Foals

“I can’t promise I’ll understand, but whatever it is, I promise I’ll listen and try to understand, and I promise I’ll still love you.” He gave her neck a kiss and slid a hoof over hers, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

Cadence sniffed, realizing that she was blinking back tears as she clutched at her pillow tightly. She took a deep breath, it was now or never.

“I… I don’t know where to start explaining… so I’ll just say it. I have this thing… where a part of me wants to be a little filly.” She instinctively brought her wing up to hide the shame on her face.

There was a short pause, which seemed like an eternity to Cadance.

“Is that a kink thing?” Shining asked, sounding more curious than anything.

“Yes… well, kind-of? It’s more than that though.” She let out a sobbing sigh. “A big part of it is comfort? Stress relief? You know how stressful the job can be. Well sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, I just want… I want to curl up in a ball and go back to being a filly. Or a foal. I know that sounds stupid.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid,” her husband said after some thought, giving her hoof another squeeze. “It makes a lot of sense actually. To find yourself wanting to go back to a time when things were simpler, with less expectations and responsibilities?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head, her voice sounding small. “Basically.”

“Did this start after you took over the Crystal throne?” he asked. “You probably need a real break. We haven’t had a proper vacation since before we got married.”

“I do,” she said, “but no… I think this has always been a part of me. Or at least since I was much younger.”

“Oh,” he sounded surprised by this. “How do you mean?” He laid his hoof across her belly, pulling her gently to him.

“N…not the kink side. But growing up… It’s hard to explain. You know I wasn’t born an alicorn, but I was still of the blood, and groomed for being a working royal from a fairly young age. Part of me desperately wanted to be a grown up, so I could prove how well I could handle my duties like Aunt Celestia; become an alicorn, marry a hoofsome prince, have my own little pony, live in my own castle… you know, the usual fantasy tropes fillies are into, except…” She giggled, leaning into Shining’s cuddle, starting to feel more relaxed.

“Except for most fillies that’s just a fantasy? But you’re the real deal,” he whispered, nuzzling at her ear and giving it a gentle nibble.

She shivered, squirming. “Hey, two out of five ain’t bad right?”

“At least three out of five,” he said reproachfully.

“Hey, I never said you were hoofsome!” she giggled.

“Maybe not, but don’t don’t undersell yourself, you do handle your duties like Celestia.”

“Pff, hardly. I feel like a fraud most days.”

“You don’t think Celestia feels like that sometimes too?” he asked, giving her another gentle squeeze.

“I doubt it. Even if she did at the start, she’s had an eternity to learn the role. And let’s be honest, running the Crystal Empire isn’t really comparable to running Canterlot, never mind Equestria. It disappeared for years and almost no-pony in Canterlot even noticed it was gone.”

“Cady!”

“What?”

“Don’t ever say stuff like that in public here OK? I like your head.”

“I won’t. I like your head too.” She giggled, letting go of the pillow and turning over in bed, giving Shining a little peck on his cheek before nestling her head into his soft chest fur, hugging him back.

“Which one?”

She gave her grinning husband a thwack on his flank. “Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m trying to bare my soul here!”

He craned his neck and kissed her forehead, stroking her back lazily with his hoof. They lay like that for a while before either of them spoke again.

“OK, so being a princess is more stressful than you imagined as a filly. That’s not surprising. When did that go from wanting to grow up to wanting to be a filly again?”

“It’s not really that black and white,” she said, thinking. “I did still want to be a grown-up, and show everypony how responsible I could be, but also at a certain point, I started wishing that I could go back to being a foal. Not all the time, just sometimes.”

“And when did that start, do you remember?” he asked.

“Well, I was six when I became an alicorn…”

“The youngest alicorn in recorded history! It was a big deal. I remember Mom and Dad talking about it. It was in all the newspapers.”

“Pff, that’s tabloid tosh. The Canterlot newspaper archives only go back a few hundred years or so. Celestia didn’t correct them because it was good press.”

“Huh.”

She looked up at his surprised expression, stretching out her hoof and giving the top of his head a playful pat. “I wasn’t the youngest by a long stretch. I could tell you a lot more about alicorn genealogy than the papers, but then I’d have to kill you,” she teased.

“I bet you were still the cutest though,” he said, giving her mane a stroke with his hoof.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

He grinned. “Sorry, anyway you were saying?”

“It was painful, growing a horn as a filly. My thaumic exposure from the magic event that triggered my ascension must have been a much weaker dose than what triggered Twilight’s, because my horn didn’t appear all at once like her wings did, it took weeks for it to grow out, and the worst migraines I’ve ever had.” She rubbed the base of her horn thoughtfully, remembering. “I was off school for six weeks.”

“Ouch!” he tapped his own horn. “Born with horn here. Hadn’t thought about it being painful to grow one later like that later.”

“The worst part was, my parents took me to all these doctors and specialists who poked and prodded at me and did all these tests, but nopony thought to bucking explain to me what was happening to my body. I guess they assumed that because I’d always dreamed about becoming an alicorn as a foal that I understood what was happening, but I honestly had no idea at the time. My father was mostly annoyed because I missed so much school, and my mother was too busy drinking and boasting to her Canterlot society friends that her daughter was now an alicorn to care what I was going through.”

“I’m so sorry Cady. I knew you didn't get on with your parents, but I had no idea it was that bad when you were young,” he said.

“This was all before Celestia took me under her wing of course,” she continued. Anyway, it took a while for my body to start feeling like my body again. There was some temporary nerve damage, and a lot of adjustment learning how to control my new magic, and I guess I was a little traumatized. Nothing too bad, but I started having nightmares and wetting the bed.”

Shining took her head gently in his hooves and kissed the base of her horn delicately. “Is that when…” he stopped, before whispering the word “Diapers?”

She nodded. “Mom put me back in them for a while. Not for that long. I don’t really know why, but they made me feel more… comfortable? Comforted? Beyond the obvious comfort of not waking up to wet sheets I mean.”

Shining nodded. “I can understand that.”

“As I recovered, now that I was an alicorn I was expected to take on more duties as a Princess. It’s much less common, you know, for a pegasus to ascend like that compared to unicorns. I went from just being a pegasus filly in one of the minor houses on the fringes of the royal household to an alicorn suddenly surrounded by attention from the whole court and half of Canterlot. In retrospect I guess it felt like a big piece of my foalhood had been suddenly wrenched away from me.”

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” Shining said, wishing he could have been there to protect her as a filly.

“In any case, the diapers made me feel… I don’t know, but I felt safe wearing them. I felt like when I wore them to bed at night I could still be a carefree little filly when I needed to be. But that only lasted a few months before I stopped wetting the bed, and they were taken away from me. I never forgot what that feeling of safety felt like though.”

Shining just nodded, listening attentively.

“After that, I would go to bed without them and cry myself to sleep at night. Eventually I got over that phase, but the feeling of wanting to be able to be a filly again sometimes; it came and went but it never really went away. As I got older and expectations on me kept growing I would find other silly ways to rebel and feel more like a filly again when I had the time and privacy, which wasn’t often.”

“Such as?” Shining asked with more than a hint of curiosity in his voice.

“Little things like sleeping with a stuffed animal, until Mom got rid of them like she did with everything. Sucking my hoof - she couldn’t take that away. Braiding my mane with ribbons, drinking milk, making drawings using my mouth not my horn,” she giggled.

“That’s adorable,” Shining said smiling, “I had no idea you could draw!”

“I absolutely can’t. I’m terrible at it! Especially if I don’t use my horn,” Cadance giggled. “But that’s what makes it fun to do when I’m in my filly headspace.”

“Filly headspace?”

“I’ve read about it being called that sometimes, describing the mental state I get into when I need to feel… little again. That’s what I like to call it now, but there are other names…”

“Wait, you read about it? Someone’s been writing about you?” He frowned.

“Not me silly. I’m not the only one into this stuff. It’s actually fairly common. I’ve never met any other pony who is into it, but I’ve read quite a lot about it in psychology journals and um… special magazines,” she said blushing.

“Ohhh. That makes more sense. It’s good to know you’re not alone I guess? What did they say about it?”

“Yeah. I thought it was just me for the longest time growing up; it was good to find out that there are other ponies like me. The psychology papers I read were interesting. It used to be considered a mental disorder, but the modern medical view seems to be that it’s generally harmless. It gets complicated, but they make a distinction between ageplayers, like with my filly headspace, where there might be an attraction to objects like diapers as a comfort object versus and diaper fetishes where there’s a sexual attraction to diapers. Some ponies are into one or the other but not both.”

“But it’s the… ageplay you are into?” Shining asked, sounding the word out loud for the first time.

“Well, uh, that’s how it started for me, but um, now it’s actually both,” she admitted shyly.

“I see. And what do the magazines say about it?” he asked.

She blushed more. “Uh, they are… less academic. Ponies write in, with stories, and send in pictures of themselves… dressing like foals, wearing diapers… stuff like that. There’s adverts for stores that supply products specifically for the adult-foal community, and even for a couple of adult-foal nightclubs.”

“Wait... nightclubs, really? There must be a lot of ponies into this if there is enough of a market for custom products and nightclubs?” Shining sounded genuinely surprised and interested.

“Yeah, at least in the bigger cities. The ones I’ve read about are in Canterlot and Manehattan.”

“You’ve never tried to visit?”

“Oh gosh no, can you imagine the optics if that got into the press? I did once send in a piece of… fiction that I wrote to one of the magazines though, which ended up getting published! Under a nom de plume of course.”

“Well well well, my little pony, a published author! You’ll have to let me read some of your work sometime!” Shining said teasingly, making her turn bright red.

“Uhh… it’s more on the kink side of things,” she said nervously, not making eye contact.

“Mmhm… I figured. Want to tell me more about that side of things?”

“I… uh. Yeah… I guess,” she buried her head into his mane.

Grinning at her uncharacteristic shyness he leaned his head down to her ear and whispered, “Tell me about your kinks little filly,” before softly biting down on her ear. The effect was profound and immediate, her body trembled and she let out a whining noise halfway between a squeak and a moan that sounded very small and filly-like. She buried her head deeper into his mane and wrapped her fore-hooves around him, hugging him with a new level of needy intensity that he couldn’t remember feeling from her before.

He let her lie there, hugging him for a while, listening to her breathing. Stroking at her back with his hoof, he could feel her trembling, her hindlegs kicking a little every so often as his hoof passed by a sensitive spot near her flanks. Eventually, when it became apparent she wasn’t about to speak, he reached into his mane, guiding her muzzle firmly but very gently with his hoof until she was looking up into his eyes. Her face was flushed with embarrassment, but her purple eyes glistened with a look of desire and pleading.

“I know you’re shy about this,” he said, gazing directly into her eyes. “You can trust me. You don’t have to tell me more if you don’t want to, but I think you do want to, don’t you?”

She gave him an almost imperceptible nod, not breaking eye contact.

“I thought so. Would it help if I let you put your head back in my mane and whisper it to me?”

She nodded again with slightly more vigor.

“Good girl,” he said, kissing her forehead. He noted with satisfaction how she squirmed when he called her that. He could definitely get used to this new side of Cady.

He let her sink her head back down, reburying it in the space between his neck and mane. This time she hugged him with her hind-hooves as well, draping her left hock over him. He placed a fore-hoof on her flank through her pajama bottoms, massaging it slowly.

When she resumed speaking it was in a whisper. “It wasn’t sexual at first at all… just a…a comfort thing like I said. I don’t really know when it became a kink for me. After they took my diapers away, I would feel this intense longing for them, like another part of my fillyhood that was taken away. As I was growing up I tried a few times to recapture that feeling.”

He nodded “You said. The mane braiding and drawing?”

“Y… yes… but there were other… naughtier things. I…I tried drinking lots of water… or milk before bed hoping that it might make me have accidents during the night. It worked once or twice, but then stopped working as my bladder grew bigger and stronger like the rest of my stupid alicorn body. Then… I tried wetting myself on purpose.”

She paused, gaging his reaction before continuing. He gave her flank a squeeze of encouragement and she made an adorable squeaking sound.

“I tried wetting the bed deliberately, and it didn’t feel the same without a diaper, so I tried to make my own diapers out of things like towels, or stuffing toilet paper down my knickers. That was kind-of fun, but it never worked very well, and only gave me a little bit of the old comfort feeling back.”

While still hushed, her voice had grown above a whisper as she grew in confidence talking about this part of herself. The feel of the vibration from her talking and her hot little breaths against his neck was slowly starting to drive him wild.

“Not having access to them, I almost forgot about diapers for a while growing up, but I continued to experiment with… peeing. After a while I stopped trying to wet the bed, because that was getting hard to hide, but I kept wetting my pajamas or underwear on purpose sometimes. Not often, just every now and then, when I had privacy. I’d lock myself in the bathroom and wet my knickers and just sit there on the floor or in the bath sucking my hoof or something, whatever made me feel most like a little filly.”

“Aw,” Shining said, stroking her back.

“But I also found that I enjoyed the wetting part in its own right, separate from wanting to feel like a foal. Not really in a sexual way at the time, I wouldn’t have had a clue what that was back then, but I remember it was … exciting? It felt thrilling to be doing something I knew was so… taboo. Especially given all the expectations on me to be a perfect princess… It became my naughty secret, I guess, which honestly felt empowering when I didn’t have much else in my life I had control over.”

He kept stroking her reassuringly, leaning down and kissing her neck where it emerged from his mane.

“Then at some point after I’d hit puberty I guess it became tied up with my sexuality as I started to figure that out. Sometimes I’d drink lots through the day and see how long I could hold on for before I really had to pee, because the feeling of holding my bladder like that was… stimulating. I eventually learned from other fillies at school about… pleasuring myself in other ways, and well it all just kind-of got jumbled together in a big complex mess of sexuality at that point I suppose. I got interested in colts, and other fillies, but I stayed interested in peeing and diapers, and in my filly headspace, and I guess they all started to become somewhat sexual for me at that point.”

Shining found himself staring at the obvious wet patch that was growing between the legs of Cadance’s pajama bottoms.

“I think I was twelve or thirteen when I started foal-sitting. Celestia’s idea, not mine. I didn’t want to do it at first. I felt… envious seeing other ponies getting to live normal foalhoods. But I came to enjoy it, and I realized then that while part of me still wanted to be a foal, maybe a part of me did still want to be a mother too.”

She paused before going on. “Foal-sitting also meant that I had access to diapers. I’m really ashamed to admit it, but I would steal some occasionally… I’d give the family some discount for my services to cover the cost, but I didn’t tell them I was taking them… I know that was wrong.”

“I think that’s forgivable,” her husband said. “You were young, and it was the only way you could experiment with that side of yourself.” He hesitated. “Cady… you… you never did anything sexual with the foals you were sitting for did you?”

She sounded horrified. “Oh Celestia, No!” Her voice was louder now, shaking, and she removed her head from his mane to meet his eyes. Believe me. I would never do anything like that. This… this kink… it’s about wanting to feel safe like a foal again yourself, and admittedly for me it’s complicated, and it involves other other learned sexual responses about wearing diapers and wetting and stuff. But believe me, I would never bring any real foals into it. I’m not like that!”

“Forgive me love. I knew you wouldn’t, but I had to ask.” He said quietly.

She sighed deeply. “Look, I understand. It’s a common misconception about infantilism - that’s one of the psychological terms for the adult-foal stuff,” she explained. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve never spoken about this with anypony until now. If I’m honest, it’s one of the main reasons I quit foal-sitting, even though I ended up loving doing it. I didn’t want anypony to jump to conclusions and get the wrong idea if it ever came out… the stuff that I am into.

He nodded, hugging her. “That’s a shame love, but I get it. It seems like a sensible decision.”

She burst into tears, speaking angrily through her sobs. “Yet here I am, trying to have a foal with you! And I know deep down that there is nothing wrong with my… kinks, they aren’t harmful to anypony, and... and I also think that I could make a good mom too. But I can’t! I can’t help feeling that I have to choose; like in order to be a good mom I have to give up the part of me that is still desperately holding on to being a filly. The only thing that made me feel safe…before I met you.” She looked up at Shining, tears streaming down her cheeks and a look of desperate pleading in her eyes.

His heart broke for her when she spoke again, “And I feel so guilty, because I don’t want to let her go.”

“Thank you for telling me.” He said, holding onto her hooves in his and looking her in the eyes. “It’s going to be OK, Cady. I know that you would make a great mother. But I’m not ever going to ask you to give up who you are to become one.”

She trembled, and he pulled her tight against his chest, holding her as her body was wracked with sobs.

“Hey,” he said softly. “I can see you Cady. You’re still the gorgeous, kind, sexy, mare who I fell in love with at first sight, who inexplicably agreed to marry me. I can see you as an alicorn and a strong ruler, and I can see you as a mom; I always could. But now… now I can see this beautiful, scared little filly looking at me too, and I’d like to get to know her better.”