Crashing the kitchen door out of the way, Trusty skidded across the swept and polished tile floor, tears streaming and mud flying. "Hate her! Hate her! Hate her!" he wailed.

"Trusty!" Gramma's voice smacked him nearly as hard as the icebox when he slid into it. "Watch your hooves!"

"But Gramma!" Scrambling managed to spread the mud into a puddle around him without getting Trusty any closer to standing. "True Heart tried to kill me again!"

"For the love of Celestia..." The pins-and-needles tickle of Gramma's magic plucked him from the floor and tightened around him till he had to stop flailing. "If you had any fewer brains, Trustworthy, I swear, we could rent you out as a fishing lure."

Rapid blinks kept the mud out of his eyes while still letting him see the carpet of the back hallway drifting by beneath him. A quick glance over his shoulder showed Gramma marching along behind, her mouth a thin line, her little half-glasses hanging from their strap around her neck, her gray mane up in a bun as hard as a croquet ball he knew from creeping up and poking it when she would fall asleep in her chair in the parlor. "But Gramma!" he started again.

"Don't you 'But Gramma' me!" Her horn wavered a darker green than her hide—"Simple names in our family," she always said. "I'm Chartreuse because I [i]am[/i] chartreuse!"—and she walked with a high-stepping style that True said meant she'd been a soldier or a supervillain or something before she became Trusty's gramma.

She was into full lecture mode by now, though, so Trusty mostly stopped listening. "That True Heart's nothing but a ruffian!" was one sentence he caught, and it made him smile before he remembered how much he hated True now. Gramma kept the words going and going while she filled the bathtub, dropped Trusty into it, and scrubbed till his lime-green hide felt raw and looked as wrinkled as the prunes Gramma ate for breakfast every day.

A few other things she said didn't wash away with the water and soap. "—don't know why you insist on associating with her!" stuck out because 'associating' sounded like a swear word.  He heard "—report her to Princess Twilight," too, because the first memory he had of anything other than Gramma was watching Princess Twilight's castle burst up out of the ground. And "—whole family's never been anything but trouble!" stayed because True's family was actually really great, her mom and dad and grammas and grampas and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins and everypony in charge of the dump outside Ponyville.

Trusty loved going out there to visit True because there were always ponies running around and [i]doing[/i] stuff, earth ponies like her and pegasi and even unicorns stomping stuff or swirling stuff or blasting stuff at the landfill, the scrap yard, the incinerator, the recycling center. And they built stuff, too: True's pegasus brother Inversion Layer used crushed glass and water and lightning to whisk up these awesome weird statue things, and True's mom, the biggest pony in town except Bulk Biceps and Big Mac, welded together little go-carts out of scrap metal and held races every two or three weeks.

"Trustworthy!" Gramma more barked than said, and Trusty startled back to the tub—or actually to [i]beside[/i] the tub because he saw that he was standing on the bathmat now, Gramma's cloudy magic warm and drying the last wet spots from his mane. "Are you listening to me?"

That was a trick question, he knew. So instead of answering it, he said, "Thank you, Gramma." And making his own hornglow spark up to stroke against hers, he added, "I love you."

Her hard expression crumbled like the side of the creek True had tricked Trusty into walking out onto so he would fall in. Leaning forward, she touched her nose to his. "You're as foolish as your father and as innocent as your mother." When she smiled, she looked like an entirely different pony. "How they would've loved to know that."

Things always got tight inside him when Gramma talked about Mom and Dad. But hugging Gramma helped. She hugged him back, too, and that always made things a lot better.

The warm breath of her sigh whisked down his back. "You're a wonderful pony, Trusty, and you deserve friends who will treat you as such." She straightened up, and a little of the hardness had come back into her face. "Which is why we'll be signing you up for Coltillion tomorrow."

Trusty blinked at her. Whatever that was, he hoped it didn't take up too much time. He had to think of a way to get back at True, after all.

[hr]

"Is, too." Trusty folded his forelegs across his chest, absolutely sure he had her.

"Is not!" True never got [i]really[/i] mad, but when the off-white of her face started darkening toward the brick-red of her mane, Trusty knew he'd struck a nerve.

"Is, too." Leaning forward from where they sat beside the turnip wagon in the market square, Trusty poked True with a hoof. "'Cause my gramma plays bridge with Granny Smith, and Granny Smith said so." The first time he'd said it a minute ago, he'd been so nervous, he was sure he was going to mess it up. But he found it way easier to say the second time. "Applejack's bald as an egg on top of her head. That's why she always wears that hat."

True didn't turn her head, but her eyes darted over to where Applejack, Big Mac, and Apple Bloom stood at their cart across the way, laughing and talking with other ponies buying their fruit. "I think four years of Coltillion's scrambled your brains, Trusty. I mean, she's got all those bangs! And those pony tails hanging down the back!"

"And in between?" Trusty rubbed a fetlock. "Smooth as this." He shrugged. "If you don't believe me, sneak over there, grab her hat, and pull it off." And adding the final touch, he grinned. "I dare you."

Her lips went thin. "You wait right here," she said, standing and starting off between the grown-ups moving from stall to stall.

Oh, he was gonna wait here, all right. His stomach got all fluttery when he thought about it: True crawling through the dirt till she'd crept up real close, then jumping out, stealing Applejack's hat, and standing there like a doofus while the whole Apple family yelled at her and chased her and maybe even called her mom and dad to yell at her! It was gonna be—

His breath caught, though, when he saw through the crowd that she was walking straight up to the cart and not even trying to hide. What was she doing?

"Well, howdy, True Heart!" Applejack said, her voice carrying over the hustle and bustle. "What can I do you for?"

True looked up, raised a hoof, and pointed it back at Trusty, her voice somehow even louder than Applejack's. "My friend Trustworthy says you and Big Mac are really married and Apple Bloom's your foal. Is that true?"

Every sound snapped off like somepony had thrown a switch. So when all three Apples shouted, "[i]What?[/i]" at the same time, it sounded even louder.

But Gramma was loudest of all, Trusty was sure, her lecture that afternoon in the parlor back home very long and very specific about how disappointed she was in him, how he was grounded for the rest of the week, and how she was signing him up for another four-year stint at Coltillion.

In his bedroom, then, his blush just starting to fade after boiling his face constantly the past few hours, his ears perked at a throat clearing outside his open window. Looking up, he saw True leaning in, of course. "Applejack comes by the scrap yard all the time," she said, the teeniest, tiniest smile on her snout. "Mom and Dad invite her in to set a spell, and she always takes her hat off  'cause she's a proper gentlepony."

Trusty knew he was gaping at her, but he couldn't manage to pull his mouth shut.

She shook her head. "You're my best friend, Trusty, and you're good at a lotta things. But pranking is definitely not one of 'em, all right?" A wink, and she pulled back outside, her call of "See you at school!" seeming to hang in the air after she'd gone.

His blush back full force, Trusty could only make his silent vow the same way he always did when True got him. Someday, he'd get her back. Someday.

[hr]

"Really." True didn't ask it as a question, her eyes half closed as she tapped a hoof on the frame of the porch swing hanging from the ceiling of her family's back patio.

"Really." Seated beside her, Trusty tried to look like his name. "The ball's like the final exam for Coltillion. Last time, Gramma got one of her friends' granddaughters to go with me, but since you're the reason I had to go through another four years of it—"

"Really?" This time the word came out of her dripping with sarcasm. "I forced you to pull the worst attempt at a prank in Equestrian history?"

[i]Yes, you did![/i] he wanted to shout at her. [i]I keep falling for yours, so I hafta keep trying to get you to fall for mine![/i]

Instead of that, though, he showed her his best gentlecolt face. "I admit that I started it. But you chose to throw that giant lie out there, knowing it would get me in real trouble. So now that I've gotta go through this whole stupid fancy party again, I—" He found himself swallowing against a tight throat, everything about her suddenly unfamiliar. "I was hoping you would do me the honor of accompanying me as my guest."

"Hmmm," she said, touching her chin, Trusty's heart trying to wriggle out through his ribs. "And when is this shindig?"

"Friday. Not [i]this[/i] Friday, I mean, but next Friday. We'd hafta be there at three."

The chin touching seemed to go on and on, but then she suddenly poked him in the chest and said, "Okay. But we're gonna do this by the book, boutonnières and cummerbunds and everything, you get me?"

He had to blink at her. "You know what a boutonnière is?"

She smirked.

But she looked beautiful in a cornflower-blue gown and her hair perfectly pleated when he picked her up at her parents' house on the next Friday afternoon. She knew exactly which forks to use and when to use them, knew exactly how to flit the lightest of small talk around with the other couples at the ball, and she knew every step of the dances that Trusty had been counting on to foul her up so he could step in and rescue her from social humiliation.

Because of [i]course[/i] she did.

Even worse, when he dropped her off that evening, she smiled at him at the bottom of her front steps and said, "I had a wonderful time, Trusty."

And sure, he'd had a wonderful time, too. Just not in the way he'd planned. And staring at her in the moonlight with the slightest possible scent of rose and lavender drifting up from her, he had to ask, "How?"

Her smile squiggled into her regular smirk. "I asked your Gramma to coach me. She's really great, by the way."

But worst of all, she then leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and whispered, "You're a great guy, Trusty, but really. Stick with what you're good at, okay?"

Then she was up the steps, into her house, and gone. And as much as he tried to drag his hooves all the way home, he just couldn't keep himself from floating.

[hr]

"This is stupid," Trusty called toward the ground.

"You only say that," True's voice drifted up, "because you've never done it before."

He shifted the harness into what he hoped would be a less-uncomfortable position. "And you know [i]why[/i] I've never done it before? Because it's stupid!"

"Trusty..." She was moving around the base of the tower below him. "You did Coltillion for eight whole years. You don't get to call things 'stupid' anymore."

"Ha, ha," he said the way he always did when he couldn't think of a comeback for one of her zingers. That had been happening a lot more, he'd noticed, since they'd gotten their cutie marks and graduated from the Ponyville school system: she'd taken her wrench superimposed over a heart and slipped easily into her family business out at the scrap yard, pulling things apart so they could sell the pieces, while the little shining lantern on his flanks had led him to the School of Friendship where he'd been the assistant librarian for just over a year now.

"So," True said, stepping briskly into the fading sunlight, tossing her brick-red mane back, and smiling up at him. "This'll be just like regular zip-lining—"

"[i]Regular[/i] zip-lining?"

She went on as if she hadn't heard. "Except Morning Star enchanted the course so it's more like a roller-coaster."

Swallowing, Trusty tried not to focus on the first loop, the only part of the wire he could see from here since it turned left almost immediately after that and vanished into the trees of Whitetail Woods. "And you're not up here strapped to this death trap...why again?"

She sighed. "I've already been, Trusty. Star's sent all of us though, even Mom and Dad, like, a dozen times each. But we want to open it up and start charging admission, so Mom insisted we try it out on somepony not related to us." Her smile somehow got ever toothier. "I immediately thought of you, of course."

"You need to think less of me." He decided to keep looking at her since she was so much more pleasant than anything else in the vicinity. "Really. I wouldn't mind at all."

"Ha, ha," she said, but unlike him, she always went on talking after she'd said it. "But you know I wouldn't steer you wrong! I mean, how long have we known each other?"

He waved a hoof toward the line he was very carefully not looking at. "About another five minutes, I'll guess, since I doubt I'll be surviving this." With his eyes resting on hers, though, he couldn't help running through all the times those eyes and that smile had sent him tumbling over precipices or trying to work magic he didn't know or running from places he never should've been in the first place.

And always, always, [i]always,[/i] she'd be watching and grinning from some spot of relative safety. Or would go sauntering past with a quip while he clung by his teeth to some fragile lifeline. Or would be looking sorrowful before some authority figure as he came stumbling in barely clinging to whatever illicit treasure she'd convinced him to take.

And always, always, [i]always,[/i] no matter how forcefully he swore within himself to get her back somehow someday in some way, he never managed to put anything over on her...

"C'mon, Trusty." Her words drifted up to him as soft and shimmering as soap bubbles. "I've been watching you get stuffier and stuffier all year, and I know that's not you, not the only guy crazy enough to keep up with me step for step through all those nutty schemes we pulled. And yeah, maybe we're s'posed to be all grown up now and be smarter than that. But I know you as well as I know myself. And we both know that you love this stuff the same way I do."

Which was all it took. Without another thought, Trusty threw himself forward, the harness's wheels squeaking along the line like mad mice, his stomach yawing and stretching.

Because Celestia damn him, he [i]did[/i] love it. Gramma's perfect little angel loved letting himself go, letting himself crash, letting himself burn. And feeling the caress of True watching him the whole time...

Flinging his front hooves up, he bellowed, the play of acceleration and gravity pulling back his lips and smudging his vision. Hitting the loop, he felt his throat squeeze shut, forces no pony was ever meant to know tossing him around like a leaf in a whirlwind. Time stood still, his breath, his heartbeat, even his magic suspended for an endless instant, then he was speeding down from the top, his harness flaring him sideways as the line made its left turn.

He saw the structure rushing toward him, but he had no idea what it was even when he slammed into it a split second later. Thick, vanilla-scented goo engulfed him, filled his eyes, his nose, his ears, and stopped him more effectively than any braking system likely could. But sinking into it, struggling, pushing against the floor when it nudged him, rising to the surface, he gasped, the goo clinging cold and mooshy to him, the splops of it dripping from his snout into his mouth telling him unmistakably that he'd just been plunged bodily into—

"Oh, yeah," he heard True saying from somewhere nearby. "Did I forget to mention the big vat of custard at the end? 'Cause there's a big vat of custard at the end."

Still wrapped in the harness, Trusty wiped custard from his eyes and had to blink at the multiple little flashes that began popping off in the evening darkness behind True, grinning widely.

"Oh, yeah," she said again. "I invited a bunch of students from the Friendship School over. 'Cause I thought they might want to take pictures."

"Looking good, Mr. Trustworthy!" a semi-familiar voice called—one of the griffon students, Trusty thought. More flashes went off, youngish laughter tittering up with it.

"Still," True said, looking upward along the zip-line, "might be we'll want something not quite as sloppy here when we actually open to the public." She turned back, her face as innocent as only a pretty young mare's could be. "What do you think, Trusty?"

"Good idea," he said aloud, but inside, he was saying, [i]Revenge.[/i] Finally, after all these years and all her pranks, he was finally going to get her back. Somehow.

[hr]

"It's...it's—!" True was gushing, something Trusty was sure he hadn't seen before. "It's just been so amazing!" she finally finished.

A little pang flicked the corner of Trusty's heart, but he refused to let it show in his face. "And it just started a month ago?" he asked, leaning forward to take a sip of his strawberry malted, Sugarcube Corner buzzing with activity around them.

"Completely out of the blue!" The last year of work at the scrap yard had broadened her chest and shoulders in quite the distracting fashion, her neck muscles sometimes threatening to pop the heart-shaped locket she was now reaching up to touch more gently than he would've thought her capable of. "I mean, who knew secret admirers were real things?"

He shrugged. "I've always said you were a fictional character."

She gave him about half a scowl. "And you're from one of those non-fiction books that sits on a shelf for decades without anypony ever looking at it." Her scowl vanished as quickly as it had arrived. "But to just all of a sudden get a box in the mail with the locket and that note?" Closing her eyes, she held up a hoof and recited the words he already knew. "'You leave me breathless when you pass me in the street, and I long for the sight of you the way the day longs for the sun and the night longs for the moon.'" She sighed.

That little pang wobbled inside him again. "Sounds like this guy doesn't get much sleep."

"Well, yeah." She waved a hoof. "When true love smites a pony, Trusty, he gets all haunted and stricken and logy: you'd know that if you were capable of feeling equine emotion." A heart-stopping flex of that neck bent her head around, and she flopped a saddlebag up onto their table. "And this guy's got it [i]bad.[/i] You want me to read some more?" Upending the bag, she dumped out all two-and-a-half dozen of the notes.

Which was the exact moment when Trusty realized he had no idea what to do now. His prank had obviously worked better than he'd expected, but her bright eyes? Her infectious grin? The sort of bounce that seemed to fill her even though she was just sitting there across the table from him? How could he take that away from her? How could he wrench the rug out from under her, yell "Gotcha!" and watch that...that [i]sparkle[/i] sputter out and puff away to nothing?

And worse than that?

How could he stop writing her those notes? The way his blood raced when he sat down with the quill in his teeth—she knew his hornwriting, after all. The way he would spent hours finding the exact phrasing to tell her what he saw when he looked at her. The way he'd come to realize that he meant every word.

Once again, his prank had backfired on him. Writing her love notes every day this past moon, he couldn't deny what he was feeling, couldn't deny that he was—

"But the thing is," True was saying, her voice just above a whisper now but everything else about her continuing as bright and bubbly as before, "I figured out who it is, Trusty! I know who's been sending me these notes and presents and all!"

The air solidified around him, his body encased in glass or crystal or something he could see through but that wouldn't let him move or breathe or even think.

"It was pretty simple, actually," she went on. Her gaze darting from side to side, she leaned forward. "Since my brother Version started dating Dinky, I've gotten to know her mom real well. So when I started getting all this stuff in the mail, Derpy was more than happy to help me track my mystery correspondent down. And that's why—"

Her hooves started rummaging through the stuff she'd dumped from her saddlebag, and Trusty became certain that he'd turned to crystal as well at this point. Because he knew she could see right through him.

"Here!" She pulled a little box from among the papers, a little box with a flat bottom and a rounded top and a hinge at the back of the lid. Holding the box balanced on the frog of her hood, she slid the edge of the other hoof along the seam and flipped the lid open to reveal—

An engagement ring, simple and perfect, gold with two tasteful diamonds at the top. "Trustworthy," she said. "Would you—?"

He gasped in a breath to shout the loudest "Yes!" his lungs could possibly produce.

And then she finished the sentence: "—return this for me? You live right by the jeweler's."

His face went hot at the same time as the back of his neck went cold, sweat bursting from the base of his mane and running in shivering streams along his hide. "What?" he finally managed to ask.

With a shrug, True snapped the box closed. "I bought this ring three weeks ago so I'd be ready when he revealed himself and asked me to marry him. I wanted to be able to flash the thing at him as soon as he flashed his ring at me. I mean, Big Mac and Sugar Belle, Lyra and Bon Bon, all the great romances: you wanna have your ring ready to go as soon as the other one asks you. But my guy?" She set the box on the table. "He never asked, and after going through all this effort to learn who he is, well, what good's a secret admirer who's not secret anymore?"

The cold had wrapped Trusty completely now, extinguishing every bit of heat and making him feel like an ice sculpture about to shatter.

True pushed the ring box toward him. "So could you take it back for me? It shouldn't be any trouble. I made a deal with the jeweler to—"

Trusty didn't remember leaping to his hooves, turning, and galloping from Sugarcube Corner, but since he suddenly found himself outside racing down the street, he could only assume the leaping and turning part must've happened. He couldn't really see where he was going, either, the whole town all damp and blurry, so he kept running into things and bouncing off them: carts, mailboxes, ponies, buildings.

He could hear True shouting his name, though, but that just made him stumble faster. Not that he [i]moved[/i] any faster. He just hit more things.

Then something crashed into him from behind, knocked his hooves out from under him, and squashed him chest first into the ground. Strong legs grabbed him, rolled him over, something soft and warm but solid and heavy settling along the whole length of his barrel; his still-cloudy eyes showed him True staring down at him. "Trusty?" For the first time he could recall, her voice had a waver in it. "This...this [i]was[/i] just one of your stupid pranks. Wasn't it?"

Blinking up at her blinking down at him, he managed to get out, "At first."

Her eyes widened, her chin dropping. "What?"

Unable to look away, he swallowed. "You got me again, True. Just like always."

For a long, long moment, she stayed frozen. Then she smiled. "Well, whaddaya know. You finally got me back." Her neck bent, her face coming closer, the ends of her mane tumbling forward to brush his neck. Her breath puffed gently against his lips, and then...then....then—

Her lips touched his, held his, moved sweet and gentle against his. His first kiss from the mare he loved, and Trusty was lying flat on his back in the dirt of Ponyville square.

But he didn't blush when everypony around them started to cheer. Or at least he didn't blush [i]much.[/i]