Doing His Duty

by Dick McKickEm

Chapter the Third: Edutainment

Doing His Duty

A My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fan fiction

by Wolfram and Hart

CHAPTER THREE: Edutainment

Click. The lights went off, the room grew dark.

Cotton Swab muttered a few choice obscenities as she clumsily fiddled with the pieces of delicate and expensive equipment. "Oh come on!" She said through gritted teeth. "Why did they have to make these things so- Hah! Got it! Wait... no, nevermind." A bright spark briefly illuminated Cotton's angry visage, followed by a fizzling noise that didn't sound like it should come from that machine.

"Ow! I hate this piece of junk."

Flash Sentry sipped from the complementary mug of steaming hot coffee and shifted uncomfortably in his hard steel chair. Thankfully it wasn't nearly as bad as that armor had been. Blueblood had graciously allowed the guard to shed his obtrusive regalia before they started the whole- What did they call it? -"Orientation Presentation."

"For Celestia's' sake, I'm a doctor, not a- Yesss!" The electrical projector sputtered to life. At once a bright white square of light illumined the blank brick wall.

"Okay, rookie," Cotton grunted "it's time we brought you up to speed on what the BB Corps is really about. We were scheduled to do this tomorrow morning, but apparently those cursed mares don't give a hoot about our schedule."

"Wait, what?" Flash asked. "Mares?" What in Equestria were they talking about?

"All will be explained, so sit down and shut up." Cotton Swab slapped a clear plastic picture on the projector and the wall lit up with a black and white photo depicting two strange ponies clad in painfully familiar sets of armor standing on either side of Prince Blueblood.

"Did I really look like that two years ago?" Blueblood's voice came from the dark recesses of the room. "Ghastly. "

"In the second year of the fifth age," she began in a factual tone of voice "Captain Torrva Whitewater commissioned an exclusive new chapter of the Equestrian Royal Guard. This chapter was to be assigned the singular task of guarding the life of our beloved Prince Blueblood."

"Beloved?" Blueblood parroted.

"I'm reading from a script, here."

"Ah."

"Who are those ponies?" Flash asked.

"Hold all questions til the end, please."

"The need for this chapter was realized several months prior to its creation after the fifth consecutive attempt on Prince Blueblood's life was made by one still unknown mare."

Flash shouldn't have been drinking from his coffee mug when she said that. The scalding liquid burned like molten lava as it sprayed from his nose. He coughed the rest of it back into the cup.

"Fifth?!" Cough. "What in the name of-?"

"Questions, Sentry, you gotta hold 'em." Cotton snapped.

Cotton withdrew the picture and replaced it with another. This one was a collection of blurry mugshots, twelve in total. Flash couldn't say for sure, but they all looked like mares. Pretty mares, too. Smokin' hot, as one would describe them.

"Okay, blah blah blah, boring. Skipping ahead...In time," Swab went on "it became apparent that our prince had an unintentional habit of attracting the negative attention of many ponies. To this day, a total of fifty-three mares were held in Canterlot Castle's dungeon for the crimes of attempted regicide. Even more have gotten away with the act. A large number of them claimed to have been in a romantic relationship with Prince Blueblood."

Flash didn't see Cotton shoot Blueblood an odd look through the darkness. "None of these relationships were ever formally confirmed by the prince."

"And, uh, some more irrelevant stuff. Junk. Junk. Junk. You know what? Screw it. I'm going to the last page."

The photos were swapped out again. The third image was an insignia of sorts, a cobalt blue shield with an eight-pointed compass rose emblazoned upon it, Blueblood's cutie mark. Written above the shield in an arc were the words "The Blueblood Corps" and below the shield were the words "Nos sumus, nec requies ".

"We are those without sleep." she read. "This is our motto. Learn it, love it, take it to heart. The prince rests easy because we don't. There are ponies out there, ponies who want to see His Majesty six feet under. It is our duty to stop those ponies, to stand between him," Cotton dramatically paused for a moment too long "and death."

Xander tried to hold back his laughter, but failed miserably.

"Who wrote this crap?" Cotton asked, flipping back through the pages of script. "It's not even true. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep last night. In a bed. On purpose."

"Well, anyway," Cotton said, carelessly throwing the papers over her shoulder "the bottom line is this: tons of ponies have tried to kill Double B before, and they will keep on trying til death do us part. That's why we exist. Our track record is pretty good seeing as how he's still breathing. You are still breathing, right?"

"I sometimes stop when I'm underwater." Blueblood responded without missing a beat.

"Close enough." The guardsmare turned to Flash Sentry. "Any questions?"

Flash's mind was reeling. This was a prank, it had to be. They were just making a joke out of attempted murder, that's all. He didn't want to accept their explanation, but he still found that it made sense... in a senseless sort of way. He saw the mare in black with his own two eyes, he saw her fire at the prince with a second-rate crossbow and miss, and he saw the three of them shrug it off like it was a normal occurrence. It was the only explanation to fit what he saw perfectly. It couldn't be real, but it had to be truth.

"Uh, yeah, one question." Flash tentatively raised a hoof like a colt in a classroom. "Why?"

Cotton and Blueblood shared a glance. "Why what?"

"W-why do these mares want to kill the prince?" Sure, he seemed a little pretentious at first, but that didn't set him apart from, like, ninety percent of Canterlot.

"Uh-dunna." was Swab's carefully chosen answer. "Honestly, I've stopped asking that question a looong time ago."

Without warning, Cotton trotted away from her spot at the projector and mercilessly flipped the lights back on. The room was flooded with painful beams of light, assailing the eyes of everypony in the room.

"What my dear friend is trying to say," Blueblood said, blinking the floaty spots from his vision "is that none of my assailants seemed to be linked. Each one had their own unique motives, and were quite unaware of any previous attempts on my life. The Royal Guard prefers to keep news of these assassins off of the streets."

"They do know about that one time in Vanhoover, though." Cotton added.

"Ah, yes, that one is public knowledge." Blueblood nodded. "It was quite a close shave, if I recall."

"They're all close shaves, hon." Cotton said with a bluntness that could have rivaled a warhammer. "If they were any closer, you'd be forever known as "Prince Bluebaldy"."

Xander grinned.

The prince hummed thoughtfully. "Not the best nickname I've heard. Not the worst, either."

"Well, uh, my prince," Flash said before carefully sipping more coffee. He wasn't sure how to address him after seeing how informal he was with Cotton and Xander "you don't seem to live up to all those names that I've heard. You're not so bad now that I've met you."

That simple statement caught the prince way off-guard, and Blueblood didn't even react at first. He merely stared for scarcely a moment, his mouth slightly agpe. He drew breath for a response, but the words left him.

"R-really?" He managed to ask, his voice a mixture of disbelief and flattery. "You don't think I'm a greedy, narcissistic, pompous little colt who doesn't deserve the title bestowed upon me?"

"That's oddly specific." Flash observed.

Blueblood let out a dry, humorless laugh. "You have no idea."

"Well, I really haven't known you that long, Your Gr-" Flash stopped himself just in time "Er, Prince Blueblood. I can tell you're not as a bad as some of the ponies I've seen. You're a hell of a lot less uptight- pardon my Equestrian -compared to some of the nobles that have visited the Empire."

"Huh." The prince said, his face holding no clear expression. He was too deep in thought. What he was thinking of, Flash could not tell. "Thank you. I think. It's been a long time since..." He trailed off.

Flash went rigid, and not in the way he does when in guard-mode. Flash froze because the conversation had taken a turn for the quiet. Not a day at his duty station and he had already said something to prince to render him speechless, more or less.

"Ohhhh-kay." Cotton broke the silence like a troll in a crystal ball shop. "Well, I guess it's time to get back to work. According to our schedule, the prince is almost late for a dinner, right? Let's roll out, boys. Chop chop."

* * *

The Royal Guard's barracks were actually pretty nice.

At the end of Flash's eventful day, the pegasus and the zony were allowed to retire to the guard's community quarters for the night. It was apparently Cotton Swab's turn to take owl's shift, she would guard the prince all night as he slept. Flash was so not looking forward to his turn when it came.

The barracks cots were much too soft and comfortable to be called cots, these were full-fledged beds, like the kind that real ponies slept on. Thanks to the magic of mass production, every guard in the castle had their own nightstand and armor locker as well. This was a four star hotel compared to the vastly outdated Crystal Guard quarters.

Flash had taken a cot between Xander's and some other guard he hadn't met yet. While each pony there belonged to a different branch of the castle guard, all of them slept together (but not in a dirty way). There were even a few of those fuzzy-eared, leather-winged Selenic Guards still milling about before their shifts started.

After shoving all of his armor into the hooflocker, Flash blissfully let himself slump into the cot.

He glanced over at Xander, who was busying himself with a number two pencil in clenched his teeth and a pad of paper lying on the bed. The zony looked a little smaller without his heavy armor, but he still dwarfed everypony else with ease. The bed crraked under his weight every time that the hulk moved. Flash noticed his cutie mark, or whatever the zebras called it. What he noticed was that it didn't represent anything he recognized. It was a mishmash of swirly patterns and weird hieroglyphics assembled into a picture. He couldn't make heads or tails of it. He guessed that zebra and zony symbolism isn't as obvious as any other equine's. Flash's cutie mark, for example, was a blue shield with a lightning bolt. It meant that he was meant to be a guard with fast reflexes. It made sense to him.

Xander scribbled something on the notepad, then spat the writing implement out and presented the notepad to Flash.

Having fun? It read in hastily scrawled lettering.

"I can hardly contain myself with all this joy." Flash snarked. "It's practically an all-day party."

Xander rolled his eyes and went back to scribbling.

Enjoy it. This job will get worse before it get easyer.

"You misspelled easier." Flash instantly pointed out.

More writing.

Kiss my tattooed flank, rookie.

"He-ey! No need to get testy." Flash said. "Geez, I thought big guys were supposed to be jolly."

Xander wrote nothing, but clenched his jaw, flared his nostrils, and gave the guard a cross look.

"All right, all right!" Flash raised his hooves in a gesture of surrender. "I'm sorry."

The zony's face lightened up a bit after he apologised. Xander gave a content nod, as if to say 'Apology accepted'.

"So uh, by the way..." Flash said, his tone turning serious.

Xander cocked an eyebrow. "Hmm?"

"What was up with Blueblood earlier? You know, when we were talking and he got quiet for some reason. He acted like I asked him for his hoof in marriage."

BB's too used to ponies thinking he's a scumbag. He wrote.

"Well, he wasn't. Not to me or you guys, anyway."

Pretty much every pony in a position of power always had their own nasty rumors and jokes floating around the water cooler, but the things that ponies said about Blueblood were special. He was often portrayed as the epitome of douchebags to the point where it couldn't be anything but hyperbole. That was what Flash always assumed anyway.

Xander ripped off the front page of his notepad and crumpled it up.

Starting a fresh page, he wrote He used to be bad. Way bad. Total plotface. Now he's starting to grow up.

"What made him change? I mean, did he just wake up one day and realize "Hey, I'm a memetic jackass! I should probably fix that soon, dont'cha think?"."

Xander shrugged, then wrote Could be, but your guess is as good as mine.

Flash gave a frustrated sigh. "Of course, the likeable by-the-books foreigner gets assigned to be the personal bodyguard of the mysterious yet handsome bleach blonde unicorn noble with self-esteem issues. Sounds like the beginning of a bad gay romance novel, If you ask me."

Xander mimed gagging himself with a hoof.

"No kidding." Flash chuckled lightly and Xander with him.

A moment passed wherein neither party said anything, they merely shared a brief spell of contented silence.

"Anyway," Flash said "I'm going to grab some shuteye. Unless I wake up and find that this was all a weird dream I've been having on the train ride over here, I'm gonna need the rest. 'Night."

Without another word, both of them rolled over and set their heads on the decently soft, yet firm pillows. It didn't take long for either of them to fall asleep. Royal Guards have the learned skill of being able to fall asleep anywhere at any time and under any circumstances, as most barracks have ponies coming and going at all hours of the night with their armored hoofsteps and loud voices.

Flash was no different than the Canterlot guards. Despite being hundreds of miles away from the Crystal Empire, he felt right at home amongst the other ponies of his kind. Funny how he no longer considered Equestria his home, despite being born not far from where he laid his head that night. It was at the very base of Canterlot mountain, if he correctly recalled what his mother told him. Of course, it was referred to as "Mount Everfree" when he was a foal.

Soon, the pegasus found himself drifting. His thoughts became scrambled and less focused. Flash was was no longer aware of anything but that twilight between the world of dreams and the world of waking. He was eventually taken by the comfy black cocoon of sleep...

* * *

"Unacceptable!" the blond unicorn screamed as loudly as his lungs could muster, the white-robed hoofmaiden trembling under his seething gaze.

"I- I- I um-" Her eyes darted to everywhere but the snarl of her prince. She couldn't look him in the eye, no matter how much he invaded her personal space.

"Don't speak!" Blueblood poked her demure shoulder with a hard hoof, effectively silencing the filly. "I've no use for excuses. I've no time to waste fixing grievous mistakes as this, as I am responsible for the oversight of this entire operation!"

Her voice was strained, ranging somewhere in between a whisper and and a mutter. "But I wasn't offering excuses Your Grace, I merely set out what the delivery pony gav-"

"Oh really?" he said with a mocking tone. "Because those plates and silverware just scream "Winter Solstice is here!" And look, they match the decor perfectly!"

Blueblood was violently gesturing to a grandiose dining table as long as a house and as wide a wagon. It was covered in a midnight blue table cloth trimmed with silver thread and dotted with hundreds of glitzy white sequins. The dozens of sets of silverware starkly contrasted the cloth with its pale alabaster plates and gold leaf utensils.

"Oh." The moment of dawning comprehension on her pale face was as plain as day.

The prince was on the verge of grinding his teeth to dust. He then bopped her on the head. It wasn't hard enough to cause any real pain to the teenage filly, but it was enough to nearly stop her heart from the surprise. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe the diningware themed after Aunty Celestia didn't go with the the table themed after Aunty Luna, hmm? Well, did it?!"

"No, Your Grace, it didn't." She couldn't look up. Her eyes were affixed to the floor as if the pony before her were part cockatrice.

"I can't believe-" Blueblood suddenly did a one-eighty degree turn and rubbed his aching temple with a hoof. His voice was tuned down to a tolerable level. "Such a travesty. It will all have to be redone, all of it. This is Aunty's first Winter Solstice in a thousand years and I'm going to look like a fool for mucking the celebration. Oh, of all the days the help decides to check their minds at the door..."

The prince sighed. Without even looking at the filly, he waved a hoof at her saying "Get out of my sight. Jus- just go clean something before I fire you."

She didn't need to be told twice. The servant turned tail and slipped out as quickly as her hooves could carry-

- - -

Flash Sentry awoke with a sharp gasp.

The bleary-eyed guard threw off the covers and bolted upright. Looking around the room, Flash found that it was the same as when he left it. Dozens of fellow guards laid peacefully, their snores filling the barracks. They were completely oblivious to him.

Waking from dreams like that always left him with an odd feeling; the feeling of sanity finding it's way back into his mind the instant before he realizes that it was all in his head. It was just a dream.

"Great." Flash sank back into bed. "An oddly vivid dream of things I've never seen. Five bits says that this is going to be really important in the near future."

With that being said, he rolled over and went back to sleep.

Author's Note:

Comments

[WiseFireCracker]

Fillies and Gentlecolts! BEHOLD! PROOF THAT TWO NEGATIVES DO MAKE A POSITIVE! This is a fic with Flash Sentry and Blueblood as main characters and there is a net upvote ratio!

*slow claps*

I'm impressed, author. Things are quite interesting so far.

[zyr1987]

That author's note...I like you.

I would like you more though, if it wasn't the most overplayed Pink Floyd song this side of "Money". Something like "Hey You" or "Comfortably Numb", but I'm just being a hardass Pink Floyd Connoisseur since the new album is coming out tomorrow.

[Seether00]

How are you making both of them likable? Stop it

[Dick McKickEm]

5250346 Behold, the magic of fanfiction! For my next trick, I will make a hipster brony appear in Ponyville!

Kidding. I'd never do that to you guys.

5250366 I wanted to post a song that was kinda-sorta relevant to the chapter in my head. I just sort of defaulted to Pink Floyd. Perhaps Young Lust would've been more appropriate, but what's done is done. I am too excited for the new album. Considering how they haven't released one since I was born, this will be a completely new thing for me.

5250719 I'm having fun and you can't stop me!
But actually, since Pony!Flash has the blankest slate since Sombra or Chrissy, I can do whatever the hell I want with him. Who says he has to be the same as Human!Flash? For Blueblood, I just made a "He turned his life around offscreen!" excuse since we haven't seen him since S1.

[D48]

5251633 I am very much with you on Flash (although I strongly disagree on Chrysalis which you can read about here if this was not enough of a megapost for you ). Military service tends to significantly alter someone's worldview weather they like it or not, and that is on top of the other little divergent events from living in two different worlds, growing up with different people/ponies, and the fact that only one of the two has wings. That means human Flash provides at most a very vague generality for writing pony Flash so he is really not much more than a canned name and appearance like a random background pony.

As for Blueblood, I feel like you honestly went overboard on that one. We really only have a handful of data points on him which are far from painting the ridiculous asshole picture of him the fandom seems to have latched onto instead of actually thinking about what the evidence really says.

The first is that we know Rarity fantasized about marrying him for his looks, wealth, and position which is very typical gold digger behavior. While this does not say much about Blueblood himself, it does very strongly suggest that he is something of a dream stallion for a lot of mares the way some celebrities are in the real world. This in turn suggests that Rarity is far from the only pony to have these kinds of feelings because we know she is not the most frivolous and superficial of individuals even if she does place a high value on appearance. This logically means that Rarity is far from the only pony to make moves on him so we have to keep this in mind when considering his actions.

The second is his Cutie Mark. While we obviously do not know what it is actually about because there is no canon story, we can make some observations based on its shape. It is very clearly a compass rose which is usually found on a map which indicates that his talents may lie in cartography or exploration based on its similarity to Daring Do's. This is very different from other public figures like Mayor Mare and Fancy Pants or business figures like Filthy Rich who tend to have marks that seem to indicate talents relating to administration or money and would seem to indicate that Blueblood's talents may be at odds with the life of a noble. If true, this would mean that he would rather be off exploring the Everfree than going to the Gala which would in turn imply his ideal date would be someone more like Zecora (who I personally ship him with based on this logic) or Daring Do than Rarity. It is of course also possible that his mark is more symbolic like Cheerilee whose Cutie Mark seems to indicate something related to flowers which is very different from her actual talent of teaching, but this is still something to keep in mind even if a compass can be extremely symbolic.

The third is what actually happened at the Gala. While he was most definitely an asshole to Rarity, it is worth noting that he was slowly stepping up his bad behavior which could be interpreted as him making a deliberate effort to drive her off. This is further supported by the fact that we can very easily assume that Rarity is far from the only pony who does this and the implications of his cutie mark as discussed earlier so he could very easily have made a game of driving off his numerous suitors. If you doubt this logic, just ask yourself what you would expect to happen if you cooped Rainbow Dash up in the trappings of nobility all the time and threw a never ending stream of gold diggers at her and compare that to what Blueblood actually did.

The fourth is his appearance in season 2. He briefly appears during Rarity's "Becoming Popular" song where he is standing next to Rarity as she launches the airship and they seem to be getting along well. This is a fairly quick shot and hard to draw a lot of information from, but it does seem to indicate that they have made up at some point since the Gala which would in turn indicate that he is not nearly as bad as many people like to make him in their stories.

Anyways, the point of all that character discussion rambling was that I did not feel like you needed to have him turn around off screen and that this whole concept and especially the discussion about it in this chapter felt like an excellent jab at the silly portrayal of Blueblood in most other stories to me. Don't get me wrong, the whole thing is hilarious and stands on its own very well as a comedy, I just feel like it gains a lot as a jab at the silliness of this community.

[Dick McKickEm]

5271807 I love wall of text comments.

Flash is my new favorite character. Not because of him in EQG or his blink-and-miss-it appearances in the show, but because I can do whatever the hell I want with him (his waifu memes are hillarious too). I always had a thing for the Royal Guard as well. Sometimes I think of them as super-stoic highly-higly trained hardasses, or as bumbling stormtroopers in shining armor, the latter being more likely in show canon.

You are correct in saying that BB is a jab at the fandom's tendency to make him an insufferable prick. It's been pretty much the default characterization of him since the get-go, barring a few decent fics out there. This story will poke fun at the fandom's assumptions about Equestria and its characters without going full on meta every now and again. I do promise more backstory for the prince in the future detailing BB's mellowing out. After all, it's just as much about Blueblood as it is Flash. I haven't really thought about his cutie mark yet. Perhaps I can pull something together later on down the line.

[D48]

5271899 Well, I am very glad to hear we are on the same page on all of this, although I think the best analogue to the canon guard in the real world is Segway-riding mall cops.