(Not) Falling Asleep

by themoontonite

Rating: everyone
Tags: Slice of Life, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Sad, Original Character
Length: 2199

Dreams are for the dead, work is for the living.

Raven Song doesn't hate her job. Honest! It's just... it could be better, right? Most ponies she knows don't go in with this overwhelming feeling of gloom and misery; no storm cloud of self loathing following them onto the train in the morning. Then again, most ponies don't have to fetch tea for the Princess of Equestria.

Written for a speedwrite for Quills and Sofas where it... placed? I think? and edited with the help of Red and Kim. Art by mewnikitty on Tumblr and used with her permission.

Published 2021-02-01 16:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2021-02-03 07:00:13 UTC

Please Stay a While

Author's Note

this version contains an edited version of the ending! theres uh, no existing version of the original but i assure u that the current ending fits the tone of the story a little better

Please Stay a While

Mornings were always precarious for Raven Song. Always fraught with uncertainty, dread, with a lingering regret she couldn’t shake. Maybe it was a side effect of living alone or because of her line of work; but it managed to seep into every facet of her routine in a way that felt suffocating on the worst of days.

Today was not the worst of days. By her metric, today was almost good. Almost good was as close as she could get anymore. Raven felt like she was doomed to forever skate the line that separated good and good enough. Whatever. She stuffed down every noisy thought with the help of the bubbling of the coffee pot. The coffee maker was left to its own devices as Raven put a record on, letting the soft strings of a local orchestral group fill the stifling air of her townhouse.

The comfort of cheap coffee carried her through her commute, the gentle rattling of the subway car lulling her into a semblance of peace. Raven Song was alive. This, she was told, was a good thing. Truly, it was! Her life was not devoid of joy or care or warmth or any of the things that sustained a pony. Yet, something still maligned an otherwise peaceful existence

It was her. She was the empty spot in Ravens’ day. Sitting there in her office, only a few minute’s walk from the tea room. Her aura, her presence, could be felt even through the smooth marble walls and long corridors that separated them. Raven suspected she would’ve been a happier mare had her life chosen any path besides this one.

On particularly bitter days Raven blamed her mother, Daisy Chain. Not that she had any say in what would become of Ravens' life in the decades that followed. No. Instead, Raven blamed her for having the compassion to help plan the funeral for a friend of the most powerful mare in Equestria. Raven never met Applejack. She never met any of the old Elements. The only two she came close to knowing were Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie.

She only knew them through the way they stole her mother away for months on end, in the way that their deaths carved a gulf between Raven and the only other pony she really knew.

There were Twilight's aides, of course, there to foalsit Raven. They didn’t count. She felt like an ass, wallowing in her pity regardless of Twilight Sparkle herself paying ponies to take care of her. Even as Twilight’s friends died around her, she still cared for even the smallest of fillies.

Now though? As she pushed her way into the castle proper, making a beeline for her station, she didn’t feel bad at all. Twilight didn’t care. At least not anymore. Even when she was young there was something in her eyes, some shimmer of hope that sought to soothe the tangled wires of her angry adolescent mind. There was no such light flickering softly anymore. Twilight’s eyes were dull, lifeless; as arid and vapid as the speeches she gave.

“Raven Song? Come in.”

Raven’s hoof hadn’t even touched the door before Princess Twilight’s voice cleaved through her fragile concentration. She froze for a moment, hanging suspended in the space between words as her hoof hovered over the doorknob. Swallowing a lump, she turned the handle and nudged her way into the Princess’s office. There was a tea tray carefully balanced on her back.

“Please, sit down.” Twilight didn’t look up from her paperwork, snout buried in a veritable mountain of parchment. The door swung shut behind Raven as a table was dragged into view. Twilight looked up, straightening its placement, before returning to work. She had yet to even look at Raven.

Raven offloaded the tray, carefully separating saucers and cups and carafe and tea pot. She took pride in her work, getting everything just perfect for Twilight. Twilight knew how she liked her tea and wasted no time in telling Raven in excruciating detail upon her hiring. Raven used to use a thermometer, carefully monitoring the temperature of the water like a hovering parent. Now she knew just by the way the steam cut the stuffy air of the small room, the way it curled in the lifelessness that hung languid around them.

“You don’t dream much anymore.” Raven hated that. She hated how much Twilight knew. Even more than that, she hated how little Twilight cared. She showed concern, certainly. It was her duty as ruler of Equestria. But she didn’t really care. Not like a friend would care. She cared like a doctor, cold and mathematical. Raven’s continued living was beneficial to Twilight and nothing else. There was no care in their relationship.

Relationship. What an asinine word. Raven was hesitant to even consider the two of them as acquaintances, much less as friends. It was a relationship, one strictly professional in nature, and every moment Raven spent trapped in this tiny office was a moment being stolen from her by a mare who had forgotten how to feel.

“No, I suppose I don’t. Maybe I’m just too busy to dream anymore.” Raven chuckled, a dry sound that was bereft of any joy or kindness. Raven used to laugh, or at least try to laugh. But it was wasted on Twilight. She never laughed, never smiled, never so much as made eye contact with Raven anymore.

“I don’t dream much either.” Twilight lifted her eyes and levelled them on Raven for the first time in months. Her blood ran cold. “Not like I used to dream anyways.”

Twilight broke eye contact and Raven dabbed up the thin layer of sweat that had coalesced on her brow. “That’s… Interesting. How did you used to dream, Princess?”

“Please, it’s Twilight. Why does no one call me Twilight anymore?” The Princess shook her head, her eyes fixed cleanly on a stack of books beside Raven. She didn’t dare move. “I used to dream of love. Of fear, of sadness, of anger. I used to dream in feelings, Raven, and now I just see work. Stacks of paper, laws and bills and treaties. I wonder if this is how Luna felt.”

Raven nodded along, her lips pursed. She had delivered her tea and could leave, right? She could leave; would leave. As she stood to depart, Twilight’s gaze snapped to meet Raven’s, and for a moment, Twilight looked like she was scared. “Is there anything else you needed, Pri— Twilight?”

“Just stay, for a second. No one calls me Twilight and no one stays and... And maybe I did that to myself. Have I ever hurt you, Raven?” Twilight had set aside her crown, pushed the stacks of paper to the very limits of her desk, and returned her quill into its well. Raven felt small.

“No, I don’t think you have.” Twilight was kind. All of Equestria knew that. Raven thought there might be more to being alive than empty kindness.

“That’s… You’re lying.” Raven flinched as Twilight stood, towering over her. A wave of sparkling mane cast itself across her vision as the distance between them was closed. Raven had to crane her neck to see into Twilight’s eyes. “Look! You’re terrified of me. What did I ever do to you?”

Raven didn’t know what to say. What had she done? There was nothing explainable, nothing easily solvable for Raven to point at. It was what she hadn’t done, it was what Raven had lost. There were things in her life that she would never be able to get back. “You took my mom from me, for starters.”

“Oh.” Twilight was so much more eloquent when she was playing Princess. When she was loaded down with her regalia, standing in front of an adoring crowd. She spoke like she owned the heavens. Here? Here she was powerless, meek.

“I didn’t mean — I know you couldn’t have done anything more. You just, when she was helping you with everything, I never saw her.” For years. For years. “I don’t know how hard you’ve had it. I don’t know what it’s like to be you. But you don’t know what it’s like to be me! I miss her, is all, and it’s all I can think about when I see you.”

Twilight took a step back. Raven couldn’t tell what had changed but she seemed smaller somehow. More real. Like if she touched Twilight there would be more to her than just smoke and the promises of friendship long since buried. She sat in the chair next to Raven, setting her crown on the table between them. It was the first time she had seen anypony sit in that seat since she started working for the Crown.

“Wow, this cushion is stiff.” Raven couldn’t help but giggle and that seemed to lift the spirits of the room a little. “Daisy was a wonderful mare but you don’t need some old administrator to tell you that. If, if it helps at all, you remind me of her.” Tears were starting to pool in Twilight’s eyes. It was the most vulnerable Raven had ever seen her. So, she stretched a comforting hoof across to grip Twilight’s foreleg. “She, like you, was smart and put-together, hard-working and honest. She had a great sense of humor. A special sort of levity to her.”

The two of them remained in silence for a few minutes. The quiet was comfortable, Raven had decided. It wasn’t like every other day with Twilight, where the only sound was the scratch of quill upon paper. Raven was the first to speak, hesitant to the extreme. “How do you… how do you stop missing them?”

Twilight blinked and turned away from Raven for a moment. She had a distant look in her eyes, searching deep for an answer that might satisfy her curious little pony. “You don’t. It just hurts less, over time.” Twilight’s voice was quiet. “Everything reminds you of them at first. It doesn’t help when they have awards or boutiques or parties or sanctuaries or whole parts of town named after them, you know? Still, it hurts less and less every day, just by a little.”

Raven nodded, withdrawing her hoof to set it limp in her lap. “Makes you feel kinda guilty, doesn’t it?”

Twilight nodded, sucking in an unsteady breath. “Yeah. Yeah it does. It has to happen though. They wouldn’t want me crying over them, missing them every night. They stood for something and I,” Twilight was beginning to cry “I have to do right by them. If it means missing them less, until they’re just distant figures, then that’s what it has to be. For both their sake and my own.”

Raven found herself crying too, a gentle sniffle that had been waiting years to break free. There was a camaraderie in mutual sorrow, an understanding of the world. “I think Mom is proud of me. I hope she’s proud of me.”

This time it was Twilight’s turn to comfort Raven, a feat she didn’t know the Princess was even capable of. The hoof on her shoulder was a lifeline and Raven took it, dragging herself steadily out of the murky waters of despair. “I know she is. Though I think if she were here, she’d berate both of us for being so oblivious of the other’s feelings.”

Raven smiled, imagining her firecracker of a mother shouting down the Princess of Equestria. “We deserve it, too. Twilight, you were… You were telling me about dreams. Why don’t you dream anymore?”

Twilight sighed, straightening her back and biting her lip as in thought. “It’s… I spend so much time working that I never get to see anything else. The truth is I do dream, kind of. I have to look after ponies when they sleep and when I come back to my dreams I’m here, digging around in cabinets and filing things away. Always. The work never stops.”

Raven grimaced. “I know how that feels. Don’t you have an aide?”

Twilight made an unsteady gesture with her hoof. “I do but… It’s hard. Before, with Celestia and Luna, there were two of them. Now? At the end of the day, there’s nopony else who can raise the sun and the moon. Just me.”

Raven nodded along, trying for a moment to imagine the kind of pressure Twilight was under. Sure, everypony was the best at something, but was that fair to Twilight? Was any of this fair? The way some unseen hoof guided their lives; it felt like a robbery on the worst of days. “I really can’t imagine how that feels but… I’m here for you, if that means anything. As a friend.”

Twilight’s eyes sparkled for a moment, a serene smile gracing her face. “I’ll keep that in mind. If I ever need anything I’ll let you know. As a friend.”