The car trip was relatively silent, I just stared at the window watching cars whip by and kept thinking to myself. Quick looked at me and then looked back at the road, my peripheral vision told me that much and I think it was harder for her to concentrate on the road. She took an exit a few miles out from Ponyville, pulling over she looked at me, she cleared her throat and I just stared back at her. "Something is wrong with you." She noted.
"There's a lot wrong with me, you're going to have to point out what specifically." I retorted.
"That!" She nearly shouted, "Ever since we took this case you've been either angry or just plain silent, I don't know what happened at the palace but something is obviously pissing you off. It's concerning, and no it's not you being a professional because you have a different aura about you when that happens. So spill it, what really happened up there?"
"I don't have to tell you." I said.
"You're acting more like a pissy teenager than a grown ass adult, didn't you once tell me that you can only keep secrets for so long that eventually they won't remain secret anymore?"
"....Yes." I slowly answered.
"This isn't just a case for you, it's personal." Quick pointed out, "You wouldn't be acting like this if it wasn't."
Now she had backed me into a corner, figuratively speaking. "I...shit."
"What is it." Quick stated, she didn't ask.
"Can you keep a secret? A drop dead to your fucking grave secret?" I asked her.
"Yes, obviously. I've been keeping secrets my entire life, you think one more is going to kill me?" She replied.
I slowly take off my caster ring, letting my hair brighten into the neon green that it is. "It's me that they're looking for...they hired me, to look for me."
Quick was silent. She looked at me and was confused, "But why? Why did you leave them?"
"There are multiple reasons, firstly I wanted to get out of the shadow of all the girls. They had already accomplished so much at such a young age, and time after time after time, I was left behind. I was barely invited to do anything, all it was for me was work, work, and more work. It's not that they weren't appreciative either, they compensated me well for the things that I did for them. The daily grind of doing something for someone else and never having time for yourself is...exhausting. I told my mother that I wanted out and so she gave me the ring, the car, and enough money to get my own business off the ground and paid for my apartment until I could pay for it myself." I said, "When we were up in Canterlot, I was talking to my mother. Princess Celestia, I unloaded a bit on her that I shouldn't have and well I'm still angry."
"Well, what the fuck are we going to do?"
I looked at her, "Excuse me?"
"They hired you to find yourself. Where do we start?" Quick asked.
"So you're not freaked out by this at all?" I asked her.
"Jack I mean Spike, I uh...fuck what do I call you?" Quick scratched her head.
"You know me as Jack, and it's not like I've changed. So I would just stick with Jack." I said.
"Jack, I've known you for almost a year now. You've always had faith in me and always kept me in line whenever you felt I needed it." Quick took a deep breath. "You're kinda like the dad I never had."
"You're not going to start crying now are you? Because I'm prepared for a lot of things but the one thing I can't handle is a crying woman." I said.
"No, I'm not going to cry." She shifted the car back into first gear and quickly did a U-turn. She then turned back onto the highway and we took off, I put my caster ring back on. "You need to forgive her."
"Why should I?" I asked her.
"Because, she may not know what she's doing but she tried. Also, she let you leave the girls and spread your wings. Look where you're at now, I think you were a little too mean to her. You haven't told me everything, but I can tell."
"Women can always tell." I said solemnly.
"Besides, she could've ratted you out. But she didn't, doesn't that count for something?" She asked.
Then it hit me as to why she didn't tell Twilight I was alive, and in my anger I left out the most obvious reason. It was love, and there I went in like a brat and yelled and degraded her for no reason. "Turn around."
"What?" Quick asked.
"We're going back to Canterlot." I said.
"Why not just send her a letter?" Quick asked as she exited the highway and got back on the path to Canterlot.
"Because apologies on paper aren't as meaningful as apologies in person." I said.
Celestia was sitting at her desk, looking over the paper that Spike had read with a glass of wine in one hand, well more like a bottle of wine.
"Sister, this isn't like you to start drinking this early and to shirk your duties." Luna pointed out from behind the locked door.
"I'm on vacation sister, you should try it. It's good for your health." Celestia said drunkenly.
Luna sighed as she spotted two new individuals approaching her, one of them was excited the other had a look of what people called nowadays, resting bitch face. The pair soon walked up to Luna and she was prepared to do a lot of harm to these trespassers until the male spoke up, "Hi Aunt Lulu, could you please let us pass?"
There was only one person in the world who had called her that, and she had been convinced that he had disappeared forever. "S-Spike?"
"I go by Jack now, Jack Drake." I answered her, I then tried the door and sure enough it was locked. "Hey Quick can you?" I turned to look at her and notice that she had her face almost planted to the floor.
"Rise my little-" Luna began, but I cut her off.
"No, I want her to stay like this for a bit. I've never gotten her to bow before me." I smirked. Quick then said something but it was muffled by the carpet, "You're going to have to get up if you want to come up with a witty reply, unless you like to munch on carpets."
Luna smacked my arm and told her to rise, when she did Quick smacked my other arm. "You're an asshole."
"The door's locked, can you get me in?" I asked and Luna stared at me. "Please?"
Quick took out her tools and was about to get to work on until the door opened, by itself. Celestia looked down at all of us, "What are you doing back?"
"First." I said, I then took the bottle of wine out of her hand while dragging a stunned Quick to the balcony, and handed her the wine. "Pull."
Quick threw the wine over the edge and I pulled out my revolver and shot the bottle of wine. Celestia stared at me, "What was that for?"
"I'm sorry." I replied, "Also I hate you so much for making me dependant on having women in my life to point out when I fucked up."
"Hmm?" Celestia asked. She was still drunk and Luna had already read the situation loud and clear. She lit up a spell to lift Celestia's drunken haze and make her remember the last few seconds with more clarity. "You're back. But why?"
"I was an asshole, I was being a brat and you didn't deserve it. I was angry, and I had no right to take my anger out on you."
"Why were you angry?" Celestia asked.
"I thought, that the past was put behind me. That I could walk away with no regrets and that everything would work out. Obviously I was wrong, seeing all the shit that I had done and that was done to me rushed back like a hurricane of emotions and I didn't know how to react."
"I guess, hoping that everything will work itself out runs in the family." Celestia said, "Sp- Jack, I love you. You're my son and nothing can change that, you're going to get angry at me. That I understand and on some level I can understand your frustration. You needed an outlet, although anger isn't the healthiest, I have no room to talk however." Celestia looked at the wine bottles that littered around her. "I think we need some family therapy."
I looked at the gun in my hand and reflected on my recent actions. "Yeah I think that would do us a world of good."
"Would you like to stay the night?" Luna offered, Celestia looked at her younger sister. "What? It's not like you would have offered the same courtesy."
"We can't, we have to get going. I think Quick is still in shock that she's met two out of four of the princesses and one of them was drunk off their ass." I said as I put my gun in it's holster.
Luna looking to savor the time she spent with the now rarely seen Spike, "What about dinner?" Luna blurted and that got the attention of the three people in the room.
"Sure!" Quick spoke up and I looked at her, "I haven't had anything since breakfast and that was coffee! I've been so busy tracking down leads which are now red herrings by the way. I didn't have time to eat, if you think I'm passing up the opportunity to eat with Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, not only are you an asshole, you're also insane." Quick walked outside the door.
"Where are you going?" I asked her.
"To get my best dress!" Quick replied and took off jogging.
Luna looked at me, "I don't know where you got her, but I like her."
"I like her too, but I don't as well." I answered Luna, causing both her and mom to look at me.
"How can you like her, but not like her?" Celestia asked.
"Because it just goes to show me that I need someone in my life to point out when I fuck up instead of doing it for myself." I said, "I don't like being codependent. It shows me that I don't have what it takes to support myself."
"Is that what all your anger is about? You feel like you need someone to guide you." Luna asked.
"I don't feel it, I know it. I'm angry that for the first time in my life I'm finally doing stuff that I've wanted to do, things that make me happy, make me my own person and all of a sudden these women who have been bossing me around my entire life just show back up and push me around again and again, and when I stand up for myself and try not to be a doormat, I go overboard and hurt the people I love. I've always been a servant to someone else, whether people wanted me to or not." I said.
"That can't be entirely true." Celestia said.
"You remember that letter I sent you about that time the girls and I were sucked into my magic comic book? The girls had said that I may not have been a pony but I was certainly one of them and the next day afterwards, everything reverted back to the status quo of Spike do this and Spike do that, Spike stay behind and watch the library. I was always the comic relief, never the one to have his own moment in the spotlight."
"There was the time in the Crystal Empire." Celestia suggested, "They love you like a hero over there."
"That moment was stolen from me the moment the girls started to sing about how Twilight passed her test from you." I said, "But hey good job Spike you destroyed an ancient evil with a giant blue heart. Now let me sing about something I did that eclipses what you did."
"That's not really fair, you've done a lot of heroic things." Luna said.
"During the first Grand Galloping Gala we went to, when the girls left me behind. I spent the entire party just roaming around doing nothing. I accidently bumped into someone and at first they started to get upset but then someone said, oh don't worry that's just Ms. Sparkle's Dragon slave. That's why you found me at Joe's, I was so insulted and so upset that no one noticed I was crying, even when I went right out the front door and looked back at my mother and supposed sister. I've been physically abused to the point where I had to check myself into the hospital and no one noticed. So yeah, those things are very heroic." I sat down on the bed.
"Wow." Celestia sat next to me, "I never thought."
"No one usually does. That's some of the reason why I left." I said. "It gets, tiring. The things kept piling up, soon I became so dependent on others that. I didn't value myself, I had no self-esteem. What was I going to do? If nothing changed while I was with them then the location needed to change. I needed to leave for my sanity, or else I would've done something a lot worse than just leave."
"What are you saying?" Luna asked.
"You all were making a villain that knew every single one of your weaknesses and could use them against each other, not only essentially tearing apart the elements of harmony but the entire government as well. It was on a one way track to being me, anyone else would've fucked it up."
"Are you saying that if you hadn't left you would've become the world's greatest villain?" Celestia asked.
"Opportunity plus timing, multiplied by a lot of pent up rage to the power of intelligence and manipulation that equals one pretty unstoppable villain. Hell I even had a plan."
"But you had a conscious as well, which made you stop before you acted upon it." Luna said.
"I'm just gonna say this, had I spent a few more days like that. I would've been the one on the throne today and not you girls." I said, "That's not bragging, that's stating a fact."
"I believe you." Celestia said, "I could barely stop my own sister 1,000 years ago. I could never stop my own son, adopted or not."
"You left not only for you but to keep everyone safe." Quick said standing in the doorway, she was in her best dress, that she brought. I've seen better, she walked back into the room.
"I was raised, to value life and hold friendship dear. Very little of that was shown to me in all the time I spent with Twilight, and I wanted to inflict so much pain upon her and her friends, but then I realized something. That's what people would expect, I could've started manipulating from the background making people slowly doubt each other. Or I could become something bigger and better than something they could ever be. It'll take some time, but it's about the same amount of time I would spend slowly manipulating everything to my will and crafting my world. It was a sacrifice no one knew about."
"So you'll stick it to them, by what? Showing that you're better?" Quick asked.
"Bingo, after all they can only embody one element. Me? I'll be all 6." I said.
"Beat your enemies by being better than them, you're playing it smart." Luna said.
"I was always going to play it smart, I lived in multiple libraries and owned comic books where I could see the villain's plot coming from miles away. Do you think I just sat around doing nothing in a library when I got all my chores done in an hour?" I asked Luna. "So, now that Quick is dressed. What do we say about dinner?"
Soon we were sitting at the dinner table and I was digging into my steak, while Quick had a chicken salad, Mom had the tilapia, and Luna had fruit salad, considering this was her breakfast, I don't blame her. I poured steak sauce into a pile next to my mashed potatoes and broccoli, cutting pieces off my steak and dipping it into the sauce then quickly devouring it. Celestia cleared her throat, "So Quick, how did you meet Sp- I mean Jack?"
"I...had heard that he kept a gun in his office, I was looking for a weapon to stick up a convenience store..." Quick said, "It wasn't the proudest moment in my life. I was, unfortunate or fortunate enough however you look at it, that he was in his office and caught me. I was ready to fight, but he talked me down and hugged me. That hug, saved my life, I noticed that his office was in disarray so I offered to organize everything for him for 20 bits, he offered me 50. I kept coming back, I kept getting paid, and most importantly. I kept getting advice."
"You saved her life." Celestia looked at me.
"Be better than the ones who treated you like dirt. I knew how she felt, similar situation different path. I offered her a life preserver, she was smart enough to take it." I stated as I finished my steak.
Quick and I soon finished our food and were ready to leave until Quick stopped. She looked at the Princesses, "Before we leave, can I get a picture?" She held out her phone.
The sisters looked at each other and then shrugged, she then handed the phone and posed with them. I held up the camera and pointed at them, "Say balubaday!" They looked confused and I snapped the photo. "That's authentic."
"Why did you do that?" Quick snatched her phone back from me.
"There are thousands of pictures of the princesses smiling, not a picture of them confused. Now no one can say it's photoshop, you're welcome." I said and she backed up a bit.
"Thanks, I appreciate this." She smiled.
I looked at my mother, "I'll look into finding some family therapists, because there's a lot of shit we need to wade through, together. So pick a persona, I know you have many different ones." I pointed at Luna, "You too Lulu."
I walked back to the car with Quick behind me, we got in the car and I got in the driver's seat. I rested my head against the wheel, crying.