Sometimes They Call Me Super

by KorenCZ11

Finale I: Thanatos

Twilight

---

When mother returned, Rarity and Fluttershy had just made it back. Rarity went to approach her, but stopped short. “Oh, goddess, what is that horrendous…?” Then she noticed Applejack on mother’s back. They were faint, but a horn of light and black wings of magic were still attached to her as the sickest, ugliest feeling radiated off of her. Like a fog of nausea followed her around.

I don’t quite understand it, but I can feel it. I’ve always known that this castle was tied to me. It’s my cutiemark that sits on the front, it’s me that all this magic it generates flows through and around, and for the most part, I usually understand it. Today, the only thing I’ve always known and never questioned, attacked me from inside out. My energy was stolen, a black feeling of the darkest hatred and the deepest sorrow was left in its place, leaving a bitter taste of rage on my tongue.

Even now, though it had dulled since mother knocked Applejack out, I could still feel it. I wish I knew how to respond to it; I wish I could understand why, while all this nastiness swirls within me, I feel so… numb. I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.

“I have decided that she must be quarantined for the time being,” mother said.

Rainbow, who’d been trying her hardest to hide her sobbing, wiped at her face. “What?”

“Quarantined. To be kept in isolation,” mother repeated.

Rainbow sniffed hard and approached mother, only to stop short like Rarity did when she felt Applejack’s aura. “You can’t do that, she just-”

Mother sent Rainbow a yellow glare, which stopped her in her tracks. “There will be no argument. As it stands, she may relapse. If she does, she could kill each and every one of you without so much as a thought. Unprepared, even I may be at risk attempting to stop her. The matter is settled.”

And so it was. Rainbow backed off and mother went down to the training room. She motioned for me to follow, and so I did. Silently and slowly we took the stairs down my crystal halls as I tried to fight off the feelings in my stomach. I hadn’t really hit me until I saw him on the floor when we finally made it.

My lip quivered. The feeling in my stomach got stronger. I fell to my knees. I felt the liquid build up in my eyes. I bit into my cheek, desperately willing it to stop. But here too, there was no argument. Was this my fault? Should… should I have been out there with him? Even I’d realized things were going wrong when Applejack missed, I… I know that I’m not back at even half strength yet, but even so, wouldn’t just a little have been enough to help? I… I never believed that… I always knew this was a possibility, I thought… just before…

A wing draped around me and mother lowered her head next to mine. “Shh… quiet your storming mind. There will be time for this, but that time is not now. Be strong. Stand up.”

I latched onto her to make them stop, but they just wouldn’t; the tears kept coming, every time I moved my head in his direction a new wave of that awful feeling flooded me. Mother pulled me close, she stroked my mane, she held me tight, but even those warm feelings couldn’t stop the torrent in my head.

Eventually, she took my face in her hooves and made me look her in the eyes. “Twilight Sparkle, stop crying.”

She never calls me by my full name. She’d only said it once before, and it was in a situation… not unlike now. Ten years ago, that’s when… she last used it. I sniffed and tried to stop it, if only to so little success. She used a feather to wipe away my tears and said, “I understand how you’re feeling, but we still have a job to do. There will be time for you to grieve, but I need you to perform right now. Make a hole and seal Applejack’s legs in the wall. If she wakes up and goes into a rage again… Goose may not be the only friend you lose today, you understand?”

I swallowed and nodded, even if my face betrayed me. I couldn’t really touch Applejack with my magic the way she was now, so I moved the castle around until her body was aligned the way mother wanted, then went to trapping my friend. Her whole lower body, both her forelegs, and a shackle to keep her neck in place; enough freedom for her to breath and nothing else. Goose was already too much. I… I can’t take any more of these feelings.

Once I was done, Mother let out an exhausted breath, let her hind legs relax, and fell to her haunches. Immediately being overwhelmed with concern, I ran to her side. “What’s wrong!?”

She shook her head and put her wing around me. “More than you could know. Sit with me, I… need a moment.”

---

When the noon sky turned to dusk, mother and I finally emerged from the training room. For as long as we were sitting still, it didn’t look like much had changed in the living room either. Rainbow had fallen asleep, wrapped around Scootaloo with tear dampened cheeks, Rarity was sitting next to them checking something on her phone, still in costume and silent like a stone, and Fluttershy was laying with her head buried under her mane against Goose’s chair.

The thing that had changed was Pinkie. She was hard at work in the kitchen, preparing some kind of meal as a lovely smell drifted in the air.

“How does it look?” mother asked.

Rarity let out a breath and shook her head. “Not good, to say the least. I don’t think Persona could’ve scripted a better response, at least from the internet media. Most ponies are simply confused. Your ‘nickname’ is trending right now and the biggest question on ponies’ minds is what you and Luna are. Luna put out a statement, declaring that most federal activity will be suspended until you recover, but she’s not answering any questions.”

Mother sighed. “Well, at least that is being taken care of. If nothing else, it gives me the time to analyze what in the world has happened to the Elements.” She left my side to look at the black gems above the chairs. I started to move toward them myself, but again the sickly energy made me not want to get too close.

These were the elements of Harmony. Here in this castle is where they’ve been resting all this time. It wasn’t so much that the old fragments lost their power, but the elements had reconstructed themselves somewhere else. Only mother and Luna would know what they used to feel like, but save for the few instances they’ve acted up in the past, they’ve never been anything more than little decorations.

No signs of being powerful or having enough magic to do much of anything in them, let alone give Applejack a power boost like the one today. Even when it did happen back in… the beginning of September, that was more like a small burst. Just enough for Applejack to sustain Trump Card for a few more seconds than usual. Just what she needed, when she needed it…

Why would it do that? It didn’t act in unison, it was like the single element on its own acted because… she needed it to. Was this the same phenomenon? No, even I can tell there’s… emotion embedded in this energy. This feels like it’s almost… the opposite. Not that it was what she needed when she needed it, but… what the elements wanted, when they wanted it. I wish I wasn’t so caught up watching, maybe if I’d paid more attention to my surroundings, then I could’ve been able to tell if they were working when… j-just before…

I sniffed and swallowed. Stop it! Now is… not the time for that. We’re not done. This isn’t over. It won’t be until Persona is dead, and until then I have to focus. Just like mother said, there will be a time to grieve.

I was about to step forward when I noticed mother standing beside me again. “What do you think happened here? Was this Applejack bending them to her will, or was this… something greater, acting in concert with her?”

Before I could answer, Pinkie called, “Dinner’s ready!” in a uniquely cheery voice. It wasn’t fake, it wasn’t laced with sadness underneath, it was real, genuine, sincere. She emerged from the kitchen with a full tray of dishes and all the food she could cram onto it and started setting places around the dining table.

Mother let out a short chuckle and turned away. “I suppose we can look into that later. They did always need a common trait to work with somepony. If hope has bound itself to anypony… it’s probably her.”

---

Food, as it happens, really does clear the mind. We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast this morning and it was already seven by the time Pinkie served us. It’s hard to think about something so basic when it feels like the world is crashing down on you.

Nopony said so much as a word before we started. However, in a rare circumstance, mother offered to pray before we ate. Of the things she will talk about with me, what she believes, where her faith lies, she… she won’t say anything about that. It was possible that the words only made sense to me, because I got the feeling she said it in our tongue, but even without understanding, everypony knew what she’d said.

“O Mother, who art thou in heaven, guide our dearest lost soul back to your loving embrace. May our futures be brighter than our darkest days, and may your light lead our lost loves home. Amen.”

One for him, one for her. I could never know everything about her. As old as she is, as much as she’s learned over her time, how she possibly could have grown into what she is today. How does this affect her? Does she feel the same sting we do, or is this something old and familiar to her? While I would be inclined to believe the latter… I just can’t tell if that’s right. I don’t think I could ask her either.

When we’d finished, the pervasive silence in the room was finally broken by Fluttershy. “What… W-what happened?”

Of all the ponies here, it felt almost like the ones you’d expect to be most accustomed to death were hit the hardest. I wasn’t sure if that said something about Goose, or if that said something about them. Fluttershy was almost in a worse state than Rainbow had been all day. Rarity had bit into her lip more than once based on the marks. I’ve never seen Mother look so tired, and Pinkie… didn’t look like she had cried once.

“I made a bet and lost,” mother eventually answered. She didn’t look at Fluttershy when she said it, she just kept her eyes down and stared at her empty plate.

Fluttershy’s eye twitched. She stood on her hind legs and said, “T-that’s not w-what I asked you!” Mother turned away, which only seemed to make her angrier.

Her teeth started to turn, but before she could do anything, Rarity answered her. “He was stabbed through the heart, Fluttershy. I didn’t have any time. Nopony saw it coming, there was… nothing to be done.”

Fluttershy flared her wings out and bashed the table with her hoof. “T-that’s not true! Y-you’re the m-most powerful pony on the p-planet! Y-you can do anything, y-you could’ve saved him! W-why didn’t you!? I-if you’d stepped in, i-if you’d just gotten off y-your ass and, a-and done something, h-he-”

“And done what!? Come out of nowhere swinging and burn us all alive in the process!? What could you have done? Could you have not transformed and fought back? Or had you already realized that he was too fast and powerful for you to do anything? Could I have saved time in an effort to predict the future? Could Rainbow have taken her sword when she left? Could Pinkie have been stealthier and not missed? Could Applejack have not hesitated and won the fight when we had the chance? Just what all could we have done, Fluttershy? If you have the answers now, why didn’t you have them when we needed them?”

Fluttershy made attempts to rise to Rarity’s challenge, but in the end she knew she couldn’t. It took Applejack taking the power of the elements to finally kill Sahaquiel, and she didn’t even manage that in one shot. If mother went out there without being empowered, she would’ve been in danger too. There was never a good solution to this, and once again we were saved by a… miracle, if that’s what you’d call it.

Finally, Fluttershy sat back down and put her head on the table, carefully hiding her face underneath her mane. In a volume lower than a whisper, the words, “I’m sorry,” lingered in the air.

Mother got up from her seat and put a hoof on Fluttershy’s shoulder. “It’s alright. Even I… believe I should’ve acted somehow, but as I have said many times now, I am no Goddess. I am bound by time and space just like everypony else and there are limitations on what I can and cannot do. For two thousand years we’ve been trying to learn to interfere with time and still only Rarity can postpone it.

“We can bend space to move locations at will with enough power behind it, but even tampering with her own magic brings us no closer to that lofty idea of ‘time travel.’ I cannot change the past, I cannot pause the present, and I cannot see the future, and I don’t expect any of you to either.”

Fluttershy turned and wrapped herself around Mother’s chest as best she could and started bawling her eyes out. “I-it’s not fair! It’s not fair, it’s n-not fair, it’s not fair! W-why did it have to be him!? I-it’s not fair!”

She almost looked surprised at first, but mother wrapped her wing around Fluttershy and let her cry. The great equalizer is anything but equal to the living, I suppose.

---

By the time Fluttershy had stopped crying, Pinkie had already cleaned up the dishes and made everypony tea. Pinkie had been very quiet all this time and I think that was probably the right move. What else could we do? This wasn’t just going to go away tomorrow, nopony was going to get over this before Sunday, who knows how long it would be? Will it weigh us down when the final confrontation happens? Will Applejack recover? Can we do it without her? Will mother have to burn Manehattan again just to stop Silicon? Will a second appearance of the Radiant Sun make all this confusion even worse? Uncertainty, sorrow, anguish… how do we move on from this?

“Maybe…” Pinkie began, for the first time since this afternoon, “We should… do a viewing… so we can at least try to move on.”

Finally pulling away from mother’s chest, Fluttershy wiped at her eyes and moved her mane out of her face. “Y-you… want to do w-what?”

Pinkie let out a deep sigh. “This is gonna sound awful, but we can’t… we can’t do,” she motioned to Fluttershy and Mother, “this all week. It’s not over; we’re gonna have to get back in the simulations, try to figure out if… if there’s a way to fix the elements, and, ya know, win the last fight.”

“B-but… how can…? W-we can’t win without him! W-what are you even saying!? Goose is… Goose is…!”

Fluttershy couldn’t finish that sentence, so Pinike finished for her. “Dead! D-E-A-D! Swimming with the fishes, six feet under, taken care of, muerto, no longer with us!”

Fluttershy’s mouth quivered, but she didn’t respond.

Pinkie shook her head. “Look, I know this sucks, but you can’t keep living if you don’t eat, alright? I’ve been here before. I… I had to bury Abuelo, remember? Just under three years ago; I was sixteen, I was alone, and I was barely strong enough to drag his body far enough to do it. He was… all I had to lose back then, but I still didn’t give up, and I did move on. ‘You still have plenty of life to live.’ It’s gonna hurt… probably for a long time, but we don’t have time for… this. So, let’s get it over with. You all know that’s what Goose would want.”

And that stung, more than anything else. We all knew Goose, we practically spent every day with him for two months. He lived here, he was a roommate, he was… almost like an older brother. He wouldn’t want us moping. Right about now is when he’d crack a joke to make everything a little bit lighter. I never realized…

Mother nodded thoughtfully and said, “I suppose you are right. I’d rather not have him where we eat, so gather round the living room table. The elements seem to have cooled a little, now that some time has passed. He was… always very aware of this possibility, I’m sure there’s a will or something similar in his file cabinet in the library. So much to do…” mother shook her head and let out a breath. She untangled herself from Fluttershy, slapped her cheeks with both hooves, then stood. “It’s always in times like these that we long for the days where time didn’t seem so precious. Come along.”

The… smell that the elements gave off earlier had dulled significantly since we’d come back up from the training room and, though it was still unpleasant, it wasn’t unbearable anymore. Once everypony was where they usually were, mother lit up her horn and flashed his body to the table.

At some point, somepony must’ve cleaned him up because there were no stains or signs of deterioration. All the armor was still intact, the only places that it was torn were the obvious ones, the weakest spots between the faulds and the tassets. Without it, there was no way a pony could move in this protective gear, and just underneath the enchanted plates was a heavy kevlar bodysuit, just in case something did find the gaps. And yet… none of that could save him from Sahaquiel’s strength behind the point of a sword. Right between the plates at his hips, all the way through and out his neck. What a horrible way to die. I’m… so sorry Goose. I… I couldn’t help.

Just then, an electric feeling shot through my body. There was a buzzing in my horn and I could feel as if the castle itself was trying to reach out. Not to me, but to Goose. Something was unbalanced. Something was missing. The castle… I… the elements demanded it be corrected.

As if I were a puppet watching something while trapped immobile within my own body, my magic started to flare up. One by one, strands of black energy shot like a web from my horn to the gems at the top of each chair, then finally, to Goose.

“Twilight!?” Mother called.

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even look at her. I had no control.

A final string shot itself at Rainbow’s head, and only when she felt it did she look up and stop crying. “W-what the hell?”

My body locked up; energy flowed from the black elements like a high-powered current on a closed loop with me as the wire. It travelled from Goose through me, back to the element above the chair he used to sit in, back to me and into Rainbow. It shook the magic string violently like the image of a sound wave, letting off a jumbled series of tones, chaotic and inharmonic as it moved through my head like nails scraping glass.

But then, as it passed back through the element and then into Rainbow, the tone shifted. The vibrating string became more uniform and pleasant, sounding off a simple chord that seemed to resonate through the castle. The halls sang as they echoed the clear bell tone, a D major chord, if I knew my music, and the walls shifted in color from their usual blue to black, then to a soft vibrant red. The very same color that the element above his chair usually was.

As the color and the sound started to fade, I noticed that the element above Goose’s chair transitioned from black back to red with the rest of the castle. The unbalance had lessened, loyalty was recovered. The chord was restored, but… incomplete.

Recognition with a truth I couldn’t comprehend gave me a bit more control of myself back, but I knew what needed to be done now. Focus in mind, the next piece of the chord to restore was… kindness. The strand of red magic that connected me to Rainbow retracted and a new one found Fluttershy.

Again, the process repeated itself. A vibrant green washed over the castle, An A major chord resonated with the crystal and, once again, another bit of the unbalance was clear. For Rarity, for generosity, a B major and a soft violet. For Pinkie, for hope, a C major and a crystal blue. Then, it hit me. Like feeling returning itself, I was covered in pins and needles all over as the black magic flooded through me. As if I was hit by warm waters washing gently over me, the castle sang in G Major and filled the walls with a violet hue.

The feeling faded, the strings dissipated, and all at once everything was still. My body had come back under my control and I felt a deep, profound calm.

After looking around at everypony’s stunned faces, Pinkie asked, “Uhhh… what the hell was that?”

Mother blinked. “I… can only make educated guesses, but I believe that most of the elements have righted themselves.” She narrowed her eyes at me, then glared at the last remaining black element. “Could you…?”

Already knowing, I said, “Yes.”

In an instant, she flashed the unconscious, still lightly radiating black energy, Applejack to the table and I restarted the spell. Though it was foreign when it first started, trying to cast it now was like talking to an old friend. I knew it. I knew what it would do, I knew that it was good that I do it, but the what and the why were still a mystery. Yet, all the same, I didn’t feel as if I needed answers to those questions. I was… I am… fine.

The strings attached themselves and, just like before, the process started. But then something was wrong. The violent inharmonic tone only grew louder and louder. The castle turned black, the world seemed to shake, and all at once, my magic was cut off from me. Like a light switch turned off, the energy dispersed, Applejack’s black aura flared up a little, the element remained black, and the castle slowly faded back to blue.

I turned away from the table and let loose my dinner. Pins and needles assaulted me from all sides and I felt a headache throb from the base of my horn through my entire skull as my magic synchronized again. Mother rushed to grab me and quickly went to rubbing my back to ease the pain. My shivering didn’t stop immediately, but sickness in my stomach did.

“Clearly, something needs to happen before we can fix this. Are you alright?” mother asked.

I wiped at my mouth and took a few deep breaths. “I… think so. She… she rejected me.”

“Rejected you? What do you mean? Twilight, if I’m completely honest here, I don’t understand this magic. I’ve never seen the elements behave this way, I’ve never heard of magic physically resonating and, quite clearly, there is more to the connection between you, this castle, the elements, and… everypony else here.”

“’Cept for me, apparently,” Scootaloo said.

Rainbow sniffed and rolled her eyes, then wrapped her wing around the little mare. “Oh, shut up. You’re important, maybe not to whatever magical bullshit this is, but at least to us.”

What do I mean? Rejected? That was the word, but why did I say it? It’s not as if the connection wasn’t there, it was almost like it… “Backfired…”

Mother tilted her head. “As in ‘magical backfire?’ Like a spell gone wrong?”

I nodded. “Yeah, when I… when I tried to resonate, she… she wouldn’t play with me. I’m not… she’s not… we are not close enough… to resonate.”

Mother clicked her tongue. “Twilight, I need more information. That doesn’t mean anything to…” then, she straightened up. “Resonate? Not close enough to resonate… hmm… On second thought… I have an idea. Pinkie, clean this up.”

“Wha- why me!? I had my foreleg broken today, can’t Scootaloo-”

“Rainbow, come with me, I need to talk to Brightness. For now, I will put Applejack back in the training room, and nopony is to approach her. We may not have her right now, but I think we can get her back.”

“We can?” I asked.

Mother nodded. “I do believe so. We’ll need Luna though. And probably a few new brands…”