//------------------------------//
// The Call 
// Story: Twilight Breaks All of the Storm Chasing Safety Rules 
// by MooseWhisker 
//------------------------------//

"I don't like that you accepted that weatherpony's proposal, Twilight," Celestia said as the door to their bedroom slammed behind them. "You know how dangerous wild tornadoes can be."

"I do know how dangerous they are, and it's why I accepted," Twilight countered.

"What, so is this some kind of twisted way to get a bit of excitement into your life? Am I that boring to you?" Celestia asked her wife.

"Tia!" Twilight shouted. "You know that's not what this is about!"

"Then what is it about?"

"It's about understanding them!"

"So you're throwing your life away to understand some rare weather patterns? That'll make a great note on your grave. 'Here lies Princess Twilight Sparkle, wife to Princess Celestia. She died studying the most obviously deadly phenomenon known to ponies."

"It's not about studying for the sake of studying, Celestia! It's about saving lives!"

"By throwing yours away?"

"Do you really think me that fragile?"

"They aren't safe!"

"Neither was facing Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis, Sombra, or Tirek, but that never stopped you from throwing me in harm's way before, did it?"

"That was different!"

"How was it different?"

"They're all living things. They can be reasoned with. A tornado is an unfeeling, unthinking, killing machine!"

"Yes, because Sombra would just love to sit down and talk things out over tea and crumpets."

"But, but..." Celestia stuttered, scrambling for a way to respond to that. "You're more important now than then. The circumstances have changed since you became a princess."

"Just what do you mean by that?"

"You have such a bigger role in the government now than you did when you faced all of those villains! Equestria can't afford to lose you now!"

"And it could before? Are you saying that my life was expendable before now?"

"How dare you accuse me of saying that! Of course your life was never expendable! No life is expendable!"

"Good, we agree. Since no life is expendable, we have to figure out how tornadoes work sooner rather than later."

"A princess's duties are to her people—"

"Which is why I have to do this!"

"Which is why you have to LIVE!" Celestia shouted back. "Do you have any idea how much worse everypony's lives would be if you died?"

"So am I just supposed to sit on my butt here in Canterlot all day doing nothing while ponies die out there from something I could stop with minimal effort? Just like you do?"

"Equestria NEEDS you in order to function, just like it needs Luna and me. You play a bigger role in the lives of our ponies than you ever did before. Getting yourself killed will hurt everypony!"

"Equestria won't exist at all if everypony gets killed by these wild tornadoes! We need to figure out how they work!"

"I'll tell you how they work! They move across the land, destroying everything in their path. Trees, buildings, ponies. Everything they come across is completely obliterated."

"You don't even know the first thing about them. What makes them form? What causes them to move in certain directions? Why are some more strong than others? If we could learn to predict where they're going to appear next, we could get ponies out of the way and save lives!"

"Want to know how we can learn where they're going? We have eyes!"

"Do you think all the ponies who have been killed by them are blind? Or do you think they're all too stupid to think to get out of the way? You think you're so much better than these dumb peasants, don't you!"

"I do NOT think that!" Celestia screamed back. "I'm not the one trying to get herself killed in the futile hope that we might be able to better understand the un-understandable! Are you just trying to get away from me that badly?"

"I'm NOT trying to leave you, Celestia, I'm trying to save lives!"

"By throwing away your own!"

"ARGH!" Twilight screamed. "How absolutely TYPICAL for you, Celestia! Throwing away the lives of our little ponies to try and make yourself happy!"

Celestia gasped. "How dare you! You, you... AAARGH!" With a light of her horn, Celestia blinked away.

Twilight screamed and stormed over to their bed. She slammed her hooves down onto their mattress hard enough to completely destroy the bed frame underneath it, before shoving her face into a pillow and screaming into it.

"Why won't she just LISTEN to me? Can't she see that it's for the greater good? More ponies will die if we continue to let these wild tornadoes ravage Equestria. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID IDIOT!"

Twilight repaired the bed frame with magic before stomping over to the door leading out of the bedroom, nearly ripping it off its hinges as she left, startling both of the royal guards who were stationed outside of it.

"Your highness, are you—" one of the guards began to ask.

"I'm FINE! I'm going to the library and I do not wish to be disturbed until dinner!" She yelled, cutting the guard off.





Twilight was well aware of the whispers floating around the cafeteria as she ate alone. Obviously the rumor mill was up and running at the sight of her eating dinner without Celestia for the first time since the two had gotten married. She tried her best to ignore them, but without anything to distract her, all she could do was pick out individual words from the amalgamation of quiet conversations going on around her.

Finally deciding she wasn't hungry, she stood up and placed her mostly uneaten dinner on a cart to be taken back into the kitchens for washing before heading back up to her room. Her time in the library had been a complete loss, finding herself much too angry to concentrate on reading. Her anger had been fading ever since she arrived at the cafeteria, and was little more than annoyance by this point. Thinking back, there was a lot she regretted saying in her fight with her wife, as well as a lot she regretted not saying.

Twilight definitely wasn't expecting for Celestia to be in their bedroom when she walked in, but was somehow still disappointed that she wasn't.

"A list," She muttered to herself. That was what she needed. She needed to make a list of everything she was sorry for in that fight. That being said, while there was a lot she was sorry for when it came to the fight, she still felt the same amount of conviction that she was in the right. Ponies were dying, and Twilight was far and away the best pony for the job. What she and Celestia needed to do was have a calmer discussion with more "I" statements and less "you" statements. Using her magic, she pulled some ink bottles, paper, and quills toward her to begin working.

The sun had long since set by the time Twilight heard the door to her balcony open. She looked up to see her wife walk in. Celestia looked like she'd had a rough evening. Her wings were drooping, her posture was slumped, and her bloodshot eyes were firmly cast to the ground.

"I'm sorry."

Celestia looked up to her wife, surprised that those were the first words out of her mouth.

"Celestia, I'm so, so sorry for what I said to you this afternoon. My emotions were running high, and I just... said some things I didn't mean. That's not a excuse, I know, but... It's what happened."

"I understand, Twilight," Celestia said. "I also said quite a few things I regret. I just... I'm scared. We both know how dangerous those things are, and you want to get close to one of them. You have absolutely no idea how much that frightens me. I don't think I could take it if something happened to you."

Twilight wasn't sure how to respond to that, so she put it off until she could think of something. "I made a list of things that I'm sorry I said."

Celestia chuckled. "Of course you did, sweetheart."

Twilight gave a small chuckle. "Can I go through the list? It would make me feel a lot better."

"Twilight, there's almost nothing that I would stop you from doing if it would make you feel better."

Twilight pulled a cushion out for her wife to sit across their tea table. "To start with, I'm sorry that I brought up you sending me off to fight all of those villains as a way to accuse you of intentionally putting my life in danger. I could have said no to any of them, but didn't because I also knew it was what needed to be done. Furthermore, you tried to stop me from fighting Tirek, so bringing him up was doubly unfair."

"I, in turn, apologise for giving the illusion that I was doing that. Even if you don't believe it, the fact that it could be believed at all is something I've done wrong. I also apologise for accusing you of wishing to throw your life away. You care deeply about our ponies, and I sometimes worry that you would put yourself in harms way if it meant one of our ponies could sleep a little easier. Just because that's something I worry about, however, does not make it true."

Twilight thought for a moment. "I suppose it is a little true. I do care deeply for our ponies, and if there's something that I could do to help, then it eats away at me until I do it. I didn't realize how much it hurts you to think that I would willingly hurt myself, and I'm sorry. I'm also sorry that I accused you of thinking that the lives of our ponies are expendable. It was a horrible thing to say, especially since it's not true."

"I will not lie, Twilight, that comment really hurt me. Especially because I can legitimately see why somepony may believe that, doubly so given what I was saying at the time. I apologise for even giving a little bit of legitimacy to the idea that I may believe that lives are expendable. There is no circumstance in which that should even be considered, and yet my words forced you to believe, even if it was in a moment of passion and anger, that I did believe it. There is no excuse for that. I apologise that I made you have to consider that I would think such a thing."

"I don't think that's something you need to apologise for, Tia, I was the one who made the accusation," Twilight argued.

"Well, that's just something we'll have to disagree on."

Twilight thought for a moment. "I guess if we're both insisting that the we should be the one to apologise, then mare-ing up and accepting each other's apology is probably our best bet. I'll forgive you for making me think that you believe life is expendable if you'll forgive me for thinking it."

"I do." Celestia chuckled.

"That's all settled then. I'm sorry for accusing you of looking down on the tornado victims. Even if you were blaming them for being a victim— which you weren't— it wasn't right for me to try to use them against you."

"You were right though. I was blaming the tornado victims. I should know better than to engage in victim blaming, yet in the moment, I did to try and beat you in the fight. I was angry, we both were, but you were right to call me out on that."

"I wasn't right for what I said after, though. There is no universe in which it was okay for me to accuse you of throwing away the lives of our ponies so that you'd be comfortable. I'm so, so sorry that I said that. There's absolutely no excuse for that, and you have every right to be angry at me for that. Hay, you are probably obligated to be angry at me for that."

Celestia was silent for a moment as she chose her next words carefully. "I... don't think I'm quite ready to forgive you for that one, Twilight. It hurt me when you said that. We're supposed to be a team, a single functioning unit. There's no room for accusing each other of using ponies like that in a marriage, and yet... you did. I believe I may forgive you for that eventually— in fact I have no doubt that I will— but..."

"You aren't ready for that yet," Twilight finished. "I understand, believe me, I do. Nopony should ever be accused of that, and to have your wife do that? I don't know if you should forgive me for that."

"Well, it's a little different when it's a pony you love, who said it in the heat of the moment, and you know they didn't mean it. But it hurts nonetheless."

"That's perhaps the thing I'm most sorry for," Twilight said.  "That I didn't say 'I love you.'"

"I can forgive you for that, at least," Celestia chuckled. "I suppose we've covered everything from the fight then?"

"No, not yet. We still need to resolve the disagreement between us."

"Are you sure that's wise? We just finished apologizing for our last fight; do we really want to have another?"

"We aren't going to have another— at least not tonight— because this won't be a fight. We're going to have a nice, calm discussion where we both say how we feel about it, and we're not going to accuse each other of anything. I think something that we can both agree on, is that the longer it takes us to come to a conclusion, the more ponies will get hurt. This is an important topic, Celestia, and we can't afford to avoid it just because it makes us uncomfortable."

"When did you get so wise? Last time I checked, I was over a thousand years your senior. How are you suddenly the one dispensing in the wisdom?"

The two shared a laugh at that.

"I still want to do it," Twilight said seriously. "I can't stand idly by and let ponies get hurt, Celestia. You know I can't."

"But... It's dangerous, Twilight. You could get hurt, or worse!"

"I have to do it because it's dangerous. I could never forgive myself if somepony else got hurt doing something I could have done."

"But I could never forgive myself if you got hurt doing something I could have prevented. Twilight, I don't know if I could live with myself if you... if something happened to you out there. You know this, but those thousand years spent alone were the worst period of my life, and it took me years to drag myself out of the depression it put me in, and I'm still affected by it."

Twilight didn't say anything for a few moments. "I... I'm aware of how much you're affected by that, Tia, but I promise you, I'll be safe. I'm a big girl now, I can take care of myself."

"It doesn't always have to be you who puts her life on the line, Twilight. I know you have this... idea, in your head. That you need to do everything for our ponies in order to be a good leader, and I was definitely no help with squashing those ideas."

"You're right, Celestia, it doesn't always have to be me, but this time, it does. Who else could do this other than me?"

"I don't know, maybe somepony who knows more about weather than you? Perhaps one of the Wonderbolts? They have to know about weather, and they're some of the most daring and experienced fliers around."

"A Wonderbolt is just one pony, and if we're to gather enough information to understand these things, we're going to need more data than a Wonderbolt could gather on their own. We'd need the whole fleet of them to monitor several tornadoes to gather even a tenth as much data as I could from just one."

"A unicorn then. One that's specially trained in both combat and magic scanning."

"The best a normal unicorn could do would be to scan the debris that the tornado flings around. As an alicorn, I can use magic to scan the air itself, and get a much more comprehensive model of not only the tornado, but the storm around it as well. Not to mention what would they even do if they got caught up in the tornado with no way to control what happens to them in the air. It has to be an alicorn that does this."

"I could do it then, or Luna."

"No. The two of you are needed to raise the sun and moon; if something happened to you, then the whole world would suffer. And we both know it can't be Cadance, since she has a daughter to raise. I'm quite literally the only pony who can do this, Celestia."

"But what if you get hurt? What if you break your legs, or your wings? What if you damage your horn? Magic is such an important part of your life, and to have it taken away from you like that..."

"If I do get hurt, I have a very wonderful wife that will take care of me. If I lose my legs or wings, I won't be any less of a pony, and I would gladly give up my magic if it meant saving lives."

"What if you die? What am I supposed to do then? What is Equestria supposed to do without you? What of your friends? What of your family? What of our ponies? Don't you see how much your death would affect them?"

"Those are valid points, but I'll be careful. I'm not very fragile, Celestia, I know how to take a couple hits. And besides, if things ever get really dicey, I'm an accomplished mage, perhaps the most talented to ever live. If I ever do get in a situation where my life is in danger, I can just teleport away."

"It's precisely that overconfidence that worries me, Twilight. You aren't invincible, and if you don't respect the danger that you're in, you're more likely to be hurt by it."

"Celestia, I promise you, I will be careful. Please trust me enough to not get cocky. Did you not compliment my wisdom only a little bit ago? I'm not some clueless filly, or some overconfident colt. I'm a grown mare with a good head on her shoulders. Please trust me enough to do this."

Celestia was silent for a long time after that, and Twilight was content to let her wife work through her thoughts and emotions.

"Okay," Celestia eventually whispered. "I get it, this is something you have to do. But please, Twilight, swear to me; swear that you will be careful. Please."

Twilight stood up from her cushion and walked around the table to grasp Celestia's hoof in her own. "I promise you, Celestia. I will be careful," She said, looking directly into her wife's eyes.

"Thank you," Celestia said, pulling Twilight into a hug. The two cuddled for a long while after that. Eventually, Celestia yawned.

"Getting tired?" Twilight asked, to which Celestia merely nodded in response. "Let's get to bed then."

The two headed towards the bathroom to brush their teeth before making their way over to their bed. Celestia climbed in, but Twilight hesitated.

"Aren't you coming?" Celestia asked.

"Are you sure you want me to, after what I said?" Twilight asked in response.

"Yes, Twilight. I'm still upset about that, but I'm not going to kick you out of our bed over it. Please come join me."

Twilight crawled onto the mattress and settled underneath Celestia's raised wing. Soon, the only sounds in the room where the gentle snores of two ponies sleeping.