Twilight slowly exhaled, feeling a pleasant tingle in her chest as a thin cloud of red smoke streamed into the infinite cerulean ocean of the sky. The grass was cool against her back and the sun warm on her belly, and a gentle breeze caressed her, carrying the scent of apples uphill from the distant orchards. Pinkie giggled from her left, and a muscular purple claw reached over from her right to pluck the joint from her horngrip.
"Gotta say, this tastes awfully bitter," Spike's mellow, deep voice said, and she saw his barrel-sized chest inflate out of the corner of her eye as he sucked in a robust lungful. He was looking damn good at one-and-a-half times her size.
"Well, you know," Twilight said, taking the joint back. "Preservatives. Extremely unhealthy, but really, all that does is cancel out some of the smoke."
"It is a weensy bit disrespectful," Pinkie said, "but on the other hoof, it does let you extend the party as long as you want." She reached for the joint.
A thought filtered through the increasing muddle of Twilight's contented thoughts, and she pulled the joint back. "Hooooold on. Speaking of unhealthy. You're a pony."
Pinkie giggled, loud and long, and when Twilight glanced back away from her face, the joint was missing. She looked back at Pinkie and the joint was in her mouth, embers flaring bright red at the tip.
"Silly filly," Pinkie said when she finally exhaled, shadow-images of eldritch forms cavorting in the smoke rising from her mouth. "You know better than that."
Twilight caught Pinkie's gaze for a moment, and there were worlds behind her eyes, in a void dark and vast and cold and empty. Twilight blinked, and the moment was gone, and the sun was warm and the sky was bright.
"… I … um … guess I do?" Twilight said. "I mean. Right. There was that one time with Pinkie Sense, um. I wrote a friendship letter and everything." The moment lingered awkwardly, so she made a dramatic sweeping gesture with a hoof, watching smoke curl around her pastern, lowering her voice to whisper dramatically. "The world is full of things beyond understanding," she pronounced, and felt a little better.
"That's so deep," Spike murmured. Twilight giggled and relaxed. His voice was so deep. That was so perfect.
She passed him the joint. He sucked in another big lungful, marred by a cough that spewed a thin red cloud out. "It reminds me of a thing I read in the funeral book on the kitchen table. What was it? Something something let the world be as it is?" He waved his claw vaguely in the air, the joint trailing a line of smoke, and Twilight plucked the joint away with her magic.
"But we must be humble and allow the world to come to us as it is," Pinkie quoted, voice distant.
"Yeah —"
Pinkie continued on as if Spike hadn't spoken. "It is in convincing ourselves we know the shape of each thing that we lose sight of the shape of everything."
Spike was silent for a moment.
"Oh," he said. "I didn't think … uh. That might have been it, I guess? Twilight, was that what the book said?"
Twilight took another long drag and exhaled, trying to blow a smoke ring like Celestia's. It came out as a messy solid cloud, and she stuck her tongue out at the smoke. "You tell me. I've been too busy with this ash thing to finish my preliminary review of the new arrivals."
Pinkie giggled. "Really, Twilight, not reading? Seriously?"
"I know, right?" Twilight said, and that sent her into a wheezing fit of laughter at the funniest thing in the whole damn world. "You know, Chrysalis, I'm not even mad," she lectured herself in between gasps. "I've got enough for four."
Pinkie collapsed into gales of helpless laughter with her. Spike stayed silent.
"… You're not?" Spike said as Twilight caught her breath. "You do?"
Twilight opened and closed her mouth, and finally decided she felt too damn good to spoil the moment. Ah, buck it, she thought, and offered him the joint.
Spike stared at it, then at her. "Ah, buck it," he said in a suddenly husky feminine voice, and a blast of green fire wreathed his form. The changeling queen crooked a leg-hole around the joint, drew it to her mouth, and took a long drag. "It's this or leave. Any minute now, he's going to start looking for you."
"Actually, that looks like Spike coming up the hill," Pinkie said.
Twilight giggled. "The universe is so much on your wavelength right now," she whispered to Chrysalis.
The two of them hoofbumped and stared at the sky together. And all was right with the world.