Homecoming of a Jumper

by tosety

08 Steelskin stays home

Eleanor Asher knocked on the door to Steelskin’s house.

After several tries, she heard a muffled “Door’s unlocked.”

As she opened the door, she saw him sitting on his couch, absentmindedly petting Ginsu and staring at a piece of paper.

“Cheerilee asked me to check on you. You okay?”

“So, you got the job of truant officer.” Steelskin meant it as a joke, but it came out more like a sneer. He instantly regretted phrasing it that way.

El smiled. “No, when you didn’t show up by recess, your friends told her about how you had a flashback after school.”

“Great, now everyone knows.” Steelskin rolled onto his side and curled up.

She knelt down and gently but firmly pulled his face up to look at her. “Why’s that a problem?”

“Because I’m weak.” His anger with his weakness gave him the strength to sit back up. He looked her in the eyes and continued. “I can’t rutting keep it together like you and Alex and Matt. I can’t ever relax because a part of me is certain that some day soon, somepony is going to mess up everything like they did so many times before.”

Ginsu moved aside for El to sit next to Steel. She put an arm around him and pulled him close just in time. His body collapsed into shivers and his breathing turned to sharp, ragged gasps as he turned his attention to keep from hyperventilating.

“So,” El said after Steelskin’s body came back under his control. “Before yesterday, when was your last flashback?”

“Every night,” Steelskin responded. “Every single night, I wake up screaming. Sometimes I’ve even smashed stuff with my hooves or shredded my sheets. I’m afraid someday I’ll hurt Ginsu, but I wouldn’t be able to keep him out even if I could bring myself to sleep alone.”

El made a very unladylike noise. “Trust me, not even Trace can get away from the nightmares.” Her voice dropped down to a conspiratorial whisper. “Guess what I did last tuesday.”

El’s lighthearted tone, such a change from the resigned bitterness of her previous statement, made Steelskin look up.

“Yeah?” He asked quietly.

“Blitz wrung out a mop in the kitchen and that squelching sound...” She shivered, remembering something. “Let’s just say that when I heard it, I dove under the couch.”

Steelskin looked confused.

“Under the couch,” El repeated.

Understanding dawned and Steelskin laughed despite himself at the mental image of El curled up with a couch balanced on top of her.

After a few seconds of giggling between the two of them, Steelskin’s mood dropped again.

After what felt like an eternity, he mumbled “I just can’t pretend anymore.”

“Hi, Ginsu,” El said to the cat as it wormed its way onto her lap. She took a couple seconds before responding to Steelskin. “Pretend about what?”

Steelskin sighed. “Being a kid. Can barely act like a pony.” The words were difficult to force out.

“So,” El said after a few minutes of silence. “What’s that paper?”

Steelskin took a while to answer, looking down at the paper he’d temporarily forgotten about. “A final confession I found in one of the early realities.” Steelskin passed it over to her. “I can’t keep from thinking about how fragile Equestria is.”

"Stronger than many worlds I've seen, though. Some of the worst places were once mostly idyllic until something went wrong and no one stopped it." El smiled at Steel as they both petted Ginsu.

“Yeah, but sometimes all it takes is one stupid stallion that takes down a single, essential thing.” He pointed at the paper. “That is from a world where somepony destroyed all the magic in Equestria.”

Even before the jump sickness wore off, I knew there was something dead about this world. It was hard to breathe, I couldn’t get a good grip on the ground, and there was no taste of magic anywhere. I felt completely blind and helpless. Even Tallic looked sluggish.

That’s not to say there wasn’t life.

The plants, animals, and even ponies lived, but it was merely surviving. We first walked through the deserted ruins of Ponyville. Very few windows were broken, but almost every roof had caved in and grass had almost completely covered the paths.

When we got to the library, we found every window broken and the door off its hinges. I would’ve thought that there was an explosion that did it, but there were no scorch marks. In fact, the tree had started to grow around what little remained of the frames.

I looked in and saw books and furniture crammed into way too small of a space.

As we were leaving, we saw a couple buildings that looked like somepony filled them with junk until everything pushed the walls out and the house collapsed around it.

“All the magic was gone?” It took her a moment for the full impact to sink in, but when it did, El was horrified. “Did you find out what caused it?”

Steelskin nodded and hoofed over the paper.

No, I will never ask for forgiveness, for I deserve none. It would be the second greatest tragedy to befall Equestria if I am not executed in the most painful way a pony can devise. All I can hope is that Celestia will have mercy on my soul.

I developed it to set unicorns in their place, but the consequences of my actions were apocalyptic. The second windigo incursion had begun in earnest and the unicorns and pegasi were refusing to let us decrease our tribute of food. Years ago, all pretense of cooperation had been dropped and the old language started getting used again. We had tried explaining our troubles, but that was fruitless.

Sadly, while the pegasi just flew off with the warning that if we did not give the full tribute in a week, they would take it by force, the unicorns actually assaulted us. We were able to drive them off with our superior physical strength, but we would not survive a concerted attack should they choose to bring their weapons to bear. Since the Diarchs had left us, declaring that Princess Twilight Sparkle and the bearers of The Elements of Harmony would be sufficient to maintain our prosperity, we were left on our own. This was made abundantly clear when Princess Twilight threw up her hooves in irritation and told us to ‘Work it out on your own’. I decided that in the absence of alicorns to enforce cooperation between the races, we had to have a weapon to defend ourselves against them.

In secret, I started researching anti-magic fields and ways of disabling a unicorn’s horn. After much searching, I found scrolls sealed away by Clover the Clever concerning her research into stopping her fellows from destroying the earth pony settlements. It was unfinished research, but I assumed she was exaggerating the dangers and that she ended her research because she stopped needing it after the great warming rather than because of those dangers. I ignored her warnings of untold destruction to the death of us all. I just could not conceive how much magic we ponies used, or how fragile it was.

After months of work, I finally completed my “magic ender”.

If I knew what would happen when I activated it, I would have given them the last of our food and just watched our foals starve, but since it was inconceivable to me, I waited until they were within what I calculated was the field radius, and activated it.

That was a complete waste of time, as the one spot of anti-magic caused a shockwave that spread throughout Equestria and cancelled all magic everywhere.

I am the cause of the fall of both Canterlot and Cloudsdale.
I am the reason pegasi cannot fly.
I am responsible for our hooves no longer gripping.

I am death, destroyer of Equestria.

J. R. Oppenhorse

“Wow...” El stared at Steelskin. “You’re lucky it didn’t kill you. From what i’ve heard, pony biology is heavily dependant on magic.”

“Yeah, we were worried about how long we’d be stuck there and what it might do to us.”

“Please hop on my back, there is something disturbing here.”

I struggled to climb up, but his scales were too slippery. Finally, he crouched down as low as he could go and I carefully picked my way across his leg and hopped as carefully as I could to my spot between his shoulder ridges. Even so, I almost fell off the other side.

After a few flaps, of his wings, we found a truly worrying problem.

“...I cannot get any lift.” Tallic’s voice was calm, but there was an undercurrent of fear beneath it. “We should return to our jump circle.” His tail was thrashing in agitation as he made sure I was secure and set off back the way we came.

I had a lump in my throat and the air felt suddenly scarce. I had to keep myself from gasping for the magic that wasn’t there.

As we passed out of the edge of town, we saw a group of ponies watching us, clumped together in fear. I hopped down and ran towards them, but they retreated.

The first shiver of true fear hit me when I caught sight of an older mare’s flank.

“Nothing there?” El’s question was more of a statement.

Steelskin nodded somberly. “None of them did.”

He gave a small smile as Ginsu got up and licked his nose.

El noticed the deadness in Steelskin’s voice and started scratching behind his ears. She felt the tension drain away, but his mood didn’t improve. After a while, he felt the need to continue.

When we reached our jump circle, we found the grass wilted and the magic almost completely dissipated. We decided to trek to some caves we knew about near the Castle of the Pony Sisters.

“Watch out. I do not know what might be in here or whether my strength will hold up in a fight. Remember, if I tell you to run, you immediately run as fast as you can for as long as you can.” Tallic’s eyes brooked no disagreement.

I bowed my head and mumbled a quiet “Yes, sir.”

We trudged through a disturbingly peaceful Everfree. We could feel the fact that all of the dangers that should have been in the forest were dead and that scared the piss out of me.

“When we got to the ruined castle, we went straight to the chamber of the-” Steelskin checked himself, not knowing if the Tree of Harmony was a national secret or not. “-a cavern that had a crystal tree in it...”

He wanted to bring his eyes up to see if she bought the lie, but found his head too heavy to lift. He felt El’s arms wrap around his neck and pull him into a hug. With his eyes closed, it felt almost exactly like his mother’s hug.

A smile pulled at his face and a chuckle almost got through his depression as he noted that he just compared the metal mad scientist with the most maternal mare he ever knew. The connection was enough to remind him of El’s trustworthiness and made his decision easier.

“Buck it. The Tree of Harmony. In case you don’t know, it’s what gave the princesses the Elements. Most realities had it flourishing in a cave under their old castle.” Moving away from those happy realities, his voice lost what little emotion it had.

“...here it was dead.”

As we entered the cavern, we caught sight of probably the most horrible thing I have ever seen. Instead of bright, vibrant pastels glowing from within, it was a dull, frosted greyish pink. Most of the branches had broken off and shards of them littered the ground all around the trunk.

When I saw it, I couldn’t help but cry. There was a despair that welled up in me that I’ve never experienced before or since. The closest I can come to describing it would be to say that it was like the tree itself was the embodiment of the hopelessness of that world.

“Wh-what happened?” I could barely talk as tears welled up in my eyes and sobs choked my throat.

Tallic didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled me close with his wing.

After a few minutes of just staring at it in silent horror, I noticed something at the base. There was a little ledge formed by an exposed root. On it was a piece of a scroll held down by five small, round stones. I was too scared of it for the first couple days, but after a while, my curiosity made me slide it out from under the stones. As it slid out from under the last stone...

Well, I don’t know how to describe it.

It felt like an explosion and my guts felt like they got thrown across the room while, at the same time, my starswirl glands felt like they got sucked into the tree.

I felt Tallic’s claw wrapped around me as I passed out.

“When I woke up, I found us in a jump circle with a fully healthy Tree of Harmony in front of me. Tallic said we jumped about a minute after I passed out.”

El sat for a while, lending silent company as Steel sat, staring off into infinity and petting Ginsu.

“My entire body ached and I couldn’t even think straight. It felt like how my mom looked when she got the feather flu.” There was something off about how Steelskin was talking. He didn’t seem to have the relief someone would feel talking about having escaped potential death.

“You don’t seem happy to have been there,” El said, reaching over to scratch his ears again. “What happened there?”

Steelskin’s breathing quickened and he unconsciously pulled Ginsu into a tight hug.

Turning his head away in shame, he replied “N-no, that reality was peaceful... it’s just when... when I read that,” He pointed to the scroll. “My first thought was that he was right to do it.”

El thought for a while, not wanting to excuse or condemn.

Finally, she spoke. “That's a lot of what troubled me over the destruction of Gem... It ended the war, saved billions of lives. It saved everyone from a fate worse than death... But I killed a million people... And I can't just see them as marks in a ledger; balanced by the ones I saved.”

El could see that he was on the verge of breaking down. She pulled him close and held the tired, old stallion in a colt’s body tightly in her arms. She never thought of herself as the maternal type, but Steelskin seemed to bring something out in her.

Once he calmed, she spoke to him softly. "Alex lost it in public once, too, you know. It was a doozy. You know Grass Runner, the Diamond Dog Paladin? To make a long story short, when he first met her, he went nuts on her. Nearly killed her. Scoots was there, she can fill you in."

They sat in silence for a while. Steelskin was bemused, temporarily forgetting his own conflicts as he compared the kind Alex of this reality to someone attacking like a savage beast.

El's sudden laugh made Steelskin look up at her curiously. "You know, when I first got here, I didn't like or trust Alex. But that dope didn't seem to notice or care. He never stopped talking to me, offering advice, even just an ear to listen to. You think he's a tough guy? Ask him about the first life he took. Bring tissues.” El frowned before her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Actually, don't ask him. He'll be mopy for a week. He said to me once, that he went from scared to terrified to crazy to so crazy we was just scared again. Here, he's back down to scared, and that's good enough.”

Steelskin sniffled as El paused, growing serious again.

“...But we were right too. Sometimes there's no good answer. We just got stuck being the one pulling the trigger.”

“Does this...” Steelskin paused, his deepest fear rising up again. “Does this mean I’m gonna have to...”

“Do it again? Gods, I hope not. Once was enough for me... Not that I wouldn't if it meant sparing somepony else that guilt.” El’s eyes started to mirror the haunted look in Steelskin’s.

She got up and knelt in front of him, making him look her in the eyes.

“It will be your choice and even if you have to do something terrible, you can know that I won’t judge. It also will not make you anything other than who you are; a kind, dependable, and self-sacrificing pony. I know that whatever decision you might make in the future, you’ll be making the best decision you can with what you have.”

Steelskin gave a weak smile even as El’s turned bitter.

“And at least the Alchemical Exalted you know isn't going to hack into your brain because she thinks it's time to get your hands dirty,” She whispered more for herself, looking down and almost snarling.

Steelskin also looked down, having no clue what to say to that, and was suddenly reminded of something.

“Uhm... didn’t you have a nudity taboo?

“Meh,” El replied, snapping out of her funk. “Kinda got sick of it since every once in a while I still accidentally revert back to looking like a robot.”

Her eyes got a slightly malicious glint. “Besides, Alex and Trace are cute when they try not to look.” She tapped her chin and looked out the window pensively. “I think the real reason I do it is because all of the ponies actually stare more when I’m clothed.

“Rarity must be disappointed,” Steelskin remarked.

She looked at Steelskin, noticing less pain in his eyes. Slapping him on the shoulder encouragingly, she added “Glad you’re feeling better... And, no, not really. She’s more into the over-the-top outfits anyway and she’s relieved that I’m destroying her creations less.”

He gave a sigh, but still smiled. “Thanks for listening... Still kinda tired and bummed out, but...”

“Great,” She said, not waiting for him to lose the spark of happiness in his eyes. “Let’s go find your friends and get some celebratory ice cream.”

“Sure thing, Pinkie Pie,” Steelskin said with a laugh.