Fluttershy lived in the residential area of the Moths, a peaceful middle-class estate. Though each houses had to respect very precise rules about the colors of shutters and walls, the heights of hays and fences, as well as the mailboxes aspect, the whole didn’t give the impression that no habitation was different from the other.
Her family had found a cottage a little in the background, nearby a charming little wood where lived all kind of critters, which ravished Fluttershy’s heart. One of the advantage of this house was its wider garage, able to take in many vehicles without being overcrowded.
Zephyr had no means of transportation, and always relied on his parents or Big Macintosh to go to the city, and Fluttershy had chosen bus over the stress to drive on her own, and to be exposed to the unmerciful eyes of the other chauffeurs. In the familial garage, there only was her mother’s Mini and her father’s Sedan, which let enough room for both Pinkie Pie’s Beetle and Rainbow Dash’s scooter but obliged Applejack to leave her stately SUV in front of the house.
If they had chosen to go at their friend’s place, it was for very practical reasons. Time on their hands after class was not that long and each spot they usually liked to hang around sent them back to memories they wanted to avoid.
It wasn’t the slumber party Fluttershy secretly dreamed about, but that was already fantastic…
Each time her gang came to spend time with her in her house, she was feeling proud and happy. After she had spent almost seventeen years never rubbing shoulders with anyone, because she was too daunted to make acquaintances and that all the ones she had spoken with had abused her kindness one too many, she finally felt she belonged in a tight band.
Well… Tight is what she always thought they were until this morning. Though they were acting as if everything was fine and nothing special had happened, they knew things weren’t the same. Without Twilight by their side, they were like an amputee still having the sensation of feeling the gone limb.
When they went past the doorstep, they all were welcomed by a cheerful smile from their friend's mother, that they liked to call Mrs. Shy. It was a woman as reserved and delicate as her daughter, and if no one had met her father yet, she herself said he was the nicest of men. For a long while, they had insisted that their daughter should go out more, to meet many other people, which had led Fluttershy to the drastic decision they all knew about, but the team had quickly realized she had probably overstated this point in her mind.
It was a proof that she truly was worthy of belonging to this group…
Fluttershy came and kissed her mother on her cheek, then warned she took juice and a few cookies and that her friends and her would climb upstairs in order not to bother her more.
“I’m not bothered at all to hear about your adventures… It reminds me of when I was younger.”
Unable to restrain, Fluttershy felt her cheeks burn, while her friends laughed of what wasn’t entirely a joke. Indeed, her mother was keen of hearing young people speak, saying it was comforting, especially in view of the future of the world.
Nonetheless, Fluttershy was always afraid that a potentially embarrassing word would accidentally cross one of the girls’ lips, and that her mother would be shocked.
Not that she didn’t trust them. That was just what she was made of – always too easy to scare.
“We’re going upstairs, mom, don’t worry. We’ll be more comfortable in my room.”
“Well, as you wish… But wait… There’s one of you missing, isn’t it?”, she asked as everyone had started to climb the stairs.
Obviously, the one she should have beware of was her own mother, because she had just planted her knife inside a sensitive spot. She feared the worse…
“No, no one’s missing. We’re whole”, Rainbow Dash assured.
“Oh, really? I thought that…”
The announcement let Mrs. Shy a bit lost for words since it had been said with such a confidence. At the same time, as if avoiding as much as possible to go into detail about this subject, Rainbow Dash had hurried to reach the upper floor.
However, she didn’t really take offense and went back to her reading of Canterlot’s number one daily newspaper, the way she did every day when she was back from work. After all, her daughter’s High School stories were none of her business, although she often took pleasure in hearing them.
As soon as they were in Fluttershy’s room, they all settled on her green carpet looking like a patch of luxurious lawn, sitting around the plate of cookies and juice briquettes she had brought upstairs with them. Of course, though they had chosen to come here partly hoping it would help them thinking about something else, Twilight was the main subject of the conversation that followed.
“Maybe ya been a lil’ too harsh here now, Rainbow Dash”, Applejack started.
“It sounds like we’ll never talk to Twilight again”, Fluttershy added giving everyone something to drink.
“It would be really, really, really, really, really too sad!”
“I’m sorry, girls, but I’m not the one who decided we were better off without her. She’s the one who rejected us. If she misses us, it’s her who’d have to come and ask us to forgive her and not the other way.”
“Don’t ya think we should think things through? We’ve known each other for so long.”
“As you say, AJ. We’ve known each other for so long. That’s why it left a sour taste in my mouth. What? She was glad we were here until now.”
It had to be acknowledged. In view of her aggressiveness and bitterness level, Rainbow Dash wasn’t about to renege on her words, just like Twilight seemed to have made up her mind.
“But we were so tight”, Pinkie added once again, biting into a cookie unenthusiastically – that was a first.
“We might not be as tight as we thought. 0,5 points are enough to say goodbye to all these things, obviously.”
“It makes me feel so sad I could cry.”
“Don’t ya weep, Fluttershy, ya still got us.”
From sadness and anger, though she had to beware not to eat too much carbohydrates in order to stay fit and more particularly not to get sick, Rainbow Dash gobbled two white chocolate and cranberries cookies at the same time. They all looked at her, flabbergasted, and her cheeks full of cakes, she only shrugged and looked away.
Talking about Twilight systematically created a lump inside her stomach which she wasn’t able to get rid of, even if she swore she didn’t care or that she didn’t deserve her grief. Twilight had been there in the worst moments of her life, and even had been the one at the start of the friendship bracelets… She was her friend, although everything seemed to separate them, this plot twist was one more deception, and the pill was hard to swallow.
With Applejack, after a rivalry of a few weeks, they had turned inseparable since sixth grade, and Rainbow Dash had often felt very sorry about the fact her friend had lost her both parents, unaware that she herself would lose her mother then.
During seventh grade in Middle Canterlot, they had made acquaintance with a class almost entirely composed of students they never talked to before. Twilight, with her glasses, books and painstaking character, had quickly appeared to be labeled as the Egghead HQ. Her awfulness at sports hadn’t helped her popularity, and on a regular basis, she had become a punching bag for a handful of girls, and this despite the fact she could defend herself with words.
Unfortunately for her, it was in action she didn’t know how to defend herself, and bullying had turned to be as much verbal than physical. First, the two young girls had only stayed where they were not sure whether yes or no they had to help the bullied.
One morning, a speaker had come to visit each and every classes to talk about moral and physical bullying at school. Applejack as much as Rainbow Dash, unlike many other persons from their own class, had a brain wave. Not to intervene was being accomplice.
From then, they had reacted and defended Twilight. Rainbow Dash had even gone as far as fighting with the girls, which had given her detention hours, and a lot of reproaches from her father – as well as a reputation of tough cookie.
It was a bit later that Twilight had arrived with a bracelet for each of them, that she had called the friendship bracelet. The goal was to choose an item representing each of them. It was supposed to work like a secret deal, like an invisible bond between them.
After her mother’s death, during the Green Haven period, Rainbow Dash had held onto this small silver chain, spurred on by desperation, or rather by expectation. It had represented the light at the end of the tunnel, the prospect of a new brighter day, by her friends’ side, that she regarded as the sisters she never had.
This all, struck out like silly mistakes on a notebook stained with ink. Maybe it was just on the spur of the moment, and that Twilight was going to change her mind the morning after, but the fact she had decided to part from them was unbearable. She felt it like a treason.
Yes, she still loved her like her own sister, yet even in the tightest of families, there could be truncations. The change had to come from Twilight and nobody else but Twilight. It was up to her and no one else to get things straight by apologizing, of this, she wouldn’t relinquish.
It probably wasn’t the best moment to choose to pester her. Unfortunately, that was the moment Zephyr Breeze chose, on day off and having learned by his mother of Rainbow Dash’s presence under his roof, to try something with the one he was determined to seduce.
Not even knocking, he stepped into Fluttershy’s room while the girls still were talking about Twilight and rushed to back hug Rainbow Dash.
“How’s the most beautiful girl in the world? I’m so happy you came to see me. What if you visited my bedroom?”
The multicolor-haired girl clasped her jaw. She knew she wasn’t home, and that it was of a peculiar rudeness to get angry after the inhabitants of the house she was invited to… Except Zephyr held her so tight against him she could hardly breath and all her friends looked at her with a mix of anxiousness and hilarity. She didn’t need more to explode and to be trapped by this impulsiveness that sometimes scared her.
She grabbed some teddy bear within reach and started to hit the young man’s face. The worse was that no one picked at it, even when she accompanied her actions with scowling words. Which, mentioned in passing, wouldn't discourage Zephyr from making advances. The more aggressive she was, the more he thought she was crazy for him unawares.
For their part, the three girls agreed on one fact. For her to react this way to something she would have chosen to ignore usually, she might be really concerned about what was happening with Twilight.
There had to be a way to fix things. But what way? When Twilight was determined, especially about something as crucial as her academic future, it was really hard to make her change her mind. As for Rainbow Dash… As stubborn than a mule, she would refuse to do anything in order to prevent the situation to linger on.
---------------------------------------------
It’s been a few weeks that, when Sunset Shimmer left her classroom, she was lighthearted. There was not a day when Applejack, Twilight, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash didn’t wait for her to come and have lunch with them. When classes were over, same thing.
In her own classroom, no one took her into consideration. Their indifference remained deep, even after all this time, and if she dealt with it with the same confidence, she had to admit that meeting her little bunch of friends did her a world of good, though she wasn’t sure whether or not they considered her as one of them.
She wanted to believe that if she didn’t rush things out, if she let them get used to her softly, and if she showed them how much she had learned from her past mistakes, one day, they would give her the sign she was waiting for.
Not to see anyone waiting by her classroom like every day made Sunset Shimmer feel blue as she never had felt since a long while.
The evening before, the same phenomenon had happened and she had said to herself that maybe she had missed them and that a part of them might already be at their extra curriculum activities, but when she had reached the usual spot where they met each other, she hadn’t seen anyone. A little dejected, she had gone back home like in bad old times, hoping it was nothing but a missed opportunity.
On her way to the cafeteria, Sunset Shimmer couldn’t help asking herself questions. Had she said or done something wrong? That was how things had started to go astray with her former bunch of friends…
No, she had to stop thinking stuff like that. The band was different, they had a real connection and sense of friendship, they would never do something so little, especially with Applejack’s sharp honesty.
When she went inside the queue with her tray, her first reflex was to check out whether one of the girls weren’t waiting as well. All she would have to do was to follow her in order to meet the others, but if it wasn’t possible, she would have to find their table on her own. Maybe they would even spot her by themselves and would call her so she would join.
Between the tomato, cucumber, cheddar salad and the grilled avocadoes with parmesan, yet, she had the chance of intercepting a conversation between the two chatterboxes Lyra and Sweetie Drops that, although it was none of her business, brought a different light on the mystery that was haunting her so much.
“I swear, my friend Octavia who’s in their class told me this morning they argued yesterday, and that Rainbow Dash had left and skipped classes after that…”
“What could have happened?”
“Don’t know. They’ve been in the doghouse ever since. The whole bunch had gone to have lunch at the stadium’s bleachers with a lunchbox instead of eating here, except Twilight Sparkle, on her own…”
“It’s not a surprise that the whole school talks about it. Everybody thought those ones were like sisters.”
An argument… If she had to be completely honest, Sunset Shimmer had to admit she had seen more than once girls of the group squabbling, often on trifles. Until then, none of these disagreements had been serious to the extent of creating a split. Conflicts were eased as quickly as they sketched since in the end every of them knew their differences was the spice of their friendship.
If they didn’t want to talk to Twilight anymore, it meant that something very serious had happened. Of course, she wished she’d have been told yet she knew the fact they had received her in their circle didn’t mean their deep friendship was acquired. It was the kind of bond that were forged with time, and was tested through thick and thin.
Perhaps they had thought this would be too delicate a situation for her, to be caught between two stools.
Whatever it was, Sunset Shimmer knew she couldn’t stand idly by her friends in a huff. There must be a way to reverse the trend, to make sure the five friends would remain as tight as they ever been. She was nothing but an honorary member and couldn’t pretend to be an ace in psychology but in all honesty she hoped to help things to change.
Since Twilight was the only one having lunch at the cafeteria, she was the one Sunset Shimmer decided to find and speak with. The young woman wasn’t that complicated to spot, since she insisted on an almost regular basis to go to school with her hair tied in a bun.
She had withdrawn in a corner of the canteen, at the end of the table where no one paid attention at her, and with a book opened in front of her, she was reading while sipping an apple juice – from Applejack’s family brand.
When Sunset Shimmer sat in front of her, first, she didn’t notice her, in all likelihood plunged into her reading. What she read, the young fire-haired woman didn’t know but it looked so fascinated she had barely touched her sweet potato and beet burger.
“What are you reading, Twlight?” she asked with as much benevolence as she could.
The teenager rose her purple eyes to look at her fellow, surprised that someone talked to her in a way so nice.
Since yesterday, Twilight had the bad impression that no one cared about her anymore, now she wasn’t hanging around anymore with those who always been her best friends. As if she wasn’t interesting when by herself. It was a shame, especially as she regarded herself as worthy with or without the group. They weren’t one and only entity after all, but a bunch composed and diverse and various characters. In fact, it even was the particularity of it.
She might well say or do anything, she would always go back to them…
“What I’m reading? Some book for school.”
This answer wasn’t anything like Twilight Sparkle. Books were her very first love, the most important of her life, no matter which boy would step into her world. She had read before anyone else, and always read more than anyone else. Novels, poems, essays, biographies, scientific articles, she liked everything and tried everything. For her, a book never was “some book”, it was a universe full of lessons about life and data to remember.
She had to find a way to address the topic that truly was important. In order for it to work, it was necessary that she wouldn’t hurt Twilight’s feelings or that she wouldn’t be too coarse or too subtle. The balance wasn’t very easy to find.
How would one of the girls do? Fluttershy would probably intersperse her request with polite formulations that wouldn’t quite invite to confession… Pinkie Pie wouldn’t even realize when she’d put her foot in her mouth… As for Rainbow Dash and Applejack, with their similar characters, they would not beat around the bush, and would get results, but this wasn’t the way Sunset Shimmer wanted to take. She didn’t know Rarity so well but it seemed to her she would say what she wanted to say with an elegance likely to sweeten the pill.
It wasn’t sure that she would be able to do such a thing. Maybe the best was to use her own method. If she wanted to be integrated, she had to stay true to herself, and not trying to borrow a style to the others. It was one of the lessons of friendship she had learned with the group.
“Don’t take it personally, Twilight… I’ve heard rumors about you and the other girls…”
“Uh, uh”, she answered staring unenthusiastically at her plate.
“And since you’re on your own, and I haven’t seen the rest of the band at the end of morning classes, I was wondering…”
“How true the rumors were?”
Sunset Shimmer nodded. It wasn’t the ideal way to get it started yet it was hers, and it seemed the method paid off. At least, she hadn’t upset her fellow, who sighed long and deeply, never taking her eyes off the barely eaten food on her tray.
“My grades are a little lower than what they were last year and I’m utterly convinced that I focus less on my studies than I did before that’s because I’m hanging around with the girls and that a thousand of things always happen with them… So, it’s more than probable that I’ve provoked the situation by telling my friends it would be better for me to stay all alone for a while.”
At least, no doubt could subsist. From the little she knew about the personality of each, Sunset Shimmer wasn’t that surprised that Twilight’s decision to go solo wasn’t to everyone’s liking.
The young women could have satisfied herself with this answer and to stay in the background, but in front of her friend’s gloomy and discouraged face, she understood her choice wasn’t as satisfactory as she would have thought. She didn’t have the cheerful attitude of someone unburdened from some heavy load.
It was in situations as such that true friendship manifested. Good moments, joys and laughs could connect people together. Ordeals shared together were the cement which reinforced the whole.
“I’m maybe wrong but I don’t feel as if you’re fine with your decision.”
“In fact… When I took my decision, everything was clear in my mind. I knew what I was doing. I don’t want to disappoint those who believe in me, like Principal Celestia and my parents… My brother had had a royal scholarship paying his whole tuition fees and everything, what has allowed him to choose the career he always dreamed of, and that’s my main goal. But for this, you have to be at least in the top three of your promotion, to have reference letters from every teacher… It’s very tough, when you’re someone like me, who’s awful in sports.”
“Do you really think this solution’s the best?”
“Yes, that’s what I thought. Now I’m no longer that sure. I’m lost. For example, I’ve been reading the same page since I’ve begun lunch. Last night I haven’t been able to memorize half of my notes. I can’t stop thinking about my friends, about our arguments, and so I’m unable to concentrate… or to eat anything.”
The gap between what the rumors said and the truth was striking. It wasn’t a simple gossip exchanged between two classes, which could be mocked for its triviality. It came from a real awkwardness and each part in question suffered from it.
Sunset Shimmer was glad she asked Twilight and satisfied of the open-hearted answer she got. She was utterly convinced she wouldn’t have confessed this way to someone else, someone for whom she had little to no consideration. It wasn’t like getting the bracelet yet, but it already was a great step forward.
In fact, she quickly noticed her fellow hadn’t taken her chain off her wrist. This dispute couldn’t go on. There still was a lot of love between every of them.
“I’m probably not the best to give lessons of friendship, but it seems it really hurts you and it doesn’t help in your studies, so maybe you should go and speak with the girls, shouldn’t you?”
Once again, Twilight sighed deeply, nonetheless for the first time since their conversation had begun, she looked into Sunset Shimmer’s eyes.
“I’ve thought about it… But I’m afraid it wouldn’t change a thing. You don’t know how stubborn Applejack and Rainbow Dash can be. Let’s imagine Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie chose to forgive me, but not the two others. What would I do? I don’t want to break the band even more. Maybe it’s best things stay the way they are. Too bad for me.”
Twilight’s point of view was valid, which didn’t stop Sunset Shimmer from thinking it was a waste of time. Deep inside, she was convinced that despite the teenagers’ obstinate sides, they would be able to make up with their friend, to forgive her for trying to go her own separate way.
Might it be how they have met Pinkie Pie or even the way they accepted her as a part of their bunch though she had taken part in illegal actions that could have had very serious consequences, they had proved to her many times they were endowed with a will to forgive and to give a second chance to those who deserved it.
Twilight had made a mistake and was now regretting it bitterly. If she explained precisely how she felt, for sure, her friends would take her back.
Twilight thanked her for listening, and admitted it felt good to confess to her, nonetheless, when Sunset Shimmer proposed to go back to class with her, the young woman insisted to go alone. She didn’t want to put her in a delicate position with the others, as if they were two separate clans, and she had chosen hers.
A bit later, as she was still ignored by her own classmates, Sunset Shimmer thought about the whole matter again, inevitably, she started to think about what she could do to get lines of this new status quo moving, because it was of an incredible sadness.
If she also was convinced of something, it was that such a beautiful friendship couldn’t be broken like a fragile branch under the autumn wind. There had to be something she could do to fix this problem. It was her duty as a friend, of this as well she was certain.