1. Now

Principal Celestia always has wings in her dreams.

It's not always a flying thing. (There was the time she gave a report to the school board in the nude, and she spent the whole dream trying to cover herself with them.) And she's not always the only one. (That one unforgettable dream with her little sister.) But it's the sole constant of her inner life. She always has wings in her dreams — radiant, unblemished white — and when she spreads them she feels a wind nobody else seems to sense, and when she folds them warm feathers tickle her hips like a kiss of light.

Then the alarm clock bleats, and her fingers fumble for the snooze button, and she stares out toward the rising sun, and she showers dresses cooks eats, drives parks opens greets, loves chides warns guides keeps it bottled up inside —

They need a principal, after all. They don't need a dreamer.

And then one day, her top student causes tens of thousands of dollars of property damage to the school.

That's not how anyone else on the scene would describe it. It's not even how she sees it. (Less abstract finance and more "six horse-eared girls blasting a bat-winged demon out of the air with beams of rainbow light.") It's magical. A dream come to life.

But even as the impossible unfolds in front of her eyes — even as a lifetime of self-denial warps and buckles, and her phantom wings quiver at the edge of physicality, screaming to be unfolded — even as her perception brushes the contours of that ethereal wind and plucks at its flow, as her hair begins to involuntarily billow out in the hot humid stillness — even as she knows, like she knows her name, that she could splay her limbs and rise from the ground and have the world behold an angel in its benevolent glory — the instincts that kick in are the ones that brought her to that moment to begin with.

She sees her students.

She sees hundreds of innocent children whose first exposure to magic isn't playing the hero and defeating the villain, but rather waking up amid a scene of chaos and devastation. Children staring at a new life defined by forces out of their control — a life where they don't matter. Children whose normal has just been brutally ripped away, with no guarantee they'll ever find it again.

So she clenches her back muscles, forcing the feeling down. She strolls out into the courtyard and hands Twilight Sparkle the crown for the Fall Formal. Behind her, Luna (who follows her lead, bless her heart) assigns Sunset Shimmer detention.

That, the children understand. The ups and downs of a school year. And it's that that they cheer as the lingering magic recedes.

She sees their faces, and instantly knows it was worth it.

But she's terrified to sleep that night. She lies sprawled on her back on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling, willing herself to burst into tears. The tears don't come.

If she goes to sleep, she'll dream. If she dreams …

Now that she has beheld winged girls with her own eyes, she's not sure if she's more afraid that her dream-self won't have wings any more, or that her dream-self will.

The sun rises, after an approximate eternity. She sits up stiffly and stumbles to the mirror. She's a mess. She showers and dresses and cooks and eats and somehow manages to avoid two separate car accidents on the way to school and mechanically staggers into her office and puts her head in her hands and finally, finally, breaks down sobbing.

She realizes it's Saturday.

She goes home.

2. Then

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As a child, Celestia believed she was an angel.

That was her only context for the wings, back then. Memories of Sunday school and church iconography (so vague, so distant; it all feels lifetimes away), and dreams that didn't match her body.

At first, her parents thought she wanted to be an angel when she grew up, which they found adorable. Then they realized what she actually meant, and thus began the increasingly stern talks with their pastor.

She went through a phase, sort of, where she thought she was a bird magically transformed into a human. She never really believed it — it was spirituality by compromise, not obvious inner truth — but being an angel was upsetting her parents, and she was still struggling to find a way to understand the wings.

She tried to tell them about being a bird. She thought they'd be proud she was putting "the angel thing" behind her. That led to several sessions with an expensive upstate psychiatrist.

She was too scared to think much about her wings after that.

When word reached her of the crash, Celestia had just turned 18.

Luna was inconsolable (she remembers: vaguely, distantly, lifetimes away). Celestia was fine, though. She knew she was fine because she had to be. With Mom, Dad and Grandmam suddenly gone, she was the only adult Luna had left. And there was only one way to heal them both: Wipe the past away as if it had never existed.

Maybe — she dared to think, if not to voice — this was the moment she had been born with dream-wings for. It was an impossible tragedy. The sort that it would take an angel to fix.

There was a huge mess with the living trust. Luna talked to the trustee behind Celestia's back and he spun her some line about "offering" to keep control so he could "help the sisters manage their finances responsibly". Tried to rope Celestia in, too, with an out-of-date copy of her parents' will and some platitudes about what they would have wanted. But she couldn't let him take advantage of Luna's fragility. Celestia was an adult now, and the family assets (and her sister) were her legal responsibility. That bastard was trying to stop her from spreading her wings.

Celestia hired a lawyer. (Litigate, liquidate, liberate.) The trustee started looking more and more haggard at their meetings — presumably with the stress of maintaining the deceptions that kept Luna sitting silently, tearfully, on his side of the table. There was a court date. Celestia won decisively. There was an appeal. There were delays. Luna turned 18.

Celestia's heart twisted when her sister walked into the next hearing with a lawyer of her own. Suddenly the whole matter was accusations and countersuits and depositions. The knives were out on every little thing.

She swung back. It ripped Celestia's heart in two to fight family, but Luna was a child compromised by grief, claiming adulthood on a technicality of age, and if she was going to be immature enough to cling to the trustee's lies …

Ultimately, Luna's resolve broke. They met for an out-of-court settlement. Luna got the fixer-upper second home in Dream Valley and her old college fund. Celestia got the rest — close to three million dollars cash, even after the lawyers' cuts.

That day, they exchanged a grand total of six words which weren't about the money.

It was their last conversation for a decade.

She remembers that dream like she just awoke from it.

Luna stands on tiptoe on the edge of a cliff on the world's tallest mountain. Fierce grey stormclouds smother everything, and icy wind whips at their bare skin. Celestia's never been here before, and yet her heart aches at the beauty the storm obscures: beneath them, she knows, the land rolls away, pristine emerald green out to the shimmering sapphires of distant seas.

"I got my wings!" Luna announces (somehow audible over the howls of the storm). She spreads them, and they are immense and magnificent, like a midnight-blue shadow looming over her thin and pale arms.

A gust of wind buffets Celestia. She staggers sideways, but recovers. Thunder rolls ominously below.

Fear grips her heart. She has to protect her younger sister.

"Luna, no!" Celestia sprints forward toward her serene, unmoving sibling in the tar-pit manner of nightmares, flailing and straining and making little progress. "Close them!"

Luna's face curls, indignant. "You should be proud of me," she accuses. "I thought you wanted us to fly together!"

"Not now!" The wind is tearing at her words, stealing breath from her lungs.

"Then when?"

"When it's safe!"

Luna frowns. The wind howls and bites, numbing Celestia's fingers. She's running out of time. So she does the only thing she can to save Luna: reaches out to rip the wings from her shoulders.

Luna flinches back, shocked. Celestia's fingers miss by inches. The wind screams like a wounded dragon, blasting Celestia back.

There's a frozen moment where they lock eyes. The storm goes silent, and Celestia is pinned only by the withering weight of her sister's outrage.

Then Luna whirls and dives into the maelstrom.

She vanishes almost instantly.

Celestia screams, and flings herself over the edge. The clouds grow fangs, and —

After the settlement, Celestia flew to Europe (a vaguely distant place: a few thousand miles and a few lifetimes away). A continent defined by its history. No better place to escape hers.

The Bittish nobility's parties glinted like gemstones, and she blazed into them like a sun. For years, she felt like the light of the world. Then the money ran out, and she began to lose her shine. One last desperate gleam caught the eye of some fifth son of the royal family, and he fell head over heels for her, and she talked herself into a whirlwind royal wedding before either of them could have second thoughts.

The press judged her. Her party acquaintances did, too. Her resolve for public appearances quickly crumpled; she tried focusing on her life at the castle and playing at domesticity. But the shine of Blueblood's conquest wore off quickly, and his interest in her dropped away once she was no longer a prize to chase.

The marriage chilled. He began avoiding her. Everyone did. Even the servants started doing that thing where they waited until her requests became orders, and then fulfilled them at the last possible second before she could legitimately complain.

It was almost a relief when he caught her having that ill-thought fling in Costa del Sol. It was almost a kindness that the divorce was quiet and ignominious.

She was left with almost enough pieces to reassemble her life.

So it was that she found herself wandering the streets of Roam one day, broke and broken and friendless and aimless. (Plans vague and distant; her friends lifetimes away.) As she rounded the corner to the Piazza di Grazia, it occurred to her to ask what she was doing with her life.

Celestia looked up. And her answer was a statue of an angel reaching up to the sky, its wings outstretched as if in flight.

She stared, dumbfounded. And a long-smoldering ember stirred and lit.

"Bullshit!" she shouted, in a roar that shook the heavens. As punctuation, she flung her half-full bottle of Campari to the cobblestones, where it shattered anticlimactically within its paper bag. She stomped off with an incoherent scream, punched some stupid ancient Roamin building that had the gall to get in her way, and sank down sobbing in a nearby alley.

Angels weren't real. (Not here, where they could be touched, the pastor had once explained — but that was a fine distinction for a girl that young, and when Santa Claus turned out to also not be real, she did some mental addition.) For all that people admired and praised and drew inspiration from them, angels didn't exist. That lack of reality freed humans to do the most terrible possible thing they could do to angels: put them on a pedestal.

The angels the world worshipped weren't messy, flesh-and-blood things. Angels didn't have problems and fights and drinking habits and estranged family and failed marriages. That, a small whisper said in her old pastor's voice, is why you're not an angel.

And now the world was saying: Look. This is what an angel is, flawless and rigid and cold and unapproachable.

It was an outrage.

They were wrong in every possible way.

When the recorded voice says "La tua chiamata è stata accettata," Celestia almost loses her nerve and hangs up.

(This happens shortly after the statue moment — long before the property damage, but no longer lifetimes away. The memory of it is clear and tangible. It is her, not Celestia-who-was.)

When Luna's sleep-muffled voice says "Hello?", she almost drops the phone.

She manages: "It's me."

There's a long silence.

"I'm sorry," she says. "For everything."

There's a choked sob from the other end of the call.

"They told me I couldn't be an angel when I was young," Celestia says, desperate to blurt it all out before the line goes dead. "Maybe they're right. But I'm not going to let that stop me from trying, and that means making things right, Lu. You were more important than the money, and I wish I'd figured that out at the time, and I was the world's biggest idiot, and I'm so sorry. If that means I have to find a job and earn three million dollars so I can trade it back for you, then damn it, that's what I'm going to do."

Luna's openly crying now.

"I don't want the money," Luna says between sobs. "Come home."

She does.

Celestia spends half a decade stretching her metaphorical wings.

She's learning how to really be an angel, now. "Flawless and rigid and cold and unapproachable" are her anti-checklist, and she takes a sledgehammer to them one by one. Flawless — well, that one's already shattered. She destroys Rigid by pounding her life into an entirely different shape: going to college, earning a degree, moving in with Luna, doing the shopping and cooking and chores that she used to order servants to do in the Buckingham Palace days. Cracking the ice of Cold is no problem at all; the blazing personality that attracted Blueblood to her rekindles in an instant, once she isn't spending her nights staring at the ceiling and wondering how her life ever got so screwed up.

Unapproachable … well, that stumps her for a while. All her life, she was in charge of everything, and it always had to be her way. (Like the sundial they gave to Camp Everfree.) And as soon as she takes charge, she's beginning to notice, everyone gets so distant. She doesn't know how to break that.

Fortunately, she works up the humility to ask her sister. Luna doesn't know either — she's been a recluse since she got her degree, working a quiet back-office job at a local high school and heading home the instant the school day ends. But, she says, maybe they can try to figure it out together.

Celestia shadows Luna for a few days, and falls in love with the campus immediately. Luna suggests she apply for the open guidance-counselor job; she bluffs her way through the job interview and starts taking night classes in psychology. And staring past her textbook one night, caffeine warring with fatigue, she suddenly realizes what that dream was trying to beat into her head all along:

It's about what others need.

The most important part of angel-hood is caring, no more and no less. But she can't care on her own terms. She made things right with Luna when she listened — when she stopped trying to be an angel, and started trying to be the sister Luna needed all along.

In an instant, the terrifying scope of her job floods in. She's talked herself into responsibility for the mental health of an entire campus of children, young and innocent and fragile. She's flawed and clumsy and surrounded by priceless porcelain.

"I can't do this to them," she tells Luna at the tail end of her nervous breakdown. "My life is one unbroken string of mistakes."

"No it's not," Luna says gently. "You came home."

"You know what I mean."

"Yes, I do." Luna holds her. "And I think that's why they need you."

"… I don't understand."

"Growing up is about making mistakes and coming out the other side." Luna grins. "What better proof that they can?"

Celestia laughs despite herself. "You're horrible."

"But seriously, sister." Luna's voice softens. "They need someone who cares. The fact you're worried about being able to do that just means you're qualified."

Celestia sleeps on that. And in the morning, with the rising sun shining on her wingless back, determination creeps in.

Breaking unapproachable means walking with the children. Understanding the hazards they face, so that when she sees one of them approaching a place where she messed up, she can help them learn from her mistakes.

What they need is someone alongside them, hand in hand.

It's time to make some friends.

It turns out Principal Sombra isn't a fan of the hands-on approach. Canterlot High's reputation for academic rigor doesn't allow time for friends — it requires a certain low-grade perpetual terror to keep the children chained to the books. The instant Celestia threatens that, he takes aim at her employment contract.

She solves that by making the right friends. A razor-thin majority of the school board.

A year later, she's running the place.

She's not quite sure how it happened. He just exploded at his staff one day, and after that, he was gone, and someone needed to take charge. She reflexively volunteered before realizing that was exactly the wrong thing to do, and the board voted her in before she could look for a better alternative.

Luna, bless her heart, steps in to handle the administration, and Celestia promotes her on the spot and tries to focus on emotional support. Balancing that with rule enforcement is a fine line, though. She keeps to the background — sticking to the walk-with plan and letting them set their own direction — and that seems to work out. Her valedictorian is ambitious, visionary, and somehow manages to ride herd on a dozen warring cliques, leading the school by example.

If only she'd open up more about her own needs, Celestia thinks. But Sunset Shimmer isn't really the walk-with sort — and if she needs space to be a leader, well, the school needs one of those.

Celestia starts dreaming again, and it scares her.

It's a distraction. She tried ascending upon her dream-wings, once upon a time, and all it did was bring her too close to the sun. She's discovered what makes her an angel, now, and it has nothing to do with who she thought she wanted to be.

Slowly, she comes to an uneasy peace with her dreams. They're a reminder of past-her's failures, she tells herself. Being tormented by the yearning pull of dream-flight helps, she tells herself — the more miserable she is, the more fresh incentive not to screw up again.

For all that, her dream-self never goes back to that clifftop. She never sees what happened to shadow-winged Luna. On the other hand, she doesn't need to — she knows.

The storm never touched Luna in the first place — she dove unharmed through the clouds and out into brilliant clear sky.

The storm was Celestia's. And that's why she took so long to catch up — battered, humbled, and short a few feathers.

She doesn't learn quite how many until Twilight Sparkle stops for a few minutes to say goodbye.

"I've got to get back to my friends," Twilight says after all her thank-yous and apologies and stammered half-explanations limp to a halt. "The real ones. Um, I mean. My world's versions. Not that this world's Applejack and Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash and Rarity aren't amazing pon—, people, but the ones that made me who I am miss me."

"I understand," Celestia says, and then the question's out from her lips before she can have second thoughts: "Is one of those ponies another me?"

She forces a casual, jocular tone into her voice, but her heart is hammering. She's remembering rainbows and seeing angels, and it would be so nice to think that there's at least one world in which Celestia doesn't have to dream about wings.

"Oh! Um. Yeah." Twilight gives a self-deprecating laugh. "I guess you figured out that was how I knew your name, huh? She's pretty amazing." Twilight's face flushes. "I'm, um, kind of her personal student."

"Your Celestia's a teacher?" Pure curiosity, there. That's a career path she never had the opportunity to pursue, but she can see it.

"Not really," Twilight says, "she's —"

Floored.

Numb, maybe? Thinking, certainly. Mind outracing the Wondercolts track team. But as the days since the property damage drag on, Principal Celestia finds herself no closer to knowing how to feel about the fact that the other her is immortal.

She does come to one conclusion.

Principal Celestia is the lesser of her two selves, mortal and fragile and imperfect. She makes mistakes that Alicorn Princess Celestia simply cannot be capable of.

Alicorn Princess Celestia — so Twilight says, and she believes it — literally raises the sun every day for an entire world, ponies and other beings alike. She's not just an angel — she's a goddess. She can't be flawed, not the way Principal Celestia is, or that flaw would be magnified to an unthinkable degree.

With that sort of power, if Princess Celestia had done anything as horrible as sundering her family for a decade, their world would be a smoldering cinder.

Principal Celestia starts to wonder what Princess Celestia's biggest regret is.

3. Goddess

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That question overtops its dam a few days after the property damage.

Sunset Shimmer is fidgeting in Celestia's office. She no longer looks like a winged flame demon, which many would say (and some do say, in stage whispers in the halls) is an improvement, but both people in the room are feeling the lack of magic like an ache inside their bone-marrow.

"Sunset," Principal Celestia says out of nowhere, "did you know Princess Celestia well?"

There's a silence that's uncomfortable on both sides, Sunset's apparently more so than hers.

Then all the tension goes out of Sunset, who lets out a long breath and bows her head. "Yeah. You could say that."

Celestia's mouth goes dry. "I-if," she stammers, "ah, you don't want to talk about it …"

"It's okay," Sunset says. "You've been giving me a heck of a second chance. You deserve the truth." The teen smiles thinly. "I guess I'd just expected you to laugh off my story, the way everyone else here has. I hoped you would, really. I've been coasting on the truth being unbelievable for so long that I never thought I'd have to face what it actually meant."

Celestia's gotten good at recognizing when a student needs to get something off their chest — and at shutting up when she needs to listen instead of talk. This is clearly one of those times. But that's not why she's holding her tongue.

Her student — not some fantastic magical interloper who's already just a memory, but the girl who's been the social and logistical hub of the school for her entire tenure — knows both versions of her.

"I mean, I used it as a punchline!" Sunset laughs hollowly. "When Snips or Snails tried to lie to my face about why some plan or another went south, I'd say, 'Yeah, sure, and I'm a magical talking unicorn from another dimension.'"

Celestia's desperate for confirmation that somewhere in the multiverse is a her who got it right. But now that that confirmation is mere words away from reality, the yawning horror of it threatens to envelop her. The only possible outcome is to throw her own failures into sharper relief.

"I didn't understand why you kept quiet," Sunset continues. "I thought by now I'd be in a jail cell dealing with swarms of media. Scientists. Government agents. I mean, your world needs to know what you saw, right? And who I am. What I did to your school … if someone else leaks that, all this comes right down on you. So there has to be a big reason you're covering for me."

… Can she even trust what she hears? From the tidbits Celestia fished out of Twilight's friends, it sounds like Sunset Shimmer and the princess had something of a falling out. She might not be an unbiased source.

Asking this was a mistake, Celestia decides. She should just let the conversation drift away to where it needs to go.

"You think I should go back," Sunset says heavily. "Don't you?"

Celestia starts. "What?"

"You're protecting me because you think I belong back home." Sunset stands and paces over to the window. "Or maybe it really just is that it'd be easier to explain everything with me gone. But if you're like her, you're thinking about me."

"No! No," Celestia says, before realizing she's three sentences behind. "I mean. Sunset … do you want to stay?"

Sunset falls silent. Celestia mentally catches up.

"Yes," Sunset says quietly. "And … I wish I could tell you that's not selfish. But I can't promise you that."

This, she can handle. It's just a student needing a kindly ear. "Why?"

"Staying would give me a chance to make it up to the students I hurt. But I also hurt ponies … hurt the Princess … when I left, and they deserve justice too." Sunset sighs. "The girls here might be my first friends ever. I want to argue they're central to my rehabilitation, but the truth is, I'm terrified to lose them, even though Twilight could help me make more friends back home. It's like that with every argument I come up with. There are so many reasons why staying feels like the right decision, but every single one also feels like a hollow justification to paper over my fears."

The instincts that have brought Celestia to this moment kick in. And she understands the fear at Sunset Shimmer's core.

It's a fear bigger than anything else she's ever faced or going to face, but it's a fear Celestia knows intimately. She fears she's gone too far. She fears she can't be forgiven.

And if Principal Celestia decides that's true — that Sunset Shimmer, a known problem, is Somebody Else's Problem — then, well, by definition that is the sort of decision that Celestia makes. And when Sunset Shimmer crawls back through the portal to face the other Celestia …

Principal Celestia is the lesser of her two selves, mortal and fragile and imperfect. She knows she makes mistakes that Alicorn Princess Celestia isn't capable of. But right now, she needs to know — more than anything in the world — that Immortal Princess Her is not capable of destroying her student, full stop.

So she can't send Sunset home.

(She can't trust a better her to succeed where she failed. Every possible Celestia has to be better than that.)

"You're staying," she says firmly.

(And just like that, they are.)

In front of the mirror the next morning, Celestia spends a long time staring at her wingless form, and then she sighs and pulls out the hair dye she uses to touch up her graying roots.

She thinks about Immortal Her while she's dying.

Out front of the school, in the still and silent morning, she yields to temptation and reaches out to the base of the horse statue. Hesitates, trembling hand outstretched.

Turns away. Hustles uncomfortably toward the front doors.

After all, the only possible outcome would have been to throw her own failures into sharper relief.

Sunset Shimmer is laying bricks there, already working off the day's detention, and for a moment Celestia's heart freezes in her chest. There's no possible way, Celestia thinks, that Sunset could have missed her moment.

Their eyes meet. They pause.

Sunset gives her a brief, sad smile, and Celestia knows immediately that she understands.

Sunset looks away, and silently returns to her work.

What disturbs Celestia most about living in a world of magic is the little things.

On twelve hours' notice, the school board "invites" her to a breakfast meeting about The Property Damage. It means getting up well before sunrise. A few hours past midnight, she finishes prepping her presentation, and sets three alarm clocks as she collapses into bed.

Five minutes before any of them go off, she slowly becomes aware of a tapping at the window. It's quiet, barely at the edge of her consciousness amid the haze of sleep. Then she realizes there's a pattern to it — clusters of threes with little pauses between them — and her brain engages.

She rolls over and sits up, instantly awake. There's nothing there. The sound immediately stops.

Nothing like it has ever happened before. Nothing like it ever happens again. And, sure, maybe it's coincidence that it woke her up clean and alert and caffeine-free right before the most important meeting of her life. But she doesn't believe that, not really. And yet it makes so little sense she's not sure what to believe.

There's a quiet click as her office door closes, which makes her look up from her paperwork. Sunset sits down, hands in lap.

"What did the school board say?" Sunset asks without preamble.

"Oh, exactly what you'd expect," Celestia says. "They were very interested to hear exactly how my valedictorian procured enough fireworks to blow an eight-foot crater in the school grounds as part of an ill-advised Fall Formal prank. Whether we had notified parents that their students were briefly exposed to hallucinogenic chemicals generated by the blast. Whether our liability insurance has sufficient coverage if any parents file lawsuits. What that will do to our premiums. And whether I was aware of a student effort on social media to spread potentially libelous rumors of magical flying demons, and the potential for you to sue us in response."

Sunset laughs bitterly. "Wow."

"You'd be proud of me. When Dr. Scholtz asked me if I really expected them to believe that street-legal fireworks destroyed a stone building facade, I rolled my eyes and said, 'No, I expect you to believe my valedictorian is a unicorn from another dimension who enslaved the school before being blasted through the wall by a friendship beam.' Then I brought up my slide of citations and started discussing Hynek's research on the Michigan 1966 swamp-gas hallucinations."

They share a laugh — genuine this time. The tension melts out of Sunset's shoulders, and Celestia tells herself that she can't be doing too badly if she's managing some sort of reconciliation by proxy with Immortal Her's former protege.

Sunset's smile wavers. "So I … um. Thank you."

Celestia nods and waits.

Sunset swallows and looks away, not meeting her eyes. "I. Um. So … Twilight Sparkle and I have a pair of magical journals that are exact copies of each other. It's supposed to be a secret, but I thought it was important you know."

At first, Celestia's confused and flattered to be the recipient of that secret, however pointless. Then the context clicks in, and her eyes widen. Can Sunset talk to the other world?

"So if you wanted to pass on a message to Twilight, or to anyone else in Equestria," Sunset says, removing all doubt, "I can do that." She fidgets. "I haven't exactly asked Twilight for permission, but for you, she'll understand. And I owe you that much."

Celestia stands up and walks over to Sunset Shimmer, clasping the girl's hands. "Thank you," she says softly, intently. Then she walks over to the window, and lies: "I'll think about it."

She does think about it, though. And hates that she can't stop the thoughts.

She's not going to take Sunset Shimmer up on the offer. That much is clear. And yet … and yet. She thinks about it a lot, over and over, and her thoughts keep rolling back to a single, razor-edged question.

What do you say …

"… to the you who is better than you in every way?" Luna asks.

They're sitting on that cliff atop Canter Peak, and the storm has receded. Celestia's legs dangle over the edge, and she stares out at the brilliant clear day past her bare toes. Beneath them, the land rolls away, pristine emerald green out to the shimmering sapphires of distant seas.

Celestia can feel the solidity of Luna's presence right alongside her, but she keeps her head turned away. (She can feel the weight of wings on her back, and she's too ashamed to look at the ones she once tried to rip away.) Luna, too, feels subdued, lost in her own thoughts, vague and distant.

Celestia twirls a finger nervously through her hair, and looks at that instead, trying not to think about its fading dye. "I was hoping you'd know," she mumbles. "I could have handled it if the other me was the angel I always tried to be. But she's so much more."

"It is a knife straight to the gut," Luna says absently. "When you discover that there is a you who didn't make your greatest mistake."

"Exactly!" Celestia says, and then the guilt floods in. "But don't talk like that. You never did anything wrong."

Luna's response is hesitant and subdued. "I know. You said."

"I wasn't paying attention to you. I was chasing what I thought was important, and I was wrong, and you were the one who suffered for it."

"No! Sister —" Luna says, then pauses, and sighs. "We agreed not to fight over guilt."

Celestia winces. "I'm sorry. You're right."

"I am sorry. I should not have brought it up."

They stare out at the horizon together. Celestia's need for touch overcomes her fear, and she tentatively unfolds a wing and drapes it over Luna's back.

"It is only that I wished for some advice," Luna says quietly, her own wings tightly tucked. "Or perhaps reassurance. I have not been able to stop comparing myself unfavorably to the other me — not since learning that on the far side of the portal, our positions in our battle were reversed."

Celestia blinks. "The other us fought?"

"Alas, yes," Luna says heavily. "But in the other world, it was I who welcomed you back from your exile."

"Wait," Celestia says, "what?"

She turns to look at Luna, really look, for the first time. Luna, too, swivels her head.

Confused cyan eyes stare back at Celestia from a midnight-blue equine muzzle, amid a mane like a halo of stars ripped from the night sky —

4. Angel

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Celestia takes the day off from work after Twilight (through Sunset) fills in the tiny missing details of goddess-her's big fight.

Luna — her Luna — calls to ask what's wrong. She lets it go to voicemail. (Luna doesn't call again — just texts "I'll be here when you need me" — which she takes to mean that Luna asked Sunset Shimmer for context.)

Celestia spends hours and hours wanting to vomit. Finally, she calls on her old dusty party skills and induces dry-heaving. It doesn't help.

How could she?

A thousand years.

How could she?

Her emotions finally boil over in the middle of the night, and she drives to Sunset Shimmer's and knocks on the door.

"Are you okay?" a pajama-clad Sunset says, after one look at her face.

"I need to send a letter," Celestia says. "To Princess Luna."

Sunset swallows and hesitates. "If this is about what you asked me about this morning," she says carefully, "that really doesn't reflect on you. And I know I promised to help you write — but we should find a less awkward way to introduce you than by making an apology."

"It's a question." Celestia chuckles humorlessly. "And it's a little late for introductions."

"Oh," Sunset says, and invites her in.

Questions — Celestia is reminded as she writes — are a little awkward too. The journal's more tin-can-on-string than cell phone. Single target only. She'll have to tell Twilight to pass the message on.

Celestia skips back up a few lines to add that request. She understands. But in a way, it's easier. Her question is far too big to ask directly:

How could you forgive her?

Then they kill time for half an hour (which involves a belated apology for waking Sunset up, a call to a 24-hour pizza place, and a lot of pencil-chewing over a half-filled crossword puzzle) as Celestia's correspondence winds its way between dimensions, through dragonfire, across a palace, and vice versa.

Sunset's journal finally vibrates.

There was never any question that I would, the response says (when stripped of its Twilight padding, and a frantic apology for the intrusion of privacy necessitated by being a middlemare for what appears to be deeply personal business).

I was the one who erred.

If I were to ask you the same question about your own sister, your answer would be identical. (But she never did anything wrong, Celestia mentally protests. ... And she finally understands.) So instead I shall return to the question weighing upon both our withers. What do we say to our better selves?

I have not yet ascertained what we should say — but I know what we will, without great restraint. It is the same apology for our own failings that we have already given to our sisters, for exactly the same reason, and with exactly the same response:

Their heart breaks at our clinging to guilt.

They love us.

I hope you can believe that more readily than I.

The room is silent for a long moment as Celestia lowers the book they're both reading. Then Sunset Shimmer lunges in to hug her.

Celestia numbly accepts — then feels tears dampen her shoulder as Sunset's body starts to shake, and remembers she's not the only one here who needs some permission to forgive herself.

They cling to each other as Sunset sobs. Flawed and bent and warm and caring.

Celestia doesn't have wings to wrap around her fellow angel, and it doesn't matter one bit.

Dear Princess Celestia,

Principal Celestia lets her pen tip hang. She's already started the letter over six times. That salutation sounds so unconscionably twee. And yet there's some sense of greater order to it.

I put you on a pedestal, she writes. That was my mistake. And frankly kind of a humiliating one. My entire life has taught me that that's how you break angels. But then, I'm the version of us that keeps getting things wrong

She stops mid-sentence. Crosses it out. Crumples the paper and starts fresh, again.

Dear Princess Celestia,

Luna walks in while she's staring down at the blank page. "Are you still writing that letter to the other you?"

"I have to," Celestia says. "I talked to her sister. It would look weird if I didn't. Like I was avoiding her."

Luna rests a hand on Celestia's shoulder and slides a piece of paper onto the desk. It's a photocopy of a journal page, containing calligraphic script in a deep, rich ink.

Dear Luna, it says.

I have so many things I want to say, but this is the most important:

Thank you for being an inspiration.

Sincerely,

Luna.

"I don't really know how to feel about that," Vice-Principal Luna says.

"I can tell you," Principal Celestia says, "from direct personal experience, neither does she."

Without even looking, Celestia knows her sister is smiling. Luna gives her shoulder a squeeze.

"I meant, that I'm an inspiration to an immortal moon goddess," Luna says. "That's a lot to take in."

"I don't think Princess Me will have that problem," Celestia says drily, and for a moment is tempted to simply copy the correct answer off her fellow student's homework. But that would feel even worse than getting it wrong on her own.

Luna tousles the fading aurora of Celestia's hair. "Well, when you figure it out, I just pulled your lasagna out of the oven." She takes a step toward the door. "It smells delicious."

"Hang on," Celestia says, and Luna pauses.

Celestia stands and throws her arms around her younger sister. "Other you is right. You're awesome and I love you."

Luna's laugh lights up the room, and she returns the hug warmly. "What brought this on?"

Celestia leans into the embrace with a grin. "I'm learning."

Administrative Angel

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