Deep Roots Grow Healthy Flowers
“No, don’t touch that one!” snapped Wallflower.
Too late: Derpy’s finger poked the flower, and several things happened. The “tiny blob on a stick”, as she’d called it, shattered into scattering black pellets; the bush trembled as the seeds shot like slingshot bullets and hail over the leaves; Wallflower yelped and put a hand to her eye; and her other arm firmly barred Derpy from getting anywhere near the bush again.
Derpy winced, her own eyes shut. Like a tortoise peeking out of its shell, one eye peered through her fingers.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I only wanted to know what it felt like –”
“You know what that one is called!?” Wallflower flapped her away from it and, urgent as a medic, fussed and frisked and checked over and cheered up her patient the Impatiens plant. Her one eye was red where she’d been hit. “Touch-me-not! The clue! Is in! The name! There there, sweetie, Momma’s gonna make it all better…”
“It’s OK, I didn’t get any in my –”
“I wasn’t talking to you!”
Seeds had scattered across the soil in the garden, but Wallflower – who elsewhere tended to walk into or around people as though they were some frightening stampede of wild buffalo – had near-psychic senses whenever she entered this forested patch of school property. Her property. She’d put too much of herself into it. She wouldn’t give it up easy.
She noticed Derpy picking up one of the scattered seeds and angrily held out a hand for it.
“I could help you look for –?” Derpy began.
“You’ve done enough,” said Wallflower firmly, snatching up the seed.
By the time she had them piled up safely in a cradling container, Wallflower felt the old bile and flame simmer down. This garden had so much of her in it, anyone trespassing on it felt like a mocking enemy…
Her brain, which had strange and frightening thoughts stirred up in it, tried to put the words “mocking enemy” onto a picture of Derpy. Weird-eyed Derpy, smiling Derpy, Derpy with the dopey voice and the flat, uninteresting hair.
Soil still on her fingers, Wallflower put her palms over her face and held them there until the world was no longer too much for her, then left streaks of brown like ruined cake over her forehead and cheeks.
More gently, she explained, “The seed pods explode if you touch them. Touch-me-not is very precious, but the seeds can’t grow just anywhere. I don’t want to lose them.”
“OK,” said Derpy, wary but determined to keep the cheer afloat. “I won’t touch the touch-not. Can I hold the container instead –?”
“No!” Panicking, Wallflower held the container out of reach. “No. No, thank you.”
Gardening with Derpy was a nightmare. She’d already had to stop the girl digging down to the water mains, knocking over the celosias, and somehow setting the three decorative stones on fire with a paper bag full of cotton candy. The paper party hats “to celebrate our new friendship with the flowers!” had caught a freak breeze, and they still turned up in odd places like the treetops, the undersides of potted plants, and even – Wallflower still wasn’t sure how it had happened – inside a rosebud before it had bloomed. And Wallflower shuddered at the memory of Derpy trying to install a new sprinkler system, which on closer inspection had turned out to be a bunch of showerheads, a firehose, and Derpy’s foot standing on the wrong place at the wrong time.
Worst of all, Wallflower hated losing her patience with Derpy. Lots of classmates had taken pity on Wallflower when they’d learned how lonely she was, but all of three people had actually joined her gardening club. Derpy was the only one who visited daily.
Wallflower hated losing. Not when she finally had someone to lose.
But it should have been a happily ever after. That would have been… right. Derpy should have been good at gardening. Now Wallflower’s mind was cornered and not liking it.
“Er,” said Derpy, “anything I can do? Anything nice?”
Racking her brains, Wallflower cast her gaze from creeping vine to daffodil. It was impossible to think of anything that could survive Derpy’s touch.
“You… could…” Aha! “You… could… hold that wheelbarrow steady for me.”
“Yes sir, ma’am, sir!” Derpy saluted and hurried over to it on the edge of the garden. Not that Wallflower needed the sacks of compost yet, but what possible harm could she do if Derpy merely stood there holding the bars –?
Barely had Wallflower turned her back to inspect the Red Baron Blood Grass – her pride and joy after all the other pride-and-joys; it had taken her weeks of scouting gardening centres to find that one – when there was a crash and a thump. She wheeled round, which was entirely appropriate: the wheel had come off.
And the sacks were crushing the rainbow chrysanthemums! It had taken her months on the Web to track down those seeds, and months again to save up for them!
Derpy gripped the handlebars so tightly that her knuckles went white. “I swear I didn’t mean to!”
Wallflower pinched the bridge of her nose. Down one potful of rainbow chrysanthemums… great… wonderful… terrific…
“It’s OK,” she warbled through gritted teeth. “It was an old barrow. The wheel’s been squeaking for weeks. I am calm. I am very calm. I don’t. Lose. My temper…”
So she didn’t. She just sagged and gave up.
She slumped to her knees. The sight of all those blazing purple, red, and yellow flowers crumpled beneath the unsympathetic sacks of fate: it was like seeing her own life again, wasted.
A hand appeared before her. Derpy had come over to help her up.
For a cruel moment, Wallflower wanted to slap it away out of spite. Then she felt the anger fall back, leaving nothing. She let herself be heaved up without any sense that it was important. Shuffling over to the flowers and kneeling down to salvage what she could from under the sacks, and that was all now happening a long, long way off.
Grimly, she watched Derpy heave the sacks aside – surprisingly, the weight seemed by-the-by to the girl, whereas Wallflower had nearly popped a blood vessel inching them onto the wheelbarrow in the first place – and then picked at the pitiful scraps of colour mashed into the soil.
When Derpy sat down to watch, not even offering, Wallflower felt… off.
“Thanks,” popped out of her own mouth, though she wasn’t sure why.
“I know I mess things up,” whispered Derpy to her shoes.
“It’s not your fault. I told you the barrow was old. In fact, I’ve been saving up for a new one so I could finally get it replaced.” Wallflower held up a few scraps of petals to the light, vainly hoping the result might suddenly prove to be a healthy, merely scruffy survivor.
Miserably, Derpy’s eyes followed the questing fingers. “You don’t want any more help, do you?”
It wasn’t a question. It was a hopeless fact.
Wallflower felt something in the air slipping away, and she grasped the next few flowerheads much tighter than she needed to.
“Gardening,” she said without looking up from the stains, “is hard. No one gets it right away.”
“I don’t get anything right away.”
Wallflower quietly got on with piling up the dead chrysanthemums, because she had no idea how to follow up something like that. What was she supposed to do? At least talking to plants meant she didn’t have to think about them talking back.
“Well…” She chewed her lip. “Maybe you’d be really good at Stalk-Talking?”
“What’s that?”
Somewhere below Wallflower’s cheeks a fire raged in a desperate bid to burn all evidence of her words, but they tumbled out too fast. “It’s what I call talking to the plants. Stalk-talking, you see? Because it rhymes, and the word ‘stalk’ has the word ‘talk’ in it, only if I call it just plain ‘Stalking’, it sounds weird and creepy, which isn’t… what I was… going for…”
She risked an inspection of Derpy’s face. No new growth of understanding there.
Wallflower cleared her throat. “Anyway. Well, it’s an idea I got off of a beekeeper I met once, when I was little. I’d toyed with the idea of getting a hive of my own so they could pollinate my dad’s petunias. You know, instead of waiting for natural bees, which might not come. And, uh…”
“Ooooooooooh!” cooed Derpy out of nowhere; Wallflower jumped as though zapped. “You mean like Talking to Bees!”
This burst of capitalized intellect from Derpy stopped Wallflower’s hand. So far, the smartest thing Derpy had ever said was: “Zirconia’s a funny name for a flower, isn’t it?” Admittedly, Wallflower’s idea of smartness depended on how many genera of plants the speaker knew, but still…
“Um, yes?” she said, in case another brain bombing run was on the way.
“Granny Smith told me all about it once!” volunteered Derpy, who’d found her charitable element again. “She said when you get the honey for jam, you have to talk to the bees so they’ll let you take the honey without stinging you. It’s called Talking to Bees. It’s good luck to tell your bees all kinds of things, but it’s very good luck to tell them gossipy news and things. They like that.”
Around them, Wallflower noticed something she hadn’t heard for a long time: the peaceful silence. Conifers grew to the sky and pumped water and sucked their sap up several storeys high, all in a complete and confident quietude.
Briefly, she thought she heard the gristly crunching of roots worming their way through the blankets of earth.
“What did you want the honey for?” Wallflower cursed herself. Interrupting, and with a stupid question like that!
Derpy smiled sheepishly. “There was a girl in my class who was sick. I told her I’d get her something nice, but she didn’t want anything from the store. So I thought some fresh honey might make her feel better.”
Wallflower’s heart crumpled with guilt. “Who was it?”
“I don’t remember. But I cured them!”
“Oh. Did you?”
“Yeah!”
“How nice.”
Beaming with pride, Derpy leaned back and put her hands down for support –
– then yelped and drew them back sharply.
But Wallflower’s eye would’ve put a hawk’s to shame. She’d seen the stinging nettle branch creeping along the edge of the garden. She’d long since put a mental pin on it, with a mental note saying, To do: prune this. No nettles in my garden.
“Owie, owie, owie!” cried Derpy.
“Don’t squeeze it! Here, hold it towards me.”
Whilst Derpy gritted her teeth and hissed, Wallflower scrambled up and rushed over to the touch-me-not. Most of her interest in plants lay in watering and pruning, but she couldn’t browse libraries or surf websites without picking up a thing or two about herbal remedies.
“Sorry,” she whispered to the plant, “it’s an emergency. Forgive me!”
She plucked a handful of flowers.
Forcing Derpy’s moans out of her head, Wallflower rushed just beyond the garden perimeter to the artfully hidden shed. Well, she called it a shed, but it looked more like an outhouse that had been disqualified for being too cramped. Week after week of rooting around the jumble sale of coiled hosepipe and mysterious web-smothered toolbox had given her an intimate knowledge of how to pull out the pestle bowl and mortar without knocking over lawnmower parts.
A quick, experienced mash – in her youth, she’d had to learn the hard way that firmly grasping the nettle later meant firmly cussing up a storm – and Wallflower was ready.
“Hold it steady,” she commanded. Actually commanded: some part of herself was reeling at the thought that she’d actually, genuinely, really commanded somebody to do something.
Derpy gripped her own wrist and whimpered, holding out the reddening palm. Wallflower slathered the mash on with the pestle – she still felt much too squeamish to use hand-to-hand contact.
Once again, there descended upon her a sense that peace and silence had settled home to roost. Only this time, they felt wrong. Like they were the intruders.
“So…” she said breezily while she worked, “what else do you do? When you’re not sitting next to stinging nettles, I mean.”
The brave sapling of a laugh got trampled down. All that happened was that Derpy tilted her head in confusion. Obviously, Wallflower had a way to go yet before she’d master the art of “telling a joke”.
“Oh, I used to do all sorts of things,” said Derpy, straining to count them off her fingers whilst not blocking Wallflower from tending them too. “I was in a music band, and then I was a spelling bee, and then I went sailing, and then I took up archery with all arrows and targets, but I wasn’t very good at it –”
Guiltily, Wallflower had a vision of hails of arrows, crowds screaming for cover, and a dopey voice shouting, “Sorry! I didn’t mean to pull the string that hard!”
“– and then I started my own blog, and it was called Muffin Moments, but then people said muffins got old, and then the new big thing was cupcakes, so I left that alone and went abroad to see tropical islands and stuff…”
“It sounds amazing,” sighed Wallflower, as if she didn’t know. Wallflower, who had never even ventured outside of town before, much less outside her own tiny bubble, and who’d resented anyone who did. “Your life, I mean, sounds amazing. I mean, all that stuff you did sounds amazing. You know? Cos of all that stuff you did.”
Wallflower shut herself up right now, before anything else spilled out and made an embarrassing mess.
Derpy winced at a nudge of nettles, then giggled behind her free hand. “Did I never tell you that before?”
“Er… no, not that I remember.”
“Really? I could have sworn I did. Still, that’s not a surprise, is it? I wasn’t very good at any of it.”
“But you’ve tried so many things! You never clicked with any of them?”
Shrugging, Derpy whispered a quick Ow! “I only did it because I wanted to stay with my friends. They’re the amazing ones, really. Like the time Roseluck went to the Arbor… the Arobet… the Arbum… ooh, that place with all the trees, what was it called now?”
Botanical knowledge sprouted a memory. “The Arboretum?” Wallflower suggested.
“Right! She went to every tree and told me what every single one of them was called. Without looking at the labels too. I remembered all the stuff she said.”
“Really? Like what?” Hope rising…
“No, I mean I remembered her saying it. I don’t remember what she said.”
Hope tripped over its own shoes. Wallflower pretended to be engrossed in the last scraps of petal on Derpy’s hand.
“There,” she said, standing up. “How’s that?”
Derpy nodded. “Better, thank you!”
“I’ll, um, put my stuff away.” Wallflower made a show of glancing up, even though by now she could tell the time merely by the way the light trickled through the crisscrossing needle branches and shaded the Gingerbread Man Orchids. Lazy Beth, her mom used to call them. Wallflower never found out why, but the name stuck somewhere at the back of her head.
“Want some help?” said Derpy.
“No-thank-you-I-got-it-covered-bye!”
Wallflower hurried there, hurriedly threw her stuff away – the minutes crawled agonizingly by – and hurried back. So she was taken by surprise to find Derpy standing up, arms folded. A smudge of mash Impatiens had already stained one elbow; Derpy’s instruction-following instinct was a common cause for complaint in the nurse’s office.
“I guess, um, I guess I’ll l-leave you to look after your garden, then,” stammered Derpy, backing away.
A few moments ago, Wallflower would have floated with relief; now, she sank. “What? Why?”
“You’ve got a lot of things to do, and I’m only getting in your way –”
“No, no, no, no, no, that’s not…” True, was the word sprouting up from her larynx, but it died in the shade she threw at it, and instead the fruit of honesty dropped something onto her head with a slight concussion. “…what I want?”
Derpy hesitated. If she’d been any other species, her ears would have pricked up.
“I mean,” added Wallflower, hastily realizing how selfish that sounded, “if you want to go, if you got a club or something like that, I won’t stop you. I mean, I shouldn’t stop you. And, if, you, want, to… you know… you know?”
“Nope,” said Derpy, shaking her head.
“OK, but maybe later, then? Don’t let me stop you!” Wallflower settled on a nervous laugh which withered away before it had properly grown. “Not that I would. I mean –”
“I don’t have any other clubs.”
Wallflower’s brain, hastily stacking up its next conversational workload, dropped it all at once.
“What?” Then she thought that sounded unoriginal and added, “But what about all that stuff you talked about?”
Derpy laughed and waved at her as though dispelling a swarm of harmless hoverflies. “That? I haven’t done that stuff in ages.”
“You haven’t?”
“Uh uh. I never stick at anything for long. I just let my friends get on with it and cheer them on.”
“You do?”
“Of course! When Roseluck was sick, I tried taking over her backyard rosebush for her, but… well, she told me to wait outside after that, and in the end, I thought, Why not talk to her when we’re at school? That way, I’m not in the way, she gets what she wants, the roses stay alive, and we stick together somewhere. It’s a winny-win-win!”
“But…” Wallflower looked at the touch-me-not, which had a bald patch where she’d denuded it of its pride and joy. “But isn’t that just them pushing you aside?”
Derpy often looked confused, except this time she had some sting to it. The thought zipped across her face, and to Wallflower, it was a momentary mirror: the twisted pain of being kept apart, the dull horror of realizing this was as good as it was going to get, the claws of frustration clutching the skin around her eyes and one crushing squeeze away from a lifetime ablaze.
Yet Derpy recovered in a blink. “I’m sure they don’t mean to…”
Wallflower had to turn her back on Derpy for a moment. She gripped herself. Hard.
When she turned back, the conifers and the ivy around the stones glowed green with sudden sunlight. Brittle as her smile was, it was brittle like reinforced glass: it’d take a few tough thumps to make it shatter.
“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
Without looking back – then changing her mind and looking back, because she never knew with Derpy – Wallflower led her out of the main garden and round the shed to a secluded little pit covered by a block of wood nailed to the wall. It was enough to keep the rain off, but not much else.
Crouching down, Wallflower beckoned Derpy to do the same.
The garden had never attracted much attention, which was why Wallflower had moved in to begin with. At school, she didn’t belong to any club, to any classroom, to any clique or corner. Even the gardening club paperwork had passed through the vice-principal’s office like a commuter hurrying on their way to someplace else. So even by those standards, a nook behind the shed was an exceptionally good place to hide a secret.
It looked like a flytrap on fire.
Around the central stem, which curled green like any easily breakable flowering plant but was as stiff as bamboo when tapped, leaves of red and yellow spiked the air, twisted slightly, suggested frozen fire. None of them were bigger than a thumb, though when Wallflower reached forward to demonstrate this, she worried Derpy might copy her, so she desisted. Otherwise, she’d have also shown the leaves were warm to the touch.
“Ooh,” cooed Derpy. “Pretty.”
“I found the seed at the same time I found the Memory Stone, in the –” Wallflower glanced across, but Derpy was mesmerized by the fiery leaves. “Anyway, I found them. I don’t think they’re native to this world. Maybe when the portal opened, they sort of spilled through. You have to be careful about invasive species at the best of times.”
“Those leaves look just like Sunset’s hair!”
Wallflower Blush blushed. “Yeah. I don’t know why it does that. It used to look like my hair, you know, all scraggly and green… Ahem, anyway, I haven’t figured out yet how to make it bloom. See the bud at the top?”
Derpy obediently looked. A green sphere balanced itself on top of the swan-neck stem, with only two tiny points at the top and a thin line running down the belly of the bud hinting that there was anything covering it up. Two large leaves, hiding an orange. Or something about the right size and shape.
They both sat down properly and more comfortably in the dirt. Then they watched it in case anything interesting happened. But the thing sat there looking fat and not much else. Whatever nicely mystical air had haunted it now felt empty.
Wallflower licked her lips.
“You know,” she mumbled, “it might not even be from Equestria.”
No sound from Derpy, but Wallflower felt the urge to fall forwards anyway and press on.
“My parents used to tell me stories about long, long ago, hundreds – maybe even thousands – of years ago. They said humans weren’t the only ones in charge back then. We weren’t even really in charge. Everything used to belong to the elves.”
Not a sound. Wallflower had expected a snigger.
“There were more forests back then,” she continued, “and magic too. Our magic, not Equestrian magic. And there weren’t any cities. There was hardly anything bigger than a village. Humans couldn’t wander beyond their tiny farms and little lakes without walking into elfland. They say the elves looked after all of nature: the majestic trees, the tiniest blades of grass, and meadows and meadows of all kinds of flowers, gardens of paradise. And they were full of magical plants, more beautiful than anything left today. Anyone who threatened that was dealt with.”
Her voice hardened. Earth parched to harsh desert.
“Sometimes, the elves would wipe out a village because it was in the way. They didn’t care about anyone except themselves. They thought the forest mattered more. Humans were just… just… vermin. They treated us like we weren’t even really people. Like we didn’t exist. Sometimes, they hunted us. For fun.”
Wallflower’s mom used to have a painting framed on the living room wall. That was all the clue young Wallflower had as to what elves might have looked like. So sleek, so perfect, so… smug. They’d somehow looked basically like humans with pointy ears and like something too sharp, too beaky, too fanged, too rotten to be real humans at all. They’d looked abominable, in their corrupted colourful clothes that suggested sparkles had settled on a rotting pile of fruit.
“And then one day, they found another world they liked better. And they left. They didn’t even look after the plants anymore. They just took all the magic with them and… left.”
To her shock, a tear ran down her cheek. Wallflower hastily wiped her face where Derpy wouldn’t see. She’d never cried for that story before. Normally, she’d clench her fists.
“That’s supposed to be when humans started taking over,” she added, shrugging. “I always thought it was just a story.”
She checked on Derpy, who was either engrossed by the plant or had wandered off several astral planes away and was waiting for a tug. Perhaps now, she should tell her? But the burning chill died away, leaving Wallflower confused.
“Anyway,” she said, wrapping things up, “I thought I’d show you.”
Glumly, she hauled herself up, then drifted towards the garden on shuffling steps. But she’d only made two when a ringing hum jolted her, and she spun round. Derpy had poked the green bud.
“No, don’t touch –!” Wallflower began.
Then she saw the bud squeeze itself.
As it widened and flowed down, out emerged a single iridescent bubble. The bud seemed to be spewing its whole roundness out, only when it was done, the bud returned to its original size and shape.
Careful not to accidentally headbutt the bubble, Wallflower sat back down again. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” droned Derpy, as though hypnotized. “It just seemed the right thing to do.”
Across the bubble’s surface, the floating bits of rainbow shifted. At first, Wallflower thought that was the light reflecting off it as it shifted through the air at random, but then she saw shapes beyond the film.
A symbol drifted past: one purple star, six-pointed, surrounded by five smaller ones. Then it slid away like the shine off a film of water, revealing another symbol: a cloud with a rainbow lightning bolt. This gave way to three balloons, then three butterflies, then three apples, then three gems, and then finally to a sun, half-red, half-yellow, its flames giving it the appearance of a particularly aggressive Tao symbol.
Then the bubble popped.
“What was that all about?” whispered Wallflower, as though she were in a theatre during a production.
“I dunno. Let’s do it again!”
“Wait, can you do that?”
Derpy did, poking the bud. Like before, it gobbed out another bubble and then slid back to its original girth as though nothing had changed. Overhead, the bubble drifted towards them.
The first symbol was a bunch of blue circles, but when Wallflower squinted, she saw they were stylized bubbles of their own. This gave way to…
An eye. A dark squiggle below it. A pot, blacker than tar.
Although she had no idea what was going on, some secret sense shuddered and sparked and spat. This did not feel right.
After the bubble popped, the sensation was still there. Wallflower backed away from the shed and the strange plant. Since she’d sat on her backside, it wasn’t an elegant scramble, and it was only a mercy her jeans were already filthy.
“Maybe the plant’s trying to tell us something,” said Derpy.
Wallflower looked at her as though she’d sprouted onions out of her ears. “Aren’t you freaked out by this one bit?”
“Don’t be a silly billy. They’re nothing but bubbles. Ooh, maybe I can make the next one extra big!”
“Don’t –”
But Derpy couldn’t have read the room if it had used neon large print. Besides, there wasn’t a room out here, whether or not Derpy had the look of someone content to wait until one was built around her. She poked the bud extra hard until the stem sprung back.
What emerged was a much bigger bubble. How an orange-sized bud had squeezed a beachball-sized bubble out was anyone’s guess.
Wallflower backed further away and fell on her shoulders; the bubble drifted towards her.
“No, stay away! This could be more dark magic! Keep away from me!” She huffed and puffed. She might as well have flapped her arms to start a hurricane.
The bubble zoomed with deceptive bumblebee slowness and instantly, it had burst on her forehead with a sting –
Destiny Bloom, bloom, bloom…
The words echoed around the memory of Wallflower. A fragile bubble herself. Soul so easily popped.
Great sadness – not her own – settled over her as snow. Melted on her skin, trickled away from her warmth, but it all kept coming and soon the cold swarmed and stung.
What she felt was the cold, an ancient cold, passed down to her younger self and prepared to abandon her once she’d served her time. It was the cold she got when warm bodies were kept far, far away, and warm souls were kept behind shields, and warm thoughts were embers of humanity trapped in the bubble of endless blue.
It was how she’d felt, being alone.
But worse, much worse.
The Destiny Bloom – alien knowledge broke into her mind and pushed everything else away – the bloom showed her a vision. It showed her Canterlot High, the school as she’d remembered from her freshman year, bigger than a palace, so meaningless that its students were no better than ghosts haunting the corridors, but oh the moment they saw her, they’d become ghouls, and she felt too small, too weak, too squeezed in on herself until the despair quaked and solidified and burned hotter and hotter and became the core, and ruptured her mind with molten anger.
That had been the seed of one life. But now the vision branched into another.
Canterlot High, and her little bubble of a garden hidden among the nearby trees. The feelings poured back in; this was not enough to satisfy her. They would rue the day they stole her life from her and then pushed her out. They. Would. Pay!
A flash of red within the secret garden: Wallflower recognized the tell-tale magic of the Memory Stone. So she’d found it.
Streams of memories snaked through the air. On another plane of reality, they wrapped around each other, became a spaghetti of symbols – bubbled – fizzed, sputtered, evaporated. Lost forever after the third day.
Not enough.
More streams of memories were stolen. More life drained out of Canterlot High. Student scores plummeted. Teachers had to retire early as though struck senile. Parents drove up and dragged students away in droves. Eventually, the windows were boarded up.
Behind the school, the garden spread. Vines crept over the faculty parking lot, tree saplings cracked the concrete, shrubs advanced like the greenest army in the world. Still more streams of memories vanished into its dark heart.
But the anger didn’t die. It survived. It spread like a weed. It burned all it found.
Slowly but surely, the houses and streets around the school emptied. People moved away, their happy lives and family ties broken. Their heads didn’t remember why, but their hearts sensed something wrong. Rumours spread.
Vines smothered the boarded-up windows of the school. Trees that had remained tame and stately grew shaggier and bigger along the boulevards. From high above, the garden became a mould on a gigantic sandwich.
But the anger didn’t die. It grew desperately hungry. Enough was never enough.
Famous celebrities – the successful, the rich, the powerful, the ones smiling on TV – suddenly came down with bouts of forgetfulness. Some forgot their entire lives. Audiences who tried to tell them woke up next morning wondering what all the fuss had been about. Everyone who was anyone, who could still smile even once in a while, became a vacant blank slate. The city was full of ghosts, who didn’t remember dying and who no longer had an afterlife.
Shrubs and flowers conquered the city. The rest of the world sent men in suits to investigate, and horror spread: the survivors came back as if they were strangers from another planet. Soon, the rest of the world left Canterlot City, too frightened to look any further. Anyone who got too close was as good as dead.
But the anger didn’t die. Sooner or later, it fed on itself. It turned raw, to heartbreak and hunger, excruciating, just to stay clinging to life.
And in the mists of the forest, through acres and acres of broken buildings and endless leaves and flowers that bloomed darkly no matter what colour they were meant to be, there lay a tangle of vines. Nothing suggested it was human anymore. Amid the pile of growing greenery, though, there beat two things. A red light, and a red heart.
Nothing else. Except a pair of clawlike hands. Grasped around a stone with a single eye.
Sooner or later, unfed, finally forgotten, the hunger died.
– the bubble popped.
Wallflower blinked. For a second, she had a world on her back, then she remembered she’d been lying on the ground.
Derpy’s hand appeared in front of her. “Are you all right? Did you see all that stuff on the bubble?”
Fear shocked Wallflower upright. She still remembered the bubbling of the memories. “You saw that!?”
“Oh yes. The bubble was sitting on your face for a little while. I was really worried about you.”
“But what was that? Was it real? Was it a prediction about the future?”
Relief sagged Derpy’s shoulders: seeing Wallflower so excited calmed her down. “Maybe it was a memory?”
“I don’t think Canterlot High ever got covered in trees, Derpy. Everything felt so real. It was like I was there! And I saw the Memory Stone!”
“I thought that was destroyed?” said Derpy, keeping up.
“Right! So it must’ve come back! It’s going to find me again, and when it does –”
“Well, if it’s destroyed, it won’t be doing anything like that. Even I know you can’t un-destroy something.”
Wallflower glowered at her. She was going to be doomed, and she wasn’t going to be fooled into thinking otherwise.
“Then,” she spluttered, flailing about for the right words, “then someone’s going to fix it. They’ll make a new one, or, or… or they’ll make it look like a Memory Stone –”
“Wallflower?”
“– but really it’s something even more evil!”
“Wallflower!”
“Or maybe it’s what I was going to do if I’d gotten out of control! That was me! I could’ve ended up just like that –”
“WALLFLOWER!”
She’d never heard Derpy shout before. Not like that. Wallflower shut up quick.
To her consternation, if anything Derpy looked calmer than before, and that was with the wonky eye.
“We don’t know what it was or what it meant,” said Derpy, picking a twig out of her own hair absentmindedly.
“Exactly! What if –?”
“So there’s no point getting upset about it, is there? It was just a bubble.”
“But it felt so real –”
Derpy sighed, which paradoxically made her patience seem all the more rigid. “Wallflower, this is here and we are now. We’re in the garden. There’s nothing bad happening, is there?”
“Well, no, but –”
“So it is what it is. That was a bubble, and now it’s popped. This is our bubble, and it hasn’t popped yet. So let’s deal with this one now, OK?”
Wallflower watched her amble past the shed. “Bubble?” she repeated.
“Let’s check on the plants and then we can go home, like we were going to do anyway. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what you told me we were gonna do?”
“Uh…” Wallflower checked this was Derpy she was talking to, and then some inner voice told her to just go along with it, and it’d probably make sense eventually. “Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, wanted to make sure there weren’t any caterpillars on the rhododendrons again.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
Thankfully, there weren’t any holes or bite marks on the large bush. This meant Wallflower could make a quick getaway. Yet she didn’t totally want to throw herself out of the garden and rush home and hide in bed and pretend today hadn’t happened. Some part of her had to know…
Derpy hung on the margins when she turned around.
“I’ll wait till you’re done,” said Derpy apologetically.
“Didn’t you want to go home early?”
“No. Because then you’d have no one to talk to.” A sunbeam spread across Derpy’s face, or else that was her smiling. “We could call it Talking to Wallflower. Wall-Talking!”
Wallflower rolled her eyes. New to friendship as she was, it hadn’t taken her long to spot sappiness when she heard it. “Like the bees?”
“Busy, busy bees. And your jumper’s stripy!”
“It’s a turtleneck.” Wallflower couldn’t stop a giggle, though. All she needed were the wings and about a million more like her, and that’d do it.
Just in case – and to drag out the time – Wallflower checked the rhododendrons again, turning over leaves each time. You never knew: caterpillars could be sneaky.
Scraping noises made her turn around. She found Derpy dragging the Destiny Bloom over.
“What are you doing!?” hissed Wallflower.
“I never got a turn.” Derpy pouted, then she poked the bud.
Before the gigantic bubble burst forth, Wallflower was already running across, scattering soil under her sneakers, hand outstretched, mouth shouting a warning. Unfortunately, Derpy had seated herself right next to the plant. The bubble had barely any distance to cross before popping on her nose.
The pop flashed beyond Derpy. It flashed beyond Wallflower. It flashed beyond the garden, the forest, the sunlight, the entire world.
This time, the air did not chill. The air was warm.
Canterlot High was a castle. All the meagre growths around the lot were verdant national parks of hills and trees. There was a moat, and a ring of guards on the battlements, and a cluster of villages and towns where once there had been Canterlot City.
People gathered in the streets, many with children on their shoulders. Bluebells and violets hung from baskets. Stalls of rare spices and cotton carpets and woven wickerwork mingled with the festival of vegetables and visions of fruit. Tulips rang their bells along the flowerbeds, and girls wore daisy chains in their hair.
The low yet bright sun suggested “spring”. Some puddles of meltwater dotted the streets, now playful pools for the little ones to splash around in. Everything seemed welcome, even the dark shade beneath the rows of oaks.
A fanfare, a military march, an army of knights and cavalry. Banners and pennants, all showing the same symbol: bubbles.
High up on the gates, past them to the white tower, through a stained-glass window depicting six stars around a greater seventh, past the red carpet and the cries of “HUZZAH!”, up the steps flanked by the Royal Guard, on an alabaster throne… a green figure curtseyed and crowned Queen Derpy.
Who raised her sceptre. Overhead, hidden in plain sight the whole time, was:
An eye. A dark squiggle below it. A pot, blacker than tar.
Yet as everyone watched, it roared and sizzled away, revealing:
A normal pale daffodil, if bowed and bent and with its head hung low. A normal green stem, bearing normal green leaves. And a plant pot – cracked, yes, but still a normal earthy pot. Weak, but very much alive.
And there was much rejoicing –
Derpy popped the bubble and lowered her finger.
“You see?” she said, as if she hadn’t just seen in five seconds herself holding a social status lightyears from her current one. “Me as a queenie! Isn’t that the silliest thing you’ve ever heard?”
Not that Wallflower felt like laughing. After a while, she faked a couple, coughing “Ha! Ha.”
“Well, then. Come on, it looks like it’s getting dark.”
Indeed, two brave stars had put out a claim against the setting sun when the two of them emerged from the forest and onto the parking lot. Derpy led the way, so she didn’t notice when Wallflower stopped to glance back the way they’d come. And didn’t move for a while.
Now or never, now or never, now or never…
If she didn’t ask, she’d never know.
“Er, Derpy?” she quavered.
Derpy noticed she’d gone a way away and scampered back. “Whoopsy-daisy! Did you say something?”
“No…”
“Okie dokie, then!”
“No, I meant –!” Wallflower waited for her to scamper back again. “Er, there’s something I haven’t said which I should have said before. Sorry, I garbled it. I was trying to be clever. You know, because you said ‘did you say something’, and I took it to mean…”
She gave up in the face of Derpy’s well-meaning bewilderment.
“Urgh! Why is this so hard!?”
“Are you OK, Wallflower?”
Wallflower stopped pacing and hit herself in the elbow. “Look,” she said impatiently, then remembered who she was talking to and softened her voice. “Why did you join the gardening club? Tell me that.”
Overhead, the sky looked bruised. Derpy skewed her lips.
“Didn’t you want people to join?” she said.
“It’s not that. Roseluck I get. She likes gardening. But I don’t remember you ever being interested in it.”
Derpy’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you remember me?”
And that right there was the sort of trouble Wallflower’s mouth could get her into. She clenched her fist, only this time it was shaking almost as badly as her voice.
“Be-because we… went to the same… sch-schools together?”
“But I didn’t know you back then –?”
“Just forget it,” pleaded Wallflower. She’d caved in. She couldn’t do it. The only right way had been a long time ago, and she was the wrong person to tell it. Besides, things had gone so well so far, why destroy it now?
She hated herself for thinking like that. It had been the thinking that had overwhelmed her over the years, that had driven her from people like a rabbit from a field of sheep and wolves in sheep’s clothing. At least plants just wanted water and sunlight. They didn’t snap at you out of nowhere.
Derpy walked alongside her for a few paces, then apparently a thought struck her and got out through her mouth. “We used to be friends, didn’t we?”
“Well…” Wallflower’s heart went frantic wanting to abandon ship. Everything was sinking. “…yeah.”
“Before you found the Memory Stone?”
“I didn’t mean to!” Wallflower got a grip on herself, but only physically; her elbow wasn’t the part of her cracking and crumbling into a big, black sea of shame. Nothing was spared, but she threw herself into it regardless: “I just wanted everyone to forget! I didn’t know the memories vanished after three days! I was stupid! I’m sorry!”
Nothing moved, except her and the horrible tears she angrily palmed off and threw like acid raindrops. Everything came back, only inverted. The years of only seeing one friendly face, the face that was broken and had a wonky eye, the face everyone else laughed at as if she – Wallflower – couldn’t even pick one friend without it turning out to be some disgraceful loser…
Back then, she’d raged and lashed out at how unfair it was. She didn’t deserve a weak, clumsy, stupid loser like that! Why couldn’t she have had a better friend!?
Right now, she bubbled with the effort of not crying. It was unfair. It was Derpy who didn’t deserve a weak loser like her. Why had she never seen that before?
Wallflower rushed forwards and grabbed Derpy by the shoulders. To her horror, Derpy still hadn’t reacted from the shock of the news. She just stood there taking it.
“I found the Memory Stone and then I erased every trace of our friendship because I was weak.” Wallflower shook her, but gently, desperate for a reaction, anything. “I was ashamed. But that’s not who I am now, I promise! I’d go back and stop myself from doing it, if I could! Hate me if you have to! You have every right to! I’m sorry I never said anything! I was scared! I was weak! WHY WON’T YOU SAY ANYTHING!?”
At this point, Wallflower’s grip on Derpy’s shoulders was the only thing keeping her upright, and even then barely. Her knees sagged, her spine had gone, and Wallflower’s neck strained to keep her looking Derpy in the eye, even though mostly she saw nothing but smears of blond and grey.
Derpy remained stationary, completely emotionless.
Not even the sobs shook her.
Then she turned her head to watch one of Wallflower’s gripping hands. It turned red with embarrassment and ungripped her. Wallflower backed off as though scalded. Every ounce of willpower fought to keep her upright.
Derpy watched her wipe the next wave of tears away. By now, Wallflower’s sleeve was sodden.
Well, it was obvious. There was no way Derpy was going to talk to her again after all this –
“I see,” said Derpy quietly, and she nodded once as though signalling to a general. “Now it makes sense.”
Deep down, some lingering shred of Wallflower’s anger grew on insult and offence. Derpy should have raged. She shouldn’t have talked like they were discussing the weather.
“What makes sense?” wondered Wallflower. She sniffed.
“After Sunset asked me if I wanted to try the gardening club, when I saw you again, I felt… happy. Like I’d seen an old friend after a really, really long time.”
Wallflower inspected the calm face for any sign of mocking, or sneering, or any crease that said this was all some horrible joke at her expense.
“How!? I, I took your memories! All your memories of me!”
Derpy shrugged. “I dunno. Sorry, I’m not much good at this brain stuff. Maybe that was head memories? Maybe the heart never really forgets?”
But this didn’t tally in Wallflower’s head at all. “But I saw the effects! We were like complete strangers. And when I used it on –”
“Then maybe deep down somewhere? Ooh, I’ve just thought!” Derpy’s smile came bounding back with a new stick. “It could be a kind of seed, you see? Not much straight away, but give it time and it’ll grow back again. Or it’d grow a new branch. Or something. What’s cuttings, again?”
“No, cuttings are what you take from a parent plant and use to grow a clone of WHY ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT THIS!?” Wallflower nearly stamped her foot, but she lowered it gently instead. “After all those years you stayed with me, what I did to you was… was…”
“Horrible?” supplied Derpy helpfully.
“Unforgiveable! And the – Look, you can’t just pretend it didn’t happen! I hurt you!”
Derpy looked around uncertainly, scratched her head, then gave a twitch of her lips which was the face’s version of a shrug. “I got better.”
“Don’t you hate me for what I did?”
This time, Derpy’s gaze sought guidance from the two lonely stars overhead, though fainter ones were blooming all around them. “No, I don’t think so?”
“Well, you should!”
“Should I? Why should I do that? I like you.”
“But you know what I did now!”
“Er… yes, you did just tell me.”
“ARRGH! It doesn’t make SENSE! YOU don’t make sense! I just – I – WHY!?”
“Why are you pulling your hair out?”
Wallflower’s anger wrestled her horror wrestled her mortification and the whole lot collapsed when despair fell on top of them, barely trying but big and heavy and wishing they’d stop making so much noise, it was giving her a headache…
She sat down on the tarmac, clutching her head. Then she did what she’d always done: curled up and hoped the world went away.
A scuffle of clothing made her look up. Derpy had curled up opposite. She wasn’t even calm enough to get livid about it anymore.
“I knew a little while ago,” admitted Derpy. “I figured it out. But you were so happy, I didn’t want to upset you again.”
Wallflower’s voice was muffled by her knees. “Don’t you get it? We can’t be friends.”
“That’s my choice to make, isn’t it?” Derpy shuffled forward, kneeling on the white line for parking and proving that even without a car, she couldn’t park straight. “Well, I told you, didn’t I? That was then and this is now. We’re still here. And I am what I am.” She looked apologetic. “It makes things easier if you don’t think too much at once.”
Wallflower raised her head; several locks of seaweed hair slid back. “But we were friends for years, and you always told me never to give up, and they laughed at you and called you a loser, and I believed them, and then after all that, I threw it away –”
“Would you do it right now?” The question was an arrow. Sharp. Out of nowhere. Fatal.
“What!? No! No, never!”
“But the you back then, that you would do it? If she was here right now?”
After untangling the Derpy logic, Wallflower shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess so. Because she did, didn’t she?”
“Well, there you go!” Derpy beamed at her latest trick. “You then and you now aren’t the same you’s.”
“But you were my only friend for years and I still stabbed you in the back! What if I do it again?”
“Do you want to?”
“NO!”
“Well, then. Maybe the next few years will be lots better now you are who you are now.” Derpy stood up and offered a hand. Some part of Wallflower still worked, because she automatically gripped it and let the girl propel her back to her feet, even as the voices and feelings kept shouting over each other in her head that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. It was supposed to be all dark and painful and riddled with angst!
“But –” she couldn’t stop herself “– but what about tomorrow?”
“Well, every year’s gotta start somewhere. Aha! That reminds me! Roseluck wants us to go to her grandmother’s birthday party next week, and my mom’s going to take me shopping for a new dress tomorrow, and I was going to ask if you wanted to come.”
Wallflower relaxed. Just like the good old days: around kindergarten, before Derpy had emerged as an obvious fool to everyone else. And Wallflower too, because a fool’s friend was also a fool.
To her relief, she felt the difference this time. Back then, over years and years like some festering fungus underground, there’d always been that knot of rage and shame whenever Derpy had been Derpy. Wallflower had been offended. She could have done better. She should have. She’d put up walls against the world, even against Derpy, only to trap herself inside with the weeds.
But now… now it was gone. It was like she’d woken up one day and found the garden of her soul cleaned and tidied and… beautiful. Beautiful again.
“You’ve got such a lovely smile, Wallflower,” said Derpy out of nowhere, as she led them the wrong way out of the parking lot – the main road was the other way. “You should do it more often.”
Wallflower held her hand and gently guided her the other way. At the back of her mind, she remembered another name for the touch-me-not: the jewelweed. And the patience, curiously enough. Plants collected names like people collected plants.
She smiled again. “Really?” she mumbled. “Thanks. It’s not as nice as yours, though. I think I can get better at it…”
