"I'm so, so sorry, Applejack!" I said for the sixth time. "How can I make it up to you?" It was the fourth time I'd said that.
In the afternoon sunlight drifting through her kitchen curtains, Applejack smiled. Not a real smile, though: it stretched tight across her muzzle and didn't quite reach her eyes. "'Sall right, Starlight." A little of her usual good-humor touched her face. "Hey, that rhymes, don't it?" But then her expression slumped again. "Ain't no big thing. I got more mixing bowls than I know what to do with." She flicked the broom in the crook of her fetlock and swept the last of the thin white ceramic shards into the dustpan: we'd already carried the bigger chunks out to the trash bin beside the house.
"But—" It had been her mother's bowl, she'd told me just a few minutes ago, her whole body stretching to take the thing down from an upper shelf. She'd offered the bowl to me, I'd reached for it with my hooves instead of my magic to show my respect for her earth pony ways and to show that I'd maybe actually learned a few of the lessons they'd been trying to teach me since I'd been paroled to Ponyville, and—
And the rest had happened the way it always did with me.
She picked the dustpan up in her teeth and trotted to the door. I followed her outside as useless as a kitten. "There's got to be something I can do!" Because I hadn't done enough already, had I?
"There is," Applejack said around the handle of the dustpan; she tipped it to send the debris clattering lightly along the inside of the can. A stomp of her hoof spun the bin's lid into the air, and I had to gape as it did three-and-a-half full rotations before landing perfectly on top. Spitting out the dustpan, she gave me a smile that had some actual smile in it. "You can stop fretting." She tapped my chest gently and started for the kitchen door again. "Now, reckon we got us a pie to bake."
The apple cinnamon thing we put together over the next hour or so had an aroma that almost made me forget the destruction I was continuing to cause wherever I went and whatever I did. Applejack did a good job, too: she asked me how things were going at the castle and pretended to be interested in my answers while I asked her how things were going on the farm and pretended to be interested in her answers.
All the time, though, I was hearing the crash of porcelain against tile, the sharp gasp she'd let loose, the jagged silence that had followed. And I knew what I had to do.
"Useless!" I couldn't help spitting the word out loud. Slamming another book closed, I pitched it with my magic onto one of the stacks filling the table in front of me.
"Starlight?" a voice asked, and I winced. Not as much as I would have if it had been Twilight, but still...
"Oh, hey there, Spike!" I turned my own phony smile on him, standing in the doorway of Twilight's inner library with a feather duster in his claws. "How're you doing?"
His eyes lidded partway. "So what is it this time?"
My throat went dry. "What...what do you mean?"
A little snort flared his nostrils. "I've lived around unicorns my whole life." Tucking the feather duster under one arm, he padded across the carpet and poked the nearest of my book piles. "It's nearly bedtime, and you're digging through a buncha these. You've got something buzzing in your head you can't get rid of, don't you?"
"Glue!" I didn't want to shout it, but I did. "Do you know how it works? Do you?"
Spike blinked. "Ummm, because it's sticky?"
"But why is it sticky?" I picked up a dozen of the books I'd already exhausted and sent them whirling through the air above us. "What is the exact molecular, atomic, or sub-atomic process that causes glue to stick things together, huh? Can you tell me that?"
"Ummm," he said again, but this time, the wobble in his voice and the way he took a step back, the feather duster falling to the floor, cut through the gibbering of my current mania.
"Sorry!" I took a breath, stopped the books, set them quietly onto the table, took another breath, and said again less frantically, "Sorry."
Taking a third breath, I tried to go on as if I weren't the pony whose craziness had literally destroyed the world multiple times. "It's just that not even Starswirl the Bearded could figure glue out. He tried maybe eight or nine times over the course of his life to put together a good, solid, workable glue spell, but he couldn't do it! The best he managed was a rough mending spell, but it only lasts about an hour, and it doesn't work on anything smaller than, say, a broken cart wheel! The universe apparently just doesn't want magic to replicate the effects of the most basic albumen, casein, rubber, or resin-based glues!"
His brow wrinkled. "That's weird."
"I'll say." I turned back to the stacks of books. "The universe is usually a lot more gullible than that."
"Excuse me?"
"Well?" I lit my horn. "When you get right down to it, all magic is an act of the will, a force play in a sleight-of-hoof trick. When I cast a spell"—with less than a thought, I made one of the books rise—"it's me telling the universe, 'I don't care what you say! I have the ability to make that book float like a balloon!' And I'm so sure of myself and so convincing that the universe shudders, says, 'Okay,' and lets gravity relax." I cut my power, and the book dropped back into place. "I tell the universe what I'm going to do, and if the universe believes I can do it, then the universe allows it to happen. Like I said: gullible."
The silence behind me made me look at Spike, his brow even more wrinkled. "You sure about that?"
I shrugged. "If you asked Twilight, she'd give you a fifteen week lecture course full of words and concepts that'd make your head spin like a merry-go-round. And in the end, even though you had no idea what she'd said, you'd believe it." I couldn't keep from sighing. "That's why she's so incredible at magic: she can look you straight in the face and make the stupidest thing sound sensible. Her approach is so refined, so subtle, and so effective, I wish I could—" I stopped, cleared my throat, pushed that thought away like I always did. "But the old brute force method works, too. I mean, when I tell the universe what I want to happen, the universe is so scared of me, it just rolls over and does it."
"Wait." He tapped his snout. "You're saying that if I told the universe, 'When I breathe fire, it'll turn into peanut butter and garnet sandwiches,' then that'll happen?"
"Depends." I leaned over to poke him in the chest. "Do you believe it?"
"What? No!" Folding his arms, he glared at me. "That'd be silly!"
"Exactly." Waving a hoof sent the books flying back to their places on the shelves all around us. "Which is why the first thing you have to do in order to be a great magician is learn how to fool yourself. Look at pegasi: why can they walk on clouds? It's against all known physical laws, and yet, they're so convinced that they should be able to, the universe believes them and lets it happen. It's the same reason Trixie will never master true sorcery. She's too grounded in reality, so caught up in the mechanics of the illusion, she can never get caught up in the illusion itself."
Not that I'd ever say that to her, of course. But it was why Trixie was the perfect friend for me, I'd come to realize: I wouldn't know reality if it came up and gave me its business card. She was performing in the villages around Trottingham this week. Once I got Applejack's bowl fixed, I'd have to ask Twilight if I could—
"So wait." Spike's voice snapped me back to the library. "What does all this have to do with glue?"
Unused to explaining things, I rummaged around for words. "You see, some magical problems are stickier than others."
"Stickier?" He arched an eye ridge. "Really?"
I smiled and kept going as if I'd meant to make the joke. "Anypony who's ever tried to make a spell that tells the universe, 'I've slapped these things together and now they're going to stay together,' it's like the universe says, 'I don't think so!' It just doesn't work."
Spike was frowning. "The universe sounds more picky than gullible to me."
"In a way, some of it's our fault." I spread my front hooves. "We've got a couple decent theories about how regular glue works, but so far, no unicorns have ever been able to fool themselves into believing any of the theories strongly enough to make a spell work the same way. It's like I said before: if you can't fool yourself, you can't fool the universe. And if you can't fool the universe, you can't do magic."
"You know what?" Spike folded his arms. "That's pretty much the nuttiest thing I've ever heard."
Letting my smile widen, I cocked my head. "You sure you've spent your whole life around unicorns?"
He made a little popping sound with his lips. "That's a point." Bending, he grabbed his feather duster from the floor. "But you still haven't said what this is all about. Why're you suddenly all interested in glue magic?"
For half a second, I hesitated. But, well, this seemed like the sort of thing a pony would talk to a friend about. And since Spike was one of my only two actual friends...
His eyes kept getting wider as I gave him the story. "Wow, Starlight," he said when I was done. "AJ used that big old mixing bowl, like, all the time!"
"I know." It had taken some effort, but I hadn't shouted or shrieked or hyperventilated at all during the whole recitation. "She told me it was nothing to worry about, but I could tell she didn't believe it when she said it. It is a big deal to her, so I've got to make this right. I've got to fix it."
He was nodding. "So why can't you use just, y'know, regular glue?"
I blew a breath through my lips. "First, the bowl broke into maybe four dozen pieces, and most of them looked more like pencil shavings than anything else. Sure, I could gather them all up with telekinesis, but then I'd have the world's hardest jigsaw puzzle in front of me with shards so tiny, regular glue would just swallow them up. Second, how well do you suppose something that's been mended with regular glue might stand up to all the egg beating and batter mixing Applejack does? And third, does she ever actually put it in the oven and bake things in it? If so, it'll have to stay together under some pretty high temperatures."
"Okay. So why don't you just buy her a new one?"
That was even easier to answer. "Because she's Applejack. New is never good. And I'll bet that, even if I could find one as old as the one I broke, she'd want to know its history before she ever used it: who owned it and what they mixed in it and all like that."
"Okay," he said again, rubbing his chin. "So the only option is fixing the old bowl with magic that doesn't exist." Nodding, he turned for the door. "We need to talk to Twilight."
"No!" I wrapped my hornglow around him and lifted him into the air. "This is a friendship problem, Spike, and I mean a real one this time: one I created with my own stupid hooves, not one Twilight gave me to solve." I spun him around to face me. "I need to do this without her, then tell her about it after it's been fixed."
His half-closed eyes and wrinkled snout made me set him on the carpet again. "Please," I said.
In the silence, I was sure he was going to run for the door; I even had a sleep spell all ready in case he did.
But he didn't. Instead, he said, "All right." Setting the feather duster on the table, he crooked a claw at me. "But if this is a friendship problem, then we're gonna need some friends to help."
One hoof rubbing her forehead, Rainbow Dash glared through the dim shadows at Spike.
"What?" Spike spread his arms. "It says in the comics that if you want to get somepony's attention for a secret mission, you throw pebbles at her window."
"It's a cloud house, doofus!" Rainbow sprang into a hover and waved at the slightly glowing structure floating in the night sky above us. "The windows have vapor over them, not glass! Rocks go right through!" She flexed one wing, and a pebble fell to the grass in front of Spike.
More glaring went on between them, but I stepped forward. "All right," I said. "We made a mistake. We're sorry, and it won't happen again. Can we please get down to business here?"
"Yeah, yeah." Rainbow settled back to the ground. "Now what's so secret you've got to smack innocent ponies with rocks when they're reading before bed?"
Spike looked at me. I resisted the urge to growl and launched into my story again.
Rainbow's eyes widened the same way Spike's had, and when I got to the end, she also said, "Wow, Starlight," before going on. "That was, like, AJ's favorite bowl. She once said she could always taste her mom's pie crust whenever she mixed it up in that bowl." Spreading her wings, she planted her hooves in the grass as firmly as she'd just planted a knife in my gut. "We've gotta fix this!"
"And tonight," Spike said. "Right now, even."
A shudder rustled my mane as I turned to him. "What's the hurry?"
"It's Sunday night." He gestured over his shoulder. "That's when Dusty takes his wagon out to all the farms around Ponyville and hauls their trash to the dump for recycling, grinding, or atomizing."
The shudder spread all the way down to my tail. "What?"
His eyes lit up. "Haven't you ever been out to the dump? It's the best! Dusty sorts all the trash, melts down the recyclables, grinds the organic stuff into fertilizer, and the rest of it?" Spike touched a claw to his forehead, then whisked it forward while making a high-pitched 'pew, pew, pew' sound. "He blasts the rest of it to atoms with his horn! He's really good at it, and I'm telling you: if I was a unicorn, that's totally the job I'd wanna have!"
Rainbow was nodding, but I was feeling the ground crumble away beneath me. "Blasts the rest of it?" I asked. "You mean, like broken pieces of ceramic?"
"Yeah." Spike blinked. "That's why I'm bringing it up. Though I prob'bly shoulda mentioned it earlier, huh?"
The old me at this point, I'm pretty sure, would've started shouting. The me I was now, however, didn't, but to be honest, I don't know if it was because I'd grown more understanding during my time under Twilight's tutelage or because I'd pretty much stopped breathing.
"Okay," Rainbow said. "This isn't a problem."
"How?" I managed to choke out.
"Simple." Rainbow flared her wings. "I'll fly out to Sweet Apple Acres. If Dusty hasn't been by yet, I'll see if I can find whatever can has the pieces in it and move it so he won't take it. If he has already picked up their trash, I'll meet you guys at Fluttershy's."
"Fluttershy's?" It was more a collection of squeaks than a word, so I cleared my throat and tried again. "Why Fluttershy's?"
Rainbow's mouth wrinkled. "'Cause Dusty's always had a thing for her, of course. He gets a little possessive about his garbage, y'see, so if we're gonna get anything away from him, we're gonna need Fluttershy there batting her eyelashes." She pointed a hoof at me. "It'll be your job to get Shy on board with the whole eyelash thing, so that's where I'll come find you once I get the lay of the land at the Acres. Got it?"
"I'll say!" a shrill voice shouted directly into my ear; I jumped sideways, almost falling over, and blinked to see Pinkie Pie bouncing beside Spike, her gigantic grin pointed at Rainbow. "What do I getta do, Dashie?"
"You're with me, Pinkie!" Rainbow stomped the grass. "Now let's do this!" She shot up into the starry sky.
"Whoo-hoo!" Pinkie squealed and sped off in the direction of Sweet Apple Acres.
Panting on Fluttershy's doorstep, I crouched so Spike could slide off from between my shoulders. At least with it being after supper on a Sunday, we hadn't seen anypony on the streets to whom we'd had to explain why we were racing through town in the middle of the night...
Because we were dealing with my luck, though, Fluttershy's cottage was dark, and Spike's knocking got no response. Completely not shouting, I said, "Why isn't she answering? Where else could she be?"
"Well..." Spike started counting off on his claws. "There could be some animal emergency somewhere; she could already be asleep; she could be hiding under the bed; she could be—"
"Fluttershy!" And I did shout this time. Pounded on the front door, too. "Please! We need you and your eyelashes!" Which was a silly thing to say, but, well, I hadn't been having the best sort of day so far....
The doorknob rattled, and I remembered myself enough to step back, take a breath, and try not to look like I was out to enslave the whole town. But when the door pulled open, the figure behind it wasn't cringing and butter yellow. Instead, it was annoyed, snow white, and a rabbit.
"Oh, hey, Angel," Spike said, grabbing hold of my tail before I could leap over the bunny's head and start scouring the cottage. "Fluttershy home?"
The rabbit glared at him, then pursed his lips, fluttered his own eyelashes, and did a little sashay along the floor.
Spike nodded. "Thanks, Angel." He turned and started trotting down the front path. "She's at Rarity's."
Growling, I leaped forward, grabbed Spike in a levitation spell, and punched a hole through the universe that teleported us to Rarity's doorstep. The whole run from Rainbow's to Fluttershy's, I hadn't even thought about doing that.
With an even greater force of will, I kept myself from both shouting and pounding; any outside observer would've called my knocking quite civilized. "Rarity?" I called, my voice as light as the dew on a spring morning in the desert. "Fluttershy? It's Starlight Glimmer. I'm here with Spike, and I've got a really big favor to ask!"
It didn't take fifteen or twenty minutes for the door to open, but it sure felt like it. "Well, hello, Starlight," Rarity said, one of her artfully-crafted smiles decorating her snout. "Won't you and Spikey come in?"
My insides felt like they were stuffed with old steel wool, but I somehow managed to wait for her to step out of the way before I squeezed past her and deposited a heart-eyed Spike on the floor. In a back doorway, I saw Fluttershy peering out at us, but I once again managed not to do any shouting. "Thanks, both of you, but I really need your help."
Once again, I detailed what I'd done to Applejack—the story had been playing pretty much constantly in my head since the moment I'd dropped the bowl, so I found it a little hard to believe that this was only the third time I’d gone through it out loud. The recitation got several gasps from Fluttershy in front of me and Rarity beside me, but this time, I ended with Rainbow's plan for how we could set things right.
"Oh, my," Fluttershy said into the ensuing silence, her ears folding. "Dusty and I often exchange poems—he writes the funniest little pieces about the animals who live around the junkyard—but...do you really think I can help by fluttering my eyelashes at him?" She fluttered her lashes, then, and while a part of me wanted to think that I'd never seen anything more vapid in my entire life, another part of me couldn't help remembering that this was the pony who, more than any other, had burst the bubble of madness with which I'd surrounded myself and all the others who'd fallen under my thrall.
"Indeed!" Rarity announced. "And I shall be right there beside you should you find you require a back-up flutterer!"
"All right!" Spike clapped, then turned blushing toward Fluttershy. "I mean, your eyelashes are great, Fluttershy, but with Rarity along—"
"Oh, yes." Fluttershy's ears perked. "I'd be ever so grateful, Rarity, for any pointers you might have."
Rarity nodded. "Controlling the rate of flutter is vital."
"Really?" Fluttershy blinked slowly, then more quickly. "I'd never thought about—"
"Okay!" I shouted, my last nerve finally snapping. "Then we're off to Sweet Apple Acres!" And I started powering up my horn.
"Uhh, Starlight?" Spike raised a claw. "We've actually got to go back to Fluttershy's, remember? That's where Rainbow'll be looking for us after she—"
"No time!" Because this, I didn't shout no matter how loudly it was echoing through my head, this right here is everything I've always hated about other ponies with their cutie marks and their opinions and their mindless, frivolous chatter! I have a goal, you simpletons, a goal that I can only reach if you'll all fall into line! And instead, you're stumbling around, blathering this inane drivel that serves absolutely no purpose! Less than no purpose, if that were physically possible!
And as much as I knew it was wrong to be thinking this way, knew that it ran counter to everything I'd been trying to incorporate into my life since I'd shattered into more pieces than I knew how to count, it was like a dam had burst: I couldn't stop it. Struggling against the flood, though, I found that I could direct it, could grab the negative energy cascading through me and choose what to do with it. I could let it power the shrieking, raging monster flailing around inside me, or I could pump it in a positive direction. Into my teleportation spell, for instance.
A flexing of my mental attitude, and the force of my will cracked the cosmos more deftly than I'd ever cracked it before, sliding the whole group of us out into Applejack's side yard.
Four arguing voices immediately smacked my ears. The light pouring from the open door of the farmhouse showed me Applejack, Rainbow, Pinkie, and some unicorn stallion I didn't know all waving their hooves at each other beside a large wagon half filled with melon rinds, broken furniture, and trimmed-off tree branches. More trash lay heaped up behind the wagon, and the stink of it made my nose cringe.
The first clear words I could hear were from the stallion—his cutie mark seemed to be a dumpster with fire coming out the top. "Nopony takes my garbage!" he was bellowing.
"For the last time!" Rainbow's wings flapped so fast, they looked like smoke. "It's not your garbage! It's AJ's!"
"No, sirree!" Applejack stomped a hoof. "There's a reason I throw stuff away, RD, and that's 'cause I can't use it no more!"
"What?" Pinkie dove into the heap and popped back out with what might've been part of a puppet or maybe part of a wheelbarrow. "How can you possibly say you don't use this?"
"Put that back!" the stallion roared, the orange light from his horn smacking the thing out of Pinkie's hooves.
"Whoa, Dusty!" Spike was rushing forward as quickly as his stubby little legs would let him. "Let's everypony calm down a little, huh?"
"Indeed!" Rarity stepped forward more slowly, the glow of her magic tying a handkerchief around her snout. "Perhaps we could all go inside and discuss this like civilized creatures?"
"Discuss?" Applejack swung around, and her eyes went wide. "Discuss what? And what the hay are y'all doing out here in the middle of the night?"
"Ummm," Spike said, and he looked back at me. Everypony's else gaze followed—except for Fluttershy who was too busy fluttering her eyelashes at Dusty, and Dusty who was too busy staring with his mouth open at Fluttershy.
And I?
My throat had clenched so tightly, I couldn't've spoken if I'd wanted to.
I did want to, though: I just wasn't sure whether I wanted to scream and call them idiots, or burst into tears and thank them for doing this amazingly stupid thing just to help me put Applejack's mixing bowl back together.
Something I couldn't actually do, of course: wouldn't want to forget that part...
In short, I continued to stand there gaping.
Rainbow and Spike, however, both launched into completely different explanations of what was going on, Spike saying that Twilight and I needed the garbage for some research project at the castle while Rainbow was going on and on about an ancient treasure that we needed to recover before some equally-ancient monster got ahold of it. Rarity and Applejack had begun arguing about whether Applejack's trash smelled worse than Rarity's: as near as I could tell, Applejack contended that it did but Rarity insisted that all trash smelled the same. Pinkie was taking advantage of Dusty's inattention to build little sculptures out of the garbage—busts, mostly, of folks I thought I recognized from around town—and Dusty was offering Fluttershy a little bottle of eye drops. "I get dust and stuff in mine all the time on this job," he was saying.
And I?
I was either succumbing to a brain aneurysm or was having an epiphany. "Glue," I heard myself say out loud. "This is what glue is."
It didn't matter how broken or odd or disgruntled or nutty we all were. Because all of us were broken or odd or disgruntled or nutty in some way. We were all bound together by a force greater than ourselves, a commonality of craziness that transcended all differences and made us all—
Made us all what? Not ponies: Spike was just as crazy as the rest of us, after all. No, it made us all a part of the universe, a place where a pony could do the impossible just because she'd convinced herself and that big, strange, gullible universe that she could. And if we were all part of the same universe, then of course things should stay together when they're glued. In fact, I found myself wondering how things managed to fall apart when they all had this vast web of connections between them...
But that was a question for another time. Brandishing the realization I'd just arrived at from my horn, I sent a spell into the garbage heap behind Dusty's wagon that made every piece of the mixing bowl sit up like a dog at a familiar voice. Golden light crackled out from me, surrounded the pieces, and sent them rising, floating, spinning into the air. "They need to be together," I said, explaining things to the universe, "not because I say they should be, and not because all these crazy, wonderful folks think they should be—though to be clear, all of us do think they should be together. No, they need to be together because they're broken. And all us broken things have got to stick together. We've got to."
The golden light whirled the pieces faster and faster, and with a flash, they all came together, the pieces all in exactly the right place, the mixing bowl shining in the night sky above Dusty's cart. And every former crack stood outlined now with gold, the newly mended bowl showing its brokenness even as it descended, whole and repaired, to the ground in front of a wide-eyed Applejack.
"How—?" she started to ask, but a spherical flash of purple split the darkness, Twilight appearing, her mane and ears standing straight up.
"What was that?" She stared from one to another of us and ended up staring at me. "I...I've never felt magic like that before in my whole entire life!"
Pulling chairs in from a couple other rooms, we all managed to fit around the table in the Apple family kitchen: Fluttershy and Dusty were discussing the family of raccoons he'd written about in his last poem; Rainbow was waxing rhapsodic to Pinkie about the quality of what I thought was her third mug of apple cider; Twilight was turning the bowl slowly in the glow of her magic; and Spike was watching Rarity stare at it, her eyes shimmering. The bowl was worth staring at, too, the irregular criss-crosses of gold glinting from the white ceramic.
"But," Applejack said at last, her own mug of cider empty in front of her. "What's all them gold squiggles about?"
"Glue." I was still vibrating inside. "It turns out glue's not about bringing things together to make them the same. It's about bringing them together because they're different." Threading my magic through Twilight's, I gave the lines a little polish. "The gold shows each individual piece that makes up the whole."
"Uh-huh." Applejack looked over at Twilight. "It gonna be any good for mixing pie crust in anymore?"
"It should be." With one last turn, Twilight set the bowl in the center of the table. "I mean, my magic shows that it's as good as new."
I tapped the table. "Of course, there's only one way to know for certain." Feeling better than I had in years, I nudged Applejack's shoulder. "Me and Spike and Twilight'll have to come over tomorrow and help you perform some baking experiments."
"All right!" Spike bunched a fist and pumped it. "Those're my favorite kind!"
Applejack gave a low chuckle. "Reckon it's a date, then." She ran a hoof along the bowl's rim. "Sure is perty, too." Her voice wavered. "Mama woulda loved it."
My throat tightened, but Twilight nudged my shoulder. "You better be careful, Starlight," she said with a grin. "Making new magic like this can have consequences." Her wings fluffed out from her sides.
Rainbow gave a whoop and smacked her mug against the table. "The Princess of Glue! That’d be the awesomest!"
The whole group laughed, and I had to join in. "Y'know?" I told them. "It really would be."
Author's Note
Yet another subtitle:
For this one would be "Starlight Glimmer Invents Kintsugi." Because you can never have too many subtitles!
Mike
