//------------------------------// // Breaking Out // Story: You Can Fight Fate // by Eakin //------------------------------// BREAKING OUT There's a bird. A particular starling born in a tree planted eighty-seven years ago by my own hooves. Hatched three years ago to parents that had been forced to begin migration just a few weeks sooner than usual by the unseasonable cold snap I arranged. Saved from an untimely demise when, subtle manipulation across decades be damned, I caught a hungry cat mid-pounce with my magic and tossed it into the nearby pond. Above me, that bird chirps as it soars through the sunny afternoon sky. The afternoon’s not too hot, or too cold, just right. Everything is just right. Well, the sun may be a bit on the warm side, I’m sensitive to that sort of thing these days. That’s why I’m wearing this thin white cloak over my graying purple mane. Okay, gray mane with just the tiniest hints there was ever any purple there to begin with. For a mare pushing a hundred and seventy I look pretty dang good, though. That’s old even for a retired alicorn Princess of Equestria. There have been times when I managed to survive longer, through a cocktail of drugs or dark magics, but they always take a toll. About an hour from now, when I die, I want my mind to be clear of their influence. It’s been annoying to have to stay clean for so long, and every billion or so subjective years I had to fight off the urge to give myself just a little boost, a few more years, and hit the slowly onrushing wall ahead of me. But I fought it off every time, and I’m about to reap the reward. Before I do though, this former Princess is going to grant one last audience. “Granny Sparkle, guess where I am!” says a voice. A simple ventriloquism charm I taught the voice’s owner makes the demand come at me from several directions at once. I look over at the edge of the clearing. The filly I’m waiting on might be smart, but right now she doesn’t realize that a little, glowing lavender horn sticking out of a bush is something of a giveaway. “I know that you’re in that bush, Twilight. Come here.” Her head pops out of the bush, shock written in her young, purple eyes. “No way, I thought I did the charm perfectly!” She hops out of the bush into the tall grass that’s chest high on her, and trots over to me. I nuzzle her as she takes her familiar place against my side. “You did it very well. But I have my ways.” She stares up at me in wonder, gently pressing herself into me. “Now, did you say the thing I told you to say to your daddy this morning?” She nods, proud of herself for remembering. Not that I had ever expected my favorite great-great-granddaughter to forget my request. “Uh huh! I told him that if you counted in base four, tomorrow is my twenty-first birthday.” She frowns. “I don’t understand why that made him choke on his porridge, though.” I chuckle. “It’s because you made him feel old, sweetie. Don’t worry, he’ll be okay.” “Oh,” says Twilight, not really understanding. “Do grownups always feel old?” “Some of us more than others,” I reply. I look down on her and while she’s smiling, I can still tell there’s something troubling her. “What’s wrong, Twilight?” She turns her head up to me, amazed again at my simple deduction. I just love watching her be thrilled and surprised by every new thing, experiencing the world for the first time. “Well...” she begins before she turns her head down and away. “There’s a colt at school. He said mean things about you and I don’t like him.” “Really? What did he say?” I ask as I stroke her mane. “He said that his daddy says that you’re crazy and you talk about things that never happened. That I shouldn’t listen to anything you tell me. So I... uh... I sort of punched him in the face,” she admits, preemptively shrinking away from my disapproval. “Twilight, that was not the the right thing to do,” I say, frowning at her. “But he was-” “No buts. If you see him again, you tell him that you’re sorry for what you did and you forgive him for what he said.” “What he said was wrong, though! Why should I forgive him?” “It’s very important to be able to forgive ponies for hurting you, Twilight. Everypony makes mistakes, and everypony does things for a reason. Acting out like that when you don’t understand both sides of the story can make you do things that you can’t always take back. Besides...” and at this I smile and wink at her, lowering my voice and leaning in like I’m taking her into my confidence, as if what I’m about to say should never go farther than the two of us, “...you don’t get as old as I am without being at least a little bit loopy.” Twilight breaks into happy giggles. She might not get the joke, not really, but she loves feeling like she’s just been let in on some gigantic secret about how the world works. She’s so like me when I was her age. I should know; I spent quite a bit of effort making sure of it. Oh, I’m not saying I grew her in a laboratory or anything like that. And if I’d left everything to chance, the odds of my daughter’s son’s daughter’s daughter expressing so many of the same phenotypes and personality quirks I did at her age is something on the order of one in a quintillion. But with a century and a half worth of variables to play with and all the time I could possibly need to do so, a quintillion isn’t that big. Push a ship off course here so a certain frustrated noblepony’s son will end up getting ambushed by a fiery mare and her pirate fleet. Discard a banana peel in just the right place so that the sprinting tomboy staring upwards to catch a hoofball goes careening into the bookworm who didn’t see her in time to move out of the way. Just so that the two of them share a hospital recovery room for the rest of the summer and a bed for the rest of their lives. And when all else fails, sabotage a condom. If Celestia suspected anything when we showed up on opposite sides of the aisle at the marriage between her grandson and my great-granddaughter, she never let on. In fact, I’m pretty sure she still thinks the whole thing was her idea in the first place. Their union finally produced exactly what I had been waiting for this whole time. A filly born nine years ago tomorrow, and first conceived of a hundred trillion years before that. Give or take. “Do you regret anything?” The question rouses me from my thoughts. I almost drifted off too early there. That wouldn’t do, not when I’m this close to my goal already. “What do you mean, Twilight?” “Stuff that you did when you couldn’t forgive somepony, stuff that you can’t take back.” I remember almost everything. For example, I remember exactly the moment I have to back up and jostle an ambassador from the Griffin Empire so he spills a goblet of wine over the Diamond Dog emissary at a cocktail reception to derail an alliance that, fifteen years down the line, would lead to an overconfident attempt to menace Equestria away from a particular shale quarry. The ensuing skirmish would leave Twilight’s grandfather bleeding to death on the battlefield, so every loop I remember to back up right on cue. But I somehow forgot just how insightful young Twilight can be. “Yes. There is something. Something I did when I was too young to know better that I now wish I hadn’t.” I just want to shake my head at what an arrogant little brat I’d been back when I’d only been in this time loop for a few million years. So sure I could do whatever I wanted, that consequences were things for other ponies and I was too special to need to care. When I thought that the only thing that could get me through each loop was narrow-minded unfair rage. Back when I was too young to understand. I never found out what happened to the pony I took that out on, to my eternal shame. She never did return in any of my loops. “I’m so sorry, Twilight,” I mutter. “Huh? For what, Granny?” “...For waiting this long to give you your birthday present, of course! I don’t think you should wait until tomorrow to open it,” I say. Twilight’s confusion is instantly obliterated by excitement as I hover the wrapped gift over, and she tears into it with her hooves as I watch. “A baseball bat?” “I call him Home Run,” I say. I cast my eyes over the shiny, varnished wood. Enchanted to resist the wears of time, of course. “Hi, Home Run! I’m Twilight. We’re going to be best friends!” says Twilight. I ruffle her mane. “It’s just a bat, Twilight. He was my bat when I was about your age, and I think he should be yours now.” Maybe a dozen-plus years older isn’t ‘about your age’ by most definitions, but I tend to take a longer view. “Wow! Thank you, Granny Sparkle!” says Twilight. She grunts and strains to lift it and begins swinging it around wildly. Twilight slips in the middle of one of her swings and the bat drops lower, suddenly on the perfect course to clobber me in the head. I drop under it at the last second, joints and muscles screaming as I push them harder than I have in decades. I’m sorry, old friend. No more loops, I think to myself. “Granny! Are you... Did I...” “I’m just fine, Twilight. Now come, I’ll show you how to hit a baseball.” We spend the next forty-five minutes or so playing together in the clearing, as I show Twilight the proper way to hold a bat in her magic, and slowly levitate a few balls towards her for her to hit. I think I could stretch that window of time out for centuries and never grow tired of it, but in the middle of one ‘pitch’ my magic falters under the strain and I collapse. My body is failing me, organ by organ. I’ve been hiding it for the last three days but I can’t put it off too much longer. Then again I don’t need to. Just five minutes more will do. “-Sparkle? Granny Sparkle?” asks Twilight’s voice as I come to. Tiny hooves are shaking me as I force myself to smile up at her. “It’s fine Twilight. Everything is finally going to be fine. I’m just so tired all of a sudden. Let’s rest under that tree, just for a few minutes. Then I’ll show you how to catch a fly ball.” She helps me over to a spot in the shade where I collapse as gracefully as possible. My horn buzzes. It’s coming now. Well, it’s been coming since the moment I cast the time loop spell, and the moment that the other timeline’s Twilight and Star Swirl quarantined my knotted, disjointed timeline away from theirs. The universe has finally noticed what I’ve been doing. With every loop, the damage got that much worse. The quantum... something has been decoupling from the... well I can’t remember right now, as my memories start to grow fuzzy. But the thingie that’s going to make time stop has been growing asymptotically closer to the moment I cast the spell in each subsequent loop. Both Princesses know it’s about to happen, along with maybe a half a dozen of the foremost minds on the planet. All were sworn to secrecy to prevent mass panic when we couldn’t figure out a solution. Or more accurately, when they couldn’t figure out a solution and I chose not to help. It’s taken so, so long for me achieve an overlap between my lifespan and the big stop. Once I’m stopped I can’t die. If I can’t die I can’t go back. I just have to hold on long enough to reach it. “I love you, Twilight.” I’ve told her that ten thousand times, but not enough. I reach for her as my vision starts to fail at the edges and I begin to slip away, but I grope around in vain. No. Where is she? I want her with me at the end. I need her to forgive me, to promise me that she lived a long and happy life doing things I can’t even imagine in her timeline. To whisper me the story of what she created from the wealth of other possibilities open to her. Just when I’m about to give up hope of finding her, of ever getting the closure I want, something unexpected happens. Two tiny lips press down on the tip of my muzzle. With just seconds left I hear Twilight speak to me for the last time. “I love you too.” I’ve done a lot of bad things, some of them unforgivably terrible. But if the last two sensations I’ll ever feel are surprise and that I’m loved, I must have done a whole lot more right. The shroud of death lowers over me, and time stops. Well. That worked.