Compatī

It was still early morning when I left Copper’s house. It took all the strength in the world to pull myself from her hooves, as entwined as we were. But the world marched on, and I had obligations.

We shared a few quick words over coffee—where we were and where we were going. Copper wore a morose but stalwart smile. She knew what we did was wrong, but I knew in my heart she couldn’t keep turning a blind eye to her problems. It wasn’t fair to herself, least of all Star Chaser.

Speaking of, Star Chaser wasn’t there when we woke up. Probably left sometime during the night. I couldn’t blame her, and I felt no shortage of guilt for my part in it. I kept telling myself it was for the best, that a relationship built on imitation and chasing past regrets would only end up worse in the long run.

We’d move forward, one way or another. I had a job to do, and Copper had an apology to make. And it was on that melancholic note that I headed back to Twilight’s castle.

I thanked the weather pegasi for the cool, dreary overcast and the rain we got sometime last night. It made for streets slick with sodden leaves and hardly another soul to speak of, affording me time to think.

I’d been doing that a lot lately. Thinking. About myself, about Luna. About how this all fit together to form the tangled mess that was my life right now.

Copper got me on that topic yesterday, and I couldn’t unstick it from my mind: And now you’re helping her.

Wildly enough, I was. But now that I had time to let that thought settle in, it took me by the hand and led me down the back alleys of my mind that I hesitated treading.

Luna was smarter than even she gave herself credit for, like Celestia said. Wise. I shuddered. Powerful. I was lucky that dream injuries didn’t carry over to the real world, unless I were to count my pride.

But I needed that fight. The same way I needed a lot of things that I didn’t realize at the time. My life was a ball of twine that needed unraveling so that I could properly respool it. I had at least that much to thank Luna for.

I didn’t dream last night, either, and I woke up more refreshed than I had in years. I wanted to think she finally gave me the space I needed, or was at least finally able to.

Regardless, I made it to Twilight’s castle without incident, and my head was already back in the trenches by the time I clicked the portal room door shut behind me.

It was… strangely quiet. Usually, someone was up doing something by now, whether that be drawing up a new chalk circle or loudly reiterating one of the theories behind dream diving to make sure she wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t going to say I was referring to Twilight, but I was totally referring to Twilight.

But no, the portal room was indeed empty after a quick sweep. I did, however, find a little note waiting for me on the table.

Sunset, if you make it back in the morning, meet me in the kitchen.
—Twilight

Okay.

I briefly imagined making waffles with Twilight, and if that wasn’t the strangest yet most normal thought I’d had in the last week, I didn’t know what was.

What did that word even mean? Normal. My life had never been what most considered normal. But if abnormality was what I’d lived all my life, then wasn’t that technically my normal?

I let my brain do its thing as I found my way to the kitchen. It didn’t take long with the scent of vanilla and sugar practically grabbing me by the nostrils and floating me there.

A dull hum met me just outside the door, and when I stepped inside, the hum grew into the loud whir of an automatic mixing bowl. Someone was making cupcakes.

And one hell of a mess: cake batter mounding from a cupcake tray by the sink, flour avalanching across the island counter from an overturned mixing bowl, a streak of canola oil along the floor like an oil slick left by a secret agent on the run from the feds. A catastrophe of this magnitude could only be the work of one pers—

Before I could finish that thought, something picked me up from behind and squeezed me tight around the barrel. I felt like a balloon ready to pop at both ends.

“Sunset!” a very Pinkie Pie voice said, explaining just about everything in the inexplicable way Pinkie’s mere presence did.

“Hey, Pinkie,” I said as soon as she let me out of her bear hug. I tried rubbing the soreness from my ribs. “It’s nice to see you.”

A less mentally preoccupied me would have been content with that, but an idle curiosity got to me: “A-are you my Pinkie Pie or Twilight’s Pinkie Pie?”

Pinkie snorted. “Oh, silly Sunset. I don’t belong to anypony.”

Err. I should have seen that interpretation before I said it.

“I mean, are you this world’s Pinkie Pie, or my world’s Pinkie Pie?”

She zipped over to the counter and poured flour into a bowl for another batch. “Well, you came from this world, so this is technically your world, too. So answering that wouldn’t answer the question, silly.”

I put my hoof to my forehead. Mentally preoccupied or not, I didn’t need this kind of brain bending this early in the morning.

“You know what? It’s not important. Hi, Pinkie, it’s nice to see you.”

She took that as a good enough reason to give me another rib-crushing hug. Before I could process a life of breathing like this, she was at the counter cracking an egg into the bowl. And then she was at the island mixing something in another bowl.

I smiled. It really didn’t matter which world I was in. My friends were my friends, no matter the form they took.

“Hey, Sunset,” came Twilight’s voice from behind me. She stepped up beside me and nuzzled me on the cheek. She then threw a hoof over my shoulder and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, between you and me, Pinkie once told me she traded places with her human counterpart for a day, and since then, I honestly couldn’t tell you which one’s which.”

“They make the best bear claws over there!” Pinkie shouted from across the room.

Twilight went pale, and I laughed. One way or another, any Pinkie was the real Pinkie. Not thinking too hard about it tended to be the best choice, but it didn’t seem Twilight was always capable of that.

“So what are you guys making?” I asked, if only to get Twilight’s brain hamster back on its wheel.

She shook her head. “We’re maki—”

“We’re making cupcakes!” Pinkie Pie said, popping up from behind and yanking us into a hug. She whisper-hissed in my ear: “The secret ingredient is extra cake.”

And she was off to the races again, ingredients flying and whisks a-whisking at a million miles an hour.

I smirked, my brain finally attuning itself to Pinkie’s wavelength. Was that to mean she added already-baked cake to her cupcakes? I thought about egging her on with questions, but it might be too early in the morning for Twilight to handle.

She was still waking up. Had the last remnants of that bleary-eyed look about her, like this baking session was more Pinkie’s idea. The time, at least, if not the baking itself—a large mug of coffee sat on the nearby counter, with a little pink bubble shield overtop it to ward off any errant globs of cupcake batter.

Even without her cutie mark painted on the side, I knew it belonged to Twilight. Pinkie didn’t drink coffee. God help us all if she did.

Twilight took the moment to levitate it over and savor a sip. I could tell by its light-brown color there was probably more creamer than coffee in there. How it had any effect on her was beyond me. Might as well just drink ice water at that point.

“So,” I said. “It’s weird seeing you without your face buried in some book in the portal room. What gives?”

Twilight sighed. There was a certain weight to her breath, as if preparing herself for something.

“Before I say anything else, I want to make sure you know that everything we’ve talked about has stayed between us, and it’ll stay that way unless you decide otherwise. But I’ve had my own conversations with my friends last night while you were away, and they think I need to relax.” She nodded toward Pinkie doing her thing all over the kitchen. “This is me relaxing.”

“Or the closest thing you’ll get to it,” I said. I knew her well enough to know the inner Twilight was pulling her mane out wanting to get back to work. Maybe adding my two cents to the ring would get her to actually settle down. Again, the last thing I wanted was for her to come out of this worse for wear on my account. That included mentally as well as physically. “But it’s a nice change of pace.”

“It is, honestly. Rainbow Dash was here earlier,” she added. “But she left to get started on the warm front that’s supposed to be moving through this afternoon.”

“Nope!” came Rainbow Dash’s voice from a chandelier above us. “Still here!”

“Rainbow Dash,” Twilight said impatiently. “Why are you napping on my kitchen chandelier?”

Rainbow got up and stretched her wings. “Uh, duh. Because you and Pinkie were baking cupcakes. And there’s no way I was going to miss out on free cupcakes.”

“Why is there a chandelier in your kitchen?” I asked, my brain finally wrapping itself around the oddity.

“Ask the Tree of Harmony,” Twilight said flatly. Given what little I’d heard about the castle and how it got here, I let that curiosity lie.

Exactly as I would have expected Rainbow Dash from my world had she a pair of wings, this one made a show of somersaulting off the chandelier and landing dramatically not a foot from me. Were it any other pony, I would have flinched, but that would imply Rainbow wasn’t one of the few who could put her money where her mouth was. Most of the time, anyway.

“Damn, Twilight,” Rainbow said, looking me up and down. “No wonder you keep sneaking off to that human world.”

As offended as any woman in my shoes had the right to be, I could only smirk at that. Some of Copper must have rubbed off on me last night.

“I-I’m pretty sure it’s not like that,” I said.

Twilight gawked at me like I had kicked her dog. “‘Pretty sure’!? It’s not like that.”

Rainbow Dash blew a raspberry at her. “Yeah, whatever.” To me: “And you definitely got yourself a catch here,” she added, jabbing a hoof Twilight’s way. If the whole “steam spewing out someone’s ears” gag were a real thing like in cartoons, it’d definitely be happening to Twilight right now.

It wasn’t much of a secret within our friend group in the human world that Princess Twilight was a closet lesbian, whether she herself knew it or not. Didn’t stop it from being obvious, the way she acted around us. The subtle physical contact, the rapt attention, the need to please. Those weren’t “Princess of Friendship” traits so much as “I like you but I don’t know how to say it” traits. Funny how well they overlapped.

Sometimes she was so casually platonic, I often forgot until something like this happened, specifically Rainbow Dash trying to bait it out of her. She had a few bets going with Applejack on the matter, last I heard from Starlight.

“Do I now?” I said to Rainbow Dash, deciding to play along. “And what makes you say that?”

“Have you looked at her lately?” She waggled her eyebrows at me.

I have, and I did again just now for effect. Twilight looked ready to blast Rainbow Dash to the moon.

I threw her a bone: “Is this one of those ‘takes one to know one’ kind of moments?”

“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know?” She ribbed me and winked. “Buuut I can see where this is going, and even Pinkie’s cupcakes aren’t worth Twilight going all Twilight on me. Later!”

And with that, she was out the window quick as a flash. Not sure if it was my ears playing tricks on me, but I swore I heard her laughing hysterically in the distance.

“Rainbow! You get back here!” Twilight looked ready to take off after her, but if one universal law held true between worlds, it was that no one beat Rainbow Dash in a race.

“So that was something,” I said.

“She thinks it’s so funny,” Twilight said. “Oh, I could just. Ugh!” She turned her pouty lip toward me and oh god it was just too precious seeing her like that. “You’re pretty laid back about her looking you over like that.”

I shrugged. “I’ve had my fair share of objectification.”

As soon as those words left my lips, I wanted to reach out and snatch them up. It killed what little playful mood we had going on, and I felt the sudden urge to run back to the guest bedroom and hide forever.

Twilight coughed into her hoof. “So, uh…”

“Y-Yeah…” I didn’t know how to smooth that one over, either.

For what it was worth, Twilight found a smile somewhere in that head of hers and took a seat, careful to avoid any errant splotches of cupcake batter.

“So how’d meeting your, uh… was it a friend you went to see?” she asked. The words came out stiffly, and the embarrassed look on her face had me wondering exactly what theories ran through her head. Whatever her assumptions were, they probably weren’t far off.

Yeah, so I got to see my best friend for the first time in forever that I apparently mentally scarred because she was super in love with me the whole time, and then I found out that I was effectively destroying what little of a life she had scraped together by storming back into it. Oh yeah, and then we almost fucked.

“Yeah,” I said. “A friend. It went about as well as I could have hoped.” I left it at that, and she knew not to press.

She took another sip of coffee. The smell had me wanting some for myself, except maybe not with as much creamer.

“Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for,” she said after a while.

With the conversation effectively stalled, I racked my brain for a way to get it rolling again. I didn’t want to lose this bit we had going. To that end, I pressed my side against Twilight, and she leaned into it. I just… I needed that contact right now.

I wanted to ask her about the Tantabus thing in her dream. What was it? Where did it come from? How long had she had it? It was all so strange and confusing and just… not the sort of complication we needed at the moment.

Pinkie Pie appeared out of nowhere and gave me another bear hug. “I know a hug when it’s needed. Now, how about those cupcakes?”

I smiled. Cupcakes sounded good.

We spent the next hour or so baking cupcakes. So many cupcakes. Chocolate chip, vanilla swirl, cotton candy, banana split, and a million other flavors I both never knew existed nor really believed should exist in cupcake form. By the time we were done, I didn’t want to see another cupcake ever again.

But I had fun. A small but ever-present smile lingered on my face that I couldn’t get rid of if I tried. Twilight had one, too, and Pinkie Pie’s was a given. Even Spike and Starlight poked their heads in to say hi and to steal a tray or three. Also, Spike had wings now. Who knew?

Cupcakes turned into library time. Starlight joined us with the last of her cupcake contraband while Pinkie Pie busied herself with a pop-up book about a prince saving his kingdom from an evil dragon. She giggled and made growling noises whenever the dragon reared up from the pages.

Starlight read aloud alongside her, because it seemed Pinkie’s lack of actual reading and focus on the pictures had her ready to pull her mane out. I liked to think she was trying to give Twilight and me some time away from Pinkie’s overenthusiasm, but that was a tall order on the best of days.

Twilight had her muzzle buried in a textbook about astrophysics. Something about how Luna once told her how certain stars move differently based on where they were in the sky got her interested. Such a curiosity would have gotten me reading over her shoulder were it not for her mention of Luna.

Instead, I picked a romance novel at random, earning a raised eyebrow from Twilight. I needed “some light reading to get my mind off things,” which only made her eyebrow go higher. Apparently, The Rose Parade was a romanti-tragedy that was “literally the furthest thing from ‘light reading’” that I’d find in her library. I settled in with it anyway.

It started simple. Good guy stallion, beautiful redheaded mare—it was always beautiful redheads in these types of stories, for some reason. Foreboding undercurrents and suspense abounded. For all I knew, it might have been the best story I would ever read. To be honest, though, I just couldn’t get into it.

Too many questions whirled in my brain, and none of them about whether or not The Cobalt Cavalier would get the mare or not, or if they’d escape the castle before the evil baron let the monster loose. I found myself glancing Twilight’s way more often than at the pages between my hooves, but what I had to ask felt too sensitive for other ears, especially a pony like Pinkie.

It took time, but eventually Pinkie got bored and told us goodnight and to not let the bedbugs bite and a whole slew of other silly ditties I’d have in my head for god knew how long. Starlight helped speed up the leaving process, and finally the door shut with a long echo to leave Twilight and I, for the first time today, alone.

“So what did you want to talk about?” Twilight asked not even a second after the echo died away. She closed her book and stared at me. The look on her face screamed apprehensive, but no less determined to help.

“What?”

“You get this really distant look about you when you’re thinking. This isn’t the first time you’ve worn it, and you’ve been wearing it all day.”

“I…” Did I have “a look” when I was thinking? Copper once said something like that years ago. Something about being all philosophical. Was I really that easy to read?

“Do you want to talk about it?” A smile took the place of her previous apprehension. She wanted to listen, she wanted to be that shoulder for me to lean on.

Opening up to friends is not weakness, rang Luna’s voice clear in my head.

“Yeah,” I said. “I, I wanted to talk. About your dream yesterday.”

Her smile faltered but redoubled just as quick. She flicked her ears before pointing them toward me, ready for anything. Or, at least, she wanted me to think that.

“You were under this… this, like, spell,” I said. “There was a creature there, what I’d guess was a Tantabus, or like your equivalent of one. It lorded over you like this massive shadow trying to suck all the happiness out of you.”

As I spoke, Twilight’s face grew paler. Her eyes fell to the floor, and she shrank in on herself.

“I have a Tantabus?” Her voice trembled.

“You didn’t know about it?”

She shook her head. “I’ve only ever heard of Princess Luna’s.”

“It was, like, pushing you down into the stone,” I said. I didn’t know what else to tell her. “I don’t know what sort of symbolism that entails, but I figured it was bad while it was happening.”

Twilight chewed on the inside of her cheek. “I didn’t feel anything like that happening.”

“You also didn’t know it was there lording over you.”

She winced when I said that, and I instantly regretted it. “That’s something Princess Luna would know, but I don’t. I don’t have any experience with dreams. I didn’t even know this was possible. I figured the Tantabus was unique to Luna, but if you’re certain what you saw was one, then maybe I do have my own Tantabus.”

“Maybe we all do,” I said.

Or maybe just princesses had them. God knew if that was the trend, I couldn’t imagine what Celestia’s looked like or what it was capable of. It was something to think about.

We didn’t get much time to think about it, though, as Starlight stormed through the front door of the library, out of breath. “Oh, thank Celestia, you’re both still here.”

“What’s wrong?” Twilight asked, shooting to her hooves.

Starlight’s concern morphed into a lopsided nervousness. “Yeah, so I know everypony said to take the day off because you guys had been going at it for a while, but, um… something happened. Youuu’ll want to come see this for yourself.”

That couldn’t be good. We ran to the portal room, hot on Starlight’s heels.

Star Swirl sat hunched over Luna’s body in the middle. He turned to us as we entered with a grave face.

“What’s going on?” Twilight said. “What’s—”

That’s when we both saw it. Luna’s eyes had rolled into the back of her head, and she twitched as if having a seizure.

Yeah. Pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Could this be the dream falling apart?” I asked. “Luna mentioned that to me before. Something about entering the same dream multiple times tears them apart.”

“I don’t know,” Star Swirl said. “But I can only assume this is a sign that we’re running out of time.”

The others exchanged worried glances, before they all eventually settled on me.

A deep breath in, then out, before I said, “I’m ready.”