My life has never exactly been boring. The medical and social issues caused by my strabismus have always been enough to make sure of that. Becoming a single mother then presented a new set of challenges; beautiful ones that I wouldn’t trade for the world. But even given these circumstances, I haven't had an especially exciting life either.
Until I met the Doctor.
The day I found that confused stallion, stumbling out of a blue box that seemed to have crashed right out of the sky, my life changed. Suddenly everything was constant excitement. From my initial confusion of thinking he was just severely concussed, to the insane realization that this pony wasn't really a pony, to my first trip inside the TARDIS, things have never slowed down since. Even when he’s not dragging me off on some crazy adventure, his very presence guarantees things will always be interesting.
A really good example of what I mean occurred not too long after I first met him.
The Doctor had quickly realized that Equestria was very different from the world he came from. Despite how badly he wanted to go adventuring, he knew it wouldn't be safe or smart until he knew at least the basics of this world. I was able to teach him the bare minimum, but he wanted to know everything, and there was only so much I could do. So, for the first month and half he spent in Equestria, he studied.
Some of his studies were hooves-on, exploring the town and talking to other ponies, poking things with his sonic screwdriver, but most of his time was spent reading. He stayed at my house, with me and Dinky, and he would constantly come home with piles of books at a time. Apparently, being a Time Lord meant he was able to read at an impossible speed. He would power through half a stack in a single night. And those stacks were taller than he was.
One day, after he'd been staying with us for about a month, I came home from work to find him sitting in the living room surrounded by another new pile of books, reading one book with a particularly ecstatic look on his face. He looked up immediately as the front door clicked shut behind me.
“Ditzy!” he shouted excitedly, shooting up from the couch and running up to me. “Great news! I finally figured out how magic works!” He practically pressed his nose against mine in his eagerness to share his new knowledge. The sudden invasion of my personal space didn't last long though, as he pulled away so he could start gesturing wildly with his forelegs. “I went to the library this morning, and I checked out just about every book they had on magic, from facts, to theories, to history. And trust me, it is no easy feat convincing a magic student to loan you all of her magic books. Fortunately, that Twilight is a true kindred spirit; she just couldn't deny my thirst for learning. So, anyway, I checked out all of these books, and after reading several of them, something finally just clicked, and everything made sense!”
He started rambling on about “innate energies” and “rapid evolutionary adaptation,” at a rate that I just couldn't keep up with. This sort of thing had made me feel a little stupid at first, as ponies frequently made digs at my intelligence based solely on my eyes, and I was a bit insecure about it. I had quickly learned, though, that nopony could keep up with the Doctor when he got like this. I just listened as best I could and nodded when it seemed appropriate.
“Unicorns use of the stuff is obvious enough, a channeling point that they have to focus on to make function. But the way earth ponies and pegasi harness it is just as fascinating. It’s all so ingrained into the species at this point it’s become a subconscious act. Natural connections to nature, flight, weather manipulation. You lot can move clouds, for goodness sake! Clouds! They're made of water vapor, and you push them along like solid objects. You don't even need to think about it, it just happens. Fascinating!”
“I guess it is kind of cool when you really think about it.” The things I was capable of as a pegasus weren't something I usually thought about much. Really, the only time it ever came up was when I had to deal with some difference between me and Dinky.
“And you!” He suddenly pointed a hoof at me, my speaking up having apparently reminded him who it was he was rambling at. “You aren't even built for flight. I mean, sure, you seem to have the lighter bone structure, but other than that, an animal of your shape shouldn't be able to get off the ground with wings like that. It’s shouldn’t be physically possible, but you go and do it anyway by subconsciously manipulating a primal force of energy. It’s absolutely brilliant!”
I couldn't help but grin at his childlike excitement. It wasn't like he was talking complete nonsense, either. I remembered hearing some things similar to what he was saying back in flight school. Of course flying involved magic. These were simple facts to me, but to him, my entire existence was something amazing.
“I still have to wonder precisely how they work though. Haven't read any of the books specific to pegasus magic yet. Mind if I take a look?” Before he'd even finished his sentence, he came up next to me and grabbed one of my wings in his hooves.
I yelped in surprise and leaped nearly three feet across the room at the sudden, unexpected contact.
The Doctor blinked in confusion, before looking at me with mild embarrassment. “Whoa, there. Sorry about that. Didn't mean to startle you.” He was laughing, thinking all he'd done was surprise me.
I, on the other hoof, was breathing quite a bit faster than I had been moments before, and my heart was racing. My stance was involuntarily tense as I faced him and tried to regain my composure. “Doctor!” I was yelling a little, finding my voice to be about an octave above normal. “Warn a pony before you go touching them like that. Pegasus wings are very sensitive.”
“Sorry, didn't know. Like I said, I haven't gotten that far yet in my books.” He continued to laugh nervously.
I sighed. He really was like a child. “It’s alright. Just, warn me next time. Pegasi have to be able to sense air currents while flying, so there are a lot of nerves clustered in our wings to help with that. Each feather connects to a specific nerve bundle, and it makes them very sensitive. Especially to being physically touched like that. And I mean, like, really, really, sensitive to touch.” I could feel my face heating up in embarrassment as I tried to explain it to him.
“Is that so? Blimey, they just get more and more interesting.” His eager scientist expression continued for a moment, but his face gradually changed as he started to realize what I was saying. “Oh, wait. You mean…” He glanced at my now red face and his eyes widened slightly. “Oh.” Then came the complete realization. “Oh!” He now had a look of near horror, heavily laden with embarrassment. “Oh, I had no idea. I'm so sorry, Ditzy. You know I would never try to, I mean, I had never even thought that…” He ran a hoof through his mane with a sigh. “I am just awful.”
“No you're not,” I said with soft laugh. His floundering attempt at an apology was kind of adorable. “It’s fine. You didn't know any better.”
“I really didn't. I promise my interest was purely scientific.”
“I have no doubt it was.”
He smiled awkwardly, the absurdity of his expression making me giggle.
Having broken the tension, he sighed and placed a hoof to his chin thoughtfully as I went to hang up my saddlebags. “This does put a damper on my research though. I was hoping to get a real hands-on--”
“You don't have hands anymore.”
“Right, hooves, thank you.” These little slips of his were happening less and less, but he asked me to point them out when he did it. He didn't want to say something odd in front of other ponies and have to explain himself. “I was hoping to get a real hooves-on look at a pair of wings so I could have a better understanding. Things always make more sense to me when I can poke at them and do a sonic scan.”
I hesitated a moment, staring at the wall while I thought. He just wanted to understand how they worked. All he needed was a scientific look. He might learn something even I didn't know about them, given how smart he is. Really, what could it hurt?
I closed my eyes and took a calming breath before turning to face him. “Doctor.”
“Yes?”
“If you're really that curious, I'm okay with you looking at my wings.” I tried to look away from his face after I said it, but my bad eye was being particularly stubborn, and stayed firmly focused in his direction.
There was a look of genuine surprise on his face, and it took him a minute to respond. “Are you certain, Ditzy? The last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable. You don't have to feel obligated or anything.”
“Yes, I'm sure. It's totally okay with me. It'll help you out, and I might even get to learn something new from whatever you find. There's no harm in it. Really, I don't mind.”
The childlike grin returned to his face. “Oh, Ditzy, you are the best!” He pranced excitedly over to his book pile to try to find his sonic screwdriver. I followed him and sat next to the table as he dug around. “Really, I can't thank you enough. Your species is one of the most unique things I've seen in a long while, and the chance to get a proper look-- Ah-ha!” He popped upright again with his screwdriver in one hoof. Coming up beside me again, he set it down on the table and stopped to look me in the eyes.
This was something he did that I always really appreciated. Most ponies had trouble looking me in the eyes. Their gazes would typically shift around my face, like they weren't sure where to look, and were trying to focus on each eye individually. But the Doctor always looked me straight in the eyes, with a solid gaze that frequently made my heart flutter.
“Just let me know if I do something wrong, or if you want me to stop. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I hurt you somehow.”
Oh, look, there was that heart flutter. I could feel my face getting red again. “Of course. You can go ahead. Just, be careful.” I looked away and extended one wing slightly.
Even though I was expecting it this time, I still sucked in a sharp breath when he touched my wing. He placed one hoof gently against the underside of it and used the other to fan out my primary feathers. I instinctively flexed them out further. He made a small humming noise, which I was sure meant he’d noticed that muscle movement wasn't a conscious one. He used his hoof and followed the longest feather from the tip to where it met with the rest of the wing. I tensed slightly as he brushed against the nerves there.
“Should I stop?” He'd paused, concerned he might've hurt me.
I shook my head. “It’s fine. Normal reaction.”
He held back for another moment, before continuing his careful inspection.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I needed to calm down. This was an entirely scientific examination. Like when my aviologist checked my wings. Except, this wasn't my aviologist. This was the Doctor, the very attractive stallion who was living in my house. The extremely kind, funny pony who always made me smile, who never treated me like I was broken, whose confident grin made me feel like my knees would buckle. And he was touching my wings. It was at this moment I realized I probably shouldn't have closed my eyes, as the lack of visual distraction was making me even more aware of the feeling of his hooves on my wings. He brushed over a particularly sensitive area and I had to bite my lip to keep from making an audible squeak.
I snapped my eyes open as quickly as I could and tried to focus on something, anything else in the room besides him. Not only did this prove ineffective, but he asked for my attention a moment later.
“Could you bend it for a moment?” he asked while he placed a hoof on either side of the main joint.
I nodded and did as he asked, the pressure he was putting on the joint created a bizarre sensation that I tried very hard not to think about.
He let out another fascinated humming noise. “They're really not that much different from the structure of most bird wings. And yet they still manage to allow an equine to fly.”
He let go of me to retrieve his screwdriver off the table, and I used the opportunity to catch my breath.
“Alright, now let’s take a look here.” He adjusted the settings on the sonic screwdriver and spread my wing out again. “I’m not sure how this is going to feel, but it shouldn't hurt.”
Well, that wasn't especially reassuring. I just nodded again and tried to prepare myself for the unexpected.
He pressed a button and it emitted a familiar buzzing noise. I didn’t pay the noise much notice for long though. “Whoa!” A gentle vibration ran up my entire wing, leaving an extremely odd tingling sensation behind.
The Doctor stopped and grinned. “Did you feel that?”
“Yeah, it ran through my whole wing. What was it?” I attempted to shake the feeling out as it slowly faded.
“Magic. There’s a whole network of the stuff running through there, almost like a secondary circulatory system!”
I paused, suddenly less eager to get rid of the tingling. That was all magic? Magic that was just naturally in me? It was everywhere! “Are you serious? How can I have that much magic and not even be aware of it?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier! Pegasi have been able to do this for so long that it’s become entirely subconscious. A whole network that just runs without you even thinking. I'd bet that the earliest members of your species probably had to focus the magic themselves to fly, but since that would require your concentration to be split so many ways you all naturally developed a way to do it without having to think about it. I doubt even your physicians know precisely how it works, as they have no way to actually see the stuff. Though a unicorn probably could with the right spell.”
“But where does it come from?” I asked, suddenly finding myself just as intrigued by all this as he was.
“Dunno yet. Let’s take a look.”
He turned me to face him and did a general scan over me. I felt the vibration again, mostly in my wings, though it did spread to nearly everywhere. But the biggest pocket of it seemed to be centered right in between my lungs. The feeling dulled to the warm tingling again and all I could think about was that it really was everywhere. This was something that had always been a part of me and I’d never even known.
The Doctor was humming again as he studied something on the screwdriver. “Well, that is just brilliant. There’s a central source of it right at your core,” he poked me in the chest to illustrate his point. “But that’s not all there is. You are constantly pulling it in from the air around you. You both create your own magic, and utilize the stuff that the planet has already made.”
“That is so weird and cool.” I stared down at myself, as if maybe I could see my body pulling in magic now that I knew it was doing it.
He laughed. “That is amazing. No genetic modifications of any kind, just natural evolution, adapting yourselves to the energy the planet threw out for you. Now I want to see what your hooves do when you're on a cloud. I bet there’s a whole cushion of the stuff.”
“I'm glad I let you look, now. This sort makes me prouder of what I can do.”
“As it well should. Regardless of what species you are, what planet you're from, or how you came to be, every form of life is amazing in one way or another. The very fact of your existence is amazing. You should always be proud of who and what you are.”
I had to just stare at him and smile for a moment. Sometimes he said the most beautiful and uplifting things like they were casual facts. I don't think he even put any real thought into it.
“Ah, now I wish we had a unicorn to look at! I'm not touching Dinky obviously, she’s still growing, I could accidentally screw something up. I’d love to ask Twilight, but I think explaining my sonic screwdriver to her would just get her wanting to know everything about me, and that’s a can of worms I am not prepared to open.”
“You've told me a lot of it.”
“Well, of course, you’re my companion now. But if I tell the Princess’s personal student it will most certainly not stay a secret.”
“Companion?” I hadn't heard him use that term before. He would later explain to me all about his previous companions, but for the moment I was in the dark. Though the way he said it made me feel pretty special.
“Oh, and an earth pony! I bet their nature magic is even more subconsciously ingrained than yours.”
“Aren't you an earth pony?”
“I'm a Time Lord in the general shape of an earth pony; my insides are still very much me. Two hearts and all.”
“You have two hearts?”
“Oh, yeah. Want to feel?” He'd been pacing while he rambled, but now he stopped and looked at me with a grin, suddenly eager to share something about himself now that we'd learned all about me.
“Okay, sure.”
He grabbed my hoof and placed it on the left side of his chest, where a heart normally was. I could feel it beating out a steady rhythm. After a moment he moved it to the right side. There was a second beat, just slightly out of sync with the other. Together they created a beat of four.
“That’s amazing.” I looked up at him with a smile, his grin only got wider. I laughed lightly as I came to a realization.
“What’s so funny?”
“This explains so much. You're pretty much the friendliest, most caring pony I've ever met, and it makes perfect sense, because you've literally got twice as much heart as any other pony.”
He blinked at me for a moment, and then he laughed. He laughed so hard, and then I was laughing right along with him. “You are so corny, I love it!” He pulled me into a hug and we just sat there and laughed together.
And that’s pretty much what life is always like with him. Just one new discovery after another, with lots of laughter in between.
Author's Note
Headcanons everywhere.
Aviologist is a term I sort of pulled out of nowhere. I figure that, much like how women need to see a gynecologist regularly, unicorns and pegasi probably have to regularly visit specialists for their horns and wings. Thus, aviologist, and whatever you would call a horn doctor.
There are so many lines in this that seem super suggestive when taken out of context.
