When Spicy Hot tugged on her leash, Rainbow Dash made her way after him. "Yes, Master." It felt extra good to say the words, to acknowledge that they were both still in character and having fun. They left through a side door that swung closed behind them, revealing no external handles. "We're going home early?"
"I want to talk with Thunderbolt, still. You said he was able to understand words a lot better now?" Spicy Hot asked.
"Yeah. I'm fairly sure he's visiting someone—but not sure who. There's a rumor going around the neighborhood that some monster is on the loose, or something. I'm pretty sure that unless there are actual complaints of damage, the police won't do anything." Following along, keeping the leash between them slack, Rainbow Dash loved the sound of her hooves clopping on the sidewalk.
"I'm sure we can come to an understanding, but are you prepared for the situation that he might not?"
Rainbow Dash gulped, but nodded. She really enjoyed Thunderbolt, but since getting the parasite in her head she had found her heart—and lusts—seemed too diverse for just one lover to fulfill.
Climbing into Spicy's little car, they drove in relative silence to Rainbow Dash's home. Spicy Hot pulled up in the driveway and parked his Volkswagen.
"I'll go in first and make sure he's relaxed." Rainbow Dash climbed out of the car, having to physically unfold herself from the tiny vehicle. She only needed to glance at the garage to think about what her plans were for her own car.
Spicy Hot laughed. "You sure get pushy for a submissive. Alright. Until we are done talking with Thunderbolt, the game is on hold."
"Okay." There was a touch of sadness in the word, though Rainbow Dash understood Spicy's reasoning. Reaching the front door, she realized her problem—she'd left her bag with all her things at Spicy's shop. For a moment she wished her wings were free so she could fly over her house. "Going around back. We left my keys at your place."
Waiting, Spicy Hot walked to the front door. When Rainbow Dash opened it, he raised an eyebrow.
"He's not here. Come on in." Rainbow Dash could feel her tail swaying side to side, betraying her mood.
"You know, I still can't get over this place. How can you afford somewhere so big on—What do you do for money?" Suspicious, Spicy Hot followed Rainbow Dash inside. Again he saw high-class furniture and equipment in the living room, and was reminded that Rainbow seemed to be living above her means.
Sitting on the couch, Rainbow Dash only remembered to tuck her tail to the side at the last moment before she would have sat on it. "My parents gave it to me when I turned eighteen. It's kinda embarrassing to talk about, but they're pretty loaded. They're g-going to be in town next week."
"Do you want to take your boyfriend out to have lunch or dinner with them?" It was only partly a tease, Spicy Hot liked Rainbow Dash enough to meet her parents, but not in a serious way. Not in that serious way. He started to turn and sit down when he felt strange.
Rainbow Dash watched as Spicy Hot's ears glowed and flowed to the top of his head in two, tufted pony ears. A pair of leathery wings spread from his back, and she watched his hair grow out. There was tension in the air, and the source quickly became known. "Thunderbolt, I—"
Spicy Hot ducked and rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding a plume of flame that rushed through wher he'd been standing. He came up from the roll facing a dragon—at least a small one.
"No fire in the house!" Rainbow Dash shouted.
Thunderbolt's eyes were leveled at the intruder. He snarled wordlessly through his teeth and rushed forward, only to find his target sidestep, grab his shoulders, and send him moving even faster toward the front door—the closed front door.
"Spicy! Thunder! Stop this!" Rainbow Dash was livid. She jumped to her hooves just as Thunderbolt hit the door and kept going—the sound of shattering door frame in his wake.
Never before in his life had Spicy Hot been in a fight where his blood pumped up this much. He felt power beat in time with his movements as he stalked out the open doorway to face Thunderbolt. While he watched, the dragon-dog seemed to grow bigger—now topping seven feet tall.
Roaring his anger at the interloper on his domain, Thunderbolt sent a cough of flame after the exhalation. Green-purple light coursed out of his mouth right at the bat-winged man, but this time, to Thunderbolt's shock, they pumped their wings and sent the flame back!
Everything was instinct. Spicy Hot felt another surge of magic within him as the little wings on his back grew. Something swished behind him—his tail—but he was too busy focusing on Thunderbolt to pay too much attention.
Growing in annoyance, Rainbow Dash decided that the pair might hurt themselves, but she was definitely going to get hurt if she had to separate them wearing rubber. Pulling her shorts and top off, she began unbuckling and removing the equipment Spicy had painstakingly put on her—cursing out the two men in her life while she did it.
Spicy Hot hadn't spent a lot of time practicing martial arts. When he was younger, his father had hoped that sending him to a gymnasium to learn basic fighting would "straighten him out." All that eventuated from learning karate to a blue belt rank and some rudimentary boxing, too—that one of his classmates had been his first sexual encounter had endeared his time there to him. But though he hadn't kept up training, he had kept in good physical condition.
Backing off a few steps, Spicy eyed Thunderbolt. "What's the matter? Had enough?" He couldn't believe he was taunting a dragon, but here he was doing just that. "What's your problem?"
"You!" Thunderbolt breathed fire again, but this time it was a tighter lance of flame. At first Spicy Hot dodged to the side, but Thunderbolt had more to give and swept the white-hot flames toward Spicy.
"Ranged is bad. He has it, I don't." Spicy Hot flapped his wings and jumped over the flames. He rushed toward Thunderbolt just as the dragon's breath sputtered out. Balling his fists, Spicy Hot got two solid punches in before a flailing claw caused him to pull back. "Not to great at fighting, are ya?"
"Just have to catch you once. Then I'll bite you, snap!" For effect, Thunderbolt bit down and flashed a big smile. When he saw Spicy Hot's eyes widen a little, Thunderbolt charged. A wing was his target—if Thunderbolt could stop Spicy from flying, he was sure the little human would be done-for.
A clawed hand rushed toward Spicy Hot. All his old training came back, causing him to predict and adjust for the move. But rather than grab his wing—as Spicy had guessed was the target—the talons closed on his shoulder. Three knives broke the skin at the back of his shoulder, while one found the front. Strength unlike any Spicy Hot had felt dragged him toward Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt sneered. He had the pesky bat-pony-human thing, and was reeling him in for a good chomp. To his surprise, though, Spicy Hot stepped forward, placed both hands on Thunderbolt's forearm, and next thing Thunderbolt knew he was flailing mid air behind Spicy.
The blood leaking from Spicy Hot's shoulder only focused him more. He was centered by the pain, and turned to face Thunderbolt.
Spicy Hot's earlier punches hadn't fazed Thunderbolt. They'd connected with the tight overlapping scales of his torso and the muscle beneath had forestalled any real harm. But now he had a fence picket sticking through one of his wings. Pain unlike anything he had felt before ripped through the limb, and he just wanted it to stop.
"Are you two fucking idiots done yet, or do you want to kill each other?!" Rainbow Dash had freed herself of everything except the tail-braid—she actually liked how compact that was.
Thunderbolt turned his attention from Spicy Hot to Rainbow Dash. He'd seen her angry plenty of times—at least he could remember her angry plenty of times, though he'd never understood her properly when she was. "He started it!"
"What?!" Spicy Hot ruffled his wings and folded them to his back. "You attacked me!"
"I was defending my—I was defending Rainbow!" That was all Thunderbolt cared about and all that mattered so far as he was concerned. He turned his head to look at his wing and whined.
The sound that met her ears wasn't a monster, wasn't a dragon, it was her dog in pain. Sparing a look of apology and promise to Spicy Hot, Rainbow Dash ran to Thunderbolt and looked at his wing. "All I know about this kind of stuff is you aren't supposed to pull things out."
With Rainbow Dash beside him, tending to his wing, Thunderbolt felt all his arguments—and the fight—justified. "I know someone who can help."
Spicy Hot railed against his temper, wanting to rush in and claim Rainbow Dash as his prize, but there was enough of the sophisticated and modern man inside to hold himself back from the neanderthal-like behavior. "That's only for body wounds. That needs to come out."
"You lost, bat! Go home!" Thunderbolt stuck his tongue out at Spicy Hot, only to have it grabbed by Rainbow Dash. "Wath?!"
"You. Did. Not. Win! You are both fucking idiots. I don't care anymore, but if either of you decide you can be civilized, you can help the other to stop bleeding to death! I'm going inside." Turning, Rainbow Dash struggled to ignore the pang in her heart at leaving Thunderbolt standing there in pain.
Watching Rainbow Dash walk through the doorway, Spicy Hot heaved a breath. "We're both idiots, but you most of all."
"Me? I'm not the one fucking another dragon's girl." Thunderbolt spat a hint of flame on the ground, then winced as the wooden picket shifted in his wing.
"Fucking? You think we fuck?" Spicy Hot walked toward Thunderbolt, wary of claws and fangs.
"Of course!"
Spicy Hot made a point of ignoring Thunderbolt's weapons and reached for his wing. "You'd have to ask her, but apart from a few plastic toys, you're the only thing that's been in that girl's pussy. This is going to hurt like hell."
Head spinning from the words, Thunderbolt's pain threshold found a comfortable new place about two orders of magnitude higher than anything else he'd felt. Tilting his head back, he launched a gout of flame into the air that lit up the yard.
Pulling smoothly, Spicy Hot got the length of wood from Thunderbolt's wing. "And more power to you, but there's something else you messed up—she isn't your girl any more than she's my girl. She's her own person. You know who gets to fuck Rainbow Dash?"
Thunderbolt now wished he could bite the talking human's head off, but there was sense in his words—and honesty. "Who?"
"Rainbow Dash. She was coming home tonight to fuck you, and then we were going to talk about this without having to bleed over it." Green dragon blood stained Spicy Hot's hands. "You want to know what we actually do together?"
Interest thrummed in Thunderbolt's head, waging war with his pain to see who got the most attention. He tried to fold his wing, only for the hole in it to make him wince. "What?"
"We had fun. Fun is what she has with you, too. You know what happens if either of us makes what we do not fun?" Spicy Hot gestured to the wound-up hose at the side of the house.
The answer was obvious to Thunderbolt. The local female dogs had been not fun for a while. "Sh-She doesn't do it anymore?"
"She doesn't do us anymore. I don't know about you, but she is very fun." Turning the tap on, Spicy Hot held up the squirt-gun handle of the hose. When Thunderbolt nodded, he pulled the trigger only a little.
Thunderbolt spat fire again at the burning pain in his wing. The cold water, after the initial sting, felt good. Though he did notice Spicy Hot turn the hose on the burning patch of grass for a moment. "She is."
Letting go of the trigger, Spicy Hot passed the hose to Thunderbolt to hold, then stripped his shirt off. When it didn't come off easily, he realized it was caught on his wings. "Can you rip this off, please?"
The back of his "enemy" was turned to him. All Thunderbolt needed to do to make the annoying conversation stop, was slice. He used his free talon to slice through Spicy Hot's shirt. "We fucked up."
"We?" Spicy Hot asked. "Okay. I am a little to blame. I should have come here before now and explained all this. And I should have asked you if you were okay with there being more of us in her life. I'm sorry."
"How long?" Thunderbolt asked.
With his shirt off, Spicy Hot looked at the clean puncture marks in his shoulder. "A few weeks." The hose hit him with biting-cold water, but it was the good kind of sting that told you things were getting clean.
"I was just a stupid dog then. Not your fault." Despite his downplay, Thunderbolt did feel a little betrayed, but he knew he was something new and different. "Sorry I ripped you up."
"Yeah. Sorry about the wing, but it was either throw you or let you rip me apart. That's enough water on the front, can you do the back, too?"
Thunderbolt did as asked, the rush of adrenaline leaving his system causing him to feel the pain in his wing more as a throbbing ache now. "It's cool. Scars are cool."
"Now we need to apologize to Rainbow." Spicy Hot took the hose from Thunderbolt and hung it back on its hook. Moving his shoulder hurt, of course, but Thunderbolt could have picked a worse spot to grab him. "Come on."
"This was easier when I was just a dog and she was just my bitch. Why's life gotta be complicated?" Thunderbolt asked.
Spicy Hot could see outside lights on at other houses, and hoped that nobody had called the police. "Because that's just life. It was complicated before, you just didn't realize how complicated. You said you know someone else before?"
Thunderbolt nodded. "Yeah. Tree. She's nice. I don't fuck her how I fuck Rainbow. She likes it gentle."
"Wait." Spicy Hot wanted to get Thunderbolt inside, but the irony of the situation bit too much not to confront Thunderbolt with it. "So you're scre—fucking—someone else, but Rainbow Dash isn't allowed to?"
"You said you weren't fucking her."
"I kinda am. I told you the truth. I only stuff her ass." Spicy Hot thought about Rainbow's ass with the focus of a bat pony hunting a wild mango. "If she has pups, foals, or whatever, they're yours."
"It's the same, isn't it?" Thunderbolt asked.
"Yeah."
"I'm an idiot."
"Yeah. But you're not alone. This is life—we're all idiots until we realize it, and even then we're only marginally less an idiot. How good are you at apologizing?" Spicy Hot asked.
Thunderbolt shrugged. "Never done it before. What do I do?"
"You have done it, just before when you said you were sorry." Picking up the front door from where it lay, Spicy Hot gestured for Thunderbolt to go inside.
"That was apologizing? It sucks." As he walked in, Thunderbolt could see Rainbow Dash sitting on the couch, carefully folding up the things she'd been wearing when she'd come home. Now she was just wearing the clothes she'd worn over the rubber things.
"The key to not apologizing so much is to not need to—so much." Spicy Hot pulled the door into some semblance of covering the hole it used to fit snugly into, and turned around.