//------------------------------// // She's Out to Get You // Story: Bionic Titan: Operation Damocles // by KorenCZ11 //------------------------------// The next morning, Dusk found himself with very little to do. On any normal day, he served as Equestria’s Crown Investigator, the highest ranking intelligence agent the country had to offer. Find these plans, infiltrate this place, eliminate that target. He’d been doing it so long now that it even affected his daily life. However, since the initiative that started Damocles had begun, all his attention had been devoted that way. There had been no backlog of assignments, no series of tasks that only he could accomplish, no work to be done. And that, unfortunately, gave him time to think. “She was on vacation. She just wanted to see what a sunrise looked like from the Morning continent. She was staying in the hive.” One. “I’d told my cousins that place was bad news, man. Why had one of the lower floors been closed off for so long? A gas leak? Come on, guys, we can all hear the Queen’s whispers. Something was up and now that it’s gone… something was definitely up.” Two. “How do you think it happened? There’s no video of it anywhere, but… you guys all felt that, right? Like somebody charging a crazy spell right in front of your face, only for it to pass through like a wave in the ocean. It takes a whole day to get to White Hive from any commercial airport from Canterlot. And we felt that. Do you think it could happen here?” Three. Canterlot was filled with stories and theories like this. Who, what, when, where, why, how? The public didn’t have any answers to these questions, but to those who knew the answer to them all was simply ‘Celestia.’ Dusk’s own Mother. To take some of the pain of thinking away, Dusk decided to take the Asteroid to Luna City. From the plastic-like dome that covered it to the clouds and greenery inside, it was a technical marvel to see. He didn’t visit often and of the few times he had, they were never pleasant. He’d always fought with his sister over policy and who was right or what was wrong. It was like Equestria and the world at large were stuck in a problem that power just wouldn’t solve. No matter what the government does or who it supports, things just get worse one way or another. It always happens when the fighting has died down for too long. The last real war had been seventy years ago. Is that what’s happening? Is the world on course to whet its appetite again? Answers wouldn’t come, so Dusk decided to take a walk. Ten million lives. When she’d come out of the Harbinger yesterday, her face was stuck between laughing and crying. Simultaneously pleased and horrified at her own actions. Celestia was… his Mother was not the collected warrior he’d been led to believe she was. And how should that surprise him? Early Equestrian history always made note of the Sun Queen’s rage, anger, wrath. She’s just logical enough to focus the fire in the right direction, but, will she always be that way? She’s the one who named it. ‘Damocles.’ Is this what it feels like? To sit on the chair in the lap of luxury with anything one could want, pretending to be pleased, pretending to be strong as the weight of that sword hangs above. Oh, Mother… Perhaps that’s why she named it this way. It wasn’t about dropping the sword herself, it was seeing the sword dropped. It’d just missed Aunt Luna by a hair. The fear of death returned to a pair of ancient immortals who’d seemingly forgotten it. A rumble in his stomach finally gave Dusk the distraction he wanted. Hunger could be cured with alicorn magic, but the easier method was to simply get something to eat. Looking this way and that, he spotted a small café at the base of a large apartment complex. ‘Papillion de Luna’ nagged a faint recognition, and the smell of something sweet filling the air drew him inside. The moment he walked in the door, he recognized four royal guards sitting at the back table in the café. He didn’t make any sudden movements. If he didn’t talk to her, she would have to start the conversation. Of course, just as she must’ve felt her mother’s magic yesterday, the presence of her brother was something she’d feel as well.  Looking up from her book in her chair at the corner of the café, Twilight gasped. “Dusk!?” Caught. He turned slowly, putting on the smile he’d trained for years to perfect. “Oh, hey Sis. What are you doing here?” This was the last thing he’d wanted to do today. Twilight tilted her head. “I’m here most days for breakfast. Did… did you really not know I would be here?” He could have if he wanted to, but he didn’t even plan to come here in the first place. “No, I didn’t.” Twilight frowned. “Why are you here, exactly? Better yet, I tried to call you yesterday and you didn’t answer.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why don’t you sit down and order something? It’s been a while. We should talk.” A tremble ran up his spine. She would never admit it, but Twilight is much more similar to their mother than she pretends to not be. Still, Dusk shrugged it off and rolled with the punches. “Sure, Sis. I came in here to do just that anyways.” He spoke to the strangely familiar mare behind the counter, ordered the pineapple pancakes and a butterfly mocha, then sat down beside his sister. Dusk was not a large stallion at any point in his life. His father had died before Dusk was born, but everypony told him that his father was the same way. That didn’t make Dusk feel any better, though. His older sister would forever be bigger than he was, and Oxford was a giant by normal standards in his infancy. The smallest alicorn, the weakest alicorn, the youngest alicorn. Not that there was much competition.  This was less a meal between siblings and more a confrontation that had been a long time coming, compounded with Dusk’s worst headspace in years. There were a few things he could think of, but not much would make his day worse. “So,” Twilight began, hiding her face behind her latte cup. “Why didn’t you answer my calls yesterday?” And it begins. Dusk sighed. “I was preoccupied.” Specifically with moving the harmony matrix to a secure location and running another painful failure trying to get the Forerunner to work for him. Patience was never his favorite virtue. “Doing what?” Twilight asked. “You didn’t happen to be around Mother yesterday, did you?” He licked his lips. “Twilight, do we really need to talk about this here? We’re not alone in this café, you know.” He motioned to the guards, a hoof signal they recognized and one Twilight didn’t know. Of course, she didn’t know they were her personal guards either. Twilight scoffed. “You know perfectly well how to speak. And those guys are here every other day, they’re alright.” “Thanks, ma’am,” One very touched guard said. They never interact with her, and some of them still volunteer for the position. A real off-hoof compliment like ‘alright’ from their charge meant a lot to them. She turned back to Dusk. “Yeah. Anyways. You were, weren’t you?” “What if I was, Twilight? What if I had known the answer to every question you have before you’d even had these questions to begin with? What then?” The elder alicorn swallowed. He knew a direct answer would catch her off guard, but he was also ready to move past this topic. The less time he spent thinking about it, the better. She sipped her drink again as the mare running the café delivered Dusk’s order. “I…” Twilight covered her mouth. “You knew everything? From the start?” Dusk stabbed a fork into his pancakes. “I helped plan it.” He gave her a sharp smile. Letting out a breath, Twilight’s hoof moved to her forehead. A little piece of her soul had fallen off. “You… helped her do this, knowing full well what she was going to do?” Ten million lives. With a thorn in his heart, Dusk ate some of his pancakes. “Of course! She’d asked for my help specifically. What is a son to do when his mother comes to him like that?” Celestia had been keeping up a face in front of Luna. His mother was more and more stressed by the day, waiting, watching for the next one to arrive.  “We have to work, we have to be close enough to respond, we have to see everything, we need a weapon that can defend from something like that, we need a titan ourselves.”  Every day she’d say the same things over and over again, working deep into the night, sometimes not sleeping just to make progress, to solve the neural link issues, to build something that could keep her family safe when even she couldn’t. For Dusk’s part, he took that engineering degree and put it to work for the first time in decades, trying desperately to keep up with his mother. Only, he hadn’t been enough. He could do support on the technical side and manage the production process, but the ideas and the programming came from her, and as for testing… she had to turn to Oxford. She’d asked for more than he had. He couldn’t live up to her expectations and even now, it burned him inside. “You gave in, huh?” Twilight asked, bitterly. Dusk clicked his tongue. “Yeah, I did. And you know what, Sis? I’d do it again, too.” Ten million lives. Ten million lives. Every single person in this city and more. All in an instant. Would you really do this again? “Really? If she went berserk and said she was going to burn it all down to start over, would you follow her? Would you help set the fires?” She was really harping in on this. Twilight always had a knack for pinpointing a pony’s feelings. It was just the one she could never figure out.  Dusk glared at her, somewhere between helpless and furious. “Maybe! What’s it to you? She only comes to me because you won’t let her come to you!” A dark feeling washed over him. All the years of training in espionage and deception thrown out the window to use just the right words to hurt the person in front of him most came together in a black storm that resulted in this: “I’m not the favorite.” Twilight staggered as if a dagger had been thrust in her chest. Dusk felt as if a great stone had just been placed on his back. Worse than the inferiority, worse than the weight of his mother’s expectations, worse than all the violence and death, was the knowledge that Twilight would always be her favorite.  He agreed with Celestia. He believed all the same things she did. He worked so he could stand beside her, he lived for her sake more than anypony else, and never had her eyes truly been upon him. Something to make Twilight see, something to convince her, something to return her to Celestia’s side as she should be. Even Dusk had become a tool to that end, and he hated it. Why is it you, and not me? “Dusk…” Twilight didn’t have any other words to communicate with. “It comes before nightfall, but as always, as it always has, it comes after Twilight.” Twisting the knife, adding another boulder. Now that it had come spilling out, it couldn’t be stopped. “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to facilitate this. I thought she was right on principle, I’d even agreed that the solution she came up with might be the right one. But on that day, on that hour, I had a thought that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t right. That she wasn’t right. But she consoled me, she convinced me, because what can she do if not that? “Under her wing night and day for decades on end, pointing me in the right direction teaching me everything I needed to know to succeed, building a trust that only we could have, and still, and still, everything always came back to you. I can’t understand why she’s so obsessed with you, and I can’t understand why you can’t accept her anymore. Where is your resolve? Where is your strength? She always says that you’re the only one who can change her mind, so why don’t you? What is it you’re afraid of?” The attack had become more directed now, less his own frustrations with himself, and more his frustrations with her, the big sister who ran away from home. An eternity passed while Twilight tried to formulate a response. “I didn’t run away, Dusk, I…” Dusk put his hooves on the table and leaned over. “Prove it. Give me one good reason, just one. You could do your work from anywhere in the world. There’s nothing here in particular for you, there’s no reason you couldn’t be close enough to warp to in a day, and there’s nothing stopping you from working with us instead. Nothing but her, right?” At this point, Twilight was just trying to keep from crying. “There’s so much you just don’t know. That you can’t see. It’s blinding to be right next to the sun. Everything behind you is totally covered in darkness, and she moves to keep you from ever seeing it. The way she uses ponies, the way she treats us like objects, how easy it is for her to just… do something like yesterday.” “Easy? Easy!? You think she made this decision, spent a year planning and working herself to death to protect everyone at this cost, easily!?”  Finally, it struck him. She didn’t make this decision easily. It tore her apart before she even did it. What am I doing here wasting my breath on Twilight when I could be there, helping her deal with the pain? Dusk shook his head. “I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.” Twilight broke. She sobbed, silently in her chair, hunched over and covering her face. Dusk ate his pancakes. It had been a long time since he had the genuine article. Celestia used to make these very same pancakes for all of them when they used to live together in Underhoof. For Twilight to come here and order this same meal every day, perhaps she wasn’t totally lost just yet. He downed his latte and a wave of nostalgia hit him. This taste, this flavor. It was home. There had been a café like this in Underhoof, the iron butterfly, Papillon de Fer. That mare wasn’t just some random mare, but one of Oxford’s relatives, an Apple family member. He sneered at his sister. “Oh, I get it now. I completely understand.” Collecting herself a bit, Twilight responded, “Get what, Dusk? How to hurt me?” “Of course. But that’s not what I’ve come to understand now. I’ve always known how to do that. I’m your little brother, aren’t I? It comes with the territory. No, I understand why you’re the favorite. Why she’s obsessed with you.” Rubbing her nose, Twilight gained an edge to her voice. “Then enlighten me, second fiddle.” A vein throbbed in his head. He sure was happy to be doing this now. “You still can’t let go. This place, this food, these ponies.” He motioned to the mare, not the guards. “She’s one of Oxford’s cousins. This is Mother’s recipe. I even remember having this same coffee back home. You’re trying to hide in the past, and everything, I mean everything, she does is to get you to live in the present. You’ve given up on the future and you won’t let go of everything that you believed even though it was proved wrong right in front of your face. It’s not that you don’t go see her because you hate her, it’s that you miss her so dearly that you’re afraid that she might change you. That’s why you keep away, just outside her reach.” When Twilight bit her lip instead of responding, Dusk stood. He’d come to a decision. “I think you’ve helped me clear my head, Sis. Thanks for that. The next time ‘something’ happens, don’t go running off to Mother for answers. You should come to me. If I can bring you into the present, then maybe I won’t be second fiddle anymore.” Twilight stood. “You do not mean that!” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Then should I explain it more clearly? I’ll give you better details. A number for instance. Fifteen, twenty million maybe? We’ve just begun the planning, but why not thirty or forty!? Why worry about her burning it all down, when I might?” The tears had returned. “Please, Dusk, don’t do this to me.” It only made him more angry. He could feel the fire boiling inside. Perhaps this is how she felt that day. “Beg all you want. If you don’t have the strength to stop me, then I’ll do whatever I want. Because I, too, am of the sun.” Dusk paid his tab and left, not particularly caring what his sister had been doing at the time. Crying and moping never got anyone anywhere. It certainly never got him the place he wanted in his mother’s heart. But maybe quick, explosive action might. Only, he’d been taught better than that. It couldn’t just be quick explosive action, it needed to be at the right time at the right place for the most dramatic effect. Afterall, how can one send the right message without a big stick?