Last one out

by Cackling Moron

Rating: teen
Tags: Tragedy, Slice of Life, Human, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 10131

The local human deals with change

The local human has a lot of time on his hands now, and time proves itself unkind to him in its abundance.

Not that he can do a lot about it.

Still, it's just one of those things.

Published 2019-03-28 13:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2019-03-28 13:50:01 UTC

Turn off the lights

Author's Note

It's at this point I go completely off the rails.

I don't think I missed anything out.

Turn off the lights

Technically speaking it was not Jack’s birthday, but they were all celebrating it anyway.

It had all been Pinkie’s idea, appropriately enough. She’d just been merrily putting the finishing touches to the icing on a birthday when, suddenly and with horror, she’d realised that in all the years Jack had been around he had never once had a birthday party.

Plainly this could not stand, and so it was that a party was duly organised for an arbitrary date, given that having it on his actual birthday would be impossible. Cake was baked, bunting spooled, streamers prepared and all that sort of thing and thence all guests headed to Jack’s place, for he had his own place now.

He’d had to move out of the castle some while back, as getting in and getting out had started to become difficult. Now, getting in or getting out would have been impossible for him without significantly damaging the building, but no-one really liked to point that out, least of all him, so it wasn’t mentioned.

Indeed, most of the buildings in Ponyville now stood below the level of his shoulders, and the ground shook when he walked without due care and attention. If he could help it he didn’t go through the town itself anymore. He broke windows and roofs and chimney-stacks if he did, though he didn’t mean to. It just happened.

It also wasn’t mentioned that his house wasn’t really a ‘house’ per se, but rather an open-sided shelter of sorts he’d rigged up himself out of trees he’d collected. It would have been rude to have pointed out how rude his hut was, so to speak.

Walls, he’d discovered, just got in the way for him now. They tended to catch his elbows and tended to come off the worse for it.

Still, the party was nice. Everyone was having a good time.

Jack raised a hand and a bevy of galloping, giggling foals ran under where he’d been resting it, narrowingly avoiding upsetting the table on which sat his vast cake and then disappearing into the crowd. It was quite the turn out this year.

“Thanks again for this, you guys,” he said.

“Well we weren’t going to do nothing for you were birthday, were we?” Pinkie said, as though the very idea were ludicrous. Jack raised a grain-silo of cider to her good health (he was savouring it, as the sheer quantity of it meant that it constituted a present, and one he appreciated).

“You make a good point, Pinkie,” he said.

Jack was far, far too large to participate in any of the fun and games that Pinkie had set up, but he didn’t mind watching. There was a pinata at one point - for some reason? - and she did insist he give it a whack, so he’d done that. It had been like hitting a bag of confetti with a matchstick, and had not gone well.

Frustrated, Jack had ended up just flicking the thing with his finger, causing it burst and shower its contents over everybody gathered, much to their delight.

So that had been nice.

The party wound down in the evening, most well-wishers drifting off before then, Twilight and friends hanging on to tidy up and being the last to leave, and once they’d said their goodbyes and set off back to Ponyville Jack curled up and settled into what he felt was a fairly well-deserved birthday sleep.

Odd noises woke him up. At first they were merely the background fabric of his rather sparse, empty dreams, but gradually they got more and more intrusive until they started resolving into actual sounds he could sort of recognise. Instruments? Talking? Singing, even?

Loud and annoying enough to wake him up, certainly.

Cracking an eye he saw Twilight peering at him along with her friends. They all looked pretty concerned, which was unusual.

“Can I help you guys?” He asked, not moving.

“Oh thank Celestia,” Twilight said with palpable relief, a sentiment that was echoed around the others. Also unusual.

“I feel I’m missing something here,” said Jack.

“You’ve been asleep for a week,” Twilight said and he snorted, closing his eyes again and shifting around a little. Too early in the morning for jokes.

“Sure sure yeah,”

“I’m serious, Jack.”

He paused and opened his eyes once more to look at her, and then at the others. All of them looked worried enough for him to suspect that this wasn’t an exaggeration and wasn’t actually a joke. Still, that couldn’t be right, could it? A whole week?

“A week? Come on. That’s hyperbole, right? For dramatic effect?” He asked, shifting up onto his elbows, the ponies all having to take a few steps back.

“No, you’ve been asleep for an actual, whole week.”

“Huh,” he said, eyebrows raised in genuine surprise. “That’s not normal, is it?”

“You’re the human, you tell me.”

Jack blinked at her and looked down at himself. All of himself. There was a lot more of himself than there used to be. Still, nice to be called human every now and then. He looked back to Twilight.

“It’s not normal,” he said.

It was only then that Jack noticed Pinkie had on a full-blown one-man band setup - one-pony band? - and that this clashed horribly with the rather somber look on her face. It really rather undercut the tone.

“You doing a Dick Van-Dyke impression there or something Pinkie?” He asked. That foxed her.

“Huh? This?” She asked, trying to turn around to see the various instruments strapped about her person and not doing very well at it. She just ended up turning in a circle and coming back around to facing him.

“Yeah. You going somewhere after this?” He asked.

“This was to wake you up!” She asked, giving the apparatus a quick blast and producing a cacophony. The others winced, Pinkie seemed immensely pleased with herself.

“Huh. Can see how that might work,” Jack said.

Would explain the noises, at least.

Pinkie looked a little less pleased with herself and a little more maudlin.

“This time, yeah,” she said.

Jack decided not to unpick the ramifications of that particular statement, at least not with all of them there staring at him. He made to sit up and hit his head on the roof of the shelter, dislodging a chunk of it which came tumbling down dangerously close to the ponies.

A combination of quick shield-work from Twilight and a hand whipping out from Jack kept anyone from getting hurt, however.

“Shit, sorry. Could have sworn that roof was higher. You guys alright?”

They were, and told him so, though did start backing out into the open air out of the shelter. This did not pass unnoticed by Jack.

“Can - do you guys mind if I talk to Twilight privately a second?” He asked.

Judging from their reaction, him asking this wasn’t exactly a surprise. Twilight remained while her friends withdrew to a respectful distance. Once he was sure they were mostly out of the way Jack gently removed the roof of his shelter and set it aside so he could sit up, Twilight coming to stand by his side, peering up.

“Are you okay, Jack?” She asked.

“Me? Fine, fine. Just, uh, I don’t want to nag - heh, horse joke - but did you ever, uh, come to any...conclusions...vis-a-vis my...stuff…? The stuff I got going on? All this?”

This he said while gesturing vaguely to all of him. There wasn’t one area in particular he was worried about over any other area. It sort of all worried him more-or-less equally at this point. Twilight chewed on her lip and seemed to be trying to pick the best way to respond. That said all that needed to be said, as far as Jack was concerned.

“Ah. That’d be a no then, eh?”

“Are you - are you sure nothing like this happens where you’re from?” She asked, obviously trying very hard to keep her voice level.

“To the best of my knowledge this sort of thing doesn’t happen back home, no,” Jack said.

They had been over this. Some time previously - more than once, in fact - she’d grilled him for details on human development, to see if maybe there was some sort of obvious clue or hint she was missing. The overriding conclusion had been that, no, she wasn’t missing anything and that this wasn’t normal.

It seemed she hadn’t been able to progress much further beyond that.

“I’m so sorry, Jack, I -”

Jack wasn’t going to let Twilight apologise herself raw for something that wasn’t her fault and raised a hand, which cut her off.

“No, no that’s okay. I kind of figured anyway. I mean, if you’d found something you would have told me, right?”

“Of course.”

“Right. So it’s fine. Just one of those things. Can’t be helped, right?”

Twilight’s eyes were shining and Jack had to look.

“Don’t start crying, Twilight, you’ll set me off.”

He heard her sniff.

“Sorry, sorry.”

“Not like I’m going anywhere, right? Never get rid of me, you,” he said, risking a look back at her. She wasn’t crying, which was a plus, but she didn’t look especially happy either, which wasn’t great. Still, could have been worse.

“I hope not,” she said.

At this point, Jack would normally have given her a pat or her mane a ruffle, but nowadays this probably would have killed her, so he refrained. Instead, he said:

“Also, do you guys not have the square-cube rule here? Shouldn’t I be being crushed under my weight at this point? Certainly, me walking around on two legs doesn’t seem right,” he said. Then he thought about it a little. “Then again, some of those dragons were pretty big. Maybe you guys don’t. Probably different rules. Just one of those things, I guess?”

“I could explain the physics to you, if you’d like? Though you are, uh, breaking a couple of the rules. Somehow,” Twilight said, going from a budding enthusiasm to a sheepishness by the time the sentence finished. Jack wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of a physics lesson anyway.

“Let’s just maintain the mystery,” he said.

“Yeah…oh! I remember now!” Twilight said, jumping in place as though surprised by her own train of thought. “There’s a talent show in town today!”

“I have no talents,” Jack pointed out. Twilight frowned at him.

“Not true. And not what I meant. Do you want to come? Could be fun!”

“Well if you say it could be fun then it’d be dumb to stay here, wouldn’t it? Lead on, Twilight.”

Jack did follow Twilight and the others back into town, but it didn’t work out very well. He didn’t get to see any of the acts.

He was very, very careful and moved very, very slowly and deliberately but at one point he slipped up and turned a touch wider than perhaps he’d meant to, his elbow not being where he remembered it being.

The town hall was damaged as a result of this, and Jack’s frantic efforts to try and fix the damage only made it worse. So, apologising all the way, he returned to the remains of his shelter and had a nap. The nap lasted a while, and Jack abjectly refused to enter Ponyville again once it had ended.

Some time later - weeks? Months, possibly? Jack had given up keeping track - while Twilight and friends were off somewhere on some magical adventure, Jack was sat on a hillock staring into space.

He’d been there for some time and he’d zoned out somewhat, enough that the pony who’d come running up to get him had to jump up and down in front of him to actually get his attention.

“Hmm? Terribly sorry, miles away. Something the matter?” Jack asked, looking down at the pony and blinking. He did not know who they were, but that wasn’t that strange. Apart from Twilight and co he didn’t actually really know anybody.

Eggs, maybe? But he hadn’t seen her in a long time now. Just one of those things.

“There’s another human! Come quick!” The pony said, breathlessly, flopping onto their haunches on the grass as they panted.

For a second or so Jack wasn’t entirely sure he’d heard that correctly and so he leant in and cocked an ear, putting a hand up to hear a little better.

“Could you run that past me again?” He asked.

The pony - who had recoiled unconsciously on having something so big loom so close - took a few breaths and then said:

“Another human! We just found them!”

No mistaking it that time. No mishearing. Jack sat up straight.

“What do you mean another human? Where?”

“They just came out of the Everfree! They don’t look so good. Come quick!”

Jack’s brain popped and fizzed. Human? Surely not? And why did it have to happen when Twilight was away having fun-slash-engaging in daring feats of magical mettle with her buddies?

Still, only one way to find out what the deal was.

“I am going to pick you up now. If I’m heading in the wrong direction, scream in a low register.”

“What?” The pony asked, squeaking in alarm when Jack picked them up and tucked them in close to his chest.

Time was of the essence.

Jack, over open ground, had pace. Terrifying, turf-shredding, earth-shaking pace. Where the ground was flat he sprinted low, where it rolled he bounded, soaring through the air and landing at a full run. The pony he was carrying - clutched tight and safe - took it with remarkably good grace.

In barely no time at all the edge of Everfree hove into view.

“There, there!” The pony in his hands shouted, pointing. Not that they really needed to. Where else was Jack supposed to go then where the agitated ponies were gathering by the treeline? He came to a skidding, thundering halt in a spray of turf and stones and grass far enough away to not cause damage and then loped the rest of the way over.

There indeed, lying on the grass and surrounded by worried looking ponies, was a human being. Jack still couldn’t quite believe it. He’d honestly thought they were just fucking with him, or that this was the setup to some sort of joke or prank or even that it had just been an honest mistake. But no, there they were.

He set down his passenger and just stared.

Was he still asleep?

“What do we do?” The pony who’d fetched him asked. As though Jack would know. As though he’d even be able to help. He swallowed and managed to tear his eyes away from the human.

“You sent for a doctor, right?” Jack asked.

Looks were exchanged and, after a brief, quiet discussion, a member of the crowd set off back for town at speed. Probably not fast enough. Why hadn’t they done that already?

Nevermind. Everyone makes mistakes. Heat of the moment and all that. No use getting upset.

Jack knelt down.

This was what a human looked like? So small. Had he been so small? He couldn’t really remember. It would make sense that he had been, but this small?

“Uh,” Jack said haltingly and the girl’s attention - for it was some girl, or at least some young woman - finally moved from the surrounding, worried ponies to him.

The other human stared at Jack with wide, terrified eyes, her mouth open though no sound came. She appeared to be shaking.

It was obvious even to Jack - who hadn’t seen another human in years, and had hardly been anyone’s first port of call in a medical emergency even back on Earth - that she was beyond help. They could try, and he was sure they would definitely try when help actually arrived, but they would not succeed.

Too much blood lost, too many deep wounds. Timberwolves, Jack supposed. The marks looked rather like some he’d received, though far worse, of course. His had been rather light, all told, and he’d received them long enough after arrival to have toughened up. She did not appear to be quite as lucky.

And if she was anything like he was with how her body resisted magic, then there really was nothing that could be done. Just one of those things.

And Jack was right. And she died.

Jack saw it happen. One moment she was there, vital and wounded, frightened, eyes alive, still trying to speak or say something, still shaking. And then it was all gone, and her eyes were empty, body limp and still. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, beyond numb.

A few minutes after this the called-for doctor arrived in a rush with a pack of nurses and Jack took some steps back so they had room to work. They did try to revive her, bless them, but it was far too late and - much as he’d suspected - their magic could do anything much anyway. She was dead.

Jack picked the body up once it was declared officially.

“Did you know them?” Asked the doctor, despondently, the nurses and onlookers comforting one another. It had all been very sad for all concerned.

That said, this was still a very dense thing to ask him, but Jack didn’t feel the need to point that out to them. They meant well, after all, and what would being a dick achieve?

“No,” he said instead. “I’ll take care of her now.”

And with that he turned and walked off without another word. No-one said anything or told him to stop. He walked with the corpse until he hit a lake somewhere outside of town, and there he stopped. It seemed as good a spot as any.

Laying her down Jack dug a small hole, slipped her into it and covered her up again. This didn’t quite feel enough to him, somehow, and so Jack spent some time after this casting around for the largest rock he could lay his hands on. Once he found one of sufficient size he carried it back and placed it on top of the grave. A marker of sorts seemed appropriate.

Jack had no idea if any of what he was doing was right or correct. He could have been missing something obvious he was supposed to be doing. He imagined he was, but didn’t know what else he could do.

Twilight would have had a better idea of what to do because Twilight typically had better ideas than Jack did, but Twilight wasn’t around, so he did what he felt was his best.

Things were quiet by the lake. He stared at the grave and the stone he’d put on top of it.

Jack cleared his throat. There was absolutely no reason or need for him to say anything. There was no-one around to hear. But something nagged at him to do so, and to do it properly - whatever that meant. So, shuffling his feet and holding his hands together down in front of him, he spoke:

“I’m very sorry that you’re dead.”

He then cursed himself for a very poor start, cleared his throat again and started over:

“You will be missed. Not by me, I mean, I didn’t know you. But those you left behind back home - through no fault of your own - they will miss you. They are mourning you even now, and you are fondly remembered, I am sure.”

Jack remembered those that he’d left behind. He hoped they were happy, that his absence wasn’t holding them back from anything. He’d hate to think that he was burdening them without even being there.

To stop from thinking about this too much he turned his face to the lake and stared at the water until such thoughts receded.

He looked at the stone again.

“I’ll probably miss you anyway. I would liked to have known you. Would have been nice. Would have been nice to make a new friend, especially another human. Never thought I’d see another human, honestly. I hope you are in a better place, now. For what it’s worth from me.”

Following this Jack couldn’t think of anything to add. He couldn’t really think of anything at all, in fact. His mind had gone almost entirely blank and flat. He sat and looked at the lake again.

Did it mean anything, what had just happened? Should he have done more? Could he have done more? Might the appearance of this human have given some insight into how he’d arrived here and - maybe - how to get back?

Moot, all moot. She was dead. It was just a thing that had happened. Gone and done, dead and buried. Just one of those things.

Jack’s eye twitched.

“Fuck,” he said, following it up with: “Fuck. Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! What the fuck! What am I supposed to fucking do now?! What is this?! Why did this happen?! What do you want from me?!”

No answers were forthcoming for this, but Jack hadn’t really expected anything. He took to pacing around the lake and the treeline.

“Another human winds up here and she fucking dies?! How is that fair?! What the fuck! Fuck!”

He took a swipe and cut a good half-dozen trees in half. This hadn’t been on purpose, and Jack didn’t really notice.

“It’s probably your fucking fault to boot! A competent fucking person could have probably saved her! But you’re an idiot and you don’t know how to do anything useful! And even if you did you’re a fucking giant thing now and couldn’t have helped anyway! Fuck! What’s happening to me?!”

Jack uprooted trees. He tossed boulders. He pounded his fists into the ground and sent up plumes of earth. He waded into the lake and thrashed. He swore until the words stopped being words and just became vague sounds of frustration.

Eventually, he felt the need to do this ebb from his system, and flopped onto the much-churned, muddy bank of the lake.

He’d achieved a very impressive little bout of destruction and certainly made his mark.

He was not proud of this.

“When’s Twilight coming back…” he mumbled to himself, rolling onto his side and curling up.

Happily for Jack - immensely, soaringly happily - the first thing he saw the next time he opened his eyes was actually Twilight. She was sat a little distance away on the shore of the lake, staring out across the water much as he had.

From the looks of things the damage he’d done had smoothed out. It was still visible, but it clearly wasn’t fresh anymore.

Jack stirred and Twilight started.

“This is a very happy coincidence,” Jack said, propping himself up on one elbow.

“I’ve, uh, been here a while,” she said.

“Oh. Well still, it’s nice to see you. Very nice, actually. Lovely, in fact. Been up to much?” Jack asked.

He was trying very, very hard to keep it casual. He wanted it to be casual and normal and nice and like it used to be. Even if it obviously wasn’t, and wouldn’t be.

“You know, this and that. Saved the world again,” Twilight said, breezily. Jack nodded.

“Doesn’t surprise me in the least. In fact, I’d be very disappointed if you hadn’t.”

Jack just kind of figured he’d somehow live through such a thing, knowing his luck.

“Heh, yeah. We still have parties for your birthday. The lake’s a pretty good spot for them, actually,” she said, smiling, but then the smile went away again. “You - you tend to sleep through them, though.”

“Oh. Have you - have there been many?” He asked, and Twilight couldn’t look him in the eye anymore.

“I don’t think I should tell you.”

Jack considered the ramifications of this.

“...oh. No, that’s probably for the best.”

For a time the two of them were quiet. Wind blew across the surface of the lake. Jack glanced at Twilight, Twilight glanced at Jack, but they never did it at the same time.

“Did you hear that another human arrived?” Jack asked, eventually.

“I did.”

“She died.”

“So I heard. I’m sorry.”

Jack shrugged.

“Not your fault. Not like I knew her anyway. I buried her. She’s around here somewhere. There, under that stone,” Jack said, looking around and then pointing. Twilight followed the line of his finger and then nodded. She didn’t say anything though. What could she say?

Twilight cleared her throat.

“There is - Celestia has - I’ve been given a task,” she said, false-starting, shuffling her hooves.

“Oh?”

“Yes. It’s important but it’s very long-term. I may - I may not be around Ponyville as much as I used to be.”

“Sounds important.”

“It’s big. I’m just saying so that when you wake up next you don’t...worry where I’ve gone. I’ll be fine, just busy. Okay?”

“That’s fine. You do have other things to do. Important things, too! It’s fine. I’d just probably just go back to sleep anyway if you weren’t around,” he said, managing a weak laugh.

“You don’t have to stay here, Jack. You could - you can do whatever you like, go wherever you like,” Twilight said.

“I know, I know. There just isn’t a whole lot I really feel like doing. At least not right now. I’m sure something will come up.”

Further silence. It was agonising.

“I’ve been dreaming,” Jack blurted, just to keep things going.

“You have?”

“Yeah. I think? It’s kind of hard to tell sometimes. More of a feeling”

Jack probably should have thought this through better. How best to define it escaped him. He shook his head.

“I’ll figure out a better way of explaining it and get back to you,” he said.

“I look forward to it.”

Not long after this Twilight left, saying she had to go. She would have hugged him, but this was now physically impossible in any meaningful sense and so she just waved. Jack waved too and watched her fly off. He watched her - or at least the spot where he’d last seen her dwindle away to - until his eyes watered.

Not really wanting to go back to sleep so soon Jack got up and had a potter around. He didn’t really have a goal in mind, he was just pottering. He wandered up a hill and look out across Ponyville. Had it got bigger? Maybe. Difficult to tell.

He gathered stones and brought them back to the lakeside, just piling them up. He spent a merry while getting them to stack and balance and was at least semi-pleased with his results. It was kind of artistics, in a vague way that at least made it obvious that it hadn’t happened by accident.

Better than nothing.

Once that was done he lay down again, because he had nothing else to do.

The dreams sort of came, but didn’t seem to mean much. Just a general sense of something big, a sense of turning, a sense of moving.

Strange noises were, again, what brought him back to consciousness. Parps and twanging that intruded further and further on the dream until his brain apparently couldn’t take it anymore.

“Alright, alright I’m up. Jesus…” he grumbled, rising to a sitting position. Those gathered ponies around him gasped and shuffled back hastily. Jack blinked and rubbed his eyes. There really were rather a lot of them. They seemed to have made something of an event of his waking up. There were veritable crowds, all watching him with bated breath.

Nearby too was a very large bell supported on some kind of wheeled frame. A pony was stood next to it with a mallet. There was also a brass band. Presumably this was the outgrowth of Pinkie’s one-man band approach to getting him to wake up. They’d gone all out.

He also saw that the stones he’d piled up before falling asleep had all collapsed. He wondered when that might have happened. Not that it mattered.

Jack then turned to look at the one pony out of all of them who seemed to have been put forward as spokesperson.

She looked kind of familiar. A particular shade of blue.

“Starlight? Starlight Glimmer?” Jack asked, squinting, brain still starting up. The pony looked momentarily very confused.

“That was my great-grandmother’s name, sir,” she said. Jack blinked. The wheels turned in his head and thoughts ground against one another as the full meaning and weight of the words unfolded.

What could he do about it anyway?

“Is she...good?” He asked.

“She’s dead, sir,” the pony said, looking surprised to have been asked such an odd and obvious question.

Jack swallowed and reassessed. He was sure he should have felt something about this news - and he did, somewhere deep inside - it just wasn’t properly hitting him right then. It was just rather like standing in the shade on a sunny day. A sense of cold.

“Oh. Has she been long dead?” He asked.

“Nearly a hundred years, sir.”

Nearly a hundred years?

Sure. Why not. Why the fuck not. Why wouldn’t that happen?

Jack had absolutely no grasp of pony life spans but this sounded believable to him. The numbers might add up, they might not. He didn’t much care. A precise and accurate timeline would have done little to make him any happier to have woken up to the news that Starlight had died while he’d been sleeping, along with who knew however many others he couldn’t think of right that second.

That, and being called sir just made it worse. He’d never liked that.

Hadn’t he? Difficult to remember.

“Don’t call me sir,” he said, following it up with: “My condolences.”

“I never knew her, si- I never knew her.”

“I did…” Jack said to himself, though given his size there wasn’t anyway anyone nearby could have missed it. Then he shook his head and pointed to the and and the bell on wheels and the guy with the mallet.

“This kind of suggests you guys woke me up for a reason.”

“Oh, uh, yeah. We were wondering if we could ask you for a favour?”

“Me?”

“There is - they’re trying to build a road? But there’s a mountain in the way? And Apple Turnover said that, uh, well, she kind of suggested that you might be able to help?”

Jack frowned. Again he had the distinct impression they were messing with him.

“Apple Turnover? Fucking for real? Ugh, which extant member of the Apple family is that? Applejack’s third cousin’s...daughter or something?”

Keeping family trees in order given how much time was apparently meant to have passed was not something that Jack could easily do.

“She’s Apple Bloom’s granddaughter. Apple Bloom said you were good at clearing things? At least that’s what Apple Turnover said she told her.”

“He said, she said, this and that…” Jack muttered, still trying to work all this out.

Apple Bloom? Who that?

The name rung a bell - hah - and then it clicked. The little one with the bow, Applejack’s sister, the cute tiny one with the cute tiny friends.

She had a granddaughter? How many years did that mean?

Jack really had never been great at this sort of thing. It was like getting hung up on trying to work out how fine someone’s great-great-great-granddaughter was meant to be, something that had tripped him up way-back-when.

He counted off on his fingers and mumbled to himself as he tried to work it out. Maybe the numbers added up? Maybe they didn’t. He didn’t know and even if he thought he did, he’d probably be wrong anyway.

Regardless of the exact details, time had passed. A fair whack of time. This much was abundantly, unavoidably clear.

Applejack would probably be dead. Pinkie, Rarity, dead. Eggs Benedict, she’d be dead, along with those pleasant friends of hers Jack had never properly learnt the names of. Dead, dead, all dead and gone, all dead.

Jack waited for something to happen as a result of him thinking about this. Maybe even tears. But nothing. Just a void inside him seeming to get that little bit bigger and more all-consuming.

Then he remembered. Wasn’t Twilight one of those flying unicorn things? Alicorn or something? Weren’t they supposed to be exceptionally long-lived or immortal? He couldn’t quite remember, but it was a chance all the same.

“Where’s Twilight?” He asked, hoping he didn’t sound especially invested in the answer.

“Twilight? Oh, the princess! She’s on a special assignment from Princess Celestia! Something very important. We haven’t really seen her for months now.”

Jack let this information wash over him and made the deliberate decision to feel nothing about it. She had mentioned that she might not be around, he remembered, he just hadn’t quite been prepared for it to be true.

Nice she was alive, that was the main thing. That was the important part.

Would have been nicer if she had been nearby, but still. You took what you got.

“Oh. Okay. That’s okay. When you see her next would you mind telling her I’d like to speak with her?”

He did not add ‘I miss her’, though he did. That sort of thing would probably make him sound a little desperate.

Jack was desperate, but he didn’t need anyone else knowing that.

“Uh, sure, can do! So about the, uh, mountain?”

“Yeah, yeah. Where is it?”

He was shown the way. There was indeed a mountain and construction had indeed halted because it was in the way.

Starting building when there was a mountain very obviously where you wanted to go seemed like an oversight to Jack. What had their plan been to start with? Had he always been the plan? Had a contractor fallen through? Magic not working out? Costs overrunning?

Who knew? More to the point, who cared? It was what it was, just one of those things.

Jack approached the mountain and sized it up. It looked like a mountain to him. Urging everybody back a good distance for safety he just set about punching the thing. Depressingly, this worked. The stone of the mountain yielded to his fists with only a little effort, cracking and coming away in great rockfalls and slides.

That wasn’t normal. Or at least, it hadn’t been normal. Jack supposed it was normal for him, now. And he should probably get used to it. Accept it. Stop worrying so much about it. Just one of those things.

He kept on punching, scooping away handfuls and clearing a way through, figuring they’d smooth it out once he was done. He kept on day and night, focusing on having a nice, clear task to keep his mounting exhaustion at bay. Once he was through he could sleep, he told himself. Once he’d done what they’d wanted and been useful and helpful, then he could rest.

And so it took him a week or two, maybe. He wasn’t sure. Jack just smashed and smashed and scooped and obliterated his way through the mountain, carving out a cutting anyone could have been proud of.

Why hadn’t they just made a tunnel? He didn’t know. He didn’t care.

Once he’d come out the other side he turned and wandered back. A gaggle of construction workers were waiting there by the unfinished road, much as they were all the previous days. He gave them a wave.

“There you go,” he said before promptly collapsing face-first onto the nearby pile of discarded rock chunks and falling asleep.

And there he remained. It wasn’t like anyone could move him.

Jack’s sleeping form became something of a tourist attraction over the years, helped immensely by the nearby proximity of the road. He remained quite the popular sightseeing spot until later developments in infrastructure led the road’s closure, at which point the trade kind of dried up.

Eventually, he was largely forgotten about, and it was some time after this that he opened his eyes again.

No-one had woken him up this time, and in his daze it took him some time to even be aware he was awake at all.

Heaving himself up from the mountainside - stones dislodging and rattling down from where they’d settled on him - he blinked groggily and looked around. Everything looked so small. Where was he anyway?

Then it started coming back. Smashing a mountain. Road construction. Starlight being dead. All of that. He sighed and rose, grunting to his full height. Since his full height was now not what it had been when he’d gone to sleep this threw him off balance a little, and he had to cling to the mountainside to keep from falling over.

But he got over it.

The road stretched off before him, utterly empty. Close to there were buildings, though they were all shuttered and abandoned. There was a sign in a state of some disrepair indicating the various distances to the various places one could reach by following it, and he could recognise the name Ponyville on there and it seemed reasonable enough to go back there, at least to him.

Then Jack remembered that he didn’t really know anyone anymore, and that he had nothing to do.

So he wandered elsewhere. He wandered a very, very long way. Over hills and through forests and across rivers, just wandering, day and night. Eventually he hit the coast, so he turned around and went back the other way until he hit the other coast. No-one really bothered him.

He slept here and there, for however long, continuing on his way whenever he woke up again. If things changed he did not notice them.

At some point, quite by accident, he discovered an apparently bottomless pit. Not-quite by accident Jack discovered that it did, in fact, have a bottom. Eventually he climbed out and carried along his way, mildly disappointed.

Jack even fought monsters, once or twice. Not that he needed to. The ponies seemed pretty up on dealing with them themselves, he found, and were quite proactive about it, to the extent that monsters had more-or-less stopped being a problem.

But Jack had needed something to do on his wanderings, so there you go.

They had been big ones - they had to be big ones, really, anything else was too fiddly - and he generally just happened to be in the right place at the right time to deal with them rather than actively seeking them out.

The last one had been some sort of vast, serpentine thing that had come rising out of the sea roundabout the same time he’d arrived back at the coast again. The thing had been very impressive, all frothing brine and evil laughter. Something about the long-slumbering Queen of the Sirens or the Tyrant Empress of the Underwater Kingdom or something.

Jack hadn’t really been listening. He’d just waded in, wrapped his arms around them and walked them back beneath the waves before falling asleep on top of them.

He had not drowned, to his utter lack of surprise on waking up under the sea an indeterminate length of time later, though he had accidentally crushed the monster to death, which made him feel pretty bad. He hadn’t meant for that to happen.

Trudging up out of the sea and back onto land, trailing seaweed and causing waves, he wandered some more, doing his best to keep away from anything that looked like a town or city. He’d only cause them problems.

There were a lot more roads he had to avoid now, too, so as to not damage them. Roads and train tracks and even what appeared to be powerlines.

“Good for them,” Jack had though, taking great pains to step over the lines and not touch them.

Eventually - and quite without having meant to - he stumbled across a very familiar lake. At first he wasn’t entirely sure why it was it caught his eye, but then he remembered. This was the lake where he had buried the other human. And, indeed, after a little searching he even found the stone he’d set down on the spot - though now much overgrown.

This meant that he had to be near Ponyville. The realisation gave him a jolt.

How long had it been? He had no idea.

Not that it mattered. Nothing to wait for and nothing to look forward to.

But Twilight, maybe? Assuming she was still around at all. Assuming she still lived there? She had that thing she said she’d been doing, but maybe that was done with now? Maybe she’d come home? Maybe she was waiting right now? Maybe she’d be happy to see him?

Jack had no idea, but he also had nothing else to do.

Ponyville - if that’s what it was still called - was very big now, covering a significant portion of the landscape. Jack was honestly stunned. It looked like a proper city. Had a road network, lights, big tall buildings - the works. It even kind of reminded Jack of home, which hurt. He couldn’t stop staring. Was he in the right place?

He was. Looking around he saw a sign. Definitely Ponyville, and still named as such. That was nice. Some consistency.

All grown up now, it seemed.

Jack did not linger. Almost as soon as he’d appeared on the horizon a siren had started from somewhere in the city and not long after that he’d started being buzzed by pegasii and dinky little pony flying machines. They even had tiny tanks, too, all firing what were either blasts of magic or else shells at him to very little effect.

The impression Jack got was that they were alarmed to see him and did not recognise who he was and would prefer it if he went away. So he did. It wasn’t as if he could go into the city proper anyway, not without causing catastrophic damage.

And it wasn’t as if he knew anyone there anymore anyway. The castle was gone.

He returned to the lake and sat down to just stare at the water a while until he couldn’t bring himself to keep his eyes open anymore, at which point he rolled onto his side and curled up.

Some time later, he opened his eyes again.

The sun was dim and distant, its light feeble and, he noticed, red. It hung in the sky as though almost ashamed to be there, as though it should have left a long time ago and was still just clinging on out of courtesy. The light it cast was not warm. Jack frowned.

“Red sun? Fuck is this?” He asked himself in a voice that sounded rather like rocks grinding against one another. The sun continued to sit in the sky, tiny and red and very little use to anyone.

Vaguely Jack recalled that suns were meant to expand before shrinking. Shouldn’t everything be vapourised? Shouldn’t he not have woken up at all? Was that even what had happened, or was this something else?

Magic was probably to blame. Magic was always to blame when something weird happened.

Fucking magic.

Shifting, he felt earth and mud and stones falling from his shoulders. Trees that had taken root while he slept ripped up and tumbled by also, though they had all long-since died, dry wood splintering and cracking. Some of them had roots that had grown into his beard or hair and these dangled from him as he rose unsteadily to his feet.

The ground felt even further away from him than it normally did, and everything looked smaller, though everything being shrunken and dead made it a little hard to judge. The lake was gone too, he saw, leaving just a rather sad little dip in the land. Was that how that was meant to work?

Probably not. Probably magic again. Or something else. Who cared?

From standing and from his new height Jack could see far, and he could see nothing whatsoever of interest. Turning though he spotted just a hint of something that wasn’t shrunken, dried trees and bare, parched hills. He saw a city and he went to have a look.

Ponyville was still there, in a manner of speaking. The grid system of its layout was still visible and obvious but the city itself was now little more than rubble with next to nothing recognisable as a building still left standing. Plainly, the city was dead.

And not in the sense that something awful had killed it, but more in the sense that it had just dwindled and ceased and that this was all that remained. The bits that were left.

Standing by the edge of the ruins Jack nudged the nearest structure with his foot and watched it crumble. It kicked up a cloud of dust and sounded deafeningly loud in the utterly silent landscape, but that was it. Nothing else happened, nothing else moved, and soon the dust settled and the sound rolled away across the hills to no response.

Jack did not linger, again. He couldn’t bear to stay any longer.

So, again, he just started walking. Keeping his head down and watching his feet he walked. He tried to use the quiet to maybe think about how things were going and what he should actually do about it all, but everytime he started the thoughts just slipped away from him and he couldn’t really be bothered to try and hold onto them. So he thought of nothing, and just walked.

It took him a while to notice that had been following - quite unconsciously - a set of ruined tracks. Once he did notice he didn’t stop, partly because he was curious where they might lead and what he might find once he got there, mostly because he had nothing better he could be doing. So on he walked.

The sun had not moved at all.

The tracks led through deserted stations and dead towns and cities, all as deserted and empty as Ponyville had been. They must have been quite impressive way back when, Jack imagined. Equestria looked to have had some pretty slick changes while he’d been out. But he’d missed them, and it was all just bits and pieces now.

He kept walking. Eventually, he hit Canterlot. That surprised him.

Canterlot had expanded too over the years, unsurprisingly, though apparently much of this must have been made up of additional floating portions that had since crashed back down to earth. The half of the city that had jutted out over the edge had also collapsed. Though, much to Jack’s amazement, here and there a building still stood in pretty good nick. Some still even had their roofs.

Built to last, apparently.

The single-most intact remaining building and also the tallest. A grand spire, what remained of the palace from the looks of things, while all other portions had collapsed or decayed away to rubble. At the very top of this spire there was a small balcony and on this balcony Jack caught the first glimmer of movement he’d seen since he’d woken up. He approached.

There, on the balcony, he saw Celestia and Luna side by side.

Jack could almost have cried with relief.

He approached as delicately and as gently as his desperate need would allow and squatted down before the spire to bring his face level with the balcony. The princesses appeared to be sleeping. He coughed, the whumph of air lifting dust for hundreds of feet around. The princesses stirred.

“Hello Celestia, Luna,” Jack said.

Celestia, dazed, blinked and looked around in apparent panic a moment or two before clocking on that what had addressed her was the giant mass in front of her presently blocking out the tiny red sun. Squinting, she looked up at him.

“Jack? Is that you?” She asked.

On closer inspection she did not look good. In fact, she looked bad. Her mane was hanging limp and only barely flickering and - though the red light made it difficult to properly tell - she appeared washed out. Luna appeared little better.

“It’s me,” Jack said before giving a quick glance down at himself. “Unfortunately.”

“You look…”

Celestia faltered. There were very few words that she could pick to put here that wouldn’t put kind of a downward spin on the whole thing, and it had been a very long time since she’d had to speak anyone other than Luna anyway. Eventually she plumped for:

“Healthy.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“Thanks. My fault?” He asked, pointing to the sky. It took Celestia a second to properly register what he was asking here and then her eyes widened and she shook her head emphatically.

“Oh no, no no no Jack, it’s not your fault. This is just what was going to happen, and now it has. Not your fault, don’t think that.”

Jack could not tell if she was lying to him or not. He wasn’t even sure why he suspected this might have something to do with him. Ruining everything just seemed like the sort of thing he’d do, without even meaning to.

But who knew? Celestia said otherwise, and it wasn’t as if anyone else was leaping in to correct her.

And what did it matter now anyway?

“Good,” he said. Then: “Where is everyone?”

Celestia looked pained and downtrodden a moment before sitting up a little straighter on her chair. Her chair which Jack noticed was the same throne she’d had when he’d seen her last, just worn away to basically nothing. Apparently that gold covering had just been, well, a covering. Who knew?

“Everyone - or at close to everyone as could be managed - is gone,” she said.

This did fit with what he’d seen, but Jack had figured it’d pay to check.

“Dead?” He asked.

“No. Well, some. Too many. But most have left. They left with Twilight and Cadence.”

Jack had heard of Cadence, though he’d never met her. That wasn’t what caught his interest.

“Left?” He asked.

“Yes. This was always inevitable. We knew that one day the world would die, but my sister and I were unwilling to let our subjects - or, indeed, anyone if we could help it - die as well. Twilight was charged with ensuring the continued survival of, well, anyone and everyone it was possible to save. This was what we entrusted her with, knowing she would endure beyond the death of the planet.”

Jack felt this sounded pretty insane, but was beyond caring.

“Tough girl,” he said, and Celestia gave a small smile.

“As long as friendship survives, so will Twilight.”

This seemed like a pretty good deal to Jack. It also sounded like hippy-dippy nonsense, but that was magic for you. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing that had ever happened.

“Twilight saved everyone?”

“Not just her, though she did oversee the project. It was the work of thousands over the span of many, many years, a true joint venture. Ponies, griffons, dragons, Changelings and more - all races were involved, all pitched in to help. Truly, I have never seen so many united together for such a purpose.”

Jack imagined it had probably been a good deal less harmonious than that. He could picture fractious arguments and probably fighting. Maybe even a war or two. But that could have just been his lingering humanity. Certainly, this sort of thing would never have worked back home.

Back home there’d be the rusting shell of an unfinished ship lying sprawled in the dirt surrounded by the dead bodies of everyone who hadn’t quite been able to cooperate well enough to finish it.

Then again, that might have just been Jack’s mounting sense of crushing despair. Who knew?

And what did it matter?

What she laid out for him was that, through the course of years, the project had led to the construction of a giant, magically-powered ship designed to leave the dying planet and take to the stars, ferrying all the survivors with it, hopefully to a new world, and certainly to somewhere with hope.

From what she said the ship itself was basically a world unto itself, a travelling ecosystem and almost indefinitely self-sustaining. No wonder it had taken so long to put together, even with magic and all that.

There’d been a space-elevator for carrying the ground-manufactured components up for construction in orbit and everything, though Celestia hadn’t called it exactly that. Jack knew what she’d been talking about.

Jack soaked all this up. It definitely sounded like the sort of thing he would have enjoyed seeing, maybe even helping out with if he could have, but he’d been asleep.

The space-elevator had long-since collapsed, far away from Canterlot, nearer the equator. The wreckage was still there, as far as Celestia knew.

Celestia finished her explanation of the project and looked up at Jack’s wrinkled brows and expression of general mystification.

“Magic space boat?” he asked her, as though he’d missed some important points and had come away with the wrong impression completely. She gave a sheepish shrug and half a smile.

“I suppose that’d be one way of putting it,” she said.

“Huh.”

A magical space-boat packed with colourful fantasy creatures sounded about right for what Jack could remember of Equestria, at least back in the old days. That Twilight had also apparently been instrumental in its construction also sounded about right. He wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to do it.

He really would rather have liked to have seen the thing, but such was life. In his head he pictured it looking like a sailboat but big and in space, for no good reason. The thought buoyed him, though not for very long when he realised that, given how far things had advanced, it’d probably look like an actual spaceship, what with the space-elevator and all.

This was much less fun, and realising it made him a little miserable. Nothing was fun anymore.

He peered down at the two princesses again. Keeping them in focus was difficult.

“You stay behind?” He asked.

“We are bound to this place, we cannot leave. The sun is not eternal, and neither am I. We shall both be here until the end.”

Jack looked across to Luna, who still looked perkier than her sister, but only by the tiniest of degrees. Neither looked anywhere near healthy.

“Moon too?”

“Without the light of the sun the moon will be dark, and I too shall diminish,” Luna said, and Jack had to strain to hear her.

This sounded a bit threadbare and schlocky to Jack but, again, at this point what did it matter? They clearly knew more than he did anyway. Just like they always did. Like everyone always did. He nodded, slowly, and thought quietly to himself.

He then asked, though it was an obvious effort getting the words out:

“Why didn’t Twilight say goodbye?”

There was the slightest flicker across Celestia’s face as her mask of perfect composure nearly fell, but it was so brief and the world so dim that Jack didn’t even see it.

“She tried to rouse you,” she said. “The construction of the ship took many years and throughout them she tried her best. Locating you wasn’t difficult, and she returned many times over the years, but you would not stir. Once construction was completed and the launch date was approaching she…”.

Celestia very visibly decided against saying whatever she had been going to say here and carried on as though she’d never even started the sentence:

“She waited as long as she was able but in the end she had to leave with the others. They needed her. It’s not your fault.”

It sure felt like it was his fault.

Jack was quiet again for a long time after that.

“Just as well. Too big anyway,” he said eventually.

“They would have made room, I’m sure, had you asked. Had you been awake to ask.”

“Kind. Not true, though.”

Taking Jack - a Jack of any size - onto a space-boat powered by magic was never going to have been an idea anyone would have thought was good. Celestia was just too polite to say so, which Jack could see. She did not contradict him.

Jack looked around, great head trailing side to side, dead trees falling from his beard and smashing bits on the ground far below. Nothing else moved, not even a breeze.

“Are we all?” He asked. Speaking was getting harder, every word a struggle, the urge to sleep pulling him to the ground by inches.

Celestia cast a sad eye out across the dead landscape.

“Possibly there are others that remain. Strays who did not reach the ship in time, other beings bound to this place. We have not seen them. We have not seen anything for, well, we didn’t see much use in keeping track. We imagine you could go quite some while without seeing them, even were you to go searching.”

Jack nodded. Even that was getting difficult to do.

He had little inclination to go searching. He was so tired. Soon he’d sleep again, he knew, though for how long this time he could only guess, and what he might wake up to next hardly bore thinking about.

He was quiet for a time, staring out across the hills, the mountains, the dead trees, all bathed in red. Most of the features he did not recognise. Things were not where he remembered. Passage of time? Magic again? Both?

It hardly mattered. Nothing mattered, now.

He turned back to the princesses.

“Will I die?” He asked.

“I do not know. You are from elsewhere and have no connection to this place, and you have changed much. I’m sorry. I do not know,” Celestia said, sadness evident in her tone. Jack just nodded again, though by now it was more of a slight droop of the head.

“It’s okay. I’ll keep busy. Keep place tidy.”

He was so tired. Bringing up one leg under him he sunk down onto the knee of the other, the impact shaking the ground. With a crash, the rumbling brought down a good chunk of what remained of Canterlot, though that didn’t mean much. There wasn’t a lot left.

The tower - thankfully - held.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Nothing to apologise for, Jack.”

Slowly, he started listing to one side, vast hand stretching out to steady himself as he stared into space. What was the point. Twilight was gone. Everyone else was dead. Everyone he knew was dead or gone. Everything that mattered was gone and before too long everything else would go too. Nothing would be left.

Except him. Just him.

And Jack knew he wouldn’t die. Why would he? He would have done it already if he could. He should have done it already. But he hadn’t, so it stood to reason he couldn’t. If the sun could turn red and die off like this without scorching the planet, he could just continue indefinitely. Why not? That was how this place worked. Why wouldn’t it be?

No, he wouldn’t die. He would just carry on and on and on. Everything and everyone would go away and he would be left and that would be that.

He knew it, he just knew it.

Just one of those things.

What was the point.

“Can - can I sleep - here?” He asked, sinking lower to the earth with every passing moment, his face turned back to the tower and the princess even if his eyes were fixed to a point far, far away.

“You can sleep here, Jack.”

Maybe he could sleep forever. He could but hope.

“Thank you,” he said.

As gently as possible Jack lowered himself down and lay himself out as flat as he could, rolling onto his back. His eyes stayed open though they were drooping. The sky - red, empty - stretched out over him, horizon to horizon.

He thought maybe he should say something pithy. Maybe something to deflate the mood. Maybe a swear word. The last one anyone would ever hear him say. Anything at all.

But he didn’t have the energy, and he just closed his eyes instead.

The next time Jack woke up he was somewhere very, very cold and very, very dark.

And he was very, very alone.

END