Rejuvenation

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

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Celestia stood in the observation chamber of the hospital.

She didn't need to be here. There was no royal prerogative to watch an experimental process, nor was she related to anypony below.

Not by blood, no. Only one shared her blood.

But duty, responsibility? Filtered though it may be.

The stallion below, staring with bewildered awe as purple fur became purple scales before splitting apart, was a royal ward.

A fancy way of saying an orphan under purview of the crown.

He was older than Luna remembered. A young stallion rather than an older colt.

The cabal of healers shifted a hoof into a claw, longer and wider than the dainty little thing she remembered.

Ages and ages ago she had dreamed, entertained the notion of perhaps raising the newly hatched dragon.

It wasn't to be, it couldn't be. Her responsibilities wouldn't allow it. So much of her time was spent focusing on keeping the court running and her detractors stifled.

When could she have given him the time a child would need? Between court and duties, how could she have found the time to be...

Be a mother?

Spike was hardly the first she'd wanted to claim as her own. He would hardly be the last.

Celestia remained stoic as he panicked, belching fire and scrabbling at his throat.

The healers had it under control soon enough, however. Congregating together afterwards to try and find out what went wrong while one of their number wheeled Spike out of the room.

"'Tis surprising, no?" Celestia turned her head just enough to see the intruder in one eye.

Her sister. Few others had the wings to try and interrupt her thoughts.

"Yes. He's proven rather willing to undergo experimental treatments. He's very brave." It was pleasant when there were only the two.

Celestia didn't need to posture or pretty up her words for some scatterbrained sycophant.

"Perhaps. Or merely tired. The Twilight, the other one of course, you recall her words?" Luna had to restrain herself for the entirety of that meeting.

Aside from looking like a typical villian, something about the mare completely set off all of her warning bells.

"You think he's given up? After lingering hopelessly for months, with an actual prize in sight?" Celestia shook her head. "No. Not given up. But he has grown up."

And wasn't that what a child was supposed to do? Grow up, grow wise and then grow a new family?

"I can see that, I suppose. His friends care greatly for him, and through his actions he cares equally for them. Few enough who would fight for their friends. Fewer still would die for them." An awkward silence began to fill the room, a subject neither truly wanted to broach.

Death may not have been an intimate subject to pony-kind, though it was not unknown.

It was Luna who spoke first.

"Are we certain that this pony is Spike? Not some... Thing? Lingering in the shell he was forced into?" Luna didn't want to press, not too hard. Celestia's relationship with Spike was difficult, for many reasons.

"He has acted somewhat differently from what I recall, but nothing outside of reason. It is a ponies body, with a ponies appetite." And Celestia didn't want to answer.

"You know what I meant. Healer Watch House mentioned in his report that Spike mentioned having a dream, one where he could recall few details but those of a great golden dragon that was proud of him." A dream that Spike could recall nothing else of.

"Many ponies have strange dreams under strange circumstances. A disincorporated soul is, I would imagine, a very strange circumstance."

"Yes, a circumstance almost akin to what happened to Twilight Sparkle not so long ago, I would imagine." Luna was tiring of this game.

There was a reason she, and not Celestia, bore the Element of Honesty.

"I suppose you could look at it like that. But Luna, only one alicorn came through the portal and she's certainly not in this building." They'd both know if she were. Her power, her magic felt like a lingering hole torn in space and time.

"And Spike was never truly a pony to begin with." So why would he be an alicorn, Luna left unsaid.

"Indeed he's not." And Celestia left so much more unsaid.

"So what, then, would a dragon become?" Luna was genuinely curious, at the possibilities more than the reality.

The reality could be nothing after all, or it may be everything.

Only Discord knows.

"What more can a dragon become that is not a dragon? There are no deep, intrinsic differences between dragons as there are the pony tribes. Only that some are hatched with wings, others not, and all bear the same magical breath." Excepting old legends, well before the sisters time. Of dragons breathing lightning and frost.

Modern scholars simply assumed one to be Windigo's and the other myth or misinterpretation of great storms.

"Is that why you think they can have no aspirations greater than a hoard of gems?" Luna did not wilt at her sisters glare.

"I beg your pardon?" Celestia wasn't certain where the accusation came from, but it tickled her ire none the less.

"For some reason, Twilight Sparkle, your protege, inundated both our offices with dozens of papers on Wednesday containing reports, budgets, speculation and so many other problems which, upon review, were not trivial minutia. Las Pegasus is insolvent, Manehatten has more incidents of copyright and patent infringement than the rest of the kingdom and Fillydelphia is doing a very good job trying to draw the Windigo's back from the north." Luna fired off, heedless of her sisters attempts to interrupt her.

"The first two alone are serious enough, but Fillydelphia represents a matter of national interest. Growing resentment and discrimination has been fed by the creation of local laws to segregate the free beings living there and create a new caste of second class citizens!" Celestia leaned her head forward, pressing against the cool glass.

She couldn't escape court, not even in the hospital.

And judging by the knocking on the theater door, her guards were here with even more business that Luna had just brought up.

Lovely.