• Published 17th Oct 2015
  • 537 Views, 7 Comments

Mad Love - All of the Above



Usually, your heart's desire will never be yours without hard work and unwavering dedication.  Occasionally, it will fall right in your lap.

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Chapter 3

Tomorrow came a little quicker than Xavier thought it would. He didn’t sleep that night. He only thought to himself, thinking of the best possible ways to approach her, the comprehensible ways that she could reject him, the incomprehensible ways that she could reject him, the appropriate reactions to her saying yes, and the inappropriate reactions to her saying no. Xavier was almost completely prepared. Every single unexpected turn was accounted for, every single detail planned out in such excruciating detail. The only thing that he was afraid of was the possibility of her not being where he thought she was.

If only this kind of planning and thinking was used back at Glass House, he thought to himself, leaving his room to face the day ahead of him.

The stairs leading downstairs seemed like a child’s plaything because he took a monumental leap down to the bottom.

Age, however, came flooding back to him at the worst possible moment. Just as his legs made contact with the floorboards, he stumbled forward and tripped over himself. His face made a lovely indentation on the wall, along with the four other indentations.

Pain steered through his legs like he dipped them in steaming hot water. Instinctively, he hissed. Reverting back to his old, cynical age, he walked cautiously down the steps, eyeing and hissing at the stairs as if he was a cat.

The house greeted him with the same kind of silence that he was so fond of. It reminded him of the same kind of swinging silence that always greeted him whenever he knew that his father wasn’t home. A semi-happy time of his life. He supposed that it could have been worse. His father could have beaten him savagely. But, eh. What can you do about the past besides burying it next to your dog?

He began to walk but retreated. There was a noise coming from his kitchen, like the sound of somepony pouring a liquid into a cup. It was so strange and so unfamiliar, that he didn’t fully recognize until it came flowing through the air like a snake in the grass. Xavier also recognized machinery pumping in filtered fluids and raspy breaths trying in desperation to try and sound normal.

Xavier finally recognized it. He groaned loudly, making sure that the pony could hear him, and hear him well.

“I’m not that repulsive, am I?” said somepony from the kitchen.

Xavier begrudgingly entered the kitchen. As expected, an old “friend” sat at his two pony dining table. Rudely, he loudly sipped a cup of milk. Milk that Xavier was saving until it became rotten. Now that the milk had been compromised, he needed to go and buy more.

“I don’t believe I invited you here, Mr. Injection,” Xavier said, avoiding eye contact.

“I didn’t need the invite. Your door was just unlocked.”

Xavier looked towards his back door. The doorknob was lying complacently on the floor, dented and smashed.

“What do you want? I have some... things I would like to attend to today.”

“Like what? Mope around your house and pretend that you’re doing work?”

Xavier considered shoving him out, but Deep Injection was a much larger pony than he. The fear that Injection could just touch him and he would fall over and break both of his ankles were a fear that made Xavier fairly adamant of not making him angry. A habit that was very hard to follow.

“Look. I’ve never had the need to invite anypony over, so when somepony like you comes along uninvited, there’s a serious problem. Now, what in Equestria do you want?”

Injection put the glass of milk on the table. Exhaling, tubes pumped some kind of liquid into his body. With no remorse in his eyes, Deep Injection let out a statement so blunt, breaths he would take in the next half-hour halted themselves.

“Percival took his life last night.”

Of all the things that Xavier expected to hear, Percival biting the bullet was unsurprisingly on the top of the list. Percival was never the calmest and collected one in the group of friends. Xavier vividly remembered how he first met Percival. Screaming, shouting, telling every pony with ears that he wasn’t supposed to be a test subject. He tried to escape a few times until they finally just said, “Screw ya!” and let him go. As far as Xavier knew, Percival was somewhere in Equestria trying to get himself into trouble. But hearing that he killed himself...

Xavier’s breath caught itself in his teeth. Deep Injection let his head down, muttering something to himself.

“How did he...”

“Overdose. He was in Manehattan. Mugged a pony coming out of a pharmacy, downed the whole bottle then...” he breathed in deeply, more liquid went into his neck “...and there. Kept shouting that he wanted to cure himself of it. They tried to do something, but... Well, you know how Manehattan is.”

Xavier took the seat opposite of Deep Injection. If there were any words that could cross his brain, Xavier would have used them. But this made him speechless. For the first time in his life, Xavier Priston found himself confused and without a comment.

“The funeral is this Sunday. 3:00 in the... cemetery. I think you might want to be there.”

Deep Injection finished off the milk, the tubes pumping in liquid with a sickening *slurp.* With a thud, the cup clinked on the table. The small drops of milk left swam in an empty pool.

“You know what his last words were?” he suddenly said. “Find her.”

“Find who?” Xavier asked, staring at the empty the glass.

From his jacket, he pulled out a slip of paper. Deep Injection was scribbled onto the page. He unfolded the paper and flattened it out onto the table.

“Percival wrote this the day before he killed himself. I won’t read the whole thing, but it says that for a good long while, he’s been searching for his kid. A daughter that he never knew about until this mare told him that he was a father. Apparently, dealing with alcoholism proved to be a bit too much for him to bear. He never found her.”

Xavier never knew Percival too well. It hurt to know that he learned this much about him through a suicide note.

“Percival wanted me to find her.”

Xavier looked up. “W-why you?”

“I was the closest to him. He went so far to consider me one of his only friends. If there was anypony to tell her the bad news, he said that he wanted it to be me.”

“Do you even know where to look?”

“You wanna start providing actual input? This whole time, you’ve been asking questions and not even giving me an answer! You really think that I know how to...” He calmed himself down in time for a larger dose of liquid. “No. The only thing he knew and I know now is that she’s a traveling magician. Has no permanent home, nowhere to stop and smell the... roses. After the funeral, I’m going to look for her. Let her know that her father loved her very much.”

Xavier nodded. He could already picture the following week's dinner party. An empty seat, a flickering light, less of a song in her heart and no bounce in Sugar Sprinkles’ step, and a lingering silence that felt like the sting of death. Who knows how long it would take for it to finally dissolve back into their usual hardy laughs and friendly eyes bouncing back and forth from the table like a four-way, ten-pony game of ping-pong.

“...I’m sorry. I, uh...” Nothing Xavier said felt right to him. “If you find her... give her a hug for me.” Xavier didn’t even know what else to say. The only other thing that came and went through his head were more and more questions.

Deep Injection got out of his seat. “The milk is a little spoiled, by the way.”

“I know.”

Without saying another word, Deep Injection exited through the back door. He didn’t even bother closing it behind him.

Xavier’s breath was sour. A coarse sigh ejected from his mouth, cracking open his mouth. The scent of sour milk entered his nostrils. He gagged, breaking him out of a stupor of denial.

Alone. Silence. All of it hanging from the rusty hook on the ceiling, so dangerously close to snapping. Taking a deep breath of fractured air through his nose, he left his house as well. Being sure to close the door behind him this time.


Xavier broke the news to Char. Char wasn’t as close to Percival - he didn’t even know him all too well - but it still saddened him to hear news like that. He offered his condolences, and a few sniffles to go with it. Their daily lunch would have to take a sick day, but neither of them expected to resume such an activity after the death of a friend. The only thing that would come up in conversations would be Percival.

Everypony but Char would always comment about how Xavier and Percival were so alike. Both of them were frustrated addicts, both liked eating the same thing day in and day out, both even liked the same kind of pastime.: sitting alone and thinking. Xavier knew, however, that Percival’s thoughts were much different than his own. Except perhaps the question of suicide. Whether or not it would be worth it to finish off their life early. Xavier always kept the idea in his mind, but never acted upon it. He was far too busy with science and other studies to drink a tube of bleach.

That was one difference between them. Xavier would never let his life end when he still had so much to do.

What shocked Xavier after some careful thought was why Percival did it. Percival had a pretty hefty goal in mind. Whenever the thought of Percival came up, the first thing that anypony would picture in their mind was his tenacity. Even though he did not want to be in Glass House Science Facility, whenever anypony asked him to do something that would require a lot of cooperation from both test subject and scientist, he would do it diligently. Granted, they all suspected that he was doing it only to get himself out of there, but they all admired how he would do it until it was thoroughly finished.

The more he thought of it, he realized just how similar Percival and Aegis Strap were. Xavier smiled to himself. The name brought back warm memories. However, with those smiles and laughs, came the horrors of what he’s done. Day after day, they told him that it wasn’t his fault. He was just a pawn in her sick game, forced to comply or lose everything he held dear, but... Xavier couldn’t accept that. He still went ahead with the experiment despite that gut feeling that wouldn’t stop bothering him. And to this day, Xavier Priston is still cursed by Aegis.

Aegis stared at him from the opposite side of the cell. A thick, plastic wall separating Xavier from Aegis stood like a monolith. The dusty brick room behind Xavier was such a stark contrast from the shiny, freshly painted white cell that Aegis was sadly the only resident of.

Red tear stains adorned his face like tainted face paint. Wrapped tightly around his entire body was a plain white straight-jacket. Aegis made an effort of trying to get out of it. Rocking back and forth, wildly attempting to tear the thing off of him, and even scraping against the walls in vain.

“I need to stop it! You don’t know what’s coming!” Aegis screamed, groaning in agony and slamming his body against the wall.

Xavier tried his best to ignore himself retching.

“I can save us! I can save us all!”

It seemed like just yesterday Aegis was just a normal pony. A young, headstrong stallion that Xavier had gone so far as to consider him one of his best friends. And it pained him to think that Aegis was permanently damaged. All because of him.

“I know how! Just let me out! Celestia almighty, I will save you bastards!”

The experiment could have been stopped if only he just pulled the plug. He should have listened to himself when he knew that this wouldn’t work. Everything he thought could go wrong, went terribly wrong. He could have saved Aegis from living a life unfit for habitation. Nopony could survive like this.

“Xavier!”

On the verge of tears, Xavier looked up to see Aegis, doubled over and looking directly into his eyes.

“Ortiz is ready for you now,” Aegis said directly to Xavier.

Xavier turned around. Aegis stood right in front of the cell, staring deep into Xavier’s eyes. He knocked his head against the cell.

“I’m so sorry, Aegis. I’m so sorry.”

Xavier turned around. Aegis slammed himself against the glass wall, screaming his lungs out.

“You can stop this, Xavier! You can stop Glass House from creating their damned Kingdom! Save us all! Save Equestria! The wall can’t stand!”