Author's Note

A nice little chapter to post after my uber-feelsy one shot from earlier. I hope you guys like it!

And if you have areas of infantile interest for our beloved baby bolt here to explore that you'd like to see happen, hit me up in the comments or shoot me a message!

Wake In The Night

Soarin breathed heavily, jolted awake from sleep’s sweet embrace. His nightmare was beginning to dissipate now, but scads of it- the feeling of humiliation and vulnerability, the curiosity, and Luna’s words to him remained. It made him feel… exposed. Sensations came to him slowly in those moments of recovery from his dreamland. The feeling of his blankets against him, the dead weight of his own hooves- and something else. Extra warmth, and it wasn’t coming from his blankets.

He did a double take, his mind slow to catch up with what he felt. Warmth? And when he shifted ever so slightly, to take his covers off, he felt warm wetness pressing against him. His face turned beet red. He had wet his diaper.

Despite his embarrassment, which by all counts should have woken him completely, he was in an odd place where sensations overwhelmed his senses and made it near impossible to focus on anything else. Unfortunate as it may have been, the sensation dominating him now instead of warm blankets and the weight of his body was the warm wetness he felt pressing against him. It took quite a while to even realize what he thought about this.

It was… Weird. It wasn’t necessarily a bad feeling. Not at all. It was more… disconcerting. It was disconcerting more because he wasn’t used to having anything on that was solely down there, and now there was, and it was so different from anything he could remember experiencing. He didn’t have any feelings to speak on about the wetness, but the warmth, at least, was okay. A dim memory of how it had felt when he’d spilt some warm cider on himself one Hearthswarming played without his consent. It was somewhat like that, except instead of napkins doing the absorbing, it was a diaper instead.

With the sensations acknowledged, he began to be able to process some of his own emotions- only in a very general sense, though. He sensed his shame and embarrassment, but there was the feeling of vulnerability, exposure, that was more dominating. More than anything he just felt very… small. A thought tumbled through his mind that this is what toddlers must have felt like when they wet the bed, but he didn’t really recognize it as his own. The thought however, acknowledged itself in another way.

Through his feeling small, he recognized that he needed to tell his mother he needed a change. He pulled his blanket around himself like a cozy robe, not wanting to feel the coldness of his body exposed to the air after being under the covers for so long. He sat up, and got to his hooves again, beginning to walk when he promptly fell on his stomach with a thud. The whine that came out of him ended up sounding more like a whimper. Had his mother or anypony else heard it, they might have thought it was the sound of a small child preparing to cry.

This, of course, was not the case, but it left Soarin in an odd state of mind. He did not cry, he simply got up and vowed to be more careful when walking. But the fall shocked him in a way. The combination of seeing himself in his mother’s dream, the wet diaper, the now much, much more pronounced waddle in his step took his mind back to his toddlerhood, a time he couldn’t remember much of usually, because his mind was so focused on other things. It wasn’t necessarily the memories that he felt now, it was more a state of mind. The sense of the world being so large and himself being so small, and needing some help and comfort. So, waddling all the way, he made his way through the darkened hallway, despite the somewhat unnerving darkness that made him feel disoriented because his sense of vision was blocked, because the promise of comfort was too great to ignore as he made his way to his mother’s room.

Muscle memory told him where his mother’s room was, with the exact number of steps he needed to take. He grasped her doorknob after a bit of searching, and went inside. The room was brighter here. Moonlight could actually illuminate things here, since the curtains weren’t drawn as they were in his own room and there were no sources of light in the halls. The moonlight illuminated his mother’s sleeping form, and he felt impossibly small as he struggled to climb onto her bed the way he had as a toddler. Then, he crawled to her, gently shook her to wake her.

Sky Streak took in a deep breath as she abruptly crossed the line between sleep and wakefulness. Her instincts, finely honed after years of being a single mother, had alerted her a moment or two before he touched her that her son was in the room. It was just a matter of waking herself up, which he’d inadvertently done for her. Finally, she turned to look at him, and in the pale moonlight could see the wide, innocent, and fearful look in his eyes. Immediately, she was awake, and reached out to stroke his cheek tenderly.

“What is it, baby?” She asked, voice soothing and gentle.

Soarin, soothed by both her presence and touch, felt suddenly sleepy again. In the exhausted place he was in, combined with how little he felt, the sentence that came out of his mouth only made sense.

“I had an accident, Mommy.” He mumbled.

The way he said it easily transported her back a solid fifteen years. “You did? That’s okay, it happens sometimes. Let’s go get you cleaned up, okay sweetie?” She asked.

“‘Kay.” The word was covered with his exhaustion.

Sky Streak went around to him, and helped lead him to his room by the hoof. It wasn’t unlike when he’d been little, because she’d always had to help him walk to accommodate his diaper. It brought back some wonderful memories. When she got him to his room, and his bed, he laid down with tiredness. Sky Streak smiled, as she quickly got everything she needed to change him. She removed his sodden diaper and balled it up, throwing it away, and wiped him clean. Then she slid a new diaper under him, powdered him, and finally taped him up. For Soarin, the only coherent thought he had was of his mother and how nice she was. His eyes were heavy again, but he managed to keep his eyes on her face as she came back from putting his changing supplies away. Her smile was comforting, and she leaned in to kiss him, and put his blanket back over him.

“Goodnight, sweetheart.”

Soarin yawned and snuggled into his bed, inadvertently grabbing Doggie Do from nearby. “Night Night, Mommy."

Then, sticking a hoof in his mouth to suckle, he drifted off to sleep.