Brock Starthumper exhaled air as thick as syrup. He was alone with her in his dark bedroom. This tiny space, furnished with only one small porthole, was hot, and heavy, and green with the muted light from Brock’s fishtank. Heavy in a literal sense, in fact. As a humble zero-G technician, Brock had his room near the outermost layer of the outermost station ring. It wasn’t making his shallow breathing any more relaxed.
He could barely see her, there across the papery shadows. But he knew she was with him. So he smiled, moving into the light where she could look at him. Fishlight bounced off his clock; the time was eleven at night, February, 2056.
Brock labored for one more deep breath. “Okay, Aria.” He felt a tingle as he said it. “Here we go.”
The Cadenza ritual had been around for nearly as long as humans had been courting other species. So growing up, Brock had learned about it the same time he learned about the birds and the bees. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind to do this any other way.
The first step was exposure. Brock almost frantically unzipped his UV-shielding suit. He used for walking around outer access halls and unshielded machinery domes, and it had both a look and feel of tinfoil about it. He was more than happy to get it off.
Next came his blue jeans and a thin cotton shirt. Brock tugged and tore until every shred of his clothing was gone. It was awkward to stand naked outside of the dry-press shower, but Brock realized with an odd twinge that he was neither cold nor ashamed. He smiled shakily. And he kicked his jeans underneath his tool bench, careful not to wrinkle the burgundy throw rug that softened the clearing in the center of the room.
Now it was her turn. Aria stepped into the light for him.
Flutterponies tended towards very pale coat colors, most commonly butter yellow. Aria had a rare coat color for her kind. Blue—her hair-tips so light she looked like a patch of Earthside sky over a blazing beach.
She had to step carefully, because Brock’s ceiling wasn’t very high. Her head came up just past his waist, but her folded wings loomed over the fishtank, and it would have been agonizing to smash them into the titanium hull overhead.
He’d only ever seen them like the way they were now—closed, a tight sail rising straight up from her back. The outer edges were rippled in dark pink. Nearly purple in this light. Flutterponies always had their wings closed when they went out in public areas. They weren’t comfortable showing the inner edges. The only way a stranger could hope to see them was by happening to pass over one in a flight hallway. A pegasus, for instance, might catch a glimpse. But if they were discreet they wouldn’t mention it.
Since Brock couldn’t fly, it was his first time seeing them when she turned around and opened up as far as the walls of his room would allow.
He cupped a hand to his mouth. The inner edges of Aria’s wings were a riot of spots and bands in every color imaginable. Maybe thirty or forty of them. Gazing upon the shuffled rainbow was the next best thing to a trip home. He immediately guessed that Aria’s wing pattern was different from that of every other Flutterpony’s. Unique like a thumbprint, or a cutie mark.
Then they tilted—just an inch—as Aria failed to keep them perfectly steady. The colors moved. Brock reeled. He held perfectly still for a moment, watching to see if they would change again. Then, experimentally, he swayed his head. The colored bands wove across her wings like a lenticular print. Brock laughed and started rocking back and forth like a maniac.
But she tolerated his silliness.
How else would anyone date a man named Brock Starthumper? It wasn’t his real name, of course, and it had sounded like a much better idea from the bottom a late night of antique sci-fi movies. Technically, as on his ID card, his name was Cloverthumper. But he hadn’t gone by that name since walking through the Dimension Gate to the International Space Station. He didn’t want any of the guys on the zero-G crew to make fun of him. Even after sixty years, some things didn’t change.
When Brock had been a stupid young man, fresh onto the station with the latest batch of glorified welders, he’d done what any one-worlder from a backwater farming town would do. He’d blown the entirety of his first day in space by exploring the full length of Market Hall One. As the most trafficked public place in the entire station, it had species-specific facilities for every kind of life that might have cause to pass through—little nooks off to the side every thirty meters, hideaways where a given race could find a sensibly organized bathroom or a breath of home. Well, the human one was kind of a joke. A couple Coke machines and a soccer field’s worth of astro-turf. But then again, Brock did appreciate a cheap Coke.
Not even knowing the most basic of station etiquette—that he shouldn’t walk into any other species’ nook—he’d seen a room full of giant flowers and marched straight in out of curiosity.
Once inside, he hadn’t had time to take in the sight. He couldn’t see anything but the fluttering wings which suddenly filled the room like a glazed tornado. Brock had been forced to shield his face from the miniscule buffets of a hundred-odd Flutterponies, all at once taking flight. He was standing right in the face of a gentle tempest.
Butterflies, he had thought dumbly. Butterflies with wings wider than hang-gliders. That was where he’d met Aria. She was the last one to take off—slowly pulling her legs out of a tall orchid. She was the only one to hover and glance back before flying blindly into the recesses of the sky-painted ceiling.
Now, Flutterponies had been described by almost all other sentient races as ‘shy’. In that regard, they faced many of the same challenges as solitary predator species like dragons, who had also been one of the last races on the Equestrian planet to join the Equestrian Pan-Galactic Alliance. It took Flutterponies some time to find ways of working with other species and thus moving their civilization into the spacefaring age. Ponies in particular had a surprisingly hard time getting along with them.
So Brock, who considered himself half-pony by upbringing, didn’t start off with the best chances at dating one. It took him days just to figure out who Aria was. A week to get her to say a single word to him. Still, even that was more than his co-workers had thought he’d be able to do. They told him to give up and date an earth pony like everyone else—or an Asari, or a kitsune—or, God forbid, one of his own kind. A Flutterpony was way too much work.
It took a month of constant visits before she agreed to go anywhere with him. The whole family had gotten to know him better than they liked by that time, and he’d learned to pick out their sprawling nest of cloudstuff and giant leaves from across a five-degree hallway.
That first round of dating hadn’t lasted long. On the second date he accidentally slapped her barrel, just once, when he turned around without looking. It took two months of constant apology letters and Giant Ambrose flowers to get her to see him again.
But as a blessing in disguise, this had helped their relationship truly take off. Once they began to test the waters of courtship once again, Brock kept writing letters. And she wrote back. In writing, Aria wasn’t a tenth as shy as her natural flight response made her in person. She could reveal an inner life profuse beyond anything Brock had expected. She could also express affection without restraint. Until that first letter of hers—six pages long, and still kept in a lockbox under Brock’s bed—he hadn’t really been sure that she liked him.
In their fourth month together, Brock stole his first kiss—in the middle of a maintenance tunnel, no less, with many promises stammered under hissing steam. After seven months, the family stopped looking at him like trapped deer each time he brought her home.
And now he and Aria were finally going to do the deed.
She was still a little tense—it was just a part of who Aria was that she could never be as relaxed around him as with other Flutterponies. But they’d made enough progress together that her instincts were dampened enough for their want to overcome.
Touch was the second step. Aria went first. Leaning forward, she lifted a marshmallow-soft hoof and placed it over his crotch. Brock swallowed and lifted one of his own arms.
Aria flinched. “Jen?”
“You know I’ll be gentle. Here, in fact—it will easier if I don’t have to reach. Turn around again?”
She pivoted. The most sensitive area on a Flutterpony’s body was their wings, particularly near the base, where the nerve-endings were thickest. Brock was required to show that he knew at least that much. But he’d never touched her wings even on the outside before. If he looked at her from straight on, they vanished. That’s how thin they were. Dear Luna—what if he broke them? He was almost leaning back as he drew a pair of fingers across the wing, with the lightest touch he could possibly maintain. They felt like silk dissolved in air.
Her breath caught for an endless heartbeat. Brock, almost sweating with the effort of maintaining his light touch, frowned. This wasn’t how he wanted it to be. He removed his hand, thought a moment—and had a stroke of genius.
Aria’s head snapped back; of course she panicked when Brock got down onto his knees. She started turning around to see what he was doing.
“Don’t worry, I just want to try…this…” Her flanks tensed as he leaned in, then relaxed again as he blew a puff or air right across the surface of her left wing.
Her wings dipped as her flight muscles relaxed, along with the rest of her body. Even her tail twitched. Brock, grinning irrepressibly, blew again, this time a little harder. Aria let out a fillyish moan.
Brock thought that the goosebumps would tear him apart at the seams. Aria had never made that noise before.
Expectation was the third part of the Cadenza. Actually, Brock would have been quite happy to stay on this part for a while, but Aria moved them on, turning to pull those precious wings away from him.
As she was rearranging herself on the tiny floor space, she nearly tripped over his busted holo-set—the expensive one Brock had never gotten around to fixing. He winced and made a note to move it. It was perhaps odd that Brock, who considered machines his life’s passion, had never gotten around to fixing the thing, especially when it would be so practical to do so. Maybe if it had broken before he started dating Aria it would be whole right now.
“What…” Aria inhaled and move her face close to his. She gave a tiny grin. “What s’mean?”
“Me first?” Brock had to bite his lip before he answered. Although he knew exactly how the Cadenza went, a lot had been occupying his mind leading up to tonight. He hadn’t actually thought about what he was going to say.
“I guess it means…well, it means I love you, Aria.” He lifted his hands. “I’m a hundred percent sure I love you, and so I want this as much as you do. I’m not sure what I can add to that. Okay. Your turn.”
Aria shuffled closer and tapped Brock on his right arm to signal him to turn around. They often did this when she had too many words to say and not enough patience to force them all out. It was easier for her to whisper into the back of his ear.
“…Mean we’re mated,” she murmured happily. “Forever. Might have foals—oh. Can’t.”
Brock solemnly held his knees. Aria had never mentioned that before. He wanted to turn around and say something—mostly, to hold her close. But it was one of those little hiccups that always appeared in an interspecies relationship, and there was nothing to be done about it. Besides, Aria hated being interrupted. He was glad he hadn’t turned around when he heard her take another breath.
“And when you die…me…too.”
Brock waited to make sure she was done.
“Okay,” he said. “You know, I wondered if you might say something like that. I heard one time that Flutterponies might mate for life, and—”
He collapsed into the closet with his mouth open. “Wait, whattaya mean, die?”
Aria was startled by the sudden fervor of his voice. She fluttered backwards onto his bed, knocking over several hydro-spanners in the process. Brock flinched, and that only made her flinch again.
He tried to hold still. “Aria, what do you mean?”
With her eyes crunched shut, she heroically forced out the sentence. “Always…when…mate dies…first. Can’t…change.”
Brock was on his feet. His hands were on his head. He was pacing—and he had once sworn to give up pacing for her. “Is this a Flutterpony thing?” he exploded. “That can’t be right! You’re not some kind of bug. You…you didn’t tell me about this!”
She squeaked out a nod when he looked her way. Aria had a firm grimace plastered on her muzzle. Both knew things were going south. This whole night had been a delicate arrangement from the start—but at least he’d been prepared for the risks he knew about. There was a footstool by the bed so that Aria could climb up and down. The door buzzer, which was loud and unpleasant enough to startle a human, had been disabled.
“You didn’t tell me.” Brock sat down. Then he got up again. He knew he couldn’t stay here in the room. If he let himself become any more stressed, he might scream or even hit something. Then, if she couldn’t flee past him and out through the door, she would really lose it.
He took a deep breath. “I’ve got to go outside for a minute,” was all he said, and then demonstrated what he thought was a great deal of restraint by not slamming the aperture-door on his way out.
Brock was two degrees down the hallway before realizing that he hadn’t put on any clothes. All the apartments were kept at a perpetually balmy temperature, which could make it hard to notice. There were a few humans out in the dim corridor at this hour, and there were stares. Maybe they assumed that he’d come right out of the shower by accident.
Brock ran to the nearest hatch in the wall and used his ID card to access a maintenance tube. He jump upwards at a steep angle into darkness. Like a mole he ducked inside, and out of sight.
Once inside the tunnels, he was in his element. Brock knew how to slip through even the little cross-hatches that weren’t meant for human maintenance workers. He was so good that he’d once sat down with a piece of paper and worked out that he could get anywhere in the station without ever setting foot in a public hall. He’d never taken advantage of that fact before, since walking was much easier than crawling, but now seemed like a pretty good time to test the theory. Brock came out of the tunnels about twenty degrees up from where he lived; it was still afternoon there, so he streaked to the nearest door. He jammed his keycard into the lock, bashing buttons until the security system believed that there was a serious enough electrical emergency to let him into the room on maintenance grounds. His back was plastered against the aperture almost before it pinched shut.
This room was the same shape as his, albeit more thoroughly decorated and better-lit. A redhead sat on a bed with a red comforter, reading a book. It took her a few moments to notice an adult human male standing on her welcome mat without any clothes on.
“Brock…” she said warningly, reaching for a wrench on her nightstand.
Brock threw up his hands. “No! No no! Elaine, I just need—I need—I need—”
“Clothes?”
“Yes! Brilliant!”
Elaine gave a tight sigh and then leaned over in bed, waving at a bronze circle set into a far wall. It popped out as a dresser drawer which gradually grew to six feet in length. Brock, too grateful to be picky, grabbed the first outfit that caught his eye and started throwing it on.
Elaine was a homeworld girl. She was born and raised her whole life in Aerotropolis, so life on the International Space Station was practically second home for her. It made her the perfect friend to come to for advice when Brock had been new. Elaine was in the big leagues compared to him—she had a hand in planning the missions which sent new Dimension Gates on rockets across the stars. When the rockets landed, explorers would hop out of this plane into Equestria and then slip back through the new Gate, thus charting a new world for the Alliance and spreading the seeds of space travel Princess Twilight had planted some forty years ago.
But Elaine always had a unique way of yelling at Brock. He sometimes wondered if it was because of her upbringing. She’d been co-raised by something called a Kushiban while her mom was still in school. Common enough on Earth, but not where Brock grew up.
Elaine watched him dress with all different kinds of concern on her face. “You found out about mated pairs, didn’t you?”
“You knew?” Brock said through the shirt fabric. His eyes narrowed, although he was still pulling a top on and couldn’t see her face. “I thought you said I should stay away from her!”
“That was before I saw how crazy she is about you.” Elaine dropped her book.
“Elaine!” Brock shook his arms through the sleeves and held them out pleadingly. “Flutterponies can live to be, like—sixty years old!”
“Life expectancy is around forty, but sure.”
“And—and—my job is hazardous! What if I get hit by an asteroid!”
“An asteroid? Brock, what in the Milky Way…”
“She’s only six months older than me!” he gasped. “We’re starting off at a disadvantage! I might die before she does! I might kill her! If I love her I can’t kill her, right?”
“What if that’s what she wants?” Elaine said in a cold slither.
Brock shook his head vehemently. “What if? Don’t ask me about what if! What if we break up? Then what, she has just has to worry about dropping dead any old day? How does that even work? Why does any species mate for life?”
Elaine watched him lace an ill-fitting pair of rubber shoes. Her face was intently pensive, an expression Brock had learned to recognize as a warning sign.
“So do humans mate for life?” she asked.
“What? What the hell are you even saying?”
She steepled her hands. “Is this really about being scared for her?”
Brock stood, flushed. “What are you talking about? Of course it is!”
“Brock, even if you’re not going to bed her, you have a relationship that’s withering away every second that you stand here. And—hold on a second. Are you wearing pink?”
Brock looked down. “Guess so.”
“There’s like—maybe one pink shirt, one pink bottom…one pink pair of socks in my entire drawer. And you picked them all.”
“I guess so. Why?”
Elaine rubbed her temples and dropped her head against the wall. “How could I forget? You’re ‘half-pony’. Probably half-stallion, then; that’s why you have a double legacy of cluelessness.”
Brock took a deep breath and punched the button in the center of her door. “Good talk, Elaine. But I know what I have to do.”
Her eyes shot open. “What? I didn’t say you could go! Brock! Brock, those are my good clothes, you can’t just run away—”
She chased him halfway out into the hall, shouting at the top of her lungs. “Brock Starthumper! Come back with my pants!”
The last he saw, she was cringing and trying to duck back inside. But she would be fine. There was a construction project nearby on an elevator to the next ring over, which covered some of the noise of her shout. So there were at least a few faces in the hall not snickering at her.
Brock ducked his head and sprinted to the nearest metro waypoint.
There was still time to get out of this. He had to wait in line for half an hour, but he purchased a pass for a one-way trip on a private tram. It would take Aria back to the center of her own district, dropping her right in the Flutterpony commons. And then, after that…he could just avoid ever being in the same room as her again. It was a big station. It wouldn’t be that hard.
He would just take this card, explain himself, and give it to her. He was almost back to his room now…
He lay in a maintenance tube, staring at oxygen pipes.
The heat running through the metal catwalk was discoloring Elaine’s shirt. It might have been curling the expensive tram pass in his pocket, too. But Brock wasn’t ready to open his front door.
Instead, he slipped underneath the grille, into the space between floor and the bottom of the Jefferies tube. His waxy orange hair spread out when hit by the static. He’d spent many hours pressed flat in spaces like this, routing power conduits back together with laser-heated mercury filling up his nose and giving him someday cancer. He did his best thinking here.
Brock’s back pocket buzzed. He contorted his body to try and reach a hand into it, accidentally ran his elbow into an exposed resister and hissed with pain.
On the second try he managed to pull the silver wafer out. There was text on it. A message from Aria.
But I did tell you. Wasn’t this the designated time for talking about these things?
Brock sighed. Under Aria’s typical brand of logic that made perfect sense.
He would have given anything to talk to Dad right now. Not being able to was torture. But that wasn’t one of his two options. And, uncertain whether to go down this tube or crawl further up and hide, he couldn’t decide. He was stuck in place.
Night began to pass. Brock had slept in tubes before, by accident on long shifts. For now he would just rest his eyes. As he lay there, he tried imagining what his father would have said to him if they could walk together in a meadow, just the way they had so many times before.
Instead, perhaps because Dad was dead, his memory dredged up a conversation some fifteen years old.
“Cloverthumper,” Dad had said, in the same basswood voice that never changed even as the brown earth stallion aged into his thirties. Every talk began that way. Most of young Brock’s friends rolled their eyes or tried to run whenever a parent began a conversation that way. But Brock always liked to hear his dad say his name. It didn’t mean he was in trouble. Dad just liked saying it. As if he liked the sound. As if he was impossibly pleased with himself for being able to put his name on someone.
“You’ve been saving up for a new toy. Is Mother getting a lot of chores out of you, then?”
Young Brock had probably rolled his eyes and dodged an affectionate nip to the hair. “It’s not a toy, Dad. It’s an exploration drone.”
And they had probably been walking down the shallow side of the hill, off to the right of the log cabin where Mother and Grandmother and Auntie hustled around the kitchen. They’d be making pumpkin pies and setting them on the windowsill so that the south wind would spread the smell all across Orange Hills. Cows would be waiting for automobiles to cross the main avenue, and friends Brock knew would be heading back to the one-room schoolhouse to make ornaments for Hearthswarming, or cards for Hearts and Hooves day. Or maybe carve pumpkins for Nightmare Night. Something about the spice in the air suggested that this memory was a holiday, but Brock couldn’t remember which.
“Naturally,” Dad said. “A good drone must be expensive these days.”
“So much,” Brock sighed.
“Well, that’s how it is, Clover. The good ones are never easy to get. But don’t worry. Working for it is half the fun!”
Brock wrinkled his nose.
“You’re going to play with Steven when you get it? Be careful. I don’t want you boys spying on anypony. Or breaking any windows. You use that in the forest, or out in the field if you want.”
“I don’t know.” Brock shrugged with a feigned nonchalance that he probably assumed was grown-up. “I didn’t say I’d get it. I already saved up thirty bits. I might just get another action figure.”
“Ah.”
And they walked together over to Choco Chunk’s house, where they sat on the railing and bought mugs of hot chocolate. Choco was open half the year, and her hot chocolate never failed to taste like whatever season’s breath was on the wind.
After that, they’d turn around, and start heading back towards the house. By this time the local teacher would be poking his head out of the schoolhouse to see who was around. He’d wave when he saw Brock.
It was a tiny town, Orange Hills. Frustrating for any ten-year old whose ears were filled with tales of Tokyo and Aerotropolis. But Brock had to admit, looking back from across the years, that it was a fine place to raise a child. Not one person had ever, even once, batted an eye at a little boy calling a stallion his daddy. Almost half the kids in town were adopted. The orphanages of Earth, as the saying went, emptied straight into Equestria, and nowhere was that more true than in Orange Hills.
They were about halfway home before Dad felt moved to speak again.
“The way I see it, you have two choices.”
“Between a Daring Do action figure and a Luke Skywalker?”
Dad waited before speaking again.
“You could keep saving up, keep pulling weeds for Mom, and someday buy your drone. But that means you won’t be able to buy anything else for a long while. You have to make sure you really want it.”
Brock stared grumpily at his sneakers.
“Or you can get another action figure, like the ones you already have. It won’t be as nice as that drone, but soon, if you don’t give me any reason to stop your allowance, you can get another one. And maybe another one after that.”
“Hey, you’re right!” Brock pounded his open hand. “That sounds awesome!”
“But you’ll forget about those toys sooner or later.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“What about that Applejack figure you got for Hearthswarming? I found it behind the radiator.”
Brock frowned in intense concentration. “That doesn’t count!” he sputtered. “Her legs don’t even move!”
Dad nickered, tipping his muzzle so that Brock would look up at the house. Mom was there, in the window. “Before we got you,” Dad said, “we had lots of different kids. We would take one out of foster care for a little while, see how well we got along, and then put them back.”
Brock furrowed his nose. Not paying much attention, like usual, he was instead trying to see if he could look down at the top of Dad’s mane. He was getting towards the age where he would tower over his father soon.
“Some of the families we were friends with just kept on doing this forever. They would bring home a child every month, and never pick just one. But you mother and I knew that wasn’t what we wanted.” He looked over, leaning his head back knowingly so that he was once again taller than his son. “Now, when we got you, do you think you were easy to get along with?”
Brock gaped for a second. “I must have! I was the best, wasn’t I?”
Dad chuckled. “Nope. You set our favorite carpet on fire.”
“Oh. That was before you adopted me, huh?”
A nod. “But we decided that we had to make a choice. We knew that it wouldn’t always be easy being your parents. But what we wanted was a real child, someone who we could call ours. And if we wanted that, we would have to give some other things up.”
“Like the carpet?”
“Yes. Like the carpet.”
Brock was still pouting as they clambered back up the hill. “But I’m not the best? Then how come you got me? I mean—you’re the best parents.”
Dad had snorted with laughter, nimbly tossing Brock’s carroty hair before the boy could leap away. “You’ll understand someday.”
In the year 2056, Brock sat up and hit his head on a metal grille. He growled, rubbing at his bangs the same way he used to rub away kisses left by the old stallion.
After slithering out from under the walk, he dropped himself out of the tunnel and sprinted through his front door. The aperture shut behind him with a gentle click.
He could hardly see in here. Brock wheeled the bedroom light up a couple stops so that he could find Aria without startling either of them.
She was there, lying on his mattress. Aria didn’t look angry or upset at being left alone in his room, but she did look worried about what Brock was about to do.
What he did was move slowly. First he sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. “Aria, I’m so sorry. I just—” He scratched his head. “Well—you scared me.”
Aria shook for a minute. But after she stepped down the footstool near his bed, she managed to smile. “…Understand.”
Braxis chuckled. “Yeah. Guess that arc-welder cuts both ways.”
He took a deep breath and looked straight into her pinprick eyes. “Okay. Last step.” Acceptance. “And—yes. I do. I still want this.”
Aria covered her mouth. Her wings buzzed, and she could but nod.
A week later, on an identical night, that’s what they did.
The steps were knocked out like dominos, and impatiently, Brock slid forward bit by bit. As he neared his bed, he noticed a silver glint underneath—an old-timey ‘exploration drone’ they used to market to kids in the forties. It was little more than a model ornithopter, with a few cheap sensor outfits and a laggy VR interface. You probably couldn’t find many intact these days. But Brock’s was in excellent condition. He still maintained it, and its wings were still painted, as colorful as a butterfly’s.
He stretched out on the bed and waited for Aria to join him. As soon as she was close he reached out, wanting to touch her. His hands carefully roamed from her eartips downward. She climbed onto his torso as if she was scaling a mountain, stopping every half-step to make happy chirrups or to flap, fanning the recycled air of the space station into his face.
And she got all of him.