Author's Note

Prompted writing.

Untitled

My job was tough - I had to know the worst of this superficially idyllic world, and I had to protect my charges from ever seeing it. Sometimes, when it was very dark and quiet, I used to have the rare pleasure to sneak out and enjoy our Night Princess's starry domain; sleep, however, was something I couldn't afford, and my job got a lot harder when she came along. Suddenly, I was forcibly back-seated by some misguided lust for adventure, for danger, for the tail of some raver junkie at a club that was half "music" and half dirty Apple Puff. I could still work behind the scenes, give subtler hints and warnings, keep us all out of trouble, but sometimes it seemed like everypony was blind and deaf.

Failure was inevitable.

The day I failed started off the same as too many others. Octavia woke up alone in the junkie's bed, her teeth laced with a few long, bright blue hairs. Spitting, she held one hoof up towards the window across the room, trying to block out the sun while covering her face with another leg. Her whole body was racked by aches and shakes from what I kept trying to tell her was withdrawals, but she ignored my warnings and stumbled out across a minefield of dirty clothes, empty orange bottles, and used syringes. She insisted to herself that it was just dehydration from sleeping with her mouth open, and the pills kept next to the bathroom sink were just a soothing, herbal pain-killer from Zebrica - or whatever that mare told her.

I wished a city pony could afford to be so willfully naive. I wished a lot of things, and while Octavia threw up in the sink, I wished she would at least listen to me, at least understand her sex life didn't have to be something better drug-blotted from memory than savored. Somehow, she still thought her cares and the highs were worth the scar she hid with a bow-tie. Somehow, she still wondered why she would cry herself to sleep, muffled beneath a pillow, when her "lover" was done with her.

There was another black eye marring her image when she finally stopped retching and faced the mirror. She stopped and stared for a few moments - just long enough to get my hopes up. Maybe, with the proof literally staring her in the face, she would stop fighting the truth of--

"I probably banged it on a bedpost while I was sleeping. Of course." There was a nervous edge to her tone, barely marring its practiced calm. Once, I would have screamed, argued, and fought her - we both knew she had slept on nothing more than a mattress in the middle of a trash-strewn floor - but I had become weary. Nothing could part her from this other mare.

Octavia turned away from the evidence in the mirror and poked her head back into the bedroom, calling anxiously for the one she thought she loved. There was no answer, and there never was during daylight hours.