Refusal

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

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Getting out of geometry as the last class of his day, Spike had expected to find Twilight in the library or waiting by the doors to walk home.

She'd been in neither location.

Nor was she answering any texts.

Spike knew he didn't really need to worry about Twilight. She was a strong girl, when she wanted to be.

It didn't stop him from doing so anyway.

He'd considered checking a few of the classrooms, maybe asking some of the teachers.

He'd considered it. Then he decided to not bother wasting time and just knocked on the door to her lab.

He didn't get an answer. He hadn't been expecting one.

The room was empty. Not bare, but the papers were missing, Spike was missing, Twilight had been in here recently.

And moved everything important out.

That... Was a bad sign.

She didn't like rearranging her work or living space unless she deemed its configuration flawed. Too cramped, too wide, this needed to be closer to that or some such thing.

He wasn't quite certain of the implications, he just knew it wasn't good.

He was halfway through a text when his phone started vibrating.

'On Bus to canterlot high. Couldn't hear phone.'

That... Was odd.

Twilight had never mentioned an interest in visiting Canterlot High School.

Spike looked around the room for clues. After going over it a few times, he saw something.

'What are the friendship games?'

He'd run past the point in the timeline he had been around for. Or maybe the Friendship Games had been so blindingly ordinary it wasn't important.

'School friendship competition thing. Boring.'

Spike put his phone away and glanced around the room one more time.

Buses were already gone. The sports students were already gone.

He needed to find a teacher, ask if there were any more buses heading out today.

----

There were.

----

Spike grumbled as he stepped off the short bus.

The kids hadn't been a problem. He got on just fine with most of them.

The teacher chaperoning though?

The guy was a royal jerk. He spent more time yelling at a kid who was sitting still and not doing anything than paying attention to another boy who'd been half out a window.

Spike thought it would almost be worth the pain to trip him down the stairs getting off the bus.

But it wouldn't. Scales and blood ripping out of his hands while the authority figure was getting hurt? Probably a little too showy.

Canterlot High School, now that Spike was taking a moment to properly look at it...

Hadn't changed in the slightest.

He didn't see Twilight though. That could be a problem.

A big one.

He had no idea how she was going to react if everyone here recognized her.

"Twilight!" That was Cadence's voice. His head jerked to look at her. "You need to check in with the others."

He jogged over to her, breathing deeply at even that minor exertion.

"Oh Spike, you're here." Twilight sounded distracted, she was looking at the device she'd made.

It was supposed to detect and contain anomalies, or at least that's what he recalled her saying.

"You alright?"

"Yeah." She looked up, glancing around to notice that there was some distance between herself and everyone else. "No."

"What's up?" Everything he'd seen, everything he saw so far. He was getting more and more worried.

"It's... A lot." She was hesitating, putting her words together before she said them. "I... I don't want to be here, Spike."

That didn't surprise him. This kind of thing, it wasn't really her scene, being out in the center of attention.

"Cinch... I think she threatened me into competing. I filed an application to join an independent study group for advanced students last year. I'd still kind of like to go, but I'm not making it an absolute at the moment. She was holding it over my head, and getting in my face and she had Shining Armor there to tell me about how much he enjoyed the games four years ago." Twilight was curling in on herself as she spoke. Fiddling with her hands and twirling a bang as a means of covering her face.

And it was getting worse.

"And when I went to get on the bus to come here, the girls were... Just really mean. I think I offended them? But she kept mumbling at me, bad things. Even after we got here she wouldn't stop."

He left her alone for a day.

One day.

Just the one.

"Then I got into the school, the pendant was picking up on things. A lot of people here recognized me, Spike. They thought I was the other Twilight. It was... Nice. They were all greeting me and saying hello and how it was, how it was nice to see me again. Spike... I've got a question." She was glancing at him from the corner of her eye. She was nervous still, but less so.

"You're the only one who's spoken to me like that in years at Crystal Prep. Is that... Normal? Here I mean, or maybe the rest of the world. Is it normal for people to be so nice?" She took a few more steps after asking her question before she'd noticed that Spike had stopped.

He was looking at her with an expression she recognized. One she'd seen often enough in her own mirror.

Dejection. He looked like he'd failed something.

"It's normal Twilight." He caught up to her quickly enough and they continued to the auditorium. "Not for everyone, but most people out here will say hi, be happy to see you if they recognize you. Crystal Prep is just different."

Wrong. He'd noticed a week after he'd been enrolled, but there was something wrong with the place.

The normal students were aggressive and mean.

Twilight Sparkle, unassuming and nervous, was simply part of a minority of students who weren't concerned with making themselves look good.

Spike didn't think he was in either camp.

He always looked good, if he did say so himself.

Real good.