Best Friends Forever
is a one-shot My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic written by Obselescence.
At some point in the distant future, Celestia pays a visit to an isolated castle where Twilight Sparkle has made a home for herself and for some reason, refused to leave ever since. At once, it becomes clear that Twilight is not on good terms with Celestia; furthermore, the castle also appears to be playing host to a small group of very young foals.
And the names of these foals? Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity.
It soon becomes clear that Twilight Sparkle is not in her right mind and hasn't been so for quite a while, and as the full extent of her breakdown is revealed to the reader, Celestia finds herself facing a nightmare that might very well go on forever if she doesn't take drastic steps...
This fanfiction provides examples of:
- Apologetic Attacker: Celestia sorrowfully apologizes to Twilight after fatally wounding her.
- Berserk Button: As Celestia soon discovers, attempting to reason with Twilight by bringing up Fluttershy results in an explosive temper-tantrum.
- Bittersweet Ending: Heavily on the bitter side. To wit, the surviving members of the Mane Six can now grow up and reclaim their lives, but this only happened because Celestia killed Twilight, and Celestia is gripped with remorse over what she had to do.
- Combat Pragmatist: Celestia doesn't allow Twilight to challenge her to a protracted magical battle, and instead simply nails her through the heart with a spear of light while she's distracted.
- Cynicism Catalyst: The point which really broke Twilight Sparkle was having to witness Fluttershy's long and miserable death of natural causes. Having already seen her wither away to the point of being too weak to do anything on her own, it was this moment which ultimately drove Twilight to her obsession with keeping her friends alive and young for all eternity.
- Early Personality Signs: Consciously invoked; Twilight gives the baby versions of her friends their adult selves' favorite objects as toys, in order to speed them along the path of growing up to be exactly the way she remembers them.Twilight: And don’t put that sapphire in your mouth, Rarity. That used to be part of your favorite dress, remember?
- Exposition of Immortality: Twilight's immortality and the immortality she's inflicted on the Mane Six aren't fully revealed until she and Celestia wander through the castle and begin finding all sorts of relics from the many, many lives that Mane Six have lived - including two pictures of Applejack, one of her as an old pony and the other, more recent one of her as a young foal.
- Fountain of Youth: The members of the Mane Six have been regressed into infancy by Twilight Sparkle in order to spare them from death from old age, and it's implied that she's been doing this multiple times over the course of decades or even centuries.
- Gone Horribly Right: When Twilight was a young mare, her mentor Princess Celestia wanted her to learn about friendship. She got so attached to the first real friends she made that she couldn't bear to be separated from them. When she became an alicorn and realized she would outlive them, she decided to kidnap them, sequester them and herself in an isolated castle, and use her magic to keep them functionally immortal in an endless cycle of regressing them into babies and raising them from infancy to old age.
- Ironic Episode Title: Quite apart from the fact that any friendship between Twilight and Celestia has long since been scuppered, the story concerns Twilight's efforts to preserve the lives of her friends forever - in a way that, to put it mildly, would involve the end of any sane friendship.
- Loss of Identity: Being repeatedly regressed to infancy resets the Mane Six's personalities to blank slates; however, as a sign of just how unhealthily obsessed she is, Twilight essentially grooms them for the same roles they possessed when she first knew them.
- Metaphorically True: After killing Twilight, Celestia tells the members of Mane Six that Twilight is having a well-deserved rest and that they'll see her again - knowing that without Twilight's magic to keep them from getting too old, they'll eventually die and be reunited with her in the hereafter.
- The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: The regression of the Mane Six's bodies doesn't spare their minds, leaving them not only with infantile personalities but no memory of their lives.
- Noodle Incident: The full extent of Twilight Sparkle's activities has been left a mystery, so it's not certain just how long she's been regressing the other members of the Mane Six for - to the point that Celestia herself isn't sure how long it's been.
- No Ontological Inertia: After Twilight is killed, the magic she's worked around the castle dies with her. Unfortunately, this doesn't include the regression the Mane Six have suffered.
- Parent-Induced Extended Childhood: In order to prevent the rest of the Mane Six from dying, Twilight Sparkle magically de-ages them into babies, raises them from foalhood to adulthood, and turns them into babies again when they get old, a cycle she's implied to have repeated for centuries.
- Sanity Slippage: Seeing her loved ones growing old and dying have pushed Twilight Sparkle to the breaking point, and her efforts to keep them alive have transformed her into a dangerously obsessive paranoiac.
- Shoot the Dog: Celestia realizes that the only way to stop Twilight's designs is by killing her - and manages it with a surprise attack.
- Stockholm Syndrome: Some of Twilight's dialogue implies her friends weren't all that willing to go along with the "immortality via turning back into babies" plan at first.I couldn’t just let that happen to the rest of them. Even if they didn’t want—even if they couldn’t see—they came around, eventually. It only took a few tries. They were happier starting over. We were happier starting over...
- Three-Month-Old Newborn: The baby Mane Six can talk, possibly as a side effect of the repeated age-reversing magic Twilight has been using on them.
- Tragic Keepsake: One of the mementos in Twilight's castle is a faded pink scarf, woven with butterfly patterns. Fluttershy was the only one of her friends who died of old age before she could "save" her.
- Trying Not to Cry: After killing Twilight, Celestia can only put on a brave face for the foals and try valiantly to hold back the tears.
- We Used to Be Friends: The relationship between Twilight and Celestia has long since collapsed in the wake of the former's descent into madness and the latter's efforts to talk her down.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?:
- Twilight Sparkle has been struggling to cope with the nastier side-effects of immortality for an unspecified length of time - enough to see Fluttershy die of old age. Unwilling to see any of her other friends die, she's sequestered herself away with them in an isolated castle, driving herself progressively mad in her attempts to preserve her loved ones.
- Said friends are suffering this from a different angle: whenever they get old, Twilight Sparkle regresses them to infancy, destroying their identities and forcing them to start their lives again from scratch.Celestia nodded absently, listening vaguely to what Twilight was saying while she studied the two Applejacks on the wall. They both had Applejack’s bright green eyes, sparkling with honesty and good-natured cheer... and in both pictures, those eyes seemed very tired.
- Young Face, Old Eyes: One of the photos on the wall of Twilight's castle is of an infant Applejack with tired-looking eyes.
