"Ah don't know why you keep stopping here," Big Mac said as he and Fluttershy pushed through the front door of the Carrot and Stick. "We've got better stuff at home for half the price."
Fluttershy gave him a quick kiss. "Sorry, honey. It's a deep, dark secret. Now have yourself a nice mug of cider. I'll just be a minute."
She walked around the corner of the bar, kicking up a puff of sawdust with each step. She scanned the dimly-lit faces in each little group clustered at the bar or around a table. Halfway down the length of the bar, she stopped, one hoof suspended in mid-air.
The murmur of a dozen indistinct conversations, the creaking of stools, faded away until she was aware only of one face in a group at the other end of the bar, a unicorn stallion. His colors and details were softened in the haze of dust and smoke, but he had a distinctive twinkle in his eye as he set his empty mug down and laughed. She took a deep breath, then walked over to the group and quietly slipped up next to him.
"Hello, Nosey."
The dark-blue unicorn turned to her with a wide smile on his face. He paused, confused, then the smile crept out again. "Butterfly! Long time no see!"
She smiled back at him. "We need to talk."
His head, mouth, and ears all stopped halfway on to some other expression of pleasure, waiting for his mind to come back and tell them what to do.
"Excuse me, everypony," he said, standing up. "I'll be back in a minute." He took a step towards the stallions' room.
Fluttershy stepped back to block his path, still smiling. "We need to talk now."
The two stallions he'd been talking to raised their ears to catch this new conversation.
"You know, I meant to write, but—"
She raised one hoof to his mouth. "No, you didn't. Now be a good boy and come over here and sit down."
He flicked his ears, but followed her to a table just out of earshot of the others. Nosey sat drawn up tightly in his chair like a colt taking a test he hadn't studied for. Fluttershy gave him another little smile, then looked down at the center of the table between them and began speaking quickly.
"I didn't get pregnant."
He let out a breath like a pony just acquitted on a technicality.
"But it hurt me. I was so lonely."
"I'm sorry," he said, a little too quickly. "I just wanted us both to have a good time. You said you had a good time."
"I was afraid," she went on without looking up. "I was afraid other ponies wouldn't like me. They'd see I wasn't like them. And then, you were so nice to me at first, and I thought…"
She swallowed, and blinked. This was the part where she'd imagined him leaning forward in his chair, his eyes widening as he realized what he'd done. But instead of looking downward in guilt, he looked relieved. Instead of drawing closer in sympathy, he kept glancing away as if he wanted to escape.
She could feel her mental focus pulling back into just the space behind her eyes, churning violently there. The salt shakers, the table, Nosey—they seemed far away, unreal. She had to plant both forehooves on the table to steady herself.
She hadn't realized she was still so angry.
She felt the words rise in her throat like vomit: She'd thought he loved her. She'd thought she loved him. As she imagined herself saying them, here in the bar, they sunk back down in leaden shame.
She'd loved her mother. Anypony who knew even that much about love had no excuse for such stupidity.
What she wanted most was to explain everything to him, make him understand how badly he'd hurt her. And that meant she mustn't explain it at all. This wasn't supposed to be about her.
She took a deep breath. "Well… I shut myself away for a long time, and almost missed everything. Everything." She glanced back towards the bar's entrance, where Big Mac was just a big, dark silhouette leaning over a mug.
Nosey frowned. "But you're okay now, right?"
"Yes. I'm okay now."
"I'm glad it worked out for you. That's great. Great. You moved on, I've moved on. No hard feelings." He leaned back in his chair, glancing around as if he were looking for someone to rescue him from this conversation.
She looked up. The bar had grown quiet around them. She stared over at his two companions, who quickly turned their heads away and started talking loudly to each other.
"I'm not asking for an apology," she said. "I'm trying to help you."
"I don't follow."
She sighed. "This isn't going right at all."
He nodded. "It's okay. Forget about it." He put his hooves on the table, ready to stand up.
"Wait." She indicated the other two stallions with her nose. "Are those ponies your friends?"
"Yeah, they're my friends."
"Good friends?"
He looked back over his shoulder at them. "Yeah, sure."
"Why don't you introduce me to them?"
He studied her with half a smile and cynical eyes for a few seconds.
"Okay. I don't see why not." He led her back to the two other stallions, who were still sitting at the bar: a pegasus with a goatee and intense, deep-set eyes, and an earth pony wearing an improbably-tall black hat.
"Gents, I'd like you to meet Butterfly, one of the sweetest mares I've had the pleasure of knowing."
"Fluttershy," she said. "My pleasure."
"Fluttershy," Nosey repeated. "And Fluttershy, meet Boxcar and Enigma, my best pals in Ponyville."
Fluttershy nodded at them each in turn. As soon as they had all sat down together and gotten out the standard greetings, she turned and called down the length of the bar, "Honey? Would you come over here, please?"
At the other end of the bar, the big silhouette raised its head, then stood and began plodding towards them. Nosey watched closely, flaring his nostrils, and began tapping the edge of his empty glass lightly.
She turned back to the ponies she'd just met. "I just thought you'd like to know that my husband is coming over here to, um, trample, your friend. If you don't mind."
The other two stallions looked up at the big red figure coming towards them out of the darkness, looked at Nosey, then looked at each other.
"Though," she added with an apologetic smile, "I'm afraid it won't make much difference if you do."
Their bar-stools were still rolling and clattering on the floor when they disappeared out the front door. Nosey sat up very straight, holding his breath.
Fluttershy shook her head sadly and turned to Nosey, who was opening and closing his mouth like a fish. "They weren't very good friends after all, were they? Oh, honey, this is Nosey. He's an old friend."
"Howdy!" Big Mac offered, looking down on the pair. "Your friends sure left in a rush."
"I was just telling him how frightened I used to be of meeting ponies."
Nosey said something choked and squeaky.
"What was that?" Fluttershy asked.
He coughed. "Sounds rough," he said a little more loudly, still looking up at Big Mac.
"Eeyup," Big Mac said. He looked down at the floor. "Fella dropped his hat."
"But," she went on, "you can also be afraid of getting close to them. Of sharing your secrets. Of getting caught. Afraid that the best thing in the world is behind one of the doors you haven't opened yet. Afraid of choosing. Of settling."
Nosey rapidly nodded his sincere and heart-felt agreement.
She looked up at Mac and smiled. "I've never had that problem. But I can imagine it could be scary."
Nosey looked back and forth between Fluttershy and Mac, who both had gentle smiles on their faces. "So… you're not angry with me?"
Fluttershy considered her answer carefully before answering. "I am angry with you." She frowned a little. "But that's not why I'm here. I hope."
"Look, Fluttershy. I appreciate your concern. But that's not me. I'm having a good time. I've got lots of friends."
"I saw," she said.
He waved his hoof dismissively toward the door. "Oh, forget those guys. I've got others. All over this part of Equestria."
"How many of them know your name?"
He snorted, just a breath, and pushed his stool back. "This conversation is getting needlessly personal."
"So you're going to run away again?"
The three ponies looked at each other in silence.
Big Mac cleared his throat. "I'm gonna go settle my bill."
"Okay, honey. I'll catch up to you in a minute."
"Don't worry," she told Nosey as she watched Mac walk away. "He wouldn't hurt a fly."
"Good to know," Nosey said, "but I'd still rather leave before he gets back." He stood up.
"Unless he thought it had ever done anything to hurt me."
He sat back down.
"So why are you here?" he asked.
"So you can see that I'm happy now."
"So what is this, some kind of passive-aggressive revenge?"
"Oh, no. No." She drew her head back and frowned. "At least, I hope not. I wanted you to see how happy my husband Mac is. But I think we scared him off."
Nosey swirled the ice cubes in his empty glass. "Ironic."
Fluttershy looked down to her right along the bar. Mac was waiting quietly in the background, while the bartender polished a glass and listened with a polite smile to a shaggy earth pony, three empty glasses before him, telling a story about a cow that was afraid of squirrels.
"I guess Mac and I aren't very expressive ponies," she eventually said. "But he is happy."
Nosey said nothing.
"Oh, it's hard sometimes. You wouldn't think we could shout at each other, would you? We do, sometimes. But not very much."
Nosey slumped his shoulders and started playing with his glass. "I'm glad to hear it."
She stared at him intently.
"A lot of ponies say a lot of silly things about marriage." She clicked her tongue. "No, that's not what I mean. Marriage isn't even what I'm talking about." After a glance at Mac, she lowered her voice and said, "I don't want a promise from Mac. If a day came when he'd be happier without me, I'd want him to go, and be happy."
He raised one eyebrow. It was the first sign of interest he'd shown. "So what are you talking about?"
She wrinkled her brow, thinking. "It's the most amazing thing... Sometimes, if you try hard, for a long time, to see what another pony sees, and feel what they feel... you do."
Nosey sat up straighter on his stool.
"It was horrifying the first time. I'd just gone out to the field to bring Mac his lunch, and he was holding it and looking at me, saying thanks, but I saw this look in his eyes that he gets when something is hurting him but he won't admit it. He was looking at me. I was hurting him somehow."
Her eyes unfocused, and her nose drifted down, pointing vaguely toward the bar's glossy surface. "And then I remembered him telling me that his mother always brought lunch out to the fields at noon on the dot, no matter what, and smiling when he said it. I'd decided I'd do the same thing, only then I didn't. It was much more efficient to feed all the animals at the same time, you see. And it took so long sometimes. Each day I said to myself, 'Tomorrow,' until I stopped doing even that."
By now she'd drifted so far into the past that Nosey could have slipped off unnoticed. But he sat stock still, his empty glass forgotten.
"I'd gotten so used to seeing him and talking to him that I was just seeing him and hearing him. Not feeling him. Like he wasn't as real inside as me. And now my husband was looking at me, not complaining, but I saw what he saw. The pony he loved, who couldn't be bothered to feed him before her animals. I felt him feeling… ignored. Ashamed. There was another… another I there, as alive and real as me, hovering somewhere near me, looking out through its eyes like I look out through mine, and suddenly I saw what it saw. I saw how phony my smile looked. How I'd handed him his lunch like I was just getting rid of it. And he didn't even know how easy it would have been for me to step away from the animals and bring him his lunch on time, to show he was important. I was even worse than he knew."
Her head drooped slowly as she said this, her eyebrows squeezing together in an inverted V, until she looked like she might cry. "And all the while I kept remembering other things I did, or didn't do, and every one of them felt heavy. He had just gotten used to carrying around all this weight. And I could feel him still loving me from underneath it."
Nosey leaned towards her, raising a hoof uncertainly toward her shoulder. But she took a deep breath, and raised her head up straight. "When that happens, you've either got to shut it out and run back to the safety of your own head… or you've got to do something. Mostly just little things you never bothered to, or didn't really think mattered. But you've got to keep on reaching out for that other I, trying to feel what it feels, and keep on doing, until you can stand to see yourself through those eyes. And then, strange things happen."
As she spoke, Nosey's jaws slackened, and his hoof dropped slowly to the bar.
"You start saying 'we' more than 'I'. You care about twice as many things. You notice twice as much as before. You don't have all the same opinions, but you can sort of understand them all, twice as many as you did before. You do twice as much. You feel twice as much alive."
There was a long silence. Then the other pony let out a breath, leaned back, and rubbed his chin. "I admit… it sounds nice."
"And when you try to imagine—and sometimes you do—what it would be like if you left them, you can't. Because it wouldn't be 'you' anymore. It would just be that half-pony you used to be."
Nosey scowled abruptly. "Now that's romance-novel talk. It's creepy. And it can't happen."
"It could have," she said. She looked into his eyes. "I would have given that to you. Everything I am, for the rest of my life."
He shifted uneasily on his stool and ran one hoof over his mane. Looking closely, Fluttershy noticed the hair around his eyes and horn had begun to turn gray.
"I'm glad I didn't," she said. "I'm too quick to love. I'm the opposite of you, that way. You closed that door, not me. But you didn't even stop to see what was inside."
He slumped all the way forward, laying his head on his hooves and not even looking at her. "Congratulations. You win. I made a mistake. Is that what you wanted to hear?"
"No." She reached over and touched his foreleg. "I wanted you to know that it can be worth it. Really, really worth it. I want to help you not be afraid."
He stared at her, opening his eyes wide, as if she had just now appeared next to him. "Who are you?"
"Just another pony who's been afraid."
He looked down at the bar. "It's too late."
"It's too late for you and me, that way," she said. "But it's not too late for you. And we can still be friends. I think you need a friend. A real friend."
He said nothing, so she got up and set the stools back up that his friends had knocked over in their haste. Then she turned to leave.
"River Pebble," he called after her.
She turned. "What?"
"River Pebble. That's my name."
She smiled. "That's a lovely name."
She rejoined Big Mac by the front door. "Don't tell me you been looking for that fella all this time," he said as they left.
"Okay."
They blinked in the sunlight outside. Big Mac snorted lightly, in the way that Fluttershy knew meant he was annoyed and amused at the same time. "But we're not going back there again, are we?"
"Ee-nope," Fluttershy said as they walked away.