The word was a familiar one. It was, in fact, a word her father used quite often, for all sorts of reasons, generally with ponies who had genuine fear of hearing it and would do just about anything to change the word into its opposite. But on this occasion, sitting on different sides of the far corner for a dinner table which sometimes seemed much too long for just two, he had said it to her, and that was something Diamond simply refused to accept. So she went into her internal arsenal and headed directly for the heaviest weaponry she possessed, for dealing with that word wasn't going to be a casual exercise.
She put on the pout, let her lower lip tremble as she planted her forehooves on the edge of the table (in defiance of all etiquette, but it was a private dinner, as it almost always was), and squeezed her eyes tightly shut in the hopes of forcing out a tear, or at least something which could serve as such until her father had cause to glance away and she got a chance to go for the water mug.
"...no?" Diamond expertly whimpered. "But... daddy... she's being unfair... she doesn't have any right..."
She was angry, of course, but she had no intention of showing it. Her father didn't say "No" to her -- well, all right, there were times when he did and those seemed to be experiencing a disturbing increase in frequency, but she could still talk him out of so many if she really tried and he just had to see that this should be one of them. And the truth was that she had a very hard-working daddy, at least when it came to supervising all the efforts so many ponies went through to keep him (and her) on top. It made him tired, she knew it did, and there were times when he would half-limp through the door, dragging his legs under the burden of so much responsibility for making sure everypony else did the work, or at least that was how Diamond saw it and she was pretty much always right. On those nights, she would quietly cuddle up to him, let him read to her because even if the stories were stupid, her father wasn't and she knew reading aloud made him feel better.
When you were tired, you could make a mistake, one you normally wouldn't make when you were fully alert. Her father was tired and had made a mistake, and he was tired because he worked so hard. He did so much work because he loved her. All she had to do was make him see that it had been a mistake. Because he was tired. And then after he'd fixed everything, she'd let him read to her.
"Cheerilee has every right to make you change desks," her father stupidly insisted, which meant he was really tired.
"No, she doesn't."
There were bags under his eyes: she'd just noticed that. "And what makes you say that, Diamond?"
Her poor weary daddy. She would really have to spell it out for him: clearly asking him to do any part of the work was simply too much. "Because she's..." Diamond concentrated hard, which helped with the fake tears. "...assuming executive powers which have no basis in previously established policy!"
The exhaustion was also making his blinks extra-slow. "...what?"
"Daddy, when we came in for the first day of the semester, she let us pick our own desks! That means she was -- giving over the power of choice to us! And once she does that, forcing me to change my desk is claiming she has an unenforceable right to do just that! You can't say ponies are allowed to decide something for themselves one day and then take it back the next! It's -- basic student rights! She's overstepping her bounds!" Thoughtfully, "I bet the school board could even impeach -- I mean fire her for that..."
Her father stared at her. She promptly decided it was with pride.
"I think," he wearily said, "I've been letting you read too many newspapers."
"But there was this really interesting article on how the annual Return Day eclipses are actually a plot by the Princesses to --"
"-- and from the wrong publisher," he sighed. "Diamond... the school board is not going to fire Miss Cheerilee because she told you to change your desk. Not if you were passing notes. And this isn't the first time you've been caught passing them. It isn't the first time..." The tired eyelids sagged, momentarily closed. "...for a lot of things."
How did he know about that? She'd taken the letter which the teacher had ordered her to give her parent, reworked it so carefully as to remove any cause, made it look as if Cheerilee was just ordering the desk change because she was being mean and thus make her father rise to defend her like he always did... "I -- I didn't..."
His left front hoof pushed aside a napkin he'd been avoiding through the entire meal. There was a letter underneath. A letter displaying very familiar mouthwriting.
"Private courier," he sighed. "I paid her back the expense, of course: it cost her far too much to hire a pegasus just to carry this across town, but she wanted the security and now I can see why."
The lip quivering was starting to accelerate. Diamond was proud of her own acting abilities, and kept telling herself that because feeling as if it was anything other than acting was going to a bad place -- or that the place was heading towards her, galloping closer at speed and she was accelerating, running away as fast as she could, but it was following her and
my daddy doesn't believe me? Over everypony else?
And there was the tear she'd needed so badly at the start.
Stupid thing. Late to every need.
The table was too big. The room was too big. Her father was so very big and she...
"I deal with a lot of ponies, Diamond," her father said, and she wondered at the sorrow in his voice, considered whether it was something she could fake during the eventual rebuttal. "And the thing about having a retail business... is that I have to keep dealing with them. Oh, I can afford to drop the occasional supplier if I'm truly having issues and losing a customer here and there doesn't sting that badly. But at the same time, there are limits. And because I know what those limits are -- because I care not only about my business, but the ponies who make it work -- I do my best to get along with everypony. I don't sell much in the way of specialty products, you know... most of what we carry is available from others: sometimes at the same price, or just a tenth-bit more. Even a little cheaper now and again. Customers have options for where they want to spend their bits, when things aren't scarce or exclusive... and customers are fickle things, Diamond. They can find so many excuses for not spending. So many easy ones, invented for no real reason at all -- or ones which are all too real."
She didn't understand. "But this is about my desk...!"
"Ponyville business is off." The tired eyes would not leave her face, wouldn't slip away no matter how many tears lubricated the trail. "Not by enough to hurt, not yet -- but enough to fret about. I've been spending extra hours in that store, trying to find out what's been going on. And what I've noticed is that certain regular customers have gone missing. Do you know what they all have in common, Diamond?"
"...I wasn't passing notes, she was lying, she just wants to -- wants to --"
"-- you. The common element is you."
"-- see you -- because she's -- she..."
He gently reared back, carefully reached down and pressed her tiara between his front hooves, removed it and set it on the table. And as he spoke, he rubbed the base of her ears as he'd done when she was just a foal.
"The Apples still do business with me, at least in that they'll sell to me and nopony has suggested breaking the contract -- a contract they no longer have any legal obligation to honor, not after all those years. A verbal agreement with no force behind it other than their own dedication to keeping such. I respect that, Diamond. But nopony in the family will shop at my store. I used to see them every three days or so, and they haven't been in for weeks."
It gave her an opening. "Apple Bloom!" She hated to even say that name, but this was desperation and such called for sacrifice. "It was her -- she must have been --"
"-- that blonde pegasus mare with the unicorn filly... oh, what was her name, she's so distinctive, even beautiful in some ways... I wish I'd learned her name. I could learn it now, in moments, just by asking the right ponies. But I haven't seen her either. Not since the first rumor of what you whispered about her reached my own ears. I'm guessing they had already found hers."
Her daddy had just said a mare was beautiful. Diamond surged past mere desperation in a single shove and landed dead-center in the realm of fear. "She's just being stupid, being mean, she hates me because my eyes aren't --"
"-- let's see... who else? Pipsqueak's parents. Featherweight's. The Belles, all of them. In fact, just about everypony who's related to one of your classmates has chosen to shop elsewhere, with the exception of Silver Spoon's family. But it doesn't stop there. I recognized a few other faces through the vacuum of their absence. There were a number from that party which you insisted you were old enough to attend with me, the one where you hung around with a few of the older fillies and colts, then denied every word they carried back..."
He had never looked so tired.
Diamond was going to let him read to her for hours.
"And I believed you," her father sadly said. "Because I can compare numbers and sales reports and regional trends from every settled zone, but I don't want to contrast what my daughter said on the prior occasion to what just emerged on this one. Because it's so easy to believe in persecution and conspiracy, and I may be reading too many of the wrong newspapers while trying to figure out what's actually happening across the continent and how it might affect business. And I do believe that many of your classmates don't like you, Diamond, and some of them might even be actively acting against you. It's just that... lately, I've been starting to wonder about the cause. Because some ponies do attract trouble. There is such a thing as a repeatedly innocent victim who truly never means any harm and never experiences anything but. Some ponies have hard destinies that way. I -- we named you Diamond in the hopes of protecting you against that, did I ever tell you? We wanted you to be unbreakable. I never thought that it would make you spend your life proving just how hard you are by scratching everypony else..."
She tried to find somepony she could blame. It wasn't hard: one -- two -- had just been offered up to her. Two ponies she could use to prove that none of it had ever been her fault.
But one of those ponies was her father. And the other...
He saved her the effort.
"Names are destiny, they say," he said --
-- and the rubbing stopped.
"...daddy?"
He then saved her the trouble.
"Maybe it is my fault, in some ways," he said, and she wondered when he'd found time to dab at his own water mug, apply the results to his face. "Not just the name... but through saying my daughter was... anything other than what other ponies said. Because she was --"
was?
"-- my daughter, and..."
He pushed himself away from the table. Stood up.
"It's a week, Diamond," he quietly told her. "You can live with sitting somewhere else for a week. You'll still see Silver, you won't be grounded or anything else. It's just a change of desks. I'm not going to the school board. I'm not threatening to sue, because the district seems to have stopped buying supplies from me and I'd been wondering why. I can always offend a few suppliers here, a customer or two there, and not worry too much about it because some ponies will simply take offense no matter what I do... but never all, Diamond. Not even most, or a little less than half. And the thing is... I'm starting to wonder if it's about what I do any more. About how long that hasn't been the case. How long it's actually been all about..."
He just looked at her, then. She couldn't look at him. She looked at his water mug instead, and found the level had never changed.
"We'll talk," he said. "After the semester ends. After I sort some things out. But for now... Diamond... when you try to use me like this... you want it so that when you speak, ponies hear me. See me standing behind you. And you know something? They do, Diamond. They truly do..."
He walked away. It wasn't even a trot, and every leg dragged in turn.
It was just her at a table which was far too large, where two occupants was generally the most which could be hoped for, the most she ever wanted if Silver wasn't the third and even then, she never wanted her friend sitting too close because this was her daddy and the prospect of adding a permanent bench was...
...was.
Daddy always wins because he loves me.
Daddy always fights because he loves me.
Loves me.
And her daddy didn't want to fight.
...was.
She...
...had a week. That was good. A week was a long time. A lot of things could happen in a week. Maybe she could find the right words during a seven-day hunt, or there would be something which would distract him, maybe business coming back because she could threaten some of the ponies in her class and make them send their parents to the store, couldn't she? Surely that had to work.
Except that... what was she supposed to do? Follow them home? Make sure they got the adults out and spending bits? Trail them until every fraction of lost revenue had been made up for? It was just her and Silver, and he'd mentioned so many names... seven days wasn't enough to cover them all. No, it was best to think of excuses, something which was so easy because her father always backed her up except for the few times he hadn't and this was one of them, she was on her own and Silver couldn't do anything to help her, not with this and her daddy
isn't fighting.
Because he
had to see how good she was. She had to prove that for some stupid reason. And what was the best way to prove she was a good daughter? Through being a good student. If she passed all her finals, he would see everything bad anypony said about her was lies. Good grades, therefore, good daughter. That was it exactly. She had her way out plus seven days to think of ways to make it even better. With that kind of lead time and her own perfection brought to bear against the problem plus whatever Silver might incidentally contribute and Diamond would have thought of anyway, there was no way she wasn't going to win this one too. And once her father had seen that, he would believe her again. Fight for her. And -- everything else.
Which meant the very first thing to face was passing.
And she wasn't going to sit next to Silver for the rest of the semester. She was stuck with Snips and Snails. Quite possibly the two dumbest colts in the history of Equestria, boys for whom the term 'morons' had first been invented and then discarded because it was simply inadequate to the task. Copying off Snips and Snails was a guaranteed way of making everything worse.
It was a problem. But it was a problem which she was practically born to solve. She had to delegate again, just like her daddy did. And then he would see just how good she was. How good she had been all along, and always would be, because she had solved things his way.
I have to make them study. Get them up to a place where I can cheat off them and be safe.
Forget problem: this was going to be a challenge. Quite possibly the challenge of her life. The hardest thing ever done in that history of Equestria and anything in the textbooks was now just a deliberate overstatement, because it wasn't as if she could just blast the two colts with the dumb Elements and make them smart.
(She thought about that for a few seconds and came up with several possible, mostly bribe-based ways of getting into the vault, but none which instantly granted her four extra ponies. Still, she could always try to wear five necklaces at once and in the name of not removing her tiara, she supposed Silver could have the dumb crown, if only just long enough for it to work...)
So there it was. Get Snips and Snails to study, copy off their papers, and in any spare time which might exist, create lies for backup, something she was already good at. And then everything would work out.
Diamond forced herself to finish dinner. She was going to need the strength from every bite.
It took two solitary hours. Every time she looked at it, her dumb food kept getting too soggy to chew.