Some time later, her rumbling stomach wakes Fluttershy up. She tries to stand but stumbles, dizzy and disoriented, and instead sits up against the bookshelf, taking in the room she’s landed in as she recovers. It’s tiny, the doorway leading in taking up nearly the entire wall on that side. Aside from the ones scattered on the floor, the books on the shelves are packed as tight as possible. Fluttershy blinks the weariness away to try to read the title of one of the books.
Applebloom? Why does Twilight have a book named Applebloom? She keeps looking down the row. Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Diamond Tiara. She takes a look at another part of the shelf. Octavia, Vinyl Scratch. What is this? Fluttershy reaches out and grabs the nearest book to look at the title.
Applejack.
She flips it open to the first page. The text is messy, obviously written rather than typed. Words are crossed out and replaced, notes are written in the margins. The book is very clearly a rough draft. She reads.
Applejack. An orange Earth Pony. She’s dependable, and very very friendly. I’m not entirely convinced she actually understands the concept of personal space. Still, anypony who gets to know her grows to love her. A member of the Apple family, she has a lot of responsibility with the-
Fluttershy decides to flip to a page further in.
Supposedly, Applejack actually did have a rebellious phase when she was younger. Or at least, that’s what she calls it. I would argue that making your family a peach cobbler doesn’t quite count as an act of rebellion, but she believes otherwise. Maybe it’s an Apple family thing, but I think it’s probably just an Applejack thing. She is many things, honest, hard working, dependable, orange, but one thing she is not is rebellious.
She’s not exactly a pushover, though. If she isn’t happy with something, you’ll know about it. I remember, one time, Fluttershy tried to help restore a kind of grass that was dying out in the forest and it spread into the orchard. I have never seen somepony actually lecture Fluttershy, it was something else.
Fluttershy cringes. She remembers that vividly. Applejack berated her for hours, talking about food chains and invasive species, telling Fluttershy she should know better. She was right, of course. Fluttershy has given ponies that same lecture, but sometimes her heart manages to beat out her mind.
What Twilight didn’t see was the hours after the lecture, after Applejack calmed down. How Fluttershy had tried to go home to stew in her guilt, and Applejack hadn't let her. Instead she made Fluttershy spend the afternoon with the Apple family, talking and having fun until the anxiety was pushed to the back of Fluttershy’s mind.
It didn’t fix things, Applejack knew that, but it made it that much easier for Fluttershy to process everything. Twilight is right, ponies don’t often confront Fluttershy about things, but Applejack wasn’t being reckless. She never would have come down on her like that if she wasn’t positive Fluttershy would be able to handle it with some help.
A smile creeps onto Fluttershy’s face as she reads through the story of her friend’s life as told by Twilight. She gets lost in it, reliving all of her fondest memories of Applejack. The good times and the bad, all the little moments that make friendship so special. It isn't until she reaches the final page that she realizes just how much she's read, but she doesn't hesitate to grab a new book to start all over.
It’s as she’s staring at the cover of that second book, titled Fluttershy, that her stomach really starts to cause a fuss. Pain racks her gut, followed by nausea. She struggles for several minutes, deep breaths and tight muscles straining against the hunger, before she’s able to recover enough to stand up.
Her legs are still shaky, but she’s spent too much time here already. She grabs the book with her name and sets back off into the library. She looks around, trying to get her bearings. Just a long, nondescript hallway. No doors aside from the one she just came through, no signs to direct her. To her right, an empty hall stretching to a corner, and to her left the same.
Except it’s not the same. As she strains her vision, Fluttershy catches sight of something. A tiny, hardly noticeable thing, lying on the floor. The minuscule, frayed end of a broken string. She rushes forward, hardly believing her eyes, but as she rounds the corner she sees that it’s real. Somehow, she’s stumbled back upon her lost trail.
She doesn’t even dare to pick up the thread as she follows it, lest she accidentally break it again. She just walks, eyes glued to her salvation. Through rooms and hallways, intersections and straightaways. It takes her at least another hour to finally get back, not helped by her stomach making her too weak to walk from time to time, but finally, finally she breaks out back into the main library. She would break down in tears on the spot if not for the incessant badgering of her body pulling her towards the kitchen.
It’s dark outside as she stands in the kitchen, eating with neither a plate nor a table. She pays the night no mind, devouring her food. She finishes a sandwich, then makes another, and finishes that. The darkness stares her down as she eats, but she has neither energy nor attention to give it.
After she finishes making a third sandwich, she decides to get a plate and sit at a table. She grabs her food and her book off the counter and heads over to the nearest reading table, the one she had tied her lifeline to, but freezes when she realizes the table isn’t empty.
There’s a note. A note that she didn’t put there. A note being held down by a pair of scissors. Her hooves trembling, she puts her food and book on the table and moves to read the note. Only a single word.
Gotcha.