Harnessing the Sun

Harness Pathfinder, duly elected sheriff of the town of Cape Colt, had always thought of herself as somepony who could handle anything thrown at her. Usually, though, “anything” was a minor violation of a municipal code, often litter-related, rarely fundamental-view-of-reality-altering. It generally wasn’t sitting at a cafe table, pointedly not watching the late-summer sun melt into the horizon beyond the harbor, and instead staring across that table at a funhouse mirror image of yourself from another universe.

So for the past hour or so, ever since Funhouse Harness had stumbled through a glowing portal at the edge of town surrounded by Funhouse Everypony-Harness-Closely-Knew-and-Loved, the concept of “handling anything” had been less like a thought and more like a mantra: I can handle this. I’ve been handling this. I will continue to handle this for however long it lasts, and so will… other me. Him. The two of us together. Or one of us split apart? Or–

“This is so weird,” murmured Hitch Trailblazer, duly elected sheriff of the town of Maretime Bay, with a shake of his head that set his short, boyish mane bobbing above his temples. “It’s like looking in a funhouse mirror.”

“Yep,” Harness agreed, unconsciously brushing her own mane — longer, fuller, tied into a tail behind her head to keep it from covering her ears — away from her eyes. “Exactly like that.”

They sat in silence for a bit, then decided at the same time to start handling things again. Harness had home-field — or home-reality, or whatever — advantage, so she spoke first.

“So, uh… how are you all here?” Harness asked herself. Or himself. Or the disarmingly attractive stallion sitting across from her whose name was Hitch. Whatever. “Y’know, in a purely scientific, literal sense.”

“Not a hundred percent sure,” Hitch answered. “Sunny thinks the Together Trees are… wait, do you have those here?”

Sunny. He meant Sunbeam — or Hitch’s version of him, anyway. Harness had already handled that too: meeting all her stallion friends as mares, them meeting her, all the others trundling off to the Brighthouse together to talk through probably all the same things she and her counterpart were. Continuing to handle it without a week’s worth of wide-eyed, sleepless nights would be something she’d just have to figure out later.

“We have Forevergreens,” Harness offered. “Thick trunks, wide leaves, grown by the magic of friendship?”

Hitch nodded. “Sounds about right. Anyway, Sunny’s theory is that they’re not really trees so much as… bridges. And just like their roots are all linked with each other in our universe, she thinks all the Together Trees, Forevergreens, all of them are linked together across universes in the same way.”

“Hang on, universes? Like, plural?”

“Well, we know of at least one other besides ours and yours,” Hitch said, muzzle bending into a cheeky grin. “And there’s some old legends of one where we all descended from monkeys.”

“Monkeys,” Harness incredulously repeated. “So what, instead of hooves, we have…” She lifted a forehoof, imagined tendrils of muscle and bone sprouting out from it, and shuddered. “Ugh. No thanks. Glad you’re normal-shaped, at least.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Hitch chuckled. “So yeah, Sunny and Zipp wanted to see where else our Trees might link to, plus Misty thought there might be a chance that Opaline…”

“Assuming that’s Nacreous. Geez, you guys got a way better name.”

“... or Nacreous might still be alive and plotting in some alternate dimension, so they experimented. And, well, here we are.”

“Experimented, huh?” Harness mimicked again. “I take it you voted against said experiment.”

“And was outvoted, yes,” Hitch muttered — and not for the first time that day, Harness just about could’ve mouthed his response along with him. It was like she just knew what he was thinking because… well, it was her thinking it, kind of. Another version of her, different in some ways, but so similar in others. And speaking of which…

“Okay, now I’m curious,” Harness said, leaning forward in her chair. “Aside from the obvious, how similar are our universes?”

“Pretty curious about that too, actually,” Hitch said, because of course he was. “Okay, first things first: how did you all meet? I mean, you and your friends.”

“Well, I’ve known Sunbeam since we were kids,” Harness answered, Hitch nodding along with each detail from her life that he recalled from his. “Then a few months ago, Ike wandered into town talking about unicorn magic, Sunbeam ran off with him to Eurus Peak where they met Pepp and Zepp, and then I caught up with them all in time to help them restore everypony’s magic everywhere. Wasn’t easy, either. There was this ancient monster, and a big fight, and…”

“Wait, you fought a monster?”

Harness blinked. “Yeah, huge one. Wait, did you guys not?”

“No! I mean, sort of. My deputy, Sprout, I left him in charge of Maretime Bay while I went after the girls, and he kind of, uh… built a war machine, went full fascist. It was a mess.”

“Deputy Spr…” Harness trailed off, then scoffed and shook her head. “Okay, no. No way.”

“Your Sprout didn’t do that?” came Hitch’s puzzled reply.

“Well, my Sprout’s name is Sapling, and no, Sapling would never do something like that! She’s so, I don’t know… demure, and traditional, and scared of everything and ooooohkay. Yeah. Now I see it.”

“Yep,” Hitch chuckled. “Probably should keep an eye on her.”

“Definitely gonna keep an eye on her.”

Unsurprisingly, the conversation petered out after that. Hitch turned his gaze pensively towards the sunset, and Harness tried to gaze with him. After a few moments, though, she found herself gazing more at him, curiosity growing into something closer to compulsion.

They were eerily similar in so many ways, but that just made the differences stick out even more — both the obvious big one, and the smaller ones that stemmed out from it. Both of them were Sheriffs, both had helped to save the world from disharmony, they even both had basically the same friends. But while she was the only mare keeping a rowdy group of stallions in line, he was the only stallion doing… what, exactly, with five adorable young mares who all seemed to trust him implicitly?

It’d be rude to ask. And she knew the answer anyway. Not a single thing about Hitch said, “I’m the type of guy who plows every field my tool can reach.” But she’d seen the mares who’d come through the portal with him. She was looking at him right now. There was no way at least one of them hadn’t at some point…

Screw it. She was gonna ask. She’d never stop wondering about it otherwise.

“So,” Harness said, leaning towards Hitch as he glanced her way. “We have the same friends.”

“Seems that way,” Hitch replied.

“But you have girl friends.”

“Well… yeah,” Hitch said, after an extra-long blink and a twist of his lips. “I guess.”

“You guess, or you do?”

“I-I do!” he stammered. “I mean… where are you going with this?”

Oh, he had. He one-hundred-percent had. “Just curious,” Harness went on, dragging the word out until she saw Hitch squirm in his seat. “Any of ‘em, ah… more than friends?”

“Wha… w-what kind of question is that?” Hitch sputtered. “Do you think I’m friends with the girls just because I want to sleep with them? I mean, that’d be… I-I’m not that kind of stallion! You’re not that kind of mare, even, or… or are you? Not that that’d be… I-I don’t mean to imply that, uh…”

“Wow,” Harness murmured, smiling. “All those words, and none of them were a ‘no.’”

Hitch clammed up and turned towards the sun again. After a moment, Harness leaned back and relented.

“Ah, c’mon, I’m just teasing. And, admittedly, actually curious. Because for the record, I haven’t with any of my guys over here. But, Sheriff to Sheriff? Totally thought about it. And I’m thinking you’ve at least thought about it too. So, Sheriff to Sheriff again, who’s the one?”

Still facing the horizon, Hitch chewed on his bottom lip. Then, with a sigh, he muttered, “There isn’t one.”

“You mean to tell me none of those mares get you hot under the–”

“No, that’s not…” He trailed off for a moment, and Harness realized suddenly that it wasn’t the sun glaring on his face — he was blushing, pink as a peony. “I mean there isn’t… one.”

“Oh, Hitch,” Harness gushed, grinning like a hyena. “Don’t tell me you’ve done the dirty with two of ‘em?”

Hitch shook his head.

“More than two?”

At first, Hitch mumbled so softly Harness couldn’t even hear him. Then, seeing her enraptured stare, he took a big breath and repeated himself:

“All of them.”

For a few seconds, Harness just kept staring at him, and Hitch kept flushing darker and darker shades of scarlet. Then, all at once, the words burst out of her through lips curled into a delirious grin.

“No fucking way,” she managed to say, just before she dissolved into laughter that got Hitch’s face all the way to maroon.

“Not all at the same time!” he loudly insisted, which just got Harness going even more. “It just… happened, all right? In different places and different contexts, and… they all know too, for the record. It’s not like I’m running around on anypony.”

“Oh my stars,” Harness gasped. “You have a harem. In another universe, I literally have a harem.”

“It’s not a harem!”

“You’ve slept with five different mares who are all friends with each other and willing to share you. That is definitionally a harem, buddy!”

“It…” Hitch started to say, but after his jaw hung open for a few seconds without any words passing through it, he gave up on any hope of arguing the point. “Whatever.”

“Hey, look, I’m not judging you. If anything, I’m proud of you.”

“Sure doesn’t feel like it,” Hitch griped.

“C’mon, dude, you’re living the stallion’s dream!”

“Well, I just… I don’t like the implication, okay? That I manipulated them, or I turned them into something they’re not. They’re really good ponies, and I care about all of them, and I’d be friends with them with or without… that.”

Harness couldn’t help cocking an eyebrow.

“I would,” Hitch insisted, with enough of a bite behind his words to convince Harness he really, truly meant them. “You don’t hang around your friends just because you want to have sex with them, do you?”

Harness shrugged and sat back. “Fair enough. No, I don’t. They’re goofballs, but… yeah.”

“Exactly. You’re… we’re the same that way. Just because I’m a stallion and you’re a mare doesn’t change who we are deep down.” He let the silence hang over them for a second, then sighed and seemed to settle himself down. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. Just…”

“No, you’re right,” Harness said, meeting his eyes — the exact same shade of hazel as hers — and keeping his gaze locked in her own. “I was out of line. I’m sorry too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hitch said, voice softening even more.

Another second passed, then two, then a few more. Their shadows stretched farther back along the plaza behind them, inched closer together, almost joined at their apexes — and then both ponies blinked at the same time.

“Nope,” Harness said, leaning back hard in her chair.

“Yep,” Hitch agreed, doing pretty much the same thing in his own seat. “Feels, uh…”

“Incest-y?”

“Kinda.”

“Yeah.” One more second passed. “We were both thinking about it, though.”

“No we weren’t.”

“We one-hundred-percent were.”

“No we…” Hitch shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Ugh. I’m insufferable here.”

“And I’m a prude there. See, we are different! A little bit.”

Other than sighing again, Hitch didn’t deem that worthy of a reply, which seemed like a good enough reason to wrap things up here.

“Reckon the others are done talking?” Harness said as she got to her hooves. “And/or mid-multiversal-orgy?”

“Stars above, we really are different,” Hitch muttered as he stood too. “Are you like this all the time?”

“All my close friends are stallions and I run a town that’s sixty percent dude-by-volume. What else could I possibly be like?”

“Fair enough. Wanna head over to the Brighthouse?”

“You go ahead. I’ll catch up. Gonna get a quick patrol in before we lose the light completely.”

Hitch straightened up and extended a forehoof. “Well, in that case… good to meet you, other me.”

Harness tapped her own hoof to his and shook. “Likewise, other me.”

With that, Hitch departed, and Harness watched him go with a feeling of satisfaction that, bit by bit, dissolved strangely into the exact opposite emotion. She wanted to chalk it up to regular old disappointment at seeing the tail end of a new friend, like when Sunbeam’s mom used to tell her it was time for little colts and fillies to stop playing and go to bed. But the longer she stood alone in the plaza and the closer the sun got to vanishing completely beneath the sea, the more sure she was that it wasn’t that at all.

All of them…

In another universe, she wasn’t just friends with all the same ponies, she’d gotten freaky with them too. And what’s more, every one of those friends was apparently fine with the arrangement — neither pushy nor possessive, no rivalries ready to bloom into bitter feuds, nopony even so much as tossing a “What are we?” into the mix like a live emotional hoof grenade.

If Hitch were anypony else other than literally her stallion self, she might’ve thought he was exaggerating, or just straight-up lying in a weird attempt to impress her. But she wasn’t the lying type, and neither was he. He really had, with all of them. And that made her feel something that wasn’t disappointment or anger, but kind of more like…

“Oh, for stars’ sake,” Harness murmured. “You’re fucking jealous.”

Yep. She was. She’d been Cape Colt’s most eligible bachelorette for who knew how long, wondering all the time what her friends might be like in the sack, never doing anything with any of them because she couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting the others — and in another universe, her stallion self had just gone ahead and done it, and it had apparently worked out great. And then he wanted to act all high and mighty about it like his real actual life wasn’t ripped straight out of a Playmare magazine, like it had just happened because he was just so damn nice and hot and gentlecoltly.

“Well, fuck that,” Harness muttered. “And fuck him. And you know what…”

They were the same pony, right? Barring a few biological traits and social habits, they were exactly the same. So if it could work for him, why couldn’t it work for her? In fact, why shouldn’t she make it work for her, and then act even higher and mightier about it right to his — her own — whoever’s fucking face whenever it next portaled back into her life like a live psychosexual atom bomb?

“Oh, this is a bad idea,” she said with her full voice, in the same tone she couldn’t help using when a perp answered a question in a way that made their lawyer blanch. Bit by bit, the aggrieved frown on her face bent upwards into a devilish grin. “This is the worst idea ever.”

Yep. It was. But one other thing Harness and Hitch had in common was this: once they got an idea in their heads, they were one-hundred-and-twenty-percent going to make it a reality. And as Harness got to trotting with a spring in her non-stallion-y step, she had a pretty good idea already of where she wanted to start.