Stone Statues Can Be Friends Too
Sunny knows how to take care of herself. Dad's left her home alone plenty of times before, and she thinks she's really independent by now. She can get the food Dad leaves in the fridge for her, and reheat in the microwave, and she knows to never, ever use their stove alone. (A lesson she learned the hard way the one time she tried to make pancakes and almost started a fire. Oops.)
Sometimes Dad can be gone for a while when he goes on one of his research trips. She's not upset about it, though. Being a researcher like him must be hard. Even harder when nopony else believes you. She still gets upset about Sprout and Hitch not believing her; she doesn't know how Dad deals with it having to deal with everypony. Researching ancient Equestria is hard work, and sometimes it means Dad has to go away for a while while he finds something new and exciting out in the world.
Sunny's always wanted to go with him. The thought of getting away from boring old Maretime Bay and seeing the rest of the world, maybe even meeting a real unicorn or a real pegasus!—that sounds amazing. But Dad's always said the same thing when she's asked: 'Maybe when you're older.' Hmph. How much older does she have to be? It's gonna be forever before she gets to go on a real adventure with him. She can't imagine how much longer she's gonna be stuck in the house alone when he gets to go see cool things.
She doesn't mind being alone too much, though. She knows Dad will always come back. And when he does, he always comes back with a new story to tell.
Sometimes, Dad comes back with something even better.
Today, Dad comes back with a knock on the door and a shout. "Sunny! Come help your father out, will you?"
"Daddy!" she yells, leaping to her hooves and nearly knocking her bowl of half-finished cereal off the table. "Coming!"
When Sunny pushes open the door, she sees what Dad's brought home: a life-sized statue of a filly her age, reared up on her hind hooves as she flinches back in fear from something unseen. Her stony eyes are wide with fright, and her little wings are spread back behind her—
—her wings.
"Whoa," Sunny says, trotting forward with wide eyes of her own to take the statue in. "Is that a real pegasus statue?"
A pause as she looks into her eyes, feeling a little twinge in her heart. "She looks so… scared."
Most statues she's seen have their heads high, like brave warriors ready to defend the Bay, or leaping mid-trot with excited energy. This one looks like how Sunny feels when it's dark in her room, afraid of monsters.
"It's real, alright. I found it at the base of the big mountain, covered by rubble. It was a lot of work to bring it out into the sunshine," Dad says, giving Sunny a smile.. "But come on, don't just stand there looking at it. Give your father a helping hoof."
The statue is heavy. Sunny thought it would be lighter, since it was so small compared to any other statue she's seen, but she guesses the stone gives it a lot more weight. It takes what feels like hours of huffing and puffing and bracing her body against the stone before she and Dad finish dragging it into an empty spot in the house.
The statue feels like she fits right in among all of Dad's other stuff. There's the pinboard with all the names of the Guardians of Friendship, Dad's desk with his lamp and all the papers, the swamp of books with words too big for her to read yet behind. Sunny thinks it's her wings. In every other way, the statue looks just like another pony her age, but the wings make her seem magical, a relic of a distant past.
Even if she does look so scared. What happened to her? Sunny almost asks, before feeling silly. Statues aren't alive. Somepony just wanted to spend all that time sculpting a scared statue, for… some reason. Sunny doesn't really get the point.
But the statue is still really cool. And it must be really old, if Dad decided he had to drag it all the way home! Really, really old. Too old for her to count, even if Sunny spent three hours and taped a bunch of paper together to try and tally it out.
"You said you found her near the mountain, Dad," Sunny says, looking at the statue's place propped up against the wall. "Did you see any pegasi?" She turns wide eyes to her father, hopeful.
"No, no. I don't think they usually come down that far," Dad says, wiping sweat off his brow. "Maybe I'll see one next time!"
"Oh, oh, next time, can I go with you?" Sunny asks, giving him her best pleading look.
"When you're older, sweetie."
"Aww," Sunny says, hanging her head, but she's not surprised. She just thought maybe this time she would be finally old enough to go…
…oh well, at least the statue is pretty. She likes her wings.
Sunny pulls the lever for the lift downstairs with a quiet creak, hoping the sound isn't loud enough to wake up her dad. It's early in the morning. So early, in fact, that the roosters haven't even started crowing in the distance yet. The sun is just barely peeking over the horizon, just a tiny little sliver that sends small sunbeams falling through the window. The lift hits the bottom floor with a quiet thunk, and Sunny slips off, being extra careful not to step on any creaking floorboards as she navigates the house by the thin dawn light.
She's pretty sure Dad won't wake up unless she does something really loud. Dad is really good at hearing her 'ruckuses', as he calls them, but he's a bit of a sleepyhead. But better safe than sorry, right? If he catches her now, then he'll be watching out for her to do it again, and then she'll never get to be left alone with the statue.
Sunny knows Dad won't be happy about what she's planning to do with the statue. It's a piece of ancient Equestrian history, and you aren't supposed to mess with those. Old things are sometimes really fragile, and break apart at the slightest touch. The statue's pretty solid, and it looks smooth and nearly untouched, so Sunny's not worried about that…
…but the other thing is, Dad wants the old things to stay untouched. They have to be as close to what they looked like when he found them, so he can study them. Sunny knows this. She's heard many, many, many lectures from him about this.
But… she glances at the marker in her hoof, then up at the statue. It's just erasable marker. That stuff washes off pretty easily with a bath or whatever. Sunny's used it to draw on her fur a hundred times; it won't hurt the statue if she uses it on it, right?
It's just that the statue looks so scared. And… and she feels like part of it is missing. Or maybe the statue's a missing piece of something else, like a lost jigsaw piece. She doesn't have a base; aren't all statues supposed to have a base? Dad had to prop the statue up against a wall to make sure she wouldn't fall over. Was she sculpted with some other statue? Does she miss them?
Probably not. She's just a statue, not a real pony like Sunny is. But her expression still tugs on her heartstrings, and she meets the filly's eyes with a nod. Don't worry. I'm gonna make you better.
The marker draws weirdly on stone compared to fur. Maybe the marker isn't made for the smooth stone of the statue. The red is faint and it takes a few tries before Sunny can really make out a distinct line on the statue's face. She's never been one to give up just because of some little obstacle like that, though; she forges on with her marker and determination, and by the time the sun has actually started rising in full and the rooster is crowing distantly the statue's expression has been altered into a smile.
It fits her, Sunny thinks. Much better than that sad fear. The pony's sculpted, fluffy curls and little stone bow make her look cutesy, and her big, wide eyes look just as good for happy things as they do fear. With the expert application of Sunny's artistic talent, the statue now has a big, wide smile. The way her hooves cup her cheeks even makes it look like she's doing it on purpose!
She looks… she looks cute. The expression reminds her of the kind of cutesy smile sunny herself would put on for her father when she really, really wanted something. But the statue's smile is all real, right?
Hey. You should stop drawing on my face like that.
"Eek!" Sunny startles hard, kicking herself back with her hind legs and going crashing into her Dad's desk, sending the lamp toppling and a flurry of papers scattering to the floor.
Crash! Bang! "Sunny!" her father yells from his bedroom. Sunny leaps to her hooves, quickly reaching up to wipe the marker from the statue's face with her ankle. She can't let him see this; otherwise he's gonna lecture her about treating his stuff properly for hours!
The marker wipes off as easily as she thought it would, but Sunny's too distracted to really enjoy the fact that she was right. Her thoughts are still spinning in circles, thinking about that voice. Who was that? Was she… real? Was that a real voice? She had to be real, Sunny's normal thoughts sound totally different. But where could it have come from?
Was it… the statue?
Sunny doesn't get another opportunity to look at the pegasus for… a while. Not alone, at least. She'd wiped the ink off the statue and quickly hid the marker among her Dad's collection of research stuff, but it was still obvious when he came out of his room rubbing at his eyes that she was doing something with the statue.
Her dad kept a close eye on her around the statue after that, as she thought she would. Sunny was allowed to look all she wanted, and her dad would sometimes sit her down and talk about all his theories about the old pegasi, how they lived and what their role in old Equestrian culture might have been, but it wasn't the same. As interesting and cool as all his knowledge about old Equestria was, she wanted something more than that.
Always, her mind wandered back to the statue. She kept thinking about those words, her voice. With every day that passed, Sunny grew more and more certain that the statue was the one who had spoken to her. In her head.
Weren't unicorns the ones that were supposed to read minds? Pegasi could just fly, right? Maybe the stories got it wrong. Maybe the pegasi had—have—a magic of their own, something that has nothing to do with the clouds or the sky.
Or maybe that's just a thing magic statues can do.
Sunny doesn't know for sure. And it's hard to know when Dad won't let her around it by herself! She gets it. She gets why Dad wants to keep it clean, and safe, and not damaged, but ugh. It's not fair. She's tired of waiting. The mystery keeps annoying her like a buzzing fly. She keeps lying awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering about the statue. Repeating her voice over, and over, and over in her head.
She just wants to know. Is that too much to ask?
Finally, finally, Dad tells her he's going out on a research trip again. Sunny wishes he didn't have to leave her home alone so often; wishes that he didn't have to go away so far and for so long. Any other time, the news would be met with her slumping over, grabbing onto his legs and begging, please, Daddy, just one more day! And she's still sad to see him go. She's still frowning as she hugs him close and then watches him go, standing in the doorway until he crests the horizon and she can't see him anymore… but then a thrill of excitement runs through her, and she shuts the door and spins around to lay eyes on the statue.
The statue that can talk. The statue that talked to her, in her head, she knows that really happened and she knows that's not a figment of imagination and eeee, she's been waiting so long!
She runs right up in front of the statue… and pauses.
Slowly, Sunny realizes something. She's spent all this time thinking about the statue, thinking about how nice it would be when her dad finally leaves her home alone with his stuff so she could finally figure out what's going on with this weird statue—that she forgot to figure out what she would actually say.
Well, she can…. she can…
…she can talk to it?
"Um." She sits down in front of the statue, curling her tail around her hooves. "...hi?"
No response, even as she strains to listen for a thought that isn't her own in her head. For that voice. There's no way she would miss it—she knows she wouldn't! She's spent so long trying to memorize it.
"Helloo? Talking statue? Can you hear me?"
Nothing but her own head. The house is quiet. Distantly, she can hear crashing waves.
"Um… I'm sorry about drawing on you. I didn't know you were alive."
Oh, golly, that's okay. You didn't mean it.
Oh my moons, Sunny thinks. "You're real!" she shrieks, leaping up, not caring who will hear her. She's alone in the house anyways, and—and!
"I knew it, I knew it!" she sings, bouncing on her hooves. "You're real, and you can speak, and you—!"
She pauses, suddenly reminded of how the statue looks, frozen and afraid. She's still as stony as she ever was. Nothing's changed about her even though Sunny knows that she can speak now. There again is that little bit of worry in Sunny's heart. "...you're real… are you okay?"
A long pause, so long that Sunny thinks the statue's not gonna reply. Then, sadly…
Nopony… nopony's asked me that in so long.
"That's not fair!" Sunny cries. "You're a pony too, even if you're made out of stone! What happened? Did everypony leave? Did they leave you because you're… a pegasus?"
Soft laughter. Sunny thinks it sounds like off-key bells. Oh, no. Not in Equestria. They accepted everycreature. No matter what.
It's just you and your dad. I think you're the first creatures I've seen in, gee. More than a thousand years. Hard to keep track, when you've been stone all that time.
"Oh," Sunny says. For a moment, she can't stop thinking about the way the statue admits, just like that, that Equestria really was a place of friendship. But the resignation in her voice, and the sad tone to her next sentence, make her look sorrily into the statue's eyes.
"That's sad," she says. "I can't imagine being alone for a thousand years."
It was lonely, I guess. Nopony to talk to. Nopony who wants to talk to you. I slept a lot.
"Being a statue sounds boring. You can't even go anywhere without somepony carrying you. And you have wings! You're supposed to be able to fly!"
Gosh, I wish I could fly. It's been so long, standing here in the same place. If only I had somepony to talk to…
"I can talk to you now!" Sunny says, leaping to the task. "Um, Dad doesn't want me around you alone. He thinks I'll break you. But he's gone right now, and I can talk to you, and, and you can talk to me about ancient Equestria, and I can show you my coloring books, and we can play with my toys!"
Really? Would you really do that? For little ol' me?
"Yes!" Sunny cries, not wanting her to think for a second that she doesn't want her as a friend. Especially not a friend with wings. "Oh, this is so cool. I've always wanted to be friends with a pegasus!"
She doesn't care if she's only a statue who can talk. She has wings, so she's a pegasus, and her voice sounds really sweet and pretty and Ms. Cloverleaf would probably faint if she saw her statue, so that means she's a real pegasus!
Golly… my first friend in a thousand years. What's your name? Friends should know each other's names, right?
"Yeah!" Sunny agrees. "My name's Sunny. Sunny Starscout. What's yours?"
It's very nice to meet you, Sunny. I'm Cozy Glow.
The next step of Sunny's friendship with her pegasus is, of course, asking lots and lots of questions.
"You said you lived in Equestria, right?" she asks, lying on the floor in front of the statue as she colors in a picture of a pretty pink pegasus dancing in the clouds.
Golly, where else would I live?
Sunny giggles. "I dunno. Maybe far, far across the sea, where nopony else has gone! Or maybe so far up in the clouds that it's not even Equestria anymore! My dad said pegasi used to live in the clouds."
Oh, they sure did. They had cities in the sky built out of clouds, with rainbows falling from them like waterfalls.
"Whoa…" Sunny says, flipping the paper over to start on an image of a cloud city just like that. "Did you live in the clouds?"
Oh, no, no. I was down on the ground, with my parents. They were unicorns.
"Unicorns?" Sunny gasps. "You mean you're a pegasus and you were raised by unicorns?!"
They were my parents, silly. Who else was supposed to raise me?
"Nopony in Maretime Bay would ever be raised by a unicorn!" Sunny exclaims. Her voice peters into a sigh. "They're all too afraid of them for that to ever happen."
Earth ponies? Afraid of unicorns?
"Yeah. They think they're meanies who fry ponies' brains. I try to tell them they're wrong. Dad and I know they're wrong, but nopony ever listens to us! Not even my friends."
That's sad. They should listen to you if they're real friends, shouldn't they?
Sunny frowns. "They're not that bad. Sprout just listens to his mom too much, and Hitch listens to Sprout too much. But they're not bad friends. They still play with me when they come visit, even if they play all wrong and wanna play pegasus and unicorn fight. And when I went exploring down near the coast and hurt my leg, both of them helped carry me back to the boardwalk, and Hitch ran and got an adult to help me."
She sighs. "They're just so stuck with what everypony else thinks. I wish they'd believe me."
Well, you'll always have me, Sunny. I'm not going anywhere.
Sunny gives her a lopsided smile. "Sometimes I wish you could," she says, wishing that her friend wasn't just a statue.
Cozy Glow seems to slot right in place as a friend. Sure, Hitch and Sprout are good friends, Sunny knows they are, no matter what Cozy might say about them. But it's different having a friend who understands, who believes her when she says unicorn and pegasi and earth ponies were friends once. More than that—Cozy was there! Really there! Cozy talks about it when she asks, telling her about a magical world where everypony went to the same school together and got to learn friendship no matter who they were. It sounds wonderful.
Cozy is wonderful. She's sweet and kind and she's smart, too. Really smart.
Sunny found this out when Cozy found out Dad had a chessboard, and asked her to bring it to her so they could play. Sunny's not one to just say no to a friend, so she trots into his bedroom and brings the board out to set up all the pieces with Cozy's help. She's never played chess before, but Cozy said she would teach her.
Cozy does, in fact, teach her how to play. She teaches her how to place the pieces on the board, what they're named, and how they work. She teaches her that each spot on the board apparently has a letter and a number assigned to it, and when you put those two together you can name each place on the board without even having to point to it. This is important, of course, because Cozy can't really reach down and move the pieces herself, can she?
Cozy then proceeds to stomp her in the first round. And the round after that. And the round after that. And the round after that.
Sunny huffs as Cozy tells her where to move another piece and watches her rook sail right into her last knight. "I'm gonna beat you eventually."
Really? There's a glee in Cozy's voice she's never heard before. Sunny thinks she might enjoy beating her at chess this much.
"Yeah! You might be good at chess, but I'm gonna be better at it. I just need more practice.
Oh, golly, you think so? You can try…
The teasing tone in Cozy's voice just makes Sunny even more determined to capture her king.
Sunny almost forgets about the problem with the statue and her dad.
Almost forgets, that is, until she hears his hoof rapping on the door midway through another game of chess (she thinks she's losing less badly than the last time!) and her heart stops. Oh.
She's happy that Dad's home. Really happy, to open the door and see his smiling face, to throw herself into him for a hug. He chuckles and holds her close, and Sunny buries her face in his neck, glad to see him back home… but something sad still pokes at her in the back of her mind.
It's there when Dad sees the half-finished game of chess in front of the statue and he laughs and assumes that Sunny was just playing chess with herself. She goes along with it without much cheer.
It's there when Sunny pauses briefly in front of the statue as she clears away the board and catches Dad giving her a watchful look out of the corner of her eye.
It's there when Dad sets down his saddlebags and trots into the kitchen, and it refuses to leave even as he calls that he's going to make omelets, your favorite!
It's just that, Cozy's her friend. And a really good one, too. Sunny thinks she could even be one of her… one of her best friends.
And she doesn't even know when she's going to get to talk to her again.
She tries not to let her sadness show. She thinks Dad would ask questions about it, and even though Cozy knows a lot about old Equestria and Dad would be thrilled to ask her things, well. She doesn't know if Dad would be happy to hear that she was messing with the statue again. And Cozy…
…Cozy had told her once, not to talk about her to anypony else. Sunny can see the reason why, because she looks outside and thinks about all the earth ponies wandering around out there, full of lies and so afraid of anypony with wings or a horn. She thinks about all the anti-pegasus machines Sprout's mom likes to show off. She worries.
What would happen if word got out? What would happen if somepony found out she was real?
They would panic, is what.
Cozy worries about her. Cozy asks about her life. Cozy, she thinks, wants to keep her safe. Would Sunny be a good friend if she didn't return the favor?
She finds it hard to go to sleep that night, even as Dad tucks her into bed ever so comfortingly and her nightlight throws figures of dancing ponies of all the races over her walls. The little wings on some of the pony shapes only make her think of Cozy, all alone down there again. She thinks about how she might not get the chance to talk to her again for a while. A long while.
She wishes… she wishes Cozy could see her from up here. She wishes she and Cozy could talk from all around the house, not just down there where Dad could see.
Without thinking much of it, just reaching out, she whispers to her bedroom ceiling. "Cozy?"
Yes?
The relief that fills Sunny is as thick as the statue's stone. She sighs heavily as she turns onto her side in bed, cozying herself up under the blankets and letting her eyes slip shut. "I'm glad you're here."
…so am I.
Time passes. Cozy continues to beat Sunny in chess. Sunny tries her best to learn new strategies, new rules, new ways to keep her pieces from being taken off the board quite as fast. She hangs out with Sprout and Hitch, and tries to convince them that she's right about the pegasi and the unicorns, no matter what they say, and eventually Cozy learns to stop worrying over everything that could be taken as bad about them. She even says something nice about Hitch, once, though Sunny's pretty sure Sprout's way past her kindness capacity.
She learns Cozy isn't all the sweetness that she presented herself as when they first met. She thinks Cozy doesn't even really mean to reveal that much, it's just that Sunny is very observant and she thinks it's hard to hide pieces of yourself when you spend so much time one on one with somepony else.
Cozy, she learns, has a kind of sharpness to her, hidden underneath that soft voice. It's most evident during chess, where Cozy loosens up a little, loses that sweet shell. Where she says one thing about her strategy, means another. Where Sunny will move a piece and Cozy will murmur Are you sure about that? with this grin in her voice and Sunny never knows if Cozy means it or if she's just trying to trick Sunny into something else.
Sunny doesn't think she minds it, really. She's spent a few long nights in bed, turning the thought over and over in her mind; that quiet realization that Cozy was probably sniping at her friends because she wanted her all to herself. But she's better at that now. She's gotten better. She thinks that Cozy isn't really malicious, doesn't really want to hurt her. She's just… like that. She likes to think Cozy has learned something from her.
She thinks she's learned something from Cozy. Enough to see past the facades of other ponies. Enough to know when she's lied to, at least, and to know how to lie in return. Dad wouldn't like her being so underhooved.
But Cozy, she thinks, would be proud of her.
One day, Sunny's father leaves on a research trip, and he doesn't come home.
The house feels empty without him.
It'd felt empty before him, a little, when he'd go on those trips before and leave Sunny alone for what felt like eternity to her little mind. She remembers long days where she'd run up and down and up again through the house to hear the stomp of her hooves on the floor, just to make it sound less empty, more like somepony else was in the house with her.
It'd gotten easier with Cozy around. They'd spent many days and nights just talking to each other, having conversations about anything and everything, or playing chess, or just being next to each other while Sunny occupied herself with baking or coloring or reading books. One time she'd even managed to lug Cozy's statue all the way up to the highest part of the observatory so she could talk to her about the stars.
But even Cozy's constant presence feels dim, now.
Sunny had held out hope for so long. She'd kept her hooves crossed, hoping that maybe Dad was just taking a bit longer this time. Or maybe that Dad had gotten lost, but he'd come back in time, as he always did, and Sunny would cry for being so worried and she'd hold her Dad close and he'd chuckle in that way he always did when he saw her again, laugh and ask if she wanted to hear a story.
It's been more than a moon, and the neighbors are getting worried. Even Cloverleaf had checked in on her, knocking on the door to an empty house and looking around with shrewd, narrowed eyes at all the research stuff behind her, gathering dust, before mustering up her sweetest voice and asking where her father is.
Sunny could tell that Ms. Cloverleaf didn't really care for her father, but she was still trying her best to be worried and care for Sunny herself. It was… nice. She guesses.
The house is empty, solemn, and dark. Dust lies heavy upon Dad's work, covering his desk and his books and his lamp and his artifacts in a thin layer of regret. His absence feels like something physical, ballooning through the house and filling up each and every empty space until Sunny feels choked with it.
Cozy is silent for a good long while. Sunny doesn't bother reaching out to her. She wanders through the house as a pale shade of herself, retracing her father's footsteps. She visits his bedroom over and over again. Part of her mind keeps telling her that he's just away on that expedition still, far away among the mountains or the forest, and that he's still out there, waiting. That he's just lost, wandering in circles, and one day he'll come back.
Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. But it doesn't change the fact that he's still gone, and Sunny misses the last time she heard his voice. Sunny… Sunny isn't sure if she'll ever see him again. She doesn't really have the will to muster up the hope to reach for such a thing.
All she has is their picture hanging next to the door. They're standing side by side, both with great big smiles, and little filly Sunny looks so small beside him.
She feels so small. She's grown since then, since that day they sent the lantern off to distant lands, since the day her father had dragged the statue back into the house and she met Cozy, but staring at that picture makes her feel like a little filly trapped in a teenage body. She's just a little filly without her dad, crying on the inside.
She opens the door and stares blankly out into the clear blue sky, waiting to see her dad on the path home.
There's no hope in the action. It's just kind of an automatic motion, her opening the door and waiting for him. She wonders if she could sit here forever, wasting away as she waits for him to come back.
Stupid, stupid. He's not coming back, is he? He's not fucking coming back. She feels like an idiot for it. Stupid little Sunny Starscout with too much hope and a too big heart, waiting for a father she no longer has.
The breath she heaves when she eventually turns back around and closes the door behind her, slamming it with a rattle that shakes its boundaries and leaves the picture lopsided—it tears from her like shredded tissue paper, like the remains of her beating heart, still crying in her chest. Thump-thump, thump-thump. It aches like a wound, like a bird dying on the street, and Sunny wonders numbly if it'll shatter entirely.
Without thinking, she paces the floor and curls up at the statue's hooves.
Sunny? Cozy's voice comes tentative, distant, like at any moment it could blow away in the wind. Sunny isn't quite sure if she even spoke at first; but she knows that voice. She's learned it well, over the years.
It just doesn't seem to matter much.
With a dim sigh she settles her head on her hooves, letting her eyes drift across the wooden floor, seeing but not really seeing the motes of dirt dancing across its whorls and grooves. Let her talk if she wants. It's fine. It doesn't matter.
…I'm sorry. The words are heavy with a thousand unspoken things; the weight of more than Cozy could ever say.
"You didn't know him," Sunny huffs.
He made you happy. He… cared.
"He was my dad," she says, and then has to choke the rest of the sentence off before her tears overflow. She doesn't want to cry. She doesn't want to cry right now. She just wants to be numb, empty, forever. Maybe if she keeps it up for long enough the pain will stop.
He loved you.
"Why does that matter? He's… he's not here."
A long silence. Sunny wonders if the statue is going to leave her alone, like Dad did. Maybe it's only fair for her to lose everything in one fell swoop. She can't really muster up the will to care.
I don't like seeing you sad, Cozy says, and the wording is… weird. She says it almost like she's surprised; almost like she's shocked to be saying it herself. Please… please don't be sad?
And it's—it's so ridiculous. It's the worst thing Sunny has ever heard as an attempt to comfort her. But it's—it's so Cozy. It's so her, just to—to try and ask a pony not to be sad. To try and get Sunny to do this for her, like she doesn't know any way else to do it.
All day—all week—all month, ponies have been coming up to Sunny to try and comfort her. With soft voices and hopeful tones, saying, oh, well, he'll be back soon, won't he? I'm sure he's okay. I'm sure he just got a little lost. He'll be okay. And then when the days passed and it was clear it wasn't okay, that he wasn't coming back, it turned to, I'm sorry for your loss, I'm sorry you lost him, this must be so sad, let me give you a hug and none of it worked. None of it is working, because why would it? Sunny lost her dad. So suddenly and out of the blue that she didn't even have time to brace for it. No soft words can fix that.
And then Cozy comes along, barely even trying, and she says—please. Please don't be sad?
It's so stupid.
It's so ridiculous.
Sunny finds herself laughing without even really realizing it; peals of chest-aching laughter that leave her unsteady, practically wheezing on her belly as she sits there and laughs—desperately, hysterically.
She wobbles to her hooves and throws herself into the statue's arms; the small little statue, somehow seeming too small for the voice that comes from it, but still steady enough for Cozy's outstretched, frozen hooves to hold her as she hiccups and tears turn to sobbing.
She cries, and she cries, and Cozy holds her, and she doesn't speak, but Sunny knows she's not alone.
She's not alone.
(So blurred her vision is by tears that she fails to notice the tiny cracks spiderwebbing across the statue's surface.)
It gets easier after that, somehow. Sunny isn't sure how it managed to get easier, considering the well of pain in her heart and how sometimes she'll step into the kitchen and have to step out, suddenly stabbed with the memory of her dad standing at the stove cooking eggs, but it gets easier.
Cozy apologies for what she said to her that day. Sunny only laughs and shakes her head, nuzzling at the statue's curls.
Something's shifted between the two of them. She doesn't know what, but something; she can hear it in Cozy's voice. It's not quite the high sweetness it usually takes. There's something more like her tone when she plays chess with her, gleeful and rougher. It feels more natural. It feels like her.
Sunny suspects Cozy wouldn't take that tone of voice with anypony else. It warms her; helps keep the dark grief away. She has Cozy. She might not have anyone else in the house with her, but she has Cozy, and that matters.
And then Cozy says to her one day, Sunny? I need to tell you something.
"What's up?" Sunny says, looking up from where she's writing in a journal at the table.
I'm not really a statue.
She blinks. "What do you mean? Wait—"
Some odd mentions of Cozy having parents—she'd honestly assumed she meant her sculptors—as well as some other bits and pieces from the years finally click into place.
"Are you—are you actually—?" She gestures vaguely with a pencil.
Wow, you sure picked that up quick. I always knew you were smart.
Sunny flushes, gesturing even harder. "That's not the point. You mean you're—you're real. You're real?"
I was a pegasus once, before somepony turned me to stone. For a moment, her voice drops to a harsh, angry growl she's never heard before. Ahem. Golly, I don't know what came over me there.
"Why are you telling me this? I mean, that sounds really interesting, besides the whole trapped in stone part, but…"
The magic those stupid ponies used on me isn't gonna last forever. Oh, maybe… maybe it's actually weakening right now.
"What?!"
Don't panic! I just noticed a few days ago! I think… I think it has something to do with that magic of friendship. Our friendship. It's been weakening my bonds the whole time, you see? Soon enough, I'll be free. Free to—!
An awkward pause. Free to be friends with you.
"That's amazing, Cozy! When do you think it's going to happen?"
I dunno. I can just feel the magic weakening. I just wanted to tell you, so… you knew.
"Do you think it'll be soon?"
Just a little longer, I think. There's just one thing.
"Well? What is it?"
The spell's magic is what lets me talk to you like this. When it's gone… I'm sure you can guess.
"Oh." Sunny will…
…Sunny will be alone, then. While the magic keeping Cozy petrified in stone breaks, however long that might be. Stuck alone in this empty house, without her dad, without… without Cozy.
She swallows and tries to measure up some resolve past the wound, recent as it is. It's fine. Cozy can't stop it either way, and Sunny doesn't want her to stop. She wants her to be free, able to move around again instead of being stuck in one spot, playing endless games of chess. She wants her to be able to go and see the stars without Sunny having to lug her up the lift and then up a flight of stairs.
She wants her to live, whatever that takes.
"Okay. Okay. I can be alone for a couple days, right? It's no big deal. However long it takes for the spell to break, I'll be there. I promise."
Of course, Sunny knows it isn't going to be as easy as that. She has never fared well with being alone. Less so in these times, stuck alone in a house full of painful memories.
She comforts herself by looking at Cozy Glow's statue. She can see it beginning to crack, now; a sight that'd stopped her heart at first, as she whispered "Cozy?" but got no response, for a painful moment wondering if something had gone wrong.
But, no—there's something under the stone. She can see a flash of soft feather through a chink along the sculpted wing, gentle, bubblegum pink, and her heart cheers at the sight.
It's fine. It's fine. She's been through worse, she can survive being alone for a couple days. A couple weeks, even, if that's what it takes.
It's just so hard without her voice. Without Cozy's constant, cheerful presence—sometimes real cheer, sometimes a kind of saccharine sarcasm that always got Sunny to laugh, no matter her mood. Without the games of chess they'd play, Sunny sitting over the board with her eyes narrowed as she tried to think out her next move, while Cozy would giggle and remark and maybe, rarely, just a few times, praise her for her strategy.
Sunny, she finds, misses Cozy. Of course—she knew she would, ever since Cozy told her what was happening with her curse. Cozy's her friend, and a friend that's always been around, a constant presence ever since she was little.
But it's different. She misses her in a way that pierces soul-deep; in a way she didn't expect, considering that it's only temporary and it's necessary, so necessary for her to finally be free again.
It's just…
…just…
…she loves her.
A long time ago, when Sunny was little, she had the opportunity to see a butterfly hatch from its chrysalis. Hitch had found it hanging from a tree branch, and as much as he tried to pretend he didn't really care about the critters that followed him around, Sunny knew that he had a soft spot for animals of all shapes and sizes.
The chrysalis wiggled and wiggled, a colorful shape inside its bland shell, until eventually it split open and the new butterfly pushed its way out, beautiful against its old prison even if its wings were kind of wrinkled.
Today, Sunny is startled awake by the sound of a sharp crack! from downstairs, and barely registers even getting out of bed before she's on the lift downstairs, tapping her hooves anxiously as she listens to the creaks of the gears turning.
"Cozy? Cozy Glow?"
The statue is in pieces. Sunny turns the corner just in time to see a pegasus rise from the flakes of fallen stone, her coat the color of soft cotton candy and her curls the blue of the sky. Sunny's spent so long seeing her in monochrome gray—what a difference it makes to see her in full color. She's bigger now, too; Sunny wonders absently if Cozy went and grew up alongside her.
Cozy meets her with wide eyes—crimson like roses, or maybe the sunrise—and smiles. It's not like any smile she'd imagine on the pegasus' face, not cutesy or sweetly saccharine; if anything, she could say it's… shy. Her wings flutter a bit in a little buzz and Sunny's heart skips a beat.
"Hiya," Cozy says, and her voice sounds so solid and so real that Sunny loses all her common sense.
"I think I'm in love with you," she blurts—then proceeds to whap a hoof over her mouth, immediately regretting the last five seconds. Please take that back. Please take that back.
At least Cozy seems caught off guard by the admittance, her eyes wide and her wings fluttering a bit, uncertain—then she gets ahold of herself, and the smile she gives Sunny this time is sharper in a way that makes her think of chess matches.
"Golly, what a funny coincidence!" she says, brushing aside the rubble at her feet to stride closer to Sunny. She's getting very close. She's—
—laying a kiss on her nose, and Sunny's ears pin back and her eyes go wide as her heart and mind decide both in that moment to stop functioning.
"I think I love you too."