Very different beneath the surface

by Slick Dash


A restless night for most

“Well, Macintosh went ahead of us, so hopefully he’s told the rest of the family what’s goin’ on. Means we got one less thin’ to do I suppose!” Laughed Applejack, as she led AJ down the winding country lane towards the farm that was quickly looming out of the night. AJ nodded, but something was amiss in her movements.

“You a’right there sugar cube?” Applejack asked the silent pony. The double simply stared at her feet as they stepped one after the other.
“Umm, it’s summit you just said, the REST of the family.” Applejack frowned.
“Yeah, what about it?” AJ looked up at straight into Applejacks identical eyes.
“Who is the REST of your family?” Applejack wasn’t sure to laugh or gasp in surprise. A nervous chuckle escaped her lips as the two continued past the front gate of the farm land.

“Now you’re just pullin’ mah tale, aint’yah!” AJ looked back at applejack and shook her head. Not a single hint of a joke was shown on her face. Applejack immediately stopped laughing, realising how serious this double of herself was.
“Well.” She began delicately. “There’s Granny Smith?” The name didn’t seem to mean anything to the otherworldly pony. “Big Macintosh, as you know,” AJ nodded. “And of course there’s Apple Bloom!” She smiled at her other self.

“Apple Bloom?” Applejack stopped dead in shock. Her mouth hung open as she stared at the other pony slightly ahead of her. AJ gazed back confused, “I’m sorry, is she important here?” Apple jack’s jaw nearly pulled out of place from hanging so low. She stuttered and stumbled over her words as she tried to reason with the other pony.
“S-She’s your- I mean my- I mean OUR baby sister!” Now it was AJ’s turn to look surprised. She stared back incredulously at the neater version of herself.
“S-S-sister?” She asked astonished.

“Yeah! Little Apple Bloom! She has a red mane and a yellow coat? Maybe you called her something else in your world?” AJ shook her head again.
“It’s always just been me and Mac.” She bit her lip at the thought of her brother, still in that horrible place she had finally escaped from. “It...had been anyway.”

Applejack and her double continued up the sloping path towards the farmhouse. The Stetson wearing pony glanced at the ragged looking creature beside her. “So why d’you think you never had a little sister like me?” She asked. They reached the porch of the house, AJ sighed and stopped just before they reached the door. Applejack waited patiently for her response.
“I don’ need to think Applejack, I know. The reason I don’t have a sister like you...” She looked straight into her double’s matching green eyes. “Is because Empress Celestia ordered my parents to be killed when I six months old.”

.........................................

“You won’t get anythin’ outta me!”
“Come now sweet heart, surely we can be reasonable, after all I believe I’m being quite accommodating, all things considered.”
“Loosen these chains and I’ll really show you how grateful I am!” Macintosh lay chained in place on a wrack. Somewhere in the dark that shrouded the room lay some unseen and malevolent entity, taunting him from the safety of the shadows.
“Come now, we know that if I did that, you’d try something...” A face leered out from behind the wrack just behind Mac’s ear. “Treasonous.” The elegant lips whispered.

“It aint treason if it’s what EVERYPONY wants!” shouted Mac as he pulled at his bindings. The face grew serious, its lips turned from a grin to a scowl.
“You are implying that my subjects detest my reign on the thrown. Now that IS treason!” the long horn in the centre of her head began to glow with a misty energy. The same energy began to twist the levers on each corner of the wrack, pulling Mac’s limbs hard. He let out a loud scream of pain, but quickly got a hold of himself, trying not to give her the satisfaction. He clenched his teeth tight and panted through them in rasping breaths.

Specks of spit flew from his mouth and spattered the floor as the stallion grunted in pain until the turning bolts stopped. “Now, dear, I detest doing that so”-
“Then why are you doing it yourself? Surely you could get one of those lackeys outside to do it instead.” The red stallion jerked his head in the direction of the door he had been dragged through hours before. “That’s right!” He shouted, into the shadows ahead of him, hoping he was addressing the being’s general direction. “Because you’re a violent, heartless, soulless, evil BITCH!”

Macintosh clenched his teeth waiting for the chains to pull harder, but they never grew any more tort. There was silence throughout the chamber, a terrible, screaming silence. “Draig, take which ever hoof you wish.” Pain screamed into life in Mac’s right hoof and he cried out in shock! He stared down to see a tail, purple, scaly and huge, retracting from view.

Every nerve in his right leg felt as though it had exploded. He looked down to see his hoof, shattered into at least four segments. Chips of the bone like material fell and spread across the floor beneath him, as blood slowly began to drip from the cracks in his flesh and pool around the base of the wrack. “You hurt my feelings there sweetheart.” Cackled the voice from behind the veil of shadows. The laugh echoed horribly, spreading across the room until it bombarded Macintosh from every direction.

Eventually the monstrous laugh died into unrelenting silence once more. When the voice spoke again, all humour had been dropped. The voice was now cold and demanding. “What spell did they use?!”
“What?” Asked Macintosh, shocked by the strange question.
“What spell?! Don’t play dumb, I know you hid it! WHAT SPELL!?!?” The figure now loomed out of the dark, gliding like a wraith. She came face to face with Macintosh, their noses only an inch apart from one another.

Mac chuckled, the laugh slowly grew into an unbelievable guffaw, he threw his head back letting the sound wring out around the room. The magical glow grew again, silencing Mac as it twisted the bolts again, stretching his legs to their fullest extent. “Am I missing a joke here?” The figure asked. Mac couldn’t help but chuckle again.
“Well, you’re obviously missing something, but it aint a joke! My apologies your majesty...” He spat on the pure white face in front of him. The glob landed just below the dark red eye that loomed ahead of him “I aint hidden anything! Which means, you’ve lost your only chance of finding them!”

The bolts twisted again silently, without any witty comment from the figure before him. The red eyes simply stared back at his green ones with silent fury. Mac gritted his teeth again, grunting at the pain as he felt his left foreleg begin to burn white hot in pain. With an agonising crack, the foreleg displaced itself from his shoulder. He screamed, unable to bare the pain through his shoulder and the building pain in his broken back hoof now being pulled at a horrible angle by the chains still binding it.

“That’s right Macintosh,” The figure smiled. “Scream! Scream like the pathetic creature you are! Scream. Scream! SCREAM!” Celestia’s eye’s burned with rage as Macintosh’s pain climaxed, bones cracked, blood spurted from his broken hoof-

-“MAC!” Flutt bolted upright. Her skin was on fire, sweat poured down her face as she frantically fumbled out of the bed and rushed to the window. She swung it open and gasped for the welcoming fresh air. Her heart threatened to burst from her chest with its relentless pounding against her ribs. She panted and gasped for a few more moments before she regained her composure.

Flutt looked up into the sky filled with its many shining stars, replaying the dream over in her head. The terror began to set it. As Flutt gazed into the sanguine sky, she realised what her dream was telling her. Mac, HER MAC, was in trouble. She shuddered at the memory of the crunch of Mac’s bones under the scaly tail, and the cracking of his limbs set into the torture wrack. Quickly growing queasy at the thoughts.

“Uhhh... F-Flutt? A-are you alright?” Asked a timid voice from behind the Pegasus. Flutt whirled round, ready to attack any unfriendly face that approached. But it was only Fluttershy. Her eyes were bleary and only half open, Flutt had obviously woken her with her shout as she woke up. Flutt opened her mouth, ready with a sarcastic response, but she bit back at the last second.

She cleared her head, and addressed the hospitable Pegasus as politely as she could. “Yeah...Fluttershy.” She still wasn’t too fond of calling the other Pegasus her own name, but she dealt with it. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep it down.” She turned back to the window and looked out on the night once again.

“You know...” Fluttershy began, coming up beside Flutt to gaze out of the window beside her. “I know what I look like just before I cry.”
“So?” The other Pegasus asked dubiously.
“So, that should mean I’m able to tell when you’re about to cry too.” Fluttershy turned and faced her copy, who starred stubbornly at the sky refusing to look into her identical teal eyes.

“Is it your version of Big Macintosh?” Flutt was surprised, she turned to the usual timid Pegasus who stood beside her, her head slightly tilted to one side, a look of worry on her face. Flutt closed her eyes, and laughed bitterly.
“Rainbow Dash...” She muttered to herself. She looked back up. “I’m guessing ‘Dashie’ told you about who we left behind then?” Fluttershy nodded. “Well, yeah. We left him behind, and just now I...” Flutt stopped herself. ‘What the hell am I doing?’ she thought to herself. ‘I don’t know her at all, and I’m about to tell her anything she wants?’ Flutt tore herself away from the window and flung herself back onto the guest bed she had been sleeping on before. “Never mind.” She finished lamely.

Fluttershy watched the back of the lying Pegasus rise and fall with each breath. She sighed, feeling terrible that she couldn’t help the pony that looked so miserable. “Ok.” Fluttershy said quietly, heading towards her room once again. “If you need to talk I”-
“I don’t!” Flutt cut across her, leaving the cottage in silence accept for the light breathing of the animals in the other rooms as they slept.

“O...k...” Fluttershy returned to her room. Flutt lay there, she wriggled further into the soft covers to keep warm. She glared at the wall she faced.
“Go talk to Pink if you wanna talk about leaving people behind.” She grumbled to no one at all. She closed her eyes hard and buried her face into her pillow. “Because I don’t want to!” Then she lay in a grumpy silence, as she waited to fall back to sleep.