By the time Rainbow Dash made it out of the market, she was finally beginning to calm down. Her breathing was still shallow and rapid, but the thudding of her heart had dropped to a distant drumbeat. She hated to admit it to herself, but she had completely freaked out when Applejack addressed her. She sighed and wiped sweat from her brow, momentarily relaxing—then snapping back to full-blown paranoia a second later, certain that she was being watched by somepony. Wanting to get away from everypony else as quickly as she possibly could, she took the remaining several blocks to the Golden Oaks Library at a mild trot, doing her best to look like she had nothing suspicious to hide and failing miserably.

She approached the door and stood in front of it, hoof raised to knock but not moving. She closed her eyes and inhaled, deeply, exhaled, inhaled again and held the breath this time, and rapped her hoof against the door three times. There was a brief pause before a voice inside called out, “Come in!”

Twilight Sparkle, unlike some ponies she could name, had only had a single drink the night before, and woken up with no ill effects at her usual weekend time—7:30 AM sharp. She had immediately gotten to work: removing the dust that settled throughout the library each night, making sure that every last one of the books currently in the library was in its proper place, sending off vaguely threatening letters to the borrowers of long overdue books, and other tasks that needed to be done each day. At eight, the schedule called for her to begin making breakfast which on Sundays was Prench toast. After the forty five minutes she allotted herself and Spike to eat, she made a final pass throughout the library to make sure everything was ready to go. And at 9:00 AM, on the dot, she was sitting behind the librarian’s desk, horn aglow as she flipped the sign on the front of the door to read, “Open,” and unlocking it.

With her number one assistant out helping Rarity dig up gems for the day, that marked the beginning of three hours and forty seven minutes of near isolation for the unicorn, punctuated two and a half hours in for eighteen seconds when somepony from out of town asked where to find town hall.

Still the librarian remained at her post, her only defense against soul-crushing boredom a thick textbook on theoretical physics. She was nearly halfway through, reading through a theory about mass-energy-magic equivalence, when somepony knocked on her door.

Two emotions flashed through her: elation at someone finally coming by; and annoyance, partially because she’d have to wait to finish, but mostly because it was a public library and how many times did she need to tell ponies that before they stopped knocking and just entered?

She took a moment to memorize the page she was on, close the book, and set it to the side of the desk. “Come in!” she called, briefly wondering who it was before the door opened.

Twilight inhaled sharply as Rainbow Dash quickly entered and slammed the door shut. Her friend was breathing rapidly and sweating. This could have been dismissed as the effects of a recent workout, if it weren’t for the fact that she was darting her head around. It’s almost as if, Twilight thought, she’s afraid of somepony else being here. Stepping out from behind her desk, she approached the pegasus. A worried look on her face and concern in her voice, she said, “Rainbow, are you—”

That was as far as she got. In the time it took her to blink, Dash was on top of her, almost literally. The unicorn found two hooves on her shoulders and a stream of gibberish flowing out of Dash’s mouth, the pegasus talking so quickly Twilight couldn’t keep up. The only words she could make out were “Celestia” and “help”. After a moment of confusion, she took a step back and a light purple glow flared up around her horn. An identical shade appeared over Rainbow’s mouth, which the pegasus was now unable to move. For a few seconds, she didn’t seem to realize, but stopped trying to move her jaw as soon as she did. The light vanished as Twilight released the magic. “You about done?” she deadpanned.

Rainbow grinned sheepishly and looked down, rubbing the back of her neck with a hoof and relaxing somewhat, the nature of her visit half-buried by embarrassment. “Heh... sorry about that,” she said, looking back up and lowering her hoof.

Twilight smiled and nodded, saying, “It’s alright, Rainbow. Now...” she hesitated, “you said you needed help with something?”

The smile on Dash’s face disappeared. “Yeah...” she said slowly, now looking off to the side rather than at Twilight. “D’you remember what happened last night?”

“You got drunk,” she said flatly. “Really drunk. Which I imagine you’re paying for right now. Here,” she said as her horn lit up again. This time, rather than confining itself to Dash’s mouth, the soft glow of magic enveloped her entire head. For a moment, the headache—which at this point had actually receded to a distant thump—came back in full force, as if cannons were firing at the inside of her skull, then disappeared entirely. She blinked twice and shook her head, somewhat disconcerted by the magic but glad to be rid of the accursed hangover.

“Better?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Dash.

“Good,” the unicorn said. “Now, was that all you needed, or is there something else?” She assumed there was. After all, the pegasus had asked if Twilight remembered last night, and if the pegasus hadn’t been able to remember she got drunk then she needed to be checked into the hospital.

“Yeah,” she said hesitantly. “There’s...” she paused, then looked at Twilight. When she spoke again, there was no mistaking the seriousness in her voice... and, Twilight thought, a touch of panic. “Look, Twilight. You can’t tell anypony about this, got it?”

“Of course, Dash.” She put a hoof on the pegasus’s shoulder, looked her in the eye, and smiled. “It stays between you and me.”

“Alright. I... I need to remember something from last night,” she said nervously. “You got a spell or something?”

By the time she had finished her sentence, Twilight had spun around and moved to one of the bookshelves. Looking at the spine of each book on one row, she dismissed tome after tome, until finally coming to one called Mastering Magical Manipulation of Mind and Memory. She telekinetically grasped the book and opened it. She walked back over towards the pegasus while flipping through the pages, until she came to the section regarding memory recovery.

Rainbow Dash sat down and fidgeted as Twilight read through the procedure on casting the spell, though the unicorn didn’t notice. It only took her a few minutes before she felt ready to cast. The spell itself was pretty straightforward, wouldn’t require much magic, and had no risks greater than failing to recover the memory and the caster getting a glimpse of whatever recently-formed memory the subject was thinking about.

“Okay, Dash,” she said, closing the book and setting it to the side. “Ready?” The pegasus nodded. “Alright. Just sit down and we’ll get started,” Twilight said, taking the action herself. Once Dash was settled, Twilight touched her horn to the pegasus’s forehead, closed her eyes, and focused intently as she released her magic.

The spell failed miserably, despite being perfectly cast—a one in fifteen chance associated with each memory, rendering it permanently inaccessible to magical viewing. Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately, depending on how pessimistic you may be—the failure of the spell brought into being the second risk, showing Twilight the memory at the forefront of her friend’s mind; and a mere hour and a half after discovering that they had committed a murder, what sane being would be thinking about anything else?

The memory flashed across Twilight’s mind, and for a moment as it was downloaded she thought it had first been one of her own. Neurons fired and certain glands kicked into gear, others shutting down as her system switched from “regular morning” to “stressing the hell out”. Adrenalin surged through her veins, her body getting ready to do whatever it took to preserve itself... and then it processed the memory again, cross-referenced it with earlier ones, and came to the conclusion that it had not in fact happened, stuffing it away for later examination. Twilight Sparkle was, of course, unaware of this, knowing only that she felt like she had just fallen half a mile and that one of her best friends had a dead body stuffed away in her house.

She stood up shakily—the catastrophic failure of the spell had knocked both of the ponies down—and collapsed again. Rainbow Dash, who hadn’t had to deal with a terrifying memory being forced into her head, was already standing, albeit a bit shakily. As Twilight collapsed, her eyes went wide with alarm, confusion from the effects of the spell being shoved aside by concern for her friend.

“You alright, Twi?” she asked, concern clear in her voice.

Twilight looked up at Dash, eyes wide, and again forced herself to her hoofs. Body trembling as the adrenaline rush began to wear off. “Rainbow, I...” she stopped. She thought. And then she exploded.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done!?” she yelled. One might have thought, had they been there at the time, that she hated her friend. This was, in fact, simply one of Twilight’s methods of showing concern for her friends when they did something remarkably stupid and legally dubious. A fact Rainbow Dash was unaware of, as evidenced by her trembling in what was most definitely not fear. Nope.

“Twi, I—”

“No! Don’t! Just don’t! You have done some ridiculously idiotic things since I met you, but this! This is just... I don’t even have words to describe what this is!” As Twilight ranted, her horn began to glow, as did a collection of objects throughout the room—a few dozen books, two lamps, a glass paperweight and a pepper grinder—which began very slowly rising into the air and started rotating counter-clockwise. Despite the fact that the door and all the windows were shut, there was a slight breeze picking up in the same direction. Neither mare noticed, one too busy being furious and the other too busy being terrified.

“Do you have any idea what this means?” she continued, the objects and wind beginning to pick up speed. “What’s going to happen to you?” Her eyes were glowing a brilliant, blinding white. “You could be banished, Dash, or thrown in a dungeon, and I’m not even exaggerating this time, there’s precedent!”

The magical storm was getting stronger every second. At first it had started off as just a few floating books in a light breeze; now nearly half the library was flying through the air at breakneck speeds, forcing the pegasus to seek shelter under the table in the center of the room even as the projectiles flowed around the unicorn, wind roaring at her ears, and still Twilight’s seemingly-enraged voice nearly drowned it out. It was fortunate that Twilight had long ago taken the liberty of soundproofing the library.

“And even if you manage to get out of this before you’ve died of old age, you’ll be ruined! How do you think you’ll be treated, wherever you go!? You’ll be shunned, Rainbow, by everyone, and do you think that you’ll ever be allowed to join the Wonderbolts after this!? YOU HAVE MADE THE BIGGEST MISTAKE OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE!”

Everybody has breaking points, at least two—anger and despair, and Twilight’s rant was what finally pushed Dash to the second one. She had known already that she had screwed up, and bad, but hearing it from one of her closest friends, put so mercilessly... and there had been the terror lying dormant in the back of her head, that she’d be exiled from ponykind even as she lived with them, that the dream of becoming a Wonderbolt she’d nursed ever since she was a little filly was gone, shattered, as dead as the mare hidden underneath her floor—

Rainbow Dash reached her breaking point, and she started to cry.

At first, before the tears began to flow, one might have mistaken the drawn-out, choking sobs for a somewhat deranged laugh. As the seconds dragged on, though, it became quite obvious. Still under the cover of the table, the pegasus drew her forehooves to her face as she curled up in the fetal position, and then she sobbed not like a baby but like a child who’s dog just died, the stress and fear and shock from everything that had happened pouring out through her weeping eyes and her wailing mouth, and all the while the library was filled with the roar of the wind and the brilliant white light pouring from Twilight’s eyes and the cacophony of hundreds or thousands of books smashing into each other, and—

“I-I’m sorry!” she choked out, “I’m sorry, it was an accident, it was an accident!” she screamed even though she had no idea if it was, and—

—somehow Twilight heard Dash’s tortured screams, even over everything else that by all rights should have blocked it out, and she realized then that she’d gone way, way too far. She had done what no unicorn was ever supposed to do—lose control of their magic, because when they did ponies tended to get hurt like she now feared Dash had been. Twilight hadn’t even realized that she had been using her magic, and when she did she released it instantly. Freed of her telekinesis, everything that had made up the magical tornado dropped to the floor. The paperweight shattered, but Twilight didn’t notice it, because in the sudden relative silence that permeated the library she could easily hear her friend’s crying and the occasional choked plea for forgiveness.

She crawled under the table and after laying on her side, wrapped her hooves around Rainbow Dash. The pegasus pulled her head from her hooves and looked up at Twilight for a moment, then buried it in the fur on the unicorn’s chest. Her cries, which had been slowly but surely tapering off into a heavy sniffle, redoubled in force. And as Rainbow Dash sobbed out her fears onto Twilight’s chest, the unicorn patted her on the back and whispered, “It’s alright, Dash, it’s okay, everything is going to be okay,” and after a long long while like that Rainbow Dash managed to cry herself into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Author's Note

Arrrgh what a fucking week. I hate finals, especially when I have to write twenty pages of short stories. Thank God I planned to release the first four chapters at the same time, since otherwise this would be chapter two and you'd be getting this a week or two later. Unfortunately for you, this is the last one I had written at the time of publishing. I should have chapter four out this time next week, but after that I make no promises. I'll try and keep you up to date on progress, though.

I wasn't too sure about this one—the last four paragraphs felt a bit too emotional for me. Still, I needed to bring Twilight into things, and I had the whole "Twilight yelling at RD" thing for sure. Once I finished with that, the rest of it sort of wrote itself.

Anyways, thanks again to everyone who's read this story, and especially to those of you who've stuck with it this far. Constructive criticism would be very much appreciated, since I know I'm not a perfect (or probably even particularly good) author, and when I only get positive feedback I feel like the only people commenting are incapable of actually telling good from bad (I know this isn't true, but it's like being afraid of heights: you know you'll be fine, but you still just can't do it). Not necessary, but it would be greatly appreciated.

On a non-pony note, you should all go and buy this game about jumping through windows and punching people in the face. You get to... you know... jump through windows and punch people in the face.

Signing off, but...