That somepony who noticed my malaise, of course, was the T.A. in my last class that day. I walked down the hall toward the exit, not even the exit that led to the university library but to home. Somepony walked beside me and, without a by-your-leave, she leaned ever so slightly into my right side. I saw yellow fur, and felt the warmth of her body.
It was cheeky.
It implied intimate familiarity.
It was embarrassing because it was a mare, though in Canterlot girlfriends seemed to be a lot more touchy-feely than ones in Baltimare, particularly where I'd lived where they might just as likely kiss you on both cheeks as knife you for such a prank.
With Sunset Shimmer, I wasn't convinced it wasn't a prank.
I cringed and gasped. I was a mass of bruises barely hidden by short fur on my right side from twisting mid-leap to avoid killing Fellows in the furniture warehouse.
She flinched and looked at me with uncharacteristic concern in her turquoise eyes. Her magic opened the door so we could walk out into the front quad. She asked, "Are you okay? You weren't your annoying self in class today."
When I didn't answer and disconsolately walked toward the street, she walked ahead of me. "Look at this! I'm beginning to see the numbers!"
In front of us, illusory fiery numbers played and spun like fanciful butterflies. She seemed inordinately pleased with herself and happy, both also uncharacteristic of her.
"Is that a joke?" I all but whispered and turned around.
"No. I know illusions aren't your forte, but this is a mirror of what I'm seeing in my head. I can see the numbers, though I will admit it's impossible to manipulate them—" Her grin went away and she sped up and got in front of me again, trotting backward. "You aren't well. What's the matter?"
"Soft. Nice. Concerned? What's the matter with you?"
"I found a little helper with my concentration. But that's me. What about you?" She stopped. "Dish."
Dish? I almost walked around her, but instead stopped and sighed. "I got beat up," I prevaricated, though it wasn't exactly a lie either, "and I hurt and I deserved it and I want to go home."
"Beat up? Deserved it? Nopony deserves to be beat up. It's that neighborhood you're living in on Lower West Gallop."
"Wait? You know where I—?"
"I've got means, and I suspect you do too. You need to move—"
I started blinking as an unfamiliar emotion welled up. She wasn't the only one acting uncharacteristically today. "I'm little better than a vagrant—"
"And I'm so much better?"
"Your arrow is aimed at the sun, mine at the dirt and the mud. I'm bad news with a bad attitude and you don't want to be associated with me."
A pink and an orange pony had stopped to look, attracted by my intemperate speech. Like I cared.
"Who's down in the dumps today?"
Prissy talk? Seriously? I wanted to kick her, which was an improvement in my mood. I ground my teeth and glared.
"Well!" she said, pulling her head back in mock effrontery. "I do want to associate with you. You're a patient teacher, you take crap from nopony, and you're magically talented. That's good in my book. What I don't understand is how you got beat up."
"Even you beat me up."
She huffed dramatically. "I remember it differently. Yeah, I challenged you, but your injuries were entirely self-inflicted."
Indeed, the doubled-star marks from the practicum where I'd burned off the fur in the backfire of trying not to kill her were still visible. "There are parallels," I admitted.
"So you weren't beat up?"
"I am beat up." Absolutely true.
Two white unicorns under a tree and the old greens keeper with a straw in his mouth had joined into the audience. Sunset Shimmer dressing down a lower-classmare was always a spectacle. If she fought back, more the better.
I added, "If somepony reputedly quite talented herself would teach her supposedly magically talented student how to cancel a spell, she might have avoided some of it."
She swished her tail. "Heh heh." She didn't look all that contrite despite the faintest blush, but the dig hadn't succeeded in digging in, either. The sarcastic part of me wondered if she'd gotten a stallion to ride her last night.
I made to walk around her on the grass, but I had been standing long enough for the bruises to tighten up and I visibly winced. Sunset sidestepped into my path, looking concerned.
"You are hurt!" As I rolled my eyes, she leaned forward and examined my right hindquarters, even going so far as to blow air to ruffle my fur, though it would have been far more polite to use her magic. "Glimmer, you look like you were hit with a brick. You're all black and blue. You're lucky if something isn't broken."
"Something is," I whispered.
"That's enough. You are stupider than you look, and that's saying a lot. Follow me. Now!"
I knew where we were headed and complied. She muttered, "Perhaps I need to teach you judo, first."
After being tutored in defense as a young filly—learning how to fall, be thrown, and escape—I'd trained as a prizefighter. Turning an attacker's momentum against them had been a first lesson. Prizefighting had rules. The syndicate had subsequently taught me to fight dirty. Overly trained reflexes were my problem.
"You're probably not so much kicked as knocked over? Am I right?"
Of all the rest of the nattering she did along the way, the only thing I paid attention to was that she said that if I would be willing to take a roommate, she could find me a room for a gold bit and ten silver a month. That made me think of the nineteen bits of silver guilt that jingled in my saddlebags, essentially double the amount I made on most jobs. Yeah, ask me to sell off more of my little remaining soul, why don't you?
We found her bespectacled father in the hall having locked the door to his office. Sunset Shimmer said, "She's been beat up."
I added, "Sunset had nothing to do with it."
The frosted glass in the door rattled as he unlocked it. Sunset Shimmer politely stayed in the waiting room as the doctor turned on the lights and led me into an examination room. I levitated off my saddlebags and hopped on the table as he donned his head mirror.
He separated the fur and palpated areas, causing me to grimace. "I suppose I should have seen the other fellow?"
I giggled at his unintentional pun, but I went with it anyway, remembering Fellows hooves up, his stallion-parts exposed on the the sofa. "He was actually quite cute. The only thing I did to him was stun him to get away." And cut off part of his ear.
"He knocked you down and back. You've lost a bit of fur here. I'm surprised you're not cut up."
"I was."
He paused. His dark green eyes flicked to look into mine, then back to my rear haunches. He stepped back.
It took him about ten seconds and he spotted the healed injury across my withers. The scar was red, and obviously new. Thinking about it rationally, he had to realize it was long and deep enough to require stitches, not just glue, but was perfectly straight and perfectly thin and perfectly sealed. It had soaked my cape with blood.
Flowing Waters got a beatific smile on his face. "Which transform? You know how to use calculus with imaginary numbers?"
I shrugged, which hurt, and answered his questions. He nodded a lot, corrected some suppositions I didn't quite have right, and quizzed me until standing made my leg quiver.
He looked out the window at the late afternoon sun. In a low voice, he asked, "You performed this upon yourself?"
"Well, yeah."
"My, my." He tapped his hoof, as if trying to say something but not coming up with the right words. Finally, he stated, "You're something of a prodigy."
"What? 'Cause I could heal myself? It seemed straightforward when I tried hard enough."
He laughed briefly. "Straightforward? Easy? Young lady, I found those transforms in a book nopony took seriously for centuries. I had to track down the original book in the Star Swirl the Bearded Time Wing of the Canterlot library and convince the princess to even let me in there. You just watched me doing my magic and, with a few hints, figured it out yourself?"
With a little light reading. I shrugged, but something fearful grew in me.
"To top it all off, you performed the magic on yourself, first? I've never had the nerve to work on myself! It took a decade working on livestock before I used it on anypony, let alone Tia." He stared at my blank flank, obviously surprised to find it still blank. It was my silent wish that it would forever remain so. "Show me. Show me, I have to see it to believe it."
I shook down to my hooves, but his passion—better suited to a colt than a pony his age—blinded him. He glared at me. I complied nearly in shock, pushing my magic into my leg and harnessing it against the fracture in the bone. His eyes, magnified behind his bottle-bottom glasses, stared unfocused into my blue-green aura as he sampled my numbers.
"A green-stick fracture," we both said together. Our synchronicity changed my discomfort to wonder.
He had me lie down and together we healed the bone in my leg. About an hour later, we proceeded to treat my bruises, causing the damaged tissues to heal further than they had. The interstitial fluids could not be magicked, but he assured me that the bruises would disappear unnaturally rapidly. As for my withers, he gave me a tube of silver salve for my saddlebags and warned against sealing wounds without cleaning them first.
"Before you get too high on yourself, working on yourself ought to be a magnitude easier than working on another pony because of nervous system feedback; it's just that it takes an incredible amount of nerve to do that because…"
I filled in what I figured. "Because I could damage myself easily." That was the scary part I'd ignored.
"If you'd severed something, you could have bled internally, even fainted, unable to fix it."
He had a lot of fears about a process he'd never tried and learned. "I could have paralyzed myself, or—"
"Yes. This wasn't a good idea, you understand."
I nodded noncommittally.
"Well, that's settled. You're a third year student, right? Sunset Shimmer's teaching assistant assignment is third year."
"I'm rated at first to eighth year, depending on the subject, bumped up because of some exams Vice-headmare Ms Maple administered. I've had a lot of tutoring and—" I coughed. "—in-the-field experience before she admitted me."
"That explains the artificial postern in your right leg, doesn't it, and the nerve damage that requires you to wear a prosthesis in your hoof."
I blinked at him. He hadn't missed it, after all.
He said, "Your nose was broken at least twice, and you've got more than a dozen pressure-cut scars all over your body. Good doctors worked on you, but still..."
I almost laughed. Dr. Feels had also been a quack, as evidenced by her rubber duck cutie mark as well as her lack of accreditation, but somepony had to heal prizefighters that beat each other bloody considering the fights were technically illegal.
I stated, "I protect ponies. My job—"
"Protecting ponies? At your age?" He sounded shocked, but astounded as if he believed me.
"Was my job."
"That you were even younger makes it better?" He pointed at my postern.
I took a deep breath and let it out. If I told him, he might be able to look up reports of the incident and figure out who I was and that I'd protected Doña Carne Asada, but the witnesses were mostly syndicate mobsters and piecing it together would require work and believing hearsay. I sighed.
"A griffon dive-bombed us. I pushed away my employer and teleported myself and the griffon away. The magic I used to defeat the hen, blasted me into a bookcase and broke the bone in half. I saved my employer, and she saved me. Said I died twice from blood loss, but how could that be because I'm here, I don't know?" I reiterated, "I save ponies."
He murmured something that sounded like army?, but my ears swiveled his way too late. "Well, that's something I have to tell Princess Celestia about—"
"Uh, please don't."
"A prodigy like you needs to be fast-tracked into university study. You require senior classwork at very least."
"I—I can't keep up in half my studies."
"Let me guess. History, geography, and literature?"
I nodded. "History is the worst."
"Equestria needs its brightest minds, now. Your body alone screams you've got talents that are sorely needed. There is something known as 'trailing studies' and 'assigned tutors.' Your school's motto recently changed to 'Equestria Needs Unicorns.' You may not know this, but there is a silent war going on. Incursions by magical beasts, and a few neighbors needing to be discouraged from raising armies."
I blinked, then understood. He believed I could protect ponies, and I realized I had told my story with pride. Spies. Special operatives. All needed. "Both my father and mother were killed in that... I actually know, though I—I don't think I understand."
"Princess Celestia took both Sunset Shimmer and her rival as protégés from modest backgrounds and is training them for a reason. Her school finds the best. There is a need, and besides which, you sound like you wouldn't mind. I can sense a greedy part in you when it comes to magic. It would mean access to restricted archives and rare objects."
Ohhh. Bad colt! Offering the foal candy, and me a sugar addict.
Actually, I did mind being drafted. That seemed to be the one constant in my life. Being drafted. Being honed into somepony's razor-sharp tool. I had no idea who the real me was!
So, it was a secret little war that had taken my parents' lives and made them heroes and left me an orphan of elevated means I had no use for. "I don't come from a modest background," I said. "Though I would like more challenging magic classes, I don't want—" Celestia to notice me. "—to bother Princess Celestia—"
"Too late. You no longer have a choice."
I never did. Never had. Probably never would.
Still, the idea of getting into the university much sooner worked for me, if I could manage the fallout.
Princess Celestia. I did not like her. I could not meet her as she might recognize me.
I didn't know if he took my wheedling seriously, to keep my scholastic "promotion" anonymous for a while—and how embarrassing I'd find it... and all the other spaghetti I threw at the wall. At some level, I think he got that I had to want to cooperate.
I hoped.
I would rather learn all the things I needed to learn sooner than later, because sooner or later my job with Running Mead would kill me. Better that I quickly wrung dry what Canterlot provided and leave alive.
In any case, this quashed any thought I had of leaving Canterlot any time soon. I had to stay, even if I was forced to work twice as hard at my "job."
To my chagrin, I would get an interesting blue note that night.
But, before I left and before an oddly mellow Sunset Shimmer took me to a feel-better dinner at the Hey Burger!and didn't drink at all—before all that, the doctor said as he locked up his office, "If you follow a medical track... Realize that I am an old stallion but Princess Celestia will out-live us both. I can't retire because nopony can replace me, except—maybe you could."
A new dream. I could see me doing that and loving it. Tears began to form in my eyes, though. They stung. They burned.
Such a heartless thing he'd said, gifting a momentarily credulous filly a hollowed-out dream.
Would the princess want a criminal as her personal physician? Even were her physician a member of the peerage and the daughter of Heroes of Equestria?
I knew the answer. It was an emphatic, "No."