//------------------------------//
// We Could Be 
// Story: Running Out Of Air 
// by I-A-M 
//------------------------------//







Sunset Shimmer







The rain started falling again a few minutes before we got back to the apartment and we had to make a mad dash for the little vestibule dividing the lobby from the outside before we got soaked.
Wallflower is hugging herself while I punch in the code, and I miss the code about three times before I finally put in the right one.
I’m distracted.
I’m more distracted than I’ve been in a while, and it’s over the dumbest thing, because even though it’s small and probably means nothing I can’t figure it out.
Why wouldn’t she hold my hand?
It’s never bugged her before... unless it has and she just never said anything? Isn’t that an awful thought? What if I’ve been making her feel uncomfortable this whole time? Except… except she’s instigated it as much as I have.
Last night, we snuggled on her mattress because she kept having anxiety attacks over her upcoming meeting with Bright Eyes.
Finally, I manage to hit the right sequence and the door hisses open, and the two of us beat a hasty retreat from the weather into the warm confines of the lobby.
My jacket kept the worst of the rain off of me but Wallflower only had her sweater which didn’t do much more than absorb the water and make it hang heavily on her.
She’s shivering violently while I hit the button for the elevator, and the moment I’m sure the old beast is crawling down, I turn to her and move to put my arms around her.
And I stop.
I barely get my arms up past my sides when I stop. I have this feeling, and I don’t even know if it’s rational or not, but I feel like if I try to hug her then she’ll pull back and I am irrationally afraid of that. I don’t want her to pull away from me, I want her to stay close and…
“Here,” I say quietly, completing the movement of my arms, but rather than reaching for her, I shed my jacket and throw it over her shoulders, tugging it close around her. “It’s warmer than just your sweater.”
A shiver of my own rolls through me as I rub at my now bare arms. I knew I shouldn’t have worn a t-shirt but it was a semi-nice day out and I’d hoped that it would stay that way.
“Sunset, you don’t—” Wallflower starts but I cut her off.
“I’m not the malnourished one, Wallie, just take the damn jacket.” My teeth click as I shut my mouth the moment the last words leave my lips. That came out a lot harsher than I meant it to. Swallowing hard, I wave a hand. “Sorry, just… you’re more likely to get sick, that’s all.”
Her fingers tighten around the edges, and a small tremor passes through her that I’m passingly sure isn’t anything to do with the cold.
“Wallie, I’m… I didn’t mean to say it like that,” I say softly, raising my hands and holding my arms out. “I’m sorry.”
It’s slower than before. Just yesterday, all it took was opening my arms for Wallflower to fall into them, and wasn’t that a nice feeling? But now, she hesitates, and I’m on the verge of lowering my arms and swallowing another quiet rejection when she takes a halting step forward, then another, and settles awkwardly against me.
“It’s okay, I know,” she squeaks. “You’re just worried, right?”
“Pretty much always,” I reply with a wan chuckle. “But I’d rather be worried about you than not have you around, y’know?”
She goes quiet at that statement, and in the silence the doors to the elevator open. She shuffles past me the moment they do and slips into the cab before punching the button for the sixth floor, and I follow her a moment later.
“Hey,” I start quietly as the doors close. “Are… Are you okay?”
Wallflower shrugs, then sighs and shudders, wrapping her arms around herself as she does and pulling the jacket even tighter around her body.
She doesn’t answer for the whole ride up, and by the time the doors hiss open on my apartment’s floor my nerves are rattling something fierce. I asked if she was okay, and she didn’t answer me.
That means either she’s not okay, or she’s not sure if she’s okay, and I’m really not sure what to do with that information.
I step out of the elevator and Wallflower follows on my heels. I keep an eye on her over my shoulder, and the one thing I can say is that she doesn’t really look ‘not okay’, she just looks really deep in thought. That leads me to suspect the second option, in that she’s not sure, but that’s really not all that much better because what if the answer to that is ‘no’?
The deadbolt thunks loudly as I unlock the door to the apartment and nudge it open. I step inside and Wallflower follows suit, moving past me until she gets to the bathroom and shuts the door behind her.
Not a word is said.
That’s not ominous or anything.
Great. Now I’m shaking.
I try to get a hold on my panic and anxiety. More importantly, I try to fight off the urge to sprint out into the stairwell and smoke.
Wallflower clearly didn’t like what she’d seen when she saw me smoking so that’s something I have to avoid around her now. Not that that’s a big change. I’ve done my best to keep my smoking private, which hasn’t been all that hard since I do it so seldom.
Less now than ever before actually.
The only one who knows that I smoke is Fluttershy and that’s only because, unbeknownst to anyone else but me, she smokes too.
Unlike me, though, she hates it. I happen to like the taste of cigarette smoke, but Flutters just does it to keep her anxiety down because her parents are, while lovely people, not what you’d call psychologically literate. They think psychologists and antidepressants are a bunch of hooey and that the cure for all that depression nonsense is to step into the good old fashioned outdoors and sunlight and blah blah blah.
Whatever. I can’t smoke now, so I won’t.
Instead, I go to the kitchen and I start tea: matcha for Wallflower, oolong for me, just like always. I set the bags in the cups and fill the electric kettle to start it heating just as the shower goes on, and a small sensation of relief wells up in me that at least she’s warming up.
“Deep breaths, Shimmer,” I say quietly. “In and out.”
I turn and lean my elbows against the counter.
“She’s fine,” I say to myself. “Wallie’s fine, she’s alright, everything is… is fine.”
I swallow back hard before letting out another breath and turning to pick up the kettle to tip the water into the cups. Hopefully, I don’t burn the tea this time, but I’m not really holding out hope. I really am an awful cook.
“Deep breaths,” I repeat softly as I set the kettle down.
My fingers are tingling and I wring my hands, and my chest feels vaguely fuzzy. That’s how I know I’m starting to hyperventilate.
“I-In… and o-out.” I force the words through clenched teeth. My skin is crawling, my vision is constricting, and none of my old stand-by’s are working. “In… and… and out,” I repeat. “In… in and out… deep breaths, in and o-out.”
A soft pressure on my shoulder snaps me out of my trance and I turn my head to see Wallflower standing less than a meter away with her hair damp and matted around her face, and half-covered in a towel. Her face flushed with warmth from the shower, and she’s wearing a hoodie and a spare set of pajama bottoms, both of which she borrowed from me, and she’s looking at me like I’m about to explode.
Funny, because I kinda feel like I am.
“Sunset!?” Wallflower looks scared and her voice sounds almost fuzzy.
Before I can say anything in my defense, Wallflower wraps her arms around me and pulls me close to her, and without thinking I hug her as tightly as possible. She smells like stormwinds and summer leaves, and it’s the only thing real for me in the world right now.
“It’s okay,” Wallflower says softly as she pulls me along with her, guiding me through the apartment.
Then we’re lying down. I can’t really account for the space of time between standing and lying down, but here we are.
I take long, deep breaths. In and out. I haven’t scared myself that bad in a long time. I can’t even remember the last time I had a panic attack that bad. Maybe at the high school in the weeks right after the formal, when I remember having a small meltdown in the showers of the girls’ locker room.
Even that, though… this is different because it isn't about me. It's about Wallflower, and I have no way to tell if the danger is real or not, or if I'm just imagining it. The thought of Wallflower being hurt though… it feels like dying. It was like that brief space of time between when Wallflower stood up in Sticky Note’s office, and then keeled over, and I thought my soul was about to vacate my body while Sticky was on the phone with emergency services.
“It’s okay.” Wallflower is still repeating her little mantra, and I have no idea how much time has passed.
Shifting in the bed beside her, I turn to look up at her. Wallflower is looking down at me with worried eyes. Those soft, brown eyes are so beautiful. I wonder if anyone has ever told her that.
I should tell her that.
Maybe when it’s less… weird.
“Are you okay?” Wallflower asks.
“Are you?” I counter. “I… I asked before, and you didn’t…”
Her eyes widen, then her face falls and her mouth twists to a grimace. I can see the guilt work it’s way onto her features and I shift out from her arms to prop myself up on my elbows.
“Are you okay?” I repeat.
Wallflower sighs and sits up, curling up and tucking her legs under her chin and wrapping her arms around her shins as she stares down at the ground. Her hair is a mess, the towel was lost somewhere amongst the sheets and blankets, and the result is a frizzy wad of green curls that are sticking out.
I think it’s cute.
“I’m scared,” Wallflower says finally. “Because I… I guess, I realised something kind of, uhm, unrelated to anything else going on and it sort of shook me.”
I frown and sit up, folding my legs over one another so I’m cross-legged, and I lean forward, elbows on knees, to listen.
“Tell me?”
Wallflower hesitates for a long moments before taking a deep breath, blowing it out, and saying:
“I think I’m gay.”
…
What.
WHAT?!
Let me offer some background.
Since the age of six when I was taken in by Princess Celestia, and beyond, I received the most thorough and extensive political education available via the tutors and classrooms of a thousand-year-old monarchy, through a curriculum developed by said thousand-year-old monarch. I was drilled mercilessly in dissembling, body language, microaggressions, advanced physiological reaction theory, and about a dozen other disciplines that require magic to discuss.
I was trained to keep a straight face and an even temper in the most cutthroat royal court on the face of the planet, and all of that training barely kept me from screaming: ‘WHAT’ at the top of my lungs.
Instead, I managed to keep my reply to a quiet, croaky, ‘oh’ that I think sounded suitably interested without being overly extreme, and I’m pretty sure it only cost me a lung.
Not bad!
Wallflower is silent for a while, and I take advantage of that quiet to try and rein in the chaotic storm that my brain has become.
Maybe it’s stupid, but I always just kind of thought she knew! I figured she was just already aware and that’s why she was so… so clingy with me. I thought that maybe she liked me, but now I have no idea!
“Sorry,” Wallflower says softly while burying her face against her knees.
What?
Oh.
It occurs to me now that I haven’t actually responded to her confession which probably took a lot of courage for someone like Wallflower to get out. Instead, I’ve been staring at like a gormless fuck for like a minute straight.
“Wallie, no! I’m sorry!” I stammer, reaching out to take her hands before pitching back as I remember what happened last time. “It’s not— it’s fine! That’s not wrong, I was just surprised!”
That’s putting in mildly while still remaining in the zip code of truth.
“Rarity and Applejack have been dating for like five months! It’s fine!” I say with a laugh that’s only a little forced.
Wallflower looks up at me and I realise, to my utmost horror, that her eyes are faintly red. She’s not crying, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen her cry come to think of it, but she’s clearly breaking.
“R… Really?” She asks in a quiet, cracked voice.
“Yeah!” I assure her gently, deciding to split the difference by awkwardly patting her shoulder. “They’re not like, super out about it like Lyra and Bonnie, but yeah, and they’re good together, too.”
She sniffles, looks down, and rubs at her cheeks for a minute before looking back up at me.
“So uhm, y-yeah,” she says slowly, “I just… I talked to Bright Eyes about it a little and he’s pretty sure I’m…” she swallows and looks down again. “He… he said I’m probably not in a good place to be with anyone, which is kind of like saying a little too broken, and… and I know that.”
Damn it, Eyes.
“I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable around me okay?” Wallflower continues. “I really don’t, okay? I won’t try anything, I promise, I just—”
“Wallie, no,” I say softly, finally pushing through the block in my heart to slip closer and put my arms around her. “You’re fine. We’re fine, okay? Nothing has changed between us, I promise.”
Wallflower pauses, freezes maybe, but eventually she lets out a sound like a dry chuckle, nods, and turns to bury her face against the crook of my neck.
“Thank you,” she mumbles. “I guess I’m, uhm, just a little more broken than I thought.”
“You’re not broken,” I mutter against her hair. “You’re just a little messy right now, okay? We’ve got this. Nothing has changed.”
She nods against my neck and squeezes a little tighter.
“Right,” she says softly after a moment. “Nothing… nothing has changed.”






There’s a clock in the loft that hangs from a nail right over my bed. It’s an older one, small, and actual clockwork, so it marks the passage of time with a quiet, steady, tick-tick-tick.
I think the reason I like it is because back in Equestria we didn’t have digital clocks. If you were poor, you had a sundial, which is a lot more accurate in a dimension where the sun is controlled by an immortal alicorn, but if you were a pony of means you might have splurged on a timepiece.
There were large ones for homes, and small ones you could wear, but they were expensive and required semi-regular maintenance, so naturally the palace had a clock in almost every single room.
Princess Celestia told me once that it was to help keep her on track. She had a schedule almost every day, planned to the minute, and thinking about it now… really thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that would have driven me insane.
No free time, except in the rarest of circumstances, no ability to control my own life, despite ostensibly having control of the wealthiest, most stable, and most powerful nation in the world, and no room to be myself.
I think that’s what drove us apart.
I was so obsessed with being perfect and, in the end, I think that she was too.
Like mother, like daughter, I guess.
But the ticking… I like the ticking because it reminds me of the castle, where you could hear the timepieces tick-tick-ticking away in every room. Each one was perfectly aligned with the others, creating a little mechanical concert. The ticking makes me feel like I’m home.
Normally, anyway.
Tonight, it’s just reminding me of how long I’ve been lying awake on Wallflower’s mattress beside her, staring at her stupid-pretty face while she snores wheezily in blissful repose while my mind goes about a billion meters a minute trying to keep itself sane.
In my defense, I pretty much knew she was gay from the get-go, the only problem is that I thought she knew it too.
This whole time I’ve apparently been creeping on her with absolutely no justification for it. She thought I was being a good friend, when in fact I was sitting there like a dumbstruck chungus over how beautiful she is.
The notion makes my skin crawl.
Wallflower shifts in her sleep, curling a little closer to me and burying her face against my chest before settling again.
Well, at least I don’t make her uncomfortable. If I did then I doubt she’d be able to sleep so easily around me. Maybe that’s just me projecting though. It took me months before I could get more than a few hours of sleep during Pinkie’s big sleepover parties because I just… it’s not that I didn’t trust them, but I’m naturally suspicious.
In both senses of the phrase.
Indulging myself a little, I reach up and slip my fingers into her messy tangle of green, morning glory curls to start teasing out the knots and snarls. They’ll be Tartarus’ own job to untangle in the morning if I don’t, and I know Wallflower hates having to brush her hair.
It would be a lot easier if she weren’t so perfect.
Because she is.
Wallflower Blush is kind of perfect.
She’s soft and smart and gentle, and she’s patient with me when I get overzealous, and when my anxiety hits me she doesn’t lose it or try and talk me down, she just rides it out with me until I’m better.
And she’s so pretty.
I don’t think she realises it, which is a little tragic. She is though… she’s pretty in a lot of different ways, and it makes me a little mad that I’m the only one who can see it.
Mad… and happy at the same time, because I’m that type of person. I’m torn between wanting everyone to know how pretty and amazing Wallflower is, and being secretly a little glad that I’m the only one who sees it because otherwise someone might… they might try to take her away from me.
Written’s Quill, I really am a horrible person.
I’m selfish, and I always have been. I want Wallflower all to myself and because of that I’ve been babying her and letting her take slower steps when I know she’s strong enough to be better and do more. Even with her problems with taking her meds, she’s tougher than anyone gives her credit for.
She’s lived through some bad shit, worse than me in a way, and she did it without the benefit of a five-star education.
Is it any wonder that I’m a little in love?
I just wish I wasn’t too much of a coward to say it out loud. I want her to know that someone loves her. More than loves her. Adores her.
The problem is, I don’t know how to tell her that. If I do I’m scared she’ll just retreat the way she did earlier. We’ve patched things up for now, but the idea of driving her away again like that genuinely terrifies me.
I don’t want to lose her.
Taking a deep breath, I savor the gentle scent of leaves and rain that hangs around Wallflower. She’s so close right now, it would be easy to just give in to the urge to kiss her.
Just once, and just on the forehead. It would be small and she probably wouldn’t even wake up.
Just a small betrayal.
Slowly, I pull my hand from her hair and bring it down to rest on her cheek, running my thumb over the soft lines of her face. My heart feels like it’s about to burst over how much I adore this girl in my arms.
Her eyes flutter open, her long, pretty eyelashes flickering a few times as she looks up blearily at me.
“Mm?” She mumbles wordlessly.
“Hey,” I whisper, “sorry, but uhm… I’m gonna move back up to my bed, okay?”
She frowns, but she doesn’t argue, instead she just asks: “why?”
It’s kind of charming how often she asks that. I think it’s because she’s always so certain she’s done something wrong. Either that or because she just can’t fathom why anyone would be nice to her.
I take it back, that’s not charming, that's tragic.
“I just…” I trail off, trying to find a way of saying it that won’t leave her feeling hurt. Best to just play to my strengths and be honest. “I want to give you some space, that’s all, today was a long day, and… and a big day, y’know? But I’m not leaving you, and if you need me I’m right up the stairs.”
She stares at me for a while, and it’s just about all I can do not to lean and try to kiss the little frown off of her lips. That would definitely be the wrong decision. Even if I was absolutely positive she felt the same way about me that I feel about her, and that is a massive ‘if’, tonight is not the night.
“I thought… is it—?” She starts but I don’t let her finish. I can’t let her complete that thought.
“No, it’s not,” I put as much strength and sincerity into my voice as I can without raising my volume. “I promise, it’s not, okay? I will always be here for you, Wallie, alright? Always, and you don’t need to ask why, right?”
She nods as she wraps her arms around me and hugs me tight. For a long moment, she’s quiet, and I don’t want to have to pry her off of me, but just as I start to get the feeling I might have to, she finally speaks up.
“Will you say it?” She mumbles.
My mouth goes dry.
She’s never asked me to do something like that before. It’s always something I’ve had to remind her of, or it’s felt that way anyway. Hearing her ask me to say it? Knowing she wants me to say it?
It makes me so happy and for some reason, it also breaks my heart.
“Yeah… yeah, sure.” I hug her back and bury my face in her hair so she won’t see me start crying when I say the words. “It’s because you’re precious to me.”
The moment the words pass my lips, she squeezes me even tighter. All the strength in her thin, narrow body is put into hugging me like she’s scared I’ll turn into mist and vapor.
Something happens in that space between heartbeats where she’s hugging me and I’m holding her and trying not to cry into her hair. I don’t know how to put it into words but in that brief, heart-wrenching split-second, I understand.
I’m going to lose her.
She’s going to leave.
Just like everyone else, Wallflower Blush will eventually leave. She’ll get up one day from this mattress, have all of her things packed into bags, and she’ll leave to live on her own.
She’ll have her own bed and her own apartment. She’ll have a job and a life, and I…
I won’t be in it.
Not the way I want to be.
“If you ever need me,” I hiss through my breaking heart. “I will always be there for you, Wallie, I swear it.”
Wallflower nods against my chest and shivers.
“I know.”
Now it’s time. I have to give her space so that when she leaves, it will be easy. So I pack up the little bits of my heart, put them in a little box, and I tuck them away somewhere close by inside of my mental warehouse. I can’t let them get too far, even though it hurts, because that heart? That’s Wallflower’s. It belongs to her whether or not she knows it, and so I have to keep it close, otherwise I might lose track of it, and I can’t do that.
With my heart put away, I take a deep breath, swallow, then pull back and sit up, surreptitiously wiping at my eyes as I do before reaching out and giving Wallflower’s hand a fond squeeze, wishing her goodnight, and then standing up from the mattress to go to my own bed.
It’s cold and it’s lonely, and that’s how I know it’s mine.
Tomorrow we’ll see Doctor Hive, and then Wallflower will be one step closer to having a home.
And one step further away from me.

That tick-tick-ticking isn’t so comforting anymore.