The Roses of Success

by HypernovaBolts11

Chapter III - Courted

Twilight glanced over her shoulder at Fangheart, who was pacing back forth in front of the jail cell he'd occupied the first night after meeting her. It was now being used to store the anesthetized worker while they waited for it to wake up, which wouldn't happen for another few hours.

No matter how many times she reminded him of that, he continued to simply pace back and forth, like the worker might stop breathing at any moment, and that if he wasn't right there all day, it'd die because of him. He was just as nervous as he had been when they first put the thing to sleep.

Nurse Redheart was still in the basement too, just to make sure that her patient wouldn't suffer from any complications of the procedure, and was plenty capable of watching the worker by herself. He knew that, of course, but it still seemed as though he didn't trust the professional.

Her head made an analogy that gave her pause for thought. She had been about to compare him to a nervous father at a hospital, but something about that comparison made her feel strange.

She knew that it was basically his job to sire children, as his biology dictated, but she hadn't really asked about that aspect of changeling life all that much.

Twilight took a step towards her partner, and asked him, "Fangheart, why don't you and I go work on that book while we wait?"

Much to her surprise, he turned around, and said, "Yeah. Sure."

She followed him up the two flights of stairs, after grabbing her notebook and quill designated for this topic, and shot a beam of magic at her bedroom window when they emerged from the tunnel connecting the second floor to the first. She said, "Just so nopony can fly by and see your natural form."

He nodded gratefully, and led the way up the short flight of stairs to her bedroom, which wasn't really its own room, but an elevated platform above the entrance to the second floor. He sat down in front of her bed, and dropped his disguise in an instant of green fire. "What do you want to talk about?" he asked her.

"Courtship," she answered immediately.

He raised an eyelid at her —for a lack of eyebrows— and said, "And I thought I was the weird one."

"My choice of topic has nothing to do with personal curiosity. It's scientific curiosity," she said, joking, of course.

He thought for a moment, and said, "Okay. So... First of all, each drone has his own way of impressing the queen, thanks to our unique diversity, and the infiltrators, who introduce foreign biological features into the incubating workers' systems." He waited for her to finish with her notes before continuing.

She asked, "So, what's your method?"

He blinked at her, and blushed, pointing his head down at the floor. "Well... I..." he said, and shook his head. "It's nothing special."

"Are you saving it for your eighteenth birthday?" she teased.

"That's a long time from now, so no. It's just... not very spectacular compared some other drones. There was one, my mother always talked about, who could make his fangs act like oppositely charged ends of a battery, and would place the tips of them on her shoulder," he said, somewhat dreamily. "She always said that felt nice, and she named him Zmaylank'."

"What does that name mean?" she asked him, crossing her forelegs in front of her, her quill scratching the page in front of her.

"Ecstasy," he told her flatly.

She crossed out a bit of her notes, and asked, "Do they just do a single attempt to woo her, or is there a more prolonged commitment involved?"

"Well... a bit of both," he said. "Y'see, there's a bunch of drones that hang out around the hive, waiting for the queen to exhaust the supply of genetic material from her current suitors, and she summons them all at once. They each take their turns showing her what they can do, and then all do one big thing as a group. She selects a few of them to mate with, and keeps them well fed and cared for while she lays their eggs.

"They aren't lazy, just to be clear. They clean up her living quarters while she's away, trying to maintain the relationship, and, when she's out of eggs, try to impress her for another round. If the incumbent drones fail, she summons the nearby drones, and the freeloaders get kicked out until she's gone through another few suitors, before they get another chance with her," he said.

Twilight finished jotting down some notes, and looked up, prepared to ask another question.

Fangheart was sitting in front of a large bookshelf on her bedroom wall, facing away from her, and his horn was glowing dimly as the books floated about, all pulling off of their respective shelves for him to examine.

She cocked her head to the right, and tried to figure out what he was doing. She absentmindedly closed the book, and pushed it towards the foot of her bed, upon which she lay quietly.

Some of the books floated up, lifting above the group of remaining books, and another few floated towards the ground a bit. The books that had gone up were all red, while the ones that had moved down were all blue.

The books continued to shift about, and the books below moved to the right, whereas the ones above moved to the left. The red books gently set themselves down in a small stack on the floor, as did the blue ones, followed by orange and green books, then purple and yellow ones.

He brought each stack to the space in front of him, moving the more brilliantly colored ones around within their stacks, before placing them back on the shelves.

When he was done, the red books had all moved to occupy the far left of the uppermost shelf, and the orange ones had taken up the remaining space on the right. The yellow books were on the left of the middle shelf, and the green ones were to their right. The bottom shelf held the blue and purple books.

Any gradient colors were at the ends and middles of the shelves, forming a sort of rainbow, if a rainbow could be chopped up and stacked atop itself.

Fangheart blinked at the books, his green eyes showing a sort of displaced discomfort, like he wasn't satisfied with his own work, and zipped down the stairway to his left, before repeating the entire process with the lower floor of her bedroom, arranging the books into colorful stacks, and sorting through them.

Twilight watched from the edge of the upper floor, her head peaking out over the space above the door.

While his behavior was odd, and she would have to reorganize the books later, she found it intriguing, and besides, the shelves were due for another reorganizing that afternoon, so his minor bought of scaler chromatic organizing was of little consequence.

She tried to understand his motives, like when she had been looking at him from behind the safety of a cell wall, and he had been concussed, sleeping heavily.

Maybe he was just in the mood for a little sorting, like she was on occasion.

He didn't leave the spot at which he sat, and simply turned around with his front hooves when he needed to look at another stack of books. He would crane his neck from time to time, stretching it out to get a better look at the spines of certain books, and turned to face the door when he finally decided that he was done.

The walls were decorated as though a slice of a rainbow had been stretched out to the necessary length and wrapped around the bookshelves, starting from the top shelf to the right of her bedroom door, and moving clockwise from shelf to shelf until it moved down a level after a full revolution.

She looked down at him, and he looked up at her, an anxious look in his eyes, which glowed for a brief moment, flashing in a brilliant green light, before the bioluminescence generated just behind the surface of his ocular lenses faded away.

She considered asking him what he was doing, but then chose not to when his earthen green wings buzzed against his sides, and crossed her forelegs across her chest as he looked back down.

His head whipped around a few times, as though searching for something, and he darted back up the stairs, closing the blinds on her window with his green aura. He sat down on her bed, and puffed out his chest proudly, closing his somewhat luminous eyes, taking a deep breath.

She turned around to face the bed, before his eyes snapped open, and flashed in a series of intricate patterns, showing more brightly in the now dim light.

Now she understood what he was doing.

He moved his wings swiftly, releasing a myriad of gentle humming sounds, and placed a hoof against the middle of his throat, which he cleared. He gave off a short sound, a kind of chitter chirp, high in pitch, and soft to the ear. His eyes blinked, and then flashed in a pattern that lasted around six seconds.

His eyes would flash, slowly dim for a second, flash twice, and then he would do that again after another half second. With an additional flash added at the end of each pair of this cycle, he would repeat the entire pattern after another second of pause.

The display instilled within Twilight a rhythm of thought that began to dictate the timing of her heartbeat, which was thumping hard enough for her to simply feel without trying to. Her breaths came in as his eyes flashed to begin the cycle, and she exhaled when he began the second half of his display.

She wouldn't have considered what he was doing mind control, but she found it interesting that he could coax her body into following his rhythm, all with a visual song that he began to play for her.

It started when the fourth flash in his pattern only occurred in his left eye, and then the final three flashes were from his right, left, and right eyes respectively. He repeated that altered cycle once, and then started another one by only flashing his right eye, and then echoing the flash with his left.

He slowly moved towards her, never encroaching on her personal space, but flashing his eyes in a continually changing song, which followed a basic melody, and became an increasingly complex symphony as he added more and more tricks to his display.

He would hum with his wings from time to time, filling the otherwise empty second between flashes with sound, and chirp whenever he lifted a hoof to come closer to her, as though asking for permission.

She watched in awe as the changeling became his own musical instrument, and felt her wings stiffening against her sides. She glanced over her shoulder for a moment, while he stepped around her, keeping himself in her field of view at all times. She remembered Rainbow Dash telling her that her wings might tense up if she got excited, and she already didn't like it.

He moved in front of her as she looked back up, and cut off the cycle before he could add the third flash to the final pair. He stepped forward, and his lips met hers. His eyes both flashed one last time, a scant few centimeters from hers, filling her vision with green light, like the finale of a great composition, before they closed.

Twilight's wings shot out from her flanks, and remained spread, primaries bristling as she sat down. Her horn gave off a faint purple glow, prepared to cast any number of spells she might need. She didn't know what she would need them for, but being prepared was always a good idea.

He broke from the kiss, and said, "I..." He trailed off, and blinked, the glow gradually fading as the chemical reaction in his eyes continued to exhaust its supply of reactants. He gulped audibly, and said, "I... Sorry. Since I don't have a queen, my head keeps telling me that, since you're as good, and better in some ways, I should... y'know."

The alicorn smiled at that. Whether or not he had meant for that to be so sweet she didn't know, but was willing to guess that he hadn't. Either way, she found herself blushing in what choked light managed to make it through the sides of her window. It was a cute sentiment, that his biology believed that she was his queen.

"Y-yeah," she told him. "I mean, I get it. We're good."

They remained there for a long moment, avoiding each other's gaze, until she broke the silence that seemed thick enough for her to cut with a knife, "I need to sort the books up here, not that your way is bad. It's very pretty. But um... Spike is busy today, so I was wondering if you could... maybe... help me with that."

"Um... Sure," he said at length, and blushed, his cheeks turning a dark shade of moss green. "But then we need to talk about what we're doing with the worker," he noted.

"We can talk about that while we work," Twilight said.

---

Fangheart looked over at the jail cell, where the unconscious worker's chest rose and fell slowly. He glanced at its stomach, which was hidden by a series of bandages wrapped around its entire barrel, keeping away any new infections, and catching what lymph it could from the holes left by the parasite.

The doctor had removed what she could, treated everything else with a few medicines he didn't recognize, and closed the changeling's stomach back up.

He was glad that workers didn't have any armor, or the whole procedure would have been even more difficult. He still remained in his pony form, so as to prevent any spores from getting on him, and had seen to it that every bit of the parasite had been contained so Twilight could create a cure for it, which she was occupied with at the moment.

He looked over his shoulder at the busy alicorn, who was racing back and forth between machines, pausing every once in a while to drop something from a pipette into a vial of fluid. He would have helped her, but he had no clue what she was doing or how to operate even one of the machines she was using.

He turned to look back at the changeling, and slouched against the wall as he watched it, letting his eyes drift closed. He didn't have all that much to do, save for reading the hundreds of books that surrounded him, but he wanted to make sure the worker didn't feel abandoned when it awoke.

He heard chitin sliding against the rough metal bars, and opened one eye to check on it.

The worker's eyes opened, but it didn't move anything else. It was on an anesthetic, not to keep it asleep, but to deprive it of pain, but it didn't know that, so it didn't dare move.

He sighed, and hissed, "We did what we could, but there are still a few parts of the parasite inside of you. They should die soon if they haven't already, but you shouldn't be able to feel any pain."

The worker glanced at him, standing up, and hissed, "Why are you helping us instead of turning us in?"

He came to the realization that it didn't know who he really was. He hadn't taken off his disguise in front of it, and he'd never explained his situation to it. He stood up, and walked towards the cell. He closed his eyes, and let his disguise down. Green fire crept down each of his limbs, leaving behind those of his true self. His neck erupted into fire, as did his chest and stomach.

He opened his poisonous green eyes, and smiled at the worker before him. A sense of glee washed over him as the worker sat up, and he felt his wings quivering in excitement. He said, "Welcome to my home, sister."

Its blue eyes fixed onto his green ones, and it stood up. It walked towards him, just barely poking its nose between the bars containing it, and hissed, "What of the queen?"

He frowned, and looked down. He shook his head slowly, and turned around. "I... I know a place for you to go. You will be safe there, and ponies will look upon you with respect. You will never go hungry there, and you will be free from the hive mind forever," he hissed.

It hissed, "Where?"

"The Crystal Empire," he answered, and reverted back to his pony form. "No more plight. No more fear. No more oppression, and no more hive. You will become your own person in time, and you will never have to carry eggs."

Its ears perked up at that.

He sighed, and said, "When you meet the destroyer, know that she is good. She will help you, and she will be like a queen to you. She will command you to follow some rules, but not in such an invasive way as the queen."

It blinked its ghostly blue eyes, and hissed, "Will you come with us?"

He shook his head. "My place is here. My home is here. My life is tied to my... to my friends, and my partner, but you are not safe here," he told it. "Now, let's begin. I am going to teach you everything you'll need to know in order to make it to The Crystal Empire in one piece."

Comments

[tsaukpaetra]

Awe courtship dance was cute.
At least the worker survived, it was beggining to sound like it wouldn't make it.
Keep going! ;)

[Devildogg20]

Great! Can't wait for the next!