//------------------------------//
// Nightmare 
// Story: A Dinky Love Story 
// by Cryptid-Kid 
//------------------------------//

"Amy..."
"What?"

"Look."

The sobbing unicorn managed to pull her head away from the floor of the rusty car to peer at a flooding light heading their way. Her purple eyes bulged wide with a brimming hope - until she noticed the fact that the blinding, beaming yellow light that fought the darkness intensely and clashed with her watery eyesight, was straying dangerously close to their broken car.
"D-Dinky-"
"Is it gonna stop?"
Surfacing at a quick speed, a truck roared its way down the road in front of them, momentarily lighting the gravel above its trail for a light second and carrying on to get closer and closer to them. 
"We're saved." Amethyst wiped the cold sweat running down her forehead. 
Before anyone could think to respond, Amethyst's door swung open into the night again. She had no time to lose, and did not hesitate to climb out of her seat to wave her arms frantically in the air.
"Stop! Stop!"
To the sisters' relief, the truck began to slow in speed, eventually barely trailing its way along the road and the sound of screechy, stopping tires filled the cold night air. When the vehicle came to a full stop, the only sound they could hear was their heartbeats.
A moment of silence followed, and it was so silent that they might have been able to hear a pen drop onto the gravelly road below them.
And then the door of the truck creaked open ever-so-slightly. Dinky's eyes narrowed as she squinted to make out the shape of a bulky, muscular stallion climb out of the driver's seat through the harsh, ghostly glow of his headlights.
Amethyst might have whimpered slightly at first when she saw him, but it didn't matter. They needed help, darn it.
Dinky took one look at that pony, and in that same moment the awkward, advancing silence was caught by her gasp of surprise.
"Hey! I know you!" Dinky whisper-shouted as she herself made it down to the ground and out of the car - she knew that scar - it was that pony from the restaurant, their waiter... 
	WTF?!
The pony only raised an eyebrow and scratched the nape of his neck. "I remember," he said quietly.
Amethyst swallowed. "Listen, I'm sorry to bother you, but we're lost and we're trying to get to Fillydelphia from here. I-I ran a flat tire... Do you have a spare?"
The stallion simply nodded and turned to retrieve said requested object. 
Thank Celestia.
It took a minute, but the stallion's silhouette reappeared after vanishing behind the truck momentarily. Pressed firmly to his side was a black rubber tire, held in place by the battered and torn wing of his that was draped over the object. His awkward gate was soon recognized by the mares as he half-limped over to them.
Amethyst's magic gripped the tire and she levitated it across from him, the object slipping from his own grasp and into her hypothetical telekinetic control.
"Thank you so much," she whispered to him, a slight smile abroad her face. Her eyes slipped up to scan his own face for a minute before instantly retreating to the ground once she noticed his scar. 
Nopony said anything for a long time. They just stood there, staring at each other, at the ground, at random places in the night's forest until Dinky coughed loudly to break the awkwardness.
"What a coincidence running into you here," she muttered in a pathetic attempt to make conversation with their savior who had appeared out of the thin forest air.
He simply nodded, obviously not a pony of many words.
"So... what're you doing out here?"
"Going home," he simply muttered.
Dinky stood confused for a minute, wondering how he could possibly be knowing his way through the labyrinth of a dark forest, and how he got from the restaurant to here in an effort to get home. (But then again, you never know, she concluded to herself.)
"Do you know how to change a tire?"
The stallion nodded grimly and pried the tire from Amethyst's grip to set it down carefully on the side of the road. He then turned to grab his toolbox from the back of his beat-up old truck. 
Scarred and roughed hooves turned the work of a genius, and the mysterious pony had finished for them in a matter of minutes with little trouble.
He simply gave a curt nod at the praise he was offered by the unicorns whom he had saved.
As if he could read Dinky's mind, the mysterious stallion stared into her eyes with his pair of icy cerulean ones. Finally he spoke in a raspy voice. "Just take the straight path through the forest until you reach a wooden sign that says 'Fillydelphia: 30 Miles Away.' It should mark the end of the forest. Then you're gonna need to turn right and dodge through the neighborhoods for awhile until you reach a long narrow street called Saint Pegasus that curves into the city."
Amethyst screwed the knowledge into her brain. "Okay... I think I got it."
Dinky rolled her eyes and shook her head before bouncing off into the warmth and safety of the car to retrieve her notebook and pencil.
She dug around in her saddlebag, which was perched on the pile of luggage flooding the back, her hoof feeling around in the cramped darkness to reach a notebook and pencil. 
Her mother's snoring filled her ears and it comforted her to know that she hadn't waken up yet and panicked with them. Dinky knew how much of a heavy sleeper her mother was, and at the same time she suffered from great anxiety at times. 
The filly stepped back out into the cold night air yet again to use her golden magic, bringing the skinny wooden stick a few inches away from her face. The steady flowing glow of the luminescent flashlight radiating from her horn allowed her to see as she jotted down the directions and notes given to her.
She concluded her note page by shutting her notebook proudly with a smile on her face. "Thank you," she told him in an excitable yet quiet manner.
The stallion shrugged before turning tail to climb back inside his tall white truck. That would be the last time Dinky ever saw that shadowy figure's scar run across his eye. She hoped that, at least. Still, it was very generous of him to stop and help them out. Dinky wouldn't long to see that creepy-looking stallion anytime soon nonetheless.
As the ponies all settled in their car, shutting their doors so that the cold air outside wrapped around the car's metal cover and tried in vain to leak t through the minor crevices the car offered. Dinky shivered from what she hoped was the cold as she peered over her sister's shoulder and into the shady truck's windshield, noticing those piercing blue eyes carve their way into her chilled soul. The truck reared back, turning to swerve onto its specific side of the road as it was going the opposite way, and the rumbling sound of its shape steamrolling down the path became foggier and foggier with each second. Soon nopony could hear anything, unless they counted their mother's sleep-roaring (which was painfully loud for both pairs of ears.)
Amethyst turned the key that ignited the car's fire in silence. If she said anything at all, it was lost under her mother's incessant snoring. Dinky didn't say anything either, for a long time. She simply tried to doze back into the calm world of sleep while they prepared to roll through the forest.
Creak. The car moved forwards, the new tire edging forward to roll a bit with the others. Amethyst's hoof pressed on the lever that triggered the wheels' movements, and the car began rumbling down the forest lane with low speed. 
They were off into the night.
Dinky didn't even remember falling asleep.

Her soft, hoarse voice filled the air as it whispered for anyone. "Hello?"
The only response given was the flicker of a shadowy figure darting to retreat to its stormy caves. 
Fear trickled down her throat, where she stuffed the unwanted emotion in an attempt to be brave. Suddenly the pony just felt so... puny as she stared into the depths of the pitch black pools of darkness.
The darkness wrapped around her and she couldn't see anything in front of her. Instinct told her to use her horn magic, but as her brain clicked to enable her familiar aura to course through her horn, it simply flickered for a minute and died out, leaving her stranded in the night.
Dinky gulped and whispered out into the dusky shade: "Hello... Is anyone here?" her voice echoed through the sea of shadows.
A blanket of darkness became her only option as a wandering path - she couldn't see where she was going, or hear her footsteps as she advanced, and even if she stretched her neck in all sorts of directions she couldn't find the slimmest strand of light flittering to reach her eyes as she had hoped it would.
Blindly following her path, she croaked in a raspy voice much unlike her normal one: "He-hello? H-hey! Where am I?"
Dinky had stopped to ponder why her voice had changed so drastically when her hoof slipped out of her control and she found herself being pinned by her weight over the edge of something steep and dangerous. Trying desperately to regain her balance, her heart pounded as she teetered over the edge, limbs flailing and wobbling in an attempt to save herself. It didn't work.
She wanted to scream for help, but her voice was cut off now. The only thing she could hear was the intense blood pounding through her head and the wind rushing through her ears as she gave way under gravity, toppling over the edge at last and falling down into the night that led to Celestia-knows-where.
She couldn't scream or feel or see anything. She was just plummeting through advancing darkness in absolutely nowhere, and her heart leaped as she braced herself for the hard landing ahead of her. 
But it never came. Down she fell, her speed rising with every passing second the unicorn charged headfirst into a new inch of the sea of darkness she found herself wrapped in. There was no ground, there was no sky. There was nothing, only darkness and fear down the endless abyss she was falling through.
And then Dinky came to a halt. Her body shuddered and jolted slightly at the sudden strain of action, and she could sense nausea starting to catch up to her as it rushed to her head.
She didn't even know where she was.
She was just floating. In midair. And she couldn't tell how she was doing so or where the heck she was - there was only the shadowy and cold embrace of darkness falling around her as her guide, which wasn't much at all.
Her hooves felt around for the ground - or at least something that could be touched - but there was nothing. It felt utterly strange to just be floating in midair without any help or any visible explanation as to why it was happening, but Dinky's brain was reeling too fast from shock for her to care too much about it.
The pony didn't even flinch or move her body drastically. She just froze up in fear, wondering where she was, and how she had been in this absurd situation. Dinky gritted her teeth as she wondered if she were to move or do something wrong, she would screw up everything and she would go plummeting down into the trench again. She considered this idea and stayed perfectly still, eyes shut tight in terror as she waited for what awaited her coincidentally.
She could see nothing until a faint glowing light teased her closed eyes' senses. Opening them to mere slits, a sudden harsh vibrant light began overflowing her sight.
Out of instinct she winced, shielding her poor eyes from the intense radiance before it died down to a crisp, darkened yet fiery glow.
Dinky guessed it was safe to look now. She didn't even want to, but the pony couldn't stop herself from staring at what there was in front of her.
A pale pegasus with a sleek cut glared at her through the purple rage burning in his luminescent eyes. The light still hurt her own sensitive eyes, as she had not yet adjusted to the level of brightness displayed before her now, and she let out a moan of discomfort as she felt that intense heat burn holes right through her fur. Well, not literally.
"Rumble?" she hissed, eyeing him as he snarled at her furiously. She didn't think she had ever seen a pony so disturbed or so frustrated. He shook himself, but didn't answer. "R-Rumble, what the freakin' hay?! What's wrong with you? Answer me, please!"
She flinched violently the moment his booming voice echoed through her ears.
"You left me, Dinky Doo."
Dinky stood in bewilderment at the sound of his outrageously loud, startling voice.
"What?"
"You abandoned me and now I will burn because of you."
	
"Rumble, what the hay are you talking about?"
"Shut up!"
She winced again as he hissed out in front of her, rage seeping from the strange pony's glowing aura. Dinky stood in awe as he growled again, this time his voice slightly being less harsh.
"I gave up everything for you Dinky, and you left me to die."
Her stomach churned as he continuously spat out words of hatred that she had never known existed.
"Rumble! What's gotten into you? What's wrong with you?" Dinky whisper-shouted.
"I loved you and you treated me like trash. You left me behind and now I will perish. I hope you're happy with yourself. This is all your fault."
Dinky's eyebrows raised at his last statement, the first sentence spoken painfully working its way through her veins into her heart. She shook her head to clear everything.
"Rumble, what are you talking about?" she screamed loudly, but he did not even barely flinch. He stood completely normal, not intimidated by her anger one bit. She wondered if he could smell fear.
The smell of smoke flooded her nostrils, and she coughed at the overwhelming presence of such a thing. Shutting her eyes in an attempt to block the thick black haze of the smoke out of her senses, she growled as she noticed a wave of the fiery cloud wrap itself around her, cutting air from her lungs.
She tried to squeal as she could barely breathe, what thin air she could reach being pathetic and barely operative. 
Dinky opened her eyes at the sound of a distinctly masculine voice piercing the moment to stare at Rumble through the cloud of smoke.
He was now cloaked in a fiery coat of flames that slowly began to engulf him. Shrieks and moans of agony made her shudder with fear as she took in the sincerity of the moment. Those genuine cries of terror mocked her, sending a wave of anxiety down her weak body.
"Rumble?!"
	
The pegasus was hardly noticeable anymore. Fire stained his coat, burning away at every inch of his body as his desperate cries for help reduced Dinky to tears. Every second sent another intense sensation of deep pain through him as he felt himself roast under the unbelievably scorching flames. 
"HELP ME."
Dinky couldn't bear to listen to the sound of his pained voice, and she would have moved if she hadn't felt immobilized.
Her hooves and body were locked firmly into place. The unicorn struggled over a matter of seconds to reach him, so desperately striving to, but she just... couldn't.
A pang of sincere panic shuddered through her. She couldn't let him just burn under those flames. She needed to save him. She needed him. He needed her.
"Rumble!" she wailed, hoping he heard her through the trauma he was pit against on his deathbed. Her heart shattered to a million pieces as there was not even a weak, hoarse response muttered from the burning pegasus.
But she was just so attached to him that it started to drive her insane being stuck in place. The pony temporarily went mad with fury at trying in vain to break free from her invisible prison.
She fought and she struggled and she jerked violently inside, but could not overcome her paralyzed state. The pony screamed in horror and frustration as she grew increasingly anxious to reach him.
A feminine voice barely touched her ear.
"Dinky!"
It didn't matter. She had let her best friend die and it was all her fault. Tears streamed down the sides of her face as she repeatedly shouted his name, hoping desperately that somehow he would spring from his fiery prison into her arms and hold her.
"Dinky!" 
She had failed. She was the worst. What a horrible, disgusting-
"DINKY."

Her eyes snapped open to find subtle darkness around her and the cramped space of the backseat in her family's car. Dinky breathed heavily for a second, eyes scanning her surroundings as she tried to remember what the hay had happened just then.
Her older sister merely rolled her eyes. "Hey, sleep screamer. We're here." Her voice rolled off Dinky's ears.
The unicorn blinked out her fear as she realized how much sweat was running down her body. She could barely mutter a hoarse voice. "Wh..Where?"
Amethyst looked at her like she was an alien from a foreign planet. "...At the motel, stupid."
Oh.
The pony rubbed her eyes as she still struggled to overcome her half-awake state. She tried very hard to calm herself down as the memories of her recent nightmare began to be shoved down her throat.
"Hurry up," Amethyst barked, but the pony's pushy tone only became a buzz in Dinky's ringing head as she managed to somehow stumble out of the car without breaking anything. The icy feeling of cold gravel under her weary hooves chilled her and surprised her further, bringing her further and further from her strange nightmarish fantasy she had just been entranced in.
Blinking the confusion out of her eyes, she shook her head as she tried to forget the trauma she had just been thrown into. Well, she knew it wasn't real, but it still had shocked her greatly. Waking up in the backseat of her mother's car really had made her feel better already, even if the pony rousing her hadn't been particularly friendly.
Although it was still dark outside, she could still manage to see the stallion in front of her. He was a tall, skinny unicorn with tired amber eyes and a scruffy, short red mane that fell behind his ears. His faint pale blue coat shone within the moonlight as he took it upon himself to haul their luggage up to their room. The stallion's horn lit up in a dark midnight shade of blue to lift all their bags a few feet from the ground as he guided them through the nightly parking lot and ushered them inside.
Dinky's stomach churned when she approached the old, broken building. Its dusty brown walls sported a thin layer of paint that was chipping away and stained with strange green substances. Cobwebs sprouted up between decades-old antiques that lay still on various black shelves adorned by the creaky walls. Dinky shuddered as she entered the dark room with its mysterious gothic vibe. A cold feeling crept through her fur as she wondered if the ponies painted on the walls, enclosed by the golden crested picture frames could watch her every move as they did in horror movies. 
Something stirred in the pain of the darkness; Dinky's eye caught sight of a scruffy silhouetted figure about the size of a loaf of bread bolt out from its hoard of shadows. She could hear its sharp claws scratching against the cold wooden floors as the furry creature scampered lowly to the ground so it could peer at them through the shade. Dinky gulped as she met a pair of wide, glowing yellow eyes that stared into her shaken soul. The figure gave a short, raspy hiss as it stepped forward into what little light fell into the creepy motel lobby.
Dinky relaxed her tense body slightly when she recognized the creature as an old black cat with a raggedy pelt and a long, bent tail. The feline's eyes still shocked her, and it didn't take a long time for her to compare the cat's eyes to the bellman's. They were nearly exactly the same, only differing in color. Everything about this place was beginning to shock her and drive her to the bridge of being slightly creeped out.
The cat gave a flick of her tail as she padded off to keep on the lookout for any stray mice that might have escaped her view earlier. Dinky watched the cat's eyes stare at them directly until the cat turned the corner into places unknown.
The lonely halls of the dusky motel made her shiver as she followed the bellman and her family through to the end of a deep and long hall covered with long paintings of historical figures. She noticed the blood red carpet planted beneath them tended to get torn at the edges or dragged out of place.
Finally they reached a tall, dented wooden door painted blue as the night. Slowly it creaked open to reveal a small room flooded with no moonlight. There were two small, lumpy beds laying across the room from each other that were covered in layers of a thin, short and slightly torn bedspread. Dinky felt uneasy as she noticed the glimmer of glass shine across the room and recognized it to be a tall mirror almost edging up to the ceiling. She swore she could make out the outline of a number of creatures that dwelled in the shadows around her. 
The strange bellman nonchalantly set their luggage on the hard floor below them before accepting a tip offered to him by Dinky's mother. He then left them the key to their room before departing back into the creaking sea of darkness with nothing but the faint glow of his horn to guide him.
A light flickered on in the small room, and an unwelcome steady glow of a lamp burned Dinky's vision. She growled as her eyes had not yet adjusted to this foreign source of light. 
Their mother soon disappeared into the door at the end of the room as the two ponies checked out their surroundings.
There was a cobweb-infested couch sitting on top of a ragged gray carpet, a black table with a vase of wilted black flowers perched atop its dusty cover, and various paintings depicting strange and abstract art hanging on the yellow, chipped wallpaper.
Dinky snorted.
"What?" Amethyst said sharply.
"We're not... actually staying... here? For the whole weekend?" Dinky stood staring at her surroundings in bewilderment.
"What's wrong?"
She stared at her sister and gave her a look that one typically gave if they were to witness a great disaster. "What? What do you mean, 'what's wrong?' This place has 'haunted' written all over it." She gestured to her surroundings with a sweep of her hoof.
Amethyst Star rolled her tired purple eyes. Oh how they reminded Dinky of her Rumble's beautiful eyes... She shook the thoughts out of her mind, however. There was no need to think of the pegasus she was so desperately trying to save in her dreamscape at the moment. She listened as her sister spoke: "You don't actually believe in that crap, do you?"
Embarrassment flooded through the pony's blood, but she stuck to her guns. "God, look around you. They might as well have called this place The Bates Motel."
Amethyst narrowed her eyes. "That was just a movie. Anyway, before your stupid imagination gets the best of you, let me just tell you that it's not like we have enough money to stay somewhere.... better. So you're just gonna have to put up with this place for the time being."
	
Normally a pony might have asked if they could stay with the relatives they had come to visit in the first place in their houses. But the ponies that would have done that might have had a normal family with no strange, unnatural and uncommon.... problems. Staying with Dinky's relatives was no picnic. And it wasn't like Dinky's aunts had the best record of safety involving children to brag about.
The ponies shared a mutual yet hostile understanding for a brief moment, just staring into each others' eyes. Dinky blinked out the tension of the moment, shaking her head and sighing.
"I just want to -"
Before she could finish her sentence, her mother burst in through the door she had wandered into a few moments ago. Tucked under her wing were millions of small little glistening stones of soap. Dinky raised an eyebrow at her mother's joyful and childish expression plastered across her face.
"Look, everyone! Complimentary soaps!" 
In a second tons of tiny sweet-smelling soaps carved into stones were scattered across the floor as their mother had thrown them in the air to punctuate her happiness. A rain of the soap had fallen onto the dirty floors below them to their respective dooms. 
The light pegasus sheepishly grinned. "I'll go get some more," she whispered loudly, and flew back into the bathroom where she had emerged from. She left the floor, polka-dotted with the multicolored soap scattered across its wooden panels.
Dinky turned back to Amethyst and glared at her. 
"Don't expect me to be dying to sit around all day in this dump," she growled lowly.
"I never was going to," Amethyst retorted, violet eyes perfectly narrow in a half-closed fashion to display her calm, stern and tired mood. Once again painful memories flashed through Dinky's traumatized mind as those eyes reflected on Rumble's. 

The unicorn couldn't sleep. She just... couldn't. She had tossed and turned, gave an unnecessary large amount of effort to find a comfortable position, and ultimately ended up laying awake staring at the ceiling, pondering over her strange nightmares that sent shivers down her spine. 
Dinky tried to convince herself that it was just a dream, but it seemed so real. Every single deep feeling she felt during that sequence had been so amazingly valid that it nearly paralyzed her with anxiety just thinking about it - even if it had been a dream, it shook her emotionally. 
She had been so incredibly desperate to reach her dying friend - the unicorn had seriously considered leaping into the scorching embers to pry Rumble from death's grip - but if it weren't for her apparent lameness in her horrid dreamscape, she very well could and would have done so. Dinky became curious at this thought. 
What drove a pony to be so needy? Did she really need him by her that much to the point where she would not even want to consider life without him? No.. that thought was unbearable.
What would she do without Rumble? The very thought sent a massive wave of anxiety down her throat, and she bolted up to sit upright in her bed. Noticing she was immensely sweaty and the fact that her heart rate had increased rapidly, Dinky whined a second before straying back to her original position on the bed, head falling to rest on the stiff pillow below her.
She didn't even want to think about life without him.
Heck, it was hard to get by without him there, right next to her, curled up in bed with his hooves wrapped around her. She didn't know why it was so hard at the moment, all of the sudden. But after that crazy dream she just wanted someone to be there for her... and she wanted to know he was okay. 
A tear rolled down the side of her face as thoughts of her sweet pegasus friend drifted through her tired insomniac mind. She thought of his soft pale fur and the plush tips of his thin feathers. She loved the way it felt to have the feel of his amazing feathery touch curl around her shoulders. She envisioned the face she had seen so many times in her life - that gorgeous face that she hated herself for thinking was gorgeous. She loved the way a few strands of his dark, sleek mane curled to fall in front of his eyes and he would brush it nervously out of his face to look into hers. 
She thought about how wonderful he always smelled - he always carried the most entrancing scent of sweet citrus and honey, and some other lush, refreshing scent she couldn't quite place. Whenever he had stayed until late night for a sleepover she had been lulled to sleep after talking to him for hours by that sweet, lovely scent. In the morning when he was absent his scent would linger faintly in the air and she was left to savor its richness and ponder over its mysteriousness.
She thought about how adorable it was that he cared so much about how his mane looked - he was always up at 6:30 to gel his hair back in a sleek style that lately Dinky couldn't seem to stop noticing or obsessing over like a stupid middle school filly. She loved the streak of light that flowed through the shady depths of his silky hair. It was like an oddball ray of sun in a depressing but beautiful dark crevice. And she adored that.
She thought about his perfect face and his smooth jawline. She loved the way his beautiful smile caught the attention of everyone and lit up everything about him. It was such a radiant, cheerful smile full of emotion and genuine care- a true gift to possess. Dinky didn't just love his smile. She loved how often he used it and how amazingly easy it was to be captivated by his sweet smile. He just naturally had the ability to make others laugh and grin and feel better about themselves with his charming innocent smile and happy demeanor. Her mind drifted to the thought of his smooth lips, scratched slightly, but still soft and gentle all the same. A heated blush rose to her face as she remembered the lovely yet surprising feeling of his lips pressed against hers. She still became angry yet again for thinking those ridiculous thoughts.
She didn't deserve him, she didn't even begin to succeed at qualifying to be his temporary girlfriend. And yet somehow, deep beyond in his cluttered mind, he was somehow able to find a strand of sunlight in her deep dark soul. She didn't know why in Equestria he had the capability of finding anything possibly good about her.
She was selfish. She was a coward. She wasn't any of the things he was: compassionate, kind, honest, funny... Dinky wasn't even sure why he saw anything good in her at all. She knew he hated himself, and she abhorred that fact. If anyone should begin to hate themselves, it was her.
She had neglected her friend's feelings and focused on her own. She was just so in love with a jerk that she didn't even realize how her friend felt about her. Some friend she was.
Dinky hid her face in her hooves as if Rumble were in the room with her and she needed to disappear into darkness. The poor pony wept silently into the night without feeling a drop of anything but horribleness. 
Just the very thought of him not being there, him not existing or living or breathing, made her utterly disgusted beyond words. Her stomach churned and she instinctively clung to a pillow for comfort, wrapping her hooves around the stiff object as if it were Rumble, the pony she so deeply wanted - needed - to be right there next to her at the moment.
She couldn't stand those depressing thoughts. If he left her, gone off somewhere else... possibly forever... She didn't even want to think about how devastated she would be...
Dinky wanted and needed him; she would do anything to save him even if it meant sacrificing her life to those dreadful flames that enveloped him... She loved him so much that it shocked her to even hear herself repeat those words in her mind like a broken record.
Rumble, I love you. 
Love. That word made her heart flutter and her stomach churn at the same time. What did it mean? She supposed it meant to care for someone strongly and passionately to the point where they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the pony in question, and she felt that way unconditionally towards her mother and sister, but....
Romantically? 
Dinky had honestly thought she had felt that way about Pipsqueak for a long time. She thought she loved him so much that she couldn't live without him, and when he was her boyfriend she felt a stupid burst of happiness every time his face caught hers. But... 
The thought of needing to protect him, to put him before herself had never really occurred to her. Now that she really stopped and thought about it, she wasn't all too sure she would be utterly depressed if Pipsqueak had left her.... Well, she wasn't at the moment.
That was what love did to somepony stupid. It took the form of an illusion and spread itself through somepony's weakened mind to make them think they adored a certain jerk. They made everything that pony did seem like something of that of angel, every kiss feel like heaven was wrapped around her in its sweet embrace. And then when they became such a sucker for that two-faced idiot, the world would turn its cold shoulder on her and she would suddenly be left all alone in the dark, angry and bitter-hearted.
Of course she loved Rumble. To the moon and stars and back, infinitely. And platonically she was certain her love lay on him, but romantically... that was a different question. Year after year he had stood up for her, comforted her, given up everything just for the weak little filly he once knew her as. They had talked and laughed and cried together, and there had been times when they had screamed at each other, finding unique and clever ways to hurt the other emotionally with scathing remarks and hurtful insults. There had always been conflict between the two, what with their different personalities clashing like fire and ice. But for every fight between them there was always a chance to make up and they always took it. Even if it were days later, one of them would bolt up to the other with tears streaming down their eyes telling them how sorry they were for all the mean things they said and they would always end up cradling each other in their arms. 
She didn't know if she loved him in a romantic way. They had been through so much together, and she would hate for him to leave, but at the same time, she couldn't figure out her conflicting feelings for him - platonic or otherwise.
Dinky shifted uncomfortably so that her eyes could catch a glimpse of the morning light sweeping through the blinds, pouring out in white strands that fell on the dusty floor. It calmed her to know that her nightmare was nothing more than a nightmare - Rumble was safe and all was well. 
But it still troubled her to know that there was a rift between the two. Thinking back on the kiss, that wonderful, sweet kiss... Celestia, here I go again, she growled to herself as those thoughts squirmed into her system. 
Yes, she enjoyed the kiss. It was short and sweet and it disgusted her to think that she liked the idea of kissing her best friend, but at the same time it just felt... right. To think that she would want to run back to Rumble right now and capture his lips in another lovely kiss... it made her heart flutter, but did that mean she was in love? And what if-
"Rise and shine," her sister's loud voice flooded through her ears. 
The thin and torn blanket was pried off Dinky's chilled layer of fur. Her teeth chattered at the touch and feel of the cold morning air.
"H-hey," she growled, rubbing her tired eyes before pointing them directly in Amethyst's. "I didn't get any sleep."
"Too bad," Amethyst snapped back, turning to nudge her mother gently. "Wake up," she whispered in the pegasus's ear.
Dinky groaned as her sister practically tore the blinds down so the bright light instantly flooded through the room and burnt everyone's eyes.
"Get up, you lazy sacks," Amethyst continued, poking her head out the window for a second to stare into the creepy motel parking lot. A smile formed across her lips and she turned back to them. "We're not gonna be late this time around. We gotta get going if we wanna make it to the aunts' on time."
Their mother made a strange noise and her pupils dilated, both of them trailing off in different directions to pin on the ceiling.
"Aunt Pear Seed said she'll have breakfast for us." Amethyst seemed to show a bright and proud demeanor due to being the one to find out the information first. 
Dinky practically collapsed out of bed and moaned. She hated her aunts' cooking.
This was going to be a long weekend.