It was far too late for any sensible person not working a night shift to still be awake, but sleep eluded Twilight Velvet no matter how hard she tried. It didn’t seem to matter that she was exhausted from a long day, with her eyes burning and feeling gritty; she was far too worried to be able to relax. She rolled over, adjusting her pillow in what she knew was a futile attempt to get comfortable, her mind replaying the days events again.

She knew something was wrong the second Twily came home from school. The unnaturally long delay between the key turning in the front lock and the door opening, as if her daughter was having to think through each step separately, completely finishing one action before she could begin the next had tipped her off that it had been a bad day. When it was followed by an agitated back and forth pacing in the front hall for several minutes before Twilight had even set down her backpack and started taking off her coat, Velvet frowned, saving her current chapter and rising to start making a cup of hot cocoa and a snack of some of her youngest’s favorite comfort foods.

The entire time her ears trained on the sounds in the front hall, hearing Twilight begin to fuss with getting her coat to hang just right, putting it on the coat rack and taking it off repeatedly, making little sounds of frustration, before the sound of everything on the rack being pulled off so that the teenager could start over with the task, organizing the coats, hats, and scarves in a fashion that satisfied her brain’s need for order and control. She knew better than to offer to help or interfere just yet—these little rituals of Twily's were hers alone, and she never reacted well to someone's 'aid'. Instead she used it as a way to judge how severe the situation was, knowing that the more times Twilight repeated the reorganization task, the worse the upset.

Spike had headed in to greet his mistress the instant she had arrived, and as she began to repeat the reorganization of the coat rack a second time, Velvet had heard the sound of him whining and circling Twilight. The dog was someone she hadn’t thought she would come to appreciate having in their lives as much as she did. With the training he’d undergone, and his sensitivity to Twilight’s emotions, he could often reach her first, starting the process of grounding her and soothing riled emotions.

Today was clearly an exception to that. After three rounds with the coats, Twilight finally came into the kitchen, hands twisting and rubbing her wrists unconsciously in her distress, her feet shuffling in a little tapping dance as she struggled against her want to pace.

And when she met Velvet’s eyes, the words that spilled out were a jumbled babble fixated on the one comfort her mother couldn’t provide.

"Sunset. Mom, Sunset's not here. She should be here. She's not here and she should be here by now. I calculated it. She was on her bike, and it takes nine minutes and thirty six seconds to go between the loft and here if she goes the speed limit and hits all the red lights, and she wasn't doing anything after school that should have delayed her. I'm delayed. She should be here and she's not."

It was little more than an unfiltered stream of consciousness, blurted because Twilight had needed to get them out more than from any kind of decision to speak. Carefully, Velvet placed the snack plate in Twilight’s line of sight, before seeking to reassure her daughter. “Sweetheart, she’s probably caught up in weather or traffic. Its a lot harder to ride her bike safely in winter weather, and Sunset is a responsible driver.” She reached into the corner cupboard in the kitchen that doubled as a medicine cabinet, finding the bottle with Twilight’s medication in it. “If something was wrong, she would contact you. Give her a little bit and if she’s still not here, text her.”

Her daughter’s hand wringing and foot movements increased, and she abruptly darted over to push the mug and plate away, "No. No. No. She should be here. It’s not right, Mom, it's not. Not without Sunny. Where's Sunset's plate and mug, there should be one for her too. Mom, I need Sunset here. She needs to be here with me, not out there.” There was a pause as she drew in a shaky, shallow breath, and then the words started up again. “It's not safe out there, statistically three times as many bike accidents happen in bad weather, and icy conditions are ten times more likely to cause a bike to go out of control. She's not here, and something must have happened, something bad...”

Abruptly, Twilight started pacing, her steps carrying her from the kitchen to the front hall and back again. “It has to be something bad. Sunset said she’d come over right after school...but she’s not here and she’s always here when I need her. She just knows, and I need her now, Mom. If she’s not here, then something bad is keeping her away. We should call the hospital, she could be in the hospital, I know she is. She had an accident, and she's in the hospital, because she wouldn’t just not be here, and we haven’t heard because they don’t know to call us. Your number isn’t in her phone yet—why aren’t you in her phone? You should be in her phone. This is her home and we’re her family, and you should be in her phone so they know to call, and they don't. And now she's—”

"Twily!" Velvet interrupted firmly, trying to get her to focus on something that wasn’t a negative spiral of increasingly unlikely events. It didn’t help—Twilight was stuck in her own head, barely registering external stimulus enough to take the anxiety medication from her mother. After swallowing the pill dry, the teenager was locked into a rhythm, her words matching the cadence of her steps—a repetition about how Sunset wasn’t there and that meant something bad had happened. All her mother could do was let her pace, and pray quietly that the girl she was so focused on got there soon.

It had been like that until Sunset had arrived in the driveway, amid freezing rain and bitter wind, interrupting Twilight’s mental loop and pushing her over the edge emotionally into the meltdown that had been building all afternoon.

Velvet always felt so torn in her feelings on her daughter’s episodes. On one hand, it tore at her heart to see her child in a state of such distress, emotionally overloaded and falling apart, but there was relief there too, when it finally happened. She could very much recall Twilight’s younger years, especially before her progress with her therapist, when these moments would go for days on end, and all she could do was watch her daughter exist in a state of agitation and anxiety, to the point where she would refuse to eat or sleep. Those were days where Twilight would spend all her time pacing in a room or a hall, or obsessively rearranging the same area of the house over and over, until her body simply could not keep going and she collapsed from exhaustion and finally had the meltdown that had been building. Only then could Velvet hold her while she cried herself to sleep, whispering soothing sounds and wishing she could do more to help.

Those times were far and few now, between years of work with Dr. Soft-Spoken and the efforts of the family who had learned Twilight’s nonverbal cues...and that wasn’t even counting the arrival of Sunset Shimmer in Twilight’s life, which had done more for her in a span of months than the rest of the family managed in a year.

Sunset was everything Velvet could have ever wanted in a friend—or partner—for her daughter. Unwaveringly loyal, and with a tremendous amount of empathy for a teenager, Sunset never hesitated when Twilight reached out to her for help. Velvet had watched from the kitchen that day, as the girl had put aside everything the instant she had seen Twilight’s distress, pulling Twilight into her arms and being a rock in an emotional storm. More than that, she weathered the onslaught and brought Twilight out the other side in a way that no one else could match, something Velvet attributed to Sunset’s sensitivity to Twilight’s nonverbal signals. Whether it was an innate trait or one learned through the circumstances dumped on her by life, the older woman didn’t know, but Sunset could pick up on subtle shifts in Twilight’s moods with an almost preternatural awareness.

If she could, Velvet would have thanked Sunset for how much she did for Twilight, but just like she seemed confused and wary of compassion when they’d met her, the redheaded teen was clearly discomforted by large amounts of praise and gratitude. Instead, she would make sure that several of Sunset’s favorite foods made an appearance over the weekend—perhaps a batch of those oatmeal raisin cookies the girl could inhale by the dozen? Whatever she made, she decided she would make enough to be able to send the leftovers home with Sunset.

Readjusting positions again, trying to ignore the prickling at the back of her neck, she frowned at the ceiling of her bedroom. As much as it didn’t make logical sense, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Twilight’s episode from earlier wasn’t self contained, but rather a harbinger of something unpleasant on the horizon, an ill omen of trouble to come. Her eyes fell on Night, snoring softly beside her, and she fought a brief stab of resentment at how easy it was for him to just switch off his worries and concerns, falling asleep with ease. Velvet found herself jealous that she couldn’t do the same, but more than that, his lack of difficulties in falling asleep left her to brood and worry alone, no matter how desperate she was for the rest.

There was also the fact that it felt like he had barely even acknowledged the worries—when she’d expressed the strange foreboding sensation, he’d chuckled and made a joke about how her words made her sound like his sister, with her obsession with New Age mysticism, tarot cards, and portents of doom, and her concerns about Twilight’s mental state had been met with the firm point that their youngest had wanted quiet space for the night, and there was nothing they could do about it until morning anyway, before he’d tried to encourage her to lay down and sleep. As much as she argued that this particular meltdown of Twilight’s was different, he seemed blind to it being anything out of the ordinary, almost as if some form of misplaced ‘school pride’ from his own days at that school had rendered him unable to see that something about the environment was having a profoundly negative effect on their daughter.

Velvet rubbed at eyes gone gritty with tiredness and pinched the bridge of her nose. Maybe that was at the root of it all. She'd never liked the choice of Crystal Prep for any of their children, Cadence included. Even though both Shining and Cadence had seemed to... Her brain halted, uncertain for a moment as she scoured her memories from her son’s high school experience, and she realized that nothing about it stuck out in any particular way from a vague, hazy blur of many days that all seemed the same. That…was unusual for her; a writer with a mind for details, her memory was exceptional, and she could recall things from decades ago with sometimes painful clarity. Twilight Velvet frowned pensively, trying to remember anything about their time there, other than a sense that they'd done well due to the guidance of Principal Cinch….even though she couldn’t actively remember the woman ever truly interacting with them.

Even her own, albeit brief meeting with the much lauded principal to discuss Twilight’s particular accommodations being met at the beginning of freshman year was…indistinct at best, but now that she considered it, Velvet remembered that the stern faced woman with her rather severe dress had come off fairly cold and predatory…“Welcoming as a tank of hungry sharks,” as her father would have said. Yet Night's family had praised the academic excellence of the school, and claimed the woman was personally invested in the success of her students in a way other schools weren't. Velvet snorted softly—maybe she was just not of the appropriate “social class” to see it, to truly understand the cachet of the Crystal Prep name. She had seen the way it seemed to command a certain... not quite respect, or not respect alone, but... something, an undefinable power and control among a number of the elite in academia and beyond, the way it had opened doors for her husband in his career, the way some of the brightest minds in the state had nodded approvingly when they heard his credentials, or when it came up that their children had been enrolled there. That attitude was what had left her personal objections feeling emotional and somewhat petty, especially when a twelve year old Twily had fixated on the school the way she had, taking the time to research the institution and its accolades, presenting her parents with a well written, fully formatted, dissertation in miniature, complete with formal citations as if she were presenting a proposal for a postgraduate study and not just an explanation of which high school she wanted to attend. Next to that, a motherly ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, because it feels wrong,’ could hardly bear any real weight.

Now though? Two and a half years in, and seeing the effect the school environment was having on Twilight’s mental health? Maybe they should look at an alternative—Sunset seemed to be thriving at Canterlot High, and she was close to Twilight on an intellectual level. Everything that Sunset mentioned about the school suggested that the faculty were invested in the health and wellbeing of the students, not just their test scores. Her brief conversation over the phone with the Vice Principal supported that, a far cry from the disinterested secretary at Crystal Prep who simply told her “Principal Cinch is a very busy woman. You’ll have to schedule an appointment.” Maybe she would call Canterlot High’s office on Monday, just to get information on the curriculum and advanced programs that Twilight could benefit from.

Velvet made a mental note, right next to the one about calling and conversing with Dr. Soft-Spoken. The therapist knew more about her daughter’s mental health than anyone, and was a good source of advice whenever they encountered issues. Twilight was a smart girl, but sometimes she couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and when she fixated on something it was hard to get her to change her mind. The doctor was one of the few people skilled at getting Twilight to let go of her tunnel vision and consider other options. Velvet had a distinct feeling that such a skill was going to be needed if they tried to push the school transfer on Twilight, especially given her reaction the few times in the past that they’d suggested the option.

As if identifying a reason for her inability to relax had released something in her mind, Velvet finally felt her body grow heavy with sleep. Stretching into a mattress that seemed to have magically grown more comfortable in the last half-minute, she yawned and let herself drift off to plans of an extra-special batch of muffins for breakfast.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the kitchen next to the phone, in a cup that housed an eclectic collection of pens and pencils, something pulsed with dark power, sending tendrils into the minds of the house’s sleeping occupants…

Night couldn’t remember the last time he’d jumped out of bed so fast, but when the blood curdling screaming ripped through the house, his body had acted without his conscious thought. He was on his feet, glad he slept in sweatpants during the winter, as he followed on his wife’s heels. They weren’t alone in the hallway—the whole family was converging on Twilight’s bedroom, where a second voice could be heard sobbing for help.

His heart was in his throat as Shining led the way into the room, armed and ready, praying that his daughter and the girl he’d started thinking of as another daughter were alright. The screaming chilled him to the bone—Twilight had had nightmares since she was little, but the screams from those had never sounded so...agonized. He was terrified at what they would find.

Three steps into the room and Shining lowered his gun, taking in the scene before him. Sunset was on her knees, hunched around her stomach like she was in pain, lashing out wildly, while Twilight was sprawled on her rear on top of the covers nearby, sobbing and begging the other girl to wake up. Spike was barking and howling, unable to get on the bed with his mistress, but every time he lunged, it seemed to trigger another round of terrified flailing from Sunset.

Shining Armor passed his gun to Cadence. “No one touch her!” he barked. “It’ll just make it worse and she could hurt you!” He darted around the bed, grabbing Twilight up in his arms and carrying her away from her best friend.

Twilight went from terrified to struggling. “No! Let me go! I have to help her!” She clawed violently at her brother’s arms, trying to break free, to get back to Sunset.

“Twily!” Shining pulled her further away from the bed, picking his way around a broken lamp. “You can’t touch her right now.”

Stubbornly, Twilight continued to fight, tears streaming down her face. “She needs me! Let me go!”

“Twilight!” This time Shining’s voice was an order, and he managed to break through the panicked haze she was in. “I need you to listen to me. You can still help Sunset, but you can’t be that close to her right now. She’s caught in some kind of flashback—she has no idea who you are right now, and she could hurt you very badly. Sunset is a strong girl and knows how to fight. In this state, she’s seeing everyone around her as part of whatever she’s reliving, and she won’t see you as her friend, only a threat.” He hugged her tightly. “If she did hurt you, she would feel terrible once she was in control again. You have to go about this rationally, for yourself and for her.”

Night Light watched his daughter’s frantic fight for freedom cease as she buried her face in her brother’s t-shirt and cried. Shining hugged her, providing a steady presence while she brought herself under more control. In the meantime, Night bent down and scooped Spike up, getting the puppy to stop barking and howling.

Shining waited until Twilight had calmed as much as she was able, his eyes watching Sunset, before talking again. “We need to get her out of this state. Mom, don’t get too close, but talk to her. Tell her she’s safe, tell her where she is—describe the room, who is here, anything to ground her in the real world and get through to her. Cady, go put my gun back in its holster, and get a glass of cold water and some Tylenol. Dad, keep Spike under control?”

Despite the situation, Night couldn’t help but feel proud of his son, particularly when he started talking to Twilight again. “See, Twily? Look. She’s starting to come out of it, and she needs you calm in order to help her.” On the bed, Sunset had stopped flailing against some invisible enemy, and her screaming had become heart wrenching whimpers instead. “I’m going to let you go, and you can stand here and talk to her too, like Mom is doing...but only if you promise me you will wait until Sunset recognizes you to try and hug her.”

Another tortured whine, and Sunset’s voice brokenly wept Twilight’s name.

Twilight mumbled a hasty promise to her brother before stumbling forward back to the bedside, gripping the edge of her pillowcase, and calling to Sunset when her mother stopped to breathe. “Sunny...c'mon...open your eyes. You’re safe, I’m safe, no one here is going to hurt you or me...please...I’m worried about you...I need you to open your eyes and look at me...”

Night held his breath when Sunset finally responded to the external stimuli, bloodshot eyes registering something other than a spectre of her past. “Twi-Twilight?” The redheaded girl’s voice trembled with hesitation and fear, and it made Night’s heart feel heavy again. No teenager should ever sound like that, he felt. As grown up as they thought they were, they were still children who shouldn’t be put through some ordeal so hellish that it left them with screaming nightmares and a million mile stare from eyes that were so much older than the face they looked out from.

His daughter nodded. “It’s me, Sunny. I’m right here.” She held out a hand carefully, leaving it close enough for Sunset to be able to reach out and touch, but still well outside the other girl’s personal space.

Sunset reached out with a shaking hand, fingers uncurling stiffly to stroke over Twilight’s palm, eyes watching the appendage briefly with unnerving intensity. Then her head lifted so she could meet Twilight’s gaze. Whatever she found was what she needed, because she broke down into fresh sobs, hurling herself across the bed and pulling Twilight into a bear hug, clinging to her as if she were afraid the younger girl would vanish forever. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I couldn’t stop it...I tried...and then you—”

Her voice broke, and she pulled Twilight onto the bed with her, face pressed into Twilight’s neck while she cried. Twilight hugged Sunset in return, arms around her and her cheek resting against tangled, fiery hair. “It’s okay, Sunny. I’m okay. I’m right here and I’m not going anywhere.”

There was a moment where Twilight’s eyes flicked to the other members of the family, filled with the distress she didn’t let leak into her voice. Velvet responded by settling on the other side of Sunset, reaching out carefully to rub circles between her shoulder blades. “Sunset,” she encouraged gently, “you’re both safe, sweetheart. We’re all here and we aren’t going to let anyone harm you or Twilight. Whatever you saw was a nightmare. It didn’t happen and it won’t happen, if we have any say about it. Everyone here loves you, loves Twily. It’s going to be okay.” With the gentle persistence of moms everywhere, she coaxed both girls into her embrace without trying to separate them, continuing the soft monologue of reassurance and love.

A look passed between Shining and his father as Cadence returned with a bottle of cold water and the bottle of Tylenol. Both men took the chance to step back for the moment. They needed to speak without the teens overhearing. “I’m going to let Spike out—with all this excitement, I don’t want him to have an accident inside,” Night commented. “If you need me, yell. I’ll be back up in a few minutes.”

Shining nodded. “I’ll come with you, Dad. I want to double check the doors and windows anyway. Make sure everything is still snug and secure.”

Night could see his wife watching him, and knew without a doubt that she saw right through them both. He also realized that neither his daughter nor her best friend had heard a word of it, half drowsing and lost in soft conversation and the very emotionally intimate bond that everyone in the house politely pretended not to notice.

They were both silent until after Night had let Spike out into the backyard and Shining had put on a pot of coffee. The older man sagged into a chair, exhausted and drained well beyond his years as he looked at his son. “I was expecting to get woken up by Twilight having a nightmare, especially after her episode today. I wasn’t expecting...”

Shining Armor leaned back against the counter, arms crossing over his chest. “None of us were.”

He massaged his temples, feeling the start of his own headache. “You were right, son—I’m just glad it happened when you were here and we got to them fast enough to keep Twily from getting hurt.”

There was a thoughtful hum at the kitchen door, Cadence joining her fiancé at the counter. “And a good thing too. It would’ve destroyed Sunset to come to her senses and learn that she’d hurt Twily.”

Running a hand through his hair, Shining sighed. “I’m surprised it’s taken this long for something to trigger her. As resilient as she is, PTSD isn’t something easily shrugged off. I just wish I’d been able to find out what actually happened to her—there’s an entire four year period where she drops off the map other than some sealed school records at some fancy European boarding school—and another two and a half where she’s here in town before she was legally listed as emancipated. I think her file has more in it that's redacted than what's left behind.”

They all fell into their own thoughts about the history of the girl who had stumbled into their lives. Night found it to be an enigma, the kind of story that just seemed too out there to be real. Shining Armor seemed to have a much grimmer outlook though, if the sour frown was anything to go by. “What’re you thinking, son?”

Shining sighed again. “Worst case scenarios...none of which are pretty, or something I would wish on anyone. It’s just...the kind of behaviors I’ve noticed...the kind of stress a psyche has to see to end up with those are not things that a girl between eight and eighteen would see outside of those worst case scenarios.” His eyes fell along with his shoulders. “None of those things are anything I want to have happened to Sunset.”

Night Light wanted his son to be wrong, his mind shying away from the dark thoughts brought to the fore by the suggestion of ‘worst case scenarios.’ He found himself hoping that Sunset’s history was simply that of an emotionally neglected runaway, and not something with far more sinister elements. Clearing his throat to rid himself of the sudden lump in it, Night tried to keep his own emotions from leaking into his words. “That’s true for all of us, son. Sunset’s a good kid, and it’s terrible to think she’s gone through any kind of hell...but we can’t change her past, any more than we can our own. What we can do is be here for her now, make sure she knows this place is safe for her, that we care about her and that she can trust us, just like we’ve already been doing.”

He thought back to some of his own interactions with Sunset, and how over the months that she had been coming over, she’d occasionally given them glimpses of the sad, lonely little girl under the tough, bad girl leather and careful mannerisms. “It’s already helping...and for what it’s worth, I think she wants to tell us...but she’s not ready yet....and we have to let her get to that point in her own time. She has to come to that place on her own, I think, because it’s going to mean she trusts us....and everything your sister has said suggests that trust from Sunset is hard won.”

And thus, the trauma continues. Also a little perspective from the Sparkle parents, and what the adults have settled on in regards to what they've put together on Sunny's past.

*cackles*

And for those of you wondering where the family was when Sunny started screaming, I hope this answered that. :}