There was something about Twilight’s room that was its own kind of magical.
It was an observation Sunset made almost every time she stepped inside, but it was never any less true. Her friends’ rooms all ran the gamut in terms of how decorated they were – from Rainbow Dash’s, messy and sparsely decorated with taped-up posters, to Rarity’s, opulent in style and meticulously maintained – and all felt like they perfectly befitted their residents. But Twilight’s had a special kind of wonder to it, the light from the ceiling lamp perfectly illuminating all the features that made the whole place scream Twilight Sparkle. The planetarium above the bed, the large overstuffed bookshelves, the telescope and star charts, the gorgeously patterned windows, the sheer amount of purple in the room…
Sunset loved every bit of it.
She’d also been by the place enough at this point to have practically every detail of it memorized. It was fairly easy, as Twilight wasn’t the type to arbitrarily change up something that was in good working order. (The only things that did change regularly were the aforementioned bookshelves, as Twilight often found new and far superior ways to organize her personal collection of literature, which would then require reevaluation when a new book was added that forced her to find a new, extra-superior way to properly re-sort the library.) So when there was something unexpected to see in the room, which wasn’t very often, it would quickly catch Sunset’s eye.
She probably would have picked up on this particular item regardless of that, but it stuck out all the more as Sunset sat down on the bed, opposite Twilight, and criss-crossed her legs atop the comforter so that the two were properly facing each other.
“So,” Sunset asked. “You got a stuffed animal?”
Twilight blushed, her eyes briefly darting to the object in question and back. “Oh, heh. I probably should’ve put that up.”
Sunset blinked. She hadn’t expected Twilight to find it embarrassing, but that laugh had sounded rather insincere. “No, it’s cute!” she said hastily. “I just wanted to know more about, y'know, what it was.”
Said item, which Sunset turned her gaze to look at more fully, was a meter-long plush shark laying in front of the pillows, its head facing Sunset’s side of the bed. It was certainly big, for a stuffed animal; there were real sharks that existed that were smaller than this, though they weren’t of the fearsome variety this one approximated. It was grayish with a heavy blue tint, which contrasted with the purple that dominated the room as a whole. And with its two dorsal fins, one large and one small, and two rows of teeth sewn where its mouth was, it had all the trappings of a top predator of the sea – yet it was fuzzy and felt, and those ‘teeth’ were soft, thin, and rounded.
It was an altogether charming facsimile, and one that Sunset supposed wasn’t too different conceptually from the stuffed bear toys one could find in Equestria as well as this world. Though those were usually a bit further removed in appearance from the real deal, but then, they needed to be, given how many Equestrian settlements were close to the territories of real bears. Even with Canterlot City’s beaches, few humans were likely to ever run into a big shark.
But why did Twilight seem uncomfortable about having a simple stuffed animal? She pondered briefly, but nothing convincing came to mind.
Slowly, Twilight reached over and grabbed the toy fish by the tail fin, dragging it over to herself. She set it in her lap and looked up at Sunset, whose gaze had followed the movement. “It’s my blåhaj.”
Sunset tilted her head. “Isn’t it just a shark?”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s what it is, but…” She slid her right hand underneath the stuffed animal’s head and lifted the thing up about 45 degrees. “It’s my blåhaj.”
That wasn’t very helpful.
“...That probably wasn’t very helpful,” Twilight added after a moment. “Sorry, I’m just feeling a little awkward talking about this.”
Hearing that, Sunset adjusted her posture so it was more obvious she wasn’t trying to be judge-y. “Oh, that’s okay. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with still using your old stuffed animals every now and then, right?”
“Um…” Twilight tensed, ever so slightly.
Perplexed, Sunset took a more focused look at the sh– the blåhaj. It looked to be in rather good condition – a bit worn, but not aged as much as one would expect a beloved childhood toy to be. She supposed it was possible that–
Oh. Sunset suddenly had a better sense of where the discomfort was coming from.
“...Or maybe a not-so-old stuffed animal?” she asked.
Twilight nodded. “Yeah. I’ve only had it for just over a year. I got it during my last few months at Crystal Prep.”
Sunset quickly made the connection. One of the loneliest periods in Twilight’s life, when she was firmly under the heel of her principal and shunned by her classmates, when her brother had gone off to university and her parents were all too frequently away from home. Just a big empty house, a dog, and bad thoughts.
“I don’t know if I’d call it desperation,” Twilight elaborated, resting the blåhaj back down. “But it did feel necessary. I don’t mean to sound like I was wallowing in misery back then, but I was learning the difference between simply being introverted and realizing I had basically no one in my life. The closest thing I had to a friend was my dean, and Spike was just a normal dog – and a pretty small one that gets antsy if you hold him too long. And I had routines, experiments, stuff that kept me distracted a lot of the time, but late at night, when I was having trouble sleeping and constantly hugging my pillows… I just needed something.”
Sunset glanced back down at the stuffed shark, and noticed probably the most worn part of it was right in the midsection, where Twilight’s arms had likely wrapped around it very often.
“And I happened to remember hearing about these some time earlier,” Twilight continued, “in a chat forum I occasionally popped into. They were a bit of a fad, I think, but they were still being made – they still are – and I remembered just how big they were supposed to be. So I went and got one, and, well, it helped. It helped to have something there.”
Twilight picked up the plush and wrapped both arms around it, holding it against the right side of her body, its head pressed against hers.
Scooting forward a bit, Sunset reached out a hand and placed it on Twilight’s knee, just a few centimeters from where the toy had been resting. “I’m sorry.”
Twilight tensed, though she didn’t withdraw. “Not your fault. I didn’t know you then.”
There was a temptation to respond, but Sunset knew pressing the point would go nowhere; she knew from past experience that Twilight didn’t care for nonspecific apologies like that. So she just sat for a moment as Twilight slowly loosened her grip on the blåhaj, eventually letting it fall. It landed mostly in her lap, facing the other way from how it had been positioned before.
That was Sunset’s cue to shift the topic a bit. “Did you ever have stuffed animals, growing up?”
Relaxing at the change, Twilight shrugged her shoulders. “Not really. Just this one raggedy doll I called Smarty Pants. She’s somewhere in the attic, and she’s in pretty bad shape. No one’s gonna be fighting over her.”
Sunset nodded, shifting forward a bit. “Fair. I never had any. For a while I was, y’know, ‘too tough’ to have one, I guess; then later, I didn’t really think I deserved to have something comforting like that.”
She took her hand off Twilight’s knee and began to gently stroke the blåhaj, which was about as soft as she’d expected it to be.
“I wouldn’t mind something like this, honestly,” she mused aloud, before making eye contact with Twilight again. “You weren’t afraid I was gonna judge you for having a stuffed animal, were you?”
Twilight opened her mouth for just a moment, then closed it, clearly pondering. Sunset felt a twinge of guilt, pulling her hand back from the blåhaj. Had she been too invasive? It seemed like such a simple question to ask, but Twilight’s reactions weren’t always the easiest to gauge in advance. The universe might have deemed Sunset some kind of avatar of Empathy, but being able to comprehend emotions wasn’t the same as being able to intuit them. (And Sunset wasn’t about to break her policy of not invading her friends’ minds with her geode over questions about a stuffed toy.)
Take your time, Sunset almost said, but by then Twilight had finally found what she’d wanted to say, or at least something she could manage to say.
“I don’t know, honestly,” she began. “I just feel like I shouldn’t need this, anymore. I have friends. My life is different. And even with Crystal Prep, my old classmates made amends with me. Midnight’s gone. But I keep holding on to my blåhaj at night. I never bring it to sleepovers, and I feel like I sleep a little worse without it. I shouldn’t need it anymore – really, I don’t need it anymore – but I keep it anyway. I even once tried an experiment to see how many days I could go before I felt like I needed it, but I woke up in the middle of the first night and grabbed it because I forgot about the whole thing. So I didn’t bother recording the results.
“And now that I’m talking about it, it just feels stupider. Like part of me wants to always be sad, and just never get over anything. It’s ridiculous. Yeah, things felt pretty bad back then and I did terrible things because of it, but now it almost feels like whining. ‘Poor Twilight, she didn’t enjoy her elite prep school, she needed a stuffed shark to hug, boo hoo. Clearly she’s the least fortunate person in the world, with her big house and lab access and opportunities.’”
Twilight hung her head, looking down at the shark. “I know that’s probably being too harsh on past me. I just… it makes me wish I knew how to stop throwing pity parties for myself. Like I’m doing right now. That’s why I always hide this – I’m not ashamed of having a stuffed animal. I just didn’t want to explain that I needed something to hug.”
There weren’t any tears under Twilight’s eyes. Sunset felt certain it was because Twilight was straining not to let any loose, lest she prove herself right.
Sunset fought back the urge to immediately give her a hug of her own. At this point, expressing visible sympathy would be a gamble, or at the very least a tightrope walk. Once that word pity was invoked, all expressions of comfort became innately untrustworthy. They now had to be wrapped within the guise of a sales pitch, in order to convince the comfortee they’d earned sympathy, that it wasn’t shameful to accept. It was a mindset Sunset had been training herself to avoid, after she’d spent most of her life indulging in it, and any step she could take to help break Twilight out of it as well would be a good one, if she could get it right.
Even touching Twilight again would probably set things off on the wrong foot, so Sunset simply cleared her throat to get Twilight’s attention. Once their gazes were solidly locked on each other – the subtle tremble in Twilight’s eyes stabilizing as she awaited what Sunset had to say – Sunset inhaled and spoke.
“Twilight,” she said firmly, “I…”
It took only a few seconds for Sunset to identify a flaw in her original line of reasoning, as well as the one she came up with after that, and the one after that. She froze, and Twilight’s briefly curious expression became downcast once more. Panicking silently, Sunset once more noticed the blåhaj slumped on Twilight’s lap.
“Can I hold this, for a second?”
“Oh, um, sure.”
Sunset nearly started to reach forward and take it, but before she could, Twilight had picked it up and gently placed it in her palms, which had opened instinctively. After a moment, Sunset held the plush up against her torso, wrapping her left arm around it while stroking it gently with her right.
She knew Twilight was watching, quietly, but Sunset kept her focus on the doll before speaking again.
“Twi, it, um… I’ve always noticed you like to look for meaning in things. Not in a spiritual way, that is, but more of this deterministic ‘X exists because Y’ kind of thing. And it makes sense, I’m not saying it doesn’t. That’s what science is, right? Knowledge that brings understanding of the world.”
She glanced up, and saw Twilight hesitantly nod.
Sunset slid her left arm off the shark and grasped it from underneath with her newly free hand, and from above with her other. She thrust it forward, toward Twilight. “So what is this?” she asked.
“...it’s my blåhaj.”
“It’s just a shark, Twilight. A big cute stuffed shark. That’s all, right?”
“.........I mean, yes, but, um, Sunset–”
“No, you’re right, there’s more to it. It’s also soft. It’s easy to hold. It’s big enough to hug. And those are all, um, intrinsic to it, right?”
Twilight stared, most likely trying to figure out just where Sunset was going with this. Sunset held back for just a moment before pressing on.
“But that’s just what this is. What it means is something else entirely. It was a comfort you needed back when you had none, and now, because that’s not true anymore, you think it should be obsolete. You still want it, but… it’s also a reminder, right?”
Twilight nodded.
“So that’s what it means. And that meaning is different from what it is. Because of that, I think we have two options. Option One is that we could just get rid of it.”
Twilight’s eyes went wide behind her glasses, and Sunset even noticed a little jolt run through her body. She regained composure near-instantaneously, but what had been revealed was undeniable. There was no Option One.
“Or,” Sunset continued, “Option Two is that, because the meaning of the blåhaj is different from what it is, we could find a way to give it a new meaning.”
Twilight exhaled softly. “In what way?”
Manipulating the shark in her hands, Sunset moved it so its body faced Twilight head on, then began to press down on its head in intervals. “I don’t know, Twilight,” she said in a squeaky voice. “What way can we do that?”
That earned her a frown, which Sunset had expected. “Har har. Be serious.”
“Why?” ‘the shark’ asked. “Isn’t this all because we were being too serious to start with?”
Peeking from above the artificially animated fish, Sunset caught the barest hint of a smile on Twilight’s face, before it returned to a pout. She let go of the head and lowered the blåhaj a bit.
“Twilight,” Sunset said, voice returning to normal pitch, “it’s not some horrible personality flaw that something that was special to you at a bad time in your life is still special to you now. I still really like a lot of the same stuff I did when I was making an ass of myself and being a jerk.” She motioned to her leather vest. “I started dressing like this because I used to think it would make me look tough and scary. And that feels really silly now, and for a while, I thought about giving it up so I wouldn’t look like how I used to. But I couldn’t, because it still feels like me.
“I guess what I’m saying is… I’m just thinking that, if this is still special to you, then I don’t want you to think you have to give it up. Maybe… maybe we just need to give it a better reason to be special.”
Twilight was quiet for a moment. Sunset was silent in turn, not wanting to interrupt the gears in her friend’s head as they turned. When they finished, all she asked was “How?”
Sunset shrugged. “Making new memories for it, I guess.”
She lifted up the shark once again, and she could see Twilight looking closely at it. She wasn’t quite certain how Twilight was looking at it, but she definitely was giving it her attention.
Then, all of a sudden, Sunset found the blåhaj being pulled from her hands, surrounded in a purple glow. She instinctively tried to grab it back, but it moved faster than she’d expected, floating forward in a line towards Twilight, her geode bracelet pulsing, her expression twisting into a smirk.
Its mouth landed right on Twilight’s neck, and Twilight immediately threw her hands up and began mock-flailing. “Oh no! It’s got me! My blåhaj turned evil and is trying to eat me!”
Scrambling onto her knees, Sunset adopted a hero pose from the torso up, a silly overdramatic one that Rainbow Dash almost certainly would have used in an actual combat situation. “Never fear, Twilight,” she said boldly, “I will save you from this fearsome beast!”
Scooting forward, Sunset reached for the plushie, only to find it suddenly zipping away from Twilight, floating high into the air and aiming itself right at her. Sunset could hear Twilight’s giggling as the fearsome beast shot at her like a missile, and she had to flop down onto the bed and roll to the side to avoid direct impact.
She quickly got back up just as the shark began to levitate upwards, still pointed towards her. “Oh no you don’t!” she shouted as she lunged with both arms, snatching the fiend out of the air. She barked a laugh of triumph, only to find it premature, as the wily fish caught her off-guard and lunged at her, breaking her unsecure grip on it. It brushed right past her face, stopping only to slap it twice with its tail, before darting back over to Twilight, the glow dissipating as it fell onto her lap.
“Memories like that?” Twilight asked, beaming.
Sunset grinned. “Exactly.”
Twilight laughed, and Sunset laughed in return. A few little tears, finally unrestrained, had streaked down Twilight's face, but they didn't mean anything anymore; Twilight was happy, and so was Sunset.
And then the blåhaj floated back into the air.
After a few more rounds of Sunset vs. Stuffed Animal (with Sunset winning fewer times than she’d care to bring up in the future), the two of them were resting, backs up against the pillows that remained on the now-very-disorderly bed. The comforter was 90% on the floor thanks to all the combat that had occurred atop it, and the sheets were in disarray as well, exposing part of the white mattress underneath all the purple and lavender.
They were both smiling, satisfied that the past hour-plus had been a fulfilling one.
Sunset turned partly onto her side, facing Twilight. “Can I say something?”
Twilight looked over in her direction, without moving the rest of her body. Her glasses slid partly off her face, but she didn't adjust them. “Sure.”
“Well…” Sunset took a moment to think through her words, which mostly proved needless. “I just want you to know that you can always share things with me. If it wasn’t obvious enough before, well, I guess it’s always helpful to say it again. Trust me, I get that feelings are hard. I guess just remember that– that you aren’t justifying your feelings in front of the world. You shouldn’t even need to justify your feelings for me. I just want you to know that I’m listening. I’ll always listen. It’s as simple as that.”
She reached over and pushed Twilight's glasses back into proper position, then rested her arm on Twilight’s shoulder. She could see Twilight’s expression brighten.
Somehow, she could sense her own face doing the same.
“I know,” was all Twilight said in return. And Sunset felt assured that it was all she needed to say.
Twilight rolled onto her side and scooched close to Sunset, who inched toward her as well. Their arms reached out, but just as their bodies were about to meet, they felt something in the way.
Both looked down at the same time and giggled. Apparently, they’d managed to forget they’d laid the blåhaj right in between them.
Twilight reached down, grabbed it by the dorsal fin, and laid it behind her. Then she wrapped her arms around Sunset, and Sunset did likewise. And they held each other, hugging for long enough that they lost track of the length of their embrace.
Neither particularly felt like letting go anyway.