It was the little things that made life worth living.

Waking up to the smell of Spike’s cooking. The burble of fresh coffee brewing in the percolator. The warmth of a hug from one – or even all – of his closest friends. The sound of polyhedral dice tumbling on the kitchen table.

In a lot of ways, Shining Armor’s life in Ponyville was much simpler than it had been in Canterlot, but all those things that made life simpler also made it vastly more complicated – just one of the paradoxical aspects of Friendship that made it so worth studying. What had once been a highly regimented schedule of academic self-betterment and professional improvement, had been turned upside down and jumbled up like Spike’s Three Ruby Scrambled Omelette Surprise – which ironically was never a surprise, because the ‘surprise’ was always rubies.

Sure, there was the occasional adventure, or world-threatening crisis, or pie eating contest, but just as often Shining Armor found himself sitting back and going with the flow of small town living. Sundays always seemed to be especially quiet. Whether this was by some cosmic arrangement or the result of observation bias, Shining couldn’t say. Either way, it was definitely his favorite day of the week.

This particular lazy Sunday found Shining Armor in Sugarcube Corner, sitting at the soda bar while Pinkie worked the counter. A tall Triple-Trouble Choco-Chocolate-Fudge Milkshake was on the bar, held tightly in his hooves as he sucked the extra-wide straw Pinkie had given him. His eyes were glued to the comic hovering in the field of his magic. A stack of comics was next to him on the counter, half-a-hoof tall with the week’s newest releases. New comic day was earlier in the week, but the colt at the shop always held his order on reserve to be picked up on the weekend.

Shining Armor considered himself a fast reader, with better-than-average reading comprehension and retention. You read enough books and you tend to get good at it, he always said.

Well, not always. He said it once.

Maybe twice.

Comics, though, he never rushed. A good comic was like a good wine, something you sip and swirl around in your mouth, getting a full taste of the subtle notes. It wasn’t something to be rushed, it was an experience to savor, and so comics tended to eat up the entirety of his Sundays.

The steady stream of chocolatey ice cream and fudge flowing into his mouth went dry, the straw loudly sucking at the last dregs of syrup and guk at the bottom of the glass. Shining Armor tore his eyes from the page to peer down into the cup, maneuvering the straw with his lips to suck up the remains of the shake clinging to the glass.

“All done, Shine-Shine?”

Shining Armor lowered the comic to find Pinkie beaming at him with the usual Pinkie-cheer. He let go of the straw and licked his lips. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “It was good, thanks.”

“Need another?” she asked. The glass was quickly snatched away and stowed under the counter with a clink of dirty glassware.

“I think I’m okay,” he replied, patting his belly. He tucked the comic he’d been reading into a mylar bag – cardboard backed – and placed it atop the pile with the rest. “I was done reading like ten minutes ago anyway. I was just looking at the art on the last page.”

“Okie-do,” Pinkie said, humming as she trotted around the bar and towards the cupcake counter. Pinkie pulled out a serving tray and began emptying the display case, though, on closer inspection, it was already pretty bare. “You don’t want anything else?”

“No, thanks,” he said as he watched her go about her business. Something was off. It was suspiciously quiet for a Sunday, which was often one of the busiest days for the sweets shop. Looking around, Shining Armor noticed that the place was empty save for himself, Pinkie, and Pinkie’s pet alligator, Gummy, who was sitting atop the cash register at the far end of the soda bar. “Where is everyone?”

“They went home,” Pinkie replied, giggling. “It’s late, silly.”

Sure enough, a peek out the windows showed a darkened street. With just a glance Shining could tell it was that magic hour between when nightfall began and when the streetlights were on. The sign on the door was flipped, signalling that the shop was in fact closed.

“Oh, wow, so it is.” Shining Armor laughed, pulling a pair of saddlebags onto the counter to carefully pack away his pile of comics.

Once he was done putting away his reading material, he stowed the bag beneath the barstool and walked around to the back of the bar. Next to the big plastic tub filled with dirty dishes waiting to be carried to the kitchen, was a bucket of soapy water with a goodly supply of clean wash towels soaking within.

Shining set about helping clean up. The work was split between them in silence, under nothing more than a tacit understanding that friends helped one another. And besides, after sitting on a stool all day, Shining Armor felt he could do with a bit of moving around.

“I’m surprised the Cakes are still gone,” Shining Armor said offhandedly.

“I told them they should take the whole day off,” Pinkie explained. “They deserve it. They’re always super-duper understanding when I need to take off on an emergency for adventure stuff. I’m just glad that they trust me enough to mind the whole store by myself.”

“Well you’re great at it, so why wouldn’t they? Where’d they go?”

“They took the twins to a waterpark in Whinneapolis,” Pinkie said. “They’re taking a sleeper train back, so they’ll be home just in time to help with the morning rush.”

“That’s good. At least you won’t have to run the place alone two days in a row.”

Pinkie murmured in agreement, her usual bubbly cheer only slightly dampened with fatigue. It seemed that Pinkie Pie’s reserves were merely near-bottomless.

Shining Armor’s cleaning eventually brought him towards the cash till, where Gummy was still perched, his bulbous eyes fixed on Shining Armor the whole time. Normally, Shining Armor didn’t think anything of Gummy’s stare, since the baby alligator tended to stare at everything, but today he’d been extra attentive to Shining Armor.

“Are you still mad?” Shining Armor asked of the tiny gator. “It was over a week ago!”

Gummy stood there, motionless except for the periodic blinking of his eyes – first one, then the other – and a long, lazy smack of his toothless maw.

“I don’t know how many more times I can apologize,” Shining Armor said as he wiped the counter a little more vigorously. “I told you I wasn’t actually going to do it… It was a bluff!”

Gummy blinked.

Shining Armor threw the rag onto the counter and cantered over to where Gummy sat in silent accusation. “Look, you were there,” Shining Armor said, “you saw what I saw. Two-hundred Pinkie Pies, all bouncing around, tearing the town apart. We needed to find the real Pinkie, and the only thing that separated the magic Pinkies from the real one was their insatiable lust for fun and their complete disregard for the wellbeing of their friends.”

Gummy blinked.

“Seriously!” Shining Armor rose to his hind legs, gesticulating wildly. “Two-hundred Pinkie Pies with sociopathic tendencies! We’re lucky they didn’t start trying to use ponies as pinatas.”

“It’s true,” Pinkie Pie said, chiming in from where she was boxing up the unsold cupcakes in to-go packages with discount stickers for the following day. “I had a dream like that once, so it definitely would’ve crossed their minds eve~ntually. Real ponies probably aren’t filled with Mares Bars and Clip-Clops like the pinata ones are.”

“See?” Shining Armor declared, pointing at Pinkie, his star witness. “Even she knows it was an emergency. We had to figure out which was the real Pinkie, and I thought, hey, why not gather them all up and then announce that I would divide you, their beloved pet, into two-hundred equally sized pieces so that they could all have a Gummy of their own. I knew only the real Pinkie would care enough about your safety to object. It was the only way to know for sure.”

Gummy blinked.

“Okay, yes, I should have told you I was going to have a kitchen knife, but I had to make it look good!”

Gummy blinked. A low, whining mewl rolled out the back of the tiny alligator’s throat. Shining Armor wasn’t sure what that meant, but something about the noise struck him as contrarian.

Shining leaned against the counter, rearing up to put himself snout-to-snout with the baby gator. “Look, buddy, I can’t keep apologizing and we can’t keep going in circles here… How’s about I buy you a whole box of chocolate-covered mice and we call it water under the bridge, eh?”

The slitted pupils of Gummy’s big reptilian eyes narrowed to pencil-thin lines at the mention of chocolate-covered mice. The seconds ticked away, and finally, at long last, Gummy opened his maw and clamped down on the end of Shining Armor’s nose. The little reptile started chewing, snapping his toothless jaws, dampening the end of Shining’s muzzle with gator saliva.

“I… I can’t tell if he’s accepted the apology or if he’s eating me,” Shining Armor said. He shot his friend a sideways glance. “Pinkie? Little help? Are we friends again or is he trying to take my life?”

“You’re friends,” Pinkie said, chipper as could be as she walked over to gently pry Gummy from the end of Shining’s nose. She placed the baby gator on her head, and its body slowly sunk into her voluminous curls – like a quicksand pit of cotton candy – until only its face could be seen.

“Well that’s good,” Shining Armor said with a sigh.

Pinkie Pie smiled, suppressing a little giggle behind her hoof as she picked up where Shining Armor had left off. Wiping down the sticky counter after a day of clumsy spills and messy sundaes was one of her nightly tasks, so within moments she’d already cleaned more than Shining had managed in several minutes.

Shining Armor, seeing that he’d been rendered obsolete to the task of wiping the counter, went to get another rag and find something else to clean, but his attempt was waved off by Pinkie.

“I can handle this,” she said. She tilted her head towards the kitchen door, where cleaning supplies had been left after being pulled from the back. “Could you do me a favor and start sweeping? That’d be a rea~lly big help. It’s the worst part of mopping the floors.”

Shining Armor summoned the broom with his magic and started from the far corner of the shop, where dust bunnies had already started to gather after a long day of hoof-traffic. The work went quickly. With magic and a good rhythm, he made short work of the bunnies.

“So, have you heard from Twilight?” Pinkie asked, talking around the cleaning implement clenched between her teeth. She’d moved on from the counter and was cleaning the display cases with window cleaner, the rubber blade of her squeegee squealing loudly as she worked.

“Oh yeah, a lot.” Shining laughed. “She’s been writing practically every other day.”

“Nervous about the new job, huh?”

Shining Armor nodded. “Understandably so. She’s been running herself ragged trying to keep up with everything she has to learn and she keeps asking me for advice.” A smile found its way to his lips. “I’m actually glad she’s struggling so much.”

The squeak of window cleaning stopped and Shining Armor felt the unmistakable weight of eyes on him at his confession. He cast a nervous look over his shoulder at Pinkie, who was now tilting her head at him, one eyebrow cocked all the way to her maneline in unspoken question. Somehow, even the jaunty angle of the squeegee handle between her teeth looked oddly curious.

“That didn’t come out the way I meant it,” Shining explained, chagrined. “You don’t know Twilight the way I do. She’s…” He frowned, racking his brain to word the way he felt. “She struggles, but not the way normal ponies do. Things come easy to her, always have. It’s great, but it means she’s very self-sufficient. I never really got to be a big brother to her – not the way I was with Spike. Twilight doesn’t ask for help, it’s just not the way she is, but now she’s in this new position and it’s something I understand because of all the diplomacy stuff Celestia made me learn. This is something I can help with.”

“You feel useful,” Pinkie supplied, setting down the wiper.

“Exactly!” Shining Armor tapped the end of his nose. “Exactly that!”

“It is nice to be needed, I get that. I think we all do. It’s a little like that with me and my sisters.” She laughed, rubbing the nape of her neck in a rare display – for her – of self-consciousness. “I’ve never really been good at rock farming stuff, but I can whip up a cake like nobody’s business. It always makes me feel really warm and mushy inside whenever they ask me to cook for them.”

“Well,” Shining began, playfully making a show of tilting his head from side to side as though in deep consideration, “I don’t know about mushy.”

Pinkie laughed again, louder this time, the warmth of the sound filling the room. Pinkie had a great laugh. “Please, Shine-Shine, you’re a big tough stallion, but that’s just the outside,” she teased joyfully. “All big stallions are like that. Rough on the outside and sweet on the inside – like a big old burlap sack full of sugar.”

Shining reeled back in a show of dramatic outrage that would have made Rarity proud. He scoffed, touching a hoof daintily to his chest, scandalized, and said, “Why I never. I’ll have you know that I am, most indubitably, without reproach or peer, the hardest of the hardcore.”

“Oh yes~” Pinkie began, waggling her brows with the enthusiasm of a cat toying with a mouse, “Suuuuuper hardcore~ A mushy-mush would never have bawled like a colt with a chipped tooth at his little sister’s wedding.”

“T-that’s not my fault,” Shining said defensively, his face burning with shame at the memory. “It was a beautiful ceremony... I’m not made of stone!”

“Okay, okay, I’m not saying it’s bad,” Pinkie explained, her laughter tapering down to a soft, nasally chuckle-snort. “It’s very cute. Chicks love that sensitivity stuff, trust me.”

“I don’t know about all that,” Shining Armor said as he returned to his brooming. A few of the bunnies had tried to hop away, so he carefully pulled them back into the pile with the rest of the dust. “It really was a great wedding, though.”

Pinkie put away the window cleaner and moved on to her next task, all the way back across the store, back to the soda counter. There didn’t seem to be any sort of methodology to the way she moved from place to place, but Pinkie being Pinkie, she probably knew what she was doing.

“I liked Cadance’s dress,” Pinkie commented. “Rarity always does a great job.”

“Yeah, and Twilight looked great in her uniform.”

“Do you… yanno… still regret that you never got to wear one?” Pinkie asked.

His friends of course knew about his childhood dream. Conversations over tea and coffee – most often tea for the girls, coffee for him – were like winding roads, twisting and curving, splitting off in unexpected directions. There were very few secrets any of them still had that weren’t known to at least one other in their group.

Shining Armor summoned the dustpan and a bin to tidy up the sweepings as he thought it over.

“Kind of, but no,” he said, shrugging. “Being in the Guard was something Little Shining wanted. Sometimes it still crosses my mind, but no more than any other fantasy, I guess. I’m happy with where I’ve ended up, and it’s not like we don’t see our share of action, yeah?”

“You got that right!” Pinkie said, nodding vigorously in agreement. “But I will admit, I prefer our adventures to whatever that scary alligator thing we helped her fight was.”

Shining Armor shivered at the memory. Twilight had been a little evasive about what exactly the creature she called Ammit was, but from what he’d been able to gather from her and from Celestia, Twilight and that thing had had something of a history. Whatever may have actually happened, Twilight was being tight-lipped about it, which worried him to no end, but he trusted her when she said the matter was settled. To the world at large, Ammit was simply some weird monster, like the Cerberus, or a Tatzlwurm, and Shining Armor was happy to support that view if that was what Celestia and Twilight thought was for the best.

The broom, bin, and pan were sent away with a pop of magic, and Shining went over to reclaim his seat at the soda bar. “Still,” he mused, leaning against the counter with a hoof under his chin, “I guess that it would have been nice to wear one of those uniforms, just once.”

Pinkie whipped the wet rag she’d been wiping the shake machine with across the room, dropping it into a bucket of dirty rags. She joined Shining Armor at the bar, mirroring his sitting posture and swinging her back hooves lazily under the bar.

“Maybe we could ask Princess Celestia if we could have some kind of Special Forces uniform,” Pinkie suggested. “With cute little berets and tactical camouflage.”

“We already tried that,” Shining Armor said, his head lilting tiredly to one side. “We tried to design some like two weeks after our first adventure. Remember? Rarity kept wanting to put spangles and bells on them, AJ wanted stetson hats, and RD wanted flight goggles. We got tired of arguing about it and ended up going out for noodles.”

Pinkie’s brow creased in apparent concentration. “No… I don’t remember that… but I definitely remember eating noodles... What about our Mare Do Well costumes from the time we pranked Dashie? We could all wear those like a superhero team. Plus, we’d get to see you as a girl again. You were super cute as a girl.”

Shining Armor felt his cheeks flush at the compliment. “I wasn’t actually a girl,” he quickly explained. “It was just an illusion, remember? I was still a stallion. I just looked like a mare to anyone looking at me, so we could all play the same character.”

“You were still cute.” Pinkie sniggered, her curls bouncing with her laughter. “You’re just uncomfortable because you got stuck like that for a week and those teenage boys whistled at you.”

“I felt so violated,” he said, his already white coat blanching at the memory.

“Ay, chiquitita, don’t be so cold~” Pinkie teased, laughing and throwing in a wolfish whistle of her own. “You know I actually got kind of girl-jealous at how adorable you were.”

“Girl-jealous?”

Pinkie’s hoof pounded gently on the bar as she raised the other hoof, waving it around dramatically. “‘Curses!’” she said with theatrical intonation. “‘Confound her and her impossible beauty!’ Or something like that.”

“Huh…” Shining Armor scratched his head. “I didn’t know that was a thing…”

“The female heart is a fickle pickle,” Pinkie said with the air of something profoundly mysterious.

“You’re starting to sound like Rarity… kind of.”

“No, if I wanted to sound like Rarity, I would be telling you to get off your keister and go talk to Cheerilee, because that girl walked past the shop window six times today just to look at you,” Pinkie Pie said as she leaned in conspiratorially, wagging her eyebrows.

He frowned, casting a curious glance back towards the window. “Maybe…”

“Come on~ you should go for it,” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, ratcheting up the enthusiasm a few notches. “Or if not her, what about Roseluck? She’s cute and she always smells really nice. Plus, she ordered three sundaes and practically stared a bald spot into your back while she was eating them.”

“Pinkie…” Shining Armor growled in warning.

“Okay, okay, I know…” Pinkie Pie said, sighing as she laid her face against the nice clean counter. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. I know you girls mean well, just... after what happened with Trixie I think maybe it’s better if we uphold the agreement. The one where you girls stop trying to set me up.”

“I still feel awful about it. We never meant to hurt her like that.” Pinkie’s ears drooped, her poofy curls deflating slightly. “You do know that we just want you to be happy, right?”

“I am happy,” Shining replied.

“I know,” she said wistfully. “We all know. Doesn’t mean we don’t want you to be even happier... And besides, it’s not like any of us has anything going on… except Rarity...”

Shining frowned. Rarity and Spike were the only two in their group with any romantic entanglements, a truth made worse by the fact that they were entangled with each other. By now they knew well enough to keep their… amorousness… confined to private moments out of regard for their unattached friends. Still, it was annoying when they let their flirtations get the better of them in public.

“Well, I guess I can understand that,” Shining Armor muttered. “Not to sound insensitive, though, but rather than living vicariously through my love life, maybe the rest of you girls could, I don’t know, find boyfriends and girlfriends of your own?”

“Ughhhh but I’m soooooo picky~” Pinkie said, moaning in despair at the impossibility of the suggestion.

“Well, that’s not such a bad problem to have,” Shining Armor said as he gave Pinkie a consoling pat on the head. “If you’re picky that means you probably have a pretty good idea of what you want. That’s better than some of us have.”

As Shining gently pat Pinkie’s voluminous mane, something took hold of his hoof. He withdrew the appendage from Pinkie’s curls and found that Gummy had come along for the ride. The little gator’s toothless maw was gnawing happily on Shining Armor’s hoof as its bulbous eyes stared right at him.

“Yeck.” Shining Armor held his hoof out and shook himself free. The alligator dropped to the counter, leaving behind an extra big dab of gator-spit. Shining Armor summoned a kerchief and wiped himself dry. “I’ll just go ahead and assume that was another display of affection,” he said, leveling an amused glare at his attacker.

In response, Gummy rolled over onto his back, exposing his belly and wagging his tail like a friendly dog. Shining couldn’t resist the sight and found himself rubbing the baby reptile’s tummy as Gummy mewled and snapped his jaws in delight. He never much saw the appeal in Pinkie’s choice of pet, but watching it wriggle playfully like this, he couldn’t help but admit that it was actually pretty cute.

Sure, it was an apex predator that would one day grow to a size where it could swallow an adult stallion whole, but right now it was pretty darn adorable.

“You would’ve liked Trixie…”

Shining Armor’s hoof stopped mid-tickle at the unexpected statement from Pinkie. “What?”

Gummy wiggled out from under Shining’s hoof, his nails clicking against the laminated countertop as he skittered back to Pinkie. He disappeared into the forest of pink curls with a sound like rustling leaves.

“Trixie,” Pinkie clarified, her voice oddly wistful. “She was your type.”

“I don’t know that I have a type,” Shining quietly insisted.

Pinkie shook her head, her mouth curling into a subdued, quiet little grin that was wholly unlike her usual million-watt smile. “Nah, you do.”

“I think I would know if I did.”

“Nah,” she repeated. “You do, you just don’t know it. We already decided on it.”

Shining snorted. “Oh, you did, did you?”

“Who knows you better than we do? Celestia? Your mom? If they knew Trixie, they’d agree with us.” The soft, teasing grin quivered, then vanished. “We messed that up, though…”

The slow buildup of annoyance Shining Armor was feeling over Pinkie’s teasing faded at the look in the girl’s eyes. There was a glimmer of regret there that he wasn’t used to seeing in any of his friends, least of all in the indefatigable Pinkie Pie.

“I’m really sorry, Shining,” Pinkie said, her eyes all misty. “We messed up what probably could’ve been a good thing for you, and we really, really embarrassed someone that we all ended up liking.”

Shining wasn’t too sold on Trixie being ‘his type’ or anything like that, but he had to admit, the girls had made a pretty spectacular mess out of that whole scheme.

Their first meeting with Trixie had been anything but friendly. Though Shining himself had had very little direct interaction with the showmare at first, his friends had been rather unimpressed by her braggadocio. He had originally intended to stay out of it, not wishing to draw attention to himself, but fate being what it was, he eventually found himself at odds with the mare. A round of misadventure later and Shining had found himself on the receiving end of Trixie’s impressively broad vocabulary.

He’d been certain that she hated him, judging from the way she’d berated him even as she galloped away, screaming curses at the sky. His girls, however, had taken it another way, and decided that they would play matchmaker for their guy-friend and a mare that, in their eyes, was clearly smitten. To that end, they’d tracked the girl down and become penpals with her, pretending that they were him.

The postal chicanery that followed had ended up rather steamy, from what he’d later been told, though Shining Armor had never seen the actual letters himself. Rarity had burned them in what she claimed was an act of contrition, but was just as likely simply destruction of evidence. They had claimed that the letters were written by committee, but Shining Armor suspected that Rarity was the one pushing for escalation.

That mare did love her smutty romance novels.

From what he had heard of the letters, it was no surprise that Trixie would think she’d snagged herself a long-distance beau. This led to a very awkward meeting in his bedroom, which Trixie had meant to be a grand romantic gesture involving a lot of rose petals, sexy music, a dash of breaking and entering, and a strategically erotic deployment of whipped cream.

Of course, Shining Armor, having had no idea what was happening, had simply walked away from the surprising, if arousing, sight that he’d found himself presented with. He was normally quick on the uptake, but going from a discussion about civil engineering with the mayor to overt eroticism with someone he hadn’t seen in months was too many skipped gears, even for him.

All around, it wasn’t a high-point for anyone involved.

It wasn’t all tragedy, though. After the initial shock – and a quick shower to get all that whip cream off – Trixie had sat still long enough for Shining Armor to get to the bottom of things and explain what had happened. Although she had indeed run off once more cursing his name, she definitely wasn’t a mare to give up easily. A short time later he’d received a letter from the jilted girl, which included the note “Just in case,” written on the back of a photograph that certainly didn’t lose out to the live image she’d presented to him that night.

The girls, of course, didn’t know about Trixie’s follow up letter. That was just for him.

“I won’t tell you that what you did was alright,” Shining Armor said after a moment of thought, “but I will say it’s in the past. We all learned something from it and that’s what’s important… and something tells me Trixie is doing just fine.”

Pinkie fidgeted in her seat, squirming as though she was trying to gather the courage to say something. Whatever it was, it must not have been important. She grunted, softly nodding as she sat up straight, pressing her hooves against her back and loudly popping her spine. She slid off the stool, groaning like an old mare as she settled back onto her hooves.

“Guess I better get back to work so I can hit the hay,” she said.

“Anything else I can help with?” Shining asked.

“Nothing, you’ve done plenty, thanks,” Pinkie replied. “You want to stick around for dinner? I probably don’t have the energy for anything fancy, but how’s jam on sunflower toast sound?”

Shining Armor rubbed his belly, noting not for the first time the distinct rumbling of hunger slowly building inside him. He’d just been snacking all day, and hadn’t had anything even remotely like real food. The lack of a substantial meal was starting to catch up with him.

“I think I’ll just head home and eat some of the casserole Spike left in the fridge,” he said. “It’ll probably go bad if I don’t eat it tonight.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Pinkie said as she trotted over to where the mop was soaking in a bucket of sudsy water.

“Okay then, see you later, Pinks,” Shining Armor said as he pulled on his saddlebag and made for the door. “Thanks for putting up with me today.”

“Shining, wait.”

Shining Armor paused at the door, wondering what Pinkie might have suddenly remembered. She was the most easily distracted of his friends, and almost always had one last thing to tell anyone parting company with her.

Shining Armor had barely a heartbeat to notice that something was flying towards his face. His reflexes kicked in, his magic plucking the thing out of the air and holding it in place. All those long hours of tossing a tennis ball in the air to himself while mulling over homework had finally paid off.

“Never know when you might need some extra cupcakes,” Pinkie declared. “Those are on the house.”

Shining Armor lifted the lid of the white cardboard package. The scent of frosting and sugary cake wafted out, immediately tickling his tastebuds. The cupcakes were decorated with light pink frosting and covered with a generous helping of sprinkles. Oddly, atop each of the cupcakes was a little candy heart bearing a declaration of love that was several months out of season.

“Thanks, but what’s with the hearts?” Shining Armor asked.

“We had a big box of those left over from last Hearts and Hooves Day,” Pinkie explained. “I was feeling kind of festive and the box was already opened, so I wanted to use them up before they went stale. They actually sold pretty well.”

Shining Armor shrugged and moved some things around in his saddlebags to make room for the cupcakes. He said his final goodbyes, with the added promise of meeting the next day for lunch, and stepped out into the darkened streets.

* * *

The nights in Ponyville were very different from those in Canterlot. Canterlot wasn’t as sleepless as a metropolis like Manehattan, or a party town like Las Pegasus, but it was a city that catered to a wide variety of people.

At night, lights were almost everywhere you looked in Canterlot. There were street lights every few paces, and a glowing bulb above every stoop. In the parts of town that were more nocturnal, neon signs flickered like the North Star guiding customers to shops that dealt in the trade of ‘night life’ in its various flavors.

Ponyville wasn’t like that. The sun went down and the lights came on, but they didn’t glow with the blinding false-day of light pollution. The street lamps were spaced far enough apart that the halos of soft orange light barely brushed against one another, and the porch lights only stayed on long enough to let visitors know the residents were still awake.

Canterlot sat atop its mountain, burning throughout the night like a second moon anchored to the earth, while the subdued lights of Ponyville flickered like the glow of fireflies over still water.

It was still early enough that ponies were out and about, off to visit friends and lovers, or out to walk off a full belly before retiring to bed. There was something charming about the nights here, which while less lively than those in Canterlot, were definitely more intimate. It was just quieter. Ponies in the streets spoke in whispers and soft murmurs to one another, considerate of the peaceful night itself as much as for any neighbors that might have turned in early. The only source of raucousness came from the local watering hole at the far end of town. Quiet as the nights here were, you could hear the clamor of music and day-end revelry echoing all over town, but even this was softly muted to white-noise, like the song of crickets.

Shining Armor took the scenic way home, though arguably every route home was scenic. Hungry as he was, he was enjoying the fresh air after having been cooped up in a sweets shop all day. The rumble in his stomach grew every time he passed an open kitchen window or a busy restaurant, and if it wasn’t being so aggressive, he would have been content to simply stroll around town until long past his bedtime.

He rounded a corner, stepping onto the street leading directly home. He could see the top of his tree peeking over the row of cottages – nothing about Ponyville was urban enough to be called a ‘block’ – and the sight of home, so near, lightened his steps.

He’d only lived in the library for a year or so, but it already felt more like home than his quarters back in Canterlot ever had. Maybe it wasn’t as fancy as a tower in the castle, but he loved his library. The old tree smelled of lacquered wood, aged paper, and the sharp, fresh scent of greenery.

He unlocked the front door and pushed it open, shoving aside the small pile of books that had accumulated since he’d left. The library had been closed for the day, but there were always a few returns waiting for him when he got home. He levitated them into a neat stack and dropped them onto a cart to be stamped and sorted in the morning.

At least he had the house to himself. Spike was spending the weekend with Rarity, as usual, and the pair had decided to take a trip out of town while Rarity had some work done on her home. They probably wouldn't be back until well into the next day.

He cantered to the kitchen, happy to be home after a long, tiring day of doing nothing. It was good to be back, and the blessed silence of an empty house was a wonderful respite from the rigors of socialization. Friendship was magic, but solitude was a magic of its own.

He left the lights off as he went. He knew the library like the back of his hoof, and the thin shaft of light pouring in through the window from the bulb above his neighbor’s porch was more than enough to get him to the kitchen.

He turned the corner that separated their living area from the rest of the library and stepped into the kitchen. He paused at the doorway, peering suspiciously into the darkness as his subconscious mind told him something was up. This was his kitchen, site of many midnight snacks, and he could tell that there was something off about the shadows, something that wasn’t supposed to be there. His instincts proved right, as a long, deep, grating growl rumbled out of the darkened kitchen.

Shining Armor flipped on the light, throwing back the darkness and revealing something purple, lumpy, and misshapen atop his kitchen table. The big lumpy thing snorted, groaning and growling as it rolled around on the table in an attempt to right itself.

The thing quickly wiggled enough to expose what it was beneath its outer layer of purple cloth, and to his surprise Shining found himself staring at a mare – and a familiar one at that – in the midst of the oddest table dance he’d ever witnessed.

“Hubbafwubbubabah?” Trixie asked with as much eloquence as could be expected after being caught sleeping on someone else’s kitchen table. She’d fallen asleep wearing her cape, and the long swath of star-spangled cloth had wrapped around her like a cocoon. She tried to rise, only to fall back to the table with a thunk as she was standing on the cape. She quickly undid the knot tying the garment around her neck and thrashed about until she was free. “Aha!” she declared triumphantly.

Shining Armor watched this all play out from the kitchen doorway. His shock at seeing Trixie in his kitchen after all these weeks was quickly replaced by sympathetic chagrin as Trixie had fumbled and flopped about like a clown in a Prench circus.

Trixie grinned, mugging like the whole world was watching, as she looked down at her shed restraints. She wore the pride of an escape artist who had just performed a death-defying stunt as she threw back her head and let out a quick bark of laughter.

“Nothing can hold the Great and Powerful Trixie!” she declared.

“Impressive.”

Trixie went still, every muscle in her body pulling almost audibly taut.

Shining Armor had been turned to stone once and he had to imagine that the look on his face as he came snout-to-beak with a cockatrice wasn’t that different from the one Trixie wore as she stared at him.

Trixie looked at him, then down to her cape. Back up to Shining. Back down to her cape.

She scrambled, kicking the cape aside and levitating her big wizard’s hat atop her head from somewhere beneath the table. “Ah-haha, Shining Armor, you fool!” she cried, rearing up to point a hoof and sneer imperiously at him. It was impressive, but lacked impact without the cape – not that he would say that to her face. That’d be rude. “You have fallen into Trixie’s trap! Trixie knew all she had to do was wait for you, and here you are, like a fly into delicious premium-grade organic honey!”

“Yeah, you caught me,” Shining Armor said, smiling as he played along with her dramatics. He slipped off his saddlebag full of comics, set it down against the wall, and held his hooves up in surrender. “My jig is up! You have made of me your gull!”

“Indeed!” Trixie said, throwing back her head and laughing once more. “Now all Trixie needs is to… to…”

Trixie looked down, an edge of panic creeping into her well-crafted facade of gloatery. She spun around, frantically looking for something. She looked over the edge of the table, letting out a squeal of glee as she found whatever it was she had lost.

Trixie stood again, this time with a piece of jewelry held in the grip of her magic. It was a jewel, blood red, set into an amulet of something that might have been black gold, fashioned in the shape of a unicorn’s head, with a pair of wings jutting from the sides – an alicorn motif, he surmised.

“Behold the Alicorn Amulet, the implement of your doom!” Trixie cried. She took a step towards him, menacingly. “With this, Trixie shall—”

The sound of something breaking cut across Trixie’s diatribe. They both looked down to the empty casserole dish that had somehow managed to escape her earlier conniption, only to be gracelessly kicked off the edge of the table. The broken pieces of ceramic looked spotless, like they’d been practically licked clean.

Shining and Trixie looked at one another, and for the first time Shining Armor noticed the remains of the casserole that was to be his dinner had dried into a crust around the edges of Trixie’s mouth. He looked down at the dish again, his powerful mind easily putting the clues together.

“You ate my dinner,” he said, voicing his deduction.

“I-it was Trixie’s… by right of conquest!” Trixie protested. She faltered, her lower lip quivering. “D-don’t change the subject! You’re still doomed!” She held out the amulet, shaking it at him the way his friend Zecora waved her staff at the bog pixies that sometimes tried to nibble at her herb garden. “She… I… I can still… I can whammy you and then I’ll… ah peanuts…”

Trixie sighed, collapsing onto her rump, teary-eyed and dispirited. She held the Alicorn Amulet between her hooves, her lower lip quivering as she glared at it, as though her embarrassment was its fault.

“I don’t know why I even came here anymore…” she muttered as she tossed the amulet aside. She laid down, pulling the wide brim of her hat and clamping it down with both hooves like it could hide her from the world. “Just go... Leave me to my shame…”

Shining Armor sighed. This certainly wasn’t what he was expecting to find when he came home, but he’d learned over the past year that he had something of an inborn knack for rolling with the punches. Besides, all his best friends were young excitable mares, and so he’d navigated his way through more than his share of dramatic freakouts.

“I’d probably do that if this wasn’t my house,” Shining Armor replied. He conjured a broom and dustpan and started cleaning up the mess. “How do you keep getting in here anyway?”

“Jimmied the lock on the back door with a library card,” Trixie explained. Her words were only slightly muffled by the hat.

Shining paused. “Is that irony?” he asked, to himself as much as Trixie. “Using a library card to break into a library…”

“I think it might be too literal to be irony,” she said, peeking her face out from under the hat. “I’m no expert, though. I’m more of a schadenfreude girl.”

“And I think that might be irony,” Shining Armor said with a chuckle.

Trixie withdrew back into her hat like a turtle pulling into its shell, with a soft nasally sort of groan accompanying the retreat. Shining Armor couldn’t help but remark to himself that it was so pathetic that it was actually incredibly adorable.

Shining Armor dumped the mess into the trash can and sent away the broom and pan. The stool nearest to Trixie was lying on the floor, a victim of her earlier escape trick. He picked it up with his magic and had a seat to examine the amulet thing that Trixie had seemed fixated on.

It was an oddly beautiful, if creepy looking, bit of jewelry. There was no telling what the largest jewel was, but he could tell that the blood-red eyes of the alicorn ornamentation were rubies. They weren’t particularly impressive, but as he tilted and turned the thing in his hooves those simple eyes seemed to follow him. It was actually kind of unsettling...

On a hunch, Shining Armor pouted in concentration and touched the amulet with a spark of his magic. Something in it resisted, then bit back at his probing, leaving behind a cold, angry feeling in the pit of his stomach. He quickly withdrew his magic, blinking in surprise at the feedback he’d just gotten, and asked numbly, “Is this thing evil?”

“Probably,” Trixie said, peeking one eye out from under her hat to watch him. “I bought it from some evil guy who owned an evil shop, who told me it was evil and would give me evil superpowers… but you know, you can’t trust anything an evil guy tells you. It could be evil, or it could be some piece of junk. I haven’t actually tried it on yet…”

“Putting aside the fact that you possibly might have brought something evil into my house, that was pretty poor planning,” Shining surmised as he set the amulet down… gingerly. “I mean what if you put it on and it didn’t actually give you evil superpowers?”

Trixie shrugged meekly. “Refund?”

He smiled. “I’ve got a little experience with evil guys, I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that they don’t really do refunds”

Trixie sat up on her haunches, still on the table, still holding the brim of her hat over her ears. “I could put on my evil amulet and force him to give me a refund…”

“The evil amulet that doesn’t work.”

“Right… right…” Trixie’s face scrunched up in thought, her brain clearly puzzling over the puzzle of how to get her money back in such a scenario, which culminated in a simple conclusion. “I’d be screwed then. Give it to me, let’s find out.”

Shining Armor set his hoof atop the amulet. “Yeah… about that…” he muttered as he slid the amulet across the table, just out of Trixie’s reach. “I kind of work for Celestia? I should probably confiscate this and turn it over to her…”

“Oh…” Trixie withdrew, clearly dismayed as she stared at the amulet. “I spent a lot of money on that…”

“I’ll angle for her to declare you a temporary agent of the crown and say you purchased it for the purposes of surrendering it to the authorities,” he suggested. He cast a quick spell, sending the amulet to his study upstairs. There was a small safe there, hidden behind the desk, where he kept things of a sensitive or birthday-related nature, especially if they were things Spike might accidentally eat. “That way you’ll get compensated.”

Trixie stared with a look of resignation at the spot where her amulet had previously been. “I guess that’s okay…”

Before Shining Armor could press the matter of why Trixie would bring an apparently evil artifact into his home, the mare in question’s stomach began growling like a cornered wolverine. Trixie’s grip on the brim of her hat tightened, pulling it back down over her blushing face.

Shining Armor thankfully had enough tact that he could save her this one small indignity by not calling her rude tummy noises to attention. His good manners didn’t spare his own pains, though, as his stomach tightened – thankfully silently – as though answering the call of Trixie’s belly grumbles. He went to the fridge without another word and peered inside.

By this time of the week their larders tended to be pretty bare. Barring any sort of unscheduled adventuring, Spike invariably did the household shopping on Mondays, when he could use the coupons clipped over the course of the previous week. As such, there was very little that could be considered meal-worthy in the fridge and Shining knew the cabinets would prove similarly deficient. They probably still had some cereal, which could be a fun dinner, but it wasn’t very filling.

A search of the freezer proved a bit more fruitful. Someone had taken the last of the frozen waffles and put back the empty box, but hidden behind that and the tubs of neighopolitan ice cream – with only the inedible strawberry left – was one last frozen pizza. They’d gotten a whole bunch of them for a board game night, but Fluttershy had brought plain cheese, so no one had bothered to make it.

“Mama Celestia okay?” Shining asked as he pushed things out of the way to get at the pizza.

“Yeah, I love pizza,” Trixie replied, smiling bashfully as she was finally lured from under her hat by the temptation of food.

Shining set their dinner to cook, reflecting only briefly how odd it was to be cooking – frozen pizza counted as cooking, in his learned opinion – for someone other than himself or one of his friends. The queerness of the scenario ratcheted up a few notches at the reminder of the last time he’d seen Trixie and, especially so, as he recalled the conversation he’d had with Pinkie less than an hour before.

The pizza went into the oven and Shining Armor joined Trixie, who had finally climbed down from the table and taken a proper seat.

He smiled at Trixie.

She smiled at him.

The egg timer counting the seconds until pizza time ticked away like the nervous heartbeat of an awkward colt on prom night.

Shining Armor kept smiling.

“So you came here to kill me, or… what’s the deal?”

Trixie flinched. “Ooooooh, I was hoping that you would have forgotten about that by now,” she muttered.

“It happened literally less than five minutes ago,” Shining Armor bluntly stated. “I mean I’m forgetful sometimes, but that’s goldfish levels of short-term memory failure.”

“Oh-hohoho, but you don’t want to know about that,” Trixie said, waving a hoof and chuckling dismissively like some heiress in a racy play attempting to laugh off questions about her indiscretions. She gave him a coy look, fluttering her eyelashes coquettishly. “Let’s talk about how you’re doing. Are you still the Element of Magic? That’s utterly fascinating, do go on about that.”

Maybe a stallion with less female friends would have fallen in that tiger pit, but Shining Armor knew better. Rarity alone had six black belts in this sort of evasive girlishness and he was well immune to it.

“Well the day started off great,” Shining began. “I woke up early, had some cereal, did my workout, bought some comics, had a couple of milkshakes. Usual Sunday stuff.” He leaned forward, grinning slyly. “And then I came home and wouldn’t you know it? Someone broke into my house and threatened swift, possibly bloody, revenge on me. Then she tried to weasel her way out of telling me why she was so angry. I mean, I would get it if she was angry considering the way she and I last parted, but I was kind of under the assumption that we were cool… because of, uh… a letter she sent me...”

Trixie’s face flushed with the deepest blush he’d ever seen. “Oh, so you did get that…?”

“Was I not supposed to…?” Shining Armor asked, now feeling bashful because she was being bashful.

“No, no, that was for you, it was just that… I was kinda… you know…” Trixie tilted a hoof towards her mouth like she was taking a drink, a pantomime that he assumed meant she’d been a little tipsy at the time. “I wasn’t sure if I wrote your address correctly, honestly. It’s actually a huge relief that you got it. I’ve been worried that some random stranger had a picture of me with my back hooves up behind my ears.”

“No, I got it,” Shining said, the corners of his mouth involuntarily pulling into a big dopey grin. He quickly schooled his expression once he realized he was probably leering and cleared his throat. “It’s upstairs, if you want it back.”

Trixie squirmed in her seat as she chewed her lower lip with almost certainly unintended eroticism. “Did you like it?” she asked demurely.

Shining Armor just nodded silently, afraid to open his mouth lest he let on exactly how much, and how often, he enjoyed that particular picture.

“Then that’s yours,” she said with a happy grin.

“Thanks.” He glanced over at the egg timer. The knob on the timer had barely moved, but it felt like they’d been talking for at least an hour. “I think we got off topic, though. You haven’t explained why you brought that weird necklace here and told me I was doomed.”

“I guess there’s not really any point in hiding it now,” Trixie said as her smile faded. She reached up and massaged her temples. “I was going to use that amulet’s magic to make myself stronger, so that I could challenge you to a magical duel, defeat you, and force you to be my boyfriend.”

Shining Armor blinked dumbly at the confession. It was certainly… a plan… of sorts. It was somehow simultaneously overly complicated and childishly simple.

“You could have come to my house and just asked me to be your boyfriend,” Shining countered, immediately finding the most glaring flaw in Trixie’s plan.

She fixed him with a deadpan look. “Can you honestly blame me for wanting to hedge my bets a little bit, considering how our last meeting went?”

“I guess not,” he replied, reluctantly admitting that she had a point. A completely bonkers point, but still a point. “I suppose I’m just confused that you still think about me in that way. I mean, you do know that wasn’t me writing those letters.”

“Yeah, it was your friends,” Trixie said, her expression darkening for only a brief moment, like a passing shadow.

“So then why?”

Trixie went uncharacteristically quiet. She looked away, seemingly unable to continue meeting his gaze. Her horn lit as she retrieved her cape from the corner of the kitchen where she’d kicked it earlier. Even Shining had forgotten about it. She laid it on the table, carefully smoothing it out and brushing away the dust with a gentle hoof.

“Because I guess, even if it was fake, that was probably the best relationship I’d ever had with a stallion before,” Trixie quietly admitted. “I’m not actually all that great at magic. Magic-magic, I mean. The stuff you can do, the stuff they teach in fancy schools. My talent is in showmareship, pageantry, the ol’ razz-matazz. It’s hard to make it big doing stage magic as a unicorn, because everypony who sees your show just assumes you’re doing real magic to make your illusions work. It’s harder to impress a crowd with sleight of hoof when you’re a unicorn, so you have to work twice as hard as any other street magician. Doesn’t exactly leave a lot of time for socializing. And my shows don’t gain many adult admirers, sadly.”

Her cape now relatively clean and wrinkle-free, Trixie folded it with the care of a veteran folding a flag and set it aside. She leaned her weight against the table, her eyes still cast downward, and licked her lips before continuing.

“I was pretty mad when you embarrassed me the first time, but I got over it. I had it coming, I suppose, for falling for my own hype like that. I was moving past it, but then…” She took a deep breath and let it go with a whuff. “Then I started getting those letters and, after a few back and forth, I started realizing how lonely I was. You get so used to being alone that you stop noticing it. You don’t even realize how miserable you are.”

“I get that,” Shining Armor said. “I felt pretty alone for a long, long time. Right up until this last year, honestly. I never had time for friends or relationships when I was younger, and as I got older I just got so used to being without those things that I never even thought about trying to make those kinds of connections… Looking back on it, I can admit now that I was miserable. I don’t know if I could’ve made it this far without Spike and Princess Celestia supporting me.”

“I know,” Trixie said, stealing a quick glance at him to flash an amused grin. “‘You’ told me pretty much the same thing in our letters. I gotta admit, your friends really nailed their impression of you.”

Shining frowned, deeply and with much conflict in his heart. “I don’t know how to feel about that… proud?” His frown deepened. “No, definitely not that…”

“Be flattered,” Trixie said with a soft, girlish giggle. “They really love you. They wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of mail fraud if they didn’t.”

“I guess that’s one way to look at it,” he replied with a sniff.

“I was completely pissed after I found out it wasn’t you I was talking to,” Trixie continued. “That one girl, Pinkie Pie, she tracked me down a few days later, though. She explained what happened and practically begged me to not blame you for it.”

“Wait.” Shining tilted his head quizzically. Hadn’t he just been speaking with said mare about the other said mare? “You met up with Pinkie? She never mentioned that.”

“I made her promise not to,” Trixie said. “She did some kind of crazy religious dance or something. Said it would seal the deal.”

“She calls it a Pinkie Promise,” he supplied.

She shrugged. “Right, that. Well after that I told her that it was too late. I said that I hated you and that I didn’t want you to know where I was at. She accepted it, prayed to her weird Secrecy God, and went home.”

“So you lied to her?”

Trixie rolled her eyes as she pursed her lips and blew rudely. “Obviously. She seems nice, sexual entrapment aside, so I felt a little bad, but not by much. That pony is kinda intense.”

“Tell me about it,” Shining agreed with a chuckle. “I feel like that can be said about all the mares in my life. They’re all pretty ‘intense’ in their own ways, yourself included.”

Trixie grinned, hope glimmering in her eyes. “I’m... ‘in your life’?”

“I think considering how dramatic our meetings have been so far, I’d have to say so,” Shining said, clicking the tips of his forehooves bashfully.

Trixie’s stomach growled again, and this time Shining’s stomach couldn’t resist the urge to loudly agree with it. There was still a lot of time left before they could eat, but he desperately wanted some sort of buffer – something that would make the inevitable lulls in their conversation less awkward.

The cupcakes Pinkie had thrown at him sprung to mind. He levitated them from his bag and set the box on the table between them as Trixie leaned forward curiously. The lid opened, once more releasing the scent of heavily-sugared frosting. The cupcakes had gotten a little smooshed, but you could still see hints of Pinkie’s artistry with the frosting bag. He levitated the cupcakes out and set one down for each of them.

“Something to tide us over until dinner’s ready,” he said. “Unless you think it’d ruin your appetite.”

“I’d never say no to a cupcake,” Trixie happily declared.

Shining had forgotten about the little candy hearts Pinkie had added. Odd coincidence, but he wasn’t about to complain. For all he knew it was just more of her Pinkie Sense nonsense.

He picked the candy heart up with his magic and squinted at it. There was a tiny picture of a train engine, complete with a trail of smoke billowing out of the stack. He flipped it over and licked the frosting clean, revealing the cramped lettering.

“‘I Choo-Choo-Choose You’...” he read aloud.

Trixie laughed, snorting cutely as she did. She plucked the heart from her own cupcake, which had been pushed into the frosting until it was half-submerged. She licked it and read her own message.

“Oh!” she shouted. She put a hoof to her mouth and tittered. “There’s a picture of a bee on it and it says ‘Bee Mine’. That’s so stupid. Why do you even have these?”

“Pinkie gave them to me.”

“Ah, say no more.”

Shining Armor smiled as he bit into his cupcake. It may have already been a day old, but the cake was still fluffy and moist. Pinkie was an earth pony, but that mare sure had some magic hooves when it came to baked goods.

“So tell me more about being a stage magician,” he said as he took another bite.

“You don’t want to hear about that,” Trixie muttered as she bit into her own treat. “It’s not really anything compared to what you can do.”

“No, I really do,” he said encouragingly. “Don’t you get nervous talking in front of a bunch of strangers? Me? I get nervous, especially in front of dignitaries.”

Trixie leaned forward, giving a smile that showed off the rainbow frosting between her teeth. She still had dried casserole in the fur around her mouth, too. It wasn’t exactly a conventionally attractive look, but Shining’s heart still skipped a beat at the twinkle in her eye.

“Want to know a trick for that?” she asked. She didn’t even wait for a reply. “Just look out into the audience and picture everyone wearing funny hats.”

* * *

Shining Armor sat at the small writing desk in his bedroom, his eyes fixed on the bowl of peanuts sitting in front of him. He picked one up, and cast a quick look over his shoulder at the mare sitting on his bed.

After finishing the pizza, Trixie had loudly complained that she was still hungry, and with their choices of dessert severely limit – it was a pleasant discovery that she shared his perfectly sane views on the uselessness of strawberry ice cream – he had recalled a bowl of peanuts he’d left in his desk drawer upstairs. Trixie had wasted no time before trotting upstairs and making herself at home, sprawling out on his bed and pouting until he offered to feed her peanuts like a servant colt feeding grapes to a reclining sultana.

He’d had mares up to his room on many occasions since moving to Ponyville, but he’d never really been aware of them in the same way he was Trixie. Not when he knew her… her bits… with such private familiarity that he could conjure the image with perfect facsimile in his mind’s eye. It didn’t help that the way she stretched out, her head resting on an upturned hoof, reminded him of that night they’d had their first ‘misunderstanding’.

“So what’s your sister like?” Trixie asked.

“Twilight?” Shining Armor let out a long ragged sigh. “Don’t even know where to start with that girl. She’s a few years younger than me – about a year younger than Spike. She is… was… in the Royal Guard. She’s a tomcolt, and I mean not even a little bit girlish, and she loves reading even more than I do.”

“She just got married to Princess Cadance,” Trixie added. “I saw the pictures in the paper. That was big news. Do you get along with her wife?”

“Cadance is great,” Shining said. “We more or less grew up together in the castle. In those days I wasn’t the kind of pony that really saw the value in making friends, but she was always nice to me and Spike. My mom loves her though.”

The bed frame creaked as Trixie sat up, her ears perking at the mention of Shining’s mother. “Your mom?”

“Oh, they’re best friends,” Shining Armor said with a laugh. “They went drinking once. Twilight said she had to carry them both home on her back, under an invisibility spell, so they wouldn’t cause national shame.”

“Do you think your mom would like me?”

The question was asked so quietly, in such a small voice, that Shining Armor had almost missed it. Even at a whisper, Trixie’s voice hadn’t been so subdued, so… Fluttershy-like. It was a surprisingly fresh new dimension to the girl. He couldn’t help but watch her as she turned her head away, hiding the flash of bashful vulnerability that had oozed around the cracks of her normally playful smirk. One hoof was toying nervously with her mane, flattening it with almost manic purpose.

“I think she would,” he said with total honesty. “My dad says she’s kind of crazy, and Cadance I know for a fact is a total goofball when she isn’t in public. I think they’d both really like you.”

“Cool…” Trixie said, still shyly tugging at her mane, but smiling like she’d just found a hundred bits lying in the street. She looked up very suddenly, her eyes wide as if some terrible, unthinkable thing had just crossed her mind. She quickly asked, in a single breathless rush, “Hey I know we talked about it earlier and we’ve been kind of flirting and stuff and I forgot to ask but do you maybe want to be my boyfriend?”

Stunned for the moment, Shining Armor stared at Trixie, his eyes just as wide as hers. The peanut he’d just tossed into the air landed on his head, bouncing off his horn and rolling away.

“Okay?” he said with an unintentionally interrogative inflection, having summoned his every erg of brainpower just to get that much out.

“You don’t sound sure,” Trixie said. She got up, standing atop the mattress like she was preparing to bolt for the door. The furtively panicked looks she was shooting towards in that direction indicated that escape was certainly crossing her mind, just the way it would for an animal that had been backed into a corner. “Is that yes for certain or did you only say that because I sprung the idea on you without warning?”

“No!” Shining shouted, leaping from his desk chair and onto his hooves. In his haste, he accidentally smacked the bowl of peanut shells, spilling them everywhere. He paid no mind as he hurried to the bed, the shells crunching beneath his hooves as he hurried to the bedside. “I mean yes! I totally want to be your boyfriend. I thought it was kind of… uh… implied in this sort of flirty-flirty thing we’ve been doing all night...”

Trixie’s mouth puckered into a surprised little O-shape. “Oh,” she said, slowly sitting back onto the mattress. “That’s good… still, I mean I kind of suspected, but you should never take things like that for granted. I mean you did say earlier that I should have just asked, and I didn’t, so I thought maybe I should… Is that rambly…?”

Shining Armor couldn’t help but smirk as the cute mare started getting all bashful again. The way she flattened her ears, hanging her head and trying to hide behind her bangs, all the while pawing like a nervous kitten at the bedsheet – it was all just very, very cute.

He climbed up onto the bed next to her and leaned over, planting a kiss on her cheek before she could flinch away. The effect was immediate as the poor girl went all stiff, her face burning red and her breath catching in her chest with a strangled, mouse-like squeal. For a second there Shining was afraid that his new girlfriend might fall over dead.

Life returned to her with a low, nasally giggle, and her face split into a wide, dopey grin. “Cool…” she muttered dreamily.

The clock on the wall chimed once, marking the hour and drawing Shining Armor’s attention to just how late it was. “Wow, I guess we’ve been talking for a while…” he muttered.

“Cool…” Trixie replied, still a little lost in the weeds after the unexpected kiss.

“Do you want to spend the night?” Shining Armor asked. “We’ve got an extra bed down in the basement. It’s a little drafty, but we’ve got plenty of blankets.”

“Cool…” Trixie shook her head, her consciousness snapping back into place with a practically audible pop. “I mean not cool.”

“Oh!” Shining Armor slid off the bed, his eyes turning to the door as he pawed at the floor nervously. “I guess you can take the bed and I’ll just sleep in Spike’s room. Rarity is getting her closets expanded again, so she took Spike to Manehattan for the weekend. They won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon.”

Trixie didn’t respond right away. She just sat on the bed, chewing her lip in apparent hesitation, her ears twitching anxiously.

“So…” she began. She scooted on the bed, backing herself up against the headboard. “Feel free to say no to this, but I was kind of wondering if maybe… maybe you might want to have sex?”

Shining Armor’s first instinct as a good host was to say it was no trouble at all and he was happy to let her have the bed. His brain, powerful as it was, quickly realized this response was not congruent with the question he was just asked.

He forced a smile, his ears flopping almost manically, and asked, “Come again?”

“That’s the idea,” Trixie said.

The joke hung in the air for a moment before Trixie started giggling and tugging at her hair. “Like, you know,” she said in a strangely high-pitched voice. “Like come, like, you know. Like cum… hehehehehehe… hah...”

Shining Armor watched, utterly perplexed, as Trixie seemed to melt, sliding down until she was nearly flat before wriggling under the covers like a cockroach escaping beneath the fridge. She laid there, a perfectly still lump, the only sign of life being the long, steady, high-pitched whine emanating from the lump.

Shining Armor was not suave. He was handsome, sure, and probably desirable, if all the mares that desired him were any indication. But he was admittedly very new to dealing with mares, and the sight of one that he very much liked hiding under the covers, keening like a baby bird with a broken spine, left him a little thunderstruck.

He eyed the door, wondering if escape was the correct move. A very loud voice at the back of his mind shouted at him – with his mother’s angrily shrill timbre – that this was in fact not the right thing to do.

He scratched the nape of his neck, feeling very unsure of himself as he asked, “So… sex then?”

The keening stopped. The lump under the blankets shifted to the edge of the bed, lifting up the covers enough to reveal Trixie’s face half-hidden in darkness.

“Yes, please,” she muttered hopefully.

Shining Armor heaved a sigh and tugged the blanket aside with his teeth. “Come on, now, we’re adults,” he said, ignoring the panicked little eep! Trixie let out at being unceremoniously uncovered. “We can talk about this like big grown-ups.”

Trixie narrowed her eyes, suddenly appearing to take affront at the insinuation that she was anything less than a grown-up. “Trixie is the most grown-up,” she declared sitting up straight and puffing out her chest. “The most Great and Powerful grown-up you’ve ever seen. Why, when Trixie was in school, she was voted most likely to be a grown-up.”

“Okay then, Great and Adult Trixie,” Shining said with a roll of his eyes and smirk playing across his lips, “let’s hash this out. You don’t think it’s a little soon to be engaging in sex just yet? We did just sort of get on the same page about being a ‘couple’ no less than five minutes ago.”

Trixie replied with a pout, as if that was enough of a rebuke to prove her point. When it wasn’t she just sighed. “Well, the thing is, my original plan?”

“The one that involved evil magic amulets.”

“Right, my evil magic amulet plan,” she confirmed, nodding enthusiastically, “that plan had a few steps, with alternate backup steps in case things went sideways, but the whole thing definitely ended in sex. I kind of was thinking about it the whole way here, and I got, yanno, real…” She cleared her throat. “Yanno... horny.”

Shining Armor’s eyebrow lifted, slowly, like a steadily inflating balloon, as he recognized a sticking point in the romance of this explanation.

“Now I know what you’re thinking!” Trixie interrupted, holding out a hoof. “But it wasn’t as sordid as all that, I assure you. I wasn’t going to force you to do anything, because that would be wrong, even if I was under the influence of evil amulet magic. The idea was that you’d see how great and powerful I was and you’d get so turned on that you’d beg to get some of this, and I’d say okay, and you’d just jump on top of me and be like uhn, uhn, uhn!”

Shining Armor watched, positively agog as Trixie got up on her tippy-hooves, bouncing on the mattress as she mimed a very vigorous rutting, thrusting her hips with every grunt.

“That’s, uh…” He swallowed the lump in his throat as he watched his new girlfriend hump the air. “That’s quite a plan…”

“Right?” Trixie plopped down on the bed again, red-faced and slightly winded. She fanned herself with a hoof and let out a heavy sigh. “Phew, is it hot in here or is it just us?”

Shining Armor cleared his throat again, licking his now suddenly dry lips. It was definitely hot in here. Really hot.

“Okay, so,” he began, “you just want an emotionless bang to get the horniness out?”

The look she gave him took hold of his heart and twisted it all up in his chest. “Do you really think I’m that kind of girl?” she asked, her voice tender with hurt. “This whole thing is because I like you. Maybe it wasn’t you I’d been talking to through those letters, but everything in them was you.”

Shame flattened Shining’s ears against his head.

“That day I came over to surprise you," she continued, "it was because I was in love with the guy in those letters. I was in love with the guy who would unwind from reading physics books with the new issue of Power Ponies. With the guy who was a little embarrassed that he couldn’t drink his coffee straight black because it was too bitter. With the guy who had to get his stomach pumped because he didn’t have the heart to tell three little fillies that maybe cooking wasn’t their special talent.”

Shining Armor joined her on the bed, kicking aside the blanket that was already half-hanging off the mattress. “I feel really cheated that you know so much more about me than I know about you.”

Trixie smiled impishly.

“I think you know plenty.” She looked over at the nightstand next to the bed, pursing her lips as she lit her horn and opened the drawer. There was a picture inside, hidden underneath a book. She levitated it out and held it in front of his face. “Knew it’d be there… So tell me, Mr. Too-Soon, how many times have you tugged one out to this picture, huh?”

Shining had the good grace to blush, and the good sense not to answer.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Trixie said with a satisfied grin. She spared him further chagrin and put the picture away. “That’s why I sent it to you. It makes me glad that I can turn on the guy I like. It makes me feel… marely, I guess.”

“You don’t think it’s too soon?” he asked, lamely.

“I don’t see how making love could ever hurt our chances for falling into it.”

The last of Shining Armor’s resistance crumbled as he leaned forward, pushing Trixie to the mattress. He kissed her for the second time, and this time it was far less chaste. He poured himself into her and she did the same for him, each seeking one another with their mouths.

The world shrank, compressing down to the size of two bodies pressed against one another.

Trixie squealed, pulling away from the kiss and turning her eyes downward. “Whoa, what’s that now?” she asked, giggling as she reached a hoof down to prod at the erection pressed against her belly. “Nice to finally get a look at that thing, seeing as you know mine so well.”

Shining Armor squirmed a little as Trixie dragged the tip of her hoof along his length. The impropriety of showing something so rude to a mare tinged his cheeks a bashful pink, only for his chagrin to be renewed and redoubled as he realized that it wasn’t really anything improper given the context. He had no reason to feel shame, and he felt silly that he did.

Trixie didn’t seem to notice his initial discomfort, having found herself a new plaything. She toyed with his dick, batting at it like a kitten with a cattail and giggling as it swayed.

“How undignified,” she teased, looking up into her stallion’s face. “You boys sure have it rough, don’t you? I can get as turned on as I want and you wouldn’t be any the wiser, and yet all I have to do is a little kissing and this guy tells me exactly how much you like it.”

A flush of competitiveness went through Shining at the mare’s teasing. He may not have been quite so contentious as Rainbow and Applejack could get – especially with one another – but he didn’t get as far as he had in the cutthroat world of academia without a little bit of assertiveness.

Never taking his eyes off hers, he reached down, past where Trixie was now stroking him with both hooves, and pressed his hoof against her mound. Trixie’s eyes went wide, and that mousey little eep! escaped her lips again as he stroked her sex with the soft hairs of his fetlocks.

“Oh, then I guess this has nothing to do with how excited you are,” Shining said as he lifted his hoof and tasted her moisture with a long, hopefully erotic, lick.

Trixie let out a moan, shivering beneath the stallion looming over her. “Fuck me, that’s sexy…” she muttered. She started rubbing him again, faster and rougher than before. “I want you to take this turgid member and thrust it wildly into my fuckbox…”

Shining Armor, who was just about to lean in and reclaim his girlfriend’s lips, paused. Something in his brain started screaming, demanding to be heard over the white noise of lustful brain-death that usually accompanied a rediversion of blood from head to groin.

“What was that?” he asked, tilting his head and trying to focus over the sensation of an admittedly slightly-too-vigorous tugjob.

“You heard me!” Trixie growled. “Take your wanton desires and baste me in them, sexfully, until you spill your hump-honey all over my verdant mound! The Great and Sexual Trixie demands no less!”

Shining sat back on the bed, feeling very lightheaded, and not just because he was now extremely erect. “Verdant?” he repeated. “But… you’re not green.”

Trixie froze. “What? Green?”

“Verdant,” Shining repeated once more. “It’s an adjective, it means green. Like the color of lush grass or plant-life. Like a hillside or a spring meadow.”

Trixie pulled her hooves away from her lover’s cock like it was on fire, cradling them defensively against her chest. “It doesn’t mean like… like fertile?”

“I mean, if you’re grass,” Shining Armor acquiesced, tilting his head in a sort of lazy quarter-shrug. “Pretty sure ‘sexfully’ isn’t a proper word either.”

Trixie shrunk a little further into the mattress. “Sorry…” she muttered, hiding her shame behind her hooves.

“Don’t be,” Shining Armor said, reaching out to stroke his lady’s mane comfortingly. He paused, considered his actions, and decided to use the non-sticky hoof. “I really appreciate that you tried, and it was interesting. I gotta say, I am curious where you heard such… interesting terminology.”

Trixie emerged from behind her hooves like a timid animal peeking out of its burrow. “Well, I mean, I live in a wagon for three-hundred-and-sixty-five days out of the year, and until about ten minutes ago I was officially single. Not really much to do except read the cheapest romance novels I can get my hooves on and masturbate.”

A blush yet again found its way to Shining’s cheeks. “That’s a very candid explanation…”

“Well you just had your hoof up my honey-hole,” Trixie said, clucking her tongue. “Not like I have anything to hide from my boyfriend.”

Shining Armor felt touched, and not just because Trixie was touching his penis again. The fact that Trixie would be that… real with him, was strangely intimate and actually pretty arousing. He crept further up the bed, back to Trixie, and kissed her anew.

As they kissed, they continued their mutual hoof-play, spurred on by every squeak and every moan as they each tried to out pleasure one another. Without even realizing it, their explorations had become a competition, and before long they couldn’t even find the breath to continue kissing. They simply looked into one another’s eyes, sharing breath as they panted with naked hunger.

Trixie’s stroking slowed, and squirmed her way a bit further up the mattress, tilting her pelvis up to rub the head of Shining’s cock against her slit. Up and down, up and down, coating his head with her wetness as she pushed herself just enough to feel him at the very edge of entering her.

“You sure you want it?” Shining Armor asked.

Trixie just nodded, mewling excitedly as she pushed against him.

Shining pushed her hooves away and guided himself in, pushing past her outer lips and into her warmth. He froze, suddenly overcome with the sensation, and he held himself there, half-hilted, as he tried to adjust to the feeling of being inside a mare.

He opened his eyes, slowly regaining a little of his senses, and looked down to see Trixie just as stiff as he was. She was looking up at him with her eyes wide and round, and her lips were pulled into a tight little line.

“You okay?” he asked, immediately concerned.

Trixie tried to nod, but all that she could do was let out a long, shivering sigh. “O-o-o-okay,” she stuttered breathlessly. “Okay. The… the Great and Horny Trixie may have been exaggerating her readiness for… for this. She did not think you would be so… so big and so… inside of her…”

“I can pull out...” he suggested with more confidence in his voice than he felt in his heart.

“No!” Trixie shouted, her voice shrill with panic. She reached up and wrapped her hooves around his neck, pulling his face down into her chest. “Don’t take it out. It feels good, just… just let me get used to it…”

Shining Armor nodded, the soft eiderdown of Trixie’s chest fluff rubbing against his cheek as he did. It felt good, so he kept at it, breathing in the smell of sweat and feminine excitement as he remained half-hilted inside his mare.

“Yeah, this is good,” she said, almost breathlessly. “It’s not exactly what I was envisioning when I thought about this, but it’s good… What about you?”

“What about me, what?” Shining asked, looking up at the mare holding him captive.

“When you look at that picture and touch yourself,” she said, her eyes flicking towards the dresser before returning to his. “Do you ever think about… I dunno… this?”

Shining Armor gave his mare’s chest a long, sensual lick. “I think about that day I walked in on you in my bed. I wonder about what it would’ve been like if I’d just… you know, done it.”

Trixie smiled, all at once suddenly appearing far more comfortable at this confession. “Same for me,” she admitted. “I know it would’ve been an awkward discussion afterwards, but it’s sexy, right? It’s like every teenage colt’s fantasy – he comes home from hoofball practice and there’s some strange mare just laying in his bed, wet and horny and eager. He doesn’t know her, and he doesn’t want to know. He’s just horny, and she’s horny, and they both need to fuck.”

Despite his earlier protestations in regards to emotionless sex, Shining Armor understood that fantasy was fantasy, and Trixie’s attempts at dirty talk were far more effective when she wasn’t quoting the cheapest discount erotica she could find. The idea was certainly arousing, and the way that Trixie had begun to twist and grind her hips, even as he remained inside of her, was stoking the already raging fires in his loins.

“Hey,” Trixie said, taking his cheeks in her hooves and chewing her lip, her gyrations never ceasing. “I think I’m good now. Finish putting it in. But go slow, I want to feel the whole thing.”

Shining didn’t need to be told twice. He pushed himself up, looking down to watch as he plunged further into Trixie. It took all his willpower to do as she asked, overcoming his need to be fully inside her with his desire to make sure he gave her exactly what she wanted.

He adjusted his position on the bed, trying to find better leverage, but the sudden shriek that cut the air halted his movements. In a panic, he scurried away, withdrawing from Trixie’s heat, leaving the freezing air to nip at his mare-lubed shaft.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in concern. “Did I go too far? Was I too big!?”

“You stepped on my mane, you horny oaf!” Trixie whined, rubbing at her tender scalp with both hooves.

“Oh, Trix, I’m so sorry!” Shining Armor said as he fussed over the mildly-injured girl. “I didn’t mean to, I was just really focused and—”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Trixie said, brushing away his concern. “Let’s just… let’s just do it this way, okay?”

And with that Trixie lit her horn and grabbed the pillows that had fallen off the bed during their heated make-out session. She piled them up at the headboard and laid atop them, hugging the pile to her chest as she raised her hindquarters in the air. She flagged her tail, exposing her sopping wet vagina.

Shining Armor took the hint and, very carefully, stood up on his back legs and lined himself up. It was a little awkward holding his balance on the mattress, but managed okay and was able to slip back into Trixie’s sex. He grabbed hold of her hips, which helped his balance, and slowly pushed his way inside.

Trixie’s tail flagged and wiggled as he sunk into her. When his hips were finally flush against the surprisingly soft cheeks of her butt, they both let out a pair of long, contented sighs.

“Okay that’s a lot more comfy the second time,” Trixie said breathily. “You good?”

“Super good.”

“Right,” Trixie said as she tossed a sultry look back at her stallion. “Then do it hard! Fuck me dumb!”

And boy did he.

Shining Armor pulled out, with Trixie’s vagina flexing around his member, as if trying to keep it from escaping, and pounded it back in with a grunt of effort. The steady slap of his hips slamming into her rump filled the air like a fleshy-metronome, keeping time for the rhythm of their lovemaking. Every time he hilted inside her, Trixie let out one of those adorable little squeaks.

“Keep going, keep going,” Trixie urged him. She groaned near-orgasmically as he slammed into her with a particularly enthusiastic thrust. “Sweet Celestia, are you big.”

“Please don’t say that name right now,” Shining Armor said, flinching at the mention of his mentor as assuredly as he would’ve from hearing his own mother’s name while mid-coitus.

“Oh? Why not?” Trixie shot him a look equal parts playful and lusty. “Don’t like thinking about her? Even though she’s so hot? She’s got that big round butt and those sexy eyes.”

Shining leaned forward, hooking his forelegs more securely around Trixie’s hips. He lowered his own hips and thrust hard.

Trixie yelped at the unexpected change in angle. Her legs quivered as her quim spasmed, and a fresh spurt of moisture dribbled down her legs and onto the sheets. The combined burden of minor orgasm and a stallion’s bodyweight was too much for her now that her legs had gone all jelly. She collapsed onto the bed, her legs tucked under her and she moaned out her climax.

Shining Armor didn’t let her escape, not after that kind of teasing. He followed her down, laying his weight fully onto her back as he pumped and grinded into her.

“Okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Trixie moaned as Shining continued to fuck her. “I’ll be good, I promise! Just keep going!”

Shining obliged, redoubling his efforts to please his mare. He could already feel the tension building in his belly and moving down, heralding his fast-approaching orgasm. “I’m going to cum really soon,” he whispered into her ear.

“Yeahyeahyeah!” Trixie said in breathless excitement. “Go go go, do it in me!”

He nodded, and as he pushed himself to the edge, he remembered something he’d read in Cassaneighva’s The Secret of My Sexcess. Taking a gamble that a two-hundred-year-old semi-auto-biographical sex manual was a good source of advice, Shining grabbed the back of Trixie’s mane with his teeth and yanked – just hard enough that she’d feel it.

While stepping on her hair had put a temporary halt to their earlier efforts, this particular maneuver, whether by timing or location of yanking, did the trick. Trixie practically wailed, shaking as the orgasm shuddered through her. Her whole body tightened, and the effect wasn’t lost on Shining. The sudden grip and the feel of her body trembling beneath his weight pushed him that last extra inch. He finished inside her, gritting his teeth for all he was worth as he maintained his hold on her mane.

The lightheadedness of post orgasm euphoria came over Shining Armor like a fog, and he rolled to the side, just to take his weight off Trixie. He left himself hilted inside her, and the way she rolled her hips, grinding her butt against him as she tried to coax out the last aftershocks of her climax, told him that she appreciated it.

They stayed like that for a while, until Shining Armor finally pulled his flaccid and spent tool from Trixie. He scooted up to lay beside his mare properly, pulling her into a tender embrace.

Trixie accepted, burying her face into her lover’s neck. “It’d be weird if I said I loved you right now, right?”

Shining Armor took a deep breath. “I think we can just agree that the dopamine is affecting our judgment right now, so anything we say can’t be held against either of us. I think a ten minute grace period after orgasm is pretty fair.”

“Cool,” Trixie said with a heavy sigh. “Love you.”

“I love you, too.”

They laid there for a while longer, just enjoying the heat of one another’s bodies. They were soaked with sweat, and definitely needed a shower, but that could wait until the morning. Spike wouldn’t be back until the afternoon, and they could just open the library late.

After breakfast at a nice restaurant.

And maybe a morning quickie.

“Hey, feel free to say no,” Trixie said, breaking the silence, “but do you wanna screw again?”

“Oh most definitely.”

* * *

“I can’t believe you’re still mad,” Spike said, trudging along behind his lady love with a pile of suitcases balanced precariously in his arms.

Rarity looked over her shoulder, glaring at her boyfriend over the rim of the fashionably dark sunglasses she was wearing despite it being three o’clock in the morning.

She had in fact been quite angry, and though her temper had cooled, she knew very well she couldn’t let him know that. No, better to keep up the charade, for the principle of the thing if nothing else. Stallions – and drakes – were like that: you give them an inch, and they take it and they put it in your butt.

“Well I can’t believe you thought it was alright to stick your… your… that in there of all places.”

She pushed the shades back up with a flick of her magic and soldiered on, head held high and chest out proudly. She was careful to stay in range of the street lamps. She would refuse to admit this to Spike, who thought her glasses were dumb, but this new fashion trend was in fact pretty dumb. Still, fashion was fashion, and she wouldn’t dare give Spike the satisfaction of an ‘I told you so’. Not after he’d so rudely helped himself to the forbidden pleasure.

“But you liked it,” he insisted.

“Keep your voice down,” Rarity hissed, scanning the darkness uselessly for eavesdroppers. “Whether I liked it or not is not the issue. The fact is that that is not something you simply spring on a mare. A maiden must prepare her heart for such wanton degeneracy.”

The chirp of crickets singing to the night was the only sound for a long while. Rarity could practically hear the machinery in Spike’s head cranking away in thought.

“So it would’ve been okay…” he mused, “...if I’d told you first.”

Rarity lifted her nose into the air, pointedly ignoring any attempts at logic. “I’ve no desire to confirm nor deny such assertions. This incident and its resulting argument has already cut our trip short, so we will discuss it no further.”

“I don’t see why we had to come home,” Spike grumbled.

“You ruined the mood!” Rarity explained in a harsh whisper. “And since you have trespassed upon my personage so egregiously, you must pay the price. This is what’s going to happen: We will be going back to your house for a nap, you will take your brother and I to breakfast in the morning, and then when you least expect it, we shall see if you enjoy that particular act from the other side.”

“Eh?”

“You heard me,” Rarity said, shooting him another look that would have been positively scathing if the glasses hadn’t been in the way.

“Oh!” Spike seemed to have caught on, perhaps remembering the various bedroom accoutrements Rarity kept in the suitcase hidden under her bed. “Hmmmm….” he hummed.

“And what’s that ‘Hmmmm’?”

“Nothing,” Spike said. “Just a ‘Hmmmm’.”

Rarity narrowed her eyes behind her glasses. “Hmmmm...”

They left it at that, making their way through the empty Ponville streets. Not even the farm ponies were up this early, and the only other souls they’d seen were the few other passengers taking the express midnight train back into Ponyville. Those other passengers had all already gone off, making their way home and leaving the two quarreling lovebirds to walk in silence.

Once at the library, Rarity lit her horn and opened the suitcase positioned at the top of the pile Spike was carrying. She had long ago been given her own key. She stepped inside, stretching out and moaning in relief.

“It is nice to be back home,” she said. “I do so love the big city, but nothing quite beats the comforting silence of Ponyville at night.”

“Hey, we may not be as glitzy,” Spike said as he set the suitcases next to the door, “but it’s plenty exciting.”

Rarity giggled, the relief of finally being home already taking the edge off her earlier prickliness. She cantered over to her dragon paramour and stood up, resting her forehooves against his chest to bring their lips within range, and gave him a quick kiss.

“Certainly so,” she said. She gave him a tap on the snout and smiled. “Truthfully, I did enjoy that thing. Just ask next time, alright?”

“Will do,” Spike replied, returning her boop on the nose with one of his own.

There was a thud above their heads, drawing their attention to the ceiling.

“Oh dear,” Rarity said, “is your brother still awake?”

“Yeah, that’s weird,” Spike commented, idly scratching one of his spines. “He doesn’t really have any major projects in the works, so he doesn’t have any scheduled all-nighters that I know of, and you know how he is about his schedules.”

Rarity nodded in agreement. “That stallion certainly enjoys his structure.”

“Or hey,” Spike said, shooting his girlfriend a cheerful grin, “maybe it’s an enemy attack and he’s up there fighting for his life.”

“Oh, don’t you even say that,” Rarity chastised, though she was also smiling as she swatted playfully at Spike’s chest.

“Ow ow ow! That hurts!” Shining Armor screamed from upstairs.

Spike was the first to move. The sound of his brother crying out in pain was like a starter’s bell, and he quickly dropped to all fours, his lithe, powerful form darting up the stairs before Rarity even registered what was happening.

“I’m coming!” she shouted, breaking into a run as her brain finally caught up to speed.

She followed the direct path Spike had taken, leaping over a cart of unsorted books that the dragon had overturned in his haste, and running up the stairs. She found Spike standing in the doorway to Shining Armor’s room, frozen like he’d just met eyes with a cockatrice.

“What is it?” she asked, shoving him aside and bullying her way into the room.

Inside the bedroom she found Shining Armor sitting on his bed, leaning back against the headboard. This was not strange, but the addition of the bed’s other occupant was very unexpected.

Trixie Lulamoon was atop the bed with Shining, just as stock-still and wide-eyed as the two males. Her face was buried in her bedmate’s crotch as she stared at the two intruders over the top of Shining’s thigh.

Nobody moved. Nobody even breathed. Not until Trixie slowly pulled her face from her lover’s groin, the bulge in her throat sliding upwards as inch after inch of Shining Armor’s erection revealed itself. The head of his prick cleared her mouth with a pop and a smack of the mare’s lips. She coughed, patting her chest as she carefully maneuvered herself to block the poor stallion’s rapidly deflating member from view with her body.

Trixie spread her hooves as though she were on the stage. “Ta-daaaa~!” she sang lamely, awkwardly forcing a smile like she’d just pulled off an astonishing trick.

“We can explain,” Shining Armor said, equally lamely.

“Oh, I think this explains itself,” Spike said.

Rarity was decidedly less chill about the whole thing.

“I have to tell everyone.”

“Wait, Rarity!” Shining Armor called after the mare, whose thundering hoofsteps were already at the stairs. He leapt off the bed to give chase, to stop his friend before she got the gossip mill going.

Trixie was having none of that. With a mighty battle cry and strength that belied her petite frame, she tackled her boyfriend to the ground and held him there.

“Go!” she shouted. “I forget your name – the fancy one – but you! Go! Tell everyone of Trixie’s conquest! Spread her legend!”

“Trixie, let go!” Shining Armor shouted, struggling to free himself from the mare’s iron grip. “How are you this strong!?”

Spike just held up his claws in surrender and walked out of the room. “It’s too early for all this, I’m going to bed.”

* * *

Author's Note

Well that took a minute to write, didn't it? Sorry I made you wait, those of you who were waiting. You might notice the tone of this one's a little less... sultry than the last one. I wanted this to just be a fun little sexcapade with some fun jizztakes and cum goofs. I hope it was at least fun to read.

As per usual, if you find any mistakes please send corrections to me in a PM so I get an email and can address them quickly.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, that you'll have a great weekend, and that you'll join me next time!

Please be excited!