Author's Notes:

None of this has anything to do with anything.

I just like making shit up.

There was a ‘thump’ as Anon walked into the doorframe.

“Ow,” he muttered. “Moving too fast, my bad…”

Rather more slowly and carefully he maneuvered into the room, so focused on avoiding the door he nearly blundered into a stack of books that had - to be fair - been left in the middle of the floor.

“Oh shit,” he said, steadying them. He’d meant to come in quietly and already he was causing ruckus.

Twilight, further off into the room proper and barely visible behind a mound of tomes, scrolls and other assorted magical paraphernalia, was too busy at that precise moment to look up at any of this. Though her ears did flick in his direction.

“Anon? Is that you?” She asked, squinting as she ran a hoof down the page to make sure she was on the right line. Off to the side her quill scratched out some notes.

Silly question anyway. It could only have been either Anon or Spike and Spike - being an Equestrian native - did not swear. He’d tried it once and had not enjoyed it at all. Anon had been accused of being a bad influence and that had been that.

So that narrowed her choices down. But Twilight hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice this particular.

“Yeah, me, sorry to interrupt I just - whoops, oh dear.”

Another stack of books very nearly fell over.

“Why are these everywhere…?” He muttered. It seemed every time he stuck out an arm to keep his balance or bent to keep something from falling he brushed or knocked something else and had to quickly turn to fix that, which just made more problems.

Somehow - in defiance of everything he - he made it to Twilight without causing a disaster and then stood there like a lemon, silently watching over her as she hurriedly jotted out the last few bits and pieces she needed.

Finally finished doing what she was doing, Twilight was able to look up at him for the first time since he’d come in.

Something about him looked off, but it was difficult to pin it down. Paler than usual, maybe. With him being the weird colour he was it was hard to tell. Probably nothing.

Stiffly, he got down onto one knee by the side of her table, the better to talk at the same level. He rested an arm on a clear spot near him and pushed his hair back with his free hand. It needed a cut. This he knew. This they both knew. He’d assured her he’d be getting onto it but clearly hadn’t yet. Needed a wash too, she could tell.

“I wanted to ask you something. If you’re not busy,” he said.

If there was something that Twilight liked only a smidgen less than asking question it was answering them. A chance to put some of that hard-earned knowledge to good use! For the benefit of a friend, no less! She beamed.

“Never too busy for you, Anon! What is it?”

“You, uh, wouldn’t happen to have anything I could use to help stay awake, would you? Like a potion or something? Magic potion?”

This caught her off guard and left her flathoofed for a moment. Then she thought about the question. Not in any great depth. Just the surface of it, to find an answer. She couldn’t not answer. That would be unthinkable.

“Potions are more Zecora’s area of expertise,” she said.

“Right, course, yeah,” he said, nodding, swaying slightly, head drooping before it flicked back up. Then: “What’s a Zecora?”

There followed a very quick explanation about who Zecora was. Zebra. Forest. Hut. Ingredients. Potions. Knowledgeable. This he absorbed with a confused frowned. Clearly it wasn’t the sort of immediately helpful answer he’d been hoping for.

“You ain’t got any spells or anything that’ll do the same thing?” He asked.

This she gave some genuine thought to, but couldn’t come up with anything. It just wasn’t something she spent a whole lot of time looking into. Time travel? Sometimes. Pep spells? A few. Straight-up sleep avoidance? Not so much. The sort of thing that was liable to go quite wrong unless handled very carefully, magic or no.

Not beyond the realm of possibility though, obviously.

“No, sorry. I could look something up if you wanted?” She suggested.

The sheer bulk of mess pressed in on them with such force it was like an interruption in the conversation. All the work she had already started and all the work she’d started while doing the first load of work. And what she’d been doing when he came in, which was actually just a side-project she was looking over while having a break. She grinned sheepishly.

“Might, uh, take a while though…”

Anon’s head dipped again and he blinked furiously, leaning back and heaving back to standing with a groan.

“Don’t worry about, it’s fine. I can figure something out. Was just wondering,” he said.

“If you’re sure,” she said, quill lifting back up from the ink bottle.

Then the question he’d asked came back to her, and she wondered about all the bits above, below and around it. The bits she should have noticed in the first place. The quill went right back down again.

“Wait, why are you asking?” She asked.

Anon, who had been carefully working his way back out of the room again, froze in place so suddenly he actually did manage to tip over a stack of books this time. This stack hit another stack on its way down, and the resulting spill knocked the bottom out of a another stack. Through all this Anon stood like a statue. Wincing.

“Just curious. No reason. Uh, sorry, by the way,” he said, gesturing to the books and then squeaking when they lifted into the air surrounding by shimmering, insubstantial magical energy. He still wasn’t used to that.

“It’s fine, really. You doing anything today?”

“Hmm? Doing? Right. No. Nothing. Not today. Not doing anything.”

“That’s alright. I think you deserve a day off. I’ll see you at dinner then?”

He’d scoffed at the mention of deserving anything but then wavered in confusion at the mention of dinner. They typically took it together, and alternated in whose turn it was to get it ready. He’d lost track.

“Am I making it today? Or…?”

“It’s my turn,” Twilight said, a little perplexed she had to remind him. He blinked, face scrunching up. Then it cleared.

“Oh, alright. Alright cool. That’s cool. Thought it was mine. Cool. See you then, then,” he said. Then he chuckled. “Then then. Heh.”

And he was gone.

Twilight, having finished restacking the fallen books, raised an eyebrow towards the door through which he’d just disappeared and then shook her head, returning to what she’d been doing before.

“What was that about?”

-

Dinner time rolled around.

Anon came wandering blearily in from wherever he’d ended up and slumped at the table while Twilight set about doing all fo the actual work. She didn’t mind. When it was his turn he did everything himself - was quite insistent on it - so this was only fairly. Smiling, she practically hopped as she levitated his plate in front of him.

“Ta-da!” She said. He blinked and only then noticed the food that had appeared.

“Ah. Thanks, Twilight. Looks great,” he said, with what looked like an attempt at a smile. Twilight was too busy wiggling into her seat to see this though, and so only heard him.

“That’s okay,” she said, immediately tucking in.

It was a few minutes before the unusual thing struck her.

Never the most talkative, Anon was a level of quiet through dinner that Twilight had not seen before. He wasn’t eating, either, just staring down at his plate, eyes wide.

“You sure you’re alright?” She asked. His head snapped up, the sudden shift in weight making his whole body sway for a moment.

“Fine. Fine. Totally fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“Okay,” she said, unsure, fork hovering. “Eat something.”

“Oh yeah. Right. Eating,” he said, taking a spoon and shoveling a mouthful away without any apparent notice as to what it was. He chewed, he swallowed, he set the spoon down and got back to staring.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Hmm? Nothing, honestly.”

Twilight wasn’t buying this.

“Just tired,” he said, shrugging helplessly.

She eyeballed him hard, the better to coax a more complete answer from the human. It did not work, because he did not look at her.

Dinner continued and concluded in silence. Any other day she might have felt put out at him having not touched his food, today she was just concerned. It wasn’t like him at all. She tidied up around him, eyeing him warily as he swayed in his seat, doing the washing up and then trotting back in and past him.

“Alright well I’m going to turn in. If you’re tired you should be going to bed as well, yeah?”

Twilight waited for a response. Response came there none.

She turned back.

“Anon?”

“I’m just going to sit here a minute, you carry on,” he said, unmoving.

Well, it wasn’t like they needed to go to bed at the same time or anything anyway. They were both adults living separate, adults lives. So that was fine. And not wholly unusual. If anything, it was normally Twilight who was the one staying up later.

“If you’re sure…”

“Sure sure, I’ll be right up, don’t you worry.”

She considered saying something but held her tongue. He was an adult, as said, and he could do what he wanted. Within reason. It wasn’t unreasonable to want a quiet moment to himself just sitting. It happened to the best of us. Still, not like him.

“Alright…” she said quietly, frowning to herself and heading up to get ready for bed.

Something was definitely up. He’d never been like this before in all the weeks she’d known him. Indeed, he’d never been anything even close to this. Even when he’d just shown up - waking up in a field, by his own admission - he’d been chirpier. He’d smiled more, laughed. Now that was all gone.

She sighed. If he was still like that tomorrow then she’d see if he wanted to talk about it. If not then maybe it was just a human thing he hadn’t seen fit to mention. Who knew? Maybe this was normal. There still a lot to learn about him, after all.

That thought buoyed her. The many questions as-yet unanswered. It’d keep her going for months. Years, maybe! And she’d be the first! How exciting.

Smiling sleepily at the very thought she closed her eyes and drifted off to a nice, peaceful, nightmare-free sleep.

-

Come the next morning Twilight was much refreshed and - following a brief shower - made her way towards the kitchen with the breakfast weighing heavily on her mind. Her turn for that, too. Pancakes again, probably, not that anyone would be complaining about that, she was fairly certain.

She stopped mid-step when she saw the back of Anon’s head.

He was sat pretty much exactly where he’d been sat the last time she’d seen him, staring into space and slouching. This wasn’t ordinary behaviour, at least going by what Twilight had seen of him so-far. He didn’t even hear her clip-clopping up behind him.

“Uh, Anon, are you okay?”

For a good solid two or three seconds he just kept staring. Then he flinched so suddenly it even made Twilight jump. Blinking and having obvious difficulty getting her into focus he turned around in the seat.

“Hmm? Oh, oh yeah. Fine. Just trying to stay awake. It’s fine.”

Then he turned back again.

What had just been a sneaking, crazy suspicion for Twilight then became a genuine cause for concern. He wasn’t sat pretty much exactly where he’d been - he was sat exactly exactlywhere he’d been the night before. He had not moved at all.

Now that definitely wasn’t normal. Or healthy.

“Anon have you moved at all since last night?”

He squinted and scratched his head, still looking intently at nothing much in particular.

“I did get up to take a slash but - but that was it. I think?” He scratched some more. “Or did I? Maybe I didn’t. Could have imagined it. Not sure. I think…”

At that point he was just mumbling. Twilight cocked her head. What she’d shrugged off yesterday was now glaringly, unavoidably obvious. The shadows beneath his eyes had deepened, and the eyes themselves were alarmingly bloodshot. Twilight knew that look.

Delicately, she cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you something?”

He broke off from his mumbling and looked at her again, again having clear difficulty just looking at her, one eye seeming to want to close and the other doing the same by the time he’d got around to forcing the other open.

“You can ask me anything,” he said, biting on his hand to keep from yawning.

“How long have you been awake for?”

She saw him flinch, and suddenly he looked very sheepish indeed. The look of someone caught in the act. He took the fist out of his mouth.

“...not that long,” he said, tapping his fingers on the table.

“And how long is that?”

“...little bit…”

“Anon…” she said, warningly, eyes narrowing.

“...maybe, like, forty eight hours or something. Maybe a little more. It’s hard to keep track without proper clocks.”

Took Twilight a second to fully register what he’d said. She thought perhaps she’d misheard. She had not.

“Two days?!”

Anon shrugged.

“Maybe, more. Think it might have been nearer three days, now I think about it. Not that long. I think? Maybe that long. Where would I even start counting from? When I woke up last, I guess, I don’t-”

Twilight cut across him, feeling that if she didn’t he otherwise wouldn’t stop.

“Nearly threedays, Anon? Why? That’s really bad for you!”

“Yeah, yeah I know. It’s fine though. I feel fine. Little - wooo - spacy and stuff but it’s actually pretty great. I feel fine. Like I can think but also not. It’s fine.”

He swished his hand through the air as he spoke, to better illustrate ‘spacy’, and once he’d done that he gave her what he hoped was a convincing and winning smile.

Twilight was not impressed. She also didn’t believe him.

“You need to go to bed. Now! It’s unhealthy! Come on.”

With a tinkling of magic and the scraping of wood she pulled his chair back, but Anon scrabbled for purchase on the table and managed to hop forward again. This happened at least another two times before Twilight gave up with a sigh. She’d have picked him up, but the strange way magic worked on humans would mean she’d probably just drop him, and that was no good.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, flatly.

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” he said, hands still braced on the table.

“Why not?”

He flinched again. Only slightly this time, barely at all, but still enough that Twilight noticed.

“I- I’m...I’m scared to go back to sleep…” he said, eyes darting side to side, voice so quiet Twilight had to strain to hear it. She blinked in surprise.

“This isn’t that ‘existential dread’ thing you told me about, is it?” She asked.

This was so out of nowhere that Anon looked completely baffled. He’d tried (and failed) to explain the concept to her some weeks back and ever since she’d been trying to pin him down on it. Every time she hadn’t quite got it. This was no different.

“What? No. No, this is just regular dread.”

She looked only mildly disappointed. Regular dread was unusual enough for the disappointment to be mild.

“Oh. Well that’s still not good. Why?”

Anon shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He stared at his hands.

“You know how I got here?”

“No. No-one does. You don’t,” she said, muzzle wrinkling in confusion. Then, despite herself, her face lit up. “Do you remember?!”

“No, no. Well, maybe. Not really. I’m remembering something. I think. I don’t know.”

He found an errant bit of someone’s dinner that had dried stuck to the table and started worrying it with a finger. When it came loose, he started distractedly pushing it around, keeping his eyes down.

“I’ve been having dreams. Bad dreams. But I don’t think they’re dreams. They’re more like remembering something. Like something that happened to me. I thought it was a dream but it’s just the same over and over and that’s not right. I think? I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

He shivered, brow furrowed. Twilight got a little closer, the exquisite burn of curiosity building within her.

“What happens? In the dreams?”

Anon stopped pushing the food around. He stopped moving at all. He even stopped breathing, holding his last breath for so long that Twilight started to be genuinely concerned. She was about to do something when he finally let it out, deflating as he did so, head hanging.

“It’s like...you guys have oceans here, right?” He asked, glancing up at her out of the corner of his eye. She nodded. “Right, right. Course you do. Stupid question, sorry. They’re deep, right?”

“Deep enough to be uncharted,” she said, shrugging. Not her area of expertise. She dabbled in the occasional smattering of oceanography and marine biology, but who didn’t?

“Right, yeah. So it’s like...waking up in an ocean. Deep in an ocean. Like that, but not any actual ocean. Just the feel of one, you know? Dark and cold and you don’t know what way is up. So small and so helpless. And it’s suffocating. All this weight, this pressure. And you can’t breathe. And you - I - feel something move behind me and it’s so big - it has to be big, I can feel it’s big just from how it feels when it moves, everything shifting because of how big it is - and I fumble and struggle and turn and there’s…”

He swallowed and stopped, eyes wide but not really looking at anything. Then he blinked and shook his head, refocusing - with some obvious effort - on Twilight.

“I don’t want to see it again. I can’t. Sorry. I just don’t want to. And if I stay awake I won’t have to. Not again”

“What was it?” She asked breathlessly, leaning in close. He slumped forward across the table and buried his face in his hands, shaking his head. She saw the angry red marks on his arms where he'd been digging his nails in.

“No, sorry, I really don’t want to think about it again. I don’t want to see it again. Sorry Twilight, I just-”

Twilight, realising with a sick lurch that she’d put her own curiosity ahead of the obvious distress of a friend, hopped up on her hindlegs and wrapped her hooves around him.

“Hey, hey it’s okay, you’re okay. I’m sorry I asked, it was insensitive. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“E-every time I try to sleep! And i-it can s-see me! It-”

“Hey, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here. It’s just a nightmare, you’re okay, shh,” she said soothingly, rubbing his back until he went quiet and then keeping on rubbing and shushing. She was mostly making it up as she went along, but it seemed to work.

Sniffling, Anon sat up, Twilight breaking the hug and stepping away. Pushing his hair back with both hands Anon sniffled and stared into space. If his hair might have benefited from a wash yesterday it definitely needed one now.

“I think...when I came here...however I came here...I must have gone through somewhere else. To get here. And while I was there...something noticed me…”

He was trembling. Even so, he managed a tiny, half-coughed chuckle, blinking and looking into Twilight’s wide eyes with his own red-raw, watery ones.

“That probably sounds crazy. And I don’t know any of it. I just feel like it happened. I can feel it. Like it left a mark. That sounds crazy, right?”

She put a hoof onto his leg and smiled as comfortingly as she could manage.

“It’s not crazy. You’re tired and you’ve had some very bad dreams. Anyone would feel, ah, unsettled,” she said. Then she frowned, and the hoof came back to tap at her chin. “Should probably ask Luna about this, though. Kind of weird she hasn’t noticed already if they’re as bad as you say…”

“Luna? Th-the big one? The other big one? The night one?” Anon asked.

Twilight gave him a very level look.

“Princess Luna,” she said.

“...the other big one?” He ventured. He’d only met them once or twice and at that moment it was difficult to remember which was which. He just remembered that one was ever-so-slightly bigger than the other.

Twilight could see it was not worth pressing the issue.

“Yes Nonny, the other big one.”

He smiled.

“I like her. She was nice to me. You’re all nice to me.”

The smile wobbled, wibbled and then melted completely and then his face was back in his hands.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Twilight. I’m so sorry I’m just so tired.”

And like that she was hugging him again, rubbing his back again, shushing him again.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find out what it is. We’ll fix it. I’ll call Spike and send a message to - no, no, we’ll just go. We’ll go,” she said, having changed her mind midway through.

Sending a message would take time, and waiting for a reply would take time, and she might need to explain things, and then they’d probably need to go anyway. Best to just go.

That, and Spike was elsewhere. Something with Rarity. Helping her out. Whatever that involved.

“Go?” Anon asked, blankly.

“To Canterlot. To see Princess Luna.”

“Canterlot? The place with the castle?

He’d been there once or twice already. Not that he’d seen a lot of it other than the castle, and even that had been overwhelming. The decision to move him further out had been a result of his reaction and already a tiny trickle of that same panic was coming back. Not as much this time, but still a pinprick.

“Yes, the place with the castle.”

“That’s a long way away, Twilight. That’s like - you need your balloon for that, don’t you? You don’t have to do that. It’ll be fine. I can ju- I can work something out. Honestly.”

“Anon, this is for your own good. This is already serious. You could do some real damage if you don’t get a proper sleep! And if it’s nightmares there’s only really one person to talk to. She won’t mind, and I don’t mind taking you.”

For a moment it looked like maybe he was going to keep arguing it, then he got lost in Twilight’s enormous eyes, blinked, and let his shoulders slump.

“Why are you all so nice…” he mumbled, slumping forward and clunking his head on the table before sitting bolt upright again. Twilight frowned. Better get started.

She needed to call Spike anyway after all that. To send a message ahead of arriving, and to help wrangle the balloon.

Hopefully he was done doing...whatever it was Rarity had had him doing.

She wasn’t going to ask. Probably perfectly innocuous. If not?

Well, one problem at a time.