Of all ciderhouses in all of the towns in Equestria, Trixie had to walk into this one. She didn’t want to, but she had to. She set a hoof on the door, took a deep breath to steady herself, and walked in.
Why Ponyville of all places? It was the first time Trixie had come back here since the Alicorn Amulet affair and she’d hoped to show the town she’d turned over a new leaf. She publicly apologized to Sparkle… Princess Twilight. She put on a show. The town still distrusted her, but she was working on it.
And then she saw his face staring out at her from a poster on the town notice board. Same confident grin, same striped mane. He was going by a different name now, but it was definitely him. The stallion Trixie had spent her entire adult life looking for. The stallion she’d given up on finding. She’d finally stopped searching, and then she just happens to stumble onto him in here of all places. Oh, who was she fooling? Of course it had to be Ponyville.
Trixie had stowed her costume and asked around about him, which led her here, to this ciderhouse. She stood in the doorway and scanned the room. It was set below ground level and the dying rays of the setting sun cast her shadow down the steps and far into the room before being cut off by the door swinging shut behind her, leaving only a small window and dim lamps to light the hazy room a dull orange. The ciderhouse was fairly empty; just some sloppy drunks getting an early start on their night and bored husbands that didn’t want to go home yet. And there were even only two mares in the dive. One with a short, magenta mane was drinking by herself at a booth table and the other in the adjacent booth, some pretty, young blonde thing, giggled away with- There he was. Tall, handsome, impeccably groomed. His cutie mark was different - a simple trick for any unicorn with the right illusion - but it was him. Broad Horizons. Her ex-fiance. He was in the booth next to the giggling mare, doubtlessly sweeping her off her hooves. That was all the motivation Trixie needed.
As she approached the table, she slipped on a loving expression and called out to him, “Oh there you are, dear! I got that topical ointment the doctor recommended. He said the rash should clear right up.”
The blonde mare looked disgusted, then livid. “You’re married!? Coulda said that up front, scuzbag!” She slapped him, then stormed out of the ciderhouse.
Trixie watched this from beside the table with a righteous glee. Horizons looked up at her and sipped his drink, seemingly unperturbed. “Why, my good mare, if you wanted my attention, I’m always delighted to share my ministrations. And I do, in point of order, have a twin brother to assist.”
Trixie scowled. “Do you know who I am?”
“Indubitably!” He quirked an eyebrow. “Unsatisfied customer?”
Trixie scowled harder. “You don’t remember me? What am I saying, of course you don’t.” She slumped down at the table opposite him and slid the young thing’s unfinished drink in front of her.
“My dear mare, I assure-”
“You can drop the carnie act, Broad,” Trixie interrupted.
The stallion had a momentary flash of surprise, just a split second, before his whole body language changed. He held himself less casually, more guarded. “Broad?” His voice was slightly lower and had lost its musical cadence.
“Broad Horizons. Does that name mean anything to you? What about ‘Lullaby’?” Trixie demanded.
Horizons’s eyes scanned the table, as if looking for the answers there. “Those are names I haven’t heard in years. Hmm… Twelve years ago, I think. Trottingham. Yeah… She was this sweet little-” His eyes darted back up to the mare in front of him. “Lullaby?”
“Not anymore,” Trixie answered grimly.
“So what’s this about then? Is this some sort of revenge thing?” Horizons asked, more amused than concerned.
“No,” Trixie responded, “I’m going to tell you a story.”
Trixie fixed him in his gaze and took a deep breath. When she continued, it was almost as if she was reciting something from memory, like something she’d rehearsed. “There once was a mare named Lullaby. She was shy and didn’t have any friends. Her parents were moderately wealthy, and when she was fourteen, they died, leaving it all to her. She was all alone. She was so shy that she could barely talk to other ponies, least of all stallions, and most didn’t even know she existed.”
Trixie’s face darkened. She absently ran a hoof around the mug in front of her. “Then along came a spider. She was fresh out of school when she met an older stallion who swept her off her hooves. His name was Broad Horizons and he was the kindest, handsomest, most charming stallion she’d ever met. He made her feel like a princess when no other stallion even looked at her. She never knew she could love another pony the way she loved him. It was a whirlwind romance and within three months, they were engaged. He was her entire world. He took her heart. He even took her virginity. But that wasn’t all he took. One day he asked her to share her banking information with him so they could start planning wedding expenses. The next day she woke up alone and he was gone forever, along with all of her money.
She went to the police of course. They told her that he had been a conpony, a pony that pretended to be somepony he wasn’t in order to take innocent ponies’ money. That his name wasn’t even Broad Horizons. But the damage was done. She had nothing left. No money, no fiance, nothing.”
Trixie paused to catch her breath and compose herself. “She decided to try to find him. She sold most of what possessions she had, put everything else in a wagon, and began traveling town to town. At first, it was because she was in denial and she wanted to find her lost love. She thought he couldn’t really be a bad pony that he had been forced to do it. She began asking around about conponies, learning about them and what they did. Eventually, blind hope died and reality set in. She came to realize the truth: Her search became less about finding the stallion who’d stolen her heart, and more about confronting the stallion who’d stolen her life.”
The mare levitated the mug to her lips, but didn’t drink. She seemed to change her mind, and lowered it back to the table. She swirled it around, watching the cider slosh back and forth, and continued. “At the same time, she had no money and started to have to resort to the same tricks as the conponies to survive. She became a conpony herself. She learned sleight of hoof and illusion. She learned confidence and charisma. To always work with a partner. Pickpocketing and talking somepony out of their bits were easy. But her favorite trick was bigger. She created a stage persona, a traveling magician. She was traveling around anyway, so it was perfect. She’d put on big, flashy shows for a town while a partner would go around stealing what she could while the townsfolk were distracted. It was a great gig until it all blew up in her face in an incident involving an ursa minor.”
She felt emotionally drained, but Trixie was almost done. “The point is, she spent almost twelve years looking for Broad Horizons. He had disappeared, stolen everything she had, and she never even got any closure. She immersed herself in his world to find him, but she never even came close. But the hunt still consumed her. Even after all that time, he was still controlling her life. But eventually she gave up hope of finding him and after an encounter with an evil magical artifact, she realized exactly what she’d become: a monster. She’d become him. She made the decision to change; hopefully for the better; to go straight and become a legitimate showmare.”
Trixie smiled ruefully. “Then lo and behold, what does she see out of the blue? A poster with Horizons’s face on it. He has a twin brother and they’re running a show in the same town as her on the same day. She finally decided to let go, and he comes right back to slap her in the face. How’s that for irony?”
Trixie finished her story and the pair sat quietly for a moment and silently staring at each other, waiting for the other to make a move. The faint rays of fiery sun that had struggled through the room’s one dingy window had finally died. Somepony drunkenly sang to himself. At last, Horizons responded.
“So in order to get back at a dirty conpony, you became a dirty conpony. Sounds like you’re no better than me, sister,” he chuckled.
“I AM better than you!” Trixie countered, slamming the mug onto the table with a bang of a splash of cider. The ciderhouse’s other patrons turned to see what the ruckus was, but quickly turned back to their drinks. “I only took what ponies didn’t need! I never took everything. And I never broke anypony’s heart!”
Horizons rolled his eyes. “So what’s this about then? You want revenge? Get in line. Answers? Sweetheart, it was nothing personal. It was a job. Don’t start bringing feelings into it. There were a hundred mares in a hundred towns before you, a hundred mares after you, and there’ll be a hundred more still to come. Don’t think you were special in any way.”
Trixie narrowed her eyes. “No, Horizons, or whatever your name really is. I know you won’t tell me. I just wanted to tell you my story, so you’d know what you did. Who knows what I would have been if I’d stayed meek little Lullaby? Would I have taken my money and made something of myself? Would I have married and been a loving housewife? Would I have been a spinster with a dozen cats?” She finally brought the mug to her mouth and drained the rest of the cider in one long pull.
She slammed it back down and glowered at Horizons. “I’ll never know. I’ll never be that naive filly again. Ironically enough, you broadened my horizons. You created me. Made me who I am, for good and for bad.” Horizons squirmed ever so slightly under Trixie’s glare as her eyes hardened and yet shined with an inner fire. “But most importantly, I’m here to get my closure. I am over you, Broad Horizons, and you don’t control me anymore,” she announced triumphantly.
But then she smirked. “Oh, and also, to remind you to always work with a partner.”
At that sign, Trixie’s old partner, now her stage assistant, a pink mare with a short magenta mane, who’d been sitting in the next booth over since before her boss had even walked in, sprang up and seized Horizons in her magic. Trixie dumped his drink over his head, then casually stood up and walked over to him. She placed her face just inches from his own, and growled, “I. Am. Over. You.”
At that point her assistant took the opportunity to clock Horizons over the head with an empty bottle, stunning him. She turned to Trixie. “You get enough closure, boss? I think you could maybe give him a couple bucks in the gut’s worth of closure for good measure.”
“No, I’m good. I said what I needed him to hear. The violence was just icing,” Trixie reassured the other mare. “Now come on, let’s go.”
Her assistant released him from her magic and together they left Horizons slumped over his table, groaning in pain. Trixie felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She’d achieved what she set out to do all those years ago. She exited the ciderhouse out into the cool night and the whole wide world now open to her.
Author's Note
I wrote this for a 24 hour Write-Off contest: http://writeoff.me/event/29-Just-over-the-Horizon/results The prompt was "Just Over the Horizon". This was my take. My first draft was about 1700 words, which I had to trim down to 750 for the contest, rendering it almost unrecognizable. If you picked up that Horizons was Flim, that's fine, but he doesn't have to be. It was intentionally left vague so you could fill in the blanks with your imagination. Originally, I mentioned his name a couple times, but when I shortened it down for the contest, I unintentionally took all reference to his name out, and people who read it liked the fact that it was just implied it was Flim. I was like, "shit, did I do that by accident?" and went back to check, and sure enough I did. I liked that it wasn't explicit any more, so I took his name out of the long version too.
I realize that this story is very "tell-y" rather than "show-y". I had contemplated expanding it further to actually intersperse some flashbacks into Trixie's story, and someone told me that he thought it would work better as a longer story independent of my own thoughts of the same. I do think the story would be better served being done that way, but expanding it that way would require at least tripling the length, and I'm pretty sure I've expended my interest in this one. That'd be a lot of work that I'm just not interested in doing. So eh.
Umm... not much else to say, I guess.
