“This is all my fault,” Twilight said.

Rainbow Dash frowned. Twilight had spent the last something like six hours on the computer, oblivious to everything around her. Then, she’d just stopped. Like, sank back in her chair and stared at the wall for twenty minutes kind of stopped. Which was never a good sign.

Now that she’d finally said something, Rainbow Dash leaned cautiously forward from where she sat.

“What is?” she asked.

“Everything,” Twilight said in a defeated voice. “All of it.”

Rainbow looked around the fallout shelter that was their base of operations, then back to her friend.

“Um… can you be more specific?” She asked.

Twilight sighed.

“I realized, just today, that the way I helped Apple Bloom get out of the country was flawed,” she said, looking down into her lap. “Put simply, I forgot to create false positives for an individual to have been scanned in her place. I checked the airport records, and I think somebody’s already accessed them. Accessed them in the way you would if you were looking for someone who didn’t show on their security.”

Rainbow Dash’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

“There’s no sign that she’s been flagged by any law enforcement agencies yet,” Twilight added miserably. “And I covered her tracks just now, of course. But that’s too little, too late.”

She slumped, holding her face in her hands.

“I’m an idiot,” she whispered.

“Um, never in my experience,” her friend offered.

“So, I don’t dare even send a warning to her, because whoever Armor has working for him, I’m not certain I could detect if they’re watching her,” Twilight went on. She removed her glasses to wipe her eyes, then said, “So if Apple Bloom does have some sword of Damocles over her head, I’m the one who put it there.”

“Um, I’m pretty sure that would be the other hacker…”

But Twilight shook her head.

“It was my responsibility,” she said. “And it was my mistake. Which, by the way, was a stupid mistake. Careless. Like my other mistakes. And with what we’re doing, every mistake costs someone. Someone who either had nothing to do with this, or had no business being part of it. And that makes it my fault.”

“Okay, let’s say that’s true. I don’t think it is, but everybody makes mistakes, Twilight—”

“No!” Twilight was standing now. She turned to face Rainbow Dash, fists clenched, tears streaming down her face and breathing hard.

“No, that’s not good enough! It can’t be good enough!” she shouted. “When we first starting fighting the Sirens, we took on by default a higher responsibility through our use of magical power! And we failed, Rainbow Dash! Do you understand? We failed! And because we failed, innocent people died!”

Rainbow Dash opened her mouth, but Twilight overrode her, clutching the sides of her own head as she did.

“And now, it’s happening again! It’s still happening! Sweetie Belle, Apple Jack, now Apple Bloom…”

She collapsed then, and Rainbow Dash caught her as she fell, lowering her to the floor, holding her as she cried.

“And so many others,” Twilight wept. “Too many others! And now, it’s all happening again! How many people are going to die because of me now? Because of my stupid mistakes?”

For several minutes, Twilight simply cried, and Rainbow Dash simply held her. After a while, Twilight managed to speak again.

“It’s the jewel,” she said.

Rainbow Dash paused, uncertain. Finally, she said, “What?”

“It’s the jewel,” Twilight repeated miserably. “The one the Sirens divided between themselves. That’s what Trixie has been using.”

Rainbow Dash’s eyes went wide. “Are you sure?”

“I am now,” Twilight sniffed. “I found some footage of her. She was in a limo. The angle was bad, and it was badly pixilated, but when her driver opened the door I saw the green glow at her throat. It was the right size and shape. I wanted so badly for it to be something else…”

“It’s okay,” Rainbow Dash whispered, hugging her. “We’ll handle it.”

“We’ll handle it?” Twilight demanded, her head snapping up again to stare at her friend. “We’ll handle it? We’ll handle all the deaths caused by her gang? By her cult? By the mystical poison she’s been selling, calling it a drug? We’ll handle what happened to Gabby Driver, and who knows how many others before him?”

Rainbow Dash winced but said nothing.

“All I had to do – literally, all I had to do – was pick the damned thing up! Pick up the pieces and put them somewhere safe. Embed them in concrete. Drop them into the Marianas Trench. Launch them into space. Or, best of all, just fucking destroy them! And now it’s gotten on top of Trixie somehow, and it’s my fault because I wasn’t smart enough!”

Twilight took a slow, shuddering breath, let it out in a series of uneasy sobs.

Rainbow Dash sighed. Then, once again, she silently held her friend while she wept. She thought about trying to break the silence. About trying to make Twilight listen to her, somehow. And, not for the first time, she thought about tracking down some of Twilight’s old teachers at Crystal Prep and running over them with a truck.

But eventually, the tears slowed down. Twilight seemed more-or-less wrung out, and probably tired enough that she would listen. Then, and only then, Rainbow Dash broke the quiet that had grown between them.

“You weren’t the only one,” she said.

Twilight swallowed, saying nothing.

“We were all there,” Rainbow said, shifting her position slightly so her leg wouldn’t fall asleep. “All of us. Any one of us could have thought of grabbing the magic rocks they were using. But none of us did.

“And it’s not because we’re stupid. Or incompetent. I mean, okay, we all are, sometimes. But here’s the thing, Twilight: we’re not trained professionals. We never have been. This shit just came down around us, and we had to step up because literally no one else could.”

Waving an arm around them both for emphasis, she added, “I mean, look at us! We were high-school students, for fuck’s sake! We were in a band! And then shit got ill, and we’ve been playing catch-up as best we could ever since!

“And it’s not like a video game,” she went on bitterly, “where bodies dissolve and you can just walk over and collect the loot they spawn. This is real life, big as God and twice as ugly. You have to grab a fucking corpse, the bloody remains of somebody that you made dead, and then roll them around in your hands and grope your way through their shit. And, and… no. Just, fucking… no.”

“I still should have known better,” Twilight sighed. “I should have been thinking better…”

“No, you really shouldn’t have,” Rainbow Dash replied. “We’re not seasoned professional killers, any of us. We’re not even professional soldiers. And frankly, cool as it sounds from a distance, I don’t wanna be one.

“And because we’re not any of those things, we’re going to miss stuff. We’ve fucked up before, we’re gonna fuck up again. But the alternative is us not doing anything. Just letting crap like the school bombing and the Sirens’ magic go unchecked, letting it get more and more awful every day, forever. And like you’ve pointed out before, that’s even worse.”

Eventually, Twilight spoke again.

“That doesn’t fix it, though.”

“Yeah, I know,” Rainbow Dash sighed. “I don’t think anything can, the whole world’s pretty screwed.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?”

“Supposed to do? Hell, I don’t know. All we can do is our best, really. Just do our best, give people back control over their own fucking lives, and then get the hell out of the way when we’re done.”

It was close to twenty minutes later, and Twilight was back on her computer again, grimly typing away.

“Hey, you want something to eat?” Rainbow Dash offered.

Still typing, Twilight shook her head, no.

A few seconds later, Rainbow Dash set a glass of milk beside the keyboard.

Twilight looked up with an expression of mild irritation.

“Humor me,” Rainbow Dash said.

Twilight rolled her eyes, but she also took a sip before going back to her typing.

Rainbow Dash sat on one of the easy chairs nearby, cross-legged, watching.

Finally, she asked, “What are you working on now?”

Twilight shook her head again.

Inwardly, Rainbow Dash sighed. Whatever it was, apparently the Twi-brain was locked onto it hard. With nothing else to do for it, Rainbow picked up her Daring Do book and started reading. They’d talk when Twilight surfaced for air.

It was about an hour later, and the glass of milk was empty, when Twilight finally swiveled her seat around to look at Rainbow again.

“Last chapter,” the blue woman said, turning a page.

Smiling a little, Twilight rose and went to the kitchen area. She grabbed a pizza, popped it into the oven and set a timer.

As she turned back to Rainbow Dash, the blue woman set the book down again and said, “Okay, so? Whad’ya find?”

“I’ve confirmed the location of the opium farm the Children of Trixie are using,” Twilight said, running a hand through her hair. “It was the only logical place, really. I just didn’t want it to be true.”

“And?”

“Sweet Apple Acres.”

Rainbow Dash’s eyes went wide. “WHAT??”

Twilight nodded. “It’s the only suitable farmland that’s positioned such that it’s both easily accessible and easy to overlook, and also big enough for the kind of operation they’re running.”

Twilight could almost hear the pieces slamming together in Rainbow Dash’s mind.

“But…” Rainbow Dash stammered, “But… that means…”

“That means that when the cops attacked the Apple Farm, they were probably paid to do it,” Twilight affirmed grimly. “Or, at the very least, the commissioner who gave the order was.

“And no,” she added as Rainbow opened her mouth again, “it wasn’t Armor. This was before he was in charge. In fact, he wasn’t associated with the strike in any way.”

Looking uncomfortable, Twilight added, “Frankly, that’s what I was doing last. I just had to be certain that my brother hadn’t been in on it. Absolutely, completely certain.”

“And he wasn’t.”

“It’s literally impossible that he was.”

“Okay, cool,” Rainbow nodded. “First good news in a while.”

Turning and opening the fridge, Twilight continued, “The official excuse was drug charges, of course. Then the place stayed in escrow until the courts finished seizing it from Apple Bloom, by which time she was a fugitive anyway. The cops finally caught up with her at the farm, and set it on fire to smoke her out. Then Trixie bought it at a closed auction, set up a high wooden fence with guards all around it, tore down all the remaining trees, and started growing poppies.”

She tossed Rainbow Dash a beer and opened a soda for herself. Rainbow opened the bottle, drained it, tossed it into the bin.

“That’s completely fucked up,” she said.

“It is,” Twilight agreed.

“Yeah,” Rainbow nodded. “So, when do we attack?”

“I’ve had the herbicide ready for weeks, plus a flame thrower for afters,” Twilight said grimly. “Is tonight too soon?”

The limousine had pulled over to allow the goddess and her priestess to get out. The driver knelt before the vehicle, forehead pressed to the ground, waiting for her to command him further. For it was a rare occasion that the goddess saw fit to emerge into the public air, and rarer still that she did so with company. He was honored to be present for such an occasion.

Her emerald glow lifted her out of the car and towards the outer edge of the overpass. And with her servant beside her, the Great and Powerful Trixie seemed to consider carefully the far-off opium farm as it burned, illuminating the nighttime sky in crimson, orange and gold.

“It is beautiful,” Trixie said at last.

Wallflower Blush considered what was safest to say, and ultimately concluded that silence was best.

“It is beautiful,” Trixie said again. “Yet, it is also expensive. And expense is inconvenient.”

More silence. Trixie tilted her head, as if in thought.

“Trixie has determined that she is no longer amused by the Rainbooms and their antics,” she said at last.

Wallflower Blush nodded, still saying nothing.

Slowly, the robed and cloaked form rotated in the air to face her fully, green orbs blazing in the shadow of the goddess’ wide-brimmed hat. Her voice was very quiet, very dangerous.

“Find Twilight Sparkle and her Rainbooms, Wallflower Blush. Find them for Trixie.”

“Yeah, about that,” Wallflower said uneasily. “I mean, those guys all have magic, and Twilight is a genius who’s had time to plan, you know? Finding them is gonna be hard, maybe even impossible.”

The green glowing eyes narrowed dangerously, and Wallflower winced, quickly adding, “But... maybe we can lure them out.”

“Ah. You have a plan, then.”

“I’ve... got a few ideas, yeah.”

Trixie gazed at her coldly, then turned away, floating back into her waiting limousine.

“Good. Trixie is counting on you, Wallflower Blush,” she said. “Do not disappoint her.”

The door closed. Wallflower swallowed as the car started up and began to drive away.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “I’ll try not to.”

Meanwhile, Rainbow Dash watched the flames lick the buildings and fence of what was once Sweet Apple Acres. To her surprise, she found she was actually pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

Sure, gathering up the guards had been a slog. Disarming and zip-tying idiots at high speed always was. But running around the place with Twilight’s weed killer had been pretty fun, despite everything.

And burning the crops and buildings afterwards? Just taking everything that had been staining the memory of the Apple family and setting it on fucking fire?

Man, that had been fucking cathartic.

And now, she and Twilight were sitting on a rooftop maybe a half mile away, enjoying the view as Trixie’s Great and Powerful Opium Hideout burned to the goddamned ground.

She could hear Twilight on her cell phone, calling it in.

“Armor, no one, literally no one, gives a single, solitary damn what you think about this,” Twilight was saying. “The villains are tied up, the farm is gone, and you have dozens of busts just waiting for you to pick them up. You can either act on this, or not.”

There was a pause, followed by, “Do you remember Sweet Apple Acres? Well, it’s there. That’s why your noble police force of heroes raided it in the first place, Commissioner. They framed and murdered our friends wholesale so their land could be turned into a fucking opium farm. But it was all done by the right people behind closed doors, so I guess that’s not your problem, is it?”

Then she tore the phone in half and hurled the pieces into the darkness, turning and joining Rainbow Dash where she sat.

They sat together for a while, silently, just watching the farm burn.

“Sweet Apple Acres,” Rainbow Dash sighed at last. “Man, what the fuck.”

Twilight sighed as well, but said nothing, instead just looking out into the vast blaze.

Once again, for several minutes, neither of them spoke. Eventually, Rainbow Dash broke the silence.

“Twilight?”

“Hmm?”

“How the hell did we end up here?”

Twilight considered the distant inferno that engulfed the farm and its buildings.

“One decision at a time,” she said at last. “Psychology talks about how, when someone does something that goes against their self-concept, it creates a kind of crisis. Usually, you resolve it by either redefining yourself as someone who does do that kind of thing, thus creating a new self-concept that’s more likely to engage in such behavior… or you justify the act to preserve the old self-concept, which also makes such justifications easier in the future.

“There are other options, but those two are by far the most common. And neither one makes it less likely that you’ll do it again.

“Then, there’s the Foot in the Door Phenomenon,” she went on. “Which kind of weaponizes that same process against you. Remember, Anakin Skywalker didn’t become Darth Vader overnight. It was lots of smaller decisions and crises over the course of years, and he changed his self-concept or justified himself a tiny bit every time, each crisis edging him a little more into the darkness.”

Shrugging a little, she added, “Granted, when he killed Mace Windu, it created a huge new crisis… but without those other little nudges into the shadows, he would never have struck.”

“Yeah, but he did strike!” Rainbow observed in her best Pulp Fiction impression. “That mother-fucker cut his motherfucking arm off at the mother-fucking wrist!”

Grinning a little, Twilight nodded. “He did. And when he did, Palpatine offered him a justification, thus becoming a kind of living anchor for Anakin to hold onto for stability. And then later, when Anakin killed the trading guild and the younglings, he altered his self-concept on his own to better match that of Palpatine, as well as his actions as a new Sith.”

“Yeah, but he was crying, though.”

Twilight nodded. “Even while you’re resolving it, an identity crisis can hurt. And something like that would have been agony. But the point is, he was changing his ideas about who he was, in order to erase that hurt.

“So, by the time Obi-Wan found him, Anakin had changed his self-concept so much that killing his friend and mentor would no longer cause such a crisis of identity. And that was when he had truly become Darth Vader.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Rainbow nodded. “He had the Clone War, and we had the Gang War.”

“Yes.”

“Plus, we had the Sirens,” Rainbow Dash added. “Their magic also affected us. Hell, it’s still affecting some people.”

Twilight glanced at her, then looked mournfully back at the raging fire.

“We don’t have any real evidence to substantiate that,” she sighed.

Rainbow Dash drew her legs up and hugged them as she rested her chin on her knees.

“No,” she said miserably. “We don’t.”

More time passed in silence. They could hear the sirens as the fire department finally started to arrive, having ascertained that it was safe to approach the farm and fight the blaze.

“Hey, Twilight?”

“Hmmm?”

“If Obi-Wan had talked to Anakin on that river of lava,” Rainbow asked, “like, really talked to him, you think he might have reached him?”

Twilight considered this.

“Possibly,” she decided. “Anakin was still talking, and in a sense still listening. And he still felt it necessary to justify his actions. Also, he said ‘to me, the Jedi are evil.’ That’s not an absolute, it’s an acknowledgement of relativity.

“But Obi-Wan had shut himself down in his desperation to be able to kill his best friend, and that led to his condemning him. ‘Only a Sith deals in absolutes’ is itself an absolute, and a blatantly false one.

“So, yes. If Obi-Wan had appealed to Anakin logically, pointing out actual evidence for Chancellor Palpatine being the real enemy, I think he might have reached him. Especially if Anakin mentioned Padme. Obi-Wan could have pointed out how unlikely it was that the Sith actually had any power over death, especially when no one listed in the Jedi records ever had, including Yoda. And it wasn’t exactly a secret that the Sith would lie whenever they wanted to.

“But within the paradigm of our previous discussion, Darth Vader being irredeemable would have been Obi-Wan’s justification for killing Anakin. He had to believe that his friend was lost, in order to forgive himself. It was the only way he could preserve both his self-concept and his ability to take Anakin out. So, he’d stopped listening.”

“Huh,” Rainbow Dash mused. “Maybe that’s why he didn’t kill him at the end. He couldn’t quite buy his own line of crap.”

Twilight shrugged. “Maybe. Ironically, if Anakin had somehow started coming to his senses on his own, I think they could have both walked away from that, even with Obi-Wan’s determination. Sure, Anakin might have listened to Obi-Wan. But I think Obi-Wan would have definitely started listening again if Anakin had showed real remorse, or even just powered down his lightsaber.”

More silence.

“Awkward question,” Rainbow said at last.

“Awkward answer.”

“Shining Armor: Anakin or Obi-Wan?”

Twilight let her breath out in a long, regretful sigh.

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “We’re different people than that. We’re also not part of the same peacekeeping organization, and magic doesn’t seem to have a light or a dark side, even if he possessed any. Real morality’s harder than that.”

“Yeah, but,” Rainbow Dash pressed, “if he was one or the other…?”

Twilight made a sour face.

“It’s hard to say for certain,” she said. “But I hope he’s Obi-Wan.”

“Why?”

Twilight looked out at the expanse of flame that had started to engulf even the repurposed grain towers while the fire department struggled in vain to extinguish it.

“Because right now, he thinks we’re dealing only in absolutes,” she said. “And he’s stopped listening.”

Commissioner Armor stared at the phone on his desk for a long time, trying to process what he had just been told.

He’d heard about the Apple Farm raid after the fact. He’d read the file, once it had become available. And according to records, when the raid went down the place had been filled with narcotics. The main charge on the warrant had been trafficking, but with the rate of production and the amount of product stored, even that had seemed an understatement.

Plus, everyone who had been killed there had been flying at the time of the raid. Wired, heavily armed, and shooting at everything with a badge, determined to die hard. And afterwards, Apple Bloom had gone on to become a cop killer herself, dismissing any possible doubt as to her association with her family’s crimes.

At the time, he’d accepted it. With everything else that had happened, it had been just one more shock, one more heartbreak, one more betrayal.

But now…?

If the chain of events had really happened the way that Twilight said, if the property had really been sold off to the Children of Trixie right afterwards…

…then what about the raid?

What about everything?

Eventually, he realized he was still holding the receiver and hung up. Pressed a button on his desk.

“Carol?”

“Sir?” his receptionist replied.

“Send three trucks and some ambulances to the old Apple Farm, at the edge of town. Sweet Apple Acres, you’ll find the address on file. And call the fire department, if they’re not already there.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“Yes. Send in CSI, everybody we’ve got. I mean everybody. Twilight Sparkle was there, and I need every trace of everything they can get. Every burnt board, every chemical in every inch of soil, everything. If she dropped a single strand of hair and a half-eaten Chicken WacNugget into a gasoline fire, I want them both bagged, tagged, and on my desk.”

“Yes, sir.”

Clicking the intercom off, Commissioner Armor sat at his large, expensive desk for several more minutes. Then, determined, he rose. Opened the door and stepped out, pausing to glance at Carol Holiday, diligently typing away.

“Carol, I think I’ll be taking dinner in my office again,” he said. “Could you pick me up a couple of sandwiches?”

The younger woman smiled, already rising. “The usual?”

“Yeah. Actually, could you make it four? I think tonight’s going to be a long one.”

“Sure thing, Commissioner. Fries?”

“As many as you can carry.”

She grinned and nodded, reaching for her purse. “Will do.”

Armor went back into his office. Waited until he heard her leave. Then, waited longer, giving her time to get out of the building completely.

Finally, he exited his office once more. He headed downstairs to the main floor, then down to the basement level below. Down the silent, dusty, less-traveled concrete hallways. There, out of sight and away from the desks, offices, and meeting rooms of the rest of the department, waited long-term storage, old physical files, janitor supplies…

…and the hacker, White Hat.

Author's Note

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Ending Credits: Burn the Fields, by A Life Divided.