Love Deeply

by I-A-M

Rating: everyone
Tags: Slice of Life, Wallflower Blush, Romance, Equestria Girls, Sunset Shimmer
Length: 2839

One in the morning is a time when you visit the people you need the most.

One in the morning is a time when you visit the people you need the most. Sunset Shimmer is that to Wallflower Blush, as Wallflower is to Sunset.

It rains hard in Canterlot, and cold.

This was done over the space of about three hours of compulsive writing. After a twelve hour shift. Give it a little grace. Written for Scampy.
Cover art also by Scampy.
Featured on 08/15/2020 for some reason

Prequel to this story is First Day Of My Life
Find the collected works for the SunFlower Saga here.

Published 2020-08-15 05:40:00 UTC
Last updated 2020-08-15 05:40:00 UTC

...And Regardless

Sunset Shimmer

My hand claps over my cell before the first ring finishes chiming and drags it under the blankets to me. I’m not even completely conscious yet but the action has become muscle memory by this point.

“M’llo?”

The words come out gummy and mashed together with sleep as I burrow out from under my covers and sit up.

My hair is a tangled rat’s nest of red and gold snarls, my body is still half-numb, and my eyes are partially glued shut, and despite that I’m already getting up and fishing for my socks.

//Sorry.// Her voice is soft and shaky on the other line.

“No, no, Wallie, it’s fine,” I mumble, smacking my lips to try and work some moisture back around my mouth. “Where are you?”

//I uh, I’m downstairs.//

I blink some of the sleep from my eyes as I try and organise my thoughts. That’s no mean feat at one in the morning on the best of days, especially since I only got to sleep two hours ago.

Wallflower is downstairs, that's the important part.

“Downstairs… of my apartment?” I ask, trying and failing to shake the remaining cobwebs from my head.

//Yeah.//

Deep breath, Shimmer.

“You remember the entry code, right?” I ask, knowing full well she did. I’d given her it almost a month ago.

//Mhm.//

“And the key?”

//Y-Yeah.//

Deep breath.

I kick my shoes off after having finally gotten them on. It took a couple of tries in my sleep-deprived state to manage it before I realised I was trying to put them on the wrong feet.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Come on up, alright?”

Wallflower mumbles something in the vague affirmative and hangs up. I drop my phone onto my bed and rub at my eyes with the heels of my palms, trying to force some wakefulness into my brain.

“Deep breath,” I say, leaning forward.

I hang my head and breathe, counting down the minutes. The elevator in this building is slow. It’s an old model, installed sometime in the Cretaceous period, I think. It’s functional but it groans it’s way up the floors with the kind of tired belligerence of an old man in a town car slowly reversing into the front end of a Prius.

I stand up and skip, from the loft where my bed is, down the steps to the kitchen.

Moving mostly on automatic, I put the electric kettle on, flip on the burner, turn away… then immediately swear and turn back to flip it off when I remember I have to put water in it first.

With the kettle filled and slowly warming, I grab a couple of mugs and toss some tea bags in. Matcha for Wallflower, her favorite kind, and Oolong for me.

An almost imperceptible knock on my door sounds as I’m filling up Wallflower’s mug, I put the kettle back on for my tea before going to the door.

“You’ve got a key, Wallie,” I say, chuckling as I cross the room to unlock the door and open it up,

Just across the threshold opposite me is Wallflower Blush.

Even before we graduated a year back, when we were still going to school together, I had the thought that Wallflower Blush was almost a wraith. She's ephemeral, slight, and barely there even on her best days. She’s the sort of girl who exists in the corner of your eye. The one you pass on the street and your eyes glide right over.

None of that has changed in the past year.

If anything, she's almost… I don’t want to say worse. She's not ‘worse’. She’s gotten a lot better actually. She smiles more, even if I’m the only one who can tell she’s smiling, and she talks a little louder, speaks up a little more.

But she’s still so quiet. Not audibly, although she is definitely that. It’s her soul, for lack of a better term. She takes up so little space, and everything about her feels…

Brief.

“You’re soaked,” I say with a weak laugh, and she chuckles back at me.

She’s wearing two hoodies layered over one another, and they’re both soaked through. Her morning glory locks are plastered to her face and neck from the rain outside tonight.

Tonight… I glance at the window and wince before looking back at Wallflower as I step back to let her in.

“You walked here in that?” I jerk my thumb to the window where sheets of rain are flooding the grimy streets of the Commons.

“It’s n-not that b-bad,” Wallflower says through slightly blue lips as she peels the hoods back. She’s doing a bad job of hiding how much she’s shaking as I let her in and shut the door behind her.

“Hold on.” I move past her quickly and dive into a pile of my clean laundry, turning up a pair of pajama pants and one of my own hoodies which I hold out. “Here, go dry off and put these on, I’d rather you not get pneumonia, thanks.”

I say the last part with as much of a laugh as I can while I nod towards the bathroom. Wallflower just bobs her head raggedly and retreats to clean up.

The moment she’s out of sight I sag against the counter and card my fingers through my hair, working my fingers through the snarls and knots, worrying at them as I stare out the window.

It wasn’t this bad when I went to bed, so it can't have been raining this hard for more than an hour or so. These torrents don’t last much longer than that anyway but…

I bite my lip, look up at the bathroom door, and wonder what it is this time.

Wallflower pushes the bathroom door open again, giving me a sheepish smile as she scrubs at her hair with a towel before bundling it up and taking it over to the dirty laundry.

“Sorry,” she says again, looking up at me with eyes that are probably heavier with exhaustion than mine. “I uhm… I woke you up again, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say. It’s pointless to deny it, and lying will just make her feel worse. “But I told you before, you can wake me up any time. Or like, even just come up to my place and crash on my couch.”

Her gaze trails away from me as she shrugs and walks over to the couch to slump down onto it. Her whole body drops like a severed marionette with beads of iron tied to its limbs.

The electric kettle whistles atonally beside me, and I turn back to pour the hot water for my tea, pulling the bag in Wallflower’s mug out and sniffing at it while I do. It smells right. This time, anyway. I didn’t turn it into boiled leaf juice like last time, at least.

I grab the mugs and make my way over to the couch, settle in beside Wallflower, and pass her the mug which she takes gratefully, cradling it in both hands to bleed some of the heat from it. She leans in and breathes deep, taking the warm air into her lungs, and shivering again as a small smile finally works its way onto her face.

“C’mere,” I say softly, grabbing one of the plethora of blankets haphazardly draped over the couch and settling it around us.

Wallflower sidles closer and I drape my arm over her shoulder, and she rests her head on mine.

“So?”

“It’s stupid,” Wallflower says quietly, sipping at her tea around the words.

“Tell me anyway?” I say.

She sighs and nestles closer, takes a few deep breaths, and nods. I run my fingers up her side, and along her arm, then back down. It’s a calm, even, lazy pattern. It’s hard to stay awake, but I force myself to do it anyway. The rain-soaked scent of summer forest leaves that perpetually hangs around her is a hell of a soporific, though.

“My neighbors are throwing a party,” she says finally. “It got… loud.”

“Gotcha.” I nod as I pluck my teabag out of the mug, shake the remaining liquid loose, and toss the soggy mass on to a used plate from yesterday that I still hadn’t thrown in the sink. “How long were you walking?”

Wallflower shrugs again. “Since like, ten-ish, I guess.”

Four hours of wandering Canterlot. I shiver at that.

“Wallie…”

“I know,” she says in a cracked voice. “I know you don’t like me just… wandering.”

“You could’ve come here.”

“I didn’t want to be a bother.”

I sigh and pull her closer, burying my face against her hair. I take another deep breath. It’s easier to feel how real she is when she’s close to me. When I can hold her and hear her and just be near her.

“Stay tonight?” I ask softly.

Wallflower nods, curling up closer and sipping at her tea.

“Stay forever?”

Wallflower chuckles.

Then she shakes her head.

She always gives me the same answer, no matter how many times I ask her to move in with me. She always says no. I can ask til I’m bluer than Rainbow Dash and I’ll still get the same answer, and believe me I’ve tried.

The first time I asked her to stay with me was just after we graduated and a month after we started dating, and Wallflower was living then where she’s living now. A small, single room, fourth-floor apartment situated in a tenement on the nicer edge of the East End.

Nicer is, of course, a relative term. Specifically, an estranged relative that chain-smokes, does whip-its, then watches sixteen straight hours of conspiracy videos online, but is otherwise harmless.

It was a herculean effort just to get her into that place and out of the shelters she’d been drifting between.

Thanks to the Memory Stone, her parents don’t remember her. None of her very few relatives do. Given the kind of person her father is, though, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it did put her in a hard place.

No home. No money.

I owe Sticky Note a lot for going out of his way to take on her case, especially since Wallflower’s closed-off nature didn’t make it easy. My old social worker managed it though, and I’ll always be grateful to him for it.

When we graduated, I asked her to move in with me, and she turned me down flat. Too early, she’d said, and maybe she was right. The second time I’d asked was two months later, and she’d made another excuse that was the same excuse worded differently.

This is the fourteenth time I’ve asked, and Wallflower has stopped giving excuses.

I’ll never stop asking, though. Maybe one day she'll stop giving me 'no's.

“Stay through tomorrow?” I offer, and Wallflower sighs quietly, but she’s smiling while she does it.

I can’t see her smile, but I don’t need to. I can hear it. Wallflower Blush has a smile that can illuminate an entire room in a spectrum of light that no one else can see. No one but me.

“Okay,” Wallflower says. “Sorry again, that I woke you up.”

“I’m not,” I reply, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“You always say that.”

I shrug. “I always mean it.”

Wallflower pulls out from under me and sets her empty tea mug down on the coffee table in front of the couch before going back to where she was, settling in and wrapping her arms around me.

“I love you, Wallie.” I whisper the words against her hair, and I know she hears me.

I say the words and they lock up my throat on their way out. They make my heart hitch in my chest and the edges of my eyes burn. It’s almost like I want to cry, but I can’t really decide on whether or not it’s because I’m happy or horribly, horribly sad.

A measure of both, maybe?

“I love you, too,” Wallflower takes a long, slow breath.

In and out.

Every time I say those words, and when she says them back to me, it feels like I trip backward and start falling down.

Down and down and down.

It’s not cold but it is dark. It’s warm and, in a way, it’s both lonely and not. I’m with her, and I’m not. We’re together and we’re not. There’s a sharp white fracture in the darkness that I can’t really account for. It’s like a Dichotomy Paradox, where I can never close the distance between us completely. I can make it halfway there some times, a quarter of the way other times.

I’m closing by increments and never quite making it all the way.

Soft snores issue up from underneath me, pushing me out of my ponderous thoughts. Wallflower makes a tiny wheeze through her nose when she snores, and I don’t think I’ll ever tell her that because she would be mortified. Worst case scenario is she gets too anxious to sleep around me, and that would be tragic because that little wheeze is actually kind of adorable.

Slipping my arms underneath Wallflower, I scoop her up, hold her close, and move slowly up the steps to my loft bed and settle her down on the lumpy, abused mattress with its weird cram of blankets and pillows that look more like a nest than any kind of actual bed.

This isn’t the first time she’s come over here like this, and it won’t be the last.

I slip past her and pull my shirt over my head, then kick my pajama bottoms off, and curl up beside her in our little cocoon of blankets.

Wallflower sidles closer in her sleep, her hair fluttering around her mouth and nose as she makes her wheezy little snores. I cast the blankets over her, and draw her close, and she curls up instinctively against me, holding on so hard that it makes my ribs creak for a moment before she finally relaxes back into real sleep. Her fingers tangle into my long hair and her head comes to rest against the crook of my shoulder in the tangle of blankets we’re sharing.

“I love you, Wallie,” I whisper.

She’s asleep. Dead to the world in the way only an insomniac who has finally figured out the trick to crashing can be.

I chuckle quietly and wanly. I don’t know if I’m a stubborn idiot or a complete coward. If it’s possible to be both, I think I might be that. In my weirder, darker moments, I wonder if I stay with Wallflower because I know she’ll always turn me down when I ask her to get closer.

Other days, I wonder if it’s because of the challenge.

My better days say I stay because I love her with a ferocity that borders on the very quietly thermonuclear. I hold onto those days hardest of all, not because it’s the most comforting reason, but because it’s the most terrifying, and because I think it might actually be true.

I run my hands through her soft hair. Bright, green, morning glory strands.

“I wish you’d stay with me forever,” I say, taking comfort in her unhearing sleep and her even, wheezy snore. “I really wish you would.”

I lean down and press a kiss to her forehead, and let my lips linger there for a long moment before pulling back.

“Dead to the world, huh?” I say to my mostly-silent girlfriend.

My lips flatten to a line as I watch her sleep, and suddenly my heart feels too big for my chest. My eyes are burning, my throat is closing again, and I… I want to tell her I love her again, but it’s so much more than that. It’s worse and better.

Mostly better.

“If you’d let me, I’d marry you right now,” I say in a flat voice tight with strain.

The moment the words leave my lips, Wallflower’s breathing hitches, and the air in my lungs freezes solid.

She was asleep, right? Right?

Slowly, Wallflower raises her head and looks me straight in the eye. Sweat beads on my brow and down my bare back, I can’t seem to get any air into my suddenly useless lungs as she stares up at me with those warm-oak eyes of hers.

‘I just fucked up.’ Is my overwhelming thought.

She’ll spook and leave and—

—and… go back to sleep.

Wallflower brushes her lips over my clavicle, a once and fleeting touch of skin, and then she nestles back against me and closes her eyes.

Tears prickle at my eyes, and I smile as I curl around her and rest my head by hers. I’m tired, and so is she. We probably won’t talk about this. She definitely won’t bring it up.

But she’s still here, and maybe, for now, that’s enough.

I take a deep breath, and I sleep.