“So do you have any children?” She moved a pawn
He snorted. “Just the one.” And he moved a knight.
“What?—oh. Psht! Bertram’s a nice young fellow.”
“Silly, scatterbrained, exasperating and thoroughly unsuited to serious work.”
“But…?” She moved another pawn.
“But…cheerful, kind and generous. Not a cruel or destructive bone in his body. Well, not deliberately destructive.” He moved a bishop.
He was spending his half-Sunday with Cheerilee, the way he had since…it’d been only a few months but he couldn’t imagine a time before. They were taking afternoon tea, to which custom and its ornaments he’d introduced her. She’d proved a quick study at brown bread, and her pikelets were coming along nicely.
Outside a spring storm was muttering itself out. A gentle rain was falling and the light was dim. The window was open and the breeze smelt of green things and moist earth.
“That makes him better than a lot of my students, and they’re all good children—um, on some days more than others. But still.”
He grimaced. “And that reminds me: I’m telling tales out of school. I shouldn’t. So…please don’t—“ Judge Bertie too harshly. Repeat it. Dislike me for it. He waved all that away.
“…Of course not” she said kindly.
There was silence for a while as they played on. Hooves seemed to be taking an intense interest in the board though you couldn’t tell from the moves he was making.
“Although…” he said.
“Yes?”
“…if he were my son, I don’t think I would be too displeased. No.” He sat back, gazing at the ceiling. “I think I should be rather…glad of him. Yes. Glad.”
She looked up at him, then: this is new. His attention seemed far away.
Don’t ask “why.” Ask a question they can answer. Very gently, she said “When did you begin to think that?”
“I suppose when he began seeing Miss Pinkie. He adores her, you know. Worships the very earth she bounces on--that’s hardly a confidence.” he added hastily.
“She…likes him too. Very much.”
“Oh, but Miss Pinkie likes everybody.”
“Not like this. Not before. I’ve known her since –well, she was one of my students, remember.”
She loves him the way I’ve never seen her love anybody else. And I was afraid poor Bert was just some upper-class --predator. So to find out about him I got to know you, and…I was wrong about you both, so very wrong, and I’m not sorry for snooping…
“I keep forgetting you’ve been teaching here so long. You look too young for that.”
“Oh, you.”
“No, really. But I imagine half the town’s been through your classroom.” He chuckled. “You must know where all the skeletons are hidden.”
“About a quarter, actually--and” she sighed “I’m afraid so.” If you knew half the stories that were sobbed out to me in the little boys’ room or the little girls’ room or whispered in a corner of the playground…
He looked taken aback. “It must be a burden, sometimes. I was wrong to joke about it--I’m sorry, Cheerilee.”
“It’s all right Hooves, I’m a teacher. I get that a lot.” But ‘til now no one ever thought beyond the joke. “Anyway--you were saying about Bertram…”
“Oh, yes. Well…he’s always been a good employer, easy to get along with if you handle him properly. Which isn’t difficult. And I could see why a lot of people liked him despite his silliness. I suppose I did too, after a fashion...
“But then Pinkie came along and just …lit a fire under him. Or maybe the fire was already there and she simply took away the bushel basket. “
“It’s been the same with Pinkie—though,” she smiled “you’d really have to know her to notice the change. It’s good to know it’s mutual. I was worried it might not be.”
“Really? But you can see the change in Bertie, plain as day. He used to be idle: now he has purpose. He used to take pleasure, take amusement, now he…takes joy. ”
She was looking at him then, the board and its battles momentarily forgot. Always, until now, always perfectly dressed for the occasion, with both feet firmly on the ground, but now …
… naked and swimming in deep water…
He was toying with a rook. “The world can be—unkind. Especially to young people. Especially to innocent young people. So when you see them like that, you just want to…build a fortress around them. And man the battlements.”
Yes. “But of course you can’t.”
“No.” He castled to the Queen’s side.
“You have to…” Her bishop made a long, slashing move across the board and took a knight. “…defend in depth.”
She reached out, covered his hoof with hers. “And I think you should have a bit more confidence in innocent young people, you really should. I see them every day. They’ll surprise you with what they can do, when they need to. Or want to.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about Pinkie—you know, Luna, the necromancer, that elemental …thing--but Bertie…”
“He found Pinkie, out of all the people in the world. And he was smart enough to know what he’d found. ”
He moved his last remaining knight with his off-hoof, didn’t withdraw the other from hers. “You know, those wandering ponies, that live on the plains—the Vanner Folk?—complete heathen, of course, believe the world goes ‘round the sun and suchlike nonsense, but…they have this one particular myth…Er, if anybody’s keeping score, I believe you’re in check.”
She blinked, looked at the board. “I believe you’re right. Hm. Let me see—but please, tell me about the myth, I’m listening…”
“Well, they say that when the gods--I mean, their gods--made the world, they peopled it with these… eight-limbed monsters, very strong and swift. And eventually the monsters turned on their creators, and tried to storm heaven—nearly took it, too. So as their last defense the gods worked a miracle, and split all the monsters in half, so that each half would spend its life looking for the other instead of troubling the gods.”
“And that’s their just-so story of male and female, I guess?”
“More or less: we’re each of us just half of something better, something grander, and we’re looking to be that whole thing again…”
He was looking down at his forlorn king. He didn’t seem to notice as her queen swept down the board …
“…It’s just a heathen story, but—we do spend all our lives looking for someone who’s like us, but not us. And when we find them we call them our better half, our other self, our…”
“Mate” she said.
He looked up suddenly. She was gazing at him, leaning across the board, her queen and his king under her free hoof. The other had never left his.
“Mate,” she said again, with a smile that was faintly shy.
He looked back down at the board, saw in retrospect how the game had unfolded. “You…waited this whole time to make that move.” It was not a question.
“Some people wait a lot longer.” She got up, came around the table to him. “Some people wait all their lives for the right moment, the right one.”
He looked in her face, saw in its faint lines the hagiography of labor and love and worry and laughter, and in the eyes…
…a mirror of his own.
“And what do they do,” he said slowly, as if a spell were on him “What do they do when that happens?”
“Then they don’t wait, anymore.”
She was very close. Her breath smelled faintly of flowers, her mane, of herbs.
“Check,” she said, and leaned towards him.
He would have answered, Mate, but they had passed beyond words.
Later:
“Hooves?”
“Mn?”
“You were saying ‘When? When?’”
“I was?...oh…’sa dream.”
She nestled closer “Tell me?”
“…was silly…tell you i’th’ morning…”
“Dreams fade. But if you tell me, I can remember it for you. ..Please?”
“Well…I was wandering around in the dark, and it was cold, very cold, seemed my whole body was going numb, and…it didn’t hurt, but I was thinking ‘this can’t be good…’
“And then I came on this great house, all lit up as if a ball or something were going on, and the door was open and somebody was calling to me from inside. So I went in, and it was full of people—some I knew, most I didn’t---and they made me stand next to the fireplace because they said I was almost frozen.
“There was this huge ruddy blaze on the hearth and I began to warm up and…you know how it is when you’re cold and you first get into a warm bath? There’s this…ache that runs all up and down your body. That’s what I felt. Only it kept getting stronger and stronger and everyone was patting me on the shoulder saying “It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright.” And I was asking when would it be alright, and that’s when I woke up.”
She was silent for a while. “But you said it was silly,” she finally chided.
“Well isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, not compared to most dreams. There’s…more logic to it, even though it’s dream-logic.”
“Interpreting dreams? You keep surprising me my dear,” he chuckled sleepily, his voice gently teasing. “What are your other abilities—unarmed combat? Demolition? Do you have a secret identity? Have I just become a sidekick to a caped crimefighter?”
She laughed “Just don’t call me a mild-mannered schoolteacher—at least not when we’re together like this! But,” suddenly serious, “Hooves, look here…”
She stretched out her flank—the one with her Mark—in a square of moonlight that fell on the bed. “Now—what do you suppose that is?”
She couldn’t see his smile but she could hear it in his voice: “Why, it’s part of a filly.” he said. “I do believe it’s a—“
“No, silly! My Mark—what do you think it is?”
“Well, first, very pretty, and second, daisies, I suppose. Yes?”
“Close. It’s chamomile.”
“Ah. Like the tea?”
“Yes, and the reason they use it in tea is because it’s ‘a pleasant and serviceable herb with great power to comfort, heal, and strengthen…’
“…That’s what I do. That’s what I am, dear. Everything I’ve learned—I’ve learned in order to fulfill that destiny...
“...That’s what you’re getting. That will always come first...
“...Now—is that what you want?”
He held her tightly. “I’ve thought a lot about my other half. Ever since I heard that myth. And —I couldn’t settle for anything less than what you’ve said. Because if you weren’t like that, then you wouldn’t be my other half...
“...But you are. So yes, Cherrilee. That’s what I want, and all I want: nothing less, more or other…
“…Do--do you want what you’ll be getting in me?”
“You’d make me repeat myself?” she said in his ear.
“As a matter of fact… it bears repetition, yes.”
She awoke the next morning to an empty bed, and a sense that the house was empty the way it was every morning—except for the dawning awareness that somehow, this morning was different…
“Hooves?”
She sat up in bed. The covers seemed to drag at her—someone had tucked her in. Carefully.
And on the mismatched spare pillow next to hers was a note with the inscription:
WAIT
Please.
* * *
The stars were fading as the sky brightened towards dawn and the air poured past like a torrent of wine from which he drank and drank and grew lighter at every draught.
He’d cut across the fields to shorten his way to the manse and besides, he didn’t want anyone on the road wondering why a fellow was hurrying away from the schoolteacher’s house at this hour. No. There’d be nothing breathed about Cherrilee ‘til the Parson had done the deal. He carried that resolve like a sword at his side.
So on and on in the half-light he galloped on good turf as he had when he was young. Young! It seemed a year dropped away at every hundred paces.
There had been a day, once, when he’d first started coming into his strength: when he could feel the play of muscle under taut skin, feel the bone beneath transmit to the earth his weight and his right to walk upon it. And every step had launched him into a future that unfurled itself like a blossoming bough.
He felt that again, now.
And suddenly there was the manse , set in its hollow and rising up out of the mists like the stern galleries of some grand old sailing-ship. Not a window alight: Bertie wouldn’t be up before the crack of noon. There was plenty of time to go around the hedge and enter by the gate…
No.
He judged the distance, shifted his pace, felt the leap coming on as the hedge drew closer and then the perfect jump always comes as a surprise his body fell up and away from the ground…
…surging over the hedge as if riding a wave, as if he was the wave…
..and the touchdown a solid welcome from the earth, no shock to rebuke old bones. There weren’t any trumpets but he allowed himself a private ha ha!
Now in by the kitchen door, quickly, quickly, so little time, so much to do…
He put the kettle on then went upstairs to his room. From the dresser he took a small box that seemed to have no lid until he opened it with a cantrip.
Inside: a few letters, a lock of hair, a small picture in a heavy frame, and…yes. As he left the room he grabbed a satchel.
Back to the kitchen where the kettle was beginning to sing. As the tea was steeping he got the tea-tray together—sugar, lemon, morning paper—then sat down to write a note:
Sir—
A shortage of certain essentials (let him use his imagination: he’ll make that dire enough on his own) has necessitated an early errand. I have taken the liberty of serving your morning tea ready-made. There is a timestop spell on the pot to keep it warm, which means it will not pour until the spell is broken. To accomplish this, simply clap three times.
N.B.: on no account should one attempt to touch the pot until the spell is broken. The magic involved is rather saltational, and may transmit itself on contact.
--HOOVES
He normally didn’t hold with magic as part of his job—service was service, not utility-spells—but today needs must. He placed the teapot on the tray, took out the tea-ball at three minutes to the second, and placed the spell on the pot.
Then—careful not to touch the pot—he took the tray up to the master bedroom. Years of experience had taught him the trick of moving noiselessly through any house, though in this case it wasn’t necessary: Bertie could sleep through the end of the world, content to read about it in the papers.
Tray deposited with the note conspicuously displayed, he picked up the satchel and left the house. The way back to Cheerilee’s lay uphill, but he was well warmed-up and glad of the challenge. The sun was just peering over the horizon, and the air was resonant with birdsong. He settled into a gallop.
Heart as full and confident as ever he could remember, he surged up the hill.
* * *
He hadn’t left a moment too soon: Cheerilee was just leaving the house, dressed for the school day and nobody else could make “prim” look quite so fetching, he thought.
She heard the drumming of hooves. Her eyes widened as she turned to see him coming up the lawn, head high, tail flaunting, divots probably fluttering like swallows behind me, heh! And still full of his success at the hedge, he decided to take the fence.
Unfortunately he didn’t reckon with the fact that he was going downhill then, but uphill now.
So his rear hooves clipped the fence minor fault, catch my balance when I touch down only the grass was wet from yesterday’s rain so his fore-hooves slipped out from under him, oh dear, well, roll to the point of the shoulder which he did, then tumble, pop up on my feet and make a joke about meaning to do that only the grass was, as before, wet, and he couldn’t get enough purchase to come all the way over and get his feet under him.
The result was that his hindquarters slewed around as he rolled belly-up, and he came to rest, legs flailing, nose-to-nose with an astonished Cherrilee.
“Dear,” he said from that vantage, “I have something I need to—oh good heavens my satchel, where’s it got to?”
“Hooves, what—wait, it’s over here: I’ll bring it.”
He seized it, rummaged furiously “Pleaseletitbeinherepleaseletitbeinhere—thank you, thank you—pleaseletitbeinhereplease—Ah!”
From the satchel there arose a locket on a subtly-braided chain of bright metal that struck rainbows from the morning sunlight. On it dangled a pendant...
...Two unicorns pranced on a jeweled pedestal: a golden mare with eyes of opal and a saddle-cloth of sapphires, and a silver stallion with sapphire eyes and a jet-black mane. Both seemed to look toward some distant horizon, their faces full of joy, of hope…
It hung in midair, Hooves holding it in his mind’s grasp. Then it settled around Cheerilee's neck.
“Hooves,” she gasped “It’s…it’s…”
“It was my mother’s.” he said, “It was the only thing she left me…
“…Miss Cheerilee—would you please be my wife?”
There flashed through her mind a thousand prudent, needful things to say: That’s a very fine offer but we need to have a serious conversation about combining our careers and our households, and we shouldn’t say anything to anyone until we’ve set a date, and…
What came out of her mouth, as of its own volition, was “I can’t leave my children.”
Hooves spluttered, “But--last night—what we said—destiny—other half—love, I want you to go on teaching!”
“Well what if your employer decides to pack up and go somewhere else?”
“Bertie’s not leaving Pinky, and Pinky’s not leaving Ponyville.”
“But you’re a unicorn, and I’m…”
“Well that doesn’t seem to matter to them, does it?”
That brought her up short. “I—keep forgetting Bertram’s a unicorn.”
Hooves spluttered at that. "Eh? Big horn in the middle of the forehead –that’s not a dead giveaway?”
“I know, but he doesn’t act the way you’d think a unicorn would act.”
“He…what…and how isTHAT, if you please?”
“I don’t know!” she wailed, exasperated, “More dignified—like you!”
“She says, to the fellow covered in grass waving all four hooves in the air.” Which, to emphasize the point, he did.
She tried to keep from laughing but gave up when he started. “Here, let me…” and between the two of them Hooves got right-side-up once more.
“Dear,“ he said when that was done ,”you needn’t answer right away. I know that allowing someone into your life would be a big, a very big change…”
“Yes.”
“…so I’m perfectly content to wait, you know, if you need more…”
“No.”
“Er…which…answer goes to which…what was the question again?” he finished plaintively.
“No, I don’t need more time. Yes, I’ll marry you.”
It was the first time she’d seen him speechless.
She leaned close, rested her neck against his. “Yes, letting someone into my life is a big change. But someday my life will change anyway—that’s how life is…
“...And all I can control is, whether it will change then, at a time I don’t choose, in a way I don’t choose—or here, now, because I choose--
“And I choose you, Hooves. I choose you.”
There was a long moment when no words were necessary, or indeed possible. Then…
“…and …uh…we really both need to get to work!” said Cheerilee.
“Yes...” he said, still in a daze. Then he shook himself. “I mean, yes of course! Bertie’ll probably have finished his first pot of tea by now. Have a—“ I’ve wondered what people felt when they said this “--have a good day at work dear.” He kissed her again, gently, and turned to go.
“Thank you Hooves, you too. And—we shouldn’t say anything to anyone until we’ve set a date.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Andweneedtohaveaseriousconversationaboutcombiningourcareersandourhouseholds!”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“And for heaven’s sake use the gate this time!”
“Er—yes dear, of course.”
“And Hooves—“
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Cheerilee.”
And they hurried off to the others who needed them.
* * *
The note hadn’t been touched but the teapot had. Bertie was frozen in place, sitting up in bed with one hoof on the handle.
Hooves sighed, thought for a moment, then carefully retrieved and pocketed the note. He clapped three times.
“—NAUGH! Hooves, where did you come from? You startled me.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Did you not see me enter when you rang?”
“I—no. In fact…I don’t remember ringing for you. All I remember is waking up, and the tea was there, and then you were. There, I mean.”
Hooves nodded sympathetically. “I understand, sir, that memory is particularly volatile upon first awakening.” He moved to draw the curtains back. “Possibly that is the reason why one seldom remembers one’s dreams.”
“Well…possibly, Hooves, possibly…Speaking of dreams, I had a real corker last night. I don’t know…do you suppose echidnas drink the blood of the living?
Sunlight flooded the room. “I believe they are in fact insectivores, sir.”
“Ah. Well that’s a relief…what’s an insectivore?”
Author's Note
I wrote this story away back in 2013, when I first got into the fandom. I think Season 3 had just started. At the time I didn't know much about the background characters so I thought it was reasonable for Miss Cheerilee to be a generation older than the Mane Six--old enough to have taught some of them in school. I've since found out that's not the case, hence the "Alternate Universe" tag.
This was all part of a longer story which may or may not be written (within a much larger epic that definitely won't), in which I ship Pinkie Pie with Bertie Wooster. Because really...
...how can you not? 
The pendant Hooves gives to Cheerilee, that was his mother's? That's based on a real piece, a brooch designed by my cover artist ( 
), Giorgio de Chirico:
They do look like unicorns, don't they?
