Mirror the Fun

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.