Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence

by Broseph_Stalin

Losing Time

Chapter VII. – Losing Time: Juniper Berry

"Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death."

-Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

. . . .

As the pair moved on, they entered the therapy wing. Rows upon rows of doors stood in long, inescapable hallways. Twilight glanced casually at the clock, and laughed to herself as she realized that the exact same clock stood over every other door down the entire expanse.

As they cantered silently down the carpeted hallway, the pair stopped as a white mare wrapped in a black shawl exited a door hurriedly. Her face seemed pinched and worried as her black mane fell unkempt around her shoulders and stuck out from beneath the tightly wrapped shawl.

“Ah, Juniper Berry, my dear! How was therapy today with Dr. Tune?” the doctor asked expectantly. His voice flowed smoothly with a well-practiced cheer.

The earth pony grabbed even tighter at the black shawl that sat draped about her shoulders, seemingly in shock at the two unicorns that stood before her. She eyed Twilight skeptically.

“Good.” Her voice sat plain and unemotional. It seemed a heavy grey brick of noise compared to the doctor’s jovial greeting, but latter pushed on with his same enthusiasm.

“Very glad to hear it. May I introduce Twilight Sparkle?” he said, turning slightly to let Juniper have a look at the purple unicorn. Twilight smiled sheepishly.

“Good to meet you,” Juniper said diffidently. Her face seemed to drop slightly as she shifted her body weight from one hoof to the other.

“If you could, Juniper, please be sure to remember to ask-” The doctor was cut off.

“I’m not Juniper. It’s Midnight,” she said scathingly. Her gaze flowed over Twilight judgmentally. “Ugh. Your mane is beyond disgusting. A bob? Really?” She sneered cruelly as Twilight blushed uncontrollably at her disparaging remark.

“Now, Midnight. Go see Nurse Lily for your medicine, okay?” The sentence wasn’t a request, though. It was a command as the doctor’s cheery voice switched gears to a professional tone.

“Whatever,” she said, and took off down the hall the way Twilight and Dr. Glass had entered. As they watched her round the corner, the doctor turned to Twilight.

“I suppose I am safe in assuming you would like an explanation?” He smiled slightly as Twilight nodded her head dumbly.

“Well, Juniper Berry suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, or, more commonly referred to as Multiple Personality disorder.” He paused as Twilight flipped through her manual with a sparkle of magic. Her eyes glanced over the thick text.

“And how many other ponies exist inside her mind?” she finally asked as she settled the book away into her pack.

“Seventeen.” He chuckled as Twilight’s eyes widened. “At least, as far as we have been able to discern. There may be more. Only time will tell,” he said, shrugging.

Time. Twilight glanced at the clock absentmindedly; she realized with a shock that nearly twelve minutes had passed since she had last looked; it had felt like five.

She looked down at the doctor’s face. He seemed intrigued at her surprised reaction.

“It’s funny you happen to look at the clock, Twilight. There is a particular idea I want you to think about now. You saw not one but two ponies today in this hallway. And directly down the split that defined Juniper appeared Midnight. Now, in the twelve minutes that has passed since we first met Juniper, each part of her has only experienced six minutes apiece.”

He glanced sidelong at Twilight, to ensure that she was following what it was he was proposing to her.

“Do you get what it is I’m going at here, Twilight?”

“I think so, doctor.” Her face was screwed up slightly as she tried to piece together what Dr. Glass had said. “You mean that Juniper, the primary consciousness, only experiences what she can consciously process. Even though her mind runs for twenty-four hours a day. Correct?”

An appreciative nod acknowledged Twilight’s intuitive reply.

“She’s losing time, Twilight. Far faster than either you or I are, or even can. This is the result of detachment- dissociation from reality. It’s one of the reasons we devote so much time and effort into solving these mysteries that take over our minds.” He tapped his head lightly, as if to prove a point. “Sanity is a relative term. Make sure you never confuse it for what it truly is.”

Twilight nodded in deep agreement as her gaze shifted back up to the clock. She could feel the queer sensation of weightlessness envelop her as she watched the second hand drag unyieldingly across the clock’s blanched white face.

It is a clock that slays time...

. . . .

...But only when the clock stops, does time actually come to life. Imagine realizing that you are only losing time.

In the past, within the quiet room of a hospital, Juniper Berry remembered the first time it had happened.

"I snapped to attention to find the eyes of a hoof-full of ponies staring at me. I realized with a hot flush of embarrassment that I had been rolling in the fountain in the middle of town for what seemed ten minutes. I remember, what shocked me the most was that not a second ago I had walked past the spa, noticing that there was a sale on body crèmes..."

"I stepped out, soaking wet. I remember my black mane clinging wildly to my wet body. 'My, what an awful mess I must look!' I remember thinking. I had apologized profusely to everypony around me and ran home, crying the whole way.

“I see,” the bearded grey earth pony said from somewhere out of sight behind her. His voice was even and firm, imparting a due comfort on her. “Please, if you can, tell me more about this ad you saw.” The question seemed innocent enough, if not a bit strange. Juniper felt her mind spin uncontrollably.

. . . .

Doctor Tune sat behind his patient. The roster read Juniper Berry, Earth Pony, Age: twenty-three, possible Dissociative Identity Disorder. In all the years of psychiatric counseling, this is the only case like this he had tackled. He looked over his patient with a keen eye as she answered his question.

She dresses in black every day…She keeps her mane simple and plain…She never wears makeup, he noted off on his pad.

But nopony would care if she did anyway, he reasoned evenly. She never got out to spend time with anyone recently anyways, she had said.

His face furled in deeper thought.

She doesn’t recall yesterday. Faces seemed twisted and strange. Both mind and quill raced as he thought more about what she had said.

But she always wakes up, only to find she’d been miles away.

He looked down at the notes he had jotted on his pad:

Absence of awareness … “Losing time”… A lapse of perception … “Losing time…”

She had said that in passing more than twice. He considered it the most important notation.

Dr. Tune looked up as he realized Juniper had stopped talking. He was more surprised to see her turn around, eyes peeping over the top of the recliner like a curious filly.

“Juniper, eyes forward please,” he said calmly.

“Who’s Juniper? My name is Midnight,” Juniper said darkly. “Why don’t you back off?” she added, almost as an afterthought.

Though he was shocked, he tried his absolute best to not show it.

“I don’t know what you mean, Juniper, I-” he was cut off by a deep, guttural groan.

“I hate it here. I hate this place. I hate myself. I hate my life. And Mother would not approve.”

“What?” Dr. Tune said, preparing his pen and notes to write, and glanced up expectantly. An odd look overcame Juniper’s face, and she refocused back at him.

“I guess that’s why it affected me so much, doctor…The ad, I mean,” she seemed to finish quietly. The white mare realized she was looking at him, and settled back down quickly to look at the surrealistic painting at the other end of the room that she had been staring at for the past half hour.

Dr. Tune laid back in his chair, face puzzled and thoughts ablaze. What in the name of Celestia is going on with this mare? he thought.

. . . .

Through time, therapy became the truth teller. Dr. Tune had shortly identified after their first session that Juniper did indeed suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Throughout three years of counseling, he discovered that there were seventeen unique identities existing in her split mind.

He had listened, enraptured, as each identity told him of her traumatic childhood. Though the same story came from seventeen different entities, the voice from a single mouth that told the story was an eerie reminder of how incredible the natural mind could be. He winced as he learned the dark things her parents would do. Being sadists, they had enjoyed devilish ceremonies in which their only daughter became the victim of their maddened rancor; drugs played a very large part in this.

He listened, almost at the verge of tears, as the youngest personality, Spirit, told him about how they had tortured her at three years old with the skeletons of her pets and the belief that her soul was too clean for them. He sat on the edge of his seat through every gruesome detail of her parent’s sick and twisted activities as they occurred in different points of her childhood.

Wanting to escape, he realized, she had created a way to survive. She learned to detach from herself, a behavior that kept her alive.

Dr. Tune was glad her parents had died long ago. The urge to strangle them himself overcame him quite often for what they had done to their poor filly.

He realized grimly that the thoughts he had about this scared the living hay out of him.

. . . .

One thing he came to realize: this mare was losing time. As long as the twenty years that she had lived, she barely recalled or experienced half of these.

“Juniper, may I ask you something?” he questioned thoughtfully one day.

“Hm?” the white mare replied mildly.

“The troupe that lives with you, in your mind. Midnight, Spirit, Otto, Grey Goose and the rest, do you ever feel like they are in control? Like they take over a part of you that should be yours?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, doctor…yes, I suppose they do. We all know that we are seventeen lives trying to breathe within a single body. We suppose there’s no confusing the fact that We all feel pressed for time. But that’s just it.” Dr. Tune watched her face drop significantly in spirit. “A heart is nothing but a timer, beating to every second and counting down until it runs out of all it can give. We are, all of us, losing time.” She looked to the bearded doctor, a pleading look haunting her pinched features. “And we’ll never get it back.”

Dr. Tune could feel an eerie shiver of revelation overtake his body. It took the entirety of his will to focus it down to just a twitch of the head, a twitch of the hoof.

“I see,” he said flatly.

Another long pause held still in the air. Dr. Tune could feel his mind panic as he realized the timer in his chest slowly beating down to nothing.

“That’s all for today, Juniper. I’ll see you next week at the same time.” The dismissal was well practiced, oiled to fit perfectly at the end of any session. Dr. Tune stood up stiffly, and saw Juniper out the door. After he had shut it quietly behind her, though, he sank slowly down to the floor. Grief tugged at his weary heart.

What she had said had struck him unlike anything he had heard from her or any other patient in his long service to Neighsville Psychiatric. The thought, the idea of losing time…It depressed him on a fundamental level as he realized she would never get it back.

Nopony would ever get their time back, in the end.

Tough line of work, he thought with a sigh. He buried his face in his hooves

I need a drink.

Comments

[Pleaseworkforonce]

so what chapter do you plan on bringing twilight in as a major part of their lives or is she just going to wath them from afar

[William A Grey]

Just finished with "Losing Time"... Quite a shocking statement Juniper did, uh? But so true.

Well... Excellently well written. Way to combine storytelling and song lyrics, and make it feel natural. Way to combine great lyrics about a mental illness with an equally great backstory for each one of the 6 (or are they 22?) ponies. Excellent job, man. Here's a moustache
Absolutely looking forward to the Grand Finale