Sleepless

by Cackling Moron

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Slice of Life, Human, Twilight Sparkle
Length: 28798

Anon can’t get to sleep. Strangely, he doesn’t seem to want to.

Anon, presently living with Twilight, is looking a little bit the worse for wear. He seems to be having some difficulty sleeping. More unusually, he seems oddly keen to keep it that way…

Published 2018-07-04 23:20:07 UTC
Last updated 2020-04-17 12:44:16 UTC

The day is my enemy

Author's Note

Can a pointless story that meanders even be considered to have filler? I'd imagine so - life finds a way. Let's find out together, shall we?

The day is my enemy

In the end, Twilight hadn’t had the heart to pull Spike away from what he had been doing with Rarity (something to do with gems, apparently) and so they’d just taken the train. A better idea on the face of it - direct and much less faff. In retrospect probably a mistake.

Some combination of the sunshine filling the carriage with warmth, the gentle rocking of the tracks and the rolling, repetitive, beautiful countryside all swirled together with Anon’s sleepiness to put him out like a light mere minutes after he’d sat down next to Twilight.

And mere minutes after this he’d woken up screaming.

Not a long or prolonged scream. More of a yelp, really, but loud and sudden enough to make Twilight jump a good foot or so out of her seat. That she’d been nodding off as well hadn’t helped.

“What? Who?” She sputtered, on all fours and looking around wildly only to see Anon pressed back into his seat and looked even more confused and scared than she felt, eyes snapping from one side of the carriage to the other but obviously seeing nothing, understanding nothing.

Twilight quickly found herself soothing him again, something that she discovered had got easier. Hopping back up beside him she once again put her hooves around him, squeaking a little in alarm when he clung to her, head pressed to her chest. But she got over it. There seemed to be certain things he responded better to, and these she went for automatically.

“Hey, you’re alright. I’m here, you’re okay, it’s okay,” she said softly.

His eyes stopped rolling around and instead focused on her. Then, a second later, actually seemed to see her.

“T-Twilight?” He murmured, blinking. She smiled.

“Yes Nonny. You’re okay.”

He smiled too - weakly - then noticed that he’d wrapped himself around her perhaps more closely than he would have had he been entirely conscious. Meekly he pulled back, shuffling away from her on his seat up to the very edge.

“Sorry,” he said, quietly.

“It’s okay.”

He then looked around and blinked.

“Why are we - we’re on a train? Why - oh, no, no wait I remember. Yes. Going to see the night princess. Luna, right?” He asked, glancing up to check for confirmation. Still smiling, Twilight nodded and Anon looked away and out the window.

“Good, yeah. Couldn’t take the balloon. I remember now. Alright.”

Then he turned back to her.

“She - she’ll know what to do, right? She does this kind of thing a lot?”

“Luna will know what to do,” Twilight said, with more confidence than she actually felt. Luna was the sensible one to ask, this was beyond doubt, but why hadn’t she said something already? There could have been any number of reasons why, obviously, but which one?

They’d find out soon enough. Probably.

Following this, Anon took to walking up and down the carriage which, much to Twilight’s relief, was empty apart from them. Not a day to be going up to Canterlot, apparently. He swayed alarmingly as he walked and often had to brace himself on the back of seats to keep from falling over, but otherwise seemed as alright as might be expected. For someone in his condition.

Twilight watched him closely, partly out of a concern for his immediate safety - anytime he looked like he might overbalance she had to fight to keep from leaping up and catching him - but mostly due to worrying about his general wellbeing.

Her whole experience of him up to this point had been one of immense and abiding calm. He was somepony - someone, rather - who didn’t seem to get ruffled by anything. Even somehow ending up the sole example of his species in an entirely alien world had only managed to coax a raised eyebrow out of him, and that hadn’t lasted. That was just how he was, it seemed.

Until now, until whatever had started happening had started happening. It made her distinctly uncomfortable to see him like this, muttering to himself, checking over his shoulder, fighting to keep his eyes open. As far as things went it was pretty upsetting to see.

She really hope they fixed him soon.

“You’re staring at me,” he said. He’d wandered all one way up the carriage and now wandered all the way back again without her really noticing. With him standing in front of her she blinked and resettled herself, smiling reassuringly. Or at least attempting to.

“Sorry. Was just thinking. Worried about you,” she said.

He would have blanched, had he not already been about as pale as he could possibly get.

“Why? Should you be worried about me? Do you know what it is? Is it really serious and you just didn’t want to tell me?”

He’d dropped to one knee in front of Twilight while babbling all this out and had grabbed one of her hooves for good measure. She took the opportunity to grab his hands right back and stare him down, realising perhaps that in future she would have to think carefully about her choice of words.

Then again, who knew what was going on in his head by now? What would the right words even be?

“No no no it’s fine, hey? Shh, it’s fine. No, sorry. I’m worried because you haven’t slept. That’s a good reason to be worried about you.”

Anon took a second to process this. Once he did, he looked sheepish.

“Oh. Oh right. Yeah. Sorry. I’m just really tired.”

This much was a given.

His eyes, which had been staring blankly out of the window, wobbled back over towards her, though they didn’t get any less blank.

“You’re real nice to me, Twilight,” he said and she smiled, waving her free hoof at him as though to brush his words aside.

“It’s nothing nopony else wouldn’t have done,” she said. His grip on her other hoof tightened and his look - still blank- somehow got more intense.

“No, no, you’re so nice, Twilight. You put me up when no-one else would, you fed me, looked after me, talked to me. You’re just - you’re so nice to me. You’ve always been so nice to me.”

As grave and serious and slightly intimidating as all this was she couldn’t help but go a little pink at his rather gushing praise. Anything she might have said in response was cut off when he let go and stood up all at once.

“Oh, I’m all emotional!” He giggled before starting back off up the carriage again.

Twilight gave him a very lopsided look of concern.

It was probably just as well they were arriving soon.

-

Canterlot station had been blissfully quiet, it continuing to somehow be a day when no-one wanted to go there or apparently leave, either. The few ponies who were there gave Twilight (and more specifically Anonymous) a wide berth, doing their best to act as though he wasn’t there and they weren’t actually going out of their way to avoid him.

Not that Anonymous noticed, too dazed and too busy letting himself be led by Twilight to the nearest place that coffee could be found. She left him outside while she popped in, popping back out again bare minutes later bearing the extra-large cup into which she had poured several double espressos.

“I don’t know anything about coffee,” she said as she passed the cup to Anon, who took it blearily and slugged back a mouthful without a word. A tremor ran through his whole body from top to bottom and he staggered back.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.

“Not good?”

“No, good. Just bracing. It’s like being kicked in the face. It’s amazing.”

He had some more, visibly wincing and Twilight again wondered about the appeal of coffee. Not her sort of thing. Her stimulant of choice? Life. And learning. And possibly books, but that sort of tied into the second one.

“Feel any better?” She asked.

“Not really. But thank you anyway.”

Another sip. More wincing.

“You know, I’m still kind of surprised you ponies have coffee at all,” he said.

That made her genuinely curious.

“Why?” She asked.

Anon blinked. He obviously hadn’t expected any reaction at all, and now that he’d been forced into thinking about what he’d said he was coming up with nothing. After a moment of struggle he just gave up.

“...I don’t know.”

Conversation petered out a little after that, and after clearing her throat Twilight silently led the way onwards. Anon followed, equally silent, through infinitely more sheepish.

Once away from the station and the rather more pedestrian, workaday bit of the city in which it dwelt, the place opened up and became infinitely more gorgeous. This was driven home especially when they turned a corner and caught a magnificent look at a vast slice of the place bathed in blinding sunshine, every polished stone and arch gleaming. A lot of corners in the city had been designed with this sort of effect in mind. The novelty rarely wore off, surprisingly.

“Never not impressive,” Twilight said, unable to keep the smile from her face. Anon, for his part, was mainly just squinting.

“It’s so bright,” he said, slurping.

He wasn’t wrong. Being the home city of a celestial deity did mean the place was perhaps a touch better-lit than most places. Twilight was just used to it.

Still, nothing worth dawdling over. They’d done enough of that already.

“Come on,” she said, setting off again at a brisk trot.

A few more of these stunning, delicious corners later had them on the route to the palace proper, passing guards who appeared to know Twilight on sight as they did not stop to challenge either of them, and all gates were opened.

In his semi-official and poorly defined capacity as ‘guest of the state’ - and also owing to the widely-known circumstances of his mysterious and unexplained arrival - Anon did not draw undue comment. They knew who he was, what he was and if he was with Twilight they didn’t really need to know why he was back in Canterlot, either.

He waved at the guards as he went by anyway. Not that he got a reaction.

Another minute or so of silent walking saw Anon starting to sag and his steps starting to slow. Twilight noticed when he halfway wandered into her, mumbled a semi-verbal apology and then nearly fell into a hedge. Once he was upright again and moving she gave him a bump to the hip to get his attention.

“Hmm? Sorry, sorry,” he said, blinking down at her.

“You’re falling asleep,” she said. “Tell me about something. You have palaces back on Earth?”

Seemed like a dumb question (who didn’t have palaces?) but it wasn’t supposed to spark a deep and involved discussion, it was just to give him something to keep his mind on. Anon screwed his face up as the question sunk through the fog and into his brain proper.

“Palaces? Yeah, a few, I guess. All over the place.”

He thought a little more.

“Big one up in town, too. That one’s famous.”

Doors opened for them and now they entered the castle proper. Stained glass. Fabulously expensive fixtures and fittings. Polished marble tiles. Priceless artworks and artifacts gathered across centuries. Anon noticed none of it, and Twilight had seen them before.

“What’s it like?” She asked, coaxing him into continuing.

“Big. Not as big as this, I don’t think, but still big. Very nice looking. Behind these big gates but otherwise it’s just there. Nice big gardens, too.”

He yawned and rubbed his face.

“One time mum took me up to town - I was a kid - and this was after a princess had died? Accident, it had been. And everyone was so sad! There were the palace gates, right? Big gates. And people had put flowers down in front of them. Hundreds of bunches of flowers. Thousands, maybe. You couldn’t even get close to the gates. They just kept going and going. I’d never seen anything like it,” he said.

Then he shrugged.

“Course, I didn’t really get it at the time. I was only a kid. But I remember what it looked like. Never seen anything like it.”

“Sounds beautiful. Sad, but beautiful,” Twilight said.

“Yeah, I guess it was.”

He sighed.

“I miss home.”

Twilight felt an unexpected stab of guilt at that. She’d got rather used to him being around of late. So used to it, in fact, that she’d almost completely forgotten that he wasn’t meant to be here at all.

It had been some months since all her efforts at working out why he’d arrived had come to nothing, and her additional efforts on working out a method of getting him back hadn’t got much further either. Anon himself had told her not to worry about it, and he talked about his home so little it was easy to forget sometime.

Or maybe she was just a bad friend. Her ears flattened.

“Why you asking me about palaces anyway? I thought this was a castle?” Anon asked, peering around, as though the walls might give him some kind of useful answer. They couldn’t, and so they didn’t.

Twilight did her best to put her bad thoughts behind her, smiling again.

“Just testing you,” she said.

“Oh. Oh right. Cunning.”

-

Anon stood dazedly while Twilight rushed around getting them settled into one of the castle’s guest rooms. He wondered briefly whether he should have packed since it looked like they might be staying overnight, but then he remembered he didn’t actually own anything he could have packed. Bit of a moot point.

“Where - where am I sleeping?” He asked on noticing the room had only one bed. A very big bed, to be fair, in a very plush and luxurious room, but still only one bed. He then seemed to realise what he’d said as he went somehow even paler. “Wait, no, no sleeping. Don’t need a bed. This is fine, this is fine.”

Twilight gave him a look and nudged open a door into an adjoining room. The suite just seemed to keep going on and on.

“I’ll be sleeping through there. Only a door away.”

Something wrinkled Anon’s brain and it took him a second or two to pin down exactly what it was.

“Shouldn’t you have a room here? Somewhere?” He asked.

Twilight had told him about her personal history during the course of their many, many conversations but the exact details of her movements were now a little fuzzy to him. Had she had a house? Lived in the castle? Both? He couldn’t quite remember.

“I felt it best to stay closer to you, keep you company,” Twilight said, smiling pleasantly. The sight gave Anon’s gut enough of a wrench to have him sit down heavily on the bed. It creaked, unused to someone of his dimensions and mass. It held though.

“Oh. Thank you,” he said.

“It’s okay. Now, we’re early. I’ve been informed that neither of the princesses are free yet, but will be before too long. When they are a guard should knock on the door and tell us.”

There was a knock on the door. A guard stuck his head in.

“The Princesses will see you now,” he said before disappearing again. Twilight was blank for a moment.

“That was quick,” she said, shaking it off and settling herself. “Well, guess it’s better than having to wait around.”

“Shhould I come with you?” Anon asked, rising to his feet. She looked him over. Haggard. Unwashed. Shadows under the eyes. Swaying. Slurring. Dozing off every few seconds before snapping back again.

“Uh, you may not be in the best condition to meet them,” she said as delicately as she could.

“Oh thank God,” he said, slumping back onto the bed and cradling his head in his hands. “The big ones scare me…”

Well that solved that.

“That’s good then. Don’t worry about it, Anon, I know what I need to tell them anyway, and this is just to see if they have any ideas. You can stay here and try and get some sleep.”

Somehow, he managed to go even more pale. At this point he was inches away from see-through.

“No. No sleep.”

Twilight would have pressed the point but, looking at him, it seemed pretty clear he’d be nodding off soon or later whether he liked it or not. She’d just have to make sure the guards were warned about the possibility of sudden screaming. That sort of thing tended to rub guards up the wrong way.

“Alright, okay. You going to be okay on your own?”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll find something to do,” he said, adding a moment later while wringing his hands: “Will you be long?”

“I’ll try to be as quick as I can.”

Anon stared at her for a moment.

“What’s-” she about managed to say, but he cut her off.

“You’re so nice to me,” he said, with what sounded almost like a barely-swallowed sob before grabbing her in his arms and hugging her. Twilight squeaked in shock but did hug him back once the surprise had passed, reaching under his arm awkwardly and giving him a pat on the back with her hoof.

“You’re my friend,” she said simply, by way of explanation.

She probably would have appreciated his spontaneous gesture more had he showered recently.

-

“And this came about quite suddenly, you say?”

“Yes. He’s been fine for as long as she’s been here, then just the last couple of days this happened. It’s not like him at all.”

Luna considered this, a hoof tapping against her chin. Twilight’s eyes flicked between the two princesses, a feeling of unaccountable tension building in the pit of her stomach. A childish part of her had, perhaps, been hoping for an instant and painless solution. No such luck.

Celestia didn’t need to be there, nightmares weren’t exactly her wheelhouse, but she had insisted. Partly out of curiosity, partly out a slightly nepotistic desire to help out Twilight’s friend, but mostly out of genuine concern for the apparent suffering of another.

“I have not detected or felt anything...untoward…” Luna said, eventually. “But then I have been giving our guest a degree of privacy when he sleeps, as he is not of this world. But one would imagine - were these nightmares of his as severe as you say - that I would have noticed something…”

She went quiet again, plainly deep in thought.

“A malign force, perhaps? Something interfering with your ability to perceive it?” Celestia ventured. Luna nodded.

“Not beyond the realm of possibility. If it is being actively caused by some foreign entity then it might stand to reason that it would take pains to mask its efforts. I would. But that is conjecture. Without more to go on I couldn’t possibly say.”

“Yes. Yes I think that’s it: speculation will only get us so far. I think we should see this Anon in person. See how best we may help, divine what our move should be.”

“We have some time now, do we not? For a brief meeting, at least?” Luna asked, and Celestia nodded.

Twilight winced. For whatever reason, the thought of others seeing Anon in the state he was in and perhaps thinking worse of him as a result made her oddly uncomfortable. Just didn’t seem fair on him somehow.

“He’s...not his best at the moment,” she said.

“I think we shall survive,” Celestia said, gently. Twilight swallowed.

“R-right. I’ll go get him then,” she said, turning.

“We can ask for a guard?” Celestia called out to her back as she moved towards the doors as quickly as politeness would allow.

“No, no I think it’d be best if I went to go get him,” Twilight said.

The sisters shared a look and came very close to shrugging. Years of experience kept them from doing so, however.

“As you say,” Luna said.

And so Twilight galloped off.

-

A few minutes later, only slightly out of breath, Twilight got back to the rooms and slowed, pleased to see that the brace of guards she’d left outside the door were still there. She wasn’t sure what she might have expected to see, but seeing nothing was a good sign.

She nodded to the guards and the guards nodded to her.

“He hasn’t started...screaming or anything, has he?” She asked, pausing just before the door.

“No. Haven’t heard a peep from him, Miss Sparkle,” said one, the other just shook his head.

Twilight felt that, on balance, this was probably a good sign.

“Thank you,” she said before nosing the door open. The room was dark. When the door clicked shut behind her it got darker still. Unusual but not too crazy. He might even have dozed off if she was lucky.

“Hello? Anon?” She asked, stepping carefully into the room, eyes adjusting. “There’s good news and bad news. Good news! The princesses will help! Bad news. They have no idea what that might involve. But once they’ve seen you they should know better! It shouldn’t take long - if we go now quickly they can talk to you and....”

She trailed off.

The room was silent as well as dark. Twilight squinted.

“Hello?”

No response. A breeze rolled past and she shivered. Now that she was more used to it she could see that the window was open. Wide open, so she saw, and that wasn’t all.

Trotting over - feeling increasing trepidation with each step, for what good ever came of entering a dark, silent room where someone was suppose to be? - she saw that the bed had been stripped down to the mattress and dragged across the floor to the window so much it was now pressed to the wall. The answer to the question of where the sheets had gone was made clear on closer examination, when Twilight saw them tied together and secured to the bed itself.

The knotted bedsheets dangled out the window. There was no way that even with all of them tied together they would have reached all the way down to the ground. Jumping up onto the bed Twilight stuck her head and looked down. There the makeshift rope dangled, maybe reaching three quarters of the way towards the ground. Below that, hedges. And nothing else.

“Anon?” She called out.

No answer at all.

He wasn’t there.

Night after night don't know what it means

Author's Note

Think I caught all the bits I meant to fix? Who knows? What's proofreading? What's drafting?

What's writing?

Night after night don't know what it means

Twilight did make sure to check the other room first, just on the off-chance that he’d done this mad thing with the bed sheets and then promptly fallen asleep underneath her bed or something.

He hadn’t, and both rooms had been entirely devoid of human. He had gone out the window and simply disappeared. There were not even any tracks she could see.

Twilight, electric with worry, ported back immediately to the throne room and explained the situation. Or did her best to, at least:

“Anon! Gone! I mean, he’s gone! He - the bedsheets! He made a rope! Out the window! The bed! He’s not there, I checked! I checked both rooms! He’s gone!”

While garbled, it got the message across, and guards were duly deployed to aid in the search. Twilight would have gone out herself - and had wanted to - but was held in check by the princesses mentioning the possibility that, if he just happened to wander back, it would be good were she still there.

So she remained, and the guards looked.

You would have thought that finding a unique and unusual creature in the most guard-infested place in Equestria would have been a cinch. You would have been half-right.

Tracking him proved quite easy. There was no shortage of helpful citizens who had seen Anon go this or that way and following his trail in this way was not difficult. It was just that every time they got to where they thought he was, it turned out that he’d left, and where he was was now where he’d just been.

He’d been to a lot of bars, it turned out. Canterlot had a healthy selection of such places and it seemed as though he had been running a gauntlet of them, of rapidly declining quality and cleanliness and without any real pattern to them.

Twilight - who was highly agitated - had been performing increasingly frantic circuits of her room while waiting for the reports to filter back to the castle and by the time Anon’s trail went cold she was practically beside herself.

“W-what do you mean nothing?” She stammered at the guard who’d just come back empty-hoofed. He’d been the one sent off to follow up on the last direction they’d received, but apparently it had been something of a dead end.

“The route we were pointed in splits up, and there is nopony there we can ask. It looks like he’s slipped through, unless we find somepony else who saw him,” said the guard, shifting uneasily, not the biggest fan of being the bearer of bad news.

Twilight chewed her lip.

If they’d found him in a broken heap at the bottom of the wall that would have been something. She felt guilty having hoped for it, but at least then they could have patched him up.

Having him just disappear was worse. Anything could have happened. Anything could still be happening! Who knew where he might have ended up? Even at the best of times his grasp of where he was and how it worked wasn’t the greatest, and these were not the best of times!

The guard stepping into her line of sight broke up that particular train of thought and brought her back to the moment.

“We’ll continue the search but it would be best if you got some sleep, Miss Sparkle. It’s going to be a brute force search from here on out, it seems like, and I can’t be certain that the reports will be regular,” he said.

“B-but...he’s still out there…” She said, casting her eyes to the window. Maybe he’d climb back in?

He didn’t.

“And we’ll find him, don’t you worry.”

She wanted to go out there herself. There was a burning desire to personally trawl every available inch of the city but she knew this was flatly impossible. It really was going to be brute force. Needed hooves on the ground. She was just one, very tired pony. At this point she’d probably just be getting in the way, even if she did go out to look.

Her shoulders slumped.

“Okay…”

The guard gave her a reassuring, assured smile.

“On my honour we won’t rest until we’ve tracked him down. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. And you’ll need your energy to yell at him when we come back with him, I expect,” he said with a wink.

That got maybe the vaguest hint of a smile out of her and Twilight’s tail flicked. The touch of levity was much appreciated.

“Yeah…” She said, glancing to the window again.

Anon still did not appear.

-

Twilight did not sleep. She couldn’t sleep. Had she had any thoughts to spare she might have found that ironic given the reason she was there at all, but she didn’t - she was still desperately worried on top of being excruciatingly tired.

In her head she drowsily ran through every possible scenario she could imagine for where he might have gone and what might have happened to him. Most of what she came up with was deeply distressing, which just made her feel even worse. The cycle pulled her ever downwards. She couldn’t help it.

What if he’d fallen off something and hurt himself? Like the walls? It could have happened. What if he’d hurt somepony else by accident? What if they’d hurt him by accident? What if he’d fallen into a moat and drowned? What if he was drowning right now? It could happen.

What if he was stuck in a hole somewhere? He was an odd shape, she could definitely see it happening. Him, trapped, desperate for help but beyond earshot of anyone. The mere thought made her sick to her stomach. She tossed and turned. The covers had long-since been flung from the bed in her agitation.

There was a hissing sound.

Her ears pricked up. Had she imagined that? Was that exhaustion? Worry? She strained to listen, sitting haflway up on the bed. She listened some more. Birds were singing, somewhere, as the first hint of dawn started filling the sky, but it wasn’t that she was listening for.

Nothing. Twilight’s ears folded back and she started to sink again. Then:

“Psst. Twilight! Psst.”

She had not imagined that.

It was coming from outside.

Dashing to the window and sticking her head out she peered down. There, at the base of the wall and looking up, was Anon. He looked rough, like he’d fallen backwards through a hedge, but other than that he seemed in perfectly rude health.

In fact, looking rough was pretty normal for him, so he looked about as good as could be expected. On seeing Twilight his face lit up.

“Hey! My rope is gone. Could you lower it down or-”

With a pop and a flash he disappeared from the outside and reappeared on the inside.

He had about a second or so of standing and looking confused with his hands still cupped to his mouth before dropping to one knee and clutching his head. There was also groaning.

“Oh man, oh I didn’t need that - that’s what teleporting feels like? Why would anyone do tha-”

Anything further was cut off by Twilight crashing into him and knocking him flat, the two of them tumbling end-over-end, Anon winding up on his back with a very angry pony standing astride his chest.

“Where were you?!” She practically shouted, her face inches from his and a veritable mask of fury. Anon winced at her volume, trying feebly to block her out with just his hands. It did not work. She had the leverage, and he had the stinking hangover.

“An alley. I think? I woke up in one.”

“An alley?!”

Inches became half an inch perhaps, and her muzzle was basically touching his nose.

“Well I wasn’t in an alley the whole time but that’s where I ended up. There was a fair amount of drinking before that point. Like, a lot. Pony stuff is pretty, uh, weak. But there was a lot. Hence the headache. Could be a hangover. Hence the please could you maybe shout less?”

Twilight, breathing hard, noticed the distinct lack of personal space going on and backed up a little. She didn’t let Anon up off the floor yet though, and a shift of her hooves and her weight kept him from trying to wriggle up. He seemed to have got the message that he was in trouble. Which he was.

“You snuck out of here - the castle, where we came to see the princesses, who offered to help you - to go and get drunk?”

This she asked far more levelly and quietly, not that it made it any nicer for him to hear.

Now that he was apparently less sleep-deprived, lying flat on his back in the cold light of day, he could see some of the issues with his plan that he hadn’t picked up on last night when he’d come up with it. At the time it had seemed like genius - he’d have been a fool not to sneak away and get drunk!

Not so much, now, looking at Twilight.

“...were they mad? The big ones?” He asked, completely unable now to look Twilight in the eye, writhing guiltily beneath her.

“They were concerned,” she said, feeling him fidget with his fingers resting on his belly. His eyes flicked up to hers briefly before looking away again.

“...are you mad?”

Twilight sighed.

“Yes. But only because I was worried! You disappeared! You shouldn’t do that! We had the guards looking for you! We still have guards looking! I wanted to look for you! No-one knew where you were! Anything could have happened to you. ”

Anon tried and failed to scoot out from under her by shuffling downwards, Twilight stopping that by putting a hoof onto his stomach. Lightly, but enough for him to get the message.

“...sorry…”

Twilight could feel the ball of rage that had been twisting in her gut starting to uncoil. It was difficult being angry at him at the best of times. WIth him being so out of sorts - and looking so miserable and guilty at he did right at that moment - it was even harder.

Rationally speaking, she could see why he might have made some bad decisions. What with the insomnia and nightmares and all that. Irrationally, she did still rather want to smack him about the face for putting her through that. But that would get her nowhere.

Didn’t stop her thinking about it as she hugged him instead. It was awkward due to him being on the floor and all, but it was heartfelt. Tension released almost immediately.

“It’s fine. Just don’t do it again. Ever. Okay?”

“You have my word,” he said, muffled.

The hug broke, Twilight stood back and Anon rose unsteadily to his feet, still wincing and now squinting anytime he looked towards the windows.

Twilight was unfamiliar with hangovers and knew of them only distantly, so did not really pick up on this. Anon was intimately familiar with hangovers, and had had worse. Not that this was one was like skipping through a meadow, it still sucked. But he was a big boy. He could tough it out.

Then Twilight thought back to what he’d said before, something she’d glossed over in her haste to shake some answers out of him.

“Wait, you said you woke up in an alley, does that mean you got some sleep?” She asked.

This clearly hadn’t occurred to him. He blinked.

“Oh yeah, I guess it does” he said, face splitting into a grin. “Hey! My plan worked!”

“Plan?”

“Yeah. Figured if I got drunk enough I wouldn’t have any nightmares and, hey, since I don’t remember anything after a certain point I guess it must have worked.”

He looked very proud of himself.

“That’s a terrible plan,” Twilight said flatly.

This did much to puncture his pride. Now he just looked sheepish.

“Well yes, but like I say it did work. I got some sleep! I feel - well I feel terrible, but I’m well-rested-ish. Which is something. Right?”

The look Twilight gave him said more than words ever could have. It could have stripped paint. Anon took a step back.

On the one hoof she was still low-key apoplectic with rage at him for disappearing, getting wasted and now - in all likelihood - writing off a whole day to being hungover. On the other she was overjoyed that he was okay and also happy that he’d finally got some sleep. Not in the way she would have liked, obviously, but still.

You took what you got.

He then doubled over, groaned, and ran for the attached bathroom facilities and was promptly and loudly sick. Twilight was torn between concern and disgust and settled somewhere in the middle at the vague impression that he probably deserved to suffer a little bit for what he did, but that she should probably also comfort him at least a tiny bit.

That said, the noise of him being sick was horrifying. She approached cautiously and saw him clinging to the plumbing.

“Oh why did it have to be cider…I don’t even like cider that much!”

He groaned again and wrapped himself more tightly around the toilet.

“Just gonna stay here for a bit, I think…”

“There there,” Twilight said, patting him on the back, face screwing up in distaste as he vomited some more.

“Oh God it’s Old Rosie all over again…” he wretched.

Friendship. Glamourous.

-

The guards were duly informed that Anon had shown up of his own accord. They took it with good grace. They were, after all, professionals.

By this point hours had passed and the sun was already up and Luna and Celestia were both indisposed and unavailable, so the day was wasted for all intents and purposes. Twilight made sure to make Anon feel guilty about this while also forcing water down his throat and marching him out into the sunshine to sober up.

His protests that he was already sober and that a hangover was the painful absence of intoxication fell on deaf ears.

“It’s like Lemmy said: if you never stop drinking you’ll never be hungover,” he tried to explain, shielded his eyes from sunshine that seemed to glare at him from every available angle.

“I don’t know who that is,” Twilight said,

“Bet there’s a pony version of him somewhere…unless he’s dead here, too...urgh…”

He adjusted the sheet he’d wrapped himself in while he grumbled. Twilight had insisted on him showering, sealing the door to the guest bathroom shut until he had and sending his clothes off for washing. In lieu of anything else to put on - and before she’d been able to stop him - he’d stripped off a bedsheet and wrapped it around himself.

It wasn’t like he wasn’t going to be getting odd looks anyway. That was his argument at least. Twilight hadn’t had the energy to press him on it, and watching him struggle with the thing as he walked along was strangely soothing. Made it look more like he was suffering for his poor choices and actions. Some degree of penitence seemed important.

Anon, mainly, was trying to remember how to fashion a toga, ignoring the nagging suspicion that he didn’t actually know how to do it in the first place. It was harder than it looked. His respect for the ancient Greeks increased.

Dimly, he recalled, that a toga should be longer. But he worked with what he had to hand.

“I am really sorry, you know. For disappearing. Must have made sense to me at the time,” he said. Apologies had been bubbling out of him fairly regularly at this point.

“The important thing is you’re back and safe. And that you got some sleep, which is good. Even if you did it in an alley. Feel better?”

“I feel awful. But I’m not that tired and I can actually think straight now. So it balances out.”

Not long after that they found somewhere for breakfast. Or rather, Twilight did. She knew the place better than Anon.

Anon was fairly confident that he would not be able to keep anything other than water down, and even the water was dicey. He kept his eyes averted from her plate when it arrived and did his best to close his ears to the sound of her eating.

“You’re shure you don’t want anyhthing?” She asked, mouth only partly full. She’d learned a little of proper table manners, but sometimes she forgot the finer details. Anon put it down to being an absent-minded scholar type of a pony. It tended to indicate that there was something on her mind, at least in his experience.

“I’m good,” he said, sparing a glance in her direction and watching as more hay bacon disappeared. Who knew hay was so adaptable?

Hay bacon. Haycon.

He chuckled.

“What’s funny?” Twilight asked, cheeks bulging.

“Nothing, nothing. Uh, by the way, I know you said that the big ones were ‘concerned’ about me, but you didn’t actually say whether they were going to be mad at me or not. So...do you reckon they’ll be mad?”

She swallowed, levitating a serviette over to dab her mouth with before replying.

“The princesses will understand, don’t worry. They’re very nice. I don’t get why you’re so nervous about them,” she said.

“Because they’re so big.”

This he said while trying to shrink into his seat. Given that the seat had been made for those much smaller than him - indeed, he’d had to pull up two and awkwardly spread himself across both - this did not really work. Twilight frowned.

“You’re bigger than they are!”

Not by a huge amount, but still enough to be noticeable. Anon didn’t really have an answer to this and shrugged helplessly.

“Well, yeah...but they’ve got that hair. It makes my eyes water.”

“Their manes? Really?”

Anon grasped at the air, as though he might pluck better words out of it. He couldn’t, but he tried his hardest.

“It’s just that, you know, it’s not something I’m used to. None of this is, really. But for most of it - you, say - I can kind of just about skirt around it. But they’re these...alien...goddess...ladies...with magic hair...moving celestial bodies...and I’m just a guy. I can barely move my own body.”

“You’re intimidated,” Twilight said flatly, catching on. Anon nodded dolefully.

“And what if something’s really wrong with me because of this? The sleep thing? Some weird magic thing I don’t know about? I don’t know anything about this. It could be something really bad. Maybe it’s the worst.”

He tapped his fingers together nervously. A waiter came to take Twilight’s empty plate away and she waited until they’d gone before leaning across the table to put a hoof onto his hands.

“I doubt it’s the worst, Anon. And even if it is they’ll still help you. And I’ll still be there.”

He looked up, smiled.

“Thanks. Guess I should relax, huh?”

She smiled too. Supportively, like.

“It couldn’t hurt. And you should probably not call them aliens to their face, either. Just a suggestion.”

“True. They might take it the wrong way,” he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I’m the alien, really, if you think about it.”

“Shush, you. You’re a guest and my friend.”

Even he couldn’t come up with anything snarky to say to that.

At least not off the top of his head.

-

The day wore on. Twilight and Anon burned more daylight wandering and shooting the shit mostly because, until later, they literally had nothing useful they could do.

Twilight showed him some of the sights, given that the last time Anon had been in Canterlot he hadn’t really been in any fit state to sightsee having just fallen through a universe or two, but that was about it as far as activities went.

As the time drew closer though they wandered back up to the castle.

“So it’s going to be the same idea as yesterday?” Anon asked.

“Yes. Only this time you are going to actually talk to them yourself.”

Twilight had deemed him sufficiently clean and coherent enough for this. That, and this way he was less likely to climb out of any windows. Anon could accept this. Really, he’d brought it on himself.

First though, he was to change out of his bedsheet.

The joke had worn thin at this point, and besides his clothes had been cleaned and returned to the room by then - that’s royal efficiency for you. He found them folded and laid out on the bed for him. They’d even folded his shirt into a swan, for some reason.

“Sweet, trousers! Swan shirt!” He exclaimed, delighted.

It almost seemed a shame to ruin their good work, but Anon was tired of the sheet and so, after a moment’s hesitation, was upon them.

“I’ll never get what it is with you and clothes,” Twilight said.

“It’s a societal-rift thing. I’m the alien, yo, like I said,” he said, clumsily managing to put his trousers back on without taking the sheet off first. Twilight shook her head and was all set on turning to look away as he shucked the sheet away when something caught her eye.

She double-took and goggled, a hoof jabbing out to point at his chest where there was a large, blotchy, mark. It pulsed, and spidery veins of it stretched off away from the centre of its mass, where there was a rather alarming dip.

The thing did not look healthy.

“What’s that?!”

Anon paused, shirt halfway on, and looked down.

“Oh, that’s got bigger,” he said, frowning.

“You knew about that already?!”

“Well I kind of saw it earlier when I showered but it was smaller. Figured it was from sleeping in that alley, thought it’d go away. Guess not. Doesn’t look good, does it? Is this normal?”

He let the shirt dangle from one arm and poked the weird, throbbing lump and was about to put his finger into the depression in the middle of it before Twilight interrupted him.

“Don’t poke it! That isn’t normal!” She squealed

She considered this. He was, as he’d said, an alien. Maybe this was normal. Maybe strange, near-black nodules did just sprout from them at time-to-time and it was nothing to worry about.

Stranger things had happened, albeit not often.

“Is it normal?” She asked, eyes narrowed.

“No, not really,” Anon said, jabbing it again and wincing. Why he’d expected anything other than pain was unclear.

“Then don’t poke it! Stop poking it!” Twilight snapped.

A tinkling sounded accompanied the magic that promptly yanked his hand away and his other hand for good measure, hoiking Anon backwards with a yelp.

“I hate it when you do that…” He grumbled.

“It’s not something I enjoy doing, I assure you. Just…stop touching things when we don’t know what they are. Please? Promise?”

She gave him The Eyes, though it was unnecessary. She’d said ‘please’ in the way that Anon had never been able to properly refuse. Unintentionally, of course, she didn’t know it worked so well. But it did.

“...okay,” he said, and she let him go. He rubbed his wrists.

“That magic stuff is still so weird,” he said, peering down at the throbbing mark. “Think this thing is related to the whole ‘not wanting to go to sleep because I’m terrified of the stuff I see’ thing? I mean, I want to say yes but in my experience dreams don’t normally manifest like this. In my experience.”

Twilight eyed the growth - nodule? - whatever it was on his chest warily. She did not like the look of it one bit. In fact, even just seeing it was making her feel uncomfortable. For one thing it was distinctly unpleasant looking just on its own. Mainly though it being on Anon just made it so much worse. It had no right being there.

Hissing quietly to herself she turned away and folded something. A towel. Didn’t matter what. Just needed to do something to be doing something.

“We’ll ask after you show the princesses,” she said.

Anon, midway through doing his shirt up again, paused.

“I’m going to have to take my shirt off in front of the big ones? Great.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“Says you. You don’t even wear shirts.”

He wasn’t wrong.

-

“How long have you been having these dreams for?”

“Uh, not long. Guess they only really started getting bad a few days ago.”

Luna was the one asking the questions. Anon was just stood with his eyes down, body turned in on itself as though trying to draw as little attention as possible. Celestia sat back, watching closely. Twilight provided moral support, or at least that was her intention, catching his eye and giving supportive smiles anytime he glanced her way.

Anon appreciated her presence, even if he still felt extremely uncomfortable being the centre of one of the big ones’ attentions.

“‘Started getting bad’?” Luna repeated. Anon shrugged.

“Well, one or two nightmares is normal, isn’t it? Here and there? They just didn’t make feel like...that...before now.”

“And always about the same thing? Even then?”

He shuffled his feet and kept his eyes down. Clearly he’d somehow hoped that this particular detail would have been glossed over or avoided, but now he was there, pinned, and given no real choice. He didn’t think that lying about it would get him very far.

“...yes,” he said, quietly.

“And this is only after your arrival here? You’d never had a dream like this prior to that?”

“...not like this, no. This was only after I came here.”

Anon squirmed, though he was clearly trying his best not to. He actually looked up at Luna then, probably properly for the first time. He even made eye-contact.

“T-this is the sort of thing you’ve run into before, right? Not a big deal?”

“I cannot say I have dealt with anything quite like this, no,” Luna said with perhaps a touch less tact and delicacy than she should have. “I have been respecting your privacy as an outsider and a visitor and so have not paid any particular attention to your dreams, though I must also admit that - on reflection - I saw no sign of you in the first place. There is the possibility your dreams function differently and exist outside of my realm of influence.”

This wasn’t exactly what Anon had wanted to hear. Somehow his shoulders managed to slump even further.

“Oh.”

“But as we learn more we’ll be able to use Princess Luna’s expertise, I’m sure,” Twilight said with only slightly forced optimism.

“As we learn more,” Luna said by way of agreement, inclining her head slightly.

It was better than nothing.

This wasn’t going exactly as Twilight had planned, either, and she felt she had to try and steer things in a more productive direction. Luna had proven detached from the problem and Celestia hadn’t even said a word since they’d entered. If the Princesses wanted more to go on, then she would provide it.

Twilight nudged Anon.

“Show them,” she whispered, though at the right level of volume to ensure that anyone who’d want to hear would have been able to. Anon frowned.

“It’s fine, they really don’t need to see,” he whispered back, but he made the mistake of being quiet.

“You need to show them,” Twilight said, not even bothering to keep her voice down now, her stare concerned but mildly disapproving. Anon withered beneath it.

“Show us what?” Celestia asked, leaning forward and making the human flinch a little.

“Just a, you know, little thing. It’s really not that important,” he said, shrugging and looking helplessly at Twilight for relief, finding only pitiless, driving compassion. He looked to the princesses and saw only regal curiosity. There wasn’t any getting out of this.

It was for his own good, after all.

“Fine…”

His shirt was duly unbuttoned and shucked off halfway. The mark was worse looking than it had been before, darker and now shot through with livid red. Twilight couldn’t tell whether it had got bigger or not, but at this point that hardly seemed to matter. Both Princesses sat forwards.

“Would you mind coming closer please,” Celestia said, beckoning politely with a hoof.

Sparing one last glance to Twilight - who shooed him forward - Anon did as he was told, clearly struggling with his intense desire to put his shirt back on. He stood still while the alicorns looked him over.

“That doesn’t look good, does it?” Celestia said, voice hushed, leaning towards her sister.

“No. I have seen examples of nightmares manifesting physically, though it is very rare. Vanishingly so.”

“What is the most common cause?”

“It varies. Without better access to his nightmares I could not say.”

Anon did his best to pretend he could not hear any of this.

“Does it hurt?” Luna asked, and Anon was still doing his best to pretend not to hear any of this so only noticed this question had come his way when she waved a hoof in front of his face, snapping him out of it.

“Hmm? Oh, no. Not unless I poke it but other than that, no. Weirdly. I mean, looking at it you’d think it would, wouldn’t you?” He asked, moving to poke it again only to remember Twilight’s telling him not to. His hands remained by his sides, where they fidgeted.

Luna’s horn flared into life and Anon flinched, taking a step back. Nothing else happened though, and a few moments later the magic disappated.

“Strange,” Luna said, looking honestly perplexed. “It is like a void of sorts. Or an absence. Certainly, there is no magical trace I can detect. No trace of anything, in fact.”

“That sounds bad,” Anon said.

“It may simply be that we do not know what to look for,” Celestia said, quickly. That helped him feel a smidgen better.

“Could you describe your nightmare to me? In as much detail as possible,” Luna said.

“Sure…?” Anon said, scratching his cheek.

Anon did his best, bless him, but his best wasn’t very good. Portions of the nightmare were simply beyond his grasp and what parts he could remember - the parts that Twilight knew about and heard him repeated - obviously made him uncomfortable to talk about. He seemed to know he wasn’t being helpful and trailed off with a sad shrug.

“Sorry,” he said.

The princesses exchanged what appeared to be a meaningful look.

“That wasn’t much use, was it?” Anon asked.

“No, it was not,” Luna said, not unkindly but bluntly, and Anon appeared even more displeased with himself.

“There is something else you can do for us that would be helpful, however,” Celestia said, and he looked up again.

“I don’t need to show you anything else, do I?” He asked, some desperation creeping into his voice, glancing back at Twilight without really thinking about it. She gave him a smile and a little wave and he couldn’t help but wave back.

For some reason, the prospect of having to strip down with her in the room was infinitely more uncomfortable than the thought of just having to do it for the big ones.

Celestia noticed his distress and smiled one of those motherly smiles of her. This had the desired calming effect, much to Anon’s surprised.

“Not for this, no. This is not so much the physical. We will be looking into your mind.”

That put the wind up him. He blinked.

“...I’m sorry?”

“We will be looking into your mind,” she repeated, adding: “With your permission, of course.”

“No, I heard that first part. I’m just - you can do that?”

This was news to Anon, and not exactly what he would consider good news, either. He’d been scared enough of the big ones without knowing that they were able to do anything like that.

“We can. It might show us something important, assuming you allow us to do it. Certainly, it will give us a clearer picture of your nightmare You are under no obligation, of course,” said Luna.

Anon swallowed.

Having to take his shirt off was one thing, this was something else entirely.

Like any sane individual Anon had often wondered what it might be like if others could take a look inside his head and - like any sane individual - he had concluded that, really, it was a good thing no-one could.

Being confronted with the reality that actually someone might able to was leaving him feeling as though his gut had been filled with icy water.

“Uh,” he said, grasping for the right words an coming back with nothing. Celestia seemed to get the hint that he wasn’t brimming with enthusiasm.

“We could have Twilight do it, if that would make you feel more comfortable. I have covered the rudiments of the technique with her before,” she said.

Twilight looked about as uncomfortable with the suggestion as Anon felt, but nodded anyway when he turned her way for confirmation. It had come up once or twice in her studies, and while she’d never actually really done it outside the context of a lesson per se the theory of it was rock-solid in her head. Anon swallowed.

“N-no, no that’s f-fine. Sh- Twilight doesn’t - she doesn’t have to do that. Does it - do we have to do this? The nightmares aren’t so bad. I can just go. I-I’ll be fine, r-really,” he mumbled, half-stumbling over the words, brain popping as it hurried to come up with solutions, preferably solutions that resulted in him leaving without having had his mind read.

The thought of the big ones having a poke around was scary, because they were scary. The thought of Twilight having a look around was terrifying.

Not that Anon had ever thought anything particularly untoward that he wouldn’t want Twilight knowing about, it was just that he didn’t trust his brain not to cook up something horrible on the spot just to make her horrified. His brain was like that. Or at least he thought it was.

He liked Twilight! She was great! What if she saw something she didn’t like? What if there was stuff in there he’d forgotten about but would change how she thought about him?

What if she stopped being friends with him afterwards?

Anon had the distinct impression that feeling he was noticing building up from the pit of stomach and seizing every organ in his body was raw panic. He wasn’t a fan.

But even as he thought all this, the cold, rational wheels that ran forever in the background of his more scattershot thoughts were throwing facts at him he simply couldn’t ignore.

The sooner the princesses had as much information as possible the sooner they could fix what was wrong and the sooner Anon could go back to Ponyville, get some proper sleep and never have to think about this whole episode ever again.

Grin and bear it. Bite the bullet. Get it done. Stiff upper lip. Etcetera.

Given the choice between a stranger plumbing the depths of your mind and a friend who you’d have to ride the train back with, pick the stranger. You wouldn’t have to have awkward conversation with the stranger. At least in theory.

“Fine…” He said, shoulders sagging. “If it’ll help. But c-can you do it?”

This he said while pointing a shaking finger at Celestia.

He didn’t want to outright say he was scared of the big ones, Luna in particular, but they could probably figure that out on their own. Still, it seemed to be his best option, going with Celestia, even if a big part of him just wanted to run screaming. Twilight put a comforting hoof against his leg, making him jump. He hadn’t heard her closing in.

“It’s not invasive,” she said, but he just raised an eyebrow. “It’s not! Honest! They wouldn’t do it otherwise! No-one would. That’d be horrible.”

Anon still wasn’t wholly sure, but did find himself feeling a smidgen better about it, having heard this from Twilight herself. Before he could fully consider the appropriateness of it he reached down and gave her mane a ruffle, and even though she quickly fought his hand off she couldn’t keep the smile off her face.

“Okay, so what do I do?” He asked, turning back to Celestia.

“I shall need to touch your head with my horn. Other than that you just need to relax. Normally I’d have to bend for this.”

“Well, glad I could be at least a little helpful,” Anon said, closing his eyes and doing his best to relax. It wasn’t easy, knowing what was about to happen, and part of him was still expecting this to be a joke.

They couldn’t really go into people’s minds, could they? That’d be crazy.

Then again, the slightly-smaller big one could go into dreams, apparently, and that was pretty close already, right?

He could feel something tingly approaching his head. Getting closer. Anon gritted his teeth.

At which point the doors to the throne room burst open. Everyone looked.

There, out of breath, was a guard. He flinched on seeing the attention of both princess, Twilight and Anon focused his way, and then straightened up.

“Apologies, your Highness, but it is an -” the guard’s eyes flicked to Anon, just for a moment. “An urgent matter.”

“I trust it urgent enough to warrant interrupting royal business?” Luna asked.

But the guard’s tone had been serious, serious enough that Celestia bade them approach. Whatever news they’d brought was whispered hurriedly and the guard left, shutting the door behind them.

Anon had stood to one side with Twilight to let them get on with it, and the looks they’d shot him once or twice during the exchange made the hairs stand on the back of his neck.

“Uh...everything alright?” He asked.

“A pony was attacked and injured last night, quite severely. The attacker was not clearly seen but was stated by several witnesses near the scene to be bipedal and at least twice the height of the victim,” said Celestia, sitting up very straight.

All this she said very properly and flatly, without any intonation or feeling. Just delivering news.

Anon’s eyes widened and his stomach turned and he very nearly fell off the dais as he stumbled backward

“Oh God,” he gasped. “Oh God did I do that while I was blacked out? What did I do?”

“Anon, you-” Twilight tried to interrupt, to try and calm him down, but he didn’t appear to hear her, his knees giving out as he collapsed to sit on one of the steps, clutching his head.

“I can’t remember! What did I do? Oh God, I thought I just fell asleep, but I blacked out first. What did I do?”

“Anon, calm-”

“Last time I blacked out I punched my friend in the face! And tried to climb over razorwire. I tore my trousers open! My leg, too, kind of. Oh God what did I do? Did I hit someone? You’re all only little! Oh God, no no.”

Anon was rapidly going to pieces, which Twilight found incredibly distressing to watch. He’d never done anything like this and she couldn’t understand fully why he was doing it now. The utter impassiveness of Celestia and Luna - watching over the whole thing - did not help, and Twilight felt rather cast-adrift.

The doors opened again, both of them this time, and more guards entered. Four this time, and moving as one. Twilight thought that might be a bit much, but wasn’t going to say it out loud.

“Could you please escort Anon to the secure accommodation and ensure he has everything he needs while my sister and I consider this,” Celestia said and the most-senior guard - marked out by having the most and most shiny bits and pieces on his uniform - nodded to her before nodding to the others. As a group they moved to surround Anon, who was still sitting.

“But - what?” Twilight said, looking around helplessly.

This had to be a joke. Or a mistake. Or something. It didn’t make sense.

“Come on, son,” said the most-senior guard, his commanding tones finally seeming to puncture the bubble that Anon had been inside for the last minute or so. He looked up, eyes reddened, and then noticed the guards. He rose without a word.

Head hanging, Anon was led away.

“Wha-? He-? You just-?” Twilight blathered, but answers came there none as she watched the throne room doors close once more.

The cool, calm and rational part of Twilight - similar in a surprising number of ways to the cool, calm rational part of Anon, not that either of them really knew this - wondered if maybe continuing on with having a look into Anon’s mind would have been a good idea, given what happened.

Maybe shed some immediate light on the situation?

But she wasn’t the one in charge of things, and she didn’t feel especially cool, calm or rational at that moment anyway.

Living after midnight

Author's Note

Think it's about time to I tried to put this to bed.

Living after midnight

Twilight was having difficulty maintaining her composure.

The last sight of Anon had been him with head down and shoulders slumped, surrounded by guards and being marched off. Then the door had closed behind him. Twilight had kept on staring though, still not fully grasping what had just happened.

When she turned, she found Luna and Celestia both leaning in to one another, discussing at pace, but not loud enough that she could hear anything above a back-and-forth murmur. Twilight suddenly felt very left out and very alone in the world, and couldn’t quite shake that she’d somehow brought it on herself.

And on Anon, too, who must be feeling much worse right at that moment she realised with a lurch.

And they were just sat there talking! And she was standing there like a sinking pudding!

“What was that?!” Twilight blurted out, not really giving it as much thought as she probably should have done. The princesses stopped conferring and looked up at her, which was a harrowing experience.

“A pony has been injured, Twilight,” Celestia said, but Twilight was unmoved. Well, she didn’t like it, but she didn’t think this mattered because, obviously, Anon couldn’t have done it.

“But he wouldn’t do anything like that!” She protested, loudly.

“We agree,” Celestia said, Luna nodding as well.

“Then why - ” Twilight said, but couldn’t think of the right words to finish it with. Something along the lines of ‘Then why did you lock Anon up’ would have worked, but she didn’t really have much desire to say them.

Not that she needed to. The Princesses were ahead of her on this.

“While not as familiar with Anon as you, Twilight, we are aware that violent behaviour would be entirely unlike him. Which is why - assuming it was him at all, which remains to be confirmed - this development is alarming. Certainly, it puts his present circumstances in something of a new light. Whatever it is that is happening to him may be more severe than initially feared,” Celestia said.

“But-” Twilight said, again faltering when she failed to come up with anything else to say. Facing down both of them at once was a lot more intimidating than she remembered.

Anon was right - they really were big.

“Plainly he is already in a state of distress. If nothing else he would benefit from some time to collect himself, while the details of the incident are properly ordered,” Luna said.

How could they sound so calm about this? Twilight felt like she was three steps away from just turning into a collapsing heap of matchsticks. Why specifically matchsticks? She didn’t know. She just felt it.

“Furthermore, given the dramatic and worrying turn events have taken, it would seem to be wise to exercise rather more caution going forward. Particularly with something as delicate as reading a mind. As useful as it might be in clearing up the truth of the matter, it also presents a dire risk. Or might.”

“We should tread lightly,” Luna said, by way of summing up.

The rationale - once explained - made sense, Twilight was forced to admit. Or enough sense that she could see their point. There were a lot of unknowns going around, and now also something rather worrying in the sense of sudden, inexplicable violence, so caution was in everyone’s interests, even Anon’s.

She still felt terrible about it though. Like what had happened to him was somehow her fault. That she should have looked out for him more, done more and done it sooner. But she couldn’t do a lot to shake that. It was just there, in her head, making her feel bad

“Am I allowed to see him?” She asked, the question coming out a lot more forlorn than she might have meant it to sound.

“You are. Though I would allow him a little while to be settled, first,” Celestia said.

Twilight wasn’t sure how much settling could possibly be required but wasn’t going to question this. She’d give him a bit. He’d probably need some quiet time alone anyway.

Or would he need a friend immediately? Twilight didn’t know.

What would she want were she in his situation, she thought. Sleep-deprived, confused, probably hungover, now possibly responsible for injuring somepony else and put into ‘secure accommodation’. She’d want a friend, she decided. As soon as possible. So that was that.

“This is a vexing issue,” Luna said, snapping Twilight out of her thoughts and back to the moment. Luna, though, had been talking to Celestia who nodded and said:

“It is. Unusual and troubling. Something we shall endeavour to see resolved as quickly as possible.”

This was not a definite and clear timeline, this was a statement of vague intent. Twilight’s nerves continued to not be soothed in the slightest.

“Uh, heh, how quickly is quickly?” She asked.

“As quickly as approaching it with all due care and attention allows it to be,” Celestia said.

Again, not really a concrete answer.

“Ah, heh, well, how-”

“Twilight,” Celestia said, not sharply, but with enough regal force behind the word to entirely derail anything that Twilight might have been about to say. That sort of thing took practise. “I understand that you are concerned for Anon’s welfare - we are both aware of how close you two are - but you are going to have to trust us in the way we handle this situation.”

“Everything will be well resolved. Be at ease,” Luna said.

Twilight was very much not at ease but also saw that pursuing the issue further would be pointless at best and actively unwise at worst. She bit her tongue and just nodded, doing her best to smile as though she felt that everything was comfortably in-hoof.

-

In the end Twilight gave it a solid twenty minutes before going off to visit Anon in his secure accomodation.

Technically it wasn’t the dungeon. The dungeon was for prisoners. Anon had simply been put into one of the reinforced rooms they had for special guests. The rooms where the doors locked from the outside, to keep the specialness where the guards could keep an eye on it.

“I haven’t had the best day, Twilight,” he said once she’d been allowed in and the door locked behind her. He did not look great. Sat on the end of the bed in the corner of the room, his head hanging down, he’d looked the most dejected it was probably possible for him to look. Twilight had hopped up beside him, getting in close, but he didn’t seem to have noticed.

“You’ll be okay. I promise,” she said warmly, putting a hoof onto his shoulder, going for comforting. Anon was still just staring down at his hands.

“I hurt someone.”

“You don’t know that.”

Anon looked at her sideways.

“Twilight, this seems pretty cut and dry. Not many other bipeds around.”

They weren’t unheard of, naturally, but they were certainly pretty thin on the ground, at least in Canterlot, at least right then. No-one else was said to be on the hook, even if it had only been twenty or so minutes. The guard wasn’t looking for anyone else, Twilight was led to understand.

So she went with:

“You wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“Kind of seems like I did, though.”

“It’s not like you.”

Anon sighed.

“Normally maybe, maybe. But I was, well, I wasn’t doing so great. Several reasons. And I’ve been known to do things I regret at times like that. And that’s when I’m not...avoiding sleep…” He shifted, eyes flicked up to Twilight for a moment. “I’m worried. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Twilight found she couldn’t say anything to this, so instead just worked her way in under his arm to give him a hug, putting a leg about his waist and nuzzling against his chest. It did not make her feel good, seeing him like this.

Without raising his head he gave her a scratch behind the ear. He didn’t really think about it, he just did it. He didn’t even notice. Twilight did but decided not to comment.

“And I’m still just so tired...mare of a headache, too,” he said. That last part confused Twilight a little.

“Mare?”

“Sorry, it’s a - thing. Sorry. I’m so tired,” said Anon.

He finally noticed that he’d just been absent-mindedly messing around with his friend’s head and stopped immediately, putting his hands back where they’d been before. His mood had evidently not improved. Twilight did her best to stay chipper.

“Maybe you could try and get some sleep?” She suggested and Anon visibly flinched.

“Oh no, no no no, not again. Last time I tried - I don’t know. I’m not even that tired anyway. No, I’ll be okay. Just have to hold on, right? The big ones have got something in the bag, right? Just got to hold on for that. I can do that,” he said, hoisting himself up and starting to pace around the room, leaving Twilight sitting on the bed watching him. She bit her lip.

“They didn’t - they haven’t really committed to a deadline or anything like that,” she said.

Anon kept on pacing.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“It could be a while.”

“It’s fine. I can wait.”

“It could be days, Anon-”

He rounded, and Twilight got a very good view of just how bloodshot his eyes were.

“Look, Twilight, with the best will in the world can you just - you - I mean - last time I got a proper sleep was because I was so pissed I apparently roughed someone up in an alley. And that was the best sleep I’ve had in weeks! No nightmares! That’s the only way that’s worked! And it wasn’t even that good and was only for a few hours. Was something though. But I’m not doing that again, not here, not ever. Not if that could happen again.”

Reaching back behind him until his hand found the chair he’d stopped by he turned it around and sat down heavily. This being a chair for ponies it was a lot lower to the ground than he’d been expecting and he landed with a bump and winced, but carried on anyway:

“And if I just try and sleep normally it’ll - it’ll happen again I know it will. And I’m not seeing that thing again. I think it sees me, too. I just - it’ll be fine! It’ll be fine! They’ll sort something out. I don’t mind. It’s fine!”

Twilight felt that Anon was perhaps reaching a few shaky conclusions here but imagined that pointing out some of the holes in his reasoning would not cheer him up. Clearly he’d made his mind up, and his mind did not seem to be in the best of conditions at the moment. Understandable, really.

“Do you want me to stay with you? I can stay with you for a bit, if you want,” she asked, slipping from the bed and padding over to him. He took a second to respond, having apparently drifted into some mental tangent.

“No, no it’s fine. Don’t feel the need to hang around just on my account. I’ll be okay,” he said. He did add: “You - you won’t, like, leave to go back home without me though, right?”

“Of course not.”

He’d looked genuinely worried at the possibility.

“Okay, good. Cool, thank you. I wouldn’t want to be left here,” he said, somewhat forlornly. Twilight put a hoof onto his knee.

“I wouldn’t leave you.”

He put a hand onto her hoof, gave her a smile even if there wasn’t a whole lot behind it.

“Thanks, Twilight. Sorry. I’m really sorry about all this.”

The conversation fizzled somewhat from there, with Anon too subdued and despondent to really add much and all of the important matters having been settled anyway. Twilight had not learnt a whole lot from the visit, and eventually guards brought a meal for him which seemed as good a time for her to bow out as any.

Promising to come back at some point she left, wandering off, deep in thought.

At length her wanderings led her to a random corridor of the castle - there were a lot of them to choose from - where sat on a bench that had been placed there for an indeterminate purpose, knowing that staying still would aid the thinking process.

Her thoughts had been running along towards what she could do right then to help prove that the whole situation was not what it looked like. Working backwards from conclusions wasn’t the best way of doing things, she knew, but the whole thing just seemed so wrong to her, and the idea of sitting on her hooves and letting others sort of it out was abhorrent.

Really, would - could - the princesses object if she helped speed things along a little bit? Twilight was aware that she’d been told to trust their judgement, but what about that stopped her from assisting? Wouldn’t their judgement benefit from a helping hoof? That was co-operation, after all, which was basically friendship after a fashion. It could only be good of her to help.

Her logic was undeniable.

With this in mind she stood, determined, immediately heading off out of the castle.

Time to do a little sorting out of her own.

-

It wasn’t difficult working out where the injured pony had gone, neither was it difficult for Twilight to get there.

Getting in herself to see them, though? Little trickier.

A guard was posted outside the room, which took Twilight a little bit by surprise. Certainly this was a wrench in the works, but nothing she could not overcome. Probably. Hopefully. She could work something out she was sure.

Lurking out of sight of the guard, Twilight took a few minutes to gird herself and think of the best possible excuses. Once she was confident she would be able to handle things she stood up straighter, put on a brave, official-looking face, rounded the corner and went strolling on up as if this was perfectly fine what was happening.

“Hello!” She said, brightly. “I’m here to talk to the patient. You know, followup on the incident and all that.”

The guard looked her up and down.

“The Princesses’ orders were no visitors, Miss Sparkle,” he said.

Could kind of seen that coming. Why else put a guard there? Twilight remained breezy, waving a hoof, smiling wide.

“Oh, they were but then they changed. The orders changed, I mean. Didn’t you hear?” She asked.

The guard shuffled.

“No. I did not.”

“Ah, well, that’s unfortunate. They did though. They wanted me to come see the, ah, patient.”

“Did they?”

“Yes! Followup questions, you see. Like I said. Part of the investigation.”

The guard gave her a very steady look. It was impossible to tell, but inside his head he was weighing up which of the options before him presented the greatest risk to his career.

Insult Celestia by denying a known, favoured student access, thereby implying that said student was dishonest, thereby impugning Celestia by association? Or go against explicit orders by allowing a visitor, even a notable one who is saying that it is okay she be allowed in? Blindly follow existing orders or trust somepony known to have the ear of the princess?

Decisions, decisions. The soldierly answer was obvious - stare ahead and refuse entry. The astute answer less clear. Ultimately, it was all way over his head. Conclusion: he was screwed no matter what he did, and he just wanted to go home.

The guard sighed, and stepped to the side.

“I’m going to regret this,” he said.

“No, no it’s fine, honest. It’s totally fine. You’ll be fine,” Twilight assured him, inching her way into the room. The guard sighed again and screwed his eyes shut briefly, hoping that by the time he opened them she would be gone and he pretend it just hadn’t happened.

“Just go inside,” he said. Twilight did so.

The guard had not been having the best day, all things considered. This episode was just the cherry on top.

Ideally he would have preferred palace duty, where you were mainly expected to stand around looking intimidating without actually doing anything except on the rare occasions when something big and nasty showed up whereupon you folded like a card table. That was proper guard work. That was something he could have sink his teeth into.

But nooo, he’d have to get lumbered with something that involved him having to be vaguely active. Actually having to take an interest in what was going on around him and who was coming to see the pony he was expected to guard. He could have been daydreaming but no, he had to pay attention!

What had he ever done to deserve this?

Meanwhile, inside the room, Twilight found a pony tucked up in bed looking a little bit worse for wear. They were also asleep, or at least dozing. Twilight approached cautiously, heart in her throat. The damage was not as severe as she might have feared but it still wasn’t great. There were bandages and, as she got closer, obvious bruising.

Seeing somepony hurt was never a fun experience and Twilight felt her breath hitch. This small noise was apparently all the pony needed to jerk awake and they groaned, rolling over and blinking drowsily, then clapping eyes onto Twilight.

Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to mind her being there.

“Oh! Hello! I wasn’t expecting visitors. Are you a doctor?” They asked.

Twilight wondered how she looked like a doctor.

“No, sorry. I’m from the palace. I just wanted to talk to you,” she said, finishing crossing the room and clambering onto the chair that had been placed beside the bed.

“Ah, say no more! Talk away,” they said happily enough, grunting quietly and shifting around in bed to sit up better. For somepony who’d supposedly been attacked they were very chipper.

Twilight waited until they’d sat up properly before asking her question.

“How did you get...that?” She asked, pointing to the pony’s face. The pony seemed momentarily confused.

“This?” They asked, only then remembering that they had a whacking great bruise. “Oh, I ran into a wall,” they said.

Not the answer Twilight had been expecting. She blinked.

“A wall?”

The pony nodded, casual, this whole thing plainly a massive fuss over nothing.

“Yes. I panicked a little when I went in and saw, well, something…”

On this they seemed a touch flummoxed, raising a hoof to rub their head and wincing when they brushed the bruising, pulling the hoof away again. They looked to have drifted a little, and Twilight pressed to get them back on topic.

“Saw what?” She asked.

“You know, I don’t rightly know. Certainly not what I expected. I’d just seen that tall chap going into an alley - you know, the chap on two legs? Not from around here? - anyway, I saw him wandering off the street and he looked in a bad way so I thought I’d just go along and see if he was alright, you know.”

So far, so good Samaritan. Twilight listened and the pony continued:

“By the time I’d got there he’d fallen over, poor sod, and from the sound of things he’d fallen asleep to boot. I heard snoring, you see? Moved in to wake up him because an alley is hardly the place to be sleeping but then something, ah, well, there was something else.”

They winced again, the memory either unpleasant or patchy and difficult to dredge up.

“Something was...there...wasn’t there before but then it was. I thought I saw...mist?” They said, only to shake their head. “No, no, not mist. Moved like it though. It was a colour? I don’t know.”

They frowned.

“Really can’t say. Didn’t like it though, not one bit. Probably why I panicked, heh.”

“Panicked?”

“Well, wouldn’t you? One moment I’m expecting to be rousing a tired and emotional fellow only to be confronted with all this...stuff...that kind of just made my eyes...ache? Couldn’t look at it. And it was just there! Flowing all around the poor sod!

“What was it?”

“No idea. Not my wheelhouse! I haul bricks for a living and write saucy poetry on the weekends! Far above my paygrade,” the pony said, jovially. Twilight wasn’t letting this go, though.

“But what was it like? Please, it’ll help,” she said, and the pleading edge to her voice got a response.

“Hmm, alright, if you say it’ll help. Let me think…”

They tapped a hoof to their chin.

“You ever had one of those moments where you have a blindspot right in the middle of what you’re trying to look at? Just a big splotch of fuzzy nothing that you can only see around? It was rather like that, actually, now that I think about it. But it was moving, and wasn’t in my eye but in front of me. Something actually there. That’s the best way I can sum it up. Does that help?”

It didn’t, not really, but it was still something. Twilight gave the injured pony a thankful smile.

“It does, thank you. You should probably get some more rest now.”

“That’s what they keep telling me! I’m quite alright though, really don’t get what all the hubbub is about. Ah, how is the big chap, by the way? If you know?”

“He’s...fine…” Twilight said, thinking about how best to sum up Anon’s circumstances at that moment. Amazingly, the injured pony entirely failed to pick up on the strained pause or Twilight’s consternated look, and took her words at face value.

“Glad to hear it! He looked to be in a bad way, what glimpse of him I got. Give him my best regards! Ah, assuming you see him, of course.”

“I will,” Twilight said, leaving them to their own devices and heading back on out the room. The guard gave her a grunt on her way out and then stepped back in front of the door again, but Twilight wasn’t really watching him or, indeed, anything around her at that point. She was thinking.

Wandering again without really paying a whole lot of attention to where she was going, Twilight chewed over what she’d learnt.

Bit light on details as it had been, it really did paint the whole thing in a completely different light. Certainly, things had not gone the way she’d feared they had, what with a drunken Anon just lashing out - as painful as that might have been to picture, she could well imagine it happening. Very glad it hadn’t, very confused about what apparently had.

Whatever it was it sounded like magic. No idea what kind, but clearly some kind. Right?

Had the injured pony been interviewed already? Did anyone else know what Twilight did now, that they hadn’t been attacked but that something else entirely had happened? Would it be a good idea to bring this to the princesses, or would her meddling do more harm than good? They were likely waiting on the same information themselves, delivered through rather more official channels. Could it wait though? Twilight was rent asunder with uncertainty.

For her though there was one overriding point that kept bobbing to the surface, and that was that, at the very least, Anon had not actually done anything wrong himself. Apparently. He had been present, yes, but something else had happened, and something that sounded suspiciously close to magic and so that something was obviously nothing he could have done with intent.

Famously, Anon was not magic. Humans had no affinity for it, he said, and certainly he’d never demonstrated any, and the tests he’d very patiently sat through for Twilight had confirmed this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Yet, that alley...

Something was clearly, obviously, really wrong.

Dream evil

Author's Note

Continuing my ignoble quest to try and put this thing to bed.

Getting there!

Dream evil

At the very least Twilight could tell Anon that he hadn’t actually been involved, technically speaking. Present, sure, but inactive. He’d probably benefit from knowing that he himself hadn’t done anything to anypony.

Even if this information also dovetailed into the fact that, you know, something much worse might be going on with him. He’d appreciate the first part and maybe Twilight could just sort of skirt around the second. For now. At least until she’d found out a little bit more.

With all this in mind she went dashing back to the castle, dashing back through its corridors, dashing past guards and finally dashing towards the secured guest accommodation.

“Has he said anything?” She asked a guard on her way in.

“Been quiet,” said the guard, shrugging lightly. “Think he might have gone to sleep.”

If he’d gone to sleep it seemed highly unlikely he would have been quiet for long, Twilight felt, but she also felt that pointing this out would require more explanation - the poor guard likely didn’t have the full extent of the situation laid out before. So she just laughed.

This was awkward. The two of them made the mutual, silent decision to pretend it had never happened, and Twilight was let in.

The nature of the secured accomodation was such that it had two doors - an inner and an outer door. For the safety and comfort of the secured guests, you see. Twilight went through the outer door and then more delicately opened the inner door as the outer was locked behind her. For the guests’ safety.

“Anon?” She asked quietly, peeping around the door as she opened it.

There was something off but she could not quite put her hoof on it. The air wasn’t moving right. Or was it? Or was it too dark? Too late? Difficult to tell.

That, in itself, was worrying.

“Are you okay?” She asked, opening the door more fully and stepping in.

The place was...the same. But wrong.

The sunlight seemed to be having difficulty entering the window. It hit the glass, came through and appeared to get a bit sheepish, as though it suddenly felt it didn’t belong. That wasn’t normal.

Not immediately obvious why, either. Twilight tried to pinpoint the exact point at which the issue started but found her eye just sliding around and over it. Difficult to see. Kind of like a blind spot.

When she realised this she felt a jolt, because she remembered what the injured pony had said.

“Anon?” She tried again, stepping further into the room. No response, and the blind spot ebbed around her, some of the room opening up so she could see it, other parts disappearing from view.

He should have just been on the bed, presumably, and that should have been obvious. It was not a big room. And yet she found herself looking around and about. The area that she couldn’t see shifted whenever she looked or moved. She even ended up bumping into a wall.

At this point she started to worry and would have left but, unfortunately, she couldn’t quite spot where the door was anymore. Everything was kind of just a colourless, void of a mess.

Then she bumped into the bed and jumped, whirling around, sighing with relief when she saw Anon. But then she looked at him, and the relief went away again.

He was slumped backwards on the bed, limp, and all the problems with the light and the colours were surrounding him. Or coming from him? Difficult to tell. It leaked from him and dribbled to the floor and spread out from there. He was still visible though. Mostly.

There was a noise, too.

It was like breathing. Sounded much like his breathing, in fact, but louder, and with a rattling edge as might be expected from a fly trapped in a tin can. On the plus side this meant that he was still breathing at all. Twilight could even see his chest moving, kind of, even if most of the oddness seemed to be dribbling from his chest.

On the downside, the noise was terrifying.

She wanted to back away, but then she might have lost the bed again, so she held firm.

The noise rumbled down and down and refined and seemed to come to a point - as much as a sound can be said to come to a point - before popping out completely and plunging the room into quiet. Then, Anon cleared his throat, or something cleared Anon’s throat, and his body rolled over and, making Twilight flinch and step back, rose into the air, as thought being hoisted up on ropes.

There he hung, limp, dangling, one arm swinging gently at the elbow.

“Ah, oh, there we go, a better handle on things. Is someone there? I can - ah, give me a moment…”

He rolled over a little more and his head lolled forward, eyes staring blankly in Twilight’s broad direction. The slack look on his face made her gut hitch.

“Ah, yes, there you are, I see you now. ‘Seeing’! What a concept. And communicating, too! With sound, no less. Ah, this is quite extraordinary, I must say.”

The voice was really, really not Anon’s voice. It was more like something inside Anon’s voice, clumsily stepping about in it. Like someone borrowing someone else’s clothes only they’re the wrong size and they have to keep hoiking them up. The rattling, buzzing breathing hadn’t stopped either, and didn’t seem to actually relate to his breathing at all.

Twilight took a very tentative step forward.

“Anon?” She asked.

His head lolled, briefly, and his eyes looked right through her.

“Hmm? Oh, no, no not right now I’m afraid, just me just now,” he - it - said.

For a split-second Twilight didn’t know what to make of this but then the words clicked in her head and she was filled with a sudden, fierce anger. She even took a step forward, the swirling mass of nothing-much-at-all forced away from her.

“What did you do with him?!”

“Do? Do? Ah, oh, I see. Yes. You’re imagining harm. No, no, no harm. Not yet, at least. He is, ah, hmm, oh? What would be the word? So much of this is unfamiliar. Let me just, ah-”

Anon’s whole body twitched but his head in particular seemed to shake, hanging loosely on his neck and flopping backwards briefly before another spasm jerked it forward again.

“Asleep! That is the word, ah, yes. This one - one! Distinction! Such distinction, ah - this one is asleep, yes, and so I am able to exert some, ah, control. It is most unusual, yes.”

Twilight tried to think of where the door would be. She glanced back but couldn’t see it. It wasn’t as if this was fog or something that blocked her view, it was more like there was simply a gap that her eyes refused to see. Judging by the position of the bed though the door would be pretty much directly behind her.

Should she go for help?

It might be sensible.

But what might happen if she left? Anything could happen. And she had a chance here to learn something. It would be sensible to use that, too. And she was already here...

“What are you?” She asked.

Seemed a reasonable question given the circumstances.

“Me? Hmm, ah. I am, hmm. I am from - elsewhere. Your, ah, friend, is it? Is that the word? He seems to think it, yes? This is the word I see. Ah, friend! Fascinating! Such distinctions!”

Anon’s body - which had been drooping a little - hoiked back up into the air, one arm jerking at a hard right-angle to the rest of him. Not painfully so, but suddenly enough to make Twilight flinch in shock.

“Your friend fell through me from a higher Limit and was briefly present in me before his fall continued into this Limit, where he appears to have come to a stop. I, ah, came with him.”

This answered nothing.

“...what? What are you?”

“I am! I am, ah, well. I simply am, you see?”

Twilight did not see, obviously enough for whatever was speaking through Anon to notice.

“Apologies. This is not something I have ever had to explain. Indeed! I have never had to explain anything! Or even talk, ah, indeed. A first for everything!”

Anon’s body continued to dangle in midair. Twilight said nothing, and so the thing continued.

“The Limit in which I, hmm, reside? No, not quite right word. Not strong enough, but sufficient! My Limit lacks, ah, distinctions - not like yours! It is, and I am it, and that is all. I am height, width, and depth. Length and breadth! Weight and more besides. All is me. Here, all springs from the same fabric but diverges, becomes, ah, separate - distinct! So much! I do not know how you, ah, do not lose your mind! My Limit is only me, and I am only my Limit, you see? All is one and that is I, do you see?”

“Sort of?”

If Twilight took a couple of broad concepts as read she could just about follow what the thing was saying, in a general sense at least. They seemed very fond of the word ‘Limit’ and were putting enough emphasis on it for Twilight to gather it was important. Beyond that, a lot sounded like gibberish.

The thing laughed. Or Twilight assumed it did. Anon’s head swung from one side to the other. The fuzzy gap seemed to curdle and settle a little, twitching about the floor, which faded and flickered from view around the edges.

“Apologies, ah, I imagine it must be hard for you. Imagine for me! From a Limit - and being a Limit! - where there is only ever and always me to here, with such distinction! I was quite overwhelmed when first my, ah, awareness manifested fully here. It has been some, ah, time, since I was exposed to such distinction. I had forgotten how bewildering it can be!”

Twilight took a breath and did her best to keep calm. There was a veritable hurricane of questions available for the asking but one was foremost in importance, at least for Twilight.

“Is Anon okay?”

“Hmm? Oh, this one. Yes, I believe. He is, ah, well, unharmed? Certainly, he is not, non-distinct. Oh, hmm, dead? That is the word! He is not dead. Is that good?”

Twilight relaxed a tiny bit.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes that’s good.”

“Good!”

She took another breath. The next question was also fairly high on the importance stakes:

“What are you doing to him?”

“Doing? What am I, ah, doing? Oh, I see! No, I am not doing, ah, anything, you see? His body has become an - ah - what would the word be?”

Anon’s head twitched again and Twilight winced at how loose his neck appeared to be.

“Ah, ah yes. Doorway, that seems to fit. That is the word. His body has become a doorway, yes? A link between. My Limit - me, you see, yes? - and this Limit. And through the doorway I am leaking.”

“Leaking?”

“Yes! The doorway is, ah, opening wider, shall we say? And more of my awareness is coming in, more of, ah, me.”

That didn’t sound good. Twilight glared.

“Stop it!”

It came across as petulant, but she didn’t really know what else to do and had spoken without thinking. The colour recoiled somewhat and Anon’s body drifted back a little. The floor became somewhat more visible again.

“Oh, ah, apologies. This is not intentional, I assure, ah, you.”

“What?”

“Yes, ah, it is a result of your friend’s fall. He fell through my, ah, Limit - through me - and in so doing has taken a piece with him. It is tangled up in his colour. His, ah, essence? What is word? Ah, soul? That word seems fitting. Yes. Bound up, tangled, I’m, ah, afraid. The doorway will only widen.”

That sounded bad.

“And what’ll happen to him?”

“I do not, ah, know. Though I can venture a guess, if you like?”

“Please.”

“Your friend will, ah, cease to be distinct and what had been his distinction will become only the doorway, through which your Limit may, ah, drain into mine. Or else mine flood yours. One or the, ah, other. Likely the former.”

That sounded extremely bad.

“...sorry?”

“Just a guess, as I say. It has happened before, you see? A lower Limit had a, ah, similar doorway open into mine quite inadvertently, once, and I, ah, drowned it. I did not mean to, I simply could not close, ah, the doorway, and nor could they, it seemed. Two Limits became one, and I became more. It was, ah, unfortunate.”

Again, this sounded bad. Twilight realised her mouth was hanging open and closed it.

There were a lot - a lot - of other questions that needed asking but all of them were trying to get to the front all at once and Twilight’s brain jammed as a result and she ended up just standing there, gawping, staring vacantly at Anon’s dangling body while her mind clicked helplessly.

“Your friend is waking up,” said the thing leaking through Anon, bringing Twilight back to the moment.

“What?”

“He is waking up. That, ah, means that I shall recede, for now. It is most strange. His, ah, awakeness does much to keep me at bay! Or has done. Likely it shall not remain so. Which is, ah, a shame. But still! He’s coming back now! Do tell him, ah, that I bear him no ill will. It is simply an unfortunate set of, ah, circumstances. I am very sorry.”

“Wait!” Twilight cried, but too late.

Anon’s limp body flopped back onto the bed and almost all at once everything strange that had been filling the room just vacuumed right up and disappeared beneath his shirt and - presumably - back into that unfortunate mark on his chest. Just like that.

It happened so suddenly Twilight’s eyes were left watering from all the everything she could now see again, and all the light that didn’t feel so reluctant on coming into the room anymore.

She then heard Anon groan, and it actually sounded like Anon groaning.

“I don’t feel so good…” he grumbled, sitting upright and squinting around. His eyes alighted on Twilight. “Twilight, what-”

“I’ll figure it out!” She squealed, hurling herself at him and knocking him flat on his back on the bed again. The human, startled, had about enough time to let out a yelp as he found himself wrapped in pony.

-

Unsurprisingly, the princesses were summoned after that.

Any discipline or recriminations Twilight might have suffered as a result of her snooping and prying and lying were forestalled, for now, though she was fairly certain they’d come to her eventually. For now, Celestia and Luna were more than willing to hear her out. After all, what she’d come to them with - breathless from having run straight to them - was fairly incredible to hear.

All of them were in the secured guest accommodation, making the small room feel even smaller. Anon was sat on the bed with his hands in his lap, staring down. Twilight was positioned halfway between him and the princesses, who were looming and nearer towards the door.

“-and that’s when Anon woke up,” Twilight said, concluding the story in full. She’d given a brief rundown of what she’d felt had been the salient points to get the princesses there, but the complete details had taken a bit longer to get through.

Celestia and Luna had listened, nodding occasionally and chipping in for clarification here or there. From the looks on their faces they were plainly taking this very seriously indeed.

Anon, mostly, had listened in total, unreadable silence. It had got a little uncomfortable to watch so by the end Twilight had had to turn away from him, because it was just starting to make her feel bad seeing him so downcast.

Then again, she supposed, if you found out you were apparently doomed to become some sort of intra-dimensional gateway that might lead to the destruction of the whole world or even the universe, you might be a bit sad about it too.

“Might we talk to this being?” Celestia asked, once Twilight had wrapped up.

“Uh, well, the thing is it can only come out when Anon’s asleep, apparently,” Twilight said.

“What?” Anon asked, piping up. Twilight turned to him, a pained look on her face.

“That’s what it said. Said that you being awake kept it back.”

Anon’s brows bunched in thought as he digested this information. It seemed he’d missed that part when she’d been telling it.

“Would explain the nightmares, I guess. But then - oh, oh no. And now it can come out when I sleep? That must mean it’s getting bad. Oh that can’t be good, can it? Oh God, is that what happened in that alley? Did this thing come out and do something? Oh God that’s not good.”

A profound lack of proper sleep coupled with some uncomfortable revelations were swirling together in him to produce what was plainly rising panic. This Twilight recognised, and she quickly moved in to try and squash it before it could get going.

Putting both hooves on both his knees she reared up the better to be on his level, looking him in the face.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said, clearly. Anon found it very difficult to tear his bloodshot eyes away from Twilight’s ever-so-big ones, and also found himself being reassured enough for the panic to ebb. If Twilight said so, he found himself believing it.

“So Anon would have to be asleep for us to be able to speak with it?” Luna asked, and Twilight turned back to the princesses.

“That seems the way it is.”

Celestia and Luna exchanged another of their looks.

Twilight watched this, and cottoned onto what it might be that they were planning on doing. She took another unconscious step closer to Anon and wrapped her tail around his leg. This he noticed and blinked at, not really getting it. She hadn’t ever done it before.

“Wassis?” He asked her, peering down, but before Twilight could answer Celestia had taken a step forward and this had grabbed his attention.

“Anon,” she said, calmly, in that soothing way she used sometimes. “For us to better understand what it is that is happening to you, you are going to have to go to sleep.”

“I, uh, what? Uh, oh, right, right. That’s - I don’t really - I mean. I can’t do that on command, you know? Maybe - maybe later? Not right now, right?” Anon asked, looking desperately from Celestia to Luna to Twilight hoping one of them might let him off the hook. None of them did.

Luna then stepped forward.

“I would be able to help you sleep now.”

“W-what? You can do that?” He asked. Luna nodded. He looked to Twilight.

“She can do that?”

Twilight nodded too, nervously.

“I, uh, well. That’s - that’s good. That’s - do we really have to do it now? I just, I was just asleep, wasn’t I? And Twilight came in? And that - that thing was...I was...do we have to do it now? I really don’t want to. Can’t we just wait?”

“The longer we wait, the less time we may have to resolve it comfortably,” Celestia said, still going for soothing.

“I know, I know I just - it’s not - I really don’t want to. It’s - there wasn’t a nightmare this time it was just nothing really I mean a lot of nothing I can’t even really remember but that thing - there’s a thing - do we have to do this?”

“Anon…” Twilight started, turning to him again.

She wasn’t going to get through though. She could see it.

“I mean I know it’s good for me and all I just - I know I have to do it I just I’m scared, alright? Can we - can I wait a bit? Little bit? Can we do this later? I can get ready! I can ready myself, you know?”

“We shouldn’t waste time,” Luna said, advancing again, and Anon started shifting backwards on the bed.

“Please please don’t let them make me go to sleep, Twilight,” he said, eyes locked on Luna even as he tried to find Twilight with his hand.

“We have to,” Twilight said, though it pained her to do so. The edge of exhausted fear in his voice was not something she enjoyed hearing.

“It is for your own good, Anon,” Celestia said, some of her composure starting to crack as well in the face of him going to pieces.

“No-one ever’s said that and had it be good!” He wailed.

Luna, not letting her own feelings on the situation show, took a final step forward and her horn lit up. Anon fell backwards as though he’d been poleaxed.

The instant he hit the bed that fuzzy loss-of-space began bleeding out from his chest again, slithering out and dripping onto the floor and flowing up in great drift of space that you just couldn’t look at. It wafted around the hooves of the princesses, seemingly afraid to get too close, and built up in the corners and edges of the room.

From the looks on their faces, neither Celestia nor Luna had really been expecting it to happen. They also jumped when Anon sat back up before drifting lazily into the air.

Less painfully this time. There was more control to it.

“Ah! Hello again!”

Get outta my dreams, and into

Author's Note

Right, let's just drive a bollock dagger through the visor of this story and put it out of its misery.

I can't remember what I might have had in mind when I started but this is what I wanted to happen and just didn't around to until now.

Done, done. Draw a line, done.

Get outta my dreams, and into

The conversation with the thing - which did not have a name and which found the concept of names in general to be delightfully novel while also being rather difficult to understand - was not exactly productive, but it was at least illuminating.

It went over again with the princesses what it had gone over with Twilight and not a whole lot had changed. If anything things had got just ever-so-slightly worse, barriers weakening and all that. A little worrying, all told.

But still, now at least they’d heard first-hoof what Twilight had, and had a better grasp of the gravity and reality of the situation. Twilight had just stood listening with a mounting sense of dread, mixed with the intense discomfort that came from seeing Anon dangling like some sort of puppet.

In any other set of circumstances this was exactly the sort of thing Twilight probably would have been quite fired up about, all told.

Confirmation of multi-dimensional layer theory? Presence of and communication with an extra-dimensional entity? All amazing, but now really wasn’t the time to be excited about it.

Now was actually the time to be very, very concerned about it, particularly as there was the very real threat of all sorts of nastiness starting with the death of her friend and then escalating from there, culminating (apparently) in the death of everyone.

Indeed, her only real takeaway from hearing the conversation the thing had with the princesses - or at least the only thing that had burned into her mind - had been that, when it was over and Anon had woken up, the first thing he’d done after sitting up and blinking had been bursting into tears.

None present enjoyed seeing this. Twilight immediately leapt up to comfort him while both princesses shifted unhappily, keenly aware that he hadn’t wanted to go to sleep because something like this would have happened, and they had put him to sleep and something like this had happened.

Never nice knowing that you’d made someone cry, even if you might have had a reasonable reason for having had to do it.

“We apologise, Anon. We were hasty. We did not mean to cause you undue distress,” Luna said as Anon clung onto Twilight and sniffled.

“I - I know. It’s okay. You had to. I’m just - I’m just so tired!” He croaked.

No-one present could really argue with that.

“Anon,” Celestia said, stepping forward. “Twilight, my sister and myself are going to go and discuss what should be done next. I feel it would be best if you remain here.”

“I can stay with him,” Twilight said, still being clung onto, only for Anon to then release her. Puzzled, she looked up at him.

“You should go with them. Cleverclogs,” he said, forcing a smile.

“I can stay with you, if you want me to,” she said, more quietly this time, but he shook his head and sniffed.

“I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay. I’ll just - just lie here and be quiet. I’ll be fine.”

Unlikely, but no-one present really wanted to argue with that.

-

They left Anon in his quieter room and moved to another one, there to discuss more openly, away from him so as not to distress him further. Twilight was utterly out of ideas and followed them dumbly, feeling drained.

Fortunately though the Princesses seemed to already have something in mind.

There was an expert, apparently, somepony who’d immediately come forth to both of them. Somepony who was - they said - in the know about these sorts of things. Handled these sorts of things before, was outstanding in his field.

They said all this and it all sounded impressive, but the way they’d said it rather suggested that this wasn’t someone they would have called on if they’d had any other options available. Twilight picked up on this, and was a little curious as a result.

This curiosity melted rapidly when the expert, summoned, arrived looking as though every single good day of the year had been condensed down to one and it was this day.

“Hello! I heard something might be dying, yes-yes? Of something interesting?” The expert asked, skidding to a halt after coming slamming through the door, apparently worried he might have missed it all.

He hadn’t, and instead found himself getting very level stares from Celestia and Luna and a look of bafflement from Twilight. Had the guards got the right expert?

“Twilight, this is the expert, Doctor Knacker,” Celestia said, delicately.

“You’ll have heard of me!” The doctor said proudly.

“Um, no. Sorry,” Twilight said quietly and Doctor Knacker didn’t seem especially put out.

“You should have heard of me, then, yes-yes? So-so, what is happening? What must happen! Details, details!”

The situation was explained to Doctor Knacker in greater detail (or details), and the more it was explained to him the happier he looked until, by the end, he appeared to be almost vibrating in place from excitement.

“Oh this is most-most interesting, most new! So unlike anything! Can I see the subject? I mean, victim? Patient?”

“He is somewhat fragile at the moment. We felt it best you dealt with us first. We assume - hope - that you feel able to assist, given what you have been told?” Celestia asked and Doctor Knacker nodded furiously.

“Oh yes-yes! Most certainly! You came to the right expert, yes-yes. Would know for sure if I could see the sub- the patient but from what you say I think I know, I know. An idea forms in me! We should begin immediately!”

“Whatever you have in mind, doctor, you can assure us that it will be safe?” Luna asked, taking a step forward. The authoritative, regal kind that might have given others pause. Not so here, where Doctor Knacker instead just seemed a bit confused by the question.

“Safe? Hmm, what is ‘safe’, really? Life is notoriously unsafe! Matters such as this? Very dangerous, yes-yes? The mind is complex but present, here, material, can touch it. Slippery, but literally so! The soul? Hmm, HMM! Slippery, but figuratively so! The worst kind! Tricky-tricky.”

Twilight was not overwhelmed with enthusiasm about this expert.

“But is it possible? Solving this? Safely?” Celestia asked before Twilight could put a voice to this lack of enthusiasm.

“Oh yes-yes! Many things possible, this one of them most certainly! I have a device, yes-yes? Something designed for just such as this! Just so, just so! Did I not - ah - did I not present my designs to you, princessesss?”

“You did,” both Celestis and Luna said in an unplanned and unsettling display of stereoscopic synchronicity. It left Twilight blinking. Doctor Knacker just nodded.

“I thought so! I remembered it, in here!” He said, tapping his head happily before looking thoughtful. “There was a prototype too, wasn’t there, yes-yes? Or did I imagine that? The mind is so slippery!”

If he remembered it correctly and was not imagining it he’d sent the prototype in along with the plans in preparation for the Canterlot Equestrian Expo that had happened not that long ago. He remembered being there to exhibit his as-yet-unnamed magical brain imaging machine, but could not remember also being able to show off this other machine. Hence him wondering if he’d imagined it.

“No, you did,” Celestia said.

“Oh. But I did not see it on display with all the other wonderful, interesting, new devices. I was rather looking forward to seeing it there,” he said with a pout. His face was not built for pouting. It was debatable whether it was built for anything other than smiling too wide, really, but pouting was something it was most certainly not built for.

“There was insufficient space on the show floor.”

“Ah, that makes sense, it was very busy-busy. Anyway! It is here, somewhere! That is good! Makes everything easier! We can get started soon-soon! Right away! Guard! Are there guards here?” He asked, looking around, eyes flashing when they clapped onto some guards (for there were always guards somewhere nearby). “Ah, guards! You must go and fetch my device, post-haste! Quickly-quickly!”

The guards, unsurprisingly, weren’t in the habit of taking orders from some guy who’d just rocked up and so looked to the princesses for confirmation or possibly orders to throw this expert out on his ear.

Instead, Luna motioned for a clutch of them to come over and quietly conveyed to them the location of Doctor Knacker’s device and sent them to retrieve it. The good doctor was practically wallowing in delight.

“Where is the subject? The patient? Should I go to them, or them to me? Or both?” He asked.

“How - um - your machine...how does it...work…?” Twilight asked, unable to keep from butting in, all of this being so close to overwhelming that he couldn’t quite help herself. Doctor Knacker rounded on her so suddenly she flinched.

“Work? Work work? What? Who are you?” He asked, advancing. Twilight back away until she bumped into something at once both soft and unyielding.

“Twilight Sparkle is my student and also a friend of Anon, the patient, so if you wouldn’t mind explaining your device to her, doctor, please?” Celestia said, stepping in beside Twilight to provide a very tangible form of moral support, something Twilight appreciated.

Doctor Knacker was immediately mollified, if only because he’d just been given an excuse to exposit.

“Oh! Delightful! Well it is insultingly simple, you see, and merely the practical application of a few formerly theoretical processes. You see…”

And he explained it, and Twilight’s enthusiasm remained where it had been. And then he explained it further, and her enthusiasm sunk along with her expression.

Broadly speaking, his invention seemed to work rather like this: the subject would enter the machine, whereupon the machine - through the exercise of numerous spinning, magical aparati - would draw out the subject’s soul, pass it through a complicated series of tubes, scrubber, screens and filters (all also magical) to remove impurities and then, once that was done, the soul would be restored to the subject, who would obviously feel a host of benefits as a result of this process.

He did not elaborate on what constituted an impurity, for which Twilight could only be grateful.

“I...see…” she said once Doctor Knacker was done. He was out of breath and beaming, clearly enormously proud of this thing he’d designed.

“Amazing, yes-yes? Amazing nopony ever thought of it before! So simple! So obvious!” He said.

Presumably operating off a slightly different standard of ‘obvious’ to that which was used by society at large. Typically, it was felt that the soul was best left where it was. Surely?

“And it works?” Twilight asked. Seemed an important question.

“Oh, it should! No test subjects, sadly. Nopony willing! Can you imagine? So no-no, this subject first test subject! Will work perfectly, perfectly!”

Twilight swallowed.

“Why did you invent this?” She asked. She couldn’t help herself.

He blinked at her, utterly at a loss. He had the look of a man who’d just been asked why he breathed air and ate food and was struggling to work out how best to start on answering something so bafflingly obvious.

Celestia, ever-mindful of keeping things on track, stepped in before he could answer, however.

“If there is anything else you feel you require, doctor, might we suggest you go and collect it now and then see to your machine? Time is of the essence,” she said.

“Ah, yes! Yes-yes, of course. I shall - ah - I shall ‘get right to it’, as they say! Off and away,” he said, giving the most clumsy bow imaginable and scrambling away with ungainly haste, clearly unable to believe his luck that such a wonderful thing should have fallen into his lap.

His exit left a sucking vacuum of awkward silence which Celestia then filled:

“He is an expert, I assure you,” she said, seemingly able to guess what Twilight was thinking.

“What he’s invented sounds pretty horrible,” Twilight said. Celestia sighed. She couldn’t disagree. There had been a reason it had been omitted from that exhibition, after all. The opinion had been that it was unlikely to have been a hit with the crowd, so to speak.

“He means well, he just perhaps hasn’t the firmest grip on how his definition of meaning well is perceived. While we are sure that this machine of his was designed and built with the best of intentions, it is something we felt was rather too dangerous to be put on public display.”

“Not to mention distasteful…” Luna said, sticking out her tongue and getting a sideways look from Celestia for her troubles.

“Now, however, it seems quite perfect, or as close to perfect as we have available in what limited time apparently remains. Assuming the entity can be trusted in the first place, of course,” Celestia then said.

“Even if it can’t, and even if every word it told us was a lie, it is unlikely to come out of the process benefitting from it, so it would gain nothing from misleading us anyway,” Luna said. Twilight supposed she had a point. Not that it made her feel better.

“It just doesn’t sound safe and…” Twilight said, trailing off. The thought of what the machine apparently did - and the thought of Anon going into it and going through - was supremely uncomfortable.

And he’d be the first one through it! What if it didn’t work? What if it did something unexpected? What if - him being human - it did something it wasn’t supposed to completely? What if it didn’t work at all?

What if, what if, what if - Twilight felt a little blip of panic rising and, again, Celestia demonstrated an ability to think ahead and laid a comforting wing over her back. The panic receded.

“It would be worse to do nothing,” Celestia said.

Given what had happened already - and what was going to happen, assuming everybody was telling the truth - this was very true. Didn’t make going for the untested, dubious-sounding option any more comfortable, however.

“I know…”

What a rubbish sequence of days. Her friend suffering, possible end of the world - just not a great time, really. And their current, best hope presently resting in the hooves of a pony who Twilight, despite having only just met him, would be hard-pressed to trust with a knife and fork, let alone a soul.

Still. It was what it was, and there wasn’t much sense in complaining about things you couldn’t change. However cathartic it might have been. Step around the brambles, throw away the cucumber.

“I think it might be best if you were the one to explain the process to him, Twilight,” Celestia said, bringing Twilight back to the moment with a bump.

“Me?!”

“We feel that we intimidate him,” Luna said, moving in the better to be part of the conversation. Twilight looked up at her, then to Celestia, then back again.

“You don’t - I mean, well, maybe a bit…” She mumbled.

Even before all of this had started he’d always been a bit scared of them, Twilight knew. She’d found it quaintly amusing at the time, back then, one of his many idiosyncrasies. Now not so much.

Again, they were right. If anyone was going to explain what was about to happen to Anon to him, it should really be her.

She supposed it was a good thing they were the ones in charge.

-

And so it was that Twilight returned to the room they’d left Anon in.

He had a very distant look in his eyes and was, once again, pacing and he looked straight through Twilight a good two times before finally noticing she was actually there watching him, at which point he jumped.

“Whoa, scared me. How long were you standing there?” He asked, hand to his chest.

“Not long,” she said, then: “You seem livelier.”

“They brought me coffee. Think they’ve put something else in here though, I feel quite pepped up. Or maybe I broke through the wall. Again, heh. Feel all spacey.”

He waved a hand around to demonstrate how spacey he felt. Twilight wasn’t wholly sure who he’d meant by ‘they’ but was fully sure that now wasn’t the time to get side-tracked by minutiae.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“Heh, no, I’m really not. But we knew that, didn’t we?”

Kind of the only answer she could have expected to get, honestly. Twilight chewed her lip and Anon used two fingers each to try and prop his eyes open wider, with limited success.

“So there’s a plan, right? They’ve got something?” He asked.

“They have got something. The princesses,” Twilight said, nodding. Anon hadn’t seen that one coming and took a second to register that she’d said what she’d said and during that second he just stared at her gormlessly.

“What? Really? I wasn’t - I wasn’t actually expecting anything that quick. They really have something? It’ll work?” He asked.

“We hope so.”

“Oh shit. Soon?”

“Very soon.”

Anon mouthed uselessly for a moment or two - mostly more swear words - before lightly slapping himself across the face (Twilight didn’t appreciate this) and shaking his head.

“So what is it?” He asked.

“I should explain to you first what it is that’s happened to you, as far as we know. Just so you understand it all and what it’ll mean. Okay?”

“Uh, sure, yeah. Makes sense.”

She went over - again, more clearly and directly this time - what she knew. She’d done this a few times today, but this time she was explicitly talking to Anon, who might have overheard the last explanation when she’d been talking to the princesses but hadn’t really been best-placed to pay attention and hadn’t said anything about it either way.

He definitely paid attention this time though, even if however much actually sunk in was unclear.

“Huh. Souls exist? Alright. I’ll buy that,” he said once she’d wrapped up, his face a mask of concentration.

“That’s the bit that got you, souls? Not the...falling through a whole other universe that was itself an entire being? That then latches onto you? And did you forget the part where it will kill you?”

She refrained from saying ‘Is killing you’ despite that being the more accurate statement, as it wasn’t something she actively wanted to say. Anon just blinked at her slowly, letting her words sink in. He then yawned.

“Well, you know. I’m really fucking tired.”

“Right...”

“So what’s the plan?”

“There is a...machine…” Twilight said, and Anon, who had been about to resume pacing again, paused and turned back around to her.

“You don’t sound very happy about it, so that’s a good start,” Anon said with the tiniest hint of a giggle. That’d be the tiredness again. Every fresh moment was a roll of the dice at this point. Twilight swallowed and continued:

“The idea is that your...soul...will be...drawn out? And passed through the machine and, well, spun and filtered is kind of the only way I can explain it, before being put back into you with the...entity...removed…”

Hopefully.

Anon blinked.

“Like...soul dialysis? Only not really?” He asked.

“Yes?”

She didn’t know but if that’s what he thought of and that’s how he understood it then why not.

“That doesn’t sound safe,” he said.

“No, it doesn’t…”

Not exactly what Anon had hoped to hear. He stood perfectly still and thought about it but his head was too thick and fluffy to reach any useful conclusions. He just felt bad. But then again, he’d felt bad for days now, so what was new?

“Guess it has to happen though, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be an option?” He ventured.

“Yeah…” Twilight said, trying for supportive agreement but not able to rise to it.

“Kind of surprised you guys have something like that lying around, Anon said.

It seemed kind of extreme to him. More like the sort of thing they’d be trying to destroy somehow before it got used for some nefarious purpose. He wasn’t an expert - and he was, as has been mentioned, extremely tired - but he was fairly sure that removing souls was a negative thing, regardless of any intention of putting it back once you were done with it.

“So am I, honestly. Somepony made it. An expert. He’s here too,” Twilight said, jerking her head back in the vague direction of ‘outside the room’.

“This soul-sucking, filtering thingy was just made by some guy?” Anon asked, having expected it to have been some ancient magical artefact or something else instead, and not just something cobbled together by someone he could meet. Somehow that made it just seem less reliable to him.

“Yes,” Twilight said.

“He seem, uh, competent?” Anon asked.

“The Princesses vouched for him and while he comes across as, um, unique it is kind of an...unusual area and there isn’t really anypony else and…”

None of this was coming across as a ringing endorsement and none of it was doing anything to bolster what threadbare confidence Anon had in the plan. This was pretty clear from the doomladen, wide-eyed look on his face.

Twilight switched tack, moving up to him and rearing back, putting her hooves onto his waist to balance. This didn’t do a whole lot to shrink the height difference between them but it did immediately get his attention.

“Trust me?” She asked.

He did. He really did.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m worried. I’m scared. I don’t like any of this. But if we don’t do anything it’ll only be worse, and even if this sounds bad - and it doesn’t sound good - it’s the only thing we have. I just want you to be better and this...this seems like the best way for it, right now,” she said.

Anon swallowed.

“Alright,” he said. “Mean, not a lot else I can do anyway, right? And if you think it’s a good idea, well, good enough for me.”

She smiled, he smiled. His smile faltered first, however.

“You’ll - you’ll stay with me though, right?” He asked.

Twilight’s smile had not faltered, nor had it wavered.

“Of course,” she said.

Anon’s confidence remained threadbare, but was now a slightly higher quality of threadbare.

-

“So you’re a...soul doctor or something?”

Anon asked this while Doctor Knacker - with a rather heavy-duty set of mirrored goggles incongruously strapped about his head- dashed around putting the finishing touches to his hastily re-assembled machine.

They’d had to find quite a big spare room to put it in, as the thing was not small and also had a lot of spinny, sticky-outy bits that made it look even more dangerous than it did to start with. And it had looked pretty threatening to start with.

Anon, unfortunately for him, was sat right in the middle of the thing. Everyone else - Twilight, Celestia, Luna, et al - were more towards the edge of the room, watching closely.

“Oh no, no-no! Actually, my speciality is the mind, but there is always a link between that and the soul, yes-yes? The material, the immaterial? Interacting, combining, relating. Fascinating!” Doctor Knacker said, grinning furiously at Anon for a moment before disappearing up to his middle in the guts of the machine, legs kicking.

Anon swallowed.

“Uh, sure. I’ll buy that.”

The other option was being paralysed by anxiety, which didn’t appeal. Anon decided to keep it as an option available for future use, however, pending further developments. Maybe being paralysed by anxiety would become much more attractive some point soon.

Stranger things had happened, and these were rather strange times.

“This won’t hurt, will it?” Anon asked after a moment or two and after Doctor Knacker had withdrawn himself. Seemed a prudent question.

“You will experience a sensation, it might be interpreted as pain,” Doctor Knacker said dismissively, continuing to tinker and only belatedly noticing the appalled looks of everyone else in the room. “But only the good kind of pain! Not the bad kind,” he clarified.

Twilight chose this moment to move over, hopping over the leg-thick cables that snaked across the floor and ducking under the various, bewildering bits of metal sticking out of the machine to come up beside Anon who was still kind of gaping at Doctor Knacker in blank stupefaction as the pony completely ignored him and kept on poking and prodding and pulling on what looked to be important pieces of the machine.

“Hey,” Twilight said, making Anon jump only to relax on seeing it was her. “You’ll be okay. I’ll be right over there. Okay?”

She put a hoof onto his leg and he put a hand onto her hoof.

“Okay. I’ll be fine. Pain don’t hurt, right?” He said, grinning, strained.

“Right,” she said, not wanting to contradict him if saying this sort of insane nonsense helped him get through strange situations. If - when, when - this was all over and they were looking back on it and laughing she’d call him out on it, and point out how dumb it was. But not now, then. Later.

Something to look forward to.

“We are ready! Non-subjects out of the area, please! Stand back, stand back! Now-now!” Doctor Knacker yelled, shooing Twilight back against the far wall, much to her irritation. She complied though, wouldn’t do to get in the way.

Once she was back there Doctor Knacker returned, performed a final touch or two, double-checked that Anon was sitting exactly where and how he was meant to be sitting (the machine hadn’t been quite built with someone of his size in mind, so it was a bit of a squeeze) and then took up position himself behind a vast and intimidating bank of buttons, dials and levers.

The buttons, dials and levers were all labelled. With notes that had been stuck on. Anon only noticed this now. Eyes widening again he looked over at Twilight.

“You’ll be okay,” she mouthed.

And then the machine closed on Anon, like some sort of junkyard clamshell. There came a click, then a rising hum. Bits of it started moving, first slowly, then gradually faster. Some steam even vented from somewhere.

“Um…” Twilight said.

“The steam means it’s working!” Doctor Knacker yelled, furiously wrangling the controls as though they were trying to throw him off. Twilight chewed her lip and just focused on the spot where Anon was sitting, and thought happy thought.

Not a whole lot anyone else could do about it anyway.

-

Anon came out of the machine limp and snoring.

He slept for a little over an entire day, completely dead to the world. Not once did he wake up, screaming or otherwise. While it was rather too early to be definitive, this did seem like a good sign.

Doctor Knacker declared the whole thing an immediate and overwhelming success and seemed to think this meant that now his machine had been vindicated. Indeed, he offered all present a go as soon as Anon had been removed and taken back to the secured guest accomodation to be put into the bed there.

To Doctor Knacker’s disappointment, all present had demurred politely.

To his greater disappointment - bordering on baffled outrage - the machine was to be dismantled and put back into storage. He was thanked for his troubles and paid for his time though, and told that, once things were more settled, it was likely that he would be consulted on the matter so a more thorough examination of what had happened and why might be put together. This mollified him greatly.

Then something unexpected came up that required his immediate attention, and he was left to it.

After that was sorted out and as soon as was possible, Twilight went to Anon’s side and remained there. This was why she was there when he woke up. At first it looked like he was just shifting in his sleep again and Twilight was all about ready to doze off again herself when she noticed that he’d opened his eyes and was squinting around in groggy confusion.

“Wha?” He mumbled, yawning and shifting beneath the covers. His eyes then fell on Twilight and he smiled dumbly. “Ah, you. Good. Cleverclogs, heh.”

He stirred some more and stretched, sitting up. Twilight had dismounted the chair she’d been sat in and moved on over but was giving him space and doing her best not to interrupt or blurt out anything unhelpful like ‘You’re awake!’, feeling that he’d know that already.

Still blinking he screwed his eyes up and looked at his hands in his laps, resting on the sheet, then looked back to Twilight again, stood by the side of the bed and smiling up at him.

“Oh man, I feel so much better,” he said, reaching out to pat her on the head. He stopped halfway there though, his brain waking up enough to realise that was kind of an odd thing to do to a friend - he’d just been acting on some base instinct. He put his hands back.

“Not tired anymore?” She asked. He thought about this.

“No,” he said, then he laughed the laugh of an incredibly relieved man. “No! I’m not! Oh God! Oh wow. I’d forgotten what that feels like! Mean, still, just woke up and stuff but...wow.”

Could hardly believe it had worked!

And so easily!

Surely he had to be missing something? He looked around the room for signs of foul play but, given that it was a strange room in the first place, he didn’t notice anything he could point out as particularly out of place.

“I didn’t die or anything did I?” He asked Twilight. She gave him an odd look.

“How would you be sitting there asking that if you were dead?”

“Well, maybe I got brought back to life somehow. Or maybe this is a dying dream or something,” he said, fishing about for possibilities. Twilight was unmoved and unimpressed.

“No. Apparently it worked completely perfectly, just like Doctor Knacker said it would,” she said. This seemed highly unlikely to Anon. Since when did things work perfectly?

“No grim side-effects?” Anon asked.

“Well, we don’t think so. Are you noticing anything?”

Anon thought again, felt about his person and then slowly, deliberately, lifted up the bedsheet for a nice, big, overblown look underneath it. He held this for far longer than was necessary.

“...no,” he said at length.

Twilight, somehow, was managing to look even less impressed than she had been before.

“Really?” She asked, flatly.

“Hey, you would have done it too,” he said.

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said.

This wasn’t an argument Anon could win, and he deflated.

“No, you wouldn’t…” he said sadly.

Rolling her eyes Twilight hopped up onto the bed and moved in to curl up right against Anon’s side, to his surprise. Once all curled up and quite snug she let out a long, tired sigh.

“You’re okay though. You’re back to normal. Well, normal…” she said, tailing off most deliberately, leaving the blank there to fill in itself.

“Hey,” Anon protested. She just giggled and snuggled some more, which made it impossible for him to press the point further. The two of them stayed there quietly for a few minutes, just soaking in how bloody normal and dull things were now. No tiredness, no looming sense of dread. Anon had seen that even the horrible mark on his chest seemed to be looking better already.

Eventually he felt Twilight stir and he looked down at her.

“What was it like?” She asked.

“Being in the machine?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh…”

Difficult to describe. It had certainly been a sensation. Rather like being drunk - in the glass of water sense. Not painful, at least not in any way Anon was used to things being painful. But not exactly pleasant, either, and certainly more than a little bit claustrophobic. He had no way of conveying the conclusion of all this.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said eventually, feebly.

“Okay,” Twilight said, understanding, snugging again, just happy to have him back and healthy.

Ponies were so touchy-feely. Not that Anon was complaining.

She broke the cuddle a little after this, however, and slid back off the bed and onto the floor.

“I should go and tell the princesses you’re awake, they’ll want to talk to you. I’ll be right back. Okay?” She said.

“Okay,” Anon said. He wasn’t super-thrilled about being left alone again - not in the weird room in the scary palace where the big horses lived - but he was a big boy and could handle it. Twilight departed. When she came back, the big horses were with her, guards and all.

“How do you feel, Anon?” Celestia asked as she loomed.

“Much better, thank you,” he said, fiddling with the bedsheet.

“Good, good,” Celestia said, nodding. A pause. Then: “There’s something we think we should show you.”

The way she’d said it got his attention.

“Hmm? What?” He asked.

“Right now?” Twilight asked quietly, lean in towards the princesses.

“We feel sooner would be best,” Luna said.

That seemed to settle that, and at another nod from Celestia one of the trailing guards departed from the room. Moments later he reappeared, pushing a trolley.

And on the trolley was a box.

A very fine box indeed, all expensive-looking wood and metal detailing. More oddly, a thick cable was sticking out the side and linking to what looked to all the world to be a gramophone, or at least the horn part. Anon hadn’t the foggiest idea what was going on.

“What’s in the box?” He asked.

No-one wanted to answer this, it seemed, and no-one wanted to open the box either. Everyone just sort of stood around awkwardly and quietly for a bit before with another nod (very versatile with her nods) Celestia got the guard with the trolley to lift the lid.

And in the box, sitting in a comfy padded recess, was a fist-sized sphere of what appeared to be black glass. Even just looking at the thing made Anon cold. Then the horn attached to the box made a popping sound, followed by a crackle, and then came a voice:

“Hello!”

Immediately Anon launched himself off the bed and scrambled into the corner in a tangle of bedsheets and a scattering of pillows.

“That-! That’s the-! No! Not again!” He squawked, eyes wild, doing his best to get as into the corner as was possible. Twilight was already over by him, having kind of seen this coming.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

“That’s the thing! The voice! I know that voice! It’s - it’s that!” Anon was nearly shouting, pointing at the box and still trying to force himself deeper into the corner.

“You’re okay, you’re fine. It’s just in there, now, just there, the connection was severed,” Twilight continued and Anon finally managed to wrench his attention away from the box and focus it more-or-less in her direction.

“What does that mean?!”

“It means it worked, it worked. You’re safe, we’re safe, everything’s fine. The, uh, ‘hole’, I guess, was closed when you went through the machine. It’s just that whatever part of...it...that had already leaked through was still here. And had to be, well, contained. Apparently,” she said.

Anon stared at her, panting a bit, trying to calm down.

“...I don’t understand,” he said once he’d done that.

“Imagine a large vessel is leaking from a hole. The hole has now been plugged, but what had already leaked required cleaning up, to keep it from presenting a hazard. Thus,” Luna said, pointing to the box.

Anon thought about this.

“...okay. I think I get that,” he said, then turning to Twilight. “And that doctor guy did that? Just, off the cuff? Like it wasn’t a big deal?”

“He did. He’s creepy but he did do exactly what he said he’d do and more,” Twilight said.

“There is a reason he is kept around,” Luna said.

Things got quiet again as Anon, no longer frantic, just sat and stared for a bit.

“So...whatever was...in me...isn’t in me anymore?” He said.

“No,” said Twilight.

He pointed again.

“And it’s in that?”

“I am maimed! It’s quite delightful. So new and exciting! I’m distinct!” Said the box happily. Twilight, who didn’t like being interrupted at the best of times, gritted her teeth a moment before responding.

“...yes,” she said.

Swallowing, Anon got back to his feet and very, very gingerly moved towards the box. No-one really knew what to make of this so just watched, cautiously. He moved right up, peering down at the sphere. The sphere, being a sphere, had no real awareness of its surrounding beyond what the horn (a two-way horn, apparently) allowed it to hear, so it said and did nothing.

“Nearly killed me and now it’s just...this…” Anon said, licking his lips.

“No malice intended, I assure you! Merely an unfortunate, lethal and entirely accidental set of circumstances,” the sphere said.

“That doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better but thanks anyway?”

“Quite alright! I do feel most terrible about whatever distress all this might have caused. Can only hope I find some way of, ah, making it up! Is that the term? What an idea! To be so distinct as to, ah, come up against such otherness!”

Anon, while rested at long last, was nowhere near rested enough to deal with that.

“Can we go home?” He asked Twilight. Twilight, in turn, looked to the princesses for the go-ahead. There was, unsurprisingly, another nod, and Twilight led Anon out of the room to go and see if she could find something for him to wear on the way back that wasn’t the rather loose robe they’d wrapped about him to sleep modestly in.

That left Celestia, Luna and a handful (hoofful?) of guards. And the sphere.

“I must say, it’s quite the experience being like this,” said the sphere unprompted.

“Is this your problem or my problem?” Celestia hissed to Luna, who rolled her eyes.

Please release me and let me dream

Author's Note

None of this has anything to do with anything.

I just like making shit up.

Please release me and let me dream

There was a ‘thump’ as Anon walked into the doorframe.

“Ow,” he muttered. “Moving too fast, my bad…”

Rather more slowly and carefully he maneuvered into the room, so focused on avoiding the door he nearly blundered into a stack of books that had - to be fair - been left in the middle of the floor.

“Oh shit,” he said, steadying them. He’d meant to come in quietly and already he was causing ruckus.

Twilight, further off into the room proper and barely visible behind a mound of tomes, scrolls and other assorted magical paraphernalia, was too busy at that precise moment to look up at any of this. Though her ears did flick in his direction.

“Anon? Is that you?” She asked, squinting as she ran a hoof down the page to make sure she was on the right line. Off to the side her quill scratched out some notes.

Silly question anyway. It could only have been either Anon or Spike and Spike - being an Equestrian native - did not swear. He’d tried it once and had not enjoyed it at all. Anon had been accused of being a bad influence and that had been that.

So that narrowed her choices down. But Twilight hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice this particular.

“Yeah, me, sorry to interrupt I just - whoops, oh dear.”

Another stack of books very nearly fell over.

“Why are these everywhere…?” He muttered. It seemed every time he stuck out an arm to keep his balance or bent to keep something from falling he brushed or knocked something else and had to quickly turn to fix that, which just made more problems.

Somehow - in defiance of everything he - he made it to Twilight without causing a disaster and then stood there like a lemon, silently watching over her as she hurriedly jotted out the last few bits and pieces she needed.

Finally finished doing what she was doing, Twilight was able to look up at him for the first time since he’d come in.

Something about him looked off, but it was difficult to pin it down. Paler than usual, maybe. With him being the weird colour he was it was hard to tell. Probably nothing.

Stiffly, he got down onto one knee by the side of her table, the better to talk at the same level. He rested an arm on a clear spot near him and pushed his hair back with his free hand. It needed a cut. This he knew. This they both knew. He’d assured her he’d be getting onto it but clearly hadn’t yet. Needed a wash too, she could tell.

“I wanted to ask you something. If you’re not busy,” he said.

If there was something that Twilight liked only a smidgen less than asking question it was answering them. A chance to put some of that hard-earned knowledge to good use! For the benefit of a friend, no less! She beamed.

“Never too busy for you, Anon! What is it?”

“You, uh, wouldn’t happen to have anything I could use to help stay awake, would you? Like a potion or something? Magic potion?”

This caught her off guard and left her flathoofed for a moment. Then she thought about the question. Not in any great depth. Just the surface of it, to find an answer. She couldn’t not answer. That would be unthinkable.

“Potions are more Zecora’s area of expertise,” she said.

“Right, course, yeah,” he said, nodding, swaying slightly, head drooping before it flicked back up. Then: “What’s a Zecora?”

There followed a very quick explanation about who Zecora was. Zebra. Forest. Hut. Ingredients. Potions. Knowledgeable. This he absorbed with a confused frowned. Clearly it wasn’t the sort of immediately helpful answer he’d been hoping for.

“You ain’t got any spells or anything that’ll do the same thing?” He asked.

This she gave some genuine thought to, but couldn’t come up with anything. It just wasn’t something she spent a whole lot of time looking into. Time travel? Sometimes. Pep spells? A few. Straight-up sleep avoidance? Not so much. The sort of thing that was liable to go quite wrong unless handled very carefully, magic or no.

Not beyond the realm of possibility though, obviously.

“No, sorry. I could look something up if you wanted?” She suggested.

The sheer bulk of mess pressed in on them with such force it was like an interruption in the conversation. All the work she had already started and all the work she’d started while doing the first load of work. And what she’d been doing when he came in, which was actually just a side-project she was looking over while having a break. She grinned sheepishly.

“Might, uh, take a while though…”

Anon’s head dipped again and he blinked furiously, leaning back and heaving back to standing with a groan.

“Don’t worry about, it’s fine. I can figure something out. Was just wondering,” he said.

“If you’re sure,” she said, quill lifting back up from the ink bottle.

Then the question he’d asked came back to her, and she wondered about all the bits above, below and around it. The bits she should have noticed in the first place. The quill went right back down again.

“Wait, why are you asking?” She asked.

Anon, who had been carefully working his way back out of the room again, froze in place so suddenly he actually did manage to tip over a stack of books this time. This stack hit another stack on its way down, and the resulting spill knocked the bottom out of a another stack. Through all this Anon stood like a statue. Wincing.

“Just curious. No reason. Uh, sorry, by the way,” he said, gesturing to the books and then squeaking when they lifted into the air surrounding by shimmering, insubstantial magical energy. He still wasn’t used to that.

“It’s fine, really. You doing anything today?”

“Hmm? Doing? Right. No. Nothing. Not today. Not doing anything.”

“That’s alright. I think you deserve a day off. I’ll see you at dinner then?”

He’d scoffed at the mention of deserving anything but then wavered in confusion at the mention of dinner. They typically took it together, and alternated in whose turn it was to get it ready. He’d lost track.

“Am I making it today? Or…?”

“It’s my turn,” Twilight said, a little perplexed she had to remind him. He blinked, face scrunching up. Then it cleared.

“Oh, alright. Alright cool. That’s cool. Thought it was mine. Cool. See you then, then,” he said. Then he chuckled. “Then then. Heh.”

And he was gone.

Twilight, having finished restacking the fallen books, raised an eyebrow towards the door through which he’d just disappeared and then shook her head, returning to what she’d been doing before.

“What was that about?”

-

Dinner time rolled around.

Anon came wandering blearily in from wherever he’d ended up and slumped at the table while Twilight set about doing all fo the actual work. She didn’t mind. When it was his turn he did everything himself - was quite insistent on it - so this was only fairly. Smiling, she practically hopped as she levitated his plate in front of him.

“Ta-da!” She said. He blinked and only then noticed the food that had appeared.

“Ah. Thanks, Twilight. Looks great,” he said, with what looked like an attempt at a smile. Twilight was too busy wiggling into her seat to see this though, and so only heard him.

“That’s okay,” she said, immediately tucking in.

It was a few minutes before the unusual thing struck her.

Never the most talkative, Anon was a level of quiet through dinner that Twilight had not seen before. He wasn’t eating, either, just staring down at his plate, eyes wide.

“You sure you’re alright?” She asked. His head snapped up, the sudden shift in weight making his whole body sway for a moment.

“Fine. Fine. Totally fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“Okay,” she said, unsure, fork hovering. “Eat something.”

“Oh yeah. Right. Eating,” he said, taking a spoon and shoveling a mouthful away without any apparent notice as to what it was. He chewed, he swallowed, he set the spoon down and got back to staring.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Hmm? Nothing, honestly.”

Twilight wasn’t buying this.

“Just tired,” he said, shrugging helplessly.

She eyeballed him hard, the better to coax a more complete answer from the human. It did not work, because he did not look at her.

Dinner continued and concluded in silence. Any other day she might have felt put out at him having not touched his food, today she was just concerned. It wasn’t like him at all. She tidied up around him, eyeing him warily as he swayed in his seat, doing the washing up and then trotting back in and past him.

“Alright well I’m going to turn in. If you’re tired you should be going to bed as well, yeah?”

Twilight waited for a response. Response came there none.

She turned back.

“Anon?”

“I’m just going to sit here a minute, you carry on,” he said, unmoving.

Well, it wasn’t like they needed to go to bed at the same time or anything anyway. They were both adults living separate, adults lives. So that was fine. And not wholly unusual. If anything, it was normally Twilight who was the one staying up later.

“If you’re sure…”

“Sure sure, I’ll be right up, don’t you worry.”

She considered saying something but held her tongue. He was an adult, as said, and he could do what he wanted. Within reason. It wasn’t unreasonable to want a quiet moment to himself just sitting. It happened to the best of us. Still, not like him.

“Alright…” she said quietly, frowning to herself and heading up to get ready for bed.

Something was definitely up. He’d never been like this before in all the weeks she’d known him. Indeed, he’d never been anything even close to this. Even when he’d just shown up - waking up in a field, by his own admission - he’d been chirpier. He’d smiled more, laughed. Now that was all gone.

She sighed. If he was still like that tomorrow then she’d see if he wanted to talk about it. If not then maybe it was just a human thing he hadn’t seen fit to mention. Who knew? Maybe this was normal. There still a lot to learn about him, after all.

That thought buoyed her. The many questions as-yet unanswered. It’d keep her going for months. Years, maybe! And she’d be the first! How exciting.

Smiling sleepily at the very thought she closed her eyes and drifted off to a nice, peaceful, nightmare-free sleep.

-

Come the next morning Twilight was much refreshed and - following a brief shower - made her way towards the kitchen with the breakfast weighing heavily on her mind. Her turn for that, too. Pancakes again, probably, not that anyone would be complaining about that, she was fairly certain.

She stopped mid-step when she saw the back of Anon’s head.

He was sat pretty much exactly where he’d been sat the last time she’d seen him, staring into space and slouching. This wasn’t ordinary behaviour, at least going by what Twilight had seen of him so-far. He didn’t even hear her clip-clopping up behind him.

“Uh, Anon, are you okay?”

For a good solid two or three seconds he just kept staring. Then he flinched so suddenly it even made Twilight jump. Blinking and having obvious difficulty getting her into focus he turned around in the seat.

“Hmm? Oh, oh yeah. Fine. Just trying to stay awake. It’s fine.”

Then he turned back again.

What had just been a sneaking, crazy suspicion for Twilight then became a genuine cause for concern. He wasn’t sat pretty much exactly where he’d been - he was sat exactly exactlywhere he’d been the night before. He had not moved at all.

Now that definitely wasn’t normal. Or healthy.

“Anon have you moved at all since last night?”

He squinted and scratched his head, still looking intently at nothing much in particular.

“I did get up to take a slash but - but that was it. I think?” He scratched some more. “Or did I? Maybe I didn’t. Could have imagined it. Not sure. I think…”

At that point he was just mumbling. Twilight cocked her head. What she’d shrugged off yesterday was now glaringly, unavoidably obvious. The shadows beneath his eyes had deepened, and the eyes themselves were alarmingly bloodshot. Twilight knew that look.

Delicately, she cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you something?”

He broke off from his mumbling and looked at her again, again having clear difficulty just looking at her, one eye seeming to want to close and the other doing the same by the time he’d got around to forcing the other open.

“You can ask me anything,” he said, biting on his hand to keep from yawning.

“How long have you been awake for?”

She saw him flinch, and suddenly he looked very sheepish indeed. The look of someone caught in the act. He took the fist out of his mouth.

“...not that long,” he said, tapping his fingers on the table.

“And how long is that?”

“...little bit…”

“Anon…” she said, warningly, eyes narrowing.

“...maybe, like, forty eight hours or something. Maybe a little more. It’s hard to keep track without proper clocks.”

Took Twilight a second to fully register what he’d said. She thought perhaps she’d misheard. She had not.

“Two days?!”

Anon shrugged.

“Maybe, more. Think it might have been nearer three days, now I think about it. Not that long. I think? Maybe that long. Where would I even start counting from? When I woke up last, I guess, I don’t-”

Twilight cut across him, feeling that if she didn’t he otherwise wouldn’t stop.

“Nearly threedays, Anon? Why? That’s really bad for you!”

“Yeah, yeah I know. It’s fine though. I feel fine. Little - wooo - spacy and stuff but it’s actually pretty great. I feel fine. Like I can think but also not. It’s fine.”

He swished his hand through the air as he spoke, to better illustrate ‘spacy’, and once he’d done that he gave her what he hoped was a convincing and winning smile.

Twilight was not impressed. She also didn’t believe him.

“You need to go to bed. Now! It’s unhealthy! Come on.”

With a tinkling of magic and the scraping of wood she pulled his chair back, but Anon scrabbled for purchase on the table and managed to hop forward again. This happened at least another two times before Twilight gave up with a sigh. She’d have picked him up, but the strange way magic worked on humans would mean she’d probably just drop him, and that was no good.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, flatly.

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” he said, hands still braced on the table.

“Why not?”

He flinched again. Only slightly this time, barely at all, but still enough that Twilight noticed.

“I- I’m...I’m scared to go back to sleep…” he said, eyes darting side to side, voice so quiet Twilight had to strain to hear it. She blinked in surprise.

“This isn’t that ‘existential dread’ thing you told me about, is it?” She asked.

This was so out of nowhere that Anon looked completely baffled. He’d tried (and failed) to explain the concept to her some weeks back and ever since she’d been trying to pin him down on it. Every time she hadn’t quite got it. This was no different.

“What? No. No, this is just regular dread.”

She looked only mildly disappointed. Regular dread was unusual enough for the disappointment to be mild.

“Oh. Well that’s still not good. Why?”

Anon shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He stared at his hands.

“You know how I got here?”

“No. No-one does. You don’t,” she said, muzzle wrinkling in confusion. Then, despite herself, her face lit up. “Do you remember?!”

“No, no. Well, maybe. Not really. I’m remembering something. I think. I don’t know.”

He found an errant bit of someone’s dinner that had dried stuck to the table and started worrying it with a finger. When it came loose, he started distractedly pushing it around, keeping his eyes down.

“I’ve been having dreams. Bad dreams. But I don’t think they’re dreams. They’re more like remembering something. Like something that happened to me. I thought it was a dream but it’s just the same over and over and that’s not right. I think? I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

He shivered, brow furrowed. Twilight got a little closer, the exquisite burn of curiosity building within her.

“What happens? In the dreams?”

Anon stopped pushing the food around. He stopped moving at all. He even stopped breathing, holding his last breath for so long that Twilight started to be genuinely concerned. She was about to do something when he finally let it out, deflating as he did so, head hanging.

“It’s like...you guys have oceans here, right?” He asked, glancing up at her out of the corner of his eye. She nodded. “Right, right. Course you do. Stupid question, sorry. They’re deep, right?”

“Deep enough to be uncharted,” she said, shrugging. Not her area of expertise. She dabbled in the occasional smattering of oceanography and marine biology, but who didn’t?

“Right, yeah. So it’s like...waking up in an ocean. Deep in an ocean. Like that, but not any actual ocean. Just the feel of one, you know? Dark and cold and you don’t know what way is up. So small and so helpless. And it’s suffocating. All this weight, this pressure. And you can’t breathe. And you - I - feel something move behind me and it’s so big - it has to be big, I can feel it’s big just from how it feels when it moves, everything shifting because of how big it is - and I fumble and struggle and turn and there’s…”

He swallowed and stopped, eyes wide but not really looking at anything. Then he blinked and shook his head, refocusing - with some obvious effort - on Twilight.

“I don’t want to see it again. I can’t. Sorry. I just don’t want to. And if I stay awake I won’t have to. Not again”

“What was it?” She asked breathlessly, leaning in close. He slumped forward across the table and buried his face in his hands, shaking his head. She saw the angry red marks on his arms where he'd been digging his nails in.

“No, sorry, I really don’t want to think about it again. I don’t want to see it again. Sorry Twilight, I just-”

Twilight, realising with a sick lurch that she’d put her own curiosity ahead of the obvious distress of a friend, hopped up on her hindlegs and wrapped her hooves around him.

“Hey, hey it’s okay, you’re okay. I’m sorry I asked, it was insensitive. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“E-every time I try to sleep! And i-it can s-see me! It-”

“Hey, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here. It’s just a nightmare, you’re okay, shh,” she said soothingly, rubbing his back until he went quiet and then keeping on rubbing and shushing. She was mostly making it up as she went along, but it seemed to work.

Sniffling, Anon sat up, Twilight breaking the hug and stepping away. Pushing his hair back with both hands Anon sniffled and stared into space. If his hair might have benefited from a wash yesterday it definitely needed one now.

“I think...when I came here...however I came here...I must have gone through somewhere else. To get here. And while I was there...something noticed me…”

He was trembling. Even so, he managed a tiny, half-coughed chuckle, blinking and looking into Twilight’s wide eyes with his own red-raw, watery ones.

“That probably sounds crazy. And I don’t know any of it. I just feel like it happened. I can feel it. Like it left a mark. That sounds crazy, right?”

She put a hoof onto his leg and smiled as comfortingly as she could manage.

“It’s not crazy. You’re tired and you’ve had some very bad dreams. Anyone would feel, ah, unsettled,” she said. Then she frowned, and the hoof came back to tap at her chin. “Should probably ask Luna about this, though. Kind of weird she hasn’t noticed already if they’re as bad as you say…”

“Luna? Th-the big one? The other big one? The night one?” Anon asked.

Twilight gave him a very level look.

“Princess Luna,” she said.

“...the other big one?” He ventured. He’d only met them once or twice and at that moment it was difficult to remember which was which. He just remembered that one was ever-so-slightly bigger than the other.

Twilight could see it was not worth pressing the issue.

“Yes Nonny, the other big one.”

He smiled.

“I like her. She was nice to me. You’re all nice to me.”

The smile wobbled, wibbled and then melted completely and then his face was back in his hands.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Twilight. I’m so sorry I’m just so tired.”

And like that she was hugging him again, rubbing his back again, shushing him again.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find out what it is. We’ll fix it. I’ll call Spike and send a message to - no, no, we’ll just go. We’ll go,” she said, having changed her mind midway through.

Sending a message would take time, and waiting for a reply would take time, and she might need to explain things, and then they’d probably need to go anyway. Best to just go.

That, and Spike was elsewhere. Something with Rarity. Helping her out. Whatever that involved.

“Go?” Anon asked, blankly.

“To Canterlot. To see Princess Luna.”

“Canterlot? The place with the castle?

He’d been there once or twice already. Not that he’d seen a lot of it other than the castle, and even that had been overwhelming. The decision to move him further out had been a result of his reaction and already a tiny trickle of that same panic was coming back. Not as much this time, but still a pinprick.

“Yes, the place with the castle.”

“That’s a long way away, Twilight. That’s like - you need your balloon for that, don’t you? You don’t have to do that. It’ll be fine. I can ju- I can work something out. Honestly.”

“Anon, this is for your own good. This is already serious. You could do some real damage if you don’t get a proper sleep! And if it’s nightmares there’s only really one person to talk to. She won’t mind, and I don’t mind taking you.”

For a moment it looked like maybe he was going to keep arguing it, then he got lost in Twilight’s enormous eyes, blinked, and let his shoulders slump.

“Why are you all so nice…” he mumbled, slumping forward and clunking his head on the table before sitting bolt upright again. Twilight frowned. Better get started.

She needed to call Spike anyway after all that. To send a message ahead of arriving, and to help wrangle the balloon.

Hopefully he was done doing...whatever it was Rarity had had him doing.

She wasn’t going to ask. Probably perfectly innocuous. If not?

Well, one problem at a time.