what have you done

I held you deep in my arms
When your world was falling apart
I was the light in your dark
I was always there for you when you lost it all

No one knew exactly what to do with me.

I’d been a prisoner for so long, and then a highly-guarded guest, and now? Now, I was simply another person living in a castle whose ruler was shackled in a dungeon, awaiting punishment. 

It had been two weeks since Andromeda released the emotions and memories she’d locked away in that stupid little black box. Two weeks since she’d willingly surrendered her reign. Two weeks since I finally got to see Twilight Sparkle again, and all I found was the love of my life broken by what she’d become. 

Well… That isn’t exactly true. She wasn’t the love of my life. She hadn’t been the love of my life for a very, very, long time.

The list of crimes Andromeda had committed was beyond counting, growing and growing as she willingly offered more information. Horrors I’d gathered, and some I think will keep me up at night for the rest of my life, my face clutched in my hands. 

Just like no one knew what to do with me, no one knew what exactly to do with her, either. Executing her had been thrown around as the right choice, but she had been their only ruler for millennia. They couldn’t grasp how to rebuild a kingdom without a ruler to guide them. 

“She’s willing to help you,” I’d said when they turned to me, my identity revealed and understood as an ancient ‘hero’. A title I didn’t feel I’d earned when it was my disappearance that ushered in this horror. “Use her, like she used you. She can help us rebuild.” 

Us, because I was staying there now, wasn’t I? This was my home now. I’d come to terms with it a long time ago, and if I was going to continue to be there, then… I felt obligated to help. 

It was also a selfish suggestion. 

I didn’t love Andromeda. In fact, for quite some time, I had hated her with a passion that was rivaled only by how much I loved a Twilight that was long, long gone. But Andromeda was gone, and Twilight was here, and even if she wasn’t my Twilight, the thought of letting her be killed felt unbearable. 

Maybe, by the time the kingdom was rebuilt, I would finally be in a place where I could let go. 

But not yet. 

I’d not visited Andromeda in a few days, even despite my torn feelings of protectiveness over her. It was hard to see her when there were her own feelings we had to reckon with. Of all the things I imagined would return when Andromeda had her emotions back, I’d never once considered this would mean her love for me would as well. 

It was hard to see her when she loved me desperately, and I just didn’t feel the same, avoiding looking into darkened eyes that now brimmed with emotion too late. 

“Lady Rarity?” 

I looked away from my desk and towards the front door, a knock following the call. 

“Come in!” 

A guard—Sabertooth—walked in, slight anxiety painted on his face. 

“My Lady, I—er—I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have a message for you from the Empress—I mean, Andromeda. From Andromeda.” 

“So you do!” I smiled politely. “Saber?”

“…My Lady?” 

“Why are you doing her bidding still?” It wasn’t a question asked with ill intent or to scold. It was just a gentle nudge. 

He winced. “Ah… I’m sorry, I—” 

“It’s perfectly alright,” I said. “I just think it’s important to remember she is a prisoner, not your empress. What was her message?” 

“She—Well. She wanted you to know that the evening sky should be interesting to watch tonight, and that she recommends viewing it from her library balcony when dusk falls.” 

I frowned, taking this in. “…I see!” I said, slowly, as his shrug indicated he was as lost as I was. “Did she say anything else?” 

“No, my lady. Only that she hopes you enjoy it.” 

“Well! I suppose I shall if I decide to venture that way later. Thank you, Saber.” 

“My lady,” he said with a salute before quickly retreating, closing the door behind him. 

I looked back towards her desk, towards the half-read journals Andromeda had bequeathed me after her incarceration. They were a fascinating read despite their grim contents, offering me insights I would likely need in the long journey towards restoring Equestria to even a quarter of what it used to be. 

They were also painfully Twilight Sparkle. Her journaling style hadn’t changed much despite her lack of emotions; sections here and there would even go on relevant tangents, much like Twilight used to do when we’d speak long into the night, my darling princess keeping me company as I pulled yet another all-nighter trying to finish a dress commission. 

This was also why, I must admit, they were still half-read. They were too much like Twilight, and reading them for too long often brought back a very, very sharp pain, raking my heart apart like claws. 

I stood up from the desk and wandered towards the bedroom window, the lake I’d once very half-heartedly tried to end my life in stretching out before me. My faint reflection stared back at me in the glass—the very thin face, the tired eyes, the weight of three very hard years. 

I’d changed, too, hadn’t I? I was a far cry from the Rarity who’d landed, terrified, in a forest after Sombra’s time attack. He had killed me, in a manner of speaking. 

“You’re dying!,” I’d said to him. “You can’t possibly win, you’ve all but lost!” 

“I know. But I will bring Twilight Sparkle and her kingdom to ruin, even if I won’t be there to see it. What I’m doing to you will just be the start.” 

And he had. 

I took a deep, steadying breath, expelling the memory from my mind. It was over. It was done. The past could not be changed. 

I looked instead towards the sun, watching as it started its slow descent into another day in what was going to be a long, difficult life. I hoped it would start feeling easier soon. 

“Tonight at dusk,” I murmured, her fingers grazing the windowpane. 

What are you planning, Andromeda?

The library was quiet, the evening light shining in through windows whose curtains were still not used to being drawn. 

The first thing I noticed was the balcony door. It was half-opened, which was not as I’d left it when I’d been there that very same morning, fetching complicated books on politics and economics. 

This should have given me pause. It should have given me worry. Instead, I felt a slight kind of hope that materialized into a very gentle warmth when I stepped out and saw Equestria’s former ruler sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking up at the stars, her wings neatly folded behind her back. Her handcuffs lay neatly by her side. 

“Well, well, well,” I said, “I thought you were supposed to be in prison.” 

Andromeda shrugged, her eyes still on the sky. “A small vacation won’t hurt anyone.” 

“Is that what we’re calling it these days?” I crossed my arms. “The guards might be upset at your little ‘vacation’.” 

It was strange to hear her laugh. The rougher edges of her voice were still there, but in the chimes, I could hear the ghost of princesses past. Best not focus on that last bit too much, though, before that sharp pang came back. 

“They won’t. Laquer is covering for me. You’d think my advisors would all renounce their loyalty after everything that has come out, but I think she’s still hoping I might make a comeback.” 

“My stars. I have my work cut out for me.” 

“I think it’s endearing. Undying loyalty. It reminds me of—” She cut herself off, and in that moment, I wondered if she wasn’t the only one now familiar with arresting thoughts. 

Months ago, the thought of even uttering her next words would have been nigh unthinkable, but… but even if Andromeda deserved not a single allowance, I felt kind. 

“Who?” I asked, softly. “Rainbow Dash?” 

“Yeah,” Andromeda replied. “Rainbow Dash.” 

“You know what’s the worst part?” I continued, allowing myself to walk down a path I could walk with no one else. 

“That she probably would have stayed loyal to me?” said Andromeda, turning her head slightly, the dark violet eyes contrasting with the pearly-white grin. There it was, in my heart. That pang. I let it stay. “Even if she were furious about it.” 

“Well, I suppose it’s good that Lacquer is there,” I conceded, sitting down next to Andromeda. I allowed myself to steal a proper glance at the woman, at the dark magic scars lacerating her face, which was still a sight to behold despite them. “I think it’s for the best that the poor guards are spared a heart attack.” 

“To be honest, I don’t think they’d have realized I was gone even without Lacquer,” said Andromeda, thoughtfully. She raised her right hand, the magic suppressant bracelet fixed tightly around her wrist. “They really think that this thing should be enough to deal with me. Which, honestly, I—”

“Andromeda.”

Andromeda fell silent at the sound of my voice. At her name. I wonder if it hurt her, that I still called her that. I have to suppose it did, but I couldn’t call her anything else. It was too much, too soon. 

“Why are you actually here?” I continued. “Because I don’t think it’s to show me the stars or ponder the competence of the guards.”

She watched me from the corner of her eye. “You’re right,” she replied, her slight smile vanishing as fast as it appeared. She looked back at the sparkling lights of long-dead stars. “There’s something I still have to do. A plan I can execute.”

“A plan to execute? I hope you realize you’re not really in a position to execute much of anything,” I noted. “What exactly is this plan?”

“To fix what started this all.” Her voice was exactingly neutral. It almost sounded like the old her, her emotions repressed in their totality. It was only the slight catch when she spoke next that betrayed her. “To send you back home to your actual time.”

I froze. “What?”

“You heard me right,” she said, and nothing else.

The words coming out of my mouth felt as if spoken by someone else. To be frank, I might have even felt just a bit numb. 

“…You can send me back home?”

“I never knew why,” Andromeda said suddenly, as if she’d forgotten the topic of our conversation, going off on a tangent. She wasn’t Twilight Sparkle, but sometimes, she was. Sometimes, she was very, very much. “For as long as I remember, I was working on a timespell that could span millenia. Long fuelled by dark magic. Working on it, like I had to. It was a habit I didn’t know I even had. At some point, I think it was just to see if I could. And then—” She smiled wryly. “About five hundred years ago, I finished it. A stable time-travel spell that could work when I wanted. And I remember feeling like I had something I needed to do. I should have had, why else would I work on it for thousands of years? But I couldn’t think of what that was, and I already ruled Equestria, so I stashed it away and never thought of it again.”

I was deathly quiet. 

“Well, I remember now.” She turned to me, a smile on her lips. “Better late than never, I guess.”

“…Why would you send me back?” I asked, still not believing it was a possibility. Still a little numb, even as I stated, “You love me. You would lose me again.”

The stars shone in Andromeda’s eyes. 

“Yes. Yes, I would,” she said, composed. “But after everything I’ve done, I can at least try and do one good thing.” She was back to looking at the sky. Was it on purpose? Could she not bear to look at me? “Would you like that?”

“But that would change history,” I whispered, starting to comprehend what was being offered to me. “Wouldn’t it? This all happened because I disappeared. If I go back, what—? What would happen then?”

Andromeda shrugged. “I’m not sure, actually, but I think one of two things. One possibility is that there’s a timeline fracture. You’d go to the past, and your timeline would be a new one, following a new future in which you came back, and this timeline would continue without you. Or…”

“Or…?”

“Or…” She gestured to what was left of Equestria in a sweeping motion, “we’re all erased. This timeline is wiped. It disappears now that what caused it isn’t reality anymore.” She placed her hand back on the floor. “We’d be as good as dead. Everyone living here. Everyone in this timeline.”

“…That’s horrible,” I managed, pale. 

She laughed. “I guess! But I’m not sure this ‘present’ is really worth saving, to be honest.” She glanced at me. “It’s not any future I want you living in, at any rate. I want you to have the life you should have had.”

“Are you mad?” I gasped, scrambling to my feet. 

“I’m doing this for you.”

“Doing things for me is exactly the reason we’re in this situation, Twilight!” I exclaimed, not catching what I’d just said until it was done, until I saw her react, her gaze shooting to me almost instantly. I barrelled forward, regardless. “And they weren’t even for me! You think I wanted you to suck away your own emotions?! Tell me, a billion years ago or however long it’s bloody been, did it ever occur to you once I would not want that?”

“That’s not the point of discussion,” she said, short.

“Well, it damn well is now.” 

“I’m trying to fix things, Rarity,” she said, raising her tone just so, as if I was being unreasonable, and I could have killed her. “None of this should have happened, and the only way to ensure that is by sending you back, regardless of the consequences.”

“Consequences? Murdering everything alive? Those consequences? I was under the impression you weren’t a genocidal ruler anymore, Andromeda,” I hissed, clenching my fists so tight, I think I drew blood. She looked away from me. “Because if you are, so be it, but you are not making me one.”

“It wouldn’t be your responsabi—”

“Yes, it would,” I cut her off. 

“But it isn’t killing us. They wouldn’t have even existed,” she protested. “None of us would exist, it—”

“But I would remember them! I would remember you,” I snarled, tears in my eyes. Just the thought of it. “I will not go back. I refuse. I already have enough things you’ve forced onto my conscience to have the death of millions on it, too.”

She had the audacity to roll her eyes at me. “I didn’t even say that’s what will happen. Just that it was a possibility.” She looked at me again, eyebrow raised. “There’s just as much of a chance that the first option happens, and this timeline continues without you.”

“I don’t care. I’m not risking it.”

“Don’t you miss them?” There wasn’t an inch of emotion in her voice. It was controlled and calm, every word precisely said and put. “Your friends.” Not ours, ‘yours’. “Your family? Everyone back home, don’t you miss them?” And finally, an inch of emotion as she continued, “Don’t you miss her?”

“Who?” I asked, even if it was silly of me. I knew who she meant.

“Twilight.”

And she had me, of course. Because I missed my family, and my friends, and Twilight Sparkle so much, I think I would die if I thought of it too much. 

“They’re dead,” I pushed out, somehow. “My friends, and my family, and my Twilight are gone, and I am not going to get them back. And if you don’t stand down and respect my choice, I will tell you right now that any respect I still have for you will die, and you will lose me twice.”  

She said nothing for the longest time, and then—

“Fine,” she replied, and I was struck to see she was crying, too. Subtle and faint, but there they were, tears in her eyes, my now bleak future the real punishment for her crimes. The terrible, terrible consequence she would have now have to eternally live with. She shocked me again when she continued, softly, remorseful, “I’m sorry, Rarity.”

“…I know,” I whispered eventually, my temper subsiding, and my affection for who she used to be returning. I couldn’t forgive her, but… maybe, with time, she could become someone I could forgive. 

“I need to go back to my prison,” she continued, resigned. “This is the last time I’m doing this, I promise.”

“Good.”

“But…” She looked up at me, and in twin violet eyes, I saw pain. She smiled, a lopsided thing. “Is it okay if I hold you one last time?”

I hesitated. And then caved. It wasn’t Twilight, but it was, and I think we both needed that final goodbye. 

“All right,” I whispered, walking up to her and sitting down. “Just one last time. And then you’re going back to your dungeon, and I have to start fixing your mess.”

“Terrible,” she said, cracking a grin, like it was millennia ago, and she was a silly princess in love. 

“Just awful,” I replied, caving to her, like it was millennia ago, and I was weak to Twilight Sparkle’s whims. 

“The worst.”

“Stop stalling, dear,” I said, politely fluttering my eyelashes and reaching out with an arm. “Trying to be cute isn’t saving you from jail.” 

She laughed, and when she pulled me in for a hug, she was warm. She was warm. She smelled like lavender, still, and even if her grip was different, and dark magic had changed her body, it was so easy to close my eyes, lose myself in her embrace, and pretend. 

She breathed me in, her face buried in my hair, and I felt like she might not let me go. 

“I’m not Twilight Sparkle anymore,” she whispered.

“No,” I replied.

“And do you know how I know?”

“How?”

“Well,” she said, breathing me in one last time, the familiar thrum of magic in the air, “Twilight Sparkle would have respected your choice.”

And then I was gone. 

The very first thing I saw was the branches of trees hanging above me, the night sky, and its quilt of stars. 

I want to say I sat up immediately, gasping in shock. But that would not be the truth. 

The truth is that I lay on the ground for minutes, petrified, Andromeda’s gaze still burned in my mind. Her last words still a dagger through my heart. 

Twilight Sparkle would have respected your choice. 

She was dead. Andromeda and thousands of other ponies had died in the blink of an eye, either literally by being wiped from existence, or metaphorically by now existing in a timeline or universe I was no longer part of. 

I think I should have cried. Wouldn’t that be the right thing to do? I should have wept, shed some amount of tears, mourned yet again, but I did not. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t feel entirely there. I don’t think I was entirely there. 

Any moment now, somehow, I would wake and find myself back in the reality I was condemned to be in—Andromeda’s reality, where I was to rebuild the broken country left behind by the ghost of Twilight Sparkle. 

It was the howling of a timberwolf that forced me up, dragging to the surface an undying, unyielding survival instinct I always felt shocked to still have. 

Andromeda is gone. Allegedly, I was back home in a place and time I’d already mourned, and yet, I felt nothing at all. I felt my steps, slow and unsteady, one foot in front of the other, hands grazing tree trunks for support, but inside? Inside, I felt nothing. 

I suppose I must have been in shock. Or maybe I was unwilling to believe I was home, too afraid of the damage if it turned out to be a lie. Maybe both. I think both. 

And suddenly, there was Ponyville.

Not some decrepit, decaying ruins, but a small vibrant town, alive and thriving under the watchful gaze of a castle, its towers still complete, its banners hanging high, its emblem untouched. 

I was dreaming. It felt like a dream. Andromeda had simply put me to sleep, done something to me somehow somewhy. Nothing was real, I told myself as I staggered into town. Nothing, including the tears rolling down my cheeks. 

And then I saw my grinning self in several missing posters on a wall, and staring at them wide-eyed, I learned three things:

• Sombra had been recently defeated. 
• The reward for finding me was so large it couldn’t be written down. 
• I had been missing for over two years. 

I kept walking. 

Andromeda was dead. She was gone. But I still expected her to appear. 

I still expected Twilight to be gone. 

The door to Carousel Boutique was unlocked.  

I should have gone to the castle, but my heart led me home first, just to see if it still could, which it could, of course. Every step, every path, every turn, my heart remembered as clear as if I’d walked home yesterday. 

I turned on the light switch, and I was surprised to find it just as if I’d never left it. There wasn’t a single thing out of place, almost unnaturally so. My bags left on the couch just where I’d dropped them, my favorite coat hanging from the rack, and if I stepped into my workshop, I can imagine every fabric, every pattern, every dress would be just as I’d left it.

Carousel Boutique looked preserved, and in a brief moment of lucidity, I wondered if it was exactly that. If my home was left just as it was the day I vanished as a sort of memento, a remembrance, honoring a young woman who was likely gone for good. 

Andromeda said everyone accepted my death except for her and the girls. She mentioned they held out hope until the bitter end, until either death took hope away, or in Twilight’s case, she ripped it away along with her mind and memories. 

This wasn’t my home anymore. This was my grave. My mausoleum. 

My memorial. 

It was just as I heard footsteps upstairs that I remembered something Andromeda had said after her return. 

She’d been talking about the castle, about my disappearance, and more specifically, how she stopped sleeping in her own royal room and spent sleepless nights at the boutique in case I came back. 

A force beyond my own willed me forward, away from the foyer, towards and up the stairs, and it was only when I saw light pouring out of my open bedroom door that I finally felt something. I felt dread. I felt hope. I felt every little thing all at once, but more than anything, I felt that if I opened that door and saw anyone other than a loved one, but more specifically Twilight Sparkle, I would either wake or die from the pain. 

I looked in to find my bedroom had not been preserved as I’d left it. 

It was a war-zone of papers pasted on walls and scattered on the floor, of books littered over the bed and the drawers and the desks, of wanted posters and pictures and sketches stacked all over, the haphazardness of it leaking from every inch of the room.

A woman who looked very much like Twilight Sparkle was at this storm’s center.

She was sitting on my desk chair, one arm hanging over the armrest and the other—the one closest to me—crossed over her stomach. The chair itself was tilted back, enough that her head hung back as she stared up at the ceiling, her long hair cascading down her wings, past her shoulders and hanging in the air. 

It should have been an arresting sight. It should have been a wonderful sight. But as I stood there watching her, her truly impassive expression executed any relief and emotion I felt. She didn’t look calm, or peaceful, or resigned, or even tired. She didn’t look anything at all. A complete blank slate. 

Even if her body and her clothes and her hair screamed Twilight Sparkle, her face belonged to Andromeda. 

I was too late, I thought, paralyzed by horror. 

She moved suddenly, the chair leaning forward, its front legs greeting the floor with a soft thud. She hadn’t even realized I was there. All she did was lift the arm over her stomach and place her elbow on the armrest so she could bury her face in her hand. 

She stayed like that for one, two, three seconds and it wasn’t until she let out a harrowed, pained, emotional sigh that my eyes filled with tears, and I felt my knees weaken, my body slightly slumping against the doorframe. 

Only then did she notice me. Her face was still half clutched in her hands, her eyes gliding over to me and staying long enough I felt relief crush me at noticing she was crying. 

“Twilight?” I asked, voice breaking. “Is that you?”

I couldn’t wait for her to react. The last thing I saw were her widening eyes before my knees gave out, everything I’d gone through for the past years collapsing me, and then again when it wasn’t cold floor that broke my fall, but her embrace, Twilight launching herself at me faster than I think either of us knew she could move, her wings splayed open. 

The questions came at me like a blur. Was it really me? Where had I come from? Was I okay? Where had I been? Was I hurt? Was it me? Was it actually really truly me? 

I didn’t answer a single one. All I could do was sit there, muted by shock, staring into violet eyes, afraid that if I spoke or moved, the dream would shatter and I’d awake in Andromeda’s castle once again. 

“Rarity, please, say something,” she begged me, taking my hand in hers. I used to say long ago that they fit together like puzzle pieces. This was no longer the case, her hand feeling enormous around my own, thinned by years of small rations and lack of appetite. 

I found I didn’t care. I didn’t even notice. All I had eyes for were her own, and their pain, and their horror, and the emotions I never thought I’d see in them again. How terrible to say that hell burned in her eyes, and I was happy to see it. 

I had to be sure, of course. 

“What’s your name?” I asked my beloved ghost. “Who are you?”

“Who am—?” She froze, the initial confusion very quickly turning into a full-blown alarm. Her hands dropped mine and rose to my shoulders, gripping me tight. “Rarity, what do you mean who am I?” I could practically see them, the dozens upon dozens of horrific scenarios now forming in her mind. When next she spoke, it was slow and deliberate and terrified. “It’s me. Twilight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course I’m sure,” she said, tearfully. She pulled me in, clutching me like I was her beating heart. Her voice softened. “I’m here. It’s me,” she whispered, so relieved. She pressed her forehead against the top of my head. “You’re back. You’re actually back, you’re—” She was talking to herself like a mantra. Her voice caught. “I don’t know what was going to happen to me if you didn’t come back.” 

She was worried all over again when I started to weep.