“So something happened to the others?” I finally ask as the Taxi stops at the curb outside the hotel. Oddly enough this same place feels so much more friendly and safe compared to just hours earlier when it hadn’t been raining. The world is easier to keep track of when it is smaller, I suppose.
“Well, they were worried when we were kidnapped, but they couldn't do anything but call the cops,” Linda explains. “They've been waiting for us ever since then.”
Reid opens the door and trots out into the rain, the water immediately darkening her, or his, clothing and turning his mane into a dense matted sheet of curls. I ponder on how hard it is to keep thinking of Reid as male as he adopts more and more of Pinkie’s mannerisms. Then again, how adept am I really at reading masculine body language? I was hardly interested in one life and straight off disinclined from men in the other. Leaves me balancing on a sort of oblivious fence, doesn’t it?
“Well then, let's head in,” Reid says with a tone of determined finality. His tone reminds me of Angel, an assuredness in it I have never been capable of.
I hop out of the Taxi and close my eyes as the rain snaps across me like a sheet being drawn back in the morning, and I feel so very awake. My wings feel cramped and dirty despite having kept excellent care of them lately, and I enjoy the spray bouncing off my feathers for a moment, my mane being weighed down like a shawl across me. Opening my eyes proves to be a mistake, as I see several pedestrians stopped mid stride under umbrellas and awnings, looking at what surely must seem like a strange sight.
My wings snap shut before I even feel the panic seizing me, and I find myself cowering next to Pinkie, I mean Reid.
As we head into the hotel, I can see Julien helping Linda out of the Taxi, though nice of him I start to wonder if Julien on his own would ever have done that? Then again, does it matter? Our behavior now is as much our own choice as the choice of our components, so I guess if anything he is simply learning to be more chivalrous. Hopefully that doesn’t get him into trouble.
We make our way into the warm and quite welcoming lobby, which is conspicuously empty aside from the rest of our group. I have to say I am tempted to call them our family.
Reid shakes himself off like a dog and I am close enough to be sprayed by much of the water coming from that cotton candy mane, but really not much more moisture than I had accumulated outside, no harm no foul.
“Hey guys, you miss me?” Reid asks calmly.
Jacqueline was the first to speak, sounding much like a mare whose foal had gone missing at a park. “That's it? You were just kidnapped by who knows who and, and, and--”
“And it happened,” Reid said with a reassuring smile. “and it's past, and we're all together again.”
“Shy... It’s okay, everything is over with, everything is fine, okay? Everypony is fine and you helped sooo much.” The voice says from the other side of the bedroom door.
I find it hard to reply through the choking sobs as I barricade the door with my own body. The windows have been covered and my patio door has a dresser partially blocking it, casting me into comforting darkness. The world can’t hurt me in here.
“It wasn’t your fault.” She says for the hundredth time. “He was controlling all of us, and in the end everything worked out, okay?” I can hear her trying the handle of the door, but not pushing. She would never try to force herself into my room, just check to see if I had opened it yet.
“You know, you managed to catch Dashie, that’s pretty cool. Then you helped banish the most dan...”
My sobs at the thought of the draconequus doubled, as I began to shake in fear.
“Oh... Shy, how many Discords it takes to screw in a lightbulb?”
My sobs are interrupted by my confusion.
“He doesn’t screw them in, he plants them and gets light-tulips!”
The ensuing giggle from the other side of the door is infectious and soon I am interspersing tears and weak giggles.
“Knock knock.”
“Wh... Who’s there?” I whisper timidly through the oak panel.
“I am.” She replys, a smile in her voice.
“I am who?” I reply.
“You forgot who you are?! Oh no!” Pinkie giggles and I join in, though punctuated by hiccups.
Finally I open the door.
She has been there for hours. I wouldn’t talk at first. We are both surrounded by used tissues soaked by tears and runny noses.
She opens her arms and I fling myself into them, crying anew as she runs a hoof through my mane and rocks me back and forth. I don’t talk to anypony about myself, my past is my problem, and nopony should have to worry about it, but just once I let myself be comforted.
My tiny ego and my crushing fear of judgement leave me, and Pinkie rocks me back and forth as I cry myself into a stupor. I wake up in the morning to a cup of somehow still steaming hot coco and a note. “Friends stick together. Smile!” In loopy hoofwriting.
“Anyone want hugs? Hugs help when facing the scary and inexplicable.” I propose, back in the present.
Ginny grabs hold of us first, wrapping us in a hug until the rest join in, excluding Ian and Harold who ceremoniously stand guard.
“Yay! So now we can all go to the rooms and relax right? I like the idea of relaxing.” I comment, imagining a quiet night of stitching and tea over small conversations about the weather or something equally stress free and ordinary. Though I suppose conversations of the weather here would have less of a “What can we do about it” quality to them.
“O-Of course, darling,” Jackie assures me. “It's just... We were all so worried about you...” She says as she lets go of the little ball of hugs.
“He didn't hurt you, did he? If he did, I swear I'll--” I could only imagine what little Ginny would do to a giant robot, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Just my pride.” Reid says with a sigh as he gazes at the floor dejectedly. “I don't know if it'll ever recover though...”
I giggle at his antics. “We are fine, I kinda feel bad for the poor guy...”
Ginny seems baffled at my display of blind kindness. “What? Why?”
“It was Doofenshmirtz.” Raid growls.
“Who?” Ginny asks. “You're kidding.” Reid’s brother groans.
Linda takes a shot at explaining Doof to Ginny. “He was... basically a cartoon mad scientist, called himself evil and had a giant machine for throwing ponies at people.”
“You're fucking me.” Ginny says in a tone of incredulity. I worry that she is getting the wrong impression, as Doof didn’t actually throw anypony.
“He was nice, I mean besides the evil scientist thing, he was okay....” I pitch in.
Julien shrugs. “Well he probably died from the fall. Or bounced, I dunno.”
“Not. Funny.” Reid snarls. I have a brief image of Pinkie and Shining fighting, something that breaks every rule about friends and family I can think of.
“He probably had a jetpack...” I propose, remembering the plethora of mechanical oddities and impossibilities he seemed to have at his disposal.
“He's probably alive, anyway. Don't joke about his death.” Reid punctuates each sentence with a clop of a hoof against the hotel tile, which brings the lobby to an eerie silence for a moment, which I feel is as fragile as glass.
Jackie finally breaks it. “Well!” She clears her throat gently and composes herself. “I have the costuming cloth station up for anybody who would like to help me with it. I already carved out your Midna helmet, the paint just needs to dry.”
“Wow! Can I see it?” Reid exclaims, practically bouncing over to her.
“Anything I can wingstitch?” I ask hopefully, unfortunately causing another moment of awkward silence.
“I... don't know.” Jackie finally says.
Reid rolls his eyes. “Let her see what you have, she can decide if she can do it.” He instructs, before Jackie agrees and leads us to the sewing room which is just one of the bedrooms that has the other two hotel rooms attached to it by passthrough doors, turning three rooms into an excellent sort of living quarters for a large group like ours.
I manage to find some simple pieces that need to be sewn together and bring them to a corner, trying to remember the pattern for wingstitching through half shadowed memories. Needle in outer primary notch, secondaries grab the cloth and hooves to tension, pass from right wing primary notch to left wing, using the shaft to add pressure to penetrate the cloth, and repeat. When you get into the motions it feels like you and banking right and left through the air, as one wing dips in just before the other, and vice versa.
I hear Reid or Pinkie giggling about the helmet, and for all I know I could be sewing part of her, or his outfit, but once you get into a pattern with wingstitching it is easy to let flight instinct take over, and all you do is move the fabric in time to the beat.
“Quite random, isn't he?” Jackie says, shaking me out of my meditative daze. I give her a small smile as she watches me stitching away, doing my best not to catch my mane in the stitching. “You're... actually very good at that.”
I try not to blush from the simple compliment. “Thank you, nimble feathers help. I don't think Cadance... Er... Linda would be able to do this with her curled feathers. Sort of reminds me of flying.” I explain, humming a familiar tune.
“But I've seen her wings, they're... you know what, I'm not even going to ask. You're the expert, at least until we get Dash here.” She says, and I think for a moment whether or not what I said was true, and I have to admit to myself I only assume that Cadance has more curled feathers because she has a tightly curled mane, for some reason I associated the two.
“Are you actually an adult or are you a teenager or... what?” Jackie rouses me from my reverie again.
“Well.... Erica was twenty two, Fluttershy was eighteen, but just barely. I think.... I think we missed Pinkie's birthday.” I say, remembering that I am just a bit older than her, and wondering how we could have possibly missed it this time around. I feel like I have committed some great crime. Did we forget? Or did we celebrate and I forget that we did? It would be so rude to ask whether we did or not and turn out we did... It would imply I didn’t enjoy it!
“So... twenty two and eighteen? Does that make you... forty? Or would you prefer to average it?” Jackie asks with a small smile as she pins and adjusts Julien’s outfit.
“I would prefer an average, twenty sounds about right.” I say guiltily, not wanting to seem old.
“Of course darling. Twenty it is!” Jackie chuckles.
From the other room, a moment later, I hear Reid’s voice call out, though it sounds oddly muffled. “Hey, Erishy, could you come here for a second?”
I carefully set down the half finished work, fold my wings after giving them a good stretch, and trot into the other room.
“Yes....” Is it Pinkie, or Reid? Reid or Pinkie? Will one be upset if I call them the other?
“Reid?”
Whichever it is, the pink pony has the hood on his or her hoodie up, and a towel wrapped around like they had taken a swim and were waiting for their mane and tail to dry. Turned away from me, I can’t see if the brilliant sapphire blue eyes are bright and sparkly or serious and strong.
“Could you, maybe, shut the door?” Reid asks.
“Y... yes?” I push the door shut gently, as not to slam it and bother the others, or startle Reid. “Are you okay?”
“....So, you’re the element of Kindness, right?”
So no answer to if he or she is okay... did they finally merge? Did it hurt? Do they have a concussion or some injury we didn’t spot that they are afraid of revealing for some reason?
“Well... yes,” I finally answer. “I gained it again so I suppose I am... are you okay? did you get hurt?” I probe, moving to sit next to him.
“Well, you know how oblivious Pinkie can be, sometimes, and.... as an aspie, I often quipped that I lacked the natural empathy others had. So, you know, kindness is something that.... it’s very easy for me to be unintentionally unkind. Can I get some advice?”
I move closer, trying to see any visible injuries, but he is still facing away from me.
“Well... Being blunt or being oblivious isn’t unkind. I mean, Pinkie didn’t mean to make cranky upset, she just wanted to help him. A mistake like that isn’t mean, but if she had simply started breaking things on purpose, that would be. You... Um... You blame yourself a lot, don’t you?”
I ask this last question looking away, wondering how close I am getting to offending him, or causing more damage than I already might have.
“I blame myself for what is my fault. I’m intelligent enough to recognize what isn’t. But... this isn’t about that.” He turns to look at me and I can see he has been crying, a lot. Echoes of a long lost night on opposite sides of a door come back to me. His mane is straight as a ruler, and he looks miserable.
“If.... If you discovered something horrible, learned about a terrible event just after coming out of something else that was pretty bad, and your friends didn’t know... should you tell them? Compound their worries? Or just keep it close to heart?”
He looks so hurt. He looks so lost and scared, and damn it all if I don’t feel like I am looking in a mirror. This is my time to pay it back, all the times Pinkie has helped me, this is what all those imaginary I.O.U.’s I catalogued are for.
“Oh Reid...” I whisper, pulling him close in a tight hug. “You can’t be alone. There are six of us for a reason. nopony, noone should ever be alone, especially when dealing with something terrible... what happened?” I ask, my concerned gaze meeting his tired and hurting one.
Surprisingly, he chuckles, though weakly. “Yamato Nadeshiko.”
I can tell that it is Japanese, but beyond that I have no clue. “....Gazunteight?”
He rolls his eyes. “It’s japanese. You know parts of the fandom have declared you honorarily japanese? It would explain the eyes, I can never draw your eyes... Anyway, I learned about the term from TVTropes. Yamato Nadeshiko, japanese wildflower. A cultural ideal of womanhood: Softspoken, elegant, but with a core of iron.”
I look back to him incredulously. “I am not elegant. You know why I decline going to dinners? I can’t hold utensils. No idea. I try really really hard but I’m always afraid I’m going to drop them.” I explain, holding out my hooves as if sandwiching a fork.
“Mmmmhmmm, and you were a model and pretty much everybrony thinks making you cry is a federal crime. But... it’s not the elegance I was referring to. It’s the iron core.” He says in a sad tone as he hands me his iPad. “Because you’re going to need that.”
Unicorn Hospitalized, Princesses Missing
Twilight has been shot. The princesses have vanished on their ways home to visit family. All our dreams have died. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
A deep breath banishes the dark thoughts, at least for the moment. Will Twilight pull through? She has to, there is simply no other option. The alternative is unthinkable.
Will the princesses be found? Of course, they are deities in their own right, human tagalongs or not. Hope has to carry us through this. Hope and fear, hope and fear, it is the polarity of life, and right now I am scraping at the bottom of the barrel for more of the former.
“T...Twilight? We need to get to New York.... I...” My thoughts finally catch up with my mouth and I give Reid a squeeze, as much for my own comfort as his. “We can’t let her be alone either. We need to leave Reid.... We need to leave now.” I urge, eyes wide in an equine panic.
“Why? If we leave now... we look like we’re panicking. We look like we’re panicking, and the world panics. I hate it, Erishy, I hate being stuck here, but right now... right now, things are dark, and the world needs a little laughter. I think we should... still go trick or treating tomorrow, just so everybody knows we still have hope.”
The truth is often the most painful and bitter leaf to chew. We are the champions of the world, and the world will run if we run. Our herd is at the edge of a cliff, and not all of them have wings.