Children of Darkness and Light

by Aquaman

The Corporal

“Get the fuck outta here,” the crystal pony gushed. Spike had been swapping war wounds with him for a while now — the scar on the pony’s shoulder from a broken thopter cable, Spike’s acetic acid burn while rescuing workers from an industrial accident, the leg the stallion had lost when his ship sank during the Battle of Backbone — but the almost imperceptible gap in the scales above Spike’s left eye was the first one the corporal seemed legitimately impressed by. “You were at the Guildhall Massacre in Akhal-Teke, pre-First-War? How old were you?”

Spike lifted his highball and drained it, his throat numbed enough from previous drinks that the whiskey didn’t even seem to burn. “Not old enough,” he answered once he clacked his glass back down on the bar.

“Heart’s sake, who fuckin’ would be?” The pony caught the bartender’s eye, signaled for two more rounds, then straightened up and blinked at the harsh sound of ice clinking into two clean glasses. “The hell were we talking about, again?”

“Mizuma,” Spike reminded him, nodding his thanks as the unicorn opposite him and his companion slid him a fresh bourbon. “And Aris Bay.”

“Shit.” The pony grimaced, grabbed his glass, and emptied it down his throat as his face tightened into a glower. “Fuckin’ Aris Bay. Fuckin’ ———.”

Spike didn’t interrupt, and didn’t comment on what the corporal had said instead of “Mizumans.” He wanted information more than the moral high ground over a war veteran — and besides, this wouldn’t be the first or last time he fudged a Guild report for the sake of political sensitivity.

“They didn’t wait a second, did they?” the pony continued. “One day everything’s fine, and the next day Senna’s halfway through Griffonia towards Orlovia, Zaniskar’s on a fuckin’ Celestial Crusade into Zebraria, and the ——— decide they’re too good for us, stab their own family in the back and then decide they want all of Kiria for dessert. And Cadance, Heart bless her, she did everything she could. Shining Armor too. But there was nothing anypony could’ve done. Not when you’re dealing with creatures like that.

“We weren’t even battle-ready at Aris Bay, just a fuel station for refugees who’d gotten out ahead of the purges. Probably ten civilians for every soldier, no air defenses, nothing. And I was just a dumb fuckin’ seacolt assigned on the Resonance, got lost stumbling home from the bar and passed out in an alley. Next thing I know, I’m waking up to thopters buzzing overhead and the cobblestones shaking loose from the bombs, and my ship is sinking into the bay with a thousand souls on board. ‘Cause of the fuckin’...”

The corporal restrained himself this time, but only barely, and seemingly only because of the look he was getting from the bartender. “Sobers you up quick, I’ll tell you that. Hearing mares screaming, kids crying, hooves banging on metal that’s already under thirty feet of water. Kinda thing that changes you. Changed everybody who was there that day… ‘cept for her. Except for Flurry Heart.

“I saw her afterwards, when she first flew in. Saw Cadance just collapse onto her, and when she heard her father was dead, she just… didn’t do anything. She didn’t cry, didn’t seem angry, just went blank for a minute, like she’d left her body behind and gone someplace beyond the world I knew about. Then suddenly she was back like she’d never been away, and she got Cadance standing up and told her it was gonna be all right, and I knew right then just by looking at her that I was gonna follow her to the end of the world and past it, because she was gonna handle this. Handle them. And she did.”

The corporal glanced Spike’s way — at the untouched whiskey in front of him, ringing the bartop with condensation. “I know what I’m supposed to say,” he sneered. “‘Oh, she went too far, she was too mean, we should’ve let all those poor ——— be spies and murderers and who knows what else.’ Buncha prissy little peaceniks who weren’t there tryin’ to tell me, tell everypony who fought and bled and died for this empire, how I should feel and what I should think. And you know what I do think?”

Spike had known what the stallion thought since the moment they’d first met. He’d heard similar thoughts all across the Empire about Flurry Heart’s decree after returning from Aris Bay: any Crystal pony who wasn’t truly of the Empire, who couldn’t trace their lineage back to someone Sombra had once enslaved and frozen in time for a thousand years, was under immediate and indefinite house arrest, and then eventually moved to hastily constructed camps on the outskirts of the capital — “for your safety, and for the security of all.” It hadn’t been nice. It certainly hadn’t been fair. But…

“I think for the whole rest of the war, nobody even thought about attacking us again,” the pony said. “We were safe. Flurry Heart kept us safe. And you know what the only thing she did wrong was?”

He grabbed Spike’s abandoned drink, gulped it down, and rubbed his free hoof against his prosthetic hind leg, glowering at something only he could see.

“She stopped.”

Comments

[Sunny]

Flurry as fusion of Truman and FDR, mm~? With it sounds like perhaps a little MacArthur in the mix. Makes sense after the 'gift' Cozy gave her, back when.