Twilight Sparkle felt… ‘like garbage’ didn’t sound quite right. Garbage didn’t really ‘feel’ like anything, but then maybe she was just taking the turn of phrase too literally. She felt like she wanted to crawl into a little cave nestled deep within the mountains, and then curl up and rot away as the passage of time desecrated her flesh and left her bones nothing more than ash and dust.
Too morbid. Maybe Rarity’s flair for melodrama was rubbing off on her.
She was sitting inside a nice restaurant; there were only a few other ponies inside— and they were all ponies; Twilight hadn't seen any dragons since arriving in the Empire, but it was already getting late, so maybe…
Anyway. There were a couple ponies. Who cares.
Rarity was sitting next to Twilight in the booth, engaged in lively conversation with Applejack and Spike sitting across from her. Twilight wasn’t listening to any of it. She wasn’t touching her food either. She simultaneously wanted someone to notice and ask if she was doing okay, and also disappear entirely and never speak to anyone again.
It didn’t matter. If anyone asked how she was, she would simply say ‘I’m okay’ and brush the subject under the rug.
“Twilight, my love?” Rarity said concernedly, and Twilight barely registered her soft fingers brushing against Twilight’s hand. “Is something the matter?”
Twilight shook her head. She didn’t look at Rarity.
“Hmm,” Rarity hummed. That helpless hum when you know someone you love is lying to you but you don’t know whether it’s worth it to pry. “Do you want to get away for a second?”
Twilight twitched her nose or her lips or something; a flicker of a scowl that was washed away as quickly as it came by an overwhelming apathy. That was all the response Rarity was going to get from her.
Rarity scooched closer to Twilight. She put her hand on Twilight’s and rested her head on Twilight’s shoulder, entwining their tails together.
She didn’t say any words. She didn’t need to, the gesture was enough.
Twilight put her hand up to her face, digging her nails into her skull as she tried desperately to… honestly she wasn’t sure if she was trying to hold tears back or beckon them forth. They weren’t coming, either way.
Twilight let out a sigh, and she could feel her breath leaving her and it felt heavy, like a toxic cloud. She needed to get her head on straight. She needed to focus on what mattered, and it wasn’t her stupid feelings.
Or maybe it was? Maybe there was a lot of things that mattered, and Twilight just couldn’t juggle them all in her head and they all came crashing down on her at once. It’s never just one thing, there’s always intersections and domino trails. It’s never just one thing.
“I want to tear my eyeballs out,” Twilight said, her voice a disgusting hiss that poisoned the mood of everyone around her, “of my skull, and place them on the table. I want to crush them, into paste, with my fists.”
“Why?” Applejack asked, and Twilight gave her the mother of all death glares, Applejack meeting it without flinching.
How dare she ask Twilight why. Not because Twilight didn’t have an answer, because holy shit did Twilight have an answer, but it was sickening to think that someone so supposedly close to her could ignore everything that felt like it was ripping and tearing at Twilight’s skin every damn day.
“What do you mean why?” Twilight hissed. “My people are being hunted down and killed, or treated like slaves, my brain is full of horrors stories of friends’ deaths, or eye-bleeding memories of seeing them killed myself! I’ll never be free of these horrors! Someday we can maybe— MAYBE— make a world where future generations won’t have to suffer, but I’ll always carry the nightmares of my family with me.
“And for what? What does it matter? When innocent people are being tortured and killed and imprisoned for life, when children can’t show their true skin without fear of being murdered in their homes, when everyone who looks like me has to live with the burden every day of worrying that maybe this time they’ll be the horror story… what the hell do any of my feelings matter?”
“Twilight—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Twilight stood to her feet, barely even registering who spoke to her. “I want to be alone.”
Twilight teleported out of the restaurant. She didn’t know where she was, the Crystal Empire was foreign to her. She teleported again, and again and again and again until she was looking over the Empire from outside on a nearby hill.
She felt the grass under her hands and knees, but she didn’t feel much else. She curled into a ball, face to the grass and hands clutching the back of her head.
Alone.
With nothing but her feelings.