The waiting is the hardest part

by Cackling Moron

Rating: everyone
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Human
Length: 2961

Twilight and Jack, in space, plan to go and have lunch.

You'd have thought that being in space on a planet you'd long-believed to be dead and gone but which turned out to in fact have been kept tidy by the weirdo alien you also believed to be dead and gone would be exciting.

And in many ways it is, but in many ways it's also just more work to do and more boxes to tick, but that's being in charge.

Still, Jack did suggest going and getting lunch and Twilight did say yes, she's just got some things to finish up first.

And Jack, surely, has experience of waiting?

Right?

Published 2021-01-26 13:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2021-01-26 13:10:01 UTC

Quietly into the night

Author's Note

This is mainly just an off-the-cuff idea I had while walking to work and listening to the 'Quietly into the night' and idly daydreaming about what Jack's time would have been taken up with between Last One Out and In From The Cold. So I did this.

Uh, is it sad? I don't know. If you found Last One Out sad you might find a bit of this sad, I guess? I don't really know how people relate to these things.

If it's sad, tell me and I can - eurgh - put a tag on, I guess...

Quietly into the night

In her office with its nice view of the mountains, Princess Twilight was engaged in some of the fiddlier, more administrative bits that came along with her role as Governor Twilight.

Pacing about her office and occasionally circling her desk and doing a very good job of distracting her from what it was she was trying to do was Jack, local human (in a manner of speaking) and also possibly a significant component of the planet?

Research was ongoing.

“Nearly done?” Jack asked as he loomed behind her chair.

“Nearly done,” Twilight said without looking away from her screen, her eyes narrowed in clerical concentration. Jack threw his hands up.

“You said that ages ago!”

“This is important, Jack, I just need to finish this then we can go.”

The plan for them was that they were going to go out and have lunch together. The local ponies were moving on leaps and bounds when it came to reclaiming their old planet, the one that Jack had done his best to keep tidy, and nothing showed this progress better than the fact there were local eateries now.

Or so Jack liked to think. Twilight had tried to puncture his amazement by pointing out that they were all pretty well-settled now so it would have been, frankly, more amazing if there weren’t local businesses, restaurants included, but Jack insisted on remaining amazed.

Quite astoundingly amazed, in fact, like it was something he had trouble believing had actually happened. Twilight couldn’t quite work out if it was a long-form joke of his or not. He just seemed so honestly thrilled that there were places you could go and buy food and eat food at. Even if he didn’t actually have to, that they existed plainly brought him immense joy.

She couldn’t really hold that against him, she supposed, and when he’d asked if she fancied going out for lunch she’d said yes anyway, so that was that.

What was holding this plan up was the need for Twilight to sign off on a small raft of colonial requisitions, things those ponies who’d moved back onto the planet needed or said they needed and which were not presently available locally. Things, therefore, that the Hegemony could be asked to provide. Things that the Hegemony most-likely would provide, happily, too.

The Hegemony was very generous with these sorts of things compared to a few other system-sprawling space governments you might care to name, but unfortunately that generosity also extended to paperwork, which they dispensed with enthusiasm.

The Gorf apparently had a thing for documenting every single step of a transaction.

Though, was it still paperwork if it was all done on a soft-light haptic interface on files that existed on a system-spanning sub-aether cloud network? Twilight sometimes wondered this and had decided that it still had the spirit of paperwork, so probably counted.

And then she realised what she’d been driven to thinking about and realised that perhaps she had too much of it to do, and was losing her mind.

“They’ll be closed at this rate,” Jack griped, checking his wrist and a watch he wasn’t wearing. “Hell, they’ll probably have shut down. How many of these businesses fail in the first year? How many because people are too busy to actually show up and have lunch?”

Twilight gritted her teeth and ticked some boxes and sent off another completed form, sparing a moment to glare at Jack over the top of the screen.

“You know, with you being immortal now, Jack, and probably being older than me owing to time dilation and other as-yet unidentified hyperspatial anomalies, you’d think you’d be better at waiting,” she said, perhaps more tartly than she might have intended to.

Jack heard this, and blinked.

-

And he was very, very alone.

And at first - for a second, perhaps - things were so quiet and cold and dark that Jack wasn’t even wholly sure that he’d woken up at all, and thought perhaps he was just dreaming or maybe even actually, finally, properly dead.

Then he saw the stars.

These were not the stars he remembered from before, the ones that filled the sky and twinkled and seemed so close you might have been able to just reach up and snatch one, the ones he’d been told were Luna’s purview and somehow tied to her. The magical, fancy, hippy-dippy pony stars, the ones he’d got used to over the years, the ones he’d got familiar with.

Those stars were gone. These stars, the ones he could see now, were far and dim and distant and cold. The light of theirs which reached him was an afterthought, falling on him by accident, and achieved nothing of value, illuminating nothing.

These were stars for other people, not for him. Just one of those things.

At anyrate Jack was awake, again, however much he might have preferred not to be.

He lay staring up at these unfriendly stars for some time, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did, obviously, as everything that could have happened had already happened, and there wasn’t anything left. If anything was going to happen, Jack understood, it would have to come from him.

Experimentally he tried to speak, to no immediate effect. He tried to shout but, again, it achieved nothing. The air was all gone, he supposed, and this apparently did not affect him in the slightest. And why should it? He’d fallen asleep under the sea before to no ill-effect, why should being in the airless void of space be any different?

He was just continuing to blithely exist on an airless, basically lightless, entirely lifeless ball of dead, dead dirt. Of course he was.

And this continuing would continue, he knew. Even if the planet ended up crumbling to dust beneath his feet and floating away on some cosmic breeze to leave him drifting he would just keep going on. On and on and on and on.

And on. Forever. Just one of those things.

So now what?

There probably wasn’t a lot available for him to do, Jack thought. Not many places to go, he imagined most of the planet looked basically the same, now, and that was even if he could see it. He could not see it. It was too dark.

So now what?

Lay there staring at the stars and waiting to go back to sleep again so he could wake up later and stare at the stars some more while waiting to go back to sleep? Forever?

The thought twisted his guts. Jack knew that cycle was all he had to look forward to, now, but the idea of not even moving and just letting it happen to him for whatever reason filled him with absolute, stinking dread.

No, he had to get up, he had to move. It wouldn’t change anything but he had to do it. His body was heavy and every movement a terrible effort but he had to do it. His legs were shaky and his head alarmingly far above the ground, now, but he had to do it. And so he did, and so he was standing.

Now, walking. Where? Anywhere. It wasn’t like it mattered where.

So Jack walked. He had no expectation of finding anything or anyone - how could he? It would be impossible. He was all that was left and he knew this.

Knowing this didn’t change the tiny, squirming little shred of hope that writhed right in the back of his mind, in the pocket where he kept his guilty, self-indulgent wishful thinking. The shred that suggested, hey, maybe he’d find some hidden pony bunker full of plucky pony survivalists? Maybe he’d walk halfway round the planet and find the other side was actually fine somehow? Maybe he’d find something else just like him walking the other way?

But no. He found nothing. Just like he’d expected.

Nothing moved on the dead planet. Except him. Only him.

He kept walking regardless, as it wasn’t as if he had anything better to do. With those long, long, long strides of his he probably covered a good chunk of the planet in this way, not that it mattered. It was always dark, and there was never anything there anyway.

He kept walking until he couldn’t walk anymore and then just let himself keel over forward, hitting the ground with enough force to leave a crater. It didn’t hurt. He noticed it, but it didn’t hurt.

And then Jack would sleep, and he’d dream.

Most of the dreams were not a whole lot better than being awake.

Sometimes though, rarely, he’d have a proper dream, and usually it was a variation on a theme:

He would open his eyes and he’d find himself back just like how he remembered - arms, legs, all as they were supposed to be, back to normal. There would be blue skies and warm sun and he’d be laying on green grass and all the weight he felt all the time would be gone.

And then there’d be Twilight. Smiling.

It never lasted, of course, and Jack would always wake up somewhere where there were no blue skies, no warm sun, no grass of any description and that terrible, crushing weight would feel ever-so-slightly worse than it had before he’d fallen asleep.

And no Twilight.

Normally though the dreams, such as they were, were not like that. They were abstract in a frustrating sort of a way, because while they made no real sense to Jack he still somehow understood what it was he was looking at.

The pull of vast, invisible forces, the nigh-infinite number of only-barely perceptible strings linking every thing to every other thing, the sense of how he fitted into all of it and moved through it. The sense of exerting a pressure on all those strings, of being one of those forces. Whatever that meant.

He preferred the dreams with Twilight, especially when they stopped happening altogether.

This went on for a while. Jack had no idea how much of a while. It felt like a considerable while and it probably was, but he had no way of checking. And even if he had, would it have mattered? Would knowing have helped? It was just one of those things.

One day when he woke up (Jack liked to think of those periods when he was awake as ‘days’, though they technically were not days) though he found that he could not rise, and it wasn’t to do with the ever-increasing weight he had to struggle with.

Instead, this time it was because his legs weren’t working like they were supposed to. It took him a while to figure out this was because they weren’t there anymore, there was something else there instead.

Whatever was there still bent, he found, just not how he expected, and this was because, he found, there were a lot of them. A lot of joints, not knees, just general joints, joining all the many, many bits of what he had now in place of legs.

He’d screamed a bit, soundlessly, but he got over it eventually.

And while the loss of his old legs did stop him walking like he usually did - if only because he couldn’t really ‘walk’ on what he had now - that he still had his arms meant it didn’t stop him dragging himself across the planet in the dark from one cold place to another cold place.

Which was basically the same thing anyway, really.

If you thought about it.

-

Twilight had signed off on another two or three requisition orders before she realised that Jack had not replied.

She’d been halfway braced for a comeback to what she’d said, snappy or otherwise, but when none had come she’d got absorbed into her bureaucracy again and it wasn’t until the silence kept dragging that she finally snapped back to the moment and looked up.

Jack was just standing there, a little slack in the face, eyes focused on nothing much at all.

“Jack? Are you okay?” She asked, but he did not appear to hear her.

“Jack?” She asked, louder this time, and this time he did seem to hear her, head swivelling in her direction and eyes looking through where she was sitting. Not really at her, but in her vague direction.

“Hmm?” He went, blankly.

Twilight seen that look before and she knew what was coming.

Leaping down from her chair she moved quickly around her desk and over to him, rearing up on her hindlegs so she could reach to put her forelegs over his shoulders. Time was she wouldn’t have been able to reach even with standing up, but the years had seen her grow and him shrink - or, rather, return to the size he used to be - and now it worked.

And besides, the second she made contact Jack had sunk to his knees anyway, putting his arms around her middle and pressing his face to her chest and holding her as though he was afraid something was going to pull her away from him.

These little moments happened. Rarely, only ever briefly, but they happened. He still refused point-blank to explain to her why they happened or what it was he was thinking about, but she didn’t need him to to be able to recognise when it was happening, or know what to do when it did.

“It’s alright, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere,” she said softly as Jack continued to cling.

Things were quiet for a little bit. Twilight could tell when the moment passed because Jack’s way of holding himself shifted. He went less limp, that slight tremor went away. Even once that happened the quiet continued a little bit longer and he did not let go.

“Well that was embarrassing,” he said eventually, muffled.

“Shh, no it wasn’t,” Twilight said, stroking his back.

“Felt pretty embarrassing…” Jack mumbled.

Prising his arms loose from around her Twilight leant back and put her hooves on his shoulders, the better to stare him down. Jack could not meet her eyes. In his defence, she had a lot eye to meet.

“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Jack,” Twilight said with firmness. He just gave a tiny shrug, which was probably all she could expect then. At least he hadn’t denied it.

“Are you ready to talk about it yet?” She then added, delicately.

For a second that distant, blank look returned to Jack’s eyes but he quickly blinked and shook his head.

“Nope,” he said, emphatically.

“That’s okay, whenever you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, I’m here. I’ll always be here, okay?”

Jack cycled through a few words that he might have wanted to say here, but decided against saying any of them and instead settled on saying:

“Thank you.”

Imperceptibly the mood lightened, both of them knowing that that particular conversational hump had been got over and they were now on smoother ground. Jack found himself able to look her in the face again and Twilight found herself smiling.

“Shall we go have lunch?” She asked.

Jack opened his mouth to say ‘Yes’ immediately but then glanced past her to her desk, where lights blinked mysteriously.

“You finished?” He asked.

“Nearly, just a few more,” Twilight said, a wing coming in to tilt his head so he was back to looking at her again, and not at a distracting desk. Jack fought this though.

“You should do those then,” he said.

“No, we can go,” said Twilight.

“No no, it’s important, you finish,” said Jack.

“No really it’s fine I can finish later.”

“No it’s okay you finish now.”

“No honestly it can wait, it’s not going anywhere.”

“No it’s better you get it all done now, less to worry about.”

A stalemate. Both of them pursed their lips.

“We could probably keep at this for hours, couldn’t we?” Jack asked.

“If we wanted to.”

“Could probably find a better way to fill those hours. Wink.”

Twilight’s mouth worked wordlessly.

“...are you...was that…?” She managed at length. Jack rolled his eyes.

“It was a dirty joke, yes. Not even an especially dirty one,” he said.

Twilight looked appalled.

“...let’s just go and have lunch,” she said, dropping back onto all fours and, with a spurt of magic, putting her desk console onto standby, drawing a definitive line under everything. Jack rose to his feet.

“Thank God. You’ve always got to go and make things awkward, Twilight, honestly,” he said.

She responded by magically yanking the rug he was standing on and toppling him flat onto his arse before sprinting full-tilt from the room.

“We’ll be late, Jack, come on!” She shouted back at him as he rolled about on the floor and scrambled back to his feet, running smack into the wall beside the door before actually managing to set out in hot pursuit.

“Where’d that come from?! You’re meant to be the mature one here, damnit! They let you run a planet?! Get back here! I’ll mace you good!”