Do you smell that?
That sweet, sickly scent...
The one that prickles your wings and makes you feel safe? Old books and fresh ink and lavender coatscrub and avianequine hormones and the residual aftermath of a spell that’s just like the air after a lightning strike—smouldering ozone and all energy and adrenaline—
And do you hear that?
The thumping against the ground?
The one that’s driving you crazy?
And do you feel her dragging you forward, right into her mou—
Her mou—
Mou—
Jaw and teeth and tongue sort of thing.
The smell is overpowering you now... you feel dizzy in the overwhelming heat of it all.
Is that the heat from your body, from the smell?
Or does that heat come from somewhere else?
Wet, wet mouth.
So vague and undefined, you feel like you are tearing apart at the seams, like Rarity herself had come up and undone you stitch by stitch.
Coulda been nicer about it, really. Supposed to be your friend, and all.
And now it’s burning, tearing your flesh apart—
Eating away at your insides like a cloud of chlorine (how you imagined it from that war diary she made you read)—
You vomit upon the floor and begin to crawl away, but your legs don’t work quite right—
Your hooves won’t respond, just twitch and crack...
And now the thumping is in your chest.
The ground is pushing back, back against you, just as it has so many times over and over before...
The wind rushing through you, the soil galloping up to bury you...
And the heat of the earth, from its deep volcanic underground chasms, is spilling forth and flooding your senses, filling you full and fit to bursting.
An eternal worm is driving itself forth through the bedrock, through the strata and layers from its buried tomb to be reborn against the surface of the earth:
And wails out a thousand cries to drive a haunting madness through the minds of all Equinity (like in the mythologies she spoke of).
One phrase that is repeated on the lips of all in Equestria soundlessly, but with absolute clarity in understanding so that anyone could comprehend it simply by being near them:
“We wish we were dead.”
And to her, you say—”Oh, come on! You’re kidding, right?”
But you can tell by the smell, that sweet sweet smell which billows out through the hallways—and how those hallways always reek of her scent—you find yourself repeating:
“Please, come back.”
A deep, rattling breath.
“Please, please come back.”
The aching, sharp pain in the chest running across creaking ribs and minced muscles.
“I am nothing—”
A cough, a gasp—
“I-I am no one...”
A wheeze—
“I need you to come to my mou—”
My fat tongue so heavy, filling my mouth and pressing up against teeth so loose in their gums, the rich taste of wet iron assaulting me—
Spit out a bloody tooth. “No, my lungs, I need you to be in my lungs...”
But how much can collapsed lungs hold?
And instead now I can taste you on my tongue, and my hoof is scratching and tapping against the floor—I can’t tell the difference between this sound and the one that rang through my chest.
Actually feeling you on my tongue for more than a fleeting moment and pounding against one another, almost impossible to tell if we are fighting or or hugging or playing. And you can play well, nopony gets under my hooves like you do, and the things you do with your wings—
My breathing picks up and all of a sudden I am one (from what I thought more than)—
My wing crumpled against the cloud, the course of electricity ringing through me—
An unbelievable pain, the searing of flesh, the burning of feathers...
And that’s the smell.
Filling every single pore in her nostrils, pervading everything; it was all she could smell. It was like she had never once experienced a single other scent in her life than that rich, eye-and-mouthwatering, acrid scent of a smouldering body.
Choking her and causing her chest to convulse, stinging along down her throat and making her eyes water—
That burning, that horrid horrid burning—
Of feather and flesh crinkling and wisping away
Flaking off into so many ashes...
The world began to mount, swelling uncountably as the sky split open before her.
And she saw everything.
Rainbow yelped as the huge wall of wind slammed her,
sending her head over hooves
wings straining futilely against the storm.
Tumbling down the vertical shaft of wind,
she slammed into several thick groups of smallish clouds that had detached from the larger masses of the storm through the force of its hurricane-level gales.
Grunting with each crash through the cloud bodies,
Rainbow struggled to push her wings out
straight
again;
it was her only hope to avoid becoming a blue and red splatter against the ground.
She let loose an inequine roar,
and mustering all of her might,
tilted her body to the side.
She felt them snap. She felt them break.
My wings.
Her goggles were completely obscured by accumulated rainwater and now
Something dark crimson
All of which was replaced just as fast as it ran off the lenses.
Rainbow didn’t need her sight to know what was going to happen next
She could calculate it perfectly.
Didn’t need to know what was going to happen next.
Everything was turning black and gold and blue and white.
All falling away except for the one
Thing that she couldn’t shake: that
Horrid, sweet, sickly smell.
“Words suck.” I declared.
Twilight turned to face me, expression monotone as her voice. “If you wanted to spar, Rainbow, you could have asked nicely.”
I smirked. “You know what I meant. Proved it right there, too.”
She rolled her eyes, but there was that smile. “Alright. Point?”
“You know how I work, right?”
“I should hope so by now.” Was that concern? It was a joke.
“I have to really be in the moment to make the connections. To bring up the things you talk about that go right over my head like a buckball pass from Pinkie after six cakes.”
I paused, waiting. Twilight waited as well, and we made eye contact. Gazing deep into her purple eyes, watching her blink as if in slow-motion, heart pounding eager and aggressive.
They’re really nice eyes.
“Rainbow?”
I blinked, and realized that my mouth had been slightly agape. “Huh?”
“What were you saying?”
“Uh.” What was I saying? I wiped the corner of my mouth. Oh, right. “Was that a good simile?” I asked earnestly.
Twilight made a noise that was between a laugh and a sigh. Sounded kinda painful. “Rainbow, as weird as it may sound, there are other things I want to do with you besides talk about books and syntax.”
I grinned. The faint echo of my heartbeat in my ear. I could almost feel the wind between my feathers, hooves skimming the surface of the clouds, lungs full of crisp high-altitude air and the sharpness of her scent left in her wake.
“For real though, I get my best ideas while flying. Something about the pure raw thrill of it all makes my mind go into overdrive. When I’m laser-focused in the moment it’s like everything calms down for a second, weirdly, and like somehow I’m able to put it all together! Without it distracting me, even. Well, usually.”
“Probably something to do with adrenaline.” Twilight rested her hoof on mine, and my heart leapt as I remembered about the structural dynamics of hippogriff biotransfiguration, the definition of the word “Quixotic”, and the new way we’d discovered to tickle the inside of her frog all at the same time.
“I tried stopping to write down what I had but whenever I do the feeling fades and I can’t quite capture it.”
“Well, maybe we could find a way to simulate that experience,” she said. Her tongue brushing against the tips of her teeth, a slight hiss to her s’s.
Heady scent hanging in the air, like the world’s best perfume—
Lips brushing against one another—
The books were burning. Everything around them on fire. Twilight lurched towards Rainbow me, a glowing golden skeleton aflame, and held me in her hooves.
Not for a second did I fight back, not as the boiling serpent of her tongue seared the inside of my mouth, not as she pressed her molten body against herself and boiled my innards, not as my charcoaled tongue prodded fragile teeth out of her blistered and smoking gums, not as the hooves I love to hold in hers dug through the thick muscles of my chest, wings drooping behind me limp against my back as their cords were cut like so many of Starlight’s kitestrings.
“Is something wrong?” Her voice was way too soft. She’d noticed. Even though her skull was splitting in two and generally disintegrating into ashes, she’d noticed.
“I need to fly to feel it,” I whispered, and that fucking sucks because I’m not going to be flying anymore.
And through the haze of everything—everything all at once—piercing the veil of nothing and all things, their voices rang forth.
“So when does the operation start again?
“Well, as soon as she’s stable, really.” Curt, melancholic snorts at the pun. “Heh. No, in all honesty though, that was quite a terrible crash—uh. Are her eyelids supposed to be fluttering like that?”
Was this... was this the hospital?
“What? Oh. Oh, no. No, no they are not. Quick, pass me the morphine dial there.”
A click. The hospital began to fade.
“Sweet dreams, Rainbow.”
“In the morning, you’ll be fine.”
And then the smell.
That sick, sweet, horrid smell.