Sunset nestled her head in the cavernous crook of Starlight’s neck, her crimson hair soft against Starlight’s rough blend of heliotrope skin and coat. Her fingers entwined around the nubs along the edges of Starlight’s hoof-hand, where the fingers could or should have been. Starlight breathed in with lungs that did not need the air, and let herself relax against Sunset’s embrace.
Their view was the same as it always was, sitting on the edge of the field of bodies, the forever inaccessible portal still shining forever out of reach above them. She tried to meditate on the calmness of that unchanging sight. Its constancy. Its contrast with the breathing warmth that she could feel against her side.
They could let hours pass in such a state. Even days. Even weeks. Their bodies would not hunger or thirst or tire. Their joints would not stiffen. Bedsores would not form. Their bodies were not really bodies here, in the Void, like they were in the outside world, or were back in Equestria. Their bodies were, as far as Starlight theorized, magical constructs that felt and worked how their minds expected their bodies to feel like and work from a lifetime of living in them.
But those long discussions on the subject with Sunset and Twilight, complete with experiments and theories written in the unraveled threads of sacrificed clothing, were years ago now, even though they kept going round and round on the same ideas long after the last time any of them or their friends had anything new to say on it. That had been the fate of all conversations about the Void itself a long time ago.
Still, round and round they went, those old conversations. And what else was there to do in the ever-lengthening stretches of time when it was just the two of them, amidst the sleeping bodies of every person that now mattered in their lives?
“What if I could figure it out, Sunset? How to make the dreamlands work for a unicorn mind like ours?”
Sunset took a moment to respond, as if needing to thaw out her voice after being frozen in an Ice Age of silence.
“But one of us still has to be out here, to wake the other one back up. We can’t both go in there together.” She gave Starlight a squeeze. “And I’m not leaving you out here. What would even be the point if I couldn’t be with you?”
Starlight looked away, as if she was contemplating the distance, so that Sunset couldn’t see her face.
“You know, I could probably teach Twilight to do that. It’s not like it’s impossible for humans to learn how to manipulate the magic here, just because they grew up without unicorn horns.”
Sunset frowned deeply. “Starlight, you know what happened the last time someone said something like that.”
And, without thinking, Starlight responded,
“I mean, Twilight’s not the one suggesting it, and it’s not like Twilight would use it for what she—”
She stopped when her brain caught up to her mouth. Awful. Awful. How could she do that to Sunset, to remind her of the last thing Starlight would ever want to remind her of? The worst thing that had ever happened in all their years in the Void? And to be so flippant about it…
When Starlight could bring herself to look at Sunset again, she saw that she was staring off at where Twilight lay.
“I mean, she’s so happy in there, you know? Everything feels right. I can see why she feels so awful when she’s out here instead. And if we’re in there together, what, she’ll be the one to watch over us alone? She wouldn’t even have you, like how I have you. I know she would do it for us if we asked, and she’d gladly try to suffer through it, but I could never put her through that.”
Starlight knew, from her own visits to the dreamlands, that Sunset was right about how happy Twilight was, living that life she had expected to live in a world full of wonders and the love of her friends. Even Sunset’s absence from it was not a dark cloud hanging over them, or an excised memory. In the dreamlands, Sunset had gone home to Equestria to live happily ever after there, explaining why her visits were so occasional, and why every time she took such joy in catching up with her friends just like the old days. And Starlight…
Sunset cut off her thoughts by continuing.
“I don’t know. I feel like it’s almost… good that we can’t spend time in there like they can. That we can’t remember what it’s like to not remember. Otherwise we’d just be so tempted to, oh, I don’t know. Figure out how to send all of us to the dreamlands at the same time? If that’s even possible?“
Starlight laughed. “Well, isn’t that an idea? That would solve everything, wouldn’t it?”
Sunset gave her a wry smile. “Well, then what would happen if a new arrival comes? Imagine being stuck in a featureless void for all eternity with what for all you know are a pile of corpses? I could never leave anyone to a fate that horrible!”
“We could leave the Memory Stone, and maybe write a book on how Equestrian magic works, so that whoever ends up here after us could, after who knows how many years, figure out how to join us?”
Sunset raised an eyebrow.
“Do you really think a book is going to do that?”
Starlight laughed. “It was just an idea. I mean, it’s not like this magic would work on our unicorn minds anyway. I don’t know.”
She changed the subject to another old conversation that kept going round and round.
“You know, it’s been at least a year since Zipporwhill arrived. What if she’s the last one? What if the Mirror is broken, or Juniper Montage is dead, or whatever, and there won’t be anyone coming in and out of here for all eternity?”
“Starlight, we always say that right before a new arrival comes.”
Starlight held her tight with her strong arm.
“But what if?”
And Sunset responded as she always did in the last several dozen hundred times they had had this exact same conversation.
She sighed with pronounced exasperation. She let a good amount of time in silence pass, for good measure. Then she said,
“I don’t know. I guess it’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there.”
Their lips met, and held, and could hold forever, a breathtaking kiss between two bodies that did not need to breathe. Hands met flesh, rough hairs half-merged into skin meeting skin that was supple and soft and warm.
Starlight Glimmer was the unicorn that wrote the spell that could remove the cutie mark of an Alicorn Princess. Given years of time alone with Sunset and nothing to otherwise distract her, of course she could figure out how to use her Empathy magic for herself.
Minds met, emotions reacting to emotions reacting to emotions, mirrors of mirrors, reproducing endlessly.
It was the only way that Starlight could believe Sunset when she told her that no matter what Starlight thought of the smeared and blended mix of human and equine features she inhabited, that she was, in every way, beautiful.
It was the only way that Starlight could believe that Sunset could know every awful thing she had ever done in her life, and tell her that still, in all ways, mind and soul and body and heart, that she truly deserved the love that Sunset gave her.
And in those moments, and only those moments, could Starlight quiet the incessant hum of regret in her mind, if not for long.