Pinkie groaned, because everything was sore. But then she smiled wickedly because everything was sore. Twilight slept beside her. She didn’t snore, just a soft rise-and-fall of her chest. The corset was strewn about on the floor, but she’d fallen asleep with the skirt on.
Pinkie rolled out of bed, careful not to wake her. She stretched, rolling her neck, working her jaw. Wow, that was especially sore. She grinned again, letting the bone click as it settled back into place. Yeah, that was a really fun one.
Fluids. Salt and sugar. She needed those stat before she could crawl back into bed, or she’d wake up like a zombified lich mummy. With cottonmouth. She’d learned her lessons about sleeping dehydrated after her second cider season.
She had learned nothing from her first.
It took her a few steps down the stone hall, following the grooved path from Twilight’s room to the library and towards the kitchen, before she wondered why her hoofsteps weren’t ringing in her ears.
Oh yeah. She was still wearing the socks. Hee hee. What were originally meant to be sexy powers were sneaky powers now. Truly, socks were a force to be reckoned with.
Past where the groove ended at the library, down the stairs on tippy-hooves to the kitchen. Applejack had been cooking. Ooh. That was right: That wasn’t entirely on her every morning. She had a helper now.
Dining room then, and see if there was -- sniff sniff, breakfast apple strudel? -- some still left for her.
Everypony else was in the dining room when she got to the door, and she could hear them all. The doors were open, so she could see them all by looking at them through a mirror hanging on the wall. She paused. She was still sneaky-sneaky right now, and it felt like a waste to announce herself.
“Pinkie knew I was joking when I said I was giving them time off so they could hook up, right?” Applejack said in the next room, “I ain’t even mad. Just... unimpressed, I should say, is the word.”
Pinkie felt the blood rush out of her face and into her cheeks at the same time, caught halfway between the cold embarrassment of getting caught doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing, and the hot embarrassment that comes from being proud of having done it.
Then Cadance laughed. Pinkie pressed her ear to the wall as she watched their reflections. “Just be happy they gave you the courtesy. Did you see the way Twilight was looking at that sweet girl?”
“Ah, not much. Maybe a little? Didn’t see them together much.”
“My special talent is recognizing the love ponies have for each other, but even you should be able to see that Twilight looks at her like she’s the last ray of sunshine in the whole wide world.”
“It’s weird.” Rainbow Dash admitted, dipping some bread soldiers into an egg, “Before all this, Pinkie was just annoying. I mean, she was great to be around in small doses, but you couldn’t take more than that. Actually, you know what the difference is? You know how some ponies don’t think before they speak? Pinkie didn’t listen before she spoke. Now she does and every, like, fifth sentence starts with; 'Twilight said-'"
That totally wasn’t how her voice sounded. Also, hey! Also, she did kind of do that, didn’t she? She couldn’t really help it...
“You want to see something really cute?” Cadance leaned forward and stage whispered. Fluttershy tried hard not to look like she was leaning in closer to listen, as she leaned in closer to listen. “Every time Pinkie does that in front of her, Twilight goes from staring at her, to completely unable to look at her. She looks down like she got caught with the cookie jar. It’s the sweetest thing.”
Applejack grunted. “Wonder why?”
Cadance was in full gossip mode now. She was leaning forward, resting her chin in her hooves and her elbows on the middle of the table. “Because I taught her modesty, and Pinkie talks about her like she’s the smartest pony that ever lived.”
Fluttershy sipped at her orange juice through a straw, her eyes focused on nothing in particular. “They really respect each other, don’t they?”
Cadance nodded enthusiastically, overflowing.
Rainbow snorted. “So why didn’t they just, you know, doink already?”
Shining stopped mid-bite of his strudel, thumped his chest and put it back down on the plate. “Can we not say it like that...? But, knowing my baby sister, because ‘the fate of the whole world was on the line’. Every second she spent not saving the world was another second of freedom she was taking from everyone else. Her brain works like that.”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Yeah, they couldn’t have waited even a second longer...?”
Cadance snorted. “Please, are you kidding me? You’re lucky Twilight didn’t just drag her by the mane, neanderthal-style, as soon as she got some responsibility taken off her. Little ladybug was pent. Up. I bet she felt too guilty to take care of herself without permission, poor thing.”
Ooh, she was good.
“Cadance!” Shining choked on something, maybe even nothing. “My baby sister.”
“Shining, I love you and I know it’s weird to think of your sister as a sexual creature, but tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not, and that’s why I’m so upset right now.”
“Aww! That’s sweet of you to think about her so innocently. Just think how she feels about her big brother and her favourite babysitter, then.”
“Oh, geeze. I did not think that one through...”
Cadance’s smile dropped, and she looked at Applejack levelly. “Trust me, it’s much better to work with than the alternative. So don’t get annoyed when they make some transparent excuse and run off for an hour, or else you’re going to have to work with stressed-out, grumpy Twilight. We don’t want that.”
Rainbow shrugged, left with more soldiers than egg and wondering if she really wanted to eat the plain toast or not. “I mean, it’s been two years with these two locked in a broom closet together. It’d be weirder to think this wasn’t going to happen.”
“What, you reckon we would have?” Applejack said.
“Yeah, probably.”
Applejack looked her up and down, and shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I probably would have, with Rarity.” Fluttershy whispered. Everyone stared at her, and she hid behind her mane. “Well, I wouldn’t have let her be evil. I mean.”
“Huh.” Applejack rapped her strudel thoughtfully against the table, “Don’t that beat all.”
Cadance giggled. “You should see what’d happen if you locked me in a castle with the cute pink one for two years...”
“Honey!”
“I love you!”
“... I love you too.”
Pinkie’s breath had caught in her throat at that, and she exhaled slowly. Her first instinct to gasp air back in would have given her away. Quiet, slow breath back in. Cadance was giggling evilly under her breath.
Fluttershy was whispering again. “Two years of that... and she didn’t let herself...?”
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we just talked about how hard it’d be not to... fall into a... get smoochy?” Fluttershy tapped her hooves together and looked at the floor, letting her hair cover her face again. “But she thought that made her a bad pony, because she thought it was selfish to put that over the whole world.”
“Well, yeah. I guess we’ve gone over that. So what?”
“Do you think she might hate us?”
Rainbow lowered the soldier she’d given in to eating, just before she bit on it. “Woah, now. Hate us? Why hate us? What’d we do?”
“Twilight gave up so much to be here. And she kept giving it up. Don’t you think we might seem a little... ungrateful? Like, she did it all for everyone else, and we just talked down to her...”
Rainbow and Applejack held their breath. Applejack’s face twisted up.
“Yeah, but that was her choice. It ain’t like... I mean, she can’t... Dangit.”
“She’s not saying she does,” Rainbow murmured, “She’s just saying that, if I were her, I’d hate my guts right now.”
Fluttershy didn’t raise her head, not even a little. “I don’t know about that...”
“Dang it!”
“You’re here for her now,” Shining pointed out. “If you want to help, when it seems like she’s working too hard and needs to take a break, don’t tell her that. Offer to take over what she’s doing, on the condition she does something else. Probably tell her to talk to Pinkie, it seems like she’s had the most experience at this point in figuring out what my sister needs.”
Rainbow snickered. “I bet she has.”
Shining stared directly at her. Rainbow shrank behind the table a little, and crammed her mouth full of bread so she couldn’t speak.
Pinkie took that as her cue to burst in. “Good morning, everybody!”
They all stared at her. She looked down. She was still wearing the socks. There was an obvious bite mark taken out of her back right one. “Oh, you all knew.”
Applejack’s eyes never left the teeth marks as Pinkie took her seat at the table. “Twilight likes it rough, huh?”
Shining’s face fell to the table and he groaned. “Please. Please, do we have to do this?”
“It’s always the quiet ones,” Cadance said to herself wistfully. Everyone looked towards Fluttershy, whose blushing face receding below the tableline reminded Pinkie of a setting sun.
Pinkie took a big helping of mushrooms from the table. Mushrooms grew just the same as they ever did, and they made a really good, protein-heavy breakfast, which she needed. “Would you believe me if I said I was just expecting to quietly read together, and maybe some snuggling?”
Rainbow Dash burst out laughing, breathing in some toast crumbs and hacking on them in the process. Applejack and Shining actually considered her though, and Applejack nodded with her arms folded in front of her.
“Reckon I do. Nice to know you weren’t just being coy or taking advantage of me then. Not that I thought you were, mind, just... nice to know.”
Shining looked almost as incredulous as he had when Cadance had admitted to not reading Sandman. “You’re telling me that my sister did anything like that without a plan?”
“Oh! Yeah! She planned on me saying ‘no’. So when I said ‘yes’ she got way-ahead-of-herself enthusiastic. Then she had a panic attack the second she stopped to think about what she was doing.”
Shining massaged the bridge of his nose, just between his eyes, by holding his hoof still and nodding his head into it. “That is definitely Twily, yes.”
“So I phrased it like a problem to be solved instead, and told her to present her solution as a list. Then I gave her some alone time to think, but not enough to overthink.”
Shining Armor still looked like a man having a crisis, but he smiled even through the balled-up-scrunchy-face. “I understand why she likes you so much.”
Cadance head snapped up. “That’s why you were in the hall after you disappeared from the library! I knew--” Then she clamped her mouth shut and went to hide under the table with Fluttershy.
“Dearest, sweet wife of mine... were you snooping?”
“There was a big burst of love in the library, and then it just disappeared! I needed to check!” Cadance’s voice rang through the table. Pinkie ate the mushrooms and they were good. Spicy, actually. Definitely had to get the recipe for this, they’d make a great burger...
Huh? Rainbow was watching her, leaning forward, waiting for her to do something. “What?”
“Aren’t you going to get mad or something?”
“Why? She was being nice.”
Applejack tipped her hat back, making sure her smirk disappeared whenever Shining looked in her direction. “Some folks would care about modesty, privacy, that sort of thing.”
“Not me though. Just ask Fluttershy, right?”
Fluttershy squeaked, and Cadance made the noise children make when they meet a puppy for the first time. “She’s acting all flustered, while hiding under the table! Ah! Oh, sorry, this isn’t helping, is it?”
Rainbow stuck her head under the table, down periscope. “Fluttershy?”
“Pinkie wiggled her eyebrows at me, a lot, on the way to Twilight’s room. In the socks... she was very pleased with herself...”
“I was!” Pinkie said. Rainbow grinned, and Cadance bumped her hoof under the table. “I think Cadance is more hiding from her husband, cause of the whole... peeping on his little sister thing? Secret wingmare stuff?”
“I love you!” Cadance sang out under the table.
Shining’s expression was as impassive and unmoving as a cliff face. “Not coming out, yet?”
“Looove you.”
Applejack and Rainbow made the hummed ‘ah’ of understanding, and Pinkie continued to appreciate the mushrooms.
It was Applejack that seemed to consider that. “Would Twilight be okay with it. Heck, with you being so honest about it?”
“I think so. I don’t know. It’s less that she likes honesty than I don’t think she understands being dishonest.”
“Morning, everypony,” Twilight’s tone was absolutely professional as she walked into the kitchen. She’d showered, her hair was brushed to precision, and her posture was perfection. Pinkie hadn’t seen her like this since she first came to Ponyville. She looked... normal, which really wasn’t normal for her.
Twilight smiled. Everyone stared back at her silently. Cadance and Fluttershy’s heads popped out from under the table to join. Silence. Twilight’s smile clattered to the floor.
“You know?”
“We heard.” Applejack confirmed. “Before Pinkie showed up, I mean.”
Pinkie expected Twilight to blush, or get nervous. Twinge in her heart even worried she’d deny it, pretend it didn’t happen. Do the teenager getting caught with their first crush routine.
She didn’t expect Twilight to sigh, “Can’t be helped,” and kiss her on the cheek before sitting down for breakfast. It didn’t seem like anyone else did either, especially not Shining. Cadance seemed to take that as absolution, and took her seat back beside him.
Twilight took a piece of toast from the table and chewed on it. “Any questions?” She whipped around on Rainbow, whose face had lit up. “Respectful ones.”
Rainbow folded her arms across her chest, slid down in her chair, and sulked.
Pinkie raised her hoof. Her girlfriend looked at her like she’d tried to fit the whole thing in her mouth. “You can just ask, Pinkie, you don’t need permission.”
“Oh! I was just going to ask where Spike is?”
Twilight bent over and looked under the table. “He wasn’t with Cadance and Fluttershy? Hello, Fluttershy, by the way.”
“Hello, Twilight. It’s lovely to see you.”
Cadance fielded the question. “He’s in the library with some ice cream. Moondancer has been sending him notes all morning, poor thing.”
Twilight grabbed the toast, held it in her teeth, gave the room a perfunctory nod, and ran out. Pinkie had a private smile at everyone’s confusion, and even Applejack being a little offended. Shining was smiling the same way. Twilight could get used to having friends around her for the first time in two years after the important work was done.
Then Shining noticed she was smiling the same way, and he seemed to think really hard about that. He was so overprotective, it was great.
Pinkie grabbed a big pot of coffee and ran after her, waving goodbye as she did.
She followed Twilight to the library. It was super easy if you didn’t know, or if you couldn’t see because your face was full of coffee pot: all you had to do was trace the grooves in the floor back up.
The door was still open. Spike was sulking on the floor with his entire head inside an ice cream bucket. Dozens of scrolls were piled on a reading table behind him, and Twilight pored over the notes.
Spike lifted his head out of the bucket. “When she gets like this, it’s best to leave her alone and let her figure it out for herself. Trust me.”
That was... what? No. What? “The entire time you’ve known her, you didn’t get her to just... talk to you before she did something?”
Spike shrugged. “I mostly just try to be a supportive listener.”
“How many things blew up?”
“A metric butt-ton, but when Twilight gets something in her head-”
“That’s why you need to know what she’s thinking before you start getting worried. Or else it’s just going to be too late, and everything’s already on fire. Why did I think you were good at this?!”
Spike pulled himself off the floor with a shrug and dragged himself to the door, ice cream bucket pressed to his chest. “See if you do any better. I got real bad heartburn anyway... euugh.”
Then it was just Pinkie in the room with Twilight, and her pile of papers. Pinkie wasn’t quiet about coming up behind Twilight at her library desk, but Twilight didn’t even turn her head to acknowledge her.
“Wow.” Pinkie looked over the pile as she put the coffee next to Twilight. How did you stack scrolls that high without the tubes sliding around...? Practice, probably. “This is a lot of stuff.”
Twilight began drinking from the pot like it was a mug. “Most of it’s the work I sent Moondancer to look over. I’m just looking at her notes to see if she came to the same conclusions I did.”
Pinkie stuck her nose over Twilight’s shoulder trying to read whatever was on the scrolls. It was all maths and formulas and marking pen and stuff. So even when she could see it, she still couldn’t read it. “What conclusions did you come to?”
“The Tree of Harmony in the Everfree was the original source of the Elements. It’s something I kept running into in my research, it’s full of so much of Equestria’s Harmony magic. But on its own, without the Elements to channel it...”
“So, the Crystal Heart would... act like kind of a battery?”
Twilight did a teetery-wobble gesture with her hoof. “More like a capacitor. Which is sort of like a battery. The point is,” she said, tapping a part of the scroll that Pinkie assumed meant something, “Moondancer checked off on it too. The Crystal Heart is supposed to be a conduit to convert the love of the Crystal Empire into refined magic. We should be able to...”
“Able to what?”
Twilight stopped, and gave Pinkie a look of fierce and grim determination. "Pinkie, do you trust me?"
"Oh, Twilight," Pinkie sighed as she squeezed her in a tight hug, "Absolutely not. No."
Twilight flinched, but Pinkie kept hugging her tight. “How could you not trust me?”
“Because I know you, and love you to itty-bitty bits, and you were totally just thinking something like,” and Pinkie did her best Grumpy Twilight voice, “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?” She leaned back from the hug enough to watch Twilight hang her head in... strong-negative-emotion. Pinkie kissed her cheek. “And you wouldn’t ask me like that unless it was something you knew I was going to have a hard time forgiving you.”
Twilight managed to squeeze her arm out of the hug to rub her eyes against. “You know me way too well.”
“What would I have needed to forgive you for?”
“A capacitor is just a kind of battery where you release all the energy in it at once. So... a bomb. A really big bomb. Without the Elements to turn it into a ray, the next best thing we could manage would be... indiscriminate in its targeting. I wanted to make sure with Moondancer that it’d still be harmony magic and only affect evil targets but... no such luck.”
“Harmony magic in, harmony magic out though, right?” Pinkie wasn’t a scientist, but she was an optimist. Which is to say, she definitely wasn’t a scientist.
“In the quantities we’re talking about? Total molecular harmonization in a two kilometer radius. Which is bad. You don’t want all of your body to be averaged out with itself, and then with the surrounding air.”
Pinkie tried to imagine it, then tried to stop imagining it, then tried very hard to stop imagining it, and failed to stop imagining it. “Wow. What were you going to do with it. Lure her to the castle and blow yourself up?!”
You could see the realization happening in real-time behind Twilight’s eyes, from the way her pupils darted back and forth, her ears went high and still, her jaw went slack but her lips rapidly mimed words too fast to say. Then, she dry heaved, and Pinkie pushed out of the hug.
“Twilight!”
“That is... much... better than what I was going to do.”
“How?!”
“I was going to hide it under her throne, to be absolutely sure. Moondancer found some tunnels through the crystal caverns-”
“You would have destroyed all of Canterlot!”
“I know!” Twilight was somehow taking the news worse than Pinkie was, “I know, but... Years of work, of being under constant threat of annihilation, and I had a plan. With exactly one shot. I was just thinking of odds of success. I didn’t even think-”
“You would have been worse than Nightmare Moon if you did that!”
“You can remake Canterlot. And only a few thousand live in the blast radius, but the whole world is without a sun, is living under a total dictatorship. The loss of one city would have been... fine.”
“Everyone, everyone would have hated you forever and ever! You could never come out of hiding.”
Twilight was lying on the floor with her hooves over her eyes, like a scared foal. Not the kind that’s scared by monsters, but of their parents when they see the bottle’s empty. “That’s what it’s already like!”
“Except you have me, don’t you?” Pinkie panic-shouted, half angry, half confused, half trying not to make Twilight feel worse than she already did, only able to deal with two of those things at a time, “Do you think I would stay after you destroyed Canterlot?”
Twilight’s voice was weak and fragile, barely rising up from the floor without breaking. “Would you?”
“If you thought I would, you’d have told me first, instead of trying to ask around it.”
Twilight was quiet at that.
“Were you really going to do it, if I’d said I trusted you?”
“You were the only one who stayed with me for everything else. I didn’t want to lose you, but I just want all of this to be over. I need this to be over. If this was all for nothing...”
Pinkie sat down next to Twilight and rubbed the back of her head. Calming skritches, the kind that feel good when you do it to yourself but a hundred times better when someone does it for you. “We can still beat her. We’ll just find another way. Because what’s the point of winning if you don’t get to be happy after, too?”
Twilight leaned her neck back to rest it on Pinkie’s lap. She buried her face against Pinkie’s stomach and trembled.
“New rule, okay?” Pinkie said as she stroked Twilight neck, “You don’t get to do it if it doesn’t mean you get a happily ever after, too. Even if you don’t care about you, I care about you, and you care about me. So you have to care that I care.”
“Okay.”
“I promise not to tell everyone else, too.”
“Thanks.”