four foot nothing little girl.
“I hate you!” Tundra screamed, bashing her little fists against Maddie’s decomposing chest. Ice began to mix with the fire leaving Maddie half fire and ice.
Maddie patted Tundra’s hair and smiled. “I know, and that’s ok… I hate me too.” The sobbing mess of a girl disappeared into particles of light, leaving her sitting alone of the floors of purgatory. For only a short while.
“Do you hate me too? Whitetail?”
The deer woman stood solemnly behind her, Maddie stood and waited for whatever punishment her previous test subjected wanted to inflict on her. She had been expecting an antler through the heart or something, but Whitetail only patted her head.
“I’m not innocent either, I enjoyed my time preying on the weak, it felt good.” Whitetail stepped back as black hands grabbed her from below and began pulling her into the ground. “Goodbye, Master, I hope… we don’t see each other again.”
In a blink, Whitetail was gone, and the white fog cleared, leaving Maddie baffled as the were suddenly a lot of people around her in a courtroom setting. She couldn’t make out their faces, the blinding light shining from their heads made it impossible. Above the sound of a gavel banged.
“The judgment of Maddie Hoof will now commence! Let the weight of your conscious lead you to your eternality.” A large golden scale fell from the sky in front of her, Maddie looked around expectedly, unsure what was going on.
“They want you to touch it,” A voice said, the same voice that spoke to her earlier. Maddie turned around to see a tawny skinned woman with black hair and silver eyes wearing a tan Patroller coat with the infinity symbol on it. She didn’t recognize the woman, but she saw that coat before, several times.
“Who are you?”
“For now, think of me as your lawyer. Now go, touch the scale.”
Nowhere to go but down Maddie laid her hand on the golden scale and felt something being pulled out of her. On the right side, a ball of light formed and plopped on the gold pan and on the left side, a black ball appeared and slammed down tipping the scale to the left. The scale tipped from one side to the other, most of the time leaning towards the black until it leveled out.
The judge, who just appeared a shining beam of light to her, cried out, “Judgement is passed! She is neither pure enough to ascend nor does she deserve to fall into the abyss. This court sentences the soul of Maddie Hoof to the wheel of reincarnation. Ms. Infinity please run your client through the details.”
“Ok, just stop! What the hell is going on here?” Maddie screamed; everything was moving really fast now. The courtroom just disappeared and left her in the white fog again with her ‘Lawyer.’
Her ‘lawyer’ walked up beside her. “They just judged your soul, your entire life, the good, the bad, and the ugly and you balanced out. Roughly fifty-fifty, you need at least a sixty-five, either way, to go up or down.”
“So, I wasn’t good enough to go to heaven or bad enough to go to hell? First, I want to see the legal book on these numbers, and two, what happens to me now? How does reincarnation work? I’ve read on the subject, but how does this really work? What happens to me? I mean won’t I become a different person when I’m reborn? Do I keep my memories?”
Mysterious Lawyer clapped her hands and smiled. “If you would shut up, I was about to explain all of that. By the way, you can call me Dusk.”
“Didn’t the judge just call you Ms. Infinity?”
“Call me that and I’m reincarnating you as a goat.”
Maddie stepped back away from Dusk warily. “Ok, noted.”
“Great…” Maddie clapped her hands, smiling tensely. “Now, to answer your question, reincarnation works in several different ways. You can be reincarnated as a different person, animal and even into a different world. For you, you get to go back to the world you died in, or you can be reborn in Equestria, you can thank you, father, for that option. As for what will happen to ‘you’ your soul will be recycled into a new body. Starting at the beginning of life. Your old self will slowly merge with your new self until your both one and the same. As you grow older your past experience will fade from your memory.”
“And I have to be good?”
“You can be however you want, it’s just a second chance to save your soul from purgatory. That said, if I reincarnate you now, you’ll end up an orphan, and that’s a very mixed bag, lucky for you, you have some volunteers willing to give up eternity to help you.” Dusk stretched out her hand and poked Maddie in the chest. “Don’t skew this up for them. Otherwise I’m going to erase you from existence.”
Dusk disappeared, leaving Maddie fearful and confused. “What are you! Are you like a god or something?”
“No…, just an unfortunate traveler.” Dusk’s voice resounded from the void. Leaving Maddie wondering what was going to happen next as the white mist began to clear, leaving her standing on a white marble platform with a long white staircase stretching up into the clouds seemingly forever.
“Longs way up isn’t girl?” A voice drawled.
Maddie stiffened at the voice she hadn’t heard in years, slowly she turned around coming face to face with her father’s killer and Mac’s father, Nico Vega, his wife Applejane standing behind him.
“What are you doing here…”
Nico ruffled her hair, she slapped his hand away, but he laughed and grabbed her into a hug making her freeze. She wasn’t used to receiving hugs. “I saw everything, thanks for saving my son, but you died too young, Maddie. We need to fix that.”
“How are you going to do that?” She mumbled sighing against Nico, enjoying the warm embrace, looking back her dad hadn’t been very… open. She couldn’t remember if he even hugged her once in her entire life.
Nico padded her back, she was crying? Why was she crying? “I think you know.”
“We’re going back with you; we’re going to be your parents this time around.” Applejane said.
Maddie pushed herself free of Nico, pulling her hair as she looked at the couple with dismay and disbelieve. “You can’t be serious! My father killed her! My family destroyed your family! You can’t seriously be willing to give up fucking heaven for me! Why! Why would you do this!”
Nico smiled as he ruffled her hair again as she sniffed, tears falling freely with no regard of her attempts stop them. She couldn’t even tell if she was sad or happy!
“It’s what we want to do,” Nico told her with a big goofy smile, it reminded her of Mac’s. “Ready for another, go on the merry go round?”
Tears streaming unhindered down her face, Maddie nodded and, in a flash, they were all gone.


Somewhere on earth in a hospital, a child was born, a little girl, to two parents. When the doctors handed the child to her parents he asked, what her name was.
“Mackie,” The father said. “Her name is Mackie.”