Sunset woke up to an empty bed. It took all of three seconds to become completely awake, look around, and locate Wallflower: she was sitting cross legged on the floor, her back to Sunset, in a familiar spot.
Sunset crawled off of the bed and across the floor quietly. She wasn’t aiming for stealth, but it seemed to have had that effect. Though, truthfully, she couldn’t tell if Wallflower hadn’t heard her, or if Wallflower were simply in an unresponsive state.
Sunset didn’t need to look at the section of floor Wallflower was intently staring at. She didn’t need to see the memory stone, retrieved again from its hiding place.
Sunset maneuvered to give Wallflower a quick kiss --a peck on the temple, just in front of her right ear-- and then settled into her own familiar place: seated on the floor behind Wallflower.
“You don’t want to do that,” Sunset said.
“How do you know what I want?” Wallflower asked.
It hurt to hear her voice so . . . dead. There was nothing there. The flatness would give Maud Pie’s voice a run for its money if not for the tint of utter despair.
Still, no matter how much it hurt to hear, it was a question, and thus Sunset would have to give an answer.
“Experience,” she said. “I’d like to think that I know you well enough to make that call.”
Wallflower didn’t turn toward Sunset; she didn’t move at all. She just kept on looking at the stone.
“I could make it go away,” she said. “All of it. I could make them all forget that the Rainbooms accused you.” Her voice showed signs of life: it started to speed up, “I could make everyone forget everything that made them think you even might be Anon-a-Miss. I could make them forget they hate you. I could make them forget they want to hurt you. I could make them forget that it’s open season on Sunset Shimmer. I could--”
“You could get overwhelmed,” Sunset said. “You could lose control.”
“You don’t know that.” Something about the way that had been said made Sunset think Wallflower would turn to face her. Wallflower didn’t move. “There’s a solution right in front of us,” she said. “I could fix things.” There was real hope in her voice now. “Why not try?”
“Why risk it?” Sunset asked. “You know what happened to me.”
“You turned into a raging she-demon,” Wallflower said; “you only mention it every fifteen minutes.”
Sunset said, “Forget the transformation!” Then she realized she’d been shouting, and said, “Everyone focuses on the transformation,” at a more usual volume.
“Because they follow your lead,” Wallflower shot back.
“Look,” Sunset said, then paused a moment to figure out what to say next. “Demon, human, unicorn-- it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I used more magic than I could control, and it took control.” Sunset took a breath, shook away unpleasant thoughts and memories, and said, “I tried to murder someone.”
A small nod was the first time Wallflower acknowledged Sunset’s presence with her body rather than her voice.
“That’s not me. That’s never been me. Even at my worst, it’s not something I would ever consider,” Sunset said. “But when I put that crown on I lost myself.
“I was angry; I became a demon. I was perturbed at the fact that I’d lost control of the school; I used mind control on the entire student body. I was pissed the fuck off at Twilight Sparkle; I tried to kill her.” Sunset paused a moment. “All of the parts of me that might have said, ‘No,’ to any of those things were shut off. I was a monster --not because of the claws, but because everything that made me more than a collection of base desires had been overwhelmed and cast aside.”
“Exactly,” Wallflower said.
Sunset had no idea how to respond to that and, after a few moments, just parroted back, “Exactly?” in the form of a question.
Wallflower looked back at Sunset, over her shoulder, and said, “You tried to use the element when you were in the wrong state of mind, and everything went wrong.” Wallflower returned to looking at the memory stone. “If I use the stone while I’m calm, with a single clear objective in mind-- think about it Sunset.
“You were drowning in emotions and being pulled in three different directions,” Wallflower said. “That’s why things went wrong: you didn’t have something to hold onto. Something to remind you why you were doing what you were doing. If you’d had the element when you were able to clear your mind of everything but the desire to be an alicorn, who’s to say it wouldn’t have worked?”
“Who’s to say it would?” Sunset asked.
“It’s worth a try,” Wallflower said. “Every day I see you, and you’re so . . . broken. You’ve never been . . . you’re not supposed to be this way Sunset. You’re the strongest person I know.” Sunset couldn’t see her face, but she knew Wallflower was crying now. “This is all wrong.”
“You’re talking about a massive magical procedure,” Sunset said. “Mental manipulation of everyone at CHS, and probably a smattering of others from the greater Canterlot area, all with surgical precision. On top of that, the ideal time to do it is when the vast majority of them are asleep, so they’re going to be scattered around the city in their beds, not congregating in easily zapped locations. You'd need to find each one of them first.”
Sunset paused for long enough that most people would have thought she'd finished speaking; Wallflower didn't interrupt.
“The stone itself isn’t smart enough to do any part of that,” Sunset said. “It can’t identify the targets, it can’t find them, and it certainly can’t go through the high level reasoning necessary to determine what to take out and then separate those things from the ones that ought to be left in.
“That means it’s going to use your brain to get the job done. It won’t ask, it’ll just channel all of that magic through your head so that it can use your grey matter as the hardware for its software. It’ll rewire you, and --since it won’t tell you what it did-- you’ll have no way to check if it put things back to normal afterward.”
Sunset took a breath.
“And that’s not even the point,” she said. “The point is that, regardless of whether the brain stuff is a problem in itself, there’s no way to do what you want without channeling the magic through you. All of it. No matter how clear your mind or precise your goal, there's no changing the fact you’ll be hitting yourself with more magic than a human being should ever face.”
Wallflower would know Sunset was finished with her mini-rant, Sunset was sure. She'd know it without having to wait long enough to see if Sunset resumed. It was refreshing not to have to tell someone, “I’m not done yet,” and “Ok, now I’m done,” when she got into these kinds of conversations.
“If it could make you happy,” Wallflower said, “it’s worth the risk.”
Sunset didn’t know what to say to that. Before she figured out, Wallflower added, “Besides, maybe I could take it. Maybe I’d be fine.”
Sunset let out a rough breath. There was a chance she might be crying soon.
“You’re already being affected by leakage,” Sunset reminded Wallflower. There was an urgency there that she couldn’t hide, and she didn’t know if she wanted to. “It’s why people have a hard time remembering you even when you don’t use the stone.”
Wallflower nodded.
“The kind of output you’re talking about is unprecedented,” Sunset continued, “there’s no telling what the side effects could be. You’re talking about . . . how to human terms this?”
Sunset took a moment, not so much to figure out the human terms to use, but just to keep herself somewhat close to calm. She was getting worked up enough that hyperventilating would be a risk.
Wallflower was right. This was all wrong. Sunset Shimmer and hyperventilating weren’t supposed to go together.
Once she had her breathing under control, Sunset said, “You’re talking about finding out a reactor is leaking dangerous radiation, even when it’s running at the lowest --safest-- levels, and then cranking it up 300%. Even if it doesn’t explode, the results won’t be pretty.”
“Nuclear reactors don’t explode, Sunset,” Wallflower said. “They melt down.”
“The point, love,” Sunset said with heavy sarcasm, “you are missing it.”
“Nothing’s getting better,” Wallflower said. “Maybe we need to take bigger risks.”
“And what if, after you do this, the side effects get to the point where I can’t remember you?” Sunset asked.
“You’ll have your old friends back. You’ll be the most popular girl in the entire school: the star of everyone’s favorite redemption story.” Wallflower paused. “You won’t need me.” Another beat of pause. “You’ll be fine.”
Sunset hadn’t been thinking about herself. At all. So she asked, “What about you?”
“I can make it all go away,” Wallflower said. In a sense they’d come full circle: Wallflower had started by saying, more or less, that. But this time was different. It was disturbing in a way that Sunset couldn’t quite identify.
Sunset was afraid, and she didn’t know why.
“What if I made myself forget how to breathe?” Wallflower asked. She was serious.
Sunset considered pointing out that breathing was primarily an involuntary action, and therefore it was probably impossible to forget how to breathe. She decided that had nothing to do with the point.
“Wall--” Sunset didn’t even make it to the second syllable.
“Or forget that eating is a thing,” Wallflower said. Again, she was completely serious. This was a viable option in her mind. “It doesn’t have to involve injury, you know. I could just forget what it means to be Wallflower Blush. Forget school, forget being alone, forget being ignored, forget gardening, forget . . . everything.
“I could be just a Jenny Doe with amnesia at Canterlot General,” Wallflower said. “Every time I tried to give myself a fresh start before, I held back. I didn’t go all the way. Maybe what I’ve needed all this time is a truly blank slate.”
“What about me?” Sunset said. “How do you think I’d feel about losing my girlfriend, my best friend, my only friend?”
“You wouldn’t need me anymore,” Wallflower said, “so you wouldn’t need to remember me. You wouldn’t need to suffer at all.” Sunset had felt the way Wallflower sounded right now. She knew the emotion well.
This was ‘I’m heading to the roof, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be jumping when I get there’ territory. That, actually, gave Sunset an idea.
Wallflower knew that Sunset had bad times. She knew that Sunset thought about hurting herself. She didn’t know everything, though. Sunset had tried to balance honesty with the fact she didn’t want Wallflower to worry, and the result was that everything she’d told Wallflower was true, but she always stopped short of telling the whole truth.
Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe Wallflower needed to know that Sunset had been there, and that she knew what it was like.
“Wallflower,” she said. No response. “Wallflower,” she repeated more loudly. Nothing. “Wallflower I need you to look at me.” Nada.
Sunset took hold of Wallflower’s shoulders and --firmly, but not with enough force to cause pain-- spun Wallflower to face her.
“Wallflower,” Sunset said, releasing her shoulders and looking her in the eyes for the first time this conversation, “what if I jumped off the roof?”
Wallflower’s eyes went wide.
“You know how much I like it up there,” Sunset said. “It’s not like there’s a big wall around the place. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to just,” she moved a hand sideways in a quick gesture and said a non-word that sounded like, “whhuut.” She paused, but not long enough to let Wallflower interrupt.
“There’d be a bit of stumbling on the inclined section,” she said, “but it is, in a very real sense, all down hill.” Wallflower was looking increasingly distraught. “Once I get passed that, it’s just a few seconds of freefall, and then all my problems are solved.”
“Suns--” Wallflower said.
This, probably, would have been a good place to stop, and possibly reflect on whether that had been even close to a good way to broach the topic. Sunset kept right on going.
“And don’t worry about being sad,” she said. “You can use the stone to forget everything you ever liked about me,” Sunset more or less repeated her earlier gesture, but this time the tips of her fingers started out touching her head, which she hoped gave a sense of memories being removed, and said, “whhuut,” again --it occurred to her that, perhaps, ‘woosh’ would have been a better sound effect, but she was in the middle of a sentence and so didn’t have time to dwell on it, “and there will be nothing for you to be sad about.”
That, very much, did not put Wallflower at ease. If anything, the horror showing on her face had grown.
“Or, you know,” Sunset said, “I could do it preemptively. You wouldn’t remember ever having met me, so when you heard that I’d died it would be unpleasant, in the way that news of suicide always is, but not in any way personal. Certainly not devastating.”
“Sunset,” Wallflower said, “I don’t . . . no. You can’t do that.” When she added, “You won’t do that,” it was clearly a command.
“But what if?” Sunset said. “It’s not like there’s anything that’s really standing in my way. It’s definitely an option.”
“Don’t consider it, don’t imagine it, don’t even think about it,” Wallflower said. “You are not allowed to kill yourself. The only reason for you to ever bring this topic up again is if it’s to say, ‘Wallflower, I need help to stop thinking about this.’”
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it,” Sunset said, now somber, “but I have something, not involving hurting myself, that I want to suggest.”
“What?” Wallflower shouted with volume and anger that Sunset thought was uncalled for. Apparently Wallflower felt the same way, because she said, “Sorry, kind of worked up right now,” before asking, “What?” again without any anger and at a more appropriate volume.
“I want to . . . propose a deal,” Sunset said.
It might have been a good idea if she’d put thought into how she was going to actually phrase this earlier. Obviously it was too late for that, so she decided to just blunder on and hope it worked out. Given how simple the idea was, it would probably work.
“A quid pro quo, as it were,” Sunset said. “I’ll never suggest killing myself again. If I can’t convince myself that jumping is a non-option on my own, I’ll come to you and we’ll work through it together.” It was pretty clear that Wallflower liked things so far. “In return, you don’t suggest lobotomizing yourself. Ever. If you start to think about it, you either stop it on your own or you come to me--”
Wallflower said the final words with Sunset, “and we’ll work through it together.”
“I . . .” Wallflower said. After a few moments of silence she tried again, “If it’s what it takes to keep you from hurting yourself, then I guess . . .”
Wallflower looked away. “It’s just that everything stays the same,” she said. “Things aren’t improving. This might never end. I see you hurting so much. I want you to be happy, Sunset. I want you to smile, and laugh and . . . and dance, or something. I want this mess to be over. I want it so much.”
“Look,” Sunset said. Then she reconsidered. “Or don’t look. I‘d prefer you to look, but you don’t have to. I just need you to listen to me.” Wallflower did look, allowing Sunset to look her in the eyes again.
This had to be right, Sunset thought, so taking a moment to think over the words seemed worthwhile. Once that moment was taken, Sunset --stilling looking Wallflower in the eyes-- did her best.
“Things aren’t good. And they’re not happy. And they’re not what either of us would have chosen. But, Wallflower,” Sunset didn’t exactly take Wallflower’s hands in her own, it was more that she gently grasped the green girl’s wrists, “they’re enough.”
For a moment nothing happened. “They’re enough,” Sunset repeated.
Wallflower nodded. “So,” she said, “I don’t zap, and you don’t jump, and we both just . . . survive.”
Sunset nodded.
They ended up hugging, and they fell asleep on the floor still holding one another.