Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid
If there’s a way to make him fall in love with me, this absolutely isn’t it, so why do it?
Because I don’t want to be alone with this any longer. Because it hurts.
So here it is.
I used to keep this journal, diary, thing, and I kind of maybe wrote down every single coherent thought I’ve ever had about King Thorax. Most of them are about how bad I want to kiss him. Some of them are about how perfect he is. A small amount of them are about how he’d never look my way. Every single one of them terrifies me.
They’re all gone now. The writings, not the thoughts or the fear. My cave kind of caught on fire the last time Trixie visited and…well, yeah, everything I owned (my moss bed, some pictures of sunsets, and the journal-diary-thing) was destroyed, except for these excerpts.
And the reason I’m putting this out there is because one of two things might happen.
Outcome 1: my most intimate thoughts are somehow enough to get him to love me back, or at least give me a chance.
Or, the more likely…
Outcome 2: my most intimate thoughts freak him out, I lose my job, my life is ruined, and I’ll be forced to move to Ponyville like every changeling in every changeling romance novel that’s been published since we traded charcoal for pastel, though we’re always holey and love-starved in those. Maybe I’ll fall in love with Princess Twilight or something.
But I’ll be free. I’ll be free from this painful circle, this loop of knowing I’m at the bottom of a hill that I’ll never be able to climb, but because I haven’t failed yet, I keep thinking the same two words to myself.
What if?
What if I’m a moth to a flame?
And what if I’m a larvae in an egg, and I only need one last push to break free and breathe air for the first time? What if I’m close?
What if it’s not impossible?
What if I—
What if we could—
What if he—
Oh, boy.
At the same time I am hopeless, and too full of hope.
Stupid. That’s what I am. That’s what these thoughts are.
But I heard once, from a friend of a friend of a friend, that Thorax kind of likes his guys a little stupid, so…
So…what if?
Once the Queen had gone, everyone I knew had nightmares for weeks.
I was one of the few whose dreams were all sweet.
He was in them. How could I not swoon?
So brave! So sparkly! So incredibly, irresistibly sexy.
Thorax. Pharynx’s runt! I was in the sleeping cave beside their hatching’s, and I’d sometimes walk by to see him getting bullied by all the stronger drones, only for Pharynx to come in and save him before crushing all his hopes to dust. It was hilarious.
But, years later, there he was. Escaped from the hive only to come back and stick it to Chrysalis, and win.
And then he grew into his proper monarch morph, and I was pretty much in love by then.
I’d never noticed how…cute he was. Now that he was bigger, and his eyes were wider and colored that gorgeous shade of fuschia, I could see the sparkle in them. I could see all the pure, unrestrained love inside of them. Love that he’d earned, that he wasn’t afraid to share. And I wanted it all.
I knew I’d kill for him. I mean, hopefully I’d never have to, but I knew I would if that’s what it took to protect him. And hey, I was a guard for the old Queen anyway, so what else was I going to do?
But then my sister Acari learned how to make doughnuts, and I kind of ate those for the next half-year.
Until Pharynx had his whole freakout, and then I remembered that I wanted to be one of Thorax’s guards, so I let him whip me into shape, and during the Hive’s first Hearth’s Warming, Thorax called me by my name for the first time since I introduced myself the week before.
He looked at me, and smiled, and he said, “Happy Hearth’s Warming, Maxilla!”
I get chills thinking about it.
It’s probably a little scary. I think about him a lot. A LOT.
And I’m sure he hardly thinks about me. He’s too busy! Why would he ever think about me? I mean, I’m great, but I’m weird, but I’m nobody. I am literally the guy who opens doors for him and then I stand outside of those doors and I try to look scary and keep an eye out for evil villains and former changeling queens who might be trying to assassinate him.
It’s the best job in the world. It’s the most boring, too.
So I have time to think.
About him.
A lot.
I think about the way he walks. He’s so clumsy and weird and casual, but he’s still got a sense of grace to him that makes me feel like I’m watching a butterfly flutter through a breeze, or a squirrel scamper up a tree.
And there’s the way he talks, that sweet lilt to his voice and the tender heat coating his words when he talks about something he’s really passionate about. I’ve heard him sing once or twice, and he wasn’t very good, truth be told, but I’d love to sing with him regardless. I love how he sounds when he’s happy.
Everybuggy loves Thorax. We all dote on him and we’re nice to him. I mean, for the first three months a lot of the Hive was kind of against him, but now that we’ve got this whole friendship thing down, we’re all pretty much in agreement that the King is to be respected and loved. That’s the least that he deserves. Even when we bother him with solving petty disagreements between ourselves, we do so knowing that he’s the best. And he is.
I hope that he knows that I mean it differently.
“Maxilla, look at that!” he might say, pointing to a sunset outside of our car in the Friendship Express.
Then I might say, “That looks really pretty, Thorax.”
And he might beam at me, and I’ll lose my breath.
But I’ll be talking the next second, voice wheezy and cracked, my mouth too fast for my brain, and I’ll say something like “You look just as pretty, you know. Especially today. I think that you said a lot of smart things at your meeting.”
Then Thorax will blush and thank me, and we’ll continue on, despite my heart exploding into strawberry jam.
I know I’m not the first guard to say something like that to him. I’m sure other ‘lings are just as sweet. How could they not be?
I just hope that when I say things like this, that he knows that I mean it with every single fiber of my body. I hope he can feel even an inch of the warmth I feel when I tell him that I like his jokes, that I want to hear more about his ideas for the Hive’s future. I hope he’s ignorant of what I’m trying to say.
I love him.
I’m in love with him.
I know that love is like, this hard thing and it’s not just all these sticky sweet feelings that I feel, but I can’t help it that ‘love’ is the only word that comes to mind when I think of him.
At night I dream about being with him. Not anything particularly romantic or grand. I just dream that we’re in a room together, or sitting by a river, and we’re quiet, and I know that he wants me there, because he loves me back.
I haven’t had a dream about him for a while, but that’s fine. I see him every day. That’s a dream enough.
I sit in front of a mirror sometimes and I shift.
Griffon, dragon, drone, Chrysalis, Discord, Princess Celestia. Then I go back to myself.
My usual form has blush pink chitin and jewel purple eyes. My elytra are a striking apple red, and my barrel is a lighter shade of red. This is me.
I make myself sparkle. I turn myself gold. I turn myself moth-eaten. I turn myself heroic, taller, stronger, cooler.
I end up at myself every time.
I wish I knew his type.
If I did, and it wasn’t me, could I turn into somebuggy better for him?
I wish I could say that I wanted to. I can’t.
I want him to love me for me, and the fact that there’s nobody like me is nice a lot of the time, but it’s scary. It means that if he doesn’t want me, then I can’t do anything to change that.
I don’t know what I’d do if that were the case, so I try to imagine that it’s already true.
I feel my heart pang. I sit there and I look at myself and I go, “He doesn’t want you.”
I do that for hours.
It doesn’t help, but I keep doing it, sometimes until I realize I’ve been sleepwalking the whole day, lost in a nightmare I’m forcing myself to have because I’m stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid as stupid can be, and I deserve to feel like this, because I was stupid enough to entertain the idea that he might love me back.
We’re friends now, apparently?
It’s nice.
No, that’s understating it.
I feel like I’ve been shocked with lightning. Every step I take, I feel like my muscles are wrapped in electricity.
He’s my friend. He likes me.
He enjoys my company.
Let me rewind a little bit.
A month ago, it was raining, and he was bored, because no bug had come to him for help and he was somehow caught up on every letter and bill that needed answering, writing and reviewing. And then the greatest thing in the world happened.
He turned to me and grinned. “Hey Maxie, do you want to read books about plants?”
And books about plants are the best so I squeaked and nodded.
So we did that.
For five hours straight, we traded different plant facts that we came across, and it was just…
I wish it could’ve lasted forever. But it had to end, and now I sit here, heartbroken, pining.
We’re meeting up again tomorrow. That’s twelve hours away. This past week has felt like a million years.
Look, I’m not the jealous type, but when people talk about Thorax taking a Queen or, worse, a Prince-Consort, I feel like throwing up.
He and Dragon Lord Ember are good friends. Some think they might marry. I would hate that option the least.
Ember is a good leader. She’s scary, but she’s kind, and she treats Thorax with respect. She doesn’t fawn on him or talk down to him like Queen Novo and even Princess Twilight tend to do without meaning to.
I like her. I’d hate it if she married him.
If he started dating another boy, though…
That would kill me.
I was one of Chrysalis’s warrior drones. We were at the top of the food chain. We were the most suitable for passing on our genetics to the next generation of the hive.
We weren’t allowed to be in love. We weren’t allowed to look at other males in the way that a lot of us wanted to. We were just DNA and muscles and training.
Then there was no more need to keep certain bloodlines clean, or predictable. Then I could fall in love freely, and in that freedom I found that I loved Thorax.
I just wouldn’t know what to do if he chose someone like me, who wasn’t me.
...Yikes.
Today I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t.
How can I?
So I sit here and pine, and pine, and pine.
We never had a word for pining before.
I woke up in the middle of the night and shifted into somebug else. I stayed like that for hours, until it was time to go to work.
I changed the color of my usual chitin, turned the shade of pink darker.
King Thorax didn’t notice.
A love letter:
Dear Thorax,
I think the best part of my day is being able to see you smile.
I have hobbies. I really do adore reading about plants, and science, and the things that I would’ve never been able to learn about under our old Queen’s rule. I love flying to the top of the spires so I can watch the sun rise, and that’s a kind of solitary peace that I don’t want to share with even you.
I have a mother, who used to be my unit leader but now bakes cookies all day, and I’d do absolutely anything for her. It’s probably weird—I feel like a pony might make fun of me if I said this—but she’s my best friend. I feel like I can tell her anything. I even read her these journal entries sometimes.
But you’ve supplanted every little happiness I feel, and I know how that sounds, but it’s true. If I had a choice to start over again from the beginning when I died, and I knew for a fact that you’d never return my feelings, I’d still choose to live my life over, and over, and over. Every moment, every second of this ridiculous, self-absorbed agony. If I could get this same job so I could have you in my life and watch you smile every day, I wouldn’t have had my life go any other way.
Whenever we spend time together, reading books, talking in your off-time, my heart flutters, and whenever I’m able to make you laugh I feel like I’m in a dream.
I don’t ever want to wake up from this, though a part of me knows I’m going to have to, at some point.
I just hope that when things change, as they always do, that it doesn’t hurt me too much.
He talked to me without me needing to prompt him or anything today!
And no, that’s not a rare occurrence, but there was something different about the way he said my name.
Something about it—he’d been thinking about me. On his own. I didn’t have to bug him about book club or save him from any villainous assassins or undercooked empanadas. He was just…thinking about me, at some point, and remembered that he wanted to ask me something.
“You mentioned that you were wanting to go to a flower festival in Baltimare the other day,” Thorax said. “I haven’t seen any forms from you asking to take the day off, though.”
I tried to keep it cool, despite my face feeling like it was melting, like a bag of gummy worms left out in the sun.
“I said I wanted to go,” I said, “not that I was going to, my King.”
Thorax frowned. “When is it?”
“Next week,” I said.
“Then I’ll just have to force you to go,” he said.
“No!” I cried.
Thorax tilted his head at me.
“I mean, like…” I scuffed a hoof on the floor. “I’d rather be here, making sure you’re safe.”
“I understand your dedication to your job, Maxilla, but—”
“It would be hard to focus and enjoy myself if I went alone,” I said. “Really, it’s fine, just—”
“Well!” Thorax interrupted. He smiled at me. “I think I know a solution to that.”
Trixie visited yesterday.
Everything I own has been burned to a crisp.
Not many bugs own anything. I don’t own much, either.
I owned the entries in this notebook, but they’re gone now.
It’s kind of a relief. I’ve always been worried that somebuggy might read it without my permission, but that’s why I hid it under so much moss.
Flammable, flammable moss.
It’s kind of funny if I think about it, but I can’t think about it too much, or I might cry.
Anyway.
That Baltimare flower festival was canceled, and it wasn’t even because something came up in Thorax’s schedule, like I expected. There’s just a magical shield around the city that the Elements of Harmony need to figure out how to get through, and it looks like they’re not going to make any progress before it’s time for the festival. I doubt any of the flowers are getting the right amount of sunlight behind that shield, anyway. The flowers won’t be very pretty.
Thorax has been very consoling about it. He keeps promising to take me next year, and I keep telling him that it’s fine.
Because it is. We still have book club. We’re on Mage Meadowbrook’s Guide to Bayou Flora and Traditional Medicine, Volume III, and her style of writing is starting to get less technical, and it’s fun to read.
I’m not heartbroken, or disappointed. How could I be?
Thorax is my friend. I see him every day. What else can I ask for?
And that’s it.
It’s not poetry, it’s not even very entertaining or special.
It’s kind of boring, obsessive, weird, creepy, silly, stupid, depressing, overdramatic, unremarkable.
A crush. A heavy one. Flickers of love that sting my tongue when I try to taste them.
Here it is.
It’s just me.
I hope he sees it. I hope he doesn’t. I feel like I’ve explained enough as to why.
I wish I had an ending for this. I wish we did.
I wish for a lot of things.
But hey, this is done, and I'm done doing this. I need to stop wishing for him. I have to move on.
And I really would have, but he just looked the cutest when we were eating lunch today today. Let me tell you about it—
Author's Note
partially inspired by one of my favorite fics growing up
