In the Small Moments

by Pascoite

Rating: teen
Tags: Sunset Shimmer, Profanity, Autumn Blaze, Sonata Dusk, Romance, Drama, Aria Blaze, Adagio Dazzle, Equestria Girls
Length: 32706

Adagio Dazzle has a penchant for showing up at the wrong time in places special to Sunset Shimmer. School, the PostCrush concert, and now her favorite music cafe. Adagio doesn’t seem to be causing any trouble yet, but sirens only sing for one reason.

Adagio Dazzle has a real penchant for showing up at the wrong time in places special to Sunset Shimmer. The school, the PostCrush concert, and now her favorite music cafe. Adagio doesn’t seem to be causing any trouble with her singing yet, but sirens only sing for one reason. When Adagio sets her plan into action, Sunset will be ready to stop her.

Thanks to Jarvy Jared and NaiadSagaIotaOar for extensive editing suggestions.
Featured on Equestria Daily!

Published 2023-07-12 00:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2023-08-17 00:50:13 UTC

Adagio ma non troppo

Sometimes, running my own sushi restaurant really sucks.

I’m constantly reminded of how little night life I get to enjoy. Not that I’d ever give it up, but closing time can get pretty far in the rear-view mirror before all the cleaning is done, especially when I do most of it myself. At least my favorite cafe stays open late.

I slide into my normal booth in a shadowed corner, and the waiter brings me the usual cappuccino. He doesn’t need to ask. After midnight by now, but the same thinly clumped residue of disaffected teens sits around the room. I’ve earned the right to call them that: I used to be one.

The coffee lands on my table with a gentle smile from the waiter. He probably told me his name the first few times I came here, but surely I’d remember it after this long. At least his eyes say I’m an old friend, and if I asked, they’d say they wish they were a lot more.

All I can do is hold the warm mug in both hands, up to my face, and let the cinnamon spark each breath I take in. A single cup won’t keep me from sleeping tonight, and tomorrow is the one day a week I don’t have to get up so early.

Brick walls surround me with the remnants of decades-old posters and actual painted-on advertisements, but unlike most of the patrons here, this place is authentic. I bet it used to be a speakeasy back in the day, and even though it’s not allowed anymore, it feels like an atmosphere of cigarettes in those long, thin holders still pervades every tattered scrap of leather clinging for life to the banquettes, collecting in a haze around the iron beams overhead.

Whoever’s on stage sure has this type of crowd eating out of his hands. Check that: her hands, judging by the voice. Open mic night, and some thoroughly generic teen angst song comes pouring out of an acoustic guitar and a surprisingly talented set of lungs. I look up and…

Adagio Dazzle. Adagio fucking Dazzle.

My mug clunks hard against the table, and I fight that first wild animal instinct to run, but not from danger. At least not a danger to my life—more that it’ll awaken something inside me that I don’t want to become. She can’t see me here anyway, hidden from the lights. The quickest way to alert a predator is to move.

First sip, a little too hot, but it goes down anyway, warming me from the inside now, but the bitterness of that monster on stage seeps into it. The song’s changed, too. Not the incessant strumming through predictable chords, just an occasional accent of single notes, and the words, they’re becoming a bit slurred, mumbled. Enough reach my ears to get the sense of it. It’s in a minor key, yet it still grasps, looking up, ascending, hopeful. Some motif about budding trees, and for all that I’d normally ignore whatever songs come up on these nights…

I love music. It was my life, so long ago that nobody else even knows. Of course I can play guitar, and the Rainbooms all knew that, back before life sent us in different directions, but not the passion. Maybe I should have shared that with them, but it never seemed right, burdening them with what I care about, even though they’d almost certainly disagree.

When Princess Celestia plucked me to become her personal student, she hadn’t found me in an orphanage, rummaging through dumpsters in an alley smelling of urine, or swimming among a crowd of pockets to pick. I get the impression my friends all think that, but none of them have ever asked. Not that I did know my parents, but it’s not the same thing, and I let them assume: a stupid little game I play against nobody because I’m a head case. No, Princess Celestia recruited me from an opera school. I could already sing a mean aria, and I’d learned guitar… and theorbo, which always takes about five minutes to explain to someone what it even is, so I never bring it up.

Celestia enjoyed hearing me sing. She had a penchant for treating her students like her own children, at least until they got above elementary school age, yet when she’d come to tuck me in, I’d end up singing the lullaby to her, after she’d sung it to me enough for me to learn it. Every night, with her warm smile shining down on me as my eyelids got droopy. Hush, my darling, and don’t you fret…

Shit, I get lost in my memories sometimes. And here I am in my own secluded corner again, humming it to myself. I haven’t thought of that song in years.

Life always comes back to the chorus, the theme’s reprise. And it sounds like Adagio is winding her tune to a close as well. I really don’t appreciate the way her music leaves my skin feeling as if it’s buzzing, especially given what I’ve seen it can do. But her amulet broke long ago, and nobody else here is acting like her zombie minions. Maybe it’s just all that nostalgia washing over my head. I leave enough cash to cover my drink and a tip, and I shoot a glare at her, for all the good it does—she isn’t even looking at me.

All the way home, I can only think one thing: why does she have to invade every place that’s special to me?

I’d never seen Adagio here before, and I’ve frequented the place for years. It had to be a one-time thing. But of course, a week later, there she sits on stage again.

No light reaches my lugubrious corner, just the occasional muted glints off my jacket like the scattering of black keys across a keyboard. Adagio can’t see me here.

I want to mock her, ridicule how inept she suddenly became when her amulet shattered, exposing her con game to the world, but where would I be if people had done the same with me? And last week, after she made it through the obligatory fluff, pure soul flowed from her. How did she do that? Something is different about her, and for all that I’d love to banish her from my mind, my stupid inner busybody wants to know why.

Again, now, she innately senses when to keep her tone level and when to let a subtle vibrato flutter from her throat, when to linger a bit on the end of a phrasing and when to let the song’s momentum take over. She just… fundamentally understands something about the music.

Most people her age get preoccupied with distancing themselves from home, but her song feels like a plaintive call, a wish to belong again. Of course, her age is a complicated thing, according to what Twilight says. And Adagio has nobody but herself to blame for not belonging anywhere.

Kind of like me. The old me.

So I slump over my mug and breathe in the cinnamon with its little descant of chocolate. I’d get a refill, but then it’ll keep me up, and opening time comes awfully early.

Then another song starts, and its syncopated rhythm has me in mind of a courant, and—I let out a hard sigh. Why do I have to over-analyze everything? My mind is all stuck in centuries-old music, and I’d expect Adagio’s to be bound in the past, too, except her music doesn’t sound that way, so why should anything else about her be? If I didn’t hate Adagio’s guts, I’d simply ask her.

This song searches, yearns for something, striding upward. Not the tripe she normally sings, and her voice soars into her falsetto range, higher than I thought she could go. I have to… I have to take one hand and cover my eyes. It’s a tenderness I’ve never known from her, and were it anyone else, I might believe it. She’s never had a grain of truth to her.

It weighs me down that I do hate her. I wish I’d outgrown the tendency to. I thought I’d become a better person now. Maybe I’m not, maybe I never was. But thinking that way does a disservice to Twilight and the other girls, so I choke it down, change keys, transition over to a countermelody.

She deserves a chance, even though I gave her several already, and another song circles my ears, and it rings as a carillon bell in my head until I nearly nod off to the sweet lilt of it.

I can’t do this. I can’t like, can’t tolerate her, not after the total contempt and disregard she’s always shown for anyone but herself. My head swims, but I don’t see those colorful streams of magic swirling toward her, the ones carved into my memory from the Battle of the Bands. It’s not her, she doesn’t even have the gem anymore, but what if she found some new magic and I never warn anyone? I need to think about it. I need to think about it like Twilight would.

And the same as last week, I slip away and pay my bill unnoticed, my head clearing in the outside air. The sizzle of tires from the nearby highway can play me off the stage.

Thank goodness Adagio didn’t show up this week.

I sound like the biggest hypocrite. Where would I be if everyone else hadn’t given me one more chance than they wanted to? And now I’d deny her just that.

Whatever. She isn’t here. And some guy whose voice hasn’t quite finished changing is shrieking out a song about how he’s so alone and nobody understands him. The usual crap, but it gives me a good laugh. I need one.

Which of course only makes me feel bad. Belittling him won’t help anyone. Maybe I should stop coming here, at least on open mic night. I pull out my phone and look up the week’s weather.

As much as I’m not connecting with this music, it looks like I won’t connect with Rarity, either—first Tuesday of the month, when she often stops by my restaurant on her way to check her shop in town. But she won’t show if it rains.

Of all the girls, we have the hardest time coordinating schedules. I’ll serve her up something new, she’ll tell me about her travels, and I live vicariously. She’ll say everything’s delicious and wink at me. Always a flirt, that one, but never follows through.

I toss my phone on the table, run my fingers through my hair, and lean back against the bricks, with a flaking shred of poster for some ancient cola touted as a health tonic whispering in my ear.

My imagination runs again, this place full of girls in flapper dresses and men in seersucker suits, downing glasses of that cola cut with gin, and the symphony of their voices rises, settles, bursts with fanfare, staccato laughter, the recitative of music embedded in speech. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era, but none of those people would ever touch sushi.

I’ve let my eyes drift shut, but the act on stage has cycled to one with a softer voice, so they can stay closed. Then a swish of cloth pauses by my table. “Not yet,” I say with a flick of my wrist toward the mug. “I haven’t finished.”

But the table tilts slightly as the waiter sits on the bench across from me. So, will he finally ask? Honestly, I don’t know what I’d say if he did. “Hey,” he speaks up, just as I get my eyes open enough to see a mass of orange hair.

My faint grin falls faster than a pegasus stunned by a bolt of lightning. “I’ll be going now,” I spit, just short of involving actual spit.

She immediately frowns and creases her brow as though she’s forgotten something, and almost as an afterthought, she grabs my wrist before I can get halfway out of the booth. Well, not exactly grab—she holds it gently.

“I didn’t know you liked to listen to losers with approximate mustaches,” she says, angling her head toward the guy on stage, but the sneer lives in her voice only. I’ve seen that look before, usually on the first-year students, probing for effect like a mentalist in the hope they can impress the cool kids. Something’s changed. Even when I saw her at the PostCrush concert, after she’d lost her powers, she still had that Adagio confidence, but now she wears it as a mask.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t think…” She must finally see my glare telling her how many pieces of that hand she can pick up off the floor if she doesn’t let go now, since her eyes widen and she relaxes what little grip she’d managed. “Please.” What a very not-Adagio thing to say. She folds her arms in her lap and looks down at the bricks beside her.

The mask comes off. Why would she want me to see her as classic Adagio if she actually expects me to tolerate a conversation? But just as quickly, I understand: any other version would have reeked even more of insincerity. It gets her foot in the door.

Fine, I drop back onto the bench and prop my chin in my palm. I can’t help but notice a small grin of her own, and for all I want it to be some odious, self-satisfied smirk, it looks more like a little girl finally granted some trifle by an overly strict parent. The slightest breeze might dislodge it. I don’t know what this is, but it’s got my interest.

“Th-the last few times. You seemed to enjoy the music. It made me glad.” She’s waiting for an answer, but she won’t get one. “Didn’t you?” Still no. The pause stretches out uncomfortably long, as when the maestro doesn’t quite have the percussionists’ attention and the audience starts to wonder if something’s gone wrong. At least I hope it feels that way to her. That stupid opening line she gave me—what’s her game? Her heart wasn’t in it, and she should know it’d only piss me off. “Have… you been doing okay?”

She shrinks in her seat even further. “I won’t come here anymore,” Adagio says, her face hidden under all that hair.

Dammit. Now she’s the one halfway out of the booth. “No, stop.” I can barely keep that from sounding sarcastic, but she obeys. “That’s not fair to you. I can come on a different night or find somewhere else to go.”

Finally, her eyes appear from underneath the orange again. “Did you like them though?”

My sigh rasps harshly. “Why do you care? Why are you even talking to me?”

Her shoulders bob as if pulled by a puppeteer. “Maybe I’m turning over a new leaf?”

I laugh before I can think to do anything else, and a dry, mirthless one echoes from her throat, too, not the full, rich sound she had just a week ago. But the mediocre guy on stage is basking in the little drift of applause as he packs up his guitar, and Adagio’s eyes snap from the wall to the stage, only briefly pausing on me. “I’d better go,” she says. “I’m on next.”

Well, that gives me half an hour or so where she can’t talk to me. So I listen to one song, which I really enjoyed from two weeks ago, then stay for another I remember, another I don’t, and there goes that stirring again! Every one of them makes me feel like I’m on the verge of finding something but never quite there, a suspended chord that doesn’t resolve. She’s searching, through her music, same as I have all my life, some need she doesn’t understand. Then she finishes, wipes a thin sheen of sweat off her forehead, and grabs her guitar case from behind the curtain.

Turning over a new leaf? If she’d used that as her opening line, I wouldn’t have believed her at all. So a lame attempt at being her same old self and in a way I’d see right through and then swallow the second piece of bait instead. That’s a calculated move, whether she means it in earnest or is employing her legendary siren manipulation for some other reason. I can’t figure her out.

Again, I feel my body buzzing—I don’t know what else to call it—but not drained of energy like her magic used to do. Almost the opposite. And now I’m more sure than ever that she has some kind of magic going on, and I didn’t give it the Twilight treatment I promised myself I would. I didn’t think it through.

I leave before she can come back over here.

What the hell am I doing?

I feel like one of those women who always falls for: “Honest, babe, things will be different this time.” I need to keep an eye on her. She doesn’t have the other sirens helping her, and she’s not manipulating anyone, as far as I can tell, but I can’t see her purpose.

“Listen to this guy. He should take some time off ’til his balls drop,” Adagio says. Last week, she could barely get a word out without looking like she might cry, and now she breaks out the salty language as if we’re best friends? But it’s different this week: not testing the waters. She means it, but she doesn’t gloat as if she’s achieved some victory, and it doesn’t escape my notice that she kept it between us instead of making sure everyone at the nearby tables heard her insult. “Seriously, who needs another song about how nobody will date him? I bet he’s never actually asked anyone out.”

I do chuckle a little. “I kinda had the same thought the first time I heard him, but then I decided I didn’t want to be mean. I’ve done enough of that in my life.”

“It’s not hurting anyone if he doesn’t—” Her eyes rove up to mine, with a little grace note of something I’ve never seen in them before. “Alright. I won’t.” Easy to miss, but she squints, just a bit. She’s tiptoeing carefully around me, but the ‘why’ keeps out of my reach.

“Tell me,” I say. And she looks up again, that trill back in her eye as of a herding dog waiting for its signal to go do its job that it can’t discern from play. With the heel of my hand against my chin, I drum a couple of fingers on my lip for a moment, and still she hangs there, waiting, anticipating. “Why are you here? Why do you sit with me? What do you want?”

She looks like someone who’d finally found a distraction to take her mind off a dead pet only to have someone carry a cat past her. “Everyone assumes I want something from them. Used to be I did, so why would that change? I don’t blame you for thinking that,” she says.

Great, even if she doesn’t, now I’ll blame myself for going there.

“I’m sorry, that’s not—okay, go back one. Why me?” I ask. With any luck, her turn on stage will come around soon.

She shrugs. “You’re about the only person I know.”

“Really?” Adagio almost jumps. I didn’t mean to erupt that way, but she always had an air of mystery about her. That attracts followers. “You must work somewhere.”

Reaching into her breast pocket, she flashes a huge, forced smile, then produces a name tag with a bullseye on it. “Can I help you with something?”

For a few seconds, my mouth twitches. Is she joking or—? “Do you not like it there?”

“It’s fine,” she says, stuffing the tag back in her pocket, “but I don’t talk to anyone on the job. Just customers.”

“Your…” I circle a hand in the air. Are they sisters? “The other sirens…”

Another shrug. “They’re fine, but we kind of do our own thing.”

“But don’t you do concert tours together?”

“Oh yeah,” she replies with a snuff of laughter out her nose. “I forgot you saw us at that… what was it? Past Crash?”

“PostCrush,” I add, so quickly I almost interrupt her.

And the snuff turns into a full-bore giggle. “Fangirl much?”

I shoot her a glare, but I make sure to add a smile too—don’t want her taking it seriously. She hasn’t worn out her leeway yet. “Still, though…” She never really answered. “Why me?”

“Because I think we’re a lot alike.”

Not a hint of a grin from her—she isn’t making a joke. I don’t think she’s trying to piss me off either. I take a big breath, like the tuba player getting ready for his entrance.

“We are,” Adagio says. “We both came from a place where we just felt entitled to the magic around us, and then we both very abruptly learned that no, the world really doesn’t give a shit about us. So we thought we’d teach everyone a big, painful lesson.” A harsh sigh follows, the tail end of it even heading into whimper territory. “So we found ourselves in the pieces of broken…” She rolls her eyes up. “Bricks, I guess, for your case, or so I hear. Pieces of gem for me.”

Right, the amulets. “Wait, how can you sing, then?”

Adagio cuts her eyes sideways at me. “Well, you saw our autotune equipment at the Past Crash—”

“Now you’re just doing that on purpose.”

She smirks. “But we were growing out of the need for it by then anyway.”

I don’t like the sound of that…

For a moment, Adagio blushes and clutches at her shirt collar. Then she slumps forward a bit and undoes the top button of her shirt.

“Whoa, hey, I—” And a red glint catches my eye.

Right down between her collarbones, mostly hidden: a red gem. Badly formed, not all faceted like it used to be, but also not shattered. My body goes stiff. The only reason I took her at her word was that I thought she had no way to command magic anymore.

Then it dawns on me that I’m staring at her cleavage, so of course now my cheeks go uncomfortably warm. “How’d that happen?” I ask, way too rushed.

“If a sea snail breaks its shell, it generates another,” she answers, and for all I expect to see a triumphant grin on her, she seems lost. “I know what you’re going to ask, but go ahead.”

“What are you doing with that magic now?”

She lays her arms on the table and rests her chin on her fists. “I’m just tired of being angry all the time.”

“What are you doing with that magic now?”

“I sing.”

She invited the question, so why avoid it? “And some of what you sing is teen angst crap that’ll get everyone sad, which you presumably soak up in that,” I say, pointing at her jewel.

“Yeah.” She takes a deep breath. “I do, but I don’t use that for anything bad.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you to know what’s bad and what isn’t.”

She flinches as if I missed a note.

“What do you do with the magic?” Hell, at one time, who was I to say what was bad? “Every time you sing, I feel it. I thought it was just me, but—”

“Wait, you do?” Nothing about her smile screams ‘fake.’ She shakes her head. “I didn’t think anyone could. Maybe it’s because you’re sensitive to magic, or, hey, as a musician, you know how wonderful it is when someone just gets one of your songs, right?”

I still can’t tell, dammit. “What do you do with the magic?”

“I’ll show you sometime.” Then Adagio turns her head at the commotion on stage, and she slouches out of her seat at her namesake tempo. “Sorry. My turn.”

By now, it’s all stuff I’ve heard her play before. And it’s still good, definitely improved since the PostCrush concert. While it rings in my head as it has for weeks now, I don’t linger on it. Not on the music, anyway, but here I still sit as she walks off the stage, and her grin at seeing I haven’t left reminds me of how the girls all look when opening their thoughtful gifts from Rarity at Hearth’s Warming.

Adagio has grown, somehow—a lot of little things that add up. She gave me good answers, when I finally got her to answer, without any duplicity I could detect. Her demeanor softer, even her clothes, less showy: jeans that may as well be painted on but with a loose-fitting flowy blouse and a pair of tasteful boots. The only spikes are in her usual hairband.

If I didn’t know her, I might like her.

She sits back down, and her face no longer shows that ashy grayness, no doubt thanks to her amulet. One way or another, I’m following the script she wants me to, but I don’t see that this is heading anywhere bad. Not yet, and I do owe the world a few second chances. Despite myself, I can’t help feeling warm, but I need to keep an eye on her anyway. “Y’know, I own a small sushi restaurant at the mall. Why don’t you come by sometime?”

Her eyes sparkle even more, the rising sun glinting off wave crests. “C’mon, former sea creature? I thought you’d never ask. I love sushi!”

“Oh shit, this is good,” Adagio mumbles through a mouthful of salmon roll.

Funny, she looks less mysterious in the daylight. Still, that gem shines over the edge of the tank top she has on. Wait, it’s not on a chain? It’s… growing right on her skin? “You don’t mind if people see that?” And I realize I’m staring at her cleavage.

She peeks down at her chest. “Eh, it usually doesn’t show much, and most people don’t know what it is anyway. It hasn’t freaked anyone out, at least.”

“But I thought it was something you wore around your neck.”

Adagio runs a finger along it. “When it’s fully regrown, yeah, I’ll molt it and put it on a chain. I tried too early on the last one, while it was still cracked, and I should’ve known better. It can’t function on its own until it’s a perfect crystal. Gotta keep it attached for now.” Then she takes a swallow of tea. “So why did you come to this world anyway? Not really a place for a pony to hide out.”

“Well, I’d gotten delusions of grandeur, so I ran away here, thinking I could raise an army to go back and—” Now she’s staring.

“Damn, girl, we are the same!”

“Don’t remind me,” I mutter, but when she gives me a questioning glance, I wave her off. She isn’t wrong. For the second time in as many days, I find myself thinking that if I’d never met her before, we’d already be good friends.

She flaps her hand by her mouth after a bite with a lot of wasabi on it. “So, like… when you got here, did you find anyone you knew? Other than Celestia, of course. But… family?”

I shake my head and start spreading some more rice across a seaweed wrap. “I didn’t have any real friends, I guess aside from some of my classmates from opera school, but I hadn’t seen them in years at that point.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Opera school!? Wow, I didn’t realize you were more than a guitar thrasher.”

The past curls the corners of my mouth. “Eh, a lifetime ago. I’ll never stop loving music, but back then, I had no doubt I’d be a diva someday. Now…” The tip of my knife swishes around at the walls and ceiling. “I started here in high school, and when the old chef retired, I took over the lease from him. I’ve had fun.”

Adagio gives the room a once-over. “Small, but still, how do you run this place all by yourself?”

“I’ve hired on a college kid recently, and the former owner comes in to help out during dinner hours until I can get the new guy up to speed, or if I’m out sick.” I stick a thumb over my shoulder. “I only have to clean the kitchen area and tables. Mall management sees to the floors and windows, Rarity showed me what software she uses to track her business finances, and really, that thing is a miracle. Does it all for me.” I take a long breath and relax. It scared me at first, but everything’s finally starting to get comfortable. “Lunch hours aren’t that busy, so I just do those alone. If that changes, I’ll look into more help.”

“Well, opera school. No mystery why you can sing, then.”

“And play guitar.”

“Natch.”

“And theorbo.”

She nearly chokes on her tea. She falls into a coughing fit, and I shove a couple of extra napkins at her. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” she wheezes. “No fucking way! What a great instrument!”

“Wait, how would a siren know what a theorbo was?”

She starts ticking off a list with her fingers. “One, they exist here as well; two, I’m all about music; three, you do know how long ago Star Swirl banished us, right?”

My chopping pauses. “Oh, so you saw them back then?”

“Saw them? You know who Luthier van Dross was?”

And now the blade clatters down against the cutting board. “Stallion who invented the thing. Don’t tell me…”

“Who do you think told him to build it? ‘You’ve got a high-pitched lute, you’ve got a bass lute, smash that shit together!’”

If only to curtail her little cadenza, I raise an eyebrow. “In less colorful language, I’d guess.”

She shrugs. “Yeah. Plus I did the whole… siren thing…”

And another term I don’t like the sound of. At least it’s well in the past. “Siren thing?”

“You know… suck out his life energy, he died young.”

Good thing I haven’t picked the knife up again. “And you don’t see a problem with that?”

“Not like I can go back and change it. But no, not my finest hour.” She coughs one last time, and then she starts eyeing the unfinished roll in front of me. “So, didja meet your parents on this side?”

“Didn’t meet my parents on that side, so no, never had a need.”

“Huh.” She watches her tea swirl in her cup for a minute, and then she reprises her melody. “What about you? Find your double? I’ve seen both Twilights, so I guess everyone has one?”

I leave her hanging on a suspended chord until I finish getting this all scrolled up and sliced. “Nah, it’s a bit haphazard. There isn’t a copy of everyone. I can’t guarantee there isn’t another Sunset hiding under a rock somewhere, but in all the reasonable places for one to be, I’ve never found any.”

“You could probably track down who your parents were in Equestria, if you wanted to.”

“If I wanted to.”

I get everything arranged on her plate, every note perfect, every instrument tuned. And she takes a bite. “Mm, this is so good.”

“Thanks,” I say, flashing a grin.

“No, you don’t understand. I already told you.” Her jewel starts to glow, and… the skin on her neck turns to scales. I don’t feel that buzz to my skin, though, and my mind is clear. Just before I consider using my knife for something else—as a joke, mostly—the light fades. “Calm down,” she says, all mirth gone from her voice. “I told you, I don’t do anything bad with it now. Just reminding you, I’m originally from the ocean. Fish is my thing.”

I don’t quite put my knife down yet. “There are fish here, too.”

“But… they’re not Equestrian fish. At least not until they’re touched by Equestrian magic. It does a little something.” Another bite, down the hatch, and she positively beams. “I haven’t tasted anything like this in centuries.”

“Wait, how old are you?”

And she erupts into laughter, nearly choking again. “No, I mean… we got banished centuries ago, but to this place, this time. I’m not centuries old.”

“Oh…”

I thought the time would never come, but she’s finally had her fill. She takes the linen napkin out of her lap, dabs it at her mouth, and puts it on the counter. “Tell you what. I said I’d show you what I do with my magic now. Sometime. Well… how about on Saturday morning? Before you open?”

Yeah, she doesn’t have a clue. “I don’t think you realize how early I have to show up here to open for lunch.”

“Perfect. It’ll look best at sunrise.”

Just a minute ago, her voice brimmed with confidence. But now her eyes are blaring conflicting tones. Pleading almost, but her feather-wisp smile would wilt at the slightest touch. “Fine.”

The air in the park could have been creepy, under the right circumstances. Droplets of mist swirl around like phantasms, and the pre-dawn gray illuminates just enough to put me on my guard. Aside from the occasional jogger, nobody comes by here at this hour, but I’ve found an out-of-the-way place, a small enclosed area with a brick path looping around a copse of dogwoods, a fence encircling it all. I slouch on a bench, but I bump up against a dense hedgerow, and the dew congealed on it has my hair all wet now, so… great.

I guess I never set a specific time with Adagio. Six fifteen already. If she doesn’t show soon, I’ll have to leave. Even without her here, I feel my body on edge. I might find out what she’s trying to do. I might finally know.

Just as I try to brush some of the dampness from my head, here comes Adagio through the gap in the hedge, her hair a bolt of fire amid all the gloom. “Hey!” she says. Funny, I didn’t expect a chipper attitude. She seemed more a night owl. “You found my favorite spot! Go figure.” She eases herself onto the bench, at the far end from me, and leans forward to keep her mass of hair clear of the damp leaves behind her. “I see you found out the hard way.”

I just grunt a response, but when I look over again, she has her chin angled up and her eyes shut. She takes a deep sniff in through her nose, then exhales softly, her lips barely parting. And she hums a single note.

Something sparks, dances on the tips of the grass blades, among all the dogwoods, but before I can seek it out, it’s gone. A little flare of lightning, or—I must have imagined it. I don’t know why, but my heart falls. Like one time, at opera school. The conductor had us holding a chord and told everypony, do not sing the middle note, and his eyes said now was not the time to joke about anything. So we obeyed, and held it out, and he wouldn’t put his hoof down, strained it upwards, until we’d almost run out of breath. Then the middle note rang out, on its own, not from anypony’s mouth, just for an instant.

And it was over. The conductor grinned fiercely but said nothing. My classmates and I only looked at each other. Had it happened at all?

Somehow, I missed that she has her guitar case with her, but she’s shoved it under the bench. Still, she sits there motionless, a gargoyle blindly surveying its domain. If I saw it right, it’s the only blatant display of magic she’s shown yet. I hate to break the silence, but I’ve been wondering something. “Can—?”

She jumps.

“Sorry,” I say, but she smiles faintly and and glances over through slitted eyes. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Adagio waves a hand, conducting the leaves rippling in the breeze. “No, don’t worry about it. I just get in the zone here.”

“Zone?”

She nods, but then her eyes go distant, her lips poised to say something that never comes.

So I shrug. “Can Aria and Sonata sing again, too?” Adagio takes another breath and holds it. Didn’t she invite me here? “Um… and if they do, why are you a solo act?”

Finally, she parts her bangs and sits up straighter. “We still have our group stuff, but I like to do my own thing in my off hours.”

I check my watch again. If she’s just going to give me a bunch of non-answers, I might as well get to work. “You must have a lot of free time, given how much of it you spend at the cafe.” With a grin, I add, “Or at the sushi bar.” It is nice to have a customer that enthusiastic, plus it keeps her where I can see her.

“Yeah.”

A decidedly unhelpful response.

It’s one thing to hear the stockbrokers and lawyers bloviating about what deals they’ve closed over ahi rolls, but this girl has mastered the art of saying nothing. “So…”

“Sorry,” she whispers as her grin fades. “I know, I asked you here. I just needed to see how much was in the tank.”

I squint at her and open my mouth, but—

“Check this out.”

Another hum permeates the air, but it’s strange, resonant, with an almost metallic quality to it. That spark dances over the grass again, here, there, always in the corner of my eye, and then I notice: I can’t hear the crickets chirping anymore. I can’t hear the cars on the highway. I can’t hear the leaves rustling. The wind’s hiss is still there, but constant, pervasive, like the sky is holding its breath. My watch slows.

Each droplet in those swirls of morning fog hangs suspended, glistening in a werelight that shines from all around. In the stand of dogwoods, the buds straining toward the first warmth of spring unfold, spread their leaves, white blossoms opening up and showering points of light. And in between them, stalks nudge their way up from the soil, transform into blue, pink, yellow, purple. Hyacinth, daffodil, jonquil, lily of the valley, daisy. Behind me, the hedges erupt into japonica, azalea, and hydrangea, spilling over my shoulders and gracing our world with their perfume.

Sweet smells, the chill wind prickling at my arm. Everywhere, the dancing sparks dart, and I try to follow them, but it gets hard to move my head that fast, or… move it at all. No world around me, no world inside me, and I don’t think I’ve taken a breath for over a minute now, I don’t think I need to. It all has a life of its own, sustains me. If I reach out, I could rearrange the mist, and it would hang in place, precisely as I’d sculpted it.

And through it all, this crystalline melody—

My mouth hangs open, and I’m crying, but I don’t know why. “How are you doing this?” I rasp, my voice sibilant like the valve on an old radiator, but stifled, dead, the strength of it soaked into the void holding us away from everything. My own words sound muffled, and as I look around again, it’s not just the plants: dragonflies hover above the tips of each leafy tendril, ladybugs trundle up the stalks, butterflies of every color flit about. As I sit flexing my fingers, deciding whether to take one of the flowers, a blue butterfly perches on the end of my knee and flaps its wings once or twice.

She stops. And she peers out of the corner of her eye again, the knowing glance at an eavesdropper, but not an unwelcome one. The light starts to fade, the flowers grow dim. On her chest, scales revert to skin. “I don’t know.”

The spell broken, I find my full voice again. “How do you not know!?” Nearby, the crunch of gravel sounds, but we’re not completely back in the jogger’s world. He never notices.

Adagio gives me another one of her shrugs.

“That’s earth pony magic, except… why does it go away?”

She shakes her head, scratches a finger at her cheek as if it might bring back a memory. “It’s not any kind of plant magic. I don’t think so, at least. You’re right—it would stick around then.”

“So what is it?”

Once more, she hums, just enough to make the flowers’ brightness pulse. “Maybe it’s about beauty.”

Maybe so. I guess that would fit a siren. “But while it’s here, is it real? Or only an illusion?”

She leans forward and sags, a laborer pushing through the day’s final hour, but her voice churns again, a single lilac climbing into the space between us. And she picks it, holds it up to my lips, brushes the petals against my chin. “Real.”

“Just because I can feel it doesn’t mean it’s not an illusion.” But it smells real.

“I know how one looks, so I know how it looks to you, too. Unless you’re colorblind, I guess.” She chuckles, and with it, the flower wilts a little. “But I don’t know how one would smell or taste to you. Never tried it myself. So I couldn’t fool you there.”

I would take a taste, but… human taste buds are different. I found that out abruptly, not long after I came to this world. Grass tastes pretty awful now. And it doesn’t do human digestion any favors.

Adagio smirks at my frown, and the flower goes away, the distant trucks thunder by, the birds resume their arguments over territory. “If it is about beauty,” she says, then averts her eyes toward the ground where the lilac once bloomed, “it didn’t make you any more beautiful.” She closes her eyes momentarily, and I think I hear “as if it could” drifting languidly on the mist. But I don’t know what to make of it.

She showed me her magic. She could have kept me under her spell, I’m sure of it. But for what? I never felt compelled to do anything. If she wanted me, she had me, yet she let me go. She only showed me her magic.

Exactly as she promised.

“Why do you do this?” I understand that she’s changed since those years ago and Canterlot High, but she never cared about beauty, especially not for its own sake. Though it does shut her off in her own world for a little while, if ruling this diminutive realm means something to her. I keep watching, but her face stays carefully still. “And why just you? Have you shown the other sirens?”

“Yeah,” she replies, waving a hand. “But they don’t really care.” She looked so fresh before. Now she seems as though she hasn’t slept in days, her eyes dim and her hair tousled. “They can do it. I showed them how. But they got bored with it right away.”

Then she leans back, carefully keeping her wavy mane out of the dewy shrub’s grasp. “For me, I… Well, I always felt like art lives in the small moments.”

I don’t quite know what she means by that. But with her looking nearly comatose, and me needing to get to work, I stand halfway, and—

How much was in the tank. She… did all this for me? Or she knew she didn’t have enough accumulated to keep me under control and she was just testing? She can barely sit up, and she’s a dry leaf trembling in a blizzard’s gale. I don’t get it, and I… need to think about this. It was beautiful, and maybe it was a gift, and I hope it was a gift.

I stand the rest of the way, and I hate making excuses, so I take off my jacket and let my work uniform do the talking for me. But I do put a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you,” I say, looking her steadily in the eye for the first time ever, and one of those rarely genuine smiles forms on her lips. Tired, exhausted, but real.

Author's Note

The chapter title is a musical direction which would normally refer to adagio as a slow tempo. It literally means "Adagio, but not too much."

And there's Adagio with the title drop. I originally saw that as a quote from Shirley Jackson, but I don't know if she originated it, as I've since seen it pop up in a couple other places.

If people don’t know, yes, Luthier van Dross is a ponified name. Luther Vandross was a well-known R&B singer. A luthier is someone who builds lutes.

The whole story is already written, so I'll be posting on a regular schedule. Chapter 2 coming next week.

Opus 1, Revised

Adagio shovels in another roll filled with salmon roe, and can she even taste it when she does that?

But between courses, she fluffs her hair a bit, sits taller, and squares her shoulders as if bracing to carry a heavy load. Then she hums a little, and the sprigs of flowers in the bud vases on the counter perk up, intensify their perfume, and somehow… sparkle.

After each time, the shadows deepen on her face, and she seems like the pianist gasping for breath at the end of a demanding concerto. There’s not even anyone arguing in here to charge her magic, not that I’d want that, for my sake, anyway. For hers… I like her now. I do. And it scares me.

Early for lunch, but I have a couple at a table near the entrance, so I excuse myself for a minute to carry over a platter of tempura. “Enjoy, folks!” I say as I set it down. They smile back and immediately dig in. Semi-regulars, and if I remember right, they came in a month or so ago to celebrate an anniversary. Thirty-sixth, maybe?

When I take my place behind the counter again, Adagio waves a hand at the logo on the menu card standing at the empty seat next to hers. “So where’d you come up with the name for this place?” she asks. “Sa-Shimmy,” she adds with a snicker.

I shrug. “Not sure if I ever caught his name. Some wanderer who used to hang around here.” Then I gesture at her plate. “So, what did you think of that?”

“Great! Loved it!” she spouts, a trumpet’s fanfare, before she licks a finger and dabs up a stray grain of rice.

And my shoulders slump. “You’ve said that about everything.”

“Because I’ve loved everything.”

“Fine, but…” She’s staring now. She rests her cheek in her palm and gives me an easy grin, peering at my eyes. My own cheeks get warm. “You’re missing the point of omakase. I’m supposed to use your feedback to fine-tune the next course.”

“I trust you.” Without so much as a flinch, she keeps that disarming stare directed at me.

“That’s new,” I mutter more to myself.

“Huh?”

“Oh, just…” I take a moment to put a sprinkling of salt down, pat my fingers over it before working on the rice. “Omakase’s one thing, but it sounded like you meant more. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it.”

She smirks a little too big and taps her pinky finger against her cup. “No, you got it.”

“Nobody’s ever been that quick to trust me. It only took years at Canterlot High.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter to me.” She pours herself a refill from the small steaming teapot by her left hand, then holds the ceramic cup just under her nose and breathes in the aroma. “I’ve seen how you are around your real friends. And what put everyone off anyway?” She doesn’t even wait for a reply. “I knew that wasn’t a relapse at the Battle of the Bands.”

True, she would. Since she’d caused it. So I sigh. “Alright,” I say, “let me whip something up with abalone.”

FInally, a twitch. “What’s that?”

“Wait, former creature of the ocean, and you don’t know what abalone is?” A few chops of my knife, with a percussionist’s rhythm, and I have a small pile of it ready for a quick sear on the grill.

“Didn’t have those in Equestria. As you said, I guess, there’s not a double of everything.”

“Still, it’s nice to have someone believe in you.”

“Yeah, it is.” The teacup returns to the counter, and her posture returns to that soft gaze. It reminds me of the look someone would give a puppy: not sure what’ll happen next, but certain that it’s worth seeing.

But how would she know that feeling? “What do you mean?”

“You trust in me.”

I pause at rolling the hot abalone in with the rice. Do I? Is she wrong? She does seem to be acting honorably these days. And ever since I encountered her at that cafe, she hasn’t done anything to make me mistrust her. But why?

“I just…” I start. I can’t figure out what about her gets me talking. Now, anyway. It never did before. For a second, I hold my breath, listening for the subtle cues that she might be singing, that she might be making me do this. Except it’d only help her if that caused negative emotions, and this has me feeling… airy, I guess. And if she only wanted to prove to herself that she could control me, she already did, in the park. Why try any more than the illusions here? Why do it at all? Adagio squints at my silence. “When I had to live without magic. It was a long time. I kept sneaking back to Equestria to steal bits of it, but I never got anything substantial, so not much better than nothing.”

With my knife point waving in the air, I gather up the minute tingles in my back, as if waiting for the one chord in the whole symphony that brings everything together. “It gave me a new appreciation for people who treated me with kindness and respect. Not until afterward, of course, since I still had to get that massive chip off my shoulder.”

Adagio starts to smile, but then her mouth twitches, and she blinks, looking kind of… worried? “You could, if you want to,” she says softly. She sets her chopsticks down and flips the back of a hand toward my chest. “You could use your geode on me. I won’t stop you.”

“No, I…” A sigh rushes out. “You said I trust you, right? It wouldn’t show much trust if I did that.” Then I pat a palm against my collar. “I don’t keep it with me all the time anyway.” How’d she even know about the geode? That was after she left school, but—oh, right, I read her thoughts at the PostCrush concert. Another misstep in my life that haunts me.

She halfway slumps over her plate and averts her eyes sideways. “I do think you trust me, but I also have to admit there’s a limit. You could make sure.”

“Not necessary,” I say, and her lips just barely curl up at the corners.

I go back to my rice and get the abalone all finished and pretty, then scoop it up with the flat of my knife and slide it onto her plate. Something about the tune she’d hummed—familiar, a little, like a different version of one I’ve heard before. I pick up what little I remember and get through most of the melody before I catch myself staring at the spray of flowers beside her. But naturally they don’t flourish any. That’s her magic. She flashes me a curious little grin.

“I forgot,” she says. “You’re all about music, too. No surprise you have a nice voice. And down in the lower register, with me.”

Why does that have my cheeks burning?

“Good singer, good guitar player. Why don’t you ever do open mic night?”

My knife tip flicks again, and I have got to quit doing that before I slash something. “The Rainbooms wouldn’t fit up there, and good luck getting them all together these days. Especially at such an everyday venue. Without them, I really don’t like being a solo act.”

The curl at the corner of her mouth practically calls checkmate. “Then play with me.”

At least I hold my knife well back this time, but I do poke it in her direction. “You remember how hard it was to find time to meet in the park? And you think I can squeeze some group rehearsal in?”

“Still, I think it’d be fun.” Wearing that same smirk, she returns to resting her chin in her palm. I half shrug and tilt my head, but she continues: “If you don’t like going it alone, then maybe we can do it together? It’d be a lot of fun. I bet you’re the type where we can go by ear and come up with some great improv.”

She retrieves her chopsticks and bites off half the abalone roll, and as she chews, she’s staring at my neckline, but it’s cut low enough she should be able to see my geode isn’t there, and I already told her I didn’t have it with me. Well, I didn’t say it outright, but I sure implied—

“What’d be even more fun,” she mumbles through her mouthful, her stare intensifying, “is playing with those boobs.”

What the f—

If I thought my cheeks felt hot before... Yeah, looking at my geode, huh?

I slap my knife down, the metal singing out across the room, and a chef should know better than to treat her knives that way, but I glance over to see if that couple is listening. They haven’t reacted any.

“Way to kill the mood,” I growl at her.

Then I stalk over to my other customers, taking a moment as I near the table to do the stress-relief arm move Twilight—pony Twilight—taught me. “Anything else, ma’am? Sir?” I say with a broad smile.

“No,” the man replies, “delicious as always.”

After a generic thank-you, I slip back behind the counter to run his credit card, and I can feel her eyes on me. Where are they roving? Dammit, now I’ve got it in my head, and I’m very aware of how far I bend over in this skirt to return his card and receipt.

Not since those early days in the cafe have I seen her flip so quickly from self-assured to looking like she wants to hide under a table. “Sorry,” she mumbles, gazing down at the counter. “I’m bad at this.”

“No shit.”

“Look, I’m sorry.” She raises a hand gingerly, then sets it down. “I’m a siren. You ever… y’know…” The hand raises again, then comes down, hard. “You can’t help being what you are.”

I’ll give her a little leeway. “I told you about trying grass once.”

“Yeah, like that.” She takes a deep breath. “But it’s different, in a way. It’s like a compulsion, same as getting hungry. It’s the difference between—” Her hand slaps the counter once more. “I can’t explain it!” she shouts, and I glance around again, but the restaurant is empty. Still another twenty minutes or so until all the nearby businesses go on their lunch hour.

“Take your time,” I say, and I stand there with my arms folded, trying my hardest not to glare at her as if she’d completely missed the cue the maestro kept yelling at her about in rehearsal.

“Lots of times, you eat because you have to, right? You shovel in whatever, just to make your stomach quit grumbling, and as long as it doesn’t taste like shit, you don’t care much. You gotta do it, it gets done.”

I nod.

“I think… well, the food’s great, and I like it, and sorry if you thought I was talking about that.”

I would keep staring, but my eyes are getting dry, so I blink once.

“I think this is the first time in my life I ever wanted to eat.” For an instant, she looks up at me. But the instant ends, and she studies the menu, omakase gone from her mind. “I’m trying not to eat, though, because it’s not the same if it’s completely me causing it, and—fuck, it just doesn’t sound right that way.” One more slap of the counter, but gentler this time.

“I understand.” I pick up the knife again and jut my chin at the menu that seems to have her so engrossed. “Still hungry?” She almost laughs, though I have to admit to myself, I did mean it in both senses. More for the food, but she takes the napkin out of her lap and folds it up over her plate, then shakes her head. “Besides, I usually like guys,” I add.

She nods quickly, looking every direction but mine. “That… was his name Flash Sentry?”

“Yeah. At one time. I thought he was such a steed.”

And a snort erupts from her. “Pony much?”

Finally, I relax my posture and set my knife in the sink behind me. I’ll use a fresh one for the lunch crowd. “I told you about trying grass once,” I repeat.

“Usually guys?” she asks, her eyebrows raised.

“Yeah.”

For a long minute, she holds back something in her throat, and finally she speaks. “Look, can we start over? I already explained how I feel and why, so no resetting that, I guess, but…”

My mind drifts back over the last few months. Her, confiding in me repeatedly, sharing, thinking we were kindred spirits, opening up more than she ever has to anyone else. This really does mean a lot to her. I haven’t caught her in a lie once, and I’ve never confirmed my suspicions that she was controlling me. I wouldn’t have expected it, but she’s right: I do trust her. Maybe… maybe I could even consider her a friend. She’s gotten warm, personable. She earnestly shows interest in me and the things I care about, inspires me to do the same for her. We have the same passions, including the bad ones.

She’s right: we are the same. I have to chuckle about it, and fortunately she doesn’t notice it in the silence. “But what?” I ask.

“I’m trying hard, to do this the right way.”

It weighs on my shoulders. I suppose I had a niggling itch in the back of my head telling me I should have read the music, but… it’s not like I actually object. Not that much, so as she picks up her earlier theme, but more gently this time—

“I think it’d be nice,” she says. “Can I?”

I look around the empty restaurant once more. And I nod, my jaw firm. I don’t know about this, but I don’t think it’ll hurt anything.

She stands, leans over the counter, and kisses me. Given her personality, I was expecting something forceful, that she’d grab the back of my neck and pull me in hard, that I’d shove her away and tell her she’d had her fill, and don’t ever dare think she could do it again.

But it’s soft and gentle, nothing like I’d ever seen from her before, nothing like I would have thought her capable of. A simple, light touch, briefly caressing my bottom lip, and it reminds me of how her magic has changed: domination and violence, turned to tranquility, inviting, engrossing, and I’d…

I’d do anything to feel it again.

It was a nice kiss. It was perfect, and when had I closed my eyes? I swear it only lasted a couple of seconds, but now I’m not so sure. What I am sure of is that she didn’t make me do any of it.

“You knew just how,” I breathe out. “Why?”

She grins as if she’s gotten the birthday present she didn’t have the slightest hope anyone could find. “Seemed to me that’s what you’d like,” she answers.

In her eyes, I can tell: not ‘what I’d like’ because it gets her what she wants. No, ‘what I’d like’ because it’s what I’d like.

She’s really changed. She really has changed. She genuinely cares about someone other than herself. And I don’t know what to do about it.

Adagio hasn’t mentioned a single thing about last time. No apologies, no come-ons, no omakase. She’s quietly eating a plate of tempura shrimp and vegetables.

But then she gives me a curious glance, braces her cheek across her wrist with her chopsticks jutting past her mouth. “I was thinking about what you said.”

Given all the things we’ve talked about lately, that does little to narrow it down.

“About doubles.” She takes a breath and nimbly picks up a piece of carrot like a harpist plucking her string. “I didn’t think about it a lot until you said so. I had to do some digging in the library, since I showed up here around a thousand years after I got thrown out of Equestria.”

“What did you find?” With her ordering off the menu today, I’m not keeping up a steady stream of food, so just the usual lunch specials for the staff from the veterinary clinic over at table five and some semi-regulars at the tables along the far wall. As often as she comes here now, good thing she’s a paying customer.

“Star Swirl did exist as a human, and a handful of other ponies I remember.” She shrugs. “But more than half of them don’t seem to have doubles here.”

I’m not feeling especially charitable today, so I stay quiet. If she wants to make a point, she can do it on her own. But what’s got me so grumpy? She doesn’t deserve it. If I could just feel her magic again…

I glance over at my gecko Ray’s terrarium on its sideboard along the wall. I spend so little time at home that it’s not fair leaving him there alone, and I keep a second home here for days I bring him in. He’s still asleep.

A small frown steals across her face. “It gets kinda complicated, but there are some patterns you can follow,” she finally says, not even finished with her chewing yet. “Of the few I know about these days, take Celestia. Ageless princess of a nation there, but just a small high school here? And from how you always talk up Twilight, she’s not even Celestia’s protegée in this world.”

Something about that image makes my mind drift. Fortunately, it lightens my mood a tad, and I chuckle.

“Hm?” she says, flaring out her fingers from her chopsticks.

“Just remembered something.” I gaze out into space, past the far wall. “No surprise I had more than one rebellious phase. One of them was wearing very tight clothing, which, really, what does that matter on a pony when they don’t usually wear clothes at all?”

Adagio gives half a shrug. “I dunno. It’s different for humans, I guess.”

“Yeah. But somehow it mattered then, and maybe I’ve been human so long I forgot why, but here comes Princess Celestia into my room one afternoon, and she says, she actually says, ‘If that was any tighter, it’d be behind you!’” I can barely finish, for all the laughter that wants out—I wrestle it under control, but I hear a giggle from her.

Still, I keep my eyes on my work, yet her little piccolo solo of a smile returns. “Now bear with me. Sometimes it gets bent even further. Star Swirl the pony never had any kids, but Star Swirl the human had a son. The son existed as a pony, but one not related to him at all.”

That makes me pause in my slicing, and her smile only grows at the attention. “Really? Seems almost random.”

“Yeah, but it can make a bit of sense in a strange way. I won’t bore you with the logic of it. I’ll leave it that if someone only exists in one world, you can sometimes figure out who they would have been in the other, and what that might have changed some others into.”

“Sounds like as much guesswork as anything else,” I say as I grab another slab of tuna from where it sits on ice. I need to order some more tomorrow. “You know those modern classical pieces that just give you some random direction? Play this measure as many times as you want, move on to the next, and so on. Just make sure you’ve gotten to the end by the time it’s over, and since everyone’s part is like that, it never goes the same way twice. Out of that chaos comes something that can sound cool. But for whoever wrote it, did they really see a pattern?” I give a little chuckle, and there’s a spark to her eyes I haven’t seen in weeks. “For that matter, how much credit do you give them for the performers’ decisions and what might just be chance?”

She nods. “That’s fair,” she says. “I’ve just been following a thread through some of the genealogy stuff I found, and it’s been interesting to see what turns up. Like if there’d been a human Princess Platinum, there wouldn’t have been a Dante Allegory. She would have written The Divine Comedy instead of him. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“Mmhmm.” I need to order more nori, too.

Adagio wilts as if a blossom with the relentless sun cooking her. Then she speaks, her voice so tiny: “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Can we get together in the park?”

I start to open my mouth, but—

“I know that means you couldn’t hang out at the cafe tonight, so you can get up early. But I want to sing for you again.”

Whenever one of Fluttershy’s dogs has gotten into the trash, it won’t meet her eyes. It tries, but it can’t make its gaze stay on her for more than a second. It also looks so adorable that she can’t help forgiving it right away.

But there’s nothing to forgive her for, not lately anyway, and if I could experience her magic welling up around me, I’d lose this stupid malaise in a second.

Adagio keeps trying to make eye contact. “Would you play theorbo for me, too?”

I hold up a finger, finish slicing the last roll, and deliver a nice bento box to the lady at the end of the counter. Then I return to my lost puppy, and she basks in the attention. “I don’t have a theorbo.”

“I could get you one.”

“Adagio, they’re crazy expensive! How would you even come up with the money for that—?”

“I—”

“And before you even say it, no, it’d be ridiculous for you to do that, and I wouldn’t let you.”

Her mouth forms a grim line. “The museum has one. Other old instruments, too, in working order. They loan ’em out to the students of ancient music at the college for performances sometimes. I’m sure I could… convince the curator to let me borrow it.”

A red gleam just on the edge of her neckline catches my eye. “I thought you’d changed.”

She takes a clump of her hair and pulls it over her shoulder, a widow’s veil across her face. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “It’s all new to me, and I’m trying…”

I’m trying, too. It’s not her fault, and I’ve been quick to accuse. I let out a heavy sigh. And a few more customers walk in. The avuncular mechanic from down the road and a few of his employees, super nice guys. I don’t want to make them wait, but it’ll take them a couple minutes to look at the menu.

“You made me think of an old pony fairy tale,” I say, and she brightens a tad.

“Which one?”

“A young stallion’s fiancée took ill—”

She snorts. “‘Took ill’? What is this, Ye Olde Speake Theatre?”

It’s nice to see some life out of her right now. It’s… strange. I feel like she’d take a lot of work. I also feel like she’d be well worth it. She’s come so far already. “A young stallion’s fiancée took ill, and she remained confined to the house. The stallion lamented—” another snort “—thank you for the commentary—that she’d never be able to see the world with him, so he spent a year traveling by himself. He collected keepsakes, photographs, anything he could, so that when he returned, he could show her all the wonders he’d seen and let her experience them, too. But from looking at what he’d brought home, she only wept bitterly about what she could never have.”

Adagio rolls her eyes, but without any mirth in her grin. “Wow, pony stories are dark.”

“Try the human version, where he returns home to find she’s already died of her illness.” She raises an eyebrow. “Or instead of crying, she kills herself.”

“Okay, makes sense ponies would have the least screwed-up version.”

I take another breath, lean forward on my elbows, and give the downbeat. “I don’t have a theorbo, but I do have a classical guitar. I’ll bring it.”

And she’s a dewdrop-covered blossom again, straining toward the faint moonlight, as I go to wait on my customers.

I pluck out the final chord and let my guitar’s strings resonate until the sound dies on its own. I take a breath and open my eyes—she’s absolutely beaming at me! I’ve never seen her smile that big before without a scheme behind it.

“That was a chaconne by a composer I’m sure you’ve never heard of,” I say, “from about five hundred years ago. It sounds a little different without the bass line.”

And now her smile has a scheme behind it. “Chaconne? That’s a love song, right?”

I clear my throat and avert my eyes to my instrument’s tuning pegs. “I… was hoping you wouldn’t know that.”

“C’mon, siren? We’re practically made of music.”

“Yeah, I should have known you were pretty much an expert. Anyway, don’t read too much into my choice of song.” Who am I trying to convince?

I really don’t like the way she winks at me. “I could tell it wasn’t Past Crash, anyway,” she says. She gets a nice glare for that.

I’d have thought the joggers would react to Renaissance-era music in the park at daybreak as unusual, but they don’t spare us a glance. Go figure. But as I take my neck strap off and set my guitar back in its case, her eyes spawn a queer glint: falling at my time on stage ending, but lighting up at her own turn.

She lets out a short hum, and the air resonates again, a sort of gray wall drawing a curtain between our world and everyone else’s. I can feel the silence, a storm building, or… no, something I needed, something more pleasant, more portentous, a percussionist winding up to smash her cymbals together. Birds hang in the air, and I swear if I stood and walked up to one, I could touch it. Just for a moment, the flowers and fresh scents and dewdrops, like an orchestra warming up, before it all flashes back to reality again, her note tapering to silence. I’d forgotten to breathe, only for a few seconds, but I gasp anyway.

The buzzing returns, but… not harsh this time. Not the horrible draining feeling her magic had long ago. This is uplifting, wonderful. I love it—and when can I feel it again?—but it tires her out so much, and I can’t impose on her.

Adagio smiles. And with blooms and petals and nectar fragrance burgeoning up as a fanfare, she adds words for the first time: “Hush, my darling, and don’t you fret—”

She recoils from me as I grab her shoulders, the pleasant euphoria all but gone. “That song!”

Her eyes wildly flick back and forth between my own, not knowing which one might betray if I mean her any harm. She even holds up a forearm, ready to ward off an attack.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I loosen my grip, let go, wring my hands. “It’s just… I’ve known that song all my life, but I don’t know where it came from. I’ve never met anyone else who knew it.”

She takes a second to gulp, then relaxes back into the bench again, though I can tell she’s forcing it. I’ve seen that enough before: musicians make mistakes all the time, more often than the audience realizes. They’re just well hidden. “Ponies used to sing that a lot back when I lived there. Really, nobody does anymore?”

“No. I don’t know where I learned it, but it’s been special to me all my life. Who used to sing it?” Now I’m the one playing it off, acting casual.

She rolls her eyes up, then shrugs. “Hard to remember. One family, had a lot of apple cutie marks. Maybe they’re related to Applejack?”

I’ve never heard AJ sing that, but it doesn’t rule it out either. I should ask her later. But for now, I close my eyes. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Would you sing it again? For me?”

I can imagine the angelic face she must have on, maybe even relishing it in the absence of my sight. But she does sing it. I’m probably sitting in the midst of a starburst of flowers, and I’m being terribly unfair to her by not seeing that, but the song, the song…

For the first time in a couple decades, I’m curled up in a fancy bedroom, all kinds of lace and feather comforters and brass fittings around. Not to my taste, but to hers, the princess, and I’d gladly live among it all if it meant being close to her. A cheery blaze in the hearth, and of course a young filly shouldn’t have to tend a fire, so the castle staff would come in regularly to manage it. I could count the hours by their punctual appearances, know when to douse my hornlight and stash whatever spellbook I wasn’t supposed to be learning under the covers, until they slipped out quietly again.

A soft touch on my shoulder, one of the stewards waking me up for class and pretending not to see the corner of a book concealed beneath the sheets—

No, Adagio’s hand. I finally crack an eye open, and she peers at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I rip my stare away from the grass growing around my feet and give her a weak smile. “It’s just… that really sent me back.” That lovely weightless feeling already begins to subside from my body.

“Good,” she says, her face alight. Then she scoots closer, the certainty gone from her eyes and a weariness about her body as the last hints of scales dissipate from her cheek. She emptied the tank again. “Can I?”

I scowl at her. “Now you’re making it sound like we’ve agreed to an exchange.”

“If you don’t want to, it’s okay. Really. I don’t expect anything.” Her grin hangs on desperately. “It just seemed like you might let me.”

That phrasing. Not that she might want it or that I might want it. That I’d let her. I know that’s not what she means, but it does cheapen things. “If you think you deserve it.”

She falters a half second, but does close the rest of the distance and lightly presses her lips to mine. As before, it’s… it’s so beautifully gentle, unlike anything she used to be. And it doesn’t feel right to sit here just… enduring it, I guess, as though I’m forking over her payment. It’s not as if I don’t appreciate what she’s doing, or that I don’t enjoy this, so…

I lean in, only a little, and angle my head, even pucker a bit.

I misjudged her again. Same as last time, I figured she’d take any sort of compliance as meaning she could grab my head and kiss me hard, but she doesn’t try to take control. I do like her. She’s become nice, enthralling—her music’s beautiful, she’s beautiful. A tingle runs down my neck.

And I probably would have lingered on the feeling for a while, but one of her curly tresses brushes my nose precisely the wrong way, so I break off, scratch my nose, but too late—I turn away from her and sneeze. “Sorry,” I say, rubbing my nose.

When I look back, she’s gazing at me so intensely. As if she has a super-important question buried in her throat, but she keeps it inside, along with a grin that’s trying to erupt. Too many words piled up, and if she doesn’t say something, she might pop. So I ask her. I want to know anyway.

“Why me? We were never friends. And even years later, at the PostCrush concert, you still didn’t like me. What changed?”

She licks her lips for a second, does let a small smile out to play, then says, “Once I got over that rebellious schoolgirl phase—” I begin to chuckle, but she holds up a hand “—yeah, I know, I was already way too old to call it that, but still. I saw the kind of friends you had, that you were able to win everyone over. I really admired that. I wanted to be like you.”

A brief glint of red flashes through her eyes, but when I glance at her amulet, it doesn’t seem to glow any. “Even after I got caught breaking into your van while wrongly suspecting you?”

Adagio shrugs. “Everyone trips and falls sometimes.”

“Sounds like my line,” I mutter.

“If I’m supposed to take life lessons from you, it helps when you’re less than perfect. Makes it a reachable goal.”

“Fair point.” It’s encouraging that she wants to work toward something, though I really don’t feel as though I should be a role model. Better to shift gears. “I like what you’re doing with your magic. How long did it take to learn that you could do that, and then get that good at it?”

“Three months, maybe four—” She drops her gaze. Some more of what she wanted to say starts trickling out, the countermelody I have to strain to hear. “You remember what I said about doubles? That there aren’t always copies in both worlds, but you could figure out what might have been?”

I chuckle once more. “You mean that you could figure out. That’s all over my head.”

“Well…” She huffs a breath out her nose and still won’t look at me. “I think I’ve worked out that there was never a version of you in this world.”

That’s not something to be timid about. It’s not even that surprising. So what’s still got her—?

“And I’ve been over it a bunch of times to make sure.” Her voice has gotten so quiet I can scarcely hear her, with our own little world dissolved and the birds singing again and laughter and conversation floating around as more people intrude on our refuge. “I know, if there had been a Sunset Shimmer here, who your mother would be.”

How could she have…?

I don’t get it. She offered to walk me through it before, how she does that. Every time she comes to my restaurant, she drops some tidbit about who would have done this or that, mostly here, since she’s way behind on Equestrian history.

My mother. I never knew who she was. And according to Adagio, just because it’s someone here doesn’t mean it’d be the same person there. Two lines that may never connect, if they were even meant to. Celestia didn’t know, at least I assumed not, or else she would have told me. Unless she thought I was better off ignorant. No, no, that’s not Celestia. Truth over everything.

My mother.

Adagio looks so much like a small child herself right now. “Do you…” she says, barely above the sound of crunching gravel from the pathway. “Do you wanna meet her?”

Author's Note

Hm, that wanderer who suggested Sa-Shimmy as the name of the restaurant... could that be our own Wanderer D?

The lullaby that Sunset is so attached to is one you might have seen before in some of my older stories. It first appears in Duet in the Folk Style (in its entirety), and I thought I'd referenced it in one more, but I can't find it now.

Another ponified name: Dante Allegory, appropriately enough, for Dante Alighieri.

Coming next week, chapter 3.

Music and Lyrics by Adagio Dazzle

I’m not sure of anything.

Rather than get together at my restaurant as Adagio suggested, I’d prefer the cafe, a more neutral ground. But my normal table is so dark that we might not be able to see each other well, and we couldn’t all face the stage at once, and should any of us really be paying attention to the people abusing the mic tonight? Not with how… monumental this feels to me.

I choose another table, out in the light, angled so we can all watch the unfortunate singer. And here I sit, for the fifth time already reminding myself to stop fidgeting that leg. I check my phone. No text from Adagio, and she’s ten minutes late. But that’s still normal, nothing to worry about. She’ll come, soon enough, just wait.

It doesn’t help that I’m on my third espresso, and I didn’t want to impose, making someone come here late at night, so at least it’s not so close to my bedtime that this’ll keep me up, but it’s definitely getting me jittery, not that the situation helps, and I think I feel my teeth vibrating, and—

I stop my leg from fidgeting again, just as Adagio comes through the door with…

The woman with Adagio is elegant, moving with the effortless strength of an ice skater’s stride, wearing her cool, flowy dress, hanging behind Adagio but perpetually peeking around her, eyes probing and bright, finally finding their mark. She grins at me.

Poking out from below the dress, a pair of ordinary flats with long socks, and she looks odd wearing white with how pale her skin is. Dark orange hair, and I’ve seen it a lot in anime, but I’ve never actually met someone with an adhesive bandage across the bridge of her nose. It almost looks like scales.

Adagio plops into her seat, leaving this woman standing there without any sort of preamble to build on, so I offer her my hand, and she takes it in both of hers. “Sunset Shimmer,” I say.

“Yeah, Adagio’s told me. I’m Autumn Blaze.”

“What has she told you?” Not too many people know about magic and Equestria, so I can’t just start blabbing about my life.

Autumn gives an easy shrug and slides into the chair across from me. “Just that you’re like a long-lost relative of mine, and some cousin or great aunt or something or other might have made it so that I was like a mother to you when you were young—” she leans in with the back of a hand shielding her mouth and stage whispers “—I don’t understand the first bit of it.” But she sits back up and brightens with a little jounce of her shoulders. “I figured why not, you can never have too many friends, right? Maybe if you’re trying to pack them in a car, I guess, but—y’know, the friends I do have always tell me I talk too much. Do I talk too much?”

She’s squinting over at Adagio now, so I suppose Autumn is speaking to her, but by now Adagio’s resting her chin on her arms, and she rolls her eyes at me.

“Ooh, is that espresso?” Autumn doesn’t even wait for an answer. “I’d love one. Hey! Hey, waiter guy! Can I get an espresso?”

“That’s about all I understand of it as well,” I cut in. “I never knew my mom, don’t even know her name, but Adagio says you were close to her.”

Autumn scowls at that, the bandage wrinkling. “But you don’t know who?”

I shake my head. “No, more like… you’re really similar to her. Like if I got to know you, I could get to know her.”

“So, like, you want my life story or something?”

She’s grinning as if she hopes I do. “Just… tell me about yourself. What you love, what you do. Where you come from.”

Her head bobs this way and that, already saying her entire existence probably deals in vagaries. “Lived here all my life, was an ordinary kid, until I got into all kinds of philosophy. Spent a year living in a zen temple under a vow of silence—” Adagio bursts into a laugh “—I know, right? I couldn’t take it anymore, so I got into the grunge scene as a singer and met Adagio’s band. As luck would have it, they needed some help on vocals because all three of them had some… what was it?”

“Chronic… throat… thing,” Adagio mumbles as she tugs her neckline up to cover the scarlet sheen there.

Autumn fans her hands out in some game show hostess move. “Tada! I sang with them for about half a year until they were doing better.” When the espresso lands in front of her, she snaps her eyes down. “Hey, can you Irish that up? Shot or two or… tell you what, just bring a glass of whiskey and I’ll dump the coffee in that.”

And she whirls back to me: “Hey, Adagio grabbed me on short notice and I didn’t bring my wallet. Can you cover me?”

That reminds me—I’d thought about applying for a liquor license so I could serve sake. Which led me to wonder if I’d careen down the path of needing to have mixed drinks in general, and would I need to hire a bartender or just learn myself.

The waiter comes back, and Autumn sloshes her little espresso cup over the chunk of ice, the dark brown making foggy curlicues through the gold. Actually, it kind of reminds me of her hair. And she downs it in three gulps.

Yeah, just sake. Or maybe not even that.

“So, what else you wanna know?” Autumn says.

“Just… well, not that you did it, but I always wondered: why would a mom give up her child?” I don’t know. She does seem like me in some ways. Brash. Flighty. Constantly on the verge of screwing up all the progress she’s made in life. Maybe I get that from her.

Funny, she’s a singer, but I haven’t had a single hint of music in my head since she showed up.

“Seriously, would you want this as a mother?” she asks, gesturing again, down her torso, as if indicating the bonus round’s prize. “Sometimes that’s doing the kid a favor.”

She’s pretty. Fiery. I could love and hate her all at once. She might be right, for all that it’s a stock answer.

“I don’t…” I take a deep breath. “Just think about it though. Yeah, I know it’s just hypothetical, and I’m not looking for reasons to get mad at you or argue. But what would make you give up a child?”

Autumn props her chin in her palm for a moment and chews on her fingertips, flinching this one and that one as if she’s playing a piano on the ivories of her teeth. “Could be a lot of things. Maybe I never wanted a kid? Maybe I’m some nobody, and I died, and who’d notice?” Her eyes flash toward me, then she starts again, less certain now: “That’s the less important question, right? More is whether I’d want to know how you were doing now, even if anonymously. Are you sure she didn’t?”

I’ve never thought about that before. And she’s right.

Then she leans back in her seat, finally listening to whoever’s on stage. “They’re pretty good,” she comments, followed by a short sneeze, so she grabs her purse and digs through it for a tissue. I can see her wallet in there.

“Hey, Adagio says you have a sushi restaurant? I should stop by there sometime.”

It’s true in both worlds: you can’t choose your family. I don’t know what to think, so we take in the rest of the set without talking, until I decide I really need to get home if I’m going to make opening time tomorrow, but Autumn’s fallen asleep herself.

Adagio rolls her eyes again, but she gives a muted smile and waves as I stifle a yawn and slip away. And I do pay for Autumn’s drinks as I pass the cashier.

“Did you like her?” Adagio asks.

As usual, I’m glad she always comes here early, before I have any other lunch customers. Hell, I only open this early in case someone needs to place a large to-go order for pickup later, or some shoppers want to look at the menu and plan to come back when they’re loaded down with bags.

I can only shrug. “I don’t know much about her yet. It’s probably… what does Twilight call it? Uhh… confirmation bias, yeah. But I think I can see how I take after her some.”

She smiles before biting into another salmon roll. “Remember, on the pony side, your mother might be someone different, if Autumn even exists there.”

“I should ask Twilight—pony Twilight—if she’s ever met an Autumn Blaze before.” I do still have the journal, though it can take her days to notice if I’ve written something, since it’s always hooked up to her portal machine now.

“Hey,” she says, and I notice I’ve been staring into space for a minute. “It didn’t… fuck anything up to meet her, did it? You seem a bit out of it.”

I wave the tip of my knife around. “Didn’t sleep too well, lots to think about. But nothing bad.”

“Would it help if I…?”

My knife lies softly on the counter, and I take in a slow breath, close my eyes. “Yeah, I think it would.”

And she sings. Not the lullaby, and given how I reacted to it last time, she must figure I’d get riled up again. But it doesn’t matter.

A sweet melody lilts out from her lips, and the little sprigs in their bud vases on the counter might be perking up, but in my mind, I’m on that same bench in the park with Adagio, fresh flowers springing to life all around me. I can feel their energy, so renewing!

“…Ivy, sing Ivery, my father left me an acre of land, and a bunch of green holly and Ivery…”

Mmm, another tune I know well. Quaint folk song from long ago. Not quite on a par with the lullaby in personal meaning, but I’ve still always had a fondness for it. I join in: “I plowed it with a ram’s horn…”

I remember reading about birds in biology class, years ago, that they could often make more than one sound at a time when singing. I’ve never heard the Dazzlings do that, but here, now, a whole symphony rings out, melody over a moving bass line, repeating, ever-present even as what flows above it constantly shifts. Could she always do that? Is it part of how her magic is changing?

Then it stops, the beautiful lightness fading from my body, and I take a minute before I open my eyes. When I do, I can’t read her expression, but she points toward the entrance, where the mechanic I like is here, holding one of the menu slips. He slides it in the box out front. “Thank you!” I call, and even I can hear the grogginess in my voice. “I’ll have your order delivered in half an hour!”

“I can drop it off when I go,” Adagio offers.

Nice of her. It’s close enough I usually take a couple of minutes to run it down there myself, but it’s safer if I don’t leave things unattended, including Ray. “Thanks, that’d help a lot.”

…And she taps me on the hand. “Sorry, did I zone out again?” I ask.

She nods, and her smile warms up a notch. “I’m glad you like it.”

“I don’t know what it is about your music, but it really does help make things peaceful. And how did you do the double voice?”

“Part of the new magic,” she confirms as she dabs her next bite in a wash of soy sauce.

So I was right. “I liked the ostinato.”

“The what?”

“As I recall someone saying,” I drawl, jabbing a finger toward her while I fluff up my hair to Adagio-esque volumes, “‘I’m a siren. I’m practically made of music.’”

And she lets out a small chuckle. “Touché. I do know music, but not always the technical lingo.”

I need to get started on that lunch order, so I lay out a few sheets of nori and load up the rice maker, then lightly salt my cutting board. “Same origin as the word ‘obstinate.’ Same meaning, too: a theme that’s stubborn and won’t go away, keeps repeating even though everything else around it might change.”

A noncommittal grunt serves as the perfect antithesis to what moments ago had been an utter mastery of sound.

“And it does help.”

Her smile sprouts anew, as much as any blossom in the park might, and I open my mouth to continue, one false start, then another, and: “Can I?”

Adagio freezes.

At once, her mind and her mouth clash between staying unreadable and broadcasting elation to whoever might see it, but she wrestles her body under control as quickly as she can, all of it except her eyes. They stare so intensely, daring me to say I was only kidding, gazing over a precious treasure, infinite curiosity channeled into a new puzzle.

“I… I’ve been eating sushi,” she says, barely above a whisper. “I’d be all fishy.”

Like that stopped her from asking me the first time. Why in the world would she suddenly lose all that self-confidence?

But I know better. That’s just what sirens do: look the part, if not feel it.

“Siren, fish, what’s the difference?”

She almost seems hurt. “We’re more closely related to reptiles.” Not sure if Ray would consider that a plus, but hey, maybe they’d get along.

I lean forward on my elbows and give her a gentle smile. “I didn’t mean to offend. Just to say that it doesn’t matter.”

Her previous grin returns. “You didn’t have to ask.”

“Yes I did.” I understand why she said that. But she needs to understand my answer, too. She has value; I don’t get to take her for granted. Something glows about her, the smile less sharp, more soft around the edges, more relaxed. And she nods.

I kiss her as lightly as she’s always kissed me, and I lose myself in it as much as I lost myself in her singing. Yet the nagging voice in the back of my brain keeps up its refrain: Am I doing the right thing? Am I starting something that I can’t follow through on? Am I being fair to either one of us?

The rice maker’s beeper goes off, and it shuts down.

She really has changed. I believe that. But I’ll be careful. I will.

I pull away, stay hovering close, watch her eyes for a second. Her mouth still seems like it might erupt into beams of sunlight at any moment, and yet the beginnings of tears well against her cheeks as her scarlet gem gleams through her shirt.

I return her grin, give her another quick peck on the lips, then the rice maker beeps at me again.

As I step into the shower and indulge in the hot water rolling over me, I finally let the questions that have been stewing in my head congeal. Is Adagio controlling me? I don’t think so. To what end? Besides, I’ve never known her to control people unless she used their own emotions against them. She doesn’t have anything negative to soak up from me, and she can’t use the teen angst from the cafe on me.

I keep circling back to that: what’s in it for her? The same thing that’s in it for me, I guess. And I don’t find anything wrong with that.

But I do know that I have to be careful. I would anyway, but especially with her, if I think this might ever turn into a relationship. And more to the point, why am I already jumping toward calling it that?

She did offer to let me use my geode on her…

I rinse out my mouth and spit the slightly rusty-tasting water toward the drain. A bit clouded, swirling around nothing. Kind of like my head these days. And I glance in the mirror just to make sure my eyes aren’t glowing red.

That isn’t fair to her. She’s been nice. I like her. I… I like her a lot.

With a groan, I rub my hand down my leg, and yeah, they need a shave. Rinse them off, take the shaving cream and lather one up, then get my razor and run stripes up through the foam, like plowing snow. And dammit, I always hit that little… mole, or whatever it is, on the outside of my thigh, of course it’s bleeding now, and I need to get a dermatologist to just take the stupid thing off.

Is that my phone?

I stumble around the shower curtain and nearly trip on the edge of the tub, but yeah, my phone’s ringing. Shaving cream drips in globs on the floor, and I at least swipe the water off my face with a towel before I answer it. “Hello?”

“Hey, is this… uh… Sun Girl? You know, Adagio’s friend?”

“Who is this?” Not a number I recognize.

“Autumn Blaze. Your kinda mom… person… thing. Remember?”

Adagio must have given her my number. “Yeah, I do. Listen, I’m in the middle of a shower right now. Can I call you back?”

“Oh, yeah, heh, I just… I’m surprised they let me stay this long, but I’m getting kicked out, and I don’t have a ride. I was wondering if you could pick me up.”

If Adagio needed to charge her amulet, now would be an ideal time. “I have to be at work in twenty minutes. Can’t Adagio get you?”

“They played some music festival the next town over last night. Haven’t got back yet, heh, not for a couple more days or I would have asked her first, but we don’t talk that much anymore, so I hate to impose on her, but hey, this would be a great time for us to talk, right?”

Funny, Adagio never told me she had plans to leave the city. “I drive a motorcycle. We wouldn’t be able to hear each other—wait, kicked out? Where are you?”

“Uhh, hang on…” Some door that really needs a spritz of oil swings open, and I hear the sounds of cars in the background. “Griffonstone Pub.”

Oh hell, that place? “Are you drunk?”

“No, no, I don’t ever get drunk, I can handle it.”

“It’s six in the morning, you’re just now calling me from a bar you got kicked out of, and you apparently go there enough that they let you sleep some of it off.”

“Look, don’t take an attitude with me! Are you coming or not?”

Damn it. She has to endure a heavy sigh first. “Fine. I can get there in ten. But don’t make a habit of this.”

She sounds happy, but whatever she says only comes through as garbled. So I hang up, do a rushed job of my other leg, complete with three or four nicks, and head out without washing my hair.

When I get there, I find Autumn sitting against a brick wall next to some trash cans. A pair of rough-looking guys loom over her.

“Hey, babe,” one says. “Why don’t you come back to my place? No reason for the party to end now, right?”

I rev my engine. “She’s coming with me.”

“Liking the sound of this even better,” his doughy friend chimes in.

“No. Her, me, alone.” I’d flip up my visor to let them see I’m not in the mood for any bullshit, but maybe I’ll look a little more intimidating this way.

“Aww, we can’t even watch?”

I found out years ago that some things don’t change across the portal. Pony strength in a human-shaped body has made more than one street thug regret his choices in life. Those two idiots, leering at me, and Autumn can’t even keep her head up, sporadically giggling. So I turn off the engine, pop my kickstand down, walk over, and whip my leg around, freshly shaven as it is. Not that they could tell through my jeans, but I kick one of the trash cans so hard I nearly put a hole in it.

“You getting the picture now?” I yell at them, and they stand stiffly before backing away and running off.

“Yeah!” Autumn shouts at the retreating forms, shaking her fist. “You don’t wanna fuck with us!”

“You’re not helping,” I say as I try to get her standing, and I lead her back to my bike, then shove my spare helmet on her. “Now, where are we going?”

She chuckles at some private joke. “Your place would be fine.”

“I said I had to go to work. And now I’m going to be late.” Not to mention I had to leave Ray behind.

“But Dagi said you… you own the place, so, like, you can’t ever be late, right? You set your own hours—”

“If I’m not ready to open when people want lunch, I don’t get any customers and I don’t earn any money. Now, I need to go to work, and I’m not letting someone I barely know have free rein over my apartment, so where’s yours?” Her face clouds immediately, and she flips her own visor down.

“I’m not a fucking child!” she barks. “If you can’t be cool about this, then fine, just fucking take me home. And don’t go narc on me.”

You can’t pick your family, I remind myself again. This has got to be some kind of test life has for me. Something I need to learn, something good that will come out of it. But for now, I grind my teeth and fight the urge to punch her. “And who would I do that to?”

She shrugs. “My boss. Or Dagi.”

“I don’t have the first clue where you work, and you said you don’t keep up with Adagio anymore, so why would she even care?”

Autumn glares at me. She gestures toward my bike with an unspoken “well?” So I climb on, and she sits behind me, leans in heavily. Thankfully, I don’t have to listen to her now, but she does point at each intersection, slumping harder into my back, until I finally pull up at an apartment building I’ve seen a few times before.

“Which one is it?” I ask, but she staggers off the seat, falls into the bushes, and goes motionless.

Perfect.

I rummage through her pocket, take out her wallet, and good thing her driver’s license has an address that seems to be current. Unless she changed units, but this is the right place. And I consider getting repaid for that booze-laden coffee she treated herself to the other night, but I stuff the wallet back in her pocket and dig around in the other, fishing out a set of keys.

With no small effort, I drag her down a few doors. Ground-floor unit, or I would have left her sitting in those bushes.

I really would have. And I also would have hated myself for it later, I realize as I mull over what Twilight and the other girls would think if they saw me now. Enabling a drunk, rationalizing it all because she’s family but not family, and shit, I wouldn’t even want to begin explaining it.

So with a growing chip on my shoulder, I roll Autumn onto her bed, leave the keys by her phone, and show up to work nearly an hour late, without any boss except me screaming that I’d better not fuck up like this again.

I pluck a couple of my guitar’s strings and give the tuning peg on one a slight twist. Then I stifle a yawn and rub the foggy feeling out of my eyes. “I didn’t know you were leaving town.” Dammit, three days later, and I can’t shake that tired feeling.

“Sorry, it was a last-minute decision,” Adagio replies as she peers around the park from our bench.

“That you told Autumn about and not me?”

For a split second, a jolt shoots across her face, but she gets it under control. “Sorry. I should have, but I didn’t know if you’d care.”

“I might wonder why you stopped coming to the restaurant and worry something had happened to you.” She turns, her full attention suddenly on me. At first, she seems lost, but something clicks in her head, and her expression warms. “It takes a while to get used to. I remember it well.”

She raises an eyebrow, tries to speak, closes her mouth again.

“Learning that people can actually give a shit about you,” I fill in for her. “It scared me at first, like I had to constantly earn it. But then it made me feel good.”

Her eyes start to wander, and I can see the gears turning. But she does hunch up her shoulders a tad and smile in nobody’s direction. “So, do you like her?”

“Don’t know yet. Maybe Tuesday was just a bad one for her, but man was it infuriating. I hope she doesn’t always act that way.”

She tests out a short hum, then coughs. “She’s definitely bipolar.”

“No shit. What else do you know about her?”

Once more, her full attention turns on me. “She only sang with us a few months. Good singer, seemed an okay chick, as long as you didn’t get on her bad side.”

I don’t even know where to start. Does she have a good side? “Her drinking problem can’t be anything new.”

Like swatting a gnat, or… finally, without Autumn nearby, I can get my head back into a musical architecture. She wafts her hand like a conductor corralling a brass section who’s not watching the tempo. “No, but it never got in the way of our shows. Long term, it probably would have been a deal-breaker.”

“You didn’t tell me anything beforehand.”

“I didn’t want you to judge her before you met her,” she replies. Fair point.

“So, what does she do for a job?” Please don’t let it be a teacher or a cop or anyone with special responsibility.

Her hand returns to directing an unruly row of trumpets. “Some office thing. Data entry, I think. I don’t know.”

I’d already given Adagio the whole rundown when she resumed her appearances at my sushi counter yesterday, but one thing I’d left out: “I called her the next morning to make sure she was still okay. But she didn’t pick up.”

“She’s fine,” Adagio says with all the lethargy of old news.

Funny, I used to have a hard time fitting these morning meetings into my schedule, but—I need to say this out loud. “It does help seeing you here. Now more than ever.”

“Good.” And she starts up humming again, no words, but gradually morphing into the lullaby I love, and I strum with her, adding a descant. My little countermelody, though I was never that good at playing the extreme high notes. That’s more a guitar thing than a theorbo thing.

I swear, her singing does enclose us in some kind of veil. Nobody outside it ever reacts as if they can see or hear us, our own private world. Shame the beauty that burgeons up from it doesn’t get much of an audience. I hope I can convince her to share it with more people someday, not shut them all out. Though for now, it does make a nice sanctuary.

Never before have I felt the stress melting off me so thoroughly, but it feels good, so good, same way it always does, same way I spent all yesterday anticipating. I would have expected to find it more relaxing when I only listen, but playing along with her works even better, adding my own voice—she’s moved on from the lullaby to something else, but it’s a simple enough melody that I can follow the chords and improvise.

Just as she said, way back in those early days in the cafe: we’d make a good improv group.

I owe it to her to keep my eyes open, see all the beauty sprouting around me, so I watch the blooms, take in the fragrance, look at her face…

She has such an angelic aspect to her, which I never would have thought I’d say. No words anymore, reverted to humming, but what a voice, like when her amulet hadn’t yet shattered, and then some. The music has its own pulse, an ebb and flow with her heart, taking every piece of my malaise with it as if it’s become my amulet, rendered powerless and fractured.

Her gem’s healing has become hers, and hers has become mine.

Adagio sees me staring, my voice gone silent, and smiles, almost a smirk, but not quite. In the sudden silence, the veil dissipates slowly, shred by shred, as I set my guitar in its case at my feet. She hums again, sporadically, just enough to keep the gray screen between us and the world. I find myself grinning stupidly, but when I see her begin to speak, the longing look in her eyes, I already know what she’ll say: “Can—?”

“Can I?” I cut in, like an antiphonal response, except not waiting for her theme to finish first, so in canon against itself, and—why does my mind get so flooded with music when Adagio is here?

An amused curl forms at the corner of her mouth, and she gets it now. She doesn’t tell me that it’s okay to assume, and it may yet develop that way, but for today, I owe her that respect.

So she leans over and waits: I got the question out first, so I make the move. I kiss that little curve of a smile, and her humming buzzes against my lips, keeping the few joggers oblivious in the dim daybreak.

She pulls away soon enough, to take a breath, but I keep her close, gathering an arm about her shoulders. I don’t want it to end.

“Can I?” I say more urgently, and she nods before I finish speaking, so I lightly brush my fingers over the back of her neck, through her hair, turn her sideways toward me with my other hand. She takes the invitation, swinging her legs up, across my lap, and putting her close arm around my back, the far one at my waist.

She did it so gently before, saying that was how she thought I’d like it, so I give her the same courtesy, press in, kiss her again and again.

All the beauty she’s made for me, but at the heart of it, she’s beautiful. She does take my head, as she must have wanted to for months now, and pulls it harder against her, still with her humming, still creating this universe where we don’t have to worry about anyone else.

Adagio finally breaks off, smiling weakly like someone humbled by a magnanimous gift. I lurch at her, but she holds a hand to my chest, pushing. “Don’t you have to get to work?”

I do, but seriously, fuck that.

Yet she shoves me again, gently. “We always have tomorrow. Don’t give up the things that are important to you.”

She’s right. And she shouldn’t have to be the one saying that. So I nod, get one lest peck in while her guard is down, and smile at her. She’s crying. Not the sad kind, though. I don’t need my geode to tell.

“And thank you,” she says, no longer singing as the color and sound and everything from the real world intrude.

Author's Note

The other song that's new in this chapter is an old English folk song I've liked for some time called "An Acre of Land."

Coming next week, chapter 4.

Arranged by Adagio Dazzle

“My treat this time,” Autumn says as she grabs the bill. Good thing she hasn’t pursued coming to my restaurant. I don’t want her there. Not yet, anyway. So here we are, meeting at the cafe, but in the morning, when it operates more as a diner. She still has that bandage on her nose.

And against my expectations, it’s gone pretty well today. Although we didn’t talk much while we ate, at least she was in a good mood. And we can talk now.

“Adagio tells you me you play guitar,” she continues. “How long you been playin’?”

I shrug as much as I can with my elbows already on the table. “Almost as far back as I can remember. Well… not guitar, exactly. I started on theorbo.”

“Theorbo? What’s that?”

Hence why I rarely bring it up. Though I was hoping our connection, whatever form it takes, would mean she already knew. No such luck. “Just… a kind of old-timey guitar. You don’t see them around much.” And then it occurs to me: “Wait, when did Adagio tell you? I thought you didn’t keep up with each other.”

“More nowadays,” she answers, waggling her hand. “We have a common interest in you.”

Well, that makes me feel better. I wonder what they say about me. Though the music—it’s not sitting right. “What kind of stuff did you sing with the Dazzlings? They always sounded like modern pop to me, but your voice seems suited for… I dunno. Some smoky jazz riffs or something. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard you sing. Would you mind?”

She starts to blush. “What, right here?”

“You’d be surprised how little people notice bursting into song in these parts.” Or join in, I might have added. Maybe that was just my personal preference speaking, but I do like jazz. And PostCrush.

With a surreptitious glance around, she begins to hum, and when nobody pays her any attention, she adds a few words. Yes, a rather bluesy take on an older song I’ve heard the Rainbooms play before. Quiet, but the further she gets into it, she lets her soul take over. She feels the words, the loss, the tough times, but then what else would the blues be about? No surprise the Rainbooms never liked that song.

She’s good, and she has that pack-a-day huskiness that creeps in when she digs for it, but thank goodness I’ve never seen her smoke. And the music: She has it. It’s in her. Maybe she could have been my mother.

“You ever consider doing the open mic night?” I ask as her voice tapers off, and it morphs into a chuckle.

“Nobody there wants to hear an old fart like me sing in a style they don’t care about.”

“But you sang pop with the Dazzlings. You could fake it.”

“There’s a difference between ‘hafta sing’ and ‘wanna sing.’”

I guess that was before her current job, then. I’d ask if she quit the band because she didn’t need the money anymore, or if they’d shown her the door after they’d fully recovered. But bringing up sore subjects is a bad idea. For how little I know her, I do know that she can turn downright fiery.

And against my better judgment, I’m starting to warm up to that fire. You can’t pick your family. But today has gone well. I’m glad I called her back. “And I’m happy you’re doing okay after I dropped you off at your place last week. I was beginning to wonder…”

“About that…” she says with a laugh. “Say, the local booze shop kinda has it in for me. Can I give you twenty dollars and have you grab me a bottle of vodka?”

And here we go…

“I’m kinda young. I don’t think they’d sell it to me.” Which isn’t exactly true. But what else can I say? I don’t want to get caught up in this shit. Anything bad comes of this, and I’d never get a liquor license. I could tell her that, but now I even less want to plant the seed of my restaurant in her mind.

“Alright, I’ll ask Dagi.”

Her again? I don’t see why they’re such good friends after all this time. Adagio doesn’t talk about Autumn at all, unless I bring her up. But can Adagio actually be this blind? Or do sirens have no concept of enabling an alcoholic?

Suddenly I don’t want to be here anymore. I’d made special arrangements to prep my place early so I could duck out for a quick lunch. But I have to get back, and I can’t tell her why. So I grab my phone and gawk at it as though a surprise text came in. “Crap, gotta take care of this. Sorry to run, and… thanks for lunch!” I say with a smile and wave.

She doesn’t get mad, waves in return. But as I round the corner and stop to catch my breath…

I feel like such an ass.

I can only think of one person who’d text me this early in the morning. The ding must have gone off when I was in the shower, so of course Autumn sent a couple more to ask if I was up yet. Nothing good can come of this.

So I open the messaging app, and… she wants me to go to the pharmacy for her? Hell no. What for?

I punch in her number, and it rings four times before she picks up, sounding awfully sleepy for someone who had urgent business with me not ten minutes ago. “What’s this about the drugstore?” I bark. I don’t care if it pisses her off. This shit has to stop.

“I got a prescription yesterday at the clinic, but they won’t give it to me. Some shit about not authorizing it for someone with DUIs. But what the fuck do they expect me to do? Just because I fucked up before means I can’t get a prescription? How fair is that? I’m just supposed to take the pain or something?”

I flip the speaker on and tune her out while I dry my hair. Funny, she didn’t run her mouth at the diner the other day. She usually talks nonstop.

“Hey! You there?” finally cuts through the noise, so I pick the phone back up.

“Look, I don’t know why they’d say that. I’ve never heard of it, but you think they’d really give it to me? Prescription painkillers? No way I can get that if my ID doesn’t match.”

“It’s worth a try. They might not ask.”

No way am I getting involved in this. “So let me get this straight. You want me to drive you to the pharmacy, but you’re going to stay out of sight, since they probably remember you, and then I’m supposed to fill a prescription that’s not mine?”

“Yeah, so you’ll do it?”

“What the fuck, Autumn? You know what kind of trouble I could get in for that? I hate to ask, but is that even a legit prescription?”

“What, you don’t trust me? I’ve gone out of my way to spend time with you, and I can’t get one tiny-ass favor?”

I rub a palm down my face and resist the strong urge to hit the tempting red icon and give myself some blessed silence. “No. Unless you give me a damn good reason why your story makes any sense at all, no. I’m not committing a crime for you.”

Several flame-laden breaths huff out, and I can imagine smoke rising from my phone. “Fine, just fuck off then. I thought you had my back. You were the one person I could count on. Y’know, Dagi told me you were all about some kind of friendship shit, and if this is how you show it, then no surprise all your so-called friends left you behind!”

The call cuts off. And I stand there gaping at the phone.

Damn it!

I see Rarity once every couple months at best. Who else? They all went to different colleges, got jobs. Yeah, we talk on the phone. And we get together when we can. But they see each other more than they see me.

Am I a failure?

Fuck, it’s even been months since I…

I hold in a sob, and I go to my bookshelf. Without my towel, probably giving anyone across the street a nice view, so I tug the blinds closed. And I get down the journal.

It might take her a week to notice it glowing. But I write anyway. Hasty, sloppy, ink smearing, but I ask her. I ask Twilight Sparkle, please, tell me I haven’t gone back to being the same monster who wouldn’t put herself out for anyone, who preferred to go without friends because she didn’t need them, and sorry for not writing earlier, of course waiting until I need something, since that’s the kind of shit I’ve become these days.

And I cry. I cry and shake and sit there as long as I can take the shivering, then finally put on something warm, get Ray out of his tank, and huddle on the couch with him on my shoulder, my knees gathered up against my face.

Twilight doesn’t answer.

“Am I a bad friend?” I ask Adagio as she swipes her tuna roll through the little dish of soy sauce. Look at me, reduced to asking her that.

She stares as if considering whether to recommend a psychiatrist to me. Maybe she should. “Uh… no.”

But the eyebrow stays up, inviting more. And of all people right now, she’s the one I can tell. “Autumn wanted me to fill a really suspicious prescription for her. Pretty sure it was fake. But she said some things…”

She sets her chopsticks down. “What things?”

I can only shake my head. “It just got me wondering. I don’t keep up with the girls that well anymore.” When I get home tonight, I’ll tear that page out of the journal before Twilight sees it. I don’t need to load my problems on her. “Something I’ve tossed around in my head from time to time, but I guess not much since I left Celestia’s school: if you could have the one thing you most wanted in life, how long would it make you happy?”

“Okay, cancel my earlier observation that humans were much more grim than ponies.”

“Sorry,” I say, wiping away tears with the back of my hand.

“Hey, hey, c’mon,” she replies. “Stop with that. C’mon. Hey, I know what cheers you up.” She covers my hand with one of hers and leans forward. “Can I?”

I don’t say yes, but I don’t say no either. She does give me a brief kiss, and then the humming starts, burgeoning into words. No greenery here except a few vases, so I close my eyes, imagine myself in the park, Adagio beside me on our bench. Lily of the valley, hydrangea, marigold, hyacinth, sprouting everywhere. No, no, not imagine. I don’t have to. Her magic pervades my thoughts, makes the spell happen there as well, across town, where my soul stays. We don’t need the bench. We lie down in the clover and watch the sky, growing sleepy in the morning warmth of spring, her song, that lullaby—I join in, sing along. Richer than ever before, so real.

Once or twice, I peek at her, in the true world, and she wears an immense grin. I agree. I wish this would never end. “You don’t know how much I need that these days,” I breathe out, my palm against her neck. Her skin—smooth, scaly, but warm and soft in the faint light from her jewel.

“You don’t ever bring the other sirens with you,” I say, glancing at Adagio from my cutting board.

She shrugs, mumbling, “They don’t like to go out much.”

“I just thought you were a tight-knit group or something.” It’s been three days now, and I never did tear that page out of the journal. But Twilight still hasn’t written back.

“We get along fine. Seriously, don’t worry about it,” she replies, poking her chopsticks at me.

Why am I worried about it? I guess Adagio deserves to have friends as much as anyone, and if not them, who else does she have? She wrinkles her brow at me, then her eyes wander over to my ears.

“Nice earrings,” she says. “Those new?”

I reach up to feel which ones I have on, and… yeah. “I can’t figure her out. Autumn got me those yesterday. Just because. And only a couple days after she chewed me out for… not helping her get drugs, I think?” My knife’s tip circles little curlicues in the air.

“I told you she was bipolar or something.”

That doesn’t exactly help.

And she puts her chopsticks down. “I can tell it’s still bugging you. Sonata, Aria. We’re friends. Maybe not the way you’re used to, but…” She sighs, sets her chin in a palm, the fingers flicking in front of her face. “Sirens are different. We don’t think about… anything the same way you do. I know how it looks to you, but we’re good. Really.”

That does help.

…And her plate’s empty. I thought she just stopped because she wanted to talk straight. Well, I can fix that. I walk around the counter to get her dishes, and—

Her dress. I remember her always wearing that… thing. I don’t even know what it’s called. Kind of a one-piece short jumper. Then ever since I encountered her at the cafe, she wore jeans and the same few concert t-shirts. But she has a dress on today. It’s crisp, white, flowing, swishing, even at her slight movements, and her bright acidic shock of hair glows like the sun against it. Elegant yet casual, sleeveless, high neck concealing her gem, the kind of thing she should be sporting while lazing about in a hammock during a commercial for some tropical resort.

Her grin softens. “You like it?”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding dumbly. I touch the earrings again.

“Those amber?”

“Yeah.”

I’ve let her dishes pile up; I can only get half of them in one arm, so I take a load back to the dishwasher, return to see her bright eyes watching me once more. “She drives you nuts, huh?”

What else can I do? She’s my mother. Or not. I don’t even know. I’m really not in a joking mood, but Adagio seems to need the levity more than I do. So I shake my fist. “A murrain on thee, Autumn Blaze!”

She immediately erupts in laughter, still sounding musical, the tinkling notes of her wind-chime voice ringing mirth in my ears. Only around her does the music spring to life in my head, a full symphony raging forward, holding back at just the right moments, and her theme underneath it all, unmoving, ostinato. “Ye olde speake again?”

“You’re the one who’s centuries old. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard that before.”

“From centuries ago isn’t the same thing as centuries old.”

“Still.” I come around the counter again to get the rest of her dishes, and then I need to unlock the front door and open for the day.

But as I reach for the last stack of plates, she takes my wrist. “At least we have Past Crash in the modern world.”

“Yeah, it’d sound weird on theorbo.”

She doesn’t laugh. She purses her lips, gets a searching look in her eyes. “Can I?” she says.

I let my smile speak for me, and she presses her lips to me softly. No humming this time, but we don’t need it; we already have our own private world, right here, and the beauty—she’s beautiful, in her lovely dress, flowers or no. She curls an arm around my shoulders, pulls me closer, kisses me again, and I close my eyes, brush my fingertips across her cheek. Her other hand rests on my hip, then eases down and gives my ass a squeeze, her mouth sprouting a grin.

Through it all, I can hear the music anyway, her music.

“You’ve got customers,” she says, her silky voice swirling around my ears.

She’s right. Outside the fake paper sliding door, a silhouette checks its watch.

So I nod, take one step away, then hold her cheeks with both hands, plant one last hard, firm kiss on her until her humming bubbles up on its own.

“You don’t know how much you’ve helped me,” I whisper on my way to unlock the door.

This shit again?

It seems like once every couple weeks, Autumn’s sorry drunk ass calls me for a ride home, and being an idiot, I always do it. At least she can walk out under her own power today, so I don’t even bother going in to get her.

She lifts one leg over the motorcycle seat, wobbles, and nearly falls, but then does make it on a second try, leaning forward into my back and clinging to me. Really, she ought to know better than to wear a short skirt when she knows she might need me to drive her home.

“Tuck the back of your skirt under your ass,” I shout to her over the engine’s hum, “or it’ll fly up and air your undies to the world.”

Autumn only giggles incoherently as she jams my spare helmet on her head. Fine, let her thong get recorded on everyone’s dashcams. And we’re off, streetlamps flashing past while I grumble about having to be up in five hours. Each time I feel her sliding one way or the other, I have to stab an elbow behind me to keep her in place. Would it be easier if she fell off and I didn’t notice, left her far behind? Damn, I really have sunk back to my old ways, haven’t I? No wonder Twilight won’t answer me. She can’t bring herself to lie.

After so many times, I know the way to Autumn’s apartment, know where to park closest to her door, know which pocket has her keys. Good thing, ’cause she’s passed out.

I drag her off my bike, lift her arm over my shoulder, and walk her to the door, where I shove a hand into her left pocket—

“That tickles!” she snorts without opening her eyes, and she slaps my hand.

With a roll of my eyes, I get her to the bed, in the near-dark. I’ve never hung around long enough to see what she sleeps in, but I’ll spare her some horribly wrinkled clothes. Off come her shoes, then the skirt—huh, not a thong after all—and the tank top. Not dealing with the bra, but I’ll undo the clasp so the elastic doesn’t dig into her skin overnight. I’d say she’ll thank me in the morning, but she won’t.

The glow from the night light in the bathroom gives my hair a really orangey tint, and as I twirl a finger through it, Autumn’s eyes crack open.

“That you, Dagi?”

I just grunt.

“You got my money?”

Don’t tell me she’s trying to shake Adagio down, too. Except Adagio doesn’t seem the type to play along. She’d likely just tell Autumn to get the hell out.

“You’re a week behind,” she says, wincing as she holds a hand to her forehead. Hangover kicking in already?

If I didn’t want to take off right away, I might try to convince her to leave Adagio alone. But even if I did, she wouldn’t remember it. So I busy myself picking up a few stray pieces of clothing on the floor, though considering how much of a mess she is, Autumn actually keeps her place in pretty good order. But a wave of fatigue washes over me, and I don’t need to be driving in this condition. Better get home.

“See you later,” I say, waving the back of a hand toward her.

“C’mon,” she whines. “You told me you’d give me fifty dollars a week to pretend to be that girl’s mom.”

I whip my gaze over to her. She moans softly and rubs the heel of a hand against her temple. Is she dreaming? If so, it’s awfully on the nose. No, the booze loosened up her tongue. My back stiffens, my face goes white hot. I bite down on the urge to scream at her, but she’s not the one I want to punch. So many thoughts, whirlpooling around my head: Why? What did it get her? Did I actually mean something to her?

I felt like shit for months! And for what? So Adagio could… laugh at me? So she could watch me be… miserable…

Negative emotion. She needed to charge her amulet. I thought she’d changed, but she’s the same old Adagio Dazzle. No way I can sleep now, and tomorrow’s going to suck. That bitch had better never come to my restaurant again, or I’ll be sorely tempted to ruin one of my good knives on her.

Doing her… doing her siren thing? She’s killed a pony with that before, at least once. Did she intend to kill me?

I think I slam the door on my way out, but I don’t remember, don’t remember racing home, don’t remember falling into bed, don’t remember huddling up and wiping the tears on my sheets. And Twilight still hasn’t answered.

I know better than to chop veggies this hard with my good knives, but I can’t stop. How could I let myself be dragged into another one of Adagio’s con games? It’s just like her to pull this shit—

But everyone thought the same about me once, and it’s not fair to do the same to her, except I would have been right, which only pisses me off more, because that doesn’t justify it.

Damn it! She seemed so genuine. I guess the good con artists always do. I really thought she had changed.

She’s late. Good. I hope she doesn’t show up. I hope Autumn awoke in the middle of the night, realized she’d blabbed about it all, and called Adagio in a panic. At least Adagio could feed off those negative emotions instead.

I pound a fist on the counter, looking forward to a wonderful day of trying to appear cheerful to everyone while really wanting to hole up in the back room and cry. Of course right then there’s a tentative knock at the entrance. No mistaking the silhouette of that hair.

“Sunset?” Adagio calls. “You forgot to unlock the door.”

Quickly I stalk over and jerk the door open just enough to expose half my face. “Now how could that have slipped my mind?” I ask, my voice as saccharine and unctuous as I can get it.

She raises an eyebrow. “You okay?”

“You need to get the fuck out of here right now before I call security.”

Adagio laughs. She laughs. But as much as I want her to be showing her true stripes right now, she actually thinks I’m joking. “Wait, what?”

“Don’t you still owe Autumn some money?” I recognize that look. I must have had it on my own face more than once, when Princess Celestia was scolding me but I couldn’t figure out which thing she’d discovered. Only confess to the crime she’s got you on.

Does… does that mean there’s more? She has other schemes going on, and I’ve only found an edge piece of the puzzle?

“Money? For what?”

Good thing I left my knife at the counter. “I had to ferry her drunk ass home last night, and she thought I was you. She spewed everything. I know what you’re doing.”

Her eyes jolt wide open.

“Leave,” I bark as I shut the sliding door a little too hard and lock it again.

In the final glimpse I caught of her face, she looked like the soloist whose big moment is fast approaching but has completely lost her place in the music. She’s actually confused. “Didn’t you love the singing?” she says, her voice muffled by the barrier between us.

No way she’s really that stupid. “Stay the hell away from me!” I shout, returning to my spot behind the counter. For way too long, she lingers out there, thankfully not speaking to me, but then… her shadowy form wipes its eyes? And runs away?

I don’t want her gone, I can’t deal with her here, I need to start figuring out how to stop whatever her bigger plan is, and fuck, why does even thinking about her still flood my mind with music?

Today is going to suck.

Author's Note

Sunset wearing amber earrings? Yeah, that's a reference to Ambergris, though they're not in the same continuity.

Coming next week, chapter 5.

Aria Blaze and Sonata Dusk, Accompaniment

I haven’t heard from Autumn in several weeks now. It makes me curious whether she knows she spilled the beans and it wouldn’t do her any good to hang around me anymore, or if Adagio called her to let her know the scam was off. For her part, I haven’t seen Adagio in a few weeks either. I did block her number. Maybe she got the picture.

In a way, it’s a little disappointing. It might have propped up my ego a bit if she begged forgiveness, but now it only proves she had zero interest in me beyond soaking up my emotions in her amulet. Just another piece in the chess game of her life. I really thought she had changed.

“Hello, and welcome to Sa-Shimmy!” I call to the trio heading in the door, that mechanic I like and two of his techs. They gesture toward their usual table, so I nod. “I’ll be over in a minute with some hot barley tea.”

I pretty much know what they’ll order, but they always look over the menu anyway. So I take my time gathering up one of the small stoneware pots, filling it from the urn behind me, and three cups. A theatrical flair as I pour, lift the pot high, then down again, perfectly synchronized as it stops just below the brim, and they smile at me. I should have learned their names by now.

As expected, they all order the same things they usually do, and I busy myself behind the counter preparing everything. It takes a minute for me to notice, but someone’s skulking near the entrance, and they finally take the plunge. New customer? No, it’s—

Aria fucking Blaze.

What the hell is she here for? I level a scowl at her, but she never looks up, nearly stumbling over more than one chair. Odd to see her so timid, but at least one thing about her hasn’t changed, as much as it did about Adagio: she has on the same old outfit. It does look more appropriate for everyday use, not that strange… jumper thing Adagio had way back when.

And I can’t let myself get so calm about Adagio. Even the mention of her name, finding a familiar color, seeing another one of the sirens needs to make my heart erupt with the sharp, conclusive drumbeat of a death march. Damn it, why does Adagio still bring music into my mind?

“H-hey,” she says, sliding into a stool at the counter. I’ve never seen her so indecisive, but maybe because she was never the one making decisions. “Adagio said—” She coughs and holds a fist to her lips, and she keeps her eyes cast downward. “I heard you had really good sushi, and I thought… I should try…”

“Why are you here?”

Aria sighs hard and squints at the counter’s wood grain. “Adagio’s not herself lately. I’m worried about her. Do you think you could—?”

“Do you know what she fucking did!?” I bark, my face immediately blanching as I cover my mouth. It doesn’t look like the car guys caught that. No idea how they missed it, but a lady who’d been perusing the menu on the easel outside frowns, covers her toddler’s ears, and hustles off.

“Sorry, ma’am!” I shout, probably too late.

I shake my head and fix my stare on Aria again, though she’s only showing me the top of her head. “Look, you should go. I’m not dealing with this shit.”

“But you did this to her!”

About the only thing keeping me from burying my knife in her neck is the whiny tone she uses. She really is worried, and if she has a legit reason for it… well, here comes that little ego boost I needed. “She did this to herself, and I’m asking you again to leave, before I call security.”

Aria holds her hands over her head as if she has an Autumn-level hangover, and only now do I wonder if that shared Blaze makes them related. Except Aria came from Equestria, like me. “I’m trying, I really am. It’s different for us.”

“Different how?” I return to slicing tuna for those guys’ order, but I do keep an ear perked toward Aria. Adagio said something similar once.

“Adagio let that lady screw with you, but it meant she could sing and make all the beauty magic for you. Didn’t you like it?” She sounds as if that makes everything self-evident. But if she knows that much about it, did Adagio tell her? And when? All along, or just now, when Aria started asking her what was wrong?

“I did,” I acknowledge, “but now you’re saying that the end justifies the means. That’s not how most people operate.”

She tightens her grip on her head, and she might even tear some hair out if I don’t stop her. If I want to stop her. “I know, but I said I’m trying.”

“Trying what?”

“To think through how humans… I guess ponies too. How they see things. It’s different.”

Not surprising, but… okay, I’ll give her some freedom here to sing her cadenza. “I’m listening.”

“You’re right, Adagio did all that because it just… it wouldn’t occur to us that going through the anger wouldn’t be worth getting the reward for it. As long as the reward was better. It all comes out positive, right?” She finally looks up with a tenuous smile. “That’s what matters to us: the end state. If it’s better than before, then who cares what happened in between?”

For a second, I pause and flick my knife tip toward her. She can’t help flinching. “If you saw her agonizing over something like that, would you feel bad for her?”

And she actually has to think for a moment. She nods. “Yeah, right then, but when it turned out good later, no.” Then she returns to clutching at her skull. “But I know it works different for you. It’s not easy, but I can try to see it how a human would. Adagio wouldn’t have thought to.”

“I’m still not convinced she wasn’t trying to do the… siren thing.”

“Siren thing?”

As if she doesn’t know. “Suck out my life energy.”

“Shit no. She wouldn’t do that to you.” A big gulp follows, and she looks up once more, her eyes glistening with tears. “Something’s broken in her. Bad.”

This is another scam, isn’t it? Adagio appeared equally sincere, and I fell for it once. I set my knife down. “Fine. All your cards on the table. Your Autumn game is spent, so what’s your next play? Adagio herself? Not gonna work. She tried that, too, acted like she was some vulnerable thing turning over a new leaf. I don’t buy it anymore.”

“You… you can use your geode on me if you want.” Adagio offered me that as well. If I’d taken her up on it, could I have headed all this off? Even if I had it with me, what would it prove now? That Aria genuinely believes what she’s told me? For all I know, Adagio has her fooled, too.

And it finally dawns on me: For all that Adagio falsely set me up with Autumn, she didn’t invent what she was saying about doubles. She brought up my geode after that, and if I’d used it, I would have immediately seen through any lie. At that point, she probably even hadn’t planned to use Autumn yet.

Aria takes a steadying breath. “I’m trying. Trying to see it your way.” She watches my hand as if I’ll touch her, read her thoughts. I go back to cutting fish. “Do the same for me, please.”

I roll my eyes, huff a breath out my nose. And nod.

“When you’re young, just a hatchling—filly—ugh, kid, whatever.” Finally, a bit of that Aria attitude. “Did you ever have a teacher give everyone a lesson that was so obvious that there was no point in it? Like… I don’t know, what do humans learn? ‘If you see a fire in the building, then evacuate in the other direction.’ Well, who the fuck wouldn’t?”

She waits. I’ve got a nice layer of rice spread out, on goes the tuna, a little sesame oil, a little vinegar. “Still listening.”

“As hatchlings, we’re told, ‘Your job is to make your prey love you. That’s how you live. That’s how you gain magic. That’s how you influence them to anger, violence, hatred. It will always lead to a full amulet.’ Lesson one, first day of school.”

Nothing new there. But she isn’t finished. “And?”

“Lesson two: ‘They fall in love with you. You don’t fall in love with them.’ Which is completely stupid, because it never happens. Family’s a little different, but barely. More like tolerated. But sirens don’t love. We can’t.”

Three plates ready. I dish them up and arrange them on a tray.

“And it’s not just that we can’t. It’s that if we did, it would mean something’s gone wrong. Very wrong.”

Everything settles into place in my brain, the dissonant chord that resolves to a clear triad. “It’s gone beyond tolerating. You love her, don’t you?”

Her lips buckle into a weighty frown, and her tears come freely as she nods. “I don’t want to see her hurt.”

Shit.

Am I falling into her trap? I do feel bad for her—her only—and I have time to make one more quick roll, then I slide it onto Aria’s plate as I take my guests their order. I shouldn’t, but maybe it atones for all the assumptions I made earlier. “Damn, this is good,” I hear her mumble on my way.

When I get back, I put a hand on her shoulder, and I catch her flicking a glance to see if I have my geode on. “So you’re messed up, too?”

She shakes her head, but her eyes widen like a grade schooler asked to solve a calculus problem. “No. That’s just it. I should be, but it’s not screwing with my head. Maybe because she’s family and some of that comes naturally. I don’t know. I don’t get it. But something changed after our amulets shattered,” she says, pulling her neckline down and running her fingers over her jewel, its facets partially regrown, same as Adagio’s.

Shit.

“Does she love you back?”

“Adagio’s hurting. Bad. Yeah, she loves me. But there’s a difference between loving someone and being in love with them.”

Shit shit shit. And of course next comes the one thing I would have welcomed three weeks ago but don’t want to hear now. I should never have let her sit down and talk to me.

“She’s in love with you. And it’s breaking her.”

“Breaking? She seemed fine to me.” She can’t be worse off than any other failed relationship. Just none of them know what that is. They’ll get through it.

Aria blinks. “It’s like… an infection. Something that’s not supposed to be there. Something that can’t be there. Your body fights it, and it makes everything go bad. Unless you have help.” Then she lets out a sigh that segues into a sob. “Adagio’s in love with you,” she repeats.

“I don’t believe you.” And I don’t even know why I said that. I could be under Adagio’s control and wouldn’t even know it, but it doesn’t seem that way. She isn’t exactly subtle—once you know what to look for, she can’t take you by surprise anymore. How would she have even fallen in love with me in the first place? When I think back now, she acted that way from the first time I saw her at the cafe. If it started that long ago, it doesn’t make sense. “She only thinks she’s in love with me, unless she’s lying about all of it.”

She shook her head the whole time I said that. “No, she is, and… you’d understand better if she had a reason to. It’s all—” she wafts a hand, fans her fingers out “—gibberish to me. But it’s still there, plain as day.”

“But—”

“No, it’s like seeing the sun in the sky. I might not know how it works or why it’s there, but that doesn’t make it go away, and I still know what it is.”

She might pop if I turn her down. Something’s off, though: if she wants in on Adagio’s scam, it wouldn’t be enough. Two sirens feeding off one person’s emotions? From what I’ve seen, it works the opposite way, a bunch of people for just one of them. No way does Aria get anything out of it. I feel like punching the counter, but I settle for returning to my spot behind it and washing my hands so I can get started on the next order. “What is it you expect me to do? Make her stop loving me? If telling her to go fuck off—” I cover my mouth with my hand towel, but again, the car guys don’t appear to notice. Or don’t care. I lower my voice to a harsh whisper. “If that didn’t work, I don’t know what will.”

“I don’t know,” she says, the tears spreading to her voice. “I just know things can’t stay the way they are now.” She grabs a napkin and wipes her eyes, leaving a little smear of mascara. “Please talk to her. Then you two can figure it out.”

I get the sudden impression that I’d rather deal with Autumn. But Aria’s right: if I can break this off before it screws Adagio up, then better for all of us. I need to calm down first, though. “I’ll think about it.”

She has so many words swelling in her throat, but she finally decides on one: “Thanks,” she says quietly. Not even with a smile. She really doesn’t think I’ll help her. And that hurts the most out of everything that’s come out today. Maybe Twilight shouldn’t answer me.

So she flops out of her chair, all that siren grace of movement vanished, and shambles a few steps toward the exit. “Hang on,” I call, holding out the sea urchin roll I just finished on my knife blade. “One for the road.”

A more genuine smile sprouts, and she savors it in two bites, then sucks at her fingertips. “Thanks,” she repeats, some of the weight gone from her face.

Once she’s out of earshot, I lean toward the glass terrarium on its sideboard along the wall. “What do you think?” Ray watches her go, blinking one eye and ignoring the cricket wriggling in front of him.

I really didn’t feel like opening the restaurant today. There’s too much going on. If I had the time, I’d stay at home and spend the entire morning crying, but not all for bad reasons.

Twilight answered—Twilight answered me—and I didn’t notice the book glowing until after I got out of the shower. For weeks, I’d meant to tear that page out, but I kept forgetting, and she…

Now I am going to cry, whether or not it’s at work. Good thing I don’t open for another ninety minutes.

Twilight felt awful and said I should have simply come through the mirror to visit her if I needed help that badly and couldn’t wait on her to realize I’d written to her. She promised to add it to her daily checklist, so she’d see any messages promptly. I told her it wasn’t necessary, but I know how she gets.

She wrote that I’m a good friend, reliable, sweet, thoughtful.

I’ll need a tissue for this.

I hadn’t really noticed that it’s getting close to my birthday. Twilight contacted the girls, the ones from this world, and set up a party. Not just the other Rainbooms, but everyone who had become special to me. Wallflower Blush, Trixie, the Crystal Prep crew… too many to name. And she’ll bring Starlight Glimmer with her, too. It led to a renewed flurry of texts, and I asked Applejack about the lullaby, and she said yes, it’s an old family song. She had no idea how it would have made its way to me, but it’s nice to find that origin, something about where it’s from, where I’m from.

Twilight even confirmed she knows an Autumn Blaze over there, similar but without the addictions dragging her down, still prone to rapid mood changes, but friendly and well-adjusted overall. And definitely not my mother—she’s a kirin, a race that’s lived secluded for long enough to make that impossible.

I love them all, but then love is the other reason I want to curl up and cry. Three days later, and I still haven’t contacted Adagio. How do I even start? I have no idea what to do, but it won’t go away on its own. And I kinda promised Aria.

This might be a three-tissue problem, to mangle a bit of Fetlock Holmes, but it’ll have to wait. I toss the used one and wash my hands again so I can get back on course for opening time. Like the soloist, finding her center in a quiet moment before the curtain reveals her to the audience.

Musical thoughts without Adagio here. It doesn’t feel right.

Just as I finish lugging a bag of rice out from the storeroom, someone taps at the door. “We open at ten!” I shout.

“Can I come in?” At least I think that’s what I heard, but she said it so quietly.

“Mall restrooms are across the hall.” That’s usually the issue.

“No, I wanna talk about Adagio.”

Great. Not Aria’s voice, so the other one… Sonata? I always have trouble coming up with her name. I bet she and Wallflower would make good friends.

So I turn the lock, and yup, Sonata, ponytail and all. But she’s not wearing her usual thing either. Kind of a sweaterdress, off one shoulder, in a maroon color, and it looks good on her. “Sit at the counter, pardon me if I work as we talk, I assume Aria sent you,” I rattle off as I return to my post.

“Naw, I came on my own,” she answers, “but I did leave her a text in case she wants to join me when she wakes up.”

That gets a raised eyebrow. “Aria doesn’t know you’re here?” Sonata shakes her head, takes a seat, and starts spreading out the bud vases and mini menus gathered at one end of the counter. Nice of her to help. “Thanks. And I don’t know if she’ll want to come. She must be about ready to kill me by now.”

“Kill you?” Sonata asks, leaning back as if to dodge a punch. “That’s pretty extreme, and Adagio would get mad at her for doing that.”

Right, Sonata’s kind of… out there at times. “It’s just an expression.”

“Oh,” she grunts. “Yeah.”

Something tells me this could prove to be an ordeal. I wipe down my cutting boards, dry off my freshly cleaned knives, and check my container of salt. Running a bit low—I’ll need to open a new one after lunch. “So what’s your angle?”

“Hm?” That went completely over her head, for some reason.

More direct, then. And I’m curious anyway. “Do you love Adagio?”

“Oh, yeah, of course I do!” she replies, her eyes lighting up.

“Aria felt weird about it.”

Sonata shrugs. “I’ve always loved her. She’s my big sis! But I guess Aria didn’t realize it til now.” She giggles, a snorty laugh. “She’ll get used to it.”

“You don’t seem worried,” I remark as I tie on an apron.

“I think things’ll turn out fine, ’cause you’re the kind of person who always helps.”

To hear her say that… it’s almost as nice as what Twilight wrote. “Well, you must have something to say. Are you mad that I haven’t talked to Adagio yet?”

She smiles, but gently, the wind that dies down after a storm. “I had some ideas.”

I’m trying really hard not to channel Adagio. The old Adagio. “About what?”

And she… starts to undress? “Whoa, whoa!” I say, grabbing her wrist as she tugs the top of her dress down. At least she has a strapless bra on, but I manage to stop her before she exposes more than a little of it.

Sonata points at the red jewel gleaming below her throat. “Look at that and tell me what you see.”

Besides cleavage, I suppose. But her gem… a small red me stares back, distorted in the curved surface, curved where it shouldn’t be. Some of the facets have flattened out again, some of the edges sharp, some of the cracks filled in. “I don’t get it,” I say. “You left your old ones behind when they broke. Adagio told me they’d regrow, but why would these still have cracks?”

“They… kinda have to restart from what state they were in before,” she answers, still completely at ease, not at all how Aria was.

“Oh. Well, it is growing again. Is that what you wanted me to notice?” I ask, and thank goodness she pulls her neckline back up.

Sonata nods, and for the first time, I do look her in the eye. Despite her outward brightness, there is a lingering fog, and of course there is, if she loves Adagio like she claims. “We’re born with them, and they grow, and sometimes they get damaged, and they heal. You remember what they do, right? They take in emotion.”

“Yeah,” I reply as I peek at my watch. I guess I still have some time to spare, and talking to Sonata is completely different than I assumed.

Then there’s another tap at the door, and Sonata takes the cue: “C’mon in, Aria!”

As Aria ambles over and sits next to Sonata, she casts a curious glance at her sister.

“They take in emotion to make magic and store it for us to use,” Sonata says, pretty much ignoring Aria, “but if they need to heal, they use that magic up. And you’d know how emotion and magic aren’t that different, huh?” She lets out another snort-laugh, and Aria rolls her eyes. “So what do you think we’re taught as hatchlings? Make your prey love you.”

A grin crescendos across my face, and I jut my chin toward the new arrival. “Aria went over this with me. A tiger can’t change its stripes.”

For a moment, Sonata’s eyes go cloudy, but then her body jolts, almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, like that. Except we’re sirens, not tigers.”

I want to laugh, and it probably wouldn’t even make her mad, but I owe it to her to take her seriously. “Keep going. I follow you so far.”

Sonata gives me a cymbal-clash smile. “Good! We can skip all the school stuff. So we’re trained to target negative energy, and we use that to cast negative magic, and it just keeps feeding itself that way, right? You get out what you put in, and the gems quickly get to where they only bother taking in negative emotions and magic. Then that becomes what we are.”

Makes sense. Though listening to a scientific lecture from Sonata is a bit odd. She’s like a savant or something. “Can it even take in good emotion anymore?”

Her eyes light up as if a music historian finding a prized centuries-old instrument in a dusty attic, and she leans forward, just inches from my face. “No, it can’t really use that. Unless it has to.”

Has to? And why does that have her grinning maniacally?

Oh…

“They got broken!” I blurt out.

“They got broken,” she confirms with a nod. “It’s totes not life-threatening—” she flicks a wrist at me, a conductor urging me on to the next passage “—unless it doesn’t heal at all. Then we prob’ly would die. But there’s always emotion around, and there’s always magic around—in Equestria, anyway—so it always can heal. But in an emergency like that, all completely shattered…”

She claps her hands together, an actual cymbal clash this time. “Smash,” I say for her. “It can’t be particular about what kind it absorbs.”

“Right!” she says, and… taps a finger to my nose? “Now it rebuilds itself with all that positive magic and feelings of friendship you blasted us with. And that becomes part of what we are.”

But then… “Wait, wait. Aria said you have a whole different mindset, a different way of seeing the world. And what Adagio did was pretty damn devious.”

Aria frowns. “Hey, I already—”

“I know, I know,” I cut in, holding my hand up to stop her. “She didn’t mean it that way, but it still was.”

That seems to placate Aria a little bit, and Sonata shrugs. “Some things are too much part of us to change completely, some things are just our nature.”

“So the tiger can change its stripes, but only so much.”

“Yup,” she says, beaming and punctuating it with an exaggerated nod. “Except we’re sirens, not tigers. I already told you that.”

I do laugh this time, but she only gives me a blank stare. Aria puts a hand on Sonata’s shoulder and shakes her head. “Did you know about all this?” I ask Aria.

“Not until last night,” she drawls. “Sonata’s the one for figuring out technical things, and after I told her what we’d talked about, something clicked with her. She jabbered at me for over an hour, and I guess it makes sense.”

Then I glance back and forth between both of them. “So… do you like what it’s done to you? I don’t hear anything about undoing it all and returning to your old selves.”

“I’ve always loved them!” Sonata answers right away, bouncing like a child eager for approval of the exquisite handmade birthday card they have for a parent. Yeah, I guess maybe she didn’t change all that much.

“You?” I say to Aria.

She can only get one shoulder to participate in her shrug. “We all seem a little happier. Except for Adagio, lately. But we could see we got along more like all of you, from when we last bumped into each other at that concert—what was it? Past Crash?”

“PostCrush. Adagio coach you to say that?”

Aria laughs a little, but it barely carries any mirth.

“So what does all this mean about Adagio?” I ask. I didn’t really intend to muse that aloud. She got bombarded with love, she internalized it. “Is this one of those fairy-tale love potions? She’s shot with Cupid’s arrow, and then she’ll love the first person she sees, or the first person she thinks about, or—” Sonata’s eyes have gone wide. “Shit, it was my magic. I was the one singing at the end. That’s the only reason she’s focused it on me.”

They look at each other for a moment, an audience hearing a new twist on a familiar piece and wondering where the conductor will go with it. But Aria shakes her head. “No,” she says, “or Sonata and I would be head cases for you, too. Or maybe for one of the other girls in the band.”

Oh yeah.

“I don’t suppose you two suddenly caring about Adagio a lot feels like a compulsion either, huh?”

“Naw,” Sonata replies, slouching and looking far more serene than I’ve ever seen her.

“But what if she—?”

Now Aria holds up a hand. “I think you need to ask her that.”

Probably. I slump over the counter, a pipe organ with all the air deflated out of its bellows. “Your place or here?”

“Come by after work,” Aria says with a grim smile.

“It’ll be late.”

Finally, Sonata loses that chipper affectation and blends in better with her sister. “She doesn’t sleep much now. It’ll be fine.”

I take a long breath in, a diva ready to belt out that high note and hold it until her lungs burn. And let it out in a small huff, anticlimactic as possible. “Alright.”

“But one thing first,” Aria says, her voice as hard as stone. “Do you love her?”

All the warmth oozes from my body, and for an instant, I imagine I can feel her soft lips on mine again. Then I remember what she did, and the heat returns with reinforcements. “I don’t know. I’ve only been hanging out with her for what, a few months? That’s pretty quick to make a call on whether I love her.”

Again, they glance at each other, lips pursed.

“I do—I did enjoy being around her. I can honestly say that.”

Sonata screws up her face like a kid about to throw a temper tantrum. “But do you love her?” she barks. “If she has someone to share that with, it won’t be such… such an open wound. It’ll heal.”

They can’t put me on the spot this way! “No,” I say, its bitter flavor hanging on my tongue. “Maybe I could, if I spent time with her again, and if she stopped pulling this shit.”

“Maybe isn’t good enough,” Aria replies, the gentle one now, oddly enough. “Can you love her, yes or no?”

As if they understand the first thing about love. “You can’t ask me to make that promise. Even if I did feel it right now, what am I supposed to do? Vow to love her forever?” Aria starts to open her mouth, but I smack my hand on the counter, give the downbeat for my solo. “No. You don’t get to demand that of me. People fall out of love all the time, and even if I could genuinely say I loved her right now, I can’t guarantee how long it’d last.”

Fuck, I called that earlier, didn’t I? If you could have the one thing you most wanted in life, how long would it make you happy?

But I’m not through ranting. “If I say I do, and a year from now we break up, what then? She’ll go mental for good? Well, more mental than she is already. You want me to carry all that on my shoulders!?”

“Then break it off now,” Sonata says, her voice gone all stentorian and yet so small. “Make her stop loving you.”

“It’s not in our nature,” Aria chimes in. “Sirens don’t love, duh. But this one does, and she doesn’t know how to handle it, and we don’t know how to help her, so either shut her down so she won’t love again or else be the one who can help her by going through it with her.”

“Shut her down so she can never love again,” I growl through gritted teeth. “And you think she’s broken now? What kind of life do you call that?”

I already know the answer. But Sonata supplies it: “A siren life. Smash her gem so it’ll grow back again, and we’ll make sure, for realsies, she’s around the right kind of emotions when it happens this time.”

The right kind. Bullshit.

“That means smashing ours too,” Aria says. “They’re just as… infected.” She tries to sneer at that word, but she can’t bring herself to. They would have already done it if they really wanted to. If they really thought it was better that way. “If you can’t love her, then break her and let her rebuild like a good siren. She won’t stop you. But she deserves to hear it from you.”

Shit. I actually agree with her. On that point anyway.

“Alright. Give me your address, and I’ll come by after work.”

Of course Sonata instantly seems carefree again, jouncing in her seat. She reaches for her phone and holds it out, so I sit mine next to it, and it downloads her contact info. “Oh,” she adds, her toothy grin blaring like an entire brass section. And on the edge of my vision, I see a little bit of her jewel flaring warmly, the skin around it turning to scales. “Can I try one of those salmon rolls Adagio is always raving about?”

I let a smile of my own work its little melody into the day’s theme. “Sure. Why don’t you two stick around for lunch?”

If there’s one saving grace to everything, it’s finally sinking in that maybe Twilight is right. Maybe I’ve actually become a better person. After immediately condemning Adagio the first night I saw her in that cafe, I didn’t react that badly to Aria. And Sonata didn’t put me off any. They’ve all changed.

But as I start slicing fish, an idea settles onto my heart. I need to stop by home to feed Ray, but I also need to pick some things up before I go see Adagio tonight.

Author's Note

I've always enjoyed writing Sonata as someone who's kind of clueless, yet really smart about specific subjects.

Coming next week, chapter 6. The finale!

Recorded from a Live Performance

Adagio’s room is dark, mostly because everything is dark this time of night, but even up here on the twelfth floor, the streetlights shine in through the blinds and leave stripes across her body. I can imagine them as whip marks, with her self-flagellating over what she did. At least I hope she regrets it, and not just because it got her in trouble.

“Hey,” I say, but she doesn’t move. Did the others tell her I’d be coming? I expected her to react with more surprise, but she was already nearly in a fetal position, and all she does now is scrunch up a little tighter. It’d open a can of worms if I sat on the bed, so instead I set my guitar case down and plop onto the floor, my back to the mattress, my back to her, my back to her sisters. The bed shakes, gently but constantly.

Finally, I turn to look at her. She has a pair of sweat pants on, plus a sleeveless crop top, but she shivers, sometimes violently. Shit, they didn’t tell me it had gotten this bad. I feel her forehead—she’s burning up! “You’re hot,” I say flatly.

“Now you notice?” she replies, a couple of forced laughs wedged between her chattering teeth, but then she clutches her arms across her stomach. “Sorry.”

“I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing any more of Autumn Blaze.” That’s not fair either. She wasn’t that awful. Maybe we can work on her together. “I’m guessing you don’t actually know who my mother is or… hypothetically could have been… whatever?” She shakes her head. “Was any of that stuff about doubles true?”

“Yeah,” she says hoarsely, “I only lied about the one.”

Pretty much what I figured. Without thinking better of it, I idly reach behind me and stroke her bangs back from her face. I feel her skin tighten, and Adagio curls up harder, another tremor surging through her body. This is bad. “Are you messed up because of me?”

She nods, and the way I phrased it makes it sound like my fault, but she’s in no state to argue. Still, she grasps at my wrist and shakes her head again. I get it.

“Your sisters were worried about you.” I assume she already knows that, but it doesn’t hurt to let it sink in. “Man, what is this? I can’t tell if you’re suffering from something like sickness, withdrawal, or… I don’t know, organ rejection?” Before she wonders why I compared it to all those, I add: “Did Sonata explain her theories to you?”

“And Aria,” she grunts, squeezing her eyes shut. “I see why… you were mad… even though…”

I wait a moment, then finish it for her. “Even though the end result seemed to you like it should be worth it. Yeah, we had a nice chat about that too.”

“Sorry. I’m trying.” She’s been saying that from the start. And I didn’t catch what it meant until now. “I can’t promise I won’t fuck it up again.”

A bit of a gamble—I turn around, on my knees, and lean over the edge of the bed, put an arm around her back, and give her a hug. She’s covered in sweat, but I didn’t even bother to change or shower before coming here, so I probably smell of fish from the restaurant. Though her trembling does ease. “It might be tough, but I need some answers from you. Do you think you can handle that?”

Adagio tries to sit up, but I let my weight keep her down, stirring around the edges, like the violins creating a hush for the featured soloist. So she remains curled up in a ball. “Mmhmm.”

“Your gem absorbed my magic and everyone’s love. It—damn, I don’t know how to explain it.”

She pulls the neck of her shirt down, exposing the red facets, gone dim and distorted in the yellow-green light filtering in. And she finally opens her eyes, peering at me as if anything she does will make me simultaneously save and condemn her.

So I swallow hard and try again: “Did you focus on me because your gem made you? Because it was my magic and my friends’ love it used to fix itself?”

“No,” she says, her voice less raspy. “It’s been years, and I really didn’t think of you much until I saw you at the cafe my first time there.”

“And it only took you how many weeks to talk to me? I thought I’d stayed hidden.” I allow myself a small chuckle.

One of her hands comes unclenched, the rookie cellist ready to release her death grip on her bow after her first audition. And she touches my cheek. “My jewel could sniff out your magic. But I saw you leave the cafe, and I couldn’t blame you for it.”

“I was going to ask if you’d fallen in love before you’d even seen me. Would’ve been a sure-fire sign that your amulet made it all happen, but you kinda answered that already.” Ugh, love always turns any conversation into a rat’s nest. “Was it love at first sight? That’d raise alarms with me too.”

“I definitely admired you.” Her hand descends from caressing my cheek and feels along my arm, interlocks her fingers with mine. “The way you get along with your friends, the way you rose from your own broken jewel—I didn’t even understand until breaking mine. But it was after all the patience you showed, talking at the cafe, treating me with respect. I had no right to it, but… I loved you for it.”

I can’t help sighing. “I feel like an idiot. Talking about being controlled to love someone, and yeah, I had to consider the possibility, but even doing it the right way, what about love does anyone really have even the slightest control over?” She never used her magic to control me, if it can even do that anymore. The euphoria it caused—it felt good simply because it felt good. A special gift she wanted to share with me, me of all people, and it feels good to be loved.

Her eyes crinkle, but her wisp of a smile drains of all humor. “Sirens are supposed to control it completely.”

“Do you know what Aria wants me to do?” She doesn’t answer, her face a prisoner, bound up in irons and awaiting sentence. “She says I need to promise to love you, long-term, so we can get you through this and out the other side. And if I screw that up, it’ll damage you, seriously. If I can’t make that vow, or if I just don’t feel that way in the first place, then I need to break it off now, never see you again.”

She squints at me. “Aria said that?”

“Honestly, I think it’s selling you short to say you couldn’t pull through and eventually find someone else, and maybe by then, your gem wouldn’t react so much the next time.” Her face clouds, and I can see the question already forming on her lips.

“You must not have much faith in me if you think I’ll keep having failed relationships,” she says, averting her gaze to the wad of sheets shoved down past her feet.

There’s a lot about being human that she doesn’t know. “It’s just how life goes. I’d assume the same for myself, too. But Aria said if it went that way, I needed to smash your gem. She said you wouldn’t stop me. She said she could make sure it grew back the right way again, the siren way.”

“Even less faith than I accused you of having,” she mutters.

“Except it’s obvious what she wants, or else she would have already smashed it for your own good. She didn’t know it on a conscious level, but taking away your ability to love? Only if she had no other choice.”

“Then what am I supposed to do with it?” she asks, her voice rising, but she coughs, the hoarseness returning.

I can’t stay angry right now. I don’t want to. But the fatigue, the frustration, the pain—her jewel glows, and even as I watch it, one small crack near the edge disappears, seals over. I remain kneeling beside the bed and get out my guitar, start on the same chaconne I played for her once. No bass strings on a classical guitar, but I fill in that line with my humming, my own voice a lower range, just like she noted before. A love song, yes. I don’t even know if I mean it, but I hope it helps.

Adagio smiles as she listens, and she peers up at me, her eyes questioning, asking me the same thing I’m asking myself. She hums as well, her trembling gone still, and with no flowers in here to grow in response, I close my eyes, placing both of us in the park among bowers of beautiful blossoms, fragrant florid air, and nobody else but us. Then the last chord echoes, and I set my guitar back in its case.

“Do you mean it?” she whispers, clutching at my arm as if it’s the safety line hauling her out of a chasm. “Do you love me?” Her gem gleams in the muted light, and the skin I can see on her chest, neck, shoulders has turned to scales, already anticipating my reply.

I reach out and touch one of those shoulders, smooth but soft, and warm, pliant, velvet under my fingertips. “Yeah, I think I do. I love you like a friend—” Her face falls, but I hold up a hand. “Let me finish. I love you as a friend. Very much. I don’t want to see you hurt this way, and I care very deeply about you. I think you’re finally starting to get what that means, so don’t dismiss it as some second-tier kind of love. I understand you better, why you did what you did, but while that needs to change—” she purses her lips and nods “—I still love you, and you’re very important to me.”

Before she can assume that’s the end of it, I take another breath. “I’ll always feel that way, and I hope you know how special it is to have another person in your corner like your sisters are—” she nods again “—but… can it be more than that?”

I know the answer. But I need to phrase it right so she doesn’t misunderstand. “Life happens. It’s unpredictable. I can’t promise that nothing will ever screw things up, but I want to try. I do love you, and even though it’s been sorely tested, it didn’t go away.”

She smiles, tears streaking her face, and her amulet flares even brighter, the scales spreading down her arms.

“Is that enough?”

“Yes,” she says without pausing to think, and she sits up, throws her arms around me, and hugs me to her.

“Because if it isn’t, then maybe we need to do what Aria said,” I add, patting her on the back.

“It’s enough, it’s enough!” she blubbers, and I reach behind me to feel her forehead. Still too warm, but not as bad as it was.

That leaves only one thing still missing. “You just need to learn to consider other people’s feelings better.”

“I can, I will, you’ll teach me!” she says, shifting onto her knees, on the mattress above me, and looks down, cupping my face in her scaled hands and tilting it up to kiss me. In my head, the full symphony rings out again, the music returned, the music that she brings to my life. Her lips slide off mine, across my cheek, down to my shoulder, where she rests her head and sobs while I stroke her back.

When it seems she’s calmed down, I let go of her, straighten up, and stuff my hand in my pocket. “I’ve given that a bit of thought.”

At last, her eyes show some life, peering at me like a child whose mother is dangling his favorite candy in front of him. She doesn’t want to lose this any more than I want to take it from her. But part of that is trust, which is why I need to make sure I don’t touch her right now.

I withdraw my hand from my pocket and hold up my geode.

Adagio tenses up for a moment and sags a little. “Okay. You can use it.”

“No,” I answer, shaking my head. “That’s why I can’t touch you with my hand right now. If I’m holding it and I do that, it’ll activate.”

Then her eyes narrow. “You can’t give that up.”

“Yes I can. It’s not the same as the other girls’ geodes. They help fight off enemies. This one never did that. It helps me understand people. And that’s what you’re missing.”

“You’d… do that for me?”

I nod, and I know all the questions that must be coursing through her mind. “Well, I’ve given it a little more than a bit of thought: you’re not a touchy-feely person anyway, so you wouldn’t have to change your behavior to avoid using it.”

“What if I—?”

“I know, what if you’re tempted to use it for bad reasons? I don’t think you would now. It’s not a weapon, just information. The old you would ignore it or use it against people, but if you wanted to return to the old you, then you’d have to smash your gem, which would destroy the geode, too.”

A brief tic crosses her cheek as she fits the final note into the chord. “You don’t mean I’ll be wearing it.”

I set the geode on the bed next to her, take my hand off it, and strain upward to kiss her softly, and let her rest her forehead against mine. “Info is just info. It’s what you do with it that matters. It won’t change who you are, not like adding love to your amulet did. You’ll still be the Adagio I like, the Adagio you like.”

“But when I touch you…”

That earns her another smile and kiss. “I trust you with that, the same way you trusted me.”

So she sits up tall, closes her eyes, sets her jaw, and angles her chin toward the ceiling, fully exposing her jewel. One long split still runs across the bottom left corner. I take the geode and hold it up to her amulet, careful not to touch any of the scaled skin surrounding it. Red crystal against red crystal, blending in perfectly as the geode barely sits into the narrow rift. I press it in a little harder. “This might hurt a bit,” I say, and she braces herself.

Then I pound a fist against it, cracking her gem apart and embedding the geode between the pieces. She winces, grunts, cries out briefly, but immediately, her amulet flares, and glowing tendrils bridge the gap, wind their way around the new piece, use the fresh, rare supply of magic to heal their form. The red brightens more and more until I can barely look, and for an instant, a full siren lies there, coiled on the mattress, scales, fangs, fins, hooves, bigger than I remember her being.

But with another flash, there sits my Adagio, her amulet almost pristine. A few chips remain, a few imperfect facets, but we’ll get there. Eventually. She lets out a breath and opens her eyes.

“Well?” I say.

She takes my face in both hands, looks down on it, her eyes searching. “It’s odd,” she murmurs. “Not like the direct mind reading you talked about. More like… a strong hunch.”

That is different, but maybe the magic just works differently for her. “What’s your strong hunch telling you?”

Her eyes flick back and forth between each of mine for a second, then she grins broadly and leans forward to kiss me. I reach my arms around her neck and pull her close, flute trills ringing in my ears. It’s still her, thank goodness—I thought it would work this way, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.

It’s still the Adagio I know, unchanged, ostinato.

When she finally stops to breathe, tears streak down her face. “What’s wrong?” I ask, wiping them away for her.

“I see now,” she whispers. “I see what I did to you, how it made you feel.”

“And the old you wouldn’t have cared,” I add on her behalf. “The new you cared but didn’t understand. Now you’ve got it all.”

“That’s the fuckin’ truth,” she says, laughing.

“It’s alright. Really.”

Several times, she kisses me, backs off, smiles anew, kisses me again, still holding my face. And she gets an odd squint to her eyes, peering toward the open door, where it has been rather conveniently quiet. “If you two are going to listen anyway, you might as well come in.”

Sonata struts through the doorway, looking rather proud, followed by Aria, at more of a slink. “So are you a couple?” Sonata asks.

Adagio looks to me, awaiting her cue from the conductor, but I’m no maestro. I just smile. She can say it.

“No.”

Sonata droops like a willow tree. “Aww. Why not?”

“Maybe it’ll get there—I want it to—but it’s not fair to call it that now. We need to take it a bit at a time, but we’re in a good place, enough that it’ll stop kicking the shit out of me.” And she adds with a grimace: “I hope.”

“Then yay!” Sonata shouts, jumping into the air, and Aria draws a pigtail over her mouth to hide her grin, but she can’t keep it from shining in her eyes. “Sushi party when?”

Adagio finally releases her grip on my face, so I return to sitting on the floor with my back against the bed. She rolls onto her stomach, and soon enough, her head appears over my shoulder. I check her forehead again. “Still a little fever.”

“It’ll prob’ly take a while. She’s gotta absorb something she’s not tuned to,” Sonata says, but she keeps staring at me.

I let out a sigh and imagine the sound of bagpipes slowly dying with it. “Alright. We can do sushi. But I don’t know how much I can afford to give out—”

“Oh, we’re paying,” Aria cuts in.

“Totes,” Sonata adds.

I wait a second to make sure they don’t mind, but they keep smiling. Adagio drapes her arms around my neck from behind. “Okay. And I’m having a birthday party in a couple days,” I say. “I hope you’ll all come.”

“You sure…?” Aria says.

“I’ll explain everything to the girls, it’ll all be okay, no problem.”

“She means it,” Adagio cuts in, her fingertips lightly touching my throat. She’s really having fun with her new ability, not that the others would know, depending on how much they overheard.

But they nod, so… I guess I’ve got my week planned. I let my head flop back, and finally the fatigue sweeps over me. Almost twenty hours since I got up this morning, and Adagio’s gentle touch on my neck is pretty relaxing, so I’ll just close my eyes for a minute…

I wake up to soft whimpering next to my ear. The sun glares in my eyes, but it’s not up that high yet. Good, since I still need to shower and change, but at least I don’t open until eleven today.

Curls of orange sit massed against my cheek. She stayed looking over my shoulder all night? I turn to see—ow! Shit, my back hurts! I dozed off while slumped over, and it didn’t do my spine any good.

I scoot my ass until I’ve got some support behind me, then I reach above my shoulder and run my hand through Adagio’s hair. “You didn’t move?” I ask.

Her fingertips continue tracing patterns on my neck, and she shakes her head. “Too much on my mind.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

She shakes her head again.

“Why are you crying?” I say quietly, but I don’t really know how volume would matter. Just to sound gentle, I guess.

A quick sniffle, like the rattle of maracas. “I didn’t want the feeling to stop. I was scared if I took my hand away, I’d find out it was wrong, and I’d touch you again and learn how you really felt about me. It’s stupid, I know.”

“No, I’ve been there. When I first learned my friends could actually care about me, I was always afraid it might just stop at any time, for no reason. Just because the world decided I didn’t deserve it.” Then I struggle through the cramp in my back, stand up, her hands sliding off me, dangling limply to the floor. So I sit next to her on the bed, take one of her arms, and lift her palm to my face. “Still there, right?” I ask, rubbing her back with my other hand.

“Yeah,” she replies, her soft crying starting up again. She’ll get used to it, and then she’ll be fine.

I check her forehead again. “Fever’s gone up some. You want something hot or cold to drink?”

“I feel okay.”

Not really an answer. But given how enamored she was last night, I have to ask: “Did you try out your power on your sisters any?”

She nods, a timid little oboe venturing into the silence. “Yeah. They let me before they went to bed. Nothing too surprising, but it was nice.” Then she sighs. “I still don’t like touching people, though. I doubt I’ll want to use it on anyone else.”

Unless she needs to, I almost say. It wasn’t the most in-demand of our geode powers, but it came in useful sometimes. We may have to ask her someday. But until then, it won’t matter, and really, it’s better this way. “You think they might ever want to find someone special too?”

Her eyes briefly grow distant. “Yeah. I bet they’d be willing to try. Someday.”

“Good. Now listen, I’ve gotta go home and clean up, get a change of clothes, and go to work—”

“You’re leaving?” she says, withdrawing her hand and propping up on her elbows.

“Well… yeah. I have to work.”

“I… I don’t…”

“I’ll be back later.” Poor girl. I’ve never seen her so insecure. “You’ve got your sisters here. Unless you want to come along. You might find it boring just sitting in the restaurant all day, but if it’d make you feel better…”

She rubs her head as if she has an Autumn Blaze-level hangover. “No, no, you’re right. Of course you have to work, and of course I have to go to work at Bullseye, too, and I need to book the Dazzlings’ next performance, and…” Another hard sigh, verging on a cough. “I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me. I’m so scared I’ll lose everything I’ve gotten. But when I think about it—Sonata and Aria have stuck with me forever, the geode magic is screaming at me that you don’t have any intentions of leaving me, but I can’t make my head listen to reason.”

Oh shit, I never unblocked her number. I take out my phone and handle it right there. “I’ll text you while you’re at work, okay? Every hour. I’ll check in on you, we’ll decide something to do after quitting time, whatever. I won’t drop you. We’ll get through this. Maybe we’ll even do open mic night sometime.”

“You mean it?” she asks, perking up. I smile, and after a shuddering breath, she adds a smile of her own. “This love thing had better be fucking good, or it’s so not worth it.”

“Oh, it’s worth it,” I say as I stand, and the pain in my back has eased enough for me to bend down. I repay an old gesture and give her ass a squeeze, then roll her over, off her stomach, and kiss her, good and hard.

“Totally worth it,” she says with a sly grin as she steals one more kiss before letting me go. It’s nice to have some of that brassy personality surfacing again. I peek on my way out the door to see if her smile falters. She stays strong, stretched pretty tight like a theorbo string.

But she’s constant, enduring, ostinato. She can take it.

Author's Note

All done! No particular thoughts on this chapter (other than the chapter titles making for the header info of a musical recording yet also carrying a hidden meaning for the chapters' contents), but it's unusual for me to write something of this length, and I had fun with it. Thanks to all who stayed through the end!