After knocking three times and hearing no answer, Flurry lit her horn and opened the thick wooden door herself, unraveling the host of security spells and intrusion alarms embedded in the lock as she did. They weren’t particularly complicated, nothing even a moderately capable unicorn couldn’t have gotten past. But according to her mom, the lock wasn’t meant to keep this pony inside her room, but rather to keep other ponies out. It had only been a few days since she was unfrozen, after all. Some ponies might not understand why she was being set free at all.
She was sitting on the bed at the room’s far side when Flurry entered, atop a pile of rumpled sheets that didn’t look slept in so much as deliberately twisted into an unruly mess. Physically, she looked about Flurry’s age, short and compact with her mane done up in primped blue curls and her disheleved pink wings raised and twitching along her back.
But she wasn’t Flurry’s age, not really. Maybe she had been years ago, when she was first turned to stone, but now… Flurry didn’t know what she was now. All she could settle on was what she looked like—and despite what Mom had said, she looked more than anything else like a prisoner.
“What?” Cozy Glow intoned once Flurry stopped at the room’s center, about a dozen feet from the foot of the bed. In response, Flurry nodded at the cart she’d tugged in behind her, and specifically at the plate on top of it laden with fresh fruit, pastries, and a bowl of scrambled eggs.
“I brought you breakfast,” she said.
“I’m not hungry,” Cozy Glow replied.
“Mom told me you’d say that,” Flurry informed the little pegasus. “She said you might be… uncomfortable.”
A rough, unsettling sound emerged from Cozy’s throat. It took Flurry a moment to recognize it as laughter. “Did she?” Cozy crooned. “What else did Mommy tell you about me?”
“Not much,” Flurry admitted, but without blinking or turning away.
“Did she tell you what I did? What I’m capable of?” Cozy leaned forward, her face contorting into a sneer. “Are you here because you didn’t believe her, or because you did?”
Mom had reminded her of the basics: Cozy’s alliance with other bad creatures, her brief time as an alicorn, the magic she’d stolen and the punishment Celestia and Luna had given her for it. Mom had never lied to her before. But Mom also hadn’t told her just how small Cozy Glow was.
“Do you wanna be friends with me, little Princess?” Cozy went on, every word soaked with baleful condescension. “Once your mommy fixes me, you wanna play dress-up and have tea parties together, and pretend everypony gets to live the same perfect life as you?”
Flurry didn’t say anything. Cozy took that as an answer. “No? You just wanted to gawk at me, see what was worth all that trouble? Well, now you have. Good for you. Now do what we both want, and piss off.”
Flurry couldn’t help but cringe, though she did her best to straighten up back up before Cozy noticed. “Mom told me you might swear. She said it might be how you express your feelings.”
Cozy made her awful laughing sound again—like a mix between a chittering songbird and a drowning cat—and flopped onto her back, kicking her sheets out from under her with her back hooves. “Of course,” she sighed. “Stars forbid I get my feelings hurt.” After a few moments, she craned her neck and looked at Flurry again. “I can’t help but notice you haven’t pissed off.”
In fact, Flurry hadn’t moved at all. In every way possible, Cozy was exactly what she’d been told to expect—and maybe that was what intrigued her. Nopony was exactly like someone else described them. She was sure Cozy wasn’t either.
“I understand why you’re mad,” Flurry said. “I would be too.”
“Oh, what a relief,” Cozy growled back. “The pampered princess understands me. Go ahead and freeze me for another decade, because I feel positively liberated.”
“What the Princesses did to you was wrong,” Flurry continued after a deep and shaky breath. “We can’t go back and change that. But we want to do what we can now to make things–”
“You totally could, by the way,” Cozy interrupted. “Go back and change it. Starlight Glimmer still around? Ask her about it. Maybe discuss it over some sympathy cocoa, or whatever.” After a beat, she waved her hoof and let her head fall back onto the bed. “I’m sorry, you were making yourself feel better. Don’t stop on my account.”
Flurry grit her teeth, but kept her nerve. Mom would be furious with her if she got in a fight with their “guest”—but stars, did she want to. Even if it was just what she knew Cozy wanted. “You don’t have to like us,” she told Cozy. “You don’t have to like me. But we’re going to help you anyway. Because that’s what good ponies do.”
For a long time, Cozy said nothing. Then she whispered, “Good ponies…” under her breath and, in a whirlwind of displaced linens, threw herself to the ground and stalked forward until her nose almost bounced off Flurry’s.
“If you were good ponies, I wouldn’t be here,” she seethed. “Your parents wouldn’t be royals, your aunt wouldn’t be a god, and you’d just be a snot-nosed, spoiled little brat with a head too big for her giant moondamned wings. Oh, wait a minute, you already are! How about that?”
Flurry’s hooves itched—the way they had when Briar Spring had tugged on her braids during recess last year, and when that pony in the street had yelled at Dad that Auntie Twilight was a murderer. She felt her heart racing, and her face filling with heat—and finally, she understood why she’d stayed, and what Mom hadn’t told her. Cozy Glow was an obnoxious, abrasive, infuriating criminal—and she was smart. She was so good at being who other ponies expected that it was like she’d been spawned from a preformed vision in their heads.
Flurry wanted to be like that. She knew she’d have to be, if she wanted any chance of being a real ruler one day and not just a spoiled brat with giant moondamned wings. And the first step was proving to Cozy Glow that she wasn’t just another stuck-up princess who wanted to “fix” her.
“Yeah, I am,” she said to Cozy, feeling braver than she’d ever felt before. “And you’re stuck here with me. How about that?”
She turned around and left before Cozy could reply, restoring the magical locks behind her. When she returned later that day with lunch, the plate she’d left behind was clean.