There was never enough time to do everything: Fleur had learned that at an early age and was currently hoping, rather vindictively, that the same thing could be said for Celestia. Time was the ultimate commodity: it was just about impossible to gain more of it, everypony was always trying to take it away from you, and no matter what you did, it was constantly being spent, right up until the moment it ran out.
The trot to the cottage was not a casual one: Fleur would be losing time every day just from going there and back again, especially since there didn't seem to be any residences along that road which she could rent for herself. Staying at the cottage was starting to look like more of a viable option than it had before, at least once the myriad of residents had been made to leave her alone -- but she'd already told her charge that she had somewhere to stay. It might be possible to back out of that lie by claiming lease difficulties or paperwork errors, but...
Well, for now, finding a place to live was another demand on Fleur's time, and it was something which couldn't be settled immediately: there were no rental agencies open so early in the day, any more than she could locate an open spa (there was a closed one, and it smelled as if the owners knew what they were doing) or a bathhouse (rare and she couldn't find one at all in the scant minutes she had for looking, but sufficient ponies still considered bathing to be a social occasion to keep a few public facilities open). She wanted to wash up, and taking a dip in a stream wasn't going to work: careful use of her field made it possible to comb water out of her fur, but anything which soaked in would stay there, and galloping around with a damp coat on a cool fall morning was begging for illness.
However, she had recently been informed that she smelled somewhat like an angry (and thankfully, scared) rabbit -- and so Fleur reluctantly took the only option available. There were a few hotels and inns serving visitors to the settled zone and she booked a room at one, making it clear to the proprietors that she would be paying on a day-to-day basis until she managed to locate a longer-term residence. The stallion behind the desk, whose shifting pieces said he would be reluctant to lose any degree of access to Fleur, still helpfully passed over a list of the town's realtors -- under the watchful gaze of his spouse.
She had just enough time to clean and dry herself, although it meant the trip to the cottage would be done at something approaching a half-gallop. An hour or two used for that first lesson, and then she could excuse her departure with a perfectly legitimate statement: she was still moving in. Get back to the center of the settled zone before any of the agencies could close, find something she could rent, and then...
...I'll still be serving my sentence. I just get to pay for the use of my cell.
At best, it was a bitter joke, and the quality of the graveyard humor wasn't enough to trigger a laugh. But she was clean, and more than pretty enough for most purposes, especially since she still wasn't quite ready to start seducing her way into the center of a new web and her license was -- unavailable. And as for any future cottage-acquired odors -- she would have to ask Fluttershy about where to purchase a supply of Dr. Groomer's. The scent might come with its share of memories and wreck any plans she might have for perfume, but she was going to be spending a lot of time at the cottage and there was nothing else which would do the job.
Time spent. Teaching a pony who didn't know what she wanted. Time just for reaching that pony and going back, possibly every day. Hours upon hours, moon after moon, until... a foal was born. A foal produced from a true union with somepony Fluttershy loved. A love which was seldom instant, and a pregnancy which was never so.
With extraordinary luck in the initial encounter added to a pony who was willing to have sex immediately after the first date and a cycle which had reached exactly the right moment, the minimum sentence Fleur could have expected to serve was something just under a year. But with Fluttershy...
She would have time to learn Ponyville's businesses. Where they were, when they opened, what the owners were like. Every last one of them. Stolen, snatched, unrecoverable time.
Her coat seemed to dry rather quickly. It might have been from the heat of her hate.
The animals didn't seem to watch her quite as closely this time, and the shrew ran up to her right forehoof and sniffed it for a few seconds before tossing off a completely horizontal shrug and scurrying off towards the cottage, where it used a miniature swinging pet door cut into the lowest section of the wood. Fleur's guess was that it was heading off to alert its mistress and when the door opened while she was still coming up the approach path, she was proven right.
"...hi," the pegasus eventually said. "...things aren't... well, there's things I -- have to do later. There usually are. But I've done everything for the morning, so... I guess we can start. If you want to. If you're ready, and... I think I'm ready, I -- I'll try, but..." She took a slow breath, then swallowed most of it. "...so what are we doing?"
Fleur had spent most of the trip to the cottage in trying to answer that question. It felt like the information she needed most would come from seeing what Fluttershy was normally like in a social setting: take her out on the town for a night, watch what happened, and learn a little more about what she had to work with. See if her charge was doing anything right which could be built on, record every error and start working on how to fix it. But choosing a setting would require more knowledge of Ponyville's nightlife than she currently had, and -- she felt as if she might already have the rather dejecting answers to most of those questions. Still, it was something she'd probably wind up doing within the first two weeks because no matter how much depression her imagination could conjure, she was sure reality was up to overmatching it.
They would be going out on the town (for whatever value of 'out' the town might offer) eventually. But it might take a little extra confidence just to get Fluttershy that far out the door.
Using the day for reviewing her charge's previous dating life was -- well, not entirely pointless, even with Celestia having said that life didn't exist. It was possible that Fluttershy had at least tried an approach once, and she was sure somepony had to have asked the pegasus out, especially if her diagnosis of early puberty was correct: you couldn't look at that tail during the pubescent years and not have at least a twinge of curiosity. Finding out what had taken place on both ends could help -- but she was sure her charge didn't trust her enough to open up on that level. Not yet, and reaching that level with Fluttershy could be the work of multiple frustrating moons.
So shortly after passing the abandoned mill, Fleur had decided to start by building her charge's confidence. There were so many occasions in life when all you needed to truly start on a new path was the knowledge that you were capable of doing one basic thing right. It could provide the emotional boost necessary to take on the rest. The first success led to the second and beyond, until you wound up at the point where you could almost teach yourself.
(Never entirely, of course. Some things were only learned through direct experience. And experience didn't care if you survived the lesson.)
"I'm going to teach you how to trot," Fleur told her.
It got her the one-eyed blink again. "...um... I -- kind of... know how to do that already..." There was no offense in the words: just mild surprise, along with a touch of fear that expressing the shock might somehow offend.
And at some point, we're going to talk about a manestyle which lets ponies see your entire face. But that could wait for a few days. "There are ways to move which let ponies know you're available," Fleur told her. Keeping her tones stern, slightly towards the side of dominant, "That you're not only looking for a mate, but you want them to start considering you as one." Or at least as a companion for the blanket-ruffling duration of one evening. "It's about presentation. You need to trot like somepony who wants company. You're not just moving from place to place: you're issuing an invitation to follow you and find out what's waiting for them at the destination."
The pegasus thought about it.
"...I don't like it when ponies follow me."
"It's not inviting stalkers," Fleur quickly (but still sternly) said. "Stalkers happen." Was that the right topic to bring up? Would it scare her too much? No, she had to know all of what she was up against. "And they'll blame you for it. Even if you just stayed completely still and curled up in a corner, they'll just say you wanted them to --"
The birdsong was loud in her ears, and it still wasn't loud enough.
"-- we'll go into self-defense later." Actually... "Can you fight?" The initial supposition was that her charge had to have some skill in combat, given the kind of situations the Bearers carefully weren't paid to deal with. But it was possible that Fluttershy was just support staff for the group, or... well, Fleur was having real trouble trying to figure out exactly what the pegasus' role was, or even had the potential to be. The caretaker wasn't exactly her first choice to send into any level of fight, and Fleur just wasn't seeing that many situations where Fluttershy taking on Nightmare and chaos -- literally chaos -- with a shaky request not to hurt her was going to accomplish much.
Another blink. "...a little."
Which probably meant she knew where her legs were and that the hind ones could kick backwards. Plus she was a pegasus, so Fleur supposed lightning was available as an option, along with wind, driving rain, hail if the conditions were right or could be tweaked in a hurry... "We'll go over that too. But there's a point to this, Fluttershy. In order to attract somepony, you need to learn how to be attractive. You need to let them know you're available and interested. You can't control what comes to you, not initially: you can only learn to deal with it after it shows up. Eventually, I'm going to be teaching you how to reject ponies. But before you can sort out your catch, you need a lure."
It got her stared at. The single blue-green eye (currently the left) was rather good at staring. "...sort out a catch...?"
"You've never been --" A deep breath. No, Fleur, she's probably never been fishing. "How would you catch an animal for the first time?"
Fluttershy rather visibly thought about it, feathers faintly vibrating as she stood within the battered doorway. "I'd find out where that animal normally lived," she said, and the words emerged with a confidence which hadn't existed in any other syllable. "What times it was most active. What it avoided, and when that might be in the area."
Fleur, much to her own surprise, found herself starting to smile. Once you understood how the most basic of animal interactions functioned, you would actually have most of the dating scene --
"-- and then I'd call out to one, we'd talk a bit, maybe about how things were going, and after we'd gotten to know each other and I'd given him a nice little name to use around ponies so everypony would know just who I was talking about, that's usually just my friends but you never know when somepony might be listening, we'd just talk a little more about coming back to the cottage and meeting all my other friends, they're usually a little skittish when I tell them just who's staying with me, but once they understand that everyone keeps the truce --"
The smile had started to vanish about thirty words into the run-on sentence, and the groan finally put a note of punctuation on the whole thing.
Apologetically, "...what? Did I say something -- wrong?"
She was trying to be patient, in the midst of her assumed dominance. She'd never been a teacher before, and the occupation was proving more frustrating than she ever would have expected. But she'd been a student, and one of her instructors had been truly skilled. All she had to do was follow that model --
"Why wouldn't I be there?"
-- but not to the end.
Fleur wasn't shaking, and she was proud of herself for that. She was perfectly still, simply looking at Fluttershy, who was waiting for her to speak.
"Fluttershy," she said with a patience which she still wasn't quite feeling, "how would somepony who can't talk to animals catch one?"
Eventually, "...with bait. I have to be -- bait?"
"A little bit," Fleur admitted. "Alluring might seem closer, but even that's got lure in it. Ultimately, it's bait. And then we sort the catch."
"...that..." The pegasus swallowed air again. "...doesn't sound -- nice."
That word again. Fluttershy had a knack for making the lack of niceness sound like the single worst thing in the world, as if it was the most devastating insult which could ever be delivered --
-- and that lack was the way Celestia had chosen to describe Fleur.
Good. Being nice came with too high a price. "The Princess," Fleur reminded the pegasus, "sent me to be your teacher. The single best teacher for the job. This is your first lesson. How to trot. Walk. Move. And without the first lesson, we can't move on to the second." Every last bit of that patience in her voice, along with the echoes of the one who had taught it to her. "So are we doing this?"
Finally, reluctantly, "...yes."
The day was becoming pleasantly warm (and that reminded Fleur: she really needed to get a personal copy of the local weather schedule: the hotel would become upset about even that degree of theft from the room) and so the initial lesson was conducted outside. She'd only seen one part of the cottage, but there hadn't been a great deal of open space in that area and she wanted Fluttershy to conduct her first practice in a location which didn't have so many eyes on her, even if they were animal ones. So she'd asked Fluttershy to lead them into something exposed to Sun, and the pegasus had carefully taken her in a new direction, past chicken coops and what appeared to be a rather well-insulated (but currently empty) kennel. They'd passed swans and ducks, moving across something more suited to swimming hole than pond. There had been a lemur, and a marmoset. And then there had been the giraffe.
It had been a baby giraffe and so when Fleur had stared at it, she hadn't had to look all that far up.
"...she's just here for a few weeks," Fluttershy told her. "...somepony... was opening up a zoo, somepony mean, and... they didn't ask her if she wanted to come, or bring her parents, or... anything. I found out where she's from, and somepony will be taking her back. Once she's recovered a little more. Most of the others were already brought home."
"The others," Fleur carefully repeated.
"...you just missed Mr. Tabby Fangs."
It was her first attempt at translating 'Fluttershy' into 'Equestrian' and to Fleur's credit, her kick landed dead-center. "A tiger."
Surprised, "...of course."
"You. Hosted. A. Tiger."
"...he was very nice once I got to know him." A thoughtful pause. "...and if I rubbed his fur against the grain. That's a little weird for a cat. I wasn't expecting it."
"A... cat," Fleur carefully tried.
"...he's just a big softy, really..."
Somepony took a tiger out of Pundamilia Makazi. Probably smuggled it out under the zebras' snouts, because they're so careful about what they allow to leave the borders. That would have created a really unhappy tiger. And it lived here. With everything else I saw on the property. So far. Oh, and everything else I've seen here happens to still be alive. Along with Fluttershy.
"Kitten?" Fleur immediately asked.
"...only when he got playful," Fluttershy smiled. With open pride, "Once he was eating properly again, he got up to about three bale-weights. And I just know he'll keep it on now that he's home."
The rest of the walk was conducted in respectful silence, at least from Fleur's end. She still didn't know much about her charge, and there was just so many things she had to learn there, with that role among the Bearers as a significant part of it. But now...
She was born in the wrong place.
Her memories darted back, returned her to that teacher and the lost moments which had become so much more precious for their passing. Her imagination placed the pegasus next to them. And then, as a final self-punishing step, substituted, pegasus and talent for unicorn, all the way to the end.
She would have won.
It was the moment when she truly began to respect Fluttershy, if only for that one thing. It was also the one when she began to hate herself again.
They were in a pasture area, which Fluttershy told her was used on those occasions when she hosted large numbers of grazers. The grass was beginning to brown here and there, blades sagging under the weight of their own approaching death. Fleur was starting to wonder about the true size of the property, along with the true impact of the property tax bill.
"...okay," Fluttershy finally decided. "...this is private."
Fleur looked around a little more. "For now," she immediately decided.
"...sorry? I usually get interrupted a lot and I'm sorry if that happens today because it probably will, but I don't hear anypony coming, and none of my friends are around --"
"-- is any of this stuff yours?" Fleur asked, gesturing a shapely foreleg. Fluttershy glanced in the indicated direction.
There was a rusted cart axle, which still had one battered wheel attached. A rather large inflatable ball, about the size of a pony torso. Two upended troughs. A sketched-out circle for marble play, complete with two abandoned large red marbles, a little bigger than the ideal for hoof-flicking. And that was just the start of the signs for intrusion, along with the other pieces of garbage which said --
"Somepony," Fleur concluded, "is trespassing. And using your property as a dump. How's your security? You have a lot of border to watch, and --"
"-- ignore it."
Fleur blinked.
The words had been quick. Steady. Something very close to insistent.
"So it's your garbage? Nopony's been collecting --"
Immediately, looking away from the random elements polluting her pasture, "-- ignore it." And then, more carefully, "...please?"
So somepony had decided it was just too much trouble to go all the way out to the fringe for trash collection, and Fluttershy just didn't want to bring it up... Fleur managed to keep from grinding her teeth. Enamel damage wasn't attractive. "Fine." She made a minor show of looking away from the debris. "I want you to show me what you think a sexy walk is. Just go ten body lengths down that way, then come back, trot past me, and keep going for another ten. Can you do that?" It got her a bare nod. "Start."
Fluttershy took another one of those deep breaths, and Fleur watched feathers rustle before the pegasus began to trot away.
Trotting. It was starting to register. Fluttershy -- trotted. It was only their second meeting, but -- the pegasus hadn't been in the air once. Simply living on the ground would have been seen as mildly unusual by many, but Fleur recognized the realities of Fluttershy's profession: the land was where the animals were. However, even when looking at so short a period of time, to not have taken off even once...
Maybe it was just hospitality. Her charge wasn't taking off because her guest couldn't. Well, when it --
-- which was when Fluttershy stopped, turned, and brought out her sexy trot for the local part of the world to see.
Only one of the observers was capable of facehoofing and somehow, the sound of her not doing it was worse than any impact could have been.
"Your idea of a sexy walk is to move," Fleur tensely said, "like a model."
"...oh."
"That's not a compliment. Models are supposed to be aloof. Mysterious. Unapproachable." So it was actually worse than having to merely teach her from the ground up: there were now things to unlearn --
-- Fleur blinked.
"Do that again."
The hesitation on the next sentence might have been natural coming from anypony. "...what?"
"That walk."
"...but you said --"
"-- do it."
Fluttershy complied. And Fleur, who knew her charge had been taught that little hip-hitch by the only pony in the world who thought it was good for anything and somehow hadn't been kicked to death because of it or anything else, groaned.
"How did she justify not paying you?"
"...I'm sorry," Fluttershy instinctively apologized in a way which was also threatening to become a signature move, "but I don't understand --"
"Photo Finish," Fleur spat, and Fluttershy pulled back from the anger. "What did she write into the contract that time? You had to pay for your own cosmetics? All hotel rooms were booked using your salary? It turned out that every time a shoot ran overtime, you covered the extra and 'overtime' started after three minutes? What was it?"
A soft fall breeze shifted the grass, carried some of the cottage's odors around them. None of the miasma could put a taste in Fleur's mouth which would have been worse than the name, and even Mr. Flankington would have been hard-pressed to trigger more illness.
"...I left before my term was complete," Fluttershy finally said. "She told me there was a -- forfeiture fee, and... my friend almost went after her, I just got my teeth around her tail in time, and after that, it was hard to... there were consequences, and..." Her head slowly dipped, bowed by the weight of memory. "It... hurt her. For a while. And I... didn't get anything except a copy of the calendar. From the printer. And she still tried to send me a bill for it."
Fleur softly sighed, because there was only one pony available to take the anger out on and it was exactly the wrong one.
"You're not the first," she quietly said. "You won't be the last. Most of what she's been doing in her fine print is barely legal, and the rest... well, there's a lot of escorts who are former models." After an encounter with Photo Finish, a number of stallions and mares would decide that if they were going to spend their lives being screwed, they might as well be getting paid for it.
With soft empathy, "...did she... get you?" And in faint hope, "...some of what she does isn't legal?"
"She didn't get me." Fleur read fine print. All of it, no matter how many hours she had to spent with Equestria's most powerful magnifying glass in front of her face, hoping unto Moon that the paper wouldn't catch fire. "But she tried. Any time somepony gets offended or panicked because you insist on reading what they want you to sign? Don't sign it. But for the legality... she gives a lot of the things her models wear away, after she's made them pay for those outfits. Photo Finish probably has every judge in Canterlot on her Hearth's Warming list. It makes it a little harder to bring a charge against her, and it scares a lot of ponies out of trying. She's only lasted this long because she knows whose hooves to kiss. For starters." She snorted and for what it was worth, the exclamation of disgust was a pretty one. "If you ever see her again and want to piss her off, tell her I said hello. She's never forgiven me for getting away." Something which had done its own share of damage, which Fleur had needed to overcome. She'd been in the process of exacting that portion of vengeance when the palace had summoned her. "And when you do, call her Lens Cap."
"...why?"
"Because she hates her real name," said the mare who'd finally tracked it down in the public records. "More than anything except having to pay her models." She'd so been looking forward to that next party --
-- wait. Given everything she'd seen about Fluttershy's personality --
"-- how did you get into modeling?"
A very long pause. "...well..."
A parrot swooped down from the sky, landed on Fluttershy's right shoulder, and squawked into her rotated ear.
"I have to go," the pegasus said with completely unexpected haste. "I'm sorry. There's something happening at the cottage. Somepony brought their friend in and -- I'm sorry, this is going to happen a lot, there's hardly ever a good time and -- I'm sorry, I hope everything will be all right, please be all right, please, I have to go --"
Those somewhat oversized wings flared out, flapped, and Fluttershy took off, spinning her body to face the cottage at the moment her legs were free of the grass, speeding away to confront whatever was happening in her home --
-- gone.
Fleur waited until the grass was no longer being shifted by a wing-raised breeze, then sighed. Her charge might have said she wasn't officially a vet, but it seemed as if at least one aspect of animal caretaking was the same: when somepony called, you had to answer.
Not 'officially' a vet. So she probably doesn't have the license. Is that legal? Can she work without one, even if she's just treating animals? Is there an actual vet in town, and if so, why do ponies come here -- no, that's a stupid question. And there was a better query lurking behind it. If you had a choice between a conventional vet and somepony who could just ask your pet where it hurt, why would you ever use the vet? What was the business relationship between Fluttershy and the locals, and was there truly any competition at all?
Not something which was likely to play into finding her charge a partner. But if it kept leading to interruptions...
She seemed to have two options: wait in the pasture until Fluttershy returned, which left her wasting time. Or she could trot back to the cottage and find out if there was anything she could personally do to --
"Oh, good," the voice snorted from behind and above her, and there was no beauty in that exclamation at all. "We have privacy. And now that it's just you and I present for what I'm certain will turn out to be a rather illuminating discussion -- who, exactly, are you supposed to be, at least for the short time when you still might be anything at all? And what are you trying to do with my friend?"
And she knew.
She'd never heard his voice before. (It was probably a safe bet that most of the ponies throughout history who'd heard it had never heard anything else again, and the majority of those who'd lived through the encounter hadn't kept their own ears.) To that degree, she was only guessing about the nature of the other entity who was standing in the pasture. But she was facing towards where the garbage had been and the random debris spread around the pasture had vanished, replaced by something a million times more random and almost unimaginably more dangerous.
The words went through her head, before she turned. The mantra of those who survived.
...as long as I stay alert.
As long as I stay focused.
The mantra of those who might survive.
She turned, steadily, at a normal pace. It left her facing an odd curve of brown-furred torso, until grey neck bent down at a completely unnatural angle, one which should have shattered bones, and red eyes stared at her with the already worn-out patience of madness which wasn't used to being postponed.
"You were here yesterday," he accused, and the words came out as being petulant. "I saw you leave, when I was checking on her. You didn't drop off any kind of pet. And here you are again today, you're making her do things, and I already know you're not one of her friends. I know all of her friends, including every last one she really shouldn't have when she has me. Which is, quite frankly," and he struck a pose, preened horn with talon, "all of them. Because when you have me, you really don't need -- well, she probably doesn't need you, now does she? Five -- or six, I suppose, it really depends on how you care to count them --"
An abacus appeared in the air. Black beads clicked back and forth for a few seconds until he waved a paw and made the entire thing explode into a puff of boredom.
"-- pieces of inferior competition for her free time are quite enough, thank you," he pouted. "And now we have you, at least for now, and now? Is already too long. So again -- who are --"
"-- and who," she callously interrupted him, "wants to know?"
The red eyes blinked. She kept looking at them. At his face, which was something which she felt would cost her dearly later. Not from having to continue taking in his warped appearance. It was being so close to insanity and waiting for it to decide the time had come to inflict itself. Facing down madness and -- not being afraid.
Not outwardly.
"...who," he repeated, inadvertently doing a rather good imitation of his only friend, "wants to know?"
"It's not as if you bothered with introducing yourself," Fleur declared, and added an artistic sniff. "If you're going to go around demanding somepony's identity, especially when you're on somepony else's property, when I have no idea if you're an invited guest -- actually, didn't you just tell me that you were sneaking around here last night, close to sunset? Is the owner aware you're been skulking about?"
She could die at any moment. He could do things to her which would make death into the best of all possible options. And it didn't matter. Because if he was going to do it, he would. She couldn't stop that, had no hopes of defending herself against any of it. Fleur would fight if she needed to, already knew she would lose -- and none of that mattered, because she wouldn't let it matter.
As long as I'm not afraid...
He blinked again.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
"Who are you?" she shot back.
The neck curled down. (There was no crack of fracturing vertebrae, and there should have been.) He was staring at her, from less than a hoofwidth away. She didn't move.
"Oh," he said, and pulled back until he was snidely looking down at her from his full height, or at least as close to it as the twisted posture would allow. "How rude of me! Of course, it's been quite some time since my last fully public appearance, at least for something other than a rather limited and, incidentally, decidedly unappreciative audience. Please allow me to introduce myself..."
He brought up a claw. The talons snapped, and the madness went into the world.
Sky twisted. The concept of air became solid, that of ground translated into water. She was pushed down into the sea of earth by the mountain of the sky, insects swam about her flashing fins of steel as her legs flailed, rocks became gel and coated her fur, she was trying to ignite her horn, find the working which would save her, but there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, she was going to --
-- there was a flash of light. She was dry and clean and standing in the pasture under a blue sky. And he was in front of her.
"I have," he said with a bemused false patience, "been working on my calling card. What do you think?"
Nearly every part of her wanted to scream. To flee. To leave Ponyville, forget she'd ever heard of Fluttershy, gallop back to Canterlot and beg for prison. Spend every moment of her scant time to come waiting for stone walls to melt.
But she had been taught, and that which had learned was still in charge.
"I think," she said, "it would be more practical to hand out something with your name on it." She made a minor show of inspecting paw and talon. "Was that the right verb? Handing something out? It's not as if you're going to kick or nose anything over, but with those... actually, I'm still waiting on a name. And as the first party to speak in this conversation? You're supposed to be the one providing it."
He took a breath. She suddenly realized it was the only one he'd taken.
"Seriously?" he declared. "I know some ponies don't exactly keep up with current events, but I would think --" He stopped. "-- you are staring at me."
She nodded.
"Why?"
"Because I'm still waiting to hear who you are. And I think you're stalling. Should I just go find the police?" If only for the image of what Miranda Rights would be like after going through that.
He rolled his eyes. The left one went all the way down his paw, leaving a trail of blood in the fur.
"Discord," he said, and casually tossed the orb back into its socket. "And you are?"
"Fleur," she replied. "Now please explain what you're doing on the property. Because I don't think you're here to drop off a pet."
(Her imagination briefly took over and tried to come up with something which he would have considered as a pet. She really wished it hadn't.)
"I am," and the petulance was back, "Fluttershy's friend. I understand this comes with certain obligations. To drop by. To check on her. To occasionally provide gifts, although --" and his tones temporarily dropped into those of the confidant "-- I am encountering certain difficulties in picking out something she won't tell me to take back. Or unmake. Undo. The entire category of rejection, really. It would be rather off-putting for most, I suppose, but she is supposed to be my friend and so in the name of that friendship? I endure. But really, Fleur, today and last night, I just happened to be checking on her. As her friend. To make sure she's all right. That no little thing, or no little pony, happens to be upsetting her. Because I also understand that when somepony is your friend and they have become upset, you are supposed to do something about it. To make the upset -- go away. So tell me, Fleur..."
He leaned in again. She didn't pull back.
"...do you upset her?"
She considered her answer.
"If I told her what you did just now? I probably would."
It made him take his second breath, pulling air past the protruding fang, and it played a melody. Eight notes, all beautiful, each completely pure, and none of which ever should have led into the others. Another partial straightening, returning to that curved, hunched posture.
"Why are you here, Fleur?"
She'd had that one ready. "I was sent by the palace --"
He snorted. Every blade of grass in the pasture died.
"Oh," he said. "Well! I know exactly what to do, then!" The talon was outstretched, that twisted arm reaching towards her just before the jovial "Hello!", followed by the worst smile in the world. "It's so nice to meet you, Fleur The Thirtieth! I'm sure we're going to be good friends! Just like One through Twenty-Nine! Such good friends, that I know they think of me often. All the time. Until they can't think of anything else. Because the palace believes they -- she? They? Oh, it could be a mutual effort, but I personally feel this one is pure Grimcess. To believe that she, and she alone, can choose my friends. I? Think some would find that offensive, I really do. But I'm working with it. And everypony she sends. Working on -- did I say on? With. I work with them until they discover the true meaning of friendship, possibly even writing a scroll about it, once they remember how to write again. Do you think any of them put down the first lesson? The one which says it can't be forced. But still, I'm sure you'll be different. You may even find a new appreciation for the little things in life. Like bear caves." He stretched paw and talon: knuckles theatrically cracked, which lost nothing for their having appeared outside his body. "Now, when last I left off with Twenty-Nine --"
"-- I'm not here," Fleur pointedly cut him off, "to be your friend."
The knuckles fell into the dead grass.
"...you're not?"
"I have," she continued, "no interest in being your friend."
She'd insulted him. She could see it in the warped features. The little sneer of distorted upper lip, the way those tattered eyebrows were moving. "Oh, really."
"I'm not here for you in any way."
She thought about what she'd said in the palace, that she could provide companionship. About having entertained the brief fantasy of having sex with this, acquiring it -- and then politely told her past self just what an idiot she'd been. She could easily spend the rest of her life kicking herself over such stupidity if such wasn't clearly a complete waste of time. And Fleur had shut down her talent before stepping onto the cottage grounds, unwilling to spend her hours there dealing with the crowding of intact animal pictures added to Fluttershy's sad blank slate. She was starting to realize that action might have been the greatest stroke of luck in her life.
"But you're from the palace," he said. "All the ones from the palace come for me. Unless --" and his tone shifted again, into something she refused to believe "-- is this a mission? Were you making her do -- whatever that was -- for a mission? Where is she going? When should she be --"
The reaction was just about instant and, as it turned out, not quite the right one. But to be fair, there were worse things Fleur could have said. To a degree, her instincts were good, because they kept the worst of the words away. She couldn't tell him everything: that felt as if it would have been the greatest of all possible mistakes, to let him know that the palace thought his friend's newborn foals would keep him controlled. But he was going to drop by. He would see things. He would wonder. And if he saw enough things, any total lie would fall apart. So she gave him a partial truth and in the end, many things would come from that.
There were worse things Fleur could have said. It could have been argued that there were no good words, and that something would have happened no matter what she chose to tell him. The right response might not have existed at all. And yet she would spend so much of her future time staring out at a stream and wondering if there were something else she could have told him. Done. Anything at all, right up until the moment he would appear behind her again.
"The palace sent me," Fleur told him, "because Fluttershy wants to start dating, and she asked for help with that. I'm here to teach her how. And that's all."
He frowned. The expression would have been comical on his face if it hadn't been so horrifying.
"Dating," he repeated.
Fleur nodded.
"Well," he shrugged, "I can take care of that! Really, she should have just said something! There's finally something she wants? Well, a friend will provide!"
And before she could chose a reaction through the fog of terror, he spit out his fang. It landed in the center of his paw, and he casually slung the browning tooth into the dead grass.
The soil exploded. Dirt rained down into Fleur's coat. Little pebbles beat against defensively-closed eyelids, and by the time she could see again --
"Yes," he decided with open satisfaction. "That should be enough."
Fleur stared across the eight body lengths, looked at the nodules of rough bark which coated the new tree. The spiny stalks, slow-waving fronds, and heavy bundles of fruits which bowed the branches down close to ground level.
Her nostrils flared, and in spite of what was going on, in spite of everything, the scent carried her home.
She slowly trotted forward. Staring at what had been made. At what almost couldn't be real. But the heavy clusters were hanging so low, she could just stretch out her neck and bite one if she just got close enough to --
"Excuse me," said the palm tree.
Fleur stopped.
"These," the tree impolitely insisted, "are Fluttershy's dates. Not yours. Where were you raised, to be so rude with somepony else's fruit?"
She glanced down, towards where the sound was coming from, and saw the mouth sticking out of the bark. A look back found half a missing skull, with vacuum covering the gap.
"Stop throwing your voice," she told him.
The mouth flashed back into existence in its proper location, along with a new fang. "It's a party trick!" he insisted, and began to walk closer. "So what do you think? Now, I know some ponies might say it's a little late in the season for dates, but really, seasons themselves? In some ways, they're a lot more recent than you might think. Making something of a comeback, you might say. But at any rate? Dates. Here they are. And so there is no longer any need for you. Seriously, why would the palace send a unicorn to grow something? Unless that mark is supposed to be the most stylized trees ever seen..."
She was still watching his approach, the shifting of the mismatched legs. (One was a little shorter than the other, giving him a hitching gait which Lens Cap would have probably charged him a trademark violation fee for.) And she sighed, making sure the sound was long, slow, and exasperated.
"Not that kind of date."
He stopped.
"So it's the time travel spell," he said. "You're taking her back, for the whole half-minute of it not doing any good or making a single difference. When?" And then, a little faster, "What did she want to see? Who --"
"-- I can't cast it." She'd never even heard of it, and every thought she could spare wanted to learn more. Time travel as a working? There were so many moments when just thirty seconds, half a scant minute given back to her would have --
'not doing any good'
-- she focused, and hated herself for having dreamed.
He was staring at her again. It was surprisingly easy to read his expressions, even when they came on a configuration of face she'd never seen before, perhaps because they were so exaggerated. Every feeling he had was writ larger than life across every grey feature. Or perhaps everything he was pretending to feel.
"I don't understand." And those words, as with so many things he'd said, were openly, childishly petulant. But they were also confused.
"Dating," Fleur said. "I'm teaching her how to date. You seriously don't know what that is?"
He blinked, and the red eyes flashed with light.
Discord vanished.
She waited several seconds and did not consider them wasted, for it was the time she needed to check the landscape. To make sure that ground was earth, sky was air, and there was nothing random in the area which would make them any other way. Of verifying that he was gone.
And then she sank into the restored grass, went down to her barrel and belly in the dirt without caring about her coat, and shivered. Trembled and shook and fought back the screams until a personal reality had been fully restored and the victory began to soak in.
...as long as I stay alert.
As long as I stay focused.
As long as I'm not afraid, I win.
I'm alive. That's how I know I won.
You would have been so proud of me...