34-Parents
I sigh as I watch Comet and Cheerilee snuggled up against each other, fast asleep. True to the doctor's guess, the bat pony mare broke three of Cheerilee’s ribs. I could only thank God that they were clean breaks and no bone fragments were there to do any real damage. For now, Cheerilee needed rest. Comet needed rest after everything that had happened. I'd caught her crying when she thought I wasn't looking. I didn't say anything about it, of course. She'd be embarrassed, and she didn't need that right now.
I stand up from my chair and gently stroke Comet's mane. She stirs but doesn't wake up, merely tightening her grip on Cheerilee's foreleg. She’s safe now. Both of them are. Content with that, I walk out of the hospital room to get some fresh air. As I walk through the hallway, many of the doctors and nurses give me sympathetic glances, but I largely ignore them. I trust them to take care of my wife while she's recovering. Plus those stupid bat ponies are in jail. They can't hurt Comet anymore.
I exit the hospital and begin walking around town. I get more sympathetic glances from the townsponies, and one or two of them even tries to talk to me, but I'm not interested in equine interaction right now. Or at least, not the kind they'd give me. Words of sympathy and empty platitudes about how everything's going to be alright, even though I nearly lost my family.
Again.
Never again.
After a few minutes of aimlessly strolling around Ponyville, I finally look up to see where my legs have taken me. The Ponyville police station. My mouth goes thin and I make a call. I open the doors to the station and enter. The mare working the front desk looks up from whatever she's doing and grimaces.
"I want to see them."
The mare sighs and runs a hoof through her mane. She doesn't even need to ask who I'm talking about.
"They haven't been processed completely yet, and it would be better if you waited until they were actually incarcerated in the Fillydelphia prison we're sending them to. However, as their accuser it is your right to speak with them." She reaches underneath the desk and grabs a few pieces of paperwork. "If you truly want to, you'll need to fill this out and sign in."
I quickly scrawl my name on the sign-in sheet and snatch the clipboard out of her magic. She nods and leaves the desk for a moment, presumably to talk to some nearby officer about my visit. I lean against the wall and fill out the paperwork as fast as I can. Part of me thinks it's a stupid idea, seeing them this soon after they tried to take my daughter away from me. On the other hand, part of me has to see them. I need to know why they thought this was a good idea.
Or maybe I just have to yell at them some more. I have every right, don't I? I dunno. Cheerilee would probably tell me that I'm acting with my emotions, rather than my brain, but she's not here right now, is she? She's in the hospital with broken ribs. Those bat ponies saw to that.
When the mare comes back, I toss the clipboard onto the counter and she takes the forms and begins filing them away. Another police officer opens up the door leading to the back of the station and beckons me to follow her.
"What have they been saying?" I ask as we walk towards the holding cell. "Any weak pleas about how they deserve to be Comet's parents?"
The cop frowned at that. "It's not department policy for us to divulge what happened during the initial incarceration. We're only allowing you back here because you're their accuser, thus you have a right to speak with them. You'll only be allowed twenty minutes, and we'll have an officer there the entire time to make sure nothing bad happens."
"You worried that they'll escape and attack me?"
The officer doesn't respond to that. She doesn't need to, then. Her opinion is pretty clear. I guess that happens when your best option to stop your daughter's kidnappers is throwing knives at them.
We don't say anything else while we go to the holding cell. Not that I care to hear what she has to say anyway. I'm just here to talk to them.
We reach the holding cell and the officer unlocks the door so that I can go through. She follows me inside, where another officer is waiting next to the cell itself. I stop in front of it and the other officer tells me the same thing the first one did. He'll be watching, twenty minutes, blah blah blah. The first officer leaves, saying something about finding me a chair. I don't care about that. I care about the two bat ponies sitting in a cell in front of me. The stallion has his forelegs around the mare's shoulders as she's crying into his chest. I just stand there and stare at them until the stallion seems to notice that they aren't alone anymore. He looks up, his eyes widening when he sees me. He nudges the mare to let her know I'm there. She looks up and stares at me fearfully, like I'm here to kill them.
Well I'm not. Even if I could I wouldn't. I'm mad, madder than I've ever been before, but I won't hurt them. They can't hurt my daughter anymore, so there's no point. I take a deep breath and cross my arms.
"Why?"
The stallion clears his throat. "Mr. Powell, we didn't want to do it that way. We weren't thinking."
"I have yet to hear such a gross understatement in my entire life," I growl. "You wanted Comet back, so your brilliant idea was to drag her tied up and gagged through the Everfree Forest." My eyes narrow and I take a step toward the cell. "If I hadn't wanted Comet to have blood all over her, I wouldn't have even bothered with the warning shot. You'd have been dragging Comet away from her family one moment, then the next you blink and wake up in Tartarus."
"It's not like that Mr. Powell," the mare whispers.
"Then what is it like, huh?" I snap. "You came to my home and told me you were going to take my family from me! I am not going to lose my family again, do you understand me? I already lost one forever, then you tell me you're breaking up the last shot I have at a happy life?" I scoff and shake my head. "What gives you the right?"
"Nothing," the mare says quietly. "Nothing gives us the right. We knew that in the beginning. It wasn't too long before we regretted giving Comet up, but at the same time we knew we'd made our choice. We couldn't go back on it, and Comet certainly didn't deserve parents who had already done that to her, even if she was too young to remember it."
"She's always going to remember this," I respond. "Any time she thinks of you two, she's going to remember you trying to take her away."
"I know, and we were wrong, Mr. Powell," the stallion admits. "Very, very wrong. We were just... emotional. Not thinking straight."
"Why were you even thinking like that at all?"
The mare's jaw wobbles as she wipes her eyes with the back of her hoof. "W-we were wrong, we see that, but... we wanted another chance. One more chance to make things right for our foal." She sniffles and looks back up at me. "About a year ago I became pregnant again. When we found out, we were so happy. Finally we'd get to make up for the mistake we made with Comet. We figured that she had to have been adopted by a loving family by that point, so we resolved to never let our foal feel that she was unloved or unwanted.
"The pregnancy went smoothly, other than the normal bumps that come with being pregnant, and when it came time to deliver, we knew we'd get to make up for the worst mistake of our lives." A small smile crosses the mare's face as she leans her head on her husband's shoulder. "When our filly was born, she didn't cry. She just looked up at me, and I could tell she knew who I was. If she could have, I bet she would have smiled at me." The smile disappeared in an instant. "That was the first thing I registered about her. The second was her ragged breathing. The doctors took her away almost instantly. They wouldn't tell me what was wrong for another day when I was well enough to get out of bed to see her in the NICU. They said on top of her lungs not being developed enough, she had a heart condition."
The mare began sobbing and she wrapped her forelegs around one of her husband's forelegs. "We had to watch her waste away while the doctors did everything they could to save her. One in a million chance of a foal developing that condition at birth, they said. I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to think that I'd lose a second daughter right after she was born, just like the first one. I spent every waking moment by her side. She had an oxygen mask on at all times. They fed her through an IV. She was always twitching, but she'd stop when I'd touch her. I'd just put my hoof on her little head and she'd stop. I'd lean down and whisper 'my little Night Sky. My little angel.' During the scant few hours I was resting, Shadow would be there. She'd stop trembling at his voice. A-after f-four days of that, I was standing with her when it happened. Sh-she opened one of her tiny eyes, weakly reached a hoof out to touch my leg, a-and then..."
The mare begins sobbing too hard to keep going. I don't even know how she made it that far, to be honest.
"We didn't know what to do," the stallion continues. "We didn't leave out house after it happened except to get food. How could we go back to normal after that? After a few months we began slowly recovering as much as we could. Not that you ever truly recover from something like that. We heard about your book and thought it would do us good to get lost in stories of far-off adventures where no matter how bleak it looked, good triumphed in the end over adversity."
I didn't though. I fought for six years and lost. I feel that they don't really need to hear that, though.
"We got to the end and saw your family photo," he says. "We couldn't believe it. Our little Comet with the man we'd just spent a week reading about. For the first time in a long while we knew where she was. After everything that had happened, we wanted to try again. We'd lost one daughter and did a great injustice to the other one. We thought that maybe, just maybe, we could get her back and do right by her. Even if she wouldn't like it at first, we'd help her understand that we love her and want to make up for what we put her through."
"She spent eight years being rejected by family after family after she was rejected by you the first time," I say evenly. "When we adopted her, she cried and said she never thought she'd get out of that place."
The stallion flinches back at that. "We did wrong by her. We knew that mere days after we'd given her up, but by then it was too late."
I take a deep breath and lean back in the chair that had been given to me during their story. I simply stare at the two of them for a few moments, trying to get my thoughts together.
"She's happy where she is now," I say after a minute or so. "You want to do right by her? Leave her with the family that would do anything for her without hesitation. She's been my daughter for less than six months, but already I'd die for her if I knew it would keep her safe." I stand up and push the chair back. The officer indicates to me that time is almost up.
"I'll be getting a restraining order that only Comet can overturn. If at some point she wants to see you again, that will be her choice that I will let her make." I sigh and turn away from the cell. "Beyond that, I won't be pressing charges. Once you're out of here, leave Ponyville and do not come back."
"Mr. Powell, I--"
I don't even let them finish before I walk away.
* * * *
Cheerilee and Comet are both still asleep by the time I get back to the hospital. I sit back down in the chair I've spent most of the day in and hold my head in my hands. I can only stare at the floor, thinking about everything that's happened over the past week. I hate it all. I just want Comet to be safe.
"Hey, Daddy." I look up and see that Comet has woken up. She's giving me a small smile. I return it and ruffle her mane a bit.
"How's it going?" I ask.
Comet shrugs. "Okay, I guess." Comet's expression changes to one of intensity and fear. "Mommy's gonna be okay, right?"
"Of course she is," I say with a comforting smile. "She's going to be just fine. We all are."
"Okay." Comet close her eyes and nuzzles Cheerilee's leg that she's holding on to. "Can we go home soon?"
I nod. "Yeah, we'll go home really soon. Tomorrow at the latest."
"And they're not going to try to take me away again?"
I shake my head. "No. They're not. Nobody is going to try to take you away again." I give Comet's hoof a loving squeeze. "You don't have to worry about that anymore. You're my daughter. No one is going to hurt you ever again."
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I must say that this is the FIRST story that has me crying actual tears on the inside. Bravo..
Ah. I like a heartwarming ending to a story arc.
fucking love this story
Ok, so apparently it was as simple as it appeared. Well, plus the helpings of stupid and tragedy, but that's kinda par for the corse for TD.
7309330 just on the inside? My dog is giving me the death stare because I got her fur wet with tears.... I really shouldn't read stories with feelings in them, but they are the best kind
You know what I am waiting for? Just for him to go up to Celestia and ask her for one more face punch for old times sake after being so nice for so long, and after said punch to get freaking destroyed by a wing slap in return. I missed those moments, first was a face punch and in return was absolutely wrecked by Twilight, then we got Luna breaking his spine after he whacked Celestia again. I missed these moments so badly.
7309398 Why? Why do you want that?
7309351 I agree with you and the other guy as well.
7309403 Nostalgia?
7309403 Because we want to see how bad it'll go this time.
Also: third times' the charm or so
So, no sinister third party? No situation that forced their hoof? Just two ponies driven mad by grief? I'm not quite sure how to take this. On the one hand, it reinforces their petty selfishness, though with the grief they went through does explain things. On the other, it means they weren't tricked, coerced, bamboozled, or otherwise forced to assist in some dark ritual, or some-such, that they felt worth sacrificing their own daughter for. Something to think on, I guess. Looking forward to more.
Keep up the good work. Deus tecum.
No memes, no jokes, no sarcasm.
I cried at the end of this chapter.
It makes me wonder if TD will ever be able to phone home or if they will find him? I am sure if he could he would love to be able to tell his parents about his wonderful wife and daughter.
7309536
Or that hoof has motives we cannot see and has very deft hand on ponies. *coughCelestiacough* one who would know all there is to know about the situation, and would have easy access to manage the "slip-up" on the security.
Right after the restraining order you have the hospitals checked to see if that oh so convenient sob story is true. If so then you can take a moment or two to think damn that's rough.
If the effect they claim is so rare, wouldnt it be of special intrest to Celestia and her specialists, for deep analysis to try and mitigate, and maybe help in other situations in the future as well?
Its not as bad as claiming your grandfather won the VC etc, but it should be almost as well noted?
Im still trying to find out if its true or another lie that my grandad recieved the Legion d'Honeur (?) gven that the situation he claimed was done by only a handful of people as far as I understand.
Even with World Magic, the children shouldnt have to suffer for the sins of the parents.
7309403 Because if TD isn't doing something stupid, followed shortly by great pain, the nature order has been compromised and the TD Universe will collapse?
Screw you author, you made me cry with this chapter.
Well done.
this is a perfect ending to this story ark.
I think this would be a perfect time for the DR to tell Cheerilee and bye the way when we did a full body scan you are pregnant.
and after a test it shows that TD you are the father.
but that is just me being sappy.
7309403 Tradition.
7308475 Turns out they are grade A ideological idiots...
At least that is the one we get now. If they come back then the current explanation won't hold water anymore.
7309403 The better question is, when is Comet going to take up the family tradition and deck Celestia herself? I think it's high time TD passed down the Celestia Face Punching torch.
Hopefully we won't be seeing more of them anymore. I wonder what else the universe has in store for TD.
Also I caught this little thing:
7310538 That's why you don't eat Taco Bell right after a personal tragedy.
7310339 Since this is a fanfic... they could just be really good liars and need the foal to resurrect Nightmare Moon for their dark cult leader.... PRINCE BLUEBLOOD!! Or as he's known in the cult, KING SOMBRA!!!!!
So THAT'S why we've never seen BB and Sombra side by side! IT MAKES SENSE!!
media.tumblr.com/4a0ca56e84c90b8310b804db5d3ff224/tumblr_inline_n9i9qsR7ra1r1zkbr.png
I feel like I'd enjoy this even more if emotional range was greater than that of a doorknob. Either way, it's still a great story.
7311087 What do you mean?
7311280 It doesn't feel as sad as it should is what he means.
7310762 Well... That sounds interesting... How about you write a fic about that would you? BB as Sombra in hiding, that's one I personally haven't seen before. But given this is BronyWriter I wouldn't actually think he would make such a weird and random twist. He is good at making surprise twist and also make it so that you slap your forhead and go "Why didn't I realize that earlier!?" rather than the very obvious "WTF?" you would get from a twist like yours.
7310356 You know, one version of TD punched Celestia in the face a third time only to have her punch his (her) face back, which eventually ended in them having a brawl which pretty much freaked out everyone in Ponyville. I guess it was just another tuesday for the Ponyvillians as they got back into their regular rutines quite quickly after the two alicorns had their fistycuffs.
7311972 There's no way I'd write a story with a twist that ridiculous unless it was going to be a totally ridiculous farce with snowballing absurd twists, one after another, until the universe blows up.
Honestly TD just dun goofed. Seriously just a restraining order? They ignored the law once and they don't seem better, they really needed to be in jail. This is gonna be a decision that will bite him in the ass.
Wow. I never thought TD would give them a second chance. Guess it shows that even a hardened man can be a softie inside sometimes.
7312925 Actually prosecutors can still press charges on the pair, even if TD himself won't in fact the court could even subpoena him into being a witness, with the exception of TD invoking 5th amendment rights (If Equestria has a equivalent to the US Constitution anyway). Otherwise TD could be jailed for contempt of court.
All this according to criminal defense lawyer dot com, so I'm pretty sure the information above is accurate (though not certain), and of course that is U.S. not Equestrian law.
7317434
Still given how Equestria is I doubt that here won't be legal actions against them from the state now that you mentioned it. Still this seems to hint that the restraining order is all which I hope isn't the case. These crazy ponies need to be watched by government as they have proven, minimally to get help for their obvious mental health issues.
Anyone here seen Mel Gibson's: The Patriot?
Should give you some idea of just how patient I feel T.D. Was here.
7342331 A bad screenwriter for an even worse romance movie.
So, I'm gonna go a little against the grain here and say that I sympathize with Night and Comet Sr. I also sympathize with TD and Cheerilee.
I'm part of a large clan. (In the traditional sense though we aren't Scottish) Some of my family members sought help from social services many years ago when they were pregnant. The social service agent got it in her head, that the best thing for them would be to adopt their soon to be born child away. And she wouldn't leave them alone till they agreed to it. This was the first time it had happened to us, and we weren't ready to play hard ball with social services yet. (God have mercy on any agent that tries that with us now) She was successful, and I lost my cousins.
So at that angle, I understand how perfectly good parents can end up adopting children out, even if they don't want to.
That said, they had no right to just demand Comet jr be returned. None at all. They had no right to even demand they see her. The sum total of their rights is to ask Cheerilee and TD for compassion and possibly, maybe allow them to meet their biological daughter. They have only one bargaining chip, and if I were in TD's shoes, I would want that chip. I'd want it badly.
Had I been TD and answered the door to that, I can tell you that I wouldn't have talked with them then. Not with my child in the house. "Come back at noon tomorrow. If you're early or late, we're done talking. If you don't leave now, I'll call the cops." would be about the gist of that conversation.
The next day, with Comet at school, and hopefully Cheerilee there, the gist would be "I hold all the cards. It's only because I'm kind that we're here. I want your medical information, and family medical history, and your contact information. We will tell Comet about you before her tenth birthday, and if she wants to meet you, I'll set up a meeting. I understand how hard it is for you to loose your child, but imagine how hard it would be for Comet to loose her home and the only parents she's ever known. If you're willing to work with me, then I'm willing to entertain you meeting my daughter. Do not try and go behind my back, I will consider that a hostile action and if you've read my book, you know what happens to my enemies."
And if they pulled that kidnapping stunt. I would have very likely killed the shit out of one or both of them.
Wow, TD has changed.
8145347
no crap. he changed very much over his 14 years in that world7526121
I know right? Them losing their child twice doesn't justify literally kidnapping the first one after she has just finally being adopted into a very loving family.
I would've sympathized with them too, had they not just barge in and demanded that Comet is to be theirs again. I wonder what in the world were they thinking to antagonize their filly's adopting family, destroying their smidge of a chance at redemption and/or explanation.
And that sympathy is dead the moment they kidnapped her.