Fallout Equestria

Chapter 25.

Alone.

I had given my possessions, even my barding, to Calamity. Knight Poppyseed had brought me soiled, filthy slave cloths to wrap myself in. Thick wrappings had gone around my right foreleg to hide my PipBuck, complete with twigs and bloodstains to suggest my leg had been cruelly wounded. (If anypony asked, I intended to tell them I'd been run through with a piece of rebar.)

Then I had been shackled. (As with the slavers before, Knight Poppyseed had been unable to shackle me properly at the hoof thanks to my PipBuck, so she had locked the manacles above my knees.) I had floated myself into the cage of a slave wagon and bedded down in moldy hay filled with small, itchy bugs. It had taken only minutes to become wretchedly uncomfortable. Between that, and nearly getting fucked in the tail by a giant flaming Pinkie Pie the evening before, I had been deemed to look decently pathetic.

I had been allowed to attach a few bobby pins to my rags, but I would have to hope I could find a screwdriver somewhere on the other side of The Wall.

Then, with worried goodbyes, my companions left me alone. I was to lay there and wait for a member of Red Eye's slavers whom the Steel Rangers had sufficiently bribed (or perhaps ensured the cooperation of in less wholesome ways) to come and get the slave wagon.

I'd forgotten what it felt like to be alone. I had spent my whole previous life alone. I hadn't had any friends growing up; and my mother, as much as I loved her, wasn't the sort of parent a filly could feel "together" with. Alone is cold and dull and miserable. It is a void that aches to be filled. And the little hobbies and distractions that I had turned to had never really filled that hole. Because it was a hole that could only be filled with companionship.

Growing up, the closest I had come to that was music -- the singing on the Stable Two broadcast. At least with music, there was another pony involved who was trying to make a connection. And I could pretend that pony was trying to make a connection specifically with me, not just anypony who was listening. The illusion was never perfect, and it couldn't be held beyond the song. But while the music was playing, the mirage of friendship helped protect me against the cold.

Needless to say, it was the songs of Velvet Remedy which I had cherished the most. I had even fallen in love, I think, with my dream of her. I still remembered the hurt when my ridiculous and unrealistic mental image of her was shattered by the real thing standing in a train car, a non-prisoner in a slaver town. And even then, I think, I still clung to little fragments of my dream-Remedy until the day she shot me.

That said, I wouldn't have traded my very real friendship with the actual pony for anything, much less for a relationship with my two-dimensional daydream. What I had was better. Far better. Because it was real.

When I left Stable Two, my life changed forever. And the most drastic change wasn't the vast open wasteland, or the sickly sunlight that pushed its way through the clouds. It wasn't the horrors and wickedness and cruelty I had seen, or the daunting amount of pain I had suffered, or even the growing river of pony blood drowning my hooves.

The most drastic change was friendship. And it started just a few days out of the Stable with a pony named Calamity.

Calamity was unlike any pony I had ever met. He was fearless and noble and just in a way that I could only aspire to. And he cared about me in a way nopony, not even my mother, ever did. He was willing to stand by me, even when I was being foolish and wrong. Not that we never disagreed, because we did often enough. But he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He trusted me and he was somepony I knew I could trust in return.

I freely admit that I had been jealous when Calamity and Velvet Remedy had started to gravitate towards each other. (And, in retrospect, I have to wonder: was my conviction that they were a couple already accurate or a self-fulfilling prophesy?) How foalish I was to feel that way. But friendship was and is still new to me, and I had many lessons to learn about it. (And many, many more to go, if the sheer number of Spike's stories are to be believed.)