Rainbow Dash was not having a good weekend. It had started put okay, with plans in her head to enter the showcase, maybe roping Applejack and Rarity to join her on bass and a keyboard. They’d had some fun with that in middle school band and it would be neat to see if they could still jam with each other, especially if they could find someone to round them out on drums. She’d managed to get in a scrimmage with some of the guys and girls who were on the team last year too, and her team had totally kicked serious ass! And the cherry on top was being able to call out Sunset Shimmer on her games and make the tyrannical bully know that Rainbow was watching her; the others may have fallen for her act but Rainbow Dash knew that leopards didn’t change their spots. Her Friday had been great!

But then the text came, a message to not just her, but the other girls in her circle of reunited friends. Reading the words almost made her drop the phone, fear and anger lancing through her in equal parts.

-Girls, I need you to come over if you can. It’s an emergency.-

The message had been sent by Fluttershy.

Rainbow thundered up the driveway at a dead sprint, ignoring the painful burn in her lungs and the agony gouging deep into her side like a chunk of broken glass. She leapt over Rarity’s car hood in a move she would have crowed about under better circumstances, landing inches from a collision with Applejack as she was getting out of the passenger side.

“Consarnit, Rainbow!” she growled.

The athlete didn’t waste time with words—she hurled herself up the three familiar steps and didn’t even stop to ring the bell—she shouldered the door open, past Fluttershy's startled parents, and raced up the stairs three at a time.

She vaguely heard Rarity scolding her or Applejack apologizing for her downstairs. Getting to her oldest friend was more important than anything. Her fist banged sharply on Fluttershy’s bedroom door, the pattern of two and then three from their earliest days done as habit.

The door swung inward, Pinkie Pie pulling her in as she all but collapsed, barely able to breathe. “…Shy…Got here…fast as i could…what…emergency? …who did it..? …’ll break their face…”

Fluttershy frowned and handed her a half full water bottle. “Rainbow Dash, you didn’t run all the way here, did you? Oh dear.”

Rainbow Dash took it, guzzling the cool fluids and internally sighed in relief as it soothed the ragged feeling of her throat. “…Emergency…You don’t…say that for…no reason…you called…I came…”

“I didn’t mean for you to nearly hurt yourself to get here. It’s just…something happened today and you all need to hear about it.”

Applejack plopped herself down on the floor near the bed, and Rarity took time to close the door behind her before sitting on Fluttershy’s other side—the one not occupied by Rainbow’s panting upper half. Pinkie was entertaining herself by slowly spinning in Fluttershy’s desk chair, though even the pink party planner seemed a little worried and subdued—the way she wasn’t bouncing off the walls or saying much at all suggested just how concerned she was.

“What happened, darling?” Rarity put a comforting arm around the soft spoken girl’s shoulders. “You’ve been crying. Please, talk to us.”

“It’s…Something terrible happened today with Sunset Shimmer,” she admitted tearfully, and Rainbow saw red.

“WHAT?!” She was on her feet, swaying woozily. “I knew that bitch was playing another one of her games! Shitty people don’t change! They don’t magically accept friendship and love and become better people! I’ll fucking bury her up to her neck and use her head for soccer practice!”

“Rainbow…”

She was dimly aware of shouting, of strong hands on her arms trying to pull her back to the floor. “I fucking warned her—if she messed with my friends, I’d make her sorry!” She tried to shove Applejack out of her way, but the farmer used it to finally get her in a firm hold and force her to the ground.

“Rainbow…” the soft voice was louder this time.

“Let go of me, Applejack! I’m gonna finish what that first rainbow started with that ugly, she-demon bitch!”

“Rainbow Dash! Stop this right now!”

The entire room went silent, four pairs of eyes staring at Fluttershy. The timid girl blushed, and continued in a quieter volume. “Sunset Shimmer didn’t do anything to me. It’s what’s being done to her that I wanted to talk to you about. Sunset is being bullied.”

“I…what?” Rainbow gawked, and felt AJ let go of her. Surely Fluttershy wasn’t talking about her confrontation with Shimmer after the former she-demon finished her detention. That wasn’t bullying—she was only making it clear that she didn’t trust Sunset Shimmer any further than she could toss her.

“Bullied? Good heavens, darling—how?”

“People have been using marker and writing horrible things on her locker for weeks, every day.” Fluttershy’s eyes teared up. “I stayed after because I wanted to talk to her—she’s been avoiding me, and I wanted to let her know I forgave her. I thought it might help.” She wiped her eyes on a tissue. “I found her crying in the hall, trying to clean her locker.”

“Ah had no idea…she never said anythin’, doesn’ give any hint of it when Ah help with her detention. Sure, some days she looked a mite tired, but Ah always figgered she had a job on nights an’ weekends ta pay bills, ya know?” Applejack took off her hat, resting battered leather in her lap. “Ah get tired like that sometimes mahself, especially durin’ harvest, an’ Ah never saw her locker. Always parted from detention so ah could get home an’ do mah own chores.”

“She is always in a good mood when I talk to her in the mornings,” Rarity admitted. “Like Monday, she was practically glowing, and told me that she’d had a wonderful weekend. Even this morning, as tired as she looked, she was smiling. Though I have noticed the erratic bouts of tiredness too. She mentioned poor sleep once.” She frowned. “But never has she mentioned being harassed.”

“Sometimes her smiles are fake,” Pinkie Pie said suddenly and with great conviction. She had a look of intense concentration on her face. “Not the Monday morning ones—those are good smiles, ones that mean she’s super happy. But sometimes, when she comes to lunch…those are fake smiles, the kind that hide things so people don’t worry about you. Its why I keep giving her cupcakes and hugs—it makes the fake smiles real, and she laughs and I know she knows she has friends now.” Her hair wilted from its cotton candy state into straighter strands. “I just thought it was because she was thinking about how she used to be a meanie, not because other people were being meanies to her…”

Fluttershy played with her hair. “It wasn’t just mean. I read some of it—these were horrible things…and the drawings were even worse.” With halting words and lots of blushing and apologies, the animal lover repeated some of what she had read, leaving Rarity aghast, Applejack angry, and Pinkie Pie even more like a wilted flower than before. “Not only that, but…” Fluttershy’s tears started flowing again. “…Sunset had her jacket zipped up all the way, like she was trying to hide something…I’m worried maybe it’s more than just people saying and writing nasty things to her.”

For her part, Rainbow was quiet. She was having a hard time wrapping her brain around Sunset being bullied to the point of tears, that the former queen of the school wasn’t just playing a long game. That image and belief was starting to run into problems, and she scrambled, trying to explain it to herself.

“That’s not even the worst part,” Fluttershy went on, after they composed themselves a few minutes later. “She thought it was justified punishment—it’s why she’s kept it to herself. She’s been making herself read it all, every day, and then scrub her locker clean so they can do it all again the next day.”

“An’ none of us knew…” Applejack tipped her head back, eyes clenched shut. Rarity reached over, resting a hand on the blonde head for a long moment, blue eyes filled with tears.

“Twilight asked us to look after her, girls,” Fluttershy said. “To teach her friendship and how to be a good person, to help her get better.” She pressed her face into her palms. “We haven’t been doing a very good job.”

The statement hit them like a freight train, even Rainbow. It had been the one real promise Twilight Sparkle had asked of them before she went back to her home beyond the portal. “You’ll look out for her, wont you?” she had asked, almost as if she’d been unwilling to leave if she couldn’t find someone to entrust Sunset with. Guilt sat heavy in their hearts—the one promise they’d made, and they had failed spectacularly.

The weekend had gone downhill from there. Friday night had seen them leaving late from Fluttershy’s after several long hours of brainstorming on how to fix their mistakes. Rainbow Dash had remained silent and brooding through it all, guilt at war with her conviction that Shimmer hadn’t really changed and she needed to protect her friends. She’d shuffled in her front door at almost midnight and gotten an earful from her parents about not calling them to let them know where she was. That meant grounding and chores Saturday and most of Sunday. She’d also dug her old guitar out of the attic and found that it was beyond hope of repair, so the money she’d been saving was going to have to go towards a new one if she wanted to start playing again.

That left her here, kicking a ball against a tree in the park repeatedly, trying to decide what to do. Could she trust Shimmer enough to give her a chance? Was it wrong not to? And the bullying—all else aside, whether she liked Shimmer or not…she loathed bullying. Was it really right to ignore it when it happened to a bully? She’d heard and seen some of it—name-calling, dirty looks, the occasional paper ball…even a few times when someone had bumped her none-too-gently in the hall…but she really felt a lot of it was Shimmer getting a taste of her own medicine. Now, though, she wondered…was that really justified, or was it just bullying turned in a different direction? …and more than that, what did it make her, if she’d been turning a blind eye to it?

“Rainbow Dash!” The call was one of desperate relief, and she caught the ball before turning to face Scootaloo.

“Hey, kid. How’s it going?” She offered a grin, one that faltered when she got a good look at Scoots face. “Whoa. What’s wrong?”

The girl looked at her like she was carrying the weight of the world on her back, and Dash guided her to a seat on the grass. “Hey. Come on. We’re like sisters, you can tell me anything.”

“It's about Sunset Shimmer. I…don’t know what to do, Rainbow Dash. She’s not as bad as everyone thinks—she never was, and yeah, I get some people are mad, but it's just…they’ve gone too far, and I don’t know what to do!”

More about Shimmer? Great, just what her weekend needed. “Look, Scoots, if this is about the stuff on the locker, Fluttershy said the principals already took care of it.”

The younger teen shook her head. “Not on the locker, in it! And the MyStable page!”

MyStable page? What? Confused, she handed Scootaloo a soda from her bag. “Okay, kid. Start at the beginning. What stuff in the locker, what webpage? And what do you mean she’s never been as bad as we thought?”

“Sunset’s not always mean. She saved me once, from getting mugged. There’s these kids that hang around near Starlight House, and they steal from places and beat people up for their money and stuff. They used to be a real problem, trying to take stuff from kids at the home, beat them up, right? But when they cornered me a few years ago, Sunset stopped them. She beat them up and told them to leave the kids in the home alone! And whenever they try stuff, if she’s nearby, she makes them stop! I even heard she beat them up good here in the park for attacking a girl!” Scootaloo opened the soda and took a drink. “She knows how to fight, and she’s good at it, too…but she never hit anyone in school. And she made Snips and Snails stop picking on Applebloom about her parents—called them away to do something else. She did mean things, but she did nice things too. Miss Gem said maybe she was mean because she was scared and being mean kept people from hurting her.”

Her head spun from the information, and the picture she had of Sunset started to crack and crumble. “And the locker?”

Scootaloo scowled. “People have been leaving notes in her locker—I see her sometimes, before lunch, reading them and throwing them away. I pulled some out of the trash—it's awful, telling her how no one wants her and how they wish she’d go and never come back. Some even tell her they're sad she’s not dead! And then someone printed out pages from a MyStable page and put them there.” The girl looked guilty. “I followed her to the bathroom and she was crying, Rainbow Dash! Just reading and crying, and she threw them away afterward, and I took them and I read them and it’s just—it’s awful and I don't know what to do! All the names are blacked out so I can't even turn them in!”

Dash narrowed her eyes. “Do you have the pages?”

“Yes…”

“Give them here.” She held out a hand, and the younger girl passed her a stack of papers that had been folded many times. “I’ll take care of this, little buddy, don't worry. Just…don't tell anyone about it for now, okay?”

The head bobbed quickly in a nod. “Thank you, Rainbow Dash! I knew you’d know what to do!”

She got to her feet and offered Scootaloo a hand up. “Anytime…and Scoots? Thanks. You helped me today too.”

It was early Monday morning when she received he message that her account had been given access to the group, and she scrolled through it, carefully putting her plan into motion. It took a few hours time, but missing her first three classes was worth it. This needed to end—and she would do what she should’ve done all along.

At eleven thirty Monday morning, Rainbow Dash strode into the school, her eyes hard with fierce conviction as she sent a group text of her own.

-Principal’s office. Now. Emergency.-

Short interlude. Bit of a cliffhanger. Can't decide if I should make y'all wait til next week or not.

On the other hand, have the chapter a few hours early.