And I Hope You Die

by Aquaman

This Town Again

The alley was cramped, even by alley standards. Flurry had to suck in her breath to squeeze around a pile of old shipping pallets coming in, and even now she had to lean back against the wall just to fit length-ways into the narrow strip of space between a barbershop and a crappy pizza place. If she’d stood on all four hooves, her nose and lips would’ve pressed against the opposite wall. Aside from being disgusting, it also would’ve defeated the purpose of coming back here.

“So of course, she gets on my ass about it,” Flurry said, pausing between sentences to suck a mouthful of smoke from the cigarette Cozy had “acquired” from someplace or other. Probably the same place she’d “acquired” her stash of full-size candy bars and her infinite supply of half-bit coins in wrapped paper rolls.

“And of course,” she continued, once she passed the cigarette over to Cozy and blew a roiling white cloud out of the side of her mouth, “I get all of three words out before she’s yelling over me, going off about how I’ll get suspended and it’ll show up in my permanent record and whatnot. Like any college is gonna trash my application because I copied one homework assignment before one class.”

“Like you even need to go to college,” Cozy added after taking a puff herself. With the cigarette trapped between two of her primaries, she shook it a bit until the gray dot of ash at the end fell off and scattered in the drafty alley air.

“Right? Like, what am I gonna major in, Princess Studies? Kissing Ass 101?”

“Maybe they have a seminar on despotism,” Cozy suggested as she passed the cigarette back. Flurry snorted as she grasped it with a tendril of magic. “Y’know, an elective. Not committing or anything, just trying it out.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell her that next time,” Flurry said, swallowing back a cough as her next pull went a little too deep. “That’ll freak her out even more.”

As she floated the cigarette back into reach of Cozy’s wing, Flurry rolled her tongue around in her mouth and drank in her surroundings. If she was perfectly honest, it sucked back here. The walls were rough and damp, the ground was sticky with ages-old grime, and she’d seen three rats scurry under nearby trash piles in the short time since they’d come back here. Nopony in their right mind would go out of their way to find an alley as drab and depressing as this to hang out in. Especially not ponies who should’ve come back from their lunch period a half-hour ago, and instead were skipping calculus to smoke a stolen cigarette with a mare who had literally been to Tartarus and back.

Then again, the suckiness was what made it so special to her, so totally unlike any other place she’d ever gone in her life. In the real world, she was a capital-P Princess with a 3.8 GPA that could’ve been a 4.0, and a promising life ahead of her that her mom just couldn’t resist getting way too involved in. But back here, she was just another wayward teen making poor choices with their free time, complaining about her parents and choking down a stick of unflavored tobacco that was, in perfect honesty, about the worst thing she’d ever tasted. But more than enjoyable, it was illegal. And more than illegal, it was something that would drive her mom crazy.

“So are you grounded, or what?” Cozy asked, holding the cigarette near her lips but not yet taking another drag. “Actually, can you ground a Princess? Is that… I don’t know, legal?”

“If you’re a bigger Princess, sure,” Flurry grumbled. “And if I’m not grounded now, I probably will be after today.”

“It’s really that big a deal?” Cozy sounded genuinely surprised. “I thought everypony copied homework once in a while.”

“Yeah, everypony does,” Flurry said pointedly. “But not me. Not even once. That’s not…”

A jumble of derogatory alternatives for “Princess-ly” got mixed up in her mouth, and through the lingering sour sting of cigarette smoke on her tongue, she couldn’t settle on one long enough to say it aloud. Instead, she just sighed, and reached for the cigarette, and took a pull big enough to throb behind her eyes and nearly make her gag.

“Well, at least you’re handling it well,” Cozy wryly remarked, accepting the cigarette back but still not partaking. “Your mom even know you still hang out with me?”

Flurry shrugged—an earnest answer. “Who cares?” she mumbled less earnestly. “Screw her.”

“Only if she buys dinner first,” Cozy said. She started to lift the cigarette to her mouth, stared at it for a moment, then looked at Flurry. “This tastes like ass, by the way.”

“Ugh, it really does,” Flurry agreed, encouraging Cozy with a nod to toss the nasty thing on the ground and stomp it out. “Can’t believe grown-ups actually like those things.”

“At least it was free!” Cozy said with a wink, before leaning back against the grimy wall and huffing out a sigh. “Well, now what? You feel like going back to class?”

“Nope,” Flurry replied. “You feel like becoming a productive member of society?”

Cozy grinned. “Hell no. Let’s go break stuff.”

And then they did. And Flurry got in huge trouble for it. And it was totally worth it.