An Artist Among Animals

by Bandy

History of a War

When Noir was Seventeen, it was a very good year.

A famine had just broken out when Noir left his homeland of Scoltcilia. The first of the great northern vineyard to die closed its gates the day he boarded a long, bullet-like airship aimed for Equestria.

That morning, as Noir packed with his family, his father gave him a revolver. The barrel was long and sleek and silver. They stared, awestruck at the awful thing, before wrapping it up and placing it in one of Noir’s carry-on bags.

The ride went without incident, save a troubling newspaper article about more farms going under. Years of high demand for Scoltcilian produce had reduced nutrient cycling to a laughable offense. The money was in durum wheat and tomatoes, and the money was right now.

And it didn’t start out as a famine, of course. What plague starts out in its deadliest form and regresses? The soil was not dust you would find in an Appleosian flower garden. It was strong. But a new form of bug which could thrive in a bucket of pure pesticide was stronger. The only thing that could kill the bugs was a freak cold-snap. When that too hit the island, the bugs suffered and died along with their food supply, and the ponies’. Then, when the cold melted away, the bugs came back.

It was a very good year for travel companies, but not as good as they might have hoped.

The distance made him bitter like bad wine. In his letters home--ones he had to send two months in advance to assure they would get to their destination on time--he told his family he was fine.

Meanwhile, the famine worsened. Day by day, like a wasting disease. It festered in houses, in the pitiful growls of small bellies. An open sore, exposed in times of quiet and sacred silence. Churches gave up. Churches! Hope for the hopeless! Pray for food! Gods, Celesia, Luna, save us! You can’t help us? Why? Divinity can’t save us from bugs? Who are they to decide the fate of ponies? They would be better off squashed.

All this Noir read from his new home in Chicoltgo, purchased with what would have been a meager college fund. He found a job, then another, then another, until his resume was a mess of reputable names and warnings against this employee’s acute anger problems. His references raved about his unparalleled abilities in sales.

But what did Noir care? He had taken enough off the top to sustain him. He sipped the brim until it receded into the barrel, too far away for him to reach. It was a fine year, but over the months his thirst grew greater. Opportunities around the city began to shrink, slimmer and slimmer, until there was no source of income--his or someone else’s--left to manipulate. As the help wanted section in the newspaper disappeared, so too did the letters he received from Scoltcilia. The famine had earned its name, and Noir’s family had to sell most of their possessions to get by.

They ran out of ink before paper, so they wrote with used charcoal embers from the previous night’s fires. Their writing suffered, too. He could see the hunger in their hoofwriting. The starved swirls, the ravenous dips. They hurried through their writing, as if he would send them food for writing him.

Their final correspondence contained only 15 words. Mama is feverish. Only thieves eat. Famine is in from Griffonia. Please send money Love

Initially, Noir had puzzled over the odd space in the letter. For a few months, the mystery compelled him to survive as he waited for another letter. An explanation, another mystery--something to keep him wondering. He went so far as to save the note, pinning it up on his wall while all the others had gone into the hearth after a good long read.

A month passed. It was a very good month. Not for Noir, but for someone out there. The imagined successes of the elite made him sick with jealousy. He longed for money. He longed for more than a short wait in the Ponyville breadline--a line which, over the course of the months after his family’s final letter, grew steadily to include businessponies and models, artists and clockmakers, college dropouts and accountants. Microcosms of society lined up and waited.

It was in one of these lines--the longest one he had ever seen and wouldn’t be topped until the next day--that he learned the meaning of the letter. Coincidentally, the truth came about through his insatiable temper.

“I can’t tell if your hearts are beating,” he called to the crowd, “because you’re all standing so damn still.”

“Hey, cálmate carcamano. We gotta eat too,” a pony with a Brayzilian accent said.

“You don’t have to eat here. You have jobs.”

Yeah, but no food,” replied another stranger from behind him. “No food in supermarkets, can’t eat nothing.”

“Where are you all coming from?” Noir turned towards the first speaker. “You’re dressed in good clothes. You speak strongly. You’re not suffering. Why are you here with low-lifes like me?”

“We are low-lifes, carcamano. The famine what from Pissbeaker finally came round and hit us.”

“Imports--no good anymore,” the pony behind Noir spoke up. “Imports dead. They take exports, but no pay for us. It’s charity.”

“You’re wrong--the famine started in Scoltcilia.”

“It’s a festering wound, carcamano. Griffonia is gonna infect us. They did this to us, that’s all I’m trying to say.”

A murmur went up around Noir, a chorus of nodding heads and vague hums of agreement.

Noir frowned, hesitated, and bolted from the line. It closed in behind him with a final call of, “Where you going, carcamano? You a pissbeak sympathizer or something?”

Noir grew quiet. Where was his family now? Had they moved in search of food? Were they dead? Something clicked, and the space in the letter fell into place. His hoofsteps clattered on the rough street sides, an echoing war chant growing louder and louder as the streets narrowed.

He ran through time. The buildings dipped, then soared high above him. Forte piano crescendo. The higher they got, the closer they came to him, narrowing harrowing a run across a busy street carriage screaming past him his family is dead the famine is in Griffonia carriage--whoosh!--too close he doesn’t care his family is dead dead dead dead dead five ponies traveling along the Scoltcilian countryside begging for work carriage the famine is from Griffonia carriage somepony shouting a cop? what good will a cop do you can’t arrest a famine with handcuffs only help and who will give it but Equestria except now Equestria is in a famine there are ponies in suits in breadlines the famine is in Griffonia--

Noir was on the other side of the street. What had been an orderly street disintegrated into chaos as carriages veered and honked their horns. He reeled and stumbled away towards his apartment.

Buildings rose up to obscure the sun at uneven intervals, throwing Noir into odd shades of shadow and light.

He ran into a newspaper salespony--almost knocked him over, too. While the old stallion was busy picking up his wares from the ground, Noir tucked one into his body and ran away. Light, then dark, then light, then dark, then light--electrical light.

Noir slammed the apartment door shut behind him. He cut a path into the couch, then the table, knocking the latter onto its side, before reaching the wall where the letter was pinned.

He tore it off the wall, sunk to the ground, and read the letter again, and again. Five times in total.

From beneath him he pulled the slightly crumpled newspaper and laid it next to the letter. The headline proclaimed in bold letters:

GRIFFONIAN FAMINE HITS HOME
SOURCES WITHIN EQUESTRIAN GOVERNMENT CONFIRM REPORTS OF PESTICIDE-RESISTANT LOCUST IN EQUESTRIAN BORDERS
EASTERN FARMERS UNPREPARED FOR FREAK COLD SNAP
GRIFFONIAN IMMIGRANTS, IMPORTS TO BLAME, SAYS CROWN
SCOLTICILA CONTINUES TO SUFFER UNDER SIMILAR INFESTATION! DEATH TOLL FROM HUNGER RISES
ALL THIS NEWS AND MORE ONLY ONE BIT

It clicked into place, like the bolt of a rifle. His mother must have tried to correct his father (who, being the only one besides Noir who could write in the family) after he had written that the famine was in Griffonia. They didn’t want to waste energy scratching the word out. The famine wasn’t just in Griffonia. It had originated there.

In the following weeks, the word spread, first by newspaper and then by word of mouth. By the time homeowners started to find anti-griffon leaflets stuffed in their mailboxes, Griffonia had been unofficially charged with rampant incest, torture of political partisans, violent atheism against the Princesses, violent theism against the Princesses, and aggression in the form of a string of unknown assailants attacking the border mountains on the Northeast border of Equestria and Griffonia.

The princesses denied griffon involvement, stating the attacks were merely raids conducted by desperate villagers, but refused to comment when asked what species the attackers belonged to. They also denied that it was griffon immigrants smuggling infected produce into Equestria to sell at local markets that had caused the bug to jump from one country to another. Their response to such an allegation was a wordy shrug. In time, they would even have to clear the griffon name of purported sky-terrorism as questions rose as to whether it was the griffons behind the savage cold snap and not just the regular flux of the earth’s weather. All the while, the pamphlets grew bolder in color and darker in tone.

None ever showed up under Noir’s door. None were necessary, as far as he was concerned.

The sentiment grew harsher with the weather. The awful snap that had plagued Griffonia and Scoltcilia manifested in the heart of Equestria. A perpetual alien wind blew protest signs and leaflets across the streets, carrying the message from one side of Chicoltgo to another.

And when Equestria seemed ready to burst at the seams--a statement from the Crown! Increased windigo activity in the lower atmosphere! The product of an unnatural wave of racism. The princesses implored their subjects not to spit fire at the innocent griffons, but instead use it to warm their homes and their relationships with Equestria’s sister state.

It was a very good year for parchment stores. Large-font letter stencils and posterboard flew off the shelves.

Why was it his fault, Noir wondered, that his nation had suffered? His fault, that his surrogate home now required an expensive heating unit he didn’t have? His fault, that a loaf of bread would have cost him a day’s wages--if he could find a job? His fault, that griffons had brought a plague upon his kind? His fault? Some probably believed that, too.

He would show them.

Anti-griffon marches didn’t get off the ground until the price of corn spiked. The grain could be imported. The fruit could be hydroponicized. The cold could be combated with a coat or two. But the corn! The corn was Equestria’s worldly staple. It equalized cuisine. Everyone from the lowliest workhorses to the princesses themselves ate corn on a regular basis. Corn oil fried their food and corn syrup sweetened it and fermented corn turned it alcoholic. Call it corn-crazy.

When the corn became infected and then froze, the bottom fell out. Half the market destabilized and toppled. When the Equestrian market went down, it took a few others with it, mainly the floundering Griffonian trade partnerships keeping the country off the edge of the financial plateau. The loss of the corn market, it could be argued, dragged the world into war.

The griffons, having no more central market to rely upon to regulate the distribution of food, turned to local black markets which flourished with both bad crops and crime. The images of bug infested produce stained with pesticide and fights over hunks of bread only served to solidify the Equestrian opinion. The griffons couldn’t be satisfied with the destruction of the Equestrian way of life--no, they had to go and destroy themselves too. What good were they, when they couldn’t even keep their own country out of turmoil? And then drag Equestria with them? Who were they to decide the fate of ponies? They would be better off squashed.

As the black markets became more competitive, the average griffons lost their foothold in the business to wealthy mafiosos who swept in and bought up the food only to turn around and sell it at a tremendous markup. The whole landscape went straight to shit.

And things were not better on the homefront--or any front. Noir had never been to an anti-griffon march before, or a march at all for that matter. But--but!--now seemed the opportune time to start! Let his voice be heard! Equestria was a free country, unlike the tyrannical Griffonia, ruled by sex-crazed gods of destruction and an archaic ruling class. Here he could speak his mind.

Except he didn’t--not at first. It didn’t take courage to march--it took hatred. Noir hated the griffons, sure, but for some reason the regular weekly intervals of shouting coming from down the streets inspired him to stay inside and cook his hatred in habitual isolation.

He had never seen a griffon in person, but the newspaper advertisements of terrifying claws and beaks shredding flesh and a grin stained piss-yellow through the black and white print gave him sufficient evidence. Inside his little slice of hell, emotions leaked out of him like sound from a squeaky chair, bounced off the walls, and hit him a second time. Thoughts, too--they resonated better than any violin.

It took violence to spur Noir into action. As in the past, so in the future. The formula of these things was almost cliche. Somepony would incite the police. It was a simple, repetitive refrain, but a catchy one. Shout something at a cop. Cop gets close, threatens you with arrest or some other mild punishment. Get up in his face. Cop pushes you away. Bump into him. Cop breaks out the billy club. All hell breaks loose. You do the pony polka and you turn yourself around and put your hooves behind your head you have the right to remain silent. And that’s what it’s all about.

And one night, a rote scene of horrific violence took place right outside Noir’s window. A police pony with a billy club and a protester with a chipped piece of brick. One went into the other, and the other went into the flat below Noir via the exposed window. Noir was sleeping at the time. He slept through the crash of glass only to awake to the panicked cries of his downstairs neighbor. Help! Help! Gods! He’s bleeding! The rugs! Amateur bebop.

So! Out into the night he went, to the tune of a wailing trumpet filling the air with nonsense notes. Like sirens! All he meant to do was survey the damage--really. He was going to go back inside right after he caught a glimpse of the shattered glass, the frantic struggle of a pony in handcuffs, the blood.

What he hadn’t counted on was the violence--gods, the rush of violence! It grabbed him as he exited the building and forced a deep breath of smoke into his lungs, until he had to pant just to keep from passing out.

He had heard the protests before. But now! Gods above! The violence was firsthoof! There was a carriage on fire, there was a pony sitting on his own broken bones. There was a police pony with a cracked piece of headgear. There was the future! What a rush! Wander the streets and survey the damage. To see was to be, and be empowered. All this chaos, and Noir was alive in the middle of it!

Before he could react the sweeping tide of temporary anarchy swept him up. A carriage soared past him, a tilted cobblestone away from total collapse. Police in dark visors jumped out as it sped by, rolled, and started dismantling the protesters.

--And all of a sudden there were protesters! Scores of them! Ten, twenty, who knew? In the initial high of the moment Noir had failed to notice the stream of ponydom rampaging around him. These apparitions had come about from thin air. He was in an abandoned metropolis one moment--

And the next he had been pushed, hard, in the back.

Noir went down hard on his side. Another limb sailed into his chin, cranking his head around his spine. Blood flowed from his mouth. There was a riot. Police were hitting ponies.

Someone had hit him. Was it one of the police ponies in dark visors? A fleeing fugitive? This was the consequence of violence; acute and unrelenting pain.

He got up. Stood up on his own hooves. Teetered. Stabilized. The cart was gone. A pony or two ran across the street. The tide had ebbed, leaving Noir alone in the middle of a broken street with a busted face, spitting blood. Wasn’t he in his home a few moments ago? Where was his family? Where was the easy sunshine of Scoltcilia? When had it turned into slow-burning snow-falling hell?

He finally saw his neighbor’s house with the shattered window, all the way down the street. The police pony must have backed their target into the window hard enough to crack it. A few pieces were missing. Presumably the suspect had fallen to the floor inside. All in all the damage wasn’t that bad.

He looked around and opened his mouth to cry out. Bloody spittle trickled from his lips. He coughed. Where was the violence? Where was the dance? Tangled up tango--down the street.

That night, he slept in a grove of trash cans on the outskirts of a small park near his house. To return to his home in such a state seemed criminal.

So he hid like the cowards, the passive protesters who couldn't afford to have their bones broken and fur burned.

Ponies would run by, close enough to reach out and grab him.

Flames lit the night. Street lamps and carriages. Burning.

He’d hide from the lights on the city green, when he was seventeen.

When noir was twenty one, it was a very good year.

It was a very good year for all able-bodied stallions aged eighteen to twenty five.

On the long and lonely train ride to basic training, Noir wondered to himself how many of the stallions around him would ride their draft number into the grave. He never got the chance to dwell on it--the train was far too loud, and it moved far too quickly--but for that time on the train, with the whole of Equestria flying by, empty fields and dull-colored towns, the sun, the moon, the stars, the sun, the things he would inevitably protect, it was okay.

War, he decided, didn't deserve a memoir. War was what? Strategized violence. Attack here, build a base there, bomb that town, drop incendiary charges in that forest. The border attacks, as much as they intensified, didn’t really have any chance of succeeding. Hungry griffons in rags with spears and flintlock rifles against armored members of the Equestrian Long Patrol--who would win those fights? And what were the griffons fighting for? Food? Temporary shelter? If by some miracle the griffons actually succeeded in their attack and drove the ponies out of their forward base, they could stay there for about a day before the far-reaching hoof of the Equestrian Air Force came down on them--another few days more if they just killed everypony in the base. Left to its own devices, the border disputes would settle themselves. Why the princesses saw fit to charge the whole of Griffonia with armed assault and make plans to reciprocate didn’t quite add up to him.

War was the prolongation of violence. What was war again? A drawn-out release of violence? Bullshit. War transcended violence. Violence was brief and temporary. A punch in the gut. Wars lasted--how long? Years. Months. However long it took.

What was war? A great juicer. And everyone--Noir and his family and the griffons--was a lemon.

War wasn’t fair. Ponies died in their sleep from hypothermia and got shot while they walked to the breakfast line and stepped on landmines in the middle of good jokes. Most of the other casualties were thinking of something better when they got juiced. What a waste! Life and voice! Pony and hatred.

War wasn’t worth Noir’s memories. But violence has a way of sticking in place--a moment detached from time. The initial months of the war skated by like Noir couldn’t, and individual memories--a recruit getting chewed out for forgetting to lock the bathroom stall door, a collective first experience with guns (but not for him), the train ride to the borderlands where he learned he would be fighting in a snowy and mountainous environment shortly after being outfitted with a thin overcoat, the shout of a recruit eating snow as they pushed up the base of one of the many mountains dividing Equestria with Griffonia--snapped like bullets hitting the dirt in front of him, pushing up strange flowers made of snow and frozen rock.

War! Get in the mentality of it. Civilian no more. You’re a killer now. Noir? Who was he? Oh? A pony? A rifle and a helmet, fueled by food stolen from natives, fueled by hate, a near-inexhaustible--but still finite!--amount of hate.

How long can a pony hate? A day? A year? Forever? Hateful ponies look back with sadness. Their families are gone and they themselves will soon follow suit.

Noir could hate for a very long time.

A shift. Minor to major. A glorious battle, followed by a terrible slog. The years burned with chemicals and a sticky kind of petrol spray that turned everything it touched black and wrinkly, like mistreated leather. The vapors looked just like a battery of carriage tires burning, burning a hole through the mountains of Griffonia. The flames, it seemed, reached for the core of the earth itself. Trying to reunite with the one single continuous fire that could only be extinguished by the extinction of the entire planet.

He came undone, when he was twenty one.

When noir was thirty five, it was a very good year.

It was a very good year for ponies who could shave away years like they could a five o’clock shadow. Skin and fur and bones could be manipulated. Only the eyes told true age. Take a razor to their throat and miss, time after time, stroke after stroke, until they were neat and presentable--downright spiffy even, in a pair of dress blues.

Noir considered the option for a very long time. He would stand in the bathroom of the same dingy flat he had lived in before the war broke out--a flat that would have been somepony else’s, had not the landlord taken Noir’s service into consideration and cut him a deal that only resulted in a slight increase in rent. How very lucky for him! Some of his friends had nothing--and hold a razor to his chin.

It probably would have been more symbolic and satisfying to hold it against his neck, but that would put his foreleg at an awkward angle and it hurt after a few minutes. So he would hold it to his chin and pretend it was against his neck, though the feeling wasn’t quite as good.

But as weeks turned into months, he began to forget about how good or bad it felt. The razor was a small bit of security, like the pension checks that arrived in the mail every month. He basked in the quiet isolation of his flat, grew like a potted plant into his surroundings.

And he watered well! At first with cheap swill beer from convenience stores to ward off cold, then with harder and finer years.

He discovered that he could condition himself to enjoy hunger. That was the day he was able to reassess his finances and buy more booze.

And finances! Gods above, he had to worry about finances again! In the army you had to worry about getting shipped off to a far-away country to die by the talons of some rabid unthinking savage of a griffon, but you sure didn’t have to worry about getting audited for forgetting to do your taxes. The fear of death may not have been imminent, but in a strange sort of way it was an almost preferable comfort to the horrible thought of losing his home, the only unchanging thing in this post-war period of reconstruction. If you get shot in a war, it’s the bad guy’s fault. If you miss your tax deadline and wind up homeless--that’s on you.

Apartments were spreading into suburbs and the carriages were getting sleeker and the buildings were getting taller--but his family’s final letter was still hanging on the wall. The house, it seemed, had mummified itself in dust during the time Noir spent fighting. A replica of a dingy old flat with skin the color of jaundice and a repulsive beauty that beckoned to be stared at but not disturbed. Aside from the dust, everything was as it was. The drawn shades gave it a sort of acidic orange glow, a look of perpetual early-morning.

And Noir didn’t want to disturb it. He only wanted to live there. Occasionally drink too much and make a mess, but nothing more. That was what he wanted from life, then. To get by and to be left alone. What he really needed more than anything else, more than money and liquor, was to sort out his memories--were they memories anymore? Were they still happening every night when he closed his eyes? When he heard the lid of the garbage can slamming shut in the alley below?

That was another reason why he didn’t want to disturb the flat. He was worried about leaving a mark.

When Noir got out of the train that had taken him from the station by the border to Chicoltgo, they had ushered him and his remaining friends without fanfare into a large conference room with no chairs and no desk. There they were told they might have nightmares or vivid hallucinations. They were given a set of phone numbers printed on a large notecard to call, just in case.

He tossed the card in the trash before he left the station. He didn’t want to bring it into the house. He was back. He was home from war. The griffons had signed an armistice. The war was over.

He didn’t want to take the card into his house. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to leave a mark. The nightmares continued, until one night in a feverish scramble beneath the covers he kicked over his nightstand. He just happened to get his hooves under the lip of it and buck hard enough. It was there. Then it was over.

What a sight he must have been. A pathetic waste of a stallion. The card was gone. The nightstand was over. What was he to do? Spiral? How long did he sit there staring at the overturned nightstand? Disgusting. He didn’t even have the nerve to fix it for five whole days. There was his mark.

Regrets? He had a few. Throwing away that card was one of them.

Going out was another--but did he have a choice? Groceries needed buying, trash needed taking out. He could lock his windows and draw the shades and live in his filtered sunrise, but he couldn’t survive in it. Besides--where else but in the city’s bars would he be able to get drinks as cheap as they were?

He could bank on a few free drinks if he dressed in his army blues, and moved from bar to bar periodically, partially to avoid seeming like a mooch and partially to avoid being recognized. He could flirt with liquor as much as he pleased--neither it nor he would remember by tomorrow morning. But other ponies could. They might remember his awful angel eyes, his temper, his dress blues, the way he would stare at his boots and shake his hooves a little bit before speaking. Ponies like Noir got remembered, one way or another, in moments and memories. He wanted to be a part of neither. The war had blasted him inside himself. His body had weathered the bombs and bullets, but his soul had caved in. People could reach in, but they wouldn’t find much. It takes effort on both sides to heal, and Noir no longer contained the will to reach out.

And that’s what ponies would try to do, when they remembered Noir. Reach out. Try and save him. They knew what he was going through. They wanted to help? Can I buy you a drink? Why don’t you just talk about it? War trauma, you say? I read about that once. Nasty stuff. I’m so sorry you lost your mind. If it’s any consolation, you look just fine.

He did look just fine--was he ever dashing! Strong and tall and fit; the picture of equine health and fertility. He couldn’t communicate with actions the unending wariness, the marionette self-inflicted listlessness that blasted his mind into a hyperaware coma. How the hell do you talk about something like that? How do you think? He saw everything, remembered everything. His mind couldn’t work properly due to the sheer amount of information it took in. Permaflow on a highway. It crippled him--but his legs were still chiseled and steady.

Alcohol made him unremember. He drank to forget, back then; an unamusing and boring pastime. Money couldn’t remember. Money was a passive addiction. You would never give away rock candy you bought off the streets for a loaf of bread, but you could spend extorted money without trouble.

So for some time--a few years, probably. He didn’t keep track of his birthdays--he remained a ghost of an unknown soldier. He thought it would be best. He was right. And eventually, despite all his efforts, despite all his moving around and staying still and wordlessly begging and staying as far away from everypony as he possibly could, he was recognized.

It didn’t happen for any one reason. Noir had his uniform on. He sat at a bar drinking a beer that didn’t belong to him. He hated the taste--but it was free! It was late, late enough for the lights to be low and the music easy and sad.

Not late enough. Not dark enough. Not slow enough.

In walked the future: a static point to move towards, and eventually away, in the same continuous line. A finely dressed stallion with strong legs and a sharp midsection accented by gold-lined shoulder boards. His face was an unmoving picture partially concealed by dark sunglasses.

Was he ever dashing!

He was more than handsome, though. He was intelligent. Observant enough to notice the service patch on Noir’s uniform. Quiet enough to slip into the spot next to him without being noticed. Fast enough to grab Noir’s foreleg with his own and proclaim with a subtle quiver of emotion that grabbed the whole room’s attention, “Gods above. You’re a billy goat. I don’t see many of us around.”

Noir replied, “Well, there were a lot of suicides.”

Noir grimaced as this strange new stallion sat down next to him. Within moments they got right down to the awful business of being remembered. War stories were dragged up from their mass graves. Prostitutes in the border cities were scrutinized. Dead friends were mocked. Over the course of a few hours, Noir was dragged back into the past by--what was his name, Noir asked?--McTough. They had been in the same camp for a month or so during a lull in the fighting, when Griffonia pulled some of its forces from the mountains to amass them on their border with the Crystal Empire to wait for an attack that wouldn’t happen for over a year.

They had played a game of cards together, McTough--that was his name, right?--told him. Apparently Noir didn’t want to part with his bits when he lost, so he offered to fight McTough for them.

They didn’t fight--Noir would have remembered that. Ponies remember violence. Nopony gives a damn about a lost card game. You can shake that off. But fights are imprinted into the flesh of your face and the pits of your memories. You remember a good fight. You remember a good ass-whooping.

Noir didn’t whoop McTough’s ass over a few bits. How else was he supposed to remember him?

But McTough didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he was being awfully reserved about meeting another pony from his unit, especially with the reputation the billy goats had among enlisted personnel. His demeanor betrayed nothing but precision and calculated gestures. McTough, Noir soon learned, was very good at being neutral. It drove him crazy, too. What was a pony without emotion? Where did all the piss and vinegar go? He had to be good at hiding it--that was it. His head must have been a clusterfuck of thoughts to bottle up and conceal.

Those, and memories.

Here’s what happened over the evening. They drank some more. McTough picked up the tab, a gift which Noir repaid by humoring the conversation. Talking was tough and it hurt Noir’s head, but he did it anyway. He thought it might be good for him. The best way to cope with stress was to vent it. That was common sense.

With time it became a bit easier. The end of each sentence left him with a pleasant buzz, a simpleminded form of euphoria. Had he been drinking? No--it was the talking that made him feel good. Noir had no money. Other ponies paid for drinks. McTough was another pony.

And through the talk, through the reminiscing and the omitting, Noir realized he remembered everything. And once more--it made him feel good.

Crazy! He had been going about it wrong. How had he been doing it before? Listening? Understanding? Trying to? How stupid. He couldn’t understand any of it--the war, his part in it, the nightmares. Why try?

But he could remember it. Gods above--he could remember it! That was as good as understanding. In the wee small hours of the morning in the dim amber light of the bar, Noir remembered his frailty. He could have died in the war, or he could have swallowed a bad oyster, or gotten hit by a speeding carriage. Why hadn’t he?

Who knew? Who cared? For the life of him Noir couldn’t remember why the war had started, but for those hours in the bar with McTough he remembered the days he would have naturally forgotten, the average days where nopony died before his eyes and all he had to worry about was ducking low enough when moving through the shallow rocky trenches connecting the machine gun posts and keeping his socks dry.

That was as gratifying as writing a dissertation on war itself.

He tried to think of a dissertation on war itself just for the heck of it. A spur-of the moment thought. All he could think of was “wasteful.” There was the simplicity he wanted. A clear and objective goal to strive for. War was wasteful. Remembering was good.

Wouldn’t you know!--It would lead him to his grave.

When they ran out of war stories to tell, the present reasserted itself with such force that Noir coughed out the sad state of his living situation. Like someone had hit him on the back hard enough to push the air out of his lungs.

He sat there agape in silence as McTough told him about open positions in his own line of work--the Chicoltgo Metropolitan Police Department. How they were a bit low on level-headed and experienced decision-makers. How the office gave special consideration to veterans. How he could put a good word in with the commissioner.

But first--Noir had to make a promise. First to McTough--then, later, he promised, to the commissioner to make it official. He wouldn’t touch another drop of alcohol again. Alcohol was destructive, they deemed. It would inhibit Noir’s ability to perform as a member of the force. This was their ultimatum; five seconds of serious thought and a nod of his head.

“You’ve been drinking all night with me,” Noir said.

“We’ll need to work on your observation skills, then,” McTough replied as he pointed to a single full glass collecting condensation in front of him.
.
That five seconds turned into a few more hours. The yes was worth the same.

From that day onward Noir stayed out the bars. He ordered grape soda at restaurants despite the jeers of his fellow officers and guzzled it down as if he were trying to float away. He stuck to his promise.

Of course, he still drank heavily. Only now it was in secret. Reserved. An intimate sexual encounter with the past in the confines of his tiny bedroom. He was done beating it out of his memory with booze bottles. From that day on he promised himself to remember all that he had intentionally forgotten over the years. He played music to pave the road to the past and he drank to make it slippery, so when he inevitably stumbled he would slide.

It was a very good year when his life stabilized, when he no longer had to bear the indignity of charity, when he had passed training and gotten his badge, when the feeling of freedom and his dependence on alcohol put each other into tipsy equilibrium.

And then, like all good sob stories, it came undone. There was his pride! It was always in the past.

Noir and McTough were assigned to a case involving exotic furs being smuggled illegally into the country through the assets of the family Philarmonico, a family of Scoltcilian descent who built a name in the classical music scene while accruing a fortune in the illegal fur trade. Their name was known throughout Equestria as one of the last great marefia families. The rest had been crushed by the war, yet they remained. Their endurance unnerved city officials.

Who better to take the case of such monumental proportion than an upstart veteran and his glassy-eyed partner in crime?

The two were to pose as slightly revised versions of themselves. They were both disillusioned war vets who couldn’t integrate into civilian life. They had heard about the Scoltcilian organization through family back home--that was the revised part of their characters--and wanted the opportunity to continue their war. When they acrued enough evidence, they would route the entire organization.

They did it all, and well! They knew they would probably be killed by the end of the operation, brutally and slowly in a basement or, hopefully, quickly and suddenly while they waited for the bus. A shot through the back of the head--what a fantasy! Painless and surprised, with a half-formed look of serine curiosity on their faces. They had access to the files on the Philarmonico gang. They signed the forms, then the wills. McTough gave his family heirloom, a gold watch with a studded amethyst centerpiece, to a relative in Fillydelphia. Noir burned his family’s last letter. Just before he held it over his stovetop burner he recognized his sacrifice; his sentimental last gift from his family for their safety--if they were still alive. Who knew what a powerful marefia boss could do with an overseas address?

Over the next year, Noir found out exactly what could be done. McTough couldn’t make any progress--he turned away all the dirty jobs--but Noir flourished. The best good guy, it seemed, was a bad guy. They were doing just fine until all the bad guys died.

What probably happened was a large group of marefiosos from a clan on the other side of the city were lured to a newly acquired Pihlarmonico restaurant with the promise of a deal on a new shipment of exotic leather from northern ranches of Griffonia, the ones that hadn’t been irradiated during the war. Seven arrived in total, representing the branches of the family and their guards. They went into the restaurant, with its nice stone walls and purple drapes peeking from behind the windows, later determined to have no real business in it whatsoever. Upon sitting down, they were promptly overwhelmed by several stallions dressed in military uniforms. Thinking it to be a raid, the marefiosos surrendered. They were promptly shot execution-style in their seats. The shooters dumped their guns into the Chicoltgo river and fled the country with the help of the Philarmonicos.

What probably didn’t happen was this: Noir hadn’t been told why he needed to shoot--all he had been told was that this act of good faith would solidify his standing in the Philarmonico family. This was the only way to make sure he was totally loyal to the family. All he had to do was put on his uniform and tell them to surrender.

He hadn’t shot a gun in years. He missed the first few times, but it sprayed wide enough.

He tried sneaking back to the police station only to be trailed by McTough and photographed leaving the scene of the crime. Bail was set at half a million bits, just to make sure nopony would try to bail Noir out. The public wanted justice! And the police would ensure it in spectacular fashion.

That is, until Tom Philarmonico, son of the don of the Philarmonico marefia, walked into the Chicoltgo police station with a suitcase full of gold bars.

“One of your prisoners has a dinner appointment with my father,” he told the stunned officer working the counter. “This is easier than rescheduling."

The Philarmonicos drove Noir out of prison, past McTough, past the past, past his future. They desired his further assistance. They walked out of jail and into a bright black limo waiting for them on the street corner.

Their chauffeurs would drive, when he was thirty five.

But his days grew short. It was the autumn of his years.

His dreams curdled and turned to nightmares again. He drank and drank and drank, yet he could still remember. Worse--it made him remember. This was his penance. This was what he had to do. He had to remember all of it. Forget the present. Fuck the future. He needed the past. Needed it! All of it! The story wouldn’t come in pieces. He had to swallow it all at once like a stiff shot. Again and again so he would never forget.

It was a mess of good years. And then, a mess of years.

Noir took a sip of his wine and swirled it around in its glass before setting it down on the desk. A vintage. Made before the war. When the northern vineyards could still produce quality grapes.

He took a sip and smiled bitterly at the taste. It was a very good year.