“So why did Braeburn ‘disappear’?” Rainbow Dash asked, fluttering her wings as she settled against the alley wall, kicking tiny bits of discarded trash up into the air like dejected dragonflies.

“Well, I mean, he didn’t disappear, really. I just... lost track of him.”

“Right. What you might call ‘disappearing’.”

Applejack glared. While she was grateful for the chance to get the sudden onset anguish of her poorly handled conversation off her chest, she had to consider the difference between giving Rainbow Dash a backstory and simply telling her to jump up and scan the crowd.

She settled on the former. Dash was her friend, after all.

“Right,” Applejack said and sighed. “So, he disappeared because, we, uh... well, we had a bit of an argument.”

“What about?” Rainbow Dash asked, nonchalantly leaning against the wall with her foreleg. Even in the most supposedly intimate situations she managed to keep an air of aloofness to her every move. It would have made Applejack grumble in any other circumstance.

“It’s... complicated.”

“Oh?”

Applejack sighed.

“He, uh... well, he told me somethin’, and I’m thinkin’ he didn’t like the way I reacted too much. We both said some stuff and he, uh, took off runnin’ before the conversation was over.”

Dash picked herself up off the wall.

“Alright, so spill the beans. What were you guys talkin’ about?”

Applejack’s tongue felt heavy.

It had been a struggle for Braeburn to tell her, no doubt. So who was she to tell somepony else?

This case would have to be an exception.

“He told me he... well. He said he likes... stallions.”

Rainbow Dash took a few seconds to consider Applejack’s answer. She blinked once or twice, waiting for more, eventually concluding by virtue of silence that Applejack saw her response as complete.

“And?” Rainbow Dash finally asked, leaning forward with even more insistence.

“Whatta you mean ‘and’? He told me, and I... told him what I thought about it, and I guess that set him off.”

Rainbow Dash backed off a bit. Her expression changed subtly enough that a passerby wouldn’t have picked up on it, from generally vague interest to a sudden, cautioning stare.

“And what did you tell him you thought about it?”

“Well, you know... I told him that... well... that ain’t normal.”

Applejack barely managed to finish her sentence before a hoof took her breath away, this time in the form of a jab on her chest, pushing her back, a foot that she stumbled over until her hind legs met the dumpster at the mouth of the alleyway. She coughed for a few seconds before opening her eyes to an irate looking Rainbow Dash closer to her face than she was comfortable with.

“Whadda you mean it ‘ain’t normal’?” Dash’s voice was as brash as AJ had ever heard it, the same antagonistic, confrontational tone she had used with the Appleloosan ponies in their buffalo negotiations. Applejack recognized it, and it made her sweat a little.

“You know!” Applejack said, wishing to avoid another jab in the chest. “Proper couples should be a mare and a stallion—”

“‘Proper couples’ is a load of horseapples,” Dash interrupted, placing her hoof dangerously close to Applejack’s chest. “What on earth has gotten into your head that makes you think there’s some definition of two ponies who love each other that’s considered ‘improper’?”

 AJ felt her lungs gather in an extra large gulp of air in nervous anticipation.

“Well... okay, maybe ‘proper’ isn’t the right word. But c’mon, RD. You know it ain’t normal for—”

“What’s normal?” There it was, the poke. Applejack had prepared herself, and leaned back against the dumpster in an effort to deflect the brunt of Dash’s force. It worked, and Applejack’s lungs rewarded her with a mild groan instead of full-out shouting.

“You know... normal! Like a mare and a stallion, or—”

“Or a mare and a mare?” Dash interjected, seemingly focused on not letting Applejack finish a single sentence.

“You know what I mean,” Applejack countered, huffing herself up against her friend’s sudden aggressive disposition. “Mare and a mare’s different ’cause—”

“Stop right there AJ. Don’t get into the second part. Why don’t you tell me what’s ‘normal’?”

Applejack’s skin felt hot suddenly, hotter than it ever had under the ever-beating sun that had bathed her during her applebucking. Rainbow Dash’s stare bored into her skin like a beam of light focused through the lens of a magnifying glass, and she could almost hear the invisible sizzle as her conversational composure began to smoke.

“Normal,” she started, “like if—”

Rainbow Dash didn’t let her get more than a few words out before another jab. Applejack hadn’t been expecting it, which meant the rest of her sentence was consumed by sudden coughing, accompanied by a glare from Dash.

“Normal’s a mare and a stallion, huh? So let’s talk about ‘normal’. In your group of ‘normal’ friends, you’ve got a mare who likes books more than stallions or mares. You’ve got a pony who I don’t think you could pay enough to think about what sex somepony happens to be, on account of how much she likes all of them. You’ve got a pony who’s more scared of dating than she is of her own shadow, but if she wasn’t, would probably sooner spend her evenings with a bear or a flock of bunnies than another pony; a pony who spent ages obsessing over some stupid prince, so set on getting a stallion you were sure they were straight until their plans fell apart and weeks later stuff got kind of weird and you wanted to believe them, but there’s no way a straight pony is that good of a kisser...”

Applejack blinked through the last remnants of her coughing fit. She wasn’t sure she’d heard properly.

“...you, who’s never had a date in her life and probably hasn’t spoken to a stallion in ages other than her brother, and me. And I like mares.” Rainbow Dash finished, managing not to gasp for oxygen despite her breathless delivery.

The air between the earth pony and pegasus simmered, feeling hotter than the sun that beamed down above them.

“So why don’t you tell me what’s normal, AJ?”

Applejack steeled against the warm metal of the dumpster behind her, leaning as far away from Dash’s accusing hoof as she could manage. Rainbow Dash’s eyes were narrowed in a way she recognized only from confrontations that had shaken the foundation of events around them; narrowed in pre-negotiation talks with buffalo; narrowed behind raised fists in Discord’s direction; and narrowed at her now, trying to explain why her cousin was ‘abnormal’.

Applejack swallowed. Her throat felt dry.

“Alright, okay, I get it.”

Dash relaxed her stare but withdrew her hoof only a bit. Applejack allowed herself a deeper breath without the point of an accusing limb on her chest. The scent of heated garbage began to waft into her nose, and she stepped away from the dumpster, wrinkling her nose and pushing past Rainbow Dash. Dash let AJ gather her thoughts for a minute, huffing the taste of decaying food out of her nostrils and trying to fill them with air from elsewhere that might carry some kind of extra clarity.

Applejack tried to speak again.

“But—”

Rainbow Dash turned in a flash, readying her accusing stare before Applejack could begin her contradiction. The rapid pivot made Applejack balk, but she stayed rooted on all four legs, trying her best to allay the intimidation she had let sink into her heart with Rainbow’s hoof on her chest.

“But,” she continued, “just ’cause it ain’t... well, I mean, normal or not normal, it doesn’t... it doesn’t make sense.”

Applejack circled back and forth in the alley in tiny ten-step long grooves, and Rainbow Dash withdrew the ferocity of her glare as she watched her friend pace.

“I mean, what’s wrong with mares? I ain’t the type to fancy all that girly prissy stuff that Rarity likes, but I know girls ain’t hard to look at, and they’re nice enough to be around at the worst of times. So why don’t Braeburn like ‘em? Don’t make no sense for him to wanna chase some big dumb stallion when he’s probably got filly heartaches followin’ him like a trail of appleseeds behind a planter...”

Rainbow Dash let Applejack’s sentence trail off before she stepped forward, standing in the path of Applejack’s pacing in preparation for an inevitable collision course. Just as she had done before, Applejack bumped into blue feathers with her mind elsewhere. This time she was saved the loss of breath, but she still looked put-out underneath the brim of her hat as she looked up.

“Let me try to explain it another way,” Rainbow Dash said. “What’s the one thing you love more than anything in the world?”

Applejack thought for a few seconds, her eyes drifting sideways into the corners of her mind. She opened her mouth to speak but found Rainbow’s hoof on her lips before she could utter her first syllable.

“—and don’t say apples,” Dash cautioned before lowering her hoof. Applejack glared at her, but parted her lips for a second time after a moment.

“Well... shucks, I dunno. I guess it’s my family.”

“Okay,” Dash said. She circled around, leading Applejacks head in an arc until her eyes reached the wall, and Rainbow Dash leaned against the worn brick with her traditional nonchalance. “So, what if you woke up one day and somepony said you couldn’t love your family? Not even that it wasn’t ‘right’, or ‘normal’.” Dash arched the tips of her wings with each accented word, making scare quotes with her extended feathers. “Just, you got up, got ready for your day, and somepony said, ‘You don’t love your family anymore. You love... fashion.’”

Applejack scrunched up her face as she tried to reconcile the impossible hypothetical.

“That don’t make no sense. Why would somepony—”

“That’s not important. Listen; what’s important is thinking about it. Ignore the ‘why’ for a second. How would it make you feel?”

In the deep furrows of her mind, Applejack fought the absurdity of the proposal with her best attempts at empathy.

How would she feel?

The concept was inscrutable to her. It was like telling a fish to ride a bicycle to work: utterly alien to every fiber of her being.

“I couldn’t do it,” she said plainly.

Rainbow Dash nodded.

“Mhm-hmm. And why is that?”

“Because...” Applejack paused, looking to the ground as though the scuffed dirt and erstwhile scraps of trash might key her in to the secrets of expressing the thoughts in her heart instead of her head.

“Because... because that ain’t who I am. I don’t love fashion. I love my family. They’re the most important thing in the world to me.”

Dash nodded again.

“Because your family, and loving them, is part of who you are.”

“Exactly.” Applejack grinned.

“Right. So,” Dash started, picking herself up from the alley wall, “think about how it would make you feel just to have somepony tell you that. What you’d think if they suggested for a second giving up that bit of who you are, saying your new purpose in life was fashion, or research papers, or... pears.”

“... pears?” AJ’s eyes glossed over, losing the thread of the metaphor in a cloud of particulars.

Rainbow Dash put her hoof on Applejack’s shoulder and shook her head with a sigh.

“Not the point. How would that make you feel? And not just anypony telling you that; your family. Somepony you care about more than anything, telling you that you were wrong?”

“Well...”

Applejack thought.

How would it make her feel?

The very notion of somepony trying to convince her the core of her being was something she could discard at their direction was laughable. She’d do just that—she’d laugh in their face and tell them to take a hike before she took them off her acre herself. If they told her to start farming pears the next day instead of apples, she’d tell them right where they could put their pears.

Applejack was an Apple, and for Apples, family always came first. Loving her family was part of who she... was.

Applejack’s mouth formed the ‘oh’ without pushing the air past her lips.

Dash let her hoof sink into AJ’s shoulder.

“Are you starting to get it?”

“But that’s different!” Applejack said, practically shouting, and jumped back from Rainbow Dash’s hoof like it was a hot poker that had been left in a fire. Her face turned into a mask of panic as her brain attempted to reject the inkling of comprehension that had crept through its iron gates.

“And why is it different?” Dash asked.

“‘Cause... ‘cause it just is! Family and... who I wanna date ain’t the same thing, dang it!”

“So you’d be okay with being told you’re supposed to like mares now?”

Applejack sputtered on an unspoken sentence for a moment, her tongue suddenly unable to form the words of her protest.

“No, I... but I don’t... that... that has nothin’ to do with...”

Dash’s hoof pressed on her shoulder again.

“I know you get it, AJ. I don’t know why you’re so convinced you don’t. It’s all the same.” Dash lowered her voice, her words soft but still audible over the background noise of the nearby city square. “Family, mares, stallions... apples. It’s all the same love when you break it down.”

Applejack looked around. Open ends on either side of the alley greeted her, the potential avenues of escape from a conversation that made her feel as though she was trapped inside her own head, the walls of her argumentative thoughts closing in on her closer with every second.

How would she feel if she was told what she cared about was ‘wrong’?

If her purpose and lifelong pursuit were incorrect?

If what she felt, or who she felt it for wasn’t ‘normal’?

If the thing she loved the most wasn’t right?

Applejack sank a little into the ground, her body suddenly deflating as the balloon of her obstinance punctured and gave out its last gasp of protest.

“I...”

The single word faltered into open air. In the distance, the two ponies could hear the sound of the crowd milling about, all of them with their own purpose and pursuit. All of them who they were, and right as no one else.

Applejack opened her mouth several times and let her tongue flop around like a wet fish, searching for what she wanted to say.

She settled on her words with clunky hesitation.

“What... what do I say to him?”

Dash rubbed Applejack’s back with an almost motherly tenderness, coaxing away worry as best she could with the light pressure of her hoof.

“Well,” she began, “he’s your family, isn’t he?”

Applejack nodded.

“Then that’s what you tell him.  You tell him he’s your family, and you love him no matter what, and that you’re sorry.”

Applejack raised her face finally, pulling her eyes away from the unfeeling dirt that had refused to aid her, devoid of answers. Tiny trickles of tears had made their way down her cheeks already, and errant drips began to drop to the soil, sparkling in the sunlight before they hit the ground.

“And then what do I say?” she asked, her voice thick with emotion, and the feeling, suddenly, of knowing what she had done wrong.

“You don’t say anything,” Rainbow Dash said, rubbing along the base of Applejack’s neck one last time before lifting her hoof.

“You listen.”