You Can Fight Fate

by Eakin


Five Years Later: An Unnecessary Epilogue

FIVE YEARS LATER: AN UNNECESSARY EPILOGUE

Buck bureaucracy, I think to myself as I stare at the stack of paperwork on my desk. Despite hammering away at it for nearly two hours now, it seems no smaller than it was when I started. Hard to believe I once enjoyed doing this kind of thing in my spare time. Spare time, I remember having that a long time ago. Seriously, buck it right in its stupid hypothetical face.

Could this day get any more aggravating? There’s a loud crash from the other room, and I beat my face against the surface of the desk just hard enough to feel. Yes. Yes it can.

I slide off of my chair slowly, debating whether or not to take advantage of my wings to get where I’m going more quickly. They’re really useful things, now that I’m acclimated to them. Ultimately I decided to just hoof it, though. I run my foreleg over the heavy bulge in my abdomen that’s been slowing me down these days, and can’t help but smile. Azalea warned me what a pain it was, and she’d know since she did it last time, but I insisted that it was my turn. Haven’t regretted it for a minute since.

I take a deep, calming breath then head for the source of the noise in the other room. Remember Twilight, you love your child. You love your child. You love your child. That doesn’t mean you have to like him all the time, I tell myself, repeating the mantra that’s saved my son from countless moon-banishments over the last two years. Pushing open the door to the library’s second bedroom, I take in the disaster in front of me. A bookcase, the most durable one we could find for exactly this reason, is laying on the floor where it’s toppled over with the arm of an unfortunate teddy bear sticking out from under it. A field of green magic belonging to the culprit in the crib on the other side of the room tugs futilely at it.

“Leafy,” I say to the little green colt, swapping the Princess Crown for the Mommy Hat in my mind, “what have I told you about being careful with your magic?”

“Bear!” he replies as he reaches out through the bars of the crib, straining towards the beloved stuffed animal. I suppose nap time is over.

Despite the cleanup I’m looking at in my immediate future, I smile at him. I lift him from the crib and perch him in the familiar spot on my back, flaring my wings to keep him steady. “Yes, yes, Bear,” I say and add my magic to his own to lift the shelving off the floor and free the pinned doll underneath. He screws up his face and jerks the bear bit by bit across the floor until he can reach down and snatch it in his hooves, squeezing it against his chest. “You did it, Leafy! Great job,” I say to him doing nothing to hide my pride as I nuzzle his cheek. I’m rewarded with a hug of my own, even harder than the one he gave to Bear, and it nearly brings tears of joy to my eyes. Although the way he’s gripping my face in his forelegs is more than a little awkward.

Now that Leafy is fully and properly awake, the window of opportunity to handle all my Princess paperwork has been closed. I’m more than okay with that. Most of it is just annoying busywork, with a single big exception: the letters. I hadn’t ever realized how much fan mail a Princess gets, other than the letters I sent as Celestia's student of course, but I make the time to read every single one even if I can’t always reply. They remind me that what I do has the power to really change ponies’ lives, which is easy to forget when you’re just staring at columns of figures all day. Call me selfish, but the little life perched on my back and the one growing inside of me will always get preferential treatment.

It doesn’t take as long as I feared to clean up the mess Leafy made, the only real damage is a broken picture frame containing a shot of me, Azalea, and Spike laughing at a picnic together. Even though Spike moved out when Leafy was born this still feels like his room to me. Sure, we needed the space, although I would never have made him leave if he hadn’t suggested it himself, but even with him living just eight blocks away it changed the dynamic of our relationship a lot. It’s good for both of us, I think, and I know he appreciates having his own ‘lair,’ even if it’s really just a studio apartment. Needs new curtains, though, no matter how he bristles whenever I tell him so. My horn glows and the shards of glass lift from the ground and fuse back together into a single pane within the frame. Leafy watches from my back, entranced by the workings of my magic. “Again!” he shouts when I’m finished.

“Sorry, hon, maybe later,” I tell him. The last thing I need is for him to get the idea that he can break things just to watch me fix them, so I trot out of the room humming a familiar song to him. If two-year-olds weren’t so easily distracted I doubt any parent would stay sane long enough to see their third birthday, and the song does exactly what I expect it to. My ear twitches. I still have the whole super-alicorn-senses thing going although I can filter it out most of the time. Right now, my improved hearing recognizes the rhythm of the hooves that just turned the corner a block or so away. “Leafy! Mommy Azalea’s coming home.”

“Yay! Mommy ‘Zalea, mommy ‘Zalea!” he shouts, rolling off of my back with a splat as he hits the floor and bouncing around with unbridled joy. It's about five minutes later when Az pushes open our front door and walks into the library.

Leafy rushes over to her first, as per usual. He's rewarded with a long hug from my exhausted wife. Her mane and tail are both frazzled from an entire day working in her flower shop. She probably hasn't realized that she has a smudge of dirt on her cheek either.

She is, and always will be, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Blame all the extra hormones affecting my brain if you want to, but if Leafy weren't right there watching us I might snatch her up and ravage her here and now. "Welcome home," is what I say to her instead.

I'm thoroughly rewarded with a deep, lingering kiss and I savor every second of it. I miss her when she's out running her flower shop, although I suppose technically it's my fault she even has it to run. Still, we had the money, it was nearly her birthday, and Crossbows and Bowling Balls had just gone out of business downtown. Was I supposed to not lease it for her?

Didn't get the reaction I expected from that. She was, frankly, really ticked off that I'd spent that much of our money without discussing it with her first. I get that, I really do, but it was her dream to own her own store, and she's done such a great job managing it. I have never even for an instant regretted marrying her.

It was about a year after my coronation that I popped the question. Planned the whole thing out over the course of a month. I thought all my new responsibilities would've scared her away, but nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, she's the bastion of sanity who never fails to bring me back down to the ground, literally and/or figuratively, whenever I start to get overwhelmed. I'm just about the luckiest pony in the world, I think. Even if I was shaking so badly that I botched the proposal by dropping the ring over the side of the boat I proposed on. And dove in, unthinking, after it. Never did find it.

Not that it mattered in the end. Once I swam to shore Azalea let me know that her answer was yes anyway, and she had all kind of ways to warm me up again. When even Cloudy and Kicky settled into long-term relationships I knew it was time for me to do the same. Nice of them to be two of Azalea's bridesmaids, too, even if they did spend most of the reception hitting on my brother. Much to his discomfort and Cadence's amusement. That's one of the few details about the wedding I actually remember. Most of it's just a nervous blur in my head.

I, of course, didn't have to think for even a second before I chose the five ponies I wanted by my side for the ceremony. Although there was a bit of a spat when we realized that my wedding would originally fall on the same weekend as Applejack and Rainbow Dash's before I rescheduled it. Celestia officiated, and it was everything I always dreamed it would be.

“Thanks, Twilight,” says Azalea as she breaks the kiss and leans against me for the support I’ll never stop giving her. “I needed that. Long day.”

“Bear!” shouts Leafy again, and shoves the stuffed animal towards her.

“How could I forget?” She wraps Bear up in one of her wings and kisses him too with a subtle roll of her eyes. I only smirk. That’s pretty much my entire life in a nutshell these days, no reason she should get to be exempt from the embarrassing Mom duties.

"I'm making pasta and wheat balls for dinner, I've been craving them all day," I tell her.

"I remember what that's like," she replies from where she's draped a wing over Leafy. "For me it was usually pickles."

"You always crave pickles," I remind her. Before she can answer that I wince and kneel down. The baby just kicked. We decided to let the race and sex be a surprise this time, but secretly I'm thinking that Azalea's earth pony heritage won out if that kick was anything to go by. She joins me on the floor and rubs my belly reverently. "Hee hee! Stop it, that tickles!"

"Sorry, can't help myself," she says as she spreads out her wing so the very tips of her primaries overlap with mine. The same quiet way she's said 'I love you' since I grew them. "Oh, I picked up the train tickets for next week on my way home. We'll have an extra day in Canterlot before we head on to Saddle Arabia."

I grin. I've been looking forward to this vacation for three months, even if it's technically a diplomatic visit. "That's fine. We'll drop Leafy off at my parents' and then swing by the palace. It would be nice to see Rarity again." My time with her has been a lot more scarce since she and Morning Glow got engaged. The descision to move her boutique to the big city surprised nopony, and even though she played off her choice to live in the palace as an act of selfishness on her part having an extra pair of hooves there makes a lot of sense as Star Swirl gets older. He's slowing down just enough to be noticeable, although he's too stubborn to die for at least a few more decades.

That sort of responsibility would have fallen to Shooting Star, except about a year and a half after she got here a very annoyed Luna from her original timeline showed up to take her back. She still visits, and she's grown into quite the magic user herself. Not surprising, given who her parents are. I hadn't realized that her timeline moves faster than ours, or at least she pops back and forth between them at something other than a one-to-one interval. Last time I saw her she was older than me.

I finish making dinner for the three of us and we sit down to eat. It's looking like a late night of wrapping up the forms I didn't finish earlier, but the family dinner is inviolable. Or almost inviolable, as the tail end of it is interrupted by somepony knocking at the door. I glance out the window. It's already after nightfall, and the library is closed. Who would that be at this hour? Azalea begins clearing the dirty dishes as I head for the door to investigate.

When I open the door, the pony standing there is too excited to wait for an invitation and immediately walks in past me, a familiar ancient text carried in her magic.

"Princess Luna?" I ask. We've been swapping letters about the odd book she found in one of her bedroom drawers, where it had apparently been forgotten since before her banishment.

"Twilight!" she cries out in excitement, "we have been fools this entire time! "Argent Map' is an anagram for the word 'pentagram!'"

I smack my forehead with a hoof. Of course! It's so obvious! "Wouldn't that mean-"

"Precisely!"

"And so the translation would be-"

"Exactly!"

"Really, though? With an enchanted spatula?"

"It is the only rational explanation," concludes Luna.

"Azalea, I have to-"

"No adventures!" she calls back from the kitchen before I can even get the words out. "No quests, no journeys, no epic undertakings. You promised me after the thing with the pearl inside of the giant fish."

"But Azaleaaaaa!" I try deploying the Royal Canterlot Whine, but alas she long ago built up an immunity. I hope and pray every single day that Leafy never inherits that particular ability. "But... but... enchanted spatula! We have to do something or the cultists will cross-pollinate with the mutant porcupines."

She appears in the doorway to the kitchen, a scowl across her face. "Twilight, I don't know if you've noticed at any point in the last seven months, but you are quite pregnant. You aren't going into any ancient ruins, you're going on a vacation."

"It's inside a volcano, actually," says Luna. She at least has the good graces to look sheepish.

"No volcanoes! What's more important to you, recovering an ancient artifact or spending time with me?"

I open my mouth to reply that it's clearly the artifact, but at the last second I catch on to the fact that this is one of those questions. "Sorry, Luna," I mutter. "I can't go."

She looks back and forth between the two of us. For a second I think she's going to try playing the Princess card, which I know from experience never works. Instead she just nods. "Fear not, Tia and I will handle it ourselves. You enjoy your time off."

"Yeah, I guess," I say, dejected as Luna leaves as quickly as she arrived. I mope around the library for a bit longer before it's time to put Leafy in bed for the night. Despite the nap earlier, he falls asleep quickly after a bedtime story and a lullabye leaving Azalea and me the only ponies awake. While I'm intent on stewing for the rest of the evening with a book, Azalea has other ideas and sits down next to me so she can rub my back.

"Hey, are you mad at me?"

"No," I say, which is a blatant lie. "Maybe a little."

"I know you're a little disappointed you couldn't go after the, uh, magic whisk?"

"Spatula," I correct her.

"Right, the spatula, but it's not just you and me these days. You can't just run off on the spur of the moment without thinking about what's at stake," she says. I don't reply right away, but I do shift on the couch so I'm laying on my side. Azalea rests her head with an ear against my bulge and closes her eyes. I'm not mad at her anymore.

"It's fine. We're gonna have a great time in Saddle Arabia," I say and I smile at her, closing my eyes too. "You're the best adventure I could ever wish for."