Up Here in the Mountains

by Shaslan

Chapter 2

Sweetie Belle lay still for a long time, just listening to Rarity’s nervous steps as she paced back and forth. But then came the knock on the cabin door, the first that Sweetie Belle had ever heard in all the time she had lived here, and she sat bolt upright. She heard the door open, some quiet words spoken. She couldn’t help herself. She slid off the bed, crept to her door, and pressed her ear up against it.

Eavesdropping was wrong, of course, but it had been so long since she’d heard anypony at all but Rarity. She just wanted to listen to another voice. And perhaps try to figure out the tantalising answer to the question of who exactly could make Rarity so nervous. A boyfriend, perhaps? An ex-boyfriend? Maybe that was the real reason she was always going to Canterlot.

Sweetie Belle’s head was so firmly pressed against the wood of her door she thought it would probably leave imprints in her fur. But try as she might, she still couldn’t make out more than a low, indistinct hum of voices. No particular words, but enough to firmly identify the stranger as female. Hmm. Not a romantic visit, then.

Sweetie Belle clenched her eyes tight shut and tried to listen harder. She imagined her ears growing and twitching, like a bat’s, but though her ears flicked in response, she couldn’t hear any more than she did before.

Slowly, cautiously, she raised her hoof to the doorknob. Rarity might be annoyed, but Sweetie Belle didn’t care. She needed this. She had been starved of entertainment, any entertainment, for months. Rarity would just have to exercise her famous generosity and be forgiving.

Sweetie Belle cautiously eased the door open and poked her nose outside. The short corridor from her room to the living room was empty, and she could hear the conversation more clearly already.

“But darling,” Rarity was saying, her voice curiously tight with emotion, “Why are you here? After all this time? I don’t understand.”

Walking on the very tips of her hooves, Sweetie Belle reached the corner of the corridor and peeped around it. The stranger was sitting on the settee with her back to Sweetie, and Rarity sat in the armchair opposite.

The stranger’s hood was still covering her head, but her voice, when she spoke, was somehow familiar. “I’ve come to ask you to come home, Rarity.” The timbre of her voice was rich and melodious, and Sweetie could have sworn she’d heard it somewhere before.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, darling,” Rarity replied, her hoof tensing on the arm of her chair. “I am at home.”

“Rarity,” the stranger leaned forward, her voice deepening in sympathy.

Rarity’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Oh, I have missed you.”

“I missed you too, Rarity.”

Sweetie Belle wished she could somehow get a better angle. She was dying to see who this mare was, who seemed to know Rarity so well. Perhaps she could creep a little closer?

She crouched low to the floor so that the bulk of the sofa would hide her from Rarity’s gaze, and edged her way to the left. She inched towards the back of the settee, craning her neck all the while to try and see what lay beneath that purple hood. It had to be someone from Ponyville, right? Who else would know Rarity so intimately? But it certainly wasn’t one of the other Elements, and Sweetie thought she would have been able to identify most ponies she knew immediately. Besides, they hadn’t left Ponyville on bad terms with anyone. No, it was more likely to be one of Rarity’s contacts from the fashion industry. From the tales she told, it seemed like there was plenty of bad blood there.

The purple-robed figure leaned forward to reach for a teacup, and a white hoof protruded from the cape to scoop it up. Watching the hoof avidly, Sweetie Belle put her own hoof down on the floor just a little too hard, and the resulting muffled thud caused both adults to jump.

Rarity leapt to her feet and her eyes widened as she saw Sweetie Belle hunched on the ground. The stranger turned too, following Rarity’s eyes, and her hood fell back from her face at last.

Sweetie Belle froze.

Heart pounding, she stared up at the pony before her, too stunned for a moment to even attempt to move. The newcomer gazed down at her with the same eyes that Sweetie Belle saw every time she looked into a mirror; pale green irises flecked with points of deep emerald. The stranger’s fur was the same silky white as Rarity’s and Sweetie Belle’s own, and across her forehead fell the familiar pink and purple curls.

It was like looking at her reflection. Her own enormous, aged-almost-beyond-recognition reflection.

The stranger gaped in horror.

Sweetie Belle scrambled to understand. Who could this be? A distant relative, perhaps? Somepony with enough shared genetics to bear a passing resemblance to her — okay, more than passing — but that she’d somehow never heard mentioned. A long lost aunt, or a cousin.

The stranger’s wide white eyes narrowed at last and her expression turned hard. “Rarity,” she said, and her voice was like iron, “You promised me you’d stopped all this.”

As though wakened from her frozen state by the words, Rarity surged into movement once more. She darted around the sofa and bundled Sweetie Belle back towards her room. “Come on, darling, back you go! I thought I told you to wait for me while I worked this out!”

Sweetie Belle’s eyes stayed locked on the stranger. “But I—” She couldn’t find the words. What was happening? She felt lost. Swimming in a sea of uncertainties. At least Rarity’s firm grip on her shoulders was something familiar, something known.

“Rarity!” The stranger’s voice was strident.

“I won’t hear it!” Rarity protested, still trying to herd Sweetie Belle. “It’s harmless enough!”

“No, it’s not,” the stranger insisted, her brows pulling low in an expression so familiar that Sweetie Belle’s stomach twisted. This couldn’t be…it couldn’t somehow be her, could it?

The stranger’s voice was rising now. “It’s sick! You’re sick! You swore last time was the end!”

Rarity’s grip on Sweetie Belle tightened and she almost lifted her bodily. “It’s not like you can stop me,” she snarled. “You’re never here.”

The stranger’s hoof slammed down onto the wood hard enough to make them all flinch. “Nopony is here, Rarity! You won’t let them be! You left us all to go and live in the wilderness with…” her eyes flickered to Sweetie Belle, who instinctively cringed away, “…with this thing!”

“I left you?” Rarity shrieked, her voice louder now than the stranger’s. “What choice did you give me?”

Tears were suddenly spilling down the stranger’s cheeks. “You didn’t have to do this,” she wept.

“Come on, Sweetie Belle!” Rarity gave another savage yank to Sweetie Belle’s neck, and Sweetie finally stumbled to her hooves.

“Rarity!” cried the stranger from behind them, her voice hitching in a horribly familiar way. “It’s not like I died!”

Rarity shoved Sweetie Belle away from her, down the corridor towards her room, and Sweetie Belle cried out as she pitched forward onto her face. Half-sobbing, she turned back in confusion to see her sister, always so calm and full of grace and poise, advancing on this horrible funhouse mirror reflection, screaming into its face like a banshee. “You might as well have! You changed! You left me! What was I to do but try to pick up the pieces? Twilight gave me a gift!” Her voice was climbing. “It’s nothing to do with you, Sweetie Belle!”

Sweetie Belle’s world splintered beneath her like ice on a frozen lake. Her sister, her own big sister Rarity, addressing this — this changeling with her own name.

The stranger whirled away from Rarity, her hoof pressed to her mouth, and the movement finally disturbed her cloak enough to reveal it. Her cutie mark. A striped pink-and-purple shield with a musical note in the centre. The fragile ice Sweetie Belle stood on cracked and gaped open, and Sweetie Belle tumbled down into the void.

“Rarity!” She cried out, reaching with a shaking hoof for her sister, her solace, her one companion. “I don’t understand—”

“Sweetie Belle!” Rarity howled, half-screaming, and to Sweetie’s horror, Rarity still wasn’t speaking to her. “Don’t go!”

Sweetie Belle, not knowing how she did it, staggered after them. “Rarity, Rarity, please—”

Rarity caught at the stranger’s cloak with her teeth. “Stop!” she demanded, and the stranger did, shaking all over.

“Look what you’ve done!” Rarity flung out a hoof to point at Sweetie Belle, who stood trembling, her ears flat to her head as she stared up at her big sister, the focal point of her world.

“I had it all so ordered, so — so organised, and you—” But the stranger didn’t let Rarity finish her sentence.

“You did it!” The stranger — Sweetie Belle — cried, whirling on Rarity once more. “You always do it! And then you just wipe her and it begins again! Ten years you’ve wasted on this insanity, Rarity!” She stopped, her shoulders heaving, and raised a foreleg to her eyes. “And the whole time, you’ve had a real sister, waiting and waiting and waiting for you to come home. Your real home, in Ponyville.”

Rarity laughed mirthlessly. “Waiting for me? You never have any time for me. You ignored me and abandoned me the second you were old enough. Why do you think I asked Twilight for my little sister back?”

Sweetie Belle kept moving, putting one trembling leg before the other, trying to reach the end of this suddenly endless corridor, where her sister waited, where surely everything would be alright again. If she could only get there before this storm of words ripped more of her world to shreds—

The false Sweetie Belle clawed a hoof through her hair, her eyes wild. “I don’t know why she listened to you, she’s meant to be our Princess — she’s meant to make wise decisions—”

“She’s my friend, she understands—”

“She’s scared for you, we all are. You have so many ponies who love you, but you choose to waste your life out here in the middle of nowhere, perpetuating an illusion for the sake of an object—”

They were talking about her, Sweetie realised distantly, and finally she found her voice. “I’m — I’m not an object. I’m a person. A pony.” She crept at last to Rarity’s side, and leaned against her, hoping against hope for comfort.

Rarity froze, and then rushed to embrace her. “Of course you are!”

The stranger looked down at her with only pity in her eyes. “You’re a mask, little one. An empty mask with nothing inside.”

“N-no,” Sweetie’s voice trembled. “I’m not. I’m real. I know I am.”

“You’re a facsimile of me,” the older pony whispered, walking a little closer. “Trapped here by my sister’s madness.”

“I’m not—” Sweetie Belle whimpered, but Rarity shoved past her again.

“Madness! How dare you? It was you that left me!”

“I went to college, Rarity! Every teenager does!”

“You left me and you never came back!” Rarity’s voice was a high wail of despair.

Sweetie Belle clung to Rarity’s tail, still hoping for some sort of breakthrough, some way to make sense of all this. “Rarity, please, I don’t understand who she is — let’s just go home, let’s go home to Ponyville— I want to see Apple Bloom and Scootaloo —”

Tears spilled down the stranger’s cheeks. “I so hoped that you’d moved beyond this, that you’d changed, Rarity.”

“I want to see Apple Bloom and Scootaloo!” Sweetie Belle gasped, desperate now. The lack of letters, the unending days alone, only her and Rarity — it couldn’t be true. She remembered Ponyville. She had a home there. Ponies who loved her. If she could only see them, hold them, she would know everything the stranger had said was lies. She would be sure of herself again. She just had to see her friends.

The stranger knelt down to her, and more tears crept after the others, dripping from her chin. “I see them every day. We work together, teaching at Princess Twilight’s school.”

“What? No — I — no—” Sweetie Bell stuttered. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo were her age, not adults.

The pity in the false pony’s eyes was endless. “I’m so sorry, little one.”

“No,” Sweetie Belle’s words returned to her and she spoke again, stronger now. “No. They wouldn’t have grown up without me. We— we were meant to do it together.”

The stranger shook her head once more. “We did grow up together.” She looked back to Rarity, and her face twisted in pain. “I…I can see that you haven’t changed at all. I don’t…I don’t know why I even came.”

The door banged shut behind her, and Rarity ripped herself away from Sweetie Belle’s clinging hooves and galloped after her.

“Don’t go! Not again, Sweetie Belle, please, just stay with me. Stay the night, just a few hours! Don’t go!”

“Sweetie Belle! Sweetie Belle!” Her sister’s screams echoed down the mountainside, and Sweetie Belle collapsed to the floor and wept, because the name her sister called was not her own.