//------------------------------// // 8. My Decision // Story: Shattered Prism // by Kaidan //------------------------------// I had a restless night of sleep spent drifting between dreams of a past I had lost and an uncertain future. The more I tried not to think about it, the more my mind wandered back to the accident. I had once been Scootaloo, yet now I wasn’t. It felt like an important part of myself was missing, but the same time, I was Dash now. Would I still be me if I was suddenly Scootaloo too? I shook my head and sighed and felt Pinkie roll over in the bed. She had insisted on spending the night with me in case I needed anything. It was silly to think I was their Dash—they all knew I was a fake, yet they treated me the same, like a friend they had known all their lives. They seemed worried that I might die a second time by choosing to go back to being Scootaloo. It wasn’t a decision I was prepared to make—not until I had all my memories. I decided to roll out of bed and stretch. My wings ached from all the tossing and turning, and the sun was barely cresting the horizon. A joint in my shoulder popped, and soon I was cracking all my stiff joints. It felt good to loosen up all my stiff muscles. Pinkie heard me and got out of bed herself. Amazingly, her mane was still as curly as the day before while I, on the other hoof, had a horrible case of bedhead and had to run a comb through it. It’d still get messed up when I flew, but at least it wouldn’t be a tangled mess of colors. “How’d you sleep, Dashie?” Pinkie asked. “I’m not Dash. . .” Pinkie walked over and smiled. “I know, but I miss pulling pranks with her and—are you gonna see if Twilight can reverse it?” I looked at her and saw her eyes misting up. The part of me overwritten to be loyal was tugging at my heart. I couldn’t just leave her, or the others, and make them lose Dash again. All I had as Scootaloo was my aunt and the Crusaders anyway. “I don’t know, but I think I want my memories as Scootaloo back first. We’ll see from there.” She smiled and hugged me. “Okie dokie lokie! We’ll go get your memories back, and if she tries any funny business I’ll hit her in the face with an apple pie!” “Apple pie?” I laughed deeply. “That must be an alicorn’s only weakness?” “Of course! It’s super sticky and messes up their mane.” “Oh, Pinkie Pie, you’re so random.” I walked over to the window and looked back. “I’ll race you to the library.” “You don’t stand a chance,” Pinkie said. “Oh yeah? Well then—one, two, three, go!” I jumped out the window without hesitating and flew down towards town. Twilight’s library sat towards the middle of Ponyville. With the sun barely up, there weren’t many ponies out and about. I couldn’t see Pinkie or her helicopter anywhere, and the hot air balloon was tied up outside the library next to the house of the only pony in town with a hot air balloon cutie mark. I landed on the doorstep with a smug grin on my face and knocked on the door. “Don’t worry, Twilight, I’ll get it.” My smile vanished as the door opened and Pinkie smiled. “I win again!” “What?! How—You—” I looked back up to the cloud in the distance that was my home, then back at Pinkie. I poked her in the nose to be sure she was real, and then pinched myself. “Haha! I’m not a changeling, if that’s what you’re thinking. Then again, maybe I am a changeling but they erased my memory so I wouldn’t remember, and now they’re going to use me to assassinate the Elements of Harmony, and I’ll have to start with you, so I’ll drug you and drag you down to my—” “Pinkie, is that Dash?” Twilight shouted from inside. “Yeah, Twilight!” I shouted back. “Can we talk?” “Of course! Come in! I was just making tea!” I shuddered at the mention of tea before walking in past Pinkie. There was just something wrong with tea. I couldn’t place my hoof on it, but I was fairly certain I didn’t like tea for some reason. Twilight came out and offered me and Pinkie a cup. Despite my unease, I found myself unable to refuse it. There was something commanding about the way she asked me if I wanted tea. I shook my head, wondering if she had used some kind of spell on me too. Was there anything that would explain her odd behavior, or had she really lost it? “How’s the tea?” Twilight asked. “Super!” Pinkie exclaimed. “Eh, I prefer less frou-frou drinks.” I took another sip of the bland green tea. Twilight giggled. “I, uh—I’m sorry, Dash. I made you drink tea every time you visited. I guess that’ll be a hard habit to break. What brings you two by?” “Well, two things really.” Pinkie looked over to me and smiled to boost my confidence as I spoke. “First off, I want you to take me to Scootaloo. You said you didn’t kill her, so you must have her off in a hospital or something. Second, I want you to restore my memories.” Twilight frowned, and as she relaxed I saw the bags under her eyes. She looked like she hadn’t slept, but quickly regained her composure—no doubt a trick Celestia taught her to help her appear more regal. “Dash, I can take you to see Scootaloo. I have your memories so I can restore them now. I took them from Scootaloo as part of the spell, and I can restore them like I did when Discord took over. . . but are you sure?” “Yeah. I know you want me to reconsider and stay as Dash. To be honest, I’ve grown pretty attached to the five of you. I want to have Scootaloo’s memories to remember who I was and see for myself why I chose to become Dash. Maybe then I can forgive you for the can of insanity you opened up.” Twilight smiled. “Okay. Just—I’ll just need a minute.” She turned and walked away, wiping something from her eyes. She returned a few moments later with the Element of Magic on her head, and levitated the Element of Loyalty to me. “You’ll need to put your Element on to facilitate the process,” Twilight explained. I snapped the necklace around my neck and felt it tingling. I looked down as it glowed a dull red. “Isn’t it supposed to be brighter or something? I seem to recall it being a lot more. . . awesome or something.” “It hasn’t been the same since the swap. Whatever binds the Element to Dash is still in her body, but the loyalty—the soul of Dash—I couldn’t recreate. If I’d let her die, it could have been decades before the Element found a new host, and I couldn’t stand to lose you. . . not yet. Now that I’ll live thousands of years, I need time to adjust to the thought of watching all my friends die one by one.” “That’s a rather depressing way to look at it,” I said. Twilight sighed and looked at Pinkie. “You haven’t lost somepony close. Pinkie lost an aunt, Applejack her parents, and yet they’ll see them soon when they pass away. . . It’ll be millennia before I die and get to see you girls again.” “Come on, Twilight. Cheep cheep, chirp chirp, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up!” Pinkie chanted. Twilight chuckled once. “Sorry. You wanted your memories back and here I am depressing everyone. Just close your eyes, and trust me.” I looked at Pinkie who gave me a knowing nod. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and closed my eyes. I flinched as I felt a horn touch my forehead, and the world exploded around me. I saw myself rocketing through the sky. A rainbow contrail and a blue speck, exploding through a thunderhead in a spectacular display. At least a hundred ponies had come out to see my self-proclaimed one-mare stunt show. As I watched I realized something was wrong. I couldn’t be watching myself. I wanted to look down at my hooves, yet seemed to be in some sort of dream or memory, and could only watch. My memory was coming back and I knew what was going to happen before it did. There was a loud roll of thunder, a flash, and a sickening crunch as Dash hit the ground. I was running towards her, wings buzzing, not believing what I just saw. It had to be part of the stunt, some trick. She’d fly off and finish the Sonic Rainboom when we least expected it. There was a crowd of ponies gathered around Dash when I got over there. They tried to hold me back, and the sheer mass of their bodies huddled around her almost prevented me from getting in. I was small enough to crawl between legs and squeeze through. Applejack and Rarity were doing their best to keep the worried ponies at bay. Pinkie flew by in a flash towards town to get help. I stumbled into the clearing around Dash with my eyes wide in shock. There, on the ground before me, was my idol. Both her forelegs had been mutilated in the crash, with her leg bones snapped in two and sticking out of the torn skin. Fluttershy was tying strips of cloth around them to slow the blood loss. Dash took pained breaths and only one side of her chest was rising. I could see Twilight kneeling over her. “Please, Dash, don’t move; you’ll make it worse!” Her horn glowed and Dash stopped twitching. Twilight kept her immobile while she and Fluttershy tried their best to keep her alive. I had walked closer than I thought and felt warmth at my hooves. Looking down, I saw strands of violet and green hair in a pool of bloody red dirt. Already I could see the weak breaths fading as blood pooled in the ground and large bruises formed. Before I could reach out and hug her, a nurse burst through the crowd. Twilight, Nurse Redheart, and Doctor Stable got her onto a stretcher and raced off towards the hospital with her. I don’t remember how long I was there or what happened next. My next memory was of waking up at Applejack’s house, sharing a bed with Apple Bloom. I was too stunned to move, to think. I just sat there for what felt like days as I struggled to grasp the death of my hero just weeks after being taken under her wing. I opened my eyes once the memories had finished. Twilight had started restoring Scootaloo’s memories to me in reverse order from the moment I agreed to become Dash, through the crash, and back to a time when my parents were alive. I could remember agreeing to help Dash in any way possible. Next I looked at my legs in disbelief, noticing for the first time the faded scars under my blue coat of hair. Now I could remember seeing myself—no, Dash—broken and bleeding after the crash. I was crying, both from reliving the death of my hero, and from seeing my parents again. I had watched them die again, and the pain nearly made me try to tear Twilight off me. Then I was a foal again, staring into my parent’s loving eyes. I felt Pinkie lifting me up and hugging me and Twilight too. I looked at her and realized we were both crying like fillies. “You—all those sad memories of mine, you saved them for me?” I asked. Twilight was still crying and just nodded. I tried to imagine what it would be like for her to have the memories of Dash crashing from two different viewpoints, or her realizing only after using my filly body to save Dash how much pain I had suffered in my life as Scootaloo. The burden of that sorrow had to weigh heavily on her. “I didn’t know you felt so much pain at her loss, or mine,” I said. “I’ll always have those memories, Scootaloo. . . I’m sorry, I failed you both.” I hugged her. It is what Dash and Scootaloo would have wanted. I now had two sets of memories in my head from two different lives, and yet they seemed to weave together. From the little filly and her idol to the fiercely loyal Dash and the filly she had taken under her wing. We were one and the same now. I felt something burning against my chest and looked down. The Element of Loyalty was glowing brightly and part of me knew it was working properly again. I could feel the loyalty for my friends inside me; not because I’d been programmed to be loyal, but because I genuinely cared for them. I was hurt just as much as Twilight or Pinkie for their loss, and knew what I had to do. “Thank you for doing this. I’ll stay as Dash, I think it’s for the best. . . after all, you’d be a real mess without me.” I chuckled and lifted her chin up to see her smile. “Do you still want to see Scootaloo?” Twilight asked. She rubbed her cheeks off and straightened out her mane. “It’ll be a little weird, but, uh. . . I sorta feel like I need to say goodbye to my old life to move on.” “She’s in Cloudsdale Hospital under the name of Morning Mist, Room 302, unless they’ve moved her. I didn’t want anyone accidently finding out what I did, so I hid her there. We can go and visit together, but she’ll never wake from her coma. She is you now Dash, and you are her.” “I guess that’ll have to do. We can figure out later how to tell everypony what happened. I might need a little space for a while to figure it all out though. I’ll have to visit my aunt in the nursing home—she could barely remember my name as Scootaloo. At least I can keep her company as Dash, even if she has no clue I’m her little niece.” “I’ll come too! I bet she’d love a surprise party,” Pinkie said. “I’m sure she would,” Twilight said. The door to the library opened and we turned to see Spike standing there with a scroll in his claw. He immediately looked away from the three of us, as if he was ashamed to see us huddled and crying. “It’s okay, Spike, haven’t you seen a grown mare cry before?” I asked. “It’s. . . Twilight, I shouldn’t have read it but I was at the farm and got curious. . .” Spike walked over and handed her a letter from Celestia. The royal seal was broken. Twilight nervously looked down at it, her eyes going wide in fear. “What is it? Does she know?” Spike just gulped and scraped a foot across the floor. Twilight unfurled the letter, quickly reading it. She did little more than begin to weep and drop the letter. I picked it up and read it for myself. Dear Twilight, Applejack sent me a letter telling me what you have done. I am disappointed in you, my student. You took an innocent life in an attempt to save a pony whose time had come. I am on my way to Ponyville to reverse the process. After restoring Scootaloo and letting Dash pass away to restore the natural order, you will return with me to Canterlot for no less than one year. It has become apparent you need further supervision to come to terms with being an alicorn. If you see Dash, put her to sleep and await my arrival. Have the Elements ready, I should be there shortly after you receive this letter. Your ruler, Princess Celestia Twilight looked like a beaten puppy, the kind you’d find in a city like Manehatten that had been used and abandoned. I knew she didn’t take failure well, and always strived to please Celestia. This was probably the first time she had truly disappointed her, and not just blown things out of proportions. After Pinkie read the note, she broke the silence. “I’m so sorry, Twilight. I’ll get the girls, I won’t let her take you away!” Twilight whimpered something about losing me again and I couldn’t take it anymore. She looked up at me, her horn blinking on and off as she tried to summon enough conviction to carry out her mentor’s order. “Twilight, it’s okay. She won’t put me back,” I said. “I think—no, I want to be Dash. After all this, I just don’t see how I can go back. You’re my friend, and I would always remember how horrible you felt, how you all felt, that I left you.” “B-but she’ll be here a-any second, and s-she is the princess! She’ll f-force you back!” Twilight said. I smirked with the cocky grin I’d often envied of Dash. “Hey, you leave that to me. Just buy me some time, alright?” I rubbed my hooves on the floor and braced myself for launch. I then leapt into the air and rocketed out the window upstairs, headed towards Cloudsdale. Celestia may be a princess, but nopony in Equestria was faster than me. As the wind tore at me I saw a golden chariot landing near the library. She was too lazy to even fly here. I wondered if she could even get close to the sound barrier, or if she had spotted me. It didn’t matter. I felt the familiar feeling of the air pressure around me changing. Threads of color began to unravel at my hoof. It was both beautiful and painful as the tip of my hoof spearheaded a mach cone. Part of me was afraid to break the sound barrier, but another part assured me we could do it. It had done this a dozen times and I found myself smiling. As Scootaloo I had dreamed of this moment; the moment when I would fly as fast as Dash. I laughed as the spiraling colors at the tip of my hoof lengthened. The air grew silent, which I had not expected. Sonic Rainbooms were usually really loud. I looked back and saw the signature Rainboom spreading across the sky. That was when I realized every single pony in Ponyville, Celestia included, would have heard it. I was traveling faster than sound—that would explain the deafening silence. The wind still sliced through my feathers like razorblades, and I flew towards Cloudsdale. My wings were burning, yet I knew I could keep this up for an hour before collapsing from exhaustion. I had trained hard, and somehow knew at this speed Cloudsdale was only a few minutes away. If things as Dashaloo didn’t work out, I could always get a job as a mail mare. I bet ponies would pay big bits to have packages delivered in ten seconds flat. I screeched to a halt when I realized I had reached Cloudsdale, and nearly ran straight into one of the large outlying cloud arches. A sudden wave of deafening sound caught up with me, startling me into folding my wings against my side. It was the loud Sonic Rainboom that had chased me all the way from Ponyville. I opened my wings back up to slow my fall, and saw dozens of Pegasi looking at me in shock. I gave them a smirk and saluted, then flew off towards the hospital. I landed at the front doors and trotted inside. “Good afternoon, Dash, can I help you?” The nurse at the front desk asked. “You know me?” I asked. “Of course, you’re the only pony that can pull off that Sonic Rainboom, despite the Mayor of Cloudsdale literally begging you to stop doing it in the city limits.” “Oh, uh, well. . . I’ll work on it. I’m, uh, here to see a friend. Morning Mist, room 302 right?” The nurse looked down at a clipboard and flipped through a few pages. “Yep, but visiting hours are over in thirty minutes.” “That’s fine, it’ll only take a minute. Just want to say hi.” “Well, the stairs there go up to the third floor, it’s on your left.” “Thanks!” I trotted over and started going up the stairs. My heart was still racing from the flight over and likely wouldn’t slow down anytime soon. By now, Twilight had spilled her guts to her teacher. I couldn’t begin to imagine what punishment Celestia would give Twilight for essentially taking Scootaloo’s life. My heart continued racing as I walked down the third floor corridor, and closed the door to the room behind me. My heart skipped several beats as I breathlessly stared at myself. I was outside my body, and yet inside it at the same time. I was Dash, and I was the orange filly lying on the bed. Scootaloo—I lay there with a breathing machine hooked to an endo-tracheal tube, and a feeding tube in my stomach. IV’s were placed in my arms, slowly hydrating me and delivering medications. Dozens of sticky leads were placed on my shaved chest, monitoring my heart beat. The machine beeped a slow rhythm as my sleeping form lay in the bed. I slowly walked over to myself and looked down. My under-developed wings had atrophied to the point that they looked like little more than a Nightmare Night decoration. My legs were all skin and bone, and my stomach no longer had that pudgy layer of fat from eating too many of Pinkie’s cupcakes. I knew what I had to do, but I couldn’t fathom actually doing it. I couldn’t go back to this—thing—that lay before me. I wasn’t Scootaloo anymore, nor was I Dash. I was something else, I was the best of both ponies. The girls needed me, and so did the Crusaders. I could be there for everypony. . . but not as Scootaloo. There was only one way to ensure Celestia did not put me back in this body. I walked over to the wall and began unplugging machines. This caused several loud alarms to sound. I quickly went over and started hitting buttons trying to turn the alarms off. I finally gave up and just yanked the breathing tube out of Scootaloo’s throat. I then picked her pillow up and held it over her face. I hugged her as I smothered her. “Goodbye,” I whispered. There were tears rolling down my cheek. The slow throb of her heartbeat against my chest vanished as she faded away. I placed a hoof on her chest and felt she was gone. I held her there in my arms and lost track of time. The next thing I heard was the door opening behind me, and without looking, I knew who it was. I smiled.  She wasn’t nearly as fast as me, and now Twilight would not have to lose me again.