A singer and songwriter since he'd first stepped weary hoof on the lovely Earth that barely deserved his extravagant presence and wondrous being, Time Bomb wasn't the usual colt you'd first think of when you laid your hopeful, gazing eyes upon him. His deep voice and preferably shaved haircut perturbed more than just the ponies around him—namely his friends, family, and himself whenever he found himself catching a glimpse in the mirror—and he spent most of his school years going through his various bits of schoolwork and only working on them at the last second, which ended up being little more than minutes before its respective class began ticking down its allotted time. Despite a very measurable distance around him, he rose up the ranks of his local Hoofball team and became its starting quarterback, leading his dumbfounded mates—who were left open-mouthed in his flurries of dust—to countless points and hard-earned victories. The Eaux Mares Badgers were both a name and a force to be reckoned with and shied away from to the point of near paranoia upon even the slightest vocal beginnings of the letter B.
He'd started his first band in high school under the name Tick Times Three, or T3 for short. With childhood crush River Rapid on saxophone, best friend Light Beam on drums, acquaintance White Chocolate on bass, met-him-once-and-he-wanted-to-join-up Almond Milk on trumpet, and himself on lead guitar, Time Bomb released a small, self-titled album they distributed among the town for all to hear. As it was, everypony simply threw their self-proclaimed gifts into their respective rubbish bins later that night, and Time Bomb still continued onward until he graduated.
He may have kept completely close contact with Light Beam, but it was River Rapid who was to be attending the same Uni as him, even taking many of the same classes that piqued both their interests in the categories of World History and Fine Arts. Meeting up at lunch together every day and going out to get meals at the cafe, it was love in its simplest form. They held hooves, and they nuzzled necks, and they kissed, and, as nature did what it did best, they took each other for the first time on a cold winter night as the snow trapped their entire building inside and, as the staff members couldn't reach them, the two dorms intermingled and shared the rest of the day until Unicorns were able to dig them all out.
Time Bomb needed something, though. His life was as best as it could possibly be, but there was something missing. The music was barely scraped up in his Fine Arts classes.
He needed a new band.
This one, under the title Maytes, was composed of twelve members in total reaching all across the Uni, from the nerd in the corner of the library to the bench-warming jock catching the game-winning touchdown in the big game. His music became nothing but ambient noise, consisting of wild alto saxophones and blaring trumpets, peppered with twangy banjos and piano keys, and tinted with lonely violins and his own vintage guitar. He had taken a bit of a background position in his new pastime, but it didn't bother him one bit. Maytes was more an experiment than it was an actual band, with many members parting ways after dropping out, graduating, or simply losing interest until it was just Time Bomb and River Rapid once more.
They both graduated at the same ceremony.
The two began living together in a little apartment, sharing smiles and laughs and love and those cute little crinkles on your nose that made the both of them just melt. His eyes were on a shimmering ring. Her eyes were on maternity leave.
And then River Rapid was hit by a carriage while crossing the street late one night.
Time Bomb was more than just destroyed. His whole life had been put in a chokehold and smothered in the matter of three whole minutes. He needed space, and he needed time that he didn't think he could keep looking forward to. So, fleeing his hometown of Eaux Mares, he headed south and found the city of Baltimare in all its coastal glory. He applied for a grocery store job stacking crates, rented a smaller apartment barely fit for a dog, and fell in with another mare named Dream Catcher. He constantly told himself that it was just a way to get over River, but... it wasn't. He was in a terrible, borderline horrifying place, his mind and his body working in tandem to try and send him off with the same fate as his lover, but it was Dream Catcher who kept him back on all four hooves.
She had held a bit of a penchant for singing to him, a liking of which Time Bomb only confessed to sharing with her much, much later late one fall evening. Feeling a pain nestled in his gut, and in his heart, Time Bomb and Dream Catcher put on recording equipment, took out a guitar, and sang a few separated verses with one another until they passed out from exhaustion. As he woke up in a start, Time Bomb felt a chill down his spine, a torrent of ice on his forehead, and a passion in his legs.
Packing up a briefcase, grabbing his recording equipment, and shouldering his guitar, he took the next train back to Eaux Mares.
His father was an outdoors kind of guy who would spend weeks chopping up firewood, observing nature, fishing, and enjoying the soft crunch of dirt cooped up inside his bespoke cabin deep in the woods near the city. A way to get away, as it seemed. Naturally, Time Bomb's first stop back home was his parent's abode, where he simply plopped himself on their couch and stared up at the ceiling for what felt like an eternity and a half. His mother and father both left to go to work, and they wouldn't see him for three whole months.
For Time Bomb, deserting the home he once called his own once more, had retreated to his father's cabin, shut the door, found the bed, and fallen asleep for two whole days. He woke up, feeling his stomach screaming bloody murder at him, and went about doing just what his dad used to do. On the cusp of the brutal northern winter and with the beginnings of a horrid liver infection causing mass destruction of his entire body, Time Bomb—then twenty-five—stayed firmly nestled within the boundaries of his hideaway and grew worse.
Bedridden, anxious, painfully ill, and simply devoid, he clutched his guitar, turned on his recording equipment, and began to sing.
This singing became an obsession of his, something he'd spend the better part of a day doing. Pencils writing down lyrics on scraps of paper, bruises on his hooves from guitar strings, quaking in his throat from his newly found falsetto. He woke up singing in the morning and went to bed thinking about what he'd sing when he arose. He fashioned drums out of a flannel shirt of his and a plant's ceramic pot; he modified an old trumpet laying about to increase its buzz. As the winter months blew onward, his beard grew and his mane went wild.
The blue moons that met his lack of singing were instead focused on reading the one book he'd brought with him: Northern Baring, by author High Tail. In it, a Unicorn mare from the deserts of Appleloosa moves up to Vanhoover at the behest of a friend, and has to deal with the day-and-night differences of a hot sun and a cold breeze. The citizens of Vanhoover, every first snowfall, stop everything that they're doing and crowd the streets to wish everyone a, "bon hiver", Prench for "good winter". A phrase, coming up only once in the story, caught Time Bomb's eye.
The protagonist of the story, not understanding what all was happening, is chuckled at by an old stallion on the corner of the street. On his lips is a comment.
"Cigare brûlé. First winter is a big event up here, lass."
Cigare brûlé. Prench for "burnt cigar", a nickname given to tourists because of how easily noticeable they were, akin to a fuming cigar.
His mono in full swing and his life teetering on ending, Time Bomb felt the name to be powerful, and chose it for himself.
His heart ached, and his head rang, and for three whole months, he remained fixated on nothing but a sole desire.
And there, with that desire, the years and years and dreadful years that had so hopelessly plagued him spilled out in a shrill falsetto, mixing in with the terror and gusts storming outside his lakeside fort.
Under his new moniker, Cigare Brûlé, Time Bomb emerged from the cabin with ten songs under his belt, and, after properly titling them all and ordering them, published his collection under an album simply named, To River, To Night. Though he'd originally intended to remaster what he'd done and give his project to a few groups of friends, it was Light Beam who convinced him to keep it as is and send it to a label. One took him in an instant, and Time Bomb found himself growing to worldwide fame quicker than he ever would have imagined possible.
Releasing two albums and an LP—a self-title, 44, Two Million, and Bit Bank, respectively—Cigare Brûlé became a well-known, well-versed, and incredibly well-received folk band that skyrocketed to critical acclaim.
His songs, from "Mantle" to "The Woods", spoke two-volume pieces to anypony who listened to them, evoking raw emotion and suppressed memories and moving one to unstoppable tears. His method of songwriting—creating the music itself and adding lyrics to it afterward—helped him paint unrestricted pictures of beautiful landscapes, massive ice-tipped mountains, and college universities in the dead of winter. He may have abhorred the term if it was being applied to him, thanks to his uncomparable humbleness, but Time Bomb was one of the greatest lyrical geniuses of the time, able to speak of the heaviest matters that ached one's body and wracked one's mind in the same way it had to him thirteen years before.
At least, that's what Octavia had told her friends growing up.
Either they didn't have the capacity to understand just how wondrous Time Bomb and his music were, or they were just screwing with her. There was no chance that somepony listening to one of his tracks wouldn't fall in love immediately. The very idea of such an occurrence put a residual halt to her mind and made her stutter like she'd just suffered a robotic shutdown and would self-destruct in fifteen seconds. Fourteen, now. Honestly, the idea that she could actually have that happen to her one day and not have the knowledge within her to remember some kind of passcode or the like to stop it frightened her just a bit, but she looked at the floor and rubbed at one of her forelegs to remind herself of her mortality.
There it was. The unmistakable cold, and the sticking-up of her little gray hairs.
The dry, dry husk of Octavia Philharmonica.
There was... but one line that came to her mind at the moment, in a well-broadcasted and very clear attempt to distract herself from further, horrible, slippery-slope self-deprecation.
The first song on To River, To Night was a bit of a traitorous one, if put in regards to the album's title, as it was recorded with Dream Catcher the night before Time Bomb fled her figure. "Sluice," it was called, was widely regarded to concern miscarriage, and newborns—or, she guessed, the... lack... thereof—but, in her mind, it meant something else entirely to her, and because it was music, it was universally encouraged to explore the different definitions that a guitar twang and a head voice could entail.
"Sky was the womb, and she was the moon."
Many people took the word "womb" at face value, and immediately believed that it referred to childbirth.
Octavia saw more different than that. Whether it was because she was genuinely smarter or believed herself to be such so that she wouldn't be able to remember the actual, unwanted answer, she wouldn't know.
The womb was where you were born; where you grew up from a single cell and eventually grew your little hooves, your little brain, and your little earthly being. It's where you were born, and, in essence, is you.
The moon is the largest, brightest, most beautiful thing nestled in the night sky, and still very much present in the day. It shines its light across everything you see and brings clarity to a time most described as harrowing.
Sky was the womb, and she was the moon.
She was the biggest part of what made him, him. But made, not make.
"Octavia, you're stupid."
"You listen to such dumb stuff."
"Dude, so deep."
The responses were very much expected, but Octavia believed time and time again that she could change them—morph them; form them; completely fix them—into something far kinder and intelligent.
She'd, for a time, thought that it was simply because it was her favorite band and she couldn't take criticism in the slightest sense or fashion, and, honestly, looking back, it was more than a tiny bit true, which actually kind of upset her in the present. Wow, what a child.
But no, though, it was... it was just wanting ponies to like what she liked, or did, or created, or made, or whatever.
Her first macaroni art piece she'd artfully vomited together—which barely resembled their abode, could pass as a rocket ship, and would admittedly make a hell of a battering ram—late one afternoon for her father when he returned from work, which he apparently didn't love enough to not put on their refrigerator. Then again, Forte might have... eaten the macaroni off it if it were placed in such an easily abused position so close to the ground, dried dabs of glue and shreds of paper and all. Disgusting little virgin bastard. He was the reason her sister's stupid watercolor art project found its way to the fridge and not her inedible pasta vomit.
She snickered.
Wow.
Digusting little virgin bastard? Look in the mirror, coño.
"You want a plate or–"
Octavia waved a hoof, not even caring about who it was who was trying to initiate conversation with her at the moment.
"I'm busy."
Nothing would have pleased her more than seeing her macaroni art stand proudly next to her school's lunch calendar consisting of mostly dried prunes on the side, below her family's weekend grocery shopping list reminding them to get the right kind of popcorn this time, above the little one-word magnets that she and her sister had used to spell out 'the son made a gross thing', and opposite the little metal popping machine she'd nowadays recognized as a bottle opener, despite its seldom appearances in her delightfully wine-enriched lifestyle. Such an important position to see something in the house, which was why each and every single one of the aforementioned items stood plastered where they were. The fridge brought a crowd every day it remained, and that meant more and more views on her project that she'd worked so, so hard on! She'd learned how to not use glue sticks, which way scissors went, how hard it was to get glue out of your hair, why you shouldn't cut your own hair, why she looked terrible with short hair, why she looked terrible, why she was terrible, and why she, as an Earth Pony, wasn't destined to fiddle and screw with little pieces of macaroni that were better off eaten or shipped overseas to someone who actually needed it. You know. For survival.
She would've loved nothing more than for them all to marvel at something she'd created, not something she'd mimicked.
Sure you could... drag a nice strip of rosined horse mane across four strings in a set pattern and get applause but... it didn't really feel the same, now, did it? It was just like every time somepony had heard it before, just with different ponies filling in different stands. The rising crescendo of Mountain Queen or the longing notes of Pavane were no different between Mozart and herself. All of it was just simple preserving of time, reading from a paper from the inklings from the mind of a pony who'd used all three to deliver what it was she was reading. There were no good players in the industry, just people who could replicate the sounds as close to the original as was possible.
Oh... oh Gods...
But ponies called her good. She didn't believe it when it was said, she didn't like it when it was said, and she barely responded to it when it was said... oh Gods ponies called her good. She was good at the bass. One of the more popular bassists of her time oh Gods she was good. She was good, which meant nothing, because if you were good you were just a good replicator and that didn't really amount to anything good it was borderline plagiarism and that wasn't good oh Gods she was good.
She was good, and that's all that she was known for. Nopony praised her for her milk drinking skills, or her writing posture, or her album collection, or just her in general. They praised the music. Music made the world go round and without it both she and the world were nothing shiiiiiiiiiiit.
Gods... where did it all come from?
Just... all of it. Her. Where did all of her come from? All the fibs, and all the tossing abouts, and all the things she lived while wishing she wasn't. Wait.
Was she having a breakdown?
Was this what it was like to have a breakdown?
Why did she care so much about wanting people to like what she liked? Why did she care so much about wanting people to like what she did? That was just a regular pony emotion, wasn't it? You made something. You were proud of that something. It was only right and practically sensible to want others to like it, too. If somepony looked her in the eyes and said, "Octavia, I think that your dog picture collection is horrendously troglodytic," after proudly presenting it to them with a drum roll and a flashy curtain, she would probably cry a little bit, but a small part of it would be because they didn't like her hours and hours of work that she half-wished she could go and get back. But why did it bother her so much? Most ponies—and believe her, it was most ponies—would simply brush it off with a laugh and a joke and move on, and she always did the same, but... it lingered.
There it was again.
Her first year in the Academy, she'd been struggling on a song, prompting a nearby bassist in her class to mind her.
"Oh, those are slurred. And flats."
"Oh, my mistake."
She carried on, making it through the section and then the entire piece. Just a simple conversation and a bit of assistance.
And then they played it again.
Really, Octavia? That was stupid.
They got past the troubled section.
You actually screwed up at that part? Gods, you're stupid. You're so so stupid. That's the most simple-minded thing you could play, and you flubbed it. Good job, idiot.
They ran through it a third time.
Her eyes glazed over.
Look at you. First year in the Academy and you're a mess. Screwing up on easy lines, making a fool of yourself. What would Mother think of you? She'd be ashamed. Ashamed of how Godsawful and stupid you so very clearly are. Maybe that's why you haven't made many friends here. Maybe they all know that Octavia Philharmonica is a shitty pony and that being friends with her is being friends with every little thing that could go wrong in your day.
And then they got past the part.
You did it again! How stupid could you be?! He's laughing now, but he just doesn't want to say out loud how astronomically mental you are. Look at them all, snickering. But they were right though. They were right to be laughing and to be snickering and to be clutching their stomachs and disrupting the class because you deserve it because you're stupid and ugly and terrible at each and every thing you do.
Her bass was big enough to hide her bow behind, and so she stood in an increasingly blurry room as the piece went by a fourth and presumably final time.
She excused herself to the restroom, locked herself in a stall, and bawled her eyes out until the class was over.
It was hard to get people to like what she did when what she did, she did terribly.
But it was... some kind of confirmation of something. Some kind of confirmation that she was doing something right, a reassurance that she wasn't isolated, alone, and seeking escape from it. She was doing something that brought smiles to ponies, and it was by her own two hooves that that something came to fruition in the first place. If she found herself doing something, and there was nopony around to watch, then there was no real point in doing it. Wasted minutes to hours to days of her life better spent doing what people knew her for. Less time on her own pieces of music and more time on famous ponies' pieces.
She did her own things, but the only real audience ended up being her home. And her home couldn't really give her constructive criticism or a hug and a smile. Well, it could, but she'd have to go back down to Highes and vandalize her house to make it look like it was. Maybe it was worth it. Would be, that is.
Her thoughts ended on the price of four-by-fours, thankfully far and far away from the endless assault of self-harassment she shakingly called her own gray head.
"Holy Sputnik Octavia this is good."
The wooden ship, and its wooden walls, and its wooden tables, and its very much wooden people all rushed back to ample recognition.
Lavi, as well, fizzled back into form.
She was not wooden.
And she had just said something to Octavia.
What...
Oh, she must have been eating Cheers' hashbrowns. Octavia hadn't had any hoof in making it. Cheers had made sure of that. He wouldn't even let her near the stove when he fled the cooler nearby and all but threw a large, orange, hole-ridden plastic sack onto the countertop with a grunt and a very astute blimey.
"Play wit' yohself," became his running joke, and she genuinely considered doing so out of spite until she realized how incredibly bad of an idea that was.
A claw retracted from Lavi's plate, dangling... a small, breaded sardine, its head removed.
Oh.
She'd... made that.
Cheers had had some sardines packed together in the cooler, and some leftover breading for chicken whenever they felt proud enough to "take a bite out 'f our li-ohl brothas," and she'd asked him if it was okay for her to use them both for a combination dish she'd eaten once or twice—actually many times, shut up—back in Canterlot. He'd told her, plain and simply, "Yoh thinkin' wit' yoh 'ead, bu' I 'unno 'bout yoh stomach."
She'd told him, uncommonly and convolutedly, "Eat a dick, you preposterous sack of spoiled spermoids."
He'd laughed, and that was that.
Lavi tossed her head back and thereafter the sardine. It gracefully did a somersault she would have gladly given an eleven, danced through the air upon the wings of glorious angels, shimmered in the bright light of the sun poking in from the slats above their heads, and ended its maneuver by promptly catching on the edge of Lavi's lower beak, where it found itself eviscerated and quietly tucked further into the depths in a similar fashion to a mare being dragged into a crawlspace in a mediocre horror movie.
Octavia still had the nightmares.
That crawlspace hatch always looked so eerily close to the one in her foalhood home.
A fish was dangling in her sights again, this time much closer to her face.
Lavi blinked at her, mimicking her own gesture.
"Hey, you okay? You're, like, really out of it."
Another sardine down a throat.
She'd made that.
Lavi dipped her plate to scratch at a nice heap—not a helping, it was, like, a heap—of hot sauce, and Octavia seized the moment to look at its contents. Some assorted greens, a steaming roll with a square of dripping butter atop it, some rice and beans, and... covering a little over one entire half of her plate, Octavia's breaded sardines. Octavia's. Breaded. Sardines.
She'd made that.
"I made that."
She'd apparently caught Lavi off-guard, as the griffon paused in her glorious feast, her head craned completely backward and her beak wide open like a satisfied pelican. Her eyes went wide, and, without a response from the mare in front of her who suddenly couldn't keep still for some assuredly stupid reason, she dangled her choice of early-day prey like it was a lifeline of sorts.
...
She missed Grandma.
"Did you?"
Lavi gulped it down, licking her beak all dog-like and cracking a grin.
"That's super good. You should make more."
Octavia cocked an eyebrow.
"What, you really think you'll be able to eat it all?"
There had been a lot of sardines and breading in there.
Lavi pointed back at the lines and lines of tables... lining the Scuttlebug's mess hall.
"I mean, if everyone else wasn't hogging them all..." she turned at the hip, still chewing, and shrugged, "...ehhhh probably could."
GUH.
"W-w-w-wait, everyone else?"
Lavi snickered.
"Yeah. Everyone's eating your sardines. Which I guess makes sense, since we're all... birds." Lavi suddenly lowered the foreleg she'd been raising, fish in claws, and placed her food back onto her plate. She looked for a candle thousands of yards in front of her. "Oh God am I having an epi-pen right now?"
Epiphany, dear La...vi...
There was no way that people were actually eating the food she'd cooked. The last time that had happened, Vinyl had gotten profusely sick to the point of projectile vomiting on everything in proximity—which included the fridge, the stove, the microwave, the sink, the trash can, the fridge again, the fridge again, and the bottles of alcohol Octavia had hidden on top of the fridge that had rolled away at the unusual Unicorn contact—and, after a pregnant, well-deserved pause and an evil, evil grin, everything in sight—which included Octavia's morning glass of milk she had been excited to drink because she'd wanted to kick her coffee addiction's little butthole, Octavia's toothbrush down the hall and in its dumb mug that read Brush, Flush, Shush, Octavia's toilet right next to it, Octavia's throw pillow back in the living room, Octavia's sheet music that later turned out to be Vinyl's own, Octavia's milk again, and then finally Octavia's head.
When Octavia had later gone to the black powder store to peruse their blunderbusses, equally sickly and newly showered, she wasn't even the slightest bit surprised to find Vinyl scouring them as well.
Without her head to guide her, her hooves did what they did best and carried her ignorantly forward at a snail's pace that ended after only two steps. Her vertigo somehow neglected at the moment, she stared down the impressively undisturbed line down the mess hall to find griffon upon griffon—sometimes literally, which was kind of weird—chowing down on little fish-shaped bundles of breading, their barely-fresh vegetables, their blistering hot soup, their cans of peaches, and, most importantly, their hashbrowns, temporarily forsaken in favor of gorgeous, fried sardines.
Nopony—excuse her—nobody was gasping at stray hairs (which was a thing that had happened), or throwing things at each other, or even getting the tiniest bit angry. In fact, the whole display was... chummy in a way, reminiscent of a casual Wednesday at her high school when ponies actually ate in the cafeteria and weren't just mulling about playing games or having conversations or, in one particular case that almost got the school shut down, seeing how long they could hold their breath while exposed to hoof-lighter-induced flatulence fume fires. Griffons here and there and pretty much everywhere were talking up a storm about storms, discussing their work and distance traveled for the day, joking about drowning themselves, and giggling at little jokes and funny faces.
Wait. No, she knew it was too good to be true. Griffon stomachs were different from pony stomachs. They had gizzards and such, and so they could stomach even the largest amount of sludge that a pony wouldn't be able to even glimpse without gagging and falling dead on the spot for good old rigor mortis to set in. That was why they were eating her sardines so incredibly quickly and going for more and now lining up for more and bringing back massive piles to their seats and eating them just as quickly as their first round oh Gods they liked it.
Wait but no the stomach thing. Different stomach probably meant different teeth, and tongue, and tastebuds, and likes and dislikes, and oh Gods were they liking it?
"Octavia! There ye are, lass!"
Octavia looked over to find Andy, but instead jumped into the air as he flung his foreleg around her shoulder. She swore that she could see Valkyrie immediately rise from her seat on the opposite side of the ship and look her way, wide-eyed.
Wait who the hell was driving the boat?
"Um, good day..."
Andy, chuckling behind his strong wall of teeth, fanned one of his arms around and presented Cheers to her as he began walking their way.
"Cheers was just tellin' me about the breakfast this mornin'." He blew air out his nostrils and faced the toiling crew. "Seems you're a hit, boyo."
Andy knew that she was a mare, right?
"I wouldn't say so–"
"Gah-uh geev it to ya, luv," Cheers cut her off with a hedge trimmer, crossing his arms and flexing his chin, "they'uh enjoyin' the peace outta yoh sahdeens."
Oh Gods no.
Octavia already felt her face growing red. Oh Gods was there any place she could hide for the next hour?
"I'm sorry–"
"Oh, she only made the sardines, then, did she?" Andy asked, suddenly facing Cheers.
Octavia looked at the English bird, who shook his head with a light grin.
"No. She pretty much made this whole meal herself."
Wait what no–
Octavia's eyes grew wide. She looked at Cheers to show him. He narrowed his own and nodded quietly.
Andy whipped out a wine glass from his pocket, completely out of nowhere considering the pocket's size, and tapped a claw against it like he was rearing to pose a toast at the wedding she'd never have.
"All right, boyos, quiet yourselves down!"
As though hearing a teacher try to begin her lessons for the day, the griffon pirates did as they were told, albeit with a few straggles whispering obscenities and obvious inside jokes loudly concerning tuna.
Oh Gods were they all staring at her?
After a satisfactory amount of silence, "I can tell by my own two ears that you all are enjoyin' yer breakfast this morning."
A roundabout of cheers, whoops, and hollers erupted from the crowd, complete with raised fists and stomping paws.
"As it is, your... lovely chef Cheers had not a single part in today's early meal..."
Andy placed his wine glass back into his longcoat's pocket, raised the foreleg, and extended it to Octavia's side, open-palmed toward the wooden ceiling creaking above them in the quiet.
"Octavia here made it all, from your brocc'li to yer God-gifted sardines."
Oh Gods they were all staring at her oh Gods she was turning beet red almost as much as the tomato soup she'd almost burnt and had actually screwed up anyway so she'd thrown it away which was a big waste of tomatoes and probably would have caused any spaghetti nights onboard the ship to go forsaken Gods she was so so–
"Yeahhhhhh!"
"Go Octavia!"
Weet-wheeooo!
"Thanks, mare!"
"Kick ass!"
"Hell yeah!"
A griffon rose from his seat, large mug in claw. Octavia thought that she saw a beard hanging from his face, but she was beginning to list and go completely off kilter at the moment. His mug shook aggressively as he roared, "Three cheers for Octavia!"
Well that was a bit over–
"Hip hip!"
"Hurrah!"
Three griffons and a shaggy black mane appeared at the far end of the ship.
W, T, and Valkyrie saluted her. Sesame waggled a yellow-shimmering sardine.
In her ear, "Hip hip!"
Next to her, "Hurrah!"
Octavia looked over at Cheers, words failing to spill out of her mouth.
The griffon simply adjusted his cavalry hat, smirked, and strode away, not needing any words.
"Hip hip!"
"Hurrah!"
The pirates let loose with all their might, clapping and stomping and shouting and singing and laughing and whistling and yelling her way.
"Thank you!"
"Thanks, Octavia!"
"You go, mare!"
"Second batch?!"
"Bring 'em on!"
Octavia's nose crinkled, and she suddenly became aware of every little liquid inside of it. She sniffled them back up.
At her home, she would be cooped up inside all day, only slightly pleasing herself with unhealthy foods and tiring music.
But, out here, on the open seas, strangers were enjoying her company and her work just inches from her, praising her and thanking her for a job so incredibly well done.
She was a pony too caught up in her own lack of worth with too much money to throw at it in an attempt to rouse it up.
But these were griffons constantly out in the horrid seas, braving terrifying waves, and bitterly cold conditions, and being served simple meals by a simple pair of claws that joined theirs in hoisting sails, lifting barrels, pulling ropes, bracing walls, and pulling weights the likes of which Octavia could never herself pull. These were people with more to do in their days than she thought she'd had in her head, important to-dos that determined whether or not they'd even still be walking on wood by the end of the night. These were people who actually deserved a good meal at the end of the day.
And she'd given one to them.
Mind, it was in the beginning of the day, but it was the preparation that saved you, not the winging, in the end.
She'd given them something nice to eat before they endured a hard day ahead.
A smile graced her lips, the catalyst that sent a hoofful of tears down her cheeks as well. She wiped them away.
Oh...
Oh Gods she'd just realized...
She'd become her worst enemy.
She choked.
She was... a lunch lady now.
Oh no.