Flurry Heart gazed up at the stars, and wondered.
Where is she right now? Is she…is she looking up, too?
Her eyes drifted towards Sirius, the wolf star. The one Cozy Glow had pointed out to her, once.
My dad was an astronomer.
He was? It had been the first detail about her birth parents that Cozy had ever shared.
He used to tell me that if I didn’t watch out, that Sirius would come down and eat me up. Swallow me whole, feathers and all.
Flurry Heart had sat up, eyes wide. That’s — that’s horrible, Cozy.
And Cozy Glow had looked at her, one corner of her mouth quirked in a sardonic smile, and shrugged. Yeah.
And she had never mentioned him again.
What had Cozy gone through, when she was a child? What had she suffered? And why wouldn’t she trust Flurry with it? Why wouldn’t she let her help?
Flurry had stewed on it for months, had tried in a thousand different ways to ask her marefriend; obliquely and otherwise. But Cozy Glow had shrugged and smiled and changed the subject. It was like trying to pin down a cloud. Impossible.
That was the way everything had been, really. She was charming in the day to day, and happy to talk about anything so long as it was in the present. So long as it wasn’t real. Cozy Glow was sharp and fierce and beautiful, and she was the most emotionally distant pony Flurry Heart had ever met.
It was easy, to lie here in the soft grass, her ever-present guards at a discreet distance as she stared up at the stars, and obsess over Cozy Glow’s flaws. She had so many of them.
But that didn’t change the fact that Flurry Heart felt her absence like a physical pain, like a phantom limb. That her ghost was beside her right now, whispering caustic commentary into her ear, jibes and jokes and things that no one but the two of them could ever understand.
Cozy Glow was a canker, a poison, and Flurry Heart missed her with all of her soul.