“Alright, have a good night! Thank you for stopping by the Carousel Boutique!” Sandbar said with a wave and an eager smile as his head peeked out the door of his (half-his) establishment. As he closed the door, however, the smile very quickly melted off his face as he let out the sigh he’d been holding in for the last thirty minutes.
“Please don’t spend over an hour after closing window-shopping and gossiping with your friends.” He continued bitterly to himself as he, with uncharacteristic aggression, pointedly flipped the sign on the front door to ‘closed’.
With this small action, his anger faded slightly. Not fully gone, but it bled into a much stronger feeling of boredom. At least with customers around, he had something to do other than close down the shop in blinding silence, especially with his compatriot in Yakyakistan for familial issues.
As the green earth pony stepped over to straighten up some of the display dresses that had been tried on and fiddled with during the day, most of which in the past hour, he flinched as he heard a knock on the door.
His expression soured immediately as he wondered what the ponies who had just left could have forgotten. But, taking a deep breath, he forced a smile to his face and did his best to fix up his messy mane as he approached the door.
“I am terribly sorry, but we have closed for the night.” He said in a forcedly nice tone as he opened the door. He opened his mouth to say more, rattling off opening hours in order to make the intruder go away for a few hours at the very least, but stopped once he saw who was at the door.
“Rough night, huh?” Asked the slight orange dragon standing in his doorway. Smolder offered up a calm smile and the bag she was holding in her claws as she gestured past Sandbar. “I brought food. Wanna talk about it?”
Sandbar’s forced smile fell for a moment, but it was immediately brought back with a softer, more realistic one. “Absolutely.” He said simply before stepping aside to allow her entrance.
As Smolder entered, she made a bee-line a table in the back of the boutique to set her bag down. “Me and Ocellus heard Yona was gonna be out of town for a while, so she figured it’d be nice if we made sure you don’t starve before she gets back.”
“Oh come on, I can feed myself just fine!” Sandbar complained as he approached from behind. “Yona’s only gonna be gone for a week anyway. I think I can survive until then.”
Rolling her eyes at Sandbar’s whining, Smolder spun around to face her green pony friend. “Alright, what’d you eat today then?”
Sandbar spent the next few seconds considering how much he could lie, but all of that was for naught as his nose caught the scent of a very delicious smelling salad.
His stomach growled very loudly, and he could only blush in response.
“Yeah, I figured as much.” She said with a soft grin. “You’re always so busy with this place that you forget to do anything else.”
Sandbar chuckled as well, trying his hardest to resist fiddling with a misplaced accessory he spotted out of the corner of his eye. Turning to properly ignore it, he gave a small shrug. “I guess I inherited more than just the shop from Rarity.” He surmised.
Sandbar approached the table, interested in seeing what other little foodstuffs Smolder had prepared for him and hoping for at least one cupcake. As he did, Smolder’s expression soured just a slight bit.
“But Rarity still makes time for her friends every now and then.” Smolder said as gently as she could with a sentence like that. She carefully studied Sandbar’s face as he slowed his rummaging, but noticed no real change that would stop her from continuing. “Even Yona still has lunch with me and ‘Cel, and you know how much time she spends with Silver.” She said as she elbowed him gently.
As much as he tried, Sandbar couldn’t hold back a slight laugh at that last bit.
Egged on by this moment of levity, she clapped him on the shoulder with a claw, freezing him in his place immediately. “We miss having you around, dude. We only see you at big events now. And, you know, next month is Ga-”
“My order! Right.” Sandbar said immediately, cutting her off before she could finish. He broke free from her claw with ease as he rushed over to a desk at the side of the room, shuffling around a few papers that were displayed on it. “Rarity’s gonna be sending over a huge case of outfits she’s debuting for the new winter resort line, so I’ll be up to my mane in orders, backorders, and displays until way after the twenty-third.” He said as he flashed a grin that was a touch too wide, and a touch too apologetic. “You guys are gonna have to party without me.”
Smolder waited for a moment to see if Sandbar had any more before shaking her head. “You’ve gotten better, but you’re still an awful liar.” She said with a sigh, slipping something out of her bag before abandoning the table to approach him. “I didn’t even get to say anything about partying, but you’re already blowing me off like every year.”
As she spoke, she placed a card on the papers Sandbar was still busying himself with. As Sandbar pulled his hooves back in response to see a small, hoof-made card covering his important work documents. It was emblazoned with a half-decent drawing of the face of a sky-blue griffon, and the words on the front that bore a hole into his soul:
“Happy Birthday, Gallus”
“Ocellus also wanted me to bring this by for Yona to sign. Me and her already signed, and obviously Silver did when she made the thing, so she can just send it out after.” Smolder told him, shaking him from his frozen state. As Sandbar looked up, he saw a hopeful look on her face. “You can too, obviously, but…”
The way she trailed off left them in silence for quite a few seconds, the unspoken words only echoing that more clearly to them.
Sandbar seemed quite hesitant to respond, his eyes darting between Smolder’s face and the birthday card wildly, so the orange dragon felt the need to lead on her own.
“I still don’t know what happened between the two of you,” she said, shaking her head softly, “But at least think about it. It’d probably mean a lot to him, I think.”
Sandbar was silent for another few moments, but still found himself nodding at her. He wasn’t intending to commit to anything, but felt trapped in it immediately as his draconic companion smiled gently towards him.
“Great!” Smolder said with a grin that immediately turned cocky. “I guess I’ll just leave you to it. I mean, you probably have stuff to take care of around here anyway.” She gestured broadly to the slightly messy boutique behind her, then offered up a shrug.
Still thrown quite a bit by this turn of events, Sandbar could only find himself stammering in response. “Oh, uh, yeah… sure.” He added noncommittally while he shuffled a bit on his hooves uncomfortably.
Taking this as a good sign, Smolder offered up a balled-up claw to the pony. Despite leaving his surfer ways behind years ago, Sandbar still knew exactly how horrid being left hanging was, and hoof-bumped her without hesitation.
“Sweet. Well, I’ll get out of your mane then.” Smolder said as she sauntered towards the door. As she reached it, however, she suddenly spun around to face Sandbar yet again. “And you better come by the school to visit when you get lonely. You can’t just hole yourself up all week.”
This garnered a soft smile from Sandbar, and he gave a small, bashful nod in response. “Y-yeah, I’ll see what I can do.”
While Smolder would normally push for an answer with more commitment, she also realized that it was getting late and she could bug him about it later anyway. A bridge was best built on both sides of a river, she figured.
So she simply gave a thumbs up and a cocky grin, and she left the boutique as quickly as she showed up.
Sandbar immediately released a sigh he hadn’t known he’d been holding in for the longest time. He shut his eyes for a moment, bracing himself against the desk he stood behind while he felt what little energy he had left leave him.
Now that he was finally alone again, he realized that he didn’t really care if the boutique was a mess right now.
“Damn it.” He said simply, softly, to himself as he shook his head.
He stared at the card on the desk and it stared back at him. Quite literally, as the cartoonishly drawn bright blue eyes beamed at him from the paper. Despite knowing he’d regret it, he opened the card to access his options further.
On the inside Silverstream, obviously Silverstream as Ocellus and Smolder couldn’t use crayons in half the inventive ways that she could, had drawn more childish renditions of the five of them on each half of the card, leaving enough room beneath to write a small enough message to the recipient. The three who had signed had left one, and common courtesy would dictate the other two follow.
And there went Sandbar’s idea of just signing his name and washing his hooves of the whole thing like the years previous. Right out the window, landing right next to the pride he’d tossed years before.
With an unnecessary amount of swearing that he was glad customers weren’t around for, he slammed the card shut, as best you can slam paper at least, and skulked across the room to the staircase leading towards the second floor and living quarters of Carousel Boutique.
He made as much noise as he could while ascending in an attempt to quell the confusing feelings that were being brought to the forefront of his mind for the first time in a while.
Once on the second floor, Sandbar wandered aimlessly around his smaller, sparsely decorated living room and kitchen as he attempted to find something to distract himself with. He must have opened the door to his nearly empty fridge about five times before realizing he’d left his dinner on the table downstairs.
Sandbar quickly resigned himself to eating cold salad for breakfast, as he was much too lethargic to want to do more than flop down right there and have sleep for dinner instead.
But he didn’t. His bed was much more comfortable than the cold tile floor.
The green stallion sighed passively as he stumbled down the hallway on his way towards the warm comfort of his room, passing the slightly ajar door to Yona’s room as he did so. The light was still on, but Sandbar did his best to ignore the contents, knowing better than to snoop while his business partner was away. Which made one of them.
As he closed the door to solidify this choice, he heard the tell-tale click of the door locking itself shut. Sandbar froze, but sighed placidly with a shrug. “She can just buck it down.” He said to himself as he continued down to the end of the hall.
Once in his room, he didn’t get so much as a few hoofsteps inside before just collapsing onto the carpeted floor below.
As much as he wanted to sleep the bad feelings away like he usually did when they popped up, all of his thoughts kept springing to Gallus.
All he wanted to do was ignore what happened and put what he said behind him, but all he could see was that griffon’s face as he flew off in a huff for the last time.
Their last fight.
Sandbar spent the next few minutes in the dark, glued to the floor as he tried to steady his breathing enough to not have tears threaten to spill down his cheeks every time a memory popped up. He wasn’t successful, but he still peeled himself off the floor all the same.
He flipped the lights on in his room, revealing it as sparsely decorated as the living room. The only furnishings he had to speak of were a princess-sized bed, a desk he used primarily for writing letters to Rarity and drawing up designs, and a large bookshelf that only held a few books on fashion and photography.
He never really was much of a reader.
On the ground was a somewhat sizable collection of clutter, cans of energy drinks and balled up notebook paper mostly, that he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning just yet.
The walls were barren for the most part, though the small thumbtack holes and very slight fading along certain parts of the wall denoted the fact that that wasn’t always true.
The only thing that could constitute a wall decoration was a small section of photos that he had pinned lovingly above his desk when he moved in, meant to be just at eye level with him as he worked.
Right now, however, he wanted to do anything but look in its direction. He needed sleep, so that he could wake up and work, so that he could sleep again and repeat that cycle until Yona returns and helps him fix whatever was going wrong.
So Sandbar flopped into a bed much too large for him, and shut his eyes while cradling a sizable pillow close to his chest.
A minute passed.
And so did another.
And another.
At the fourth minute Sandbar grew restless, rolling over and clutching his pillow closer to his chest. As if a tighter resting position would mean a quicker take-over by sleep.
And as the fifth minute of attempted sleep loomed over Sandbar, he sat up in his bed with an irritated grumble, throwing his pillow aside so that it slapped uselessly against the wall.
Gallus.
Sandbar glared across the room at his wall of photos that, despite all attempts to ignore it, were still calling to him just like anything else that would remind him of that dumb bird.
He dragged himself out of his bed and across his room, stepping over the clutter in an instinctual manner at this point, and let out a deep sigh as he sat down in his desk chair. He gently moved aside an empty notebook so that he could lean tiredly against his desk, resting his head on his hoof as he looked at the photos he still couldn’t bring himself to remove.
And despite himself, he smiled softly.
It was just hard not to as he looked at pictures of all of his friends just having fun and goofing around. Just like friends normally do.
Most of the photos were from back when the six were still students at the Academy of Friendship, back in the somehow simpler times of balancing Friendship Lessons with helping save Equestria with the Elements of Harmony. One that Sandbar couldn’t help but chuckle softly at was of when everycreature but he wandered through a patch of Poison Joak.
Peppered with those photos were a few ones of them in the years after graduation. Celebrating Sandbar and Yona’s co-ownership of the Carousel Boutique, Smolder and Ocellus’ wedding, a few of when Silverstream stole his camera.
And even the one of Gallus’ promotion to captain.
Placed lovingly next to a photo of the hospital visit that happened moments later when Gallus tried to show his friends how cool he was with a sword.
Sandbar sighed in both loving remembrance of times gone, and also a small amount of sadness as he looked over how few photos there were that were taken in the last few years. Even less of Gallus, who moved to Canterlot seven years previous and couldn’t make it to the smaller events.
And then there was the fight.
But Sandbar waived those thoughts away with a shake of his head. It felt weird for him to think about things like that when he was just reminiscing about the good times he had with his friends.
Even still, he couldn’t help but notice how few pictures there really were of Gallus on his wall, and certainly none of the two of them alone together. The more Sandbar tried to put his hoof on the absences, the more he realized that there was more missing than realized upon sitting down.
Especially one that still held at least some importance to him.
Sandbar began to search around his desk for the missing photo, searching under notepads and old mail he still hadn’t gotten to, and even lifting the desk to look behind it on the off chance that it had somehow unpinned itself from the wall and snuck itself back there.
Dropping the desk with an annoyed grumble, Sandbar flopped back into his seat as he tried to consider just how an item he used to cherish could just disappear like this. And then, as a lightbulb popped to life above his head, he recalled the last time he got sadly nostalgic when Yona was around, and how he found her stealthily poking about his room the day after.
As stealthily as a two ton yak could be, at least.
She told him she was searching for a few business statements he was holding onto but, as he stood up suddenly from his seat, he realized that it probably wasn’t the whole truth.
As Sandbar stormed back down the hall yet again, he muttered several terse words to himself while shaking his head. Once at the large, yak-sized door, he shouldered it roughly to open it with a slight scowl.
And he bounced back uselessly as he remembered the important fact that he’d accidentally locked it not too long before. The shock of being knocked back by the reinforced door was enough to shake Sandbar from the anger he was experiencing as he reeled back with a sigh.
He inspected the door for a few moments as he tried to figure out how to enter without committing further harm to his soft, equine body. There was no keyhole to allow any lockpicking, which he could have handled with ease, and he couldn’t just slip in through the window from the second floor without a pair of wings on his side.
The more he tried to find a way around it, the more his only option became clear to him.
He was going to have to kick it.
While Sandbar had never been averse to kicking his problems away, as it was The Earth Pony Way, he still understood how expensive getting a replacement would be. Yak-proof doors didn’t come cheap, after all.
Even still, some things were more important than the few hundred bits a new one would cost.
That’s what he told himself, at least, as he pressed a hoof to the door and spoke a short apology to it.
Sandbar then took a step back, breathing deeply to steel himself, and spun around to rear back and buck the door with all the force he could manage. He did his best to aim his hooves to hit the door right next to the knob, as an old birdy friend had taught him to do while both were screwing around while more than slightly intoxicated, and he did it with mixed success.
The door popped open without much more trouble, though splintered wood hit the floor along with the metal knob moments later. As Sandbar turned around to inspect his work, he bashfully scratched the back of his head.
But the damage was done, so the stallion just entered the room and vowed to get the damage covered up before Yona got back from Yakyakistan.
Entering Yona’s room alone always made Sandbar feel slightly uncomfortable. Not because he felt weird about poking around in the room of a close friend, or even because it was a girl’s room, not that it made much of a difference to him.
It was because he always felt so small.
Everything in Yona’s room was obviously scaled to match a massive Yak such as herself and, without her to use as reference, Sandbar felt like he was a foal searching for Hearth’s Warming presents in his parents’ room.
And much like a colt searching for gifts, Sandbar knew where to look first.
Yona’s closet was, similar to everything else in the room and even its usual occupant herself, very tall as it loomed over Sandbar. The closet door was stuck open due to the absurd amount of outfits peeking out of it, ranging from dresses to more wintery wear to even a few suits for when Yona felt in the mood for those instead.
Despite the amount of clutter in the closet, however, Sandbar was quickly able to spot a small cardboard box quarantined to the back of the top shelf. The top shelf which, even in Sandbar’s normal sized closet, he couldn’t quite reach without help.
But this was not as much of a problem to Sandbar, as he was well equipped in navigating closets at this point. He just dragged Yona’s desk chair, really more like a wide bench that she laid down on, and did his best to balance on it with his back hooves while snatching the box with his grabby ones.
He came down from the height without much trouble and inspected the box and, upon seeing the quicky scrawled ‘Gallus’ on it, dashed back to his room to try and find what he was looking for.
After returning to his room, he felt a sudden wave of hesitation wash over him upon laying his box of loot onto his desk, sitting down in his chair moments later.
It suddenly struck him as weird that he was stealing back something he’d asked Yona to hold on to for this exact reason. Usually it was only when he was somewhat inebriated that he wanted to get nostalgic about this portion of his past, and those nights usually ended with his best yak friend consoling him until he fell asleep.
With Yona gone, he wasn’t exactly sure how he would struggle through whatever emotions were dredged up.
But he was, for the most part, sober. And he wasn’t going through his normal form of introspection and self-blaming just yet, so he swallowed his hesitation as best he could and placed his hooves on the lid and pulled it open.
The first thing he saw was a few sheets of paper spread out to block the contents of what was inside. On every single sheet was written a single bolded word in the center of the page, written large enough that it was almost impossible to ignore:
NO!
Sandbar was taken aback at first, but found himself rolling his eyes as he very pointedly ignored the message. Yona’s heart was in the right place, but now wasn’t the time for triple guessing himself.
After moving the offending material aside, the first thing that Sandbar spotted, and the thing that took up the majority of the small box, was a long red scarf that exuded a small amount of warmth even as it sat there in the box.
Of course, Sandbar instantly recognized it, upon taking it out, as the first Hearth’s Warming gift he ever gave Gallus. The griffon had then traded with Sandbar for one of his sweaters during one of his winter Canterlot visits after coming home complaining about the cold metal of his armor against his chest. He promised Sandbar he’d get it back once summer rolled around.
But it seemed Gallus never had a chance to get around to it.
Doubt came in again, but just like before Sandbar shook it off with a shake of his head, pulling the lukewarm fabric close to his chest and breathing out a terse breath through his nose. As the scarf pressed against his chest, a dull, calming warmth spread through his body as the fabric’s dying enchantment coated him.
Despite himself, he brought the one end of the scarf to his nose. He wasn’t sure what he wanted it to smell like, but he was quite thrown off as it unexpectedly smelled strongly of laundry detergent and yak fur.
Understandably, Yona had washed it. But despite the sense it made, Sandbar was saddened that it was now no longer Gallus’ Scarf, but a scarf that was once owned by Gallus.
But maybe that made its place in this box better.
It took several minutes of soft, calming breathing for Sandbar to press onwards. His brain was wracked with more and more doubts, but he managed to quell most of them with his gentle breathing.
After setting the scarf aside, Sandbar peered into the rest of the small cardboard box. Without the scarf taking up most all of the space, there was very little left to reminisce over. Just three or four items, including the photos he was looking for.
But he felt it was best to work up to that.
Instead, the first thing he pulled from the box was a simple string necklace.
It was one of the later gifts Gallus had given to him in their relationship, given just before the griffon shipped off to Canterlot for basic training in his Royal Guard career. Being the first griffon to enlist in The Equestrian Guard, it was a very special occasion.
Especially special was the feather that dangled loosely from the necklace, only held to it by a yellow bead that it was glued to. The feather was a deep dark blue, a color of feather that reminded Sandbar of soft warmth wrapped around him while attempting to sleep.
A feeling that Sandbar struggled to recreate now, even with one or two pegasus flings he’d had in the past few years.
Sandbar was a bit disheartened to see the feather had gotten crushed and bent out of shape, but he figured that it was his penance for sticking it in a box for so long.
Setting the necklace on top of the scarf delicately, Sandbar rummaged around the box for anything that wasn’t the stack of photos, wanting to distract himself as long as possible before the main event. He was concerned when he found nothing, upturning the box to let his pictures fall out.
And nothing else.
It was only then that Sandbar recalled, very briefly and foggily, having a Depression Clean just a few weeks before Yona took his box away from him.
With a hearty sigh, he pressed a hoof to his chest and wished a fond farewell to those prized momentos he’d almost assuredly tossed out while at his lowest, only leaving the two closest to his heart.
And then there was the photos that were now strewn all over his desk. As Sandbar began to poke through them and reorganize them into a cohesive pile, he started to look them over with greater interest.
All of the pictures in the pile were either of he and Gallus together, or just of Gallus alone. They were all mostly candid shots of them during their schooling; selfies of them together, pictures of Gallus sleeping as adorably as he always did, pictures of dates they were on once Sandbar got comfortable with it, and a few very special photos of their first visit to Los Alicorn together.
There was one photo, the odd one out of the bunch, that set itself apart by actually being half of a photo that was ripped vertically down the middle. As much as Sandbar still hated the idea of defacing one of his prized pictures like this, film wasn’t cheap after all, he was still willing to make an exception for this one.
The half-photo that Sandbar held in his hooves, moving the rest of them to the side for the moment, depicted a grinning Gallus sitting against a wall, making an obscene gesture to the camera while wearing a shiny and new Royal Guard helmet that was just a touch too big for his head.
Sandbar chuckled a small bit as he recalled the reason the picture was taken in the first place. Gallus was mere moments away from heading off to Canterlot for his basic training, and Sandbar wanted to take a picture for the sake of remembering this special occasion. So, after handing the camera over to one of their friends, Sandbar couldn’t remember which, he wrapped a hoof around his boyfriend as said boyfriend made a considerably un-official motion while wearing his official regalia.
The tear in the photo came not long after, as Gallus returned to Ponyville downtrodden and sore on one of his holidays off. Sandbar offered the half with him on it so that both could keep the other with them, even while so far away.
As Sandbar’s soft smile fell to a frown, he flashed back to months later when that very same distance between the two became their downfall.
Hearth’s Warming had come and went without much fanfare for Sandbar as he found himself buried under order after order, having no one to fall back on while Yona returned home to spend time with her large family and break a few tables in his honor. As they had agreed upon before the orders came rolling in.
This stress was made all the worse by Gallus making an unexpected post-holiday appearance, finally getting some time off to spend with his boyfriend. As happy as Sandbar was to see him, it didn’t help anything that his time was now to be spread between work and play.
It wasn’t long before Sandbar said something he immediately regretted, but it was much too late for regrets as Gallus spoke some words of his own, then stormed off to take the next train back to Canterlot.
Days later, Sandbar received a short and professionally worded letter from Gallus expressing a want to take a break from the relationship, but still be friends. Sandbar, wanting nothing more than to keep Gallus in his life, obviously eagerly agreed with what little he could get.
But then the ever present distance, and the new roles they took on, blended with the still raw nerves, which bled into hostility, and hostility bled into…
Well, nothing.
They burnt their bridges and parted ways like nothing happened. Sandbar threw himself into running the Carousel Boutique with Yona, and Gallus hadn’t visited Ponyville since, cementing his place in Canterlot as he quickly rose the ranks of the Royal Guard instead. Their shared circle of friends did their best to spend time with both, but in every event there was a very large hole that all of them struggled to fill.
But now that those bridges were cooled, or at least only slightly smoldering, maybe it was time to start on using what was left and building something new. Something more stable now that Sandbar had finally found steadiness in balancing his life and his work.
For the most part.
So with an uncharacteristic lack of hesitation for something like this, Sandbar quickly packed up his box of memories and set it to the side, then pulled over a previously set-aside notebook and pen.
Taking a moment to have a calming breath, he began to write.
‘Dear Gallus…’
