Eventide, Evenfall

by Former Unicorn

Introspection

Never before in her life had Sunset Shimmer hated herself.

She hated black dresses. She hated looking at everyone she knew and lying about “the home invasion by drug dealers” or whatever shit had been in the news for the past week. She hated seeing all the bullet holes, broken arrows and inexplicable burns around the house. She hated not being able to go to the gazebo by the pond; chances were, if they didn’t tear it down, it was going to have to be scrubbed down and repainted before they would ever let her go there again.

She hated being weak. She hated being helpless. She didn’t sleep much at all the past few days, her strange dreams and fantastic nightmares being replaced by mundane (if you could call it that) horrors of watching as the love of her life died.

She hated going to Warren’s casket, placing a rose there and hearing everyone in the distance say “how strong” she was for “holding it together” as tears filled her eyes to the point that she couldn’t see. She hated looking at Warren’s parents, seeing the utter grief over losing their only child and telling her how much they knew she loved him and how much they appreciated that she’d given him so much joy. She didn’t feel like she deserved their desperate embraces, as if comforting her would in some way take away a measure of the agony they all felt right now.

She felt like a fraud. She felt like a sham.

And as she went home, she wasn’t sure she knew what anything was anymore.

There was a knock on her door, and she ignored it.

The door opened anyway, showing a well-groomed blonde man in his late forties, dressed handsomely in his dress uniform. Because of the situation, Thomas Shimmer had been flown back to the States immediately, because he knew his family needed him. He’d arrived just before dawn, just in time for the funeral. “Heya, kitten. I know you’re in a way right now, but do you have time for your old man?”

She wordlessly gestured to the spot next to her on the bed and Thomas sat down next to his heartbroken daughter. “I know this isn’t easy, Sunny. I know none of this is—I thought Warren was a cool kid, and perfect for you. I know it hurts.”

Sunset sat up and hugged her dad, and the two stayed that way for the longest time. Of the twins, she tended to favor her father’s nature more than her mother, and “Daddy’s Girl” jokes aside, it was now obvious why: Sunset wasn’t the fighter like her sister was—or, apparently, her mother.

“I also understand that you haven’t spoken to your mom since this all went down,” he finally added gently.

“Can you blame me? She lied to us, Dad! All these years, I thought she was Rebecca Shimmer, senator for District 14! I was proud of that! I wanted to be just like her! And now? Now I find out that she’s some super-secret spy shit Navy SEAL whatever—”

“Air Commando,” Thomas interjected, trying to add some levity to the situation. Thomas wasn’t Special Forces himself, but he was a proud Air Force officer.

“You know what I mean!” she spat. “And now she’s saying her real name is Sunset Shimmer—like me? I mean, isn’t that kind of freaky as hell? I thought our last name was Shimmer!”

“It is—remember that your great-grandfather changed it from Zimmer to Shimmer because having a German last name probably wasn’t the best thing to have here during World War II. Your mother’s name … well, that’s a two-parter. She doesn’t have a last name, per se. Long story there, and believe me, I had a hard enough time believing it when she told me. Doesn’t mean I don’t love her.” He reached over and patted his daughter on the shoulder. “And I’m going to guess you don’t hate her either.”

Sunset didn’t know how to answer that. No, she didn’t hate her mother … but she wasn’t sure if the “other” Sunset Shimmer was her mother. Rebecca Shimmer had been–but apparently, she’d never existed. The woman in the house that Sunset had loved and idealized all her life turned out to be an enigma and one that Sunset wasn’t sure she wanted to deal with.

---

Never before in her life had Sunset Shimmer hated herself so much.

She knew who she was: she was Sunset Shimmer … and she was Rebecca Manzanas. Proud wife, daughter, mother. But now? Mother of two daughters that currently hated her. Especially the daughter that had inherited her original birth name.

Currently, she watched the news covering the whole story about the home invasion and how it had impacted her family. That woman named Adagio Dazzle, apparently hopped up on something, talked her gang or fellow druggies or whatever and raided a rural farmhouse in a sleepy bedroom community, causing multiple injuries and a few deaths, not only to her own side but also that of an innocent boy, Warren Seaver.

The story PIECES’s information operations in D.C. had fed to the media worked perfectly, so much so that had she not known the truth, Rebecca would have believed it herself. It helped that the woman named Adagio was “certifiably insane”—who was going to believe some story about a person who claimed to be a sellsword from another world?

But the fallout had been immense. She’d flown to D.C. for a day to get her ass personally chewed out by both the Vice President and the National Security Advisor. Several senators were demanding she resign, or that PIECES be placed under Homeland Security, Defense, or (in one particularly bizarre statement), State; more than a few would’ve preferred both. But after all was said and done, she’d ultimately spoken with the President himself, who assured her that he still had faith in her (which was great, given that the previous administration considered her barely trustworthy) but that maybe she needed to think about what was best for her family.

She knew that statement; it was bureaucratese for “I don’t want you to resign, but I’ll understand if you do—and given what’s going on, you might want to give it a thought or two.”

“She doesn’t hate you—none of them do.” She looked up and saw her older brother, Travis. Just part of the lie that her life had been … although this part, strangely enough, was the truth as well. “We’re family and family’s always there for each other … even when you know you seriously screwed the pooch, Becky.”

She slumped in her chair. “Jenny still mad at me?”

“She’s pissed at me for not telling her,” Travis laughed, his sandy brown beard jiggling in time with his jaw. “‘Course, to be fair, she should’ve known that because of your job, not much I could say, really.”

“I should’ve said I was the assistant to a state senator, but assistants don’t travel as much as I do–I suppose technically state legislators don’t travel as much as I do, either. Frankly, I’m surprised they never bothered to look it up.”

“That’s on you. But I get it, sis, I really do—serving your country can be a bitch at times. I still remember my stint in the Army.” He walked over to the kitchen and was back a second later with beers for him and her. “But Jenny will get over it and so, in time will Jamie—she’s just worried about the twins, more than anything else.” He looked at his sister. “And in time, they’ll get over it, too.”

“This is like the time Mom and Dad thought I was going to be jailed because ….” She paused, only to take a swig from her bottle. “Well, you remember that.”

“Yeah, I do. Trust me, I do—your buddies at the CIA were crawling all over everything with a fine-tooth comb, thinking we were some deep-cover KGB sleeper agents or something. But you did the right then when you came forward then, and as hard as it is, you’re doing it now. That boy’s parents—or the other parents involved, for that matter—aren’t ready for this kind of shit. Hell, we weren’t ready for it when we finally found out what you were, and you’ve been there for all of my life.”

Rebecca was silent as glanced at the TV, watching as the anchor on-screen segue from the news on the attack to a story about a new tax bill being proposed. “I knew, someday, this was going to happen,” she admitted softly. “Maybe not this specifically—based on how old Cady looks, it seems that only ten years have passed in Equestria while it’s been a lot longer here—but I knew that someday, my past would catch up with me. I just didn’t expect it to impact my daughters.”

“And yet you named them Sunset and Sunrise—not exactly typical names.”

“I named Sunny after me; Rise’s name was a compromise, obviously. And I didn’t expect to have daughters that would be the spitting image of me. Maybe part of me always hoped I’d just be Rebecca Manzanas and not Sunset Shimmer.”

“You told me that you were proud of and loved your family back there.”

“I do; seeing Cady … it just brings back all sorts of memories, kinda like the ones you and I had growing up. I had many like that with her, too. But … I changed. I’m not the person I was back then. That was literally a lifetime ago.”

“No, you’re still the same,” Travis told his sister. “You’re still a straight-shooter, for better or worse. You don’t like lying to anyone and it’s tearing you apart to do so now even if it’s the best for everyone. You’re conflicted between your old family and your new one, but they’re your family just as much as we are, and if you ask our parents, they’d say the exact same thing. And you’re still the tomboy who could outshoot me any day of the week.”

“I need to tell them, don’t I?”

He nodded. “If it matters, I’ve always got your back, sis. Since the day Mom and Dad brought you home, I’ve had your back.”

She nodded, smiling wanly. “Fine, I’ll do it.”

---

For all it was worth, Sunrise Shimmer felt like a coward right now. Her boyfriend was not happy that she needed space right now, because she needed to be there for her sister—she almost broke up with him for that, and it was only that after, when Todd found out that Warren had died, that he stopped acting like a total prick.

But being there for Sunset meant that sometimes she needed to give her sister her own space to deal with her grief. Sunrise wasn’t a “touchy, feely” type, not like Sunset was. But she wasn’t stupid, either. And right now she was giving her sister that space, mainly so their father could talk to her.

Truth be told, she was also avoiding their mother, but the less said about that the better. So right now, she was in her cousin’s room, laying on Jaime’s bed and listening to whatever was playing on Jamie’s Alexa. Jamie didn’t really have the same taste in music that Sunrise did, but that didn’t matter much. It was a distraction, and if there was something that Sunrise needed right now, it was definitely a distraction.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Jamie asked from the other side of the bed.

“You seem to be taking this a lot easier than me. I mean, fuck, all my life my mom was virulently anti-gun—she bitched when Dad decided to teach me and Sunny how to shoot a pistol for safety reasons. And now to find out that she can swing an assault rifle with the best of them? That she’s an actual SWAT, or FBI, or whatever she said she was? I mean ….” Sunrise lifted her hand to the air, as if reaching to grab the light from the fixture on the ceiling. “Remember when Kyle Carpenter was making a big deal that his older brother made the Green Berets? I wonder how he’d feel if he knew my mother could probably literally kick his brother’s ass without breaking a sweat?”

“Yeah, you got a point. How’s Sunny doing?”

“A wreck, and you know that. I know how I’d feel if Todd got killed, but ….” Sunrise sat up. “Promise me if I tell you this you won’t tell Sunny?”

“Is this something embarrassing?”

“Fuck yes.”

Jamie groaned. “Well, stupid is par for the course for you, Rise, so yeah, I won’t tell her. Go ahead and reveal your dark secret.”

“Part of me … well, I know I jokingly flirted with Warren a lot, but sometimes I wonder if I was really joking. I mean, Todd’s great and all, but he’s not the most romantic guy out there and contrary to rumor, I do like being treated like a woman on occasion. And whenever I saw how Warren treated Sunny, I kinda wished ….”

“So you were going to steal him from your own sister?”

“No, are you crazy? I’d never do that to Sunny! But,” she admitted, “I wouldn’t have cared if he’d slept with me if he was nice about it.”

“And you’ve done the deed with Todd?”

“No, because he keeps bringing it up. Believe me, he mentions it on our dates so often, it’s a Goddamn turn off. I know it sounds fucked up, but I’d have just let Warren have his way with me because I know he’d be a gentleman.”

“You do realize that if he did take advantage of you, he wouldn’t exactly be a gentleman, right?”

“Yeah. Fucked up world we live in, right?”

The two fell silent once more, letting the conversation die out. Sunrise was grateful for that; she was already being a coward when it came to the hell her sister was going through at the moment. No need to make it worse by bringing up her own personal stupidity.

---

“Hello, Scarlet.”

Maggie looked at Sunset and Sunrise’s father. He looked good in his uniform and much better than her asshole parents. She then reminded herself that flirting with someone decades older than her was probably not a good idea, especially when said man was happily married to a woman who knew her way around automatic weapons and happened to be the parent of one of her best friends.

Still …. “Uh, Mr. Shimmer, you can call me Maggie, you know. No one really calls me by my first name except for my parents.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, if you came to see Sunny, she’s upstairs right now. I think she wanted to take a nap, but I think she could use the company.” He moved aside, letting the teen come into the house.

Maggie set the Tupperware container on the table. “Here, I made red velvet white chocolate chip cookies for everyone. I figured Sunny and Rise could use the pick-me-up.”

“You should take some to her. I’ll bring up something to drink for you guys.”

Maggie nodded and picked up the cookies once again, heading upstairs. She immediately went to Sunset’s room, knocked on the door and came in.

“Sunny?”

“Yeah, what’re you doing here?”

“I came on behalf of the rest of the girls. Rayne wanted to give you space, Sabrina is working on something special for you—she won’t tell me what it is, Wren is babysitting her kid sister today, and apparently Yu and Taz’s parents won’t let them leave the ranch until they know it’s safe. But they all want to talk on Discord and see how you’re doing.”

Sunset sat up. “I buried my boyfriend today and had to lie to his parents that I’ll manage. How do you think I’m doing?”

“Yeah, I figured. But we’re your friends, Sunny. We’re here for you. You helped me when my parents were going through a divorce, and I’m here to help you, too.”

“Thanks, Mags.”

“Now, c’mon, let’s get your computer on. The girls are all waiting on theirs so we can talk over on Discord. And I’ll call Jamie to get her on as well. Rise is over there, right?”

“Yeah. Rise is giving me a lot of space right now. Strange that my sister’s being, well, sisterly.”

“It’s because she loves you, Sunny, just like the rest of us.”

The rest of the evening was spent with the girls talking to each other, and after a while, Jamie and Sunrise left her home and joined Sunset and Maggie in Sunset’s room. Hugs and kind words were given out repeatedly, followed by an impromptu pizza party—this time Sunset happily scarfed down her favorite slices—and by the time things wound down and the other two went home, Sunset started to feel a little better about things.

As she crawled into bed, yawning, she felt herself hugged by Sunrise, who had dutifully slept next to her each night. “You know, you don’t have to do this anymore, sis.”

“Sunny, if the situation were reversed, would you do it for me?”

A loving smile came over the older sister’s face. Despite everything, she knew she had one person in this world that she could turn to when things went to hell. “I appreciate it, Rise.”

“Yeah, well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t bogart the pillows this time. I am not using one of your plushies as a pillow again, got that?”

Sunrise got a face full of a rainbow unicorn plushie as a result.

---

Because of considerations by Sunset, Cadance and her followers had been moved out of the cell and into what were referred to as “VIP dormitories”, which was likely a nicer way of saying “still under arrest, but not being treated like a complete prisoner.” The dorm had one common room, with separate bedrooms for each, and Cadance was surprised to discover that for the first time in weeks, she slept in something that felt luxurious—an actual bed.

She felt guilt due to that. Here she was, in the Otherworld, enjoying these luxuries, while her husband and family still fought tooth and nail against the Usurper. Time was running out, and she was living the life of a queen.

Some queen I am, she groaned. Canterlot is in ruins. The Usurper rules from the Crystal City and my people are suffering while I am here, chasing phantoms and memories.

Well, at least there was one silver lining: she’d found Sunset—No, she calls herself Rebecca now, though I don’t know why, Cadance reminded herself—and that meant that there was still hope for Equestria.

She walked into the common room, watching as her three paladins sat on a raised divan, watching a black box from which the entertainment of this world showed. It was very much like the magicasts of her world, and another sign how little magic had taken root here in the Otherworld—and how they clearly didn’t need it.

As if sensing her liegelady and friend’s thoughts, Sugarcoat smiled. “To them, magic is nothing more than myth to the point that they make up stories about it.” She pointed at the television. “We just watched a magicast—or whatever they’re called here—called The Lord of the Rings. To them, it’s pure fantasy, but it felt as though I was watching a magicast drama about the life of Lord Starswirl and his struggles against the warlord Tirek from centuries ago.”

“It helps that their machinery skills are able to make convincing-looking magic,” Indigo added. “I am truly impressed.”

“Girls, don’t get comfortable,” Cadance reminded them. “We still have to convince my sister that it is time for her to return and take the crown. I fear that Aunt Celly is no more, and that with her gone, it must fall to Sunset to become the queen of Equestria and destroy the Usurper.”

“Spoken like a woman who clearly doesn’t want to be queen herself,” Sour teased.

“You’re right: I don’t wish to be. If I had my way, I would have been content in the duchy of the Crystal City and Shining and I could have lived there in peace. But that whore of a Usurper sits on my parents’ throne and stains it every day with her being. The bones of Canterlot cry out for justice and I have no choice to be vicereine, as I am the only one left!”

There was a knock on the door and Sour got up to answer it before she remembered that it was locked from the outside and that she would have to use her magic to break it down if she wanted to open it … which would not make them appear as peaceful as they wanted to present themselves as.

The door opened up, revealing Rebecca.

Cadance smiled and went over to hug her foster sister. “Sister! How fares things?”

“It’s been a rough week. We just buried Warren today, and I’m still patching things up with my family,” Rebecca replied in a tired tone. “Truth be told, I didn’t come here on my day off just to tell you that.”

“Yours is a welcome sight nonetheless,” Cadance assured her.

“In any case, I came to let you know that I have spoken with my government and though they will have some questions, based on the investigation they have agreed to let you free for now. Moreover, given your position, Cady, you will be given diplomatic immunity … especially since you are the ruler of Equestria.”

“But that is your position, sister—”

“No, it’s not. That position belonged to Princess Sunset Shimmer … and she’s gone. I am Rebecca Shimmer, a senior officer in the US government and we both know that it would be a conflict of interest for Equestria. It sure as hell is one for here. Trust me, after living my whole life here, I should know.”

Cadance caught those strange words. “Your whole life? I-I don’t understand.”

“Trust me, Cady, there’s a long story that needs to be told. And you’re not the only one that I need to tell it to; the rest of my family deserves to know as well. In any case, grab your things; we’ll get going and then we can hit the base PX to get you four some local clothing, so you don’t look like rejects from a renaissance faire.”

Another look of confusion came over Cadance’s face. “Again, I’m at a loss for words.”

“Funny, I always told you that’s the first step to wisdom.”

For the first time in a while, Mi Amore Cadenza laughed. For the first time in a while, despite everything, maybe there was such a thing as hope still.