Compatī

I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I shuffled down the hallway the following morning. I felt like I rolled in one side of bed and right out the other. All-nighters I could handle—the staying up part, that was. In fact, I thrived on them. But the moment I laid down for some shut eye, I was one with my mattress, and Celestia help me if I didn’t get a full eight hours. Which was to say I needed all the help she could give and then some.

Nothing a hot cup of coffee couldn’t fix, thankfully.

I was pouring a greedy portion into my Best Princess mug, a gift from Starlight last Hearth’s Warming, when she trundled into the kitchen with her own fair share of sleep still bagged under her eyes.

She gave the mug a glance, then me a smile. “Morning.”

“Ughnn,” I said.

I took that first sip, and there it was… revitalization.

“Is it really that good?” Starlight said. She wore a mischievous grin as she opened the cupboard and pulled out a box of graham crackers. “I swear, that smile on your face almost looks like afterglow.”

And there it wasn’t. I was in the middle of my next sip when she decided to ruin the rest of my day. And by that, I meant she made me spew that second sip all over the counter.

To add insult to injury, she snickered at me the way I knew Trixie loved to behind my back. At least she had the decency to magic a napkin my way so I could wipe the dribble from my chin.

“Did you really have to go there?” I said, getting to the rest of the counter.

Starlight shrugged. “I don’t know. Our new friend’s been rubbing off on me a bit, I guess.”

“Coppertone? But she’s so… demure.”

“You’d think that from how she acted yesterday, but once you get to know her, she’s quite the firecracker.” She seemed to consider what she just said. “She and I hung out for a bit after you went to bed. Just, you know, chatting about stuff. She’s really snarky when she isn’t all… preoccupied.”

Preoccupied… That was a word for it. She practically wouldn’t take her eyes off Sunset while we were in the portal room. Celestia only knew what ran through her mind with a look like that on her face.

“She’s a friendship problem and a half, by the way,” Starlight said. She went rummaging through the cabinets and came out with a box of cereal, because the graham crackers weren’t enough, apparently. “She’s got enough baggage to fill a train car. You’ll wanna work your Princess of Friendship magic on her soon.”

I rolled my eyes at her phrasing. I knew she meant well, but the way she said it came across as dismissive. Still, Starlight wasn’t wrong. Coppertone certainly had her own assortment of issues she needed to address. Between her talks of Star Chaser, the way she watched Sunset last night, and Sunset not coming back the night before last, I had a few guesses as to what went wrong. And, uh, the sleeping arrangements we made for her probably didn’t help.

She stayed in the guest bedroom again. We didn’t tell her it was the same one Sunset used. Starlight hadn’t realized that little slip-up in logistics when she first let her stay the night before, and by now it would be, one, weird to tell her to move rooms, and two, awkward if she knew why. Besides… i-it was one less bed Spike had to make, and he was already busy enough dealing with both his own workload and the one I shirked for the sake of the whole Nightmare deal. It was more efficient that way, right?

There was an idiom about devils and appearing that my brain was still too sleepy to remember verbatim, but Coppertone stepped in, quiet as a mouse all the same. She had a wistful, contemplative look in her eyes.

“How’d you sleep?” I asked with a smile. It didn’t have a perfect track record, but a happy good morning usually did well in setting my friends on the right track to an actual good morning, no matter the circumstances. Giving my friends a smile was like finding north on a compass.

“It’s Sunset’s bed, isn’t it?” she asked at length, and my blood ran cold. “It smells like her.”

I… I didn’t know what to say. That was the last thing I expected her to lead with, and just as much a damning statement for our oversight. I clicked my mouth shut to keep from looking like an idiot and scrambled for words, not that any would suffice.

“Thanks,” she said before I could process a reply, and a little smile crooked the corner of her mouth.

And I still didn’t know what to say. Starlight sure as heck didn’t either, the way she was staring like a rabbit before a wolf. But if it made her feel better, then no harm no foul? Words still didn’t find me, and so I went in for a hug in hopes of sending a message words never could.

She accepted it, but in that stiff sort of way one does when they’re unsure what they should be feeling. Her smile persisted, at least, and the look in her eyes finally got the jumbled words at the back of my throat in order.

“We’re happy to have you,” I said. “No matter the circumstances, and I’m glad you’re happy, too.”

She looked away. I could tell I made her uncomfortable, but I knew in her situation that was a necessary first step in moving forward. Step two was the more genuine smile she brought back around to me, and step three was the words she said next:

“Let’s get to it, then?”

• • •

We spent the next thirty minutes reorganizing our notes and setting up a fresh study space. With our, um… mishap with the cutie mark grounding theory, we cottoned onto the idea of using grounding crystals the way we… the way we should have from the get-go. Given how much of the spell relied on Starlight’s modifications based on cutie marks, that meant we had to effectively scrap the entirety of the spell. Not that we hadn’t learned anything from our first go—we learned quite a lot, actually—but we confirmed we were playing with a fire we didn’t know how to contain.

To say Starlight was morose about it would be putting it lightly. Truth be told, she bore the turn of events heavily on her shoulders, almost as much as I did, which honestly wasn’t fair to her. We all knew what we were getting into, and I… she wasn’t the one who locked Sunset in there.

I shut down that train of thought before it left the station. I didn’t need that right now, and the others didn’t deserve that from me. Sunset didn’t deserve that from me.

We had a new direction now: reconfigure the Dream Dive Spell in order to integrate it into the battery glyph, which quickly became a tangled mess of equations and double- and triple-checking those equations, while I let Coppertone redo the chalk lines.

I didn’t tell her or Starlight, but I had Spike do some digging yesterday before bed. He was kind enough to send Princess Celestia a letter and get me Coppertone’s school transcripts. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her to be an asset to the team—anypony can be an asset to any team if they put their heart into a project—but I wanted to know her strengths and weaknesses and where she’d fit best.

She did well in her first two academic years. I expected nothing less from somepony who attended CSGU, but I was interested specifically in her Arcanonaturamancology grades. She had barely scraped through her first semester with a 42%, but then suddenly dropped out of not only Arcanonaturamancology II, but CSGU entirely.

To say I wasn’t concerned with the implications there would be a lie. Still, she passed the first semester, and with an 85% failure rate, that was an achievement all its own. I’d just have to ask her what happened between then and now, when the time was right.

For the moment, she seemed to be throwing herself headlong into redrawing the glyph. Her lines were clean and professional, and she made good on consistently referencing the notes splayed out beside her.

She had a scholarly look about her that I couldn’t help admiring. That intense focus, the crease in her brow. And if I had to admit it, she was… aesthetically pleasing to look at.

She even smelled pretty. Coconut, I was pretty sure. She had enough mane to empty a bottle in a week, no doubt, but I wasn’t complaining. The way it fell in effortless curls around her shoulders would have even Rarity grumbling behind her back.

Starlight caught me staring and gave me one of those raised eyebrow looks of hers. A little smirk formed on her lips.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” She left it at that, busying herself with her half of the notes we’d worked up.

That little smirk of hers lingered as if I weren’t in on the joke. Probably something inappropriate, like the ones Rainbow Dash and Applejack loved throwing back and forth. The thought of bringing it up in front of Coppertone didn't sit well with me, so I let it lie for when we had a moment alone.

Starlight and I were about halfway through reordering the energy ratios of the Waterwalking and Clarity Spells when somepony cleared their throat behind me.

Coppertone stood about two feet away, levitating my notebook beside her. “Princess Twilight? I have a question.”

“Sure, what do you need?” I turned around fully to see which page she might be referring to.

“I just wanted to make sure I have this right. Drawing’s easy enough, but Abjuration magic isn’t my best subject.”

“You know,” Starlight said, “speaking of best subjects and all… I, I think I forgot something, over in, um… somewhere. I’ll, uh, be back in a bit.” She zipped out the door, making a show of closing it behind herself.

Well what the hay was that about? If she needed to duck out for a minute all she had to do was say so. She didn’t need to make up an excuse.

Whatever. I needed a break from that smirk of hers, anyway.

I turned back to Coppertone. “So, you were saying…”

She was staring at Sunset. She maintained a level of stoicism, but it didn’t take much to see her writhing on the inside, like a worm trying to escape the rotten core of an apple.

Why was everypony always wearing masks around here? This was a time of struggle, sure, and we all needed to be brave for one another. But hiding our fears and our hurts only let them fester.

I wanted to reach out to her, hold her, just let her know she wasn’t alone. But I didn’t know how much would be too much, or what might come across as affection, which added its own set of issues to a mare staring longingly at somepony else.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she noticed me staring. “I’m just… having a hard time. She’s right there…”

“And yet she isn’t,” I finished. “I know.”

We sat in silence for a moment. I didn’t have the heart or the headspace to keep at the formula like this.

“She’ll be okay, though,” I said at length. “She’s with Princess Luna. She’ll keep Sunset safe.”

The pain warring across Coppertone’s face twisted into a mixture of disgust and disbelief, and she aimed it at me. “How the fuck can you say that? ‘She’ll keep her safe?’ Are you for real?”

She pointed a hoof at Princess Luna. “You know who that is, right? Princess Luna. Nightmare Moon, Nocturne, whatever the fuck name you want to use. It’s still her. She’s the one who caused all this. All of it. How can you be so hopeful and up-beat that she’s locked in there alone with Sunset? Like she didn’t fucking rape her?”

She laughed in that weak, breathless way one did when unable to emotionally comprehend something.

“You know that’s what she did to her, right?” She jabbed her hoof at Princess Luna. “That’s what that fucking cunt right there did to her. W-with her hooves, or-or or her fucking mane or whatever the fuck, I don’t know. It makes me sick just thinking about it. But now they're in there together doing Celestia knows what, and we’re supposed to just pretend like that didn’t happen? Are you fucking kidding me?

“The only reason I haven't said anything until now is because I trust Sunset.” She placed her hoof against her heart. “I trust that she knows what she’s doing. But I just… This is so absolutely fucked and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand seeing them like this. Seeing Sunset like this, with… her.”

I lowered my gaze to the floor, and a strange mixture of emotion I could only rightly call shame welled up inside me. Shame for facilitating this, shame for not knowing how to feel, shame for a lot of things.

“I get it. It’s… just about as un-ideal a situation as anypony could ask for. Sunset… Sunset told me, too. What Princess Luna did. And I hate it. I hate that it wasn't just some silly misunderstanding, some… little argument or disagreement that they couldn't just talk out. Really, it’s out of my league to arbitrate.

“And same as you, I also trust Sunset. That she knows what she’s doing. But… I trust Princess Luna, too, as wrong as that might sound. I…” I felt my mouth hang open as I grasped for words, but I knew the feeling in my heart and the utter insufficiency of language to impart it.

“I’ve seen the goodness in her,” I continued. “All the good that Luna has done since coming back from the moon. I saw the Elements. I-I was the Elements. I saw and felt the anger and resentment and, a-and… vengeance stripped away from her, to leave her how she was before. In that moment, I saw true clarity return to her. She…”

I shook my head, and an uncomfortable weight seemed to press down on my shoulders. The weight of contradicting ideals and the shame of not knowing how to process them.

“I saw the Tantabus and the crushing guilt she has for every single evil she did in the past. And… I get that guilt is no equivalent to justice, but it’s the first of many steps to atonement. And she’s trying. She really is. She’s striven every day since the moment I’ve met her for exactly that.

“I’m not stupid enough to believe that there’s any way for her to fully make up for what she did to Sunset. Not on a personal level. What she did to Sunset was beyond evil. But all the good she’s done since still counts for something. It… it has to.” A cold tingle worked its way down my spine, and I wanted more than anything to not stare down this dragon of a moral dilemma. “How much, though… I feel like that’s only for Sunset to say. I’m… I really don’t know what to do in this situation, other than just… move forward. I really don’t.”

“I’ll tell you what you do,” Coppertone said. She trembled as the emotions warred across her face—anger mixed with pain mixed with sadness. Tears beaded in the corners of her eyes, and still that trembling threatened to have her collapse into a sobbing mess. “You give me a fucking baseball bat. That thing can't come out if she's dead, right? If she wants to be a hero, then I'll make her a fucking hero.”

Her voice sounded like a pane of glass ready to shatter if I touched it. “After everything she did to Sunset…”

The longer I watched her, the more I couldn't deny the emotions shoring up on the other side of the mask she tried to sell. I knew that look on her face. It didn’t take a social genius like Rarity to understand.

“You love her,” I said. “Don’t you?”

She held her gaze on Sunset for the longest second before slowly, resignedly, shaking her head, as if any faster might slip loose the mask from her face. Her voice came out as a broken whisper.

“That doesn’t matter…”

I laid my ears back, and all I could do was drown in the heartbreak seeping out from behind that mask.

I had never fallen in love before, not the kind romanticized by the back half of the library’s fiction section, anyway. Mild attractions and platonic gravitations came and went, but never anything to the extent playing out before my very eyes. My heart reached out to her, but at the same time, an unfamiliar nervousness pulled back on the reins.

“What matters is that this shouldn’t have happened,” she said. Her breath hitched, and she shakily sucked in another. “None of this should have…”

Another moment of silence followed on the coattails of that sentiment. It felt… suffocating, just watching her gaze into whatever memory captivated her so. The look on her face was almost haunting. For all I knew, it haunted her.

“When she and I…” Copper swallowed, but it didn’t seem the lump went down. “When we had our fight, she said that I was always putting her down and taking up the spotlight. But I wasn’t, or at least… I wasn't trying to. But… It doesn’t fucking matter what I think.

“I just… part of me always wonders. I-I have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I think about it. That, like, by being my stupid bullshit self, I somehow caused this. That everything Sunset hated about me gave her just enough reason to open up to that bitch. That I pushed Sunset into trusting her by not being good enough of a friend.”

Copper laughed weakly and shook her head. Her eyes misted over, and I knew in that moment that I watched a mare’s heart break before my eyes.

“‘She was patient and kind,’ she said. And I…” The crease in her brow told its own story of self-loathing, but whatever words it heralded died in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and collapsed in on herself.

She stayed like that for a little while, and so did I. I didn’t have the heart to trespass on those emotions. I really didn’t know what to do.

Hesitantly, I put a hoof on her shoulder. I felt comfortable enough doing that much.

“It’s not your fault, Copper. What happened to Sunset is not your fault.”

Copper let out a little chuckle. She closed her eyes and reclined her head. Again with the mask, by way of a sour smile on her lips, she whispered: “It’s not my fault… I wish that was the truth. I want to believe that was the truth. Because I’m not the one who manipulated her and then used her like a two-bit whore.”

She brought her gaze down to me, and in her eyes I saw the tears of countless regrets. “But I am the one who didn’t stop it in time when I had the chance. I didn’t see what was happening until it was too late. It all happened because I let it, because I was too fucking stupid to take her little gripes seriously, because I didn’t just fucking grow a pair and tell her those three godforsaken words, and you can’t tell me I’m wrong.”

I… I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t my place to affirm or deny that, no matter how much I wanted to question the veracity of it. Some regrets we couldn’t help others through. They had to come to terms with them on their own, so I let her continue:

“I don’t know what would have happened between us if I was any less of a piece of shit, but I know it wouldn’t be”—she gestured helplessly at the entirety of Sunset, Luna, and the glyph—“this.”

She let out a breathless laugh and wiped her eyes. “But I finally did. And now look at her.”

It’s not your fault jumped back to the forefront of my mind. I beat that toxic phrase down before it could escape again. It was a sentiment I’d tried expressing, but I clearly fumbled it. I should have known better than to downplay how she felt. We all experienced our own feelings in our own ways. I’d be wrong to tell her otherwise, and so I came at it from a different angle:

“We’ll get her ou—”

“I almost killed myself.” She said it so simply, so matter-of-factly that it didn’t register at first. But the far-off look in her eye and the pain knitting her brow told a different story. “Back when she first ran off. I almost did the other day, too, after she left.”

The hairs on my nape bristled instinctively. “Nopony should ever feel like they have to do that. Everypony is special and unique. Equestria wouldn’t be the same without each and every one of us.”

“Including her?” Copper said, eyes on Princess Luna, and I… I didn't know how to respond to that, so she let out a weak laugh and continued: “Of course you’d think so… You’re a princess. Everything’s sunshine and rainbows for you.”

That got a scowl going on my face real quick. “Excuse you, but that is, first off, extremely rude, second, awfully presumptuous regarding me, and three, insinuating that of Princess Luna is a dangerously loaded statement.”

She didn’t back down when I raised my voice. Rather, she pointed her ears forward, and the look in her eyes poised a question like a sword held up to my throat:

Yes, and?

I again felt the hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end. There was power in that stare, power in the anger and frustration and misery finally spilled forth for the world to lay bare that simple yet defiant question. More accurately, it prompted a very uncomfortable truth in my own mental wanderings since this whole situation spiraled so wildly out of control.

Yes, and? Yes, and hadn’t you, Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, pondered this very same question? Yes, and hadn’t you followed that hypothetical to its logical conclusion? Yes, and hadn’t that little thought wriggled the tiniest bit in the back of your head every time you looked at her? Every time you had to move her wing to draw a line? To fix a pillow under her chin? To sit and work quietly in that room knowing exactly what she did and whom she did it to?

Yes, and so the question remained. Copper’s eyes were still on me, and as one second became two became three, I felt myself withering beneath her stare.

I sighed. “You’re right. I’m the Princess of Friendship. I… I can’t ignore a certain degree of separation from some of the harsher realities other ponies face. I deal with friendship problems, not—” I gestured vaguely at Sunset and Luna. “This is… this is a whole lot more than a friendship problem.

“But I am the Princess of Friendship, and…” And I heard Sunset’s wisdom once again ring true in my ears, just strong enough to bring my ears around and to look Copper in the eye. “And that means I am for a reason. Because for better or worse, I’m trying. Because I’m trying to understand in the face of something that terrifies me. Because I’m here trying to be the friend Sunset deserves. Because… I’m trying to be worthy of her friendship.”

At that, all the vitriol Copper had leveled my way sloughed from her face. Her ears, at first pointed at me like daggers, swiveled back, and she broke off her gaze to search for some semblance of composure in the cracks along the floor. The sight got my heart squirming in my chest.

I could tell commiseration when I saw it.

No matter the direction of the conversation, no matter the sharpness of her tongue or opinions, right now, Copper needed somepony to talk to. She needed to let the hurt out. She needed to let the healing in. Simply, she needed a friend. So I latched onto that sentiment, let it guide me, and threaded a hopeful smile across my face.

“And I’m trying to be worthy of yours,” I continued, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “Because no, you should never have to feel like you need to do that to yourself. You are special and unique. Nothing can take that away from you.”

I caught her staring at Princess Luna, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she shrunk in on herself, ground the sides of her hooves together. The words on the tip of her tongue had her pinning her ears flat against her skull.

“You don’t know what I’ve done,” she whispered. “To Star Chaser.”

“Copper, there’s…” I glanced at Princess Luna, then back to her. “There’s nothing you’ve done that can’t be forgiven. Nothing.”

Her lip quivered, and her eyes roved around the room before settling on my hooves. She took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I didn’t tell you what happened between me and Star Chaser.”

“You said it was a bad breakup.”

She laughed, but the smile that came with it petered out until only the scars of a painful memory remained. “Yeah, but it’s not about the breakup. It’s about everything else.

“I know I already said it, but… I’m in love with Sunset. I always have been from the moment I first met her. And that… that never changed, even while I was dating Star Chaser.” She stared through me, as if trying to process the words coming out of her mouth, like she couldn’t believe them herself.

“It started out innocent. One day she dyed her mane red for a photoshoot. Another day, she styled it short and wavy on a whim. That fucking daffodil pendant I just happened to find at the craft fair and had to get for her. And so many other little things. Little by little, I… I twisted her. With every little thing that remotely reminded me of Sunset. I destroyed who she was and stuffed her into a box she could never fit into for my own selfish lovesick bullshit.

“And I knew.” She swallowed, and her breath hitched. “I knew what I was doing, but I did it anyway. I let it consume me like this… this… thing, where if I could just make her… close enough…

“And do you know what happened then? When Sunset waltzed back into my life two days ago, and I finally had the real thing right in front of me again? The real Sunset that I’ve been yearning for all my life?” She let out a broken laugh, and the tears started down her cheeks. “I fucking threw her away. I threw Star Chaser out with the garbage, so that for a single goddamn night, I could pretend. I could pretend that I was happy.”

She laughed again, because that was all she could do. “And I even said that: just let me pretend, even after Sunset rejected me.

“I said it knowing exactly what it really meant. I knew what I was doing, what it would do to Star Chaser.” She looked like she was going to throw up. “And I did it anyway.”

She stared at me with teary eyes, and I was again faced with the terrifying truth that I was way out of my depth.

“You know the worst part about it? I talked to her the day after—to Star Chaser. And you know what she did?” She shook her head and threw her hooves up in defeat. “She forgave me. Just like that. She wanted to act like nothing happened, like I didn’t just try to fuck Sunset in the other room while she was lying awake in bed listening. She begged me to let us go back to how we were, because living that lie was somehow better than admitting it was one in the first place.

“And I actually thought about it, and it makes my skin crawl that I could even remotely consider that.” She hugged herself tight until her hooves dug into her coat. I was worried I would have to stop her before she started bleeding. “I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve her forgiveness. I didn’t even deserve her in the first place, because she wasn’t the one I was trying to love.

“What I deserve is to die, for someone to just… off me, or, or turn me to stone and make a statue out of me so that I can at least effect some positive change in the world. Don’t be like this fucking piece of shit or you’ll hate yourself ’til the day you die. But I don’t deserve to make that choice myself. I don’t deserve the easy way out of this fucking mess of a life I’ve lived.”

The tears kept coming, and she kept laughing in that breathless defeated manner that had me terrified she might do something drastic. “And really, that’s the only thing that kept me from doing it. I can’t even justify that I just… stop existing, so that I can stop fucking up everything I touch.

“So please. Please, Princess. Tell me how. How did I let myself become so fucked in the head that just being gay isn’t enough? How could I do something like that to somepony who loved me? Who thought the absolute world of me? How could I twist them into a mockery of another pony just so I could pretend my life wasn’t falling apart?”

She shook her head and glanced at Princess Luna. “That’s not love. That’s a monster. I’m a monster. Just like her.”

I didn’t know much about love, but I did know about ponies, and I liked to think I had catalogued enough lessons on forgiveness to have a say in the matter. It and communication were the foundations of friendship.

“No,” I said. “First off, you don’t deserve to die. Nopony…”

As the words tried rolling off my tongue, that little thought wriggled the tiniest bit in the back of my head: Yes, and?

The neurotic side of my brain wanted to follow that tangent off into infinity, but Copper didn’t deserve that from me. I took a deep breath to tamp down the tightness in my chest and focused on her.

“There are some wayward souls out there, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that you’re not one of them.”

“You might think that, but it doesn’t change how I feel…” She gave a defeated laugh. “I know how it works. You say the things that you think I want to hear. ‘You matter.’ ‘You’re special.’”

She shook her head wistfully. “I hate myself. I have for as long as I can remember. I don’t want to, but I can’t help the way I am.”

“Well, the way you are seems pretty normal to me. We all have our issues we work through every day. Some are different than others.”

She shook her head and looked down. “There’s no such thing as normal.”

“Even if there isn’t, that doesn’t make any non-normal pony wrong or abnormal. It just makes us, us.”

She let the silence fill in a gap in conversation, her eyes trained on her hooftip as she traced idle circles along the floor. Her lip twitched upward for the briefest smile.

“Do you hate yourself, too, Princess?”

“I…” How was I supposed to respond to that? I’d felt embarrassed and ashamed many times for the many stupid and shortsighted things I’ve done and the mistakes I’ve made. Outright hate myself, though? That was a little extreme.

“I don’t think comparing you and me is the right way to go about it,” I said. “You’re you and I’m me, and like I said, we each have completely different lives and problems that go in them. But… I am who I am, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

That exasperated laugh of hers broke through again. She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hoof. This time, though, the broken smile on her face seemed at least a little genuine, if not fully.

“I wish I could be like you. I wish I could just… be happy with myself. But I’m not. I’m a useless, fucked-up waste of space whose last reason to live is lying right there on the goddamn floor.” She pointed at Sunset before letting out another breathless laugh. “And now I don’t even have that.

“What am I supposed to do with myself now?” she said. “Where am I supposed to go from here?”

I tried my hardest not to shrug. I really didn’t have a good answer for her.

“Sometimes, life simply happens in a way we don’t want or can’t account for,” I said. “All we can do is try our best to make the right choices along the way.”

She brushed her mane behind her ear and sniffled. “Then what am I supposed to do when my heart tells me the only right choice is the one that I know is wrong?”

“That, I… I don’t know.”

“But you’re the Princess of Friendship,” she said. She was choking up. She tried her hardest to keep it in, but every dam could only hold back so much. “If anypony in the world can figure out what the fuck is wrong with me, it’s you.”

Actually, that was more a Cadance question, but that was beside the point. The course of this conversation had merely proven an earlier truth I had pieced together. Copper didn’t need love advice. She needed validation. She needed to understand she was worth more than what she saw in herself and the level of dignity and life issues she attributed to her sexual orientation. Because she was worth more than that. Anypony with two eyes and a heart would say the same. How to word it eluded me, but that didn’t excuse me from trying.

“I, I don’t know what to say, Copper. I really don’t… I haven’t been in your shoes, I haven’t lived your life. But I hate seeing ponies hurt the way you do, and while I want to help, I can’t. That has to come from inside.

“So no. I don’t know what you should do. But if I were you, I’d start by telling myself that I’m not a monster.”

I pressed my hoof against her chest and looked her dead in the eye. I tried so desperately to impart the feelings in my heart with that one look and said, “Because you are not a monster.”

With that, her trembling became too much, and she broke down sobbing into my chest. Her warm tears stained through my coat.

“I don’t want to hurt anymore,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say, so I simply held her. A lump formed in my throat, but I did my best to be the rock she needed. I gently swayed back and forth, rubbing her back the same way Mom used to do for me as a foal.

We stayed like that for more than a few minutes. I didn’t bother counting. I would have stayed like that for weeks if she needed me to.

Eventually, she got it all out and pulled away. She wiped her eyes and sucked in a long breath through her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t deserve this from me. I just want everypony to be happy, but I’ve only ever broken everypony I touch.”

I offered her a smile. “Well, you’ve been hugging me for at least five minutes, and I’m still in one piece.”

She didn’t have the emotional faculties to laugh the way I had hoped, but she did smile, however tiny it was, and I took the opportunity to follow through on my earlier sentiment.

“It’s not a matter of whether or not I deserve to deal with your struggles,” I said. “It’s a matter of whether or not I want to help, which I do. Because believe it or not, you are special, and you do matter to ponies out there.” I nodded at Sunset, then flitted my wings to indicate myself. “To ponies right here.”

I took her hooves in mine and looked her in the eye. “You matter to me. Whether you think you deserve it or not. And no matter what you might be going through, you’re not alone.”

She laughed breathlessly again and wiped her eyes. They were puffy from crying, but that didn’t stop her little smile from being the most beautiful thing I’d seen all week.

“Goddamn it,” she whispered. “I’m such a fucking mess.”

“We all have bad days,” I said.

She let out another laugh and wiped her nose with the back of her hoof. “Some of us more than others, clearly.”

I laughed with her. It felt appropriate to let her have at least that little self-jab, but I circled us back emotionally with a squeeze of her hooves.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” I said. “I don’t know what it feels like to go through what you are, but it takes a lot of courage to open up about those kinds of feelings. And I hope that me listening helped.”

“Yeah…” She brushed her mane out of her face, sniffled, looked everywhere in the room but me, and then nodded. “Yeah.”

She shuffled past me for the door. “I, I should go clean myself up.”

“I’ll be right here when you come back,” I said.

The door closed, and an unsettling dread crept in with the newfound silence.

So much hardship, so many ponies hurt by this singular event—one great splash in the ocean of life. How far did the waves spread? How many more ponies would they send under the surface?

The question brought my eyes around to Sunset, then, eventually, Princess Luna. I lingered there, and the longer I stared, the more I couldn’t stand it anymore. As Princess of Friendship, I did my due diligence focusing on Copper first and foremost. But now that I stood alone in the portal room with the dregs of our conversation collecting in the bottom of my heart, I couldn’t refrain any longer.

“Why…?”

I searched Luna’s face for an answer, as childish a hope as that was. And like a child, I nevertheless waited. Silence begot silence, and the little threads that made up the tapestry of Luna in my mind led me back to the beginning, to that fateful moment in Castle Everfree. Feeling the Spark. Becoming the Elements—washing over her, stripping away the evil until only the good and pure remained.

I knew what I saw. I knew what I felt. My friends and I turned her back to good. But…

Yes, and?

“I looked up to you…”

And on the wings of that broken statement, silence. So I put my childish hopes to bed with a sigh. Best get back to work.

I had the room to myself for about another quarter hour. Just me, my notes, and the ever-present glyph dominating the center of this room.

It was… therapeutic. I didn’t get moments like this to myself much anymore. It was always arbitrate this or delegate that. Princess things.

I didn’t mind them, but “me time” had become a scarce commodity I made sure to cherish, and what better way than to look over Copper’s notes?

They were, truthfully, my notes, but she had taken to scribbling in the margins—facts worth double-checking later and the like. Her horn script was impeccable. I stopped short simply admiring it.

I had never seen cursive that perfect before, not even in the Canterlot Library’s pre-classical texts that were the literal lifeblood of many a sorcerer’s career. I didn’t have to squint or look at it sideways or anything like when reading Starlight’s notes.

It was beautiful. As beautiful as… as she was, to be honest.

There was nothing wrong with thinking that. Ponies needed to be reminded they were pretty every once in a while, and I was allowed to think that of them. Empirical evidence is as empirical evidence does. In that regard, all my friends were beautiful in their own way, physically or otherwise.

It’s just, none of them had an affinity for magic the way she did, other than Starlight or Sunset. It was rare for a scholar to be both, well, scholarly, and artistic. They were simply two skill sets on entirely different ends of the professional spectrum.

It was impressive to say the least. And, well… she needed a friend. A friend that wasn’t lying—

No, don’t finish that thought. I couldn’t finish that thought. Just thinking about not thinking about it tugged my eyes toward Sunset, and my brain started flashing back to those final, lightning-filled moments—

“Stop,” I said out loud. “Stop thinking that.”

I just had to think about something else. Something, anything. Copper’s smile. It was the last positive visual I had, and a point of pride on my part, if I were to allow myself that. I needed to let myself have that. I helped somepony today, as simple as it may sound. I got her to smile, and I just had to keep thinking about that and not the other thing.

“Am I good to come back in, or do you need a moment?”

I almost jumped out of my skin at Starlight’s voice. I whirled around, and there she was with a bottle of something or other in her magic and a confused frown on her face.

“You okay?” she said. “You looked like you were trying to hold in a fart.”

“I was not—” I took a deep breath and let it out. “Did you get what you needed?”

“Yeah.” She twirled the bottle of what I now realized was chocolate milk, scanning the room. “Where’d Copper go?”

“She went to the restroom.” I could feel my heart rate coming down, and sweet Celestia, what was it with ponies and sneaking up on me all the time?

“Oh.” Silence. She scuffed her hoof on the floor as if trying to dispel the awkwardness she brought in on her own coattails. “So…”

She dragged the word out in a knowing fashion. There was a glint in her eye and a mischievous grin on her face. She propped herself up on the table by her elbows.

“So what?”

“How’d it go?”

“Uh, we talked? And then I started working on the glyph while she went to the restroom.”

Starlight’s smile flatlined, and she did that adorable scrunchy face she often did when perplexed.

“Okay, um, never mind then.” She perked back up as if her line of questioning never happened. “So what’s next?”

I pivoted on my heels and snatched up my notes so I could tamp them down into a neat stack. “With the glyph redrawn and a quick recharge, it should be a day or two before it needs redoing.”

“Yeah, but… that’s just our holding pattern. What about after that?” She took a swig of her chocolate milk.

“I… I don’t know. I was really hoping we’d have this taken care of by now.”

Copper chose that moment to wander back in. She seemed composed, and the effects of a tiny smile shone through despite the storm clouds still brewing over her head.

I came level with her gaze, and the light behind her eyes gave me the strength to say what I needed to. “We do our best. Like we always do.”

“While true,” Starlight said, “that doesn’t answer my question.”

“Then we keep going over and refining our notes until we think of something.”

“Well, just remember to take breaks this time, would you?” She cuffed me on the shoulder. “I swear, if you keep at it, you’ll be seeing those notes of yours in your dreams.”

I laughed alongside her, but the longer we stood there, the more it tumbled around in my head.

It was an innocuous enough joke at an innocuous enough moment, but after our previous setback and the valuable time spent playing catch-up, I couldn’t get that thought unstuck from my mind.

When the end of the day rolled around, I excused myself for bed, but made a pit stop at the library to secret away a book from the divination section. I couldn’t have Starlight acting like a monkey on my back over this. I didn’t need a part two of yesterday’s lecture.

What we needed was time—time to think and time to prepare. And what better way than to utilize all the time we had?

I settled into bed and cracked open Septal Slumber’s Magical Mundanities, a Guide to Lucid Dreaming.