You're Not Alone
"Spike?"
Twilight leaned her head down and gently nuzzled her number one assistant, who had been simply staring at the floor on her bed for the past few hours. A small, sad smile crossed her face, and she wrapped her forelegs around him in a comforting hug.
"It's not your fault, Spike. It was just your dragon instincts. If anything, it's on me. I should have helped you through it better."
Spike continued staring at the floor, barely even moving. Twilight could hardly even see his chest rise and fall as he breathed.
"But you're fine now, and so is everypony else. Rarity is okay, the Wonderbolts are fine, and the damage to Ponyville as a whole was superficial at worst. No one blames you. Like I said: if they should blame anypony, it should be me. I should have done more to help you."
"I forgive you, Twilight," Spike croaked. "I'm not mad."
Twilight let out a quiet sigh of relief and nuzzled Spike again. "I'm very glad to hear you say that." Her ear flicked and she let out an uneasy chuckle. "I know it's silly of me, but I was a little worried about that. You're my number one assistant, and I'd never do anything to hurt you. I've been taking care of you since you hatched, and I'm going to keep on doing just that."
"I know, Twilight." Spike rested his head on Twilight's chest and took a deep, shaky breath. "You're a good mare."
"Thanks, Spike." Twilight began stroking his head spines in what she hoped was a comforting gesture. "It means a lot to hear you say that. Sometimes I really do need to be reminded of that."
Twilight's ear twitched again, and she took a few deep breaths to collect herself. Spike was fine. They were all fine. So why was she so uneasy? A trio of loud knocks on the library door made her flinch, but she ignored them. Didn't the pony notice the "closed" sign? She could come back later. Right now, Spike needed her more than anything. The books weren't going anywhere.
"It didn't hurt, did it?" Twilight whimpered, squeezing Spike tighter. "I just... didn't know what else to do. It was the only spell that I could think of that would calm you down." The pony knocked again. Eventually she would go away.
"No, Twilight, not at all." Spike nuzzled Twilight's chest fur before letting out a little snort. The closest thing to a laugh he had in days. "Okay, I guess I was a little surprised to be this big dragon, then back to baby me. The world got a lot bigger once I changed back. It sure was a surprise to Rarity."
Twilight returned his snort with a little chuckle as the pony knocked again. Twilight sighed and released Spike. "Just give me a minute." Spike nodded and Twilight trotted down to the door, opening it with a glare.
"What? Can't you see the sign?" she snapped. "The library's closed!"
Twilight barely flinched back when she saw that Princess Celestia herself stood on the other side of the door. She went to slam the door, but Celestia ignited her horn and encased the door in her aura, keeping it open.
"I'm not letting you take him away," Twilight growled. "He didn't know what he was doing!"
"Twilight..." Celestia lowered her head and let out a quiet, weary sigh. "You know I must. It isn't right."
"I'll decide that!" Twilight snarled. "You didn't raise him! You don't know him better than anypony on this planet! I know that Spike is perfectly safe to be around! He didn't really hurt anypony, and he understands what he did!" Twilight's glare faded away, and she gently put a hoof on Celestia's foreleg. "Princess... don't we all deserve second chances? I mean, look at what Nightmare Moon did. Now Princess Luna is doing a lot better, isn't she? I believe the same thing can work for Spike! He's not going to go on a rampage like that again, I promise!"
"Twilight, please. I need you to understand. I need you to re--"
"NO" Twilight attempted to slam the door shut again, but Celestia's magic held firm. "It doesn't work like that! It..." A stone column. Three gems. Twilight groaned and rubbed her head. Wonderbolts. They were okay.
"You are not at fault for what happened, Twilight," Princess Celestia said, taking a few steps into the library. "You did all you could to help Spike."
"Ponies keep saying that, but I could have done more!" Twilight moaned. She looked back to her bed, where Spike had gone back to staring at the floor. He clearly wanted to see Princess Celestia as much as Twilight did. "It's... embarrassing. Or... I don't know."
"Twilight, I'm sorry," Spike muttered. "And I'm sorry to you too, Princess Celestia. I didn't know that I could do that."
"It's okay," Celestia soothed. She wrapped a wing around Twilight in a comforting hug. "But Twilight, it's time to face the reality of what happened with Spike."
"But he's fine!" Twilight groaned. "He's not going to go on any more rampages! He's learned to control his greed." Twilight eye twitched. "Do you want him to send you a friendship report on that?" Twilight ducked out of the wing hug and began pacing. Stone column. Black. Three gems etched into it. Everyone was okay. Twilight heard more ponies come in. Probably her five friends. They'd explain to Celestia that Spike was okay to be around and that she didn't need to take him away.
"Sugarcube..." Twilight stopped pacing and let out a breath that she didn't know she had been holding in. Somehow Applejack's southern drawl felt comforting. "Can ya please trust Princess Celestia? Y'all know Ah'd never do anythin' not in yer best interests."
"I know, Applejack, I know." Twilight looked over at her friend and smiled weakly at her. She wasn't wearing her hat or her hairbands. Twilight frowned. She had never seen Applejack without them.
"We're just tryin' ta help ya." Applejack motioned over to Rainbow Dash, whom Twilight hadn't noticed a moment before. "Yer not alone."
"I know, girls, I know." Twilight's weak smile returned. "Spike and I can't tell you how much that means to us."
"Twilight, I think it is time," Princess Celestia said as two more ponies wearing doctor's uniforms entered the library. "This will only be for a short while. These gentlecolts just wish to speak to you for a few days about Spike."
"Uh-huh." Twilight scoffed and resumed her pacing. "I'm telling you: he's not dangerous. One mistake doesn't mean that he's going to destroy all of Ponyville when he gets a Hearth's Warming Eve present and gets greedy. It hasn't happened before, and it's not going to happen again."
"I know, Twilight. But as your mentor, and someone who cares for you more than you can ever imagine, I need you to talk with these gentlecolts for a time. Please trust me."
"I do trust you." Twilight sighed and flattened her ears. "I do trust you. I just don't like bad things."
"Neither do I, Twilight."
Twilight slowly nodded as the ponies walked up to her. One of them slipped a magical nullifier ring on her horn before they led her out of the library, leaving Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Celestia alone. The moment the door shut behind Twilight, tears began streaming down Rainbow Dash's face, and she leaned her head on Applejack's shoulder.
"Is she gonna be alright, Princess?" Applejack asked, a note of helplessness in her voice that Celestia could not miss.
"I do not know, Applejack," Celestia said sadly. "I wish that I did."
Celestia turned away from the pair and walked up the stairs towards Spike. She stopped next to the bed and sat down, closing her eyes and sighing sadly. Twilight had done a good job. His dragon biology likely helped as well. Celestia ignited her horn and lifted Spike into the air, her heart breaking more as he flopped like a rag doll in her magical aura. She took one of the sheets off of Twilight's bed and gently wrapped him in it. He would be laid to rest alongside that which he held most dear.
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Oh man, this reminds me of Prevention. Poor Twilight. How's she going to ever get past the fact that she had to kill her special little guy?
Well... That happened... and I'm not really sure on how I think about it..
5694273 And Rarity, apparently
5694285 Aw geeze, I missed that.
This is amazing.
That was weird...
[youtube=https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMiYklHvjk]
Wait, wait....Spike....died? And twilight.....went insane? I'm so confused....?!
Nice twist at the end, quite dark.
Admittedly this seems quite muddled near the end.
A bit crazy but other than that it's a wonderful story.
Aww, man.
Do you still have to write a long killer Twilight fic now?
Oh.
5695008 You didn't read Downfall?
5694632
5694824 All of the clues are there. The tone reflects Twilight's state of mind. in the beginning it's pretty clear because it's just her and Spike, but when more ponies come into the equation and make things more complicated for her, her mind gets more muddled.
Well that was a confusing read. I get it that it implies that Twilight has gone insane and someone died, but I can't really figure out who. Spike? Rarity? The Wonderbolts? The rest of the Mane 6 except for Rainbow Dash and Applejack? Applejack and Rainbow Dash? All of them or a combination of these?
5695732 This takes place a few days after Secret of My Excess. Instead of Spike calming down on his own like he did in the show, Twilight hurls a spell at him that accidentally kills him. Rarity and some or all of the Wonderbolts who show up to help are killed as well. Twilight, stricken with insane grief, took Spike's body, preserved it, and locked herself up with it, pretending that he's still alive and everything is just peachy.
Twilight went insane?
5695414
I did indeed do so... probably during a small break from the Killer Rarity series. What I meant was you have a habit of writing multi-chapter serial killer/sociopathic/
litterallywhyamireadingthisitmakesmesadbutohsohappyfics. I figure you letting all of your crazy Twilight be drained by occasional one shots. Good ones, naturally, but not the long epics that are so common.I'm afraid I sound demanding, and that is not my intention. Just curious, is all.
Bad ending to, "Secret Of My Excess"!
Spike kills Rarity!
Twilight kills Spike and makes him into a doll!
Celestia sends Twilight to a mental hospital!
Very nice. It's always fun to read a psychological madness fic once in a while. I love the amount of subtly and the pacing is great. Which something that can sometimes be hard to find with fic's like these.
Woa. Bad ending.
5695431
It becomes more noticeable when I am not dealing with Food Poisoning yes.
5695431 oooh ok.
5695885 Ah okay, thanks for explaining it to idiots like me.
For a brief moment I thought you were going to go with a "Spike is imaginary Twilight went crazy theme" but this ending was just as sad.
From the description, I was expecting this to be Twilight helping Spike deal with guilt of turning into a giant monster and attacking the town, but when I started reading the story Spike seemed to be handling it rather well, and Twilight seemed... off. Then I got to the end, and realised what had happened to Spike. And then I read the comments, and realised the full implications of that, and that's what makes this story work. You don't see what's actually going on until the end, but when you then look back on it, everything falls into place, and the true situation becomes apparent.
The BATES MOTEL in ponyville. . .
5697259
i.imgur.com/K1f9EGD.jpg
Comments like that tell me that the content is something that I really don't want to read, but that the writing is fantastic. I feel so conflicted.
Huh. Dark, but interesting.
I thought for the longest time it was just terribly written with Spike, Twilight, and Celestia being crazy out-of-character. Admittedly, I did miss a few of the little hints (three gems! the wonderbolts!), and I almost stopped reading. Glad I didn't, I suppose. It's dark. I'll give it that. Pretty well-written, if you're into dark-for-the-sake-of-dark.
Two small errors:
I think you mean superficial? Could be wrong. I've never heard "superfluous" used that way.
"the" to "they" would be my guess.
Took a little while... Damn... My feels hurt.
5695885 Which of course means that no one is there to stop Chrysalis at the wedding and the Changelings win and everypony is cocooned as has their love sucked out until they die, then Sombra comes back reenslaves the Crystal Empire and gets powers and battles the changelings for supremacy, resulting in billions of deaths, then Discord breaks free again, and he's psycho Discord and rips the planet into pieces after turning every last living thing inside out and into various mutilated forms and EVERYTHING DIES FOREVER THE END!!!
5719699 Depends on when Twilight gets out of the looney bin and how all of that affects the wedding. If there's no wedding, Chrysalis cannot infiltrate as well. As for Sombra, Luna said that she could handle the situation in about five minutes. Her and Celestia did the first time. They only left it to Twilight as a test. As for Discord, he got out the third time because Tia let him out. With no Sombra/Changeling war, he's not going to get enough chaos to get out.
*shrug*
5719762 Uhm... Chrysalis doesn't exactly need the wedding to infiltrate Canterlot.
Changelings are shape-shifters, mmm-kay? Rather than relying only on Shining's love, every changeling could have replaced a pony and fed off the love of their families until the ponies were all left weak while they became too powerful to stop.
And then there's the issue of that threat against Canterlot... who the heck made it?! And WHY?! That will never stop bothering me since it just doesn't make any damned sense! Chrysalis sure as hell wouldn't have made the threat. Why on earth would she WANT the ponies to be on alert? Why would she WANT a shield in place at any time as a barrier to her forces? What did she plan to do if she happened to be found out early in that case? And what pony would have made the threat? Was it just some random terrorist phone call that coincidentally occurred at that particular time? We have nothing to go on. The threat is a very weird and random insertion into the story, solely existing to show off Shining's abilities at casting a big shield and create some artificial tension later on when the shield is cracking, as far as I can tell. It makes no strategic sense for Chrysalis, and there's no other culprit so much as hinted at. Even Scooby Doo did a better job at filling in the audience of such details of the villains' weird plots and ploys.
One story DID propose something that I wish the show had done: a changeling who'd fled the hive and lived in Canterlot saw Chrysalis for who she was; but, fearing for her own safety if ponies found out she was one of the very bug monsters the Queen led, she was afraid to do more than slip a general warning to official channels. That solves the issue of the confounding warning perfectly.
The wedding plan was actually immensely stupid, if you think about it a little. What was the point of going through the motions? She got found out, and STILL basically won anyway! Her 'loss' was solely because she performed a typical kiddie villain maneuver of letting the hero run about behind her back while she paid no attention. Had she simply cocooned everypony, it would have been game over.
The changelings, like Discord, are villains with so many advantages that if they're written as intelligent beings with an ounce of strategic intellect, they simply can't lose. I hate to say that, since I like the ponies and want to see them win; but Discord only had to send one Bearer to the other side of the planet and Chrysalis only had to have put Twilight in a more secure imprisonment and either villain would be running Equestria for the forseeable future. If anything, Chrysalis had the biggest advantage, as it seemed nopony even knew about changelings other than Cadance, and she likely only knew since she'd been abducted by Chrysalis... who probably gloated to her about the entire plan in a stock villain monologue.
Neither needed to resort to killing to win (though that would certainly have cemented their victory), as they had the powers and techniques to secure their victims in such a way that there'd be no hope for salvation.
5719934 Every changeling could have done that? In a military operation that would have taken months, and one little slip-up and the whole thing is kaput? I mean, if you remember the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies, it didn't take too long before people started to get suspicious, and that was with the aliens completely replacing their victims. The changelings don't seem to do that. They seem to be more "replace and store somewhere." type creature. So if one pony comes across it, then it's all kaput. As you pointed out, Chrysalis isn't the brightest bulb on the shed, so this operation would take too long and be overly complicated. It would fail pretty quickly.
And no, I'm not arguing the rest of it (who made the tip? Chrysalis is dumb for giggling instead of doing that after she had secured everyone, Discord had to literally snap his fingers to win) but I think for Discord that killing would be boring.
5720034 You mean the 1970's version... where the alien plants won?
You will never convince me that the wedding plan was anything but awful.
A species of creatures who could change shapes with ease, had perfect mimicry skills, fed on a simple emotion, and could employ a form of mind control... all this, and THIS was the best plan they could come up with?
We have to assume Chrysalis is an idiot, as it's the ONLY explanation for this plan! And that makes her a terribly dull and ineffective villain, when she could have been so much better with just a little more thought in the episode.
I am not one to make excuses when the writers clearly didn't think things through. I shouldn't have to make excuses for them! It's their job to write! Would I be excused for blowing up my lab because I was flinging chemicals around?
5723149 The plants took over the town, but the world might be a bit of a stretch.
Those shrieks the aliens made were terrifying. It was easily the superior of the two versions.
Anyhoo, yeah, I'm not arguing that Chrysalis' plans needed one or two or... ten more revisions. If Luna had been there when Celestia had confronted her, she wouldn't have even gotten as far as she did.
Depends on how quickly you have to douse your latest out of control monster in hydrochloric acid before it takes over the world. If you kill it, then your lab blowing up it a small price to pay.
5723450 It was implied rather strongly that the plants had taken over the world in that version, which also starred Leonard Nimoy as one of the plant baddies! It's the only time I can think of him in a villain role off the top of my head.
Anyway, the plants could not win now since we have 5-Hour Energy! Yes, drink 5-Hour Energy every 5 hours and keep yourself safe from alien plant duplicates!
*Alondro gets bag of money* Ah, selling out is awesome!
5723678 *shrug* Maybe. It's been a few year since I've seen it, but I sure remember the ending bit where Donald Sutherland screeches at Lambert from Alien.
5724377 You know, I've been thinking about this story in terms of the "Friends Forever 14" comic which sent me into a seething rage of fury over how horribly awkwardly and irrationally racism was tossed into it...
Looking back at the episode your story comes from, and indeed all episodes with dragons, where is the evidence of 'racism' the comic's author believes exists? The ponies basically forgave Spike for nearly destroying their town and turning into a rampaging beast with less sapience than the adult red and green dragons we've seen! If there was any racism against dragons, they'd have either kicked him out at once or imprisoned him.
Plus, nowhere does the show suggest that ponies think dragons are evil, nor are they portrayed as evil. The teenage dragons act much like many teenage humans: brash, arrogant, thoughtless, irresponsible, and cruel to small helpless animals. Now, if that's 'evil'... then almost all teenagers are evil at some point!
... ok, that may be true... but it's age-based rather than race-based!
Laying the severe continuity issues of a town of small dragons who apparently never suffer from Spike's greed-growth aside directly into a major pony city, the very concept in that issue was horribly out of place in Equestria. The issue of racial animus was already dealt with in a very 'ponyish' fashion with the buffalo, and to an extent with Ponyville freaking out over Zecora.
But beyond that, Equestria is a land where griffons, minotaurs, cows, donkeys, and other sapient species have existed side-by-side for centuries. Racism as it exists in our world CANNOT be present there, as it would have no foundation any longer. During the era of the tribes, yes, then one could easily place race-based hatred since the ponies hated each other! But... that was probably getting close to two thousand years in their past by this point, and the world has been through a chaotic period after which I suspect every race settled down to a great extent. Plus, Celestia is about as benevolent a ruler as you can imagine and has had a thousand years of unabridged rule to guide her ponies.
As I said in quite a few of my comments on the comic and in my blog, the dragons, all evidence suggests, don't care to associate with the ponies because the ponies aren't important to them. The immature dragons find ponies pathetic and even mock Celestia, while the adults simply ignore pony society altogether.
I don't know where people are getting this anti-dragon racism in Equestria nonsense, but they need to lay off the hallucinogens while listening to Al Sharpton, because they're seeing racism in places it simply doesn't exist!
God damn. Well done.
Can somebody explain the whole stone column/three gems thing to me? I understood everything except for that.
5695732 the first three, by my understanding.
My theory: spike kills the wonderbolts, twilight kills spike accidentally, rarity dies from the fall.
5731568 Rarity's grave/memorial.
5696766 No worries, I needed that clarification as well. the line
through me for a loop
That's a good way to do a dark story.