Quantum Vault

by WishyWish

7.6 - Beside or Aside

DATE UNKNOWN

LOCATION UNKNOWN

Light.

The gleaming presence of endless white light, spanning in all directions clear to the horizon. It was impossible to tell if it was blinding or not, because there was nothing else to be obscured by its radiance. In the light’s embrace, direction meant nothing. Up, forward, and right were as meaningless as their antonyms, for there was nothing by which to define the concept of place and movement.

Nothing but a single, scrawny, mint-coated pony.

On the heels of a piercing scream, Quantum bolted upright and squinted until her eyes were convinced there was nothing to see. Panic instilled in her an instantaneous, appalling need to begone.

Before they came for her again.

She galloped. Changed directions. Galloped again. Wide-eyed and panting, tasting the palpable fear that came with the ‘sentence’ she had never forgotten, she came and went, charged and fled. Nothing changed, and at length she collapsed onto her rump with exhaustion as though she had simply been running on a treadmill.

“Alright...I get it,” Quantum rumbled, head down, her glasses slipping to the tip of her muzzle. “I lose. J-just...make it quick.”

No reply came.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Quantum’s gaze shot to the undefined heavens like the sharpest applebuck, “I said you win! Don’t spike the ball!” She waved her forelegs frantically about her, “All this...why? Why not just end me now? I don’t want to be here! I-I’m, I’m...!”

Her voice softened.

“...I’m scared.”

Familiar words rang out from everywhere without a voice:

Fail, and you will never know the peace of death.

“But...I...” Quantum sought for words. Her analytical mind wrestled with the incalculable concepts of emotion and fate, until they reduced her to a harsh realization - her end had already come. This was the perfect Hell for a pony such as her.

A Hell where nothing happens. Where nothing can be created or destroyed.

The minty mare sat and wailed, wondering if her sounds were even real, or if she was merely convincing herself she could still see and hear in such a void. She blinked against her own tears.

Once.

Twice.

Somepony was there.

Instantly giving in to her instincts, Quantum recoiled and scooted away from the figure. The shape did not gleam with the blending hue of the White Pony’s robes. It was darker, and Quantum’s logic demanded she assume it was among the number of the shadow-ponies that had once jeered at her, accusing and meting out their judgment. With nothing to hide inside or behind, she curled into a ball and peered through her fuzzy forelegs, searching out the empty holes through the apparition’s face where eyes ought to have been.

What she saw instead was a peridot gleam - the first color beyond the presence or absence of it she had ever observed in this place. It was surrounded by a mop of black hair with frosted tips, and a burnt-orange grin that involuntarily skipped three beats of Quantum’s heart the moment she could make it out.

“HAL!”

Even at a gallop, she couldn’t be certain which of them was moving closer to the other. And she didn’t care. Fully expecting to leap right through her holographic companion, she instead collided with him and collapsed in a heap of flailing limbs, glowing horns, and beating wings. Sprawled atop him, the pair could only stare in disbelief as they each reached a hoof towards one another.

The hooves touched. Firm and solid. Each pony found their first words choked off by relieved and fanciful laughter.

“What...what is this place?” Hal finally managed.

“Its...its...” Quantum faltered. “...the white pony’s realm, I guess? I told you he...it is real.”

“I never doubted you,” Hal grinned, reaching out to adjust Quantum’s glasses for her. “But what are we doing here? How did we get here? The last thing I remember was--”

Quantum’s smile inadvertently vanished. Memories rushed in, shattering the heels of her elation like brittle bones. “...lied to me.”

“What?”

Quantum pushed away and rose to her hooves, looming despite her diminutive height. The shadow of her bangs cast a cool, dull gloom over her sapphire eyes.

“You lied to me,” she rumbled, the fire in her mind threatening to ignite again. “You were lying to me the whole time. You knew that taking Twitter Step to that dance wasn’t the right choice to make.”

Hal looked away. He said nothing.

“You knew it wasn’t right,” Quantum continued, “But you lied to me, encouraged me, and made it happen anyway. Even though you knew it would irrevocably alter your future. Why?”

Hal swallowed.

“WHY, Hal!?” Quantum wrapped both her hooves around Hal’s turtleneck and pulled him in close. “Why would you do something like that? You lied to me! You lied to Tissy! And for what? Some nebulous second chance at a future you couldn’t possibly foresee? What’s wrong with the life you have now?”

Hal pressed a hoof to his temple and shut his eyes tightly, trying in vain to call upon memories that weren’t there. “What happened after the dance?”

“I asked you a question, Hal!” Quantum growled.

Hal repeated his question as pegasus expression suddenly matched unicorn. Quantum sighed dramatically.

“I talked to Tissy.”

“What happened to Twit?”

Quantum felt the flames crackle up through the veins in her eyes. “That’s all you care about? What happened to Twit? I’ll tell you what happened to Twit! I fixed everything! I made it right again once I realized what you were trying to do to screw it all up!”

Hal rose, his expression tense. “...what did you do?”

Quantum folded her forelegs and turned sharply away, closing her eyes and forcing calming air through her lungs. “I took her out of the equation. I put things back the way they’re supposed to be.”

“...how dare you.”

Quantum’s eyes popped open, the vista of empty white flooding her vision instantly. “What?”

“I said,” Hal ground his teeth until it was practically audible, “How dare you.”

“H-how dare--” Choking on her own words, Quantum spun and met Hal’s rocky gaze with a hard stare of her own. “How dare I? How dare you! You have the nerve to say that to me when this whole time you were manipulating--”

Quantum couldn’t carry the thought. Her eyes focused on the single tear rolling down her friend’s cheek. Hal’s eyes narrowed, and he quivered as though the temperature had just dropped below freezing.

“I--” Quantum tried again, but she found Hal’s hoof over her muzzle so fast, only the single word got out. Without looking up, Hal spoke.

“Fine,” Hal simmered. “I did it. All of it. Everything you said. I falsified Tissy’s data, and I told you the wrong thing to do. But Cutie, I...I saw her again. Saw my life again. Everything that I’d conveniently buried over time. It all came back to me, and I...couldn’t just let it all play out the same way again. And you’re damn right I said ‘how dare you’. How dare you presume to decide what’s best for me?”

“...but what you did was wrong,” Quantum observed softly.

“Was it?” Hal snapped back. “Was it really wrong? Who are you, of all ponies, to judge me for something like that? When your mother came back into your life, what did you do for her? How far were you willing to go, to win back her affections?”

Quantum slumped, and found herself with nothing to say.

“It all happened so fast,” Hal continued, “and I thought, maybe the grass is greener on the other side. Do you have any idea how many times I berated myself? How many times I thought, ‘you idiot, all you had to do was get over your cold hooves and just go to that stupid dance’? How many times I wondered what might have been?” Hal took in a sharp breath, “I knew it the very next day, just from the change in her demeanor. We were still friends. We spent the rest of high school as friends. We still danced together. But I could tell. That dance was our moment. Our one chance. And I screwed it up. When we graduated and were out of one another’s sight? That was the end of it.” He paused, “I cared about her, Cutie. I cared about her a lot.”

Quantum mumbled something unintelligible. The brightness of the endless white made hiding one’s face in the shadows impossible, so she stalked several paces away. Hal’s ears perked. His wings beat without thinking, and closed the gap through slow floating.

“I didn’t hear you,” he asked. “What did you say?”

“...me?”

Hal edged closer, reaching out with his hoof, as if daring to swipe the cheese from a giant mousetrap before it broke his neck. “...what?”

“What about me?” Quantum’s voice was softer and weaker than Hal could ever remember hearing it. “Don’t you care about me?”

Frazzled, Hal pulled his hoof back. “Wh-what? Of course I care about you. Why would you think--”

“Then why did you abandon me?” Quantum persisted. “You’re not a fool. You know that what you were doing would change the timeline. That you would probably never go to C.A.S. And then you’d never meet me or Tissy. Tissy didn’t even remember you, Hal. When I spoke to her, she treated you like just another statistic. Another past to put right. Another happy ending. You were changing more lives than just your own. Didn’t you stop to think about that?”

Hal cringed. “I...dunno what I was thinking, I just--”

“I guess that’s one thing if Tissy didn’t remember you, because her memories were altered and thus never there to begin with. But for whatever reason...whatever spacetime mumbo-jumbo my molecules are going through, I remembered everything. How could you...do that to me?”

“Cutie, I--”

Quantum felt herself coming apart. She levitated her glasses off her muzzle and wiped her face with her foreleg. Her concentration broke, and the aura around the spectacles released, consigning them to whatever counted as the ground.

“How could you leave me? Don’t you care about me?” She sputtered, her expression cracking and her vision blurring with moisture. “Does an old high school flame really mean so much to you? Are memories that were all said and done in the past that important to open up again? Do you think Twitter Step the only mare who could ever care about you, or want you to care about them? If that vault had been years later...would you have manipulated it to make sure you and I would still meet?”

Hal suddenly felt as though the white all around him was a gigantic sclera, and his companion was a contracted pupil focused entirely on him. He wilted under it, his ears drooping. “...I knew we were friends, but I didn’t know you felt that way...”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Quantum sniffled plainly. “A blind, geeky, winged idiot with no fashion sense.”

“And you’re a stubborn, crude, four-eyed, emo son of a great and powerful nag,” Hal reproached. “And look who’s talking, nerd.”

Hal managed to keep himself in the air when Quantum flung herself into his forelegs. He folded them around her scrawny, bony warmth, and found there a certain quivering softness he’d never given her credit for concealing in her heart.

“I’m sorry Hal,” Quantum’s muffled voice blubbered from somewhere in his garish turtleneck. Hal brought a hoof soothingly up his friend’s back and ran it through her seagreen mane.

“I’m sorry too, Cutie. Sorry for everything.”

With a gentle push of a hoof on his chest, Quantum lifted her face. Without leaving his embrace, their eyes met. Hal felt warm breath wash over his snout, and he blushed.

“I...I mean...we...”

“Shut up, jerk.” Quantum muttered.

In a place where there is nothing, distance and direction have no meaning. Time also means very little, and both ponies quickly lost track of how long their lips touched. Alive with the scent and touch of one another’s soft coats and steady breathing, their minds coalesced into a dreamy haze of warm, delicious relief. An infinity later, Quantum batted an eyelid, caught a glimpse of something over Hal’s shoulder, and roughly pushed away from him, clearing her throat.

“Huh? Wha-?” Hal looked around, bewildered, while Quantum pointed a hoof at the image of the white pony. He - it, was now simply there, its masking robes merging in and out of the endless white as they billowed without a breeze to carry them. Hal squinted.

“What? Is something there?”

Quantum frowned, “You still can’t see him?”

The seed is sown

Hal started at the voiceless words that seemed to project into his mind from everywhere. “No, but I can hear him.”

Halifax Calavanner

Hal stared blindly in the direction Quantum was pointing. “...yes?”

An ear for an ear

A hoof for a hoof

Stand beside or stand aside

Hal and Quantum stared blankly at one another. Hal spoke first.

“I don’t underst--”

Stand beside or stand aside

Hal put a hoof to his chin in thought. He looked back to his small, minty friend. She stood on legs that were shaky from the prolonged weight of emotion. She was staring straight ahead, without her glasses; fright clear on her pained expression.

In that moment, Hal knew he wanted nothing more than to make her awful expression go away. He stood next to Quantum, close enough to brush flanks, and stared again at nothing.

“I stand beside,” He replied in challenge.

The choice is made. For better or for worse, for good or for ill, you will share in the fate of your companion, Halifax Calavanner.

Hal did a double take and suddenly recoiled.

“You can see him now, can’t you,” Quantum stated.

“...uh huh.”

Quantum Trots Lulamoon. Your penance is not yet satisfied. You and your companion will continue to pay for the lives that have been destroyed by rebuilding others, until this tribunal is satisfied with your toil. Succeed, and you will be redeemed. Fail, and you will never know the peace of death.

“Yeah I’ve heard that before,” Quantum felt strangely emboldened, brushing up against Hal’s wing. “So you’re giving us another chance?”

Go

The single syllable rode on the trails of a rising thunder that rolled towards the two ponies from all directions, as if they were in the epicenter of a collapsing hurricane. All around, the white began to shatter, giving way to a warped, screaming myriad of realities - moments in space and time too numerous for either mortal pony’s ability to perceive them all. Millions of voices and sights crashed down on Quantum and Hal like a world-ending tsunami.

When it all cleared, the white space was empty.

Comments

[RTStephens]

The choice is made.

"The Traveler has come!"

Yeah, couldn't resist.

So, back to the grind, are we? Good for Hal and Cutie to air out all that angst. I'm guessing that last loop doesn't count now, other than the two remembering it.

These two better sell themselves to Twitter Step step to make up for that poor mare's grief.

[WishyWish]

7438777 Don't feel bad. My brain went Gozer the Gozerian the moment the white pony uttered it

The issue of who remembers what will be addressed. They have a timeline to fix, after all!

[Everglue Horace]

hmm... Is it odd that I'm not sure how how Hal is going to manifest now... Wynona?

[ferret]

The seed is sown

Thanatos is such a voyeur.