Penance

by Bicyclette

Zipporwhill

In the hands of the one who once held it, and would never hold it again, the Memory Stone was a blunt instrument that tore away at the mind in chunks, leaving thick scar tissue where the forgotten memories were separated from the remembered ones. But Starlight Glimmer was not a human teenager who grew up in a world with no magic. Starlight Glimmer was the unicorn that wrote the spell that could remove the cutie mark of an Alicorn Princess.

Starlight Glimmer could do anything.

In the metaphorical hoof-hands of her mind’s eye, the Memory Stone’s magic was a surgeon’s scalpel, able to make changes much subtler than forgetting an awkward interaction, or the existence of a person, or the past three years of a life.

Zipporwhill was following her instructions well, her excitable fidgeting stilled as she lay in repose with her eyes closed. Not even breathing, as she had been taught how to do here, like all new arrivals were. Her mind still pulsed and hummed with life and awareness, but directed inward, away from the outside stimuli Starlight was trying to cut away.

Starlight sank the blades of blue light into Zipporwhill’s mind.

The first cut was always the easiest, as a bright, thin line of blue traced itself around Zipporwhill’s memories of her short time in the Void so far, holding them back from the rest of her until there came a time to restore them. Then, the real work began, as Starlight reshaped the last fifteen years of her life. Blue lines traced around those teenage memories of being anxiously glued to the TV news alongside her parents as national government after national government fell. Of the pledges recited every morning during her final years of high school at Cloudsdale Comprehensive. Of every state-mandated viewing of every movie, sitcom, reality show, and interview of Her Cinematic Majesty that was churned out by the entertainment complex that stood at the apex of the new world order.

She kept her beloved schoolfriends, but not what happened to them after that protest. She kept her first kiss, but not that it happened while on the run from the Ushers. She kept her first real “I love you”, but not the night sky that it happened under, when the very first stars began to go out.

And most importantly, she kept the dogs.

The ones she owned and raised and loved. The ones she bathed and pampered for a living. The ones she walked past on the street just once before never seeing them again. Border Collies and Golden Retrievers and greyhounds and poodles and huskies and beagles and the innumerable majority of no specific breed. The world may have turned out wrong for the humans living in it, but the dogs didn’t know any of that.

Starlight even kept those two most spoiled little Cotons de Tuléar that the world had ever seen. Just not why it was so very, lifestakingly important that their coats had to be kept immaculately coiffed and styled at all times.

With what remained, Starlight crafted her dreamlands, a version of Zipporwhill’s life that would have happened if that fateful day at the Canterlot Mall had not. All of the pains and joys and wins and losses that made human existence and its challenges meaningful, without the despair that came with a world that was just wrong in a way she was powerless to change. A life that her mind would not reject. A life she would not question the reality of.

When she was done, Starlight closed her mind’s eye and opened her “real” ones, to look down at the closed eyes of Zipporwhill. Eyes that would not open until the day they could escape the Void, when she would go back and reverse the work she had just done.

A soft smile of serenity and peace.

Not the too-wide, rictus smile she still remembered all too well. Certainly not that.