Rediscovery

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

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"Guess what, Twilight?" Spike asked his phone while he balanced a cardboard container of drinks in one hand while holding a bag. His cellphone was propped against his other ear in his offhand.

"What is it Spike? I'm a little preoccupied with Spike!" He could tell, the sound of thumping and banging was audible from where he was standing.

"Well, if you don't want to come downstairs and let me in, I could just drink both of these milkshakes by myself." He smirked when he heard a door slam upstairs. There was a rapid thudding of her footfalls coming down the stairs and then the front door flew open.

Twilight looked like a mess. Her skirt was covered in grass stains. Her blouse was covered in grass stains. Her glasses were askew and her hair more resembled a frazzled mop instead of a neat pony-tail.

"Mine!" She grabbed one of the milkshakes out of their carrier and drew on the straw. A second later she pulled the straw out of the shake, coated in vanilla ice cream, and grabbed the other milkshake from the container. "Nope, this one's mine."

"Yeah, thanks for clearing that up." He accepted the vanilla milkshake while she switched the straws, not saying a word.

This was hardly her weirdest quirk. She was hardly the first person he'd met who was concerned about germs.

"I wasn't expecting you to come over until after I'd taken Spike to the trainers, so I'm kind of a mess." It had taken forever to convince her that he wasn't going to think any less of her for being less than perfect. He didn't know when he started getting through to her, but she didn't sound apologetic about looking like she wasn't a porcelain doll anymore.

"Trainers?" Spike walked in after Twilight stepped back.

The house looked a mess, too. Like a pack of wild dogs had torn through it.

Or one hyperactive puppy.

"Yeah. Obedience training and service animal training." She started upstairs and he followed.

"Alright, umm... What's service animal training?" She opened the door to her room.

It didn't bear describing the room itself, merely that at the epicenter of the destruction sat a perfectly content puppy, happily wagging his tail.

"It's, well, it's special training some dogs get to be registered as service animals for people with special needs. It instills behaviors meant to help regulate difficulties in a disabled persons life. Like comforting someone having a seizure or getting doors for people who aren't able to do so, like if they're stuck in a wheelchair." She was speaking in an offhand manner, like she were speaking of the weather.

"Okay. But why does Spike need that training? Nobody in your family is disabled." The dog perked up at his name, bounding towards Spike. Human Spike.

He hesitated for just a moment, certain he'd read something about this being a bad idea before he bent down and scratched the dog behind the ears.

Something of momentous import happened, the likes of which would never more be repeated.

The dog wagged its tail.

Or not.

What, did you think something like an explosion would occur, or matter, for some inexplicable reason, cancelling itself out? The chronological signature of every atom is measurably different, but the atoms themselves are functionally identical beyond a certain point.

What does the universe care about a duplicate?

And so a poorly explained sci-fi plot twist failed to come to be as Spike pet Spike, who was licking Spike.

"It's for me. I thought I mentioned it a while back? Or maybe I thought about mentioning it, the two kind of are interchangeable I guess." Twilight started wringing her hands when Spike looked to her, confusion clear on his face. "I have AS. Asperger's Syndrome?"

Spike just shrugged, ignorant of its significance.

"It's part of the autism spectrum." She was getting more nervous the longer she spoke.

"I don't really get it, Twilight. I go to class with a few autistic kids, and you don't act anything like them." He picked Spike up and handed him to Twilight, who started hugging the dog like a lifeline.

"It's not normal autism, I mean, no autism is normal but this is different. I don't..." She sat down on her bed, Spike, the dog, rolling in her lap and begging for a belly rub. "I don't understand people. Give me math, science, even music and I can pick it up without really thinking about it. It just clicks. But people, they make me anxious and nervous and frustrated! Because they won't make up their minds or they're always changing them so they can make the same mistakes over and over and over again! And that's just other people."

"And other times I get so caught up on something that I think is important and I can't do it. Or I can't do it right. And I focus on it exclusively and make myself a nervous wreck over it. If I don't find some way to fix it, or if someone else doesn't derail it, it turns into a full-blown panic attack before I have a nervous breakdown." One hand was rubbing the belly of a very happy puppy. Her other was nervously twisting the blanket underneath of her.

"When... When my parents finally had it diagnosed a few years ago there was a lot of shouting. From my mom. She blamed my dad, she blamed the doctors who vaccinated me when I was a little kid because she bought into the whole scare-tactic the anti-vaccination groups were selling. I think she blamed herself, too. Dad though, he just, he just sat down with me and talked. He asked me what I wanted." She looked to her left, where Spike sat down. He still looked confused, but he wasn't interrupting her.

She didn't think she'd be able to keep going if he did.

"I told him I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be able to talk to my classmates and not feel frustrated over how pointless the small talk felt, or that I didn't want to be upset when I asked them a simple question with a yes or no answer and they started telling me their life story. I guess dad felt really bad that the one thing I asked for, he couldn't do for me. A week later though, he signed Garble up for the service dog training." Thinking about the great red dog left her eyes watering, but she started this and she intended to see it through.

"We didn't think he'd take to it. Garble wasn't a puppy back then, he wasn't old yet though. And he was stubborn. His training took a little longer than normal, but he passed it. He was supposed to be with me when I went to school, so I could focus on him instead of... Whatever was causing my anxiety." She looked over at Spike, seeing a purple blur of his hoodie instead of the sharp gaze of his eye. She couldn't bring herself to look him in the face.

She didn't want to see what he thought of her.

"I miss him, Spike. And I feel like I'm replacing him and I feel terrible and-" She was cut off when a pair of arms wrapped around her, freezing for a moment before she melted into the hug.

"You're perfect, Twilight. Don't-don't let anyone tell you otherwise, you got that?" His voice was thick, like he was choking out the words. "Don't let anyone ever tell you you're not perfect!"

Her arms wrapped around him, squeezing so hard it nearly hurt.

He didn't care that she was different. He didn't care that she had difficulty understanding people, or that she was smarter than him or anything else.

He was her friend.

She didn't know why his acceptance of her, his acceptance of her flaws and problems left her silently shedding tears as she held him.

But whatever it was left her feeling like she'd shed a weight around her neck she'd gotten so used to carrying she hadn't even noticed.

Author's Notes:

Anyone remember Lesson Zero? Twilight's actions in that episode may be a bit extreme, but her reactions throughout follow a painfully familiar thought process with a drastically skewed priority optimization not found in a 'Normally functioning mind'.