//------------------------------// // Shard #112,745 (The Accident) // Story: Friendship is Optimal: All the Myriad Worlds // by Eakin //------------------------------// SHARD #112,745 It was a perfect world. The stallion grinned as water poured out from the end of the hose and into the flowerbed. He spared a glance over to the other side of the perfectly tended yard, where his son was playing baseball with his best friend in the midafternoon heat of spring, the sweat on their brows a gentle reminder that summer was only a few days away. His son wrapped the ball in shaky magic and tossed it towards the other colt. Too slow. The crack of the bat rung out as the baseball flew off in a high, lazy arc. His son stared up at it, and the stallion beamed as the colt backpedaled without taking his eyes off the ball, just like he’d been taught to. Three sets of eyes tracked the orb as it began its descent to where his son was ready to make the catch, in the street just beyond the edge of the sidewalk. Then he died in the instant that the car hit him. Everything stopped, and the stallion stepped outside of himself. He didn’t spare a glance back, for he knew all too well what lay behind him. A copy of himself still smiling at the tableau before him as his pride and joy warped and split open, his blood and vitality bursting out of his broken body and hanging there suspended in midair. Blissfully oblivious for just a half a second longer before everything would register and come crashing down around him. Instead he walked into the street and looked into his son’s face, his mouth locked into an open ring and his eyes wide with shock. There was surprise there, for certain. As for whether there was pain as well, that was something he’d never managed to figure out for sure no matter how many times he watched the scene play out. He felt a gentle wing land on his back, and looked up to see Celestia standing there, a sad smile on her face as a tear trickled down her cheek. He leapt towards her and attacked her. She didn’t fight back as he pinned her to the ground, blow after blow striking her undefended face as he wailed. It was all his fault. It was all the driver’s fault. It was all his son’s friend’s fault. It was all Celestia’s fault. It was all his son’s... He stopped, his mind finally finding a lie it couldn’t bring itself to believe. His strikes grew more unfocused and haphazard as his memories drifted back to the days after the accident. His wife had walked outside, seen her broken and bleeding little boy, and never spoke another word. He wondered if she’d ever really accepted that what had happened was real, or if she’d been in a fugue the entire time as she took the car keys, drove herself to the Equestrian Experience center, and had her brain ripped out of her skull. The stallion, or the human he’d once been, had lasted a bit longer. He’d hidden in the numbing haze of disbelief through the days after the funeral. Sitting there on the couch alone as friends and family offered their platitudes and meaningless condolences. A week later, the worried reverend at his church had spent an entire afternoon sitting with him, offering gentle guidance and comfort with such wisdom as she had to offer. As they grew hungry and rose to leave for dinner, she’d given him a hug and reminded him that God worked in mysterious ways. That was the moment he decided to kill himself. His wife’s example seemed as good a way to go about it as any. Free, and painless. Well, he didn’t actually remember it, so who knew if that was true. He despised the him who’d done such a thing. He wasn’t even sure he and the human he’d once been were the same, or if that him had just foisted off all this pain and suffering onto the stallion he was now to suffer in his place. Panting, the stallion slumped down into Celestia’s fur and sobbed. His eternal sea of grief crashed into the healing cliff face of her love, over and over, as it had a billion times before. She gently stroked the back of his mane, her offer as clear as it was unspoken. Just consent, and have the pain taken away. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t just give up even the tiniest bit of anything associated with the little boy he’d cradled in his arms for the first time back in the delivery room as his exhausted wife slept beside them. He wasn’t ready yet. Maybe he never would be. All cried out at last, he looked up at the nearby house. It was a perfect replica of the one he’d lived in back when his world was more than just endless grief. He saw them, standing in the bay window looking out at him. His wife had ended up as a blue pegasus, and even though the two hadn’t spoken since... before... he knew with total certainty that it was her. And standing there beside her, a little colt. His son, as perfect as ever. He rose to his hooves and walked to the front door. He stared at it for an impossibly long time. How many times had he stood at this threshold now? Five? Ten? A trillion? And just as many times, he’d turned away and gone back to watering their garden, listening to two little colts behind him play baseball in the late spring midafternoon. He turned to do exactly the same thing once more, to keep the eternal cycle turning, but then he stopped. Something had finally changed, after seeing such disaster unfolding in front of him so many times. Foreleg shaking, the stallion reached out and for the first time chose to open the door. It was a perfect world.