Day One
Fine was awoken by the shouting. He jerked awake to find himself in a gazebo overrun by trees and vines and shrubs. It didn’t take long for him to recall why he’d chosen to settle down here for the night. The shouting came from the overlook. Fine felt a twinge of worry and crept through the thick underbrush. Ignoring the clinging limbs and leaves, he turned his ears forward as the male voice rose again.
“At this rate, you’ll never pay back what you owe me!” The voice had a distinct accent, though Fine had difficulty placing it. “I’m a veteran, you little turd. What have you done that makes you think you can get away with stealing from me?”
“I’m sorry!” That had to be from the filly. “I’ll have more tomorrow, I promise!”
Fine winced at the pain implied by the sound. He was almost over the foal’s little nook; he wouldn’t be able to see, but he could hear everything.
“You’d better, you little zit. I didn’t spend fifteen years fighting griffons to have some snot-nosed brat take my hard-earned produce!” There was the sound of cracking wood. “I expect no less than ten bits tomorrow, you hear me? Otherwise I’m gonna break that little nub off your ugly head.”
Fine pressed himself to the grass at the sound of hoofsteps, his eyes on the overgrown path leading back to the park entrance. A zebra in a thin brown vest appeared below, stalking off with loud stomps. He never looked back, so Fine didn’t get a chance to see his face.
Not that it mattered; how many zebras could there be in this area? He’d learned enough that finding him again wouldn’t be hard.
He blinked. Had he seriously just considered that?
The foal’s crying redirected his attention, and he slunk his way down the slope and toward the road. After a few minutes, he reached the same hiding spot he’d found the night before. He hunkered down and peered at the area beneath the overlook. One of the benches had a board broken in two and the fire stones were scattered.
The filly sat outside her lean-to home, tears dripping on the stones at her hooves and a bruise on her cheek. She trembled like a leaf, visibly straining to regain control of her emotions. The sight left a horrendous pang in Fine’s chest, but he dared not show himself. After what seemed an eternity, the filly’s sobs came under control. She moved slowly to push the scattered rocks back into a circle one at a time, sniffling all along.
Fine closed his eyes and tried to drown out the pathetic sounds. The last thing he needed to do was fret over a child. He knew better than most that it would lead to nothing. Life sucked, and that filly was just another casualty. Help her and he’d be a casualty too. He’d seen far too many ponies become casualties – often to him – to think that bothering with this would make things better.
The horn. He needed Sugarcube’s horn back. No more, no less. He would wait for the filly to leave, find where she’d stashed the horn, then leave New Clusterdam and the accursed foal behind.
Sure of his path, Fine nodded to himself and opened his eyes. The filly had completed the stone circle and was just crawling out from under the sign. Fine barely resisted a frustrated groan; the damn pony had the horn! It dangled from her throat on its wire, seeming to taunt him as it swayed. He considered leaving his hiding place and confronting the foal…
…but couldn’t. He didn’t understand why, but he couldn’t. Maybe because he didn’t know how to handle foals. Maybe it was that she was a witness to his crime, and the last thing he wanted was to drag her into his accursed life. Whatever the case, he knew he couldn’t let her see him, so he held his temper and watched.
The foal held the horn in her hooves, raising it before her face and staring at it. Her lips set in a small but firm frown; her brow furrowed; her gaze became piercing. Something about that expression bothered him. He’d seen it before, but he wasn’t sure where. Wherever he’d seen it, he knew it didn’t belong on a pony so young.
At last she let the horn dangle from her neck. She sighed and, with her magic, pulled out a small, folded piece of cardboard, a decrepit pack, and a plastic basket. Slipping the pack on, she balanced the cardboard on her back and began to walk resolutely down the path, basket handle in her mouth. Fine watched her go and sighed in defeat. He thought about the body left in an alleyway, about how he should be far away from New Clusterdam by now, about Sugarcube and the horn he wished were hanging from his neck.
Despite everything his head told him, he found himself following the foal.
Fine hated sunlight. It pierced his eyes like a knife, to say nothing for how it drove away all the best shadows. Even so, he didn’t dare lose track of the filly.
She’d not travelled far at first, going into a small clearing of the park where four neat rows of flowerbeds were planted. The filly cheered up at the sight and, gathering some rusty tools from a hidden spot behind a tree, began to work with the flowers. She pulled out weeds, clipped old buds, and checked for bugs. After an hour’s work, she used the basket to gather water from a faucet down the road – the same one Fine had used to wash up the night before – and came back to water the plants.
By that time she was finally smiling. It looked nice, even with the ugly bruise on her cheek. Fine watched the whole thing from behind a tree, safe from both her eyes and the menacing sun. He analyzed her movements, her manner, her eyes, just as he analyzed everything he saw. One thing was clear: she loved these plants. Which was why it surprised him when she took a rusty pair of shears and started clipping off the flowers. Once a few dozen were picked, she set them all with great care in her basket.
When the last flower had been picked, the filly whispered thanks to the flowers and put away her tools. Reclaiming her pack and setting the cardboard on her back once more, she took the flowers and left the clearing. Fine couldn’t help but note the resigned look on her face. After one last stop by the faucet again to wash the dirt away, she left the park, blissfully unaware of the serial killer watching her every step.
They walked for nearly three hours, leaving behind the Horseshoe District. Fine followed with the patience of a practiced hunter. Their journey took them to the much brighter and nicer Songbird neighborhood. She only stopped when she reached a small park, settling down on the grass close to a playground. A couple mares were present with their youngest foals, but it was too early for the older kids to be out of school.
Fine settled himself under a tree where the thick leaves protected him against the worst of the sun’s rays. He sported a drab brown coat he’d nabbed from a carriage stop along the way and munched on a bagel he’d bought with some pickpocketed bits. He kept his attention set on the filly, wondering just what she was up to.
The filly set her pack and cardboard down. Rummaging through the pack, she pulled out a small tin can with the label missing and set it down in the grass by the dirt path. She next pulled out what appeared to be a coin. By its red color, Fine suspected it was a carriage pass. She sat and set the coin on the tip of her hoof.
She flicked her hoof, and the coin flipped into the air.
And kept going.
Fine followed the coin as it rose up and disappeared in the sunlight. He stared, perplexed, then looked to the filly. He blinked; the coin was back in her hoof. Taking a moment to rub his eyes, he craned his neck to get a better angle, but the coin was certainly still there.
She flicked her hoof, the coin rose. This time Fine watched her hoof with a peering gaze. She moved it in a swift twirling motion… and there was the coin.
He sat back, mouth agape. It was about all he could manage. He watched blankly as the filly practiced the move another two dozen or so times, not once messing it up or accidentally revealing the trick.
Then she shifted to a different one. She raised both hooves to an equal height before her and, with yet another flick of her fetlock, tossed the coin from one hoof to the other. Fine watched intently, wondering what was supposed to happen. She flicked her other hoof and caught the coin…
Fine stared; somehow the filly was now carrying two coins, one in each hoof. She tossed the coin in her left hoof, and now there were three. That was when things got truly ‘magical,’ as the single coin seemed to fly back and forth over and over again, almost in a blur, bouncing between the two other coins without ever touching her hooves. She kept this up for nearly thirty seconds before clapping her hooves together; when they parted, she raised them both up as if to display them to an audience.
There was only one coin.
Fine rubbed his chin, curiosity piqued. He ignored the filly’s next coin trick in favor of studying her. She was small and still lacked a cutie mark. He was certain she could be no more than seven years old, and yet she knew magic tricks? Not even the kind of tricks requiring a horn, but magic of the ‘stage’ variety.
This kid was talented.
The filly spent all morning practicing her routine, revealing a little over a dozen tricks of various types that she’d mastered and another half-dozen that she apparently didn’t have the hang of. There were only two times she attempted to use her horn: once when she tried to lift a frayed rope from inside her backpack but couldn’t get it high enough for whatever she planned, and another involving something that Fine couldn’t determine. The latter she seemed quite determined to learn, going back to it over and over again, but the poor thing never managed more than a few white sparks that barely left the tip of her little horn. Whatever she was trying to do, it just wasn’t working.
At around noon, the filly finally took a break. She stuffed all her things into the backpack, but left it behind as she walked off for a nearby bathroom. Fine thought nothing of this at first… until she walked right past the doors. She instead went around the back of the building, pausing only to look around and make sure nopony saw her.
At first, Fine considered leaving this alone; if she was using the bathroom, he had no intention of watching. Yet why would she do so from behind the stall rather than in it?
Time passed. Fine wondered how long she would stay back there. Surely she couldn’t be using the bathroom, time was stretching on for too long. Should he reposition and check to make sure she was okay?
Just as he was preparing to move, the filly reappeared. She hurried to the mare’s room as if her life depended on it, but she wasn’t fast enough for Fine to miss the green on her cheeks. Good Goddess, the filly was eating grass? Fine figured she was hungry but that… that disturbed him far more than anything he’d seen so far.
Well, aside from that jerk of a zebra.
When lunchtime came around, so too did the ponies. The park had a surprisingly large number of visitors for a weekday, but perhaps that was common here. Ponies out on picnics, many of them locals taking a break off work and the like. All the faces made Fine uncomfortable to the point that he seriously considered retreating to some hidden corner to wait it out.
He did hide, but not from the crowds. Fine knew that his presence would be noticed if he stuck around watching the filly in the open for so long, so now he found himself a hiding spot in the brush. Letting him get away from the sheer number of ponies around was a bonus. He made sure to nab a couple scones from a passing picnic basket before returning his full attention to the filly.
He was just in time to see her set the cardboard panel against a nearby tree. He stared at the scrawled whatever that was on the front, but couldn’t make sense of it until she turned it sideways. It was a sign, apparently. The wobbly, unclean letters of black marker spelled out:
SonFlowErS flowers
a bit
mAgic ShoW
Fine took in the poorly written words, which offended his writer’s sensibilities. Well, former writer’s sensibilities, and he had to take into account her apparent age and lack of schooling. In fact, from that perspective the sign was pretty good. The filly pushed the can a little closer to the path and set her basket of flowers under the sign.
Then she worked. Fine could think of no other term for it. She began calling to ponies who passed by, offering them flowers and a magic show, putting on a smile and performing some of the presumably easier tricks. She wasn’t very loud and couldn’t seem to draw the attention of anypony who wasn’t nearby.
Yet she was relentless.
“Excuse me, sir, buy a flower? Only one bit.”
“No thanks, kid.”
“But it’ll look nice in her mane.”
“She looks nice enough as is.”
“Honey, buy a flower from the dear.”
“Don’t need it.”
“Then I’ll take one, sweetie.”
“Thank you!” The filly eagerly placed the little purple flower in the mare’s waiting hoof, grinning wide as a lone bit found its way into her waiting can. “Would you like to see a magic trick?”
“We’ve got horns, thank you.”
“Okay, thanks a lot, lady!” The filly waved enthusiastically as the couple walked away, flower tucked in the smiling mare’s mane. Her partner merely scowled.
An instant later, the filly was calling to a suited stallion just preparing to sit down in the grass opposite the path. “Hey Mister, wanna buy a flower? I can do magic, too.”
The stallion promptly walked off to find a different spot to have lunch.
There it was, the expression Fine had been waiting for. The filly’s face fell, her ears folded back and her tail tucked around her side. Her eyes slipped to the can with its lone bit. Then, just like that, she was smiling again and calling to the next pony to dare walk within range.
She kept going, the little trooper. Fine spent all afternoon sitting in the bushes and watching her. She spoke to every pony she could, never travelling far from her sign. She didn’t attract much attention; indeed, most ponies just walked right by her. Every now and then a pony or two would pause to watch her perform one of the magic tricks she’d been practicing all morning, and a few would buy flowers. Fine kept count; twelve bits in three hours. He was tempted to steal a bit or three and buy a few.
The ponies thinned significantly after the period Fine assumed accounted for a lunch rush. The filly took a break then, starting by dumping the contents of her can and counting the coins one at a time. She did this three times, and by the third time she was grinning from ear to ear. Perhaps this was what she considered a ‘good’ day. The thought made Fine nauseous.
The break didn’t last long; soon the foals from school had invaded with their parents. The noise of screaming and laughing children made Fine’s head hurt, but he bore with it and kept his eye on the filly. She worked even harder now, and her magic tricks drew the attention of some of the other kids, many older than her. Some of the parents promptly dragged their protesting foals off to another part of the park, looks of disapproval or guilt covering their faces. Others were kinder, buying a flower or two and stomping for the magic tricks. Most paid the little performer no mind at all.
At least the foals were nice to her… up until they noticed the bruise on her cheek and the horn around her neck.
Then it began.
“Is that a real horn?”
“Where’d you find it? I want one!”
“Did you fall and hurt yourself?”
“Magic trick blow up in your face?”
“Nah, her daddy did that. Pint Size had bruises just like those.”
“Her mom could have done it.”
“Is that why you ran away?”
“I bet it’s her dad’s horn.”
Amid parents hurrying to hush their foals – if not dragging them off outright – the filly’s face turned red and she lost her energy. She made a point of looking up at the sun and acting surprised before grabbing her things and stuffing them in her pack. She left the park so quickly that Fine couldn’t keep up without being obvious.
He left his shelter and moved at a leisurely pace, but his mind was running circles. He stopped at the exit to watch as the filly fled back in the direction of the Horseshoe district.
Stats
Page generated in 0.025 seconds
Total duration
1,046 users online
1,871,263 hits today, 2,073,628 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
She certainly is unique, in the way that it's a good view into the life of a true street urchin, or whatever they're called.
It's a believable story, and she plays the parts well.