The best solution to a problem is the one with the lowest chance for failure. Starlight didn’t seem to have considered this when planning her revenge, but Twilight and Spike did when determining how to thwart it.
It didn’t make enacting their plan any less painful, however. They’d had to flee from Sombra eighty-nine times (or was it ninety-eight?), escape Nightmare Moon sixty-three times, dodge Chrysalis a whopping one hundred forty-two times, evade Tirek thirty-five times, and duck Discord seventy-six times.
Twilight and Spike had agreed years ago that Discord was the worst of the usual suspects. He knew what was going on, and he thought it was just hilarious. He made extra sure to have some fresh material to show them every time they arrived. Twilight still wasn’t sure if the headless statues of her friends were the ponies she’d known or just a facsimile. And that was just the twenty-seventh go.
The ones that hurt the most weren’t Discord’s needling, though. It was the rare times when her friends were the problem. Rarity possessed by the Nightmare, Rainbow having somehow launched a coup as captain of the Wonderbolts, Fluttershy ravaging Equestria with an army of beasts, or Applejack controlling the food supplies in times of famine. There were other possibilities, of course. She’d seen them too. Twilight had yet to see one with Pinkie in command however. On the occasions when Twilight’s sense of humor returned to her, she would muse that maybe the empty wastelands she sometimes got were Pinkie’s doing somehow. Sometimes that even got a laugh.
Every time going back was starting to become a relief these days. Starlight was just now starting to show the first signs of aging. It was starting subtly, so much so that Starlight might not realize it yet. It would have escaped Twilight and Spike’s notice as well, if Twilight hadn’t set up a spell to point these things out. The first gray hair had been found. Starlight’s reaction times were slowing down, although not by enough yet for Twilight to let her guard down.
Unfortunately, she was still just as chatty as ever.
“Why don’t you just stop?” Starlight sneered into Spike’s face. “We’ve been through this so many times I’ve lost count.”
“One thousand, one hundred fifty-six times,” Spike grunted out as he threw a punch towards his opponent. His wings had finally come in, and what he lacked in fighting skill he made up for in nearly impervious scales and muscle that Starlight couldn’t ignore. Twilight hadn’t had to actively protect him in nearly a decade.
Starlight lowered herself out of the way, then raised herself right back in front of Spike. “And have you won a single time? I mean sure, you can fight me, but even that’s enough of a spectacle to disrupt everything. Even if I lose, so do you.”
Twilight screamed wordlessly as she fired a shock spell from her horn with enough power behind it that were she back home she’d be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. Starlight dodged that too, creating more distance this time. While her reactions were getting worse, experience was filling in the gaps.
“Come on now,” she taunted at the two. “You really shouldn’t be trying to do things like that. I mean, how would you live with yourself if you accidentally killed your best friend?”
Losing all patience, Twilight simply snatched Starlight with her own levitation as the magical field around the mare turned from cyan to purple. “You,” Twilight practically growled as she slapped Starlight. “Are not.” A jab in the gut this time. “My friend!” Twilight dropped her unceremoniously. She’d clearly survive; Twilight could already feel the tug that started from her stomach every time the spell kicked in to take her to the present. It was only as the spell completed and she was pulled through the rift that Twilight realized how close she had come to actually killing Starlight directly. She tried as hard as she could to suppress the part of herself that wished she’d timed it right to actually finish the lunatic off.
“You know, you say we’re not friends, but really think about it Twilight!” Starlight said as she dodged another laser. “At this point we’ve been at this for what, two decades?”
“Two decades, seven years, five months, one week, two days, eight hours, and six - oh wait seven - minutes,” Spike rattled off from the time-keeping spell Twilight had implanted in both their heads. Technically it should have been twelve hours, since it took Twilight the extra four to realize that it would be useful to have something measuring time in the absence of normal days, but it was close enough for her purposes. It had only taken an extra hour afterwards for Spike to convince her of that instead of fiddling with settings until she could make it perfectly accurate.
“Exactly,” Starlight continued. “Now name for me one other pony that you’ve spent twenty-seven years of your life hanging out with. You must really like me.”
That stunned Twilight long enough for Starlight to get in a crystal stasis spell on her and for the rift to come in. The last thing Twilight saw before the portal sucked her in was her nemesis smirking like she’d finally won.
Twilight knew she was in this for the long haul, but it hurt to realize she’d been twenty-five before this started. If this went on for much longer, she’d be older than her own mother.
Spike had to do most of the work for the next run because Twilight was too busy sobbing, but it was just the Flim Flam brothers. No real challenge there; machines of iron didn’t stand up well to his claws and fire. They even had time for a rare breather before reactivating the table.
“You know she’s just trying to get to you, right?” Spike asked, standing between Twilight and the table so she couldn’t just bail out of the conversation and the first rest they’d had in days.
Twilight tried to take a deep breath in, but only found another wracking sob. “And what if it’s working, Spike?” Having let out the worst thought, breathing came slightly easier. Ragged full breaths were an improvement over ragged short ones. “I just want to be done. I just want her to either quit, or keel over from age. I want to stop worrying. But I can’t! We don’t know where she goes or what she does when we’re not fighting her! What if she’s building a phylactery? What if this never ends, Spike? She’s right about one thing. I haven’t seen my friends for more than half my lif-”
Twilight jumped as she found one of Spike’s claws gently shushing her. When she looked up at him, he was somewhere between a smile and tears. “You’ve seen me every minute of every day, Twilight.”
Twilight wrapped her forelegs around his chest wordlessly. “We have to keep going. You saw her. She’s gone completely gray, and she basically can’t move without her levitation. If she was going to turn herself into a lich, she would’ve done it years ago. We’re gonna’ go back in there, and we are going to laugh right in her face when she says she’s winning, okay?”
Twilight nodded, but didn’t move from her position. “Hey Spike?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think we can rest just a little while longer?”
“I think we’ve got a while before Flim and Flam get that thresher back in working order, so yeah.”
The two of them held each other until they heard the grinding of machines signalling the need for an exit.
“You know Starlight, for somepony who was smart enough to rework Starswirl’s time travel spell, you really are stupid,” Twilight said as she put on as much bravado as she could muster.
A perfectly malicious laugh was the response. Starlight had been practicing it for nearly three decades, after all. “Says the mare who’s attempted the same thing over a thousand times and has yet to succeed.”
Spike flew right up into her face, grinning evilly. “You don’t get it, do you? You’ve been losing this entire time, Starlight. Here, take a look.” He flew to Twilight, grabbing a sheet of ice she’d conjured, and pointing its reflective face towards Starlight. “We’ve been running down the clock. Of the three of us, you’re the one aging the fastest. You were playing the wrong game, Starlight.”
For the first time in twenty-seven years, five months, four days, six (or ten) hours, and thirty-three minutes, Starlight Glimmer was rendered speechless. Twilight wished she could say she took pleasure in seeing her enemy’s tears as the rift opened up, but for her it just drove home how long it had taken to reach this point. The point where Starlight would either give up, or take measures even more extreme to keep this going forever.
For the first time in twenty-seven years, five months, five days, one hour, and forty minutes, Starlight Glimmer didn’t attack immediately when Twilight and Spike came through the rift. She looked broken.
“Well Twilight, you win. I have nothing left. My dreams. My village. My… My youth. It’s all gone. Let’s just say I don’t fight you here. What happens when we get back? You go back to living your life normally, and I go to prison?”
For the first time in twenty-seven years, five months, five days, one hour, and forty-one minutes, Twilight pitied the creature floating across from her. Twilight had created this sorry wreck, after all.
“No Starlight. We go back, and we go our separate ways. We’ve both been in prison for long enough to prove this stupid point. Just… go away Starlight. Do what you will with whatever time you have left. There’s nothing left for either of us in pursuing this any further. I want to go home.”
Starlight looked Twilight dead in the eyes for the first time in the conversation. “And what if I come back? Try something else to get my revenge? I have a lot more to get payback for in the future.”
Twilight and Spike both laughed mirthlessly. Spike was the first to recover. “You won’t, and we all know it. You’ve wasted everything you had getting to this point, just let it go. You lost, and we’re giving you one last chance to reclaim something.”
Not so far off and worlds apart at the same time, an explosion of sound and color shattered the horizon, and one last rift took the three of them back to what would have to pass for normal going forward.
Author's Note
So like I said in the story description, this is a story that's been burning in the back of my head basically since the season five finale aired. So I finally sat down to write it, got it posted here...
...And immediately the sidebar is recommending other stories of the same concept. Oh well, at least it's done.