Fallout Equestria: All That Remains

By: CamoBadger

Prologue: Innocence
“No! No shrieking. No screaming or squealing either.”

Someone once told me war never changes, that it was some kind of universal constant we were unable to stop. They told me stories about how war destroyed our home, the ancestral lands my kind had inhabited since our inception millennia ago, through some divine being’s wish to see beings lesser than themselves. I never understood that, because I had never seen war. If it never changes, it should be expected that I would see it all around me; a constant fight to survive and defeat those who wished to kill me and those I loved. But I never saw it in my youth, only the remains of a war long since over. The land was burned, the sky a curtain of grey which never folded at our whim to see whatever lay beyond.

This was the world I had seen all of my life, it was what I knew. I’d been told stories of times long passed in which zebras ran free through fields of green between the mountains which spanned our lands, when there was a blue sky where the grey now rolled out from horizon to horizon. They told me it was a time of peace and tranquility, when nobody thought of fighting one another for such simple things as food or land; there was no need. Everyone helped each other, making sure that not a single zebra was left alone or starving. It sounded so good…too good.

But in my youth, I still believed in the old times. I had dreams of the stories the elders would tell us, the tales Father would read from his scavenged books and from his own imagination. I loved that world, the world I could never be in, the world I longed to see someday. My youth allowed me this illusion, the ability to take the words of others and weave them into scenes within my sleep, and when I woke each morning I would almost want to cry as I looked back onto the blasted land we now inhabited.

I couldn’t understand what had happened, how the once beautiful place I saw in my dreams had been burned away into the husk it now is, how all of the love and care somehow died along with the grass and trees. I asked Father about it, I asked the Elders about it, and they would all say the same things.

Greed.

Anger.

War.

I was just a filly when they told me these things, so I did not know what they truly meant, or how they were somehow connected. That answer was also provided to me, always with contempt and hatred I had never seen before.

Ponies.

So that is how the brainwashing began for me, my brother, and every other foal in the village. Ponies killed the world. Ponies took away the sky. Ponies took away everything that was good in life. As far as I knew, ponies were war. The term ‘war never changes’ quickly became ‘ponies never change’, and for as long as I could remember, I kept that belief. They became monsters in my dreams, horrible zebra-shaped creatures who would snatch me from my sleep if I ever questioned my elders or forsook the beliefs of my kind.

That was my youth, it was all I knew, and I can’t honestly say I don’t still believe at least some of it.

The sky was grey as it always was; a rolling curtain of clouds over my father’s home which let just enough light onto the world to allow me to see as I did my chores. The floor of our house was filthy as usual, littered from wall to wall with empty glass bottles and crumpled up cigarette packs. The walls lay bare, a spartan design for a home which only usually saw one of its three inhabitants. Only three doors branched from the room I was cleaning, one bedroom per zebra to allow at least a small amount of privacy to each of us when we were sleeping or doing what we wished in our free time. The closest of these doors was etched in an old tongue with the name of my younger brother, Felix. The next door, my door, was adorned with a poorly scribbled ‘Shayle’ that was barely legible even to those who knew my name. And the last door belonged to my Father, his door unmarked, or maybe it was and I just can’t remember.

Felix was off in school as always, learning Caesar knows what from the older zebras and their seemingly infinite knowledge of the world. He was very young, having started school only a few years earlier, but learning much more than was expected at his level. He was like a leech for knowledge, but without the parasite part, always looking for more to learn even if it was considered ‘above’ his level. He had tried to explain some of his knowledge to me, but I could only understand so much of it, the rest being lost in the air around my brain and eventually pushed back out with a light breeze.

Oh, that might be an important thing to add; I never got to go to school. Felix was the first in our family to be given that honor, the gift of education. Father never went because he apparently spent his entire life as a travelling trader with his own parents until he settled down in our home of Zeza, learning everything he needed to know from his elders . Mother…I never found out. And me? I was forbidden from schooling under Father’s order. Felix was allowed to go because he’s a colt. I’m a mare, and according to Father, mares aren’t meant for school. So instead I spent my days cleaning and finding other ways to occupy my time.

Another bottle flipped through the window as I whipped it with my tail, smiling to myself as it jangled against the pile just outside. The last bottle in the room caused me a moment of pause as I looked it over, still able to see a small amount of liquor at the bottom. I was always tempted to at least try the drink whenever I found such a bottle, curious of the taste and why Father seemed to enjoy it so much. It would just take a quick second, he would never know! But I never did, and this time was no different. I flung the bottle through the window and was rewarded by the jingly jangle of glass on glass.

No more bottles covered the flat dirt of the floor, and no crumpled cardboard could be seen to give away my father’s second addiction, at least not at first look. If you were to open the only cabinet in our house you’d find a veritable treasure trove of filled bottles and unopened cigarette packs, but those were supposed to be his little secret. After all, it wasn’t very professional of a Remnant licensed trader to partake in the things he should be selling.

Finished with my chores, I turned my attention to something that I actually looked forward to; the stack of scavenged, and maybe some stolen, paper resting beside my bed. Most of the sheets were stained and torn, hardly able to be called something valuable, but to me they were worth more than all of Father’s whiskey. I lifted the top sheet carefully, staring at it for a long while until I saw something completely different. With semi-practiced precision, I began folding the paper, always picturing which folds I would need to make if I wanted it to end up as one of those roses an older zebra told me about in a story once.

Felix got home a few hours later, a smile on his face as he pushed my door open just enough to stick his head in. “Hey sis, how are you?”

I turned to him with a smile, my hooves still trying to work the last few folds on my almost complete rose. “I’m good, how was class?” I turned back to the flower, trying to push the shape into a tighter form with my hooves before folding out the petals. At the moment, it looked like a ball with spikes on the top, but it was opening up a bit more than I wanted it to, and trying to compress it without completely crushing it between my hooves was proving to be a challenge.

Felix sat beside me on the mattress, his head craned around my side as he watched me try to fix the paper to match my dreams. “It was good, we talked about Nightmare Moon more,” he explained, sounding annoyed about the topic of his schooling. He had originally been pretty excited about the lessons on the pony her teacher called ‘The Dark One’, and enthusiastically tried to explain how the mare came to be by making a deal with the stars and donning their armor. I hadn’t really understood it much; I wasn’t very knowledgeable about the stars and what they did. I just knew them as speckles that used to fill the night sky and were apparently evil spirits or something, according to the elders that told the stories. Still, I took his word for the knowledge, his teacher knew best right?

I nodded casually, not focused so much on what he was saying as I was trying to finish the project in my hooves. My tongue stuck itself from the side of my mouth as I carefully prodded each side of the rose, focusing on not scrunching folds or accidentally wrinkling the paper any more than it already was. I wished I could have found better paper, maybe some without any wrinkles or tears around the edges, but that quality only existed in books. I had taken a few pages from some of Felix’s books before, and it had been worth it at first. Those flowers looked much better than the ones I got from trash paper, and were much easier to work with than the limp sheets like what I was working the rose from.

But I hadn’t taken any from his books in years, it always made him so sad to find that a page was missing, and he always knew I took it. He didn’t get mad at me for it, he never even brought it up, I only found out when I walked into his room one day and found him staring at the frayed edge like it was the end of the world again. I apologized and tried to give him the flower I made from the page as a gift, but he didn’t want it; he didn’t really care about flowers as much as I did. Instead I just stopped taking the pages, not wanting to see him so sad over it anymore.

After watching me for a while, Felix stood and quietly left the room, closing his own door a few moments later. I could imagine him passing out on his own mattress in the next room, enjoying his usual post-class nap while I tried to finish the rose before Father got home for dinner. It only took a few more minutes to get the flower to the size I wanted at the cost of it looking a little lopsided, but that was hard for me to avoid with such poor paper. I was finally able to fold out the petals, and behold my final product. A small frown crossed my face at the lack of rounded petals like in my dreams, but I didn’t know any way to make round folds, so it would have to do.

I placed the flower alongside my previous work, carefully positioning it so in a straight line with the others which had been arranged at the head of my mattress. My frown flipped into a smile at the sight of my expanded flowerbed, and I began trying to picture them in color like they were in my dreams.

Father got home late as he often did, making his return very clear to me and my brother as the door shut with a slam. I quickly rose to my hooves and trotted out to the main room, greeting him with a smile and asking him how his day was. He responded with his usual “Fine,” before making his way to the kitchen.

He pulled out three cans of Cram, which I guess was some kind of ground meat or something of unknown origin, but never bothered to figure out exactly what it was. Felix joined us rather quickly afterwards, woken from his nap by the slamming door. The three cans were placed on the table, and what followed was our usual silent dinner. Nobody talked as we licked clumps of puree from the old cans, both me and my little brother being sure to keep our heads down as we ate. Father likely did the same, never one to get distracted during a meal, but we never bothered to lift our own heads and check.

We used to talk when we were younger, and by that I mean about 5 years before that night, until Father grew tired of our chatting and made it very clear that dinner was silence time. “You can’t eat if you’re talking, and dinner is for eating.”

There were a few instances after that when we didn’t truly get the message, and ended up spending an evening without dinner. They weren’t fun nights, and hunger was a good way of remembering to keep quiet and just eat our food.

That was just one of Father’s many rules of the house. Among the others were “no touching my whiskey”, “no touching my cigs”, and above all, “don’t wake me up”. To be fair, they were very common sense rules, even for children like me and Felix. We had an easy enough time following them, especially the ones involving the whiskey and cigarettes, even with my temptation to taste the former, but the last rule was more strict than you may think. Waking up screaming from a nightmare was a quick way to welcome a beating into my life, especially if Father had one more drink than he really needed.

I hadn’t experienced too many of those, especially as I got closer to my twelfth birthday, but they were enough to keep me quiet even if I woke in a cold sweat from one dream or another. I don’t know if Felix ever did, but I think I’d heard him receiving a few smacks from Father on one or two nights when he was really young.

After our meal was done, Felix excused himself to go do some reading before he went back to sleep for the night. I didn’t understand how he read so much, I still don’t, that many words just didn’t seem entertaining to me. Either way, he did it every night, somehow without receiving a new book except for once every few months. This left me and Father at the table. The elder zebra turned around to pull a bottle of whiskey from his cabinet, along with a fresh pack of cigarettes. The smell of smoke with a hint of liquor filled the room within moments, stinging my eyes slightly, but not enough to bother me after living with the buck for my entire life.

Looking at the freshly opened bottle, Father cast a dark glaze to me from across the table, then took a quick look around the room before his eyes fell on me once again. I tried to smile, a bit nervous about why he was looking around as if something were missing from the scene. “Where’s my bottle from this morning, Girl?” he asked grimly, tearing my smile away.

“Y-you told me to th-throw them all out,” I stammered.

“But what about the one with my leftover from last night, huh?” he asked in the same grumpy tone, his body leaning in and looming over me. “Did you finish it off while I was gone?”

“No, I t-threw it away…there wasn’t even enough for one drink,” I lied as I shrunk away from him, looking pitiful as I tried to avoid punishment.

His eyes continued to glare down at me, boring holes into my head as the buck tried to pull some detail from my expression that might give me away to him. What was probably a few seconds felt like an eternity of scrutiny as I waited to see if my lies would get me through the night unharmed, and finally it did. Father leaned back and took a long pull from the newly opened bottle, belching loudly once the swill had gone down.

Without waiting for an invitation, I pushed away from the table and quietly trotted to my room, shutting the door behind me and letting out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. The assorted paper flowers at the head of my mattress put a smile on my face again, their form a welcome source of beauty in the rat’s nest of a house I lived in. I trotted to my moldy haystack and sat looking at the folded paper, trying to think of any others I could add to the collection. Each looked slightly better than the one before, a sign of small improvement with each time I went to work with the paper. It was always good to see the work turn out better than my last one, and I always felt like eventually I would actually be able to do the images of my dreams justice.

If only Father agreed with their beauty. Instead, I had grown into the habit of keeping the flowers to myself, no longer taking them to show off like I had done when I was younger. The first flower I ever folded; if you could even call it that, it looked awful; was quickly used to put out his cigarette when I had shown him. He hadn’t even told me why, and I was left with a pile of ash on the kitchen floor, which I was of course told to clean up. I just thought it was because the flower looked bad, and decided to keep working at them. Each time I finished the folds, I would run out to Father with a smile, chirping to him about what I’d done. And each time he would find new inventive ways to destroy them. Using them as makeshift bottle stoppers, padding for his rump when he felt the ground was too hard that night, a coaster for his whiskey bottle; he never did the same thing twice. He always told me ‘thank you’ with a sick tone after doing whatever he desired with the flowers I usually spent the entire day making, then shooed me away so he could continue his drinking.

I hadn’t taken them to him after one incident in particular, where his creativity either failed him, or he had finally had enough of my bugging him. I could still picture his hoof smashing down on it; something one of the elders had described as an Orchid; over and over until it was a flattened wad of torn apart trash. He completely ignored my tears as he ranted about how ‘this shit has to stop’ and ‘nobody cares about beauty in the Wasteland’. That was the point where my young mind finally pieced together that my father resented my ‘art’, seeing it as everything he hated in the world.

I don’t know how long I spent staring at my makeshift flowerbed, glad they had managed to avoid the fate of the ones that came before. I did know that by the time I looked away, I could hardly see the folded paper through the darkness which had claimed my room and the rest of the Wasteland. A large yawn pulled itself from my body, filling my head with thoughts of what dreams I could have that night. I hoped for another dream about the apple trees the elders had once told me about, it was one of my favorites!

I wiggled my body backwards, allowing my head to rest a few inches from the flowerbed as I closed my eyes, thoughts of trees filling my mind.

It was way too dark to be waking up, and I certainly didn’t feel like I had been asleep long enough to warrant waking on my own. Yet there I was, eyes opening slowly, darkness filling the room to the point I could barely see a few inches in front of me, and for some reason the smell of alcohol filling my nostrils. I turned my head to see Father crouching over me, his head lowered to within inches of my own. Well that solved the mystery of the whiskey smell, his breath reeked of it. A creepy smile was barely visible on his lips as he stared down at me, his breathing heavy and disturbingly warm on my face.

“Dad?” I asked drowsily, peeking toward the window to make sure I wasn’t imagining the darkness. “Is something wrong?”

His head slowly swayed back and forth, that same smile never changing over his lips. I groaned softly and just stared at him for a while, trying to figure out what he was doing, if I was actually even awake. I felt a strange pressure beginning to push down on my thigh, and swiveled my eyes down to see what was causing it. Before I could react to him pressing against me, the stallion’s weight dropped onto me, knocking the breath from my lungs.

As I gasped for air, my lungs burning as they struggled to work again, his hooves pushed and pulled on me, roughly rolling me onto my back. My eyes shot wide, and I tried to fight back the best I could, flailing my legs and trying to kick out at him as he positioned himself, the sick smile never leaving his lips as I tried to breathe and scream at the same time. Before I could get enough air in me to call for help, a hoof pressed into my throat, once again depriving my lungs of the air they had just managed to pull in.

My legs pressed into his chest, and I tried to shove him off, but he only pushed down harder. I quickly stopped my fighting, not strong enough to push him off of me, especially with the growing burn in my chest. The world began to spin above me, and curtains of darkness began to close around my vision, pulling me into unconsciousness.

“No screaming my dear,” he whispered into my ear, his hoof still pressed into my throat. I nodded as much as I could with his hoof in the way, and the striped leg lifted from my throat. Cool air rushed into my lungs, and my body heaved with relief as the darkness at the corners of my vision evaporated.

I didn’t fight while he finished spreading my legs and positioned himself clumsily over me.

I wish I had just let him choke me.