The Humiliation of Quirk

by Achaian

4: Dawn of a Black Day

“A moral man is one who reacts to temptation as soon as he feels it in his heart, without yielding to it…”

-Sigmund Freud on The Brothers Karamazov

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Dawn of a Black Day

“Oh my.”

As usual, those words were an understatement of the severity of the situation at hand. Normally, the sight of an explicitly bruised and deathly haggard-looking pegasus trapped under a cracked and fallen tree trunk would cause at least a sharp inhalation of shock, but she was more prone to muted reactions. In all likelihood, the unfortunate pegasus had been trapped there all night and into the current early morning: visible scrapings on the earth, the wood and the body wedged between them indicated a long, torturous, and fruitless struggle to escape crushing confinement. Eyes closed, his ragged breath was barely audible over the morning radiance of sound in the forest. It was much brighter now than in the forsaken night; the twisting streams from the morning sun had passed him by, leaving him in a merciful modicum of shade in the illumination around him.

She moved closer immediately to determine his condition; by all measures he was far from well, yet his biggest malady was the trunk pinning him to the ground. The earth was uneven and broken around him and the log had fallen at an angle, saving him from a more untimely but perhaps more merciful demise. Nevertheless, he would succumb to any number of morbid conditions if he was not moved out from under the trunk soon. Help could be reached, but it would be too long coming; she had to work some solution now if she was to be sure of his safety.

“Hello?” She stepped in closer, doing her best to rouse him gently with voice. To do so now would be far from easy, as she was not a very vocal pony by any means, and he appeared to be caught in a mortally bound sleep. “Can you hear me?” Her soft voice had no effect.

With the lightest touch, she put a supporting hoof to the side of his face and he gasped- a quick, saw-bladed intake of breath- and his eyes jacked wide open with a broad primordial intensity born of terror and sick desperation. She did not recoil, but she was concerned; and her worry for him was magnificent enough to overcome the surprise. Yet she had touched him! He was experiencing catharsis now; the touch had vivified the remainder of life in his damaged body and tortured mind. She was the singer! She who possessed the splendor of grace in voice had come to him, but he was trapped and would soon be a claimant of death’s embrace; it was the only possibility foreseeable to a ravaged mind.

“It’ll be alright.”

Liar.

“Can you talk?”

He nodded, but did not reply. She was innocently confused to the strange reaction, but continued regardless.

“I can try to move the trunk, but I’m not very strong, so you’re going to have to tell me if I’m taking the pressure off you, please. If you think that’s a good plan, I mean.” She added, drawn inwards for a moment on the ghost of a hint of an offensive attitude.

Contrary to her apologetics but in cohesion with her concerns, she fluttered around to the other side of the log, out of his vision, and began to push. Despite her saying so, she did seem strong enough to be able to move the crushing log somewhat, if only with great strain and effort. She heaved, stopped for an instant; it was a mighty drain on her small physical reserve of strength; breathing hard she moved it a few inches, but it only caused him more pain- she was crushing him underneath it!

“Is it working?”

He growled instinctually with a primal determination; the trunk was cutting into his air, but his words would not pierce that selfsame atmosphere- no, not while he still drew breath, yet he would only draw breath for a swiftly diminishing time under the titanic weight. Scraping the ground, his mind flashed in and out of blackness momentarily- again- if he would not speak he would face imminent death and all the fear of the unknown country. Short, cracking thoughts echoed thundering sounds as the trunk began to seize out of its supports.

“Stop!” he gasped, his voice hacking from lack of use.

She stopped immediately, ran back around. It was too late for him.

The trunk had not crushed him, but long silent shrieks of miserable frustration wracked through his mind regardless. The screams of memory, the thousand misdeeds and the unmistakable crime that wrought his torment were there- in the present!- No, he had not been crushed by the trunk, yet the long and demonizing past that he had left behind was recalled instantly at the sound of his own voice, and grim hatred of his own self funneled through it into a macabre concentrate more horrid than any wrath yet poured out. He was a factory, a distillery of self-hatred, and he had been left to mature towards his sick conclusion in a night that had only added shadowed hate and the inky blackness of despair to the concoction. The eyes remained the only intelligible indicator of the torrid upheaval within, a plagued and furious dual globe that now stared at she who had brought him promises yet inebriated him with pain.

“I’m sorry!” She saw immediately the trouble she had caused, and threw herself against the other side of the twisted-thick log. While she was straining on against the weight, he could only look on blindly with miserable hate in his eyes and curse silently. She had brought this onto him; she had caused the greatest Humiliation to be scarred on him; with an explosive and exhaustive push the log fell off of his beaten form and his sinister growl was lost in the crashing and the exhausted pants of she who had saved him.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated as soon as was able to move herself to his wounded side; blood and blue-black bruising disfigured his coat where the trunk had crushed him. “I’m Fluttershy.”

His mind was chaos's nexus, but somewhere in forgotten memory and the gasping relief of decompression an old habit triggered and he spurred a phrase of an older time:

“My name is Quirk…”

His vision was fading rapidly, she was doing something to him; what little perception that was not pain was taking its leave. She was touching him, flashes of pain penetrated him like needles through his nerves. She was saying something- he could feel it only in the barest distance- the long mind’s agony was coming to a shorter end-

“This might hurt a little bit…”

Sharp! A pain stabbing, he was about to scream out against it, and then- then- nothing; blessed blankness.

He thought he could hear something in his dreaming, but it was only a mirage, a soundscape.