Aegis was still there when I closed my stand down. Sitting on an out-of-the-way bench, staring at his hooves, waiting patiently. Good or bad? I didn’t know where to begin.
He didn’t look up as I approached. He probably didn’t hear me in the rest of the crowd. I waited a minute for it to clear out a little more, then cleared my throat. “Hey.”
Aegis’s ears promptly shot up and he raised his head. He smiled for a moment, and… Well, it was one of those earnest, genuine smiles it’s impossible to fake. Pure joy. Part of me poked me in the brain, reminding me that there was a possibility he had a good reason for not showing up. It was annoying.
“Hey,” Aegis said as he climbed off of the bench. “I… I guess I kinda deserved that.” He said it sheepishly, but also with acceptance. I didn’t know whether that made me feel better or worse.
“That’s one way to put it,” I said flatly. “Coming back out of the blue after five years.”
“I-it’s not like that!” he protested. “Bluebell, I-”
“Look, Aegis, I waited a year to see you again. Then, when the day finally came, I waited for hours on that platform, hoping to Canterlot you’d be there on the next train. But whenever the next train arrived, it didn’t have you. I- It-” The words caught in my throat. “So all I gotta say is you better have a really good reason for not showing up.”
“I was attending my grandfather’s funeral.”
…
I blinked. My cheeks started glowing. “…Oh.” That was a really good reason, to say the least. “Pardon me while I extricate my hoof from my mouth.” Head, meet wall.
How could I have been so stupid? So selfish? Of course it’d be something like that. And all this time, I’d just been thinking of myself. I’d never thought to imagine that life could get in the way of us. And since we’d never exchanged addresses, he couldn’t tell me about it, either. Here I was, thinking only of my feelings, when Aegis was mourning the loss of one of his family. He’d probably forgotten me completely, and, to be honest, I’d never blame him in the slightest. Losing a family member was something I’d gone through, too, and… yeah. It’s hard.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. Already, I could feel my anger draining away and being replaced with shame. I hadn’t given him a chance to explain himself when that would’ve solved everything. I was being so self-centered it wasn’t even funny.
“It’s okay,” Aegis said. “It, it was his time anyway.”
Which wasn’t at all what I’d meant. I’d meant- And there I went again, trying to swing the conversation to be about me. Yeesh. Did I have a problem?
“He’d lived a long life,” Aegis continued, “and, and he went peacefully in his sleep, so no suffering there.” He shrugged. “That didn’t make it not hard, but it made the whole thing less hard.” He sighed and ran a hoof through his mane. “I didn’t remember our meetup until a week later, and…” He waved a hoof around. “Things happened, but… I, I just couldn’t forget you, even years down the line. Then I remembered you said lived out near Halterdale, and I came here to look for you on the off chance I’d find you, and…” He shrugged again and spread his forelegs wide. “Here I am.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. It was the only thing I could think to say. I’d spent so much time thinking about me, me, me that I had to completely reorganize my thoughts to accommodate it. And now I was going in circles about “thinking about me” trying to process it all. Wow. Did that night really affect me that much? It was only a few hours.
Aegis’s voice derailed my thoughts. “Did you, um, show up the next year?”
“What?”
“The… the next year. Did you also show up the year after I sto-”
“After your father’s funeral. You would’ve only stood me up if you’d had a choice.”
Aegis grinned. It wasn’t much, but it was far more genuine than most anything else I’d seen so far today. “Right. Yeah. Did you show up the year after that? And, um, grandfather’s funeral.”
“No.” I looked away and my cheeks started burning. “It’s, after you weren’t there the first time, I didn’t think I’d want to see you a year later.”
“Well, um, I guess…” Aegis coughed. “I guess it’s good that I didn’t show up, then, either.”
“So what’s your excuse?”
“Same as yours, kinda. Opposite reasons, but same result. I…” He swallowed. “I felt ashamed, more than anything. We’d both said we’d be there, and then I couldn’t be, b-”
“Whoa, hey.” I scooted up next to him and threw a foreleg over his shoulders. “Listen, buddy. You had a really good reason for not being there. Family comes first. I get that. You’ve got no reason to be ashamed. I don’t know wh-”
“The, the way you-”
“You know what, Aegis? Just shut up and let me talk for a moment.”
Aegis opened his mouth, paused, nodded, and mimed zipping his mouth shut.
“Okay. Aegis, I was a selfish bitch an hour and a half ago. I didn’t let you talk when that would’ve cleared everything up like right away. I was only thinking about me, and, well, you’re the one who came here, not the other way around. Don’t think it has anything to do with you, okay? It was all my fault, and I apologize.”
In the half-second between when I stopped talking and he started talking, I bit my lip in anxiety. I already knew he’d forgive me, but part of me kept saying he wouldn’t. I’d been too abrasive and brushed him off. He was only here chasing a dream and hadn’t really thought he’d find me. He was stringing me along just to drop me and mock me for thinking that he would come back. And any one of a dozen other stupid things. Of course, if all that was true, why had he waited? I thought it anyway.
Irrationality, I guess. The same irrationality that made me think he wouldn’t have a good reason for not coming.
But Aegis didn’t respond immediately. He looked at me thoughtfully for a while and licked his lips. Then he said, quietly, “I forgive you, but… did something happen in those five years? I never really saw you as the kind to be so… I dunno, bitter. I thought you’d just shrug it off or something. I mean, it almost felt like you were taking it personally.”
The funny thing was, in spite of that being a very personal question about a very specific part of my life, I had the answer all lined up. “It’s complicated,” I said, removing my leg from around his neck. “Short version, it, that night brought up a romantic side in me-” I rubbed one leg against the other and turned away. “-and then you didn’t show up next year, and that pretty much crushed the romanticism I had. And I was like, well, if that romance was a lie, even though it felt so real, then all romance is the same, and…” I turned back to him and clicked my tongue. “Yeah.”
“Ah,” Aegis said, nodding. “Sour grapes.”
“Pretty much, yeah. Let ferment for four years.”
We stood there in silence for another few moments, letting other ponies pass us by. It was still a lot to take in, especially since we’d — I’d — made amends. It’d gone smoothly, and now we were both thinking, Now what?
Aegis coughed. “So…” He managed to grin. “You said I had to have a good reason for not showing up. I had a good reason. So, you wanna, you know, go and try it again? I’ve only got a few hours before I need to leave again, but the last few hours we spent together were great.”
I turned the thought over. Somehow, it was both appealing and appalling. I’d enjoyed my time with him. I’d enjoyed it a lot. But it was five years ago. Would it actually work, or would we just be spinning our wheels, trying to recapture a lost night we got lucky on? Pretty much impossible to say. I considered this. I considered that. I hemmed. I hawed.
Aegis noticed. He looked at the ground and shuffled his hooves. “Y-you know, if, if you don’t, I mean really don’t want try, it’s, that’s fine, just, tell me.”
I decided. “Aegis, I don’t know if it’ll work. It was one night five years ago.”
“Oh,” he said quietly. “I se-”
“But we won’t know unless we try, right? So let’s try.”
His ears went up and he broke out in a grin. “Great! That’s, yeah, wow. Cool. So… what do you want to do?”
“I dunno. What do you want to do?”
“I dunno.”
Well, at least that much hadn’t changed.