Moving On

by Bad Horse

Friendship is just a stage

Twilight once again found herself alone in the library long after it had closed and her assistant Nickerdoodle had put the chairs up on the tables, swept the floor, and departed. The draft of her article lay unrolled on the table before her. Books with covers in different colors and fonts but all bearing Celestia’s seal were scattered across the rest of it surface. These were just the ones the princess had written while Canter had been lecturing. Celestia had written so many books over the course of thousands of years that no one but Celestia even knew what was in them all. It would take more than a lifetime just to read them.

If she’d taken that position at the University of Hoofington, Twilight could have done work like this during the day, as part of her job, instead of in an empty library at night. She'd been all set to—she'd even gone shopping for a house. For some reason she'd just never said "yes" to the search committee.

Twilight pushed Hoofington out of her mind and focused on the book open in front of her. If Celestia had had similar thoughts about Haydigger, it meant Twilight was onto something publishable. True, beside the princesses there were only six unicorns in all Equestria who might understand her essay. One was arguably insane, two hated her, and two would appreciate her work only if she inserted enough complimentary references to their own. But that was par for the course. Twilight rubbed her hooves together and began working her way through the old books, savoring the rough texture of their thick pages and the gradient of yellowing, from light brown at their edges to creamy white in the middle of each page. Her thesis might drag her into unknown waters, but she’d hang on relentlessly until she’d reeled it in, like the fisherpony in The Old Stallion and the Sea. If Celestia thought Twilight was still just trying to impress her, she’d think differently then.

After an hour, she found the relevant passage. Celestia had been talking about a god of the ancient Hipponians, but it was a similar idea. She anticipated Haydigger's thesis and dismissed it, demolishing Twilight's interpretation in a footnote. The essay was dated nearly three hundred years ago.

Twilight closed the book in a daze, realizing three things all at once. First, she really did want to impress Celestia. Second, nothing she could ever do would seem impressive to Celestia. Third, she didn’t give a damn what six unicorns in Canterlot and Hoofington thought of her.

As she reshelved the stack of books, rolled up her little scroll, and dropped it in a trashcan, Twilight recollected with a pang the days when she’d written simple reports about friendship that any of her friends could appreciate. She could hardly talk to them now. They used the same words she did, but they took them out of one context and plopped them willy-nilly into others, until everything degenerated into non-sense and Twilight had to use a special spell she had developed to stop herself from screaming at ponies about the implicit assumptions of dualistic thinking.

Also, there were the husbands and foals. The few times her friends were available, they spoke of meals, diapers, tantrums, or parent-teacher meetings. While she had become an expert on semantics and epistemology, they had become experts at life. Even Rainbow Dash, who had adopted but never married, sometimes seemed to be humoring her, as if there were something they all knew, as basic as knowing when to assume linearity or statistical independence, that she was blind to.

Once, the solitude and silence of the late hours had seemed peaceful to her, and the vast space reaching down to the tall windows at the end of the reading room and up to the vaulted ceiling had seemed grand. Now, it just made her feel small and alone.

She trotted over to the information desk, opened a drawer, and removed a roll of parchment. She unrolled about a foot of it on the desk, setting one small stone on each of the four corners to keep it open.

“Dear Princess Celestia,” she wrote. “Today I learned that friendship is just a stage.”

She set the quill back in the inkwell and stared at the paper for several minutes, but could think of nothing to add. So she cut it off from the roll, rolled it up tightly and tied it with a bright red ribbon. Then she opened the door to a large cabinet, which was nearly full of similar-looking scrolls, and added it to the pile.

The library turned dark as she turned out the last of the gas lights. She could still dimly see the rows of thick hardcovers and royal committee reports lined up in the reference section, as indistinguishable as the bureaucrats who had written them. Once Twilight had lived in a library, and the walls of books had defended her from the uncatalogued wilds outside, and at night she had felt the answers to all her questions nestling close about her, wrapping her more securely than any blanket. Now she had a library and a home, both full of books, none of them with the answers she needed.

She stepped out into the street, her breath misting in the crisp night air, and locked the door behind her. The moon which hung close over Canterlot reminded her that she knew one pony who would still be awake. A pony who knew something about loneliness. A pony who must, at times, have felt her special talent was a curse. A pony, she remembered with a twinge of guilt, whom she hadn't seen in years.

She had never dropped in on either princess uninvited. They had invited her numerous times to do just that, but Twilight had never dared to. And now that Celestia no longer wanted to spend time with Twilight, it seemed far less likely that Luna would.

The library's clock tower said it was nearly time for bed. She stood in the center of the empty street feeling as tired as she ever had. Far better, far safer, just to go home. Home, to the books, which were always there for her.

Twilight turned instead towards the castle and walked slowly up the nearly-empty streets.

* * * * *

As she approached the castle gates, Twilight saw that the guards on duty were barded in the gunmetal gray of Luna's night watch. They surely wouldn't recognize her, wouldn't believe that a middle-aged mare wearing an off-the-rack tan cardigan and a beaten canvas tote bag was a personal friend of the Princess of the Night. She stopped, wondering whether to give up and head home, when she remembered she still had Starflower's new library card in her bag.

Stepping forward, she floated out the card and introduced herself as the head librarian. The only proof she had of her story was the card and the brightly-colored "Ask a Librarian!" button attached to her cardigan, but the ranking guard brightened immediately at Starflower's name. "She's a sweet one. Bright as brass, too. You can leave that for her with the night porter."

As her hooves clicked on the slate tiles leading around the courtyard fountain and into the keep, she reflected that she was now more welcome at the castle as Starflower's delivery mare than as Twilight Sparkle. Of course those were just the outer guards. There would be no problem now that she was inside. Tailspin, the porter, was always pleased to see her. He was one of the few pegasi in the castle with a strictly groundside job. She suspected his cutie mark, which looked like a pegasus doing a cartwheel, had something to do with that.

She considered leaving Starflower the copy of Haydigger's On Being and Tea-Time she still had with her as well as the library card. Just to show the little darling what she was in for.

But once inside the keep, she found some strange unicorn mare behind the porter's desk instead of Tailspin, with a white coat and a tightly-bobbed black mane, wearing the silver vest of her office. She looked up from her ledger with a bored expression as if daring Twilight to say something. Of course, Twilight remembered with a sinking feeling, Tailspin was the day porter.

"I ... I have this library card for Starflower." She pulled the little white card out of her bag and floated it over to lie on the table.

"Princess Celestia's student?" The night porter's expression changed from boredom to amused pity. "That's sweet of you to come all this way, but ... you really didn't have to come all the way up here in the middle of the night. You do know we have mail service at the castle?"

"Oh, yes. I know. I—I also came to see Princess Luna," Twilight said, smiling as if she did this all the time.

The porter looked back down at her ledger. "Cases for the Night Court must be filed by sunset."

"Not a case. Just a visit."

The night porter peered over her spectacles and looked Twilight over more closely. "A visit."

Twilight nodded.

"On what business?"

"On ... she asked me to come."

The porter looked back down at her ledger, and flipped the first page over. "You have an appointment?"

"Oh, no. I mean, she asked me to come years ago."

The white mare blinked, set down her ledger, and fixed Twilight with a less-friendly gaze. "The Princess of the Night asked you to come years ago? And you didn't get around to it until now?"

"It's not like that! Well, it is like that, but...."

The porter removed her glasses, pulled a white handkerchief from her vest pocket, and began cleaning her glasses with them, all the while staring intently at Twilight.

Twilight gulped. "Is it a bad time? I can come back tomorrow if this is a bad time. Or the next day. Or I can just write her a letter. Can I leave a letter for her with you? You know what? Just tell her I said hi." She turned and trotted back towards the gate.

"Wait," the porter called after her. "What's your name?"

Twilight broke into a canter. She had no right, no right to come prancing up to the castle unexpectedly and expect Princess Luna to drop everything to see her. Not after all these years. Thank goodness she hadn't given her name. Her face burned just thinking about what she'd almost done. The guards at the gate stood aside and stared as she hurried past them.

Twilight increased her speed once out of the gate and galloped through the gaslit streets of Canterlot. She had to stop after only a block. A night watchpony watched with an air of professional curiosity as Twilight leaned against a lamppost, gasping for breath.

After catching her breath, she began walking. She didn't want to go home, or to the library, or back to the castle. Soon she realized she was heading downtown, toward the edge of Canterlot and the long road down to Ponyville. Which was absurd.

She stopped in the middle of an intersection and turned around in a circle slowly. The windows of the storefronts and of the walk-up apartments above them were dark. Almost a block behind her, back the way she had come, light streamed from a single lonely ground-floor window. She dimly remembered noticing it as she had run past it.

She turned back and approached it. Above the window a giant O loomed in the darkness. Twilight smelled a leftover trace scent of rising yeast and realized it was Pony Joe's donut shop. She quickened her pace. A donut. She didn't deserve to see the princess, but if she could just get a donut without being recognized, and sit in a corner and nibble on it, well, there wasn't anything wrong with that.

She pushed the wood paneling on the door with her nose and gave out a little yelp as it stayed solidly closed. She backed up and looked inside. A sign hanging in the window said, "Sorry, we're CLOSED! Come again tomorrow!" There, just beyond the locked door, was the table she and her new friends had stood around with Celestia all those years ago while they laughed about their disastrous first Grand Galloping Gala.

Twilight sat down abruptly, slumped against the door, and began to cry.

Comments

[pjabrony]

O. . . K, apparently the philosophical conversation wasn't irrelevant. If that's the case, then Chapter 1 should be rewritten to put more focus on that and less on the action of the library. Celestia stopped in to escort a young filly to get a library card. Just say that, and say, "While the filly was completing the form, Twilight remembered a point she wanted to discuss. . . " or something like that. Or start with Twilight alone at night, and have her flash back to the conversation. Go into more detail on how she drifted apart from her friends. From where I stand now, this looks like a story of a mare who fell too much in love with knowledge and is unhappy about it. If that's the case, focus everything on that and it won't seem so slow.

I will read more later.

[take flight]

While she had become an expert on semantics and epistemology, they had become experts at life.

damn

a lot of little 'oh wow' moments here, sentences that think

[Bradel]

This is really reminding me of the early parts of "Eternal". Twilight, stuck in a holding pattern. I'm finding your take on her future as a marginalized scholar both depressing and compelling. Then again, I actually spend my days worrying about things like epistemology, linearity and statistical independence. [For a good time / if you value your sanity don't] get me started on Bayesianism, omniscience, and perfect probabilistic knowledge.

But back to the point, I like the characterization in this chapter. It's obviously non-standard Twilight, given the age, but it feels believable to me, and you do good work in delivering the characterization in a steady flow. (I'd comment on consistency, but meh. I'm not going to read a Bad Horse story and expect that's something I really need to worry about)

It might be that I'm more hooked into the story, but I definitely felt like the writing was stronger in this chapter. There were still a couple unwieldy passages, but as I mentioned after Chapter 1, I think part of that is intrinsic to Twilight's viewpoint and fighting against it too hard would be a mistake. One or two personal issues with word choice, but that's just me being a pain in the butt and given that this is already published I feel a little odd bringing them up. (In particular, do a find on 'recollected'. Coming after descriptions of interactions with tangible objects, it took me a second to realize she was remembering and not re-collecting something she'd just put down).

I particularly liked Twilight's cabinet of unsent reports. Also, the line

If Celestia thought Twilight was still just trying to impress her, she’d think differently then.

Definitely looking forward to some Luna, especially since it didn't seem like a whole lot happened in this chapter. I find that very forgivable, because it's a short slice and I'm entertained by discussion of what many might find to be abstruse academic allusions, but I'm glad there's something already published to follow this.

[TheCloudtop]

Okay. Chapter two was better, but still I am unsure.

It seems like you are just putting Twilight into a future where she has lost all of her meaningful relationships, without much of an explanation. I know you said that her friends are leading their own lives, etc, but it still feels very unexplained. And I still don't get why Celestia would not be interested in Twilight anymore.

Will read the next chapter, if only to see where you take this.

[Blue_Paladin42]

I find I identify with Twilight in this story a bit more than I care to admit. Her feelings of loneliness, isolation, and regrets about how her life seems to have stalled, in so far as her relationships are concerned anyway, somewhat mirror many of the fears I have about my own life. It makes this story more than a little personally compelling.

[Princess Cadenza]

This is a nice story, I like it so far!

[Themaskedferret]

So far this is starting as a very beautiful and touching story. I'm genuinely saddened to know so many people will ignore or dislike this story.

The first chapter was appealing and pulled me in but I sort of would've liked to have more on how she drifted from her friends. It felt very sparse and I suppose to Twilight that makes sense but I would've liked to see her reminiscing more about it. Just remembering the old days and how they slowly managed to change.

I won't deny the cupboard with the scrolls hit me right in the gut. It felt so perfectly Twilight and at the same time so very tragic.

[DubstepPinkiePie]

This is your saddest fic I've ever read. Why wasn't it rated sad?