Trixie was asleep in her hotel room. It had only been the a few days since their raid at the Echelons underground base, but still. She was tired as hay and that much magic drained her. She spent most of her days since then sleeping and she was confident that she wouldn't have to do much else in a long while. Her off-white hair was sprawled against her mattress and her sheets and blankets were almost all kicked off. Mare-do-well would be doing her routine patrol right about now, and she did a well enough job for Trixie not to have to wake up each and every night to aid her in her struggle against crime. As for the Hat, he was likely asleep as well. His sole mission was to stop the Echelon and now that that had been done and that he knew for a fact that Mare-do-well didn't need his help, he could actually sleep at night.
But for Trixie, sleeping had always come difficult to her. A single recurring dream would always return at least once every two weeks. It was more akin to a nightmare, however, and it was not something she enjoyed either. Her body began to move and her face began to flinch.
There she was, a young filly of only seven years old. She heard her parents fighting from across the small stable that they rented from a kindly old colt. She burried her face into her first book of magic. It was leather bound and had been a gift from her land lord. She read it over and over, as it was her only respite from her rather... sad life as a child. "CELESTIA DAMN IT, CRYSTAL!" She heard a loud bang and tried to ignore it. But what she couldn't ignore was her mother’s screams of terror at her father, Rock. "You went to your sister again to borrow more bits, didn't you?!"
Her father was Rock Salt and he was little more than a bully to anything he'd ever met. Even his wife. Especially his wife. Trixie tried harder to just be ignored, as she had always been. At that age, she wouldn't be surprised if her cutie mark would literally be nothing, because that seemed to be all she was good for. Her own father told her so. "I'm sorry!" She heard him strike her face again. "I'M SORRY!!"
'THAT'S ALL YOU SEEM TO BE GOOD FOR, ISN'T IT, CRYSTAL?!" Trixie heard another crash, and began to cry as she tried to bury her face back into her book. Things weren't always this bad, her mother once said. Her father had been nice, once upon a time. "I'M SORRY," he began to mock her in his hoarse voice, raspy from the yelling. "I'M SORRY." He pinned her against the floor of their small home. "YOU THINK I'M A FAILURE, DON'T YOU, CRYSTAL?! YOU'D RATHER BE WITH THAT RICH OLD LAND LORD, WOULDN'T YOU?!"
Trixie could hear nothing but her mom’s constant sobbing. She learned the hard way last week what happened when she tried to stop her dad from hurting her. Her left eye wore the lesson in black and blue. "Please! Stop this, Rock!" At that point, it was all she could hear her mother say. Everything else just translated into tear-filled nothing. Even as a foal, she didn't even think her mom knew what she was saying. And then the worse thing possible happened. Her father, Rock Salt, turned to her.
His eyes were still filled with rage, perfectly complimented by the broken furniture that filled the family room, although a family is hardly what Trixie would have used to describe what they were. "YOU!!" His brown eyes were almost a blaze with hatred. It was almost like she was staring into the fiery depths of Tartarous itself. "Come. Here Now!" He was calm, but not the good kind. She could see on his off-white coat the sweat and his heart beating faster than the Wonder Bolts. She looked again to her mother lying on the floor, her off-blue coat and her white mane covered with sweat and some of it matted with freshly let blood. She could see the tears flowing from her mother’s crystal blue eyes and, to this day, feel the urgency in them as she mouthed one word to her, no doubt fully knowing the consequences: "run." She saw what seemed like a smile that disappeared after only a half second. She fiercely nodded her head no and grabbed her second most valued possession in the world, her beginner’s book on magic. She turned tail and ran from the pit of agony her father created for her and her mother. "DON'T YOU RUN AWAY FROM ME, GIRL!!!" But it was too late.
The door was left swinging back and forth and Trixie fled as fast and as far as she could from her seven yearlong nightmares. By the time she stopped to take a breath, her father had long since given up the chase for her. She could still see her broken family’s home even though she was a mile away, and then she heard the one thing that would keep her running to this day. It was almost as if her mother knew what would happen if she told her to run. It was almost like she had made the decision a thousand times before in her head. She heard her mother scream her last. It was so loud and so piercing that the birds fled from the area and made the full moon look like it had been blasted full of holes. She wanted to fall to her knees and give it time to sink in. She wanted so badly to have time to mourn for her mother’s death, but she couldn't. She knew her father would be out searching for her again, so she kept at her mother’s last dying wish. She ran. She kept running and she never stopped.
It wasn't until the next day, when she left that hay-hole miles behind did she stop to take a real rest beneath a wild apple tree that was planted next to a small brook. She looked deep into it, and then realized something. She bore each and every one of her mother’s features. Her mane and her coat and even her eyes. She was a mirror image of her mother, Crystal Salt. She shed a tear made of either sadness that the one person who ever loved her in her short life was gone, or joy in knowing she will always knowing her mother was with her in some way. She then dunked her head in the brook, thirstier than she thought she could be.
"GAH!" Trixie woke up in a cold sweat, fully knowing and remembering her dream and always carrying it as a bitter reminder of what her life was like once. "Dammit," she wrapped her blanket around her body, closed her eyes, and uttered two simple words that might as well would have become her own personal creed: Never again. She fell into slumber once again, hoping that the nightmare of her past wouldn't repeat itself