Caramel ran. The unicorn ran for all he was worth as he crossed the streets of Silver Shoals and galloped for the mansion. Caramel ran across the roadways, heedless of the carts that drove across the pavement.
He found the mansion in a few minutes and saw the crowd of newsponies standing at the gate. He ran past them, heading for the secret entrance at the back of the mansion to get inside without alerting the gaggle of scavengers at Luna’s front gate.
He ran along the side of the property, passing the wrought iron fence and gaining a few glances from the mob. He ignored them and pushed past, running to a small cliff face that stood behind the manor house. Caramel climbed the cliff’s edge and wished that he had been a pegasus like his character instead of a unicorn. He pushed himself, coving himself in the dust as he took the fastest path up the cliffs to where he knew the door to the manor’s escape tunnel hid in the shadow of the rocks.
Caramel quickly found the door and opened it wide, only for shock to run through him as he found a blank wall immediately behind it.
The tunnel was closed? Did Luna shut it the other night? Oh, you idiot, Caramel!
He glanced back at the manor and the gate that surrounded it. He could try and go through the front, but that meant he’d have to get around the flock of journalists at the entrance and make sure they didn’t follow him in. He felt that would only make things worse.
He’d have to jump the fence out of their view.
Now, if only it weren’t nearly three times as tall as he was.
The fence offered no hoofholds to use to climb, and while the cliff did offer him a place to stand where he could try to jump over it, the distance between the two made him uneasy. If he could even make that jump and not wind up impaled on the fence, then the fall would probably break a bone or two.
He judged the distance.
There was no way he could make that jump. It would be crazy to even try.
Yet, it was his only way in.
He ground his teeth, backed up, and hoped that he’d make it.
---☼---
Luna lay slumped on a couch, staring at the wall and eating a tub of ice cream.
The nocturnal alicorn read somewhere that ice cream made situations like this better, and while she did find it delicious, she decided that frozen cream with chunks of frozen cookie dough was perhaps a little too sweet for her.
That was another problem she had. With the modern-day industry, luxuries like sugar became commonplace, and ponies these days just put it everywhere. Natural sweeteners were typically more than enough, but when they shoved more sugar into her drinks, she wound up trying to drown in coffee. Truly a unique complication for her life, that nopony but Celestia might understand.
Caramel might understand, at least conceptually.
Luna crushed the treacherous thought in a second before picking up a discarded tub of ice cream. She used her spoon to scoop out the very last bits of the cream out before shoving the spoon in her mouth.
Yes, he might understand with his remarkable understanding of history, but he also traded all of her friendship and time for a quick buck.
He needed the money.
Luna muttered. “Well, I could have bought the whole apartment building, but he didn’t come to me, did he?” She licked the spoon clean before throwing the spoon and carton aside and slid further into the couch.
Still too sweet. She might need to try and find some salted carrots to balance everything out.
Her ear flicked.
“What’s that sound?”
Luna rolled out of the couch and peeked out of her windows to the front gate.
The mob was gone.
Luna blinked as she stared, mouth agape at her suddenly uninhabited front door. “How?” she asked herself aloud. “What happened?”
She blinked again before the thought that something terrible must have happened struck her. Panic began to rise before her years as royalty took over. Luna forced herself to remain calm before she teleported herself into her front yard.
Surprisingly, she didn’t hear the cries of ponies in panic. No riots or laser beams being fired by a giant monster. Luna glanced around, trying to figure out what happened before her ear twitched again, and she could now recognize the definitive sound of a cry for help and the clicking of camera shutters coming from behind the manor.
Spreading her wings, she took to the air and flew over the manor and saw a pony hanging by his hindleg from her fence, with a crowd of ponies taking pictures of him.
She blinked before she rocketed forward toward the pony hanging by the fence.
“What is wrong with you all?” She bellowed. “Are you all so desperate for a story that—”
The pony hanging by his leg was Caramel. The fence tore through his leg and left a massive gash that bled all over the place.
Her Princess instincts kicked in again, and she finished yelling at the journalists. “Did none of you call an ambulance? Are you all insane?”
A journalist called out. “Lady Luna, are you aware that this pony was trying to—”
“Go. Get. A doctor!” Luna roared before she picked Caramel off the fence and then teleported herself and Caramel into the manor.
The alicorn dropped Caramel onto the floor of her kitchen, rather roughly she’d admit before she made her around the counter toward the first-aid kit. “And why, pray tell art thou trying to climb my fence Caramel?”
Caramel didn’t answer, and Luna glanced over at him before realizing he was unconscious.
Luna bit her lip before she lifted Caramel back onto the counter and looked at the leg. The gash was deep, but more importantly, he lost a lot of blood.
Luna reached into the fridge with her magic and pulled out a half-gallon jug of milk. Taking a tiny smear of his blood, she used Perceive Body to identify his blood down on the cellular level before using Transform Body to change the milk into a perfect copy. “And Celestia said whole milk will only make me fat,” she muttered before she used Transform Body again to begin sealing wounds.
She worked quickly before making sure that almost all of his veins and arteries were closed except for a single hole in one of his veins. She reached into a drawer and pulled out a straw before she pierced a hole into the jug of milk and then slipped the straw into the hole before she started closing it around the straw.
She began manually pulling the blood through the straw and into his system with magic while simultaneously working carefully to ensure that air didn’t get stuck inside.
Within a few minutes, she had put back enough blood that Caramel began to stir.
She pulled out the jug, transformed it back into milk, and then poured it down the drain. “So, now that you’re awake, what are you doing here?” she asked, using her formal voice to punctuate her words.
“Lu-Luna?” he asked hazily. “Luna, where am I?”
“On my kitchen table. Though I have to wonder why you decided to jump over my fence.”
“Had-had to talk to you, Luna.”
“I’m sure you did,” she replied.
“I didn’t...I didn’t say anything to them. I didn’t tell them anything about Celestia.”
Luna turned from him and stared out the window.
“I swear I didn’t tell anyone, Luna. I swear by everything that exists, I didn’t say anything.”
Luna didn’t reply.
“I am so sorry, Luna. This wasn’t worth it, it was never worth it, and I knew that. I knew it was a terrible decision, but I tried to do it anyway, and I am a terrible pony for doing it, I know. I broke your trust, and I couldn’t possibly make it up to you, I know. But I need to try, please.”
Luna continued to stare out the window.
He betrayed her trust. Caramel had asked her the question she could not answer for the sake of her sister. That alone was bad enough.
But he’d been so desperate.
That didn’t give him a right to destroy her trust.
“You broke my trust when I tried to help you.”
“I know,” Caramel said. “You did, and I threw it all away so I could take care of it myself like an idiot. And I am an idiot. I’m the biggest idiot on this side of Equestria. I know that. You deserve better than this. I know. I’m so sorry.”
Luna stared out the window for another long second.
“Luna, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I’m a desperate idiot that tried to do something I shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I had to let you know that I didn’t tell anyone.”
“So you didn’t think I that I told you the truth? You think I lied?”
“No! No, I think you told me something that I could use,” Caramel said. “I’m just a coward and moron. I could have used it, but I would also have to live with it, and I learned that night I asked you that I simply couldn’t live with it. I just can’t. I’m sorry.”
Luna sighed. “You know I’m not known for my forgiveness?” she asked.
“I know. But I had to apologize. I had to.”
Luna sighed. “Even if it meant jumping over my fence and tearing thine leg open?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I should probably go to a doctor’s.”
“Thou should be fine. It has been a while since I performed surgery, but it is far easier to do with magic than without it.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better or worse about not going to the doctor?”
She turned to face him. “I had a plan. I will have thee know,” Luna said. “As soon as Celestia returned, I would have revealed my solution for the entire group.”
“For everypony?” Caramel asked. “I thought they were doing well?”
“They are doing adequately,” she replied. “I hope to improve that.”
Caramel nodded and set his head down on the countertop. A moment of silence sat between them. “I didn’t fix anything, did I?”
Luna glanced over at him. “What dost thou mean?”
`“I still made us lose something. We’re worse than when we started.”
Luna nodded. “Broken trust takes a long time to heal,” she said before giving a sardonic laugh. “It’s been a thousand years, and I barely still trust myself. But thou hast opened the door again. We can try again from here.”
Caramel nodded.
It would have to do.
---☼---
Marble and Celestia could barely talk to each other for the flurry of activity that followed. The ponies that called themselves the Sons of the Storm, the Warband that Dusk managed to collect for herself, either needed to be subdued or scattered. Some of the ponies continued to make questionable decisions, such as attacking an alicorn. According to Celestia’s whim, those few were teleported to another cell in Canterlot or scattered across the jungle.
Marble tried to figure out what her standards were on that, and while she did typically send them to prison, he couldn’t quite figure out what the line was. Strangely, he wanted to know what that particular line was more than he probably should, considering she used to be the ruler of the country.
Then again, it was also kind of hard to see her that way when he had watched her slurp down a mango. He’d still swear that she’d make less of a mess if she stuck her face in the fruit and rubbed it around.
The others, the ponies that already learned that they were in over their heads, and continuing to work this way, would only get them in more trouble, were told to make their way to the palace. Once there, they were to report to the Princess for judgment and explain what they found before they were teleported to Canterlot city.
At least the first few were. After that, Celestia teleported them as close as possible, with the last few groups being thrown either into the hydra’s swamp if guilty or close to the jungle’s border if they were at least thinking about it.
When they finished, the sun started rising in the east, and the alicorn was panting.
“Are you alright?”
“Teleporting that many ponies will take it out of you,” Celestia replied. “Even if you had the power to casually lift the sun in the morning.”
“Do you want to rest before heading back?” Marble asked.
She gave a weary smile. “That sounds like a wonderful idea.”
Marble gave her a soft smile. “Where did they drop your saddlebags?”
“Not too far from the vault. Do you want to head back there and rest?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t really want to spend more time in this temple than we need to. Not to mention the fact that it’d be hard to set up a hammock down here.”
She smirked.
Marble began leading the way back to the vault and recovered Celestia’s saddlebags while she picked up the steel sphere that still contained the cloak of feathers.
With their effects gathered, they made their way outside and found a pair of trees to set their hammock up for the night. Once that was done, Celestia dropped the massive sphere to the ground, where very little could move it, and flopped into their shelter.
Marble joined her a moment later and sighed. “How did this whole thing happen?”
“I wanted a vacation,” Celestia said.
“Vacation?” he repeated.
“Yeah.”
“And you decided to go to the jungle?”
“I don’t get the chance to do reckless, questionably-dangerous actions while also being the highly respectable and responsible Princess. Or, Duchess, I suppose. The point is, it’s hard to let your mane down where you’re royalty.”
“And so you decided to brave a jungle instead?”
“It mostly worked out,” she said in her defense. “I just had two problems, and you were there for both of them.”
Marble shook his head. “That doesn’t make that better.”
“Maybe not,” she admitted. “But I had a chance to let loose and pretend to be normal.”
“You have a bizarre definition of ‘normal,’ Lady Celestia.”
She grimaced. “Don’t call me that. I’m not ready to go back to that life just yet.”
Marble glanced at her. “You don’t want to go back to a life of being retired?”
“It’s not that I’m retired, Marble,” she said with a sigh. “It’s that I’m Celestia. Perfect, untouchable, all-powerful Celestia. Ever since I abdicated, I’ve been hounded by the press asking what my opinion is on every single thing Twilight does. As though I haven’t been training her to take the throne for a decade or so, mind you. Sky above, the only time I haven’t been chased down to ask for my opinion was when I started this little trip. I had to disguise myself and then walk into a jungle just so I wouldn’t have somepony asking me for my opinion.”
She sighed again and closed her eyes as she leaned back in the hammock. “I just want to not be important anymore.”
Marble shook his head. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Celestia. You’ll always be important to someone,” he smirked before muttering, “even if it’s just to me.”
Celestia opened one of her eyes to stare at him.
“Sorry, that was pretty forward, and I—”
Celestia’s leg hooked around his neck and pulled him down into a hug. When he didn’t pull away, Celestia held him close and brought her muzzle up to his, slowly getting closer and closer until their lips would brush against each other if they moved.
Marble blinked and stared into Celestia’s deep, brilliant, magenta eyes.
Sunny’s eyes.
They stared at each other for a brief moment that stretched on forever.
Celestia smiled. She made her intentions clear, and now she closed her eyes.
Marble took a breath, inhaling the scent of a mare that spent the past five or six weeks running through a jungle.
He leaned forward and kissed her.
And the day passed by without a single problem in the world.