“How are you doing, sir? Would you like another drink?”
“Nope,” Big Mac said. He used the quick falling-then-rising “nope” that meant “No, but I sure do appreciate the thought.” The waiter didn’t seem to understand; his lips stayed pressed together, his nostrils pinched, and his eyelids drooped. So Big Mac smiled and added, “Thanks.”
The waiter moved on to the next table and began wiping it clear of the fine red dust that kept drifting off the clay street. Big Mac looked out over the pine-green picket fence around the dining area—a low silly thing that couldn’t have kept a pig in—and his ears tilted forward as he squinted down past the two-story storefronts lining the street, toward the great spreading lone-wolf oak at its far end.
That waiter sure was considerate. He’d stopped by four times over the past hour to see whether the big red stallion might have changed his mind.
Big Mac sighed. Twilight wouldn’t forget about him. She’d have his name on some checklist. But she was a busy mare. Something must’ve come up.
He’d heard they used linseed oil to make their coats shiny back in Canterlot, so he’d rubbed some over his fur to make it especially shiny. Now the dust clung to the oil like red soot, and all the patches he hadn’t been able to reach stood out, solitary spots of cleanliness that somehow only made the rest look dirtier.
He thought maybe he ought to move inside, in case somepony noticed him sitting there so long, not working. It was a thing some ponies did, he knew. Not work. It gave him a guilty thrill, like the time when Braeburn, just a colt himself, had gotten him down into the cellar where the hard cider was and challenged him to a drinking contest.
But he didn’t want to take his eyes off the street. She always made him feel like he was standing still, watching her gallop by, and he had only a moment to lasso her before she'd be out of sight.
When you roped something, only one of two things could happen: You stopped it, or it carried you off. Big Mac didn’t believe he could stop Twilight even if he’d wanted to. If his rope took hold, she’d drag him along behind her, away from the farm and kin, him just hanging on. Maybe today. Maybe he’d never buck another apple tree.
He’d never turn Twilight into a farmer’s wife, never, nohow. Just being here meant he was ready to say goodbye to all that. Anything less and he'd just be messing with her.
He tried to imagine a future of not apple-bucking, but it was a misty thing, without form or color.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything, sir?”
Big Mac looked over at the waiter. “Nope,” he said again, and nodded at the pony to make his appreciation clear.
“There is a library at the other end of the street which I find useful when in a meditative mood,” the waiter noted, raising one eyebrow slightly.
“Oh, that wouldn’t work at all,” Big Mac said. The waiter nodded curtly and moved on.
The street was lined with the shops and homes of ponies who did not buck apples. The thought of being one of them—a Big Mac who didn’t buck apples—made him nervous and a little giddy. He saw himself walking the streets of Canterlot, not pausing to look up at the towers, but moving at a trot, keeping his head down and avoiding eye contact, like Canterlot folk did. Some of that slick stuff in his mane.
He shook his head clear. Realized he was breathing heavy.
Canterlot was a big city. It must have work for a big pony.
There was the guard, of course. What they did was the opposite of working. Stand in one place and don't move. Just frown and look straight ahead like you not moving is more important than anything anypony else is doing.
Big Mac shuddered.
Did they all have some kind of guard cutie-marks? Or were there some carrots and cherries hiding under that armor? You couldn't tell. Which maybe was the point of it.
Anyway, he'd never seen a red guard. Nor an earth pony guard. White and grey. Blue manes. Probably born to it.
There was always lifting and hauling; ponies needed that everywhere. But it wouldn't do. "I'm advisor to Princess Celestia, and this is my husband, the ditch-digger."
Big Mac was pretty sure nopony'd said that, ever.
He had a deep voice, the deepest in Ponyville. It embarrassed him. But maybe they could use a voice like that in Canterlot, in the operas or whatnot. They’d have some quiet low notes, in the most-serious part, when the stage was dark. Notes only he could sing. He’d be standing in the choir, in a fancy black robe maybe, and he’d sing them, and nopony in the audience would be able to tell just whose voice it was, excepting Twilight.
A scholar, or mage, or advisor, or whatever it was Celestia was training Twilight up for, could maybe have a singer for a mate. It wasn’t too big of a gap, maybe.
But watching the scene in his mind, he realized he… he hated the big red stallion in the fancy black robe. He wasn’t Big Mac at all! Just somepony who looked like him, somepony who’d stolen his body, his memories, his mare.
The stallion turned his head slowly toward Big Mac, smiled a shiny-toothed smile, and mouthed the words, “Apple bucker!”
“Apple what?” someone nearby asked.
Big Mac snorted in surprise and realized the waiter was hovering by him again, saying, “We have apple juice, apple cider, apple martinis, applejack—” His voice trailed off into silence.
Big Mac shifted a little to get back into the shade of the table’s umbrella. “Apple cider,” he said.
He was still pretty sure Braeburn had cheated somehow.
The waiter didn’t seem to have heard him. He was looking past Big Mac, off down the street. The water in the flower vase lurched, and Big Mac felt the ground rumble.
He turned and looked. There was a cloud of dust and a herd of ponies, with Twilight and her five friends at its head, coming this way. They were smiling and singing, with an odd bounce that made their steps look like dancing.
She was looking at everything and everypony with eyes as bright and wide as those of a foal seeing its first snow. She looked at everything and everypony that way. In case she'd missed something last time. She knew everything down to its inner workings, and somehow that made it all more magical and mysterious for her than it was for the ponies who gaped in awe, or the ones who’d learn a thing’s name and think they knew it. Knowing the necessity of every little detail, and the bigness of them all together.
It began to rub off on Mac, as it always did when she was around. He became aware of the Ponyville smell of sawdust and bread, the flower in the waiter’s vest pocket, and how the sun scored a shining white line down Flat Top’s barberpole as it spun.
He was going to just stand and watch her gallop by, but when she saw Big Mac, her eyes lit up, and she rushed over and pushed her head across the little fence.
“Oh, Big Mac! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I forgot, but you won’t believe what happened today! I was working on a spell, and it went all wrong, but then it all worked out because—”
Big Mac tried to keep his eyes on her face, but they kept drifting back to—
“I’m sorry. Listen to me go on about myself. What did you want to talk to me about?”
Big Mac looked down at the table, then back up at Twilight.
“Ya got wings,” he said.
“Oh,” Twilight said as if just remembering them. She flapped them once slowly, and blushed. “Do you like them?”
“They’re real purty.”
“Princess Celestia says I’m a princess now! Can you imagine that? Me, a princess?” She leaned forward to look into his eyes, then looked down shyly.
“Huh,” Big Mac said.
Her friends swept her away, still singing, his sister among them.
“Huh,” he said again as she galloped away and disappeared.
Author's Note
Thanks to GhostOfHeraclitus, bookplayer, and maskedferret for pre-reading. GhostOfHeraclitus wrote the description.
He said it again that evening over supper. “Huh.”
Applejack lifted her muzzle from her plate. “Feeling talkative, are we?”
“Twilight’s an alicorn.”
“That she is,” Applejack agreed. "Pass the taters."
“And a princess.”
“That too.”
“But she’s still Twilight,” Big Mac said.
“Course she is.”
Big Mac frowned, turning these facts over in his mind, looking for some angle at which they’d fit together.
“Maybe she was always a princess, and didn’t know it,” he said.
“I guess that stands to reason,” Applejack said. “Being as things are what they are. You can’t plant pinecones and get apples.”
He said nothing else, so she dipped into the steamed thistles and carrots again. The farmhouse was unusually quiet. Apple Bloom had wolfed down her food and rushed off to meet her friends to prepare an ominous-sounding “special surprise” for the new princess.
“Sis,” Big Mac asked, “what am I?”
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure you’re a pony.”
“Everypony’s a pony.”
“Well, I reckon you’re also an apple farmer.”
“Is that what I am?” Big Mac stared past her, out the window, off toward where the summer orchard was.
“Do you plant apple trees?”
“Yup,” he said, with the slow rising “yup” that meant “Where is this leading?”
“Do you take care of them trees as they grow?”
“Yup,” he said, with the quick rising “yup” that meant “Go on.”
“And do you gather in the apples, and stack the baskets in the barn, and take some off to market, some to the cider press, and pack some into barrels to ship to Canterlot?"
“Ayup,” he said, with the quiet falling “yup” that meant “I see where you’re going, and you might be right, but I don’t have to like it.”
"And have ya got one half of a bright green apple plastered across each side of your big red behind?”
He looked back down his flank. "Yup," he said, with the flat harsh "yup" that meant "That's a fact and no denying it."
“Well, then, I guess you’re an apple farmer.”
“I guess.” He kept staring off into the distance. “But what if there were no apples?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. As long as there’s Apples there’ll be apples, and as long as there’s apples there’ll be Apples.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“And you’re my big brother,” she added.
“That’s good,” he said.
“Sometimes I wonder what’s rattling around in that big head of yours, Mac.”
“Yup,” he said, with the soft breathy “yup” that even he didn’t know the meaning of.
They cleaned up together, her washing and him drying, then went up early to their separate bedrooms. They had twenty barrels to pack and haul to the station before the afternoon train left for Canterlot next day.
As Big Mac drifted off to sleep, he thought of all the bushel baskets of apples stacked and shelved up to the barn’s rafters, waiting for him. It was a lot of apples. He wondered, half into the dream world, what he would do if they turned on him, packed him into a barrel and rolled him down to the cider press. Then he felt the soft black curtain of darkness over him, and the wood staves squeezing his shoulders together, and realized it was too late. They already had.
He smelled their sharp tangy breath all around him, and heard prayers murmured for him by a thousand trembling leaves. He was their slave and their god, and they poured him out into the cider press barrel, not roughly, but reverentially. The barrel's oaken slats were stained with the juice of a thousand Apples. He poured in smooth and filled it snug and tight.
Then the big screw pressed down on him from above, and he was flowing out between the slats. They caught everything dull and dirty, so that only what was sweet and strong ran through the gaps, down the trough, and spilled into another barrel. The apples sealed it, bunged it, and shipped it off to the palace, where a purple princess on a throne of gilt-edged books sipped the fresh cider from a silver goblet, and smiled.
Author's Note
You could read this story as a sequel to Big Mac Reads Something Purple if you wanted to. Or not.
