//------------------------------//
// (2 AM) Wake-Up Call 
// Story: The Space Between Stars 
// by Novelle Tale 
//------------------------------//


Dedication: 
For Dad. 

I wish we had gotten to use our telescopes together. 

Happy Birthday. 






“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

I slowly blinked my eyes open. It was still dark, of course it was still dark, four-year-olds never seemed to understand the concept of sleeping in. I squinted up at the shadowy, bouncing ball currently turning my bed into a trampoline.

“Twilight, I think it might be a little too early for Daddy,” I offered, almost hopefully. I craned my neck towards the alarm clock—almost two AM? “Or maybe it’s too late,” I considered.

Even in the gloom, I could see Twilight’s glee morph into a frown as she finally stopped bouncing.

“But you said if I ate all my dinner and went to bed early, we could get up to watch the comet,” she said plaintively. “You said it, you said it, Daddy.”

“Oh. So I did.” I blinked again, the last cobwebs of sleep dissolving away as I finally sat up. My joints only creaked a little bit as I did so. 

Twilight watched me expectantly, wide-eyed and impatient.

“Alright, alright,” I sighed, but I was already smiling as I slid out of bed. “You’re lucky Mommy is on her business trip, I bet she would’ve gobbled you up if you’d woken her up at two in the morning.”

“I would have used finer precision if Mommy had been here,” Twilight answered primly, hopping off the bed with one last bounce. 

“‘Finer precision’?” I asked, raising an eyebrow as I followed the little hoofsteps down the hall to the observatory. “Have you been reading the dictionary before bed again?”

“No!” Twilight answered  vehemently. And then, more quietly. “I was reading the telescope manual.”

“Alright, alright, fair enough,” I said with a chuckle, pushing the door open. Twilight pushed through the gap as soon as she fit, racing over to the telescope. “I take it you’re excited?”

“Mhm!” 

I chuckled again, but didn’t comment further. The ‘Observatory’, as we had taken to calling it, was really just an office with an attached balcony that faced the back of Canterlot Mountain. There were almost no street lamps to pollute the night, and the rest of the house—and the small hill it lived on—blocked off most of the rest of the lights of Canterlot proper. All told, it was a pretty great setup for a hobbyist astronomer, with a good spread of stars and Milky Way visible most nights.

“I don’t know, Twilight, what if we can’t find it?”

“We will!” she answered, glaring up at me in determination.

“Are you sure?” I asked, feigning skepticism. “The sky is just so big, and we’re so small.” 

Speaking of small… I lit my horn, floating the telescope through the balcony doorway, thankful that I had assembled it earlier. Fiddling with such tiny parts was never much fun in the dark.

“But we know where to look,” Twilight exclaimed triumphantly, pointing one little hoof to the sparkling sky. “It’s between the Daddy and the Filly— I-I mean, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper,” she stammered.

“The ‘Big Dipper’, what’s that now?” I asked. The smile in my voice would have betrayed me to Shining or any adult, but Twilight was still young enough to miss it. 

I would miss it when she no longer was, I realized with a pang.

“Moondancer told me their real names in class today,”  Twilight said. She turned her back on me to hide her face, but I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. “That was a mean trick, Daddy.”

My chest panged again, a little softer—in guilt, I realized.

I set the telescope down, swapping out the lens with my magic even as I focused my attention on the sad little filly before. “I’m sorry Twilight, I wasn’t trying to play a trick on you.”

“You lied,” she pouted, still not looking at me. I stared down at her little head and sighed, but I was smiling.

“You really are growing up,” I muttered, bittersweet. I stepped over and dropped a hoof onto her head, ruffling her mane.

“Hey!” she cried.

“I didn’t mean to trick you. I just like thinking about you and me playing in the sky forever,” I admitted, more truthfully than I had meant to. 

“But we’re already gonna do that,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes as she tried to push my hoof away from her mussed hair.

“Us? Play forever?” I asked with a gasp.

“Duh!” she said, grunting in effort as she tried to remove my hoof. “Daddy, let go, we hafta see the comet.”

“Oh no,” I whispered.

“Daddy?” She glanced up at me, her upset forgotten.

“I… I can’t lift my hoof,” I explained. “It’s stuck.”

“S-stuck?” Twilight’s mouth formed a little ‘o’ of surprise.

“I think… I… I’m being sucked in,” I said with a grunt, struggling and failing to lift my hoof away.

“Use your magic!” she said, her own horn lighting shakily. I lit mine, only for the glow to stutter once, twice, and snuff out.

“I-I can’t, I–” I breathed in sharply. “I know what this is.”

“What is it, what is it?” 

“It’s… a black hole! Not light or magic can escape!”

“What!” Twilight squeaked as I scooped her up in my hooves in a massive bear hug, and then she was laughing.

“We just have to weather the storm,” I cried, spinning us around. “The only way to escape the black hole is with a hug.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Twilight giggled.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to be true,” I said, hugging her tighter. 

She giggled harder, and as her little hooves wrapped around my neck, my heart melted in exactly the same way as it did the day she was born, when she gripped her little hoof onto mine, so tight,  like she’d never let go.

“You’re so silly, Daddy,” she said, still giggling. “And you lie a lot.”

“I guess that’s true,” I offered blandly, slowing my spinning and drawing to a stop. “But you know, technically, I didn’t lie.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s true!” I lowered Twilight to the ground and sat beside her, the marble of the balcony cool against my flank. “The scientific names for the Big Dipper and Little Dipper are Ursa Major and Ursa Minor,” I said, pointing with my hoof to first one constellation, and then the other.

“Like the monsters?” Twilight asked, frowning up at the sky and eying the stars thoughtfully.

“Yes, the Major is the parent, the mother, and the Minor is the baby—the filly,” I amended.

“What if it’s a boy?”

“The colt,” I amended further. “Or the kiddo, for either or whatever in between.”

Twilight nodded slowly, apparently satisfied. “So the mom and the baby are always together, even in the sky.”

“Mhm,” I said, dragging the telescope over with my magic and adjusting the focus with a practiced horn. “There’s a lot of space between stars, as I’m sure you remember.” Twilight’s back straightened, and she nodded once, proudly. 

“But even though their stars are far apart, we can see them both, and don’t they look so close?” I gestured my hoof from side to side, spanning the distance between the two twinkling constellations. “And they can still be together, always, if they look up at the sky.”

“Daddy, that doesn’t make sense, they’re in the sky. And if they’re far apart, the sky won’t bring them closer,” Twilight said with an exasperated sigh, but she was still smiling.

“But they can feel closer,” I replied.

“But they won’t be closer, in real life,” she insisted.

“I guess that’s true,” I hummed. “But you know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’ll understand someday.”

“But I understand now—”

“Annnnd, locked,” I said, the magic around my horn fading and leaving us in darkness once again. “Do you want to see the comet? I can put the telescope away if you don’t.”

“No, no, I do, I do, I wanna see!” Twilight pushed forward, climbing into my lap and practically jamming her face into the eyepiece. Several beats of silence passed and then—

“Woooooow,” she whispered, long and low. “It’s so green.” Another pause of thoughtful wonder. “And so far. Daddy, how far is it?”

I tapped a hoof to my chin. “I’d say probably about… 96 million miles.”

“96 million?!” Twilight exclaimed. “That’s, that’s… that’s so far!”

“At least as far as from here to Ponyville,” I confirmed.

Twilight pulled back from the microscope, tilting her head back to make a face at me. “It’s much farther than that.”

“From here to Manehatten, even,” I agreed.

“You’re ridiculous,” she mumbled, giggling again.

“‘Ridiculous’?” I asked, mock offense coloring my words. “That’s a mighty big word for such a small filly. Did you learn that from Moondancer, too?”

Twilight leaned back, crossing her legs across her chest. I wrapped mine around her in a hug, waiting.

“... No,” she finally answered.

“No?’

“I read it in the dictionary,” she admitted.

I threw back my head and laughed to the sky.


______________________


The crickets chirped more in Ponyville than they did in Canterlot, Twilight thought idly as she opened yet another box of books.

The Golden Oaks library had had a decent enough collection to begin with, but seeing her own personal store join it was deeply gratifying, if, well, somewhat laborious. She’d already sent Spike to bed; the poor dragon had been too tired from a full day of unpacking in the summer heat to protest his early bedtime.

Thump, thump!

Twilight startled out of her reverie, turning to the door. Who in Equestria would be coming to the library so late?

“Special delivery!” a chipper voice offered helpfully from the other side.

“Oh.” Twilight trotted briskly to the door, opening the top half. Golden light spilled out into the night, illuminating the grey delivery pegasus hovering just in front of the door.

“Here you are, Miss!” she offered brightly, holding out an oblong brown package.|

“Oh, um, of course. Thank you.” Twilight took it in her magic. 

“Please sign here to confirm receipt, and then I’ll be out of your mane.” She haphazardly offered an only somewhat crumpled receipt, digging in her bag for a quill. 

“Of course,” Twilight said again, lighting her horn and stamping the paper with her magic, no quill required. “Thank you.” She glanced up at the package still floating beside her. “Do you know the sender…?”

“No, Miss, just that it was a special delivery.” The pegasus saluted, nodding once, clearly satisfied by a job well done. “Have a great night.” 

And then she was gone, swooping away into the dark. The crickets once again filled the silence she left with their thoughtful chirping.

Twilight closed the door gently and settled the box on the ground, already tugging the paper off. Her eyes widened with recognition.

She’d know that beat up blue travel case anywhere.

A simple note fluttered toward the ground, and Twilight fished it out of the air with her magic before it could land.


Twilight,

An old friend to help you map out your new sky.

Love,
Dad