Zephyr Breeze Doesn't Know How To Flirt
blah blah blah zephyr breeze thing
Zephyr Breeze is, pretty much, a loser. Not in the sense that he’s necessarily a failure, that he always loses, but more in the apathetic waste of space sense; In the sense he’s content to live in stasis and grease, and that he has confusing and aberrant understandings of social concepts. Many of these aberrant approaches to sociality are deliberate, conscious deviations (i.e. with regards to his understanding of personal space). Many others are just because he’s too stupid to know better (i.e. not knowing how to flirt). One would easily assume that the confluence of these loser-type behaviours would more than easily desecrate his romantic chances in their entirety, but they seem, impossibly, to be the exact driving force of his not-too-shabby to average love life. Some ponies like a loser. Some ponies like a loser who can give them a massage.
Obviously, though, it’s not always successful: Take, recently, Zephyr Breeze, having become bereft of mare companionship, staying in Canterlot for a royal guard training course he’s sure to flunk, waiting in line in a cafe. He’s about to order an iced coffee with an absurd amount of cream and syrup, but loses his train of thought with the ringing of the bell attached to the door that signifies the door being opened by somepony. In this case, the door happened to be opened by a pony who was the head of the royal guard - a pony who is generally accepted to be a rather attractive pony. Despite currently training for the same royal guard this pony oversees, Zephyr Breeze did not recognise Shining Armor. He did, however, recognise the same physical properties which (in part) contributed to Shining Armor’s marriage to the princess Princess Cadance. This is to say, he found Shining Armor alarmingly attractive. As in, like, short-circuit, major distraction attractive, as in struggle-to-speak-without-sweating attractive, as in already-planning-future-together attractive.
Now, Zephyr Breeze (probably due to his intense lack of self-awareness) is quite a confident pony, so suddenly forgetting what he was planning on ordering did not throw him off. He did not care about the drink anymore - if one was being crude they may suggest that Zephyr now harbored a different kind of thirst. Zephyr now cared only to speak to the radiant pony that currently stood a meagre distance away. Zephyr attempted to facilitate this newborn desire overtaking him with the shuffle of hooves out of the line he was standing in and towards the door for the cafe, where Shining Armor now stood. Shining Armor, seeing a pony suddenly leave the line and walk towards the door, assumed the pony now no longer wanted to purchase any coffee (partially true) and was attempting to leave the cafe (untrue), causing an awkward scuffle between the two as he bumbled away from the door and Zephyr Breeze course corrected towards his new vector: this carried on for a few seconds, strange circular bumbling, hooves protracting slight squeaks from the polished floor, until Shining Armor just gave up and stayed in his spot - now halfway into the cafe and undesirably close to a customer’s table.
Zephyr Breeze, now also in the middle of the cafe and thoroughly blocking egress between the ordering counter and the door (and vise versa), pulled on his best ‘flirty smile’ which came across to Shining Armor as somewhere between a grimace and a, for lack of better words, predatory stare. Zephyr knew he did not need to oversell himself so he used only one word. “Hey.”
“Oh, uh… Hi.” Shining Armor was not unused to being stopped by ponies he did not know very well. He had become sort of a public figure since the royal marriage. He knew better than to judge the social skills of these ponies, too, as there were a lot of very kind ponies who were also very shy or very nervous to meet him. So Shining Armor tried to smile too. He happened to be a lot better than Zephyr at putting on smiles that didn’t make other ponies uncomfortable.
“Want me to buy you a coffee?” Zephyr was standing probably a little too close to Shining, not close enough to be touching or to force Shining to cower or scrunch into himself, but close enough that they were breathing in and out each other’s air.
“Thanks, but I can afford mine just fine,” Shining Armor joked, laughing as he spoke. He was already quite a charming pony, but the time he’d already spent talking to fans had allowed him to carve out endearing and kind responses for most social situations he found himself in - being offered food, drink or money being no exception. He didn’t need anything from anypony, and he still wouldn’t if he wasn’t a prince. He truly believed he was no better than the ponies he met, a belief that a more sensible pony would have had tested when engaged with Zephyr Breeze - who was currently too busy staring and nodding to say anything, being a pony with far fewer plans and contingencies when it came to unexpected social interactions. Shining Armor took Zephyr’s internal verbal calculations for simply being starstruck, and found himself once again harboring the onus of communication. “Aren’t you gonna introduce yourself?”
Zephyr’s grimace somewhat untwisted into more of what resembled a genuine grin, Joy and Victory subsuming his mind. This unknown gleaming white stallion wanted him to introduce himself. Zephyr believed himself to be halfway there already. “Oh, of course. Where are my manners? I’m Zephyr Breeze.” Zephyr stuck out his hoof to be shaked, before catching his own reflection in the polish from his recent manicure (at this point, a daily routine for him with the way guard training can really wear down the beautified hoof - Zephyr’s unfondness of debeautifying behaviour being the forerunner of his current reasons for considering giving up on the whole guard thing) and becoming so distracted by a couple of flyaway hairs that he used said hoof to fix his mane instead.
The behaviour came off as sort of rude to Shining Armor (his own hoof now hanging in the air in front of him, in the middle of a reciprocal hoof-shaking motion), largely because it was actually very rude - though Shining’s perception was of deliberate treachery instead of the reality of Zephyr’s pure stupidity. After a few micro-moments of furrowed brow and agog stare, the cogs in Shining’s brain allowed themselves the grease to keep turning, thus he went about processing the name that was just placed on his tongue. “Zephyr Breeze. Zephyr Breeze.” He started nodding, as if trying to shake the name into place. “Oh, you’re a trainee, right? It’s always nice seeing you guys around.”
Zephyr Breeze, to clarify, was still unaware that he was speaking to the head of the royal guard. If he was doing better in training, he might have realized this already, but without this knowledge he simply assumed he was a far better trainee than he actually was. In this moment, he genuinely believed that he was so good at being a trainee guard that Canterlot citizens whom he had never met before had heard of him. Zephyr allowed himself another sly grin as he spoke the words “I guess my reputation precedes me.”
Shining Armor laughed at this. It was the sort of thing that would actually be pretty funny or pretty charming to say if said with a tongue-in-cheek self awareness, as Shining Armor believed Zephyr Breeze’s intention to be.
This encouraged Zephyr. He felt as though his flirtation attempts were being validated, and wanted to push them further. “Y’know, I’m sure it could precede you” - with a tilt of the head and the word chewed as if a hunk of gristle - “if you want.” The sentence was an effortless progeny of Zephyr Breeze’s overconfidence and underslickness, a little trash ball of every throw-away line consumed from cheap romance novels and action heroes; a quite blind affair of no substance but an intense concentration of tone: You, me and the grease upon my fur.
The response received was primarily of silence and staring. The ease of which the phrase had slicked from Zephyr Breeze’s maw came up empty come the time to penetrate Shining Armor’s internal verbal processing. He worked and tried as best he could, unable to grasp the tone through the utter meaninglessness of the utterance. “Sorry, I don’t think I… caught that properly.” He punctuated his confusion with a short glance at the counter he could have easily already bought his coffee from by now.
“I said my reputation could precede you” - chewed, now, even harder ‘til but a stump of a word - “if you want.”
“I… Don’t think I follow.” Shining Armor tried to reassemble his smile, but it came out as a poor facsimile, betrayed by the sheer confusion he felt. The smile was crooked.
“It’s just a joke, babes.” Zephyr tapped Shining’s forehead with his hoof. “Don’t think too hard about it.”
“Right…” Shining’s nod was accompanied by a faint chuckle. “I don’t really get it, though.”
Shining Armor’s moment of clarity approached surprisingly quickly with the contortion of Zephyr Breeze’s mouth - curling upwards in the corners and bearing teeth - and the words that followed: “A pretty colt like you, does it matter?” The phrasing, if you would believe it, had already been internally adjusted and cleaned up by Zephyr Breeze in act of self-censorship/-preservation to ‘decreep’ the original thought of ‘A pretty colt like you doesn’t need to think.’ Still, even sanitized from internal monologue, the syllabic expulsion quite metaphorically put Zephyr’s plain body bare on the table to be seen.
Shining Armor now understood what was happening. Shining Armor now presumed to understand what was happening - certainly his time in the royal guards had earned him the (loving) reputation as somewhat of a meathead, only semi-sarcastic as his incredible tactical and academic intelligence was often beset by his lacking ‘everyday’ sort of knowledge (from the beginning, he was the top of the class when he was in training yet had to beg his roommates to teach him how to cook instant noodles). So, the situation, in Shining Armor’s eye, was some sort of play on this old trope that had managed to drip down still through the modern royal guard: simply, Zephyr Breeze was playing a trainee’s idea of a joke on him. So he chuckled and patted Zephyr’s back in that casual way that stallions do, and, though it was nice to meet another fan, he was really starting to feel like he should hurry up and buy that coffee. “You know, I should really hurry up and buy that coffee.” And there he was, awkwardly sliding aside from Zephyr to present pointed pony hoof angled at coffee-shop counter.
Zephyr Breeze thought for a moment. “How about we skip the coffee altogether? It’s a nice day but it’ll be nicer with me.”
Shining Armor meant no malice in the words he picked when he spoke next: “Oh, no. The coffee’s for my wife.” He meant no malice because the words were true, though perhaps less tactful than he would have chosen if he was clued in to the whole flirting thing.
“Right. Right. Cool.” Zephyr nodded as his brain filled with saltwater. “Cool.” His thoughts were faint and drowned. “Cool.” He had no room to think above the tide and pressure of the water in his brain. “How about-” but the words failed to form.
Shining Armor paused, politely, but soon realized Zephyr would not finish his sentence. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Zephyr!” He smiled, ducking his way to the back of the line.
Zephyr sort of half-grunted, which, along with his sort of half-nod, was meant as a confirmation or agreement. The water had started to seep from his brain and drip into his limbs. They were heavy and immobile, so he stood alone in his spot, trying to will the effort to move a leg and leave the cafe, trying to drum up his energy and pick up his hoof and place it inches away and repeat three times over. To take one singular canter. And he does, after a bit, head drooping to the ground and smacking against the glass door as his weight barely pushes it open, as he exits the cafe and is welcomed by Canterlot’s street and as the saltwater inside him mingles with stomach acid and sweat and the thousand bees it seems he swallowed and as the bile works its way up his throat, sun shining down and the smell of oranges from a fruit stall a few steps astride, he vomits right there on the street, quite violently, in front of a family and their kids and two other trainee guards.
Shining Armor, conversely, was fine. He was too busy humming along to the music on the cafe radio and trying to remember whatever weird name the chain chose for their drink sizes. ‘Hand’, he thinks it is. ‘Hand’ is medium.