Time spits me out on a barren ledge in the Everfree. I don’t land very gracefully. A crystal lands in front of me, and I take it and tuck it into my carapace.
Underneath me is the forest’s canopy, but there’s something about the specific layout of the trees that triggers familiarity. I can’t put my finger on it until I see the Castle of the Two Sisters.
The spell worked.
I sit and I wait. It shouldn’t be very long until—
A rumbling in the ground, strong enough that I have to lower my centre mass and brace myself against it. No wonder Headmare Twilight was the only one who came to find out what was happening—any sane resident of Ponyville would figure that a villain was rising up from the depths of the Everfree.
There’s no villain, though. Not this time.
A surge of what will eventually, fittingly, be named harmony magic ripples in the air around me. I shudder under its magnificence. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt it. Laughter, Generosity, Loyalty, Honesty, Kindness, Friendship. The magic translates the elements into feelings. Those who are well attuned to its presence are especially affected by their…vividness.
I shiver and take to the air, keeping low so no one sees me. As far as I remember the only changeling that’s my size as of now is Pharynx, and Pharynx wouldn’t be caught dead in my colors. Any sightings of me will be branded as suspicious.
Luckily for me, I’m in a place that nocreature in their right minds would wander around in alone. I have a relatively easy time getting to a good vantage point, closer to the treehouse but far enough to be hidden.
I see me.
Her wings flutter, and Little Me starts to glance back. I’m cloaked and suppressing my empathic connections before her head turns even ten degrees.
She casts a confused glance at a bare spot in the Everfree forest, before she turns back to the treehouse.
All her friends are beside her. Everycreature is so small. So tiny. It’s surreal.
The future Disciples of Harmony step up to the headquarters for the very first time.
I hear the pop! of Headmare Twilight’s teleportation before I turn around and fly into the forest. My mind stays blank for most of the next hour or so. It’s only when I’ve found a nice tree to curl up in that I realize that I’ve been crying steadily.
No one’s around, but embarrassment hits anyway. I wipe my tears away with a hoof.
Time travel, especially through non-unicorn means, is completely exhausting. I don’t have trouble sleeping until a few hours after the sun sets.
We had a sleepover in the treehouse that first night. I fly to it, maintaining my cloak all the while. If Little Me sees current me, it won’t be good. She’s smart enough to figure out that I’m not from this timeline, and she’ll go crazy trying to figure out what ends up being so wrong with the world that she’ll eventually have to come back to the past to try and save it.
But it’s nothing. The world isn’t in danger. I’m actually breaking a ton of rules by doing this. Headmare Twilight and Thorax are definitely gonna chew me out once I come back, but I have to try.
The treehouse comes into view. I focus on a spot at the very top.
Gallus once said to me that the first time he ever sat there to gain respite from the world was on this night. I hope he was telling the truth.
I fly to the top of the treehouse, landing in the very centre of the dome, and I sit and wait.
It’s another hour before I lower my cloak and open up my empathy. Little Me is sleeping. Everycreature else is sleeping as well. All except for him.
I disguise myself as, well, myself. My legs and my head and my everything gets smaller, and I wait some more. If I had to guess, Gallus is probably doing something dramatic and angsty, like walking around and peering into our rooms, brooding to himself and wondering if the universe somehow made a mistake, and he never deserved this and—
“Ocellus? What are you doing here?”
I turn around. “Gallus! I…”
I haven’t talked to you in years. These are the first words we’ve exchanged in two whole years and they’re not even from the real you. Can you believe that I actually forgot what you sounded like?
I cough. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t,” he answers, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I couldn’t.”
Gallus smiles and eyes the space next to me. “That seat taken?”
“Not at all, but can I ask you to do something?” Not because I need it, but because I can still ask you to do me favors.
“What’s up?”
“W-Wrap your wing around me? It’s really cold.”
He shrugs, sits beside me and does just that. Gallus’s wings remind me of the silk blankets that they have in Saddle Arabia’s royal palace. Smooth and cool to the touch until they’re wrapped around you, and they’re as warm as anything you could ever conceive of.
I try not to get too cozy. Mirage knows that this is just a temporary comfort. An echo of the past, trying to touch the sharp edge of the broken future.
“That good?” he asks.
“Yes. Thank you.”
I take a second to gather my words. I only have so many before this night comes to an end.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?”
“A lot on my mind.”
He wants to talk about it, but he won’t do that if I ask him to, even now. Reciprocation is key. Quid pro quo. Bits for services. The griffon way.
I need to know what’s on his mind. Our friendship, our real friendship, starts after tonight. I need to know why, so I can try and change whatever burns it down in the end.
I nod to myself and give him a little glance from the corner of my eye. “There’s a lot on my mind, too. Mostly about the treehouse. Are we just going to live here, now? I have a family at home! I don’t know if I want to leave them so soon in my life.”
Oh, no. I shouldn’t have mentioned his family. He’s gonna get all uppity.
“No idea what that feels like,” he snarks. There it is. “But I don’t think the tree wants us to just pack up and move in so quickly.”
“It’s more than that, though.” I notice that he’s looking up at the sky. I raise my chin and look too.
The stars are beautiful. They’re more vivid and shiny than I’ve seen them in a while.
You know, maybe I can jumpstart the friendship thing. Do some quick bonding so he can open up and hopefully I’ll be able to leave before the night is over.
“I’ve been thinking about our friendship,” I say.
“What about it? We’re a group made out of the weirdest—“
“Not all of us. Specifically us.”
“…Okay?”
“I was thinking about why we don’t hang out more. I have tea—tutoring with Smolder. I walk around with Silverstream and we like learning about new things in Equestria together. Yona and Sandbar are always down for milkshakes or whatever comes to mind.”
I put my gaze back down and look at Gallus. He does me the same courtesy. Reciprocation is key.
“Where’s all this coming from?” he asks.
“Nowhere important.”
He makes a low rumble as he considers his answer. “Well, I like you and all, Ocellus—“
“Aww!” I force a teasing look out of my eyes. Gotta stay in-character.
“Hush. It’s just weird to think about because we don’t have too much in common.”
“That’s fair.” I shuffle a little closer to him and lean my head on his shoulder. He tenses up, like he always did, but he allows it. “The only thing I can think of right now is that we’re both pretty decent at school.”
A scandalized groan of disgust comes out of Gallus. “What do you mean?”
“You have the second best grades out of all of us. You study hard. You don’t associate school and life separately, which I do sometimes. You’re always learning and you bring that learning into the things that you do, into the situations that you come across.”
He takes notice of the slight quaver of my voice. “Hey, you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just thinking.”
Gallus squints at me, but he’s not a changeling. He can’t feel the caustic erosion of regret that’s coming out of me in such heavy waves that I’m worried I might wake Little Me up. So he doesn’t notice how I really feel. He just thinks I’m being weird.
To be fair, I am.
“We can hang out more, if you want.”
I chuckle dryly. “But do you want to?”
“Yeah, but why would that matter? Even if I didn’t I’d probably end up liking it anyway.”
“...Can I pitch you a hypothetical?”
“Shoot.”
“Let’s say that we hang out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you think we’d do?”
Gallus clicks his tongue. I’m close enough to hear him trill a little too. “Whatever we’re doing now, I guess.”
He’s got it right. When me and Gallus used to hang out, we’d simply talk. For hours. And it didn’t make sense on the surface side of things, the bookworm and the streetwise, rough and tumble, sarcastic type. It was real, though. We’d talk until one of us fell asleep—I can’t count all the times that I’ve been reprimanded by a blushing Sandbar about how I sleepily dropped Gallus into his bed in the middle of the night again.
Those days are long past, though. Now the most I get from Sandbar is a stray letter asking how I’m doing. He’s stopped writing those recently, though. I think he got the idea after the fourth unanswered one.
In all honesty, I want to respond. It just makes Gallus more mad if I don’t.
I inspect one of my hooves. “Imagine that we do whatever we’re doing so much, we become best friends.”
Gallus laughs. The idea of it is silly. I think it’s pretty silly now, too. “Where is this going?”
I continue. “And then right when we’re best friends, something happens.”
“Like?”
“You know that one saying? Familiarity breeds contempt?”
“You’re saying that if we get closer then we’ll get tired of each other?”
“Not exactly,” I say. “Well, maybe. Can I ask you another hypothetical?”
“Sure.”
Gallus’s joking tone is gone. I’m worrying him. I can taste it.
I can’t bring myself to care.
“Imagine that we—we grow up, and we leave school, but we still get together a lot to hang out and stuff. Imagine that we’re all trying to make it on our own, but not really on our own, because we have each other, and then one day, years later, we get together once more and that magic just…isn’t there.”
“And then,” I keep going, because he’s not saying anything in response. “And then it’s like there’s been a blemish on your face for years that you couldn’t see until now, but now that you’ve finally noticed it you can’t unsee it. The things that stopped us from being friends before start to do so again. My rationality clashes with your intuition. The way I explain things begins to bore you. The way you talk starts to get annoying. And that’s just the start.”
I steel myself. I close my eyes. “Soon enough it becomes about the look in your eyes when you see me, and the way that I breathe when no one’s talking. Imagine that after going through everything together, our friendship wasn’t strong enough to survive, and the lessons that we learned during school were all useless.”
“What do you do?” I ask. “What are you supposed to do when it feels like the past just had this weird—I don’t know—thing about it that made it good, and that thing just up and left? Now think about if the...the hate between us began to infect the others. And soon enough a spat between two of us becomes a six-way bar fight every time we get together.”
His wing squeezes me. Temporary comfort.
I keep talking.
“I wouldn’t know what to do if I grew up and I found out that all the love that I felt for you guys was just…gone. I wouldn’t want to sit there, confused and numb, wondering where all the time went and realizing that it was wasted on nothing.”
At first I try to keep talking, but after starting and stopping several sentences, it’s clear that I’ve said my piece. My mind’s exhausted, and it keeps shooting blanks. I can only breathe the crispy night air and wait for Gallus to talk.
“So I guess you had a nightmare or something?”
I nod.
“Sounds like a dumb nightmare, no offence.”
Of course. Of course. I should have expected denial. We’re so young right now that it’s completely inconceivable.
I don’t know why I came here.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not.”
“Hey.” His wing squeezes me again. “We’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. Don’t you remember the song we just sang?”
“The one about cherishing the past?”
“The one about looking towards the future.”
I roll my eyes. He doesn’t see.
Let’s just end it. “So, why are you up here?”
He’ll tell me now. He has to.
“Honestly?” he says. “I was just saying I had a lot on my mind because I actually had no excuse. I just wanted to come up here and be alone.”
Are you kidding me?
The one thing I needed. Of course.
It’s impressive, really. How many times can Gallus let me down? Actually, I don’t think I want the answer to that. That’s bound to be depressing.
I force a smile.
“So you don’t have any other pieces of wisdom for my nightmare? The big, scary one where we end up not liking each other?”
I don’t know why I’m asking. He’s bound to tell me something stupid.
“Stop dreaming,” he teases. “That, or you can stop being dumb..”
“What?”
“I think that, if we ever get to that point, if I’m gonna end up being a total jerk to one or all of you and we just can’t stand each other anymore…I’m gonna end up saying and do the worst things that I can possibly think of. I don’t think I’d ever mean them, though.”
“But imagine if that you do.”
“I won’t.” His wing pulls me tighter against him. “I never will.”
“You say that.”
“Why do you want me to be wrong so bad?”
“I don’t. I’m just saying that saying ‘never’ completely denies the possibility of the opposite happening, and that’s not a very logical thing to do.”
“Let me repeat: why do you want me to be wrong so bad?”
Ugh. Young Gallus. So stubborn for no reason at all.
I close my eyes and sigh.
Of course he takes that to mean that he can keep talking.
“Ocellus,” he says. “You’re acting crazy. You’re acting like you haven’t learned anything from going to school.”
Bait. I don’t rise to the challenge. I keep quiet.
“Do you actually think that our friendship couldn’t last a fight or two?”
No. I just don’t think that it can last fifty.
Not that I’ve been counting.
“Look. Let’s say this insane scenario happens. You can’t let me push you away. If you do that, then I won’t let you push me away either.”
“But what if we both fail to do that.”
“We won’t.”
“What if we do?”
“Holy Celestia,” he curses to himself. “You’re actually getting me heated talking about a fantasy, but I’m gonna keep arguing because I’m right. Ocellus: You could never push me far enough away that it would be impossible for me to come back to you. There’s nowhere that far. You’re my family, same as the others. And I don’t know anything about real families, but in this one I can guarantee that I’m gonna be around for forever, because I have nothing else. I have literally no one else. It’s just me, and all of you. I know it’s easier said than done, but if we ever fight, then after everything’s said and done, I’m gonna fight just as hard to make up with you, because personally? I can’t imagine not being your friend. That would suck. And I want my life to not suck. Don’t you?”
“I…” I shake my head. “You’re impossible.”
“Magic’s supposed to do the impossible, right? And friendship—”
“I know, Gallus,” I groan.
Oh.
I do know, don’t I?
Or maybe I did know, but I forgot.
I swallow. It feels like my throat’s stuffed with rocks.
“Don’t cry,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“Good. Don’t tell anyone that I was that sappy with you, either.”
“Don’t worry. I can keep a secret.”
“Good,” he says. “Because I think I actually really like talking to you. You wanna do this again sometime?”
“Sleepy already?”
“Kind of. You mind if I take off?”
“...I think I’m going to enjoy the night sky for a few more minutes.”
“Okay.” He removes his wing from around me and stands up. I feel the chill of the air around me like I’ve jumped into a river at morning. Gallus takes off, but not before shooting me a look. “Same time tomorrow night?”
“You might have to remind me that we did this,” I say. “I forget things that happen right before I sleep, sometimes.”
“Totally.”
And with a couple of flaps of his wings, he’s gone.
And I’m an idiot.
There wasn’t any other way that this night, or any other night could have gone that could have prevented what happened with us, was there? But I already knew that.
It was stupid to come here. Nothing about the past can be fixed. The past is and should be fixed.
There’s only the present.
I close my eyes and find the crystal that that’s been keeping tucked into my carapace. I place it on the ground and I crush it, reigniting the time spell. The sound of celestial gears turning and twisting fill my ears as I’m sucked back into the void.
The warmth from Gallus’s wings still sits on my shoulders as I’m lifted up.
I remember a song from a while ago. I remember how I felt when I sang it.
I try to remember to remember that I remember. Does that make sense?
I laugh as I sing.
“And friendship always wins at the end...of the—”
The portal closes, and I’m thrown back towards the present.
Author's Note
that last episode had me cryin' in the club
i needed emotional catharsis of some kind
