She came, and found no one.
Author's Note
Suggested soundtrack.
She came, and found no one.
Twilight was not drenched in sweat. Far from it. But she could feel how every pore in her body was emanating an acrid, unpleasant excretion. She felt disgusted by it. She wouldn’t shower it away, though. She wasn’t in a mood to. She felt a cold, detached, irritated laziness. Her face slackened into a half-lidded, cold frown. The hunger, the greed, the lust, the sheer wanting that had been driving and oppressing her was gone. It did not leave behind happiness, satisfaction, or even contentment—only a relief, a void. She knew how playing with herself made her feel. She knew it didn’t really make things better, knew it did not fulfill her. And yeah, playing with herself was the operative phrase; playing by herself, alone, but by her own rules. No fear, no dependency, no compromise, no doubt, no pain… no gain either. No satisfaction, no happiness. Only the measly relief of an itch scratched, in the full knowledge that soon, inevitably, it will start itching again, that it would never truly leave her alone.
Twilight sat up. The mess around her barely registered. She couldn't bring herself to care about any of it. Books and pictures, haphazardly strewn, spoke of high passion and low appetites, of tense embraces and wet kisses, of forbidden pleasures that Twilight hadn’t felt guilt or shame about in a long time. Minutes ago, she had been immersed in them in a trance, running after an unattainable prize, the figures’ overt desire in symbiosis with her own. Now, she couldn’t even remember how that felt, to lust, to want, to strive. She only regarded the scene with a tired, slightly disgusted indifference. The kind one usually reserves for the cold, damp leftovers of an uninspiring meal.
Between the lines of text and the dots of pigment, imaginary characters and paid actors and models writhed and heaved, twisted and thrust, grabbed and released. They bit and they kissed and they clawed and they cried. Over and over again, in every combination, every permutation. Better them than… better this than the alternative. She knew that, without these anchors, these strangers and phantasms, her imagination would go to work on its own, and it would use the people she knew, the bodies she saw, breathing, hot, alive, at hoof. She did not want to think of her friends, her neighbors, her acquaintances like that. It felt wrong to debase and use their image in her mind. What’s more, there was the continued, persistent, unassailable contrast between the world of pleasures and excitements her dreams offered, and the frustrating status quo… She started crafting schemes and drafting lines, she ran conversations and scenarios in her head, she became overwhelmed with the desperate need to change things and get what she wanted, no matter the cost, the only consequence of any weight being her fulfillment. It was wrong, it was unbearable.
So she danced alone, to her own tune. Easier than leading, much easier than synchronizing. She didn’t have to wrestle or weasel or charm or earn consent. She didn’t have to worry about consequences and circumstances and audiences. She danced alone, and it was safe. She played by herself, and kept herself company.
She didn’t feel like getting up. She didn’t feel like doing anything. Plans, organization, schedules, checklists, none of that mattered. Nothing at all mattered. She couldn’t care less. And there was relief in that, too, there was peace, there was sanity. The scorching fire was not quenched, but it had become, for now, a dull ember. That was the best that she could hope for.
She curled unto herself. Hugged herself. With deep, slow breaths, heedless of the chaos around her, unconcerned with her own unpleasant smell, or the sticky stains on the blankets, she drifted into slumber and silence, her dreams blissfully free of the kisses and caresses of the ponies she knew, and loved, and could never have.
Author's Note
This chapter contains a few tentative sound tracks. You may or may not want to click them depending on whether you think it'll break your immersion, but if that's the case, I think you can open the first one safely and ignore the rest.
Sun Day.
Twilight woke up. The memories of her dream were still fresh and harsh, but they kept dissolving the harder she tried to grasp at them.
A clown; a circus without a tent; an escape; a courtyard; an abandoned diner; a memory, the same courtyard, one night, long ago; an audition, long ago, outside of the diner; yellow light outside its windows, blue moonlight upon the courtyard; a neon sign, flashing against the dark; a circular saw, the rough deconstruction of a public bench, a splinter in the clown’s hand; an intelligent but inflexible ringleader, a fascinating eyebrow, a despair, a hiring.
A hiring? The despair turns into uncertainty, the future appears fearsome, the future is now present, the present is now uncertain. After all that has happened, is there still a circus? Is there still an audience? Is there still a point?
Twilight woke up, for real this time, the dream forgotten, leaving only an aftertaste of doubt and hesitancy. Whatever her brain had been digesting, whatever notions and fears and impressions it was dealing with, it was done processing them. She stretched against the covers, and felt and heard her joints crack and pop.
At that point in time, Twilight wasn’t running on willpower, but on sheer, well-worn routine. There was a sequence of actions that she took every morning, without a thought, without a care, but with a method. In the dim light, she reached out to the night-stand. Right next to her was the list she’d prepared for herself, before she had begun her session. She knew that, had she delayed writing it to right before sleep, she wouldn’t have written it at all.
She considered her instructions, in the dim gray light that had pierced through the curtains. From her hornwriting, you could tell she’d been impatient; she hadn’t dotted all the i’s. The list consisted of the following items, written in a neat yet slightly jerky cursive.
Check the tıme.
Clean up the usual mess, then open the wındows.
Shower Power!
Breakfast like a Champıon!
Wait for Rarity to come; she’ll be bringing Spike back from his sleepover. Make sure he has everything he needs, then head out with Rarity. This Sunday is Spa Day!
Oh. That was be something to look forward to. One step at a time, Twilight. First item:
Check the time.
Twilight got up, gingerly navigating the mess around her. She consulted the clock, with some trepidation. It was three hours later than she woke up any other day of the week. She sighed in relief. This was part of the plan. She always needed that extra time, after her sessions, to recover. Check. What next?
Clean up the usual mess., then let the morning in.
Twilight wasted no time removing—or rather, sharply yanking away—the dirty sheets and cushion covers, carefully closing and archiving her materials, smoothing over whichever damage she’d done to them in her sleep, placing the new bedsheets, and so on. All traces of her party of one erased. No-one would guess, from this sight, the dark mess of yester night.
She reached out to the windows, and flung the curtains open. The room bathed in the beams of light. Little motes of dust shimmered as they floated gently in ascending, convective currents of air. The little, shimmering dots of light added up to the illusion of a tangible solid. Twilight did not resist the temptation of cutting through it with her hoof. As usual, no resistance, but a uniform, slight pressure on the side of light. That photons had momentum despite having no mass had always perplexed her. She played for a moment with the high contrast between the parts of her hoof that were sunbathed, and the rest, and messed with the shape of the beam and the shadow that cut and narrowed it. But enough of those foalish games.
She opened the windows, and shivered in the fresh morning air, watching as the dust flew in violent spirals at the intake. She took a deep breath. Until then, she hadn’t realized how stale the air had gotten. It was like removing one’s shoes: a predictable feeling, that still felt like a pleasant surprise every time. Morning in Ponyville shimmered, morning in Ponyville shone—Twilight smiled to herself; this day was going to be just fine. Check. Next?
Shower Power!
As she walked into the bathroom and mechanically took hold of her equipment, Twilight wondered why she had told herself to shower, if, soon thereafter, she’d be going to a spa. It seemed redundant. As the water flowed around her body, jolting her awake with a pleasant, chilly bite, it dawned on her (again). It was out of the question to appear before Rarity, or anyone at all, with the rheum in her bleary eyes and the matted bed hair and the stains, oh Heavens the sticky pale stains on her coat. Ugh! Wipe, wash, scrub and scour! Rinse and repeat!
Like every morning, she made a mental note to buy a new brush, the bristles on this one were beginning to fray; she couldn’t write on her list while in the bathroom. Like every morning, by the time she had dried herself, she had forgotten about it. The brush had been in need of replacement for weeks and weeks now.
That kind of repeated, consistent, predictable mistake was one of the factors that made Twilight so aware of her fallibility. She was only equine. Her mammal mind was a mass of contradictory needs, compulsions and processes. They arose unneeded and turned off unwanted. Reason, logic, strategy, consciousness—they were only a flimsy element in the whole thing.
But here was the key; they were predictable. One might even say, characteristic. Which meant, there was something she could do about them. She could anticipate when and how she would be and feel at any given time, and plan things so that she took the right actions in spite of herself. It was a complex balancing game of defining the right instructions, incentives, and deterrents—and setting them with the right timing and pacing.
Her lists were one such tool. And, speaking of which, the next item was:
Breakfast like a Champion!
The list’s enthusiasm was slowly beginning to get to her. When she had woken up, the Twilight who had written that list might as well have been a different person, like an annoying, overzealous parent. As she walked down the stairs to the kitchen, however, Twilight was feeling more and more herself. Or rather, that specific self of hers, cheerfully organized, jauntily methodic. That wasn’t quite the same as the Twilight that had written the list. That Twilight had been on edge, gleeful and impatient, eye-twitching and lip-biting and foot-tapping with anticipation, expediting the list with a desperate hurry to be done with it so she could finally dive into her new material.
As she got her oatmeal from the fridge, ready-made since yesterday, she winced at the memory; the dive had been quite literal, having cast her telekinetic field on herself in a simulacrum of swimming through the air into her bed. Chuckling awkwardly at the recollection, she grabbed the spoon from the drawer, and sat comfortably. She wasn’t feeling hungry yet, but, as Rarity said, “l’appetit vient en mangeant, darling; appetite comes by eating!”. Sometimes she’d add, “Just don’t let it come too far, dear. Everything in moderation.”
Sure enough, Twilight had started eating rather daintily, but she got heartier, and happier with every spoonful. ‘Quand l’appetit va, tout va!’ as the Fancee saying went; when the appetite is well, all is well.
With a satisfied grin, Twilight took her now-empty plate to the sink, cleaned it, and left it to dry. Check. All that was left was:
Wait for Rarity to come; she’ll be bringing Spike back from his sleepover. Make sure he has everything he needs, then head out with Rarity. This Sunday is Spa Day!
Ah, blessed ‘widdle Spikey Wikey’. Twilight wondered whether Rarity’s policy of not acknowledging the baby dragon’s crush might not end well. As far as Twilight could tell, Rarity was stalling and hoping that it would fade eventually. But, in another sense, she was leading him on. It was obvious that she enjoyed the attention. The preposterous amounts of help Spike gave her were also an incentive to maintain the status quo. That one time when Spike had been a pincushion came to mind. “Thick scales, can’t feel a thing,” he said. Or that time when he’d carried untold amounts of luggage around. Twilight wondered whether there could possibly be a spell to make luggage self-ambulant. She chuckled at the vision of Rarity prancing proudly, a single file of excited little chests and suitcases ambling after her like chicks after their mother.
Seriously, though, she and Rarity needed to have a talk about the whole Spike situation. And about her general habit of roping males into doing the heavy lifting for her. Twilight felt it was somewhat unethical in the same way that selling lottery tickets was. A small (or not-so-small) service in the exchange of an almost-certainly-false hope of something allegedly amazing. It didn’t help that brains suck at multiplying, and grossly over-estimated the chances of the happy outcome. Not that Rarity wasn’t an amazing pony in many respects, but…
Maybe she was right. After the whole greed-induced-gigantism episode, their relationship had shifted. It seemed like Spike had calmed down a bit, but it also seemed like Rarity had grown to respect him more. Maybe he would become a handy friend to her, eventually. Twilight couldn’t tell for sure. But this whole keeping of open secrets, and the not-addressing of potential problems… that just didn’t sit right with her. It made her… fidgety. Problems, Twilight thought, should be preempted, solved before they even have a chance to happen. Better safe than sorry, that was Twilight’s motto—
There was a knocking at the door.
Startled out of her silent soliloquy, Twilight grabbed her bag of bits and went to open the door.
Sure enough, Rarity stood there. This was a spa day, so Rarity hadn’t put quite as much effort into her appearance as she usually did. Her hair was merely combed, rather than styled. She had dispensed with the fake eyelashes, and the mascara, and the eyeshadow, thus letting her deep blue eyes shine naturally. She did look a bit more ordinary. But Twilight—and, from the looks of it, Spike, who was… not quite swooning, but definitely abstracted—still could appreciate her natural features, not to mention her poise, her energy, the sheer joy of being herself. It might be fairer to say that Rarity looked a little less extraordinary.
Even though Rarity wasn’t at full power, Twilight checked herself for the symptoms of actual lust—accelerated pulse, involuntary eye-wandering, unbidden imaginations, muscles clenching and unclenching, humours flowing—and found nothing. She found herself admiring Rarity, like one would admire a sapphire, or a lily; with great pleasure, but entirely platonically. That… was a win..
“Why, hello, my darling Twilight!” Rarity said. “My, you do look amazingly pleased with yourself. Had some breakthrough in your research yesterday?”
“Hi, Twilight! She’s right, what’s with the grinning?” Spike said.
“You could say that I got what I wanted out of my time alone, I suppose.” Twilight said, her grin turned awkward. Time for a change of topic. “So how was your sleepover, i.e. your secret foalsitter duty?”
Spike puffed up, all self-important. “Well, the CMC are a handful, I’ll give you that. But I found a plan to distract them. One that can be used more than one! I’ve found a crusade to keep them busy. An Eternal Crusade… Mwa-ha-ha.” He paused. “Er, Twilight, you know you’re not supposed to say ‘i.e.’ out loud like that, right?”
Twilight chuckled. “Says the guy who Verbally Capitalizes, and laughs ominously at his own plans. You should wait until Rainbow’s around, then she could strike lightning at the appropriate times.”
Spike scratched his chin in speculation—and so did Rarity. “You know, Spike, I don’t often get to make you any clothes. How is your Dastardly Whiplash outfit holding up? I hope the cape is comfortable around the neck.”
“Rarity, that was the greatest present a baby dragon could ask for. I’ll never be grateful enough for it.”
Huh. So that was where it had come from. Their relationship wasn’t quite as one-sided as Twilight had thought…
“Oh, hush, you helpful little crinkle-cracker. Say, how about I make you a suit? Shirt, waistcoat, double-breasted, hm, peaked lapel, surely, black-on-red, yes, I think, or, no, black-and-yellow… maybe a bolo tie? Do we need a cane? What if—”
“Rarity, we have an appointment.” Twilight said. When Rarity got into a creative mood, she could stay there for hours. As for Spike, he was definitely enjoying the attention.
She emerged from her Zone. “Ah, yes, that’s right. It wouldn’t do to let Aloe and Lotus wait for us. Spike, I must finish that suit, I simply cannot leave things be like this. I already have your measurements, but I’ll definitely need to schedule an appointment with you later, we need to discuss the details.”
Twilight hoped that dopey grin emerging in Spike’s face didn’t have a “It’s a date!” thought behind it. Still, better safe than sorry. “I’m sure Spike absolutely trusts your judgment, right Spike?”
The faintest shadow of disappointment flickered through his face, and was immediately replaced by absolute support. “Sure! Plus,” he added with a sardonic grin, “we all know what happens when we try to tell Rarity how to do her job, am I right, Twilight?”
Sigh.
“Touché.” Twilight reluctantly admitted. Rarity failed to hide her amusement.
“Very well, Spike, I shall endeavour to design this on my own. Fear not! This will be my best work yet!”
“Rarity, every work you ever make is better than all those that came before it,” Twilight said in mock-boredom.
“Except for that shawl you made for Maud,” Spike joked, “that was substandard.”
That got an awkward chuckle out of Rarity.
“Very well. Spike, you’re the dragon of the home now,” said Twilight. “Your mission: to guard the treasure with all your might!”
Spike saluted smartly.
“Rarity,” Twilight said, “let’s go!”
“Aye, captain, my captain!” she said, “To the hot waters!”
And to the hot waters they went!
