Five Weeks Later
Carrot Top rose with Celestia’s sun, kicking to extricate her tail from the tangled bedspread. Within three seconds flat of awakening, she jumped to her corner trough, splashed water on her face, and gave two quick hoof-pumps to the bellows of her log-fired cookstove. The resulting blast of hot air removed any lingering traces of drowsy temptation.
Carrot Top didn’t believe in sleeping in while the Pony of the Morning Star was beckoning her subjects to face the day. Her morning routine was swift and decisive. She rustled up some hay pancakes on the stove, pounded her hooves into her shoes and got the weeding done in her backyard patches, all before the Apple family rooster could be heard over the hills.
But she did do one thing different this morning. Instead of moving onto the east field, Carrot dusted off the mirror on her beech-wood vanity and gave her mane a long, hard glare.
Today was the day. No more waiting.
Five weeks. For five weeks she’d let Day run in and out of her market stand with nothing but a hot and bothered mumble. She’d let him stumble away, watching his stiff, two-legged gait with a lopsided smile instead of chasing after him like a mare ought to. He was tall, he was well-mannered, and he was brilliant once you got to know him. A good lad. And Alexandra, the human who came with him, was clearly a girl of excellent taste if nothing else. So what was Carrot waiting for?
Maybe the difficulty of pinning him down was one of the things she liked most. He was shyer than a pre-pubescent colt, despite the fact that she could make him smile with nothing but a wink. She had to admit that she derived a certain pleasure from chatting him up, getting him to kneel his face close to hers, and then whispering the most romantic thing she dared, only to watch him slip away with a cardboard excuse. Each time, the urge to knot her harness on his neck grew even stronger.
But no more. She was going to catch that human, and it was happening today.
Thus the glare for splits hairs and sprigs of frizz. She was hoping to replicate Ma’s ‘mom look’, which in Carrot Top’s foalhood had seemed capable of sending thunderclouds scurrying for their rooms, to say nothing of unruly manes.
But she had a backup plan tucked safely away in her closet. It took a little searching, but Carrot found her pink hairbrush near the back under an old broken plow-harness, still wearing its price tag. Carrot bit it off and applied with gusto.
Combing an unruly mane had been described as the next best torture to flight for an earth mare, and Carrot had always heartily agreed, but she twisted her limbs and mouth in every direction they would go, tugging right past the stings in her scalp every time she hit a snag. It was, if anything, worse than she remembered. She’d no doubt let her mane get a little longer since she moved to Ponyville–probably without even thinking about it. So many other mares wore their hair long here. By the time she was working on the backmost curls, Carrot felt like the Apples’ dog Winona spinning in circles to chase her own tail.
But that was the worst, and soon past. Carrot’s tail was a little harder to reach, but it submitted to the new world order with much less resistance. It was an everyday matter to glossy up her coat with the curry comb and dandy brush sitting in the top drawer of the vanity.
She paused for just a moment to overlook her final reflection before setting out. She hadn’t prettied up like this in a long time—not since stallions she had long since forgotten, and who had surely forgotten her. Maybe Applejack’s attitude had rubbed off on her. Ever since she’d been old enough to run her own farm in Ponyville, Carrot Top had privately shook her head at mares who went through this fiasco every morning.
But today she had good reason to spare no effort. Today was the day she’d thought might never come. It was time to get serious about love.
With a brief whisper asking Celestia to watch over her, she was cantering through Ponyville—avoiding the impulse to break into a gallop, which would undo her morning efforts. She did obey the impulse to pick up a bouquet of carnations when she ran across Morning Dew setting up in the marketplace. It was always best to be a gentlemare. Ma wouldn’t have expected anything less.
It was no secret where the humans lived in this town. Lyra had her plaything stashed up on Crayonberry Lane, and when the new row of houses had gone up, everypony had known by the drab colors inside that they weren’t for ponies. Rumor had it that the outer walls had been planned to be painted entirely in beige, but the Mayor had intervened for the sake of the town atmosphere and convinced whatever Earth-side company contracted the job to have them done over in lovely shades of mauve.
Carrot had only to trot down the row and follow her nose to the front door which smelled the most like Amadeus. It was built in Earthling fashion, one solid rectangle intimidatingly tall. She sucked in a breath around the bouquet, steeled herself, and knocked.
Day steeped himself in swirling steam, toweling off just before he kicked open the bathroom door to let it escape down the hall. Though he wasn’t one for superstitious thoughts, he found himself wishing a blessing on whoever was responsible for the miracle of engineering and/or unicorn magic that brought hot running water to this quiet corner of the multiverse. And it wasn’t the first time. Hot showers were one of the few quick ways he could relax after the caffeine-sped nightmare that was work.
Pressure was mounting at the project headquarters. Vedalkan had been seen on the upper floors, moving parts with unsettling blue calm. Explosions from the thirteenth floor weren’t uncommon either; according to Shiny Springs, they were trying to sculpt antennae that functioned as artificial unicorn horns and launch the field of automated spellcasting.
It was true that US defense contractors could smell easy money through a mile of solid rock. It was also true that the military on any world told their contractors little, and the Princesses everyone kept whispering about told them even less. But the orders that filtered down filled the team, down to a man, with dark unease. If all went according to schematics, Equestria would soon have surface-to-space missiles capable of taking out a Turian dreadnaught, and Day shuddered to imagine ponies dealing with anything that rivaled such a scale. The multiverse grew wider every day, in this age of exploration, and Day almost regretted that ponies had bonded so tightly to mankind that they would plunge headlong into whatever dark and terrible things the curiosity of apes unearthed.
His own team was still failing to make much progress on the ergonomics issue. Existing keyboards couldn’t be used except by well-trained and very talented unicorns. And if ponies couldn’t use whatever they were given effectively, the whole ordeal was rather moot. Day had been quoted at one point as sitting in a corner mumbling over and over again that he ‘hoped to God’ someone had a breakthrough before they fell to hitting each other over the head with soldering irons.
But that was like a different story from a far-away world. Here…here in Ponyville, life was sunny and harmony reigned supreme.
Day was just considering whether he wanted to rifle around for some clothes when the sound of conversation—in Equus, no less—stopped him short. He hung back, listening to see how Allie was improving. He would have rushed to get dressed if he’d thought it was important, but random ponies were fond of calling in on them now and again, as if they just didn’t want any house in Ponyville to go unvisited for too long.
A loud, delighted squeal in a familiar voice jolted him back into action.
Day peeked into the living room just as an orange mare bounded off the sofa, stopping less than a foot away from being able to grab his towel in her mouth. He stepped back. “You?”
“She said yes!” Carrot Top shrieked with a great big smile, jumping up on him. Her footloose forehooves supported her upright against Day’s bare chest, until he jumped away from the contact an instant later with a horrified look at Allie.
“Yes to what?” he cried. He was acutely aware of the need to keep his eyes front and center, now of all times, but the sudden smoothness of Carrot Top’s coat wasn’t helping the situation. He had to fight not to pay attention to the interesting curls in which her mane cascaded over her sides.
Carrot hardly seemed to notice that she’d been dropped back on all fours. “I’m going to take you to a musical, and I’m going to take you out to dinner, and I’m going to take you on long walks in the forest, and I’m going to take you to the spa, and I don’t even know if that’s a good idea, but hayseed if I care…”
She gave one more happy squeak, and took notice of Day once again. Despite the total bewilderment with which he met her grin, she looked him up and down without the slightest attempt to disguise her enjoyment. “So you do have a little coat hair. I like it! Gives you character. Now I know you have this obsession with bundling up, but sun’s light, would it kill you to wear a little less for once? Go outside like this. You could stand to show off!”
Day pulled the towel a little tighter around his waist. “Where I come from, we have this concept called modesty.”
“Never fear, my little human.” Carrot patted his leg with the edge of her fetlock. Had she picked that up from Lyra? “I’ll cure you of those artificial values now that we’re together.”
“We’re not together! I thought I made that perfectly clear!” He looked up at Allie in horror—what she must be thinking! But the woman was looking on with nothing more scrutable than…was that amusement?
Carrot Top whimpered. As she drooped, falling back on her haunches, her ears followed by flattening to either side. “B-but you said I was a nice mare,” she nickered. “You said I was pretty.” A step forward, reaching out as Day backed cautiously away from her. “You meant all that, didn’t you?”
Day was now backed up all the way against his living room wall. “Of course I did! But I’m Allie’s! Miss Carrot Top, I know I explained this!”
Utterly unfazed, Carrot Top pointed at the girl herself, who was still seated demurely on the sofa. “But I asked her and she said yes! So now we can! Isn’t that the grandest?”
Day’s eyes went slowly wide, darting back and forth between the two girls in the room. “She said what?”
“Yes,” Carrot repeated with slow, enamored emphasis. And a little hop. “Is next Friday alright? Och, maybe we can go out today! Do you have time?”
“What?” Day looked to his girlfriend for answers, but she was just toying with the kerosene lamp that sat beside their electric lampshade, plugged into the only outlet in the house. “Allie, what does she mean, you said yes? What is Carrot talking about? We’re not going somewhere, are we?”
Allie shrugged, still looking at the lamp. “I don’t figure she’d lie to you, Day. Guess you’d better grab some pants.”
“But–” He looked at Carrot Top. The pony’s hooves were tensely planted in his pile carpet, her eyes wide with gentle sparks of electrified hope.
Back to Allie. She still wasn’t meeting his eyes.
“Miss Carrot,” he said carefully, “you’re going to have to give us a moment alone.”
“Not a problem,” the mare declared, crossing her chest with a hoof. “My mothers raised a gentlemare. You can have all the time you need to talk it out.” She poked at one last unruly wing of hair sticking from her mane. “Can I try out your sink in the meanwhile? Might be just the thing.”
Day tried to catch Allie’s face again, and just for an instant, she looked him in the eye.
“Actually,” he found himself saying, “this might take longer than that.”
Day closed the door behind Carrot Top when she finally left, turning quickly back to the living room where his fiancée waited for him. Day approached carefully, patted out a spot on the couch, and scooted himself in until their legs were touching.
“Honey,” he began–he didn’t know how to begin. “Honey, Carrot Top didn’t mean the kind of date we used to go on with your brothers. She meant a real date.” He fidgeted. “As in a candlelit dinner. That kind of date.”
“I know, she’s like, dead-set on it. And so serious! You should have heard her asking me for permission while you were still in the shower.” Allie chuckled like wind through chimes. “I totally felt like your dad!”
Day turned cautiously, as if about to keep his head down and try to back away. “Wait. You know?”
“She brought flowers.” Allie thumbed towards the kitchen. “I put them in water for you.”
Day groaned. When his hand was done massaging his forehead, he used it to wave dismissively. “Okay. Whatever. What did she say to you while I was in the shower?”
Allie glanced towards the kitchen and back. “Aren’t you going to go look?”
“Maybe later,” he said with a touch of irritation. “I’m trying to talk about something important here!”
“Important,” she spat back. “Day, when someone gets you flowers, you don’t ignore them. Go look!”
Day wasn’t going to get anywhere fast unless he played along. With a sigh, he got up to the kitchen; a butterfly alighted on a twig in his stomach when he first saw the dozen carnations in voluptuous full bloom. They were big, beautiful and ostentatious—and they’d been bought for the sole purpose of impressing him.
To his own amazement, he quite forgot his interrogation for a moment, quietly bunching the stems in his hands to take a deep whiff of the blossoms. Why should this have any effect on him? Sure, no one had given him flowers before, but he was a guy. He’d bought plenty of them in the past for Allie, and for his mother.
Allie was leaning against the kitchen entryway. “She said to ask if you liked carnations, since she didn’t know if you’d want to eat them or not. She heard humans don’t eat their bouquets.”
“Never tried carnations,” Day muttered, running his fingers across the petals. “If you knew, why did you say yes to her?”
Her neck disappeared in a smiling, unhelpful shrug. “Like I said…I thought you would enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it? Honey, you realize this pony is trying to get me to cheat on you?”
She crossed her arms as if to fend off the words. “The way she explained it to me, she’d be dating both of us. Apparently that’s how it works here.”
Day forged through the tiny, endless steps to his fiancée. He cupped her cheeks. He searched her face. “Allie, what are you trying to tell me?”
She clapped her hands over his. Her fingers were slender enough to balance on top of his. “I don’t how I can make it any clearer, Day! She asked to go out with us and I said that was fine. She said you totally wanted to. Do you not want to?”
Day muttered a curse under his breath. “Don’t listen to her. Besides, forget about what I want. I can’t do this to you!”
She bit her lip. “Maybe we could.”
Day was clearly lost, so she took his hands. “We can stay here if we want. You know you can get another job after this one. There’s openings all over the place, and the taxes are, like, nothing.” She snuck under his arms and into a stolen embrace, pressing her cheek to his collarbone. “I love it here, Day. Our house is beautiful, and this town is beautiful. And—‘When in Rome’ you know? You said that yourself.”
“At the time, I was talking about what kind of wallpaper to put up!”
“What’s taking so long?”
Carrot Top paced the window of Lyra’s bottom floor, looking across the street to the distressingly quiet house on the other side. Her friend provided the perfect place to wait for Day’s herd, but it had been ten minutes with no sign of activity. What could have happened to take them so long?
“Maybe I should go check on them.” She skipped towards the door, but not before a mint-green blur blocked her path.
Lyra rolled her eyes, pushing Carrot Top back to a piano bench with one hoof. “Oh, no. You just sit right here. They have a lot to talk about.”
She went back to the music sheets scattered across the cover of the upright, but stopped to watch the earth pony. Carrot curled up miserably wherever she’d been placed, glancing constantly out the window for any sign of humanity. Lyra’s muzzle tightened for a moment; she draped herself over the piano and played a few bright cords. “I never knew little old Carrot Top would be head over fetlocks for a human. This is such a scrapbook moment!”
Carrot Top rewarded her with a faint, lazy smile. “There’s just something about them…”
“I know!” Lyra squealed. “Finally, somepony who gets me! They’re so…so…”
Carrot raised her head. “Tall?”
“Tall and dark!” Lyra hopped enthusiastically. “Go to Canterlot and read the papers sometime. Have you heard all those stories? Earth is such a terrifying place! And humans, to live in it–so tough.”
Carrot tilted her head. “That’s just a bit of it,” she suggested softly.
“You’re right!” Lyra agreed, immediately pouncing on her thought. “Then you find out that underneath all that, they’re just as soft and squishy as any little colt. Oh, I just want to hug and fix all of them!”
Carrot tried biting her lip, but it didn’t hold back the laughter. Lyra had her forelegs wrapped around her barrel and was rocking herself back and forth. She was standing on two legs now without even thinking about it.
Lyra installed them in a more comfortable space to wait. The Human Research Laboratory, really more a bulletin of newspaper clippings and a foal’s chemistry set, had been dismantled since First Contact, but now the reading chairs served as a wonderful place to sit and talk. “I mean, I dated this human once–”
“Really?”
“You!” Lyra batted at her ears, careful to miss. “He only had one leg.”
Carrot’s ears shot up. “Oh, the poor thing!” she cried. “Was he born with just the one?”
Lyra shook her head. “Nuh-uh. It stopped at the knee. He was a soldier, and he’d been in battle where it got blown clean off.”
Carrot leaned close in morbid fascination. Lyra put a hoof to her forehead and threw herself back in a swoon worthy of Rarity herself. “Celestia, it was so sexy!”
Carrot’s left ear twitched when her friend invoked the Princess’ name in vain, but she didn’t say anything. She’d had to get used to that sort of thing. It was just how ponies talked here.
“We used to fight a lot, though.” Lyra looked askance into her old bookshelf of myths. “He was the first one I was serious about, you know. We were always trying to tell each other what to do. Dumb Earthman thought the guy was supposed to be in charge of the relationship, and of course I wanted to run everything, because I was a stupid little filly and he was my first real crush.” A wrinkle bunched around the base of her horn. “He had to go back to Earth. I hope he’s okay.”
Carrot pondered the fire and turmoil of that faraway land, and reached out to pat Lyra’s hoof. It was the only thing she could think of to do. “I’m sure he’s alright.”
Lyra hummed a tiny note of gratitude and turned one on Carrot. “You have that problem too,” she said. “You’re going to keep fighting with Day unless you learn to back down a little.”
“I thought you said I was a quiet mare.”
“But listen to the stories you tell me about Day!” Lyra smirked. “Put you around those two and you turn into a completely different pony.”
“Do I?” Carrot looked downcast at her hooves. “I suppose I did slip up here and there. I just—can’t think straight when he’s around. I want to sweep him off his feet, just like a storybook. Only it never works out the way it ought to.”
“Don’t worry, filly. It’s love.”
Carrot groaned a steam-valve release of frustration. “I believe you! Do I ever!”
As a follower of Celestia since the cradle, Carrot Top was an unshaken believer in true love. She had never doubted that somewhere, out there in the world—or on some world—were souls made just for her. All that remained to her was to find them. And, as she admitted, “I think they’re the ones, Lyra. I mean truly the ones. I’ve just got to make him understand.”
“And that’s why Auntie Lyra’s here to help!”
Carrot Top gave a silent thanks to the Princess for Lyra Heartstrings. Not only was she a goofey mare to spend the day with, Lyra must have known everything there was to know about humans. The unicorn managed to occupy Carrot’s mind for quite a while with some good straight mare talk: advice on faux pas to avoid, things humans liked to do, and how to get a human to put their hand on your withers without noticing. Carrot was able to check piles of hearsay against Lyra’s first-hoof knowledge.
Not all of the advice was exciting and fun, though. When she asked what Carrot Top was planning to wear on her first date and Carrot thoughtlessly replied that she never bothered wearing anything, her friend would have nothing of it. She marched Carrot Top all the way back to her farmhouse so that they could lay out an outfit right then. “You’ve got to trust me on this,” she insisted. “All humans are big on clothes. All Westerners, anyway. Don’t worry, they don’t go for the pearly frilly stuff. It’s actually better to wear something simple. Something light. I have this skirt Tom had Rarity make for me, and it doesn’t go more than an inch up my tail. I swear, there’s nothing to it. But if I’m feeling frisky, I just throw it on and he goes nuts.”
“I don’t like clothes,” Carrot muttered as the unicorn pushed her towards her closet. “They get in the way when I’m gardening.”
“You don’t have to wear them when you’re gardening, silly. Now let’s see what you’ve got.” Lyra flung the closet doors wide. As she gazed within, her throat echoed the rusty squeak of the closet door’s hinges.
While the floor of Carrot Top’s closet was cluttered with boxes and with farm implements in various states of repair, the hanging bar sported a dozen empty hangers—oh, and one dusty Winter Wrap-Up vest against the edge. Judging by the way it peeled off the wall, it had been hanging there untouched for the better part of a season.
Lyra swapped Carrot an incredulous glare for a sheepish one. “Okay, filly. Time for a wardrobe transplant.” She thrust a hoof dramatically skyward. “To Rarity’s!”
Carrot Top rolled her eyes and followed in chorus. “To Rarity’s.”
After the twelfth circuit of heavy footfalls round the kitchen, Day wagged his index finger at Allie. “I know. I know what this is! You’re doing this for me. You think it’ll make me happy if you pretend not to care who I fool around with.”
“Oh, Day.” Allie crossed her arms. “I love you when you don’t act too smart to understand.”
“Nope.” Day waved explosively, fighting back the insipidly cozy urge to quit questioning her. “I’ve figured you out, and I won’t let you do it. It’s ridiculous–it’s mad–but I’m convinced you’d do anything if you thought it would make me happy.”
The more he thought about it, the more certain he became. Well, there weren’t any other obvious explanations. At least this had historical precedent. She’d moved to another world for him, hadn’t she?
When the race to design the hoof-compatible computer had begun—almost overnight—everyone had been brought in for interviews, so that the finest talent from every department could be cajoled, inspired, and bribed with inconspicuous raises to pack their bags for Equestria. It had all happened so fast, the most fateful interview of Day’s career. He’d thought they were looking to fill marketing positions two floors down.
He’d astonished both himself and his superiors by proving that not only could he catalogue more alien species than anyone else in the office, he could already stumble through a few halting words of Equus without breaking a jaw—an immeasurable advantage in speed.
Day had thought that all the time spent digging the corners of the net for explorer’s journals had been wasted, until it turned out he’d been preparing for his new job for years without even realizing it.
Allie had been there, watching him through all those years. He’d used to think he was pretty good at hiding his feelings about mares, even from himself, but the shields that used to feel like glaciers now appeared to him like a trickle of thin cracks. What conclusions might she have drawn, watching him bury himself in those pages? Those stupid pages. Suddenly, a tremble of fear—he was so bad at this relationship thing! Might Allie have thought that he wasn’t happy, there on Earth, with her?
But that wasn’t true. He’d never expected to come to Equestria! Not everyone could be an astronaut, after all; someone needed to stay behind and keep the Earth spinning. Day was needed at home, and at his job. That was why he’d buried the dream of adventure. Ironic, wasn’t it, that it was his job which eventually sent him into the multiverse?
And yet, these thoughts had a sick tang of familiarity, gagging Day like petrol fumes. In fact, this whole day was infected with it. Mightn’t he have dreamed about just such a day as this, even once, all those nights he spent fawning over photographs of mares? He would have crushed such thoughts immediately, of course, because they were wrong, wrong, wrong, but still they might have lingered where he couldn’t see them.
And a girl like Allie…she could have noticed feelings in him that even he couldn’t see.
He reached out from a blinding lurch of guilt, squeezing her shoulders. What were the words a man ought to say at a time like this? “Allie, I don’t feel that way about ponies. You don’t need to do this. You’re the only one I love!”
She responded to his distressed urgency by tapping him on his nose. “Don’t lie to me. I saw what color you turned when she got a hoof on you.”
“Ah–” Day blinked. “No, you’ve got it all wrong…”
With a curt groan, she rested her fists on her hips. “Look, would it help if I said I thought she was cute too?”
Day opened his mouth and then left it there, still clinging onto her shoulders like the last pitons on a cliff face.
This was too much to imagine at once. It wasn’t the revelation that Allie was partial to a pretty girl; he’d always known that. According to the word around the sororities, she’d been something of a womanizer before Day came along. But once they were together, she’d insisted that it made no difference, because she had chosen him to spend her life with. Day had assumed that the logic made sense. At the time, he’d felt privileged and even a little guilty that she was giving up the chance to strike up romance with another female ever again, all for his sake. But he’d been much younger then. Nowadays that notion seemed silly. At least…it had.
But—ponies!
“There’s no way.” His hands slipped. “Do girls even go in for that sort of thing?”
“Oh, come on.” She threw her gangly arms around him, kicked up both of her feet and laughed, as though he were the silliest thing in the world. “What girl doesn’t want a pony?”
“But I only like you,” he insisted. “That is…” Gagging on the confusion, he threw his hands around her waist and set her down on the nearest chair. “Am I the only one who’s straight anymore?”
Allie coddled his shoulders with another giggle. “Odd man out, aren’t you? I think ponies have a more, like…open-minded taste. Maybe you should try it.”
“I, for one, think it’s rather silly. If you must ask.”
Rarity poured herself a glass of red wine and offered the bottle to Lyra. Carrot Top hoped it wasn’t an expensive vintage, though she could smell the soil of Hollow Shades in the grapes. Rarity really shouldn’t have been sharing that, but Carrot wasn’t in a position to do anything about it herself. She stood frozen in the center of the boutique, with limbs outstretched while telekinetically animated measuring tapes made an uncomfortably thorough examination of her curves.
“In Manehatten,” the dressmaker went on, reclining against her sofa and swirling the glass, “the stories you hear! Even my own acquaintances. You remember Stitcheroo, don’t you? She met a young man herself, and he was very charming. But do you know what happened when she decided to walk him home? The minute he came in the door, the young woman who was in the apartment—oh, I don’t think I can say it.”
She slammed the glass down, rolling over Lyra’s attempt to say it for her. “An attempted murder, in our very own Manehatten! With a curling iron! And for what reason was an innocent curler desecrated?” She shrugged, apparently finding solace in another swirl of her untouched glass. “I don’t mind saying that I’d be hesitant to consort with any creatures prone to fits like that. What have we come to, that we tolerate these sorts of things in Equestria? Are we even civilized? You’d think we still drank out of troughs.”
Carrot chuckled nervously along with the rest of the party, remembering with some discomfort the rows of water troughs used at every bi-annual Carrot family reunion. She had a rather tender spot in her heart for the heirlooms, for tradition’s sake if not for hygiene’s.
“Hey!” Lyra pulled Rarity’s measuring tape out of the air to gesture with it. “Relationships with humans have a ninety percent success rate. And in Equestria, their rate of violent crimes is two points lower than griffons.” She crossed her arms with a smirk. “Don’t diss the chosen race of a girl with facts.”
“To each their own, of course.” Rarity inclined her head towards Carrot Top, and, while she was at it, stuck out her tongue and lit up her horn to try to effect of a bow tie around Carrot Top’s neck. “I wouldn’t dream of standing in your way, dear. I’ve seen the way you look at him.”
Day kneaded Allie’s shoulder with his chin, tightening his arms around her while plumbing the quiet which he had cocooned around them. The curtains were drawn, the lamps off, and none of the few appliances they owned were running. They had been about an hour on the sofa by now, but half of it had been spent looking into each other’s eyes, drawing out invisible threads with soft and silent conversation. Day had hoped he could pull out her soul by these faint emotions, if only he took the time, but so far a magical connection which transcended words refused to surface.
And for planning purposes, of course, time spent this way didn’t count. “Are you sure we’ve thought everything?” he said with a nervous tap on the cushion. “We couldn’t bring her home for anything.” Abruptly, his fingers snapped. “Christmas! Oh, man. What if we showed up with her on Christmas?”
Allie rolled a long-suffering glance towards heaven. “We thought of everything, Day. Even Christmas!”
“No. You never mentioned holidays!”
“We’ll just stay here and celebrate with ponies instead!” She flounced around the sofa in exasperation. “You don’t even like half of the holidays back home. Day! We could totally live here.” She squeezed his cheeks. “Oh, Day. Let’s never leave Equestria.”
“Oh, man.” Day got up and paced the room. He had nervous energy to burn. The solidity of the plan was dawning, and it was hard to take in. “Maybe we really could do this.”
“We can do whatever we want. If Carrot Top scares you, we could ask out anypony we wanted.” Catching a laugh that had snuck up on her, she covered her mouth, drawing her legs onto the couch. “I can just imagine that. You and me on the prowl, checking out ponies at Sugarcube Corner.” She winked, pointing at an imaginary pony. “How about that one? See anything you like?”
Day’s head rattled like an electric toothbrush. “Oh, no no no no no. “Let’s just—stick to this.”
He paused, took a deep breath, and grasped Allie’s hand. He had to stop pacing before he made her dizzy. So he oriented himself towards the front hall. “I guess we should go tell her then. So just the one date, for now, and no kisses on the first date. I still have to have that in there, Allie.”
He trailed off with a loud start when Carrot Top, who tapped around the corner of the hall just as he was turning for it, appeared in front of his face. She was carrying something in her mouth, which might had been the only reason she didn’t try to plant one on his lips the entire extended moment he spent in shock.
“Guess what I found!” she sing-songed, setting them in full view on the coffee table.
The top magazine on the pile was a back issue of Wingboner, with corners beaten and colors faded by coffee more than by time. The chocolate-brown pegasus on its cover, however, was immaculately groomed and well-oiled to boot. She faced away from the camera with wings outstretched to their full six-foot span, putting every single feather on flagrant display. The cover left most of its space free for the scandalous image, but left just enough word space to advertise even worse things within.
Day’s paralysis boiled off under the friction of his storming forward. “You looked in my dresser?”
Carrot’s eyes shot open. “What?” She backpedaled. “No! I wouldn’t do that! They were sitting on the buffet table!”
Day halted. That couldn’t be, because he would never, ever have left them anywhere in the open. He had been proud enough of the fact that he hadn’t touched them from their hiding place in at least a week.
He spun. Allie was plugging their daisy chain of power splitters back together, and from her expression, it would have seemed that the chore pleased her immensely.
“Don’t feel bad. As least it’s got good taste. I hear Wingboner is the best publication of its kind.”
“If by that you mean the only,” Carrot remarked as she sifted through the pile. “Never made much sense to me. If you want to look a pony’s body, go outside.”
“You might like the thundercloud pictures,” said Allie. “With models kicking lightning bolts around and everything. They’re kind of cute. I mean—unless you don’t think anything of ponies,” she added, twirling a lock of her hair with a diagonal glance at Day.
“Ooh, that does sound interesting.” Carrot Top slowly reached for the cover of the magazine. Day’s had shot out to race hers, but he had to stoop towards the coffee table. Her hoof came within half an inch of grabbing the cover before pulling away and laughing as it crumpled against Day’s chest. “Just kidding! I wouldn’t be that mean.”
She went for the next one instead, which announced its name–Herdmate Magazine–in crisp prismatic letters. On the cover were eight mares in ball gowns giving each other a group hug, and in between them page numbers for articles like 15 Group Dates Under 50 Bits, and Introducing the New Flame: how to make the new pony feel welcome in your herd without pressuring your herdmates to fall in love.
Allie leaned over Day’s horror-frozen shoulder to peer inside, as Carrot flipped through the pages by licking her hoof. “I don’t get it. Why’d you hide this?” she said after skimming the first few articles. “Nothing embarrassing here. Och, that’s a lot of mares, though. This the kind of herd you want, Day?”
“Uh.”
Carrot Top didn’t appear to notice his had creeping towards the magazine. She wasn’t looking up from it. “I think I could go for that!” she said brightly. “I always rather wanted a big herd myself.” She thumped the cover of another Wingboner in the pile. “If you’re curious about pegasi, Day, I might be able to find you one. I always suspected that Raindrops liked me a little bit. Want me to ask?”
“Ah.” Day shook his head, snatched at the magazine, and winced as Carrot pulled her head back to draw it out of reach.
“Mind you,” she said with a chuckle and an overly wide grin. “I don’t know if I want to share you with that many ponies. I was hoping to take up a lot of your time!”
She held her pose for a moment, waiting as if she half expected a rimshot. When even now Day didn’t punch through his crimson face to respond, and nobody laughed, her smile began to slip.
Day did move though, if only to point with signpost stiffness in the general direction of the door.
Carrot stared at his arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Get out of my house.” He repeated himself in barely controlled puffs, barely loud enough to be talking to anyone but himself. “Get out of my house.”
“What? What did I do wrong?” Carrot Top’s voice cracked around the Herdmate Magazine still grasped between her teeth.
Day advanced. He redoubled his stony gesture towards the door, forcing Carrot backwards across the carpet, and crescendoing into a shout far unseemly for a closely packed neighborhood. “Miss Carrot Top, you are no longer welcome, I’m afraid I am going to have to ask you to get off of my property!”
Allie put a hand on his shoulder. He shook, as if stung, throwing her off. “Out!” He was on the balls of his feet. The pony, reduced to the whites of her eyes and a flicker of orange, fled at a gallop.
In twelve minutes, Carrot Top was back at Lyra’s house.
“Oy!” Her blazing groan was cut off, halfway into its ascent, when her face dropped onto the table. “What did I do wrong, Lyra? How was I supposed to know he was so sensitive? We were just having a little fun!”
“Hang on. I got you. If I can find it…” Lyra was digging in a chest beside her music stand, tossing aside sheafs of sheet music. She let Carrot wave her hooves around until she finally came up from the box with a blank-covered tome. “Here it is. The Descent of Man. Still has the bookmark in it!”
The book feel open between them with a dust-rattling thud; Carrot Top, drawn in curiosity to the eldritch-looking letters of Day’s human alphabet, pored over pages which Lyra skimmed by magic. Carrot couldn’t read a word of it, but the two columns of fine print, stamped in queer precision onto every page, radiated a sense of weighty knowledge.
“Birds…insects…fish…Aha!” Lyra suddenly smacked the open book, beginning to read halfway down the page. “…a man never obtained a wife for himself unless he captured her from a neighbouring and hostile tribe, and then, she would naturally have become his sole and valuable property.”
“What?” Carrot nudged Lyra’s face out of the way so her own nose could trace over the writing, trying to pick out the offending lines.
“It’s mostly about evolution, but they talk a bit about the way humans are in here. Tom thought it would be the easiest way to explain why humans where he grew up are so weird about big herds. Here, it says more somewhere else...” Lyra tapped another paragraph. “The most probable view is that primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men.” Carrot sat in stunned silence, trying to imagine the world sketched in those few lines.
“That’s sick,” she said curtly.
Earth seemed like an even more foreboding place than ever. Carrot Top’s life was built on the bedrock of the family that had raised her. Perverting motherhood itself couldn’t have turned up her gorge any faster.
Lyra watched Carrot’s distress play itself out, but her eyelids dipped, and she smiled salaciously. “Admit it. You just want ’em even more now.”
Carrot hung her head and blushed.
Once Lyra was done snickering, she groaned again, slamming the book angrily shut. It wasn’t fair. “I finally find someone I really like. And they like me back. And we can’t be together because of dumb rubbish like this!”
Lyra immediately quieted. After a moment, she leaned close, patting the earth pony’s back and accepting Carrot’s head tucked for comfort beneath her own muzzle. “Hey,” she murmured, “it’ll work out. Remember what you used to tell me? Waaaaay back when I was just a crazy little filly who believed in imaginary creatures?”
Carrot closed her eyes, reciting easily from a long and sacred memory.
Never be afraid for love’s sake; love will endure until the end, if it has to wear down mountains and
drain deepest seas. Love would melt the sun and moon should we ever stand in its way.
(Celestia 57:11)
She cracked one eye open. “The Princess was talking about true love, you know. I mean…” she whinnied softly. “I hope I truly love Day. Or that I will. I want to love someone the way my parents loved each other.”
“Mmm.” Lyra kept mostly quiet, continuing to pat Carrot Top. Carrot knew she wanted to let her talk, and was grateful that somepony would listen; there was hardly anyone else she could complain to about the impossible difficulties of falling in love for a human.
But she didn’t keep talking. Carrot Top frowned pensively into the scruff under Lyra’s neck, just for a moment.
Then she shot up out of Lyra’s grasp like a firework. “That’s it!”
She caught up to Day halfway across Ponyville, as he and Allie were making their way to Town Hall in damp silence to run the errand of paying their electric bill for the month. Day caught sight of her first when she was only a galloping heat shimmer; when her orange coat distinguished itself from the melting of the sunset, he let go of Alexandra’s hand with a kiss and dashed to meet her halfway.
Carrot Top skidded to a halt before they collided, waited a respectful couple of feet away, if on the tips of her hooves, while Day caught his breath.
“Carrot Top!” he gasped. “I…didn’t think you would want to see me again today after…what happened.”
“You can’t keep me away that easy!” Carrot whinnied. “Besides, I brought you to it. I should have realized you couldn’t take a joke.” She dared to put one hoof forward, drawing a little closer to Day, and he mirrored her, lifting an arm to the level of her cheek.
She sniffed the air around him, and they closed another half of the distance. But when he could feel the heat of her body within reach of his palm, she suddenly stopped, pulled back and drew herself up.
“But on the other hoof, it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve said something hurtful to me.”
Day’s blood chilled as he snapped to attention, hands to his sides. Those were the kinds of words that could get him fired. There was no excuse for cruelty in Equestria. Not that Day wouldn’t have wanted one.
Mind racing, he dropped to one knee. “What did I do?”
Carrot raised a hoof along with her chin, gesturing overtop his head. “Hmph. You only implied that there was something wrong with the way my family has raised its foals since before the fall of Luna.”
Oh. That. Day wanted the apologetic Carrot Top back just as fast as he had let her go.
“But it’s fine,” she went on. “Because I’ve decided to forgive you. On one condition.”
“Name it,” he said. “Whatever it takes to make it right, I swear I’ll do it.”
“Good! Then I can book your train ticket for the Carrot family reunion next weekend.” Discarding her offended air, she trotted a blithe circle around him. “Saturday afternoon. You can make the time?”
“You want me to meet your family?” His voice was laced with suspicion and confusion in equal parts.
“I want you to see a real, live herd,” she said. “Clearly you have such backwards ideas because never really met one before. Once you get a chance to spend some gab time with my folks, you’ll understand that there’s nothing better than an Equestrian family. I’m just doing my basic equine duty, really.”
Day thought about it for a minute. Maybe Carrot Top had a point. Who was he to tell a pony what was right and wrong? But there were other ways to learn, ways that didn’t involve so much messy interacting with ponies, and he’d been to parties with Carrot in attendance before. “If I said yes, it would involve taking a train ride with you halfway across Equestira—just you and me. Am I right? And how late does this reunion go?”
“Och. We’re going to party until the cows come home!” Carrot Top pumped a hoof in the air. “And the cows in Golden Hills really know how to party until sunrise.”
“Uh-huh.” His eyes narrowed. “And this is all for civic duty.”
“What’s the matter. You don’t like civic duty?” Batting lashes, Carrot circle a little closer to his side, from where she could whisper in his ear. “We can come up with another reason if you like. I know I can think of a few.”
Day’s knuckles went tight, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t be mean to this mare. But neither could he reach out, as close as she was, to run his fingernails along the underside of her snout.
“You should totally go!” Allie said from over his shoulder. “You’re supposed to be learning about the local culture anyway. Didn’t they say that at work?”
“There was going to be a PowerPoint presentation,” Day offered meekly.
“Then what did you do?” Lyra demanded.
Carrot Top held back a moment by pushing her bowl across the ice cream counter. She wiped her mouth with a napkin before indulging the mare across from her. “I told Day that if he came, he could have the frosting rosette from the World-Famous Carrot Family Carrot Cake.”
“Wow,” Lyra breathed, not without a pause to dive her muzzle into Carrot’s serving of Fudge Raspberry Swirl. “You don’t mess around.”
“Not now that I finally know what I want.” Carrot Top rested on a self-satisfied sort of smile, happily watching Lyra trying to eat like an earth pony. Things, she felt, were becoming the way they were supposed to be, and there was something rejuvenating about that. Day had said yes—not exactly to going out with her, but she would make it work.
“I’m a Carrot,” she said, “and sometimes a Carrot has to play rough for love. Fair, but rough.”