Nine Of Swords: Cruelty
Keyword: Cruelty. Anxiety and sleepless nights, spite and slander which undermine confidence. Suffering that is for eventual good such as putting up with painful treatments in order to get better. Female health problems and, possibly, self-punishment and guilt.
Reversed: A refusal to accept help or even feel that improvements are possible. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
There were times in life when Rainbow Dash had to swallow her pride and admit (very, very privately) that somepony had impressed her. Now, as she stood framed in the door of Twilight's library, was one of those times.
Twilight had not noticed that her friend had dropped by, because Twilight was working. Hard. On two tables, five quills danced across sheets of parchment leaving glistening trails of india ink in their wake. When the bottles were empty, the drawers opened, lids unscrewed and streams of murky black twisted like chinese dragons through the air and into the wells that needed it, all lit by the same unearthly red glow. With a flick of her tail, Twilight marshalled her reference books, five of them following her in mid-air like a flight of paper swallows. Then she stopped to kick a giant green raccoon that had been giving her lip all morning.
She was only hallucinating a little bit.
Of all the ponies in Ponyville, Twilight Sparkle was by far the most accustomed to sleep deprivation. It was stock in trade for a telescope-gazing, mad science purveying magician, and she had charted the depths of her own journey into the realms of waking slumber with meticulous accuracy (if somewhat loose hoofwriting, once she got past the 48 hour mark and couldn't operate a quill properly anymore). In the first twenty four hours, it was manageable- just a hollow fatigue in the bones, perhaps a small headache. Then, the symptoms gradually worsened, until her hooves were too heavy to lift and her muscles refused to work, sitting on her bones like slabs of pork. Pork never lifted anything. Pork was, in her opinion, a waste of time and taxpayer's money, and should contribute something to society if it wished to continue existing rather than being teleported to, say, the sun. (This was an opinion usually formed somewhere around the thirty hour mark, when strange things began to happen and colours began to slur together.)
After two days without the comforting embrace of forty winks and some counted sheep, she tended to hit Nirvana, the point at which her befuddled mind rolled around into a burst of incredible clarity. Ideas crackled like thunderstorms across a tired brain, and magic came much more easily to her. The world just seemed to float into place and, for that brief period, dance at her hooftips. Only when facing down Ursa Minors did her gifts come through quite so potently.
Spike, however, did not appreciate said gifts, because although everypony was crazy in Ponyville, Spike was not a pony. As such, he had already realised just why Twilight became a physical god after forty eight hours of not hitting the hay- her body had begun to panic at the amount of damage she was doing to it. It had gotten to the point where the biggest threat to the on-and-off saviour of Equestria was herself.
"Hey, Egghead. You okay?" Dash asked. A ribbon of ink that was curling its way through the air fell to the ground with a splat. Twilight turned her head with an audible creak. Rainbow Dash's admiration for her sudden burst of energy began to decay into a sense of vague horror.
"Shush. Need more coffee," the unicorn whispered, in a tone of absolute calm. Too absolute to Rainbow's ears. That was the calm that ponies experienced just before they died, after they'd gone through panic and rage and found it wasn't helping.
"I'm gonna go ahead and take that as a no. You scared the hay out of Fluttershy, you know," Dash said critically.
"When was she here?"
"Maybe two, three hours ago?"
"Oh, right. Sorry. I thought the house was flooding. I might have gotten a little shout-y. No harm done though," the unicorn added brightly as an afterthought, before turning back to her work. The ink that had fallen to the floor tried to rise back up again, and found itself too soaked into the carpet to do so. Magic, however, did not do things by half measures, and so the carpet took to the air with the ink stains in tow. Dash watched with narrowed eyes as it floated dangerously close to a set of candles that had clearly been burning a very long time. She needed to do something.
"Hey, Twilight. Could you turn around? I have a present for you," she said sweetly.
Under normal circumstances, this would not have worked. Sweet and Rainbow Dash went together like nuclear physics and barracuda, a fact which Twilight Sparkle was patently aware of. But as she had continued working and her brain began to shut off things that were unimportant, her paranoia had taken a break at around hour thirty-six. So, Twilight turned around.
At which point, of course, Rainbow Dash took the opportunity to teach her a little about the laws of physics. Namely, what happened when you accelerated a hoof to great velocity and then cracked your egghead friend on the noggin with it.
"Phew! Glad that's over with," Spike whistled, climbing out from beneath the table as Twilight spiralled to the floor, hallucinating a circle of comedy birds flying around her head before losing consciousness. "I knew I could count on you, Rainbow Dash!"
"I wondered why you sent Fluttershy to get me, of all ponies," Dash muttered. On the floor, Twilight gurgled. The part of Rainbow Dash's brain that adored kittens and babies and thought jewellery was pretty started to appraise the unicorn for cuteness. As always, Dash ignored it, and hefted her friend onto her back. It was all well and good whacking somepony on the head, but leaving them to sleep it off on the floor was just plain mean.
"Seriously. I mean, you're the only pony who'd actually handle her. I mean, I asked Fluttershy first, because, y'know, you gotta be cruel to be kind, but she said she didn't want to get her hooves dirty. I suggested she just hit her with the desk lamp instead, but she wasn't buying it," the magic dragon continued, traipsing up the stairs in Dash's wake. "So, I thought: loyalty. Would the most loyal of friends let Twilight keep doing this to herself if it wasn't in her best interests?"
"Wow, way to pigeonhole my motivations there, little guy," Dash snarked, and dumped Twilight onto her bed. "For all you know, I might've just really, really wanted to knock that egghead out."
Spike made a non-committal shrug, as if he'd considered the possibility but had decided that the motive didn't matter so long as the result was good. In the meantime, Dash checked her friend's head. There'd be a bruise there come the morning, and she wasn't sure how she felt about it. On one hoof, she'd just injured her friend. On the other hoof, it was sort've funny, in a very guilty way.
"Thanks a lot, anyways. What with her working all hours, even I haven't been able to get any sleep," Spike yawned, before shutting his mouth with a snap. He didn't like the way Dash was looking at him. If he had to pick a word to describe it, that word would be 'aiming'. "L-let's not get carried away here, Rainbow Dash!"
"Aww. But I gotta eliminate the witnesses! It'll be a perfect crime!" Dash cackled, before giving him a friendly nudge to let him know she was teasing. Spike did not look comforted in the least. Nopony ever did, for some reason. Possibly because when she nudged them, Pinkie Pie was usually crouching behind their legs so they went sprawling. She usually put down cushions for them, too, although Dash never saw where she got them from. It was a Pinkie thing.
"So, what was she working on, anyway?" Dash asked absently, scouring the shelves for any signs of a new Daring Do book.
"Dunno, but she kept muttering about the fabric of space-time," Spike shrugged, and waddled off to collect his blanket. The cute centre of Dash's brain started going off again. She sighed. Now she had to go and do something awesome to flood it with adrenaline and make it shut up. Oh well. At least she had an excuse to walk around with her chest puffed out for the rest of the day. Good deeds and all that.
Yup, by her reckoning, it was a great end to a great day. She'd done Spike (and possibly causality) a big favour, found out the status of the Daring Do books, and found a legitimate excuse to pop Twilight in the face. She was feeling pretty good about herself when she strode out of the library door.
Which was, of course, why she was not prepared when somepony leapt from the bushes and smashed her over the head with what was, apparently, the world's heaviest desk lamp. The last thing she heard before she collapsed into a concussed heap was Fluttershy's voice.
"Oh, no, Applejack! That wasn't Twilight," Fluttershy gasped in dismay. "Do you think she'll be okay?"
"Sugarcube, it's Dash we're talkin' about here. I've half a mind to hit 'er again, just to make sure she's out," came the reply, muffled by a mouthful of lamp. "B'sides, from what y'all told me, she prob'ly clocked Twi anyhow, so it ain't as if she didn't have it comin'. You wanna take her home? It ain't right to leave her to sleep it off on the hard dirt floor."
When Rainbow Dash woke up the next day, quite concussed and with her head wrapped in bandages, she couldn't quite remember what had happened. But she couldn't shake the feeling, deep down in her bones, that she couldn't get away with anything.
A/N: Okay, a little explanation: this is straight comedy, and not even good comedy. But, considering I want to avoid darkfics, and the keyword of the card is cruelty, you can imagine that I was having a bit of trouble. Eventually, I just wanted to flail my way through it and move on. Which is precisely what I did. (For the interested, this one had a different ending at one point. Applejack and Fluttershy would go into the library to check on Twilight, and thus wouldn't notice Pinkie Pie sneak into the bushes armed with a frying pan. What goes around comes around, I suppose.)