//------------------------------//
// Talks of Old Romance 
// Story: The Days Passed 
// by SilverEyedWolf 
//------------------------------//

The first thing they did when the duo entered the room was walk to a set of seats. Cadance had an L shaped desk, having positioned it so that when seated on her circular cushion she was still easily accessible and seen.

Spike sat on a what he'd been told was a tuffet, and he called comfy. It was essentially a bean bag with a frame, and it let him easily lay on it with his upper body still up and attentive. A short table sat in front of his seat, several thin wooden coasters strewn around to protect the wood.

Cadance used her magic to rustle quickly through a couple drawers, pulling a blank scroll from one and a quill and ink set from another. Quickly dipping the large white and gray pen, Cadance took a minute to write out a medium length message on the scroll.

"If you want her to write back, you should send along an extra enchanted scroll," Spike piped up, looking away when Cadance's gaze swept over to his. "Or ask her to go to Twilight, of course."

He heard Cadance hum in response, before one of her drawers opened and closed again.

After another moment of brief scratching on paper, Spike felt something firm but giving bop him on the top of the head, and he turned to face the levitating scroll in front of his nose.

"Go on, then," Cadance said, smiling. "I know you've memorized the sending of letters to her."

"Memorized you," Spike muttered, pulling the pages out of the air. Cadance giggled at him as he concentrated on Rarity, on the boutique she usually spent her time in, before letting a gentle lick of flame curl out from his mouth to consume the parchment.

He waited for a moment, before nodding as the gentle tingling on his tongue let him know that the letter had arrived.

"She has it," he told Cadance, who nodded.

"Then while we wait for her reply," Cadance said, "how about some refreshments? I can have any sort of tea or baked good brought up from the kitchens directly, and I have a certain bottle stashed in desk for special visitors like yourself," she said with a bit of a faux naughty smile.

Chuckling, Spike waved a paw towards her. "Thanks, but I think maybe some coffee would be nicer." He licked his lips a bit. "Maybe some small cakes?"

"The best of both Twilight and Celestia, I see," Cadance said with a laugh, before knocking on the inside of the door. A guard popped his head in, and she asked, "Would you have a staff member fetch a pot of coffee, and some snacking cakes?"

The guard bowed his head, which was a sight considering how it was his only visible part, before gently closing the door.

Spike returned his attention to Cadance, who had pulled open two of her desk's drawers again. From the first she withdrew two scrolls, pretty long looking from their thickness. From a long, thin drawer, she withdrew a simple black rectangle. Opening them, she pulled out a set of small black spectacles, placing them on her muzzle as she unfurled one of the scrolls. Clearing her throat, she looked over at Spike.

"While we're waiting, maybe you can tell me some things about the relationship between you and Fluttershy?" she said, dipping her quill and setting it to paper. "How long have you two cuties been together?"

Spike frowned, counting through the last few days before laughing quietly to himself, slapping a paw over his eyes. "By the Princesses, I'm doing it again," he muttered, before turning to Cadance. "It's something close to eleven days."

Cadance was instantly taking notes, scratching the quill across the parchment.

"What are you doing again, Spike?" Cadance asked, looking over at him as her quill continued across the page.

With a sigh, Spike slumped a bit in his chair. "Rushing things along," he said. "With Rarity, I was always rushing myself, either to give her what she wanted or what I thought she wanted. And now, I've already got the two of us almost living together, and it's been barely a week and a half since we started dating. Just a little over a month since Rarity broke it off, on top of that."

Cadance nodded, lighting up a drawer with her magic. She pulled out a small metal box before opening it. From within floated out two flat suckers, clear and brightly colored. She stashed the rest of the box before floating over a shiny brown disk.

"Root beer?" Spike asked, taking the offered sweet. "I thought we we waiting on coffee and stuff?"

Cadance shrugged, pulling the cellophane off her own dark green treat. "The sugar helps me think," she said, popping the sucker into her mouth to rest against her cheek. "More sweetness later isn't a bad thing, as long as we're good the rest of the day," she said with a grin.

Spike shrugged, placing the candy delicately on the table in front of him.

Cadance took a moment to finish writing on her scroll. "So, you feel like your relationship with Fluttershy is advancing too fast? Too fast for you, or for her?"

Spike thought about it and lifted his shoulders. "I don't know. For her, I guess? I'm fine with our pace, but I don't want to make her uncomfortable..."

"Have you?" Cadance asked, dipping her quill and gently scraping away the extra ink on the bottle. "Rather, has she said that you've made her uncomfortable or shown you discomfort at any of your actions?"

"Well, she hasn't said anything, and I haven't noticed anything," Spike started. "Not since that first morning-"

Cadance perked up, sitting forward.

"Well," he said, shifting from side to side, "I accidentally slept over at her house a couple of times at the beginning. One of those times we woke up together on the floor. She was in my forelegs, and I was..." Blushing, he cleared his throat. "I was experiencing the morning issue some stallions have, sometimes."

Cadance nodded encouragingly at him. "What happened?"

"Well, I was," Spike coughed again, "I was poking her flank, and she got all red and blush-y on me. I apologized, she said it wasn't a big deal, and we had breakfast together."

"But she told you she was uncomfortable?" Cadance asked.

"Yes, as soon as I woke up," Spike said, nodding. "Said she wasn't ready for, that, yet. She pulled away, before she kissed me on the jaw and ran off."

Cadance nodded, switching her sucker to the other side of her mouth before asking, "Has she been ready for 'that' yet?"

Blushing, Spike looked off. "Maybe, but I haven't pressed my luck on that yet. Not to say that we've been celibate," he clarified, holding up a claw, "just that we haven't gone that far yet."

Pausing briefly, Cadance gave him a grinning look as she continued scratching at her page. "How far exactly have you gone, then?"

Spike sighed, giving her a look as one of his paws slid up over his eyes. Lowering the leg slightly, he gave her a one-eyed gaze as he asked, "Is this a question for me, or gossip for you?"

"Little bit of both," she said cheerfully. She took a moment to give him a level gaze. "You know this whole discussion is in confidence, right? Not even Twilight or Auntie Celestia gets to know about anything we talk about while that door is closed."

"Or Shining," Spike said, nodding at her. "Still, gossip kept between two is still gossip," he said, sighing as he tacked on, "I think most ponies call it third base?"

Cadance nodded, making a couple of notations on her sheet. "Both of you?"

"Yeah, we reciprocate," Spike murmured, his neck sinking and withdrawing into his shoulders.

"Bet you do," Cadance muttered, giggling as Spike snatched up a coaster and lobbed it gently at her. "Alright, alright. Seriously though, is it always something returned, or do you both actually start it independently?"

"Well, it's not like we've gone at each other every day," Spike said. "We've only gone over each other... three, maybe four times total."

"Less than me and Shiny," Cadance noted, punctuating the point with another dip in her inkwell. Tapping on the side of the jar, she amended, "Withing the first couple weeks, anyway."

"If I remember, though," Spike said, raising a claw, "you two were on each other almost right away. Shining had that one mare at the very beginning, but he dropped her after he found her with that other stallion."

Cadance scowled, the quill pressing into the page hard enough to poke through with a small ripping noise. Sighing, she pulled the feather out of the page and sealed the rip with a spell. "We don't talk about Sherry," she muttered, darkly.

Gulping, Spike nodded quickly. "Uh, still, the point I was trying to make was that you and Shining seemed to have feelings for each other from the very start. While Fluttershy and I have been pretty okay friends, much more so in the last month, I can't say that I had these kinds of feelings until..."

Cadance let the silence trail for a minute, before saying, "Until something happened between you two?"

Spike nodded, slowly, reliving the memory of that half-awake morning. "She kissed me," he told Cadance. "We were both half asleep, and I was waiting on her to clear the bathroom. When she left, she sort of... pressed herself into me. She used her hoof to cup my jaw," he muttered, placing a paw of his own where she had touched him so long ago, "and then she pulled me down..."

Cadance grinned and clapped her two forehooves together gently, bouncing a little in her chair as she finished her sentence with a flourish. "Oh Spike, that sounds so romantic!" she giggled, giving a little, tiny squeal at the end.

Blushing, Spike ran a paw over the spines running up his neck. "Yeah, looking back, it kind of was," he said. "In the moment though, she wasn't really acting on anything. I talked with her about it that morning, and we both mentioned that while we considered each other really good friends, we hadn't thought any deeper than that. Of course, before that, we sort of... made out. Over the breakfast table." Spike wiped a paw across his face, looking away from Cadance. "A couple of times."

Giggling, Cadance nodded as she reached the end of the scroll. Blowing gently on the ink, she nodded, satisfied. "Sounds like a passionate beginning for a passionate pair. I'm not especially surprised in your case in particular, Spike. Twilight sent me letters about you and Rarity, so I know that you're not exactly, well, dispassionate. And just because Fluttershy is a quiet pony, doesn't mean that she doesn't like feeling wanted, or doesn't sometimes feel that same wanting.

"You're not even going that fast," she said, looking back over her notes. "It seems to me that you are both taking enough time to talk with each other, and are being extremely considerate of each other's feelings."

Spike sighed, heavily. "I guess I'm just used to the pace Rarity set the two of us," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "When we finally got together, it was months before we even kissed properly, much less anything more... intimate?"

"And that was after, what, years of you courting her?" Cadance asked, rolling up her current scroll and pulling out the other clean one. Spike got a glance of the writing on the scroll, almost as dense and neat as Twilight's own.

"Yeah," he muttered, scratching at one of his ear spines. "It was at least, I don't know, seven or eight years."

"Pretty fair to say that she saw you grow up, then," Cadance remarked, dipping her quill and starting on her second roll of parchment. "Not as much as Twilight or I, but eight years is quite the length of time still."

"That was the excuse I gave her," he answered frankly. "I always chalked it up to her having to get over the previous memories of me, when I was still her "chubby little cherubim"," he said, using his claws to mark the quotations.

Cadance snorted and paused her quill. "She didn't actually say that to you...?"

"Oh yeah," Spike countered, nodding his head. "That one only saw light once or twice, but she had all kinds of pet names for me. They felt endearing when I was little, ya know, take what I can get and such. Once we started dating though..." Spike shrugged. "They felt awkward. Matronizing, I guess."

"Your significant other, mom-ing you? Sounds pretty awkward," Cadance muttered, peering through her glasses at the scroll. She murmured something under her breath, and Spike watched as a line of ink peeled off the page and back into the inkwell. Replacing the text, she nodded to herself.

Looking up, she met Spike's gaze as she asked, "Honestly Spike, how was the sex?"

Spike sputtered and stuttered, stammering to get anything more than a vowel out for half a minute.

Luckily for him, he was saved from answering by a gentle knocking on the door.

Cadance put the scroll on the desk and opened the door with her magic, nodding and smiling at the pony bowing in the doorway. Without a word, the pony pulled in a tiered service tray on wheels, stopping the laden cart at the end of the table. Bowing again, they smiled at Cadance before leaving, closing the door carefully behind them.

"Now Spike," Cadance said, lifting the covering on top of the tray away and setting it to the side. The top was covered by two settings, a large silver kettle and another silver platter covered with small eclairs and gently frosted cakes. "You know I wasn't asking about how good it was or anything so vulgar as that. What were the feelings behind the acts, what were the emotions?"

Sighing, Spike chuckled as he pulled a mug from the second shelf of the cart. Cadance pulled out her own teacup, and poured a cup of golden brown tea.

"You can say I know that," he said, pulling the other kettle over and pouring a steaming mug of much darker coffee, "but I can't swear that I'd be surprised if you did.

"Uhm," he uttered, taking a sip as he thought. "Well, I can't really tell you her emotions of course. I was... Well, elated, would be the least I could say. The first time, it was one of the most intimate and gentle things I've ever experienced. She gave me an outlet, and let me put every minute I'd ever loved her into the act. Our first, er, expression, lasted for hours, just treating and taking care of each other."

"You don't have to dance around it, Spike," Cadance interrupted. "What did you and Rarity call your little get together-s?"

"Well, I called it making love," Spike said, lowering his head as he thought, "but she always had a name for it. It sort of irritated me towards the end, how she always called them 'Exorcises' or 'Sessions' or something. My least favorite was always when she called it 'Getting Dirty'." His head snapped up, and he had to work to pull the frown from his face. "It made me feel like I was dirtying her, or something. Like my expression of love was causing her discomfort."

"What did she say when you brought it up?" Cadance asked gently.

Spike huffed, blowing air through his lips before looking away from her. "The one time I brought it up with her, she blew me off. 'Of course I enjoy our time together, but you can't deny that I get quite sweaty', or something close to that."

"While that does sound awfully dismissive," Cadance said softly, "I think you should have spoken with her more than once, especially if this bothered you so much."

Spike raised a paw, mouth open to countermand her words... then sighed as he nodded.

"Yeah, I should have tried harder," he said, taking a drink of his cooling beverage. "It's easier to admit after the fact. I just didn't want to bother her at the time, you know? I felt so lucky, I just didn't want to question anything she said or told me, in case she changed her mind." He snorted. "That worked out."

Cadance sighed, putting everything down and placing her sucker on a shallow porcelain dish on her desk. She hopped lightly up from her chair, making her way over to Spike. He let her move the mug out of his paw, giving her a confused look.

He stiffened a bit when she flared her wings, but he relaxed into her as she wrapped her hooves around him and pulled him to her chest. He took a moment to carefully place his paws on her back before he pulled her into the hug. They stayed like that for a moment, Cadance half standing as Spike held the alicorn to his chest.

After a minute Spike chuckled, pulling away from her a bit. "Your legs are trembling," he said, pushing her gently into a sitting position, her torso still extended towards him.

She pouted up at him, reaching out a hoof to gently tap on his pushing foreleg. "I've always got hugs for you, Spike, whether my legs can hold up or not."

Laughing, Spike sat up on his cushion before sweeping out with his forelegs, picking up the alicorn and hugging her against him. She was just a little too heavy for him to hold, but he was able to set her haunches on the bit of cushion he'd freed up.

She squeaked a bit when his paw swept under her thigh, but she wrapped her forelegs around his neck as she giggled.

"Aren't I supposed to be the one picking you up?" she asked, pressing their chests together as she enclosed his back with her wings. "Little brother," she added, teasingly, but also just a little carefully.

Spike pulled back, looking into her face. She was smiling widely, but there was a cautious look in her eyes.

"First time you've ever called me that, Cadance," Spike said. "I don't mind," he said quickly, when her face started to fall. "But that's the first time you've ever been that explicit about it."

"Well," she said, leaning away a bit. She wobbled on the cushion a bit, and Spike put a paw around her lower back to steady her. "I'm sort of doing a, well, a therapy thing. Doctors like to establish stronger bonds between them and their patients, because-"

Spike snorted. "Cadance, you're my second favorite sister," he said, smiling. "You don't have to fake a bond we already have," he said as he used his free paw to tap gently against her muzzle.

Sighing, Cadance smiled and nodded. "Sorry, it just gets weird going from appointments with strangers to having these sorts of conversations with family."

She gave him one more brief hug before hopping down, sighing as she walked over to her chair.

"Feeling better?" Spike asked, causing her to stop and give him a look.

"Spike, that was supposed to be helping you feel better," she said slowly. "You were getting pretty angry there."

Spike shook his head.

"Cadance, I felt better as soon as we stopped talking about Rarity. The hug was nice, but I was mostly trying to help you feel a little less weighed down." He chuckled a bit, saying, "Living with Twilight, I've gotten pretty good at letting stress slip by me. 'Fix the problem, no more stress', is my thinking. Only problem with that," he sighed, "are the longstanding problems you can't do anything about. Or don't want to do anything about."

"Such as some of your issues with Rarity," Cadance said, slipping back into her chair and picking up her quill and scroll again.

"For example," he said, dipping his head in acknowledgment. "But it wasn't all bad, of course," he said, waving a paw through the air before extending it towards his coffee mug on the table. "That's just where we focused first."

"It's where the first tangent led," Cadance said with a nod, lifting her sucker from the dish and popping it back into a cheek. "Why don't we look at some of the fonder memories, next? What were some of your favorite times with Ms. Rarity?"

Spike slowly sipped at his coffee.

"Well, there were the 'fun' times, of course," he said, blushing. "Rarity is the kind of mare who knows exactly what she wants, when she wants it, and how she wants it. That translates into her work life, her personal life, and her love life.

"That was one of our first hurdles to get over, actually," he said, stirring his cup idly.

"Oh?" Cadance prompted.

Spike gave a small start, his blush deepening. "Oh, uh..." He looked away as he muttered something under his breath.

"Spike, if you don't want to tell me-" Cadance started.

"There are some... anatomical, differences, between me and your standard stallion," he said, scratching behind one of his ear spines. "Rarity perhaps wasn't prepared for that, her first time. She, uh, had a small freak-out and locked herself in her room for a night."

"Oh, Spike," Cadance said, blushing lightly but mostly just frowning. "That can't have been good for you."

"Oh yeah, that one hurt for a bit," he said, nodding. "I've always felt like an outsider, being draconian in a pony society. Ponyville's always been good to me, but you know how Canterlot was at times. When she did that, it sort of felt like it was all coming back..."

Cadance made to get up again, but Spike held up a claw and shook his head, smiling.

"I'm alright, Cadance," he said, sighing as he put down his empty mug. "It was a while ago, and Rarity and I have talked it through pretty extensively. She felt awful about it, we hugged it out, I told her why it bothered me so much, and we hugged it out some more. It's healed over, mostly."

Cadance slowly nodded, still frowning heavily.

They sat in relative silence for a moment, the only sound in the room being Cadance catching up on her notes. Spike was staring at an uninteresting painting on the wall, eyes following along with the painted ocean waves while losing himself in his memories for a moment.

Spike huffed after a moment, chuckling to himself. "I think you asked for some good memories. Sorry, guess I'm just feeling a bit negative right now."

He forcefully blew the air from his lungs, taking a deep breath as he covered his eyes and scrubbed at them with a paw.

"Uh, happy," he muttered. "Well, just spending time with her was always nice. She's very good at conversation, not just talking but knowing when the other person wants to talk, so we were never one of those couples that just sat around. It was sort of awkward sometimes, but never bad."

"What sort of things did you talk about?" Cadance asked, floating one of the small cakes on the service tray over to her desk.

Leaning forward, Spike took one as well, pouring another cup of coffee at the same time.

"The standard things," he said, placing the steaming cup on the table. "How her day went, how mine was, anything interesting we'd seen or done that day. What clothes she'd sold or certain orders she received that stood out, some of the more interesting things Twilight had me doing and the weirder books I'd seen that day." He paused to take a bite of the little cake.

"It sounds like she was a very good friend," Cadance said lightly.

Spike frowned a bit. "She was my very best friend, Cadance. She knows some things about me that even Twilight doesn't know, and I'm not just talking physically. We talked about some of the very deepest thoughts I've had."

Cadance withdrew the stick of the sucker from her mouth, tossing the item in a nearby wastebasket. "I didn't mean anything by that, Spike," she said, taking a sip out of her own cup. "Friendship is the best building block for romance, after all."

Spike sighed, running a claw along the side of his mug on the table. "Sorry," he murmured. "I guess I'm still a little sore about the whole friendship thing with her." He met Cadance's eyes. "That's a bit of why she broke it off with me. She said I still felt like a friend, instead of anything more."

Cadance nodded, adding something to her scroll. "Twilight mentioned that to me," she admitted.  "I hope you don't mind?"

He shook his head. "It's fine, not really a secret."

They sat in silence for a moment, Spike lifting his mug to sip at it, Cadance enjoying the cake as she let him think.

"Spike?"

He looked up, meeting Cadance's gaze.

"Were you happy?"

They sat there for a moment, gazing at each other.

Breaking the gaze, Spike looked into his mug. "If you'd asked me at the time, the answer would have been yes, I would have gushed and told you how ecstatic I was. But...

"I don't think I was," he said quietly.