//------------------------------// // Chapter 27 // Story: The Perilous Gestation of Swans // by kudzuhaiku //------------------------------// Coming round the corner, Gosling happened upon a troubling sight. Not long before, he had gone racing past in a chariot, and he had seen a flash of blue out of the corner of his eye. Something about it had compelled him, it had seized his attention, and now, he had to see if Luna was okay. She was sitting on the floor, which was kind of unusual for her to do in such a public space, but it was also how she was sitting on the floor. Her legs were kicked out in a haphazard manner, her posture was awful, and her wings were limp against her sides. She sat staring up at a stained glass window that showed Nightmare Moon’s defeat and Luna’s subsequent rebirth as a filly. While he approached with caution, he too found himself staring at the coloured glass representations of both Nightmare Moon and Luna. She did not look at him during his approach, but she did sigh. “We art a liar,” Luna said to Gosling as he sat down beside her. “Okay, what is bothering you now.” Feeling warm and snug in his sweater, he scooted a little closer to the mare beside him, approaching her as one might approach a cactus. He was tired, but in a good way, and felt accomplished. Turning his head, he tried to study Luna’s face, but suffered from a form of expressional-dyslexia of a sort. Whatever language Luna’s face was written in was now a jumble. Reaching out a foreleg, Gosling tried to place it over Luna’s withers, but she pulled away. He persisted, understanding how this game was played, and she squirmed even harder beneath his touch. Feeling somewhat annoyed, he made his feelings known: “I won’t stop until you tell me no.” A wordless whine slipped from Luna’s lips and she plot-walked away from Gosling, using her powerful butt muscles to scooch away. Undaunted, Gosling followed after in a slow motion plot-wiggling pursuit that contained a lot of flexing, wiggly-jiggly, rippling buttocks. The absurdity of it all would have been amusing if Luna wasn’t so depressed. “We don’t like telling you no,” Luna whined while she wiggled away and her dock wagged from side to side with her efforts. “We feel guilty—” “Fine then, I’m hugging you.” Redoubling his efforts, he hooked his foreleg around the delicate crook of Luna’s neck, the soft curve where it met her withers. She resisted, of course she did, but he understood that in this particular instance, she wanted to be held, but she couldn’t just come right out and say it. She wiggled and squirmed a bit more, then went still. When the fight seemed gone, he pulled her close, and then just sat there, trying to be her friend. “Let Us go.” “Tell me no.” “Sometimes, you are loathsome.” “And if you would just say no, I would let go of you. You know the rules by now.” Not caring that she would be angry, he squeezed a little tighter, hard enough that he could now feel her heart thump-bump-bumping away beneath her ribs. “I am forced to operate under the assumption that you want to be cuddled and held. There is no way I can physically overpower you, because you could crush me without effort. The only clear way for me to understand that you don’t want to be held, cuddled, or snuggled is for you to say no to me. We worked this out with Cadance and you agreed to it. So, tell me no.” “Nyah,” Luna whined, and she pulled her head away. “That wasn’t a no.” “We are upset. We are having a moment. We are unhappy right now.” That much was obvious to Gosling. He glanced up at the stained glass window, looked at the rainbow beams coming off of the Elements of Harmony, and with dread, his eyes focused upon the terrible black form of Nightmare Moon. Not that long ago, he feared that he had lost his friend to the Nightmare once more. He was still troubled, even though he had tried to avoid thinking about it. “What’s bothering you?” Gosling asked. “Mine sister,” Luna replied. “Did you bicker?” “Not recently.” “How far back are we talking?” “A very long time indeed.” Sighing, Gosling prepared for a history lesson, and he pulled Luna a little closer. She did not resist, so he figured that she was warming up to him. Or was at least accepting his attempt to comfort her. She wasn’t so different from any other pony, really, but she had a hard, hard time with affection. Luna was the end result of her cutie marks: on one side, the moon was waning, and on the other, waxing. Her moods, ever mercurial, wreaked havoc upon her mind. Gosling had sympathy for her—something that was almost pity—but he kept his feelings to himself, never revealing them to Luna, because then she would be angry. Destiny, fate, whatever one chose to call it, had not been kind to Luna, and she was the victim of her mark. Gosling was thankful that his mark wasn’t complicated; a rubber duckie was an easy mark to live with, with no conceivable complications waiting to manifest. When Gosling became aware of the silence, he knew that Luna would not make this easy, and he was going to have to struggle to get the words out of her. So be it. “What set you off?” he asked while he continued to examine the stained glass. “Mine sister was a brat,” Luna replied, and her lower lip began to protrude in a foalish sort of way. “Even worse, she was a prophetic brat. She knew.” “I don’t follow. Look, Luna, I can’t read minds. You have to start filling me in on these things you say, otherwise, I can’t help you.” For a brief second, Luna trembled, and she appeared to have bitten into a lemon. Patient, Gosling waited, showing remarkable forbearance for a colt his age. Luna wasn’t talking—she was just sitting there making faces—and he tried to think of all of the things that Cadance had suggested that he do to batter down Luna’s impenetrable walls. His blue wife lived in a secluded, near-impervious fortress, and if he wanted to visit, he had to find his own way in. “Say, you wanna go have some freaky, angry circus sex?” Gosling asked. “We could dress up in animal costumes.” It took Luna at least ten full seconds to process what had been said, and the entire time she did amazing facial gymnastics while his words burrowed into her brain. When at last they reached the center of her mind, she reacted: “NO!” she cried in disgust. “Well then, start talking.” “We shall talk on our own terms—” “Circus sex,” Gosling said in the most sultry, threatening voice he could muster. “Stain! Mine sister called me... Stain! She was just so.. so… mean!” Luna’s voice was strained, and her eyes glimmered with the tears she struggled to hold in. “She was right, just like she is always right! I was a stain, and the stain overtook me.” Ears perking, Gosling took notice of Luna’s language patterns falling apart. She was leaning against him now, shaking, and he could hear the wind almost whistling in her nostrils. Turning his head, he dared to look at her, even though he knew that this might be what set her off. It was a risk he had to take. “It haunts me, even now. Her words… how they came true. Right now, We are obsessing over them, I can hear them in mine ears, and I can hear echoes of her mocking laughter. She was dreadful! Dreadful!” Luna began to sniffle, and then, with a shrill whinnying whine, she slumped over against Gosling. The sudden shift of her weight almost drove him to the floor, and his eyes bulged as he strained to remain upright. He almost said something, but swallowed the words, as he knew nothing of siblings, and it would be a real strain to say anything anyway with all of the weight bearing down upon him. Whatever he might have said would have been patronising, and that was a surefire way to drive Luna to wrath. It was something he had to avoid at all costs if he ever hoped to have any chance of getting through to her. “You would dress up in animal costumes to please me?” Luna asked in a cracking whisper. “Well… I guess… maybe?” Gosling responded, taken aback by Luna’s question. He shifted his body so he could draw breath a little easier, and then gulped in some much needed air. “A lot of ponies dream about that you know… there are so many that long to be something else… like me. I am not comfortable in mine own skin. There are times I long to be something else. Something not me. These dreams, they fascinate me, and I enjoy entering them.” The raw vulnerability in Luna’s words tugged on his heartstrings, and Gosling waited to hear more. She was heavy against him, warm, and he found himself looking into her eyes. He secured his grip around her, needing her closer. He was a colt, she was a mare, and he needed possession of her. Without even realising it, he slipped from gentle comforter to a more aggressive something else. Whatever he had become, it wasn’t defined, but he liked it, he liked the feeling, and he reveled in it. She offered no resistance now, and he was free to cuddle without consequence. “We get troubled… I get troubled… sometimes, these memories, they lodge themselves in mine mind like slivers, and I cannot pull them out. I tried once, I tried to remove these painful memories, and there were consequences. I do not understand the how, nor the why, but as I tried to cure mineself of this dreadful condition of memory, the stench of ink flooded mine nostrils, and everything I tried to remove, everything I tried to correct, it came back in a flood and overwhelmed me.” “That’s a little weird.” Gosling pressed his muzzle against Luna’s neck. He felt the whole of her body tense, she jerked in his embrace, and when he began to rub his snoot up and down against the slender curve of her neck, she made a soft mewling sound that was unfamiliar to him. After a moment, she relaxed a bit, and he felt one of her forelegs slipping around his neck. “I wish to love mine sister.” Luna’s whispered confession made Gosling’s ear twitch. “I want so very much to love her the way she loves me now. But these memories… me… I still hate mineself too much to be able to love her… or anypony… I’m sorry, Gosling.” His foreleg slipped from her neck, down her withers, caressed a wing on its way down, and slid along her knobby spine that was buried beneath the most luxurious blue velvet. When he reached her soft, supple middle, just below her ribs and just above her hips, he squeezed, pulling her close, and he pressed the pad of his snoot deeper into the flesh of her neck. She was intoxicating. “If you want me right now, We will not say no,” Luna whispered. “We would lay with you willingly and allow you to vent your frustrations upon Us. It would be a purely physical act. I could give you my body, but I am not yet willing to give you my mind. We are sorry.” Gosling was tempted—of course he was—but he had faced temptation before and survived it. Still, he lingered, and with his teeth, he began nipping along the soft flesh of Luna’s neck, an action once used to crush fleas and parasites, but now done for affection. She wasn’t saying no, and he wasn’t saying yes. For now, this sexual limbo was fine, and when Luna shuddered against him, he reveled in the control he now had over her body. The sound of his teeth clicking together against her neck continued unabated. Then, showing remarkable self-restraint, he stopped. Still holding her, he kept her close, but he pulled his muzzle away from her neck. He sighed, a satisfied sound, and then he just sat there, content to be near her, to be her friend. Of course, the fact that Luna was now a delightful shade of purple was amusing, but he felt no need to tease her about it at the moment. “She called you stain because of those black spots, right?” Her purple cheeks almost glowing, Luna nodded. “I like those black spots,” he remarked. “Are you going to keep going?” Luna asked. “Hmm?” He raised an eyebrow and did his best to look as innocent as possible. “The neck nibbling and the groping…” Her words trailed off, and when she swallowed, it was quite loud. The scent of mare musk was noticeable now. “Seems pointless—” “Pointless?” Luna sounded indignant. “How is it pointless?” “Well, no matter how deep I stick it in ya, I can’t reach the place where I’d really like to be.” His words made Luna bite her lip, and Gosling allowed himself to enjoy her visceral reactions. “When I take you, I want all of you, not just the wet, slippery sexy place that I can stick my weewee into.” Rolling her eyes, Luna shook her head. “How juvenile. How… crass.” “I might be juvenile, but right now, I am not the one leaving a wet spot on the carpet.” With a gasp, Luna’s mouth fell open, and she stared in shock. “I too, am a stain.” Gosling’s confidence made him beam. “I got teased all the time because of my markings. Being dappled made me a target when I was little. But as I got older… I stopped letting it bother me. I learned how to strut my stuff, and ponies paid attention. The sooner you stop thinking of yourself as a stain, and start strutting your stuff, the better you will feel. And you need to trust me when I say, you got stuff to strut. My longing for the stuff you have to strut circles the shower drain a few times before it finally goes down, and I think about the stuff you can strut every day.” “You are depraved…” “And you are aroused, so I must be doing something right.” “We art going to take a shower,” Luna announced, and then she rose, pulling away from Gosling’s somewhat moist embrace. Sweaty, disheveled, her feathers now messy, she shuddered. “We art leaving! A good even to thee!” Like any mare might do, she tossed her head back to throw her mane around, but it had no effect other than making her look like she might sneeze at any moment. Still grinning, Gosling hated to see her leave, but he loved to watch her go.