Fluttershy, where are you?
Journal Entry 42
She’s coming for me, I know she is. I know what she did to Cloud Chaser and Bulk Biceps and everypony else. And now I know, she won’t let me live—
The warning cheep of a sparrow. Danger, danger, she approaches! The pencil falls from my hoof. I can hear wingbeats.
“Fluttershy?”
Like a worm crawling deeper and deeper into my ear canal, I can hear her. Calling me, over and over.
“Fluttershy! Fluttershy, where are you?”
Her voice is growing higher and tighter, a little more strangled with every repetition of my name. She still sounds like herself. Like my friend Twilight, desperately worried, but loving me still.
“Fluttershy, please!”
It’s such a convincing display that even now, even after everything I know, I almost believe her.
Shuddering, I whisper to my animals. “Gather closer, everycreature.”
And they press nearer. Such good friends, all of them. Not like her. Ponies are fallible and wicked, but animals will always love me. They will never betray me. I’ll protect them all, and they will protect me. I’ve gathered all of my friends here — the manticores and the mongooses, the wolves and the giraffe and even the sea lion. Angel Bunny rides on my back, and there are six chicks and a fieldmouse sitting in my mane. Only the birds are absent; spread through the Everfree to give us an early warning.
I only wish Tank wasn’t still in her clutches, locked away in the depths of her castle. That’s not what Rainbow would have wanted.
As one, we scuttle and slither and crawl away into the darkness. Deeper into the woods, where it is dark and safe. My friends flow behind me like a living carpet.
Deep in a grove of scare-oaks with grimacing faces, I stop to rest. My back is pressed against a cliff, and I feel safer. There’s no way anypony can sneak up on me and my little friends from behind, not here.
I lie down and get everycreature settled, and open my journal again.
She’s hunting me. How long can I stay hidden, even in the Everfree? I’m scared, journal, but I have to be strong for everycreature else. I just wish I could warn Pinkie, Applejack and Rarity. If they knew what she’d done, they’d help me. We could use the elements, or—
And that’s as far as I get before I hear the second voice.
“Fluttershy? Are you around?”
Is that — is that Derpy Hooves?
A chill crawls down my spine, and I clutch Angel Bunny closer. Twilight’s done it. She’s found a way to replicate the voices of her victims. How did she do it? Did she take a recording of them before she fed them to her sick needle-machine? How did she trick them into saying my name?
Oh, who am I kidding? She’s the Princess of Friendship. She could tell anypony to do anything, and they’d all believe that it was just one more wacky friendship mission. That’s probably how she caught them all to begin with. It’s how she nearly caught me. But I know the truth. I know exactly what she has done to the other pegasi of Ponyville. She has taken their magic, their voices — taken everything — and nothing about it was voluntary.
For the first time, I think she might be right. Maybe Rainbow’s death was not an accident. Maybe the real answer she’s been looking for all this time was her.
The realisation thrums through me like a lightning bolt, and my feathers are standing on end. Everything seems to click into place. It was Twilight. She killed Rainbow Dash. The best friend I ever had, the only one who ever looked out for me in Cloudsdale, and Twilight took her away. Who knows why? Maybe Rainbow saw through her like I have. Maybe she was going to leave her, and Twilight couldn’t handle it. Maybe she realised how Twilight felt about pegasi, the way she hates us, like any unicorn-supremacist bigot from the white walls of Canterlot. And Twilight punished Rainbow for the truth she could no longer conceal, just like she’s trying to punish me.
She’s fooled everypony else in town, with her princess crown and her grieving marefriend act, but I’m not falling for it. One by one, she’s taken out every pegasus I know. Every winged friend I have.
I can’t let her do it to me. I won’t.
“Fluttershy!” It’s her again. She’s given up the charade of Derpy and defaulted to her own voice. She knows I can see through her lies and that it’s pointless to pretend.
The sound of wingbeats descending through the trees. I feel the cliff at my back, and too late I see my own mistake. This isn’t safety. This is a dead end.
Angel chitters angrily, readying himself to defend me, and I hastily shush him and push him into the arms of Ophelia the Otter. She’ll hold him back, if I ask nicely.
No. I can’t let anycreature else get hurt trying to save me. I’ve seen her take down creatures the size of Manehatten skyscrapers. What chance have my forest friends got against an alicorn? It’s no use. But…but the reverse is true. Without me, there’s no reason for Twilight to hurt any of them. Suddenly everything makes a horrible sort of sense. There’s only one way out of this.
I turn to my largest friend. “Harry, I need you to do something for me.”
My explanation is quick — too quick. There’s no time to explain the morality of it, why this is the only right choice left. And Harry is sensitive. He balks. He moans and growls, covering his paws with his eyes. But there isn’t time, and I step closer, tugging the orphaned chicks from my mane one at a time.
“Griselda,” I say over my shoulder, and she honks in response. “They’re not goslings, but I need you to look after them anyway. I need you all to look after each other.”
Harry is weeping, but I cannot stop to make him understand. It is cruel, but necessary. This is the best possible ending. For all of us. They will live, and I…I will not be like Derpy and Cloud Chaser. Like my poor Rainbow.
Harry cowers, and I fix him with the Stare. “Harry. Now.”
Angel clings to my hind leg, screaming a protest, and for the first time in his whole life I kick him away. They don’t understand, but they will. When they see what she would have done.
The noise of flapping wings comes closer. “Fluttershy! There you are!”
She’s seen me. I only have seconds left.
I scoop the fieldmouse out — Larry, his name is — and put him gently beside the chicks. He has a broken leg, but the others will take care of him. Angel will be a good leader, once he has recovered from the shock.
Tears streaming down his furry cheeks, Harry kneels and opens his mouth, just as I ordered. Only his little black eyes hint at the pain he is feeling.
I place my head between his jaws, as I have so many times when cleaning his teeth. I have only milliseconds before the effect of the Stare wears off without direct eye contact. Before Twilight is close enough to catch me in her magic.
“Do it, Harry,” I command for the third time, and he does.
“Any sign of her?” Twilight called to Bulk Biceps as he fluttered beneath her, tiny wings buzzing.
“No,” he boomed, at a slightly lower volume than normal, to signify his concern.
“Me neither,” Derpy Hooves said, appearing from nowhere. “But we’ll keep looking. I tried to ask the birds at her cottage for help, and I think they might have understood? Maybe? They all flew off, anyway.”
“We can’t give up,” Twilight said, hearing how thready her own voice sounded as it echoed in her ears. It was a phrase she had repeated more and more the past few months.
Derpy and Bulk Biceps exchanged a concerned look. It was one Twilight was seeing a lot of lately, and she tried to quash the flare of resentment in her breath. Derpy and Bulk had been so kind. They’d given more magic than anyone else, but almost every pegasus in town had donated a fed of their magic to the gatherer she’d made. Excess pegasus magic to pump into the crash dummy and make it move more like a pegasus.
No one else had even tried to understand. None of her friends. Even Fluttershy. She’d come to meet Twilight at the crash site by the schoolhouse, but when she’d seen the dummy, now imbued with enough pegasus magic to make its flight function almost normally, she had turned pale.
She hadn’t listened when Twilight explained that maybe now they could finally understand what was happening. She hadn’t wanted to listen. It’s sick, she’d said, shoving the crash dummy away from her so that it staggered and fell — just like Rainbow would have, its wonky-stitched mouth smiling like hers — and rage bubbled in Twilight to see her work disregarded like that. You’re sick, Twilight.
And yet Bulk Biceps and Derpy — these comparative strangers were willing to help her search for the truth. She’d asked Derpy why, once, and the mare had said simply for Rainbow. And that had been explanation enough.
They had all been there together when Fluttershy had burst into the castle, eyes bloodshot and voice climbing to a shriek as she wielded a sheaf of tattered paper like a weapon. I know what you are, she screamed. I know what you’ve done.
And when Twilight tried to reach for her, to understand, Fluttershy hurled the papers in her face and fled screaming into the night.
Derpy and Bulk Biceps had picked Twilight up from the ground where Fluttershy had knocked her, tried to help her calm her racing heart. But Twilight had hardly heard them. She was already reading, all eighteen pages suspended in her magic as she skimmed over them all, her heart shrivelling and withering inside her.
Strange, how a heart already broken still had room left to break a little more.
And now Fluttershy had just…disappeared. Vanished into the night. Almost as though she was truly gone. Like Rainbow Dash. Twilight’s chest constricted as she thought those two words, and she shook her head furiously, trying to clear it. No. No.
“It won’t be like that,” she whispered aloud, like the foalish prayers to Celestia that she had once whispered into the darkness of her bedroom. “Fluttershy is…fine. She’s fine. I just have to find her and explain.”
But deep down, Twilight knew that wishing things was not enough to make them real. In the week she had spent beside that hospital bed she had wished on every star, every birthday, every dandelion in Equestria, and the result was always the same. Nothing.
And she heard a voice screaming up from below, so loud and so wild that she could hardly recognise it as Fluttershy’s at all.
“Do it, Harry! I won’t let her have me too! Do it!”
Derpy and Bulk began to flap towards the noise, and Twilight saw their eyes widening in horror. Heard the blood pounding in her own ears. Watched Derpy’s mouth gaping in a silent scream.
Twilight Sparkle folded her wings and dropped through the forest canopy in a dive that even Rainbow would have been proud of.
“Fluttershy!”
“It was a psychotic break, darling,” Rarity said sorrowfully, putting a hoof on Twilight’s back.
“Ain’t nothing you could’ve done,” Applejack added. “So don’t you dare go blaming yourself.”
Twilight choked out a laugh. “Who else is there to blame?”
“It was an accident,” said Applejack firmly. “No ifs or buts about it.”
Twilight winced. She had seen those powerful jaws come smashing down. Heard the crunch of bone, seen the wet viscera slopping from the carnivore’s jaws onto the forest floor. Brain matter, slick and grey beneath her hooves. Slick as tears as she screamed and pleaded no, not again, trying and failing to put another broken doll back together.
A hoof under her chin, a pair of stern blue eyes. “It was nopony’s fault.”
“Rarity, I…” Twilight hung her head. “Did you read what she wrote about me?”
“No, darling, and nor should you have,” Rarity said sternly. “Fluttershy was suffering.”
“Suffering because she thought I—”
“Enough, Twi,” Applejack cut in. “Let’s not go down that path again.”
Silence descended again. The same silence that had dominated Twilight’s life for months now. Never broken by the sound of wingbeats, the distant thrum of a sonic rainboom. The husky laugh she had learned to love so much.
The silence had subsumed her, and now it had claimed Fluttershy too. How many of them would fall before the silence was satisfied? How many lives would be claimed by the void Rainbow left behind?
Applejack cleared her throat. “Listen, the three of us have been talking, and we think…we all think that you need a change of scenery. All of us do. I’ve spoken to Mac, and he’s willing to handle the farm for a while. And Pinkie’s going to take a leave of absence; Cheese is coming to town to handle the next few birthdays. And Rares—”
“—I’m opening a new store in Las Pegasus, Twilight,” Rarity said. “And all of us are going to go and handle the opening.”
“I…no,” Twilight said woodenly, finally tearing her eyes away from the wooden box that held all that was left of her friend. “I can’t leave. The…the castle, the school.”
“Can all wait,” Applejack said firmly. “None of us handled this well.”
Twilight looked down. Nopony could say her name anymore.
“Handled losing Rainbow well,” Applejack said, her voice cracking on the word. “And now…poor Fluttershy. We should have come together, but we fell apart.”
“Some further than others,” said Rarity softly, eyes on the coffin again.
“But we’re not doing that again. We’re all going to Las Pegasus, and we’re taking the whole crew. Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo are coming along for the ride, and we couldn’t leave AB behind. And we’re bringing Angel Bunny, and Tank too. The whole family rooming together.” Applejack’s voice lowered. “We’re going to fix this, Twilight.”
Twilight sniffed so hard she began to cough. “But I — I’ve been trying to fix it.”
Rarity nudged her gently. Mopped at her tears with a silk handkerchief she produced from seemingly nowhere. “Fix it the real way. Not by becoming the Alicorn of Necromancy and building voodoo dolls.”
Twilight’s sob turned to a laugh halfway out. “That sounds like…like something she would have…”
“Like Rainbow would have said,” Rarity finished for her. “Yes. I’m trying to do that more. To say things she would say, to talk about her. She isn’t gone, and nor is Fluttershy. We’re going to remember them, Twilight. The way they were.”
“The way they really were,” Applejack amended, as concerned for the truth as always. “Before the end. No hospitals, no crazy journals. Just Rainbow and Fluttershy, as themselves.”
Slowly, very slowly, Twilight nodded. The others exchanged a smile over her head, but she saw it and felt it warm something deep inside her chest, something she’d thought too small and broken to ever feel warm again.
And with her friends on either side of her, shoring her up, for the first time in a long time, Twilight began to feel like things might be okay. Not now. But maybe someday.
“Okay, everypony!” Pinkie cried from the front of the room, beside the coffin. Her eyes were watering already, but she was still bravely trying to hold back the tears. “It’s time to start the party. It’s a bit different from most of the ones I plan, but it’s still going to be a party. For Fluttershy.”
“For Fluttershy,” the others chorused, and then Fluttershy’s chorus of birds dutifully began to sing the sweet, lilting tune that had always been her favourite.
