Author's Note

Made it back alive from Bighoof country so the story continues on.

Anniversary

Bear woke me without disturbing Gloam. I sat up, careful to leave blankets tucked around her. At three months old, she probably wasn’t active enough to roll off the bed. But even half asleep, I didn’t take chances.

“Yeah,” I groaned, “what is it?”

“Do you know what today is?”

“Uh, Thor’s day?”

“No, Frigga’s day. And it is exactly one year since you returned from Equestria.”

“A year?”

“Yes, on our time line. I do not have enough data to calculate the time elapsed in Equestria.”

So? I wondered.

“Equestria,” Bear prompted, “where your last act was being simultaneously married to and impregnated by your Twilight.”

“Muhhh?”

I was still too fuzzy headed to know where this was leading.

“Happy anniversary, Tanna.”

“Oh.”

There was something else I should say.

“Thank you, Bear.”

That was it.

“You are welcome. I made you a present.”

“Uh, where?”

“Your hand has been resting on it for over a minute now.”

There was something flat and hard under the sheet I had flipped back as I sat up.

I retrieved a clear frame holding a triptych of pictures. Twilight and me, naked in the dappled sunlight on her first day on Terra. Twilight and me, holding hands as we discreetly coupled in a floating inner tube. Twilight and me, dancing close at the club. Bear had rendered the images in the style of Gustavo Cetes, a favorite painter of the twenty third century. In the images he recast our genders from the original events, myself as the woman I had become, Twilight as she might appear in the form of a human male.

The pictures were embedded in a thick slab of something that looked like lucite but far denser. Close examination showed that the backgrounds were subtily animated: dots of sunlight, ripples in the water, and disco lights shifted slowly, bringing the images to life. Flipping it over, the images were visible in reverse from the back side.

“They’re beautiful, Bear, thank you again. How did you come up with this?”

“I trawled a lot of security footage, I made some educated guesses, and I applied a little creativity.”

I leaned the frame against a pillow and lay down to admire Bear’s vision of a male, human, Twilight.

Maybe, just maybe, I could stand to be alive.