One morning, Twilight and Spike were sorting through some old drafts of royal memos when Twilight lifted a sheet up and yelped.
“Spider?” asked Spike.
“Uh, huh,” Twilight answered uncomfortably.
“You know, if anyone who wants to overthrow you finds out that you’re scared of spiders,” Spike said, “you’re in big trouble.”
“Would you please just get it out of here?” Twilight demanded.
Spike sighed, put down the papers he’d been pretending to read, and held out a claw to the spider, who crawled onto it. Spike couldn’t resist. He stretched out his claw to Twilight.
“Spike, don’t!” Twilight flinched. “Just get it out!”
Spike chuckled and left the room.
“It feels good to hold all the cards,” he said to himself as he escorted the spider out of the castle.
Normally Spike would simply deposit an evicted spider outside, but it was wintertime and spiders don’t do well in freezing snow.
“How about I take you to Fluttershy’s?” he suggested as if he could understand the spider’s response.
The spider had not bitten him or tried to crawl away, so Spike set off for Fluttershy’s cottage. When he arrived, Angel Bunny, who was wearing a toque as a coat, popped out of a pile of snow looking inconvenienced by the presence of Spike.
“Oh, look. A snow angel,” Spike joked as he approached Fluttershy’s door.
Spike knocked, and found he’d broken a thin layer of ice on the door.
“W-who is-s it-t?” came Fluttershy’s voice from inside.
“It’s Spike,” replied the baby dragon. “I’ve got a spider for you.”
“Oh! P-please c-come in-n,” Fluttershy’s voice shivered.
“Sounds like the weather’s getting to her,” Spike remarked as he opened the door causing more thin ice sheets to fall away.
He was quite right. It was colder inside the cottage than outside. Fluttershy was sitting in the middle of the floor covered in blankets.
“I’m-m s-so happy you c-came S-Spike,” she shuddered. “I’ve r-run out-t of m-matches.”
She tilted her head towards the fireplace.
“Say no more,” smiled Spike.
He set the spider down on a side table, which felt to the spider like a tub of ice cream, and walked over to the fireplace. One green breath later, the three logs in the fireplace were blazing.
“Thank-k you S-Spike,” sighed Fluttershy. “I feel better already.”
“Glad to be of service,” Spike replied. “Speaking of which, I should get back to helping Twilight with her work.”
“OK. I’ll be sure to take good care of the spider,” said Fluttershy.
Before Spike had left, Angel bounded into the room through the open front door squeaking furiously.
“Who pulled his ears?” Spike frowned.
Fluttershy listened to Angel’s enraged squealing and watched him pointing wildly at the fireplace.
“Oh, dear!” she exclaimed. “Angel says he had a secret stash of carrots up the chimney and it’s fallen into the fire.”
Spike looked at the fire he’d just made. There was a small metal box he hadn’t seen before sitting amongst the flames.
“Oh, alright,” Spike said as he reluctantly returned to the fireplace.
Being fireproof certainly had its advantages.
“It feels good to hold all the cards,” he said to himself for the second time that day.
When he’d taken the box out of the fire, he opened it and found nine steaming, slightly wet carrots.
“Huh. Well, I hope you like cooked carrots,” he said cheekily to Angel.
Angel hopped up and grabbed a carrot out of the box. He gave Spike a look that plainly said “I better.” He took a bite of his carrot. The anger was wiped from his face. He looked happier than Scootaloo after she’d beaten her personal airborne record of fourteen seconds. He quickly ate the rest of the carrot, taking immense pleasure in every bite.
“Oh, my,” Fluttershy remarked. “Looks like he does like cooked carrots.”
Having finished all nine from the box, Angel leapt across the room and pulled another small metal box from inside a mouse hole. He then returned to the fireplace, grabbed a poker and stuck a carrot from this new box on it.
“Does he have secret carrot stashes all over your house or something?” asked Spike.
“Maybe,” Fluttershy shrugged as she watched Angel cooking his carrot. “But lots of animals eat more during winter.”
With that, Spike once again bade Fluttershy goodbye and left the cottage.
The following week, Spike heard Twilight’s distinctive yelp again. This time, he’d been reshelving books in the castle library and Twilight had been cleaning the floor of melted snow that had been tracked in by visiting ponies. Spike didn’t wait to be asked. He wasn’t about to say no to a work break. He also wasn’t going to say no to another jab at Twilight’s arachnophobia. He picked up the spider and held it to Twilight’s face as he walked past her towards the exit.
“That’s not funny, Spike!” Twilight snapped as Spike laughed like a ticklish rat. “Quit doing that!”
Spike didn’t take this spider to Fluttershy’s. He decided that this time, he would go to Crosspatch and see if she’d take it. He also wanted to see how their house, which they’d managed to buy in time for winter, was looking.
“Spike!” exclaimed Crosspatch when she answered the door. “Perfect timing. Come on in.”
Spike entered and found a curious sight waiting for him. A fire was going in the fireplace, and Lazybug seemed to be trying to waft the smoke towards a wall on the other side of the room with a sheet of cardboard.
“What’s going on?” Spike asked.
“We’re trying to smoke out some bees that made a nest in that crawlspace,” Crosspatch explained. “We’ve made a new hive for them…”
She pointed to an artificial bee hive next to the wall.
“But they won’t go into it,” Crosspatch finished. “Could you smoke them out?”
“Sure thing,” said Spike. “Here.”
He passed his spider to Crosspatch.
“Another tenant?” she asked. “Oh, alright. He won’t do any harm living in there.”
Lazybug put his cardboard sheet down and watched Spike approach the gap in the wall. He took a breath and exhaled a small flame. Dark green smoke billowed into the crawlspace. An angry bee flew out of the gap and stung Spike’s arm. The thick scaled little dragon felt nothing.
“All the cards,” he said to himself. “It feels good to hold them.” (He felt like mixing it up a little this week).
Two other bees resisted as Spike continued to pump smoke into the crawlspace, but before long, they had all been incapacitated. Lazybug shoved the artificial hive next to the gap and watched as the bees tumbled out of the crawlspace into the box.
“Thank you, Spike,” said Crosspatch once all the bees were accounted for. “I’ll be sure to add to my notes ‘Dragons = not pests’. I never knew any domesticated ones until I met you.”
A gooey gold liquid trickled out of the gap in the wall.
“Oh, great,” groaned Crosspatch. “Lazybug, would you mind cleaning up that honey?”
Lazybug didn’t answer. He simply stuck his tongue out and lapped up the dribbling honey.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “This stuff’s really, really good! Try a bit, guys!”
Crosspatch and Spike had to agree that the honey from the walls was delicious. There was a knock from the window. Crosspatch saw Fluttershy outside, and ran to the window with a hoofful of honey.
“Hey Fluttershy, try this honey!” she said once she’d opened the window.
Fluttershy obliged, and also enjoyed the honey from the walls tremendously. She looked around and spotted Spike.
“Twilight told me you might have come here,” she said. “I wanted to ask you if, if it’s not too much trouble, you wouldn’t mind lighting another fire in my fireplace.”
“Run out of matches again or something?” asked Spike.
“No, but every time I’ve lit a fire since you last visited, Angel didn’t like the carrots he cooked over it,” Fluttershy told him. “I think he only likes cooking over your fire.”
Crosspatch looked back to the crawlspace that had just been smoked out.
“Spike,” she said, “I think your fire might be a flavour enhancer.”
Spike had another go at lighting a fire in Fluttershy’s cottage, and Angel cooked carrots over it again. They were all gone within minutes. Fluttershy tried cooking a few things and sampling them.
“Crosspatch was right,” she said with a mouth full of grilled tomato. “Everything does taste better cooked over your fire.”
The afternoon, Spike and Fluttershy went to Sweet Apple Acres and asked Applejack to host a bonfire in the yard.
“In this weather?” she asked.
“It’ll be worth it, Applejack,” Fluttershy promised.
So Applejack agreed, and that evening, she, Fluttershy, Spike and the rest of the gang met at the orchard fire pit. After the snow had been cleared away and the pit had been cleared out and loaded with timber, Spike lit the fire and Applejack brought out some food. Within minutes, comments and compliments were fired at Spike like confetti.
“You’ve got to work with me tomorrow at Sugarcube Corner!” insisted Pinkie, spitting bits of corn into Rainbow Dash’s face.
“You got it,” Spike nodded.
If it had been any other time of year, Spike might not have called the events that followed a “snowball effect”. There was a line-up outside Sugarcube Corner the following day. Baked goods and hot chocolate were flying out of the bakery like styrofoam pellets in a hurricane. After having stood in line three times, the Mayor asked Spike to cook at a makeshift refreshment stand that would be set up during a figure skating competition in three days. Spike agreed, but he’d been given other offers in the meantime and found himself late to the skating contest. No one complained however as his output was exquisite. A spectator from out of town offered Spike work at a pageant in Salt Lick City preparing tea and cakes for the interval. Before Spike knew it, he was involved in the catering aspects of every winter event in Equestria for a month. He never turned down an offer, and he could easily afford train tickets as he was always paid handsomely. Until this time, he’d rarely used gemstones to pay for things. In fact, the more times he cooked for ponies, the more frequently he asked to be paid in bits. Sometimes his request was granted, and others he had to be content with jewels; something he found himself becoming less and less by the day.
“There’s my number one assistant!” Twilight exclaimed one evening when Spike returned to Ponyville Castle after four days. “This place hasn’t been the same without you.”
Spike was tired, but he couldn’t pass up a chance for a tease.
“I expected this place to be full of spiders.”
Twilight chuckled. “So, tomorrow I’d like to…”
“Tomorrow, I gotta go to the Crystal Empire,” Spike interrupted.
“Spike, you don’t have to accept every offer,” Twilight groaned. “You’re gonna wear yourself out.”
“I noticed,” replied Spike, dragging his knuckles along the floor as he walked across the room. “But I can’t say no to going to the Crystal Empire. I’m a big-shot there. And Impulsoria’s fire doesn’t have the same effect on food that mine does. Apparently, crystal dragon fire isn’t a flavour enhancer.”
“But there’ll be hundreds of ponies to cook for there,” Twilight told him. “The Crystal Empire’s become the number one holiday destination during the winter. Ponies like vacationing where there’s no snow.”
Spike scoffed. “No snow? There’s tons of snow around it. It’s in the arctic.”
“Most ponies think it’s a small price to pay,” Twilight shrugged.
“Well, thanks for warning me,” Spike yawned. “I think I’ll go to bed now. I gotta catch the Crystal Express in the morning.”