//------------------------------// // 12 - The Midnight in Me Part 2 // Story: All These Midnight Days // by Ninjadeadbeard //------------------------------// Free fall. Any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. Midnight’s mind grappled with the definition of the thing presently happening to her, and at speed. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but falling endlessly through the utter blackness of the void was something that required a little coping. Gravity. A thing that shouldn’t exist in dreams. Admittedly, she was bad at coping mechanisms in general. Midnight tried to force open her eyes, but the pressure of the wind blasting her as she fell was almost as hard as a firehose. She could only flinch and flail and curl away from the pressure. Even with her eyes closed, however, she could feel something coming. A looming existence somewhere beneath her. A looming something with mass. Impact. The part of the fall that actually kills you. She flipped around, one final time… and met the soft mattress with a jerking crash. “Gah!” she cried out in shock, eyes snapping open and lungs greedily sucking at the fresh, cool air. It took a moment for her heart to start beating again. Hypnic jerk, her mind barked again. The sensation of falling while slee— “Stop,” Midnight squeaked out the order to her brain. She blinked rapidly, feeling the paralysis of sleep slowly sloughing off, her body slowly returning to full, operating standards. She was looking up at a purple ceiling. “What…?” Midnight asked herself in a breathless whisper. She tried to sit up, but quickly found a heavy comforter holding her down. With a few extra kicks, she was soon comforter-less, and fully sat up to measure her surroundings. This was made somewhat difficult, as she couldn’t see anything all that well. Her entire world was a blur, a smear of sunlit bloom and purple hues. She rubbed her eyes, but the misty nothingness remained before her. As Midnight turned her head about in a vain attempt to bring the world back into focus, she finally saw something that was crystal clear; two circles of clarity lying on a blob she guessed would be a bedside stand. Narrowing her vision, she could almost believe they were the lenses of a pair of glasses. “… the heck?” Midnight reached out, and grasped the glasses in one hand. With a practiced hand, almost entirely reflex, she set the onto her face, as she once did in another life. The room came into sharp focus, revealing it to be nothing so mundane as her room. Her old room. From before she was a ‘they’. Twilight’s bed was missing… or, perhaps it was more accurate to say Midnight’s bed was missing. The room looked just as it had one week ago. Sister-less. Empty, but filled with the sunlight of a golden dawn. Midnight’s heart began to race. She reached up, ready to pinch herself… when she stopped. “If I’m still in my physical body,” she reasoned out loud, eyes focused on her hand, “then it’d hurt no matter if this was a dream. Great…” That realization was worrying, of course. But at the moment, it was the fact that her skin was purple that more worried Midnight. Because it was the wrong shade of purple. Just a touch too light.  Lavender, in fact. Shaking her head, Midnight stood up and took another look at her room. Just by her head, she could make out the spines of the books on her shelf. She leaned in, and tried to work out their titles and authors, only to quickly give up on that prospect. “Squiggles,” she hissed, responding to the odd, contorted, or just plain wrongness of the hieroglyphic nonsense covering her book covers. Can’t read in dreams, she thought to herself. I knew I hated it here… “Alright, Shadow,” Midnight whispered to herself, “You got me here. Now what? What’s the point of this…?” The vanity mirror was still standing atop the room’s writing desk, she also noticed. Midnight remembered conjuring it just this past Monday evening, so she and Twilight could admire their new, fused form. Hope she’s doing better than I am… Midnight strode to the mirror – noting along the way that she was clearly wearing Twilight’s pajamas – and turned to face it fully. Twilight Sparkle stared back at her. The real Twilight Sparkle. Pink stripe in her hair. Glasses. Purple eyes. The whole nine yards. “Very convincing,” she snorted. She reached up, and pulled the sleep-scrunchie out of her hair, letting the mass of dark blue fall straight down her shoulders and back. “You even added the old curls,” she laughed at the way her hair spiraled down nearest her ears. One more reason Midnight stayed with straight hair, now. As she admired the old look – and painfully obvious ploy – in the mirror, something felt off to Midnight. More than even being trapped in her own dreams while still physically awake. More than being the wrong color. Was it just the hair? The pajamas? I know Twilight’s style’s kinda plain and dorky, but… Midnight’s breath caught in her chest, and her eyes narrowed on her bare collarbone. She gasped, and the breaths started coming fast. “No,” she whispered, hands clutching at her neck, “No, no, no no no…” There was nothing there, she found. Nothing at all. She only noticed a moment later that her nails had drawn blood. Watching herself, or watching Twilight in the mirror panic and begin patting down her pajamas, Midnight searched her own pockets first. “It can’t be gone…” Her hands worked faster, and faster. And once her pockets were exhausted, she threw open the writing desk’s drawer. Nothing there, either. Around the room, Midnight flew, ripping open cabinet doors and drawers, tossing aside books written in gibberish and half-remembered knick-knacks. Old journals and scrapbooks went sailing across the room as she tore into every nook and cranny the bedroom had. Until, minutes later, Midnight stopped. The room was in shambles, and she was no closer to finding her geode. Midnight’s breathing slowed, minute by minute. Though initially worked up, she knew that panicking, and hyperventilating, wasn’t going to help her. “She took it,” Midnight breathed. There was only one explanation. One being that could have done this to her. I am naked in the dark, she wailed internally. There was nothing left. All Midnight was, was in that geode. Her one sense of self, her one thing that marked her as different, and special… and it was gone. “My magic…” Movement caught her eye. She looked back up at the mirror, the reflection of all she used to be. Twilight Sparkle stared back at her. The real Twilight Sparkle. The one who didn’t need magic to be herself. And without hesitation, Midnight reached one hand up, clenched it into a fist, and threw a punch through the mirror that would have made an Apple flinch. The mirror bent and buckled, glass shattering and splintering in all directions. Even through the flash of burning fury in her mind, Midnight felt her hand split open, and blood spurt out. She recoiled in pain, and gripped her injured hand close to her chest. She opened one eye, and looked down at the mess she’d made with a sly grin. In one mirror shard by her feet, she could see Midnight Sparkle staring back at her with that same grin. Blue stripe in hair, and light blue eyes smirking through the pain right alongside her. Even her clothes were set right. But the glasses remained. She glanced over the black rims, and found the world a blur once more. “Yeah,” she said through gritted teeth, “That’s what I thought.” Throwing open one of the dresser drawers again, she started tearing up nondescript white clothes – some artifact of the dreaming process, she guessed – and tried to fashion a makeshift bandage out of them. Dream or not, the material would hold up for now. As she tore at the cloth with her teeth, Midnight was at least happy to see her own coloration had returned. Granted, that was tinged with a bit more red now than she liked, but once she got a healing spell on that hand… “Shadowlight has my geode,” she said out loud, biting back a snarl. As she tried to get a tight seal over her broken hand, made obviously more difficult by the fact that she was trying to tie it with one hand, Midnight’s words to Twilight began to sound in her mind. “Magic isn’t some neat trick for me. It’s not just telekinesis, or the power to fly, or Sunset’s memory-vision thing… without those, you and your friends are still whole. Without it… it’s like I’m blind! “Did you know I used my magic-sense more than my actual eyesight whenever I was in control?” She shivered, hearing those words echo up from the floorboards, and down from the rafters. She could hear how pathetic she’d sounded then, even just thinking about it. She could almost taste it. As she finished tightening her makeshift bandage, Midnight noted something else amiss. There was a smell in the air. A very familiar smell that brought an unbidden grumble to her stomach. “Bacon?” She turned around, and saw the door to the bedroom for the first time. It was slightly ajar, and a most heavenly scent wafted in on the breeze, accompanied by the distant sound of someone singing a wordless tune. “You’re trying to ruin bacon…” Midnight hissed, and started for the stairs. Midnight walked down the stairs slowly, cautiously. The house beyond her bedroom seemed mostly normal, mostly how it was in the real, waking world. But now she was on guard, and more and more the house began to change. She didn’t remember half the portraits and photographs on the wall of the stairwell. Midnight could shrug away some of them as more memory gaps, but there was the odd one, every few feet. People with duck-feet. Dogs with mustaches. Even one that looked more and more like a geometric pattern wearing a bowler hat. Her mind trying to reconstruct a missing gap? Or was this just the weirdness of dreams? She really hoped the latter, especially as Midnight passed by an old ferrotype of her Great-Great-Great Grandmother Evening Aurora standing next to a frightfully familiar Professor of hers. Ignore the fact that his eyebrows are following you, she coached herself. Disqord can’t mess with you here… After what felt like walking down far more flights of stairs than what reasonably could be accommodated by a two-story house, she came to the last of the portraits. Well. ‘Portrait’ was a strong word for the last one. It was a picture she knew for certain wasn’t on any wall owned by her family. “Hello there, Auntie Pentagram,” she half-chuckled to herself. The mugshot of a young girl in her early twenties stared back at Midnight. The girl’s hair was long and straight, with presently greyscale stripes running the length of it. Her bangs hung low over her large, expressive eyes; eyes that seemed far more mischievous than angry, matched only by the mysterious smirk on her lips. The Roan Lisa, Midnight heard Grammy Sparkle once call her, amid other less-kind things. She couldn’t help but reach out a hand to the photo as she passed, however. Right now, after today, the day she’d been having, the connection was clear enough. “… the first Sparkle in generations who didn’t get into a university…” “Those poor, poor goats,” the ferrotype picture said in a familiar voice. With a sigh, Midnight pressed on. The smell of bacon was getting stronger, and there was a light on in the kitchen. And as soon as she entered the room, Midnight regretted it. It was almost painfully familiar. The sight could have been Tuesday morning, sans her folks and Shining sitting at the table. Golden sunlight filtered through the backyard-facing windows, filling the room like a miasma, both illuminating and obscuring the room in equal measure. How very dream-like. I bet there’d be birdsong if I just cracked a window. The only thing ruining the tranquility, the beauty of the moment, was the thing standing by the oven, hiding partly in a shaft of light, singing a wordless tune that danced just beyond the grasp of memory. “I thought I heard the pitter-patter of my little girl’s feet,” Twilight Velvet tittered from where she was frying bacon, her back turned to the stairs. She shook her head and laughed, “I was afraid you weren’t getting up today.” Midnight frowned. No, more than that, she scowled at the utter wrongness before her. “Spike, Shining, and your father went out for a walk this morning,” Velvet cheerily half-sang, and flipped a strand of bacon with her tongs. It sizzled and popped with all the greasy goodness such a sound promised. “And when they get back, I thought it would be nice for all of us to go see that new Daring Do film. As a family! Make a day out of it…” “Are you quite finished?” Midnight sneered. “Do you really think I’m that stupid?” The crackling sound of cooking bacon stopped instantly. Velvet stood, stock-still, and tilted her head to one side. “Oh?” she said, more quietly than before, “Is something wrong, Twilight?” Midnight snorted, and folded her arms. “Besides the fact that you’re still trying to feed me a line about erasing my sister and taking her place?” Her scowl deepened. “Or that I’m trapped in my own dreams with a dream-eating monster who has no soul? No, Shadow… nothing’s wrong.” The air was still. Even the dust in the shafts of sunlight seemed to pause in their drifting dance. The thing wearing Twilight Velvet’s skin set down the tongs quietly, and sighed. Then, she turned around to face Midnight… and the teenager’s blood ran cold as ice. It was her mother’s face. But a face without eyes. “I’m surprised, Midnight,” Shadow said, her utterly empty, void-eyes somehow piercing Midnight’s calm with laser-precision. “You always struck me as the more… dramatic sister. Surely you, of all people, can appreciate a little theater?” Midnight forced herself to blink, and then to start breathing again. “Take… that face off,” she snarled, her own eyes trying not to stare too deeply into the darkness of the monster’s gaze. “It doesn’t belong to you.” Shadow nodded, slowly. “Ah, makes you uncomfortable, does it?” she asked with a pleasant smile. Given a very specific definition of ‘pleasant’, of course. When Midnight didn’t respond, Shadow grumbled and frowned as well. With a displeased huff, she passed one hand across her face. And instantly, she changed. Midnight watched, fascinated and horrified in equal measure as twenty years dropped away from her mother’s form. She slimmed, slightly, and lost an inch or so of height, but the more dramatic changes came soon after. Her hair shifted darker, and darker, until it was the same midnight hue as Twilight’s own. The white streaks vanished, replaced by a single crimson one running the whole length. Shadow’s skin also turned a pale, pinkish red as her clothes melted and reformed into something very familiar to Midnight. Shadow’s wings were just as black and menacing as Midnight’s once were, and her outfit, though shifted pale and grey, would have been a match for the thing Midnight had worn during the last event of the Friendship Games. But one thing remained. Eyes as empty as the void, and just as deep and cavernous. “Better?” Shadow asked with a sneer. Midnight found it took her a moment to swallow. Her throat was dry. “So, this is what you look like,” she managed to say after looking her mental illness’ form over. “Can’t say I’m impressed. Black and red? Really? Did Rarity teach us nothing?” “Not that I care about what some tarted-up artiste thinks,” Shadow laughed, and splayed out her hawkish wings for emphasis, “but there’s a reason it’s the classic look, darling…” Midnight resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she rapidly ran her eyes over the demon’s shape, trying to spot anywhere she might be hiding her geode. “So, all that upstairs was… what? Theater?” she asked, buying time. “A little scare to make me think I’d actually done what you said?” “It was worth a shot,” Shadow protested with a shrug. “I guess we can confirm that being physical in the Dream Realm imparts a sort of low-key defense against mental manipulation while here. Fascinating discovery. “If I wasn’t going to destroy the world after this,” she sighed with amusement, “I might even have written a paper on it. Shame…” Midnight scoffed. “Really? Destroy the world? What did I say about copying me?” “Copying would imply I’d fall for the same weakness as the original,” Shadow shot back, smirking. “I’m improving on what you failed to accomplish.” “Well how are you going to destroy the world from inside here!?” Midnight cried, waving her arms around. Though the motion exacerbated her injured hand, Midnight pressed on. “You’re a thought! A memory! And a pretty shoddy one if you’re basing yourself off my old work…” Her injured hand snapped out to her side, and suddenly. Midnight stared at the bandaged limb for a moment, confused… before it swept around through the air in a terrible arc, and came slamming down onto the kitchen table. Pain bloomed in Midnight’s mind, shattering her calm instantly. She snatched her hand up, and clenched it tight against her chest, trying to compress the spiking, red-rimmed ache into oblivion as soon as possible. She clenched her teeth and her eyes shut. But she couldn’t unsee what was happening. Through a teary squint, she could see the kitchen table, a few cracked splinters lying on the ground. The floor was cracked, and burnt in places like a freaking lava monster had come stomping through. The walls were gone. The appliances were destroyed. And the sky was a red, pulsing, weeping sore. She only saw this through a flickering glimpse as the pain rose and fell with her breathing, but Midnight knew what she saw. She saw her sanity, breaking. And as the room faded back into its golden illusion, Shadow reached her hand out, just as she had a moment ago. Midnight’s twitched, and pulsed as her muscles briefly tried to follow the mental command, but now that she was aware of it, it took almost no effort to prevent herself from following it again. “Would you look at that?” Shadow grinned her dagger-filled grin. “I’m already this close to puppeteering your wonderful body. You’re coming along quite nicely, in fact.” Midnight held onto her pain, and the seething anguish it brought her. This was no time to play around. It was the time to think. To calculate. Maybe what Principal Luna had said was right, after all. Maybe Midnight was simply more… mathematical. More analytical. Even more than Twilight, Midnight was a brain in a fleshy jar. And even before now, she had always been a calculator. Even the timeframe of Dreams seemed to slow as she processed what was going on. Data flowed in, and computations flowed out. The pain only magnified her inputs. Can’t see the geode, she thought. Not a good chance of seeing it anytime soon. She looks like I used to, and seems to think she’s my successor. Not great. Bad, even. Awful color scheme… She can control my body, if I don’t focus. Not good. Very bad. Probably a symptom of no sleep and her destabilizing effect on sanity. Gotta fix that soon. Shadow wants to destroy the world. Why? Need more data. Wait. I wanted to destroy it so I could glut myself on magic… “So,” Midnight said, slowly, “All this… just to get to Equestria?” “Partly,” Shadow said, shrugging again. “But, honestly? I kinda just feel like blowing up the planet, like you should have done. Sounds like a laugh…” “But, why!?” Midnight shook her head. “That’s not an end! That’s… that was a means to an end for me! You need a reason to destroy the world, since you could just walk through the freaking portal!” She gritted her teeth, and breathed through her nose. Dream Realm looks like a bomb went off, but she’s covering it up with this bright and shiny visage. Why is she projecting an illusion? She knows I can see it! Or is she getting a kick out of this? Incubi are supposed to feed off mental anguish, so that’s a distinct possibility. She didn’t wait for Shadow to answer. “What is it you want?” Shadow quirked her eyebrows up. She took a moment to stroke her jaw, and contemplate the question. “Guess I just feel like it,” she admitted. Then with a grin, she added, “Besides, being the absolute Queen of All Magic sounds amazing, doesn’t it? “Or does Princess have a better ring to it?” Shadow laughed. Midnight shook her head again. “No,” she said, locking eyes with the monster before her, “No… you don’t have to do any of that. You could be better than that.” “Like you?” Shadow sneered. Midnight stamped her foot down. “Yes! Like me!” She took a long breath, and tried relaxing her broken hand back to her side. “I thought that magic was all I wanted, all I cared about. But… but the people in my life showed me there was a better way! “I’ll…” Midnight swallowed. She took another moment to steady herself. And then, she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.” Shadow frowned. “A deal?” “Yes, a deal!” Midnight nodded vigorously. “The same deal that saved me! I will willingly give up my body, if you just take a few minutes to look back through our memories, and say something nice about each of our friends.” There was silence as Midnight finished her pronouncement. She met her eyes to the absences in Shadow’s skull, and waited. Her heart pounded in her chest as the intangible seconds ticked by. Shadow stared at her. Then, she tilted her head, like a confused puppy dog, and continued to stare. Finally, she threw back her head, and laughed. “You really thought you could get me with that old gem!?” she howled with more laughter, and clutched at her sides. “The same thing that cost you everything? And you thought it’d work on me!!!” “What have you got to lose?” Midnight tried to speak up over the cackling Shadow. “If you just destroy everything, you’ll be alone forever! At least take a peek at my memories. Surely one…” A red claw gripped Midnight’s face, and pressed her mouth shut. Shadow closed the gap between her and Midnight without seeming to even move from where she’d been standing a moment before. I didn’t see her move. Those hateful voids stared into Midnight as Shadow hefted her up into the air by one clawed hand. “You really think you’re better than me, don’t you?” Shadow hissed, a flicker of fiery light deep within her black gaze rising with the tensity of her voice. “You think you can just show me how much fun Pinkie is at parties, and I’ll, what? Give up? You think you can show me how loyal Rainbow Dash is? How smart and friendly Sunset tries to be with you, even though you know she still resents you? “I know what you are, Midnight Sparkle!” she cried out, almost shrieking as her claws dug into Midnight’s flesh. “You’re not better than me! And you can’t change my mind with some memories. I’ve already seen them all!” Midnight gripped the claw around her face and throat with her one good hand, and tried feebly to pull it off of her. Too strong, she thought, can’t break free… “You want to know what you are, Midnight?” Shadow seethed. “I’ll show you. I’ll remind you what you were… what you still are!” Darkness swept over Midnight again. But unlike last time, she didn’t feel the sudden swell of gravity and vertigo. There was no sickening lurch as she dropped into another bottomless well. There was no disorientation, or confusion about what was happening. She knew where she was. She knew what was happening. She’d done all this once before. Midnight landed, hard against the floor of her bedroom once again. Shadow’s hand had let her go, and so she tried to massage a little blood flow back into her face and neck as she slowly rose to her feet. She could feel the demon behind her, and chose not to turn around. There was a show to put on, she knew. She may not have been sensitive to the magic of Dreams, but there was enough of a similarity with illusions and memory-spells for Midnight to get a quick grasp on what was happening. The whole gang was gathered in her room. Sunset, Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and most importantly a frazzled and confused Twilight Sparkle, still in her pajamas. “If we were going to the moon, I’d insist she’d packed an evening gown,” Rarity said with loving condescension to Applejack, who just stood flabbergasted over Twilight’s suitcase, which Rarity had begun to pack with what she considered necessities. “One never knows, darling!” “Cool, you can replay memories,” Midnight said with feigned indifference. She dusted herself off, and tried to affix as calm a mask over her face as she could. Even still, she flinched as the scene progressed. Shadow’s dark laughter played slowly behind her, partly obscuring Twilight’s panicked apologies to her friends for almost oversleeping on this particular morning. “But it wasn’t that morning at all, was it?” Shadow tittered from behind Midnight, her voice echoing as an all-too-familiar form materialized in the air. “Midnight Sparkle!?” everyone cried out at once. Midnight gritted her teeth, and tried to keep her eyes on… on the other monster in the room. Her hands clenched as the dark vision played on. The Midnight Sparkle here laughed like a deranged psychopath, and waved her hands about like a murderous conductor. Because that’s what she was, Midnight thought. Each of the girls vanished, their forms blurring into white as the hideous white noise tearing sound announced each of their obliterations. Their cries were cut off mid-scream, only adding to the horror. Midnight didn’t know if she flinched. She tried not to let Shadow see any of that. But when Sunset disappeared, she averted her eyes. An illusion. A simulation of a simulation. It was just a bad dream. “A nightmare, really,” Shadow laughed, clearly reacting to Midnight’s thoughts. “My, how wicked you could be! To just destroy each of your friends like that?” “They weren’t my friends,” Midnight said flatly. “They were dream-constructs. Like you, but more tolerable.” Shadow drifted easily through the air, coming around to Midnight’s front again. She wore her smug grin well, cocking her head to one side as she moved. “Oh? But it’s okay now that you are friends?” she asked without expecting an answer. “They are your friends now, right?” Before Midnight could retort, the world shifted again. Her decaying and disintegrating bedroom flew apart and away as a crystalline floor snapped into place. The red glow of sunset washed over Midnight, only to fade somewhat into dark blues and purples as walls rose up around her. She recognized this place, too. In fact, from a certain perspective, outside of Canterlot City, this was the only place Midnight had ever physically visited before her imprisonment within her own mind after the Friendship Games. The rows and rows of crystal bookshelves were unmistakably ancient, but well-preserved. The Library of the Crystal Empire was the single greatest repository of lost knowledge in all of Equestria, and right now, in the memory replaying around her, Midnight could recall only that she’d nearly destroyed it herself. “This battle is over!” a voice cried out in triumph, drawing Midnight’s gaze inexorably towards its owner. There, in the middle of the library’s upper floor, a dark alicorn wreathed in stolen magic held an adorable Flurry Heart in her maniacal clutches. “One more move, and I can’t promise what will happen to the baby!” she sneered at those who surrounded her. Sunset, pre-alicorn, as well as Midnight’s sister Twilight, Starlight Glimmer, and that one brutish pony with the broken horn stood arrayed against the old Midnight. They each appeared transfixed in terror, and despair. Midnight, the real Midnight, scoffed quietly. “They should have done something,” she whispered, never minding if Shadow was listening. “I wouldn’t have hurt…” “Wouldn’t you?” asked Shadow. “You can honestly look at yourself back then, and say with complete confidence that the person you claim you’re not anymore… wouldn’t hurt a baby?” “If anyone wants to bring harm to this baby,” the old Midnight Sparkle cackled madly as she and her team of time-displaced ponies – a factory-working Applejack, jungle-living Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy, a demonic alicorn Sunset, and dark clothed and armored Rainbow Dash and Rarity – retreated from the battle, “then by all means, attack me!” Midnight scowled, and spun slowly around to find where Shadow had gone. Seeing the dream demon lounging as the memory replayed, she stamped one foot down to get her attention. “What is the point of all this?” she snarled. “You want to prove I used to be a bad person!? No, duh! That’s what I’ve been saying so far! I’m better than that now, though! All you’re doing is proving…” A shriek stopped Midnight’s heart for a moment. It had come from behind her, where her memory of that day in the Crystal Empire was still playing out in all its horrible resplendence. She turned, and nearly shrieked herself. Trixie, the pony one in any case, had tried to rush the other Midnight from behind. The Rainbow Dash dressed in black armor blocked her path, and gave the surprisingly valiant stagepony a mean left hook for her troubles. And, like a flash of lightning, or a striking snake, the old alicorn Midnight retaliated with a surge of aquamarine magic. A blast struck Trixie as she lay on the floor, her terrified cry cut off as she froze solid into stone. “No!” Midnight cried out, “No, no! That… that didn’t happen!” “Maybe not…” Shadow whispered in her ear as the ponies in the vision leapt back into battle, “… but it’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Midnight gasped, her eyes glistening as the sounds of shrieking ponies filled the library. “N-no,” she said, with less confidence, “No, I’d… never…” Her words trailed away as her mind seemed to pull at the strands of her memory. Come on, you foolish little ponies! It’s just a baby… fight me! Midnight’s words played back for her, behind her eyes. I dare you, start something, the old Her said, internally. Make a move. Make me blast you. Do it! What else can you do!? “I w-wouldn’t…” “Twilight, please,” Spike begged, “Remember who you were! Who you are! I’ve seen you beat Midnight Sparkle before, and you can do it again!” The dream began to melt, the walls of the Crystal Library falling away, revealing a distant, giant version of Midnight stood towering over the city. She loomed like a dark shadow over the world, her own dog cowering beneath her malevolent grin. “Tragically, your Twilight cannot come out and play. Which is fine, because now I have to decide which of you will be destroyed first for defying me!” “It’s not me…” Midnight whispered, not even looking at the memories as hot tears streamed down her face. “It isn’t me, not… not anymore!” Another voice spoke out. A familiar voice. A voice that made the entire universe fall silent at its utterance. “Maybe there’s a way we can both live…” The world was grey. Grey, and frozen in place. A memory within a memory within the span of a single second, magically dragged out into an infinity of time for someone to think. Provided that someone had the power and the know-how to freeze time for so long while keeping their own mind running at full speed. It was a natural spell to cast, assuming you knew how. Midnight knew. So did Twilight. They were standing out in front of the school. It was Monday, and the world had just been saved. And while Sunset, Principal Luna, the two Discords and the rest were celebrating that fact, Twilight Sparkle was standing in a mote of frozen eternity, talking to herself. “What?” that Twilight asked, a perplexed look overcoming her spectral features. It was quite difficult for Midnight to parse precisely what was happening, since the memory - if that’s what it was - happened inside of her own mind the first time around. It was somewhat difficult to establish movements and actions in a dimension where such things are pure speculation at best. “We can both exist!” Midnight’s own intangible, ghost-form insisted. “We just need to make two bodies!” Midnight - the real one -  stared at the eerily familiar, yet unfamiliar, scene. Her jaw hung slack from her face as she watched, and listened to what transpired. “What is this?” she asked the void. “I… I don’t remember this.” It answered, in Shadow’s cruel voice. “What do you think this is?” “I don’t remember this…” Midnight whispered again. Her eyes never left the… whatever this was. She couldn’t drag her eyes away from herself. The past-herself. She, the Midnight in front of her, grinned madly at her Twilight. “All we’d need is a Cognitive Targeting Spell, to pick apart the two personalities,” Past-Midnight said with an eager, manic laugh. “though if there’s a memory-leak, we’d need a Memetic Sieve to…” Twilight balked, eyes wide with terror. “What!? NO! That’s insane! The chances of failure… my gosh! Even success is almost just as catastrophic!” Past-Midnight pressed on, shouting, “But it will work!” “I can’t let you…!” Twilight tried to step back. But inside her own head, there was only so far to go. And there was nowhere to run. “You aren’t letting me do anything!” Midnight snarled, and snatched her sister’s wrist. In a deathly whisper, she hissed, “I… we both deserve this…” “Midnight! NO!” Twilight’s cry echoed in the hollows of her own mind as a white light flooded the dream. The world began to rip asunder, and Midnight’s cruel laughter swept all sound aside. “NO!” Present-Midnight slammed her hands over her ears, and turned away from the… dream? Memory? “It’s not real! It’s not real! I…” The dream faded away, as Shadow’s face filled her vision. That demonic grin split the construct’s face from ear to ear, as unnatural and unsettling for its distortion of biology as it was for the look in her abyssal eyes. “Memory Gap,” she said, licking the air with her tongue. “You know how those are, right?” “You’re…” Midnight swallowed, hard. It took two tries, as her throat was beginning to clench tight against the swell of tears forcing their way up and out of her heart. “You’re lying! I wouldn’t… I couldn’t…” “You got some memories,” Shadow said, slowly, “Twilight got some memories… and so did I. The part of you that remembered the plan.” The demon’s claws settled onto Midnight’s shoulders. It wasn’t like before, however. They didn’t bite down into her skin, or force her about. They were tender. Soft. That was worse. So much worse. “You see now?” Shadow whispered. “This was all you. Every bit of it. Sure, the memory gap situation was an unknown-unknown… but that doesn’t matter now.” Midnight tried to pull away. The grip on her tightened. “You and I are the same, Midnight,” Shadow hissed. “You’ve just forgotten. Forgotten that this was all your idea. I only tormented you so you’d finally snap out of this pathetic state you’ve put yourself in! “Why are you trying so hard to be normal?” She shook her head, and snorted. “You aren’t normal, Midnight. We’re evil! Always have been! Always will. Accept it. Embrace it!” Midnight’s throat clenched, as she tried to hold back a choking sob. Her composure was cracking, even as she resisted the Incubus’ words. But… there was truth to them. That memory was so real. It can’t have all been a dream. Is it possible? The Midnight from before Monday would have done anything… anything to achieve her goals. That Midnight would have forced her other half to do whatever she wanted, if it meant unleashing all the magic of two worlds. I was willing to destroy everyone for that dream once. Twice, even. Why not a third? “I did it?” she whispered, her voice cracking up. “I caused the split? For… for this?” “Brilliantly, if I might say so,” Shadow cooed, and pulled Midnight in close. Close enough to turn their bitter embrace into something closer. Shadow leaned in, and wrapped her arms around Midnight’s back. Her wings formed a second set of hugging limbs, wrapping them around Midnight’s form, and pulling her in even closer. “Let go,” Shadow whispered. “Let it all go. The school. Your friends… just let me back in. Remember who you really are. “Let go, and become me again…” Midnight’s breath caught in her throat. She could see it. The abyss. The bloody river she’d swam across for her goals, her dreams. The carnage beyond this fictional world, the burning wreckage of a city beyond the kitchen walls, the metaphorical state of her very mind and soul… was of Midnight’s doing. Even if she’d forgotten the plan, it was hers. The Shadow was just some… tiny part of her mind that remembered what she’d wanted all along. This… everything that’s happened. The Split. The nightmares. It was all because I… There was a line, Midnight recalled quite suddenly. A bit of text in a literature textbook she’d hardly glanced at in years. Not since Shining had spoken the line in his middle school’s production of the play where the line was originally from. “… for now I am bent to know,” Shining Armor recited in front of Twilight and their parents one night, “by the worst means, the worst. For mine own good, all causes shall give way.” He swallowed, nervously, and Midnight said the words alongside him, “I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.” When one has committed so much evil, Midnight thought, you might as well keep going, since trying to atone at that point is… it’s as much effort as just finishing what you started… As her heart began to sink, to fully fall into that black abyss, and for her own eyes to fade and darken into shadow, Midnight thought, for the barest of seconds, that the twelve-year-old Shining Armor in that flash of memory was looking at her. And then, she realized half of him was blurry. Just over the rim of her glasses. Shining Armor’s past self stood in the darkened kitchen, and watched Midnight from over Shadow’s shoulder. “If it’s just as much effort…” his soundless lips mouthed to her, “… then both choices are equal. “You have a choice, don’t you?” Time stopped. Midnight’s mouth hung agape as the light seemed to return, and the brilliant morning, the shield across her eyes, faded back into view. There was no Shining Armor there. There was only Midnight. Well. Midnight and the demon holding her tight in a sickening embrace. Midnight swallowed. Then, she whispered, “I… I choose…” Shadowlight, with as warm and as invitingly smug a smile as had ever graced the face of a dream construct before, leaned back and away from Midnight. “Hm? What did you…?” She was, it had to be said, exceptionally surprised when a fist crashed into the dead center of her face. A bandage-wrapped hand slammed into her like a meteor with a dream to kill itself some dinosaurs, spraying the demon with bits of blood, and forcing her to take a single, solitary step back from the sheer savagery of the blow. She blinked, rapidly, and tried to make sense of it. Midnight screamed, in rage as well as indescribable pain. She clenched her teeth tight, and tried to ignore the feeling of her knuckles splintering on impact with Shadow’s nose. Because she needed to do it again. “I’M GOING BACK! SCREW BLOOD RIVERS!” Shadow blinked. “Wha--?” Another punch cracked across her cheek, but did little more than smear more blood across it. Midnight shrieked as she cocked her arm back again, and hurtled her broken fist forward like a bullet. It connected, this time to Shadow’s chin. And even though the demon didn’t seem to fully feel either punch, the sudden look of total shock on her face was a wonderful thing indeed. Too bad all Midnight could feel, however, was pain. “AHHHHHH!” she screamed, and drew in a ragged gasp of breath. “How… How dare you!?” She threw a fourth punch, despite the fact that the bandages were now sopping wet, and an electric buzz was climbing up her arm and settling somewhere behind her eyes. A flash of red light caught her hand, and held it rock-steady in the air. Shadow hadn’t even moved to cast the spell, but Midnight knew it was her. Midnight snarled, and shouted through the tears, “Messing with my memories!? You think I’m just going to buy that crap!? I WILL NOT YIELD! I am MIDNIGHT SPARKLE! “Midnight Flipping Sparkle…!” She didn’t see the fist, at first. Only afterward, in her mind’s eye, could she recall anything more than a crimson blur before a blinding wave of pain flashed through her left eye. Midnight hit the wall of her dream-kitchen, its colors faded and its light gone, and half-slumped to the floor before another red claw caught her by the collar. Shadow’s eyes were no longer dark holes into the abyss. Even through a haze of aching and throbbing pain, Midnight could make out her demon’s face now. There were two red eyes staring down at her. Glaring with all the fury of a supernova. All the rage and petty fury of a spoiled child denied. They were the eyes of a demon, cheated. The look of utter contempt on Shadow’s face was almost enough, even, to make Midnight think what she’d just done to her hand was worth it. “You… rank amateur…” Midnight smirked, and spat blood in Shadow’s general direction. “I invented that trick…” Shadow’s voice, when it came, was like a cold knife in the heart. “Apologies,” she hissed. “Let’s try something new.” And with a stiff-armed swing, she hefted Midnight up into the air, and hurled her through the kitchen window. Midnight crashed through the dream-glass, a self-satisfied smirk still on her lips, even as she flew into the blood and ash-filled skies of Hell.