“Sweetie Belle, wake up.”
Sweetie was already awake, and was also fairly certain Rarity already knew this. But, honestly, she was grateful. Rarity understood better than most, she was the only one who could understand, really. Sweetie didn’t want to feel weak, like she was made of glass, so few seemed to really get that. But Rarity, she carried on as normal, right up until the point where she had to stop. Sweetie loved her for that.
“I’m up,” she replied, rising from the bedclothes and making a show of rubbing imagined sleep from her eyes. As she stared into the dull, dark red of her hooves, she heard Rarity approach.
“Are you sure you want to go back, darling? I’m more than happy for you to stay here if you’d like.”
“It’s okay Rarity, I think it’s time,” she insisted, though the slight waver in her voice betrayed her. She was doing this because it was the right thing, it didn’t mean she had to be enthusiastic about it.
“Alright then, but as long as you know you’re always welcome here. For as long as you want.” Rarity said kindly, crouching down to meet Sweetie Belle’s eyes. Sweetie only made it a few seconds before burying her face in her sister’s mane and holding onto her for dear life.
“It’s gonna be different, right?” Sweetie mumbled
“Totally different, sweetheart. So much better. I promise.”
“Sweetie Belle!” Cookie Crumbles called happily from the doorway of their home. There seemed to be a new life in her that had been absent for the last few months. Years, actually, if Sweetie was being honest. It seemed like Cookie had been waiting for her daughters’ arrival. They’d spotted her before she’d spotted them.
“Hi mum,” Sweetie replied as she was scooped up into a hug. There was a cautious tone to it, though, and it only really tightened when Sweetie started to reciprocate.
“Hello mother,” Rarity said as Sweetie was finally put down.
“Rarity!” Cookie exclaimed, the desperate cheeriness making Sweetie’s chest hurt. She turned around to look at her sister and found Rarity only properly smiling when she made eye contact with Sweetie. Before that she had been wearing an inscrutable mask of neutrality. They had a different relationship, Rarity and mum.
“Why don’t you go and put your things upstairs Sweetie? I was thinking we could play some board games tonight! Like we used to when you were little!” Cookie cried out, the same desperation creeping in again. Sweetie chewed her lip and looked between them. She only really felt comfortable heading up when Rarity gave her a reassuring smile and flicked her head in the direction of the stairs.
She grabbed her suitcase in her magic. She’d been developing it when she was at Rarity’s and now could manage to take her bags upstairs. Cookie exclaimed some giddy words of pride, and insisted Sweetie show her all her progress later. Sweetie felt like she could have cried at her mum’s voice, but she just nodded as she headed up.
When she got to the landing, her eye twitched. And even though she knew there was no reason to do so, her eyes started to creep towards one door in particular as her mind dredged up flashes of smashed glass and saliva flecks through screams.
“Sweetie,” Rarity said gently from the bottom of the stairs, snapping Sweetie Belle’s attention from the door, “Go and unpack darling. I just need to have a chat with mother and then we can all play some of those board games, hmm?”
Sweetie could have thanked Celestia herself when it became apparent Rarity wasn’t leaving right away. She called back down her agreement, and tried to ignore how Cookie’s smile wobbled and tears pooled in the mare’s eyes.
Her room was different in ways small and large. The tidying up Cookie had done was the most immediate way, but it felt comparatively minor. It wasn’t the appearance of neatness that struck Sweetie Belle, it was the absence of mess, ripped books and broken furniture. Destruction.
She busied herself with the calming monotony of unpacking. As she opened drawers, she found little notes and sweets her mum had left her to find. She didn’t read or eat any of them, instead she just put them all in one of her bedside drawers. She’d look at them properly later.
When she was done, she left the room and went back onto the landing. Instead of closing the door, however, she kept still and strained against the silence. Sweetie could hear the hushed voices from downstairs.
“The first hint I get she is coming right back to ...ever let it get this bad… I lived with him for… responsibility to her and to… I will die before she goes through that again…”
They were too quiet and far away for Sweetie to make out exactly who was speaking when, but she felt like she could have a good guess. The things they said made her chest feel weird, so she loudly closed her door and they immediately cut off.
“Sweetie Belle? Are you finished?” Rarity called out after a few seconds.
“Yeah Rarity.”
“Okay great! Come on down then! I think we might all head over to Sugarcube Corner and get some cakes!”
“Okay!” Sweetie replied. As she started down, she walked past that door again. She stopped in front of it for a few seconds, heart hammering in her chest. After a little while, she reached for the doorknob and pushed it open. Inside was a small antechamber with another door immediately in front of her.
It was only big enough to fit one pony in there with very little room to spare. A totally pointless addition, but it had always been there. A little quirk of the house they’d all gotten used to. Sweetie thought for a moment about similar things she’d seen in her friend’s houses, things that only stuck out to newcomers. They all had one or two if you looked hard enough.
Rarity had always referred to this little room as ‘the airlock’. As Sweetie had gotten older and realised what airlocks were, like on airships and ocean trawlers she’d read about, she thought she had started to understand why.
“Sweetie?” Rarity called, and Sweetie Belle didn’t answer. Instead she slowly closed the door and headed down.
“Are you enjoying it, love?” Cookie asked, and Sweetie nodded. She loved macaroni and cheese, and even though her tummy felt a little off she still devoured it with abandon. It was something she’d missed about home, Rarity never quite put enough cheese in hers.
“We had a lovely day today, didn’t we? I can’t wait for you to show me your magic. My talented girl. And your singing. I’ve missed your sweet little voice. You can sing whenever you want now! As much and as loudly as you want now that…”
There it was, it had to be said sooner or later. Because the house was so different than how she’d left it, and all the ways in which it had changed were for the better. But some imprint remained. Maybe it would only be gone after they talked about it, but Sweetie didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to eat her macaroni and cheese. She wanted to talk to her mum without feeling these strange, uncomfortable feelings in her tummy. She wanted Rarity.
So she didn’t respond and kept eating. Because when you’re eating, you can’t think of practising for your singing performance at school and then the feeling of utter dread when you hear hooves hit the floor and you know you’ve woken him up. You can’t think of trying to hide in your room despite knowing full well you’d be found and then the wrathful screaming would begin.
Macaroni and cheese was Sweetie’s favourite and it wouldn’t be taken from her, so she continued to eat it as she felt her little body shake with sobs. And then warm, pink hooves swaddled her midriff and stroked her mane. And there was a part of her that wanted to shove them away and scream. About how they were only here now that everything was different. But she didn’t.
She just kept eating.
It didn’t matter how different things were, the one place you got none of that protection was being asleep. Sweetie had found that the dreams were the same regardless of whether she was sleeping in her bed alone or cuddled up in her sister’s hooves. After the third try, she decided to just stay awake and read.
A malicious part of her considered singing as loud as she could. Cookie would be asleep now, but she had explicitly said Sweetie could sing whenever she so pleased. But Sweetie didn’t. There had been enough of that kind of behaviour already. Someone had to break the cycle.
Plus, Rarity was down there on the settee. She’d visited again today. Sweetie had told her she didn’t have to visit so much, and spent most of her time in the house alone waiting for those visits regardless. But she thought Rarity probably knew that. She knew everything really. She’d been round every day at some point. Tonight they’d stayed up and listened to some old records. Mum had made them hot chocolate and Rarity had done her mane.
And when Rarity did it, it didn’t feel like being treated like porcelain.
Sweetie Belle licked her lips and cringed at the dryness of her mouth. She tasted the staleness of mid-night thirst. She continued on with her book in the hopes it would go, but eventually the taste was too unpleasant.
She set the book down, and tiptoed to her door. She just needed a glass of water and then she could come back and continue. It was a very exciting book that Scootaloo had leant her, full of wizards and knights. When they encountered an evil-doer they just vanquished them, and that simplicity attracted her. They never had to bother with sending evil-doers to big houses where they still might come back.
Sweetie pushed open her door and walked to the stairs. On the way over, she passed the door to the airlock.
It was a buffer, that’s why Rarity had always called it that. The airlocks on the fancy ships were the very last bit of sanctuary before you got out into the open air or deep sea. It was the last port of call before reality set in, an uneasy limbo of protective disbelief.
Sweetie opened the door and stared inside. The light was still on. This was a good sign, it meant no one had been in here. It meant there was nothing inside. And maybe that’s what she needed to make the dreams go away. Because so far all she had seen were aftereffects of how everything was different. She hadn’t stepped in ground zero.
Her mind shrieked, screamed and begged for her to not go through the airlock, to not reach for the door handle to the real, genuine danger. Because once you open the last door in the airlock, it’s not the airlock anymore. It’s the sky, the sea, a place that can hurt you.
But she needed to see for herself. Even as her lip wobbled and heart thundered over memories of his repulsive snoring, his filthy whiskey breath, the way she never knew whether she’d made him mad enough to hit her.
She pushed the door open, and the airlock stopped being the airlock. It started being a bedroom. Sweetie strained her ears to see if she could hear that snoring. But the room was empty because everything was different now, and it was all too much. Her little body fell to the ground and shook with baleful sobs, great gasps of air as all her dreams and memories of him overwhelmed her.
And worse than all of those memories of his froth-mouthed cries of insane anger because his daughter had the unmitigated gall to sing at six o’clock in the evening were those of the times he tucked her in at night. When he took her to the zoo and let her sit on his shoulders so she could see above the heads of all the other children. The misguided guilt of why he wasn’t always like that, and whether it was because of her that he wasn’t.
It was the memories of Sweetie’s mother, cowering herself. Wondering why she wouldn’t just make it stop like Rarity always did the second she heard the stories Sweetie was too scared to tell her the full extent of. Because Cookie was Sweetie’s mother and if some parents wouldn’t stop hurting their children, then those other parents should at least make it stop. And the resentment and anger at that image of her mother’s near-catatonic, foetal huddle of impotence scared her so much. She knew what anger did, knew what it turned ponies into.
Sweetie didn’t care how loud she was being as she cried in the midst of unclean carpet and spare old whiskey bottles. The sea rushed in around her and stole every breath she had. Because everything was supposed to be different, everything was different, and she shouldn’t have to feel this way anymore.
Because now he was rotting away in a cell somewhere. After Sweetie had woken him up one time too many from his alcohol-induced sleep, just before she’d had to move to Rarity’s for a while, when her sister finally found out how bad things really were. When he’d finally hit her hard enough to break her foreleg. The one time Cookie had finally stepped in, the one thing that needed to happen for it to really start being different.
Sweetie Belle lost track of time and how many tears left her in that maelstrom of agony. So deep in the sea and high above the clouds. And eventually, white, strong hooves wrapped around her and pulled her back into the safety of the ship. Sweetie buried her head in her sister’s mane that smelled so much of safety and home as Rarity shut both the doors. Her father’s room became the airlock again, and those memories got hidden away.
And eventually, when Sweetie’s tears had run out, she finally found where the real difference in the house was. She hadn’t been hit or terrified beyond belief this time, but she’d still found herself crying. But, at last, when she stopped crying it was first time she felt better than before she’d started. Safe in the arms of her sister, things felt like they had moved forward in a way.
It was only a little different, but it was a start.