Several months later, in the dead of winter...

The lights flickered on with a buzz as the orderly came into the room with a tray of hot, steaming food.

She'd be lying if she were to say she wasn’t hungry, but even so, nothing on that tray was all that appetizing. Not right now. She was about to raise her voice in protest, tell Sam just to eat the food himself or send it back to the cafeteria, but before she could a grinning figure crept up behind the unsuspecting orderly. With one quick flick of a razor sharp claw, his head tumbled from his shoulders and splattered onto the tray, sending food and gore splashing in every direction. Blood poured from the glistening stump and drenched the orderly’s otherwise white uniform as his body slumped forward.

For all that he should have fallen over dead, he continued to walk step by jerky step, the friendly smile on the severed heads face never fading.

“Now, now. There’s no need for that sour look. I know the food here isn’t great, but it’s not like it’s going to kill you,” the head spoke in a reproachful tone.

That got a girlish giggle to escape from the lips of the fiend that had sliced off his head.

As the orderly set the tray down, Sunset Shimmer could see that blood and bile had mixed with the food in a grotesque pink and black slurry. She curled her lips in disgust and glared over his shoulder at the insubstantial figure who also never stopped grinning. “Sorry Sam, I just don't seem to have an appetite for what they serve around here,” her stomach growled loudly, giving the lie to her word, "It all tastes like blood."

"Now I don't want to hear nay of that. There's nothing wrong with the food. It's just your imagination acting up." The headless body dipped a spoon into the muck and brought forth a wad of crimson slush. Despite her growling tummy, she turned her head away.The severed head frowned, “Now Miss, don’t do this to yourself. You know if you refuse to eat, Dr. Lemon Drop will hook you up to the tubes again. I know you don’t want that.” Sunset shuddered just thinking about it. She was pretty sure there was some law about force feeding a patient against their will, but if there was she’d probably lost whatever rights she had to such a laws protection after they decided she was insane.

Whether there were rules or laws against doing something though, that didn't really hold a lot of meaning so long as she was in Lemon Drop's tender care.

Suppressing the urge to vomit, Sunset closed her eyes and opened her mouth. The sensation of the filthy dreck sliding past her lips made her shutter, but she tried not to spit. She liked Sam. Even if he was a decapitated head right now, he didn't deserve her spewing all over him.

To her relief, in her mouth there were just mashed potatoes... Bland, but not bad.

As the teenager opened her eyes Sam’s head was back on his shoulders and the food, while not managing to look anymore appetizing than before, had gone back to normal. It seemed her Curse wasn’t going to go so far as to make her choke down spoonfuls of gore tonight. It had happened often enough before that Sunset was suspicious now. If the Curse wasn’t going to torment her by making her meal as vile as possible, then that could only mean that some other torture awaited her.

“There now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Sam smiled his crooked grin. He was almost cute, in a simple kind of way. If it wasn’t for the fact that he worked for her doctor, Sunset might have actually grown to like him. As it was, she could only pity him for what he had to put up with.

Behind his large form, a candy coated version of Sunset pretended not to notice Shimmer’s suspicious gaze as Sam fed her the rapidly cooling dinner. The image occupied itself by making crude gestures behind the mans back.

It was times like these that Sunset wished she could just feed herself, but the straight jacket they had her in rarely came off, if at all. She’d gone months before now without so much as a chance to stretch. She wasn’t about to give them an excuse to keep her bound by struggling against her bonds now though.

Sunset could wait.

Sadly, so could the Candy Mare.

As Sam finished up his duties, he left the padded cell and the lights shut off. In the dark, the candied version of Sunset seemed to grow more substantial. Sunset could smell the sickly sweet scent of candy and decay. Thankfully this was about as close as the Curse could get to being real, for the time being. But the nights were long and getting longer. The more Sunset sat in the dark, the stronger the Curse seemed to become. Worse, the stronger her own hunger began to gnaw at the base of her spine...

The more her stomach growled for things she did not want to eat... But her resolve was weakening.

The Candy Mare knew this, and that was why she smiled so brightly now as she said, ”You seemed to resign yourself to eating poor Samhain’s flesh and blood rather quickly tonight. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to taste the real thing? To stop sucking down spoonfuls of slop and really sink your teeth into something fresh and warm?” she asked with gusto, seeming to relish the idea herself.

“It doesn’t matter to me what kind of tricks you pull,” shot back Sunset, avoiding the subject. “I know by now that none of it is real! Play whatever sick games you want, but that's all you can do!” She growled.

But then, so did her stomach.

For all she had just eaten a rather large meal, Sunset still felt famished. She could hide her fear behind false bravado, but she couldn't hide her hunger.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, your hunger is real enough,” sneered the phantom of the Candy Mare with the sugary facsimile of Sunset’s face. “You know it’s only a matter of time before you give in.”

“I’d sooner starve to death,” muttered Sunset sullenly. Not that this was something that could actually occur in this place. Lemon Drop would see to that.

The phantoms merely shrugged. “That’s fine by me. As soon as you die I’ll hollow you ought like a ripe pumpkin. I’ll pull your flesh on like an old, damp pair of socks, and march your corpse out of this cell and back out into the world! Everyone will know you then! Everyone will fear you! And I’ll eat both my share and yours of sweet, delicious flesh!”

“You are so fucked up,” Sunset whispered, more to herself than to the Candy Mare. "It's hard to believe Pumpkin Patch was ever any part of you."

Sunset still wasn’t convinced that she didn’t belong here. That her companion wasn’t just a figment of a deranged mind. Her spell should have worked. It should have destroyed every body that the Candy Mare had stolen, every possible host. Even if she had been infected, Sunset should have burned along with the rest.

Sadly, she hadn’t accounted for how different magic was here in the human world. Somehow the fake human flesh that the Candy Mare had made for herself, that she referred to as simply ‘Candy’, had survived the fiery purge. Sunset had fought the homunculus amid the burning ruins of CHS, and she had triumphed. She’d even gone so far as to burn the things twisted remains.

It was over the artificial charred corpse that the authorities had found her... A scene that had solidified her status as the deranged culprit of a heinous mass murder in the public’s mind.

Wrongfully imprisoned or not, it seemed Sunset had lost her mind there for a bit because she had foolishly thought telling the truth would somehow make things better. Surely telling everyone that she was a unicorn from another dimension, and that she had just wiped out a fiendish curse that turned all of her school friends into candy zombies, was the perfect way to prove her sanity.

During all of the hubbub of being frogmarched between cells, to hearings, back to cells she had never thought to ask anyone to check her wounds. She had never thought that they would need to make sure there were no foreign materials lodged in the scrapes and cuts in her flesh. When the infection set up, she should have known there was something wrong, but they just fed her antibiotics and pain killers and told her she should be grateful to have them.

That must have been how the candy curse got in. Some random piece of 'Candy' had found its way into her body. There wasn’t enough magic in the human world for the Candy Mare to convert Sunset’s body into a new host right away, but there was just enough for the fiend to hang on by the skin of her teeth. Now all she could do was manifest as an insubstantial ghost to torment the teenager that had beaten her... to try and drive Sunset either to suicide, or to indulge in the cannibalistic urges that would feed her power and bring her fully back into this world.

Then the nightmare would begin all over again.

At least, that was, if Sunset wasn’t in fact crazy and dreaming the whole thing up.

Sunset shook her head, trying to shake herself from her thoughts. She’d been going around in the same circles more and more often lately. Going from wondering exactly how the Candy Mare could still exist to doubting her own sanity and back again. If she wasn’t already crazy, thinking like this would surely drive her nuts soon.

The drugs didn’t help either. As that thought crossed her mind, she felt a set of eyes on her that didn’t belong to her phantom companion.

Lemon Drop loomed over her in the dark, standing as still and quiet as death.

In spite of herself, Sunset cried out and tried to back into the far corner of her cell. He was always doing stuff like this. He’d enter her cell somehow without making a sound, and he’d never turn on the lights. Not when he brought out the syringes with their dubious contents.

“Is it really necessary for you to struggle every time, subject?” he asked with the regal air of nobility, as if he were a monarch addressing a peasant. “We both know it will do you no good. You will take your medicine, like it or not.” Sunset started to scream then, which only elicited a heavy sigh from Doctor Lemon Drop. “You’ve done that almost every time as well. You know no one is coming. No one ever does... So please, do shut up.”

Without an ounce of gentleness, he rammed the first needle into Sunset’s thigh. The sharp, burning sensation as the solution flooded her veins made her screams come out as a strangled gag. It was like the needle had set fire to her brain. Whatever was in her veins acted on her fast and made her curl into a shivering ball, despite the feeling that she was burning alive.

“Fascinating reaction,” observed the doctor as he made some hasty notes and pulled another needle from his pocket. He leaned down so that his face was only inches from Sunset’s. “Can you describe what you are feeling? The sensation? You look as if you are freezing, but I can tell by your flushed features that the inflammation is spreading like wildfire. Is it harder to think or to breath? Do you think your throat will clench shut first, or does it feel like your heart will stop beating?”

Sunset could only whimper in reply at first, but then through grit teeth she managed to squeal,”Head... burning...ahhh!”

“Ah, that is unfortunate,” replied Lemon Drop as he jammed the second needle viciously into the side of Sunset’s neck. “That means that the brain would be the first organ to shut down. Not an effective mixture for enhanced interrogation, but perhaps a means by which we could accelerate new contributions to our organ donor programs. Not that we'd want any of such from the likes of you.”

Relief flooded Sunset Shimmer, like the cool touch of an old friend. The pain was still there, but the burning subsided. As she opened her eyes, Lemon Drop had his back to her busily scribbling more notes. He might have lost interest in her, but the phantom of the Candy Mare was staring right into her face. Sunset was about to scream, but a ghostly finger pressed against her lips. It almost tingled, but it wan't quite the sensation of touch. What kept her from crying out, however, were the specters words.

“You don’t have to put up with this, you know," the Candy Mare said, all traces of her grin gone. "One bite is all it would take, and then I would take care of the rest.”

Sunset Shimmer loathed Lemon Drop. If there was one human being that she wouldn’t mind unleashing the Candy Mare on, it was this doctor that seemed more like a psychopath than any of his patients. But to do what the Candy Mare suggested? It wouldn't just be him on the chopping block. ”I can’t. I won’t. I will never take another's life, especially if it means letting you loose!” she hissed through her teeth.

“Then bite through your own tongue!" the phantom roared. "Swallow the lump of useless meat and choke on your own blood!” The illusion of the candy Sunset Shimmer distorting in the Candy Mare’s rage. She became huge. Horrific. A true nightmare to behold that filled the tiny padded cell from end to end with flesh that crawled with maddened eyes and gnashing mouths and lashing tongues. She spoke in the voices of the dead, her fury rising to manic levels “I will be free, one way or another! don’t care how it happens! I will rip out his heart and eat it in front of his face!”

Despite what it would mean for that to happen, Sunset found she actually liked the sound of those words. The phantom wasn’t angry on Sunset’s behalf though. She seemed to bear some personal grudge against the good doctor, thoguh there really was no reason for her to.

There had been a Lemon Drop in the old legends about the Candy Mare, this was true. He’d been a candy maker rather than a doctor though, and there was no way that this human that shared his name could have had anything to do with the pony version that had lived so long ago. In the human world, Lemon Drop shared his namesakes personality and warped disposition, but that was all.

It must have brought back some truly bad memories for the Candy Mare. Sadistic though she was, she was usually a jovial apparition. To see this much rage and fury directed at someone other than Sunset, the person responsible for her current weakened condition, was kind of bizarre.

Maybe Sunset could use that to her advantage? She didn’t know how, but it might be worth a try, “How about we...”

But before she could say anything else, Lemon Drop kicked Sunset so hard in her gut that she was actually lifted into the air and slammed against the padded wall. Sunset choked and sputtered once she landed on the floor, coughing up a mixture of her recently eaten food, blood, and acridly sweet tasting bile. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, but she refused to cry.

Not in front of him.

Never in front of him.

The phantom Candy Mare roared and swept insubstantial claws through the doctor, but of course he didn’t notice at all. Instead, in a perfectly calm voice that belied the violence of his actions, he said “It is impolite to mumble when someone is trying to think. I asked you politely to hold your tongue. If you can’t even manage that basic level of civility, I will just have to arrange for you to be muzzled before my next visit.” Saying that he withdraw a third and final needle from his coat. This he injected straight into Sunset’s spine.

Sunset’s eyes grew dim, and the world blurred at the edges.

She had no illusions that she would have pleasant dreams, but for now her current nightmare faded to nothing.