A lot happened that fall.
She got her first scar, when that fucker Whiplash snarled and kicked her and sent her crashing down the metal stairs leading up to their apartment. She wrote in her notebook a hundred thousand ways in which a pony named Slip Dash died, and she got suspended again when Fast Clip stole her book from her backpack, ripped the pages up and tossed them over the baseball field like confetti, so she knocked out some of his teeth.
Fine. Whatever. That gave her more time alone and time with her novels. Time to draw and write and dream the day away, until her mother would return with too many bags to count in her hooves yet even more under her eyes, and she would look at her in a way that she couldn’t quite figure out.
One night it rained, and she wandered the town in her one and only jacket with the hood drawn up tight. She wandered to the field and broke into the varsity team’s equipment room and stole Fast Clip’s baseball bat. On her way over to his apartment (so she could break his windows since he lived on the first floor), she crossed the baseball field and paused when she noticed someone sitting on the bleachers.
A mare was sitting about halfway up behind home plate, crying her eyes out.
“Hey!” she shouted.
The crying mare snapped her head up.
“You!’
“Me?”
“Yeah!”
They stared at each other in the damp and rundown field, illuminated by the field lights glowering over them.
“Why are you crying?”
“What?”
“Why are you crying?!”
“What?”
She unfurled her wings and began crossing the field. “I said, why are you crying?”
The other mare sniffed. “I’m not!”
“You are! I can tell from here!”
“Well… Why do you have a bat?” Her eyes widened. “Are you going to kill me?”
She balked at that. “No! Why would I kill you?”
“I don’t know! Why are you out here at midnight with a baseball bat?”
“Why are you crying on the bleachers?”
She drew to a stop just in front of home plate and looked up at the stands. The other mare stared at her through a pair of watery green eyes. Next to her was a spilled box of chocolates: each piece laying upturned and disheveled across the stands. “What’s that all over your face? Why does it look so bad?”
“Because makeup runs when you cry, you idiot,” she sniffed. “Have you never worn makeup before?”
“No? Why should I? Why were you crying?”
“I wasn’t crying!”
“You–” She worked her jaw and growled. “You just said you were!”
“It’s none of your business!” cried the other mare.
She flared her wings and marched around home plate to climb the bleachers. “Well it is now! Because I have the bat!” She raised the bat to the sky like she was summoning a deity.
The other mare was unimpressed and continued to sulk. “We know each other,” she muttered. “Regrettably.”
She stared blankly at her.
“We have History together with Mr. Dustworth.”
“Oh!” She twirled the bat in her hooves. “He’s cool. He doesn’t ask me for a note when I’m late and he doesn’t report me either when I ditch. You’re, uh–”
“You don’t know me, I made sure not to ever speak to you,” she replied.
“Right. But you know me, huh?”
“Of course, everyone in this city knows Disaster Daring Do.”
Daring grinned. “I prefer Danger Daring myself!”
“I think disaster is more apt.”
Daring bent over and swept some of the excess pieces of chocolate off the bench. “I don’t know what apt means.”
The crying mare grunted and turned away from her. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you, they might suspend me too.”
Daring picked up the chocolate box’s cover. The brand was some Prench name she couldn’t pronounce. They sold bigger boxes, but they also made smaller bars that were easy to stuff into her pockets when the convenience store cashier was distracted. “This stuff’s expensive…”
“And he didn’t want it…”
The gears began churning in Daring’s head. “Ohhhh. You got denied from prom, huh?”
“You wouldn’t get it.”
“Huh?” Daring blinked. “What makes you say that?”
The mare dried her eyes with the back of her hoof. “You– You just… You seem like you wouldn’t care.” Her glare softened a bit. “Sorry.”
“I mean. I don’t. I just… Don’t get it.” She used the edge of her bat to prod at the upturned box lid. “I don’t get what makes you want to… ask someone to do that.”
The other mare wrinkled her nose. “You never liked someone?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve never… Had feelings about someone? Like, felt a connection? Wanted to kiss them? Ask them out? Thought someone was pretty?”
Daring looked the other mare over. Her purple coat was damp from the rain. Tears had ruined her makeup, her mane looked unkempt and a little damp from the rain, and her cheeks looked red and puffy. She looked… like a pony.
Was she supposed to look like something else?
Daring thought hard. She tried to picture herself asking someone to prom. Who would she want to ask? Someone she liked, right? Well… who did she like? Was she meant to look for something in their eyes? Their height? Their voice?
“Uh.”
“You… You’ve never felt any of that? Like, at all?”
Daring set her bat down. “Hm.” She thought about some of her favorite books, and how some of them would feature love stories. She never paid them much mind, since she was always more invested in the action and adventure parts than the sappy kissy-kissy parts, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she was never really sure what the two characters saw in each other.
If the author said they liked each other, then sure. But beyond that, how was she meant to know what it meant to like someone?
“Look. I… When I had my first boyfriend, I thought he was hot. He had this beard-thing going on, and his mane was kind of messy, but his abs… Woof.”
Daring blinked.
“You’ve never felt that way about a stallion?”
“No?”
“...What about a mare? I mean, mares can be sexy in their own way.”
Daring gagged at that word. “No! It’s not that! I just… I don’t think I’ve ever thought about ponies like that before.”
The other mare widened her eyes. “Woah. Really?”
“Yeah! Really!”
They stared at each other, both shocked by this revelation.
“...Whiplash was right, there is something wrong with me,” Daring muttered.
“What?! No there isn’t! I mean– I don’t think it’s wrong to not feel something towards other ponies! Look, I… I heard from some friends that there’s a couple of ponies out there who don’t get any of those types of feelings unless they’re for someone they already know. So, like, they don’t feel love towards strangers at all, but they can feel that way towards closer friends.”
“I… I don’t know. I never thought about this before.” She looked up at the clouds dotting the sky and began to chew her cheek. “Sorry. Uh… I should go. Sorry for… Bothering you.”
Daring stood up and began to descend the bleachers, still thinking.
“H-Hey!” The other mare stood up and called after her. “Uh. I’m… I’m Cheerilee.”
Daring nodded. “Thanks?”
“Sorry for…” Cheerilee gestured vaguely.
Daring shrugged.
“You forgot your bat?”
“It’s not mine.”
They stared at each other for a while longer, neither understanding the other, before Daring turned and left the field. She went home and snuck back into her room before digging out her journal, turning to a fresh page.
There was once a King and a Queen who loved each other. Because… Because….
“Because…” Daring set her pen down and frowned. “I… What the fuck is love?!”
A lot more happened that fall.
Daring found herself caught in between her love for chaos and hunger for knowledge, and did her best to keep both needs satisfied. She snuck into parties and knocked drunk creeps onto their back, she stayed late at office hours chatting with her history professor. She used permanent markers to draw crude figures on the whiteboards and spent months perfecting a story for her creative writing class that blew everyone else out of the water (suck it, Zesty).
And then her mom died. And everything seemed to change after that.
Her dad sent a very worded letter expressing his sincerest apologies for her loss and how wonderful a mare she had been. It spelled her name wrong. The funeral gathering was small, but Cheerilee stuck with her throughout, casting reassuring glances in her direction as much as she could.
Her aunts moved in afterwards to help, and eventually they took Daring under her wing. Not much changed in her life thanks to their help: she was able to keep attending the Community College, she didn’t have to move or leave or find a second job.
But something in herself changed.
She shed the ‘disaster’ portion of her name like a snake shed its skin, and instead she threw herself whole-heartedly into writing and studying. The swing in her behavior was shocking and drastic for everyone involved, but Daring didn’t care.
At least, that’s what she told herself.
“Ugh… If this is how they expect us to teach math, then no wonder the average intelligence in Equestria among youth is plummeting.” Cheerilee flipped a page in her textbook with a sigh.
“Uh, actually, I think it must be doing better since you aged out of that demographic.”
“Shut up!”
Daring stuck her tongue out. She leaned back against the tree and gazed at the baseball bat beside her. Cheerilee had apparently kept it after Daring abandoned it all those years ago, and now it seemed to follow them around when they hung out. Sometimes it just felt good to have it in her hooves, to take a few swings with it at nothing.
Cheerilee sighed and shut her book, pushing it aside and rolling onto her back to stare at the sky. “The more I learn about education, the less I want to do it.”
“Then just don’t be a teacher.”
Cheerilee scoffed. “That’s easy for you to say, miss stay-at-home-writer.”
Daring ignored that and opened her notebook to doodle in the margins.
“Anyways. What’s next for you?”
“Uh…” Daring’s pen danced around the page, finishing up a drawing she had started in her statistics class. It featured a pony sitting on a large staircase, in front of a worn brick building. Their head was in their hooves, tears dripping onto the stairs below them. “What do you mean?”
She glanced up over the edge of her book and caught Cheerilee’s gaze. Her friend’s eyes were half-lidded, lazy almost. Quiet, tired, yet still full of life and joy. “Y’know,” she said. “It’s our last year here before the transfer window opens. You going to apply somewhere?”
“Uh…” Daring found herself wandering through Cheerilee’s eyes. She walked past her old apartment, staring up at the window where she could see her mother sitting and crying at the dinner table. She passed the baseball field where they had first encountered one another. But past home plate… There was nothing. “I dunno. Maybe.” She shook her head in shock, yanking herself back to the grassy yard in front of the campus’ main hall. “I’m guessing you are, though?”
“Mm.” Cheerilee rolled over onto her stomach. “Going to have to, if I ever want to land a teaching job somewhere.”
Daring chewed her lip in thought. “Makes sense, I guess. I haven’t really thought about what I’m doing next. I don’t even think I’ve thought about what’s happening tomorrow.”
“Well… Nothing wrong with going one day at a time, I guess.” Cheerilee sighed, her eyes softer than they usually were. “I was worried about you for a while. I’m… Glad you’re doing better.”
“...Me too.”
Daring looked down at her notebook, at the drawing. Then back up at Cheerilee. Then down at her notebook again. She hadn’t just drawn any mare… Daring had absentmindedly drawn Cheerilee.
Sitting on the front steps.
Crying her eyes out.
Something kicked at her chest from within. Her breath caught in her throat and her heart beat a little faster. Fuck. It was something… strange. Something she hadn’t ever felt before. She watched as Cheerilee smiled and stretched, opening her textbook again. “Hey… I’m always here for you if you need anything.”
“T-Thanks.”
Daring turned a page in her book, but her mind had ground to a halt. It was caught up with her drawing, and of the earlier image of Cheerilee laying on her back, looking at her in that strange, calming way. Did it mean something?
It had to.
Was this…
Was she…
She took her pencil and wrote the only thought that entered her mind: I don’t know what happens tomorrow. But I want to find it with you.
“So, uh… How’ve you been?”
“Well… A lot’s happened this fall.” Daring cleared her throat and looked down at her hooves. “Got some new scars… I think I lost some old ones too, actually. Hard to tell with the way magic and curses work. Uh, I figured out that thing with my publisher, so hopefully we can actually start getting the book out there… Oh, I finally got that ancient battle mask I was telling you about authenticated. So that was cool.”
Daring stared out onto the baseball field. The entire field had been redesigned thanks to some educational grant the city had just gotten, and they had even installed a bigger cage around home plate to stop balls from flying into the stands instead of relying on volunteer unicorns to try and catch them with magic before anyone got hit.
Her bat (well… Fast Clip’s bat, but Daring had owned it longer than he did by now) sat beside her, still in fairly good condition from its relative lack-of use. She was amused that Cheerilee still had it.
“That is cool!” Cheerilee tightened her scarf and giggled. “Didn’t you say that pot was going to challenge our entire fundamental view of Equestrian history?”
“I may have been embellishing a bit.”
“You? Daring ‘Drama’ Do? Never!”
They laughed, but Daring felt her throat tighten a bit.
It was on this very field when she had her first crisis of faith all those years ago. The crushing realization that she didn’t feel love the same others seemed to, that her understanding of relationships was practically zero.
It was so much back then.
It was so much now.
Because Cheerilee had been right, and the longer Daring knew her, the more she began to understand. There was even a word for it now. Demi-romantic. Unable to feel romantic feelings, unless they had already established a connection.
In all their years of knowing each other, every day made it more clear.
It had started that one fall years ago, but Daring couldn’t deny what it was anymore. As each and every year passed it only grew stronger. Armed with academic access she threw herself into searching for something, anything that might help convince her otherwise. But everything pointed to one singular thing.
She knew what it meant when her heart beat quicker, when her wings began to flutter and tremble, and when she would feel a lingering sadness whenever she was alone. She kept looking: over her shoulder and down at the ground. Like maybe the answer was in the bleachers. Maybe there would be some kind of solace in the empty stands around her. But there wasn’t. There was nothing.
It was all so much. It was all too much.
Because it hurt.
Daring summoned the strength to smile. She wanted to speak her mind, to open her mouth and let the words flow like water. Fuck, she wanted to let her know. She wanted to let her know how she wanted to find every single tomorrow with her. To let her know how long this had been tearing her up inside.
But she couldn’t. Maybe not ever.
Because the mare next to Cheerilee wrapped a wing around her, and Cheerilee blushed and leaned into their embrace. “I don’t know much about history… Is that important?”
“Blossom, you silly.”
Blossomforth chuckled. “That’s why you love me.”
Cheerilee didn’t protest. Daring almost wished she would.
Because in the time she had spent figuring herself out, the world decided to keep moving on.
Because Cheerilee wasn’t a psychic, and Daring wasn’t someone who could change the past.
Because in a few more months, Blossomforth and Cheerilee would marry.
And then, Daring would be right back where she started. A scared mare on her own.
Watching from the bleachers.
