Chapter 4: Bloody Hooves
It just can’t be! The...there’s no way. My mind raced at a million miles an hour as I watched that familiar mane, mottled and tarnished with blood, flow from where that hood had been hiding the truth until now. Oh, how I wished it was still obscuring her from my eyes: How I wished I could pretend I hadn’t seen Rainbow drive a blade straight through the mayor.
That’s when it hit me; I could pretend it never happened. It was dark out, anypony could have mistaken the mysterious assassin for somepony they knew. A trick of the lighting; That was it! It wasn’t really a rainbow coloured mane, but a trick of the waning light. I heaved a sigh of relief as the stress slowly evaporated from my mind, but, at the same time, the familiar pony at my side let out an audible squeak.
How could I have been so engrossed in my own rushed rationalizations that I had forgot Rarity standing right beside me? As my head jolted to look at her, the normally calm and collected pony was a mess of nerves. Any colour her body normally held had been drained and replaced with a ghostly dishevelled appearance as words slowly tried to squeak themselves out of her mouth, “How, but, How could Rainbow Dash do something like that?”
There was a nagging voice in the back of my head asking me exactly the same question, but I couldn’t be bothered to listen to it. Right then, right there, my world was made up entirely of that idea and I couldn’t let my reality be torn down. So, as Rarity continued to spiral towards madness, I found my hoof working its way to her mouth. I silenced her rather harshly and refused to remove my hoof even as I felt her hyperventilating against it.
“Listen to me Rarity,” I felt myself pushing ever close to her face, but it was like some kind of strange dream. I could feel the desperate look creep across my face and the threatening gestures I would make, but it didn’t feel like me. It felt like I was watching some kind of dream version of me, “That wasn’t Rainbow Dash.”
“Buph,” The muffled response was quickly cut short as I dug my hoof in deeper.
“No, I don’t care what it looked like to you. The Rainbow Dash we both know would never do something like that,” Slowly, I watched the realization, and finally acceptance, creep across Rarity’s face. She seemed almost as relieved as I had been at the discovery. Colour crept back into her face, her eyes regained a little luster, and she even began to tame her mane as I released my threatening grip.
“Of course you’re right Twilight dear. Rainbow Dash might be a brute, but...”
Her voice was forced intro trailing off as I began to ignore her in favour of examining the scene. I had read about death before, many times and in many different texts, but this was like nothing I could have read. This wasn’t scientific, or dignified, but instead was a gore of the likes I could never have imagined. Coagulated blood stuck to my hooves as I approached, each step making a sickening squelch as if I was treading on her very own corpse. And, when I finally reached the now semi rigid body of our mayor I noticed something. No, I affixed on something to keep me from taking it all in.
Her eyes were still open, the death had been so instantaneous that she hadn’t even been able to close them as I’d read often happens in death. I wanted to give her something, I wanted to provide her with some small piece of solace. For some reason I thought trying to close those eyes would provide that. I tried with a bloodied hoof to close them, but maybe my resolve wasn’t strong enough. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that rigor mortis had set in, hardening the nerves and muscles of her once limp body, but the thought never made its way forward. Instead, I stared at the bloodied face of an old friend and felt dirty.
I had watched as she died and done nothing and now I couldn’t even give her eyes rest from this world. Instead, all I could do was dirty her fur more and more, bloody her body and stain my soul. It felt so wrong, it felt so painful, it felt as I was the one who had killed her. I wanted to shed tears, to break down and cry, but the tears refused to flow over this desolate landscape. It was then that I finally became aware of the quiet sobbing of my friend beside me. She had come with me, bloodied her own hooves, and had been able to do what I simply couldn’t. I tried desperately to hide my lack of tears with a concerned face and wise words.
“We need to tell Princess Celestia,” I tried to steer the conversation away from our dead friend. It was a thinly veiled attempt to keep from heading my own dark feelings. I was trying to bring back my own happiness, to remember the good times as an innocent student, “If some pony, or some ponies, are going around doing things like this, she needs to to know.”
“Of course, you’re right.”
The words were few and far between from there on. A brief discussion about cleaning ourselves up before meeting back up with the others, a short and unfinished discussion about how to break the news to them, and a foreboding air permeating our thoughts. It wasn’t clear at the time, but that was the last time any pony would see the body of the mayor and the beginning of our time at the top of a hitlist we knew nothing about.