Author's Note

My perception of Rainbow Dash is as of an enabler of hijinks. Yours may differ.

This ended up not where I had intended, and about twice as long. Hmm.

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Toby, resident human, sorcerous apprentice of Twilight, was drunk.

Rainbow Dash, resident pegasus, friend of Twilight (and of Toby), was also drunk.

They were drunk together. A little bit drunk.

They’d made a bit of a habit of this, lately. It was their Friday thing now, assuming neither of them had anything else they could be doing, which they sometimes did. If they didn’t, this was now the fallback: go to the weirdo little annex that Toby had had bolted onto the library to live in, drink, talk shit, laugh, probably fall asleep, feel bad for the first part of Saturday.

As far as fallbacks went there have been worse ones. The only rule was not to wake up Twilight or Spike, which was less a rule and more just a sensible way to conduct themselves, as it tended to put a kink in the good times. Keep the drunken sniggering to a reasonable volume and all was well in the world. Good general life advice, it could be argued.

(What business Twilight had taking on apprentices was an open question by the by, but she had, because she’d found it next-to-impossible to refuse Toby when he’d asked her if she could teach him about magic. He’d just been so earnest and enthusiastic! She couldn’t resist his adorable, squishy human face.)

Rainbow and Toby were a few hours into doing basically nothing by now, a good couple beers down each, and were both starting to get onto the tail-end of their energy. The quickfire jokes of earlier in the evening had slowed in pace and now long-stretches of happy, content silence were the new thing. Toby had slumped onto a heap of cushions to stare at the ceiling, half-full tinny in one hand, his other on Rainbow’s head, where it scratched her behind the ears.

The first time he’d done this he’d felt a bit weird about it and read far too much into it. Now he’d lost count of how many times it had happened, and he’d long-since come to realise it was just pals being pals. A private pal thing, sure - she’d made that clear - but a pal thing all the same. And she was very soft.

“Mmnh… if I had fingers I’d just scratch myself allll the time…” Rainbow sighed, legs stretched out behind her and one wing twitching. It twitched harder when Toby found a particular spot he remembered about.

“Novelty wears off. The fun part is scratching someone else,” he said.

“Tell me about it…”

It was perhaps fair to say they both got something out of the arrangement.

“Wish I could fly, though.,” Toby said, idly. Rainbow nodded.

“Flying is pretty great.”

“S’why I wish I could do it.”

Made sense.

They lapsed back into no-talking after this, as both felt they’d made their points adequately. They remained in position - Toby slumped, Rainbow laid out flat and elongated beside him - and Toby’s scratching gradually tapered off to nothing as he inched towards dozing off. At least until he felt something on his lap. When he opened his eyes, he found enormous ones inches from his. This was a shock.

“Gah!” Said Toby.

Rainbow, who was the something on his lap, had expected this and didn’t so much as flinch or back up from pressing her face into his. She’d rode out rougher rides than Toby.

“I got an idea,” she said.

The intensity with which she’d said this did much to pique Toby’s curiosity.

“S’what issit?”

“We swap.”

What she meant by this wasn’t immediately obvious to Toby. After a second or two of thinking he still hadn’t figured it out. Being sozzled and perhaps thirty seconds of closed eyes away from falling asleep didn’t leave him at his sharpest.

“... swap what?” He asked. Rainbow flicked a hoof between the two of them.

“You, me. Brains, body. Zwip. Switcheroo.”

Blink blink.

“You’re messing with me.”

“No! I mean, it makes sense, yeah? You get to fly, I get fingers, we see what the deal is, boom, we go back! Easy! Nothing could go wrong! It’ll only be good!”

Had he been a touch more sober he would have pointed out a few of the flaws in her plan, but since he wasn’t he found her overwhelming enthusiasm an overwhelmingly convincing argument - why else would she sound so stoked if it wasn’t a good idea? Only one real issue made its way through the beery fog in his head:

“... and you’re doing this?”

Division of labour was important in matters of body-swapping sorcery. Rainbow looked at him like he was the crazy one here.

“No! I don’t know how! You do though, right?”

He did not.

“No!”

(Twilight hadn’t got to that particular lesson yet, assuming she ever would or it was even a lesson to start with. ‘How to magically swap bodies with a friend in a moment of drunken madness’ was probably not high in anyone’s magical curriculum. Just as a guess.)

Him saying this was apparently not as much of an obstacle as he’d thought it would be as Rainbow shrugged it off without missing a beat and, grabbing Toby by the wrist, started pulling him to his feet.

“Oh, you’ll figure it out! Let’s go find a book!”

Problem? Throw book at problem! Problem solved.

Toby was dragged (drug?) out of his dinky little annex and out into the library proper, thence to the greatest concentration of books. He was passingly familiar with a handful of the things, in no-way familiar with them enough to know where to even start looking for something like what Rainbow was asking. But, he was in his cups, so he was brimming with misplaced confidence and simply grabbed the biggest, reddest (red meant important (and also fastest)) book that caught his eye and started looking through it and nodding like this was all perfectly reasonable.

“Yeah - yeah, this’ll work! Lemme just see…”

Sticking his tongue out the corner of his mouth he trailed his finger down the page, nodding and squinting and humming and, to Rainbow, not exactly broadcasting the kind of energy she’d been hoping for,

“You sure you know how do this?” She asked.

Toby was affronted not only by the slight on his abilities but also kind of annoyed he’d been volunteered to do this in the first place only to end up being the one questioned at the eleventh hour. If he’d had doubts, pride would have banished them.

“Yeah I do! M’pretty smart, you know. An’ Twilight is a super good teacher. Super super good,” he said, sternly, to which Rainbow beamed.

“You looooove her~!”

“Now that’s just childish,” Toby said with as much force and authority he could manage while bladdered, which wasn’t much. He underlined how seriously he meant what he’d said by wagging a finger under Rainbow’s nose. Her eyes went a little crossed as she focused on the tip of the finger, and then she blew a raspberry at it.

The finger specifically, not Toby in general. Just the finger.

“Pfffbbbt!”

They both immediately descended into giggles, shot through with telling the other to shush lest they wake the dragon (and her pet dragon, ba dum psh). Toby cracked the tome and flipped pages.

“You stand there and I’ll stand here. Just think human thoughts, yeah?” He said, pointing to what looked to be an auspicious spot on the floor. Rainbow took her mark.

“Right, got it,” she said. “I’m a big weird thing. Tiny eyes. Real slow. Dopey looking. Can’t fly.”

“Shh! Concentrating. Now, let’s see, what’s this word here…”

-

Toby regretted having got drunk. This wasn’t unusual. This was almost weekly. He also regretted apparently having chosen to fall asleep on a hard wooden floor in a chilly, bright room. That was slightly more unusual. He’d only done that once and he’d sworn never again.

“Eurgh, brain…” he groaned, putting his hands to his head. Or at least that had been his plan, but that was when he’d thought he had hands. Which he didn’t. It took him a second to notice.

“What…?” he mumbled, finally cracking his eyes against the horrible glare of morning. Everything was blurry and the light made the thumping in his head double, but he could see enough to see something was wrong. Not hands. Also blue.

The bottom fell out of his stomach.

“Whaaat did I doooo?”

Then he remembered.

“Oh. I remember now. Shit.”

That this had come out not as his voice really underlined the situation.

“Eurgh, brain…” he heard from nearby, and as much as he’d expected it to sound like him, actually hearing it was still a singular experience. The pause afterwards suggested he wasn’t the only one having issues. “That’s… not… me… Toby!”

“Yaaay, it worked…” Toby croaked, and he certainly sounded croakier than usual.

Looking, he saw himself, and saw himself looking back at him. The surrealism of the situation would have been enough to make him lose his lunch without being horribly hungover. But, thankfully, he hadn’t had his lunch yet. In the event he just heaved and looked away, screwing his eyes shut a moment. They certainly felt bigger.

“This was my idea, wasn’t it?” Rainbow Dash asked him, through his mouth. He nodded her head back at her. It was a whole thing.

“Yeah,” he said. He knew his own face well enough to know the expression meant she was bitterly disappointed she had no-one else to blame for this but herself - and maybe him a little for going along with it, but mostly her.

“I hate this,” she said.

“Which bit?”

“All of it.”

This was fair.

“Ahem.”

That last part hadn’t been either Toby or Rainbow. Doing their best to move as little as possible, they craned their respective (borrowed) necks to look, and saw Twilight. She looked at the pair of them sprawled out, dishevelled, mussed up. She reached a conclusion.

“You guys didn’t… you know… in the library? Did you? Please tell me you didn’t,” she asked, wincing.

What with how sprawled out, dishevelled, and mussed up they both were - among other rather more immediately pressing concerns - this took them both a second to unpick, and they both arrived at what it was Twilight was driving at at the same time.

“No!” They said in perfect unison, before splitting off into a mingled cascade of:

“No! Not - how could you - us - hah, Twilight!” “
That’s disgusting, we’d never!”
“Not the nature of our relationship, Twilight!”
“Gross!”
“No! Not here!”
“Us two? No!”
“This floor would be murder on the knees!”
“Yeah! Wait, what?”

And so on. Twilight weathered this until it stopped.

“Well. That’s something at least,” she said, thoroughly unimpressed.

The two of them began to stir and start to rise, at which point problems immediately presented themselves. Neither of them were in full command of their bodies, which wasn’t a huge surprise given that they weren’t their bodies. Not that Twilight knew that. She just saw Toby and Rainbow Dash try and utterly fail to stand up, something they were both normally quite good at. She raised an eyebrow as the two of them collapsed and gave up for a moment to catch their breath.

“Are you two okay? Is this a hangover?”

Being a sweet and delicate flowerchild (and cute fuckin’ nerd) Twilight had never personally got so drunk as to ever regret it the morning after, at least not yet. She was aware of the concept, though. She did, after all, know Toby.

“Yes. But that’s not, uh, that’s not the main issue…” Toby-as-Rainbow panted, flopped across Rainbow-as-Toby’s legs, and something in his (her) delivery put Twilight on edge.

“What’s the issue?” She asked.

The other two looked at each other and said nothing. The way they looked at each other, however, spoke volumes, albeit unclear volumes. You wouldn’t have had to be that sharp to work out something was up, and Twilight was at least that sharp.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing! Well, okay one thing.”

“What one thing?”

Last night, this had all seemed like something that would have no consequences whatsoever and just be a bit of crack. In the cold, harsh, headache-worsening light of morning it was becoming rapidly apparent that it was nothing but consequences. None of them fun.

“Mighta… swapped… bodies… ?” Rainbow said, apparently hoping that the sentence would get better towards the end and plainly not enjoying that it didn’t. Toby winced in sympathy.

“Swapped. Bodies.”

This did not come out from Twilight as a question.

“Just a little bit?” Toby proffered, wanting to hold up two fingers an inch apart to show just how little it was only he had no fingers and he had forgotten this, and on seeing he’d raised a fingerless hoof he double-took and yelped.

“Why?!” Twilight squawked.

“We were drunk!” Rainbow protested.

“That’s not a good excuse!”

“If you’d ever been drunk you might not agree with that, Twilight. Oh, my head…” said Toby with a groan. Twilight was flabbergasted.

“You - what - how did you even do it?” she said.

“Magic, obviously. Ow…”

This was obvious in hindsight. Twilight’s eyes darted and then she lunged at Toby. Or Rainbow, actually, since she’d gone for the human first out of habit. Took her a second to switch around, grabbing Toby by the cheeks.

“What spell did you use?! What book?!”

“Uh, that one, yeah,” Toby said, casting around and spotting the book where it must have fallen - miraculously still open on the page he’d been reading from. This was good, because otherwise he didn’t have a clue how else he might have got back to it. Letting go of his face Twilight picked it up and brought it over and gave it a squizzy.

Her expression, already dire to start with, got direrer very quickly.

“... this is a book of laundry spells. This one is for stain removal!”

The look she gave him could have removed stains all on its own. Toby swallowed.

“Man, I fucked up.”

Twilight’s attention was back on the book though, flipping back and forth as if hoping an easy answer would be one page over or behind. It wasn’t. Obviously.

“How did you… I don’t even know where to start with this…”

“I’m actually kinda impressed you got it so wrong it came out super-right,” Rainbow said to Toby, who stuck his tongue out at her.

Or, rather, stuck her own tongue out at her. It wasn’t really worth getting too caught up on such details, though it was an odd experience for her - the latest in an increasingly long line of them. She’d never been on that side of it before.

“Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better,” he said, jumping a second later when the book snapped shut with an almighty smack.

“You two! Shush! You are both in trouble! I am going to fix this and you two are going to stay here and go nowhere and touch nothing while I figure out how! Understand?”

“Yes Twilight,” Toby and Rainbow said as one as Twilight stared down the pair of them.

“Good! Sit! Stay! Spike!”

And with that yell off she shot, leaving the two of them sprawled on the floor. After watching her go they looked at one another, then broke out into more giggles. Even with the headaches it was rather hard not to. Twilight would sort it out. In the meantime?

“We’re in trroooouubbbbbllleee~” Rainbow went.

“It’s like being a schoolgirl again,” Toby said without thinking, then he frowned. “Not sure the joke still works now, in the current circumstances. Pah.”

“Weird being a girl?”

He looked over, unimpressed, and raised his hooves.

“No, Rainbow, the part that’s tripping me up is being a horse! Pony. Whatever. I don’t have fingers! For one thing! Well, ten things.”

His borrowed hooves received a withering look of consternation. Them being hooves, they didn’t care. Rainbow, looking at him, couldn’t see what the deal was.

“What did you expect?” She asked.

“Going to go out on a limb here and put it to you that I maybe wasn’t really thinking through the full ramifications of my actions last night. Oh, my head…”

“How do you think I feel?” Rainbow asked. She’d actually managed to sit up at this point, arms limp and hands together between splayed legs. It was plainly taking her a lot of effort not to keel over backwards again. Toby looked her over. Himself. Weird.

“Bigger?” He offered.

“... fair.”

At this point the two of them stopped talking so they could both concentrate on trying to stand up, as it seemed a significant and worthy hurdle. Having got their breath back, they got stuck in.

It was neither elegant nor dignified. Both of them moved as though their whole bodies had fallen asleep, every move uncertain and trembling. Initially they used one another for early support, but as they got a little steadier they each branched out into latching onto and leaning on furniture. It helped.

Toby was finding it particularly hard. The shape worked, but his experience worked against the shape and made every movement a struggle. His brain was telling him that he needed to stand up straight and on two legs, and normally that’d be fine, but now it wasn’t, and it kept tripping him up. Rainbow was experiencing her own version of this problem, though of course she’d say she was handling it better (and she wouldn’t have been wrong).

At length, both of them managed to stand up and stay standing. Once confident they were not going to collapse into a heap again they looked at one another and gave slightly tired grins.

“This is weird though, right?” Toby asked.

“Really weird! Twilight’s gonna fix it. Yeah?”

“Oh yeah, she’s super smart.”

“A real nerd!”

“Yeah!”

A pause.

“She’ll fix it,” Toby said. The alternative wasn’t a comfortable thought.

For her part, Rainbow had been bold enough to take an actual, bonafide step forward. Once she’d done that, she even took another, and then another, and now her grin was far more triumphant.

“It’s pretty great being tall though,” she said, standing up a little straighter and looking very smug about it. She then frowned. “Everything looks so dusty from up here.”

Toby took a step of his own, and while he didn’t fall over he wasn’t anywhere near Rainbow’s level of accomplishment yet.

“That’s what I keep telling everyone! Wait, can’t you fly?” He asked.

“Yeah, so?”

Toby considered pressing this issue but then decided letting it go would be the wiser move.

“Nevermind. Agh, this is fucking me up. How come you’re so good at being me?”

“Because I’m awesome.”

“Ask a stupid question. How’s fingers?”

Rainbow raised the hands she was currently the caretaker of and looked at them. They wiggled. Her expression was somewhere between delighted and disgusted.

“I feel weird,” she said.

“Probably a good sign. Probably?”

He didn’t know. Rainbow was still looking at the hands when an idea plainly occurred to her.

“You know…” she said, and the way she said it did and the way she was now looking at him did not set his soul aflame with comfort and security.

“What?” He asked, warily, taking another faltering step and feeling that maybe he was close to getting the hang of this

Her grin hadn’t shifted but it had taken on a singular new aspect which didn’t do much to make him feel much safer, either. He made a mental note to never grin like that once he was back.

“I’ve always wondered what you been hiding down here anyway…”

And she started moving a thumb very deliberately towards his belt and very deliberately looking downward. The eyes he was borrowing from her widened.

“Hey!”

She stopped, she laughed.

“Joking! Joking! I wouldn’t actually do that!”

He glared, just long enough to get her to be uncertain.

“... pretty funny… but still. You’re perverse.”

“You’re perversed! You’re not even wearing anything! And you’re me! Ew!”

“That’s— that’s normal for you!”

“Yeah, but not for you!”

He couldn’t think of an adequately witty comeback for that.

“Argh! This is confusing! I am naked! And part of me feels this is unacceptable behaviour but another, new bit is telling me it’s fine! Dissonance! This is not the whimsical experience I was expecting!”

Rainbow had stopped paying particular attention after ‘naked’ but nodded anyway.

“Yeah, next time I think we gotta psyche ourselves up a little better and, like, plan ahead or something.”

“Next time?” Toby sputtered. “Noooo no next time! I’m writing this off as a drunken mistake! This is weird! It only gets weirder! I’m tiny and-and fingerless and every word I say is you saying it only not! Gah!”

“Ah you just need to relax and roll with it. Besides I’m not that small. Taller than Twilight.”

She had by this time got comfortable enough in his body to start walking slow, leisurely laps of the room, really making the most of jaunting about on two legs. She was striding and stretching out as though she’d just come from the Ministry of Silly Walks, plainly having a good time doing so. Toby, watching, decided to take a risk and have a tiny jump on the spot. It worked out.

“Guess I should be enjoying the novelty of it all, huh?” He asked.

“Oh yeah! Whatever that means. It’s just a thing! I’m still kinda unsure how much I hate it or if it’s kinda cool,” she said. Then she scratched herself. “You’re right, that’s not that fun. How about I try…”

She was honing in on him with intent, one hand outstretched. Toby hadn’t quite mastered the art of walking backwards with legs yet though, and so instead flopped unhelpfully onto his rear as she loomed over him - damn, he really was tall, wasn’t he?

“Hey, what are you doing?”

Rainbow said nothing, and it wasn’t until her hand moved to his head that he twigged it, and by the time she’d started scratching him behind the ears it was too late. He’d have argued more, but it was sort of hard to keep his thoughts in a row all of a sudden.

“Oh,” he said.

“See, now this is the fun side of a switcheroo!”

Likely open to debate, but Toby wasn’t in a position to argue convincingly.

“This is probably someone’s fetish,” Toby said, allowing himself to enjoy it a moment and feeling profoundly filthy for doing so. The look on Rainbow’s (his!) face did not help this.

“It’s mine, now!”

With great effort and reluctant he reached up and pushed her arm away with both hooves.

“Why are we friends.”

“Did you forget the me being awesome part already? And hey, you haven’t even tried flying yet!”

He’d entirely forgotten about that. So far he had mostly been able to get the wings to twitch and maybe ruffle a bit mostly by accident, because getting wings to work wasn’t something he had a whole lot of experience with. Looking back at himself (a rather vertigo-inducing experience with a sudden surge of panic he had to push down) he concentrated very, very hard on the lingering sense of knowing how the wings were meant to work. They actually extended!

“True… can’t really do it in here though, can I?” He asked, returning his attention to Rainbow and glancing about the room they were in. Big, yeah, but not big enough.

“No, you can’t. Not in here,” Rainbow said, words heavy with implication. The wink she gave was perhaps a bit much. Toby made a mental note not to wink in future if he could help it.

“Twilight did say to stay here,” he said.

“Yeah but, like, when you gonna get a chance like this again?”

“... how much more trouble could I be in, right?”

“Right?!”

Toby wondered how much of the compelling need to be in the air was coming from his own desires and how much was coming from the body he was presently squatting it. He wasn’t qualified to venture an opinion. He just wanted to give it a go while he could.

“Alright. Ten minutes, I’ll give it a go. That sounds alright, yeah?” He said. Rainbow looked unimpressed.

“Only ten?”

“She might come back!” Toby protested, gesturing off towards where Twilight had disappeared and would, presumably, reappear before too long. Rainbow booped him. Again, the roles were reversed and, again, both of them quietly enjoyed it on a level neither would ever want to analyse.

“Wuss.”

“I have to live with her! Literally!”

“Fine, fine. Guess that’s fine. See what you can do! You’re working with great material.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Just don’t, you know, crash or something. Take care of me.”

“You too!”

And off Toby fololloped, leaving Rainbow behind alone with his body.

His trust was admirable.

-

Unsurprisingly, Toby had not immediately started pulling loop-the-loops or flying backwards with his eyes closed. Surprisingly, he had actually managed to get some air, to his unbounded delight. It had not been elegant or especially natural looking but, from a running start, he had got up and stayed up, at least for a little distance. Even this briefest touch of flight had been better than he might have imagined.

Oddly - for him - it had come much more naturally than walking had. He would have thought, given he had at least some experience of walking as opposed to no experience of flying this would have been the other way around, but no. He wasn’t an instant expert, but he got it, and he only crashed once! And only mildly. More a tumble than anything, easily brushed off and no-one saw. He thought. He hoped.

Only so much he could do in ten minutes, sadly, and it barely felt like it had started before he had to hurry back. Letting himself back into the library as quietly as possible he found Rainbow where he’d left her, though she was sitting down again, and the stream of blood all down her front from her nose was new, too, as was her rather sheepish, pained look.

“What happened?!” He asked, aghast, concerned. Her sheepish look deepend and she couldn’t meet her own eyes (to be fair, who could?)

“I was trying to touch your toes.”

“Why?!”

“Because I don’t have any!”

“Fair, I guess. And you stacked it?”

“I really did. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Shirt’ll need washing though.”

“This is why you should be naked.”

“Weird. You need a tissue or something?”

“Nah, it’s a little late for that. This’ll be your problem, anyway! Flying good?”

He had to admire her sympathy for his future plight. It was hard to be too mad though, given he was still jazzed from flight.

“So good. Why do you even ever touch the ground?”

She was back to grinning, but it dropped a little as a thought occurred to her:

“You didn’t make me look bad out there, did you?”

“No!”

“... you did, didn’t you?”

“Yeah…”

Only a little, he liked to think. It was only one crash! A mild one!

And a lot of mediocre half-flight.

Rainbow sighed at him.

“Well, at least you’re good at magic, right? You don’t even have a horn!”

There was a dirty joke to make here and the temptation to do so very briefly passed between them. They mutually, silently, decided not to make it, though. The look they gave one another made it clear they didn’t need to.

“Thanks,” he said, taking what he could get.

A door banged open and they both jumped. Standing there was Twilight, lookingly only mildly frazzled. She trotted on over to them. She had a rod with her. She saw the blood and looked set to make a point about it before quickly deciding against it.

The rod was hovered into a position of prominence between them all.

“This is a Rod of Reversal,” Twilight said.

“Ooh,” said Toby and Rainbow together in perfect, cadence-matched unison, to Twilight’s frustration.

“Hand and hoof. Hold them out,” she said. Toby and Rainbow did as instructed. “Closer, next to each other. Just touching. That’s good. Now hold still.”

The rod hovered up above their hand and hoof and Toby and Rainbow eyed it apprehensively, expecting flashes of sorcery. Twilight concentrated fiercely on the rod, eyes narrowed, tongue poking out (it’s where Toby had learnt it from), and then brought it down sharply with a whap.

Neither Toby nor Rainbow had time to comment on this or even feel much of the pain that came from being whacked by a rod, as the instant it made contact there was the most horrendous train-jolting-to-the-side lurch and they found themselves back where they belonged, simple as that. It was so sudden and simple they didn’t immediately notice, and when they did they both did the appropriate ‘Is this my body’ patdown.

“Fingers!” Toby declared joyfully.

“Yeah!” Rainbow said, giving her wings a stretch.

They gave one another a bump of fist-and-hand, and then held out to Twilight, who sandbagged them and left them both hanging. They supposed they deserved that. They were, after all, in trouble.

“You,” Twilight said, jabbing a hoof at Rainbow. “Go home. You,” the hoof now jabbed at Toby. “Stay here. I am going to tell you off.”

“Trooouuubblllle~”

“Home!”

Rainbow didn’t need telling twice. With a triumphant laugh she shot off, making sure to catch Toby in the side of the face with her tail as she went, leaving him spluttering.

“Are you ready to be told off?”

“She broke my nose!” Toby protested, pointing to his face. It hurt!

“She wouldn’t have had your nose to break if you hadn’t swapped bodies with magic!”

“It was her idea!”

“Shifting responsibility is not a good look! You could have said no!”

Ah, the old classic ‘You bear some level of responsibility for your own actions’ trick. Toby hated that one. It always caught him out.

“... was drunk…

Twilight looked set to delivery another vicious verbal blow only to relent and sigh instead, rubbing her face.

“It wasn’t an accident, but I know you weren’t thinking straight. Either of you. You’re just very lucky it worked out the way it did. You used the wrong spell in the wrong book! I haven’t even started on trying to work out how what you did worked at all. I don’t even know what that means!” she said.

“I’m sorry, Twilight,” Toby said. And he really was.

“I know, Toby. Everyone makes mistakes and weird decisions sometimes. Take this one as a lesson. And if you ever, ever, ever do anything like this again, Toby…” Twilight said, gravely, and Toby braced himself for what was no-doubt going to be a gruesome and imaginatively laid-out punishment. “I will have no choice but to stop teaching you magic.”

Toby blinked.

“Oh. Oh that’s, uh, entirely fair and appropriate actually, all things considered…”

“You seem disappointed?”

“No! No. Not at all. Just was expecting something a little more… gruesome and imaginative.”

“What would you like me to do to you?”

There was a dirty joke to make here. Given the nature of their working relationship, however, Toby judged that it would be wildly inappropriate and likely would only be wasted on Twilight anyway. He’d tell Rainbow Dash later. She’d love it.

He went with something else instead, delivered with a shit-eating grin:

“Give me a sticker for doing the spell so well?”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed.

“Is that a dirty joke?”