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// 4 - It's Easy 
// Story: All You Need is Love 
// by AugieDog 
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Sapphire gave four taps with her hoof against the office's industrial carpet—a nice medium tempo—and spoke the first lines of the five-act play she'd been rehearsing in her head for more than two decades:

"My mother blotted out the sky. She was vast and mighty and shook the very essence of time and space whenever she deigned to step into my line of sight. Of course, I was just a grub, so it might be that my impressions can't be trusted. But Chrysalis ruled as Queen of the Changelings for longer than you and I've been alive, Mr. Bunny, so I'd say that counts for something."

The white rabbit barely shifted on his cushion, but this was one performance Sapphire didn't need an audience for. Or rather, the audience she needed would never see it, would hopefully never be anything ever again but a slightly spiky pigeon roost across town...

She did however, she chided herself, need to focus. "One minute, all us little squirmers'd be tumbling over each other and laughing down in the nursery off the egg chamber, and the next, the sweet glowing green sky would vanish, and there'd be Mama looking down at me with her eyes half closed. And yes, she was technically mother to us all, but I was the one the attendants would hold up close to her, the one they'd carry along, trailing after her into the corridors, the one they'd leave in a chamber with her, the one she'd teach."

And Sapphire didn't even have to think about the shift anymore. Not that it was any sort of actual physical transformation: just holding her head higher, she knew, would be enough to have her speaking in Mother's voice. "Infiltration," she said, and that got this Angel Bunny to stir and stare at her with wide eyes. 

Mother's throaty snicker followed. "You will be my masterpiece, little one, my precursor and my herald. You will plant seeds in the minds of those foul ponies, will make them see and hear what I want them to see and hear, will lead them to the point where they succumb to my blandishments and become a fruitful field ripe for us to harvest."

Her own voice seemed so much thinner, so much weaker when she switched back to it. "I'd've done anything for her, you know that? Would've stormed the gates of Canterlot on my stubby little legs if she'd said the word. But instead, I wrapped my attention around her, drank her in, and learned...well, not quite what she wanted me to learn."

For this part, she brought in the movements she'd envisioned. A quarter turn to the right, and she shrank against the floor, her face aimed upward at an angle and her eyes absolutely dancing. "The music, Your Majesty!  That's what you're talking about, isn't it?"

Then a full turn to her left, her neck cocked back like a viper ready to strike the space where she'd been standing a moment before, ice in her manner and Mother's voice on her tongue: "What's this prattling, child?"

Back into the place where she was her younger self: "The music! I feel it every time you visit, hear it every time you talk! The way you make the air move so strong and perfect! If I could make music like you, I could do anything!"

Stepping around to take Mother's role again, she gave a nod as crisp and resolute as an iron gate clanging shut. "Indeed. Do as I tell you, and you will be unstoppable."

Another quarter turn brought her back to her first persona and her first position, looking Angel square in the face. He was sitting up quite attentively now, the showmare in her noted with just a touch of smugness. "I didn't know it at the time, but she had no idea what I was talking about. And it was right there, right then, before I'd pupated even, that she and I started parting ways.

"So I practiced what I thought she was preaching, and she kept preaching since what I was practicing gave her the results she wanted to see during our lessons." And as much as she tried to stop it, she couldn't keep her voice from hitching just a bit. "The pride in her eyes, fiery and green and feverish, as she towered there watching me spin my cocoon, it was everything I'd ever wanted out of my circumscribed little life, and I sealed myself into that waxy bundle vowing to make her look at me that way again and again and again for as long as we both might live."

With a breath, she bowed her head and said, "End of Act One."

Two beats of silence, then she looked back up at her audience. "Stewing in my cocoon, I marinated, hatched into the sweetest little nymph, and took my first—and last—pony shape." She struck her strongest, sexiest stage pose, the one that had set her early audiences to howling and had started two riots before she'd curtailed its use.

The rabbit's ears quivered. Sapphire hid her smile. She still had it...

"Mother had a family all picked out for me," she continued, "earth ponies whose roots stretched so deep into the bedrock of Canterlot's mountain, they still sniffed a bit at the nouveau riche unicorns who'd showed up with Princess Celestia after the Longest Night a thousand years ago. Diamond Head, third son of the Glitters family, and his wife Alizarin were expecting a blessed event, and instead, they got me." This time, she let her smile shine forth in all its splendor.

But only for an instant, her gut twisting and her voice dropping to a whisper. This part of her story still stabbed her whenever she thought about it. "Changelings disguised as hospital staff switched me for their actual newborn filly, and I...I never learned what happened to her. Chrysalis was a megalomaniacal monster, no doubt about that, but for all that I can't believe she would've just killed the child, the investigators I've hired over the years, they've accounted for every earth pony foal born that day in that building. And none of them tested out to be the daughter whose place I took.

"Of course, records get lost or stolen, shredded or burned, especially when infiltrators are concerned. So maybe she's out there, dropped off on some farmer's doorstep in the middle of the night and raised in the bosom of a loving family. I like to think so, at least. I very much like to think so.

"'Cause I most surely was." She stomped her hoof, raised her head, and pushed the thought of her semi-sister to the back of her brain the way she always had to. "Mums and Poppa absolutely flooded me with affection. Knowing my goal—and thinking I knew how I was supposed to achieve it—I showed off my singing prowess early, got the finest vocal coaches gold and precious gems could rent, and manufactured myself a cutie mark in a fairly dramatic fashion at the end of my first recital."

Angel's brow wrinkled, and with a squeak, he gestured toward her hindquarters, a wave of confusion rolling over Sapphire like nothing she'd ever felt before.

After his earlier display of broadcast emotion, though, she was a bit more prepared. Hardly missing a beat, she glanced back at her flank, blank and exposed from her skirt riding up when she'd crouched down to play her younger self. "Takes more concentration than you'd think, toying with elemental destiny and all. It's why I prefer outfits that got more coverage to 'em: the less magic I hafta use in my life, the better I like it."

Still, a wrinkle of her own brow set the process in motion, the star-crowned shell with the jewel at its base squirming into existence over her rump. "Not a sea shell, mind you. It's an acoustic shell like you'll find behind the stage at every theater where music gets performed. The jewel shows where I came from, and the stars show where I'm headed."

She batted her eyelashes at him. "That's what I told my folks and anypony who asked, anyway. And when I used my allowance to hire a band and started drawing crowds to clubs in downtown Canterlot with a presentation of current pop songs, I was on my way with step one of my plan, step one on the road to what I'd been born for. Or so I thought." She couldn't keep her mouth from tightening. "Till my mother the Queen slithered back into my life."

Bowing her head, she squeezed out between clenched teeth, "End of Act Two."

Those same clenched teeth featured prominently in the smile she gave Angel when she raised her head two beats later. "I hadn't seen her in sixteen years at that point: not a word, not a glimpse, not a quiver." She squared her shoulders, spread her forehooves, took a stance as solidly determined as any steel cable. "But I'd kept the faith! I was doing her will, knew I was fulfilling the role I was destined to play in bringing about her dominion over these weak and awful ponies!

"Of course..." She let her shoulders sag, let her spine lose its rigidity. "I'd gotten to know ponies in those sixteen years, Mums and Poppa and all the Glitters family and my band and my fans, and I...I was having a hard time reconciling what I'd learned from Her Majesty with the day-to-day reality I'd been experiencing..." With a shudder, she straightened herself back up. "Not that I doubted my true mother! Never! But—"

Again, she went partially slack. "Alizarin, my Mums, the pony who'd raised me from fillyhood, who'd taught me how to tie a ribbon in my mane, who'd supported me even when I'd started straying from her beloved art songs, she..." And here, she went completely slack, nearly drooping all the way to the floor. "She loved me. I knew that. I could feel it every minute of every hour of every day. While I'd never felt a thing from Queen Chrysalis. All the love I'd focused on her when I was a grub, I'd never gotten one single sliver of it back. Not one."

A sob wanted to bubble from her throat, but she clamped it down. "So when Mums stepped into my dressing room after my third night selling out Arjay's downtown and I felt all that nothing from her, I knew it wasn't Mums at all..."

Pushing herself back up, she slid a quarter step to the left, cocked her neck, and fixed as withering a look as she could on the carpet now ahead of her. "And what," she said in Mother's hissing voice, "exactly is the meaning of all this?"

She didn't have to reach very far to find the expression of joy and fear she needed to display after shifting into position to play her younger self. "Your Majesty! You...you saw the show?"

Back around to Mother and the lash of her cold fury: "I saw the creature into which I poured my knowledge and expertise writhing about on a stage while her supposed prey watched her with eyes hungry enough to devour her whole! Tell me why I shouldn't kill you right now for abandoning your mind, your purpose, and your duty!"

Again, the shock she'd felt during that long-ago conversation came flooding back all too easily. "But...I'm following the plan! I'm becoming an icon, gaining a following! Soon, I can—!"

"Can what?" Over the years, Sapphire had practiced the leaping, spinning motion of interrupting herself while switching from one character to another as diligently as she practiced the dance moves for her show. "Can become the tastemaker I need to properly plant suspicions about Celestia and her reign? Can become the political force I need to pave the way for my taking over? Or can become a laughingstock, a jester, a spectacle!" The sneer Mother had given her then would never be far from Sapphire's thoughts. "An entertainer..."

Her stagger when she took her younger self's place wasn't planned, but it was exactly right. Too bad she was never gonna perform this particular piece again... 

She rallied, though, the way she remembered, planted her hooves, and glared at the empty spot before her where the nightmares she still sometimes had placed Mother's glowering face. "An entertainer who they love and listen to! An entertainer who gets 'em before they've got their cutie marks and influences the way they're growing up! An entertainer who's gonna drop this little number on 'em next week!" And she launched into "Serves Her Right," that very first performance of it, she still thought, the best she'd ever done, fueled by the indignation that had filled her almost to bursting at her mother's words.

Even now with an audience of one in an office tucked up among the rafters of Canterlot Square Garden, she couldn't keep from snapping out the lyrics, from bearing down on the tune, from delivering the song as the smack in the face she'd always meant it to be. Of course, she had to do the repeated "serves her right" refrain herself since she didn't have her back-up singers, but, well, she was playing all the parts in the story of her life, wasn't she? She could manage a couple choruses.

And when she stomped in unison with the title one last time and ended the song, the clapping and whistling from the desk made her glance over, Angel Bunny hopping up and down and applauding on his cushion. The oddly sharp and spicy scent drifted up from him, and Sapphire's senses decided that he was feeling a sort of grudging respect.

Giving him a nodding bow, she stepped back into Mother's position, her face blank except for one arched eyebrow. "Acceptable," she said, then she shifted around to face her audience, dredged up her current self's voice, and continued. "Which was the most praise she'd ever given me, something that should've filled me with joy like a balloon fills with helium. But watching her pace over to the dressing room window, throw it open, transform into a raven, and fly out, I felt nothing. Not from her, not from myself, not from anywhere."

Eyelids drooping closed, she couldn't get the words out in anything more than a whisper: "End of Act Three."