I failed my report, but that was okay. Scribe had clucked disapprovingly when I’d presented him the empty parchment, and I was sure Grampa Gruff would get a strongly-worded letter about it at some point, unless I persuaded Gabby to lose it along the way, but I had more pressing things to worry about. Softer, warmer, kinder things. Things like how in stars I was gonna tell Sandbar. It wasn’t a question, really, that I would tell him – maybe some creatures could hold on to stuff like that, but I was pretty sure that if I tried, I’d fail harder than any test I’d ever flunked, and it would come bursting out at some point anyway, probably at the worst possible time. So I had to do it.
I was so distracted, in fact, that I didn’t even notice Smolder wasn’t there until I went to ask her for a quill.
“Hey,” I hissed, when Scribe’s back was turned, “where’s the dragon?”
Ocellus turned, shrugged. “Counsellor Trixie’s,” she said.
“What’d she do this time?”
The shadow of a smile played at the corner of her mouth. “Got caught fighting with Sandbar.”
“Got...what?” I stared. Ocellus giggled.
“It was just before class. Sandbar asked if he could switch places with Smoldy for Literature, and Smoldy said maaaybe, if he could beat her in an arm wrestle.”
My sleep-deprived brain struggled to wrap itself around the idea of Sandbar agreeing to this. “So what happened?”
Ocellus looked, for some reason, strangely proud. “They fought. Smoldy fell.”
“Smolder lost to Sandbar?”
“She was really mad about it.”
I picked my beak off the floor with some difficulty. “I’ll bet she was.” I knew, of course, that Sandbar had it in him to fight, but I couldn’t imagine him doing it so readily. Ponies didn’t usually fight unless they had to – unless something they really cared about was at stake. “Is he okay?” I asked.
“Oh yes, they’re both fine. Good, actually.”
“Huh.”
“Indeed.” Ocellus’s eyes twinkled as she leaned closer. “So, I don’t suppose you have any idea why he might have done it?”
“I...” The soft intensity of the night past flitted through my head. I saw Sandbar’s smile at my purr, and a flush spread across my cheeks. “Guess he’s just really into Romeo and Juliet.”
Ocellus shook her head knowingly. “You know I can taste emotions, don’t you?”
“Not fair.”
“I can’t exactly help it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Well, if anycreature had to know, at least Ocellus could keep a secret. A thought occurred. “Wait, so you can, like, totally tell, though, right?”
She frowned. “Tell what?”
“You know.” I lowered my voice. “If somecreature, well...likes you?”
“...Yes, pretty much.”
“Say,” I grinned, raising an eyebrow, “Smolder wasn’t exactly as keen on getting out this class as she said, was she?”
Ocellus blushed. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh.”
She cleared her throat. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t be polite to say.”
“So you wouldn’t lend me a claw here, huh?”
“Absolutely not,” she said smugly. Well, that was that dashed.
We both jumped as Scribe’s hoof slammed down on Ocellus’s desk. “Working hard, are we?”
Ocellus looked guilty, I grumbled a vague apology, and when he left again, she turned to whisper one last thing. “It’s not just emotion for creatures I can feel, either.” She looked pointedly at the book upon my desk.
I took a deep breath. “I hate Romeo and Juliet,” I told her, meeting her gaze as levelly as I could.
“Egghead,” she pronounced.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone there willingly. Oh, sure, I’d been here enough that I probably knew as much about Trixie as she knew about me, but it wasn’t like I’d ever sought her out myself. Well, there was a first time for everything. Sandbar had clearly wanted this enough to wrestle Smolder for it, I reasoned, and even if the why of that desire might not be what I hoped, it was the least I could do to ask. I raised a claw to the door, but it swung open before I could knock.
“Sandbar!” exclaimed a ball of pink from three inches in front of my beak.
“Professor Pie?”
“Yup!” She beamed, and held the door open for me to enter.
“Is, uh, is Counsellor Trixie not in?” I asked, as she shut it cheerfully behind me.
“Nope! Her and Starlight are taking the day off to spend it together, or something. I’ve been called in to help out!” At my bemused expression, she added, “Headmare Starlight Glimmer, that is.”
“I’ve heard of her,” I said, sitting down on the couch, in vague hopes she’d take her seat across from me.
“So!” She hopped up upon the couch beside me. “What’s the issue? As long as it’s not wing moult, I’ve got you covered. Unless it’s beak maintenance. Or horns, I guess. Or maths! Anything friendship-related, though, I’m great at.” She blinked. “I’m on the Council of Friendship, you know.”
“Professor, you taught me for years,” I reminded her.
“Aww, you remember!”
“I...” I pressed one claw very gently against my forehead. “Sure. It’s more of an administration issue, anyway.”
“Oh, I’m good at those!”
I eyed the large stack of papers which had been neatly swept into the bin. “Glad I came to the right creature.”
She nodded wisely. “What can I do for you?”
“Well,” I started, and paused. I want Sandbar to move class so we can read together and cuddle and maybe make out a little too didn’t seem like quite the right way to put it. “My friend,” I said, carefully, “wants to move into my class so we can study together.” Yeah, that sounded better.
“Ohh.” She gave me a huge wink. “It’s that kind of problem. You just need to tell him how you feel!”
“...Huh?”
“This ain’t my first rodeo,” she assured me. “I can read between the lines.”
I stared. “What...what lines? How could you possibly...?”
She shrugged. “I was just talking to Sandbar, you know.”
I suddenly, desperately wished I’d caught that conversation. “Isn’t student information confidential?”
“Sure!” She gave me a huge wink. It didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
“So what was he saying, then?” I asked, casually.
“Ah.” She folded her hooves together and looked at me very seriously. “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”
“Of course.”
“But I think I can still help you.” She leapt from the couch, and began rummaging around in her mane.
I tried to keep my alarm out of my voice. “Oh, good.”
“I present you...tada!” With a flourish, she pulled from her mane a small glass vial.
“What is it?”
“A potion,” she said, placing it in my claws.
“...What does it do?”
Proffessor Pie gave me a mysterious smile. “That’s the question, really, isn’t it.”
“You mean,” I said, absolutely failing to keep my dread hidden, “you don’t even know?”
“Afraid not!” She flopped down on the couch again with a sigh. “Got it from some reindeers way up in the mountains.”
“So why are you giving it to me?”
“They said to give it to somepony in need!”
I tucked the bottle very gingerly inside my bag. “Look, can’t you just let us change classes?”
“Welllllll...”
“Please?” I offered.
“Aww, I can’t say no to that. So I totally would! If I knew how.”
I buried my face in my claws. “Thanks anyway.”
She beamed. “Oh, it was nothing.”
I couldn’t help but agree.
Purple, misty, bright, the stuff seemed to almost sparkle as the sun shone through it. The juice swirled as I shook it, shimmering for a moment before settling again. It was completely unmarked, which didn’t help matters, and I wasn’t really sure whether it was a good sign or bad that there was nothing I could see that was magical about it. I uncorked it, sniffed, and plugged it up again. I held it up to one eye, and my room warped and pulled as I peered through it.
I’d pretty much decided I was going to drink it.
This was, all things considered, a terrible idea, but stars, I was in the mood for terrible ideas, and, well, a trip to the Ponyville Hospital would be an excuse not to see Sandbar tonight. Not that I didn’t want to see him – I kinda wanted nothing more – but seeing him would mean talking, and even though I’d thought about it and everything, imagining it still made me want to throw up. For better or worse, Sandbar would look at me different come morning, and as long as I could put off that change, I would. Cause if things went wrong, I didn’t want to think about what that would mean. Being roommates would become pretty awkward, for one.
I thought I remembered a story about those reindeer, though, from Hearthswarming time, sitting round the fire. Silverstream had said something about them, maybe, and though perhaps Silversteam was not the most reliable source of information in Equestria, it did add up with what the Professor had said. Something about them getting just the right things to just the right creatures. So hey, maybe this potion would make things turn out all right. Maybe it was a love potion, and it’d end with Sandbar and me, happy together, no conversation needed. Maybe it’d put me into a deathlike sleep for two days. Maybe it’d make him kiss me. Maybe it’d do nothing at all.
I took the vial, popped it open, and raised it in toast to the stars. Really, what was the worst that could happen?
I woke up two days later.
“Hey,” Sandbar said, and I knew it was him before I knew who I was.
“Hey,” I managed, sitting up slowly, carefully, as reality assembled itself around me. Like Yakyakistani flat-pack furniture, or something.
“How you feeling?”
I frowned, leaning back against the headboard. “Uh...fine? I think?” I wasn’t quite sure why he was there, watching me wake up, but I couldn’t say I minded awfully much.
“Hey, easy, dude,” he said, as I went to get up. I watched bemusedly as he fussed about me, setting a glass of water gently down beside my bed.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You’ve been out for a while. Asleep, that is.”
Huh. “And...?”
“No, dude, I mean a while. Like, days.” That woke me up, alright.
“Seriously?” Sandbar wasn’t normally the one to start such elaborate pranks, but that didn’t mean this wasn’t some other creature’s work. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Yona. Or Ocellus – she had a devious mind, when it could be persuaded away from a book.
“Seriously,” he said. I studied him a moment, then lay back. Either he’d gotten worryingly good at lying in the space of as many hours, or he was telling the truth.
“Dang.”
“Yup.” He sat down on the bed next to me, his tail just inches from my nearest claw. I had the sudden, bizarre urge to play with it.
“I guess...” My eyes widened. “The potion! Professor Pie gave me a potion, and I drank it before I went to sleep!”
Sandbar seemed to be shaking. I reached out to touch him, and realised he was grinning. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing.” He waved a hoof reassuringly. “It’s, it’s just, well, when you didn’t wake up yesterday I went straight to her, and after hours of ponies standing about and shaking their heads – they were even about to send a message to Griffonstone – we realised, uh...” He placed next to the water another vial, this one still full of a rich, liquid green.
“What?” I pressed him.
“It actually got really serious. They sent ponies down from the hospital to check on you and everything. We were all super worried – Silverstream said that maybe since Professor Pie was kind of a draconequus herself, your soul might have been dragged off to Tartarus.” He was laughing again. “And then Professor Pie went to scratch her head and found out she’d given you the wrong bottle.”
I stared.
“It was blackcurrent juice you drank.”
“I...”
He nodded.
I couldn’t help it, I started to chuckle. The idea of everycreature fussing over me like that was...well, oddly comforting, really, but also downright incredible. I laughed, and so did Sandbar, and the more I thought about it, the funnier it became, until we were both sitting there wheezing, clutching each other, and I hadn’t even noticed we were that warm.
“So, so,” I snickered, wiping a tear away with one claw, “so what you’re saying is I was just really tired.”
“That’s right.”
“And, so, everycreature was standing around all serious, and Silverstream thought my soul was trapped in Tartarus, and the whole time I was just sleeping?”
“You missed two days of class,” he told me. “Scribe was all ready to just give you a pass, if you ever awoke from your enchanted slumber, and he was so mad when it turned out to be regular sleep.”
That set me off again, imagining the pony’s thunderous scowl, and Sandbar seemed just as delighted as I was. “The best part,” he added, through gasping breaths, “was when Smolder tried to play it off like he’d overworked you. He threw up his hooves in the air and shouted – actually shouted – ‘Work? Work? That griffon’s never worked a day in his life!’ Ocellus swears she could see a blood vessel threatening to burst in his forehead.”
It was, frankly, too much. My sides hurt, and my beak was sore from too much smiling, which was a shame, cause I’d have a lot of that to do the rest of the day.
“Long story short,” Sandbar finished, running a hoof through his mane, “you’re in my class, now.”
I swallowed, letting the laughter subside. “Oh, oh stars. That literally could not have gone any better.”
“Heh, yeah.”
I took a long drink from the water he’d brought me, and sat next to him on my bed as I let it run down me. Clean and fresh and new. It was a minute before I realised just how close we’d been, and a minute longer before I could feel any awkwardness about it. Inches from me, just to my right, he seemed at once horribly far and unbearably near.
“So,” I said, when I had quite recovered.
“So,” he agreed.
I had to say something. We were alone, we were together, and it was as good a time as any. I looked down into my glass as if it might offer some advice. I didn’t mind if he didn’t love me back, I told myself, that I could bear – it was the look he would give me, and the way the space between us would change as he shifted away, just a little.
“Hey,” I began, “I got something I need to—”
“Uh,” he said, at just the same time, “there might have been one other thing I—”
We exchanged glances. Snorted.
“You go first,” I said. He looked like he’d much rather not, but nodded.
“Cool.” Sandbar leaned back, putting his hooves behind him to support it. My right claw was a hair, a feather away from his leg. “Right. So.” He seemed to be gathering himself, gathering courage, and I wanted desperately to cover his hoof with my claw, only I wasn’t sure that would reassure him. “Okay.” He bit his lip, and said in a rush, “I kinda sorta kissed you when you were asleep.”
Taking a deep breath, not daring to look at me, he explained, “Professor Pie thought it might be one of those spells, like in old stories, where true love’s kiss would wake you, and, uh, for whatever reason she told me to give it a go. And we were all really worried and didn’t know if you were going to wake up and Silverstream was crying and Yona was just staring, staring like she’d smash the school itself to wake you up, and...” He came up for air. “I was scared, too, you know, and hey, like, it might’ve worked, and...yeah, sorry.”
“Huh,” I said, after a moment.
Sandbar opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Huh?” he repeated. “Dude, that is not a reaction you’re allowed so have.”
“Huh?”
“No!” He pushed against me theatrically. “I’ve been thinking about that for days! You don’t get to just say huh.”
“Okay,” I said, quite reasonably. “I...don’t mind?”
“Huh,” he said, after a moment. I grinned, waiting for him to continue. He didn’t.
“You wanna hear what I was going to say?” I asked, eventually.
“Tell me.”
I swallowed. My stomach lurched, and the moment felt right, and I had to get it out, but still I struggled to form the words. Even now, it was difficult. “I drank that potion...well, blackcurrent juice...because I knew I had to talk to you, and I knew I wanted to put it off.” And I sat, and I told him about just what I’d felt when he’d held me against him, reading softly, in the quiet of the night, where he and I were the only two creatures in the world, his voice humming through me like the strings on an instrument as he breathed words written four hundred years ago as passion itself. I don’t know what I said, exactly, but then it wasn’t the words that mattered. I started off looking him in the eye, but by the time I whispered that what I meant to say was I wouldn’t mind, in the end, if he kissed me again, my gaze was firmly on the floor.
Silence hung between us, and my cheeks burned, and I traced patterns in the wood that were dull as I’d thought the play to be, but it was better than looking up to see him staring, to see him moving away.
Something brushed against my claw, and I recoiled, but a moment later it was there again, stronger, more insistent. I blinked, and followed the tingling with my gaze. Sandbar’s hoof, of course, and Sandbar’s shoulder, and Sandbar’s chest and Sandbar’s nose and Sandbar’s eyes and Sandbar’s smile.
“Hey,” he said, very gently, squeezing my claw, “it’s okay. I like you, too.”
It wasn’t musical, it wasn’t poetry, but it was beautiful all the same, and truer besides. His fur reddened as I stared into his eyes, and met his smile with my own.
I went to say “Really?” or “Thank the stars”, or even just his name, just “Sandbar,” but along the way it got caught and all I let out was a squeak. His eyes sparkled, and I felt myself blushing.
“Gallus,” he said, looking at me quite seriously, “that was unbearably cute.”
“Shut up,” I told him. He leaned forward, went to add something, but I never found out what it was, because I cut him off right there. I kissed him.
Thus with a kiss, I die.