To Brave a Storm

by saarni

IV. Tale

Placing the mug of vile, steaming brew on the marble table in front of Fluttershy, Twilight took the opportunity to have another up close and personal look at this interloper who was pretending to be one of her closest friends; she just couldn’t understand why they’d put so much effort into the deception, recreating her almost perfectly – even that airy, lavender scent which clung to her coat – yet having got the age so spectacularly wrong and coming up with this weird cover story, too. If she, it, whatever, was, in fact, a Changeling or some other shape-shifting creature, then it was extremely important, Twilight knew, to uncover its plan before any other pony came to harm. She hoped that the real Fluttershy was alive and well somewhere, and could be rescued once the doppelganger’s deception was exposed.

“Thank you.” A faded yellow hoof wrapped around the cup, and Fluttershy enjoyed savouring the warmth that thrilled through her having spent so much time in the cold. Both flying here from Canterlot and having waited in the doorway for so long while Applejack and Twilight had made their minds up about her. She inhaled the pungent aroma of the dark brown liquid deeply, smiling in satisfaction. With her eyes half-closed, she said to Twilight, “Princess Celestia gave this blend to you as a castle-warming gift, and you always wondered why when she knew that you didn’t drink coffee.”

“I never told you about that,” replied Twilight, eyebrow raised doubtfully. It seemed that her suspicions were confirmed and the impostor had finally given away something that it shouldn’t have known about. She tried to keep her surprise a mask so that she, it, wouldn’t know that she was on to it. Applejack, she noticed, was hovering behind Fluttershy, probably ready to tackle her to the ground if she attempted to escape once she knew that her little scheme was rumbled. “So how could you have possibly known that?”

Taking a small sip of her drink and offering Twilight a tight grin, Fluttershy said, “It was my idea for her to give it to you.” She sighed in satisfaction as the zesty, tangy taste tickled her tastebuds as it always did when prepared correctly. “It’s my favourite flavour, from deep in Saddle Arabia, and I wanted to make sure that you had some waiting for me when I got back home. To be honest, I was getting worried that you might’ve thrown it out at some point.”

Looking at each other again, Twilight knew that her and Applejack’s thoughts were lining up almost perfectly: it was Fluttershy, but it also wasn’t. It looked liked her, it spoke like her, it even acted like her, but it was also subtly different. Less jittery and tense, maybe? Even around her friends, she’d never been able to fully relax, but there she sat seemingly without a care in the world despite the serious accusations being levelled at her. It was a Fluttershy who’d finally embraced the many, many assertiveness lessons she’d been made to learn.

Slamming a hoof down on the table, almost putting a dent in its smooth alabaster surface and jolting Twilight who had been starting to fall asleep again, so worn out was she by the events of the evening, Applejack scowled at the impostor as she blithely continued to drink her coffee, seemingly unaware of the violence of her act or the implication contained therein. “Listen, whoever or whatever you are, you’d better tell me this instant just what in blazes is going on here. I just saw one of my best friends get vaporised by lightning – to say nothing of saving my life in the process – and here you show up moments later pretending to be her, but you clearly can’t be. Why not just cut the act and come clean? We’re decent ponies. We won’t hurt ya so long as you tell us the truth. Did you cause the storm? Was it a plot to try and replace one of us so you could learn more about the Elements?”

Exhaling a little wistfully, almost forgetting how to the point Applejack was, Fluttershy placed her now half-empty mug back on the table and said, “Okay, I suppose you’ve waited long enough. We all have.” She smiled enigmatically. She met Twilight’s eyes. “You were mostly right about the storm’s effect on me. My weather magic did save my life, and I was teleported away. I wasn’t sent somewhere else, however, I was sent somewhen else.”

“You were displaced in time?” said Twilight, letting out a gasp of shock. “But that’s-” she stopped herself before uttering the word impossible when she considered all the myriad absurd things that had happened to her since she’d first moved to Ponyville “-very, very unlikely, isn’t it?”

Still not believing a word of it, Applejack asked, “Oh, really? And just when did you end up exactly?” She leaned on the back of Fluttershy’s chair, angry eyes fixed on the greying mane as if that were all the proof that was needed something was off-kilter here.

“I woke up to find myself in the orchard during the day, but when I called out for you, there was no answer,” replied Fluttershy, her eyes taking on a glassy look as she recalled the events of so long ago. “I went to the house and found a young Big Mac and a young...er Granny Smith there. That was my first clue that something was dreadfully wrong somewhere.” She remembered thinking that the storm had made everypony younger or something at first. “I flew back to Ponyville and it was very different, too: fewer houses, no castle, Sugarcube Corner had different owners.” Fluttershy shook her head gloomily. “To cut a long story short, I eventually found a newspaper and saw that the date was almost thirty years in the past. Somehow, the storm had sent me spiralling backwards in time.”

Though she was doing her best to remain detached, Twilight still found the story concocted by the ersatz Fluttershy to be compelling; from her own experiences with Starlight Glimmer, she knew that time-travel was theoretically possible, if incredibly dangerous to actually do. The memories of those destroyed and distorted Equestrias she’d encountered would not soon leave her mind, anyway. She shuddered involuntarily. Things had worked out here, but Twilight couldn’t help but feel that, somewhere, those battles were still being fought. It made her sad to know that there were versions of her friends out there who didn’t get the happy endings that they deserved and were instead destined to live in abject misery, fighting wars and losing loved ones.

Her mood was not improved one bit by the knowledge that this rogue storm from the Everfree Forest of which Fluttershy spoke had the power to send ponies back and forth through time; it was the kind of thing that Equestria’s enemies would love to get their hands, claws and other protuberances on. Should it ever reach them, well, Twilight had already seen multiple times what could happen to her beloved homeland when such power was misused.

Softly, Twilight asked, “After making this discovery, that you were stranded thirty years in the past, what did you do?”

“You don’t actually believe this, do you?” asked Applejack, glowering at how easily drawn by a good story Twilight was. “Don’t get suckered in by its lies.”

“I’m keeping an open mind, like I said I would,” said Twilight, raising a hoof to ward off any more interruptions from Applejack. “Nothing more than that.” She said this last part while gazing at Fluttershy.

Once they were done talking, Fluttershy resumed her story, “As a matter of fact, I took a page out of The Book of Twilight.” After another small sip of her drink to wet her dry throat, she said, “I went to Canterlot to speak with Princess Celestia. I figured that she of all ponies would be able to help me out.”

“And she believed your story?” Twilight asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, she did.” Fluttershy inclined her head slightly in a nod. “Because it wasn’t the first time that she’d heard it.”

This got both Twilight and Applejack’s attention. “This has happened before?” they asked together.

Again, Fluttershy nodded. “That she knows of, at least fifty pegasi have been displaced by these storms since she first became aware of them.”

“Only pegasi are affected, then?” Applejack asked.

“Don’t ask me to explain the details of it, but as Twilight said, it’s a unique reaction between the storm’s own and our weather magic.” Fluttershy looked pensive and started fiddling with her mug. “It’s pretty much random where – er, when, that is – you end up, too. I was luckier than most to still be relatively close to what I thought of as the present. Princess Celestia told me stories of some ponies who’d been sent back as much as five hundred years. Others might have gone even further back to, uh, the time when Discord was still in charge.” She trailed off, leaving it up to their imaginations to fill in the blanks there. If there was a fate more awful than being cut off from those that you loved by the cruel, unfeeling barriers of time, the morose Fluttershy did not want to know about it.

“If these things are so powerful, so dangerous, why hasn’t Celestia ever told me anything about them before?” Twilight asked curiously. “I’ve never heard mention anywhere, even in Canterlot’s archives, of anything remotely resembling these time storms. You’d think that she’d want me to be on the look out for them.”

Adjusting her posture slightly as her back began to seize up – one of the many delightful things she’d learned about getting older – Fluttershy said, “They’re one of a very small number of things that Celestia has chosen to keep to herself. She didn’t want anypony, but especially villains like Discord, Sombra, Tirek and Chrysalis, from having access to a viable form of time-travel. As remote a possibility as it might have been, she was scared that somepony might figure out how to harness the power of the storms and use them to screw the timeline up beyond repair. From what you’ve told us of your battle with Starlight Glimmer, you know firsthoof what that would be like.”

Twilight nodded her understanding. She may not have liked having been kept in the dark like this, but Celestia’s reasons did make sense; she was all for as much information as possible being out in the public domain, but again, sometimes they’d been a bit too trusting when they should have been cautious. She sank back in her seat, wondering if this is what Celestia’s daily life was like: constantly having to balance ponies’ right to know what was going on versus the greater good of Equestria’s future. “Could she not have used Star Swirl’s spell to send you and the others home, though?”

Shaking her head, Fluttershy said, “Because we’d time-travelled via unnatural means, some kind of-” she screwed up her eyes in concentration as she tried to remember what Celestia’s exact words had been “-magical interference wave was being generated which made it impossible to use Star Swirl’s spell on all the affected pegasi.” She tried to forget how devastated she’d been when Celestia had told her this. She wasn’t sure how long she’d spent crying afterwards. “No, we were instead resettled.”

“Resettled?” asked Applejack.

“For very obvious reasons, we weren’t allowed to return to our own homes with the knowledge we had of the future,” said Fluttershy, her words barely above a whisper. Though she was speaking in generalities, Twilight was pretty sure that she was only talking about herself. “We ran the risk, even accidentally, of making changes in the timeline. I wasn’t allowed to return to either Cloudsdale or Ponyville, so I ended up staying in Canterlot until, well-” she shrugged “-until I finally caught up with the present.”

Neither Twilight nor Applejack were slow in detecting the palpable sense of sadness radiating out of Fluttershy’s voice. “Have you been on your own all this time, sugarcube?” asked Applejack tenderly, despite herself. Guess I’m finally comin’ round to believing her.

“No, I’ve never been alone,” Fluttershy said with a false sense of cheeriness. “I talked with Celestia nearly every day, and there were plenty of scientists who wanted to examine me and learn more about the storm’s effects on my body.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Applejack.

Fluttershy sighed deeply. “Again, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t allowed to form close relationships with anypony in case I screwed up their eventual destinies.”

“It must’ve been terrible, Fluttershy.” Her expression tender, Applejack placed a hoof on Fluttershy’s tensed wither before she even realised what she was doing. To suddenly find yourself in a situation, so far away from home, and you couldn’t even bond with anypony out of fear of what might happen … she didn’t want to imagine it. Fluttershy might not have been the most sociable of creatures, but she valued friendship all the same.

Dabbing at her suddenly moist eyes, grateful that Applejack was finally beginning to warm up to her even if she still had her doubts about her story, Fluttershy said, “The days weren’t so bad. Celestia gave me a job tending to the castle grounds so I had plenty of contact with animals, and I even made sure that the statue of Discord was kept neat and tidy.” A half-smile crossed her muzzle as she recalled their long conversations. “The nights, on the other hoof … I mean, I wasn’t exactly forbidden from going out and exploring, but knowing that I couldn’t get, um, intimate with anypony because of the timeline put a bit of a damper on things.”

“Did, er, did Celestia ever ask you about the future?” asked Twilight.

“I might have given her a few pointers.”

“Pointers?”

“Oh, it was nothing too on the snout or anything,” said Fluttershy quickly by way of hasty clarification. “She sensed my connection with the Elements of Harmony just as I think you did earlier and was curious about it. Whilst being as unspecific as possible, I gave her a quick overview of things like Nightmare Moon’s return, Discord escaping and so on. If you’ve ever wondered why she seems so calm when everything’s turning to chaos around us, well, now you know.”

Unsure of what to say now, Applejack and Twilight merely exchanged glances.

Fluttershy asked, “So what now? D’you … believe me?” Some of her old timidity was returning.

With a frown, Applejack said, “I don’t not believe you.”

“It’s a lot to take in, but-” Twilight chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully “-I believe you.”

The entire night had been incredibly tiring for all involved, and the morning was going to be even worse; how they would explain this to their friends, she did not know, but somewhere deep in her heart Twilight knew that this was indeed Fluttershy.

Fluttershy stood up, noticing that her friends were practically dead ponies walking and could barely keep their eyes open any longer. “I think we could all do with a good night’s sleep and we should continue this later when we’re rested.” Adrenaline and coffee were all well and good in the short term, but the effects of her rush were already beginning to wear off. She wanted to get home, see Angel Bunny for the first time in three decades, and crawl into her own bed. Idly, she wondered how he would react to her appearance. Or if he’d even notice at all. As far as he was concerned, it’d only have been a few hours since she’d left the cottage to perform a quick errand.

“That sounds like a good idea,” said Twilight, stifling a yawn. She approached Fluttershy and gave her a quick hug. “It’s good to see you again.”

“You, too.”

“D’you mind if I see you home, sugarcube?” asked Applejack.

“I wouldn’t mind at all,” replied Fluttershy with a smile.