Sweetie Belle didn’t like to brag about it, but secretly she thought she was pretty good at a lot of things. Maybe they weren’t quite worthy of a cutie mark yet, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t think positively about them anyway. Princess Twilight said she was in the sixty-seventh percentile in magic development for her age, for example, and last week she’d managed to make breakfast without charring anything but a few of the cornflakes. Besides that, she wrote her own plays, made her own Cutie Mark Crusader cape, and could finish all her chores in exactly thirteen minutes provided she got a running start and nopony checked under any of the beds. And to top things off, she was really, really (sometimes) pretty good at following directions.
She supposed it was the last not-quite-special-talent that led to the situation she found herself in today: standing outside a two-story house on the other side of town from hers, listening for the hoofsteps of someone coming to let her in, searching for an excuse to be anywhere else in the world but here on Button Mash’s front stoop. To be fair, it had more to do with the minor details than the major one still ignoring her knock. It was a sunny Saturday in October, unseasonably warm enough that Apple Bloom and Scootaloo were already settled in at Ponyville Lake for the day, and she could’ve already been there with them if her mom hadn’t made her stop by Button’s house first to “get to know him better”.
As a matter of fact, Sweetie Belle did know better, and had known better for most of her life. Rarity called it the Bumblebee Corollary: as the volume of Mom’s afternoon coffee decreases, the probability of her trying to matchmake for one or both of her daughters approaches one. Sweetie Belle wasn’t sure why Rarity put air quotes around the word “coffee” when she said it--nor, for that matter, what bees had to do with anything. Based on both their past experiences, though, she knew Mom would find out from one source or another whether she’d actually seen him or not, so it was best to just get this over with now and save Future Sweetie Belle the same trouble. Not to mention she had so much homework she’d probably have to start on it tonight, and losing any of tomorrow to an unscheduled “play” date with Button Mash would only make the load heavier.
Rarity’s advice on the matter was to stay positive and always have a pressing engagement between 2:00 and 5:00 PM each day, but since the second one had already failed her, Sweetie continued to focus on the first instead. It felt crummy that the only positive thought she could muster up was that things could’ve been a lot worse, but that still counted, and it wasn’t exactly a lie. Button wasn’t that bad, in the way that meant he wasn’t that good either. A nicer word for him might’ve been “inspired” or “unique”, but Sweetie Belle liked to think she was a simple pony, and the simplest word for Button was just “odd”. Odd because of how he played alone at recess with pinecones as enemies and a stick as a make-believe sword to hit them with, odd because of his near-physical love for video games, and especially odd because of how he acted around her.
In a way, he reminded her of Rarity’s cat Opal: sometimes he’d be friendly and easy to be around, sometimes he’d barely even acknowledge she existed, and sometimes she just dangled something shiny in front of his eyes until he got excited enough to pay attention to her. All told, he was harmless enough, though “harmless enough” didn’t equal “somepony she’d consider a friend”, nor did it cancel out “honestly kind of a dork”. Sweetie Belle wasn’t that good at math, but that equation seemed simple enough to her.
Among her many not-quite-special-talents, though, one Sweetie Belle shared with few others was her ability to translate Button-Speak. It wasn’t a very complex language, nor was it particularly easy on the ears. Usually it consisted of various grunts, shouts, murmurs, and sobs strung together into different combinations, all of which meant something different and none of which most ponies really cared to interpret. But ever since she’d been paired up with him for Miss Cheerilee’s big science project two months ago--the one she’d have to leave the lake early anyway to work on--necessity had become the mother of Sweetie Belle’s ingenuity. Over the past few weeks, she’d developed a near-telepathic understanding of every incomprehensible sound that emerged from Button’s mouth, from the standard “Wow, that boss has a lot of health” sigh to the ultra-rare “Harmony 3 is finally getting released” near-silent screech.
So when an ear-piercing scream burst through the second upstairs window from the right and drew stares from pedestrians at both ends of the block, Sweetie Belle just furrowed her brow and put a forehoof to her chin in thought. That was definitely worse than a “I’ve been stuck in this stupid Water Temple all day” frustrated groan, but it wasn’t desperate enough to approach a “I saved over my 99% completed Wind Thief file” despondent wail, nor stricken with enough primal terror to warrant a classification of “my JoyBoy just died and we’re out of fresh batteries”. Judging by the bellowing pitch and short-to-medium length, she guessed it was more in the range of “Why does Koopa Kart even have blue shells?”, maybe balancing on the fence between “there’s no way that buck got inside my hitbox” and “somepony lied to me about the Harmony 3 release date again”. A minor incident, in any case. Perfectly safe to go inside and investigate.
The front door swung open when Sweetie Belle fiddled with the knob, so she went ahead and stepped inside the house. Sunlight streamed inside through the windows on either side of the door, painting bright white squares onto the furniture and a hint of a frown onto Sweetie’s lips. It was an odd time of day for all the lights to be off, especially when Button was clearly still home--and alone, by the looks of things. Before she could think the matter through any more than that, another yell broke her concentration. This one nearly reached “What do you mean, that’s how the trilogy ends?” levels. What in Equestria was he doing up there?
She didn’t get an answer by calling out for him from the bottom floor, so she climbed the stairs to look for one from closer range. Button Mash didn’t move out of his beanbag chair or turn around all the way to look at her when she entered his room, but that didn’t really bug her that much. Most times she came over, all she got was a nod and a quick glance away from whatever screen was flashing in front of his eyes. In Button-Speak, looking away from a video game was the most precious form of endearment she knew of, reserved only for her, his mom, and every once in a while a newer game being dangled in front of his eyes.
“Hey, Sweetie Belle!” he said, his voice as chipper and cheerful as ever even though his cheeks still glowed with poorly contained rage. “Come on in!”
“Hey… Button,” Sweetie said haltingly, although in her opinion she had a pretty good reason to be confused. “Hey, Sweetie Belle! Come on in!” wasn’t in the same ballpark as anything she’d heard from outside his room. Come to think of it, it wasn’t really even the same sport. And speaking of sports…
“HOW IS THAT A FOUL?”
Sweetie cringed as her train of thought careened off its tracks, squeezing one eye shut as the clang of its fading bell echoed against her skull. Button had thrown both hooves up in the air in protest, his face contorted with abject fury. A second later, the tinny sound of a whistle blowing brought Button’s hooves back down to his joystick, his brow still crumpled a bit but otherwise neutral. Speaking of sports, in any case…
“What are you playing?” she asked him, leaning in as close as she could without getting within what she knew to be Button’s flailing range. It looked like a sport, as far as she could tell: Button’s screen showed a wide expanse of green grass divided up by long white lines, one of which cut through a hollow circle in the middle outlined in the same color. Miniature ponies wearing red and blue jerseys ran back and forth across the field, darting and weaving between each other as they kicked around a black-and-white ball. Button seemed to be controlling the ones in red--or at least, that was who he seemed to be yelling at when one of them stumbled and let a blue pony thread the ball between his legs.
“NO THAT’S FINE JUST LET HIM RUN RIGHT OVER YOU.” With a growl and a forceful tug on the joystick, Button made another red pony run up to the blue one and knock the ball away, then glanced back at Sweetie Belle once it rolled past one of the white lines to the sound of another whistle blowing. “New game,” he said, all sparkling eyes and cheeky smile once more. “Just got it last week.”
With some effort and a bit of metaphorical smoke, the gears in Sweetie’s brain finally spun around far enough to process a response. “Oh… kay,” she said, shuffling around Button towards his bed so she could see the screen better. Nearby, a stack of plastic game cases formed a precariously leaning tower on his bedside table, and Sweetie Belle squinted up at the one lying halfway open on top of the pile. Its cover showed a scowling, stocky-looking stallion with a stringy black mane and a soccer ball balanced on his hoof, and the title printed over his head just had the next calendar year next to a word she’d never seen before.
“What’s an IFAH?” she asked, reading out her best guess at what Button’s new game was called off what she presumed to be its case.
Button spun the joystick in a circle, and one of his red ponies on-screen mimicked the motion well enough to dodge around its blue opponent. “It’s an acronym,” he explained, leaning hard to one side and lifting the controller off his lap as his player booted the ball towards a big white net guarded by a pony dressed in all black. “Stands for International Federation of THAT’S GOTTA BE A CORNER ARE YOU ACTUALLY SERIOUS Association Hoofball, or… something.”
Sweetie didn’t know what corner Button was talking about or why it was apparently such a huge deal, but she did actually know what hoofball was. Some of the other colts at school--the ones that spoke in normal languages to normal fillies--liked to play it at recess, with a smooth brown ball shaped like an almond. After watching Button’s game resume for a few seconds, sparks burned against the lining of Sweetie Belle’s skull as her brain-gears ground to a halt again.
“I thought hoofball was the one where they score touchdowns and tackle each other and stuff?”
“That’s Equestrian hoofball. Totally different. Totally lame.” Button took advantage of a brief pause in the game to roll his eyes and sigh, then let his eyes glaze over with a look that told Sweetie Belle to make herself comfortable and strap on a pair of imaginary earmuffs. “This kind of hoofball’s way better. It’s the kind they play over in Trottingham, in Prance, all over the world. It’s the greatest sport ever known to ponykind--o jogo bonito. It means FOR THE LOVE OF EQUESTRIA MAKE A TACKLE ONCE IN YOUR LIFE.”
With her heart in her throat and her earmuffs proving to be far more imaginary than she’d hoped, Sweetie Belle watched with a mixture of fascination and confusion as Button reverted from teeth-gnashing wrath to the same dreamy, vacant gaze he’d worn just now and way too many times before.
“... the beautiful game,” he finished in a reverent “there it is, the best armor in the whole Wasteland” whisper. Sweetie Belle cocked one eye and shook her head. Whatever this was, it wasn’t like any dialect of Button-Speak she’d catalogued before. For a moment she considered borrowing a pad of paper and taking notes. At the very least, she should probably go back downstairs and make absolutely sure there was nopony else in the house who could translate for her.
“Sounds, uh… fun,” she said after a few seconds.
“Yeah,” Button agreed. “The real sport’s pretty cool too.”
Sweetie nodded, knowing the bobbing motion in the corner of Button’s eye would be good enough to convince him she agreed. “So IFAH… makes the game?”
“Nah, they just HE’S MUGGING ME FOR PONY’S SAKE run the sport in the real world,” Button answered, Sweetie’s gritted teeth one of many things his concentration on the game robbed him of the ability to notice. “I guess the developers named it after them because they YOU’RE BLIND YOU’RE DEAF GOOD THING YOU’RE A REF thought it sounded cool.”
“How do you play?” she said next, her tone that of somepony who knew much better than to ask but was still thinking a bit too positively for her own good.
“Well, this is Ultimate Team, so I’m playing over STAY ON YOUR FRICKING RUN JoyBox Live with somepony else who’s controlling the other team. I’ve built up my A side to be real sweaty and strong on the counter, but WHO ARE YOU PASSING IT TO THERE’S LITERALLY NO ONE THERE I ran their fitness too low getting enough points for a division promotion, so now I’m parking the bus with my B side just to finish out this season and get the HE’S TEN FEET AWAY YOU DON’T HAVE TO BLAST IT HALFWAY TO CLOUDSDALE extra coin bonus, because then I can buy a pacey winger for the 4-3-3 I want to run on A side and refill my backline’s contracts before I jump back into tourney play.”
One of the greater ironies of Sweetie Belle’s life was that she understood Button Mash a lot better when he wasn’t talking than when he was. Maybe that was what Mom’s bumblebee thought was cute. “I… kind of meant how do you play hoofball,” she intoned, pressing a forehoof into the twinge in her temple she really should’ve seen coming. “Like, the… sport.”
Button’s hooves went still on the controller, and a blue player stole the ball from a red one and launched it out of sight into the stands. “You, um… you kick the ball into the other guy’s goal to score,” he mumbled, his face roughly the same shade as the jersey on the pony throwing the ball back onto the field. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Hmm,” was about all Sweetie Belle could muster in the way of a response, her eyes glued to the alarm clock wedged in beside the pile of games she’d looked at before. Each tick of the second hand chipped another chunk of time off her day that she could’ve spent at the lake, and added it to the time she’d have to waste making the presentation for their dumb project. How long had she been here already? Five minutes? Three? Could she just go now, or should she wait until Button’s mom came back and saw her? If Button was the only one here, would he vouch for her if--or when, really--Mom came calling tomorrow?
“OH GREAT NOW YOU FEEL LIKE PLAYING DEFENSE,” Button shouted before Sweetie Belle could think of a third rhetorical question. On second thought, Button’s mom probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. She’d probably left some aspirin behind for Sweetie Belle to borrow too. Button’s mom was very considerate.
“So…”
“Get in there get in there GET IN THERE,” Button screamed, his fever pitch so loud it almost drowned out one final whistle blast from his game. As Button slumped back with his brow knitted and blew out a rough sigh, a menu screen faded in over the grayed-out hoofball field, collections of numbers and statistics surrounding a highlighted box with the word “Continue” printed in it.
“Good match,” he growled, still out of breath but beginning to regain his composure as he swiveled fully in Sweetie’s direction for the first time that day. “What’d you say, Sweetie Belle?”
Sweetie Belle blinked twice and held her eyes closed on the third attempt, but nothing short of a lobotomy could’ve squeezed the ache out of her head now. Why did colts have to be so hard to talk to? “Never mind. Did, um… did you win?”
“Nope!” Button brightly announced. “Zero-zero draw.”
Sweetie Belle spent a while trying to decide if Button was kidding, but the score on his screen and the fact that none of Button’s any-kind-of-talents included lying said otherwise. “And that’s fun.”
Are you kidding? It’s the best game ever!” Button assured her through an ear-to-ear grin. “I’m kind of surprised my B side guys held up so well. They played great in that match.”
Sweetie Belle had never really wondered whether slamming her head against something really hard would ram her horn back inside her own skull, but while she was on the subject of lobotomies, she was tempted to give it a try. “But you’ve been yelling at them ever since I came in!”
“Well, yeah, but that’s just ‘cause the game wanted me to lose. Sometimes it does that if you get on a run of good matches. Ask anypony.”
For lack of anything polite to say, Sweetie Belle stared at Button Mash for a few seconds so there was a bit of a delay before she said it anyway. “So it’s impossible to score points, the computer cheats when you play too well, your players don’t do what you tell them to half the time, and you spend the whole time screaming your head off just to be happy with a tie. That’s the best game ever?”
Button looked down at his controller for a moment, then lifted his eyes back up to Sweetie Belle and shrugged. “It’s got a really good soundtrack too,” he said. After Sweetie Belle chose open-mounted silence as her response, Button grabbed for the controller again and offered it up to her. “Wanna try?”
“I…” Sweetie Belle fell onto her rump and sighed with her hooves over her eyes, promising with her inflection that she would write a whole new chapter in her Button-Speak anthology about this. “No, thank you,” she said as gently and with as unclenched a jaw as she could manage. “I actually have to go. I promised I’d meet up with Apple Bloom and Scootaloo this afternoon, and then I have to get home early tonight so I can starting working on the display thing for our stupid science project…”
“Oh, I already did that.”
She hadn’t quite been fair to him before: Button Mash did have a few of his own not-quite-special talents after all, and chief among them was the ability to leave Sweetie Belle at a loss for words. This time, though, it had less to do with him being weird and more to do with how she couldn’t possibly have heard him right. “You… what?”
“Yeah, it’s done,” Button said. The screen flashed as he exited the first menu and brought up a new one, but as he started to fiddle around in it he nodded toward a trifold posterboard propped up next to his desk, almost hidden from Sweetie’s view by the dim lighting and the slope of Button’s bed. “I overheard you guys talking at school about going to the lake today and I figured… y’know, you’d have that and I’d just be playing this all weekend anyway, so why not, I guess. I was gonna come over and tell you tonight, but then you came over here now, so… yeah.”
As Button turned back to his game, Sweetie Belle edged around the bed and lifted both of the trifold’s flaps with her magic. The whole thing was laid out exactly as she’d planned in class Friday, from hypothesis to procedures to a graph of the result printed in neat colored pencil. There were even a few photos here and there showing different steps of their experiment, as well as a block-letter title clearly drawn by hoof. It wasn’t just done. It looked incredible. She hadn’t thought Button had an artistic bone in his body, let alone any reason at all to do something like this.
“I mean, if you want to fix it or whatever, that’s fine,” Button added, his lip clamped in his teeth as he navigated around what looked like a list of players on his team. He made it sound like it was no big deal, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have put together their entire presentation all by himself--without her even so much as mentioning how much she was dreading having to deal with it--just because he wanted to be nice. His mom must’ve made him do it, but his mom wasn’t here to tell her so. He must’ve felt bad about something he’d done to her, but she couldn’t think of anything that might fit that description. It was the best thing to happen to her all week, but it didn’t make any sense.
“No, it’s…” she tried to say. “You didn’t have to… th-that was really nice of you, Button. Thank you. Seriously.”
She couldn’t see him very well from this side of the bed, but Sweetie could’ve sworn she saw a smile flash across Button’s face, only visible to her in the way it crinkled up the corners of his eyes. Whatever it had really been, it was gone by the time she walked back around to stand next to him. He’d been sucked back into his game, left her world for his own again. She scuffed her hoof against the carpet, and finally realized what he was hoping she would say. Well, all things considered, that was fair enough. At this point, she figured he’d earned it.
“You… wanna come to the lake too?” she asked him, already bracing herself for his emphatic answer of...
“Nah, I’m good.”
Sweetie’s eyes shot back open, just in time to see Button rest his controller in his lap so he could face her. “I’ve got a season championship to win here,” he said with a confident smirk, though his face fell once he saw the look on Sweetie’s. “O-or I guess if you… if you really want me to come, I-I could do that instead,” he stuttered. “Either one’s fine, I just didn’t know if, um…”
“It’s kind of short notice, yeah…” Sweetie agreed.
“And my mom’s not home, so…”
“... didn’t ask Apple Bloom or Scootaloo…”
Sweetie Belle shuffled her hind hooves, but didn’t move any closer to the door. Button’s controller slid out of his lap and clunked against the floor, but he didn’t make any motion to pick it back up. “Some other time?” Sweetie Belle asked.
“Yeah!” Button ran his tongue over his lips, trying to keep his eyes forward while pawing around for his controller behind him. “Some other time, totally.”
“Okay.”
“Cool.”
“I’ll… see you Monday.”
“Later.”
Button settled back down in front of his game, and Sweetie Belle made her way out of his room and down the stairs. She made it all the way to the front door before she stopped to look behind her, up to where she could already hear Button groaning over a new match. She was wasting time standing here when she could be outside and already on her way to a great day with her friends, but something held her back. She couldn’t place what it was, only that it came from the colt upstairs who sometimes ignored her and sometimes annoyed her and sometimes did things that even her best friends might not have thought to do. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t understand it.
In the end, she supposed she didn’t have to. Odd as he was, Button Mash was way nicer than she’d given him credit for, and apparently had more to his personality than just video games and a silly-looking hat. If Mom was going to pick somepony to force her to hang out with, there were plenty of worse options than him.
“I BARELY TOUCHED HIM THAT CAN’T BE A PENALTY.”
Provided, of course, she invested in some earplugs. Making a mental note to ask Rarity if she had any to spare, Sweetie Belle opened the door and stepped out into the sun again. She had a long day ahead of her, and she had other friends to see before it ended.
Author's Note
This story is absolutely not a metaphorical summation of the last month of my life.
This story also absolutely does not include seeds for a sequel that I absolutely will not write.
