All You Need is Love

by AugieDog

5 - All You Need in Love

Two beats later, Sapphire raised her head and gave Angel her magazine-cover smile. "'Serves Her Right' blew up. I went from playing clubs to halls to arenas on the strength of the album that followed, full of digs at Sunbutt and her dusty, rusty rule. And I became the Pony of Pop pretty much overnight."

She let the smile go sideways. "All as part of what I thought was Queen Chrysalis's scheme: with me sowing doubts about Princess Celestia, she could reveal herself when ponies' questions started getting loud and pervasive and demonstrate how Equestria would prosper under the guidance of a real sovereign." A little more slippage, and her smile became a sneer. "Turned out, though, that once again, Her Divine Buggy Majesty and I weren't exactly on the same page."

The rabbit was sitting forward on his little cushion, the carrot he'd been crunching forgotten on the desk beside him. The showmare inside Sapphire wanted to strut a bit, but this next part didn't call for anything like that.

With a swallow, she just launched into it. "I'd met Princess Celestia by then, y'see, and the Big Lady, she..." Sapphire cocked her head. "Is there a word that combines 'impressed' and 'confused'?"

Slipping to the left, she straightened her neck and relaxed every muscle in her body, a requirement in trying to capture Celestia's essence. "Sapphire Shores," she said, and even though she knew she could never replicate the warmth she'd heard that night, she gazed down at the empty stretch of carpet before her with her mind filled with as much love and sunshine as she could imagine. "I've so looked forward to meeting you."

She jumped back into her first position facing her audience. "Can I add 'terrified' to my earlier 'impressed' and 'confused'? And remember, this was before Luna's return, so we're talking about the single most powerful being in the entire world calling me into the Royal Box at Canterlot Square Gardens after my first night selling this place out, the immortal alicorn I'd been smacking around lyrically for months at that point asking to see me."

In slow motion, she moved to her right. "And standing there in front of her..." She tilted her head up and up and up like her younger self had had to. "For the first time in my life, I knew what a true ruler looked like." The glance she shot at Angel Bunny was as quick and sharp as a pin puncturing a balloon. "Not that I was about to admit that to myself or to her. I was calm. I was cool. I was her worst nightmare and the nemesis she didn't even know she had."

Her eyes whipping back to the imaginary princess, she gave a smile that she'd practiced numerous times over the years: broad and bright, it also had to look as shaky as a wheel with half its spokes gone. "Well, of course you want to meet me!" she let fly the way she had at that meeting all those years ago, her voice creaking and cracking like a rusty gate. "I'm the Pony of Pop!"

Angel Bunny squeaked a laugh and pounded the desktop with a hind leg.

Sapphire felt her face heat up, and encouraging the blush, she slumped over to where she was looking at him again. "Shoulda called myself the Duchess of Dork. But Celestia?" She closed her eyes, let those memories play across her mind. "After everything I'd been singing about her, she was graciousness incarnate. And even more than that? She said—"

Shifting left, she opened her eyes, spread out that gentle smile. "I wish more of my subjects felt free enough to lampoon me this way. Or any of my subjects, for that matter."

Back to the center, raising a hoof, pointing to the spot she'd just been standing: "You hear that? You hear what she said less than ten minutes after first meeting me?" She stepped forward, fixed her gaze on Angel's blinking eyes. "'Any of my subjects,' she said. Which meant she knew I wasn't one. And what did she do with that knowledge? What did she do?"

The answer still made her shake her head, and she flopped back to sit on the rough carpet. "She let me walk outta that meeting, let me go on tour, let me write, record, and release more songs, let me perform at one of the concerts honoring Luna when she finally got over herself and started coming out in public again! While my actual sovereign? My mother and queen who I was supposed to be smoothing the way for so she could take over?"

Sapphire sprang upright and stomped her front hooves. "The first I hear that she's attacked Canterlot and gotten herself and the hive stomped down is when I read about it in the Trottingham Gazette the morning after the second night of my four-night stand at the Civic Center Arena!" She smacked herself in the chest. "I'm her girl, her ringer, her inside agent, and I don't even get a whisper before she unleashes some half-assed invasion!"

All these years later, it still made her gut boil. "'Cause I coulda told her it wouldn't work, that the love between Candybutt and her boy toy was something too weird to mess with! I coulda brought my expertise to bear after more than two decades observing ponies! Coulda done the job I thought she wanted me to do, the job I thought she'd created me to do!" She had to stomp again. "And the worst part? You wanna know the absolute worst part?"

She pivoted to the left and forced away every trace of heat, this next set of transitions the most difficult in the entire piece. Tightening her neck and her throat and her face, she said in her Chrysalis voice, "You had become untrustworthy."

Leaping back to center, she let the heat flood her again. "That's what she said! To me! Two weeks after her failure destroyed everything I'd been setting up for twenty years! In the center of the four-acre forest I'd had planted behind my country house outside Baltimare, the place I'd bought specifically so she and I could meet and more closely coordinate our efforts!"

Another slide left, and she embraced that horrible cold haughtiness: "Look at you! Look at this place! Open your eyes, Pheropsoph, and try to tell me you haven't become more pony than changeling!"

Her twist physically was a full one hundred and eighty degrees, but emotionally, it was so much more than that. She'd felt no anger at that point, after all, hadn't felt betrayed or dismayed. Summoning that moment to memory, all she could call it was absolute, bone-deep, soul-churning confusion. "My...my queen?"

Back into Chrysalis position and mode: "Your incompetence left me no choice! I had to take matters into my own hooves, had to move more precipitously than I would've liked in order to take advantage of the Royal Wedding, a situation about which any reliable infiltrator would've informed me months ago!"

She jumped back into place as her younger self just long enough to narrow her eyes on her expression of wide-mouthed incomprehension, then she stepped into the center to fix those eyes on her audience. "And right then, right there, in the woods outside the house I'd built with the money I'd made giving ponies a way to feel rebellious against their monarch without actually being rebellious against her, the first little stirrings of rebellion started bubbling up inside my carefully disguised carapace."

Taking a breath, she pointed to the empty spot on her left, the spot where she could practically see Chrysalis standing and haranguing her. "Because right then and right there, for the first time ever, I felt something from my mother, felt something from my queen, felt the tiniest vibration of emotion trickling out from between her accusations and her disputations and her loudly expressed frustrations."

Sapphire licked her lips. "I knew the taste. Every changeling did. It was the sour taste of failure, the dusty taste of a mission gone horribly wrong, the chalky taste that usually sprang up when we stumbled, revealed ourselves, and let the truth come out."

Angel Bunny was sitting even further forward on his cushion, and the showmare in Sapphire wanted to string the moment out, add another tricolon crescendo to the string of them she'd already employed. But no. This wasn't really a show, after all. So—

"Fear," she said as simply and quietly as she could. "My mama was afraid. And not just of the ponies finding her, not just of Princess Celestia sweeping her up in whatever magical net she might've deployed, not just of having to pay the price of her own overwhelming arrogance and lack of planning." Inwardly rolling her eyes—fine: one more tricolon crescendo—Sapphire tapped her chest again. "Me. My mama was afraid of me."

She moved the hoof from her chest to her forehead. "And standing there, watching and listening to her blame me for everything she'd done wrong, I started singing. 'Cause it was the only damn thing I could do." A slip to the right brought her into the place of her younger self, her face hard and hurt, her throat tight with the tears she'd refused to shed. "There's a lesson here! You want to learn it?"

A flip this time, vaulting across the carpet to stare open-mouthed at the spot where she'd just been standing. "What?" she shouted in her Chrysalis voice. "Whelp! You dare—?"

The second flip landed her in a crouch, her lips pulled back from her teeth. "My respect's a coin! You got to earn it!"

The third flip was the hardest of all, requiring her to sail from the bunched-up crouch into a tall, lock-kneed, three-hoofed stance, her right front hoof coming up to touch her neck as she drew her head back: she couldn't even count the number of times she'd flopped herself over sideways trying to get this move down.

But practice as always paid off, and she was able to add the shock she felt on making it successfully to the shock and outrage of Chrysalis's expression. "Ignorance! Impudence! Vile, ungrateful—!"

The fourth and final flip, then, came off like a dream, Sapphire becoming herself, channeling her own rage and grief and deep, elemental sense of shame at falling for so long for this duplicity into three words, each jabbed with her hoof directly into the spot where her memory forever placed Queen Chrysalis: "Serves You Right!"

The showmare in her wished for a ton and a half of reverb to bolster the moment, but Sapphire rather liked the way the subsequent silence nearly crashed into place. Eyes closed, she let herself flow back into the center spot as languidly as smoke drifting from a snuffed candle. "My mother burst," she said, trying to slide her words in under the silence rather than push it out of the way, "shriveled into a black and green butterfly as big as a buckball, and flapped away into the trees."

Not trying to stop the shaking that quivered her legs and spine and neck, she bowed her head. "End of Act Four."

She waited the two beats before looking up. Angel had his paws clasped to his chest, his eyes more than a little wavery. But she kept her expression as blank as she could manage. All it'd take, she figured, was one little crack, and her whole facade would collapse, knocking her to the floor and leaving her a weeping, mewling mess. This was the newest part of the program, too, the part she hadn't had as many years to rehearse.

Still, the show must go on, right? Or whatever this whole thing was...

"Life was good," she said, her voice as blank as the rest of her. "My next two albums went double platinum. My next two tours sold out every venue. My face appeared every place a face could be expected to appear." She struck three quick poses—happy Sapphire, pouty Sapphire, sassy Sapphire—then went still and blank again. "I hired the Element of Generosity herself to design the costumes for both tours, something that made the former changeling infiltrator in me strut around like, well, like me, I guess..."

The drooping where she stood wasn't planned, but it worked so well, she went with it. Taking a breath, then, she straightened. "But I did see my mother alive one last time, though it wasn't before she actually took over the governments of both Equestria and the Crystal Empire." She cocked her hip and let her mouth go thin. "I'd become untrustworthy, remember? So once again, no advance warning for me."

Lowering her hindquarters to the carpet, she sat, looked past the rabbit, and unfocused her eyes. "I've tried to imagine what her plan for me might've been. I mean, she'd replaced the prince and princess up north, both princesses here, and all the Elements of Harmony, so she could've done anything she wanted." She touched her chin. "Would she have had one of her newer infiltrators cocoon me up and take my place? Maybe she would've stopped by my Baltimare house and given me a chance to crawl over, lick her hooves, and beg that she take me back."

With a puff of breath, she shook her head. "Knowing her, though, she would've marched into one of my concerts all done up as Princess Celestia, accused me of being a changeling, and had me hauled away in chains to be a distraction while she consolidated her position. But instead?" She shrugged. "As always, she got sloppy, didn't think things through, and ended up losing not only the power she'd stolen but also the power she'd been born to. With hardly a word, Thorax transformed the hive, showed 'em how love's as easy to give as to get, and took over as king."

A sassy little smile seemed right, so she let one out, touched a hoof to her chin. "I coulda told 'em that ten years ago, of course, but I don't think I'd enjoy being queen. The outfits aren't nearly fabulous enough." She shimmied to let the office's meager light sparkle across her vest and was rewarded with another squeaky peal of bunny laughter.

"But yeah, I did see her again," she said then, going completely still. "Afterwards. After the news had reported the happenings at the hive, after King Thorax had issued his call for all infiltrators still in Equestria to come home and embrace the new way, after I'd put out another album and done another tour, I drew up outside my place in Baltimare, and I could smell her, could scent something rotten-sweet and wormy in the air."

The shiver that shook her came straight from her memories. "I told the carriage ponies to leave my luggage in the front hall, sent my assistant home with instructions to sleep for a week 'cause that's what I intended to do, waited till I was sure they were all gone, then put on my best frilly hat, skirt, and vest and strolled out into my own private woods.

"Should I have called the guard? Absolutely I should've." Sapphire waved a hoof to her left, to the spot where she'd been standing during this whole monologue whenever she'd taken Chrysalis's part. "This was a hostile foreign power who'd just come within inches of taking over the country! This was an alien force powerful enough to deceive and defeat all five of the world's alicorns and their most important associates! This was a monster who'd shown time and time again that she had no compunction against using the most brutal tactics available to achieve her goals!"

Stopping, she swallowed. "This was also my mother."

Slowly, she puffed up her chest and raised her head. "So I stepped out into those shadowy woods in the gladdest of my glad rags and with no idea how any of this was likely to shake out." Ears spread, she lowered her voice. "I could feel her watching me, though, could hear a rustling in the trees, and I made my way toward the center, the circle of stones I'd had placed there when I'd still thought she and I..."

A sigh, and she closed her eyes. "Not a single bird chirped as I reached the stones, but a darker piece of shadow squeezed out from a spot across the way." She opened her eyes. "And she was standing right there."

Not an image Sapphire would ever forget. Even if she wanted to... "I'd like to say that she looked smaller, more decrepit, somehow humbler." She shook her head. "But she was the same prideful, wrathful, envious creature who'd first looked down her nose at me and my hatchmates all those years ago."

Again, she tapped her chest. "I was the one who'd changed. Stronger, steadier, more accomplished in things worth accomplishing, I looked at her looking at me this time, and...and that was it. That was the end."

She held the pose and let the silence spread out from her like a fog.

It didn't take more than a few seconds, though, for Angel to be leaping up from his cushion, his jaw working and his arms waving.

"The end," Sapphire said again, pointing a soft smile at the rabbit. "She turned around, spread her wings, changed into a dark blue pegasus, and flew away without looking back. I watched till I was sure she was gone, blotted out by the sky, then I headed for the house."

Sitting, she spread her front hooves. "She had nothing to say to me, and I had nothing to say to her. Everything I had, everything I'd learned, everything that had made me into me, the love that I felt from my fans and the love that I gave 'em in return, she couldn't understand it, wouldn't understand it. And everything she had, everything that drove her, everything that had made her into her, the love she could never feel but could only take, I couldn't understand it, wouldn't understand it. So we were done."

Her shoulders shifted with an almost audible click. "And that," she said, bowing her head, "is the end."

Author's Note:

Did I say:

One more chapter? How 'bout one more and a bit of an epilogue instead? Yes, that sounds right...

Mike

Comments

[Super Trampoline]

Congrats, you've just inspired a song from me. It's inchoate right now, but also inspired by recent events with a now ex-best friend, I think it's gonna be a good one.

[Yoshifan30]

Wow dang thats something