Fallen Angel
Certain death wasn't supposed to look so painfully inviting.
Spike had left the woods to find himself facing a well-traveled dirt road, ponies coming up and down it every few minutes at various paces. Talking, laughing, some of them even picking flowers to snack on in between their 'real' meals. Some very young ponies had been playing hopscotch nearby a while back; they had gone, but their scratched chart in the dirt remained and seemed to entice every silly-minded pony who passed by to give it a try. Even the serious businessponies in their light working clothes slowed down enough to smile at those who had nothing better to do. Spike could recognize young couples, still in the earliest, giggly stages of that gross thing called love. He could see old ones, too, leaning against each other and complaining like nothing was more fun than picking apart every little thing that was wrong with their lives. And whole families, struggling to reel in (in some cases, literally) their younger members before too much havoc was wreaked. Even the ones who weren't plainly out for a good time weren't too rushed, and they all looked safe and reasonably happy.
No one looked up at the sky to check for pegasi – although pegasi often dipped down to wave and chat with acquaintances.
No one checked around them for danger – there was no danger for them here.
No one looked tired, or hungry, or scared.
He longed to be a part of it so much he ached with it, but it wasn't his world, was it? The moment he stepped out into the open, they'd be on him, and one of those happy families would stir up a big, proud fuss about catching a free dinner.
Too much time had already been spent just watching the road like it was separated from him by an invisible wall, as though they couldn't bump into him or glance at him any second now. And then he'd be done for, because there was no way he could get away from this many ponies at once.
Still, Spike couldn't turn away. He'd never seen them up close before engaged in regular non-murdery activities, just going about their ponies lives. The closest he'd ever come till now was seeing a funeral that had been caused by a murder expedition. Now, they were playing games, talking to one another about regular not killing nonponies stuff, or simply keeping to their own business and traveling with nothing more than getting to their destination on their minds.
Then Spike saw something he'd never expected to see in his whole life, something that changed everything.
A griffin with a weird bracelet flew by, low to the ground, completely untouched by the ponies. Some of them glanced over, but they always returned to ignoring the lion-bird hybrid after a second. The griffon paid them just as little attention, other than daring to pick somepony's saddlebag with her tail as she flew by, Spike couldn't help but notice.
Thinking back through everything he'd ever heard and seen about ponies, Spike couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation for it. Griffins were just as much on the menu as everything else. Nations didn't make peace with Equestria – at best, they bargained for ponies to eat LESS of their residents, not stop eating them entirely. And Spike was pretty sure that if there was a great big huge faction of successful working ponies who'd turned vegetarian or something, he would've heard about it by now. The griffin just didn't add up.
And it made him hope in a way he was really, really scared to hope.
Because if a griffin could step in there and not get killed right off the bat....
Who was to say a dragon couldn't do the same?
It was dumb, and like all of Spike's dumb ideas, he felt that admitting how dumb it was made up for the irresistible need to follow it through anyway.
Of course, he wasn't going to jump out there and trust his chances. There was dumb and then there was suicidal. But he watched which direction she was flying in, took note of the forest continuing alongside a big part of the road, and hustled to keep up with her. If she hadn't been going so lazily, barely flapping her wings, he wouldn't have had a chance. But the way she kept drifting around to peek at the scenery (or, for all he knew, steal things from more ponies' saddlebags) gave him the extra time he needed to keep up, even if it was at a pretty big distance. He followed that thieving, sour-looking, cat-calling griffin like it was an angel beckoning him to paradise, always keeping a spare part of his attention on a good hiding spot and on the sounds nearby. No snapping branches. He'd been kind of worried that... but no, no, he was okay.
He realized that he had to get closer to her if he wanted to get any answers; it would be better to ask her what was up instead of just tail her to wherever she was going, wouldn't it? Griffins ate some meat, but definitely not dragons. But getting closer asked him to trade off safety for speed, and he just couldn't bring himself to do it with the clopping of pony hooves and the murmuring of their voices all around him. So Spike just kept trailing, her feathery form sometimes pretty close, sometimes barely more than a vague smudge in the distance. It didn't help that he was still hungry, but he'd gone way longer than this without food before. Just had to remember to pace himself. Steady breathing, even strides, that was the ticket.
Going by the sun, he figured about an hour of this had gone by once he got to a crossroads and winced at the sight. Ponies, ponies everywhere, so many that he didn't even dare peek out enough to look at them all clearly. This was apparently a major hub of some kind; it even had a snack stand with an earth pony calling out the apparently infinite virtues of his delicious diamond dog sausages inna bun (with pickled parasprite relish!). The griffin just kept on going straight, which was a problem. How was he supposed to cross the road and get beyond if it was so well-traveled?
Watching wagons go by, an idea clicked in his mind. Most of the wagons were pretty open; apparently security wasn't a super high priority here. He could just climb into one and move along the road that way, and hop out once he caught up with the griffin. Even if it went the wrong way, he could just get out and try again... assuming he could get close enough to get in and out without being seen. That was tricky part.
Spike had never been so glad to be small. He found a particularly leafy cluster of trees just next to the main road, crouching and peeking through the thinnest slivers of visibility for an opportunity. His legs tensed every time he saw a big cart coming... and settled again as he saw all the ponies nearby that would definitely see him if he took the chance.
Minutes went past until finally a real opening appeared: huge, rough flaps leather bowed over what barely amounted to more than a large, sturdy wooden box with wheels attached. There weren't any ponies very close to the back of the cart, probably because of all the dust its wheels were churning up. Spike held his breath.
Did he really want to do this? Did he want to risk his life on a random weird thing that might not mean nearly as much as he thought it might mean? Then again, his life wasn't worth much at this point anyway. As the cart was about to pass him by, he jumped into the dust and crawled inside, rolling down against a crate.
Immediately, the smell of bloody flesh swam up his nose and mouth and made his eyes water. His eyes quickly adjusting to the dimness, he found himself staring at a jar. Inside it, the head of a hydra floated in a yellow-green liquid, its tongue bobbing gently with the cart's movement, its eyes turned up in the sockets. All that fear and disgust that Spike had been forgetting to feel came back in full force. What was he doing? This was insane. Garble's idea had been insane. Anydragon with a lick of sense would have run the opposite way from Equestria and just kept on running until a couple of countries were between it and him.
But a griffin flying among ponies and not being killed by them, that was insane too!
The rest of the cart, as much as he dared to peek at with a bare minimum of movement, was full of just as nasty things. Assortments of legs and arms of critters mummified into jerky. Bunny, possum and squirrel heads on tongue depressors, coated with caramel. Transparent soup mix packages that included chopped up fingers, claws, organs and skin. But his least favorite part, by far, was the whole stuffed griffin. It was stuffed with mice, rats, snakes and other tiny creatures, till they jutted out of its empty sockets and mouth and ears.
And yet, he'd seen another griffin being treated just like a pony not moments ago.
Even as his revulsion led to shakes and a sickly feeling that combined very strangely with his empty tummy, Spike knew that he couldn't rest now, not until he'd figured out what was going on. If the ponies could make exceptions for a griffin, why not for other kinds of... food? He wanted to be an exception. Then he could just forget about everything and move on with his life, he could start a hoard, maybe find a club of cool fellow dragons or start a catering service for yeast-based breads and associated condiments. He could do anything he wanted if he just had a day to himself without being afraid of that day ending suddenly.
The cart didn't seem to be turning left or right. He was solid. That delicate feeling of satisfaction, of everything going his way for once, shattered suddenly when he heard a high-pitched little pony girl's voice chirp up from the front of the cart.
“I still don't see why we gotta take all the meattastic treats back t'Ample Acres,” she said poutily, her words heavily-accented in a way that reminded Spike unpleasantly of Appleloosa. “I mean, the Inn did place their order first, it ain't fair! I know that Blueblood feller's higher on the customer priority list, but Sweetie Belle said he wouldn't notice if his snacks were just a lil late...”
“Sweetie Belle don't know much 'bout Blueblood, then,” came the unmistakably deep voice of a large stallion from further up still, probably the one pulling the cart.
“Can't we just pretend we didn't get the message till after we delivered the meat?” she begged, cuteness counterbalanced with an ear-screeching whine.
“Nnnnope! That ain't how we do business, Apple Bloom,” the stallion chided mildly. “Apple family started out honest and that's how we'll stay.”
“Aww, shucks! Stupid Apple family honesty traditions. Stupid priority list! Crusadin' is my priority, I'll tell ya that much!”
The smell was already getting to him. And something from the nearest crate was dripping on his back. Spike kept himself occupied by scratching a tiny hole in the side of the leather cover and propping himself up against it, trying to keep his stare fixed and unblinking to make himself look like another snack, if anyone ran their eye over things. It wouldn't fool any of them up close, not even in the shade of the wagon cover, but if he didn't make any noise, there wasn't any reason why any of the ponies would look close.
It was a lot harder not blinking than he thought. Pony after pony went by, but no griffins. Hm. Wait, of COURSE he wouldn't see the griffins, big wagons went by slower than even the laziest griffin would fly! If he wanted to catch it, he had to get out.
But the wagon was safe cover. Maybe the griffin would stop somewhere and he could catch up. And he wasn't even sure what he'd say to it once he caught it, either. What if it just turned him in to the ponies? Oh, irony of ironies, Spike, you were always too much of a dreamer for this world! The griffin would totally let them eat him, he knew it.
Still....
“D'you hear somethin'?” the filly asked.
Spike's breath stuck in his throat and he kept dead still, his heart rate doubling practically instantly.
“Nnnnnope.”
“I think we got mice in the back. I'm gonna go check.”
“Mmm... mice,” the stallion murmured, smacking his lips ogrishly.
Through a strained, watery eye, Spike frantically scanned outside, hoping for an easy escape route. The clatter of hooves was too loud, there was no time, he had to go NOW or they'd find him! With a hope and a prayer, he abandoned the stench-ridden vehicle for the clean, if pony-scented outdoors air, and ran for the treeline.
There were no screams, no shouts, no calls of 'Free dinner!' Nopony had seen him. Almost hyperventilating with relief, his knees knocking together, Spike shakily resumed his journey from behind the trees. He imagined the distant sound of branches snapping and screams. At least, he was pretty sure that was his imagination.
Running ahead, he found the griffin again, paused at a fork in the road while looking at a crumpled map. This close, he could see the griffin was a girl... or at least a slender-figured griffin with feminine makeup, either way. All the ponies were going right, but the griffin nodded once, shoved her map into her feathers somewhere and headed on to the left.
Perfect! All he had to do now was catch her before any ponies came from behind! His heart felt like a hammer on the anvil of his chest as he scrambled from tree to tree to tree, anxious to put his enemies behind him. The griffin, maybe bored now that there wasn't as much scenery, was flying faster now, but fortunately still keeping to the road. He ended up having to run full-tilt to keep up, and even then it was a close thing. Before long his breath was burning his lungs, and there was no way he wouldn't be caught if any ponies came nearby.
All the more reason to do it quickly. Ponies didn't hesitate and neither could he, if he didn't want his head to be on one of those tongue depressors and gooped up with a liquid sugar coating.
“Hey, you!” he whisper-shouted at her once he was close enough, unable to decide between a real shout or a real whisper and thus compromising. “Over here!”
“Eh? Wha? Whozat?!” she called out with a rough but very definitely female voice, banking sharply to roost on the tree just above him and peering through the branches suspiciously. “Look, colt, I don't have time for- oh, you're not a pony kid, huh.” She squinted and peered down more intensely, her eyes narrowing. “Where's your bracelet, dragon?”
“Huh? Look, I'm not into jewelry,” Spike said hurriedly, frightfully aware that any moment, a pony could just come trotting by and then he'd be lunch meat. “Look, why aren't the ponies trying to eat you?! Are you a duchess or something?”
“Hah! Me, a... yeah, sure shrimp. Look, I'm off the menu because a' this,” she said, shaking her wrist significantly. The bracelet, a simple steel thing with small cinnamon-colored parchments attached to it by rings at even intervals, hung loosely about her arm, mostly staying on because her talons were spread out. “If you wanna check out the Inn without becoming part of somepony's stew, you gotta shell out for one of these, so they all know you know what the rules are. How'd you even get out here without one of these, shrimp?!”
“It's a long story,” Spike said mostly because it seemed like the mandatory cliché to say.
“You do know you're smack dab in the middle of pony homeland, right? It's totally legal for them to eat you alive and kicking, whatever!”
“Yes, I know,” he hissed frustratedly, his forked tongue slipping out a few inches further than usual. “Look, can you keep it down?!” He glanced around, but no ponies. Some sounds in the distance he couldn't quite make out, but that was all. Probably not sounds of ponies coming hunting for him. Nope. No bloodthirsty ponies.
He locked his legs to keep his knees from knocking together again. It'd been so much more relaxing... relatively speaking... when he'd just been sneaking around on his own!
“Seriously, lame-o, they could just tear your throat out to make blood angels in the puddle of jugular stuff right now, and no one'd even-”
“I know! How do I get one of those bracelets then?!”
“I just told you, you pay a lot. I got me a three-week lease with a coupon for only a few thousand. Pretty sweet, eh?”
It would have been pretty sweet, if he'd had any money to his name whatsoever. “You don't have a spare one do you?” He tried to make his biggest, innocentest, sparkliest eyes at her.
She was unimpressed. “Look, loser, I'm real sorry that you ended up in the middle of crazy town without a strait jacket, but that's your problem. You're not nearly cool enough for this bird to give you anything for free, even if I had a bracelet other than the one I'm wearin'. Which I don't. If you want my advice, I'd say you'd better turn around and go back to wherever you came from. If you're as lucky as you've been so far, you might even make it out alive, but I wouldn't bet on it.”
His 'angel' had betrayed him. Turned out to be a harsh-voiced, unsympathetic vulture of a bird with way too much eyeshadow. That was just great. What was he going to do now? Just give up, like she'd said? Forget about immunity to pony attacks, forget about the bracelets and the Inn, whatever that was. Just turn around and walk away from Equestria, and go back to hoping that his life would settle down.
It never settled down.
He'd spent every stupid day of his cowardly fat little life waiting for it to settle down.
Never. Did.
He didn't want to give up! He was sick of running and hiding. He wasn't strong enough to fight. This was all he had, and he was so close to something like safety, he could practically taste it on the tip of his tongue....
“Come on, give me a break!” he said as loudly as he dared, looking back and forth and to the sky, seeing no ponies but dreading their appearance at any moment. “You're a griffin, you're supposed to be better than them! If you took that stupid jewelry off they'd kill you just as soon as they'd kill me, so why can't w-we h-elp each... each other....”
Spike only realized he was crying when the tears got big enough to make audible plops on the ground.
The griffin paused briefly, her still wings slowing her descent to the road's fine brown dusty dirt.
“That's life, kid,” she told him with just a bare touch of sympathy in her voice now, but it only seemed like enough to taunt him, mock him with hope of consolation that wouldn't come. “You might as well suck it up and get used to being screwed over, because it don't get any easier the bigger you get. Ciao.”
Spike watched his hopes and dreams flap their wings and gently amble off without a care in the world.
His stomach growled.
As if it were a gunshot for the start of a race, that set him off, and he threw himself against her, right in the open, heedless in desperation. He grappled her, begging, bribing, threatening and cursing all in a jumble, and she flapped harder and did a clumsy barrel roll, trying to knock him away.
“Let go a' me, you crazy thing!”
He thrust his little arm through the bracelet she was wearing. If her entire arm had been furry, it probably wouldn't have worked, but the part that the bracelet was dangling from was the sleek, compact yellow of a bird talon, not really that different from a dragon's hand.
“There!” he crowed triumphantly while she stared, open-mouthed. “Now the ponies won't eat either of us!”
She jerked back, causing the thin strands of the bracelet to bend and flex alarmingly. “It doesn't work like that, you moron!”
“How do you know?!” he hollered right at her beak. “Is there a rule, huh?!”
“Well, no-”
“Then you DON'T know, HAH!” He yanked back at the bracelet, not really that much, just enough to make it clear he wasn't going anywhere. Sweet, sweet safety was his at last!
“I'm warning you, buzzkill, you've got to the count of three to the count of three to get lost before I MAKE you get lost!”
The griffin brandished her claws, the beginnings of a lion's roar reverberating in her throat. Spike hesitated, trembling all over, eyes wide and burning. Then he realized he was shaking as much with anger as fear, and clenched at the bracelet with his free hand, thrusting out his chin.
“No!”
It wasn't a rejection of the idea of personal property or whether she, as a bystander, really owed him anything. It was a rejection of the idea that running was always the answer, that he had to give up and get away, every single time, no matter what he lost in the process. Why couldn't they just get along and be friends and work together? Just this one time, let things work out. Just this one time.
Something in his longing may have come out in his face, because she hesitated, looking conflicted in a way she hadn't in the whole encounter.
But then her eyes and she roared in his face, waving limbs in a fury to hurt him, to throw him off and bash him out of her way. Dragon scales were tougher than griffin claws, but it still hurt, and the force she put into her flailing had him instantly completely disoriented and feeling the full force of hunger and tiredness-induced weakness. He couldn't resist. Like a doll, he was thrown about in every direction, bruised and slashed and pecked from every angle. But he kept his grip on the stupid bracelet.
The dizziness turned into a head-over-heels whirlwind of blurring color and he flew through the air, smashing into a tree and tasting bark mixed with blood. The ground met his ribs as painfully as the tree had greeted his face, but his body's instincts were pretty automatic by now, and he got to his feet without even being aware of doing so. All he knew that he was standing again, and staring at a griffin who was charging him with all the fury of an eagle and a lion put together....
And, in the distance, he heard the sound of snapping limbs growing like thunder as a ring of rainbow warped the sky overhead, blasting away clouds and searing the blue with a lingering hue of shimmering colors from the whole spectrum.
He knew that sound.
He was pretty sure he knew that rainbow pattern, too.
They were more death to him than his fallen angel could ever be, no matter how she was screaming at him and slashing away, many of her wild, arrogantly-hasty blows (but not all of them, of course, so many still got through) landing on the tree instead of on Spike.
Stay and fight and die.
Run and live.
Or really: Stay and fight and die like the dragon you wanna be... or run and die inside and live on the outside.
Spike intended to stay, made the conscious decision to hold his ground, no matter how dumb it was. But his body knew what was up better than his heart did, and it had no intentions of obeying the commands emerging from simple little things like feelings or thoughts or principles. His body, as treacherous and cruel as Little Strongheart or the griffin, betrayed him and fled through the trees, fled the ever-increasing sound of wood ripping, fled with the icy wind at his back and the rainbow overhead. A lifetime of running had burned itself into him, harder and hotter than dragon scales or dragon fire, and he couldn't shed it so easily. The griffin's screams in his ears faded quicker than he would have believed possible. Maybe the ponies had something to do with that. The ponies, the ponies, always the ponies.
It was a very, very long time later when he had the presence of mind to realize that he was still clutching at the warped remains of the steel bracelet, its rings completely snapped and twisted into crude horseshoe shapes, like a demon's gag idea of an ominous surprise gift.