“Hey, did you hear something?”

Those were the last words out of the recruit’s mouth before the world exploded inward in a burst of fine craftsmanship and clocked him square upside the head. As he fell backwards, a torrent of words, slicing like the rain of a hurricane against his ears, slapped him further.

“What in my good name is going on here? You dare make a mess of this fine mess hall?” the voice boomed. In the recruit’s haze, it seemed to come from everywhere at the same time--swerving around the angels bleating into his ears a cherub’s song of suffering, past the bright lights turning reality into a soggy mush before him, and into his head. The pain of having his head smacked first into a door, then the floor, then a cinder block-wall of words drove him to his haunches. For a moment, he vaguely recalled a tray of food in his skittering hooves, but another shout from the voice above and below him pitched the thought right out of his head. The room filled with the sound of scraping chairs and clicking hooves, like little thunderclaps.

"Look at this. Pathetic! Perhaps that little pea-brain of yours could have realized it wasn't a good idea to walk right in front of a busy door as somepony was opening it. But no-sir-ee! You just pranced your way right into that sucker like it was your business to! You should get an award for gallantry, throwing yourself in front of that dangerous door to save your fellow trainees like that!"

The stench of sweat and breath that hadn't spoken the word 'toothbrush' in far too long knotted his senses, tangling reality with the burning need to reel back and gag. “And would you look at all this food you’re rolling around in! Do you want to be a member of the Royal Guard, or do you want to be a french fry?”

Funny, he couldn’t remember having food. Thinking hard, he couldn’t really remember anything at all before the collision. The world had become his teetering self, buffeted by gusty threats to the point of collapse.

“I wonder how long it would take the mess staff to mop your sorry hide off the floor and deposit you in the nearest trash can. Do you have any idea in your cutesy little mind how hard these ponies work to keep this place up to snuff? And then you disrespect them by throwing your food all over the ground! I don’t like trainees who disrespect the ponies around them. It’s a sign that they lack respect. And what, class, do we do with those who don’t respect the Royal Guard?”

“We respect them with ex-treme prejudice!” the class shouted back in unison.

“Oh, you kids give me shivers every time!” the sergeant shouted back, his voice thick with sarcasm. “As for you little floor-dweller,” he turned back to the recruit on the ground, “you’ll be on dish duty tonight to make up for this little mess. Am I clear?”

He still had the sense in his head to bleat, “Yessir!”

From somewhere beyond the recruit’s own intimate, frightening reality, a voice reeled into being.

“Permission to assist him, sir!”

The drill sergeant glared up at the newcomer, measuring up his sheer arrogance for intruding upon his private verbal beat-down. The ugly stare fell out of favor a moment later, replaced by a look of sinister ambiguity.

“Private Clarity, you need to learn to stop taking the rap for your incompetent friends. Permission granted.” The drill sergeant wheeled around to face the rest of the room. “Now--all trainees! I think tonight is time for a special occasion,” the grinning pony stated, his voice still as booming as ever. “I’m going to pull executive privilege and change our schedule a bit, starting with movie night. I am hereby changing it to tonight, right now.”

The room sat in silence, unsure whether to whoop and holler or cower in fear.

“Are you deaf as well as dumb?” He finally shouted, annoyed at the recruits’ scared silence. “This R&R isn’t optional. Get a move on, you lead-footed sacks ‘a cotton!”

An entire room full of grim-faced ponies shot for the door, pausing only to ebb around the mess on the floor; all except for the recruit, still blinking back shock, and the interrupting voice from earlier, who waited until the room was almost deserted (and the drill sergeant had forgone the room with a smug nod of satisfaction) before trotting up to his dazed friend, tapping him on the shoulder and offering him his hoof.

“Dude. Get up. It’s over.”

The new reality took a moment to comprehend. After a long second of waiting, the recruit took his friend’s hoof.

“That looked like it hurt,” Clarity said.

“It felt like it hurt.” The recruit resisted the urge to to grimace. “What was it that got me, exactly?”

“A hurricane.”

“Ha ha. Really.”

“The Sargeant.”

The recruit paused. “The Sargeant?”

Clarity nodded the affirmative. “He opened the door while you were going by and decked you. Then he yelled at you. Now you’re going to scrub dishes until your hooves get little moldy spots while the rest of the guys go watch a movie.”

Blinking back dismay, the recruit groaned his misfortune, closing his eyes as if to un-see the past and knock him back into naivety. “But movie night’s not until tomorrow!”

His pal nodded solemnly. “The Captain moved it up a day after he finished yelling at you. He probably knew you were looking forward to it.”

The two stopped at the double doors leading to the kitchen. Beyond those doors lay a whole evening’s worth of dirty dishes, courtesy of his good friends and servicemen. They took this moment for all it was worth, leaning against the door frame, both pairs of eyes locked on the center crack just in case one of the workers would come out to look for forgotten dishes and spot them slacking off on their assignment.

The punishment would be bad, but not bad enough to keep the two from basking in shared defeat, comforting each other the only way they knew how: passively.

“The movie wasn’t a good one anyway,” Clarity murmured. “It’s an action movie with a lot of explosions and an old koot of a B-lister walking away from them like they were firecrackers in a Filly Scout camp.”

Clarity knew the sheer inaccuracy of those dramatic explosion-walkaway scenes would generate some sort of response (the two had discussed the matter at length in their barracks a while back the night they discovered a shared interest in movies). Despite throwing the peeve out there like bait on a fishhook, though, the recruit didn’t so much as show an angry blink of emotion. “Those are fun to watch,” he said. “They’re not very realistic, but they’re fun to watch.”

“There’s a lot of scantily dressed mares, too. I think that’s why the Captain picked it. I’ll bet he thought the group would like it after so many weeks of training with a bunch of sweaty stallions.”

“They’ll probably love it.” The recruit shifted, gazing at the door through eyes flickering with the thoughts of somepony else--somepony that wasn’t him. “Stallions love attractive mares.”

The recruit’s pal punched him in the shoulder before shoving the door open and disappearing into the humid room beyond. The recruit followed suit, if not just to maintain the appearance of timeliness. The captain would have him scrubbing the latrines with his bare hooves every day if it so much appeared that he was slacking off.

A muggy voice, sticky like the air around them, slapped them into motion in earnest, clinging to their skin like a wet towel. “Alright now, you gumwads,” bellowed a portly old stallion, his mane permanently plastered to his head so as to fit into a constrictive hair net. “I’d give you some wisdom on not walking by doors that are prone to getting opened, but that little bump on your head’s probably keeping you from thinking straight.” His eyes drifted behind the two, presumably to the pile of dishes awaiting them. “Mercy, mercy, mercy, you’re gonna wish you had never been decked by that door.”

“I already do, sir,” the recruit stated over the hiss of a running sink nearby.

“Fabulous!” Two wet dishrags flew through the air. Both recruits caught them in their teeth. “The dishes are over there. Clean them, dry them, then put them in the dishwasher for disinfection.”

“Can’t we just put them in the dishwasher first and spare the trouble, sir?” The recruit forgot how inappropriate of a question that was until the stallion was up against his nose, breathing the smell of unwashed teeth and pure, unflinching disdain onto his face.

“You will both follow orders exactly as I have laid them out for you, or you’ll carry the dishes out to the track and run laps while cleaning them.”

They saluted, pressed out a “Yessir!” through the cloud of steam waiting to form around them, and turned towards the sink. They had both memorized the layout of the kitchen a long time ago.

“Laps around the track?” the recruit mumbled under the whine of the kitchen. “That’s not too bad. I’d be scared if he told us to run laps around his beer belly.”

Clarity risked a chuckle at the jab as they arrived at their station and resigned their poor souls to the company of soap-scum and ketchup stains for the remainder of the evening. Dishes rose before them like plastic mountains, jutting with outcroppings of stray forks and knives.

“Well?” The old stallion pounded his hoof on the sink. “Are you going to stand there and make love to them with your eyes, or are you going to clean them?”

They both shouted out “Yessir,” not wanting to risk another unintentionally snide comment that might get them thrown into the dishwashers along with the plates. A moment passed as the sheer hopelessness of their impending job hung before them, lifting the pile of dishes until it loomed over their heads like a great hulking monster, eager to devour their wits and spit out clean plates in return.

Their glances drew together like gravity, both towards each other and away from the dish-demon before them; half a knowing glance, hardly even that. They dared not risk anything more, lest the surly stallion oversee them. Their System, they called it, of keeping themselves contained to sidelong glances and hoof bumps and ‘hello’s’ and ‘how do you do’s’ served its purpose--just like they did--for the sake of everypony else around them. They bore that burden by choice, and they were not less for it. It wasn't just their choice to make, when it came down to it. It hurt to be so close to a pony and not be able to do a thing about it, but no more than a hundred laps around the track for splitting a fellow recruit's nose after they spit out a slur--or those looks, not quite disdain or outright rage but something more refined, a casual hatred a tone below violence and just above disgust.

They had nopony to avoid them now, except for the old mess stallion. The world was a mountain of plates held together under its own gravity, clouds of steam shifting over it like horizontal waterfalls, and them: two little figures plopped square into the midst of a struggle perhaps beyond their ability, an uphill battle towards normalcy.

“I wonder when the next movie night is gonna be held,” the recruit pondered aloud.

“Not for a while," Clarity replied. "Few months, maybe. Captain’s fond of giving us extra sparring training.”

“Yeah.” The recruit sighed, letting the silent cry of self-pity drown under the churning weight of the air around him. “I hope we get to be a part of it.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment, silent. Then, when all that needed to be said was spoken, they turned to their dishes, little white irises ready to be washed clean of blinding impurities by the hooves of ponykind.