“Stop running! You bucking promised me!”
“I lied! Big fucking surprise!”
Celestia jumped over the chair that Raegdan threw in her way, and then hopped a second time to avoid the poor guard that followed, losing another precious second to make sure that this pony also landed without breaking his neck.
Considering she had four legs and a set of wings, she would have thought it would be easy to catch up to him. But no, Raegdan kept going through the narrowest, most twisty corridors he could find where he had the edge by being able to turn sharper and accelerate faster. Every now and then he would cut through various rooms, jumping or sliding over tables and furniture with outstanding tenacity, even if he slipped a couple of times and landed on his nose. He’d just get up and keep running without missing a beat, apart from a short exclamation of pain.
“You promised me!” Celestia shouted, insisting on that particular point. Dear heavens, what kind of endurance did he have? It felt like he would never get tired.
“You were beating me with a tree! It was a promise made under duress!” A maid opened a door on Raegdan’s path, the blonde maned mare curious to see what the commotion was about. She immediately became a short part of the chase as Raegdan made use of her. “Catch!”
Celestia did so, whispering a hurried apology to the surprised maid as her magic deposited her on the floor again after her short flight. “You can’t run forever!” Celestia did her best to keep him talking. Anything that could shorten his breath and this chase.
“I know, I plan to hide once I lose you,” Raegdan said, a moment before he crashed through a door, kicking it open with the aid of a small jump as to not lose his momentum. Celestia was right behind him, and she heard him laugh to himself.
Raegdan cut to the left, and headed for the window that led outside. It was a thin one, almost a slit on the wall rather than a proper window, but Raegdan made it through by twisting sideways.
“Let’s see your fat ass making it through here,” he crowed, and he was out before the small fireball that Celestia almost unconsciously casted at these words was able to reach him.
She reached the window just as the thump of Raegdan’s bad landing reached her ears. She saw him dizzily stand back up and shake his head, trying and failing to stumble in a straight line. He resembled a drunk bee on his walk. Apparently, sticking a landing on his legs was impossible even for him when jumping through a window sideways and shoulder first. Celestia made a half-hearted attempt to squeeze through. She might have been able to fit her shoulders and chest, but Raegdan was right in his thinking in one way. This was not a way she wanted to get stuck.
There were kinks about this sort of thing for Sun’s sake!
She lit her horn, mainly gathering her magic, undecided yet on what spell to use. Should she magically try to enlarge the window, shrink herself, or just blow a hole in the wall? She had to make her choice quick. Raegdan had regained his senses and he was running for the hills while she wasted time trying to choose a spell—
Celestia wasted a few more moments to facehoof herself. She couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. She sighed in derision and disappointment for her mental faculties. She had let Raegdan annoy her to the decree where she wasn’t thinking straight, just like the canny biped meant to. Well, no more of playing right into his hands.
Her magic focused, and her target chosen, she teleported in front of Raegdan as he ran.
That’s when she played right into his hands. Or more accurately, his forearm.
The damned biped must have been waiting for the moment that she would remember to teleport herself instead of running after him. There was the glint of an evil, self-satisfied smile the second before he put his right arm straight to the side, leaned his direction more to the left as he centered on his target, and then his muscled arm knocked into her throat with all his built speed.
This was the third time he had pulled this move on her in all the time he lived with her, and Celestia had enough. She coughed her tongue out of her throat, while her hated enemy was running away and throwing victory signs all around him. She glared at his back with enough intensity that if he wasn’t immune to magic he would have burst into flames.
“Fat hawk down, I repeat, fat hawk down,” Raegdan sing-songed as he made his way away from her and towards his perceived freedom. That was the final straw for Celestia. No more nice Princess.
She gathered her magic. She chose her target, this time not in front of Raegdan. She cast the spell. She teleported. And she made very certain that she didn’t spread her wings.
A perfectly proportioned, according to her height and size, Princess fell from the sky and right on Raegdan’s unsuspecting head and back. Hooves first.
Celestia checked Raegdan’s breathing. She had been doing that quite often. He didn’t make any noise while asleep, and snoring had always been out of the question. Unless he was drunk, then all that repressed gutter noise came flowing out. She shook him again, almost hard enough to rock him off the couch.
His eyes fluttered, and then were open in an instant, only to narrow as he winced at the pain he became conscious to. “Oh, fuck. W- Where am I?” he croaked.
“My office,” Celestia replied, leaning a little to clear his field of vision and see where he was. She saw him taking in her desk, her comfortable chairs and couches where she entertained the few visitors she had in here, her locked door, and her equally locked and barricaded windows.
He prodded his head, that Celestia had good reason to suspect was extremely tender at the moment. “Why does my head feel like a mountain range?”
“Well, after I got you, I had to bring you here, didn’t I? I dragged you all the way from the gardens, taking the long way around. You know, the one with the most stairs. By the way, your pants ripped. The Guard has filed a report for indecent exposure.”
Raegdan made an attempt to half-sit, and his hand went to his side, where Celestia was certain his ribs throbbed with pain. “Gah, did you drop me or something?”
“No. I just allowed those ponies you were throwing in my way, to visit you while you were asleep. Some of them were very enthusiastic in paying you back for playing catch with them,” Celestia confessed.
“Great, and I don’t even know who they were,” Raegdan grumbled.
“Hence why I let them have their fun while you were unconscious.” Celestia directed a stern look at him, straightening up in her most imposing ‘Princess of Equestria’ stance that Raegdan completely ignored. “Now, are you gonna behave?”
“For wh— Oh crap, Cadance!” Raegdan threw away the thin cover Celestia had put over him and stood up. “I’m out—”
There was a Technique that Celestia had learned in her early days, before she was a Princess or anything more other than a simple wandering pony. She was tall and pretty, and quite often lacking in funds. Some ponies saw it as a reason to offer her a way to make some money by giving herself to them. Others simply thought she didn’t really have a choice on the matter and considered themselves generous and good because they were willing to pay at the end. Others, some of the worst, thought she had no choice against them, period.
The absolute worst were those who targeted her little sister.
Her answer had always been no. If they weren’t welcome to her refusal, then she employed The Technique against them. A Technique that in some way or another had remained useful even after she became Royalty, though she hadn’t made use of it for centuries now.
Unfortunately, that meant that she was rusty in employing it and had forgotten exactly how much force was advised. A secondary implication was that she didn’t wear her metal shoes that far back.
As soon as Raegdan was up she executed The Technique.
Her steel shoe, covered with a thin film of gold, connected solidly with his groin, pushing the tender tissue so far back into his body that for a single, tearful moment, Raegdan had more in common with the females of his species that he ever would without employing very invasive surgeries. Celestia’s strength still drove her hoof forward, muscles and genitals proving themselves paltry foes, and easily crushed and bruised beneath her steel march.
Raegdan’s body doubled in two as he exhaled violently, and his eyes had gotten so wide that Celestia feared she would have to help him pick them up off her floor. Bubbling saliva leaked out of his lips, and as the assault on his procreator mechanisms unfolded, bile and stomach acids burst out as the same time as his tear ducts let loose.
Celestia’s hoof retreated, her assault taking no more than the span of a second or two. If somepony had good enough hearing and paid attention, they would hear the double pop as testicles rushed back to where they rightly belonged. Raegdan landed on his knees with a thud, his eyes rolled so far back that only white showed, interspaced with the vivid red of burst blood veins.
He shuddered as he pulled in a breath, his chest filling like that of a pony escaping drowning, and it took all of that volume of air to utter a single sentence, spoken with the voice of a shrill, eight year old filly.
“...you bitch…”
Then he fell to the side, clutching himself and quivering as if electricity was flowing through him. Celestia was almost, almost sure, that he was crying, but the way he pushed his face into her carpet it was hard to tell. A wave of guilt overtook Celestia for a moment but she drowned it out by summoning her niece’s tormented expression in mind. This was for Cadance, and only very limitedly for herself.
“Are you going to behave now?”
He grunted a guttural noise, which in Raegdan-speak probably meant ‘yes, until you look away’. Good enough. She didn’t mean to take her eyes off him either way. She waited a minute for him to stand up. He didn’t.
There was a knock on the door, and Celestia used her magic to unlock it, opening it just a breath to let her guest know it was fine to walk in. It was Cadance, right as she expected. Her niece looked at the form of Raegdan, still curling on the floor, and raised an eyebrow in question.
“Hello, Cadance. Raegdan, Cadance is here. Won’t you get up and say hi?” Celestia prodded him.
Raegdan reached for the couch with a shaking hand, and using it as leverage slowly made his way to his knees, stopping every few seconds to take a few breaths, cough savagely enough to make Celestia and Cadance worry about the state of his lungs, or just groan and stare vacantly while sweating up a flood.
It took him a couple of minutes, but he managed to stand up, refusing Celestia’s help when she offered it. He paused for a few seconds again, breathing deeply, and then turned around to greet Cadance.
Cadance screamed and covered her eyes.
Right, right, Celestia thought. I forgot about his ripped pants.
Cadance, still covering her eyes and turning her flaming red head to the side for good measure, pointed vaguely at Raegdan’s direction, shaking her hoof, and almost screamed, “Why, in the name of all that is holy, is… everything on display?”
Celestia was right on her niece’s side. “Cadance, I’m sorry, that was an accident. We brought you here for a reason, but, ehm, you know—”
“Your aunt is insatiable,” Raegdan said.
The pink Alicorn’s throat convulsed, and Cadance made an undulating sound with an actual toad’s croak at the very end. Cadance stumbled for a second, and made a half-hearted turn to leave.
“Cadance, wait.” One of Celestia’s wings reached for the nauseated Alicorn, stopping her. “Don’t mind him. There is something we need to tell you.”
“Fine,” Cadance said, her eyes squeezed shut. “Just tell me what it is so I can leave and open my eyes without fear.”
“Well—”
Raegdan interrupted her, insistent on making this as hard as possible for everypony involved. “How would you like to be your aunt’s bridesmaid?”
“What?” both Alicorns said.
“We haven’t got a date set up, so we will go ahead when you’re ready…” Raegdan continued, not noticing what Celestia did.
It was why he kept pushing the joke on Cadance’s expense, and why it had turned cruel. He didn’t notice that moment of pure despair and self-loathing that crossed over Cadance’s face. The instant where Cadance thought to herself how horrible this could go if it was true. How it was all the fault of her prank, and even worse how her own talent and function could make wrong of something she believed to be pure and untainted. It all hit her every time, worse with every repeat, and only lately had Celestia realized it. But Raegdan did not.
So Celestia used her magic to open the door and kicked him out, following quickly behind him before he could say any more.
“We’ll be rightbackCadance,don’tworryaboutthis!”
Raegdan was still stumbling as he fought to regain his balance, and Celestia didn’t let him do so. As soon as her magic closed the door and put a silencing spell over it, she pushed Raegdan against the wall, and almost snorted on his face. She rarely got really angry with him, but this was one of these times.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Raegdan returned her angry stare in equal measure. “I think we should just let things lie as they are.”
Celestia knocked him lightly on the forehead, making his head bounce on the wall. “Are you crazy? Why would we do that?”
Raegdan huffed, looking at her as if she was an idiot. “Look, what do you think will happen after we tell her? I’ll tell you. She’ll be relieved and think everything is fine, just like you want. But what is going to happen next? She’s the freaking ‘Alicorn of love’. She’ll start feeling guilty after everything is fine. Oh, maybe I should have been more supportive, or some other emotional crap.”
Celestia had to admit that he might have had a point so far.
“And then?” he continued. “Then she will try to make up for it!” he hissed, sounding scared at the prospect. “She’ll start looking for potential… mates or, even worse, she’ll try to get us together for real to make up for her ‘behavior’. Look, you’ve no idea of the crap I said to her in order to get her to give Shining Armor a chance. I’m fucked. She thinks I’m fucking lonely!”
“Raegdan.” Celestia waited for him to calm down and focus his attention to her. “Raegdan, we are hurting her.”
“...What?”
“It’s not all fun and jokes. Cadance really thinks she screwed up, and all you’re doing is making her blame herself for something that she thinks is going to go very wrong. Cadance is suffering, Raegdan. What are you going to do?”
Raegdan pouted. “I’ll suffer too when it’s all over.”
“Raegdan.” Celestia just kept her stare on him, a somber and trustful expression on her face.
He resisted for a few more seconds. “Fine!” he spat. “Whatever. It was getting old anyway.” He pushed her, carefully, away from him and headed back into the office.
Cadance was still waiting where they left her, almost trembling in anticipation of what she believed would be terrible news. Raegdan went down on his knee in front of her, getting down to her height.
“Okay, Cadance? I have something to confess,” he started, which for some reason made Celestia’s niece look even more worried. “Celestia and I are not a thing. We’re not doing anything together, we’re not getting married, and we’re certainly not romping everywhere in the castle. I, uh… I had figured out your joke and turned it back to you. I just… kept it up a couple of days more than I should.”
Cadance looked thunderstruck. “It’s been over six months since then,” she said in a daze.
Raegdan winced. “Yeah. Sorry about that. It was just a joke. I should have stopped it sooner. I’m sorry.” He stood up. “Are you okay? Forgive me?”
“...I, I… Forgive you? Gosh, you… you… six months...”
“Yeah, but it was funny?” Raegdan attempted.
Cadance let out a choked bleat of laughter. Then another. “Yeah, I… guess it was funny looking back.”
Raegdan beamed at Celestia.
Cadance laid a leg on Raegdan’s chest, as high as she could reach, smiling up on him. “And I know how hard it is for you to do something like this. I appreciate it, really, I do. I know that you would care for so few, and that you didn’t mean it in any malice towards me.” Cadance sighed, her head cast to the floor, making Raegdan wince as he saw physical evidence of how he hurt her. “But it was Tartarus on me, Raegdan. I thought that… I thought…” She sniffed, and wiped her nose. “Anyway. Can I forgive you? Yes. Yes, I think I can.”
Raegdan smiled in relief.
And Cadance employed the frontal attack version of The Technique perfectly, making Celestia proud in her abilities as a teacher.
“Forgiven. I’m going to see Twilight. And cover yourself, for heaven’s sake!” Cadance left Celestia’s office and Raegdan wheezing on the floor, biting his lips hard enough to draw blood.
“Well, Raegdan, all in all, good job. And hey, now I know for certain that Cadance knows how to pull off that move. You can’t buy this kind of assurance.”
“Fffffffffffffffffffff….”
“Do you need help getting up?”
“Uuuuuuuuuu….”
“Alright. I’ll be next door,” Celestia said, opening the door. “It’s time for Twilight’s lessons. Hmm, maybe I should teach her The Technique as well?”
Raegdan found the strength to lift his head. “Celestia… Don’t you dare… don’t you fucking dare… Celestia… Celestia!”
She closed the door behind her.
“Oh heavens, no,” she heard him whimper.
Celestia didn’t mind. Why, as soon as the pain faded away, and he realized that was a weapon in Twilight’s arsenal to keep touchy stallions away from her —which was exactly how she planned to pitch the idea to him later on— he might even offer pointers.
Or even his services as a training dummy.
Hmmm, Celestia pondered. I should probably find some kind of cup for him.
Or not. How hard could Twilight hit anyway?