Dear King Thorax,
Here’s the situation.
I’m on my way home to you for the winter holidays. As stern as Head Mare Twilight is about rules, when it really hit her that she wasn’t letting us come home for Hearth’s Warming, Snilldar, The 3 Days of Freedom and all the other holidays, she felt pretty bad about it. Long story short, she’s letting us come home for exactly 4 days before we have to return to school and do our remedial friendship lessons.
As I’m writing this in my head (I know you prefer verbal reports) I’m on the Friendship Express in a cabin specially reserved for me and my friends. It’s somewhere in the afternoon, the wind and the snow are breezing free outside, and I’m a little sleepy. Most of us are -- we woke up early today so we could all have breakfast and spend some time together as a group.
Right now I’m sharing a bed with Smolder, who’s napping on her back beside me as Yona sleeps on the bed directly across from us and Silverstream, Gallus and Sandbar attempt to play Scrabble on a bed on the other side of the cabin. It’s mostly them who make up the noise. It’s not really noise, though, as much as it is filling up the would-be silence. It’s them talking about this and that, and occasionally they’ll ask me if something’s a word or not, and I’ll giggle and say yes and define it for them, or I’ll laugh and say no. It’s not noise. It’s what a home sounds like. It’s what family sounds like.
I’m pretending to read a book on Pre-Equestrian Pegasi tribes. In reality, I’m just enjoying the sounds of my friends talking, and of Smolder sleeping.
She’s very warm. I don’t know if you know this, King Thorax, but dragons are surprisingly good at maintaining the large amount of body temperature that they need to survive and keep their inner fires lit. If I’m being honest, I think the only reason that she wears earmuffs, a hat and a scarf when she’s outside is because she wants an excuse to look cute. And boy, does she.
If I listen real close I can hear her breathing and muttering in her sleep. It’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve heard. I hear the tone of her voice as pure as it’ll come, without pretense or nerves or even emotion, and I think it’s beautiful. She sounds beautiful.
I shuffle a little closer to her, trying to get our legs and sides to touch, and when they do it’s like I’ve touched the sand of a beach in the peak of summer. She’s almost too warm, but I stay and I wait, and I adjust to her temperature until I can’t imagine being without it.
I want to wake her up, Thorax, but that would be rude. I want to talk to her.
“Ocellus?” Gallus calls.
I lean forward and look over to him.
“Is ‘blarf’ a word?”
“No,” but it puts a smile on my face. I giggle. “Whose suggestion was that?”
“Mine...” whines Sandbar. “This game is hard when you only draw consonants.”
“Keep calm and carry on,” I chirp back at him, pretending to go back to reading my book.
That’s when Smolder stirs.
She shifts her shoulders, snuggles deeper into the bed (and closer to me), and lets out a soft groan.
So cute.
“Ocellus?” she whispers quiet enough, so just the two of us can hear what she’s saying. “Anything interesting happening?”
“Not really. They’re playing scrabble and Yona’s asleep,” I hush back. “Are you ready to awaken from your thousand year nap, o slumbering dragoness?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Do ya want me to?”
“Of course I do,” I turn and nearly nuzzle her, but I stop, realizing that we’re in bed, and that would be too much. Instead I look deeply into her eyes and pretend that it’s somehow less intimate.
If she thinks anything of it, she doesn’t show. I don’t feel any hint of embarrassment or nervousness of her. All I get are her eyes -- half opened and looking up at me. The light’s shining directly down on them, so they look almost exactly like two blue pools of the world’s bluest, cleanest water.
She smiles and closes her eyes, and for half a second I feel like the world’s ended.
“Gimme a few seconds,” she mutters, turning over and yawning into the mattress. Then she rolls onto her side again, lazily throwing an arm over me. “Nevermind,” she says. “I think I just want to whisper to you a little more. That cool?”
I nod. “Uh huh.”
“Good.”
We settle into a quiet for a while, listening to the others play Scrabble.
“Are you excited to go back home?” I ask.
“Nah. It’ll be cool to see my folks and brother again but, like, it’s whatever.”
My heart jumps. “I-I see.”
She purrs in contentment, wriggling around a little as she gets more comfortable. “What about you?”
That question makes me pause. I’m happy, of course. I get to see Mom and Dad and my siblings again, and I’ll get to see you, and everyone at the hive. I’m happy because of that. But I’m not as happy as I should be, and that’s really eating away at me.
“Super excited,” I tell her. “But, I don’t know.”
I bite my lip. My heart quivers. “I’m gonna miss you guys.”
For a second I feel like I’m gonna cry. Just for a second.
Then Smolder pats my belly.
I tense up, trying to keep a straight face. Don’t laugh, I tell myself. Don’t even move your lips in any way. Not one bit. Don’t you dare.
But it’s too late.
“You’re ticklish,” she observes. I can see her grin from the corner of my eye.
“Please please please don’t.”
She’s silent for a moment. I feel like praying, but I’m not sure who I’d be praying to.
“I won’t,” she decides, chuckling to herself mischievously. “For now. It’s always funner when it’s a surprise anyway.”
“Hey, if you’re feeling ambivalent on going back to the Dragon Lands, what if you came back with me?”
My heart quakes. Smolder looks confused. “What do you mean?”
This is just like a presentation in class. I just need to steel my nerves, and deliver my points, and not seem robotic or awkward. That way she’ll see my points as clearly as possible, and then I can persuade her to accept them without seeming forceful. I take a breath to calm myself. “You should, you know...um, come with me. For Hearth’s Warming. And stay at my place? For the four days. You could sleep in my bed! While I slept in it. It’d be like a sleepover. Which Professor Twilight says are good for friendships and, and -- uh....”
I give up, closing my eyes and sighing.
Smolder giggles. “I don’t think I’d fit in at the changeling hive. Too cheery and cute. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“You’d stay with me, for one,” I mutter.
I open my eyes and look to the side, where I see my dragon grin teasingly. “Aww, are you gonna miss me?”
"Yes!” I hiss, sounding twice as angry as I meant to on accident. “Yes I am. Is there something wrong with that?”
She raises a brow. “What’s there to miss? It’s only four days.”
Everything. Every single thing. Literally. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
Smolder stays quiet for a moment. So do I.
“Woohoo!” Silverstream cheers, flapping her wings excitedly. “Sixty-nine points!”
“Nice,” Sandbar drawls, looking to Gallus and offering a hoof-bump, but the griffon’s too busy sulking as he scribbles Silverstream’s score down on the piece of paper they’re using to track their points.
Silverstream and Sandbar start talking about how fun Seaquestria’s going to be with the three of them there for the holidays, and I decide that it’s time.
I clear my throat and poke Smolder to make sure I have her attention. When she raises an eyebrow at me, I enact my plan B: try to pitch it to her again. Second time’s the charm, right? I try to smile reassuringly. “Look, it’ll be so much fun. We can fly around the hive and go bathing at the hot springs and I just know that Pharynx is going to love you. And then when the time comes, we can exchange gifts and because you’re a visitor you won’t even need to give any! You’d just get a bunch of gifts because we appreciate you being there. Doesn’t -- Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Smolder smiles back at me, but it’s not a good smile. It’s the kind of smile that a professor gives you when you obviously studied hard for the test, but you didn’t study the right things. “That does sound good.”
“...But?”
“I just gotta see my folks again,” she explains. “And, no offence, but it’ll be nice to be back in the Dragon Lands after spending so long in Equestria.”
There’s a shred of relief that I can feel coming off of her and it makes my stomach turn.
“What, so you’re just sick of us, then?” I hiss.
Smolder’s consolation prize of a smile drops immediately, turning into an unamused look “That’s not what I said.”
And she’s right.
My anger deflates like a balloon. I exhale sadly. “I know. I just -- nevermind.”
You know what? I’m tired. I scoot away and roll over to my other side so I can go to sleep.
Thorax,
I want to come home. I miss everyone. I want to see all the new things you’re doing at the hive. I want to see the things that we haven’t been able to do for years finally being done, and I want to hug my parents and my siblings and you and Pharynx. I still have some catching up to do in regards to craft time, but it’s not exactly a competition, so I’m not too worried about that. Thorax, I really really do want to come home. I just feel like I’m leaving one home to go to another. I don’t know what to do.
I thought that maybe I could get Smolder to come with me because she’s the one that needs it the most.
No, that’s not true at all. I guess I just needed Smolder the most. And--
Tingling in my sides. I flail my limbs around for a moment, before my angry switch gets flipped. She said she wouldn’t tickle me!
I arch backwards, my legs quivering as I try to keep them from kicking, and turn over to give her a full-volume earful in front of all of our friends--
But both of her claws grab my hoof and brings it to her chest. Her heart, more specifically. She presses my hoof against it and touching her chest is like dipping into a hot shower.
I relax on reflex. I try to say something, but Smolder’s gaze has caught mine. We look at each other, wordlessly facing off in a battle of wits and bravery that I lose in about two seconds. I relax, and place my other hoof on the pile of appendages we’ve made between us.
“What?” I ask. There’s something clearly on her mind.
“How long is left on the train?”
“A couple of hours. Maybe more for the ice. More maintenance needed for the freezing tracks and wheels, and the train ponies have to talk longer,” I respond robotically.
Smolder squeezes my hoof. “Then why don’t we just enjoy the time we have left, alright? And maybe next year I can come over and stay at yours. I just gotta come home this year to make sure they haven’t melted my hoard down and sold all my gems off. And to see my parents and my brother, obviously.”
Her voice turns small, but hopeful and gentle. “Does that sound okay?”
To my surprise, it does. Maybe I’m biased to her. Maybe she actually makes sense. I don’t know. But my anxiousness fades away like breath in the cold air. I just look at her, and beam back. “Yes.”
“Good,” she purrs. “Now then...”
Then she shifts closer, and closer after that, until we’re inches apart. Maybe even the metric of measurement that’s smaller than inches -- I can’t think of it right now because I can feel her breath on my lips, and hers are so close.
The bed shakes suddenly. I shoot up, alarmed.
Silverstream’s bouncing on the mattress happily, chirping and squawking. “I won! IwonIwonIwonIwonIwonIwon! Ocellus!” she trills. “Be proud of me!”
I smile approvingly. “I am!”
Beside me, Smolder sits up and fake-yawns.
Silverstream stops bouncing, putting a claw to her mouth and gasping softly. “Ohmigosh! I’m so sorry, Smolder. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“You totally did, though,” Gallus snarks from the other side of the car.
Smolder shrugs. “Eh. I’ve had worse wake-up calls.”
An idea pops into the hippogriff’s head. “Hey! Let’s all play Scrabble! Round two!”
“Too many people,” Smolder responds. She smirks at me. “What about O&O?”
My favorite. Game, I mean. My favorite game. And dragon, too. Sorry Spike.
Silverstream’s radiating excitement at the suggestion. She turns to the guys, calling “You wanna play Ogres and Oubliettes?”
Gallus and Sandbar respond with a simultaneous “Yeah, fine,” and “Totally!”
The bed directly across from us creaks as Yona sits up. “W-What we playing?”
Silverstream turns to explain the situation to her, helping her to her feet as she does so. Me and Smolder watch while everyone starts pushing beds together and Sandbar checks his luggage for the board and character sheets.
I’m enchanted.
I feel a feeling wash over me like I’ve both walked underneath a waterfall and took my first steps into the world’s most tranquil lake. It’s a feeling that I can’t put a name to, but only a place with mirth and a warm fire and a family. It’s enough that I don’t have to miss them anymore. I can just think of this moment, and this feeling, then I won’t feel alone.
Smolder puts her claw back on my hoof, and gives it a squeeze. I squeeze back.
Dear King Thorax,
I don’t think I’m actually going to give you this exact report, but thanks for being a good friend that I’ve been able talk to this whole time -- even if it’s just been in my head. I’m gonna give you a big, huge hug when I get home, and you won’t know why, but that’s okay.
I can’t wait to see you. Until then, I’m going to be spending some quality time with my friends before we part ways for the holidays.
Love, Ocellus.
