Inertia
⁂
The first thing Twilight heard as the magical light began to fade was a southern drawl that could only have been Applejack. “Twilight...? Is that you?” it asked. The next thing she knew, some sort of blue, airborne creature had latched onto her side.
“Hah! Twilight’s got wings! Awesome!” Rainbow Dash squealed as she wrung Twilight with her hug. “A new flying buddy!”
That got Twilight’s attention. Her horn automatically flashed imperceptibly with a practice born of years, then she made a show of looking back over her withers. “What? Pfft—I don’t have wings,” she dismissed, waving her hoof and extricating herself from the grip of her excitable friend.
“But you do!” Rarity marvelled as she moved around to see... nothing? She furrowed her brow in confusion. “You did, really. Why, for a moment there you’d become an alicorn! I didn’t even know that was possible!”
Twilight blinked, looked from one confused friend to another, then blinked again. They were all looking at her, expecting some sort of answer.
Just that moment, Pinkie pie swung in on a rope, wearing fake wings and a party horn on her forehead, screaming “Alicoooooooooorn partaaaaaaaay!”
Again, Twilight’s horn flashed and this time Pinkie Pie’s foam wings disappeared. A moment of consideration and another flash later, so went the party hat strapped to Pinkie Pie’s forehead. A final flash and even the rope she was swinging on disappeared. Pinkie Pie squealed sounds of delight as she careened through the air.
“YOU—SAW—NOTHING,” Twilight snarled insistently.
Silence reigned on the street, until there was a heavy metallic thump and jangle that could only have been a royal facehoof. Indeed, Princess Celestia was suddenly standing behind the ground of ponies, a stricken look on her face. “Twilight,” she sighed in exasperation. “That was your cue.”
“My what?” Twilight stared in confusion.
Princess Celestia gave a pained groan, pinching the bridge of her nose with the crook of her hoof. Taking a deep breath, she reared up on her back legs and spread her forelegs wide, singing “It is time for you~ to fulfill your des—tiny~” as she had only a few minutes before.
Suddenly, a light of comprehension lit in Twilight’s eyes. “Ooooooooooooh,” she said, finally getting it. Her horn flashed again, and the wings on her back reappeared, along with Pinkie Pie’s fakes. “Look girls! I’ve suddenly become an alicorn!”
Everypony just stared back at her.
“They’re not buying it,” Twilight whispered to Celestia through the gritted teeth of her fake smile.
⁂
The train ride to Canterlot was, in a word, awkward.
Celestia had excused herself to make preparations back at the castle for the coronation the next morning and nopony else wanted to approach the elephant in the room—or the alicorn in the room, as the case may be. Finally, Twilight gave in to the pressure.
“So!” she started with artificial cheer, “Remember that part of my cutie mark story where I was engulfed in light and turned my parents into potted plants? I—” Twilight paused, suddenly hesitant, but quickly put her fake smile back on and barreled on. “I might have left out this one, tiny little—well, two—two tiny little details!”
Everypony just looked amongst themselves, bewildered. Twilight wiggled her wings as a hint, but there was no response until Applejack ventured to ask, hurt, “You lied to us? Since the day we first met?”
“No!” Twilight shouted in denial. “I didn’t lie, I just… didn’t tell you,” she reasoned, pawing the seat with her hoof, but the half-truth only seemed to throw fuel on the fire.
“You called yourself a unicorn!” Applejack yelled incredulously. “You hid yer wings and pretended t’be something ya ain’t!”
Twilight flattened her ears in the face of Applejack’s shouting, and shouted right back. “I was born a unicorn! I’ve got as much right—”
Applejack waved the comment aside. “That’s not the point! A lie is a lie!” she shouted, a little too forcefully, gathering startled looks from all around the railcar. “Th-the point is,” she stuttered, subdued and embarrassed at her outburst. “Shucks, Twi, we thought we knew you.”
“You do!” Twilight emphatically insisted. “PPPCD doesn’t change who I am!”
Everypony blinked.
“Prepubescent Polyracial Characteristic Development?” Twilight tried.
Everypony blinked again.
“Look,” she tried to explain. “Early-onset alicornification is just a part of my life that I accepted a long time ago. I’ve moved past it.”
“Does this mean... no party?” Pinkie Pie interrupted.
Twilight sighed. “I’m sure there’ll still be a party, Pinkie,” she said to reassure the pink party pony. “That’s what a coronation is—a big fancy party.”
Pinkie Pie brightened right up, but Rainbow Dash remained downcast. “So, I, uhh, I guess you don’t need flying lessons, huh.”
“I... might?” Twilight offered in compromise with an embarrassed smile. “It’s been a long time since they banned me from flying in the castle ballrooms.”
“Oh dear.” Fluttershy was dismayed. “You learned to fly indoors? That must have been difficult.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Twilight assured her, sensing the mood in the room change slightly. “The princess had them take out the tables and chairs after the first week or so. Um—what was left of them, anyway.”
“It must have been hard for you, keeping a secret like this from everyone for all this time,” Rarity suggested, trying to play up the sympathetic angle for Twilight’s benefit, but the long-time alicorn didn’t quite catch on.
Twilight thought about it for a moment before simply shrugging. “Not really?” she finally answered, earning her a round of shocked looks.
“I mean...” Twilight stopped to put her thoughts into words, scratching the back of her head with one hoof. “It’s just my life, you know? I don’t stop to think ‘I need to lie about being an alicorn,’” she explained, giving Applejack a pointed look. “I just... I think of myself as a unicorn; I don’t think about it at all.”
Applejack was having a hard time swallowing it. “But you’ve got wings!”
Twilight looked back at the offending appendages and wiggled them. “Honestly, Applejack, I forget they’re even there.” Twilight shrugged dismissively.
Rainbow Dash’s jaw dropped, motioning with her hooves as she cried out “You forget? They’re wings! How can you forget you have wings?”
“Practice?” Twilight suggested with a hint of sarcastic humor. “Really, girls. It’s just not that big of a deal to me.”
“Not that big of a deal?” Rainbow Dash squeaked, dropping her hooves in deflated disbelief. Then, suddenly she snapped up and shouted “No!” throwing one foreleg around Twilight’s withers in comradery. “You may have spent your whole life pretending you don’t have wings, but that’s going to change—starting now!”
⁂
It didn’t change.
Twilight’s coronation went by without a hitch, except for the fact that ponies had to keep reminding Twilight to put her wings back on. The illusion spell that hid them had just become so automatic and so practiced over the years that it was like adjusting her mane, and she kept doing it without even thinking.
“But, what about that time with the hydra?” Applejack asked Twilight, one of a long line of questions that had followed the not-so-new alicorn princess all the way back to her old tower in the palace where she busied herself with paperwork that had to be done before heading back to Ponyville.
Twilight grabbed the form she was filling out and crumpled it up in her hooves. Looking up at Applejack, she grumpily snapped, “What part of ‘I forget they’re even there,’ was difficult to understand?” though she immediately regretted it. “Sorry,” she apologized as she tossed the crumpled up paper onto a pile of similar specimens in the wastebasket and grabbed a fresh form. “I just can’t seem to get this right.”
“What’s with all these forms anyhow?” Applejack asked.
Twilight pointed one by one at the piles of papers spread out in front of her. “Alicorn residency, princess registry,” she listed, pointing at the two largest piles. “Military authority, security clearances,” she continued, indicating several thick manilla envelopes tied shut with string and sealed with wax. “Access to the royal treasury,” she pointed out one stack, followed by several more as she continued her explanation, “Which I need in order to pay for a dozen other things, royal guards, heralds, hoofmaidens, new stationary, a place to keep it—”
“It?” Applejack asked, confused. “The stationary? What about the guards, heralds and hoofmaidens?” Applejack asked for clarification.
“Them too,” Twilight dismissed. “Anyway—”
“Hoowee. Well,” Applejack interjected before Twilight could continue on to the boxes of papers stacked up beside the desk, which included declaration of the Ponyville library as her royal apartments and work orders for a new library. “I can see that ya’ll got yer hooves full. I reckon it’d go a lot quicker, though, if every other sheet didn’t end up in the trash bin.”
Twilight sighed. “Yeah,” she simply agreed vaguely.
“Glad it’s not me,” Applejack declared good-naturedly. “I bet all that makes the farm’s taxes look like Applebloom’s homework.”
Twilight shook her head. “Oh, it’s not like that. I’m good with paperwork, it’s just...” She hesitated, a little embarrassed. “You know how for the first half of January, you keep writing the previous year on everything?”
“Yeah? But it’s summer,” Applejack pointed out.
“Yeah, um... under ‘race’ I keep writing ‘unicorn,’” Twilight admitted.
⁂
It took Twilight the whole rest of the day to finish her paperwork in triplicate—not because the forms were required in triplicate, but because it simply took that many tries on average to get all the right details together on the same form. It wasn’t just the “race” field that vexed her, but also various other details she had subconsciously repressed over the years. Blood type, magical phenotype, heraldry and titles all different from what she’d been writing all of her life. She had to quite literally stare at her quill and force herself to write Princess Twilight Sparkle, or she’d have to start all over again.
Eventually, however, the plethora of papers was banished to the moon—figuratively speaking, of course. If you actually banished paperwork to the moon, Luna had a tendency to banish it right back with a few choice additions. Anyway, once the paperwork was sent on to the hoary bureaucratic purgatory from which it came, Twilight was finally free to find her friends again and relax.
Applejack’s stubborn anger had been worn down by the sheer monotony of watching Twilight file paperwork, and she’d eventually apologized for her behavior as an excuse just to get away from the skritchy scratch sound of quill on parchment followed by the inevitable muttered grumbling and crumpling of paper.
That, and Twilight’s wastebasket-tossing skills were truly atrocious to watch, which was shameful for a student of her caliber.
Glad to have a reason to stretch her legs, Twilight eventually found her friends down in the west castle courtyard enjoying the view of the sunset over the wide open land and waved at them from the parapet above. “Hey guys!” she beamed with a smile, and they all waved back.
“Are ya’ll finally done with all that paperwork?” Applejack shouted.
“Done as I’ll ever be,” Twilight was proud to say.
Rainbow Dash did a little loop in the air and motioned with her hoof. “Well, get down here, then! The Cloudsdale weather teams do the best sunsets! You can’t see that far from Ponyville, but Canterlot is perfect for it!”
“Sure!” Twilight shouted back, then turned around and walked the other way.
Rainbow Dash frowned, and gave it a second. “Is she getting a running start or something?” That second turned into a minute, then two, until finally Twilight reappeared out of a door at the bottom of the parapet on hoof.
Rainbow Dash was beside herself as the recently revealed alicorn joined the group with a completely oblivious smile. The stricken mare looked at the rest of her friends for support, but they were busy sitting Twilight down and providing her with a bowl of daisy petals to munch on before dinner.
Twilight was surprised to hear that everypony would be spending another night at the castle before heading home to Ponyville. They hadn’t known just how long Twilight would take or what other things would come up, and all felt the occasion was worth a few days off.
“Twilight,” Rainbow Dash stated flatly.
“Mmh?” the alicorn responded, turning her head to reveal a daisy petal poking out of her lips, which she licked up and swallowed. “Yeah, Dash?”
“You sure took your time getting down here,” she hinted a little sourly.
Twilight frowned. “Yeah, I was enjoying stretching my legs. Did you expect me to run? I’m pretty stiff after sitting at my desk all day.”
Rainbow Dash had no words. “Twilight!” she shouted. “You have wings, for Celestia’s sake! Stretch your wings!”
Twilight cocked her head to the side in contemplation. “Um, yeah I guess I could have done that,” she admitted, then gave a “Huh” of enlightenment and hoofed herself another few daisy petals as she went back to watching the sunset.
Rainbow Dash glared in irritation at Twilight, sorely tempted to throw the newly revealed alicorn off the balcony just to make her use her wings.
It wouldn’t have worked.
And it didn’t go unnoticed.
⁂
“So then I said, ‘But Cadance, I understand cardiovascular thermal exchange just fine, but Shining said spreading your wings makes you hotter,” Twilight finished as the six ponies and one baby dragon made their way through the streets of Canterlot after dark.
Rarity, of course, had to act scandalized. “He really said something like that around you at that age?”
“He did!” Twilight laughed. “I mean, can you imagine?”
Applejack was less amused. “Ah can imagine, considerin’ y’all just did the same thing,” she said, glancing meaningfully at Spike.
“Oh Applejack, you don’t have to worry about Spike,” Twilight explained. “Dragons are semi-cold-blooded themselves. He knows all about cardiovascular thermal exchange.”
Everypony fell silent at that. Spike was nodding proudly, while the others, to a mare, all shared looks of mixed shock and confusion, not quite sure if their friend was making use of some sort of obscure innuendo, pulling their collective legs or simply having an entirely different conversation than the rest of them.
Eventually, Fluttershy’s quiet voice broke the silence. “So—um—Twilight. Where are you taking us?” she asked, thinking it best to just change the subject.
Rarity latched on to the opportunity to put some distance between them and… whatever had just been said. “Yes, do tell. I can’t say I’m familiar with this part of the city.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t be,” Twilight said with a grin. “This is the part of the city where all the so-called ‘merchant-lords’ live—that is, the newer lorded nobility that rose to their positions on account of various trading empires… which is basically the same as the older nobility, except their money is new enough that ponies still remember looking down on them and their generally more extravagant tastes,” Twilight lectured. “I figured I’d take you girls out to dinner as thanks for… well… you know. There’s this great place my family used to take me to on special occasions. You’ll love it.”
“Extravagant tastes?” Rarity’s eyes sparkled. “Oh darling, you didn’t have to,” she said, gracious.
“If it’s all the same—” Applejack had begun to say, only to get kicked in the fetlock by a significantly less gracious-looking Rarity. “Ow.”
“So Twilight,” Rarity interjected, making use of Applejack’s sudden silence. “Does your family live around these parts?”
“Oh—no,” Twilight explained as she led the group down a street of fancy café and bistros that saw most of their business during the day. “My family inherits its titles from older unicorn stock. Our place is up that way.” Twilight stopped a moment to motion with her hoof in a direction where large manors seemed to tower over the rest of the city.
“My stars, I had no idea you were so well off,” Rarity answered, honestly amazed. “I had thought that all of your notoriety came from being the Princess’ student.”
Twilight gave a little laugh and shook her head with amusement as she suddenly ducked down an alleyway. “Oh, it pretty much does. No, Rarity, we have some titles and a nice piece of land, but that’s about it. My ancestors were some of the unicorns that used to raise the sun and moon before Celestia and Luna, but it doesn’t amount to much these days.”
“Oh,” Rarity said, a little deflated. “But then, how did you afford…” she began to ask.
“That’s what makes this place great!” Twilight beamed as she exited the alleyway and stepped aside, waving one hoof out to present their dining establishment for the night.
“Well hay,” Applejack remarked with surprised appreciation. “This place is nice!”
⁂
As the group left the restaurant behind, Rarity lagged behind, muttering to herself. “Some day, I will tell my children about the time a Princess of Equestria took me out to dinner on the day of her coronation—the very day!—and I will describe it in such incredible, intimate detail that the experience will be burned into their minds! I will knit them sweaters in my old age, and they will say ‘never forget!’ When I die, my tombstone will say—”
“Aww, that’s so sweet, Rarity!” Pinkie Pie said with honest, if misplaced, admiration. “But, you know what?”
Rarity sighed. “What, Pinkie?”
“It could have been better!” Pinkie Pie declared.
Rarity rolled her eyes. “You don’t say.”
“I do say—and I say the night isn’t over without the most important meal of the day! Dessert!”
“Must we?” Rarity pleaded.
“Aw, don’t be such a sourpuss Rare,” Applejack said, giving her a jovial nudge as they walked. “Ah know it weren’t what you were expecting, but good food is good food.”
Rarity sighed. “Oh very well,” she said. “I suppose ice cream can hardly make a night worse.”
“How ‘bout it, Twi?” Applejack shouted ahead to Twilight, who was being regaled about the joys of flying by Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy. Spike was defending Twilight’s choice to remain ground-bound, being the only one present who had actually seen her flying, which apparently resembled her dancing.
“What’s that?” Twilight asked, craning her neck around to address Applejack.
“Ice cream! Pinkie’s getting that look in her eye,” Applejack explained.
Twilight tapped her chin with one hoof for a moment, thinking. “Ice cream, huh? Okay sure, I know a place,” she said with a grin.
⁂
“Ah, the local clop and shop, I should have known,” Rarity commented flatly, having given up by this point.
“Ooh!” Pinkie Pie beamed. “I love this place! They have these three-gallon tubs of rocky road that are just superspectaculicious!”
“I’m glad it meets your approval, Pinkie,” Rarity said, shaking her head. “Still, that is a rather unfortunate name.”
“It’s clopping as in, you know, walking,” Twilight clarified.
“I am aware,” Rarity said, “but they have to have known what they were doing.”
“You’d think,” Rainbow Dash snarked. “But have you seen some of the sheltered nobility-types that show up at events in this city? I’m surprised any of them manage to get—”
“Rainbow!” Rarity interrupted. “That is quite enough.”
The group made their way to the frozen food section and split up looking for their favorites. For once, everything seemed to be going relatively smoothly, as even Rarity couldn’t pout in the face of her beloved chocolate chocolate fudge and toffee ice cream.
As she was heading to her own selection, Twilight noticed something on the shelves opposite the ice cream and stopped to ask, “Hey, does anyone want sprinkles?”
The response was a variety of answers, all some variation of “Nah,” “Nope” or “Nuh-uh,” so Twilight shrugged and moved on to pick something out for herself.
It wasn’t until they were checking out that Pinkie Pie had a very special twitch in her left cheek that told her something was wrong. She looked around with a mix of curiosity and concern, then she spotted it.
“Vanilla?” Pinkie Pie asked.
“Yes?” Twilight said, wondering what the problem was now. “You know my tastes better than anyone, Pinkie. I happen to like vanilla. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Of course not, silly,” Pinkie Pie agreed, continuing to look around for something and failing to find it. “But you never have vanilla without sprinkles.”
Twilight shrugged. “Yeah, but nopony else wanted them. I’m not about to buy a whole bottle just for myself—not at three times what it costs in Ponyville.”
Pinkie Pie was stricken with incredulity at this response. “Twilight, as your sprinkle supplier I know that that’s only two extra bits! You can’t not have sprinkles today—it’s your special day!”
“No, Pinkie, it’s not,” Twilight snapped back at the most selfless of her friends. “It’s not my special day. It’s Tuesday. It is, statistically, the least special day of the week.”
Rarity tried to step in and mediate, but all she ended up doing was set more fuel on the fire. “Dear, it’s not every Tuesday that you—”
Twilight slammed the carton of ice cream down on the counter, startling everypony present. “You stay out of this, Rarity.”
“I… what?” Rarity stammered, taken aback at the sheer vehemence in Twilight’s voice.
“I’m not deaf, you know. I’m sorry my favorite restaurant from my fillyhood wasn‘t up to your standards, and I could do without your opinion on my choice of ice cream too.”
“Twi?” Applejack asked. “What in Equestria—”
“And you!” Twilight shouted. “Ducking out on me because you’re bored does not constitute an apology!”
“Hey, cool it Twilight,” Rainbow Dash interjected, not amused at all about Twilight going off on the rest of their friends.
The reaction was predictable.
“Oh, that’s rich coming from the mare who gives me sad looks every time I have the audacity to walk somewhere.”
Finally, it was Fluttershy’s turn, but rather than accuse or censure Twilight, all she did was ask, “Twilight? Is something wrong?”
“Yes! Yes something is wrong!” Twilight shouted, causing the rest of the ponies at the checkout to take a step back. “I’ve been trying to be nice about it, but I am sick and tired of my friends being so eager to see me differently! Yes, okay, I lied to you! I already admitted that and I’m sorry—but if this is how you act, then maybe I was right to!”
Applejack looked like she’d been kicked. “You can’t mean that, sugarcube,” she said, but Twilight wasn’t having any of it.
“What good is a bunch of friends who can’t accept me for who I am?” Twilight shot back.
Fluttershy wilted, and sadly, quietly said, “Twilight…”
Unfortunately, that attracted Twilight’s attention and she rounded on the gentle mare, pointing and shouting, “And you, Fluttershy!”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“...Carry on,” she said begrudgingly before swiping her ice cream off the counter and disappearing with a flash.
⁂
“Twilight?” Cadance called out onto the dark balcony. “Twilight? I heard crying. Is that you? And is that a five pound bag of gourmet sprinkles from the kitchens? What in Equestria...?”
“Oh shut up,” a puffy-eyed Twilight moaned, stabbing her spoon back into the tub of ice cream which was now both half empty and one third sprinkles by weight. She was an ugly crier, and she didn’t want company.
Cadance, of course, didn’t let that stop her. Twilight heard the tap tap tap of hooves on polished stone followed by her fellow alicornification victim sitting down beside her.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Cadance asked.
Twilight scoffed. “Do I look like I want to talk about it?”
“A little,” Cadance said with a little giggle. “You look like you’ve been stewing in your thoughts and preparing a rant, anyway.”
Twilight’s shoulders sank and she looked away. “I already had my rant, unfortunately.”
“Oh dear,” Cadance exclaimed softly. Placing a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder, she asked, “What happened?”
And so, Twilight explained, recounting the events of the past day, culminating with the argument at the supermarket.
“I see…” Cadance said, no stranger to the difficulties that came with being an alicorn, though at least she, so far as Twilight knew, had never been asked to hide herself. Whether or not that had resulted in more problems or less was anypony’s guess.
“Yeah…” Twilight said with a heavy sigh.
“So,” Cadance said. “When are you going to apologize?”
Twilight balked, and turned to look at Cadance to check if she was serious. “Apologize? Me?” she asked incredulously. “They’re the ones who should be apologizing!”
Cadance hmmed a little sadly. “Did I ever tell you about the best friend I had before I became an alicorn?” she asked, to which Twilight shook her head. “I thought so,” Cadance said.
“Well, as you know, before I became an alicorn I grew up in a small fishing village out on the coast. I was an orphan—the only pegasus in an otherwise earth pony settlement, and ponies joked that by the way I had just shown up out of nowhere, I had been blown in on the march winds. It was like a proper fairy tale, and everypony in the village pitched in to help raise me.
“Unfortunately, the truth was… a little less innocent. There was always this one stallion who never had quite the same smile as the rest of them, and eventually I found out why. To make an unfortunately ugly story short, that stallion had been my mother’s husband, but was not my father. My actual father was some pegasus that I was never told the name of that had been passing through the village, and my mother had died in childbirth.
“It was a shock. The whole village knew this—or at least, they suspected—but they never held it against me and I continued to grow up as the village’s little wind-sent child. Even the stallion who was not my father went along with it in his own melancholy way. The only ones who didn’t know were the other fillies and colts, and that was fine. Like many orphans who are later told that they were adopted, I still saw the people who had loved and raised me as my parents, and for me that was the whole village. My identity wasn’t tied up in being the bastard daughter of a wandering pegasus, so it became just something I knew and didn’t think about.
“Children will be children, though, and what one child can discover, so can another. There was a shy, quiet girl named Violet Blossom who had a problem with her heart. She wasn’t allowed to go out and play with the other fillies and colts, so none of them had any reason to interact with her in turn. There wasn’t any vindictiveness to it; she was just ‘that girl who stays inside all the time.’
“Not to me, though. I’d grown up showered with abundance of love from everypony around me, so when I saw this filly I’d never met before watching the world go by from her window like it was something she wanted but could never have, I decided that I would change that. And I did.
“Now, I’m not saying that it was easy. It took time and no small amount of earnest persuasion to convince her of my sincerity. It isn’t always easy for somepony like that to come out of their shell, no matter how much they want to, but eventually we became the best of friends. Something that would prove serendipitous and maybe just a little ironic.
“You see, as it turned out, Violet was my cousin. Our mothers had been sisters. She was ecstatic when she found out and couldn’t wait to tell everyone about it.
“I was absolutely furious with her. To her, all it meant was that she was even closer to the most important pony in her life, but to me it was something that I’d chosen to forget. Something that, over the years, as I grew older, I’d learned to be ashamed of. I didn’t understand how she could do that to me, and we had a fight. I cried and I yelled at her, and then I stormed off.
“She… died. Her heart condition. Nobody even found her for hours. I literally killed her with my anger over something that she was happy for. Something that didn’t really matter. None of the other children treated me any different except to console me. Given how happy she’d been, everyone assumed that it was that that had done it. That she’d died happy. And I…”
Cadance choked up at the memory and Twilight turned to see her eyes wet with tears.
“That’s why I do what I do,” Cadance admitted. “That’s why it tears me up inside to see people who are close to each other fighting. It’s so easy to say something that can’t be taken back.”
“Cadance, I…” Twilight had no idea what to say other than, “I’m sorry. That’s so sad… and bizarrely specific to my current situation.”
Cadance sniffed and had a sudden case of the giggles. “Isn’t it, though?” she mused with a melancholic smile. “I’m glad, though. It’s not a story that I tell often, but… it’s worth passing on, don’t you think?”
Twilight shrank back, thinking about her own fight with her friends. Was it really the same thing, though? Twilight’s friends had been consistently rude and antagonistic…
…Hadn’t they?
The more she thought about it the more she came to realize that each of her friends just wanted to share in Twilight’s happiness in their own way, and by denying those things, they saw it as Twilight denying her own happiness. That’s why they were angry with her. Twilight… knew that, really. She’d known it all along, but she’d been too angry to see it.
“Yeah.”
⁂
Twilight found her friends all looking down and depressed back at her personal tower, surrounded by their own mess of ice cream cartons. She had cleaned herself up, but her eyes were still puffy and she was just discovering that she had missed a sticky patch on her rear below her left cutie mark.
Rainbow Dash was the first one to shoot up at the sight of her, skipping standing and going directly into the air, but the rest soon followed and soon enough it was all that she could do to fold her ears down to muffle the storm of apologies and bodies.
“Sugarcube I—”
“Twi, you know that—”
“—Really, really sorry!”
“You know I’d never—!”
“—Hope you’re feeling better.”
“Stop! Stop!” Twilight cried, overwhelmed and buried in friends. Extracting herself from the impromptu group hug, she backed off and… froze, wilting underneath all the attention she suddenly had and the prospect of apologizing.
Looking down at her hooves and started with the least that she had to admit. “You don’t have to apologize.”
Applejack stepped forward to say something, but Twilight stopped her.
“No, you really don’t have to—well, maybe you, Applejack,” she said awkwardly. She could interpret anger over being lied to into a desire for closeness and understanding with friends, but it was a stretch.
Where was she again? Oh, right.
“I didn’t come here for an apology, I came to apologize,” Twilight said. “I realize that I haven’t been the most cooperative mare today, and while I have my reasons, I also understand that I haven’t been being fair to you all.
“Fluttershy, thank you for trying to step in when things got heated. I know that couldn’t have been easy for you.
“Rainbow, I would love to go flying with you sometime.
“Pinkie Pie, I’d like to reassure you that I had an embarrassing amount of sprinkles with my ice cream.
“Rarity, I was really happy to share my favorite restaurant with you, but I realize that I could have done that any time and this was…” she sighed, “…a special occasion and a chance to make memories.”
“And Applejack… Um… I would love to… have that apol—I mean, I would love to share some stories of my childhood with you sometime?”
There. She’d done it. She’d apologized, and the reaction was… positive? In front of her were five faces of fond appreciation.
Then, someone snickered and suddenly Twilight was buried in ponies again.
It was good to have friends.