~Chapter 3~
Avoidance
Spike huffed out in exhaustion at the door to his house, the dashes to Ponyville and back again had deprived him of the last traces of energy in his body. He, of course, regretted nothing. It had been a wonderful night that started the path to fully mending his relationship with Twilight, and he couldn't help but feel that the unexpected twist of her being a dragoness now was the metaphorical cherry on top for his late night trip.
Now however, he was exhausted, and he desperately wanted something to quench the thirst he had built up on the return trip. Using the key hidden under the floor mat in front of the door, Spike unlocked the boutique to let himself in, greeted once again by nothing other than the damned wooden ponies clad in various dresses. The building was plunged in darkness, letting him know that the two other ponies in the house were probably already asleep. His draconic eyes allowed him to navigate through the rooms devoid of light with ease, and he quickly found himself in front of the house's refrigerator. Rarity had insisted that they should replace the icebox the used to have, one of the few things he actually agreed with.
The darkness in the kitchen was sliced away by the fridge's light when Spike opened the door, returning hastily after he had retrieved a orange-flavored soft drink and closed the door on his way upstairs. He thought of what he should tell the sleeping alabaster mare when she woke up, finding it difficult to think about such things without someone encouraging him the way Twilight did during his visit. His drink was long gone by the time he reached the white doorway leading into his shared room, and his free claw reached out for the golden door handle.
"Locked, just fan-tastic."
He knew that was a sign that Rarity was either really angry at him, or doing some deep thinking of her own. He also understood that it would be pointless to force his way in, all that'd manage to do is break the door and put the unicorn on the other side in an even worse mood than the one she was already in. With a dejected sigh, Spike tossed the empty can in his claw into a waste bin as he walked into the bathroom.
A coat of sweat still gave him a sheen that shone when he flicked on the lights. He needed a hot shower to help him clear his head, not to mention avoiding waking up smelling like a bog, so he stepped into the stall and turned the temperature as high as it would go. The scaldingly hot water raining down on his scaly body was nothing compared to the lava pits he swam in when he was younger, so it only served as a nicely warmed downpour. The dirt accumulated on his skin melted away, much like the physical and mental tension he had acquired while he was on his trip.
His thoughts, as clear as they had become due to his relaxation, were still confusing to him. He didn't know what he felt towards Rarity anymore, not since the dam created by his patience was broken. There was little hope that things between the two of them would ever be the same again, but that line of thought simply connected him with the other pressing matter at hand, Twilight. Or, more specifically, how he planned on making things right with her again. She had put his fears of her rejecting him to rest, but the guilt in his heart was still strong, and it wouldn't bu quelled until he felt like he had actually given it his all to mend the bonds with the dragoness.
He faintly noticed that something felt...different, whenever he thought about his lifelong friend and her new form. The purple drake continued to feel the small surges of confusing new emotions when he decided to stray his thoughts towards the older dragon. He couldn't help but like the idea of teaching the studied dragoness the little secrets only someone that has lived in a dragon's body for their entire life could know, but judging by her higher knowledge on using her fire breath she probably already went through studies of her form herself. Very thorough studies, like she usually likes to do.
'Okay...gonna stop thinking about my friend's body now.' both, the tint on his cheeks and the imagery coming to his pubescent mind failed to be dispelled by the measly amount of will he put into his internal statement. He felt something on his own body beginning to stir, much to his surprised embarrassment, and he switched the water from scalding hot to freezing cold to stop it before it became a much bigger problem. That probably wasn't a good idea considering that he failed to remember he was a cold-blooded creature, and the frosty water nearly caused him to go into hypothermia before he managed to escape from the chilled stall. At least his 'Problem' was taken care of, but now he was shivering cold and sapped of any energy he had received from the soft drink.
'Whoa, that was...interesting?' the images began to come back slowly, but he was quick to cut off the flow, 'No! No, it was just Twilight being her regular self, and don't you dare make me think otherwise. Damn, traitorous brain.'
That was just what he needed, more complications arising because of his hormone-driven mind. Spike toweled himself off as best as he could while trying to warm himself up with the friction, walking back downstairs shortly afterwards to find where he would be sleeping for the night. His gaze fell upon a luxurious blue couch, one that was barely big enough to house his outstretched figure, but it would do. Before drifting off to a dreamscape dotted with crying angry white unicorns and a purple dragoness hiding stealthily in the shadows, Spike gave said one last thing to himself.
"Have a good night's sleep everypony, cause tomorrow I'm surely going to need it."
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Twilight roamed the halls of her library home, trying to quell the pestering fears that plagued her mind. She had the greatest night from the past five years on that day, all because her special dragon had finally come to visit her again, and he even left her with a promise of his return on the following day. It brought about utter joy within the depths of her secluded heart, but a looming smog of doubt still hovered over her euphoric state, canceling it out by whispering dark taunts into her ears.
Her tail whipped at nothing in particular as she shook her head to clear away the gloomy thoughts coursing through her.
"I don't need to think like this anymore...he made a promise, and I trust him."
Trust. It one of the most valuable tokens of friendship, yet it was also the easiest to corrupt, to betray. She was heartbroken when she got the news that Spike was going to move away, but she let him go with a faux smile on her face because she wanted him to be happy, no matter how that would affect her. The letters exchanged between the two of them were enough to hold their friendship together, barely, but when those stopped coming she was left with nothing but her library.
After that, well...she didn't want to think about that anymore than she already had. Still, she had grown more isolated from the world around her, feeling as if a piece of her soul was ripped out when her dragon left, and that little piece had been annihilated ever since the exchange of updates between Spike and her ended. It had been erased from the face of Equestria along with any fantasies of ever seeing or hearing from him again, but this one night had changed everything.
Deep in her mind, past the sea of recent euphoria and the haze of aged depression, lay a flickering flame called hope. One that refused to be put out by her traitorous subconscious' futile attempts, but it was significantly dulled by the way Spike had parted. She loved that he had promised he would come back to see her again the following day, but she trembled at the similarity his goodbye had to his final letter, planting new seeds of doubt in her head.
Right before the letters stopped being exchanged, her favorite purple dragon had sent her news on what he was planned to do for his one-year anniversary with Rarity, saying that he promised to write to her the following day after the celebration was over. He promised.
She waited, and waited, and waited, but the letter she was expecting never came to her doorstep. She dashed over to the post office to ask Ditzy Doo if anything directed for her had been mixed up in the deliveries, but nothing came up. Nothing ever came up after that, leading up to the aforementioned destruction of a vital portion of her happiness.
"No, I have to stop thinking about the past. He's back now, we can start fixing what we had...together."
Her battlefield of a mind started to settle down as her resolve grew, fueled by her dreams and aspirations to light up the darkness cast by the blockade of hopelessness. Her dragon nature was urging her to migrate closer to the only other dragon she knew, whispering the plans of how to relocate quick and easily into her ear. She, of course, suppressed it like she had learned to do so over the past years, but it was stronger than ever before. Having seen Spike for the first time in her new body had activated parts of her instincts that were usually only activated during the estrus seasons, increasing the variety of urges her draconic nature would try to make her follow along with.
Honestly, she was having a hard time saying 'No' anymore, and the only thing stopping her was her morality code.
"Ugh, I need a bath, and sleep. Lots of sleep."
Wading in steaming hot water helped sooth her exhausted nerves greatly, giving her the final push she needed to be able to sleep at all. She lay on the spot she had been come to sleep in for such a long time now, finding that having had a taste of companionship after so long only made her feel even lonelier when no one was around. With a mighty sigh, Twilight lay her head down onto her pillow, relishing the cool surface as she sunk into its plushness.The dragoness curled herself under the blankets just before she spoke softly to anyone listening, drifting off to a blissful sleep at last.
"Goodnight Spike, I'll see you tomorrow...I hope."
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The morning sun's rays filtered in through the semi-transparent drapes covering the windows to the Sparkling Diamond Boutique, falling directly onto the eyelids of a purple dragon snoozing on a luxurious blue couch. He began to stir from his sleep due to the annoying sensation the solar rays caused, and he had to shield his eyes from the offending light with a numb claw to avoid letting the stinging grow even worse. With a groan, Spike hopped off the couch and dropped to all fours with a yawn before stretching out his limbs, arcing his back very akin to the way Opalescence would do as he popped all the kinks he had received overnight. The sofa was comfortable, yes, but it wasn't exactly fit to sleep on.
He turned his head this way and that to try and see if anypony had already woken up before him. His emerald eyes spotted nothing, but his ears picked up small noises coming from the kitchen, not to mention the smell wafting over to him. His stomach growled for being teased with such a succulent scent, but his mind was set on settling things with Rarity. His patience was running thin with the alabaster mare already, but he still held it together somewhat enough to be willing to try and fix things with her.
With determination blazing in his eyes, Spike crossed the archway from which the smell of food originated, finding a unicorn already sitting at the breakfast table. Of course, it wasn't the unicorn he was looking for.
"Good morning Spike! How'd sleeping on the couch treat you?" Sweetie Belle greeted the drake with the energy she always managed to mysteriously summon in the mornings, snapping any trace of rebellious drowsiness still clinging to him.
"If you look past the sore neck and the back pains, then it was not that bad actually." the dragon somehow managed to smile through the small grimace he gave, rubbing the back of his back to try and sooth the lingering annoyances, "That aside, did you get any rest? You've been working really hard lately trying to rise through the scoreboards."
"Yeah, I have enough juice to last me the entire day, but I would have gotten more if you and Rarity would've lowered it a few notches yesterday. What's got both your tails so badly in a twist anyway? You two are usually so quiet and reserved, not at all like the shouting you guys did last night." Sweetie scratched her right ear with her hoof, faintly noticing the feeling of the cooled golden ring piercing she had on it as she awaited Spike's answer. A small frown had grown on his face as he started to remember the events that had played out yesterday with the older unicorn, but his response wasn't delayed.
"Sweetie, have you been in a relationship yet?" the question intrigued the teenage unicorn filly because of how spontaneous it was.
"Yes I have, I think my last breakup was the fifth one already. Why do you ask?" now, the singing filly wasn't the everyday whorse who was spreading her hind legs for anything she saw fit, but she did like testing the waters every now and then with a variation of younger stallions. Unfortunately for her, the stallions of Trottingham were more than a little snobbish, and they always chased after her flanks rather than try to chase her heart. It was a fact that frustrated her to no end, but she wasn't one to give up easily after failing, a trait she had developed over the years as a crusader.
"Because I've got some things I need to talk about with Rarity. I can tell you what it's about, but I've got to ask you one thing first."
"Go ahead, I'm all ears."
"Will you be cool about whatever I say, because it does involve your sister?" a nod from the filly was all he needed as a response, "Where is she by the way?"
"Well, she woke up about an hour ago, and everything was the same as usual. That is, until she found you sleeping on the sofa. After that, she started acting a little erratically, saying that she was going to go for a walk and for me not to..tell...you. Uhm, oops?"
Spike's right eye twitched as he realized what the fashionable unicorn was doing, and it was exactly the thing he wanted her to stop. She was avoiding him, again. Whether it was done out of fear or out of anger, he couldn't be sure, but he very much knew that his newly strengthened patience was beginning to crumble already. In a desperate attempt to stop himself from falling into a rage fit, he grabbed a piece of french toast from a platter on the dining table and took a massive chomp out of it. The buttery flavor managed to distract him from the spikes of ire in his mind, but they were still going on without him there feeling them, still destroying his will to bear with the unicorn's evasive nature any longer.
"You won't tell her I told you, right?" Sweetie Belle was basically pleading him to keep secrecy, and he was about to let his unstable emotions get the better of him and lash out at the innocent filly, barely stopping himself by staring deeply into her eyes. She had done nothing bad to him, in fact she had actually helped him out just a couple of seconds ago, so she didn't deserve to get any of his venting directed at her.
"Nah, but now I have even MORE I want to talk to her about." his anger seeped heavily into his voice, sharpening it enough to cause the young unicorn to recoil a little at how alien it sounded.
"Do you want someone to hear you out right now?" Spike knew that he needed to let out everything he was bottling up, but it had never occurred to him that his marefriend's younger sister would be the one helping him in his time of need. He graciously took up the offer silently by sitting down at the circular table, just across from Sweetie, "So what's going on between you and my workaholic sis'?"
"It's nothing new, but it's something that I've been pushed to speak out about. I feel like I'm drifting away from her, Sweetie Belle, each day since we've moved here she and I have talked less and less. It's as if we were just what we were before I confessed to her, me being the assistant that follows in her hoofsteps, letting her do as she pleases instead of what I would like for her to do."
"I guess I understand, except for that last bit. Haven't you two always agreed on everything before?"
"Before she became my marefriend, yes, but I've rarely been given the chance to make any contributions to the decisions we're supposed to be making together. Before I can even say anything, Rarity takes the reigns and steers them anywhere she wants."
"If it's such a big issue why didn't you mention it sooner?"
"Because I could bear with the sacrifices I made for her, but this thing about moving to Canterlot is just pushing the line for me. I spent most of my life there and I can tell you it isn't a pretty city to be in if you aren't living at the castle. It is full of corruption, greed, and backstabbers trying to reach the top of the power pyramid of society. I worry that if we move over there Rarity will become just as twisted as the rest of the mares of business drawn into the 'Glamorous' city, doing everything she can to exceed those around her only to lose it all when she gets masterly swindled by another aristocrat trying to take over all of her possessions." not a single lie left the drakes lips as he spoke. True, he hadn't mentioned all of this when he argued with Rarity, but he didn't do it because he knew she couldn't listen. She had always dreamed of being among those of high class, so she wouldn't be deterred from her path by what she could easily think was a lie fabricated by the purple dragon.
"Something tells me that's not the whole story, Spike. What aren't you telling me?" weeding out the cheaters that had pined after her white flanks had given her an uncanny ability to detect lies. She was no Applejack-level lie detector, but she could easily tell when the dragon was lying due to the five years she spent living with him, learning his little signs he would give off. Caught with no way out, and without a reason to avoid the perfectly normal question, he explained the core of his reluctance to leave.
"It's just that I feel guilty for...for avoiding Twilight so long unintentionally. I wish I could just take it all back, before I ever left her behind without as much as a letter for three years."
"Dang, I haven't heard that name in a long time. So that's one of the main reasons you don't want to leave?"
"It's probably the biggest one of all. That's why you saw me sleeping on the couch a little while ago, I had run all the way to Ponyville to finally see her again, and I felt happier than I have ever been recently when I did. The look on her face made up for the exhaustion I went through to get there, but it also let me know just how much it had hurt her to not hear from me in such a long time. I even left her with a promise that I would see her again today, and I intend to keep it, but I wanted to settle things with Rarity here and now. For her to tell me to just abandon Twilight like that is just...just...I can't even find a word to describe it right now."
"Don't you think you're exaggerating a little?" Sweetie noticed the look of hurt on his face the second it appeared and quickly worked to rectify it, "Don't get me wrong! I respect whatever decision you make, but you can't forget that you've both been really stressed out lately. Maybe all of this is just a result of you guys overworking yourselves."
"No, I've been frustrated with her neglecting me so much for a long time now, tired of her choosing to expand her business rather than to hear what I have to say. Now, she just tipped the scale a little too much, and I thought I would be able to fix it today by talking with her about it. Apparently that isn't possible because she's trying to avoid me in every sense possible now, and that's just the last push I needed to make a decision I'm most likely going to regret in the future."
"W-what are you going to do?" Sweetie let her imagination run wild, crafting scenes where the older dragon rips her sister in half and chars the body in a bout of green flames.
Were they unlikely? Yes.
Did that make them leave her head? No.
She watched silently as her question floated in the air, waiting for the response that would either cause her to sigh in relief or run for her sister's life. Spike stood from his spot at the table with eyes burning coldly with the flames of his determination, and when he spoke it was in a straightforward voice that held little reluctance in it.
"It's time for Rarity and I to take some time apart."
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Twilight stood by her kitchen's window, watching the sun shift from it's early yellow colors into the orange that marked the afternoon. Her sad frown mimicked the suns decent, growing darker with every second that passed by. She was alone in her library again. There wasn't a purple dragon next to her, telling her stories of his time away, there wasn't a friend she could trust at her side, with whom she could share her deepest secrets, and there certainly wasn't a lovely drake there to make her heart flutter.
She had her house, her books, and a cabinet that beckoned her to give into its influence.
The latter drew her attention away from the darkening horizon, causing her to leave the window that had taunted her all day to unleash the corruption behind its wooden panel. With nothing else that was worthy left to lose in her life, Twilight began to lose her will. Within the cabinet, she found a glass and a bottle of wine, both of which had gone untouched for about three year's time. One claw extended to grip the alcoholic beverage while the other got a hold of the cool glass, the keys to saving her from her tormenting thoughts. The cork screwed off easily, having been opened repeatedly in the past, giving access to the half-bottle's worth of liquid within. The strong drink poured into the tall glass, which was then raised into the air by a shaky arm. The rays of the dying sun reflected off the droplets falling from the dragoness' face, highlighting the frail words slipping past her lips.
"To us."