"Master," said another robe. "The girl on the alter – is she to serve us for a Dark Revel? She seems unworthy of such a joyous occasion. I could find better, Master, if you give me leave for just a short time-"
"No, Mr. Friendly."
-HPMoR Chapter 113
Riddle's 'happiness mentor' did not even wait five minutes. She immediately started him on the program that, according to her, would end in a Patronus Charm.
She started with his sleeping habit – i.e. his habit of not sleeping. She suspected, like he did, that simply forcing him to put his head on a pillow for six hours each night would not work. It would only lead to annoyance, frustration, and Riddle concluding that she's stupid.
Instead, he would be pushing himself to stay awake as long as possible, without any polyphasic resting intervals. In theory, this would build up more pressure to sleep at longer intervals. In practice, it simply meant his rest is becoming less voluntary. Now, rather than entering 'zombie mode' at will, it would happen whenever he was bored. He dislikes that he has less control over his own bodily functions, but he is enjoying the frustration it's producing in his 'mentor', especially when he falls asleep during her 'lessons'. As the former Element of Honesty, she cannot complain when 'falling asleep' is his honest, unfiltered response.
It mostly happened during memory-viewing sessions, the second item on her agenda. It didn't happen the first few sessions, both because the effects of her 'sleep program' hadn't fully kicked in and because she started with very informative memories.
He'd also been interested in the 'Astral Plane' phenomenon in general during those first few sessions. Apparently, after he'd been taken there the first time, he could return to her Astral Plane whenever he wanted so long as she hadn't explicitly decided to ban him.
The memories she showed him were past 'Night Court' sessions, and like the Astral Plane problem, they initially prevented him from falling asleep because they had his full attention the entire time. These memories in particular were, according to his happiness advisor, the peak of what she once did with her Princess position, and they were not at all what he had been expecting.
For instance, he had been expecting to have trouble understanding them, in the same way thousand-year-old portraits in Hogwarts are nigh-impossible to understand. But 'Equish' (i.e. Equestrian English) hasn't changed over the past 1,000 years like Earth English has.
He'd also been expecting the memories to at least remind him of Day Court, but the two courts were nothing alike. Rather than focus on any legal disputes like her sister, the Alicorn of Night and Dreams preferred to help individuals with personal/relationship problems, especially in one-on-one or one-on-two sessions.
He was learning a number of things about relationships (mostly between ponies, but probably people as well, for the insights seemed applicable) that he hadn't known before. In his own defense, his former ignorance might have had something to do with how he typically avoided having relationships in the first place. He could analyse others with clinical, cynical detachment, but he has many blind spots, as these memories are proving.
The past self of his employer picked apart the mental states of her petitioners better and more clinically than he could have, and she wasn't even a Legilimens. Furthermore, she saw through deceptions and evasions almost instantly. She 'cut through the bull manure', as one of her more crass petitioners put it. She'd been able to do that long before she connected with the Element of Honesty, or so she now claims.
The first indication that these memories – or some of them, anyway – were worth watching was during a marital dispute that had made it all the way to her Court. Past-Luna made this wild prediction seemingly out of the blue:
"For you-" to the husband "-I would guess sexual abuse in youth. And for you-" to the wife, "-physically abusive or violent parents?"
The petition up until that point had contained absolutely nothing about their pasts. It had only involved recent disputes, like the wife shouting at her husband and breaking objects when angry, and the husband being sexually dissatisfied, even going so far as to suggest, and briefly attempt, an open relationship (though it never got past the point of 'meet other ponies who are also interested in open relationships'; meeting the kind of pony who was open to that sort of thing quickly ended the desire to try it).
The 'violent parents' prediction was easy enough to understand in retrospect, but Riddle had absolutely no idea why past-Luna thought the husband suffered sexual abuse, and he was even more shocked when the husband confirmed her guess. And again, this was done without Legilimency.
When he asked present-Luna about it, since past-Luna had not explained, she said that genuine interest in sexual depravity, i.e. open relationships in this particular example, are almost universally the result of foalhood sexual abuse. She said that almost all negative desires and behaviours can be linked to past trauma or neglect or bad parenting in one way or another. There are exceptions, of course. Some ponies become sexually depraved without suffering the trauma first. But those are rare in comparison.
If it were true, you'd think that the world's most prolific Legilimens and cynical social manipulator would know it already. And he did know it to some extent, but not to the point where it gave him that kind of predictive power from evidence that scanty.
After his first time reading Bellatrix's mind, he made it a personal policy to avoid Legilimizing victims of severe childhood abuse. Especially sexual abuse. It is extremely unpleasant to read the surfaces of their minds. If he hadn't had that policy, or if he had been more interested in using Legilimency or even normal conversation to uncover people's pasts, he might have discovered the more general link between parenting styles and behaviours before this point.
He was initially suspicious about that link when watching the memories. He had doubted the link was as solid as past-Luna so firmly believed. But after so many undeniable examples of successful out-of-the-blue predictions in petition after petition, even he was beginning to become convinced. Convinced that it applied to ponies, at least.
Past-Luna often claimed, when slowly walking others through their past traumas, that she suffered parental abuse as well. That could have been a lie, a mere tactic to encourage her petitioners to share their own experiences. But given how much detail she often gave, and how consistent her anecdotes were, she was probably being honest.
Present-Luna said her past abuse is how, even without a Vow, she was able to calmly, peacefully, and non-judgmentally help other ponies understand their behavioural woes. She'd gone through 'the journey' herself, so she can empathize, not just sympathize. Just like she is currently doing for him.
The only difference between then and now is that she did not have a Vow forcing her to do it in the past. Past-Luna did not declare ponies to be helpless even as they described 'immoral' and often illegal actions they'd done, and there was nothing forcing her – the princess of a nation – to be so lenient to confessing criminals.
A well-known and respected policy of the old Night Court system was that ponies who came to her would not be legally punished for what they disclosed. Everything they discussed would remain private.
Riddle noticed the similarity to muggle religious 'confessionals' right away. That policy is something he's been meaning to ask about, but he hadn't had a good opportunity yet. Hopefully he would soon.
In the session he's currently watching, past-Luna had just offered a theory which he had not heard before: "overweight is overlooked".
An obese petitioner was asking for advice on how to lose weight. After a brief question-and-answer session, past-Luna pointed out that the adult petitioner has a very child-like voice, which is worrisome, then suggested "overweight is overlooked" as a possibility.
In short, a victim of foalhood sexual abuse will eat so much food that they become unattractive. Once they become overweight, they are overlooked by the pedophile, who moves on to somepony else. Thus the phrase, "overweight is overlooked".
If this is the reason for a pony's obesity, as it sometimes is, losing weight as an adult is nigh impossible without addressing the root trauma. It might not be the case, past-Luna said to the petitioner, but past-Luna went on to say that young fillies who went through sexual trauma in general seem to share a tendency to have child-like voices. She had no idea why this might be the case (maybe it involved emotional stunting, Riddle thought), but it was so. The petitioner in the memory was overweight and had a child-like voice, and so past-Luna was throwing out this as a possibility, even though the petitioner had not so much as hinted that she might be that kind of victim, even to past-Luna's heightened perceptions about that sort of thing.
The obese mare listened to this hypothesis with increasing alarm, then begged the princess never to tell anypony else.
At that point, Riddle decided to ask, "Do you think these ponies would be amenable to the fact that you are sharing their deepest secrets with a complete stranger?"
His mentor paused the memory and turned to face him. "If they were still alive, some of them certainly would not be. But now that they have been dead for over a thousand years, and their issues long buried by time, I think… if there was an afterlife and we could somehow reach it to ask them for permission, I think that they would grant it. I think that they would want me to be able to help you in any way I could, just as they were helped. Though in the same vein, some of them would be fine with it, even if I had asked them while they were alive. Like the pony with the… bowel problem, whom I showed you yesterday."
Riddle chuckled. A 'bowel problem' is one way to describe uncontrollable self-defecation.
"He would likely wish his story be told, not shy from the public shame," Luna observed.
"You might be right about that," Riddle remarked.
That pony had declared at the start of his petition that he did not care anymore. He did not care that, in bringing the issue to Night Court, he might be making his problem known to the entire country. He did not care that he would be making it known to the Princesses themselves. He just wanted it to stop.
Past-Luna reassured him that everything would be private, but the petitioning pony said that it didn't have to stay private if she managed to figure out what was going on. He said that he didn't want anypony else to suffer what he went through, and he wasn't only talking about the bodily problem. There were many other problems that went with it – the shame, the bullying, the smell, etc.
At that point in the memory, Riddle had asked Luna to pause it and explain to him why the problem of uncontrollable bowels would be that bad in a world where public 'nudity' is so generally accepted. Couldn't he just not wear clothes, stay outside most of the time, and run to a nearby bush or tree whenever the problem happened? (It's not like actual ponies care where they defecate. Actual ponies can't even control when they do so.)
The Princess explained to him that, a thousand years ago, public 'nudity' was not generally accepted. Luna and her sister grew up with it, but there were many ponies that were not raised that way. For a reason that she never understood, many ponies, especially the oldest ones when she was growing up, always insisted on wearing clothes. Her own great-grandfather – a long-lived Earth Pony – was like that until the day he died.
The self-soiler came from one of those 'wear clothes at all times' villages, sufficiently answering Riddle's question.
The rest of that Night Court petition was particularly insightful as well. The beginning was insufferable, though – for Riddle, not the ponies in the memory. The petitioner started his plea by describing a dream he had the other night and the past Princess of Dreams was happy to indulge by delving into that dream's symbolism.
Present-Luna had told Riddle beforehand that the first part would probably bore him – it did – and she told him to understand that the petitioner was simply avoiding unpleasantness, as many other petitioners have done. Even still, if she hadn't strategically shown him that memory after he'd just woken from a resting session (he was at 25 minute long rests at this point, up from 15), he would have fallen asleep when they were going back and forth about a pointless dream.
Twenty-three minutes and twelve seconds into the memory (he knew the exact time because he was constantly casting the tempus spell), it finally began holding his attention.
After a bit of digging through the petitioner's past and bringing painful memories to the fore, the princess learned that this pony, like the husband from the marital dispute, suffered sexual abuse. Unlike the husband, it had been at a much younger age. Furthermore, it had not been an adult who had abused him, but a 'friend' – a fellow colt who should have been far too young to even have sexual thoughts in the first place. (That suggested to past-Luna that this 'friend' had been heavily abused himself, probably by a parent or uncle.)
At that age, what his 'friend' could inflict amounted to touching and looking, especially in and under his flank, but that is more than enough to leave a long-lasting impact.
One thing led to another, and by the end of past-Luna's questioning, Riddle had developed a slightly disturbing mental image of what amounted to a colt sex cult, except without true sex. Even his mental conception of Voldemort, who had orchestrated and witnessed what his Death Eaters called 'Dark Revels', found the description mildly disturbing.
No adults were involved. It was only colts. Most were inducted at ages six and seven (even the depraved among the Death Eaters selected ages ten and above) and the first thing that any new 'inductee' was told was to not tell their parents.
This tactic worked because they were giving these inductees far more attention than their neglectful parents. The 'friend' who started it all was both extremely skilled at games and a charismatic extrovert, even at age seven, which is how the petitioner had been drawn in. He liked his 'friend' more than he liked his own parents.
The petitioner in question tried to tell his mother like a creative child might. He composed a detailed, many-paged novel, with associated pictures, of young colts doing things that no young colts should be doing. Apparently, when he showed it to his mother, she only read the first part of the first sentence of that novel, which did not contain anything disturbing. She then said "that's nice" and continued out the door for her night out, never reading another word or looking at any of the pictures. As with the other victims, the petitioner evidently had extremely negligent parents.
After learning all this, past-Luna quickly developed the theory, and the petitioner (and Riddle watching the memory) quickly agreed, that the self-defecation was likely a defense mechanism. Whenever it happened, the cult would lose interest in their 'normal' activities and do actually normal things, play actually normal games.
Ponies cannot command their own bowel functions to operate in such a fashion under ordinary circumstances, but the body has a way of adapting to extremes. It likely happened by accident the first time, but what the body can do once, it can learn to repeat.
(It's even possible, Riddle thought, that it could be a genetic impulse produced by evolution, assuming sexual abuse was common in the ancestral environment. Anal scarring and infection would certainly have been unhealthy, and thus evolutionarily disadvantageous. A 'poop when about-to-be pedophiled' mechanism might exist somewhere in human/pony brains. Though it probably didn't.)
Regardless of the underlying biology, the petitioner subconsciously knew that soiling himself prevented his abuse, and thus he did so whenever he was socially uncomfortable.
Past-Luna then went on a rant. It was initially aimed at the petitioner's parents, but it spread to pony society at large.
His parents never even thought to take him to a healer for his problem, she pointed out. The general healer at his annual checkups did not investigate the offensive smell that would have been present on multiple visits. Not a single pony – and in particular not his parents, the ponies with the most responsibility – even thought to help, let alone try to help. They didn't even notice anything amiss, aside from the bowel problem. They didn't notice the cult their colt had joined, despite all the signs.
And even worse than that, his parents joined in on his bullying. Like everypony else, they mocked and taunted and shamed him, making a bad situation worse.
A pang of emotion had flashed through Riddle at the mention of that. He was bullied himself, mostly in the muggle orphanage, and past-Luna's phrasing struck a chord of anger. It wasn't his fault strange things happened. It had been accidental magic, even if he didn't know it at the time. He had then blinked, realizing he'd just tried to justify and defend himself from a mental image of Mrs. Cole. Normally he had better control over his thoughts, but his general state of sleep-deprivation made his mind wander. He'd shaken his head a bit and focused on the memory in front of him.
When asked, the petitioner said he extricated himself from the cult long ago, but he still has the 'pooping problem'. Luna reasoned that it must be simple habit by this point. His body is automatically running the 'poop when socially uncomfortable' program.
After considering many possible solutions, all of which would likely take months to try and none of which would likely work, past-Luna did something unusual as far as her typical petitions go. She prescribed a non-addictive, hallucinogenic weed with a reputation for relaxing the ponies who take it. It worked as an instant cure – a very rare thing in the medical field, at least at that time.
Present-Luna remarked that there are potions for that purpose nowadays, but back then they often had to make do with what nature provided them.
A St. Mungo's healer, Riddle knew, could have made such a potion, and might have even been wise enough to use it as a cure for a self-defecator, but even the best healers on Earth would never have dug down to the root cause of the problem.
What also struck Riddle was how past-Luna emphasized over and over that the petitioner bore zero responsibility for the things that happened during his foalhood, including the fact that he personally inducted new ponies into the cult and occasionally took pleasure in the acts, so long as they weren't being done to him.
She said he was far too young to know right from wrong, especially with such parents as he had. It is a pony's instinct to do unto another what is done to himself; it is especially a young pony's instinct to mirror the behaviours of his role models, no matter the behaviour and no matter the role model.
She said that, as an adult, he has done Equestria a service by not continuing the cycle of abuse, by not instinctually inflicting upon others what was done to himself. That's how abuse typically perpetuates itself, present-Luna informed Riddle. It's also how a single abuser can spawn tens or even hundreds of new abusers, if they are not stopped in time.
Past-Luna reinforced these points by claiming that she does not take any responsibility for what her father did to her. That was all, entirely, her father's burden to bear, and the burden of the village protectors who did nothing, and the burden of the adults who did not believe that such a reputable, likeable stallion could possibly do such terrible things. They did believe, thanks to her father's charisma, that young fillies should not lie for attention. Only Tia had ever believed her when it truly mattered, even without a shred of evidence, and that had kept her sane.
"Wouldn't she have witnessed it first-hoof?" asked Riddle at that point in the memory. "He was her father too, yes? Or did he treat her-"
"We are not-"
"-better than you…"
"-sisters by birth."
"Ah," said Riddle. "Were you later adopted by her parents, or…"
Luna smiled. "No. Your reference frame is mistaken. Tia and I were raised in a… hm… a large tribe. That would say it best."
"Not by your parents?" Riddle asked.
"Occasionally, but… well, at night we were with our parents, but foals spent the daytime with whomever was deemed to be the best caretaker. Once we grew to fillies and colts, we typically had a single adult overseer, chosen on a rotational basis from the pool of parents who had sired the group. Tia and I were in the same group. Most of them left us to our own little games, but sometimes the day's parent would play along, or try to teach a lesson." She frowned. "After he did and continued to do so much violence to me in private, it was eye-opening to watch my father publicly treat young ponies amazingly. It taught me that he knew what a good father should do. And since he managed to flip on a bit, from violent to friendly, the moment our private home had a visitor, I concluded that everything he did was a choice, not an uncontrollable impulse like he would sometimes lie about."
"What all did your father do to you?" Riddle had asked.
"You should well know by this point," Luna had replied.
"I know the general patterns of physical violence and constant manipulation," Riddle had acknowledged. "But in the end, I've only heard a few anecdotes. I don't know the full extent."
"That is the full extent," Luna had said simply. "If you are asking whether I suffered what so many of these petitioners suffered, to my father's credit the answer is 'no'. But…"
A memory had appeared in front of her of a dark grey stallion with a furious face and a raised hoof.
"…but being beaten half to death is trauma enough." Luna had frowned at the image, and it disappeared. "Most ponies these days, especially in affluent places like Canterlot, or good places like Ponyville, cannot comprehend it. They cannot understand how a young filly might mean it when she thinks to herself, 'My father is going to kill me'. Even when young ponies say it aloud, adults write it off as a great exaggeration. To be fair, in this day and age, it often is. But back then, it often wasn't. Good ponies cannot imagine the statement being unironic, but some young ponies literally feared for their lives, as I once did. Such incidents are far, far rarer these days thanks to a thousand years of effort on my sister's part…"
Ah, Riddle thought. So ponies might NOT be inherently less evil than humans. It might have been a deliberate, top-down effort.
"…especially sexual abuse, which might have been eliminated entirely, as far as I can tell from my dream-walking. And with a thousand-fold increase in population size, that is an impressive feat. Despite her neglect in other areas, I was overjoyed when I first realized that Tia had diligently addressed the most important issue during my banishment."
"That being?" asked Riddle.
"Abuse and neglect of foals, of course," said Luna without hesitation. "Particularly by parents. As you have seen by now, that one issue is responsible for perhaps ninety-five percent of all behavioral woes. In fixing it, my sister eliminated Equestria's biggest problems… well, our social problems, anyway."
Riddle nodded in approval. She acknowledged that the country still has major military problems, and she corrected herself without any hesitation, without any doubt, and without any prompting on his part. Her ability to think about such exceptions independently, to actually learn from his mere advice, not just harsh experience, is why he doesn't mind her company.
"Though I suppose Tia did not quite get around to eliminating all instances of adults abusing their fellow adults," Luna added, acknowledging yet another bit of counter-evidence he might have offered if she hadn't gotten to it first. "I think your Day Court petition was a wake-up-call to her. The punishments for abusing foals are drastic, but Tia did not think that adults would habitually hurt other adults. I think she assumed that simply getting rid of one would get rid of the other."
"You'd think she would have seen plenty of counter-evidence to that assumption before I came around."
"She likes to see the best in ponies. She does not pry when she sees minor red flags, so long as they do not point to foalhood abuse. Thus, she did not see how spoiling and pampering can lead to an arrogant and callous disregard of others."
"With Chrysalis and Blueblood being prime examples," Riddle remarked upon the accurate analysis.
Luna nodded. "Ones that, with any luck, taught her a thing or two about the problem of pompousness. And arrogance. And elitism."
"Even with all the luck in the world, I doubt she learned that lesson from those incidents," said Riddle. "I wouldn't have had to hammer the point home so often if she had. She's only taken to heart… I'd call it a tenth of what she still needs to learn. And she learned it from your joint interrogation of the nobility, nowhere else."
Luna sighed. "I am afraid you might be right. But that should still not take away from what she did accomplish."
Riddle tapped his cheek in consideration. It was strange to do with the tip of his hoof instead of a finger, but still felt fitting in this circumstance. "Can you say how you know Celestia was responsible for the elimination of foalhood abuse?"
"I know because many of the stories I heard in Night Court, including the ones I have shown you thus far, have appeared in what is now the standard textbook for aspiring clinicians."
Riddle had not read any medical textbooks yet aside from ones on basic pony anatomy, so that was news to him. Evolution and biology, he had studied. Psychology and therapy, he mostly hadn't. Except a few from Mr. Potter's collection, but those didn't cover this topic.
"You told your sister about the 'private' Night Court petitions?" he asked, focusing his attention on yet another inconsistency. "And then she told them to the whole nation? Are you certain that 'Honesty' did not mind that you called them 'private'?"
"They were anonymous in the textbook," Luna said in both defense and excuse. "False names obscured their identities, and other details were also altered, so long as they were unrelated to patterns of abuse and trauma. Even I had trouble placing a few of them, and I know the source material better than anypony. Furthermore, the textbook was published decades after my banishment, and since information traveled rather slowly in those days, the anecdotes within would not have disseminated to the general population for another few decades. The petitioners would not have been alive to see their traumas being used to improve the public good. And if some of them were alive and did encounter A Healer's Guide to Abuse, they likely would not have suspected it was their stories being told."
Riddle considered this. He could continue arguing, but… "I suppose that works." But it's not like his secrets were at stake. "How were they used, exactly?"
"The cases are presented as 'standard' examples of red flags to indicate potential abuse. Even though it's a textbook, it is a gripping read, and since it was made mandatory for all clinical healing professionals, it has had a lasting effect. If the oldest publication date is anything to go by, licensed healers have been looking for such signs in their patients for about nine hundred and seventy-five years. And despite her leniency in many other areas, the legal punishments for foal-abusers are the harshest on the books."
"Interesting…" said Riddle. "What did Celestia do about false allegations? If she did not have you there to reliably call them out…"
"The investigations were extremely thorough as a matter of course. Both so that false allegations did not implicate the innocent, and so that true perpetrators are punished. Deliberate lies about foal abuse were punished as harshly as the foal-abusers themselves. Concerned neighbors reporting red flags do not fall into this category, but if somepony wishes to stain another's reputation by claiming that pony is abusing their foal, the liar suffers the same punishment that the accused would have suffered if their conscious and deliberate slander had been taken seriously by the justice system. Prosecutors who get it egregiously wrong also suffer severe consequences for their incompetence. And I believe my sister has done a few things in the arts to impact Equestrian culture as well. Thus has she eliminated sexual abuse."
That explains a lot, actually, Riddle thought.
Even human society might have turned out like pony society if such policies were implemented for a millennium by the highest authority. But that wasn't likely to happen on Earth.
After his direct experience as Lord Voldemort, and his experience with his servants in particular, the politicians in positions to promulgate such policies are the last people who would ever do it.
In general, politicians – especially 'noble' politicians who believe they're better than everyone else, i.e. arrogant elitists – are corrupt bastards. It's not uncommon when their degeneracy manifests in the sexual direction. When you believe you're superior, you believe you have the right to do whatever you want, laws and norms be damned.
There are always exceptions, like Lucius and his small cadre of personal friends, and Dumbledore and the Longbottoms and Potters on the other side, and the Greengrasses in the middle. Those are families that did not abuse their own children, as far as Tom Riddle was able to discern. But exceptions only prove the rule – the Blacks, the Carrows, and the Jugsons are only the tip of the iceberg. They're the ones everybody knows about. There are a hundred others that slip through the detection spell, or 'go under the radar' as Mr. Potter would put it.
Cheating and promiscuity are the most common forms of depravity, but child abuse is also prevalent. Just ask the Blacks - Sirius and Bella both.
Pedophilia in particular is much more common than the average adult wizard would like to believe. The percentage of pedophiles among politicians and nobles isn't as high as 50%, or even 25%, but isn't as low as 1% either. And the politicians who had opened his eyes to this fact had been that way before he recruited them, so he was not to blame for their degenerate desires…
…although he did contribute to the problem with 'Dark Revels'. It was a thing Lord Voldemort was expected to do, since he had already rewarded his other servants for good performances, and so he had done it without flinching. Even if Tom Riddle did privately find it distasteful.
By the time Severus Snape came around, Tom Riddle had enough experience and foresight as Lord Voldemort to reject Snape's desired reward of Lily Potter's love. Not when the request was made long after joining, but at the very beginning of Snape's induction into the Death Eaters. That is how Tom Riddle, as Lord Voldemort, was not forced by his role to tolerate Mr. Draught's degeneracy like he was forced to tolerate (and reward) Mr. Friendly's.
"How many ponies were privy to these 'private' sessions?" he had asked, partly to distract himself from unpleasant memories and partly to continue the conversation, even if he could guess the answer to his own question. "If your sister knew about them, then it must have been more than just you and the petitioner."
"My sister… well, in this case, I should say my fellow princess was the only other pony who was allowed to know the details of Night Court," his employer predictably explained. "That is how I can be certain that she wrote the original text herself, or at least co-authored it."
"If the book has been around for nine-hundred and seventy-five years, she was rather eager to push these policies as soon as you were banished, was she not?"
"Yes, but I do not see that as a bad thing in the slightest. Abuse was our biggest point of agreement in law and politics by far, though I was more passionate about it than she was." Luna paused. "I think… in her regret over Nightmare Moon, I think she adopted my passion as her own. That way, when I returned, it would be to a better Equestria, one that did not infuriate me all the time. She has never said it directly, but I think that was her state of mind."
His employer then began talking about the subtle evidence that led her to draw this conclusion, which he didn't find all that interesting.
A poke in his side startled him.
"You are falling asleep again," his employer said, her horn no longer glowing.
"I was," he confirmed after a minor pause to recollect. His mind shifted back to the present. Right… he was watching a memory he didn't particularly care about. He'd been awake since yesterday's defecator; his mind must have been 'digesting' the most important information. He didn't bother defending himself because…
"I suppose this one does count as boring, doesn't it?"
…because Luna had picked up on the pattern by this point, and she saw it as a failure on her part whenever she put him to sleep.
"The first part was decent," he replied, referring to 'overweight is overlooked'. On his end… "Yesterday's was good as well. Was there anything else you wanted to say about the link between past abuse and present behaviour?"
…on his end, whenever it was pointed out that he'd been falling asleep, he would make the effort to keep the conversation on 'redemptive' topics that still held his interest. His mentor had said this would be a two-pony effort, and he intended to fairly and diligently uphold his side of the bargain as long as it seemed to be beneficial.
"There is one thing," said Luna. "Do you see now why I was so frustrated by your policy of not 'prying' into your past?"
"I can see how it would have been a red flag when you were hiring me," Riddle allowed.
"Do you also see why it has stunted my efforts to help?"
"Partly," said Riddle. He could guess where this was going, but… "I would still like the full explanation."
"Very well."
The memories of her Astral Plane, which typically consisted of moving phantom images in 3-D space, arranged themselves into rows and columns of still images inside portrait frames, though they gave the illusion of three dimensions within those frames. They were all pictures of ponies he had seen. He could point to each one and say what their problem had been – violent father, sexually abusive uncle, manipulative mother, negligent and uncaring single parent (divorcee, not widow), and so on. It helped that they were arranged in the order he'd watched them.
Not even ten percent involved sexual trauma, he was now noticing, but those were the ones that stood out the most. And not because he was particularly empathetic with those cases; he hadn't suffered that abuse himself.
Perhaps they stood out because the subject is ordinarily so taboo in polite society; perhaps that is why he regarded these memories, petitions, conversations, etc. as containing unique information. You might hear about a violent and shouting father, or a vile and manipulative mother, in hushed whispers at social events. But rumors of pedophilia won't even reach the stage of whispers. If it's not completely hidden by money, influence, or simple skill, then it's being shouted to the rooftops by the press and the government.
"Every single one of these cases," said Luna, "required a deep dive. I could not help them solve their issues until I had a clear picture of the root problems, and that means I needed to know about what happened to them in the past."
The portrait frames were replaced by a single one containing the black silhouette of a pony wearing glasses and a cloak – clearly meant to be Riddle himself.
"And I still do not have a clear picture of you," she said. "Once you have deemed my Occlumency acceptable, I am going to ask that you show me as many of your most formative moments as possible. That will be the fastest way I can help you. Now do you understand why I have found your desire for privacy so frustrating all this time?"
His eyebrows furrowed. "You are claiming that it was for my sake, not yours?"
"I am not just claiming it, and I am meaning it, my fool. Yes, I was worried that you had done evil in the past, even the recent past, but I've helped many ponies who have done evil in the past."
"You also seemed worried that I was currently doing wrong."
"I could always find out if you were currently doing anything wrong simply by asking. More than anything, I was frustrated that I could not understand you." She turned to face him fully, her back to the memories. "Will you let me?"
For some odd reason, he felt like taking a few steps back, even though her demeanor and tone were not threatening in any way – quite the opposite, actually.
"Only because you have Vowed secrecy," he answered.
A/N: So, as I said, Luna's remembered Night Court sessions are based on true conversations. It comes from a podcast that might, unfortunately, politicize this story if I named it. Otherwise I wouldn't hesitate to share the source. If you already know, please refrain from mentioning it in the comments. DM me if you must.
It's not your standard kind of rationality, but the skill of pattern-matching past/present trauma to past/present behavior is the single best tool a person can have when trying to break bad habits. Also, if you become a parent, and your child has pooping problems, maybe take them to a doctor.