Right, so one of the first things anybody who has been off their feet for any length of time is going to notice is how hard it is to get back up, for any number of reasons. You’re too tired to get up, it’s too comfy where you’re sitting, or you’d get up, but your leg fell asleep. To some extent, they’re all valid excuses. When you’ve been lying in bed for at least two weeks, you better believe it’s not going to be a cakewalk. If you’ve been bound for your own protection, only changing position enough to prevent bedsores, it’s only going to be harder. That’s kinda how I feel right now.

Every muscle is sluggish, as though rather than cords of flesh expanding and contracting, there’s silly putty beneath my skin. That’s not to say my limbs have gone completely gimpy in my forced indolence; I can stand and walk just fine. It’s just keeping on my hooves that’s a problem. Feeble is definitely a word that could describe me right now.

Just watching me struggle along the halls seems to be enough to make both princesses eye me worriedly. “No, before you ask, I do not need help or a wheelchair,” I say, making direct eye contact with Luna. “After being bound in a bed with limited movement for so long, I’m going to walk to that cafeteria if it kills me.”

It’s Luna, after glancing at the small retinue of their personal guards, that shakes her head. “Silver, you are still incredibly weak at this point.” Nodding toward two mares in the squad, she looks apologetically at me. “It will do you no good to turn down kindness in favor of pride. Please, let us help you.”

Laughable, her helping me. This all came about from her helping me, didn’t it? The whole reason I’m so weak is because she made an executive decision regarding my well being. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel like being touched right now.” Looking pointedly at Celestia, I sigh. “I know your sister means well, but I’m sure you understand how little comfort her presence presently brings me. May we please dine in private?”

Luna stops in her tracks, rounding on me with pleading eyes. “I know you are hurting, but please do not push me away.”

Oh, bloody hell! Is she really trying that look? Bitch, please. Watery eyes and trembling lip ain’t gonna work with this pony right now. “You were the closest thing to a mother figure I had here in Equestria, Luna. I trusted you explicitly because you basically promised me a good life.” In spite of my shaking legs, I bring myself nose to nose with the woman I once looked up to. “I put my life in your hooves coming forward with my rape, even after being kidnapped by the same conniving rich bastards responsible for Equestria’s government being so fucking corrupt, and for what?

“You decided to have a heart when it came to the psychopath that raped me, letting her off with a slap on the wrists!” I snort angrily, glaring at the guards around me out of the corner of my eye, daring them to blast me. “Then, when she comes back and rapes me again, and murders the mare I love, instead of being allowed unfettered access to the one mare who needs me most, you ask the doctors to restrict the access of magic users to me. Worse, you allowed me to live in denial for two bloody weeks! You wouldn’t even let anypony talk to me about what happened until I admitted that it happened.”

Turning my head, I spit on the floor. “There’s only one creature in this world I trust less than you right now, Princess Luna. I can only hope she’s locked up in a prison cell pending a very public trial.” I shove my way past a very perturbed looking guard, not even sparing the scorned royal a second glance. “It’s going to be a very long time before I can think about forgiving you, never mind trusting.”

The guards around me are fuming, and all of them look ready to attack. Can’t blame them, either. When you shout down the one they’ve sworn an oath to protect and leave her on the verge of crying, you better bet they feel the need to protect her honor. At the same time though, since this entire exchange happened in a public hallway here in the hospital, there are many witnesses to my tirade—nurses, doctors, orderlies—who know most the details of my situation, a lot of whom look very sympathetic right now. As much as Luna is one of the country’s figureheads, the guards clearly see no win in attacking the mare with admittedly valid complaints against her.

Even as I stride past Celestia, once more utilizing the strength of my rage to keep me moving, Luna says, “Ladies, leave her be. I have... other matters to attend to.”

For a moment, I worry that I’ve pressed too hard and alienated Celestia as well as Luna. It’s not that it ultimately matters, but personally, Celestia is somepony I’d rather deal with over the doctors. Most Equestrian doctors, while good physicians, seem to have terrible bedside manner, while a head of state like Celestia is more diplomatic and thoughtful. What that means to me is that while she’s charismatic enough to be comforting, she’s also intelligent enough to know that I need somepony until I can talk to Chill Beat.

Eventually, though, I hear Celestia join me at my side, her own guards flanking us. “As justified as it might have been, that wasn’t very nice.”

Sitting down across from Princess Celestia with a tray of food stocked with shepherd’s pie, chicken noodle soup, and a great big porkchop—fuck you! I need protein, even if it is hospital food meant for griffons—I quickly realize that I’m the center of attention. Worse off, I get the vague impression, that it isn’t my choice in food or company drawing their attention. Ponies, the odd cow, and griffons are all staring at me with varying looks of pity, sympathy, curiosity, or even suspicion. Worst of all, some even look judgmental or outright accusatory.

“I get the impression that there’s more than one reason I haven’t been allowed access to a newspaper,” I say, lifting a spoonful of ground pork and mashed potatoes to my mouth. For one short moment, my worries about the onlookers are completely unimportant as I’m treated to the first bit of meat I’ve had in weeks. “Just what exactly has been happening while I was locked away in my cage and mind?”

“Following your false imprisonment and subsequent appearance at Twilight’s coronation ceremony, a photograph of you appeared in a popular tabloid,” she says. A paper clipping appears on the table in a flash of magic. I barely halt myself from diving under the table, but my shriek does turn a few heads. “It wasn’t the most flattering article, but it wasn’t entirely bad, either.”

Floating it up to eye level, she allowed me time to read it. Princess of Magic or Underworld Crime Boss? the headline reads, beneath which a photograph of me, conversing with Twilight Sparkle after the ceremony, is displayed. The article is your standard tabloid fare, promoting conspiracy theories about the newly crowned princess and her relation to a mare in a prisoner’s jumpsuit. According to the author, I’m apparently an enforcer in a prison gang, broken out by the royal guard on orders of Don Sparkle for recruitment purposes.

“That doesn’t seem so bad.” Finishing off my shepherd’s pie, I move on to slurping my soup. Even though part of me wants to laugh out loud at the article, it’s still hard to even smile, given the way that Celestia doesn’t seem to agree. “Something more happened, I take it?”

“Remembering seeing you at the ceremony, real reporters began asking questions about your identity.” The princess sighs before conjuring up a pot of tea. “For a time, our insistence that you were just a friend of Twilight who’d shown up at the reception dressed like a prisoner as a prank had been enough to sate the reporter’s petitions for information... until the day following that tragedy.

“The Head of House Shimmer, the same house responsible for your foalnapping, apparently instructed the private investigator that had gathered the information used in the forged suicide note that if he were arrested, he wanted that information passed on to a reporter almost a month following the arrest.” Sipping her own tea, she seems not to mind my own lack of decorum as I devour my meal. She instead piteously watches me. “The morning after that event, the same reporter showed up for morning petitions, brandishing the information sent to her by the P.I., stating that Equestrians had a right to know that there was a real alien living among them on the crown’s bits.”

I put down my bowl, leaving a few stray noodles in the bottom, and look sullenly at her. “So you did the only thing you could do under pressure; you went public.” My face fell, and it suddenly felt like I was in a sniper’s crosshairs. No wonder ponies were looking at me funny. “How much did you tell them?”

“At the press conference, we told them everything we thought the public needed to know.” She glances at somebody across the room and shakes her head. When I look back over my shoulder, I don’t see anyone I recognize, but for all I know she was just signaling an aide about something. “I verified that you were indeed the same pony mentioned in Twilight’s coronation speech, and that you were not always a pony. The circumstances regarding you becoming a pony, while censored for the privacy of many, have been made public. When asked how they might get into contact with you for an interview, we concluded the conference by stating that you would be unable and unwilling to submit to an interview while receiving ongoing treatment after being victimized in a violent crime.”

So why are they staring at me like that? I want to ask. Surely they wouldn’t look at me with scorn or suspicion when I have done nothing wrong. Instead, I settle simply on warily asking, “What has changed, then?”

Celestia looks sourly down at her cup of tea, as though its taste has become bitter and offensive. Heaving a sigh, she looks up at me with a pained grimace as I cut into my porkchop. “Investigative reporters do their job almost religiously.” A bright flash of light goes off somewhere to my side, and when I look, a stallion with a camera is being tackled by some of Celestia’s entourage. “Even now, many of them pry into what happened in Ponyville.”

“Fffffuck,” I hiss, taking a mouthful of pork. This is the last thing I need to hear. If they know about Ponyville and are trying to milk my friends for information, then invariably they’re going to get to Lyra at some point. “So even when I go back to Ponyville, I’m not going to get any peace?”

This much catches the princess off guard. “You’re leaving? But what of your education?”

“Celestia, don’t!” I say as I drop my fork, my appetite gone. Suddenly, my head is beginning to ache most painfully. “There’s too much pain for me here.” I look down, rubbing at my temples. “Even before this all happened, I thought about it...” Slowly, my chin lowers to the table, and my body begins to feel weak. “Before, I had Blossom as my pillar, my reason to stay if things went bad. Now, I don’t—I’m never going to get over this, you know? Every day I spend at the university, even if I’m in a different room or even dorm hall, I’m going to be reminded of what’s happened and what’s been taken from me.”

I let out a sniffle. “If I can’t do my studies via correspondence, then I’ll buy the books I need and learn it the old fashioned way.” With a defeated sigh, I force my tear stained eyes to look directly into Celestia’s. “After all, if I don’t bury myself in my research, I’ve got nothing left but pain.” In spite of myself, my lips pull into a smirk. “I heard them, you know—the nurses. Talking about how I’ll never have foals. I tried to deny that they were talking about me, projecting my feelings so that she was some poor mare in another room, unable to have her foals.

“It’s funny, really; when Beat was talking about how important offspring were to ponies, that it was like a punishment in and of itself, I thought she was crazy,” I whisper. “Hearing those words through the door, something inside me clicked. It was like the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach from Blossom’s murder was suddenly enough to eat me whole, like all of my hope was torn from me with surgical precision... and... and...” I clench my eyes shut and loose a mournful wail. “Why do I feel this way? Why does this always happen to me?”

Imagine my surprise when somepony small hugs me. When I open my eyes, there’s a tiny vanilla alicorn with a patchy coat hugging my side—being incredibly gentle about my bandaged wings, no less—beaming up at me with big blue eyes. “It’s okay, Miss,” the filly says in that exuberant tone of innocence only a child could have. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at; this child, gaunt and lacking a mane or any tail hair, has leukemia, or at least, some pony equivalent. “Even when you feel sad and your future’s not so bright, sometimes just making others happy can make you feel alright.” She looks across the table to Princess Celestia. “Right princess?”

“That’s right, Aur—”

“Aurora!” a mare calls out from across the room. The voice isn’t angry, but there is some admonishment to the voice. “You know we don’t just hug strangers like that.”

The filly, Aurora, looks back across the room sheepishly before letting go of me. She makes to return to her guardian, whoever she is, but pauses, looking back to Celestia. “Will you still be coming this Friday for Princess Time?”

The princess nods and smiles at the filly. “That’s right, Aurora,” she says in her motherly tone. “Princess Celestia never misses Princess Time. Run along now, though. We don’t want Nurse Hope to get in trouble, do we?”

Rather than replying, the filly runs off, pausing only to give me one last smile. “I thought alicorns didn’t get sick...”

My voice is little more than a whisper, but it doesn’t escape Celestia’s ancient ears. Shaking her head, she says, “She’s only a winged unicorn—no earth pony blood in her.” Raising an eyebrow, she smiles. “I thought Twilight went over this with you?”

I look confusedly at Celestia for a moment before a thought occurs to me. “We may or may not have operated on the assumption that I already knew all the pony races because of the show,” I admit, surprised at just how well a sick kid managed to calm me down. “She never mentioned the possibility for hybrids, and I never thought to ask. In hindsight, it makes sense, though.

“I’ve seen pegasi who are too bulky—built like Applejack’s brother—to be very aerodynamic, and earth ponies too agile for the strength rippling beneath their muscles,” I recount, looking thoughtfully at the drab ceiling. “So... winged unicorns? Not quite as powerful as alicorns then?”

She once again shakes her head. “Usually not even as strong as most unicorns.” A crestfallen look crosses her face. “Hybrid ponies are either decent fliers, strong, or have a certain proficiency in magic, but never all of the above; their bodies don’t have enough magic. Winged unicorns have it worse in that most never master anything beyond telekinesis and have stunted wing growth. For whatever reason, the odd one is born with a fair balance of unicorn and pegasus magic, and are proficient in both, but these ones are invariably prone to certain maladies like cancer. Like Aurora.”

“That’s a real downer, Celestia,” I say, shifting uncomfortably on my seat. “Why tell me this now?”

Once more a smile creases her visage, but this time, there is something more to it. “You did seem to be confused on the subject,” she says almost teasingly. “Besides, it isn’t that you will not have any foals at all; you just probably won’t be having them any time soon.”

“Wha—”

Celestia leans forward and whispers, “You suffered a lot of internal tearing during the attack, and there were a lot of infections. Your fallopian tubes as they are right now are very scarred, even after much magical healing. The scarring will fade with time, but as it stands, your physician felt it pertinent to stop you from ovulating to prevent further complications. You’ll still function normally and even go into estrus, but you won’t ovulate.”

“But they said...” I shake my head. This is good news, right? I mean, if there had to be a lot of treatment, maybe nothing took. So why do I still feel bad. “Um, I think I need to lie down for a while.”

Nodding solemnly, the princess rises. “I was going to ask for your input on preventing a civil war, but I am not so out of touch to see when a pony needs time alone.”

Standing up—much easier this time around—I give her a false smile. “Even if you did, I wouldn’t help you,” I say flatly. “Hell, even if I didn’t blame you both in part for everything that’s happened to me, Equestria is your country. It’s not my place to tell you how to fix it.” Turning my back on her, I say over my shoulder, “Vox populi, vox Dei. Figure that out, and you might stand a chance of fixing your country. Remember, they’re not your little ponies anymore.”

I don’t really know how long I dozed on my hospital bed. Having my first chance to be on my bed without being bound, it’s just too easy to get comfy. If I know me, and you know I do, I can say without a doubt that I probably napped the afternoon away. It sounds like the sort of thing I’d do when stressed, that’s for sure.

More to the point, the first thing that clues me in that I am awake is Wind Whisper at the door. “Silver, your friend is here to see you.”

Bleary-eyed, I’m still trying to figure out at what point Wind Whisper, new armor and all, got back when my heart sinks. Chill Beat is standing there just inside the doorway, haggard and disheveled. I know I said that I wanted to talk to her, but seeing her now, I just wanna crawl beneath the bed and die. It’s so bad that I almost can’t look her in her eyes.

“H-hey.” When your mind blanks, it’s really all anypony can manage. Can I be blamed for that? So many things can happen right now. She could blame me, or hate me for being the one to live. In some way, am I not to blame? Didn’t I ask Blossom for a date on that specific night? “You look every bit I feel.”

Beat traces a path to the bed, an almost drunken list to her step. Despite everything that’s happened, she smiles weakly at me. “Because you look so much better,” she says, lacking all the emotion that would otherwise make it a sarcastic, albeit friendly greeting. There’s no anger there. Rather, it’s a complete lack of any emotion. “I was wondering if they’d ever let me in to see you. They made it sound like you’d get violent if you saw me.”

Backing up to rest entirely on my pillow, I invite her to sit with me on the bed with a pat of my hoof. “Sorry it took me this long to snap out of it.” Watching Beat crawl onto the bed, I almost have to wonder which one of us was really raped here. I admit I was raped physically and maybe a bit mentally, but what about her? Is the murder of her sister not a spiritual rape? They shared blood, so doesn’t it stand to reason that she lost a part of herself along with Blossom?

“There’s no excuse for any of it; I just couldn’t admit to myself that any of this happened, you know? I was so insistent that it was all some horrible nightmare, that I’d just been in some sort of accident, and at any moment, Blossom would just come strolling in to tell me everything would be fine. I—” A lump rises in my throat, and my eyes begin to burn. “I’m still not sure it’s really hit me yet that she’s really—that I’ll never see her again.”

“Must be nice,” she says longingly. Her lips quiver as tears begin to roll down her cheeks. “I was the one who had to identify her remains, even though they knew it was her. You were in the hospital, and she had nobody else here.” With a sniffle, she asks, “What happened to her, Silver? Why did Icy have to die like that?”

Lacking any idea exactly what to say to her, I just stare for a few moments. “Aqua Regia was out of her mind,” I say at last, and suddenly, the words come to me much easily. “She wanted revenge for everything I’d taken from her, as though it was all somehow her right to do so. She broke into my room, and with the very potion I brought out of the Everfree, beat and raped me repeatedly.

“In the midst of it all, Blossom showed up for our date. I didn’t actually see it, but Aqua tied her up so she wouldn’t get in the way.” I don’t actually know if Aqua ever touched her, well, before murdering her, but I’m not sure I should even tell her that much. How do you even tell someone that their sister’s murderer desecrated her corpse?

“Did she touch her?” Beat asks. Why do you have to ask me this? “Did she touch my sister?”

“No... no!” It’s too quick of a response, and it feels like a lie. “But... when Blossom broke free of her bonds and tried to stop her from hurting me, Aqua lashed out with her magic and...”

Having to tell her any of this is eating me up inside. It doesn’t help that her gaze is basically matching her name now. “But what Silver? Why did you start with a but?”

Flattening myself on the pillows, I throw my arms over my head. If there’s a time to panic, it’s when your dead lover’s sister is looking at you so coldly because she knows you’re not telling her something.

“IblackedoutandwhenIcametoAquawasusingBlossom’sheadasacocksleevepleasedon’thurtme.”

Beat lets out a startled sob before gently placing a hoof on my shoulder. “W-why would I hurt you Silver?” She almost sounds offended. Peering out beneath one of my arms, I see a hollowness in her gold eyes. “Icy loved you! Even if I did blame you, which I just can’t bring myself to do, she would never have forgiven me if I hurt you.”

“But she’s dead because of me!” I push her comforting hoof away. “Don’t you hate me for that? For not avenging her? For...”

My pathetic whining comes to an end when Beat pulls me into her warm embrace. “No, you did what was right, and Blossom would agree,” she whimpers into my ear. “What happened to you both wasn’t your fault, even if you were the reason she was there. You couldn’t have known... Mother might say differently, but Blossom’s blood is on the Guard’s hooves, not yours.” To my surprise, I feel her gently nuzzle my neck. “You made sure that monster didn’t get away...”

Just sitting here being hugged by Beat, this is what I really needed—not some mollycoddling or protection from the truth. It’s enough for me to know that in spite of my fears, I’m vindicated in Beat’s eyes. I don’t have to hold it all in so not to somehow cheapen the grief of others with my own. It’s... okay to be sad. “When’s the funeral?” I say, my eyes blurring with tears. “Please tell me I haven’t missed it.”

“It’s tomorrow, actually, but Silver?” She stiffens slightly and looks me warily in the eye. “Mother is going to be there. Are you sure you want to face her? By all rights she likely vilifies you in all of this.”

“If it meant going through all of that again, to bring Blossom back, I would,” I answer, sniffling. “Nothing will bring her back though, so at the very least, your okaa-san deserves to hear the truth... from me.” Once more, Beat pulls me into a tight hug, and together we weep. For Blossom.

Author's Notes:

Next up, funeral, court, and ponies.

Edit by E3gner NightmareKnight, ReFro, Fourpony