We were sitting at the kitchen table. Luster was looking down at the table, her eyes full of shock, pain, and betrayal. I was avoiding her gaze. I wouldn't be able to stand the hurt look she would give me if I met her eyes.
Since Luster already found out about the show, I figured there was no use in trying to put it off (and I was a pretty bad liar anyway). So I sat her down and told her about my story with My Little Pony, which did next to nothing. She wasn't interested in how I liked the show; she wanted to know what happened in the show. And so I told her as much of the timeline as I could remember. I told her about Twilight Sparkle and her friends, and all the adventures they went on.
I told her about the last episode, the only episode in which she was present.
"So... I was Princess Twilight's top student?" Luster whispered. Hearing her voice was almost worse than looking into her eyes. It was full of betrayal and disbelief as if she couldn't believe that I had kept this from her when she had trusted me.
I nodded. "And... you didn't want friends, so Twilight sent you to Ponyville and showed you how important friendship really was."
"What happened after that?" Her voice was barely audible but amplified in the dense silence that smothered all other sounds. Even the air conditioning from my neighbor upstairs was a dim hum that I could hardly hear, in contrast to the usually loud and obnoxious sound I was used to hearing.
"I don't know," I admitted. "That was the last episode, so we'll never really know what happened after that."
"Why didn't you tell me?" She finally lifted her head like it weighed a million pounds and met my eyes. I held the gaze for a while before dropping my eyes to the table and mentally counting the number of scratches in the wood; anything to avoid looking into those eyes.
"I was afraid," I confessed. "I was worried that, if you knew about the show, you would want to leave. And I didn't want that. I had always wished My Little Pony could be real, and you proved that, and I was scared to let you go. I was planning on telling you after a while, but I kept putting it off. I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I was constantly worrying that you might leave."
"So, you knew everything about who I was and where I was from, and you decided not to tell me because you were being selfish?" Luster said, anger creeping into her voice, which was steadily getting louder. I winced. Her words stung me in a way I never thought possible.
"I'm sorry, it's just-" My voice cracked. "This year has been really rough, and I just wanted something to give me a little hope that things would get better."
"Why did I ever trust you?" Luster's voice was full of rage and had reached the point of shouting. "You're no different from everyone else I've ever met. Maybe I could have met someone actually trustworthy if you hadn't been so much of a selfish jerk!"
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she leaped from her chair and ran out of the room towards the entry hall. I got up and slowly approached her, saying, "Luster, please..."
"GET AWAY FROM ME!" she screamed. Her horn was lit, and I nervously backed up. As much as I didn't want her to leave, I also didn't want to find out what it would be like to be blasted with angry unicorn magic. Luster whirled around, using her magic to twist the doorknob and throw open the door. She ran out, leaving the door swinging in the wind, and me, feeling like my heart had just broken into a million pieces that could never be reconstructed.
I'm ashamed to say it, but I spent most of the day sitting on the couch, crying. I got out my Derpy Hooves plushie that I had bought on eBay a few years back and cuddled it in my arms. If anyone were to look inside my house they would have immediately left by the insane weirdness of a grown man sobbing on the couch while holding a pony plushie.
Eventually, I turned on the television, looking towards politics and bad news concerning coronavirus to distract me from my pain. But it only made things worse, as I kept expecting Luster to shout some rude comment about our nation's leaders, or how things were being handled, or a completely obvious solution that would be "20% cooler than anything they were trying."
One news story caught my eye, however. It was a report on CNN of a strange sighting of a unicorn by the Bean...
I sat up quickly and grabbed the remote, frantically switching to CNN. They were currently in the middle of an update on how the voting was going for electing a new president, but although I despised most politics-related topics, I kept watching, on the edge of my seat the whole time, praying that they hadn't already covered the story.
Finally, at about seven-thirty, the perky blonde woman reporting the news stacked her papers, cleared her throat, and said, "There have been several reports of sightings of a pink unicorn over by the Bean tonight, and a few even managed to gain some recorded evidence. Here are a few examples."
The screen showed several grainy and shaky footage of crowds of people at the Bean, marveling, as always, the strange sensation of seeing your warped reflection on the underside of the famous sculpture. The camera zoomed in on Luster Dawn, who was wandering aimlessly around, not even caring that dozens of people were seeing her. The crowd was making a large circle around her, not that she noticed. After about seven minutes of footage, the screen switched back to the newscaster.
"Reports are still coming in, and many are wondering what this creature is doing in Chicago, and how it got here," she continued. "Some are telling us of the striking resemblance between this unicorn and the fictional character Luster Dawn from the children's television show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Here's a picture of both of these so you can see the similarities yourself."
I didn't even wait for the newscaster to finish her sentence, didn't even turn off the TV. I stuffed my feet in some shoes, pulled on a jacket, grabbed my keys, and dashed out the door.
I had a bad feeling that, if Luster got captured, there wouldn't be much hope of setting her free again.