Romance: A Trialogue

by darf

Rating: mature
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Rainbow Dash, Other, Romance, Sex, Human
Length: 5598

Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and an anonymous human share a romantic evening (sort of)

Because sometimes, there's a romantic in all of us.
Because sometimes, romance is important. Yes – even more important than sex.
Well... as important, maybe.

Dedicated to TAW, whom I wish the best.

Published 2013-02-22 19:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2013-02-22 19:40:01 UTC

Story

Magic Horn and Speedy Cloud were two ponies who lived in Ponyville. Magic Horn was a brilliant unicorn princess with a coat of the most vibrant lavender, and Speedy Cloud was a periwinkle pegasus with amazing swiftness.

Magic Horn and Speedy Cloud were the best at what they did. No pony in all of Ponyville, or even in Equestria, could match their abilities. Magic Horn was the most learned unicorn in centuries, with a knowledge of ancient spells and Equestrian history to match the most ribald of textbooks. Speedy Cloud, on the other hoof, was a pegasus of record-shattering velocity, capable of circling the entire continent in the blink of an eye.

But Magic Horn and Speedy Cloud weren’t happy with how amazing they were. There was something that made them both unhappy, in a very special and similar way. Because, no matter how much Magic Horn studied and learned, or how fast Speedy Cloud, there was something neither of them could learn or catch: and that was love–

        “–ow! What was that for?”

        Rainbow Dash lowered her foreleg, the print of her hoof still firm against the back of my head.

        “That was the worst start to a story I’ve ever heard,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain.

        “You asked me to tell you a romantic story,” I said, rubbing the back of my skull. “So that’s what I was doing.”

        “I said romantic, not dumb.”

        I turned my eyes to the other pony in the bed. Twilight Sparkle’s frame took up more space than I was used to; she was sandwiched between me and Rainbow Dash, tucked under the silk blankets and looking at the both of us with an amused grin on her face. Her wings were the part I was still acclimating to; the bulges under the covers when she let them spread out took up more room than either myself or Dash on her other side could manage.

        “Twilight, was my story dumb?”

The sound of my voice didn’t carry very far in the room. The wooden walls soaked up most of the sound, and the relatively small size of the secret hide-away in Twilight’s house meant there was no room to echo. The lone window on the far wall shimmered as trickles of moonlight seeped through the glass, shining inside and illuminating the jet-black blankets and bits of the three bodies visible outside the bedding, myself included. The four posts at either corner of the bed twinkled with polish as the moonlight hit them.

     Twilight bit her bottom lip, and I could feel her trying to spare my feelings. Her restraint didn’t last long. To my relief she managed to avoid bursting into giggles, and instead settled for an awkward grin.

        “It was pretty dumb,” she said. I rolled my eyes.

        She was probably right.

        “I don’t get the appeal of a ‘romantic story’ anyway,” I said. “Or how I’d go about telling one in the first place.”

        I settled back into the bed and closed my eyes. The cushiony soft mattress was too easy to fall asleep into if I wasn’t careful, so I opened my eyes before my head sunk down into the collection of floofy pillows. The whole bed was a kind of secret paradise; tucked away in the attic of Twilight’s tree house (not to be confused with a treehouse), it was easy enough to feel, under the comfort of cloud-soft quilts and satin sheets, lying there with two smooth-fur bodies bedecked with delicate feathers, that if there was a deity with more power than Celestia, surely he, or she, must be very kind.

        “Don’t act like you’ve never heard a romantic story before,” Twilight said, a glimmer of playful disbelief in her voice. “Making a story romantic is not an impossible task. You just picked an... unpracticed way to start.”

        Dash and Twilight giggled as I rolled my eyes at them again and tucked my hands behind my head. The pillows were almost too comfy to resist, so I tried to use the firmness of my own palms against the fast-growing bruise on the back of my head to keep myself from their siren song.

        “That doesn’t cover my other problem. What’s the point of a romantic story in the first place? They’re so cliche. I’m sure you guys would enjoy something more interesting. If I’m stuck to storytelling duty, anyway.”

        Twilight scoffed at me.

“Romance is not cliche,” Twilight said. She took a moment to snuggle further into the quilts and up against my side in the process. I snuggled back at her in a noncommittal fashion, and Rainbow Dash did the same on her other side with a subtly panicked look in her eyes, as though she’d suddenly noticed Twilight and me moving closer and didn’t want to be left out.

        “Romance is the most wonderful thing there is. It’s the most powerful thing a story could ever be about,” Twilight said.

        “Just saying that doesn’t make it true,” I countered. Twilight glared at me and fluffed her wings under the blankets. I wiggled a little as I felt her feathers tickle along my side.

        “It is true though. Romance is something that makes every story more worthwhile.”

“And why is that?” I asked. Rainbow Dash’s hoof shot up on the opposite side of the bed like a filly eager to answer teacher’s question at school.

        “Ooh, ooh, I know,” she said. Twilight and I turned towards her with expectant eyes.

        “It’s because it makes the sex better,” she said matter-of-factly.

Twilight groaned, but I couldn’t hold back my grin. Rainbow Dash matched it with one of her own.

“No,” Twilight said, rubbing her hoof over the front of her face in an exasperated fashion, “it’s because it’s meaningful.”

“Why?” I said. I felt like I might be trying too hard to be difficult, but Twilight was always fun to tease. With the right amount of provocation, she got upset the most adorable way.

        “Because!” she said, the annoyance already creeping through her composure. Rainbow Dash and I shared a grin over her head.

        “It’s ‘cause no one wants to read a story just about doin’ it,” Dash said. “Anypony could write that. It’s only a really good story if the somepony loves somepony else, and they totally are like, all romance and things for each other, and stuff. Right, Twi’?”

        Twilight’s head looked like it was about to explode from exasperation. I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing.

        Rainbow Dash was less successful. Twilight’s deadpan glare brought out Dash’s laugh, and it was only through sheer willpower that I managed to keep composed. Twilight kept up the glower until Rainbow Dash eventually calmed down and wiped a fake tear from her eye.

        “Sorry, Twilight,” she said, her voice still brimming with left-over giggles. “What’s the real reason then?”

        Twilight waited for a moment until she was sure neither I nor Dash would interrupt. She cleared her throat and closed her eyes for a moment, as though she was reading an invisible script on the insides of her eyelids.

        “Romance is important because it’s something everypony can connect to,” she said. “It’s something that connects all of us with the universal nature of its beauty. Romance is what most ponies hope one day to find, and the thing that they’ll remember as something world-changing for the rest of their lives. It’s something that makes a story memorable, and keeps it in our minds and hearts forever.”

        Rainbow Dash looked appropriately stunned as Twilight’s monologue sunk in, but I wasn’t about to be quieted so quickly.

        “Can you give an example?” I asked, wondering how far I could push before Twilight snapped and used her newly-christened princess-ian magic to turn me into a parasprite. Twilight spared me a quick glare, but returned to her regular composure without hesitation.

        “Easy,” she said. “Romeo and Juliet. Everypony knows that story.”

        “Is it really called Romeo and Juliet here too?” I asked. The sensibilities of Human to Equestrian translation were lost on me sometimes, so I wanted to make sure I hadn’t misheard.

        Twilight nodded, and Rainbow Dash along with her.

        “Mhm-hmm,” Twilight said. “Romeo and Juliet; two star-crossed lovers in warring families, the Coltulets and the Maretegues. A play written by William Flankspeare.”

        I stilted my groan in favour of a beleaguered sounding sigh. I should have figured.

        “Right,” I said, “so everyone knows that story. But why is it romantic?”

        Twilight looked at me as though I’d asked why breathing air was important, but Rainbow Dash’s eyes brightened at my question.

        “It’s because they all die at the end,” she offered.

        “No,” said Twilight, her agitated tone already returning. “It’s because it’s about two ponies whose love was so great that even death couldn’t keep them from each other.”

        “I’m pretty sure it did,” I offered. “I don’t think after they were dead they got up and had romantic makeouts later on.”

        “That’s not what I mean!”

        “If both of them were dead, would that mean if they did it, they’d both be necrophiliacs?” Dash asked, placing her hoof on her chin in a ponderous fashion.

        Twilight’s glare threatened to melt both me and Rainbow Dash into puddles on the bed, so I quelled the laugh brewing in my throat and cleared it away with a small cough.

        “Alright, alright. I won’t give you a hard time about it. But I don’t see why that makes it a story worth reading, or remembering. Two people—ponies—were in love, they both died, the end. Who cares?”

        “Everyone cares!” Twilight said. Rainbow Dash, to my surprise, nodded along.

“Everypony knows that story,” she said. “We had to study it in school.”

“As one of the great examples of classic Romance,” Twilight added. “With a capital ‘R’.”

“Isn’t it just romantic because it’s these two fantastical, unbelievable figures in history? No one real could ever have a story that romantic.”

        “That’s not true,” Twilight said. “Romance happens all around us every day. It happens to ponies like me, or... well, not like you,” she said, stumbling as she looked over my long human limbs and bare chest, “but you get my point. Romance is something everypony dreams of to make their life worth living.”

“That’s a bit melodramatic,” I said, and Rainbow Dash nodded. Apparently she wasn’t sure whose side she was on yet.

“I don’t need something romantic to look forward to,” she offered. “Heck, I’m

happy if I wake up in the morning and somepony’s made breakfast.”

        Twilight had used the full extent of her arsenal of glares, so she settled on a worn-out eyeroll before settling back into the bed.

        “Alright, so tell me how to make a romantic story,” I prodded, leaning back again in a nonchalant fashion. Playing Devil’s advocate was already too much fun. “Convince me that romance is important, that it could happen to any...pony.” I couldn’t tell how mad at me Twilight was, but I figured that if she was going to freeze me in a block of ice or throw me out the window, she would have done so a long time ago.

        “Gladly,” she said with a sarcastic bite in her voice. I ignored it. She was way too much fun when she was mad.

        “Let’s pick a familiar setting...” she said. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the inviting tug toward sleep from the pillows underneath my back.

In a town called Ponyville, where nopony was ever sad or sorrowful for long, there were two ponies who were the exception to the rule. They were sad because they were two halves of the same heart that had never met, and each day was another ache for them to feel.

Nice start.

I dunno, it feels a bit much.

She’s setting the scene, dude.

  Will you two be quiet? Ahem.

The two ponies in Ponyville that yearned for each other had never met, which made their absence from each other all the more awful. They were two pieces of the same puzzle kept in different packaging; two sides of the same sphere that would fit together perfectly, if only they could meet.

This is what I mean about Romance being ridiculous. No real pers—pony—would ever talk like this about someone they cared about. They’d never be ‘two sides of the same sphere’.

Well you didn’t do a much better job!

        Why do you need the whole giant build up? Can’t the romance just happen?

No! Romance is bigger than something that just happens. Even if it’s for simple, everyday ponies, it’s still bigger than anything else in life. It needs composition.

What about love at first sight?

That doesn’t really happen.

        And why not? It sounds a lot more romantic to me than some giant build up to what essentially amounts to two ponies liking each other.

Yeah. You don’t need one-hundred-thirty-seven-thousand, seven-hundred-fifteen words of stuff to make something romantic. It can happen in like... less. Like a thousand, probably. Romantic is romantic. It’s special just ‘cause; it doesn’t need a lot of words or build-up.

        That’s an oddly arbitrary number.

It just kind of came to me.

 You two are missing the point. Okay, yes, you don’t need a ton of build up, but Romance is still bigger than just a thing. It’s a force that drives pony motivation and meaning throughout all of history!

Twilight’s eyes lit up, and she waved her hooves in the air like a conductor orchestrating the performance of his greatest symphony. The passion in her voice was palpable. I felt less of a need to be pithy and undermining, but not completely.

        “So just because something’s not historical, it’s not romantic?”

        Twilight squinted at me as though the light at the end of her metaphorical tunnel was me attempting to blind her with a high powered flashlight, instead of the salvationary interpretation she’d been looking for.

        “Well... yes, sort of. Romance doesn’t just happen every day. It’s more special than that.”

        I sat up from my pillow-cushioned lean and put my hand on the covers above Twilight. She squirmed a little at the proximity of my hand, but settled after a few seconds. Rainbow Dash looked down at my fingers like I’d use all five of them to insult her mother, and put her own hoof on her leg with a longing gleam in her eyes.

        “So when Rainbow Dash kissed you the other morning for making breakfast; that wasn’t romantic?”

        Twilight blushed, and Rainbow followed suit, though not as brightly.

        “It... well... I mean, it was nice, of course, but I don’t know that it was romantic...”

        “I disagree.”

I pulled my hand off Twilight’s lower body covers and folded my arms across my chest.

“I felt like that kiss was a lot more meaningful than a story about some tragic love affair that happened a thousand years ago.”

        Dash blushed harder, but Twilight ignored her. She kept her eyes locked on me.

        “Of course you did. That’s because it was happening to you, here, now. It was a very sweet kiss, but it’s nothing compared to the greatest romance ever written.”

        “But why is that? Why isn’t something that happens here and now more romantic?” I looked overtop of Twilight toward Rainbow Dash on the opposite side of the bed, and she jumped a little, as though my eyes had suddenly pricked her with a shock of static.

        “Rainbow Dash, which did you think was more romantic: Twilight waking you up for flight practice with a bagged lunch when you slept through your alarm, or somepony you never met killing themselves because their family didn’t like their girlfriend?”

        Rainbow Dash glowed beet red and rubbed a hoof behind her neck awkwardly.

        “Well... I mean... the first one, I guess. It was just really... sweet.” Dash turned her eyes towards Twilight, and the two of them smiled meekly at each other. Dash extended a hoof and rubbed it along Twilight’s leg through the covers, and Twilight shifted a little toward Dash’s side of the bed.

        “I don’t think romance is about stuff that happened throughout history. I think it’s about us, or anyone, as it happens, in a way that’s important to them,” I said.

        “I see where you’re coming from,” Twilight said, giving a tiny nod. “But that means you agree that it’s important?”

        “I guess I do. I think there’s a lot more romance in a single moment or a single kiss than there is in a long overblown story about an impossible love affair.        “

        “Kisses are hella romantic,” Dash agreed, bobbing her head in assent and rubbing Twilight’s leg in the same motion. Twilight squirmed underneath the covers against Dash’s touch, and I felt her hips wiggle up against me as she did so. I took the chance to sidle up closer to her.

        “I don’t think a kiss can be as romantic as an epic, world-changing historic relationship,” Twilight said.

I leaned over Twilight, put my hand on the back of her head, and kissed her.

I kissed her with a passion called up from months of affection; from

days of happy giggles and budding courtships and tiny smiles and little pecks on the cheek that had cemented me in her heart. I kissed her with a passion brewed in the ache I had felt when I first imagined my mouth on hers, and the way my heart had felt so strongly as though it might burst when I had first touched the softness of her lavender lips and heard the whisper of her murmuring as I stole her breath away. I kissed her suddenly, without warning, and she kissed me back, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

We kissed like youthful sparks. We kissed like movie stars. We kissed like lovers. We kissed like worlds ending. We kissed like the final bloom of a centuries old flower that upturned the earth to deliver the last brightness of its petals to the world before fading into memory.

To put it simply: we kissed. It felt nice.

“Hey!”

Rainbow Dash ‘s tomboy voice yanked me away like gravel in the engine of a machine, and I pulled myself away. I felt the tingle of Twilight’s lips carried away in my own as I drew my head back, and the shiver of her body as our mouths separated.

“Kissing doesn’t need to be way overdone to be romantic,” Dash said, audible agitation in her voice. “Simple kisses can be romantic too.”

I nodded, and leaned over Twilight’s body in Rainbow Dash’s direction.

“You’re right,” I said. I kissed her, a quick one, on the nose, and she blushed.

        “They can be tiny,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek. I felt her eyelashes flutter against my skin as she blinked.

        “They can be plain,” I said, and kissed her on the side of her neck, just next to her chin, and heard the rustle of her leg under the covers as she twitched.

        “And they can have all the meaning in the world just at once.” I kissed her on the mouth, and she moaned. I felt her lips part, and the breath of her enjoyment crept into my mouth, so tangible I could almost taste it.

        “You can even be romantic without kisses,” I said. I raised my hand over Twilight’s body and let it rest on Rainbow Dash’s shoulder, pressing my fingertips down softly into the warmth of her fur. She squirmed into my touch, and I traced my fingers along her body, drawing circles on her cyan coat.

        “Romance, I think, is everywhere.” I lowered my mouth to Dash’s neck again, and sucked lightly, drawing out another needy moan into the moonlit quiet of the attic. “It’s in everything there is to find about someone you love.”

        I slid my hand down Rainbow’s back and felt for the base of her wings. The moment I touched the tensed muscle and bone joining her feathered appendages to her body, she squealed, and ground her hips up into the air, arching her back towards me but meeting nothing for the moment.

        “It’s in the little squeaks that you might make at your lover’s touch.” I kneaded Dash’s wing muscles, and she squirmed even more on my fingertips.

        “Or, in the way someone you adore loses their voice when you touch them somewhere special, just here.”

        Dash’s moan cut off into nothing as I kissed her just below the base of her ear, and her entire body went rigid, as though she was suddenly paralyzed by the focus of my affection.

        I felt the covers shift underneath me as Twilight pulled herself out from underneath the blankets. The air rustled softly as she unfurled her wings, letting them stretch out from her back like a body-worn crown of her princess-hood.

        “I think you’re right,” she said. She stood beside me and nudged me softly in the shoulder with the side of her head, and I shifted to allow her room to lie back down above the blanket. I moved myself to the right, but kept a hand on Dash’s body, tracing it from the base of her wings along her side and letting it rest on the softness of her stomach.

        Twilight held her legs to either side for me, and I leaned over her as my right hand touched her, starting at her chest and walking down towards her tummy, then even lower, past her waist and in between her legs.

        “Maybe Romance comes in all kinds of different—f-forms...” Twilight’s stuttered slightly as my fingers found her wetness. I slid my palm along the slickness of her sex, and she squirmed, almost thrashed, as I caressed her. I could feel the eager insistence in her movement even from just a simple touch. I touched her there for a while longer before I withdrew my hand, dripping wet. I tucked a thumb in the waistband of my boxers and slid them down, kicking them off my feet and letting them fall beside the bed before I moved, and held myself overtop of Twilight.

        “It can be historical, and beautiful...” Twilight held her breath as I kneeled over top of her and leaned forward, letting my elbows and forearms hold my weight on the slickness of the silk bedding.

        “Or it can be simple, and elegant... just like – that!”

        I pushed forward, and slid inside her. She gasped. Her mouth hung open for a moment until I pulled back.

        “Just like that,” I repeated, and slid forward again. Twilight clenched around me. She clung to me like she didn’t want me to move. She wrapped her legs around my waist and held me there for a minute.

I could hear her heart beating. She pressed her ear to my chest, and I could see her listening as she closed her eyes. I held myself there, wrapped in warm and soft and sublime ecstasy for a minute or two, before Twilight pulled her head from my chest and opened her eyes.

        I nodded to her, and we kissed. My hips moved back. Hers tried to follow, but let me out after a few seconds.

        When I pushed in again, she moved with me.

        “Mmmm...” The only sound aside the joining of our bodies. Her mouth locked with mine.

        The two of us stayed in motion like that, the count of my hips back and forth lost in the haze of our friction and delicate nerves. Twilight kept her legs wrapped around me, and we moved in tandem, Twilight breaking our kiss to hold herself against my chest, whimpering and quivering with a soft, intoxicating weakness to her voice that tested my restraint. I put my hands on her shoulders and rubbed the softness of her feathers as her wings flared out along her back and pressed against the bed.

        A hoof prodding me on my shoulder drew my head to the side.

“Romance doesn’t have to be romantic,” Dash said. She stood up on her hind legs and walked towards me, her eyes shimmering with want, and her hooves pointing pleadingly between her legs.

“Sometimes it’s in something base, or vulgar... something you’d never... tell

anyone,” I said between breaths as I extended my hand. Rainbow Dash took it between her hooves and guided it downward, pressing my knuckles against her cobalt coat and dragging them downwards until the texture of her fur changed from dry to damp. I turned my hand and let Dash pull slightly forward. She sighed as my fingers found their mark, and I curled them upwards against the moisture of her entrance.

        “Something you share only between you and someone you love,” I said, and Dash fell forward, letting her forelegs rest on my back. I turned my head upwards towards hers, and she let her lips find mine, and kissed me wantonly, her tongue invading my mouth and dancing like a softly flowing ribbon caught in the wind. I moved as she kissed me, my hand rubbing in circles on the hard nub of flesh at the top of her slit, my hips rocking back and forth as Twilight moaned and met my movement.

The three of us shook back and forth to the beckoning of our pleasure, our bodies aching for each other, wishing and wanting and having but still needing more. I felt the heat of Dash’s grinding against my palm, and the velvet caress of Twilight’s folds as she welcomed me inside again, swallowing me every time I moved forward, her legs locked around my back.

        There was an ache inside me. It was a pain that was borne of something beautiful, like a cry waiting to be let out in the hopes that someone might hear and howl back, and I let me know that I wasn’t not alone.

        But I wasn’t not alone. I was a part of a whole.

        I pried myself away from Dash’s kiss and increased the vigor of my fingers. My thrusts became stronger as Twilight thrashed underneath me, her voice long since lost in her throes of pleasure. Dash was the same, the timber of her moaning the only thing to set her voice apart in the sea of vowels trapped inside the moonlit wooden-walled room.

        I felt a pressure, and the press of both bodies against me showed me I wasn’t alone. At once. Our hearts were beating together.

        I leaned forward suddenly but kept my hand in place. My hips moved with purpose, and found a special placement, and my lips found Twilight’s, and we kissed.

        “Mmhmmmmmmm....”

        She moaned, long and low, into my mouth, and her wings flapped in futile arousal as her body shuddered, and I felt the urgency of her climax in the way her back arched, and her hips slammed upwards, and her moan doubled in strength and drowned my tongue with its force, and suddenly I felt close.

        I moved myself away before I could fall apart, and Dash closed her eyes and kissed me with the emphatic force she knew I was searching for.

        “Ah–”

        Her voice caught for a moment before I pressed down and felt her beneath my fingertips, a single bump hard and twitching, and her whole body went stiff, and then suddenly loose at the same moment.

        “Mmmf!”

        Her sound was succinct, and she let it stop as her volume peaked, content to let herself go. She came, and her legs clenched around my hand. She shuddered, and I felt her orgasm rush through her by proxy of my touch. She shivered, and my fingers felt wetter, and then she relaxed, completely, and fell backwards, suddenly loosening her grip on my hand with a move of her legs.

        But she sprung up after only a few seconds, like a runner out of bed on a marathon morning, and threw herself towards me, and Twilight did the same. Dash’s hooves traced down my chest and touched my base, below my waist, the part of me not quite enveloped by Twilight, and Twilight shoved herself towards me, hard, and I was inside her almost all the way but for the touch of Dash’s hoof as she ran it along my skin and then underneath, reaching toward the part of me that didn’t go inside, and touching, caressing, fondling, and coaxing the last vestige of my restraint out.

        I let out a soft groan, and simply, just like that, emptied myself. Dash and Twilight moaned like a chorus as they felt me twitch, and I was gone, and both of them were gone with me. Twilight held me inside for a minute before my strength left, and I fell forward, landing on one side of Twilight, and Dash on the other.

        The three of us lay there, panting, until we managed to catch our breath.

        Twilight lifted herself up off the bed first, and Rainbow Dash followed shortly thereafter. The two of them stood out of the way as I pulled back the covers. They snuggled against the sheets and rested their heads against the pillows, and I pulled the blankets back, and wrapped all us in their warm, comforting softness.

        “That was good,” Twilight said from the middle of the bed. Her sentence tapered off as she let her head rest against her pillow.

        “Really good,” said Dash. She grabbed a hoof-full of blankets and tucked them up under her chin, snuggling against them like a filly with a teddy-bear.

        “It was...” I said, taking a deep breath as I nestled against my pillow, “... very romantic.”

        Twilight and Dash beamed at me, the latter with her eyes closed.

        “And fun,” Dash said with her eyes closed, still grinning.

        “Mrow,” I said, and grinned back at her.

        “I don’t know if that counted as romantic,” Twilight said, already nestling into the cushiony mattress. Her horn glowed for a moment, a bright shimmer of violet amidst the silver of the moonlight, and the candles in the corners of the attic flickered out, leaving the room in darkness. The only I could hear was the soft breathing of the two bodies next to me.

        “Actually,” I said, “I think it was. I think that was the whole point.

        “The whole point of romance—as you pointed out, Twilight—is to give us something to hope for. But I don’t think it needs to be an aspiration to some big, grand idea or notion of what’s ‘romantic’. I also don’t think it needs to be loftier than what simply is. The historical notion of romance doesn’t supercede the immediate one. In fact, it’s kind of less important.”

        Rainbow Dash opened her eyes to blink at me. She turned her head towards Twilight, then to me, then back to Twilight.

        “Do you understand what he’s saying?”

        Twilight giggled. I saw her hold her hoof up to her mouth, my eyes having begun to adjust to the darkness.

        “I think so,” she said, the brightness of her laugh still lingering in her words. “He’s saying that personal relevance is more important than aspirational relevance.”

        “Zuh?”

        Twilight gave a shrug that looked like it was accompanied by an eye-roll.

        “What matters to you from moment to moment is more important than what matters in the big picture, because those little moments make up the big picture. Does that make sense?”

        Even without seeing in her eyes, I could feel the light of understanding creep into Dash’s head.

        “Oh. I think so.”

        I propped myself back with my hands behind my head again, and stared across the bed at the two ponies lying next to me.

        “The stories we hear about love and passion and romance—with a capital ‘R’—” I say, “are nice because they let us hope that there’s something greater than what we see in front of us... but we don’t really need that. There’s romance in everything. It’s in feather touches, and soft smiles, and hand holding and opened doors and giggles and frowns and the moment you remember that means more to you than anything, even if it was just another minute in an ordinary day.

        “You don’t need something unbelievable to be romantic. Sometimes, just having something is enough.”

        A few seconds of silence passed before Rainbow’s mouth opened up wide. She yawned in an exaggerated fashion and grabbed a bundle of blankets, which she pulled up to her chin as she closed her eyes.

        “Alright, I think I get it. All this philosophy talk is putting me to sleep though. You eggheads can yak about it some more if you want, but I’m gonna get some shut eye.”

        Twilight and I shared a glance overtop of Rainbow Dash, daring each other to keep going, but reaching a mutual agreement with only our dimmed eye sight to keep quiet. Both of us smiled as we lied down properly, me on my side, staring across the bed, and Twilight on her back, her eyes toward the ceiling before she closed them. A beam of moonlight hit her, and her horn shimmered. She looked just like a princess.

        There was more I could have said. A few errant thoughts that were still tumbling around in the back of my head that I’m sure Twilight would have discussed with me. But that was okay. There wasn’t really more that needed to be said. Nothing essential, anyway.

Besides; I wouldn’t want to ruin such a romantic moment.