Fallout Equestria: Forget

by CivilWarPony

Part Four: Hard Lessons

Part Four: Hard Lessons

After my unit was redeployed to the battlefront on the borders of the Crystal Empire, the progress of the war became even more desperate all across Equestria. Even with the development of new technological advances such as power armor which made anypony into a walking tank, the Zebras merely adapted their technology to counter any advances we made into protecting our military forces. The Zebras were making some serious progress in the Crystal Empire. They had developed a new kind of magic that wiped out whole platoons at a time and the Crystal Empire’s forces were rapidly diminishing. Princess Luna sent some of her finest soldiers to the Empire in order to hold Equestria’s northern border.

Hope seemed to almost universally vanish as the war dragged on. The suicide rate spiked in not only the Empire but in Equestria as well. The Crystal City’s morgue was perhaps the busiest location in the entire city. It ran all day, every day. There were funerals and memorial services for not only those who had killed themselves but also those who had fallen in battle. Eventually in order to stop the ever advancing armies of the Zebra Empire, we were ordered to dig trenches. I found the idea disdainful and so did Thunderlane who had joined me in the Crystal Empire. We were practically digging glorified graves that we would bury ourselves in after the Zebras were through with us. As the war became more intense, I looked back at my early volunteering to join the military as a mistake. I had just had a son, and perhaps I was too eager to see combat. But war has a funny way of making you do things that you would have never done before. I was young and stupid then. Even though I felt like I had changed perhaps I didn’t change enough to see what really mattered and that was my family. There were times that I unconsciously caught myself thinking of what would my life had been had I not signed up for the military and had there been no war. Questions like these bothered me, it was dumb to think of any sort of reality other than what was right before me but still I couldn't help it. Maybe I could have gotten at the Cloudsdale Weather Factory rearranging cloud formations, this would give me a chance to fly as often as I liked and get paid for it. Also I could spend time with my family and be a proper mother to my son instead of an absent one. But the war has changed the fortunes of everypony, and now we all must suffer the consequences.

The slaughter of the War was made all the easier with the large scale deployment of the megaspells. Granted the worst of them were kept hidden away as a countermeasure in case the Zebras threatened us with annihilation. Once while waiting for our scouting party to return I talked with Thunderlane about whether or not he regretted joining the military, what he said generally shocked me. He said he didn’t regret one day of it despite the fact that I noticed he no longer slept that much anymore. He went on to say that after all of the death, destruction, and suffering caused by the advancing Zebra hordes he knew that if his service meant that he could keep our family safe then he was more than willing to die for that belief. I asked him whether or not he felt like he had lost his soul along the way, he turned and said that his soul sat before him. I had become something that kept any semblance of his better nature intact.

The truth was this frightened me. I wasn’t even sure that my own soul remained intact, after all of the things I had done. I could squeeze a trigger at any Zebra soldier I saw without even thinking about it. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that killing was wrong. It was contrary to everything that ponies were taught before the war. But I had to kill in order to survive and get back to my son. Also the propaganda machine that was in fully effect at this time made the Zebras seem like the worst possible monsters imaginable. I had bought into this mentality and it did make things easier whenever I killed somepony.

I wasn’t snuffing out a life when I killed, just merely putting down a rabid animal. But that one part of me that still held onto whatever innocence that remained inside of me refused to drown in the ocean of blood that had filled my soul. I hated the Zebras with every single fiber of my being. I had watched them cut down my friends and comrades. They had no respect for our dead and would hang their mutilated corpses across no-pony’s land. But there was one occasion that I started to question whether or not they were really the soulless beasts that I perceived them to be. We had taken back a trench that we had lost the previous day, during the fighting I had been wounded in my hind right leg. I was left behind to await the medics who were going to carry me back to our lines. While I waited, I pulled out a locket that I kept around my neck of my son. Looking at it, I failed to notice a small shadow that was slowly creeping over to me. Just then somepony pounced onto me, I wrestled with this figure for a good five minutes before I was able to pin whoever it was and place my knife at their throat.

Looking down I saw it was a young Zebra soldier; he must have been no more than eighteen years old. He gazed up at me with his bulging wide eyes. He had blue eyes with a fresh pink scar across his left eye. He looked at my knife at his throat then closed his eyes as he turned his head. He was breathing heavily and I could feel his heart hammering inside of his chest. I held the life of this young Zebra in my hooves. I wanted to kill him to be honest, every part of my body was screaming at me to do it. But something in his eyes stayed my blade from slitting his throat and watching his life’s blood pool around us. Perhaps I recognized myself in him when I was younger and more naïve. Whatever it was I couldn’t kill this Zebra. I said to him, that I wasn’t going to kill him as long as he promised not to kill me. This caused his ears to cock forward and he slowly turned his head to look up at me. He studied my face to see whether or not I was telling the truth. He nodded and I let him up.

I walked a few steps backwards to put some space in between us just in case he tried to pull anything. I asked him what his name was; he told me it was Zetes. He asked me mine and I told him it. After that we stared at each other for a long while before Zetes finally asked why I didn’t kill him. I told him that I didn’t know why but I just couldn’t. He said that he had never met a pony who didn’t kill Zebras. I told him that I had never met a Zebra who didn’t kill a pony. We laughed and that seemed to break the ice between us. Zetes told me he was from a small village within the Zebra Empire. It was so small that it didn’t even have a name or at least a name that the locals called it anyways. To him it was home and that was enough. He asked me where I was from and I told him I was from Cloudsdale. I was surprised to see that he knew about Cloudsdale and also told me that I was the first Pegasus pony he had met face to face.

He told me that he never wanted to leave his village. He liked the quiet of it and was content to remain there forever if he could. I asked him why then did he join the military. He said he wasn’t given a choice in the matter. The Zebra Empire had instituted a draft and his name was called up to serve. He said that a lot of his friends had already gone off to war so he felt like he had to serve despite having reservations about it. He asked me why I had joined and I told him that I had volunteered after hearing about how much of a threat Zebras were to ponykind.

He said that back in the Zebra Empire, everypony knows that you should kill a pony should you see one. He said that everypony there believed the Princesses to be wicked sorceresses who could steal your soul which is why it was the duty of every Zebra soldier to kill as many ponies as they could because it would be a kindness to them than have them wander around as lifeless husks. I told him that we pony’s thought of Zebras almost in the same way. It was then that I came to the understanding of how much this war had warped everything. We didn’t even try to get to know our enemy besides what we needed to know in order to kill them. Had we tried to get to know them instead we might not be in the mess at all. But I knew such a sentiment was too little too late because we were at war with the Zebras right now.

Zetes pulled out from his utility barding a small clay flute that had elaborate patterns embossed onto it. He began to play and I listened to this instrument play a haunting melody that made me think back to flying through the summer skies around Cloudsdale. After he was done playing I told him that the song was beautiful and that he played very well. He thanked me and said that his father had given him the flute before he left to go off to war as a way of keeping a piece of his family with him. He was in the process of handing me the pipe when I noticed that he suddenly jerked forward as a scarlet hole appeared on his chest. I screamed loudly as he slumped over muzzle first into my lap, he was breathing laboriously. I pressed my hooves down onto the wound trying to stop the flow of blood but my efforts were in vain. Zetes weakly held up his right forehoof and I held it. He didn’t say a word as I watched his eyes cloud over then finally the embers of his young life went out of his eyes as he died.

Looking up I saw it had been Thunderlane who had shot him. Thunderlane quickly rushed to my side as he wrapped his hooves around me. He had been worried when he saw Zetes sitting by me and feared that he would kill me. I smacked Thunderlane and said that he didn’t have to shoot him. Thunderlane looked at me confused as he rubbed his cheek then he said that he had just saved my life from being taken by a horrible Zebra. I felt my anger boiling over inside of me and I yelled at him saying that Zetes wasn’t like that. He actually had made no attempt to harm me. I noticed that his lip was bleeding from where I smacked him and hugged him tightly apologizing for what I had done. Thunderlane held me close to him and said he wouldn’t have known what to do had he lost me. I began to sob heavily trying to hide my face from the other ponies who were watching us.

I wasn’t crying because I regretted hitting Thunderlane, I was crying because when that bullet passed through Zetes’s body the last shred of the innocence in my soul died with him. I had felt it die inside of my heart like a baby bird being crushed by a falling rock. I also cried because I had finally regained something far more precious by talking to Zetes and that was my soul. But now it was lost again. I continued to cry as the medics finally arrived to escort me back to our lines. The only thing I could do was hold onto Thunderlane’s hoof afraid that he let go of me my grief would kill me. On that day I learned a hard lesson and that was that innocence never survives in wartime. No matter how much you hold onto it, you cannot protect it from the harsh realities of combat. It is a lesson I wish I had never learned.

I stayed in the field hospital for a few days just trying to hide myself from the horrors of the war that raged outside of the tent but sooner or later I was judged to be fit to return to active combat. After Zetes death, I made myself numb to the killing even when I saw more young Zebras like Zetes. I killed them anyway to spare myself more pain and to make sure that these Zebras would not have to endure the horrors of this new and brutal world anymore. The trenches were beginning to have an effect on the Zebras. It was slowing there advance and buying us time to rally the remaining forces of the Crystal Empire. The period after this is a blur to me, I guess I just wanted to forget everything that I was seeing on the battlefield. There are only flashes of sensations that I can recall vividly. Pulling the pin on a grenade then lobbing it into the air, feeling my hooves sink into the blood sodded soil, shivering in the trench then feeling warm as Thunderlane lay by my side.

I fought in the Crystal Empire for three years, during my time there I stayed away from home for long periods that seemed to be an eternity for me. It was a self imposed exile even though I was given plenty of chances to return home, chances that Thunderlane eagerly jumped at in order to take advantage of them but not me. I didn’t want to see my son after everything I had done during the fighting here in the Empire. I had made myself numb to any positive feelings that might bring me joy, for me there was only my duty as a soldier that kept me focused. As a result I missed my son’s first, second, and third birthdays. My own family became strangers to me, but I had become a stranger to myself. It was like my body was on autopilot, a cold ruthlessly efficient killing machine. The mind that wandered inside of the corridors of this body was a foreign entity that resembled somepony I once knew as Lightning Dust. Thunderlane and I became estranged from one another. After each time he would return after getting back from his leave and come to visit me. At first he would tell me all of the things that had changed at home with my son, whom he said would cry all night screaming mommy, but these things he told me did not break my already cold dead heart. Thunderlane knew that his wife was gone; all that remained was this Machine in the form of the pony he once loved. After that he stopped visiting me, I only briefly acknowledged him with quick curt nods as we passed by each other in the trenches. So this routine went before the pony that I once was returned to claim her body after one harrowing fight.

During the fighting in the Empire, I had been promoted to Captain and given command over a group of our newest recruits. I had the experience of combat the recruits lacked, although they were each very hard fighters. They had all lost somepony in this war whether it was a member of their own family or some friend they had made when they were young. I considered them to be like my own surrogate family, they all called me Nails short for Tough As Nails, the nickname stuck and wasn’t something that I mind being called. I figured it was as good as any name since I had forgotten my own long ago. There was one recruit in particular though who I didn’t really think much of, and his name was Aero. He was stupid and foalish. He never took his duties as a soldier seriously, I once found him lobbing snowballs at other soldiers while hidden behind a barrel then screaming grenade as he lobbed the snowball at the nearest pony to him. I watched as the soldier he hit beat him within an inch of his life before I stepped in to stop this soldier from killing somepony who wasn’t worth it.

Aero despite all of these personality problems, Aero did as he was ordered to do when under fire or at least tried most of the time. I once found him sobbing after we had slaughtered a group of Zebras who had infiltrated our trenches and were slitting the throats of ponies while they slept. I asked him why he joined the military; he replied that his father had been a Wonderbolt before the war. But when the war started he was too old to be of much use so he signed up his only son to fight in his stead. Aero said he was just trying to be like his father, somepony who could be fearless but in reality he wasn’t cut out for the whole soldiering thing. Trying to live up to the legacy of somepony else is a hard road to walk. I learned that you had to walk your own path in order to find out what you are really made of. My own life was proof of this fact. We were stationed on one of the outer redoubts that dotted our line; each of these small fortresses was to fixate the point of the attack on our lines so we could kill as many Zebras as we could. It was an effective tactic, perhaps a little too effective in my opinion. Any Zebra soldier that came within our sector was immediately killed. We stacked up a large body count while being positioned here. Maybe this was the reason that the Zebras attacked us with such ferocity one cold night.

All of the fighting and discharging of magical weapons in the Crystal Empire had begun to change the weather patterns. Normally before the war the snow of the Empire didn’t make you feel cold but now that was a different story. It had a hard bite to it, and if you weren’t careful would freeze your hooves to the ground. I had seen many ponies that had gone to sleep in the open air of the trenches only never to wake up as they would be buried alive in a snowdrift when we received a freak snowstorm that blew in from nowhere. Perhaps it was like the Windigo’s who caused the weather to snow so heavily as they fed off of the festering hatred that bred easily in this war. Who knows of such things though? The snow had fallen so thick outside our redoubt that it had covered the razor wire we had placed outside of our position. I had at regular intervals placed small tin cans filled with rocks which would jangle if knocked by something. An effective tactic at rooting out small raiding parties that attacked us at night, but ultimately an irrelevant tactic because now those same cans were buried under ten feet of hard snow pack.

Asking anypony to climb over the walls of the redoubt to clear the cans was a useless gesture cause as soon as they so much as put a head above the walls of the redoubt they would shortly thereafter finding themselves wanting for a head. So instead I doubled the guard on the nights watch, but asking fresh recruits to stay up during a cold night is not something that is possible for them to do. Young bodies my own included needed as much sleep as we could possibly get and when you snuggled close to a warm fire after having a full belly you just pass out. This is how it was when the Zebras attack us one particularly cold night when the wind howled like frozen timberwolves that seemed to lurk in between the lines waiting to feast on the corpses of those who would be killed when the fighting started again. At first, I didn’t even know we were under attack. The sentries had fallen asleep as they huddled together. Their throats were slit while they slept muffled any pained cries of agony. But the Zebras had grown careless when they saw us as easy prey waiting to be harvested.

I awoke to the sound of the bucket I used for a toilet being kicked over as somepony entered the hovel I used as my home inside of the redoubt. When I woke up I found a Zebra soldier cursing as he wiped his hooves off of the feted contents of my bucket. I silently grabbed my knife then quickly lunged at him and buried my knife into his chest before he could make a sound to alert his comrades to my presence. Grabbing the plasma pistol Blossomforth had given to me. I quietly crept around to each one of my soldiers waking them afterwards they quickly responded when I told them that we were under attack. However the fighting began to grow louder as one soldier whom I knew to be Aero began to scream as he fired widely around him. Aero’s panicked screams caused the Zebras outside the redoubt to rush our position like hungry sharks smelling the blood of a fresh kill. The fighting around me wasn’t entirely clear as one of the random snowstorms we had all become accustomed to blew in. I could barely draw a line of sight onto any target except fire at anything that moved. I knew right away that we were not going to win this fight. There were too many dark shapes moving in the storm for me to have any hope of rallying my men to hold their ground. So I ordered them to retreat but there was no place to retreat to. The Zebras had effectively cut the lines in this sector and we were on our own.

My soldiers fought bravely but one by one they fell. The Zebras killed all of my men with those who survived fled back to defensive corner of the redoubt. Aero had been one of these lucky few to last this long into the fight. We were running low on ammo but what we lacked in bullets we made up for with the amount of grenades we had. My soldiers began to throw the grenades as fast as they could not really lobbing them in any one particular direction. Soon I could accurately gage the number of Zebra soldiers around us when the grenades went off with a flash of light that quickly silenced the panicked whinnies of the Zebras soldiers who were unlucky to be in the way. I figured that the Zebras must have attacked us with two full battalions of soldiers. It was then no wondered to me that we had been so quickly outmatched by them. Aero was curled into ball at the farthest corner of our position sobbing like a baby foal. While his comrades died bravely around him all he could do was cry. This peculiar scene awoke something deep within me that I had long since forgotten. The Pegasus pony known as Lightning Dust was fighting for control of her body again.

But just as I went to grab Aero and pull him to his hooves he suddenly stopped sobbing then grabbed the nearest grenade to him and pulled the pin. I guess everypony has that breaking point when they know Death is closing in for them and there is nothing they can do but resist it. Every time Aero threw a grenade at the enemy it found its mark. The wind and snow around us took on a pinkish hue as frozen blood swirled around us. By this point in the fight there were only a few of us left and that part of me I had long thought had vanished was fighting to regain control of me. Memories of my life before the war flooded my mind and made my eyes tear up. It was difficult for me to fire my weapon when the life that had haunted my dreams suddenly manifested inside of me like a newly lit flame that burned brightly.

As I rubbed my eyes of the stinging tears which were freezing to my muzzle, a bullet clipped my brow. Another would have killed me had it not been for Aero pushing me out of the way. He fell on top of me as we toppled over to the ground. I could feel his hot sticky blood soaking through my armored barding. Aero spoke to me softly saying that I had to live and get back to our lines to warn them that the Zebras were coming as he pushed himself off of me, I could see that he had been gut shot, a very painful and a very serious wound if left unattended grabbing my med kit from my utility barding but Aero stopped me and said there wasn’t any time for that now. Looking into his eyes I could see a fierceness that I had never noticed before. He said to me that the blood of his father had finally won out over the war that raged within his own soul. He said he was conflicted about who he was and that after watching me lead him. He decided it was time for a change for once in his life.

Aero winced as he grabbed onto the nearest grenade and held it to his heaving chest. I looked and saw that he was leaning against a stack of grenades and the few remaining ammo boxes we had left. He told me that it was time for me to leave and I nodded in agreement as I took a few steps back from him then soared into the air and flapped my wings as hard as I could to put as much distance between the redoubt and me as possible. I never stopped looking down at Aero who held my gaze as long as he could before pulling the pin on the grenade.

A huge fireball exploded and turned the redoubt into a massive funeral pyre for the many Zebra soldiers who had got caught in Aero’s final act. The explosion hurled massive chunks of debris and shrapnel that hissed angrily by me. I tried to avoid as many of these as I could but I couldn’t escape from Death which had finally come to claim me. I hurled out of the sky towards our line like a feathery rocket. Both of my wings were cut to ribbons like the rest of my body. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was my left hind leg daggling by a thread of muscle exposing the shattered thigh bone beneath then something hard caught up to meet me. I remember only opening my eyes once after this and hearing what to me sounded like voices talking to me like they were underwater. I could see the dark outlines of the trench I had fallen headfirst into and the ponies who had gathered around me to look at this shattered Pegasus who had fallen from the heavens. The entire part of the line had seen the explosion and the illuminated Zebras who were unlucky enough to be seen by them after the raging fire exposed them pulling away the veil of night that had concealed them in the storm. I closed my eyes and wanted Death to claim me, to take me as far away from all this war and chaos as possible but there was still part of me that didn’t want to die. That part of me I had known as Lightning Dust. She wanted to live, I wanted to live. To see my son’s face again and to tell him how much I had missed him and to hug my husband tightly while I apologized for how stupidly selfish I had been for avoiding him.

I could feel pain all over my body. Every nerve pulsed messages into my brain like telegraph wires. I took stock of the damage and knew that I had really messed myself up this time. Even though I wanted to live, I don’t think anything could be done to save me. I was drowning in a sea of wooziness and I knew that this sensation would assuredly kill me. So I thought of something else to keep my mind off of the pain. A picture of Thunderlane holding my son in his arms flashed into my mind and I think this was what I think kept my heart beating as I fought to stay alive. As that memory was swallowed up by the void that was slowly spreading across my mind there was a voice that called out to me, it was voice I recognized. It called my name and I tried to answer it. When I responded to the calling, I felt a warmth spread across my entire body it penetrated deep inside mending all the broken places both physical and mental inside of me. I felt my soul renew itself for the first time in years. All of the toil and suffering was gone. Maybe this is what it felt like to die, all of your burdens stripped away leaving only the good memories of your life intact. I wasn’t scared if this was Death coming to whisk me away. It felt good to die and I embraced it with every single fiber of my being. Then I knew no more after this.

The first thing sensation that I registered after regaining consciousness was the feeling that I was well rested. Something soft cradled my head while another covered me with its warm fuzziness. Opening my eyes I saw the patterned tiles of a ceiling above me. Looking around I saw that I was in a room lined with bed and filled with other Pegasi like me most of whom were still sleeping or talking to loved ones who sat by their bedsides. Most of my body including my wings were covered in bandages, turning I saw Thunderlane sitting in a chair next to me while he held my son in his arms. My son who had grown so big since the last time I saw him said mommy to me. That word made my eyes water, and I nickered happily to him. Thunderlane heard me and awoke from his slumber.

He smiled at me and said, “Look who is finally awake.” I smiled back as he leaned forward to kiss me. I was about to apologize when he presses his hoof to my lips and said that there was no need for me to say anything, he already knew what I was going to say and that he was just glad that I was alive to be with him. I asked where we were and he told me I was in the Cloudsdale V.A. Hospital back in Equestria. I had been brought here because of the severity of my wounds and that I had been given another medal for bravery while I was unconscious it was then that I finally noticed the medal as it hung around my neck brace. Seeing this made me panic a little and I asked Thunderlane how badly wounded was I? He replied that I had broken practically every single bone in my body when I hit the ground and tumbled into the trench I was found in.

Thunderlane told me that it was a Unicorn named Fancy Pants who had saved my life with a megaspell he had learned from the Ministry of Peace that saved ponies from the brink of Death. Thunderlane had been in the trench when I fell into it and watched as Fancy Pants used the spell to save my life. Somewhere I registered the name Fancy Pants, I knew I had heard it somewhere before but couldn’t place a face to the name. Whoever this Fancy Pants was I would have to thank him after I got out of the hospital. I asked Thunderlane how long was I going to stay in the hospital. He told me that my injuries would keep me here for some time to come. That I needed to be rehabilitated in order to walk again as one of my legs had been severed but successfully reattached when I was brought in. I was determined then to get better as soon as I possibly could. I didn’t like hospitals and certainly didn’t want to linger in one for more time than I had to. But for now it was enough for me that I was alive and was with my family far away from any battlefield as a pony possibly could be.

Author's Note:

Part Four of my story. Please enjoy it and don't forget to give a thumbs up if you like it!!!!!

Fallout copyrighted to Bethesda Softworks

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic copyrighted to Hasbro Inc.

Fallout Equestria copyrighted to Kkat.

All other characters are copyrighted to me.

Comments

[CivilWarPony]

4236975
I am glad you are enjoying my story!

[PresentPerfect]

Her change of heart was a definite surprise. Pleased to see it. :)