//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: The End of an Old Day // by Satsuma //------------------------------// Mortar. Brick. Mortar. Brick. Mortar. It would be a lot easier if her eyes didn't keep fogging up. And if the cement didn't keep sticking to her fingers. 'I won't be able to get if off for days,' she thought. That wasn’t the worst part. Not by far. The worst part was that the simple nature of the task kept her mind free from preoccupation. There couldn’t have been a more dangerous moment for her idle mind to run wild. She would drag her thoughts away every time they strayed to the events of the evening but there back to the earlier events of the evening, but eventually, through a mixture of frustration and petrifying, morbid curiosity, she allowed herself to entertain those thoughts. Her plan, so masterfully shaped, was in shambles. it seemed cruel to her that only the intervention of one unpredictable deus ex machina had ended it. Everything that she had built up from nothing over the course of two years, had coming crashing down on top of her head. She’d also been forcefully convinced to reassess her long-term goals and ambitions in life, through what was possibly the most embarrassing, humbling and physically painful method she had ever had the misfortune to experience. ‘And on top of all that,’ she thought bitterly, as she flicked a glob of concrete off a finger, ‘this will be stuck to my nails for a week at least.’ She took a moment to digest her thoughts (they seemed awfully irrelevant, an unusual consideration given the circumstances), and for a moment, she was torn between laughing and crying at the predicament. ‘Pathetic,’ she concluded apathetically, maintaining her emotionally detached visage. She was her other-self now, separate to her own experiences, overlooking herself with a cold, critical gaze. It didn’t last long. She could feel the disappointment welling up, disappointment that she didn’t want to feel. So she tried to distract herself by looking out over the empty parade grounds, through the gaping hole in the wall which she had blasted apart earlier in the evening. The last of the party-goers had left the hall, and even now, a few straggling individuals bunched together and made their way through the otherwise lonesome night. Besides them, there was not a soul to be observed anywhere around the suburban street beyond. She was alone as could be. ‘Same as always,’ she reasoned. 'You've made it on your own this far, you'll never need anyone.’ The tears welling up in her eyes didn’t seem as sad, just a testament to the unfairness that she was sure she had endured, and that she was no longer going to tolerate. “I don’t need them,” she continued in a low mutter. “Not Celestia, the mindless drones of the school, Twilight Sparkle and her magical Element. Not Snips nor Snails. Not even--” She happened to look up and her angry scowl faded. “Flash Sentry,” she finished. It sounded hollow, as if she hadn’t been the one to say it. Their gaze met from across the parade ground, and she could feel his silent observation pull down her hastily constructed wall of egotism. Pretty soon she felt too weak to so much as grit her teeth, and the brick currently in her hand slipped back into its pile. She averted her gaze. “I didn’t need him either,” she mumbled derisively, even though there was no one to hear it but herself. “Him or any of the other incompetent fools around me,” she grumbled. “I could have made it through the portal and taken over Equestria from there.” After a pause, she repeated more firmly, “without them,” seemingly to reassure herself. It was a right, she thought, granted to her on account of her greater capabilities. Then the lofty demeanour of superiority faded and left her in the twilight glow of a yellowing fluorescent bulb. Months Before… The bell rang shrilly in its lofty post atop an anonymous wall, and its report was echoed by many counterparts throughout the school compound. The scraping and thumping of desks opening and closing, chairs scraping, and students raring to be gone joined the cacophony. As the rest of the class filed out amid idle chit-chat, Sunset kept her sullen gaze stayed fixated on her desk. She’d been sitting in the back of one of the many identical classrooms. Everything down to her posture and demeanor had remained constant for the duration of the currently-concluded lesson. She seemed to stare through her textbook, through the teachers who had questioned her on their subject (though she was unflinchingly accurate in her answers nonetheless), and through the few classmates who had reason to converse with her. Five minutes progressed, the uniform silence only punctuated by an occasional deep sigh and a slight change in her posture. It had taken all her self-control not to do so during school hours. It would attract too much attention. Halfway through her third attempt to memorise a particularly convoluted definition through a state of visual defocus, she gave up. Abruptly closing the bulky textbook, stacked it on top of the other similar volumes and slid the whole stack off her desk into her haversack. Then she stood up sharply and pushed in her chair. In a few seconds, it was as if nobody was ever there; a fitting testament to her impermanence. Personally, she felt that being easily forgotten complemented her environment well. After all, no matter where she turned, it all looked the same. The same dusty, linoleum-floored, white-walled corridors, lined with archetypal gunmetal grey lockers, leading to the same classrooms, full of the same half-familiar faces. None of which would give any reaction that they noticed her at all, other than an impassive stare and a glint of half-recognition which seemed to be reserved specially for her. It dulled her mind and took the colour out of everything she saw. Half the time she would seem to come out of a trance and would look around in surprise, all the while asking herself the same question: ‘What am I doing here?’ She was always met with the same silence, before a sad little voice whispered back, ‘you don’t belong here.’ She’d come seeking the rush of infamy that she deserved, a kingdom and a grand adventure of her own, to boot. She hadn’t found it, and now it seemed that she never would. This world, it was alien and bewildering. Nothing had ever felt more unwelcoming, and though she had a place to stay, there was no rest to be found. No purpose. Nothing she ever did seemed to change the world around her, for better or for worse. She didn’t feel like it was her world either and she didn’t know if she could change it, nor did she feel she had a part to play in it. It seemed more like she was an interloper, a guest whose existence was merely tolerated here, if not frowned upon. More than ever, she felt powerless, and small, not at all like when she had stormed out of the Throne Room following her announcement that she would no longer linger as Celestia’s student, and was heading out to find her own destiny. All at once and hardly for the first time, Equestria came to mind. Mental pictures of things like the Summer Sun Celebration, the Hearth’s Warming lights twinkling in the streets of Canterlot, the vast tracts of Everfree Forest, even the familiar shapes on an atlas. Those images weren’t new: they were familiar and called-upon with great fervour, etched in her vision as if they were burned into her retinas. She clung to them, obsessing over every little detail, no matter how irrelevant, or useless. Because she wanted to go home. The portal hadn’t opened in the year since her arrival, and she had hoped it would be an annual event. The last three days, much to her disappointment, had proven that it was not so. So now she was stuck here, in a world that she most certainly would not be finding her destiny in, and she had no idea of how or when she could go home, if ever. The library in Canterlot had only told her so much, and what her own intuition surmised, had evidently failed to happen. She abruptly noticed that she was out of the school compound already, and that her every step brought her closer to the portal. She felt nothing as she approached it, and even less, if it was possible, when she ran a hand gently over the smooth-worn granite. ‘Definitely no portal here’, she thought, and she didn’t feel anything as she turned and walked away aimlessly. She walked silently, not really thinking about any one thing long enough to matter. Lost in thought, she had been putting distance between herself and the inert portal, but had not been considering her direction of travel. Now she found herself back in the school block again. The hallway looked the same, with all its standard adornments. So did the classrooms. Even the sunlight streaming through what few windows the structure afforded looked to be no brighter or dimmer. It made her feel much worse than she already did. Much, much worse. The headache had continued building… She laughed somewhat cruelly at the recollection, but disconnection was all that she could manage. The bitter chill of solitude was something she both loathed and welcomed at the same time. “Hug your sadness like an eyeless doll,” she quipped impersonally, and shook her head as she slapped another layer of mortar onto the raw brick. She had no idea why the poem, simply titled ‘A Sad Child’, had chosen this moment to surface in her memory. “You’re not a child anymore….” As she recalled the rest of the poem, the Indeed, she seemed to be reverting to the most basic emotional reflex of wanting to cry. It was hardly something that only children did, but it was a reaction she thought she had mastered and put down already. So now she was nothing more than a scared, helpless and possibly hopeless child without anything to draw comfort from, after being denied something that she wanted badly. Strange that this feeling barely stayed long, despite its cold comfort She noticed with a start that it wasn’t the first time she had thought like this. In fact, the last time was just a few weeks ago. When she had dumped Flash. Or had he dumped her? She snorted in derision. ‘I didn’t need him,’ she thought hastily, and with that she put the thought out of her mind. Heaven knew she tried, but those scenes kept coming back. She remembered strutting away from where she had left him, mouth agape and in the sympathetic company of his “bros”. It hadn’t felt real, now that she realised. The sudden surge of confidence, pride and lofty apathy,...it hadn’t seemed as obvious at the time, but it was all so surreal, so insignificant. A layer of varnish, which was it. A layer of well-applied, unbroken emotional varnishing. And the more she thought about what had happened then, and about what had just taken place, the more she felt the urge to cry. Despite it being the most basic reaction--practiced from birth-- of a person who didn’t get what he or she wanted, it was nonetheless a course of action that Sunset considered below her. A few stray tears corroded their way through her facade and clouded her vision. She blinked in irritation and swiped the back of her hands over her eyes. As was her usual modus operandi, she pressed down as much as she could on it; stamped it out until she could no longer feel anything but a strangely euphoric, empty numbness. Perhaps, she had thought, if she had to try so hard then he wasn’t the right one for her. If she had to wait so long then she would never get anything, and it was time to move on to greener pastures. It all rang hollow now, and she knew that no matter what justification she offered, it was her fault. She now knew that no amount of justification was going to do any good, that it would still have felt as painful regardless. But the events of the night kept recurring, replaying, revolting against her, so that she was revolted. Even now, a single line was playing again and again. "I have magic, and you have nothing!" the multi-faceted voice spoke. Her own voice. "I can't believe I would ever say something so corny...." she muttered bitterly. She gave the the growing plain brick wall a particularly vicious swipe with the crusted metal spade she had been using. More tears. 'Just about time,' she thought, disgusted. 'The concrete's drying up.' She should just forget all this. It wasn't worth thinking about it. Brick. Mortar. Brick. Mortar. Shame. Such a shame.... It wasn’t the first time Flash sat with the all the girls, but it was the first time that a fullness of empathy dominated the mutual atmosphere. It was the silence in the group that conveyed most of the emotion, not Pinkie Pie or Fluttershy's sighs, Rarity's ranting plea to the stars, or Rainbow Dash and Applejack's silent vigil, eyes affixed on the now-closed portal. The emotion wasn't new, nor was he sure that it was true, but now....it was gone. Surely and completely gone was the ecstasy that had been on his mind since he'd seen their Wondercolts advertising run (that was what it was, he wouldn’t mince his words), up to the very moment where her hand had slipped, so gently out of his own as she made her way to the portal. The thought came and he clenched his hand. Too late, the residual warmth of that brief touch bled into the night wind. ‘The one that got away,’ he mused. "….well, ah'll bet you’re the biggest casualty, eh, Flash?" Applejack's half-hearted jibe snapped him out of his reverie. "Hm?" He looked up, didn't really know how to reply. He noticed Rarity, instead turning his attention to the other members of the group. Rarity was milling around awkwardly and smoothed over his soft guitar case, indicating that she should take a seat. She did so, after running her hands over her dress, even more gingerly than usual, if that was possible. "Not pleasant for any of us, I guess..." he finally offered, after finding an answer he could ascertain was true. Pinkie Pie nodded emphatically, attempting to truss up her now-limp hair. It didn’t work. "I don’t think it’s going well for her either...," Fluttershy mumbled, casting a furtive gaze at something behind Flash. He turned to look, as Sunset Shimmer laid a brick down, then reached into the wheelbarrow and drew up another. She sighed, seemed to direct her empty gaze into the brick in her hand, and without warning, flared up, tossing it against her partially constructed wall. It bounced harmlessly off and hit her in the shin, before the wall itself gave way partially and a gaping hole appeared. Rarity drew a sharp breath and Rainbow chuckled without meaning it emptily. She bent over, clutching at her shin with her head down. She didn't seem to move at first, but Flash could see the gentle jerking of her upper torso that indicated she was sobbing to herself. He stood up, thought of sitting back down, and seemed to stumble. Then his legs started carrying him, very slowly and very quickly all at once, to the ruined wall. He ignored Applejack’s query, ignored it again when Rainbow repeated it, and continued walking towards Sunset. He felt vaguely as if he were were returning to some vice or bad habit. The afternoon sun somehow found a way to catch her eye even as she wandered the stuffy corridors of CHS, stepping haphazardly in the current of afternoon heat flowing through the hallways. The same recurring lockers seemed to alternate between the left and right walls every time she passed, the slap of boots on linoleum, unnaturally constant in timbre. Thump. Thump. Thump. It drove the dull nail of migraine further into her left eye. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that her bag had slipped off her shoulders somewhere. The soft thud of book and fabric was outweighed by the single notion; I want to go home. Listlessness led her to a corner in the corridors barely different from the rest, except that the sun had not penetrated the shapeless black where windowlesness and no lighting intersected. She ambled towards it, because looking at anything else stung the eyes. Reduced to squinting and biting her lips to keep from whimpering, and heading for the centre platform vertically bisecting this floor and the next, her mind returned to an earlier time,before she was a royal scholar. The linoleum floor was replaced with dirty brick, and the smell of bleach cleaning agents with urban refuse. Back in a dark alley, cowering and shivering from the winter frost that quilted over Canterlot. All alone. Tears blurred her vision and muffled sobs stifled years ago resurfaced in her chest, bubbling up to her lips. She backed into a corner of the stairwell, curled behind her shins. It could have been a minute or an hour, when a door out of sight clicked open and an outpouring of people spilled over into the corridor adjacent to her stairwell and half a level down. They looked and sounded like a group of carollers to Sunset. The memory played out in perfect dystopian synchrony with the present, and they walked past in warm, apathetic huddles. Her head sank back down beneath her wrists, hiding her sight from a past that she dreaded to revisit. The cheery banter faded eventually, disappearing down the chilly lane in her memory. That passing decade left behind a single blue-haired male with a stylish red-and-white bass guitar slung across his back. He had lagged behind the others to lock up, and had been spared the bulk of their chatter. The relative silence brought with it a single sniffle originating somewhere close. He stopped, straightened, straining to hear. More sniffling. Muffled sobs, a sigh. Unbeknownst to Sunset, he looked towards the stairwell to his left. The sight of a person--apparently trying to sleep in a stairwell--greeted him. He knew the deadlines usually started piling up in August, but this was getting ridiculous…. “....Hey….” The dishevelled curtain of fiery red hair shot apart in a frenzy. Two turquoise eyes peeked out at him, paused, then their owner hurriedly wiped a sleeve across her face. Tear streaks could be removed, but bloodshot eyes took a good night’s sleep at the very least. Maybe she could pretend that she was just tired. “Hi,” she replied hastily, although she found her voice hoarse and her throat somewhat swollen. She cleared it in the silence, took the outstretched hand that was offered to her. It’s surprisingly strong grip pulled her gently to her feet, which she reciprocated with a muffled “thank you”. “I….I uh, heard you, uh, sitting here, and….are you alright?” Flash stifled a cringe upon offering his query. “Yes,” the girl said, mainly to his shoes. “Thank you.” An electronic bell rang shrilly through the now-empty corridor. “Please be reminded that the school gates will be closed at 5 pm sharp, and that students are advised to leave the school 15 minutes ahead of time. Students aren’t allowed to stay on campus after hours unless it’s been cleared with the principal.” The click of a receiver on the other end transmitted over, with finality. Flash turned back to the other student, who had been hastily straightening her attire, brushing her hair behind her ears….she froze when she noticed he had been watching. There was nothing abnormal about her composure so far, but he felt that something was off anyway. “I guess we had better take our leave,” he offered, trying his best to smile. She nodded, again a little too readily, and for the first time, he noticed the puffiness around her eyes, the telltale dampness in the corners, that did not quite mean that she was ‘alright’. They walked in silence down the corridors. At some point of time, they encountered a schoolbag that seemed to have bled its contents out as it dragged itself along the hallway. She seemed mildly surprised at the sight, then groped around behind her shoulders, then hurriedly got on her knees to retrieved the scattered effects. Flash helped as much as he could, and passed a joke that neither of them really noticed, but both laughed at anyway. Then he came across a hardcover, its spine braced with thick leather strips, and its front adorned with a beautiful bevelled symbol of coloured glass, but not any kind of glass he had seen before. The colours looked crystalline and solid at the same time. It didn’t look anywhere near cheap too. “Hey, is this yours?” He waved the book over his head. A clatter behind him called his attention. The girl had dropped the stack of books in her hands, and stared entranced at the book. For a moment, it looked like she was about to keel over, before she remembered that he was there and averted her gaze. “Yes, it is,” she said, as she collected herself, and her texts. She took the book hurriedly and all but jammed it in her bag, working the clasp and strap furiously, cussing when she got a knot wrong. “All right, that’s that. Thanks,” she said, with a slight and fragile smile. Flash smiled back. They resumed their walk. “So,” he ventured, “you’re that transfer student right? Literature on Wednesday in Room 11-B?” She nodded absent-mindedly. Come to think of it, she’d seen him a few times, but almost always in the centre of a gaggle of frivolous-looking girls and some sportsmen. And to think that he paid her more attention, than she did him. He notices me…. As if to reaffirm her thoughts, he asked why she always sat at the back when there were seats up front. She shrugged, said she didn’t fancy being bored to death. “I call bullshit,” he retorted with a smirk. “I look behind me sometimes and you’re all like--” He mimed the act of furiously scribbling on a notepad, emphatically adding a punctuation point at the end for good measure. They both laughed with a little more warmth this time. She shrugged. “Got me there,” she conceded, “I guess it just….doesn’t make sense to sit up front. I can hear and see from back there.” “Doesn’t it get lonely?” He might as well have stuck out his foot and caught her in the shins mid-stride. She stopped jarringly and the wan smile melted off her features. “Like you wouldn’t imagine.” A sudden compulsion caused her to turn to Flash in panic, as if she was afraid that he would disappear. She really was afraid of that now. Tell him. “Yes?” Her gaze broke off and she brushed a hand over her eyes again, pretending to comb it through her hair. “It’s….nothing,” she lied, then hurried to catch up with him. Tell him, the compulsion insisted. “I suppose it wouldn’t change a thing, even if I were to sit up front.” She shrugged again. “Nobody I know in that class. Or any other.” She could hardly keep the bitterness out of her voice. Damn, she was starting to cry again. She stopped mid-stride as her vision fogged up with tears. A surprisingly gentle hand took hold of her firmly above the elbow, guiding her somewhere off to a side and sitting her down on something low. Try as she might, she didn’t stop crying. Later in retrospect, she was also grateful that Flash hadn’t tried to hold her hand or put an arm around her. She would have headbutted him despite the very real fear that she’d gone and scared him off once and for all. Her head shot up, just to make sure he was still there. He was. “I’m sorry, it’s just….” she held back a sob. “Feels strange being somewhere new?” She nodded miserably. “It feels like I don’t belong here, and being here doesn’t make a lot of difference. ‘Transient’, I guess you’d call it.” “I have no idea what that word means, but I get what you’re trying to say.” Flash somewhat grimaced. “Or maybe I don’t. I was from further up north, one of the big cities. I mean, I wasn’t a cross-border transfer, but Equestria can be a big place.” He sighed. “Even now, I still kinda get the feeling sometimes that I’m not as much a part of, well, everyone else, as I could be.” He paused. “It’s the way they talk, the way they act, as if it’s nothing unusual. But it feels different doesn’t it?” He glanced sidelong at her. She nodded without looking at him. “Just reminds me that….it’s….not home, I guess.” “The best part,” Sunset added, “nobody knows but us. Just us.” She was upright again now, and her hands were clenched in fists, braced on the seam of her skirt. “Damn it, it sucks.” She wondered now what her former mentor would say in response to 'such language!' She turned fiercely to Flash. “You know you’re the only person I’ve talked to for a month?” She slouched in agitation, hands still gripping the seams of her clothing even harder. “Talking to anyone’s the least of your concerns,” he replied, slowly and carefully, “I haven’t found anyone who could really understand what I meant, I mean really understand it, for about two years now.” He wasn’t outraged, the way Sunset sounded, just tired. “I mean, they all nod and say ‘yeah, I get that’, but I don’t think they do. Not the way we do, anyway.” He rubbed the back of his neck in agitation. “My parents were so eager for a fresh start that I never wanted to trouble them by bringing it up. My little sister’s just too young to remember. "Sometimes it feels like it’s just me.” He didn’t as much see it as feel Sunset’s posture relax a little, and she bumped his shoulder with sympathy. “That’s rough.” He waved it off on impulse, put a hand over his face in sudden shame. “Sorry you had to hear of that. I’m not trying to make light of your problems.” “I could say the same.” It was getting late, and the sun sagging towards the concrete horizon of downtown. Across the parade square, from the wide front steps of CHS, the view was something worth pausing at, to say the least. It glittered in shades of burning sepia and deep, long shadows that would soon spread to encompass the entire school ground. The strong light and lack of corresponding heat always gave Flash the impression that the light was shining through him, laying him bare and making him transparent. It always did, but now more than ever. He took a deep breath. “I try to make sure I get to watch the sun set everyday. It’s the only thing that didn’t change, maybe won’t ever change.” They sat and watched, caught by surprise in mutually comfortable inaction, as the dying light gilded over them. “I never quite got your name, by the way.” “You just said it yourself.” “Come again?” “It’s Sunset. Sunset Shimmer.”