There was no Pony of Pop. There hadn’t been one for a few weeks, but another one would pop out of the shadows soon. That was just the way things went in music. That was something that, no matter how hard anypony tried, would never really change.
But then again, thinking things were the way they were was part of what got me into a lot of this trouble, right? Singing my heart out on stage and conveniently ignoring everything else. Forgetting that “Pony of Pop” wasn’t really an honor at all, just a name ponies liked to give the next big thing. Every time I heard them call me that in their articles, I would feel like I’d earned my cutie mark again and again, forgetting my purpose in Equestria only to be reminded of it more and more.
When they first started calling me that, though, I couldn’t help but realize what I had done. I never in my life thought I’d get that far, and it was like being called by the wrong name. Because if there was one thing I knew, it was that there was one pony who was supposed to have that title. She’d held it ever since I was a filly.
I’d watched her in the theatres. I was just one in a chorus of fillies basking in her inspiration. Back then, I’d thought she’d shine forever.
Years and years of competitors went by, and with every one, the record companies would keep thinking on just how to do it. To unseat Sapphire Shores, the mare who’d gone past Pony of Pop and became its queen, it’d have to take something far beyond anything they’d tried before. And a year and a half ago, in Manehattan, they’d found it.
You’d think I would’ve seen it coming, but I was just as floored as everypony else when I saw the articles. I didn’t realize how fickle this profession could be. All it’d really taken in the end was a few drops in the charts, and a new star had been born. But I kept pushing it further and further back into my head, performing so hard that maybe, someday soon, I’d forget what I’d done.
I followed her to my dream. I did everything I could to make it. I just didn’t realize that included pulling her down.
For the record companies, the answer had been simple all this time. All it really took to unseat the queen was to bring in a Countess.
****
Life after the incident was simple. It’d happened a month ago, and yet I’d only scheduled a few performances then. But, as much as I would like to say that I did what I did that day out of guilt or some other sense of responsibility, the truth was that I really was that desperate. I knew as well as anypony else what happened when the lights went down on a star.
The interviews had kept coming, but the venues had run dry. Ponies weren’t willing to take a risk on the new me quite yet, and I understood that. But as I rewatched a certain somepony’s old concert footage, I knew at least she would. It was only a matter of making sure she never knew my full story.
I’d told my new manager that I was going off to Canterlot on an excursion, and even if this crazy plan wouldn’t have worked, I probably still would’ve stayed there to take in the sights. I’d been there more than a few times before, but this time, after spending a month basically confined to my Manehattan apartment, the sky seemed even clearer. Maybe it was because the princesses who controlled it were so close, or just that everything was built so low that nothing could block it. Either way, it almost felt like an entirely new place.
Then again, that was what I was going for. Countess Coloratura wouldn’t have been amazed at all after having played so many venues. But for Rara, all of this would’ve been a mystery.
New stories had already begun to hit the newsstands, so barely anypony noticed when I trotted by without even a single sign of celebrity around me. No bodyguards, no entourage: I even strapped a guitar to my back to really complete the “new musician” image. (The whole time, I internally hoped I’d find a piano in the place I was heading towards, because my guitar-playing skills wouldn’t get me far in this town.) Finally, I managed to make it to what was possibly the most secluded area in the capital—not a castle, but something that might as well have been one. Its white material glimmered like a gemstone in the light, and when I saw the golden treble clefs lined along it, I knew that I was exactly where I needed to be.
Seeing as I’d somehow completely forgotten celebrity protocol in the past month, my first reaction was to knock. You could practically hear it reverberate all around the ivory doors, almost as if the entire house was hollow and empty. Hearing the sound bounce all around at an unnatural rate only amplified my feelings that I really, really shouldn’t have been there, or at the very least, that I should have expected the worst.
I hadn’t heard anything about Sapphire Shores’ manager or if she was anything like Svengallop, but anypony with any sense wouldn’t have given my presence any second thought. There are about five reasons a pony would show up at a celebrity’s doorstep, and from everything I’d been told up until now, none of them were good. Even in a place with only a gold-plated and easily jumpable fence for security, ponies didn’t exactly go door to door selling celebrities Filly Scout cookies.
Not even an off-the-cuff remark about helping ponies get on their hooves in this business could change that. You could sell anypony anything they wanted with a wink and a smile; that’s what ponies like Svengallop had always said. Whether or not you actually did it was something that’d come at the end of the night, when the managers were gone. Were you really genuine when the lights were down, or were their carefully rehearsed ideas still trapped in your head?
I stretched out my hooves, trying to make sure they could trot as fast as they could before the cameras could frame it as a stalker on the premises. Or worse, a potential sabotage by a rival performer in a paper-thin disguise. Just as I was about to take off, though, I heard something creak in the distance.
AJ had always called me a fraidy-pony at camp as I hid behind her on night hikes. As I grew as a performer, learned some of the tricks show business used to both impress and scare ponies, I thought I’d gotten over that. But somehow, that silly little creak just made it all come back. I had no idea what kind of monster I thought was going to creep out of there, but all I could feel was my legs galloping as fast as they could just before somepony pinned my tail.
I was done for.
Eventually, I turned my head to face whatever was keeping me from moving. Sure enough, it wasn’t quite the ghost I was picturing, but I could still see some sort of glow coming from her clothes.
“You almost dropped your guitar there, hon,” the other pony replied, nodding towards a black case on the ground. “Looks like a mighty fine model, too. Thank the princesses above I caught it in time!”
I was really done for. Here I was, out on my own with a ridiculous plan that should never have been encouraged or attempted in the first place, and I’d already been caught on a famous pony’s property. My old management team would’ve blown a gasket if they’d found out. “These sorts of pranks are outside your reputation,” they would’ve said then and there. “You’re better than this.”
“I really am sorry,” I said in a low voice, not wanting to draw any attention that hadn’t already been drawn. “I—just—well…there really isn’t a good way to explain this, is there?”
I’d lifted my hoof to my neck, trying to take the whole bashful routine as far as it would go. The plan was basically dead at this point, and the sooner I could get help elsewhere, the better. Just then, though, Sapphire stretched her arm across my back.
“There’s no need to,” she spoke. “Haven’t I always said fellow musicians are always welcome here? Or at least, that’s what I’m assuming from the guitar and all.”
“Piano’s actually my main instrument,” I answered, “but yeah. I was supposed to do a release in a few months, but my manager was the one with the recording studio, and—“
Sapphire simply shook her head as if she’d heard it all before, and I could feel my voice dropping.
“So indie artists like you still have to put up with that stuff? And here I always thought going off the grid meant getting away from that drama.”
I was about to open my mouth to correct her, but then I realized that somehow, without even trying, the plan was still going along. At this point, I didn’t even need to act for her not to recognize me. For somepony like her, my inexperience could probably be smelled from a mile away, and she could fill in the gaps from there.
“You had that issue, too?” I asked, pushing myself not to correct her any further about her other statement. From the way her head suddenly went towards the ground, the one time I’d ever seen it not held high, I already feared the answer.
“Not personally,” she responded, already easing back into herself if only to keep the show going for the fan in front of her. “But I know how it goes. Years ago, some of my biggest competitors dropped straight off the charts, all because the pressure got to them. That’s what happens when managers stop seeing friends and start seeing bits in their eyes.”
I stared into her eyes, trying to read at least some sign of hostility, recognition. Even annoyance at having to hear this. Ponies of Pop, we aren’t exactly trained to pity our competition or even acknowledge them. They tell us we’ll burn out in a few years, so we’d always supposed ponies like Sapphire Shores stayed that long because they incinerated everypony that could challenge them. But those rules didn’t apply anymore, not after I’d seen the light.
And even if they did, they never applied to her.
Inside her eyes, all I could see was pure concern. Rebellion against everything that was supposed to get ponies ahead in music. An offer of blind friendship.
“How long do you need the studio?” she asked.
“However long it takes,” I answered with a shrug. “You can’t rush the creative juices.”
“As long as you let me cut in now and again, I’m up for it. Up for you staying here, too, even.”
Maybe I hadn’t been shown enough kindness over the past year or so, because every last part of it still surprised me. Until I realized who she was giving it to.
To the indie artist Rara, I had to remind myself. To the lie. Not to the enemy who dethroned her.
****
Over the days I spent with Sapphire, I figured she had to have seen my cutie mark at least once. Or, at least, she had to have noticed the effort I’d taken to hide it as much as I could. But even then, she didn’t say a word that would indicate that she’d discovered my identity.
She rushed off to events every now and then, and left the studio to me. Considering that she might have recognized what my voice would sound like without all those unicorn spells, that was for the better, too. Even though I knew I should probably be at those galas too, part of me didn’t even care. It was almost like I’d gone so much into convincing Sapphire that I was new to the business that I felt renewed myself. Just left to my music, not having to worry about paparazzi seeing me, playfully trotting away when they came to her house. Outrunning everything for once.
It was a sleepy routine, almost like I was living with my parents again. We’d get up at roughly the same time, take turns brainstorming our music. Still, I’d only managed to get a few songs out by Thursday afternoon.
That day, Sapphire said she’d found me with my head dangerously close to the piano keys, my hooves barely tapping at the instrument. Even though every magazine in Equestria said she was in a slump, she’d still managed to get an interview with one of the greats, and she’d been out doing that and other promotions all day.
“How long have you been up to this, Rara?” she asked, her voice already exasperated seconds after seeing me. “Have you been doing it since I took off?”
“Yeah,” I replied with a shrug. “I guess I just wanted to make full use of your resources. But I’ve made it to the final chorus, at least.”
With a delicate motion, I picked up the sheet I’d spent all afternoon composing. Even the notes weren’t quite in perfect rows; the meaning was decipherable even if it looked like chicken scratch from a distance. Right next to it was the lyrics sheet, which I’d started last night and finished this morning.
“What is this, your third song this week?” she muttered, shaking her head. “Three songs in four days. I don’t know if I should be impressed or just tell you to slow it the hay down.”
She hid it underneath a smirk, but I could still see the worry watering through her eyes. Throughout my visit with her, she’d been nothing but smiles for the most part, taking pains to make me feel welcome. But every once in a while, as she watched me, faces like this would come out.
“That won’t do,” I finally answered. “The sooner I can get the album out and recorded, the better. I don’t want to keep my fans waiting, and, well…I don’t want to burden you too much.”
“You really are serious about this, aren’t you?”
She looked distantly towards the piano, which I gratefully had not yet slammed my head on.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” My voice rang out with the same sort of defensiveness I’d had when I’d confronted Applejack about Svengallop, before I really knew anything. “Singing’s the main thing I’ve got, and if I stay still for long, somepony’s going to take advantage of the opportunity.”
Sapphire just kept looking at the piano, analyzing the keys, seeing if it was really worth it.
“So things have gotten that competitive in the indie stage too, huh?”
My eyes suddenly widened, and for a moment, I almost forgot the lie. I nodded as fast as I could, hoping she wouldn’t take the time to do her research.
“That’s just too bad, then,” she continued. “I never have seen why all us singers can’t just be friends, after all. Seems like every time somepony new shows up to the party, everypony wants them to be our rivals.”
Everything in my spirit wanted to believe her, but I just couldn’t. The things ponies said about me back then, they were about the pony I pretended to be. Everything she said then, I thought that was no different.
I’d come here to get away from all the pretending. But all this time, I was still wearing a mask. It looked like me, sounded like me, but I still wasn’t showing her everything I had been.
But, listening to her talk, maybe I could.
Even then, I was too afraid to, though. In the days that followed, I didn’t even have music to connect myself to her. She’d made a point of using them to give me advice, since she told me there was no way I could go back there the way I was now.
“You’ve been hurt by your manager, and I get that,” she started, “but still, you need serious help. Working on albums left and right like that doesn’t do a singer or a song any good. It doesn’t matter how much you want the spotlight if you can’t polish them to shine as much as they can shine. And, I hate to tell this to you, but right now, you aren’t in much condition to shine yourself.”
Sapphire had moved onto other topics, but that one still got to me, and by the time the day was over, I knew what I needed to do.
“What’s keeping me from shining, then?” I asked. “Back then, I didn’t shine because I didn’t show my true self. But now I’m not going anywhere because I am.”
She shook her head just about as far as it could go, and I prepared for yet another lecture.
“It’s not because you’re staying true to yourself,” she replied. “It’s because you’ve forgotten why you’re doing this. I don’t know what they did to you back there, but all this talk about staying popular, staying relevant…it’s almost like you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself on stage. To own it in a way that only you can!”
“And how exactly do you suggest I do that?”
All she had to do was push a button, and I was already back to the pony who cowered before creaking doors. Back when she’d let me into that house, I honestly thought I was safe. But I didn’t even know that the scariest thing lay inside it.
Beams of magic flashed over our heads, forming themselves into a mosaic of rectangles. The spell went black for a moment, but I recognized what it was going to show right from the first note. Any decent musician could do the same when her song came on.
It was my Ponyville performance, something I’d always figured nopony had bothered to record. I tried to find ways through it, figuring that if anything, I was only referred to by my real name in that show. The stage name never came up, so hopefully she wouldn’t see.
The song finished playing, and the magic exploded in a heartbeat.
“I’d suggest being more like that pony, Countess Coloratura,” she said, her tone almost indecipherable.
I was really, really done for. My mind went straight into autopilot, trying to figure out the best way to defuse this situation.
“I didn’t want to lie to you.”
Handling a smaller part of the situation instead of addressing the bigger question. That’s another thing Ponies of Pop are taught to do, you see. Whenever we get too controversial, baiting and switching is our way of surviving. It isn’t a question of what’s right so much as it is what’s in the manual.
“I was too scared to tell you.”
Letting emotions run free at just the right moment. Letting the other pony know how you feel in hopes that maybe, forgiveness will come easier to them. A lot of famous ponies use this to manipulate others. This time, that was the last thing on my mind.
“I don’t want to fight you.”
The emotional angle backfired. Instead, I just sent myself into more tears, fearing what was to come. I’d finally made a friend in the music business, and now, I could see it crumbling away.
Until it came crumbling back.
“You never had to,” Sapphire finally answered, curling her hooves around me. I’d found from the last week or so that hugging tended to be the first weapon in her arsenal.
I found that I didn’t squirm away near as much as I thought I would have. I actually let her wipe the tears off my face, even knowing that this could be an act.
No, I finally realized. It isn’t, because Sapphire Shores never went by those rules. Not by any of them, and not even once.
“How long have you known?” I wondered.
“Since you came over here,” she replied. “I figured that, if you didn’t want to tell me, there wasn’t a reason to force it out of you. I just didn’t know what you’d want out of it ‘til I looked up your manager. He’s gotten in pretty big with your recording company, hasn’t he?”
I only nodded, still not wanting to go further into it.
“Well, someday, they’ll come to their senses about hiring him. But for now, let me say this: why on Equestria did you honestly believe anything those tabloids said? About us being rivals and all that?”
“It seemed logical,” I answered. “I took your spot, remember? From everything they’d always told me, you’d seem like the first pony who’d want to keep me from making a comeback.”
She diverted her eyes from me for a little while, her little nervous tic. Accepting as she was, something was still wrong.
“I’ll admit, I was like that too, for a while,” Sapphire replied. “I won’t lie: I was bitter as all Tartarus when you got that number one hit. I was coming up with ways to beat you and everything. But the more I saw you being billed as some sort of rival to me, the more I saw what everypony else was trying to do. I’d never had a rival before, and they wanted me to have one. And I am never one to give into anything those tabloids tell me to do.”
She let go of me for a slight second to shrug before latching onto me once more.
“That’s how I’ve stayed in the biz for so long, I guess.”
“Well, I just want to set the record straight and apologize,” I finally said. “No matter what my record company will tell you, I never sang so I could beat you. It was so I could shine like the pony I always heard on the radio.”
With a blush, I whispered, “I even got my cutie mark trying to sing one of your songs.”
“Really now?”
“School talent show. I got honorable mention, though.”
I’d stopped expecting her to react violently to my story. Instead, she just smiled at me as if she was watching my filly self again, probably imagining me trying to hit the impossibly high notes back then.
“Good on you,” she replied. “I bet you wowed them every bit as much as you did in Ponyville back there. And that’s the Rara I want to see.”
“But what’s changed?” I questioned. “I haven’t changed my look since then, or anything else. Why can’t I get back to that?”
“’Cause you’re thinking too hard,” Sapphire explained, pointing to her head as she did so. “Let me ask you something: you know the first thing that came to my mind when I saw that performance, other than ‘covering up that black-and-blue mane with a wig that clashes with your fur tone is a crime against ponykind’?”
When I didn’t respond, she said, “I thought ‘that pony’s finally having fun up there.’ Do everything by the book long enough, and you can forget about that. Trust me, it showed in your choreography big time.”
“That much, huh?”
Somehow, everything was finally starting to register with me. I’d always thought I could just go back to living my old life after that Ponyville concert and act like nothing had changed. The truth is, though, that if you dismantle one of Svengallop’s little rules, all of them fall down.
The only question was, though, how would I get myself, a pony who’d only made it as far as she had in music with rules like that, to stop living by them.
“For a start,” Sapphire answered when I asked her that same question, “maybe we really should think about extending your stay.”
I shook my head about as fast as I could after hearing that, still thinking about formality even after the distance melted between us.
“I couldn’t. I’d only get in your way.”
“Not necessarily,” she spoke. “I know a way for you to relax, get a new album in, and get back on the charts.”
She probably already knew what my response was going to be. Any way to get back on stage, I’d pursue like crazy, especially with the inspiration she’d given me all along. Still, I expected something drastically impossible.
What I got was almost too good to be true.
“I’ve been looking for somepony to do an album with me. From what I’ve seen so far, I think I might have found the right pony to back me up. After all, if they like us as rivals so much, who’s to say they won’t like us more as a duet?”
The old me would’ve shown skepticism. She wouldn’t have let anypony else share the spotlight, not because she believed it, but because that was the way things had always been. But now that there was a new way, there was only one response I could have.
To realize that my idol was giving me the chance I’d fought for all my life. That maybe, just maybe, we could make a world where there could be two Ponies of Pop.
My squeal of delight already told my answer long before I could even say anything.
“I can tell you it won’t be easy, though,” she warned. “Getting a pony who’s way too serious about singing to ease up and have some fun isn’t my usual forte. But if it means both of us shining brighter than before, well…”
I already knew her answer, too. Looking into my eyes, I knew she had a plan. And for once, I wasn’t scared.
A former countess. A glittering sapphire. Finally singing together, more than the sum of their parts. The next album wouldn’t be under either of our names. Rather, it would be under the band name, the new name we made together.
We would be Lady Lazuli.
Author's Note
Ceci n'est pas un shipfic. But it could be one through potential sequels. Assuming Sapphire was a teen idol when she started out and Rara got into it in her early 20s or so, the age gap wouldn't be that wide, either.
This was originally written to commemorate "The Mane Attraction's" first anniversary on November 21, but this story took a bit longer to linger. 
