Sleep No More

Normally, Twilight Sparkle would be asleep as soon as her head in the pillow; surviving the craziness that was Ponyville during the day was more than enough to wear you down, regardless of how resilient you might have been. Though her friends definitely helped in that regard, much better was eight or nine hours blissful ignorance of the world and its attendant problems. Sweet oblivion was exactly what she needed right now after everything that had happened.

The local environment, however, seemed to be doing its abject best to produce the exact ideal set of circumstances to prevent her from falling asleep, though Twilight still had enough of her wits about her to realise that taking it personally was a sign of madness.

It was much, much too warm for a start; the sweat-drenched covers clung to her body like a second-skin, practically suffocating her in a claustrophobic nightmare … a nightmare that even Princess Luna couldn't rescue her from. Gradually, Twilight became aware of the fact that she badly needed a drink, but even worse she also needed to pee, but either of those tasks alone presented an insurmountable obstacle and she baulked at the notion of attempting both in tandem.

Space and time had warped in her sleep-fuzzed brain until the bathroom was no longer just down the hallway, but at the summit of a vast mountain. Behind a locked door. Guarded by dragons. And molten lava. And molten lava dragons.

Even worse, outside of the warm embrace of her duvet, the ambient temperature was somewhere between the Frozen North in the midst of the coldest winter on record and the atmosphere at one of Rainbow Dash's prank-parties. The advice for surviving either was very much the same: dress warmly, stick to the marked paths, and don't make eye-contact with whatever might lurk there. To expose her fragile skin to the cool night air would be to invite certain frostbite and a slow, lingering death from exposure.

All right, I know I'm just being lazy.

Part of the problem – in getting to sleep, not dealing with the imaginary molten lava dragons – was dealing with her own rampant internal monologue; Twilight had a sharp mind, but it was a double-edged sword: while she was a brilliant student and a quick-learner, she didn't know how to quieten the storm within her. Ideas would form out of nothing, demand that she make use of them, or be doomed to forget them as soon as the dawn broke. Princess Celestia had once told her that, “If you forget an idea that you've had during the night when the morning comes, it probably wasn't worth remembering, anyway.”

The nerves in her hooves felt twitchy. A sure-fire sign that she needed to write something down or forever be doomed to feel restless.

Some ponies would lie awake at night, worrying that they hadn't packed enough activity into one day; they would go for runs, or go cycling, or even – and Twilight inwardly shuddered – throw themselves into a frigid lake and actually swim around in it. Twilight got her biggest adrenaline rushes from particularly scintillating passages of prose. She never felt more alive than when she consulted a thesaurus and found that it was recommending the same word that she'd just thought of a moment earlier.

Writing was her extreme sport; she'd yet to win any medals for all her competitive efforts, but there was still time.

Fishing underneath the bed meant risking imminent bisection of her foreleg due to the biting chill which pervaded her bedroom, but Twilight bravely pawed at the floor until the tip of her hoof hit something: a notepad that had been sitting there for weeks, possibly months, since she'd purchased it and completely forgotten about its existence on the same day.

Luckily, there were always plenty of quills dotted around; more than once, Spike had complained about them, and Twilight kept promising to be more careful, but their entire relationship seemed to be based upon on making promises and then being charmingly circumspect when they kept running into the same problems time after time.

She quickly jotted down the little nuggets of scenarios that had so skilfully burrowed into her mind, clamping on to her neurons until she was afraid that the whole world would dissolve only leaving her half-crazed notions as her new reality. It usefully wasted an hour of her life, but she didn't feel any more tired or able to fall asleep by the end of it.

She hefted a sigh in the direction of the ceiling; counting sheep, plotting out story ideas, picturing her and Rainbow Dash taking on the zombie hordes in a hellish, post-apocalyptic Ponyville … none of her usual calming strategies were having any effect. No matter how many times the pale, wasted figure of Trixie exploded in a hail of rainbow laser fire, Twilight couldn't get her mind or her bladder to stop nagging her for attention. If there was something concrete she could put her hoof on, it would've helped, but even after an extensive trawl through her memories of the day, she couldn't find anything that would bring about this level of insomnia.

Staring at the ceiling was usually an effective remedy; it was so mind-bogglingly boring that, if she ever had to undergo major surgery, she was going to insist on using it instead of anaesthetic to ensure that she was actually under for the duration. Tonight, though, every crack, every striation, every gap between the tiles twisted and resolved themselves into a pattern of psychedelic complexity. It was as if she could see the entire structure of the universe revolving around in the plasterwork. It was then that Twilight realised she had to go to the bathroom or her pelvic floor area would likely collapse. And having to hear Spike complain about that was more effort than it was worth.

She made it to the bathroom without receiving any permanent damage from the glacial wasteland the hallway had become overnight; Twilight half-imagined that she could see a thin layer of frost coating everything and icicles growing out of the floor in bizarre shapes. Some strange analogue of performance anxiety kicked-in, however, because as soon as she sat down on the toilet, she found that she no longer needed to go; trying to maintain her temper after the wasted journey, Twilight skulked back to her bedroom and barely avoided slamming the door shut. She collapsed face first into the covers and mouthed a scream that was muffled by the blankets. Facing the world was bad enough, but having to do so without proper respite from its previous assault on her psyche?

A weight joined her on the bed. A voice, cool and calm, said, “Hey, Twilight. You look like you're having trouble sleeping?”

It sounded familiar to her somehow, but her sleep-fuzzed brain had trouble identifying the source of the voice. Twilight wondered if it was worth the effort to haul her neck around forty-five degrees in order to learn who had so brazenly secreted themselves into her room. They might have interesting things to teach her in regards to stealth, anyway. The fact that she wasn't more concerned about the intruder's intent ought to have bothered her, but it didn't. “Hey,” she replied slowly, “uh, how did you get in here?”

“Does it really matter?” There was a hint of something in the person's voice. Quiet amusement, perhaps? As if breaking-and-entering into a young pony's bedroom while she was trying to sleep was such an everyday occurrence to them that expounding upon the methodology involved was an absurdity.

“I suppose not,” Twilight said, bobbing her head from side to side in agreement. “But if you're an axe-murderer, could you at least keep the noise to a minimum? I'd hate for you to disturb everypony in the neighbourhood.” She could just imagine the almighty brouhaha that would ensue if Spike and the others were to stumble upon some madpony dismembering her bloody corpse; it brought a smile to her face, obliterated though the expression was by the foamy duvet doing its best to asphyxiate her, picturing them berating a psychotic murderer as they skilfully cleft her into her component parts. Maybe an artist could use the pieces as part of an ironic sculpture on the decline of civilisation?

Instead of being viciously rent asunder by sharpened blades, however, Twilight felt a strong pair of forelegs gently nudge her until she was lying on her side; facing away from the intruder, however, so she was still in the dark as to his or her identity. Her automatic assumption was that it was a male, although making snap-judgements was probably best avoided at this point. Then again, the list of ponies that she could reasonably distinguish in her soporific state wasn't especially high, and they certainly weren't in possession of arms such as the ones snaking around her waist, pulling her close until she was nestled snugly against … whoa. “Uh, I should be fighting you off, shouldn't I?” said Twilight, feeling a deep blush break out across her muzzle. “I mean, you've invaded the sanctity of my lair, and are, um-” she trailed off, feeling a mite silly at her weakly-worded protest.

“Sometimes,” the voice was saying in a measured tone, while its body got on with doing something that caused a breathy moan to escape Twilight's lips, “it's best not to over-think things and just go with the flow. How many times in your life can you honestly say that you've done something that was purely in and of the moment?”

Twilight had to admit that there were relatively few occasions when she'd actually done anything that was spontaneous. It wasn't her style. Rigid planning and thinking, that was how she rolled. Still, the bits of her mind that had managed to remain steadfastly logical were telling her that letting a complete stranger do what they were doing to her now – even if the irrational sections of her consciousness were telling her to just shut the Tartarus up and enjoy it – wasn't exactly the best place to begin this wild foray into uncharted territory.

The body that the voice was connected to finished its work with a little satisfied grunt, and even Twilight had to admit that she, too, was feeling a certain giddy warmth suffuse her after the whole process had been brought to a mutually-beneficial conclusion; curiosity finally overwhelmed her and she turned to see who her mysterious visitor was, and then, just as she was about to identify them her eyes snapped open and rafts of sunshine were pouring in through the minute gaps in the blinds.

“Damn,” Twilight said softly, her chest rising and falling in time with her gasping breaths, using a hoof to shield her eyes from the harsh yellow glare that threatened to blind her. “I really do have weird sexual fantasies.”