The Friendship Trap

by albedoequals1


Thicker Than Water

The door to Twilight’s castle swung open to reveal Spike the dragon. “Oh hi, Minuette, what’s up?”

“Hi, Spike! Is Twilight in? I need to ask her for help.”

“Well, she’s working on a—“

“It’s a friendship problem!” Minuette interrupted. “She’s the only pony that can help us!”

“Well, uh, won’t you come in?” Spike asked dubiously.

Minuette beamed and followed him back into the castle. He led her down a hall and into a side room. Several books lay open on a table next to a mostly unidentifiable collection of equipment, although Minuette recognized a video camera in the mix. Oddly enough, there also seemed to be a book built into the machine, with several wires attached to it via suction cups. The princess was buried up to her wings in the contraption and was muttering to herself about “Trottenburg’s method.”

“Hey, Twi, Minuette says she has a friendship problem,” Spike announced.

There was a clang and a groan from somewhere inside the device, then Twilight withdrew her head, cradling her forehead with a hoof. “Oh, hello, Minuette. I’m glad you came; I wouldn’t want to spend all my time on this when I should be out there, spreading friendship and, uh, you know.” She smiled sheepishly.

Minuette bounded up to the other side of the table and thrust her head forward. “Twilight! I need your help!”

“Of course,” Twilight drew back reflexively, “anything for a friend.”

“I just found out that I have a twin sister. Our parents broke up when we were born, and each took one of us. We never knew we had other family, but now we have a plan to get our folks back together!”

“That’s wonderful! What do you need me to do?”

“Can you invite both of our parents to dinner? They would never turn down an invitation from a princess.”

“That could be arranged. I could tell them about how wonderful—“

“Then, once they’re both there,” Minuette continued, “Spike comes rushing in and tells you there’s a national emergency and they need you! You rush off, leaving them at the table by themselves, and then they talk about whatever they’ve been holding in all these years.”

“Uh, that’s one possible outcome, I suppose…” Twilight said, cautiously.

“Shouldn’t you be there too?” Spike asked. “They’re your parents. Don’t you think you should talk to them?”

Minuette seemed to think that over for a second. “Yeah, then we can keep them from escaping until they talk it out.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Twilight said, “who is your sister?”

“It’s Colgate, of course! She lives right here in Ponyville, but somehow, I never met her when I was here visiting Lyra.” Twilight’s blank expression prompted Minuette to add, “She’s a dentist?”

Twilight continued to stare blankly.

“She looks just like me, goes to lots of Pinkie’s parties?”

“I always assumed that was you,” Twilight admitted.

Minuette giggled. “This is going to be so great!”

* * *

Pinkie Pie was pulling down decorations at Sugarcube Corner. She felt a tingle in her forelock and turned around to see a blue unicorn grinning at her. “Hi…Colgate!”

Colgate was levitating a box in her magic with all of the remaining decorations in it. “How did you figure out it was me?” she asked.

“Your sparkly teeth! Nopony has as bright a smile as you!” She looked at the box. “Ooh, thanks! That would have taken me a while to clean up.”

“No problem! Do you think you could help me with something?”

“You betcha! Is it a party?”

“You know it!” Colgate looked around conspiratorially and whispered in Pinkie’s ear, “Minuette and I are actually sisters!

Pinkie gasped loudly.

Our parents separated when we were born,” Colgate continued, “but we have a plan to get them back together!

Pinkie grabbed Colgate’s ear and whispered back, “So you want to have a ‘getting-back-together-with-your-first-love’ party?

Colgate nodded enthusiastically. “What do you know about romantic dinners?”

* * *

“Are you sure about this?” Minuette asked her twin as they walked into a joke shop.

“Absolutely,” Colgate assured her. “I snuck into Mom’s room and looked in her lockbox.”

“Wasn’t it locked?”

Colgate winked and flourished a set of pointy dental tools. “I found some receipts, an article from the next day’s paper, and her diary.”

Minuette browsed the shelves. “Aha!” She held up a bottle of invisible lubricant. “This should do the trick.”

Colgate looked at the label and read aloud, “Guaranteed to last at least four hours in low-traffic areas.” She snickered. “This is going to be great!”

* * *

A blue unicorn stallion with a white mane sat in the waiting area of Le Percheron. Tennessee Waltz straightened his uncomfortable suit and tapped a hoof nervously. Ever since he had received a dinner invitation from Princess Twilight Sparkle earlier that week, he had found it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything else. His imagination had proposed innumerable nonsensical explanations for why the Princess of Friendship would invite him and his daughter to a private dinner. He knew Minuette had been friends with Sparkle back when she was just another unicorn, but he was pretty sure that the princess had never even met him. If the princess arrived before Minuette, it was going to be really awkward.

He glanced around the waiting room in the restaurant and noticed a very familiar-looking unicorn mare sitting on the other side. He quickly averted his eyes. What were the odds? He hadn’t seen her in 17 years, but there was no mistaking her blue-and-white mane and yellow eyes. Hydrangea.

Hydrangea happened to look up just as Tennessee turned away. She gaped. This had to be a coincidence. After all, he lived in Canterlot; he probably went to this restaurant all the time. She briefly wondered if Princess Twilight would be willing to move their private dinner to a different restaurant, but realized that would be an absurd request. Where was Colgate, anyway?

After what seemed to both an eternity of sneaking looks at each other and pretending not to notice, the front door opened to admit a pair of armored pegasi. “ANNOUNCING HER HIGHNESS, PRINCESS TWILIGHT SPARKLE!” one of them bellowed.

The princess herself rushed in right behind them, belatedly trying to subdue her entrance. “Please, not so loud, everypony’s going to…” she trailed off as she saw that everyone in the restaurant was staring at her. “Um, hi. Please continue, pretend I’m not even here.”

Colgate and Minuette walked in behind her, wearing identical dresses and mane styles. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” one of them said.

“We’re glad you could come,” added the other.

Their parents stared at them, then at each other, then at the princess. “How did you find out?” Tennessee said at last.

The twins posed next to each other. “The real question,” said one, “is ‘how did you keep it a secret so long?’”

“I hope you don’t plan to change us after all these years,” Hydrangea said.

“Of course not,” Twilight assured her with a strained smile, “we’re just having dinner. I like to have dinner with my friends. And I’m the Princess of Friendship, so I have lots of friends and…um…so I eat dinner a lot…yeah.”

The major domo came to her rescue. “Your table is ready, your highness. If you would follow me?”

Nopony said anything else until they were all seated at a table in a private room and perusing their menus.

“So…” Twilight said, turning to Tennessee, “Minuette tells me you work at the palace?”

“Yes, your highness. I work in the laundry room.” He repositioned his menu to block his view of Hydrangea.

“And Colgate says you arrange flowers?”

“I just try to keep busy. I’ve been living with my parents since…for a while.” She moved her menu to hide from Tennessee.

Twilight’s ears sagged. She glanced at the twins, who were both watching her with disturbing grins.

In a few minutes, the waiter came to take their orders and carried the menus away with him, leaving the estranged couple with no cover.

Twilight made another attempt at small talk. “So, how did you two first meet?”

Spike came running into the room. “Twilight! It’s terrible, just terrible! Nopony knows what to do! This looks like a job for the Princess of Friendship!”

Twilight facehooved with an audible smack. “Please excuse me, hopefully this won’t take too long.” She vanished in a purple flash, leaving Spike to run back the way he had come.

“So, Dad, what was it about Mom that first made you fall in love?”

“I knew it!” Tennessee pointed a hoof accusingly. “This is just like the half-baked schemes you came up with as a filly, Minuette.”

“I’m Minuette,” protested the other twin.

He adjusted his hoof to point at Minuette.

Hydrangea spoke up, “He said he really liked my mane.”

“I still do,” Tennessee admitted, “but it’s too late now. We parted due to irreconcilable differences.” He folded his forelegs as if the topic was resolved.

“Differences like how we folded towels? Everypony knows a towel doesn’t work if it’s wrinkled.” Hydrangea jabbed.

“That was never the point!” the stallion reposted, starting to talk a little louder. “If you couldn’t respect my wishes in one simple thing, how could we ever agree on the important things, like raising our foals?”

The twins had been levitating the silverware and napkins around, so as to have an excuse for their horns to glow. Minuette’s horn glowed a little brighter, and time stopped for all but the twins. “The waiter is coming. You rig the tray and I’ll trip him.”

Colgate pulled out the bottle they had bought earlier and nodded.

The bickering couple didn’t even notice the flicker, or the sudden small change in the twins’ postures.

They did notice when the waiter tripped and spilled his entire tray on Tennessee Waltz.

The stallion sputtered and floundered for a moment before regaining his composure. He reached up and pulled a now-empty soup bowl made from half a watermelon rind off of his head. He stared at the edible bowl in disbelief, then at the twins. “Watermelon soup. I had a bowl of watermelon soup dumped on me at our first date. How could you have possibly…” He looked over at Hydrangea, who was covering her mouth with both forehooves and turning red. His expression was the last straw, and she burst out laughing.

“We didn’t turn out so different,” Colgate said. “It seems to me you agree on the important things.”

“Look at Mom,” Minuette agreed, pointing at the laughing mare. “She still thinks it’s funny when you get watermelon soup dumped on your head.”

“And you still work hard for your family,” Colgate continued. “You’re both still the same ponies, the only thing that changed was us.”

“But now that we’re grown up and moved out, what’s keeping you apart?” Minuette asked.

Hydrangea abruptly stopped laughing. “Oh no, dear! It’s not you, it was never you!”

Tennessee nodded. “We always had our differences, but when we had foals, we realized how important our differences could be.”

“But we’re not that different!” Colgate protested. “You can’t even tell us apart.”

“Of course I can, you’re—“

Both twins’ horns glowed and there was a flurry of blue, but it looked like nothing had changed. “Yes, father?” they said in unison.

The stallion paused. “You’re Minuette,” he asserted at last.

“Are you sure?” Hydrangea asked. “She looks like Colgate to me.”

Another waiter set his own tray down on a nearby empty table and tried help his humiliated comrade clean up the mess. He stepped on the greased tray, and slipped backwards, sitting on the other table and flipping its contents into the air. The twins’ horns started to glow, but it was too late. Soup and pasta buried the pair in delicious karma.

As they sat in open-mouthed shock, their father regarded them with all the severity he could muster. With gravity worthy of an undertaker, he carefully picked up the empty watermelon bowl and placed it back on his head like a hat.

There was a moment of quiet, and then all four burst out laughing.

When the laughter finally died down, Tennessee said, “I sometimes wondered if we could have made it work, but now I’m working in Canterlot, and Hydra’s working in Ponyville. Neither of us can just drop everything and move.”

Twilight Sparkle appeared behind him. “Actually, I’ve been looking for someone to do the laundry in my castle. When I lived in a library, I could handle it myself, but now I’ve got a bunch of tapestries…” She noticed that both Hydrangea and Tennessee were staring at her. “Oh. I was invisible and I was here…the whole time.”

“What about the emergency?” Hydrangea asked.

“We asked her to help us get you back together,” Minuette confessed. “She wanted to talk to you about it but we convinced her to just get you here together and then find an excuse to leave so you would have to talk to each other and realize that you still loved each other and we could all be a family.” She drew a deep breath.

“Well…” Hydrangea looked at Tennessee.

“I guess it worked,” he said. “Dumping soup on yourselves was a nice touch.”

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Colgate admitted.

“How about a hug, Mom?” Minuette reached out her dripping forehooves, prompting Hydrangea to scoot her chair back.

“I assume you two will take responsibility for this mess and the nuisance you caused this restaurant?” Twilight asked with a stern tone.

The twins laughed nervously. “Of course, fair’s fair,” Colgate said.

“Best get started,” Tennessee said.

The twins got up and went to talk to the restaurant staff, smiling in spite of themselves. There would be time to be with family later.

All the time in the world.