Fallout Equestria (With bonus sidestory and 10yrs after)

Chapter 15: Whispers in the Darkness

Chapter Fifteen: Whispers in the Darkness

“Psst!  Pinkie Pie, are you asleep yet?”

Rest.

Sleep came in fits and starts.  I seriously, desperately needed rest, but every time I closed my eyes, fevered dreams of wasteland horrors dashed themselves against my mind’s eye.

I saw ponies loading into a passenger ( Sky Bandit Stages ) wagon.  In my mind, they were families on their way to a day of laughter and fun at a Ministry of Morale amusement park -- parents smiling warmly as their colts and fillies pranced in place with anticipation.  (I don’t know why, but I was certain that MoM had built amusement parks, and that they had been regularly packed full of screaming kids.)  I saw mothers urging their colts not to climb on the seats, fathers checking to make sure their cameras had film.  And a great wall of green flame with a sinister rainbow sheen rushing towards them that somehow nopony could see.

I saw a pony named Trixie leaving a message on the door to her cottage, grinning as she assured herself that her whole life was about to change.  I saw her walking away from that door (which in the dream I had somehow become) even as I called out to her to come back, knowing that if she left, she would never live to see her little cottage again.  I called, pleaded, cried.  But she could not hear me and walked away.

I saw ponies giving their loved ones the great news that they had been selected for a Stable.  I watched as they -- bright and colorful and living ponies -- trotted into their new home, the clock on the wall above them counting down the minutes until an accident would doom them all to horror and death.

I awoke with a fit.

I was laying… somewhere.  A bed.  But every time I tried to remember exactly where I was, or how I got there, the memories slipped away.  I opened my eyes.  The room was dark, but light poured in through a cracked-open door.  I didn’t recognize the walls with their shadowed posters or the roof with its still and silent turret.

My body felt wrong.  I ached, I felt horribly weak.  I had chills when I wasn’t sweating profusely.  My stomach churned.  My mouth tasted strange and mushy.

Shadows trotted near the door.  I heard Calamity’s voice.  “Do ya think she went an’ picked up somethin’ in the Stable?”

Velvet Remedy’s voice, soft and clear, responded, “Or it could be brought on by stress.  I’m worried about her.  I think the wasteland is getting to her.”

“Y’all seem t’ be doin’ well,” Calamity observed, his voice low so as not to wake me.

Velvet gave a wry (yet very feminine) laugh.  “Not as well as you think, my noble outsider.”  Was that sarcasm?  Or affection?  I couldn’t tell, and trying to think about it made my thoughts swim.  “And I should do better than Littlepip; I’m over a decade more mature than she is.”

Great.  I’m a child to her.  Beautiful.  I’m a fucking filly.  The same filly as the first time we met at some older filly’s Cute-ceañera.  My life just couldn’t get any better.

“And all those drugs she’s been taking… they’re certainly not helping.”

My stomach convulsed violently.  I wanted to cry.  My eyelids were too heavy to look around anymore, and I didn’t fight them as they closed on their own.  I turned away from the slice of light coming through the door, falling again into fitful sleep.

***     ***     ***

“Are ya gonna stay in here with ‘er all night?”

Calamity’s voice was a whisper, very close to my bed.  I wasn’t entirely sure that I was awake, much less at which point the tides of dreaming had deposited me on the shore of awareness.  I vaguely recalled a change in the darkness, a fluctuation of light, perhaps the opening of a door.