//------------------------------//
// Reflections 
// Story: Time Passes Slowly By 
// by MasterFrasca 
//------------------------------//

	I slumped on the wall, sliding down until I was in a sitting position with my hooves spread in front of me. My life had to be over. There was no way that that could have happened just now. I never imagined that she would just leave me like that. I thought Twilight and I had something going for us. I thought we were in love. Little did I know she would kick me to the curb and tell me that I was just another one of her assignments. I was just this month’s project to her, nothing more.

She had come up to me and asked right out if I was single. She had asked me that exactly one month ago. I had no clue she was looking for love then, much less love with me. I was just a simple clock repair pony, nothing special. I had always looked at her from afar. She had peaked my interest during that moment I saw her at Pinkie’s signature “Welcome to Ponyville” party. Her profession, her mane, and her personality all helped to shoot an arrow of love through my heart. I had tried to keep my feelings to myself, because what would a hero like her want to do with such an isolated pony as me. She was the savior of Equestria, stopping Nightmare Moon’s wrath cold, while I was just the pony who had broken clocks brought in to be fixed.

But she had asked me, not Blues or any of the other renowned Apple family stallions. She had asked me for a date. She had been blatant and awkward when she said it, yet calm and sincere at the same time. That first night she had asked me, I knew that we were going to have something wonderful. We went out and had dinner at a local café, turning quickly from passing strangers to two ponies in love. That dinner was the beginning of the best times of my life.

Oh the wondrous nights we shared with each other, going out and gazing upon the thousands of stars in the sky. She would point out all the stars and name them by heart, and I would make up different constellations and show them to her. We laughed making out funny shapes with the millions of glowing dots in the night sky. There were days we spent together where she would come to my shop and I’d show her all the different machines I kept in the basement. She was astounded at the amount of things put into making and repairing clocks and other devices. We would sit down there forever while I tried to explain how a clock works so well, and why some needed wound up or why some would never work again. She was always eager to have me show her how a part worked or how to use a certain tool. After a few days I even had her help me fix a clock. I told her where the piece would go, and she would levitate it into place.

She had seemed so happy and energetic during those nights, learning about the inner workings of clock in town. She was always eager, too, to show me something new when she could think of it, and as the days went by she grew happier as we grew closer. One peculiar thing she always did was take notes while we did just about anything, but that didn’t bother me one bit. A few times she even brought her best friend, Spike, out with us. He was almost like a son to her, and she always knew how to look after him. All these fun times had led up to this fateful day: the day things changed.

Ironically, the pegasus ponies had scheduled a small storm for today, and Twilight had asked that I come over to the library for some “emergency.” I had thought that, after all those hours spent in my little workshop, she was going to show me something special. I had taken my coat to try and keep dry in the pouring rain, but since I had no umbrella, my head got the bulk of the rain. By the time I had arrived at the tree, my mane was dripping with water and plastered to the top of my head. I tried to shake some of the water out, but my head was thoroughly covered, and I gave up just heading to the door, dripping wet. I knocked on the door, hoping that she had something I could dry myself with inside.

I didn’t know I would never make it through the door.

She opened the door and once she saw it was me, she said plainly, “We need to stop seeing each other. My studies on dating are over, and I no longer need your services.”

She had quickly shut the door on me, and I just stood there I shock. I should have known that the Princess’s only student would have never taken a true interest in me, and yet here I stood, a fool who thought he had found his soul mate. The notes. The fact that we had never kissed. The blatant question that started it all. All these signs raced over my head as I trudged blindly through the forest of love, not realizing the quicksand beneath my hooves. My only option is to go back to the shop, back to my monotonous Twilight-free life.


Clocks were the only things I understood anyway…