Hurt
Hurt
“And you’re sure he’s not just hiding under Ma and Pa’s bed?”
“Positive.”
“You checked?”
“Yes. Twice.”
“Well, who was supposed to tie him up?”
“Huck.”
Sigh.
Of course he was.
“And how many drinks did Huck have at dinner, Clem?”
“I’m not a bar tender, Gent.”
“Yeah... I know...”
Gentle Strokes turned to his younger sister
“I’m sorry, It’s just…” He sighed. His hoof ran long across his face. Flesh and fur were pulled down, moulded like putty, before he released and they reformed. “I was supposed to meet Stormy almost an hour ago.”
“He’s a big boy, Gent,” said Clem, smiling. “I’m sure he’ll be alright.”
Gentle Strokes mumbled an ‘Mhmm’ under his breath and said nothing else.
“Let’s focus on one thing at a time?” Clementine suggested. “Duke first, then you can go get blotto with your friend.”
She gave him a look -- something that was equal parts understanding and playful -- then she grinned and trotted ahead. Gentle Strokes followed. Clem’s little body bobbed and weaved through the patchwork of low branches and splintered tree trunks. Leaves crunched beneath her hooves.
Gentle Strokes was having a hard time catching up with her, and, when he did, he was nearly out of breath. They stopped, for the moment, and he leaned his body weight against a tree. Clementine stared up at him. He smiled down at her, wiped sweat from his brow and then spoke
“So... um...” Gentle Strokes fumbled with his words as he caught up to his sister. “...what did you think of him?”
“Who, Stormy?”
Gentle Strokes nodded. His sister smiled.
“He’s really cool,” she said. “I can’t believe he wanted to hang out with a dork like you.”
She stuck her tongue out. Gentle Strokes’s eyes rolled in his head.
“But, you liked him, right?”
Clementine cocked her eyes half shut and stared with curious intent, at her older brother. Gentle Strokes held his breath.
“Yeah...” she said. Her eyes never broke their studious squint. “Why?”
“Well, uh...”
Now was probably not the right time for this conversation.
“He’s going to be staying in town for a few more days and I just wanted to make sure everything was good and groovy with him coming over a few more times?”
“...’Good and groovy’, Gent? ” Clementine gawked.
“Shut. Up.”
They walked silently for a long while after that and searched for signs of a midsize pug with glandular problems. Anything would have been a treat; a cracked twig on the ground -- crushed by his weight -- or a barren oak tree where a canine posterior might have torn off bark.
Even a cowpie would have been nice.
They got nothing.
Trees stuck out from the ground like the rib bones of a creature too big to have sustained life. Yellow and dead leaves blew in the wind and crackled beneath their hooves. Sadly, unless Duke was secretly a skilled saboteur, the wind had blown any traces of his trail away some time ago.
This happened sometimes. Duke would run into the woods behind the house chasing a rabbit, or a squirrel, or whatever, and get lost. Unlike most dogs, Duke didn’t have that natural ability to find his way home and opted instead to lay in a ball and succumb to his fate. Without a proper master to look after him he was done for and he knew this.
“I swear,” Gentle Strokes sighed. “Huck probably did this on purpose.”
Beside him, Clementine chuckled. Gentle Strokes didn’t see what was so funny about his statement. She cupped her mouth with her hooves and called out for Duke.
Her call was answered with a whimper from the woods.
Out from the sticks bolted the drooling mess of a creature. Duke had a smile plastered on his fat and heavy face and his tongue and tail wagging together. When he reached them, he reared himself onto his hind legs and kicked off the ground. His body, all hundred plus pounds of him, collided with Clementine’s chest and took them to the ground. With his prey disabled, he took the offensive and attacked her face and throat with his tongue.
Clementine pushed Duke off of her and wiped strands of saliva from her cheeks.
“Aww, Duke.” She grinned down at the dog circling her legs. “You’re such a romantic.”
Duke nodded.
“Great, let’s head back,” Gentle Strokes suggested and turned on his heels, only to realize he wasn’t exactly confident in where ‘back’ was. The forest was a countless mile stretch of dead and dying trees behind his house and Duke had wandered too far for him to see the comforting lights from the kitchen window.
“Uh, Gent?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember which way we came from?”
Gentle Strokes looked to his left, then his right. Both paths had the same infinite number of lumber and no distinct difference between them. He stared back at Clementine.
“You’re kidding, right?” He asked.
Clementine kicked her hooves into a small pile of leaves and bowed her head.
“...No?”
Gentle Strokes inhaled a deep breath.
Stormy was sitting in a bar alone and he was trying to backtrack his way out of a forest just behind his house.
He exhaled sharply through his nostrils. Duke, with his fat legs kicking out to his sides, hobbled up to his leg and craned his head upwards. His jowls hung low. His tongue rolled out of his mouth and thick drops of saliva splattered on the leaves at their feet.
Gentle Strokes wasn’t so easily swayed to calm himself.
Stormy. Sitting alone. Worrying that something awful must have happened...
“Gent?”
He turned to face his sister and saw the panic and worry in her face.
“Yeah?”
“I think we might have come in from over there?”
She aimed a hoof behind him and towards a tree split down the centre by some powerful force of nature a long time in the past. It looked vaguely familiar, but then again, so did each and every other tree in the forest to him.
“I reckon?” he shrugged.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.” she urged.
Duke took the lead, behind him Clem and behind her Gentle Strokes. At some point in their lives they would be home, Gentle Strokes just prayed that it was sooner rather than later.
***
It took a half hour longer than Gentle Strokes would ever care to admit to find the path home and a half hour after that to walk it. Duke still led the charge, hobbling on proud limbs all the way up the back porch and through the dog door, his body and the rolls of extra weight on him only caught in the door for a split second before he disappeared into the house.
Inside the home the lights were dim and the bodies of three ponies, all the size and shape of adults, cast shadows against the windows. Curious by the prospect of a visitor this late at night, Gentle Strokes followed through with his gut instincts.
He entered behind Clem to the sound of muffled whispers coming from the living room. He couldn’t make sense of the situation but he caught a few words in between ‘Huck,’ ‘Bar,’ and ‘Insane,’ were all words his ears picked up, and nothing about them filled him with warmth.
When he entered the living room his parents stood quietly, their eyes staring down at a colt sitting on their couch. Drought -- a baker’s son from town -- was their visitor.
Normally, Drought was a welcomed sight. Unlike most of the colts in town, Drought had a calm, politeness to him. He was kind and gentle, almost timid.
Today he was distressed.
His hooves trembled as he tried to hold a mug tight between them. The mug slipped and rolled around in his grasp, and he wouldn’t stop staring at the floor.
Gentle Strokes’ hoof touched against a loose floorboard and sent a snap through the house that drew all eyes on him. Of the three ponies in the room it was his mother who looked the most upset. Drought came in at a close second with that stupid lost puppy dog look on his face.
Even his father’s eyes had a softness to them.
“Gent…”
It was Drought who was the first to speak. His voice cracked and he bit his upper lip and sucked in a breath of air.
“Drought.” Gentle Strokes greeted with neutral formality. “I didn’t know you were coming by?”
Drought stared down at the floor and the mug in his hooves slipped again.
“Drought.” Gentle Strokes repeated, this time quicker and with less warmth. “What’s wrong?”
“Your cousin…” he began to say then stopped and let the sentence, and all the implications it brought with it, linger.
His eyes lifted to meet Gentle Strokes’s own, and the mug fell out of his hooves. It didn’t shatter when it hit the ground, the soft fur of the rug broke the fall but kept it intact. The Strokes household was still up one ‘Equestria’s Greatest Dad’ coffee mug and Gentle Strokes wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“What about him?”
“Gent,” blurbed Drought, once again staring away from him. “You need to know, I didn’t want them to do it to him...”
With no one else in the room willing to rise to the occasion, Gentle Strokes’ mother took it on herself to clean Drought’s mess. This was her way. The house could have been on fire in that moment and it still wouldn’t have stopped her from finding a pointless task to distract her from the growing tension in the room.
“What in the seven Hells are you talking about?”
If he was anything Gentle Strokes was perturbed. Disenchanted. Unhinged. A dictionary’s worth of colourful words he could have used to describe the feeling of being held up by another pointless distraction that kept him from Stormy.
A floorboard shook loose behind him. The creak of wood unfit by years of faithful service came with it and Clementine’s stealthy entrance into the curious fray in the home was sabotaged.
“Its Huck, Gent.” Drought started again. “He came hollering down to Tucker’s parents place, talkin’ about some colt from out of town who slighted him and how we should all put a scare in him. We… were all drinking, you know? And, we were having fun and… he only said was we were going to scare him. Like we did when those two sales ponies came tryin’ to sell that cider machine.”
“Drought.”
“And…”
Drought grimaced and ran a hoof long across his face. Flaps of soft flesh coated in dirt coloured fur regained their hold and Drought’s face looked more or less back to normal.
“Gent, when I saw what your cousin was aching to do to that colt… it made me sick to my stomach.”
Gentle Strokes mirrored this feeling. He didn’t have to be told what had happened. He already knew. Huck. His cousin. The brash and fire tempered farmer with a hair trigger and a disgust for any pony in Equestria who didn’t fall under the banner he considered ‘normal’ had done something to Stormy.
His Stormy.
The colt he loved.
The room started shrinking. Objects -- the puke green couches with the lemon coloured tassels that had been chewed past the point of being ‘chic’ or ‘campy’ and just looked ugly and worn down -- got bigger. So did the ponies sitting in them.
His stomach touched the floor and it was then that his brain caught up with his body. He was on the floor now, laying flat with his hooves folded underneath him. His face was so firmly planted to the ground that his nose stung with the smell of the floor cleaner his mom must have used to clean Drought’s spilled coffee.
Stormy, bleeding out in a dark back alley. Huck, and a gang of faceless thugs all cackling above him maniacally. Ignorant hicks. Villains from some early frontier novel.
A whimper got caught in his throat.
“Gent,”
Clementine’s hoof found his shoulder and she squeezed it tight. It didn’t do Gentle Strokes any good. Above him both of his parents looked down on him with sadness in their eyes. Maybe they knew the truth? Maybe they didn’t? In this time and space it didn’t matter who knew what, all that mattered was that their oldest son was laying flat on the floor trying his hardest not to emote.
“What did he do?”
It came out in a soft whisper that he surprised himself he could find the courage to give out.
Celestia bless him if he could stand to hear the answer.
“I don’t know,” sighed an anguished Drought. “I tried to put some reasoning in your cousin’s head. Honest to Celestia, Gent. But, he chased me out of the bar and locked the doors behind him.”
There were a thousand curses he wanted to scream at Drought for being too weak willed to do anything, but he didn’t. He cursed himself instead. He was stupid. He was an idiot. How could he not have seen it coming? Letting Duke run a half mile through the forest, leaving dinner early, all the signs had been there and Gentle Strokes hadn’t ever suspected his cousin of being foul enough to do something so devious, and yet he had, and Gentle Strokes only had himself to blame for it.
Himself... and Huck.
Huck, who was not long for this world.
His hooves rooted themselves into the floor. His muscles tensed and bulged, his body lifted. He lifted himself up and not a pony in the room said so much as a word. They watched him -- he noted that -- though they all seemed to silently realize that nothing they could say or do could stop him.
“Where is he now?”
Drought swallowed a lump in his throat.
“Last I saw he was still at The Great Ball of Fire.” said Drought who had himself transfixed with the floorboards, “I reckon, that is to say, if we hurry, you might be able to catch him at the same time Sheriff Steel does.”
“You’re coming with me.” He insisted.
Drought nodded apprehensively.
“I’m coming too, Gent.”
He turned to face his sister and saw the same kindling burning in her eyes that must have been in his. He didn’t have time to waste arguing, not that he would if he did. Clementine was a young mare, but she was still as much of a mare as their mother. Sometimes more. She was braver than any girl her age and it showed more now than ever.
“Fine,” he grunted.
His little sister, a coward named Drought and himself. They were far from an army to come to Stormy’s rescue, but it was the best he could come up with on such short notice. He wanted to ask his father’s help, but, he realized his father could have a more important role that he needed to be home for.
“If Huck comes back here tonight,” He said, turning to his father. He surprised himself with the sound of his voice, he sounded -- at least in his mind -- amplified. “Keep him here.”
His father nodded.
Nothing else was said as the three set off to find trace or tail of Stormy, Hucklebuck or if ill luck would have it, both.
***
Their walk was silent and took longer than Gentle Strokes had ever remembered it taking in the past. What was normally a quarter hour trek from his home, through town and up the path to the Great Ball of Fire now felt like years of his life crawling away from him. Each step hurt to take. He knew, after a time, he would reach the bar, and after that he’d find Stormy, or Huck, or both.
This was something he didn’t want.
A few paces behind them, Drought’s hooves dragged along the dirt and kicked stones ahead of him. Drought had always been a colt crippled by self doubt and paralyzed by his insecurities. He was different than his friends and the colts and mares he tried to surround himself with. His father was a baker in a town of hardworking ponies. His mother ran off with a unicorn from Canterlot (or Fillydelphia depending on who in town you asked) when he was only six. For years afterwards that had been the only thing housewives in Dodge Junction gossiped about. The whole town knew the sad sob stories of Drought, his father and his mother.
Knowing this helped Gentle Strokes ponder why Drought would want to be a part of whatever had happened at The Great Ball of Fire. Maybe Drought had wanted to prove his masculinity by scaring a stranger? Maybe he’d wanted revenge for being the punchline to a joke shared behind closed doors in town? Maybe he just figured picking on a queer was a good bit of fun?
Whatever his reasoning was it was in the past now. Again Drought had fallen short of becoming more than his heart desired to be; a colt feared and praised. Drought was still as much a coward as he would always be, and Gentle Strokes was somewhat thankful of that.
“Gent,” Drought called out, panting.
Thoughts of Drought, and others gathering in a bar, circling Stormy like vultures. Shoving him. Pushing him to the ground. Laughing. Cheering. Hooting. Hollering. There was a middle school mentality at work here. The kind of reasoning that made ponies shove ponies into lockers and knock over their books in hallways. He didn’t trust the colts his cousin gathered to be the type who actually had graduated from that school of thought, or even ‘school’ itself.
“Gent!”
Stormy, scared and defenseless.
Drought too paralyzed by fear to stop what was coming.
“Gentle Strokes!”
He turned to face his accuser.
Drought stood stupidly; he’d shifted the weight of his body onto his left side, so that his right limbs hung loosely and his frontmost hoof swiped at the dirt beneath his hooves. His head was cocked down and hung so low to the ground that Gentle Strokes imagined he could kiss the dirt path.
If he’d wanted too.
“What?” He barked at the cowardly colt. “What do you want, Drought?”
Drought lifted his eyes to stare up at him. They were soft, and his lower lip was quivering. He tried to smile, a soft, feminine thing, but it hardly rose past his cheeks. His mouth opened to speak.
“I need to talk to you for a second,” He stopped to cock his head towards Clementine. “In private.”
Clem looked on at the two colts. Even the few feet between her, Gent and Drought, wasn’t enough to hide the determined, curious look in her eyes.
“Just say it,” Gentle Strokes spat at Drought. “We’ve wasted enough time already.”
“Gent, I really think we should talk about this… without your sister?”
“Drought!”
“Fine.” Drought sighed. He raised his head then sniffed at the air. “That colt at the bar. Stingy, or whatever his name was? He was making all kinds of wild accusations about you.”
Gentle Strokes kept quiet; his eyes wandered towards his younger sister who peaked an eyebrow, and he realized that maybe Drought had been right about wanting to talk in private. If this was going to be the discussion he thought it was, he could have thought up a million better ways to get this lingering weight off his chest.
Hindsight was 20/20, and karmic payback for treating Drought like shit was a bitch.
“So?”
“Well,” mumbled Drought “He, uh, implied some... stuff and things...”
He shot his eyes towards Clementine, his younger sister, and tried to read her face for any emotion that sold the idea that she understood what Drought was struggling to get out of his mouth and off his back. Her eyes were wide, and when they met his, she gave a fickle little half smile that sunk his heart to the bottom of his hooves.
“Shut up, Drought.”
He turned back to Drought and started pacing forwards. His hooves felt heavy and when they touched the ground it felt like he could crack the gravel beneath him. As he stepped forwards Drought fumbled backwards, his hooves kicking dirt and gravel about the road and raising little dust clouds around him.
“Gent-”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
More dust kicked off the ground, Drought was moving backwards faster, or, he was pacing towards him faster. They were both moving faster.
“You’re just a stupid hick-”
He took a step closer to Drought.
“-An ignorant asshole-”
Drought took a step backwards.
“-And a coward-”
Another step towards Drought.
“-The kind of colt who doesn’t have the balls to stand up for himself-”
Another step backwards from Drought.
“-The kind of colt who listens to my ignorant, racist, intolerant, homophobic, piece of shit cousin because he wants to prove himself to a group of racist, intolerant, homophobic, piece of shit assholes-”
Drought’s left hoof caught on a rock and he slipped and fell on his ass.
“-And for what?-”
Gentle Strokes stood high above Drought, who looked so small and pathetic laying on his ass and hoveling away from him in an improvised crabwalk.
“-What do you know about anything, Drought?-”
Drought’s little crab-crawl stopped and he raised his hooves over his face. Gentle Strokes had to stop abruptly. In the glow of the street lamp, Drought looked pathetic and broken. Both of his thin lips were trembling, his jaw was shaking.
He was crying.
“You’re right!” He coughed out the words. “I am a coward! I was scared, and I didn’t wanna be a part of whatever your cousin was fixing to do to that boy! But, I knew if anypony in town could talk some sense into him it was you, so I came running to yours as fast as I could.”
“Oh, and that was real brave of you, Drought.” Gentle Strokes lauded with restrained enthusiasm and sincerity in his voice. “You’re a real life Daring Do!”
“Hey,” Suddenly, Drought had found his backbone. He was lifting himself off the ground and the look he fired at Gentle Strokes was as angry as he had ever seen the colt wear before. “T’aint my fault! I didn’t put the hooves to that boy, your cousin did. If you wanna cuss anyone out for this it’s him, alright?”
This was the most logic he had heard from anyone all night. Though he didn’t want to admit it.
“Well,” Gentle Strokes huffed, “Doesn’t mean you were right to run away!”
Clementine threw herself between the two colts, much to their surprise.
“Drought’s right, Gent.” She said, giving her older brother a stern, commanding eye. “And you two can argue all you want after we find Stormy.”
The defensive side of his ego told him to cuss his sister out, to cuss Drought out, and continue on alone. The logical side, however, told him his sister was right, that Drought was right, that Huck was wrong and that Stormy was still out there. Cold and alone.
Gentle Strokes wasn’t the kind of colt to let anything stand in the way of logic.
He didn’t say a word to Drought’s defense, he simply held his hoof out and allowed the other to lift himself off the ground with it.
The rest of the walk to The Great Ball of Fire was deathly quiet.
***
Tapper the bartender, stood underneath the hanging neon sign that advertised with unrestrained gusto ‘The Great Ball of Fire.’ Just beneath the neon lettering was the cartoon picture of a fireball igniting in tame shades of yellow and orange.
Smoke clouds rose from the older stallion’s mouth and from his nostrils. The cigarette he was smoking was half finished. The six butts by his hooves were long dead. The Great Ball of Fire was closed for the night. Another neon sign in a dark windowsill said so itself.
“Figure’d you’d be showing up soon,”
It wasn’t much of a greeting. Then again, Tapper wasn’t much of a bartender. If his wasn’t the only establishment to serve spirits in all of Dodge Junction he’d have run himself out of business a lifetime ago.
“Where is he?”
Gentle Strokes wasn’t about wasting time.
“Y’all came a bit late,” Tapper huffed, “Sheriff Steel came not but ten minutes ago and took him to Doctor Toboggan’s.”
Gentle Strokes stood firm. The wind blew his mane. His lip trembled.
“He’s alive… if you were worried?”
Gentle Strokes let out a sigh of relief.
“Your cousin damn near ruined my bar kicking that colt around.” Tapper sighed. Two thick pillars of smoke emerged from his nostrils. “I’ve got a pair of dining room tables smashed to shit, couple chairs too,” Tapper turned to Gentle Strokes. “Who’s gonna wanna to come to a bar with blood staining the floors?”
Blood?
Staining the floor?
Gentle Strokes said nothing. There was nothing to say. He walked past Drought. Past his sister. Past Tapper -- who didn’t move to stop him --, up the stairs and through the doors to The Great Ball of Fire.
He already knew he’d hate himself for what he was about to see. But, he had to see it anyway.
The room was dark. The windows barred and the interior was as lonely and desolate as he’d ever seen it. The thought that loneliness was how Tapper started and ended his days didn’t bother Gentle Strokes.
He scanned the room and his heart stopped.
He was staring at what looked like a haircut done by a pony in the late stages of Parkinson's disease. Fur. Mane. Thick strands of grey from Stormy’s coat, and thicker strands of black from Stormy’s mane were worn wild along the floor. Between them were splotches of red painted in thick blotches the floor. There thinner lines that led to larger puddles. Places where Stormy had been dragged across the floor and then thrown down.
Gentle Strokes bit his lower lip. His heart raced in his chest. His head hurt. He wanted out. He needed out.
He jolted backwards, his hooves caught on themselves and he fumbled, then fell to the floor. His crash was short and without a proper climax; he fell onto his rear and sat like that -- dumbly -- for what felt like a lifetime. His eyes just staring at the mess of blood, and fur and skin, that had come from the frail, fragile body of his boyfriend.
For the longest time Gentle Strokes just sat and stared. Stared at the blood, and the fur, and the skin, and tried to imagine how many colts it had taken? Who were they? Did he know them? Dodge Junction was a small town and he knew nearly every colt by name. Huck’s friends were a revolving door of hanger ons, clingers and temporary farmhands. Colts who lived in town for a couple paychecks then moved on.
Tucker was one of them.
Drought had been one of them.
Who were the others?
Did it matter?
The blood was dry and coagulated now. It looked more brown than it did red. Streaks like a bad artist doing an expressionist piece ran all across the floor.
Did Tapper even try to clean it?
His eyes felt wet, and when he wiped them, he realized he was tearing up. Not crying. Just… teary eyed. His eyes wet with emotions.
His head hurt.
“Gent,”
It was soft and feminine and could only be from his sister.
She stood in the doorway. He didn’t want her to see the blood. The gore. The signs that a colt had lost a fight he never even knew he was apart of. Most of all, he didn’t want her to see him like this.
Emoting.
“We should go.” He said.
She nodded. Her eyes glazed past him and over his shoulder and she gasped.
“Oh... shit.” She said. Her eyes grew wide and filled with fright. “Shit! Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Her eyes were wet too. Her hoof, shaking, lifted to cover her mouth and then she was mumbling unresolved curses in the tightest clenched hoof that Gentle Strokes had ever seen. She looked defeated.
“I… I can’t…”
She was speaking in tongues.
He lifted himself from the floor.
“How… How could anyone…? I mean, what did he ever do to...?”
When he reached his sister he pulled her tight into a hug.
“How could this happen?”
Gentle Strokes didn’t know the answer.
***
Doctor Toboggan’s practice was on the first floor of his two floor home in the middle of town. His furniture -- all the possessions he owned not related to his career -- were all kept upstairs. He had a kitchen there, and a living room with lamps that Gentle Strokes had never been so fortunate enough to see. He had no wife to keep him company and so Doctor Toboggan lived in the home alone.
The lights were on in the main floor of his home.
The doctor was in.
Sheriff Steel sat on the swinging two seater on the porch. His sheriff’s hat -- a marvelous stetson with a single chrome star displaying his rank and authority centred in the middle -- pulled over his eyes as he leaned back in the seat.
Hearing the hoofsteps of colts, the law enforcing pony’s finely tuned senses kicked in and he shot awake. His hat fell of his head and when he stared at Gentle Strokes and his sister Clementine, his eyes fell flat. He took the hat off his head and held it over his chest.
“Reckon y’all are here to see the recently admitted?”
Such an astute observation.
“Doc’s just inside with him,” His nose scrunched up and the whiskers on his moustache danced over his upper lip. “He… ain’t in too good shape. Y’all might not wanna disturb the doc… for that boy’s sake.”
Gentle Strokes was done taking advice from ponies for the night. He said nothing as he knocked on the door. His beckoning call was answered a short minute later by Doctor Toboggan himself.
The good doctor was a curious site and specimen of the far west town of Dodge Junction. He was a unicorn, firstly. Every single other colt who lived in Dodge Junction was an Earth Pony, or, if they weren’t, they were a zebra or a pegasus. He was the sole horn headed pony in the entire town and this made him no more or no less popular with the locals.
He had a story. A reason why he’d fled from wherever he’d originated and ended up in Dodge Junction. There were rumors about him. His origins. How he’d ended up in Dodge Junction, but none of them seemed true.
Gentle Strokes had never heard his story, nor did he care.
“Rather cold evening tonight.” He greeted solemnly to Gentle Strokes and his sister. He was dressed in clothes that reflected his means. An eggshell lab coat, droll green scrubs, a white paper thin mask over his muzzle. His hooves were covered in polymer gloves and the stain guard he wore had a collage of red and brown spots dotting it.
“Come in.”
That was Doctor Toboggan’s way. He was as eccentric in his mannerisms as he was private about his life. He spoke in an accent unfamiliar to Dodge Junction. Something whimsical and with an air of foreign dialect. As if he was more familiar speaking another language than the one he used to greet clients and townsfolk alike.
The Strokes siblings followed the doctor inside of his house/practice.
“Have a seat.”
Neither one objected. They sat in chairs as old and frail as the doctor was young and lively. Gentle Strokes’s felt like it would snap into kindling under his weight. It creaked when he sat down and the legs scratched against the floor.
His sister seemed to do be doing better off in hers.
“Can I offer you a drink? Either of you?” Doctor Toboggan proposed, waving his hoof out in front of him. “I have a pot of coffee on. There’s cream and sugar just upstairs…?”
“Coffee.” Clementine said.
Gentle Strokes said nothing.
The doctor nodded and then he was gone.
When he reappeared, he was carrying two cups in flamboyant and colourful mugs. The one he floated towards Clementine was pink and the phrase “#1 Son.” was written across it in purple lettering and coated with white glitter. The one he floated towards Gentle Strokes said “I support single moms.” And had a picture of a mare dancing around a stripper pole.
Doctor Toboggan sat in the chair across from them. He arched his back, leaned forward and rested his head onto his hooves and his hooves onto his lower legs.
“Its been a very long night,” he sighed.
No objections came from his audience.
“Sheriff Steel had some trouble trying to piece together the events that unfolded. He has his deputy searching for your cousin, who I patched up not but twenty minutes ago. No doubt he’d be keen to acquire any information he can from you,” He pointed a hoof accusingly at Gentle Strokes. “But, as it stands, I’ve done each and every single thing in my power for that colt…”
He stared down at his body. At the stains on his labcoat, and his shirt, and he sighed. Low and heavy.
“I don’t know what transpired at that bar, but, I can’t imagine any pony in Equestria deserves what they did to him.”
He scratched an itch on his neck.
“Can I see him?”
Doctor Toboggan looked at Gentle Strokes and saw the pleading look in his eyes. The older colt licked his lips. His jaw locked to one side. His tongue probed his mouth and then he locked his jaw on the opposite side.
“Please?”
“Gent… His wounds… The way he was when he came in, he’s going to need a lot of rest.” The doctor locked his jaw to the right again. “I have him on some heavy sedatives. He won’t be awake for some time… and…”
“Please?”
Gentle Strokes was begging.
Doctor Toboggan looked first at Clementine, then at Gentle Strokes, then locked his jaw to the left. His glasses fell an inch down his nose and he readjusted them so they sat neatly perched on the highest point that they could.
“I… suppose it couldn’t do any harm to the boy.”
Gentle Strokes stood up.
“But… you have to understand, Gent,” He stopped Gentle Strokes with a hoof pressed firm into his chest. “Pardon the expression, but, he was on death’s door when Sheriff Steel brought him in. He’s… an ugly sight to be seen, truth be told.”
“I don’t care.” He grunted.
“Very well,” The doctor sighed. “Please, follow me.”
Gentle Strokes did as he was told.
The two trotted up stairs and through the kitchen, past the bathroom, through a hallway and stopped when they stood before a closed door. Gentle Strokes hardly had time to admire his first ever glances at the living quarters of Dodge Junction’s soul unicorn inhabitant. Nor did he find it a curious enough thing to worry himself with.
“I prefer to keep my overnight patients in my guest room,” The doctor explained the answer to a question Gentle Strokes didn’t ask. “I find it’s… more joyful than the conditions of my offices downstairs.”
Gentle Strokes nodded.
“Before we go inside,” Doctor Toboggan started and his hooves kicked into the floor. “I need you to understand that he’s going to require a series of surgeries. What you’re going to see is going to be him at his absolute worst. If he’s lucky, and if Celestia is looking down on him favorably, he’ll heal more overtime, but…”
Doctor Toboggan let the sentence, and all the implications it carried with it, linger. Gentle Strokes hardly had a minute to consider what the doctor said before his magic was spinning the door knob and the door was being opened.
The room was dark. Doctor Toboggan flipped on the lights and then…
The world stopped spinning.
Gentle Strokes’s heart stopped beating.
He stopped breathing.
What was lying in the bed -- the thing that was supposed to be Stormy -- wasn’t even a pony anymore. It was something beat and broken. It was an old ragdoll. It was one of Duke’s chew toys.
Whatever was in that bed wasn’t Stormy. It couldn’t be. There was no way in the seven hells of tartarus that this… broken little creature had ever been a pony.
Gentle Strokes knew in his heart, and in his mind, that he was inherently wrong for thinking this.
“I did try to warn you,” Doctor Toboggan reminded. “Your friend has suffered some serious injuries tonight, and-”
The doctor was still talking but the words he was saying didn’t make sense to Gentle Strokes. He could see Doctor Toboggan’s mouth move, and he knew that the doctor was speaking, but all that noises that came out of his mouth sounded like nothing. White noise. Like listening to empty airwaves on a radio station.
“-He’s fractured his-”
The doctor said. Apparently.
“-Which minor nerve damage might-”
Gentle Stroked stared back at the broken little body masquerading as Stormy and sighed heavily.
“-With serious trauma to his-”
He stared up at doctor Toboggan. His mouth was still moving. White noise was still coming out.
“-Which will require stitching-”
There were splotches of dried blood from The Great Ball of Fire on the cuffs of his hooves.
“-It will be a miracle if he ever-”
He was staring back again at ‘Stormy’, wondering how it was even possible to identify that thing as a pony… He looked so beaten. So used. So woefully unresponsive that it was hard to imagine that this thing was the same creature that had once dragged him from the depths of self diagnosed depression and into the exciting, captivating world of Camden art school.
“-That is all to say, if he’s lucky he might one day recover from-.”
Stormy’s -- or, rather, the thing in the bed’s -- chest rose, fell, and a muffled cough came from him/it. It was laboursome, it came out in a pitiful weeze. Half panted, half choked, and then Stormy turned his head to the side and half of a face full of deep cuts and purpled bruises presented themselves in the dim light.
“-In some time, he will walk, but-”
Staring at Stormy, watching his little chest rise and fall, seeing his face thrash against the pillow, and the way his lower legs tried to kick, Gentle Strokes found that his eyes were wet again.
“-There’s… one more thing,”
By now, Gentle Strokes had more than resigned himself to trying to interpret all the fancy phrases and words that Doctor Toboggan was saying. Even through the static he understood -- perhaps subconsciously -- that Stormy was in bad shape. This was to say, he fully identified that the thing laying in the bed had once been a pony -- a colt -- and that he was also extremely damaged.
What was one more heartbreak?
“Sheriff Steel said, and, I sincerely hate to tell you this is one hundred percent true, but…” The doctor’s voice trailed off. “He found your friend in the alley behind The Great Ball of Fire. Beyond the blood, he was soaked in… and, please, realize this isn’t easy to say but, well-”
The doctor’s glasses fell down his face.
“-His fur was soaked in urine,” The doctor sighed again. His hooves ran long across his face. “Not his own.”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
A machine -- something powered by magic and hooked through a series of plastic tubes to Stormy’s chest -- was the sole sound in the room.
“I’m gonna just…”
The rest got caught in Gentle Strokes’s throat. He’d had something to say. An excuse to leave. But, whatever it was, he wasn’t saying it. Instead, he turned away from Doctor Toboggan. From Stormy. From all of the bruising, the cuts, the fractures.
He walked out of Doctor Toboggan’s guest bedroom, strolled through the halls, down the stairs, past the waiting room and stopped only when his chest met the cold wood of the railing on Doctor Toboggan’s porch.
Sheriff Steel was gone now. There was a chance he was off, scouring the town looking for suspects, or, maybe he’d just gone home? It was hard to say, and really, it didn’t matter. Gentle Strokes knew who was to blame. He also knew, for better or for worse, that there were few too many places that Hucklebuck -- his cousin -- could be at this time of night.
Where Sheriff Steel had once sat on the swingset instead was now his sister -- Clementine -- who watched her collapse against the railing of Doctor Toboggan’s porch and bury his face into his crossed hooves.
Then she heard her brother give out the deepest, darkest, cry that she had ever heard come from a creature in all of her life.
Her movements towards him were swift and methodical. She wasted no time getting to her hooves, then racing across the loose floorboards, until she was beside him, and her hooves were around his neck and his face was pressed against her cheek and he was swearing hexes and screaming bloody murder.
He was going to kill Huck. He was going to mangle him. He was going to peel the fur and flesh from his own cousin’s body, then crack his neck and bury him, and Drought, and Tucker, and Saddlesore (who he wasn’t sure, but was still fairly convinced, was a part of this) all of them, up to their necks somewhere out in desert and watch when the vultures picked them apart.
Celestia was a bitch, he told her. She was a cold hearted ‘c-word’ who could judge him all she wanted to for saying it. She could have him hung for it! Even still, she would be the last pony he’d talk too after he did what he needed to do. To satisfy his sister’s curiosity, he shared his master plan.
He was going to commit the act of murder that night.
He wasn’t sure what the right word was. It wasn’t ‘patricide’ (because that was for killing ones father and he wasn’t going to do that), but, Gentle Strokes promised, to his own sister, that he was going to commit, in his own words, “Freakin’... whatever… cousin-cide!”
He was going to kill Huck.
For all she was worth, and what little good it could do, Clementine just held her brother’s head firmly against her breast while he, filled with anguish and sorrow, plotted murder. Then, after some time, he softened to the idea and instead he did something she hadn’t heard him do in all of his lifetime.
He broke.
His was a personal kind of defeated. He didn’t fall, or become weightless as the mares in old black and white picture shows did. Instead, he clenched tighter and squeezed her harder. This was his release. This was what he needed, and she was only glad -- for lack of a better word -- that she was here for him. Her brother. Who whimpered and whined and cursed and then, finally, who softened and opened up.
For the first time in a long time, her brother was crying.
She’d never heard him cry like this before. He’d broken bones, cracked ribs, suffered splinters, fractures and pain from his work. Ponies he knew and loved had passed away -- his grandfather in particular -- and still, she’d never heard him quite like this. He was so small now. So defeated. So painfully broken in that moment that all she could do was suffer with him.
Two siblings crying on a cold night in Dodge Junction.
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I can just see the tombstone, and on it these simple words: Here Lies Huck. Got curb stomped by his pillow biting, stallion stuffing, cousin, much to Hucks eternal shame. Let it be heard his last words "I died as I lived... In my house..."
Well... Time to wait another two months. :x
Good to see you're still alive.
This was a pretty damn powerful chapter. Well done.
oh man thats pretty brutal.
Nicely done, Guy. I know you were struggling with this one.
I think you nailed the emotional arc necessary for this.
this was...so painful to read...in a "this is very good writing but OH MY GOD! STORMYYY!!'" kind of way
what really sells it is probably the way you didn't fully describe the injuries mentioned by the doctor, leaving in our imagination to fill in the horiffic gaps
Well it took me a while but I finally caught up. Time to wait many weeks I suppose (still better than my upload rate)
Ok... I'm not a very emotional person but I have to admit that this chapter really had an impact. One question I have: Is Huck going to survive? Just to make that clear, I'm asking about Huck because I kinda had an idea that might take the meaning of the word "gruesome" to a whole new level and eh... Well... I'd like the idea of Huck being a "guest star".
Fucking dammit! That cliffhanger!
I can't wait for more!
3430579
I'll run the risk of to alienating myself from my audience here and say I love Huck. I don't think I've written anyone, ever, who's gotten such an emotional feedback from people quite like him. he's a dick. He's the worst kind of douchebag. He's your 34 year old cousin who shows up to Thanksgiving dinner with another tribal tattoo on his neck, a new future ex-wife, another kid and asks you if you can lend him 40 dollars so he can 'totally not buy beer. Its for the kid cause he needs diapers, yo'.
Huck is a douche. But, he's fun to write for. His will be satisfying conclusion.
3431583
No. I wrote it to read like that. Blue Skies is really just Patrick Bateman. I actually tried to do a spinoff/solo thing with him (You can check it out if you want) that read like a bad American Psycho rip off.
3449017
What'd you have in mind? Huck is probably overdue for some karmic payback? If you want to write him getting horribly mutilated in one of your stories I wouldn't stop you (But, I'd also knd of want to pre-read it also)
3482654
What irks me is more then likely the families going to take Hucks side when the beating he so richly deserves. I know people like Huck... I've dealt with people like Huck... and people like that you never feel bad for beating up.
Of course, like all vermin, huck will probably have his Cous thrown in jail for assault, and will lawyer up as soon as possible
3482654
I'm not entirely sure what I have in mind yet, but the ideas I have are always utterly insane and that will set the standart for what I am planning to write. And maybe I will need your help when it comes to Huck a since I'm not sure what his behaviour would be in the situation I want to put him into.
About the pre-reading... I can arrange that but it will most probably have a horrible writing style and a horrible grammar since english isn't the language that I'm normally using when I'm writing.
Holy shit! Very well written. I hope the next update is soon but I'm no better at uploading my own story but still the emotions. I know all those feelings in fact going through some things now so I know how real all these emotions are. I just feel for Gent and Stormy and want to skin Huck alive.
Holy shit, wow. This chapter. (in good of bad way...good writing)
This is amazing. Very much like, very much like indeed. Please, we NEED another chapter.
If I was Stokes I wouldn't kill Huck fast. I would break him slowly and only when he begged to die would I would burn him at the stake. A Huck roast for all to see.
This is some God-tier writing right here. Seems professional. Hope to see how this cliffhanger turns out
3868465 JESUS CHRIST WOAH.