This story is dedicated to all those brave souls who suffer with the devastating burden of anxiety, depression, self harm and suicide.

Never give up. You are not alone. You are loved.

Dusk

It was Friday, just after noon, in the city of Canterlot. In the suburbs of Canterville, one person didn’t care a damn if it was Friday, Monday or any other day of the week for that matter. She didn’t know what time of day it was, nor did she particularly care. The mid-day summer sun tried hard to get through her window and into her unkempt house, but it didn’t stand a chance against the thick heavy curtains that were tightly drawn like blackout boards. Inside the house, it was absolutely pitch black. No light from anywhere pierced the all-encompassing darkness.

That was just how Adagio Dazzle liked it.

The darkness of her living room matched the darkness in her heart and soul. On her couch, where she had been laid for the past week – except for the sparse moments when she had to use the bathroom – the ex-siren stirred under her blanket. Police sirens, or was it a fire truck or ambulance? She didn’t care, but whatever they were, they were sufficient to wake her from yet another nightmare.

Adagio hated being asleep. Then again, she hated being awake, for that matter. As she slowly and reluctantly forced her mind into some basic level of coherence, she tried as hard as she could to shake the memory of her nightmare. She failed, because every time she closed her eyes, she saw it again. She saw the stage, the crowd of hundreds of CHS students, she saw the hill where those damn Rainbooms made their stand and worse, much worse than that, she saw that gigantic magical alicorn and she felt the blast of magic that had stripped her and her sisters of their own magic.

Every night it was the same. Every day it was the same. Every time she closed her eyes, every time she opened them, every time she drew breath, Adagio relived the worst few seconds of her life. Her worst day. Her worst mistake. Her worst failure.

Laid under her blanket on her couch, the naked woman turned over from her back to her front, the only movement she had made that day, or night, whatever time it was. She didn’t have the drive or the energy to do anything else. She hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone in almost a week. A quick text and a lie to her boss at the Burger Joint about her mother dying had bought her a week off that she could use to properly hate herself and despise her existence. She didn’t even need to venture out into the miserable unforgiving neighbourhood to buy food because she had a mountain of fast food she had taken from work.

The miserable creature under the blanket rolled once more to a more comfortable position on her side. She stared out into the darkness of her living room. So depressed had she been that she hadn’t even mustered the drive to get herself up to her bedroom. She had simply gotten home from the crappy dirty diner she worked in, stripped off her greasy stinking uniform, let it fall to the floor and got on her couch. There she had stayed for six days.

Even though her house was in total darkness, she could see the contents of the room in her mind’s eye. She hadn’t cleaned her place in weeks, or was it months? She didn’t care. A small mountain of junk mail lay behind her door. She didn’t care. Adagio knew they were just the usual crap and death threats she usually received. Other than that, none of her furniture matched. It was all old, battered, threadbare and lumpy. Couches, chairs, tables, TV, stereo, everything had been through at least three charity shops and several previous owners. Not that she could see the carpet under all the dirty clothes and old empty fast food cartons that were strewn about the place.

She just left them where they fell. Adagio didn’t have the drive to give a shit. It wasn’t like anyone else was there to get on her back and tell her to clean, not since Aria and Sonata had moved out into their own places. She knew that somewhere on the floor were the remnants of her thick bushy orange hair. While she had liked having it long, the simple fact was that she couldn’t be arsed to wash it or to even brush it and, after just two days, it had become a tangled, matted mess as dirty as the rest of her.

So, after taking up a pair of scissors at the end of the last week, she had hacked off her long poufy hair. Of course, she hadn’t shown any care to what she had done. Her hair now barely reached her shoulders. It was uneven, sloppily done, but she didn’t care about that either. She just let her fallen locks mix in with the rest of the detritus that littered her living room. If she thought about it, she couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a bath or washed her clothes.

What was the point?

It wasn’t like she had anyone to be clean or presentable for, was it? Even before her week off, she hadn’t bothered to bathe or to shower. Really, what was the point? Even before her week off, she hadn’t bothered to bathe. Every day she came home stinking of grease anyway. It got in her hair, up her nose, in her ears, in every pore, so what was the point of washing? As she moved under the filthy blanket, she caught a whiff of her foul body odour and she gagged. She smelled rank, but so what? She wasn’t leaving and no one was coming to see her, so there was no one except her to be offended.

Again, the sound of emergency sirens reached Adagio’s ears through her walls. Again, she didn’t stir or give any sign she had heard them. In the low rent rundown neighbourhood she lived in, hearing sirens, whether they were police, ambulance or fire brigade, was an everyday occurrence. Not that she cared anyway. On her street alone there were two cars burnt out, three houses derelict and five that had broken and boarded up windows. From somewhere outside she heard two cats fighting. That went on for a while. Then, she heard a lone cat outside. Was it the winner or the loser? She didn’t care, but its crying sounded so forlorn, like it was the end of the world.

Adagio Dazzle understood all too well.

She had lost. She had lost her magic. She had lost her sisters. She had lost everything. Not a day went by, in her fetid stinking dirty living room, that she didn’t think about the others: Aria and Sonata, her two younger sisters. They had coped far better than she had to losing their magic. Then again, as the leader, she had been the one hardest hit by the Rainboom’s magical assault. Aria and Sonata had both moved on with their lives. Just…accepted it all so easily. Now they lived in the city proper. Aria was a night club bouncer and Sonata a chef in a taco restaurant.

Adagio had been left behind to fester and wallow in the pit they had once called home. Invariably, thinking of her sisters led her to thinking about Them. The Rainbooms. The seven human girls who had bested her. She had been at the height of her power and still she had lost. She had once bought Equestria to its knees. She had bested alicorns, gods, dragon lords and griffon kings and yet, on her best day, she had been laid low by what amounted to seven human girls. She had not just lost her magic; she had lost her voice too.

The humiliation had been unendurable.

So, she had given up.

She considered it that way.

Aria and Sonata had probably forgotten about her by then at any rate. Part of her hoped that they had. Adagio knew they were better off without her, that they didn’t need her any longer. All she was, was a failure. Dead weight. Good for absolutely nothing. Some tiny part of her psyche tried, in an infinitesimally small voice, to muster a defence, to tell her that she was wrong, that she needed to keep living. That tiny voice was quickly extinguished though by the deep dark abyss that was the depth of her depression.

Despair. Regret. Jealousy. Hate. All consumed her in a dark and bitter spiral of self-destruction.

Slowly, the ex-siren rolled out from under her dirty blanket and off of the old lumpy couch. Once she was on her feet, she carefully navigated the meandering path through the amassed crap that littered her living room floor. Her bladder demanded it be released, and depressed as she was, she was not at the point of laying in her own bodily waste.

Not yet, anyway.

Ablutions taken care of, she came walking nude back down the stairs and she made her way to the kitchen. She hadn’t seen fit to dress, what was the point. Though the rooms of her house were pitch dark, she knew where she was and where she was going. Turning on a light required effort on her part that she wasn’t prepared to give. It felt to her like she was moving in a dream, somehow oddly less real than my nightmare.

Or maybe this was her nightmare?

She didn’t know any more nor did she care.

Adagio stepped onto the cold lino of the kitchen floor. Immediately she hissed as the pain from the cold floor ran up her legs through the soles of her bare feet. That was enough to convince her it was almost certainly reality. In the dark she stood in front of her battered old gas cooker reached blindly to her left for the cutlery drawer she knew was there. She ignored everything else in the kitchen, the unused pots, the kettle, toaster oven…all was covered in a week’s worth of dust. Off to her right, under the window that overlooked the overgrown jungle that was her garden, was the sink, piled high with dirty dishes. She hadn’t bothered to wash them in at least a week, maybe even more. The stagnant water at the bottom smelled odd.

Adagio ignored it. When she had run out of clean dishes, she just ate her fast food supplies directly from their cartons and dropped them on the floor.

Groping in the darkness, her hand eventually settled on the handle of her cutlery drawer. A simple tugged pulled it open and she ran her fingers across the contents. Sixteen stainless steel utensils greeted her. Four forks, knives, teaspoons and tablespoons. Then, her fingers found her special knife. One of Sonata’s sharp chef’s knives that she had stolen from her sister’s place months ago.

That knife had become her best friend.

Her only friend.

As if in a trance, Adagio turned and, with the knife held in her hand, she walked back the short distance from the kitchen to her living room. She knew she was there when her feet touched carpet. There, she headed for the couch that had become her bed of late. She didn’t bother to navigate the litter; she just kicked the empty greasy cartons out the way.

When she found her couch, she sunk down on the dirty cushions that had been forced out of shape by her weight. Adagio laughed humourlessly. There were no mirrors in her house, and hardly any reflective surfaces at all. For good reason. She hated the sight of herself. Besides, she didn’t need a mirror to know looked even older than she was, or to know that her butchered hair was a complete disaster. It looked like she had jammed her hand in the plug socket. She knew her eyes were sunken, bloodshot, and rimmed with bags. She knew her belly was pudgy and fat, her breasts small and her ass as massive as her fat chunky thighs.

Gone was the sexy and confident Adagio Dazzle who had once seduced, manipulated and bullied czars, kings, queens and anyone she had damn well pleased. In her place was a physical and emotional wreck of a creature. A weak and pathetic specimen. A complete and abject failure who was beneath contempt.

Determined, she held the knife in her left hand. As she pressed the blade of the knife against her opposite wrist, perpendicular to her ulna, she kept it there. Everything swam across her mind once more. She had gambled everything she had on one roll of the dice and she had lost, spectacularly.

Worthless.

Useless.

Hopeless.

Pathetic.

The death threats haunted her too. While it was true that she didn’t receive as many now as she did in the days and weeks following the Battle of the Bands, she still got at least one a week. Time was she got upwards of four every day.

“Kill yourself.”

“Nobody will miss you.”

“You’re better off dead.”

Those had been the tame ones. Some even offered to do it for her. If she went to X alley at X time, and so on and so on. The more she dwelt on the letters and threats, the more she descended into the depth of her self-made misery and despair. More determined than ever, she applied more pressure to her wrist until she started to feel the sensation, at worst mildly uncomfortable. After a minute, she lifted the blade away. There was no cut, but there was a thin red line on her wrist.

The ex-siren’s tortured mind was a whirl of thoughts, all her memories and sensations melding and crashing together and somehow they managed to drag her further and further down into the dark desolate abyss that was her psyche. It hurt. Everything hurt. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. It hurt to exist from one second to the next.

Everything was pain. Breathing in, pain. Breathing out, pain. Thinking, pain. Just…existing, being her, being there, was pain. She closed her eyes and in the darkness of her living room she again saw the stage, and the hill, and that mighty magical alicorn about to blast away her magic and strip her of everything that made her, ‘her’.

Opening her bloodshot eyes, all she saw was regret and despair. Both at the mistakes she had made – in Equestria that had ended up with them being banished to this miserable cess pit of a world and here – at the ponies and people she had hurt, at the sins she had committed, all the mistakes, all the failures.

Adagio hated this. She hated everything. She hated Starswirl the Bearded, she hated Equestria, she hated magic, she hated this foul, stinking, dirty, disgusting world, she hated the humans in it, she hated her sisters, she hated those damned Rainbooms and, worst of all, far more than any of that, she hated herself.

Again, Adagio held the knife against her wrist and, with her mind full of grim resolve, she slashed in a rapid lateral motion across her dirty unwashed skin. She didn’t feel much of anything in the instant she self-harmed. A slight discomfort and that was it. In the dark, she stared at what she had done. She couldn’t see it, but she knew the cut wasn’t very deep, just a few tiny pockets of blood slowly seeping out that would, disappointingly, dry within half an hour or so.

She felt nothing, neither physically nor emotionally, except for disgust. The ex-siren was disgusted both at what she had just done and at the fact that it was not enough. Despite her hatred of herself and everything else, she had, again failed. Knowledge that she had, yet again, failed, only served to anger her. Thoughts of her sisters going on and living and being happy coursed through her brain. All that happiness just made her depression even worse. She wanted them to be as miserable as she was and that just made her hate herself even more.

Adjusting her left hand slightly, Adagio found a spot on her wrist, further in from the first and, amid a mass of older scars from her other previous attempts, she slashed at herself again, this time harder and deeper than before. The effect was immediate. That time she felt something. Adagio felt the pain just as she felt the hot slick blood that leaked from the cut and run down her hand and onto the floor.

She dropped the knife and laid back on her couch. Adagio had no idea if her cut was deep enough to do what she wanted to do. Maybe it would, maybe it would just join the rest of the scars that adorned both her forearms. She didn’t care, really. Bleeding from the self-inflicted wound, she pulled the blanket over her head. Without knowing if she would wake up or not, Adagio Dazzle cried herself into a dreamless sleep.