Chapter Nine
Everything is clear in hindsight, but understanding does not lessen the sorrow.
Falcon Wing held Alana as tightly as he could manage and buried his face into her pelt as far as he could, sobbing relentlessly. She kept one foreleg wrapped around him and pulled off his hood with her free hoof, proceeding to stroke his yellow and orange mane. She rested her head on his, maintaining her silence while the red colt grieved.
He wanted to continue speaking, to explain, to tell her what he knew, but could not bring himself to do so. His ability to speak was completely lost in the surge of pure grief and the only thing he could do was cry.
Cry and hold onto the mare for dear life, as if he never wanted her to leave his side again.
He imagined how Klaxon and Steiner would have looked at him if they were there to see him, unable to know just how much they had changed over the course of these many days. He only knew them as they were.
“A sobber by the looks of things. What a waste of water,” was the memory pertaining to the bronze earth pony.
"Well that isn't pathetic at all," echoed the blue unicorn in his mind, his words cold and piercing after more than a month.
But he knew Klaxon cried and he knew Steiner knew immense sorrow as well. They would not look down at him for his tears, but envy his ability to shed them so readily. And Falcon now knew the burden the two stallions carried. He could now count himself among them in their misfortune. He knew what it was like to take the life of someone who was nothing short of a parent to him, even if her reasons for being one were not entirely pure. Erasure was surely dead by his hooves and the guilt ripped its gnarled teeth into his spirit. It thrashed about, tearing him up from the inside.
He did not even bury the pink pegasus that had long streams of an even lighter pink for a mane. He had Alana loot her corpse then left it for the ravenous hunger of a nine headed behemoth.
He shuddered badly at the thought, took in a ragged breath, then continued his deluge into Alana.
"You didn't want to do it, did you Falcon?" he heard Alana ask over the sound of his sadness.
She thought his maelstrom of sorrow was caused by him having to take a life for the first time... she had no idea what was truly the cause.
She couldn't have known.
Falcon Wing never told her about the series of unfortunate events that comprised his life and she never told him about her past in detail. The most Alana knew about him was that he was a pegasus who lived above the cloud cover and he lost his wings to the Wasteland. The most Falcon knew about her was that she was a pony who lived in the Hope compound for most of her life and lost her mother tragically. Her father was never brought up, perhaps for the better.
And then he remembered when Fogchaser died: the mare knew a similar pain to his own, even if she didn't know it yet.
"Misery loves company," Falcon Wing thought bitterly from the pits of his despair.
"I... thought I had no... ch-choice," the wingless pegasus willed himself to say after pulling his face away from the caramel mare; "but... I... her..."
He almost lost himself again, shaking away the quivering lips and ignoring the rivers forming on his face.
"One of those pegasi back in the swamp... she used to take care of me... after my parents died," he continued, knowing he would have to tell his story again for Alana to understand. And by the end of it, she too had tears in her eyes, holding him close and telling him how sorry she was.
"You couldn't have known... you were not well... I shouldn't have let you go back..." she said rapidly, her tears coming out of her eyes just as quickly.
"I insisted," Falcon Wing responded. "You tried to talk me out of it but I went ahead and did what I did anyway."
"Again," he added mentally.
"I should be the one apologizing, Alana. I am so sorry for Dodge City... for starting all of this. You cannot imagine just how awful I feel knowing everything we went through those last few days happened because I decided I needed to hook up to some crazy... phoenix's terminal!"
"As... but -- that pony didn't even wait for an explanation! He just found you and immediately tried to kill you! It wasn't like you were trying to steal his caps or break into his savings!" Alana shot back. "It was... foolish, I won't deny that,"
Falcon's ears drooped and he wanted to pull his hood over his face.
"but it was a misunderstanding... the ground and water might be free of radiation and the skies might be free again, but this is still the Equestrian Wasteland, Falcon Wing. Ponies still living with the memories of a harsher time, ponies still dealing with the scars left over. You just forgot that in Dodge."
"Well I shouldn't have," Falcon Wing replied.
"Agreed. But there's nothing you can do about it now. I'm sorry... I really am but... do you really know what would have happened if you didn't try to defend yourself?" Alana asked. "If you had attempted to talk to this Erasure?"
Falcon Wing thought about what the pink pegasus within that black carapace said then considered what Flint had told him. He felt like Steiner again as he did and came up with an answer.
"She was just as likely to shoot me as the others with her," he said glumly.
Alana frowned. "If it wasn't you or her, it was you and the three other pegasi with her. You did what you did so that you'd live another day and there's nothing wrong with that, Falcon."
The red colt did not feel like saying more, his guilt now replaced with self-disappointment. Sneaking without his cloak wasn't the only mistake he had made in the last few days... and even though it had quite nearly cost him his life, it was only a minor mistake.
He was truly regretful for putting Alana through everything she had gone through up until this point and being so oblivious to it until now.
He let go of Alana and wriggled out of her embrace.
"Thank you... for everything. I don't think a pony like me deserves a mare like you --"
She put a hoof to his mouth.
"Rest up, get yourself together. Then we start thinking about what we do next. I'm gonna give you some time alone to figure things out," she said, getting to her up after and then walking to the door to the shack. She looked back at him again before opening the door, watching him lie back down on the bed roll and put his goggles over his eyes.
She sighed softly and left the shack, closing the door behind her gently, leaving Falcon in dimness with only the light being the sunlight shining through spaces in the ceiling and the green glow of his Pipeye.
Cycling through the functions, Falcon Wing found new data stored on the goggles. Information taken from a terminal in Dodge City.
The whole ordeal wasn't sparked by him doing something as trivial as recharging his goggles... he had stolen something from that saloon. But why...?
He opened the file named "Contact", hoping it would jog his recovered memory.
And jog his memory it did...