Another Horizon

by Crystal Wishes

Seeing the Past

The inside of Velvet's condo was, well, nice enough. Nicer than my little rented room back in Ponyville, at the least. The main area was pretty spacious and flowed to the left into a small but serviceable kitchen. There were three doors: two set against the wall opposite of the entrance and one off to the right. The living room was home to several sitting pillows, one of which Velvet nestled into.

I remained where I was right by the door. While I looked at the wall that was covered in floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Velvet looked at me. I tried not to notice.

"So, where's my room?" I asked, the awkwardness in my voice more apparent than I'd have liked. "You said it was a two-bedroom, right?"

"Yup." She pointed at the door off to the right. "That's your room. It's a little bare, but it's got a bed and a dresser for your belongings." Giggling, she added, "Well, if you decide to get any, that is. Feel free to decorate it as much as you want. Or don't. It's yours."

I swallowed. "Right." My legs felt stiff as I walked over to the box of muffins. Of course, she had set them where I had to walk around her to get to them. She watched me the whole time, as if studying my every move.

"What?" I finally asked after taking the first of many bites, but she just stared, smiling.

"Nothing. You're just so tense." She waved a hoof. "I don't bite unless you ask me to first."

I stiffened, she laughed, and I rolled my eyes. It was so hard to get a read on her because she had such a serious look in her eyes, but she kept joking around like that and throwing me off whatever trail I thought I found.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts and sighed. "Okay. Anyway, so what is this all about? Don't you have friends that can keep you company or something?"

Velvet gave a lopsided grin. "Wow, are you complaining already?"

I shook my head. "No. I just—I'm confused, all right?" I paused to take another bite. "We just met. You know nothing about me. I know nothing about you. And you want to be roommates, just like that?"

"Yup."

And that is the way Velvet is. Once she makes up her mind, there's no changing it... and while I'm sure you know that, I didn't back then. I just sat there, chewing on the muffin and trying to figure her out. She gave me nothing but a grin to go on.

"So," she prompted, her tail swishing to curl around her folded legs, "what's your answer?"

I froze. This was it. I had to make a decision, but rooming with a mare I barely knew was crazy. Especially one who made as little sense as she did. I had other options. Plenty of them!

My employer, Maj, certainly had lots of bits. Unfortunately, generosity wasn't a trait he was known for, and he could be impossible to deal with if he decided he wanted to dig his hooves in the ground. And if I tried to ask for anything from him, he'd probably turn it against me somehow.

My parents. Even if I didn't want to move back to Cloudsdale, I could ask them for help. They'd help me. And then complain about how I don't visit often. And likely convince me to stay the night, and then another, and another and another until I was living there again.

That's right! I'm a pegasus! Pegasi build cloud homes all the time. Of course, they tend to drift, so if you want to stay in one place, you have to be careful, and cloud-wrangling isn't exactly high on my list of skills...

Groaning, I put my hooves over my eyes. I didn't want to see her face as I replied, "Okay. For now."

Blocking my sight didn't block my hearing. She giggled, and I could hear her rise up off the pillow. "Great! Well, for now, you have a place to stay. I've got plans tonight, so you'll have the place to yourself. You can get acclimated to it and all that without me around."

When I heard her moving away, I peeked out from under one hoof to watch her disappear into what I presumed was her bedroom. The room where she'd be sleeping. In the condo I'd be staying. Me with her. Her with me. Two total strangers living together.

It still hadn't quite sunk in yet as my new reality.

My hooves lowered to my lap and I sat there in relative silence. A clock ticked on the wall to remind me that time was slipping past, so I stood up and started to walk the perimeter of the main room in hopes that it'd feel more like home if I got to know it better.

The floor-to-ceiling mirrors were interrupted only by a bar at about shoulder-height that extended all the way across the wall. It reminded me of something, but all my mind said was that I was staring at some kind of freaky sex thing. Glancing at the bedroom Velvet had gone into to ensure I had a moment of privacy, I lifted a hindleg and rested it on the bar.

How was it supposed to work? The angle seemed all wrong. And, not to mention, it was just plain uncomfortable.

Curiosity got the better of me and I shifted to put both forelegs on the bar. Yeah, that didn't seem right, either. What sort of weird stuff was Velvet into?

Laughter filled the air behind me and I froze in place, wings pressed tightly to my sides.

"Oh, sweet Celestia," Velvet exclaimed, coming up beside me and swatting at my hooves. "You're doing this all wrong!"

I could only stare at her as I backed away from the wall. She had glitter in her coat that made her sparkle in the light. And were her lashes always that long? No, it had to be makeup. Mares, whether they were unicorns or not, were all capable of magic when it came to makeup.

Velvet rose up onto her hindlegs like a ballerina—and that was when I noticed her cutie mark: a ballet slipper. She wasn't like a ballerina. She was one. Everything clicked into place and I tried to keep my embarrassment from showing on my face, instead focusing on her movements.

She rested one foreleg on what I now know as a ballet barre, then leaned forward and raised the opposite hindleg up, up, up into the air until I was sure it was going to snap off. Then, her foreleg that wasn't on the barre swept forward and around to touch where the hindleg curled back.

Every sweep and glide was precise, a swan drifting across a still lake or a ribbon dancing in the gentle breeze. I had never seen ballet moves up close before, and it would be a lie to say I wasn't in awe.

The spell broke when her lips quirked with a grin and she dropped down onto all fours. "Got it? Now, if I come home and catch you doing weird stuff on my barre again, I'm going to have to ban you from using it." Her tail perked and her coat shimmering, she pranced for the door. "See ya!"

"Bye," was all I could say before the door shut.

Wait, was she going on a date? Of course she was! Why else would she have coat glitter? She was going on a date—she had a special somepony after all. That thought gave me some relief, and I felt the tension leave my muscles.

So, she was a ballerina and had converted the living room into, more or less, her practice space. That explained why there was so little furniture. I rolled my shoulders, looked around, and decided to continue my self-guided tour.

There was a small bookshelf over near the sitting pillows. My gaze traveled each spine, trying to take in the titles to build a better impression of Velvet from them. The first row held three books all from the same author, C.W. Step: The Mare's Temptation, The Princess of the Knight, and Her Silent Love. I struggled to imagine her sitting with a box of chocolates and swooning over stories like them, and the lack of creases on the spines agreed with me.

I smirked to myself. What would she have said if I told her that I was the one who wrote the script for C.W. Step's film, The Desert Rose? I tucked that little tidbit away just in case an appropriate situation arose later.

Next to the romance novels was a large collection of books all featuring a character named Prima Donna. I surmised that from the fact that each one was titled Prima Donna and the Cliché Something. My right wing stretched out to tip one of the books out so I could see its cover, and the reason for the well-loved spines became clear: Prima Donna was a ballerina.

How cute. Velvet had an idol. I bet she even dressed up as whoever this Prima Donna was as a filly. Maybe that was how she got into ballet in the first place.

The other rows didn't hold any books, but held picture frames instead. Most were of her family, including the little foal I had seen wandering Sunridge Sweets. They all looked so darn happy, including Velvet. Her sincere smile is really something, you know? I found myself smiling just looking at it, which felt weird, so I quickly looked at another picture.

I was surprised to recognize the pony in it: High Horse, the mare who runs Haut-Savoir with her husband, Savoir Fare. She was young in the picture—very young, in fact, but I could recognize her easily. She had the same blue coat and side-swept brown mane as she did last time I saw her. That, in and of itself, wasn't much of a surprise, as she wasn't the kind of mare that I expected to look radically different as a foal. She is just one of those gentle souls that not even time can change, you know?

The surprise, for me, was that Velvet knew High Horse. And High Horse knew Parasol. The hairs on the back of my neck raised and I tried to chase away the creeping suspicion that this was all some sort of elaborate scheme, but how could that be? They would have had only a few hours while I was asleep on that cloud to put everything together.

Not to mention that I should have been the one doing the revenge-scheming, not Parasol! No, it didn't make sense at all for her to hurt me more than she already had. Why would she do that? She said she liked me, as worthless as that affection turned out to be. She didn't have any reason to do this to me.

I took a step back as I felt overwhelmed with sudden anger. Even though I knew it was extremely unlikely that Parasol was behind me meeting Velvet, just thinking about her brought everything back to the surface. Anger began to boil and bubble with shocks of pain, confusion bounced around haphazardly inside my ragged breathing, and sadness tried to drown it all under its unfathomable weight.

No single emotion won out over the others. They just ended up making an entire mess of my mind and heart until the room started to spin.

My room was to the right, and I stumbled my way to it. Light poured into a dark room that held only the essentials: a bed, a dresser, and thick curtains covering a window. I kicked the door shut as I walked to the bed and dropped down onto it.

Parasol. The vision of her face flashed before my eyes. Her smile. Her eyes. Her pitying look when I proposed.

I couldn't see in the dim light that escaped from underneath the door and around the curtains, but I knew my vision was going blurry.

Everything ached from the mere thought of her name. I had loved her—I had loved her so much.

Memories consumed me all at once. I remembered our first date, when I had fumbled my ice cream and she snorted as she laughed. I felt our first kiss, which I had been so nervous about that I nearly chickened out. I mourned our first night together, with the window open so we could say we made love under the stars.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried. In fact, I outright sobbed. I was sprawled on a bed that smelled unfamiliar, in a room that looked unfamiliar, living with a mare that was basically unfamiliar in a city that was entirely unfamiliar.

I was alone for the first time in five years.

It wasn't until the smell of something burning awoke me that I realized I had cried myself to sleep like a foal. I sniffed the air a few times with clogged nostrils to confirm that there was, in fact, the distinct smell of something cooking for too long. That was when I pushed myself off the bed and hurried to the door. Had Velvet left something in the oven before she left? She hadn't told me that!

When I skidded to a halt in the living room, I noticed that the condo was dark. Like, not just curtains blocking out the sun dark—it was basically the middle of the night with only a single light on in the kitchen. Velvet was standing in the kitchen with the haze of smoke billowing around her from the oven.

"Sorry," she coughed, taking something out and closing the door. "I started making myself something to eat, and... then fell asleep."

My brow furrowed. If she had fallen asleep long enough to burn food, how long had I been asleep?

"What time is it?" I asked, my voice hoarse and groggy. I hoped it sounded like I was just tired and not that I'd been crying my heart out.

Velvet paused to glance at the clock I could have easily read myself. "Just past midnight. So, you know, proper dinner time for night owls." She snickered, dumping whatever she had been making into the trash. "I'm going to have some cereal. You want anything?"

The smell of burnt something was still in the air, and I had eaten like almost ten muffins, so I shook my head. "I'm good, but thanks."

She shrugged. I noticed, in the clearing haze, that not only was her glitter and makeup gone but her mane was down. Apparently, when she didn't keep it in a bun, it was curly. Really curly. Adorably curly. I had to quickly distract myself before I went further down that train of thought.

"So, where did you go? Who were you with? Did you have fun?"

I tried not to frown at myself. That was almost worse than thinking about her cute curls. Honestly, I don't know why I asked all that. I guess my mind had thought small talk was a good idea and failed horribly. Or maybe it was still a little bit suspicious of her for no good reason.

Velvet paused, standing tall on her hindlegs to reach for a box of cereal. Slowly, she lowered it and herself, her gaze holding steady on me. "Who are you," she finally asked, grinning, "my mother?"

I slumped into one of the two seats at the tiny dining table and returned her grin with a frown. "I'm just curious."

She poured the honeyed oats into a bowl, put the box away, and retrieved a spoon. She then turned to face me, leaning against the counter to support herself while she had both forelegs raised to eat with. "Okay, well, I was out with some friends. I do that. If that's going to be a problem, well, it's your problem, not mine." She paused to munch on some of the oats.

"It's not a problem, okay?!" I bit back a little too loud, a little too angrily, then winced. "It's not a problem," I repeated in a more calm voice. "I just woke up to you nearly burning the kitchen down. I'm still waking up. And forgive me for trying to figure out more about the pony I'm living with."

Velvet gave a snorting laugh. "So you're not a midnight pony, got it." She stirred her spoon around the bowl in thought. "I work hard, so I like to play hard, too. I have some friends I go clubbing with. Sometimes I don't come home, so by the way, don't freak out if that happens."

My ears twitched and I felt tension creep back into my muscles. So she didn't have a special somepony. That put me somewhat ill at ease. "I won't."

"Cool." She chomped down on another spoonful of oats. "Sorry for waking you up, by the way."

I just nodded, instead trying to calm down and rationally think things through. It was hard, given the lingering smell of smoke, the crunching of cereal, and the fact I was still groggy.

Velvet worked hard and played hard. Did that mean she wasn't around very much? Was I going to, more or less, have the place to myself? That seemed way too good to be true on top of everything else.

As I stared at her, she stared back at me. I still wonder what had been going through her mind at the time; all I know is that when I smiled to cover up my growing suspicion, she grinned.

I wanted to—no, I needed to know more about her. In the morning, I'd have to tail her and figure her out. There were just too many uncertainties in the air: who really was she, what was she after, what did 'work hard, play hard' really mean...

And, as crazy as it sounds now, I just had to know for absolute certain that she wasn't in league with Parasol in any way.

Author's Note:

If you have enjoyed this story so far, please consider taking a look at Anzel and my's website QuillnBlade.com for extra content such as mini stories, an Ask Us form to submit questions, responses to said questions, and special rewards for the awesome folks who support our Patreon.

Comments

[zyr1987]

Velvet is so calm about falling asleep while cooking and nearly starting a fire...

Anyway, yeah, the poor guy is going to have a hard time with not falling in love with Velvet, just judging by the way he thinks about her. This is going to be one fun ride.

[Mythic Night]

Yeah, I'd say he's a future baby-daddy for sure!

[PhycoKrusk]

8044204
Look who she used to live with. I figure if you go through that without becoming unflappable, you did something wrong.

[Mind Jack]

I really do like this story so far. I really do feel for Silver. Can't wait to see how the rest of this goes.
Also it was pretty cool seeing Velvet doing her ballerina stuff again. It's been a little while.
Keep up the good work!

[Always Breakfast]

The floor-to-ceiling mirrors were interrupted only by a bar at about shoulder-height that extended all the way across the wall. It reminded me of something, but all my mind said was that I was staring at some kind of freaky sex thing.

I love how apparently normal irony wasn't enough for you, so you had to write double irony.

[Fistfire]

didn't Crystal tell Velvet she was colloraborating with a pony named Silver Script?

[Crystal Wishes]

8044204 Or maybe she's just trying to look cool when she got caught!

8044267 We'll see!

8044391

8044627 It's fun to write Velvet from a "new" perspective, to show her doing things we've seen before in a new light... I highly recommend doing something like this as a writing exercise, honestly!

8044703 Darn it! I was holding out for triple irony. And we were almost there!

8045215 Horsey is the one she was talking to in Hopes.

[RainCrasher]

I snorted about his thoughts about the ballerina bar. the irony is strong there.. and has probably been used as such... I can see why he would start thinking as such once he seen the picture of high horse about his ex. Ive seen that sorta trap happen before. though I believe velvet is better than that. This was a good chapter!

[PhycoKrusk]

8045489
Of course Velvet is better than that. She's second best pony, after all! Only Pink Pony is bester pony.

[RainCrasher]

8045594 OH i know velvet aint like that, but he dont. and aint velvet pink anyway?

[PhycoKrusk]

8046184
Velvet is a pink pony, yes, but she is not Pink Pony.

[RainCrasher]

8046268 Thought there was some universal law that Pink Ponies were the bastions of happiness and laughter and such

[Psyco Josho]

I keep wondering what Parasol is up to, how she's handling her end of that broken stick...

[uwe_toll]

Under the presumption that Velvet hows who the script writer is, I think she got told in Hopes how writs it.
So Velvet has the pony who writs the script, together with Crystal, for the move of a book as her roommate. The book was written by Crystal about Velvets live. That is clever Velvet, very clever not pony Crystal.

[Bypenandhoof]

Good chapter. The whole Parasol-suspicion makes for a great segue to future shenanigans.

[djthomp]

Floor to ceiling mirrors, very lewd I'm sure.

The floor-to-ceiling mirrors were interrupted only by a bar at about shoulder-height that extended all the way across the wall. It reminded me of something, but all my mind said was that I was staring at some kind of freaky sex thing. Glancing at the bedroom Velvet had gone into to ensure I had a moment of privacy, I lifted a hindleg and rested it on the bar.

Very lewd!

But seriously, I'm sure Velvet keeps her freaky sex things in her bedroom and not out in the living room.

Remember, Silver, you aren't supposed to be falling in love with her so try to ignore this demonstration of flexibility.

Midnight cooking while exhausted, possibly not the best of ideas.

I wanted to—no, I needed to know more about her. In the morning, I'd have to tail her and figure her out. There were just too many uncertainties in the air: who really was she, what was she after, what did 'work hard, play hard' really mean...

Also in the ranking for not particularly good ideas. I recommend dressing as a vampony while tailing her though, that way it'll just look odd instead of stalkery.

[Midknight Defender]

I smirked to myself. What would she have said if I told her that I was the one who wrote the script for C.W. Step's film, The Desert Rose?

*snerk*

I want to see the expression on your face when you find out that she is the Desert Rose, Scribblebutt. I really, really do. :D

[Night_Song]

Oh, man. I feel for Silver, here. The exact same thing just happened to me recently. It does get better, eventually. I have to believe that.