The bath was huge, and she was less than two hours away from learning that it wasn't big enough.
There were ways in which the clearing of the barracks was very much like working a giant sliding puzzle: at first, you were happy just to have any degree of space with which to work. But then you discovered that shifting something to the left meant fifteen other pieces came crashing down into that area, you might just barely jump back in time (which had put her fast-moving buttocks into something else, and the crashing had pretty much gone on from there), and then there would be a new mess to clear. Getting something to what seemed to be its natural home at the rightmost corner suddenly meant there were seven segments which could no longer move at all. But if you persisted, if you kept pushing and, as with the worst sliding puzzles, eventually gave in to the urge to just pick a few things up and remove them from the problem entirely -- in this case, that meant the hallway -- there would be a moment of clarity. You would fight your way to an edge and having reached it, abruptly see that this went there, that went there, the other thing was hopefully going to be set on fire, and then everything in that section would just -- open up. All at once, at least when checked against the ever-shifting solution which existed within her inner vision: the actual hauling still took a few minutes.
Cerea had moved one thing, then one more, the ridiculous length of ribbon-wrapped metal pole had finally come free --
-- and the bathroom door had swung open.
She'd stared at it for a moment, watched it sway slightly under its own weight. And then she'd gone inside, mostly to see how much work had to be done there. Between training, the recent addition of the smithy, ongoing language classes -- Nightwatch would be due in about two hours -- and the endless clearing of the barracks, she'd left 'overworked' behind in the dust. She was rapidly closing in on the need for a forty-eight hour day, which would naturally need to go along with a centaur who could be awake and fully functional for about forty-three of them. The bathroom was a space which existed and based on what had happened to the barracks, it was therefore a space which could be filled with enough debris to push her temporal needs into the low seventies.
But all she found was a bathroom.
There was a pair of partial long wooden closets against the far wall, ones where the dark paneling had been raised just far enough from the floor to let someone observe hooves on the other side. They were large enough to host ten ponies each, they had multiple swinging panels available for entrance, and Cerea quickly confirmed the presence of continual-flow trenches in all of the compartments: ones which vanished into the floor instead of continuing into the next stall. It would have been just about ideal for her own toiletries, at least once she took out one of the inner dividing walls to create sufficient room.
The sinks were long and low: as with the one in the cell, she would need to drop down somewhat to use it. There were visible pressure plates in the floor near those elevated troughs: some were placed to be triggered by hind hooves, others by fore, a few more were built into the forward edge of the sinks themselves, and the first bit of timid experimentation discovered that a portion of the local plumbing was still functional. It took a little more time before she managed to stop spitting out water, along with a minute for using a hairpin to get the gunk out of the tap and let the liquid emerge in a direction other than up.
Mirrors: again, far too low for her use, although the reflection did allow her to regard the cloth over a seldom-seen upper abdomen. There were a few ancient brushes, and the straps stated that they were meant to be slipped over lower jaws and hooves: she learned just how ancient they were when the first one threatened to tear at her touch. She wound up staring at a rather complicated array near the sinks for about three minutes of total confusion, and would eventually need somepony to tell her how it was used for tooth-cleaning: a desire to avoid nausea meant she never asked about flossing.
But then there was the bath...
The walls nearby were covered in multiple panels of sponge: so old as to potentially be incapable of retaining moisture, but large enough for a pony to stand against without overlap, and -- she could see the little clear empty tanks mounted over each one. Water and soap dispensers: the sponge was moistened, the suds rose to the surface, and a pony just rubbed up against it. One more accommodation for a quartet of species which needed to find ways of operating without hands.
You soaped yourself up by rubbing against the sponge. You rinsed off in the bath.
They rinsed in public.
How large was the bath? The barracks had been designed to host at least twenty ponies: the sunken marble pit of a tub with ramps leading in and out, deep enough at one point to allow a mare of Nightwatch's size to swim -- that was big enough to let all of them wash up at the same time. It was something which could take place without the dividing wall which the girls had found at the hot springs resort: with ponies, the sexes could clean themselves in front of each other without shame, and perhaps they even cleaned each other. Cerea still hadn't spotted any anatomical trick valves --
-- they bathe together.
They clean each other...
In Japan... the bath had been large. Nowhere near this size: that would have required a completely separate house -- but any bath which had to accommodate Cerea and Miia needed dimensions to suit. But the girls had seldom bathed together, and one of them couldn't use the bath at all.
Suu's greatest fear came from huge amounts of water, enough to dilute the slime girl's form to the point where she would lose cohesion and, within minutes, her life. Rachnera tended towards quick dips, because anything which let the underside of her lower torso touch the water meant she had to hold her breath: the arachne had book lungs in her spider portion, and extended submergence gave her a doubled chance to drown. Lala was terrified of dropping her head in a place where her body couldn't recover it in time. Miia needed the water to be heated on a level where just about no one else could risk being in the bathroom for more than a minute: touching the liquid risked first-degree burns, and staying near the tub's rim meant inhaling pure steam. (This was just for quick dips, though: long enough for the heat to reach her core and then out.) Mero preferred cold water -- and all things considered, also preferred an environment where her gills weren't being told to breathe soap. And Papi would splash around endlessly for the sheer joy of it, had discovered one of the few things wings were good for in the water was sluicing long waves of splash damage at the others and generally couldn't be near any fountain without giving spectators a reason to think of birdbaths, along with quickly violating multiple public nudity laws -- but that water also soaked into her feathers. She couldn't fly until she was dry again, and dreaded the downpour which was strong enough to drive her out of the sky.
Put it all together, and there were ways in which Cerea was the most comfortable with the house's modified bath. It was large enough for her, the heat level she preferred was closer to the human normal -- just a little hotter, to match her increased body temperature -- and that meant she was the most likely to share the room with another --
-- there were pools near the sporting field.
We all washed up after the competitions were done. One pool for fillies, another for colts. The colts weren't allowed to get anywhere near ours. But the fillies washed up together.
Some of them washed each other, because it was faster than the brushes. They were laughing while they did it. They splashed and giggled and held hands.
I was always near the edge, away from the others. So I could get out quickly, after I couldn't watch them any more.
I wanted someone to hold my hand like that.
He washed me.
I asked him to.
I wanted him to get used to me. I... didn't think he would see anything appealing, not where there was fur. Not to start. So I covered myself for anything he knew, and let him use the brushes. He didn't know how to start. Then he didn't know where he should have been more careful about touching me, and...
I forgave him for that. I always...
...I wanted him to touch me.
I wanted him to love me.
She remembered his touch, and did so in a world where her existence meant it might have been the last one.
He never could have loved me.
It was the sort of thought she couldn't have for long, not if she wanted to exist at all, and so she wrenched her attention to the taps.
The water was flowing to the sink.
The majority of her waking hours were being spent in labor. She washed by lying down under multiple showerheads at the training area barracks, and that meant she was only clean for a brief part of the morning and afternoon. Cerea had been sleeping while dirty, it made her feel foul, she didn't like the way she smelled when she woke up and didn't think anypony else was all that fond of it either, she still didn't have any real long-handled brushes and anything she asked for was just one more burden she was putting on the palace...
If the sponge panels were replaced (because her pay had to go towards something, even if she couldn't personally spend it)... if the tanks were refilled, she could rub against the soaked resilience. It would take longer than the time required for a pony, along with some awkward angling -- but it could be done. And in the meantime...
There's only one way to find out.
She looked at the multiple water inlets, regularly-spaced holes around the edge of the bath.
There had to be a control somewhere.
And then, just as it had been in Japan, she immediately felt guilty about running up the water bill. Especially with a bath of this size, because filling it to a depth she could try to use meant filling all of it. She couldn't channel water into a single section and keep it there: that probably would have been the magical domain of seaponies, if they had actually existed. All Cerea could do was watch as the bath took on more and more steaming liquid, quickly reaching the point where she was convinced that she'd emptied out an entire water tower. That was the sort of thing which just had to create trouble, and she was now waiting for somepony to come in and complain about having had their shower drained away.
But the tub just kept filling. Not just with hot water, but with clean liquid: she'd dedicated one more round of labor to scrubbing the floor and sides, and so wasn't going to have much in the way of blankets for the night. It had taken time, created extra laundry -- but it meant no dirt was floating up within the tub. She wouldn't be soaking within the remains of ancient filth.
Cerea peered out into the barracks, found the lone working clock and checked the time. Still about an hour before Nightwatch was due. Backed into the bathroom again, looked at the tub and considered all of the water she'd already wasted before closing the taps. No matter what she did now, that water was here. So all things considered...
The centaur reached for the lower edge of her sweater.
She was on her knees in the water: all four of them, within a fairly deep portion of the tub. It was enough to let the warmth lap at the lowest part of her breasts. (She'd already finished that part of the scrubbing. When it came to staying clean, every part of the body was equally crucial -- but for centaur mares, there was a single prime location for fungal infections. Or rather, there were two.)
Cerea never felt the soft sigh emerge from her upper torso, losing the sensation in the warmth of the water she'd just splashed towards her shoulders. Feeling trickles of welcome heat run down her skin, offering a tiny hint of massage to her upper back.
Miia had massaged her shoulders once, but it had been an even exchange: they'd both been coming off a horrible day and the assistance had been needed on both ends. The lamia had been the one to suggest it. There had been nothing sexual about the contact, not with someone who qualified as both rival and sister. There had simply been a release of tension, and then a long talk about just how undignified food selling was, especially when your mutual living blouse gave up halfway through.
Her shoulders were sore, as was her upper back. However, contrary to what some humans had almost constantly voiced, it wasn't from the weight of her breasts: centaurs had evolved towards larger endowments, and so had also evolved the muscles and ligaments to support them. Her shoulders and upper back were sore because just about everything was sore. That was what happened when you spent nearly every waking hour at some form of labor, and even with the extended thought exercise of the afternoon to provide some degree of respite -- she'd just been cleaning the barracks. And the bath.
I wish someone would rub my shoulders.
I wish...
There was a human saying, one Cerea didn't have a point of origin for. You wished into one cupped hand. You spit into the other. And you watched to see which one filled up first.
She wondered if the ponies had an equivalent aphorism, and whether it involved the frogs at the center of their hooves. Properly speaking, a frog wasn't deep enough to hold very much.
The centaur wished she could hunch a little deeper in the water. (Her lower body wasn't really built for hunching.) But the deepest part of the bath had something of a slope to the floor, and standing on a slippery angle...
Cupped hands filled with water. She splashed herself again, wiped off her face, felt more water dripping from the tips of her ears onto her shoulders, and stared at the steam-covered flaking sponge on the walls.
I need to wash my hair.
I need to cut my hair. It's halfway back to my tail already.
I need to do something with my hair before the party.
If there is one.
She'd liked Fancypants. The scent of fear had risen from the stallion just as it had with virtually everypony else, but the scent had been the only thing which betrayed him: his voice had been perfectly normal throughout their brief meeting, and his posture had actually reached a state of visible relaxation. He'd spoken to her as if she was a person, and he'd felt that the best way to have others do the same was to arrange an Event.
(He'd also had a manner of speaking which made it easy to hear capitals.)
The noble wanted to host a party, and have Cerea there as both guest of honor and a rather mobile centerpiece. But it would take some time to arrange, plus he apparently had some true need to travel and the Solar Princess had felt that it might be best to wait until after Cerea had passed her Guard training.
if I
She didn't know when the party would be, or if one would take place at all: she was having a hard time picturing a positive response to the invitations. She was terrified of being at the heart of it, trapped for hours within a cloud of fear and whatever Ms. Garter decided was an appropriate dress. And no matter what happened there, the palace was still trying to arrange the first meet-and-greets with children...
Cerea forced her breathing to slow, found oxygen waiting within the clouds of steam. Closed her eyes, leaned forward enough to rub at that portion of her forelegs which could easily be reached and kept it up until that small portion of the tension falsely went away. Straightened again.
I need a hoof pick. They have to have hoof picks. Maybe not ones designed to be held by fingers, but hoof picks.
Would Nightwatch pick one up for me? If I gave her the money to pay for it?
She did her best to estimate the time remaining. Probably forty minutes before the pegasus was due. Plenty of --
-- there was steam in the air, and that presence did things to the local currents. It made portions of them swirl, used heat to push a portion out as colder air tried to get through the doorway, and it completely blocked out any scent encroachment from the fast-approaching source.
It meant there was a moment in which Cerea was trying (and mostly failing) to relax within the bath. And then there was one in which her dripping ears picked up the sound of wingbeats --
-- the pegasus flew in. Nightwatch did so at a speed greater than Cerea had ever seen the little knight use while indoors, even with the weight of laden saddlebags bulging along both flanks, and arrived in so little time as to give the centaur none in which to truly act. She registered that a pegasus was approaching and the water wasn't deep enough, she couldn't twist her body in a way which brought her upper torso deep enough under a clear surface, there wasn't enough time to try flipping a curtain of hair to the front of her upper torso and she was suddenly in a situation where she didn't seem to have enough hair...
But she tried. Her arms went back, and had to bend in what humans would have recognized as a truly unnatural way to do so. Her hands flexed to the precise wrong angle at the wrists, and the combination of movements thrust her shoulders back, stuck her upper ribs out with both shift and breath, of course she had to breathe and that was when the little knight saw her.
The pegasus didn't stop in midair: strictly speaking, she couldn't. But her path instantly diverted to the tub's rim, slamming her hooves into marble with the force of something more than gravity. And the whole time, the silver eyes stayed focused on Cerea. Refusing to blink.
"I didn't think you were coming this early!" the centaur frantically protested, and did so while arms more or less windmilled because a creature with six limbs suddenly had no idea what to do with two of them. Some of the syllables found her hands in front of her breasts, at least for what felt like the very small percentage they were able to cover. Others had her going for her hair again, and at least one moment of vocalization nearly had her tie her wrists into the center of a spontaneous blonde knot. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry --"
The mare whinnied.
Cerea stared.
And then she remembered that in order to make cleaning her face that much easier, she'd left the translator on the far rim of the tub.
It led to the most awkward trot of her life. She couldn't stand up and keep enough of her body below the clear water. She only had two hands and, as it turned out, nowhere near enough hair. All she could do was slowly, horribly shuffle towards the disc, feeling the weight of those silver eyes as that gaze roamed across every centimeter of a fully nude, completely exposed distortion.
In terms of distance, it was a few meters. Measured in the metrics of humiliation, it took forever.
The centaur reached the disc: a position which had her about four meters away from the staring mare. Put it on, and then repeated nearly everything. With extra apologies.
"-- good," the pegasus said. "You got the bathroom clear. That'll help."
There had been very little tone to the words, and the dark tail swished once as the sleek head turned away from Cerea. Moving towards a saddlebag.
"I'm sorry --"
"-- there's going to be blankets sent down in a little while," the little knight quietly continued, her voice fully neutral. "So once you get out, we need to pick out an extra place in the barracks."
The centaur, who still couldn't work out what was supposed to stay covered, abruptly found her arms falling limply to her sides.
"...why?"
The mare glanced back, just long enough for Cerea to see that her lips had thinned.
"I live here now."
Blue eyes blinked.
A repetition of "...why?" seemed necessary.
"My apartment isn't available," the pegasus softly said. "And won't be for a while. Neither are most of my things. Just about all of them, really. So I live here, because a Guard with nowhere to go can always use the barracks. It just happens that you were using them first. But there's room."
Cerea listened to all of it. Failed to pick up any emotion within the syllables, couldn't scent the mare's mood within swirls and steam, and suddenly wished to understand none of the body language expressed by tight muscles and lashing tail.
"What happened --"
"-- it doesn't matter." The black jaw delved into the saddlebag, extracted a book. "Go back to your bath. We can do the lesson here."
"I'm nude," the centaur protested. "You --" and she knew there was no good way to say it "-- shouldn't have to look at me --"
"You're a different species," the pegasus softly countered. "I don't understand where I shouldn't look. A taboo only exists if you know it does. And... I don't. Go back to where the water's a little deeper. Wash. I'll find where we stopped last time. Get ready to take the translator off."
Cerea listened to all of it, and it took her frozen ears a moment to pick up on the echoes of silence. The absence somehow seemed larger than the words.
She isn't hesitating. There's no pauses.
She's looking at me.
But that was wrong.
She's looking through me.
Had her appearance been that offensive? Was it whatever had happened at the little knight's home? It was possible that it was both, and --
-- if that was somehow tied to Cerea...
Immediately frantic, "Is it something I did? Is there anything I can do --"
"-- you," the mare quietly stated, "can go over there."
The centaur looked at the sapient who was the closest thing she had to --
-- turned away. Trotted. Sank back down into the water near her original starting point, as low as she could go. Adjusted the fall of her hair, and waited while the dark snout carefully flipped pages.
"'Date'," the mare read.
"Um," Cerea substituted.
All it got her was "'Date'. Take the disc off --"
"-- I don't know which kind."
The pegasus looked up.
"What do you mean?" Toneless.
The fast-spreading blush was heating her skin more quickly than the water. "It's a word which can mean several things, in some of the languages I speak. A kind of fruit. A point on a calendar. Going... out with someone you care about..."
"It's that last one," the mare softly said.
"Oh."
Some of the steam cooled, turned into droplets running down the walls.
"Did you date much?" the pegasus asked. "Where you came from?"
Cerea hesitated.
"Um..."
"It's a natural question," the mare quietly continued. "You have a species. Which means you had parents. There was breeding involved. And before that, presumably dates."
I don't want to think about...
Things were bad enough already.
"Not in my herd," Cerea softly said. You didn't have dates with centaur stallions. You had encounters and in order to make sure you came out on the right side of them, you carried something dense and heavy. And during the time given for love... there had been no one at all.
"And when you went to the other place?" was the steady followup. "After you became an exchange student?"
He never could have loved me.
"A few." She could feel herself forcing every breath. "They were... awkward." One of them had been spent waiting for an assassination attempt, and that had been among the less embarrassing examples. "It was... with the human who was hosting us. He wound up going on a lot of dates, because... there were so many of us..."
The mare looked up a little.
"He was dating all of you?" A simple question.
The answer took about fifteen minutes, and the pegasus listened to all of it.
"That happens here sometimes," the mare finally said. "It usually doesn't end well for whoever's at the center, and most of the ones around them wind up getting hurt. But the exceptions usually stay together."
"Whoever wins --" Cerea automatically began.
"-- it only works when they all win."
The girl's soaked tail twitched within the water.
"What?"
"Group marriages are legal," the pegasus evenly stated. "In Equestria. You can even bring in new members after the initial ceremony. But everypony involved has to agree to the inclusion of everypony else. Or it doesn't work. There might be four miniherds in the capital. Less than a hundred for the continent. But they happen."
There was a single instant when she could picture it, and that was followed by another where a mind which had been told to win tried to figure out what her status would have been in a situation where everyone had technically tied for first. Plus it would have meant the inclusion of the arachne, and...
He never could have loved me.
"They're not legal in Japan," was all she could say.
"Oh." The pegasus looked at the page again. "What's the weather schedule like there?"
Almost desperate now, "We don't have --"
"There's thunderstorms tonight," the little knight said, and the dark tail lashed again. "The Bureau schedules a few for autumn. We'll get thundersnow in winter. Just once. As a special treat. But tonight, it's a thunderstorm."
Frantic again, her hooves starting to push against the tub's flooring, "Nightwatch --"
"-- you'd think ponies would understand how lightning works," the pegasus evenly continued as her ears flattened against her skull. "The Bureau makes sure there's classes, even at ground level. But some ponies don't remember, or they never cared to learn. They see the first burst, they hear the thunder, and they -- run towards the nearest tall object. Sometimes that's something metal. They try to take shelter near the thing most likely to attract a hit. It's stupid, really. And if something happens, they never blame themselves. They just blame a pegasus."
"-- please, if something happened, if it's something I did --"
"-- but when you know there's a storm," the mare quietly finished, "and that the storm could go on for a long time, when you know how storms work, how lightning works, how it goes for the tallest thing in the area, and you still think there's shelter, there's a storm and you think the thing most likely to be hit is what needs shelter, so you try to protect it and you're the one who winds up getting hit..."
The silver eyes looked at the page, and nothing else.
"'Date'," she repeated. "The word after that is 'hopeless'."