//------------------------------//
// Stand Up to Bullies 
// Story: Sweet Nothings 
// by Golden Tassel 
//------------------------------//

The reactor hadn't simply malfunctioned; it had been almost completely dismantled. Pieces of it were scattered all across the room. Of the dozen-or-so engineers in the room, about half of them were in the middle of fondling various parts as though they had never seen a pipe fitting before. The other half—all the senior engineers—were seated around a table at the back of the room, playing a game of cards on top of the reactor schematics.

"What happened here?" I gasped.

Nopony answered me. A few glanced up at me but quickly averted their eyes when they recognized me.

The overseer cleared his throat, bringing everyone to attention. He reminded them of who I was and why I was there. Nopony said anything, but I saw a number of them glaring at me. "Well, I leave you to it," said the overseer. "I'll return later to see what progress you've made." He turned to leave. "Come along, Sweetie Pie; let's get you out of the way."

Sweets was still riding on my shoulders, and I felt him squeeze around my neck.

"Sweetie Pie," the overseer repeated as he looked back at us over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed.

"I want to stay with my big brother!" Sweets cried.

"That choice isn't up to you. Now come here."

"He won't be in the way," I spoke up. "He can even help. I used to bring Sweets with me on my shifts."

The overseer's eyes met mine. "That choice isn't up to you either," he said slowly, drawing out each syllable as though to make certain that he wasn't being misheard. "I have allowed this reunion to go on long enough."

"Don't make me go," Sweets whimpered as he clung to my neck and buried his face in my mane.

"Sir," Starry interjected. "From the look of things, we really do need all the help we can get if there's any hope of getting this reactor back online before the stable has to be evacuated. If Sweets can help us, then you should let him stay."

The overseer's eyes shifted over to Starry. "Do you presume to speak for the best interests of my stable, miss? Need I remind you that you are here only at my discretion and I can have you removed at any time?" He pointed his hoof at me. "And don't you think for one second that simply because I agreed to pardon you, Lucky, that I won't take it back if you start causing trouble."

"That's specious reasoning," Starry said as she stepped up toward the overseer, putting herself between him and me. "If Day really is the only one capable of fixing this thing—and from what I can see of the repairs so far, I think he is—then you may as well evacuate now if you think you can actually follow through on a threat like that."

The room was silent; everyone's attention was focused on Starry and the overseer. His eyes darted around the room before settling back on me. His pursed lips drew back into a crooked smile. "You are quite right, miss. It would be foolish of me to throw you both out before repairs are finished. But if Lucky Day wants to stay, and if he ever wants to see his little brother again, for whom he says he committed such a brutal murder, then you both will be on your best behavior while you are here."

Sweets squeezed tighter around my neck, nearly choking me. "Y—you promised he could stay!" he cried. "You promised!"

"That I did," said the overseer as he adjusted his glasses. "And I'm a fair stallion. So I'll let you stay here for now, Sweetie Pie. You help your brother: remind him why he's here and why he wants to get along so he can stay. I'll come back for you later."


***


At first we just hung back by the doorway, looking out over the scene in front of us. I wasn't even really sure where to begin; I hadn't known what to expect, but once I had realized that it was the reactor that needed repairs, I'd thought that it would only need an hour or two's work to fix. And perhaps it might have if it hadn't been completely disassembled. We wandered over to the collection of damaged parts that had been separated from the rest and began by examining those.

"Almost looks like a bomb went off in here," Starry whispered to me.

"Some parts of it operate under high pressure," I mumbled. "Maybe if a valve or a seal failed, a pipe might have burst explosively?"

I tried asking one of the engineers, "What happened here?"

She snorted. "It's broken. What's it look like?"

Starry leaned in next to me. "I'm starting to get the impression that nopony in here is very competent. They only took my harness at the entrance and didn't think to search us for other weapons—you've still got your pistol in your bags. And now it looks like they don't even know what they're doing here."

"Well, it's like I said the other night at the diner: this thing ran perfectly for as long as anyone can remember; nobody ever needed to know how it worked." I sighed. "We've got a lot of work to do. Let's worry about that right now." I took a quick look around the room. "Wait here a minute," I said. "I'll go get my toolkit."

I headed for the corridor at the back of the room—it lead directly to the maintenance offices and to the lockers and supply rooms.

One of the senior engineers moved to block the door from me, though. "Where do you think you're going?" he asked sternly, looking down his nose at me.

"To the lockers to get my toolbox," I answered.

"What makes you think you have a toolbox? You don't work here. You don't even live here. You'll have to fill out a requisition form and wait for somepony to approve it."

"I . . . but that's absurd! We need to repair this thing before the end of tomorrow! Just let me get to work!"

"Hey, I don't make the rules, kid. I just follow them. We all gotta get along down here," he sneered.

"I'll just ask somepony to share with me," I mumbled as I turned away from him. But all the engineers I approached would immediately scoop up their tools and hover over them like possessive vultures hoarding their carrion. "I'm using these," they'd all say.

With each failed attempt, I felt more and more self-conscious about how I must have looked to Starry and Sweets. This was supposed to be my domain—I knew more about the spark reactor than anypony in the stable. Sweets had made such a big deal about it; I couldn't let him down, and certainly not in front of Starry.

Starry had stood up for me enough already. It was my turn to stand up for myself. So I made a break for it. I got out into the maintenance corridor before the senior engineer could block me again. I heard him call after me, but he didn't follow.

The locker room was right around the corner. Inside, I found my locker almost exactly as I had left it; all they'd done was peel off the tape with my name written on it. I grabbed my tools and carried them back to the reactor room.

The senior engineer was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

"I have work to do," I told him.

"Not with stolen tools, you don't," he said. "Go put those back where you got them, or—"

"Or what?" I snapped at him. "What can you do to me?" I almost instantly regretted saying that; my heart began to race, and I was about to start apologizing profusely, but then I saw the look on the senior engineer's face: he looked afraid.

He started backing up and stammering. "O—or . . . or . . ."

"Or nothing," I said, stepping past him.

After that, the other engineers would move out of the way whenever I went to work on something. The senior engineers even moved their card game so I could get at the schematics. Nopony would say anything to me, but I could hear them whispering and could see them staring at me whenever I glanced over my shoulder. I tried to simply ignore it, though. If I was going to go back to living in the stable, I'd have to expect that I'd be treated differently. So I focused on the task in front of me.

We started by reassembling some of the smaller components, but after I finished showing Starry and Sweets what to do with the first one, and moved on to a second, I saw one of the engineers pick up the part we'd just finished rebuilding and start taking it apart again.

"What are you doing? Stop! No, don't—" I cringed as I watched him simply drop the component; it landed on the table with a loud clang which immediately drew everypony's attention and turned the quiet murmur of activity in the room to complete silence.

"I just finished putting that back together. Why are you taking it apart?" I demanded.

"I . . . I was just looking to see if it needed fixing . . ."

I put a hoof to my forehead. "Nothing here needs fixing except the pile of scrap in the corner," I explained through gritted teeth. "You don't have any idea what you're doing, do you?" A blank, slack-jawed stare was his only answer. I couldn't believe it: the stable was going to fail by the end of the next day and nopony seemed to appreciate what that meant. I knew what it meant, though: it meant my little brother would be forced out into the wasteland.

I wouldn't let that happen.

"None of you know what's going on here at all! You're all fumbling around down here just trying to look busy, and somehow expecting everypony else to get this thing working before the emergency power runs out."

Nopony said anything as I looked around the room. They all had the same blank stare on their faces, as if to plead ignorance of their own ignorance, and as if that were any excuse.

"Get out!" I yelled. "All of you, just get out! You're all useless!"

At first nopony moved. They all exchanged glances with each other briefly, then collectively shrugged and started walking out—none of them even cared about what they were working on. Even the senior engineers didn't seem to mind being chased out by me. And somehow I wasn't even surprised that they listened to me—or maybe they were simply happy for an excuse to leave.

The engineer I'd accosted hesitated. "I . . . I want to help," he said.

I sighed and rubbed my temple. "Just go."

He nodded slowly and turned to leave with the others. And I went to stand on the side of the room with Starry and Sweets, keeping out of the way while everypony filed out.

One of the junior engineers, a zebra mare whose name I couldn't remember, stopped in front of us on her way. She glared at me briefly. "You don't belong here, little bird." Then a smug grin crept across her face as she glanced over at Starry. "Did he tell you how he butchered his own mother?"

Hearing her say that was like a kick in the chest. My heart skipped a beat and I felt Sweets cling tightly against my leg.

Slowly, Starry turned back to look at me, her eyes wide. "Day? Is . . . is that true?"

"Oh, it's quite true: stabbed her in the throat over a dozen times while she slept, I'm told," the mare said with a laugh.

"It's not his fault!" Sweets screamed.

"It's okay, Sweets. Don't argue." I took a deep breath and nodded slowly. My eyes stayed fixed on the floor under Starry's hooves. "It's true."

"Day . . . what happened?"

"She was killing him!" Sweets cried out. "It had to be done!"

"Sweets! Please, let me handle this." I felt him shaking against me. I was shaking too. "I had to protect my little brother. It was the only way." I looked up at Starry and saw that her face wasn't angry as I expected. If anything, she looked . . . sad. I couldn't hide my shame any longer. "She hit us. All the time. I tried to protect Sweets; I let her hit me instead. But it was getting worse. She . . . she was going to kill me if it didn't stop." I looked down at Sweets. "If it were just me, I'd have let her. But I had to keep my little brother safe." I closed my eyes and nuzzled into Sweets's mane. "She can't hurt you anymore."

The zebra gave an impassive snort, apparently content with forcing a confession out of me, and she turned and left. Then the three of us were all alone in the reactor room.

For a while, nopony said anything, and none of us moved. I hadn't wanted it to come out that way. I cursed myself for not having had the courage to tell Starry myself what had happened when I'd had the chance. But now she'd heard it. I couldn't change it. "You must think I'm a monster," I whispered with a cringe. "I mean . . . what kind of person murders his own mother?" I pulled Sweets into a tight embrace, wrapping him in my wings.

Starry didn't answer right away. She was silent for a minute, and then she sighed. "I don't know what to think. You said she beat you, and if you were afraid for your life, then . . ." She put her hoof on my shoulder. "I believe you. And I don't blame you. But wasn't there any other way?"

I squeezed Sweets and kissed his forehead. "Go see if you can put some of the smaller components back together. I need to talk to Starry for a bit."

My little brother looked up at me. "Not a monster . . ." he whimpered quietly.

I hugged him one last time before I let him go. He needed a little encouragement, but I got him to busy himself with cleaning up the mess of reactor parts that littered the room. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere," I told him.

"Day . . . couldn't you have told somepony?" Starry asked.

"Who would I tell? Security?" I shook my head. "They'd have told me to stop making trouble and get along like a good little pony, and then they'd probably throw me in a detention cell overnight for good measure to make sure I got the message. Meanwhile, Sweets would be left all alone with her. I couldn't just abandon him like that.

"If anypony noticed, nopony cared. And what would they have done anyway? Report it to Security?" I let out a short laugh, though it sounded more like a cry. "When I got hurt, I told everyone I fell. Nopony asked any questions."

I looked up at Starry, and I pleaded, "What should I have done?"

Again, she didn't answer right away. I felt the seconds drag on into minutes as we both stood there in silence. A few times, Starry opened her mouth as though to say something, but she closed it without a word almost immediately. I felt as if I were holding my breath the entire time, waiting to hear her speak, but I couldn't make up my mind about what I wanted to hear: Part of me wanted her to tell me that there wasn't anything I could have done differently—to absolve me of my guilt; if there had been no other way out of it, then that's all there was to it, and it had been just the bad result of a bad situation. But another part of me wanted her to come up with some solution, some magical thing that I could have said or done that would have spared us all such misery—something that would've been so obvious in hindsight that of course it had been all my fault for letting this happen, and I deserved exactly what I'd got for it.

"I don't know," she said at last. "I mean . . . was it really so bad that you were afraid she was going to kill you?"

"I . . . I don't know." I looked down at my hooves. "It was getting worse. A month ago, she . . . she beat me so bad that Sweets had to help me get to medical. By the time we got there, I couldn't breathe—the doctors told me that a broken rib had punctured my lung. I honestly felt like I was going to die, and all I could think about was how, if I did, I'd be leaving Sweets all alone with her."

I sighed. "She didn't used to be like that, you know. Before Sweets was born, she mostly just left me alone."

"You mean she neglected you?"

"No. Well . . . I mean . . . I never really thought of it like that, but to hear you say it that way . . ." I shrugged. "I was pretty much on my own before I even had my cutie mark. And even when I did get my cutie mark . . ." I put a hoof up to my left ear and felt along the torn edge there. I let out a mirthless laugh. "I remember when the air conditioner unit for our section had malfunctioned. They told us that somepony from maintenance was working on it, but the day went on and it only got hotter and stuffier. So I wandered off on my own to see what was taking so long. I found the air conditioner, but the engineer working on it was nowhere to be seen. Parts were scattered all over the floor, and he'd even left his tools sitting out."

I looked at the scene around me: reactor parts and tools littered the floor. I noticed Starry following my gaze. "They aren't just bits of metal to me: they're pieces to a puzzle—bigger and more complicated than any of those cardboard cutout childrens' toys that I loved to play with," I told her. A smile crept across my face. "I'd already played with every toy puzzle in the stable dozens of times, and they were all too easy—I even put them together face down so I couldn't see the pictures. But this was a real puzzle! One with moving parts that fit together in three dimensions!

"I found the piece that didn't fit right, and I found the matching replacement part from the spares that were mixed in with the tools, and I started putting it all back together myself. The engineer came back just as I was finishing up. I was still crawling around inside the access panel when he started yelling at me for messing around with his tools, but then he just stopped. It was right when I hooked the power back up that he told me I just got my cutie mark. I was so excited that I got careless and clipped my ear on the radiator fan as I was backing out from under it. It bled all over the place, but I didn't care: I had my cutie mark.

"Mom yelled at me for going off by myself. She didn't really care about what had happened. I don't even think she knew I had been gone. But that engineer got me apprenticed into maintenance after that, and that's where I started spending all my time."

Starry reached out to me and put her hoof on my shoulder. My smile faded as I looked over at Sweets. He was still busy reconstructing one of the compressors that had been needlessly taken apart by the other engineers.

"She started getting mean when she got pregnant with Sweets. At first it was only a lot more yelling, and I figured that it was just hormones or something or that she was mad at whoever his father was—I don't even know who my father is; could be the same guy for all I know. But I just assumed that it was something that would get better after she gave birth. I learned to be really quiet and careful around her—'yes, ma'am,' 'no, ma'am,' 'sorry, ma'am'—and I just waited for her to get better.

"But after Sweets was born . . . she came home with him, and he was crying. Mom put him in my room and told me to keep him quiet while she got some sleep. I tried giving him a bottle, but it didn't help. She kept yelling from her room—at him to be quiet, at me to do something . . .

"I didn't know what else to do, so I tried to entertain him: silly faces, stuffed toys, nothing seemed to work, and I could hear mom getting angrier every time she yelled. And then I tried walking on the ceiling."

"Walking on the ceiling?"

"Yeah—fly upside down and put your hooves on the ceiling. You should have seen the look on Sweets's face. It was . . ." I let out a small laugh and shook my head slowly. "I fell in love with him when I saw that happy little face looking up at me like I had just done the most amazing thing in the world." I looked down at my hooves. "That's when mom came in. She saw me up on the ceiling and she yelled at me to get down. And as soon as I landed, that's when she hit me for the first time. It wasn't really that hard, but I fell over and dislocated my wing. I started to cry, but she screamed at me to be quiet, so I held it in, and she went back to bed.

"I had to take Sweets with me to medical to get my wing treated; I was terrified to leave him alone with her—if he started crying again . . . what she might have done to him . . . and she never did get any better."