Noblesse Oblige

After that, what with one thing and another, several years went by.

The first of those things, of course, was the almost painfully adorable courtship of Princess Luna and Captain Greaves, the two quickly becoming fixtures at various of the libraries, art galleries, cafes, and performance venues about town. Their project? To engage in some light snuggling, yes, but more importantly, to familiarize the princess with the best writing, music, art, and assorted creative whatnots the citizens of Equestria had committed during her long absence.

What Princess Luna immediately and accidentally discovered, however, was the lurid lore that had accreted over the past thousand years concerning Nightmare Night.

She took it much better than anypony had a right to expect, actually. Princess Celestia told me that her sister burst into her room one evening about a week after the Ruddygore performance, recited some old bit of rustic doggerel about Nightmare Moon gobbling up foals, and fell to the floor laughing. She then declared her determination to seize this quickly approaching holiday and make it truly her own by—and I believe this is a direct quote—"appropriating its symbols and reimagining its conceits."

I'm told she fashioned a spell that transformed Greaves and his adjutant into some semblance of the mythical "bat ponies" who, according to legend, formed Nightmare Moon's entourage. She further conjured up a fantastical chariot for them to pull, and the whole team of them set off for Ponyville on the night in question, Princess Luna wishing to begin her public reformation efforts at the site where she'd reclaimed her true identity some months previous.

Once again, Princess Celestia's former student, the redoubtable Twilight Sparkle, managed to keep the evening from dissolving entirely into fiasco, and Princess Luna returned to the capital emboldened by a new determination to absorb Captain Greaves's modernization lessons.

All of this, I thought, would bend my admittedly rather bent relationship with Princess Celestia in a more positive direction. A great deal of the self-loathing she revealed only to me in the privacy of her rooms, after all, apparently stemmed from the centuries of guilt she'd been steeping in after banishing her sister on that first Nightmare Night. So now that Princess Luna was back and, to judge by the discreet and not-so-discreet smiles and more-than-smiles she and Greaves were sharing all over town, was happily reconnecting with the earthier aspects of a non-lunar lifestyle, my princess would undoubtedly find a great deal to smile about as well.

I thought.

But while Princess Celestia made no comment when I began curbing somewhat my previous life of wretched excess, she made it quite clear in the same unspoken way that she expected me to continue providing a bad example to proper ponies everywhere so she could upbraid me and then upend me, as it were. Even more troubling? She never varied an iota from her view that the mind-meltingly fantastic experience of being physically intimate with her was somehow a punishment she was inflicting upon me. I longed to express the joy that surged within me like the sweetest possible storm clouds whenever we were together, but her eyes pleaded with me not to say a word—including, oddly enough, the word "Auntie," her unfailing orgasmic trigger during our first years together.

So her needs and wants were indeed changing. I just had no idea whether they spelled a cessation of her assorted neuroses or the arrival of a whole new batch. Especially when she started escorting me to join her, her sister, and Captain Greaves for breakfast on those mornings after we'd engaged in one of our sessions.

Awkward wasn't a strong enough word to describe the first several dozen of these little shindigs. From one of the many balconies dotting Canterlot Tower, Princess Luna would lower the moon, her captain and main squeeze standing at attention to her left, while Princess Celestia raised the sun, my bleary self slumped in a slightly less perpendicular fashion to her right. Then we'd all adjourn to the royal coffee nook—a bit more well-appointed, perhaps, than the average coffee nook, what with the full dining table in the center, the several steam trays along the walls, and the quiet attention of at least six liveried attendants who shuttled in and out with platters of pastries, carafes of coffee, tureens of tea, and a wide variety of non-alliterative substances as well.

Whether it confused and/or angered Princess Luna, this tacit admission that something was most certainly going on between her sister and me, I found myself unable to tell. She never asked a direct question, of course—and Princess Celestia certainly never offered even a hint of an explanation—but the implication that we were rising from our shared bed just as our nocturnal counterparts were settling into theirs shone brighter than anything in the sky outside.

However, I allowed more of my actual nature to peek through the Blueblood guise I maintained in public, and after several weeks, the partial glares jabbing across the table lessened from nearly crippling to merely severe. That Greaves and Princess Luna were besotted with each other helped, I think: she seemed unable to remain in a grumpy mood while he was anywhere in the vicinity, and I did my utmost to treat him with as much respect as I could manage.

That I actually did respect him made the task easier, but, well, the steed was so upright, forthright, and just about every other compound adjective one could think of involving the concept of 'right' that I had no choice but to needle him now and again: "Keeping a stiff upper whatever the foals are calling it these days?" I would ask him, for instance, or imply that he could assist the national treasury by releasing his claim upon his bedroom "since I doubt you've spent much time there recently."

He took the gibes as stoically as his namesake armored shin guard, and his sterling example rather forced Princess Luna to take them as well. Of course, he didn't have to say a word to make his own comments, merely lifting an eyebrow a scant hair's breadth and aiming it in my general direction when I would collapse into my place at table beside the elegant, flowing perfection of Princess Celestia.

That's the problem with stoics. They can be every bit as insufferable as us loudmouths without making a single sound...

Still, as fall got run into winter and winter got wrapped up into spring, I couldn't help feeling a tension spread throughout Princess Celestia's fine, ivory frame. She had often in the past become randier as the days grew longer, summoning me to her room sometimes four or five times a week. But this year, a desperation clung to her actions, a certain wild jitteriness taking her when she climaxed.

From any other pony, I would've thought I was detecting fear and uncertainty in those gasping, shuddering moments when her true self came as close to breaching the many layers in which she cloaked herself as it ever did. A saltiness touched the edges of her usual river-water-trickling-over-stones scent, but since I was hardly in a position at those times to be taking precise measurements, I could never quite be sure.

One late evening in early spring, however, the sense of something unhinging my princess tingled in my mind after the other tingling that always filled me when we lay tangled with each other and the bedclothes had faded. Unable to remain quiet, I let the words bubble out: "Is there anything else I can do to help, my Lady? Anything at all?"

Her embrace, already oddly tight, gave a small but convulsive squeeze before slackening just a bit. "Tell them I tried my best," she murmured into the hair between my ears. "If things go badly in the next week or two—and the chances that they will go badly are not negligible—speak soothing lies to the survivors if you're among them and tell them I failed rather than that I betrayed them."

It took every ounce of the control I'd learned during my twenty-odd years not to leap from her arms at these words. Instead, I tilted my head back along the pillows until I met the depths of her gaze. "Are there perhaps any other pertinent details you'd like me to share with these hypothetical survivors should I hypothetically find myself chatting with them?"

The tiniest bit of a smile tugged her muzzle, and she bent her head to touch her nose to mine. "All right, fine," she said. "I'm being mysterious and melodramatic. I'd've thought you'd be used to that by now."

"Oh, I am, I am." I forced as much breeziness into my voice as I could. "But if I'm to bear your legacy into the post-apocalyptic doomscape of the future, I just thought my listeners might enjoy a few more tidbits upon which they can gnaw whilst we sit scratching at fleas around our guttering bonfire. That's all."

She drew a breath, her barrel expanding between my forelegs. "We have two disasters imminently looming. One I've been expecting for a thousand years, but the other's just come to my attention within the past few days. Alone, either could easily destroy everything ponies have been striving for since before I first felt the warmth of the sun. But together and properly managed, these disasters could lead to an Equestria that's stronger than she's ever been."

I blinked at her. "'Managed' seems an odd word in this context."

"It is." Pulling me closer, she tucked her chin over the top of my head once more. "Because the only way I can see for this all to work out successfully is for Luna and I to do nothing. To do less than nothing, in fact: I myself must be beaten down by one enemy and mustn't even approach the other while Luna...she must know nothing about the one and must listen to reason about the other. And that other is a subject about which she's proven herself to be less than reasonable on multiple occasions in the past."

With my face pressed to her chest, the great steady kettle drum of her heart thudded faster than I'd ever heard it. My thoughts a jumble, I fell back to first principles and began kissing my way up the glorious flex of her neck. "Again," I murmured, "what can I do to help?"

The princess made a purring noise deep in her throat. "Just exactly what you're doing right now," she said, and the rest of the night passed without an intelligible word from either of us.

I slept late the next morning, but upon arising in time for an early lunch, I learned of two announcements that had the entire city in a tizzy: first, Princess Luna had detected some nebulous but virulent threat to Canterlot during her nightly sojourn into the dreamscape, and second, Captain Armor had at long, long last made his intentions official toward Princess Cadance by scheduling their wedding for the end of the week.

This, I hardly need mention, signaled the beginning of the first disaster, the one in which my princess had to be struck down by her enemy so that others—Captain Armor, his aforementioned sister Twilight Sparkle, and the actual Princess Cadance—could step forward and foil the planned destruction of all we ponies hold dear.

Well, they did so, of course. And that evening, after the invading army had been blasted away by the sheer power of love, and the new marriage, I assumed, was being consummated the same way, Princess Celestia hurled me into her bed without any of the ritual chastisement that always opened our sessions and took me with an outpouring of passion even more overwhelming than usual.

"We're so close!" she murmured between kisses that were in and of themselves as intense as I imagined being struck by lightning would be. "I told Luna to concentrate on finding the threat while I took care of the wedding, but of course the wedding was the threat, so she was deep in the dreamscape when the changelings attacked! Chrysalis had absorbed so much love, I barely had to fake anything when she smacked me aside, and now? Now we're more than halfway there, and it's going to work! I know it is!"

Once again, her tender—and not so tender—attentions left me in no state to ask what exactly she knew was going to work, but when, not many days after the wedding, the news burst over Canterlot that a sizable but largely unknown empire had appeared to the north, I began to suspect that this might in fact be the beginning of disaster number two.

The heated conversation at breakfast the next morning rather confirmed my suspicions. "This will not stand!" Princess Luna exclaimed the instant Princess Celestia and I stepped into the coffee nook. The Night Princess had apparently been disemboweling a grapefruit with a runcible spoon before our entrance, but now her hornglow was brandishing the sharpened edge of said utensil like a cutlass in our general direction. "If that foul traitor Sombra has returned as well, we must sally forth at once to bring about his final, ignoble defeat!"

Greaves's ears perked. "But say the word, Your Highnesses, and I will lead the forces of Equestria against whatever fiend lurks within the heart of this Crystal Empire!" He shrugged. "Since Shining Armor's still on his honeymoon and all..."

And while I'd never before imagined I'd see such a thing, Princess Luna went absolutely pale, the midnight blue of her hide turning a sickly shade of gray. "No, my captain," she said quickly. "We would not waste our valiant troops in this fashion. This...this is a problem of our own—and by our own, I mean my own—making, and I will deal with it." Her glare sharpened again and fixed upon her sister, seating herself with a cup of tea at the table. "In the way that it should have been dealt with many centuries ago!"

Princess Celestia didn't raise her eyes from her cup, nor did she make a sound as she stirred in a few drops of milk and a few grains of sugar. It was Greaves who spoke: "My Lady? Can I serve you in no way in this matter?"

This time, Princess Luna didn't pale. She blushed a deep and glowing shade of purple. "Do...do you recall, my love, the conversation we had some months ago wherein we shared assorted details about those ponies with whom we had each—" Her jittery gaze grazed my own for an instant, then sprang away as if I'd stung her. "—had relations?" I could almost smell the effort it took for her to turn that gaze toward Greaves. "I told you that, in all my many years, there had been but one pony who had touched my heart in a manner resembling the way you've touched me?"

Greaves went very still. "This Sombra?" he asked, his words as brittle as eggshells.

Princess Luna leaped to her hooves. "He means nothing to me now! Less than nothing! He was a brute and a tyrant and the most devious monstrosity ever to arise among the pony tribes!" Again, her gaze darted to meet mine, but something with a much harder edge shimmered there now. "One of the most devious monstrosities, at any rate!"

"And yet?" Greaves said quietly. "You say that you loved him."

The entire room seemed to freeze this time, Princess Luna's eyes going wide.

Princess Celestia set her cup upon its saucer with the tiniest of clatters. "Sombra had developed a spell," she said without looking up, her voice so gentle that, instead of breaking the silence, it just nudged it a bit to the side. "Utilizing the magical crystals the Empire is known for, he cast upon himself properties of reflectivity and conductivity. He'd originally thought that this would let him absorb power from the ponies around him, and the spell did that quite well. But he found that it also allowed him to discern and assume whatever traits those ponies found most desirable. He was able to pull those traits over himself like a mask, projecting erudition and compassion while keeping his true venality and pettiness hidden."

I couldn't help blinking. Firstly, it sounded like a very useful spell to have in one's arsenal, and secondly, well, I couldn't recall the last time my princess had simply come right out and explained anything in this fashion. I was considering mentioning these two observation aloud in an effort to lighten the mood when Princess Celestia nodded toward me. "A thousand years ago, Sombra made an alliance with that era's Prince Blueblood, the last surviving remnant of the old Unicornian nobility, and the two of them used Sombra's spell to woo my sister and myself with the sole purpose of marrying us, killing us, and taking our thrones."

Which statement rather put the kibosh on any idea of lightening the mood...

"By the time we saw through their scheme," Princess Celestia was going on, "Sombra had absorbed so much of our power that the both of us combined could barely turn him to shadow and seal him in the ice, and we couldn't stop the curse he'd placed on the Empire from vanishing it away into a thousand years of slumber." She raised her head at last, her attention focused solely on her sister. "I hope you'll forgive me for acting without consulting you, but at the first report of the Empire's reappearance, I dispatched Princess Cadance and Shining Armor to lead the aid efforts. Captain Armor's natural organizational skills, I feel, will prove indispensable to the task, and the love and compassion that form the basis of Cadance's power will—"

"Her cutie mark!" Princess Luna said suddenly, her eyes going even wider. "I'd not before noticed how greatly it resembles the Crystal Heart around which the Empire revolved!" She nodded. "I approve entirely of their appointment, Sister, but they will need our help to—" Her eyes, which had been descending toward their normal size, once again flew wide to such an extent that I feared for her ocular safety. "And yet we cannot! If Sombra is indeed flitting about the edges of the Empire, his spell will latch onto our familiar energies and add them to his own! We...we can do nothing!"

Princess Celestia sipped her cup. "I've also asked Twilight Sparkle and her friends to call upon us this morning."

Princess Luna's whole countenance brightened. "That is most excellently thought of as well! They have shown their capabilities time and again, and this will stand as a most appropriate test to see if your young student is truly walking the path we both hope that she is." Her ears fell, and she turned to Greaves, chewing the same mouthful I was sure he'd been chewing for the past several minutes. "While we await their arrival, Greaves, might we retire to our chambers and talk? I would clear the air between us."

Greaves's slow smile told me everything I needed to know, an opinion that was only reinforced when he set a hoof upon hers and said, "No clouds could ever come between these eyes and the face upon which they long to gaze."

She made a little giggling noise, and they took their leave—I assume to their chambers to talk. Or perhaps to commune in some other way...

My princess and I finished our morning meal side by side in companionable silence. I didn't commend her for the way in which she'd played her sister like a well-tuned cello, nor did I ask any of the questions that bounced around the confines of my skull. This wasn't the time for questions, after all, and some of them—whether the spell that my ancient forebear had cast upon her had ever been dispersed, for instance, and how said spell might explain her continued predilection for ponies whom she could call Blueblood—I discovered that I didn't really want answered.

Still, as students of history will recall, the return of the Crystal Empire didn't become any sort of disaster whatsoever, nor did the return of Discord not many weeks later, nor the ascension of Twilight Sparkle to alicornhood as the Princess of Friendship not many weeks after that. It was a rather busy spring, one might go so far as to say.

Of course, the rest of the year had its share of pitfalls as well, what with both Princess Celestia and Princess Luna falling into one of Discord's old traps the day of the Summer Sun Celebration and the entire country nearly coming unglued due to yet another rampaging, semi-mythical, would-be tyrant. But for all the explosions both good and bad, for all the drama and the trauma, for all that some of us were forced over and over again to sleep alone in our own rooms while our princesses were off attending the multitude of sudden summit meetings in the far-flung corners of the world that are apparently de rigueur when one's nation starts producing princesses at an alarming rate—at least Greaves got included in his princess's entourage what with him being the captain of the Night Guard—

But for all of that, nothing seemingly affected my princess more than Princess Cadance and Prince Armor becoming parents.

"Astonishing!" she murmured as we lay curled together the night after she returned only slightly singed from the crystal-based ceremony to which the ponies of the Empire apparently exposed their children, her bedding strewn haphazardly about us. "That Cadance's daughter should be born an alicorn! I can't begin to understand how it happened!"

"Well," I drawled, touching a hoof to my chest, "I've been told that when a stallion and a mare love each other very much—"

She stopped my lips moving by judicious application of her own lips. "It's a good thing," she said when she finally let me up for air, "that you're nearly as cute as you think you are." Her gaze above me became unfocused again, and I couldn't even begin to guess where her thoughts were taking her. "These events open so many possibilities for the future," she finished after a moment.

"Do they?" And as certain as I was that those thoughts of hers weren't wending in a maternal direction, well, this was the time for questions, after all. So I blew out a theatrical sigh. "Will this call for a great deal more effort on my part? I'm all for sacrificing myself for my country, of course, but there's only so much the mortal pony body can be expected to—"

Again, her lips smothered mine, and my treacherous mortal pony body reacted rather stereotypically to her ministrations. But she pulled away before events could lead to more than some cross-eyed panting on my part. Lying back along her pillows, she shook her head. "Fear not, my hapless Lothario. No pony would be less-suited to motherhood than I." She stretched herself long and luxuriously beside me. "Twilight Sparkle, however..."

My cutie mark began tingling. The return of Polaris Blueblood, Matchmaker to Royalty, was it? I scooted myself close to her side and was rewarded when she enfolded me within one of those great, gorgeous wings. "I don't know," I said into her neck. "I've got this rather demanding marefriend whom I don't think would take it well were I to throw her over for a younger model."

Her chuckle vibrated through my skull, down my spine, and out the end of my tail. "That's what happens when you become invaluable." Her feathers stroking me fore and aft forced me to clench my teeth lest I begin rhapsodically exclaiming the joys of being helplessly enthralled to her. "You've made two of our five current princesses ecstatically happy by your efforts, and now you're being called upon to go three for five."

That I didn't freeze in her embrace I can only ascribe to the heat flowing between us. For while I'd certainly assumed that I'd been making her happy these past several years, she had never before so much as implied that to be the case. And for a pony as allusive and elusive as my lady to so very nearly come right out and say that she enjoyed my company...

I snuggled closer to her. "I'll expect overtime pay for this."

"Of course." The rise and fall of her breathing so lulled me, not even her next words could keep me from tipping headfirst into the sweet abyss of sleep. "I've already bought your ticket: you'll be leaving for Ponyville on the dawn train tomorrow."