It was impossible for Rarity to hide her emotions this time. Where Luna had caught only hints before, the princess of the night now saw volumes. It’s not like the ivory idol broke down and cried, but there were thousands of little tell-tale signs. Her breathing had become shallower, and her pupils had dilated. There was a small tremor in her body, although only somepony that had eons of experience reading body language would notice it, and a couple of small beads of sweat belied how much stress she was feeling. The mad mare’s mind might deny the existence of her feelings of guilt, sorrow, and fear at what she’d become, but the body knew all too well. The old Rarity was buried in there somewhere, and she was fighting to break free.
After several minutes of Rarity silently fighting to control herself, Luna decided to intervene again. “Rarity, you must see what’s happening.”
“I know perfectly well what’s happening!” Rarity’s calm was shattered. There was desperation in her voice, and it broke here and there as she tried to regain control of herself. All of her carefully constructed self-control mechanisms had fallen apart at the memory of that dejected little pink mare, and the ivory idol was desperately trying to reconstruct them for her own sanity. “I have planned it all perfectly! How could I not know what will happen?”
“I’m not talking of your plan, my dear. I’m talking about you. Can’t you see what’s happening to yourself?” Luna gazed at her captor somberly. It was hard to know what to say, yet she couldn’t think of how to show Rarity what she needed.
“Why, whatever do you mean, darling?” The ivory idol’s eye developed the tiniest of ticks. “I am, and always have been, a monster. There’s nothing more to say.” Her captor was still in denial, and the princess of the night was stuck with no other choice than the head on approach. It was a wonder that Rarity couldn’t see it. Luna was willing to admit that many of the signs of white lady’s stress were small, but even her captor must notice that she had started grinding her teeth. The pale mare’s own cold logic should be screaming at her that something was wrong. Luna took a deep breath, and prayed to the stars that what she was going to say wouldn’t make her lose her host forever.
“You care, Rarity. No matter how much you deny it, you wish you had never started down this path. You charge ahead with this twisted scheme because it’s the only chance you see to right every wrong you ever made. You may have began this madness for the good of the world, but it became much more than that. Don’t you see how much your hatred and self-loathing affects you? Just now, when you were speaking of Pinkie, you almost lost control over the horror you feel at what you did.” Rarity was silent. The mad mare’s eyes were closed as she breathed deeply to regain control of herself. “Monsters don’t have the ability to admit they’re monsters, Rarity. They have no good in them to see that they have wronged. You, my dear, know what you have done. There is still good in you. Don’t you owe it to yourself to let it out?”
Rarity shuddered at those last few words before opening her eyes. Her calm and poise had returned, and so had the cold glint to her eyes.
“You’re wrong princess.” The pale lady took a sip of her tea. “There was good in me, but it is gone. All that’s left are the echos of where it was taken from me, bit by bit.”
The lunar maiden had to keep trying. If Rarity regained her self-control, she might never get another chance. “You’re wrong, Rarity. You think the goodness in you was torn apart by all the crimes you witnessed yourself commit. Time and time again your heart was ripped out as you saw what you were doing, but that’s exactly why I know there’s good in you. If you didn’t care about what you were doing, you wouldn’t even bother to watch, yet you always found an excuse to see it with your own eyes. You might claim it was to tie up loose ends, or that you needed to make sure things unfolded right, but it was always because you wanted yourself to suffer for what you were doing to your pawns. You kept the goodness inside you alive by twisting knife after knife in the corruption in your soul. You didn’t destroy your goodness. You saved it.”
“What does it matter if there’s any hint of goodness inside me?” Frustration cracked through Rarity’s calm again. “It doesn’t help the plan, and it doesn’t help me! What could I possibly gain from acknowledging the existence of that pathetic little spark?”
The princess of the night attempt to smile that motherly smile only Celestia could pull off. “You have a lot to gain from it, my dear, and you have a lot to thank it for. It was that same spark that led you down this path to begin with. You can claim it was the evil inside you, but I think it was always that little spark. Sometimes we must drive ourselves to the point of self destruction to reach enlightenment. I did it when I became Nightmare Moon. My own jealousy twisted me into a monster, but it was that very same jealousy that showed me how much others cared for me in the end. My sister could have destroyed me, but she tried everything she could to save me, and in the end she did by sending Twilight Sparkle to meet you.” Rarity tried to interject, but Luna wouldn’t have any of it. This was her only chance. “That spark of goodness in you helped me then, and that spark of goodness is trying to help you now. You set yourself on this path of destruction for the same reason you set the world on it. Only by showing yourself the horrors of what your inner evils could truly unleash could you gain the strength to fight them. You risked your soul to attain the very enlightenment you seek to give to others, and all you have to do to reach it is let that goodness out.”
Rarity was silent a long time after the princess of the night finished. She sat there thinking, while Luna pretended to enjoy her tea to give the ivory idol time. Finally, Rarity spoke.
“I’m sorry princess, but I can’t do that. To atone for what I’ve done now would destroy everything I’ve tried to build.” A single tear rolled down the elegant mare’s cheek. “If I tell my story to the world and try to right my wrongs, the public would lose the sheer overpowering hatred they’d need to reach that enlightenment themselves. I would be depriving them of the greatest gift I could give so that I might receive it myself.”
It was happening. Luna could see it. A certain sparkle had reappeared in Rarity’s eyes. That cold glint of malice and cynicism was gone, and a soft warm glow had taken it’s place. There was still pain there, and there always would be, but it seemed Rarity hadn’t killed hope after all.
“There are other ways to reach enlightenment than through hatred, my dear. Anger can cleanse the soul of impurities, but it can also burn the soul to a blackened wisp, and leave it a twisted shadow of what it was. I want you to come with me and help bring the world you want into being, and we’ll do it without destroying the world.”
Luna fought through the drugs effects to lift her hoof towards Rarity.
“Come with me.”
Rarity looked at the offered hoof, and a range of emotions flew across her face. Fear, sadness, guilt, and hope, all of them were truly and clearly shown. There wasn’t even an attempt to hide them made. Rarity reached out and took the hoof.
“I can’t,” she said, pushing it away.
“What you say is all true, but I cannot let all my work go to waste. All the pain and suffering I caused will be meaningless if I give up now. It was wrong to walk this path, but it would be even worse to abandon the small amount of purpose I had going into it. Besides, you’ll find I’ve outwitted you one last time. You may have broken through the cold wall of logic I used to hide myself from the world, but a true manipulator always considers every possibility. You see, I knew there would always be a chance I would lose the will to continue, and I knew what it would mean for all the crimes I made if I never gave them their purpose. I told you I made back up plans for every contingency, and this was no exception.” Now it was Luna’s turn to be silent. “To be honest, I never thought it would happen during the final step of all places. I thought I would have overcome any weakness I had long ago, and I certainly didn’t expect you of all ponies to wake me from my delusions. I thought you would be emotional and impulsive, a perfect final pawn, but it seems I underestimated how much you truly care. I made sure that I would be dead by tomorrow, whether it was by your anger or through my own machinations.”
“What are you talking about? What did you do?” Luna whispered the words, unable to process that she had been beaten even in triumph. Surely there would be a way to reverse whatever Rarity had done.
“I’m the most powerful and influential pony in the world, darling. When I say come, the world rushes to comply. Earlier today I held the what was to be the most premier party of the year, and every noble from around the world, good and bad, attended. It was the type of party the common pony speaks of in awed whispers, for they will never experience its charms, and it was there I played my final card. I made sure the world would rise in the morning without the foul corruption so many nobles and myself embodied. You see, the very medical advances that kept me alive led to a couple of interesting breakthroughs in poisons. I’ve been saving a certain one of these breakthroughs for my final coup de grace. I poisoned the entire attendance in my toast to the future, and I used a poison that has no known cure.”
Luna tried to rise and get to Rarity, but the drug was still inhibiting her movements.
“Don’t even try to cure me with magic, princess. This poison resists magical cures. That’s why I choose it. There may be a few herbs scattered across the world that can cure it, but it acts so silently that no pony will have time to find them when symptoms begin. In fact, they will most likely just think they’re tired and take a nap to the sweet oblivion of death.”
Luna felt anger and frustration well up inside her. She had come so close only to fail, and there was nothing she could do.
Rarity levitated a new pot of tea over from the cart beside her, and gave the princess of the night a fresh cup to drown her sorrows in.
“There is one thing you could do for me, darling.” Rarity looked Luna in the eye and smiled genuinely for the first time in decades. “You can listen to my story, and you can mourn for one no other can.”
Author's Note: Sometimes there's more to redemption than doing what is right. Sometimes doing what is right is completing an act which is wrong. The greatest of evils can strengthen the world as they fall, and sometimes those great evils we fight are merely righteousness in disguise. Does evil redeem itself as it strengthens us falling, and what if a villain sees the errors of their ways in the end? What does it mean if we can justify their actions even as we feel overwhelming disgust with them? Doesn't the ability to see why the villain did what they did make all the difference? Things to think about.
I hope this turn doesn't disappoint any of my few readers out there. This was the only route I ever really considered for Rarity's redemption. The question is... Do you believe she's redeemed herself? Nothing in the plan has changed, but it's not the same anymore. Does she need to atone, or is simple enlightenment enough? I feel that by reaching the very enlightenment she sought to give others her very crimes became the way she atoned. The punishment is the crime itself if you will, and who knows. Maybe by the time her story is complete she'll have found another way to redeem herself. The story is not done yet after all, although I doubt I'm going to reach the 50k word requirement for NaPoWriMo. Maybe if I move past the mere murder of Celestia and continue with flashbacks into what happened afterwards. Who knows what I'll decide, but I hope you enjoy it.