Chapter 2

The smell of coffee and the sound of a pair of feet whispering across bare flagstones woke Twilight the next morning. It was still dark. Fog brushed up against the windows, hiding the van from sight, but a warm golden glow was drifting slowly down through the fog.

“Hey.” It was Applejack up so early. She shrugged at Twilight’s questioning look. “I’m used to being up this early. Farm, n’all. I’m surprised you’re up, though. Uh, no offense.”

“None taken. I don’t sleep well in strange places.” Despite the softness of the pad under her sleeping bag, she hadn't been able to escape the alien feeling of sleeping so close to the ground. "I've never even been camping before."

“Aw. Sorry t’hear that. But t’ain’t strange when you’ve got friends with ya. You fell asleep right quick after Pinkie started snorin’ in your hair.” Applejack waved her mug at the the pile of pink laying mostly on the couch. “I’m just surprised you tolerated her hangin’ offa you like that last night. That girl’d hug a grizzly until it whimpered.”

“Isn’t that just what Pinkie does? It felt nice, though. I mean, she’s nice. Um.” Heat crept up her neck, hidden by the darkness, and she looked away. She'd only ever seen Shining Armor and Cadance that close before.

Applejack didn’t seem to notice her discomfort. “She does, sometimes. I can’t stand it, though. Her bein’ all clingy like that. I need my space.” She took a sip of coffee, keeping her eyes on Twilight. “Still, I imagine it’s right nice if you ain’t been hugged in a while.”

Twilight looked away, blushing more hotly.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean ta imply—” Applejack coughed, then sipped her coffee, eyes flicking up briefly to, then away from Twilight’s face.

“It’s okay. I don’t get hugged often. Not by my friends.” One look around her, at the four other sleeping bags, and she knew that was a lie. She had been hugged by each of them, almost every day she saw them. “Before, I mean. At Star Swirl.”

Rarity, doing her best to remain still, despite obviously being awake, smiled. Fluttershy, holding tight to a plush animal, curled up around it tighter. Rainbow and Pinkie were still asleep. Pinkie on the couch, an arm dangling down to touch Twilight’s sleeping bag, and Rainbow Dash curled up on the loveseat.

When she looked back at Applejack, the farm girl was watching her quietly, coffee mug lowered. It felt like she was waiting, and Twilight could see no judgement in her open, honest face.

“I said it was a lot to take in, and it is. But the more that I do...” Twilight shook her head. “I didn’t have a lot of friends at the Star Swirl Academy. Not like you all. Just other people I knew. Study buddies.” She shrugged and pushed back the sleeping bag to stand up. “It is nice to be hugged just because someone wants to hug me, and not because they’re family or are congratulating me. It feels nice to belong.”

“I won’t deny that. You want some coffee? Got a pot on the camp stove.” She pointed. “It ain’t hot yet, but it is coffee.”

“I’d love some.” The kitchen table was scarred driftwood, smooth and rough by turns, cut into planks and planed smooth. Twilight ran her fingers over a hollow smoothed by countless waves as she sat down. “What kind?”

“Instant. Black.” Applejack poured her a mug and set the coffee pot back on the hissing burner. “Here you go. So... if ya don't mind me asking, what’re you writing in that journal of  yours?”

“Just... thoughts.” Twilight looked down into the coffee mug and frowned at some of the crystals that hadn’t dissolved yet. “I don’t know what to think about a lot of things. Writing them down helps me think.”

“Apple trees, for me.” Applejack pulled out a chair, and sat next to Twilight.

Outside the bay window on the other side of the table, chalk-white fog drifted lazily in a faint, early morning breeze.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Twilight said.

“I think better when I’m working in the grove. The smell, the heat of the sun. Heck, even in the shade.” Applejack’s eyes closed, and she breathed in deeply, smiling, then let it out in a long, peace filled sigh. “I don’t know what I’d do without the farm.”

“I...” Twilight glanced at her mug, where the crystals were almost all dissolved. “I have my family’s library. It’s quiet, and usually dark. Nobody bothers me very much in there.” She frowned. “It’s like that at SSA, too. Quiet. Nobody bothers you.”

“Sounds lonely.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t think so. When I’ve got my books, I don’t notice.”

Applejack arched an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“Is that wrong?”

“No.” Applejack took a long sip, frowned at the coffee, then took another. “You are who you are, Twilight. If you like quiet, peaceful alone time, that’s fine with me.” She smiled, set the mug down and twisted about in her chair. “Still, it helps to talk things out, too. Sometimes.”

The implicit invitation stuck in Twilight’s throat. She thought of the entries she was less proud of in the beginning of her journal.

Applejack smiled and laid her hand on Twilight’s lightly. “Offer’s there, if you wanna take me up on it.”

The offer being made explicit didn’t help. Twilight nodded, and sipped at the lukewarm coffee to cover her silence, but left her other hand under Applejack’s. The warm, rough hand eased the tightness in her throat the longer it rested, waiting for her to respond.

Twilight turned her hand over and let the warmth soak into her palm. She smiled, twining her fingers through Applejack’s. “I’m not sure I’m ready.” She squeezed gently, then slipped her hand away. “Yet.”

That seemed to be enough for Applejack. She smiled back. “Take your time.”

They sat at the table, staring silently out the window as the sun continued to creep up and the golden light began to filter down into the cove. The mist began to drift away, revealing the beach in golden light and shadow. The van sat in the sand, a hulking grey shadow glittering in the early morning.

“I don’t know if we’ve said this, but we’re glad you came. Seeing her again would have been nice, but... I know in my heart that she couldn’t stay.” Applejack said, breaking the silence as the sun broke over the edge of the cliff. “You can. We can see you every day, without restrictions or worrying that she might get stuck here or...” She sighed. “I mean, we love her. What she did for us was—”

“She showed you what you meant to each other. Rarity said that, when she was fixing up my hair.”

“Yeah, she did do that.” Applejack nodded. “We’ll always be grateful. But...” She shook her head. “She couldn’t stay,” she repeated. “That’s something about friends. Being there for one another.” Her foot brushed against Twilight’s. “You were there for us, even if you didn’t know what you were gettin’ into. I guess we just kinda dragged you into that whole mess with the sirens.”

“I’m not complaining.” Twilight sighed, then shook her head. “I’ve been dying to know, but... what’s she like? Is she like me?”

“No.” Applejack snorted and waved a hand dismissively, making Twilight’s stomach flop. “You might look just like her, sound just like her... but I’m glad you’re not her. You’re more relatable, y’know?”

Twilight’s stomach settled again, and she hid the relief behind her mug. She took a sip of too bitter coffee, and grimaced at the taste. “What do you mean?”

“You’re...” Applejack trailed off, staring into the fog. “I guess it’s a little hard to put a finger on why.” She twisted her lips in a wry smile. “Like now, actually. It’s easier to talk to you. You understand me when I talk about what’s goin’ on.  Cars, trucks, and tractors aren’t a mystery to you, and you don’t look at me funny when I talk about... well, almost anything. Trying to talk to her about anything more modern than a train was like running through prairie dog city.”

“Huh?”

“Well, almost anything.” Applejack laughed.

Should I have understood that?

Silence fell over the table again, interrupted by the growing burbling of the pot on the stove.

“You belong, Twilight.” Applejack’s hand covered her hand again, jerking her out of her thoughts. “I can just feel it. We’re all meant to be together.”

“And her?”

“She... I dunno how to describe it. I mean, aside from talking to her. There was just something in the way she looked at us that I can’t put to words.” Applejack shook her head. “I don’t think I can.” Her eyes unfocused as she looked off into the disappearing fog. Finally, she shrugged and took another sip, glancing at the steaming pot.

“I might be able to.”

Twilight hadn’t heard Fluttershy’s quiet feet padding up behind them.

“Gosh darn it, Fluttershy!” Applejack rasped, choking on a mouthful of coffee inhaled instead of swallowed. “Don’t sneak up on folk like that!”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Fluttershy backed up, clutching her plush bunny even tighter to her chest.

“No, no.” Applejack pounded her chest with a fist and coughed again, wincing. “Come have a seat.” Applejack kicked out a chair and waved her mug at it. “I’ll get you some coffee, too.”

Fluttershy sat obediently, looking down at her stuffed bunny’s face.

“You were saying?”

“Oh. Um.” Fluttershy stared off into space until Applejack came back and waved a steaming mug under her nose. “Right. I was thinking that Twilight—pony Twilight—always seemed like she was looking over my shoulder when I talked to  her, like she was searching for something. I suppose she was trying to find the pony us.”

Sitting back down, Applejack nodded. “Makes sense, her looking for another ‘us.’ I admit, it woulda been interesting if you two had met. You are like her, in some ways. Different in others. She was a might more open than you, but other than that, it’s kinda freaky how alike you are.”

“I wonder if that means she’s friends with the other us?” Fluttershy gestured with her mug to the sleeping girls. “I mean, I’m pretty sure she is, but I’m sure we’re different in ways that she wasn’t expecting.” She shrugged and ducked behind her mug.

“I thought some of the students at my school were trying to prank me, at first.” Twilight slapped a hand to her forehead. “Those videos of me looking so clutzy. I tried to disprove them, but there was no way they could have been faked. Not the raw footage I found.” She sighed. “My friends...” Were they really my friends? The friends sitting with her showed nothing but concern on their faces. Laughter echoed through her mind, taunting instead of happy. “Well, the other students at SSA teased me about it for a while.”

Silence fell over the table, and a yawning Rarity put a hand gently on her shoulder, then took a mug offered by Applejack with a nod of thanks. “That must have been awful, dear.”

Twilight shook her head. “I was really isolated at that school. I had my books, and my studies. Coming by the school when I did...” I wanted to clear my name. “I wanted to see if she was still there. I wasn’t even going to stop. Just drive by and look. But when I saw all of you standing around, I did.”

“And aren’t we glad you did! That was a little confusing, seeing you drive up in a car instead of appearing through the statue. I mean, after Twilight wrote back saying she was coming... then the book caught fire, we didn’t know what to think.”

“Caught fire?”

Rarity nodded. “Just woosh! Up in flames.” Rarity paused, a finger tapping her chin. “I wonder what caused it to do that.”

I would love to know that, too, Twilight thought. An artifact from another world, from a magical world, would have been a research opportunity beyond anything she’d been able to manage in secret.

“Mysteries and more mysteries. She seemed to drag them around with her.” Rarity shrugged, waving a hand dismissively. “What matters is that you are here, now. And we’re happy you are.”

“I’m happy to be here, too.”

I’m still not sure how the other me fits into this world. If she does at all. No one has seen or heard from her since Sunset Shimmer’s book caught fire. If only I’d had a chance to look at it before it was destroyed, I could have tested some of my hypotheses regarding the strange readings I’ve been getting.

Twilight looked up from her journal to watch Applejack and Rainbow Dash setting up the badminton net.

Rarity, sitting beside her, smiled. “You could go play with them, you know.”

“I’m not really the athletic type.”

“I’m not either, dear, but that’s not going to stop me from playing a game or two.” Rarity adjusted her sun hat again and shifted her shawl over her shoulders as a strong breeze briefly drowned out the rushing hiss and roar of the waves on the shore. “Such an awkward time of year. Too sunny to go without protection, but not warm enough to go without something to keep you that way.”

Twilight shivered in the breeze. “The ocean should be plenty warm. The western oceanic current brings up plenty of water from the tropics.”

“Oh, it is plenty comfortable in the water. The problem comes when we get out.” Rarity nodded to the badminton net, fluttering in a strong breeze coming down from the bluffs. “It used to be that we’d fly kites all day on days like this. Poor Sweetie Belle almost got carried off to sea one year when she held on too stubbornly.” She chuckled.

“Should I have left my swimming suit behind?” Twilight sucked on her lower lip for a moment, then shook her head. “Am I even worrying about the right things?”

“Don’t worry about it, dear. We’ll go swimming tomorrow. Promise.”

Twilight clamped a hand down over her journal, glancing at the mostly empty page. The wind came up again, fluttering the pages. I’m not going to get any writing done at this rate. She stuffed the book back in her bag and lay back to watch Applejack and Rainbow finish setting up the net, albeit somewhat shorter than normal.

Beyond them, Pinkie Pie was racing the waves while Fluttershy stayed just out of them and bent now and again to add a shell to a small basket. Pinkie, being Pinkie, had worn her bathing suit and didn’t seem to be at all bothered by the chill in the air.

“It must be all the sugar...”

“Did you say something?”

“Just wondering.” She pointed at Pinkie. “How does she stay warm?”

“Well, run around as much as she does, and you won’t catch a chill.” Rarity shrugged and waved at them. “Tell me, what did you do for fun at Star Swirl?”

“Read, study, learn new things. There was always something new to learn there. So much that it was hard to run out of things to do.” Most of the memories of the other gifted students she had studied with had never been vivid, but a few stood out. “I don’t think I was normal. Other girls there kept on asking me to come with them to do things. I wonder... should I have?”

“Would you still be you if you had?” Rarity pulled down her sunglasses and peered more closely at Twilight. “Don’t worry so much about the past, Twilight. That was one thing that... other you taught all of us. It didn’t matter what had come between us in the past. All that mattered was what we did with what we had.”

“That’s... very insightful.”

“It still took us six months or more for the lesson to really sink in, mind you. By the time those... sirens started stirring up the school, we had all but fallen apart again. Ironically, it was Sunset that kept us together those first few days, when the school was falling apart and rallying against us.” Rarity pushed her sunglasses back up and lay back down, closing her eyes. “She really helped us to see what we really meant to each other. Again.”

Twilight leaned her head back and shaded her eyes against the sun rising from late morning to noon. “Then what did I really do?” Uncertainty about her place with her friends burbled up, driving away the bliss of a morning spent surrounded by friends who claimed to love her. “Do I really—”

“Stop that. Right now.” Rarity sighed and took off her sunglasses. “You do belong. You’re one of us, Twilight. You are one of our friends, and if there’s anything I’ve learned about the real meaning of friendship since pony you went home, it’s not whether or not we are useful that makes us important to each other.” She tapped the folded glasses against her chest. “Look at me. My best friends wouldn’t know high fashion if it bit them. Does that make me any less a friend to them?”

Twilight’s eyes roved over the beach, looking for an answer. She saw Pinkie plop down next to Fluttershy, and start sorting through the shells. The whistle and thump of rackets started up as Applejack and Rainbow Dash began a game of badminton.

Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Rarity let the sound of the surf, wind and their friends fill the air. “Friends don’t have to be useful to each other to be friends. It helps strengthen the bonds if we do things together, but none of us really have a role to play. We just are.” Rarity slid her sunglasses back into place and lay back down. “Because we like each other. Most of the time.”

Twilight sat quietly, letting what Rarity had said sink into the deeper, darker recesses of her mind. She watched Applejack dive after a birdie, miss, and laugh as she got up. Pinkie Pie jumped up with a screech that echoed down the beach, then picked up a crab by the offending pincer.

Fluttershy waved her hands urgently, her words lost to Twilight in the ceaseless rush and crash of the waves. She watched while Pinkie wrestled with the crab, and finally set it down in the water.

Ribbons of light danced and faded between all of them, grew stronger, then melted away.

“I can see it, sometimes,” she murmured. Focusing on the spark in her heart, the streamers grew stronger. It was like their magic, a rainbow of light that had connected them together. Even the longer streamer leading away to the east, Sunset Shimmer, was there. The vision of rainbows faded away as a puffy cloud drifted lazily, briefly across the sun. “Magic.”

“Did you say something?”

Down near the ocean, Fluttershy looked up and cocked her head. She glanced back at Twilight, and waved.

“Just thinking.” Twilight waved back, closed her eyes, and let the sunlight streaming down, along with the spark in her heart, ease some of the worry.

Wet sand squelched under Twilight’s sandals as the wave retreated, leaving behind the cool tingle of saltwater on her skin. Ahead, the cliffside rose up off the beach like a wall of white and dingy brown. Trees clung desperately to the craggy face, their leaves swaying in the wind that continued to sweep down fitfully from the bluffs.

“This really is a beautiful place. Isolated, calm.” Fluttershy smiled into the wind and spread her arms out wide. “It’s perfect.”

“It is, isn’t it?” The feeling of peace wasn’t lost on Twilight. Without cars, city noise or even the subtler hum of electricity, something in her that had been unwinding since she arrived uncoiled that much more. Even the absence of worry about homework or school, or anything at all to worry about immediately had become more palpable in the last few hours. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so relaxed. It feels weird.”

“Being relaxed?”

“Yeah. Everything that I should be worrying about feels like it doesn’t belong here.” She waved her hand at the cove, and glanced over her shoulder at the four girls playing badminton closer to the beach house. “Except none of the things that I used to worry about apply anymore. Not really. CHS is far more lax than SSA ever was.”

“With homework, you mean?” Fluttershy paused a moment to bend and pick up a seashell half-buried in the sand. “But there’s so much more going on at CHS. The Fall Formal, the battle of the bands... the Spring Fling is coming back around again, too.”

“Those are social things. SSA had those, I guess, but...” Twilight shook her head and fell quiet. Days spent isolated in the library while, outside the thick double doors, the sound of revelry and her fellow students having fun filtered through her mind. Her only companions had been books, and her only friends had been her brother and his girlfriend. “They were never something that I worried about.”

Fluttershy peeked at Twilight from under her hair, then reached out to settle her hand on Twilight’s shoulder. “You don’t need to worry about them, you know. Just enjoy them.”

“But Pinkie Pie and Rarity—”

“Volunteer their time. We all did when other you was here. We worried, yes, when it seemed like she wouldn’t get home, but we also had fun.”

“And the Battle of the Bands? There was a lot of—”

“Twilight...” Fluttershy’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “Stop.”

Her back tensed under the touch. There’s the house, too. There’s so much to organize, and after Rarity’s tour this morning, I think we’re just scratching the surface with what needs to be—

“Let it go. Just relax.” Fluttershy stepped behind Twilight and rested both hands on her shoulders, pulling her to a stop.

Shaking her head, Twilight smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure I know how.”

Fluttershy stepped closer and pulled her into a light embrace. “That’s why we’re here.”