Starlight's Weekend Off

After Starlight took her last bite of their main course, she poured a third glass of wine from one of the Crystal Winery's finest bottles.

"I think I have to not take as much nutritional advice from Twilight. Because quesadillas are delicious." She told Sunburst, whom sat across from her.

"Especially when their prettied up for fine dining." Sunburst replied, chuckling, also refilling his glass, taking a sip.

"Listen, Starlight... There's been something I've been meaning to ask you, I just didn't know the right time to bring it up." Sunburst said, running a hoof around the rim of his glass.

"You can ask me anything, Sunburst."

Sunburst cleared his throat, figuring the right words in his mind, because he was fairly certain it was a touchy subject.

"Well... You were there when I got my cutie mark. It was the last we saw of each other for years. I guess I'm just wondering... What happened when you got yours?"

Starlight's expression turned sorrowful as she averted her gaze to her plate of crumbs.

"I'm sorry, I really don't mean to pry..."

"No no, it's alright." Starlight began, not wanting him to think he'd offended her. "With how close we've become, there's nothing wrong with being as curious as you are, and I'd want to know too if I were you. It's just... There's no preparing you for what I had become."

"You're here now. You are who you are now." Sunburst encouraged her, reminding her that she'd be telling a portion of her story that had long since ended.

"Yes, here I am now, a mare one thousand times better than I used to be. Still..."

'It was about a year after you left. I woke up one morning and it was practicing spells one afternoon and it was there. I didn't know what it meant and I didn't care.'

The filly heliotrope unicorn trotted into her bedroom. She had the house to herself, as she did most of the time due to the hours her dad worked. Her breathing was heavy as she ran into her room and slammed the door, looking down at her flank, which was now adorned with a purple and white star, with two glimmering streams coming off of it.

A cutie mark. What, was it her turn to leave home now too? It's not like she had anyone to say goodbye to.

She tried to grab at it with her magic, but all she managed to do was knock herself against the closed door. Getting up into a sitting position, she clawed at her flank, seeing if she could rub it off of her coat, but manged to do nothing of the sort.

What... What would her dad think when he saw it? Would he send her away so some magic school now too?

No. No, she wasn't ready to leave. She walked over to her dresser, and took out her makeup kit. She dug around furiously, finding the color that matched her coat perfectly, took the brush, and covered the mark on both sides.

'I was able to keep my mark hidden for another year, while I continued studying magic. From then on, I started to focus on the magic behind the cutie mark. Very little research had been done on it, even though it was apparently a staple of our society. About two years after that, I started to hear my dad talk with his friends how it was strange that I hadn't gotten mine yet, I knew I didn't have long...

The nearly-teenage Starlight sat at her desk, magically gripping a piece of parchment and a pair of scissors. More and more she had heard Hoofington residents talk about how she rarely ventured outside, and how she hadn't gotten her mark yet. So if she was to keep up this charade until she finished school, it was going to need one more step.

Having made the proper measurements and marks on the parchment sheet, she cut out a small square section that could be easily pressed against her flank, then out of that piece, cut out two identical rectangle pieces, creating a stencil of an equals sign. She touched up her "blank" spot, then took the black powder, and applied it using the stencil.

"Perfect." She said, looking at it in the mirror.

She returned to her desk, and looked down at a titled, but otherwise blank, piece of parchment.

Equality: A Manifesto

"I graduated from school at 15, and didn't wait at all to skip town. I traveled to libraries all over; Canterlot, Las Pegasus, Manehattan, Fillydelphia... Anywhere I could find more bits of information on the magic of the cutie marks. Then, I set stakes down in the mountain valley. My village... I had convinced myself that I could cut out my own little corner of Equestria, free from one of the staples of our species. If these ponies gave up their cutie marks, then they wouldn't leave me. Over the years, more and more ponies came, for all kinds of reasons. I was harsh... If they set one hoof out of line, I isolated them for days at a time. My philosophy demanded complete uniformity... Except it wasn't. There was one unequal; me. My cottage was center, everypony else's was parallel. Earths couldn't do anything beyond the most basic farming and cooking, pegasi couldn't get more than twenty feet off the ground, and unicorns only had the most base form of telekinesis. That was it. It was the most unexceptional village in Equestria. That's what my life was like for years. Then... Then Twilight and her friends came."

Sunburst continued to listen silently.

"All it took was two days. Two days to upend everything I had spent years building. They revealed my real cutie mark, and the entire village rebelled. For the second time, cutie marks had stripped me bare and left me with nothing. After that I spent months plotting my revenge. I watched Twilight from afar, figuring out how to take everything from her as she took everything from me. When everything was ready, I met her in her castle, and I used a modified ancient spell of Star Swirl to send us back in time. My plan was foolproof. No matter what she did, it always returned us to the same point. After enough tries, she dragged me back with her, to show me how much worse the alternate timelines were getting. In the end, we were evenly matched, and the only thing I could do was destroy the scroll to make it permanent. And I almost did... But I couldn't get the image of that wasteland out of my head. I decided to give her a chance. She had to have been doing something right. She had to have something that I was missing." Her voice started to quiver as tears ran down her cheeks.

"Friendship." Sunburst said. Starlight didn't look up, nodding.

"She had every right to put me in chains and imprison me for the rest of my life. But she didn't. She took me in as a student. One of the first things we did was return to the village I had founded. I was beside myself. I couldn't believe that they had stayed. But I suppose they were right; they came to me because they felt they were missing something, and they found it in each other. More shocking still... They forgave me. I had ruined their lives... Corrupted and twisted their spirits... And they forgave me." Starlight's voice shook more.

"Even more than that, they invited me to their Sunset Festival a few months later. They asked me about my studies with Princess Twilight, and how long I'd be staying... They actually wanted my input and feedback on their celebration. Even with how uncomfortable I was, it was a good thing they did because it was the only thing that saved me from the Changeling invasion. And then you experienced firsthoof the amazing and beautiful dinner they put together for us..."

Starlight finally looked up to see Sunburst, with tears running down his cheeks.

"What are you crying for? This isn't your fault." She asked him, with a hint of frustration in her quivering voice.

"I told you during our first weekend together, part of it is. I forgot all about you, my oldest and best friend. All in the name of going to Celestia's school and being the most unexceptional student there."

Starlight sniffled, wiping her eyes, only for more tears to replace them.

"You said they forgave you." Sunburst continued. "I don't think they would have done that just because you said you were sorry; not with what you just told me. I think while they probably didn't believe what you did to them was justified, they did sympathize with what happened to you after I left. Your parents were hardly ever there. I was all you had, and I was too young to realize that. They forgave you... But have you forgiven yourself?" Sunburst asked.

The teary-eyed Starlight looked at Sunburst, for a moment, and shook her head.

"No. It's hard because there's nothing I can do to make up for what I took away from them. I still have the occasional nightmare. What I did to them is going to haunt me for a very long time. Probably for the rest of my life."

"And how I abandoned you is going to haunt me, too," Sunburst began, getting up from his seat and walking over to Starlight's chair, sitting down on the floor next to her. "Seeing your face when you saw my kite, and when you saw the Empire from 500 feet up... I saw such a filly-like bliss in your eyes. I can't make-up for the time I spent away from you, but I can spend the rest of my life seeing that joy again and again and again... Moving forward as best we can and letting our pasts bother us as little as possible is the best anypony could hope for the two of us, wouldn't you say?"

Starlight looked up from the table over to his eyes, and threw her hooves around him as she tried to sniffle the last of her tears away. She broke the embrace, and looked into his teary eyes.

"I'd say... That we go and see what Cadance's pearls have in store."