Rejuvination

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

----

Pushing at her hardest, Twilight Sparkle had some serious 'Oomph' behind her.

Going at a leisurely pace, Rainbow Dash flew circles around her.

Two entirely separate worlds of skill.

Which was why Rainbow Dash was pushing a cloud far, far in the distance to Canterlot while Twilight was keeping a strong, though steady pace behind her.

It was just slow enough that the other Twilight could keep up.

Panting and struggling to keep altitude, but keeping up.

Spike was clinging behind her own neck after nearly being dropped.

Twilight stilled her wings for a moment, gliding off speed to meet her counterpart as Rainbow Dash disappeared from sight.

They would trust Spike to her.

They had to.

"So... How did you become an alicorn?" It was a question that had been niggling away at the back of Twilight's mind since they'd started the flight, and they still had a ways to go.

Almost half an hour, on the short end.

"I just-" The doppelganger was struggling to breathe, sucking in great breaths of cold air. "-was. I might have-" Another deep breath. "-tried eating an energy field bigger than my own head."

Well, that didn't make much sense, but Twilight supposed it was meant as a joke.

Especially since the other Twilight jumped in altitude while having a hacking, coughing laughing fit.

She was slowing down though, matching Twilight's pace instead of frantically trying to speed up.

"Let me guess, field of stars and fog, memories of your friends playing while some mentor tells you how you've done so well?" It was what happened to her.

Mostly.

"What? No. Blinding white light and fear while I felt my one friends hand trying to pull me free of a lot of magic. And then... Euphoria for a little while before I got shunted to the side of my own brain." The alternate Twilight wasn't even paying attention to where she was going at this point, just drifting along next to the slightly smaller alicorn with a distant look in her eyes. "Something kind of took over me, took over the magic. Spike noticed, called it out when it tried to pretend to be me and then he... Is there magic here that can drag a soul out of a body?"

"Why do you ask?" Twilight herself was only paying the smallest amount of attention to their heading as she could get away with.

"Because Spike used it. On himself. He pulled his soul out and fought the thing that took hold of me as a dragon made of fire. He pulled the soul out of me that was in control and he held it down while the... The girls over there and I did something and it-he-they got blasted with Harmony."

That certainly sounded impressive.

"And Spike died."

Wait.

"What?!"

"He wasn't breathing. His heart wasn't beating. You've seen him... Well, I thought-I thought the magic had just pulled too much from him. Rainbow Dash was performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, but we hadn't thought it worked. It... It must have, though."

"He'll... He's going to be okay, right?"

Twilight didn't even know where to begin with that.

The only magic she could think of, that she'd ever read of, that would do that...

Well, the badlands weren't always a barren wasteland.

"I don't know." She never wanted to hear empty platitudes.

She doubted this Twilight would want them, either.

"Spike was never trained in magic, everything he was doing, he was doing it instinctively, so we can't tell just what he was actually doing. But he's breathing, so we can focus on making him better." Twilight actually had to marvel at that.

He'd been teleporting.

That wasn't just a spell anypony could pick up.

And he was doing a lot of it.

"But if he has any say in it, he's not just going to leave you (me) alone, alright?"

"...Yeah. Thank you."

"Anytime."

----

Rainbow Dash was a lot of things.

Awesome, for starters.

Totally awesome, too.

And maybe sprinkled with a dash of amazing.

But only on days that ended on Y.

Today was special, though.

She was pulling out all the stops.

Well, okay, not all the stops. If she was pushing for sonic-rainboom speeds, Spike would fall off the cloud Twilight dropped him on.

But she was definitely pulling out most of the stops.

Canterlot was rapidly getting closer and she was scanning it for the building she was supposed to take Spike too.

Blue shingles, tall spire, looks just like every other building in canterlot!

Except for one detail. There was a platform next to the spire with a great big red X on it.

Well, Twilight said cross, but that's just a lazy X.

Right?

Either way, she was landing on it.

A gentle nudge had redirected the cloud under her hooves and she spread her wings, decelerating.

There was nopony on the ground to meet her.

She glanced at the cloud, the unconscious Spike, and decided she needed to fix that.

There was a bridge attaching the platform to the nearby spire, stopping off at a door.

Which was locked.

She latched on to the cloud and zoomed over the side of the building, she sent the revolving doors spinning as she rushed through them.

A receptionists desk, the smell of sick and sterile.

This was the place.

"Hey Nurse, I need a doctor, pronto!" The mare behind the desk didn't so much as look up, simply tapping on a plaque that said 'Shh!'.

"Look lady, I ain't got time! He's in real rough shape!" The receptionist finally looked up, her eyes going wide as she saw who was talking to her.

That's right. Rainbow Dash.

"Oh! I-I'm terribly sorry Miss Dash. I'll-uh I'll get right on that!" She started fumbling around behind the desk, looking for something.

Probably boring pen and paper stuff.

Rainbow Dash hated that stuff, but she understood.

Bureaucracy needed to be fed.

"Look, get somepony out here to take care of him now, I'll do the paperwork after. Capisce?" Absolutely not.

She'd get Twilight to do it.

"Certainly! Right away Miss Dash!" The receptionist, her name plate said 'Buttercream', scampered through a door.

Sometimes, it totally paid to be popular.