No time to think: she shoved the window open, leaped onto the sill, and anchored her grappling hook. "I've gotta go find a crowd to blend into before I put you in danger." Turning away from the battle raging outside, she slapped on her dark glasses and refused to let her stomach clench at Lyra staring opened-mouthed. "I'll see you at the wedding," she said, the lie flowing easily from her lips. She snapped a salute, sprang backwards into empty air, and began rappelling down the side of town hall.
"Fine!" Lyra's shout echoed above her. "But we're gonna talk about this later!"
Later. She nearly bobbled her landing, the word hitting her harder than any rock Lyra could've thrown. Slipping away among the townponies watching the fight, she had to stop, turn back, and grab the rope dangling in plain sight from the window: leave no trace was still Agency policy even if there wasn't an Agency anymore. A quick flick of her fetlock dislodged the hook; she let everything drop into her case, slammed it shut, and edged her way between the gawkers again.
Why had she thought this would work, settling down, starting a life, trying to come out of the cold into Ponyville's warm embrace? Sure, the last couple years had gone pretty well, but hadn't she known deep down that it was only a matter of time before everything went wrong again? It would always be sooner for her, never later, and she had nopony to blame but herself.
The bugbear's roar bristled her mane. Clenching her teeth, she wove through the crowd to the shadow of the flower shop. From there, she could make a break for the train station and hopefully be out of range before the monster homed in on her scent completely.
Maybe Appleoosa needed a confectioner...
Except— She couldn't be Bon Bon anymore, could she? She stumbled turning the corner and tried to jam a mental dam over the images flooding her: cutting the ribbon the day she'd opened the shop; the wonderful pre-dawn stillness of the town square when she walked to work; the mingled smells of chocolate and peanut butter, marzipan and powdered sugar—
And Lyra always there, cheering her on, raising her spirits when they got low, the first pony she'd ever known who wasn't a monster hunter or an operative. The first pony she'd ever considered an actual friend. The first pony she'd never lied to.
Till today, of course.
Deeper memories burst over her and screeched her to a halt in front of the station. Ashes seemed to clog her nose, her foalhood home collapsing to charred ruins after she'd dug herself out the day the bugbear had swept through town. She gulped the air, lungs and muscles burning from the decade she'd trained to become Special Agent Sweetie Drops. Her heart hammered the way it had when she'd discovered the bugbear's lair during her fifth year on the squad and had sent the princess a false report misdirecting the rest of the team to Pinto Point on the other side of the mountains.
She forced her legs to climb the station steps and recalled her own rock-solid certainty that she was the only one capable of completing the mission correctly. Sweat dripped cold down her forehead, and she'd just finished smashing the last of the bugbear's eggs, the sour pulp inside the things making her hooves somehow both sticky and slippery, when the buzzing, the roaring, the dim light from the cave mouth cutting off—
A bellow from the other side of town knocked her to her knees on the platform, past and present a jumble around her. In the cavern that day, she'd made every mistake possible, had attacked the creature rather than waiting for it to come to her, had kept to the open part of the cave rather than using the terrain to her advantage, had abandoned even the pretense of strategy to launch a flailing, mindless assault no different from the bugbear's own, everything the Agency had taught her forgotten as she'd battled the beast that had destroyed her life.
"Ms. Bon Bon?" a voice asked, and she cried out, leaped up, slung herself around in a roundhouse kick that would've cracked Coal Porter's skull if she hadn't recognized the Ponyville station master at the last second and wrenched herself sideways so her hoof whisked past his nose as gently as a butterfly's sigh.
The stallion blinked over his spectacles at her. "You all right, ma'am?"
"I—" Her voice cracked, and it took a couple swallows to clear her dry and jagged throat. "When's the next train?"
He did some more blinking. "Next train? To where?"
"To anywhere." Her first standing order in this situation was to get out of range of the monster and any other ponies. Everything else was secondary.
Coal Porter was gesturing to the station house and continuing along the platform in the opposite direction. "Schedule's on the board inside, ma'am. I'll be there in a minute to get you a ticket."
She nodded and tried to smile, but everything she'd kept so carefully tamped down in her head about the battle and its aftermath was sloshing around her thoughts like a storm surge: a lucky sling of her net immobilizing the bugbear and sprawling it across the foul remains of its eggs; the deep and multiple stings the creature had landed bloating her with venom, slowing her to a crawl and blurring her vision; fumbling the emergency beacon from her pack before blacking out; coming shakily awake in the Agency's infirmary.
By which time, she had to admit now, it had already been too late. Gritting her teeth in that phony smile under Ponyville's beautiful morning sunlight, she couldn't deny the truth: that was the moment when later had stopped being an option for her, the moment when her future had ended.
Because yes, she'd made a full recovery, but the stew of partially-formed embryos and bugbear poison had seeped into her, permanently stained her scent, and turned her into a target the beast would be unable to ignore. And yes, she'd captured the monster, but none of the other agents had ever trusted her again. Worse than that, they'd begun following her example, abandoning their teammates and going after their targets on their own. The injury rate had skyrocketed, and when the bugbear had managed to burrow out of Tartarus, they'd had too few healthy agents left to respond.
Voice wavering, the princess had shuttered the Agency, had decommissioned every last operative, had sent them all home with oaths binding them to silence—
"Except you, Agent Sweetie Drops," Her Highness had said, the gentleness of her words worse than if she'd shouted them. "You'll be going into deep cover in Ponyville. My hope is that the emanations from the Everfree Forest will keep the bugbear from tracking you down for the decade or so it will take me to reform the Agency. But for now..." She'd shaken her head, turned, and left the room.
Alone in the briefing chamber; alone in that cave with the bugbear's roar tearing her ears; alone on the Ponyville station platform; alone and running for the rest of her life: that was the closest thing to later that she would ever know. That was the nightmare that still woke her screaming sometimes in the cold and the dark before dawn.
And who was always there to comfort her when she leaped shivering and weeping from bed? Whose gentle voice and hooves touched her, held her, whispered that she wasn't alone?
At the thought of Lyra, the storm inside her whisked away, perfect calm descending and wrapping her like a warm blanket on a winter night.
Another monstrous shriek split the air behind her. Folding her ears, she took a breath, spun, and galloped down the steps, up the street, back toward the center of town, Celestia's deniability and standing orders be damned.
A swirling madhouse met her in the town square, but a closer look showed her that this was just the wedding preparations proceeding. Ears pricked, she caught the bugbear's unmistakable snarls, and she raced toward them to what had apparently become the battle's new location: a large, rock-filled meadow between this side of Ponyville and the first scraggly trees of the Everfree Forest.
Creeping along the wall of the silage warehouse, the last building at the edge of town, she peered around the corner to see the bugbear raging back and forth between Rainbow Dash above it and Applejack below. "Any time y'all're ready," Applejack was shouting, "we'd surely appreciate you getting on with it!"
Motion caught her attention, and through the boulders that slumped here and there across the dirt and grass, she saw Twilight, Pinkie, Rarity and Fluttershy struggling with a large, glowing net. "Okay!" Twilight yelled. She nodded to Fluttershy, and they sprang upward, each holding one corner of the net. Pinkie and Rarity had the lower corners gripped in mouth and magic, and when Twilight cried out, "Go!" they charged toward the bugbear, the airborne ponies matching pace so the net stretched open between the four of them.
A particularly large boulder blocked her view, but she heard Twilight's next command clearly enough: "Now!" An explosion of purple light made her blink, and she watched the net whirl to where Applejack and Rainbow were harrying the bugbear. Applejack dodged left, Rainbow leaped straight up— And the bugbear spun to the right, the net whistling past.
"Consarn it!" Applejack smacked the ground hard enough to stir up a cloud of dust. "Lemme try throwing it next time, Twi! I reckon I can— Whoa!"
Roaring and leaping, the bugbear slammed its stinger into the dirt where the now scrambling Applejack had been lying half a second before.
"Hey!" A multi-colored streak spiraled around the bugbear. "None of that, pal!"
With a throaty growl, the monster started flailing its paws at Rainbow Dash, and Applejack, baring her teeth, jumped up, spun, and bucked at the bugbear's hindquarters.
"Once more!" Twilight's voice sounded like her teeth were bared, too.
"Yeah!" she heard Pinkie Pie sing out. "Eighth time's the charm!"
"Fluttershy, darling," Rarity asked, her words breathy and panting, "are you certain you can't simply give this awful thing the Stare and get it to behave itself?"
"I'm sorry!" Fluttershy squeaked. "With those compound eyes, I...I'm not sure where to Stare!"
"Come on, girls!" A cloud of purple magic surrounded the net and lifted it out of sight behind the boulder. "Dash! AJ! If you can get it to hold still for, say, five seconds, that should be long enough for us to get the net around it and for the immobilization spell to take effect!"
"Sounds great, Twilight!" Rainbow Dash dodged a swipe of the thing's claws. "Any idea how we're s'pposed to do that?"
A plan blossomed through her head, and she leaped from the shelter of the warehouse, sprinted low across the grass, and slid up against the other side of the big boulder. If this worked, she could keep her cover, keep her home, keep her friends and her business and her Lyra and never have to worry about being forced into loneliness again. If it worked...
Slowly, she inched up onto her hind legs and peered over the top of the stone. Rainbow and Applejack were keeping the bugbear occupied with a combination of kicks and feints and dodges that made her nod: maybe the best holding action she'd seen two ponies carry out against a monster that size. The others were gathering the net again and preparing, she assumed, for their next run at the thing. Nopony was looking in her direction, at least, so taking a breath, she blew it out in the bugbear's direction. She was the reason it was here, after all, and all she needed to do was attract its—
The bugbear froze in mid-strike, its antennae stiffening, and craned that horrible head around. She could almost feel it catch her scent, and its roar, louder than any she'd yet heard from the thing, turned her pounding heart to stone.
No time, though: the beast was flaring its wings, was breaking off its attack on Rainbow and Applejack and tearing toward her. Ducking down, she wrenched the rope and grappling hook from her case, rammed the hook's tines into the boulder's fissures, and let her hooves spin the rope's other end into a lasso.
"No!" she heard Twilight yell. "Don't let it back into town!"
"On it!" she thought Rainbow yelled back, but by then the thunder of the bugbear's wings was drowning every other sound. Dirt, grass, and leaves swirled her mane and blotted out the sky, but rearing back onto her hind legs, she glared into the bulbous eyes that had haunted her for so long, let the rope fly, and caught the onrushing monster around the neck. The bugbear's eyes bulged even bigger; the rope zinged taut, swung the thing in an arc, and slammed it headfirst into the ground.
A flick of her fetlock undid the rope, and stuffing it into her case, she ran for the silage warehouse under cover of the dust cloud the beast had stirred up. "Hoo-wee!" Applejack whooped behind her. "It's down, Twilight! Fling your net!"
Purple light flashed, and she ducked around the corner just as a whoosh of wind cleared the dust away. "Got it!" Rainbow Dash shouted. "You sure that's gonna hold?"
"Absolutely!" Twilight more crowed than said, and a glance back to see the bugbear stretched out snoring under the net told her expert eye that the princess knew what she was talking about. "I'll just cast a protection dome over it to be sure, then we can get to the wedding!"
The wedding! She'd almost forgotten! And with the bugbear in custody again, if she could get there in time, it would mean—
It would mean that she hadn't lied to Lyra after all. And since Twilight and her friends hadn't seen her, as long as Lyra hadn't told anypony about her, her cover was still safe. She would never have to worry about running again.
Feeling lighter than she had in years, she raced through the streets, flew onto the porch at town hall without touching a single step, leaped through the doorway, and pulled off her dark glasses. "Attention, everypony!" she announced. "Our friends have done it! They've defeated the bugbear!"
And yes, Lyra was sitting there among the cheers of the wedding guests like a lump of unmelted sugar in a batch of fudge. But Bon Bon smiled. Because she was Bon Bon now. And for the first time in her life, she could look forward to a future, to the later that Lyra had yelled out the window at her.
If Lyra would forgive her. Swallowing against the dryness in her throat, she started down the aisle toward her friend.
