I Like Ike

If Harness Pathfinder was honest with herself, being the Sheriff of the town of Cape Colt was really easy most of the time. When she’d first gotten the job, she’d refused to let herself think of it that way — after all, shouldn’t a Sheriff want to enforce the law, to be the thin line separating order from anarchy? More recently, she’d come to believe that the opposite scenario was much better, and that being a good Sheriff was mostly about keeping public spaces clean, getting cats out of trees, and being the kind of friendly face that ponies just didn’t really want to get on the wrong side of.

Today, though, it just felt a little weird. Sure, it was nice to not have much to do, to be able to sleep in occasionally — or stay in bed awake, with a very good friend there to have a very good time staying awake with — without anything catching on fire or anypony actively setting things on fire. But was that because she was a good Sheriff, or because this was just a particularly quiet and well-mannered town that any pony with a badge and a stern face could’ve kept in line?

How much did she really do for Cape Colt? What did other ponies see when they looked at her? A friendly neighbor they could trust, or an authority figure to fear, or a mare with a hitch in her step because she was still kind of sore from…

Harness squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head, and wrenched her train of thought off the track it’d been looping around for just about the whole day. Nopony was looking at her sideways. The townsfolk smiled and waved when she gave them her standard Sheriff-ly nod. Even the cashier at the pharmacy earlier had barely blinked when she’d slid a bottle of herbal tea and a box of Contigency — newly imported from Bridlewood, and thankfully much easier on the stomach than the old MareSoft stuff — across the counter.

Everything was fine. She was fine. She was good at her job, and everypony in Cape Colt liked her, and she’d spent last night and a good chunk of this morning having fiendish, fantastic sex with her childhood best friend Sunbeam, and that was fine too. So if all of that was fine, her plan for the rest of the day — to move straight on from Sunbeam to his best friend Ike, because her stallion self from another universe had sex with all his friends and she could do anything he could — would be fine too. It had to be. It was only fair for it to be.

Maybe the Bridlewood stuff wasn’t so good after all. Or maybe it was a little too good. She didn’t want or need to think about it. She was the Sheriff, dammit.

Harness picked up her pace from a canter to a trot, and the pit in her stomach shrunk down to more of a divot as she went. But it didn’t go away entirely, not even once she rounded the corner onto her street and saw Sparkle in the neat little yard in front of her house, gamboling after a ball that Pepp had just tossed for her to chase. Zepp stood behind his brother, playing his usual role as self-nominated chaperone, and his eyes flicked toward Harness in the same moment Sparkle’s did.

“Mama!” the little dragon shrieked through a snaggle-toothed grin. Her game with Pepp totally forgotten, she flared her wings and zipped towards her adoptive mother like an arrow. Harness braced herself for the incoming tackle-hug and took it with barely a flinch, one forehoof around Sparkle’s squirming backside to keep her from tumbling to the ground.

“Heya, Spark,” Harness cooed. “You have a fun day?” Judging by the burbling giggle Sparkle let out as she swung around onto her mother’s back, it seemed she had. “Thanks for keeping an eye on her, guys,” she said next, addressing Zepp as he approached her but expecting that somepony else would answer.

“Nah, no worries,” Pepp said, phone in hoof. “She’s great. Plus the Peppergang loves her.” He swiveled his phone around long enough for Harness to see a flood of heart-shaped emojis filling the screen. “She gets, like, leg-day-tier engagement. It’s nuts.”

“I bet,” Harness said through her grinning teeth. “Has he been streaming all day?” she muttered to Zepp, who rolled his eyes as Sparkle flittered back over towards his brother

“I’d be more worried if he hadn’t been,” Zepp answered. “But everything was fine, seriously. How about you?”

There was a hint of something more than idle curiosity in Zepp’s tone, but Harness just added it to the mental pile of things she wasn’t thinking about right now. “Fine. Was hoping I could impose on you two a bit longer, though. Some… stuff came up.”

It was a bad lie, of course, and Zepp didn’t buy it for a second. “Sheriff stuff?”

“More of the, uh… personal variety. I won’t be long. Just dinner and a bath for her? I’ll be back before she needs to go down for the night.”

Harness did her best not to meet Zepp’s piercing gaze and, as she often did with him, failed completely. His eyes were soft, inquisitive, blue like seawater under a perfect summer sky, and just a glance towards them was enough to make the pit in her stomach swell into a chasm. That wasn’t suspicion laced through the look he gave her. He was worried about her — and getting ready to lie to her about why.

“Everything okay?” he asked softly, so Pepp — occupied anyway with showing Sparkle how to flex properly for the #peppergang — couldn’t hear what he said next. “With… you and Sun?”

Yes. Everything was fine with her and Sun, who of course Zepp just implicitly knew she’d hooked up with last night. Sun had explicitly told her to her face — while inside her, even — that he was totally fine with what she was planning to do later and who she planned to do it with, and yet there still was that weird moondamn canyon yawning beneath her ribs. And looking at sweet, sensitive, well-groomed and well-meaning Zepp just made it worse.

“Yeah. Everything’s good,” she said, and before he could fully hide it, she saw Zepp’s face tighten a bit.

“Good,” he said. “Just, uh…” The pegasus shifted from hoof to hoof, polychromatic wings fluttering along his trim flanks. “Y-Yeah, we’re fine watching Sparkle. Fish sticks okay for dinner?”

“Yeah, should be,” Harness replied, before raising her voice so Sparkle could hear her. “Hey, Spark, whatcha want for dinner?”

“Ice cweam!” Sparkle squealed back.

“Ice cream!” Pepp added, in a deeper but otherwise identical tone.

“Yeah, fish sticks are fine,” Harness told Zepp. “Just mash ‘em up a bit, mix some broccoli and peas in, and uh… just keep ‘em out of the stuff under the sink.”

“Sparkle or Pepp?” Zepp muttered.

“Both,” Harness cracked. She got a smile out of Zepp that didn’t grow into a chuckle — and suddenly, realization smacked into her like a tidal wave.

Zepp was one of Sunbeam’s best friends. He was always willing to help Harness when she needed it. He knew they’d grown up in Cape Colt and he hadn’t, and he’d seen Sun get invited to stay last night when he hadn’t, and he was exactly the type of pony who’d be stoic and respectful and think himself out of acting no matter what his true feelings really were.

She was an idiot. And an asshole. And…

And just like that, Zepp’s gorgeous eyes flashed, and he gave her a friendly nudge on the shoulder. “Sorry, I’m being awkward,” he said, sincere as he’d ever been about anything. “Go have fun. You’ve earned it.”

Harness clenched her teeth, smiled tightly back, and waved goodbye to Sparkle before any feelings could calcify into unwanted thoughts. “Be good, Sparkle! Mama’ll be back by bedtime, okay?”

“‘Kay!” came the dragon’s absentminded reply. Zepp went to join his brother again, the sun was starting to get low, and Harness was free to do whatever the fuck she wanted. Which was…

Nope. Bad brain. Stop thinking. Start doing. She could do anything her stallion self could, and she deserved to do it, and everypony who cared about her was fine with her doing it. Time to go ahead and get it done — figuratively, literally, metaphysically.

“All right, Ike,” she muttered to herself as she got to trotting towards the edge of town. “Time to see what that horn of yours can do.”

===

Thankfully, tracking down Ike today was much easier than it might’ve been on a different afternoon. Abrasive though he usually was, the Cape’s resident busybody Garland Blossom could always be trusted to know precisely where every unicorn within ten miles was at just about all times, and he’d sourly reported earlier that he’d seen one unicorn in particular galloping “suspiciously” — something only Garland could ever possibly know the meaning of — towards the forest south of the town limits earlier in the day, hopefully never to return.

So that was where Harness headed first, and sure enough, she was barely a hundred feet past the treeline before she began to see the telltale signs of an Ike-like presence. The deeper she got, the more evidence she found: gaps in the brush where a broad-bodied pony had shouldered his way through, splotches of unnatural color on fallen leaves, and eventually the faintest whiff of sandalwood body wash wafting up from overlarge hoofprints in the forest’s floor.

Even with all those clues to follow, though, she heard Ike long before she saw him, and for the final part of the journey, all she had to do was follow the sound of a carefree tenor voice humming a meandering tune. Finally, she found herself in a grassy clearing ringed by a semi-circle of trees, each of their trunks splashed — or rather, as she looked closer, purposefully smeared in an odd but consistent pattern — with various colors of paint.

At the clearing’s far end, a rocky outcropping rose over and a bit out into a rippling ovular lake. Right in the clearing’s center, Ike glanced up, gave her a nod of greeting, and flopped belly-first into a pony-sized painter’s tray with an audible splat.

“‘Sup, Harness,” he called out as he stood up, neon green paint dripping from his belly and clumping in the dangling ends of his mane. “Just a sec. Almost done.”

Before Harness could ask what exactly he was almost done doing, Ike went ahead and showed her. He trotted towards the tree closest to the water on Harness’s right — the last one on the clearing’s border that hadn’t gotten a paint job yet — and reared up on his hinds in front of it With another splat, he flattened his chest against it and wrapped his forehooves around it in what looked like a gut-busting hug.

After a few seconds of squeezing, he backed away onto all four hooves again and considered the fruits of his effort: a blobby outline of his body pressed into the tree’s trunk and dribbling through the crevices of its bark, more or less matching all the other trees around the clearing. Ike let out a satisfied hum and nodded.

“Tight,” he muttered, before glancing Harness’s way. “Whatcha think?”

“It’s… interesting!” Harness replied, which was genuinely what she thought and also the only thing she could think of to say. “What, uh… is it?”

“Art!”

“I mean, what… what’s it about? Is it about anything?”

Ike shrugged, then started trotting again, seemingly towards the lakefront. “Connections, I guess? Between, like… trees and ponies, and universes, and stuff. I thought of it yesterday. Sun thought it sounded dope.”

“Huh.” Looking around again, Harness supposed she could see the vision — and then all of a sudden, she couldn’t see Ike at all. He’d trundled up the outcropping over the lake and then hopped right over its edge, his landing marked by an invisible sploosh.

A few seconds later, he heaved himself up onto the shore, waited for some of the lake’s water to drain in rivulets down his flanks and legs, then shook what remained of it off him like a dog. By the time he steadied himself and pushed his mane out of his eyes, Harness was staring, and all the paint he’d been coated with was gone.

“Oh, don’t trip,” he assured her. “It’s biodegradable paint, water-based. The fishies are good.”

“Good for the fishies,” Harness gamely replied. She was still staring, but instead of Ike’s messy hair and no-longer-matted coat, now her eyes were drifting up his barrel chest and over his sharp chin and not quite all the way to his happy, twinkling, way-too-kind eyes.

He was a different size and shape, different color, even a different type of pony altogether — but for just a moment, breathless with accomplishment and basking in the glow of late evening, he looked just like Sunbeam. And now the pit in her stomach was back, and instead of a pit it felt more like an abyss that she was inches from tumbling into.

“So,” Harness said slowly. “Ike…”

“Yeah, I’m down,” Ike said.

Harness blinked, then blinked again. “You’re… y-you don’t even know I was gonna ask y–”

“You found out your stallion self fucked all his mare friends and you wanna one-up him, ‘cause you’re super hot and confident but also feel like ponies don’t really like you for that the way they’d like a stallion for being the same way, and that bugs you way more than you used to think it did. So you went with Sunbeam first ‘cause you’ve been friends forever and you knew you could trust him, but you kinda caught feelings for him last night and realized today he’s not the only one you feel that way about. And you were gonna ask if I wanted to be next, and I do, ‘cause I sorta-kinda feel like an extension of Sunbeam and I’d probably be cool with just a hookup, and I am. But you’re rushing into it ‘cause suddenly everything feels really scary and confusing and not fair, and what you actually want right this second is to just forget the whole thing so you can go home and figure this out alone. So yeah, I’m down for that.”

Harness gaped at Ike. Ike, looking as placid and unaccusing now as he had through his whole spiel, blinked back at her.

“Not even gonna ask if you ‘got that about right?’” Harness finally sighed. “Be a little playful with it, at least?”

“Nah,” Ike replied. “I got a seventh sense about this kinda stuff. Plus you have really expressive eyebrows.”

The moment of silence that followed wasn’t little. It felt big, and hung heavy on Harness’s back like an anchor dragging her towards the bowels of the earth she wanted to sink into right now.

“Wanna talk about it?” Ike asked, his voice suddenly gentle.

Not really, Harness wanted to say. But it wouldn’t really be her saying that. It’d be the sullen, pouty, confused part of her she’d been trying to ignore all day. “I don’t know,” was what she mumbled in the end.

“Wanna stare at the water and think out loud about it while I sit quietly nearby?”

Harness couldn’t help smirking at the goofy sincerity laced through Ike’s whole body. “Can you do that?” she asked. “Sit quietly?”

Ike shrugged, then grinned. “Eh,” he said. “First time for everything.”

And he was right. Once they settled on top of the outcropping by the lake, he did sit quietly, all but motionless next to Harness for nearly a full minute while she stared and thought and, only once for just a second or two, swallowed hard so she could wipe away tears. Not that she was crying. Not over something like this, for stars’ sake. It was just that Ike had been right about other things he’d said too. She was the Sheriff, dammit. She wanted — needed — things to be fair.

And eventually, she realized she did need to talk about that with somepony. Probably exactly how Ike had known she would. Silly, scatterbrained, arts-and-crafty fucking Ike, who could apparently also be patient and calm and way sharper than he had any right to be.

“It’s not fair,” she said suddenly — almost shouted. “Y’know?”

Ike didn’t reply. When Harness glanced at him, he pantomimed pulling a zipper closed across his lips. He was in sitting-quietly mode. She needed to think this through out loud.

“You know what the most annoying part is?” she thought aloud. “I really thought it’d be easy. To just… hook up with ponies. With friends. Because it’s easy for stallions, right? Rampaging through the world dick-first, only thinking about which tail you can get under next. That’s who stallions are supposed to be, right?”

She glanced at Ike again. Ike’s lips twisted into a wry smile as he shrugged — a silent admission that, well, stallions weren’t not like that.

“And mares are supposed to be chaste and pure and, I don’t know, loyal,” Harness went on. “I’m supposed to want to stay just friends. To just pick one of you, and turn into your marefriend instead of myself. But I’ve never wanted that. And you, Sunbeam, Zepp and Pepp and Hazy, you’re not friends with me just because you want to fuck me. I know that. I’m sure it’s the same for Hitch… for other me across the multiverse or whatever. But then he did fuck all his friends, and they all stayed just friends. I can do that too. Sun’s fine with it. You’re fine with it…”

Harness felt her jaw tighten and her temples pulse. She finally had a word for what she’d been struggling with all day, the void in the center of her aching chest.

“So why do I feel so moondamned guilty about it?” she growled.

Ike didn’t have an answer for her — or maybe he just knew she already had one for herself.

“Because I’ve always felt guilty about it,” Harness said. “That’s why. Not a single pony in my life has ever told me I needed to act a certain way or be a certain type of mare, because they didn’t have to. I told myself that. Told myself I needed to succeed and be responsible and be good, and good ponies don’t sleep around. They’re chaste. They’re loyal. They lie to themselves.”

Harness’s eyes were burning again, not with misery but with fatigue — with anger. “I lied to myself for years about what Sunbeam was to me, for months now about what I wanted from him and you and all the rest of our friends. Acted like I was protecting both of us from ourselves, and all I was really doing was keeping us from being who we were meant to be, together and apart. And I still don’t know how to think any other way about it. I’ve always just thought about what the world expected me to be, what I assumed I was supposed to be. I don’t know how to think about what I actually want, let alone do it.”

Harness fell silent and caught her breath, and once her lungs inflated, Ike’s voice filled the space between them. “What do you want?”

Harness looked at him, and frisson rolled through her along the path her eyes traced down his body — from his violet eyes past the curve of her neck to his softly flexing sides into the pit of her stomach and groin. “I don’t know,” she said. “And it’s not fair. I’m not doing anything wrong, I’m not cheating on anypony or running around on them. But I still feel like I am. And it fucking sucks.”

Ike glanced down at the water, thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re a tree,” he said.

Once again, all Harness could do was blink. “I’m a… pardon?”

“You’re a tree. Leaves, trunk, branches with fruit on ‘em. An apple tree, actually. You follow me?”

“Sure,” said Harness, who was not even close to following him at all .

“Everypony likes apple trees,” Ike went on. “You can sit in the shade under their leaves, brace yourself against their trunk, eat the apples off their branches if you’re hungry. You think about an apple tree, and you think about what you can do with it, what it does for you. You don’t think about what it is. ‘Cause it’s a tree. It’s just there. Doin’ what trees are supposed to do.” He looked at her again. His eyes bored into her. “But you’re not just a tree. You’re an apple tree.”

“Okay, sorry, I lied a second ago,” Harness admitted. “What in Dusk’s name are you talking about?”

A grin tremored across Ike’s face, half-cheeky and half-apologetic. “I’m talkin’ about you. It’s, like, a metaphor.”

“I gathered that much, yes.”

“You’re like an apple tree. Ponies lean on you, depend on you, just know you’re gonna be there for them, ‘cause you always are. But they don’t always see you. They see what you do for them, and that’s enough. You’re not an apple tree to them, not a pattern of branches and leaves and bark that no other plant’s ever had the exact same way, with fruit that no other plant could possibly grow as good. You’re just a tree, like any other tree. They see you, and they think, ‘Oh good, there’s the Sheriff.’”

“And I want ‘em to think, ‘Oh good, there’s Harness.’”

Ike’s smile twitched, and he shook his head. “You don’t really care either way. There’s just a part of you that thinks it’d be different if you were somepony else. That somewhere else in the multiverse, they’re thinking…”

“‘Oh good, there’s a stallion.’”

Ike didn’t nod or shake his head. He let Harness finish her thought.

“I don’t want to be different,” Harness murmured, staring at the water. “I want to be me. I like being me. And I don’t care if other ponies like me, not really. I just want them to see me. Just one pony doing what she wants, not a stand-in for every pony who does a certain job or lives a certain way or is a certain…”

Ike’s forehoof bumped against hers. She moved her own hoof overtop of his.

“I know I shouldn’t care,” she finished. “I know I should do whatever I want and not worry about what other ponies who don’t know me think I am. But I do. I don’t know how not to. And it’s not fair.”

Ike’s hoof shifted underneath hers, and in that tiny motion were a hundred thousand words left unspoken, agreement and commiseration and knowing as deep as the soul what it felt like to be different, even a little irrelevant bit, from what a pony who looked like you was supposed to be. He didn’t need to say any of those words aloud. She was glad he didn’t, that he knew her well enough not to. It was enough — it was everything — for him to just sit next to her and be present and patient with her.

Her eyes were burning again. Harness wiped the feeling away with her fetlock, and a new feeling rose in its place: a different kind of burning, crackling in her chest and snaking behind her ribs and roiling bigger, brighter, hotter in a pocket of space inside her pelvis.

“Thank you,” she whispered, leaning into her side, brushing her cheek against his shoulder, inhaling his scent like bellows feeding a bonfire in her core. Ike squeezed her hoof and placed his boxy chin onto her head, encouragement — intent — rumbling in his chest.

“You know what you want now?” he murmured.

Harness pulled her head away, met his eyes, and nodded. Ike’s mouth twitched. She shifted her jaw and worked the dryness off of her lips.

“Good,” he said. “There’s one thing I want first, though.”

And that was all the warning he gave her before he grinned, locked his forelegs around her shoulders, and tipped both of them together off the outcropping and down into the lake.

Harness went down flailing and came up sputtering, soaked to the skin and blinking sheets of water away from her bleary eyes. Gasping for air, she paddled with all four hooves until her head was more or less steady above the now-wavy lake surface, and only then did Ike’s head pop into view as well, his saturated mane hanging flat behind his glistening head. She tried to glare at him — tried really, really hard — but all she did in the end was scoff and sigh and, as he grinned toothily back at her, let out an unrestrained laugh.

“Was a bath what you wanted?” she asked between giggles.

He pushed himself through the water towards her, guided her back under the rim of the outcropping, slid a forehoof up from under the surface and rested it on her cheek.

“No,” he murmured, tracing his sole along the curve of her smile from one corner of her mouth to the other. “That is.”

Harness had time to blink, shiver from the water’s chill and from the most romantic thing anypony had ever said to her, and slightly part her lips. Then Ike surged towards her, hooked his hoof around her neck, pressed her back against the shore and kissed her like he meant to steal the air from her lungs, and the space in Harness’s chest shrank to a pinhole and then vanished altogether.