Walk Softly

"Watch where you're walking, loser!"

Snails heard the snarky admonishment at the same time he felt the impact of something against his hind legs, a strong enough force to send him off balance and send him toppling forward. The ground veered towards his face quickly, a personal single lane highway of dirt and grass welcoming his mouth with a taste like old pennies and a walk by a moldy tree-stump.

"Ouch," he said after several seconds.

Laughter answered behind him, two voices giggling in unison.

"Can you believe this moron? He's so slow he takes a minute just to realize he's tripped over his own big dumb legs!"

The voice carrying the insulting tone belonged to Diamond Tiara, standing behind Snails' fallen form and holding a hoof to her mouth in mock restraint as she laughed. A single-pony chorus joined her as Silver Spoon mimicked the cruel laughter, sounding not quite as derisive but still as contemptuous as she needed to be.

Snails registered the insult, but filed them away in the back of his mind as he made his best effort to sort out his legs, which had become unfortunately tangled on his trip to the ground. He didn't know if it was possible for limbs to become entwined like bowtie pasta, but it seemed his were doing their best job to find out. Snails had never been good with knots.

"Do you need help getting up, Snails?" Diamond Tiara asked as she sidled up to the fallen coat, her smarmy lacquered voice not abandoning its catty bite for an instant.

Snails looked up at her with his eyes wide, still lost in the sudden onset of events his brain was struggling to catch up with.

"Well? Are you too dumb to remember how to walk?"

Snails blinked.

Diamond Tiara rolled her eyes, becoming visibly aggravated that the target of her insults was too stupid to register their impact.

"Never mind. Good luck figuring out how to stand up, you long-legged freak."

Diamond Tiara jerked her flank quickly to the side, giving Snails a moment of further perplexment as the filly's pink tail whiffed across his face. The smell reminded him of bubble-bath and expensive ice cream he was never allowed to have. It disappeared as quickly as it had come, following Diamond Tiara as she sashayed to class with Silver Spoon dutifully in tow.

Snails' legs struggled to untangle themselves, eventually straightening out and allowing the colt some semblance of bodily perspective. Snails stuck his tongue out between his lips as he pushed himself up, standing shakily on his legs that always felt several inches longer than they should be. After a few seconds of being upright he brushed a hoof across his face and wiped away a few clumps of grass that had come with him from his visit to the ground.

"That wasn't very nice," he said to himself in his perpetually dull sounding voice.

Nopony was around to hear him. They were all in class, which had started five minutes ago.

The bell to end the day at school was the opening of a well-furnished prison for most ponies. They collected their books as best they could in their haste and scrambled out the door looking ready to run a marathon with the speed of their departure. Several fillies and colts had a more restrained approach to the announcement of the day's end, but even they put away their things with a relative quickness, finding much more appeal in the idea of heading home to play with their friends than staying any undue amount of time in the place where they were forced to learn.

Only one pony was still there two minutes after the bell had rung, carefully tucking his haphazard notebook of crumpled papers into his desk, his eyes almost crossing in concentration.

Snails' hair looked more disheveled than usual from his morning's adventure in the exploration of gravity, and in the cruel nature of a young classroom, none of his schoolmates had seen it fit to mention to him that several patches of grass had overstayed their welcome.

It was his teacher, Cheerilee, that noticed them, plucking the dirt-laden clumps off with one of her hooves and sighing softly to herself.

This was as Snails made his way to the door, his hooves stopping suddenly as he felt his teacher's hoof on his head. His body froze, worried he was about to be turned around and given a talking to.

Cheerilee wasn't the type to 'turn' anypony around, but she did tap one of her hooves against the classroom floor as she cleared her throat, discarding the balls of grass she had gathered into a nearby wastebasket.

"Snails," she said in a tone somewhere between 'motherly' and 'exasperated' - or more accurately, just 'motherly', given the colt under scrutiny.

"Yes, Ms. Cheerilee?" Snails responded, turning himself curtly - as much as could be said of his faculty of movement - to meet his teacher. The response came quickly because it required no thought. Cheerilee said his name, and he answered accordingly.

The face that met him was one contorted in concern.

Cheerilee weighed the avenues of potential conversation in her head, biting her tongue as the phrasing struggled on its way to her mouth.

"Did you... you seemed like you were a bit confused by today's lesson." Cheerilee veered right at the last second, taking the verbal off-ramp away from her original line of questioning. Snails was a boy, and boys were rowdy. The grass could have come from a morning play-session.

"I did?" Snails asked, his eyes as wide as they always were.

Cheerilee sighed.

"Yes, you did. Did you understand everything we covered?"

Cheerilee was far from wanting to spend her own time after class reiterating the day's lesson - especially today's lesson - but she had a nagging feeling in the back of her head about the big-eared colt who'd stared blankly forward as Cheerilee lectured about the difference between mares and stallions.

"I think so," Snails said.

He stared forward as Cheerilee waited for what she had assumed was an obvious necessity for explanation.

"Oh?" she asked simply, hoping to goad the confirmation forward.

"Um... yeah."

Silence.

Cheerilee sighed again.

"You know if you have any questions, you can always talk to me after class. I'm here for fifteen minutes after the bell rings every day if you need any help... okay?"

Snails blinked and then nodded as Cheerilee's words made their way from the air into his head. They decomposed as they reached the center of his understanding, the individual sounds and letters making sense on their own, and even together, but plodding through the molasses of his neural pathways so slowly that most of their significance was left behind on the walls of the sugar-coated brain-tunnels.

"Okay," he said.

Cheerilee waited for a moment. She watched Snails smile at her, blinking idly with his eyes occasionally going wide without explanation.

She spared herself a sigh, but turned around and began cleaning the blackboard to signal an end to the conversation. Diagrams of horse anatomy disappeared with a puff of chalk dust as she swept the eraser back and forth.

She counted ninety seconds before she heard Snails' hooves on the ground signalling his turn towards the door, and then a minute before she heard the door click as it opened, and then swing shut a moment later.

Alone in the classroom, she allowed herself another sigh.

Snails set about the walk home with the same absent-minded determination he approached every task. The length was unnecessary for consideration regardless of its perception- the walk was simply a walk. There was no 'time' - just the walk home. Snails got home when he got home, and thinking about the distance or duration did nothing to change that. Maybe the walk home was different than yesterday - but Snails remembered it the same almost every time. Trees. Leaves. Sometimes a breeze. Sometimes rain or snow; but the walk was the walk. It was what came after school, and so he approached it the same way each time.

What didn't normally come with the walk was accompaniment. Snails walked home by himself, after numerous back and forth between his mother and the school administrators. It had taken him a bit of practice, but now he was practically a professional at it. Though... he might not be able to tell anypony else which way it was, or how long it took. But he was really good at doing it.

It was therefore that Snails didn't see the two figures following him on his walk home. He didn't see them because they had never been there, and the walk home was always one he made by himself. The forest was the longest part. Sometimes in the fall he stopped and watched the leaves fall from the trees like dancers spiralling toward the ground. Snails couldn't explain the feeling the sight gave him, but if he'd been forced to settle on a word, he might have picked 'pretty'. For the leaves, that is. Not how it made him feel. That was a feeling still without definition.

Today was just such a day. A particularly picturesque red-and-gold leaf seemed poised to make its descent to earth just as Snails reached the tree it had called home until now, and he locked his eyes skyward as the coloured foliage hung perilously on the end of its branch for a moment before springing free, spiralling and bobbing back and forth on the tiny current of wind it found as a cushion to aid its final journey downward.

"Ooh," said Snails to himself.

Today there was somepony else there to hear him though.

Two ponies, particularly.

Their snickering in response to Snails' innocent fascination with the process of fall took a moment to register inside his head. There weren't any other ponies on the walk home, so who could be laughing?

"Why do you think his parents let him to go school without a helmet?" one of the voices posited, the smarmy tone bouncing off the surrounding trees before echoing off lost into the forest. The great wooden towers seemed to corner the sound, trapping it inside instead of rebounding it freely, creating a great nest of sound in the single forest pathway that was invisible to the outside.

"Maybe it runs in the family. His mom and dad might be too stupid to realize how stupid he is," a second voice responded, growing closer to Snails as it approached from behind. Snails could hear the leaves crunching under hoof as the two ponies approached, one on either side of him. He couldn't decide which one to turn towards first, and instead settled for a confused glance in either direction, catching site first of the pink filly moving on his left, and then the silver on his right. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, the inseparable pair of well-to-do young girls in the same class as him.

"Well?" Diamond Tiara asked, stepping so close Snails could feel the condescending burn of her stare locked to his face. Snails craned his head backwards at the sudden invasion of personal space.

"What are you guys doing here?" He asked, his slow syrupy drawl coaxing a frustrated head-shake from Diamond Tiara.

"She asked you a question, doofus. Did you hear it, or are you too busy trying to work out how to move your mouth to make sounds?"

The pair shared a quick giggle, revelling in the perplexed series of blinks that washed across Snails' face.

Had he been asked a question?

"What?" he settled on, finding it an applicable question in most circumstance.

"She asked," Diamond Tiara went on, shoving Snails in the side and sending him lurching a tad off balance in the opposite direction, "if your parents are too stupid to realize their kid shouldn't be walking to school without some kind of protection on his big dumb head."

"My Mom isn't stupid," Snails blurted out, keying at least partially to the topic of conversation. The sudden defensive claim was only that much more hilarious to the pair of fillies on Snails' either side, and the two erupted into another bought of laughter that disappeared into the trees.

"I've heard plenty of things about what your mom is," Diamond Tiara said, spitting acid with every word as she circled around Snails back end as she alluded to some less than polite graffiti found on the occasional alley wall around Ponyville, "but what about your dad?"

"Yeah, are you saying your dad is dumb?" Silver Spoon picked up, slinking over to Snails' other side and whipping her long white-sheen tail into his face.

"I don't know if he is," Snails said, trying to puzzle out the most appropriate response. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon circled him like sharks, and Snails crooned his neck to try to keep his sight on at least one of them. "I mean, he never told me."

"Holy cow are you stupid." Diamond Tiara stopped after a full circle, leering her head forward and sneering into Snails' face as she spoke. "Do you get it? We're calling your parents dumb! Doesn't that upset you?"

"My mom isn't stupid," Snails repeated, quickly losing the trail of the conversation and returning to a statement he as sure in.

Diamond Tiara rolled her eyes and scoffed, once again becoming bored with the prospect of taunting somepony too stupid to realize they were being made fun of.

So why was she spending time taunting the colt who could barely for a cogent sentence, let alone understand the intricacy of Diamond Tiara's insults?

There was a reasoning there she couldn't place. It wasn't beyond explanation to be cruel for the sake of cruelty - it was the nature of children everywhere, especially of children who had learned they could act in a world devoid of consequences and amuse themselves with the feeling that only otherwise came when torturing something else helpless, like pulling the wings from a fly.

Diamond Tiara had done this one more than one occasion, the first out of youthful necessity, the second to see if the reaction from her own senses would be as vivid as the first. The novelty of burdening a fly with a lifetime of flightlessness had proved sufficient only for a passing giggle after the second time, so Diamond Tiara had since contented herself with a less tangible, but ultimately more rewarding form of amusement.

Snails was almost the perfect target. Diamond Tiara found herself reminded of somepony else in the oblivious orange colt with lanky limbs. The image kept turning in her mind of a worker at one of her father's factory, a simple-minded brown earth pony - or he might be grey, an amalgam of a hundred different other ponies, a story that could have happened a hundred times for all she could remember - a pony who was simple, unassuming, and did his job well. Who might just do his job so well one day that he would catch Filthy Rich's eye, and the old businesspony would smile, and through what he would call a 'down-to-earth' association with the common worker, the factory line worker would find himself invited to dinner. He'd have kids, of course. And Diamond Tiara would hate him.

She wouldn't be able to say why. But for the fact that the necessity of her loathing for this pony who may or may not have existed would allow her the ability to revel in his suffering. Diamond Tiara could glare at him, being the sticking stone in what might have proved to be a burgeoning relationship for the workerpony with his employer. She could glare daggers at him across the table, and whisper to her father how the stallion gave her a bad vibe. She could spit in his drink when he turned his head; just at such a time that the corner of his eye would catch her, but his tongue would fail to say a word. And ultimately, she could taunt him, waving her bubblegum coloured rear in the poor simple-minded pony's face, teasing him with her youthful nubility and gesturing sex appeal only to provoke him into the tiniest of admissions before she revealed the nature of the situation, throwing his moment of poor judgement back into his face in a flurry of shouts and police involvement.

Diamond Tiara could ruin that pony's life, and in so many ways Snails reminded her of the same scenario.

But no matter what she did, Snails didn't quite get it. He was a standing structure in the wash of her tide of derision, and it was that adamance that made her try harder and harder to break him down.

She would have to reconsider her tools of engagement.

"Did you have trouble in class today, Snails?" Diamond Tiara asked, mimicking her teacher's words as she picked up a different tack. In the same way the sensitivity of the subject matter could be the final nail in the coffin of her father's factory-worker, she saw no reason not to use it in lieu of the usual attempts she had made at Snails already.

"Huh?" Snails blurted, even more confused by the change in subject matter. He couldn't quite piece together the different elements of Diamond Tiara's voice, so her question might have been an earnest concern for all he could tell.

"You looked like a pigeon doing calculus when Cheerilee was talking about anatomy," Diamond Tiara continued, picking up the tone of her intent. Snails blinked at her, and she sighed and shook her head, frustrated but not giving up quite yet.

"You do know the difference between boys and girls, don't you Snails? Or did your mommy never teach you that?" Diamond Tiara edged uncomfortably close to Snails' side, and she nudged against his stomach, forcing Snails' hooves into a tiny scramble on the leaves to keep their stability.

"Um," Snails started to answer before Silver Spoon appeared on his other side, grinning and picking up where her companion had left off.

"Snails still thinks that a big stork shows up one day with a baby in its mouth, don't you Snails?" Silver Spoon mimicked Diamond Tiara's shove, nudging Snails in the other direction.

Snails' hooves kicked up a leaf or two as they repositioned themselves.

"Either that or he thinks that when a boy and a girl love each other, they go see Celestia and get a pony out of the breeding mirror," countered Diamond Tiara. Shove.

Snails wished very strongly that the two girls would let him go home. Against all reasoning, this kind of diversion was most definitely making the walk home longer.

"Well Snails? Did you pay attention in class? Tell us something you learned about the differences between boys and girls." Diamond Tiara stopped her shark like circling of the helpless prey she had surrounded, leering up at Snails from the path leading to his house. Despite being half as tall as the lanky-limbed colt, Diamond Tiara managed in every way to be properly imposing.

Snails felt himself shiver a little bit. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.

"Um," he tried to start.

Silver Spoon popped up next to Diamond Tiara in front of Snails' face, smirking behind her silver-rimmed glasses.

"Did you learn any new words? Come one, tell us something that colts have that fillies don't. You did pay attention, didn't you?"

"He was probably too busy trying to hide his boner under the table when Cheerilee was talking," Diamond Tiara said.

The pair shared a laugh while Snails held back a confused head-scratch only out of necessity of stability. The leaves underhoof weren't wet or particularly precarious, but Snails felt so nervous the mere act of moving made him feel like he might go sprawling to the ground in a repeat of his morning's performance.

He opened his mouth to talk, but closed it without uttering a sound. Diamond Tiara looked up at him, and laughed in his face.

"Well, it'sobvious you weren't paying attention. Do you want a quick recap, so you can tell your mom you at least learned something today?"

Diamond Tiara was offering to help him again, but now even Snails could tell she didn't sound sincere.

"Here," said Diamond Tiara, turning herself in a one-eighty and shaking her behind in Snails’ direction.

“This,” she said, pointing her backside squarely at Snails’ bewildered face, “is a girl’s butt. When you’re old enough to dress yourself you might call it an ass.”

Snails balked, his legs tensing as the thought to back-pedal entered his mind. He shouldn’t be looking at that. More so than any of the things Diamond Tiara had said to him, this was the one making him the most uncomfortable. Diamond Tiara was waving her…butt… in his face. It made him feel all sorts of things, and the mixture of confusing emotions wasn’t one he enjoyed. The one he could pick out the strongest was an overwhelming sense of discomfort, but there was something else there as well – something he couldn’t quite call unpleasant. It made him feel a weird kind of tingly.

Diamond Tiara was too busy sneering to notice any change in Snails’ expression, but Silver Spoon had the perfect vantage point, and her grin broadened when she caught the wide-eyed anxiousness in the colt’s eyes.

“Look! He’s getting all flustered,” she said, unconcerned for Snails’ presence to the point that she didn’t see the need to speak about him as though he could hear her.

Diamond Tiara turned halfway, craning her neck over her shoulder and smirking.

“Really? Maybe he was paying attention in class after all.” Diamond Tiara turned her head further and looked mischievously at Snails who was visibly torn between turning tail and running back to school or simply closing his eyes and ignoring the taunting filly in front of him.

“Don’t tell me you’re getting turned on from me waving my plot at you!” Diamond Tiara taunted, giving her behind a particularly suggestive waggle.

Snails swallowed, the lump in his throat moving visibly with his nervousness.

“So, that means you must know the differences between boys and girls then, right? So what about what’s down a bit further?” Diamond Tiara backed up closer to snails, practically assaulting him with her bobbling backside.

Snails did have the presence of mind to back up at the sudden approach, but his hooves stumbled over each other, and he was forced to stop short of sending himself tumbling to the ground.

Diamond Tiara took the opportunity to wiggle herself even closer, grinning like mad as Snails’ face turned red.

“Well, if you’re not gonna guess, I guess I can just remind you. You were paying attention, right? If you follow my ass down, you get to my pussy, which is different than what you have, which is your dick. Isn’t that right, Silver Spoon?”

Silver Spoon picked up on her friend’s intent immediately. She could see Snails’ legs struggling to reverse, and the anxiousness in his expression as his eyes darted back and forth. Whether he wanted to extricate himself due to any undue anxiety about the subject matter, or if he just happened to be tired of the increasingly suggestive confrontation, Silver Spoon couldn’t be sure; but it was getting results, and that was a step in the right direction.

“That’s right, DT. Girls have pussies, unlike colts, which have big floppy dicks hanging between their legs… which I’m sure you’d know all about, right?”

Silver Spoon started her own approach towards Snails’ position, smirking gleefully at her own use of vulgar language, words vastly different than the ones Cheerilee had used in class.

There was a certain power behind those words. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon could feel one part of it – the kind of electric thrill of saying something so provocative and lewd. It was enough to make them giggle even if they were the only ones who heard it – but throwing the words like live ammunition at the poor nervous colt stumbling backwards in an attempt to escape was an extra dimension to the excitement. Those words were powerful. They held weight beyond simply describing the thing between each respective gender’s legs.

Snails felt the other half of the words’ impact. Embarrassment; he wanted nothing to do with words like that. Nervousness; the two ponies saying them were two of the schools most well-to-do fillies, young and rich and… the subject of crushes for almost every other colt.

And Snails felt a different version of the excitement. It was blended between the thought of ‘wrong’ pervasive in his head - it was a sort of shameful feeling, but one that he couldn’t pin down as ‘bad’. It was very different than anything he’d felt before. And, he noted now – he had felt a tingle of it when Cheerilee had explained the differences between boys and girls.

“Yeah, come on, dingus. Are you packing a decent sized piece of meat down there?” Diamond Tiara turned herself back around, having used her illicit youthful sex appeal to the full extent of its positional advantage. Now she was much more capable of enjoying the increasing anxiety in front of her. She’d made Snails stumble once or twice, caught him in a moment of particular stupidity – but that was a special reaction, and it was one she wanted to savor.

Her skin felt flushed. Though the fall air was cold and cool, she thought she might be sweating a little bit – but she shrugged it off, focusing on the nervous grimace on Snails’ face.

“No way! He probably can’t even see it when he stands up in the shower.” Silver Spoon closed the distance between herself and Snails, surrounding on his second side, giving him nowhere forward to look but into the face of a gleefully sneering filly.

“I… I…” Snails stammered, not knowing how to construct the words to free himself from this conversation. He wanted out; he wanted to go home, back to when his walk home had been a stretch in his mind that needed no contemplation.

“Is that true? Are you so tiny you didn’t even know you were a boy up until now? C’mon, tell us!”

Diamond Tiara was close enough that she could reach out a foreleg and touch Snails now. She shoved him in the shoulder, and he stumbled backwards, trying desperately to keep himself upright despite his legs protests.

“Yeah, tell us! Are you clamming up ‘cus you don’t want us to tell everyone we’re in the class with the only colt in town without a dick?”

“Is your mom upset she didn’t raise you as a girl?”

Snails’ tongue caught for a moment, but his brain scrambled for an answer as both Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon saw the flicker of thought in his eyes. They leaned forward, poised on the tips of their hooves waiting for him to say something.

“My mom… my mom says I’m big for my age.”

Both fillies’ mouths hung agape. Diamond Tiara pressed a hoof to her face and dragged it down like a wiper, trying to clear the sudden onset of disbelief at her targets stupidity.

“You showed your mom your dick?” Silver Spoon asked, incredulous. Her disbelief earned her an admonishing shove from Diamond Tiara.

“No, you dummy! He’s too stupid to even know what we’re talking about. Look at him!”

Silver Spoon gave Snails a once over with her eyes, ignoring his partially hunched over posture and nervous shaking.

“She obviously just meant he’s so tall he looks like a giraffe.”

“Oh… so does that mean he still hasn’t told us how big he is?”

Snails struggled to stumble backwards again, barely free of breathing the sigh of relief he’d just let go that had turned out to be unwarranted.

Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon set their eyes on him like a pair of sharks, skulking towards him with murder in their eyes.

“That’s right. And it doesn’t look like he’s gonna. You know what that means?”

Silver Spoon nodded.

“Mm-hm.”

Snails didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t want to find out.

His hoof stopped suddenly. Rock.

Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon shoved him in tandem, moving like a single-bodied unit with two extensions. The treacherous stone under his hind leg was the extra assistance the two fillies needed to take down the colt twice their height, and Snails lankiness was the final piece of the equation.

He fell backwards, shutting his eyes in preparation for the impact of dirt and fallen leaves. He managed to hold his breath in, for some reason feeling the need to keep himself free of any pain the girls might here.

It didn’t hurt too badly anyway. He was used to falling.

So what had they been asking him? They had wanted him to tell them…

Or to see.

“Oh my gosh.”