//------------------------------//
// 3 - Head to Head 
// Story: Dog Years 
// by AugieDog 
//------------------------------//

Spike blinked at the hovering unicorn. "You really are little ponies," he blurted, his voice sounding mostly like his own but somehow deeper, rounder, more resonant.

The princess shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling even as the gentle motion of her wings kept her floating steadily in place in front of him. "Size is relative, really." Her tone now that Spike was listening more closely was fuller than Twilight's, too, but he definitely recognized that she was sliding into lecture mode. "I've often thought it would be worthwhile to experiment with carrying objects of carefully calibrated weight and measurement through the mirror in an effort to establish—"

"Spike!" The distant shout was unmistakably Twilight—his Twilight—and turning, he saw a purple unicorn galloping across the field toward him. She was even smaller than this flying one, was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and behind her...

Behind her was the fanciest toy set Spike had ever imagined he would see. A castle, cut from crystal also in various shades of purple, stood maybe ten yards off from where he sat, its highest spire reaching just above his eye level, and the town beyond it looked even more fantastic, buildings he could've stepped over with ease but perfectly constructed and decorated right down to the miniature flowers in the miniature window boxes.

More movement caught his eye from beside the castle, a platform set up there with a mirror and another purple, winged figure, but the little unicorn wearing Twilight's glasses commanded his attention as she slowed to a trot, her jaw dropping and her eyes going wide. "Spike?" She asked it this time, and even though he could tell she was whispering, the word came to him loud and clear.

As did the almost irresistible impulse to pick her up. He could've done it easily, he was sure, wrapping his new claw-fingers carefully around her and hoisting her in both hands.

But he shook the idea away with the same decisiveness as he did the impulses he still occasionally got to jump onto the kitchen table. "Twilight?" He made sure to say it quietly, too, pushing against the impulse that was urging him to let loose a roar that would send cracks shattering through every inch of that castle.

Twilight stopped entirely, her head and body tilting back till she dropped onto her haunches to stare up at him.

Instead of bending over, scooping her up, and squeezing her to his chest the way a large portion of him wanted to, he forced himself to merely point a claw at her and say in as close to his regular voice as he could manage, "You are seriously adorable that way, you know that?"

A shadow swept over the grass, and the winged unicorn settled delicately beside the non-winged one. "It's so wonderful to see you again, Twilight!" the princess said, lowering her neck to nuzzle the side of Twilight's head in a way that kicked the adorableness of the scene up another dozen notches. The princess straightened with a smile and a sideways glance upward. "And I'm so glad you finally persuaded Spike to come through and pay us a visit. My own Spike and I have been looking forward to—"

"He's huge!" Twilight shouted. Waving her forehooves, she jerked her head back and forth between gaping at him and gaping at the princess. "Look at him! He's huge!"

The princess gave that little shrug again. "Well, size is—"

"And don't tell me size is relative!" Twilight sprang onto all four hooves, and even though she only came up to about the middle of the princess's chest, the glare she was employing made Spike very glad she wasn't aiming it at him. "I have studied every aspect of relativity theory, both special and general, during my years at Canterlot Tech, and none of it said anything about my dog becoming some sort of reptilian behemoth!"

"As we've discussed," the princess said with a sigh, and Spike found himself thinking there might be reasons other than her students that kept Twilight from coming through the mirror more often, "science and magic have both correspondences and differences. Still, I was under the impression that you understood how Spike's relative age as a dog would translate through the mirror into—"

"Big, you said, yes!" Falling back to sit on the grass, Twilight did some more hoof waving. "But this is ridiculous!"

Spike pricked his ears—though the things rising on the sides of his head didn't quite feel like ears... "Wait a minute. You're saying it's not that you're little ponies but that I'm a giant dragon?"

"Pretty much," something very much like his own voice said right beside him. Darting his glance up from the two ponies, he saw a purple dragon, square-jawed, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, but still about chew toy sized, his arms folded across his chest and his wings holding him easily in the air. "When Twilight and I first went through to your world, I was just a baby, scarcely a decade and a half old, so I came out as a puppy. Even now, if I crossed over again, I'd probably look pretty much the same. But you?" The dragon—the other him, Spike realized with a swallow—cleared his throat. "You're about as old as a dog can get, aren't you?"

"No, no, no!" Twilight was shouting somewhere below him. "Spike! This...this isn't how it was supposed to happen!"

"Excuse me," the other Twilight said, a very familiar note of peevishness entering her voice, "but I recall quite distinctly telling you that your Spike, being an ancient dog, would likely emerge here as an ancient dragon. And ancient dragons—"

"No!" Twilight shouted again. "You only said it was possible, not that it was probable! You said—"

A very horse-like snort interrupted her. "I said that I couldn't give you precise percentages on what might occur because we didn't have enough data. And you said it didn't really matter as long as he was too big to fit back through the mirror."

"What?" Spike had been about to jump in and ask if they could maybe stop arguing and start explaining what was going on, but the princess's words struck him as hard as a thrown tennis ball when he was looking the other way. "Too big to—?" Things began clicking together in his head so loudly, he could almost feel them shake when they collided. "That's why the platform." He gestured past the other dragon to the structure beside the castle. "And why we're outside. I mean, unless you always keep your magic mirror in the middle of a field."

"Of course," the princess said, rising up into view again. "Not 'of course' about us keeping the mirror out here, I mean, but 'of course' that we brought it down from Canterlot Tower. We needed a nice, big, open field just to be on the safe side."

Spike wasn't looking at her by then, though. He was looking at the unicorn practically cowering in the grass, her eyes shimmering. "You knew," he said, again shoving down the impulse to roar it. "You counted on me being too big to fit through and get home again. Didn't you?"

She was shivering now.

"Spike?" the princess asked from somewhere off his right ear. "You mean she didn't...didn't tell you what we'd discussed? Sent you through without telling you—?"

"He kept saying no!" Leaping onto her hind legs, Twilight waved her front hooves, wobbled, and toppled over onto her back. "And I couldn't just...couldn't do nothing!" She rolled onto her side, tears streaming down her face now. "I love you, Spike! I couldn't just watch you—"

"You love me?" And this time, he did roar it, surged to stand upright in a way that had never felt as natural, clenched his claws into fists and let his wings unfurl behind him. "Love to you means lying to me and tricking me?" And now that the words were pouring out, he couldn't have stopped them if he'd wanted to. "Because I love you, Twilight Sparkle, have loved you since before I had a word for it! I love you so much, I refused to even think about going on with my life if I couldn't see you every day! And now? Now?"

Twilight had buried her face under her hooves, her sobs stabbing like pins into Spike's head and driving him to bellow. "Now I'm doomed to live in a place where I'll never see you again: the real you, I mean! Where I'll never get to sit in your lap or see your nose wrinkle when you laugh or feel your fingers stroking through my fur! Ever again!"

"I'm sorry!" The words bubbled up from the little purple heap of her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm—"

Giving in to his impulses at last, he threw back his head and howled with a thunder unmatched by any storm that had ever driven him to hide under the bed. Springing upward, he pounded the air with his wings till the ground disappeared, the clouds closed in around him, and he couldn't hear her voice anymore.