The Advisor
Princess Twilight stood in the corridor of the solitary wing, biting her lip and crying silently as she stared into Cozy's vacant cell. The tray of food from earlier that night had long gone cold, the single candle in the piece of birthday cake had since burned down to a lump of wax, and the puddle of vomit had dried next to the knocked over chair. Right now she felt increasingly sick herself. Doctor Graymare was absolutely right; she was going about this the wrong way, and she didn't realize it until Cozy ended up in the hospital and she got rightfully screamed at.
She was better than this. As a Princess, as a pony, she had to be better than this.
She heard hoofsteps come down the stairs and enter the 'office' just outside the gate to the wing. She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and walked back down the empty corridor, to the currently unguarded gate, seeing as how there was currently nopony in the solitary wing. She turned the corner and saw the physician begin to sort through his desk.
"Doctor..." She began shakily, getting his attention. "Do you know how valuable it is to have an advisor who will stand up to put the advised in their place when they are obliviously in the wrong? I can't lose you. Not now." Twilight said, tears threatening the corners of her eyes again.
Graymare chose to remain silent, and looked at her expectantly; he had said his piece back in the intensive care unit.
"She won't set a single hoof back inside that cell, I swear it. I will open up as much of my schedule as I possibly can to help her along, but I can't stop being the ruler of Equestria for her. I need somepony who very clearly cares about her wellbeing as she goes through the most stressful ordeal of her life."
The physician set his bag on the desk, and cleared his throat.
"Your Majesty, I remember when I first met you when Rainbow Dash was brought in with that broken wing. I'm amazed at how far you've come in just a few short years, but this was unfortunately where your relative inexperience caused a lapse in judgement. You cannot fire a spell at a criminally sick mind, magically give them what every sane, well-adjusted mind already has, and then continue to treat them like a criminal. You have turned her into a completely new pony, in every sense of the words; a child that is now mortified by these memories of what she used to be; a body and mind that are now in a continuous state of revulsion at what she was, and that is entirely your doing. Let me make myself perfectly clear; I'm not going to play foalsitter until you come knocking. If you want me to stay, then I want daily commitment and interaction from you."
"You'll have it." Twilight immediately responded.
"Medications and other methods of pain management are at my sole discretion." Graymare demanded.
"Understood."
The doctor took a deep breath as he rubbed his forehead after a long and trying day.
"So what did you have in mind?"
Two days later...
Twilight retraced her steps from a few days earlier through the Canterlot Hospital ICU, with Doctor Graymare at her side. There was a bit more bustle this time around, but they managed to get down to the guarded room where another physician stood with the two EUP guards currently on shift.
"Well, her fever broke yesterday, and there doesn't seem to be any lasting damage. She's back in your custody as far as we're concerned, Your Majesty. Safe travels." The doctor said, making a quick note on his clipboard before giving a short bow and headed down the hallway on his rounds. The princess took a deep breath, got a nod of reassurance from Graymare, and slowly opened the door to the room.
She felt a pang of guilt in her heart when she noticed that Cozy had immediately begun to tremble upon making eye contact with her. The filly took in a shaky breath, and gripped the ends of her bed sheets. As much as the words didn't belong together, Twilight could tell that she was clearly terrified of the Princess of Friendship.
"I don't know what you want from me... But please stop... Please don't send me back down there..." Cozy begged, beginning to softly cry.
Twilight swallowed back tears of her own, and approached her bedside.
"Cozy... I owe you an apology." Twilight softly began, sitting down next to the bed and gently placed a hoof on Cozy's as it clutched the sheet and blanket.
"What Sunset, Starlight, and I have done to you has never been attempted before in recorded history. The very ethics of it is certainly debatable. I was partly wrong; you coming to terms with your newfound empathy and conscience is going to take more than time. It will also take help from other ponies, and a considerable change in surroundings. Shutting you away with nothing more than the very new and foreign emotions and sensations was irresponsible and cruel of me, and I'm very, very sorry. You are my responsibility, and I give you my word, Cozy, I am going to be better for you. Starting right now."
With that, she stood up, lifted her hoof off of the bed, and offered it to help her up. Staring uncertainly at it for a moment, Cozy Glow removed the blankets from over her, and took the princess' hoof in her own, and stood up, wiping her eyes.
"O... Okay..." She replied softly, jumping off of the bed. Twilight smiled at her, and motioned for her to follow. The pair stepped out into the hall, and she immediately saw Graymare and smiled up at him. He had been the one near-constant over the past month, and she was glad to still have him here.
"So, we've got some new arrangements for you, Cozy. Are you ready?" Graymare asked, and she nodded, thinking she didn't really have much choice. The doctor nodded at Twilight, and with a flash from her horn, they were whisked away from the hospital hallway, and found themselves outside, and Cozy's gaze rose to meet a four-story white stone tower off of the east castle courtyard.
She figured the only thing missing was a dragon, and with a considerably longer mane, she could be Raponezel.
She noticed that there was an EUP guard at the base of the stairs, and another one up at the front door before the stairs wrapped around the tower multiple times, all the way up to the top. Together the three ponies climbed the stairs, and stepped inside.
"I was brought to the realization that I haven't been nearly as supportive as I should have been in the first weeks of your rehabilitation. But just to be clear, this is still house arrest. Doctor Graymare will stay here with you, and he'll be helping you with whatever needs that may arise." Twilight explained as they entered the tower and immediately made a left down to the basement level. Already, it was warmer than the corridors of the dungeon.
The bottom of the stairs opened up to a round living space. A small kitchenette, a couch, a twin bed, nightstand, and desk were crammed into the deceptively small space, but it already felt far larger than the eight by eight cobblestone room she had inhabited for the past month.
"I thought it would be best to start you off with this." Twilight said, her magic reaching into her saddlebags, and coming out with a book and quill, which she lowered down and presented to Cozy. The hardback cover had her cutie mark engraved into it, and when she opened it, she discovered that the first page, and all remaining pages were blank.
"A journal, for when you feel you need to write your thoughts out." Twilight told her.
"Writing out your thoughts, emotions, and worries can be a great way to get new insights on them, or come back to them later with a new point of view." Graymare added.
"I thought it would be a nice way to gauge your progress, and give you something to do. There's a small library and study room upstairs; we can take weekly trips to Canterlot Library if you'd like to get some new books to read." Twilight told her.
Cozy closed the blank journal, looked at the cover momentarily, and then looked up at Twilight.
"Thank you, Princess. I... I don't know what else to say right now."
Twilight smiled down at the filly. She was still scared, but it was no longer scared, and angry, and in blinding pain.
"You don't need to say anything else right now. It was wrong of me to put you down there with no way to confront and deal with these thoughts and memories. We didn't get things started off on the right hoof, but now we can try again. I'll be clearing time in my schedule to check up on you each and every day. So, on that note, I'll leave you two to get acquainted, and I'll see you two tomorrow."
Twilight's horn glowed, and she vanished in a flash of purple light, and Graymare turned to Cozy who had gone over to set the blank journal on her new desk.
"Well, I confess I'm not the most amazing cook, but how do you feel about some dinner?" He asked. Cozy looked back at him as she opened the journal to the first page, getting the first inkwell uncapped.
"That sounds great, Doctor Graymare, thank you." Cozy answered as she gently set the inkwell down, before dipping the tip of the quill in, and looked at the first empty page of her journal.
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9930604
She never dealt with kids that refuse to listen, she mostly had kids listening to her, the CMCs, her niece and Spike.
Twilight’s act of kindness will not immediately remove the emotional damage she’s done to Cozy. Twilight unknowingly made Friendship a threat; accept friendship or suffer
9931023
Even worse, here it was "accept the friendship AND suffer because your conscience doesn't know how accept what you did in the past without one."
Twilight's certainly taking a step in the right direction with this, although this will still probably be a very bumpy road for Cozy moving foreward. This is an interesting way to do a reformation.
Lots of feels in a very short chapter. It's always nice when so few words can say so-so much.
It seems Cozy's 'Golly', 'Gosh' and other old-fashioned terms are no longer there. Perhaps the spell wiping those out of her vernacular? Or more that they were all fake to allow for her deceptions?
I'm glad the doctor is taking so well to Cozy. She needs a 'parent' figure and one who will stand up for her over put her through torture. What Twilight did to Cozy is so much like what Luna did though the Tantibus to herself. Pain only makes more pain until it can be replaced with understanding and mental recovery.
The scene that stuck out most was Cozy gripping the sheets in fear. It's something you'd never think of her doing. This is the most vulnerable I've ever seen her portrayed.
Nice work!
What Twilight, Sunset, and Starlight did reminds me a lot of the concepts in "Metal Gear Solid". However, instead of nano-machines manipulating one's emotions like SOP, we have magic infusing emotion into Cozy.
Well it's certainly going to be interesting to see where the story goes from here.
The use of the journal is an interesting touch. In my own story I did a period where Rainbow Dash was on suicide watch due to mental torture at the hooves of Nightmare Moon. I considered suicide-proofing the journal idea by having a quill enclosed in a plexiglass box, and enchanted to write as she dictated, only for it to freeze up when she used non-native Equestrian words and had to spell them out. But I eventually abandoned the journal idea entirely.
I expect that with pieces missing, ms glow also could not feel hatred. She might be feeling in now and not know it. For what Twilight has done. It's an equally new feeling. But ms glow is smart in her own way and hopefully her doctor will help guide the sorting out of these new emotions as this initially blurred rainbow of new feelings separates into distinct colors. Not all of them nice. Twilight can hide behind the profound respect all ponies have for alicorns due to generations of conditioning by Celestia. And not even know it.
Twilight's reflection on how she treated Cozy - well, DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!
Let's hope this helps with the little Eldritch one's trauma.
9931023
Wow, repeating what I said in another fic. Someone's catching on