Sunset Shimmer idly tapped her fingers against the table; the noise helping to distract her in-between worried glances at the clock on the wall.
3:40.
Pulling her eyes away from the clock, she took a sip of her coffee while looking around the shop, finding it just as empty as it had been for the last hour. Thursdays tended to be slow days at True Brew. Besides Sunset, the only other customers were a pair of older men playing a game of chess at one table and a woman who had been babbling into her phone ever since she’d walked in.
Sunset enjoyed coming here when it was like this. It was kind of like her own little refuge away from the world, someplace she could come to and be alone with her thoughts for a while, especially on cold winter days like today.
The fact that they made great coffee was a nice bonus.
Another glance towards the clock, 3:42
Reaching into her pocket, Sunset pulled out her phone and brought up her last text: Girls, there’s something important I need to tell you. Meet me at True Brew at 4. Just sending the text had been an endeavour in and of itself, but now that the time was inching closer and closer, she couldn’t shake the worry currently tying her stomach up in knots. As much as she wanted to though, she couldn’t back out now, not without having to deal with an onslaught of questions from her friends.
Reaching up, she placed her hand over the pocket on the front of her winter jacket, feeling the item within through the fabric. One way or another, she was going to get this off her chest once and for all.
The jingling of the door chime and a quick blast of cold air made Sunset glance up in time to see Fluttershy and Rarity step through the door, dusting snow off themselves as they spotted Sunset sitting alone at a booth. “Sunset!” Rarity greeted her as they walked up. “I hope we haven’t kept you waiting long.”
“Nah, I only just got here,” Sunset lied.
As Rarity sat down, she fixed Sunset with a concerned look. “We came as soon as we could. We would have been here sooner, but traffic was a nightmare to get through.”
“Your text sounded urgent,” Fluttershy added, rubbing her hands together for warmth. “Is everything alright?”
Sunset struggled to find the right words, her grip on her coffee cup tightening. “It’s… complicated,” she finally managed to say. “I’d rather wait until everyone else gets here first.”
As if on cue, the door flew open as Rainbow Dash bolted inside, Applejack and Pinkie right behind her. “Safe!” Rainbow shouted as she slid to a stop, “Told you I could beat you two slowpokes here.”
Applejack glared at Rainbow. “It don’t count if’n ya go and give yerself a head start!”
“Eh, details, details! I still won, so ha!” To top off her gloating, Rainbow stuck her tongue out at Applejack.
Before Rainbow could react, Applejack lunged at her, quickly grappling her in a tight headlock. “Why, ya little…!” Grinning, Applejack proceeded to give Dash the noogie of a lifetime, harshly grinding her knuckles against Rainbow’s skull.
“Ah! Let go, let go, let go!” Rainbow demanded, flailing helplessly to try and escape Applejack’s iron grip, to no avail.
“Girls!” Both girls froze in place at the sound of Rarity’s voice, glancing up to see her now standing up from her seat and scowling at them with her arms crossed like someone preparing to discipline two unruly children. “Honestly, there is a time and a place for such antics, and this is neither the time, nor the place! I must insist you stop horsing around this instance before you end up embarrassing us all!”
Applejack and Rainbow Dash shared a look. Then, chancing one last quick noogie, Applejack released Rainbow from her grip, the two glaring at each other before turning away with a huff and joining the others.
As the two took their seats away from one another, Rarity sighed as she turned around to address the employee behind the counter. “I do apologize for my friends little ‘disturbance’.”
The barista laughed as she worked filling out Pinkie Pie’s order. “Ah, don’t sweat it. That was the most interesting thing that’s happened all day actually.”
“Hey, Sunset!” Pinkie yelled across the shop, “You want anything?”
“I’m good, Pinkie!” Sunset replied, holding up her still steaming coffee cup.
Minutes later, Pinkie Pie came skipping up to their table with a tray of drinks in her hands. “Let’s see… vanilla latte for Rarity, two large hot chocolates for Fluttershy and Dashie, fresh coffee, hold the cream and sugar, for Applejack, and a double-shot cappuccino for me!” With everyone’s drinks served, Pinkie was finally able to sit down and take a long –and loud—sip of her drink.
Silence reigned as everyone enjoyed their beverage, the warm drinks slowing casting off the winter chill. Underneath the silence though, Sunset was frantically trying to figure out a way to approach what she’d wanted to discuss, only to end up drawing a blank. Oh, I should have planned this better!
“Well?”
The abruptness of Applejack’s question made Sunset jump in her seat, looking up to see everyone staring expectantly at her. “Well… what?”
“Mind tellin’ us why ya called us all out here? Ya said there was somethin’ important ya’ll needed to tell us, right?”
“Y-yes…” Sunset mumbled, desperately trying to hide behind her coffee cup.
“Out with it already then,” Rainbow said, her usual impatient attitude shining in all its glory. “We don’t have all day.”
“It… it’s just… I… I mean … Ugh!” Groaning, Sunset ran her free hand through her hair in frustration. “I don’t even know where to begin…”
“Take your time, dear.” Rarity reassured her with a smile. “We’re not in any rush.”
“Speak for yourself…” Rainbow muttered under her breath, jerking back in her seat as a packet of cream bounced off her forehead. “Hey!”
Readying to flick another cream packet at her, Rarity glowered at Rainbow from across the table. “Oh, hush.”
Leaning back in her seat, Sunset stared up at the ceiling as she sipped her coffee, listening to the faint whistling of the freezing winds outside. After taking a moment to sort her thoughts, she said the first thing that came to mind.
“… I was a real jerk before, wasn’t I?” When she raised her head to check their reactions, she was met with complete bewilderment from her friends.
“Is this a trick question?” Pinkie Pie asked with genuine sincerity. “Or one of those questions we’re not supposed to answer? What were those called… retroactive questions?”
“Rhetorical.” Fluttershy corrected.
“Gesundheit.”
“It wasn’t a question, Pinkie. I’m saying it because it’s true.” Sunset explained, continuing before anyone could try and refute her. “Not a day went by where I didn’t find new ways to make everyone’s lives miserable, especially with how badly I treated you girls.”
“Sunset,” Rarity cut in, reaching across the table and placing her hand gently over Sunset’s. “You’re not still blaming yourself about all that, are you? No matter what you may have done, we’ve already forgiven you for all of it.”
“Abso-lutely-tootly!” Pinkie replied as she wiped away her chocolate moustache.
“All water under the bridge far as I’m concerned,” Applejack remarked in-between sips of her coffee. “Sides, all that stuff you used to pull is in the past.”
Pulling her hand away from Rarity’s, Sunset touched the front of her jacket, again feeling the item held within. “Not all of it.” With a sigh, Sunset reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out what she had been keeping hidden from them. Reluctantly, she set it down in the centre of the table, pulling her hand back as everyone else leaned in for a closer look.
It was a small, grey flash drive, seemingly unremarkable in every way. “What’s this?” Applejack asked after a moment, still unsure of what Sunset was trying to say.
“This is how I was able to control the school for so long.” At everyone’s confused stares, she explained, “This flash drive has years worth of blackmail material on everyone at Canterlot High, students and teachers alike. If anyone got in my way, all I had to do was threaten them with this and they’d fall in line before long. It was also how I got away with all the awful stuff I did.” There was no pride in Sunset’s voice as she said this, just a cold, detached resignation.
Now everyone was staring wide-eyed at the flash drive, the seemingly innocuous object having suddenly taking on a much more sinister appearance. It was Fluttershy who ultimately asked what they were all thinking. “Is… is there stuff on us in there too?”
Sunset hung her head in shame before weakly nodding.
“Wha…what the hell!?” Rainbow shouted, staring at Sunset in utter disbelief. “Why do you even still have that?! I thought you said you got rid of it all!”
“I tried!” Sunset said in her defence. “I tried to delete all of it, but…” Despite her winter jacket, Sunset started shivering, wrapping her arms around herself. “…But I was too afraid to.”
“Afraid?” Fluttershy asked, still peeking at the flash drive out of the corner of her eyes. “Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of what would happen if I didn’t have something to protect myself with.” Sunset sunk into her seat as she recalled how she’d been ostracized after her defeat. “You saw how everyone treated me after the Fall Formal, not that they didn’t have every right to. No one was exactly lining up to forgive me, and I was afraid of what some…” The image of handwritten threats pinned to her locker popped into her head, making her shudder. “… less forgiving students might do.”
“That wasn’t goin’ to happen,” Applejack could see the fear in Sunset’s eyes clear as day, the very idea of someone hurting her friends making her clench her fists hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “Anyone wantin’ to take a swing at my friends has to go through me first. We would have had yer back, ya should have known that.”
“How?” There was an unmistaken barb of venom in Sunset’s words that caught everyone off guard. “After everything I’d done and all the people I’d hurt, how could I have possible known that any of you would actually stand up for me?” Bracing her hands against the table, Sunset stood up from her seat and fixed them all with a fiery glare. ”I can’t tell you how many nights I spent awake, wondering when you would all just turn your backs on me like everyone else, especially—“
In an instant, the fire in Sunset’s eyes died down. With her anger spent, she slumped back down into her seat, becoming strangely quiet following such an outburst. When next she spoke, the words came out more like a whisper.
“Especially… after what happened with Anon-A-Miss.”
The mere mention of that day caused a cloud of shame to blanket the table, Rarity and the others all looking away at the memory of their less than stellar treatment of Sunset, abandoning her when she had needed them the most. The knowledge that they had unknowingly confirmed Sunset’s greatest fears only made them feel even worse, if that was even possible.
“We really dropped the ball on that one, didn’t we?” Pinkie said remorsefully, her hair visibly losing some its luster and volume right before their eyes.
“Not one of our proudest moments, was it?” Rarity lamented, grimacing as she ran her hand through her hair. “I just don’t know what came over us…”
“I do.”
Everyone turned to stare at Rainbow Dash, her hands folded in front of her. Closing her eyes briefly, she took a deep breath before speaking. “You’re right about one thing: when Twilight asked us to keep an eye on you, I’d wanted jack all to do with you. Making our lives hell was one thing, but you’d also tried to kill us with a magical fireball! As you can imagine, I wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood at the time. But I’d promised Twi, so I did it anyway, if only so I could be there when you went right back to being a total pain and I could say ‘I told you so’.”
“Rainbow!” Rarity cried out, looking like she was seconds away from lunging across the table to strangle Rainbow. “I fail to see how any of this is helping—“
“But then…" Rainbow continued, ignoring Rarity's death glare. "Then I started to get to know you. I got used to seeing you at band practice, I was so happy when you offered to help with my math homework, and we all laughed when you made a total goof of yourself at Pinkie’s sleepovers. For the first time, I started seeing you less as a bully and more as an actual person, eventually even someone I could call a friend.
“And yet…” Staring at her reflection in her hot chocolate, Rainbow was surprisingly timid as she spoke. “I couldn’t shake that feeling in the back of my mind that it was all an act and that you were just waiting for us to let our guard down, no matter how much you proved otherwise. When all the stuff with Anon-A-Miss started… as much as I want to deny it, that was seemingly all the proof I needed at the time, and I wasn’t the only one.” Rainbow didn’t have to look to know that the others were in agreement with her. “What I did – what we did- was worse than anything you’d ever done period. You acted like a jerk to people you barely knew, but we turned our backs on a friend, and before Christmas no less!”
Sunset remained silent, Rainbow’s admission having rendered her speechless.
Not even caring that her hot chocolate had started to cool, Rainbow took a drink to try and soothe her suddenly dry throat, though it did nothing to relieve her of her guilt. “After the way we treated you, the fact that you chose to forgive us all says more about you than it does us. Especially now, knowing you could have easily published all that blackmail you still got on us to the school’s front page.”
“… The thought did cross my mind.” Sunset admitted after a moment, “The cynical part of me figured that if you all thought I was leaking secrets about you, I might as well do it for real, even if I knew it wouldn’t help clear my name. But I couldn’t do that, not after everything that we’d been through.” Glancing back down at the flash drive, Sunset scowled. “And yet I still couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it all either, no matter how much I wanted to.
“Which is why I called you all here, so you could take it away from me so I can’t use it ever again.” Pushing the flash drive across the table, Sunset leaned back while she waited for one of them to take it.
For several agonizingly long seconds, all anyone could do was stare at the flash drive, afraid that it might jump up and attack at any moment. “Ya sure about this?” Applejack finally asked.
“Positive. It’s not safe with me, so it’s better if one of you take it. That way I’ll know for sure that it can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
Applejack looked to the others, who seemed just as unsure as she was. Without a word spoken, the five of them eventually all nodded their heads, seemingly having come to an agreement. Nodding, Applejack reached for the drive…
… Only to push it back towards Sunset. “I’m thinkin’ it’s better if ya’ll keep this, Sunset. Safer that way.”
“Wha… what?” Sunset stuttered, sure she must have heard wrong. “But—“
“Applejack’s right,” Rarity cut in, glancing around the table. “I believe that I speak for all of us when I say that there’s not a person here who wouldn’t be tempted to use something like this for their own benefit. However…” Smiling, she turned her attention back towards the still shocked Sunset, “… there is one person here who refused to do just that, even if they had every reason to do so.”
“If you haven’t used it after all this time, then I know for certain you never will.” Fluttershy chimed in.
“For sure!” Pinkie exclaimed, her hair poofing back into shape.
“Besides…” Rainbow said, “You’re not the only person who can learn from their mistakes. No matter what happens, you’re stuck with us for the long haul.”
“Guessin’ that settles that.” Applejack said, grinning from ear to ear.
Sunset wanted to argue with them, to make them see that as long as such sensitive information remained in her hands, she would never stop being a potential danger to anyone. Yet she couldn’t form the words to do so, reluctantly taking the flash drive back. With uncertainty, she looked to Applejack and asked, “You sure?”
“Sure as sugar. Whether ya delete it or just stash it under yer mattress, it’s better off staying with ya, and, whatever ya decide to do, we’ll back ya up hundred percent. Count on it!”
With nothing else to do, Sunset tucked the drive back into her pocket. Seconds later, she heard a loud gasp come from Pinkie.
“GROUP HUG!”
Before Sunset knew what was happening, she found herself wrapped in the embrace of her friends, a warmth flowing through her and a smile spreading across her face. You girls are the best friends I could have ever asked for.
***
Later that night, Sunset lay across her bed, staring aimlessly at the ceiling as she rolled the flash drive back and forth in her hand, the conversion she'd had with her friends earlier replaying over and over in her head.
Eventually, Sunset sat up, wincing as she shook feeling back into her legs before walking over to her laptop and booting it up. The moment the desktop popped up, she plugged the flash drive in, the device responding seconds later. Rows and rows of folders stared back at her, each one marked with the name of a student or teacher at Canterlot High and filled with everything she could have possibly needed to blackmail any one of them into obeying her will.
There were even files with Principal Celestia and Vice-Principal Luna’s names on them.
With trembling hands, she highlighted all the folders and dragged them to the trash bin. Highlighting them again, a single option popped up on screen with a click of her mouse:
[Delete contents?]
The icon slowly floated across the screen until it hovered over the button marked “[Yes]”. All it would take was one click and every last dirty secret and embarrassing tidbit she had painstakingly collected over the years would be gone for good.
And yet, Sunset still found herself hesitating, doubts she had worked to keep buried starting to burrow their way to the surface. Everyone had been so quick to doubt her during the Anon-A-Miss fiasco, who was to say they wouldn’t do it again? Did it just prove that their trust in her was so shaky that she was constantly just one mistake away from having everyone turn against her again? What if this time they decided enough was enough and resorted to—
Anyone wantin’ to take a swing at my friends has to go through me first.
The fact that you chose to forgive us all says more about you than it does us.
If you haven’t used it after all this time, then I know for certain you never will.
Whatever ya decide to do, we’ll back you up hundred percent. Count on it!
All at once, any doubts she had were cast back into the shadows, bringing with it a moment of realization for Sunset. While she’d held onto the drive for her own protection, all it had done was hold her back, tempting her to go back to her old ways.
But now she knew, more than ever, that she would never go back to being the scheming, manipulative and vengeful person she’d been before, a promise she had every reason to keep.
Six reasons actually.
[Delete Contents? Yes]
