It was the biggest mistake Discord would make in a thousand years. There was no way that silly, souped up librarian could... actually turn the ponies he sent her into the friends that she imagined they were. They were the opposite of the ideals that Twilight would try to impose on them. She would try to make the compulsive liar the avatar of Honesty, and that cruel animal hoarder as the spirit of Kindness, and so on. The Elements would have no choice but to fizzle out, and remain flaccidly impotent... forever! Or, for however as long as he could find absolutely terrible representatives to fail to take up their mantle.
Discord was starting to get worried though, because as he gloated atop his dark throne, the Elements were actually responding, even on the necks of these ponies. He had his eyes closed; he’d been so confident they were just going to burn the damn things out from trying, and narrowly missed a bolt of pure Magic trying to clip him in the face. As the anodes gathered behind him, Discord reflected that the other five Elements hadn’t tried to take a chunk out of him in their passing. Maybe he shouldn’t have laughed so hard at the Element of Magic lying there in the trash bin.
It was just like the last time the Elements had gone off, but the situation was still salvagable. This time, they couldn’t activate, with the liar, the back stabber, the thug, the greedy cheat, and the cruella he’d managed to find for them. Though the ponies fought bravely, it was only a matter of time before he could tear those awful pendants right off their brawny little necks. But they were so insistent on making them work, it concerned him, so Discord took one more look into the thoughts of these ponies futilely trying to fight his benevolent rule.
“What’s this?” he murmured, as the ponies he thought he knew were somehow different ponies entirely, and their minds were just crawling with a cheerfully magenta tinged aura of magic. It was almost as if she...
“No...”
“I cursed you all,” Twilight said soberly. “All my friends had abandoned me, so I made new friends. I made you my friends. I didn’t just confuse you or beguile you. I overwrote you, with who I thought you should be. Anything that didn’t fit with my preconceived notion, I thought it was Discord’s beguilement, so I f-fixed it.
The Golden Oaks library was a rather foreboding place at the moment, with the front lobby taken up by a whole bunch of ponies who were unsure of whether to fight, flee, or friend. Anypony who poked their nose in, quickly pulled it out again, not wanting to even think about trying to check a book out with a possible fight brewing in here. Certain very smart, small, purple and green creatures had made themselves scarce. Indeed the nachos had been served, yet the shocked ponies could only idly munch on them as the purple unicorn confessed.
“I was so afraid,” Twilight said. “I tried to keep you from knowing, because I didn’t want him to escape. I didn’t want your enchantments to break; I thought... I didn’t want him to do this to me again. He tricked me into doing this to you, and I just don’t trust myself anymore if he gets free. So I tried to keep you from waking up from my b-beguilements.”
“You... you’re serious, aren’t you,” Rarity said, employing the full spectrum of her community college magic degree. “But... but the sheer amount of power, and finesse... one tiny error and it would all come crashing down, and the pony you so perverted... beguilements don’t last, Twilight! Every foal learns that in elementary school! Our minds are... are...”
“Supernaturally resilient!” Twilight said in agreement. “And you’re right. It shouldn’t have worked! Our friendship should have been utterly ruined, as soon as you overcame my dark magic! You would have become the ponies you were before, or you may possibly have gone irrevocably insane, but there’s no way it would actually work without a hitch! I’ve been sitting here waiting for the next shoe to drop, but I couldn’t let it drop because... because you’re all the new Elements of Harmony!”
“The new Elements of Harmony?” Applejack said skeptically. “Who were the old ones?”
Twilight blinked at her, and gave a look of incredulity to the five ponies gathered together: Derpy, Golden Harvest, that... unicorn, uh... 5 ponies that Rainbow Dash wasn’t entirely familiar with.
“Nevermind,” Applejack mumbled, using her hat to hide the blush. “Forget ah asked.”
“H-how long do we have?” Fluttershy asked Twilight, looking absolutely miserable. “Isn’t there anything you can do? I don’t want to be... her again.”
“I... I don’t precisely know, Fluttershy,” Twilight said to her. “But you need to be her again. I know you’re scared right now, but you can’t just go denying your true self forever.”
Rainbow Dash had to hover up to Fluttershy worriedly, as the butter yellow pegasus slowly broke down, saying to Twilight, “I don’t remember it, but in strange bits and pieces, like a horrible nightmare. I can’t remember any events, but I remember feeling so... empty. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like I wasn’t feeling anything, and that felt even more than any feeling I’ve ever felt. I must have wanted to hurt them just so that I could... could stop not... being... not being.” She choked back a quiet sob.
Dash hugged Fluttershy from behind, and Fluttershy turned to her, lost to tears. And Rainbow was probably the worst pony at doing this, but Fluttershy didn’t seem to care at this point whose chest fluff she had to cry into.
“You um...” Twilight spoke up, standing over the two of them and looking at Fluttershy with concern. Her words sounded so loud compared to Fluttershy’s quiet weeping. “You were... well, the hospital records suggest you were clinically insane. I mean, you are living on financial aid for disabled ponies, and it certainly isn’t because you’re a weak flyer.”
“Oh... I thought it was because of that...” Fluttershy mumbled into Dash’s shoulder.
“No, I kind of... added that part too, accidentally,” Twilight said, nervously twitching her ears. “But you were about to get in very big trouble pretty soon, because you weren’t supposed to be allowed to own erm... animals. Your special talent apparently involved being... cruel to them. It didn’t stop with just pinning butterflies up on the walls. And you know how hard a life a pony has, if they can’t express their special talent.”
“Oh, I hope that is not my special talent,” Fluttershy said in a tone of total hopelessness, staring at the butterflies on her hip, “I want to be friends with the animals, not... do bad things.”
“You can be whoever you want, Fluttershy,” Twilight said comfortingly, “A cutie mark is what you make of it. It’s your story that really matters.” They were wise, noble words, but Fluttershy looked away; she didn’t seem convinced. Dash had to admit it was totally hard to believe, since evil Fluttershy had a whole wall of cages and cruelty to establish that no, you can’t just give up on your cutie mark. It may have seemed like a nightmare, but those cages proved that the evil Fluttershy had been real all along.
“Whoever you were seems... really gone,” the cream mare with the red and blue locks said to Fluttershy, in a dissatisfied tone. “It’s outright unsettling! I’m afraid losing your special talent may be the least of your worries, dear. Even the Elements chose you, over well, us! I suppose even relics of power can be fooled sometimes, but I mean, you are very much ...changed.”
Fluttershy had separated from Dash as the other ponies took the conversation away from her. At least she wasn’t crying anymore and that’s good, plus Rainbow Dash kind of was more comfortable with being by herself right now. She just wanted to... think about things.
“We don’t hold it against you,” Derpy said in an easygoing tone, “I don’t think we really enjoyed all that dangerous adventuring, anyway. Well, maybe Lyra did.”
She looked at Lyra who just shrugged.
“When the Elements chose you, they were right to do so,” Bonbon assured Rainbow Dash and her friends, in a way that sounded like a sort of toned down Rarity, “You five really do deserve the Elements you were given... even if you were... made to deserve them.”
“But they didn’t choose us!” Applejack protested vexedly at the candymare’s kind words, pointing an accusing hoof at Twilight. “They chose her! We’re not even real ponies! We’re just something that purple unicorn dreamed up! Mah own family don’t even know me!”
Applejack huffed and looked away from Bonbon, who was smiling sadly at her strong words, accepting them without backing down, just like Rarity did so well, as far as Rainbow Dash remembered at least.
Twilight didn’t answer Applejack, but one of the other 5 did. “I don’t know how much the Elements really think, but they sure thought you were the real deal,” the other orange farm pony said, with a much lighter accent than Applejack, but it was still there. “We figured it wouldn’t last long, though. Your true selves reassert themselves, the Elements go all to pieces, and Discord breaks right out of his prison. Twilight here was tryin’ to prepare something for when that occurred. Then, we were gonna have to go and... take them back, and defeat him somehow.”
Golden fell to an uncomfortable silence at that. That other cream mare then sighed and admitted in Goldie’s place, “It was such a tenuous longshot, that you couldn’t even see the target over the horizon. But it was all we had.”
“It doesn’t matter, Bonnie,” Twilight told her in an admonishing tone, “Whatever we have, this is just... wrong. Even if they don’t change back on their own, we don’t have the right to ask that of them, to stay like this. There has got to be another way to save the world, if I could just... find it!”
“Twilight, how much have you slept in the past 2 weeks?” Bonbon asked with a somewhat disapproving squint.
“Enough?” Twilight said with a pleading smile, and a nervous twitch in her left eye. “That’s not important. I have to—to figure this out, so I can safely undo what I did to these ponies!”
She turned to the main 5, saying fearfully, “I had no right to overwrite you as ponies. You all think you were so bad before, but even you were important, each and every one of you! You had a special place here in your community, and I violated that. Even the Elements. You think just anypony could have done what you—what the old you were capable of? The ponies you once were, they saved my life! Not you, them!”
Firming her jaw, Twilight said a little more steadily, “The Elements of Harmony have been wielded by one pony before. Not one mortal pony, but it has happened, in desperate times. Six of us are needed to lend our strengths, our personalities, and—well—our life forces to the Elements, so that they can amplify them beyond measure. So what I did would have failed, and it definitely would have killed me, but...”
With a sigh, Twilight looked away from Rainbow Dash, to her old friends, saying, “He convinced me I had found you again. My old friends. Each and every one of you were so strong in my mind. Things were so clear to me now that I could hear you. I could see you. I had the wrong ponies, but... I think each of you gave me so much of yourselves over the years, that... I could wield the elements on my own. Somewhere inside my memories of you was all you taught me about honesty, kindness, generosity, laughter, and loyalty. And that was... what the Elements needed.”
Twilight turned and looked at her new old friends, saying somewhat disparagingly, “Well, that and the life force of a pony several times over. So my point is that... if any of you had the power to resist, or break this somehow, it probably would have backlashed on me. If you somehow refused the Elements, and brought your true selves forth, whatever’s left of them, it might all have failed. But you didn’t.
“You couldn’t fight for the truth,” Twilight said earnestly, full on entreating them now. “Not in your former state of mind. You had no power to resist, no friendship to keep you strong. You were all a bunch of weak willed failures, and you didn’t even try to fight. On some level I think you were all really... unhappy with your lives, if my research is accurate. So... yes maybe, hypothetically I used the Elements by myself, but I still couldn’t have defeated him, without you being the horrible, flawed ponies that you were!”
Twilight pulled back at that, blinking at her own words. She sighed, and looked at the floor, saying, “And now I’ve made you all twisted amalgamations of my imagination, my memories of my friends, and parts of who you once were.”
Rainbow Dash had to shake her head at this. “This is so messed up,” Rainbow Dash and ... Derpy said at exactly the same time. Rainbow cracked an eye open and gave Derpy a look, and Derpy sort of gave her a look back.
After they both carefully paused, Derpy said slowly, in her more squirrely voice, “It makes sense though,” cautiously keeping an eye on Dash who deliberately remained silent. “Discord was gonna win, and we all just abandoned Twilight, and didn’t even think about her. Why shouldn’t she wield the Elements by herself? She was more loyal than I was...”
Twilight looked from Derpy to her rainbow colored pony double, and said in a somewhat detached manner, “You, Rainbow Dash, I actually knew before the... incident. I only knew that you liked vandalizing my library with your reckless stunts. According to my research, you also had a number of petty crimes on your record, but nothing that would stick enough to have you incarcerated.
“You were... lazy, for lack of a better word,” Twilight said, her face twisted in confusion as she struggled to tell Rainbow Dash who she should be. “Which is to say, you worked very hard for yourself, but whenever some other pony depended on you, you let them down. I don’t know your reasons for that, but that’s why he chose you. Your coworkers and teammates reported that you seemed to take a perverse pleasure in ruining another pony’s day. That doesn’t ring any bells, does it? You don’t... feel that sort of thing appealing at all?”
“No, man, mare, I...” Dash shook her head incredulously. “I can’t believe I was even capable of that! I kinda hoped that it was just... fake or something. Or magic, or I dunno. So, every diary entry where I cheated on my shift, so that other ponies had to do the work to catch up, that all really happened?”
Twilight didn’t break her gaze, so Rainbow Dash had to, looking at the ground and scuffing at it. “I guess that explains why everypony hates me...” she said miserably.
“And let me guess,” Rarity then put in humorlessly, “I was greedy and stingy, and wouldn’t even give anypony the time of day.”
“Discord selected you five based on how poorly you embodied your Element of Harmony,” Twilight said, walking back and forth in front of them. “That is not to say you were all horrible ponies, but he was trying to disrupt their power, to stop anypony from defeating him. So he found the least generous pony he could—” She stopped at Rarity, and said, “You were not a horrible pony.”
Twilight faced the dressmaker impassively, telling her, “You were... you are a shrewd, savvy mare, who pulled herself up from nothing to the sole proprieter of a successful business. There are newspaper articles about you, Rarity! Not front page news, but everypony loves a self made mare. Just because you were a little... abrasive doesn’t make you evil. It happens to ponies who try to go into business, sometimes they lose sight of what they really want, and start only thinking about the bottom line.”
Walking away from the white mare, Twilight closed her eyes and uttered, “So yes, you were greedy, and stingy, and bitter for... how you thought other ponies thought of you. And that still doesn’t make what I did a good thing!”
“An’ you’re tellin’ us all this, just because you’re tryin’ to fix us? ” Applejack asked in a less than friendly manner. “Ah don’t even want to know what kinda pony you thought I was, and that’s the honest tru—that’s the truth!”
“But it’s not a good thing!” Twilight implored of them, “I unknowingly hurt you all on a very deep level! I thought you were enchanted. I made you better! I—I made you my friends! What kind of friend am I, if I have to—to dement you into being friends with me?!”
“Why are you trying so hard to make us act like our old selves again? Wasn’t that the whole point?” Rainbow Dash demanded of Twilight, waving her diary around overhead. “Have you even read this? I can’t be like that again. Even I hate me!”
“I wouldn’t even know how,” Rarity said, gazing pensively at her polished white hoof. “I barely recall any of the time I was Discorded... which I suppose is my true self. But it all seems so...”
“Stupid!” Pinkie Pie cut in.
“Silly!” Rarity agreed. “I’d just feel like a bad actor, playing the villain in some sort of tawdry stage production.”
“But... but you can’t trust what you feel now!” Twilight protested. “I made your feelings up! You’re not even real ponies. You’re just figments of my imagination! Can you really say your old self deserves to die just so you can be... be nice ponies?”
They all fell guiltily silent then, and as she was the one who said them originally, Applejack was the only one of them who could answer her own words spat back at her. After that somber silence, Applejack said, “Y’all know mah sister, Apple Bloom, right?”
There were a few nods all around. “Well,” Applejack said uncertainly, “Ah was tuckin’ my little sister in for bed the other night. She said to me all quiet like, that she liked the new Applejack. Ah told her I didn’t know what she was talkin’ about, and she called me a liar. Not saying it serious-like this time, but with a laugh, like she knew it weren’t true no more. She asked me if ah was going back, and I told her I wasn’t going anywhere. Thought she meant like, Manehattan or somethin’ ah dunno.”
Applejack took off her hat and held it in a hoof, staring down at it pensively as she said, “Mah little sister started cryin’ then. Told me she didn’t ever want me to leave. Ah didn’t know what to say to that, so I just told her ah ain’t goin’ nowhere again.”
Looking up at Twilight, Applejack said, “Ah dunno who you think I am, or who you think I was, but—” She clapped her hat back on her head and said seriously, “Ah ain’t a liar. I told her I wasn’t goin’ nowhere, and I ain’t goin’ nowhere. You ain’t got no right to make me somepony ah’m not, even if you already did it once before. Ah might be a little mixed up in mah head now, but I am a real pony, standin’ right here in front of you. And ah ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Applejack puncuated those words with a determined stomp, glaring challengingly at Twilight, and the other 5.
“What about you, Fluttershy?” Rainbow Dash asked, looking around for the soft yellow, soft spoken pony, “You’re with us, right?”
“...Fluttershy?”
Ten ponies were way too many ponies in a crowded library for everypony to panic at once. “We have to find her!” Twilight said shrilly, “She was the worst of you all! There’s no telling what she could do!”
“Okay, don’t panic!” Rainbow Dash said, searching under the seat cushions, “It’s Fluttershy! She probably just went and hid somewhere. I think?”
“Ah swear, if your crazy stories hurt poor Fluttershy, so help me—!” Applejack said, furiously butting up to Twilight while Golden Harvest got in her way, shouting,
“They ain’t crazy stories! Aren’t crazy stories! Oh golly, now you got me talking like you! ”
“We talk like each other!” Applejack shouted back. “We’re neighbors! Our families been friends forever! Ah always talked like you since we were fillies!”
“You ain’t mah neighbor!” Golden Harvest shot back, tear stricken, “Ah don’t even know you anymore!”
“All those horrid things that we said!” Rarity wailed in horror. “What if she feels like she’s regressing? What if she is regressing?!”
“If she’s anything like Flitter, it would break that poor filly’s heart!” Bonbon replied in alarm.
“What if she tries to stop it!” Rarity demanded of Bonbon frantically, “What if she refuses to be Old Fluttershy? What then?!”
“She could hurt herself!” Bonbon replied, with an equally panicked look on her face. “Or worse!!”
“The horror!” the two ponies cried, holding onto each other, “The horror!”
Lyra appeared in a puff of logic, shouting, “I found her!”
Everypony turned to look her way, and Lyra repeated less confidently, “Okay, I didn’t find her. But I found where she went! Misty Flowers saw her running down Halter street!”
Pinkie Pie burst into the library then, shouting, “I found her!”
Everypony turned to look her way, and Pinkie said awkwardly, “Okay, I didn’t find her. But I found where she—”
“Are you for real?!” Lyra shouted to her, getting right up in Pinkie’s face, but Pinkie persevered shouting back in Lyra’s face,
“It doesn’t matter! Misty Flowers said she ran down Halter street. She must be going back to her cottage!”
Lyra backed up a step, looking at Pinkie Pie tensely. “You know where she lives?” Lyra asked.
“You don’t?” Pinkie said, looking at her just as earnestly.
“She never said!” Lyra whined in protest, her ears going down, “She always just yelled at me, and kicked dirt in my face!”
Pinkie blinked at that, but shook her head, saying, “Never mind! We have to go save her!”
Everypony piled out of the library, half in pursuit of their troubled friend, the other half in pursuit of a very dangerous wildcard. Dash hung back at first, feeling like she was missing something. She wanted to make sure they were all going in the right direction, and not just outright panicking. Thankfully, Dash wasn’t the only one who noticed something was off, because Lyra came galloping right back into the library, to drag out the barely responsive Flitter, who was still staring off into space and murmuring “Fluttershy? Kindness was Fluttershy? ”
Dash dropped out of the sky in front of Lyra and Flitter, shouting, “Come on, snap out of it! We have to go! Fluttershy might be hurt!” It seemed like they both heard her, and Rainbow Dash couldn’t bear to wait any longer. She rocketed away from them, faster than Flitter could murmur, “Fluttershy? She replaced me with Fluttershy? ”
Rainbow Dash was there first, of course. Even before her rainbow contrail could fade away, she hammered on Fluttershy’s door shouting, “Fluttershy? Open up!” but there was no answer. “I know you’re in there, Fluttershy!” Rainbow shouted. “You can’t get better if you just lock yourself away! We’ll figure this out. We’ll figure out something to do. We always do!”
“We... always do...” Dash repeated, leaning her forehead on the door as her gaze dropped downward.
“She’s over here!” Derpy called out from off in the distance, and Rainbow could see now the other ponies and her friends had come galloping up the road already. Derpy was off in Fluttershy’s yard waving her hoof at them, around back behind Fluttershy’s cottage, over on the Everfree side of it. Over to the wall-eyed grey pegasus Rainbow Dash flew, with a flutter of hope in her chest, that Fluttershy would be okay.
They found her sitting in a little grassy plot some distance away from the burbling creek. There wasn’t anything there, besides grass and a... marker. It was too small for a pony’s. It wasn’t even a real... one of those. It looked more like an out of place rock, stuck in the ground on its side next to a small raised bed of earth, and it had been like that for quite a while. Any signs of digging were gone, and a lush carpet of green grass covered it, but the way Fluttershy was sitting mournfully before that out-of-place rock, it was... pretty obvious what it was.
“I found this, a few days ago,” Fluttershy said quietly, before anypony else could think of anything to say. “I don’t know who it is. There’s no name on it.”
The breeze whispered overhead as Fluttershy said, “It’s the only one. There are no others. I don’t know where the r—” She took a breath. “...rest of my missing animal friends are.”
“I won’t go back, Twilight,” Fluttershy said as her chest shook with emotion, “I can’t go back—to... to that. I... I can’t be that mare, I’m sorry. I’m just not strong enough...!”
“Fluttershy...” Rarity said, making to approach the distraught pegasus with utmost care.
“I-if... I must become that, I don’t want to live that way,” Fluttershy said in a hollow voice, plastering her cheek against Rarity’s shoulder. “I want to e-end it now, while I still can!”
Twilight was standing shakily before Fluttershy and Rarity, like she was afraid to approach, or like she didn’t feel she had any right to do so. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, Fluttershy,” she told the frightened pegasus, in a quivery nervous almost whisper. “You... you don’t have to change. You don’t have to be the mare you once were.”
Fluttershy looked up at Twilight, soft teal eyes brimming with forgotten tears, beyond hope, yet hoping beyond hope for somepony to save her.
“I guess I started thinking that was the problem, not the solution,” Twilight told Fluttershy a little bit more steadily. “But I want you to know that I couldn’t change you back, even if I tried. That’s the problem I’ve been working on all this time. I don’t know how I did it, but what I did to you... there are no flaws in the shaping, no cracks that could shatter. You should have reverted the moment you realized what was happening. I know it’s wrong to deny your true self, but... you’re having no problem in doing so! The fact that you can want to remain this way, means you won’t stop being this way! The magic I used is forbidden, because once the magic has faded, even the slightest bit of pressure would shatter the changes to your mind, and quite possibly your mind as well. But you...”
As the butter yellow pegasus fought back the sobs, Twilight at last managed to put a hoof on Fluttershy’s back, saying, “You endured this. You experienced the worst day of your life, and you’re still you. You’re still the mare I created, in my worst judgement call ever. Somehow, everything I love about Flitter is a part of you now. And I don’t see any way that could change.”
“So... so...” Fluttershy sniffled, pulling free from Rarity and looking at her friend—at Twilight Sparkle. “So I don’t have to? It won’t just... happen to me?”
“This has never happened before,” Twilight said soberly. “It was supposed to be impossible. Fluttershy, I can’t know the future, but I do know that I’ll do everything in my power to keep you from falling into your old patterns again, if you truly don’t want to be who you... used to be.”
“I just don’t know, Twilight,” Fluttershy sighed with a hoof to her chest, “I can’t see anything good at all, with how you say I’m supposed to be. I-if she really will do so, maybe we should just let that mare rest in peace. I think...
“I think I may still need counseling,” Fluttershy admitted worriedly.
“You and me both, sister!” Pinkie groaned, flopping face down on the grass.
“I’ll be honest,” Twilight said, backing up to address everypony again. “I didn’t really know any of you were living like this. Were you really such terrible ponies, that you couldn’t even stand being yourself? I didn’t even know there were ponies in this town who were in so much ...suffering.”
“Well, Fluttershy’s got it the worst,” Rainbow Dash said, gulping and admitting, “I wouldn’t... kill myself over it or anything. I just don’t like what I read, and I was hurting ponies, so they wouldn’t like it either. Why should we have to be something nopony wants, just because you think it’s wrong?”
“Ah could get mah family to love me again, like this,” Applejack said softly. “But like they think I was? It just wouldn’t end well. I know you don’t want us to be livin’ lives of denial, but why should we deny what you did to us then? Isn’t forcin’ it back as much of a lie as goin’ forward with what we got?”
“If you’re curious, Twilight, you meet a lot of troubled ponies, volunteering at the welfare shelter,” Flitter put in quietly. “That’s how I um, met Fluttershy, actually.”
“Oh, I used the welfare shelter before?” Fluttershy said curiously, “But I have low income housing, so why would I need to?”
Flitter coughed, and stated, “Actually, you’re... not allowed to visit the welfare shelter anymore, without approval from your social worker. You um... went there for a while, but once you had housing you felt it necessary to um... express your opinions about ponies who didn’t have housing... so, just a head’s up.”
“Oh,” Fluttershy said, hiding behind her hair and backing away from Flitter. “Okay, thank you...”
Twilight needed a lot of time to think about this stuff. Applejack said some pretty heavy stuff, and Rainbow Dash said some... less heavy stuff, but still pretty heavy. And Fluttershy freaking demolished them with her heavy stuff. She came in like a... really big demolishy thing. So, Twilight couldn’t give them the answers right away, but the immediate crisis appeared to be ...salvaged, at least. Flitter cautiously, gently led Fluttershy away from the small grave, and everypony ended up convening together for a final time in Fluttershy’s cottage, in what may have been the strangest tea party in history.
The cottage was still very bare, even more so from the removal of the cages, but many cages were still there, for the animals who still could not handle being free. The ones who could live freely didn’t come greet Fluttershy in loving paws, but ran for every nook and cranny they could hide in, once anypony came through the door. Fluttershy assured everypony that the animals were fine, they just had some trust issues they needed to work through, but damn if it wasn’t unsettling to have those beady little eyes staring at you from the dark places.
The tea quickly became lukewarm, as ponies involved found other things to occupy themselves with. The five of them faced off with the 5 of them, not out of fear or malice, but simple, befuddled curiosity at this point.
Rainbow Dash stood facing Derpy chest to chest, looking across the table at her as she chatted up the wall eyed pegasus. “So, you’re a pretty fast flyer, Derpy?” Rainbow asked her larger, blonde, weirdly alternate pony.
“Oh yes,” Derpy replied with a proud smile. It faltered when she added, “But I can’t really see very well, so I’m not gonna win any races.”
“You made your eyes go straight once,” Rainbow said curiously.
Derpy nodded, and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were straight. Then she blinked, and they weren’t again. “It just doesn’t come naturally to me,” she said, blushing and wingfluttering at the attention. “Lots of ponies have eyes like mine at one point or another, but seeing right comes naturally to them.”
“I dunno what I’d do if my eyes ended up like that,” Rainbow admitted nervously, “Twilight really coulda screwed me up a lot worse than I ended up. I mean, not that you’re a screw-up, just,”
“Oh, it’s okay,” Derpy said unconvincingly. “I know you don’t really mean it in a bad way. It’s true I can’t be in the racing circuits, but I can do a lot of other really cool things!”
“Yeah, like what?” Dash asked in return. “I mean, what do you get up to that’s really cool?”
“Well, once me and my friends had to scare away a dragon!” Derpy said excitedly. “You remember, when the smoke from his snoring was covering the sky?”
“How could I forget?” Rainbow Dash laughed. “And of all ponies it was Fluttershy who stood up to the big guy!”
Derpy looked at Rainbow Dash uneasily, saying, “Um, no actually it was Bonbon, who sweet talked him into sleeping somewhere else.”
Rainbow Dash’s nervous smile matched Derpy’s then, as Dash said, “Oh, right... the whole, fake memories thing...”
“What is it you remember, I’m curious?” Derpy asked, leaning forward.
“Well, Fluttershy didn’t want to go, so we basically had to drag her up the mountain,” Rainbow said, “And we did that because... huh, now that I think on it that was a pretty nasty move on our part. But it was all worth it, when she got really freaky angry. She stared that dragon down and ripped him a new one. He was actually crying!”
Rainbow Dash blinked again, and rubbed her chin with a hoof, saying, “Wow, that does not sound like Fluttershy. She was just worried about her friends, so she acted differently. Except before, when she didn’t.”
She looked up to meet the eyes of a concerned Derpy.
...sorta.
“It’s that bad, huh,” Rainbow Dash said glumly, fiddling with her teacup.
“It’s kinda cool actually, if it’s not a bother to you,” Derpy said, ruffling her nervous wings straight again. “Twilight did get angry at him, when he knocked out Flitter, and it almost looked like she was gonna try to do that, but then Bonbon showed her that he wasn’t a bad dragon, he just made a bad decision. It wasn’t Fluttershy, but it did sort of go like that. Do you remember the avalanche?”
“Yeah, um, did ...Flitter start it going?” Rainbow asked uncertainly.
“Lyra actually,” Derpy said. “You’d think it was me, but not then. I wasn’t even in the air. Just some pebbles hit her rump and she started freaking out, and next thing we knew we were dodging boulders!”
“So uh, what do you do when you’re not with your friends?” Rainbow asked. “I mean, just so we can talk about something Twilight didn’t dump into my head sort of.”
“Well, I’m a lightning specialist,” Derpy responded, smacking her forehooves together in an impressive spark. “So, that’s something. You wouldn’t believe how many ponies think I zapped myself, on account of, you know,” She stuck her tongue out and pointed at her googly eyes.
“I know what you mean,” Rainbow said to Derpy, rolling her own eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how many ponies think I have the hots for a mare! You know, on account of the whole hair thing. I mean, who says I don’t, right? But I totally don’t.”
Derpy just blinked cluelessly, her eyes unnervingly switching orientations as she did so.
“You know, rainbows?” Rainbow Dash said teasingly, giving a little hip wiggle and flicking her tail in Derpy’s direction to illustrate. Derpy seemed to have a difficult time answering, so a little self consciously, Rainbow Dash said, “...what?”
“Well it’s just, I don’t know how appropriate that conversation is here,” Derpy smiled awkwardly. “I really don’t need to know if you... ‘have the hots’ for me or not.”
“Oh,” Dash said in cold realization, dropping her tail straight down. She didn’t talk about that stuff, did she? Or, did she? “Right,” she said blushing, intensely, “Um... I get a lot of flak since my mom was a rainbow drinker? I mean duh, obviously, but ponies think it makes you stupid, or deformed or um gay or whatever. But I came out fine!” Calmly looking in the other direction and tossing her mane so casually, she said in a nonchalant voice, “Anyway, what I’m trying to say is... I know how you feel, even if it doesn’t hurt my racing career.”
Derpy nodded at that, and sipped her tea. Rainbow Dash settled her haunches back down at the table in Fluttershy’s cottage... an unfamiliar table that looked kind of shoddy and bleached, with a few cracks in the boards, like Fluttershy had just grabbed it from the junkyard or something. Actually she probably did, come to think on it. Where else was she gonna get cheap furniture on short notice? Trying to take her mind off how there were a few newspapers stuffed under one of the table legs to keep it from wobbling, Rainbow Dash tried to think of how to salvage Derpy’s friendship, and maybe a teeny little of her respect.
“So, you bottle lighting,” Dash prompted hopefully, “Sounds pretty cool. I always wondered how to do that.”
“It’s pretty tricky,” Derpy admitted, glad for at least something to talk about, “It took me a while to learn, and I still mess up sometimes. But I could show you some time, just the basics.”
“Yeah, that’d be pretty awesome actually,” Rainbow Dash said. “I could do some incredible tricks if I knew how to use lightning!”
“Well, how far did you get in weather school?” Derpy asked her curiously.
Rainbow Dash blushed, turning away and saying, “I’m uh, well I’m pretty good at cloud busting, but I haven’t exactly been formally ...trained in weather work, so... that’s okay, right?”
Derpy looked shocked at Dash’s awkward confession, but she quickly recovered, smiling brightly and saying, “You bet! Just name a date and I’ll be there!”
Well they worked out a time and place, and Rainbow Dash actually felt pretty good at that. She was usually sort of... ashamed to let other ponies know all the stuff she hadn’t had a chance to learn, but it was just easy to get along with this derpy eyed pony, now that Rainbow had a chance to get to know her.
Applejack and Golden Harvest were talking with each other too, laughing heartily over some sort of farm related pun or something, like they’d always been old friends. Though from Applejack’s perspective, they had. Fluttershy and Flitter were pretty quiet, but Fluttershy seemed a lot more at peace with herself than when they chased her over here. Rarity and Bonbon were trying to have a conversation, but Lyra kept doing something that made Bonbon laugh. And she always laughed. Pinkie was watching that exchange with a curiously adoring expression, but not contributing anything herself. And Twilight Sparkle was sitting... at the other end of the table, keeping to herself. Alone.
“Scuse me a moment,” Rainbow Dash said, standing and trotting around behind Derpy’s impressive posterior to approach her moody looking unicorn friend.
“Twilight, what’s wrong?” Rainbow Dash asked the purple unicorn, sitting her rainbow tailed rump right down beside her.
“What’s not wrong?” Twilight responded cynically.
“Okay fine, a lot of things are messed up, but you aren’t talking to anypony,” Rainbow said worriedly, “You’re just sitting here off by yourself. Aren’t we your friends?”
“Who, you 5, or the other 5?” Twilight asked, glancing at Dash with a probing gaze.
“Both,” Dash answered. “You’re friends with everypony here. Nothing bad happened, we didn’t go crazy or anything. So what’s the problem?”
“Everypony is friends with me, is the problem,” Twilight said, turning to Dash with a conflicted tightness in her vividly violet, yet bloodshot eyes. “Are you my friend, though?”
“Of course!” Rainbow said in confusion at her distressed friend, “Isn’t that the same thing?”
Twilight gave a sigh that shook her shoulders. “I... I don’t remember you, Rainbow Dash,” she explained, “I never knew you very well, any time before you just... were my friend all of a sudden.”
“But... didn’t you—you know—make me up or... or something? How do you forget that?” Rainbow asked, tilting her head. “I mean, all this stuff I remember is really your ideas. I would be more upset, but without you, I’d be a... I dunno... a mean, lonely, friendless jerk. ”
“That’s just it, though,” Twilight said, “Anything I... impressed on you wasn’t a memory I had of you. It was a memory I had of her!” She waved a hoof in Derpy’s direction. Derpy waved back cluelessly.
“From my perspective,” Twilight said mutedly, “You just came out of nowhere, and suddenly you were the best friends I could ever possibly have. You all remember me being friends with you, but I just... feel like this is all a fantasy of mine come to life! I never did anything to earn your friendship. I know you think I did, but I can’t remember any differently.”
Rainbow toed the floor, saying, “Yeah, but... you’re still friends with the other five, right?” Something about that just really hurt to say, aching in the rainbow pegasus’s heart. It was true, but Rainbow Dash just felt really... envious of them. They got to be friends with Twilight the easy way, and Dash had to sit here fighting to even be recognized as a friend.
“I can’t help but feel like I betrayed them too,” Twilight said, ears lowering, so ashamed. “I should have found them. I should have ignored Discord and brought them together again, no matter how much it hurt to do so. But it was so easy to just abandon them. I gave up on them, and went and made my own friends. I just wanted my friends back, but it hurt too much to try, so I just pretended you were all my old friends. And eventually, I couldn’t tell the difference. I wasn’t the Element of Magic. I was a little filly playing with dolls. And—”
Twilight rubbed beside her horn with a hoof, gesturing with said hoof as she said, “And it worked! And that somehow makes it worse! Am I such a bad friend that even the Elements of Harmony can’t tell how deluded I am? How do I even talk to anypony in this room? Half of them, I betrayed and replaced. The other half I... I don’t even know. How do I deserve to be friends with you, if I don’t even know anything about you!”
Twilight blinked, then added frankly, “You know, besides all the research I did on your backgrounds, after we sealed Discord away.”
“I can’t—I’m not good at this stuff, Twilight,” Rainbow said, ruffling her wings and standing up. “I don’t need a reason to be friends with you. I’m just friends with you, and that’s that. I can’t tell you how. It just is. You need to ask Applejack for the straight answer, or... Golden Harvest I guess. Or Rarity, she’s real smart about social stuff.
“You need to talk to us,” Rainbow said, flapping up and putting her forehooves on Twilight’s withers. “All of us, not just me. I can’t... I can’t figure this stuff out alone, Twilight.”
“But what do I say?” Twilight asked. The sad, sleep deprived, dissheveled unicorn looked so pitifully out of her element here. Rainbow Dash wished she knew more about what Twilight’s element was, though.
“Just tell them what you told me,” Rainbow suggested. “Tell them about the problem with you being their friend, or how you can’t do it or whatever. See how quick they shoot down that idea, and tell you the real important stuff. I mean... I don’t really know what you should tell them, but I don’t think it really... matters? Just talk to them. They’ll tell you what to tell them!”
Dash scrunched her muzzle in confusion at that line of thinking, saying, “I mean, but if they already told you what to tell them, then you can’t tell um...”
Stilling Rainbow’s confused stuttering, Twilight climbed to four hooves herself, saying, “I think I know what you’re saying, Rainbow Dash. You’re right. I can’t just... sit here by myself. Even if I don’t deserve it, none of you deserve me locking you out. Thank you, I’ll go have a talk with everypony... Dash.”
Dash had to smile; that last part did not go unnoticed by her. Rainbow Dash didn’t know what Twilight talked about with the others, all the others, one at a time, but it made Twilight feel better, and that’s what’s important. The cute purple unicorn looked brighter, and more relieved with every pony she spoke to. She was even laughing together with them, at some of Pinkie’s hilariously bad jokes towards the evening.
“And that’s how the chickens got in the trees!”
Amid laughter, Rainbow cried out, “Pinkie Pie, you are so hilarious!”
“Aww, I’m not so great,” Pinkie said with a blush.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Pinkie,” Rarity said warmly, “I dare say you’re the funniest pony in the room right now!”
Pinkie’s smile froze at that, and she looked nervously over at Lyra, who waved her hoof saying, “Don’t worry about it. Everypony knows my jokes are terrible. Why do you think I’m friends with Bonbon!”
“Don’t you dare say that!” Bonbon shouted, albeit with a smile. She wrapped Lyra in a headlock, and ruffled her stripey mane, saying, “Your jokes are amazing, even if I am easy to please.”
“I dunno, I think Pinkie Pie has a real gift for this kind of stuff,” Lyra said, her eyes turning up to Bonbon with a smirk on her muzzle. “Get it? Gift?”
Pointing at Bonbon, Pinkie squealed in realization, “Because she said please! ” And that set the lot of them falling over laughing again.
You had to be there.
“The only thing I wanna know, is how am I going to plan a party for this?” Lyra asked, wiping tears out of her eyes.
“A party?” Pinkie said curiously, sitting up to face the mint green pony. “What do you wanna do?”
“Well, of course there should be music, and games,” Lyra said, “And you’re a baker, so why don’t you bring a cake? Oh that would be perfect! ”
“And streamers? ” Pinkie said with a face eating grin.
“And balloons!” Lyra agreed excitedly.
“But sweetie,” said Ra—oh, no it was Bonbon. “But sweetie,” Bonbon asked Lyra, “What has you thinking of a party now? Because we’re all friends again?”
“Most of us, technic-ally for the first time!” Applejack pointed out.
“It sure has been a crazy day...” Derpy said wearily.
“I think Twilight is passed out in the coat closet,” Flitter mumbled informatively.
“No, no, no,” Lyra said, rearing up and waving her forehooves dismissively. “You girls don’t even realize?” She turned slowly, looking around excitedly, exclaiming to half of the ponies in the room, “It’s your very first birthday! ”
To say the room fell into stunned silence would not be accurate, because somewhere in there was an almost impossible to hear high pitched squealing noise coming from a certain pink party pony who didn’t look like she could possibly smile any wider.