Both Sides Now

They left the hotel in the early morning when the air was still cool. Rarity was not cold, but she still pressed herself into Twilight's side as they waited for the train. Twilight rubbed back against her, aware other ponies were walking the streets, and she found herself not caring.

"Hey," she asked, suddenly remembering something that had seemed extremely important at some point in the distant past, "I wonder if we made the papers."

"You know, I'd completely forgotten about that." Rarity glanced around, spotting a newspaper stand across the street where a filly was busily unloading stacks of newspapers from a cart. "Aha," she said, pointing.

They trotted to it together, scanning the papers on display. All the headlines were awash with Princess Luna's surprise display at the opera the night before. The Journal claimed PRINCESS LUNA TO MAKE STATEMENT ON THESTRALS; the Manehatten Times, far more damning, demanded to know WHAT ELSE AREN'T YOU TELLING US?

"Look," Twilight observed, "there's the Post."

"Well." Rarity held up a bit. "Shall we?"

-/-

They skimmed through the edition of the Post on the train platform, the front page with its bold and bizarre claim of BAT-PONIES: FROM THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON! There were multiple conflicting speculations on the origins of the bat-ponies -- Rarity quite enjoyed the idea that they were visitors from the future, Twilight had a good laugh about them supposedly coming from the center of the earth -- and countless reports of readers being attacked by bat-ponies or having their crops ruined by bat-ponies or being intimately involved with bat-ponies, and one quite mad tale of a furniture maker who had seen a vision of the bat-ponies living in harmony with the other three pony races under the sea after a long afternoon in an enclosed basement full of pots of varnish.

"We don't even rate the back pages," Rarity said, pouting.

"Well." Twilight folded the copy of the Post up. "That certainly didn't amount to much." She glanced at Rarity and smiled.

Rarity smiled back. "Mm," she said, pressing her cheek to Twilight's, "definitely nothing to write home about." She nodded to an engine pulling into the station, a chain of carriages behind it. "I think that's our train."

Twilight and Rarity were not the only passengers, but they did find a space for themselves in a walled-off booth intended for four. They watched the train pull away from the station, away from Canterlot, rolling back to Ponyville. When they had arrived, their seats had been opposite each other; now they sat side by side.

Twilight pressed her face to the glass to see the tip of Canterlot Castle, the high needle spire that topped the mountain. "I always enjoyed leaving Canterlot," she said. "That makes it sound like I hated being there, doesn't it? I didn't. I don't think I did. But I liked leaving. I liked escaping into books and I liked physically leaving the city behind. I think I always knew I didn't really belong there. Like it was all just preparing for something else, and one day I'd spread my wings and fly off." She smiled to her reflection in the window. "Of course, that was more metaphorical back then.

"But now I'm kind of sad to see it go." She turned to Rarity, who was watching her intently. "You know? We have to leave the training area and go back out there. Back into the real world."

Rarity placed a hoof over Twilight's, and squeezed. "May I tell you a story about the real world?" she asked, and Twilight nodded.

She closed her eyes, searching for the right place to start.

"Once upon a time," she said, "there was a little filly who wanted nothing more than to be a princess, because of course princesses got to wear all the fanciest gowns and attend the nicest tea parties."

Twilight giggled a little at this little filly's interpretation of being a princess.

"And she looked at the rest of her life, the little town she was born in, the rest of her family, and she saw they weren't anything like what a princess was supposed to be surrounded with! They were so common, they were so provincial, there must have been some mistake. And she cried and cried and cried, oh woe is me, for having the misfortune of being so destined for a life of beauty and sophistication but stuck somewhere where it was all out of reach."

"What did she do, this little filly?"

"She decided," Rarity said, "that if she hadn't been born somewhere beautiful and sophisticated, then it was her mission in life to make everyone around her beautiful and sophisticated, and that path would lead her all the way out of Ponyville and up into Canterlot Castle."

Twilight suddenly felt ashamed of ever rejecting the trappings of being a princess. "I'm sorry I grew up there," she said, "and that you didn't." It felt like she had squandered something.

Rarity touched a hoof to Twilight's chin. "I'm not." She was smiling. "If I would have been raised with everything I ever wanted out of life I would have been insufferable. So would we all, I think. It's not the end that defines the journey--" She leaned over to quickly peck at Twilight's cheek. "--But the path we take to get there."

Smiling, Twilight kissed her back. "Was she happy, the little filly?" she asked. "When she got everything she wanted?"

Rarity lay her head on Twilight's shoulder. "She was. She was very happy."

The train sped on, back to Ponyville, back to four friends who would be waiting for them on the platform.