Second Chance

by Cxcd

01 - The Beginning

It was one of those days where the sun didn’t seem to shine right. It was like something was slightly off with the way it hung in the sky, even if Andrew couldn’t really figure out why. It was always out of the corner of his eye as he was driving through the city streets. Every few moments, it would be blotted out by a tall building, but it always came back. He knew better than anybody else that the sun was really white, tinted against the sky to turn yellow, but against his better judgment, he kept thinking that it was actually yellow. After all, there was no way anything could be that yellow. Especially in the middle of the day.

“Eyes on the road!”

Quickly, he jerked the wheel, and found himself back into the center lane of the street. He blinked, the silhouette of the sun still burned onto his retinas like a Polaroid. The city streets were thin, making him wish silent ‘sorry’s to the people in the cars next to his own.

“Wha- huh?” Leo asked from the back. “What’s goin’ on? Did I miss something?”

“Nothing.” Abigail responded, looking in the back seat. “Just Andrew trying to kill us.”

“I just-” Andrew’s eyes once again flickered up to the sun. But, with the knowledge that he was one twitch of the wheel away from careening into the oncoming lanes, his eyes went back to the road. “The sun looks weird.”

“The sun looks-” Leo tilted his head closer to his backseat window, looking up at the bright ball of gas. “The sun looks… normal, actually.”

“Drugs?” Charles asked, sitting next to Leo.

“Are you offering, or…?”

“No- I mean, are you on drugs?” Charles snorted, pushing his circular shades closer to the bridge of his nose. “You shouldn’t be driving, but if you are, then I wanna know what the hell’re smoking.”

“No, I’m not high.” Andrew cleared his throat, rubbing his eye with the palm of his hand. “I just… I just think the sun looks weird. Does nobody else see the sun as looking weird?” There was a moment of silence in the car as Abigail looked back in concern at the two teens in the back seat. Both Leo and Charles looked back and forth.

“You’re high.” Charles heartily laughed from the bottom of his belly. “You’re soo high.”

“I’m not high! I’m just-” Andrew quickly reached out to the radio, a relic worthy of being housed in a museum somewhere on the east coast, and began fiddling with the knobs. “Here. Music. Ya’ll like music?” He asked over the static.

“I like music.” Leo chirped, sitting straighter up in his seat.

“High man likes the mu-sic!”

“If you’re done tripping balls,” Abigail started. “let me tune the radio.” She slapped Andrew’s hand away from the knob, and took over the radio duty, flipping through several channels. “Keep your eyes on the road, numb nuts. I wanna get to school without dying in a car crash, kay?”

“Kay.” He nodded.

He sat, foot on the pedal of his old and creaky car, feeling his knuckles slowly turn more and more white as his focus became less on the road, and more on the scarily yellow sun hanging in the sky. It was out of the corner of his vision, and it seemed to be pestering him.

“No way, man, get this out of here!” Leo said from the back seat.

“What? You don’t like MCR?” Abigail mocked indifference and shock at the exact same time. “Are you kidding me?”

“Who’s MCR?” Leo asked.

“And you don’t know who MCR is?!” Abigail turned, her indifferent face falling to one of genuine shock. “You two are kidding with me, right? Both of you? Because there is no way you two don’t know these-” Abigail turned up the radio. “Are you telling me you don’t know this song? It’s brand new!”

Over the radio, the singer began singing a slow melody. Andrew wasn’t really paying attention. Instead, his foot became more and more heavy as all of his mental capacity went into ignoring the sun. The speedometer rose from fifty-five to sixty, then sixty-five, seventy.

“Just- change it!” Charles quipped, leaning further into his seat so his knees were practically touching the back of Abigail's seat.

“Alright, alright.” Abigail screwed with the knob again. “Here. How’s this?”

“Oh, hell yeah!” Charles shot up. “Oh my god, I love this song!”

“What is this song?” Leo asked.

“You don’t know anything!” Abigail laughed. “You seriously don’t know this song?”

Finally, Andrew’s eyes flickered back up to the sun. It was so yellow. The sun didn’t have tendrils. Of course it didn’t. Any tendrils that occupied the sky were simply the way the light refracted, and of course, the way the iris reacted when staring directly at the brightest light in the sky. But Andrew, as he stared up at the sun, sworn that the thing was breathing. It was stretching, cascading down and covering the sky.

“I would walk five hundred miles, and I would walk five hundred more!”

He couldn’t take his eyes off of the sun. It just kept growing, larger and larger, until the sky was nothing more than one, huge sun. It didn’t make sense, and he certainly didn’t feel like he was hallucinating. Hallucinations always had an uncertain edge to them. They were blurry and incomplete. If you moved your eye too quickly, they would vanish in a millisecond. But this hallucination- no matter how hard he darted his eyes, it stayed in place. It was scary. Hell, it was horrifying.

“Just to be the man that walked a thousand miles to show up at your door!”

There was laughter in the car as Leo tripped over his line, having never sung the song before. Abigail reached over and playfully pushed Andrew’s shoulder. Very slowly, he turned to look at her. It took Abigail a moment, but a second later she recognized the look on his face. And the fact that he was no longer looking at the road.

Abigail’s lips moved. She said something. But Andrew was too preoccupied to listen. After all, how could she not see this? The sky, lighting up like a candle in a gas leak. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. And it struck fear through his heart like never before seen.

Then, Abigail slapped him.

“Wh- huh?” The wheel jerked once more as his eyes quickly darted down to the speedometer. His old hunk of junk was pushing a hundred and twenty. He went to put his foot on the brake, when he looked up.

The last thing he saw was a blue sedan.

---

There was a terrible ringing sound. That, for at least a couple of seconds as he laid on the ground, was all he could hear. Although he tried as hard as he could, his vision refused to merge into focus, instead opting to view the world through a distorted blur-like effect. The ground was cold and hard, and there was a faint smell of sulfur in the air.

He felt as if somebody had bashed an anvil into the back of his head, resulting in what felt like a dvd logo bouncing around the corners of his brain. With a groan, he forced to look up. Instead of laying in the middle of an intersection, the room he found himself in was dark and damp. He could make out a few figures on the other side of the cavernous room. One was white and tall, being flanked by two darker figures with what appeared to be wearing golden clothing. Perhaps firefighters, coming to rescue him from his headache? He couldn’t figure it out, so he opted to lay his head back onto the ground.

“Is every pony okay?” A concerned feminine voice asked. He felt a little smile spread across his face at the warm tone, grumbling something that sounded like a no. There was shuffling of feet, scraping of what sounded like heavy metal toed boots, and the gentle approach of a white figure into his vision.

“Stay still, Blazer.” She commanded. He grunted, squeezing his eyes shut. “That spell did some damage, Blazer. You’re lucky it didn’t do any physical damage. Although…” She chuckled. “It seems as if you’ll be reliving some of your former years.” He grunted once more, opening his eye once more. There was a lot of colors, faint blues and pinks, that took up his vision.

“Wh- What?” He managed to squeak out. His voice sounded harsh from the crash. “B-But I wasn’t-” He coughed, feeling his body twitch. “I-I wasn’t driving…” The white figure cocked it’s head to the side, taking a step back.

“Driving, Blazer?” She asked, looking around. It was then he noticed a few other figures, two to be precise, twitching on the ground as well. Now that he was slowly recovering, he noticed the spear-like objects being pointed at the two other blobs of color. “Driving what, exactly? The spell?”

“Driving… The ford.” He blinked. “It was Andrew. Not me.”

The white figure paused her talking for a moment. Then, she took a few quick and concurrent steps backwards, approaching the gray blobs with golden shirts and spears. The blob’s heads- if you could even call them that- looked up as she approached.

“Stand down.” She whispered. The two gray blobs looked at one another fearfully, but with restraining, lowered their spears. “I fearsomething has went astray with the spell Blazer and his family preformed. After all, there is no way of knowing what could happen when a spell of that magnitude backfires.”

Then, there was a scream.

Charles quickly pulled himself up from laying on the ground, sitting up blearily and blinking back the blur.

“H-Hooves! What the fuck?! Holy- where the hell am I?” Another feminine, this time much more shrill, voice said. The white figure began prancing forwards, and for the first time, Charles clocked the fact that she had… four legs?

Then, another scream.

“Oh my god!” A masculine, slightly whiny voice yelped. “Oh my god! Oh my- I’m not high, am I? Charles, what the fuck did you do to me?!”

“What? I didn’t do-” Charles coughed, realizing his voice had seemingly regressed several years, now sounding young and squeaky, similar to the voice more than likely belonging to Leo. “What the fuck is wrong with my-” He coughed again, his vision finally coming into view.

Standing near the only entrance into the dark cave was the prettiest horse he had ever seen. It looked less like a horse and more like a cat with an unusually long snout and without any whiskers. It’s- or her eyes were the size of dinner plates without her even trying. Her eyelashes were long and luscious, her mane flowing with the colors of a muted rainbow. On her head, a horn, and on her back, wings.

“What in god’s name?”

Comments

[RyRy]

starting a rewrite?

[ramdom_player201]

Saw this story tracked and favourited, but the first chapter is new. The car scene was great at building tension and the whole chapter was very well written. I think I might have a vague recollection of which story this used to be and I don't remember it going far, but it was quite promising.
Good to see this story revived and looking forward to where it goes.