Blackjacks Cutie Mark means she will always "win"

“So. This is it?” rasped a voice in my ear as I reached the hole. I started squeezing my way quickly but carefully through the packed mess as it shifted around me.

“Looks like it,” I said, and glanced at the bony skeleton in the duster and cowpony hat. “I thought you’d died on the moon.” I teleported through a gap that was closing ahead of me. Of course, the Dealer kept right along with me, shuffling cards between his dusty hooves.

“I was always more than just him. Besides, I know you wouldn’t want to make this trip without an escort. Nopony should die alone,” he said as I climbed.

“Well, forgive me if I’m not in the mood to chat,” I said as used the starmetal sword to cut a gap I could fit through. I didn’t want to wear out my horn before I got up there. “I don’t know what we’d talk about, anyway.”

“How about...” He drew a pair of cards and held them up for me to see: the ace and queen of spades. “How about you tell me about how you got your cutie mark?”

I stopped, giving him a skeptical glower. “My cutie mark?”

“Everypony has a cutie mark story. What’s yours?” he asked.

I shoved a piece of steel. “I got it playing cards–” Suddenly, something gave, there was a bang, the piece of steel I’d shoved wrinkled like a wet noodle, and the cavity I was in halved in size. I stared around, wondering what would give first as I tried to find a gap big enough to fit through. “Why do you care, anyway? You’re just a hallucination. Proof I really am crazy.”

“Or proof that, even toting that goddess around, you’re still Blackjack,” the Dealer retorted. “Come on. Tell me. Who else are you going to confess your sins to before you die?”

It was stupid. I should have been focusing on the task ahead, not the past behind. There was so much blood on that path. A river of blood. Yet I found myself speaking, despite everything. “It was the first card game I was ever invited to. With Mom’s job, nopony wanted me around when rules were broken.” I spotted a gap to the side and shimmied that way, finding a spot where I could climb up a dozen more yards. The Dealer kept up with me, leaning in a nook in the wreckage.

“So what’s the big deal about a game?” he asked as his bony hooves shuffled the cards.

“I sucked at it, is what. I didn’t know how to bluff, or count cards, or anything,” I said as I found my way barred by a skinny beam that might, or might not, have been load-bearing. I couldn’t get a good look in the space beyond for a teleport, so I braced my hindlegs and shoved slowly, but firmly, my body straining, the injuries I’d taken earlier burning. “I won a round and got my cutie mark. End of story.” I finally made a gap I could get through, spotting a half dozen silver wires tautly strung in the space above. Good thing I hadn’t teleported. I used a bit of moonstone dust to vaporize them. “Even Cognitum said so. Victory was my special talent.”

“Mmmm… I don’t think so,” he said as he turned a card, showing me the nightmare version of myself. “After all, she didn’t win where it really counted. She’d planned on ruling afterwards. Dying kind of negates all that.” He put the card back in the deck. “That mark’s seen just as much defeat as victory... luck of the draw, which comes out on top. Ah, but death now... that’s been a bit more consistent around it, hasn’t it?”

I froze, remembering that stupid card game with ponies I’d wanted as my friends. Maybe Marmalade could have been... or Daisy... if I’d just... done... something. “It was an accident.”

“Of course. Accidental deaths at card games. Happens all the time.”

“She got up to go pee and got crunched. End of story!” I shouted at him, then pointed a hoof up at where the Eater was waiting for me. “I don’t have time for this now!”

“Right. You’ve got a debt to pay,” he said, chuckling. “Still, no time like the present. How’d you get your cutie mark? How’d you really get it?”

I paused, pressing my head against the wall. It’d been an accident.

“Do you know what the cards on your flank really mean?” the Dealer asked as he held up an ace in one hoof and a queen of spades in the other.

“They’re just stupid cards.”

“Right. And that’s just a stupid cutie mark,” he responded with a laugh. “Ace of swords. Power. Focus. Determination. Victory. I did this once for you before, if you recall.” He turned it upside down. “Confusion. Chaos. Lack of clarity. Sounds like both sides of your life.”

My jaw worked as I stared at the card, then at the queen of spades, depicting Luna in profile with a sword. “And that one?”

“Queen of swords. Quick thinker, decisive... executioner.” He practically purred the word. “And while you might not have deliberately chopped off the heads of your prisoners, you really never took that many prisoners to begin with. You are frightfully good at killing.” He turned the card upside down. “Overly emotional, vindictive, morose... and bitchy.” He scratched his bony chin. “How many enemies have you had who haven’t died horrible deaths?”

“It was just a card game. Just an accident...” I whimpered, clenching my eyes shut. Don’t think about it. She’d gotten up to go pee. Simple as that.

“Of course. She goes to pee and gets crushed. Happens all the time.” I stared at him, mentally begging him to stop. “Woe to those poor fools who saw your flank and thought it was nothing more than playing cards. Even Cognitum’s assumption it was victory was dreadfully naïve. If anypony with a bit of sense had seen your flank, they would have run the other way and never stopped.” He paused as I swallowed, and then returned to his refrain, “How’d you get your cutie mark, Blackjack?”

What did it matter? He wasn’t real. I tuned him out, or tried to, as I struggled to climb. The shaft I’d blasted with Folly groaned and twisted around me, but every time I turned around, there was the Dealer. Shuffling cards. Smiling. Waiting for the answer. I reached for a beam, and when it pulled free, I was so preoccupied that I fell a dozen feet and got peppered by metal and debris. He leaned over me. “How’d you get your mark?” he repeated.

I groaned, pushing myself to my hooves. What would it hurt to tell him? “It was Hatches. I don’t remember what her real name was. We just called her Hatches.” I closed my eyes. “First one to leave always gets picked up by security. The others had won, and it was either going to be me or her leaving first. Getting picked up after curfew was three days locked in rehabilitation cells, or flogging. So Hatches and I had one more round to see who’d leave first. I lost.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Then I was such a whiny baby about it that she agreed to leave first anyway. Nice about it, though. Claimed she had to pee,” I muttered with a wistful smile that soon withered. “But the door’s sensor had malfunctioned. She walked through, and it closed on her. Killed her… but I didn’t get in trouble or have to tattle on the others at the game,” I said lowly.

“So you won,” the Dealer chuckled. “And all it cost you was a life.”

“I didn’t kill Hatches,” I muttered. “I didn’t want her dead. She was nice to me. Closest thing I had to a friend!” I insisted as I resumed my ascent. I didn’t have time for this shit. “Go away. I’ve got a job to do.”

Once again, he was in my path. “I’m sure.” He was silent for a second, empty sockets almost pitying, then asked as calm and cool as poison, “What was her real name, Fishie?”

I quivered, hot tears on my cheeks. “I didn’t kill her,” I repeated, the words sounding like a prayer.

“Right. But people who help you do have a nasty tendency to turn up dead,” he said with a chuckle. “Always somepony there to take the bullet. To die in your stead.”

“I never wanted that!” I shouted back at him. “I tried to save people!” Again my grip slipped, and I fell, spreading my wings to catch myself, and got pelted by rubble. I coughed and wiped gritty muck from my eyes. Was that sky up there? I was so close...

The sardonic smirk was all the reply he needed, but he went on, relentlessly, “Sure. You didn’t even want to kill your enemies. You just turned them into friends.” His grin widened. “How’d that work out for them, again?”

I quivered as I stared at the death awaiting me above. “Nopony should have died for me...” I whispered.

“Why? You were always ready to die for them. They were just better at it than you were.” He made a show of inspecting my body. “And when you didn’t have anypony to do that, well... look at what a pound of flesh can buy.”

Finally, I balked and paused my ascent, staring at him as pebbles and scree rained down into my mane. He stared back, confident and smug as a skull could be. “Who are you? You’re not my crazy... and I don’t think you’re the Eater, either...”

“No? Well, who can tell for sure?” The Dealer took his hat off. “If I were anything... and I’m not saying I am... I’d call me the Wasteland.” And he gave me a little bow.

“The Wasteland?” I echoed as I stared at him.

“The desolation. The loss. The pain and sacrifice. I take you... all of you... and I make your lives living, bloody hell. I twist you. I tear you. I see what you’re all made of. How far you can go. Where, exactly, you break.” He showed cards of me after the Seahorse. Of me outside Maripony right before the bomb went off. Of Shadowbolt Tower dying. “And you... Blackjack... you’re a pony who should have fallen a hundred times over. I try, and I try, and I try... but I can’t quite get you.”

“I don’t die easily,” I retorted, eyes narrowing.

“I don’t have to kill you to get you,” he said with a laugh. “I get everyone sooner or later, though. Everyone. You think I’m some desolate landscape? I’m everywhere. In Elysium and Flank. In the skies of the Enclave and the depths of your stable. Everywhere there’s contempt, ambition, avarice, and callousness. I was here before the war, and I’ll be here no matter what ‘civilization’ pops up, because murder and corruption, hatred and intolerance... those never change.” He pressed a bony hoof to his chest. “And for some reason, people love me.”

“I don’t,” I hissed.

“But of course you do!” He laughed. “Weren’t you always hating yourself for being a screwup? You’re now the most dangerously competent pony in the Wasteland. Weren’t you always hating your tiny little horn and lack of magic? Well, you’re descended from Twilight Sparkle now! Weren’t you pining for friends and lovers? I’ve given you more than a few!” He cackled. “I am so generous, like you. I give people what they crave! What they yearn for more than anything!” He swept his hoof towards the ceiling above me. “And now, I give you what you desire most... a heroic death.” He leered at me. “Make it a good one. You’ve none left to die for you.”

Then he evaporated with a last laugh.

I hadn’t killed Hatches, but there was no doubt I had benefitted from her death... from so many deaths... The spring from which the river of blood flowed. “One last round, then time to cash out and pay my debts,” I croaked, then whispered, “Ante up.”