The rope felt familiar in his hooves. He had studied it for a few minutes, considering every twist of the woven material as he passed his touch over it. It was sturdy, like a structure he could count on.
The bench felt cold under his hooves, unwarmed on the end he had selected. Standing at his tallest on the bench had made the legs wobble, but they held after a few uneasy seconds.
There was room enough on the sheet-music holder for his notebook. He had considered its place for what he felt was an embarrassing length of time, wanting to simply plunk it down and leave it where it fell, but feeling a tug in his chest to assert the location of what he had written. Not to put it on display, but to make it clear enough to see with minimal effort. He noted, lamentably, that his cursive was terrible, and he regretted not having the time to polish it.
He held the rope place as he lifted his head up, and it slid perfectly above his shoulders like a hug from an old friend. It chafed against his chin when he tightened it, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
It was still hard to see through the tears, but he didn’t suppose that mattered either.
The sun had finally decided to set when Applejack parted the grass of the field around her forelegs. She had followed leads of her suspicion until the darkness threatened to rob her search of its only element of detection. She could recognize Braeburn’s head of scruffy yet well-kept hair anywhere, but only if she could see it. So, with the constraints of her only means of conclusion readily apparent, Applejack had settled on her final destination before she was to give up.
‘What about the old church?’ Dash had said.
After Applejack had cried out the tears threatening to sink her heart, Rainbow Dash had agreed to a scan of the crowd without a second thought. She had leapt up like a lightning flash and parted the clouds with the speed of her acceleration, and scanned in every direction for the cowpoke hat and sandy-blonde mane Applejack had given her as reminders.
For Dash, an hour long search took seconds. But she had taken minutes.
Applejack’s face had fallen when the pegasus descended, shrugging with an empathetic expression.
They had searched together, stopping passerby and asking in the least invasive way if any of them had seen a country pony looking somewhat out of place. They had checked in shops, around corners, and under objects. Nopony had greeted them but sympathetic citizens, and the occasional old coot in too much of a hurry to be helpful.
So, on a whim, with no further leads and Dash retreating home to beat the onset of evening, Applejack had made her way to the church.
How would that make you feel?
Applejack remembered the church from when she was just a filly. She had loved the Sunday mornings spent there, even if her parents had assured her that there was no compulsion in their weekly visits. Applejack ignored them with all her heart, knowing full well that if she had been anywhere besides inside the white painted walls of her favorite worship come the weekend, something must be amiss. The lacquered walls of the now-decaying old building greeted her with a familiar reception, welcoming her inside with the utterances she remembered in the back of her head. Recitations from scripture. Rhymes she had shared with other fillies. Ruminating, even in her youthful ignorance, on the weight of the words given to her from the mouth of the proselytizing pegasus who hosted every sermon.
Applejack paused with her hoof on the cracked paint of the church doors. The finish peeled underneath her touch, and she stripped away several inches of the paint, revealing the wormy looking wood underneath, before pushing the door open properly.
The creak of the aged hinges was washed over by a louder sound. The clatter of something wooden as it skittered across the floor.
Applejack started at the noise and scanned the ground in front of her hooves in search of what errant piece of furniture she might have stumbled upon or knocked to the ground. The sudden volume was disarming, and she looked over the same patch of once-familiar church floor for several seconds before the concretes of her perception kicked in. The sound couldn’t have been her, or the door—it had come from much too far away.
The other end of the church, to be precise.
Applejack lifted her head. She held the flicker of an apologetic smile in the back of her mind as she looked up, dreaming to herself that she might open her eyes to find Braeburn standing there, waiting for her to speak.
She found Braeburn there. He was not standing.
Time spooled into slow-motion as it passed through Applejack’s senses.
The end of the church felt very far away.
Applejack remembered running through the seats as a child, animated and unconcerned until the hum of the crowd died down and the the first murmur of the self-appointed reverend’s lips ambled down the middle of the church. She remembered darting through them with pursuers on her tail, evading them at every turn and taking fantastical angles of maneuverability between one piece of wood and the next. When she was young, the seconds between seats had disappeared as she blinked them away.
Applejack lifted her hoof, and it felt slow, like sick, twig-filled molasses.
Braeburn, she thought, wishing his name to her lips.
Her mouth remained still. Her second hoof began to complete the first’s arc, raising itself and slogging through the air with an agonizing, paralyzing slowness.
If Braeburn had noticed the creak of the door, his recognition was unapparent. His only reaction to Applejack’s presence was the twitch of his limbs, jerked about by the agonizing onset of asphyxiation’s cruel fingers.
His lack of expertise had spared him a well architected hangman’s knot, and therefore left his neck intact. The slow crawl of breathless evaporation, however, seemed no more forgiving a mistress.
Applejack counted the pews as they flashed by in her periphery. She had never counted them as a child, but there seemed to be more than she remembered. The march down the center aisle of church procession had never felt like the last mile in a death march before.
Applejack tried to think those words away. Her brain aided her, having only room for the insistence of her movement. She moved as fast as she could manage, her limbs shuddering with the sudden force of her exertion. And still they were too slow.
She heard, from feet away, a choke propelled by a final slip of oxygen.
Her hooves felt finally worthwhile when she reached him.
There was no controlling her momentum. She collided with Braeburn’s body clumsily, and her heart screamed at her as it heard the noise of her impact. Braeburn’s stomach and chest convulsed as Applejack slammed into them. Applejack cringed as a cruel gasp left Braeburn’s mouth, like the sound of rain-soaked firewood being extinguished by a soggy burlap sack.
Applejack cursed in her head. She felt the clammy texture of Braeburn’s fur against her skin already. Time was still moving too slow.
Desperation. Chewing her tongue to keep from babbling, Applejack searched for a hoof-hold on Braeburn’s outstretched limbs. His hind legs shuddered slightly as she touched them, and she screamed, screamed at herself, move, move faster, move move move move move.
With enough of a foot-hold to be satisfactory given the circumstance, Applejack forced herself under Braeburn’s body and tried to lift—up.
The sputtering gasp of a tiny trickle of air parted Braeburn’s lips.
But Applejack couldn’t revel in her satisfaction.
Braeburn was heavy. His otherwise well-toned frame weighed on Applejack surprisingly so as she attempted to hold him up, straining every muscle in her back and available anywhere else to keep him up. To keep his legs warm. To keep him breathing.
Braeburn’s breaths came with a sound like a choked inflation pump, sputtering with death and stale air.
Applejack looked around. She normally reserved what little prayer she believed in for private requests after evenings of contemplation—but now, she prayed. She scanned her periphery desperately, needing something, anything, to rescue her from the situation she was suddenly in. To rescue her so she could rescue him. She needed to move, but her legs were pinned in place by the weight on her back.
Another breath died in Braeburn’s mouth, burbling out in lieu of the words it might once have held.
Move, she thought to herself. Move, she thought to herself. Move, she thought to herself.
Her legs screamed at her in protest.
“Please,” she said, managing it between the mouthfuls of her own breaths.
Clatter. Stool.
It came to her suddenly; four wooden legs leapt out like the always visible solution to an unsolvable problem. It was there, but the logistics were the difficult part.
Applejack weighed the difference in action in her head. Her legs already felt inches away from giving out.
“Buck,” she whispered to herself.
As she sloughed Braeburn off her body, her mind reminded her of the seconds. It was unnecessary. She could hear the spurts and stammered shivering movements of his tongue.
Wishing she could break the whole church in half and lay Braeburn evenly on one side to catch his breath, Applejack threw the stool toward her cousin, letting its legs skitter across the ground.
The stool skidded toward Braeburn’s limply hanging frame, now barely animate with the occasional twitching. Her vocabulary of possible profanity died in her throat along with the scream she forced to stay under as the stool tilted to its side, meeting her toppled on her return.
Move.
She moved her limbs like she had forgotten how they worked, but managed to force them in tandem to pull the bench upright and align it to what she hoped was Braeburn’s center of gravity. She leapt onto it, and held her breath as she felt it shudder under her weight.
But it held. So she grabbed Braeburn with her forelegs around his lower half, and lifted. And held.
Braeburn let out a tiny, muffled gasp through the constriction of the noose. Applejack could feel her own lungs beg in sympathy, wishing she could take over, and breathe for him, and suck in mouthful after mouthful of air and make it right and he was so heavy her legs already hurt again—
The arrangement of her body against his was as inelegant as anything could be. Applejack tried to keep her chest pressed up against him as she moved, struggling to force her posture to stay strong enough to keep him up, with slack on the rope hanging from his neck to the sturdy beam above. She needed to reach the rope, but she couldn’t let go. And he was heavy, so much heavier than she could ever have expected. All the weight of Braeburn’s slender-looking frame compounded on her like a sack of rocks, dulled from their airy lightness with the crushing pressure of impending death.
Applejack could hear the faint breaths growing even fainter, wheezing through tightening rope and a potentially crushed windpipe.
She had to undo the rope. She tried to wiggle her body to the right angle, reaching one of her hooves up and swinging it in the air ineffectually, scrabbling for even just a touch of the rope, so she could hold it, and pull it from its place around her cousin’s neck. She needed to undo the rope, but she couldn’t reach it, and Braeburn’s weight on her served as a reminder that given the slightest shift too far, the wheezing that was the only sound in the church could slow to a stop.
Applejack swiveled and held Braeburn around the back, standing on her hind legs. If all fours had made her feel sore and unstable, now she was teetering on the precipice of complete collapse. But it wasn’t a matter of what she could do, or what she thought she could hold; she needed to reach the rope, and this was the only way to do it.
With the strength of her only remaining breath, Applejack lunged forward with her mouth and caught the thick noose between her teeth. Her body screamed at her, reminding her with the quivering of her muscles that she was seconds away from falling apart completely and abandoning Braeburn to the unforgiving tightness of his self-selected lasso.
She tried to be quick, but the rope was uncooperative.
Trying to undo a hangman’s knot with her teeth was something Applejack had never imagined attempting. She would have been loathe to take it on her own advisement even now, because the knot was tight, and thick, and unforgiving, and her teeth and tongue and snout were all like clumsy boxing gloves on the keys of a piano. She jerked her head in one direction and felt the knot go slightly tighter.
A jerky creak drew her attention. It followed with a shift of her body backwards. She clenched her teeth around the rope and forced herself to stay in place, her legs wishing to desperately to melt out from under her like the outer skin from the white-hot iron that was her muscles in their distress.
Another creak. The piano bench shifted further away.
In desperation, Applejack jerked her head to the side again with a likely feeling length of rope between her teeth.
It slipped out from her mouth without giving an inch. The bench shifted again, and Applejack slid further away, now barely holding herself against Braeburn’s body.
“Gosh darnit!”
The silly almost-curse echoed in the empty rows of the church. Applejack said it with more anguish on her tongue than anypony had ever sworn before, let alone in the supposedly sacrosanct halls of what had once been a place of worship.
Now it was empty. The words of misguided ministers that had meant nothing, and everything, were gone. Only two ponies and the remnants of air between them remained.
For all the strength she had found in herself over the years—the strength to be capable, and honest, and hardworking and self-sufficient and always there when others needed her—now, she felt weak. She felt helpless. And the world acclimated her frustrations perfectly, leading her to the climax of her distress in that single, mouth-drying phrase. She could say no more, because all she wanted to do was to scream and scream and scream, and tear the world apart around her.
She wanted to undo the rope.
She found it in herself to continue. Buried away in a hidden pocket of her consciousness that was beleaguered on every side by the physical anguish of her pose, the burning of her muscles and the sudden onset fatigue of every tendon, she found the strength to try one more time. With her body still barely held forward, keeping Braeburn from the full tautness of the noose with shaking hooves, Applejack grasped for the rope.
Her teeth found it again, and she tried to deconstruct the assembly of a hangman’s knot in her mouth.
She felt the tiniest looseness as one bit slipped ever so slightly from the other.
Applejack mumbled the words to a prayer as she worked her lips over the unsavoury, tough material. The one she remembered from her childhood; the one she had said every day at church without fail, until she’d learned that the Princess of Equestria held no stock in prayer.
Celestia bless us, with all your grace, to look upon your shining face...
Applejack felt the stool lurch under her again, and held on to her cousin and her posture with only sheer force of will, just the tips of her hooves now on the polished wood, her legs stretched almost to the length of her whole body.
...for though we may not be as pure, we know you wish us to endure...
Yes. Yes. Applejack felt this part slip away from that part, and the whole structure loosened, giving her a sudden excess of rope to work with. But she had her footing now, and she knew what to do next.
...the hurt of anguish and of strife, and to remember all through life...
Applejack let out a sort of delirious cry into her mouthful of brown fabric. She tugged once, and the knot undid, finally and completely, and let her cousin go.
He fell with her to the floor, the bench finally slipping from behind her hooves. Applejack felt the breath forced from her lungs as Braeburn landed on her chest and stomach like a right hook thrown directly into her solar plexus. She coughed, and her breathing became overtaken by panicked sounding gasps, air shrieking as it was sucked past her teeth and down her throat.
Braeburn sounded the same, gasping and panting and wheezing. His breathing was more restrained, as though his body couldn’t be convinced he had gone so long without air. Instead of Applejack’s all-consuming, chest-wracking gasps, Braeburn sucked in air relatively quietly, his eyelids fluttering as the world resumed around him. The blood trapped above his neck flowed free and found its place in his veins, which made his skin tingle.
...that every pony’s life is worthwhile, if only just to find their smile.
Braeburn twitched atop Applejack’s body and turned to the side, waving his foreleg through the air. He moved and fell, landing on the cold wood of the church floor with a muffled expulsion of air. Applejack, despite her own sudden lack of oxygen, turned to him as he moved. He turned with her, onto his back, and rested his head on one of his forelegs, opposed to the hardness of the floor underneath him even in the desperate clutches of his body’s insistence for breath .
The church filled with the sounds of breathing. Applejack laid next to Braeburn, watching him cough and collect himself through his lungfuls of oxygen. She had composed herself after the force of her compelled exhalation, but still watched. She eyed the rope in the corner of her periphery, wishing it to a special fire in Tartarus when it eventually departed.
Braeburn had no sooner regained the slightest semblance of his chest’s capacity of air than his lips moved, mumbling unspoken sentences in his still persistent attempts to breathe again.
Applejack placed her hoof on Braeburn’s shoulder and rubbed, reassuring him with a soft, insistent pat, the same she might give to a frightened cat.
Braeburn didn’t let the gesture stop him.
“I... I-I’m... s-... s-sorry... c-cuz...” he managed through his panting. He raised his free foreleg to his face as he spoke, and the tears he had barely left behind reassembled on his cheeks, leaking from the corners of his eyes. Applejack felt the trickle of moisture on her hoof as she rubbed, but she paid it no attention.
Her words came more easily.
“Shhh,” she said. “Just calm down, and try to get some air.”
Braeburn did just that. The tears still wouldn’t stop, but his sobbing quelled to crying, which quelled to sniffling as the air came in. His shoulders shook as Applejack rubbed them, alternating between sides with her one hoof and propping herself up with the other.
After more time than either of them could measure, Braeburn’s breathing sounded almost normal.
It was dark outside. Instead of pastoral solar warmth, the shimmering glass windows of the church let in the faintest ambling beams of moonlight, that painted the church floor with tiny splotches of their silver; washing over, in particular, the two bodies next to each other by the church’s piano.
Applejack looked at her cousin through the moonlight. She looked over his desert-yellow coat and his mop of frazzled-looking hair. She looked at the hat that, somehow, despite everything, had managed to stay on his head. She looked at, out of the corner of her eye, the rope that lay dangling beside both of them, its delicate interweavings disassembled into a single coil that just reached the floor of the church.
Of course she had been able to untie it.
Applejack’s hoof-rub pulled away and turned suddenly into a jab which Braeburn recoiled from, more from shock than anything else. He looked at his cousin with blurred eyes, blinking his tears out of the way and looking through his body’s still lingering request for more air.
“You didn’t even tie the rope right, dummy,” Applejack said.
The church focused suddenly on the soft wheeze of Braeburn’s breath.
It counted four pained sounding inhalations before Braeburn gave up, by choice, the first air since his decision, with a snort. The snort turned into a chuckle, and Applejack joined, starting a chain reaction inside herself. Both ponies chortled, then laughed, then roared.
But neither of them paid attention to that. They laughed because it was right, and Applejack was correct. If he’d tied it properly, neither of them would be laughing; so, in a way, they laughed in defiance, suddenly and all at once on terms with the discarded pieces of the way they had been only minutes ago.
Braeburn’s chicken-scratch hoofwriting was a bright red on his notebook, its pages open like a fat, winged bird waiting to take flight from the music stand. Applejack couldn’t see it from where she was, nor had she noticed it in the first place.
I’m sorry, it said.
The laughter subsided after a while. It was replaced by silent understanding.