Mirror the Fun

Chapters

Double Take
Double Entendre
Double Chocolate Cake
Double Slit Experiment
Second Fragment Complete

Double Take

I'd known from the start that I would have to answer for my actions that night eventually. I'd just never expected that it would have to happen so soon.

The Wednesday after what I was already starting to dub the Unspeakable Incident 2 saw Spike and I finally reaching the park together on our after-school walk, as we should have done several days ago. We were engrossed in a game of fetch, or at least, Spike was. I spent my time leaning against the low wall overlooking a plastic play structure and tossing Spike's ball backwards over it into the nearby soccer field. His excited running and searching gave me some time to myself, which was both good and bad because it made me think. There was no one else in the park at the time, which was just as well, since I didn't think I could stomach being around other people for a little while.

It was easy enough for someone like me to get their head around what had happened last Sunday, but judging by the non-stop queasiness in my stomach ever since, it seemed like the rest of me was having a hard time catching up. On one hand, my accidental run-in with Flash that day had led to me finally confronting some of my personal issues, letting out a lot of my pent-up feelings towards Sunset Shimmer, and losing my virginity in a night of mind-blowing sex with the guy I'd been crushing on since the ninth grade. Those parts I was pretty happy about. Go me.

But all of it had been a lie. Flash Sentry wasn't in love with me. His real girlfriend was some Other Twilight, one who made the real thing look like a cheap imitation. By some means I hadn't yet figured out, this other girl looked like me, talked like me, and even had the same name and crest as me, but was also everything that I wasn't: popular, brave, outgoing, attractive, good enough for Flash Sentry. Her existence mocked mine, and I'd let it hurt me. I'd pretended to be her. I'd wanted so badly to be her. And now that my taste of that life was over, all I'd done was prove how little I deserved any of it. In any retelling of the events of the best night of my life, I would be the selfish, heartless, boyfriend-stealing villain.

I hadn't gone to my study group last night. I'd pretended to be tired and lain in bed all evening, staring at the ceiling. When everyone else had gone to bed I'd snuck downstairs to the kitchen and taken a knife from one of the drawers. I didn't do anything with it, just stared at it, and a while later put it back and went upstairs to cry myself to sleep.

Spike nudged my leg, breaking me out of my thoughts. I reached down and took his ball from his mouth, rubbing his head affectionately. Of course, I would never do anything to myself. My number one assistant needed me.

Still, these thoughts plagued me. Before throwing the ball I found myself staring again at the bracelet Flash had given me, which I couldn't seem to bring myself to take off. Winged unicorns, the animal I hated most in all the world, sparkled mockingly from its surface. "Oh, Spike," I mumbled as he poked me impatiently. "What am I going to do?"

As if in answer, a voice shouted from across the park. "YOU!" I looked up, and only had time to catch a glimpse of purple before another body crashed into my own. That's when everything else clicked into place.

See, I'd suspected almost as soon as I'd left Flash's place that eventually, the Other Me was going to start looking for me. I'd been subtly avoiding her, going through the arduous task of changing my schedule and leaving the house even less frequently than usual. I'd been working under the assumption that if this Twilight was anything like me, she would want to use the same analytical method of problem-solving that I do, which gave me an edge when it came to predicting her movements. It might have worked, too, if I hadn't overlooked just one small, crucial detail.

If someone had impersonated me to sleep with my (hypothetical) boyfriend, I would take care not to overreact immediately. Once I was done panicking, I'd do damage control and make sure that the aforementioned boyfriend and I were still okay with each other (and I definitely couldn't see Flash leaving the Other Twilight for me). Then I would set out to figure out who had done this, and how, and why. I would figure out where she lived, not a hard task for a sleuth like me, and tail her from a distance to try to get a feel for her. I would try to guess if this was a one-time thing or something she made a habit of, gauge her feelings about the whole thing, and only approach her once I had figured out whether she was innocent or an enemy.

I would plan all of this in great detail, probably with lots of charts, notebooks, and supplies for studying my target in the field. I would set out with a clear head and the best of intentions, in the name of calm, rational, scientific inquiry. Then, as soon as I actually laid eyes on her, I would abandon the whole thing and furiously tackle her into a bush.

All of this came crashing down on me at the same moment that the Other Twilight did, knocking us both over the wall and into the bushes on the other side. The soft branches broke my fall, but I was instantly crushed by the weight of a familiar, flailing girl, her fists bouncing harmlessly off of my chest and shoulders. "You! Had! Sex! With! My! Boyfriend!" she yelled, punctuating each word with another ineffectual strike. Spike skirted back and forth around the bushes, barking. I hoped that he was trying to defend me, but guessed deep down that he was mostly just confused and wanted his ball back.

Before I'd even finished working out what was going on, I realized that I'd gone from calm to sobbing in the space of a few seconds. "I'm sorry!" I croaked repeatedly, the dam around the guilt of the past few days literally being punched open. "I didn't mean it! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

Gradually, the punches slowed, then stopped. The Other Twilight fell over me, her hands roughly grasping my shoulders. The sun was behind her head; I couldn't make out her face, but I could see that she was trembling. I waited for a few seconds more as my choking breaths died, expecting her to adjust her grip and start strangling me. Instead she spoke again, not even sounding angry, just upset. "Why did you do it?"

"I just..." Maybe it was the shock talking, but I answered with more honesty than I'd expected from myself. "I just wanted to know what it would feel like... to be you."

We lay there for a moment longer, catching our breaths. "Here," I said quickly, raising up my arm. I pulled the unicorn bracelet off my wrist and held it up towards her. "This belongs to you."

It was slow, but I caught a flash of light as her eyes widened, and her gasp of recognition seemed to silence all other sounds. In a flurry of movement she rolled off of me and stood up, leaning over me as if to snatch the bracelet from my grasp, but then hesitated and put her hand into mine. I'd secretly been expecting some kind of tingle at her touch, or some searing pain as the universe tried to correct this impossibility, but instead I felt the opposite; in that moment I could only feel a completely natural nothing, as though her entire body were an extension of my own. It was only when she started to tug that I realized she was trying to help me up. I stood, shocking Spike into confused silence as a second Twilight emerged from the bush. It was only once I was standing that the Other Me pulled her bracelet out of my hand and stared down at it with big, soulful eyes, then clutched it longingly to her chest.

Looking at her was like looking in a mirror. I don't just mean that in the visual sense, although it was accurate; this Other Twilight was a complete reflection of me. Her face, her clothes, the way she parted her hair, were all exactly the same as me, but flipped from left to right. It went even deeper than that, however. Even though she wasn't carrying herself in nearly the same way that I was, and even though I could tell that we weren't entirely identical, even if I couldn't pick out the exact details yet, my brain simply refused to register her as another person. She wasn't some other being who'd copied my appearance, she was me, through and through. It was only that feeling that was keeping me from fleeing in terror.

The Other Twilight seemed to be feeling something similar, as she stared curiously when she looked at me again. "Thank you," she said, slipping the bracelet around her own wrist. "I needed this."

"Flash wanted you to have it," I said, focusing on the bracelet. That, at least, was something that I knew for certain we didn't have in common. "Why is it important?"

She smiled weakly, holding out her wrist towards me. "It's me," she said.

I looked from her to the hated creatures on her wrist, then back again. Spike's confused whine summed up my feelings accurately. Compared to the current circumstances, the answer that occurred didn't seem so implausible. "You're... a unicorn?" I hazarded.

"An alicorn." She nodded, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. "And a princess."

Just as I thought my brain couldn't take any more, another voice spoke from around shin height. "Wow. That is weird."

Heart pounding, I looked down. Next to me was Spike, who was staring up at me with a level of fear and confusion that just about matched my own. And then next to him was another Spike, looking around at the rest of us with an almost humanlike curiosity. "What's the matter?" he said, catching my eye. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

I won't go into too much detail about what happened next; it wasn't my proudest moment. Suffice to say that once those screaming, flailing thirty seconds were over, I was once again nearly upside-down and stuck headfirst in the bush.

It took a little over an hour for the Other Twilight to tell her story, beginning to end. We spent it sitting side by side on the low wall, watching the two Spikes as they played together. She skipped over a lot of things, saying that they weren't important or were stories for another time, and was able to anticipate most of my questions before I'd even asked them.

Despite all that had already passed between us before we'd even met, Princess Twilight was surprisingly easy to talk to. To save confusion I took to calling her Princess for short, which she at least didn't object to; after all, both of us were the Other Twilight to the other. Being in her presence was strangely calming, and she mentioned early on that retelling her tale wasn't as nerve-wracking as she'd initially feared it would be. My best guess was that since our bodies were the same, on some level parts of us were resonating on exactly the same frequency, giving us a psychological connection that could only be matched by identical twins. It didn't escape my attention that much of the time even our breathing was in sync, and I don't think it escaped hers, either.

I took it pretty well. I guess. It was a lot to come to terms with at once. Learning that parallel dimensions existed was a pretty big blow to everything I had believed about the universe thus far. Learning that an alternate version of me had somehow crossed over into this dimension was a second. Learning that my most hated enemy was also one of these dimension-hoppers was a third. The fact that my double also happened to be a magical pony princess was just icing on the cake.

"So now you're trapped here," I finished for her as her story came to a close. "That's... that's awful." I looked down at the ground. Even after all I'd been through, Princess being locked out of her home dimension and leaving all her friends to a potentially disastrous fate made my ordeals look childish by comparison. Which was another way that she'd already one-upped me, again.

"It's... not so bad." She folded her hands and copied my downward gaze. "I worry about my friends back in Equestria a lot, but... the Element of Magic was always built on the power of the other five, right? I just know that with all of them working together, even without me, they'll find a way to set things right." She didn't say exactly what this meant, but I knew we were both thinking it.

It was another second before she looked at me. "Twilight, I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to keep myself a secret from you. I tried looking for you, but everyone thought you'd moved away to the city. If I'd known you were still here, I never would have taken over your life like that."

"It's... fine," I said back. "It's not your fault. I don't go out much, and I take my classes online whenever I can. You can't really take over my life if there's nothing there to take over."

She sighed. "I still feel bad," she said. "I keep thinking that this whole... misunderstanding might have been avoided if I'd just searched a little harder."

I noted her deliberate use of the word, then quickly changed the subject. "But how is this even possible?" I asked, finally voicing what I'd been wondering for several days. "How is any of this possible? Even if multiverse theory is true, how could two such completely different worlds produce cultures that are identical right down to the biological level?"

"Twilight, don't," Princess said quietly, keeping her gaze low.

But I did. "And that means there has to be an infinite number of universes, right? There's no reason why it would be limited to just human and pony worlds. With a large enough number of universes, eventually you'd have to come across two worlds that almost exactly match up. It's the only way any of this makes sense!"

"Please..."

I was on a roll. "But if travel between these universes is possible, then what does that mean? If there are an infinite number of universes that are identical to ours, or so close as to make no difference, and each of them has a portal with the potential to open up to other universes, why aren't travelers from other dimensions appearing in our universes all the time? What's stopping the very fabric of reality from getting ripped open?" I was starting to hyperventilate. "And what does it mean if we're mirrored? Is that necessary for the mirror portal, or was it just a fluke? Are we even mirrored any more? If you went in one end, wouldn't that mean that I have to go in the other end at the same time, or the two worlds get thrown out of balance? Does what happens on one affect the other? If objects can pass between them, how is it even possible for the worlds to stay mirrored for more than a few-"

"Twilight, stop!" Princess shouted. I realized that she'd bunched her hands up into fists on her skirt, and the two Spikes stopped in surprise to stare at her. I froze guiltily, and she took a deep breath before speaking again. "Listen, I know this is going to be hard for you, but for the sake of your own sanity, I need you to not think about any of this too hard. Why?" she pre-empted me before I could ask. "Because every question you've just asked, and maybe a hundred more along the same lines, are what I've been obsessing over for the past two years. I've done research, experiments, everything that I could think of to figure out how the mirror portal works and how to repair it. And do you know how many answers I've found? None. I know just as much about the portal as I did when I first walked through it. Nothing.

"The mirror portal was an artifact of my world, not yours. It works by rules that don't apply here, ones that we can't even touch. If there's anywhere where it could be studied or fixed, it's Equestria, and like you said, now that the worlds are unmirrored, there's no reason why it would even connect to this world any more. I'm cut off. It took me a really long time to accept it, but there's nothing I can do. So I'm begging you, please, before you even start trying to figure out how any of this is possible, don't go down the same road I did." She shook her head. "It'll only drive you crazy."

I gulped. "Sorry," I mumbled. "I had no idea..."

"It's... fine. Really." She put on a smile for me. It was only then that I finally saw what Flash had been talking about: the look I made when something wasn't fine, but I didn't want anyone to know. "Spike's the one I'm really worried about. He says he's grown into it, but I know he's not happy in that body. He's growing up, you know. Back in my world he would be nearly twice his current size by now. And that's not even getting into his lifespan..." She sighed. "More questions I can't answer."

She smiled again, this time more genuinely. "But don't get the wrong idea about us," she continued. "Even if we can never go back, we're both happy here. It was tough starting out, but I have a pretty good life here now. I have new friends, and a band, and a job, and a boyfriend. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my future, but I'm sure I'll figure something out."

"Y-yeah." We were again edging onto the part of the conversation that it was my turn to dread. "How can you have my crest, though?" I asked, staving off the inevitable. "That's mine. It's supposed to represent my talent and destiny, and mine alone. How can you have copied that when we live such completely different lives?"

"I wondered about that too, at first." We both looked down at our skirts. Her crest was the only part of her that wasn't mirrored, even if she wore it on her other side. It was also then that I noticed that she didn't shave her legs. "In my world," she explained, "they're called cutie marks. We get them on our flanks when we discover our special talent. They appear all on their own, too, without any drawing ceremony or anything." She held up her hands helplessly. "I know, that doesn't make sense either. It was just one of those laws of the universe that we never questioned. Drawing ceremonies were just as strange to me when I first got here."

I looked back and forth between her crest and mine, searching for any dissimilarities. There were none. Bizarre as this feeling was, it also brought with it a kind of relief. My drawing ceremony, back when I was a little girl, had been one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life. No matter how certain I was that I knew who I was meant to be, I think everyone secretly entertained some doubts when they entered that room. The rest of my body had shaken when I picked up the Holy Pen, praying that it really was fate guiding me, and that I wouldn't end up wearing the pretentious scribble of a seven-year-old for the rest of my life. But my hand had moved slow and steady, adding details that my conscious brain had never pictured, filling in all the colours with unnatural precision. Seeing that same pattern repeated by nature, not a single line out of place, finally squashed the last of that long-lingering paranoia. However much I'd come to doubt myself in the past few years, I now knew that my destiny was real... even if I wasn't as certain of the specifics as I'd been an hour ago.

Those thoughts flashed by in just a second. "For me, my crest represents magic," Princess said, drawing me back to the present. "At first it was just unicorn magic, which I was always good at; I was the top student at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. But later I started studying the magic of friendship, and the invisible bonds that tie all ponies together."

It was eerie, hearing it put like that. "Weird," I said. "For me, my crest represents the potential of the brain. At first it was just marks and studying, which I was always good at; I was the top student in Canter Hill's gifted students program. But later I started studying the psychology of groups, and the unconscious bonds that tie all humans together." I lowered my voice. "And push them away from each other."

Princess fell silent, a triumphant cry dying on her lips. I could practically hear the gears in her head turning at rapid speed. If we had started out so similarly, then there was no reason why I shouldn't be an emotional double of her, like all her human friends were doubles of her old ones. We both knew that my life had come unglued at some point. I had figured it out early on; she, caught up in her excitement, was only drawing the pieces together now. "Sunset Shimmer's the reason you left Canterlot, isn't she?" she said.

"Yeah." I balled my hands up into fists, hiding a tremble of fury. My hatred for Sunset roared in me like a caged beast, made a hundred times more powerful by what I'd learned today. All the lies, all the torment, hadn't just been for nothing. It had been because she was jealous. Of someone else. And then, after she'd finally met the real Twilight, she'd tried to take over the world, blown up the front of the school, and then, when she was about to fail, she smashed the mirror portal, trapping Princess forever and possibly dooming Equestria, just because she couldn't have it. I'd already known that she was pure evil, but I'd never thought that she would sink so low. If I ever saw her again, if she ever dared show her face near me again, I'd-

"What happened between you two?" Princess asked, sensing the change in my demeanor. "Flash said you were upset about her."

Now there was an understatement. If she didn't already know the whole story, I wasn't about to fill her in now. "Bullying stuff," I summed up. "She didn't like me."

"I see." She bit her lip. "Because of me. I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that."

"Neither did you," I snapped. "How can you be her friend?"

I heard acid in my voice, and I think she felt it. "Because she deserves it," she answered bravely. "I know it's hard, but you don't know her. She's changed now. I've never met anyone as kind, or as helpful, or as apologetic as she is. Now that she's graduated she works full-time at Fluttershy's favorite animal shelter, and she still finds time to help out around Canterlot High. She even looks after Spike for me when I'm away. She's doing everything she can to make up for what she used to be like."

"Not to me. And not to you. I know there's nothing she can do to make up for what she took from you. She's just planning her revenge on you, I just know it."

"How can you say that? She's my friend!" A creeping horror was coming to Princess' face. "The most important thing I ever learned is that friendship can heal anything. Doesn't it mean the same to you?"

"No." I answered quickly, honestly and automatically. "Friendship doesn't mean much of anything to me."

The silence between us was razor-sharp. I looked away, refusing to look her in the eye as she stared at me. Spike was barking on the far side of the field; I could tell by his tone that he was getting tired. "Sorry," I muttered. "I guess we're not as much alike as you thought."

"...Maybe." She still had the same collected, thoughtful tone of voice. Unexpectedly, she reached out and took my hand in her own. If it had been anyone else, I might have flinched. From her, it was strangely calming. "Earlier, you said you wanted to know how it felt to be me. Did you mean that, or were you just talking about Flash?"

"I meant it." My fingers closed around hers. It was strange how someone so different could feel so familiar.

"So, um..." I looked up, and saw to my surprise that she was smiling. "Do you want to hang out sometime?"

"Really?"

"Yeah. Do you know Sugarcube Cafe?"

"I... think so. Is it that shop near Canterlot that serves a lot of sweets?"

"That's the one." She hopped down from the wall, pulling me after her. "Want to meet me there tomorrow, after school?"

"Um... sure?" I found myself being pulled into a hug. It was the first one I'd had in years that didn't feel fake. "But..." Reluctantly, I pushed her away. "But you should hate me."

"Why?"

"Because..." It was a lot harder for me to say. "Because I had sex with your boyfriend."

She gave me a sad, knowing smile. "I forgave Sunset Shimmer," she said. "This is nothing. Besides... you're basically living proof that if I were in your shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing. How can I forgive anyone if I can't even forgive myself?"

She didn't seem to notice how much this floored me. She turned and called across the field. "Spike! Time to go." Both dogs turned and charged towards us. "See you tomorrow, Twilight!" Princess called to me as she walked away as she rejoined her Spike, heading for the park's exit.

"See you, Princess," I called weakly, giving a faint wave. My Spike, who was still carrying his ball, joined me. He immediately dropped to the ground, happy and exhausted, and poked at my leg.

It was still a minute more before I could move. My brain had been suffering too many shocks lately; I was still half-convinced that I was dreaming. Eventually, though, I picked up Spike, pocketed his ball, and started carrying him and myself home. I needed to sleep on this.

Dinner was cooking when I got home. As I put down Spike in front of his food bowl I saw my dad stirring something or other on the stove and my mom trying to simultaneously kiss his cheek and talk on the wireless phone. "I'll tell her you called when I see her," she said, then turned slightly and caught sight of me. "Oh! She just walked in. I'll hand you over." She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and held it out towards me. "Twilight! Phone for you," she yelled unnecessarily loudly.

Wordlessly, I accepted the phone and held it to my ear, holding back dread. "Hello?"

"Twilight! Where were you last night?"

It was Lyra, one of the girls from my study group, and the one whose house I was supposed to have gone to yesterday. She didn't sound angry at all, just worried, with a hint of disbelief and excitement thrown in, which was about par for the course with her; Lyra was the kind of person who overreacted by about twenty percent to absolutely everything. Whenever I'd seen her she had always been restless and excitable, often to the extent that she struggled to keep her feet on the ground, but she could also be kind of socially oblivious, and didn't always know when she was making people uncomfortable. Lately she'd gotten really into some show for little boys about giant transforming robots, and she seemed to have more and more models of them on her shelves every time I entered her room, even if I'd only left to go to the bathroom. I'd also found out the hard way that she wrote fanfiction about it. Sexy fanfiction. And she wasn't shy about showing it off.

More pertinently, I wasn't entirely sure how she knew my phone number.

"Hey, Lyra," I said, shifting back and forth. I tried not to look directly at either of them, but my mom was pointedly facing away with her ears pricked up, and my dad's stirring had slowed. I backed out of the room and all but ran up the stairs to my room. "Sorry I couldn't make it last night," I managed to get out along the way. "I wasn't feeling well."

She snorted. "Yeah, like I believe that. After last week? When you showed up with a surgical mask on? And I couldn't find you at all today. Do you even touch your locker, or do you just, like, run everywhere with all your books with you all the time?"

She wasn't far off the mark on that one. "Look, it's..." I shut my bedroom door behind me. This didn't offer as much of a feeling of security as I thought it would. I sighed. "I'm sorry. It's just not something I'm comfortable talking about right now."

"Aw..." She grumbled at being caught in her game so quickly. "Do you think you can warn us next time, though? All of us were totally lost without you. Colgate's freaking out about her exams, and I still have, like, no idea what half of this bio stuff means. Bon Bon even brought that horseradish stuff you like just for you."

"Sorry," I mumbled, feeling worse by the second. It was hard to believe I was a copy of a Princess of Friendship. "It's just... something came up with someone, and I had to-"

"Someone?"

I caught the excitement in her voice and rapidly tried to backpedal. "I didn't mean like-"

"Oh my gosh!" There was a whoosh and a heavy springing noise that I could only assume was Lyra jumping up and down on her bed. "You have a boyfriend!"

Yeah. Lyra was that girl. None of us could account for it. To my knowledge she'd never even been within earshot of a real relationship, let alone in one, so what qualifications she thought she had was anyone's guess. I'd suspected for a while that she had a secret crush on one of the other girls in the group, but I'd never been able to conclusively prove it. This particular wild boyfriend-based theory of hers was closer than most, but it wasn't so much hitting the nail on the head as it was coming down right next to it and hammering me on the thumb.

My silence as I tried to figure out what my relationship with Flash was at this point was all the answer Lyra needed. "Oh my gosh! Like, I saw you walking around on Monday like a zombie, and I totally thought you had this just-got-fucked glow around you, and Bon Bon was like 'No, she's just tired,' and I was like 'No way, this time it's for real,' and-"

"No." I tactfully put aside the question of why my study partners were freely discussing my until recently nonexistent sex life and tried to get the conversation back on track. "I don't have a boyfriend. I just had something that I had to do. That's all."

"Aw." Then: "Is it Caramel? Because I heard from Sassaflash that he has, like, the biggest crush on you, but Shoeshine told me this rumour that he thinks he might be gay, and-"

"Lyra, seriously. I don't have a boyfriend."

"Fine." Then: "How big is his dick?"

"Lyra!"

"Kidding!" Her giggles suggested that that wasn't entirely true. "But you're okay, right? Are you coming to Colgate's house tomorrow?"

I hesitated before answering, thinking of the meeting I'd arranged with Princess. "Yeah, I think so," I said. "I might be a little late, but I'll try not to be."

"Awesome. I'll see you there, okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay. And be sure to actually come this time, okay? Your friends miss you."

She hung up, leaving me staring at the phone. Friends. Were we friends? I wasn't sure how to qualify that. We barely talked outside of the group, and we definitely didn't talk about who was getting... you-know-whatted by who. Sure, she'd called me up to see if I was okay... but that was only because she needed help with her bio homework. She doesn't know me that well, I decided. I wonder if she'd try to speak to me like that if she knew about the Unspeakable Incident. I doubt it. She probably wouldn't want to talk to me at all.

I threw the phone onto my desk and dropped down onto my bed, trying to catch a few minutes' much-needed rest before dinner. I caught right away that that wasn't going to happen. Between Princess and Lyra I'd gotten stuck thinking about Flash again, and our one night together - and how nobody would ever hold me that way again, and how that was the only time in my life when I would ever feel special, and how big his... his...

Five minutes later, my hand was under my skirt, getting an early start on Textbook Review 2.

Double Entendre

Sugarcube Cafe turned out to be surprisingly difficult to find. Even though I knew generally where it was, it seemed weirdly disconnected from everything else, just another dot on a map somewhere. The square building wasn't as eye-catching as my younger self remembered it, either, just the fading pink awning stopping me from cycling on by. Luckily, Princess was still waiting at one of the tables outside when I came to a stop. "I'm sorry I'm so late!" I panted as I fumblingly locked up my bike, unable to remember the last time I'd spoken those words. "I know you said after school, but I had to take Spike out, and I forgot I had homework, and then I got lost, and..."

"It's okay," Princess laughed. "I know I sprung this on you pretty suddenly. I'm just happy you could make it." She greeted me with a hug, which I haltingly returned. Touching her still produced that same calming sensation, as though my pained and twisted aura was being temporarily corrected to a more peaceful one. It was selfish, but I found myself wanting to touch her more. I briefly wondered if she felt the opposite when our skin connected, if I were somehow leeching her inner peace away from her, but she showed no hesitation as she looped her arm around mine and led me inside.

The interior of the building was more open than I'd expected. There were only a few tables and sofas scattered around, with scuff marks on the floor suggesting that they were rearranged often. The only other customers were a group of high school students wearing a mix of berets and knitted wool hats - never thought I'd see those two groups together - but they barely gave us a second glance as we strolled in. I had to wonder why the appearance of a popular girl's double wasn't causing more stares, but then, considering what I knew of her life so far, Princess probably got up to stranger things on a weekly basis. There was also a bright balloon tied to the counter, and several more bouncing around near the ceiling, which should have been my first warning that Pinkie Pie was working today.

Without warning, a blur of pink and hair that you could lose a brush in literally bounced out of the back room and over the counter, shrieking in happiness as it dove towards us. Among the unintelligible squeals I managed to pick out "Oh my gosh! Two Twilight Sparkles!" before Pinkie Pie collided with us and smooshed us into a hug that seemed anatomically impossible. "Double Twilight!" she gasped, pressing our cheeks together. "That's double, double, double everything! I can't even tell which is which! This is the best day ever!"

"Easy, Pinkie," Princess said, expertly easing us out of her grasp. "Be gentle, please. This is all new to her."

"Okey dokey lokey!" She took half a step back and stared at me expectantly.

I looked Pinkie Pie up and down. The last time I'd seen her was the ninth grade, back when she'd just been starting her quest to become Canterlot's number one party girl. The only part of her that seemed to have changed was her hair; while the rest of her body had grown proportionally with age, the ball of fuzz erupting from her head had grown into a sculptable poof reaching all the way down to her waist. I found myself amazed that she was able to keep it clean, let alone as soft and fluffy as it was, until I remembered who I was dealing with. "H-hi," I managed, waving awkwardly. "I'm, um, Twilight Sparkle. Do you remember me?"

"Of course I remember you!" She scooped me up into a spinning hug, luckily a more gentle one this time. "You're that shy girl who loves studying and had that thing with Sunset Shimmer and your brother and then you moved away to the city but not really and we all missed you so much!" She either didn't notice that I'd turned pale or didn't care. "I thought I was never ever going to see you again! I've got to show you to everyone and you've got to tell us everything and we're going to throw you the biggest party ever!-"

"Maybe later, Pinkie," Princess intervened, settling us out again. "Right now, we're just looking for a quiet place to talk. Do you think you can do that for us?"

"Right away, your Highness," Pinkie said with a salute, which turned into a giggle. She hopped back over to the counter, and we followed, me on unsteady feet. "Something to drink while you're here?" she asked. "First drinks are on the house!"

"One Twilight Special, please," Princess said. She turned to me. "And for you?"

My mind went blank. I hadn't been prepared for this. "Um... I guess I'll have the sa-" Pinkie Pie made a face and subtly shook her head. "Oh. Then, uh..." I scanned the menu randomly. "Strawberry Swirl?"

"Coming right up!" She flipped over the counter, then giggled again. "Mrs. Cake told me that's what our Twilight ordered the first time she came here, too," she added.

What followed next was a blur of motion too fast to be tracked. Pinkie Pie began turning on machines and getting out ingredients, then vaulted over the counter and began rearranging furniture. Tables, chairs and sofas were nudged around at whirlwind speed, some with people still in them. By the time I'd fully turned around to watch the last pieces were just tottering into place; if I'd come in a second later, I'd never had known things had moved. What we'd been left with was another natural, comfortable layout, but this time with a small table for two in the far corner. The people with drinks either didn't notice or didn't care that they'd moved. Right away Pinkie was back behind the counter, picking up right where she'd left off. "Drinks will just be a few minutes!" she sang.

I was too stunned to move at first, so Princess had to take me by the arm again and pull me over to the table. "Is she... always like that?" I asked as we sat down.

"She's a lot of fun once you get used to her," Princess answered. "I know she can be a little overwhelming at first. I'll talk to her. Honestly..." She leaned forward and whispered. "The first time she threw me a party, I stayed for only two minutes and then hid in my room for the rest of the night."

That got a chuckle out of me; I could definitely see myself doing the same. It helped me come out of my shell a little. "Anyways, I can't actually stay too long," I said, feeling a little more natural. "Just half an hour or so. I promised my study group I'd be there for seven."

Princess checked the clock on the wall, confused. "But it's only four-thirty."

"I know." I sighed. "But my dad tries to cook an early dinner on study nights so that I have time to pack everything before I leave, even though that's way more time than I need, and it's a long ride back home, and they worry about me if I'm not home when they're ready..."

A sentimental smile crossed Princess' face, which suggested to me that her take on the situation was different to mine. "Yeah, he's like that," she said. "Always trying to help out..." She looked into the distance for a second, then snapped back to attention. "Why don't you just have dinner with us? That way you can stay a lot longer, and we can drop you off at seven on the dot. Pinkie, is that okay?"

"You know it!" Pinkie Pie called back, doing something complicated with chocolate.

I was flattered, but this didn't address what was, to me, the main issue. "What about my parents?"

"Just call them and let them know. They'll understand. Do you have a cell phone?"

"Well..." Hesitantly, I reached into my bag and withdrew it. It was a cheap, purple device, for emergencies only. I'd never used it. "It's just... I never do this," I said, nervously fiddling with the edges. "And... I don't know if I'm ready for them to know yet. About this, I mean. Not until I've figured it out myself."

"I understand." She held out her hand. "Want me to do it?" I looked up in surprise; she had an adventurous grin on her face. "Come on. They'd never know, right?"

My schedule keened from the back of my mind, but this only set my resolve. Matching her grin, I quickly punched in the number and handed the phone over. She held it to her ear just as my mom answered on the second ring, and I heard a very faint "Hello?"

It was in that moment that I saw the one flaw in this plan. At the sound of my - and, I supposed, her - mother's voice, Princess froze. Her smile and eyes became glassy, and some of the colour drained from her face. I was worried that I was going to have to shake her, but after my mom spoke a second time, slightly louder, she seemed to snap out of it. "Hi, mom?" she said brightly. "I met a friend from my old high school, and she offered to let me have dinner with her. I'll head for my study group right after, so I won't see you until tonight." She paused, listening to something I couldn't hear. "Who?" She hesitated for only a fraction of a second. "Pinkie Pie. Remember her?"

That was a good choice. Of course they remembered Pinkie Pie. "Yeah, that's the one," Princess said. Her voice was becoming a little shaky. "No, it's fine. I've got lots of time. I will. See you." To my distress, I noticed tears building up in her eyes. She started to lift the phone away from her head, then brought it back quickly. "Mom? I love you."

I wanted to snatch the phone from her then and there. Instead I just gripped the table as she closed her eyes and listened for several long seconds, nodding intently. "I know. You too. See you." She finally hung up, and pursed her lips for a few seconds before seeing me. "I'm sorry," she said, wiping her eyes. "I just haven't spoken to her in so long. I miss her so much."

"It's fine," I reassured her, mentally kicking myself. Stupid. I should have seen that coming. It wasn't fair to put her though that. "She'll definitely know something's up now, though," I added, with a hint of bitterness. "I guess I'll deal with that when I get back."

"It'll be fine," Princess said. She handed my phone back. "That can't have been that unusual, right? Your parents know you love them."

"My parents don't love me."

If a record had been playing, a needle would have scratched it to a halt. I swear I felt the temperature drop by several degrees. Princess stared at me with the most stunned face I'd ever seen on her or me. "Of course they do," she said. "You're their daughter."

"Yeah, and that's why they pretend. That's why they spend so much time watching me, to make sure I don't do anything stupid. I'm just a freak to them."

"Twilight..." She put her hand on mine. "They're my parents too. I promise you, they love you, and they're proud of you."

I didn't feel like arguing. "Maybe."

"Order up!" Pinkie Pie shouted.

Our drinks landed on the table. Mine was simple, some chocolate thing topped with an over-generous swirl of whipped cream and dotted strawberries. It was also in front of Princess. Her drink was placed in front of me, and when I saw the Twilight Special close up, I understood why our order had taken so long to make. Princess' drink of choice was an extra-large chocolate milkshake capped off with multiple swirls of whipped cream, chocolate and caramel sauce, fruits, nuts, and what looked like at least two varieties of oats. Crowning the whole thing was a tiara made from delicately carved milk chocolate, set with a candy in the shape of a star. I couldn't even begin to speculate how many calories were in this. It was unbelievable that me and her were still the same size.

Princess blushed. "Um... other way around, Pinkie."

"Oopsie!" Instead of switching the drinks, Pinkie Pie spun the entire table around, miraculously not spilling a drop. "Better?"

"Yes." She fingered at the decoration on top, still blushing. "You didn't have to do the crown."

Pinkie Pie stiffened. "I always have to do the crown, Twilight," she said in what I guessed was, for her, a serious tone. "Always." Then she sprang back and leaned in close to me, speaking in a stage whisper. "And don't worry. I know you're not really a wicked temptress viper mean meanie-pants."

She skipped away, leaving me blinking after her. "Wicked temptress...?"

"...Oh. Right."

Princess looked down. I gaped at her. "She knows?"

"Well... kind of. Not all of it." For the first time, it was Princess' turn to look guilty. "After Flash and I... figured out what was going on, I talked with my friends about it. I didn't tell them everything that happened, but they seemed to get the idea. A few of them had some... choice words about what they thought of you at the time." She held up her hands quickly. "Nobody hates you. And I made everyone promise that no one would try to get back at you until we'd gotten a chance to get to know you. And..." She lowered her hands and folded them. "I guess it's fair to tell you that even if I'm not mad at you... collectively, we're still kind of mad at you."

After a second, she added, "I mean, it was a pretty rotten thing you did."

"I know." Thinking of that night made me shudder inside, but I pressed on. "I was just... jealous. After getting driven out of my school, and never making the friends you made, and never even getting to talk to Flash, learning about some double who had the life I've always wanted was just... too much. I didn't understand what was going on at the time, either. I thought it was some kind of dream. And even after I started to figure out that I was taking that dream away from someone else, I just... didn't want it to stop." It didn't feel like a confession. After all, I was talking to myself. "I kind of hated you," I added, since it wasn't like I could make things any worse for myself. "It felt like you'd stolen the life I should have had away from me. But since I tried to steal it right back... if you want to hate me too, I'll understand."

"I don't hate you."

Princess broke her chocolate crown in half and offered me the side with the stone. I declined.

We both attacked our drinks, trying to bring some lightness back to the situation. I almost gagged at first; I was useless without coffee most days, but even this pile of cream and fruit was more sugar than I usually allowed myself. Once my mouth had settled, however, an old craving stirred to life within me and I found myself taking a bite of nothing but cream. Princess, by this point, was attacking the top of her milkshake with a spoon, alternating between taking mouthfuls and sucking the inside through a straw. I caught her picking out a large flake of oat and nibbling on it, rolling up her eyes in ecstasy, and this threw me for a moment until the last detail clicked. Oh, right. She's a horse. It was strangely easy to forget this, but looking at her now, it cast a whole extra layer of weirdness over everything that had come before.

"How did you and Flash meet?" I asked, trying my hand at normal conversation. "Some big, magical adventure, I guess."

"Yes and no." She smiled fondly. "We started dating about two months after I arrived. He was actually one of the first people I ran into in this world, before anyone knew where I came from. Literally, I ran into him; I wasn't used to walking on two legs yet, and I kept bumping into him. He told me that's when he started to get a crush on me. We didn't have a lot of time to talk after that, since I was busy with saving the world, and afterwards I went a little crazy trying to fix the mirror portal. But when I was ready to talk to people again, he was there for me, and two weeks later we made it official."

I smiled, even though inward I was seething. That's it? That's all I had to do? Just bump into him, and he would have fallen for me? "Just like that?" I asked, keeping my voice neutral. "There weren't any... complications?"

"Everything was complicated. Remember, I was having to build a whole new life out of nothing, in a world that I didn't understand, with as few people as possible knowing that I was from an alternate dimension. Along with my friends, Flash was one of the people who helped make that happen. And even among them, he's one of the only people I know who still sees me as me. Not as an alien visitor, but not someone who was made for this universe, either. No matter how strange things get, he always takes the time to make sure I feel like the real me belongs." She blushed. "And even then... I think you know he's pretty cute."

Did I ever. After how forgiving she'd been already, it seemed unfair for envy to start flaring in me again. "Y-yeah," I answered, unable to stop myself from mentally retracing patterns over his bare torso. "Do you really find him attractive, though?"

"Obviously. You don't have to be human to see that." I thought I saw a hint of a smirk. "If you ran into the Flash Sentry from my world, I bet you'd think he was cute, too, no matter what shape he is."

"But how do you have... I mean, do you... have you..."

I stammered to a halt. Princess was silent, not looking directly at me, the casual smile on her face fading. My brain ran record speeds around itself, kicking me with what should have been obvious from the beginning, mounting up to the horror that my crime had been even worse than I'd imagined it to be. "Oh my gosh." I clasped my hand over my mouth, blood draining from my face. "You haven't done it. I stole your first time."

"No." This should have brought relief, but didn't. Something in her face told me I'd hit a deep and carefully hidden nerve. "We've done it twice before," she explained quietly. "On our anniversary, and two months ago. Or at least... we tried to."

She looked away, absentmindedly stirring the remains of her milkshake with her spoon. Finally I saw a face on her that I recognized fully on myself, one of deep thought, so I let her finish. "Twilight," she eventually said, "please, be honest. When you were... with... Flash. How was it?"

I selected and discarded several answers, finally settling on the one she'd asked for. "It was everything I'd ever wanted it to be."

She nodded solemnly, and I gave her a moment to process this. "But... why?" I prompted. "He's a human, and you're a..."

"It's complicated." She scooped up some more of her milkshake while contemplating. "I think... for me, it's always been about people, not shapes. When I was a pony, my body would sometimes want to find a mate, but that doesn't mean that I would actually do it. At first, it was the same here. And then I started dating Flash, and for the first time I had someone I actually wanted to do it with, and those feelings synced up, and..."

She looked down, and I saw that she was clutching the edges of her skirt. "I want it," she said. "My body wants it so badly, and I can't stand it. It's like I'm just a little bit in heat, all the time. When I first arrived in this world, I thought that my new body just happened to be in season, and at first I ignored it like I usually did. But it doesn't stop. My heats in Equestria were stronger, but at least with those I always knew that all I had to do was wait it out and the desires would go away. With this it's just a constant, nagging thought at the back of my mind, telling me that I need to be touched, and I need to have someone inside me, and no matter how many times I block it out it comes back stronger and stronger until I feel like I would do anything to..."

She stopped short, unclenching her hands and smoothing down her skirt. "Well, I guess you know," she concluded. I didn't answer that.

We shared an uncomfortable silence. By this point we were both beet red. "It's not... just that," Princess clarified. "I really do want to be with Flash, not just because of biology. It just... doesn't work. Even if my body wants it, even if I want it, nothing feels right. Everything's the wrong shape and the wrong proportions and even when it feels good, my brain won't accept it." She sighed. "Our first time took two hours. Including the panic attack. Whatever we tried, I couldn't get wet, and he wouldn't stay hard, not when I was struggling so much. We figured it out, eventually. I liked it, but I cried afterwards. After that it was months before I could convince Flash to touch me again. Our second time was easier, but he was so afraid of hurting me that neither of us could get into it. We haven't tried again since."

"...Wow. I'm sorry."

"It's fine." Again, it wasn't. "It's just frustrating. Sometimes I catch him looking at me, and it hurts, because I know he's got all the same pent-up desires that I do, but we can't give each other what we want. It's a reminder that however hard I try, I'm never going to belong in this world. That never gets any easier." She bowed her head and looked up at me with soulful eyes. "Thank you for giving Flash what I couldn't."

An impossible realization snaked through me, rising through my gut but touching somewhere a little lower. Before I could bring it to light, however - not that I was sure that I wanted to - a sharp chime rang across the cafe. Pinkie Pie was ringing a heart-shaped bell. Once she had our attention, she leaned over the counter and hissed to us in another stage whisper. "Boyfriend incoming!"

My heart skipped a beat, then realized that it had done it for the wrong reasons, and tried skipping a few more to make up for it. I started scanning the room for exits or hiding places, noting that Pinkie Pie's careful rearrangement of the room provided neither. "I asked him to meet us here," Princess said, nervous at my apprehension. "I thought it might be good for us."

I wasn't prepared for this. I tried to articulate something, anything, grasping for some reason why I wouldn't have to take this exam that I hadn't studied for, but the ringing of the door cut me off. My body turned with no input from me. I looked into Flash Sentry's eyes.

And he glared right back.

Double Chocolate Cake

A lot of things happen to your body when you fall in love.

The rush of endorphins is just the beginning. People like to say that love is chemically identical to eating chocolate, but it is so, so much more complicated than that. When you love somebody, connections are formed in your gut and in your brain that can never be broken. The more you think of them, the stronger those bonds become, and the more data your body has, the more bonds can be devoted to them. Biology influences psychology, and psychology influences biology. Before you've even had time to realize what you're feeling, something that's so often dismissed as an illusion has already started rearranging your body into a mappable pattern inside you. This invisible, intangible, human-created concept, completely meaningless to any of the billions of cells that make you up, has the power to physically rewire you into something unrecognizable. Love can literally bend reality.

I loved Flash from the day I met him. Not because I wanted to, but because I had no one else. My school forgot about me, my family was ashamed of me, and my only friend was a dog. No matter how hard I threw myself into my studies and my schedule, the seeds of desire had been planted in me, and I'd watered them weekly for years. There were whole networks in my brain devoted to doing nothing but giving me bursts of pleasure when I thought about his smile, or his voice, or how it might feel if he was kissing me. When we'd finally met, my body had gone into overtime filling in the blanks in this feedback loop, hungrily cataloging every scent, every texture, every pulse of sensation as our bodies rocked together. Without ever knowing it, I was craving those chemicals again, unconsciously turning myself on in the hopes that I might drive myself to kiss his lips again. My body was a shrine to him, the cells I'd stolen from him entombed within me, and its only commandment was If you find me more of him, you will again be happy.

I'd done all this research so that I could dismiss it. I've never believed in biological determinism, preferring to think of my physical side as something to control instead of submit to, and I thought that knowing the biological aspect of my crush would help me discard it. All it really resulted in was a lot of long and loud showers. And now, I understood that when I saw Flash Sentry glaring at me with disgust, when it felt like I was being torn apart inside, it was, on the cellular level, actually happening.

He looked between the two of us, just once, and then pulled up a chair next to his girlfriend. It wasn't hard to guess how he knew who was who; maybe it was the bracelet, or the milkshake, or the fact that she was beaming at him and I was shrinking away in terror. "Hi, Twilight," he said, kissing her cheek. Then he looked at me. "Hi... other Twilight."

"Just Twilight," Princess corrected him, holding his arm. "This is her world, not mine. I'm the other Twilight, remember?"

Looking at them together was a new kind of agony. It had been bad enough watching Sunset Shimmer cling to him, but the way these two leaned into one another was just so unbearably right that I couldn't handle it. Seeing this girl who should have been me, who was me, rest her head on his shoulder made me feel like I was almost in her place, so close and yet so far. The fact that he kept glaring at me just pushed me away even more.

"Let's get this over with," he groaned. Emphatically, he folded his arms. "Say what you're here to say and let's go."

I couldn't talk. Not like this, not in public, not with him staring at me like that. Because I understood then that it wasn't Princess who I should have been afraid of. There were words for what I'd done to Flash, terrible, awful words that I wouldn't wish on anyone, and he had every right to reflect all of that awfulness back onto me. Looking at him now, I could still feel him, perfectly visualizing his naked body underneath his clothes. At some point in time and space, he was still wrapped around me, hands caressing every part of me, mouth loving me, growing closer as I moistened for him, and the memory of that night was a poison pill inside me. Every vibration of his hate ripped through me like bullets. He'd done nothing but love me, and I'd treated him like a toy. All I wanted was to die, to disappear, to never have existed, so that he and Princess and everyone could have lived on happily without me.

A death of the soul later, I tried moving my lips, just to see what would happen. What happened was that I started crying. Couldn't even get that right, I guess.

"Ugh." Flash looked away. "Fine. Just keep feeling sorry for yourself. That'll fix everything."

"Flash, please." Princess held onto him tightly, maybe holding him back. "No one thinks that what she did wasn't wrong, not even her. We shouldn't make things worse than they already are."

He turned to her. "How can be you okay with this?" he snapped.

"I'm not. But there has to be a little bit of good that came from this, right? She... gave you what I couldn't."

She looked at me again. Through the haze of tears I saw an intense longing, and not a small amount of desire. Things finally clicked: absurdly, Princess was jealous of me.

"You think that's what matters to me?" Flash retorted. "All I wanted was to be with you, not some... criminal who looks like you!"

"She is me."

"That is not you!"

Princess went silent for a moment. "What about when the portal broke?" she said. I realized that she was crying too, but doing a much better job of hiding it. "When I wouldn't talk to you for a month? When you had to feed me to keep me from starving? When I threatened you with rocks for interrupting my work? Was I like her then?"

Flash hesitated as well. He looked back and forth between her and me, his scowl shuddering as it tried to decide whether to stay in place. And just for a second, I caught him looking at me as he had three nights ago: with love.

It all made sense. Even if my perverted crush had hardwired me to long for Flash, it was nothing compared to what a year of close contact had done to him. He was made for Princess, just as she was made for him, and now I was throwing that off. Even if he could tell us apart, his body couldn't; for more than a year his impulses had been telling him that the smell of her hair and the oils from her skin were good and should be sought out, but his one encounter with me had fastballed those feelings into reverse. He was caught between us, biologically breaking up with her as attraction fought with revulsion. It was chemically impossible for him to both love her and hate me.

Something had to break. Might as well be me.

"I'm sorry," I blurted, standing up. "You're right. I'm not her. I'm nothing like her. And I never will be."

"Twilight..." Princess said, rising.

"No!" I cried, backing up. "Just leave me alone! I'm sorry. This never should have happened. I'm sorry!" I turned and fled, drawing more stares as I pushed out the door. By the time Princess ran out of the cafe behind me I was already on my bike and flying down the street, not looking back.

I sat on Colgate's porch for twenty minutes before I rang the doorbell. I'd wanted time to breathe and get myself presentable, but I realized that it was going to be a long time before that happened. It took another minute for anyone to answer, and when the door did open, it was Lyra, not Colgate, who stood behind it. Had I been in a better frame of mind, this would have struck me as odd; Lyra was usually late for study sessions, not several hours early. What did catch me then was the look of surprise and uncertainty on her face as she saw me. "Uh, hi," she said, leaning back. "You're early."

"I'm sorry," I sniffed. "I didn't know where else to go."

She invited me in, but only hesitantly, as if she wasn't sure what to do with me. "Are you okay?" she asked. "You're looking kinda wrecked." She made a face at something in the next room, thinking that I couldn't see.

"I'm fine," I lied. "I just needed to..." Something caught my eye. A shiny shape was whisked away around the corner, towards the kitchen. I followed it, ignoring Lyra's feeble protests, and stopped short when I saw what was waiting.

All the girls were there: Bon Bon, Colgate, Lemon Hearts and Twinkleshine, the latter of whom was wearing a party hat. They'd all frozen, like they were caught in the act, staring back at me. Bon Bon and Lemon Hearts were in the kitchen, where it looked like a chocolate-based bomb had gone off, putting the finishing touches on a cake. Colgate was neatly piling presents on the table, and Twinkleshine had until now been frolicking around in a pile of streamers. Glitter was everywhere. Above it all was a stringy, sparkly banner, drooping dangerously low over everything, which read Happy Birthday Twilight!

Twinkleshine, in a panic, blurted the first thing she thought of. "This isn't what it looks like."

I took another step in, blinking at them and blearily wondering if this surprise had been meant for Princess as well. "What...?"

Lyra jumped me from behind. "Because tomorrow's your birthday, stupid!" she yelled into my ear.

"And you didn't tell us!" Bon Bon pouted, marching over.

In seconds, I was surrounded. Twinkleshine, stronger than she looked, picked up both me and Lyra and spun us around giddily. "Happy almost birthday, study buddy!" she cheered.

I was sure that by now numb shock was becoming my default expression. "How did you even..."

"I hacked the student records," Colgate answered, a blush turning her blue face purple. "Principal Mayor almost caught me, too. But it was worth it."

"Surprise!" Twinkleshine shouted, too late but lost in the moment.

Lyra nuzzled me from behind. "We all would have tanked our midterms if you hadn't been there," she said. "We've been wanting to do this for a while now."

"But... why?" I choked out. "We barely talk."

"Not for want of trying!" Lemon Hearts yelled from near the counter.

Colgate stole me away from Twinkleshine and gave me a more gentle hug. I'd now been touched by more people in the past three days than I had in the past three years. "You've always been there for us," she said, "whether you knew that was what you were doing or not. And as far as I'm concerned, that makes you a pretty awesome friend."

Friend.

That was the word that broke me. I sniffed once, disguise cracking, and then pitched forward and sobbed into Colgate's shoulder. She gasped. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Twinkleshine took a step backwards. "She... she doesn't like it!" she wailed in horror, flailing and sprinting out of the room.

The others stayed where they were, embracing me from both sides. I stayed too, even when Lyra "accidentally" copped a feel. The others approached more cautiously, and after a minute Bon Bon gently reached in and lifted up my chin. "Seriously, Twilight, what's wrong?" she said.

For the first time, I told her.

It took Princess Twilight sixty minutes to tell her story. I cut mine down to only forty minutes.

I left out a lot of the important parts, of course. I didn't say anything about ponies or magic or dimension-hopping; without a talking dog handy to prove my case, I didn't want any of my friends (friends!) thinking I was crazy, even for a little while. I also didn't say anything about Sunset Shimmer, since that was a whole second can of worms that I wasn't about to open. All they needed to know was that there was another girl out there who I could pass for, which was plausible enough that they didn't seriously question it.

The other difference was that while Princess had had a small, quiet audience, I had a whole party to talk through. I spoke in bursts, between which Bon Bon managed to get two pieces of cake in me and Twinkleshine pushed presents into my hands. They were an odd yet predictable selection: a purple robot toy, a couple of rare books (including one autographed by A.K. Yearling), a gift certificate, a rubber bone for Spike. Twinkleshine, a little naively, had gotten me a Sapphire Shores album, but I loved it anyway. "This one's from all of us," Lyra added at the end, passing me something hard and flat. "We thought you'd like it the most."

I stripped the wrapping paper away. It was a framed picture of the six of us, taken at some point when I hadn't noticed. We were all unknowingly posed, Lyra and Twinkleshine mid-bounce, Colgate and Lemon Hearts intently poring over their work, Bon Bon laughing from the corner of the frame as she took the shot. I was sitting demurely in the middle, reading a book, with the others framed around me. "It's beautiful," I answered honestly, clutching it to my chest.

It was evening when I finally finished retelling the events of the day. We'd made it up to Colgate's room and lounged around there, listening to me talk. When I was done we lay around for a little while longer, collecting ourselves. "Well," Colgate said, "that's definitely the weirdest reason I've heard for crashing a party."

Lyra extended her arm with a grin, palm facing me. "High five," she said when I didn't move. "Our Twilight finally got laid. High five."

"With Flash Sentry, too," Lemon Hearts whined as I awkwardly obliged. "I'm so jealous."

"It's not that great," I said. "He hates me now. And he should, too."

"Should he?" Bon Bon said. She took my hand and stroked it gently. "Yes, you lied, and you did a bad thing. But no one could know you and think that you're a bad person. As long as you're true to that, it doesn't have to end this way."

I sniffed. "Really?"

"I know it."

"It might not be that easy," Colgate added. "You might have a lot of making up to do. But even if things don't end like you wanted, you can't leave things as they are. It's not fair to anyone."

"I guess," I said. "But what should I do?"

Twinkleshine answered. "Run to him. And when you're there, follow your heart. Do what makes everyone happy." She smiled sweetly.

Lyra leaned over to me. "What she's saying is she thinks you should jump on his c-"

Bon Bon clapped a hand over her mouth. "Go," she said. "Before you lose your chance."

I stood slowly. "Are you sure?" I asked. "You all did all this for me."

"Hey, we'll see you around all the time," Lemon Hearts laughed. "But this might be your one shot. You should take it."

"I will." I started to head out, but hesitated. "Everyone... thank you. You don't know how much this all meant to me. No matter how this ends, I want you to know that this made my night."

"A lot longer than that, by the sound of it," Bon Bon said. "Good luck, Twilight. We'll be rooting for you."

"Get pictures!" Lyra yelled as I walked out the door.

The cafe was empty when I came back to it. I entered nervously, taking a long time coming in; the lights were on, but no one was home. The tables had been rearranged again, leaving me struggling to remember how they had been before. The trail was already cold.

"Boo."

I shrieked, nearly falling over a table. Behind me, Pinkie Pie giggled. "Our Twilight never stopped falling for that," she said. I didn't blame my double; I'd studied a few magician's tricks, and barring crawling across the ceiling, I had no idea how Pinkie Pie could warp around like that.

I steadied myself against a chair, suddenly nervous about being alone with her. "What do you want?" I asked.

"I thought you'd come back." She leaped up onto the table and squatted down to examine me, strangely birdlike. "Flash and Twilight had a fight," she said. "That's something they haven't done in a long, long time."

I gulped. "About me?"

"Weeeeeeell, not just about you. But you could have tried just a little bit harder not to kick something off."

Talking to her was unnerving. She kept tilting and bobbing her head while she talked, and I had absolutely no idea if she was mad at me or not. "Where are they?" I asked. "I need to apologize."

"They went to her place to do kissy things. But I don't think it's going to go well." She grinned devilishly. "Lucky for you, I know just how to get there. But if you want me to tell you, then you're going to have to do a little something for me."

My imagination ran wild and into strange and uncomfortable places. "Like what?" I asked, edging away.

"Oh, I think you know." She hopped down from the table and crept towards me, slowly raising her arms.

Five awkward minutes and a bike ride later, I came to a halt in front of the building where Princess lived. It wasn't what I'd expected from her. All it was was a squat, square, gray-toned apartment complex, unremarkable among the buildings around it. This was understandable, though, since she hadn't had much of a choice. According to what Pinkie Pie had told me, since Princess was from another dimension and didn't legally exist, she couldn't risk hunting for jobs outside of the small number of people who knew about her true nature. For her first few months she'd bounced from friend's house to friend's house until the school year had started and Principal Celestia had hired her to run the library at Canterlot High. This gave her enough to live on and pay back her debts, and she'd saved up to finally afford a place of her own - one that didn't ask too many questions.

"Evening, Twilight," the doorman said brightly as I walked in. "Didn't know you'd gone out."

"Oh, um... hi." I hid behind my hair, praying that he wouldn't see through my disguise. Not, of course, that I was wearing one.

Her room number was 314. I wondered if she'd chosen it herself. I knew walking in that if I stopped in front of the door, I would end up stood there for an hour or more; not letting that happen, I ran the final few steps and hammered on it. When nothing happened after the first thirty seconds I knocked again, more politely, and then a third time.

I was contemplating trying for a fourth when the door opened. Flash stood there, his puzzled expression collapsing into one of annoyance. "Twilight," he said flatly.

I didn't bother with preliminaries. "Tell me how to make things right."

He didn't answer, so I continued. "I don't care if you hate me. You have every right to. I can't make up for what I did, but if I have something you want, it's yours. Any kind of apology, any punishment, anything. And if all you want is for me to leave and never go near you again, I'll do it. I just don't want to leave things as they are. I can't."

All he did was stare. My body quivered underneath it. I wanted to throw myself on him and tell him it would be okay; I wanted him to let me cry on his shoulder one more time. But he already had a Twilight for that. "Flash," I mumbled. "I'm sorry."

An eternity of sorts passed, both our minds stretching out this moment for as long as we could. Then he sighed and leaned against the doorframe. Anger dripped away from him, and in those pretty blue eyes I once again saw sadness. He spoke with a heavy longing that I objectively knew originated in the brain, but deep down understood could only come from the heart. "Tell me how to make Twilight happy."

Double Slit Experiment

Princess' apartment was, unsurprisingly, exactly to my tastes. It was made up of only a few rooms, but what there was was compact, functional, and crammed floor-to-ceiling with books. Flash led me around overflowing bookshelves and several teetering towers to the kitchen table. "Keep your voice down," he instructed. "Twilight's resting. She always naps after we argue about anything. She says she doesn't like to make any big decisions until she's slept on it." A well-hidden flicker of worry crossed his face as he sat opposite me. "Spike's staying with Rainbow Dash, so we don't have to worry about him."

Between us was a vase of roses, some of which had had some of their petals picked off. I carefully folded my hands in front of me. The atmosphere was very different than our previous encounters. There were no expectations here, imagined or otherwise, and no history to speak of; even though we'd made love, we were like two perfect strangers meeting for the first time. "Princess loves you," I said. "Princess Twilight, I mean. She just wants you to be happy."

"She mentioned you call her that." He laughed, just once. "I do too, sometimes. She only lets a few people do that. You must be special."

"I guess."

We fell silent. I looked at him the way I used to when I passed him in a hallway: not quite at him, head slightly tilted, doing everything I could to etch his face into my mind without him noticing that I was staring. Now that we were face to face, I finally caught him doing the same, facing just slightly away while his eyes traced the stripes in my hair. Now more than before, it was unnerving. He didn't even think I was his girlfriend. Why was he looking at me like he thought I was attractive?

"She's afraid of you," Flash said once we were done sizing each other up. "She won't admit it, but she is. At first it was just jealousy, but she's been acting nervous ever since she talked to you."

"That's ridiculous," I scoffed. Then my stomach dropped as I realized he was serious. "Seriously? Why? I'm nothing compared to her."

"You think there's nothing special about taking college-level courses during high school?"

I must have looked stunned, so he quickly continued. "I did some digging. Nothing personal. I just have some friends who go to your school, and I asked them what they knew. That's all."

"Oh." I looked away. "So what? It's not that special."

"Maybe not to you, but..." He sighed. "When Twilight came to this world, the biggest thing she lost was her education. Back in Equestria she was considered a genius, but here everything that she'd spent her whole life studying is meaningless. Our biology is different, the laws of physics are different, all her literature and historical references sound like horse puns, and we don't even have magic. The only thing she can still do is math, but only after converting everything back into base twelve. She tried attending high school, but she had to drop out when she realized she was years behind everyone else. She's done nothing but study ever since, and she's only starting to catch up.

"And then you showed up - naturally human and years ahead of her. It completely tore her up. Her friends are still there for her, but she keeps calling them your friends. Since they would have been, if you hadn't gotten..." He gestured awkwardly. "Thrown off track."

I didn't even want to know how much he knew about that. "So what?" I mumbled. "She has her life, and I have mine. We don't even have to see each other again if she doesn't want to. What, does she think I'm just going to waltz in and steal all her friends away?"

"Well, you already tried it once."

"That wasn't-!" I winced as realization crashed through me. Flash glared at me darkly. "I wasn't trying to steal you," I said. "I didn't know. I just wanted to believe so badly that you and I were... that you..."

"You thought I belonged with you."

"...Yeah."

"Well, there you go." He sighed. "Twilight likes you. She likes being around you. But she thinks... she thinks... that if she and Sunset hadn't interfered, then I would have ended up dating you instead of her. In her mind, she's the one who stole me away from you. Now that I've met you, she's scared that I'm going to start thinking that, too."

"But you're not." I felt a flicker of something that I prayed wasn't hope. "...Are you?"

"No!" The verbal sucker punch came as a relief. "She's the version of her that I fell in love with. I don't care that she isn't from this world. I wouldn't trade her for anything."

"...Yeah." I took a moment to still my heart as the boy of my dreams finally, directly rejected me. "It would never have worked, anyway," I said, hiding a quiver in some small consolation. "You and me. It's better that you're with her. You're perfect... and she's a princess."

He reddened slightly. "Hey..."

"And she can do magic," I added. "I can't top that. And she's in a rock band, and I can't even sing. She was saving the world with her friends while I was blowing off mine to study for exams. Her life's exciting and magical, and me, I'm..." One more bitter sigh, just to drive the point home. "I'm just another Twilight."

"Twilight..." Flash shook his head. "Those aren't the reasons I fell in love with her."

This sounded condescending until I realized he was blushing. "No?" I said, almost not wanting to hear the response.

"No. Her being a princess had nothing to do with it." His blush deepened, and I glimpsed a nervousness in his face that I'd thought I would never see again. "Look, I never told Twilight this, but to be honest... when I first started to get a crush on her, it was because I thought she was you."

...

I had nothing. Just like when he'd first appeared in front of me at the school, my brain immediately checked out, convinced that what had just been said could not possibly have actually happened. "What?" my mouth forced out on autopilot.

"It's true." He was the most beautiful crimson I'd ever seen. "This might sound creepy, but back in the ninth grade I had the biggest crush on you. I think a lot of the guys did. You were beautiful, you were smart, you were funny, and..." He struggled a little, watching for my reaction. "And for me, you always looked so determined. Like you were always thinking two steps ahead of everyone else, and no matter what life threw at you, you would always find a way to come out on top. I always wished I had that kind of confidence, instead of just faking it. And you can sing," he added. "You used to sing to yourself all the time, in between classes. Remember?"

I did remember. I used to sing to myself all the time, until Sunset Shimmer told me that I was bothering people and I should cut it out. "You liked that?" I squeaked.

"Everyone did. I spent the whole year trying to think of a way to talk to you, but you were always so busy with your books that I never had a chance. I even took second-year astronomy just because I heard you were in it, but that was when you started disappearing. And after that, there was Sunset."

Inner knives scraped the flesh from my bones. He had always been this close, just one romantic comedy bump away from us falling in love? I could scarcely imagine the surgical precision it would have taken to keep us apart, the single-minded dedication Sunset Shimmer must have had for ruining my life. "Why her?" I croaked. "If you really liked me, why didn't you try to find me? Why would you date her?"

"Because she was there." He had the decency to look ashamed of this. "She was the only girl I knew who would actually talk to me instead of blushing and tripping over herself. I started thinking that maybe she was the only one I would ever have that with. Plus, I... kind of felt sorry for her. She came to me one day crying about how her 'best friend' had ruined her life. I only found out later that was you. At first I just went out with her to make her feel better, but she started making a big deal of it, and it got harder and harder to get away from her. I just thought that as long as I was stuck with her, I could at least try to make her a better person." Catching my expression, he quickly added, "I promise, I had no idea that she was behind any of it. If I'd known that she was the one who did that to you, I never would have had anything to do with her."

The Unspeakable Incident. I shuddered, silently praying that my deepest shame wouldn't be dragged back to me again, not here. "How much did you find out?" I asked.

"She told me the rumours. She was a good actress, but I never believed them, and I never told anyone. It was all just too crazy to be true." Some small consolation, at least. "Eventually she got tired of me, and I got tired of her keeping secrets from me. We split up, but by then she was too obsessed with some other plan to care. A week later Princess Twilight turned up, and..." He shrugged. "You know the rest."

I did, but what could I say? My brain uselessly wracked itself, my carefully cultivated crush reaching out to grasp at his, a crackling candle trying to rekindle another that had long burned down to nothing. "I should thank you, I guess," he continued, oblivious. "If it hadn't been for you, I might never have met my Twilight. And... I'm sorry I never talked to you. If I'd gotten to know you better, then maybe I could have stopped Sunset from hurting you. I guess we'll never know." He turned away contemplatively, and for a moment I thought I saw all the regrets and might-have-beens that I'd been feeling pass through him. Then his expression darkened. "Not that it matters, since all you wanted was to get in my pants."

Something in me snapped. Hold on. "What?"

"What do you mean, what?" The anger was back, memories pushed aside. "You lied to me. You got off on me, and you got your petty revenge on Princess, too. You got what you wanted, and then you vanished. You would never have come back if Princess hadn't found you. Is that all I am to you?"

I added things up and gasped in horror. "You thought this was just about sex?"

The faintest flicker from him. "Wasn't it?"

"You didn't know?"

"Know what?"

I slapped both palms down on the table and stood up, suddenly shouting. "That I'm in love with you, idiot!"

It was his turn to look deer-in-the-headlights stunned. I drew myself back carefully, realizing that I was breathing heavily. "I was the one who had a crush on you," I said. "I waited a whole year wishing that you would talk to me. You're the only guy I've ever been interested in; the only one I ever thought might actually understand me. You were the reason I ever tried making friends, and thinking about you kept me going after my brother left. I've spent all of high school thinking that I wasn't good enough for you. Don't you get it? I didn't want you. I wanted to be yours."

He still just stared. I couldn't look at him any longer. "But it doesn't matter," I said, turning away. "It doesn't matter what either of us feels, or used to feel. You're with her now. I'll just learn to be happy for her instead."

I took a few teetering steps away, needing space. As my foot hit carpet, Flash's voice broke behind me. "Twilight, wait..." Then again, much more sharply. "Wait!"

The warning clicked, half a second too late. My head turned as my descending foot nudged an encyclopedia, sending a tremor across the room that I could practically feel in the air. In slow motion, the eight-foot stack of textbooks next to me wavered, tilted, and started to fall.

Shock made itself known and was categorized instantly as my brain started guessing at mass, downward velocity and angles of impact instead of devoting itself to the arguably more important task of moving my body out of the way. But by the time the practical side of myself started to kick itself into gear, too late, Flash was already by my side. He yanked me by my arm out of the pillar's path, then again into the middle of the room as another mountain tumbled. I clung to him as the chain reaction spread, toppling stacks of books that seemed deliberately positioned to create thundering crashes instead of the series of dull thuds I would have expected. Fluttering pages and tough spines brushed against our ankles. When I opened my eyes again, the cave of an apartment had turned into an ocean. I also noticed that my head was firmly pressed against Flash's chest.

Flash's hands made their way to my shoulders. He tensed, as if he were about to push me away, but he didn't. "We have got to stop bumping into each other like this," he whispered.

It was surreal how something so right could twist me up so much. "Maybe, in some other life... in some other reality..." I started.

"In every other reality," Flash assured me. "But not this one."

We stayed there far longer than we needed to. I slowly encircled him with my arms, terrifyingly aware that he could throw me away at any moment, almost wanting him to. "I'll leave in the summer," I said. "I'll move away to the city. I'll find my own life, with my own friends, and my own boyfriend, if I can find one. Princess won't ever have to worry about me taking you from her ever again."

"You would do that for her?"

"She can have the life she took. I don't want it any more." My voice cracked. "You were the only good thing left in it."

He mulled this over, slowly. "Then... if I asked you to stay, would you do that?"

"Yes." The 'But why would you?' was unspoken but implied.

"And..." I could feel him getting warmer through his clothes. "What if I asked you to... spend another night with me?"

I stiffened. He can't mean... "What?" I said, moving away of my own accord.

He tried to look me in the eyes, but was blushing too deeply. "Princess and I were talking, and... she had an idea. She figured the only difference between her and you was that you're open to... physical stuff, and she isn't. So she thought that if she could learn to enjoy it the way a human does, I wouldn't have a reason to chase after you any more. Basically... she wants you to teach me to make her feel how I made you feel."

Deliberately over-complex phrasing aside, I got the idea. "You mean you want me to teach you, the love of my life, to have sex with someone else?"

"I knew you wouldn't go for it." He took a few careful steps away and slumped down on half a stack of biology books. "I was against it, anyway," he added. "I've hurt her enough already. I don't want her to force herself through more of that because of me."

A couple of final pieces slid into place. I weaved over to him, much more worried about accidentally breaking a cover on the way. "You think she doesn't want you?" I said.

"Well, every time we do anything more than kiss, she flinches, she cries, and one time she threw up, so you tell me." He spat out a lot of bitterness all at once, then continued more softly. "And it's... tough, you know? She's the most beautiful person I know, and she does so much to make me happy, and sometimes, all I want is to give some of that back and take her over the moon." A smile played around the edges of his lips, quickly dissolving. "But I know that every time I touch her, I'm just reminding her of the body she can never go back to. I don't want to do that to her. I can live without sex; we've never needed it to be happy. It's just hard being so close to her and always having that one place inside her that I can't reach."

His frustration found a comfortable echo in me. The barriers between us were almost tangible, suddenly clear to me; with three words, I knocked them down. "I'll do it."

He looked up. "Huh?"

"I'll help you both." I took his hand and searched for a place to sit down, settling for his lap. "She's unhappy because she can't give you what you want," I said, "and you're unhappy because you can't give her what she wants. She's me, and you're my alternate universe boyfriend. If I'm the one who can help you, it would be wrong not to." That, and I really, really wanted to see him naked again, but that was just a bonus.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," he said, but his hand tightened around mine.

"I want to." I leaned into him, already feeling our pulses quickening. "Do you want to?"

We stared into each other's eyes. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded. "Stars, I want you," he breathed.

Flash's other hand found its rightful place on my hip, tracing along the top of my skirt. I rested mine on his shoulder. "So... how do we do this?" I asked. "One night isn't really enough to qualify me as a teacher. You might have better luck with the internet."

"She doesn't like the internet. She says it's full of liars and weirdos." He blushed again, a new kind, shaded with desire. "But you're more... uh... hands-on. Since the two of you are physically the same, what turns you on should work for her as well."

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure? Because we diverged a few years ago, and most of sexual attraction is psychologicaaaaaaaaah..." The word collapsed as Flash reached up, under the edge of my shirt, and stroked the small of my back. All the weight dropped from my shoulders and I slumped onto him in a blissful haze, leaning us against the slope of books.

"That's one we figured out," Flash told me with a grin. "All we have to do is let Princess convince herself that it's okay for her new body to feel good. The better we can make her feel, and the more you can prove that it feels good, the easier it'll be for her. But for that, we'll need to experiment."

I felt like I could melt. Flash's looks and voice were magical enough, but a guy who knew my secret weak spots was fulfilling a whole new level of secret fantasies. "Experiment is my favorite word," I told him, pulling myself closer to him. "It'll have to be done scientifically. Rigidly structured. Tightly controlled. Extremely thorough."

"No stone unturned?" His fingers kept making small circles around the base of my spine, drawing all my body's focus to my pelvis. Beneath me, I could feel something beginning to stiffen. "Could take a while."

"Could take weeks. Months, even." It was dizzyingly hot. Our clothes were suffocating. "We might need to keep at it all summer long..."

We slid together down the pile of books, lying almost horizontal on a bed of pages. The tips of our noses touched. "Take me, Flash," I whispered. "Take me for all the myriad ways we could have done this in another life. I'll let you live a lifetime with the Twilight you love. Just let me live a lifetime with you, right here."

Our lips grazed each other, then melted together. I pressed myself into him, boiling energy uncoiling all the way from the tip of my tongue to the inferno between my legs. I would have sworn I could feel the fabled spark of magic until Flash shook his head. "Mm. No. No." He twisted his head away, quickly kissing my cheek for comfort. "No. We can't. We still need to talk to Princess. She needs to know you're doing it for the right reasons."

The mention of her brought a few of my senses back to me. "...Yeah. It wouldn't be right." Deflated and unsatisfied, I squirmed across him, catching brushes of his hardness across my legs before he inevitably pushed me away.

"We'll figure something out." He stroked my hair, letting it fall across us both. I could still hear desire in his voice, but he kept it tempered with false professionalism. "We'll ask how far Princess wants us to go, and we'll set a date, and-"

My own voice cut between us. "Actually, I was hoping we could start now."

We both flinched to the right. Princess was standing in a far doorway, leaning against the frame and smiling. She was wearing a fuzzy pink robe with her crest stitched onto it; it looked hand-stitched, and I would later realize that it must have been. She watched us calmly, the redness of tears around her eyes already fading and no signs of sleep on her face.

Even before realization had fully hit us, Flash and I were already scrambling up. We fumbled over each other, his hand still inside my shirt, mine trapped behind his shoulder, our cheeks flush as we staggered upright. "Twilight, we didn't- we weren't- nothing happened!" Flash blurted.

"I'm sorry!" I cried at almost the same time. "I wasn't trying to steal him! I just... we just..."

We both trailed off as we realized Princess was laughing. She covered her mouth, almost doubled over as she watched us try to untangle ourselves. Flash gulped. "Uh... how much of that did you hear?" he asked.

"All of it." She smiled at me. "I woke up as soon as you knocked on the door. I'm not that heavy a sleeper."

Unflinchingly, she walked over the lake of hardbacks and up to Flash, putting her hands behind his neck and kissing him. "You worry so much about me," she teased. "But I know how you feel about me. I've always known. And if you want my body even half as much as I want yours, then I will never do anything to keep it from you."

She smiled a strange little half-smile at me. "Twilight... are you sure about this?"

"I want to make things right." Looking at them was becoming easier with each passing second. Yes, it was Princess who was clinging to Flash, but I couldn't add 'instead of me' to that; she was me. As long as I imagined I was looking in a mirror, it was almost like I was in her place. "I'm sorry about your books," I added, shuffling on the surface.

She shrugged dismissively. "It's okay. They were due for a reshelving anyway." She took Flash by his hand and led him towards her room, beckoning me after with a long finger. I followed, trembling.

Despite the different shape, the bedroom had been arranged into an almost exact replica of my own, everything laid out in what I considered the exact optimal arrangement. Books, less dangerously stacked, were piled in the corner in the same way, and the walls were almost the exact same shade of blue. A television set replaced my computer, however, and her bed was nearly twice as wide. Princess pushed Flash down onto the edge of this, perching herself on his lap in the same way that I had less than a minute ago. "Twi..." he protested feebly, one last time. "I don't want to hurt you."

"Stop it," she chided. "Don't think of me that way. I'm not human, but I'm not a pony, either. Here and now, I'm your Twilight, and you're my Flash. Nothing else. And even if it takes a little extra work..." She drew closer to him. "This..." She held his wrist and slid his hand inside her robe. "...is what I want."

She kissed him, leaning them both back over the bed. His defenses fell away and he melded into her, giving in to animal passion. I stood by the doorway, watching with silent breath. They embraced one another, teasing each other ever so gently. I saw his hand move inside her robe, and my own breast tingled, as though a reflection of him was caressing me as well.

They moved over each other for about a minute, an erotic show like something out of my dreams. Then Princess opened one eye and gazed at me, as though remembering that I was there. "Flash?" she whispered, moving her lips to caress the edge of his ear. In the quiet room I could hear every word. "Kiss her."

He paled a little. "In front of you?" he whispered back. "I thought..."

"She's me, silly. The real me." She laughed. "And this is your chance to fall in love with me all over again." When he didn't immediately move, she nipped at his earlobe, whispering more intently. "Make her feel good, Flash. I want you to make her feel good."

She slid off of Flash and beckoned me closer, still giving me that same strange half-smile. I staggered near as though magnetically drawn, while Flash stood up. "This doesn't change anything," he said, putting his hands on my sides.

"I know," I answered, though I shivered under his touch. "It was just a high school crush. We'll get over it." I slid up to him, raising my own arms around his back. I blushed. "If you think about it," I added, "we were never even properly introduced."

This made him laugh. "Yeah." He finished the embrace, crushing me against him. "Flash Sentry," he said. "I've been wanting to get to know you since the ninth grade."

"Twilight Sparkle," I giggled back. "The same."

We stared into one another's eyes as though for the first time, our faces inches from each other. "Even if it came a little late," Flash said, "and even if we got off on the wrong foot... it's nice to finally meet the real you." By degrees, he closed the gap between us. "And... there's something else I've wanted to do since I first saw you, too..."

When he kissed me, it was different from all the times he had previously. This one was slower, probing, exploring, waiting at each turn to measure my reaction. I tried not to disappoint. Every questioning advance was met by a stronger one in return, inviting him to cross my boundaries further. One eye opened, as my double's had, and I saw Princess watching us with a smile and a look of fascination that I had only rarely seen even on myself. For some reason, this look spurred me on, and I threw myself at Flash and delved into his mouth with renewed passion.

I'd only enjoyed him for a minute when I felt one of his hands being lifted away from me. One eye cracked open again. As he and I made out, Princess was sucking on his fingers. She encircled one with her tongue, then two, tugging on the belt of her robe. It fell open, revealing lavender curves shadowed within. She removed the hand from her mouth and traced it down her neck, across her chest and stomach, and then lower still.

Flash's eyes didn't open, but the hand on my back began to clutch at me tighter. His tongue lanced out between my lips, filling me with the taste of him. Princess made small moans as she rubbed herself with her boyfriend's fingers. There was a slightly pained look on her face, but also a smile, like she couldn't believe that she liked what she was doing. She crept closer and closer, her breathing becoming heavier, then all at once pulled Flash's face away from mine and forced herself onto him.

Flash buckled slightly, leaning back under the weight of two Twilight Sparkles, but managed to keep himself steady with one hand on both of us. I planted more kisses on his cheek and neck while Princess glued herself to his lips, both practically straddling one of his legs. Not to be outdone, I lifted up the edge of my skirt and invited Flash's hand underneath it; to my delight, he began to rub the spot on my back as he had before, then began to work his way up my bare back. I started working on the edge of his shirt as well, lifting it up inch by glacial inch and stroking the lithe muscles underneath it. Eventually, I could stand it no longer and pulled Flash back away from Princess, kissing him once again.

We went back and forth for a while, taking it in turns to make out with Flash while the other roamed over his body. I continued lifting up his shirt, yearning for more contact with his chest and stomach, while Princess moaned and nipped at his neck and ear. Eventually, his hand reached the back of my bra, and through skill or luck he unhooked it on his first try. Another tug loosened it. Without hesitation, his hand found its way to my right breast. I gasped into him as he fondled me, feeling the little buds on my chest stiffening to life. Brimming with desire, I slid my hand down his front, but halted at the waist of his pants, this time fearing a reprimand not from him, but from Princess. Summoning my courage, I moved down those last few crucial inches to cup the delicious bulge in his front... only to be met by another hand rising from below.

The kissing stopped. Princess and I looked at each other, then down at our hands overlapping over Flash's crotch, then up at Flash's cautiously overjoyed face. Then we both laughed. "Great minds think alike?" I offered between fits of giggles.

Princess nodded. "So that's what I look like when I kiss," she said. "I always wondered. You two look good together."

Flash and I blushed, burying ourselves against one another. "I'm sure you look even better," I said.

"You're both beautiful," Flash added, giving me another squeeze.

Princess just grinned, wrapping her fingers around mine and pulling them away. "Let's get these things off," she whispered.

To my surprise, instead of falling onto Flash as I expected, Princess put herself to the task of undressing me. She expertly unbuttoned my shirt and lifted it over my head. My bra tumbled unnoticed to the floor. "This is going to sound weird," she said, rubbing my bare shoulders, "but... I really like touching you. It's like you're a part of me. It's even started to feel like something's missing when you're not around."

Flash's hands rose up to cup my breasts, sending shivers of excitement through me, and her touch massaged all the apprehension out of me. "I like it too," I said back. "It's soothing." Flash kicked his shoes off, and I followed suit, then stripped him of his shirt. In no hurry, I kissed my way down his front, bending down as I reached his waistline. As I removed his pants, exposing his half-stiffened and growing manhood, Princess slid down my skirt, leaving us both bare. She let her robe fall away from her and hugged us both, wrapping all three of us together in a warm, naked embrace.

Now that our clothes were off, the differences between the two of us were more apparent. I looked her up and down as she backed off, and she did the same to me, twirling once when she saw me staring. She was more toned across her middle, evidence of a more active lifestyle than mine, and completely unshaven around her crotch and armpits. What really caught me off guard, though, was her weight. Princess was by no means fat, a size larger than me at most, but a diet of Twilight Specials had given her curves that my rail-thin body couldn't match. Her breasts had a much more pronounced swell to them, enough for gravity to actually take effect, and the rest appeared to have collected on her hips. I'd never been envious of anyone's butt before, but this mirror of my own was making a strong case for being the first. "Wow," I breathed, clinging to Flash and looking up at him. "I can't believe you couldn't tell us apart."

He smiled back at me. "Really? You think I'd call my girlfriend a fake because she wore her hair differently and lost some weight?"

Princess circled me, looking at me with a different kind of envy. "I wish I was that thin," she complained, pressing herself against me from behind to compare our hip sizes. "I can't afford to outgrow my clothes. I can't order new ones without an official crest. But I guess you can help with that, right?"

Her touch sent an electric tingle through me. Even though she was me, it was dawning on me that I'd never been this close to another girl before, unless you counted Lyra and the Vinegar Incident. It wasn't a hot feeling, like it was when Flash touched me, but it wasn't a bad one either. Further confusing matters, Flash reached around me to embrace us both from the front, leaving me sandwiched between them. "Yeah," I mumbled back, lost in the sensations surrounding me.

I felt Princess grin. "Let's get you on the bed."

With four hands on me, I found myself being moved over to the bedside. I sat down, hunching forward as I felt myself being examined. Flash and Princess stood over me like co-conspirators at my trial, plotting a sweet vengeance for what I'd done to them. "Flash?" Princess whispered, delivering her sentence. "Love her."

"With pleasure." Flash bent down to me and kissed me again, then trailed down further, parting the bangs that had fallen across my chest. This time was not slow; there was a hunger, an urgency, to his descent. My legs trembled, but they parted at his touch. The next thing I knew, Flash was on his knees, his lips pressed against my lips of another kind.

Floodgates opened to a river of nectar. Any remaining tension left me in a shudder radiating from my core, all energies directed to the golden wellspring bubbling up in me. I scooted my hips forward, pushing myself into Flash's mouth, but I was only able to get out a few breathless gasps of pleasure before Princess delicately pulled him away. She knelt down beside him, and I turned beet-red as I saw her staring at my labia with the same aroused curiosity that I'd seen on her earlier. It made sense, embarrassing as it was; I guessed that this was an anatomy lesson for her as much as a sexual one. "So that's what I'm supposed to look like..." she said, chewing a finger thoughtfully.

"That is what you look like," Flash reassured her, nuzzling her shoulder while I covered my face with my hair.

"Um..." Princess reached out a finger towards me, then glanced at my face and stopped halfway, perhaps realizing just then how weird that would be. She let her hand fall away, masking disappointment. "Why do you shave?" she asked. "Aren't you worried about the smell?"

I just blinked at her, and even Flash didn't seem to know what to make of this. "Huh?" we said at the same time.

"Your pheromones?" She looked back and forth at us both. "Pubic hair traps the chemicals secreted by sweat, enhancing the smell that tells your partner that you're in an aroused state. Doesn't shaving it off make you less attractive?"

There was an awkward silence as we contemplated how to explain this to her. "I just... liked the way it looked," I answered, electing to sidestep the issue. "Sight and touch are more important to humans than smell. Besides..." I circled a finger over my smooth pubic mound. "I kinda like how it feels."

"It doesn't make a difference to me," Flash said. "You smell beautiful no matter what." He wrapped a few strands of Princess' hair around his finger and held them under his nose.

"Well... if you're sure." She didn't seem convinced, and kept looking down at her own lap. "Is he doing it right? I don't know how it's supposed to feel."

At this point, I was starting to get impatient; having Flash this close but not touching me was maddening. "Yes. Well..." I stopped, torn between my desire to help and my desire to feel his tongue in me again as soon as possible. In halting, staggered movements, I leaned back and ran three fingers down my slit, parting myself for him. I was already much wetter than I'd ever gotten touching myself on my own. Slowly and carefully, I slid my middle finger deep inside myself, then traced it back up and made small circles over my clitoris. "H-here," I choked out over tormenting needles of ecstasy. "Everything else feels good too, but this... this is the important part."

Nodding with understanding, Flash moved back in. I withdrew my fingers and immediately crashed back onto my elbows as his tongue flowed into me again. An involuntary moan escaped me as he licked me from end to end, then prodded experimentally at my clit. "Oh, yeah..." I hissed out, arching my back against the bed. He paused, then slashed out into me again; another pause, another touch. I opened my eyes and saw him peeking at me from between my legs, wearing nervousness stronger than mere inexperience. That was when I realized: He was still handling me as though I was Princess. All that he'd done to me already, all the pleasure he'd brought, had been him being cautious.

And after the night with him I'd already had, the thought of him not holding back gave me shivers.

"More," I begged, hoping to get the message across with some degree of tact. "Give me all you've got. You're not going to hurt meeeeeeeeee!" I squealed the last part as Flash took the hint and pressed himself fully into me. The last thing I saw was his shoulders relax; then, I could only see the stars bursting behind my eyes. All inhibition gone, he lapped at me like an animal, rubbing against every part of me. I moaned and writhed against the bedspread, grasping at the covers. My clit was on fire, aching to be sucked on, and Flash obliged, heating the ocean inside me to steam. His hands slid under my butt, squeezing and cradling me as I lifted myself towards him, and my lower half became a bowl from which he drank.

Something teased at my fingers. I looked up between heaving breaths to see that Princess had moved up to sit on the bed beside me, watching Flash in action with an open-mouthed smile. She fumbled for my hand and grasped it in her own, while her other hand stretched between her spread legs in an uncoordinated up-down motion. Even after being human for two years, I could tell that she hadn't gotten the hang of masturbating yet. This thought barely had time to flicker; somehow, feeling her that close, feeling her watching me, made everything else I was feeling more intense. Flash ate me like a piece of fruit, worming at the hardened pit like he was trying to dig it out. I was his plum, his tender slice of sweetness waiting and loving to be enjoyed by him. Then I thought about him sticking his penis in the fruit and realized that the metaphor was breaking down somewhat. Also, that I was more than ready for the main event.

"Flash," Princess said, once again mirroring my thoughts. "She wants you."

"Yeah?" He pulled away, planting a final few kisses on me, and stood. My eyes, fueled by a hunger I couldn't name, slowed the motion down and grabbed every detail of his muscles and sculpted arms that they could catch. When his penis came into view, I almost broke; if my legs hadn't felt like jelly, I might have flung myself from the bed and taken it into my mouth then and there. I'd thought often about his penis before, and become closely acquainted with it quite recently, but I'd never wanted to suck on it so much as right then and there. However, Flash instead leaned over me on the bed, starting to angle himself towards the one place that was crying out for it even more. "Ready, Twilight?" he asked, grinning down at me.

I laughed in exhilaration and smiled back. "So ready."

"Oh, Fla-aaash," Princess called in a singsong voice. She slipped from the bed, still holding onto my hand, and reached around underneath it. I heard a box click. When she appeared again, she was holding a condom. "Don't forget your saddle," she teased, holding it out to Flash.

Flash and I glanced at each other and silently agreed not to mention that he'd already ridden me bareback. "Oh, right," he said awkwardly, straightening up and taking it from her. With a rip, he tore the wrapper open and rolled the sheet of latex onto himself. The result looked admittedly strange, like a thick, one-fingered glove, and there was a faint rubbery smell that I could detect even from several feet away. Still, this did little to quell my enthusiasm as Flash lined himself up again. "Ready?" he repeated. With a frantic nod from me, he entered.

Having sex with a condom wasn't too different than having sex without. If I'd been in a more analytical mood, I might have said that the quality of the friction had changed, and the extra layer only left me yearning to be just that tiny fraction of an inch closer to Flash. However, this was like comparing an original Star Swirl manuscript to an equally rare second edition; no matter the authenticity, just taking it in was cause for celebration. I sighed with release as I absorbed every inch, feeling the absolute bliss of interlocking parts that had been made for each other sliding together. Flash stayed above me, holding himself up with his arms as our lower parts connected. He started to grind back and forth, slowly at first, but building momentum.

Princess let out a moan. She was back on the bed again, holding on to me and rubbing herself, leaning back further and further as she tried to take all of us in at once. I gripped her hand tightly as the sensations again began to overpower me. I had set something loose in Flash; within just a few thrusts, the gentleness had disappeared from his motions. I'd made myself the willing dumping ground for two years of sexual frustration, and all of it was being pounded into me at once. With a wild, hungry look in his eyes, he slammed his hips into mine, hammering me into the bed. It might have hurt if I'd been any less wet, but as it was, it was the rush that I'd been waiting just as long for. "Oh, yes!" I cried, feeling every thrust as a shockwave that traveled through my whole body and burst inside my synapses. "Yes, Flash, yes! Give it to me, Flash, give it to me!"

Hearing his name spurred Flash on even further. He bent down and kissed me, dancing tongues with me even as I screamed into his mouth. My free hand grappled at him, feeling him and pulling him closer, while my weakened legs flexed around his. This was also, it seemed, exactly what Princess had needed to hear. She was right beside us on the bed, kissing Flash's neck and shoulders in time with his movements, all the while gripping my hand and fingering herself. "Do it, Flash," she whispered between kisses. "Rut her hard. Rut her hard and make her cum!"

The pounding went on and on; if there was an upside to using a condom, it was that it seemed to extend Flash's downstairs stamina. He kept up a powerful, rapid pace, starting to let out small moans as his breathing became laboured. Just hearing his pleasure added an extra dimension to mine. I drifted on my back across an ocean of pleasure, not serene, but riding crested waves with every thrust. Or maybe I was the ocean, a high-rise water coaster that he rode in a cart made of pistons, rocketing ten-foot ripples to the horizon. Either way, it was the ride of a lifetime. Pushing it even further, Flash leaned back and vibrated my clit with his thumb, turning my latest gasp of ecstasy into an embarrassingly high-pitched squeal.

Listening to all of this was evidently more than Princess could bear. "Flash, do me," she begged, throwing herself across him. "Do me!"

His thrusting slowed, but didn't stop, and a degree of calmness returned to him. "You sure?"

"Yes. Look at me." She fell back across the bed again, and I looked before I could stop myself. She was thrumming two fingers fully inside of herself, and was teasing for a third. She repeatedly licked her lips, all but drooling over what he was doing to me. "Flash," she said, "if you don't stick that thing in me right now, I'll have to hold you down and jump on it myself."

Flash nodded. He kissed me one last time and then withdrew, leaving me whimpering faintly with disappointment. In instants she was pressed against him, grinding lustily against his leg and stroking his slick erection, but she still had time to hear and look back at me. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "Were you close?"

I considered this. "No," I answered once I'd caught my breath. "I had a while to go. But don't worry about me, anyway. This is your night."

She looked at me doubtfully, still stroking Flash, looking torn as I had been between discussing sex and getting it. "Will I know if I'm about to orgasm?" she asked nervously. "I thought I was last time, but... then I threw up on the carpet."

I worked enough life into my pelvis to sit up. "Maybe?" I said after some thought. "I don't know how it works for us. I've never had a vaginal orgasm."

This made both of them pause. "Really?" Flash said. "Because I thought... after the first time..."

He turned too red to continue. I stared at him for a second before it clicked. "Oh! No, I didn't. I was just... enjoying myself." I turned a shade to match. "But- but just because I didn't orgasm doesn't mean I didn't like it!" I blurted as well. "It still feels amazing. You're really good at... um..." Words failed me, but from the stupid expression on my face, I think he got the idea.

This seemed to calm Princess' nerves, letting her lustful expression return. "All right," she said in a sultry voice. "Make me feel amazing."

I scooted off to the side, resting against the wall, while Princess grabbed Flash by the penis and pulled him onto the bed. Instead of leaning back on the sheets as I had, she got down onto her hands and knees, tossing her hair over one shoulder. She rubbed herself and wiggled her hindquarters as Flash knelt down behind her, looking back with a teasing smile. The position seemed odd to me, so unlike any stance that I would take, until this last movement drew it all into focus. Oh, right, I reminded myself again. She's a... I curtailed this thought before it could complete itself. That was just too weird for right now.

I wasn't sure if I should watch, or if I would be able to stand doing so, but as Flash neared her I found that I wasn't able to look away. He held himself back from simply thrusting in as he had with me, instead moving slowly, teasing her with his tip before sliding the head inside. "Oh," Princess gasped, her front half falling onto the bed. "Don't stop," she added shakily as Flash hesitated. "Don't stop unless I say stop. Please... more..."

Flash put his hands on her hips and gently, almost surgically, slid himself in another two inches. A range of emotions flickered across Princess' face, from nausea all the way to euphoria and back again, but her body remained locked in place, her cheek flush against the sheets and her butt high in the air. All at once her eyes clamped shut and her breathing quickened, bordering on hyperventilation, and her arm lashed out and scrabbled desperately on the sheets for mine. I quickly moved in and grabbed her, holding back an inner ew as I felt the sticky touch of vaginal fluids on her fingers. Still, this was enough to slow her breathing as she clutched at me tighter than she ever had before, reassuring herself that she was in safe hands. Flash started to move again, but found that he didn't have to; Princess began to move her hips on her own.

The movement was barely noticeable at first, just an experimental rubbing, then with longer and longer strokes became a back-and-forth rocking. Princess kept her eyes closed, but a smile grew on her face, only occasionally twitching. She arched her back and raised herself up slightly, then pushed herself all the way onto Flash's penis and held it there, testing the feel of it inside her. He rubbed her back, massaging worry out of her while she ground against him. And then she started moving.

Watching Princess and Flash move together was altogether different than it must have been to watch me. Even though one was on her hands and knees, it was abundantly clear who was in control; Princess set the pace, working him like a toy as she began to throw her whole body into the motion. Her face became dopey and dreamlike, and she began to make small gasps of surprise and pleasure with each movement. Above her, Flash maintained a look of loving concentration. He rubbed her back and shoulders, easing her into it. There was a loving tenderness between them that had been utterly absent with me. They had the thoughtless synchronization of a couple perfectly attuned to the other's movements, a bond that could only be formed by time and friendship as much as instinct. Now the envy started to set in. And yet, even as my heart burned to see it, I couldn't bring myself to look away.

Princess started to get braver. She raised her head up to its original position and threw herself backwards, working up a faster rhythm. Now Flash had to hold on to her hips to hang on, pulling himself forward to match her. Stroking turned to a gentle pounding. Princess' butt jiggled whenever they connected, which was mesmerizing to watch, and her breasts and hair began to sway. She made a noise that seemed half snort, half whinny, at once inhuman but, coming from her, somehow natural. The sound set a strange quiver loose in me. Am I... getting turned on by this? I realized in confusion. I wanted to reject the idea, but couldn't deny it. This was hot.

Retreating into myself as much as I could, (which wasn't much, as most of the room was taken up storing images of Flash's glistening, naked body,) I tried to rationalize this as much as I could. Flash was in top form, obviously, but this was like watching porn of myself. Except not of me, but someone like me, with the body that I wanted, and the boyfriend that I wanted, and who looked beautiful even when she was being awkward... Was this jealousy, or vanity? Or... could it just be that I didn't look as awful as I thought to begin with?

Then Princess did something that I doubt I would have been brave enough to do in her place. She let go of my hand.

Suddenly, the training wheels were off for both of us. She was riding Flash without the reassuring touch of her human self to guide her, and I could no longer pretend that it was an extension of myself that was having sex with the love of my life right in front of me. We both tensed up, but then released it in a shared breath. I dissolved any thoughts of shoving Princess away and leaping on Flash for myself again; it was important to remember that her ordeal was harder than mine. She kept her eyes closed, bucking her hips and shaking her head as though searching for something. "Flash, hold me," she ordered.

Flash obeyed without question. He leaned over her, wrapping one arm around her chest and holding himself up with the other, all the while thrusting into her from behind. Now they really did look like rutting quadrupeds, one mounting the other. "Oh, yeah," Princess murmured. Her smile returned wider than before as Flash nibbled at the tip of her ear, whispering sweet nothings to her. "Oh, yes!" she moaned, twisting and writhing against him.

An intensity built up, the pair of them moving faster and faster against each other, almost reaching the speed at which Flash had been pounding into me. He moaned and leaned his head back. In response, Princess raised herself up and leaned back into him, lifting one arm up and grabbing him by his shoulder. They slowly reared up together, Princess bending back with her spine arched, until they were practically fully upright. She twisted to the side and pulled Flash's head towards her, kissing him powerfully. His hands cupped her breasts, molding and squeezing them. I caught a shine of dampness trickling down her inner thigh, and finally understood what she had meant about smell; the scent of sex was intoxicating. My legs spread seemingly of their own accord and I rubbed myself, one hand on my chest, the other lower, letting envy fuel my delirious desire to be in her place.

Flash lasted just a minute more until he began to slow; the demands of two Twilight Sparkles were finally starting to wear him down. He broke away from the kiss and panted for breath, still rubbing his nose through her hair. Princess smiled and looked at me, and I finally realized that I'd been gaping at them with my mouth open. She giggled and fell forward again, wiggling her hips, while I blushingly composed myself. "Having fun?" I prompted.

"Yeah..." she moaned. She rode Flash for a few more strokes and then eased herself off of him. "Let's switch things up," she said, rolling on the bed next to me. "The real Twilight needs love too."

Don't call me that, I groaned inwardly. "You don't have to," I protested.

"But I want to. Flash, will you?" He nodded, still catching his breath. Princess tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Now, how to do this... Flash, lie down."

Flash ended up on his back in the middle of the bed, rock-hard erection sticking straight up in the air. Princess and I both took a moment to admire it before continuing. She held on to me, sliding me one way or the other while she debated to herself, then swung my leg over his crotch and planted her plump purple posterior directly over his face, facing me. "This should work out for all of- Oh!" she cried as Flash immediately began licking at her dripping slit. Her gasps grew louder as she carefully settled down, steadying herself against his chest.

I stared for a few seconds, but the pressure against my loins was too much to be ignored. I raised my hips up and eased Flash back into me, sighing with pleasure at the feel of being filled up again. I waited a moment for more, only slowly understanding that this time, I was the one in control. Instead of moving right away, though, I sat in bliss, soaking up the feeling of having something inside me. But the cries and moans from in front of me spurred me on, and I started to move.

Being able to set my own pace added a whole new thrill to the experience. I couldn't match Flash's rapid-fire thrusting, even with my negligible weight, but I set a decent rhythm as I bounced up and down on him. I felt my inner walls being pulled and stretched with each lift and squat. It reminded me of the thrill of horseback riding, but one on wings a mile high, with our bodies and minds even more conjoined.

In front of me, Princess was staring at me open-mouthed - Is that what I look like? I wondered - and once I'd caught her gaze, it was impossible to look away. She bent down lower and lower, stretching out along his body. Flash had put both hands on her butt, kneading her and opening her up further to his reaching tongue. Watching her get eaten out while I had sex stirred conflicting feelings in me; I almost felt as though I were in her place, and vice versa.

Something seemed to be building in her. She shuddered and fell completely forward across Flash, though her eyes remained fixed on mine. From my position it looked like she was bowing, her expression pleading, asking for permission. Then her legs shook, and her eyes trailed downwards. I saw then that she was only inches away from my crotch, and, as she strained forward, that distance shortened. Shocked as I was, I couldn't stop myself from bouncing, and when her lips stretched out and grazed the tip of Flash's penis, they grazed me as well.

My brain mulled this feeling over and presented me with well-reasoned options of confusion, disgust or dismissal, but they were each quashed under the much more urgent inner cry of Oh stars, do that again! I didn't have long to wait. Trembling with new-found desperation, Princess wormed her way forward with her knees wrapped around Flash's head and planted another kiss on him. She grabbed my hips and slammed me down onto him, moving me like a toy, harder, faster. While Flash licked her, she stuck her tongue out and licked us both, timing with her thrusts to swipe her tongue all the way up his length and score a line directly to my clit. I shrieked in shock and pleasure, and she did the same, getting spurred on as I struggled to keep either my balance or my head. I settled for the former and gave in to the dual assault.

Princess started to shake. She moved faster and faster, her fingernails digging into my sides, as a shudder ran all the way down the length of her spine and collected at her hips. She started to cry out in between licks. "Flash, I'm- I'm c- I'm c-c-" All of a sudden she slammed me down and held me there, burying her face into me. "Oh Celestia-a-aaaaaaa!" she screamed as her whole body spasmed. What Flash said was considerably more muffled, but I got the idea as he pulsed and burst inside me, this time contained by the condom.

Both of them twitched for a few seconds more, then lay still, panting for breath. Princess shifted her hips to give Flash some room to breathe and nuzzled sleepily against me. I carefully lifted myself off of Flash and moved to the side. In a lusty haze, Princess grabbed at him, ripped his condom off and tossed it carelessly to the side, and suckled at the tip of his softening length while I retreated, like an abandoned toy, to the far corner of the bed.

Where I belonged.

Second Fragment Complete

Princess Twilight found me later at the foot of the bed, staring at the crest on my skirt. "Oh, there you are," she said, leaning over the side. "I was worried you'd snuck out."

I mumbled an inaudible response. I could hear that Flash had fallen asleep about ten minutes ago, and while my head wanted to make a joke about that, my heart wasn't in it. I'd put on the fluffy dressing gown on the floor, while Princess, who seemed much more comfortable walking around naked, slid down next to me in the buff. Glancing at her, I finally saw what Lyra had been talking about; she did have a certain blissful glow about her. "How are you feeling?" she asked.

I considered this for a moment and decided that "content, but drained and resentful" wasn't the answer she was looking for. "I guess you didn't need me after all," I said, dodging the question.

She snorted. "Are you kidding me? I've never felt anything like that, not even in heat. There's no way that I could have done that if you hadn't been there." She snuggled against me. "You were amazing."

It was hard to know what to make of that. Her voice softened when I didn't immediately respond. "Seriously, thank you," she said. "I know that must have been hard to watch at points. You don't have to do it again if you don't want to."

I wanted to, much, much more than I was prepared to admit to her. But the more I wanted it, the less I deserved it. "Do you want me to?" I asked, avoiding the question again. "You seemed okay on your own."

"Maybe this time, but you know body dysmorphia isn't a one-time fix. If I'm going to get used to the idea, we'll have to do this a few more times."

"Aren't you worried about me stealing Flash away from you?"

She chuckled hesitantly. "Not really," she answered, a little more slowly than I liked. "It was silly of me to worry about that in the first place. I trust him, and I trust you." She twirled a lock of hair around her finger, like I did when I was nervous about something. "Actually, I was thinking," she said. "I know it's kind of taboo to talk about these things, but since you and I are the same person... is it really necessary to say that he's just my boyfriend, or just your boyfriend? Why can't he just be... Twilight Sparkle's boyfriend?"

She sent me a hopeful grin, but backed down when she saw me staring incredulously back at her. "It's just a thought," she said more quietly. "We don't have to make any big decisions right now."

That was some comfort. "I guess."

We sat in silence for a while. "I was wondering," Princess said eventually, "how did you know where to find us? I don't remember giving you my address."

"Pinkie Pie told me," I answered with a shudder. That smile of hers would be haunting my dreams tonight.

Princess eyed me curiously. "Did she make you promise her anything?"

"Yes! With crazy hand motions and everything. She made me keep trying it until I'd got it right."

"What was it?"

I hesitated. "Sorry," I said. "Pinkie Secret."

She didn't look disappointed. "I understand. I'm sure it's important."

I nodded miserably. In less than a day, I would be pretending to be surprised at a surprise party that was now a birthday party for two.

Princess kept up her chipper attitude. "If you want, I can set up a time for you and her to get to know each other," she said. "And all my other friends as well. I'm pretty much living proof that they'll like you for who you are."

"Thanks, but... no thanks." I went back to studying my crest. "I meant what I said about moving away. I know some of my study friends are moving to the city after they graduate. I'll probably go with them. After the mess I've made of things here, this feels like a good time to start over."

"...Are you sure?" She sounded hurt. "There's still a life for you here. You don't have to give it up just because I arrived."

"Why not? You do it so much better. Next to you, I'd just be dragging everyone else down. Everyone would be better off if I just moved on."

"Don't say that." She clung to me. "I am not better than you, and I don't want to steal your friends from you." Then she crossed a line. "After all... you're the real Twilight."

Something swelled up in me. "Don't call me that!" I yelled, slapping her across the face with my skirt.

She fell back against the bed, stunned. I leaned over her, dangling my crest in front of her face. "You see this?" I fumed. "This is what you have that I don't. I betrayed my crest. Don't you get that? You didn't take anything; you got it right, and I got it wrong. You made friends. I didn't. You saved the world. I didn't. You earned a happy life. I. Didn't!" I snarled as she stared back in frightened incomprehension. "You lived up to our destiny. That makes you the real Twilight Sparkle. And I'm just some twisted... nothing! My crest doesn't mean anything! I'm not... I don't..." In a frantic rage I tried to tear the star apart, but ended up just pulling on the fabric. I tugged on it again and again, my arms slowly dropping, shaking and gasping for breath.

I expected her to slap me. It's what I would have done if she'd been the one to start ranting. Instead she put her hands over mine, locking them across the star we shared. "I'm not better than you," she said forcefully. "And you haven't betrayed your destiny. Twilight, we're the same." She linked our fingers and lifted our hands up. Our palms exactly matched. "Not twisted. Not incomplete. The same. And we're both hurt, and we're both afraid, but together, we can make things better." Her eyes lit up. "And I can prove it to you."

She stood up, pulling me with her. We left sleeping Flash behind and returned to her ocean of a main room, looking even more cluttered than when we'd last left it. Princess clicked her tongue, finally seeming to notice the mess, but still fearlessly waded through to the far corner. I followed, puzzled. With a bit of digging, she unearthed a sturdy wooden box, decorated and padlocked. With a twist of the dial she unlocked and opened it, reaching inside reverently. What emerged was a golden, jeweled tiara. I didn't understand at first; it looked cheap, even tacky, and completely out of style even for me. It was only when I recognized the star on top that it finally clicked. "The Element of Magic," I gasped.

"That's right." She stroked its edges tenderly, leaving no marks. "It's all I have left of home. It's the living manifestation of our destiny, yours and mine." She stood up and held it out to me. "I want you to wear it."

I took half a step back. For reasons I couldn't understand, the tiara terrified me. "What would that do?" I asked. "I don't even like friendship."

"That doesn't matter here." She didn't let up. "Magic in this world works differently than in mine. It comes from within, not between. In Equestria, five other Elements were needed to charge it, but here, all of its strength comes from what's in a person's heart. Whoever wears this crown will be transformed into what they truly are; what's on the outside will match what's within." She blushed. "It may also give you giant ears. Pony magic. It can't be helped."

I hesitated a few seconds longer, but eventually accepted the crown from her. It was strangely light, but also hard and inflexible. I suspected that it might be indestructible. "What does it turn you into?" I asked, turning it over. "A pony again?"

"Nothing that extreme. But it brings out the best in me." She smiled encouragingly. "And it'll bring out the best in you, too."

"...All right." With trembling hands, I put it on. It fit perfectly. Suddenly, a bright light flared up around me.

I didn't see what happened next. I certainly didn't feel any different. But whatever Princess saw in me, it wasn't what she'd hoped for. A few seconds was all it took for her to cry out and snatch the crown from my head. She held it to her chest, suddenly looking pale and drained, sniffles coming to her. "Twilight, I'm sorry," she mumbled. "I'm so, so sorry. But I need to know." She looked into my eyes. "What did Sunset Shimmer do to you?"