//------------------------------//
// Epilogue 
// Story: The Twilight Effect 
// by evelili 
//------------------------------//









September 6

The evening after the Incident was a blur.

They stumbled away from charred carpets and shattered windows into a front lot full of parents and flashing lights. Officers and paramedics and reporters mobbed Celestia the second they spotted her limping down the steps; Twilight just barely managed to draw a single breath of fresh air before a frantic Shining Armor grabbed her in a bear hug and swept her away to his car.

Her parents were there too—they’d taken the minivan. They were worried. They had questions. What happened? Are you okay? Why weren’t you answering your phone?

Because it’s still in my locker and probably dead, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have the words. Instead she leaned her forehead on Shining’s shoulder and mumbled a faint, “Tomorrow,” into his sleeve.

The sky was dark. She was so tired. Relieved, but tired all the same.

Twilight didn’t remember the drive home, or taking off her shoes, or climbing up the stairs to her bedroom and throwing herself into bed. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow—her first sleep without a nightmare in a long, long time.





September 20

Even with magic, life went on.

Somehow Celestia played the Incident off as a gas leak to all the governing bodies that cared, and—apart from the auditorium being closed off and assemblies being held on folding chairs in the gym instead—school life resumed as normal. It was surreal, almost. That one day they were fighting against a magical demon for their very lives, and the next their hardest battles were math problems and phys-ed.

Life didn’t change much at first. Despite everything they’d gone through, Twilight wasn’t sure she’d call the other girls her friends. Acquaintances, maybe. Allies. Sisters-in-arms, if she had to get more specific.

(Except for Sunset. Everyone other than Sunset.)

They rotated in and out of her routine each day like clockwork: Sunset passed her notes in first period; AJ and Rainbow were the champions of ‘cool math games’; lunch had her isolated table seat two instead of one; Rarity and Fluttershy joined her watching on the sidelines in gym class; somehow Pinkie made English class more tolerable, not less.

When they talked to her it was about the mundane. They talked about everything other than the Incident. At least, as far as Twilight knew. Maybe they’d brought it up amongst themselves.

“Maybe,” Sunset said when asked about it. She slurped her soda. Twilight took a bite of her sandwich. Chewed. Swallowed.

“Should I want to talk about it?” she asked when her mouth was empty.

Sunset didn’t respond right away. Eventually between bites of pizza she answered, “I think you should ask yourself that. Not me.”

Twilight frowned into her lunch. That was a non-answer.

“I mean,” Sunset continued, “it’s really real, y’know? Magic and demons and all those spells Luna—”

“But maybe I wish it weren’t.”

“I—” A pause. “...Yeah.”

An awkward silence filled the air around them, broken only by Twilight’s phone vibrating face-down against the table. Two short buzzes and no sound—a text message. She flipped it over and checked the screen.

Celestia: Please just let me know when you’re ready to talk.

Twilight stared at the message for a moment. Then she flicked the ringer to silent and placed her phone back down on the table, doing her very best to ignore the nausea churning sour within her gut.





October 5

It was terribly strange to have her family bring up Luna in conversation as if they’d never forgotten her at all. But Twilight had remembered, and the spell had broken, and magic seemed to have a way of sliding the pieces back together like nothing had happened in the first place.

“It’s so wonderful she’s on the up-and-up.” Her mother reached for a napkin from the holder at the centre of the table, then nudged the salt and pepper shakers over to Shining. “Luna, I mean. If I’m honest, I’d nearly given up hope of hearing any positive news.”

Twilight squeezed her cutlery reflexively. Suddenly her appetite was gone.

“You know Auntie Celestia,” Shining said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “She’s stubborn in all the right ways.”

“It’s nothing short of a medical miracle she’s still with us, really. Oh, perhaps when she’s well enough I could interview her for my next—”

“Dear,” her father gently interrupted. “Let’s not get too carried away.” He finished slicing a perfectly even piece of roast beef and nudged it across his plate into his gravy. “If we ever want the hospital staff to even let us on the premises we’ll need to keep up some pretense of restraint, won’t we?”

Her mother snorted. “Oh, boo. A few questions never hurt anyone.”

“Dear.”

“...Well, I suppose there’s a first time for everything. Shouldn’t risk it.”

Shining tried—and failed—to suppress a smile. “Better safe than sorry. Especially if we’re going to see her this weekend.”

“Oh, goodness, that soon?”

“I mean, I don’t have work, and Dad’s always free on weekends, and you didn’t put anything in the calendar for Saturday, and Twily—”

“I can’t go,” Twilight interrupted. She shoved her chair back and stood up from the table, her dinner still untouched atop her placemat. “And I... I’m not feeling well. Sorry. Excuse me.”

Her mother opened her mouth to protest, but Shining stopped her with a gentle kick under the table. Twilight pushed her chair back in and ducked her head to avoid their worried gazes as she speed-walked out of the dining room and up the stairs.

She just managed to make it to the bathroom and lock the door before it happened.

Twilight hated it.

But it always happened regardless of what she thought. All she could do in protest was hug her knees tight against her chest, curl against the side of the bathtub, and pretend that she could ignore the flickering blue-green light reflecting off the porcelain in the darkness.

“Go away,” she whispered to it. “Go away, go away, go away.”

Even when she managed to force it back down and into its cage, it never left completely. It left its signature in the little things—scattered, horrible things.

The light eventually faded and her heartbeat slowed to steady not long after. Once it did, she gathered up the evidence from the bottom of the tub and flushed fistfuls of feathers down the toilet in the dark.





October 19

With Celestia’s office still out of the question, the library quickly became Twilight’s preferred after-school study spot. It wasn’t ever perfectly quiet, but at least it was better than the hallways. Better than all the alternatives.

Sometimes Sunset would join her, but most of the time she was on her own. Which was fine, of course. She didn’t really mind either way. Frowning, Twilight stared down at her notebook and tried to catch the train of thought she’d just lost. Focus.

She managed to focus for all of three minutes before a pair of footsteps padded across the library carpet and came to a stop at the other side of her table.

“It’s not taken,” she sighed, without looking up from her work. “That chair, I mean. You can have it.”

“Uh.” Rainbow cleared her throat. “I, uh, don’t need a chair, Twilight.”

She blinked. Glanced up. “Oh.” Rainbow Dash in the library, and looking for her? That was a new one.

“So, uh. Hi,” Rainbow said slowly. She lifted one hand to her shoulder in a wave. Twilight mirrored the action.

“Hello,” Twilight responded carefully. She resisted the urge to turn around and check if Rainbow had made a mistake; if she had meant to speak with someone else. “...Do you need something?” she asked.

“I— Okay, listen,” Rainbow began, one hand fidgeting with the strap of her backpack. Her eyes darted back and forth from the table to the ceiling—looking everywhere except back down at Twilight. “I wanted to ask you something, and Sunset said I’d find you here, so... y’know that book you were reading in class last week? The one with the fire and monsters and shit on the cover?”

Twilight blinked again. She had no idea where the conversation was headed, and quite frankly she didn’t think it was worth her time to guess. “Yes,” she answered. “Why?”

“Well it— I just wanted to— After I saw it I— aw, fuck me, man.” She tipped her head back and groaned, “This was a stupid idea. I’m stupid. You’re gonna think I’m fucking stupid for asking you this.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Not yet you don’t,” Rainbow snorted.

“Try me,” Twilight challenged, her eyebrows raised and her curiosity piqued.

Surprisingly, a smile slid its way across Rainbow’s lips in response. She tilted her head back down. Made eye contact. “You’ve been hanging out with Sunset too much,” she said, her grin widening. “Not like that’s bad or anything, though.”

She swung her backpack around before Twilight could respond and unzipped the main pocket. When Twilight leaned forward in her seat she just managed to catch a glimpse of the cover of the aforementioned book inside.

“The librarian helped me find it,” Rainbow explained. Her voice seemed sheepish, almost. “But, uh, the stupid part is, I totally didn’t realize it was a series. And, like, that this one isn’t the first one.”

“Oh.” Twilight leaned back. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.” She paused. “Feel free to laugh or whatever. Call me stupid for not knowing shit about books.”

But Twilight just shrugged. “It’s an easy mistake,” she said lightly. “The author didn’t use numbered titles. A lot of series don’t, actually.” Then the penny dropped: “So, are you trying to ask me to help you find the first one?”

Rainbow’s shoulders slumped with visible relief. “If you’re not busy,” she admitted.

Twilight glanced back down at her work. She was in the middle of her English essay, and it was pretty difficult to get back into the swing of writing after an interruption, but...

“Sure,” she said, and folded her notebook closed. “I’ve got a few minutes.”

It was strange to walk with someone else down the library’s narrow aisles. It was unfamiliar to pull one of her favourite books off the shelf and hand it to Rainbow Dash. It was odd to wonder whether she’d enjoy reading it. Whether she’d want to read the rest of them too.

“I know you’re not a book person,” Twilight said before she could stop herself, “so if you don’t end up liking it, you could always try the movies.”

Rainbow visibly brightened at the prospect. She flipped the book around to scan the back. “For all of ‘em?”

“Up until the sixth or seventh one, I believe.”

“Are they good?”

“Um...” Twilight pursed her lips. “Personally, I prefer the books, but—”

“Books it is, then,” Rainbow decided, and tucked the book securely under her arm. “Thanks a ton. I’ll letcha know when I need help with the second.” She grinned again. “Probably won’t be anytime soon, though.”

She could have just looked it up, Twilight knew. Or asked the librarian, or turned to the last page in the one she’d checked out and looked at the order there. She could have just chosen to watch the movies or not even bothered trying the series in the first place.

But Rainbow bothered. Rainbow tried. She went out of her way to ask Twilight—and it didn’t feel anywhere close to pity, or being forced.

“I’m happy to help,” Twilight replied, and truly meant it.





November 4

“Nah,” Sunset said with a shrug. She dunked a fry in one of the cups of ketchup spread across the tray between them and popped it in her mouth. “Gonna wait a year, I think.”

It was supposed to be small talk. The type of conversation Twilight had heard her classmates toss around with gradually increasing frequency as the days crept on. Hell, she’d even brought it up with Rarity and Fluttershy that past Friday during phys-ed. But Sunset—

“You’re not applying to any universities at all?”

She shrugged again. “I mean, I don’t know what I wanna do yet.”

Twilight felt her stomach twist. She stared down at the table and resisted the urge to fidget with her straw. “Some programs you don’t have to declare a major in first year,” she tried. “Cloudsdale’s pretty flexible. Everfree too, I think.”

“There’s still a risk I’d get stuck in a program I hate, though,” Sunset said. She dunked another fry. “Plus, a gap year gives me a year to work. Save up, y’know?”

“But I’m sure your grades are good enough to get entrance scholarships at least.”

“Okay, and then after that?”

Twilight wilted. Right. Scholarships could only stretch so far. “...Sorry,” she mumbled.

Sunset’s expression softened. It shifted from the neutrality of discussing the future over fries in the corner booth of a McDonalds to something warmer. Something understanding. She kicked Twilight’s shoe under the table. “It’s okay, Twi. A lot of people take a break before uni. It’s not a big deal, really.”

The urge to fidget won out. Twilight rolled her straw between her fingers to ground herself in the feeling of the other end raking back and forth through half-melted ice. “I guess I just assumed everyone applied,” she explained quietly. “I don’t really know what I want to do either, but I’ve still made my list—and my parents are even okay if I want to submit more than three.” She stifled a giggle and added, “Though Shining said he’d charge me a processing fee if I go over ten.”

Sunset snorted. “He a bank or something?”

“For my mom, yeah. She gets so paranoid using her card online.”

“Aw.” Another fry drowned in ketchup. “That’s kinda cute. In, like, an old-person way.”

“My mom’s not that old, Sunset.”

“Eh, bar’s not that high.” She scraped the last of the ketchup onto the end of a fry, then pointed it toward Twilight like the world’s greasiest paintbrush. “Parents? Old. Teachers? Way old. Mrs Mayor’s old; Celestia’s old; hell, once you go to uni you’ll qualify for a senior’s discount, ‘cause I swear I’ve seen first years downtown with grey hairs and wrinkles to boot. Did I tell you about the...”

Sunset’s voice faded out to a dull whine. Suddenly the air felt far too thick to breathe. Twilight stirred her straw faster and tried to focus on the sound of rattling ice, but the noise caught in the fog and faded to a whisper before it reached her ears. Her stomach turned. It rattled furiously against the bars of its cage.

Go away go away go away go away—

A bar tore loose. The edges of Twilight’s vision lit up blue-green.

“...Twi?”

A hand pulled hers away from her straw and brought it down to the table. Sunset. She stared down at their hands for a few seconds and drew a shallow breath.

“You’re, um...” Sunset motioned to her eyes with her free hand. “You okay?”

Twilight inhaled through gritted teeth and shook her head. She didn’t dare speak—instead she blinked slowly and deliberately, her eyes locked on the back of her hand and her mind focused on Sunset and the feeling of their intertwined fingers and not it.

On the seventh blink the flames finally flickered out. When they did, Sunset gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and asked quietly, “Is this because I mentioned Celestia?”

“I—” Twilight forced herself to nod. Blinked again.

“Still avoiding her?”

Another nod. “I know we need to talk,” she whispered, guilt laced through her words, “but I can’t— Even the thought of seeing her— I just don’t know how I feel about everything that happened yet,” she managed.

Sunset hummed softly. She rubbed her thumb against the side of Twilight’s palm. “There’s no time limit on feelings.”

“Of course not, but...” Twilight exhaled a shaky breath. “I feel stupid for not knowing what my own feelings are, I guess.”

“Hm.”

They both fell silent. A minute passed, and then—

“Do you hate her?”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “Of course not.”

“Even after everything she did?”

“I know she was just trying to keep me safe. Even if her methods were... extreme.” Twilight swallowed. Her mouth felt dry. “It’s not her fault I’m stuck with magic I don’t want.”

Stuck with magic. Stuck with it. A volatile and unpredictable power with a mind of its own—both a blessing that kept her heart beating and a monstrous, nightmarish curse.

Sometimes she regretted having taken it. Had she left the prophecy intact and let it run its course, perhaps she could have kept her life and her normality for a full thousand moons. Over eighty years. By the time Nightmare would have returned for her she’d have been too old or too dead to care too much.

But...

Sunset squeezed her hand again, and Twilight was once again reminded that the price of normality was Sunset—her first and closest friend. And no matter how many times she played back the Incident in her mind, the outcome—her choice—always remained the same.

“Do you forgive her, then?” Sunset asked eventually.

Twilight couldn’t answer her. Not then. Not yet.





November 18

Everyone had their own quirks when it came to texting, Twilight realized.

She hadn’t noticed it before when her sample size was so small. Her parents and Shining and Celestia all used autocorrect, and their messages tended to stick to the realm of grammatically correct and same-y. Cadance and her didn’t talk much, but when they did she deviated from the norm slightly by topping her texts with plenty of emoticons and exclamation marks.

And then Twilight met Rarity.

wjos cominh tot he mall wogj me todsy???

And, seconds later: sry jist gotm y nailsdine

Incomprehensible and indecipherable. Far worse than her usual method of sending voice messages and forcing Twilight to wade through a sea of audio clips just to piece together a conversation. She’d tried to show Rarity how to do speech-to-text instead of straight audio, but no matter how many times she explained it the concept never seemed to stick.

(Well, at least two words of the first message were legible.)

The responses flooded in before Twilight could even open the keyboard to reply:

man the only reason im awake rn is cuz ive got a fuckin opener

Rainbow always responded as soon as she could. No caps, no punctuation. And apparently no sleep either, what with a morning shift on a Saturday.

rip dash, Sunset replied, then added, and sorry rarity, i already got an outfit for the dance. kinda wanted to spend the day in bed tbh! And then a third text: send me pics tho so i can judge

Multiple texts with multiple thoughts, as if she’d pressed ‘send’ before she’d finished writing. Knowing Sunset, Twilight suspected she probably did.

I still got the three stooges tearing the kitchen apart, Applejack sent. She texted in a straightforward manner, albeit with a few grammatical quirks that set her messages apart. Unless you want to take em off my hands for the afternoon?

oj fuvk no!!

Y’know I really see where Sweetie gets it from now.

gottem said Rainbow.

lmaooooo said Sunset.

i thoguht youwe re suppoaed to be workinh rainbow!!! said Rarity, followed immediately by a voice message that Twilight didn’t bother to listen to.

oh shit she got my name right

Pinkie, whose icon Twilight had seen lurking at the bottom of the chat, picked that moment to send her first message of the morning: GIRLS look at this!!

What followed was a picture of the sludgiest-looking iced cappuccino that Twilight had ever seen. She thumbs-downed the picture out of principle. Five more immediately followed her lead.

pinkie what the fuck is that asked Rainbow.

an iced capp!

well you sure as hell didnt get that one from me

ot look slike shjit

yeah tastes like it too honestly!

then why, Sunset said with two separate messages, are you still drinking it????? 

Pinkie’s indicator didn’t drop down with the rest of theirs. After ten seconds Applejack decided, Think she’s gone.

ok imputtimg hre down aas a no, said Rarity. twilijgth?? fkuttreshy????

Twilight frowned down at her phone. Sure, she had nothing planned for the day, but she wasn’t going to next week’s dance. She didn’t need to buy an outfit, or get anything from the mall. She opened up her keyboard to decline—

I’d say yes but Zephyr’s going to want to tag along and I can’t put you through that Rarity :(

Out of all their friends Fluttershy was the only one of them to use any sort of emoji on a regular basis. Mostly the text-based ones, and frequently as a form of punctuation.

ditch him said Rainbow.

ditch him said Sunset.

dicht him said Rarity.

hhhhh I know girls I really really really wish I could :((((

And that left Twilight.

On one hand, she could stay in bed for the rest of the morning. Make something for brunch, get around to vacuuming, maybe even tackle the growing pile of laundry in the corner of her closet. She could wear her pajamas all day and blast the album Sunset had recommended through the living room speakers and dismantle that old alarm clock Shining had found for her to tinker with.

But on the other hand she had the opportunity to be a good friend.

Okay, she sent before she lost her nerve. Can I meet you there at 10?

And, after a flurry of surprised messages from the other girls that nearly made Twilight’s phone buzz right out of her grip and a quick scramble around the house to get herself ready and out the door, she did.

Well, two minutes to ten. The bus was a bit early. But it didn’t matter much, because as soon as Twilight crossed the parking lot and went through the food court entrance she spotted Rarity sitting at one of the tables with her purse in her lap and her phone in her hand. At the sight of her Twilight swallowed down her nerves and shoved her hands into her coat pockets. Suddenly the prospect of hanging out one-on-one was much scarier than it had been a minute ago. 

“Hey, Rarity,” she called out when she walked over. Her voice didn’t crack. I’ll take it.

Rarity glanced up, then lit up. “Twilight!” She shoved her phone into her purse and got to her feet, a wide smile spreading across her lips. “Don’t you worry—you’re right on time, and I wasn’t waiting long at all.”

“That’s good,” Twilight managed.

“Then shall we?” Rarity asked, and waved her hand toward one of the halls leading out of the food court. “I’ve already got a place in mind, so we can start there if that’s alright.”

“Sure,” she replied with a nod. They started walking. “I’m, um, not really looking for anything anyways, so I don’t mind just keeping you company.”

“Really? Not anything?”

“Well, I’m not going to the dance, so...”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Oh, but you don’t need to go to a dance to buy yourself something nice.” She raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps I could pick something out for you—”

“Pass,” Twilight quickly interrupted.

“Ah. Applejack’s warned you away from me, has she?”

“Warned me if I’m not careful you’ll turn ‘picking out something’ into ‘buying me something’, yeah.”

They turned a corner. There was a bit of foot traffic in the mall, but it was far less crowded than Twilight had expected it to be. Perhaps ten o’clock was still too early for malls—but who was she to judge? She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d gone to one.

“Just in here,” Rarity said. She pulled Twilight by the elbow through the entrance of a store filled with mannequins and clothing racks and displays of neatly-folded clothing stacked up in rows. It was one of the larger retailers, she realized. A department store.

And while Twilight was completely out of her element, Rarity took to shopping like a fish to water. She marched up and down each section, combing through racks in a blink of an eye and somehow always able to retrieve what she wanted in the size she needed. Twilight soon found herself playing support and defense at the same time—each new dress or top or skirt added to the pile in her arms meant fending off another outfit Rarity wanted her to try.

“Okay,” she protested when Rarity held out a garish pink-sequined vest. “One thing. But only if you get what you want first, and I’m making no promises to buy it afterward. Deal?”

Rarity grinned, a sort of sneakiness leaking through her teeth. “Deal.”

(And thankfully she stopped with her ‘suggestions’ after that, though Twilight had a sinking feeling she’d selected ridiculous outfits on purpose to make her crack.)

It was only later after they’d finished their tour of the mall and all its offerings that Twilight realized Rarity hadn’t actually taken her up on her offer. The thought struck her in the middle of the queue for the food court—it was past lunchtime and she hadn’t eaten breakfast, and a burger sounded incredible to her empty stomach—and of course she remembered during the only point of the day she and Rarity were separated.

You’re done shopping for today, right? she texted. The line for the Thai place was just a few counters down, and her position in line gave her a direct view across the crowds to where Rarity stood waiting for her food. A second after the text sent Twilight saw her reach into her purse and pull out her phone to respond.

yeaj whuy?

Twilight wrinkled her nose at the message. She glanced up and down between Rarity and her phone in silent indignation, then responded, Never mind. I’ll wait until we get our food.

teiliiijiiiight, she whined. i cant hekp itm y nailsd artoo fab!!

Is autocorrect too much to ask of you, though?

imn ot a cowafrd twilifht

The person at the cashier stepped aside, so Twilight shoved her phone back into her pocket and went to place her order. After she paid and found an out-of-the-way spot to wait she checked her texts again: two new messages. but whya re yuo askinf? read the first, followed by, akso what djd youget?

A burger combo, she replied, then hesitated. She typed and backspaced a few replies before settling on, And I was just making sure I’m safe from our ‘deal’ now.

The sound of her order number snapped Twilight out of her thoughts before she could see Rarity’s response. She grabbed her tray and spun around to see if Rarity had gotten her food yet—

—only to nearly bump right into her, their trays just a hair apart from colliding into an amalgamation of stir fry and soda.

“Rarity!” Twilight yelped. Her heart jumped to her throat, then crashed back down when her tray steadied. “I didn’t see you—”

“I didn’t forget,” Rarity interrupted. She leaned in closer until her tray knocked against Twilight’s, her eyes alight with a familiar and mischievous gleam. The fingers of her free hand clasped her phone beneath her chin like a microphone—a focal point. Instinctively Twilight broke eye contact and dropped her gaze to Rarity’s intricately-painted nail polish instead.

“What?” she managed.

“About our deal, of course.” Her voice turned sing-song; teasing, almost. “I’m just saving it for later.”

You can’t do that, Twilight wanted to say, but her protests never made it to her voice. Somehow the anxiety of a ridiculous outfit seemed silly compared to the idea that Rarity would want to spend time with her again in the future; that she wanted to pick something out for Twilight to love or laugh at; that she’d already been thinking about something for her either before they’d gone shopping or during it.

It was a strange feeling, Twilight decided, to know you occupied someone else’s thoughts. But not a bad one. And in the end, who was she to try and argue with Rarity? Trying to stop one of her ideas would be just like trying to stop her from texting alphabet soup—impossible and unchangeable, no matter how hard Twilight tried.

So she swallowed down her misgivings and rolled her eyes and let out an exaggerated sigh of defeat. “Fine,” she grumbled with a smile. “One thing. Got it?”

Rarity mirrored her smile with a grin. “Got it,” she agreed.

Because even if it would cause problems for her future self to deal with, in that moment Twilight couldn’t bring herself to care. She was autocorrect and Rarity was underlined in red, and there was nothing she could do to change that.

And, in Rarity’s defense, her nails really did look fabulous.





December 3

Sunday morning began with a barrage of unread messages in the group chat—well over two hundred, and at least half of them from Pinkie. Somehow it had become routine for Twilight to start her day scrolling back up through whatever the others had been up to the night before. She’d gotten into the habit of putting her phone on silent before she slept out of necessity more than anything else.

After a few minutes of catch-up and a single message of her own, she then dragged herself out of bed and across the hall to the washroom.

Brush teeth. Wash face. Take meds. She checked off each task on her phone as she went. Brush hair. Clean glasses? She picked them up off the bathroom counter and held them to the light. Eh. I can still see through them.

Bathroom, bedroom, staircase, kitchen. Twilight could smell brunch burning before she even reached the last step. The stovetop fan droned over her father coaching Shining through frying bacon while her mother extracted a very brown waffle from the iron and added it to the tower on her plate.

“Good morning,” she said through the chaos, despite it being half an hour until noon, and soon after they finished eating, Sunday afternoon began with Twilight helping clean up the remnants of their meal.

Staircase, bedroom, closet, desk. Sunset had finally woken up, if the little green circle beneath her icon in the group chat was anything to go off of. Twilight sent a quick message to check and received a reply almost instantly. About time, she thought to herself, and reached across her desk for her earbuds.

“Morning,” Sunset greeted when she joined the call.

“Afternoon,” Twilight corrected. She dragged a window over from her other monitor and hit the button to share her screen. “Your week to pick, by the way.”

“Oh, hell yeah.” Something rustled against Sunset’s microphone—knowing her, it was probably a blanket and she was probably still in bed. “Get ready for the worst movie you’ve seen in your entire life. Plus or minus some pretty good sequels.”

Desk. Desk. Desk. Desk. It wasn’t the worst movie she’d ever seen, Twilight admitted afterward, but it came pretty close. Thankfully the sequels were more palatable than the original, and the hours of the afternoon soon ticked by to evening. Shining called her down for dinner as the credits rolled on the fourth, so she and Sunset exchanged their goodbyes and a promise to finish watching the rest of the series next weekend.

Sunday evening began with leftover Chinese takeout eaten at the kitchen counter. Her mother took hers to her office and her father ate in front of the television, which left her and Shining the bar stools at the edge of the island. It felt weird to use the table if it was just the two of them, so instead Twilight put up with Shining’s elbow knocking into her chopsticks the entire meal and got her revenge by swiping as many mushrooms off his plate as she could.

Then they cleaned up, and Twilight reluctantly went down the basement stairs to her mother’s office. They double-checked and triple-checked and argued and quadra-checked, and nearly an hour later she exited the basement with her university applications finalized and most of her mental unscathed.

(Anxiety was expected but pointless, and the precautions to keep her sanity intact started by immediately logging out of her email on every device to stop herself from checking it.)

Staircase. Bedroom. Bathroom. Shower. The weather was getting colder by the day. In protest Twilight cranked the shower handle as far to scalding as it would go and pretended it would prevent her from waking up with freezing hands and feet.

But her fingers eventually pruned, and the shower had to end. Steam still filled the room despite the fan—it was a tiny bathroom and she’d practically boiled herself alive—and though the air she breathed seemed to be half water it was a far nicer experience than getting out into the cold.

Twilight wrapped herself in her towel and turned to the mirror. Blue-green light danced hazily across its foggy surface. She made a face. Stuck out her tongue.

“Go away,” she said, more out of habit than anything else.

It was an annoyance and it was terrible and she still hated that it was hers, but Twilight also knew that her attitude toward magic had shifted slightly over time. Her fears of sprouting wings in public had long since ebbed—even when she felt her grasp on it falter, whatever sentience the magic had retained seemed to know when it was appropriate to escape. To complain, really.

Because that was what its outbursts were, in the end. Complaints from a captive restless and bored. The light in the mirror flickered faster as if agreeing with her thoughts.

“Go away,” Twilight repeated, her bangs plastered against her forehead like the soggy feathers plastered to her back. “You’re a pain to clean up after, you know,” she said, before she remembered she was talking to a mirror and the magic and stopped herself from saying more.

By the time she finished pulling her hair out of the hair trap and picking feathers out of the drain, it was gone.

Hallway. Bedroom. Closet. Bed. Sunday night began propped up on pillows watching videos on her phone. The weekend had trickled by, and another week of school loomed tedious on the horizon. The days weren’t just colder, but shorter too. Twilight dreaded having to get back out of bed to brush her teeth.

Her eyelids started drooping many videos later when sleep finally crept up on her. Ten o’clock may have been early for someone like Sunset or Rainbow, but Twilight had recently found that even twelve or thirteen hours of sleep never seemed to be enough. 

(Sunset had once suggested it was her body’s way of making up for all those sleepless years with Nightmare, and though it had seemed silly at the time Twilight was reluctant to admit she might have been right.)

Hallway. Bathroom. Hallway. Bed. Sunday night ended in a pitch-black bedroom illuminated only by the glow from Twilight’s phone—this time not from videos, but from her texts.

Goodnight, she sent to the group chat after she snuggled back beneath the covers. She reached over to plug in her phone, then waited for the responses that were as familiar as the messages that greeted her in the morning.

goodnight grandma said Rainbow.

goodnight twi said Sunset.

goodnight ^^ said Fluttershy.

Applejack was likely asleep already, Twilight knew, so she’d send a ‘good morning’ text the next day to them instead. Rarity sent a voice message that said only a cheery, “Goodnight!”, and Pinkie sent three different animated stickers of cartoon animals tucked into bed.

Twilight clicked off her phone screen and placed it on her bedside table. Her room faded to comforting black.

Is this my normal, now? she wondered idly.

Because even if it was just one piece at a time, life still changed. Three months had gone by in the blink of an eye, and Twilight found she hardly recognized herself in the life that she was living. She had friends. She could say that with confidence, now. She hung out with them regularly on weekends, whether in person or online, and her school days were far more varied since their lives had intertwined.

Friends and friendships and feathers and flames. Twilight turned those thoughts over in her head until she fell to a dreamless sleep—free of nightmares and Nightmare-free, both the least and most normal she’d ever been.





December 15

December. The day that was once the last Monday before winter break. Slightly snowy; definitely cold.

Twilight stared down at her phone and willed herself to raise her fingers to the keyboard. She sat cross-legged atop her bed, still in her school clothes despite it being nearly midnight and that she should have already been asleep.

Because the year’s ending, she reminded herself. It’s ending and I don’t want to leave things unresolved.

Even if she didn’t want to confront it. Even if she wasn’t sure what would happen if she did. No matter the outcome she knew she’d eventually have to bite the bullet—if not for the sake of her tangled emotions, but also for the chance that she might regain the last piece of normality she’d been missing since the Incident.

She opened the keyboard. Took a deep breath. Typed the message, closed her eyes, and thumbed the ‘send’ button before she changed her mind.

I’m ready to talk now.

And, despite it being nearly midnight, Celestia responded almost instantly.

Does Monday work?

Twilight’s stomach turned. Her reply was unnaturally fast. Another message followed seconds later, as if trying to disguise the uncomfortable tension strung taut between their words:

We could do dinner.

She didn’t want to confront it. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she did. But Twilight bit the bullet and forced herself to move forward with all the courage she had left—if not for the sake of her tangled emotions, but for the chance to regain both of the aunts she’d lost.

All it took was a single word: Yes.





December 18

“No matter what happens, I’ll still see you tomorrow,” Sunset had said at the end of the day, and Twilight had tried her very best to believe her.

Because if she waited in the library after school until Celestia came to get her, and they exchanged basic pleasantries like she hadn’t avoided her for three months, she would make it to tomorrow.

Because if she sat in the back row behind Celestia rather than the passenger seat, and made no further conversation, and waited the rest of the ride out in a tension even the radio couldn’t break, she’d still see tomorrow.

Because if her empty stomach twisted itself to knots; if her voice refused to squeeze itself through her stress-constricted throat; if she still couldn’t bring herself to look up from her shoes to Celestia’s face in fear of what she might see—there was tomorrow. There was always tomorrow.

The car turned into the driveway of Celestia’s townhouse and purred to a halt. Not her home, Twilight now knew. Not the house she’d forgotten, but the successor Twilight had believed she’d always had.

Celestia pulled the key out of the ignition in the silence. The car’s lights lit up briefly to contrast the nearly-dark skies outside.

“I suppose we should head inside,” she said lightly.

Twilight dipped her chin in wordless agreement. I suppose we should.

She exited the car and retrieved her bag, still keeping her gaze locked on the snow-covered driveway beneath her feet. Celestia mimicked her path from the driver’s door to fetch her briefcase, and Twilight couldn’t help but notice the way the hem of her pants dragged at the back and picked up mud from the heels of her boots.

The car beeped twice to lock, and Twilight followed those muddy imperfections up the front step and through the door into the entryway. Their boots tracked in snow atop the mat. Twilight accidentally stepped in some when she removed hers, and she cringed at the feeling of freezing water soaking through her sock.

“So,” Celestia said after hanging up her coat, “dinner, correct?”

Twilight just stared harder at the floor.

“It’s been so cold out recently, so I thought we could put the oven on and make something a little homey,” she continued through the silence. Her voice faded slightly as she moved from the entrance and around the corner to the kitchen. The pantry door opened and closed. Twilight made no move to follow her. “Call me sentimental, but I went through my recipe books last night and found the one for the shepherd’s pie I used to always make for Thanksgiving—do you remember that?”

Silence. Celestia kept going: “It’s got all the hallmarks of a comfort food. Ground beef and spices and potatoes with heaps of cheese and butter, and of course some vegetables mixed in to keep it somewhat healthy.” A drawer opened. Different types of cooking utensils clattered across the countertop. “Plus I feel it’s just so simple to have everything together in one dish. Less of a cleanup too.” The oven beeped, then hummed to life. “I think it’s best if we start by peeling the potatoes, so perhaps you could grab a—”

“Can you just stop?” Twilight snapped. 

The words left her mouth before she could soften them into something with less of a bite—since how the hell was she supposed to stand there and pretend nothing had changed between them at all?

The noises from the kitchen stilled, save for the oven’s gentle hum. The wall separating Twilight and Celestia felt almost like a blessing, then. Because I would never have dared to say that to her face. 

“I can’t— I just need to get this over with,” she continued. “Even though I told you I’m ready to talk, I don’t know if it’s scarier to actually bring it up, or to think we could ever pretend it didn’t happen. I can’t do what you’re doing—I can’t pretend like that at all!” Her voice cracked, but she kept going. “I have to get this over with, but the worst part is I don’t even know if I want an explanation or an apology or an argument or—”

“Do you hate me?” Celestia blurted out.

And suddenly the rest of Twilight’s sentence evaporated to gut-churning guilt.

“I don’t blame you if you do,” she added quietly, with a tremor in her voice, and Twilight was struck by just how strange it was to hear vulnerability between her words.

“I don’t,” she tried, but her voice sounded far too hollow to be completely true.

“I have always—” Celestia cleared her throat. “I have always regretted what I did to you. Please know that I so badly wish I had never made that choice. But that monster fed my doubt, and when it turned out that what I had brushed off as the occult might have been the only way to protect you, I... I thought I had to do something.”

Twilight swallowed hard. “You took my memories,” she said bluntly.

A pause. “I did,” she admitted.

“How?”

Celestia let out a low, self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, how easy it would be to blame my sister for her dedication to her hobby,” she said. “But I am the only one at fault. Despite her extensive research, I don’t believe Luna ever successfully cast any of the spells she penned. Not for a lack of trying, of course, but because of her humanity—she never lost it, even at the end.”

Right, Twilight remembered. Humans couldn’t use magic on their own. And if Celestia was working alone then even harmonic magic would have been out of the question. 

But... that didn’t make sense, did it? If she couldn’t use magic, how could she have taken—

Her stomach dropped.

Because wasn’t that a contradiction? Hadn’t she seen Celestia use magic not once, but twice within her memories? First to sever Luna’s soul, and then to imprison her for a hundred moons inside the very monster she’d wanted to stop. No, more than twice, Twilight realized. During the Incident too. She’d fought so desperately to keep both Nightmare and Luna from ever being freed.

Celestia was a human, and she’d used magic—magic that bore no traces of harmony or even humanity at its core. 

So did that mean—

“I could have done nothing more inhumane,” Celestia whispered, “than force all those who loved my sister to forget that she exists.”

And then Twilight felt her body move forward on its own; felt her eyes break free from the floor they’d been glued to and lift along with her head. She didn’t process her legs stepping into the kitchen until she was already there, and then she didn’t process that she’d moved for an entirely different reason—because she saw Celestia’s face for the first time since the Incident, and the face she saw was streaked with guilty, silent tears.

“I don’t hate you,” Twilight choked out. “I promise I don’t hate you.”

“Then you are a better person than I am,” Celestia replied weakly. She exhaled a strangled sob that Twilight pretended she didn’t hear.

“You did what you thought was right,” she tried, but Celestia just shook her head.

“I acted out of fear. Nothing more than that.” She moved to wipe her nose on her sleeve, then stopped herself. “Even after magic granted what I thought was my only hope, my fear remained. It grew with every full moon, with every month I saw you live in that terrible ignorance I had created—as if the universe itself was counting down to the day you’d die.”

Celestia sniffled, a watery and sickly sound that didn’t suit her at all. Wordlessly, Twilight pulled a sheet of paper towel from the roll on the counter beside her and held it out.

“I searched every inch of Luna’s office in those years of waiting,” Celestia continued. “I read every page in every book, but for all of my efforts I never found the answer that I wanted—if I had any chance of saving her, or if I’d doomed her the moment I’d used the spell.” She took the paper towel and blew her nose into it. Its roughness scratched her skin red when she pulled it away. “But I told myself Luna didn’t care about the outcome; that if it were you or her she’d choose you over herself in a heartbeat every time. I owed it to her to save your life—no matter what I had to do, if it meant the hundredth moon would pass without your belief setting that monster free, the price was worth it.”

Celestia paused for a second to draw a shuddering breath. “And then you met Sunset Shimmer,” she whispered. “And then I realized everything I did was pointless, and I could never take it back.”

In that moment Twilight finally caught a glimpse of the Celestia she thought she’d known slip back through her teary eyes—the desperate and ice-cold woman so fixated on the one thing that kept her willing to face tomorrow. The woman that Twilight had seen shattered on the day of the Incident after the doors to the auditorium slammed shut. The woman who hadn’t known she’d gambled with her niece’s life until all the cards were down.

To have thrown away her humanity, only to learn at the last second that it hadn’t even mattered? How much despair must she have felt the moment Twilight mentioned magic in the same breath as Sunset’s name? How much fear? How much guilt?

The beep of the oven snapped Twilight out of her thoughts. It reached temperature. In the silence Celestia wiped her nose again, but didn’t say anything more.

“I... think I understand,” Twilight eventually said. “I still don’t know how I feel about everything, but at least I can understand why you did what you did. I guess it’s just...” Her eyes prickled, and she quickly blinked to clear them. “I guess I wanted to hear something else. Because you hated magic so, so much, and I thought that maybe that was just an act you had to keep up to protect me, but with everything you’ve just told me I don’t see any reason why your hatred wasn’t justified. Isn’t justified,” she corrected quickly.

Celestia’s shoulders slumped. “Perhaps that was the easiest part of all of this,” she said. “Though I can’t say the hate I carry feels just in any way.”

Twilight felt her throat close up. “Do you still hate magic?” she asked.

“I... Well, maybe not as strongly as before, but—”

“Because you taught that hate to me too,” she continued, “and I hated magic, and now I am magic, a-and I’m trying to unlearn that, but I—” Her insides squeezed, and suddenly it threatened to break free through the frayed nerves beneath her skin.

“Twilight, I—”

“I just don’t know how I’m supposed to un-hate myself.”

The words slipped out against her will. It wasn’t that she’d wanted to stop them, but that she truly hadn’t realized she’d wanted to say them until they were already said. Feelings were complicated and foreign and terrifying things. Especially the ones tangled around the Incident like a noose around her neck.

Twilight didn’t realize she’d started crying until her tear-warped vision glistened a harsh blue-green.

She couldn’t see Celestia anymore. She couldn’t see the floor beneath her feet. The world plunged underwater, and Twilight felt as if the weight of the ocean suddenly rested upon her shaking shoulders. Blood—seawater—rushed deafening behind her ears.

And then—

“I hated magic for taking my sister away.”

Celestia’s voice cut through the storm like a rudder, even and strong. The waves calmed. Twilight gasped a shuddering breath and tried to keep herself afloat.

“I hated magic for nearly killing you. I hated magic because I couldn’t risk having you believe in it.”

Something tugged at her arm. Twilight felt herself drift downward, then land back on solid ground with both her feet.

“I hated magic for making the world forget about Luna.”

And, despite the magic she hated being plainly visible in Twilight as feathers and flames, Celestia pulled her by the shoulders into a hug.

“But I am so grateful to you for saving her,” she whispered into the top of Twilight’s head. Her arms squeezed tighter. Twilight buried her face against Celestia’s shoulder to stifle a sob. “And I love you so very much. So if you’re magic now, Twilight,” she said gently, one hand rubbing circles on Twilight’s back between where her wings clipped through her shirt, “then I’ll love magic too. With all my heart.”

A weight lifted with her words. The knot in Twilight’s emotions hadn’t entirely come undone, but it had loosened. And for now, that was enough—because they still and always had tomorrow to figure the rest of her feelings out. In that moment all Twilight wanted was to cling harder to Celestia and drown herself in relief.

Tomorrow she’d keep moving forward. Today it was better to cry.





December 25

On Christmas Day two presents meant more to Twilight than all the rest.

The first, a journal she made sure to put away safely on the shelf of her desk. It came wrapped with an ink pot and a fountain pen, and a separate kit to make feathers into quills. In case you get tired of flushing them down the toilet, the card said. Merry Christmas, Twi.

And the second, a pendant shaped like a star on a silvery chain, with a card written and signed by two people—one with slanted cursive that stretched loopy, thin, and tall, and one with ink-black writing so neat it could have passed as typeface.





January 1

“Twi?”

“...Mm.”

“You awake?”

Twilight wrinkled her nose and resisted the urge to open her eyes. She’d been so close to finally falling asleep... but of course she wasn’t allowed any sort of respite that night. Of course not.

“Unfortunately,” she grumbled into the zipper of her sleeping bag.

“Oh. Sorry,” Sunset whispered sheepishly. Her voice came from a point slightly higher and to the side—she’d called dibs on the couch earlier, Twilight remembered. And everyone else had been left to fend for themselves.

“It’s fine,” she sighed, and cracked her eyes open in defeat. There was no point in pretending to be asleep anymore. “What’s going on?”

Sunset rolled over onto her stomach so she was looking down at Twilight. “Nothing much. The movie finished a while ago and everyone else went to sleep, but I thought... well, I guess you were trying to sleep too. Sorry again.”

Twilight lifted her head slightly to peer around the basement. Sure enough, Pinkie lay sprawled snoring sideways across the loveseat; Rainbow was curled on her air mattress with music from her earbuds just faintly audible; Fluttershy was buried in a nest of cushions and blankets beside her; Rarity was fast asleep on top of Applejack’s surely circulation-deprived arm; and Sunset was on the couch.

“I didn’t actually think I’d wake you up, though,” she added.

“Wasn’t asleep,” Twilight whispered. “Just... thinking.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Whatcha thinking about, then?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Sunset snorted into her pillow. “Damn, alright then. Keep your secrets.” She dangled one of her arms off the edge of the couch, then clumsily reached around for Twilight’s face. “Maybe I should just find out for myself.”

Twilight shoved her hand away and rolled her eyes. “You do know you can’t do that anymore, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” 

They lay in relative silence for a bit after that, the stillness broken only by the slow breathing of their friends. As Twilight stared up at the stucco ceiling and idly formed pictures on its surface in the near-darkness, a question eventually bubbled to the surface of her mind:

“Do you... remember anything?” she asked quietly.

The couch dipped slightly in the corner of her eye. “You mean, from Nightmare?” Sunset whispered back.

“Yeah.”

“Not much, no.” She exhaled a sigh. “That thing was around for hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. My brain’s way too small to remember all that, y’know.”

Twilight laughed softly. “Was our exam schedule also around for hundreds of years?”

“That was one time, Twi.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

The silence returned. After it stretched on for what felt like a few minutes, Twilight shifted deeper into her sleeping bag and closed her eyes again—

“I still remember some of yours, though,” Sunset whispered, her voice so soft that Twilight nearly didn’t hear it. “Your, um. Memories. Maybe it’s because I saw them for myself, instead of second-hand.” She hesitated, then added, “Is that bad? Would... would you prefer it if I didn’t?”

Twilight blinked back out of her thoughts. She turned her head to the side so she could look Sunset in the eyes, and even in the darkness she could see something nervous lurking just behind them. Something scared. “I don’t mind,” she said slowly, and watched the nervousness retreat a bit. “I remember yours too. That’s only fair, right?”

The corners of Sunset’s eyes crinkled with a sleepy smile. “Oh. Yeah, guess that’s fair.”

Their gazes held for what felt like a second too long. Twilight looked away first, then stifled a yawn. “We should really get some sleep,” she mumbled.

“Mhm.” Instead of turning over, Sunset once again fumbled at the carpet with her dangling arm. “Gimme your hand first.”

Her fingers knocked into Twilight’s cheek. Twilight batted them away, then pushed her palm against Sunset’s instead. “Why?”

“New memory,” Sunset explained with a yawn, and gave Twilight’s hand a squeeze. “Gonna... make one. Right now. First one this year.”

“You’re embarrassing,” Twilight snorted, but returned the squeeze regardless. “Goodnight, Sunset.”

“Goodnight, Twi.”

Like always, her hand was strong and warm.





January 16

“I hate acting,” Twilight grumbled. She squeezed the highlighted script she held with both her hands until the pages began to crinkle. “This is the worst.”

“Understandable,” Pinkie said with a nod.

“They told me I could do tech. I like tech.”

“Mhm. Somebody’s gotta run the lights, after all.”

“So then why,” she complained, and thrust her script at Pinkie with her eyes narrowed, “does tech include acting in front of the entire class?!”

Pinkie tilted her head to the side. “Because I needed a partner for my presentation, and you’re a super-duper friend?”

Twilight sighed. “Because you needed a partner for your presentation and I’m a super-duper friend,” she droned. Her script dropped back to her side like a white flag. “And this is super-duper the worst.”

“Aw, even with bonus marks?”

“A bonus mark you mean.”

They stood across from each other in the centre of the vacant drama classroom, the chairs stacked up against both walls and their backpacks tossed in a pile in front of the stage. A new term meant new courses, and Twilight unfortunately found herself stuck in drama class for the rest of the year—if she didn’t want to switch her spare period from third to first, the only arts course left available to her was drama.

(And even if switching opened up more options, it also meant giving up her spare period with Sunset, and that was worth suffering as many drama classes as necessary to keep.)

“It won’t be too bad,” Pinkie tried to console her. “We don’t have to wear costumes or anything. Plus, you liked Shakespeare when we did it in English class, right?”

Because Mr Magnet graded any sort of analysis deeper than surface-level as profound, yeah. Twilight sighed again and raised her script. “Let’s just get started.”

Since it was Pinkie’s presentation, she would be presenting most of it on her own. At Twilight’s cue she launched into a rehearsed spiel about the play (Twelfth Night), the scene she’d chosen (act three, scene one), the characters (many), and her analysis (exhaustive). After ten minutes of that, all Twilight had to do was act as the second character in the scene to close out the presentation—Pinkie had begged to do a duologue instead of a monologue, and she’d only been allowed if she found someone willing to be her partner.

Unfortunately, that partner was Twilight.

“Give me your hand, sir,” Pinkie said to start the scene. She didn’t read from a script, and she slipped so easily into character that Twilight felt awkward catching up.

“Um,” she stuttered. She glanced down to her script. “...My duty, madam, a-and most humble service.”

Acting felt like an unbalanced game of ping-pong. Pinkie caught each clumsy line Twilight spoke and returned all of them with perfect form. It didn’t feel like they were Olivia and Viola over the duration of the scene—instead they were Olivia and Twilight Sparkle, one half of their duo so obviously out of place.

Somehow she managed to make it to the end. Pinkie clapped enthusiastically when they did, but Twilight couldn’t bring herself to do the same. “I’m awful at this,” she mumbled. “I won’t... You should probably find someone else if you don’t want to lose any marks.”

But Pinkie just shook her head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I already asked Mr Conequus, and he said he’d just grade me for my parts, not yours.”

“Still. I can’t be any good to practice with.”

“But you did just fine, silly.”

“I—” Twilight took a deep breath. She knew her protests were futile; there was no chance Pinkie would ever agree with something so self-deprecating. Her shoulders slumped. Exhale. “I’m just anxious about this,” she tried to explain. “I hate public speaking and I’m not good at acting, so that combination’s just making this even worse.”

Pinkie hummed thoughtfully. “So if you were better at acting, then this would be easier for you to handle?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay. Then let’s do that.”

Twilight blinked. “What?”

“Get you better at acting, of course,” Pinkie said matter-of-factly, and clapped her hands together with a smack. “Enough that you won’t be so anxious, at least.” She pursed her lips. “Let’s start from line one-fourty-five and give it another go.”

“How is this going to help me?” Twilight asked, bewildered. Despite her confusion she still flipped back a page as instructed and marked the specified line with her thumb.

“Because this time,” Pinkie explained, “instead of just reading to me, you’re going to talk to me.” She waved one hand back and forth between them and continued, “Think about each line before you say it. And instead of speaking to Olivia, just speak like you’d would to Pinkie. Okay?”

“No,” Twilight protested. “I don’t get it.”

“Tell me what thou think’st of me,” Pinkie retorted.

“Pinkie—”

“Tell me what you think of me right now. Am I pushy? Stubborn?” She raised her eyebrows. “Annoying?”

“A little bit, yeah,” Twilight snapped.

But despite the harshness of her words, Pinkie’s face lit up with a wide smile. “Okay, like that!” she cheered. “Say your line just like that.”

Irritation pooled on top of Twilight’s tongue. She squinted at her script and forced herself to speak, this time drenching her words in her feelings before she fired them back: “That you do think you are not what you are.”

The sound of her own voice surprised her—because it didn’t sound like Twilight Sparkle anymore. She’d been Twilight, and she’d spoken to Pinkie, and yet somehow by doing that she’d become closer to her character than herself.

Huh.

“If I think so,” Pinkie said slowly, “I think the same of you.”

She’d forgotten, again. That for all her pep and smiles Pinkie still understood, even if Twilight didn’t. She was a people person through and through, and no matter how odd her methods seemed there was no denying they always seemed to work. At least, from what Twilight had seen for herself. Experienced for herself.

And wasn’t she the same? Not that she was good with people—the opposite was far more likely—but that even with all her classmates’ expectations on her shoulders she’d still forced herself out of her comfort zone and volunteered. They hadn’t wanted to help Pinkie. Twilight had. Because I could see it was important to her.

Not a people person, but a Pinkie person, perhaps.

The lines from the play reflected their reality so clearly that she couldn’t believe it’d been anything but an intentional choice.

One last glance. Then Twilight folded her script in half and replied, “Then think you right. I am not what I am.”

It was far easier to act when the words she spoke were true.

“I would you were as I would have you be,” Pinkie said. Her eyes twinkled with an underlying message Twilight received across the tension loud and clear.

Normality was dead and buried, after all.

So Twilight let go of her misgivings and allowed herself to try—try acting, try confidence, try seeing in herself what Pinkie so strongly believed she had. “Would it be better, madam, than I am?” she asked. 

Pinkie’s smile widened. That time, Twilight hadn’t used her script. She didn’t need it for the rest of the line either; an apology and an appreciation all wrapped into one:

“I wish it might, for now I am your fool.”





January 31

Twilight wasn’t sure why it happened on Wednesday morning, really. There wasn’t anything remarkable about it. Shining had dropped her off in front of the school before he headed to work, and she had no reason to not head straight to the library and wait out the half-hour before the first bell rang. But for some reason that Wednesday she let herself linger in the front foyer long after she heard his car pull away from the doors. 

The school was always so still before the buses arrived. Only staff members and the students who’d driven in for morning practices ever occupied its halls. In the silence Twilight idly examined her reflection in the trophy cabinets against the wall and removed her hat. A crackle of static. Hat hair, she groaned internally, and watched her reflection attempt to flatten her bangs back against her forehead.

Why was she waiting, though? She had a test second period, so if she hurried to the library she’d have enough time to go over all her notes again. There was nothing to do in the foyer, so why—

“Oh! Good morning, Twilight,” a voice said from somewhere behind her.

Twilight blinked. She shook her bangs out of her eyes and turned around. “Good morning?” The person in her vision processed, and she added, “How have you been, Mrs Mayor?”

“Well it’s certainly business as usual around here,” Mrs Mayor said with a wry smile. She stood just outside the door to the main office in the staff wing hallway, where her view of the foyer included the trophy cabinets and academic plaques. And me. “But what about you, dear? It feels like it’s been ages since you’ve stopped by.”

“Yeah,” Twilight agreed, if slightly awkwardly. “I’ve, um, been busy.”

“Goodness, I’d imagine so. University applications and the like?”

“Something like that.”

Mrs Mayor nodded, then pointed toward the office door with her keys. “Well, I’ve got to prepare for morning announcements, but if you were hoping to see your aunt she’s probably in her office already.”

And there was the dilemma.

Sure, they’d talked about the Incident. Things were creeping back to normal at a snail’s pace—a few rides home from school here, a few mundane texts there. But going back to Celestia’s office was a huge step compared to the rest of the progress she’d made. A huge step toward normality.

...Would the armour still be there?

“I don’t want to bother her,” Twilight managed.

“Oh, I’m certain you wouldn’t. Come now, I’ll make you a hot drink regardless. Coffee? Tea? No, wait—you’re a hot chocolate person, right?”

Hot chocolate did sound nice, Twilight admitted. So, before she could talk herself out of it, she accepted the offer with a nod and followed Mrs Mayor into the office she hadn’t visited since September. “Thanks,” she added once the door shut behind them.

“It’s no trouble at all.” Mrs Mayor dropped her purse behind her desk, then leaned over the little table on the side wall to prepare the drink. It was one of those expensive instant machines that Twilight never remembered how to use. A few minutes later it finished brewing and she received a steaming mug of hot chocolate to warm her hands. She took a careful sip. Her glasses fogged as she did. Perfect.

“And I’d send you off with one for Celestia too if I didn’t know that she’s already made herself coffee this morning,” Mrs Mayor said, giving the trash can a nudge with her foot to reveal a handful of used coffee pods. “I swear that woman could drink us all under the table. At least in terms of caffeine.” She finished tidying up the coffee table and sat herself down at her desk, then gestured to the door beside it with one hand. “Now go on! Classes start in twenty, and I wouldn’t want you to be late.”

It was too soon, too fast, and an unremarkable Wednesday morning—but none of that mattered in the grand scheme of things. Twilight knew she couldn’t avoid it forever, and what better way to finally face it than by refusing to make a big deal out of it at all?

She pushed the door open to the waiting room with her shoulder and let it close on its own behind her. Her mug was warm. The room was silent.

Principal Celestia, MEd, MBA.

Twilight took a deep breath, then raised her hand against the door and knocked.

(Afterward it felt silly she'd ever been scared to go back, because it was the same room it had always been before. A real room in the real school, not some Nightmare-warped illusion at the end of a bottomless pit. It couldn’t hurt her. Not ever; not again.

...Though, even if it was just a room, she still couldn’t shake the imagery of shadows clawing from its walls.)

The door to the office opened. Celestia’s eyes flickered slightly at the sight of her visitor. “Twilight?”

And it was only then that Twilight remembered that they still had to talk about something—something that the magic she carried had surely sensed that Wednesday morning, even if she herself wasn’t actively prepared for it. A reason to hesitate and drag her feet and get caught by Mrs Mayor and be forced to face the office she wanted to avoid.

The blazer Celestia wore that day was navy blue.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence. But that coincidence framed Celestia that morning in a light that Twilight could only see as someone else. And once she saw her in Celestia’s face—

“I don’t need to come in,” Twilight said quickly. She wondered if her heartbeat was strong enough to ripple through the liquid in her mug. “I just— I just need to ask you something. I mean, I wasn’t sure until now that I’d ask you today, but I figure if I’m already here—”

Celestia’s mouth curved into an uncertain smile. “What is it?” she asked.

“Will you— I mean, if you want— Or, if she’ll have it—”

“I’m sorry?”

“Can you give Luna my phone number?” Twilight blurted out.

She forced herself to inhale a deep breath as soon as the words had left her mouth. Hold. Exhale. “If that’s okay,” she added when Celestia didn’t respond right away. “And only if she even wants to talk. But, um, only over text, because I have limited minutes, and I’m still working up to seeing her in person anyways, so—”

“Of course it’s okay,” Celestia said quietly. An unidentifiable emotion shaped her tone, though Twilight didn’t feel it was anything bad. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”

“I-I know the rest of my family’s already been to visit,” she stammered on, “so please let her know I’m not avoiding her—well, I guess I am, but it’s not because it’s her; it’s mostly been everything related to the Incident in general I guess?” Inhale. “Rambling. I’m rambling. I should stop talking now.”

Exhale.

She did. 

After she was sure Twilight wouldn’t start up again, Celestia finally replied, “I’ll send it to her once I’m back at my desk. Though, I doubt she’ll respond until the evening at the earliest.”

“That’s alright.”

“And I promise it’s okay to take your time,” she added. The tone of her voice shifted from unreadable to something kinder: “You’ll know when you’re ready. Even if it takes longer than you thought.”

Oh.

Of course she’d understand, Twilight realized. Despite the still-steaming mug between her hands, her fingertips felt as if they were pressed to ice. Because of course Celestia would have felt the exact same way she was feeling, if not a hundred times as strongly or even more. And yet somehow she’d still been able to bear that burden without breaking—a weight made even heavier by a regret that Twilight couldn’t share.

How much more difficult was it to reconcile with a sister?

How could that ever compare to just a niece?





February 15

“You finished the calc assignment already, right?”

Twilight jerked upright at the question, startled out of her thoughts and back to reality: halfway into her locker trying to gather her things to go home. The top shelf of her locker barely grazed the top of her head as she flinched. Never thought I’d appreciate being short.

“Yeah,” she answered, raising her voice just enough to be heard over the chatter of the crowded hallway. She zipped up her bag and shot Sunset a glance around the door between them. “Why?”

Sunset responded by knocking her knuckles against the locker pressed to her back. “Means you’re not doing anything after school today.”

“What a deduction.” Twilight grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder, then slammed her locker door shut. Rehooked the lock. Click. “You got me, detective. I’m totally free.” She raised her eyebrows. “So, again: why?”

“Well...” Slowly, Sunset rolled her shoulders until she faced Twilight, the perfect picture of nonchalance—boots crossed at the ankle, hands in her pockets, propped up by her shoulder against the locker adjacent to Twilight’s. Her bookbag dangled against her thigh. The locker wasn’t even hers. “I was gonna head over to the grocery store. Wanna come with?”

Twilight squinted at her. “The grocery store?”

“Yep.” She popped the ‘p’.

“...Because?”

“I thought it was obvious,” Sunset said, and smiled with all her teeth. “It’s the day after Valentine’s. Candy’s gonna be cheap as fuck.”

Of course that was why. Twilight rolled her eyes and shook her head, albeit with a smile of her own. “You’re embarrassing,” she groaned.

“Says the future recipient of thirty Hot Wheels candygrams.”

“Sunset.”

“Oops, sorry—fourty.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes further and crossed her arms.

“...Thirty-five?”

“Fine. I’ll go,” Twilight sighed, long-suffering and reluctant. “If only to stop you from making good on your threats.” She shot a glance around the rapidly-emptying hallway and asked, “Who else is coming?”

“Oh.” Sunset pulled one of her hands out of her pockets to scratch her cheek, an almost sheepish expression sliding across her face as she did. “I’m not asking anyone else.”

Twilight blinked. “Oh,” she echoed.

If she read too far into anything in that moment, Twilight was pretty sure her thoughts would spiral to somewhere between anxiety and a train wreck—and that sounded far worse than all the car-themed candygrams in the world. So, out of habit and like always, she stuck a ‘handle later’ bookmark between two mental pages and slammed that chapter of her thoughts tightly shut.

“...Okay,” she managed, and poked Sunset in the shoulder to prompt her to her feet. “Are we taking the bus?”

They were, and—after only five minutes of waiting—they did. The closest grocery store was located in a plaza just a short drive away from the school, though still a bit too far away to comfortably travel on foot. Definitely bikeable, though, if not for the snow still plastered through the streets. Perhaps once it melted they’d be able to make the trip without relying on public transit.

Tangents, Twilight realized as they exited the bus. I’m thinking in tangents again.

She somehow managed to wrangle her scattered thoughts back together by the time she and Sunset entered the store. Thankfully, it was far easier to focus when it meant keeping Sunset out of trouble, and out of the shopping carts.

“No,” Twilight deadpanned the second Sunset lifted her leg.

“But—”

“Even if you get in, I’m not pushing you around,” she said flatly. “I’m going to get a basket like a normal person, and you’re very welcome to join me.”

Sunset put her leg down and stuck out her tongue. “Fine. Mom.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

A pause. Then a devilish smirk slid across Sunset’s lips, and she opened her mouth—

“Don’t call me that either.” Twilight grabbed her by the wrist before she could say anything else and dragged her through the turnstile and into the store. She picked up a basket from the stack and shoved it at Sunset, then took one for herself and unfolded the handles with a snap. “Let’s just get your candy,” she grumbled, doing her very best to stop her ears from burning red.

The store wasn’t too busy, what with it being a sleepy Thursday afternoon. Twilight soon found that her frustration faded as she got more comfortable walking around the store—no one was going to care or point and stare, she reminded herself and her anxiety. They were allowed to be there, teenage rowdiness and all.

So on their second lap she picked things off shelves and pointed out strange foods to Sunset and let herself get sidetracked at the bakery counter looking at the half-price pastries because we could definitely split one of those, right?

(Sunset had agreed, and the third lap had Twilight’s basket heavier by an icing-laden strawberry-topped cake.)

Half an hour slipped by in an instant. Eventually, after she and Sunset discovered that grocery store flowers were out of both their budgets—even when on sale!—they headed over to the self-checkout to pay. Sunset went first: three boxes of children’s candygrams, a tub of conversation hearts, a bag of heart-shaped lollipops with icing tattoos, two tubs of cinnamon hearts, and a regular package of Oreos. 

In comparison Twilight felt far more reasonable with just the cake and a package of Hershey’s.

“You told Shining you’re with me, right?” Sunset asked afterward. Two overfull plastic bags of sugary loot swung from her elbow as they walked, her hands preoccupied with tearing the plastic off a lollipop.

Twilight nodded. “Yeah. He said to text him when we’re done.” She shifted the cake in her arms to keep it from sliding to the side of its box. “Do you need a ride home too? I can ask.”

“Nah, I was gonna bus back. But thanks for checking.” Sunset scrunched the wrapper into a ball and shoved it into her jacket pocket, then declared, “Now, don’t talk to me for like thirty seconds. I wanna see if this thing works.”

They stepped off the parking lot’s asphalt and onto slightly-snowy sidewalk. Twilight raised her eyebrows and said slowly, “Is it that I can’t talk to you, or that you just won’t be able to answer?”

Sunset hummed indignantly around the lollipop in response.

“Because if the latter's the case, there’s nothing stopping me from carrying this conversation on my own. I actually think thirty seconds isn’t enough time for me to say everything about anything. And I have some strong opinions about your taste in Valentine’s candy, so I wouldn’t mind if you gave me a bit more time to—”

“Oh my god,” Sunset interrupted, and pulled the lollipop out of her mouth with a sharp smack. “That was the longest thirty seconds of my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So did it work? Was my suffering worth it?” She turned her head to Twilight and stuck out her tongue, and their faces were so close that Twilight could easily make out the white shape printed on its surface: a heart with an arrow slanted diagonally across. 

It definitely worked, she wanted to answer, but her voice caught in her throat on the way out and turned into a strangled squeak instead, because her stupid, stupid brain chose that moment to remember the thoughts she’d been ignoring the entire trip, and she couldn’t stop herself from reading into Sunset’s actions far too much.

Friends were nerve-wracking. Friendships were hard enough. Twilight knew her second-guessing was yet another byproduct of her once-isolated existence—how was she supposed to categorize feelings she’d never experienced as one sort of way or the other? How was she to know what emotions were fine for friends and which ones weren’t?

And what would happen to her friendships if she guessed wrong?

“Twi?”

Sunset pulled her tongue back behind a worried frown. They’d stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk, Twilight realized. And she still hadn’t answered Sunset’s question. Stupid, stupid tangents.

“S-sorry,” she stuttered, and drew a shaky breath. “I... I got lost for a second. But yeah, it worked.”

“Hm.” Sunset stared at her for a moment. A small furrow worked its way between her eyebrows. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“And you know that if things weren’t, you can always talk to me about ‘em, right?”

Her words were so earnest that Twilight almost felt bad being on the receiving end of them. Not just bad. Guilty. That was the most accurate descriptor for the sour feeling in the pit of her stomach. Even if Sunset wanted to listen, Twilight knew there would be consequences if she ever dared to speak.

“I know,” she said quietly. Acknowledgement wasn’t a lie, at least. “Thanks.”

Sunset maintained her concerned stare in the resulting silence, but didn’t say anything more. Instead, she carefully lifted her candy-carrying arm and pointed her thumb over her shoulder back the way they’d come. “...Is there a deadline for when you gotta get home?”

Twilight blinked. She squeezed the box in her arms tighter, until she was sure her fingers had paled inside her gloves. “Not really,” she answered. “But I should probably try to make it in time for dinner.”

“So we’ve got, what. Half an hour?”

“I guess so.”

“Mkay. That works.” Her thumb jerked backward again. “‘Cause if we’re still splitting that cake, a Tim’s sounds a lot more comfortable than a frozen park bench, y’know?”

“Except we can’t just bring our own food to a restaurant,” Twilight tried to argue.

“Then we’ll just buy something there too,” Sunset said with a shrug. “Hot chocolate sounds nice, right? My treat.”

“I...” The rest of her sentence trickled off to silence. Going somewhere with a parking lot would make it easier for Shining to pick her up, she supposed. And it was getting colder. Not to mention darker. “At least let me pay for myself,” she mumbled.

But Sunset just laughed and shook her head. “No chance,” she said, smiling. “You bought a whole damn cake, Twi—it’s literally the least I could do.”

It was still cheaper than all of your candy, Twilight thought to herself, but she didn’t dare say that thought out loud. They started walking again, this time back in the direction of the plaza, and even though something still felt off between them the guilt in her stomach didn’t sting as badly.

And Sunset knew, of course. Twilight knew she knew—at least, that something was bothering her. It was Sunset. The very same girl who’d read her like a book across the classroom before they’d even met. Sunset always knew. She didn’t need a golden word on her wrist to remind Twilight of that.

She knew that something was wrong, but she also knew that Twilight wasn’t yet ready to talk. And instead of badgering her about it—like Rainbow would have, like Pinkie would have—or politely ignoring it—like Applejack, like Fluttershy—or finding subtle ways to drag what was bothering her out into the limelight—like Rarity—Sunset just acknowledged the wrongness and handed it back over to Twilight with a cup of hot chocolate and a smile.

I’ll be here when you’re ready, was the implicit acknowledgement. Nothing more than that, and nothing less.

(Cake was much nicer in a heated room, Twilight had admitted afterward, her stomach full and her glasses still half-fogged. And Sunset had laughed again, and said her ‘told-you-so’s, and then she’d spent the rest of their time together that evening digging through her tub of conversation hearts to find the corniest ones she could.)

The hug she gave Twilight before she left seemed to last longer than it usually did. And after waving goodbye through the car window, Twilight looked down to the bag on her lap and discovered why:

Inside the half-unzipped pocket of her backpack were exactly thirty-five candygrams—somehow snuck in by the handful when Sunset’s arms were behind her back.





March 1

Unlike the other chapters of the thoughts Twilight had filed away for later, a certain page kept reopening no matter how many times she slammed it shut. Sure, it sometimes remained closed for a few days at a time. But other times it turned into a once-a-minute back-and-forth between herself and those guilt-laden pages she couldn’t bear to tear from their spine.

Some situations seemed to make it worse. Take her spare period, for example.

Every day after lunch ended she and Sunset remained at ‘their’ table in the lunchroom. Most days they worked through their homework—perhaps with a few breaks in between for Sunset to browse her phone—and usually the last twenty minutes of the period had them finished and free to chat about anything they wanted.

Sunset sent wake-up texts. Sunset waved ‘good morning’s in the hall before first period. Sunset was in calculus and lunch and spare and law, all in a row from second period to fourth.

I really do see her the most out of any of my friends, don’t I?

Twilight risked a glance up from her calculus worksheet across the table to Sunset. She mirrored Twilight’s position perfectly—hunched over on her elbows, pencil in one hand, and calculator flat under the fingertips of the other. Her pencil scratched down another line. Her fingers tapped her calculator like a piano. She’s almost done.

In comparison, Twilight had only managed to get through half of the first page so far. That chapter of her mind had opened up again, and it was nearly impossible to run two trains of thought along a single track.

She looked back down to her paper and pursed her lips. I’m not going out of my way to see her; it’s not on purpose, she reasoned with herself. Our schedules just lined up. That’s all.

But... that didn’t explain weekends. And Twilight knew she couldn’t fool herself on that front—she’d never spent hours in a voice call alone with any of her other friends. That was pretty damning evidence on its own.

Twilight drew a careful breath, her gaze still locked on the blank problem in the middle of her paper. If I prefer spending time with Sunset over my other friends, what does it mean?

And, for the first time, she flipped to the second page of her mental chapter:

Do I not want to be friends with the other girls?

No, that clearly wasn’t right. She did enjoy their company, whether it was as a larger group or something one-on-one. Wanting to spend more time with Sunset didn’t invalidate the time she spent with anyone else—she liked all her friends. That was an unchangeable fact, and one she was finally comfortable to admit.

Even if high school was ending and university and the future crept closer every day, Twilight was determined to make the effort to keep her friendships rather than write them off as something doomed to end. And she was fairly sure the others felt the exact same way.

So she turned the page to the next thought: Then is this the concept of a ‘best friend’?

It was an idea she’d seen often on television and read about in books, though generally ones aimed at children instead of teens. Girls were supposed to have lots of friends, and they were supposed to choose from all of them a single one to be the ‘best’. The concept felt very surface-level and systematic, though—even for Twilight.

Besides, none of her friends seemed to care about that concept. Rarity slung the word ‘bestie’ around like it was nothing, and Rainbow had even picked it up ironically until it had slipped into her normal vocabulary and she’d forced herself to stop. Twilight didn’t think she could divide their group into pairs of ‘better’ friends regardless, so that idea was also out.

There was one page left in the chapter.

Twilight hesitated.

She’d never put a label to it, or had the time to think about it much. She was sure her family had their suspicions, though—about the kindergartener who’d moved the worms from the pavement after it rained because the other girls were frightened; about the third-grader who’d read a whole book series in a single night to impress another girl; about the seventh-grader who’d never come home talking about crushes or boys or dating, but instead gushed over schoolwork and science fairs and did you know I got invited to Moondancer’s birthday party? Do you think she wants to be my friend?

But then high school had started, and suddenly self-reflection took second place to the emotional drain of survival. Puberty begat cruelty from most of her peers, and while every teenager dealt with acne and changing bodies and rapid emotional swings, Twilight had been graced with a bonus on top of it all—an anxiety exacerbated to crippling by the torment from her peers.

If grade nine had divided life in two—before, and after—then the Incident had gone and done the exact same thing. And the post-Incident period was the first time in her life that Twilight had ever felt normal enough to think about normal feelings. Like friends. Like romance.

...Like liking boys, and how she probably didn’t.

Twilight felt her ears burn red, and she quickly sent every plea she could to the universe for Sunset to not look up and notice.

Because she knew what was on the last page of the chapter, but there was no way she’d ever dare read it. She wasn’t blind—even from the sidelines of school life she’d seen the fallout of friends confessing crushes and destroying everything they’d built up. So-and-so had told what’s-her-name he liked her, but then she hadn’t returned his feelings and stopped going to his games. There was what’s-his-name, who’d said they could still be friends, but then everyone in school noticed when he hadn’t sat with her at lunch. And then there was the prom king and prom queen power couple who’d broken up and forced their friends to pick a side in the aftermath.

Romance just wasn’t worth the risk, and that was that.

Even if—

That was that, Twilight scolded herself, as firmly as she could. Besides, she had far too much going on to give those thoughts any more of her time—her half-blank calculus homework, for one thing. Not to mention choosing a university when the results came back, and working up the courage to finally see her second aunt. And my stupid, annoying magic.

Sunset gave her shoes a kick under the table. “Finished,” she declared. “Beat you.”

“Because you don’t double check,” Twilight replied automatically, somehow able to keep a straight face despite her decidedly un-straight train of thought.

She turned back to her calculus as Sunset chattered on, and stuck a bookmark back into that chapter for later—she just didn’t have the time to think about it, at least for now.

Maybe she’d circle back to it once she figured out everything else.





March 17

“Rainbow didn’t pick up again,” Fluttershy said, and lowered her phone from her ear. “I think her battery might be dead.”

Twilight crossed her arms tighter against her waist. “And no one else is answering?”

“Well...” Fluttershy held up one gloved hand and counted off on her fingers: “Applejack left her phone at home on purpose, since someone stole it here last year. Sunset doesn’t have minutes, and she’s not answering our texts. Pinkie did pick up, but wherever she was was too loud for us to understand each other, and it didn’t sound like she was with anyone else. Rainbow missed three calls, so her battery’s probably dead. And Rarity’s phone is definitely on silent at the bottom of her purse.”

They stared at her hand for a second, all five fingers and all their friends marked off one by one. “Well, that’s unfortunate,” Twilight decided eventually.

“...Mhm.”

Someone with a stroller pushed through the crowd, and Twilight quickly pressed herself further back against the side of the building to stop her boots from being run over. Beside her, Fluttershy pocketed her phone in her coat and mirrored Twilight’s response to keep herself out of the way.

The festival was far busier than Twilight had expected it to be, though she supposed she shouldn’t have made assumptions if she’d never been before. The entire street was blocked off and divided down the middle by vendor’s tents, with what seemed like thousands of people squeezed together in a slow-moving crowd up and down each side. Even the businesses in the brick-and-mortar buildings that lined the street were open and packed, both restaurants and retailers alike.

And while their group of seven had arrived early enough to snag a booth at a diner for breakfast, somehow they’d all gotten separated between paying the bill and meeting outside.

“So much for a ‘group outing’,” Twilight joked. Her breath fogged in the air as she spoke—it was below freezing, but thankfully only just.

“This is usually what ends up happening,” Fluttershy admitted. She nodded her chin toward the crowd and said, “It’s pretty difficult to stick together as a group of more than two or three. Even if we did meet back up with the others, we’d probably end up splitting off anyways.”

Twilight nodded slowly. “Makes sense.” Then she elbowed Fluttershy gently in the side and said, “Guess it’s good I’m with someone who can actually see where she’s going, right?”

Fluttershy snorted. Somehow she even managed to make snorts seem delicate. “If we find Applejack, maybe we can ask her to give you a piggyback.”

“Hey, you could give me one.”

They both giggled at that. Fluttershy checked her phone one more time, then suggested, “Should we just get started? I’d hate for your first time here to be spent waiting around in the cold.”

“Sure,” Twilight agreed, and clapped her gloved hands together with a muffled smack. “Lead the way.”

When Twilight had mentioned the festival to her parents, they’d insisted on driving her out to the bank to withdraw her spending money as cash. She’d protested at the time—most places accepted debit, didn’t they?—but now that she was actually there she realized she’d underestimated how small a single vendor could be. Some tents had older women selling homemade quilts or paintings, and most of the farmers had large ‘cash only’ signs propped up beside their registers. And the line for the ATM we passed looked nearly a mile long.

She and Fluttershy made their way down the street one tent at a time, checking out whichever ones they thought looked interesting. Their first stop was for maple candies shaped like leaves that melted in the mouth, followed by a detour to grab a pamphlet from the information tent, and then a short wait in line at one of the food trucks for styrofoam cups of cider. Fluttershy pointed out the stalls she recognized and explained the things they sold, and soon Twilight had a better picture of what a ‘maple syrup festival’ actually entailed.

(And the highlight certainly had to have been the food. She’d done a double take when someone walked by with what looked like a potato spiraled down a skewer, and then when another person shoved past her with a deep-fried onion somehow cut into the shape of a flower, Fluttershy had noticed her dumbfounded expression and dragged her over to the line for something called a ‘blooming onion’.

They’d had breakfast just over an hour ago, but all the walking and the cold and the smells from the food trucks had made Twilight hungry all over again. So they’d split the onion, and then a tray of apple fritters half an hour later, and then they’d each bought some maple taffy to chew on while they walked.

Thank goodness she’d listened to her parents’ second piece of advice and taken out a little extra cash.)

Eventually they made it down to the end of the street and wrapped around to walk back up the other side. Not long after they did, Fluttershy spotted a tent selling what looked like jewelry and motioned at Twilight to check it out.

“I think this is the same seller as last year,” she explained, a sort of excited energy in her voice. “It’s where we got our rings—me and Rainbow, I mean. After we made up.”

A memory from the Incident struck Twilight briefly: Rarity’s trial, and the reactions of everyone who’d had something they couldn’t part with. She stole a glance down at Fluttershy’s hand before remembering that any rings she wore were covered by her gloves. “Oh,” she finally replied. “That’s... that’s nice.”

It was probably rude to point out that the stall was selling what looked like cheap imports from the other side of the world, right?

Thankfully, Fluttershy seemed to understand her hesitation. “The price isn’t what’s important, Twilight.” She leaned over one of the trays of rings and explained, “Sometimes things are special because they mean something. Not because of what they’re worth.”

“Well, of course,” Twilight agreed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.” She pulled a ring from its slot in the display and took off one of her gloves so she could try it on. “I guess I just don’t have something meaningful I want to symbolize right now, is all.”

“Oh, me neither.” Fluttershy held out a ring to Twilight and smiled wide. “Sometimes things are also special because they’re cute.”

It was a silvery band made to look like it had cat ears. Okay, it’s pretty cute, Twilight admitted to herself. “Are you going to get it?” she asked out loud.

“Maybe.” She tilted the ring so it caught the sunlight. “Though, I think we could walk around a bit more and see if—”

“Terribly sorry to interrupt, ladies!” one of the salesmen on the other side of the table said loudly. He flashed a wide smile and motioned to the ring. “I can’t help overhearing that you’re on the fence, and thought I’d inform you of the spectacular deal we’ve got going on. Isn’t that right?”

The other salesman nodded enthusiastically. “Why, that’s right. It’s a ‘buy-one-get-one’, don’t you know—buy yourself something pretty, and get another trinket at half the price.”

“And there you have it,” said the first man. “Unbelievably great value, wouldn’t you say?

“It’s a bargain,” added the second man.

“Not to mention the ring you’ve chosen is one of the finest ones we have to offer. Isn’t it a gorgeous little thing?” The first man somehow smiled wider. “Just let me know when you make up your mind.”

Twilight stared at the two of them for a moment, then turned to Fluttershy. “They’re just trying to get you to buy another ring,” she deadpanned, not caring if the salesmen heard her or not.

Fluttershy shook her head. “Oh, I know. Don’t worry. And I don’t think I’ll be needing more than one.” She turned the ring over in her palm. “But if you also wanted one, then...”

Her gaze wandered over to the first salesman, who quickly nodded in approval. “Applicable toward any two purchases,” he declared.

“I...” Twilight frowned, and placed the ring she’d tried on back into its slot. She really wasn’t interested in jewelry, especially not the cheap kind peddled by a pair of sweet-talking salesmen. But then again, it was cheap. It wasn’t going to cost much, especially at half the price. And Fluttershy seemed keen on her getting something to remember the festival by, so...

They got us, she sighed internally, and turned to look at the rest of the rings. “Fine,” she agreed. “Guess it won’t hurt to commemorate my first festival with something.”

After a few minutes to go over her options and a few suggestions from Fluttershy, Twilight eventually settled on a ring even she could admit was cool—a cheap golden band that unfolded into what it claimed was an astronomical sphere. It would probably break or get water-damaged within a month, but who really cared? The memories were what mattered. And sometimes things are special because they’re cool, too.

They paid for their rings and exited the tent. Just as Twilight pulled her glove back on, Fluttershy let out a gasp and grabbed her by the upper arm. “I think I see Applejack and Rarity!” she exclaimed. “Quick—let’s try to catch up before we lose them again.”

Twilight couldn’t see over the crowd, even on her tiptoes, so she let Fluttershy drag her along in the right direction and offered ‘excuse me’s to the people they hurried by—her new ring cold around her finger inside her glove, and an appreciative smile curving at the corners of her lips.





March 30

“Happy Good Friday!” Rainbow hollered, and chucked something covered in wrapping paper in Twilight’s direction the second she stepped through the front door. “Oh, and I guess it’s also your birthday or something too.”

Somehow Twilight caught the object before it collided with her chest. “Yeah, guess it is,” she snarked with a smile. “But a ‘Good Friday party’ just doesn’t have a nice ring to it.”

Unusually, Rainbow was the last one to arrive. It had seemed odd at first, until Applejack had reminded them that her shift ended at the same time the party started and she still needed time to bike home and change. Twilight had felt a bit bad that she had to work on one of the days they had off from school, but Rainbow had just shrugged off her concern with a grin and an explanation: “Holidays pay time and a half.”

And, apart from Pinkie spilling soda on the carpet and a few rounds of Mario Kart, she hadn’t really missed much anyway.

Once Rainbow kicked off her shoes and hung up her jacket, Twilight led her past the living room and down the basement stairs. “Rainbow’s here,” she called out, and dropped off the gift in the pile by the wall as she passed.

“Finally,” Sunset groaned from her spot sprawled across the couch. “Took your damn time, Dash.”

“I’ll still kick your Waluigi-stealing ass any day of the week, Shimmer.” She held up her hand, and Pinkie immediately tossed her a Wii remote from across the room. “Let’s fucking go.”

Right, Twilight remembered. She nudged Sunset’s legs over so she could return to her spot beside her. “I forgot about your grudge match,” she said as she picked up her own remote.

“I think everyone except for them did too,” Rarity sighed from behind. She and Fluttershy were tag-teaming against Applejack on the air hockey machine, though it didn’t seem to have made much of a difference. “Honestly. Video games just bring out far too much competition in some pe— Applejack!” A puck clattered into a goal. “I was talking to Twilight!”

“Fluttershy wasn’t,” Applejack drawled.

“I wasn’t,” Fluttershy agreed sheepishly. “I just missed that one.”

“That doesn’t matter! It doesn’t count!”

“Race is starting,” Sunset called out, and the television blared the jingle played at the beginning of the race a second later. She, Rainbow, Twilight, and Pinkie raised their remotes. “Better pay attention so you know I beat you fair and square.”

(At the end of it all, Twilight was just happy to place in the single digits in every race. Rainbow barely managed to snag first place overall, though Sunset did end up with more firsts in individual races. With Rainbow gloating and Sunset pointing out technicalities and Twilight running interference between the two to calm them down, Pinkie, of course, had no qualms with placing third.)

The evening carried on, and after they’d had their fill of racing games Twilight chose a movie—because she was the birthday girl, after all—and set up a card table in front of the couch. It was for the chips and drinks at first, and then for the pizza and wings and cheesy bread when it arrived.

They finished eating while the credits rolled, and then Twilight went back upstairs to grab a knife from the kitchen to cut the cake. Though, since it was an ice cream cake she didn’t even bother with it herself—the knife passed neatly from her hand to Applejack’s as soon as she returned to the basement. “I wouldn’t bother with candles either,” she warned.

“Well, I would,” Pinkie retorted, and while she didn’t manage to wedge eighteen candles through the cake’s frozen surface, she did succeed with the largest two: the digits ‘one’ and ‘eight’ stabbed roughly at its centre. 

Fluttershy passed out the party poppers once the candles were set in place. Applejack intercepted Rainbow’s before she could set hers off. Rarity struggled with the barbeque lighter, and Sunset tried to help her by using her own lighter instead, but immediately backed down when faced with a pointed give-me-a-minute glare.

She did manage to light it. Eventually.

And finally Twilight found herself seated in front of her birthday cake with friends around the table on every side. Twin flames flickered above the candles and sent sharp reflections across the lenses of her glasses that tugged a strange emotion from her chest—and then Pinkie sounded off, and they sang.

Twilight had been to birthday parties before—hell, she’d even gone to a few of theirs—and she’d experienced seventeen of her own alongside her family. Birthdays had always been an exciting yet subdued affair, a careful balance between enjoying family dinners out at various restaurants and playing the part of a perfect party guest. But celebrating with friends?

That was something completely and overwhelmingly new.

Happy birthday to me, Twilight managed to think over the cheers and the clapping and the pop-pop-pop of the poppers pulled at the end of the song. She didn’t have to think hard to find a wish when she blew the candles out: how could she not want her next birthday to play out just the same?

Cake, then gifts. She hadn’t asked for them, but her friends had brought them anyway: a stuffed animal here, a sweatshirt there. Nothing too expensive, but each one something Twilight was grateful to accept. “We could actually play this right now,” she suggested after she thanked Pinkie for her gift—a board game she’d never heard of. “I mean, I don’t have anything else planned.” Surprisingly.

“I’m down,” Rainbow agreed. “How many players?”

Twilight flipped the box over and frowned. “Six maximum, I think.”

“So someone’s gotta sit out?”

“Or pair up,” Applejack added.

Everyone turned to Rarity.

“Ugh, fine,” she sighed, as if it wasn’t an open secret that she’d have asked for a partner regardless. “Sunset, darling—you’re with me.”

“What?” Sunset made a face, then quickly amended, “I mean, not that I don’t want to be a team or anything, but I gotta get back at Dash for earlier. Pairing up with you kind of makes things unfair, don’t you think?”

Rainbow snickered into her palm. “Hey, I’m not gonna say anything if you wanna give yourself a handicap.”

“I was trying to be polite about it—”

“I-I could just sit this one out,” Fluttershy tried to interject, only for Rarity to shush her with a flick of her wrist and a smile.

“Pinkie, dearest,” she said calmly, her gaze flicking back and forth between Sunset and Rainbow’s sheepish faces. “What kind of game did you say it was, again?”

“I didn’t!” Pinkie chirped. “But there’s a description on the back of the box—”

“Players are challenged to perform different kinds of tasks while other players bet whether or not they can succeed in them,” Twilight read out. She looked up, and suddenly the expression on Rarity’s face made much more sense. “It’s, um, basically gambling.”

Rainbow’s smile vanished. “Aw, shit.”

Because if there was one type of game Rarity knew how to win, it was gambling. And it was clear as early as two rounds into the game that everyone else was just playing for second—a partial advantage of player order, perhaps, but one that Rarity just so happened to benefit from the most. Twilight barely managed to keep herself from going bankrupt with cautious bets and a few trivia-question victories, though her restraint also meant she never won anything close to a jackpot.

Then, during the fifth round, it happened.

“Is the player able to do twenty push-ups in a minute?” Rarity lowered the card she’d drawn and raised her eyebrows. “You’ll take this one, Sunset, won’t you?”

She’s done every active task you’ve landed on so far, Twilight wanted to point out, but she kept it to herself and instead pushed her ‘yes’ card to the centre of the table. “Thirty on yes.”

“A hundred on no,” Rainbow countered. “No way she can do ‘em in a minute.”

“Depends if it’s knees or full. Knees, maybe. But full?” Applejack slid her ‘no’ card forward. “That’s gonna be fifty on no for me.”

Twilight winced. Perhaps she’d underestimated how difficult a push-up really was. Not that I have a great frame of reference for them.

“Fifty on no.” Fluttershy.

“A hundred and five on yes!” Pinkie.

Rarity gave their cards a brief once-over and sighed dramatically. “What adorable little wagers you’ve all put up.” She tapped the task card twice with her fingernail. “Even if you succeed, Sunset, I’d say it’s hardly worth the effort.”

“Hey!” Rainbow bumped the table with her knee. “A hundred’s a lot for most of us, Miss may-I-exchange-ten-hundreds-for-a-thousand, okay?”

“Eh,” Sunset said, and got to her feet. “I still wanna see if I can do it.” She knelt down to place her palms against the carpet, then stopped herself. “Wait, hold on. This is getting in my way.”

Oh, Twilight realized. Right. Her jacket wasn’t flexible enough in the shoulders for a push-up.

And then her brain immediately stalled after processing that fact, because suddenly all she could see was a tank top, bare shoulders, and the terrifyingly ecstatic grin that broke out across Rarity’s face when she caught Sunset’s jacket in her lap.

Her chair flew backward. The table wobbled violently as she stood up.

“One thing,” Rarity whisper-shrieked.

Twilight nearly choked on her own saliva. “What?” she managed. “No, that’s not—”

“I told you I was saving it for later!”

No one else knew what was going on, and no one else dared to intervene. So it happened the same time it happened, and somehow Twilight found herself draped in a too-big jacket with fire burning around her glasses and under the skin of her ears and cheeks. She shot Rarity the most scathing glare she could across the table, but looks unfortunately still lacked the power to kill. Even with magic.

“Lookit you, Twilight,” Rainbow said through a smirk. “That’s adorable.”

“Like a kid tryin’ on their parent’s duds,” Applejack added. She raised her hand for a high-five. Rainbow immediately slapped it, and the two of them dissolved into stifled giggles that only served to make the fire around Twilight’s eyes burn brighter.

“Okay,” she hissed, and moved to shrug the jacket off her shoulders, “you got your ‘one thing’, Rarity, so can we stop playing dress-up and please just get back to the game—”

“Aw,” Sunset said innocently, still kneeling on the carpet with her arms naked. Her eyes flicked up and down over Twilight for a second—and somehow that made her feel like the naked one instead. “It looks good on you, though.”

Twilight froze.

Then, as if she’d just remarked on the weather, Sunset placed her palms flat on the floor and pushed herself into a plank. “Start the timer, Fluttershy!”

“Oh! Right.” The hourglass flipped over. “Okay, that’s one, that’s two...”

In the end, Sunset only managed twelve pushups before the last grain of sand fell through. She collapsed on her stomach the moment Pinkie called time, her face red and her chest heaving and sweat beading at the edges of her forehead. But when she rolled over onto her back to catch her breath, the only thing Twilight could think about was what she’d said before, over and over: it looks good on you.

Inhale. Hold. Exhale.

The flames disappeared by the time Sunset crawled back into her chair. Carefully, calmly, Twilight picked up the dice from the table and shook them around in her hand. “Did you pay out the wagers, Rarity?” she asked, as normally as she could.

“All handled,” Rarity answered, equally as normally and wearing a self-satisfied smirk. “Your turn.”

Twilight nodded, and rolled the dice.

Sunset’s jacket tugged at the shoulders when she leaned forward to move her piece.





March 31

Most families didn’t celebrate Easter on the Saturday, Twilight knew, but that was how it had always been in her family, and that year was no different. She wasn’t quite sure how it had started—perhaps it was to give each side of her family a day for the holiday—but she did know that Easter Saturday meant a family dinner, and a family dinner meant that Shining had invited Cadance.

Somehow, though, she’d forgotten about that fact, up until the point someone came up behind the couch and poked her in the side of the head.

“Earth to Twilight,” a voice—Cadance—said, then giggled. “Did you get a little lost, there?”

Twilight immediately yanked her earbuds out and slammed the book she’d been reading shut. “Cadance!” She leaned backward a bit to peer over the back of the couch. I didn’t even hear her come in. “Sorry, yeah. It’s a really good story. At least, from what I’ve read so far.”

“Oh?” Cadance stepped around the side of the couch to the front, and Twilight scooted over to make room for her to sit down. “What’s it about?” she asked. She reached for it, then stopped herself. “Whoops—gotta ask first. Can I look at the cover?”

“Sure.” She passed the book over. “It’s, um, sort of like a fairy tale, I guess. With princesses and curses and evil spirits and all that. But I think it’s got a romantic subplot? Maybe? I’m not that far in.”

Something that almost looked like surprise flashed across Cadance’s face. “Romance? Decided to branch out now that you’re eighteen, have you?”

“I—” Twilight sank lower into the couch. “I mean, I didn’t pick it out myself,” she mumbled. “It was a birthday gift. From one of my friends.”

And that got Cadance’s attention.

“Hold on, hold on. Friends? Twilight!” She shoved the book back toward Twilight and leaned in with her hand on her knees. Sheer enthusiasm sparkled plainly behind her eyes. “That’s wonderful news! Quick—tell me all about them. Every detail.”

Twilight let out a nervous laugh. “Oh, uh, I’m sure you don’t really want to...”

Cadance’s expression didn’t change. She leaned closer.

“...I have pictures from yesterday’s party,” Twilight relented, and pulled out her phone to share.

It was always easy to talk with Cadance, even when they hadn’t seen each other for a while. Slowly but surely Twilight got comfortable with their conversation and with catching Cadance up on everything that had changed in her life since the last time they’d talked. Well. Almost everything.

“...That’s Fluttershy,” she explained, and zoomed in with two fingers on the slightly-blurry selfie they’d taken near the end of the night. “She took a lot of the pictures, so she’s not in many of them. And the one beside her’s Rarity. She’s the one who got me the book.” A pause. “Yeah. That’s everyone.”

“And it looks like you all had a good time! Although...” Cadance tilted her head to the side. “What are you wearing in this picture? You didn’t have it on in the others.”

Twilight blinked. “Oh. Um, it’s a jacket.” And Cadance has eyes too, genius.

“Another birthday gift?”

“No, I didn’t keep it.” She slid the photo over to pull Sunset’s face back into view. “It was her jacket. I just... borrowed it.”

Cadance hummed quietly. It was a familiar sound—something Twilight often heard before she was asked a question she didn’t want to answer. With Cadance, though, the question was never voiced immediately. Instead she straightened up and leaned back, her hands still on her knees and something curious still sparkling in her eyes.

“I’m just glad to see you’ve finally come out of your shell,” she said eventually. “We—well, mostly Shining—worry about you sometimes. Especially with you getting ready to go off to uni, you know?”

Twilight averted her eyes. “Yeah. I know.”

“But this is good! You started with one friend, then worked your way to six, and then who knows?” 

And then—

“Maybe a girlfriend’ll be next.”

Time stood still.

Twilight felt the ice of fear rush through her veins and lungs at Cadance’s words; a paralyzing sensation that left a terror-filled numbness crystalized in its wake. Of course she’d ask that—Shining was her high school sweetheart, so of course she’d expect a teenager to want romance before graduation. 

Normal teenagers knew how to talk about that sort of thing. But normal teenage girls liked boys.

Just lie, she tried to tell herself, but her voice refused to work. Something squeezed around her heart: half anxiety, half rapidly constricting ice around a cage. She’d never felt such a fear before, not even when she’d barely avoided the same topic multiple times in the past—so why now? Why now?

The ice tightened. Magic howled panicked beneath her skin.

Because she noticed the jacket, her thoughts whispered in her ear, and she knows.

And then a worse thought surfaced:

If she knows, then everyone knows.

Fear never followed from logic, Twilight knew. Without it she could have recognized that it was Cadance asking—not a stranger holding an unknown landmine as their reaction to her secret. She could have brushed it off with a joke about no dating until I’m married, or she could have just answered with a maybe, and left everything at that. Logically, she knew Cadance was fine with it. Logically, she shouldn’t have panicked at all.

But fear never followed from logic, and instead of any could have or would have or should have, Twilight ran.

She heard herself stammer a faint, “Excuse me,” to Cadance, and suddenly she was standing; she was walking away; she was climbing the staircase with trembling legs; she was stumbling down a hallway she saw ringed with blue-green flames, with feathers scattering across the floorboards in her wake—

The bathroom door slammed shut.

Twilight threw her back against it and sank down until her forehead touched her knees.

Cadance knew. Everyone would find out. Either specifically—that she liked someone—or generally—that she would never be the normal they wished she was.

She drew a shallow breath and tried to hold it. Hot tears pricked behind her eyelids.

Sunset would find out.

A pair of footsteps padded down the hall. Too light to be her father’s. Too careful to be her mother’s. Too quiet to be Shining’s.

Cadance knocked gently on the bathroom door. “...Twilight?”

Twilight squeezed her arms tighter around her legs.

“Are you... Do you want to talk about it?”

No. A shuddering sniffle. Yes. I don’t know.

Something pushed back on the other side of the door, then lowered to the ground. Twilight could hear Cadance’s quiet breathing faintly through the wood. She sat down.

“...I’m honestly not quite sure what just happened,” Cadance admitted eventually. Her voice wavered slightly as she spoke. “But I’m sorry for teasing you. I... I can get carried away with that sort of thing.” She shifted slightly. “It’s an awkward topic for anyone to talk about, especially at your age, and I shouldn’t have brought it up when you’ve only just started making friends. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Twilight somehow managed to respond.

“Not if it’s upset you this much.”

“That’s just b-because...” A shaky exhale. “It’s stupid. I’m being stupid.”

“Feelings aren’t stupid, Twilight,” Cadance gently scolded. “They’re messy, sure, and sometimes they don’t make a lot of sense. But no one’s ever stupid because they feel a certain way.”

Silence. Twilight’s tears hadn’t spilled over yet, but she could still feel them welling at the corners of her eyes. Another inhale. She lifted her head slightly to wipe beneath her glasses with her palm.

Her fingertips passed harmlessly through magic as she did.

“...What did you see?” she finally asked.

Cadance didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, carefully, she replied: “When you left? Or in the pictures you showed me?”

Another exhale. “Both, I guess.”

“Mm. Well, again, I’m not quite sure what happened, but...” She paused. “Maybe it’s crazy,” she admitted, “but for a second it looked like you’d gone and sprouted wings.”

Twilight choked on a terrified laugh. “Maybe I did,” she breathed.

“Maybe you did,” Cadance echoed.

The air fell silent again. And while it was horrible to think that someone else had seen her magic and that she hadn’t been able to hide it, somehow it was also a relief. Like a weight she hadn’t known she’d been carrying had suddenly lifted from her shoulders.

(She still couldn’t say anything outright, though. How was she supposed to? Just open with a, hey, magic is real, and hope that Cadance didn’t freak out? Or open the bathroom door and let her see everything for herself?

Both were terrifying. Both were impossible.)

“And,” Cadance continued softly, “in those pictures, all I saw was you.”

Twilight suddenly couldn’t remember how to breathe.

“I saw you, and the friends you’ve made, and how that photo of you in the jacket reminded me of how I felt the first time Shining gave me his.” Her voice cracked. “I saw the little girl I used to babysit all grown up—and she was happy.”

Time stood still again, if only for a moment.

Cadance knew.

Cadance knew, and it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter.

And with that Twilight finally wept.

Crying was ugly and unsanitary and embarrassing, but she cried anyway, because it was Cadance and Cadance knew and she didn’t even care at all. She said something else through the door, but Twilight couldn’t hear her anymore—the world had drowned once more in a saltwater sea.

There was still panic in relief, the same way that a ship in a hurricane could so quickly pass from eye to storm. Twilight knew she had to breathe; knew that somehow she had to force her gasping lungs to pump slower than her heartbeat, but without an anchor to ground herself she couldn’t tell which way to swim to surface.

Her chest tightened. Magic, she managed to think. It still refused to leave. No, worse—its freedom dulled her senses to the hum of power in her ears and inky darkness across her vision.

Cadance knew. Twilight was drowning. Two distinct experiences isolated by the door between their backs.

The world went black. The ocean roared.

And then there was a song.





“Sunshine, sunshine, ladybugs awake...”

The sound of it was the only sensation able to pierce through the storm. Twilight recognized it immediately—a lullaby. Cadance’s lullaby; a song she’d made up all those years ago just for the two of them to share.

“...dew upon the maple leaves, mist above the lake.”

It was as if she were a kid again, crying over a scraped knee or a nasty tumble from a bicycle or something else just as small. And every time an accident happened when Cadance was there, the song came out with the bandaids and the rubbing alcohol to distract her from its sting.

The darkness—the magic—retreated slightly. When it did, Twilight clung to the melody and listened.

“It’s morning in the world somewhere, no matter where you go...”

The bathroom faded back into view. Her breathing was still shallow and her pulse still beat rapidly at the back of her throat, but that was it. The weight beneath her shoulder blades was gone. The flames had vanished.

“...so even when we are apart you know I love you so.”

Cadance switched to humming after she finished, repeating the same song wordlessly and soft. It filled the silence and stopped it from turning stifling around them, and it was only after her fourth repetition that Twilight finally felt calm enough to speak:

“I can’t tell,” she breathed. “I’ve never... I don’t know if this is just what friends are supposed to feel like. I don’t know how to tell if it’s...” She swallowed hard. “More than that.”

The humming faded away. On the other side of the door Cadance exhaled a heavy sigh. “Feelings are tricky,” she agreed quietly.

“And I... I don’t know how to bring it up. If I should bring it up. Because so many things could... break, I guess. Go wrong.”

“Like what?”

Twilight drew her knees closer to her chest. “Like... if I tell her, but she’s weirded out. Or I tell her, but then when the rest of our friends find out, they don’t like it.” She picked at the seam of her leggings. “Or I tell her, and it turns out I didn’t actually... like-like her, and then I’ve just led her on.”

Cadance sighed again. “But... anything that can go wrong can also go right, right?”

“Yeah, but even...” The words tangled around her tongue. Slowly, Twilight took a deep breath and tried again: “Even if things go right, it’s still just high school. It’s... it’s unlikely anything would come of it.” She paused. “Don’t say anything. You and Shining are the exception, not the rule.”

“Wasn’t going to mention it,” Cadance lied. Twilight could hear the smile in her voice.

“So,” she finished quietly, “I just don’t know if it’s even worth the risk.”

That was the problem, wasn’t it? Feelings weren’t built on proof or logic. They didn’t follow patterns, they didn’t make sense, and they weren’t predictable in their causes or their effects. And worst of all—they came with consequences Twilight couldn’t do anything to avoid. So how was she supposed to just blindly trust her feelings when there was nothing to back them up? 

Belief without proof was just irresponsible, wasn’t it?

Cadance hummed under her breath again—not as a song, but as an acknowledgment. “True, it might not be worth it,” she said. “I can’t promise you that everything will work out if you follow your heart.”

Twilight laughed faintly. It sounded almost like a sob. “Of course you can’t.”

“However,” she continued, her voice raising. “I also can’t promise that everything won’t work out. All I can say is this:”

Something slid into view at the corner of Twilight’s vision. She glanced down.

Two black feathers poked out from the gap beneath the door, bent mirrored into the halves of a heart with Cadance’s fingertip holding them together at their quills.

“The best things in life are never certain,” she said simply, “but they are always worth the risk.”





April 15

“Welp.” The truck rumbled to a halt. “We’re, uh. Here.”

Applejack shifted into park and pulled the handbrake. The local radio station crackled faintly through the speakers, and Twilight was grateful that she hadn’t shut off the engine yet—once she did, the only thing that would be left between them was silence.

“Yep,” she replied eventually. Her mouth was dry. “We’re here.”

They both stared forward through the windshield. Neither of them moved to take off their seatbelts. It was awkward. It was uncomfortable. A mattress advertisement warbled over the end of a country song. I think I’m going to throw up.

Because Twilight had thought she’d found some courage, and Applejack had volunteered to give her a ride in Shining’s stead, and it was a Sunday afternoon with beautiful weather and clear skies and barely any traffic on the road. But all that courage had long since evaporated to nothing in the shadow of the building looming before them:

Canterlot General Hospital.

The place where someone was.

“I need a few minutes,” Twilight managed. She dug her fingers into the well-worn cloth of the passenger seat to stop her hands from shaking.

Applejack nodded. “Sure. Take your time.”

And for a few minutes they sat there in the Sunday sunshine, in a hospital parking lot, and in a silence only broken by the car engine and the radio. If Twilight let her vision unfocus until the building in front of her blurred, she almost could pretend they were anywhere else on the planet but there—the mall; the school; the movie theatre. Somewhere familiar. Somewhere else.

But the minutes soon slipped by, and eventually Applejack shifted in her seat. “Don’t wanna idle too long,” she said, and reached for the steering wheel. “But like I said, there’s no rush.”

She turned the key. The radio cut off mid-jingle. The engine spun down. The interior lights of the truck lit up.

All that was left between them was silence.

Twilight exhaled quiet breath and forced herself to break it:

“How am I supposed to do this?”

It was a vague question. Despite that, Applejack still gave it a moment’s thought before replying, “You mean, to go and see your aunt?” She shrugged her shoulders. “The first step is gettin’ yourself outa the truck and through those doors, I s’ppose.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Though, you’re probably asking ‘bout after that, aren’t ya?”

Twilight swallowed hard. Blinked a few times. “...Yeah.”

“Mm. Figured as much.”

More silence. It wasn’t very warm out, but with the engine off and air no longer circulating, the truck’s cabin grew stuffier by the minute. Then—

“Maybe you’re just supposed to talk to her,” Applejack said.

Her remark was so offhanded that Twilight almost took it as an insult. She knew it wasn’t, of course, but still. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because—” Twilight drew another shaky breath, then turned to face Applejack directly when she spoke. “Because everything’s so complicated now, and even though I’ve suddenly got all these memories telling me we were close, she still feels like a stranger. Magic or not, we haven’t seen each other in almost a decade—and sure, I’ve texted her a few times, and she’s been nothing but understanding, but...”

It felt awful to say the next bit, but Twilight knew she couldn’t fully explain her hesitation if she wasn’t completely honest. Even with the ugly parts of truth.

“...I didn’t even save her on purpose.”

Applejack didn’t say anything to that. Instead she held eye contact with a calm, even gaze and dipped her chin slightly in a nod—a wordless indication for Twilight to keep talking.

“I— We were just there for Sunset at first. Me and you and everyone else. But even after I learned what had happened and remembered who she was I... I didn’t do what I did for her.” Twilight squeezed the seat again. Her heart squeezed back in response. “I didn’t try to save her. I didn’t even know I could.”

(She hadn’t really understood what had happened until Celestia’s teary and frantic phone call to her parents the day after the Incident—a call originally intended for Twilight that she’d refused to pick up. And while her whole family had been overjoyed for the miraculous awakening of the comatose aunt they’d completely forgotten and only just remembered the night before, Twilight had been numb to all of it.

Because on one hand, it made logical sense. The hundred-moon long spell on the armour had ended the day of the Incident, yet despite its pair of prisoners only a monster had broken free. Or so we’d all thought. Because with how it had talked, Twilight suspected even Nightmare hadn’t realized what had happened—that someone hadn’t died, that Luna wasn’t gone, and that the armour had never been what held her captive in the first place. 

Myth and man alike.

The spell hadn’t created just one prison, but two.

Following that train of logic, it made sense that destroying Nightmare would finally set her free. Human souls didn’t exist consciously outside their bodies—at least, if Nightmare’s words were to be believed—so Luna could never have escaped it without someone else’s help.

And Twilight had broken the prophecy. She’d stolen Nightmare’s magic and destroyed its physical form in the process. She’d helped. She’d saved Sunset, and freed Luna, and somehow lost no one in the process despite the terrible precedent, and it all made perfect and logical sense.

But emotions didn’t play by the rules of logic, and the outcome of the Incident wasn’t one that Twilight could accept.)

“And I can’t just tell her,” she choked out over her racing thoughts. Applejack’s expression remained neutral despite the turmoil in her words. “I can’t talk to her about anything I’m feeling—I’d hurt her.” The seatbelt locked around her dug deeper into her side with every word. “She didn’t mean to k-kill me, but she did. I didn’t mean to save her, but I did.” Her heart squeezed again, and suddenly magic thrummed to life within her pulse, a perfect mirror of the illogical emotions Twilight wished she didn’t feel. “So how the hell is talking supposed to help us figure this out?”

It was all venting, really. She didn’t actually expect Applejack to have all the answers, or even advice. Talking out loud just seemed to help her collect her thoughts. Plus, Applejack was a good listener. And she’s used to me overthinking every little thing.

Surprisingly, though, instead of agreeing or offering some sort of condolences, Applejack leaned back in her seat and sighed. There was a brief pause, and then—

“Don’t knock it ‘til ya try it,” she mumbled.

Twilight squinted at her. “...What?”

“Talkin’, I mean.” She tipped her hat slightly with her knuckles, one hand moving up to rest at the back of her neck. “I... I think that’s the right thing to do. Even if it’s hard.”

“But what if it doesn’t work?”

Applejack averted her eyes. Her gaze flicked forward through the front windshield, the profile of her face cutting a complicated expression through Twilight’s vision from her forehead to her chin. The hand at her neck squeezed. Her elbow wavered in midair.

“...It worked for you and me.”

Oh. Twilight leaned further into her seatbelt. Right.

‘Difficult’ didn’t begin to describe how terrible the first trial of the Incident had been. Even disregarding the fact she’d almost died, Twilight hated thinking back to how she’d acted at that time—suspicious and stubborn and scared. And... the way they’d wound up talking still left a bitter taste at the back of her mouth. It hadn’t come up naturally. It had been forced, and had gone against both their wishes to let bitterness and guilt fester in silence.

If the trial hadn’t happened, would they have ever worked things out? Not just between her and Applejack, but with Rainbow and everyone else as well?

Maybe. But Twilight wasn’t one-hundred percent sure.

“‘Course, I can’t understand your situation completely,” Applejack said quietly. “Family means a lot to me, sure, but I know it’s different for everyone.” She glanced back over to Twilight and lowered her hand. “It’s just, even though it hurt, I still needed to hear you say what you did durin’ the trial. ‘Cause there’s no chance I’d have figured things out on my own if you kept carryin’ on like all was fine. And if your aunt in there’s as good as your memories make her out to be, I’d bet she feels the exact same way.”

Twilight held her gaze. “She’s pretty great,” she admitted. “From what I remember, I mean. And from how she texts, I think she’s still the same person?” Her fingertips felt cold. The nail of her index finger caught as she scratched it scratched back and forth over the front seam of her seat. “And I... I guess I can’t expect people to understand my feelings if I keep them to myself. No one’s a mind-reader.” She paused. “At least, not anymore.”

Applejack snorted. Somehow the sound seemed to drive the tension back. “Not anymore,” she agreed.

The truck was still stuffy and silent and parked in front of the building Twilight wished was anything else, but she supposed it wasn’t really the worst place in the world she could have been. At least, it didn’t seem as awful as it had when they’d first pulled in. And if she wanted Luna to be a part of her life again—and I do want that—then eventually, no matter how she spun it, they’d have to talk.

And it was complicated, and it was messy, and Twilight knew she’d cry her weight in tears all over again, just like she had with Celestia, but it was going to be worth it. It had to be. All she had to do was talk.

Just... not today. Not now.

“I’ll do it by the last day of school,” Twilight whispered before she lost her nerve. “I’ll talk to her by then. Promise.” She relaxed her hands against the seat, and focused on the feeling of blood rushing back to the tips of her fingers. The magic in her pulse still flowed, but a bit calmer—and this time she hadn’t let it take control. Nothing had slipped out; not even a single flash of blue.

Applejack blinked. “You sure?” she asked.

“Yeah. I... I’m not ready today. But I think I still needed to come here,” Twilight said. Then she scrunched up her nose and muttered, “Even if it was just to chicken out in the parking lot.”

A smile twitched at the corner of Applejack’s lips. “Well. Baby steps,” she chuckled, and reached for her keys.

“But next time I’m here, it’ll be for real.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

The keys jangled in the ignition, and the truck’s engine started with a click-click-click and a roar. The radio crackled back on. The vents in the console began to breathe the springtime air. Twilight turned back to face the front, and when Applejack released the handbrake and shifted into reverse, the sound of the pavement under the truck tires cemented silence’s demise.

“Things’ll work out,” Applejack added as they pulled into line for the parking gates. “Don’t you worry too much about it if you can help it.”

Twilight exhaled sharply through her nose. “Yeah.”

“‘Sides, it’s good to get it outa the way before exam week. Probably’ll make studying a whole heck of a lot easier on ya.”

Right. Exams. And not just that, but... the end of the school year was getting closer by the day. There were only about two months left of twelfth grade—and while that had seemed like enough time when she’d said it out loud, Twilight had forgotten just how quickly time seemed to move when she wasn’t watching.

“Yeah,” she repeated lamely, despite the sudden flash of nausea in her gut, and fished their entry ticket out of the cup holder to occupy her hands. “I hope it will.”





April 29

“Wait, shit, Dash, he’s here he’s here—”

“You said he was bot!”

“Yeah, five fucking minutes ago— Oh, perfect, mid’s here too.” Slam. “And now I’m dead.”

Twilight curled deeper into her blankets and winced. No one in the call had their cameras on, but the gameplay shared from Sunset’s computer and the frustration in her and Rainbow’s voices painted a vivid enough picture to make up for it. “...Maybe there’s a chance for a comeback?” she tried.

“It’s doomed,” Sunset deadpanned.

“Fuckin’ randos,” Rainbow added. “Holy shit, I can’t deal with this. Get me out.”

The weather that weekend had been abysmal. Thankfully, at Pinkie’s suggestion, everyone had agreed to pivot to an online hangout barely an hour before the storm rolled in. But that had been mid-afternoon, and by the time midnight came around it was just the three of them left in the call—Twilight, Sunset, and Rainbow. 

A flash of lightning lit up Twilight’s bedroom like it was daytime. Thunder boomed not even a second later. Twilight shivered at the sound, and pushed her earbuds further in to try and block out the rumble of the rain on her windows. “It sounds like it’s getting worse.”

“Yeah, my lights’ve been flickering for a while,” Sunset said. Twilight could hear her keyboard clicking frantically near her mic. “Dunno if you heard that last boom, but I swear it shook the entire house.”

“Mhm. It was pretty close.”

They waited a second for Rainbow to agree, but nothing came.

“...You there, Dash?” Sunset asked.

“I think she is. It looks like she’s still in the call.”

“She’s stopped moving in-game, though.” A pause. “Ah, shit. She just disconnected.” Another flash. Another boom. “Bet her power’s gone out.”

“Mm.”

A few minutes passed in relative silence. Rainbow’s account dropped the call not too long after she’d vanished, and when she didn’t return by the time Sunset’s surrender vote went through, Twilight sent her a quick text message: You okay?

The reply was near-instant: power went

Is it not back on yet?

nah im on data now

Yikes. Hope it doesn’t last too long.

yeah i mean wish granted at least im not stuck in that clown fiesta anymore lmao

Twilight snorted down at her phone. Silver lining, she typed. Do you want us to wait for you?

nah its cool i think im just gonna go to bed

Oh, okay. I’ll let Sunset know.

thx lol gngn

“So?” Sunset’s mic peaked to a crackle. “What’s the verdict?”

“Power,” Twilight explained, and turned over onto her back with a sigh. “It’s not back on yet, so she’s calling it for the night.”

“Aw. That’s fair.” Her cursor waved idly back and forth across the stream, which now showed her computer’s wallpaper instead of the game she’d been playing. “You tapping out soon too, then?” The cursor slowed. “Don’t let me keep you up or anything.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. Sunset couldn’t see the gesture, of course, but it was the thought that counted. “You’re not keeping me up. It’s fine.”

“I feel bad that you’re just sitting there watching, though. You sure you don’t wanna play?”

“Sunset, I’m in bed.”

“Yeah, and I’d bet my teammates in that last game were playing on trackpads. We could make it work.”

“I’m still not downloading that malware you call a game,” Twilight snorted, though she couldn’t keep the smile from her voice.

“Also fair.”

“And...” A pause. “I guess I’m just used to this. Watching, I mean.” She turned back onto her side. “It’s like what Shining and I would do when I was younger. He’d play the game, and I’d tell him what to do, or keep track of stuff for him. Like I was a strategist or something.”

“A backseat driver, more like.”

“Listen.”

Sunset laughed over Twilight’s indignation—a raspy, tired laugh that came with talking too much for too long. “Sorry, sorry. You aren’t that bad,” she said. The search bar of her computer popped open as she spoke. “And I mean, if you’re in the mood to micromanage, I’m down to play something single-player instead.” Her cursor clicked something, and a different window opened up. “But only if you promise not to complain that my tunnels aren’t straight, or that the torches aren’t spaced out properly, or whatever the hell you were even ranting about last time.”

“...You dug straight down. And died.”

“See?” Her voice dripped with faux disappointment. “Trying to stop me from finding lava—that’s textbook backseating, Twi, I swear.”

It was a comfortable sort of banter; one that only came with the familiarity of knowing another person as well as they knew you. Because it’s Sunset, Twilight thought to herself, still buried in her blankets with her phone propped up against her arm. And because it’s me.

They were perhaps the only two people in the world who had lived someone else’s memories. Barring any other magical incidents that may have occurred, of course. And... it was kind of nice, Twilight could admit. To have someone who knew you almost as well as you knew yourself. Maybe even better, in Sunset’s case.

Outside the storm raged on. Sunset rambled quietly about anything and everything while she played, swearing when she died and celebrating with whisper-yells when she found something cool. Twilight was content to just lay there and watch and listen—they were together, just the two of them, and for now that was more than enough.

(She didn’t remember her eyes closing, or her breathing slowing, or Sunset whispering to check if she was awake. All Twilight knew when she awoke on Monday morning was that her phone was nearly dead, and that Sunset’s account was still connected to their mutually-muted call.)





May 15

“So,” Twilight said slowly, and ran her finger over the edge of her empty sandwich baggie to zip it up. “Do you want to see something cool?”

It was getting close to the end of the lunch period. Most other students had already headed to their lockers to get ready for their next class, and the volume of chatter in the cafeteria was now just a few voices louder than a library. She and Sunset weren’t the only students on spare, of course, but comparatively they had enough room for their table to stay out of sight and earshot of anyone else around.

At Twilight’s question Sunset looked up from her phone and raised her eyebrows. “Do you honestly think my answer to that would ever be ‘no’?”

“There’s always a first time for everything.”

“Sure, Twi. Same as hell’s gonna freeze.” She put her phone down anyway, despite the sass. “Hit me.”

Okay, Twilight thought to herself. “Okay,” she said out loud. Okay. Okay. Okay.

She closed her eyes and straightened up in her seat, drawing a slow and shallow breath through her lips as she did. Inhale. Her pulse beat louder in the darkness. Pressure danced around her heart.

There was just one month left before she had to keep her promise. And in the meantime, perhaps partially motivated by the deadline looming over her head, Twilight had finally decided to face the mess Nightmare—and someone—had left behind.

Exhale.

Then, Twilight removed her glasses and opened her eyes.

“Okay,” she repeated carefully. She folded the arms of her glasses and set them down on the table. “It worked.” She pursed her lips and added under her breath, “Which makes twelve out of thirteen total attempts, and eight of them now in a row.”

Sunset squinted. “What?”

“My eyesight.” Twilight waved her hand in front of her face to emphasize her point. “I can still see.”

“Seriously?”

“I can read the lunch menu to you if you want.”

“No, no way. You could have just memorized it beforehand.” A pause. Then Sunset snapped her fingers. “Got it!” She leaned away from the table and stretched out one arm as far from Twilight as she could without falling off the bench. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“...Sunset.”

“C’mon, Twi. How many?”

“Sunset, if I say ‘one’, you’re just going to tell me that a thumb isn’t a finger and it doesn’t count.”

“Holy shit,” Sunset breathed, and lowered her arm. The skepticism instantly evaporated from her expression as she leaned back in. “You really can see.”

“Even if I couldn’t, I don’t think you were far enough away—”

“It’s magic, right? But...” She mimicked the hand-wave Twilight had performed earlier with both hands. “I thought you needed all that spooky fire stuff to fix your eyes.”

(Twilight had thought so too—at least at first. But just over a week ago, as she’d moved through the motions of getting ready for school, she’d gone to clean her glasses only to realize that her reflection in the mirror was still clear without them on. And yet, at no point that morning had Twilight seen a single trace of feathers or blue-green light.

As soon as she’d realized that, though, the world had faded back to blurry, and she’d still had to clean her glasses before she went downstairs.)

“I’ve... been experimenting a little bit,” she explained to Sunset. “Ever since the first time it happened, I’ve been trying to figure out if I could consciously replicate the results. Since I’m assuming the initial event was something I’d activated subconsciously in my sleep, of course.” An assumption made because the alternative explanation—that it had somehow refined its power—was too worrying for Twilight to want to consider.

Sunset nodded in response, and leaned forward on her elbows. Her eyes remained fixed to Twilight’s the entire time. “So you can just, like, control it now?”

“No, definitely not.” Even though the magic was doing what she’d wanted, Twilight could still feel it rushing electric through her bloodstream while she spoke. It was wild and unpredictable, like an untamed animal she’d just barely managed to leash. “It’s, um, like a filter, I guess. Ideally, I’ll eventually be able to control which aspects of magic I let affect me, and which ones I don’t.”

There was a metaphor in there somewhere, Twilight knew. A lesson she’d already had to learn when dealing with another type of monster—not a magical one, but a psychological one synonymous to panic.

Life was sometimes a bit too on the nose for her liking, but she couldn’t deny she found some sort of satisfaction in the ways it worked.

Sunset seemed to accept her answer, at least, never mind that it came with disappointment that Twilight couldn’t just do anything and everything the same way that Nightmare had. And, just as expected, she still had a hundred and one questions to ask after that, and over the course of the next hour or so Twilight managed to answer a little under half.

She finally faltered when the bell rang—the sound startled her for just a moment, but a moment was all it took for the magic to finally wrench itself free from her distracted grasp and retreat back into its cage with a near-audible crack.

The world blurred. Twilight blinked. “Oh,” she said, and reached for her glasses. “It’s gone.”

“Just like that?” Sunset asked, the end of her pen pressed lightly to her bottom lip.

“Yeah.” She tried not to stare too hard when her vision returned alongside the familiar weight across the bridge of her nose. “Just like that.”





May 29

It was Tuesday. A perfectly normal and monotonous day.

And yet Twilight felt decidedly not normal, but stressed and nauseous and so anxious she thought she’d die.

It didn’t make sense (but it did make sense, she knew), because nothing had happened and nothing was wrong. But despite all that she couldn’t stop her mind from spiralling down tangents every which way—what-ifs over there, should-haves over here, there’s just two weeks to go before you see her buried down as far as it would go. The future was nearly the present, and it was soon.

(Out of long-forgotten habit she’d found herself in the waiting room outside of Celestia’s office at the end of the day. It was a route she’d walked nearly on autopilot, yet still consciously allowed herself to follow the entire time. But it had ended there, because two knocks seemed just as scary as two weeks, so she’d turned around and left as quickly as she’d arrived.)

Everything compounded even more when she arrived home, though, with a large envelope sticking out of the mailbox and a matching package by the door.

Congratulations, it read, and she had to sit down on one of the stools at the kitchen counter to stop herself from falling over on the spot. You’re in!

It was the last one. The last response of seven university applications, and the response to the most prestigious program she hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up for. And she’d really tried not to think about it; she hadn’t even looked at her email since the day she’d applied, and while the other acceptances had slowly trickled in at the start of the year and inbetween, she hadn’t really been able to think about making a decision until she knew that—

You’re in.

Seven applications, and seven acceptances.

You’re in.

Twilight didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Relief was like that, she recognized, a familiar feeling from the Incident and everything she’d gone through after, and as Shining showered her with congratulations and swept her up onto her feet in a hug, she figured it was probably alright to do both.





June 13

And then all too soon it was time.

The awards assembly blinked by in a flash of half-rehearsed speeches and half-hearted claps. Twilight felt numb to it; colder than numb. Frozen. Terrified. Her hands trembled harder with every round of applause.

Everyone knew about her promise at that point. And to their credit, all of her friends had shown her their support in different ways—a clap on the shoulder before the assembly from Rainbow, a knowing nod from Applejack as they’d filed into their row. Fluttershy had pulled her hands apart the first time they’d gone to fidget; Rarity had leaned over Sunset’s lap to grab Twilight by the shoulders and reminded her to breathe; Pinkie had brought hard candies. “To distract you,” she’d explained, and pressed one against Twilight’s lips before she’d been able to protest.

And it all had helped, but it all still wasn’t enough. Suddenly, the assembly was over.

Suddenly, it was time.

The crowded auditorium gradually thinned out, and despite the chatter echoing back from the halls through its propped-open entrances, the room fell quiet. Not quiet enough. Twilight didn’t dare try to stand up from her seat.

The other girls waited with her afterward for a bit—exchanging nervous glances behind her hunched shoulders all the while—but they couldn’t stay forever. They had rides to catch. They had places to be, just like she did. And one by one, ‘goodbye’ by ‘good luck’, they left.

And that left Sunset. 

Just like that.

(“I can take the bus whenever,” she’d explained, and Twilight hadn’t been able to say anything in response.)

She hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary that day, like their friends had. In fact, it almost seemed like she’d forgotten what day it was—and if it were anyone else Twilight might have believed that, except that it was Sunset, and Sunset hated boredom, and Sunset stayed.

(“You don’t have to wait with me,” she’d protested, a tremor in her hands and in her voice. “I’ll... I’ll be okay.”

“Do you want me to wait?” Sunset had asked.

Yes, Twilight had wanted to say, of course I do. “I don’t know,” she’d said instead.

“Well, do you want me to leave?”

“No,” she’d answered immediately; effortlessly. “I don’t.”)

And so they sat there, just the two of them, side-by-side in the back row of the almost-quiet auditorium on the last day of the last year of school. The same auditorium where everything had started—excluding the newly-finished repairs—and the same auditorium where everything had ended, and then continued on again.

“I wonder if there are still burn marks underneath the carpet,” Sunset said eventually, her foot tapping idly against the floor. They hadn’t spoken out loud in what felt like an eternity, yet somehow it seemed she’d been thinking about it too. “Probably just extra work to clean them off.”

Twilight forced herself to nod. “I think it was mainly the seating,” she said quietly. “That was damaged, I mean. And other non-structural things, like the windows, and the stage.”

“The curtains.”

“Yeah.”

“I got Nightmare pretty good back then, don’t you think?”

She mimed swinging a baseball bat—a curtain rod—and Twilight couldn’t help but smile. “You did,” she agreed, “multiple times.” Her smile faded. “I...” A pause. “Thank you,” she mumbled.

Sunset blinked. “Hm?”

“For the first time you saved me. For... for sitting with me right now.” She tangled her fingers together in her lap. “For always being there, I guess. I... I don’t think I say it enough. Or at all.”

“Aw, geez, Twi.” An elbow lightly nudged her side. “You’re gonna make me blush.”

“I-I’m serious.” Twilight turned to face Sunset directly and said carefully, “I... You’re... You’ve done so much for me. I just—” She curled her hands into fists and took a deep breath. “I just wish I knew how to tell you how much I appreciate it.”

Oddly, instead of the pride or embarrassment Twilight had expected, something nervous flashed briefly across Sunset’s face. “Where’s this coming from all of a sudden?” she asked. Her voice seemed strained. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate you telling me this, but the way you sound it almost feels like...”

Twilight averted her eyes. Glanced back down at her lap. Squeezed her fists.

“...It almost feels like you’re saying goodbye.”

Silence. When no answer came, any remaining cheer drained out of Sunset’s posture in an instant. Her shoulders tensed. Her foot stopped tapping. “Twilight?” she tried.

“It’s the last day of school, right?” Twilight finally replied. She blinked a few times to clear her vision. “Of course it’s a goodbye. High school’s over.”

“Well, yeah, but that just means we’ve got a whole summer ahead of us—”

“And then I’m going to university after that,” Twilight interrupted, “but you’re not.”

Sunset inhaled sharply. She leaned back against her seat with a dull thud. “Doesn’t matter much,” she muttered, just barely loud enough to hear. “Won’t stop me from visiting you every weekend in whatever shitty dorm they stick you in.”

“You know the city buses don’t go out that far.”

“Taxi it is, then.”

“Sunset.”

“Twilight,” Sunset countered, irritation—desperation?—burning within her voice. “If you think something like distance can stop people from being friends, then I don’t know whether to be offended you’d think that little of me, or pissed at whoever put that idea into your head.”

Twilight flinched at her tone, but tried to hold her ground. “Shining lost touch with most of his high school friends in uni,” she argued. “Same with Cadance, and with my mom and dad. And sure, my parents didn’t have the internet or anything, but my brother and Cadance did. If they all couldn’t make it work, then don’t you think the likelihood I’d be able to stay friends with you and everyone else—”

“Did their friends help them take down a literal monster?” Sunset challenged.

“...Well, no, but—”

“Did their friends go through hell and back with them on the second day of school?” She grabbed Twilight by the shoulder and forced her to look her in the eyes. “Did they hold racing game grudge matches, or willingly watch the shittiest movies known to man, or make over-the-top care packages for whoever caught a cold, or drag each other out every weekend because they actually wanted to see each other outside of hallways and math class?”

“I don’t—”

The hand on her shoulder squeezed tighter. “Did they have a friend so stubborn,” Sunset breathed, “that she had to destroy a fucking demon before she could accept that magic was real?”

“No,” Twilight whispered back, almost guiltily. “They didn’t.” But that still doesn’t mean we won’t end up just like them.

“Then you can’t compare us,” Sunset finished, and released Twilight’s shoulder from her grip. “Look. I know you want to be a hundred percent certain about the future—and trust me, if I could prove it to you, I would—but this is the sort of thing you just gotta hope will work out, even if you’re worried.” To prove her point, she tugged one of Twilight’s hands from her lap and pushed up her sleeve to expose the skin of her wrist. “Belief, right? Just do what you do best.”

“That was a one-time thing,” Twilight protested weakly. “I do not go around believing whatever nonsense people decide to pull out of their ass.”

Sunset snorted. “Okay, then I’ll rephrase.” She ran her thumb over the now-blank spot on Twilight’s wrist, then twisted her hand to lace their fingers together. “You’re a skeptic. You’re stubborn, and logical, and you wouldn’t believe in Santa unless he ran you over with his sleigh.”

“Sunset.”

“But,” she continued, “you believe in people. Sure, maybe not right away. But once you do, and once someone has your trust?” She gave their hands a squeeze. “Then you’ll always see the good in them—even in liars, or bullies, or a dumbass like me.”

And Twilight didn’t know what she was supposed to say to that.

“That’s what you’re great at, Twi. That’s why we all love you, and that’s why you shouldn’t worry about what’ll happen with your friendships.” Another squeeze. “You’re not going anywhere we can’t. Things are just gonna be a little different from now on. That’s all.”

Sunset’s hand was familiar and comforting and warm, just like always. Just like her. And as they sat there with their fingers intertwined, Twilight could almost ignore the promise looming over her head and the feelings fluttering frantic inside her gut—almost, but not quite. 

Say something, she urged herself. Her palm felt horribly clammy. Say something; anything.

“I-I probably have to leave soon,” she stammered, then immediately regretted ever opening her mouth. Not that! “Wait, n-no, that’s not what I meant to say—”

To her credit, Sunset didn’t pull her hand away. “Breathe?” she suggested.

Twilight did.

Then, after she collected her thoughts, she tried again: “Thank you. Again. For putting up with me, and for explaining all that.” Heat crept into the tips of her ears. “And for being a terrible, shameless sap.”

Sunset grinned wide. “You love me for it,” she teased, and Twilight nearly choked on air.

“I—” She cleared her throat. Ignored the fire spreading hot into her face. And then, before she could stop herself—

“...Yeah,” she heard her voice say. “Maybe.”

Twilight thought she could have died of embarrassment right then and there.

But before she could pull away Sunset just smiled wider and squeezed her hand and laughed. “Wow,” she snickered—somehow immune to the blush blooming pink across her cheeks. “You’re just as bad of a sap yourself.” Her foot returned to tapping, but this time instead of restlessness it seemed to stem from giddy nerves. She didn’t mind, Twilight realized. I think she knew what I meant and... she didn’t mind.

She opened her mouth to say something in response—

Her phone buzzed.

Sunset’s smile faded at the sound. She glanced down to where it came from—Twilight’s backpack—and then over her shoulder toward the auditorium’s main doors. “Is that...?”

Twilight felt her stomach sink. It’s time, she realized. Her hands turned cold. “Yeah,” she managed. “Guess she’s ready to go.”

“And... are you ready?”

No. “It doesn’t matter if I am.” She pulled her hand from Sunset’s grip and forced herself to stand. “I made a promise, right? Even if it wasn’t a ‘Pinkie’ one, I still... I still have to try and keep it.” She picked up her backpack. “So. Yeah.”

Sunset remained in her seat for a second, silent and unmoving. Then, she mirrored Twilight’s actions and pushed herself to her feet. “Alright. Good luck, then.” She stepped out of their row and into the main aisle so Twilight had room to leave. “And, call me after?”

Twilight nodded slowly. “Sure.”

“And...” Sunset pursed her lips. It was rare for her to think long before she spoke, but for some reason in that moment it seemed she couldn’t find her words. “Hm. Never mind.”

Huh?

“You don’t wanna keep Celestia waiting too long, Twi,” she said instead, brushing smoothly past her hesitation with a shrug and a wave of her hand. “Go on. We’ll talk later.” Her smile returned, albeit slightly smaller than before. “See you on Saturday?”

(It was easy to forget that Sunset was older than the rest of them—teens didn’t show their age as starkly as single digits, and the only real differences from eighteen to nineteen were alcohol, and the number of candles on a cake. But even if she’d forgotten about Sunset’s less-than-a-year lead, Twilight had made sure to mark her birthday on her calendar all those months ago when she’d first learned it:

Saturday. Just three days away.)

“Yeah,” Twilight replied with a careful nod. “See you then.”





They made small talk during the car ride. Twilight just listened for most of it, given that her day had been one long assembly she hadn’t paid much attention to. Celestia seemed content with talking—about her morning, about the technical difficulties during the assembly, about the upcoming exam week and all the scheduling issues she still needed to sit down and work out.

About Luna.

“She’s been looking forward to seeing you,” Celestia said. “It’s a bit exciting, isn’t it?”

Exciting was certainly one way to describe it, Twilight supposed. She didn’t reply to the question verbally, but if she had she would have chosen a word far more bitter-sounding instead.

The drive felt too short. The walk from the parking lot to the main entrance took less than a minute. Twilight trailed behind to let Celestia handle the check-in with the hospital staff, but even that seemed to take half the time she’d expected—why did administration only seem to go smoothly when she least wanted it to?

An elevator ride, a short walk down the hall, and then suddenly that was it. The staff member who’d directed them slipped a sheet of paper into the plastic holder on the door, then gave Celestia a knowing nod as she left. Celestia waited until she rounded the corner before she turned to Twilight and asked, “Do you want me to go in with you?”

It was an out, Twilight knew. A way to soften the impact; a way to ease the tension she felt like ozone against her skin. But if Celestia were with her when she went in, then she wouldn’t be able to talk. Not freely, at least. Not about the painful truths she owed it to Luna and herself to address.

“No,” Twilight said quietly, her voice as dry as her throat. She tried to swallow. It didn’t help. “I... I’ll see her on my own.”

And so she did.

The time it took for her to open the door and step inside and close it behind her may as well have not existed, because just like that—just like that—she stood facing the window of the little room and the hospital bed placed parallel to it with someone sitting propped up against its elevated back—

“Well, shi— shoot,” Luna breathed, her eyes wide and her hair backlit by the afternoon sunshine. “You really have grown up.”

So have you, Twilight wanted to reply, but her words were gone.

Luna looked different from how she had in her memories, but also exactly the same. Her ears were bare of piercings and the hand resting above her bedsheets wore no rings upon its fingers—thin, pale fingers that looked as if they’d wasted nearly to nothing. Even her familiar t-shirt with the faded band logo across its front just drew Twilight’s eye to more differences: her frail frame beneath its fabric, and her too-long hair spilling around its neckline. 

And yet despite everything that had changed, she still had the same dimple at the corner of her mouth; the same high cheekbones; the same playful twinkle just behind her eyes.

(If anything, Twilight thought she resembled Celestia more than she did herself.)

“Your brother’s showed me pictures, you know, but I don’t think I really processed that you were you,” Luna continued. “I didn’t recognize him at all when he first came—he’s so tall now! Just like your dad.” She tilted her head to the side and pursed her lips. “Guess you take more after your mom, huh? In the height department, at least.”

Without her voice all Twilight could do to agree was nod.

“Ah, I’m just teasing. Here, stop standing around and come sit,” she said, and motioned with her free hand to the chair beside her bed.

Somehow, Twilight managed to force her legs to walk over and take a seat. She smoothed her skirt across her lap out of habit before clawing her fingertips into its pleats and wrinkling it all over again. “S-sorry,” she stuttered.

Luna shrugged. “You were being polite. It’s fine.” Her eyes wandered down to Twilight’s hands and then back up to her face, but she didn’t say anything more.

Tension loomed between them in the silence. And it wasn’t that Twilight didn’t know what to say—she knew what she was supposed to talk about, and she’d rehearsed in front of the mirror more times than she could count—but more that she didn't know how to even start. Should she wait? Should she rip the bandaid off? For all her practice, somehow she’d forgotten that conversations didn’t just have middles, but ends and beginnings too.

Then a hand brushed her bangs back from her forehead, and Twilight’s train of thought ground to a halt.

“Your mom still cut these?” Luna asked casually.

Twilight blinked, then nodded. “...Yeah.”

“She’s gotten better, then.” Her hand pulled away. “I almost couldn’t tell.” She waited for Twilight’s hair to fall back into place before she spoke again: “So, does whatever’s bothering you have something to do with me?”

How did she—

“Even if the rest of me is fu— messed up, I’ve still got my eyes, kiddo.” She leaned over and flicked Twilight lightly in the centre of her forehead, then chided, “Spill.”

Blunt. Direct, and to the point. That felt like Luna; no matter how much of Celestia Twilight saw in her, the resemblance could only ever go as far as looks. “I’m an adult now,” she pointed out. Whether she did it consciously to change the topic or not, she didn’t know. “You don’t need to police your language around me anymore.”

“Mm, right. I forgot.” She flicked again. “Fucking spill. That better?”

Twilight tried—and failed—to suppress an eyeroll. “Sure.” Let’s go with that.

Rehearsal may have helped her plan an order to bring things up, but it was still up to her in the moment to find a way to turn topics into words. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Frowned. Chewed her lip.

Luna pulled her finger back again as a warning.

“It was just over eight years, right?” Twilight finally settled on. “When you... went away.”

A shrug. “Yeah. Sounds about right.”

“And... did Celestia tell you what she did afterward?”

Surprisingly, the annoyance Twilight had expected—had remembered—at the mention of Celestia’s name never came. Instead Luna just nodded in agreement. “She did,” she said simply. “And I was very, very cross with her, believe me.” Her expression softened slightly. “But I do understand why she did it. I can’t say if our roles were reversed that I wouldn’t have done the exact same thing, or worse.”

Twilight exhaled slowly, carefully. “Yeah. Of course.”

“Besides. I’m not the one whose memories got messed with; it doesn’t matter how I feel. Rather”—she flicked again, this time on Twilight’s shoulder—“all that matters is you.” She lowered her arm back down to her bed, then asked, “How do you feel about what she did?”

I don’t know, Twilight automatically wanted to respond—but, no, that wasn’t quite true anymore, was it? 

“I was upset at first,” she said instead. “I felt, I don’t know, betrayed? She built up all these lies, and kept so many secrets from me, and then when everything came out it was like I had to press the reset button on my entire life.” A pause. “But...”

Luna’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “But?”

“...I think now that I’ve had so much time to think about it, I’ve realized there wasn’t ever a ‘right’ choice in the first place.” She let go of her skirt and started counting off on her fingers: “Could she have asked anyone for help without them thinking she’d lost her mind? Could she have made me forget about magic without also forgetting you, given that you and it are so closely linked? Could she have just done nothing, and let me live my life haunted by the monster that took you away?” A fourth finger raised before she could stop herself: 

“Could she have ever let a child grow up knowing how they’d died?”

The room was silent when she paused to take a breath. The words were spilling out now—unrelenting and impossible for Twilight to keep unsaid. “She made the best choice she could, and I got to be normal in exchange.” Her mouth twisted into a grimace. “And, at least I can be sure chemical imbalances and hormones caused all my later problems, and not childhood trauma or something.”

She took another breath, then opened her mouth to continue—

“I’m sorry,” Luna blurted out.

Twilight froze.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” she repeated, and behind her eyes Twilight saw that terrible beast she knew as guilt. “Everything that happened that night—it was all my fault. You were just a kid, and you were scared, and you were trying to help me, but I was so angry.” She slammed her fist against her mattress with a dull thump. “I took that anger out on you, and I hurt you. No,” she corrected, and punched her bed again. “Let’s not sugarcoat it: I killed you.” 

Another punch. Another thump.

“But... for some reason, you’re still here.”

One last thump punctuated her words, and Luna’s fist finally fell still. Twilight watched her tension visibly drain away through uncurled fingers and sagging shoulders and defeated, tired eyes. She didn’t look at all like Celestia anymore, nor like the someone Twilight had known. 

She just looked... sad.

“Because you made a deal,” Twilight tried, but Luna shook her head.

“I meant here, with me,” she said, her voice hollow and her words cold. “In a hospital room with the woman who murdered you.”

Oh.

Twilight hadn’t practiced what to say to that.

“You know, for a while I thought I would never see you again,” Luna said quietly. She turned her head away so Twilight could no longer look her in the eyes. “And I’d have accepted that. I was just happy to know you were alright. It didn’t matter if you wanted nothing to do with me—you were alive, and that was all that mattered.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you,” Twilight protested. “I— I wanted so badly to visit, but there was so much going on in the aftermath—”

“But why would you want that?” There was raw confusion in Luna’s voice, twisted up with the bitterness wrapped around her words. It was genuine disbelief, Twilight recognized. She still doesn’t know. “Why are you really here?”

“Because I saved you,” Twilight said with words as heavy as her heartbeat.

“And I killed you.”

“It wasn’t on purpose.”

The rest of Luna’s arguments died before they could reach Twilight’s ears. Her words echoed a truth only made possible through its ambiguity; a statement that carried both forgiveness and remorse in equal weight.

You killed me. I saved you.

And neither of us meant to do what we did.

Twilight waited a moment to give Luna a chance to reply, then continued speaking when she didn’t: “I didn’t realize what had happened to you. Nobody did—not even Nightmare. Even after I’d remembered, all I wanted to do,” she said, her voice cracking, “was save the first friend I’d ever made, and that’s it.” Her eyes prickled with a familiar salty sting. “And... I don’t want to lie to you about this. I can’t do that. After what you did for me, it would be wrong to let you believe I did something I didn’t.”

“After what I did for you?” Finally Luna spoke up, and once again confusion rang hollow throughout the room. “Twilight, I’m the one who—”

“You didn’t mean to,” Twilight interrupted. She dug her fingers into the hem of her skirt again and squeezed. “And then you went and sacrificed your own life to make up for your mistake, on purpose. Intentionally. You’re the one who saved me—it’s never been the other way around.”

Luna bit her lip. Her hand twitched against her sheets, as if she’d gone to move it but changed her mind before she could. “You should blame me,” she said, her voice small.

“I don’t.”

“Because you didn’t remember what I did soon enough to have it count?”

“Because I had that time to forget, and then remember again,” Twilight corrected, and suddenly she felt magic start to spark within her pulse. “You did everything you could to give me the rest of my life—but then you lost nearly a decade of your life instead, and I can’t ever give that back.”

A wave of emotions slammed into her as soon as the words had left her mouth—gratitude and forgiveness and guilt and frustration bursting forward all at once. That was the root of it all; that was the imbalance in their situations that made Twilight feel so unbearably awful and so, so selfish. She’d gotten a second chance. She’d had the time to grow and change and learn and live, even if that time had been in tandem with desperate lies and forgotten truths.

Luna hadn’t.

And as Twilight’s guilt began to burn behind her eyes—

“I lost nothing,” Luna cut in, clear and stern. “Don’t you dare think that’s ever been the case.”

“But—”

“What, do you think that I just blinked and went from my office to a hospital bed”—she snapped her fingers—“like that?”

Twilight frowned and blinked to clear her vision. “Nightmare,” she tried. “It... it said human souls don’t exist outside their bodies.”

“And that’s supposed to mean I didn’t exist at all?”

“I don’t—” A pause. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Shame coiled bitter in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t know; only Luna could, after all.

Luna waited a moment for Twilight to collect herself a bit, then spoke again in softer, kinder tones. “It was more like being asleep,” she said quietly. “Like dreaming, really. Bits and pieces of reality all blended together into something I can hardly remember now that I’ve woken up.”

“...Oh.” Twilight dropped her gaze down to her lap. But that doesn’t sound any better than non-existence.

“Although, I do remember a few things,” she continued in those same careful tones. “Some emotions; some sensations; some thoughts—and, not all of them my own.”

It took a moment for the meaning of her words to settle in. When they did, and when Twilight finally realized what she meant, an odd sort of pressure suddenly squeezed at the back of her throat.

“Nightmare’s?” she asked, just barely above a whisper, and Luna simply nodded in response.

Sunset had been the same, Twilight remembered. She’d said something similar during the Incident, hadn’t she? That she wasn’t just Nightmare, or just Sunset, but a twisted combination of both; a monstrous intent blended seamlessly into the personality of its host. But that had been almost the inverse of Luna’s situation—a demon within a human, not the other way around.

...Could the same sort of exchange have also happened if they were switched?

“Identity is a strange thing,” Luna said to break the silence. “As much as I was the one trapped inside a monster, for all that time there was also a monster unknowingly stuck with me.” Her voice turned distant. “The boundary between us blurred further over time, and... I know Nightmare gained some semblance of humanity over those hundred moons, even if it never realized that it did.”

As she said that, she reached over off the side of her bed to Twilight’s lap and gently eased one of her hands away from the pleats of her skirt. Cold, was all Twilight managed to think at the sensation of two slender hands wrapping around her own. Her hands are freezing cold.

“And,” Luna finished, “I am so very thankful that my humanity gave it a heart, Twilight.” She clutched her ice-cold hands tight, as if afraid that Twilight might slip away if she let go. “Because at least it bothered to watch over you when I could not.”

...What?

That didn’t make any sense. Twilight resisted the urge to laugh at the notion that Nightmare of all beings would have ever cared about her. “Is that a joke?” she asked weakly. “You’re joking, right?”

But Luna just shook her head. “I’m not.”

“Because Nightmare tried to kill me,” Twilight reminded her. “Multiple times!” Suddenly she didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

“And I’m not disputing that,” Luna agreed. She still didn’t let go of her hand. “It still remained a monster, even with my heart. All I am trying to tell you is this:”

Her hands pulled, and Twilight found herself tugged far enough over the side of the mattress that her elbow rested just beside Luna’s hip. She was so close now—close enough to count stray hairs and see wrinkles and recognize worry shining tearful in Luna’s eyes. Cold hands squeezed Twilight’s. Her pulse sparked again. Magic raced wild through her veins.

“I would trade any amount of years all over again,” Luna whispered, “if that is what it takes to convince you your life is worth being lived.”

Her words seemed to echo in the stillness of their little room. Twilight could only stare blankly in response, her mind frantically turning back and back and back to make any sense of what Luna was trying to say—

And then the pieces clicked.

(Because in that moment the last of Nightmare’s mysteries made sense: the timing of Sunset’s unexpected abandonment; its suddenly-constant presence in her heart and all the nightmares that had come with it; the familiarity of its power during the Incident to the pressure from the worst day of her life, and the gaps in her memories that day between the cafeteria and the front office and the bathroom and the paramedics—

Luna had always been the final piece.)





June 16

“No,” Twilight said not even a second after she’d opened her front door. “Absolutely not.”

“Well, sucks to suck,” Sunset called from the end of the driveway, and stuck out her tongue. “I’m the birthday girl, and today my word is fucking law.”

It was bright and early in the afternoon—not morning, as there was no way half their friend group would have appreciated a party starting earlier than noon on a Saturday—and Twilight could already feel a headache coming on.

Birthdays? Fine. Sunset’s birthday? Great. The not-so-secret birthday present she’d ridden straight from her house to Twilight’s the moment she’d woken up?

Yeah, that was a bit of a problem.

“You do know I have my own bike, right?” Twilight said slowly. “I don’t use it much, but it exists. Literally right in the garage.” She jabbed her thumb to her side to point at the closed garage door to the left of the house, and raised her eyebrows. “I think that’s a lot safer than balancing on the back of your fancy new ride all the way to the park.”

Because of course Sunset’s brand-new bike came with all the bells and whistles, and that included the blatantly-obvious black pegs sticking out from both sides of the rear wheel—footholds for a potential passenger willing to risk a high-speed date with pavement.

“I promise to go slow,” Sunset said, then smirked. “Well, slow-er.”

“Still a no.”

“C’mon, Twi. I played the birthday card and everything!”

“And I’d like to keep my bones unbroken,” Twilight retorted. She finally stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door behind her; she could already sense the time ticking down until Shining yelled at her to stop letting the hot air inside. Plus, it’s almost time to leave regardless. Though whether that would be on her own bike or the back of Sunset’s was still up in the air.

Reluctantly, Sunset dismounted, flipping the kickstand down with her heel as she got off in order to prop her bike up in the middle of the sidewalk. “Okay,” she said, and crossed her arms, “then you ride it, and I’ll hold on instead. How’s that?”

“Still a no,” Twilight deadpanned. And if I somehow damaged her new bike, I’d never hear the end of it. She hopped down the steps and started walking over to the end of the driveway, then stopped halfway across her lawn as a thought suddenly occurred to her: “Wait. Where’s your helmet?”

“...Do I need one?”

“Do you— Sunset!” Now that gave her a reason to move; Twilight found her legs had started marching over before the words had left her mouth. “Do you want a concussion? Of course you need one!”

To her credit, Sunset had the decency to look a little guilty for her crimes. “I mean, it’s not illegal,” she tried.

“Right.” Twilight rolled her eyes as she reached the sidewalk and crossed her arms to mirror Sunset’s pose. She now stood opposite Sunset on the other side of her bike, all of her earlier banter forgotten in favour of cranial protection. “Like brain damage cares whether you’re a law-abiding citizen or not.”

“Okay, well...” She scratched her cheek awkwardly. “I’ll wear one next time, then?”

Twilight narrowed her eyes.

“Please don’t make me bike all the way back for it.”

“I was considering it,” Twilight grumbled. Then, sighing as loudly as she could, she uncrossed her arms and said flatly, “But it’s your birthday, and the park isn’t that far. So... you’re off the hook.” For now.

“Yes!”

And when Sunset lit up in response to that, Twilight felt the last of her resolve crumble away in an instant. Because if something as small as going helmetless could draw out such a brilliant smile, then surely if she agreed to something bigger; something more important and exciting—

“Fine,” she blurted out. “I’ll... I’ll ride with you, too.”

A pause. Then, Sunset visibly did a double-take. “What?” she said, her voice and eyebrows raising with surprise. “Seriously?”

“Don’t make me take it back.”

“You’re changing your mind just like that?” she asked, and leaned over her bike so she and Twilight were nearly nose to nose. Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you, and what have you done with Twilight?”

Twilight rolled her eyes—again—and gently shoved Sunset’s face away from her. “Consider it your birthday present,” she grumbled. “Besides, we need to get going, and I don’t want to spend ten minutes playing Jenga to get my bike out without scratching Shining’s car.” That was a bit of a lie—she knew her bike was up against the garage door, and a good three feet away from anything expensive. But Sunset didn’t have to know that.

“Is this your way of saying you didn’t get me anything else?” Sunset teased as she got back on her bike.

“Maybe,” Twilight said, then hesitated. Suddenly the prospect of getting on top of the back wheel seemed more difficult than she’d thought. “So how does this work, exactly?”

Sunset wiggled the handlebars and straightened up. “Right,” she said, and kicked her heel back to raise the kickstand so it wouldn’t get in the way. “You wanna stand right behind the wheel—yeah, like that—and then you gotta balance yourself on my shoulders when you put your first foot on it. Both hands,” she added as Twilight moved to try it with only her left hand. “Otherwise you’ll throw me off balance, and then we’re gonna fall.”

“Oh.” Twilight leaned further forward to add her right hand to Sunset’s other shoulder. It was a terribly awkward position—half-straddling the back wheel of the bike, the fender just inches away from catching on the hem of her skirt, and the sun-warmed leather of Sunset’s jacket the only thing keeping her upright. “Like this?”

“Yep. Now put one foot on that peg sticking out of the wheel—”

Twilight did.

“—and on the count of three, you push off and add your other foot. Okay?”

“Okay,” Twilight echoed. She took a deep breath and squeezed with both her hands. “Promise you’ll go slow?” she asked.

But instead of answering, Sunset spun the pedals into position and balanced her foot on top. “One,” she counted, and even without being able to see her face Twilight could hear the smirk she surely wore.

“Sunset.”

“Two.”

“Sunset I swear to god—”

“Three!”

And despite the fact every bone in her body was screaming at her to let go, get off, you’re going to get hurt; and even though she only realized in that moment that wait, I don’t have a helmet either, Twilight screwed her eyes shut and leaned against Sunset and pushed—because for all her teasing it was still Sunset and it was still her and I trust you, I trust you, I trust you—

And then they were moving, and then they were off. 

Twilight blinked her eyes back open as the wind caught in her hair and blew it back behind her—gently, though, as their speed was no faster than what Twilight would have gone herself. And now that they had momentum, she found that balancing on a bike wasn’t that much harder than actually riding one—though, when they went over a rough bit of pavement she couldn’t stop a panicked squeak from escaping her lips when both her feet went airborne a bit too long.

“You good?” Sunset called back over her shoulder.

Twilight nodded, then remembered that Sunset couldn’t see her and quickly added, “I think so—” Another bump. Another involuntary yelp. “Okay, wait—”

“Here.” Sunset slowed down a little bit, and lifted her elbows from her sides as far as she could without letting go of the handlebars. “Try holding on this way instead.”

Twilight blinked. “What?”

“‘Cause you’re shorter than me; I bet my shoulders are at the wrong angle—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Like in the movies!” She waved her elbows up and down a bit. “Y’know, where the girl’s on the back of a motorbike, and she’s gotta hold on for her life ‘cause the guy’s a bit of a speed demon, so she basically spoons him the whole ride—”

Another bump. This time the back wheel pitched upward, and Twilight just managed to untangle her hands from Sunset’s shoulders and lock them around her waist a second before momentum slammed her whole body against Sunset’s back. “That better not have been on purpose,” she hissed against leather as warm as her face felt. Though, once she steadied herself, she did feel a bit more stable. Not that I’m going to admit that to her.

“Swear it wasn’t,” Sunset said, and her voice was serious enough that Twilight could believe it. “It’s the city’s fault for doing a shit job paving. Not mine.”

The ride went far more smoothly after that. Carrying a conversation into the wind was tricky, though, and Twilight was content to just hold tight to Sunset and watch the scenery pass them by. Houses turned to parking lots turned to trees, and when the concrete beneath their tires eventually switched to grass she realized they’d finally made it to the park—and in one piece at that.

(And for a moment Twilight let her thoughts spread out on scattered tangents; a convoluted web of ideas and feelings all twisted back to Sunset: her nineteenth birthday; her thousand-watt smile; the movement of her body against Twilight’s arms as her legs pushed the pedals up and down; the fact she’d kept a reasonable speed the entire ride. Her hair tangling in the wind and in Twilight’s face. The leather jacket she still wore despite the weather being way too warm.

It just... struck her, then. Twilight didn’t know how else to describe it—struck. Suddenly, like lightning, but not as harshly as its consonants implied. Like a realization. Like waking up. 

Because even if the future was uncertain and unpredictable and terrifying, it didn’t have to matter yet. At least not when the present was as perfect as Twilight could have wanted. And that was what had suddenly struck her—not that the present was worth enjoying, but that it was only worth it because of the people she spent it with.)

The bike rumbled forward across the grass. Twilight pulled herself out of her thoughts just in time to notice the group of people barely visible at the other end of the field: five figures gathered in the shade of a massive maple tree; three of them sitting on a picnic blanket, one struggling to park her bike on the uneven lawn, and one jumping up and down waving in their direction with both her hands above her head.

Then, as they approached, a second thought struck Twilight: “What happens when you stop?”

“Ah.” Sunset tensed up against her, and in response Twilight felt a familiar pressure squeeze inside her chest—though, given the circumstances, she was almost relieved to feel it. “That’s the tricky part.”

“...We’re going to fall, aren’t we.” She didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Technically, I’m going to brake, and then we’re going to fall. In the worst case, at least.” They were halfway across now. Just a hundred or so metres to go. “Best case, I keep my balance, and you land on your feet.” Sunset paused to think for a second. “Middle case, I keep my balance, and you fall on your ass.”

Part of Twilight wanted to be upset with her—couldn’t you have warned me before we left?—but another, larger part of her couldn’t be bothered to care. It was Saturday. It was summer. It was Sunset's birthday. She didn’t have a helmet, and it didn’t matter—what was the worst a fall from standing still could do? Bruise my ego?

“Actual case,” she decided as Pinkie’s shouts rang into earshot and Sunset began to brake. “I get to take you down with me.”

“What are you—”

It was too late. The bike rolled to a halt before they passed the maple tree, a good distance from the other girls yet still close enough to hold a conversation if they yelled. Sunset caught herself by her tiptoes on either side of the bike, then slid forward off the seat to stand on both her feet. “Okay!” she declared. “That wasn’t so—”

The back wheel of the bike immediately swiveled to the side. Without momentum to keep her balance, all Twilight could do as she toppled over was lock her arms around Sunset’s waist and brace herself for impact.

“Twilight, what the hell—”

Her shoes slipped off the back wheel and sent it skidding away. The body of the bike pitched sideways to compensate, and Sunset—still with her legs planted on either side of it, still with Twilight’s arms wrapped around her—barely managed to throw one leg up and over before the bike collided with her other leg and sent them both tumbling down to the ground.

“Ow.” 

“Oh, fuck, I think you bruised my lungs—”

“Says the one with the softer landing,” Twilight wheezed. She flexed her shoulder against the grass to ease the pain, then remembered she’d worn a white shirt. Whoops.

“Ah, shut up.” Sunset twisted around on top of her so they could speak face-to-face—swinging her arms around to plant one elbow on either side of Twilight and prop herself up—then added in a more serious tone, “You okay?”

Twilight took a moment to think about it. She’d landed hard on her shoulder, and she was pretty sure whatever ants or other bugs lived in the grass beneath them were going to end up in her hair. The other girls had seen her fall, which once upon a time she might have found humiliating, but now was little more than a minor embarrassment. And, at least she hadn’t hit the dirt alone.

“Yeah,” she eventually replied. “I’m okay.”

She let her arms fall to her sides and relaxed against the grass. Sprawled on her back in the middle of the park like she was, she had a pretty clear view of the blue, blue sky. It’s a really nice day, she thought to herself. Really, really nice.

A distant voice broke through the silence somewhere off to her left: “You guys good?!” Pinkie hollered.

Sunset made a face, then raised her head up a bit to answer. “Yeah,” she called back. “We survived.”

“You want us to give you a minute?!”

“Or some privacy?” Rainbow added, then dissolved into a fit of laughter Twilight could hear even across the field.

“Just a minute’s fine,” Sunset yelled, and it finally dawned on Twilight that they probably looked a little suspect the way they were—flat on her back beneath Sunset with their legs tangled together from the fall. She could feel their bodies shift together with every inhale; every exhale, and when Sunset glanced back down, the sky didn’t seem nearly as vibrant in comparison to her eyes. Her face is really close.

“You think they’ll figure it out on their own?” Sunset asked quietly.

“Probably,” Twilight replied, her voice equally as soft.

A piece of Sunset’s hair tickled against Twilight’s nose. She tried to blow it to the side, then stifled a giggle when Sunset’s face scrunched up in response to the air puffed against her skin. “Whoops,” she whispered, and instead reached up with one hand to brush her hair behind her ear. “There.”

Her hand lingered against Sunset’s cheek, and as it did, the memory of their phone call from three days ago bubbled to the surface of her thoughts.

(“I think it went well,” she’d told Sunset after she’d gotten back from the hospital. “I— I’m glad I finally got to see her. And... maybe it’s weird, but it was sort of a relief to get everything out of the way. Tie up all the loose ends from the Incident, you know?”

“Yeah?” Sunset had replied, her voice tinny and distant through the phone speakers. “What sort of loose ends?”

“Like working things out with Celestia, and making friends with the other girls—for real this time, and not just as, I don’t know, acquaintances.”

“Learning about your magic?”

“That one’s still ongoing.” Unfortunately.

“And...” Sunset had paused after the first word, leaving a silence so long Twilight had almost assumed their call had dropped. “...anything with me?”)

Twilight lifted her hand away from Sunset’s cheek, her memories still spinning on repeat at the back of her mind. “Can I try something?” she asked carefully, and reached into the grass for Sunset’s hand. When she found it, she nudged their fingers together and waited for her response.

“Sure,” Sunset agreed. “Knock yourself out.”

Okay. Twilight took a deep breath in. Okay, okay, okay.

(“Maybe,” she’d whispered back, with her heartbeat in her throat and her stomach twisted into knots.

“Because,” Sunset had said, “I’ve got a loose end of my own too. It’s just, mine’s pretty conditional on you figuring out all of yours first—’cause I don’t wanna toss you something else to deal with unless you’ve room on your plate.”

“I’ve got room now,” Twilight had replied immediately; instinctively, and remembered what she’d told herself all those months ago about that chapter she’d kept bookmarked in her thoughts. “I... I’ve just got one last thing to figure out, too.”)

She pulled Sunset’s hand up from the grass and gave her a few seconds to rebalance on her other arm. Then, at the same time she exhaled her nerves, Twilight pushed her glasses up to her forehead with the back of her wrist and pulled Sunset’s palm up to rest flat against her eyes.

The world went dark.

“Tell me what I’m thinking?” she said softly.

Sunset hummed under her breath. “You know I can’t do that anymore, right?”

“I know. Just...” Twilight hesitated. “Just guess.”

“Mm. Okay...” She took a moment to think, then said, “Is it that I’m such a badass for biking here without a helmet?”

Twilight hoped Sunset could feel her eyes roll beneath her palm. “Bad at personal safety, maybe,” she retorted. “Try again.”

“...That my birthday party’s gonna put the rest of yours in the dirt?”

“I’d expect nothing less than Pinkie at this point.”

“That you’ve got a present for me that’s maybe half as good as my bike?”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

She waited for Sunset’s next guess, but it didn’t come right away. When the seconds ticked by to a minute Twilight felt her nerves begin to fray, and just before the courage preventing her from removing her hand ran out—

“Is it that,” Sunset whispered, and suddenly her voice came from somewhere much, much closer than it had been before, “you just wanted an excuse to hold my hand?”

(“I’ve got the feeling our loose ends might be the same one,” Sunset had said.

“Are they?” Twilight had somehow managed to ask, despite her pounding heart and the electricity in her veins and the burning, scalding heat blooming behind her skin. 

And then—

“I mean, mine’s that I like you a lot,” she’d said.

Just like that; just like that.

A little nervous, and a little shyly—but just like that. Sunset had said it, just like that.

And—

“Oh,” Twilight had heard herself reply, “mine’s that I like you a lot, too.”)

And Twilight smiled into the darkness, Sunset’s hand warm against her skin and more familiar than any other hand she’d ever held. “Maybe,” she teased, and tipped her head forward. Her face felt like it was on fire, but she couldn’t bring herself to care—Sunset was there, and way, way too close, and even though they were in public and in the middle of the park in plain view of all their friends, Twilight was more than willing to let their three-day secret spill—because they would have figured it out on their own regardless and eventually, and in that moment she just so badly wanted ‘too close’ to turn into something a little bit closer than that—

Sunset met her halfway.

Not in their first kiss, or in anything close to their last one, but something that slotted nicely in between—and it was perfect.

Of that, Twilight was one-hundred-and-one percent sure.