Seven - Caught
Luna’s thumb flipped through a travel brochure as she lay back in the single armchair in the hotel room she and her sister had taken for the night. Celestia was lying, unmoving, on the twin bed, above the green and yellow striped covers, her hands clasped over chest, unseeing eyes boring into the low-hanging ceiling. Luna, concerned, was trying her best to engage her sibling with small talk.
“Did you know that Crystal Prep is listed as a ‘bustling tour spot’?”
Celestia looked up briefly from where she lay on the bed. “No, but I can’t say I’m surprised. We’re talking about Abacus here.”
“ ‘The astounding intellect of students is a marvel to all those who witness it’. Well, that certainly lives up to her pretentiousness.” Luna stuck out her tongue and threw the pamphlet back onto the coffee table. “Wonder how much she had to pay for that.”
There was a minute of silence as Luna tried to think of another subject to discuss. Celestia was acting closed off and broody, no doubt worrying too much for her own good. But Luna wasn’t confident enough to confront Celestia about her feelings—that seemed too… backwards. Luna thought that maybe if they talked for long enough, it would come out on its own. At least, that was all she could hope for.
“So, uh, Celly, what do you think about Bon Bon?”
“Hmm?”
“You know, the secret agent posing as a student?”
“Again, I can’t say I’m surprised. After all that’s happened at Canterlot, someone was bound to notice. We’re lucky it’s an organization that can keep things quiet.”
“If only we actually had a process for checking students’ backgrounds to make sure they aren’t aliens, lying about their identity, thousands of years old, or all three.”
“That has been a problem lately, hasn’t it?” Celestia expelled a hefty sigh. “Say, Luna, do you think the changelings will have left our apartment by tomorrow?”
“You of all people are willing to risk that?”
“Well, we’d need to pack our things if we want to… you know…” Celestia let her implication hang like a foul odor, and Luna scrunched up her face as if it were.
“You want to leave?!”
Celestia admired the carpet.
“What about the students? Everybody else? You want to leave them for dead?”
“Do you honestly think we could make a difference?”
“It doesn’t matter if we can make a difference or not!”
“Of course it does!” Celestia shot back, finally finding the courage to face her sister. “I don’t want us to end up another two corpses on the pile!”
“Tia, I couldn’t ever forgive myself if I left, and I doubt you could, either. And trust me, I know I thing or two about guilt.”
Unknowingly, Luna had opened the floodgates that had been repressing her sister’s pent-up anxiety, and Celestia exploded. “Oh, and I don’t? Do you seriously think I didn’t blame myself? Seriously think that I’ve forgiven myself? Sure, you were the one who cried, the one who couldn’t stop apologizing, the one who hurt yourself when you didn’t think I’d notice, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t struggling!”
Luna shrank back in her chair. Whatever she’d been expecting to talk about tonight (and she had thought she’d been expecting the worst), Luna hadn’t been prepared for Celestia to start digging up the past. But it seemed the stress of recent events had thrown her a sweatband and a shovel.
Celestia, on the other hand, wasn’t quite finished. “Do you know how hard it is to raise an emotionally traumatized eight year old child with a guilt complex when you’re fifteen? It’s really damn hard! If I’d cried, if I’d broken down, then who would’ve been there for you? But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do all that while you were busy having your nightmares!”
Luna forced herself to take a deep breath, however shuddering it was, and wrapped her arms around herself. She wasn’t scared of her sister; no, she was guilty. Always with the guilt.
But she was bigger than it now. She wouldn’t let it consume her again. She was an adult.
Not to her. To her, you’re still just a child.
(She needs to vent, that’s all. She doesn’t hate me for what I did.)
Even if you deserve her hate.
(This isn’t about me right now.)
But isn’t it you she’s yelling at?
(She just needs to let it out. She’s needed to for years.)
And you forced her to bottle it up. What a good sister.
Luna had no response to that.
Celestia continued after a brief pause to breathe.
“I’ve always looked out for you, Luna, and I’m only doing it again. I’m keeping you safe—keeping us safe. Face it, we either get ourselves to high ground and escape the flood, or we build half of a dam before we’re having a family reunion with Mom!”
Celestia’s final word punched Luna in the face, but she managed not to show it.
“Well,” Luna said, slowly and cleanly. So far so good. “I… wasn’t aware you felt that way, sister.”
“I—” Celestia looked away once again. What had she been thinking? She should be able to keep it together better than that. She was a mess. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have unloaded on you like that. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Luna let out a hollow chuckle. “I think we both know that’s not true.”
“Luna, we’ve been over this, it was an accident. And I… I should’ve—” her voice broke. “Should’ve done a lot of things, really.”
“I can’t forgive myself, Celestia.” Her voice took on an air of determination. “But I can move on.” Luna, despite how small she was feeling, looked Celestia directly in the eye. “Go.”
Celestia blinked once. “What?”
“If you want to go, go. I-I’m staying.” You aren’t all I have anymore. I’m finally over it.
“Luna, no! We have to stick together!” You’re all I have now. I’m falling apart.
“I’m an adult. I don’t need you anymore, if it comes down to it. And I’m sure you’d do fine on your own, too.”
You’re wrong. “I can’t just leave y—”
“But you can leave them?”
Luna’s eyes issued a challenge; Celestia’s, a plea.
The silence that stuffed up the room could kill.
In the end, Celestia was the first to rip her eyes away, lying back down onto the bed. Luna picked up the travel brochure again, and started to read.
And like that, it was decided.
Twilight paused at her doorstep to make sure that her jacket concealed the burn on her arm. It still stung, and the chafing of the sleeve sure didn’t help, but it was better than her parents finding out.
She had barely opened the front door two inches before her mother stormed up to it, her hands on her hips and her eyes skewering. “Twilight Star Sparkle.”
And in that moment, Twilight knew she’d screwed up, big time.
“You know how I told you that if you didn’t clean up your room I’d do it for you?” Velvet interrogated.
Crap, Twilight knew she’d been forgetting something in all the craziness. “Sorry, I—”
But Velvet couldn’t care less about what Twilight was sorry for, and continued unhindered. “Bet you thought I was kidding, huh?” She held up a white-knuckled fist that clutched a pile of blueprints, and used her other hand to point accusingly at the schematics on them. “Explain.”
Twilight was suddenly very, very glad that she had dropped off the thaumic compressor in her lab at school.
“I-It was purely hypothetical design! I wasn’t going to follow through!”
She was also very, very glad that Cadance was as kind as she was.
“Good!” Velvet spat, not looking at all satisfied with Twilight’s answer. “Maybe I’ll only ground you for a week, then!”
“What?!”
“Young lady, this has nothing to do with ‘human and canine co-habitation’, so I know it’s not for school, and even if you didn’t plan on building it, I don’t want my daughter designing ways to kill people! Understood?”
A sigh. “Yes, Mom.”
“Glad we’re on the same page.” Velvet directed one more disapproving stare Twilight’s way before marching back to the kitchen. “Dinner’s in ten minutes, sweetie, so don’t get started on anything too big.”
Twilight barely heard her as she walked up the stairs to her room. How was she supposed to help out with extradimensional threats if she was under house arrest? Idealy, the changelings would bring the fight to them during school hours, and it would be inconsequential, but there was still a chance that they would act after school, or during the night, or some other time.
There was also the chance that they would try to attack all of their houses individually, like what they did with the principals. Though, considering how that led to the humans’ biggest win yet, they may be cautious of repeating their mistakes.
If only her mother knew what was going on; then she wouldn’t have to keep all of her work secret. But that probably wasn’t worth the tradeoffs—once Velvet knew what kind of danger Twilight was in, there was no doubt she would try to intervene in a fit of motherly panic, and that would only cause everybody more problems. It was best to keep unpredictable variables to a minimum.
Speaking of which…
Closing her door for privacy, Twilight shrugged off her jacket, instantly feeling relieved. She rolled her arm a few times before logging on to her desktop and typing in a simple search term: Sweetie Drops.
Unsurprisingly, not a whole lot came up. Twilight had to scroll through a plethora of false positives before she found anything interesting, and even then, it wasn’t much. A single forum thread on some social networking site by user ‘Dear_Sweetie_Drops’, the only post they had ever made. It was a short message: “If I ever get out of jail, you have my word that you’ll be my next crime. You’ll pay for this. You’ll pay.”
The author was terribly over dramatic, but it did suggest that Bon Bon wasn’t lying, and that she had been involved in cases before theirs. The comments on the thread weren’t useful at all, sadly, and Twilight didn’t know where else to look for information, so she skipped to hypothesizing.
She brought out her notepad and reviewed what she had written. Sweetie Drops seemed to default to her cheerful disposition, but appeared to reflexively separate her personal life with her professional life by switching to a more serious, spy-like temperament when she was talking business. Twilight hypothesized that she was unaware of this personality quirk. She also had a tendency to threaten people, either to help assert authority, or for her own personal amusement. Finally, she showed multiple sociopathic tendencies.
Twilight concluded that her childhood must have been pretty shitty, scientifically speaking.
The question was whether she was dangerous or not. To them, that is. She was certainly dangerous to whoever was on the receiving end of her attacks, which had almost been them. She clearly valued ‘the greater good’ over the wellbeing of those close to her; that could either be useful or detrimental, depending.
But the fact of the matter was that they could take all the help they could get. Sweetie Drops was very capable, and though secretive, shared their interests. Did they have any choice but to trust her?
Twilight jumped out of her seat at the sound of her door opening, and turned to see her brother in the doorframe. “Hey, Twi, Mom says dinner’s ready.”
Twilight nervously adjusted her glasses. “O-okay! Be right there!”
She smiled far too widely as Shining’s gaze drifted to her burn. “Woah, Twily, what happened to your arm?”
“Uh… Chemical accident,” Twilight lied.
“That’s one hell of a chemical accident.”
“It was one hell of an experiment, too.” That was actually pretty close to the truth.
“You need to be more careful, Twilight.”
She rolled her eyes. “That seems to be all anybody says these days.”
“So maybe you should listen, huh?”
“I suppose.”
Shining shook his head. “What am I going to do with you?” A pause. “Well, come on, or your food will get cold.”
Shining left, and Twilight re-donned her jacket. Being careful wasn’t worth it if it stopped you from doing what needed to be done. Besides, it wasn’t like they were taking stupid risks or anything. They’d be fine.
Right?
A woman was talking on the phone—a landline—gesticulating furiously with her hand, despite the form of communication. Her feet were kicked unceremoniously up on a hardwood desk in front of her, in stark contrast to her professional attire. The heels of her flats rested on top of documents the looked as important as she looked—wearing a dark, well-ironed suit and reclining in the office chair as if she owned the place, which she most certainly did. Several filing cabinets lined the walls of her domain, each drawer labeled with no more than five characters, a perfect organizational system for those who understood it. Several certificates of honor sat in a messy pile on top, clearly stating that she didn’t know where to put all of them. (Though, with so much unused wall space, she certainly could have framed them all. But that doesn’t send the same message, does it?) Next to an inset safe, a large corkboard hung from a single nail in the wall, with a diverse display. Several printed memos was tacked there, no doubt as reminders; a single sheet of paper held a list of names, several of which were crossed off or had notes written next to them; a few scattered sticky notes, pictures, and documents; and in the corner, a photograph of a high school aged girl. She was smiling disconcertingly widely.
The woman blew a stray lock of long grayish hair from her face as the voice on the other end of the line took their turn. She decided to cut them off mid sentence.
“Wait, wait, wait, let’s get one thing straight before we continue: I’m not asking for permission, I’m telling you what I’m going to do. Are we clear?”
An exasperated response buzzed through the phone.
“Says who?”
An answer.
“Well, kindly tell ‘The Higher Ups’ that I’ll start listening to them as soon as they manage to wrench their bitchy heads out of the frightening hellscapes of their own asses.”
A beat.
“Though you may want to paraphrase.”
Her conversation partner, understandably perturbed, sputtered out a couple sentences.
She laughed. “You must be new. See, they can’t afford to fire me; I built this agency from the ground up, and I could bring it back down if I wanted to. Though I’m sure the other branches could handle it next time a centaur desecrates the Alamo, or the gates of hell open up in Time Square, or a high school student turns into a raging she-demon.”
The voice issued some strong-toned sentences.
The woman sighed. “What is it that I’m saying that you’re having trouble wrapping your sad little mind around? I don’t care if you have the goddamn president come down here and personally lecture me until my ears start to bleed and my brain falls out of my mouth—I’m going, and that’s final. Thank you for your time.”
Before the other person had a chance to respond, she slammed the phone back onto the receiver. Stretching and complaining to herself, she reeled her legs in and stood up. The phone started to ring again, and she lifted it a couple centimeters before dropping it, possibly setting a new personal best for how quickly she hung up on someone. The phone did not ring after that.
She first went to her filing cabinets, pulling out a binder marked ‘M-CH-01’ that was packed to the brim, the covers not even coming within two inches of each other unless you really, really pushed. Then, approaching her safe, she input the combination and swung the door open with a shrill creak. Out came a metal briefcase and a small handgun, the latter of which she loaded and hid in her jacket. Finally, after squeezing the binder into the briefcase with no small amount of trial and error, Chrysalis was out the door.
She hadn’t the courtesy to so much as close it behind her.