• Published 2nd Dec 2017
  • 5,651 Views, 316 Comments

Twilight In Plain Sight - Mitch H



Twilight and her orphaned niece are starting a new life in a new town, as far from Flurry Heart's monster of a grandfather as they can get. But as far as you might run, you can't run away from you. Especially when magic's involved.

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Paying Attention

Twilight let Flurry Heart sleep in, since it was the weekend. The little girl had few enough moments of childhood normalcy, might as well let her come to the day in her own time.

Twilight nursed one of the leftover energy-drinks she'd bought the last time they went to the Family Dollar. She had a notebook now full of her notes on the interrogations, her deductions, and sundry observations. Twilight had to get the results of the ritual down, before any of it faded from her recall.

Twilight hung her expended stones in the window, but it was west-facing, and would have to wait until the afternoon before they caught any sun. It was still pretty, like an oversize spider-web hung heavy with crystalline dew-drops. She watched the sun's rays burn away the night's mists in the back yards and hedges and low roof-tops and alley-ways between their apartment and the school on the rising slope across the way.

Eventually the thumping and muttering from down the hall heralded the last raising of the day, and a sleepy Flurry Heart came barefoot down the hallway, rubbing her eyes and looking for cereal.

"Where's your socks? It's going to start getting cold in the mornings, Flurry."

"Mornin'. I dunno, do we have anything that isn't raisin bran?"

"You know all that sugar isn't good for you. Huh. Well, we can get something with some honey in it next time we go down to the grocery store." Twilight gathered up her notes, shoved them into her note-book, and joined Flurry in a rather dull breakfast.

They were out of orange juice.

While Flurry went into the bathroom to take a much-needed shower, Twilight looked one more time over her note-book. Then she looked through her supplies, and found a magnifying glass and a cheap personal grooming kit she'd bought a while back. She took out one of the pairs of tweezers from the grooming kit, and got up.

"Skyla!" Dusk Shine shouted through the bathroom door. "I'm going out on the front stoop. I'll be right outside the front door!"

She listened until she heard, over the drum of the shower thrumming through the pipes, "'kay!"

Dusk Shine opened her front door out onto a sunny Saturday morning, summer making another stubborn stand against the creeping chill of an oncoming autumn in the air. She ducked back into the apartment, and took a cheap, thin jacket off a set of hangers hung over their box of shoes.

Armored against the clear, sunny chill, Dusk fumbled for the magnifying glass, and bent down to examine the tread of the steps leading up to her little wooden porch. Cheap non-skid tape had been shakily applied by someone to the wooden steps the last time they'd been replaced, with one of the strips curling slightly where the adhesive hadn't quite set right.

She went over the stairs one tread at a time, looking for her target with the magnifying glass, a pair of pill-bottles in her jacket-pocket, and a pair of tweezers in her free hand. She found a couple strands of both Skyla's and her own hair, and tucked them away in the first pill-bottle for later disposal. But as for what she was looking for…

His hair had been… a sort of pale orange? No, proper blonde.

Dusk Shine found nothing on the steps proper, not even the first stair-tread. She expanded her search across the concrete pavement of the sidewalk, and then, with a revolted sigh, under the steps themselves, filtering through the leaves and disgusting kibble that always falls through the stairs into the neglected asphalt underneath.

As she was sorting through the filth under the porch, and keeping an eye out for curious neighbors or funeral home employees, Skyla came tromping out onto the stoop, and looked down to see what Dusk was doing. The little girl ducked back inside, and then a moment later, came out with her own jacket on, and a dangerous gleam in her eyes.

"Hey, Mommy, I wanna play, too. Can I come out?"

"Stay within eyesight, Skyla, and let me know the instant anyone shows up, OK? Don't go wandering."

"'kay."

The little girl went scurrying about, walking between the parked cars, and crouching here and there. Dusk Shine continued her finicky, foul exploration of the vicinity of her own front steps.

The early autumn sun baked away the chill, and Dusk got up to put away her suddenly-stifling jacket, leaving her pill-bottles sitting on the edge of her stoop. After another ten minutes, Skyla came skipping back to hand her own jacket back to Dusk, and Dusk hung it on the hangers inside their front door, which she left open to air out the apartment a bit.

It was a small space for two women to share – it wasn't quite stinking yet, but it would definitely start to smell off sometime soon. Dusk Shine resolved to buy a vacuum cleaner next month.

She sat down on the second step, looking at the neat pile of rubbish, leaves, and disgusting trash she'd accumulated. Nothing she could absolutely be sure of, nothing she could point to and say, 'this was the hair of one Stormbringer, late of the Salvaje Outlaw MC, dead of uncertain circumstances.'

Dusk Shine wished briefly that she had become a police officer, that she could get access to the body without so many questions as to utterly destroy her beginnings of a quiet life in the process.

That wasn't happening.

And perhaps it was for the best. She'd never done the bloodstone ritual over a dead man's hair before. Who knows how it would work? There might be – there almost certainly would be – consequences. Consequences she really ought to respect.

Dusk Shine, sitting on her sun-warmed stoop in the early autumn, pondered the cautionary story of the Witch of Endor. Perhaps It was far too close to necromancy.

The sun was suddenly eclipsed by the shadow of a little girl, holding out something in her own pair of tweezers, the second pair from the grooming kit, taken, no doubt, from where Twilight had left it on the dining room table.

In Skyla's tweezers was a long, beautiful strand of pink hair. The little girl's eyes glittered in triumph.

"Was this what you were looking for, Mommy?"

"W-where did you find that, Skyla? Show Mommy where you got that."

Dusk Shine had Skyla lower the fine strand of pink hair into the empty pill-bottle, and Dusk palmed the bottle protectively. She got up, and had her little girl lead her across the parking lot, beside the garage across the way. Further down the asphalt, into the shadowed cool of the passageway that led behind the garage into the alley that ran back into the heart of their block, the alley that eventually terminated in a cross-road short of the back end of the school Dusk Shine worked at, and Skyla attended.

The passageway was roofed against the elements, open on either end, running all the way through the garage, but not actually being in the garage. It was lined with clapboard, an ancient coat of paint curling and fading, which hadn't been renewed the last time the garage exterior itself had been painted. Exposed nail-heads were working their way out of the neglected wood here and there, and Dusk Shine eyed the dangerous conditions, resolving to have a word with Skyla about staying out of this tetanus wonderland from now on. Skyla had finally gotten all of her vaccinations a week or two ago, but still, this wasn't…

The little girl pointed at one of the nail-heads, right at the level where a six-year-old could easily reach it. Two or more strands of hair were tangled up there, right where a tall woman might have leaned up against the side of the passageway, out of the sight of anyone lurking in the parking lot or the alley, where such a woman might have gotten her impractically long hair snagged upon a rusty nail-head.

Dusk Shine suddenly had a vision of clarity and revelation, her mind's-eye conjuring an image of a certain biker-chick, maybe two, crouching here for hours on end, waiting for darkness. What was sitting by their feet? What were they waiting for? Who was they waiting on?

Dusk looked down at the pill-bottle in her hands, and got out her tweezers, and took the rest of the hairs from the nail-head.

For insurance.


Twilight Sparkle didn't want Flurry Heart watching her as she renewed her preparations. It wasn't something a little girl should watch.

"No! I wanna see, Mommy!" Flurry Heart was fading, bit by bit. She talked more and more like Skyla, even inside the house. "Why don't you want me to see it? Is it something bad?"

Twi- no, this was something for Dusk Shine. Even sitting here, inside, at her own dining-room table, she needed to be Dusk Shine.

Dusk Shine looked down at her daughter, and remembered sitting at a much, much larger table with her grand-mère. The old woman hadn't hidden things from her petit fille. Was she doing the right thing in depriving Skyla of knowledge, of understanding about what was going on around her?

"You don't touch anything, you don't even breath on anything, and if I ever – ever! Catch you imitating anything I'm about to do, I'll tan your hide. You know I will." This was an empty threat – Twilight had never laid a hand on her niece, nor had the little girl's parents while they still lived. But Shining Armor had been fond of that particular threat, and his father before him, and Twilight Sparkle associated that phrase with nec plus ultra – beyond which, no tolerance for childish shenanigans, no room for horse-play.

Dusk Shine took the vinegar bath with its soaking stones out of the cabinets, and another sealed syringe. She laid out the pill-bottle with the pink hairs, and the rest of the prepared threads, and the vinegar bath, and her syringe. A wad of paper towels soaked up excess vinegar as she set out the stones to dry, and she began the weaving of mud-daubed thread and twine, of several of the pink hairs, and bits and pieces, as Skyla watched in silent fascination.

When the stones had dried, Dusk Shine wove them into the net of thread and hair, replicating the steps from earlier in the morning exactly. She paused a minute before breaking the seal on her second syringe, looking at Skyla.

"Blood," Dusk said, channeling Skyla's great grand-mère, "has a great moral power in it. To touch another's blood, is to step beyond what is proper – for a practitioner, for a sinner, even for a saint. It is a violation of everything sacred within another, within that which is not you. We are given certain limits, certain boundaries. This is also why we are not to dally with those with which we are not bound, heart and soul, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. A practitioner must take these things deathly seriously, because we tread so closely to the line in every other particular.

"A practitioner may only touch her own blood." Dusk Shine removed the bandage she'd placed over her prior wound, and pierced her vein again, drawing the blood with one swift motion. She picked up the alcohol swab, wiped down her twice-abused arm-pit, and re-bandaged herself.

The rest of the ritual proceeded as before, the bloodstones in their weave taking that unsettling crimson hue. Dusk Shine laid the fetish on the table, and looked at it.

If this Butterscotch was a practitioner herself, this might alert her that someone was gazing into her soul. Sombra had certainly detected something, when Twilight had used this against him, just as things truly had begun to spiral out of anyone's control.

Dusk Shine looked up at her wide-eyed daughter.

It had to be done.

Dusk Shine thought of Twilight Sparkle, and pulled the bloodstone fetish over her arm.


Everything was better when she was stoned.

The world was still what it was, she was still where she was, and the predators circled around her, sniffing, snarling, barking, raging at her and each other.

And that was fine.

It was easier when she thought of them as beasts, as animals. She'd long since fell in with people who made more sense as savage animals than as people. If she got high enough, she even saw them that way. The big, shaggy men in their leather vests and their riding-leathers faded and shifted, until she rode on the back of a growly centaur, or a big snuggly bear, and she could just delight in the rush and the joy of living without a thought for the future.

It generally took a lot of pot to get into that mind-set, though. And Steam Roller didn't like pot; he was more of a tweaker. Fluttershy wasn't nearly stoned enough today, not for this sort of thing.

Steam Roller was yelling again, pissed about the way she hadn't looked some of his fellows in the eye. Everyone was on edge because of the shootout. They'd lost almost a half-dozen members down in Waco, and even for Salvajes, that wasn't something you just shook off.

One of Steam Roller's buddies had nearly knocked Fluttershy off her feet, when she'd not gotten out of his way fast enough. And now Roller was explaining to her exactly how she'd shamed him.

In public.

She wasn't stoned enough for this.

She hadn't been stoned all the time before, even when she'd been living with that terminal pothead. She'd thought that guy had been an improvement over the last guy, the one with the quick fist and the hair-trigger temper. But at least the guy who'd loved to beat her, hadn't been the sort who'd just up and sell her to a biker club for a primo bag of kush, and the settlement of his outstanding debts. No, that kind of betrayal had come from the kindly, empty-eyed marijuana enthusiast.

Fluttershy didn't even recognize herself anymore. She might as well be another person.

She wanted to be someone else.

She looked up from the pain, as Roller's fist shook her by the handful of hair he had in his grasp.

And looked into the astonished eyes of Rainbow Dash.

Things got kind of blurry at that point, arms swinging, gloved fists flailing about. Steam Roller had been stupid enough to discipline his bitch in public, alone. And, in the event, seriously out-numbered.

His bitch looked down at him, bleeding into the asphalt of a convenience store parking lot, and told him, "Roller, I think this means we're breaking up. If you can't protect me, you don't own me."

She thought for a second, looking at the blood and the broken bones.

He'd live.

She walked away with the bikers who had just won her from the broken Salvaje. She looked down at Dash, who'd shaved off half of her hair, and was looking pretty good, all things considering. Even if she hadn't grown any since the last year of high school. It'd been years since Rainbow Dash had dropped out of school and disappeared.

Sometimes she'd wished that Dash had taken Fluttershy with her.

"Hello, Rainbow. How have you been?"

"Better than you, it looks like. And I don't use that name anymore. Don' want to have anything get back to the parents, you know?"

She thought about Dash's crazy parents, and all that drama, and shuddered in sympathy.

"What do I call you?"

"Hey, Soarin, whaddya call me these days?"

"Honeybunch? Momma? Mistress Pain?" joked the handsome young man in the Hussars cut, starting up his big Harley.

"Smartass. Hey, Gilda – what's my name?"

The other short biker, her grey-white hair styled in the same hacked-off, half-shaved fashion as Dash's, was incredibly butch. She looked up from her own bike.

"Shut the fuck up, Blitz. We need to get out of here before that clerk inside calls the cops. Or hell, maybe the Salvajes. Never can tell around these parts."

She looked back and forth between the bikers, and wondered who was going to take her. Who did she belong to now?

"Hey, dweeb," said the hot little biker with her shock of white-grey hair. "You ride bitch? You look like somebody who rides bitch. Where's your helmet?"

Hell, if they'd won her, they won her stuff. She went back to Steam Roller's abandoned Harley, and retrieved her helmet from where it was hanging.

She ignored the groaning, half-conscious outlaw biker bleeding into the pavement.

"What's your name, dweeb?" asked the tiny biker. Gilda.

"Call..." she thought of Dash's new name. She could be someone else. She thought of a former boyfriend's term of affection, when he'd been sweet and seductive, before it went bad like it always did.

"Call me Butterscotch."

Butterscotch strapped on her helmet, and got on the back of Gilda's Harley.

They sped away from the scene of the crime.


Interesting.

Dusk Shine looked up at Skyla, and spat out the wooden spoon-handle. It was barely gnawed at all, this time. Butterscotch had been… not restful, but not the constant agony that had been Wind Rider.

That wasn't the mind of a cult agent. Or, at least, Dusk didn't think so. She was certainly the vulnerable sort, the sort who could easily have fallen into the orbit of Sombra's people. The drug use was certainly a very bad sign. How long ago had that memory been? The ritual didn't grab for particularly old memories, but these hair strands had been very long. Who knows what the differential might cause in terms of retrieval?

No, she'd been thinking about the big gun battle in Waco. That had been all over the news for weeks. It had been relatively recent – less than three months ago.

So…

"What did you get, Mommy? Was it the bad guy?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. I didn't get any read on why she was lurking out back by the alley."

"Waiting to put that dead man on our steps, obviously!"

"That's obvious to you, is it?"

"There isn't anything else to do back there. Only animals are some big bugs down by the baseboards. And termites are boring!"

Mental note – talk to landlady about possible termite infestation in neighborhood.

"Well, I still have plenty of charge on this. I'm gonna go back in, give me back that spoon."

"'kay!"


Butterscotch had been happy when they hadn't taken her to the big deal. Gilda wouldn't let her go out after she came back the last time with a dime bag. For a rough, tough biker dyke, the little ash-haired woman was surprisingly puritanical. She'd flushed Butterscotch's pot down the toilet in the room they shared these days.

Gilda had gone with Blitz and Soarin to the big drug deal. See? Totally hypocritical. But Gilda had said that just because Soarin had developed ambition out of nowhere, didn't mean that she'd tolerate her bitch flying on 'that garbage'.

Honestly, it had warmed something in the pit of Butterscotch's stomach, melted something that had been sitting down there, frozen, for a very, very long time.

She played with her hair, thinking about that feeling.

But it was in the aftermath of Soarin's big damn drug deal, that… Butterscotch's little world had barely begun to re-form, and already, something had cracked it like an egg.

The good humor and joy that Blitz, this new version of Rainbow Dash, had shone on everything around her, went out like a snuffed torch. The lifeless body of Soarin they'd brought back instead of a duffle-bag full of meth… that had smashed up Blitz pretty bad. Butterscotch couldn't imagine how it could have done otherwise.

She thought about seeing Blitz's old man like that. Why wasn't she more upset about it? The man was dead. A boy who'd helped save her… and there he was, dead, ugly, brutally dead. The girl she once had been would have been horrified. Fluttershy would have fallen apart like wet newsprint if she'd seen something like that. Before… everything. Was this who she was now? Was this who Butterscotch was?

She tried to keep out of Blitz's way after that, half out of respect, and half for fear that her old friend would see something in her eyes, that thing she didn't want Blitz to know about. And it wasn't as if Blitz was good company after the shootings. It had left her in a near-constant state of vengeful rage. Gilda had felt compelled to pour whiskey into her friend for several nights running, to get her so drunk that she wouldn't be able to go riding out into the sultry Texas darkness to hunt down and murder any Salvajes she might come across.

This fury was part of why Gilda had fallen in with Blitz's wild scheme to do a 'honor ride' for her dead boyfriend, to go riding deep into darkest Applelachia, wherever it was in hillbilly country the once-handsome biker had come from.

Unstated was the idea that it might be a good idea to get Butterscotch out of Texas, which was currently crawling with heavily armed and murderous Salvajes, many of which might recognize the tall, distinctive bitch as runaway property of their outlaw club.

Butterscotch could stand to see mountains again. She'd gotten tired of Texas and Oklahoma. Little good had happened down here in the flatlands, as far as she was concerned.

So this was what she was thinking about as she rode behind Gilda, where they'd taken rear escort behind the panel van that contained the refrigerated remains of poor, dead Soarin. He'd been nice enough, so Butterscotch thought she understood what Blitz saw in him, but she was sort of over men in general.

She snuggled deeper into Gilda's back, a little giddy at the warm feeling of freedom, of escape. Her chin fit right over Gilda's helmet, and it almost felt like they had been made, built to sit exactly like this, the engine rumbling between their legs, the highway screaming under their tires…

Butterscotch didn't pay attention to anything at all, not even when Gilda went into the rest-area's lady's room with Blitz to 'take a shit'. She just sat on a bench beside the parking lot, keeping an eye on the Harleys, and tried to figure out if she was a bad person for feeling so happy, when her friend Blitz was mourning her Soarin.

She didn't even notice the Salvaje, until he was close enough to grab her up off of the bench, and punch her off her feet, right in the face. Butterscotch, her face stinging from the blow, looked up, astonished, at the greasy blonde biker snarling down at her.

Storm something? Storm Shower, Ice Storm…

"You fucking bitch! I knew it was you in that truckstop! I've been chasing you bitches for fifty miles! I'm gonna punt you into the concrete, and then I'm gonna fuck you up some more! The doctors say Roller ain't never gonna ride again, you fucked him up so bad!" Then he picked her up, and punched her in the gut. Butterscotch folded like a fan.

There was a battle-scream as Butterscotch bent over the pain in her stomach, and she looked up to see Gilda hurtling towards the Salvaje standing over her, with Blitz a good dozen paces behind her. The Salvaje stepped into Gilda's charge and –

Knocked her right off her feet, catching her square in the chest with a fist like a hammer. Gilda fell to the sidewalk, and gasped like a fish dropped onto dry land.

Stormbringer! That was his name. Stormbringer whipped out a revolver, and pointed it square into Blitz's face as she caught up.

"Stand the fuck back, cunt. I'mma gonna just take what belongs to us, and you fuckers can do whatever the fuck you're doing here, I don't care. Get up, bitch!" The Salvaje grabbed Butterscotch by her left arm, not looking at her, and hauled her up to her feet.

He wasn't paying attention to her, he was looking down at Gilda, who was scrambling back to her own booted feet. The dumbass driver of the panel van had just gotten out of the men's room, and was staring at the confrontation with a stupid look on his face.

The Salvaje was waving his pistol back and forth, trying to cover both biker chicks, who had spread out, their hands spread, crouching to present smaller targets.

He wasn't paying attention to Butterscotch. He had let her go.

She reached down to the big knife that Gilda had given her on the first night they'd spent together. The one in the leather holster that looked like a bit of decoration on the side of the fancy leather boots Gilda had bought her new bitch. The knife that Butterscotch had sworn she'd never need.

Butterscotch thought of the corpse of Soarin that they'd brought back from the deal, his left eye a gory ruin, and she looked at Gilda and imagined that sharp yellow eye destroyed by a bullet.

Butterscotch took her boot-knife, reached around the Salvaje's throat with the blade, and pulled as hard as she could, grabbing his shoulder for leverage.

Blood. She hadn't expected so much blood.

Butterscotch checked out for a bit after that.

She curled around her knife, gripping it tight and crouching on the asphalt beside the dead body. She watched them arguing. Blitz was screaming something at Butterscotch, and Gilda was yelling right back at her, but Butterscotch couldn't make out anything they were saying. Then both of them started yelling at the dumbass from the funeral home. Something about the other cargo in the van?

Gilda coaxed the bloodied knife out of her hands, and Butterscotch out of her ruined shirt. She dragged Butterscotch into the bathroom, washing the blood off of her, wiping her down with those parts of the shirt which wasn't already a gory ruin. When they came back out into the parking lot, the dead Salvaje had been rolled into a tarp that the driver must have gotten out of the back of his van.

Gilda wrapped up Butterscotch's knife and the dead biker's revolver in her ruined shirt, and put it into one of her bike's panniers.

Butterscotch picked at the new shirt Gilda had forced over her head, and listened as her friends explained the plan, telling her how they were going to make this right. It was a good thing that Steam Roller had found it amusing to make sure his bitch could participate in the 'bitch rides' the Salvajes occasionally staged when they were stoned or drunk enough. She wasn't a good rider, but she could keep a Harley on the road, sort of.

They couldn't leave the dead Salvaje's bike here, not with all of this physical evidence right beside it.

They got back onto the road, with a third motorcycle added to the 'honor escort', and a second corpse in the van.


"Well, huh," said Dusk Shine, as soon as she had spit out her gag, and sat on the floor, leaning against the refrigerator. She looked over at Skyla, who was curled up on one of the chairs, staring down at Dusk with a sort of cockeyed fascination. "OK, I know how the dead man got on our steps."

"Are we gonna have to leave?"

"I… have no idea."

There wasn't anything about the cult in the tall biker bitch's memories. Plenty of drugs, plenty of serious social dysfunction. But crystal molly, or Sombra's glassy-eyed followers? Not a sign.

Dusk Shine looked at what she had left of Butterscotch's hair. She had some people to meet. But first? Skyla needed lunch. And maybe so did Dusk.

Author's Note:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.