//------------------------------// // Confessional // Story: Collapse, Collide // by Zombificus //------------------------------// “Let’s start at the very beginning,” said Cheerilee, frowning a little as she looked through her notes on Apple Bloom’s version of the events. “Ah, here we are,” she began, having found what she was looking for. “Now, Apple Bloom told me that it was Silver Spoon who started the fight, does that sound about right to you?” “Yeah.” “And you joined Silver Spoon shortly after, correct?” “Yes, miss.” “Good… So, Apple Bloom turned one of Silver’s comments against the pair of you,” – a nod from Diamond – “to which you responded with a remark about her lack of a cutie mark, is that right?” “Yes…” Diamond looked down at her hooves, “…I really shouldn’t have said that.” “No, you shouldn’t have. I must say I am disappointed that you choose to continue picking on the other students – especially since Apple Bloom and her friends can’t help not having their marks” “That’s not what I meant – I mean, I know I shouldn’t have called her anything – but…well, I think the cutie mark thing’s getting to her.” “While I am glad you’ve found it in yourself to feel responsibility for your actions, quite frankly it should not have taken you three years to realise that if treat somepony like you’ve treated her, there are bound to be lasting effects.” “It didn't take me three years,” stated Diamond with a touch of steel in her voice. Cheerilee could merely blink.“…What?” “I didn't do the things I did because I didn't know they were wrong…” began Diamond. “Then why?!” Cheerilee’s face was the very picture of exasperated anger, mane falling messily out of place. “Why would you even consider doing what you've done?” Taken aback, Diamond sat in stunned silence as Cheerilee demanded: “Well? Tell me!” “I didn’t have a choice!” blurted Diamond. ”I-I wanted to… but Silver wouldn’t let… she… she said she’d ruin daddy’s business if I didn’t do it!” The combined mass of all the things she’d wanted to say had tumbled in one great mess out of Diamond’s mouth, but the final statement was chillingly clear to Cheerilee. Unless this was one great lie, she had catastrophically misjudged Silver Spoon’s character. She shivered at the idea of what may have been going on behind her back. “If that is so, I can hardly hold you to your actions as if you did them out of malice alone. If you’re lying, though…” Cheerilee’s narrowed eyes eliminated the need to finish the warning, and Diamond gulped involuntarily. “I’m not lying, I promise!” “Well, you won’t have any trouble explaining to me how Silver Spoon is supposed to be able to ruin your father’s business, will you?” “No, miss,” answered Diamond. “Go on, then,” said Cheerilee, and Diamond began… * Meanwhile, Silver Spoon ill-temperedly sat whilst the school nurse fetched some painkillers for her badly bruised snout. It had not yet stopped bleeding, so her nose remained bunged with screwed up tissues; leaving her sounding like she had a particularly bad cold. This irritated her, as did the half-hearted words of comfort from the idiot, Twist and the ever-present throbbing pain in her snout. The nurse had said she’d been lucky her nose hadn’t been broken outright, but Diamond Tiara’s betrayal more than negated any foalish concept of her having been ‘lucky’ today. The nerve of it! To hit her – actually hit her – after she and her family had done so much for the wretch! Needless to say, she would pay for this dearly. She was no better than the others… no better than the useless Cutie Mark Crusaders, or the idiots Snips and Snails – not even the half-brained Dinky Hooves. Did these ponies not realise what an honour it was to walk the same ground; to breathe the same air as a noble such as her? Did they not understand that their every action was inferior to her own? Mother was right, they did not deserve even the small gift of her presence in their backwater town. How she itched to get back to Canterlot, where the ponies who mattered lived – where she belonged. But her father had wanted her to grow up with the commons, to understand how the ‘normal’ ponies lived. He seemed to have gotten the idea into his head that this would help her to – how had he put it? – ‘become a well-rounded young mare’. How could it, when just being near these idiots made her feel as if she was being physically dirtied; degraded into somepony less than herself. It was infuriating! Twist was looking at her, wide-eyed, and Silver realised she had been breathing heavily through her mouth, clenching and unclenching the flexile centres of her hooves. Unshed tears shimmered in the corners of her eyes; she blinked them away furiously: crying was for common folk. As she continued waiting for the nurse to return, her thoughts turned once more to the foal, Tiara. Pushing down the rising wave of bile-like fury, she instead tried to rationalise just what she had lost today. What had Diamond Tiara meant to her, really? She listed off phrases to describe the filly in her head: an ungrateful little traitor, first and foremost; formerly a weapon against the other foals; a diversion to misdirect the teachers’ wrath; at a stretch, she supposed she’d been a bit of company – but certainly not a friend. All in all, she had not lost much. She was merely at a minor disadvantage now; she would have to be more careful if she wanted to avoid detentions but she could still put the other foals in their place. What had triggered her emotions to run so freely was not that she had lost the filly, rather it was that she had dared defy her in front of their entire class which had sent the volcanic rage flowing. Now came the time to put that rage to good use. She smiled a little as the nurse returned to her with some tablets and a glass of water, mind running double-time as she planned her sweet vengeance on Diamond Tiara. She downed the medicine and trotted out of the infirmary without even waiting for the nurse’s go-ahead – there was work to be done. * Three fillies stood, ears pressed to the wooden door, outside Cheerilee’s office. Surprisingly enough, not one of them had had the thought to whisper-yell ‘Cutie Mark Crusaders Eavesdroppers’ as they listened in, uninvited, on the conversation going on within the small room. One, a small-winged orange pegasus, looked to her unicorn companion and asked, in a whisper: “Did you hear that, Sweetie Belle?! – you think she’s lyin’ or what?” Turning her concentration momentarily from the door, Sweetie Belle answered her. “Good thing I did hear it, with you distracting me,” she muttered with a roll of her eyes, “As for whether she’s lying – I don’t know, Scootaloo. Maybe if you’d let me concentrate I could figure something out.” Mock-saluting Sweetie and miming the act of zipping her lips closed, Scootaloo returned to her prior position, ear flattened against the door. The third filly, who’d ignored her bickering companions in order to listen in on the whole conversation, frowned at what she was hearing. It just didn’t add up – although, when she considered what had happened earlier, Diamond Tiara’s tale seemed a little more plausible. Closing her eyes to give her full attention to the voices behind the door, Apple Bloom listened even more closely. * A short way into Diamond’s explanation of how Silver Spoon would be capable of carrying out her threat, Cheerilee had stopped her and asked instead for the filly to go through her relationship with Silver Spoon over the last few years. Similarly to what Cheerilee had originally believed about the fillies, Diamond had gone along with Silver’s plans in the beginning because she’d liked the feeling of power. On the other hand, the filly had apparently begun to feel that hurting the others wasn’t worth the power rush it brought a few months after. Diamond had also mentioned that her first attempt to change her and Silver’s course away from bullying the others had ended badly, fitting with Cheerilee’s own blurry memories of a week nearly three years prior during which the filly had seemed uncharacteristically silent and withdrawn. “I had assumed that this whole three year mess was down to that sort of thinking, but you say it was only the first six months or so? Interesting.” Deciding that it was time to move onto the next part of the events, Cheerilee enquired: “So if you weren’t enjoying it as much, what made you carry on doing what Silver wanted?” Diamond paused momentarily before answering. “She was still good company, most of the time, and she was my only friend. I fooled myself into thinking that she was just a control freak, and apart from the few times I did something she didn’t like, she was fairly nice to me.” “Alright, so how would you describe how she was back then?” “Arrogant, self-centred and manipulative for the sake of it. She was convinced that just because she was from a noble family, she was in some way better than everypony else. “She was spoilt, really spoilt, but not bratty about it – she’d just assume she had a right to a particular thing and then do whatever she felt like to get it.” A little overwhelmed at the extent of Diamond’s answer, Cheerilee hurriedly moved the conversation on. “Ok, that’ll do on that subject. What happened last year? I’m assuming your relationship with Silver got worse?” “Yeah… much worse. She started pushing me to be meaner to the others, especially the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and if I didn’t do what she called my ‘share of the work’ she’d get really nasty. The things I had to say to please her were… well, they were horrible. I-I don’t like hurting ponies – really, I don’t!” “I know you don’t”, reassured Cheerilee, and Diamond continued; once more carried along by the weight of her own words. “It was too much! So I went to her house last June, and I told her that I wasn’t going to do it anymore. She- she laughed at me! She said I was a stupid filly, and started calling me name after name. She got really mad at me, but I didn’t want her to control me anymore, so I went to leave and - and…” Diamond’s breaths were shallow sobs now and Cheerilee felt pity for the filly rise in her chest; reluctantly, she asked her to continue. “She said that if I didn’t do what she wanted, she would tell her parents that I was bullying her. They’ve helped my dad out when the business was going badly – like it is now – but only because me and Silver are supposed to be friends. If she told them that, then they’d start looking for other business partners – and there are a lot of them out there – instead of dad.” She looked Cheerilee in the eye, tears rolling down her cheeks. “We need them, Miss Cheerilee, or we’ll lose everything. But they- t-they don’t need us! And now Silver’s going to go home and tell her parents and everything’s going to be ruined!” Diamond bawled, her breaths ragged, until she ran out of energy and slumped on the desk. After a few moments of sob-punctuated silence, she muttered mournfully: “It’s my fault. Daddy’s going to lose his business and it’s all my fault. I’m a horrible daughter. Everypony would be so much better off if I had never been born…” Eyes moist with tears of her own, Cheerilee pulled the sniffling filly into a hug and tried her best to comfort her. “It’ll be all right,” she said soothingly, “it’s not your fault.” She held Diamond until she eventually stopped crying, and even then waited some time before gently telling her to go home. She had a lot of very important letters to write, concerning a certain Silver Spoon. * The three fillies awaiting Diamond on the other side of the door had not quite managed to scamper back to their chairs from the keyhole, and this did not go unnoticed. “How much of that did you listen in on?” she asked flatly. The trio scrambled to answer but in their haste all three answers were lost in a burst of gobbledegook which yielded no coherent response at all. Tapping her hoof on the floor impatiently, Diamond Tiara raised an eyebrow and Sweetie Belle guiltily answered: “Pretty much all of it…” Not finding the strength in herself to get angry, Diamond merely slumped once more into the fourth chair in the row outside Cheerilee’s office, limbs drooping lethargically. “Whatever,” she said, and Sweetie mouthed ‘do you think she’s mad?’ to Scootaloo, who merely shrugged in response. Diamond had been sat there, staring at the blank wall opposite, for several minutes in which the Crusaders grew gradually more guilty, fearing that their intrusion into their ex-tormentor’s privacy had somehow broken her spirit. Tentatively, Apple Bloom shifted in her seat to face Diamond – or the side of her head, at least – and after a few faltering, silent attempts to voice her thoughts, roused the filly from her thoughts. “Uh… Diamond Tiara? We’re sorry for... spying... on you. We just wanted to know what was happening and…y’know… well, we didn't mean to hurt your feelings, is what I'm sayin'” Diamond chuckled, the ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, and turned to face the Crusaders. “I’m not upset about that, you idiots-“ Sweetie Belle interjected an indignant “Hey!” and Diamond smiled for real this time. Not unkindly, she said: “What? You are idiots… but you’re nice idiots… “Honestly, I wish I had never picked on you in the first place. We might even have been friends… but I chose the spoilt brat with a superiority complex instead, and here we are.” “If you’re not mad at us, then why the long face?” questioned Scootaloo, confusion written on her features. Before Diamond could deliver her cuttingly witty reply, Sweetie Belle frustratingly answered for her. “It's because of Silver Spoon, right?” Diamond nodded, and Sweetie put the situation as simply as she could manage for her confused friend. “Scoots. She’s going to try and ruin Diamond’s family. They could lose everything.” “Everything?” exclaimed Scootaloo incredulously. “You can’t be serious!” “Yeah, everything,” affirmed Diamond mournfully, “Silver’s going to try, at least, and she never gives up until she gets what she wants. Keeping Daddy’s business safe was the only thing I had left that mattered to me. Now I don’t even have that. No friends, no family besides Dad, no grades… and now we’ll have no money… no house…nothing. And it’s my fault, all of it.” She once again fell into despondent silence, but this time it didn’t last. “Ain’t your fault,” said Apple Bloom firmly, “it’s that nasty piece of work, Silver who’s done all this. So quit blamin’ yourself and start makin’ up for what you’ve done. Just ‘cause you didn’t want to say what you said don’t mean it didn’t hurt who you said it to.” “But they’ve all gone home! How am I supposed to apologise when they aren’t even here?” retorted Diamond. Apple Bloom was having none of it. “So what if they aren’t here now?! Think how you’re gonna tell ‘em you’re sorry tonight and you can do it tomorrow. What you’ve said ain’t gonna fix itself.” Caught between admiration of and frustration at Apple Bloom’s stubborn nature, Diamond threw her last excuse at the filly in the faint hope she’d drop the subject. “Apple Bloom! They all hate me – they aren't going to believe a word I say! And besides, what am I supposed to do about Silver Spoon? Nothing I do matters because she’ll just ruin everything anyway!” Apple Bloom stood her ground. “We can help you deal with Silver Spoon – but you have to try. “We don’t hate you – not after hearing what you said to Cheerilee – but we sure don’t like you a whole lot, either. So if you want us to save your sorry flank from this mess you’d better put some effort in yourself.” Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle stepped forward to join Apple Bloom, nodding in agreement as the canary filly offered her hoof and her help. Not having the patience for Diamond’s indecision, she instead pushed her to give her an answer. “Decision time, Diamond,” she stated, “You do the right thing, and we’ll do the right thing. Deal?” Swallowing, Diamond took Apple Bloom’s hoof and shook it. “Deal” *****