“Get the hell away from her!”

The voice comes out of the darkness and cracks open the swirling vortex of pain. I go from being totally alone to remembering that I’m in a town full of ponies and there’s no way Mac can keep this up forever. A flash of hope blazes through me, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. I’m not alone anymore, but I recognize that voice. That voice isn’t going to be able to do anything against Mac, and I wish they weren’t even here to see this. Even if they could help me, I’m not sure I want to survive this anymore.

Suddenly, something rips him out of me. The relief of being suddenly empty is paired with a blinding pain that touches every part of my insides and crashes through my brain like a flash flood as I collapse into the dirt.

Part of me wants to feel relieved that he’s gone, but I can’t get past the panic. Letting myself relax now would just be stupid. I don’t know where he is now. I’m exposed and vulnerable. He’s going to come back and just be even more pissed off.

I have to hide. I have to get away. I have to get that stupid pony that’s trying to save me and get out of here. My wings twitch instinctively. It hurts so much that I instantly accept that I’d better not to try that again for awhile. I try to stand up, but I can’t. I can’t even move. I’m useless, and now it isn’t just going to be me that pays for it.

There’s a huge crash- something big smashing through a stack of wooden crates or something. I hear the nails groan and creak as they’re ripped from their planks, but the sounds can’t have anything to do with me. It’s too far away, and it definitely doesn’t sound like somepony coming to help me and my would-be hero.

I try to lift my head and look. The movement makes me want to scream again, which would be a really bad idea. I don’t want to draw any attention to myself right now. Mac hasn’t come back yet. Maybe whatever that sound down the street was spooked him, but I’m probably not that lucky. Still, I don’t want to give him a reason to come back. So, I put my head back in the dirt and focus on listening.

There’s a thumping of big hooves, but they are still too far away to make any sense. It sounds like somepony struggling to get up for a second, but then the sound is gone, and I hear a gasp. It sounds just like I did when Mac forced every last breath out of my lungs.

I force my eyes open. One feels like it’s almost swollen shut like it must have kept getting snagged on whatever that sharp thing sticking out of the wall was. I can’t open it hardly at all. The other one works ok though. At least, I think it does. I’m not sure I can trust what I’m seeing though, because it doesn’t make any sense.

Way down the street, I see Mac wrapped in blue. Then, with a burst of light, he’s flying through the air like a rag doll. He’s got to be more than a hundred yards away now. He hits the ground in a puff of dirt.

I hear his grunt of pain. I watch him slowly getting back on his hooves. He’s moving gingerly like he just survived a rockslide or something. Even though he’s so far away, I can tell he’s looking back at me. Then he glances at the pony standing protectively over me. A hoof stomps prepared to charge or strike again. For just a second, he hesitates, and I try to suck in a breath to hold. He could still come back. He even takes one step toward me, and I flinch.

A dim glow lights just above me, and he stops. His eyes go so wide that I can see the whites. Then, he turns and runs like his tail is on fire.

I let go of the breath I was holding and shift my gaze to stare at those familiar, well-hooficured, perfectly gray-white hooves. She’s still facing away from me, watching to make sure he's gone.

“Rarity?” I manage to say in disbelief. I want to ask her how she found me. I want to ask her how she did that. I want to beg her to get me out of here, but talking hurts. My throat aches from being choked and trying to scream.

“Oh, my stars, Rainbow Dash!” She kneels in front of me. She reaches like she wants to help me up but then pulls back like she’s afraid to touch me. “We need to get you to the hospital immediately.”

“Please.” I cough and stupidly try to stand again. It doesn’t work. I get myself an inch or two off the ground and then collapse back into the dirt. “No,” I say with a cough and a wince of pain as the wind gets knocked out of me again. That’s all I can get out.

I don’t want anypony to see me. I need her to understand that, but I also don’t expect Rarity of all ponies to listen to me. I just want to hide. I can’t go be in a place with bright lights and stares. I can’t be like this in front of anypony. I need her to get why I don’t want to go to the fucking hospital. I need her to get it without me explaining it to her.

“Darling, we must-”

“No. Please. No,” I beg. I force myself to look into her eyes hoping that she can see all things I don’t have the words to say right now. “Please, Rarity.”

“Oh, Rainbow,” she chokes through her tears. Her eyes are frantic. She’s trying to decide what to do. Her eyes don’t rest on any part of me for more than a second, but they don’t look away either. I watch those blue eyes move up and down my body. I watch as the seconds tick by and listen to her debate with herself in little gasps and whines as she takes in each place marking me with what just happened.

At the very least, I know that my head is bleeding. Maybe my eye is too, and that’s why I can’t really see out of it. I know I have a bruise that wraps all the way across my ribs from his foreleg. My jaw hurts. I’m covered mud, blood, and stallion spit. Rarity should be flinching away and telling me how disgusting I am right now, but she doesn’t look grossed out at all. She keeps trying to reach out and touch me, then pulling her hooves back like she’s afraid she’ll break me or hurt me more.

I don’t know how I feel about the idea of having her touch me. Part of me longs for it, like being touched by anypony that isn’t Mac might undo some of what just happened; like maybe if I pinch myself or something, I’ll realize this is a nightmare and wake up. Another part of me never wants anypony to touch me ever again. The loudest part of my brain doesn’t care if she touches me or not, as long as she gets me out of the street and doesn’t take me to the damn hospital.

What little hope I had that she would listen to me disappears as I watch her make a decision. I know that look. That look never goes the way I want it to.

“Can you walk?” she asks softly with a hint of resignation in her voice. The question and her tone surprise me.

“Maybe,” I manage to whisper, even though it hurts. My throat feels rough and raw like I’ve been screaming for hours, or like I’ve been gargling with sandpaper. I know that I didn’t actually manage to make much noise while he was choking me though. Just like everything else I tried, it was pointless.

I look around for him again. I don’t know how Rarity of all ponies got him to go away, but I don’t think she could do it twice. The street is still empty for now.

I remember that she just asked me a question. I shake my head trying to focus and finish what I was saying to her, “but I don't think so.”

I feel like he split my back half wide open. I wouldn’t know how to use my legs even if I could handle the pain, which I’m not sure I can. I try to twitch my wings again, which is really stupid because it hurts. It’s a sharp, piercing, blinding pain that sears through every part of my wings and down my back all the way to my tail. The pain makes me try to suck in a breath, which makes whatever he broke in my chest cry out in agony. I manage to keep my reaction to a quiet yelp, which makes Rarity twitch, but she still doesn’t touch me.

Trying to fold my wings in hurts just as much. Being forced open and pinned like that seriously messed some things up. I'm not flying anywhere for a long time- if I’m ever able to fly again at all.

“Alright.” Rarity nods. Her voice is careful, and quiet, and controlled. I can only tell that she’s right on the edge of freaking out, but determined not to let it happen, because I’ve seen her lock herself down like this before. Rarity is the only pony I know that can control her emotions like that. ”I can carry you or we can teleport, which do you prefer?”

“Which will get me off this street faster?”

“Right, teleporting it is then.” She reaches out with her hooves then stops. She’s trying to be brave, but she’s also shaking. “I’m going to have to touch you,” she says in that same steady voice, “is that alright?”

That part sounds a lot more like Rarity- polite and proper even in times of crisis. Of course, she cares about manners and asking for permission right now. I almost smile and roll my eyes at her.

“Yeah, Rare.” I spit some blood out of my mouth. I bit my cheek at some point. “It’s cool. Just get me out of here.”

She takes a breath and picks me up like I’m a newborn foal, like I don’t weigh anything at all. She’s being so careful. She’s obviously afraid of hurting me. Her touch is delicate and warm. I’m surprised when she wraps her forelegs around me, and I instantly feel a little better. It’s like getting wrapped in a blanket or something.

She is everything Mac isn’t. Rare is trim and small. She’s firm but soft. There’s nothing forceful about how she’s touching me. She isn’t shaking anymore. Everything about her is in control now. She feels solid and strong. Every move she makes is careful and takes my aches and pains into account.

I let go of a sigh of relief. Rare’s got this. She’s listening to me. She’s going to get me out of here. She made him go away, and she’s not going to stop protecting me. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t care. I’m done. I don’t have to fight right now. I don’t have to do anything. She’ll take care of all of it. Right here, right this second, I don’t have to do or be anything. All I have to do is exist. Rarity will take care of the rest.

“This is going to take just a moment,” she explains to me. “I really don’t want us to end up in the wrong place.”

“It’s cool, Rare. Take your time.”

I try not to think about the fact I’ve never seen Rarity teleport anything bigger than a dress. Instead, I focus on how she feels. Mac ripped me into pieces, but she’s managing to hold me together somehow. It’s like I’m one of those 3-D puzzles Twilight likes, and Rare has her hooves pressed to the sides with the just the right amount of pressure- enough to hold me together, but not so much that the pieces explode away from each other.

The more I let myself fall apart in her arms, the stronger she seems and the safer I feel. I open my good eye and see that her chest is covered in mud and blood. Her perfect coat that she’s always so damn fussy about is matted and gross. I glance up at her face. Her eyes are closed. She looks calm and controlled, almost peaceful. She’s taking deep, even breaths and muttering so quietly I wouldn’t know she was doing it if I wasn’t watching. Her horn is glowing. She’s focused, and she doesn’t give a shit that I’m getting her dirty. That’s a big deal for Rarity.

I close my eye again and rest against her shoulder. I don’t want to distract her. It takes a few more seconds; then I feel the cool blue drip around me. It's soft and tingly. There's a pop and a kind of sliding and squeezing feeling. It’s a super mellow version of that pressure vacuum thing I feel right before a sonic rainboom. Then there’s another pop, and we're in Rarity’s huge and freakishly clean bathroom.

She apologizes for not taking me home, but there was nopony to help me there, and Fluttershy’s was too far. I wouldn’t have wanted to go to Fluttershy’s anyway, but I don’t tell her that.

I can still feel him all over me. I can feel the places on my back where he leaned against me. I can feel a streak of something nasty on my stomach where he rubbed his cock on me. I can feel the weight of bruises forming all over my body. I’m pretty sure that I’m bleeding back where he shoved himself inside of me because something is wet and dripping.

We just sit there on the floor for a while. I keep waiting for her to get mad at me for getting the floor dirty or something, but she doesn’t. The longer we sit, the more I fall apart. I remember more and more with each passing second, and the more I desperate l am to forget the whole thing.

The only distraction I have is Rarity. At first, she tries to pull away and give me space, but I don’t want space. I don’t want to be left alone with nothing but these flesh memories of what just happened to me. I don’t even have the words to tell her any of that, so I just hold on as tight as I can. She stops trying to move away from me and starts stroking my mane carefully.

Silent tears roll through the mud and blood on my muzzle, leaving her pristine coat caked with even more gunk than before. I close my eyes, so I don’t have to look at how messy she is because of me. Her chest rises and falls in perfectly even beats, a little too slow to be natural for me, but I try to match my breaths to hers anyway. The hoof in my mane moves slowly in time with the rhythm of her breathing, always following the same pattern.

I try to match her forced stillness. It’s like trying to keep a tornado in a block of ice. Any second, something might shatter and then… I have no idea what would happen. I only know it would be bad. So, I try to ignore the feeling that I’m being rocked- not gently back and forth like a foal that needs to go to sleep, but violently- back and forth, with my face smashing and catching on every forward and my stupid brain hoping it’ll all be over this time on every back.

Some memories make me flinch and twitch. Like remembering his giant forehooves pressed into my flanks like branding irons, then lifting me up only to bring me back down on the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my whole life. And, I can’t even remember if the pain or the humiliation felt worse.

“Oh Rainbow,” she mumbles.

Eventually, she pulls in a deep breath and her muscles tense like she’s about to pull away from me. I shake my head and crush myself against her even harder. Her breath feels cool against my skin as she nuzzles me gently between the ears and says, “Don’t be afraid, darling. I won’t leave you.”

I can only squeeze her in acknowledgment.

“We really ought to get you cleaned up,” she says. There’s a second part to that sentence, and I wait for her to finish. She’s supposed yammer on and on about how she has just the thing to wash it all away. It’ll be some Prench scrub or wrap that costs more than Twilight’s crown, and it will smell like jasmine or something. This is the part where she’s supposed to say that it will make me feel better to be clean and feel put together.

She doesn’t say it. Her tone isn’t patronizing. It’s sad and listless. Like she knows it’s what we should do, but she doesn’t expect it to help much and that’s disappointing. It’s like knowing that I really should anchor my house before a serious windstorm, but also knowing that it won’t matter. The wind will just rip the anchor point out of the wall anyway, and I’ll still have to spend the next day pushing my house back to Ponyville.

I want a shower so bad. I want to believe that I can wash him off me, but I want the distraction of her more. She can’t let go of me, or I’ll stop having her breaths to focus on, and I’ll fall apart. The millions of pieces Mac ripped me into will burst into a heap on her bathroom floor, and I won’t ever be able to put them back together again.

I need her. I need her to hold me. I need Rarity to hold onto me while I fall apart or I won’t ever have a hope of being whole again. I’ll lose all the pieces I have left. I’ll lose everything.

Plus, the shower can’t really wash him off anyway. It won’t really help. Just like nothing I tried to do helped. Nothing helps, except Rarity.

“What if I get in with you? Will you let me do that? Would that be alright?” She asks with a hint of desperation in her voice. I nod. I don’t care what happens. As long as she doesn’t go anywhere, so I can stay safe.

The cool blue feeling comes back, and she levitates us both into the tub. She moves the showerhead, so we don't get blasted with cold water. After a minute, she sprays my back just a little and asks me if it's warm enough. It isn't. I want it scalding. I want him burned away from my fur, my mane, my feathers, and my skin. She sets the water as hot as she can handle, then she apologizes for not being able to tolerate more.

She reaches with her magic and closes the bathroom door, which makes the room get even warmer. As the air gets thick, I feel his hot, moist breath on my neck, his blazing body pressing in on me from everywhere, and the hollow emptiness of my insides where he stretched every part of me way too far way too fast.

I bury my face in her shoulder and try to think about how she smells instead. Even with the mud and dirt on her chest, she smells clean, like laundry and something flowery. Her scent isn’t enough of a distraction to get rid of the feeling like Mac is here in the tub with us, but it’s enough to keep me present and remind my brain that the feeling isn’t real.

She sprays the hot water over my back and mane. “Can you spread your wings?” she asks. She’s trying hard to keep her tone soft, but neutral.

I don't even try. The few twitches from the street and the spasms from the past few minutes hurt more than enough. So, I just shake my head a little.

“May I try and help you?” she asks, and her voice is just a little bit warmer than before. I nod. She tries to do it by hoof, but it hurts. I flinch and whimper, so she stops. “Shhhh,” she coos quietly at me as she wraps her leg around me again. “Shhhh. I’m sorry, Rainbow Dash. I won’t try that again.”

“Don’t call me that,” I cut her off harshly. Mac even ruined my damn name. I can hear him telling me to get rutted like a good mare, his low voice wrapping around my name and making it his- like he had some right to it.

“Alright, Dashie,” she whispers gently. I feel her magic wrap around my wing like a soft bandage. The tingling, gentle pressure feels really good. Somehow, she manages to get it open without causing me much pain. There’s still a dull ache, but nothing like it was before. Now there’s enough space in my brain for me to think about how weird it is that I didn’t just get in trouble for being rude to Rarity.

Water sprays across the plane of my wing at just the right angle for the feathers to get clean but not get messed up. I wonder vaguely why it doesn't hurt more and where she learned to do it like that. Probably in a magazine or something. Most ground ponies would have done it wrong, and the few feathers I have left would have been blasted even farther out of alignment.

“Your beautiful wings,” she mumbles to herself every few seconds. I can't look. I don't want to know.

Rage flares in my chest. What use are wings anyway? They didn’t save me. The rage flames out quickly and is instantly replaced with shame. It isn’t my wings fault I didn’t get away. I’m the one that didn’t try and take off when I should have. I’m the one that didn’t listen to that weird feeling in the back of my head. I’m the one that didn’t get away when I could have. I’m the one that let this happen to me. This is all my fault, because I was stupid.

“May I wash your mane?” she distracts me from my internal rant. My back and wings are all rinsed off now. She doesn’t try rinsing my front. We're chest to chest, and I'm not moving. I’m shaking from holding onto her so hard. The thoughts in my head make me more certain with every passing second that I need her. She made him go away. She kept me safe. I can trust her even though I can’t trust my own instincts or my own body.

I nod to the question. I want him off me.

“This will feel a bit coarse,” she warns, “but it’s going to scrub everything away. Alright?”

A little tub floats toward us wrapped in her blue aura. When she pops the lid off, the smell isn't Rarity. It's industrial with a hint of oranges. I flinch and cling to her even harder when she lifts her hooves to get the soap she needs.

“Ready?” she asks, and I nod again.

She's right. The soap is gritty like it has sand in it. Just like before, she knows just the right amount of pressure to use. It hurts a little when her hooves tug on the strands of my mane, but it’s a pain that feels good. So, I lean into her hooves, silently begging her to scrub harder and she does. Somehow, she manages to still be gentle at the same time. She twists the soap through every strand twice before asking, “Back?” I nod again. She gets more soap. “Ready?”

I hesitate, thinking she’ll just start without me, but she doesn't. She waits until I'm ready. I nod again. It’s weird for Rarity to wait for permission to do anything, but it’s also kind of nice. I let myself think about how glad I am that it was Rarity. I don’t know how anypony else would have handled it, but I know that she’s the only pony that would have me in a hot shower getting him scrubbed away right now. She’s the only one that cares that much about being clean.

Her hoof finds a spot between my wing joints that’s more tender than the rest of me and I flinch. It’s the place Mac put his hoof to shove my face in the dirt. “I’m sorry, darling,” she says and hesitates before she goes on, working the soap through my coat.

Everytime I flinch, or she touches some new bruise, or I nuzzle in a little harder she apologizes. Getting clean hurts, but I don’t want her to stop. I want her to scrub harder and strip away some of the slime he left on me. I want every last part of him to get washed away.

She grabs a brush with her magic. She shows it to me; it has short firm bristles with some spider-webby looking stuff. I nod at it. She asks again, “Ready?” I squeeze her and nod.

She wraps her forelegs gently around my head as the scrubber works my back. Then she reaches with a shaking hoof to my flank and barely touches my cutie mark. I look to see what she’s seeing. I'm bruised. I have one giant hoofprint on each side that almost perfectly surrounds my cutie marks. It’s where he grabbed me.

“I’m sorry, Dashie,” she whispers again as she pulls her hoof back.

We sit in the shower and cry for a long time. She holds me and whispers to me. I'm not totally clean, but I want to get out of the shower. She turns the water off and uses her magic to dry us. Her chest is still dirty. She didn’t even try to clean herself, but she doesn’t seem bugged by it. She throws her mane up in a ponytail or something and levitates both us to her bed, because I still don’t know how to let go of her so she can just walk.

“Would you like me to stay with you?” she asks. I just hold onto her even tighter. She offers me some water that I don't drink. Then she gives me some ice cubes to suck on. That's nice. I was parched, and my throat was sore.

We don't sleep. I cry. I can’t make it stop, and I don’t really try. The tears just keep slipping out of my eyes and rolling down my face onto Rarity’s chest. She doesn’t try to get me to stop either. I’m pretty sure she cries with me. Even though I don’t see it, because I’m staring at her comforter not seeing the pattern.

She keeps telling me that I’m safe now and that she won’t let anything bad happen to me. I believe her. That’s the one thing I can hold onto as the memories play across my mind over and over again. Mac leaning against that wall when I walk out of the bar like he’s waiting for me. His green eyes leering at my wings like they’re Harvest Day dinner. Splinters raining down on my face from groaning wood planks every time as he rams me forward. All of the memories, all of the moments I should have just left him in the dust, all of the chances I had to get away; they all play out over and over and over again, and the only thing that keeps me from screaming is knowing that Rarity won’t let anything else happen to me.

A touch of magic opens the window, and cool, clean air comes in around us. She asks me if I want her to sing. I nod. She sings me every lullaby and sad song she knows and then some. It doesn’t make me feel better, but it gives me something to try and focus on other than the feeling of being locked inside giant immovable arms with a hot wet tongue swirling around my ear, and being filled to bursting with something so disgusting and unwanted the mere thought of it makes me want to puke.

After hours, in the darkest part of the night, I want another shower. I just barely shift, and she knows. She lets me go, which I don’t really like. Then she helps me up. It’s the first time I’ve stood on my own since it happened. I hurt everywhere. I don’t trust myself not to fall over. So, I lean on her as we walk to the bathroom.

My eyes are open. Well, the good one is. The other one is still pretty much swollen shut. I don't see anything though. All I see is the bright blur of Rarity’s bathroom. I can’t make myself focus, and I don’t try.

She helps me into the tub. I don't want to be alone, so she gets in with me again. The water isn’t quite as hot as before.She uses the citrus sand soap again and the brush. She scrubs every inch of me this time, except for my wings. It hurts like hell, even more than earlier. She hesitates before going between my legs, I just wrap my forelegs around her neck and beg, “Please, Rare.”

It hurts. It hurts so much. She is being so gentle with me, but it still hurts so much that it just can’t be possible that there are words to describe how much it hurts. I’m not sure if it’s the physical pain or the other kind of pain I’ve never felt before that makes me want to scream. It’s so weird to have her touch me there, but I don’t feel the weirdness. I just feel the pain and some gratitude that she’s here to get me clean. She doesn’t hesitate again after that.

After a rinse, there’s shampoo. The scent is light, like rain and something else I can’t figure out. Another rinse, then a round of conditioner. It’s creamy and feels like being rubbed down in butter. I feel the moisture soak back into my coat. All the raw places on my body feel softer, like the skin might be supple enough to let any open wounds start to close a little bit.

When I’m clean, she washes herself quickly. I notice that there’s a whole shelf full of bottles, but she only uses two, shampoo and body wash. She puts in just enough effort to get herself clean, wasting no time to do more. Then she rinses herself off and asks if I’m ready to get out. I nod again.

She helps me out of the tub to stand on the soft rug in front of the mirror. Magic dries her in an instant while she wraps me in a fluffy white towel and gently rubs most of me dry. Then she levitates me back to her bed. Floating through the air wrapped in Rarity’s aura and a towel should feel weird. I know it should, but I can’t focus on it. My mind is starting to shut down, to go blank. I don’t fight the feeling. I just let it settle over me like a warm blanket of numbness.

“Would you like tea?” she asks as she climbs up on the bed. It doesn’t sound bad, and since she just climbed up next to me it doesn’t feel like she has to go away to make it, so I nod, and her horn lights up. I scoot a little closer and watch her face. She has her eyes closed again. There’s a little blue crease where she didn’t get all of her eyeshadow off. For a second she chews on her lip and kind of swoops her head at something I can’t see.

After a few minutes, a tray comes floating into the room with tea and toast. She floats the cup for me. The tea is strong and warm. She doesn’t say anything when I slurp or spill. She offers me a piece of toast that I can’t even try to eat.

Then we just stay there on her bed. Eventually, she takes my towel away and asks if she can brush my mane. The brush is soft. She doesn’t stop at my mane. She curries my back and chest. With a little nudge, she rolls me over to brush my stomach. When she’s done there, she looks at my cutie mark, “May I?” she asks.

I nod again. She rolls me to one side, then the other. Then she brushes out my tail. I want each stroke of the brush to feel like a new coat of paint. I want to feel like she can reclaim my body somehow, but that isn’t how it feels. There’s pain each time she touches me, not enough that I want her to stop, just enough to remind me that I’m damaged in ways she can’t brush away.

“Wings?” she asks in that careful tone she used earlier.

I’m not sure what she means, but I nod. She helps me roll onto my back. My wings, which still won’t fold right but that seem to be hurting a lot less than they should, flop out on the bed.

“Are you sure?” she asks again.

It takes me a minute, but I finally realize what she wants to do. I didn’t know she knew how, but it makes sense. She probably learned at the spa with Fluttershy or something. I nod.

She takes my wing in her lips and gently spreads it out all the way, carefully encouraging it to open. My feathers look like shit. Even after both showers, they still look dirty. Some are sticking out, broken and bleeding. It’s easy to see the outline of his hoof in the crushed and broken veins. There’s a bruise on my chest at the wing joint where he hit me at some point. Looking at the bruise, I realize numbly how close I came to losing a wing. If he’d hit me that hard just an inch further to the side, he would have ripped my wing off.

This could have been hot. It should have been- Rarity preening my wings and doing a damn fine job of it- but it isn’t. Nothing about this is sexy. I can’t feel anything, and she isn’t trying to make me feel better. She’s thorough, clinical. Every single feather gets attention. She uses her lips to tug them back into place or pull out the broken bits. She licks and grooms the bleeding and the bruised. She does the other side. There’s a pile of bloody, broken feathers when she’s done that she just makes it disappear.

“Roll over?” she asks. So, I do.

With the same focus, she attends to the show side of my wings, gently rearranging feathers so the broken shafts won’t show as much, using her tongue to work the strained muscles, so they bend and flex. Slowly, she works my wings closed. For the first time, I think maybe they aren't totally broken. Maybe I'll be able to fly again someday. I don’t know how I feel about that.

She turns her attention to the joints. Her muzzle massages the tender bones, carefully biting with just enough pressure to create a relieving pop on both sides. Then she brushes my coat again. It still doesn’t do what I really want it to, but having her try is good. It’s like she wants to brush off the bruises too.

“Thank you,” I say quietly.

“Your wings will cover up some of the bruising,” she says carefully. “But not enough.”

“Where?” I ask raising my head. I haven’t looked in a mirror, but I don’t need to to know that there’s no way I’m going to be able to hide what happened.

“Here,” she says gesturing to my neck where he choked me. She’s careful not to touch me. “And here.” This time she softly slides her hoof across the part of my ribs my wings don’t cover. “Here,” she says looking at my flank. I think that’s it, but there is one more “here” as she touches the tip of her muzzle to the middle of my back where he put his hoof and shoved my face into the dirt.

“How torn up am I?” I don’t know how to ask the question any better. Thank Celestia, Rarity understands.

“If you don’t move your tail much, you should be ok. I fear I caused more damage when I-” The words catch like she’s about to choke on them and vomit. I hear all the stuff she’s been fighting back bubble up in her throat. I look up and see something I’ve seen only a couple of other times in my life, Rarity’s eyes, wide in pain and shame, filling with tears- and not the fake dramatic kind- the kind that pull up from somewhere in her soul and leak out before she can stop them.

I reach for her. Her ears fold back at my touch. Some of the shame gets shoved off her face back into the box it came from, but it won’t stay there. It springs back to her eyes even stronger than before. I reach a foreleg around her shoulders, and she collapses into to me. “I’m sorry, darling,” she sobs into my chest.

“It’s ok, Rare,” I say wrapping my legs around her.

“May I?” she asks, her hooves twitching toward me again.

“Please.” I’m so sore, but the truth is that the only thing I want right now is to have her hold me, so I can focus on her and try to forget everything else. So, I nod. Her legs wrap around me carefully. Eventually, when neither of us are sobbing anymore, we lean back into the pillows. Just as the sun’s rays start to peek through the window, I let myself surrender to sleep.