Grief is the Price We Pay

by Scyphi


Staying

Spike arrived at the closed door of their room and saw the sign hung on the outside alerting that Thorax was inside, practicing magic. Realizing now might not be a good time to interrupt, Spike cautiously rapped on the door. “Uh, Thorax?” he called. “I wanted to come in and check something in our supplies real quick.”

There was a momentary pause before the changeling within gave any sort of response. “Well okay, but uh, now might not be the best of times…” Thorax finally called back. “Can you maybe…give me a moment to sort out this spell I’m currently working on?”

Spike rolled his eyes and proceeded to open the door and let himself in. “It should only take me just a second, that shouldn’t be long enough to—YIPE!”

With a yelp, his feet slid out from under him and as Spike found himself sliding across the floor on his back, he saw the floor of the room had been turned into a flat sheet of perfectly smooth, and thus very slippery, ice.

“I warned you,” Thorax remarked as he slid past him, sat on his rump with a magic textbook levitated before him while he urgently looked through the words printed upon it.

“All right, what did you do now?” Spike relented in asking as he tried to push himself back up onto his feet, only to have them slip out from under him again.

“I’m not even sure, the spell wasn’t supposed to do any of this,” Thorax admitted, frowning as he didn’t find what he was looking for and started flipping through the pages of his book while he bodily bounced off the far left wall of the room like a pinball and proceeded to slide back across the room once more.

Spike, using the nearby window seat as a handhold to lever himself up to his feet again, looked at Thorax. “Flip to the back of the book,” he urged. “There should be an index of things to try in the event of a malformed spell getting cast.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Thorax asked, lazily pivoting around in circles as he slid past the dragon again, skimming through the instructions listed in the back of the book. He shrugged to himself as he did so. “Well, at least this mishap’s kind of fun,” he admitted.

“Fun?” Spike repeated with an amused snort, running in place for a second as his feet threatened to slip out from under him again. “How you see an accident like this as—”

“I think I got it!” Thorax suddenly exclaimed as he lit his horn once more in time to bounce off the rightmost wall of the room.

At the same time, he fired off the new spell with a boom of cyan magic, creating a spherical shockwave that washed across the room. Boosted by the blast, Thorax slid backwards back across the room on the ice, almost riding the shockwave as it restored the ice back into wooden floor behind him. Spike, letting go of the window seat for a second to test his balance, lost it one last time as the shockwave washed over him and he found himself unprepared for the ice to suddenly vanish under his feet. It reached the other side of the room in time for Thorax’s back to thump loudly into the leftmost wall of the room, any further sliding immediately stopped as the last of the ice vanished.

A beat of silence fell, but then Thorax stood back up and shook his undisguised body. “Well, that’s settled that,” he remarked.

“Okay, Thorax, no offense?” Spike said, also picking himself up and strolling across the room, back on track for his original goal. “I get you’re enjoying toying with magic and that’s great and all, but it is a little frustrating putting up with the mix-ups that come along with it. I can never quite know what I’m going to find when I walk in here anymore.”

Thorax looked sheepishly at the floor. “Sorry, I’m not trying to be disruptive,” he apologized. He grinned though. “So tell you what then, we’ll compromise. I have been working on magic a lot for the past couple of weeks now…so I’ll stop putting quite as much focus on it, and work on it more occasionally. Would that help?”

Spike grinned a little as he arrived where they had been stashing their growing collection of travel supplies in the room’s wardrobe. “Yeah, it would if you won’t mind.”

Thorax nodded. “Then consider it done. I’ve expanded my repertoire of spells fairly considerably already anyway.” He levitated his notes over to himself and peered at the changeling letters he had jotted down on them. “Just let me finish working out this one spell I’m trying to somehow figure out and I’ll call it a day, promise.”

“Sounds good,” Spike said as he poked his head into the wardrobe to take count of their food stock and other supplies they needed for their planned departure out of the country. They had amassed a fair bit. “You know, it looks like we’ve got enough food that we could skip going to go out today to get more,” he said aloud as he pulled out their list of things they needed, still on the original piece of wood Spike had first written it on two moons earlier on the floor of an abandoned warehouse. “We don’t want too much after all, or it’s just going to weigh us down when we travel to our next destination.”

Thorax laughed as he studied his notes, comparing them to what was written in his textbook while pausing briefly to make a minor change. “I suppose not,” he admitted. “It would be rather hard to try and outrun the royal guards when bogged down with junk, wouldn’t it?” Spike, having finished his run-through of the list, suddenly paused, his eyebrows going up in surprise and didn’t seem to hear Thorax. Thorax didn’t notice and kept talking. “Though that is kind of amusing to picture…us two struggling to race for the border, weighed down with comically overfull bags while the guards leisurely stroll up to us to arrest us…ha!” He grinned to himself for a second before noticing Spike didn’t seem to be sharing his amusement. “Spike?” he asked, glancing over at the dragon. “What, you don’t think that’s funny?”

Spike didn’t reply for a moment, but he finally turned to face Thorax, numbly raising the wooden board that served as their checklist. “We have everything, Thorax,” he announced simply. “Everything we planned to get in preparation for leaving Equestria…we’ve got it.”

Thorax went silent, feeling a chill run down his back as realization and implications set in. “…oh,” he replied simply.

Spike looked down at the list again, studying it for a moment, as if double-checking to make sure he hadn’t missed something. “…so I guess we’re ready to leave Equestria now.”

Thorax set down his notes and fidgeted with his front hooves. “I guess…” he said quietly, not sounding excited about it.

Spike suddenly rose. “We need to start gearing up to go then,” he deduced, starting to pace. Realizing he had never closed the door to their room fully when he had first entered due to sliding around on the icy floor at the time, he ensured it was fully latched now to secure their privacy. “Packing up, planning when to leave, what route to take…”

“…what to tell Miss Fly…” Thorax added glumly.

Spike nodded to himself, not really listening. “…we’ll also need to make sure we cover our trail…get rid of any final evidence we were ever here in Vanhoover before we go.” He blinked. “Speaking of, we haven’t really settled on a final destination to go to, have we? Not that we have many options…there aren’t many discovered lands outside of Equestria, really…I guess either Griffonstone or the dragon realms since they’re the closest…I suppose we could consider Maretonia, but I really doubt we’d have any more luck fitting in there than—”

“…I don’t want to go, Spike.”

Spike paused in his pacing and, surprised at the statement, turned to look at his changeling friend. Seeing he had the dragon’s full attention, Thorax took a deep breath and began his confession. “I like it here. I like working here. I like Fly Leaf. She doesn’t suspect anything, and she trusts us, and actively looks out for us. We’re not in immediate danger anymore, and we’ve proven we can safely mingle with the populace without fear of discovery several times over now…I don’t want to go, Spike. I want to stay here.”

Spike blinked several times to himself as he processed this. “It’s not smart to stay here,” he pointed out. “So long as that banishment remains in action upon us, it’s in fact illegal for us to stay anywhere within Equestrian borders, and Vanhoover applies to that. If the right pony finds any hint that we’re here…”

“But no pony has! The whole of the crystal guard came down here looking for us, and they weren’t even able to find us!”

“That doesn’t mean we should be complacent and let our guard down!”

“I’m not saying we should! I just…would rather do it staying here…don’t you?”

Spike opened and closed his mouth several times as he worked to reply. Finally, he hung his head. “Yeah…I do,” he admitted. “I like it here, and I like working here too. And I also like Fly Leaf. She’s been not just a good boss but she’s also become a good friend, despite everything.” He shook his head. “And I said it before, we were very lucky to find this place. We’ve got a good place to live and a good job to support us…everything we need readily accessible or provided for us…and there is a part of me that fears we’re never going to find another deal like this anyplace else, especially wherever it is we’d end up next.” He frowned. “But we can’t stay, Thorax. Fly Leaf only lets us because she doesn’t know the truth, especially about you. And Equestria has made it clear to us it doesn’t want changelings here.”

“We have no guarantees a changeling would be accepted anywhere else too,” Thorax pointed out.

“Ember would accept us,” Spike stated confidently, then added by way of explanation, “she’s the Dragon Lord of the dragons, and a friend.” When Thorax continued to give him a non-confident gaze, he relented. “Well, she’d at least give us the benefit of a doubt, and she’d use her rank to chase away all the dragons that’ll…probably disagree.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a life, Spike.” Thorax fidgeted with his hooves some more. “Besides…the Changeling Kingdom has had contact with the Dragon Lands before even reaching Equestria…and even though it’s been a decade or two since, sufficeth to say…we traditionally haven’t been on good terms.”

Spike looked at Thorax glumly for a moment, knowing he had a point but not wanting to concede to it yet. “We aren’t anymore safe here, Thorax. We’re potentially endangering ourselves the longer we stay here, honestly. What good is there staying here?”

“It’s home,” Thorax stated simply. “And I’m happy here. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. It’s a wonderful little life we’ve built here. It may not be glamorous…but I’ve never had a better life than what we have right here, right now. Balani, it’s certainly a better life than what I was living back in the hive. And I feel safe here. At peace.” He grinned sadly. “Even with the knowledge I’m living a life in hiding, in constant fear of being discovered…I’m at peace here. And I know you do too.” He titled his head at the dragon. “Can you really promise me that we can find all of that just as well somewhere else? Can you really promise me we’d be any safer there than we are here?

Spike didn’t answer, hanging his head as he let himself fall to the floor, landing on his rump with a dejected thud.

“Besides…” Thorax continued. “…what would we tell Fly Leaf?”

Spike sighed, rubbing his eyes with his claws. He had been wondering that himself. And the fact of the matter was that…he had no answer. Nor could he promise any greater safety if they were to leave than what they had here. It all depended on if wherever they would end up was more willing to accept a changeling than Equestria was. And the thought that he couldn’t shake from his head now was…if you couldn’t find acceptance in Equestria, renowned for it…where could you find it?

“Please Spike?” Thorax continued to plea. “Can’t we stay?”

Spike glanced up Thorax, studying his friend. But all he had to do was see the changeling’s solid blue eyes and see he was being utterly genuine. He really didn’t want to leave Vanhoover, and wanted desperately to stay. He was dismayed by the very thought of having to leave. And as much as Spike wanted to put on the brave face and pretend to be the logical one…he knew he felt the same, and that such feelings weren’t buried very deep in him either. He had already been ripped away from life as he knew it once before when he followed Thorax into banishment…he didn’t really want to do it again.

Spike sighed one more time, and then nodded his head, surrendering. “On one condition,” he stipulated. “At the first sign of clear danger, if it ever comes, we flee the area immediately the first chance we get. Without hesitation.”

Thorax nodded. “Agreed.”

A beat passed between them. “I guess that’s that, then,” Spike concluded, shrugging his shoulders before standing. “We’re staying.”

Thorax nodded again. “We’re staying,” he repeated in confirmation.

A long moment of silence passed as the two let the significance of this decision sink in. They both knew the ramifications of it, still dancing at the edges of their minds, taunting them. Yet neither of them voiced further objections to this choice, and gradually the weight of apprehension that had settled on them upon discovering they had prepared sufficiently to leave started to rise again. Spike looked at the wooden board with their list written on it still in his claws. He didn’t know if this was really the smarter choice for them to make. It probably wasn’t. But…it still felt better than the alternative. Silently, while Thorax quietly engrossed himself with his textbook and notes again, Spike walked back to the wardrobe he had left open and set their list back inside. He gazed at all the supplies and items they had gathered for their formerly planned journey stashed inside for another moment.

He then closed the wardrobe door.