Together Alone

by scifipony

Together Alone

Unconsciousness is weird. Do you remember the moment you fall asleep? Do you know what makes you fall asleep the instant you think it? I'm convinced it's an off switch, never in reach when you need it. Tink. Off. Then, save for a dream that might interrupt, suddenly tink you're awake again.

I thought it a dream, that floating sensation. The sound of water lapping gently against something unseen. I felt like lead... yet, buoyant like a ship. Hot. Achy. In increasing increments, miserable.

I heard a splash.

Water dripped, then touched my forehead. It trickled from the base of my horn between my eyes before the rivulet chose right and streamed off my muzzle to pitter into the water my chin lay in.

Another splash. More water trickling. It felt hot.

Water lapped against my chest, my back. I was propped against something wooden. My rear quarters were submerged, but all four of my hooves were up?

"Wha—" I tried to say, but a loud moan escaped instead to fill a compact enclosed echoey space. The vocalizing, a honk really, made me realize my nose was stuffed and not wet just from water. That got me thinking. My forelegs struck a wood edge on both sides with a bang. I worked to open my eyes.

"Relax, Starlight."

A large hoof against my sternum pushed me back and troubled water made waves. I fought. Long ago now, a monster had forced me against my will and I reacted reflexively.

"Starlight— Please. Let me take care of you."

Shocked by recognition, I hit the back of my head pushing back. Water splashed into my ears.

One, I'd requested quarantine. Two... "Double Diamond!?"

"A pony can only bear so much burden, Starlight. I am your friend, let me—"

"What I am is sick." I coughed, and coughed, emphasizing the point. I struggled to see, but as I levered my eyes open, bluish light smeared across my vision around a blurred silhouette.

His hoof pressed against my chest again. "I know, Starlight."

"I thought you could read." I blinked furiously, breathing hard because even trying to move my legs was more effort than I could put out. I heard a crackle, but my swiveling ears couldn't locate the source.

"Now is not the time to be mean, Starlight. Of course I read your note, but you had left your door open a crack and I could see you sprawled unconscious on the floor, your horn glowing in a way that didn't look right. I would never abandon you."

Like my friend Sunburst? "Don't make promises you won't keep."

When I could pick up the thread again, I found Double Diamond filling a tea cup with water from the tub and spilling it along my horn. My "bath" room, which everypony shared when they needed it, featured a wooden slipper tub the dozen of us had built with adz, axe, pine tar, and magic last spring. I realized that the water wasn't warm. He had taken it from the rain barrel reserve in my cellar and it was as a result arguably cold, but I couldn't tell. My lack of energy and jittery muscles confirmed that my fever had conquered me and he was trying to lower it.

Sun beamed down through the window. Noon. I'd been out for hours.

When I focused on the former athlete, I noticed his big blue eyes, his fuzzy chin, and his shaggy white faintly blue bangs. His frown transformed into a wide smile. He filled the tea cup again.

"Starlight—"

I managed to block the cup with a hoof. My horn took that instant to fizzle loudly. The aura around it guttered like a candle flame, threatening to go out. My already pounding heart fluttered faster as a couple of sparks arced down to sizzle out in the water. "It's not too late! Go. You're an earth pony. You might not be infected, yet. Save your—"

The dropped tea cup plinked into the water and bounced off my hip.

He reached up for my horn, pressing it with the pink frog of his hoof while he craned his neck forward. His lips meet mine in a kiss that both surprised me and took what little breath remaining-me away. My body relaxed my jaw on its own volition. He held my horn and the kiss—for what felt like a second going on a minute—then let his hoof slip beyond my horn down to my back. He brought my weakened body up so he could cradle it against his. He let go of the deep kiss to hug me more fully, though that put him part way in the tub.

In his very patient slow voice, he said, "You need to understand what friendship means to me, Starlight. You found a ski bum in the Lesser Andirons as he galloped off a cliff edge. He had sabotaged competitors' equipment and had cheated on the race course, been found out, and been banned from the sport for three years. An eternity to him. He had made a cairn of the ski equipment that had tortured him—a memorial. He plummeted into a deep snow valley when you caught him in your magic.

"You know this Starlight."

I did, but I gasped anyway, no strength left to push myself out of his gasp.

"You taught me that my Cutie Mark had made me insane when I lacked the talent to win the biggest prize. You used Meadowbrook's staff. You cured me. Come the end of winter, you'll have given me an additional two years of life I was never destined to live. Saving you is how I wish to spend it.

"No regrets, Starlight. None. You were dying. Can you understand that much?"

I was crying, but my face was wet already and my nose was running; his embrace saved me from embarrassment of noticeably sniveling. I whispered, "I did not ask."

He could not avoid infection now. What a way of making that point!

"You never do, Starlight. And now that you are stronger..."

He lay me gently back into the tub as if I were a large ragdoll. He reached onto the floor and came back with a tea pot held up with a hoof, with the other hooked in the handle. "Party Favor pitched the herbs through the window. It's elderflower, catnip, and white willow. Probably bitter as a griffin's smile, but we really need to get that fever down."

He maneuvered the spout to my lips. The lukewarm tea found my mouth parched and my throat on fire, but it went down. I could not have handled a cup at all or more than a spoonful at a time. Were it bitter, my tastebuds couldn't register it.

"Thank you for not fighting me," he said afterwards as I found myself dozing in the water. The direction of the light had changed again, and the water now did feel cold. I ached more, but didn't feel like I was laboring just to keep my heart beating. I had been babbling, and was aware of him talking to me.

I remembered him asking, "Who's Aurora Midnight?"

The consciousness switch toggled again. Tink.

#

The next hours or days passed as a pastiche of sensations. I awoke in my bed, and not alone. Gravity had increased by a factor of five and I couldn't move.

A pair of hooves touched my withers, then clamping my right foreleg rubbed along the muscles, kneading gently up to the joint. Then again. And again. Then the lower leg. Repeat. Rear legs... Flank... Back...

It hurt.

All my muscles hurt, so more pain didn't matter much.

I'd been pummeled good and hard by Raging Minotaur when I'd been a prize fighter in Baltimare. I'd won by a K.O., having gotten the brick-red earth pony to trip before landing a kick that threw him down head first. My body aches mirrored that beating.

It surprised me that Double Diamond massaged me, but not that he had thought it therapeutic. He was an athlete and athletes were massaged—a lot. And, once upon a time in Canterlot, I'd massaged my roommate, Sunset, to relieve her nettle-ewe withdrawal symptoms.

I did think it rude and presumptive of him. Not that I had the strength to complain.

After some grumbling and moaning, I relaxed and decided I liked it—then promptly fell asleep.

I remembered him feeding me spoons of porridge like an infant foal, telling me I had lost too much weight. I needed to get my strength up. That big infectious grin of his! I sat propped in bed with crunchy hop pillows. He waved the silver spoon around to get my eyes to follow, to get me to forget about my mouth so it opened.

I dreamed of the onions, wilted borage, and dandelion blooms in the gritty hominy. Sweet butter lingered until I awoke and the flavor stayed in my mind.

I pushed off the covers. All of them, the comforter and the spred, and, as I blinked into the darkness lit by the moon streaming in, the drapes he used a further blankets. They had baked me and I felt golden brown and crusty.

I wasn't alone. I realized a foreleg lay draped over my chest and a rear leg around my hock.

I remembered shivering, teeth chattering, and crying. As the butter flavor of the dream dissipated, I remembered him adding his own warmth to help to the pile of fabric to help with my chills.

I heard him breathing, slowly. My ears swiveled toward him. Something else...

I found I had the strength to turn over. I paused, then lay my face and ear between his forelegs.

Rumbling. I'd heard wheezing.

I noticed the perspiration that slickened my fur. I, on the other hoof, breathed freely. The aches remained, but felt more like a healing bruise. It felt like my flu had broken.

I cast Illuminate and set the ceiling aglow with a marine blue-green color.

I pulled away, but it didn't wake him. I swiftly sat up, brightening the light. One might think that white ponies were pale by nature, but many had dark skins. Double Diamond had pink skin, and when I blew some hairs aside, I saw my first thought was right. He was pale verging on gray.

I felt his forehead.

Fever... Warm like a mug of hot cocoa left sitting ten minutes. Not raging like mine had been. I shook him, but he was so limp, I mostly shook the bed as he moaned. My hackles rose. I shivered with the sense of prophesy come true.

I sighed and hung my head in resignation. I'd warned him. I didn't trust the term friend, but I knew a good pony when I met one. I hoped I would learn something by this experience.

My turn playing nurse.

#

The scintillating blue-white net of thread engulfed by a thin luminous fog stretched as far as I could see, when I finally noticed it. Like a railroad, it criss-crossed the landscape. And, like for a railroad, I hadn't immediately seen it underneath me. It provided transportation through unknown lands. I had found the pathways of magic through Double Diamond's body.

I'd earned my cutie mark the day I realized how these unique energies connected a cutie mark, an organ composed solely of magic, to the physical pony. I had first used the knowledge to cripple a criminal. I had derived its functioning from the fundamentals of a dangerous healing spell I'd incidentally learned from Celestia's royal physician.

The healing spell was dangerous because it transferred your consciousness inside another pony. I knew fascination could leave an unwary healer stranded inside, were there no pony around to wake him from having been enchanted.

Horn Reaper acted like a pneumonia. The magic-hybrid bug triggered his magically-enhanced earth pony muscles to constrict around the air sacs of his lungs. I spoke softly into the glowing fleshy landscape of spheres and tubes I found myself in. I even sung and cajoled until new pale yellow liquids began to seep around the dense peppering of mauve rhombicosidodecahedral germs his body had previously ignored. I watched them dissolve. I watched it all.

Seeing magic pulse through the body of an earth pony, captured like a sail from an ambient wind of the stuff, was fascinating.

Before making the effort, I'd watched Double Diamond refuse to wake despite my shaking and striking him. I'd noticed muscles lock and shiver, and it hadn't been the paralysis of sleep. His eyes hadn't moved under his eyelids, and his sleep hadn't looked right, regardless. For all Party Favor's hobby knowledge of herbs, he proved he was no healer. No pony I'd shouted to from the second story window had been able to help me.

I had given him 21 months of extra life after he'd thrown his away. He had made a choice to throw his life away, again. For my sake.

It took five minutes of "Should I help?" and "What if I failed?" for me to act.

I forgot all my worries and the danger in the face of Barthemule's transformed spell and pretty sparkly lights. In the final analysis, like Sunburst, I was a magic nerd. I had run away from home to learn magic. Ultimately, it was what I held dear—my cutie mark magic like Sunburst—that betrayed me.

#

Volcanic pain and electric-blue phosphenes, bouncing around like glowing glass marbles behind my eyes, woke me. I even heard that coconut sound you don't want to hear from the inside. Adrenaline fueled lightning-fast reactions allowed me to catch Double Diamond's stone-white forehoof between my knees before he struck me again in the forehead. An instant later, I rolled out of bed and stood rubbing what would surely purple into a shiner over my left eye and a bruise above eyebrow.

The scent of urine made my nose wrinkle. A day had surely passed with his nurse out of commission. Yet, his chest rose and fell normally. His prancing about in some errant dream had translated into my wake-up call. He jerked as I watched; his eyelids fluttered. That was a fair warning if I decided to sleep with the stallion in the future.

I sat, letting my hooves go to my mouth. I shook my head.

As I worked, I reflected that unicorns made the best nurses because I could lift him, clean him up, change the sheets, and later wash the bed clothes without touching anything noisome. Or waking my patient.

When I had some warm tea swishing in the teapot I floated beside me, and the drapes open to let in the light of a cloudy day, I tried waking him. He remained delirious, but took tea and later broth when I put the spout in his mouth.

The next morning dawned to dark clouds and snow flurries swirling against the windows and melting. Still, he slept. Encouraged by the lowering of his fever overnight, I took the time to cook corn porridge with mashed vegetables for the both of us, and to bring it up and place it on the nightstand.

Double Diamond's stomach made a gurgling sound. He lay on his back...

Looking at me.

He said, "I could smell that from downstairs."

As recently as midnight, he'd been as far away as Tartarus and his disturbed expressions and persistent unconsciousness proved it. Seeing his blue eyes flash at me now and his grin grow wide, I felt oddly as if I were seeing a ghost.

Or that he had been replaced by a changeling.

I jumped up on the bed and looked down into his face, blinking. Changeling? No. I touched his forehead, puzzled, but felt no fever.

I asked, "Are you feeling all right?"

He smiled. "I am a bit hungry. Truthfully, I am very hungry. Thank you for taking care of me, Starlight."

I found myself shaking. It was him. Somewhere, inside, I'd distrusted all that I'd done inside him so thoroughly, I hadn't expected him to recover. Getting literally kicked out of him was an important indicator. Neither a fan of luck nor fate, in his continued non-responsiveness, I'd nonetheless begun to think I'd acted rashly or too late, or that his additional twenty-one months were all he'd been destined.

I had been wrong.

I sat down. On him.

"Um... Starlight."

"Right. Hungry!" I grabbed a spoon of the golden porridge in my magic, but saw it steaming before I could shove it into his surprised open mouth. I huffed on it, filling the air with the steamy smells of corn, squash, and wilted spinach, and butter. And garlic. Party Favor had insisted garlic was good for sweating out colds. "Here!"

"I—" he said, and I pushed the spoon in. "Mumble-Mumble."

Cooling the next spoonful as he chewed, I asked, "Is it good?"

I popped it in the moment he swallowed and opened his mouth, getting more mumbles, nods, and a tiny sense of amusement to wear away at the overwhelming fear that had grown in me.

I liked it when I was in control and hated it when I wasn't, and that was the most of the discomfort. Only he could heal himself. Stuff I couldn't control.

I kept feeding him.

I also liked it when Double Diamond cared about me, and when he had cared for me. Nopony had done that for me after my parents had disappeared, presumed dead, when I was a filly—not really. Even when my Father had returned, he'd rubbed me wrong. He'd treated me like the filly he'd known, not the mare I'd become.

He'd infantilized me.

I had, of course, not told him about the attack by a monster that had taught me I could fight, me becoming a prize fighter, my having to deal with gang stallions in the basest of ways, becoming a bodyguard and later an enforcer, and eventually dissing Princess Celestia so badly that she didn't raise the sun for half a day.

I couldn't tell him.

He was my father, and that did mean something deep in that part of who I was—that part that knew I would disappoint him. Maybe I'd disappointed myself.

On the other hoof, there was Double Diamond. He did care. His actions of the past days, his support during our year plus together, and the pitter-pat of my heart insisted it was so.

I remembered a kiss.

"Empty spoon."

I shook my head, startled. "What?"

A hoof came up. The spoon clicked as he tapped it, floating in a green nebula midair. "Starlight. Your spoon is empty."

I felt my eyes cross as I looked at the utensil as if the corn porridge had teleported silently away. Bowl. Indeed empty. "Oh."

"I'm still hungry."

"Me, too," came from my mouth. To say unbidden would have been a lie.

"I'm really feeling pretty strong—"

"That's good."

"—and I could get up—"

"That'd be real nice."

"—and make my own—"

He moved his hips under mine. Though he obviously meant to encourage me to exit the bed, it pulled the final latch and unfettered my subconscious restraint.

The spoon clattered to the floor as I leaned forward and kissed him.

He paused, but didn't tense. He didn't pull away, but leaned upward into it with wet passion. I felt his forelegs wrap around my withers and pull me in as his body reacted underneath me.

It was fortunate that he was "really feeling pretty strong." Earth pony magic; it's amazing.

#

There's this romance novel cliché that always finds the amorous couple on floor in a pile of sheets. Once, I'd laughed because I'd read it so many times before.

But here we were, side by side.

In a pile of of sweaty sheets.

On the floor.

Together.

I lay on my back and rubbed a front leg across the yellow wood floor, uneven for the dark knots and hard to wear down growth rings. I remembered working with Double Diamond and the others, using my magic to sand the pine planks split and shaped for me. Together, we'd nailed the floor boards and used egg varnish to preserve them. Hooves and magic had built this house and the cottages.

A sun shined down through the windows in small pools of brightness, past the snow piled up against the window panes. The fire in the stone fireplace had burnt out, but the heat of the coals and that of our own exertions kept the air warm. I couldn't miss his scent. I smelled the lavender soap I'd washed him with. Pony sweat overlaid that, but his was different than mine, unique, nice... it smelled like, hard to touch a hoof to it. Tantalizing. My nostrils widened on their own as I tried to pin it down. Fascinating. I could think about it on and on. Faintly of albumin and maleness. Definitely animal, but in a good way.

I'd never noticed that of my other stallions, especially not my first. The monster I'd vanquished had attacked me in a thunderstorm. All I remembered was the smell of electricity and afterward searching for a healer to learn the magic so I didn't foal. My other encounters were planned to manipulate the manipulators to get what I wanted. It certainly was nothing like what Double Diamond gave. And none had smelled fascinating.

This place I'd helped build felt more like home than the mansion I'd run away from, or the fancy loft apartment I'd bought in the patrician neighborhood of Inner Harbor in Baltimare. Sunset's Canterlot ivory tower had never felt like home.

Maybe home had something to do with who was there with you.

Double Diamond's faint snoring stopped beside me and he snorted awake. He chuckled with his head pointed away from me. "Still here, Starlight?"

I replied, "Still here."

Now he looked at me, blue eyes sparkling in the sunlight still streaming in from the break in the clouds. He smiled, which struck me as much more relaxed than his usual grin. I thought maybe he might kiss me and we'd start all over again, which made my heart race, but he began wiggling and scootching around until his head faced my flank. This gave me a good view of his muscular hindquarters, which was a nice consolation prize in itself, but also his cutie mark root.

The magic organ grew in the hip of a pony as they matured, branching out to manifest itself as a conceptual image on the surface when a certain brain body connection was made. My cutie mark talent was manipulating cutie mark magic, and that's how I figured out I could pull part of the apparition free. That left the root I studied now on Double Diamond's flank. The root presented a contagious-magic affinity for what I called the projection ganglion I kept isolated in a jar. It looked like two bars at a distance, but now that Double Diamond's coat was a hoof-length from my nose, I could see it was composed of two rectangular clusters of coin-like circles that colored his fur a scabby red-brown.

I averted my gaze. I knew that relieving a pony of a cutie mark cured all sort of insanity, like his suicidal thoughts. Its controlling manifestations were the root of all evil. Still, while I knew I had the right of it, it was a new science. I suddenly cared that I might be wrong somewhere in my train of thinking on the subject.

Double Diamond said, "Aurora Midnight." It was a statement, not a question.

I looked toward my rear to see him studying my cutie mark. After a moment, he stuck out a pink tongue and traced the green vertical wisps. I giggled despite myself, and squirmed a bit because the tickling sensation also felt really good. He traced the doubled four-pointed star, too. If my fur were black like my mother's, the twin auroras would "shine" in a midnight sky with the star.

Mom's name had been Midnight. Wanna guess what she named me?

I inhaled deeply when he paused. I had babbled the name when I was in the bathtub, feverish.

"She's some pony from another life. They raised her to care for the ponies of towns and farming villages. They were supposed to teach her to fight with magic for her pony nation as one of the sharp hooves of the nation's princess, to be a hero like her parents, but they never did. Not something you teach a lady, their favorite excuse. Life, and then friendship, betrayed her. Nopony cared a wit for her heart, so she ran away. She doesn't exist anymore."

I was blinking, as if that could distribute the tears so they couldn't drip. I inhaled and held my breath, trying to convince my eyes to stop burning.

I felt Double Diamond's breath against my flank as he contemplated my cutie mark. The warm gusts rustled the short hairs. By stages, the new sensation turned into a feeling of closeness, that somepony was there, there for me. As his breaths continued, they turned to hope and delight. He was alive. I huffed, tears drying up. He was very alive.

I began wondering about the meaning of the word, intimacy.

"Starlight?"

The clouds took that moment to grab away the comforting sunlight, replacing it with a dim blue glow. It grayed the browns, reds, and golds of the round sandstone river plates we'd mortared to form the room's stone walls, and extinguished the sparkle of the quartz in each.

I asked, "Yes?", hopeful it wasn't an omen.

"I talked with Night Glider and Free Mane when you were gone—"

I let out a disappointed nicker straight out of my subconscious, then thought of it as an animal sound. Having once been taught the fundamentals of managing tenant farms, the me that no longer existed had thought her knowledge of breeding livestock applied to ponies, too. My subsequent experiences with stallions had completely confirmed there was nothing more to it other than to wonder why romance stories unanimously expressed a different opinion on the subject. Money, I supposed. I had grown not to care or pursue.

But it was animal, what had happened, and Double Diamond proved it.

As a young mare, I'd spent my time around criminals, wielding my ethics and magic to stay above the worst of it, until the post office and surrounding blocks in Manehatten blazed with fire and, a year later, I'd crushed the princess' desires so thoroughly she'd refused to raise the sun. As a young stallion, Double Diamond had traveled the world, finding winter wherever he went, competing as his cutie mark urged him. As a year-around ski bum, he'd met plenty of ski bunnies. (Animal. Diminutive.) He'd learned what to do, and not in the backdrop of fear and striving I'd dealt with, but with calm and casualness that translated into the intensity of his grin and the passion he poured into building our little village, loving, and saving a unicorn that by rights ought now be dead.

We were not the same.

I felt myself cool as if I sensed a nasty Windigo-fomented storm approaching. Yes. That had been a soul-deep nicker of disappointment.

He wriggled again, sliding closer until the sheets piled up between us at my chest and my cheek lay against his thigh and my nose touched his cutie mark root. I immediately felt his warmth, and the prickliness of his white fur, and his jaw against my flank. He was a bigger pony than I.

He rubbed his cheek against my cutie mark. "It's important."

"Free Mane and...?"

"Night Glider told me about Chamomile, a friend she knows. She is as unhappy with her life as Night Glider had been before you liberated her from her cutie mark."

Night Glider had been talented at soaring, but it wasn't a talent that could get her into the Wonderbolts, especially because she excelled only at night. She had lived with Wind Rider for a time, and he'd at least mentored her for awhile, but in the end he'd left her soured and alone.

"Chamomile. Something to do with tiny daisy-like flowers?"

"Her talent is raising them, and making the 'most excellent teas.'"

"And not much else?"

"Not even other herb teas. She's not good at raising any other plant for that matter. She sorts potatoes in season and does construction when she can get the jobs, but complains her talent leaves her distracted and longing for the scent of something that doesn't bloom just part of the year.

"Between the two mares, I've learned of many ponies who could benefit from what we've built here, Starlight. Cutie marks are a curse. Night Glider has given me an address and said she will write a letter to introduce you. Free Mane, too. Since we've come to an understanding with the deer and moose that share our valley and they don't wreck our crops any more, and our harvest proved pretty good, I think we can attract more ponies here. It's your dream, Starlight. I think we can get fifty by the end of summer, if we try."

It was my dream. But it wasn't what was on my mind at the moment, even if it was on his.

"Starlight?" he said when I didn't respond.

"Yes."

"We talked about your cutie mark."

The green auroras and the purple on white star. He probably had with Night Glider and the other ponies, but he meant the two of us, and we had. "Hmmm?"

"You told me the day you found me that it was curse, even to you. You told me that some day, you'd use the Meadowbrook's Staff of Sameness to remove yours, too." I felt his breath against my legs and thighs as his voice ramped up in fervor. "To make this work. To grow our town so our community of equality can become truly viable, to become equal, you need to remove your cutie mark, Starlight..."

I found myself holding my breath. Don't say it.

He did: "Promise me, Starlight."

"I will," I lied without hesitation.

I'd lied about the staff. I'd found him on the mountain. What he'd attempted had scared him, and with the desolate whistle of the blowing snow in our ears, under the ugly dark clouds that raced overhead, he'd looked ready to bolt when I told him what I could do. I'd had the branch in my cart, and plenty of smaller broken sticks and kindling as firewood. Brandishing an "ancient relic" hallowed what I'd proposed, and I'd added a calming ritual I'd made up on the spot, pulling from a superstitious spooky story I'd read one Nightmare Night as a filly. I'd done it.

I'd done what I'd done the night long ago when I'd earned my cutie mark. I'd arranged with the Canterlot constabulary for them to show up when a crime boss I'd been blackmailed into working for threatened Sunset Shimmer. A sting operation, they called it. But, his talent...! A spilled beer cutie mark. He could drunken any pony and make them do what he suggested. He made the constables fight one-another.

His cutie mark made it possible.

I ripped it from his hide and experienced the revelation of my life.

So, too, had I taken Double Diamond's.

I huffed at the thought. The taking from the crime boss, Running Mead, had knocked him down. Writhing with pain, he'd struck his head against a wall, and left himself addled, allowing the constables to recover their wits.

Double Diamond though...

His pain had shown in gritted teeth transformed to epiphany as he felt his body react to the loss. His pain turned to a grin of realization. It was hard to miss his laughter as I heard one pain drown another—while I dumped my dill pickles in the bed of my wagon to free their screw-top jar.

I'd done the deed. Twice, then, at that time. Twice, each time to eradicate a curse.

And, I had lied.

The forked branch wasn't a magical object. It was tool I had used to pry up rocks and to prop up a canvas for a tent. Considering how cold the winter was proving to be, it would have eventually been tinder for a campfire.

But his words, now. His request, now. They caught me in the lie. It left me with a circular logical paradox. I needed my cutie mark magic to remove my cutie mark, but then I wouldn't be able to sustain the spell and it would reroot itself.

I had never tried. I'd never found the courage to try, even those days after I'd fled Canterlot and the princess' wrath after I'd ripped my first cutie mark free, for an arguably good reason, when my heart had insisted I should perform the deed upon myself.

Regardless.

I knew magic. I felt confident of the result.

Failure.

I couldn't tell him that. Not any of that. Nothing I could say would help.

Well. All friendships... weren't.

Especially if a cutie mark came between. Like between me and Sunburst, and now between Double Diamond and me.

I took a deep breath and said, "I promise."

I was a good enough actress, after all these years hiding my true identity, that the pronouncement that echoed in our shelter from the snowy weather sounded true and happy.

I added, "This spring."

I'd lived for years as a blank flank, during my years as runaway, a grocery clerk, a prize fighter, a bodyguard for the Carne Asada Syndicate, a half-semester at Celestia's school while serving as an enforcer for Running Mead—until I'd earned my own cutie mark at sixteen. Blank flanks looked like fillies, not mares. I'd gotten good at makeup, and afixing the counterfeits I'd created so they didn't flake off or sweat off. Lacquer hairspray worked miracles. I would wear clothes on days that threatened rain.

I now owned a taupe mackintosh.

Sadly, I wouldn't be able to let Double Diamond live with me. We could be together, alone. Sure, darkness did hide many things, but morning always dawned bright and warm. Probably for the best, considering he kicked in his dreams. Sunset, for all her tendency to sometimes whimper in her sleep and her need to be held to quiet her, had been plenty nicer to sleep with.

Another deception.

Another sacrifice to achieve my dreams.

With my cutie mark, I would make the world a better place to live. Without cutie marks, perhaps friendship did exist. It never would for me.

"Starlight?"

"What?"

"I can't tell you, Starlight, how much of a relief hearing you say that is. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Really?" he asked. "Welcome, am I?" I could hear the relief in the sudden wheedling playfulness in his voice. I imagined his grin, or maybe his newly presented smile, grow. I felt his chest expand and his warmth on my skin, and felt myself growing warm. My heart beat faster.

He rolled over toward me and my worries vanished again.

Author's Note:

Please feel free to comment. No better moment to up vote than now!

There are more stories in the Enforcerverse. I hope to release a novel prequel to The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers in a few months titled The Runaway Bodyguard. References to her being a prize fighter in Baltimare come from the already completed chapters.

Btw, if you don’t mind reading a stricly R-rated M-tagged story, my other Starlight X Double Diamond story is The Double Diamond Affair. You will have to turn on Settings > View Mature, first. It takes place after Starlight’s reform, when she’s still worried that her former citizenry might hate dislike her.