On repeat
Am I me if I’m just her? Am I her, rewritten? Am I myself at all? Questions circling in my head, day and night, waking and sleeping. Rattling like pennies inside a tin can.
“Another refitting?” Rarity’s eyebrows climbed. “Darling, are you sure?”
“Am I sure I grew three inches this week? No, Rarity, gosh, I’m pretty sure nopony would notice something like that.” Sweetie’s voice cracked on the final word — another irritating marker of her impending puberty.
Her sister frowned. “Well, really, there’s no need to be like that.”
Sweetie Belle opened her mouth to retort, but Rarity was already brandishing her tape-measure, and any sharp wordplay was soon lost in a mountain of tulle and organza. Prom was just around the corner, and Sweetie Belle’s gown was going to be the best one there by a mile. Having a designer for a sister had to count for something, right?
At last Rarity was done with her measurements and her re-hemming — a process that seemed to take an age — and then the dress was being pulled back over Sweetie Belle’s head.
“Watch my mane!” she protested, more of an automatic objection than anything with real fire behind it. But she was an adult now — practically — and visits to the spa ponies for her mane-cuts felt like a right of passage. She slept with curlers in now, just like Rarity.
As the last of the pink and purple petticoats slipped off, she turned her head to see it one more time. It didn’t feel quite real. A cutie mark of her own, after all this time. Three small paper-wrapped sweets, striped green to match her eyes. All her work — all those years of unrelenting effort — had finally produced a reward.
And one of these days she was going to figure out what it was.
I want to believe there’s something inside of me that’s unique. Some little kernel of personality or mind that’s all me, with nothing of her in it. But how can I know if that’s true, or if it’s just another thought that she thought first?
“I’m gonna dance tonight,” Apple Bloom declared, stomping both forehooves down in a power-stance before she remembered her white dress and hastily leapt away from the dusty road.
Scootaloo giggled. “Duh. It’s prom.”
Apple Bloom stuck out her tongue. “No, I mean with a boy.”
“Ugh, boys,” Scootaloo said. “Catch me dead with one. I’m going to ask Twist to dance.”
Sweetie Belle missed whatever Apple Bloom’s reply was; she was drifting behind them, occasionally glancing at the embroidered cutie marks that edged the bottom of their skirts — respectively a scooter and a pink apple on the stem with blossoms above it. But mostly she stared at nothing, her thoughts turning over the three sweets again and again.
It seemed like all her life she’d been chasing her cutie mark, and now that she had it, she was still no closer. How had she ended up with candy for a cutie mark, when she had no talent and no interest?
Maybe they’re bow ties, her mother had suggested brightly on one of her infrequent visits. Fashion, like Rarity!
They were clearly not bow ties, but had been a nice thought.
Perhaps the oracle knew what she was talking about when she suggested the name, her father said casually. Have you tried making any sweets, buttercup?
And she had, of course. He would have known that, if he hadn’t handed her off to Rarity the second she was too old to be cute anymore — but that was old ground, and she didn’t need to retread it. Not now.
After a lot of encouragement from Rarity, she’d spent an afternoon with Bon Bon, Ponyville’s resident sweet-maker. An afternoon of confusion, feeling utterly out of her depth. An intruder in a space that wasn’t meant for her. Sweetie Belle’s latest cutie mark experiment, Rarity had said airily to Bon Bon, after Sweetie Belle insisted she didn’t want anypony to know: not yet.
But Bon Bon had been strange. Withdrawn. And the candy-making equipment as looked uncomfortable in her hooves as it had in Sweetie Belle’s. She wielded the tongs like a weapon, and once when Sweetie Belle had brushed against her in the kitchen she had flinched and stared with wild white eyes until Sweetie Belle had squeaked out something about maybe I should be getting home, and then she snapped back to normal like nothing had ever happened.
It had ended badly, when Sweetie Belle fumbled a ladle of white-hot liquid candy and spilt it all over her own haunches. She had yelped and torn at the sundress she wore, and the cutie mark had shown itself. Alien and alienating. Eyes flat and dead, Bon Bon had reached for her and in her agony and embarrassment Sweetie Belle had simply bolted.
She had not returned to the sweet shop.
“Come on, Sweetie Belle!” Apple Bloom hollered from up ahead, and Sweetie Belle obediently shifted into a trot. She couldn’t be late for her own prom.
Sweet Stuff. Sweet Pop. Sweet Tooth. Sweetberry. Sweet Breeze. Sweetie Drops. There have been so many of us. Of me. Stumbling one by one from the darkness, all born alike from the first, who sacrificed herself that she might live forever. An eternal servant for an eternal mistress.
We were used and we were used until we had nothing left to give. And yet there she is. There I am. One more. Always one more.
All it takes is a hair.
“What’s wrong, Sweetie?” Pipsqueak’s smile shifted into a frown of concern, and he put out a hoof to steady her. “You alright?”
Sweetie Belle cringed away, her flesh suddenly crawling. She didn’t want to touch him — to touch anypony. Not anymore. She didn’t feel at home in her own skin. Everything was wrong. The cutie mark, the height, the way her mane coiled on her neck. She wanted to be safe at home, with Rarity slicing cucumbers for her eyes — the only surefire cure for a migraine, darling — and the world safely locked outside.
“Yes,” she choked out. “I just need some — some air.”
He looked worried, but Sweetie Belle was already bolting. Two minutes later she was out of the auditorium, out of the corridors where ponies were sneaking away to make out, and safe in the anonymity of a darkened theatre. The stage where she had once sung her heart out to a cheering crowd. When she had dared to dream just for a moment that her cutie mark, when it came, would be a music note, a microphone, anything. Before reality hit and three small candy-striped nightmares claimed her future.
Her eyes slipped shut and she tipped her head back, imagining the warm tingle of the spotlight against her skin.
But there were hoofsteps — somepony was coming — and Sweetie Belle bolted behind the closest curtain. Angry voices, slowly becoming clearer. Sweetie Belle risked a peek, and almost squealed in horror. Lyra and Bon Bon, who she had not seen since the disastrous day in the sweet shop.
“You told me I was the last,” Bon Bon snarled, her ears pinned flat against her head.
Lyra looked frightened. “You were! I quit, and without me to manage the Nicodemunion I have no idea how they made another. I was the only one who could—”
“—Shh,” Bon Bon hissed, suddenly pressing a hoof to her wife’s lips.
“Bonnie, what—?” Lyra protested, only to be hushed more aggressively.
“She’s close,” Bon Bon whispered, and Sweetie Belle had to clap her hooves over her mouth to keep from crying out.
She cringed back behind the curtain. Too risky to look anymore.
Bon Bon took a few slow steps, and Sweetie Belle felt two hearts thundering in her chest. “I can feel her."
Lyra took a shuddering breath, and Bon Bon stepped forward again, her hooves echoing too loudly in the silent theatre. Sweetie Belle clung to her curtain.
“Go on ahead, Lyra,” Bon Bon said. “I’ll catch up.”
“You sure?” Lyra echoed doubtfully.
“Sure.” Then with an attempt at humour: “Those kids won’t chaperone themselves.”
The soft sound of a kiss, and then receding hoofsteps. And then a voice, somehow smoother than usual. Suddenly entirely too familiar.
“Sweetie Belle?”
Clenching her eyes shut, Sweetie Belle waited for it to be over.
“I know you can feel it,” Bon Bon said. “If we’re left alone, without the aging spells and the combat training, we can have normal enough foalhoods. Or so I’m told.”
What…what was she talking about?
Bon Bon was prowling closer, and Sweetie Belle suddenly felt like the unfortunate mice Opalescence sometimes cornered.
“Did I ever tell you my name? My real name?”
Sweetie Belle’s eyes flickered to the dark apertures of the wings. She was so close. If she could just run—
—The curtain was suddenly ripped away from her, and she yelped and crumpled, staring up into blue eyes the exact same shape as her own.
“It’s Sweetie Drops,” said Bon Bon, still in that same horrible voice, too smooth and melodious for her. A voice that would surely be beautiful when raised in song.
A voice that…that sounded a lot like hers.
Sweetie Belle stared, and things began to click into place. The mane, two-tone and curled, just like hers. The yellow-white fur, only a little more saturated than her own. And Sweetie Drops moved, and Sweetie Belle gaped at her cutie mark. Three identical striped sweets. One after another, neatly wrapped and fresh from the factory. Mass produced.
Something deep inside her twisted and broke.
And somehow, she was not surprised when Sweetie Drops looked her in the eyes, and said very softly, “You know there can only be one. There’s not enough magic for two.”
Slowly, Sweetie Belle nodded. She had felt it herself since those terrible things crawled onto her flank. The slow leeching of something. Some indefinable essence. Something that made her her.
“I’m older,” Sweetie Drops said, almost pleading. “But…there’s Lyra. I love her.”
Sweetie Belle could have said, there’s Rarity. There’s Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle. There’s Rara’s music camp in the summer. She could have said anything, but Sweetie Drops shifted, and Sweetie Belle found herself mirroring the motion. Muscle for muscle, exactly alike.
And Sweetie leapt for her, and Sweetie reared onto her hind legs and lashed out with sharp-tipped hooves harder than iron.
I’m wounded. Everything I did, she could do. The same magic fed us both. She’s gone, but I’m going too.
I look down at her. She was just like me. Exactly the same, with each colour shifted just enough to lend the illusion of uniqueness. I reach down into the morass, and pull out a single pink hair. It curls gently as I hold it in my teeth, peering down cross-eyed at it. Wincing with pain, I turn my back on the stage and limp away from the carnage. One hair is all it takes. One hair in a test tube, and the Nicodemunion will make another.
This time it will be different.