Compatī

Call me crazy, but I honestly didn’t think that would work.

Taking the Sleep Spell Nocturne taught me all those years ago and projecting it onto another person wasn’t that big of a leap in logic. Putting all my eggs in one basket and attacking the Nightmare with it? In the middle of a magical lightning storm that could have altered the spell in any innumerable ways?

Forget calling me crazy. Stupid was more like it.

But if a stupid plan works, it isn’t stupid—or so they say—and despite all the bad luck the universe loved shoveling in my face, I found myself touching down on soft grass with a warm sun on my back.

It seemed I hadn’t projected the spell as directly as I hoped and dragged myself in with it. Or it in with me, whichever way the spell decided to work. At the very least, we were dreaming, and I had spared the world a few more minutes. That’s all that mattered for now.

I was in a town of sorts. The splotchy shapes of ponies milled about the vaguest suggestion of a marketplace. It reminded me of the first time we got the Dream Dive Spell fully working. I had to find the center of this dream, or at least the focal point or whatever Luna would call it. I spun about in place, and with little detail to lead me, I picked a direction and started walking.

Dreams had a strange way of distorting time. Anypony could say that and believe it as cold hard truth, but being fully cognizant really let me experience the magnitude of it in sobering detail.

I wandered and wandered. It felt for a brief moment like the infinity of the Dreamscape had snuck in and worked its magic when I wasn’t looking.

But time, infinite as it may be, still bent the knee to eventuality, and I found what I believed I was after in the form of an incongruence in the dream itself—like two separate dreams had been stitched together, Eversleep style.

I stood in the space between my former classroom and Celestia’s greeting room. That comforting space I had gotten to know in my many teatime sessions with Celestia overlooked the auditorium where I took my entrance exam.

I was no purveyor of dreams, but I could tell the Nightmare in disguise when I saw it.

My younger self stood at the fore, staring at an array of items atop a little table, and my eyes instinctively snapped to the candelabra that I would accidentally Come-to-Life were this to play out as I remembered.

But just before that fateful moment, I caught my younger self’s eye, the Nightmare in disguise, and it looked at me as if staring down a lion. It took off for the side entrance that led toward CSGU proper.

“H-hey! Wait!” I took off after it.

It led me on a chase through the hallways of CSGU. I barreled past Professor Wizened Reed’s A-chem room, phasing like a ghost through the unknowing ponies of this dream. The hallway became a courtyard—no, the quad, where ponies sunned themselves and played games and cooked up any number of crazy experiments—then out past the track field and beyond.

A healthy dose of clairvoyance struck me, and some preternatural instinct told me this was the evening of the lacrosse match where I met… What was his name?

I could see his short-cut wavy mane and the frame of his shoulders, but I couldn’t remember what his face looked like—just that he had pretty eyes. It had been so long, and he likewise was little more than a passing fancy.

I came to a stop at the chain-link fence where Copper had snatched that scarf. Lo and behold, it sat there on the fence pole waiting for me. It heeded my magic when I went to lift it—so I was in this dream proper, strangely enough—and I twisted it about.

What a pretty little thing. The younger mare in me still adored its tassels, but… I set it back. Copper would come along for it in some form or another, so I let it be.

I wandered back to the path where me and that stallion had had that wonderful first date so long ago.

I cut through the hoof-beaten path between the little copse of trees and felt the familiar crunch of cinder ash. There after the bend in the path, I saw my younger self sharing a moment with what’s-his-face.

For the life of me I still couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered the butterflies he made me feel, the stupid, love-drunk smiles he got out of me. No matter what fanciful daydreams my mind wanted to dredge up, memories were memories, and that’s where he was meant to stay. I momentarily wondered how he was doing, wherever he was. Did life treat him well? Better than me at least, I hoped. He didn’t deserve that kind of suffering. That much I knew.

Ahead, What’s-his-name pinned his ears back before leaning in to give my younger self a kiss. But before she could deny him as I had that day, she saw me over his shoulder, and the scene ground to a halt.

There was a look of fear in her eyes as they danced back and forth between mine. Fear twisted into anger, and she screamed at me before running off again. Unlike earlier, though, I didn’t feel a sense of urgency.

These visions—was this truly even a dream?—they were a highlight reel of what sent me spiraling. On their way to it, at least. Symbolism and syllogism withstanding, I remembered Luna once saying, and I followed along the path as it circled me back, memory after memory.

Poignant moments from a poignant past. Semester finals, the Summer Sun Celebration with Copper’s family. Fast forward to our Manehattan trip and everything in between.

Each and every prominent memory of my youth rolled past me like some sort of conveyor-belt museum tour. I felt like I already knew what was going on, where it was leading me.

It wasn’t long before I found myself in the mirror room. I stopped with no one direction to follow, and around me the month’s dedication I had poured into this little space occurred at hyper speed, like a VCR set to fast forward. I watched my younger self build and polish the mirror base, the many failed attempts to contain its magic. The times I spent standing before it, unnervingly still, staring into its polished surface long into the night—long enough that I could make out the features of my own face despite the timelapse.

Soon enough, Celestia entered. I remembered that conversation, then the one after. I again saw the pleading in her eyes to see reason, the disappointment I could only now feel in the years gone by. I made myself watch, I made myself remember, I made myself suffer that memory and the deluge of emotions that drowned out all reason in favor of what amounted to a fairy tale. I watched as my younger self let fly that desperate spell, as she groveled at Celestia’s hooves, as Stone Wall led her home.

When that final burning image undid its grip about my heart, I found the strength to turn, and that’s when I knew this was the end:

I stood in a hallway—the hallway, and I knew what awaited me beyond the door at the other end. Hesitantly, I took that first step, felt the soft carpet beneath my hooves, smelled the stale chemical smell of new paint. Then another step, and another as ancient, unwanted emotions quietly bubbled to the surface. They made my hooves as light as feathers, yet my heart as heavy as stone. They made me want to turn and run, and yet I felt myself drawn forward.

I came to a stop before the door. It stared back at me, silent and unassuming, but I knew better than I wished. I reached up and put my hoof on the handle to feel the weight of the memory awaiting me.

Something shattered inside.

I froze up, straining my ears for any little noise on the other side. Only my own frantic breathing and my heart hammering in my chest punctuated the silence to follow, longer and longer into the infinity of that instant.

And then came the screaming.

I flattened my ears back and shut my eyes while the tears rolled silently down my face, the sounds bringing back the deluge of every terrifying second. I could see her in my mind’s eye as vividly as the day it happened—the crescent-moon smile, her wings rimmed in silver moonlight, the reaching, touching, probing tendrils of shadow—and much the same as then, I waited for the inevitable, accepting silence that followed.

I didn’t know how long I stood there. The sounds had long since died away, and still I waited, hoof on the doorknob. It trembled in my grasp.

Still I waited, listening to the damnable, smothering silence like a pillow held over my face, until eventually a quiet sobbing bled through the door.

I focused on that sound. I focused on the hollowness, the complete and utter destruction of self, like a child scraping up the shattered pieces of her soul to clutch them against her chest, but I knew well enough those pieces would never fit back together. Hesitantly, I opened the door.

The room looked exactly as I remembered.

The remains of a ceramic something-or-other lay scattered across the floor by the chest-of-drawers, and my younger self sat huddled on the far side of the bed. The room lay red-washed in the waning light of dusk.

At the creak of the door, she turned and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. Her breath hitched—once, twice, three times before she laid down and squeezed her eyes shut—but there she stayed.

There was no more running. There was no more reason to.

I took that first careful step into the room, then another. My hoofsteps echoed off the hardwood, and I came to a stop at the foot of the bed. There I stood for the longest time, listening to her heartbreak. Eventually, I found the strength to voice the words in the back of my throat.

“May I sit with you?” I said quietly.

She looked at me with massive, tear-stained eyes. She was hyperventilating, and she curled in on herself as if I were here to do the very same thing I didn’t want to remember.

The instinct to reach out and hold her had my heart beating faster, but I knew better—better than I ever wished I could. I instead sat down on the opposite end of the bed, the gentle creak of the mattress beneath my weight the only reminder that I indeed existed in this space.

We sat in silence, only broken by the quiet sobs she couldn’t keep in.

I stared into the stripes of my old comforter, idly ran my hoof back and forth to feel the synthetic silk that never quite kept in the heat even on the warmest nights, watched the downy plush stuffed inside it give beneath my hoof. After a time, I noticed the sobbing had stopped.

Little Me still lay curled in on herself, but she took to stealing glances my way before retreating to the comforter. She kept her ears pinned back, but those little moments she spent looking at some part of me—whether it be my hooves, my flank, anything but my eyes—got longer and, if I allowed myself to believe, just a hair bolder.

I let her take all the time she needed, until she felt comfortable enough looking directly at me. It’s the least I would have wanted back then.

“How are you feeling?” I eventually said. It was such a grotesquely obvious question that I knew the answer to, but she needed to acknowledge it directly.

She stared at me for a long moment before pressing her face into her pillow, and we again lapsed into silence.

So I waited.

I gave her the space she needed, spending the time taking in the liminalities of yesteryear: my The Nature of the Arcane and many other textbooks lining the shelves, the calendar on my nightstand, the phoenix plushie abandoned in the far corner—all the little things that made up who I was, who I used to be, what I had lost, and what I had become in the face of it.

“You’re my Tantabus,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

It was less a question than a statement. Copper got me thinking about it the other day, and the more I let the idea take root, the more I couldn’t deny it. I guess I just wanted to hear it for myself. Or, at the very least, I needed to hear myself say it out loud.

Little Me peeked an eye out from the pillow and stared mistily at the plushie in the far corner, then down to the folds in the bedding. The crease in her brow was a delicate thing, as was the shaky breath she sucked in before squeezing her eyes shut. She said nothing, but it was an answer all the same.

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, envisioning the conveyor belt of memories that led me here.

If this was indeed my Tantabus lying next to me, then it felt the very same feelings that tore me apart in those moments immediately afterward. Well, felt didn’t properly convey that. It was those very feelings—it was the literal manifestation of the rage and helplessness I felt in that moment and my desire for control in a world that no longer made sense. It was the culmination of the mindset I thought I needed, that I clung to like a life preserver, because in reality, that’s what it was.

But it was also the stone tied to my ankle, dragging me down into the depths of my own misery. That much I could see now, and that much I needed to see.

So I started small.

“I remember,” I said.

She sniffled and wiped her eyes before looking at me.

“I remember how it feels,” I continued. “It… it doesn’t go away. It will never go away.” I shrugged and shook my head, looking down at my hooves. “That’s the hardest thing about it. It happened, and now it’s part of you, whether you want it to be or not. It’ll always be there, waiting to remind you.”

I pressed my hoof into the comforter to watch it sink into the padding, stare at all the individual creases in the silk and the little shadows within them.

“Some days are worse than others… but you get through them. Sometimes one day at a time, sometimes one minute at a time.

“And every waking moment, you ask yourself… Why? How did it get like this? How was this supposed to help? How was this supposed to benefit anyone? How… How was this justified? To think it was a reasonable course of action? Was there any thinking involved at all, or… was it all just to watch me suffer?”

I shook my head and stared at my hooves. Saying these things out loud made me feel small, and yet this desperate need to let it out clawed away inside me, yearning to see the light of day, feel the warm sun on its face.

I had the opportunity to ask the questions. I had the fortune of getting the answers. I was one of the lucky ones. And in a way, not so lucky.

“But even when you finally get the answers, they aren’t enough. Because that’s all they are. Answers. Answers to questions that shouldn’t exist. Reasons without excuses. And that hollow emptiness of finally realizing there’s… nothing. It…”

As I let that statement circle the drain of my psyche, a sense of understanding about those answers bubbled to the surface. They had made themselves known in the quiet moments after my rage subsided and my tears were spent. They came in the form of the little whispers in the back of my mind I didn’t want to believe were true. Things about myself. Things about Luna.

Because it was fun. Because I was in the way. Because I was less than, not good enough, too stupid to realize, too fucking pathetic to assert myself when and where it mattered. Because she decided how things should play out.

Because I hated her.

Which I had every right to. Anyone in their right mind would agree with me. And I needed to know how much I hated her. I needed her to know how much I hated her. Honestly, though, that was probably why this stuck with me for so long.

I felt justified. I was justified, every single loathsome second. And it was that sense of justice, that I had to bring some sort of holy retribution down upon her or see her to that end in some capacity, that kept me so… focused.

There was no alternative. Because anything less than that would mean admitting I was wrong—that I had wasted my youth, my privilege, and all the perfect things I had for going for me in an otherwise perfect life, and that my innocence had been stolen from me for nothing.

They would all pay, I remembered thinking over and over and over and over like a curse seared into my flesh. I had turned it into a mantra, a promise that I would see through, come hell or high water, when in reality, the one who paid the most was me.

Why, then? Why really?

Maybe I’d never know. Maybe the answers didn’t actually exist. Except that wasn’t quite right.

They did exist, because I found them. Found in the loosest sense of the word—less a location to arrive at or a thing to place my finger on and more of a direction to head, a sensation to follow. In order to get past the negative emotions, I had to understand. I had to derive understanding from them. And it all circled back on one very important question at the beginning of this long and winding journey: had Luna changed? Was she good now?

Well, yes.

Twilight was right about one thing from the start. Luna really had changed. She was good now. She had proven that time and again through this whole ordeal. I wouldn't be where I was this very moment without the blood, sweat, and tears she poured into these last few days—these last few maybe-months, if I were to try and gauge our time in the Dreamscape.

Not everyone gets a chance at redemption. Fewer bother taking it. But for better or worse, Luna did get that chance, and she grasped it with every fiber of her being.

But no matter how hard she strove and the rivers of blood she shed in the name of atonement, did that absolve her of what she did to me? Was there such a thing as enough to absolve her? And as that question shambled down the back alleys of my mind, I once again felt the cold stares of Ethics and Justice on the back of my head.

Never forget what she did to you. And I didn’t. Same as before, the scars were there, in my head and in my heart. But that's what they were, scars—wounds that had since healed, salved by those rivers of blood she shed in penance for her evils. Freely, willfully, wholeheartedly. That truth wasn’t lost on me.

But penance and punishment weren’t the same as atonement and forgiveness, and reaching this point in the journey left me standing at the ledge of a far more impossible question I had only begun scratching the surface of.

Did I forgive her? At least… did I forgive her in a capacity that truly mattered?

I could forgive the lies. I could forgive the manipulation. I could forgive turning me against Celestia and making me hate everything I once cherished in the name of a love that never was.

And I did. Wholly and truly, I did.

She really did care, and after all she had done to right her wrongs—after all the pain she had endured on my behalf—I felt comfortable giving her that much.

But I had to ask myself in no uncertain terms or flowery language: did I forgive her for raping me? Did I forgive her for stripping from me my peace of mind and shattering what I had once thought good and pure about the world?

I wasn't one to believe that innocence could be taken from someone, not in the way the storybooks made it sound. But Luna took something from me. That much I knew. She stole an integral part of what made me me, something I would never get back—those little shards clutched against my chest—and for the sake of the filly lying beside me, I had to give an answer to the question: was that wholly, truly, forever a bridge too far?

If I were to forgive her, would the hurts and pains go away? Would the demons that hounded me go quiet? Would Ethics and Justice sit by, content with my decision?

If I didn’t, and I held onto that hatred until my dying breath, would I stay bitter and resentful? Would every little association my brain was so good at piecing together send me spiraling? Would I remain forever steeped in the misery that had gnawed at me ever since that fateful moment?

I honestly didn’t know. Even after everything Luna and I strove for, I really, truly, fucking didn’t. Arms folded, Ethics and Justice continued staring into the back of my head, and I felt their silent demand that I fall in line.

Part of me wanted to believe that somewhere, somehow, I could find it in myself to forgive—that I should forgive, as was instilled in me at an early age. Maybe that was simply the final sliver of glass still clinging to the window frame of the Something that Luna took from me.

But part of me also felt the need for certainty before taking that leap, a true and utter clarity that I didn’t feel I possessed, one I wasn’t sure even existed. Life was a journey, and I didn’t have the fortune of knowing just how long a road lay before me.

But I was on a road—that much was true. One she forced me down, sure, one all too similar to her own, yet still one that she tried correcting in the way she thought best.

I glanced at the filly beside me, still crying into her hooves. The instinct to protect and console her and to destroy whatever could have inflicted such pain in her welled up inside me, but I had seen what became of the mare who did exactly that: Luna, Nocturne. They were one and the same, yet different. Separated by time and ideology.

Just like me, Luna really had changed. The fact that I even paused to consider was evidence enough, and I felt the need to turn, look Ethics and Justice in the eyes, and glare my defiance back at them and the simplicity of their demand.

Part of me felt like I was failing somehow, failing some aspect of the growth I had found these last few days, like I’d run a marathon but stopped just short of the finish line. But at the same time, I felt confident in the truth that I wasn’t failing, that I had found something worthwhile among the chaos of my heart, and was finally able to take stock of what had once been too much to wrap my head around.

I couldn’t deny the beacon of justice and unflagging loyalty Luna had become since her return from the moon. I couldn’t think of a word to properly describe the heroism of everything she did for my sake, as even that word felt wanting.

But did I forgive her? Really and truly? Did I, could I, should I?

Again, that nagging uncertainty crept back in from wherever it had been hiding, and the fact that I still asked the question was answer enough. Without that complete and utter certainty, it felt wrong to take that leap.

Did I forgive Luna for raping me?

No. No, I didn’t.

And honestly… I felt okay saying that.

It didn’t come from an instinctive lashing out, a foaming of the mouth, or some mindless pounding at the walls like a ferocious, starving animal. It came from a place inside that, for once in my life, didn’t feel too jumbled to trust, too mixed up with emotion to clearly see and take stock of what I felt and how it fit into the puzzle that was my soul.

I had to draw a line. There had to be a line, otherwise, the moral greys could never be distinguished from the black and white, and the simplicity of that truth instilled within me a gentle but unshakable faith.

These thoughts, these pains… They were just memories now, things to pull down from the cobwebbed shelves of my psyche and remember the emotions instilled in them. But emotions needed direction, and it was for me to decide what they meant and what to do with them.

Hesitantly, I reached a hoof out across the mattress for my younger self to take and offered her the broken pieces of a smile.

“It’s okay to be scared,” I said. “It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to want what you think is right. To want justice, to want… closure.”

Her eyes danced back and forth between mine, fell briefly to my hoof, then back up to me. She lifted a hoof, and after a long moment’s hesitation, placed it in mine. The trembles were there, but she held all the tighter for them.

“It’s okay that it might feel overwhelming and that everything you thought or were told to think might seem jumbled together to make even the simplest decisions seem impossible, and the impossible ones that much more." I squeezed her hoof a tiny bit harder. "It’s okay that the right answer might feel wrong, or that following through on it feels like you’ve failed somehow, that you lost a part of yourself somewhere in the process.

“But it’s important to know that you were right all along in a sense,” I continued. “All the feelings you felt were worth every ounce of weight you placed in them. And no matter what the world says, no one can take that away from you.

“But more than anything else, more than right or wrong, more than Twilight or Luna or Copper or anything in this world or the other…”

I felt in my heart the words I needed to hear—the words I needed to believe—then and in the years after Twilight saved me. They burned like fire in the back of my throat, but I gathered them all the same, and out came the words I never thought I’d have the strength to speak:

“What she did to you isn’t your fault.”

And as I looked into my younger self’s eyes, I saw myself. I saw the pain and confusion, the yearning for answers that would never suffice. But I also saw the resilience hiding just below the surface, the hope for a better tomorrow. And as the tears welled up in her eyes, I saw, for the first time in seven years, the truth. The tears started down her face, so I pulled her close and let her cry that truth into my chest.

There was no grand sense of Ethics presiding over right and wrong, no great Justice that doled out due consequence. There was only me, the feelings I felt, and the choices I made. I and I alone held the power to decide what that meant, and with that revelation, another fell from my lips as a whisper:

“It’s okay to not forgive. You are not a bad person for asserting that truth.”

I could accept that Luna had changed. I could accept that she had grown and become a better person—that she, to use her own words, strove to do good in the absence of that which she stole. And there was value to that.

But there was also value in that very thing she stole from me, a value that she could never balance against on the scales of justice. What she did came from a place of malice, and understanding the intent behind it solidified that reality.

Ethics and Justice may deem my choice insufficient—the fact that I chose at all rather than give myself over to some preordained truth—but I felt assured in my own reasons.

Because I had found my own value. I had found my own happiness—here, now, and in all the goodness I had pieced together in the last seven years—to balance that scale in my own way on my own terms.

Forgiveness was for the self, not the other, just as penitence was for the other and not the self. Choosing not to forgive was not failure, nor was forgiveness an ultimatum in the grand scheme of my own happiness. So long as it came from a healthy place, so long as I didn’t let it consume me.

A warmth radiated into me as my younger self’s form melded with mine, and I felt a deep-seated certainty settle in my chest, right beside my heart. I cradled that sensation in my breast and smiled through the happy tears rolling down my cheeks.

A pure and utter sense of liberation washed through me, and I was, for the first time that I could remember, at peace.

Something nuzzled me on the cheek.

I scrambled backward off the bed, falling flat on my ass before whipping around to see the Tantabus lying there—Luna’s Tantabus.

“Fuckin’— goddamn. Don’t scare me like that.” I took a deep breath to get my heart rate back in order and wiped the tears from my eyes. “How long have you been sitting there?”

It cocked an ear at me as a galaxy rolled through a starry nebula across its chest. It stepped off the bed and came up to me, nuzzling under my chin, then curled its head over my shoulder in a hug.

I hugged it back and let out a little laugh, the beginnings of a smile along for the ride. Softly, I whispered, “This is what you were hoping for all along, wasn’t it?”

It dug its chin into my shoulder a bit harder before backing away to regard me. It cocked its head as a supernova went off way in the depths of its face, where its eye should have been—what I wanted to equate to a wink, if anything. Eventually, it craned its neck to look into the empty sky. I had no means of knowing just what it was hoping to see, but my heart whispered her name.

“She’s still out there, I know.” I stared into that darkness for a long minute. She was still out there, lost in the Eversleep, prisoner to her own hubris. It was fitting.

The deed was done, the monster thwarted. I had found my peace as she wanted, and she was left to the consequences of her actions. But as much as Ethics and Justice might have already dusted their hands of her, I couldn’t say the same. Like before, when she lay bloodied beneath me, I didn’t feel I had the right to choose—even by omission.

“I better go get her, eh?”

What amounted to a smile lit up the Tantabus’s face by way of a solar flare erupting from one ear to the other, and I took that as cue to make good on that statement.

What happened next was my choice to make and mine alone, and so I chose to light my horn and pull myself up into the Dreamscape.

I drifted for a moment while my mind caught up with the transition, and somewhere in the scrambled eggs I had for a brain, I started piecing together the far-flung indifference of the universe gazing back.

I set off, resigning myself to the journey. Though, after the spans of existence I’d endured this week—I couldn’t rightly call it anything else—another trip through the Dreamscape would be less a thing to dread and more a trip down memory lane.

And so it went, just me and the stars and other space stuff that made up the this little non-universe. Soon enough, I found the Eversleep, and in I went.

I touched down amidst the ash-laden graveyard of our little arena. What little light there was to see by limned the edges of this space, maybe the size of a bedroom now, blanketed as if by the snowfall of a cold winter’s night. A little island of ash amidst the other dreams slowly encroaching to swallow it up. The ashes of a dream long since put to rest.

There were no hyena-things to be found or found by, and so I wandered the patchwork of Equestria’s subconscious detritus until I found her sitting on a cliff overlooking an ocean. A cool wind swept up from the rocky shore below and teased at my mane while a flock of seagulls cawed in the distant skies, circling about, coasting in place on the updraft.

I sat down next to her and admired the scenery.

She stared at me, alarmed and unsure what to make of my unusually casual entrance.

“You ready to get out of here?” I said, looking out over the ocean. Strange shapes swam just below the surface, far larger than what such shallow waters could support. “I get it if you say no. This little slice of heaven seems like a good place to while away the time.”

I shot her a grin, and by whatever gods existed in this universe or the next I hit the jackpot in the form of her jaw falling open.

She gawked. She actually gawked at me.

“And what of the Nightmare?” she asked.

I tapped my chest and let my grin relax to an easy-going smile I cast back over the water like a fishing line. “Taken care of. And you have a friend waiting for you.”

My smile seemed infectious, if delayed in onset. “Indeed I do,” she said. “Shall we be off, then?”

She unfurled her wings, making sure to lower one toward me like a ramp.

“Oh goddamn it, we’re not doing that crap again.”

“I do not mean to impress it upon you,” she said. “But it is the simplest means at our disposal.”

I slanted my mouth. “Only if you’re certain you can make the flight this time.”

“There is only one way for us to find out, Sunset.” She rolled her shoulders as if warming up for a morning’s stroll, her wings doing that half-unfurled thing pegasi liked to do when testing the winds. “But I do believe I am ready for another try.”

“You say that like you’ve just been sitting here with your hoof up your ass instead of trying to put yourself back together for another go.” I tapped my horn with my hoof.

“Healing takes time,” she said. “And no less so for the way this place smothers my magics, as you no doubt remember.”

I sighed but nevertheless clambered onto her back. “Just shut up and start flying.”

On fair winds, we climbed into the sky, heading for the mountain at the center of this strange existence. The magics that dipped low toward its peak seemed to almost welcome us up through the Veil and into that of the Dreamscape’s indifferent starscape. From there, we made the long trek back to my dream.

We traveled in silence, but unlike the oppressive nothingness of our previous flight through this liminal infinity, a sense of accomplishment and contentment kept me in good spirits. “Merriment,” Luna would have probably called it. “Joviality,” even. Hell if I knew, but we rode that high all the same.

We eventually arrived at my dream, and as we approached, I decided to take a back seat to whatever came next. It’s what I would have wanted were I in her shoes.

The Tantabus was waiting for us in my bedroom, the only source of movement in this otherwise timeless space. She and it stared at one another like long-lost friends, until eventually Luna closed her eyes, chin toward her chest, as if in repose. She stayed like that awhile, sharing with it whatever sentiment there was to share.

It melded with her, and the beginnings of a smile crept onto her face. Small, but no less radiant. And I smiled, too. Hate her or not, I understood.

“Everyone’s waiting for us,” I said, when I figured she was ready. “We shouldn’t keep ’em waiting.”

“Indeed. Though…” She looked at me, then about the room, settling on the sunlight coming through the window, where little dust motes danced listlessly among the blinds. “It is rather peaceful here.”

“Well, that was the whole damn point, wasn’t it?” I said, and…

She blushed? She actually fucking blushed. I never thought I’d live to see the day.

“So it was.” A small but morose smile threaded across her lips. “However…”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “‘However’?”

“I am sorry,” she said. “It is not for me to say.”

“Well, now I kinda wanna know what it is.”

A pause. “I hope that you believe this was worth it in the end, Sunset, and now that all is said and done that you find your happiness.”

I let that roll around in my head a bit. “You’re right. That isn’t for you to say. Because it isn’t your place to tell me to have a great life. It’s mine.

“And I will,” I continued matter-of-factly. “Not because you hoped for it or asked or commanded it of me or anything like that. But because I can, and I’ll put everything into doing just that.” And as I gave that statement life, I felt a simple surety soak into my bones, give lightness to my heart, and put a little smile on my face worth sharing, even with her.

I guess there was a summit after all.

“So yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna go have a great life. And you…” There were many things I could have said. Many things I probably should have. But as right as they felt, now didn’t feel like the time for vitriol. We just won, and I didn’t want to spoil that. I looked down at my hooves. “Well… the others are waiting.”

Spoken or not, the words left unsaid reached her ears to have the smile on her face take a turn for the somber. She pinned her ears back, but nonetheless took the whole of that statement as cue to rise, spread her wings, and light her horn.

The light at her horntip suffused the dream, prompting gravity to forget which way was down, and as my perception of reality corkscrewed into place, I realized someone was crying into my shoulder.

“Twilight?” I said.

“Sunset!” She jerked back to look me in the eye before throwing her hooves around me. Warm tears soaked into the crook of my neck. She shook like a leaf. “I thought you were dead…”

I laughed. For all I knew, that may have been true.

“How long was I out?”

She stifled a bout of tearful laughter and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know… Maybe, a minute? Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

It was my turn to share a bout of tearful laughter. “I’ll try not to. I… W-wait. Twilight, you’re bleeding.”

“I know,” she said, laughing, holding me tighter all the same.

“No, like a lot. And all over me, god—gross! What the hell’s going on?” I scrambled out of her hug and spied the open wound on her inner foreleg. I grasped her firmly by the pastern to hold her still, and with a bit of magic I pressed the tip of my horn against it to suture it closed.

Behind her, the double doors opened, and in poked the heads of not only Star Swirl and Starlight, but also Copper, Whistle—did she seriously still wear that slouchie?—Lily, String, and Celestia.

“Twilight!” Copper said, and she dashed in to tackle-hug Twilight in a fit of laughter. And… It was a strange sight.

Copper, the mare I loved so completely in every way, sharing that love with Twilight—the very intimacy she had unflaggingly reserved for me and me alone. And as the moment wore on, watching her kiss kiss kiss Twilight and hug her tighter while the happy tears streamed down her face, I…

All I could do was smile.

“Get a room, you two,” Whistle said, strolling in.

“I mean, if you insist,” Copper said, shit-eating grin loaded for bear. In a flash of mint-green magic, she and Twilight were gone.

“Wait,” I said. “Did she really just—”

Another flash of magic—pink this time—and before I could blink away the afterimage, Copper’s laughter filled the room. She lay on her back, pointing a hoof at Twilight, who clearly wasn’t smiling.

“Oh, come on,” Copper said to Twilight. “You know that was funny.”

“So,” I said. “You two are actually a thing now?”

Copper’s laughter died away frighteningly quickly, and a nervous silence overtook her. All eyes were on she and Twilight.

“We’re working on that,” Twilight said, coming to her rescue. She shared a smile with Copper, and slowly it became mutual.

“Gaaaay,” Whistle said.

“You know,” Twilight said, sporting an uncharacteristically smarmy grin, Whistle dead in her crosshairs. “Copper’s mentioned something about a Daisy Chain. She lives down on Amaryllis Avenue. I could put in a good word for you if you want.”

That got Whistle good and flustered. “W-what?”

Copper snorted. “Holy shit, she fucking got you.”

Forever in service of her subjects, Luna groaned and rolled onto her stomach to divert the conversation away from that imminent roasting. She rubbed her head before looking around at the rest of us.

“Luna!” Celestia said. She threw her hooves around Luna, and Luna all but melted into the embrace.

“Sister…” Luna half-whispered. “It is done.”

It’s done. It really was. Part of me could hardly believe, yet here we stood. And it seemed I wasn’t alone in that struggle, judging by the faces around me—all the smiles slowly gaining ground. Everyone heaved a collective sigh of relief as that sentiment well and truly soaked in. That is, until Luna got to her hooves and turned toward me.

I noticed Copper bristle out the corner of my eye, and she stepped up defensively beside me. She raised her chin to level a defiant scowl at Luna as she approached. The height difference brought her ears back for a moment, but she found the will to bring them around again and double down.

Conversely, Luna pinned her ears back at the sight of her—a language all its own—and the look in her eye had me wondering if she’d turn tail and bolt. But whatever archaic dogma saw her standing before us likewise gave her the strength to turn toward me and bow, muzzle to the floor.

“As sure as the stars in the sky,” she said. With that, she paid me one last solemn glance before turning and heading out the door.

Twilight moved to stop her, but I put a hoof on her shoulder. Only Celestia followed through on whatever concerns hung about the group. She headed out after Luna to leave the rest of us in a strange but not unwelcome silence.

“Well,” String said after a moment. “I don’t know about you guys, but this is the sort of thing we’d throw a party for down in the labs.”

That seemed to snap Twilight out of her thoughts. She flitted and resettled her wings in that way I always adored about her.

“Uh, yeah. I’m sure we could get Pinkie to put something together. I mean, that is, if you want, Sunset.” She stared at me with her ears at half-mast and a smile waiting in the wings. “This is your moment.”

All eyes were on me. It was the good kind of expectation, though—the kind that would happily accept whatever answer I gave. They were my friends, the ones who put everything on the line to see me to where I was today.

But right now, I had one more friend out there who needed me.

“Actually,” I said. “I have to go.”

Twilight looked taken aback. “Go? Where?”

I let a little smile shine through. “I, uh… Well, in your own words, a promise made is a promise kept, and, uh… yeah.”

With that, I made for the door. Surprisingly, no one tried stopping me.

It was still the ass crack of dawn, but although I had technically pulled an all-nighter, I felt right as rain. And as I made my way to the train station, I mused with the thought of just how many bits I should wager on Acuity shitting her pants at the sight of me.