//------------------------------//
// Stumble 
// Story: What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you? 
// by Appleloosan Psychiatrist 
//------------------------------//

She heard the shouting before she even got on the porch. She had spent the evening away from home - flitting back and forth between a library and the park. Running was one of her favorite ways to burn off emotion and the feeling of empty, quivering limbs was always a decent distraction. As she approached the house, though, she knew that no distraction would work tonight. It was going to be one of those nights. No sense fleeing and trying to come back later - her parents would just as soon end their argument the second she walked in the door as carry it on until Celestia rose the sun. She took one deep breath, adjusted her backpack, and pulled open the door.

They were in the kitchen. That was part of why should could hear it outside, but the other part was that they were just extremely loud. They mostly fought in the living room, not out of any particular desire, but mostly because it was most convenient for them. It was where they usually were. Sometimes, though, their fights meandered to the kitchen, or originated there. After all, when complaining and arguments cannot wait, they had to make due with the location they had. And of course, there was a half-eaten dinner, complete with half-full glasses of wine and a half-full bottle of half-proof, half-price whiskey.

Scootaloo immediately fell into a familiar set of actions. It was a natural reaction to stimuli at this point. She silently closed the door and stared at the ground. She was a ghost, a specter of discontent glued to the walls and sliding on silent hoofs to her sanctum. She didn't say a word, didn't make eye contact, and all she had to hear was a handful of buzzwords screamed through the slurred mouths of her parents to know that this wasn't a conversation worth paying attention to. Words like "money", "job", and "bills" were all that her mind needed to hear to complete the rest of the pattern, and to know that no matter how long this conversation took place, it would proceed over the same well-trodden ground and reach the same familiar, unsatisfying end. Look at the ground, Scootaloo. Look at the ground. Don't make a sound.

She made her way around the other side of the table, perpetually as far from her parents as the perimeter of the room would allow. Just let it flow over you, Scoots. Let the words wash over your ears, and go no deeper. It doesn't mean anything. You can talk to them later, Scootaloo. Just go to your room. Don't say a word. A thousand protests were blooming in her chest but she kept them silent. That's one thing this environment evolved to an almost transcendental skill - the ability to suppress one's inner voice.

Scootaloo reached the hallway that led to the stairs, and once she was on the stairs it was a short climb to her bedroom. She was almost there. Silence. Solemnness. Submissiveness. The ground is beautiful, more wonderful than anything that moved or shook in her life.

There was a final shout from her father, then a single loud, snarl. The cracking sound of a hoof connecting with hard, unyielding bone echoed through the kitchen and shot through Scootaloo in a rush. Her mother cried out a desperate pitiful cry, something more suitable to an animal than a pony, the death groans of a withered creature, and Scootaloo heard a body crumple to the ground, all four hooves giving out at once and a frail body folding up like a doll and collapsing lifeless onto the tiled floor.

Scootaloo's heart raced so fast she feared her father would hear it. Outside, she allowed her face a single twitch, then took in a deep and silent breath, and everything was calm again. Her heart still shook, but her pulse was regulated. She had only missed a single step, only paused for the briefest moment, before resuming her ascent. She made it up to the top of the stairs, and still heard her mother sobbing on the floor below her. Inside her room, though, with the door closed, everything was quieter. Mechanically, she unloaded her backpack and organized her room, all with the same unreadable frown on her face, then collapsed into bed. There, staring at the dull white ceiling, she could finally let the tears come. They didn't last long.

She knew that tonight had to be the night she figured out if ponies could be fixed. Even if she couldn't rely on her mother or teachers or her friends. They might not have hope that everything will be fixed between her family, but Scootaloo still did. And tonight was the night.

She heard the door slam a few minutes later, and based on her father still screaming to the outside from the kitchen below her, she knew her mother had fled into the night. It wasn't something she usually did, but Scootaloo, for once, was thankful. It would make things easier for tonight.

Her stomach growled, but luckily she had been sneaking food from school and from downstairs whenever her parents weren't looking or wouldn't miss it and storing it in her room. She didn't need to - and didn't plan to - leave her room for the remainder of the night. The less attention she got tonight, the better. She would wait in her room, pray her father never thought of her, and pray that her mother didn't come back for a while.

The alcohol was the problem, right? Of course. Teachers warned against it. The meager studies she'd done recently in the library showed that alcoholism is a very serious thing and is caused by, no surprise to Scootaloo, alcohol. If she just got alcohol out of the equation, they could become a regular family. She just had to get rid of the alcohol. Her father wasn't a bad pony. He was just sick, and Scootaloo was going to be his doctor. Her mother told her that any outside help would destroy this family, so Scootaloo knew - there was really no other pony but her that could do this. It had to be her. She almost smiled. She wanted more than anything to fix this.

Her father wandered around the house for a while - his footsteps were audible, and his shouts echoed through the house. Luckily, Scootaloo didn't hear anything that indicated he was talking to her.

It was a few hours of deathly silence, interspersed with the sound of hacking coughs and groans. The sun finally set and the whole room grew dark. Scootaloo remained staring at the ceiling, a silent listener. She didn’t bother turning on her light. 

This was the most frustrating part of it. The waiting. After what she had seen, the waiting was almost unbearable now that she finally had a solution.

As he had every day, her father stumbled up the stairs long after it had grown dark. For a brief, terrifying second, Scootaloo worried that her ruse would be seen, and that, in a moment, the door to her room would slam open hard enough to bent the hinges and splinter the frame, and her father would storm through the threshold, rushing her in an incomprehensible anger, screaming words at her she couldn't understand. Scootaloo hugged herself hard and shook, but her fear was unnecessary - after a loud, echoing trot to the bathroom, he stumbled into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Scootaloo didn't hear much after that. Her breathing was deliberate and regular. She didn't put it past her dad to lie in bed for a bottle for another few hours, listening. She sometimes tried to sneak out of her room when she thought he had gone to sleep but was caught and ordered back to her room by a slurred command and under the beady gaze of hazy eyes. Her father sometimes let it known that he was still awake through the loud, heaving sobbing he embraced when he thought he was alone.

Tonight wasn't those nights. The erratic grumbling and shifting Scootaloo heard through the wall to her father's room could have belonged to a stallion sipping at his last glass of whiskey and moaning babbles of discontent at the world, or it could be the involuntary dreamtalk and creaking springs of a fitful sleep. What Scootaloo planned was very very risky. If she was caught, she didn't know what would happen to her - she had had to dodge a hoof coming down at her face for things like coming home five minutes late, or things she was wholly innocent of. If his retribution was capricious even in the best circumstances, Scootaloo didn't want to imagine what it would be like if she was actually doing something that she knew deep in her that she shouldn't.

The hours passed, and Scootaloo was silent. The speckled ceiling stared back at her. Ponies talked outside her window, congregating into small groups in the cold night, their silver breathing loud and happy. And Scootaloo was still silent. The moon rose in the sky. The night gradually cooled in passion and tempers and everything was quiet, and Scootaloo too. Time passed. Each creak of the house might have been her mother coming home, her father stumbling into the bathroom. The lamps outside flickered occasionally, and each time Scootaloo had to suppress the urge to leap to the window and pull the curtains back. For once, she feared the sun. She could only wait so long. Somehow, she knew she had to act tonight. Tonight was her hypothesis, her proof of concept. The conditions were ideal.

Having memorized long ago where the loose floorboards peppered her floor, Scootaloo crept silently around them, slithering in between the danger and making it to her door after a few minutes. Her body was tense, permanently crept up and ready to spring, all of her muscles already exhausted from strain, and her mind focused only on noise.

Opening her door felt like it took hours. Each time the rusted hinges creaked, she stopped, winced, and waited. Eventually, it was open enough for her to slip through, and she snuck into the dark hallway, shutting the door behind her just as gently as she opened it. It was all or nothing, now. If her father was awake. If her mother came home. Scootaloo couldn't stand to think about that.

Her father's room was right down the hall. These floorboards - Scootaloo wasn't quite as familiar with them as the ones that made the maze in her room, but she had studied enough that she could negotiate the trouble spots. The hallway was almost completely bathed in an impenetrable darkness, but Scootaloo knew her way around. She'd wandered to the bathroom in the darkness often enough.

She reached the wooden door that barred that way to the inviolable sanctum that was her father's room. She couldn't remember the last time she'd ever seen the inside, much less actually entered it. Parts of it were parts of her nightmares - the sounds she heard come out of there sometimes late at night, sounds like her mother crying but not quite, somehow different - the smell, like a huge vat of dirt and dark liquors. She didn't need to be told that she could never go in there - it was intuitive - and until tonight she never had a problem with that stipulation.

She reached a hoof up to the doorknob, and let it sit there. It wasn't too late. If she heard her father stomp around in his room, she'd still have time to flee back to her room, or into the bathroom under the facade of using it. She might still get in trouble, but it wouldn't be anything compared to the bruises she'd get if her father caught her in his room.

If opening her door noiselessly took hours, then turning the knob of her father's took a millenium. A thousand thousand suns and moons passed overhead as Scootaloo clenched her eyes shut, scrunched her face, and listened to the grinding of the mechanisms. The door latch slowly releasing. Any second now, her mother might come home. Her father could be awake in there. Do not think, Scootaloo. Just act. Do not let your heart beat. Calm. Slowly. In and out.

The door slid open. Any second, she expected a trap, an alarm to be triggered - her father to come rushing at her, a massive dark form of muscles smelling of whiskey and sweeping through the threshold and tackling her to the ground. An inch at a time, less than an inch, a hair of her coat at time, tiny, tiny micropushes that slowly and silently compelled the door open until, again, there was just enough that she could slip in and shut the door behind her. The sound of her father's voice would set off the springs that by now made up her muscles and would have her shooting out of the room. She'd run mindlessly. She'd run away into the night and keep running until her legs gave out, she'd run forever. There was no sound like that. Scootaloo couldn't even hear her own breathing.

He snored. It was loud and staggering, like he was having a hard time breathing. Scootaloo's heart stopped dead in her chest. Silence. Blinking would be too loud. She stared into the darkness.

A thin stream of moonlight fell through an disheveled curtain and gave Scootaloo some sense of the room. It was a chaotic mess, a secret part of a secret life that Scootaloo didn't have hope of deciphering. Empty bottles littered the floor, some collected in a corner but most knocked on their side, scattered around the room and on the desk and around the bed like confetti, abandoned where they fell. There were stacks of books jutting out of shadowy corners and from behind chairs - dusty piles that looked like they'd fall at any second, and yet somehow seemed to have been stuck in place for years. Notebooks and pencils dotted the floor, too, trapping in them scribbles that ranged from methodical to the ramblings of a madman.

The room smelled too - no surprise that it smelled to Scootaloo like her father's breath concentrated into a cologne. There were other smells, too. The smell of grease and urine. Grime, dirt, mildew. Her mother wouldn't have abided this filth if it was in any other room, but she knew enough to know her mother wouldn't – couldn't – complain about this room. The nights that her parents actually slept in the same bed were so few and far between, anyway, that Scootaloo figured mom didn't have to see much of this room. It was choked with the smell, dust hanging in the thin film of light that streamed through the window. It was like a dusty attic that hadn't been exposed to the outside in decades. Scootaloo chastised herself for not taking in a deep breath of the air outside before entering.

There he was - laying on his unadorned, unsheeted bed, sprawled on that empty, moldy mattress that resembled a series of broken, moss covered hills. Save for his stomach, which rose and fell erratically, he was comatose and still. The work clothes that he wore almost habitually clung to his fur, saturated and matted with sweat. He was laying on his back, limbs motionless and splayed wildly, and every now and then he let out a staggered snort that Scootaloo could only assume was his snoring. Nothing about him was how ponies were supposed to be. His coat was dull and flaky, his mane a ragged collection of oily clumps on his bed. If his eyes had been open, they would have been lifeless and jittery. The palpable feeling of disease inundated every part of his body. He was like a sleeping corpse. Scootaloo supposed that was appropriate, after all. He was indeed a very, very sick pony. And Scootaloo was going to take the first step towards fixing that, tonight.

After standing silent by the door for what must have been an hour, Scootaloo felt confident enough to make a movement. Her heart had stopped skipping a beat every time her father sucked in air violently and hacked it out in the rigors of snoring. She traced out a proper path through the room a hundred times, running it over and over again in her head. She needed a safe path that avoided all possible obstacles and carried her to her destination - the half full bottle of spirit that rested beside the bed. Her father's conquest of the night, partially finished. She needed to get her hooves on that bottle.

She ran the path through her head again. And again. A mental trace around the books, between the papers, tiptoeing through the jagged brown bottles like they were landmines. Slow. Steady. Safe. She ran it through again, following the path with her eyes and then following it backwards.. And again. Another time, but now, she closed her eyes and let her feet follow her mind. She was still going through it in her head, that's all. No need to panic. No need for her heart to race as she silently and blindly dodged a dozen obstacles that potentially meant the end of her life. Her father's breathing grew close enough to hear, and it was as stunted and irregular as the rest of him.

Scootaloo was close enough that the smell of sweat and liquor leaking from his body was pungent to the point of making her closed eyes water. Still, she felt a strange and unfamiliar desire to give him a kiss. Maybe it was finally figuring out that he was just sick and like any sick pony just needed some help. She used to want to choke him. She used to feel something under her skin that made her want to scream and hit things whenever he was around. Now, she just felt pity.

Scootaloo opened her eyes. He stirred softly in bed, grumbling then rolling over. Scootaloo didn't want to risk smiling yet, but she felt something hopeful sprout inside her as she leaned over, clenched the neck of the bottle between her teeth, and lightly backed out of the room in the same way she entered. Her father didn't say a word to her and didn't stir in her direction. He knew nothing.

When Scootaloo was outside of her room, she took a few breaths in and out. Almost immediately, the urge inside her was to scream her success, and leap into the air. For once, she wanted to smile. Every external part of her was still as silent night, but inside there wasn't a nerve that didn't want to dance. She took a deep breath of the cold air in through her nostrils. Each time she lifted a hoof and set it down blindly in a place she knew was safe, she had to resist the urge to break into a sprint back to her room. Part One of her operation was a resounding success, and might have indeed been the most difficult part. She couldn't afford to get excited now. Suppressing emotions was something she'd practiced her entire life. Only one more night of it, and tonight it mattered more than ever.

Slowly, she paced back to her room, trying to keep the bottle still so the liquid inside wouldn't slosh around. Once outside her door, she turned the knob even more slowly than before, the glass object stuck in her mouth obscuring her concentration. The door opened silently, and she slipped back into her room. As gently as possible, she set the bottle on the ground. It connected with a small clink, and Scootaloo froze. Waiting. No other sound. A bird cried far in the distance, and finally, mercifully, the sound of her father's gasping snores sounded through the house. Scootaloo finally allowed herself a small smile.

Needing some light, Scootaloo risked trotting over to the curtain and pulling it back, allowing the moon into the room. It wasn't much, but it was all she needed for now. Not as if she could risk lighting a lantern or using her flashlight at this stage, anyway. Picking up the bottle after taking in a deep breath, she carried over to a illuminated, pale-white spot on her floor and sat down with the bottle in front of her.

These containers inundated her life, but this was the first time she had ever seen one up close, and the first time she had an opportunity to inspect it. As she turned it around in her hooves, the dark golden liquid inside moved just like water. For some reason, Scootaloo thought that it would be somehow more viscous like a slow dripping molasses that clogged lungs and throats. The label was sparse, not having much more than the name of the liquor - Cloudsdale Lightning - and a collection of abbreviations and percentages that Scootaloo couldn't make sense of. Her milk carton at school had more information than this bottle. She frowned. Well, it looked like she wouldn't be getting much information from the bottle. That's one task she'd have to mark as incomplete after tonight, but there were others she had to perform.

Holding the bottle tight with both hooves, she bit on the cork stopped in the neck of the bottle, and pulled hard. It came loose with a pop that was entirely too loud, so once again Scootaloo became a statue and took in the sounds of the night.

The smell wafted from the bottle and permeated her room. Her nose twitched, repulsed, and she leaned forward and took a small sniff near the rim of the bottle. Yes, it was there - a concentrated and impossibly potent version of the odor that all through her life had carried noise and shouting, insults and berating, empty rage on the sharp wings of the burning smell. She winced, and pulled away from the bottle. Reading the books over and over had planted the idea and prompted her internal speculation, but right now this proved it to her more than anything ever could. Poison. This stuff was poison. In the tentative itinerary for the night that she'd jotted down in her head, she had even made plans to taste the liquid for herself, but those were quickly abandoned. She felt a strange sort of respect for her father in the light of this new revelation - no weak pony could stomach something like this on a regular basis.

As quickly as she could, she placed the cork back in the neck of the bottle, and pushed it back in with her hoof. Okay. That was enough testing for now. Her plan was ready to go. She'd go downstairs, dump this deadly stuff out in the sink, and get rid of the bottle in a hidden place. That way, her father wouldn't be able to drink first thing in the morning and Scootaloo could at least see if anything changed. She was confident her father wouldn't notice or comment on the missing bottle - after all, while he was drinking this stuff, he misplaced so many things and forgot so much that was much more valuable that Scootaloo knew she would be safe if she wasn't caught tonight.

Then she'd do it the next night, maybe. And again. Slowly, she'd get rid of his poison. She'd watch it swirl in the kitchen sink and down the drain. She'd pour bottles into the gutter. She'd dye the snow of the yard amber, gold, and wooden brown. She nourish the cobblestones with wine and break the glasses against brick. She'd empty bottles into her own throat if she had to. Her father would be furious at first, but she'd practiced years of evading his wrath. Over time, he'd get better. The less he drank, the better he'd get.

Any second, her mother might stumble into the house, but she was far too deep in to quit now. Regulating her breathing and calming herself back down took a few minutes, but afterwards she was ready to continue. She stood up, picked up the bottle with her teeth, and snuck over to the door. Once again, she opened and it just enough to sneak out, but this time a little quicker. She was comfortable now in her secrecy. Her mind was already on the kitchen sink and watching this bottle chug out its contents into a swirling and quickly disappearing mass by the time she reached the stairs and put the first hoof on a step.

She didn't notice the noise coming from the bathroom until her father stepped out into the hallway.

Hearing the stumbling, Scootaloo turned to look at the noise instinctively, the presence and danger of it not even registering in her mind until a second later. There he was, breathing heavily, a slightly swaying misshapen mass silhouetted in the darkness. It was as if she had turned to stone under his gaze, and she could do nothing but stare at him. Maybe, maybe he didn't see her. Maybe it was too dark and he was disoriented and maybe he would just stumble back into his room but no he was looking right at her past a sheen of exhaustion and inebriation, staring right into her eyes with the beady, bird-like glare of his own. He let out a sound that was more a growl than a word, and stepped towards her.

"What the f-"

She opened her mouth to scream, to answer, to take her last breath of her life and when she did the bottle tumbled from her grasp, landing on the step and bouncing to the next, rolling over and down and clanking with the steps while Scootaloo stood there, all the blood in her frozen still and her heart pounding with each thump. When it finally fell to the bottom of the steps and smacked against the hard floor, it broke into a million pieces with a shatter that echoed through the house. The wet shards sparkled in the moonlight.

Scootaloo didn't know how much time passed with her eyes locked on the bottom of the stairs where the broken bottle stained the floor. Her heart beat so fast that it felt on the verge of fluttering out of her control, and her father's raspy breathing felt like it was all around her, everything she could hear was that shuttering weeze through a thin throat decayed and aberrated by poison.

Escape. The thought of running made her limbs twitch, but the compulsion didn't move beyond that. The bottle, despite her constant and fevered willing, wasn't empowered to reform and float back up the stairs. Her father, despite all her prayers, didn't march past her with a nonconscious grumbling and collapse back in bed, convinced nothing he had seen was real. And most important of all, Scootaloo didn't suddenly open her eyes to bright room and chirping birds, stretching her muscles and shaking away the strange, terrifying dream of which should already only remember faint whispers.

Suddenly, Scootaloo felt very small - a foolish child who'd attempted things far beyond her ability or comprehension, and now the time had come for retribution. Her transgressions would be redressed. Her father coughed loudly from some unseeable beyond, and Scootaloo swallowed. Her cheeks were already warm and wet, and the rest of her body was cold.

Her father mumbled something, coughed, and took in a deep breath. “...you little..." he growled, and rushed towards her at a speed she didn't think he was capable.

She screamed. She thought she was a brave pony but she was nothing more than a filly now, she knew. At the sight of this stallion stumbling towards her, this stallion who could crush her under his hoof, this stallion who had almost broken her limbs and her wings before, the stallion responsible for the bruises that hid in abundance under the wispy white and dying coat of her mother, she could do nothing but scream, and scramble down the steps. Her father had threatened to kill her before. Death threats were nothing new in her household - Scootaloo heard them flung at and by her parents daily. All it took was the slightest glimpse of her father's face, a flash in the darkness, empty and pitiless eyes and a scowl, to know that tonight there would be no restraint. He had lost whatever sense of disapprobation had prohibited him from acting on his threats in the past, and Scootaloo knew that if she stood still she would never see morning. She had to flee. Flee and find her mother. Something. A neighbor. She'd never come back to this house.

As Scootaloo scrambled down the steps as fast as she could move, she heard her father clammering after her, his hoof-falls erratic and jarring, making the whole shoddy staircase tremble under his weight. All Scootaloo could consider was the door. The night. Escape. One hoof over the next, able to concentrate on nothing else. Her father stumbled behind her, but whether the sounds he made were involuntary gasps and heavy breathing or further muttered insults and curses, Scootaloo couldn't tell.

One misstep was all it took. She stumbled on one step, tried to slow down but missed the next one completely, then fell. She tumbled down the stairs just like the fatal bottle had done, her body cracking and slamming on each step. Her wings buzzed futilely in the air each time she stumbled upright, desperately and against all odds trying to find purchase in the air and carry her away from her forever. Finally, the fall came to an end as she smacked with a solid and wet thump against the floor. Every part of her body was sore, and when she tried to move her limbs and found them unresponsive, she feared for the slightest moment that her body had broke into pieces as violently and as assuredly as the glittering bottle that lay scattered next to her.

Before she could think any more, before she could breathe, her father was on top of her. Almost as if he had teleported to her weakness, suddenly he was just there. Scootaloo was on her back and her father clambered clumsily on top of her, his massive body crushing hers under its weight. While before he had seemed atrophied and lifeless, now that he had something to animate him it was like she became an entirely new pony. Scootaloo had never released how strong and heavy he was. She tried to scream, but her lungs were too weak, and her spirit too empty.

His breath blew in her face and smelled rotten and deadly, a cloud of caustic vitriol that felt like it was eroding her face. She was entirely paralyzed under her father's weight - she could finally feel her limbs responding, but her legs simply fluttered pathetically under his weight.

"I knew I..." He slurred out words made of messy syllables, half-sentences and half-thoughts given stuttered life in his anger. "You..."

Scootaloo mouthed an apology, trying as well as she could to blink away the tears. No sound came out. Her hindlegs beat the ground under his body, and he didn't seem to notice.

A clumsy pair of hooves reached up along Scootaloo’s motionless body and found her neck. They pushed down and together. The air in the room seemed to grow suddenly thin, and Scootaloo’s chest had trouble rising and falling. Darkness seemed to creep around her father's face, growing from the periphery and obscuring her sight, but through the haze she still managed to make out the sight that she woke up to, screaming and sweating, every other night - piercing through the encroaching darkness, her father's beady, angry, black pupils stared down, but not quite at her. They were looking at something above her, past her, something through her, as if her father couldn't be bothered to pay attention to her. The object of his gaze was lost and unfocused. He was distracted while his hooves clamped around her neck. His anger was directionless. Gone forever were the kind eyes that once, once upon a time, maybe, watched over her. The stallion that once loved her had been drowned, poisoned, and died.

First, her forehooves reached up and raked at the ones choking her, trying to pry off the stallion's grip. Her body spasmed in the effort, every slowly-weakening muscle of her body thrashing against the captor pressing her in the floor, every piece of her contorting to wedge her body loose and escape his grasp. His hooves didn't budge, and his mouth was thin, expressionless, and terrifying. Sweat made his coat clammy and his snout shined from it. "Little bitch, I can't..." he muttered, his mouth mimicking the rest of the sentence, talking more to himself than anypony.

"You're...s-sick," Scootaloo gasped, and as those words left her mouth they felt like they might be the last she ever said. Her father didn't respond, verbally or physically. She wasn't talking to a pony, anymore. She might as well have been conversing with a mindless creature.

Scootaloo's hooves fell back at her side. A natural instinct of her body took over, and she started taking in deep gulps of air, sounding like a broken, sputtering toy as she clung to whatever she could find through her throat. Her father shifted on top of her, and she could barely feel it - sensation was slowly leaving her body, breathed out in the last of her frantic, gasping breaths. She tried to breath through her nose, somehow thinking that would work, but the air she took in was even thinner.

Her father was still muttering on top of her, nothing in his eyes showing compassion or concern. Not even a blink to hide what he was doing from himself. There was no doubt in Scootaloo's mind, now. He meant to kill her tonight.

Her forehooves animated again through concentrated effort and shot upwards, pushing against his chest with all the might she could muster. And still, it did nothing. Merely inconvenienced, her father adjusted himself so he was sitting on Scootaloo's stomach instead of laying on her chest, concentrating his weight and crushing her even more. Any second now her bones would snap under the pressure, and her neck would cave in and twist unnaturally and her head, once full of fleeting ideas about poison and rescue, would dangle and flop from her lifeless body. She was sure of it.

Overwhelming her, the darkness became too thick to see any further. Her hooves fell again to her side, limp and lifeless. She closed her eyes. Everything had gone wrong. A sensation that was the absence of heat but wasn't quite cold washed over her body, starting at her still twitching legs and pulsing with each quiet, dying heartbeat through the rest of her body. She wasn't able to feel anything all over. Every sense amalgamated into a palpable and impenetrable white noise. Her father's hooves around her neck felt like nothing now - a lack of thought and sensation, something that was impossible to care about. There was always the chance that she'd have nice dreams, she hoped.

Beside her, her convulsing hooves, ebbing with the final throes of life, found something that reminded her of her sense of touch. Her hoof ran across a shard of sharp glass, and she felt it cut her. Her eyes opened slowly. Above her was the monster. Opening her mouth, she attempted one last entreaty, and to this day she didn't know what, if anything she said, or if her father had heard her.

Leaning over, both hooves fumbled at this piece of sharp, soaked glass, smearing it with thin streaks of her blood. She dropped it on the wet floor, the piece slipping out of her grasp as her numb hooves were unable to find a proper grip. Finally, though, she clasped it between her forehooves. Her father made no sign that he took her fumbling for anything more than desperate struggling.

Scootaloo took the deepest breath she could manage, closed her eyes, and thrust the piece of shimmering brown glass hard and up into her father's chest.

She held it there, unable to do anything else with her body, unable to think. A warm, viscous dampness flowed onto her hooves and dripped onto her chest, quickly becoming a small, steady stream.

"Fuck...what di..." His voice was slurred and weak, and his breath smelled as strong as ever. Stronger somehow, somehow more colorful.

The grip around her neck slowly weakened. Immediately, Scootaloo took in a giant breath, and despite the smell of iron and poison permeating the air, she quickly took in another one. The taste of that air would never leave her. She drank lakes of it in her dreams, and woke up with it on her tongue.

After a few gasps, Scootaloo had the energy to do two things. The first was to resume her hysterical sobbing, and soon she was gasping for air again and shaking from tremors of fear. The second was to push her father off of her. The stallion didn't resist, and Scootaloo pushed him as hard as she could over her side. His body rolled off and onto the pile of crushed glass, crashing down on it with the sickening sound of a thousand punctures. In the moonlight, Scootaloo saw his body vibrating and twitching, and saw his eyes - finally, finally not angry, but frightened, confused, wide-eyed and blinking frequently, passionately - staring down at his chest. The coat of fur below his neck was dark red with blood and the color spread, forming a steadily growing shape that bloomed from his chest. His hooves, smeared with crimson, brushed slowly and awkwardly over his chest, as if they were trying to clean it, trying to scrape away a bug, brush the pain away. He was silent, though. The only sound in the night now was Scootaloo's sobbing and her hoofsteps as she scrambled back up the stairs.

She raced into the bathroom, her hooves scrambling and skidding across the floor as she burst into it. After she flicked on the lights and hopped onto a stool, she twisted the silver handle and ran her hooves under a cool jet of water. The liquid in the sink turned a dark, sick pink color, the color of flesh after you cut away a few layers. Her hooves rubbed against each other for what felt like an eternity. Still sobbing, she quickly ran out of breath, and great, heavy heaves for air echoed through the bathroom until she had regained enough to resume bawling. It still amazed her that no one heard her wailing that night. All it would take would be one curious neighbor and she would not be sitting with Applebloom and Sweetie Belle tonight.

Once her hooves and limbs were sore and raw, and the chill of the clear water was making her shiver all over, she finally dared to look up at the mirror. Staring back at her was a trembling face specked with dots of red dangling on the tips of her coat. A pair of bloodshot, puffy eyes blinked at the sight. Her lip quivered, and her whole body shook when she took in another gasp. She couldn't stand staring at this filly for another moment. Diving down to the sink, she splashed water all over her face and scrubbed viciously, first with her hooves, then a towel that she managed to gather up the clearheadedness to retrieve.

Every part of her wanted to shut the door to the bathroom and stay there for the rest of her life. Scootaloo was soaked all over, the wet towel lying crumpled under her as she poked and pushed at her neck, trying to make sure everything was still working. All over, she ached. It was like falling out of the sky but worse and hitting much deeper than any sort of impact should be able to.

The bathroom door had a lock, but Scootaloo was having trouble standing to use iit. Any second, she was sure that she'd hear her father groan and stumble up the steps in search of her, intent on finishing what he had started. Each breath she took might have been her last, and something about the lingering taste of soap and disinfectant mingling with the scent of blood made her almost wish that each one was. If only she had opened a window before collapsing onto the ground.

As the hours, days, weeks, passed, the possibility of her father returning to administer his revenge became less and less likely. It was possible he had already stumbled up to his room without Scootaloo hearing it - she had been sobbing in the silence for so long that she feared it was the only sound that existed anymore. Maybe he had simply passed out at the bottom of the stairs, or gone to get help at a doctor's or something - Scootaloo’s blood-soaked hooves convinced her he must be very hurt.. Or maybe he realized that Scootaloo was too much for him, and he decided to pick himself up and leave forever, just wander out the door into the rising sun and never show his empty eyes around her again.

Soon, another concern settled in Scootaloo's mind - her mother. Regardless of how long her father was gone or incapacitated, her mother would be home before long - these nocturnal exodi never lasted much later than dawn, anyway. When she saw the mess that was the bottom of the stairs, she would be furious. There was a chance that, if her father was departed, she could rush down and clean up the mess before she arrived. Then, when she saw her father again, he might have forgotten the whole thing, maybe - he's forgotten so many other things he'd done while poisoned, after all. Perhaps if Scootaloo just pretended this never happened, she could go back to the life she had had a few hours ago. It wasn't perfect, but back then the only things choking her were the smell of alcohol and a her own self-repression.

A door slammed far in the distance. Scootaloo was silent, save for the occasional sniffle. No sound answered her investigation. The house was dead.

She rose on wobbly legs, and stumbled past the bathroom threshold. Her bed seemed so tempting right now - she would have loved to collapse back into it, and the ache in her limbs told her that if she did, she would be there for a very long time. Whatever she did, she didn't want to look down the stairs as she walked past them. She couldn't. Her eyes were clenched shut.

One peeked open.

Then the other. She turned and stared down.

He was still there. His body, absolutely motionless. A black, shapeless mass, immobile in the fading moonlight. Scootaloo stared, as deathly still as he. His limbs didn't twitch. His chest didn't rise. He lay there, his limbs sprawled in awkward shapes, unmoving in the thick puddle that spread all around him, the colors of amber and crimson that tinted the ever-stained carpet. Under him and between his limbs, the broken shards of glass still speckled like seashells on a black seafloor - little glimpses of light spreading out and sparkling in the darkness.

Too much time passed. She couldn't take her eyes off of it. Any second, she expected him to snore or snort loudly, just like before. She couldn't decide what she would do if he did, or if she even wanted that. Whatever her desires, her father responded with silence.

Scootaloo felt a shout bubbling in her, threatening to be released. Before it could, and before the cloud of tears in her eyes could overwhelm her, she galloped back to her room and shut the door soundly behind her. Inching up to her bed, she clambered on top and under the worn, patchwork blanket. Hidden from any light and sight, she was quiet for a very long time. Her hooves occasionally rubbed the suddenly frail and brittle sliver of stability she had for a neck, and occasionally reached up to wipe clean her eyes. Despite wishing and expecting sleep to come, it didn't, and Scootaloo wasn't sure how much time had passed. In the darkness, she saw nothing but two eyes staring back at her, and they didn't go away even when she shut hers.

When Scootaloo heard the first noise she could since crawling under her covers, she threw them off of her and sat up, and finally got a sense of time. Outside of her window, the cloudless sky was bleeding into the pink-purple of almost-dawn. The sound that disturbed her was a loud, echoing bang that resonated through her house - a sound she was too familiar with, as it punctuated her parent's shouts and ended their arguments, and Scootaloo’s final message to the house every time she escaped into the world.

Her mother must be home.

Immediately, Scootaloo collapsed into bed, becoming the perfect effigy of a slumbering filly. It was still a few hours before her mom was supposed to wander in to wake her up for school, and maybe, if her father had already cleaned himself up and left, she would be none the wiser.

A quiet screech that turned into a scream echoed from downstairs. Scootaloo felt very cold under her covers. The scream was nothing like Scootaloo had ever heard leave her mother before - she'd heard all kinds of shouts, all kind of noises of panic and desperation and pain and anger, but this was the first time she heard a scream like this. It was guttural and untempered, and the sound of it terrified Scootaloo. She wanted to leap out the window to avoid having to see her mother.

The door slammed again, and Scootaloo could faintly hear hoofbeats galloping away from her home. Time felt frozen and Scootaloo trapped by inactivity. She didn't know how long it was - it could have been an hour, it could have been a blink. With her empty mind that had shut down from exertion Scootaloo had no way of telling - before she heard the door open yet again and a crowd of ponies enter. A host of unfamiliar voices speaking in rapid voices filled the house, talking to and shouting over each other with words Scootaloo couldn't quite make out or understand. In the middle of it all, her mother’s stifled and bodiless wailing occasionally became loud enough to block out all other sounds, but the conversation from the other voices went unheeded.

A loud shuffling and groans interjected the ceaseless, formless conversation, and Scootaloo's imagination ran with the possibilities of what was occurring downstairs. Any second, her mother would be upstairs, and, like a blanket thrown off, all at once her feigned sleep and everything else would be uncovered.

After a few minutes, the conversations filtered out through the stairwell and back into the kitchen, and became a muffled mess of noise when the door finally slammed shut. Only her mother remained in the house - that much Scootaloo could easily tell from the siren-like moans that she still heard inundating the air like a fog of noise, clouding her thoughts.

The strain of this on her mother's ash-corroded throat was clear enough. The wailing shuddered from, and became progressed into a state of quiet weeping that Scootaloo could just barely hear if she strained. Beside her, the sun began rising, and Celestia once again watched over Equestria. Scootaloo wondered if Celestia would have tried to help her father if she was a little filly. Sometimes, Scootaloo had flights of fancy of sending letters to the Princess, asking for help or advice. Just like everypony outside her family, though, Celestia's intervention would have torn them apart, though if it could do any more damage than a shard of glass and a pair of hooves had already, Scootaloo would be amazed.

As Equestria slowly came to life on the other side of the window, the sounds of life reminded Scootaloo of a world that wasn't entirely wrapped around her neck and clouded from her sight. Her mother began ascending the steps in slow, deliberate hooffalls, and Scootaloo flopped over, brushed her comforter to a natural position, and collapsed onto her pillow. She shut her eyes as soon as she saw heard the doorknob turn.

"Scootaloo?" her mother called from the threshold.

Scootaloo was silent. She wished she could will her heart to stop beating, because it felt like it was shaking her entire body.

"Scootaloo, are you awake?" Her mother's voice was ragged.

Scootaloo turned around ponderously, and pantomimed blinking awake.

"Wha...?"

"Scootaloo, wake up." Her mother stepped into her room.

"Hi, mom. T-time for school already?" She sat up in bed and immediately realized she had done it too quickly - no filly still shaking off sleep would be so active. Her mother, though, didn't seem to mind.

"Scootaloo, did you hear anything last night?"

"...hear what?" Scootaloo blinked, and repeated the word yawn inside her head over and over until one came out.

"Nevermind...nevermind. There was an accident, last night, Scootaloo. Your father is hurt very badly. He's in the hospital right now, but..." Her mother, her lip quivering through the whole sentence, finally broke down and her sentence became a suppressed moan. Scootaloo could see how red her eyes were, for the first time, and what a mess her face was. She had just stared at a reflection of that same face in the mirror before the sun had rose.

The room was quiet except for her mother's sniffling and quick gasps. Scootaloo had no idea if her mother was going to regain her composure, or if she had anything else to say.

"Oh," Scootaloo said, after a minute passed in silence.

"Just," her mother said, after wiping her eyes and taking in a deep breath, seemingly composed after exhaling it. "...just stay in your room, okay? There's a big mess at the bottom of the stairs."

"What about school?" This is the question Scootaloo was supposed to ask. This is the question Scootaloo would have asked.

"You'll go to school, but just stay in your room until I call you. I'm gonna clean that mess up. Just stay in here and..." Her mom glanced around the room, looking at her backpack, her dresser, then back at Scootaloo. She backed out of the room and shut the door.

Scootaloo was breathing hard. A deep wave of exhaustion and lightheadedness was confining her to her bed. The world had a blurry filter over it, almost like she was dreaming, and the only thing she wanted to do was collapse in bed, and finally sleep, pretending this was one of her nightmares. Curling back up under her covers, she wished the world away and shut her eyes.

"Scootaloo, wake up!" A shout from some distant plane of existence.

"Scootaloo, I already woke you up once. Please get up!" Her mother never said please when waking her up for school. Her voice also never had this shivering sensation, like any second it was going to break into formless noise, either. Scootaloo pushed herself up and threw the covers off.

"C'mon, you've gotta get to school. I'm going to the hospital to see your father, and I might not be home when you get back."

"Okay."

"Don't fall back asleep."

Her mouth twitched, and she swallowed back a suggestion that might have seen existence if she hadn't been so exhausted.

"Okay."

Her mom stared at her until she stumbled out of bed and stood on shaky hooves, then she turned and trotted from the room. Scootaloo heard her gallop down the stairs and out of the door. Her father was in the hospital. Good. He was sick. Very sick.

Scootaloo looked at the floor as she wandered to the edge of the steps, then looked down at the expanse below her. Her father was gone, but a shadow of his body was still lying there motionless in her memory. Her mother had certainly tried to clean up the mess that was there last night - of the crimson blood that sparkled in the moonlight and the golden liquor spilled near it, all that remained was a faint smear of burgundy. Lying against the way was a mop inside a bucket, the latter filled with water the color of tanned leather. Scootaloo stared at it for a while, then looked at her own feet. She wandered into the bathroom, threw the towel she'd sat on into the hamper, and grabbed her toothbrush.

The funeral was a quiet affair. It happened a few days later, on a bright and sunny day. Scootaloo walked a mile or two out of town with her mother, both of them dressed in encumbering black garb. Her mother's make-up was already running down her face by the time they reached the graveyard, though whether that was from tears or sweat, Scootaloo was unsure and saw no point in figuring out. At very least, her mother wasn't crying loudly enough for Scootaloo to hear.

It wasn't a place Scootaloo wanted to be. They left a short while after noon, a wordless precession of two ponies. There wasn't a single word exchanged the entire trip. Her mother hadn't said much at all after the accident a few nights ago. She pulled her down from the room and explained in blunt terms what had happened and what was going to happen, and Scootaloo had no choice but to take the circumstances in stride.

When they finally arrived, Scootaloo dug at the grass a little bit, and nopony missed her until they were ready to leave. The collected relatives exchanged a flurry of final goodbyes, and unfulfilled will-see-you-soons, and Scootaloo fell back into place beside her mother and began the march home.

It was like her mother became a different mare. She had cried at the funeral, but after that it was like she had discarded something, shed herself free of everything. It was a physical catharsis as well as an emotional one - the day after the funeral, she began to clean the house with a fervor that Scootaloo hadn't seen a tenth of in ten years. Everything that meant nothing to her was thrown away, and the house at the end was a skeleton of the former mess - gone were the useless trinkets, empty bottles, papers, mounds of trash and dusty once-valuables that littered the entire household. Scootaloo didn't even recognize it. Her father had left enough money that it was possible to support herself until she found a job, and she did in a few weeks.

Her mother had guests. Co-workers, for the most part, but scattered through the crowd occasionally was a lost contact - a former schoolmate, an old friend who'd heard about the tragedy. The miracle. For the first time in years, some ponies willingly visited their house, and could be let inside without risking retribution. A swarm of sympathizers filtered in small groups through the house, usually talking with her mother for only a short while before whisking her away for the night. In a short time, her mother turned them into friends, and the event that brought them together was entirely forgotten. Her mother smiled again, and the bruises healed.

Almost immediately after her mother finished her wall-to-wall renovation of the house and was left with almost nothing but bare furniture, Scootaloo's mom decided to move. She packed up, and they scurried off to a new apartment in Ponyville, a town their father had never dragged them to. A fresh start, but Scootaloo sometimes still felt stained by that old house.

It was thrilling for Scootaloo to see her mother transformed into something that wasn't a shambling corpse passing itself off as a pony, but the change left her just as untouchable and unrelatable. There was no way Scootaloo could talk to her about it. She didn't have anypony she could voice her concerns to - how could she explain having nightmares every night about beady, bird-eyed stallions glaring at her so hard her lungs locked up? How could she tell them why she still sometimes felt a constricting sensation about her neck, and had to reach her hooves up every so often and gently feel to make sure there was nothing but her imagination at work? She couldn't. She couldn't tell her mother what happened that night. In fact, she couldn't discuss her father at all.

There was a very clear, unspoken edict that hung over her household - that era of their life is over, and should never be brought back to life. Everything that happened would be forever banished, at least to her mother. And Scootaloo resolved to abide by that to keep her mother smiling, even if it meant that for the rest of her life every time a stallion got close enough to her that his shadow covered her, she would have to hide an urge to scream and flee under a fake smile. She never air the embers of this problem with complaints or discussion, but it still cropped up when she closed her eyes.

Her father's death was officially ruled an accident. The conclusion came quickly and unsurprisingly - no one involved in the incident save for one particular filly had any doubts at all that this was nothing more than a tragic, unfortunate accident. The level of inebriation her father was found in was such that every expert involved solemnly shook their heads at the foregone analysis - the stallion had tripped and stumbled down the steps while carrying a bottle of alcohol, and, at the point of impact, landed on the bottle so that it shattered and a piece of glass jammed into his chest with such force and such freakish accuracy that it was indelibly fatal. His death was quick and messy. Honestly, with how much and how often he drank, some ponies were amazed something like this didn't happen sooner. It was inevitable. That poor, cursed, sick stallion.

Nopony ever noticed the faint trail of bloody filly hoofprints that lead from the spot her father fell. They smeared up the stairs and snaked into the bathroom, where they ended at the sink. Scootaloo quietly and determinedly cleaned them while her mother was visiting her father in the hospital the day after the incident. Nopony knew, and nopony would ever know what happened to her father that night, unless they could read the language of Scootaloo's unnatural jitters, or see past her trauma-struck eyes and into a night that the filly had decided needed locked away forever, for the good of everypony except her.