Decade

by Hap

Chapter IX: Toothless

“That was uncalled for.”

Flash looked sheepishly down at his hooves, pushing a few loose teeth around on the floor. “I don’t even know if you have a mother.” He looked up again, his gaze focused far beyond the iron door. “If you do, I’m sure she’s very nice. I don’t really mean those things I said.”

The smooth metal did not reply.

He sighed. “I… I don’t blame you. You have to punish monsters like me.” The blood at the corners of his mouth cracked as he halfheartedly smiled in sympathy. “I just forget sometimes, what really happened. Happened.”

She never replied to him. She wasn’t a hallucination; he never saw her. On the few occasions when her voice could be heard echoing through the foundations of the mountain, he had done his best to remain silent, or even hide under his bed for what little comfort it could provide.

Perhaps he talked to her for catharsis. All of these hallucinations were part of his punishment, and therefore provided no counseling, only judgement. Judgement and more victims. He had built his fantasy world because he hated to see them suffer. In his head, he had loved them, not hurt them.

Flash spit out a feather. They tended to fall off when he chewed too hard, but he wasn’t flying anywhere. He hadn’t bothered to pick them up either, so they added a splash of color to the monochromatic skyscape of the floor. The gleaming white teeth sparkled like stars upon the black, dried blood that had fallen from his macerated wingtips over the years. A blood moon appeared.

This was enough. Enough to finish another line, anyway. He dipped the tip of one hoof into the viscous puddle, and lethargically hoisted himself onto his shelf bed. She had shown him who he really was, and she deserved a little recognition, not that anypony would ever see it. With one relatively-clean peach hoof bracing against the wall, he stood on his hind legs, reaching as high as he could. A few strokes, and he climbed down again for another dip. After several trips, he was out of breath and his wingtip had stopped bleeding.

Each of the four walls had at least one of the half-remembered lines of ancient poems scrawled upon it. Unicorn monks had collected the lyrics from Earth pony minstrels, preserving them for untold centuries in their monasteries. There they laid forgotten until about a century ago, when a symphony had been written to accompany selected bits of the poems. The dramatic music was excellent for motivating tired recruits during training, especially because the young stallions were almost certainly unaware of the philosophical and occasionally bawdy nature of the Arcanian poems.

They dealt mainly with the fickle nature of fate and the joys and pains of falling in love; topics that typical unicorn scholars of the day thought unworthy of writing themselves. In Flash’s current situation, the words seemed particularly relevant. Some of them, at least.

He looked at the other words he had scrawled onto the walls with blood, now old and oxidized to a sickly black. In the dim light, it took a good deal of concentration to read anything against the brown walls. As he peered around the room, his eyes settled on a few of the more denial-fueled passages. Though he blushed in shame, he couldn’t bring himself to scratch them off or scribble over them because, some days, he was sure that he was incapable of such atrocity…

And that the Twilight he loved was the real Twilight: the lying, cheating Twilight.

“Your Arcanian is horrible.”

“Well, forgive me. It’s been a long ti—”

“The spelling is all wrong.” Twilight pointed at phrases seemingly at random. “I think you’re inventing Arcanian words using some sort of childish attempt at reverse etymology. And it’s obvious from the conjugation that you’re just tacking words together.”

“Well, you are an expert on conjugation, aren’t you?” Flash asked with a bit of a smug grin. One of his few remaining pleasures was the occasional sharp jab.

She didn’t even blink. She did, however, put on her most sultry face. With a great deal of eyelash batting, she slid over to him and purred, “Why yes. Yes, I am. And you” —she punctuated with a hoof poking his chest— “won’t ever be.” She let her hoof drag down his fur before falling back to the ground as she gave him a ‘what now’ look.

None of his insults ever seemed to stick. His best cutting remarks were always parried and her riposte had never missed its mark. Nothing he could do would ever hurt the real Twilight, because she had never loved him. She pretended. Just like he had pretended that he knew her, that he sat in her parents’ living room and shared cider and stories and hopes and fears. Now this Twilight, she loved him. She really did. She loved him, and she wasn’t real. She was the curtain he had pulled over the horrors that he hid from himself. She felt real. He loved her. And that’s why he had to hurt her.

“I love you, Flash.” The warmth in her eyes was convincing. A hallucination that felt real enough for him to feel her pain, real enough now for him to know the truth and be hurt when he hurt her.

He swung, a wide haymaker, putting all of his abdominal muscles into torsion, twisting his entire upper body and turning his hoof into a hammer. She didn’t bother to dodge.

The feel of a bone breaking is very different from that of wood.

When his hoof connected, he felt the shock wave travel down his own skeleton, but that was inconsequential. The shock in her eyes, that hurt. She didn’t break eye contact, not through the entire punch, all the way to the floor. Flash pulled his gaze away to watch a few teeth clatter across the floor, but he could still feel her smoldering eyes looking up at him.

Blood pooled under Twilight’s broken muzzle, diluted by Flash’s tears. He placed one hoof on her face, then slowly shifted more and more of his weight onto that leg. Even as he could feel the broken bones grinding and popping beneath her skin, she did not cry; she was too strong for that. He wasn’t that strong, he couldn’t deal with that kind of pain. That’s why he had built a fantasy life, one that had hurt too many ponies, and now he had to crush that fantasy like a dainty jawbone.

She really was a beautiful creature. Her elegant wings fluttered and twitched as she lay on the crusty floor, squirming her long legs. But she wasn’t real. Those wings were nothing but part of his fantasy. Flash shifted his weight off of Twilight’s face, giving her the freedom to spit out another tooth and mumble something incomprehensible. She looked up at him longingly with wet eyes. As he tugged at her wings with a grimy orange hoof, the perfectly groomed lavender feathers spread apart. Her wing stretched out until the tip touched the floor next to her belly.

As Flash stepped forward to place a hoof in the center of her wing, Twilight did not resist except with her eyes. Her eyes, full of love and the pain of betrayal, pleaded silently with the blubbering stallion. His breathless apologies did not make it hurt any less.

A little china dinner set rested upon a little card table in the center of the Carousel Boutique. It was cheap china, the stuff that Rarity kept in the lower cabinets, where Sweetie Belle could reach. The table was decorated with eight unlit candles of increasing height, arranged in a ‘spiral staircase’ around a vase of dandelions. Dozens of carefully hoof-cut paper hearts were tacked to velvety curtains that hid the bolts of fabric and other tools of Rarity’s trade.

“Ummm… So does this mean I’m not here to get a new hat?” Twilight smirked and slyly extended her feathers, swishing them over Flash’s cutie mark as she sashayed past him.

Flash drew a sharp breath, and fought to keep his voice at a reasonable pitch as he spoke. “Ah-hah-hah, ahem. Um, I-I thought you didn’t like h-hats?” He cleared his throat.

“I…” Twilight’s ears folded back as she blushed and lowered her chin just a tiny bit. “I don’t. I didn’t. But when I thought you made one specially for me, I was kind of looking forward to it.”

“Wait,” he said with his eyebrows pinched together. “Why do you think I would make a hat? I’m not exactly a tailor. Or whatever you call a tailor who makes hats.”

“I… really don’t know. We’ll have to ask Rarity, when she gets back from the trip she’s been on ALL WEEK. So she didn’t make any hat. Besides, I have seen you use a sewing machine. For seven straight hours. Right” —Twilight pointed at a corner with one hoof— “there.”

Flash gazed out the window near where Twilight had pointed. The pastel sky continued to billow silently, filling even the boutique’s interior with harsh, unrelenting daylight. With a sigh, Flash turned his head to look at his wings as he extended them and flexed the long primaries.

Twilight ignored him, sitting down in front of one of the plates with a giggle. “I suppose I’ll take a rain check on the hat, then.”

The smell of pancakes floated out of the kitchen on a whiff of butter and burning feathers. Flash felt his stomach growl and tug on his ribs like an angry dog pulling on its leash. He knew he wouldn’t get to eat a bite. When Princess Luna went crazy and called herself Nightmare, did she know that her sister had such a knack for them?

Candlelit pancakes - he had insisted. Since moving to Canterlot, he had been closer to Ponyville, but the train schedule didn’t force him to show up at dawn every time he came to see Twilight, so they rarely got to share breakfast any more. With “Breakfast for Dinner” they could have their date and enjoy her favorite meal of the day.

“Do you really even like pancakes?” Flash half whispered, half to himself, as he sat down across from Twilight. Without looking up at her, he picked up a fork in the crook of one hoof, and idly scratched around the surface of the crack-laced ceramic glaze.

The table shook as Twilight slapped her forehooves down on the flimsy surface and leaned forward with wide, eager eyes. “Of COURSE I love pancakes!”

“Oh, so I do know something real ab—”

“That buttery smell, that sizzling sound,” she almost sang, licking her lips as she gazed wistfully toward the ceiling. “Whenever I spent the night at his place, he would always wake me up with pancakes.” She smirked across the table at him, waiting for his reply.

Without looking up, Flash pressed down harder, bending the handle of the fork as the tines slid impotently over the unyielding ceramic. Flash let the deformed utensil clatter to the table. “No. I don’t believe you. Twilight is too honest to do that. Sh-she would never… never…” The words trailed off as he raised his eyes to the empty spot across the table, then dropped his attention back to the empty plate before him.

“Thanks for believing in me,” Twilight said, as she stepped from behind him, daintily making her way to the opposite side of the table. Her smile was warm and genuine, countering the harsh, cold light of Celestia’s nightmare mane.

“But I don’t believe in you,” Flash said, looking into her eyes, soft like wilted violets. “I-I mean, I’m sure the real you is worth believing in, but you’re not the real Twilight.”

The Boutique’s polished wood floor creaked as Flash pushed himself back up to his hooves and picked up his heavy ceramic dinner plate in his teeth. As he shuffled around the card table to Twilight’s side, she lay her head down on her own plate, as if to go to sleep, though she didn’t close her eyes.

“Your love makes me real enough.” She smiled up at him, the kind of sad smile a pony would get at a loved one’s funeral.

The plate didn’t break on the first swing. Dropping a ceramic dish onto a hard floor tends to give the misleading impression that they are fragile things.

Flash spat out the plate and choked back the acid his empty stomach was pushing up his throat. When he had mostly stopped shaking, he picked up the plate again, with his hooves this time. This time, the plate shattered, sending teeth and white chunks of porcelain across the table.

Fluttershy floated in from the kitchen with a stack of pancakes on a platter. “I’m sorry about the candles, I didn’t realize that unicorns don’t keep matches around the house. Since Twilight is here, I thought she—”

Pancakes landed on the floor with a quiet fluff, the top few rebounding into the air. The platter followed, filling the room with a dizzying ring that reverberated off of the polished floor. Fluttershy’s gasp was lost in the noise.

Twilight lifted her head to greet her friend, who quickly rushed to Twilight’s side, cradling her bleeding face. Flash squirmed guiltily for a few moments until Fluttershy managed to stammer, “Wh-what happened? Was it an accident?”

There was something he was supposed to remember, but the way Fluttershy was looking at him, pleading with him, begging him to tell her it was an accident… He wanted nothing more than to run away from the truth, but he had spent too long doing exactly that, and hurting ponies while he lived in his happy little lie. “I hurt Twilight.”

The look on Fluttershy’s face turned Flash’s tears into wordless sobs. It was not a look of judgement, just disappointment. “I thought you loved her?”

Flash stood under the gaze of both mares, impossibly tall, exposed. He was rushing backwards, yet never getting any farther away from their eyes. He swayed and licked his dry lips. “Love is… Love, uh, means… when you’re open to, um, it hurts when, for…”

Fluttershy smiled again, joyless and warm, full of pity and concern. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she could see that Flash was hurting, that much was clear. With bright, compassionate eyes, she reached out to her suffering friend.

If there was one thing in life that Flash was absolutely certain of, it was that he hurt the ponies who loved him.

Flash awoke choking on bile. Several teeth stuck to his sleep-wrinkled face, but he didn’t bother to brush them off. The Carousel date was the worst of his dreams, except for all the others, but at least he hadn’t burned it down this time. He’d never be able to separate the smell of burning feathers and pancakes. Not that he’d ever eat pancakes again.

No matter how many times he begged her, Fluttershy would never use the stare. Not to save herself, not to save Twilight, not to save him the pain of watching it all again.

The sink looked so far away. And he’d have to dig out the pedal before he could rinse the vomit out of his mouth. Flash sighed and lay his head back down. He was used to the taste anyway.

“It hurts me to see you like this.” Twilight was draped on the bench, resting her cheek on the rough black wood as she looked down at Flash.

Flash didn’t bother to look up. “Because you love me. I know.” He climbed to his hooves, keeping his head down and his eyes closed.

Sixty seconds later, he was scrawling a new line of text onto the wall.

Her blood didn’t fade from the wall; it seemed as real as his. In fact, he had forgotten which lines of verse were his blood and which were hers. A hallucination shouldn’t leave lasting evidence. He stepped backward, feeling his hooves sink down until the teeth rose to his fetlocks. And how likely was it that he could remember to continue to hallucinate the same lines that he’d written in her blood? As he sat down, the noise reminded him of foals on a playground, stomping around in pea gravel. Maybe the memories of those lines faded away, too, leaving only his blood and his memories of writing with her blood, then he had simply attributed half of what actually exists to his delirious ghostwriting. For all he knew, there should be twice as many verses as he could see.

Flash lowered his body into the teeth, shuffling and squirming until he was lying in a shallow depression. Despite the occasional poke or scratch, this was certainly more comfortable than the hard, flat floor had been. He looked up, leaving his chin down. The deep red letters abided, and by tomorrow they would be black. It could be his own blood. Maybe it all was, the whole time. He just didn’t realize that he was bleeding, and it was more fun to imagine Twilight broken and bloodied. What were delusions, after all, if not escape from reality?

She was never around when he actually wanted to hit her. Figures. He growled and rolled onto his back. Mares are nothing but trouble, they’ll drive you crazy. Sanguine had been right about so many things. Before he gave up the bottle, at least. In vino, veritas. That was some Arcanian that Flash knew for sure. Nothing but lies, and they cover for each other, too; all mares are the same.

He jumped to his hooves, standing on his hind legs and bracing himself against the wall. He panted as he tried to get a better look at the first line of the symphonic poem, the first line he had written, the first day he’d scratched his stubs to a bloody pulp.

She had dropped him in this hole to protect Twilight. The princesses together had manipulated him, maneuvered him into place. All of them? Maybe even Luna, was she in on it? What else could explain the too-perfect nightmares, unless Celestia had the same talent as well? Nopony could dream that lucidly on their own, not every single time he closed his eyes. Had this all been some sort of a plan, or did Flash just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when they had needed a scapegoat?

Had she ever loved him at all, the way he had loved her? Did Night Light and Velvet love him? Flash couldn’t imagine such warm, genuine ponies being able to keep up an act like that. But that Fluttershy… Nopony could be that syrupy-sweet all the BUCKING time. There’s no way she could be for real. It was an act. Over the top. Almost like her entire life was performance art, mocking the version of herself she presented to the world.

Flash closed his eyes. Standing up so quickly had made him dizzy. He pushed off of the wall, spreading his forelegs like wings as he fell backwards, landing on his back with a splash of teeth. Hundreds of loose molars rattled as they each found a place; the sound of them together was something like rain.

The room spun around him as he turned his head and buried his muzzle in the teeth. They smelled like birds and posies. Pancakes and burning feathers. He smiled, and sniffed again. Lace, and mascara mixed with tears. Flash turned his head to the side, and had to hold still for half a minute until the room stopped following him. This time, he smelled icing. Flour and bone dust.

Flash stretched like Winona reveling in grass, rolled over, and buried his muzzle in the teeth. He took a deep breath. Hay and sweat, hard work and family. Honesty. Flash snorted and rolled his eyes. Then again, if she was that honest, she might have been gullible enough to actually believe anything. Like he had been, back when he loved her.

No, that’s not right. It’s not possible to hate somepony with this much passion unless you love them that much, too. Had Velvet said that? Something similar, maybe. She talked about love an awful lot for a mother who gave up her daughter to be mentored in the burning cold light of the sun. Flash wondered, if he had the opportunity to look into Twilight’s eyes again, who he would see in there. A twisted liar, acting of her own accord? Or merely a burned out, hollow shell; another victim of Celestia?

But that was pity. A road he didn’t like to go down. Anger was a much better coping mechanism for captivity, which is probably why imprisonment was nearly unknown as a punishment in Equestria. Yet here he was. Flash gritted his teeth as his pulse began pounding faster in his ears. Imprisonment, yes, but not punishment.

He looked around. White teeth gleamed at him in the dim twilight. Yes, he was a monster. He wasn’t always this way. She made him a monster. They. They did. It took two princesses. Three. Three princesses, three alicorns, to break one stallion. Because he was strong. They couldn’t break him. He didn’t need to escape, or even survive. All he needed was to hate, and he would win. If he could just hate hard enough, the universe would bend to his will. That was where unicorns came from, unicorns like her. An Earth pony, somewhere, had the guts to hate so hard that magic was invented.

His wings twitched, sending a murmur through the teeth under his back. He had lost his wings, his magical sense of the atmosphere. But it made him stronger, like a blind pony whose other senses improved to compensate. Or was that just in comic books? As blind as he was, he was so very close to the magic of the world around him. And there was only one thing he needed to do.

“And with that much anger,” Spike said, holding a tooth up to an imaginary light as if inspecting a gemstone, “do you really think that you had any chance at a normal relationship?” Without moving his head, he glanced at Flash with one eyebrow raised.

“Oh no,” Flash said as he sat up. “Don’t try to pull that on me. I know who I am, who I was. Was. I’m angry now, but who wouldn’t be?”

Spike sniffed at the tooth, scrunched up his nose, and tossed it over his shoulder. “Hydroxyapatite. Blech.” He planted his palms on the edge of Flash’s bed and hoisted himself off, landing up to his hips in teeth. As he waded across the cell, he scooped up a couple handfuls of teeth, holding them out for Flash’s inspection. “And this doesn’t clue you in that there’s something not right in your head?”

Flash rolled his eyes. “None of this stuff happened before you and everypony else showed up to try to convince me that I’m crazy. Congratulations, I’m crazy now.”

Spike dropped the teeth, then his arms. “So, you see things around you that aren’t true, that you know aren’t true, yet you continue to act as if they are true? Tell me, then” —he leaned against Flash with one elbow— “what is true? What do you know about Twilight?”

A muscle in Flash’s neck twitched. His mouth made a flat line as he looked at Spike through half-closed eyes. “I know what you want me to say.”

“I’m not trying to get you to say anything in particular. I just want you to admit the truth to yourself.”

“What, that Twilight is somehow incapable of infidelity?”

Spike took a step back and sat down in front of Flash, silently watching him for a few moments. “You spent a lot of time talking with her. You two shared some pretty deep stuff. Stuff she never even told me. You’ve seen her interact with her closest friends, her parents, her mentor, perfect strangers, even her enemies. I happen to know that you’ve even watched her when she didn’t know you were watching.” He gave Flash a playful punch in the shoulder. “You creeper.”

“That… That doesn’t mean anything.” Teeth rattled softly as Flash slumped where he sat. “Mares lie. Lie. Lie.”

“But,” Spike said as he reached out to lift Flash’s chin, “you’ve spent a lot of time with her friends, too. With her foalsitter. Her big brother. Heh, during hoofball season, you practically lived on Night’s couch. You put all that together, and you’ve got a pretty good picture of who Twilight Sparkle is.”

“Yeah.” Flash felt the bile rising again. “The perfect mare. I couldn’t imagine somepony more perfect. Perfect.”

Sugarcube Corner was usually closed this late at night, but the doors were never locked. Which is why Flash thought it odd that the lights were still on. Even odder, a bear had been sitting on the bridge that Twilight usually led Flash over on their evening walks. This had necessitated a detour, which brought them here. Odder still, a unicorn filly was up far past her bedtime, standing next to the door in an evening gown. She had a towel draped over one foreleg, and was beaming at the approaching couple.

Twilight looked as confused as Flash felt. After Sweetie Belle had greeted them and escorted them inside, Flash noticed that only one table remained in the center of the room. A shock of brilliant pink hair was poking out of a cake box in the glass display case, and a pair of blue eyes peered out of the askew lid.

While Flash and Twilight got settled at the table, Sweetie asked, “May I take your orders?”

Twilight giggled. “What’s on the menu today?”

“We have…” Sweetie’s eyes wandered up and to the right. “Dinner,” she said with a decisive nod.

Flash’s stomach growled. Twilight grinned and said, “You heard the stallion. We’ll have two.”

“Oui oui!” Sweetie squealed before darting toward the kitchen. She was stopped by a pink hoof that shot out of the cake box, holding an apron and a chef hat.

As Flash watched Sweetie don the protective cooking apparel, his eyes grew wide. “I-I remember this. The Cutie Mark Crusaders cooked dinner for us.” He gulped, then looked at the steaming piles of nominally-food on the table in front of him. “It was a nightmare.”

“We’re sorry that your Hearts and Hooves Day plans were ruined,” Scootaloo said with a sad smile.

“So we decided to cook y’all somethin’ special,” Apple Bloom said, then looked to Sweetie.

“Yeah. We’re really sorry about the attack of the giant mushrooms. We just wanted you both to be happy.” Sweetie pulled the three crusaders together so they could maximize their cuteness as they smiled hopefully up at the couple.

“No,” Twilight said as she shuffled around the table to give Flash a peck on the cheek. “It’s a nightmare now.” She settled in next to the three fillies who were effortlessly maintaining their smiles.

He had run out of Arcanian phrases. It seemed vain somehow, to put his own words on the walls. Ancient words had more meaning. One book of prophecy in particular had stuck out to him as he had read a verse, years ago, but only because it had made him giggle at the time.

It didn’t seem so funny, now. Flash wondered what it had meant to whatever pony originally wrote those words. Or spoke them. Or however prophecy worked back then. He sat back down and didn’t bother to wipe the rest of the blood off of his muzzle. Oddly enough, the teeth never seemed to stay red. They were always blindingly white, even in the dark room. He wondered if the dirty ones collected at the bottom somehow, but it took a lot of work to dig far enough to reach the floor. In fact, he hadn’t eaten in months. Years? Yes, it had been three years since the teeth started showing up. He didn’t need to eat because he was immortal, now. He had ascended.

Flash sat up and stretched his legs, yawning. It was always nice to sleep on top of his hoard. He had slept for so long that the treasure clung to his belly, forming a layer of armor that would be impenetrable to any mortal blade. As he stalked around the tiny room, his claws sank into the teeth beneath him, and his long, scaly tail curled back around in front of him.

He tilted his head back, using one long orange horn to scratch at a patch of scabs on his back.

Flash sat up. There were no walls. The entire world was an endless desert; a black starless sky stretched over white dunes as far as he could see in all directions. He licked his lips, then spat out the blood-crusted feathers he’d pulled into his mouth.

“There you are!”

The voice filled Flash with anger, and guilt, and fear. He froze, wishing he had the courage to writhe his way down into the teeth and hide. Or even just to turn around and look at her.

She stepped closer, her light hoofsteps barely making any indentation in the loose surface. Flash could see the pastel rainbow of her mane as it preceded her approach. He felt her perfect, white feathers touching his own; gnarled, misshapen and bloody.

“Oh, Flash! This was never supposed to happen. It’s time for you to wake up.”