Ghosting

Chapters

When you're tossing, when you turn in your sleep
That's because I'm ghosting your dreams
And this is why I have decided
To pull these old white sheets from my head
I'll leave them folded neat and tidy
So that you'll know I'm out of hiding
I've been ghosting, I've been ghosting along

When you're tossing, when you turn in your sleep

At Ponyville Castle Academy, as this was one of the very first modern buildings built in Ponyville and a stone’s throw away from the castle, there are eight forty-five minute periods a day. For Dash and I, six are for training the pegasi, one for our other class, and one for lunch. We get to play the ‘married’ card to spend lunches together, but other than that, we don’t see each other much all day.

Of course, that may be a blessing in disguise. Dash is eccentric, but it may not be so clear to others as it is to me just how eccentric she is.

A normal day for me consists of getting up in the morning at 6AM. Shower, work on breakfast, gather Dash and the kids if she doesn’t have a meeting that day, then drive to the school. After 7AM and setting up whatever routine I’ll have the students work on for my classes, I see to my lesson plan for history class.

Today was going to be uncomfortable.

The ancient lineage of pegasi before the first Hearth’s Warming is, quite frankly, not a super fun topic for pegasi. While this is also true for unicorns, the pegasi of old had an awful habit of keeping royal families royal by only breeding with other royalty. Needless to say, there were only about three royal families back then, and sometimes, they didn’t even venture outside their own immediate family when seeking a mate.

In particular, we were going over Emperor Auto Aerial’s fraught family, in which, after he was killed, his wife married her son to keep in power. And then had more descendants. While this was never a fun subject to go over, the terrible inbreeding and discovery of new birth defects aside, what that made me most uncomfortable about this topic was the description of Empress Low Castle. A yellow pegasus of small stature with, of course, a rainbow mane, one of the few physical traits in the world that are uniquely found in the pegasus descendants of Lady Low Castle.

The personality traits of lady Low Castle are boiled down to her hungry ambition and avarice, but it doesn’t help that she was also noted to be a very competitive, protective, driven, and loyal pony too. This subject comes and goes every year, and every year, comparisons are made. She brings it on herself, of course, since it feels like she can’t stand five minutes away from her precious Haze, but I’m the one who has to suffer for it.

I have to answer questions, and as time goes by, with my wife’s madness on full display every day of my life, the more I feel like I uniquely understand what Lady Low Castle was like.

Today’s class had left me thinking about the circumstances of war that left her in that position, and how drastically she was changed after the death of Emperor Auto. It was like the very traits that made her worthy of her title as empress then drove her to a sick pitch, which eventually shattered that whole royal house. The empire falls, Pegasopolis is reorganized around another of the royal families, and save for the rainbow manes that would appear every now and again, the empire’s lineage is left to the ashes of history.

As I was leaving my class and heading to the faculty room to meet Dash for lunch, I had to wonder. It would be insane to think of an unholy union like that these days, but if we’d been in that position, would Dash…? No, no, no. Haze wouldn’t have been possible in those days. But something still going wrong could've led to a similar event. A broken wing, a birth defect that leaves a child flightless, etc. Not everypony is fast enough to catch children when they fall.

Bah. It’s all nonsense.

Of course, the moment this thought runs through my head, I pass by the cafeteria. What else could I have possibly spotted there other than a mother bringing her son his lunch. And then sitting down next to him.

At his table with his friends.

“Oh, Dash.”

Praying with all my might that she wouldn’t make a scene, I cautiously approached the group, opting for stealth and trying to appear confused, as if I’d been looking for her. Everypony could see it was a lie; who can’t spot Dash and Prism from miles and miles away? But still, I tried to play ignorant.

“Uh… so, are ya gonna be stayin’ long, Mrs. Dash?” Golden Peel, Applebloom’s oldest, was the first to question the hovering mother. Save Cotton Pie, most of Haze’s close friends were earth ponies. Because I only have one mixed-race class, I didn’t really know them all that well unless they’d been to the house or belonged to one of Dash’s close friends. Several of them do, but not all of them.

“No,” Haze answered immediately. “Thanks, Mom. You can go now.”

I can’t even fault him for putting it so harshly. Sweet Wing would know better, and if it were my mother…

“Well, I mean, I’ve got some time. Come on, you don’t have to stop for me. I just, uh…”

Dash, for the love of the Goddess, please get up and walk away.

“You know, I put some different stuff in your lunch this time. Go on, open it.”

She didn’t. I’m the one who made it. And it contains the exact same things it always contains, because that’s what Haze asked for.

But, buying the lie, Haze eyed her suspiciously. “You… made my lunch today? Not Dad?”

Cotton snickered. “From what my mom’s said, Mrs. Dash burns more than she cooks.”

Dash glared at the pink-headed white pegasus with the very malice he delights in. “Pinkie was just exaggerating; I’m not that bad.” She then coughed into her wing. “Anymore.”

While we were dating, she nearly killed me with her very first home-made cake. Before meeting Pinkie, Dash did not know what a measuring cup was. Home-Ec was a skill that came late in life for her.

“I’d believe that.” Haze said, flatly. And then, the very worst thing my son has ever picked up from Cotton appeared on his face: an evil smile.

Oh no.

His mother was embarrassing him in front of his friends, and he was about to do it right back.

“You know, one time, Mom decided she was going to try and make this pie—”

“Hey!” I called, interrupting the speech. “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.” Doubtless, the story will be told later, but taking her away will at least prevent a public scene.

Dash froze in place, and Haze breathed a sigh of relief.

“Hi, Mister Soarin,” a few of the other boys answered. As if the whole cafeteria realized the story wasn’t going to be told, the volume level rose in the room.

“Hey, guys.” I tapped Dash on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go get lunch.”

She was incredibly reluctant to get off the lunch table chair. “Yeah, okay. I’ll see ya later, Buddy.”

Haze coughed, “Thanks, Dad,” as quick as he could, then waved. “Bye, Mom.”

Disaster averted. But the moment I breathe easy, Dash remembers something. “Oh, and Bell Fade?”

The lone unicorn’s ears perked up. “Uh… yes, Mrs. Dash?”

“Still waiting on that assignment from last week. I really don’t wanna call Mrs. Belle, but if I don’t see it soon…”

We were this close. We’d almost gotten away. Why, Dash?

The poor kid stammered. “I-I’ll, um… I’ll get it done today, Mrs. Dash.”

She gave him a winged thumbs up. “That’s what I thought. Bye, kiddos.”

And only after embarrassing one last pony did Dash finally come away quietly. Clear of traffic and alone in the hall, I took her aside.

“Dude.”

She threw her wings up in defense. “What!? He left his lunch in the car! I didn’t know if he had any money on him, so—”

“Dash.”

Ears falling flat, haunches to the floor, she tapped her forehooves together. “I-I mean, if I didn’t bring it… what if he didn’t eat anything today? He might’ve been hungry and thinking about food instead of paying attention in class. Ya know, Trebuchet said he barely pays attention at all in class and nothing she does ever seems to stick. I thought, maybe…”

I put a hoof on her shoulder. “Dash, sweetie, love, darling, my dearest.” Then, I pulled her close. “Giving him his lunch because you care is fine. Sitting down with him and his friends at their lunch table is not.”

She pulled back. “B-but!” She stammered for the words, then she leaned in to whisper, “T-they were talking about mares, Soarin!”

Oh, for the love of the Goddess.

“And not, like, the other students, but the other teachers! Haze is only twelve, I don’t want Cotton—”

“Dash.”

She fell silent and still, her head bowed in shame.

“He’s twelve. Next year, he’ll be a teenager. I would be more concerned if he wasn’t talking about mares.”

“B-but… teachers?”

Slowly, I shook my head. “It’s like… a male pastime. If you aren’t looking at your instructors and discussing them with the boys, something isn’t right. I mean, come on, when you were in the academy, didn’t you have ponies you talked about the instructors with?”

In my case, we were mostly concerned with how absurdly attractive Spitfire’s mother was. There were a few instructors that would catch the eye—you kinda have to be in great shape to be a Wonderbolt instructor—but Spitfire’s mom had it going on. Come to think of it, Dash is awfully similar in shape to her.

“I mean, I didn’t really have friends at the academy. Backstabbers, maybe, but nopony to talk about stallions with.” She shook the memory away. “But, I mean, twelve? Really? Are they… this is kinda early, isn’t it?”

I massaged my eyes. It would be one thing if Haze was our only son, but he’s not even our oldest son. “You are aware that Prism has a marefriend, right?”

She scoffed, like that was the most obvious thing in the world. “Course he does. Little stud. She’s lucky to have him!”

Goddess among us.

“So, if Prism can be dating Cheesette no problem, why is Haze merely talking about mares with his friends a problem?”

Her brows furrowed. “Well, Haze is just a baby. He’s not even a teenager! He doesn’t need to be talking about mares like that!”

Love is often very painful.

“Dash, he’s not a teenager… for four months. You turned thirty-nine a week ago.”

She practically jumped to the ceiling. “Gah! Don’t say that! Oh Goddess, ponies don’t need to know that!” Wrapping a wing around my mouth, she checked the hall; it remained empty. “Look, let’s just go eat, alright? Nopony in this building needs to know how old I or anypony else is.”

Oh, how the disparity continues.

“Soarin!”

I sighed. I love how persistent she is, but Goddess, do I hate how persistent she is.

I left Prism in charge of practice to prepare to go lie to my wife. “Yeah? What’s up?” As if I didn’t know. Though, she is a little more worked up than I expected.

“I can’t find Haze. Have you seen him? He didn’t tell me he was going anywhere… do you think he has his phone on him? If I call—”

I threw my hooves on her shoulders and got her to focus on me. “Dash?”

“Yeah?”

“Breathe for me, alright?”

Somewhere between hyperventilating and holding her breath, finally, she starts to calm down. A deep breath later, “Okay. Do you know where he is?”

I do, actually. “I think he’s with Cotton. He said he was going to hang out at the bakery today.”

Anger flooded her face, and wings flared open. “The bakery! Why didn’t he tell me!? I am gonna call Pinkie right now and—”

“Dash, honey.” According to the plan, now the goal was to get her to see how absurd she’s being. “Do you think maybe you’re being a little too—”

“No!” she shouts, defiant to my face. I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to talk to her at all right now. Her ‘baby’ is missing.

Well, plan B it is. “Oh-kay. Well, I’m gonna pick him up on the way home, so—”

“Nope. Going to the bakery now. See ya at the house. Love ya, bye.” The ground shakes, Dash soars into the air, then blasts off in a rainbow trail northwest, to the bakery.

It’s less that I’m not allowed to be alone with Haze, but she has to have a visual on him every chance she can. Thinking about it, I hope the students saw that. Her form is just so perfect that, if she weren’t doing it out of insane motherly desperation, you could hardly believe she was in her late-thirties. But does she think she has the strength to carry Haze home? He weighs almost as much as she does, and he’s already getting close to her height.

Seeing she was far enough away, I signaled to the bush beside the red brick wall of the gym. “She’s gone.”

The rain had stopped midway through the day. She’d called it earlier since we still didn’t have an approval to do rain drills, so I’m glad I listened. If only the reverse were true.

Downtrodden, my little guy’s head pops out of the bushes. “Are you sure?”

Taking to the air myself, Dash’s rainbow trail slowly diminishes until finally, it’s far out of view. She has to cross three districts before she actually makes it to Pinkie’s bakery, so even with her crazy speed, she’s not getting there for a while. “Oh yeah. She sure is.”

Haze emerges from the bushes, filled with relief. “Oh, thank the Goddess.”

At some point, I have to wonder if Fallacy wasn’t on the mark about this being like a friendship problem of old. It’s not just that Dash is traumatized and deeply scarred; Haze is doing his best to just run away from her instead of actually getting the truth out of her. I know he has the words to explain himself well enough, but does he have the temper to endure his mother at the same time?

“You know, you can’t hide from her forever.”

Haze threw a hoof up in irritation. “Of course, I can’t! If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she has a tracker in my ear or something. I just hope Cotton did his part…”

“Yeah, me too. She trusts Pinkie like a sister, so I’m hoping she can talk some sense into her. But, uh…” I rubbed at my chin. “What are you gonna do if she can’t?”

As if I popped his balloon, he deflated. “Oh Goddess…”

Deciding to broach the subject, I asked, “Haze, buddy, have you tried discussing this with her? And, I mean, in earnest, not just blowing up on each other.”

His little magenta eyes glared at me. “It’s not like I’ve never tried, but… but! You know how she is; she just ignores me!” His despair took over, covering his mane with his hooves. “It’s too much, Dad! I can’t take it! She’s driving me crazy!”

“Haze, I know how she is, really. But you’ve got to try and talk this out with her. It can’t go on forever, but she’s going to try and keep it that way if she can help it.”

And, really, she would try. It took him turning ten before she would actually let him go be with his friends without her. I fought tooth and nail for that, and even still, if she doesn’t know their parents as well as her old friends, she won’t let him go. Prism, on the other hoof, can be with Cheesette unsupervised as often as he wants. Thankfully, Prism is too docile to try anything, but I’ve always got that voice in the back of my head telling me how suspect the arrangement is. If it were me, I don’t think I should’ve been trusted with that freedom.

“Well, yeah, I can see that!” he groaned. “Oh Goddess, Mom, consider what you’re about! I’m twelve, unmarked, and kept in a cage so tight, I feel like freedom wouldn’t suit me if I ever attained it! It’s just out of reach and even a little bit keeps me begging for more like some kind of addict! Dad!” He stood up and put his hooves on my shoulders. “Can’t you say something? Like, anything? If you hadn’t saved me at lunch today, she never would’ve left!”

I nodded. “I know, buddy, I know.” Then, I thought better of it. “But do other ponies really need to be told the Pie incident? Your mom has low points, but… that one should stay between family.”

Re: the Pie incident—

Dash hates pie. No real reason why other than she says it feels gross in her mouth. All the same, Haze loves it, so she set aside her discomfort to try and make it for his birthday a few years back. After months of practice with Pinkie and at home, she’d finally made a few that were edible, and then went on to try and make Haze’s birthday pie. She’d made a mistake with the recipe and not cooked it properly, leaving raw egg in the mixture. It was a little loose and didn’t taste bad, but you could tell something was wrong.

We all got sick.

We were collectively ill for a week. Couldn’t keep food down; everything would blow out both ends; the plumbing was clogged more than once. It was a bad time. Of course, nobody had it worse than Haze did because it was so very close to his favorite pie, and again, it did taste alright. She spent every possible moment tending to him as best she could while sick herself, which probably prolonged the illness in the end.

To this day, nothing makes Dash more embarrassed than bringing up the time she poisoned her whole family, trying to please her son.

Haze sighed. “I didn’t tell anypony. I was hoping that the word alone would make her go away, but… I don’t know that giving Cotton that information would be a good thing for anypony.”

“No, probably not.” The chronic liar was capable of more discord than Discord himself these days. Smart, devious, mischievous and malicious. If the kid weren’t so utterly devoted to his mother, almost like a reverse Haze and Dash, he could really end up a terrible pony. He curbs his worst impulses on her behalf, but that isn’t always enough to keep him from taking his own designs too far. Naturally, Haze and Cotton understand each other like brothers would, perhaps on a level more so than either of their actual brothers. With Prism dating the youngest Pie daughter, we have quite a lot of contact with that family. It helps that Pinkie is one of the few ponies in the world who can make Dash see reason. Which is funny, considering Dash didn’t even like her when they first met.

“Yeah, I’ll keep that one to myself.” And he shook his head. “But still, you’ve gotta do something about her. Did you know that she checks up on me before every class? Everypony in my classes knows her because she always accosts me in the hall before classes start.”

“Uh…” But the truth is, I didn’t know that. I don’t ever have time to leave the gym between classes. Where does she find it? And, accosts? Where are you picking up these words? Do I even know what that means?

“And that’s not all, either. You saved me this time, but that’s not the first time she’s bothered me at lunch.”

Oof. “Really?” Oh, Dash…

“Really! She knows the name, birthday, parents, blood type, and grades of all my friends! She keeps up with it, too, just to have something to talk about when she does barge in on my circle. Sure, maybe you’d expect that for Cotton, Ace and Kick Flip since our moms are so close, but she went out of her way to hang out with Mrs. Applebloom and Sweetie Belle just to get more details about Peel and Fade! It’s weird that she shows up in the first place, but it’s creepy when she can talk about things that they aren’t supposed to know!”

Oh. Oh, Dash, why? Even at the Hearth’s Warming parties, she doesn’t talk to her friend’s younger sisters that much. Maybe… this is worse than I thought.

“Look, Dad, I can try to talk to Mom, but I can’t promise anything. I’d love to be able to like, I don’t know, have a coherent conversation with her, but she just… it’s like I’m not a pony to her. I get that she cares and all, but it’s… way, way too much.”

Nope, you aren’t a pony to her. She said it today: you’re her baby, which is the farthest thing from a functioning, independent, self-fulfilled pony there could be.

Goddess preserve me. What in the world am I going to say to her? I don’t want to get into a fight in front of the kids. This can’t turn into what it was just before Haze was born. It’ll be… just like when my parents…

“Hey, y’all, sorry Ah’m late.”

Speaking of, Golden Peel finally made his way out of the school building. True to his name, the young stallion was gold-coated with amber eyes and a red-violet mane. He and Haze were born a month apart from each other and grew up side by side. Of course, we don’t often have cause to visit his family, so only in gatherings like church, school, and parties do we cross paths. Kid’s got a winning smile, a bright personality, and enough sarcasm and wit for several classrooms over, much to the dismay of PCA’s faculty.

It’s not exactly a confirmed fact, but the rumor goes that, before immigrating to Equestria, his father, Cuore d’Oro—or Oro as we call him—was a famous thief overseas. Nopony really knows the where or why, though, but he is quite stuck to Applebloom. Dude is the envy of stallions everywhere, and his kids definitely got the best of him.

“Trebuchet’s got a mouth on her, ya know that? Ain’t happy with me fer goin’ on about gravity constants when we haven’t gotten there in lessons yet. Less happy bout how Ah corrected her in that air resistance has a greater effect on projectiles than most ponies realize in the middle of class. Hell of an earful for showin’ her up.”

Haze rolled his eyes. “You’d think that after doing the same thing to Mrs. Abacus two weeks ago, you might learn.”

Peel scoffed. “Bah, them ol’biddies got their panties in a twist. They’re just mad Ah’m better at it. Ah am mister top score, after all.”

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Better it is to be of a humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud. My dearest Peel, thou art a prig,” quoth Haze. That’s right. He took theater this semester. Good Goddess, he’s good at that.

Silently, I chuckled to myself. None other than the greatest drama queen herself to produce an heir suitable for the stage. You don’t have a cutiemark yet, but I get the feeling that it won’t be long.

Switching modes, Peel responded in kind. “Thy words fall upon the deaf. For what is a stallion if not one who strides with confidence in all acts he endeavors? But cast the devil upon this nonsense. Dearest Haze, let us alight. To delay mine honored mother is to throw stones at a bear.”

Huh. He’s really good at this, too. You’d never believe he had an accent if he spoke like that all the time. Also, alight? The hell does that mean?

“Well—” Haze turned back to me “—I’d better go. If Mrs. Pie can’t detain Mom, she’s going to come back looking for me, and I don’t wanna be here when she finds you. Thanks for helping me out, Dad.”

I patted his mane. “Don’t worry about it, buddy, but try to think about what you’re going to say next time you see her. She’s not going to be happy about this.”

“Yeah…”

“See y’all later, Mr. Soarin.” Peel waved.

“Bye, Dad.”

And so the young stallions take their exit.

Now… what, exactly? She’s going to be pissed off at all of us for colluding in this little scheme of his. Not that he doesn’t deserve some freedom, but I don’t know what I could do to get her to grant that freely.

How can I get Dash to let her baby go?

Probably by reading a book or something. I made fun of Prism this morning because he deserves it, but now Haze is using words I don’t know, and I’m the teacher. Like father, like son.

I feel for you, Mrs. Trebuchet. The kids of this generation are a different breed.

There are times when I hate being right.

It’s not super often that I can just predict the future like that, but when I get that anticipation in my feathers, it’s like I could script out the scene myself, though I’m not a very good writer either. I suppose that’s why this anticipation never leads to anything good. It happened before Dash fell—though that had a better ending than it warranted—before the miscarriage, before Haze’s fall, and it’d been fairly quiet since then.

Only now, sitting in front of the TV watching the Amateur Flier League with Prism, do I get that feeling again.

I shivered. “Oh no…”

Prism’s ear twitched. “Huh? What’s wrong Dad?”

Of course, explaining that to Prism would be near impossible and certainly not allowed where the fall is concerned. Instead, I directed it to the race. “Uh, Checkered Flag. He’s booking it like Dash used to, taking this way too far. He’s gonna hurt himself here in a minute, just watch.”

The AFL consisted of high school to college-age fliers all vying for a spot in the pro leagues and the various Wonderbolt branches across Equestria. Cloudsdale’s branch was the most famous of these, usually getting the cream of the crop, but any Wonderbolt position pretty much set a young, hot-blooded pegasus up for life, so they push themselves like Dash did to make up for her lost time, and that leads to injuries. When you’re Dash, everything has to be taken to an extreme, such as tearing a muscle so bad, the wing is practically hanging off the bone like some kind of sword wound.

And sometimes, you’re just poor Checkered Flag here. The dappled pegasus’s right wing turned at a bad angle, and Flag went down hard.

“Ouch!” Prism yelped.

Lead gone, career suspended until he can recover (if he can recover), and all because he just wanted it too bad. I’m sure his coach is cursing him right now, telling him as he goes to recover the young stallion how he’s said again and again that one race isn’t worth your career. It happens time and time again.

Prism covered his mouth. “Goddess! They aren’t supposed to bend like that!”

I shrugged, taking another sip of my beer. “No, they aren’t. By the way, if I haven’t said it enough yet, don’t get over-ambitious. This is what that gets you.”

Which I’ve known all my life. Most of the time, I deserved the second-place trophy because I’m fast enough, or at least I used to be when I was in my prime, but not reckless enough to blow my wings out in a race. To say the least, I won several races.

The boy shook his rainbow mane. “Uh, yeah, no thanks. Don’t want that.”

“Good.” Not that you’ll ever have to push during an amateur race, if you don’t just get picked up right out of school. Me at my prime versus Prism now, I might lose, especially if he pushed himself. He’s so disgustingly perfect for racing that I wonder why his special talent is related to architecture. I can only imagine how I’d feel if he had a similar sibling.

But he doesn’t.

“Is she back yet?” Haze asked as he carefully walked in the door.

“You’re in the clear for now.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Haze trotted on into the living room and plopped down at my other side on the couch. “Good. I’m too tired to deal with her right now.”

Which he was, sweating like crazy, putting off heat like a generator. Whiskey or whoever was running things today must’ve worked him hard. Considering Peel was there, it may very well have been the head Apple herself. I took a swing at playing in the Apple orchard once. Definitely not an earth pony. Nearly broke my hooves trying to kick all those trees.

“Buddy, scoot over or go take a shower. You’re gross.”

Dash’s tired eyes looked up at me irritated but too exhausted to argue, so Haze complied. “I’m kinda surprised she hasn’t gotten away yet.”

“Mrs. Pie can make a good argument when she’s not being weird,” Prism commented. “And ya know, Mom can’t when she’s being crazy.”

I rubbed at my chin. “Have you seen Pinkie being weird? It’s been years since I last saw something really out there for her.”

Prism shook his head. “You’ve been spending too much time around Fallacy and Discord. You’re used to it. I was over there with Cheesette before her dad’s birthday a few months ago. Mrs. Pie insisted that everypony help her carve a rubber chicken statue out of a giant sugar block.”

I frowned. “You worked on the Boneless statue?”

Both of my sons tilted their heads at me. “It has a name?”

I shooed the question away. “Oh, don’t worry about it. That statue is the least strange thing Pinkie has made out of candy. I’m not desensitized, you just haven’t seen the kind of stuff ponies can get up to, Discord and Fallacy excluded.”

At that moment, both my and Prism’s phones buzzed. A text in our group chat with them: “Come now, we love to be included!” Discord, Fallacy.

Prism held his phone up for Haze. “See? This isn’t even the first time they’ve done that. Honestly, they need new material. I expect this kind of thing now.”

I shrugged. “It’s the mention of their names, you know. Like the words themselves are a signal for them to respond. It’s fine, really.”

“You guys have weird friends,” Haze added.

Putting my reading from before the race started to work, “So sayeth mine own son. He, whom breaks into sonnet at the slightest nudge and the quickest whip. For what child could be produced by the lone queen of drama herself but a prince of the stage? Methinks thy looking glass must be tarnished.”

He raised a hoof defiantly… until he put it right back down. “Well, okay.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Prism, however, had been lost completely. “I have no idea what that exchange of words meant.”

I put my forelegs around both my boys and brought them in. “And you know what? That’s fine. You don’t have to be an actor, he doesn’t have to be a racer, and you can both just be my boys.”

Of the few things that competed for best feeling in the world, putting a smile on my sons’ faces like that was at least in the top three. The boys hugged me back, and we sat there just like that, letting the race finish and the clock tick away.

But then, all hell broke loose.

“Where were you!?”

Mom’s home.

Immediately jumping up from the couch, Haze stood defiantly against his mother, hilariously in the exact same position she was in right now. “Why do you have to know!? You keep tabs on me 24/7 as it is; why can’t I have an hour away from you!?”

Prism was about to get up to intervene, but I kept him with me on the couch. This was not only inevitable, it needed to happen. If they weren’t so damn similar, they wouldn’t be fighting like this in the first place.

Dash was struck. “What? Of course, I have to know! What if something happens!?”

“Then something happens! I’m not in idiot, and you’re not the Goddess!”

Someone has been thinking about what to say.

“That doesn’t matter, Haze! You can’t just go off on your own wherever! There are places, just in this city alone, that ponies like you shouldn’t be!”

Huh. So has someone else.

But Haze growled. “Can’t you listen for once!? I know that! I’m not about to run off to the cardinals; I was just with my friends!”

Dash growled right back. “Which friends? Is it so hard to send me a text so I know you’re okay!?”

He threw an accusing hoof at her. “Yes! Because, then, you come find me and bother me and embarrass me in front of my friends! What is wrong with you!? Sitting down with us at lunch when you weren’t invited!”

And so, Dash flinched. Her eyes found and pleaded with me, but I just finished off my beer. She glared at me, but went right back to Haze. “You forgot your lunch! I can’t let you go hungry!”

“I have money for that! It’s one thing if you just bring it to me and another thing for you to sit down with us!”

“Uh…” And she swallowed. “I-I was just waiting on your dad! And, uh, I needed that assignment from Bell Fade, yeah.”

“Yeah, maybe this time, but what about all the ones before that when Dad isn’t at school and you just stay!? Why can’t you leave me alone at school? You bother me when I’m playing games, you bother me when I’m with my friends, and you always make an ass of yourself!”

Now I was getting ready to intervene. If Haze starts throwing more curses around, this is going to get ugly.

“You can’t talk to me like that! I’m your mother!”

I sighed. Blow right past the valid complaints and focus on the insult like a laser. That’s my Dash.

Furious and on the point of tears, Haze had enough. “Goddess damn it, I wish you weren't!”

He turned tail and ran up the stairs, slamming the door and locking it behind.

And so, Dash collapsed.

I looked at Prism, silently sent him on damage control with his little brother, then moved to console my wife.

Tears ran down her cheeks, she’d buried her face under her forelegs, and was practically shaking on the carpet.

Picking her up, I moved us to the couch and sat with her. After a few minutes of silent sobbing, she finally asked, “Why does he hate me, Soarin?”

I stroked her mane. “He doesn’t hate you, Dash.”

“But… but he just said—”

“Honey.”

She paused, warding off the hysteria.

“If you were listening at the end, did you hear anything else he said? Before that?”

Sniffling, her wrath returned. “Of course I did! H-he doesn’t want me in his life anymore!”

“No. That is not what he said. At all.”

She waved me away but continued to cry, burying her face in my chest. “Not exactly, but that’s what he meant! He doesn’t want me around! B-but he’s my baby! I can’t just… what if something does happen? What if he gets bullied, or somepony makes fun of him, or there’s some kind of disaster and he can’t get away, or—”

“Dash, sweetie, love, darling, my dearest.”

My incantation always gets her attention. She hates that she loves it.

“You’ve got to realize he’s not a baby anymore. He’s a young stallion now. What will you do when he brings a mare home one day? Says he wants to go off to Canterlot to join a troupe, or take to a school in Applewood to further his studies? In six years, he’ll be out of school. He might be looking for a part-time job in four. He could be driving in four.”

“No!” She shook her head, burrowing further into me. “He can’t be! He’s just a baby, it’s supposed to stay that way! He can’t be, he can’t! I’m not ready for him to grow up!”

And there was the crux, wasn’t it?

“I hate to break it to you, but he’s not going to wait for you.”

“But what if he falls? What if he falls!? I… I can’t lose another one. I can’t, Soarin…”

That's because I'm ghosting your dreams

With only a few days left between now and Fall Break, I decided that mother and son needed to separate for a while. It was a hard sell, but with the threat of another outburst, Dash eventually agreed. She’d go to her parents’ house for the week, and Haze would spend the week with the Apples. Everypony would get some time off, hopefully Mrs. Windy could knock some sense into her, and maybe Haze would try to see a bit of her perspective, though I don’t know how he could since he doesn’t know why she’s like this in the first place.

I’d commissioned Fin and Applejack to try to tell him some stories of how Dash used to be, since, if they didn’t come from me, he might believe them. If I can get him to ask her what made her change, then she might tell him the story. The only problem is, I don’t know if there’s anything on this earth that could induce Dash to tell him the truth. Then again, I don’t even know if Prism remembers what happened that day.

Ugh, what a mess. A week to relax and I get to spend it trying to repair the rift in my family.

Maybe if things had been different, I would know how to deal with something like this, but my own family never had this problem. If anything, we were the opposite. After the divorce, Dad and I had this weird kind of business casual relationship. To this day, I’m not close to him. He’ll come and see the kids once or twice a year, but that’s about as often as we talk too. In addition, I could never see Sweet Wing as anything but ‘Dad’s replacement mare.’ It was harsh, but my world was broken. She couldn’t be the pony I wanted her to; nopony could.

Except Downy Snow, who, nowadays…

I suppose, if nothing else, I can understand what it’s like to be frustrated with a hard-headed, uncooperative mother.

I was sitting on the couch, contemplating this very idea, when Prism asked, “What’s up, Dad?”

I’d finally started on that book of famous plays Haze gave me a while back, but even though I was into it now, I couldn’t keep focused on it. My other son, who may very well be my reincarnation in real time, picked up on my distress immediately.

“Oh, you know. All’s quiet on the western front.”

Prism rubbed at his temple. “Dad, please. I know I don’t, like, read all that much, but you gotta talk to me in a way I understand.”

Ah, my boy. If only everyone could speak in his favorite Roboknights cartoon, then he’d have no problem. “Look, the phrase is like, ‘nothing has changed,’ but in denial that everything is spiraling out of control. In this case, it’s more like, ‘shit is about to hit the fan.’”

Laughing, he clapped his hooves. “See? That I understand.” Sitting in his spot next to me, he settled on the couch. “So, what are you gonna do about it? I mean, this is definitely a Mom-Haze issue, but left alone, they’re just gonna blow up again. Like you said.”

I blew air out my lips. “Buddy, if I had any idea, I’d have put it in action by now.”

He shrugged, thinking on it. “I don’t really know what to say. I mean, she really does baby Haze, but I don’t know. One of these days, I feel like Mom’s just gonna tell me to go off and not fuck anything up. She treats us a little different, ya know?”

“Prism, there are other words than that one. Use them. Or learn them, at least.” I rubbed at my snout. “But yeah, I’m sure she would. Probably using that word, too. Like, you don’t think she hates you or anything, right?”

“No, no.” He waved the words away as if Fallacy had said them. “Mom just… I don’t know, she gets me. Oh, she trusts me, that’s the one. But like, it’s two extremes between us, ya know? If I ever get as good as Mr. Cheese and Mrs. Pie, she’d probably let me drive her around, and you know how she is about that. But like, at the same time, I don’t know if she’d let me drive Haze around. Like, she’d trust me to drive, but not to have Haze in the car, like he’s made of glass or something. And that couldn’t be further from the truth because he’s, like, stronger than I am. Like, a lot.”

Me too, nearly. I’m running out of excuses to do the heavy lifting because he’s better at it. I wonder if it’s worse when your kids are unicorns and you aren't.

“Well, you aren’t wrong.” And what he says is true, but that’s not the root of all this.

He frowned. “Okay, but why say it like that? Is there something I don’t know? Like, a different reason than just, ‘Haze is the baby?’ Because, at least a few of my friends’ moms are like that with their youngest, too. Well, the ones who don’t have a billion kids, anyways. Mrs. Scootaloo is real bad about that with Kick Flip, though she gets weird about it when they’re at a skatepark. She’ll freak out when he flies on his own, but if he isn’t doing something he could break his head on at the park, he’s doing it wrong.” Crossing his forelegs, he shook his head. “Mares are weird.”

I chuckled. “Careful, Romeo, you’ve got one yourself.”

And Prism scoffed. “Chessette is, like, not weird in the slightest! She just gets it. She gets me even better than Mom. And she’s not crazy, either. If anything, she’s the only normal one in her family. Everypony else has some weird hobby or some other wild extreme, like Cotton and the mean pranks, or Croquette and her obsession with rocks, or even Cheese—her twin brother, not Mr. Cheese—with his birds. Cheesette just likes to bake!”

Likes to bake obsessively, though. They’re all really into something, and I’d say Croquette is the odd mare out in that family, only in that she takes after her grandparents. Cheesette takes directly after her mother in that she’s very bubbly, often weird in the way she’ll turn anything into some kind of confection and I mean anything, and Prism is either the beneficiary or the victim of those very creations. If Dash got us all sick once on accident, Prism has been sick a few times deliberately because of one of Cheesette’s experiments. It helps that they genuinely like each other and could end up together one day when they’re older, but I worry for Prism’s health when he says she’s given him a new pie to try.

He, too, is simply used to Fallacy and Discord, and can’t see much as weird when it doesn’t break the laws of physics and magic.

“But that’s not important here. There’s something else, right? Something we don’t know?”

I chewed on my hoof. Damn it. He’s not going to let this go.

A deep breath. “Prism, do you remember when we lived in Cloudsdale?”

His face grew solemn. “Well, kinda. I’ve got a memory that sticks out.”

“The day the power went out, right?”

He nodded.

I swallowed. “What do you remember about that day?”

“I was… building a castle, and then… something happened.” Prism furrowed his brows in concentration. “There was a really loud noise, and the power went out. Mom came back and grabbed me and wouldn’t let me work anymore, and then… there were police officers at the door, with you.” He rubbed at his rainbow mane. “That’s… that’s all I’ve got.”

“To make a long story short, on that day, Haze fell out of the sky, and your mother blew out the power in Cloudsdale to save him. This killed two ponies.”

He swallowed. “It… she…” His mouth opened and closed a few times, trying to find the words. When he couldn’t, he shook his mane and put his hooves on his head. “What!? You can’t be serious! Mom knows better! She… she went supersonic right next to a city!?”

“To save your brother’s life, yes.”

“Good Goddess…” He took a deep breath. “Just two? How were there not more? I… I can only imagine how destructive a sonic boom would be that close to so much glass.” He massaged his forehead. “How did Haze even fall in the first place? I thought we moved here right after he was born, or… wait a minute, why was Haze in Cloudsdale? Isn’t it, like, mega dangerous to have a non-pegasus foal up there in the first place?”

“Preaching to the choir, buddy.” I clasped my hooves together. “Let me go a little further back. After you were born, it became clear to me that, once a year had passed, Dash wanted another foal. I really had to fight her to get her to tell me that, but you know how she is: anything but honest when it’s important. Anyways, we did try, and she did conceive. Only, not even a month had passed, and she slipped.”

Prism frowned. I know he’s been through biology now, so he should understand the gravity of that sentence. “Oh.”

“She took it hard. She was moping and crying and despairing for months. It took a long time for your grandma to talk her out of it, but eventually she did.”

“Mrs. Windy or Mrs. Wing?”

And here, I made a mistake.

“What? Sweet Wing isn’t your grandmother.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “She’s… not?”

I covered my face with my hooves. Goddess damn it. “Uh, no. So, Grandma Windy talked her out of it, and we went ahead and tried to have another foal. Around March of 2011—”

“No, stop.” And Prism held a hoof up. “I mean, I need to hear the rest of that story, but what do you mean, ‘she isn’t my grandmother?’ What else don’t I know, Dad?”

“Motherfucker.”

He giggled. “There are better words, right, Dad?”

I fell back on the couch. Well, now you’ve done it. Broke your promise to keep the secret, and Prism knows about Sweet Wing. Good job, Dad.

“Your grandmother, my mother, is not Sweet Wing. Not many ponies know that, and I tried to keep it a secret from Dash for the longest time, too. She is, however, an earth pony, which is where Haze gets it from. That’s why it was such a surprise and a point of contention for us when we found out about Haze midway through the pregnancy.”

He tapped his lips, then pointed an accusing hoof at me. “So, you keeping quiet about your own drama is what led to this drama, since, if you’d told Mom the possibility was there, she might not have been so… well, I could imagine what trying to get Mom to move out from home was like. Because that’s what had to happen, isn’t it? Haze can’t be in the sky with the rest of us, Mom is Mom and tries her hardest to keep things from changing, and then something goes really wrong, and it forces her hoof. Or, Haze falls and Mom gets two ponies killed in a city wide power outage.”

I put my hooves together and leaned over my knees. Good Goddess, this isn’t really my fault, is it? Even if Dash knew about Mom, that wouldn’t have stopped her from losing it when Haze ended up an earth pony, right? Right?

“Well, actually… if you came home with the police, how was Mom never tried for that? Two ponies dead? That’s still ponyslaughter, even if it was a desperate situation.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth. “Did you know that one of your mother’s best friends just so happens to be the princess of this city?”

Crossing his forelegs, Prism nodded in understanding. “Ah, I see, I see. Getting punished is only for poor ponies. Sure am glad to be a part of the bourgeoisie.”

Sighing, I put a hoof on Prism’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you’ve taken the history lessons seriously, but there are some words we don’t use, and there are some things we don’t say. Even if they’re true.”

Melancholy taking over, Prism let out a breath. “I mean, I get it. It’s not like I would’ve wanted to grow up without her, but what about the ponies who died? And all that glass… I’d bet the whole power grid shattered. Somepony had to pay for it, but Mom just gets away scot-free?”

“There’s nothing I can say, dude. She was banned from Cloudsdale for a decade, but the official story is that it was a freak accident. You, me, your mother, her friends, and the princess are the only ponies who know about this. So, one, keep it to yourself, and two, take it in stride and count your blessings.”

He raised his hooves in defeat. “Alright, alright.” But then, he turned a brow up. “So, tell me about my real Grandmother. Is she still alive? What’s her deal?”

Now that was an ordeal.

If… all this really could be traced back to my own problems with my mother, then… maybe it’s time I set that straight myself.

“It’s not a pretty sight. Are you sure this is what you want?”

He nodded. “Well, yeah. If everything is screwed up right now, it wouldn’t hurt to see what she has to say about it.”

“Uh, it definitely could.” And I shivered. “Oh, it definitely could. But ya know what? I’d planned on going to see her this week, anyways. If I bring you along, she probably won’t throw anything at me this time.”

Confusion washed over Prism. “What?”

“I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go.”

“So, I’ve waited long enough, what’s the deal?” Prism asked.

We’d stopped to pickup flowers, as I can’t just go see Mom empty-hooved, and I hadn’t really explained anything to him. In truth, I still don’t want to, and I’m taking the trip slowly just to stall. I can only imagine what kind of insults she’ll sling at Prism, or even how she’ll react to him. He’s fifteen and I never told her I got married.

The mare in question had originally lived in the old District 1 before the castle sprouted. When the economic development plan went into effect and the princess started buying all the land around the castle, she was one of the last ponies to take the buyout and move. Mom hasn’t worked a day since. Now, she lives all the way out in what became District 39, seven districts north-west from us, drinking and smoking all that money away. Flying with haste would get me there in about half an hour, but driving it would take almost two hours.

“I suppose the reason I can empathize with Haze so well is because of her. His situation with Dash… is more or less the opposite of mine.”

He tilted his head in the noonday sky, cerulean bathing the bustling cityscape below.

“Opposite as in… she, like, won’t go near you?”

I nodded. “Yeah. When I was little, Mom was always there for me. Maybe even a little too much, like Dash is for Haze. Everything I can remember from back then, she’s in the picture, smiling or laughing with me, like… how it should’ve been. Dad worked a lot and he wasn’t with us as much, but he still taught me how to fly, and for all I could see, I thought we were a perfectly normal, happy family.”

Somewhere down below, I noticed a tree had been struck by lightning. Split right down the middle, burnt at the edges but raw in the center.

“And then, like a bolt from the blue, she left. She and Dad had a fight as soon as I got home. Quiet voices became screaming hysterics, and at the end of it all, she called me a ‘defect’ and threw a picture frame at me. I was eight.”

“Oh geez. That’s, uh…”

I sighed. “Yeah. Dad and I moved away, since we lived in Trottingham at the time, to Cloudsdale, where he remarried Sweet Wing within the year. For the longest time, I blamed her for the divorce. But I’d never know if that was the case because Dad would never tell me why it happened in the first place. The best I’d get was, ‘I didn’t want to, but she forced my hoof,’ or, ‘She left and I couldn’t stop her.’”

“So…” The young stallion was working his brain. “If all that happened, when or how did you find her here?”

“Well, to be honest, it was a little like providence.”

“Dad. Normal words, please.”

I rubbed at my temples. “You know that book I was reading at the house? You need to read it. Cover to cover. If you don’t know a word, look it up. I need you to be able to recite The Tempest before you get to practice anymore. I’d been ignoring your Equestrian grade before, but now I can see it’s a problem.”

Prism’s head fell. “…if you think it’ll help, I guess. It’s not like I don’t try, it's just… it’s hard, ya know?”

I patted his mane. “I get it, buddy, really. But this is important, especially if Haze ends up with some kind of mark related to acting. It’d be a little embarrassing if you couldn’t understand what your brother was saying in a performance, ya know?”

“Yeah… but, back to the Grandma thing.”

So much for my ploy.

“We’d come to Ponyville for a performance one day. We were on a tour, and this stop was the odd one out because, back then, this place wasn’t much more than a backwoods little village with a few shops and the acres to its name. It was my first performance as a Wonderbolt, and I was one of the backup fliers in case somepony got hurt and needed a replacement.

“When they did need me because even professionals like to hurt themselves going too far, I got to take over the lead in our show. There was a point in the routine where we’d shoot off fireworks mid-flight and drag colored smoke over the stands.

“I saw her, sitting right there, watching me. Just like she used to. All those years before. She was smiling, even.

“But as soon as I locked eyes with her, she was mort— er, horrified. She got out of her seat and left the show early. The moment I got the chance, I swapped out and chased after her, since she couldn’t have gotten all that far on hoof.

“I did catch up to her, and when I called to her, she said, ‘Go away!’ I wouldn’t, and she eventually went back home, where I followed her inside. She yelled at me, threw things at me, said everything she could to make me leave, but when I wouldn’t, she started crying.”

I chuckled, throwing my head back in exasperation. “She said things like, ‘I gave you up! You weren’t supposed to see me again! Please, just go away! Forget you found me, forget about me, do what makes you happy!’ I tried to talk to her, to at least make sense of what happened and why she… tore my world in half, leaving all those years ago, but she just curled up in a ball and kept crying.

“I finally did leave, but I made it a point to come back on Mother’s Day, hoping she would finally talk to me. I’ve not missed a Mother’s Day in eighteen years, and she still hasn’t told me what happened. As a matter of fact, it was on one of those Mother’s Day visits when I met Dash here for the first time after she got expelled from the academy.”

Thoughtfully, Prism nodded along with the story. After I’d finished, he said, “That’s rough, Dad. But, uh…” He scratched at his mane, uncomfortable. “Why keep coming back if she’s so against it?”

I let my eyes drift to the cirrus clouds way up above in the stratosphere. “Sometimes, I wonder that myself, buddy.”

And so it continues. Why do I keep coming back to this pony? She’s not been anything but abusive since I found her again. Cursing me, throwing things at me, telling me what a mistake I am. Yet all the same, I’ve never believed her once. She always loved watching pegasi fly; that’s why she and Dad hooked up in the first place—as far as I know, anyways. She… she knew I was going to be there, at that performance; she came to watch me.

“I guess, she’s my mom. As much as she wanted me to, I could never forget her. She can be mean and cruel, and she can push me away with all her might, but… she can’t not be my mother.” A smile crossed my lips. “And I’m ‘always’ Soarin. If I’m set on a task, I simply don’t give up.”

Smiling like a goof, Prism rubbed at his snout. “Well, you’re kinda cheesy, but that is pretty cool.”

Rustling his mane, I brought my son in and we flew in tandem for the rest of the trip.

Course, as we got further into the poorer parts of the city, the mood started to lose altitude.

“She, uh…” Prism swallowed. “She lives here? I thought…”

“That’s why she lives here, actually. She’s really good with her money. Property values suck here. Half of everything you see here was built twenty years ago and hasn’t seen a wash or a remodel since. It’s easy to live cheap so she can spend all that money on the alcohol and the cigarettes she likes so much. Oh, and she has a lot of cats. And, uh…” I rubbed at my mane. “She doesn’t know about you. Or your brother. Or Dash.”

As we descended into the crappy neighborhood Mom lives in, Prism became more and more nervous. “She’s not going to call the cops on us, is she? I mean, would they even come out here?”

“Oh, so now you’re fine with the bourgeoisie life you have, huh?”

“Yes, okay! This is… ugh, can we just get on with this already? I don’t want to be out in the open.”

In his defense, he was being prudent. It’s like she chose the shittiest neighborhood in Ponyville she could find to settle down in. Rusty chain-link fences, elaborate graffiti gang tags, run down cars on blocks, broken windows and windshields, overgrown grass and trash rotting in heaps.

Only one around here with nothing of that sort but grass taller than Prism was Mom’s house. The stuff was so unattended that I could swear she had a car hidden somewhere in the jungle. Not that she needs to go anywhere often.

Making our way through the canopy, we finally arrived at the front porch. Here, Prism was assaulted by the smell. “Oh Goddess. It’s like being drenched in cigarettes and cat piss.”

I huffed. “What do you mean, ‘like?’ That’s what it is. This is what you asked for. I did warn you.”

“When you said it wasn’t pretty, I thought you were talking about the looks, not the smell.”

“Oh, buddy, we haven’t even gotten inside yet.”

“Who’s out there!? If it’s those damn hoodlums, you’d better start runnin’ before I get the nine loaded! I’ll cap your asses faster than any of them other gangbangers!” Mom yelled at us, probably holding the pistol at this very moment.

Prism gritted his teeth. “Is… she serious?”

“Hundred percent.”

She opened the door of the rundown house, leaving a locked screen door between us when she finally laid eyes on my son and I, pistol in hoof.

Mom, or Downy Snow, was a white earth pony mare who smoked more than she ate, and drank more than she hydrated. In spite of that, she’s relatively stout for a mare of her age and has a fire in her to the detriment of her name. Prism and I owe her our green eyes, and her mane is a frail, scraggly dark blue. When I was young, Mom was a sort of hefty mare, but she lost a lot of weight fast after the divorce, and it’s left her skin leathery and baggy.

Scowling and clicking her tongue, Mom lowered the gun. “Oh, it’s you.” She looked around at the partially dead grass that made her jungle. “It ain’t May yet.” Then her eyes fell on Prism. “Who’s the clown? You into kids now? One of them pedophiles like that pop singer?”

The poor boy was flabbergasted. “Good Goddess, Dad.”

“I know.”

Mom’s scowl dug deeper into her face. Somehow, this only made her uglier, which was kind of impressive, all things considered. She wasn’t more than sixty, but she definitely looked ten or twenty years older than that.

“You telling me this worthless piece of meat is your father?”

“Y-yes, ma’am.”

She looked between us, studying Prism closer. “Stole my damn eyes!” She shook her head, turning back inside and putting the gun down on a table nearby. “I can’t believe there are more of you. What mare was dumb enough to let you knock her up?”

She paused, possibly realizing she forgot to invite us in, in her own way. “Don’t leave the door hanging open. Get in or get out.”

“That’s our cue.”

I opened the screen door, and tentatively, Prism trotted inside.

After being presented with flowers, Mom took the dead ones from May and put the new ones in the vase, going so far as to replace the water. Prism was already having an effect on her, and a positive one at that, since she even put plastic over the cat-piss infused couch and sprayed it down with air freshener before ordering us to sit.

She complained all the while about showing up without announcing it (not that she’s ever shared a phone number with me) and not giving her any time to make the place ‘not look like shit’ while, at the same time, making quick work of herding the cats out and cleaning up all the trash. Ashtrays were emptied and thrown in the sink to soak; the dirty carpet was vacuumed, swept, and vacuumed again till it was relatively clean, though the stains couldn’t be removed.

As she spent half an hour at this, Prism whispered to me, “And she lives like this?”

“Even before she came into the money. In effect, she worked to pay for the luxuries since that’s really all she wanted out of life. Well, as far as I could gather. Again, she won’t tell me much. I usually come for an hour or so on Mother’s Day to eat lunch in this hellhole with her and don’t come back till next year.”

Suspiciously scanning the couch beneath the plastic sheet, Prism grimaced. “Goddess. I’m not, like, a clean freak, but this is just… it’s just…”

“Disgusting,” I finished.

“Yeah.”

Upon finishing her work, Mom went to the kitchen. She set a kettle on, then started on a tray of cheeses and fruits. More than anything, I was surprised she was going so far as to get snacks out. She must really be surprised by Prism.

“How old are you?” she called, not bothering to look at us.

I nudged him, and he answered, “Uh, fifteen, ma’am.”

“Fifteen!?” she shouted. “You’ve had a kid for fifteen years and never bothered to tell me? Goddess among us, Soarin.” She turned back to glare at me, knife in hoof.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, one, you’ve never asked. Two, I figured since you won’t tell me what happened between you and Dad, I wouldn’t tell you that: I’ve been married for sixteen years, Prism is fifteen, and my youngest is twelve. I’m still married, by the way.”

“Ugh, this shit again.” She shook her head and went back to slicing fruit. “I figure you went and fucked that rainbow mare you were always pining after, right?”

Prism gagged, and I poked and winked at him. “Yes, ma’am, though I’d appreciate it if you used nicer words. For Prism’s sake.”

Finished with her preparations, she rolled her eyes as she set the food, hot water, and tea bags in cups before us on the coffee table, recently wiped down, but still stained and burnt from leftover ashes. “Whatever. Nailed her twice, huh? What about the other one? Are…” She paused, looking for the words. “Do they both fly? Like you did?”

Ah, how her tone betrays her. I ran my hoof through Prism’s mane. “He’s better than me, but Haze is an earth pony, like you.”

Running her tongue across her teeth, she narrowed her eyes. “Well, well, well. Can’t keep the Snow out forever, can ya? Damn genes would do that, wouldn’t they?” She crossed her hooves and shook her head. “Sorry for your loss, kid.”

My boy tilted his head at her. “Keep the snow out? What does that mean?”

“The snow? Boy, don’t you know your own lineage?”

She sent her frown at me, and I frowned right back. “I don’t know what you mean, either.”

Which was the truth… kinda. As the internet came into being here, I eventually did try to learn more about her. Only, the more I did, the more confused I was about all this.

She picked up a cracker and a slice of cheddar, mulling over what she had to say. Once she was done, she explained it like so: “Snow, my name, is a family name. You know them Apples who kinda own this city? With the new headmare more or less directing the princess at times, and so on.”

“We are familiar.” I didn’t know how she felt about them, so I decided to keep as much to myself as possible here. If Mom is in an explaining mood, she might finally talk.

“Well, it’s always been like that in Ponyville. Back up north, you’ve got the Snows of Horseshoe Bay. We’d been in that bay since the Princesses came to power, and every damn one of us is an earth pony, going back thousands of years. On the rare occasion that somepony who wasn’t an earth pony was allowed to marry in, none of their kids ever ended up anything but an earth pony. It’s all we are. It’s all we’ve ever been.”

Cold green eyes stared right through me. “You were the first to break the trend.”

Oh. Oh, that explains… a whole hell of a lot.

“Uh, Miss Snow?” Prism asked.

“Ugh, fuck, boy,” Mom spat. “Grandma. Or, I wouldn’t mind Granny, either. Goddess, am I a stranger to you?”

Yes, actually.

Prism coughed into his hoof. “Well, Granny, I don’t understand what you mean by, ‘allowed to marry in.’ Don’t you just get to choose?”

Mom chuckled something ugly. “Oh, you’re a sheltered little brat, aren't you? You must have it good. Considering that one—” she waved a hoof at me “—I’m surprised. You’ve always been easy. The rainbow mare’s got to be bossy, huh? Stallions like you’ve got to be led around by the snout.”

Never would I call my mother imperceptive. Rude, though.

But Prism giggled. “Yeah, pretty much. Though, Mom’s name is Rainbow Dash, by the way.”

Nodding, Mom clapped. “Damn. You traded up. Rich, well-connected, Wonderbolt record breaker for the last century. How’d you swing that?” She put a hoof on her forehead then held one out to stop a reply. “No, wait. Sixteen years? You… you were the racer who dipped to catch her when she blew out her wing, weren’t you?”

In a weird way, it lifted my spirits to know she’d always been watching. Our races and performances were some of the first television programs ever aired in Equestria. Even if she just read about it in a paper, she still remembers it, all these years later.

“Huh. How’d ya know that?” Prism asked.

And here, she looked like she’d been caught in a lie. Mom stammered for words. “I, uh. I’ve… always kept up with the Wonderbolts, yeah. Before all this crazy tech popped up in the last twenty years, all you had were books and plays and sports to look forward to. Had to entertain ourselves somehow when we weren’t working. Heh. My family’s pastime seems to be having more kids. You’ve got more relatives than you know, boy.”

Prism frowned. “That’s a weird thought. Mom’s parents are her only immediate family before us, and Dad doesn’t have any other siblings either, so we’ve always been kinda… to ourselves, I guess. My friends and my marefriend all have really big families, so I never imagined…”

“You have a marefriend?”

She’s more shocked than his own mother was at this revelation.

“I do! She’s the best. Her name is Cheesette and she wants to run a pie shop one day, though her mom owns a bakery just south of here in District 18, and she’s the only one who seems like she’d take over after Mrs. Pie gets too old to run it. She likes all kinds of cakes and popsicles and ice cream and all that, but pie is really her thing. Uh, have you ever been to Cheesy-Pie Café?”

Mom surveyed the stained, sparsely decorated, well-worn living room. “Boy, do I look like I go anywhere often?”

Prism coughed in his hoof. “Well, I didn’t want to assume…”

She waved his niceties away. “Assume away, you’re probably right. I’m just some bitter old bitch living in squalor because that’s what suits me.” Finally, she turned her eye on me. “What brings you here, anyways? It’s not May and you never told me you had a family in the first place. Why bring him with you? What, am I your bad example to show off now?”

Didn’t even think about that on the way here, but that is an excellent point.

So I sighed. “As right as that would be if I’d thought about it beforehoof, no, that’s not why we’re here.” Clasping my hooves together and resting my chin on them, I took a deep breath. “Mom, I have a problem.”

Again, Mom surveyed the living room. “What in the Goddess’s name makes you think I have any wisdom for you?”

“Selling yourself awful short there, Mom. Look, you abandoned me when I was eight, and you know what? It fucked me up. I don’t know what having a mother is like. I don’t know what growing up with a mother is like. I don’t know what getting along with a mother is like. If anything, it put me off on parents as a whole. I don’t even know how to talk to Dad these days. But now, it’s starting to mess with my family.My youngest and my wife are fighting, and I don’t know what to do about it.

“Unlike you, she’s horrified at the thought of losing Haze, and she clings to him like he keeps her alive. Now that he’s nearly a teenager, he’s starting to rebel against her, and between the two of them, there aren’t harder heads in the world. He deserves some space, but she’s too traumatized to give it to him, so they’re just yelling at each other and unwilling to talk to each other.”

I stared her directly in the eyes, feeling that heat myself. “Sound familiar?”

Glowering right back at me, she answered slowly and deliberately, “You think I’m some unicorn with a magic spell to fix all this shit?”

My blood boiled. “No!”

I nearly flew out of my seat. I just wanted to grab her by the neck and beat her into shape. Eighteen years of this is more than enough.

“I want you to talk to me, damn it! Good Goddess, would it kill you to explain it all to me? To tell me the truth? To tell me why, after all these years, you left that day? The more I see Haze and Dash fighting, the more I see what happened when I was a kid playing out in front of my eyes again. Somepony is going to get hurt. Somepony is going to say something they can’t take back. Somepony is going to sever ties and run away if this keeps up, and I refuse to let that happen to my family again.”

Unable to contain it, I stood up off the couch. “Why are you content with this? We were fine back then, and now, you live like some poor, destitute spinster with nopony to call your own, yet I keep coming back to see you every year because I just can’t let you go! Why do you keep trying to make me hate you? Why do you try to push me away at every turn? You can’t even keep that facade up in front of Prism, so why put yourself through this?”

I could feel the heat building up in my face, leaking out my eyes. “Don’t you realize I’ve been waiting all this time for you to come back home? You didn’t have to go! Goddess damn it, Mom, don’t you realize… there’s nothing you can do that would make me stop loving you?”

For the first time in my life, I made that shriveled up old mare cry. She was sitting there in her dirty recliner, shivering, clutching the cloth of the chair with all her might, scowling at me with all the hate in the world while rivers ran down her cheeks.

“Wh-what do you think it would’ve been like, if I’d stayed, huh, Soarin?” She sniffled and wiped at her eyes. “You think you would’ve been raised around other pegasi? Trained into the flier you ended up becoming? Rising all the way to Cloudsdale Wonderbolt, meeting and stealing away the mare of your dreams? Do you think any of that could’ve happened if you’d been raised on the ground in Trottingham? If that same mother you say you love had been there, you wouldn’t be who you are, where you are, or what you were. Without a weight like me on your back, you could fly.”

She got out of her chair to stand in front of me. Ugly and mean as she was, she wasn’t some frail old mare. “You wanna know why I left? Because, with me in the picture, you were doomed to a life on the ground.”

Her teeth bit into her lip. Her face quivered. Tears flowed down anew.

“A-and… y-you were always meant to Soar.”

Her haunches fell to the carpet. Mom covered her face with her hooves and sobbed loud and violent.

“Oh Goddess, Mom.”

For the first time in thirty-one years, I embraced my mother.

And this is why I have decided

Empath that he is, Prism couldn’t contain himself either and was moved to tears with Mom and I. Always a rainbow after the storm. I couldn’t help but laugh at how absurd it all was. This is what we’ve been fighting about, all these years? You wanted to see me fly?

You didn’t have to go.

There were so many other ways to see it happen. So many other options to take. So many other choices to make.

Damn it, Mom.

When things had settled back down, I agreed to go get us all dinner and left Prism with her to talk. Give her the situation in more detail, explain the fall to Mom so she knows what the other extreme is like. You took the nuclear option to get me into the sky, Dash took it to keep Haze there, and both ended up with broken families and heartache.

Still, while I was getting food, it made me wonder. If I’d tried to include Mom in my family, would things have ever gotten this far? Would she have spoken up sooner? Maybe even involved herself with us instead of living here, like this, all this time? I wanted answers before I’d share myself, but that’s just not the right way to go about this.

In all those stories about friendship and forgiveness, it starts with the individual. If I don’t take the first move to make a change, nothing will happen. I’ve known the princess for nearly two decades, and it took me this long to see what she stands for.

How would Haze put it? Ah, what blind fools are we? That sounds about right.

A bucket of fried tofu, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, corn, and sweet tea later, I went back to Mom’s house.

“Well, the thing is, we really don’t know what Haze’s mark is gonna be. Dad thinks he’ll get it soon, but, like, I didn’t get mine till I was thirteen either.”

Scanning his flank, Mom raised a brow. “Awful late for a cutiemark. What is that, anyways? Looks like… a tower of blocks? Or a rook, maybe.”

Happy to explain, Prism assented. “Yeah, it’s a fortified tower. It’s that big round part you see in old castles, with murder holes and a portcullis and all that. See, even when I was a foal, I used to make all these crazy structures out of blocks. Mom and Dad ended up buying several sets of them for me over the years, and they just got more complicated over time. I could recreate towers and some of the bigger, weirder buildings in Ponyville just with my blocks, down to the smallest detail; my latest project has been recreating Canterlot Castle with them.

“It was actually my submission of a Ponyville Castle model that got me my mark. It won, obviously, which finally put it in my head that this might actually be what I was meant to do. Kinda threw me for a loop since I’ve also won every flier contest I’ve been in by a long shot for my age group. We’ve even gone to Cloudsdale to participate and I’ve yet to get close to second. My parents say I’m not fair, but I’ll be honest.”

He hovered over to her to whisper in her ear. “My grades suck. Math is my best subject and I’m only passing with a B at my best. I’m bad at Equestrian, sciences are a coin flip if I need extra classes, and I read really, really slow. Cheesette has to help me a lot. It’s embarrassing.”

Mom shook her head, patting Prism’s mane. “Oh, that’s nothing new for a Snow. We built half the things in Horeshoe Bay, but you’d never catch us teaching or in higher academia. You’ll have to go visit sometime during the winter and participate in the ice and snow building contests they hold every year around Hearth’s Warming. Try your hoof at chainsaw sculpting and maybe you’ll run into some worthy competition. Ponies of our sort always get real extremes as far as our heads go.

“Couldn’t convince me if ya tried to make sense of art pieces, but get me into a museum of ancient architecture and I could recreate it just as easy. I’m pretty handy with a chisel myself, as it happens. Sometimes, you can just see how things fit together. You twist this shape that way, that shape this way, a nail here, glue there, these support beams going this way and that to make the structure strong and stable. There’s beauty in just making things function the way they’re supposed to, making things that last and stand the test of time.”

“Yeah, yeah! You get it, you get it!” Sitting down next to her, he crossed his forelegs in triumph. “It’s like, this stuff just makes sense to me. You can’t look at a big glass-tiered building with those big gold letters at the bottom and think anything else but, ‘wow’ as you trace it going up and up and up, ya know? I mean, the logistics of getting all that glass up in the first place, and how it would bend and shake with the wind and where you support it on the inside to keep the exterior the right shape and size so it can still deal with all that or stand through an earthquake.”

Nodding along like she perfectly understood Prism’s barely coherent ravings about the Gold Mane hotel for the billionth time, Mom responded in kind. “Stallion has good taste. You know, one of your cousins designed that thing.”

Uh, no, I didn’t, but then again, I didn’t know Mom had a talent for this architecture stuff either. But maybe there’s more to that than I’d considered. Between Dash and I, we could build just about anything out of clouds. I was just always better at cloud mechanisms than structures. Pipes, fittings, casings for wire, setting up cloud-proof tech.

“Did they, really? Do they live here too?”

The cheer in Mom’s face flew right out the window. “Well…”

I figured that was a good time to interrupt. “I’m back!”

Relieved, Mom took up her usual tone. “Took ya long enough! Twelve years off the track and you’ve gotten slow, kid.” She motioned to Prism. “Go help the old stallion. I’ll set the table.”

Prism laughed at my expense but took most of the food off my back and to the table. With mismatching plates washed of dust and wiped down for use, Mom set the table then passed out the cups and silverware, none of which were two of the same shape. Everything she had here was some one-off utensil she bought at some point because she liked it enough to take it home. No wonder she was so happy to talk to Prism, the old hermit.

We sat, we prayed, we ate, and once the table was finally clear, it was time to get down to the bottom of this. “So,” I began, “why don’t we go all the way back here?”

Frowning, Mom raised a brow. “What do you mean, ‘all the way back,’ Soarin?”

She’s warmed up, yet it’s still like pulling teeth. “I mean, all the way back. I’ve looked up what kind of ponies the Snows are. Even if we did visit, they might accept Haze, but they wouldn’t take us in as family.”

Prism was bewildered. “Huh? Why?”

Resting her chin on her hoof, Mom sighed. “You mind if I smoke?”

Yes. “It’s your house, Mom.”

She ran her eyes over Prism, then, instead of getting up and finding a pack, she leaned back in her chair and crossed her forelegs over her stomach. “What he means, Prism, is that my family has… particular views on co-mingling with the other races.”

“I… don’t understand.”

She licked her lips. “Course you wouldn’t. You’ve had it good. You live in a different world. But think back to your history classes. Things weren’t always like this. When I was a filly, a city like Ponyville was unbelievable, even before technology.”

Seeing that it still wasn’t clicking for Prism, she tried another approach. “The snow is pure. We are of the earth, and we’ll stay that way. We’re earth ponies with earth pony traditions, and outsiders are not welcome. It’s always been like that. And sadly, my family was just one with this kind of mentality. Canterlot is for unicorns, the sky cities are for pegasi, and the lowlands are for earth ponies. We kept to ourselves because, when we didn’t, there was blood. Blood spilled over stupid conflicts, territory fought over, wars for a pure Equestria.

“Before the princesses came to power, in this land, the practice of slavery was still alive and well. Any creature who wasn’t a unicorn, pony or otherwise was subject to ownership. In the old world to the east, it took many centuries after the princesses came to power for them to abandon the concept, and still, you can find it in the world where more savage peoples still vie for power over each other to build rich, developed states like this which can afford to not have the practice.

“The records don’t exist in your history books, but the oral tradition is passed down in the Snow family about how there was once a king of shadows who came across as a slave, fought against the new tyrants as this land was being explored, and gave life to the princesses themselves. We were there to record it. We fought and died for him. And yet… we lost his ideals. He himself was of mixed race and a unicorn, back when that would’ve been a scandal. He gave us hope for a future where anypony could be raised to the heights he found, but eventually, in his efforts to free us, he was killed by the stallion who founded Canterlot, Dark Canter… his own father.”

Goddess among us, I’m going to have to talk with Discord later.

“But, with he and Dark Canter gone, the princesses set forth to bring about a green land and a free world, where everypony was sovereign over themselves. It was a nice idea, but it took a very long time before the people would forget their scars. For ponies like the Snows, they never did: no unicorns, no pegasi. Anypony who transgresses this decree is cast out, a Snow no longer.”

“Look,” Prism interrupted, “I’m not going to pretend I know half of those words, but I think I get what you’re saying. But, like, I just can’t understand it. Why does it matter what anypony is? Ponies come in every color, shape and size, so what’s the difference if some have this or that? My best friend is, like, barely even half a pony. He doesn’t walk or fly, he floats everywhere! I don’t care if he looks weird.”

My phone buzzed twice, and I checked it discreetly. Both were texts from Discord.

“I don’t know who is speaking old forbidden words, but I suggest you urge them to keep it to themselves. Heaven knows what Celestia will do if she hears about it. Nopony wants to revisit those wounds again, especially not me.

“I appreciate your boy’s idealism, but you certainly need to get him a dictionary or something. I’d always believed Fallacy was exaggerating about Prism’s vocabulary, but I see that isn’t the case.”

Mom bowed her head and continued. “Ponies aren’t perfect, Prism. We get hung up on things that shouldn’t matter, and when it comes to things that do, we fail to say what needs to be said.” She then motioned to herself and I. “As you can see for yourself.”

Dejected, Prism fell back in his chair. “So, what, we just go on being stupid about things like this?”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that one. “You wouldn’t be the first, nor the last, to wish that ponies would change over time. The unfortunate truth about progress is that it doesn’t affect the heart. So ponies are born, so ponies forget. Thus, the cycle continues.”

Prism crossed his forelegs and spat, “That’s just stupid.”

Carefully, Mom put a hoof on his shoulder. “You’re just young, boy. One day, you’ll be a stallion and you’ll understand. As for the rest of us, we make our mistakes and try to correct course as time goes on. Clearly, we don’t always succeed.”

Laying her hooves on the table, Mom sat up and continued the story: “With that in the air, we come to me. When I was a filly, I was enamored with heights. The tops of mountains, the falling snow, the clouds in the sky. I loved the Wonderbolts and watching pegasi in flight. My parents thought I was deranged and sent me underground for my troubles. The extensive caves below Horseshoe Bay were like another whole city built below the surface, and down there, a pony could carve and build as they pleased. There, I discovered my own talents and made a whole mess of things because that’s what we did. The Snows built and passed down techniques and histories of old below the earth. It was our calling; it’s how we survived the harshest winters the world could throw at us.

“And yet, I wanted to see the sky.

“A pegasus or a unicorn being brought into the Snows wasn’t completely unheard of, but those marriages always involved great sums of money or large boons to Horseshoe Bay. So long as the price was high enough, they were willing to ‘soil the blood,’ knowing full well that all traces of co-mingling had a habit of disappearing under the snow.

“As science would learn over time, the earth pony gene is the dominant of the three, but you aren’t always dealt that card. With something messy like genetics, it’s a little like having two decks of fifty-two cards, and being given twenty-six of those at random. You’ve got to have one of each type of gene, but sometimes, you’re only supplied that by one parent.

“When I finally decided to leave Horseshoe Bay, I had my parents’ blessing to leave and bring something new back to the bay. Everything returns to the shore it was born in due time, and Snows always came back to the bay before they died. Like everything in the bay, I was expected to follow the tradition; even I had expected to follow the tradition. Like my father said, I’d go out, have my fill of the world, and once that was done, I’d come home and continue to be a Snow, possibly with a stallion in toe. Only problem is…”

Mom’s eyes scanned me sorrowfully. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, when I finally found myself a stallion.”

I lowered my brows. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Her neck tightened, showing off those flabby veins. “It means, Soarin, that my relationship with Hang Glider was doomed from the start. It was like a car crash in slow motion, and I was too stupid to get out of the way.”

And here I thought this would be easy. “Oh, come on, you don’t mean that! I didn’t see everything that happened, but we had a normal, happy life before you left.”

“Shut up, you stupid brat.” She scratched at her scraggly mane in frustration. “What was an eight-year-old supposed to understand about a relationship between adults? You didn’t know a damn thing; that’s how it was supposed to be! It was all fake, it was all a lie, everything you saw was constructed for your eyes!”

I slammed a furious hoof on the table. “That’s not what Dad thought! You have no idea how devastated he was when you ran out! We spoke maybe three words to each other that whole year! You took the life out of the house with you! We lived like insects, eating to survive and carrying on just because we didn’t want to die! Goddess knows what he would’ve done if Sweet Wing wasn’t there for him, and you know what? I hated him after he remarried, for a long, long time. He was happy, but my life was ruined. If it weren’t for Dash, who knows where I would be?” Mirroring her, I scratched at my mane in frustration. “Damn it, Mom, what the hell happened?”

She looked longingly at her purse, specifically at the cigarette pack sticking out the top, but again, her eyes trailed over Prism and she refrained.

“I met Hang Glider while staying with some relatives in Trottingham. I’d been simply passing through, and he had moved away from home because he felt smothered by the life he lived. He was an excellent flier, maybe even up to Wonderbolt quality, but he couldn’t handle the pressure. Didn’t like eyes on him, wasn’t a performer. He just wanted a quiet life. Somewhere he could be to just take in the world on an easy breeze. He’d run away from home to become a weather pony there, and for the most part, he was content.”

Irritated, Mom ground her teeth together. “Course, he catches sight of me and thinks I’m somepony else. That was the first time I ever heard the name, ‘Sweet Wing.’”

I… don’t like the sound of that.

“My lack of wings tipped him off eventually, but that didn’t stop him from getting to know me. Goddess knows what he saw in me back when I was just some stupid little filly wanting to see the world, but he saw something he wanted, and he was a pegasus with strong wings and a kind of grace that only the best fliers have. I’d… always loved to watch him fly.”

Pain flooded Mom’s face and she let her head fall on a hoof, resting idly in the dining room chair. “It was sad and silly, but Hang Glider tried his damndest to get me in the air with him. It’d be a miracle if a pegasus was ever strong enough to take off with a full-grown earth pony on their backs, so we struggled with ideas for one of our very first dates. Eventually we settled on taking a ski lift to the top of a mountain, and from there, he strapped me into one of those parachute slings for two ponies. We took off at a run, and then, we sailed down the mountain on Hang’s wings.”

Lost in a dream, her eyes drifted. “I’ll never forget seeing that sky so blue, so vast, so wide! The wind lazily passing us by, the sunlight tingling against our hides; wispy clouds seen from above and below, all around. How long had I wished for a view like that.”

Mom rubbed at her snout, downcast, like she’d had to land. “To say the least, I’d fallen head over hooves for the stallion who took me flying. Stupid as it was, he’d made my dream come true, and from then on, I wanted to devote myself to him, just for that.”

Even Prism got offended by that one. “Oh please, how is that stupid, Granny? A dream is worth a lot, isn’t it? And, like, taking a pony flying, even gliding, like, isn’t an easy task for us! I don’t know what kind of shape you were in, but just being average weight would’ve tired out any normal pegasus in a few minutes of gliding, let alone all the way down a mountain!”

Mom waved him away. “Be quiet, boy. You know nothing, nothing at all; it was superficial! Sure, I was physically attracted to Hang, but there wasn’t anything more to it than that, and one simply doesn’t build a life upon vain desires! The adage goes, ‘young, dumb, and full of cum’ for a reason!”

I nearly choked on my tea. That wasn’t a word I ever wanted to hear out of my mother’s mouth.

“Mom, please.”

She clicked her annoyed tongue at me. “Stuff it, pearl clutcher. You begged me to talk, so I’m gonna talk, and you’re gonna sit there and listen, both of you.”

Ears fallen and resigned to my mother’s rough tongue, we both said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. A piece of advice for the youngest fool Snow in this room: if some hot piece of ass sticks to you, you’d better figure out why and fast, before something permanent happens. Hang and I hardly knew each other, but ponies back then were awful quick to go tying knots and getting knocked up. His parents were furious that he’d given up everything and gone and ruined his life on me, and mine were furious that I’d ‘co-mingled’ with ‘the lesser ponies.’

“Course, they might’ve taken me back, so long as all the fruit that came of this ill-conceived relationship fell as the Snow does, but then comes along mister trend-breaker. Halfway through the pregnancy, Hang and I had only been hitched for a few months by then, and not before we found out about your father, I begin to think something is awful strange about it all. My mother had always talked about how heavy foals were. Among other things they do to a mare’s body, weighing us down and bending our backs is a common problem in pregnant mares. But me? It just felt like I’d picked up a few extra pounds. It was Hearth’s Warming season after all; I usually did back then.

“Lo and behold, we go see a doctor and who’s in my belly but this little stallion right here?” Mom smacked my shoulder, possibly even affectionately. “I hadn’t entertained the possibility my foal would be a pegasus. I was a Snow. That didn’t happen to us. No co-mingling of any kind had ever given life to a non-earth pony Snow. It simply didn’t happen. It had never happened.

“There was hope before then, but only at that moment did I realize just how bad I’d fucked up. His parents didn’t want us, and mine certainly wouldn’t take us now, so we were stuck. Out on our own, my skills and talents were hardly of any use outside Horseshoe Bay, so Hang had to work every chance he got just to support us. Felt like my whole world had fallen apart. All because I wanted to fly.”

She let her head loll up and stared at the light hanging from the ceiling. “If earth ponies were meant to fly, we’d be born pegasi. To think otherwise is to tempt fate. Fly too close to the sun and, sure as Sunday, you’re struck right back down where you belong.

“But that was just my lamentations for the moment. Look, I’ll be honest. I was… envious of Soarin, before he was born.”

I had to rub at my temples. “What?”

Mom was so ashamed of the statement that she wouldn’t look me in the face. “I know, I know. But it was my dream, after all. I wanted to fly. I wished so often and so dearly that I’d been born a pegasus. And here you were, of my own blood, with the wings to carry you. It wasn’t fair.

“That’s just life, though: it never is fair. At the very least I got to watch you grow into your feathers, and if you were little more than a common pegasus, nothing would make my day better than to see you soar. And so goes your name.”

Aww, Mom.

Rolling her jaw around, Mom switched modes and rubbed her chin. “But where you were concerned, Hang and I had… different ideas.”

This is news to me. Dad never pushed me to do anything, especially after the divorce. Sure, he cared, and he still cares, but he was about as hooves-off as a father can be. Wherever the breeze took us, that’s where we’d go. Hang Glider Philosophy 101.

“You… did?”

She nodded. “Mm-hmm. Don’t know if he ever told you, but he’d lived that life. Raised a racer, went through academy and everything.”

How the hell did I never hear about this? “Uh, no, he didn’t. I guess, it didn’t seem like he particularly cared when I was awarded my position in the Bolts, but it’s not like he’s ever been against me flying. He always came to my shows and races when they were in town, at least.”

Mom huffed, rolling her eyes. “That’s Hang alright. We both had assholes for parents, that’s for sure. His were the crazy soccer moms you see these days. They certainly tried to push him off a cliff to get him to fly better since he had the talent they lacked, all just to see their own dreams come true. Like I said, he was in Trottingham back then because they had done just that, and he ran away from it all. But when I told him I wanted to see you fly, it was like he got war flashbacks about being in academy himself.

“All he wanted for you was to do what you wanted. If anything, he wanted his hooves out the pot to keep from stirring it at all. His parents were so damn heavy-hooved, the last thing he wanted to do was ruin you like they did him. As you may’ve noticed, I don’t exactly have the appendages to be teaching you how to fly; that much, he had to do, so we fought about it. A lot. So what were a young, stupid couple who hardly knew each other going to do when they got all hot and bothered in an argument over their newborn? Fuck the pain away, that’s what!”

Prism covered his eyes with his hooves, and I simply turned away. Dash and I were entirely guilty of the same argument solver; that’s how the one we lost was conceived. Not that it had stopped us from doing it again later. She’s just so cute when she’s angry. I… I wonder if Dad felt the same way…

“That got us a scare once, and from then on, Hang and I resolved to keep our hooves to ourselves and just try to raise Soarin without making an already bad situation worse by adding another kid to the mix. For Hang, I’d gotten my passions inflamed every now and again, but I couldn’t ever say if I truly loved the stallion. He filled the role of husband as well as any stallion could, and he conceded to my demand to get Soarin flying. Brought home the bread, kept a modest living and eventually rose to chief weather pony in Trottingham after a few years. Things had become comfortable.

“But then, I started to notice it.”

Mom shook her head and let her gaze drift over me.

“The Wonderbolts would come once every year to Trottingham, and I made sure that we saw them. My favorite pastime was watching pegasi fly, and nothing made me happier than seeing you and Hang practicing over the house or in the yard. When you were so little and had those big ol’ eyes, they’d get so wide watching the Wonderbolts fly. You’d come home, you’d imitate what you saw, and for the life of me, I thought you’d gotten it exactly right, just like the pros.”

“Yeah…” It was all coming back to me. Oh Goddess, what was the name of the Wonderbolt captain of that generation? Oh right. “That jackass Wind Rider was captain back then. If only I’d never met him, I still might look up to the guy.”

Prism frowned. “You mean that old guy Mom almost beat to death?”

“What!?” Mom practically shouted. “What happened here? Is… is Wind Rider really that bad? I always thought…”

“Oh, yeah.” I crossed my forelegs. “To make a long story short, Dash broke his long distance flying record a while back, and he thought he could frame her for some petty theft to get her name stricken off the record. She and one of her friends ended up sorting the mess out, and Wind Rider was banned from entering the grounds for a few years.”

She sighed. “Just goes to show, you should never meet your idols.”

“As my brother would say, ‘put not your faith in princes,’” Prism quoted.

“But, now that you mention it, I did already have a few of the Bolt’s routines down before I ever entered the academy. That was part of what got me their attention in the first place. It took the other guys ages to learn the screw turn; I picked up a lot just by watching.”

Mom nodded. “You had a talent for it. Your father was terrified of forcing you into the academy, but here you were, careening toward it yourself without any coercion at all. I tried my damnedest to get Hang to really teach you to fly and maybe take you back to Cloudsdale every once in a while just to get professionals to teach you, but I’ll be damned if he ever did anything of the sort.”

I shook my head. That was one of the things I fought with Dad about. “Nope. I worked summer jobs for years just to pay my entrance fees.”

“Stubborn old bastard. Anyways, that old flame burned anew, and with the fighting came what comes, and I got pregnant again.”

“But…”

Mom held a hoof up. “I was… horrified at the thought of bringing another pony into the world with Hang Glider. But at the same time, if after six years with you and just a little spark between us was enough to restart that old flame, I believed that maybe I really did love Hang. The stallion was always so damn ambivalent about things that I could never tell what he felt for me, but with rose-tinted glasses, I went into this new pregnancy thinking things might get better with another foal. We’d grown closer as it went on, and then… two months in…”

She sniffled and wiped at her eyes, unconsciously drifting to her stomach.

“There was no new foal.”

“Oh, Mom…”

Waving me away, she moved on. “Yeah, yeah. Prism told me about it. You might be able to empathize, but you just can’t understand how soul-crushing it really is. To be betrayed by your own body. It took me a long time to really understand what had happened, and still, all these years later, it tears me up inside to think of what could’ve been.

“But that’s neither here nor there. I… didn’t want to be touched again, after that. Not by Hang, certainly, but not even by you. I’d always felt like I didn’t belong in this picture with you and Hang, but losing the foal was what really cemented it for me.”

She moved her hair out of her face, tossing away the unhappy memory. “You know, earth ponies are supposed to be the best at carrying to term. That’s why the populations have always been so skewed our way. You’d think it was an even split between the three tribes, but in reality, it’s more like half a third and a fifth.

“Things had gotten rough after losing the foal, and those little moments of intimacy between Hang and I died with it. I didn’t have the heart to lose another one, didn’t have it in me to try. It felt like a bad omen, like my parents had been right all along. Snow falls to the ground: it doesn’t fly away.”

Tapping her lips, Mom found her sweet tea and sucked it down. She stared idly at the cup, some restaurant label from Trottingham printed on it. “The final straw came when I met the mare he’d thought I was the very first time we came into contact: Sweet Wing.”

She dropped the empty cup, letting it clatter to the table.

“After so many years, she came to visit us one day. Interested to catch up with her old friend, meet the wife and the kid. I hated her the moment I laid eyes on her. She was… everything I wished I’d been. A pegasus, first and foremost, but it went deeper than that: sleek and slender, kind and true to her name, bubbly and happy. She made Hang smile, she made you smile. She wasn’t the strongest flier in the world, but she was graceful and light. Airy and easy, mild and tender.”

With a forlorn look on her face, Mom sank into the kitchen chair. “Now that was a picture that made sense. A quiet but earnest father, a kind mare happy to be there, and a child with talent that only needed to be nurtured. With me in the picture, it couldn’t happen. But with her? It could.

“So I made myself cold and hard like the ice I grew up around and set to burning bridges. I did everything I could to be cruel to you and Hang, hoping he’d finally give up the ghost and push me out, but he just took it. I couldn’t keep it up more than a month. He never whined or complained. He never retaliated or made an effort to argue back. Maybe he blamed it all on the miscarriage and thought this was just some passing madness. Maybe he felt responsible for it somehow, and this was his punishment. It wasn’t working. I couldn’t keep doing that to him after spending all those years with him. He didn’t deserve this.

“And you.”

As if the memory of that day thirty-one years ago came right back to the fore, Mom’s face contorted in pain. “There was… no way to make you understand any of it. If I could simply make you hate me and forget me, you could go on and become that flier I saw in you. So what if Hang didn’t teach you himself? If you lived in the sky, there would be other ponies, better ponies than Hang, to teach you. Every ounce of anger, every inch of hate, all the pain and suffering of every year from the day I met him to the day I left him—I had to summon all of it to do anything to you. In the end, all it could measure up to was cruel words and a picture frame.”

She shrugged, a hoof held up in defeat. “Clearly, my plan worked, seeing as you’re here in my kitchen almost three decades later, blubbering like some little colt begging for his mother back.”

“Dude. Come on.”

Prism giggled and that got a smirk out of Mom, but the mirth passed as soon as it came. “But really, my plan worked. I ran right back home with my tail between my legs begging for forgiveness, decrying the mistake I’d made in co-mingling, and though they wouldn’t take me back, they helped set me up somewhere else. A distant cousin of mine, another Snow outcast who’d made my mistake with a unicorn to a much happier end, had moved out here to Ponyville and started this… bizarre shop that specialized in writing utensils and furniture.”

I pursed my lips. “Davenport? Quills and sofas?”

Mom raised a brow at me. “No, but yes. I worked for his father, Skift Ink, for a few years. Then, I got involved with the construction around Ponyville since it always seemed to be getting bigger, and I was good with my hooves. It paid well as the jobs got more and more extravagant. Some rich asshole who lived here decided to build some little side piece of his a whole storefront, and the damn thing was entirely round. Do you have any idea what a pain it is to get wood planks to bend?”

Prism furrowed his brow. “You worked on Miss Rarity’s first boutique?”

“What?”

“Uh, the mare who owns that store,” I explained. “We’re friends of hers.”

“Huh.” She eyed me again, this time with respect in her eyes. “Better connected than I thought.”

I don’t know how to tell her I’m going to spend a week at the castle here in a month with three of the most influential mares in the city. “You could say that.”

“Well.” Mom then reset her sitting position. “A couple years after that, I’d heard about the Wonderbolts making their first appearance in Ponyville. I’d taken to the bottle and cigarettes to find something to live for, since I really had no way of knowing what’d become of you and Hang after I left. Seeing the Bolts again would be a reminder of when things were better and maybe take the edge off for a little while.”

The wrinkled leather of Mom’s face cracked at the edges. “I recognized you immediately. The first trick I ever saw you perform was what opened the show and I thought… this was it. This is what I’d given it all up for. Everything I believed, everything I realized all those years ago about you and the talent you had; it was validated right then and there. My boy was a Wonderbolt.

“Soarin.”

With rose in her cheeks, incapable of fighting off the smile, Mom wiped at her eyes furiously. “But I couldn’t stay. We locked eyes for one instant, and I knew that all my validation was on thin ice. A fake peace, a construction for your eyes only. If only I could get away before you caught me, then maybe I could just disappear back into this little old town and live on, knowing that you’d done it.

“As if some forty-year-old mare could run away from a Wonderbolt in his prime.”

She sighed, disheartened and pained. “I… had misgivings in the ten years before I saw you again, wondering if there had been another way, wondering why Hang had pleaded so desperately if there was really nothing between us, wondering what had become of you. Seeing you fly validated me. Seeing you chase after me shook me right back to pieces.

“You’d become the flier I thought you could, but you were still just a boy. I’d scarred you, and like some abused little puppy, you came right back to me, begging for my love. In my presence, looking nearly like a stallion but still trembling like the son I’d raised while he was frightened, you threatened the worth of all my suffering alone. To accept you would be to admit that I’d been wrong to leave you, and that… that couldn’t happen. I wouldn’t be able to live on.

“So, I resorted to my old tactic. Maybe it would work this time. As if that’s ever happened to anypony. You came back every year; you asked the same questions like a broken record.”

“What’s a record?” Prism interrupted.

Oh Goddess, now I feel old. “Think, like, a really tiny memory card with an hour of music on it. It plays music by spinning. If it’s broken, it skips back to the same place it was supposed to leave off from, looping over and over.”

Mom frowned. “The hell is a memory card?”

I took a deep breath. “Mom, please finish the story.”

“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “In a way, I was impressed by your tenacity. ‘This was how he got into the Wonderbolts, I bet.’ Didn’t make your clockwork appearances any less irritating, but they were impressive all the same. You’d grown into a stallion, but you’re still just a boy. You’d ask questions I could never answer, and I didn’t feel I had the right to ask about your life because… I wasn’t a part of it anymore. You kept pushing, I kept pushing back, and after a while, I’d gotten used to it. I looked forward to the day when you’d come by again, asking stupid questions I wouldn’t answer, since, at least, I could see you again. We’re an awful lot a like, you and I.”

She threw a hoof out, as if showing off the words now hanging in the air. “So, there you go. I left so you could fly. Maybe I was wrong, maybe there was a better way, but it worked. If I have any regrets… I suppose it’s that I never explained this sooner.”

In an unheard-of tender gesture, Mom ran her hoof through Prism’s mane. “If it was in my power, I’d have never missed any of your flights either, Prism.”

But the boy grabbed the hoof, holding it tightly between his. “We’ve still got the last race of the school year coming up here in a week! You can come to that one!”

That’s what he takes from his mother: her openness, her cheerfulness. Can’t help but smile at a rainbow in the warm sunlight. It’s just not fair.

“I certainly will. Why don’t you give me the details?”

Should I let this happen? After all these years, after all the shit she put me through, am I really ready to just let her back in, just like that?

Does she deserve it? She’s been nothing but a torment to me. Ghosting me when I needed her most, haunting my dreams once I’d lost her, leaving an open wound on my heart after I found her again. I…

I sighed. “Come on, Mom, you’ve got a phone, don’t you? I’m the head coach for the colts; I know the where and the when off the top of my head.”

I am the head coach. If I can’t extend an olive branch to my own mother, how is Haze ever supposed to forgive his?

She held my gaze for a long moment. She got up, took her own device out of her purse, but wasn’t so forthwith with it. She stood still in front of me, holding it.

“Are you sure, Soarin? You really want to do this?”

I snatched the phone out of her hooves, not even bothering with the downtrodden, hopeless look on her face. “Don’t you give me that shit. I’m not a kid anymore. I made my decision eighteen years ago.”

Then I gave it back, fresh resolve in my heart. “You had better show up. If you get cold hooves, I’ll drag your ass by the tail down to the stadium to see him fly.”

She snorted. “Big talk for an old stallion who ain’t no Wonderbolt no more.”

“Even if I were just some average pegasus with no training and no experience, I’d still find a way to get it done. You ran away from me once. Hell will come before I let you do it again.”

Ease filled her as a breath left. She hesitated at first, but just as quick, she stepped in and threw a foreleg around my shoulders.

“Thanks, son.”

To pull these old white sheets from my head

With contacts exchanged, I figured I’d give Mom a chance to rest before we moved from the past to the present, to Haze and Dash.

I’d finally had my own weights lifted, even if I still felt uncomfortable about it all, but that could be dealt with over time. So long as she was willing, I’d make her a part of my life again, and maybe I’d try to get on better terms with Dad, too. If her account is even mostly true, he had no part in it other than being himself, which may have made things worse, honestly. For every screaming match I’ve had with Mom over the years, I’ve never had one with Dad. Soft-spoken, willing to go along with anything, having no strong feelings one way or another.

I’ll have to get the story about him being in the academy one day. I’ve met Sweet Wing’s parents, but not his. My grandparents, that is. Solid maybe on them being alive. Both sides, for that matter, but I don’t know if I really want to go about getting involved with the Snows. The Dark Canter thing I need to discuss with Discord aside, I really don’t need that toxic ideology in anypony’s head, especially not Haze. He’s so disillusioned right now, he’d be willing to believe it.

So, the next morning, Mom took a taxi service over to the house. She does have a car in her jungle, but it doesn’t run right now, and it hasn’t run in several months. I made a promise to go look at it one day or maybe call Cheese out there to check on it. Goddess knows the dude is a mechanic on par with the best of them, but for now, this would serve.

She arrived at the house at 9 AM, and Prism was ecstatic to open the door for her. “Hi, Granny! Welcome to the house!”

Gingerly, she rubbed at her forehead as she walked inside. “Prism, please, inside voices.” Of course she’s hung over. Car fixed or not, she wouldn’t have been able to get here on her own.

“Oh, sure.” He followed her to the couch and I brought her a coffee from the kitchen.

“Morning, Mom.”

Her ears twitched. Slowly, she turned to me, looking me over. I was no different than I had been yesterday, but I could still feel the unease between us. This was going to be new, this was going to be slow, and this would be fraught with growing pains.

Carefully, she took the coffee. “Morning, Soarin.” She looked at the cup, then frowned at the black liquid. “Cream and sugar anywhere?”

“On the table. I’m almost done, anyways. Come on, Prism.”

We migrated that way, and once everypony was served, sat and graced, we dug into the food. She seemed happy enough with the usual family breakfast, and with that out of the way, we got right down to business.

“I take it the fighters aren’t in the house at present?”

I shook my head. “I believed they needed some separation. More or less to give me some space to figure out a way to solve all this, but also to give Haze some breathing room without having to worry about his mother bothering him. It’s really something to see her fret over the boy.”

Prism nodded in agreement. “It’s kinda surreal. Mom expects, like, Wonderbolt-level stunts from me on a daily basis, but the moment Haze is in any kind of danger at all, she’s got to be at his side 24/7 to keep him from it. She’s been like that for as long as I can remember.”

She rubbed at her chin, a deep thoughtful frown on her jowly face. “I’ve got Prism’s account of the story, but this sounds more severe than what he told me. Soarin, explain to me in detail what all happened here.”

I got up, refilled my coffee, and then went to work. From when I met her and the kind of pony she was, all her friends and who they became, all the way up to Haze and the fall and how we made it out of that. Also, a warning to keep the Dark Canter thing to herself: we are very well-connected.

She was silent for a long time. She finished and refilled a third cup, though she drinks more cream and sugar than coffee. “I… can see where she’s coming from,” Mom finally said after a while.

Prism frowned, setting his empty fork down. “Can you?”

“I can.” She let her eyes drift as she put her hooves in her lap, tracing the line of syrup at the edge of our ceramic white plates. A dark stain on an otherwise unblemished pure circle. “Like I told you yesterday, you just can’t understand how it feels to lose a foal. It’s not in your body to do so. The utter despair, the tormenting thoughts, the endless ‘what ifs’ that plague you… there was nothing you could’ve done right to make it any better, but all the same, you feel personally responsible for the loss of that life.

“Given another chance, of course you’d do all in your power to keep the one who lives in the best health he can have. Pile a scare like the fall your brother went through on top and your Mother must be quite traumatized from hoof to withers. You were never the one in danger, and nothing thus far has put you near it; if anything, since you seem to be so excellent, you’re the least of her worries. A fool’s errand that is, too, because, Goddess forbid, if something were to happen to you…”

Mom rubbed at her temples, turning to me. “It seems to me that this is something your wife is just going to have to get over. If she’s so often driven to extremes, then it’s more the result of her personality and the trauma than just the trauma. She’s not going to change overnight.”

I sighed. I don’t know why I expected her to have the answer. I knew that from the get-go, but… “I know that, Mom, I just… that’s the rub, isn’t it? I don’t know what I could do to help her get over the trauma after all these years, but this is just… how she is. I sprained my wing once before the kids were born, and she wouldn’t leave me for a whole week! I love that she’s so devoted to us, but at the same time, she just doesn’t get boundaries.”

She sipped and swirled around more coffee while she thought. Maybe she was more right than I liked to imagine. Here I am, married for a decade and a half, with two kids half-grown, and I’m desperately hoping Mom can come to my rescue. Thirty-nine or nineteen, Soarin?

“Can I meet this Haze of yours?”

Huh. Not where I thought she’d go with this. “I suppose. He’s staying with the Apples right now for harvest season, so I’m sure he’s been at work all morning by now. Any particular reason why?”

Licking her lips, she nodded. “When you were nineteen, you went down with a sprained wing during that show in Canterlot.”

Geez, she went all the way to Canterlot to see me? She must’ve gotten better at hiding in a crowd by then. “I did.”

“Shame as it is to say it, I was horrified. I practically ran along with the medical crew to see you there. Followed them all the way to the hospital. You were out cold and they were taking care of you, but… it was like needles stabbing my heart. I had to know, I had to see you recover, I had to be sure you’d fly again.

“It was just a sprain, of course, and the most dangerous part, falling, had already been over. All you needed was a week or two off, and you’d be back in the circuit. Still, that didn’t make me feel any better. No, I followed you all the way to the hospital until I got to the room where they’d put you after the x-rays were taken.”

She swallowed. “Hang and Sweet were there.

“I felt like such a fool. Push you away at every turn, didn’t even tell you I’d be at the show, and here I was, running and fretting after you like I hadn’t abandoned you, to secure your career. Instinct and fear had taken over; all I could think was, ‘my baby!’ And of course, the other ponies who felt that way, the ones who actually raised you, had beaten me there.

“I had no resolve, no willpower. If that was all it took to turn everything back on, I just needed to stay away. Those ties were cut; they couldn’t be mended. I didn’t have the right to fret over you anymore. So, I stopped coming to out-of-town shows. Nothing could keep me away when you were so nearby, so when eventually, you retired from performing, I was satisfied with that.”

Clasping her hooves together, she looked me right in the eyes, the mother I remember from all those years ago back in my life once again. “You can’t turn it off: that’s what I learned that day. You’re fighting nature, and reality will come and assert itself on you. You will always lose to nature. This Rainbow Dash of yours is going to keep worrying and losing sleep over her sons till the day she dies. If Prism ever hurts himself, I’m sure he’ll understand how his brother feels real quick. And all this is fine… so long as she can learn to let go.

“Now that she’s taken it too far, you’re going to have to band together and make her learn to let go. And before you can accomplish that, Haze needs to understand this too. He’s too familiar with you and your love for your wife to think you understand. You couldn’t; you’re just ‘Dad.’ But… some old mare he’s never met?” She raised a brow, knowingly. “He might be a bit more willing to listen.”

I had to stop and stare at this old mare.

She made every single wrong choice to get what she thought was right done and took it all upon herself to bear. They would’ve accepted her if she’d been too taken over by concern to keep away. You just had to keep running away, didn’t you?

But now that you’ve already made all the wrong decisions, it’s made you wise.

I let out a final breath. “I’ll let Fin know we’re coming by. Prism, go get the car ready.” I turned to go get my phone from my room, but then I stopped.

I’d forgotten a word. With newfound respect in my heart, it finally dawned on me that, yes, this is indeed the mother I’d been missing after all this time. You’re finally back home.

“Thanks, Mom.”

We had to wait a bit after we arrived at Sweet Apple Acres, or District 2, since the teams were still working on the orchard. Takes us about twenty minutes to get to the front gates, but since it was nearly eleven and time for their lunch break anyways, we weren’t bothered much. Fin himself was on duty right now, but the head mare wasn’t running things, on account of her brother coming by to help out for the week with his own family.

Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t working. Instead of overseeing the operation, she was hard at work making lunches for the crew with her daughters, her younger sister, and Sugarbelle. Since there were about fifty ponies working here today, she’s been at it all morning, and was only now taking a break to see us. Applejack had invited us into the mess hall at the heart of the orchard, further away from the main house, where we met up in an office separated from the main cafeteria with her daughters.

This room had a large wooden table and enough chairs to seat around twenty-four ponies, for business meetings and meals too big for the main house. Further back, there was a desk, computer, file cabinets, and big covered windows to let the light in. Not anything fancy, but that homey feel which permeated everywhere in this orchard was here too.

“So… you’re one of them Snows Ah’ve heard about, huh?” Applejack asked, a brow raised in the way her family does.

In spite of being cast out, Mom was still pretty proud of her heritage. “I am. Don’t hold their views, clearly, but I appreciate the legacy. Y’all Apples have got one yourself.”

Applejack stroked her chin. “Well, things have been fairly different since my dear old Granny departed this world. Her parents’ generation were the last ones to really hold similar ideas in their heads, but Ah know the stories. Either way, Dash is one of my best friends, so Ah’m not about ta make any statements on this or that. Ah’m Applejack, this is my orchard Sweet Apple Acres, and we’re happy ta have ya.”

Approving of that, Mom took the outstretched hoof. “Glad ta be here. Lived in Ponyville for thirty years now. Hard to believe that this is the same old orchard that I used to pass on my commutes every day.”

At this, Applejack frowned. “Thirty years? How in the world…”

Mom broke and shook her head. “I kept to myself for the most part. Moved up north from the first district at the end of the buyout and haven’t worked a day since.”

Slowly, Applejack nodded. I could tell she wanted to ask more questions, but she let it go. If she didn’t get it out of me by the end of the week, Fin would on her behalf. “Well, these are my girls, Gin and Craft. They helped my sisters and Ah make the lunches today. Introduce yourselves, y’all.”

The older of the two was a leafy coated mare with her father’s orange eyes and a two-tone red-white mane that gave her a very festive look no matter the season. As stated previously, this was Fallacy’s amour, unbeknownst to her. “Howdy, y’all! Ah’m Apple Gin, but Gin is fine ta keep things from gettin’ confusin’. Ask fer an apple around here and you’ll get thirty ponies wonderin’ if ya mean them or need a fruit. Ah made the pies today, so Ah hope y’all enjoy ‘em.”

To make full use of the pun, this sweet young mare was the apple of many a young stallion’s eye. You hear a bit of locker room drivel among boys, and her name comes up a lot. She’s got the full Apple mare body which even I was struck by the first time I saw it at a Gala back in my youth. She’ll be fighting the stallions off when she’s full-grown.

“And Ah’m Craft Apple, but Craft fer short. We’ve got a whole bunch of cider and punch and just about everythin’ ya can think of ta drink here, so don’t be afraid ta ask. Ah’m helpin’ serve today, so Ah’ll come if ya call.”

And then trots in the head mare incarnate. Like her sister and father, she too has the green coat, but with an orange mane and the family green eyes. She could only be more of her mother’s daughter if she dyed her coat and mane. Stubborn, strong-willed, quicker to put up a front than share her feelings, tenacious, and above all, intuitive. Of the main family Apples, she and the twins are the ones I know best because I had them in my classes, her being in my current class. I don’t know how her own fraternal twin brother, Draft, didn’t end up in class with me this year too, but maybe that was a result of keeping Cider and Stout together so long.

The identical twins share a brain half the time, and they too are good friends of Fallacy and Cotton, which is never a good thing. Worse still, there’s a lot of finagling done at PCA to make sure those four are never together on any occasion we can afford as they’re all the same age. War, Famine, Pestilence and Death: mischief incarnate.

“Nice ta meet y’all.” Mom shook hooves with the girls, then the head mare shooed them away to set the cafeteria up for the workers.

When Applejack returned, it was down to business. “So, what’s goin’ on here, exactly? Haze’s been in a real shit mood since he got here and nothin’ anypony does seems ta make it better. Where is Dash, anyways? She’s usually more bothersome when Haze is here…”

“About that…” And so, I filled Applejack in. She already knows about the fall, but the recent drama is a fairly new development, and if I know Dash, she hasn’t said a thing to a soul about Haze fighting with her. What I wasn’t prepared to fill her in about was my own mother, so she took that upon herself.

Applejack was more upset with Mom than she was with Dash. “And, what, ya just up and abandoned everythin’ ta make sure he could fly? Ya gotta know what that does ta a foal, don’t cha’? It’s a damn miracle Soarin’ is a functionin’ adult now. Goddess knows how that happened. Always thought he was a little awkward and a little slow ta warm up around ponies, no wonder. Goddess.”

Ouch.

“Yes, yes, we went over this and all the wounds it brought with it yesterday. Found out he had kids yesterday too, for that matter.”

Now, the wrath was directed my way. “You didn’t tell yer own mother about yer family!? Goddess, even if she ain’t been treatin’ ya right, ya only get one of those! What’d’ve happened if she died before ya said anythin’? Can ya imagine how crushin’ the regret is when ya leave things like that unsaid? Think ya were miserable before; if ya never got it out, it’d be a whole new level.”

Double ouch. “Well, when you put it like that…”

Applejack growled in frustration. “Course, ‘when ya put it like that,’ he says. Ah swear, none of y’all ponies realize how fragile this thing we call life is. Dash is out of her damn mind, but at least she’s got part of it right. Goddess knows Ah’d’ve killed myself ages ago if Fin hadn’t been around. Blonde leadin’ the blind, alright.”

Uh… Prism doesn’t know that story. Neither does Mom.

“You… what?” Prism asked, immediately picking up on it.

Frowning, she sent an eye at me. “Think he’s old enough for that story? Yer whole family seems ta be caught up in this shit. Might as well take a life lesson ta heart before things get worse.”

Is he? Hell, if she’s willing to talk about it, I might as well get Haze in here to hear it too. That’s a cautionary tale if there ever was one.

I licked my lips. “Maybe another time. Dash doesn’t even know that one. All three of them should hear it if you’re going to tell it. It’s, uh… fairly relevant now that I think about it.”

Sitting down and crossing her forelegs, Applejack nodded. “So another time it is. Ah’ll trust y’all ta keep that ta yerselves. Ah tell the kids when they’re about thirteen, but Draft and Craft don’t know yet. Ah worry about the filly more than most of ‘em, ya know. She’s just like me; most capable of doin’ the same stupid shit Ah did as a teen, let me tell ya.”

She checked a watch on her wrist, then looked to the door. “They should all be here in a minute now. What’s yer plan?”

Mom put her hoof forward. “First step is to talk to Haze myself. Tell him about what I’ve been through, what I did to Soarin, explain what his mother is feeling. We’ll leave the exact details aside since his mother needs to give him those, but after that, we’ll have him talk to this Rainbow Dash of yours and finally put it out in the open why she’s so crazy around the boy. Doubt it’ll solve everything, but from what I hear, getting her to tell him the story is to be the hard part.”

Applejack snorted. “Ain’t that the truth. But Ah can only imagine so many things Dash wouldn’t do fer her boys. Sounds like it’ll work ta me.”

The rumbling of hooves filled the office as the workers filed into the mess hall. In all colors of the rainbow, Apples trotted in jolly and exhausted, making tired jokes and lazy movements while conversing with their friends among the herd. Haze was near the middle with the golden boys, Peel and his younger brother, Aurum; Mac’s kids, the programmer and the sharp shooter Oxford and Liberty; the identical twin tricksters Stout and Cider, Draft the young male twin; and even the older boys, Malus and Whiskey. Poor guy was the smallest of the herd, which wasn’t all that surprising considering he was in the center of every main family Apple of the new generation.

I was mostly surprised to see the older boys in there with them. Usually, if Applejack isn’t running things, Whiskey is, and Malus is Whiskey’s right hoof stallion. She must’ve given special instruction to watch over him, which is nice of her.

Ah, Haze.

He’s trying his hardest to smile and be amiable with the best of them, but he’s clearly faking it. Wearing a mask, hiding behind his acting skill, trying his best to keep up the persona.

Stalking up to the office door, Applejack clicked her tongue. “See what Ah mean? He’s doin’ the same shit Peel does when he’s in a bad mood. All pretense and no truth. Like mother, like son.”

She then whistled, which put the whole cafeteria at parade rest in an instant. That’s sort of expected of the Apples, but even then, other ponies who were here for work or to be with their friends followed suit.

“Son, bring Haze ta the office when y’all get yer grub.”

Knowing who he was, Whiskey gave an affirmative, “Yes ma’am,” then the line went back at ease.

Spotting me, Haze furrowed his brows and frowned. We held eye contact for a moment, him showing nothing but confusion, but he was quickly taken back to the line when Peel pushed him forward.

A little while later, Whiskey and Haze entered the office with Sugarbelle, carrying trays for the four of us in her magic. We set up shop toward the end of the room by the desk, and Sugarbelle took her exit to go eat with her husband.

The moment she was gone, Haze asked, “So… what’s all this about, then? And, excuse my rudeness, but who are you?”

I was sitting at the end of the table beside Applejack and Mom, and Haze was separated from Mom by Prism. He’d been glancing between the three of us the whole time, no doubt wondering why this random old mare looked so much like us.

Smiling, Mom put a hoof behind Prism’s chair to shake. “Hey there, kiddo, I’m your Grandma.”

He was so utterly lost. Still, he had the courtesy to shake. “Uh… you are?” He looked to his brother for help.

Salivating at the spread in front of him, Prism was too busy employing all of his restraint to answer. Instead, I did: “This is my mother, Downy Snow.”

“But—”

“No, she isn’t.”

“But—”

“I know.” Good Goddess, he’s his mother’s son.

“Haze, buddy,” Whiskey interrupted, “Ah’ve got questions too, but why don’t we eat first? We worked hard today. It’s time fer a good meal.”

He sighed, smothering his curiosity. “Okay…”

So, Applejack said grace, we ate, and now it was time for questions. Course, Prism was practically in a food coma by now and simply said, “I’m coming next time if this is what you guys eat every day.”

Applejack chuckled. “Feel free, Sugarcube. We can always use a pair of extra hooves, though ya might find the work’s a bit harder than ya think.”

I put a hoof on his shoulder. “Look, Prism, I’m not sure you know what you’re asking for. You can come, but… oh Goddess, just don’t hurt yourself. You think watching Dash freak out over Haze is bad? Wait till it’s your turn.”

Haze’s ears shot up, and with wide eyes, he scanned the room. “She’s not here, is she!?”

“No, no. She’s still in Cloudsdale.”

Haze relaxed. “Oh, thank the Goddess…”

Despite only being nineteen, Whiskey had a full beard and mustache. This, compounded with his father’s white mane, made him look older than I did. Rubbing at said beard, he narrowed his eyes at Haze. “What, is that why you’ve been bitchin’ and moanin’ these past couple days?”

Haze groaned at the young stallion. “Oh, stuff it! You don’t understand how crazy she is! Sure, I get a break now, but once the week is over…”

Lowering his brows and frowning hard, Whiskey sent a glance to his mother, who nodded her approval. “Buddy, Ah know plenty about how crazy moms can get. Mine thinks she’s slick, but Ah always catch her when she’s tryin’ ta spy on me. Can’t take a mare nowhere without a tail, Ah tell ya what. As if Ah’m dumb enough ta pull the same shit Pa and uncle Mac did and get some filly knocked up.”

That snapped Prism out of his coma. Together, he and Haze said, “Huh?”

The young stallion ran his tongue across his teeth. “Mm-hmm. Ya might know about Malus, but Ah’m the result of my parent’s little affair. We Apples got ourselves a depressive streak too, so Ma thought it was better ta kill herself than get found out. Pretty damn lucky Pa got a taste fer apples after the first time.”

Again, in unison, “Dude.”

Nodding, Whiskey knocked on the table. “Ah know a thing or two.” Then, raising a brow, he glanced at Mom and me. “So, why don’t we get explanations out in the air, hmm?”

Speaking of like mother, like son…

Omitting the story surrounding Haze’s conception, Mom and I explained the situation at hoof—our relationship, and how we came to be here. At most, we explained that Dash has a reason for being as crazy as she is, and it’s related to a miscarriage before Haze, but something else happened that pushed her over the edge.

Haze was unhappy with the omission. “Well, what happened?”

“Ah think that’s a story fer Dash ta tell, Haze,” Applejack said.

More or less getting where we were going with this, the color drained out of Haze’s face. “You…” He swallowed. “You want me to ask her?”

Mom softly put a hoof on his shoulder. “I think it would do her some good, kiddo. She’s got scars over you. Real bad ones. When what happened to her happens to a mare, it tears her up inside. Tack on more trauma and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”

“But!” He was at a loss for words. He struggled for a moment, but eventually found them again. “What if she won’t tell me? I can’t deal with her being crazy for the rest of my life!”

Applejack and Mom laughed. “Hate to break it to you kiddo, but no matter what happens, she’ll always be crazy.”

And Applejack agreed. “Oh, yeah. Unfortunately fer y’all, even before the… incident, Dash was inclined ta worry about things. When she was a teenager, she had this pet tortoise, and we had ta move heaven and earth ta convince her that he was hibernatin’ fer winter and not dyin’ her first year with him. She still holed herself up fer a week ta ‘mourn’ the poor thing.”

Prism was incredulous. “Oh, come on, Mom can’t be that bad. Wouldn’t we still have it if it was a tortoise? Those things live longer than ponies do most of the time.”

I coughed into my hoof. “You ever wonder why we always go see the turtles every time we visit the zoo?”

The boys frowned. “Uh, because Mom likes turtles?”

“Generally, no. She doesn’t care for reptiles as a whole. But the really big tortoise at Ponyville Zoo? That’s Tank.”

Haze deadpanned. “You cannot be serious.”

I threw my hooves up. “He got too big! We couldn’t keep a four-foot turtle in the house with foals! Why do you think we brought a cake last time we went?”

The boys were trying their hardest to compute this, but Applejack vouched for me. “Oh, it was one hell of a day when Shy had ta come take him off with her. See, she was pregnant with Prism at the time, and as sweet as the old boy was, she was afraid of him getting all territorial when the baby came, since tortoises are known ta do that around other males.”

I shrugged. “For the record, Tank never liked me, and I never liked Tank. In his defense, I was taking his mare away from him, but… you know, he’s a tortoise. He still gives me dirty looks when we go to the zoo.” Damn turtle. I had to get my own helmet to keep him from bashing my head in when we took him flying, staring at me with those accusing reptilian eyes in the middle of the night right after we got married. Damn turtle.

“Come on! Can’t she be normal about anything? Why do I have to ask her? If this is just Mom being Mom, what am I to do? Things are just going to go back to the way they were and I’ll end up yelling at her again!” Sighing, Haze pushed his tray away and buried his head under his hooves. “I don’t want to yell at her again…”

Reaching over the table, Whiskey patted Haze’s head. You just gotta wonder how somepony this massive came out of Applejack. I wouldn’t call her small, but Whiskey, Malus and Mac are just giants. I can only imagine how Fin feels.

“It’s alright, buddy. Last time won’t be the last time ya yell at yer Ma. My Ma yells at everypony. Just gotta get used ta yellin’ back.”

Applejack concurred. “Honestly, Ah have ta wonder if Ah’ve wasted more breath on Dash or Rarity at this point.”

I snorted. “I mean, it has to be—” Then I stopped. Is that right? At least up until two years ago, Pearl was everypony’s extra daughter, but she ended up here more often than not. Dash comes here when she needs to talk and won’t talk to me first or won’t listen to me first; discounting Haze visits and visits just to bother Applejack, she always leaves with an earful. But does Rarity ever get off without an earful when she comes by? It’s almost always to pick up Pearl, too. “Actually, that’s probably a Twilight question.”

The head mare laughed. “Ah’ll have ta get her ta do the math this Sunday. Probably take her head away from that uh…” She cut her self short, coughing into her hoof. “Ah’ll let ya know when she gets it sorted out.”

Right.

Re: Twilight's Mess—

Twilight has made a mess for herself to sort out, and she is easily the least capable pony to sort a mess like that out. For the longest time, she's been romantically involved with two of her royal guards who've stayed well beyond their normal terms. Even Dash told her years ago that what she was doing wasn’t fair. Now, things are getting close to a peak on that front, and it doesn't look like either guard is going to stop at just beating the other. I don’t envy her, but just like everything Dash does, this is entirely her own fault.

“As in, Princess Twilight?” Mom interjected.

“Yes, ma’am,” Applejack nodded, “though Dash and Ah knew her before that whole princess thing. Been through a lot with that gal.”

Mom patted my back. “You did well, son.”

This time, I think she meant it. As opposed to being angry and spiteful, this was her really approving of where I ended up in life. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good.

Prism looked to his brother, and they both looked at me. “I… don’t know how to interpret this exchange of words,” Haze said, for the both of them.

Burying the butterflies, I waved them away. “You wouldn’t get it, it’s fine.” Taking a deep breath, I ran my hoof through my mane. “So, what’s the deal? Have you resigned yourself to your fate yet or what?”

He groaned, returning to the safety beneath his hooves. “Could you have said that any other way? Now I feel like you’re sending me off to my death or something.”

“But, my dear boy, death is lighter than a feather; For death is your finite end in this world, the moment in which you cease to be. To live on, to face the most terrible of monsters like the terror of your mother, is a heavy burden. Atlas, you must bear the world, as it is your duty.”

He clapped a hoof on the table, raising to glare at me. “You dare use my own magic against me, witch!?”

In the most dramatic fashion I could, I threw both hoof and wing out. “Boy, thou speaketh as if I weren’t thine author! Forget not, the stallion thine eyes fall upon be thy very father!”

“Damn you!” Back under his hoof, he smacked the table again and again. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” Completely covered, Haze settled and groaned like his own chair under an unbearable weight. “I never should’ve given you my book.”

I crossed my hooves, sitting up in triumph. “T’was thine own undoing, dear boy. Well? What have you?”

“I concede! I’ll do it, alright? Just… stop, please! I can’ take it!”

Applejack could only shake her head. “You and Dash deserve each other.”

Aware that I just did that in front of my friend and my mother, I drew back into myself. “Yes, it’s terrible, I know.”

“The weird display aside,” Whiskey began, “what’s yer plan ta get Miss Dash ta actually listen ta the boy? Ah grew up around the mare ‘bout as much as everypony else here did, and Ah think we all know what a task that is.”

Mom tapped the table with a hoof. “It’s not about getting her to listen but getting the idea in her head that she can’t keep this up forever. Perhaps that idea is already there, but if Haze can get her to talk, to open up about what happened, then she’ll think. She won’t turn about face immediately; nopony does. But a gradual change will begin from there. He won’t just be her baby anymore, but…” Her eyes trailed over me. “He’ll be somepony who’s changing before her eyes. Watching him so carefully over the years, still seeing the foal he once was in front of her, she’ll finally blink. The foal will be gone, replaced by a colt. Not the baby she remembers anymore. By the time she learns about this one, she’ll blink again. That’s… just how it goes.”

Smiling sweetly, Applejack wrapped a hoof around her son and leaned against him. “Yes, Ah suppose it is. Sometimes, it’s just hard ta forget those days when ya’d go sit out on the porch in the rain with that little boy who’d always make ya smile. But, so too shall this pass. Time will take the colt, make him a stallion, change the bond that once was forever inta somethin’ else. The memory, however, never deserts ya. It’s so much easier ta give inta worry when… it’s the colt ya see and not the stallion he’s become.”

Whiskey shrugged. “Whatever gets ya ta leave me alone when Ah go on a date.”

She pressed him harder, her brow twitching and the young stallion struggling to breathe against her hoof. “Then again, another reason ta wish they stayed young is because they get smart and forget who’s who.”

“Ah give! Damn!”

Whiskey tapped out, Applejack set him free, and in that instant, I was inspired on how to perfectly lure Dash into telling the story.

“That’s it!”

Haze held a hoof up. “Look, Dad, I’m not letting Mom choke me.”

I rolled my eyes. “No, shut up. I’ve got it. We’re going to put two and two together. Your talent and her weakness. This is how we’ll set it up…”

I'll leave them folded neat and tidy

“I just don’t understand why we have to go through all this,” Haze grumbled. “Can’t you just, I don’t know, explain it to me and then talk to Mom about this?”

I dismissed Haze wholesale. “No, no. This is your mother we’re dealing with here. If it’s not dramatic and over the top, it’s just not going to be enough for her. Act as well as you can; your genuine reaction to the story, especially from her, is what will do the trick.”

That said, we had put an inordinate amount of work into this. Dash’s inability to keep away from Haze during the school day was such a well known fact that the admins agreed to let us borrow the auditorium to make this happen. Nice of them, but another dart in the heart all the same. I’ve been ignoring this for far too long.

“I-I hate to put more nails in this coffin, but that’s essentially how it’s always been with Rainbow,” Fluttershy added as she started on the backdrop. “There was a time when we, um… played a fairly mean trick on her to get her to stop being a nuisance with her ‘heroing’ around town back when we were teenagers. It took about a week of us more or less publicly shaming her before she finally toned it down.”

Sighing, Haze rubbed at his temple. “Oh, Mom…”

Discord snapped another backdrop in place, still not quite satisfied by the ‘VFX’ that went along with his magic-holographic display. “Yes, yes, tis’ a pity your mother has a hero complex and would do anything and everything within her power for you. What a troubled life you live, Haze boy.”

That’s a hell of a blow. If Haze had been feeling bad before about all this, now he was just distraught.

“You made me a promise!” Fluttershy groaned, irritated.

“A promise I have kept. You said inappropriate jokes and tricks. That was neither inappropriate nor a joke or trick. Better yet, that was a fact with which I feel the boy has not yet reconciled. Ungrateful young ponies are a dime a dozen. Why, it’d be terrible of me not to correct misconceptions in the spawn of our friends, would it not?” Shaking his bicorns, he waved a claw and dispersed the backdrop entirely. “Bah, this simply isn’t coming out right. Can we not just turn the stage into the scene itself? It would be so much easier to make the real thing instead of some illusion.”

Fluttershy was quick to console Haze, treating him not unlike one of her own. A caring wing around his shoulder, a tender hoof through his mane, she then glared at her husband. “I also asked you to be aware of the effect the things you say has on ponies! We’re here to help, not to make him feel worse.” Then, turning away from Haze, she coughed into her hoof. “And, um, no, that would only make it harder to get through to Dash. Real lava would turn on her danger sensors, and, well…”

Discord apathetically held a paw out and turned to me. “You see what I have to put up with? She asks me for opposites simultaneously. Had I not so much power at my disposal, she’d be entirely impossible.”

“This is the absolute state of husbandry. You know, in Umanese, the words for husband and prisoner are only different by a letter and sound nearly the same.”

“Well, perhaps they’re better for more than just electronics, animations and hilariously long novel titles.”

Fallacy chimed in, “Shujin soretomo shuujin, dayone?”

The boys, Prism and Fallacy, and the girls, Amity and Magnanimity (or Maggy for Dashes who have trouble pronouncing the word) had come down from the cat walk and were joining Discord and I in the auditorium seats. “Goddess, Fal, you’re such a weeb,” said Amity and Prism. His older sister probably meant it as an insult, but the boys call each other weebs all the time, if only because one of their favorite pastimes is watching sports anime together. Which, eventually, turned into whatever show piqued their interest this month. Luckily for them, Fluttershy has an awe-inspiring collection, her being the original veteran weeb.

“Ami, you know I don’t like it when you use that word,” nagged said veteran.

Discord snapped a gloved hand into existence and poked the draconic hybrid in the snout. “And I don’t like it when you use that first one. Mind your words, girl.”

Amity rolled her eyes and stuck her forked tongue out. “Always on eggshells with you two. Why is it okay for Prism to use that word?” The eldest of the chaos children was the least pony-like while also being the most normal… if one can call them that. She was, as far as one could tell, a typical teenage girl of her age, save the part where she has: dragon horns, carnivore teeth, a pointed snout, a forked tongue, one dragon arm, a bat wing, a pony wing, two three-toed hind-legs, a single pony hoof, and a long scaly tail. Her flying has always been awkward thanks to the mismatched wings, but once Dash got a hold of her, she set her flying well. Discord, to this day, has still not let that go and brings it up every now and again when he’s feeling petty.

Amity, in spite of having so much of her mother’s face, is unquestionably Discord’s daughter, but without so much humor. Very sharp, very biting, often rigid and quick to judge, but deep down holds a core of sweetness she’s always regarded as weakness in herself. She makes an effort to meet ponies and make friends, but she could count on her claws her true friends. The question is if she realizes who those ponies are. Discord often laments that she is just like his first son and thanks the Goddess every day that she has no magic. Equestria doesn’t need another liberator.

“Unlike you,” Fluttershy answered, “Prism means it endearingly. Please be nice.”

She groaned, “Yes ma’am,” and then sat down next to her father.

“B-besides,” Maggy offered, “being a weeb doesn’t make him a bad pony. Being himself does.” She could hardly finish without letting the giggles out.

Putting himself in a bright yellow ninja outfit with a bone mask, Discord spun his claw unnaturally and launched it at the ‘coil-pony,’ as we like to call her. “Get over here!” He took hold of her by the neck, and pulled her down to his lap as his claw retracted. Little white gloves began attacking both girls relentlessly, forcing even the stone-cold Amity to fall to laughter. “You girls are just so mean! I can’t imagine where you get that from.”

“D-Daddy, please!” they protested, Amity writhing and Maggy twisting and curling herself into pretzel knots.

The youngest of the chaos children was more snake than pony, but not so much in appearance. A gazelle horn, a ram’s horn, matching bat wings, pony legs, and an excessively long tail. She was beyond flexible and could quite literally bend over backwards. When they were teaching her how to fly, Discord just held on to her tail while creating wind to use her like a kite. She’s still very quick-witted and sharp like her sister, but with more sweetness than anything else. Her teeth are a bit strange, though, and the single fang sticking out of her mouth often causes her tongue to trip, making her stutter at random. She’s the most ‘cohesive’ mix of her parents out of the three, which makes her the most dangerous to deal with. She very easily appears innocent and can outcharm a charmer, but she’s also very cunning. ‘Daddy’s little abomination’ indeed.

Discord released the girls, and the moment they regained their breathing, Amity grunted and turned away from her father, blushing, while Maggy coiled around and hugged him.

Prism and Fallacy glided down and sat next to me. “You know, I think I have just the thing to improve you, my dear sisters.”

He clicked his hooves together, and all at once, the girls were muzzled.

Satisfied with the job done to the lights, Fluttershy turned around just in time to see this. She sighed, floating down to join us. “We haven’t even been at this for an hour. Can’t you get along for once? Please?”

Taking Maggy by the head, Discord observed the muzzle. “Hold on now, I think the boy has a point here…” The girls were so used to pranks like this, they didn’t even bother struggling against the contraptions.

“Discord.”

The muzzles were dispersed. Many things had been said in that one word.

Placated, Fluttershy sat on the other side of Amity and went about fixing her mane, much to Amity’s displeasure. “The lights are ready. Are you done with the backdrop yet?”

He sighed, snapping the previous backdrop back into existence. The scene was a cliff next to a castle inside a volcano, a boiling pool of lava covering the stage floor. If one looked into the ground from Haze’s vantage point on the stage, it would look like the lava is far below, and the castle would have more details since, ‘you’re closer to it,’ as sense of space goes. Orange smoke drifted out and over the floor, and dark ash clouds thundered above, without getting in the way of the lights.

“I suppose. The lightning is too orderly and the smoke is too regular to be a real volcano. You’ve also forbidden me from filling the room with brimstone and sulfur vapor or adding the proper amount of heat to the lava’s surface, so this is as good as you’re getting.”

“That is more than enough.” She flew up to his face and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Discord.”

“You, my dearest—” he took her forehooves in both claws “—are utterly impossible.”

And he kissed her right back. It was long, it was passionate, and it made everypony under twenty very uncomfortable. For my part, I was just glad to see what a healthy relationship they had. He’s always said she was the one who made his dead heart beat again. Before he knew what to do with himself, he was twisting in knots over her affection. A second chance to get it right this time, a real shot at that family life he could never have had in his own time.

When they finally broke, Fluttershy was flushed beet red, and she slowly sank to her seat. “C-come now, we’re in public…”

Discord motioned to the empty auditorium. “Um, no, I don’t believe we are. Perhaps if that black-lunged fool of a mare had joined us, I’d have been more cautious, but seeing as it is just us here…”

“That’s no way to talk about Soarin’s mother! ‘Please be nice’ applies to all of you, not just the kids!”

Discord had not reacted so well to Mom’s story either. He has… a unique history with mares, and very much values the quality of a good mother. Since mine was about the opposite of that, he had some choice words for her when we’d asked them to help out with my scheme earlier in the week. A very strange and strained conversation occurred between them, again going back to the Dark Canter thing, and Mom decided it would be best if this all played out while she wasn’t around. Instead, I introduced her to the Pies before we arrived today, and Pinkie and Cheese offered to take a look at her car. With any luck, she can just make the trip to the house on her own when all this gets resolved, when it’s time for her to meet Dash.

“Nicer words than I would’ve used,” I then coughed into my hoof.

“Oh, Soarin,” Fluttershy muttered.

“Haze, buddy, is this good? Are you ready?”

My youngest was busy inspecting the ‘backdrop,’ trying to put his hoof through the floor where it appeared to lead into a pit of lava. When it just ‘clocked’ against the wood of the stage, he rubbed at his forehead, half amazed and half confused. “This is super trippy. It’s worse than my VR games.” Discord seemed rather satisfied with that, then Haze focused on me from the brightness of the stage. “Uh, yeah, as ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

Which was good, since we’d really gone all out for this performance. In part, this was me pushing Haze toward his cutiemark since I think I’ve got that figured out. He was very much into the writing and designing of this little play we’d made for Dash, just not so keen on actually getting her involved. I don’t know how he managed to hide it from us, but apparently he has a performance in the last week before Winter Break here in a few weeks and he’s been dreading the day Dash found out about it. Which, totally fair, it would be an incredible display of self-restraint if Dash didn’t embarrass him during the play.

The biggest hurdle here was getting Discord to help out. Haze wanted to make all these crazy props for his volcano scene when he came up with it a few days ago, but there was no way we’d get all of that done before Dash came back. Everything needed to be just so, and the only… ‘pony’ we know with the magic to do it was, of course, dear uncle Discord. All it really took was a nudge from Fluttershy and Fallacy to move him, so it actually turned out to be much simpler than I’d imagined. He did put the condition on it that he’d meet ‘the speaker of forbidden words’ before hoof, but I’ve already been over how that went.

Taking my phone in hoof, I made the call to my wife. It did not ring even once.

“Hello?”

Wherever she was, it was fairly windy. If she’s not over Ponyville, she’s in transit at least.

“Hey, Dash. How far out are you?”

“Oh, I’m like, about to land at the house. I had my phone in hoof when you called. Are you here? None of the lights are on.”

“Uh, no, we’re at the school auditorium, actually. Haze wanted your help with a project he—”

“He does!? I’ll be right there!”

And Dash hung up. And here I’d been prepared to tell her what we were doing. I let the phone fall back on its lanyard and said, “Mom’s inbound.”

Haze frowned. “And so goes my hopes Grandma talked any sense into her.”

I shrugged. “Cheer up already! Don’t be a downer; I’m a hundred percent sure this is going to work. Just follow your script sincerely, and it’ll go like I said.”

Sighing in defeat, Haze let his haunches fall to the not-volcano cliff he stood on. “If you say so.”

I do say so, but explaining it to Haze would defeat the purpose:

The first step was to get his creativity spinning. Sure, he went all the way with it and wrote a whole three-act play, but what was important was the scene where the villain forces the heroine to make a choice. As the heroine is an ersatz Dash, she must choose between the life of a baby or a city. Any sort of reason to compel her one way or another is fine, and the choice that the play hinges on should be whatever Dash decides.

Naturally, Haze opted to set the rest of the play based on the heroine choosing to save the baby before her, and in the style of the old masterworks, the city was to be sacrificed for the choice and the heroine has to live on with the baby knowing that this life she saved was at the cost of all those souls in the fallen city. The details involve an evil wizard and a definitely-not Daring Do style protagonist, because who else would he make his hero? For every time Dash has read, forced me to read, and then reread the Daring Do series, she’s read them again to the kids as bedtime stories, regardless of how inappropriate they were at the time. ‘What? Come on, Daring Do and the Temple of Serpents is totally a good bedtime story!’ And she wonders why Prism is afraid of reptiles.

Haze, however, being his mother’s son, loves those books possibly even more than she does, and definitely in a more… male way, too . Never again will I walk in his room without knocking on the door first.

My own traumatic experiences aside, we didn’t wait for more than a couple minutes for Dash to arrive. Hooves in the hallway:

Takka-takka-takka—

SLAM!

“I’m here!”

Discord clicked a stopwatch. “Would you look at that? Eight minutes and fifty-three seconds. Did you break any sound barriers on the way here?”

Dash stared blankly at the draconequus. She scanned him and the rest of us, finally stopping on me. “Uh… hey guys. What are all of you doing here?”

I made eye contact with Haze and nodded toward his mother. He groaned quietly, took a quick breath, then stood up to answer her. “I asked for their help. Somepony had to get up to the lights to mess with those, and Mr. Discord is like the only special effects guy anypony could ever want.”

Swooning, he waved a handkerchief at Haze. “Oh, you flatterer, you.”

Finally, Dash took notice of the stage. She paused stiff, trying to keep her wings from unfurling. “Th-that’s, uh… not real lava, is it?”

Windy must’ve said something. She wouldn’t have kept her cool this long before. Though, maybe it helps, seeing Fluttershy here with us. Can’t have the monster without his master.

“No, no, I was told that wasn’t allowed,” Discord answered, still irritated about it.

She cooled off a bit, but made a quick trot to the stage to join Haze, probably to check the effects herself too. She is rightfully mistrustful of Discord, but she could at least give him the credit to not put our kids in danger. Maybe. Perhaps I am too used to him.

“I… see.” Dash said, tapping the floor in the same manner Haze did earlier. “How’s everypony doing? Ami, Fal, Maggy, Shy, Discord. It’s been a few weeks, right?”

“Um…” Fluttershy coughed into her hoof. “Your birthday was a few weeks ago, yes.”

“And Maggy and I see you, like, every day,” Amity added, which was doubly true for Amity since she was in physics as well as the girls flier class. Janky though it may be, Amity has stronger wings than ponies as a whole. Given her performance, she might as well be in the boys class, but that would be uncomfortable for a number of reasons.

Dash scratched at her cheek. “Yeah. So, uh, what’s all this about, anyways?”

I made a pushing motion with my hoof for Haze, and finally, he spoke up. “Well, Mom, I…” He sighed, had to start over. “I wrote a play over the week and I’m kinda stuck on how I wanted this to go. I set it up like a Daring Do book, and since you know them about as well as I do, I figured you could help me out with the next scene.”

Raising a brow, Dash tilted her head. “Oh, really? I didn’t know you were into plays. And writing too, huh? Alright, sure, lemme see it.”

A note: Dash has also tried her hoof at writing. However, unlike Haze, who likes all kinds of books and has made an effort to read many things, Dash only reads what she likes and what A.K. Yearling puts out. I know books she’d like, such as the MHI series or the Grimnoire series or the Another Kingdom series, but she just won’t take recommendations. Can’t sit still long enough to read things, and half the time, she won’t even read her favorite books now that audiobooks are a thing. Needless to say, it is a miracle Dash can read at all, let alone write anything.

Haze took the script he’d prepared ahead of time, passed it to his mother, and she scanned over the first few pages. “Not bad, not bad at all… Yeah, I can see…”

And her smile fell flat. She flipped to the next page. Then the next page, lips curving further downward. She hit the last page, then closed the booklet.

She stared directly at her youngest, silent for a long moment. “Haze, buddy, I don’t know if I’m the right—”

“No, no, you are! You’re the only pony who could help me with this,” he said, courage growing in his voice. Now that he could see how his words were affecting her, he was less concerned about what she might do and what she would really say. He wants to see it now: her reaction.

He led her to the other side of the stage at the base of the volcano’s edge, where the rising rock jutted out of the stage. “Look, why don’t we try acting it out? You just say Rain Whip’s lines, and I’ll be the bad guy. Uh, don’t read any of the extra text out loud though, just everything with Rain Whip’s name by it, okay?”

Dash scratched at her mane. “Haze, I’ve been in a play before, I know how this works. I just—”

He grabbed her hoof, forcing her to look him in the eyes. “No, really, Mom. It has to be you.”

Dash sighed, entirely resigned. “Okay, fine. She’s just Daring Do, right? That’s who I’m pretending to be?”

Haze trotted up the cliff to the other side of the stage. “Something like that. Just act however you would. That should be fine.”

He cleared his throat, then turned to the audience. Fallacy clapped his hooves, and the lights all turned to focus on Haze.

“Rain Whip’s arduous journey has finally given her the opportunity to corner the black wizard, Shadow Canter, at the edge of Mount Kazan in the Miyako Islands. With nowhere left to run, he turns to face his opponent. Surely, this is the end for him, but as Rain Whip knows, Canter always has another trick up his sleeve…”

Discord leaned down to me and whispered, “You might have him change that name. If the Princesses ever come to see this, it would make things… uncomfortable.”

Good ol’ Mom, opening up a damn can of worms.

Fallacy clapped again, and the lights shifted. Diffused orange and red light spread across the stage, with soft white spots falling over the actors. Raising himself to full height, Haze—er, Shadow Canter turned around to face Rain Whip.

“It’s over, Canter! There’s nowhere left for you to run to!” Quickly, Dash looked back down at her script. “You’ve got no medallion, no allies, and no monsters to help you. I’ll bring you back to justice in Equestria, with or without the body bag!”

Totally in character, Haze stroked his chin, looking down contemptuously at ‘Rain Whip.’ “Rain Whip, Rain Whip, Rain Whip,” he began in the deepest voice he could make. “Surely, we know each other better by now. Have you forgotten the time we spent together in Odori Prison? Or perhaps those moments we shared in the wastes of Kycillia? There are plenty of places to run, and there will be no killing of either of us. But I have no need of running. I’m exactly where I mean to be.”

Gotta give the little guy props; he didn’t even look at his script.

‘Rain Whip’ took a few steps closer. “Don’t play games with me, Canter!”

Discord leaned to whisper again. “Oh Goddess, I’m getting war flashbacks. That is the exact same tone of voice Celestia used over a thousand years ago. Rainbow is quite good at this, too.”

“Games?” ‘Shadow Canter’ continued. “Oh, but I haven’t even shown you the game yet!”

Rain Whip’s eyes went wide; her step faltered.

Shadow Canter approached. “You see, Rain Whip, I do have a way out of this. You’ve pursued me again and again like the dogged contender you are, seeking that revenge you long for so much, but there’s one thing you seem to keep forgetting about me.”

He smiled, then turned his back on her to look out over the boiling volcano. “I don’t play by your rules; I don’t believe in your Goddess; I don’t believe in your souls or spirits or anything that constructs your morality. I believe in myself. I believe in death. I believe in flesh. If it doesn’t give me pleasure, what reason do I have to preserve it? By my will, by that which I desire, I shall attain everything within my grasp. And you?”

He turned to face her. “You are the good guy. You must play by your society’s rules, and you must do so better than the best to achieve the glory you live for. This chase, these conflicts—they’re nothing more than stimuli to you. Everypony has their rockets to blast off; I’m not one to judge… however, playing with you, making you suffer in the best ways I can imagine? Now that, my dear Rain Whip, is my greatest pleasure.”

“Canter!” Furious, Rain Whip took to the air, ready to dive-bomb the villain, but she stopped short when he held up a bundle over the lava.

“Ah-ah-ah!”

And she froze in mid-air.

Canter uncovered the bundle, revealing the face of a foal doll. “You… wouldn’t want to wake the baby.”

She sank back to the ground, real anger, real terror on her face. “Where did you—”

‘Canter’ flicked a toilet roll horn on top of his head. “Magic? Obviously. Something small, connected to my own blood like this? Why, apples are harder to teleport than this.”

“Unhoof him right this instant, Canter!”

‘Canter’ laughed. “As hilarious as complying with your request would be, given that the boy is now over about a thousand degrees of seething rock, we couldn’t play my game if I did that. No, there’s something else I’d like to show you first.”

Keeping the ‘foal’ on one hoof suspended over the lava, Haze flicked his fake horn, then Discord snapped. A magic screen with a view of… Canterlot, maybe? Or, no, this had to be further north. Possibly even by the Crystal… No, is that… Horseshoe Bay? But that can’t be the modern bay; this has to be from hundreds of years ago!

Haze let his confusion show for a moment, but then turned right back into ‘Shadow Canter’ to face ‘Rain Whip’ again. “Does this view look familiar to you?”

“Uh…” Dash opened and checked the script again. “It can’t be! Alabaster Bay!?”

Canter smiled, even more malice shadowing his face than before. “Yes. Alabaster Bay. Rain Whip Sr. lives here, doesn’t she? And we can’t forget about your friends and colleagues, with what few of them a harsh, detestable loner like you has. So desperate to be loved, so desperate to set a shining example, but deep down, you and I are the same, Rain Whip. Neither of us belong in their society.”

“I really should’ve put up the scene he asked for. This is absolutely too close to memory,” Discord mumbled, though I’m not sure anypony was supposed to hear that.

“Damn you, Canter, damn you!” Horrified and grinding her teeth, Rain Whip took a step closer, and ’Canter’ took a step back. “Why are you doing this? I gave you chance after chance, and you still won’t change! You took my feelings and threw them away, and now you trample on them, laugh at them, watch them burn with a grin on your face just to torture me! Was there nothing? Did it all mean nothing to you? Canter, please, you don’t have to do this!”

Maybe the whole stage play thing was more inherited than I thought. I knew everypony liked that Hearth’s Warming play she was in, but we weren’t super close back then and I didn’t see it. I kinda wish I had.

“Don’t have to?” Canter scoffed. “I don’t ‘have’ to do anything, Rain Whip! I do what I enjoy! Stringing you along was just another fun activity for me to pass the time with. And now? I’m tired of you, and I’m tired of that false life! I’m tired of pretending to be what society wants me to be and not living as the stallion I am! This foal, you... they’re all proofs of a lie I no longer wish to live! So, I will give you a choice. The very last game I intend to play with you, Rain Whip.”

He looked at the ‘foal’ with disgust on his lips. “I will drop this… ‘thing’ into the lava, purifying the world of it forever. If you do not save it, the city remains unharmed, so long as I am free to go. But if you do choose to save it, I will set the city ablaze from all the way on the other side of the world, right here and now, for you to watch. I will leave, and you will be here with your foal, just like me, with nowhere to return to.

“So, what will it be?”

And here, the script he gave Dash ends. I have to wonder where he got the idea for this from. Maybe a game or something, but it’s almost like he cobbled parts of the Dark Canter story he definitely should not know together and mixed it with the Daring Do books. It’s not bad.

Provided Dash follows the script she doesn’t know, she of course chooses to save the baby, Canter gets away, and the city burns, leaving Rain Whip crying with her foal as the curtain closes. But given how stubborn she is, how traumatized she was, and how much she loves Haze, she might still resist and—

“I-I can’t!” She shook her head, hooves creeping up to hide her face. “I can’t, I can’t! Please, Canter, don’t make me choose! I can’t hurt them, I can’t let him die, please, please!”

Haze frowned. Dash was shaking. She was having a real breakdown here, and now I wonder if this was such a good idea. Still, he continued on as Shadow Canter: “Ugh, how ill-fitting for one who was once so noble. What is this? Crying? Pathetic. Have it your way, I’ll burn them both.”

Dash jutted up. “You can’t! Please, no, I can’t lose him!”

“Then, catch.”

And Haze threw the foal off the stage.

“Haze!”

As if time itself slowed down, before the doll left his hoof—before he even registered her calling his name—Dash had launched off the stage and stolen the doll away from him.

“Shh… Mama’s here. Everything’s gonna be okay. Mama will always be here…”

She was cradling it, stroking its mane carefully, in some kind of trance, lazily flying away from the stage with the doll.

“Mom?”

The trance was broken. She hovered in place, then slowly looked down to see what she was holding. Just a doll, wrapped up in… oh, no wonder she lost it. That would be Haze’s swaddling blanket.

The doll and blanket fell to the seats below her, well behind Prism, the Discord family and I. All eyes were trained on her, and no eye was any less astounded than the other.

“Mom,” Haze called again.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Dash turned her head just enough to get an eye on him.

It would be safe to say we all felt bad, especially me for setting this up, but Haze… the poor kid looked like he’d seen a ghost. “It’s… just a…” he lost the words.

Dash’s face fell to the toy below. “A doll.”

He stepped off his volcano cliff and into the fake lava on top of the stage. “Why would you… you called my name, didn’t you?”

Her feathers bristled. She didn’t look back at him. “M-maybe you misheard me. I think I should just go now. Sorry I ruined your play.”

“No, don’t go anywhere!”

Dash halted her forward motion.

“Mom, what the hell was that!? That wasn’t too into character; there wasn’t even anything more on your script! Ponies don’t just lose it like that! Why did you call my name?”

“Haze, buddy—”

Anger rising up, Haze hopped off the stage. “Don’t you ‘Haze buddy’ me! You’re not telling me something! What is it, huh? You freak out over every danger, you bother me when you know you shouldn’t, you embarrass me all the time, and you know what? I’m starting to think there’s more to it than you just being weird.”

He galloped down the aisles until he was in front of the door, facing his mother.

“What happened?”

Tears welled up and flowed over Dash’s cheeks. She sank to the ground, picked up the doll, and sobbed quietly, whispering all the while, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” over and over again.

I have made a mistake.

“Hey—” I went to whisper to Discord, but he simply held a claw up.

“I understand.”

With a snap of his fingers, we were all back in the house.

So that you'll know I'm out of hiding

“So, things may have gone a little awry there,” I said over the phone.

“I told you it was risky. How is she doing?” Mom asked.

I looked back over my shoulder to see Dash still shaking and wrapped up in a blanket like a cocoon on the couch, watching anime with the boys. Not sure she’s paying attention, but the kids definitely aren’t. She won’t even look at Haze.

“Not well. Would you mind, like, getting something from the bakery and swinging by? She doesn’t like pie, and her favorite flavors are cherry and chocolate.”

Mom sighed, said something to somepony nearby, then came back to the phone. “I’m still with Mr. Sandwhich and his wife. I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Thanks.”

“Forty years old and I’m bailing your ass out all over again. You’re lucky I like that little clown so much.”

“Yeah, yeah, see you later.”

I dropped the phone to let it hang on my neck, then prepared myself for another round of, ‘Honey, are you okay?’ Things went so well with Mom, I thought maybe I could work the same trick on Dash. The plan was right, Haze did his part excellently… but I misjudged how hard this would hit Dash.

“Prism, scoot over.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He moved to the armchair, and I sat myself on the other side of Dash.

“Come on, Mom, this is your favorite part!” Haze exclaimed, “The next episode is the battle scene where the two best friends finally realize they’re fighting each other!”

“Uh-huh…” she moaned. Which, of course, is, like, all the response we’ve been able to get out of her in the hour since we’ve been home.

“Cavalry is on the way, boys. It’s gonna be a long hour.”

Haze let the enthusiasm die on his face and sank back into the couch against his mother. “Oh thank the Goddess. I don’t know what’s worse, seeing Mom like this, or really not knowing what the hell happened.”

“I mean, I would tell you at this point—”

“No!” Dash screamed. “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t! You promised! You can’t, you can’t!” She shook me hysterically for a moment, wrapped herself around Haze, and then started to cry again. Loudly, and ugly. I couldn’t even hear the music from the show's ending.

By the time autoplay cycled to the next episode, Dash had sunken back into her cocoon again, looking like a dead pony.

“But that keeps happening. If the cavalry doesn’t break her out of this, I’m calling in the big guns.” And if I did, Mrs. Windy would be some kind of pissed off. If anypony is capable of reaching down into the depths and dragging Dash out of shit like this, it’s her own mother, but that’s going to require a lot of favors and, even if she does get Dash back to normal, there’s no way it’ll end up with her ever saying anything about the fall to Haze. If anything, she’ll probably close herself off and pretend like it never happened, deny any mention of it, react violently every time it’s brought up. Course, I was wrong today, so maybe I’d be wrong then too, but maybe Mom is the real answer here, and I don’t have to get magic involved to get her here in a reasonable amount of time. Dash still has a job to return to on Monday.

“It’s you, Mountain Glow, in that roboknight, isn’t it!?” the deuteragonist shouted from his red robot.

The scene was silent for a moment. “That’s right, After Burner. It’s me.”

“How could you side with them!? They hate your very existence; they loathe you, they loathe us! Don’t you realize they’re just using you!? They know you’re better than them, yet they’re making you fight like this! Why, Mountain Glow, why!?”

The red robot charged with his beam saber drawn. A clash between blue and red, one crying and wild, one somber and silent in the flashing lights.

“I know that, After Burner. But… they’re not all bad. And you, the independence movement… you attacked innocent ponies and destroyed a colony. How many lives had to be lost for your freedom!? And what had they done to oppress you!? Was it their fault these two foolish governments went to war over a question of genetics!? What is the point of all this death!?”

The red robot hesitated, and the blue one, in a quick stroke taking advantage of that moment, slashed right through the armor and joint for his sword hoof. Forced down to his last option, the red robot switched hooves, drawing his final beam saber.

“Damn you, Mountain Glow, damn you! They were part of it! They were the very ponies who said they’d remain neutral! But while they lied to our faces, they were developing weapons for the Federation! The very roboknight you pilot is one of them! There were no innocents! They were all guilty!”

After Burner charged forward again, but was repelled when Mountain glow drew his second beam saber, catching his opponent’s blade between both of his and forcing him away.

“After Burner… I know you don’t believe that. You’re trying to justify it, but deep in your heart, you know you can’t settle with that. You were always too soft for things like this. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be fighting at all. Come on, After Burner. Let’s go home. Let’s… stop all this and go back to the way things were.”

“You know that can never happen! Damn it, Mountain Glow, why are you here!?”

A final charge, and After Burner’s robot was dismembered. The better pilot remained unharmed. “It’s over, After Burner.”

Bleeding in his robot as it malfunctioned, the engine preparing to explode, After Burner sent out his distress signal.

“It will never be over, Mountain Glow! Not until the Federation is destroyed and Equestria is ours once again! The Enhanced will take back the planet and all the lower ponies will be eradicated in the process! You may have defeated me here, but we will not stop! I will kill you, Mountain Glow, just you wait! Just you wait!”

Beams shot across space, forcing Mountain Glow to back off as After Burner’s allies came to retrieve him.

“Mountain Glow, fall back! If you stay there, you’ll be swarmed! We’ve accomplished our mission here; return to the ship at once!”

The young stallion slammed his hoof down at the controls. “Damn it, damn it all! Why… does it have to be this way?”

“We once were as one, but now nothing remains

Even in twilight, the colors have all changed~”

I rubbed at my temples as the ending song for this episode played. “Prism, don’t you have something, I don’t know, happier we could watch?”

“Come on, Dad, I picked this out because it was Mom’s favorite! I mean, I like Roboknights: Seed too, but Roboknights is kinda famous for being tragic. The conflict between Mountain Glow and After Burner is what makes this series so good in the first place. Not that they didn’t ruin it in the second season, but this one is still good if we pretend the second doesn’t exist.”

“I mean, Seed 2 is garbage, but you gotta admit, the main Roboknights are awesome in that one,” Haze chimed in. “After Burner’s knight would be so cool if it didn’t have that stupid horn jutting out of its face like a mile up and those weird clown hooves. I mean, Mountain Glow’s knight is cool too, but the designs from the older shows are just better, ya know? If I’m going to blow my allowance on a new kit, it’s gotta look good, and better than the Seed 1 kits.”

Prism huffed. “Oh, you know The Strike and The Freedom are top tier knights.”

“Okay, that’s like two suits that aren’t recolors of older designs out of, what, twenty or so unique suits and another ten grunt suits? Come on, you own a model of, like, everything from the original Roboknights; don’t give me that.”

It was true, I paid for all of them. ‘Dad, Dad! This is the random Roboknight the principality used in episode whatever that never shows up again and they only made this one specific toy for! Will you spend fifty bits on a twenty bit model to get it for me from overseas?’ And so it goes.

“Nothing will ever be as cool as the Wing Zero…” Dash mumbled, barely audible in her zombie voice.

Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.

“Ugh, but Wing is trash!” Prism moaned. “I could’ve written a better show than Wing, and we all know what my grades are like!”

Damn it.

“It’s not… that bad.”

“It is, Mom, it really is. You know, it was supposed to be some reverse harem shojo show in its original concept, but that didn’t do well with the audience reviews, so they corrected course midway, taking that absolutely ridiculous pacifism angle. IN A SHOW ABOUT GIANT FUCKING ROBOTS! Hey guys, I’ve got a great plan! Let’s not coordinate at all and try to get the whole world to unite and disarm by forcing it to happen with superior weapons! And then, better yet, let’s make some random teenage girl the queen of the world, too, with no forethought at all! That’s what the dark, gritty Roboknights series everypony loves is all about, right!? RIGHT!? Goddess, if ZZ weren’t totally canon and just as shitty as or more shitty than Wing, I don’t know if I could bring myself to keep watching this stuff. We need quality Roboknights. I’m gonna go get the one about the orphans.”

Great, now he’s going to get the saddest one.

I put a hoof on his shoulder before he could get too far. “If it has to be Roboknights, can’t we just watch the silly tournament one? Or even Wing, for your mom.”

Prism frowned at me. “I’m not putting myself through that again.”

“Prism, buddy. Please. For her.”

“I can’t do Wing, Dad. It’s just too stupid. It’s, like, actual torture.”

“Guys, shut up, the next episode is starting,” Dash grumbled.

“Though I can’t fly,

I’ll give you my wings to soar~”

Raising his snout, Prism smirked. “See? Told you it’d work.”

“Whatever.” I married such a tomboy. Oh well, I suppose it’s better that she can relate to her boys so well. It could be worse. I could’ve been stuck in a relationship like Dad’s. One of these days, I’m going to have to get the real story out of him. Poor guy.

But for now, I have to sit here and watch sad shows about war and broken friendships until Mom arrives. Personally, I don’t care one way or another about this stuff. Truth be told, I like the one the boys hate, if only because that… well, really bad protagonist reminds me of myself back in my academy days. Lovestruck, little more than a newbie with no record, and with far and few opportunities to prove himself between: I can relate all too well. The show is still crap because of stupid plot contrivances, but still. Really, all the shows with the young ensigns growing into leadership positions get to me. I was more like the bad protagonist, but I ended up living like the giga-chad protagonist who literally stole away an enemy pilot and carried her off to make a life with her after the war.

I wonder if he had to deal with some weird traumatic event later on with his second kid? Maybe. That timeline kinda sucks for normal ponies. War breaks out every ten years or so with the same old flames burning hot again. Nuclear attacks, dropping asteroids and space colonies on the planet to ruin it. Hard to raise kids in a world that keeps getting set on fire.

Three episodes later, Dash had crept out of her cocoon a bit more since, apparently, Prism knows his mother better than I do, and she was getting into arguments with him and Haze about which Roboknights would be more or less powerful than her beloved Wing Zero. Really, I’m pretty sure she just likes it because the robot has literal feathers on it… for some reason. I spent three hundred bits and a dozen days building her big model of that thing. So many pieces, so many wires, and those awful, awful screws…

My phone rang as the credits song started to play for the third episode, and I was beginning to wonder where Mom was. It was her, of course.

“Hey, where are you? I thought you said you’d be here in an hour.”

“I am here. There was traffic, and Mrs. Pie insisted she make a special cake just for your wife. Will you open the door already? I’ve got my hooves full just trying to carry this thing.”

“Alright, alright.” I hung up the phone and then went to open the front door. Sure enough, there was Mom with a big cake box on her back. She passed it off to me, and I let her inside. “Geez, Pinkie really went hard for this one, huh?”

“I’ll say. More surprised she managed to make something that crazy in fifteen minutes. I suppose when you have all kinds of cake bases lying around, it isn’t all that hard, but still.”

“Ugh, who did you bring here?” Dash complained, loudly. “I don’t want to see anypony; we’re watching Roboknights!”

I sighed. “Dash, Mom. Mom, Dash. Take a seat, why don’t you? I’ll go put this on plates for everypony.”

Dash blinked. For the first time since we got home, her attention was nowhere near the TV. “What? Mom? You mean, like the mare you wouldn’t tell me about?”

“He had his reasons,” Mom intercepted. She strode into the living room and held a hoof out in front of Dash. “Hi there. I’m Downy Snow, Soarin’s mother.”

In a different kind of daze, Dash shook the hoof. “Uh, Rainbow Dash. His wife. Uh.” She turned to me for help. “Dude, what? When? Why? How?”

“Oh, this is my fault,” Prism said. “I caught Dad out in a lie, then we ended up going to see her the day after you went to Cloudsdale. They had some stuff to get over, but they did, and now she’s been here a few times to go over this thing between you and Haze.”

“Bro, what the fuck! You’ve been scheming behind my back!?” She was still looking at me, of course.

“So what? This mopey bullshit and your vice grip on Haze has got to stop. I tried being sneaky, I tried being indirect about it, and none of that worked. I went so far as to work out my own problems with my mother just to try and help you! I did my part, now you’ve gotta talk to Haze.”

“Is there a reason you guys are talking like I’m not in the room?” Haze asked.

“Yes, and it’s because you’re literally right there. Go on, Dash, I already broke my promise and told Prism and Mom all about it. You’ve got to tell Haze.”

Her jaw dropped. “Are you fucking kidding me!? That’s not fucking cool, why would you—?”

Mom reached out and put a hoof on Dash’s shoulder. “Mrs. Dash.”

My wife scratched at her mane, irritated at the interruption. “Look, Downy Snow, It’s great to meet you and all, but we’re kinda having a discussion here, and I think I need to go beat the shit out of your son for lying to me.”

Mom couldn’t keep the smile off her face. “As much as I’m sure he deserves it, he did all this for you, you know.”

“What, betraying my trust!? Going behind my back, breaking his promises, his vows to me!? He swore he wouldn’t tell anypony what happened, and now—!” She made a quick glance at Haze. “And now…” She sniffed, her tear-worn eyes starting to fill again, the fear, the sadness, the emptiness of regret taking over once more.

Mom sat down on the couch, took hold of Dash’s hoof, and had her sit back down too. “I… have an understanding of what you’re going through here. I know what it’s like to… regret holding on to a story so important to your son for a long time and it doesn’t lead to places you want to go. Surely, you understand what a problem this is for the rest of your family, right? All of them, getting together, working with your friends and family just to help you through this.”

Again, Dash turned her ire on me as I started to dole out cake. “Who else did you rope into this?”

I set her piece on the coffee table. “Applejack and Whiskey, Discord’s whole family, Pinkie and Cheese. I’d planned to bother Twilight next. This has to be done.”

Dash’s lip quivered .“But… but I…”

Living into the mare I always knew she could be, Mom gently took her hoof and ran it though Dash’s mane, just like a mother would. “I know it’s hard… to explain something like this to somepony you love so much. You think of all the ways you could tell the story wrong, all the ways it could hurt the pony who needs to hear it, all the ways it would be better if things were left unsaid. But… in truth, that can often make things much, much worse. I’d been living a lie for my son’s sake and for that… I missed out on most of his life.” She chuckled. “If he weren’t so damn stubborn, I’d probably still be in my house smoking and drinking and wasting my life away, bitter and angry things… ending up the way I left them.”

That got through.

“Wait, wait, wait… what?” Dash was totally lost now. “Hold on, go back a step here. What happened to you? Soarin hasn’t told me anything about you. I didn’t even know your name until a few minutes ago.”

Mom shrugged. “Well, it’s quite the story, and by now, I’ve told it so many times I have all the details pretty straight. Only… if I tell you what mistakes I made, I need you to tell him about yours. I deprived my own son of his mother, thinking that was the only way to see him succeed. My mistake is in the past and set in stone. You, however, don’t have to ruin your relationship with your son. The truth can still come out, and if it comes out now, it won’t be too late to change course.”

She stuck a hoof out to shake on it. “How about it? A story for a story?”

Dash stared at the hoof for a long time. Blackened at the tips from years of smoking, dull and old and in need of a trim; the withered foreleg it was connected to, the wrinkled skin of a mare younger than she appears.

In the end, she sighed and took the hoof. “Alright, sure. I know if I don’t do it now, Soarin will bother every pony on Earth until somepony gets me to do it anyway. I just…”

She turned to her son, putting both hooves on his shoulders. “When I… when I tell you what happened, promise me you won’t blame yourself for anything, alright? It was… it was all my fault. I… made bad decisions. Mistakes. Mistakes that didn’t have to be made, but I…”

And she fell off there. “So much went wrong, all at once.”

Haze hugged his mother. “I promise, Mom.”

They held each other, and with her attention focused on Mom, we sat down in the living room for a story.

“After telling this so many times in a week, I think I have the flow down better. To start at the very beginning, it goes like this: When I was a filly, an earth pony born to an earth pony clan for earth ponies and earth ponies only, I had a dream:

“I wanted to soar.”

I've been ghosting, I've been ghosting along

It all began twelve years ago.

My wife and I were Wonderbolts back in the day. I watched her rise through the academy until she was expelled around the end of our first year. For a while, I wondered what happened to her. I kept thinking about her, even as I left the academy and was promoted to Wonderbolt myself. Had she stayed, she probably would’ve been in my place, that rainbow tail always leaving a trail, lighting up the sky wherever she went.

She was amazing.

Years later, I find out she enlisted again after getting the crown to clear her name, and suddenly, she’s back in my life, faster than ever before, working even harder now that she had her shot back. I could only outpace her for so long.

They say chasing rainbows is a futile endeavor, but I never gave up, always Soarin’. The Wonderbolt that never dropped, that was me. I chased and I chased and she rose and she rose, until one day, she fell. Stubborn ponies like her would push past their limits as often as they could, and that’s exactly what she did. Tore a wing in the middle of a race but one racer dips to save her. And I’ll never forget her words.

“My Wonderbolt.”

I’d finally caught the rainbow.

We’re married a year later, and our first son is born in ‘09. Princess Twilight was in the middle of her big technological revolution, nine years after the return of Nightmare… er, Princess Luna, and life is good. Then, she asked me for another kid. Not in those words exactly; I had to really fight her to actually get her to say it, but that’s not important.

We made an attempt, and we failed. She miscarried and she was devastated. Months of moping and crying—to this day, I still don’t think she ever got over it. But that’s just part of who she is. If she didn’t dwell on things, she wouldn’t push herself so hard. After her own mother told her the trials and tribulations she went through to have her, Rainbow learned of her family’s genetic disposition to infertility.

Inspired by her mother, we tried again, and this time, it worked. Only, a new problem came up and this time, it was my fault. Sort of.

My parents divorced when I was eight. As a child, I didn’t realize what it did to me then, but in the position of father myself, it turned me on to how aloof and distant I tended to be toward my own family. My oldest son, Prism, pointed that out to me, not unlike his mother would… if she hadn’t changed.

My mother was an earth pony. To this day, I haven’t forgiven her for breaking things off with my father.

My second son, Haze, is… also an earth pony.

Sometimes, I wonder if that was some kind of revenge for holding a grudge for thirty years. Our life in Cloudsdale, our careers as Wonderbolts, the futures we had planned, all scrapped by a sonogram. It hurt, sure, but I was ready to make sacrifices where need be.

Dash was not.

Her friends are amazing, willing to help us every step of the way. Even after a rough period between us, they tried their best to ease the growing pains of our new family. The Princess, however, came up with a temporary solution: it was an elastic headband that gave the wearer the ability to use whatever spell was trapped inside it. For Haze, it was the cloudwalk spell. It gave us time. We could keep him in the house, I could finish out my contract with the Wonderbolts, and I’d be ready to take up a teaching position as a flight instructor at one of the many new schools popping up in the ever-expanding Ponyville City.

It didn’t last long.

May fifteenth, 2012. Dash is playing with the kids and she accidentally takes off Haze’s band. Haze falls through the sky, and right near all of Cloudsdale’s power supplies, Dash goes supersonic and creates a rainboom. Every piece of glass within ten miles shatters, the hospital loses power; ponies have to be evacuated to prevent several deaths, some of whom didn’t make it. With Princess Twilight’s help, we were simply evicted from Cloudsdale, instead of anything much, much worse.

There isn’t much I wish I could go back to and change in my life, but that? If only there was a way to go back and stop it. Dash hasn’t been the same since.

And Haze… well, his freedom had been indefinitely suspended that day.

Most ponies grow, experiment, and learn in their childhoods. By the time they turn ten, they usually get their cutiemarks: self-discovery, personal journey, something deep and intrinsic to themselves that they realize all at once, cemented as a mark on their flanks.

In spite of what could be, what should be, and what might be, the growing pains are on their way back.

“Mom! Dad! I’m home!”

I’d just gotten out of school. I was flying, and I was flying better than most pegasi in the area, better than even some of the middle school kids. They’d all been saying I had potential, but Trotwood was a small place. It wasn’t much more than a village, and the races were mostly earth pony and pegasi. Even if I could fly better than our little town weather team my father led, that wouldn’t mean much if I never got a chance to reach higher altitude.

But I’d been eight. I didn’t care about any of that. My life was happy, and it was easy. I loved my parents, and my parents loved me. Sure, it could get lonely when they were both away, but that was fine too. Loneliness didn’t last long.

“…What are you saying, Downy?”

I’d never heard a tone like that from Dad. He and I, we had similar dispositions: we were easy going; float along with the breeze, enjoy the air as it passes us by. For him to be so serious… did they hear me come in? I did yell and all. Maybe I should—

“You know what I’m saying, Hang.”

Mom? I didn’t know she could make a voice like that. Like a cold heat from a pepper in a salad. Something was wrong, but I didn’t dare interrupt.

“No, I don’t! You’re not making any damn sense! What’s not working!? I thought things were getting better!”

Not working?

“Things can never get better! Things will never be better! This is never going to work! My parents were right. I never should’ve—”

“You can’t mean that! Downy, look, whatever it is, we can fix it, just… look—”

“No! We can’t do anything. We’ve been at this shit for nine years, Hang, and you know what? It’s enough. I can’t do this anymore. I’m going back home.”

“You’re already home!”

Thwack!

It’d gone too far now; I had to see. My little mind, even back then, knew what this was.

“Downy, please!”

Pushing her way out of the kitchen, Mom knocked me over. She looked at me, disgusted, then darted to the couch where a bag had been waiting. Packed full like she’d planned for a long trip, she threw it over her shoulder with ease.

Dad flew out to catch her, but she glared him down to the ground. He had a big red hoof print on his white cheek.

“It’s over, Hang. If I see you again, I’ll call the police. And you keep that, that little—”

She looked so… hurt when she finally laid eyes on me. Her face so contorted in pain. How much it twisted her heart to speak.

Mommy, please, don’t do this.

“—this little defect out of my presence! If it weren’t for you, if it weren’t for you!”

A picture of us was framed and sitting in the open on a drawer by the front door. Seeing it, she snatched it with a hoof and launched it right at me.

Dad was quick enough to shield me from the projectile, but the damage had been done.

The glass had been shattered.

When Mom slammed the door on us, I sat up in bed. Dash was still dead asleep beside me, the light outside the window was barely more than the glint of streetlamps splattered against fat rain drops, and the alarm clock at our bedside read 5:15 AM.

I rubbed at my eyes. Any day that starts with that dream is bound to be a bad one. She’s like a ghost who haunts my nightmares, coming back when she wants to torment me again. A soft chuckle escaped me, making Dash stir.

“…It’s too dangerous… Grandma and Grandpa can just come see you…”

She rolled over and fell back into her dream.

Would my life have been worse if mine had been like that? A mother mismatched with her son, taken from one extreme to another. As much as Sweet Wing did her best, she was never the mare I wanted her to be.

You didn’t have to go.

I suppose… it’s been a while. Fall break is coming up. Maybe I should escape one day and go see her.

Downy Snow.

With that resolved in my head, I carefully made my way out of bed and into the shower. At one point, there was nothing I could do to ever wake Dash. After Haze was born, though, she’ll hear a pin drop in her sleep.

Before the water had even been hot, a wing tip ran up my spine. This assault wasn’t a new one, but it always got me. She nipped my ear and whispered, “My Wonderbolt wasn’t about to get in the shower without me, was he?”

We weren’t normally up this early. That meant we had time.

An extended shower was in order.

When the alarm clock finally rang at six, we actually needed to get clean and ready for school. Once that was taken care of, I was assigned to the kitchen to start on breakfast, and she went to wake our kids. Pan on the stove, eggs and haybacon and rice. Dash and Haze will want the orange juice, while Prism and I are coffee junkies.

First door on the second floor gets a couple of hard knocks, and Dash opens the door unceremoniously. “Prism, it’s six fifteen. Get up.”

“Ugh, fine.”

The standard greeting. Prism is the future star in whatever he decides to do, a prodigy in his flight skill and a special talent in architecture, and Mom goes hard to make sure he’s at the top of his game. She treats him like she treated herself when she was that age, and her biggest dream in the world was to be the best Wonderbolt there ever was. Had she not torn that wing, she would’ve done it. Hell, some ponies would say she was back in her prime, Only now, she has a usurper to train.

A few clip-clops down the hall become soft. Gently knocking and quietly opening the door to the next room, she coos, “Haze, buddy, it’s morning. Your Dad is working on breakfast, so go brush your teeth for me, huh?”

The disparity was genuinely unreal.

“…Five more minutes, Mommy…”

“Come on, buddy, you can’t stay in bed forever! But if you won’t get up…”

Rustling, then an exclamation of surprise. “Mom, get off me!”

“Only if you get up and go take care of business!”

“You’re too heavy; I can’t!”

This, and I knew for a fact, was untrue. Haze would get away from the house at any opportunity. A lot of the time, he’d visit the Apples in District 2 and even go so far as to help work the orchard. He wasn’t bad at it, either. If he really tried his hardest, he could carry his mother. The sad truth is that he’ll be stronger than me in just a few years. Another disparity.

“Wow, rude. You callin’ me fat?”

“When you’re smothering me, yes!”

More rustling, then hooves hit the floor. “Fine, be that way.”

“Thank the Goddess…”

“Uh-huh. Breakfast will be done in ten minutes. Be at the table for me, kay?”

“Yes ma’am…”

Haze skulks to the bathroom, and Dash happily flies down to the first floor. She wouldn’t listen if I pointed it out, so I simply said, “You’re something else, you know that?”

It flew right over her head. “I love you too, honey.” Blushing, she kissed my cheek, then went ahead and set the table for the four of us.

In her defense, those were the first words I ever spoke to her, and back then, it was out of admiration. Only now, it’s more like I can’t believe she became this pony. The way the morning started, that’s how she used to be all the time. Spontaneous, free, putting her feelings out before she could think, saying what she meant, sticking to what she lived. The bright and colorful Rainbow Dash.

Then, there’s… this. Being Prism’s mother mellowed her out, softened all those edges, made every great quality shine even brighter by forcing the worse ones into submission. But with Haze, a wire crossed. All her soft edges are simply gone now. Too bright, too shiny, sharp to the touch, bristling with needles if you dare dig below the surface. The duality of the mother bear.

With both the boys at the table, we all sat and ate. A quick prayer, breakfast dispatched in rapid succession, school bags were gathered, and we all moved to the car.

“Hey, Haze, help me get the top down,” she calls as we enter the garage.

The youngest looks at the window, then back at his mother. “Uh, no.”

Thinking this was some kind of play, Dash scoffed. “What, you not big enough anymore? Come on, help out your little mom.”

Joining his brother, Prism eyed his mother as well. “You do know that it’s raining right now, right, Mom?”

Finally, she turned her eye toward the window, though she definitely heard it as soon as they said anything. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I said, unlocking the vehicle. “Come on, everypony in.”

I’d opened the driver door of our sedan and plugged the keys in the ignition, but Dash hesitated. “Uh, hey, Prism, why don’t you sit in the front?”

Knowing this was going to happen, my son had already opened the door. “Yeah, sure, Mom.”

Haze groaned, escaped into the car, and immediately turned on his hoof-held game-thingy. I’ll be entirely honest, I don’t really get video games, but I try to play when they share them with me. Muscles I never even knew I had hurt when I really got into them, but they’re so complex now that it makes me feel old. This modern generation is going to be way, way different than we were as kids.

With Dash in the back, reflexes on high alert and wings ready to jump ship with her beloved baby boy, we left the house in District 10 and made our way to the private school where we worked in District 1. We owe a lot of our lives to Princess Twilight, and the jobs we now enjoyed were another one of her gifts to us. All of Dash’s friends send their kids to school here, it’s personally sponsored by the Princess of Ponyville, and it’s easily one of the best schools in the city.

The massive metropolis was a grid overlaid with highways, everything leading out from the castle. In all the world, this city was the capital of commerce, the home of modernity, and the birthplace of borrowed technology. In about twenty years, we went from trains and wagons to cars and planes, and things have only accelerated since then, with the princesses entering a joint project with private enterprise to go into space. The tech is there to be borrowed, but even the world it comes from considers that kind of stuff ‘new.’ Off onto new horizons under the guidance of our erudite princess of the future.

Of course, of all the new and necessary things her friend has brought into the world, vehicles are something Dash hates with a passion. Her distinct and overwhelming fear of being trapped in a car or plane crash verges on madness, and that was before Haze fell. If she weren’t so unfalteringly determined to do anything and everything she could for Haze, just riding along in a car would be off the table. Still, she makes compromises by doing things like riding in the back with the windows ready to be rolled down in an instant, or insisting that we have a convertible and keeping the top down no matter the weather. One time, she even asked me about getting some kind of eject button like in those spy movies.

Sometimes, I wonder just what exactly I’d gotten myself into when I married this mare. Then again, the ‘hot/crazy’ scale is pretty absolute. If things like this morning are the reward for putting up with her insanity, I believe I’ve done pretty well for myself.

“So, what’s the plan today, coach?” Prism asked.

It took about half an hour to drive from the house to the school. We live in the third ring; so long as you use the highway, it takes about fifteen minutes to cross from one district to another. Traffic can get bad and make times worse, but it usually doesn’t this early in the morning.

“Well, the forecast said rain through tomorrow, so we’ll be working on precision drills in the gym, though this might be a good opportunity to put all these groundborn kids through a rainstorm. I’d have to see Health and Safety about that, though.” I tilted my head toward the back, making sure I kept my eyes on the road. “Hey, would you be up for bringing the girls in for rain drills?”

Since we applied together, we were given charge of one class of our choosing from the four basic academics—Math, Science, History, Equestrian—and then put in charge of everything and anything related to pegasus sports. Since Ponyville was such a massive city, even the private school we worked for had us set with seven classes every day, with a single period for lunch. It was hard sometimes, but between the two former Wonderbolts, we got results. All that aside, we don’t actually see each other much during the day. I’ve got the colts, she’s got the fillies, and we work mostly in two different gyms or fields when it’s nice out.

Dash, of course, wasn’t paying attention.

“So, I was talking to Mrs. Trebuchet the other day, and she told me that you got a B on one of your tests.”

Ah, here we go again.

Haze groaned, and he pressed his face closer to his game. “Why are you talking to her? Don’t you work in another wing of the school?”

“Well, yeah, but I still have a physics class to teach every day. Come on, dude, you know you can ask me for help if you need it.”

“B’s are fine! I don’t need your help!”

Dash scoffed. “B’s are not fine, thank you very much. You can do better. I know you can do better.”

“Ugh, what does it even matter?” Haze set his game down, finally turning Dash’s own eyes back at her. “I’m not gonna be some Wonderbolt, and I don’t care about physics. It’s so booooring. Can’t you bother the kids in your own class?”

Crossing her forelegs, Dash grunted. “Nah, dude. They aren’t my kid. You’re my kid. Besides, what’s boring about physics? Physics is cool! I know you hang out with Ace and his brother; don’t they talk about the skate park and all that? All of that is just physics, the math of motion! All the tricks, flight or otherwise, are all physics in action. Physics is totally cool.”

Again, the disparity was absolutely unreal. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Mrs. Windy had received the exact same answer about some failing grade in Equestrian or History back when Dash was in school. And again, hers would’ve been a failing grade because she didn’t give a single shit back then.

“Hey, Dash,” I called.

She finally paid attention. “Yeah?”

“If I asked Grandma about your performance in school, what do you think she might say?”

She froze in an instant. “W-well, things were different back then!”

Haze caught on. “Wait, wait, wait. What would she say?”

“I mean,” Prism added, “all you have to do to know how Mom was in school is look at her Wonderbolts exam scores.”

Frantic, Dash wrapped her forelegs around the front seat to cover Prism’s mouth. “Nopony needs to see that!”

“Well, now I have to know.”

“You absolutely do not!”

“The truth is, your mother failed it eight times before she finally got lucky and made the minimum passing score. She never would’ve gotten in at all if one of the guys wasn’t caught… uh.” I thought better on that. “Well, he got kicked out immediately after getting in, so Dash took the spot.”

“Dude!”

Haze, Prism and I all laughed while Dash tried to justify her poor performance the rest of the way to the school.

I say that, but Haze kinda… withdrew back into his game pretty quick. I caught a glance of him in the rearview a few times, and he didn’t look all that happy. If anything, he seemed more upset than before.

I should probably talk to him.

We arrive at the school at seven. Since she wasn’t listening before, I asked her about those rain drills, but suddenly being sensible about things, she offered that it’d be better to ask Health and Safety about doing them next rainstorm rather than run around trying to get approvals that won’t come till after said storm passes. So, we resolved to put that request in when lunch comes around.

Haze and Prism help set up the boys’ gym for our practice with me while Dash goes off to her meeting with the science teachers. In spite of her own performance in school, as it happens, her students consistently get the best scores for the class, and only the Goddess knows why. If it weren’t for the whole Wonderbolt thing, they’d probably have her teaching more physics classes than just the one.

As for me, I’m just a history buff and not exactly a good one. Half the time, I feel like I learn things I simply didn’t know when reading out the textbook or going over modern history I’d lived through. I can get most kids to go along with my own interest in the subject, but I’m nopony to light up a room.

Forever chasing rainbows.

Once the gym was all set and Prism had successfully run the course, I adjusted for the skill level of the other students because, as we like to say, our boy is the best there ever was. If he had any of his mom’s bravado, everypony would hate him, but because he takes after me so much, he’s not nearly as boastful with anypony he comes across. He’s just good at what he does, he knows it, and he takes it in stride. A good kid, a whole family; a happy, easy life.

Is it strange to be envious of your own son?

“Dad?”

Well, envious of that one. This one, on the other hoof, I’ve probably got more in common with. I ran my hoof through his mane. “‘Sup, kiddo?”

“Why does…”

He paused, looking for the words. Unlike the rest of us, he was pretty good with those. If he didn’t have his mom’s temper, he’d probably be pretty slick. Quiet and considerate but blows up easily and betrays his emotions after a single poke. Oh, the disparity.

“Why does she treat me like that?”

That’s anything but easy. He doesn’t remember Cloudsdale and I’ve been sworn to secrecy, but that really is the root of the reason. Her whole personality warped around that day. It wasn’t so much her fault that things went so wrong, but the entire ordeal could’ve been avoided if she would’ve just listened to me when we first found out about Haze.

And yet, the past is the past. I draped my wing over my youngest. “Well, she loves you, buddy.”

Letting his hind fall to the ground, Haze sighed. “Methinks, too much.”

It basically goes without saying that Haze is the best scholar of the four of us. Where he found a good head to put on his shoulders, I wouldn’t know, but the kid is just damn smart. His mom’s love of books, my tenacity to keep trying, her determination to succeed, my calm contemplation. He’d have been the best of us, if only…

“Come on, what do you really mean, Haze?” I shook him into leaning on me, and finally, he gave in:

“Why does she baby me? Why does she hover over me every second of every minute? She bothers me about getting a B once, but Prism is over here struggling to pass chemistry, and she doesn’t even bat an eye!”

Prism, at the mention of this, had his ears fall. The pep he’d been circling the track with up till then simmered down. Yeah, not expecting a perfect score on the ‘Bolts exam from him either.

Haze continued, “I can go out with my friends if one of her friends is there to spy on me for her, but Prism can do whatever he wants whenever he wants and her biggest concern from him is to keep from hurting his wings! I’d say it’s because I don’t have my cutie mark, and I’m already kinda past due for that, but Prism didn’t get his but a couple years ago, and she’d let him do whatever back then, too!”

He turned his mother’s eyes on me. “Like, I’m not crazy here. She is, right? Mister Discord isn’t even this weird with Fallacy! Fallacy! The chaos-incarnate kid! How is it that I’m under more supervision than a hybrid with world-ending magic?”

Because I’m sure neither he nor his father had it in them to restrain appearing at the call of their names, Fallacy did pop into existence to explain to Haze why he was given the freedom he enjoys, but I caught him and shooed him away before he could interrupt. Fallacy and Prism are inseparable, and with his magic, that is often literal. He’s more mischief than malice, and if he had an atom in him to be honest, he takes after his mother more than he would ever admit. No, the malice award goes to Cotton Pie, who happens to be one of Haze’s confidants, in spite of their four-year age difference.

With as often as Fallacy and Prism have to be separated, I’m pretty comfortable around Discord. He’d even confided in me once about Dark Canter. That was a weird conversation, but it put him in perspective for me, and I’d say I even get the guy. For the most part, anyways.

With that in mind, I said, “In all fairness, he watches over Fallacy for similar reasons Dash watches over you. She’s seen some stuff, Haze. If she’s less crazy with Prism, it’s not because she’s any less crazy, but she knows Prism could get to safety if something went wrong. You know how she feels about cars and the like.”

But the little blue colt frowned at me. “Okay, but that doesn’t explain why she has to bother me when I’m talking to my friends at school or playing my games online. She butts in on conversations! You know how ponies talk trash in competitive video games? I had to pull the plug on my own game just to get her to stop defending me! She stole the mic and everything! Like, what the hell was that? Normal ponies don’t do that.”

I had no defense for that one. Though, absurd as she is about Haze, she would’ve done that for Prism too. Or me, even. Neither of them played it, but she absolutely would be the insane soccer mom, given the chance.

I shrugged. “Look, I’m not about to pretend she isn’t a white knight, but she just cares that much, alright? She’s a defender; it’s what she does. Just… lock the door when you play games like that. And the window, too. I can try to talk to her, but I won’t make any promises.”

Haze only groaned. “Dad, I was trying to get here in a roundabout way, but you’re just not getting it.”

I get it, alright. I’m just playing dumb. But you, just like your mother, won’t let it go. “Are ya sure? I feel like I’d be the most familiar with Dash’s eccentricities by now.”

“Why does she treat me so different from Prism? Is it because I’m not like the rest of you, or is there more to it than that? Because it feels like there’s something wrong with her. Maybe if I’d been born right like all of you, she wouldn’t act this way, but… I don’t know. Even then, that feels wrong.”

“Haze, buddy.”

I put a hoof on his shoulder, sat down to get eye to eye with him.

“There is nothing wrong in how you were born. We love you because you’re you. So, maybe your mom thinks about what makes you different more than she should. But if she treated you just like Prism, she’d be ignoring what makes you special, and that wouldn’t be right.”

Unsatisfied, Haze huffed. “Uh-huh. I’m special, alright. The only earth pony in a family of pegasi where not even my grandparents are like me. That’s a genetic outlier if I’ve ever seen one.”

He shook his head and darted away from me. “Whatever, Dad.”

Well, if that didn’t work, I doubt anything but the truth will.

I didn’t bother stopping Haze and just let him go back to his game. Too damn intuitive. He’s been hanging around the Apples too much, I swear.

“That’s pretty rough, Mr. Soarin,” Fallacy commented.

The hybrid—who was the most uniform of all his siblings, mainly pony parts with a dragon and webbed-dino hind leg, an antler instead of a horn, and of course the magic of chaos incarnate—was actually one of my best fliers. Unfortunately, he’s not allowed in contests because trust and Discord go out the window unless some guarantee of fair play can be assured by the presence of a princess. I can tell when he is and isn’t being lazy, and usually, in spite of his nature, he’s pretty earnest.

“You know, I could give him wings.”

Of course, he is his father’s son.

“Oh, shut up, Fal.” Prism beat me to it, just finishing his personal drills moments ago. “Haze having wings isn’t about to make Mom not crazy.”

As if he’d never considered that, Fallacy brought a hoof to his lips. “Oh. Is he wrong-headed in thinking that the whole ‘not a pegasus’ thing is the real problem here?” Being spawn of Discord and the only one with his magic, the words and air quotes for ‘not a pegasus’ appeared above his head in white serif font as they were said.

I scattered the letters away. “You really don’t need to be saying things like that about your mother.” I coughed into my hoof. “True as they may be.”

“Ah.” Fallacy made and then snapped fingers. “So this is one of those ‘friendship problems’ I’ve heard so much about.”

“Well, maybe,” Prism added. “But, all in all, I think this is more of a them thing than an outside thing. And ya know, it’s Mom. Have you ever tried to convince my mom of anything? It’s basically impossible. And she says Mrs. Applejack is stubborn.”

Fallacy, who openly had a secret crush on Gin, Applejack’s eldest daughter, nervously tapped his hooves together. “Oh, but Mrs. Applejack is delightful. Why would she say that?”

Here, I’ll say that I’m pretty easy to talk to. My wife has her friends, and because I’m the more mellow of the two of us, I get along with all their husbands. I’ve heard a lot of stories, and I’ve got tight lips too.

So I sighed. “Because it’s true, really. That said, they’d both curbed that bad influence at one point in their lives, except she simply became more subtle about it while mine took an extreme to new heights. In Rainbow Dash fashion, as it must be. She’s awe-inspiring, in all things.”

Fallacy laughed heartily, and Prism laughed sadly. “Yeah… that’s my mom.”

“Should I—” Fallacy gave himself a beard to stroke “—perhaps consult mine about this? Nopony strikes fear in the heart quite like she does, after all. And they’re old friends, too. Would that help, or would it make things worse?”

“That would depend entirely on whether or not you could get your father to stay out of it. She tolerates him, and I’m pretty sure that’s as far as it goes.”

The hybrid then dispelled his beard. “Best not then. You know how Father is. If a pot needs stirring on the other hoof…”

Prism shook his head. “Nah. Haze is too much like her. He’d be compelled to do something stupid, and then Mom would follow suit. It’s, uh… you know, the thing with the dogs.”

I frowned at my poor rainbow-headed boy. “Let sleeping dogs lie?”

He clapped his hooves and pointed at me. “Yeah, that one.”

“You think maybe you should skip practice and go read or something?”

Fallacy literally fell to pieces laughing, and again, Prism fell dejected.

“Na coo, Dad, na coo.”