#anfic

Chapters: 4/? Fandom: My Little Pony Generation 4: Equestria Girls (Cartoon 2013), My Little Pony Generation 4: Friendship Is Magic (Cartoon 2010) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Mane Six Ensemble & Sunset Shimmer (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Sunset Shimmer & Twilight Sparkle (My Little Pony: Equestria Girls)

Characters: Sunset Shimmer (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Mane Six Ensemble (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Twilight Sparkle (My Little Pony: Equestria Girls), Spike (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Sunset Shimmer (My Little Pony: Equestria Girls)

Additional Tags: Angst, Betrayal, Abandonment, Loneliness, Canon Backstory, Post-Canon, Anon-a-miss (My Little Pony: Equestria Girls), Movie: Forgotten Friendship (My Little Pony: Equestria Girls), Post-Movie, Alicorn Princess Twilight Sparkle (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Sunset Shimmer Needs a Hug (My Little Pony G4)

Of course, the same principle applied to their actions as to Totenkopf's – just because they knew what they needed to do didn't mean they knew how to do it.

“So now what?” asked Dr. Wilson. “What do we do, just go to the Orkneys and check all the henges one by one? How many are there?”

“Well, we know we don't need to check the Twelve Apostles because I can already see that's not the one,” said DI Carter. “But yeah, there've got to be dozens. Probably way more that have fallen down and nobody knows about them anymore.”

“Well, there's gotta be a better way than visiting them all,” Dr. Wilson said. “We'll be there until next year! How were you planning on finding it, way back when?” he asked Sir Stephen. “Did you have, I don't know, a mystical druid or somebody who was going to show you the way?”

“No,” Sir Stephen admitted. “As you say, we thought we would simply visit them all in turn until we found the one that matched the map. We think the Red Death had a way to rule them out, but we never knew for sure.”

“We do know a couple of things,” said DI Carter. “We know it's thirteen stones, and we know they're not in a circle...”

“Medieval maps aren't known for their accurate cartography,” Natasha said dubiously, “and we don't even know for sure it's a stone circle. That's just what Sir Steve thinks it is. Maybe it's a riddle instead of a map.”

DI Carter shook her head. “We've got to make some assumptions or it's like Dr. Wilson said – we'll be here for months,” she said. “In the force, if we have unknowns we start with the strictest set of criteria and rule those possibilities out first, and only then do we cast our net a little wider. So we'll start with thirteen stones in an oval.” She looked around at the pictures and bookshelves on the walls. “This is an archaeology department,” she observed. “Do you have, I don't know, some kind of list of henges in the Orkneys? Preferably with maps?”

“Yes!” squealed Sue. “We do!”

Her voice sounded so odd that everybody turned to look at her, and when they did they found her eyes wide and her hands held out, as if she were terrified and grabbing at the one straw of a thing she understood here. “Lau's Enquête sur l'Ecosse Néolithique! I found it mis-shelved in the Spanish section of the faculty library at the end of last term! I'll go get it right away!” she said, and literally ran out the door to find the room.

“Uh... is she gonna be okay?” asked Rushman.

“I hope so,” said Nat. Sue was an organizer – her job as department secretary was to keep things in order for a dozen scatterbrained professors. Her world needed to make meticulous sense and she'd just witnessed something that made no sense whatsover. Nat could only be grateful that she hadn't been present for Zola's transformation, or the poor woman would probably have lost her mind.

“We have it!” Sue shouted through the wall. “Here it is!”

She bustled back into the room with a very large hardcover book bound in blue canvas – if the cover had ever had a paper sleeve, it had fallen apart long ago. Sue put it down on her desk and opened it so she could fold out a map for them. “This should be just what your research requires,” she declared. “Come on, let's get you all comfortable in the meeting room, and I'll see if I can find you some cookies.” Her voice had a high-pitched, desperate edge to it that made Natasha think she was going to pass out at any moment.

Nat went and reached out a hand, but did not actually touch the woman. “Sue,” she said, “I know I'm not the department head, but... why don't you take the rest of the day off.” People had their weirdness threshholds and Sue had clearly reached hers.

Sue grabbed Nat's arm. The relief in her face was obvious, and it was merely a bit of politeness that she asked, “are you sure?”

“Very sure,” said Nat. “Go visit Brandon or something. I bet he misses you.”

“Oh, thank you, Natalie,” said Sue. “I do think I need a break. Yes, thank you very much.”

“You're welcome.” Nat patted her shoulder, and the others made way for her to bustle out of the room.

Natasha locked the office door so they wouldn't be disturbed, and everybody got themselves settled into the library. This was a tiny room behind Sue's office, crammed with bookshelves that just barely left room for a table and chairs. The shelves held everything from textbooks of old English to more archaeological surveys to a disintegrating Penguin Classics edition of the Prose Eddas, and there was a single small window, above the radiator, that looked out on the car park. Through this, Nat could see Sue getting into her car. Hopefully she would be okay. Natasha liked Sue.

There were four chairs in the library, but with Allen Rushman there were now five people in their party, so Natasha parked herself on the edge of the table as she opened the book for Sir Stephen. When she thought about it, the Enquête sur l'Ecosse Néolithique was a perfect piece of the modern world – a book about Scotland, written in French, by a man who'd been born in Taipei. When else in human history would you find something like that?

It was also exactly what they needed – one of the appendices included detailed survey maps of all the larger known stone circles in Scotland, all to scale and with north at the top, and documenting the suspected locations of missing stones. If any trace of their circle still existed, it ought to be in there. She turned to the section with the fold-out maps, and slid it across the table to Sir Stephen. “Look through this,” she told him. “If you find any that look like your ring, put one of these on it so it sticks out at the side.” She gave him a package of post-it notes. “They're sticky.”

“Thank you,” said Sir Stephen, and reverently unfolded the first map. He would be from an age when books were rare and precious, she observed. They wouldn't have to worry about him being rough with them. “I had not expected any part of my quest to take place in a library,” he added.

“I'd say libraries are where most questing goes on these days,” said Natasha.

In order not to distract him, the rest of them filed back out into Sue's office, where there were more chairs and more space not to feel like they were sardines in a book-liken can. Rushman went to pour himself another cup of coffee, the first one having been spilled when Natasha attacked him. Dr. Wilson wandered around looking at the posters and replica artefacts that decorated the room, and DI Carter checked her email.

“Hughes identified the blood from the warehouse floor,” she announced.

“Pierce's?” asked Nat. She wasn't sure if that would surprise her or not. She had a feeling Mr. Pierce, trying to convince her his statues were real, was not merely a victim in this after all... but she was also plenty familiar with people who turned on their allies the moment they were no longer useful.

“No. It's a guy named Mick O'Herlihy. We had his profile because he'd been arrested for breaking into people's cars six years ago. We did community service and we let him go.” Carter frowned. “Why is his name familiar?”

“The Loch Ness Monster guy was O'Herlihy,” said Nat. Could they be relatives? Or was this just a coincidence.

“Oh, right.” Carter nodded. “That's why. Anyway, she says she's gonna work on the shield right away, but it might be a problem getting DNA off of something made of beat-up wood and leather. She's as likely to get a profile for the tree or the cow as for whoever bled on it.”

“Fair enough,” said Natasha. Now they just had to wait for Sir Stephen to find a match, if one even existed. In the mean time... she looked over at Rushman. What the hell was she going to do about him?

He looked back at her, and ventured a timid smile. “So, uh, who are your friends?” he asked uncomfortably. He was trying to sound as if everything were normal. He knew it was not.

Natasha thought of telling him that they weren't really friends, but didn't feel it was worth it. “Well, that's Detective Inspector Sharon Carter from Inverness.”

“Hi,” said Carter.

“Nice to meet you, Inspector.” Rushman stood up straight to shake her hand.

“This is Dr. Sam Wilson, who worked at Raigmore Hospital,” Nat went on.

Rushman shook his hand, too. “That was a terrible thing to hear about,” he said, referring to the hospital falling down. “Any clue who did it yet? Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

“I don't know,” Dr. Wilson said. “I've been pretty busy.”

“We're working on it,” Carter promised.

“And the guy we left in the other room is Sir Stephen of Rogsey,” Natasha finished. “He's a Saxon knight from the eleventh century. Or at least, he thinks he is.” The unspoken corollary hung in the air: like you think you're my father.

“I see,” said Rushman. “And, uh... what are you all doing with the stone circle thing?”

“We're on a quest,” said Carter, in a perfect deadpan. “We seek the Holy Grail.”

Rushman seemed to decide that made about as much sense as any of the rest of it. “I'm not sure what kind of help I can be with that,” he said. “I've only seen the movie... I've been to Stonehenge, though,” he offered, and smiled at Natasha. “That was your Mom and I's second honeymoon, remember? You stayed with your aunt in the city, and she said she took you to the museum...” his voice trailed off as Natasha shook her head.

“I don't remember,” she said.

She felt a little bad for him honestly. In Rushman's own mind, he'd come all this way to see a daughter who'd thrown him on the floor and told him he didn't exist... or had he? Maybe that was just what Zola, or somebody else, wanted Natasha to think? She couldn't shake the feeling that this was deliberately playing on her emotions, giving her something she'd always wished she had in an attempt to weaken her. Maybe to soften her belief in objective truth, the kind she tried to uncover in mossy ruins and smashed pottery, and make her more open to some alternate version of reality. That was what Zola had said in the police station: truth is something we make up. This was certainly an ample demonstration.

“So your parents left you, huh?” Rushman asked.

“I'm sure they had their reasons,” Nat told him. She'd hated them for it once, but since then she'd come to realize that the world was more complicated. “That was during the end days of the USSR, shortly after Chernobyl. Maybe they had no money. Maybe they were dying of radiation sickness.” Either way, she liked to hope they hadn't actually known who they were leaving her with. If they'd believed their daughter had been raised and loved... well, that was just another beautiful lie, wasn't it?

“Well, on their behalf, I apologize,” said Rushman. “They don't know what they missed.”

“They didn't miss anything,” said Nat. “Whatever you remember about me isn't real. I never did any of that.”

“You were never in ballet recitals?” He smiled kindly. “Never built snowmen? You weren't your high school valedictorian?”

Nat shook her head. “None of that,” she said.

“Oh.” He fell silent, and Nat couldn't help feeling like she'd robbed him of something.

For a moment Rushman just stood swirling his coffee. Then he drained the cup and put it down on the table.

“I came here to see you,” he told Natasha. “If you don't want to see me, I guess I might as well just go home.”

Nat's gut reaction was that this was a terrible idea. If he were something Zola had created, somebody they couldn't trust, then she didn't want him out of her sight. Keep your friends close, the saying went, but your enemies closer. Besides, there was another complicating factor.

“Do you have a home?” Nat asked. His address in Manhasset was for an empty lot, and his phone number didn't exist. His credit cards and passport probably didn't either. What would happen if he tried to go home? What would happen when he got there?

“Of course I do,” he said. “I was just there last night!”

“You didn't even exist last night,” said Nat. She sighed. “We'll figure something out.”

There was something else, too – if Natasha wasn't sure she could trust Rushman, then how did she know she could trust Sir Stephen? He seemed to believe he was in the right, but was he? After all, his goal was the same as he claimed the bad guys' was, to find the Holy Grail.

The room Obi-Wan led him to was sparsely furnished. There was a gold couch, a massive bed framed with a twisting headboard carved from some sort of wood, and a small dresser next to the bed. The room also had the same plush carpet as the rest of the building. Obi-Wan took Anakin by the arm and led him to the bed where he gently pushed him into a sitting position on the bed  and kneeled down in front of him. Anakin's body immediately went rigid. “You're so stiff,” Obi-Wan said as he ran his hands soothingly up the younger man’s thighs. “You need to relax.”

The older man stood up and set himself down lightly on the bed next to Anakin. He moved in towards the younger man and placed a soft kiss on his lips. Anakin froze for a second and Obi-Wan was about to pull away when Anakin responded. Obi-Wan grazed his teeth across Anakin's lip and a moan escaped him.

They kissed for what felt like forever until Anakin was drowning in it. He felt Obi-Wan run his hands under his shirt and threw his head back with a gasp as the other man’s finger grazed his nipple. Obi-Wan took the opportunity to mouth at his neck. It felt like his hands were everywhere and every place he touched left a trail of fire behind. Wanting more, Anakin reached down and tried to pull his shirt over his head only to get it stuck. Obi-Wan laughed and reached up to unbutton a few buttons and help Anakin get it over his head. Obi-Wan pushed the younger man down onto the bed and took his time kissing his way down his body, Anakin quivering the whole time. When Obi-Wan reached Anakin's pants he looked up into his eyes and grinned wickedly. Anakin whined as Obi-Wan pulled back and took off Anakin's boots. He was so distracted he didn’t notice when Obi-Wan froze at the sight of the Jedi’s lightsaber he had kept tucked in his boot. Obi-wan quickly composed himself and took off the other boot. Anakin drew in a breath as obi-Wan ran his hands up the younger man’s thighs and pulled off his pants and underwear in one go. With nothing restricting it, Anakin's cock sprung free. He bit back a moan as Obi-Wan took him in hand and started to stroke. It was so much better than when he did this himself. He gasped as a wet heat engulfed his cock and his eyes flew open to the sight of Obi-Wan with his mouth on Anakin's dick. It took everything he had not to buck up into the older man’s mouth. His hands were in the sheets and he was convulsively gripping and releasing it. The sound of his heart beating rapidly in his chest filled his ears and all he could look at was his cock sliding in and out of Obi-Wan’s mouth.  He felt pressure building and building and just as he thought it would burst, Obi-Wan stopped. As he pulled back Anakin whimpered. “Are you fucking kidding me?”