Tilting his head skyward, Spike looked up to the stars. They were the impossible hoard and every dragon dreamed of collecting them, but they were difficult and out of reach. He sat on the floor of the balcony, thoughtful of the events that had taken place over the last day or so. Somehow, while making a new friend, he had cemented his relationship with Moondancer and gained another friend in the process. Constance Kerning wasn’t a bad sort when she wasn’t wearing her professional guise and was a completely different pony in private than she was in public.
Down below, the lights of Ponyville created islands of illumination that drove away the gathering darkness. Warm, inviting yellow light spilled from windows and formed intricate patterns upon the streets. It was most certainly autumn and the diamond dog days of summer were gone. A faint chill lingered in the air and Spike knew from experience that whatever crops not yet harvested would soon be lost to frost if the farmers did not hurry.
This was, perhaps, his favourite time of the year. With summer over and Nightmare Night on the way, there was a giddy sense of anticipation, the torturous pleasure of waiting. Then came winter, and with winter, Hearth’s Warming. Yes, this was the best time of year just because of the holidays.
He heard a soft rustle, the sound of feathers against a fine, silken hide, and knew who it was without having to turn to look. With her hooves making soft clip-clops against the stone floor, Twilight approached, whinnied once, and sat down with a rumbling wicker. When Spike turned his head, he saw Twilight gazing upwards from out of the edges of vision.
“I’m proud of you, Spike.”
He allowed the stars to steal his gaze away from Twilight. “You are?”
“More than you know, Spike. I had a long, long talk with Talespin while you were asleep, and she told me everything that happened. Even your fiery hiccup with Moondancer. The more she told me, the more impressed I was, and the more proud I felt. Because of you, Talespin was able to come out of the closet, if I can borrow that phrase, and now she’s itching to live life. Keeping that secret and holding everything inside was wrecking her life.”
Eyes on the stars, his thoughts scattered and adrift, Spike had no response.
“Spike, everything we do begins and ends with the friends we make. That’s a friendship lesson I learned the hard way. In fact, with the hardest lesson that I can recall, it was you that saved me. I completely succumbed to my anxiety and my neurosis. That was a tough lesson… that… incident we agreed to never speak of again.”
A smile spread across Spike’s face as he thought of a certain doll, his once hated rival.
“You have a knack for saving ponies, Spike. It shows that you care.”
This got his attention and with a turn of his head, he looked up at Twilight. Their relationship was impossible to define, too complex to be put into words. They were so different—different species in fact—and she had grown older while he had hardly aged at all. She was soft, fuzzy; he was hard, scaly. Yet, they had more in common than there were differences. Learning how to live with and accept one another’s differences had changed them profoundly; Twilight had become the Princess of Friendship, while he was becoming… something.
Spike wasn’t sure what he was becoming, but that was okay. Twilight was aging rapidly so she had arrived at what she was meant to be first. He knew that whatever he was meant to be would happen in time—perhaps even after Twilight was long gone. That was the scary part, the part that never sat well with him. He would be forced to watch Twilight grow old and he feared the pain it would cause. However painful it might be, it was better and far less painful than the alternative, and that was not having Twilight at all. Every minute mattered, especially minutes just like this one, staring up at the stars together.
Spike feared what few dragons did, and that was time itself.
Twilight slipped a foreleg around him, pulled him closer, and he leaned against her whilst heaving a contented sigh. A curious static existed between them, with the electric charge built up by her pelt and feathers reacting with his scales. He didn’t possess much sensation in his scales, so a soft touch did very little, but electricity was a sensate experience that thrilled him and left him wanting more.
“Sometimes… sometimes I don’t know where I end and you begin, Spike. I trust you with so much… everything really. I would not be the pony I am without you. When I’m buried beneath work like I’ve been, it feels good to know that I can trust you to deal with pretty much anything. Spike, what I am trying to say is, I want you to know that you are appreciated.”
Fearing that he might ruin the moment somehow, he said nothing, but continued to lean against Twilight. With his ear frills pressed against her ribs, he could hear her heart and her breathing, a reassuring, comforting sound. How many times had he fallen asleep listening to these sounds? Too many times to count.
“So much depends upon our successes and our failures, Spike.” There was a vulnerable tremour in Twilight’s words and when she said them, her foreleg tightened around Spike. “So much more is expected of me now as a princess. Maybe even too much. I have to delegate responsibilities to others and I hate doing that. They do things their way… not our way. It’s getting harder, Spike. I’m afraid that I’ll have to ask even more of you. Because you and I are so successful, more and more is expected of us. Us, Spike. I couldn’t do this alone.”
“I wanted to save her,” he said, thinking about his feelings for Talespin. “Twilight, I wanted to save her but she saved herself. I got pretty worked up about it, and I even felt bad about it… that I wasn’t the one that saved her, I mean. But then I felt proud about it. She did a pretty good job of saving herself, Twilight.” He paused for a time while searching for just the right words, but they eluded him and whatever he was about to say next escaped only as a sigh.
“That’s the hardest lesson to learn, Spike. Letting others save themselves. I have a pretty hard time with that myself. I suppose it’s not so different than wanting to do everything myself, because I want to make sure the job is done a certain way. I struggle with that every day. Maybe it is time to let go of a few things and let others have a crack at it.”
Somehow, Twilight understood what he was getting at without him saying it.
“Spike… I need for you to be my eyes and ears among the students. Look, I understand that it is asking a lot of you, but I need to know what is going on. I’m a grown up and an alicorn. I’m the authority figure in their lives, so they behave differently around me. Act differently. Talk differently. This experience taught me something, Spike, and that is why Talespin trusted you. More importantly, you were worthy of that trust. Going into this second year, the school faces a lot of challenges. We need to stay on top of things if we’re going to face them.”
“I can do that,” he replied, and he was confident that he could. He wondered if the meeting at the train station might have gone differently if Twilight had come along. Perhaps Talespin might not have been so open, so trusting. The what-might-have-beens gave him a lot to think about.
“Spike, I have to get back to work.”
“Just five minutes longer?”
“There’s a lot that needs done—”
“I’ll help,” he offered. “I slept all day so I’ll be up all night. Just five minutes more of this… of us, Twilight. Looking up at the stars. It’s just five minutes, surely you can spare that.”
“Very well, Spike… just five minutes more.”