Ditsy Flies With a Bumblebee
Ditsy flew through the crisp air of a bright April morning. Below her, the first flowers of spring were blooming in a grassy meadow that flowed off to the horizon, thanks to a gentle breeze that made the plants dance happily. Other than a few pastel speck pegasi in the distance, the skies were a clear, immersive blue.
In short, it was a perfect day.
Though she flew, Ditsy did it at a leisurely pace. The air rustled her golden mane and gray feathers, but it didn’t find any beads of sweat. She zipped, she looped, and she swerved, but it wasn’t work. It was a natural expression of her very being; she wasn’t in the skies as much as she was a part of them.
Time did not exist up there, so it would be difficult to say if it passed quickly or slowly. All Ditsy knew was flying; her mind had been emptied in her aerial trance. After she swooped, flipped, and zinged one more time, she did the only thing that anyone in her place would:
Ditsy giggled.
Her voice had always been soft and high, so her laughter came out as squeaky hiccups of delight. That only made her laugh harder, which tickled her mouth as the air rushed around her.
Eventually, the sun shifted to the eastern half of the sky, which put a momentary pause to Ditsy’s ritual. It was lunchtime. She’d left her picnic basket under a tree when she’d arrived, so it was easy for her to find. Inside it, she’d packed a light lunch of sandwiches and lemonade.
After lunch, the morning’s flight and the soothing, rhythmic rustling of the waves of grass washed over her. Ditsy wasn’t a lazy mare, but at that moment, a post-lunch nap in the shade sounded like a glorious idea. She dozed, drinking in the peace and the sweet scent of fresh budding flowers.
* * *
She woke up with a smile on her face. The meadow was still bright enough to tell her that she had time for more flying before she went home for the day. She’d made her mind up to do just that—as if there were any other choices on such a wonderful day—when a speck of movement caught her eye.
A fuzzy yellow bumblebee landed on one of the bright pink flowers close by. Her breath caught in wonder and delight as she saw him dance around inside it before floating up and over to another flower, and then another.
She skipped along the ground, following her new friend as he visited all his favorite flowers. Ditsy knew enough about animals and nature to not get too close—he had a job to do, and she was a giant by comparison. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from drawing nearer and nearer to the bumblebee at each flower.
Finally, it stopped, motionless. Ditsy’s heart drooped; she’d gotten too close! The bumblebee looked at her, and she looked at it. As she did, she tried to wordlessly apologize to it.
The bee buzzed its wings and resumed its bee-business.
Ditsy’s eyes lit up and her smile returned. As she continued to follow the bumblebee, a new problem arose: What should she call him? She couldn’t very well keep calling him “the bumblebee,” at any rate. She racked her mind for a name, and the next time he landed, she asked, “How do you like Mister Bumbles?”
The bee buzzed its wings again.
Ditsy took this as yet another sign of approval from Mister Bumbles, and her heart soared as she continued following him around the meadow. She got closer and closer, and he didn’t buzz in disapproval; up close, she could see he really was adorable. Fuzzy yellow fur lined his body in stripes, and his tiny stick legs were covered in globs of pollen.
Mister Bumbles led Ditsy in a long, sweeping path through the whole meadow. At one point, he stopped visiting flowers and flew higher; Ditsy flapped her wings and followed him.
He led her to his home, which stirred warm delight inside Ditsy: The pale yellow hive was swarming with hundreds of Mister Bumbleses! She hadn’t had time to meet, greet, and name them all, so she stayed back. After Mister Bumbles disappeared inside his home, she fretted; he looked so much like his friends, how would she find him again?
Moments later, a bumblebee flew over to her, buzzed one lap around her head, and continued back to the meadow. Ditsy smiled and followed Mister Bumbles as he drifted and zigzagged lazily through the air. Even though he flew at a slower pace than she was used to, she matched his every move with one of her own.
The pair continued visiting flowers for the rest of the afternoon, until the sun painted the sky a deep, ochreous hue. It was then that Ditsy knew she had to return home. With a light, contented sigh, she smiled and waved at her friend as he landed on one last flower.
“Goodbye, Mister Bumbles!”
Mister Bumbles buzzed.
That was enough for her, so after collecting her picnic basket, Ditsy flew back to her home in Ponyville. Her whole evening was lit with a warm inner glow, and later, when she nestled into her bed, she fell asleep wearing a well-earned, tired smile.
It had been a good day.
My most faithful student, Twilight Sparkle,
It pains me to see the extent of your injuries. When I first heard about your pyrrhic victory over Scion the Black, I held hope that a part of you would eventually heal.
However, it has been several years now. It is evident to both my sister and me that we are doing you a disservice by allowing you to live here, in Canterlot, as our guest. Worse, our nurture has not healed your spirit; in fact, it has provided an environment that allowed your disability to injure your mind.
We believe it is in your best interest if we remove you from this environment. I write this letter with heavy heart, knowing full well that your situation is not one of your fault, yet still of your own making. Canterlot will provide a small stipend to you, for use as you see fit towards making a new life for yourself.
Do not take this ruling as an affront. It is an opportunity for you to succeed and rebuild your life.
Please take it.
Sincerely,
Princess Celestia
Your former teacher and failed mentor
Twilight Sparkle read the yellowed parchment, and she shivered. She had read the letter almost daily over the past decade, so she had long grown used to the words. In fact, four years ago, she had spent a month reciting the letter from memory.
The words did not effect on her.
She shivered.
Manehattan had grown as a steel forest, forged by pony blacksmiths and architects who sought utility above all else. Metal, glass, and concrete were the elements that built that construct, and in its artery-like streets, ponies were the foul magic that gave the wicked golem life.
On that day in late January, Twilight didn’t look up to see the skyscrapers rising above her. She didn’t look around at the empty, snow-covered sidewalks that were kept dead and empty by the subfreezing winds.
She simply sat huddled in her box, wrapped in her cloak, and read the letter that had ruined her life. The box held some warmth; she’d set it near a business’ heating vent. It often reeked of coal or smoke, and some mornings, she’d wake up coughing and covered in soot, but her box was warm.
It was home.
Her mind remained sharp enough for her to remember that it hadn’t used to be home. Her letter proved it. But even before that, she’d grown up in Canterlot with her mother, her father, her brothers. They were still there too—a happy, perfect, loving family.
There was no room for cripples.
One of Twilight Sparkle’s tics she held something akin to fondness for was to absently rub a hoof upwards from the top of her nosebridge to her scalp. That day, she didn’t want to spare the effort or pull her hoof out from under her cloak, but if she did, just like every day before then, she would feel fur, then a flat, disk-like stub, then more fur, and then finally her mane.
She’d tried to reason with everypony after it happened. She’d lost her horn in a valiant fight with Scion the Black, an evil necromancer who twisted the very souls he’d ripped from Tartarus into a legion of mindless soldiers. She, along with a battalion of Equestria’s first standing army in centuries, had pushed through to his stronghold. Once inside, the fight had ended in ten minutes.
Her older brother had told her that the ground outside had shaken like an earthquake during parts of it.
Nopony seemed interested in remembering in the time before the fight, the evils the fight had put an end to, or the fight itself. After the fight, when Scion lay defeated, everypony had begun to take the peace for granted—everyone except for her. She’d only noticed a fine powder of translucent sand falling down from above her eyes. That was the first time Twilight Sparkle had lost her horn.
She lost it hundreds of thousands of times after that. Every time she absently tried to lift something, or open a door, or feed herself, her lack of a horn had presented itself. Early on, the hurt had been fresh, like the first time she’d lost it. As time progressed, the pain ebbed, but it never truly went away.
It merely coalesced into a dull ache, one that filled her body with a sharp, painful truth:
She was Twilight Sparkle, the Element of Magic. And she could no longer perform magic.
At first, all her former friends and family had supported her. Heck, for three years, Celestia had done her rightful duty and given Twilight a room in the castle to live in. Even then, after the guards had escorted her out of the castle, there’d been shoulders to cry on, meals to share, and beds to sleep in.
There’d been no more magic. One by one, her friends had turned away from her. They didn’t understand. Each of them had loose interpretations of their elements, like an Honest day’s work in the apple orchard or bringing Laughter through sugary, sweet cakes.
Twilight Sparkle was magic. When her horn had broken, so had she.
In her box, in the alley, on that late January afternoon, the wind picked up around Twilight. She pulled her cloak tighter around her, though it didn’t help much. Few thoughts could survive in her mind, other than to realize how cold it was. When the temperatures got that low, being stuck outside was like drowning in an ocean. There was the cold, Twilight was in it, and all she could do was helplessly struggle to keep it from claiming her.
As she sat shaking, a new source of discomfort came back to her. Her stomach growled, gnawed on itself, and she felt an all-too-familiar sense of bile rising in her throat, like hot nausea. Twilight blinked, hard, and forced a swallow, hoping to overcome the hunger with sheer force of willpower.
Unfortunately, like the cold, hunger was an all-present force in her life. Her hot hunger met the cold air around her, which turned into a dramatic storm of emotional display.
Twilight sighed.
Slowly, on aching joints, Twilight forced herself into a standing position. Being hungry was a problem that had a simple solution, theoretically. She needed to find food. In a city as large as Manehattan, there were literally tons of edible scraps that were thrown away daily, yet none of it ever found its way to Twilight Sparkle. The last good, filling, hot meal she’d eaten was down at the shelter.
It’d been her Hearth’s Warming gift to herself.
She began walking aimlessly, with a single goal in mind. Somewhere in Manehattan, there would be food she could eat. Somewhere, she would find it and eat it. Somewhere, she would still feel empty inside afterwards, but at least it’d hurt less.
The wind sliced across her uncovered face as she exited her alleyway. Usually, no pony would choose to be out on those sidewalks, yet she noticed a surprising number of ponies to avoid while making her way to wherever her hooves would take her.
If Twilight had believed in luck, she would have found it quickly that day. Not four blocks from her home, near one of the city’s convention halls, stood a food cart. The aromatic swirls of cinnamon and sugar cut through the sharp coldness like a sweet kiss, and as she stood across the street from it, her mouth began to water.
Luckier still, the cart stood unattended.
Twilight literally lacked the energy to try and act subtle. She didn’t walk up the street, cross at the corner, and then come back down nonchalantly. There wasn’t time—the vendor would return at any moment—and more importantly, there weren’t any ponies in the streets.
At the cart, her hooves shook as she tried to open one of the heated serving containers. She was cold, and even after all she’d experienced, she still felt nervous about the concept of being caught in the act of a crime. It was against the rules. Finally, her useless, shaking hooves managed to pop the latch open, and Twilight began stuffing hot, steaming apple turnovers into her cloak.
“Hey you!” a stallion’s voice cried out behind her.
Twilight ran, dropping a fourth pastry. She’d heard of some ponies committing small crimes to go to jail for the winter, but the only thing she hated less than the cold were the stories she’d heard about prisons. As cold and empty as she was, she didn’t need anything forcefully filling her.
“Come back here!” The voice carried a familiar drawl with it, but she didn’t obey its words.
Instead, she ran all the way back home. She took a roundabout way and cut through a few buildings, to hide her tracks from any pursuers. But even in her box, in its warmth, she never felt safe.
In fact, after all that running, she felt rather lightheaded.
Once the world stopped spinning, Twilight only heard silence—no sirens or policeponies shouting around her. For now, she had time to enjoy the spoils of her victory: three slightly smashed, dripping, lukewarm pastries.
The sweet, gooey apples filled her mouth in a bliss she’d all but forgotten. There wasn’t time for dining etiquette, or decency, or morals. In less than ten minutes, she’d eaten all three pastries, licked the inside of her cloak clean, and huddled back down in her box.
After Twilight ate, the cold seemed much more bearable. Darkly, she wondered how long it would be before that small victory would fade into nothingness.
Two minutes later, Twilight shivered.
Rarity walked out into the cold streets of Manehattan alone, but with purpose.
If she were being quite brutally honest, she didn’t remember the name of the event Applejack had traveled to Manehattan for. Some sort of farming convention, with displays of new technologies, processes, and even recipes. Rarity had come to Manehattan to spend time with her apple-loving friend, not to spend time loving the apples themselves.
However, after the eighteenth plow—which had looked exactly the same as the seventeen before it—Rarity had seen enough. More importantly, Applejack had been invited to an “industry members only” talk, so she was not abandoning her friend. Their paths merely parted in a mutually beneficial manner.
Outside the convention center, Rarity braced herself against the cold. With a pinch of magic, the gems in her cloak thrummed to life, forming a small barrier around her. It was not warm, but given that the temperature was several degrees below freezing before taking wind chill into account, it was certainly bearable.
She truly pitied any pony who was caught outside in those elements, alone, without any aid.
Of course, that had been her ulterior motive in coming to Manehattan. It was not a secret one; Rarity remembered each of her four Ponyville friends’ reactions to the idea. Fluttershy had thought it kind. Rainbow Dash and Applejack had several choice phrases to describe how pointless it was to look for a treacherous liar.
Pinkie Pie had remained eerily silent on the matter.
Truth be told, Rarity herself did not quite know what her own wishes were regarding Twilight Sparkle. In fact, she didn’t even have much information on her friend—let alone certainty if they still were friends. All she knew were the rumors that Twilight had ended up in Manehattan.
Despite how Twilight had systematically wronged all of her friends in a hurtful, parasitic manner, Rarity wanted to find her to make sure she was okay. There was no altruism to that motive, nor any undue compassion. It was simply the right thing to do.
Her intentions meant almost nothing compared to the size of the task at hoof. Manehattan’s population numbered in the millions, so finding one single pony would certainly require luck. In fact, Rarity had even told herself that she could not count on finding Twilight, but rather that she would look. There was a proper way of performing such a search, channels to use, places to go; “idle hope” did not factor into that process.
Her first destination was the Manehattan Police Department. She walked out to the sidewalk in front of the convention center, and despite the thick coat she’d sewn for him, Big McIntosh stood looking surlier than usual.
“Good afternoon!” she cried over the wind.
He raised an eyebrow, looked at the gray clouds above him, and stared back at her.
“Or is it?” She tilted her head.
“Ee...nope.” Big McIntosh shook his.
This time, it was Rarity’s turn to wait silently for the conversation.
“Found your friend,” he grumbled. He hoofed at the snow on the sidewalk, where the splattered remains of an apple turnover lay.
Rarity swallowed. She’d hoped it hadn’t come to this, but she’d also brought along reasonable expectations. “She stole from you?”
“Eeyup.”
“And ran away, I presume.”
Big McIntosh nodded, then pointed at a trail of hoofprints. Rarity followed them down the sidewalk with her eyes, then nodded apologetically at Big McIntosh.
She didn’t necessarily think it fortunate that her search was going to possibly become much simpler than it had any logical right to be.
Briskly, Rarity cantered down the path that Twilight had forged. It went cold when she’d—perhaps too craftily for her own good—entered a warehouse. She doubted that Twilight was inside, but ladylike sense told her that it was unwise to enter such a place alone. Perhaps she could convince a few members of the police to search with her, but that would not be alone, that would be with an adequately safe-sized searching party.
Instead, Rarity went back to the Apple family’s food cart.
After briefly telling Big McIntosh that she hadn’t found Twilight, Rarity investigated some more to find hoofprints. With how little traffic there had been in those streets—she had no doubt that it was a stubborn family tradition that led Applejack to set up the cart, despite the weather—the path Twilight had taken to the cart was much clearer.
After looking both ways and crossing the street, Rarity found that the hoofprints of her friend formed an exceptionally clear path. The whole time she followed it, a hard sense of unease crystallized inside her. She didn’t know what she would find at the end of it, but nonetheless, Rarity continued following the trail.
It led to an alleyway, and in that alley, near a heating vent, sat a huddled, gaunt purple unicorn.
If she noticed Rarity, she didn’t make any indication that she had. In fact, Rarity’s breath caught in her throat as she realized the very real possibility that she had found a corpse. The unicorn moved, barely, but enough to show she was breathing. Rarity let out her breath, though her fears were not wholly relieved.
The unicorn in that box was a corpse of an entirely different nature.
Rarity swallowed a lump as she walked forward on trembling hooves. This... this thing had been her friend at one point. But now, she was filthy, an empty husk that stared vacantly at the wall.
“T... Twilight?” She couldn’t help that her voice broke as she spoke her friend’s name.
Hearing her name, the unicorn slowly blinked. Then, she turned her head to the source of the words. “Rarity?” Her eyes widened, but there was no brightness in them as she gave the weakest of smiles. “Rarity!”
Rarity blinked back tears at what she had helped create. No, that wasn’t fair to herself. Twilight had been a beast for months, living in her house without an ounce of responsibility—including hygiene. If she had helped create the husk in that alleyway, then surely, that implied that somepony else had done most of the work.
That pony spoke again. “Listen... I know things... got bad. But it’s cold, and I was wondering... is... anything you can do to help?”
Something shattered inside Rarity, filling her chest with hot lead. At first, she remained speechless due to shock. When that wore off, she took a deep breath. “You... you have the gall, to ask for money, after you stole from Applejack?”
Again came a slow blink. “Those... were Applejack’s? I heard a stallion...”
“I suppose you’ve forgotten that Applejack has a brother, let alone countless male cousins.”
“I didn’t forget...” It sighed. “I’m sorry.”
Rarity shook her head, and for the first time, she regretted her search. “Sorry why? Because you got caught? What if I had not found you, would you have come to make amends?”
Slowly, the unicorn shook its head.
“I thought as much.”
Rarity had half a mind to walk away on that note, but the better half of her mind knew she’d regret it forever if she did. She was angry, disappointed even, but that was because she remembered her friend. She knew what she had been capable of, the pony she used to be.
Rationally, she knew that if her friend could twist and warp into the wraith in that box, the same thing could happen to anypony with awful enough circumstances.
However, what help could be offered? The pony in that box had studied “friendship” for years, long enough to become an expert in the art of manipulating ponies. Twilight had always had a nervous tic, and had been prone to bouts of depression, but she usually had the right mind to pick herself up out of them.
Rarity sighed. She understood that losing her own horn would be devastating, but she could make do with her hooves. Some of her design patterns required expertly applied pressure from two hooves, even, so it wasn’t that dressmaking was impossible.
Twilight Sparkle had been a student of magic, and she had even been its bearer before the Scion War had destroyed the Elements of Harmony.
Rarity understood. That didn’t absolve Twilight of her actions. But that also did not rightly condemn her husk to die out in the streets because of them.
“I could help you,” Rarity admitted.
The purple unicorn’s head shook. “I... no. I’m fine.”
Rarity stared flatly in response. “There are many definitions of the word ‘fine’, Twilight Sparkle, and though you are taxing my patience, none of them apply to sitting in a box in a cold snap that is only going to grow colder before the week is over.”
“No one usually yells at me here, so...”
“So what?” Rarity scoffed. “So you’d rather die than face the truth?”
“What truth?”
“That you were the cause of your own demise. Not Scion. Not your lack of a horn. Not your friends or family. You were the pony who never moved on.”
“Moved on to what?” A tiny spark of emotion entered those hollow words.
It set Rarity’s own emotions off. “Anything better than a box in the streets!” Despite the wind, her yell echoed out into those streets.
“It’s all I can do.”
Rarity pointed a hoof. “It’s all you believe you can do. You let yourself think untrue thoughts, to absolve you of any responsibility for your action. It’s easy to live in a box.”
The grimy unicorn stood up, slowly, shaking. As she walked towards Rarity, the stench of squalor radiated like waves that made her eyes water. Without regard for Rarity’s personal space, the unicorn leaned in and spoke apple-scented words: “Nothing about this is easy, Rarity.”
It took effort to not dry-heave, but Rarity prevailed. “Perhaps not easy,” she admitted, “but preferable. Out here, you can live on your excuses. Out here is where your excuses rightfully led you.”
Dry, chapped lips curled back in a snarl.
Before she could speak, Rarity continued. “But I did not come here to berate your life decisions. I came to see what happened to my friend.” She sighed, and quickly made her mind up. “I came to offer you a job.”
The unicorn’s snarl turned upside down, confused. “A job? Like, pity?”
“Partially. But I remember a Twilight Sparkle who lived and breathed magic theory, studied it for weeks on end... You still remember some of that, yes?”
“You know it’s worthless to me.”
Rarity raised a countering hoof. “Au contraire. Just because you are unable to use magic anymore does not make that knowledge useless. For example—” she took a quick breath “—my daughter is right around the age where she is beginning to come into her talent.”
Slowly, the unicorn in front of Rarity blinked. When her eyes opened, a deep, longing sorrow shone in their core. Twilight Sparkle asked, “You... you have a daughter?”
Rarity nodded. “And a husband, of course. You’ve spent so much time away from Ponyville, dear.”
Twilight hesitated, looking down. “I... it’s what everypony wanted.”
“No, Twilight, no one wanted this for you.”
She lifted her head back. “So, that’s it? You want me to teach your daughter, and... what?”
“I cannot pay you a living wage,” Rarity admitted. “Carousel Boutique only provides so much. But I will provide you food, shelter, bathing facilities, and whatever it costs for you to gain a teacher’s certificate. In that time, you will teach my daughter the fundamentals of magic, and you will do a good job at it. If I find that you are lacking in your duties to Jewel, or to your teaching certification, or to my home, then you will be asked to leave. Does that sound fair?”
Twilight shook her head. “I used you. And... everypony else. It’s better than I deserve.”
“Perhaps true,” Rarity agreed. “You will also need to apologize to everypony you wronged. Including your parents.”
Slowly, Twilight nodded. “Okay. I can do that.” She looked behind her at the box she used to live in. “I... I guess I don’t really have a choice.”
“You have a choice, Twilight. This is a second chance to make the right one. Just this time, make sure you take it. So... let us head back to my hotel room. It should be warm there, at least.”
An almost too-eager expression crossed Twilight Sparkle’s face.
Rarity nipped it in the bud. Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper as she uttered one simple fact: “If you hurt me again, I will remember it. If you ever hurt my daughter, I will end you.”
Twilight Sparkle nodded. “I understand, Rarity. I... I know you can’t trust me, but I’ll work on rebuilding that. But it’s just so cold out here...”
“I do not mean to be harsh, only to give fair warning.” Rarity smiled at her friend. “But yes, let us get off these streets. We have several years of catching up to do.”
