“You can’t do it. It’s too risky.” Princess Celestia was tired of dealing with her sister. It was eight in the morning, and she’d only recently woken up, but once again, Luna was in that manic, hyper-energetic state she got into after a night pumped up on caffeine.
And in an animated, vivacious shake of her starry mane, Luna confirmed that she was the one with all of the energy and none of the sense this morning. “Who says that I cannot?” She peered at her sister with derision barely masked by the facsimile of curiosity. “You do?” Luna ‘tsk’d in annoyance. “I seem to remember us being equal rulers, Celestia. Now you purport to tell me what I can and cannot do?”
Celestia didn’t have the brainpower to deal with this shit right now. She was tired, she was disturbed by recent events, and Luna was being an awful brat. “I may not be able to stop you, but I can tell you just what an idiot you’re being. We know nothing about this creature. Absolutely zilch.” For effect, Celestia levitated up a blank piece of parchment. “What does this say on it?”
Luna narrowed her eyes as she searched for some hidden meaning behind the faded yellow. “It is blank. A foal could see that.”
“Yes! And it represents the precise level of nothingness we know about this thing that’s decided to make itself at home here!” Celestia furled it up with her magic and bopped her sister on the head with it, hoping the message would sink in. “You need to be exercising caution. You’re one of the most important ponies in Equestria, and if anything was to happen to you…” Celestia changed tactic in an instant. It wasn’t dishonest, it was simply how she was feeling. She sighed. “If anything was to happen to you. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. You know that, don’t you?”
Luna studied her sister’s face. She appreciated the love they shared, her desire to keep her safe, but it didn’t stop her from tutting and swishing her tail like a whip. “You don’t think my calling is serious! There is a creature that we do not understand in Equestria, and you wish to contain it! You wish to have Twilight conduct her experiments on him—”
“It’s a ‘him’, now, is it?”
Luna scowled. “The creature appears to possess attributes of a male from what we have gleaned!” With a huff and a slight redness to her cheeks, she brought things back on topic. “He is a creature like any other. And while he may be dangerous—”
“Is very likely dangerous,” Celestia interjected. “You know as well as I do that it was found around the remnants of a forest fire. There’s no telling what magic it might be capable of, what destruction!”
“Which is why I will exercise caution,” Luna assured her sister, as futile a venture as it might have felt, taking yet another sip of that coffee that Celestia wished she would leave the fuck alone for at least a single day. She could not handle her caffeine. “But my way is the most gentle. If you were to have yours, this creature would be detained and tested, he would be miserable!”
“How do we know it can even process emotion?! It’s been all but silent since we captured it!”
Luna rarely witnessed her sister becoming heated. She knew the time of day had a part to play in it, but there was something more. She really did fear this anomaly, or rather, she feared the folly of her own flesh and blood. “I believe I am the pony that can find out. I am not necessarily unlike this creature, Celestia. Please understand that I too have been trapped in an unfamiliar place, and know just how horrible that can feel.” It was always a touchy subject to bring up, so Luna didn’t press the issue. “I cannot glean his dreams, he does not appear in my dreamscape. That means that he is not of this world, no matter how we might try to rationalise his appearance.”
Celestia gestured to a letter on the study’s desk. It was one of many notes and documents that had been furtively scrawled over the disorganised space in the last seventy-two hours, since all of this erupted. When Luna considered it, she began to appreciate that Celestia might have been more tired than usual. She read from the letter:
‘While the creature now in custody holds a striking resemblance to the humans from the other side of the mirror portal, as observed by me, there are multiple outliers to suggest that its origin isn’t the ‘earth’ that I’ve come to know. Physiologically, the creature appears to be more defined than the humans I witnessed on the other side of the portal, the pigments of his hair and skin don’t match the colour combinations I’ve witnessed, and to top it off? He seems incapable of speaking proper Equestrian.
And then there’s the matter of the fact that he is in this form to begin with. Any travel from one side of the portal to the other should have rendered the creature’s body to its pony counterpart. The lack of this occurrence suggests that there is no pony counterpart for this creature, and only lends further credence to the possibility that he is not a human. At least, not a human as we’ve come to know them.’
Luna sighed before Celestia could read on anymore. “Yes, we know nothing. Yes, your point is clear.”
Finally, Celestia smiled. It was a soft smile that came with reason and understanding. “Then you know why I wish for us to be careful?”
Celestia smiled, and Luna saw it. It was a condescending smile that told her ‘sister knows best’. “I understand that Twilight Sparkle is not coming any closer to solving the matter of his origins now than she did when she first captured him—”
“Ethically contained for the good of all of us.”
A barely stifled growl. “And that this creature is a thinking, reasoning one. That it has the potential to be—”
“To be incredibly dangerous,” Celestia repeated in as soothing and as careful a tone as she could.
“Stop fucking interrupting me!” Luna could feel her body beginning to jitter. She should not have cursed. She was not going to apologise. “That creature is a living being, and it might be scared, Celestia! Do you understand that? That beyond your fear for our nation and its people, despite your worries of what terror it might bring, there is a soul in that creature, one that I cannot soothe from the dreamscape, or come to understand, no matter how I try!”
Celestia blinked. Blinked twice, maybe. “...it isn’t your job to console this creature, Luna.”
“Yes, it is!” Luna’s eyes began to drift to the floor… There were centuries of resentment and bitterness beneath their glossy surface. Fundamental differences in how the two of them—sisters for millenia, the closest that two ponies could be to one another—saw the world, saw the way it worked and considered the well-being of its inhabitants. Celestia might have thought rationally, she might have been calm, she might have been the pragmatic and reasonable one that considered what was for the greater good, and acted only in preservation of her people and country, but fuck all of that. Fuck it. Fuck her. Her eyes returned to Celestia, sharp as blades. “I’m going to go and see this creature for myself, and I am going to ensure its fair treatment and learn of its origins if I can. I am going to determine whether it can be a friend to our country, and I am going to make certain that it integrates properly into society.”
“Luna…” Celestia’s voice was weak. She should’ve shouted, she should’ve fought back harder, she should’ve pushed through the insufferable migraine the last three days had been to beat some sense into her sister, but all that came out was that airy, deflated whisper. The limp, noodled word fell flat before it had even reached her sister’s ears.
“You cannot stop me.” With those words, she teleported away, leaving Celestia to ruminate on all that had occurred up until now, and with yet another worry to cling to, to turn over in her stomach until the bile of her insides threatened to consume her body from the inside out.
And the worst part? It was the unshakeable feeling that she was proud of her sister.
His arms hurt. Not just his arms, actually. His face. His chest, his legs and his feet and his toes and his fingers and his wrists and his everything. Everything hurt.
But it was a lot better than it had been two days ago.
He tilted his head to the side. He could scarcely move it due to the weird apparatus he was attached to—a multi-hued lightshow of wires and metal that made strange, beeping noises and stranger electronic whirs—but he could do enough to glance his naked body from the upright position he was suspended in.
What had been second degree burns on the first day were first on the next, and by now, there was hardly any physical mark on him to signify that he’d ever been in that fire at all. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there. He didn’t know why he’d recovered so quickly. He didn’t know what had started the blaze in the first place.
There were a lot of things John didn’t know. His name wasn’t one of them.
He also knew that while his wounds might have been healing incredibly quickly, he still ached terribly. He’d given up on trying to escape the strange device he was kept in; he didn’t have the strength to pull himself out of it, nor the ability to speak or reason with the strange, quadruped creature that kept him there.
It resembled a horse. It made strange sounds that he couldn’t decipher, it poked him with odd instruments and lit up its horn (it had a horn) to bathe him in strange colours that made his entire body tingle in an unnatural way. It made its noises at him and he’d tried to talk to it. Once it was clear that it didn’t understand him, John stopped attempting to talk to it.
He was resigned to his fate, as bleak and confusing as it might have been. He’d given up trying to understand it.
The small, horse-like creature didn’t hurt him, though. He wasn’t sure if he was grateful for that.
There were a lot of experiences a man wasn’t prepared for. One of the most horrifying and difficult of them all might’ve been the prospect of leaving family behind. Of being lost and alone.
Then there was the fire.
John might have seemed relatively unaffected by all of this, considering his predicament. That was because he didn’t believe any of it was real.
It was a fever dream, one that had dragged and lasted far longer than any he’d ever experienced before. He was sure of that.
At times, he wasn’t so sure.
There was something he couldn’t bring to focus, though. That was always the case when you were dreaming, wasn’t it? An inability to access all of your brain, to remember everything that you needed to, to feel thoughts drifting on the edge of your subconscious and wondering which really applied to you? John could feel his mind ebbing with vague notions of past actions and experiences, predicating some fateful event that might have linked back to this moment, some insurmountable horror that had gripped and wrested his life from him, his happiness, his everything.
He was dreaming, though.
And then the strange purple horse came back in and poked and prodded at him some more.
John sighed.
Isolation often led to ponderance. John’s mind swimming in circles, his thoughts parallels that never quite managed to connect, always some terrible truth just out of reach, a catalyst to the predicament he found himself in, a reason behind the broken skin on his body and the equal damage to his mind… something that would make this nightmarish, yet ridiculous odyssey make some semblance of sense hung on the precipice of his grasp.
And then the strange purple horse came back in and poked and prodded at him some more.
John sighed again.
And that was the way it had been, the way it would be, it seemed. He’d become used to it by now. It was a quotidian and repetitive existence, but it was one that he could at least try to understand. He played little guessing games in his mind. How long might it be until the horse came back? In what order might she conduct her tests?
They proved fruitless. She came back at painfully precise intervals, and carried her motions out in the same pattern every single time. It was a maddeningly compulsive pattern, as if John wasn’t even allowed the brief respite of experiencing some small change to what had become his established norm.
And he couldn’t even call it torture after a while. It was incredibly boring, yes, but it was also peaceful. The burn on his skin never fully went away, even after it looked like it had healed completely, save a few scars. The pain felt as if it belonged there.
John spent a lot of time wondering when he would wake up. He missed his family.
And then, one day, something different happened.
“I need you to release him.”
Twilight looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. It was because she scarcely had. Not only had she been forgoing sleep to monitor this creature around the clock, she was fighting her own morality. “I can’t,” came her answer, simple as could be.
“And whyever can you not?” Luna expressed her irritation clearly. She wouldn’t stand on ceremony over a matter like this. “Does he deserve to be chained in your castle like some kind of science experiment?”
Twilight rubbed at her eyes. She felt dazed. “The apparatus he’s connected to is feeding him a concentrated dose of magic. It’s keeping him level and healthy, as far as I can tell. I’m afraid that if he’s removed from that magic source, he might begin to burn up again.”
“I do not understand.”
“Me either, which is why I’ve been working on this so constantly!” Twilight pulled readings up and thrust them in Luna’s face, which made little difference to her as she couldn’t make head or tail of the modern scientific figures on display. “His body temperature was way higher than his body could sustain when I brought him in… I’m not sure what’s happening here, but it seems as if something in our localised environment is causing a reaction in him, one that seems to cause him to combust.”
Luna was very slow to take all of this in. The caffeine high was beginning to wear off, and the implications of Twilight’s words hit like a blunt hammer. “Excuse me, Twilight, but you made it sound as if disconnecting this creature from your machine would cause him to catch fire.”
“That’s exactly what I think might happen,” Twilight repeated. “I can’t explain it either… From everything I learnt about humans from my time on earth, I never heard of anything like this. I’ve been writing to Sunset, asking for her to research, and she couldn’t bring me back anything that would cover a phenomenon such as this one. The only conclusion I’ve been able to draw so far is that it’s something from this world that’s causing his body to react in this way. An atmospheric disparity his body can’t handle, perhaps.” Twilight ran a hoof through her mane. It was frazzled and didn’t appear to have been washed in days.
Luna spent a long time considering this. It felt like a long time, anyways. She was rapidly becoming tired. “Could he be disconnected from this machine and still have the spell administered manually?”
“It would take a skilled unicorn to keep it up indefinitely without—”
“Teach me the spell. Once you have taught me, clear a guest room in the castle and make sure the lodging is suitable for two.”
For Twilight, the scientist, the genius mind that came once in a generation, amongst every other mystery she was attempting to deduce right then, this was the thing that really didn’t compute. She cocked her head, eyebrows twisted into such a look of confusion that Luna wondered if it might’ve physically pained her to be so lost. “What exactly are you going to do?”
Luna smiled. “I intend to room with him until he feels better.”
Luna had a purpose. It was to watch over the dreams of her subjects, and to ensure that whatever fears plagued them could be resolved. That each pony could be happy in themselves, and could conquer whatever woes might befall them in the non-stop gamble that was the waking world.
There might be no other way to communicate with this poor, bewildered and pained human right now—a ‘man’, Twilight had told her—than through the medium of the subconscious, and while Luna knew that attempting to reach a dream beyond her scape was dangerous, she could at least watch over him while he slept. As she understood it, Twilight’s machine, whilst keeping him level, was preventing the poor man from sleeping.
He seemed to perk up when she came to receive him. He was quite a handsome creature, exotic and oddly proportioned, but Luna’s main interest came from his face. The man had striking blue eyes, a similar shade to hers, and they seemed to follow Luna’s with some vested interest that she couldn’t deduce.
After all, there was no conversation the two could have together.
He seemed relieved when he was removed from the machine. Luna made sure to cast the spell first, and to her relief, it worked as intended. It would keep him healthy even as she slept, as it was small enough a spell that she could maintain it even whilst asleep herself. One of the benefits of being so perfectly in touch with each layer of her own consciousness.
The man proved to be quite heavy. He was a slight strain on her teleportation, and eventually, levitation spells when she brought him to his new bed. He didn’t put up too much of a fuss. Every time he looked at her, he seemed to calm some. However…
There was a sadness in his visage. It intensified when the two of them maintained any form of eye contact, Luna was sure of it.
For a while she simply sat at the end of the large bed as he laid there, now free to look around the room. Luna found it strange that now he was finally free from his confines, able to look at whatever he wished, he spent most of his time looking at her. At points, he’d mouth things, make small sounds. It was his attempt at communication, she was sure.
Two could play at that game, even if it would ultimately be fruitless.
“My name is Luna.” He doesn’t know what you’re saying. “You perplex me, human… I want to know more about you. I can see that you’re in pain, and I wish to help.” He doesn’t know how much I need this. “It hurts me to see you upset, and I only wish to make it better.”
The horse made strange noises, the dark one with those eyes that remind John of… someone. The noises were soothing. They made him feel tired.
Could you feel tired in a dream?
John missed his family.
This horse was patient with him. She was perhaps a half his size, still, but larger than the other. At first, John had thought she might be guarding him, ensuring he didn’t escape, but that seemed less and less the case as time went by, as her unintelligible conversation persisted.
She was a companion. John felt overcome with an urge to show his appreciation for what she was doing for him, keeping him company for hours on end. He outstretched a hand to stroke her mane.
The moment Luna felt the human’s hand on her head, she melted into it. She couldn’t help it, she was incredibly tired, and the shape and form of his digits felt so right, as if his appendages were simply designed to scratch at her fur and relax her. She hadn’t forgotten her duty, not one bit, but in the absence of sleep and the tumultuous chaos that these last few days had brought, a moment of placidity wasn’t something she was going to pass up.
So she snuggled closer to him. She draped her tail over his stomach, a hoof over his chest, hoping to keep him calm and content. Luna felt an almost maternal need to protect this creature. He was another of her subjects, whether he was a tourist in her world or not, and he deserved to be happy.
He reacted well to her advance. He wrapped an arm around her, holding her tight. It felt comforting to be in his grip, like nothing could get her here. Perhaps she needed to be protected also.
John was beginning to feel incredibly sleepy. The strange horse that allowed him to hold her, the one with the ghost in her eyes and the smile that promised comfort, she was there for him. She’d let him drift off, whether he was dreaming or not…
And he began to burn again.
John opened his steaming eyes. Clarity in smoke. There was no horse, there was no bedroom in a strange world nor strange machines or anything else of the sort.
But there was fire. That had always been there.
John was at the edge of the dilapidated stairs. His clothes were seared already, a large burn mark on his chest, and he could feel the places where his eyebrows had once been sizzling from recent contact with a naked flame.
And he could hear screaming upstairs.
Clarity in smoke.
“Lauren!” John’s shout came as more of a wheeze than anything else. He was already fitfully coughing as he attempted to push his way past the fallen banister and crawl back up the stairs.
Luna was content. The human had finally drifted off to sleep, a break she was sure he desperately needed. He was comfortable to lay on, too.
She’d never imagined having to console what seemed such a strong and stalwart being. Even ponies could have tough exteriors, though, she knew. She considered herself to have a front only rivalled by that of her sister. Keeping it up could be difficult at the best of times.
Perhaps this man truly was content, though. His breath rose and fell so peacefully. The gentle sway of his chest was almost enough to put Luna in a trance, her fatigue being so strong by then. She resisted temptation only as long as she could before finally placing her head on the man’s chest, cuddling him tight and wishing his ails away.
And then she began to feel him stir. Was he waking already?
No. No, he was tossing in his sleep. What was more, his body was beginning to grow hotter and hotter by the second, more so than it should have been. Luna leapt off of him in an instant, as if she’d been scalded. Was this her fault? Had she increased his temperature with her proximity? Her spell was still running, though, he shouldn’t have been burning up like this, and yet…
His skin. His skin was beginning to burn, the small scar on his chest and abdomen becoming more apparent with each second, more disfigured and seared. Panicking, Luna channeled more energy into her spell. She couldn’t lose him. There was something happening in his dream that she couldn’t understand, but no matter how she watched him, she knew she couldn’t intrude.
If she ventured to his dreams, she might not be able to come back.
The only conclusion was to wake him. She jostled him with as much strength as she could without hurting him, calling to him and beseeching him to wake up.
He only began to burn hotter.
“Lauren!” John’s voice repeated, the word like acid in his throat. He pushed his way further up the stairs, knowing his route, knowing exactly what he’d have to do from here.
A part of him felt as if he’d done it a million times before.
“La—” he hacked and wheezed as a billow of smoke rose in the narrow hallway, cutting off his oxygen. He stayed as low to the floor as possible. “Lauren! I’m coming, hold on!”
He could barely see. The burning clawed at his eyes, at his face, at every part of him, even places he couldn’t usually feel.
It was his fault. When he’d awoken, the fire had already been out of control. His wife had been trapped in the upstairs bedroom, trapped with Lucy. No matter how he’d tried to break down the door, the room was already incinerated by the time he’d gotten there.
It was his fault. If he had still shared a bed with his wife, he wouldn’t have been across the house. If he hadn’t drank so much that night, he would have woken up faster, would have woken at the sound of the smoke alarm, not the sound of screaming. If he’d carried Lauren downstairs instead of calling for her to follow after breaking down her door, she would have already been safe. He wouldn’t be going back for her now, and the two of them, at least, would’ve survived.
It was his fault. He had always known he was a failure as a husband, but now he had failed as a father. His wife, his eldest, they were gone already, and as much as he tried to cling to some hope that they’d survived, he’d seen the room, the way it had been engulfed in orange, roaring blackened flames that seared the surroundings and turned them to morbid murals of decay and death.
And now he had left his youngest behind. He had called for her to follow, but how was she meant to react to a crisis, to this?! How was she meant to know what to fucking do!
John might as well have been on the inside of a volcano, his lungs filling with toxins, his eyesight blurring as he felt the carpet he’d fainted onto beginning to brand his face. He…
He had to carry on going. But he could scarcely feel his own brain as it began to pull itself away…
To somewhere simple. Somewhere that would allow him to forget, to welcome death.
He couldn’t go any farther. His daughter’s bright blue eyes were the last thing he pictured before drifting off.
“Luna, you can’t.”
She was speaking to herself. Even through the pained scream she heard from the man in front of her as his skin continued to burn, as he became increasingly scorched with each passing moment, she begged herself to rationalise. Think like Celestia. What would Celestia do in this circumstance?
She should teleport him away. He could level the whole castle if this got further out of hoof, from what little she knew. She should take the problem and send it far away where it wouldn’t affect any other ponies, rather than dealing with the one, very hurt individual that couldn’t help the monstrous thing that was happening to them.
That’s what Celestia would do.
And it was the responsible thing to do, wasn’t it?
Luna could feel tears in her eyes as she powered up her horn. She blinked them away. She needed to be strong for this. There was no telling what might meet her on the other side. Without her magic to support her outside of the dreamscape, she was as vulnerable as he was.
John didn’t die of burning or suffocation like he’d expected to. Instead, he found himself drawing a pained, gasping breath, shuffling back up to his hands and knees. He was still here. He could still do this. Nothing was more important to him than this. He needed to do this. If there was one thing he could do to salvage something from this hell, it was saving his Lauren.
Each shuffle felt as if his body was made of lead. He wanted to lay down and merge with the carpet, morph into an affixture to his burning home and simply let events take their course. He needed to fight that want. He couldn’t give up now. His darling girl, it was the only thing he had left.
And so he continued to push all the way to the end of the corridor. The affixtures from the loft were beginning to come down around him. He didn’t know if there was going to be a way back. He could hear the screaming and crying in the near-distance. As long as she was still breathing, he would carry on pushing.
And then he was being carried. A part of him had felt as if it was floating the entire time, neither really here nor anywhere else, but it took him a long time to realise that he was physically being carried towards the end room, the last corridor in the house, the place where Lauren was, the only room yet to have been burned up and tarnished.
The only thing he hadn’t destroyed.
It was the horse, the horse from before. She was here. She couldn’t have been. He was hallucinating. The fire had driven him insane. His fantasies, the images his brain had concocted to drag him from this hell, they’d taken form.
“Human!” the horse shouted, its voice strained as it continued to carry him into Lauren’s bedroom. “You must awaken from this nightmare now until it is too late! Your body cannot handle the strain!”
The horse continued to shout, but it fell on deaf ears. The moment John entered the room, he saw his Lauren, her dark hair and shiny blue eyes, only made to sparkle more by the tears flowing down her cheeks as the rest of the house continued to catch up to them all.
He held her. He held her close. Held her safe. As long as he held her, nothing bad could happen to her. He was her protector.
The doorway erupted in fire. The three of them were trapped inside.
Luna could feel the heat of this strange world pressing down on them from all angles. This was real fire, it burned at her coat and singed her skin beneath, it brought with it pain that she could barely stand. The human was clutching a smaller human, likely a child. He appeared distraught, as if her safety meant everything to him.
But this was just a dream, was it not? The only reason it was affecting him is because his mind was still linked to his own world, that was why it was so potent. She needed to sever this connection, and for that, she needed him to wake up.
“This isn’t real!” Luna shouted over the roar of the flames around them, as all the while the little human stared at her as if she was a figment of her imagination. It almost seemed to shake the fear from her. “You cannot stay here, there is nothing for you but death! Your body cannot take the strain anymore!”
“I can’t leave my daughter behind!” the human shouted back, the language barrier erased by their linking of minds, everything made sense now. John, he knew where he was, and Luna?
Luna had to keep convincing herself that she was right. Even if this felt too vivid to be a dream, more so than she’d ever experienced or imagined. Even if the fire around her burnt like any she’d felt, and she was powerless to stop it.
“There is no daughter,” Luna assured him, but she had to force the words out. Part of that was the smoke, which was beginning to rise. The rest was something else entirely. “This may be your past, your present, or your future, but I assure you that this is not reality. You are in Equestria, in a bed, burning up because you will not let go of this dream!” Luna wrapped her wings around the pair of them, attempting her utmost to keep the encroaching heat away for as long as she could. She dropped her tone to a whisper. “You have to let go…”
“How can I let go?!” he clutched his daughter as he spoke, his voice a broken echo of torment. “My entire life has fallen apart around me, this is the ONE thing that I might still be able to save!”
“It isn’t real!” Luna turned to face him fully, pulling his face up by the hoof so he’d look at her fully. He recoiled from the contact, but she didn’t let up. She forced him to look. “This world, this torture you’re putting yourself through… there’s nothing for you here.” She pointed to the door, to the flames, to the lack of escape. “This is a cell, and there is no escape. The only way out is to let all of it go, to embrace change!” Luna leaned forwards and kissed him on the cheek. It broke her not to acknowledge the little girl by his side. She wasn’t real. She told herself that with as much force as she could muster. “There is a whole life waiting for you on the other side, I promise. I will protect you. I will nurture you, I will help you to move past this, but you have to let go.”
He only clutched his daughter harder. Luna imagined it must’ve hurt her to be squeezed so hard, but he was in just as much pain. The flames were closing in, there was no time left. “You need to wake up now. You must! You have to cast this aside and move forwards, it’s the only way to save yourself!”
“Why can’t I take her with me?! Why can’t I have her too?!” Anguish didn’t describe it. Sorrow painted this broken man’s face.
“You’ll always have her with you, I promise...” Luna placed a hoof on the man’s chest, even as the fire began to sweep up the furniture in the room, began to form a circle around them that moved forwards with each second, licking at their ankles and pushing them closer together. “But you must make a choice now. Will we live together, or die here?”
And so John made his choice.
He let go.
She left his arms.
He left her behind.
She died with the house, with the past, with him.
And he was reborn anew.
Luna awoke with a start, feeling a convulsion beneath her. It was the man, it was him, he was crying and screaming and clutching her and thrashing on the bed and clawing at her fur with all of his shattered heart.
He had left his baby behind.
And Luna took the pain of his hold until it became a more stilted and gentle thing, until his sobs were quiet and soul-wracking, until his tears flowed freely into her mane and she did the only thing she could, stroke against his head and keep him close, remind him that whatever might have happened there, she was here for him now, and always would be for as long as he needed.
It didn’t even occur to her at first that her original spell had stopped. He wasn’t burning anymore.
He still bore his scars, though they were mostly faded. For all of her insistence, for everything she’d said… Luna wasn’t convinced that what she’d entered, that what she’d witnessed, that any of that was a dream.
But she had saved him.
No, he had saved himself.
His sobs eventually receded to shivers. John didn’t know whether what had just happened was his imagination or not. He didn’t know if this was the afterlife, if he’d been in hell, if he was reliving past torment, or if this had just happened, and he had survived the entire thing if only for the magic of a guardian angel that was able to save him and him alone.
John missed his family.
But he took solace in knowing that whether that terrible event had happened or not, whether it had been a moment ago or a lifetime ago, a dream, a memory, or completely false, that there was someone here for him now. Someone to kiss away the scars that had imprinted themselves upon his mind, to keep him sane, to hold him and keep him steady through every throe of upset and anger that he felt shooting throughout his core.
And he didn’t burn anymore. The pain was finally gone, for better or worse.
He had a place now. He didn’t know how long he’d been without one. He didn’t know what had come before, not really, and had no clue what might come next, but right now, his home, his chance at happiness, his survival, it was within the embrace of this magical creature that had come to him and given him a life to live once more.
And he didn’t know if he could do it alone. John couldn’t forget what had happened, he never could, but maybe with the help of her, he could begin to accept things for whatever they might be.
Luna felt incredibly troubled, but she was at peace. She had a human beside her that was hers to protect. She would make sure that no harm befell him. She would keep him happy. She would not let him become her. Not ever.
When he had been silent for a while and the sun kissed the horizon, Luna leant in towards him, giving him one final squeeze, an affirmation of her presence, a silent promise that she would always be there, no matter what happened. She raised herself to his ear.
Her voice was delicate. Her lips were soft.
“The true nightmares are the ones we live.”
Her hair was dark. Her eyes were blue.
Author's Note
April fools... I guess?
I honestly have no idea what to think of this story. I wrote it in a flurry of activity and I'd love to hear your opinions on it. (Apparently this is what happens when I go without antidepressants for four days.)
Love you guys.
