Mortal coil
The weather being nice, Twilight had decided on walking home.
It had been another unexpectedly busy day for her. Well, maybe not that unexpected. Handovers were hard enough if she was simply stepping aside for a few days for an off-world conference or a day off - having to arrange things for her imminent retirement was providing fresh and exciting problems for her to deal with on top of the stale and unexciting problems she was used to having to handle.
While she might have thought her workload would taper off towards the end, it was in fact reaching a peak. She felt she should perhaps have seen this coming.
Still, wouldn’t be much longer now. She could almost taste retirement, even if she kept expecting someone to come out and tell her she couldn’t or that the whole thing was some weird joke she hadn’t known about. That in a couple of weeks she would no-longer be either princess or governor still felt a little unreal, as real as it really was, really.
She imagined it would take a few years for it to sink in properly.
Stopping briefly to allow a happily screaming pair of foals to gallop past (followed closely by a harried and apologetic-looking parent or caregiver) Twilight sighed and did her best to put it out of her mind.
Nothing else she could do about it today. Today she’d done all she needed to and all she could, and everything else was just waiting on others to do things or get back to her. And, pre-retiree that she was, she wasn’t in the mood to hang around waiting for more work. For today, she was going back home.
And back to Jack.
They had been living together for a good few years now. Prior to this Jack had just sort of hung around her office bothering the night staff whenever Twilight had gone home, being as how he didn’t need anywhere to go and had nowhere to go. Sometimes he’d wandered out into the streets in search of anyone else still awake if there hadn’t been enough night staff to bother.
That he’d wanted to go back home with Twilight had been obvious to everyone, himself included, but it had seemed an inappropriate thing to pursue for reasons none had sought to dwell on, let alone explain. So he never did.
That Twilight had wanted him to come home with her was also obvious, and that she had also considered it inappropriate to pursue for nebulous reasons was equally obvious. So nothing had continued to happen.
It had been Nova who’d shaken them both out of this, leading to tentative sleepovers as a proof-of-concept, and cohabitation had followed. Whatever else had followed remained between Jack and Twilight, and this was another thing everyone else was more than happy not to dwell on, this time with perhaps slightly better reason.
So it was not a surprise that Twilight came home to Jack, as indeed she’d been expecting this. What was a surprise to her was that he did not greet her at the door like he normally did (waiting like an eager puppy as he had on more than one occasion described it) and did not reply when she called out to him.
Mysterious, she felt. Maybe worrying, she wondered? She wasn’t sure, so she cautiously moved in. She spotted him in short order, sitting at a desk and, apparently, being intensely absorbed in something. Seeing an opportunity that didn’t often arise, Twilight quietly moved in behind him.
It was normally quite hard to sneak up on Jack, as he possessed a level of awareness that bordered on the omniscient, assuming his attention wasn’t elsewhere. He could - and often did, as a party trick - tell that people were coming at him from miles away. Sometimes, to Twilight’s continuing bafflement, he even knew when visitors were teleporting, turning to face empty air for seemingly no reason just before someone flashed into it.
This was because while you might have thought you were sneaking up on him, what you were really doing was sneaking up on the body he’d made for himself, while he was actually under a (forbidden) mountain and his mind just sort of swum about in the air across the entire planet. Hard as it was sometimes to keep that in mind.
So if you did sneak up on him it generally meant he was concentrating on something.
(Or was daydreaming. Or was distracted. Or was having a moment.)
This time though it looked like concentration. He was staring. Staring at…
…flies?
“What were you doing?” Twilight asked, and Jack even jumped, straightening up and turning around and attempting to block her view of the little line of flies with his body in as casual a pose as he could manage. It didn’t quite work.
“Oh, nothing much. Just, you know, thinking about life,” he said, over-cooly, making a show of folding one leg over the other in another ill-fated attempt at seeming natural and at-ease. Twilight leant around him.
“While looking at dead flies?” She asked.
Defeated, Jack shifted a little so he could sit more comfortably and was no-longer blocking the view. There were the flies, a little collection of the things in a little row. Dead.
“Well, life and death, innit? Juxtaposition, innit?” He said.
This was a profoundly unconvincing and unsatisfying answer, and Jack was plainly in no hurry to add to it or explain himself further. He had on one his smiles, the ones that suggested he thought he was being funny. Twilight cocked an eyebrow at him. Normally this got results.
“...okay,” she said.
For a second she saw him wavering but then he straightened up and clapped his hands together. Twilight’s turn to jump.
“Anyway!” He declares. “Now that that dull bullshit is out of the way, let’s change the subject! You! Retiring! Ooh, big stuff, big stuff, exciting! This is going to be a big change for you, isn’t it? You’ve been at this for a while now.”
Twilight gave a restrained (and only slightly strained) smile.
“Quite a while.”
“You going to become one of those aimless retirees who just keeps showing up at the office all the time even though they don’t work there anymore?” Jack asked.
“No.”
“Good. That sort of thing is just depressing. Going to be one of those fun retirees who does cool fun stuff and lives footloose and fancy-free?”
It was getting increasingly difficult for Twilight to keep from smiling properly.
“Yes,” she said.
“Thought so, you have a look of footloose and fancy-free about you, and I always said you were cool. Well that’s good! Great! Fun! Cool! That means you’ll have even more time that I can bother you in, now! Hah! Potentially forever! Forever and ever, Twilight. Forever and ever…” Jack trailed off, eyes starting to get that distant look they sometimes did.
“Jack?”
He snapped out of it, reaffixed his expression of blithe detachment with only a little visible effort.
“Just thinking, you know. Always thinking, me. But, uh, question: if you retire, that doesn’t mean you stop being immortal, does it?” He asked quickly, as though the idea had just that second occurred to him, only to suddenly seem to think the implications of this question were unfortunate and selfish and rushing to clarify: “Not that you can, you know, n-not decide to do that if you want to. I’m just - just curious, is all. Heh.”
“I’m still an alicorn, Jack.”
This might have been enough of an answer for some, but not for all. Or, at least, not for Jack it seemed.
“So is that a no?” He asked.
“It’s a no.”
“Ah, good, good. I mean, I see, right. Makes sense,” he said, nodding a little too much for his own good. Twilight could see where this had come from, and could guess where it might go, and felt she should put a stop to all of it.
“I’m not leaving you again, Jack,” she said.
“It’s not - it’s not about that, don’t worry about that,” he said, despite it being exactly that.
“Come here,” she said, raising a foreleg and leaving herself open for a hug. He did not come here. Rather, he brought her to him, reaching out and pulling her in. Twilight squeaked. She probably should have seen that coming.
A nicely pleasant moment followed where it was just cuddles. They had a lot of these moments, in all honesty, some (most) less emotionally fraught than this one, but all very nice in Twilight’s opinion. She had gone a long time without much in the way of cuddling, and so had Jack, and it looked like they were working hard on making up for that.
“It’s really not that. You know? It’s really not,” Jack said after a small while, not letting go of her.
“It’s okay,” Twilight said.
“Would be nice. To have an end. Knowing it would end eventually, I mean, that it wouldn’t just keep going with everything else not keeping going. I couldn’t blame you, you know, if you had that option. It’d be something to look forward to.”
A pause. Twilight gently but firmly disengaged from him and took a step back so she could properly fix him with A Look.
“Don’t think like that, okay?”
The Look was potent enough that Jack couldn’t weather it and had to look away. Twilight, not standing for this, brought a wing around to his chin to nudge him back into the full force of her eyes. Jack did not resist. He’d long ago learnt not only not to, but that he just couldn’t when she did that (and he’d also learnt not to dwell on how pony wings worked).
“...okay,” he mumbled. Twilight kept up the intensity.
“I mean it. Don’t.”
After this she relaxed a little and Jack was able to look away again, choosing this time to look down at his hands, which were in his lap.
“Sorry, was just - was on my mind for some reason. All this. You and me forever though, right? Everyone else, eh, not so much. Though, I mean, could always, you know, heh, bring people back…” He said, chuckling, but also making sure to keep an occasional eye on her to see how it landed. Twilight wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t taken in for a moment.
“You’re gauging my reaction to that, aren’t you? That wasn’t totally a joke,” she said.
“And if it wasn’t…?”
“Jack. Don’t try and bring anyone back from the dead,” Twilight said, in the flat, serious tones of someone who can’t quite believe they’re having to say what they’re saying. Jack’s face fell.
“Why not?” He asked in tones creeping towards the stroppy. Again, Twilight couldn’t quite believe this was where the conversation had gone and where she was having to steer it back out of. He said weird things sometimes, but the problem with Jack was that he was also in the unique position of acting on most of the weird things he said. Even the notionally impossible weird things.
“Jack…”
Jack just looked unhappy now. Not angry, just unhappy.
“I mean, I’d need their permission first, obviously - maybe they could sign something - but why not? I could do it! I could totally do it! I made stuff that’s alive! I made trees! I made grass! I steered a planet! I can bring someone back to life if they want me to. Can’t be that difficult, can it? I could do it! Why not?!”
“Is this about the cat?” Twilight asked, gently.
The cat in question had been a scraggly, friendly thing that they’d occasionally cross paths with on their little walks around and about. It had been quite a novelty seeing a genuinely old cat given the wondrous age of wonderful wonders in which they lived.
Clearly already on its way out when they’d first met it, they had not met it many times since because, understandably, it hadn’t lasted that long. They had stopped crossing paths with it on their little walks, and while the first couple of times Jack had shrugged it off as a simple twist of fate, as time had gone on it had got harder for him to admit that, maybe, the poor decrepit thing had simply died.
It had taken finally bumping into the owner - quite a coincidence, that - and having it confirmed. They would not be seeing the cat again. Jack had apparently not only taken it worse than Twilight had thought he might, but had also taken it personally.
“It’s not about the cat!” He wailed. Then he sniffed. “Okay, maybe it’s a little bit about the cat, I liked the cat. But it’s not just the cat! It’s about Nova! It’s about everyone. So many! You’d have thought I would have got over it or be used to it but I’m not. And I don’t need to be! Because I can do this! Look!”
He turned back to the flies. Nothing happened.
“I had it working before…” He muttered, screwing his face up in concentration. Why he needed to look as though he was concentrating was less clear, but Twilight wasn’t concerned about that part.
“Jack, don’t even-”
One of the flies twitched. Once, twice, then buzzed in half a circle before stopping again.
“Hah! See! Did it! Come on, man, you’ve got it in you,” he said, leaning in closer and speaking directly to the corpses. Twilight felt a mounting level of concern.
“Jack, you need to-”
He was now jabbing a finger at the one fly who’d moved.
“Oh come on! I put everything back the way it was with you! It should work! It was working before! You were up and about! Come on!”
“Jack!” Twilight shouted. Jack rounded on her.
“What?!”
“Nova is dead. The cat is dead.”
How she’d said it hadn’t even been blunt. She wasn’t hammering a point home, she was simply laying some things out, clear and plain. Indeed, her moderation in how she’d said it was what slipped past and got through to him. Jack blinked.
“I - I know that, I-I mean-” He stammered.
“You can’t change that. You shouldn’t change that.”
“B-but-”
“I miss her too. I miss all of them.”
“But I could - if - they wouldn’t - we…”
A stumbling flurry of half-baked arguments tumbled out, slopping uselessly against the stonewall that was Twilight’s unyielding expression. Jack’s train of thought also met its end there, slamming and crumpling and leaving him with nothing. He slumped.
She didn’t even need to say anything else.
“No, no you’re right. I was being, ah, insane. Yes, that’s the word. Insane. I was having a moment, one of my moments. No, silly - ridiculous! No idea what came over me. What trouble I’d get into if you weren’t around, hah! Ahah. Hah. Best, ah, forget that ever happened. Could we - could we forget this ever happened?”
“Yes.”
Jack nodded gratefully, swallowed, then promptly burst into tears, flinging himself off the chair at Twilight and wrapping around her. Twilight had been ready for this, attuned now to Jack’s moments. The cuddling that then happened was less of the gentle emotional support of the previous round and more someone clinging on for dear life.
At length the sobs tapered to sniffles, then quieted completely. Jack then stood up.
“Hate those. Hate that still happens. Hate it. Should make a body that can’t cry,” he said, brushing himself down. “Can we go outside? I want to go outside.”
“We can go outside. It’s nice out,” Twilight said.
“Yeah?”
“Yes, very nice. Sunny, warm the whole thing.”
“The whole thing she says! Can’t argue with that.”
She had only just got back, of course, but going out again wasn’t a problem. She was nearly retired and she was free-and-easy - she could do what she liked.
“We could get something to eat, or go to the lakes. Anything you like.”
They had a lot of options, particular as, between the two of them, they could go to literally any spot on the planet with very little effort at all. Jack though had more local ideas.
“Let’s go watch some spaceships,” he said with very little hesitation.
You could see spaceships from basically anywhere nearby at basically most all times of day. All you had to do was look up. What he meant was heading to the port more specifically to make an active effort of watching them come and go, something he had an avowed fondness for. Twilight cocked her head at him.
“You’re not sick of that?” She asked.
“Never. You’re not, are you?”
“Not yet. But you might be pushing it.”
Such things were a bit of a busman’s holiday to her at this point, after all. Jack stuck his tongue out at her.
“Boo to you. Spaceships are cool. Some of us never got to go on one. And never will,” he said, hand to his heart with an exaggerated sniff. Twilight was having none of that.
“Jack, don’t make yourself miserable again. Let’s go,” she said, halfway turning to leave.
“Okay, okay. Man can’t make a joke…” he muttered, moving to stand.
“And Jack, one more thing?”
He’d paused, still down on one knee.
“Oh?”
Twilight turned back. There was a smooch.
“Together forever,” Twilight said, giving him a brief nuzzle before turning fully with a swish and heading for the door. Jack, dumbstruck, stayed on his one knee for a bit longer before snapping out of it.
“...way you say it it doesn’t sound so bad…”