Compatī

I spent what felt like another week wandering the Dreamscape.

It still got goosebumps running up and down my legs from how big this place was. Infinity had always been an idea I could wrap my head around, but the moment it became more than a concept…

Mortal minds weren’t meant for this.

To spare myself another existential nightmare, I elected to switching off my brain in favor of coasting in neutral. Hours of that supposed week went by like the blink of an eye. In the short moments I came out of standby, I focused on what Luna told me: Follow your heart, Sunset. It will never steer you wrong.

I did just that. I listened to the rhythm of my heart when different memories rolled through the movie reel that was my brain—some good, some bad, and some… I wasn’t sure.

The last time I let my heart draw me toward Luna, I felt hatred, rage, contempt—all the things that made me want to stomp on her face until her teeth fell out. But where that rage once burned like the fires of hell, I… I didn’t know what I felt anymore, but it wasn’t anger. At least, not strictly.

Honestly, I felt lost in a way no compass or map could fix. And the only pony who had an inkling of what was going on was the very one at the end of this nigh limitless journey.

Luna. Her name alone should have had my stomach upending itself. My brain lashed out instinctively: never forget what she did to you. And I didn’t. I couldn’t. The scars were there, in my head and in my heart. She broke me, yet she was also the one working hardest to fix me.

It still felt wrong admitting it, but she looked out for me. She protected me. And when I let the rage of what she had done get the better of me, she beat me into the dirt in order to peel away the mask hiding all the nastiness and uncertainty underneath. I still couldn’t justify that as the best way to help, but it proved one undeniable fact: she didn’t see me as the porcelain doll everyone else did.

I was a living breathing human with all the dignity and fallibility that entailed. She didn’t coddle me, nor did she try fixing me so much as enable me to fix myself.

Part of me still didn’t want to admit it, but she understood. And the way she laid bare her soul to me at the fireside had me feeling a little more… I didn’t know. Patient? Willing to listen? That much was true, if nothing else.

Maybe it was the whole concept of acclimatization that desensitized me to who she was and what she represented. God only knew the fuckery I had come to call “normal.” But it was mine to fight and mine to fix. She was merely there to see me through it in the way she thought best.

And it worked for the most part—scrub away the infection so the body could heal. The mind worked the same way, I had to assume. At least, that’s what mine told me, and no matter the circular nature of that logic, I was content.

I followed that contentment through the inky infinity, time a distant memory as I made myself one with the stars, and when I came to a gaping blackness I could only see by the absence of stars beyond it, I knew I had found the place.

The Eversleep took the form of a black hole. Little flecks of spacedust drifted into its gravity well and winked out, figments of someone’s last dream-thought gone, never to be dreamt again. It sent an icy chill up my spine.

I approached the event horizon, and I felt gravity shift insidiously, by way of the hairs tugging at my fetlocks. Another inch, and there was no going back.

I thought about it for the briefest moment: just turn around and walk away, leave her to the consequences of her martyr complex. But Twilight counted on me. Equestria and the human world counted on me. And I needed to do this for myself just as much. I sucked in a deep breath, and I took that fateful step over the threshold.

The change was immediate and intense. What was once an event horizon became the highest reaches of some planetary atmosphere. Icy winds howled and battered at me like feral windigos, tossing me every which way, but I gritted my teeth.

I kept my mind focused on Luna: her regal posture, the way her wingtips poked up above her back and the way she held her head upright and rigid yet with a smoothness of motion even Celestia couldn’t match. The Warrior Princess.

She wanted to help just as much as she needed to make amends, and I liked to think I had cooled off enough to let her. Tough love as the saying went. But that was a type of love, or at least the extent she was capable of, a sense of justice she felt I was due.

It was… calming? Relieving? Alleviating? I couldn’t pick the right word for it, but the sensation persisted even as I touched down amidst the maelstrom. The winds ripped apart the very ground beneath my hooves, and yet I felt… safe. Maybe not happy, but safe had never been more of a certainty, and no less so as she turned to greet me. Except maybe I was jumping the gun on that assumption, judging by the crease in her brow.

“You should not be here,” Luna said curtly. She sat up from where she lay overlooking a darkness my eyes couldn’t penetrate. She wore a scowl that could have peeled paint off a wall, and goddamn it no matter how hard I tried to see her in a different light, she just knew how to get under my skin.

“And why not?” I shot back.

“Because when I raised you from this place, I did so so that you might stop the Nightmare and end this plague.”

“No, you didn’t do so so that I might anything,” I said. “You did so so that I could do what I thought was best. I chose to go. Besides, it’s not like you even tried to come with.”

“Because it was safer that way. I could better focus on manipulating the fabrics that separate us from the Dreamscape. I could guarantee your escape, or I could chance ours. I see little reason to consider the notion.”

If I’d had fists, I would have been clenching them. “The whole fucking point is that we work together. You’re the one who wanted to fix this so damn badly.”

“And I do. I have said it time and again that I would bleed for the chance, so do not deflect when I ask why in Orion’s name you have returned.”

“Because someone has to save you, you dumbass!”

The look in her eyes faltered, and where there was once confusion and frustration, there was now… pain?

“Sunset, I had once before made the choice to save you at my own expense. Do not tell me you have forgotten what happened because you came to—”

“No, stop talking. I don't care what sort of sob story you think you're the star of here. I don't care if you think leaving yourself for dead is the right play. Now is my turn to talk, so just listen to me.”

“I have listened, Sunset. Tell me—” She spread her winds to gesture at the surrounding maelstrom. “—is this not what you wanted to become of me?”

I… and there she went, turning my words against me. Like some kind of goddamn stenographer itching to see me off to the chopping block.

But was she wrong? Wasn’t this what I wanted?

I’d told Luna she could burn in hell, and I meant every word when I said it. The animalistic part of my brain still did. This here was the closest she’d get while still technically alive.

But…

But what?

Things had changed. I had changed. My time drifting alone in the Dreamscape gave me perspective. It gave me ample space to think, to see, to feel what made me who I was, who I was becoming, and Luna’s place in it all.

She could get under my skin like nobody’s business, but annoyance wasn’t rage. Oil and water didn’t combust like alkali metals. They just… didn’t mix.

The rage that once consumed me had burnt out—been stamped out, really, but gone all the same. To some tentative degree, I was content with who she was and the dynamic we shared. But did that lack of hatred acquit her of what she did to me? Did she really deserve to burn in hell? The whole ethics thing wasn’t my strongest suit.

I could science anything I put my mind to, but there was no chemical formula for right and wrong, no scale that could measure earnestness, no chromatogram for stratifying morals. Truth didn’t come in a reagent bottle, nor was intent measured in molarity.

I had no numbers to correlate or graphs to infer from. All I had were my eyes to see, my ears to hear, and my heart to feel. I felt intellectually naked, and the very idea of that unknown terrified me the way disappointing Celestia used to years ago.

But I had my eyes, and I could hear and feel all that Luna had done—not Nocturne, Luna. Despite the wrongs she committed before, she strove to make up for them. The proof was written in her own blood. Not once or twice, but three times she had sacrificed herself to save my life, and despite the thankless hell I’d put her through, she stayed true to her word.

She really did care.

Maybe she deserved to burn in hell despite it all. Maybe she didn’t. I couldn’t say for certain anymore. But right now, that didn’t matter.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is what I wanted. Wanted, not want. And you’re right that I probably shouldn’t have come back. It was dangerous and stupid of me. But I did it anyway. Because…” My mind wandered back to my last conversation with Celestia, and a strange squirmy feeling wrapped its grubby fingers around my heart. “Because I need to come to terms with this. I need to grow the fuck up, and that means coming back for you, the way you did for me, and not just because Twilight asked me to.”

I sucked in a deep breath through my nose. It took all my willpower to form the words in the forefront of my brain:

“I can’t do this alone.”

I let the rest of that breath out as an exasperated sigh. “There, I said it. I need your help. I want your help. Because you’re smart, and brave, and you kick ass like it’s nobody’s business. You know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, and if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that you didn’t have to leave yourself behind. You said it yourself. Maybe it really was safer, but you didn’t have to.”

I looked back and forth between her eyes in the hopes I’d see something in there worth all these mixed-up thoughts in my head.

“I can’t do this without you,” I said again. “I really can’t. But right now, you need to stop getting your rocks off to this bullshit martyr complex of yours and fucking help me.” I took a step forward and looked her dead in the eye. “Please.”

She stared at me, so taken aback that I was pretty sure her brain had to do a hard shutdown to reboot. A solid two seconds went by before she blinked, snapped her wings flush against her sides, and turned the lights back on between her ears.

In that annoyingly pensive way only she could manage, she gave me another moment’s regard before closing her eyes. The way her ears flicked about told me there was no shortage of cognitive dissonance and self-deprecation going on in her head, but she eventually craned her neck toward the maelstrom above and let out a sigh.

“You have come far in this short time we have known each other, Sunset. I am proud to bear witness to it. I would be a fool to think myself infallible, and indeed, mayhaps I was wrong in discarding myself so hastily.” She went quiet again, and slowly her gaze came around to settle upon me—fragile, yet hard as diamond.

“You truly believe what you say?” she asked. “That you need my help? That you want my help?” There was a certain hollow measure to her voice, as if whatever I said next would be the most important words to ever come out of my mouth.

After a long moment, I said, “I do.”

The wind howled, the ledge crumbled to sail off into the sky, and still she stared at me with the weight of her soul borne upon the hope I found in that gaze, until eventually a smile came to her.

“Very well.” She got to her hooves and gave the ever-circling maelstrom a determined glare. There was an electricity to her, a spark flickering to life in challenge of the storm. “Then we shall rise against the maelstrom together, and will that Hell shall meet us should it be our fate. ’Twill not be easy, and I know not what will happen should we fail.”

“I sense a ‘but’ in there,” I said.

She tracked a sidelong eye down toward me. The way her lip curled into a grin had me second-guessing our tentative arrangement.

“But,” she said, “you will have to trust me.”

She flapped her wings, and just as my brain processed the implication, she lowered her right wing toward me like a ramp.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, no no no no no. We are not flying. I told you—”

“Sunset,” she said, the calmest I’d ever heard her speak.

I almost didn’t hear her over the wind. I waited for her to say more, but she merely stared at me expectantly.

Oh god. Oh jeez. We really had to do this, didn’t we? I was going to do this. This was insane. I took back everything I said a moment ago. I didn’t want to grow up. Coming to terms was for chumps. I hated flying.

“Sunset,” she said again in that same patient voice.

I winced and snapped my ears flat back. A deep breath, in then out, and I opened my eyes. We were doing this. We were really doing this. I had to do this. For… for Twilight. For Copper. Everyone was counting on me not being a little bitch.

My heart racketed like I’d run a marathon as I hopped up on her back. She was warm, but she could have been made of magma and it still wouldn’t have done jack for the ice water running through my veins.

She gave her wings a few test flaps. There were gaps in them where she still hadn’t regrown all her feathers, and I felt a lump in the joint where her wing met her shoulder that probably healed incorrectly. But she had full range of motion, and I had to pray that was enough.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Fuck no.” I wrapped my hooves tighter around her neck.

I could practically hear her smile in the laugh she gave. She found a sick, twisted sort of satisfaction in my misery, I just knew it.

She gave a few more test flaps before running toward the far end of the mountaintop. Oh god oh god oh—FUCK ME!

And we were off into the sky. My mane whipped in my face, and the wind felt like ice against my coat.

Luna pumped her wings to take us higher up and away from sweet, solid ground, and I felt the subtle arching of her back with every wingbeat. A perpetual grunt settled into the cracks between her breaths.

“Hold fast, Sunset,” she shouted over the now roaring wind as we approached the darkened clouds above. They loomed like an iron fortress awaiting whatever hapless travelers may dare enter.

She lit her horn, and everything was lost to a flash of light and the howling wind.

[End of Act II]