Flim stared at Applejack, trying to process what she just said. He must have been mistaken; he just misheard her. That was all there was to it. Because she did not just say what he thought she did.
"What..." he started slowly, then took a deep breath and tried again. "What, exactly, visited you last night?"
Applejack blinked, her gobsmacked look slowly slipping off and blending with a toned-down version of her glare from earlier. "I wouldn't exactly call it a visit, partner. It snuck onto the property last night, behind our backs."
"What did?!" Flim persisted, his voice raising an octave as he began to suspect that what she said was, in fact, what he'd thought in the first place. And that was bad. Very, very bad.
The coral-coated mare bit her lip and huffed stubbornly. It was only when Big Mac sternly nudged her that she sighed and came clean. "A phooka. A phooka snuck onto the farm last night."
Granny Smith gasped, and the little filly, (Apple Bloom, was it?) just looked confused. The elderly pony slid off her rocking chair and trotted around to face Applejack squarely. "Is this true?" she asked, giving her grandfilly as steely a look as she could muster on her normally guileless (if airheaded) muzzle. Applejack grimaced at the look, but nodded. Granny Smith turned to Big Mac beside her. "An' what 'ave you got to say about it? Did you know about this?"
The only things that betrayed how uncomfortable the burly stallion was feeling under the scrutiny his grandmare was giving him were his eyes, which widened slightly. Other than that, he remained very calm as he replied, "Eeyup. I found a patch of black fur this morning in the hayloft." Big Mac reached into his yolk and pulled out the fur he'd shown Applejack earlier. Granny Smith squinted at it, leaning her muzzle so close that the tips of her nostrils just barely touched. She sniffed a couple of times, lightly enough that the hairs didn't waver, and yet somehow loud enough that it made Apple Bloom jolt in her seat.
With a dramatic gag, hack, and wheeze, Granny Smith pulled her muzzle away. "Cinn'mon an' sulfur. Yep, that there's a phooka, alright. When 'zactly were you two miscreants plannin' on tellin' me about this?"
Big Mac nodded his head towards Applejack, who grimaced further when Granny Smith turned her steely gaze up a notch and steered it back to her. "Well?" the green pony demanded.
Applejack sighed. "Darnit, granny, I was hoping it'd turn out to be nothing! I didn't want to worry you none about it. I was gonna bring it up later, I promise I was, but I didn't want to just spit it out at breakfast when you'd just woke up. S'not like it was gonna hurt us, anyways!"
"Not like it was going to hurt you?!"
Everypony jumped and rounded to face the stallion who'd yelled. It was as if they'd forgotten Flim was there, with the reproach Applejack had been about to get from her grandmare. The cream pony was still standing in front of the couch, with his hooves spread in the aggressive stance from his standoff a few minutes ago, and was now steaming with unbridled rage directed towards the mare in front of him.
Flim took another harsh, heavy step closer to Applejack, breathing laboriously and struggling to contain himself. In a slightly more quiet, but no less intense voice, he hissed, "You act as if this is just some macabre homeless pony who spent the night in your barn, something to bring up with your mayor and then forget about. Not like it was going to hurt you?! Do you know what that thing did to my brother?! He kidnapped him! He threw me against a tree, snatched my brother, and threatened to break Flam's neck if I so much as revved a beam of magic in that beast's direction! That thrice-darned animal would have killed Flam! And now I find out that it spent part of the night in your hayloft?!?! How do I know that maybe you weren't conspiring against me for a change of pace? It's not as if you don't have plenty of motives for it!"
In the back of his mind, Flim was subconsciously aware of Apple Bloom gasping wetly, and Granny Smith stepping over to comfort the young pony. He could see Big Mac putting a hoof on the middle sibling's shoulder, ready to hold her back or shove her behind him, if need be. None of that mattered right then, and so none of it alertly reached him. The only thing his mind was focusing on at the moment was Applejack, who was back to looking utterly gobsmacked.
She stared at him silently. Her mouth hung open, not moving, not making a sound. Slowly, slowly, it closed. The mare's eyes narrowed and turned to slits, burning a fury far beyond what they held before, a scary fury, a quiet fury. This wasn't just spitting insults back and forth or juvenile shouting. Applejack was well and truly offended.
She marched up to Flim, attempting to shrug off her brother's hoof but ultimately failing and leaving it there, and looked her opponent in the eye.
"Don't you ever," she growled in an undertone, "Ever, ever lower me to your standards. Don't ever say that I would do something like that. In case you've forgotten, we here in Ponyville are the good guys. We're the ones always putting a stop to the plans of scum like you. Now, I wouldn't put it past you to try something like that, but don't you dare say that I would stoop so low." Applejack stopped, closing her eyes and blowing through her nose, before snapping them open and fixing Flim with an eerily cold smirk. "And 'sides... has it occurred to you that maybe you're brother got what was coming to him?"
Apple Bloom gasped again, Granny Smith yelped, "Applejack!", Big Mac jerked his sister back, and there was a beat of appalled silence.
Then Flim reared up on his hind legs, shouting at the top of his lungs, "YOU BUCKING, HEARTLESS CAD!!!" With the last syllable, he slammed his hooves on the floor with a resounding thoom! "I hope the beast gets to your family and that your blasted Elements of Harmony can do nothing about it!! How will you feel then, helpless and unable to do anything to get them back?!"
Applejack sucked in air, looking as if she had just been socked in the gut. Her face twisted with hatred, and she lowered her head, scraping one hoof on the ground as she prepared to charge. Her brother held on tighter.
Ignoring him, she snarled, "Get. Out. Now."
"Fine!" Flim snapped, spinning around and fairly running out the front entryway. The wooden door slammed behind him, and the family descended into silence once more.
After a few seconds of staring at the door, making sure the incensed salespony wasn't coming back, the Apples turned and glared at Applejack with outraged expressions. Applejack glared back. "What?" she huffed angrily. "Don't you be telling me he didn't deserve that!"
Granny Smith shook her head in disappointment. "Oh, he deserved a good tongue-lashing to be sure, but that was most certainly not a good tongue-lashing, young'n. That's what would be called a bad tongue-lashing."
"He accused me of conspirin' against him!" Applejack protested, although her wrath was quickly fading as she suddenly realized what had come out of her mouth. It wasn't pretty. Not at all.
The green mare stomped a hoof on the ground. "And you kept the phooka from me 'till the last possible second! I'll be the first to say that what he said was wrong, but what you said back was just as wrong, if not worse! It's times like these that make me wish you were more like your clammed-up brother, who knows when to shut his mouth!"
At this, Applejack clapped her mouth shut, a pain cutting through her heart at her grandmare's statement. They hurt, but nopony could deny they were true. At a loss for words, Applejack looked at her brother, hoping he might say something to ease the pain. He only surveyed her with disapproving scrutiny. She had never seen him look so distant. "I... I was just..."
"I can't believe you said that to him!" Apple Bloom cried out, jumping off her seat and advancing towards her sister much in the way that Flim had. "How could you be so heartless? You're an Element of Harmony? Don't you know what that means?!"
Her older sister scowled. "Of course I know what that means!"
"What then?" Apple Bloom pressed.
"Well... It means I'm the Element of Honesty," Applejack replied. "Because I'm honest. And... put together with the other Elements, we, uh, symbolize Harmony... we save Equestria from monsters and work for peace and happiness and... stuff..." The mare frustratedly growled under her breath. "What does this have to do with what just happened? If anything, being an Element means I should protect Ponyville from ponies like Flim!"
"No!" Apple Bloom shouted. "No, no, no, no, NO!" She shook her head so rapidly that her bow became unbalanced, hanging lopsidedly on her head. The filly paid it no mind as she continued. "Being an Element of Harmony means you stand for friendship! Because friendship is magic! That's how you stopped all those bad guys- because you and the others used your powers of friendship to defeat them! None of them understand friendship, and that's why they lost! They're heartless, and alone, and they'll always lose as long as they love themselves more than others! Isn't that right?"
"I mean... yeah..." Applejack muttered, taken aback by her younger sister's tirade. Before she could say more, Apple Bloom went on.
"Yes! That's what it's all about! That's what it's always been about, ever since you guys met! Friendship! Even Discord, the craziest, freakiest of all the baddies you guys beat, turned mostly nice when Fluttershy taught him friendship! Because. Friendship. Is. Magic!" She took a huge breath, carrying on her rant without interruption. "And now, when one of your old enemies- not even one of the big, horrible, scary ones like Discord, but a salespony for crying out loud- comes back, crying and begging for your help, practically screaming of an opportunity for you to show him what you've learned about Friendship Magic, you turn him down? And not just that, for sweet Celestia's sake, but you yell at him and yell at him and say all these horrible, awful, mean things that sound like what Diamond Tiara says for fun, and kick him out of the house! What kind of Element of Harmony are you?!" The filly stopped all at once and glowered at her sister with all the force she could muster.
For a minute, it looked like Applejack was going to yell back at her. The mare opened her mouth, thought better of it, closed it, and just looked at her sibling. It shook her with a jolt when she suddenly realized that Apple Bloom was crying. She'd made her cry. Apple Bloom never cried. Not ever. She didn't cry during Apple Bucking season, when she dealt with Granny Smith's antics while helping pack and preserve apples, when she was so tired that her hooves could barely hold an apple-peeler and one of the older ponies with less energy and more stamina had to carry her to bed. She didn't cry the time she'd nicked her hoof with the peeler, deep enough to draw blood. No tears for when Scootaloo crashed the scooter and sent the Cutie Mark Crusaders tumbling in a wave of bruises, scrapes, and skinned knees. She didn't cry no matter how miserable Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon's insults made her. She never cried, full stop.
But now little Apple Bloom was crying. And she was crying for the pain another pony was feeling, a pony she had every right to hold a grudge against and be hostile and downright hateful with. Hateful like her sister was being.
Applejack hung her head as the words hit home. "You're right... I can't believe myself. I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. I just... I was so mad because he'd already done his best to make our lives hard before, and now he comes in here asking for help, expecting me to give it to him... and I didn't want to give it. I still don't. He doesn't deserve help after the cow-cud he's put us through."
Granny Smith put a foreleg around Apple Bloom, hugging the filly to her side. "He might not d'serve it, but ain't Apples s'posed to be known for their ho-spee-tali-tee? I couldn't 'a said it better'n Apple Bloom here, myself. We gotta be better than him. As tempted as I know I am to buck his head in on sight, that might not be the best way to deal with the situation, eh?"
Big Mac shook his head. "Nope. And it ain't us you should be apologizing to, Applejack."
The mare sighed, her head shrinking between her shoulder blades and doing its best to imitate Fluttershy on a bad day by playing ostrich with the floorboards. "I better go find him, shouldn't I?" Her family members nodded solemnly. The mare sighed again. "But... what am I supposed to say? I can refer him to a police-pony or something, but I'm still not sure about helping him myself. We still have chores to do, and..."
Granny Smith held up a hoof to stop her. "Applejack, what if the horseshoe was on ther' other hoof? If Big Mac or lil' Apple Bloom here was the one kidnapped by a kooky phooka, and Flim was the only pony available to help you get 'em back?"
Apple Bloom frowned up at her from her head's position near the floor. "He'd probably find some way to take advantage of the situation and extort me along the way..."
"But if he was the only pony who could help you?" Granny Smith asked. "Wouldn't it be worth the risk?"
"Well, of course it would!" Applejack answered. "I mean... I don't like him, but I love my family more than I dislike him."
Granny Smith nodded. "And he loves his brother more than he dislikes you."
That did it. The thought of Flim, unpleasant conpony that he was, going through the kind of pain that Applejack went through whenever she worried about her family struck a chord in her. She didn't like him, she didn't like his brother, and she knew they didn't deserve any help.
But, she was an Element of Harmony; she was an Apple, dangit, and Apples always took care of their family! As much as she disliked him, she loved her family more, and as much as she wanted to just sit by and let him flounder about on his own trying to get Flam back, she couldn't. She couldn't leave him like that. It would go against everything her friends had taught her in this past year since Twilight moved to Ponyville, and more than that, it would be downright wrong.
Besides, if Flim cared about his brother so much that he'd be willing to try and temporarily put aside his snobby money-grubbing ways to ask the one pony who could very well count as his arch-nemesis, if he had one, for help, then maybe... maybe he wasn't entirely as heartless as Applejack thought.
Maybe.
With another sigh, Applejack lifted her head up and walked to the door. "Alright... I'll go talk to him. And I guess I'll try and apologize... and I suppose I'll offer him my help. Once. But, only once. If he says no, I'm coming right back here."
Granny Smith and Big Mac gave each other knowing looks and nodded simultaneously. "We couldn' ask for more," the elderly pony replied.
Applejack nodded back, putting a hoof on the door and starting to open it, when she felt something latch onto her leg. Looking down, she found Apple Bloom clinging to her, still sniffling a little. Her bow dangled loosely from her mane, and she looked very much like a sad puppy begging for attention. "Aw, Apple Bloom," the mare murmured, putting a hoof on the filly's back. "I'm sorry for upsettin' you. I'll be right back."
"S'okay..." Apple Bloom mumbled, her voice muffled by her sister's fur. "Jus'... try an' be safe, okay? Cuz' you might not be right back, if Flim says yes. You can't jus' come back and finish your chores if he says yes. You'll hafta go. So be careful looking for that phooka, okay? An' get me a souvenir while you're gone!"
Applejack couldn't help but chuckle at that, despite the sour mood all around. "Alright. I'll get you a souvenir while we look for the phooka, if he says yes. That's a big 'if', considering the fight we just had."
Apple Bloom tilted her head up, looking at her older sibling with big, wide, wet eyes. "Pinkie Promise?"
Now Applejack had to laugh. A small laugh, but still. "Yeah, yeah. Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye, I'll get you a souvenir if Flim says yes. Now leggo so I can git this over with!" Apple Bloom nodded and released her sister's leg, stepping back so she could go through the door. Applejack tipped her hat at she went out, quietly shutting the door behind, and left the family in silence once again.
After a minute, Apple Bloom sniffed and turned to her brother and grandmare. "Uh... so what's a phooka, anyways?"