“Whoa! What the hay, Applejack!?” Rainbow Dash shouted as she flitted higher to dodge yet another half-rotten apple.
Below, a red-faced Applejack hastily picked out one more mushy missile from the apples scattered across the grass and bucked it skyward as hard as she could. “Just… just…” Whatever she was trying to spit out, Applejack choked on it. “Get out o’ here, you varmint!” she finally exploded.
What had gotten into her? One second, they’d sat there all nice as usual, having a conversation in the orchard, and the next, Applejack had come at her like a timberwolf with a grudge. “Fine! I like apples better! You can’t make my favorite cider without them, after all.”
Applejack only clenched her jaw harder and stomped a hoof. “That don’t make it any better! I don’t give a flyin’ feather what you like! Now git!”
“What’s your deal?” That feather comment had raised her hackles, but if Applejack would just calm down and…
Well, now she’d stopped looking for apples and started eyeing her wagon. Not that she had any chance of hitting the fastest pegasus in history with it at this range, but Dash didn’t care to take a risk like that. So she retreated to the edge of the orchard and ducked behind a tree. “C’mon, AJ. Simmer down and tell me what I did wrong.”
If possible, Applejack seethed even harder, slamming her hat to the ground. “I ain’t got to tell you nothin’!”
“Then how am I gonna—?”
“Just go away!”
“AJ…”
“I’ve had it!” Applejack snatched up her hat and stalked off to the house. A slammed door added some pretty clear punctuation.
Still, Applejack tended to think in earth pony terms, so Dash flapped up to her friend’s bedroom window—
And got a faceful of shutters. She rubbed the bruise on her nose and tried to peek through the cracks in the boards, but she couldn’t see anything inside. She did hear a soft voice, though: “Please. Just leave me be.”
Fine. She couldn’t exactly give up, though, so she backed off slowly, making no sound. Then AJ couldn’t claim she’d won, and—
Ugh. This wasn’t a stupid contest.
Maybe Twilight could figure out what had happened. She was good at this kind of thing.
“I’m not good at this kind of thing,” Twilight Sparkle said as she reclined in her chair. Not her throne—Dash had convinced her to talk in a more private room, in case Applejack showed up, and Twilight had suggested her personal study.
“But you’re the Princess of Friendship!” Dash replied, flailing her arms. “How can you not know what to do?”
Twilight breathed in some steam from her teacup and returned a gentle smile. “I can help you work through how to relate to Applejack, but without knowing what the exact thing is that upset her, I can’t help you with a specific plan. I don’t have the ability to read her mind, after all.”
“Not even with your magic?” Dash mustered up the best pleading gaze she could manage.
But Twilight only shook her head. “No, that would be an invasion.”
“I bet Starlight would do it,” Dash muttered, and Twilight immediately sat upright.
“Don’t,” she said, probably louder than she meant to, “go barking up that tree. We’ve gotten her to a better place with respect to responsible use of magic, so let’s keep her there, okay?”
When Twilight put it that way… “Alright,” Dash grumbled.
But now Twilight was squinting at her. “What did you say to Applejack anyway?”
Dash sat up straighter, too. She’d have Twilight on her side in no time. “See, we were having lunch after I got home from Wonderbolts practice, and I had a pear with my sandwich. So I told her I like pears better sometimes, and she blew up at me!” Twilight started to open her mouth, but—“Yeah, yeah, I know you don’t go insulting apples around her, but that wasn’t exactly an insult, and when I told her later that fine, apples were better, she just got even more mad.”
“Hm.” Twilight held a hoof to her chin. “That does seem odd. I don’t know why that would suddenly set her off.”
“Could you, y’know… talk to her for me?” With her most winning smile, Dash raised her eyebrows.
“Honestly—heh”—yeah, like this was a laughing matter—“I don’t think it would help. The way I see it,” Twilight said with a sharp nod, “you have two options: do something to make up for it or give her time to get over it.”
And so Rainbow Dash flitted over to Sweet Apple Acres the next morning, well before she needed to report to her next practice, and well before any sane pony would be awake, which of course meant Applejack had already spent an hour working. There she stood, waving her hat and shouting at… nothing Dash could see. Had AJ finally lost it?
Once Dash had gotten close enough to make out what Applejack was actually shouting: “Shoo! Get lost!” Ah, some kind of bug, then. Nothing that the fastest, most awesomest pegasus couldn’t handle.
“Hey, AJ! Need some help with that?”
“Speakin’ of pests…” Applejack muttered, her face darkening.
“C’mon, gimme a chance. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for!”
“Well…” Dash tapped her front hooftips together. “I’m sorry for that, too, alright?”
Applejack only flicked a foreleg at her and cantered off toward the house. Well, this was going just great. Still, whatever problem AJ had out here, Dash could fix it. Then AJ would have to forgive her. So she peered down at whatever Applejack had been looking at. Nothing there, though. What had got her so riled up that—
Oh. A couple ants. “Look, guys, you gotta go,” she said to them. They barely even acknowledged her, and yeah, Applejack hadn’t exactly gotten very far talking to them. So she held a hoof over them, but… Fluttershy would kill her if she did that. Not kill her, kill her, but close enough, and then both she and the ants would only live a cursed half-existence. Kinda like those rainbow cookie zombies.
Can’t stomp ’em, and yelling didn’t do the trick. She shoved one of them through the grass, toward the woods. Then a second and a third, but the first one had started glowing, and then it went a bit out of focus, and next thing she knew, there was a copy of it standing there! It opened its mouth, and—
“REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Dash clamped her hooves over her ears. “Oh, come on!” As if they could even hear her above that deafening shriek. “Stop it!” she yelled, poking a hoof at them, but the other two ants divided as well, and now she had three of them splitting her eardrums.
Okay, she could deal with the original ones later, but these copies had to go. “Fine. Smush it is.” She did a little hop and landed with all fours on the noisy little bugs. At least it muffled them a bit, but they didn’t stop, so she curled a hoof up to see how she might further gain some blessed silence, fully expecting the need to scrape them off her hoof. Crap, there had to be like a dozen of them! Had they divided again? And all of them still with that shrill blast, only louder now. She tried brushing them off, but they stuck firm and divided again, and now she had them clinging to her front hooves as well!
She scuffed all four hooves over the grass again and again, and oh crap, oh crap, it just kept getting louder! The more she scratched at them, the more they multiplied, her hooves all covered with black now.
“What the hay is all that noise!?” she heard Granny Smith yell from the house.
Yeah, this would really endear her to Applejack, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Every step only squished the ones on the bottoms of her hooves more, making them split over and over, up to her knees already, and not far away, the original ones, unharmed. No way she’d hear them over all this, but she could swear they were laughing.
She took to the air, at least to keep from stepping on any more of them, and streaked toward the woods. “Fluttershyyyyyyyyyyy!”
“See,” Fluttershy said, and somehow she managed to make herself heard over that grating sound, even through Dash’s earplugs. Who would have thought Fluttershy could shout that loud? “These are nuisants. When threatened, they make screeching copies to distract predators.” She plucked one off Dash’s foreleg with a pair of tweezers and tossed it to an anteater.
“Y-you’re willing to feed them to…?”
With a grin, Fluttershy patted the anteater on the head. “Arthur. And no, I don’t mind. The copies aren’t alive. They’re just dummies, but they can continue to divide for a while if you keep stressing them.”
“Oh.” Dash pursed her lips and rolled her eyes in the direction of Sweet Apple Acres. “I don’t suppose I can borrow Arthur for a while, huh?”
Another ant tossed, and another. The noise had finally gotten just below the level of insanity-inducing. “I’ll take him over there, and I’ll have a talk with the nuisants. Applejack must have known not to harm them. I’ll tell them they need to go live in the woods, and maybe Applejack can throw them a bruised apple every now and then.”
Dash gritted her teeth, and Fluttershy quickly looked up as if she must have accidentally jabbed her with the tweezers, so Dash waved her other somewhat less bug-covered hoof. “If she’s throwing apples, I probably shouldn’t be there.”
“Why, what happened?” Fluttershy asked, nose buried in her task again as the blaring reduced to a mere assault on her internal organs.
“Dunno. I said something about pears, and she went berserk. I tried to apologize, but the switch that turns on ‘vengeance is mine’ mode must turn off the ears, too.”
Paused in her plucking, Fluttershy replied, “That… kind of sounds like her. What are you going to do about it?”
“My plan was to help rid her of an ant infestation.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah.”
Arthur’s appetite seemed to be slowing down, but at least only a few ants remained. “I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to take Arthur over there,” Fluttershy said. “I don’t want him to make himself sick.” With a little flourish, she tweezed off the last ant. “There!”
Blissful silence. Here, anyway. “You mean AJ has to put up with the noise overnight?” Dash’s stomach settled somewhere well below ground level as both of them pulled out their earplugs.
In an instant, Fluttershy’s eyes widened. “Oh dear…”
“Yeah, we should’ve gone over there first. If someone’s gotta lose sleep because of this, might as well be me.” She couldn’t even offer to swap houses for the night, what with the walking on clouds and all. Good thing most of the ants had stuck to her. “You got any suggestions for how to make… whatever up to her without causing more problems?”
“Hm.” Why’d Fluttershy even say that? She packed up her little medical kit without taking a moment to think. “Maybe you could get Pinkie to cook her something?”
“Just not a pie,” Dash muttered.
“Hm?” And this time, Fluttershy did focus on her.
“Nothing.” If Pinkie ever found out…
Pinkie had both forehooves planted on the counter as she leaned forward, almost touching noses with Rainbow Dash. “So what kind of cake do you want? (Are you sure you don’t want a pie?)”
“I don’t know. Apple? I always feel weird about trying to give her anything with apples. On the one hoof, I know she’d like it, but on the other, isn’t that like trying to compete with her or something?” A hard sigh swirled some muffin crumbs around on the display case’s top. “What do you think?”
“I think she’ll appreciate that you’re putting this much thought into it.” Then Pinkie’s eyes lit up more than normal. “Ooh! I could bake some little apple tartlets with exploding confetti inside!”
“I wanna say I’m sorry, not break her teeth.”
Pinkie gave her head a wistful little shake. “I’m always getting those mixed up.” She kept staring, her eyes gradually losing focus, then jolted as if remembering an appointment. “What’d you do to get AJ so grumpy-growly?”
What could Dash do but shrug? “I’d packed a lunch to bring over after Wonderbolts practice, and I had a pear with my carnation sandwich. She looked a little peeved about it, so I just said, hey, I sometimes like pears better.”
“And…?” One of Pinkie’s eyebrows raised, and she peered at Dash like she would have through her detective’s magnifying glass. Thank goodness she’d lost it years ago, but those kinds of things tended to turn up on the rare occasions Pinkie combed her mane.
“And she started yelling and bucking rotten apples at me.”
Sure enough, Pinkie reached into her mane and retrieved her pipe, then blew a few bubbles from it. That magnifying glass had to be in there somewhere. “She likes most fruit, though. She can get jealous for her apples, but I’ve seen her eat pears before. Something doesn’t add up.” Her teeth clacked against the pipe stem, and even more bubbles floated around her head.
“Okay, but… what do we do about it?”
Pinkie grinned a little too wickedly. “I have an idea.” Uh oh.
Try as she might, Dash couldn’t hide the tremor in her voice. “Um… what’s your idea?”
“We start with carrot cake: something neutral,” Pinkie said with a nod.
“Liking it so far.”
“Cream cheese icing, some carrot shavings in the batter for texture, three layers, plenty of nutmeg,” Pinkie continued, somehow ticking each off with a new hoof.
“Still good.”
“Flour, sugar, eggs.” Yet more hooves…
“Yeah. Cake. I got it.”
“Then on top—” Pinkie leaned in and lowered her voice, probably to make sure Dash could also be arrested for whatever she had in mind “—we put a couple apple slices and pear slices.”
“You said you had an idea.”
“Yeah.”
Dash wrinkled her nose. “Sorry. I guess you never said a good idea, but I assumed…”
Returning both forehooves to the countertop, Pinkie loomed over Dash and wore a smile just this side of maniacal. The twitching eye didn’t help. At least Pinkie realized it. “You see that eye?” she said. “I had a swishy tail and a tushie tremor, too! That means things turning out unexpectedly well!”
“So…” Dash scratched her head. “You want to do something you know is wrong, because it’ll come out okay in the end?”
“Not exactly,” Pinkie replied, her mane bobbing with each rapid nod. “I thought it’d be sweet to show apples and pears together, even though Applejack is in a snit about it for some reason, and the ol’ Pinkie Sense says to keep marching on.” Somewhat unhelpfully, she stomped around behind the counter to illustrate. Then she added a smart salute. “So stay the course, mon capitaine!”
One time, while AJ was working, Dash had a look at all the cogs and gears spinning in the complex machinery of her equipment that did who knew what, and a little pebble got stuck in some of the gear teeth. Kinda far in, where it might have been hard to reach, but something like a screwdriver might have poked it out of the way. Still, AJ kept cranking it until the gears had crunched that pebble and pushed through to get to the rest of their life, no longer even remembering that brief hang-up and happy to move on.
Sometimes, trying to figure Pinkie out was like that.
“If you’re sure…”
“I am!” And Pinkie gave her the warmest smile, with all kinds of hugs packed in it. Most times, being Pinkie’s friend was like that.
“Okay.”
“And while I’m at it, I haven’t baked you a pie in almost a day! I’d completely forgotten!” She pulled out some kind of squeaky hammer and conked herself over the head with it. “Silly me! What kind would you like?”
“Sweet Celestia,” Dash grumbled quietly, shaking her head.
“What was that?”
“Um… surprise me. Heh.”
“I always do!”
With an eye roll, Dash started for the door. “You can say that again.”
“I alw—”
“Pinkie.”
Pinkie beamed like a foal looking over a spread of unopened presents on Hearth’s Warming. “Uh huh?”
Dash couldn’t keep looking her in the eye. “Thanks.”
With the offending cake balanced between her wings, Dash crept through the gate to Sweet Apple Acres, free of screaming ants now, thanks to Fluttershy and Arthur. Apples and pears together, and it might have symbolized what Dash wanted to say about different fruit getting along, but Applejack had just tuned her out last time. Except Dash hadn’t exactly said it nicely, so… both their faults? Yeah, good luck getting AJ to agree to that.
No way this would ever work. But Pinkie had assured her, vibrating butt and all.
Why’d they have to put the house so far from the road? It’d make more sense to keep it a shorter walk, right? Easier for everypony. But far too soon, there Dash stood on the front porch. She hesitated with a hoof poised to knock for the third time when the door opened anyway.
“Why dontcha just come in?” Apple Bloom said.
“Oh, uh… okay.” Dash walked in and craned her neck to see if she could find AJ on the couch, but Apple Bloom kept watching her. “Is… is your sister around?”
“Mighty tasty-looking cake you got there.” Apple Bloom licked her lips, then shook her head as if dislodging a bug from her hair. “I take it you said something about apples and pears, and AJ blew up at you?”
Lucky guess. “How’d you…?” Apple Bloom didn’t look angry, so maybe Dash could press the point. “That mean you know what’s up?”
“Yeah,” Apple Bloom answered with a nod, “but don’t you worry. I ain’t mad at ya, and the rest of us ain’t, either.”
Better than the alternative, but it didn’t help that Apple Bloom wouldn’t tell her any more than AJ. Just as she started to ask, though, Apple Bloom anticipated it: “She’s in the barn. You need to hear it from her.”
Great, that made it so much easier. Whatever. So she trotted as fast as she dared to where she heard the sounds of something sharpening on the grinding wheel. Not a comforting thought.
“AJ?”
Her friend turned, and for an instant, the same fire as before lit in her eyes, but it died away immediately. “What do you want?”
Dash set the cake down and waved at it with a little flourish. “Tada!”
For a minute, Applejack just stared at it. Dash even thought she could pinpoint the moment AJ saw the alternating fruit slices. “Apple Bloom put you up to this?”
“No. Pinkie thought it’d work, but she didn’t know why.”
Applejack set down the shears she’d been working on. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so mad.”
“Could you just please tell me what’s going on? I don’t even know what I did wrong,” Dash said, shrugging.
“Nothing. Just…” Applejack tapped a hoof on the pear slice and sat in the hay. “I haven’t told anypony this yet, but you never knew my mama.”
Come to think of it, had Dash ever seen pictures of her in the house? “Nah, but I hadn’t really thought about it before.”
“Everypony called her Buttercup. Heck, I thought that was her name.” She took a deep breath and picked at a loose stalk of hay. “Turns out her name was Pear Butter.”
Okay. “And…?”
Quickly, she shot a squint at Dash, but it faded with another deep breath. “I don’t expect you to know this, but the Apples and Pears used to feud a lot.”
“Still? But I’ve never even seen you—”
“Not anymore. We put that behind us.”
Now Dash let out a heavy sigh. Could everypony please quit dancing around this? “So what’s wrong then?”
“Lots o’ ponies in town had connections to her I never expected, too. Mrs. Cake, Mayor Mare… And I realized I hadn’t thought about her much lately, not as much as I did growin’ up.” She pursed her lips hard, and her nose twitched a little.
She looked as completely wilted as one of her apple trees in a drought. “I know, I know,” Dash said. “You cry on the inside.” If this took another step toward touchy-feely stuff… “I—I guess you’d rather I left you alone—”
Applejack lurched forward and hooked her forelegs around Dash’s neck. Dash’s back stiffened, her body tingled like when she’d have to push around a fully charged thunderhead, and her jaw clenched. This… this wasn’t how Applejack acted. Ever.
“You… you okay?”
Applejack sniffled hard and pulled Dash closer. Not some arm’s-length thing. She held onto Dash, clung to her like she might fall down a pit otherwise, pawing at Dash’s back to find that sure foothold that’d keep her safe. “I miss her, Dash,” she blubbered. “I miss her. I sometimes have trouble rememberin’ her face now, and how could I do that?”
Automatically, Dash hugged her back, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Something had broken. Nothing else would do this to AJ.
It felt like a kick in the gut not to fly off and get as far away as possible—loyalty usually meant standing and fighting, putting herself between her friends and whatever threatened them. Not…
Her chest deflated. “It’s alright, AJ.” She hugged her friend back, a real hug, as Applejack still desperately hung on. Applejack hid her eyes in Dash’s shoulder, and she’d even started shaking, silently. “Let it out.”
When she’d finally steadied herself, Applejack pulled back a little, wiped away tears, and gave an apologetic glance toward the dampness on Dash’s neck. She didn’t object to Dash rubbing a hoof over her withers.
“How about this,” Dash said. “You enjoy a slice of cake, and when you’re ready, you can tell me all about her.”
A few new tears collected on AJ’s chin, but she actually smiled—the first one Dash had seen on her in days. “I… I think I’d like that.”
“As long as we don’t have any more of those stupid ants.”
A laugh erupted from Applejack’s mouth, and Dash raised an eyebrow at it. “Sorry, I felt real bad for ya, Dash, but the whole thing was so ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” Dash replied with a roll of her eyes. “Glad I could entertain you.”
But Applejack had settled down again, and she took a steadying breath. “And thanks. You been real loyal to me to help me like this, and—” she gave a weak smile “—not tellin’ anypony about it.”
“Pssh. You think I want anypony knowing?” Applejack only grinned in return, so Dash took the cake knife she’d borrowed from Pinkie and cut a hefty slab. “And… y’know, don’t take things so personally. You know that ‘don’t give a flying feather’ you used the other day? That comes from before Equestria. It was a way of saying pegasi were worthless. But I didn’t let it upset me.”
When she’d gotten a nod in reply, she continued: “Old-timey clan feud, huh? Why don’t you tell me how she met your dad in the middle of all that?”
And Applejack did. While Dash listened to every word of it, what really stuck in her mind was her friend’s smiling face. She laughed and cried and went on for hours, and she must have missed out on a lot of work, but somehow, Dash didn’t think AJ would mind.
Best of all, she had her friend back. And, come to think of it, Dash ought to go drop in for a visit with her own parents. Just because.
