Paths Less Travelled

by Botched Lobotomy

Chapter 6

“Hold me, please,” you say to her, in bed, exhausted.

She looks about as tired as you do: you’ll hold each other, tonight. She slips under your hooves, small body folded to your own, and you let yourself go limp for her, let the tension out your body. The pain and terror of last week, the exhilaration of the fight, the joy of joining true their love: too much, too much, all of it. You know exactly how this moment feels; you’ve been here before, another night, another pony. Shining Armour trapped inside his own head, asking if he can hold you, only hold you...

You press together close beneath the covers, and you reach out with your wings to wrap around her, even as she comforts you. Cocoon of love and warmth: in the life you know, from that cocoon your foal emerges: in this, who knows? Only warmth and trembling and love.

Vinyl Scratch is crying. You can feel it hot upon your shoulder, soaking through the fur—and then, of course, you’re crying, too.

It’s okay, you want her to say, even if this isn’t right, even if she isn't yours. It’s okay, please, just tell me it’s okay. Shiny did.

“That was awful,” Vinyl chokes out. “The worst day of my entire life. It was...it was...”

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” you tell her. “But terrible as that would have been, what was worse was seeing you...imagining you, up there, with her, trying to love another pony, trying to remember me, while she used you, took it all away.”

“I want— I just want it never to have happened. I didn’t want to know what it would be like, almost losing you.”

“You didn’t,” you whisper. “I’m here, we won, you didn’t.”

“It doesn’t feel like winning.”

“Hold me,” you say again, and in your hooves she’s so alive, so warm, so there. Protective and protecting you. “We’ll never feel this way again,” tight and tense and violently in love, “nothing will ever separate us.”
In this close space, it seems impossible that anything could. Impossible for things to be any other way. Impossible for this ever to have been at all.

Comments

[Bicyclette]

You press together close beneath the covers, and you reach out with your wings to wrap around her, even as she comforts you. Cocoon of love and warmth: in the life you know, from that cocoon your foal emerges: in this, who knows? Only warmth and trembling and love.

the two layers of that cocoon metaphor here, love it

“Hold me,” you say again, and in your hooves she’s so alive, so warm, so there. Protective and protecting you. “We’ll never feel this way again,” tight and tense and violently in love, “nothing will ever separate us.”
In this close space, it seems impossible that anything could. Impossible for things to be any other way. Impossible for this ever to have been at all.

after such an experience, i can imagine how impossible that would seem. Cadance's narrative voice is starting to submerge into the spell's image of Cadance's