Follows A Little Spark 18&19

>You open your eyes, but it does not get any brighter.
>You’re lying in bed, perfectly still
>Too still
>You try to move a hand to your face, but neither one responds.
>You cannot, you discover, even feel your limbs, let alone move them
>Your head keeps moving very slightly, and it takes you some time to realize it’s due to your breathing
>Yet you cannot feel the rise and fall of your own chest.
>It takes you considerable effort to just turn your head to your left side.
>There should be a window there, where you’re looking
>Only darkness greets you.
>You can’t see
>You can’t move
>You can’t feel anything
>You can, however, start to panic
>Can’t see, can’t move, can’t feel, can’t THINK
>CAN PANIC
>CANTSEEMOVEFEELTHINK
>In a tiny corner of your mind not subsumed with primal fear, you realize you CAN think, and you’re thinking right now, only in this little part, only from what feels like a great distance.
>Your breathing is loud enough you can hear it now.
>It sounds as distant as your thoughts are from your chaotic mind.
>It sounds labored.
>Are you dying? Is this what death is like?
>A new series of minute movements arises in your neck, rhythmic, rapid, like a muscle spasm.
>It’s your pulse, you realize.
>It’s preposterously fast.
>Heart attack? Or is it connected to the breathing? Does your heart rate go up or down when you can’t breathe? What is the mechanism behind a heart attack, anyway?
>It’s hard to tell when you can’t feel your chest.
>You try to scream for help
>All that interrupts your hyperventilating is a moan, distant and indistinct.
>The area outside your fragmented awareness grows slightly brighter.
>You can see?
>The nearly-imperceptible outline of your window resolves as the light increases ever so slightly
>You can see!
>You try to get a grip on your breathing
>It’s tough work
>The light outside the window coalesces to a point, a small and dim one, so far away.
>It’s the moon, you realize. The moon is rising outside your window, but even on the horizon, it’s as small as if it were at the top of the sky
>As the light grows further, it eventually forms a dim but visible shaft from the window, falling across your bed.
>The moon continues to rise, changing the shaft’s angle downward. Now to the floor, now sweeping across it.
>It sweeps a dark shape five or so feet away from your bed.
>When the light passes over it, however, the shape is not illuminated.
>The moonlight just disappears into it, as if it were a massive void.
>You lose control of your breathing again, and it once more speeds up dangerously.
>Death? Is this the shape of death? No hooded or cloaked figure, no scythe, just this looming shape of nothingness.
>The light slips away from it, then disappears entirely.
>Once more there’s total darkness.
>Until two impossibly bright lights appear.
>Not lights.
>Eyes.
>The dark form is looking at you.
>Now you wish you could go back to not being able to see.
>The eyes shift as the figure looks around.
>Then they move towards you.
>You try to scream again, but it only adds wordless sound to your terribly fast breathing, making a hitching, stuttering sob.
>The few parts of your body you can feel start tingling. Your vision starts swimming – no, buzzing – and it’s hard to focus.
>The eyes of light dip down towards you.
>They’re very close now. You could touch them, shove them away, defend yourself, if only you could move your left arm.
>“Anonymous, steel thyself! ‘Tis only a dream!”
>A dream.
>A dream?
>Yes, yes it is. It’s a dream.
>You know this dream. A holdover from your nightmare-plagued youth. The most recent addition to a terrible variety that had survived the others’ extinction.
>The worst of them all, the one you couldn’t escape. Your punishment for figuring out how to avoid the rest.
>The only dream it was worse to be aware of than to suffer in thoughtlessness.
>The dream that gave you all the time in the world to think about what you distracted yourself with work or friends or the internet to avoid.
“L-Luna...”
>You manage to stutter it out through your rapid breaths
>They’ve locked themselves into a pattern now, like your whole body is shivering, not that you could feel it.
>The two eyes of light are a mess across your vision as they lift away from you.
“Help!”
>You can just barely rasp the word out.
>“Thy dreams are strange, Anon, we cannot simply banish them! Control thyself, and we can resolve it together!”
“C-cuh-count.”
>”What?”
“Count!”
>Luna’s glowing eyes blink a couple times, but she starts counting up slowly.
>You focus on the numbers and try to still your breathing. It’s difficult when you can’t feel your chest, when you lack that feedback, but you try to wrap your whole mind around those numbers.
>Luna, still only visible by her eyeshine, looks over you and moves side to side in a motion you can’t resolve.
>The motion – both visually and with shifts in sound direction – seem to help a little more, distracting you.
>Eventually you get your breathing under control, though your jaw still tingles.
>At least your eyesight is normal again.
>”Art thou recovered?”
“I, uh, well, kinda.”
>”What meanest thou?”
“Well, it’s pitch black, and I can’t move.”
>Luna’s horn starts glowing and her eyes stop, finally casting enough light around the room to see by.
>”Sorry, we forget that thou hast not our night vision.”
>When her horn dips low enough to be roughly in front of her eyes, you notice they exhibit a strong cyan-colored reflection, even without the supernatural bright white light she demonstrated just before.
“So are you here to save me or something?”
>She looks away from you. “We wish we could.”
“I’ll tell you now, this paralysis isn’t pleasant.”
>She starts looking about the room, apparently agitated.
>“We can’t help, Anon. What does this mean? For thee, for us?”
“Hey, stop that. If you start freaking out, I’m going to start freaking out again, and we’ll be even worse than where we started.”
>Talking around your semi-numb jaw is difficult, but you’re managing. The tingling’s mostly gone now.
>She settles, but only a little. “Fine, the long way it shall be. Is this a common nightmare?”
“Used to be. Less frequent the past several years.”
>”And thou sayest thou cannot move?”
“Yeah.”
>She returns to your bedside and looks your inert body over. “It… plains us, to see thee like this.”
“I’d say it pains me too, but if it did, I wouldn’t be able to feel it.”
>”This must be a fear of thine.”
“There’s a lot to be afraid of.”
>She cocks her head. “We know why ponies would fear it, but not thee. Tell us?”
“I don’t know, Luna. You’re the expert. All I know is it gives me time to think in a state I want to think the least. I knew a few people with traumatic injuries causing impairment. It’s inevitable, when you work with heavy machinery and enough people, even if I spent most of my time at a desk.”
>She’s silent while she takes this in, still looking at your striken form rather than meeting your eyes. “Thou workest with thy hands.”
“More through them than with them, back home. Lots of thinking, lots of computer work. Uh, computers, er, the thing you saw in my room I spent a lot of time with. I did most of my design work with it. It did calculations and visualization and stuff for me. Kinda hard to explain what I did to you, honestly.”
>”Some sort of sophisticated drafting table?”
“That’s not too far off. We’d call stuff like that CAD – computer-aided drafting, or computer assisted design, or whatever you feel like saying it means. It wasn’t everything, but it was part of it.”
>”But thou still doest it with thy hands.”
“Yeah. And, well, I can’t even get out of bed like this. How would I support myself? I’d have no independence, and all the time in the world to think on my helplessness and uselessness.”
>”Surely thou hast family thou canst rely on to care for thee.”
“No.”
>You’re much quieter.
“I was pretty much on my own.”
>”Thou art a stallion, Anon. Even between herds thou canst find shelter from any storm. Was there truly no going back?”
“Where I’m from, Luna, males were expected to fend for themselves. Going back home, to my parents or whatever, that’d be admitting defeat. Shameful. I was expected to care for myself.”
>”But thou art in Equestria now. Thou art cared for. Free.”
“No, it’s followed me. I threw away my cushy responsibility-free life in a fit of pride, when I asked Celestia to take me seriously. But that’s part of it, isn’t it? If I couldn’t make myself useful even here, I felt I’d still get kicked out.”
>”Plenty of useless stallions leadeth comfortable lives.”
“Yeah, well, not me. Besides, throwing myself into my work stopped me from thinking about anything more unpleasant. Back home I’d come home from work and get to work distracting myself. Exhaust myself to sleep, go to work, buckle down, come home, and repeat it. Couldn’t give myself time to think. Here, I don’t have that. So it’s just from one kind of work to another. Keep me busy, keep me sane.”
>Luna puts her head down on your bed at your side, looking ‘up’ at yours. “Thou remindest us of stallions from our time. Back when life was more dangerous. When stallions walked the perimeter of the herd as the mares recovered, when their power bolstered their mares’ tenacity, some becoming heroes in their own right. When they were still protected, but not as defenseless, nay, but as the last line of defense for the young and invalid. But the plans of ours and our sister’s worked. Life became peaceful. And when life was peaceful, stallions became… domesticated.”
“I’m not really domesticated. It’s something of a sticking point, if you hadn’t noticed.”
>She smiles at you. “We have most assuredly noticed.”
>You sigh and – with some effort- look back up at the ceiling.
“Being stuck like this, for me, is probably the only thing I fear more than death. My work is all I have, especially now.”
>“Skies above, no. Thou hast more to live for than that.”
“Like what?”
>”We – and our sister, and her student – have pulled thee away from thy work often, Anon. Thou hast us, and hast left thy work to spend time with us. We are sure – or at least most fervently hope – we are more than a mere distraction for thee.”
“I… yeah. Yeah, you’re right on that.”
>You let your head flop back to the left, to look at her again.
>She’s still smiling that sweet smile at you. “And is it not better?”
“Well, besides feeling stressed about falling behind, yeah. I enjoy our time together, and with Twilight. And even Celestia, though she’s only really opened up to me recently. I enjoy my work, but I’m not complaining about companionship, to what degree it’s available to me here.”
>”And is this dream not more bearable for our presence?”
>Your turn to smile.
“Yeah. Much better than being left to it alone, though I still wouldn’t call it great.”
>”Perhaps, Anon, thy helplessness and uselessness is only part of this dream. Thou hast, after all, hardly been either of late. Perhaps this dream riseth from another fear.”
“What’s that?”
>Her smile falters. “Isolation. Solitude.”
>Ah, one of the many thoughts you hated to be left to, in this nightmare’s typical vast time for thinking. You do your best to nod in agreement.
>”We know much about solitude, Anon. Absent our magic to dispel this dream, we shall at least alleviate thine. It seems, as this dream embodies, thou knowest some of what we’ve been through. More than we’d thought.”
>You tilt your head a little further as she looks away from you.
>”To be all alone, in the night.”
“Not nearly as long as you, Luna, but yeah. I know it.”
>She meets your eyes again, and her smile returns. “Then let us speak of all manner of things, until thou wakest to our sister’s morning.”

* * *

>You open your eyes once more, despite them having been already open.
>This time, you’re greeted with bright daylight
>Experimentally, you wiggle a foot.
>This time, it responds.
>You close your eyes again and heave a huge sigh, relishing the sensation of air entering and leaving your lungs, feeling your chest’s rise and fall.
>You’re free. Luna kept her word, and you’d talked for what felt like hours, but now you’re free.
>You reach a hand over to blindly grope at your nightstand for your phone. Your hand actually obliges, which brings another strange pleasure.
>Your body merely working as intended shouldn’t bring such joy.
>When you turn the screen on, though, what you see brings none.
>How the fuck is it so late?
>When you put the phone back, something catches your eye.
>You lift your arm and the overly plush blankets to find…
>Princess Luna’s sleeping head, laying just where it had been while you spoke in your dream.
>She’s lying on the floor about where you’d normally swing your legs over the side to get up.
>Good thing you hadn’t done so automatically, or you’d have kicked her in the noggin.
>And maybe impaled a calf on her horn.
>That would have been a rude wake-up call for both of you.
>Even as you gather yourself up to get out of bed the other way, though, your movement causes her to stir.
“Ah, hell. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
>She opens her eyes halfway and looks around blearily. “Ffforgive our intrusion.”
“Only if you tell me why.”
>She drops her head back to the bed. “Dreams normally end, Anon. Thine did not. It just… dissolved, and thou sunk beyond our reach. We came to be sure thou was not lost in a deeper nightmare than we could intervene in.”
“And you stayed?”
>”Ah, an old tradition,” She’s slurring some of her words, which is strange, considering she’s always been clear of speech even when mumbling or otherwise not making an effort of it.
>Is it weird for the a princess of the night to be so bad at waking up?
>Heh, not a morning pony.
>”Some ponies in bands sleepeth while others watcheth,” she continued. “Usually the watchers looketh out, beyond, for threats. When one of the herd is ill, one watcher instead looketh to them, foregoing their own protection to be more aware of threats to the stricken, and to monitor their condition. Before, this vigil was not risky, for a couple ponies would be alert to other danger besides. In modern times, it seems this vigil hath become symbolic.”
>You can’t help but smile, even as you rebuke her.
“I appreciate the thought, Luna, but I wasn’t sick.”
>She slides her head off the bed and drops it to the floor, out of your line of sight. “It was uncalled for. We apologize for our invasion of thy privacy,” she mumbles.
“Well, the biggest problem is the fact I’m wearing nothing but my boxers.”
>That and attendant post-waking quirks of anatomy in that area of your body.
>Not that she needed to know, and didn’t, thanks to how thick and fluffy the top layer of your bedding was.
>”Besides these poor excuses for useless armor,” she lifts a foreleg into your view, displaying one of her darkened metallic hoof-guards, “we wear nothing at all, Anon.”
>That does not help aforementioned quirks of anatomy.
“Ah, all the same, Princess, I’d just like a few minutes of privacy to get ready for the day.”
>She sits up again, looking back at you. “Please do not hold our too-great concern against us, Anon. Thou art right; we should not have remained. It was presumptuous of us, to an outrageous degree.”
“Look, it’s fine. Honest. I understand your concern. Just… not something I expected, nor something that’s normal for humans who aren’t, well… Bit of a culture clash there. We’re cool.”
>She looked content, until the last bit. “C-cool? Oh, as we feared, a chilling between friends-”
“Chrissakes, no. We’re, uh, warm, I guess. Everything’s fine. Seriously. It’s alright. I’ll see you this evening, okay? Get some rest in a bed, instead of beside one; you look like hell warmed over. I don’t want you wearing yourself out on my account, I’d feel guilty as hell after all you’ve done for me.”
>She took a couple steps back before dipping her head to the floor again, this time far enough away you could still see her. Her eyes met yours briefly. “Thank thee, Anon.”
“No, thank you. You made last night nice enough to forget it was a nightmare.”
>She smiles at you, then in what you could only describe as a loud inverse pop, she vanished.
>Teleportation is a good way to not get the guards talking about what could be construed as a walk of shame, you suppose.
>Today is going to be a weird day.