//------------------------------//
// Why The Long Face? 
// Story: The First (and last) Unicorn 
// by ashtreelane 
//------------------------------//

Despite all the extra time that Sunset had gained from waking up so early, she was barely able to eat breakfast and run a brush through her hair before she had to stumble out the door and swing herself onto her bike to start the short, pleasant drive to school, ducking down back roads to avoid the worst of the early morning traffic. 
The sky is still dark as she rides, though not enough to see the stars. The sun is hidden behind a tree-thick horizon, but shows itself in the blue light spilling over the darkened sky. 

Sunset Shimmer pulls into Canterlot High School’s parking lot with an extra ten minutes to spare before the warning bell rings, time she intends to use chatting with her friends. Sunset struggles with her helmet clasp as she walks into school, clipping her elbow into the door as she tries to unstick the clasp.  
"Shiiihhooooot." Sunset stutters, correcting herself at a stern glare from Vice Principal Luna. Sunset sighs in relief when Luna only winks and turns away. Pleased to be let off easy, Sunset tucks her helmet under her arm and rushes down the hall as quickly as she can without it technically being running. Luna may not be a hardass about swearing, but she will get on you for running in the halls. God, can that woman yell. 

Sunset slows to a stop as she approaches the music room. The door is already open, so they're probably already waiting for her. Sunset steps inside, her smile widening when her friends turn and fix her with matching friendly smiles. 
"Hey girls!" Sunset greets cheerfully, any lingering thoughts of her nightmare burned away by her friends' company. 
Holy shit. She's starting to sound like Twilight. 
"Oh! Oh. Hiiii Sunny!" Rarity says, her voice tight and too high-pitched to sound natural. Sunset feels her smile drop- along with her stomach, as her friends exchange nervous glances. Like... they had been waiting for her to show up. 
"...Sunny?" Rainbow Dash asks incredulously. Rarity gives her a stern look, but honestly Sunset would have said something if Rainbow hadn't. Sunny isn't a nickname that Sunset has heard since she was a foal, with it not fitting her bad girl persona. She's only heard it a couple of times in her adulthood, both from Pinkie Pie and occasionally Rainbow, when the athlete wanted to get a rise out of the Sunset, but she has never heard Rarity call her that.
"What? Is a girl not allowed to try new things?" Rarity defends huffily, putting a hand to her chest. Sunset can see an embarrassed flush creeping up the back of her neck and resolves to let it go.

"Uh... Alright."  Sunset says. " Did you guys have a good Sunday?"
"Better than yours apparently!” Rainbow says, raising an eyebrow. “You look like a wreck, what happened?"
"Rainbow…" Applejack sighs exasperatedly, pulling the jersey-clad girl to the back of the group by the back of her shirt. "What Dash means is that you don't look like you got a lot of sleep last night, sugar cube. Are you all right? "
"I'm fine girls," Sunset says with a small smile. "I just had some… crazy dreams last night."
"Dreams about horsiiieeeess…?" Pinkie asks, sliding closer to Sunset, who frowns, upset that her friends were able to read her so easily. Before Equestria’s Twilight, before the Fall Formal, and before her friends, Sunset would have shoved Pinkie away and snarled it all of them to leave her alone.
Instead, the Sunset Shimmer of today does something she never would have done a year ago.
She looks down, she bites her lip, and she stumbles over her words.
"I- I didn't- I'm not-" She slams her mouth shut with a clack of teeth before she can make an even bigger fool of herself. No one steps in. They wait for her to finish. They care about how she feels. Sunset takes a breath. "I dreamed that I was- that I was back in Equestria.”
There is a pause.
"That's all?" Rainbow Dash asks incredulously. "Then why do you look like you got hit by a bus?"
"Rainbow!" Scolds at least three of the girls. 
The warning bell rings.
"Oh shoot! I have a class to get to, you know. Cause we’re at school! And the bell rang. I have to get to that now, bye!" Sunset rushes out as she walks backward out of the room, eager to get away from this... unlawful interrogation.

She speed-walks to her first hour- AP Lit, and collapses in a frazzled heap at her desk. The bell rings mere moments after she had sat down, and Mr. Doodle-Donkey takes up his usual place at the front of the room, preparing a deep dive lecture into the symbolism of a complicated 18th-century novel. His class may be one of the dullest that Sunset has ever taken in her life, but he seems genuinely passionate about what he teaches, which is more than what she can say about a lot of the teachers she's met in her life. 
She allows herself to become completely absorbed in her own research as Mr. D drones on, taking perfect, deliberate notes from a book on Equestrian swamp fauna. She's been working on transcribing the most interesting portions of the book into the last third of her Geology notebook, which may not be the exact thing she's supposed to be doing in her lessons, but it's still learning, and studying has always been Sunset's go-to method of keeping her mind from her troubles. 

She carries on with this method of stress relief for the rest of the morning, carefully transcribing the ancient pages into fresh ink, carefully extracting the information and including her own notes and observations. Making it better than she found it. She sighs. This had been exactly what she needed to get her mind off of things. Maybe if she hadn't been so hellbent on being a maniacal dictator/princess, she could have been happy as a scribe back home. 
She sits up and stretches out her back, stiff from sitting hunched over her notes, and goes back to writing, her world narrowed into one of delicate cursive and smudged ink. 

Her tentative peace lasts until lunchtime, when Sunset must reluctantly put away her books, and join her friends at their usual table.
"Hey Sunset!" Twilight greets as she approaches, marking a page in her book and putting it away.
"Hey girls!" Sunset says with a grin, thankful that her friends are acting relatively normal again. She sets down her bagged lunch and takes out her food, biting into an apple as she sets up the rest of her lunch.
"THAT’S why you're vegetarian! " Rainbow blurts, slamming her hands on the table and startling all of them. A few nearby tables have their attention drawn by the sudden noise, halting in their conversations.
"What?" Sunset asks incredulously, her voice pitching up in her confusion.
"Because you're a horse!" Rainbow says proudly, like she's just solved some great mystery. 

Sunset's spork snaps in her hand. 

Sunset feels anger burning in her chest, that overly reactive, petty, burning hot anger that she had allowed to rule her life for so long. She clenches her fist under the table and narrows her eyes at her friend. Rainbow had said it loudly enough that a few of the tables around them are giggling, are shooting them curious glances, making Sunset's face redden in mortified rage.
Her friends can surely see her rage. Anger was one emotion that she had always struggled the most to hide. Her friends seeing her unable to control her anger once again only serves to deepen her humiliation, which she responds to with more anger. More lashing out. More defensiveness. A vicious cycle. A poison loop. 
Fluttershy silently stands from her seat and gently tugs Sunset's wrist, urging her to follow the animal-loving girl, which Sunset does without argument. Fluttershy leads Sunset out of the crowded, noisy lunch room and into a nearby bathroom, which is thankfully empty of any other students.

When Sunset was in the process of learning how to be a good friend, Fluttershy took up the mantle of acting as what Sunset called a 'Kindness Coach', someone who could see when Sunset was about to blow up or lash out and would guide her away to talk and calm down. Fluttershy's intervention of her fits of rage has no doubt stopped her from getting kicked out of the friend group (and potentially the school) more times than Sunset would care to admit. She should mail a gift basket to Fluttershy's house one of these days.
She hasn't needed Fluttershy to calm her down in months, not since a girl had dumped coffee on her on purpose.
"Are you still mad?" Fluttershy asks quietly. She used to sound so afraid when they were alone together. She doesn't anymore.
"A little." Sunset admits. "Not at you, though. Not really at Rainbow either. "
"Oh?" 
"I just- I- I don't know." 
"You’ve seemed… sad since we spent the night at Applejack’s aunt’s house. Were you upset by the horse? By Harper?"
Sunset shrugs miserably. She doesn't know if Fluttershy would be able to understand her woes. She doubts that anybody could. Except maybe for the Dazzlings, but it's pretty obvious why Sunset can't go hash it out with them.
"Is it... about how you used to be a pony?" Fluttershy asks softly.
"... I don't know." Sunset heaves, running a hand over her face. "I've been homesick." She finally admits. It’s what stings the most, but it is making up a pretty large portion of the dark cloud hanging over her head. She isn't lying, but her friends wouldn't understand the whole truth. And besides, Sunset isn't sure she's ready to tell them. How could she even put this kind of grief into words?

"Do you… want to ask Princess Twilight to open the portal?" Fluttershy asks carefully, like she's scared of what the answer might be.
"No." Sunset says firmly and instantaneously.  “You guys are here. It's just that… well, I'm going to have to reimagine what my future is going to look like now. I was always destined for greatness in magic, but… without that. In this world… what am I supposed to do?" 
"You get to choose your own destiny." Fluttershy says with a serene smile, proud of herself. Like she's hit the nail on the head. She's solved the problem. Write it down, stamp it, and send it to Princess Twilight, right?
Sunset smiles back. Her heart is not in it.
"Right." Sunset agrees. She doesn't know how to tell her friend that choice has nothing to do with it. 
This, Sunset has found in her time on Earth, is one of the key differences between Ponies and Humans. 
Human beings, for the most part, are incredibly resistant to the idea of such things as predestiny. When Sunset had shared bits and pieces of her old life and culture with her human friends, one thing that stuck out to her was their reaction to the concept of a Cutie Mark. They all seemed to find it disturbing, which struck Sunset as odd even then, though she didn't push it. 
To a human, a Cutie Mark appeared to be perceived as something of a shackle, a brand that serves as a constant reminder of the duties you must perform. 
'It's not like that!' She had wanted to say. 'A Cutie Mark isn't an outside force, it comes from you!' 
She could have talked about it for hours, though at the time she hadn't said a word, too new and too unsure in her standing with the girls to argue her point. 

She doesn't say it now either, here hiding in the bathroom with Fluttershy. She opens her mouth and she shuts it again. In the briefest flash, a still second, she allows her grief to rock through her like lightning, memories of the joy her destiny had brought her lighting up her mind's eye. She mourns the youthful excitement of combing through dusty old spellbooks, of spending days upon days buried up to her chin in rare and important books, instead of having to subsist on sneaking off for private study sessions with books that Twilight lends her through the portal.

"I can choose my own destiny..."

Sunset Shimmer was so happy on the day she got her Cutie Mark that she cried in front of her bunkmates for the first and last time.
She had been so happy. It had been everything she'd ever wanted. 
Sunset catches her own eyes in the bathroom mirror. 
The tired-eyed girl in the mirror can't do magic. She doesn't have a destiny, she doesn't even have a horn.
Sunset turns away. 
"Let's go back to lunch." Sunset says casually, squeezing Fluttershy into a one-armed hug. "I'm sure the girls are wondering where we are."
"Right, okay. Lunch." Fluttershy agrees quickly, getting to her feet and following Sunset's brisk walk back through the crowded lunch room and to their table. The two girls approach their seats, with Sunset doing her best to avoid the curious gazes and subdued giggles of the groups seated at the surrounding tables. 

"I'm sorry for being insensitive." Rainbow says glumly as soon as Sunset sits down, prompted by twin glares sent her way by Applejack and Twilight.
"It’s okay, " Sunset says, opening her fruit cup. She means what she says. “I wasn't really upset at you specifically, I'm just… I've just been homesick."
A look of sympathetic understanding crosses her friend's faces, making Sunset twist her fingers nervously underneath the table. She hates speaking on how she feels, but if she didn't tell them then Fluttershy would have as soon as Sunset was out of earshot. Not that Sunset blames her, she probably would have done the same thing had their roles been reversed, but... Fluttershy tends to catastrophize, which would in turn lead Twilight to spiral, and so on and so forth until by the end of the week it will have been massively blown out of proportion, and all of them would either be in detention for whatever magical catastrophe they had been caught in the middle of, or writing about the friendship lessons they had learned to Princess Twilight. 
Sunset's life events feel strangely repetitive now that she thinks about it. 

"We understand completely, darling.” Rarity says kindly, reaching out to lay a pale, finely manicured hand on top of Sunset's own and pulling her from her thoughts. 
"Well, we don't understand," Twilight corrects, pushing up her glasses with a shy smile. "But we're here to support you anyway!"
Sunset can't the smile that stretches across her face, grinning widely enough that it pushes up the corners of her eyes., blurring her vision. And if her eyes sting a little from unshed tears then that's no one's business but her own. 
"Thank you, girls." Sunset says, ducking her head to hide her no doubt sappy expression. "Honestly, I'd really just like to keep my mind off of things, if that's all right with you guys."
“Totally!" Pinkie Pie bursts out excitedly. "We'll be the best ‘keep Sunset Shimmer’s mind off of her old life in Equestria squad’ ever!" 
"Ah’ think we'd be the only uh… whatever she said squad ever." Applejack points out dryly.
"That makes us win by default!" Pinkie says, beaming.
"Oh! That's my favorite way to win." Fluttershy interjects, smiling.
"Of course that would be your favorite way to win!" Rainbow groans good-naturedly, making Sunset laugh behind her hand.

Finally, her friends are back to their usual lunchtime antics, far, far away from the subject of the world- of the life that Sunset had left behind. Her friends do a pretty good job of distracting her for the remainder of their half-hour break, but when they go their separate ways the end of lunch and head off to their respective classes, Sunset once again finds her mind filled with longing. With sorrow. With memories of her old life. 

There is no distraction from it now.