the camera adds twenty pounds and several legs
Silverstream sometimes wondered about butterflies. They were SO WEIRD. Like, if her body was just this weird, furry tube and on either side of her were giant wings that were basically just as big as the rest of her, if not bigger. And then Gabby was visiting one day and took a picture of her from a Wonderbolts’ eye view and Silverstream realized everything about herself was a lie.
She wasn’t a hippogriff.
She was a butterfly.
Or maybe all hippogriffs were butterflies.
She remembered how much she used to fight with the boys.
She remembered the squeezing. This was before Seaquestria had more than one school and the adults just decided to throw all of their teenagers into a series of underwater caves, not realizing that what they had created was just—
Silverstream paused. Was it a prison? Was it worse?
“What are you doing?” came a voice from behind her.
Silverstream grinned, and flipped her head backwards, an even ninety-degrees, the perfect angle to terrorize the now upside-down griffon in her vision. “Gally!”
“Silverstream,” Gallus said. “I hate hippogriff biology. Stop that right now.”
Silverstream giggled, and snapped her head back into the right position. An audible crack left her neck. She didn’t have to look back to know that Gallus was wincing.
“What’s up?” Silverstream asked.
“You’re staring at a picture,” Gallus said.
“Yeah,” Silverstream said.
Gallus crept closer, and looked over her shoulder at the photo. “You know, I figured that cameras wouldn’t work underwater.”
“Seapony magic,” Silverstream said. “And that’s all the explanation I have for that.”
“I wouldn’t have figured that you’d be cool about keeping stuff like this,” Gallus said.
“Why not?” Silverstream asked. “Wasn’t I handsome?”
“You’re super young here,” Gallus said. “So I can’t say.”
“Oh, come on!” Silverstream turned to him with a grin. “I was seventeen. You can say that I looked nice.”
Gallus snorted, still choosing not to answer.
Silverstream shrugged. “Wanna know something?”
“Is it going to get in the way of us going to Sugarcube Corner with the others later?” Gallus asked.
“I kind of miss it sometimes,” Silverstream looked at the photo in her hand. “Being all tortured and brooding.”
“You. Tortured. Brooding?”
“I used to make Terramar tag along when I’d escape the caves and creep along the reef, looking for shark skulls that I could decorate my room with. And I had this old book of poetry written by this guy who history only remembers as The Raven, and every poem was about him pretending to be the ghost of dudes’ wives and basically making them repent against every wrong they’d ever done against the girls in their lives.”
“I can see where this is going,” Gallus said.
“You don’t, actually!” Silverstream chirped. “You wanna know why I’m like this now?”
Gallus narrowed his eyes at her. “Is it going to make you sad?”
“We had an old Equestrian entomology book at the back of the library. It was one of the only windows to the surface that we had. And I saw a butterfly, and then I saw a moth, and I was like wait WAIT, that’s like exactly the same thing. They’re literally just as pretty as one another, it’s just that one has more colors and one is kind of furrier and eats clothes. And I went to sleep that night and I woke up like, WOW, I’m a girl!”
“That’s—” Gallus stammered. “I mean, yes. I agree.”
“...That’s not actually how it happened,” Silverstream admitted.
A blue wing wrapped around her. Gallus laid his head on her shoulder. Or, he tried to, but she was just objectively huge, so he was kind of just pressing the side of his face on her bicep.
Silverstream wasn’t sure what to say, so she said the only thing on her mind. “I’m hungry.”
“Be strong, drink water,” Gallus said. “We’ll stuff our faces at Sugarcube Corner.”
Silverstream rested her chin on the top of Gallus’s head. “Wish I was a butterfly.”
“You’re a thousand butterflies,” Gallus said. “Swarming me and eating my blankets.”
“Those are moths,” Silverstream said.
Gallus snorted. “Same thing.”
And Silverstream laughed, and she closed her eyes and leaned into Gallus, but not too much, or she’d topple him.
“Sometimes I look at that photo so I can remember how sad I was,” she said.
“Why would you do that?” Gallus asked.
“Dunno,” Silverstream said. “I feel like—if I don’t remember that feeling, then it’ll rise up from the past and it’ll attack me and I’ll start going into the showers and staring at Ocellus and Smolder and Yona and I’ll like, I’ll feel jealous of something that I don’t have.”
“Are you?” Gallus asked.
“Not anymore…” Silverstream said.
“I don’t know if I can tell you this,” Gallus said, “but I feel like you should stop wallowing, maybe. That doesn’t sound healthy.”
“I’ll probably bring it up to Trixie,” Silverstream sighed. “Right now, though, I’m just, I don’t know. I can feel myself slipping into that kind of sad that lasts for days and—”
“Hey, do butterflies do it like mammals do?” Gallus asked.
“There goes my appetite,” Silverstream said. The image in her mind was…well, she actually wanted to paint it, now that she realized how disturbing it was.
“Wanna look it up?” Gallus asked. “Revive your whole entomology career? I bet it’d be weird, but not weird enough to not stare at the diagrams.”
Silverstream laughed, so unexpectedly that she had to take a second to remember where she was, what she’d been doing, who she was with.
She leaned down and kissed the top of his head. He looked up at her with that smirk she so loved.
“Are you feeling better?” Gallus asked.
“You’re very funny,” Silverstream said.
Gallus’s smirk widened into a grin. “You look beautiful right now.”
“I know,” Silverstream said.
“Oh, yeah?”
Silverstream nodded, giggling.
“You wanna know something?” Gallus asked.
Silverstream shrugged. “Is it going to make me think about butterfly dicks?”
“You kind of look like a dragonfly from the right angle.”
Dragonflies. Silverstream turned that over in her mind.
“Dragonflies are so cool,” she said.
“Dragon my balls across your face,” Gallus said.
“Too late!” Silvestream cried. “Sentimental moment already happened, you can’t ruin it!”
Gallus cackled as he stood up, helping her stand before he led her out of the room, his outstretched wing softly wrapped around hers.
“Guess what?” Silverstream asked, halfway down the hall.
“What?” Gallus asked.
“I bet we look like a single, gigantic crab to the ants on the ground.”
“You know what I bet we look like to the others?” Gallus asked.
“What?”
“A princess and her consort,” he said.
Silverstream’s heart raced. She beamed. “Well, go on then, Sir Knight. Lead me to the bug sex.”
And Ocellus, who they’d just passed, said “What!”
But Silverstream was being led to another wonderful realization. She wished she had a camera. She’d bet that she’d look so weird right now.
