The black scorch mark where Shining Armor had once stood was still smoking. I stared at it. I was distantly aware of a faint screaming coming from somewhere, but my mind was too stunned to care. First David, now Shane. No. It couldn’t be true. I could feel the memories burning in my head. Memories from my still distant dragon side, of my various experiences with Shining Armor. But the memories from my human side, of Shane, my friend, burned hotter still.
I became aware that the screaming was growing louder. I turned to see Cadance galloping madly towards the spot where Shining Armor had once been, her face in shock, eyes streaming. David, tears pouring down his face, noticed her too. Instantly, he pressed a button on the console. A large transparent shield slid into place, blocking Cadance’s path as lightning continued to pound the scorched area. Even though the engine was fully repaired, lightning repeatedly lashed out, although much less frequently, and all blocked by the shield. Cadance hit the shield and stuck, gazing with desperation at the smoking stain that was all that remained of her husband.
I looked at David, feeling my insides torn by raw pain. How could this happen? How could Shining Armor, the best fighter I’d ever known, just die? I looked into David’s eyes and saw something there. Something more. Despair. Acceptance. Knowledge. Something clicked in my mind.
“You” I whispered, my brain filling with sudden rage. “You knew.”
David looked up at me, crying heavily. “I-I had to... The- there wasn’t any other...” He couldn’t finish.
‘You knew!” I yelled.
“I, I-I” David stammered.
I plowed through. “You knew what was going to happen, that the lightning would strike, and you just let him die anyway!”
“Yes, I knew.” David said, sobbing. “But y-you don’t understand, there wasn’t any other w-way.” He pointed to the control console next to him. “The computer can predict exactly when the lightning would strike. if we hadn’t put the shield up now, there wouldn’t have been another opportunity. The TARDIS would’ve exploded before the lightning s-stopped.” Even now I could hear the lightning still repeatedly striking the bridge.
My anger would not be brushed aside though. “There could have been another way!” I shouted. “if you’d given us some time, we could have found a way around it! You sentenced Shane to death all by yourself!”
David’s cheeks grew hot and he burned with anger. “You think I didn’t think this through? That I didn’t fully consider every other possible option? I don’t just throw my friends’ lives away!”
“You could have fooled me!” I said. “You didn’t even tell Shane what was going to happen, or ask him if he wanted to go. You just let him die, scared and alone!”
“I tried to save him pain!” David cried, my words twisting in him. “It had to be done either way, or the universe would explode! I didn’t want him to go into that knowing that it was a suicide mission. He would have wanted to die not knowing.” He turned away from me.
“You don’t know that! You don’t know anything about what he would have wanted, what he was thinking or feeling as he died! You don’t-”
David whirled around. His face was absolutely livid with anger and pain. “I don’t know? I can’t not know!” he screamed. “Ever since I got this in my head-” he indicated his Timelord brain. “I’ve been forced to know! I knew exactly how much time we had before the universe ended, I knew exactly how crucial it was that we put the shield up.”
He advanced on me, eyes wild. “And I know exactly how much agonizing pain you feel in every molecule of you body when you get completely disintegrated by pure lightning! So please, if there’s something that I don’t know, tell me what it is, so I can relish in the fact that I DON’T KNOW IT!”
David whirled around and stalked away, sitting hunched over by the control console, body shaking with angry sobs. I stared at him. My anger towards David hadn’t faded any, but I didn’t really know what to say to something like that.
Turning away from him, I walked over to Cadance. She was kneeling with her face pressed against the forcefield, staring at the bridge, her eyes unseeing. She winced with every new bolt of lightning, as if it were hitting her, not the blackened bridge. Her face was drenched with tears. If she’d heard me and David arguing, she gave no sign.
“Look, Kate,” I began. “I don’t know if this will mean anything to you, or if you’re even paying attention to me, but I want you to know that even if Shining Armor didn’t know that he was going to die, even if he had, he still would have done it for you. He loved you, before the end, just as much as he ever had.”
Cadance looked at me, wordless, her eyes till pouring. I didn’t know quite what I meant, or how much of it was true, but I knew I had to say something, anything to soften the blow, to try and make her happier, by any amount. I dug through her saddlebag and pulled out the necklace Shining Armor had given her, back before this whole thing had started. “See?” I said. “This proves it. Even before we turned into ponies he knew who you really were. He bought this necklace before we started remembering, and it looks just like your cutie mark. His memories of you must have been so strong that they leaked through your suppression spell. So when he saw this crystal necklace-”
The Doctor’s head shot up. He rushed over to us and stared intently at the necklace in my hand. “Did you say crystal?!” he asked. “Is it really solid crystal?”
“Um, yeah,” I said, perturbed. “It’s 100% crystal. It came with a certificate and everything.”
The Doctor looked at the ceiling in silent hope. “Oh please let it be one of those days.” he begged. “Has Shining Armor ever used magic on it?” he asked Cadance sharply.
“Um, well I-I... I don’t-” Cadance stammered.
“Hurry, please!” snapped the Doctor. “It’s life or death!”
“Yes!” Cadance blurted. “One time, at the park, he levitated it and gave it to me.”
“You’re completely sure?”
“Positive.”
“Alright then!” cried the Doctor, snatching the necklace out of my hands. “No harm in trying!” He scooped me onto his back and galloped full tilt out of the room, Cadance in tow.
“What are we doing?” I cried, holding on desperately as the Doctor barreled down hallways.
“Magic,” said the Doctor. “It starts in the brain. It operates on the same brainwave frequencies. That’s why you need to know the precise way to think things in order to perform magic. Crystals can refract and contain magic. Imagine a small solar powered battery capturing energy from the sun and containing it. Are you picturing it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well forget it, because it’s nothing like that, but it’s the closest analogy you have.” He entered a room that was dominated by a large tube. Several console lined the sides of the tube.
“That doesn’t explain anything!” I said. “What are we with doing with the necklace?”
“Bringing him back,” said the Doctor, tossing the necklace into the chamber and closing it. He sprang to the consoles and flitted between them, entering commands.
“What, Shining Armor?!” I cried incredulously. “That’s impossible! You’re just going to create him out of nothing?”
The Doctor laughed. “Not out of nothing. Out of magic! The universe’s super DNA. It stores all the information about a body inside it, including memories and being. You’ve heard the phrase pouring yourself into your work? Well, unicorns take it literally.” The Doctor threw a lever, and the necklace in the chamber began to pulse. Cadance leaned against the glass of the chamber, watching intently, her face slightly hopeful.
“Creating new cells is nothing. People are growing new kidneys and livers and arms and legs all the time. Putting a person into it though, a living, thinking, personality, and not just that, but a specific one as well, with all its memories, goes beyond science, and into the arcane.”
“Well then, why aren’t we all just wearing magical necklaces with backup copies of ourselves then?” I asked.
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “It’s not that easy. Crystals can only hold magic for a few minutes, an hour at most. But this,” he said, looking at the necklace, which was now pulsing more intensely. “This is a crystal heart. There’s a reason why the true Crystal Heart is heart shaped. It isn’t just for symbolism. The heart shape is the best at catching and holding magical energies. It might give us just enough...”
The heart in the container suddenly blazed with light. “It’s like a computer,” I said. “You have a spare file. You’re-”
“Restoring from a back-up!” cried the Doctor.
The heart shattered. A mass of rapidly swelling purple energy expanded from its remains, coalescing into a thick mound. The magic started swirling, rotating into a column. The Doctor watched it sharply, studying its movements. It began to form a familiar shape. The Doctor smiled. The shape wavered wildly.
“Oh no you don’t!” the Doctor cried, hooves flying over the console. “You’re not getting away so easily!” The shape steadied and began to glow brighter. As the shape became more solid, Cadance’s face became more intense. A fearful hunger grew in it, wanting desperately to hope, but not daring to. The energy finally settled into the shape of a pony. As it did, it released a blinding burst of light. We looked away.
When we looked back, Shining Armor was laying in the bottom of the tube. He looked up sluggishly. “What?” he questioned. “Where.. How... am I?” Cadance was straining, magic forgotten, trying to pry the tube up with her hooves. The Doctor pressed a button and the tube ascended with a hiss. Cadance shot forward and buried herself in Shining’s mane, sobbing uncontrollably. Shining Armor, thoroughly bewildered, reached up and patted her back. “I missed you too,” he said to her.
*****************************************
We all made our way back to the control room, supporting one another due to our exhaustion from the night’s events. The Doctor ran a diagnostic scan, searching for any more problems.
“Well, it appears that everything is in tip-top shape.” the Doctor said. “No more enginey exploding core problems to deal with. Now that that’s out of the way and we finally have a spare moment to breathe, I suggest that we figure out, what we’re going to do next.”
“How about sleep?” I proposed from my place by the railing. The other two nodded their heads emphatically. “Speaking of which, are there any beds in this place?”
“Yes. If you go up the stairs, there’s a floor full of bedrooms. That’s all that’s on that floor. Take your pick.,” replied the Doctor. “But we should have a plan for the future before we go to bed. Sleep is 2.5 times more restful if you’ve made a determined plan before hand.”
“Really?” I asked.
“No idea.”
“Well, isn’t it obvious what we need to do next?” said Cadance. “We need to attack Discord. It’s time to stop playing cat-and-mouse and take the fight to him.”
“Sounds great.” said the Doctor. “Just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Count me in,” said Shining Armor. “I still owe him for that last swordfight.”
“No.”
I stared at the Doctor, stunned. The look on his face was one of intense apathy, mixed with a burning pain. His eyes were dead and blank, with no emotion in them whatsoever.
“You’re all fools,” said David. “You’re going to get yourself killed. Go home. If you need me, that’s where I’ll be.” He turned and walked from the room.
********************************************************
David sat in a room. He wasn’t sure which. There was a bed in it. He sat on the floor. The others were fools. They were going to die. You couldn’t take on Discord. It was impossible. They needed to be working on a way to change themselves back to humans, live normal lives and pretend that none of this had happened, not running off antagonizing chaos gods.
He turned his thoughts to the vast new store of knowledge that was now in his mind. Every law of math or science he’d ever known, he now knew to be either completely untrue, or having at least thirty two new side notes to them. He examined a small corner of his knowledge, turning each new fact over in his mind with detached disinterest, like someone passing through a shop, looking at each of the items in turn and replacing them on the shelves. They didn’t really matter anyway. None of it did.
He heard footsteps behind him, and the door to his room opened. “David?” Spike said.
David didn’t answer.
“David, we came to talk to you.”
No answer.
“David, if it’s about what happened in the engine room, yeah, I’ll admit it was pretty intense, but it’s nothing you have to go and leave over.”
David was silent.
“How would you even leave?” Asked Spike. “You’re stuck inside the Doctor. You can’t leave unless he leaves.”
“I’m a Timelord,” David said in a dead voice. “I’ll think of something.”
“You can’t just go,” Spike said imploringly. “We need you. We can’t do this without you.”
David scoffed. “You don’t need me.” His voice was hoarse and self-mocking. “You have the Doctor. He’s all you need. He brought Shining Armor back. All I managed to do was get him killed.”
Spike sighed. “Look, what I said in the engine room. I was too harsh. Everything was panicked, the universe was going to explode, you didn’t have time to really think about what you were doing. You made a mistake. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.”
David said nothing again.
Spike’s voice grew anxious. “Please David, you’re my best friend. Don’t leave me to do this without you. Equestria’s waiting for us. We’re the only ones who can save it.”
David shook his head. “Equestria’s waiting for you guys, not me. There’s nothing for me there. There’s nothing for you there either now. Can you imagine what it’s like back there? Twenty five years under Discord’s rule? There’s nothing there but a blackened mound now. A blackened mound and Discord sitting there with a knife and a smile.” He shivered.
“You don’t know that,” said Spike forcefully. “Discord was defeated before, we can do it again.”
David said nothing. There was a long silence. He heard Spike sigh, and walk slowly from the room. “I... I understand why you did what you did,” said Cadance. “I’m not mad at you for... for Shining Armor.” She sighed. “At least, I’ll try not to be mad.” She too turned and left the room.
David continued to sit, his mind empty. What was he going to think about? What mattered anymore? The Doctor seemed to be keeping his distance, staying in a far corner of their mind, not interrupting. David heard hoofsteps enter his room again, the hoofsteps of the last person he wanted to talk to.
“I killed you,” he said to the pony behind him.
“Yeah,” acknowledged Shining Armor, who sat down beside him, staring at the same corner he was staring at. “You did.”
“I suppose you’re here to tell me not to go too.”
“No,” said Shining Armor. “I’m here because, well, you killed me. And I never got to say thank you for that.”
David looked at him. “Thank you? You’re thanking me?”
“Yeah,” said Shining Armor. “You did what you had to do to save everyone. It was a soldier’s call to make, and you stepped up to it without hesitation.” He looked at David. “You did the right thing.”
David turned away. “Spike and Cadance don’t seem to think so.”
Shining Armor snorted. “Spike and Cadance don’t know what they’re talking about.” He frowned. “Don’t tell Cadance I said that, though.” David cracked a half-smile.
“Anyway,” continued Shining Armor. “No matter what they say, you did do the right thing. We needed to shield the core, and there was only one way to do that. I needed to be where I was to place the shield. I just relearned the shield spell yesterday. I may have access to my memories, but that doesn’t mean I know what to do with them. They’re all still like movies to me.”
He sighed. “I’m sure I’m telling you stuff you already know. You knew we were out of time. By the way, exactly how much time did we have left? Was it down to minutes?”
“Three,” whispered David.
“Ah, see? There was definitely no spare time left. What would have been the point in saving me, if the universe had then blown up minutes later?”
“But you don’t understand,” said David, looking at him sadly. “I didn’t even tell you. I didn’t give you a chance to decide for yourself if you were willing to die. I sent you to your death not even knowing what was going to happen.”
Shining Armor waved it away with the air of someone who was coming to terms with death and death-like situations. “Whether I knew it or not makes no difference. I still would’ve done it anyway. Like I said, what’s the use of staying alive an extra three minutes? Sure, maybe I would’ve liked to know beforehand that I was going to die, but only so it wouldn’t be so unexpected.” He looked at David. “And that’s certainly not something that’s worth you beating yourself up about.”
Shining Armor stood up. “Anyway, whether you decide to stay or go, I’m not worried. You know how to handle yourself.” Shining Armor nodded at him and left the room.
**********************************************
David sat in his mind, turning over the things that Shining Armor had said to him. Some of the crushing weight he’d been feeling had lifted, but it still didn’t change his decision. He wasn’t about to go up against Discord.
He noticed the Doctor moving around. They were in a workshop. David didn’t remember them getting there, but he had been preoccupied. The Doctor removed a headset from a dusty wooden box underneath one of the many tables that dotted the room. It was a black wire headset, with lights rimming the side and a center circular panel. The Doctor made his way back to the bedroom they had entered previously. It was a simple room, containing only a bed with a blanket and a pillow. The Doctor laid down on the bed, placed the headset on his head and flicked a switch on the side. David’s vision went black.
When it returned, he was standing in the control room of the TARDIS, looking at his own body. He blinked. His body blinked back. He tried raising a hoof. His body did not do the same. His hoof did raise though
. He looked down. He was in a different body, a pony with light blue fur. He turned to look behind himself. His untidy mane and tail were a bright ginger red and his cutie mark was a digital clock with the time 1:11 on it. He looked back at the pony he now knew to be the Doctor.
“What is this place?” David asked.
“It’s a dream state,” replied the Doctor. “I figured we needed to talk face-to-face.”
David gestured at himself. “Why do I look like this?”
“It’s a dream state,” reiterated the Doctor. “Your subconscious decides what you look like. It knows it’s not supposed to look like me, but it doesn’t know what it should look like, so it came up with something.”
“Why this though?”
The Doctor shrugged. “How should I know? It’s your subconscious. Anyway, that’s not important now. We need to talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” said David. “I don’t want to fight Discord.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about.”
“Then what is there to talk about?”
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Well, you did become part-Timelord. That’s probably quite an event.”
“Oh. Well, there’s nothing to talk about there.”
The Doctor’s second eyebrow joined his first. “Really? Nothing at all?”
There was silence for a few minutes. “How... how do you deal with it?” David asked softly. “The choice... of who lives and who dies? Which ones are the important lives? How much of the universe can you allow to crumble for the sake of one person? or two? or three? Are there people who don’t deserve to be saved? When do they get to such a point, if it even exists at all?”
He turned away. “The others don’t understand. Spike and Cadance. They call what I did a mistake. They’re wrong. If I could go back and do it all again, I’d still make the same choice. And I hate it more than anything.”
The Doctor sighed. “The age old dilemma of the Timelords. Our price for seeing the edges of the universe. All that power. What does one do with it? It’s a question that leaves no one intact. Some have been twisted. Some have run away. And others,” he stared at a distant wall, as if seeing another person. “Others have been driven mad.”
“How did you deal with it?” asked David.
“I ran,” said the Doctor with a bland smile. “I run and I don’t look back. I trust that I made the right decision, and then I don’t look at the answers. I imagine they would scare me stiff more often than not.”
“I don’t want a life like that,” said David, looking away. “I don’t want to be the one to make those decisions. That’s why I’m not going with you guys. Because that’s what this quest means. Another opportunity to get my friends killed. To be the one who decides when they die. And I don’t want to do that. Ever. Again.”
“And I envy you that choice,” said the Doctor plainly. “If I had the option to settle down somewhere, perhaps with a family of my own, I’d snap it up.”
“But you do,” said David. “You’ve saved every planet in the universe at least three times. You’d have your pick of any place to settle down if you wanted to.”
The Doctor gave a sad smile. “And what happens when my past catches up with me? When my enemies finally track me down? Who else would I have to bury then?” He shook his head. “Running’s not a bad life though. It keeps you on your toes.”
"So you're not going to try and convince me to stay?" asked David.
"I'd help you leave any way I could," said the Doctor. "Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do to help that along. You're kind of stuck with me until we figure out a way to separate the two of us. I'll devote my time to finding the solution, but not if it puts the others in harm's way by inaction. We do have a power crazy chaos god hunting for us, after all."
"Of course," said David. He nodded and smiled. "Not if it puts them in harm's way."
"Well," said the Doctor briskly. "I'd say this conversation's pretty well wrapping up, wouldn't you?"
A low, evil chuckle echoed around the room. "Au contraire, my Doctor." said a voice emanating from nowhere. "I'd say that things were just about to get a bit more... exciting."