“You know, Shimmer, I didn’t take Dash for the literate type.”

Adagio leaned against the open doorway of the Shoe Boxer break-room, where they found Rainbow Dash sitting tense and upright on the couch with her face physically buried in some schlocky YA novel. One of A. K. Yearling’s wastes of paper, by the looks of it.

Shimmer completely ignored Adagio’s snark – how rude! – and instead scrambled to her friend’s side. “Rainbow! Please tell me you’re okay!”

Dash scooted away from Shimmer, her face still entombed between those pages. “Y… Yeah, of course I’m okay! Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“Oh, thank Celestia…” Shimmer breathed a sigh of relief, like a gullible little guppy. “It’s– Someone got their hands on Equestrian magic… –again. They got Pinkie and they got me, and I– I wanted to make sure they didn't get you, too!”

“Well, like I said, I'm doing… awesome!”, Dash insisted, still hiding her face.

“That's great!” Shimmer awkwardly wrapped her arms around Dash, who was too intent on holding up her book to reciprocate. “That means you can help us track down whoever did this!”

“Oooh…,” Dash said, wincing. “Uh… sorry… I… can't. Still got a couple hours before I'm free…”

Shimmer pulled back with the most delightful face of utter bafflement. She may well have been too confused to keep crying, in the brief window before the use of words came limping back to her. “Are… What? Someone’s running amok with magic and you’re… What? What?”

“I'm really sorry, but I– I can't just leave. The store, I mean. Not this room…”

“…I can’t– I can’t believe Miss Spring Breakdown doesn’t want to run off to take down a b–…” Shimmer lost the spirit to finish her sentence, but Adagio couldn’t help but snort at the words she was so sure would come next: ‘bad guy’.

“ …Yeah…”

Shimmer’s shoulders slumped. Adagio couldn't be certain whether she was still buying this bullshit or not, but she was clearly disappointed, either way.

Perhaps it was time to unmask the blue blowhard. From what Adagio remembered of her, Dash was a belligerent loudmouth with zero impulse control. Five years ago, her attention-seeking personality almost saw her own garage-band break up with minimal actual magical interference from the sirens whatsoever. “You should at least look a lady in the eye when you turn her down, Rainboom.”

“No, uh, this book’s really good– Wait.” Suddenly, an anger more like lightning than Shimmer’s inner fire shocked Dash’s system. “Hey! I know that voice!”

“Took you long enough.”

Dash ripped the book away from her face, except for the two sodden pages that tore themselves out, glued to her cheeks by yet more tears. “You…! …Siren!”

“…I have a name, you know. Adagio Dazzle. Don't tell me you've forgotten that easily?”

The shoe-store clerk ignored Adagio’s remark completely. “I bet you did this to me! –To us,” she amended, noticing the inflammation of Shimmer’s face. “Didn't you?!”

She tried to peel the pages off her face, but they crumpled into wads of inky pulp in her fingers. Still, she threw them at Adagio – and with a hell of a throwing arm. Despite her efforts to step aside, they still met their mark, and even stung a little through the siren’s puffy coat.

Adagio said nothing, instead focusing on getting the ruined paper off her clothes before the ink stained them. In any case, she had no reason to believe Dash would listen to her, no matter what she said.

Shimmer was going to set her straight, anyways. “No, Rainbow, she… She didn't.” Quieter, she added, “I checked…”, and started weeping all over again.

Dash made no apology for her accusation, nor her assault. “Then why’s she here?! With you?” All things considered, she held her composure remarkably better than Shimmer. Her anger seemed to be keeping everything but the streams of tears down her face in check. Perhaps other strong emotions would override this default sadness the same way.

Adagio crossed her arms in performative indignation. “Why, at this point, it’s to clear my good name. Every Rainboom I stumble across seems to think I don’t have better things to do than to magically manipulate random peoples’ emotions.”

That got Dash bristling even harder. “Because you did that! A lot! For a really long time!”

“Yes, I suppose I did.” The key was to react as flatly as possible when one’s hypocrisy was pointed out, to offer neither an argument nor an apology. The subtext: ‘Yes, and what are you going to do about it?’ It left the self-righteous feeling deliciously ineffectual.

But it wasn’t Dash who answered the challenge, despite how apoplectically-red she got. It was Shimmer, stepping between them and saying, very firmly, “Adagio, stop. If you’re going to harass my friends, you can just– Go home.”

Adagio flinched. “…Pardon?”

“You can go back to whatever you were doing before.” She wiped the tears off her face like they were nothing more than the morning’s eye-crust. They were replaced with new ones in seconds, but the gesture filled her with conviction all the same. “It’s fine. We’ll take it from here.”

“You’re not supposed to be back here, anyways,” muttered Dash.

But Adagio didn’t leave.

When it became apparent to Shimmer that she wasn’t hearing Adagio’s heavy boots clomping away, she said, without even looking at the siren, “You got what you came for, didn’t you? You wanted to clear your name. Consider it cleared, then: you’re not the villain today.” Her shoulders jerked with a stifled heave. “–Just an asshole…”

There it was again. A different note of that same solutionless despair. It played Adagio’s heartstrings so tenderly that she couldn’t think of a less cliché metaphor.

Except, this time, the problem she wanted to solve was Adagio, wasn’t it? And not the kind of problem you solve by disposing of it, if she was still so torn up inside after telling her to scram.

“…Shimmer.”

“Go.”

“Shimmer.”

“Please, don’t.”

“Sunset Shimmer, I did not get what I came for.” Adagio made a show of scrutinizing her nails, refusing to look Shimmer in the eye no matter how much her sense of diplomacy told her it was the correct move. “As you might recall, I told you at the food court that leaving you in this state would make me look like a banshee.”

– “…make you look like what you are…”, grumbled the peanut gallery, through gritted teeth –

Shimmer’s retort was a little less bark, a little more bite. “Well, you’re out of the public eye, now.”

“And yet, I still look like a bitch.” Her hand dropped limply to her side.

– “…because you are one…” –

“Adagio, what are you actually trying to say?”

Another flinch from Adagio. This was unbecoming of a mare as dignified as she. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t always mean what you say.”

“…I have been known to tell a lie here or there, I suppose. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know, I– Clearly I’m wrong, but I had– I had this feeling. That maybe you actually wanted to help, for– I don’t know why. But you could have just driven off and left me in the parking lot. There wasn’t anybody watching you there. And you didn’t. Why?”

– “And why do you care whether we think you’re a bitch?” –

“…Cutting right to the point, I see.” And yet, for all her claims of sight, Adagio could not bring herself to look up. She did not want to see the rings of ice around the fire in Shimmer’s eyes.

“Please, Adagio.” It wasn’t ‘please’ the way Adagio said ‘please’ – ‘please don’t waste my time’ – even though, by all means, she had the upper hand in this exchange. It was an earnest plea from someone who really wanted Adagio to look her in the eye. “Just give me a straight answer.”

But Dash answered for her, before Adagio could open her mouth. “Come on, isn’t it obvious? She just wants to snatch the magical doohickey for herself so she can get back to messing with people’s emotions! The thing she does.”

Shimmer seemed to be considering the words of her counsel very seriously. “I… guess I was too optimistic…”

“Oh, that’s it, isn’t it?”, Dash laughed, through her tears. “Bus-ted. Well, you know what, Dazzhole? You can go f–”

Dash was silenced by the golden fingers pinching her lips shut. It was a technique long practiced on Adagio’s sisters, whose bickering in their hungry years could go on for hours if Adagio didn’t mediate.

“Rainbow Dash,” Adagio enunciated, “I don’t need a magic stone – or whatever it is that assails you – to manipulate anyone’s emotions. I’ve been cracking stonier hearts than yours for centuries, with and without the tatters of choral magic that remained to us on our arrival. Now, I’m going to trust you to shut up and permit me my own explanation, because if you don’t, I’ll show you just how fragile that fickle drum in your chest really is.”

She released Dash from her grip. Rubbing her muzzle, she said nothing, but gave the siren a glare almost as spiteful as one of Aria’s.

“…Go on,” urged Shimmer.

“Sunset Shimmer, I want you to call to mind one other thing I told you before: that it reflects poorly on both of us as nemeses for you to be rendered so pathetic.”

“…You’re not my…–”

“–Which is why I intend to help you catch the culprit, restore you to your former worthiness, and grind whoever it is under the heel of my boot.” Adagio finished her declaration with a stomp so resolute the coffee-pot on the counter clattered on its plate. “I insist.”

At last, with her intent declared, Adagio was finally able to meet Shimmer’s eyes.

Whatever fire Adagio might have expected in them was gone. There was a silence to accompany its absence, which stretched seconds into minutes.

Dash then broke this silence with an inexplicably-smug, “Ohhhhh, I get it.”

“Get what? You say that as though you still believe I'm up to something.”

“I mean… you are.” She put her hands on her hips. It was amazing just how cockily she could grin with tears streaming out of her eyes. “I just had the wrong idea!”

“It would seem you still do.”

“Nah, nah, nah. My gaydar doesn’t lie. You're one-hundred percent crushing on Sunset. Is this ‘nemesis’ deal how sirens flirt or something…? I mean, me and AJ got something sorta similar goin on, so I get it, but…?”

Adagio clamped down on the third full-body flinch she felt coming on. She could not afford to lose her composure here, no matter how outrageous the accusations leveled against her were.

But she did need to retort, lest her silence be construed as an admission of guilt. “Please. If I were attempting to seduce Little Miss Shimmer, I assure you my methods would be nowhere near so circumspect: an insincere apology for past behavior, followed by ever so many sweet little compliments. ‘Oh, the way your hair catches the light like flame in the evening sun.’ ‘Oh, the crack of your smile warms me up like the crackling of logs on the fire.’ ‘Oh, the way you melt into my touch like you’ve come in from a long, hard life in the cold.’ That’s how the song and dance goes.”

Shimmer was silent, but the blush on her face indicated that Adagio’s words would have had the intended effect.

Dash snorted. “…You’ve really put a lot of thought into the moves you’d put on her.”

Adagio inspected her other set of nails this time. This was the limit; if she did it a third time, she wouldn’t have the plausible deniability that made her own brand of arrogance so intoxicatingly irritating. “Does it really come as a surprise that I would plan out how I might break my enemy’s heart from within?”

Before Dash could come up with a counterargument, however, Shimmer did something which Adagio could never have predicted.

She burst into laughter – laughter through tears, but laughter all the same. Or perhaps she was laughing so hard the nature of her tears changed completely.

Dash looked on with a confusion that soon faded back into magically-induced misery, and truth be told, Adagio wasn’t clear what she was laughing about either…

Except for the distinct note of mockery in-between her chuckles.

“…I fail to see what’s so funny, Shimmer.”

“Oh– I’m sorry, I just– I’m not trying to be mean, but– I never realized you could be such a cornball!” She tried to get ahold of herself, but like a plague, her mirth spread to her insolent friend, and now both of them were laughing.

At Adagio Dazzle.

“What do you mean?”, she very carefully did not demand. She just asked.

“I mean– Okay– Listen– Those lines would be sweet if you meant them– But oh sweet Celestia, literally everyone tries a fire metaphor with me, oh my god.”

Before Adagio could deride Shimmer for crying out to the divinities of two different worlds in the same breath (she’d only lived what, a decade in this world? and she’d already gone native) Dash affirmed, “She’s right!”, doubled over wheezing and clinging onto Sunset for support. On her free hand, she started counting, “Twilight, Pinkie, Trixie, pony Twilight, Wallflower…” She gave up on counting, but kept going. “Trixie again, me, pony Pinkie, Trixie a third time… It’s like a requirement! You gotta do it if you wanna get with her!”

There were a lot of questions raised by that list that Adagio did not have the time nor energy to inquire further into.

“I really don’t know why,” confessed Shimmer.

“It’s ‘cause you’re smokin’ hot!”

A stifled snort puffed out of Shimmer’s lips as she punched her alleged friend in the arm. “Shhhhut up, you dork!~”

Meanwhile, despite her efforts to remain composed, Adagio couldn’t help but shift on her feet. “Would that not play in my favor? Hackneyed as those particular turns of phrase may have been,” she reluctantly admitted, “they’d nevertheless allow me to follow the typical course and slip into your heart undetected.”

Shimmer fought off an entire new wave of laughter to retort, “I mean– No? Maybe for a little bit– But then the moment we hold hands–”

Ah. Right. The mind-reading magic Shimmer was weaponizing towards her self-righteous vigilantism. It seemed to require skin contact.

“…I think we’ve strayed from the matter at hand,” Adagio artlessly deflected. She was too… She wasn’t mad, or embarrassed. Just… annoyed. Yes. She was just momentarily irritated at Shimmer getting the better of her (just this once! in an utterly inconsequential battle of wits!), and that was putting her off her game. She continued, “We’ve yet to determine how, exactly, Dash fell under this sadness-spell.”

The sales clerk in question deflated, the wind vanishing from her sails, as Adagio’s words brought her back to the moment it set in. She stumbled back onto the couch and hid her face in her book again.

But she did talk. “I… don’t know, okay? One minute, I’m helping Tennis Match try on her new special-order sneakers; the next… I’m running back here so no one sees me crying for no reason like I’m twelve again.”

Adagio noted this ‘Tennis Match’ character as a name in her list of suspects, though she did not mark her as very likely. Adagio was more interested in the means at the moment, anyway, so she pursued her personal theory. “Did you drink anything around that time?”

Dash lowered the book and stared at the ceiling for a good long while before answering, “…I don’t know…”

“…You don’t know.”

“I mean… I might have taken a sip from this…” She patted the – in retrospect – very conspicuous half-gallon water bottle carabinered to her belt loop.

Ah-ha! “And there we have it. Someone poisoned your water.”

Dash shook her head. “Nah. I never let this bad boy out of my sight.” Unhooking the canister, she took a long pull of water. Not sounding any more depressed than before, she said, “Tastes normal to me…”

”…Nevermind, then. Shimmer, do you have any ideas?”

Taking a seat next to her friend, Shimmer asked, “Do you mind if I…?”

“Go for it.”

And as they held hands, the very moment that Shimmer locked fingers with Dash’s, her eyes flashed white.

This must have been what her ability looked like from the outside. What Shimmer was seeing, feeling, thinking, Adagio wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The airhead’s thoughts interested her about half as much as the bubbles where Sonata’s brains should be.

No more than fifteen seconds after it started, the light faded, and a look of determination set upon Shimmer’s brow. “There was water on the counter. It started right when Rainbow put her elbow in it.”

“…I thought it was just condensation off my bottle…”

Adagio hummed in thought. “Then my poisoning theory isn’t entirely off-base. It must be the kind that can be absorbed through the skin.” She was, unfortunately, reminded of an affair with the mob back during Prohibition, involving a steamy bath and the lover she found lying in it. “But that also would imply our culprit planted it there while Dash was away, just like when you set down your beverage. There’s a camera watching this place, isn’t there?”

“…Yeah, there is.”

“All the stores have one,” Shimmer confirmed, but she frowned. “But… it’s all centrally– Mall security handles it. –All of it. I don’t know if they’d let us in.”

“Wait, did I forget to tell you?”, asked Rainbow, overcome with a sudden excitement.

“Tell me what?”

“Junie got the job!”

“She did–? Wait, you mean–?!”

“Yeah!”

Adagio stepped into their exchange with a, “Pardon me; who’s this ‘Junie’?”

Suddenly remembering that an enemy under truce was in the room, her enthusiasm quickly cooled. “Junie’s one of my other g–… one of my friends. She used to work at the movie theatre, but now she’s on the security team.”

Sunset spared a little chuckle.

“Hm?”, Adagio queried.

“Oh, there’s just… history. She didn’t always want to be on that side of the camera.”

Dash got out her phone. Its sky-blue case was scuffed all over and it was cracked to hell and back. It was a surprise the touchscreen even worked. “I’ll let her know you’re on your way.”

“Aren’t you coming?”, asked Shimmer.

“I… I can’t.” She hung her head in shame. “I want to, but… I’m kinda still on the clock –and, okay, I just… can’t be seen like… this.” She gestured at the mess that was her face.

There was something or other Adagio had in mind to highlight her cowardice, but Shimmer cut her off. “I totally understand.”

“–But hey… If you need me for a friendship laser septablast (or if your new girlfriend turns into an even worse bitch than she already is),” – she unsubtly pointed her thumb at Adagio – “call me. I’ll be there, tears or no tears.”

Sunset Shimmer gave Rainbow Dash a deep, warm-looking hug. “I know. Thank you so much.”

Author's Note

To be clear, gaydars aren't real. While it is true that there are common personality traits that might suggest the possibility of homosexuality, it's all just vibes-based bullshit in the end.
That said, Rainbow Dash is absolutely the type to believe in a gaydar.

I actually had Rainbow Dash just say "Gayyyyyyyyyyyy" originally, but that didn't quite make sense with the way I see the Equestrian and Pedestrian worlds being just way less homophobic in general than ours. Obviously, she wouldn't have meant anything insulting by it, being a huge lesbian herself, but ironic homophobia doesn't really scan in a world that barely has unironic homophobia.