> Grouchisaurus Rex
>  by Baal Bunny
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> 1 - Vern
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"No, no, no, no, no!" Scrolls, quills, and books flew everywhere, a yellowish light surrounding them, and Petunia made a noise halfway between a grunt and a howl. "I need the Magical Compendium, volumes one through thirty-six! Where is it?"

Vern gently set down the bag he was holding—Dusty had winked at him before rehearsal and told him to be more careful with the props—and rushed to his mark beside Petunia just as she spun to face the bookshelves. Her horn glowed to fling six or seven small books away, then the big one came sliding out. Keeping his focus on it, Vern put on his most dismayed expression followed by his most determined one, braced himself, and spread his front claws to catch the giant book when Petunia cut her power.

"Flash cards!" she shouted right on cue, and the book dropped.

Reaching for it, trying to stagger, trying to collapse onto the stage, trying to pretend the thing weighed more than an empty paper sack and was actually crushing him, Vern get ahead of himself and started to fall before he'd actually caught the book. He corrected quickly and grabbed for it, but the thing was so light, it spun away from him like a balloon, bounced off the backdrop, and smacked the floorboards with a hollow and echoing thump.

"Hold it," Dusty's gravelly voice called from the other side of the footlights, and Vern froze, his eyes clenching shut.

Every time! It didn't matter what scene they were doing, either from the beginning like this or from the end when he had to ride Grease Paint in her Princess Cadance costume right between the hooves of the big King Sombra puppet that Marionette had built, Vern always found a way to mess something up!

A hoof touched the ridge of scales between his stubby wings. "It's okay, Vern," Dusty said, and Vern looked up to see the director smiling down at him. "Not your fault you went through the molt and had that growth spurt. We just need to—"

"Wyvern!" cried a very familiar voice from the back of the theater. "Oh, my goodness! Are you all right?"

"He's fine," another familiar voice answered, and Vern looked past the footlights to see Mira Belle and Twilight rushing down the aisle toward the stage.

Though really, only Mira was rushing, the air wavering around her horn. "Please, Wyvern!" A silver flash engulfed her, and with another flash, she burst from the empty air beside him, her golden eyes wide and, as of two days ago, on the same level as Vern's when he stood up straight. "Tell me you're okay!"

"Mira Belle!" Twilight's sharp tone folded Vern's ears, and he couldn't help but notice the similar reaction from everypony on the stage. It was easy to forget who Twilight really was—or maybe it was more truthful to say that Twilight made it easy to forget who she really was. But when she spoke like that, there was no forgetting that one of Equestria's five princesses was in the room.

A good thing, too, Vern thought with a grin. Twilight in full princess mode was sometimes the only pony Mira would listen to. Like now, for instance, the way the little gray unicorn froze in her hoofprints, her heart hammering loud enough in the suddenly silent theater for Vern to hear it.

Twilight cleared her throat, and her next words came out at a more usual volume: "You know Dusty's rules about who gets to be on stage, and you know very well why he has those rules."

"I do." Mira hung her head and made a slow quarter turn to glance up through her chocolate-brown mane at the director. "I'm sorry, Dusty."

Dusty's chuckle sounded like a can of rocks tumbling down a hill. "On behalf of the Ponyville Community Theater, Mira, I accept your apology. But we'll have to take five here, troupe, till we can get—"

"The Magical Compendium?" The laugh was back in Twilight's voice. "Volumes one through thirty-six?" With a toss of her head, a giant book drifted over the lip of the stage, the unmistakable purple of her magic shimmering around it.

Vern gaped. Sure, growing up in Twilight's castle, he'd seen lots of old books—Mira had been Twilight's student for longer, actually, than Vern could remember since it was Mira hatching his egg during her entrance exam to Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns that had brought Mira and Twilight together—but this book looked way older than most. The magic floating around it tickled his nose like dust and made his new wings twitch.

Then the words Twilight had said clicked in his mind, and Vern looked from the book to the princess. "That...that's the real one, isn't it? The actual book you went looking for back before your trip to Canterlot when Princess Celestia told you about the Crystal Empire for the first time."

"Almost." Twilight smiled. "This is the one I ordered as a replacement copy after Tirek blew up the original along with the old Golden Oaks Library." She set a front hoof on the book's cover. "It's the same edition and everything, though, so it's as close as I could get. And if it's all right, Dusty, I'd like to contribute it to the theater for the duration of the play's run."

A moment of silence, then Dusty shook himself. "Twilight, that...that's wonderful! Thank you so much! But..." He set a hoof beside hers on the cover of the book, and for all that the earth pony was nearly as tall as her, he was all lanky legs: Twilight's hoof was maybe half again as big as his. "You know we're gonna be dropping it from that shelf during every performance, right? I wouldn't want to break it—or for it to break Vern."

Twilight's face lit up even further. "That's the best part! Grimoires like this are designed to be really tough, so you don't need to worry about hurting it. And?" Her horn flashed, and something about the book changed. Vern cocked his head at it and flared his nostrils. It still looked the same and smelled the same, but it sat differently on the stage, the air seeming to flow more slowly around it. Or something...

"Its weight is magically adjustable!" Twilight was going on. "I can teach Marionette the spell, and that way, you can make it however heavy or light it needs to be to work in the scene!"

"Well, now." Dusty bent down, slipped his front hooves under the book, and hefted it up and down a few times before looking over his shoulder at Vern. "Wanna give it a try?"

Stepping forward, Vern took the book in his foreclaws and lifted it easily from the stage. "That's no better than the phony one we've been using." His ears folded at how whiny he sounded. "I mean, can we maybe make it a little heavier?"

Dusty chuckled again. "Not exactly a Stallionslavski method actor, are you, Vern?"

Vern blinked at him, but Twilight laughed, so he guessed it must be some grown-up joke. Before he could ask them what it meant, though, Twilight's horn glowed, and the book began gaining weight in Vern's claws. "Say when," she said.

Raising it and lowering it a few times, Vern waited till it felt good and solid in his grip. "There." He gave Twilight a grin and a nod. "This'll make it so much easier! Thanks, Twilight!" A thought struck him then, and he turned to Petunia, sitting with the other actors in the Golden Oaks Library set. "It's not too heavy for you, is it, Petunia?"

Petunia tossed her head, the bob of her purple and magenta wig whisking around her shoulders. "Anything the part calls for, I can do." She planted her hoofs, flared her horn, and Vern let the book go when he felt her magic tug at it. It drifted upward with a bit of a wobble, and Petunia gave a laugh. "Which is what we call—" she started to say.

Everypony in the troop finished it, Vern joining in as well: "Acting!"

"Brilliant!" Dusty gave the required response, then he turned his smile toward Mira Belle, blinking her big eyes where she still sat at stage left. "So, if we could please have all non-acting personnel clear the boards, we'll take it from the top."

Mira's blush always made Vern think of a forest fire, the way it spread so fast and red over her gray face. He stepped forward quickly and wrapped a hug around her. "Thanks, Mira. Knowing you're watching out for me is the best feeling in the world."

He thought for a moment that she was trembling, but then she nuzzled his neck and disappeared. Looking around, he saw her silver flash go off next to Twilight out in the front row of seats.

"Places!" Dusty called, and Vern scrambled to join the others. And not only did the scene go perfectly, but when Dusty said he wanted to run through Twilight's Failure Song from the end of Act One before calling it a day, Vern didn't so much as let himself groan. He just took his mark, did the little dances as well as he could, and hit his harmony parts right when and where he was supposed to: he even got a smile from Petunia when they wrapped up, something he was sure the perfectionist pony had never given him before.

"Y'see?" she said, touching a hoof to the tip of his snout. "Acting."

"Brilliant," Vern said automatically.

"You know it, kid." Laughing, she levitated her wig to Button Hook, Marionette's assistant in the prop department, and started for the stage door.

"OK, troupe!" Dusty was shouting backstage. "Full dress tomorrow, so bring your brains with you!"

The rest of the cast and crew were heading into the wings as well, but Vern made for the house instead, for the two ponies seated in the front row of the otherwise empty building. They were both smiling, but Mira was practically vibrating in place, her front hooves pressed together below her chin. "Oh, Wyvern! You were so wonderful up there! I would never be able to sing in front of other ponies like that!"

Vern shrugged, glad yet again that his scales didn't show it when he blushed.

"Yes," Twilight said, her voice soft and her gaze fixed on the stage where Marionette's crew was raising the Canterlot Tower set into the rafters. "The whole production is incredible." She took a breath, shook her head, and something like her regular smile came back. "I know I say it every time Dusty does one of these shows, but Petunia makes a better me than I ever did."

"Twilight..." Mira's stern look came over her face. "You know that's not true."

Bending down, Twilight touched her horn to Mira's. "But it's funny, so that makes it okay." She turned and started up the aisle. "Now! Back home for supper, then evening lessons for you, Mira, and bed for our master thespian!"

Which was more than fine with Vern: after a day of rehearsing, he always felt like he'd run from the West Ponyville Branch of the library to the new East Ponyville Branch and back. By the time they got to the castle, he was already yawning, so he ate his amethyst almandine, let Mira kiss him good night, dragged himself upstairs to her room, collapsed into his basket—

And suddenly found that he couldn't keep his eyes shut.

He tried for what seemed like a couple hours, curling up tight and pretending he was back in his egg, then stretching out wide enough to actually touch the edges of his round mattress with both his front paws and his back paws, but neither position worked. It was like he had a beehive inside him or something, thoughts of all the things he had to do in this play tickling at him.

Because this wasn't like the other times he'd been Spike in Dusty's shows. He didn't just have a couple lines to memorize and a few funny bits. This was The Return of the Crystal Empire! Spike was the hero of this one! Which meant that Vern had a song and dance to do with Petunia and that whole thing with Sombra's scary door in the basement of the palace and a bunch of stunts at the end and...and everything!

More awake now, he was sure, than he'd ever been in his whole entire life, he rolled out of his basket and padded over the carpeting to the door. Maybe if he went downstairs to Twilight's study and curled up under the table where Mira was having her lessons, that would help. Most of what those two talked about put him right to sleep anyway.

Pulling the door open, he squinted into the light that always glowed through the hallways here...and something stroked against him and through him both at the same time.

It wasn't a scent exactly and it wasn't a sound and it wasn't five or six other things, either. But it made parts of his brain sit up and start clicking, parts that normally sat there and didn't do anything unless—

"Yes!" Turning, he sprinted down the hallway for the back stairs, jumped down them three at a time till he came to the basement level, then scrambled on all fours around the boxes that filled the castle's underground storeroom. At the far end, the gigantic double doors that had sat there dark and closed and silent for almost a whole month were now thrown open, and Vern bounded inside. The walls shimmered, torchlight reflecting from the gold and gems piled on the floor. And lounging on top of that pile, huge and purple and green and scaly— "Spike!" Vern yelled, leaping for the other dragon.

Spike had a book delicately balanced between his foreclaws, and he swung his big head toward Vern at just exactly the right speed for Vern to grab his friend's rounded snout and haul himself up. "Vern!" Spike said in his rumbling voice. "Wait a minute. I was only gone three weeks! How can you be that much taller?"

Laughing, Vern spun on the end of Spike's nose. "You were gone four weeks! I had my molt, and now it's like all my growing's happening at once! I mean, if I stand on my tippy-tip claws and stretch my neck, I'm almost as tall as Mira Bella now!"

The chuckle that rolled up Spike's neck jiggled Vern around so much, he had to laugh himself. "I still remember the first time I could peek over Twilight's head without standing on my tip-claws." He waved a paw, the torches flickering in the breeze it stirred up. "And now look at me!"

Vern couldn't help looking—Spike had said to, after all—and like always, he was just plain amazed. All the way from the ridge at the top of Spike's head to the pointy end of his tail, Spike was bigger than some of the buildings in Ponyville. And even though Vern had heard Spike tell the story fifteen or twenty times probably, he'd watched the movie on his memory pad even more times than that: some documentary crew had filmed it a hundred and fifty years ago when Twilight had hired a bunch of Diamond Dogs to dig out Spike's room and the tunnel that led to his private entrance out in the Everfree Forest.

It always made Vern swallow when he looked at Spike, and with the way he'd grown recently, he couldn't help asking, "Am I really gonna get as big as you someday?"

"Could be." Spike brought a foreclaw up and touched Vern's back in that surprisingly gentle way he had. "Once your wings come in, well, the sky's the limit."

Normally, Vern would've groaned at the joke, but the rest of what Spike had said made him shout, "No!" instead.

The whole cavern suddenly went quiet, Spike's chest stopping in mid-breath. "Whaddaya mean by that?" he asked.

Vern's ears folded, something odd and brittle in Spike's voice. "I...I just mean that you're the biggest and strongest and best dragon that ever was," Vern managed to say. "And I...it wouldn't be right for me to ever get bigger'n you. That...that's all, Spike, really: that's all I was saying."

Spike's chest sort of sank, and a greenish-black puff of smoke rolled from his nostrils. "Yeah, well, a long, long time ago, they used to call me 'little Spikey-Wikey,' y'know."

"What?" Vern looked down along Spike's whole length again. "Who would've called you that?"

Another gust of smoke rose, but this time it came from Spike's pursed lips, a silvery, diamond-shaped cloud drifting toward the ceiling. "Never mind," he said. "Now, what's all this I hear about you pretending to be me? You trying to steal my hoard again?"

It was another joke, Vern knew, but thinking about the play made him want to hop up and down some more. "We're doing the whole story about the return of the Crystal Empire this time! Princess Cadance and Princess Flurry Heart are both gonna come for opening night, and...and you're gonna be in town, right? To come and see it?"

The quiet this time felt different somehow: sharper if silence could even be sharp. "I dunno, Vern." Spike's attention was focused on the smoke diamond slowly drifting apart as it wavered upwards and vanished among the stalactites. "I mean, I'll try, sure, but I might have to head out if there's, y'know, a big emergency somewhere."

"Well, yeah." Vern swallowed. "But...if there isn't?"

Blinking, Spike's big eyes rolled down to meet Vern's gaze, and a smile touched his snout. "I wouldn't miss it, Vern."
> 2 - Twilight
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Her whispered name—"Twilight?"—brought her awake. Blinking, she saw Mira Belle standing beside her bed, her horn casting a soft silvery puddle of light around her.

Twilight couldn't help but grin every time she got one of these late night/early morning wake-ups. No matter how many centuries went by, she would never forget creeping up to Celestia's bed in exactly this same way, monsters or math problems swirling in her head and stealing her sleep. True, Mira hadn't done this in a while, but the special firm and gentle voice Twilight had devised for such occasions still came naturally to her. "What is it, Mira Belle?"

Even under the best of circumstances, Mira seldom spoke above a murmur, but she had a clarity of tone that always reminded Twilight that her great-to-the-fifth grandmother had been Sweetie Belle. "We're very sorry, Twilight," Mira said, and her gaze shifted to give a little glance over her shoulder.

A grayish-yellow shadow hovered at the edge of the partially open door, and Twilight realized that Wyvern was peering in from the hallway.

Odd. Vern reminded Twilight of Spike in so many ways, not the least of which was how well his practicality grounded Mira's wilder flights of fancy. So to see him here now as well—

Wafting her magic across the room to fade the lights in, Twilight folded back her blankets and rolled upright with her legs tucked under her barrel. "Is something wrong?"

"Well..." Mira looked at Vern again.

The little dragon came shuffling in, his foreclaws sort of grasping at each other across his chest. "It's Spike," he said.

And Twilight found herself out of bed, her hooves planted in the carpet, her arsenal of detection spells bristling to life throughout the entire castle. Because Spike's solid warmth, so absent these past four weeks while he'd been traveling with Equestria's delegation to the decadal Greater Nations' Summit, was gone yet again, not a trace of him anywhere within the palace walls. "Where is he? Is he all right? What happened? Why isn't he in his room? Did he say something to you about going out again?"

"No!" Vern waved his arms. "That's just it! He was here last night and said he'd be here to see the play when we do it in two weeks, but when I woke up, I couldn't smell him anymore!" Sour, salty waves of fear rolled through his usually smoky scent, his eyes wide and the little spines on the sides of his head slicked back. "But if there'd been an emergency, you'd know about it, right? So where'd he go, Twilight? Why'd he—?"

"Wyvern!" Mira Belle sprang forward, reared back, and enveloped him in a hug. "It's okay! We're all here, and we're gonna find out what's going on!" She turned a purse-lipped look over her shoulder. "I mean, if all of us can maybe stop panicking so much?"

The rebuke made Twilight blink, then smile. "You're right, Mira, and I apologize. Spike's been my dearest friend for so long, I sometimes get a little—" She stopped and shook her head: more than two hundred years she'd been the Princess of Friendship, and she was still learning lessons in it every day. "But yes, let's not jump to conclusions. Spike's been gone for a month, so maybe he just got really hungry for some of Honey Pie's apple fritters."

A quick glance at the wall clock showed her it was half an hour till dawn. "You two head over to Sugercube Corner, all right? He's probably there helping Honey heat up the donut glaze. Or if he's not, try the site where Dolores and her crew are building the new concert hall. You know how much he enjoys being both a crane and a welder."

Vern's head spines perked up. "Hey, yeah! And when Gaia and the other griffons in town do their stretching exercises in Glimmer Park at sun-up, he sometimes goes over there and does 'em, too!"

Not letting her smile waver, Twilight nodded. "Good thinking! I'll take a quick flap over the Everfree Forest and see if he's out there, and we'll send each other messages when we find him."

"Yes!" Whirling, Vern raced for the door. "C'mon, Mira!"

Mira trotted after him, her usual worried look on her face, but Twilight forced herself to keep exuding confidence till the clattering of hooves and claws had faded to mere echoes out in the hallway. Only then did she let her own worry surface again, and firing up a teleportation spell, she crackled herself down to the one-story tall doorway of Spike's room in the basement.

Cavernous, it lay cold and dark and silent, three things it never was when he was home. Not even the gold and jewels of his hoard seemed to glitter in the light of Twilight's horn. It didn't feel like he was in town, either—she sometimes joked that she could smell his breath from a mile away, but she really had known him long enough to sense the way he displaced the air whenever he was nearby.

The Everfree, of course, fuddled her magic just like it still fuddled everything, so she popped into the seneschal's office, knocked on his bedroom door till a bleary-eyed Golden Voice peered out, and left him with several layers of instructions: what to do if she wasn't back by eight AM; what to do if she wasn't back by ten AM; what to do if she wasn't back by noon. She then ran from the government offices in the palace's west wing through the public library and museum in the central wing to her room in the east wing in order to get her muscles limbered up, slung on her saddlebags, and jumped out the window into the pearly-gray pre-dawn.

Summoning a map of the forest into the air ahead of her, she quickly drew up a search pattern than would take her to Spike's favorite spots while letting her cover as much of the woods around them as possible. If she struck out at all those places, she could circle back and sweep the rest of the woods in a simple grid pattern before lunchtime.

She had to grin at that thought. By then, she could just listen for the thunderous groaning of his empty stomach...

But he wasn't at Zechariah's hut and he wasn't at the Sisters' Castle and he wasn't down in the cavern with the Tree of Harmony. Each time, Twilight sighed and headed for the next stop on her itinerary, her eyes, ears, and magic wide open for any sign of him.

The sun came up eventually, but even then she still almost missed him. The purple expanse of his scales and his big green spine ridges mixed so well with the early morning shadows of the stretch of woodland she was passing over that she only stopped and doubled back when she heard the familiar whoosh of him exhaling.

She smiled. She'd known he had to be around here somewhere. After all, she liked to think she knew him pretty well by now.

Except... Her smile faded. She hadn't expected him to disappear without a word the way he had this morning, had she? And hovering in the blue autumn sky above the long, shade-dappled stretch of him, just visible here and there between the tree branches, she had to admit that his grouchiness the last few months had taken her by surprise, too.

An old tree stump squatted at the edge of a meadow where the rumbling sigh had come from. Twilight folded her wings, settled herself down onto the stump, and looked up at his seemingly sleeping face among the tree trunks. "Spike?" she asked gently.

Stretched out, he wound away into the woods, his head bigger than her whole body. But he still grimaced when he didn't want to wake up, the spines twitching all along his neck. "Not today," he said, his voice always his voice no matter how deep it got.

The breath that washed over her had a slightly sour tinge, but it was the words that made her blink. "You're not Spike today?"

"I'm not waking up today." His eyelids pulled apart just enough for her to see twin reflections of her confused expression in his shiny, black pupils. "So thanks for stopping by, Twi. You can show yourself out, right?"

"I see." She rubbed her chin. "So instead of Spike, you're the fabled Grouchisaurus rex."

His eyes came more fully open. "The what?"

Twilight put one front hoof to her chest, waved the other at the sky, and declared in her best movie announcer voice, "A legendary beast who once roamed the forests and swamps of ancient Equestria!" Flaring her horn, she conjured up a cartoon image of a big, purple-and-green dragon stomping over some appropriately primeval landscape. "Snarling and growling at all who crossed his path, he struck terror into the hearts of those ponies who only wanted to know what the hay he thought he was doing lying around being grouchy all day!" She grinned.

He didn't grin back.

"Hence the name Grouchisaurus." Twilight found herself going on even though she was pretty sure the joke had fallen flat. "Because he was being all, y'know, grouchy..." She let her tableau vanish with a pop.

"Grouchy," Spike said, his mouth barely moving, and silence settled over them. Sitting with her grin frozen in place, Twilight tried to think of a clever way to ask what was bothering him, but he spoke again before she could come up with one. "Sounds like that must be the word on your calendar for today."

Her awkward grin became an actual smile. "Spike, I haven't used one of those since I was in school."

"Huh." He shifted his head, his forelimbs sliding him forward a bit. "Well, here's your word for tomorrow, Twi: 'bicentennial.'"

Quickly, Twilight ran through her mental list of anniversaries. It wasn't two hundred years since his hatchday: they'd thrown that party nearly a decade ago. It wasn't two hundred years since the Summer Sun Celebration that had brought the two of them to Ponyville for the first time: they'd done that particular anniversary up in style just last year with Celestia and Luna and Cadance and Flurry Heart and a giant crowd spilling out of Ponyville's town square.

But even though nothing specifically bicentennial came to her with regard to tomorrow, she was fairly sure she could guess the general outline. "Something to do with her?" she asked, not even trying to keep her voice from cracking.

Spike nodded, the grass rustling against his chin scales, and more rustling brought one gigantic arm reaching out from the tree shadows. Something caught the sunlight between the stalactite claws of his thumb and forefinger, and Twilight found herself looking at a lovely aquamarine gem about the size of her hoof. "Two hundred years ago tomorrow was the day we first ran across the Diamond Dogs." Even his whispers made the air shiver around her. "The day she gave me this."

She couldn't hug him anymore, not the way she'd once been able to. But she touched both front hooves to his nose, let a warm stream of magic shiver out from them, let it circle to close at the back of his neck, and let it tighten so he'd be able to feel it.

He closed his eyes, leaned forward, and gently touched his bedspread-sized forehead to the tip of her horn.

"Twilight!" a voice shouted, and a cascade of magic crashed over her as cold and hard as a bucket of hurled ice cubes. "Are you here? Did you find—? Whoa!" The sound of somepony thumping against the ground made Twilight's ears wince; she turned to see Hoedown sprawling onto her back out in the meadow, her bright orange mane and tail spreading out around her like a lava flow. Her head popped up immediately, though, light of the same color playing around her horn. "Elevation! Right! Always forgetting that!"

"Hoedown!" Twilight cried, taking a step forward. "Are you okay?"

"Are you kidding?" Hoedown leaped onto all fours and made a rude noise with her lips. "I fall farther than that just getting out of bed in the morning!" She tapped a hoof against the side of her head. "If I told you how many times I've popped back into normal space only to find this melon of mine stuck halfway inside a rock—!"

"Thirty-eight," Spike said. Twilight looked over her shoulder to see him actually grinning, his foreclaws still cradling the gem and folded under his chin. "Unless you've done another couple in the month I've been away."

"Spike!" Hoedown jumped straight up, her horn flaring again. "Hang on!" And she vanished with a clattering crash like a box of silverware falling down a stairwell.

Twilight blinked at the spot of empty air and shook her head. "I need to have another talk with that filly," she said.

"Six," she heard Spike say behind her. Turning to ask him what he meant, she saw him counting down on his claws. "Five, four, three, two—"

The air shattered once more, and six figures tumbled across the grass in front of Twilight: three ponies, a dragon, a griffon, and a donkey. Twilight had to smile. That particular combination told her exactly who the new arrivals were even before the magical tau particles of the spell had shimmered away.

Hoedown was the first to scramble into an upright position. "And that is how I win the teleportation scavenger hunt every year!"

"Excuse me?" Cinnamon Teal pushed himself up next, his wingtips coming around to straighten his glasses. "Might I remind you, Hoedown, of what Princess Twilight has told you several times about attempting to—"

"Attempting?" Hoedown shoved her snout directly into Teal's. "Look around, Goggles! I did it! I mean, we're all here, aren't we?"

With a chirp, Gaia sat up, her talons brushing her crest feathers out of her face. "Gimme a minute. I might be missing a chunk or two."

"I know that I'm missing something," came Dolores's voice, so sweet and clear, it always reminded Twilight of singing even when she was just talking. The big, muscular jenny donkey rose and shook herself, her long ears flapping. "I had a picnic basket full of breakfast Honey Pie gave me for when we found Spike and Twilight."

"Right here." A lumpy ball behind Dolores unrolled to become Vern, a large wicker basket clutched to his chest. "No way I'm letting one of Honey's breakfasts outta my sight."

Spike chuckled, the sound so rich and deep, it always made Twilight think of hot chocolate with extra marshmallows. "You've learned well, my faithful student," he said.

Vern beamed up at him, then his smile crumpled a little around the edges. "I...I'm sorry, Spike. I guess I maybe panicked a little when I woke up this morning and you were gone."

"Yeah," Dolores said. Her big black hooves flipped the lid off the basket to reveal part of a red-and-white-checkered blanket. "Mira? Hoedown? Get this thing laid out, will you?" She looked over her shoulder. "So spill, Spike. Us delicate, sensitive types get all upset when dragons and unicorns come pounding on our front doors to yell about friends gone missing."

"Delicate?" Teal blinked up through his glasses at her. "You've won the last three Cider Days tug-of-war contests all by yourself, if I recall correctly."

"Sensitive?" Gaia clicked her beak. "I've watched you eat a whole bag of cherries without even noticing the pits!"

Dolores straightened to her full height and glared down her muzzle first at Gaia, who quickly busied herself with pulling various paper-wrapped packages from the basket, and then at Cinnamon Teal, who paled nearly to beige under her scrutiny and shrank back till he seemed no bigger than Mira Belle. Dolores gave a snort, shifted her glare around, and growled, "Any other comments?"

Twilight almost spoke up, a quip ready about how the pits were her favorite thing about cherries, but a giggle from further out in the meadow drew her attention to Mira Belle. "I have a comment!" Mira's horn flared to whisk everything out of the basket and onto the blanket she and Hoedown had unfolded. "Breakfast is served!"

Hoedown whooped and dove face first into an apple fritter. "Now that," she said, coming up with frosting coating her horn and snout, "is the sort of commentary I can get behind!"

The snort Dolores gave this time was all laughter. "You and me both, kiddo!"

One of Hoedown's eyebrows arched. "You're only a year older than me, Lori."

"And yet?" Dolores patted Hoedown's bright orange mane. "One of us is strawboss at Doodle Construction, and the other of us is—" She cocked her head. "What is it you do again, HD?"

With a shrug, Hoedown stretched her tongue out to lick frosting from her nose. "I'm a menace to society."

"And that," Twilight said, joining the others as they took places around the blanket, "is the sort of commentary we can all get behind."

The kids laughed, and Twilight swallowed. Because they weren't kids anymore, were they? It had to have been three years since they'd all graduated from the school, after all: Gaia was pretty much running the Ponyville Post Office these days, and Teal had been the reference librarian at the new branch of the library since before last Hearth's Warming. Even Mira wasn't all that much younger than Twilight herself had been the day she'd hopped out of that chariot to touch the streets of Ponyville for the first time...

Tearing her gaze away, she looked back at Spike, his eyes glowing slightly in the darkness among the tree trunks. "Will you be joining us?" she asked, not quite sure she managed to keep the plaintive tone out of her voice.

The moment stretched, Twilight acutely aware of everything around her: the clatter of cutlery and the voices of her students-become-friends at the tablecloth; the morning breeze playing around the swirling colors of the evening sky that her mane had grown into; her very best friend in the whole wide world almost invisible, the shadows wrapping around him.

Then he moved, crawled forward, gave her the gentlest smile she'd seen from him in months, and reached out two big claws to pick up a cinnamon roll. "I'd like to propose a toast," he said.

"Hold it." Mira squinted, her horn flaring. A piece of bread appeared in front of her, and her hornglow slid it to hover in front of Vern's snout. "Let's do this right."

Vern rolled his eyes, but he still puffed out the tiniest tendril of flame, crisping the bread to a lovely golden brown on both sides.

Mira gave a nod, then wafted the toast to a spot beside Spike's claw.

Groans and giggles rose up, but Twilight had to swallow again. If Spike was still feeling grouchy—

"Ah, Mira." His voice rumbled the ground. "You also have learned well, my faithful student. But no way am I letting go of this cinnamon roll." Reaching out his other hand, he took the toast, raised it, and said, "To friends, both present and absent."

Everycreature repeated the phrase, and Twilight hardly noticed the next hour going by in a lovely tangle of laughter, chatter, pastry, and apple juice. She would've been more than happy to spend the rest of the day there, too, but...

Tipping back her cup, she caught the last drop of juice on the tip of her tongue and concentrated on the sweetness of it rolling all the way down her esophagus. "Sorry guys," she said into the next comfortable little lull in the conversation, "but if I'm not back at the castle in twenty minutes, poor old Golden Voice will have to cover for me at the planning commission meeting. And I like him too much to make him do that."

Dolores was shading her eyes with a hoof and looking at the sun. "Yeah, I may be the boss, but that doesn't mean I can skip going to work." She nodded to Hoedown. "You zapping us back to town, HD?"

Hoedown noisily sucked up the last two mini éclairs and tossed the plate toward Gaia. "You bet!"

Gaia caught the plate, tucked it into the basket, and clapped her talons. "Come at me, then! This place isn't cleaned up in sixty seconds, we all gotta go to Twilight's meeting with her!"

The next fifty seconds saw the griffon leaping and spinning, catching cups and saucers and empty brown paper bags, and somehow packing them all away. Wings flapping, she touched one hind paw to the ground and twirled in a slow circle. "We forget anything?"

A clearing of throat like a minor thunderstorm drew Twilight's attention—and everyone else's as well—to Spike, lying on his belly so that only his tail snaked back into the trees. With a grin, he poked a claw at the big blanket most of them were still sitting on. "I can carry it back to town if you haven't got room there, Gaia."

Tapping her beak, Gaia glanced back and forth between the basket and the blanket. "Fold it good, and I'll make it fit."

All of them stood, and Spike folded the thing into an almost perfect cube, something Teal and Mira both laughingly declared was impossible even as Spike was doing it. Gaia then somehow squeezed it into the basket, and Dolores, hoisting the wicker box in her teeth, tossed it to balance perfectly across her broad back. "Once again," she declared in her musical soprano, "we've managed to overcome science, magic, and good sense all in the same morning!"

A tiny crackling fireworks display shot from Hoedown's horn. "And we all lived happily ever after!" The fireworks changed to a display that looked a lot more like a volcano going off. "Now! Back to town!" She waved a hoof at Twilight and Spike. "You two coming?"

Twilight pretended to consider it. "Well, the last time I went teleporting with you, I was bald for a week and a half."

Mira Belle giggled, and Hoedown rolled her eyes. "Fine! Spike?"

Spike had risen back to sit on his haunches, the spiny ridges on his head reaching higher than the first row of tree branches. "Seriously?" he rumbled, folding his arms across his chest.

Looking up at him, Hoedown actually went a little pale, the first time Twilight could recall seeing that. "Yeah, might be better I catch you next time," she said. Sparks blossomed from her horn. "Everybody else ready? 'Cause here we go!" The sparks swirled in a tornado through the meadow, and when they cleared away, Twilight was alone with Spike.

She let the silence drift down for a moment before asking, "So, coming back to town?"

"Well, yeah." He touched his claws to his chest. "I mean, if I don't get the order for my new bow tie in to Stiches now, it probably won't be ready for the premiere. And how would it look if Spike the Brave and Glorious didn't attend opening night of the play written in his honor without a new bow tie?"

"Quiet, you." She unfurled her wings and sprang up to hover in front of him. "Or do you want me to tell Dusty the true story of what happened when you saved the first Crystal Empire Equestria Games?"

His eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't."

"I would." She did a flip and flopped onto her belly to sprawl across the top of his head. "Unless the fabled Grouchisaurus rex gives me a ride home!"

For a moment, the only sound was the morning breeze in the trees. Then Spike heaved a sigh that bent every tree ahead of them in the opposite direction. "Princess of Friendship?" His head shook slowly back and forth, Twilight digging her hooves in just enough to keep herself from sliding off. "Should've been the Princess of Goofiness..." And he started forward into the meadow.

"Whoo-hoo!" Twilight tapped a quick rhythm over his scalp scales. "I'll be the envy of the Equestria Paleontological Society!" 

He tried to make his laugh sound like a cough, but Twilight knew him way too well to be fooled. So she wasn't at all surprised that, when he spread his wings and leaped into the air, his whooping, plain and unbridled, mixed freely with her own.
> 3 - Spike
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The whole thing was a giant nuisance, of course. Spike didn't have any other sort of nuisances anymore.

"It's not a problem!" Dolores kept insisting, the team of pegasi, unicorns, and griffons from Doodle Construction carefully unfastening the clamps from the back edge of the theater roof in preparation for folding it open. "I mean, Great-Granddad designed this place with you specially in mind. It's supposed to do this."

Spike's snort came out way grouchier than he intended. He took a breath, very deliberately didn't fold his arms across his chest, and said, "I appreciate that, Dolores, really. But I told Nate when he built it that he didn't need to worry, and we've never bothered opening it up before! I'd rather just stick my head in through the side door." He waved his claws at Glimmer Park, dappled and shady beside the Ponyville Community Theater. "I can stretch out in the park like I usually do." And not have everypony make a big deal about it, he didn't add though the thought was always there in the back of his head.

"Well, yeah," Dolores said, her attention on the workers above them. "But since the others are gonna be here, too, I—" Her ears folded, and her wide eyes snapped in Spike's direction. "I mean—"

"Others?" The word trickled into Spike's head like rain water through a broken window. "What others?"

Having watched her grow up, Spike knew that Dolores could be a pretty good liar, but only when nothing big was at stake. Now, though, her ears were folding, her mane bristling, and her voice stammering, "I just mean, y'know, all the princesses! 'Cause, yeah, we, uhhh, we wanna have the roof open in case...in case they need to fly off somewhere in a hurry!"

He didn't even bother scowling at her, just leaped into the air and gave a flap that he knew would've tipped over anycreature less solidly built than Dolores. "Spike!" he heard her call after him, but he knew who he needed to talk to if what he thought was going on was really going on.

Once in the air, he adjusted his profile to cut down on the turbulence he was creating—no need making things worse for any other fliers out today—and tried to breathe away the weird mix of pride and dismay that soaring over Ponyville kicked up inside him these days. For more than half a century, the Chamber of Commerce had been using the slogan, "The Biggest Small Town in Equestria," but looking over the rooftops spilling out from the wedge bounded by Sweet Apple Acres, the Everfree Forest, and the Whitetail Woods, Spike had to wonder if the place had maybe outgrown that claim...

The castle had expanded over the years, too, with multiple spires now and a horseshoe shape that Twilight ascribed to the Tree of Harmony's weird sense of humor. At least it was still the tallest building in town: no Planning Commission document said anything about that, but every construction company kept it as an unspoken guideline. Spike swooped over the central wing, dropped onto the courtyard's landing pad, and padded toward the big main doors.

Noontime saw the park and gardens that made up most of the courtyard bustling with ponies and griffons, changelings and hippogriffs, a lot of them workers from the government offices in the west wing. They waved to him as he tromped along, the tourists in the crowd staring with loose jaws before raising their cameras to snap photos. It took some effort to keep the tightness in his middle from showing on his face, but he did his best to wave and smile and call out to those who actually called out to him.

Once inside, he turned for the east wing, the residential part of the palace. Ducking into the main corridor, he gave the guards a nod as he slipped between them and sent a puff of yellow smoke in Twilight's direction. They didn't need written scrolls anymore, not between the two of them. Yellow meant 'important but not life-threatening,' and while a part of Spike wanted to use red smoke, telling her to drop whatever she was doing and find him immediately, he had to admit that this wasn't quite a Tirek- or Grogar-level event...

The carpet muffled his claws, the light from the clear crystal windows nicely diffuse and muted. Winding his way into smaller and smaller hallways, he finally squeezed through the door of the Twilight's library—not the public library and museum that filled the castle's central wing, but Twilight's personal space.

That she wasn't here went another step toward confirming his worst suspicions, but he stopped himself from scowling when he saw Mira Belle looking up from a side table, her horn glowing to guide at least three quill pens across several sheets of paper spread out around her. "Mira?" he asked, coiling himself into one of the window alcoves and silently thanking the Tree for keeping up with his own slow-but-steady growth. "Twilight gave you homework on the weekend the play's opening?"

"Homework?" She blinked at him, then shifted her gaze to blink at the papers. "Oh, this is just some thoughts I've been having on thaumaturgical particle decay. I always get too nervous to do anything real when Wyvern's going to be appearing on stage." Shaking her head, she sighed. "I don't know why. He's really, really good at it."

"Yeah." Spike's feelings about Vern had gotten just as jumbled two weeks ago as everything else inside him, so he fell back on his standard joke. "He makes a better me than I ever did."

Mira gave him one of her squint-eyed scowls. "That's not funny when Twilight says it about Petunia, and it's not funny when you say it about Wyvern, either! Equestria wouldn't be Equestria if it wasn't for you two! It probably wouldn't even exist, or if it did exist, it would be a terrible place where no creatures were friends with each other, and they all went around shouting and growling and not having any fun at all!"

"Wait." Making himself scowl back at her, Spike held up a claw. "Are you saying that Twilight's been stealing my line?"

She rolled her eyes in a way that Spike was proud to have inspired in most of Twilight's students. "Excuse me," she said, standing and drawing herself up to her full height: for all that she'd been growing, too, she still wouldn't've been able to poke his knee without jumping. "I have serious nonsense to do this afternoon, and I don't wish to be disturbed."

He opened his mouth to inform her that she was lucky he stopped by, then, what with him being an expert at nonsense, but a sudden mustardy scent tickling his nostrils stopped him. "Actually," he said instead, swinging his head and sniffing, "I'd hate to keep a promising young goof such as yourself from her studies." The smell was coming most strongly from the door in the library's north wall, so Spike rose onto all fours and started toward it. "Besides, I'm hunting the Crepuscular Winged Monoceros, so I'll see you later."

Her giggle followed him to the door. "Tell Twilight I chased you off with my overwhelming work ethic."

The grin he gave her over his shoulder evaporated as soon as he'd pushed through into the corridor outside the library. Twilight always used a mustard scent trail to answer his yellow smoke when she couldn't come to him and wanted him to come to her. That she was responding this way pretty much told him why she was busy, but he forced his neck spikes not to bristle at the thought since the corridor here was a little on the low side.

The aroma beckoned to his right when he came to the transept, and that settled every doubt. The corridor to the right sloped downward, after all, leading him underground through larger and rougher tunnels till they opened out into the familiar cavern beneath the castle, the protrusions from the Tree of Harmony shedding a cooling light over the nooks and crannies. Another scent began mixing in with the mustard smell, and Spike let himself bristle at last. Rising up onto his hind legs, he padded across the smooth stone to a large doorway and stepped inside.

Something close to daylight shone here—the Tree had grown some skylights up at ground level back when Twilight had hired the local Diamond Dogs to expand the subterranean portions of the castle. Twilight lay with her forelegs crossed on a cushioned outcropping about halfway up the wall, a large, flat-topped stalagmite serving as a table between her and her guest.

Despite his grouchiness, Spike had to admit that Ember had really grown into her position as Dragon Lord over the last couple centuries. Two stories tall and all smooth, sinuous muscle, she made him think of Celestia more and more every time he saw her. Except, of course, when they'd had their little talk two weeks ago at the end of the Greater Nations' Summit...

Thinking about that let him steel himself against her diamond-sharp gaze turning toward him. "Afternoon, all," he managed to say without wobbling the words too much.

"Spike!" Twilight's voice had a happiness in it that was both real and phony. "What a surprise! Ember and I were just talking about you!"

Which meant that she'd called him without letting Ember know. Which meant that they'd been discussing him in ways that she thought he needed to be a part of. Of course, that Ember was even here meant that Twilight had invited her, and that Dolores had said 'others' instead of 'other' while opening up the theater roof meant that Twilight was expecting at least one more dragon. Which meant that they'd undoubtedly been talking about—

He put as much nonchalance into his shrug as he could manage. "I was just heading to my cave when I caught a familiar aroma." He bowed to Ember. "Your Lordship."

One of Ember's eye ridges rose the tiniest amount. "Are we really going to do this, Spike?" When she wanted to, she could still sound almost exactly like the brash young princess he'd first met all those years ago. "Because if you insist that I call you Ambassador, you'll put quite the damper on what was up till now a perfectly lovely little tea party." She picked up her cup, looking so delicate in her claws even though Spike knew it held nearly twenty gallons, and sipped it.

"Please," Twilight said, her yearning tone more than enough to start melting Spike's steely resolve. "We're all friends here. I'm sure we can talk this through."

Ember shrugged. "I tried talking, but Spike didn't seem—"

"Talking?" Spike couldn't keep from baring his teeth. "You ordered me to get Smolder pregnant!"

"No." Ember set her cup back down on the stalagmite table, snapped her claws, and a ball of fire burst into the air above her paw before clearing to show the Bloodstone Scepter floating there. "I could've ordered you to. If I were any of Dragon Lords who came before me, I would've ordered you to, and you would've been unable to disobey." Another snap, and the Scepter vanished. "But I didn't do that."

Something that felt like an icicle had stabbed into Spike's chest at the sight of the Scepter, and when it disappeared, he had to force himself to take a breath. None of the coldness went away, though.

"Y'see," Ember went on, picking up her cup again, "I'm convinced that having the Dragon Lord choose which dragons enter into mating pairs based on the ancient fitness criteria hasn't really done much for us as a society. We're the biggest, strongest, most magical beings in the known universe, and yet we're also the grouchiest, the stingiest, the laziest, and the least organized. And yes, I'm including griffons."

Twilight sighed. "Ember, that's not—"

Ember's snort seemed to startle Twilight into silence. "You know it's true. I know it's true. Everycreature in Equestria knows it's true." Her gaze focused on Twilight and somehow got even sharper. "You ponies, though, you run the world. And your basic family units are formed largely on choice and on 'love'." She made little air quotes with her claws. "I've talked a few times with Princess Cadance about it, and she agrees with me: we need to encourage more of this love thing in the Dragonlands."

The heat surging through Spike pretty much blew away the last of the ice, but instead of stoking his anger, he just felt tired all of a sudden. "Love's not that simple, Ember," he muttered.

"See?" She waved her cup at him, brown liquid sloshing out to splash against the wall. "You already know about this stuff!  And Smolder, well, she was the first dragon from the Dragonlands to graduate from a pony school, the first dragon from the Dragonlands to have pony friends, the first dragon from the Dragonlands to actually get invited to regular pony parties and to walk the streets of your cities without giving anypony a heart attack! I've watched you two grow up together, and now that you're both of age, it's obvious that you'd be perfect partners! I mean, you like her, right?"

"Well, of course!" he answered without thinking, then caught his breath. "But—"

"Then it's settled!" Ember slammed her cup onto the table. "She'll be here in fifteen minutes, then we can all have some dinner, go to the play, you two can enjoy a moonlight flight afterwards or whatever it is that happens on dates. It'll be perfect!" She glanced over at Twilight. "That's the word, right? 'Date'?"

Twilight nodded, sighed, and turned to Spike. "Ember raises some good points, Spike, so now let's hear—"

"What?" All the ice crashed back into Spike's stomach. "Twilight? You...you agree with her?"

"I'm only saying," Twilight began.

But that was as much as Spike needed to hear, his ears pounding and the walls seeming to close in around him. Spinning, he sprinted out into the hall, scrambled for his private entryway, spread his wings, and flapped for the end of the tunnel as fast as he'd ever flapped in his life.

Fortunately, Twilight had set up magical sensors to open the door at his approach, but, well, he'd never approached at this speed before. He focused on the slowly widening crack of daylight between the door and the jamb, stretched himself, rolled to the right, tucked his wings to his sides, and barrelled out from the side of the ravine just north of Zechariah's hut. More pitching and rolling kept him from slamming into the cliff face on the other side, and he whooshed up into the clear air above the Everfree so quickly, he was surprised he didn't leave an expanding ring of rainbow behind himself.

His first thought—hide somewhere!—he dismissed almost immediately. Twilight knew all his hiding places, and as he'd discovered two weeks ago when this same problem had driven him sleepless into the pre-dawn darkness, he didn't fit very well in any of his old spots anymore anyway. He needed to find somewhere he could hunker down, somewhere he could catch his breath, somewhere he could lay low for a year of three till things had maybe gotten a little less—

"Well, hey!" a voice he couldn't quite place rang out beside him. "You hurrying to put out a fire or to start one?"

Glancing over, he could only blink for a moment at Hoedown, the unicorn racing along through the sky next to him, her usual big, goofy grin stretched along her muzzle. "'Cause I'm totally up for either," she finished.

Spike pulled into a hover. "Hasn't Twilight talked to you about how unreliable flight magic is?"

With a shrug, Hoedown stopped as well. "She talks to me about a lotta things, but let's talk about you right now." She bobbed in front of him, her horn sparking and its glow surrounding her. "If you're rushing toward something, can I come, too? Or—" She waved a hoof over the tangled treetops in the direction they'd just come from. "If you're rushing away from something, well, there's two of us now, so let's go back and kick its sorry tail!"

Even with his stomach flipping around, Spike had to give her a grin of his own. "You've got no idea how tempting an offer that is, but right now, I...I just need somewhere I can hole up and think for a while."

"Thinking?" She shook her head. "I wouldn't recommend it, but hang on a minute." The glow around Hoedown flared up till Spike had to squint, then she was gone.

He barely had time to draw a breath before she reappeared, something brown and feathery squawking between her forelegs. "Hoedown!" Gaia shouted, wriggling away and dropping with a gasp, her postal delivery hat popping off her head. Her wings shot out immediately, though, lifted her back up to grab her hat in her claws and scowl. "Some of us are trying to work, y'know!"

"Exactly!" Hoedown spun and nodded to Spike. "No creature knows Ponyville like Gaia does 'cause she brings mail to all of it! So if we need a place to hide out—"

"Spike?" Gaia was blinking as if she'd just noticed him. "Hide? What...what's going on?"

Opening his mouth but completely unsure what he was going to say, he was saved by Hoedown giving a groan. "C'mon, Gaia! All we need's someplace new where Spike to fold up in for an hour or two!"

Gaia tapped her beak. "Well, Dolores and her crew just finished the cellar at the East Ponyville branch of the library. They haven't installed the boiler yet, so that oughtta be plenty big enough to—"

"You're the best, Gaia!" Hoedown reared back, and everything around Spike went as white as a sudden snowbank.

Before he could even blink, darkness crashed over him. Something flat and solid smacked against his chest, and the return of gravity told him he was now lying sprawled across a hard surface. He managed a blink, maybe two, but then ahead of him, a little orange light like a candle flame poofed up, hovering at the tip of Hoedown's horn, Gaia beside her with her crest feathers flat against her head. "Oh, yeah," Hoedown said, looking around. "Nice and roomy."

For the length of another blink, Spike considered mentioning the several teleportation safety lectures he'd heard Twilight give her, but he finally decided to say instead, "You've been hanging out with Discord, haven't you?"

"Hey, now." She shook a yellow hoof at him. "If you're gonna talk nasty about Pop-pop—"

"No, no." Slowly sitting up, Spike squinted through the darkness to see a fairly spacious area around him, a few windows along the tops of the walls, a ramp across the way leading up to what looked the big sliding doors of a loading dock, and a regular, pony-sized door not far from where the three of them were sitting. "Just wondering where I should send the 'thank you' card since I didn't end up with a gullet full of gravel." He nodded to Gaia. "You okay?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "This better be a good story I'm about to get: that's all I've got to say."

"Me, too." Hoedown gave a crisp nod, the shadows cast by her horn dancing along the wall, then leaned forward. "So tell us everything."

Spike took a long, slow breath, not sure where to start—or if he even really wanted to start—but a rattling at the smaller of the big room's two doors made him look over. It creaked open just enough for a pony's head to peer around it, and Spike wasn't entirely surprised to see that it was Cinnamon Teal: he ran this branch of the library, after all. "Hello?" Teal called, his glasses reflecting the glow from Hoedown's horn. "Is somepony there?"

"Just us, Goggles." A greenish tinge came over Hoedown's light, and the whole cellar took on the air of certain fern-encrusted grottoes Spike had visited over the decades along the coast south of Vanhoover.

"What?" Teal stared, one wing pressed to his chest. "Spike? Gaia? Hoedown? How did you—?" Closing his eyes, he shook his head. "Wait. I withdraw the question. The words 'how' and 'Hoedown' should never be placed in close proximity."

Gaia puffed a breath. "Tell me about it." She beckoned with a claw. "C'mon in and close the door. Something's got Spike scared."

"What?" Teal asked again, and before Spike could object, he'd trotted in, one hind leg tapping the door to swing it shut behind him. "What is it? What can we do? Do you need any—"

"It's not—" Spike waved an arm and winced when his paw smacked the ceiling. "There isn't— You can't—" Forcing his brain to stop whirling, he concentrated on not blowing any fire out when he sighed. "Twilight and Ember think that Smolder and I should start dating."

Silence followed, then, "And what?" Hoedown asked, cocking her head. "They all insist you pay for dinner?"

Tightness started coiling in Spike's chest again, but Teal was turning to glare at the unicorn. "This isn't a joke, Hoedown. Matters of the heart are extremely delicate."

Hoedown blew loudly through her lips. "We're talking about dating here! I mean, c'mon!"

Gaia's crest feathers bristled. "And how many dates have you ever been on?"

With a sniff, Hoedown pointed her snout at the ceiling. "I'm just waiting for the right guy to ask me."

"Really?" Teal looked over the top of his glasses at her. "And who might this 'right guy' be?"

"You, you doofus!" The light from her horn flickering, Hoedown stomped a hoof. "I've had the most massive crush on you since, like, sophomore year! I mean, what'm I s'pposed to do? Summon a giant flaming heart into the sky above Ponyville? But no! You'd just say it wasn't on the weather schedule! You're such a stupid, gorgeous, rock-headed hunk of brain!" Her voice caught, and her eyes went wide. "Wait. That...that all was supposed to be inside my head..."

Spike knew his jaw was hanging open, the other two staring at Hoedown with similar looks on their faces. Teal recovered first. "Hoedown, I—" He stepped forward and pressed a wing to his chest. "I've likewise held you in secret regard from the moment I first beheld you, but I couldn't imagine that a glorious, vivacious creature such as yourself—"

"Goggles!" Hoedown threw herself at him, wrapped her forelegs around his neck, and rammed her lips into his.

"No!" Spike shouted, his inner fire flaring in ways he'd never felt before. "That's not how it works!" He leveled a claw at the two kissing. "That not how any of this ever really works!"

Neither of the ponies seemed to notice, but a breathy little laugh pulled his attention sideways to where Gaia was shrugging, a sort of half-smile pulling at the base of her beak. "Ponies, right?" She rolled her eyes at him. "I swear, the universe has one set of laws for them and a completely different set for the rest of us."

His throat clenching, Spike stared back and forth between her and the other two, now standing with their eyes closed and their foreheads touching. Then he was leaping across the cellar, digging his claws into the loading dock doors, shoving them open, and bursting out into the nearly blinding afternoon. A tiny voice in the back of his head started yammering about proper flight safety procedures, but he didn't even try to stop his wings from pounding the air, lofting him upward with his face stretched into the wind rushing against him, the gale-force gusts not nearly enough to dry the tracks of water flowing along the sides of his head.

How long he flew or even in what direction, he had no idea, but eventually, a sensation started poking at him, the particular swirl over his scales that told him someone about his size was flying alongside. Not sure he wanted to look but knowing that he had to, he blinked the crust from his eyelids and glanced over to see Smolder gliding there.

"Hi," she said.

Everything inside Spike felt like glass about to shatter. Because while Ember embodied the ideal of the female dragon, all fluid strength and dark, glittering majesty, Smolder was shorter, stubbier, broader at the shoulder and with a snout that always seemed ready to curl into a laugh.

Completely perfect, in other words, though Spike wanted to smack himself for thinking it.

She was nodding toward a rocky field below and to their left. "Can we settle down and talk a minute?" she asked, her voice as rough as ever but still so smooth in his ears.

Not trusting himself to speak, he nodded and tipped into a roll, the airflow telling him that she was following. He backwinged to a landing, dust wafting up to tickle his nose, and the scent of it told him where they were: the Pie family's rock farm would be somewhere around the other side of those hills just off to the west.

The lightest possible thump told him Smolder had come down beside him, and the growl behind her words told him she wasn't at all happy. "I asked Ember to keep her stupid snout out of this, but no!" She flailed orange claws at the sky. "She yammers on and on and on about how she's gonna be a different sort of Dragon Lord, and then she goes and pulls a bone-headed stunt like this!"

"You—" He had to swallow before he could go on. "You don't want this date, either? I mean, you're great: you know that, right? But—" You're not her, he stopped himself from saying, an alabaster face with sapphire eyes and amethyst mane drifting as always through his thoughts.

"Yeah." Smolder's eyes lost focus. "When Gallus died, I— I wanted to— It almost—" She shook her head, a sliver of a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. "I don't think the big jerk ever had any idea about, well, anything. But his wife and kids did, and they...they wouldn't let me crawl away. They kept flying in to visit, kept sending me invitations, kept pestering me no matter how much I yelled at 'em, and they kept me—" Her gaze came up and met Spike's. "To this day, they've kept me a part of the family."

"Gallus?" Spike could only blink at her. "I...I never knew."

She shrugged. "You weren't supposed to. So, yeah, I mean,  you're great, too, and, yeah, maybe someday—"

"Exactly!" Reaching out, he grabbed her claws in his, his smile feeling like it stretched clear around his head. "You're right!  You're totally, totally right!"

"Of course I am." Her curling grin always made his heart do a little stutter, and he couldn't help noticing how she wasn't pulling away. "So how 'bout we shine off this whole play thing and head over to the Pies for some rock soup?"

Every one of Spike's spikes went rigid. "The play!" A quick glance at the horizon told him it was still a couple hours till sundown, so if they left now at top speed, they could reach Ponyville just in time to— Taking a breath, he focused on Smolder again. "I promised Vern I'd be there, and, well, part of the family, right?"

"Don't gotta tell me twice." She spread her wings. "So. Race you back to town?"

He started to snort and tell her she must be crazy, but she was already exploding upward, dust and gravel spraying into his face, her raspy laughter tickling his ears.

"Hey!" he shouted and took off after her.
> Epilogue - Vern
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sure, Vern had almost forgotten his first line with Spike and Smolder and Ember all there peering in from the back of the theater where Dolores had folded the roof open, but as soon as Petunia had given him his cue, everything had just clicked right into place. The audience had laughed when they were supposed to, had gasped when they were supposed to, had gone absolutely silent when they were supposed to, and the applause and whistles and hoots at the end had made Vern feel like he was hovering even with his claws firmly on the stage.

So the play went great. But the party afterwards in the castle courtyard went even better. Though Hoedown and Cinnamon Teal were acting a little weird, spending the whole party together, kind of giggling and poking each other and Hoedown not smacking Teal in the face when he lay a wing across her back. "What's that all about?" he finally asked Gaia and Dolores the one time he met them both at the punch bowl.

Gaia just rolled her eyes and said, "It's about ponies being ponies."

Dolores shook her head. "It's about freaking time is what it is."

Neither of which really answered Vern's question, but then he didn't have a lot of time to wonder. Everycreature at the party wanted to take his picture, it seemed like, so Vern had to keep scurrying all over the gardens to pose with the cast, with Twilight and the other princesses, with Mira and the rest of their friends, with Spike and Smolder and Ember.

Those three were acting kind of weird, too, Vern thought, Spike and Smolder's smiles tighter than usual when they were with Ember but looser than usual when it was just the two of them. Or something. Spike and Smolder hung around each other most of the night, though, and Spike seemed a lot less grouchy than he had the past couple weeks. So that was good. Smolder needed to come visit more often, anyway. It was always like a holiday when she stopped by.

Things started blurring a little about then, the food and the music and the laughing and all the comments about what a great job he'd done especially from Spike and Cadance and Twilight since they'd actually been there and done all that stuff in real life, and Vern couldn't help remembering that he still had another performance tomorrow night and a third the afternoon after that with three more next weekend, all sold-out houses, Dusty had said. Scarfing down crunchy little garnets, he found it harder and harder to hide his yawns till Mira was tapping him on the shoulder and saying, "Time for bed, Wyvern."

"But...the party," he managed to say before a yawn broke through and took over his snout for what felt like half a minute. By then, Mira's magic had floated him to his usual spot on her back, and he settled in with a sigh. "Getting too big for this..." he mumbled.

"Never," he heard her whisper, then they were moving toward the castle, Vern blinking and waving to those folks who were saying good night to him.

The dark and the quiet folded over them when Mira carried him inside, and he snuggled into her mane. "Mira?" he called with another yawn. "D'you think we'll ever go on big adventures like Spike and Twilight and all their friends?"

Her gentle rocking steps soothed him, and her answer when it finally came, well, he wasn't quite sure if he heard it or dreamed it. "You never know about adventure," her quiet voice said, softness cushioning up under his back and warmth spreading over his chest. "But I know if our friends are with us, anything's possible."

"Yeah." Vern sighed, nestled against his pillow, and let himself relax.
> Grouchisaurus Rex (Original Version)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The silence of the castle woke her before dawn. Half annoyed that she was being foolish and half alarmed at the lack of those long, slow, gentle snores that made the place sound like a river ran through it every night, she crept downstairs to take a look.

His cavernous room lay dark and cold and empty, three things it never was normally. Not even the gold and jewels of his hoard seemed to glitter in the light of her horn.

Refusing to panic, she stopped by the seneschal's office to leave several layers of instructions with a bleary-eyed Golden Voice: what to do if she wasn't back by daybreak; what to do if she wasn't back by eight AM; what to do if she wasn't back by ten AM. She then run back upstairs, slung on her saddlebags, and took off into the darkness. He couldn't have gotten far, and he wouldn't have, either.

She started with his favorite spots around town and in the forest nearby. Not finding him in any of them, she left hastily written notes for those friends of theirs who also frequented those places and moved on.

On and on and on she searched, flying in a widening spiral centered on Ponyville, but even with the sun fully up and all her senses magically enhanced, she still almost missed him. The purple expanse of his scales and his big green spine ridges mixed so well with the early morning shadows of the meadow beneath her, it was only when she heard that familiar rumble of him sighing that she stopped and doubled back.

Relief flooded her, but she'd known he had to be around here somewhere. With all the decades that had passed since she'd hatched him, she liked to think she knew him pretty well by now.

Except she hadn't expected him to disappear, had she? And hovering in the blue autumn sky above the long, shade-dappled stretch of him, just visible here and there between the tree branches, she had to admit that his grouchiness lately had taken her by surprise, too...

An old tree stump squatted in the grass near where the rumbling sigh had come from. Twilight folded her wings, settled herself down onto the stump, and looked up at his sleeping face. "Spike?" she asked gently.

Stretched out, he wound away into the woods, his head bigger than her whole body. But he still grimaced when he didn't want to wake up, the spines twitching all along his neck. "Not today," he said, his voice always his voice no matter how deep it got.

The breath that washed over her had a slightly sour tinge, but it was the words that made her blink. "You're not Spike today?"

"I'm not waking up today." His eyelids pulled apart just enough for her to see twin reflections of her confused expression in his shiny, black pupils. "So thanks for stopping by, Twi. I'll be home next week. You can show yourself out, right?"

"I see." She rubbed her chin. "So instead of Spike, today you're the fabled Grouchisaurus rex."

His eyes came more fully open. "The what?"

Twilight put one front hoof to her chest, waved the other at the sky, and declared in her best movie announcer voice, "A legendary beast who once roamed the forests and swamps of ancient Equestria!" Flaring her horn, she conjured up an image of a big, purple-and-green dragon tromping over some appropriately primeval landscape. "Snarling and growling at all who crossed his path, he struck terror into the hearts of those ponies who only wanted to know what the hay he thought he was doing lying around being grouchy all day!" She grinned.

He didn't grin back.

"Hence the name Grouchisaurus." Twilight found herself going on even though she was pretty sure the joke had fallen flat. "Because he was being all, y'know, grouchy..." She let her tableau vanish with a pop.

"Grouchy," Spike said, his mouth barely moving, and silence settled over them. Sitting with her grin frozen in place, Twilight tried to think of a clever way to ask what was bothering him, but he spoke again before she could come up with one. "Sounds like that must be the word on your calendar for today."

Her awkward grin became an actual smile. "Spike, I haven't used one of those since I was in school."

"Huh." He shifted his head, his forelimbs sliding him forward a bit. "Well, here's your word for tomorrow, Twi: 'bicentennial.'"

Quickly, Twilight started running through her mental list of anniversaries. It wasn't two hundred years since his hatchday: they'd thrown that party nearly a decade ago. It wasn't two hundred years since the Summer Sun Celebration that had brought the two of them to Ponyville for the first time: they'd done that particular anniversary up in style just last year with Celestia and Luna and Cadance and a giant crowd spilling out of Ponyville's town square.

Nothing specifically bicentennial came to her with regard to tomorrow, but she was fairly sure she could guess the general outline. "Something to do with her?" she asked, not even trying to keep her voice from cracking.

Spike nodded, the grass rustling against his chin scales, and more rustling brought one arm reaching out from the tree shadows. Something shone between the stalactite claws of his thumb and forefinger, and Twilight found herself looking at a lovely aquamarine gem about the size of her hoof. "Two hundred years ago tomorrow was the day we first ran across the Diamond Dogs." Even his whispers made the air shiver around her. "The day she gave me this."

She couldn't hug him anymore, not the way she'd once been able to. But she touched both front hooves to his nose, let a warm stream of magic shiver out from them, let it circle to close at the back of his neck, and let it tighten so he'd be able to feel it.

He closed his eyes, leaned forward, and gently touched his bedspread-sized forehead to the tip of her horn.

"Twilight!" a voice shouted, and a cascade of magic crashed over her as cold and hard as a bucket of hurled ice cubes. "Are you here? Did you find—? Whoa!" The sound of somepony thumping against the ground made Twilight's ears wince; she turned to see Hoedown sprawling onto her back in the grass, her bright orange mane and tail spreading out around her like a lava flow. Her head popped up immediately, though, light of the same color playing around her horn. "Elevation! Right! Always forgetting that!"

Hoedown leaped to her hooves, but Twilight still cried out, "Are you okay?"

"Are you kidding?" Hoedown made a rude noise with her lips. "I fall farther than that just getting out of bed in the morning!" She tapped a hoof against the side of her head. "If I told you how many times I've popped back into normal space only to find this melon of mine stuck halfway inside a rock—!"

"Thirty-eight," Spike said. Twilight looked over her shoulder to see him actually grinning, his foreclaws folded under his chin. "Unless you've done another couple since last week."

"Spike!" Hoedown jumped straight up, her horn flaring again. "Hang on!" And she vanished with a clattering crash like a box of silverware falling down a stairwell.

Twilight blinked at the spot of empty air and shook her head. "I need to have another talk with that filly," she said.

"Six," she heard Spike say behind her. Turning to ask him what he meant, she saw him counting down on his claws. "Five, four, three, two—"

The air shattered once more, and six figures tumbled into the grass: four ponies, a griffon, and a donkey. Twilight had to smile. That particular combination told her exactly who the new arrivals were even before the magical tau particles of the spell had shimmered away.

Hoedown was the first to scramble into an upright position. "And that is how I win the teleportation scavenger hunt every year!"

"Excuse me?" Cinnamon Teal pushed himself up next, his wingtips coming around to straighten his glasses. "Might I remind you, Hoedown, of what Princess Twilight has told you several times about attempting to—"

"Attempting?" Hoedown shoved her snout directly into Teal's. "Look around, Goggles! I did it! I mean, we're all here, aren't we?"

With a chirp, Gaia sat up, her talons brushing her crest feathers out of her face. "Gimme a minute, HD; I'm not too sure I'm all here yet."

"I'm sure I'm not," came Dolores's voice, so sweet and clear, it always reminded Twilight of singing even when she was just talking. The big, muscular jenny rose and shook herself, her long ears flapping. "I had a picnic basket full of breakfast I was hauling along for when we found Spike and Twilight."

"Yo." Dusty, on the other hoof, sounded like nothing so much as gravel grinding together. The lanky earth pony untangled his legs to reveal the large wicker basket he'd been wrapped around. "Got it right here."

Dolores gave a squeal. "My hero!" She hopped over to where Dusty was climbing to his hooves and practically knocked him over again with her hug.

"Gracious!" With Dolores out of the way, Twilight could see Mira Belle huddled down in the grass, the little gray unicorn with her usual red scarf knotted around her neck. "Where in Equestria are we?"

That got another snort from Hoedown. "We're, like, two hills away from downtown, Mira! Hardly even outta anypony's backyard!"

Mira's ears fell, and Twilight cleared her throat. "To be more accurate, Mira, we're out in the Everfree Forest about five miles from Ponyville Town Hall."

"Yeah, yeah." Hoedown rolled her eyes.

But Mira sat up straighter. "Five miles?" The words came out with more breathy excitement than Twilight usually heard from her student. "That's farther away from home than I've ever been!"

Teal turned his wrinkled brow toward her. "Forgive me, Mira Belle, but you've been to Canterlot several times with us and even to Manehattan that one time we all accompanied Twilight and Spike—"

"It's not that, Teal." Mira waved a hoof, and Twilight couldn't stop a smile. Not that long ago, Mira Belle would never have dreamed of interrupting another pony. "Those are all cities like Ponyville, so going to those places is just like staying home. But here..." She stood, her gaze moving along the tops of the trees surrounding them. "We're out in the woods. Five miles away out into—" She shivered slightly. "—the unknown."

"Yeah," Hoedown said again, but this time, she didn't sound bored at all. "Isn't it great?"

Gaia gave another chirp. "All this catbird knows is that it's breakfast time." She flapped over to where Dolores was opening the basket. "Got any poppy seed bagels you need help with there, Lori?"

The others quickly moved over to help as well. Twilight joined them, and Dolores gave her the red-and-white checkered tablecloth to spread out on the grass. She was just starting to unfold it with her magic when a shadow fell over her, and she looked up to see Spike. He held out a claw. "I'll take this end; you take that end."

It was the best breakfast Twilight had eaten in quite a long time: Dolores had even packed a bag of quartz crystals for Spike. The talk and the laughter rolled all around the little meadow, and she watched Spike's grouchiness melt away under the warmth of the kids' high spirits.

Except they weren't kids anymore, were they? Dolores pretty much ran her family's construction business, and Cinnamon Teal was now the regular evening librarian at the newly-grown South Ponyville Library. Gaia had made herself indispensible over at the post office; the shows Dusty choreographed and danced in at the Ponyville Community Theater brought ponies to town from all over Equestria; and Mira Belle continued to develop into the most thoughtful student Twilight had taught in decades. And while Hoedown was, of course, Hoedown, she wasn't much more of a loose cannon than a lot of other ponies Twilight had known over the years. She would find something she could devote her talents to eventually.

Several sighs pulled Twilight out of her thoughts. Gaia was folding up all the various papers and cloths that had wrapped the food and was tucking them expertly back into the basket, and Dolores was getting to her hooves. "I may be the boss," she said, "but that doesn't mean I can skip going to work." She nodded to Hoedown. "You zapping us back to town, HD?"

Hoedown noisily sucked the last drops through the straw in the juice box she was holding and tossed it to Gaia. "You know it!"

Gaia caught it, squished it, and looked around. "We forget anything?"

A clearing of throat like a minor thunderstorm drew Twilight's attention—and everyone else's as well—to Spike, lying on his belly so that his tail snaked back into the trees. With a grin, he poked a claw at the blanket most of them were still sitting on. "I can carry it back to town if you haven't got room there, Gaia."

Tapping her beak, Gaia glanced back and forth between the basket and the blanket. "Fold it good, and I'll make it fit."

All of them stood, and Spike folded the thing into almost a perfect cube, something Teal and Twilight both laughingly declared was impossible even as the dragon did it. Gaia then managed to squeeze it into the basket, and Dolores, hoisting the thing in her teeth, tossed it to balance perfectly across her broad back. "Once again," she declared in her musical soprano, "we've managed to overcome science, magic, and good sense all in the same morning!"

Dusty gave a whistle. "I'm telling you, Lori, you're amazing! You've gotta let me put you in wunna my shows!"

Dolores blushed all the way out to the tips of her ears, and a tiny crackling fireworks display shot from Hoedown's horn. "Whoo-hoo!" she shouted. "And we all lived happily ever after!" The fireworks changed to a display that looked a lot more like a volcano going off. "Now! Back to town!" She waved a hoof from Twilight to Spike and back again. "You two coming?"

Twilight pretended to consider it. "Well, the last time I went teleporting with you, the stripes in my mane switched places."

Mira Belle giggled, and Hoedown rolled her eyes. "Fine! Spike?"

Spike had risen back to sit on his haunches, the spiny ridges on his head reaching higher than the first row of tree branches. "Seriously?" he rumbled, folding his arms across his chest.

Looking up at him, Hoedown actually went a little pale, the first time Twilight could recall seeing that. "Yeah, might be better I catch you next time," she said. Sparks blossomed from her horn. "Everybody else ready? 'Cause here we go!" The sparks swirled in a tornado through the meadow, and when they cleared away, Twilight was alone with Spike.

She let the silence drift down for a moment before asking, "Feel better?"

He nodded. "We have such great friends," he murmured, his eyes unfocused. "Some of them are gone, sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't our friends anymore. And the ones who are here, every moment we're with them is the best gift we're ever gonna get." He blinked at her, and a smile curled sideways over his snout. "I'm sorry: I should've put a 'Dear Princess Twilight' in front of that, huh?"

"Quiet, you." She unfurled her wings and sprang up to hover in front of him. "As I think somepony may have said once or twice in my hearing, 'friendship is magic.'" She spread her front hooves. "But more than that, it's everywhere and in everything if you let it be."

The next sound he made sounded suspiciously like a sniffle, but before she could ask him teasingly about it, he was catching her in his arms and pulling her into a hug. And while it wasn't like the hugs they used to share, it was most definitely a hug, and Twilight found herself feeling a little sniffly too all of a sudden.

More silence drifted over them, then he said, "Can the fabled Grouchisaurus rex give you a ride back into town?"

Giggling, she slipped from his embrace and flapped up to flop over the top of his head. "I'll be the envy of the paleontology society!" 

She heard him sigh, but it wasn't one of his grouchy ones. And the two of them started together into the woods.