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.
Harness had always known Ike was a big pony. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was hard to notice — even at a casual glance, he stood a couple inches taller than Sunbeam, a good six or so above Zepp and Hazy, and the less said in front of Pepp about the gap there, the better. And sure, if you looked a little less casually, it wasn’t hard to notice he was sturdy too: thick in the haunches and broad in the chest, and all-around proportioned like someone had tapped a photo of a unicorn on a phone screen and expanded it a little in every direction.
But there was big, Harness was quickly learning, and then there was big. There was looking up a bit when you wanted to meet Ike’s eyes, and then there was being enveloped in his forelegs and compressed against the expanse of his torso, running your hooves over his flanks and legs and feeling the power constrained within them. And then, as she was learning very quickly, there was what was between those legs, not even half-hard yet, barely unsheathed and already wide enough to rub against both her thighs at once as he shifted his hips forward to grind them against hers.
For just a moment, Harness was mad at herself again. Years of confusing emotions and self-repressing instincts, and all it had gotten her was a briefly upset stomach and what was now a downright offensive delay in learning that her stocky, goofy, gorgeous friend Ike was hung like a fucking Clydesdale. And a really good kisser.
If only he’d kept kissing her — kept swiping with his tongue and squeezing with his hooves, and pressing back-and-forth and up-and-down with his whole body in swells of motion that matched the ripples of the lake they were floating in. But instead, he pulled back for a moment right as Harness’s eyes started to roll back in her head, and waited for her to catch her breath and glance longingly up at him before he swooped down under her chin and latched his lips against her neck.
The pressure of his hooves on her sides increased, from groping to holding her in place. At the bottom of her vision, Harness saw Ike’s horn flash, then felt something odd — smooth, flexible, seemingly weightless — butt up against her jaw. She looked down as the pressure vanished just in time to see Ike’s head slip beneath the water’s surface, then felt him descend down her chest and belly with little kisses and nibbles of his teeth, then felt his tingling tongue swipe across and down her navel, then…
Okay, never mind the weird feeling. This feeling was much better.
Harness flattened herself against the bank of the lake, not caring if she got muddy, hardly noticing the dull ache in her lower lip where it had unconsciously slipped between her teeth. All she cared about now was what Ike was doing under the water: swiping his tongue in broad strokes over her labia, pursing his lips around her pussy and suckling harder each time she twitched, not just rubbing her clit but smothering it with his mouth and chin and the weight of his entire head — back-and-forth, in-and-out, sending towering waves of electric pleasure surging up her spine and roiling through her pounding heart.
Stars, this felt good — just as good as Sunbeam last night, even better in some ways. There was no gravity pulling distractingly on her lower half, no sensations there at all except for the delicious ones Ike was creating, and the surface of the lake lapped and caressed like a thousand tongues in a ring around her torso, drawing beads of sweat out from her brow and a delighted, lingering sigh from her lungs.
Ike changed his angle, latched his lips and teeth both firmly around her opening as his tongue danced inside her, and Harness’s sigh grew into a full-bodied moan. Her voice reverberated among the trees ringing the lake, and she couldn’t help wondering if she was being watched right now, whether dozens of little woodland critters were gaping at her from burrows and nests and telling their little critter boyfriends, “Why don’t you ever do that for me?”
Poor guys. Lucky her. Ike was doing everything she could possibly want him to, making her shake and squeak and splash her hooves against the lakeshore in search of something to grasp onto, so she could stay in place as her core tightened and her legs went rigid and she got closer and closer and almost all the way to…
… how long had Ike been waterwater for?
Orgasm fluttered in her belly, prickled down her thighs, clawed and clenched and nearly found completion a few inches deeper than Ike’s wonderful tongue could reach — and then it was gone, obliterated by an impeccably ill-timed thought about how it had been a while since Ike had gotten any kind of air in his lungs. Was he okay down there? He wasn’t stopping. Stars, she didn’t want him to stop, but… dammit, he’d been down there too long. He couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think about anything else now.
With gritted teeth and a frustrated huff, Harness found Ike’s head with her forehooves and tugged him out from underneath her. He rose quickly but calmly, and looked perfectly fine when he breached the lake’s surface — save for a shimmering sheen in front of his face, like there was still a thin veil of water between the two of them.
“‘Sup?” he murmured, and his voice echoed tinnily inside what Harness finally saw as what it actually was: a bubble, almost perfectly translucent, forming a globe around Ike’s head like a magical diver’s helmet. That explained his horn lighting up, and what she’d felt press into her chin a minute ago. She should’ve let him finish. Dammit, she wished she had.
“Thought you needed air,” Harness muttered, cheeks darkening from pink with pleasure to red with embarrassment. “Clearly not.”
Ike chuckled and glanced up at his horn, still softly aglow with the spell he’d cast. “Old unicorn trick. Or I guess new trick, kinda. We’re all still figurin’ out how horns work.”
“Looks like it works pretty well,” Harness aimlessly replied. Her mind was still a step ahead of her body — but this time, going in a direction she was pretty sure she’d like. “So… how big of a bubble can you make?” she asked, glancing down at the lake and peering as far past the surface as she could see.
After a moment, Ike caught on to the intent in Harness’s husky tone. “Let’s find out,” he said, before shutting his eyes and kissing her again.
Harness felt the edge of Ike’s bubble wobble and warp as it molded to the shape of her face, then felt it slide wetly over both her cheeks and reform itself behind her head with a soft schlup. Through her eyelids, she could see the glow of Ike’s horn grow brighter as he channeled more energy into the bubble, expanding it over her shoulders and down her back, sluicing the lake’s water off of her one tingling inch at a time.
She went suddenly from floating to lying flat against the lakebed, separated from the muck by a thin membrane of magic that felt as soft as a cloud. Ike settled on top of her, rolled his hips in rhythm with his lips and tongue, slotted himself between her splayed hind legs so the pillar between his own could grind inside the cleft of her lower lips. It was rough at first, a bit rubbery, but soon lake water gave way to natural lubrication: Ike’s lingering saliva, and Harness’s dripping arousal, and the heat in her core that wanted desperately to be stoked into an inferno.
Not here, though. Not quite like this. She’d let Sunbeam drive last night, and been happy to do it. Now, she wanted to take control — to do what she wanted, with whoever she craved.
Harness tilted her head, not to break their kiss but just to reposition it. Ike yielded to her without complaint, let her sit up beneath him and push him back onto his haunches and then throw herself onto him, so they both fell together deeper into the lake. The bubble came with them — or really, they went with the bubble. It cradled Ike as he flopped back onto it just as it had Harness, and stayed solid around the both of them as they slid down the sloping lakebed, keeping its rounded shape even as more and more water compressed it from above.
There was a good amount of air inside the bubble with them, and it shimmered a thousand beautiful, impossible colors as the dim light from the surface refracted through the lake and then through Ike’s magic. They glided between vibrant clumps of moneywort and waving stalks of pondweed, and schools of silvery minnows and golden perches parted around them, and even now — even with Ike’s lips on her throat and his shaft still trapped between her thighs — Harness couldn’t help but look up and around and everywhere, reveling in the world she’d made for herself, feeling hotter and stronger and better than she could remember ever feeling before.
But then the lakebed leveled out and the bubble bumped to a stop, and Ike’s cock swelled beneath her, stretching her lips further apart, sending sparks shooting through her pelvis and flitting wonderfully through her shoulders and throat. She shifted her hips, moved forward along his length with her teeth clamped around her lip, then settled herself onto Ike’s stomach as his shaft jumped up behind her, fully erect and throbbing against the dampened skin of her back.
Sorry, Sunbeam, Harness couldn’t stop herself from thinking. Guess you’re about to be the second-biggest I’ve ever had.
“It’s not too big, is it?”
Ike was blinking up at her, his hooves wrapped around Harness’s hips, casually glancing where Harness was luridly staring: at the mottled-pink Coridethian column jutting up from his groin, flexing with each beat of his heart, poking firmly into her spine — holy shit, almost halfway up her spine. Coming from literally anypony else, what he’d just said would been insufferably obnoxious, but from Ike it sounded genuine, innocent, actually worried. It probably had been a problem for him in the past. It was not going to be a problem for her.
“Let’s find out,” Harness crooned down to him, already out of breath, literally drooling with anticipation. Or maybe that was just leftover lake water. It was probably that. She was gonna tell herself later it was that.
In the meantime, she got her hind hooves under her and hiked her hips up, and up, and really high up, until she felt the round ridge of Ike’s cockhead slot underneath her and press just a millimeter or so inside her. She took a breath, bobbed up and down a bit to get as much lubricant as possible onto his tip, took another breath while there was still space in her torso to do it, and sank down to take the first inch or two inches or four or ohstarsshitfuckhewassofuckingmoondamnedBIG.
Her eyes were squeezed shut and bulging against their lids. Lake water dripped off her tongue and dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Ike was perfectly still beneath her, not even so much as groping with his hooves as he calmly, innocently shish-kabobed Harness like a juicy, bright-red, eyes-too-big-for-her-entire-abdomen grape tomato. She took another shaky breath, and would’ve sworn in front of Dusk Shine, Solaris, and everybody that the head of Ike’s tree-trunk prick was what pushed the air back out of her lungs.
“You sure it’s not…”
Neurons popped like fireworks in Harness’s brain, and she clamped one forehoof over Ike’s mouth and pressed the other flat against her chest. Bracing herself with all four legs, she clenched her teeth and swallowed back an animalistic whimper as she flared her hips as wide as they could go and sank further down onto him.
She felt every single inch like it was her first time feeling anything, her inner walls throbbing and her core jumping like a jackrabbit. Every new inch of him was thicker than the last. Every inch of her prickled with waves of adrenaline. She reached his ring and, wiggling and working her hips, took it inside her. His whole shaft twitched and swelled, and for a dizzying moment she thought she might black out.
And then she felt her butt bump against something hard — quivering muscles and fat against sturdy skin and bone. Harness’s mouth popped open so something between a moan and a triumphant whoop could spurt out of her throat, and she let her full weight settle onto Ike’s hips with the full length of his cock sheathed snugly in her cunt.
For a few moments, all she could do was force herself to stay upright and take manual, muted little gulps of bubble air. She could barely even shiver around Ike, let alone meaningfully squeeze, and she didn’t feel stretched so much as distorted, so completely filled up that it almost hurt. It did hurt, actually, sharp and sore and then, slowly but surely, fading into achy, weightless euphoria. It felt impossible. It felt extraordinary. She felt like a fresh coat of paint slopped on top of a traffic bollard.
And then Ike propped her hooves under her withers, pushed her an inch off of him and then let her fall back down, and she felt lightning and thunder and an earthquake-fed tsunami leech the pain from her body and replace it all with thought-erasing, soul-affirming bliss. He was so big. This was so perfect. She felt so unbelievably, inconceivably powerful right now.
And it was only going to get better from here.
Harness gathered all four legs under herself as best she could, each one feeling like it was filled with all the water the bubble was keeping out. She pushed and strained so she could rise several inches up Ike’s glistening dick, and watched his face with half-lidded eyes as she plunged back down and filled her heart and mind with stars. Ike’s eyes rolled as his jaw went slack, and he squeezed Harness by the withers again as a low groan left his chest.
“That feel good?” Harness whispered down to him. She lifted her hips with the first word, dropped them firmly again with the last. Each fresh stroke was a bit easier than the one before: smoother, slicker, closer and closer to frictionless as her body molded to his. Ike said nothing at first, just grunted and sighed and finally let out a baritone moan as she slapped her hips against his, grinding in place, every micrometer of his length suffused in the soft, soaked heat of her innermost depths. Finally, he found his voice again, and the sound of it echoing on the bubble’s wall made Harness blush and shudder and giggle with satisfaction.
“You f-feel amazing,” he mumbled. “You’re… this is… wow.”
Yeah. She was amazing. He’d never had somepony take him this well, this assuredly, in quite the way Harness Pathfinder — the best possible Sheriff for the town of Cape Colt — could. She wasn’t like other ponies. They weren’t like her. She was a hero just like Sunbeam, a kind soul and fantastic lay just like Ike and probably all her other friends. She deserved this, deserved everything and anypony she wanted, and everyone else in all of Equestria could see that and understood it and would either give it to her or get out of her way.
Huh. So this was what confidence really felt like. It felt good. She could really get used to this.
Harness leaned forward, pressed her lips to Ike’s, then pressed her chest flush to his and let him take all of her weight at once. He lifted her hooves to her sides to hold her in place, and that gave her all the leverage she needed to lengthen and strengthen her strokes: lifting all the way up to the bulging base of his tip, slamming back down to stretch the last remaining unstretched spots inside her, repeating the motion every second until her juices spread stickily up to Ike’s waist and her whole lower half buzzed with pulsing, nearly peaking need.
Ike kissed her back, thrust his tongue against hers, angled his hips and thrust up as she surged down, drove her closer and higher and fuller until she couldn’t kiss him anymore, until all she could do was bury her muzzle in his chest and grip her legs around him and keep grinding, pounding, harder and hotter and almost nearly there…
She came with a squeal, and a shudder, and a torrent of ecstasy that emptied her out and set her floating someplace she wished she could stay forever. Ike held onto her as she quaked, and she held onto him as she moaned and mewled, her pussy kneading his cock with a desperate desire to draw his climax out alongside hers. It almost worked—she felt him twitch and swell again inside her, and heard the snort of his breath catching in his throat. But as her pulse slowed, so did his, and his grip softened as her body went slack.
With limbs like jelly and a brain like microwaved tapioca, Harness pawed at Ike’s chest until she found enough purchase to push herself upright. Quivering, panting, still speared on top of Ike’s monstrous, searing-hot cock, she focused her eyes and wiped the drool off her lips, and with what little coordination she could muster, she bent her hips upward and then let them fall, impacting Ike’s thighs with a sloppy squish, rekindling the flame in her core and sending tendrils of delight all the way up to her skipping heart.
“Whoa,” Ike said, seeming half-brainless himself, eyes locked on what must’ve been a hypnotizing view of his dick vanishing and reappearing in and out of Harness’s reddened, sopping cunt. “You… you good?”
“Mmeh-hmmgh,” Harness gurgled. She was so good. She’d be good for the rest of her life if she could spend most of it with Ike inside her — or whoever, really. Ike was great, but so were all of her friends. Pepp and Zepp, and Hazy, and Sunbeam, and oh stars she’d just remembered that thought from this morning of her two big stallion friends sandwiching her between them…
Her forehooves shook and slipped, and Ike caught her before she could faceplant into her chest. She giggled again. She felt drunk, and high, and a million other things she’d never let herself feel before — including Ike’s hooves on her back, stroking up and down, hugging her and holding her steady as he lifted her hips and pushed his cock all the way inside her to the hilt. He seemed to really like doing that. She liked him doing that too.
“Wow,” he murmured again. All his masculine bravado from earlier was gone, replaced with reverent bliss. Harness angled her head up and kissed the highest part of him she could reach, which was a spot halfway up his neck that vibrated beneath her lips as Ike kept talking. “You’re incredible. I’ve never…”
“Never what?” Harness groaned into his neck, clenching around him as he hilted himself again, shivering as another warm wave of pleasure washed over her. Ike was fucking her slowly, adoringly, not like he thought he’d hurt her but like he was enraptured by the fact that he hadn’t.
“Never… had anypony like you,” Ike said — and from his tone and the heat rising in his skin, Harness could tell he was adorably blushing. “Who could… handle me. Kinda thought that’s why you wanted to hook up. Thought it wouldn’t… that you wouldn’t…”
Well, now she had to kiss him properly, wonderfully slow screwing be damned. Harness clambered up Ike’s torso, felt his cock slip fully out of her and leave her gaping and seizing in its wake, and pressed her lips to his until they softened and parted and allowed her tongue between them.
“You’re so much more than that,” she whispered several seconds later, once she could bear the thought of separating any part of her body from any part of his. “We both are.”
Ike chuckled and grinned, and once again he was the only pony Harness had ever met who could’ve pulled it off — who could talk about having a fifth leg like it wasn’t the best thing in the world, who knew in at least some way what it felt like to just be basely desired rather than wanted, and then to be rejected in the end anyway for something you had no reason to be sorry for. Harness was done being sorry for herself, for who she was and wanted to be, and Ike deserved to feel exactly as good.
“You wanna keep going?” Harness asked Ike next, flaring her aching hips overtop of him, asking her real question with her eyes and a deferential stroke of her pussy along the underside of his shaft: do you want to keep taking me like this? He stumbled over his words at first, like he’d never said them in this order before. Just like with Sunbeam, Harness encouraged him with kisses and nibbles on his neck to ask for what he really wanted.
“Can we…” he said. “I wanna… from behind. Standing up. I’ve always wanted to try that.”
Harness didn’t say anything back, and didn’t feel the need to. She just sat up straight, swung one hind leg over Ike’s chest, and swiveled in his lap until she was facing away from him, then leaned down and forward with her back arched and her tail raised. His shaft sprang up from beneath her and slapped against her butt, and Ike sprang up with it a second after. Harness saw the bubble shift forward with him, felt his hooves wrap underneath her and his weight press down onto her, and bumped her head up under his chin as the happy hum in her throat rose into a moan and his cock slid back inside her, just as big and hard and rapturously filling as before.
He started off slow and sensual again, pulling out gently and pushing in carefully, so Harness threw her hips back against his and angled herself to take him deeper. The first time he bottomed out, he huffed in what sounded like surprise, and she shuddered as the head of his cock sent a sharp, intoxicating shock through what must have been her cervix. The second time, he thrust hard enough to make the gooey smack of their hips together echo inside the bubble.
And after that time, Harness stopped counting, because all she cared about was Ike’s hooves on her chest and his hot breath on her neck, and the stretching and sliding and slamming of his cock inside her as he railed her properly like they both deserved. He hilted himself with every stroke, trembling from excitement and total pleasure saturating every part of his shaft, and with each explosive second that passed, more of the old Harness dissolved away — dripped off her body as sweat and saliva, rushed from her lungs as breathless squeaks for more.
She didn’t think about who she was. She’d never think about it again. She knew what she needed, and she was getting it, and she’d get it whenever she wanted from now until forever. She’d sneak Sunbeam into her house so she could slide his cock down her throat, slip away to the woods with Ike so he could stretch her out and make her squeal loud enough for the whole world to hear, and next would be Zepp and Pepp and Hazy and anypony she fucking wanted.
Her life was hers and no one else’s, and this was what she wanted from it, and that was enough — combined with Ike thrusting harder, fucking her faster and deeper as the noises from his chest rose from groans to needy whimpers — to raise every hair and light every nerve on fire, and make her cum all over Ike’s cock wildly and freely and with a wordless scream that said, “Don’t ever, ever stop.”
And he didn’t. He kept fucking her, taking her, all the way through one climax up to the edge of another one, craving the same release for himself. Despite her best efforts, Harness’s forelegs gave out, and Ike caught himself before he collapsed on top of her, one hoof by her head and the other shoved into the small of her back, holding her down and imprinting the shape of her body into the squishy bubble-shielded bed of the lake. Harness moaned Ike’s name into the magic-warmed peat, and Ike grunted hers back at her as his cock twitched and his breath caught and his hips unsteadily jerked with the erratic rhythm of near-completion.
Ike filled Harness totally, shook and roughly sighed, and the first jet of his cum felt like aloe on a burn, quenching the heat burning in her core, spreading tendrils of numbing delight through her exhausted muscles and nerves. He stayed buried in her as his cock pulsed a second time, then reared back as the third pulse sprayed onto her inner walls, then pulled out just as the fourth spurt of his orgasm erupted from his tip, so instead of inside her it smeared into her folds and across her withers and warmly onto the little wrinkled rosebud an inch above her quaking cunt.
Distantly, Harness felt him keep cumming for a bit after that — felt little droplets of jizz splatter onto her butt and trail down the backs of her thighs, and ooze decadently out of her buzzing, winking pussy. But really, it was the body of a thoroughly, outstandingly well-fucked mare that felt that. Harness, the pony usually occupying that body, wasn’t in right now. Ike would have to leave a message for her in the pearly pictograms he was painting onto her ass.
It was a very nice message. The mare receiving it was sure Harness would love it.
And she did, sort of, once she blinked a few times and realized she had conscious control of her limbs again. Being covered in the cum of a stallion she adored felt far better than she’d ever let herself believe it would, and the bottom of Ike’s magical bubble was a very soft surface to let her jizz-drenched lower half flop down onto. But the thing about cum, she learned as Ike flopped down and panted for breath alongside her, was that it felt great inside you and pretty good when it was warm outside you, but it didn’t take long for it to rather unpleasantly become neither of those things.
Still, though, it wasn’t all bad. The view — ten feet under the lake’s surface, wreathed by soft green flora and surrounded by schools of indifferent fauna — was still incredible. Plus Ike was hugging her now, spooning her from behind and stroking her chest as he nuzzled the back of her aching neck, his big dick softening between his groin and hers.
“You good?” Ike murmured once again. Harness murmured something in the affirmative back. She was good. But also, she was sweaty, and sticky, and sore. Harness didn’t sympathize with the mares who’d strung Ike along and couldn’t handle him in the past, but she did get it now a little more than before.
“You good?” Harness asked after a few moments, her voice scratching at her throat. She turned from her side onto her back so he could see at least some of Ike’s face, and the part that was visible told her that yes, he really was.
“Yeah,” he said. “And… sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“For actin’ all…” Ike worked his tongue in his mouth as he tried to find the right word. “... casual before. ‘Bout hooking up, and what your deal was. That was kinda mean.”
“Well, you were pretty much right,” Harness told him, leaning into his chest as she spoke. “And you made up for it.”
Ike smiled, but didn’t seem completely content. “Still mean, though. And not really honest either. I don’t really have a lotta… I haven’t actually been with a lotta mares before. I kinda acted like I had, but…”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Harness cooed, but she let Ike continue from there once she got a chuckle and a squeeze out of him.
“Thanks. But I shoulda just been honest. Told you what I wanted, what I wasn’t sure about. Stuff that didn’t go great in the past. I just really wanted it to go great with you, ‘cause I… y’know, you’re…”
Now she finished his thought for him. “I’m really cool,” she said, grinning. “And you are too. And we should do this again sometime.”
“Hell yeah,” Ike agreed, and that was that. Ike wrapped Harness up in his big, strong forelegs, and Harness snuggled into his chest, and they laid together in his bubble under the lake, hidden away from a world they were finally at peace with.
And then Harness shifted, and something crackled below her waist, and the world suddenly felt a lot less peaceful.
“Ugh,” she muttered. “Okay, not that that wasn’t super hot, but now I really do need a bath.”
Ike lifted his head away from hers, glancing first at her and then up at… oh no. Harness realized too late what she’d implied.
“I can fix that,” Ike said, sparks of magic flitting out of his horn.
“Ike, wait, no, don’t–”
But that was all Harness had time to say before Ike’s horn flared and his bubble popped, and an entire lake’s worth of water crashed down on top of both of them.
On the bright side, Harness was more or less clean by the time she flailed her way up to the water’s surface and dragged her bedraggled self up onto the shore. Ike was damn lucky he was cute, though. And that it was a warm evening to drip-dry in.
