Of all the bakeries in all the world, she’d probably say, you had to walk into mine. His sister had always loved old stories like that one; when they were young, he’d hardly ever seen her without a book floating in front of her nose or tucked beneath her foreleg. Her first words were from a cardboard page in the nursery. Her last ones to him had been a line from a silent film they’d seen his last night home, the final words from a mare to her departing lover, printed onto her noiseless lips by white text on a black placard:
“Don’t be a stranger.”
The door to the bakery was open, and the smell of rising dough drifted out from behind it. Above its frame, a pink-painted sign announced its name to be, as it always had been and would be, Sugarcube Corner. She hadn’t bothered to change it, then. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what that meant.
In any case, there wasn’t any real surface to knock on, so he just sort of stood outside waiting for her to come out, so he wouldn’t have to make the decision to go in. And it was only a few seconds before she did, before she ducked out from behind the counter and stood in front of him silently, stoutly. In a different world, that alone might have meant something to him, but here in this one all he could think about was how much she hadn’t changed in all in the last six years. Her shoulder-length mane was still a fiery orange, her hooves were dusted with flour and still a bit on the small side, her eyes still reminded him of lightning at midnight. Her horn, glowing with sky-blue light, held a cookbook in midair by her side.
“Hey, Pumpkin,” he said.
“Pound,” she intoned. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“Did you come here to apologize?” she finally asked.
“If I did, would it make a difference?” he asked in return. She didn’t seem to have an answer to that, so they went back to just staring at each other and thinking their own private thoughts.
“I just wanted to see you again. I just...” he started to say, but without the composure to be able to finish. “I wanted to come home.”
Home. What a magical, distant, stars-awful concept. There’d be a lot of good things about staying there: a warm bed, a few hot meals, a chance to meet the adorable little mare poking her head out from behind her momma’s leg, a niece he’d never even gotten to know the name of. But there’d also be a lot of waiting, a lot of staring out the window wondering when the breeze would come back in, when he’d step outside and know he only had a moment to say goodbye before it whisked him away again. A whole lifetime of it. Pumpkin would bake her cakes and Pumpkin would follow in their parents’ hoofsteps, but he would always be looking for a way out. He would always wake up in the early morning, gasping for one more second, one more adventure, one more drop of memory to throw into a sea of millions. And he would spend years reminding himself why he wasn’t getting another chance. Why he didn’t deserve one.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Are you going to stay?”
Well, that was the eternal question, wasn’t it? Are you going to stay, Pound Cake? Are you going to run away like a coward because you don’t think anyone wants you around? Or are you terrified of taking the risk, because you know all too well it can’t possibly last? Because you know that this is only a weekend stopover, that come Monday you’ll be back in Cloudsdale meeting with new clients and taking on new contracts, and keeping a running tab at a ground-level saloon because it’s the only way to forget that it’s been five-and-a-half years since you’ve sent a letter home, and three since she stopped sending them to you?
With a tiny sigh, Pumpkin lifted her hoof and pushed the door open a little further, and in that moment he finally made a decision. Come hell or high water, he would stay this time. He would tell her why he didn’t write, why he laid awake at night wondering how the bakery was doing, why his shame had kept him from doing something he ought to have done years ago. He’d torn his family apart to chase after a dream, and now he was back. Now he could start mending the wound that had never scabbed over.
Now the next time she asked him that, he could give her an answer.
===
It felt strange, Pumpkin thought, having another body in the kitchen with her. It reminded her of when her parents had still been around, when they had taught her how to hold a whisk right and how to invite the heat into a croissant. It reminded her of when it had been like this before, when she’d been able to turn around and see him standing there with that cheeky grin, up to his elbows in batter without a clue in the world of what to do with it next.
“She looks happy,” said the stallion on the other side of the room. He wasn’t covered in any batter now. He’d offered to help, but she’d told him was fine on her own.
Pumpkin let the spoon she was stirring with fall gently back into the bowl, and followed his gaze all the way over to her daughter. Vanilla was six now, ready to start school in the fall. She loved sitting on the counter while she was baking, hoping to catch a morsel from each batch out of the oven. How like him, she always thought.
“She in school yet?” he asked next. Of course he wouldn’t know. A few years ago, she might’ve excused him for that. He’d been away for a while. They’d parted on quite agreeable terms. He promised that next month he’d have time to reply to a letter or two.
“Next fall,” she replied. “How’s the job in Canterlot going?”
“Awesome. You wouldn’t believe how much of Equestria still hasn’t been properly surveyed. Even the settled areas need a few guys to fly around and figure out where they can afford to put a house down.”
Pumpkin lit her horn, and the spoon lifted up and began rotating again. “I suppose you travel a lot, then.”
“Too much,” he answered quickly. “You lose track of things out there. Of what’s really important.”
Like your family, Pumpkin thought. Like your own flesh and blood. Like anything that isn’t bright and free and beautiful enough for you to allow it into your perfect, free life.
“Oh?” she said, pulling the spoon out and tasting the mix. Too sweet. Needed more body to it.
“Yeah,” he said. A patch of warmth spread over Pumpkin’s shoulder; he’d placed his hoof there delicately, as if he were afraid he’d break her if he moved towards her too fast. “And I did. I got lost and I screwed up a lot of things, and I... I want to start making it up to you. Right now. This whole weekend, it’s just you and me and Vanilla. We’ll go to the park, we’ll goof off, we’ll remember how good things used to be, and I’ll be there for it. Okay? Can you... I mean, do you want me to do that? Are you okay with that?”
Oh, what a question to ask now. Am I okay with that? Well, he’d never apologized. He felt bad about everything, apparently, but he’d never said he was sorry about leaving them behind without so much as a postcard for six years. And yet, she couldn’t help but smile, couldn’t help but feel the weight in her chest lift up a little bit. How like him, she thought. Clumsy, clueless, but still trying. Still absolutely sure everything’s going to work out in the end.
His optimism was infectious. It always had been. And now, for some incomprehensible reason, she felt a little bit of it work its way back into her heart again. Maybe this time he would be there. Maybe this time he would stay.
“Sure,” she said, and his grin was all it took to convince her she’d been right. He hadn’t fixed anything by saying what he’d said, but he was trying. And for now, for this one weekend, maybe that could be enough.
===
Despite being a pegasus by birth, Vanilla Cake knew very well what magic sounded like. Mommy used it sometimes when she was in the kitchen making a cake or a tray of cupcakes; her horn would light up and shoot off sparks the same color as her eyes, and the sparks would sing to her, tinkling and chiming against the air as they soared off Mommy’s horn and danced around a spoon or a spatula or a big giant whisk as big as her hoof.
The Stallion was the one using it now; she called him that because she’d never figured out his name. He had just showed up yesterday, and Mommy had let him in and talked to him for a while like they had known each other forever. She didn’t seem to like him at first, and Vanilla herself didn’t quite like him either. He wasn’t Mommy’s friend, for one thing. Vanilla had friends, two other fillies who lived down the street and were called Cirrus and Buttercup, and she saw them every day when she went outside to play. That’s what friends were: ponies you saw every day, ponies you liked to be around. Vanilla had never seen the Stallion in her life before.
More importantly, he was a pegasus just like her, and pegasuses couldn’t use magic. Everypony knew that. So when she woke up that morning and heard magic in his room, she knew she had another reason not to trust him. How could she be friends with a pegasus that wasn’t even a real pegasus?
Already in a grouchy mood from being woken up so early on a Sunday, she followed the Stallion downstairs as he trotted out of his room and down the stairs, nearly knocking her over as he passed with his tan wings stretched out and his brown mane messy from rolling around in bed. She was still navigating the landing halfway down when Mommy saw him trying to leave, when he turned around with a look like he’d been caught doing something bad. Which he probably had been. Pegasuses who weren’t really pegasuses probably told a lot of other lies too.
“Pumpkin, I-I’m so sorry,” he started saying, “This isn’t... it’s not my choice, I told him I was off this weekend, they’re being completely unreasonable...”
To her credit, Mommy wasn’t buying it. In fact, she looked a weird kind of happy, like she knew this was going to happen. Like she knew the Stallion wasn’t really her friend either.
“Look, I promise I’ll write sometime and I’ll be back as soon as I can... it’s just that I got this letter now from the boss and he actually bothered to magic it out here just to tell me I’m fired if I don’t...”
“It’s fine. Just go,” Mommy said. Her eyes were hard. She was mad.
“I...”
And that was all. The Stallion muttered something that Vanilla couldn’t hear, and then he was gone, out the door and into the sky faster than she’d ever seen a pegasus go. She watched him fly for a bit, wondering whether he was a pony like the princesses who could fly AND do magic, and then Mommy was next to her and pulling her back up the stairs, telling her to go back to bed and quit staring ‘cause it’s not polite.
“Who was that stallion, Mommy?” she asked just before Mommy closed her door again.
“Nobody,” Mommy said. She was still mad, but her eyes were watering now too. “Just an old friend.”