99 Epilogue
The evening after their return from the System, Twilight trotted through Canterlot Castle. Dash and Celestia had slept through most of the day. While Dash seemed largely rejuvenated when she awoke, Celestia would need much more rest before she returned to normal, if Twilight was any judge. Still, she had risen and gamely joined in when Pinkie arrived in full party mode, and Twilight reflected that there would be more to Celestia’s recovery than mere sleep.
She found Dash sitting on a balcony, staring up at the stars over Equestria. Twilight thought she could just barely make out the soft glow miles away that was Ponyville. She quietly moved over and sat down next to the pegasus, gazing up at the night sky too. Dash glanced over at her and gave a tight smile when she saw the unicorn. “Hey, Twilight. Sorry to disappear like that. It was getting a little crowded in there.” She ruffled her wings.
Twilight mentally reviewed the attendance list of Pinkie’s Welcome Home Celestia party—six friends from Ponyville and two alicorn princesses in a banquet hall fit for two hundred ponies—and nodded in understanding. “No apology necessary. I think it’s perfectly normal, expected even, for you to want a little space.”
They gazed out into the night. Stars shimmered above them in a clear, soothing blanket. Dash sighed, and Twilight looked over at her. “Are you doing okay?”
Dash pursed her lips. “I guess so. I just can’t… stop thinking about what it was like, in there. I hated that place, Twilight. I felt so… so trapped! Normally I can fly home from anywhere, but…” She shuddered, and Twilight nodded.
There was companionable silence again for a while, and then Dash said, “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you in there. I mean you, you. Well, it was bad enough the first time, when I thought Spark was you. But then when you showed up for real I just—for a second I was so mad, because you were supposed to be outside to get us out of that mess, but I couldn’t stay mad, because at the end of the day, I was just so happy to see you. The real you.”
Twilight remembered that moment too, and then one that had immediately followed: meeting her program counterpart, being pulled into a hug, and hearing her own voice, weighed down by a millennium of regret, beg her to take care of Rainbow Dash. In her memory, she nodded back, a silent promise. She found herself echoing the motion in the present as a frown creased her brow, the hazy glimmer of something beginning to form in her mind.
Dash distracted her by snorting and saying, “Not that it lasted. I mean, right after that we had to deal with Cracken—err, APP—and those dragons, and then, well. Let’s just say for a while there I didn’t really think I’d be coming home.”
Twilight’s breath caught, but Dash didn’t notice. She was still looking out into the distance. “That rainboom was something else, though. It’s been… it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of those. And then when it… Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to top that here in Equestria.”
She turned to give Twilight a wry grin, but it quickly became a frown at the abject look on the unicorn’s face. “Twilight? What’s wrong? Everything’s cool, we all made it out in the end. Everything can go back to normal now... no worries.”
Twilight shook her head furiously. “I don’t think things should go back to normal, Rainbow.” Her throat got tight, but she forced herself to keep talking. “I owe you… I owe you an enormous apology. I was so caught up in trying to find Celestia, trying to figure out what she had been doing—”
“Twilight,” Dash said evenly. “I get it, it’s oka—”
“No!” Twilight nearly shouted, and Dash froze. “No,” she said, quieter. “It’s not okay. You didn’t deserve how I treated you, what I said to you.” Despite the vagueness of her words, Twilight could tell from the look on Dash’s face that they were both of them remembering the same very specific moment years ago. “I was so… so overwhelmed... But it doesn’t matter. You’re a good pony, Rainbow. A good friend. You always have been, even when I was too caught up in my own problems to see it.”
A tear formed in Dash’s eye and broke free, trailing down her face. She didn’t move, staring straight at Twilight, who held her gaze unwaveringly.
“I’m so, so sorry, Rainbow.”
Dash searched her eyes for a moment, then finally looked away. “I really, uh… Well, let’s just say I think I’d given up on ever hearing that.” She rubbed her face, and when her hoof came away wet, she looked down at it in surprise.
Twilight just watched her silently, that glimmering idea floating around in her mind, looking for something to latch onto.
After a moment, Dash cleared her throat and looked back up. “I couldn’t stand seeing you that way. I couldn’t understand how the others were able to just… just let you hole up down there. I thought if I could… if there was something I could do, some way I could help you, but…”
“But I pushed you away.”
Dash nodded slowly. “So I just… waited. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“And you were still waiting, until last night.”
Dash blew out a sigh. “Yeah, I guess I was.”
Twilight nodded. “So, no. Things shouldn’t go back to normal. Things can’t go back to normal. You deserve better.”
Dash smiled sadly. “It’d be nice to have my friend back.”
Twilight shook her head in perplexment. “I can’t believe you waited ten years for me to get my head out of my rear, as Applejack might say. You really are the Element of Loyalty, aren’t you?” she said fondly.
Instead of grinning back at her like she’d expected, Dash just looked uncomfortable. “I…”
A sudden thought, her mind making a connection. “And then you… and then you tried to…” Twilight trailed off, staring at her pegasus friend as that glimmer finally crystallized into full, true understanding. “And then you were willing to give up your life for me. To save me and Celestia.”
Dash swallowed hard. “I mean... you’d have done the same for me. I know you would have. Spark—well. What are—what are friends for?” Twilight’s keen eyes picked out the faintest rosy tinge on her cheeks.
She kept gazing thoughtfully at Rainbow Dash, and Dash grew more and more uncomfortable. Then the unicorn mare blinked and smiled. “Of course I would have, Rainbow. But even so, thank you for being such a good… friend.” And after the briefest moment of calculation, she leaned over and kissed Dash on the cheek.
Dash stiffened and then immediately relaxed, and it was like watching a lifetime of weight and tension evaporate in moments, and for the first time in a decade Twilight saw the joyful Rainbow Dash she’d known her first year in Ponyville, and she thought to herself that if either one of them was an idiot, it was her. Years like this, and I never even suspected… Oh, Rainbow.
She forced back the guilt again and vowed to do everything she could to make it up to the most loyal pony she knew. She already had an idea of how to get started; she made a mental note to speak to Luna about it at the first opportunity.
Twilight looked over at Dash, who had allowed a very stupid grin to spread across her face and kept glancing furtively back at her. She grinned back and stood up. “C’mon, Rainbow. Everypony’s waiting for us.”
Dash stood too, and they turned and walked back to their friends together.
“So this is what you’d been hiding all these years,” Dash said, nosing through some of the parchments on Twilight’s desk.
They had all returned to Ponyville several days ago, and as soon as the others had made the time, Twilight had shown them her basement lab. Spike had probably been the most affronted, astonished to learn what had been lurking under his home for so long, but by and large everyone had understood Twilight’s unhappy position, caught between her best friends and her princess’s wishes.
She had shown them around the equipment and then, realizing none of them had the necessary knowledge or inclination to keep up, around the simulation of Ponyville, which at least looked recognizable.
“Land sakes,” Applejack had said. “That looks just like the farm. Why, there I am, buckin’ that tree!” On the screen, tiny apples fell from a tiny tree into a tiny basket.
Rarity had expressed polite interest, though it was clear that in the end, she couldn’t quite see the point. Fluttershy had cooed at the little simulated animals. Pinkie had been excited to see her virtual double, and strangely the double had seemed nearly as excited, despite having no way of knowing they were there; the two Pinkies did a little jig together. Dash had lurked at the back of the group, until Rarity had suggested they should all move on, as Twilight and Dash probably had a lot to talk about. She had shot Twilight a very pointed look as they all called out their goodbyes and climbed the stairs to the library.
“Yes, this was it,” Twilight said, with a touch of false cheeriness. “Not much point to it now.”
Dash glanced around the lab, taking in the computational towers with their blinking lights, and finally turned to the screen. Twilight realized it was the first time she’d seen Dash acknowledge its existence, and she watched quietly as Dash stared up at it. She saw Dash’s eyes go hard and lips start curling down, and she turned to look up at the screen as well.
They’d left it centered on Ponyville’s town square, and stretched out on one of the clouds floating over the market was a tiny Rainbow Dash, snoring in the warm sun. Twilight looked back and forth from Dash to the screen, and then carefully made her way to the control console and entered a few commands.
The screen froze, and then the image on it defocused, fading to nothing as one by one her computational towers shut down. As the cooling fans spun to a stop the room became quieter than it had been in years, and she walked over to Dash, her hoofsteps echoing.
“There was a point to it,” Dash said abruptly. She paused, Twilight watching her closely. “What you were doing down here… it’s what let you save Celestia. Save me.”
Twilight nodded. “But that’s over with, now. I don’t need it any more. I’ve spent enough time locked away down here, ignoring everything else.”
Dash thought for a moment, then asked, “What’s Celestia going to do with hers?”
“She shut hers down, too, before she went to bed that first morning back. I think you had already passed out upstairs,” Twilight needled gently, and Dash offered up the ghost of a smile. “She said it was too far gone, the corruption too deep-seated, to save the simulation. She’d have to start it over. She’s not going to.”
Dash blinked at that, frowning slightly. “She’s not? But what about all the talk about… about testing things out before she does them for real, to make sure they’re good ideas?”
“She said she’d just have to wing it,” Twilight said, and Dash put her eyebrows up. Twilight grinned. “That’s what she said. That except for the occasional mistake, things had been going well enough without running predictions in a simulated Equestria, and, well, she didn’t want to risk…”
“Risk it happening again?”
Twilight frowned thoughtfully. “No, not this happening again, exactly—though she didn’t want that either, and I watched her melt the Gateway into slag after she shut the System down. I think it was more…” She pursed her lips.
“She told me she had originally intended to show ponies how to use these computational engines to make our lives easier, but she kept revising her designs, finding ways to improve them. She didn’t want to give us something half-baked. She thought a gift from a princess to her subjects needed to be as close to perfect as she could make it. She got so caught up in what she was doing, she didn’t properly consider the consequences of her actions, of what might go wrong.”
Twilight swept a foreleg through the air, taking in the lab around them. “I know what she means. I let the same thing happen to me, trying to follow in her hoofsteps. I lost sight of what actually matters.”
Dash made a noncommittal noise. “What are you going to do now?”
Twilight smiled. “Spend more time with my friends, for a start. And I can get back into my own research, things I’ve been meaning to study up on but haven’t had time for.” She eyed Dash. “What about you?”
Dash started, clearly not expecting the question. “What about me?”
“What are you going to do now?”
Dash shrugged, looked up at the sky—or where the sky would be, if they weren’t in the basement of the library. “Go back to work, I guess. Gonna have to make missing that shift up to Open Skies somehow. Same old, same old. I’m not the one who locked myself away for ten years.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?” Dash stared back at her, uncomprehending. “Come on, I actually have something for you upstairs.”
They wound their way through the silent computational towers. At the top of the stairs, Twilight extinguished the lamps, plunging the room into darkness. They emerged into the library’s ground floor, and Twilight led Dash to a table by the front door with some scrolls and parchments piled on it. She sifted through them, Dash looking on curiously, until she found the object of her search and levitated it over to Dash. “Here you go.”
Dash took it and opened it, reading silently, confusion growing on her face. “I—what? ‘Dear Rainbow Dash, It is my pleasure to extend this invitation for you to join the Wonderbolts Academy summer training session. Signed, Spitfire.’” She squinted and peered closer at the bottom of the note. “‘P.S. It’s about time.’” She flipped to the other papers. “It’s an application. It’s… it’s already filled out. What is this?”
Twilight smiled softly. “Princess Luna’s last official action as sole ruler of Equestria was to ask the Academy Commandant to open up a spot for you in training. It turns out she hadn’t needed to; Spitfire’s been holding one for you for a few years now. All you have to do is sign it and send it back, and you’re in.”
Dash shook her head, retreating a step. “But— I—”
“Rainbow,” Twilight murmured, and Dash relaxed a little. “It’s okay. Celestia’s back in Canterlot and I’m back in the library. You don’t need to be quite so selfless any more. You can, and should, do something for yourself.”
Dash was silent. Twilight didn’t understand why she wasn’t more excited. Celestia had been right: this had been Dash’s dream since she was a filly. She gazed into her friend’s eyes, and was surprised to see a flash of fear there. Dash’s eyes widened a split second later, when she realized Twilight had seen it. The pegasus coughed and broke eye contact. She can’t possibly be afraid of making it into the Wonderbolts; she just outflew three dragons, and rainboomed in the middle of it. So why…
“It’s late,” Dash said, tucking the invitation under her wing. “I should get going.”
She’s hurt. I’ve… hurt her feelings? I’m encouraging her to follow her dreams… which means going to train with the Wonderbolts… which means going away. I did that in Canterlot and now she thinks I’m trying to push her away. Again. After everything. Oh, Rainbow.
“Ah… yes,” Twilight said. “You must be tired.” She went to open the front door, to show Dash out, but she stopped after a moment. “Unless… you’d like to have a sleepover? The new Daring Do comics came in yesterday, we could read those. I’m pretty sure we have some snacks, and in the morning, well, Spike’s been dying to try his new alfalfa pancake recipe on somepony else.” She smiled hopefully at the pegasus. “What do you say?”
Dash had been watching her carefully as she spoke, and Twilight couldn’t read her expression. But after a moment, Dash broke into a small smile. “That sounds really good.”
“Great! Why don’t you grab whatever you want in the kitchen? I’ll let Spike know we’re having company. Meet me upstairs?”
“Sure,” said Dash, and Twilight trotted off, pleased things had worked out.
She paused on the second-floor landing and looked down to the main floor. Dash was still standing by the entry table, staring into space. She came to and pulled the Wonderbolts application back out from under her wing, setting it on the table. She leafed to the last page, found a quill, scrawled something, then rolled up the application and left it sitting on the entry table.
After a moment, Dash let out a quiet whoop and did a somersault, landing nimbly on her feet with a little dance, a broad grin on her face, before cantering into the kitchen.
Twilight smiled to herself, warmth spreading through her, and went to find those comic books.
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Nice conclusion.
Still sad for Spark...
This was an amazing Tron crossover, both storyline wise and character development wise.
I do wish it didn't have to end, but overall, I give this a solid 10/10.
I did, myself, absolutely love this. As an ardent fan of TRON and, of course, FiM, this was a dream come true to see a work like this have thought, care, and attention given to it that I wasn't sure I would see.
Without being too overly verbose, I thought this ticked all my boxes, and I'm happy to get the bonus nuggets of trivia and BTS at the end here, too. Absolutely loved this, definitely taking a firm spot in my favorites.
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Thank you all very much! I'm thrilled you enjoyed it.
I honestly never saw any of the TRON movies and I'm so unfamiliar with them that I say any because I don't know if there's only two. I think your cover art was what got me to read it, it looked so cool and now I'm just happy to see one of the earliest stories I ever started finish, it was pretty good too. Thanks for finishing it up over the years.
Well it's been very fun! We think you did quite well adapting everything.
A little sad that Spark was apparently not saved, she clearly earned Isomorph status with that spell, a feat that accordingly wasn't able to be performed by a "mere program" until that moment. Tragic.
Thanks for the awesome ride!
YES! Seven years waiting to see the end of the hiatus... Finally, I can read it!
The romance in this reminds me a lot of The Games We Play for some reason
In the making since 2011, huh? Well, this has been a magical journey. Thank you for writing this!
Woo! That was a great story, RBDash!
Thank you for writing it!
That was good. I'm glad to finally see this as a complete story after all these years.
Little surprised to see the end result of turning all the technology off, but then again everyone inside was dead and everyone outside was traumatized, so there's probably nobody left who has any reasons to keep playing with it.
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Thank you all very much for reading (and commenting!)
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This is high fuckin' praise to me that IMO I do not deserve at all lmao
...But you know what, the more that I think about this I think I can almost kinda see what you mean? Huh.
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Perhaps it's my subconscious railing against the introduction of advanced tech in Equestria!
nice job on story
Nice job
Huh. So you did finish it after all. Cool.
-M
Okay, that was a) pretty damn cool, and b) seriously freaky.
Do you have any idea how much of that that felt eerily similar to my style of writing? I just re-read my stuff over the last couple of days and this feels hauntingly familiar to the last revision of my only long story – which is also my earliest work. That's both good and bad, as I have to admit I found my own rather disappointing, even if I'm still very pleased that it shows how much I progressed!
What it really shows, though, is just how much better the framing and pacing works here than it did in your original draft you shared with me. I can't remember the details, but I remember what issues I'd taken with it to prompt a discussion. Where this got rebuild to it's significant benefit, I never did reconstruct my original fic and it suffers for it. Here there is a much more consistent feel of what I feel is my snappier, more streamlined writing from later years. I even predicted exactly when the bad guy shows up while you were doing the quick scene cuts because it's almost exactly how I would have done it – just maybe a little better than I could have done it. Which is really a grandiose way of saying it's the sort of prose I like to read because it's the sort I like to write.
With regard to following the source material on the TRON Legacy side, I did appreciate how you were able to parallel, subvert, and sometimes invert situations so that it was never quite clear how it would go. It made it much nicer to hit those word for word recitations because you couldn't assume they'd be there or what context they'd be in. I also think you did a great job of capturing the pace of the film. It's a very paint-by-numbers film but it does what it does with a very distinct brevity and relentlessness. It's never really fast paced, but they are on the clock. Even with the bits you changed, you still kept the sense of urgency when it might have appeared to vanish on the surface, the portal first shutting off for example. I had kind of assumed that Spark would be the one to get out, though, to mirror the film a little. More dramatic, perhaps, but arguably less MLP.
I think I'd rather the short Twi/Luna chapter not have been there, though. I don't feel like it added anything, but it did lose a little of that pacing. It's not like it hurt the story, but it was a pile of words that didn't help. Again, it's the sort of thing I used to do and can only really recognise with several years separation from those days. All in all, though, I'm glad I happened to take a look and see if it was done while I dropped by. When you didn't contact me again, I wondered if I'd overstepped my bounds with the offered help. If the finished result is anything to go by, it certainly feels like I helped.
Happy trails to you and your girlfriend-turned-fiancée-turned-wife.
M, out.
Finally got around to reading this, and damn was it good!
Finished this last week, but didn't get around to writing a review.
This was really good! The set up was intriguing and did a great job justifying a Tron story in the MLP setting, from Twilight working through Celestia's efforts to Celestia's justification for making this in the first place. On that end, I did think it was a bit odd that the story didn't go much into what actually caused RBD to go bad, but it isn't a dealbreaker.
Going in, I thought that with the story length, this would be relatively slow, but it actually moves at a pretty fast clip. That said, it would have been nice to spend more time with the digital versions of the characters; they die off pretty quickly.
The action sequences were pretty well done, though it is kind of amusing how the first guard Rainbow Dash encounters is too strong to deal with, but then she fights off all her later foes pretty well.
Overall, good job!
So glad I finally got around to reading this! Apologies it's taken me so long, but it was well-work the journey. Now I want to watch Legacy again, though I might be disappointed with the story given that you were able to tweak some of the wonky parts.
As a datahoarder of sorts I am sad that they shut down the simulations, but I suppose it makes sense. I can only hope that maybe somepony somewhere preserved the final program data states of our lost virtual friends.
Excellent, excellent work in getting this done after so many years. I wasn't there for the start or many of those years, but I've seen you talk about it enough that I feel like I've been on part of that journey with you. Gives me hope that someday I may get around to revisiting my old story too.
Thanks for the ride!
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Honestly it could be read as strong/very close friendship too and I'm not against that!
Though I guess I did give in and put a Romance tag on it, I remember wafflingOh uh this was really more of a "boy now I want to reread it" so I did 😳👉👈
But thank you! I do think it's neat to get that sort of behind-the-scenes look at what authors are doing/thinking.
Cool!!
Hell yeah!
Finally finished it after going "oh hey, Tron!" all those years ago. Yeah, the aesthetics was top notch even if the plot was a little thread bare and nonsense, but hey we now have horse!
Very fun to revisit S1/2 era for this story again. The final battle at the portal was great. Spark ... we'll miss her. It doesn't make sense they could just download themselves out, but oof either way.
Completely unrelated, had a funny shower thought where Celestia sacrifices herself and Spark wakes up in Celestia's body by accident
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This is even funnier if you backport it to TRON Legacy and have Quorra wake up in the real world in Kevin Flynn's body and now Sam gets to go on a romantic motorcycle ride with his dad. 😍
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Well at least Quorra won't have to deal with a complete lack of personal ID or paper history. Now all she has to deal with is explaining "him" disappearing for 10 years.
I finally had the chance to read this story. I Vaguely remember reading the original one. Few years later I saw the rewrite and was excited to see it. Though never had the chance to read it until a couple days ago. I am so glad that I finally had to the chance to read and finish it. Thank you for making such an awesome story. Good luck to all your next stories.