And that's enough
Pipp rubbed her eyes and put her phone down, carefully placing it on the table in front of her. It fit perfectly in the same spot it always did, between a bottle of hoof polish and her pad of content ideas she had brought in from her bedroom. Sometimes she would wake up, half-remembering something, then grope for the pad in the dark to write down her idea. The next morning, she would wake up to either the best idea she’d had all week, or nonsense scribbles and a vaguely crude drawing of what she imagined was her sister, since they both usually had mostly unreadable expressions, but with a faint hint of pity lurking behind the eyes.
She rotated her ears, straining for any sounds of her sibling, but nothing reached her and she swiveled in her chair. She watched her reflection in the mirror copy her movements, and she was slightly envious that once she left the room, her reflection was free to do as she pleased, while Pipp walked back into a life filled with routine.
Wake up, wash up, eat up, shut up, smile and wave, pretend to be happy, be happy…
Not always in that order, and not always with the same emotions, but enough was the same she kept checking behind her for a rut in the lush carpets of the royal palace.
Pipp Petals, Princess Petals to the average Zephyr Heights citizen, a slew of nicknames – kind, non, and everything in between – to her fans, and a variety of nicknames exclusive to parents and siblings.
Well, parent and sibling, if one wanted to be pedantic.
She barely registered the guards saluting her as she passed, and she waved a downy wing at them more out of reflex than on purpose, and she couldn’t tell what expression was on her face at the moment since she had her phone tucked away rather than in front of her for a quick livestream or vlog entry.
The little purple pegasus glanced out one of the windows, and her stomach did a little swoop at the expanse of Zephyr Heights that spread out below and away from the palace.
Funny how a pegasus could get vertigo, but she was one of hundreds that didn’t deal well with heights in a city of hundreds of thousands of lives perched precariously on a mountaintop. She forced herself to move onward, putting the window behind her as she turned down a less-used hallway, tracing a path she wasn’t wholly familiar with, but remembered it because it was where she would find her sister.
Many turns later found her at the top of a staircase even darker than the hallways that led to it, and she reached out with a wing to trace a clean line along the wall, slowly guiding her down the spiraling steps.
She’d fallen down them once, and thankfully the scar left behind by the impact at the bottom was small enough to hide behind her mane. She shivered at the thought and her pace slowed to a crawl as she felt out the steps before her with cautious hooves.
One last turn, a short hallway, through an arch, and she was free.
She took a deep breath of fresh air, blown in through a massive open window at the far end of what her sister theorized was some sort of long-disused transportation hub. Faded posters lined the walls, filled with names of locales that were lost to the mists of time. The carpet beneath her hooves was little more than a few strands of blue and yellow thread, and the sounds of rodents fleeing into their holes reached her ears as her hooves hit the ground hard enough to send even her quiet steps booming through the chamber.
Movement at the far end caught her eye, and she breathed a sigh of relief as the familiar plume of her sister’s mane caught the light, a beacon in the darkness.
The older sibling didn’t call out to the younger, waiting patiently until they were close enough, and noses touched in a familial way, shortly followed by smiles and nods.
“I had a feeling you’d be down here,” Pipp said, stepping back to take in her sister’s somewhat dusty appearance. “You’ve been cleaning.”
Zipp Storm nodded, causing a cobweb to fall from her ear. Pipp’s ears went flat against her skull as she shuddered, and the older sister tilted her head, brow creasing slightly. “What brings you down here?”
Pipp smiled slightly. “I had some free time, and wanted to use it productively.”
“You hate it down here.”
“Only when it’s messy.”
Zipp’s pink eyebrow floated upwards, followed by half of a muzzle, before the head shook itself with a snort. She stepped back, into the light coming through the center window, and half-turned to flick a wing around the room.
“Do you like it?”
Pipp followed the sweep of the wing, seeing the edge of where Zipp had cleaned. The difference between dusty and swept wasn’t obvious, but she nodded nonetheless, which made the elder happy.
Pipp saw the device as she turned back, noticing that it had been moved out into the fading light. Beyond it was a blackboard covered top to bottom and side to side in scribbles with numbers and shapes and all manner of things Pipp couldn’t even begin to comprehend, despite having taken the same classes as her sister.
The books she noticed on tables tucked away in the gloom, with titles she couldn’t make out, no doubt held the secret of the arcane scratches, but she wasn’t here for them.
“Are you ready?”
She registered the words, and nodded, and she followed her sister towards the machine, half-listening as the pale pegasus explained the operation of the industrial fan.
Pipp watched her sister take a running leap, jumped off a lever, and the roar of the fan drowned out everything else as the sibling flew into the air on a storm of wind, mane and tail flailing wildly in the maelstrom as the other spiraled up on spread wings. She turned, and Pipp saw the expression on Zipp’s face before it became blurred by tears.
Pipp blinked them away, but not before Zipp noticed and flew out of the wind, landing on the lever to turn off the fan, then jumped to her sister’s side, her expression worried.
“What’s wrong? Dust in your eye? Did something get blown into you? Are you-”
Pipp raised a hoof to stem the tide of words and shook her head, smiling wetly at her sister.
“It’s not that,” she said, voice thick. She swallowed. “Just...seeing you like that…”
Zipp tilted her head, peering at the other. “Like what?”
Pipp somewhat copied her sister’s crooked smile. “Happy.”
Zipp blinked, stepping back a bit, before slowly turning to look at the fan thoughtfully.
She was silent for a few moments, ears twitching, before she glanced back. “Yeah, that makes sense.” She took a breath. “What about you?”
“No.”
It came out harsher than she intended and Pipp winced as her sister twitched.
“Sorry,” she tried again. “It’s just...you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for.”
The crooked smile returned. “But I perform all the time.”
“That’s different.”
The hoof came up, gently touching fur. Pipp rested her own against the limb, resting her cheek on it.
“No support.”
“But I have you.”
And that was enough.