//------------------------------// // 22: Dangerous Mission [Dark] // Story: Thirty Minutes Shy // by Esle Ynopemos //------------------------------// ((Prompt: Re-imagine MLP: FiM as a war story.)) The blood wasn't what scared Fluttershy. She had known blood before the war. She knew its color, knew its coppery smell. There was just more of it now, spurts and gouts and pools instead of the little drops of it she had known a lifetime ago, bandaging up hurt birds and field mice. It was just much more of the same, and the blood wasn't what bothered her. It wasn't the fire, either. The haze of smoke that never truly left, and made it hard to tell night from day. In the first days of the war, she had been afraid of all the fire, but that fear had run itself dry. It was just a part of her world now, oily black plumes choking out the sky and a persistent red-orange glow on the horizon. Fire was nothing more than a tool, something to warm up next to during the freezing nights, to cauterize wounds before they bled out. The screaming wasn't even what scared her. She would always hear somepony wailing, somewhere. Sometimes, there would be a loud bang, and the screams would suddenly stop. Sometimes, they would keep going at a newer, more frantic pitch. But that wasn't what scared Fluttershy. It wasn't the claustrophobic trenches, filled with mud and bodies. It wasn't the haunted look she saw in ponies' eyes when she passed by; glassy, dull, halfway to joining the unseeing stares of the dead among them. It wasn't the constant threat of another enemy air raid, or another brutal unicorn firebombing. War wasn't what terrified Fluttershy. What terrified her was how damn good she was at it. Infiltration, that was her job. Before the war, her job had been taking care of animals, but there were no animals here, besides the ones that marched off with spears and swords clenched in their teeth and iron plates on their hooves, seeking to kill one another. Infiltration was easy. It just meant being quiet, and Fluttershy excelled at being quiet. It was amazing how many things a pony could do just by being quiet. She could report enemy movements so that Twilight and her unicorns knew where to launch their deadly volleys of magic. She could slip into enemy territory and sabotage their supply lines. Hunger cut far deeper than any sword, and she did not dare think about how many of the bodies she passed in the trenches were there because of the depots she burned. The one thing that cut deeper than hunger, though, was fear. Fluttershy knew about fear. Fear was her constant companion. Fear was her guardian, and her weapon, and the thing she curled up with when she slept at night. Fluttershy understood fear, knew how it worked, knew how to use it. A fresh contingent, well-equipped and ready to make a flanking charge would wake up the morning they were supposed to advance, find all of their commanding officers missing, and break into chaos. A fortified position, dug in deep to defy any kind of offensive movement, would quickly empty when a sweet-smelling green fog fills its corridors. Her coat color might have seemed to be a disadvantage when slipping from place to place under the cover of darkness, but it really wasn't. In the mud of the trenches, everypony's coat was the same gray-brown. Rarity would have been appalled to see what had become of her mane. Cropped nearly to her skull, and caked with mud. If she were here... She shook her head. She couldn't afford to think about that. She had her mission. Stay quiet, watch, listen. Do what she can to make sure that the good ponies win, and the bad ponies lose. It got harder to tell every day which was which. He was a general, apparently. That was what her briefing had told her. He was a general, and critically important to the enemy's plans. What he was doing so close to the front, Fluttershy could not guess, but she was not a general, she was an infiltrator. She did not make strategies, like him. She waited, and stayed quiet, and did what she could to make the enemy half as afraid as she was. He must have been near the front for a long time, because his guards were exhausted. They were half asleep, and it was hardly a challenge for her to sneak past them. Her hooves fell silently on the packed earth as she crept up to his prone form. He looked peaceful, there on his cot. He did not look like a pony who made a living of ordering the deaths of thousands. The way his sheets were twisted, she could see that his cutie mark was a windmill; he had probably been a miller before the war. But a glance around the room told her that he was indeed a general now. Maps were laid out on the table, full of pins. Coded correspondences laid next to an enchanted decoding ring. A faded green jacket hung on a hook displaying rows and rows of medals he had earned for killing ponies. Fluttershy slipped a thin-bladed knife out from between its hiding place among her feathers. One throat, and the end of the war would become months closer. One throat to save thousands of throats. To bring back blue skies and green grass, and maybe some day she might look in the mirror and not need to scream at what she sees. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, as quiet as a knife in the dark.