Summer Days and Evening Flames Interlude - Chapter Eight

Interlude: Summer Nights -->

Chapter Eight -->

INTERLUDE - SUMMER NIGHTS

Someone was knocking at my front door, but I didn’t want to wake up. Sleep came so rarely to me ever since I lost him, and dreams were the only times that we could still be together. The knocking came again, so I forced my eyes open with regret. Some other night, Malt.

I got up from my sofa and walked over to the door. I fought with my mane in the hallway mirror for a moment before I realized that it was an exercise in futility. Instead, I grabbed a rubber band and tied it up in a bun to keep the hair out of my face.

I opened the door, and none other than Captain Iron Bulwark was on my front doorstep. He was dressed in his full regalia, too, which, based on how late it was, immediately made me think that something terrible had happened.

It wouldn’t be the first time that someone wearing that armor had come to my door with bad news.

“Hi, Sherry. Did I wake you?” he asked benignly. It was a loaded question, though; either he had woken me up and we were going to talk about my insomnia again, or he hadn’t and he was going to feel guilty for the duration of his visit.

I didn’t know how long he intended on staying, so I figured I’d do the friendly thing. “Maybe,” I said, trying not to sound overly tired. “Maybe not. A better question is: What are you doing up at this hour?”

He didn’t waste any time beating around the bush. “One of Harmon’s men woke me up; apparently, Gilda and Lieutenant Starfall were dueling in the market square.”

That news parted the clouds of grogginess in my head. Starfall didn’t really make it a secret that he hated my newest officer, and she... well, for all of her cultural differences, she at least knew better than to speak ill of her superiors behind their backs.

Still, putting aside all political ramifications, that would have been a sight to see. Starfall had been itching for a fight with the entire griffin race for a good decade, and that was a mean species to be fighting with in the first place. “And you didn’t come get me?” I asked, jokingly. “Hell, we could’ve sold tickets.”

The humor was lost on Iron, though; his only response was a glare. I stepped back from the doorway to let him in, saying, “Okay, okay, come in, then, before all the bugs do.”

He came into my house and closed the door behind him. As I led him into the living room, I was grateful that the only thing on my coffee table was the novel I had been reading before I fell asleep. That night, at least, the gin was still locked away in its cabinet.

He sat down on his usual spot on the sofa, but I continued on into the kitchen to make myself a drink. “Would you like some tea, Iron?” I offered.

He mulled it over and nodded, seemingly in spite of himself. “That would be great, actually.”

I filled the kettle and put it on the stove. I opened the divider over the counter between the living room and kitchen so that I could talk while I waited for the water to boil. “So... what ended up happening?” I asked.

He held out a hoof in front of him as if he were reading things off a large list. “From the looks of it, she broke both of his wings. I don’t know how long until he’s going to be well enough to return to duty, but I put him on ‘indefinite suspension’ anyway. It should give me time to figure out what I’m going to do about him breaking the law so severely while he was on duty.” After a quiet moment of confusion, he added, “As for Gilda... she wasn’t wearing her armor, so I’m not sure what to do.”

I raised an eyebrow at his indecision. “What do you mean? Just treat her like a normal civilian.”

He looked glared at me with a look like I had stated the obvious. “Thanks, Sherry, but it’s a bit trickier than that.”

“How so?” I asked in a somewhat confrontational tone. After his big speech to the parasites at the Farrington Times about intercultural relations, it was somewhat disheartening to hear him giving different treatment to her because she was a griffin.

Before he could answer, though, the tea kettle went off. I busied myself by assembling the tea set for a few minutes, but Iron was silent in the living room. I brought out the tray and set it on the coffee table before sitting next to him.

“Thank you,” he said, picking up his cup to steep the tea bag a few times before setting it back on its saucer. “As for Gilda... I don’t know how to put my personal feelings for her aside for this,” he said with a hint of shame.

I smiled at the captain, and reprimanded myself for not having seen it sooner. They were a good match for each other. I shook his shoulder a little, saying, “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

He looked back at me gratefully before asking, “You don’t mind, then?”

“Well, if you want me to...” I rapped the side of his helmet with a hoof, “Bad Iron! Choose who you have feelings for.”

He chuckled and picked up his tea cup. After a long drink, he smiled warmly and said, “It’s a difficult situation, but it makes me feel better to know you understand.”

I drank a bit of my own tea before answering, “That’s what friends are for.” A puzzled look came over his face, and I figured with all that had happened that night, he was thinking of Starfall, so I added, “Well, friends who don’t let their prejudices cloud their judgment.”

There was sorrow in his voice when he asked, “What about them, though?”

I smiled at him, sadly. “No one’s perfect, Iron. Starfall’s got a lot of hate, but it’s pretty much focused on griffins and his wife. He usually does right by you, at any rate.”

“He doesn’t hate...” Iron began, but he stopped speaking before he nodded, reluctantly. After a sip of tea, he agreed, “Okay, I can see that. But still, what should I do for this particular situation?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “This is exactly why I’ve passed on the promotion every time it’s been offered to me. I’ve got too many friends in the guard; it’s best that I just have my four officers.”

“So, I should resign?” he asked, like an idiot.

I glared back at him. “Don’t make me hurt you, Iron. I’m old enough without having to worry about achy joints tomorrow.” He smiled, but he still looked confused. I added, “For your particular situation, though, I’d talk to Starfall, then to Gilda, and sit them both down and talk it out amongst the three of you. If the lieutenant looks like he can keep his head on straight around her, then go easy on him. If not...” I paused trying to think of what he should do in that case. “Well, if not, you’ve got a difficult decision to make, because they’re not going to be able to both be guards.”

He gave me a harrowed look, saying, “I meant, ‘What should I do about Gilda’s lawbreaking,’ Sherry.” After a moment, he realized that I was right about the overall situation, so he whispered, “Damn it.”

“That might not even come to pass,” I said, trying to put his mind at ease, “but you should be ready for it nonetheless.” I let that advice sink in before I added, “As for Gilda’s punishment... I think we both know why you came to visit me tonight.”

He nodded apologetically, asking, “Would you?”

“Sounds like you’ve got enough on your plate already without having to strain your relationship.” I nodded back at him, “What all did she do?”

The captain told me everything that Gilda had done, including the part where Lieutenant Starfall assaulted her while they were both on duty. That came as a surprise to me, but I figured that Iron had enough on his mind without me reiterating that the lieutenant most likely deserved to be fired over that.

Still, it explained why Gilda looked like she had gotten into a fight when she came to see me that afternoon.

When Iron finished, I shook my head in disbelief. “You know, I don’t think we can fault her for doing things halfway. When she breaks the law, she breaks the law.” Iron looked back at me expectantly, so I thought about it quickly. She probably deserved at least a few days in prison, at least, for the duel. I didn’t want to believe that she would just threaten a guard like that, either. Something felt out of place, at least.

I sighed, and figured that the best thing to do would be to hear her side of things, but that would have to wait until tomorrow.

After I left Iron at the northern gate, instead of heading for home, I flew northwest towards the Everfree Forest.

The forest itself was huge, in that its northern boundary was at my tribe’s ridge, but it continued farther south than Ponyville, and even the Equestrian capital city, Canterlot -- a distance of at least two thousand miles. Farrington Mountain was part of a ridge that penned it in in the northeast, but that was a tentative holding at best; at the southern end of the mountain ridge, the forest engulfed it and began growing on both sides. For the time being, that growth ended near a lake that was about ten miles south of Farrington, but from the sheer number of ponds and streams that were located within its boundaries, I didn’t think that a lake would stop it for too long.

At any rate, I had a fairly deep stab wound in my shoulder, and I needed something more substantial than a spit-scab to treat it. The record-keeper had taught me all about the wonders of griffin spit after I kept showing up to her cave covered in cuts and scrapes.  Apparently, our self-healing was common knowledge that my father withheld from me, but the record-keeper didn’t want me getting blood everywhere.

She also told me a bit more about Lebenwedel, including its growing patterns and how it worked. Alone, the plant was worthless, but when it was combined with our saliva, it held wounds together and actually drove the flesh to grow back together.

The growth that it caused made it deadly for us to eat, though. I wasn’t curious enough to ask how she knew, but she told me horror stories about griffins’ throats and stomachs closing up because they thought it was a good idea to eat it with every meal.

At any rate, I had only ever seen Lebenwedel once in the eastern expanse of the forest near my cave, but I couldn’t remember where exactly it had been. I wasn’t stupid enough to trespass within my tribe’s borders, where the frond was more plentiful, but I figured if I were starting with a blank slate, my odds would be better to find it up north than to the east.

I remembered that the plant liked to grow around running water, so I landed near a stream. As I crouched to soften my landing, I felt tearing in my shoulder and hand as both of my wounds reopened. I spat in them again. When they stopped bleeding, I began walking west along the stream to look for Lebenwedel.

It was awkward to walk on three limbs at first; I was holding Starfall’s knife in my good hand and walking on its knuckles. Eventually, walking like that became too cumbersome, so I checked my surroundings and sat down by the stream for a moment.

I pulled his knife out of its sheath and ran it underwater to rinse my blood off the blade. When it was clean, I brought it up to my face to take a better look at it. I wasn’t a judge of knife craftsmanship, but I figured that it was reasonably well-made. Near the handle, there was a bit of engraving: a heart that contained the letters ‘S’ and ‘C’.

Sighing, I put the knife back in its sheath. Sure, he had cheated by throwing the sheath at me to distract me during the opening moments of our fight, but by the engraving, I figured that it held sentimental value to him. It didn’t feel right to keep it as a trophy anymore.

When I started walking again, I held the knife in my damaged right hand. Moving was much easier, even though I would have preferred to have all four of my limbs free. I followed the stream for at least ten minutes, all the while looking for the distinctive shape of the Lebenwedel’s leaves. I knew the shape fairly well from all of my childhood experiences with it, so my mind was free to wander to what was really bothering me about that whole night: Iron’s reaction to everything.

I blinked back tears when I remembered how upset he had been with me over what I had done. No, I thought, ‘upset’ isn’t the right word. He had been disappointed with me, which was worse. I had known that he wouldn’t have approved of the fight, but I went through with it anyway. I tried to keep him out of the whole affair, but that ended up blowing up in my face.

When was I going to learn to just be honest with the individuals that cared about me?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my reasons for fighting Starfall had been completely for my benefit. I had wanted revenge for all the times he had insulted or disrespected me. I always knew that I was a good liar, but I never thought that I could lie to myself so easily.

As I walked upstream, I alternated my thoughts between self-derision and thinking of what I was going to say to Iron the next morning. After about ten minutes, I saw a familiar plant, and smiled in spite of my mood. Judging by the depth of both wounds, I’d probably have scars on my hand and shoulder after everything was said and done, but I was glad to be able to treat my wounds nonetheless.

I cut off a few leaves of the Lebenwedel with Starfall’s knife and put them in my mouth, chewing. The resulting sludge in my mouth was bitter, but it left a warm sensation on the inside of my beak. I ripped the scabs off my hand and spat some of the dark-green goop on both sides of the wound. It seeped into the hole, so I squeezed my hand to close it. I almost screamed out at the pain, but I kept my beak shut still: I had another wound to go, still, and I didn’t want to waste any of the Lebenwedel I already used.

After counting to five hundred, I wiped my hand clean and clenched it a few times. The fist I made felt tender and loose, but when the skin on the back of my hand stretched, the wound stayed closed. Now it’s just a matter of peeing on my hand for the next few days, I thought blithely. Fun times.

I ripped the scab off my shoulder and spat the rest of the poultice into it. As I held the now-stinging wound closed, I thought about the various acrobatics necessary to keep that wound clean. After I figured that I just wasn’t that flexible, I shook my head, chuckling. There was probably a pony ointment that kept wounds sterile. Barring that, I could just double-up on bathing; the important thing was to keep the wound clean until the skin grew back over the top.

I rolled my arm around in its socket and noticed that it ached considerably less than it had. With my first aid completed, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of exhaustion. The moonlight was strong enough for me to find my cave by, I thought, so I set off for home. I’d probably get there in time to be able to get all of three hours of sleep, but with everything else that had happened that night, that sounded luxurious.

As I flew towards my cave, I wondered what was in store for me in a few hours when I showed up for my shift.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to send your girlfriend to jail,” Sherry told me. It sounded strange to have Gilda referred to as that, but then again, apart from our genders, there was very little about our relationship that was conventional. My friend continued her verdict, “I am going to wait until I see her tomorrow before making my call, though. I want to hear her side of things.”

I nodded and replied, “That’s fair enough.” It was the fair way to settle things outside of court, after all, and it had completely evaded my mind. I knew that a relationship would blur the lines of my impartiality, but I had no idea how bad it would actually be. I didn’t think I could convey how thankful I was, but I tried to put all of my meaning into the words, “Thanks, Sherry.”

She smiled and put down her teacup and responded, “Like I said, that’s what friends are for.” After a short pause, she added, “Now, what’s your next course of action for tonight?”

I didn’t know whether she was testing me or trying to get rid of me, but either way, I figured it was time to get going. “I don’t think I’m going to get to sleep yet, so I guess I’ll go track down Starfall and see how he’s doing.”

Sherry raised an eyebrow at me, “You don’t know where he went?”

I sighed as the shame over my actions came over me, “I basically told him that I didn’t care where he went, just that he left. He’s probably at the hospital, but he might have gone home first to let his wife know.”

Even as I said the words, the realization struck that there was no way that he would have gone home to tell his wife what had happened. Sherry read my mind, or at least the expression I wore. “You should go tell Comet,” she told me somewhat firmly.

There was no arguing that point with Sherry; at the very least, she had firsthand experience with the issue of having a husband being injured in the line of duty. I felt tears form when I realized how glad I was that Gilda had only broken his wings; I didn’t think that I could bear to break that news, not to Comet. When I thought about his two children and how I would have had a substantial role in his death that night, a few tears leaked out of my eyes. “She could have killed him,” I whispered, trying to keep from sobbing.

She was smaller than me and with my armor, probably half my weight, but Sherry still managed to pull me over into a tight hug. I returned it. She patted me on the back a few times before saying, “Come on now. She didn’t, and you know she wouldn’t if she had the chance.”

After a few minutes, I regained my composure. I broke out of our embrace and wiped my eyes, saying, “I know she wouldn’t. This whole situation is convoluted, and it feels like everything I try to do to make it better backfires.”

Sherry didn’t say anything at first, but finally, she grinned at me. “With any luck, the worst is behind you now. So buck up, the end is in sight!”

I got up from the sofa, somewhat energized by her words. I needed to go tell Comet what had happened that night. “Thank you, Sherry,” I repeated myself for what felt like the tenth time.

She stood up and walked over to her front hallway. “Anytime, Iron. Maybe not so late next time, though?”

I chuckled, but was overcome by a wave of guilt. I had woken her up, after all. She hadn’t slept well for the past five years, not after Lieutenant Spade died. I tried to hide my guilt as I replied, “I’ll do my best. Good night, Sherry.”

She opened the door for me and nodded. “Good night, Iron.”

I left Sherry’s house, and I was alone again. However, my mind was much more peaceful than it had been when I arrived, and I had a new purpose, so I wasn’t too concerned about being on my own. The hospital was more-or-less along the way to my friend’s house, so I figured that before I ruined Comet’s night, I should at least make certain that her husband had even made that far. I set off for it in a brisk trot.

Farrington General was the largest non-industrial building in the city in that it took up an entire city block. It was located in the northwest part of Farrington, so it took  me almost ten minutes to reach the premises. As I got nearer, I distinctly noted a trail of black hoofprints on the ground, and a newfound guilt washed over me: I should have made more effort to ensure that he even got to the hospital instead of just blowing up at him.

I passed through the double-doors into the lobby, and a janitor was finishing mopping the center of the floor. The water stank of bleach, and his mop was stained a disturbing color of pink. “Excuse me,” I got his attention.

He turned to me, seemingly glad to have a distraction from his duties. “Oh, Captain Bulwark! One of your men just collapsed in here, not forty minutes ago. Made a mess on the floor, too; blood everywhere. That stuff’s not easy to mop up, you know?”

Then get a better job, I almost snapped at him. Instead, I just confirmed, “It was Lieutenant Starfall, right?”

“I didn’t catch his name, but he was a lieutenant. His wings were busted and he was stabbed in the foreleg pretty bad.”

“Where is he now?” I asked.

The janitor looked at me cluelessly before he turned to face the information desk and yelled, “HEY, CARD!”

An annoyed-looking filly passed through the double doors. “This is a hospital! What is wrong with you?” she snapped.

He gestured to me. “Captain Bulwark here’s looking for that other guard.”

She looked around him to meet my eyes. “They took the lieutenant to the Trauma wing. I don’t know anything else.”

I thanked her, turned around, and left the hospital. Now that I knew just how bad off Starfall was, I was overcome with gratitude for Sherry’s advice. I set out for Starfall and Comet’s house. They didn’t live too far from the inside of the northern wall, so it was a matter of minutes before I was in the street outside their home. I let myself through their gate and walked up to their front door. I took a deep breath before I knocked loudly, hoping to wake Comet up if she were asleep.

Within a matter of seconds, she was at the door. She saw it was me, and she let out a small, despairing sound before she covered her eyes with a forehoof.

Probably a bit too quickly, I interjected, “It’s okay, he’s just in the hospital.” That wasn’t the right thing to say, though, and she threw herself at me, crying. She was incredibly light, but I held her for a few minutes, carefully rubbing her back so as not to aggravate her scars.

She composed herself and stepped away from me. “Sorry, Iron,” she said with a tiny sniffle, “it’s just... he’s over two hours late, and I woke up alone, and there wasn’t a note, and I thought...” she dissolved into tears a second time, so I drew her into a hug. She returned it, and we stood there for a few minutes while she let out her sorrows a second time.

Finally, she found her voice and asked, “What happened?”

I had been dreading this part of the visit, but I had to tell her. “He and Gilda got into a fight in the market square. From the looks of it, she put him in pretty bad shape.”

She looked down and shook her head slowly for a few turns before whispering, “Idiot.” A few moments later, she looked up at me and said, “I need to go down there and make sure he’s okay.” She hesitated before asking, “I know it’s late, but can you stay here in case Hailey or Moonshine wakes up? I’ll be back before your shift starts, hopefully.”

I snapped a salute at her, “I can and will, Comet. I don’t think I would be able get to any sleep anyway.”

She went back into the house and I followed her inside. She walked into the kitchen and over to a small table to load up her saddlebags for the trip. When she was done, I stood to the side of the hallway to let her through. On her way out the door, she gave me a peck on the cheek and told me, “The coffee’s in the middle cabinet, help yourself.”

All I could do was nod before she was out the door. I considered calling after her in order to find a guard to escort her to the hospital, but she was in a rush to begin with. Besides, the hospital was close, and they lived in a good neighborhood.

I locked the front door and went into the kitchen to take Comet up on her offer of coffee. It had been a long night, and by the looks of it, it was only the beginning of an even longer day. While the decanter filled, I wondered about her two foals. Part of me hoped they slept through until morning, but at the same time, I wouldn’t mind if they woke up to keep me company, either.

At the very least, I was glad that my own house was empty that night. I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with Maxie waking up and finding me gone; that would be almost as bad as Comet Tail waking up without her husband in the house.

I looked at the clock; it was almost three thirty. I wondered how my sister was doing over in Stalliongrad, but when I really thought about it, I decided that I didn’t want to know.

It was almost two in the morning, and I was beginning to regret my choice for the evening.

I mean, really. I thought all of the ‘romantic’ ones went to bed early. Not Snowflake, or Snowball, or whatever his name was, though. Nope. Three in the morning, we were in his room, alone, and he thought I wanted to hear music.

As I sat on the edge of his bed, I decided that I would give him two more minutes, or five minutes, or... I wanted to get to sleep, dammit! Frustrated, I took a drink straight out of the half-finished handle. I remembered when straight vodka used to burn, and how far away the relative innocence of my youth seemed. I remembered that I wasn’t even twenty yet, and that brought about a sting of sadness, so I took another swig to drown it.

Snowstorm or Blizzard or whatever looked over at me. “Careful. Is maybe stronger drink than you. Go slow.”

Slow, slow, slow, I thought as I threw myself backwards onto his bed. I was tired of waiting. “Are we gonna do thish... or what?” I said, hearing how slow my words sounded.

“Papaki does not lie. You are very direct,” whatever-his-name-was said, almost sounding amused.

“Who the hell ish Pa...ki?” I lifted my head up to look at the white colt in the room with me.

“He is the one you are meeting last week. He wore hat,” he said, pointing at his own head.

“Oh,” I said, vaguely remembering. I looked over at the clock, it was a little past three now. One minute, I decided, but Snowcone finally got his priorities straight and came over to the bed. He climbed on top of me and looked at me like he was going to start talking again, so I grabbed his shoulders and brought myself up into a kiss. It was empty, and I felt myself going through the motions of it, but a bad kiss was better than hearing him yammer on any longer in his stupid accent.

For how long it took us to get to that point, things escalated pretty quickly after that.

Ten minutes after we finished, he was asleep with all four of his hooves wrapped around me. I rubbed my temple against the one under my head. The alcohol, the sex... three years, and I had learned that it was the easiest way to get to this point.

In the beginning, I had tried finding a steady boyfriend or girlfriend, but... that just never worked out. Even though I visited Stalliongrad almost every week, they always wanted to see me more, or for me to come visit on my time off.

That wasn’t going to happen. I hated that stupid city. It snowed year-round. There was something wrong with having to deal with three feet of snow during June. Everything there was cold, even the ponies. Even romantics like Snowblower, who was now breathing into my ear and it sounded like a damn wind storm. I dug an elbow into his chest and he turned his head a little, and things were quiet again.

I couldn’t sleep when I was away from home, not without drinking myself completely stupid or finding some company for the night. It was strictly a matter of economics when I chose the latter route: I got a stipend to pay for lodging, but the places I could afford were usually motels. Crappy, run-down motels. If there was one thing worse than being alone in a crappy city, it was being alone in a crappy motel room, staring at the ceiling, mentally jumping every time I heard a noise...

Besides, it was practically free to find some lonely stranger to pay for my drinks and share his bed. Sure, there were some kooks who wanted weird things like to listen to fucking polka at three in the morning, but I rarely had to spend even a fifth of my lodging allowance in Staliongrad this way. I saved the rest and stayed in a nice hotel, in Hoofington, on the way home.

I hated Stalliongrad, but things were starting to get pretty stupid back home in Farrington, too. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I started having problems sleeping in my own bed, but even now, I knew that it was slowly starting. An hour one night, a nightmare the next... How long? I asked myself with a shudder.

I didn’t want to have to drag any of Stalliongrad back home with me.

Then again, I guess that Farrington already had its fair share of deviant characters. My stupid brother wasn’t doing his job, either, so for the past month, she had been at my post office on a weekly basis, making a mess out of things, wasting my time, flashing herself at me...

I tried being courteous at first, but she didn’t get the hint. I tried being rude, and she still didn’t get the hint. It didn’t help, but she was too dumb to complain to my boss about it, so I at least got to vent whenever she came rolling around looking for her stupid letters.

I mean, who do animals like that even write to?

I shook that stupid griffin from my head and snuggled into Snowdrift’s foreleg. I decided I should just be thankful that I had found someone for the night, and that I could finally get to sleep.

As I drifted off to sleep, I sincerely hoped that I would be the first one awake so that I wouldn’t have to deal with an awkward, clingy morning-after.

I woke up face-down in a pillow that wasn’t mine. I pulled my head back and looked at it; something was obscuring my left eye’s field of vision. I turned to my right and saw that I was in a hospital room, but I didn’t remember going to a hospital.

Everything felt... fuzzy, and padded. I saw a bag of intravenous painkillers hanging from a stand near my bed. I followed the path of the tube that it drained into, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw that it was inserted into my back, right above my shoulder socket.

From my left, I heard Comet’s voice saying, “So, you’re awake.” Startled, I turned to look at her. She was sitting on a cushion next to the wall, and she was glaring at me with a look that made me genuinely grateful that there was probably a doctor nearby.

“Where am I?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I was at Farrington General.

My wife got off the cushion and came over to the bed. “You’re in the hospital now. Don’t you remember? How you stayed out two hours late, making me worried sick? How you got this?”

She accentuated her words by pressing into my left foreleg with her hoof. Pain erupted, and even though it was somewhat hazy and distant, it was enough to make me involuntarily groan. When the pain subsided, I remembered how I had gotten stabbed, and more importantly, who had stabbed me. The rest of the night’s events came rushing back to me: I remembered everything up to where I collapsed in the lobby of the hospital.

Now, my wife was with me, and the sun was rising outside. I looked at the clock; it was a quarter to six. Still, my wife was here, so that meant... “Who’s with the kids?” I asked. Worrying about them sharpened my mind even more than the pain in my forearm.

“Iron,” she said, and I felt anger rising in my chest at that thought. I never figured that he was the type of colt to throw around his authority to impress females, but then again, I’d never seen him date anyone, either. Now, he was watching my children because his fetish had sent me to the hospital.

“And that’s just great,” I muttered, even though I knew on an intellectual level that he wouldn’t hurt them or anything.

I felt the slap before I registered what had happened. “Don’t you dare...” Comet whispered, shaking with frustration. Her voice returned to a normal volume, but she still shook as she continued, “What do you think would have happened last night, if you had lost your petty little fight?”

I glared at her before gesturing towards my back with my head. “Woman, does it look like I won the fight?” As I saw the casts out of the corner of my eye, I noted with disdain that they were hot pink. “Nice color, by the way. I love how you enjoy adding insult to injury.”

“You were like that when I got here, you arrogant... prick!” In spite of myself, I flinched. Comet didn’t swear, or what she counted as swearing, lightly. After she said it, she calmed down a little and shook her head. “What were you thinking?” she asked in an incredulous tone.

I looked at her and realized she wasn’t entirely angry with me; she was mostly scared. I felt guilty when I thought about it; in my fury, I hadn’t really planned much past the ‘kill Gilda or die trying’ part of last night. Moreover, I hadn’t thought of Comet or the kids at all at the end of it, when I should have died. Instead, I was just resentful of having my life spared by a member of a race of murderers.

What had they turned me into? I thought with regret. It was awful, discovering how horrible a father and husband I had become. I scowled when I thought about it all: first my wife’s flight, then my marriage, now those beasts were trying to take the love I felt for my children?

I would kill their entire filthy race before I let that happen.

Reality caught up with me, and I shook my head at the futility of it all. I couldn’t even manage an adolescent female, let alone a fully-grown male. Looking over at my wife, I lamented, “They’ve taken so much from us. Why am I the only one in this city who remembers?”

The rest of her anger subsided; she just looked sad now. She shook her head, saying, “There’s a difference between ‘remembering’ and ‘obsessing’.”

I said nothing in reply; instead, I rested my chin back on the pillow. After a moment, I decided to apologize. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for making you worry.”

She stroked my mane with a hoof, “That’s the least of our problems right now, but okay.” The words carried a bit of weight with them, but I still wasn’t coherent enough for it to register.

Eventually, Comet put her hoof down and backed away from me. “I need to head back home. Try to get some rest, and I’ll bring the kids by--”

“No,” I almost shouted, but I didn’t move my head to look at my wife. “I don’t want them to see me like this.” Even as the proud words left my mouth, the truth in them stung me: not only was I in a somewhat embarrassing, prone position, but I didn’t want them to see how badly I had been hurt, either.

I couldn’t see my wife’s expression, but I knew the face she made when she spoke in her self-righteous tone, “Well, then, wallow in self-pity by yourself. I’ll come by if I get a chance, but I can’t make any promises until Iron gets off his shift.”

I shut my eyes, and noted that the sun was making it too bright for me to sleep. I didn’t want to give Comet the satisfaction, though, so I waited for her to leave before I called a nurse in to shut the blinds.

In the darkness, I lay there, hating everything about my situation. After a while, though, the activities of the prior night caught up with me. Combined with the drugs, my weariness dragged me away into an uneasy slumber.

END SUMMER NIGHTS

Chapter Eight -->

CHAPTER EIGHT

Shrill ringing broke through my hazy sleep, and I began Wednesday with a splitting headache that was wrapped in a veil of exhaustion. I tried opening my eyes, but I was too tired to keep them open for more than a few seconds. I let loose a stream of the best swears from two languages as I blindly stumbled over to turn my clock off. When things were quiet again, my head was still throbbing, but the pain slightly dulled.

Without opening my eyes, I walked over to the entrance of my cave where I kept my armor in a pile. My right hand stung with every step I took, and I remembered why I was exhausted in the first place. After my duel with Starfall, I had gone more than an hour out of my way to find some Lebenwedel. That meant that I had ended up in the expanse of the Everfree Forest to the northwest of Farrington, on the other side of the mountain range it was set into.

The moon had been exceptionally bright that night, but I had flown home on the other side of the mountains than what I was used to, so I ended up losing a good hour when I overshot my cave and wound up completely lost. The glowing dot on the hour hand of my clock confirmed that it had been right around five o’ clock when I finally collapsed on my blanket.

Barely two and a half hours later, I felt as if I had somehow gone backwards in the amount that I had slept. As I began donning my armor by feel, rather than sight, I realized just how horrible the upcoming day was going to be. Not only was there going to be more fallout from my duel with Starfall, but I was going to be miserable from a lack of sleep.

I wanted to voice my resolve to never get so little sleep in a night again, but all I could manage was to croak, “Never again.” Speaking made me notice how dry my mouth and throat were, and as focus shifted from my pounding headache, I also became aware of the gnawing hunger in my stomach. I took my chestplate back off; I needed breakfast, but I didn’t want to have to clean fish ichor off my armor when I was done.

It would literally be suicide to dive at the ground with my eyes closed; that train of thought was the only way that I could finally open my eyes for the day. The sky outside my cave was bright and my vision was blurry, but I managed to keep my eyes open.

I leaped from my outcropping and glided down to the pond that wasn’t too far from my cave. I lucked out with an easy meal, at least: there was a suicidal fish idling near the surface, so I didn’t even need to get my elbow wet when I grabbed it out of the water. When I finished eating, I dunked my head underwater, both to wake myself up properly and to get a drink.

I took care of some other morning rituals of mine before heading back up to my cave. By the time I was back on my landing, I felt tentatively coherent, so I got my armor on and took off towards Farrington. The more I thought about the consequences that lay ahead for me, the more I dreaded having to face them. Still, I hadn’t been fired, so I had a job to do.

I fell asleep twice during the flight; luckily, each time I did, I was kicked awake by an abrupt falling sensation. I gave myself more altitude after each time it happened, too: more height was dangerous in a fall, but at my speeds, even grazing a treetop could cause me to roll into a deadly crash.

The thought of my impending demise reminded me of my business at the post office from the day before. I had set up a pair of letters to be sent out to a few of my family members if I didn’t show up to stop them. If they were sent out, I would be violating the terms of my Verbannungsprüfung, which would be fatal. So, cancelling those letters was my highest priority.

When I finally reached the lake at the north of the forest south of Farrington, I was glad to be almost done with my morning flight. I was still fairly far out from the city when I noticed that a guard was waiting in front of Iron’s currently-empty guard booth. By the color of the armor, I knew that it wasn’t Iron; silver armor combined with a purple pony meant Sherry. I gave myself a burst of extra speed; she was probably waiting for me.

I landed in front of her, but it took a great force of will to keep myself from swaying in place as I greeted her, “G’morning.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Rough night, officer?”

“Not... yes,” I said, amazed at how coherent I was.

I thought I saw a look of pity cross her face, but if it did, it was quickly replaced by a stern expression. “I’m not going to ask twice. What were you doing in the city last night?”

Her tone was ice, and the words hit me like a slap in the face. If anything, though, the shock brought me out of my fog of exhaustion. At the very least, I became coherent enough to realize that my situation would only get worse if Sherry caught me in a lie. “Lieutenant Starfall challenged me to a duel last night, and...” I couldn’t think of a better way to put it, so just said, “I accepted.”

“At two in the morning,” she accused. “How’d you even manage to get in after we shut the gates?”

“I flew over the wall,” I answered. I thought about adding the part about how the guard up there had given me a hard time about it, but I figured that that didn’t really add anything to my explanation.

“What did Officer Weatherly have to say about that?”

I blanked on the name. “Who?”

Sherry didn’t say anything in reply; she glared at me and pointed a hoof at the top of the wall. I looked up, and the guard up there was peeking over the lip of the wall. He pulled his head back when he saw that I was looking at him, but I had seen enough to know he wasn’t the same guard that had been up there last night.

I knew what Sherry wanted to hear, though, so I told her the story. “He pointed his crossbow at me and asked what I was up to. I told him I was meeting someone,” I paused, bracing myself for embarrassment, “and he called me a whore.” The words almost burned as I said them, but when they were out, I felt slightly better. Whatever relief I felt was short-lived, though, when I remembered what came next: “I... threatened to rip his throat out for that.”

I had a hard time reading Sherry’s reaction to my confession. Finally, she turned her head to the side with a scoff and muttered something. I only caught the last four words: “always running his mouth.” She frowned back at me before turning her head around to glare at me straight-on. “Weatherly’s an asshole. That does not excuse death threats!” she snapped. “Do you know what the punishment is for threatening a guard like that?”

I didn’t think it would be wise to say anything, so I didn’t. Sherry continued with her hardened speech, “Part of me wants to put you in prison just for that. Any guard should know better.” She paused to find the right words, finally continuing, “Iron asked me to deal with your punishment, and requested that you didn’t end up behind bars. He’s a good friend of mine, so you lucked out on that front. This time. If this gives you the idea that you have free reign to break the law in this city, though, then you are sorely mistaken.” When she finished her sentence, she was literally snarling.

She regained her composure, but she took a few steps towards me as she started up again, “After today, if you so much as breathe on the law in a way that I don’t like, then I will personally break the news to you that you. Are. Wrong!” Her voice slowly rose in volume while she spoke, so she was shouting right in my face when she punctuated her last few words by repeatedly jabbing me in the chest with her hoof.

She pulled her face back and away from mine before finishing her tirade in a menacing, low voice. “If you think Starfall was something, you should try getting on my bad side. Not even Iron’s going to be able to help you then.”

I tried to say, “I know,” but I was thunderstruck by Sherry’s rant. Instead, I just nodded slowly.

She frowned as she gave me a single, slow nod in return. “With jail out of the picture, that leaves a fine and community service. It’ll take a bit more paperwork,” she said with a glare, “but you’re going to be doing no less than a few months’ worth of volunteer work, and you’re going to have to pay a fine of at least five hundred bits.” After a short pause, she added, “And, you’re going to have to apologize to Officer Weatherly.”

When I processed what my punishment entailed, I had to stop myself from wincing. I figured that the apology was going to be the easiest part; the volunteer work was going to take up a lot of my time, and the fine was going to take most of my money to pay. I had received my second bag of wages the previous Friday before I spent half of a date stumbling around in conversation with Iron. That weekend, I had counted the bits out as I combined my money bags, so I knew that I was paid four hundred bits every other week.

Presently, I had thirty-seven bits more than that fine, so money was going to be fairly tight for... Ten days, I counted. I was going to have to sell some feathers; otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to eat lunch every day, let alone go on any dates with Iron. That train of thought led to the realization that, all things considered, Iron probably wasn’t be in the mood to go out with me. I had lied to him and mangled his best friend. Hell, I’d be mad at me.

Also, I recognized that, as bad as the punishments were, Sherry was still taking it easy on me. As angry as she was with me, I figured that my best course of action was to respond with a quiet, “Okay. And thanks.”

She nodded as if that was an acceptable response.

Almost immediately after that, Captain Bulwark stepped through the south gate holding a cardboard drink holder in one hoof. His timing made me suspect that he had been standing there, waiting, but I didn’t want to start off our morning by accusing him of eavesdropping. Our eyes met, and he looked at me like he was having trouble deciding what to think of me. I turned my head away in shame.

Sherry looked behind her at the captain, then back to me. “I guess you two have some talking to do before your shift. You’re back in the Residential district today,” she told me. I supposed it was in a neutral tone, but compared to her earlier rage, it almost sounded warm. She turned around and told the captain, “Sir, it’s five ‘til.”

“Thank you, Sherry,” he nodded at her, and I felt like there was more to it than just gratitude for warning him about the time. After she passed through the arch and into the city, he walked over to me and held out the container he was holding. I saw there were two paper cups inside, and he offered, “Coffee?”

I had never actually drunk the beverage before, but I knew what it was for. I took one of the cups, and the captain added, “I also have some sug--” but I had already grabbed mine and was in the process of guzzling it before he could finish his sentence. It was hot, but not enough to burn the inside of my beak or throat. There was a cup obscuring my vision, but I heard the captain’s voice say, “Never mind,” in an amused-sounding tone.

The coffee’s effect was immediate. I wasn’t really awake, but when I finished drinking, my mind felt like a tired ball of mush that had sharper edges around it. Captain Bulwark set the container with his coffee down on the ground and emptied a small envelope of sugar into his drink before he grabbed it in the joint between his hoof and the rest of his forelimb.

After he took a good swig, he brought the cup away from his face and asked, “So, how is your morning going?” The question stank of both evasiveness and coffee.

“There’s no good answer for that, sir,” I replied. I was grateful for the coffee, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew that he had been standing there, hiding while Sherry exploded at me.

He sighed and shook his head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to phrase it like that. What I meant was, did you get back home okay?”

“More or less,” I said, looking down at my armor. He was asking inane questions; I wished that he would just get to the point.

He grunted acknowledgement before asking, “So, Sherry told you what your punishment is?” in a reserved tone.

I had been growing tired of his whimsical attitude about the whole situation, but that was the last straw. I did not like being pandered to, so I put that frustration into my voice as I snapped my head back up to face him. “It’s most of my money and some community service. But I’m sure you already heard. Sir.”

I thought I saw a hurt expression cross his eyes for a split second before he frowned. I was satisfied that I had at least succeeded in shaking him from his pompous demeanor. He responded in a steely voice, “Addressing me as ‘sir’ does not give you free reign to take that tone with me.”

I was feeling bold after my first ‘victory’, so I shot back, “Are you done? Or are there any other subjects you’d like to dance around?”

From the surprised anger that came across his face, I figured that I might as well have punched him in the chin. By the time I realized just what I had said, it was far too late to do anything about it. Once the shock passed, his voice was just cold when he ordered, “Go home. If you feel like acting in a manner befitting a guard on Friday, come back then.”

It was futile, but I tried apologizing, “That just slip--”

“GO!” he thundered, pointing south with the hoof that was holding his coffee.

We were far enough away from each other that he couldn’t hit me, but his voice and hoof still made me shrink back defensively. Adrenaline fueled an angry response, but I got my head together before I did anything drastic in retaliation. Instead, I remembered that I still had business in Farrington that morning. I stood back up to full height and started to walk around the captain. As I did, he turned to me and shouted, “Do I need to tell you again?”

In turn, I snapped my head back to him and yelled back, “If I don’t go to the post office, I’m leaving my armor behind when I leave the city!” I turned back to the city and I didn’t look back at him to see his reaction. Seeing as how he didn’t try to stop me from entering the city again, I figured that I was more or less free to carry out my business.

She walked past me and I let her go. I was shaking with either rage or too much coffee, but either way, I kept myself from escalating the situation. I didn’t want to call Gilda’s bluff over leaving the city permanently. That’s because it wasn’t a bluff, I reminded myself. Knowing that it was true didn’t help my mood any; instead, it just added a new level of frustration.

I had thought that, after how we parted ways last night, we were going to start on reasonably good terms this morning when it came to her punishments. Realizing that they had somehow gotten worse before they got better made me want to groan. I suppressed that urge, though, because I was within earshot of two officers: Gilda was in the street with me, and even without looking up, I knew that Vigil Lance was watching me instead of the road or the treetops of the Everfree to the south.

Instead of lamenting my problems, I turned around and watched Gilda as she walked down the main street. When she got to the intersection the citadel was located, she turned east, but she didn’t even spare me a cursory glance. At that, I felt some of my anger soften. She really was angry at me, and I reminded myself that that was one of the reasons I liked her so much. Even though she rarely told the whole truth, she was one of the most genuine individuals I had ever met when it came to emotions. She doesn’t lie, I scoffed, but she sure as hell picks her truths.

As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I felt that it was unfair of me. I supposed that it was true, but only in the harshest manner possible. Gilda had grown up in one of the worst environments I could think of, and though I didn’t know the extent of her father’s abuse, I could see what a childhood like that would do to someone’s verbal defenses. She had accused me of ‘dancing around the issue’ of her punishment, and realized too late that she would have preferred me to have just been blunt with her. She was out of line, professionally, but from a personal standpoint, I should have at least known better than to try slowly leading into the subject.

I shook my head and sighed quietly at what a mess everything was becoming. My reaction spurred me into action, though, so I began walking to the citadel. Sending an officer home was a punishment that came with repercussions: now that Gilda wasn’t doing her patrol, I’d have to get one of the morning sergeants to cover for her. Despite all the coffee I had drunk over the past seven hours, I felt weary. I drained the last of my current cup, but there was only so much that coffee could do for three hours of sleep in a night. I knew I was beginning to reach that limit.

I entered the citadel, and Sherry was standing in the lobby. It was either my guilty conscience or my rationality, but I knew she was waiting for me. Sure enough, as soon as she caught sight of me, she turned to Memo and asked, “Would you please get us some coffee?”

“Sure, ma’am!” the secretary replied obediently before hurrying through the door into the Guard’s quarters.

Sherry grimaced, or came as close to grimacing as she allowed herself when she was on duty. When we were alone, she turned to me. She raised an eyebrow and commented, “I just saw a very pissed-off griffin heading east, away from the Residential district.” She paused before she asked, “What happened, Iron?”

Even though I had the authority to ignore her question, it wouldn’t get me anywhere to bark orders at another subordinate this morning. Also, Sherry was one of the few ponies in Farrington who could actually give me advice on the problems I was currently experiencing. “Long story short,” I said in an exhausted tone, “she snapped at me, so I sent her home for speaking out of line.”

She looked back at me, shocked. “You... pulled rank on her?” She not-so-subtly added a quick, “Sir?”

I stared back at her and nodded slightly. I didn’t want her to be on edge for the rest of our conversation, so I said, “Point taken. But there are protocols that are part of her job. What would you have me do?”

Sherry’s expression turned sympathetic, and she noted sadly, “You’re bad at this sort of thing, aren’t you?” I recoiled at the abruptness of her accusation, but before I could say anything, she continued, “What I mean is... you haven’t thought it all through yet.” Her voice turned somber and she explained, “When you told me earlier that you two were dating, the only reason I didn’t say anything was because you were literally in the middle of seeking a neutral party to deal with her. Believe me, Iron: you can either be her captain or her lover, but not both.”

I let her advice sink in for a few moments before I asked, “Is that how things worked between you and Lieutenant Spade?”

She closed her eyes and smiled. It was a happy expression, but it gave me the impression that I wasn’t the only pony in the room who was exhausted. “We put that out in the open on our second date.” She opened her eyes, and it looked like she was waking up. Her smile dulled as she continued, “For now, my best advice is to relinquish your authority over her... at least until you two set some boundaries. I mean, you heard earlier, I don’t mind playing tough. But I know for a fact that you’re just going to be adding to her confusion over everything if you keep switching from ‘boss’ to ‘boyfriend’ like you did.”

I nodded at the advice, even though there was a lot of it to comprehend. I wasn’t sure how I felt about giving up authority over a guard, regardless of the reason. It wasn’t that I had any love of power; it was that every time I needed to exercise my authority, it was always smoothest to follow the chain of command. I resigned to think about it later; thanks to my overzealous punishment, I now had two days to come to a resolution before I would see Gilda again.

I thanked Sherry for her offer to play ‘intermediary’ between Gilda and myself, and was about to move on to my next order of business when Memo came back through the door. She was precariously balancing a small platter that held three coffee mugs, and when she got to us, she offered it to us. Both Sherry and I took a cup and thanked her, and Memo put the tray with her coffee on the side of her desk before she sat back down. After she was settled, I turned back to Sherry and took a drink before asking, “Would you mind taking booth duty today? I’m the one who sent Gilda home, so I should pick up the grunt work I left open.”

She nodded, “Yes, sir. Can I take my morning workload in there with me?”

I returned the nod, “Of course.”

Sherry went back into the guard’s quarters to get her morning paperwork. I finished my coffee and thanked Memo again as I put the empty mug back on its tray. As I headed back out into the street to start what was now my morning patrol, I didn’t know whether it was the coffee or Sherry’s advice, but I was filled with an energetic, almost giddy sense of motivation.

I seethed with incoherent anger for the six blocks it took to walk to the post office. When I finally reached the building, the light gray colt was inside.

“Good morning,” he greeted me in the first warm tone I had heard that morning.

“Hi,” I said, almost choking on my rage as I tried to speak neutrally. “I need to cancel all those letters.”

He nodded sadly and went into the back. He brought out a small bin that had the three scrolls and my twelve bits. I took the scrolls and ten of the coins. I pointed to the remaining two, saying, “That’s for the ink and the trouble.”

The postmaster shook his head, but I put the eight coins into my soon-to-be empty bag and left without picking them up. Your move, mail geek, I thought maliciously, but I chastised myself when I realized I was taking out my frustrations on a colt who, above all, was doing his best to help me out.

I stopped in my tracks and clenched an armored fist at the whole situation. It was incredibly unfair that, in discussing a personal issue between us, I had ended up committing insubordination. The more I got to know the captain, the more the line of authority between us was starting to blur. Things had been weird between us from the start, but I enjoyed my time spent with Iron enough to look past most of it. After what had just happened, though, I found myself wondering if it would even be worth it to continue.

I noticed a stinging, wet sensation in my right gauntlet and almost screamed in frustration; the scab on the back of my hand had ripped open. It took every ounce of resolve I had to instead put my hand down on the pavement and start looking for a store that sold medicine. A few blocks from the post office, I finally stumbled across a pharmacy. Inside, I spent the ten bits I had gotten back from the postmaster on a small jar of salve and, at the recommendation of the clerk, some bandages.

Outside, I stepped into an alleyway to wrap up my injuries. When I was finished, both of my hands smelled horrible, but there was a hot stinging in my shoulder and hand that let me know the salve was working. I put my gauntlets back on and buckled my chest piece back together. I tried to think about whether there was anything left for me to do in the city. Nothing came to mind, so I decided it was time to leave. I was fairly deep into the Business district at that point, so it was more or less the same distance to the east or the south gate.

I headed east, figuring that it would be the easiest way to leave the city. After I passed through the gate, I took off south for home. Even though I was inconvenienced by the bag of medical supplies I had bought at the pharmacy, Iron’s coffee gave me the coherence I needed to stay awake, so my flight home was much smoother than the arrival trip had been.

It was a blessing that came with a curse, though. When I got back to my cave, I took my armor off and got ready to finish the previous night’s sleep. However, even though my mind was a woozy and incoherent mess, my body was alert and jittery. The end result was that all I could do for a few hours was stare at the wall and reflect on just how miserable it was, not being able to sleep.

It had been almost eight years since I had last walked the beat of an officer, but I still remembered the patrol routes by heart. I supposed that it wasn’t too outstanding of an achievement, seeing as how I had refreshed myself over some of the paths when I trained Gilda three weeks prior. Even then, I hadn’t needed to look at the map to remember the routes before we set out.

As I walked through the streets of the Residential district, several ponies came out of their homes and gardens to greet me. I returned their hospitality in as polite a manner as time would allow, but I rarely broke from my stride. Protocol dictated two laps around one’s patrol every hour, which was by no means a neck-breaking pace, but that morning, I was tired enough where if I stopped walking, it would take a great effort to start walking again. That would cause me to fall behind, so I kept moving as best I could.

Walking in the steps of an officer reminded me of my own path that my life had taken. Captain of the Farrington Guard was a prestigious title, and I was definitely the youngest pony to ever attain it. It was an achievement that I was aware of, but I didn’t take much pride in it: the only promotion I had actually earned had been sergeant, and even then, part of me wondered how objective Lieutenant Spade had been after it was Sherry who recommended me for the promotion.

In terms of my promotion to lieutenant... I had replaced Lieutenant Spade in many ways after he died. Then-Captain Reigner had given me the rank, but I had been good friends with Sherry even before her husband died. After the funeral, I did what I could in order to help her cope with being alone: I bought her groceries, helped her out around the house, and when needed, I was a shoulder for her to cry on.

We grew close, but we were just friends; the time that we got drunk together and she told me that she thought of me “like a son” had killed off even the tiny voice in my brain that wanted more than that. Regardless, after everything was said and done, Sherry was one of my closest friends, and I was one of the few guards that actually knew anything about her personal life.

And, I noted, she’s one of the few guards that knows anything of mine. My promotion to lieutenant had stirred up a reaction paramount to outrage among the other sergeants. Usually, lieutenants and captains were at least a few decades older than I had been, which often led to retirement after a few years. When I was promoted, Starfall and I were both in our early twenties, so we both had potentially long careers before us. I was lucky that the most outspoken of the outraged sergeants was also the most competent among them; when I promoted Horatio to fill my gap instead of one of the younger sergeants, most of the dissension went away. After everything was said and done, I didn’t have many problems with insubordination among the sergeants, but I definitely didn’t have many friends among them, either.

When I came to the subject of ‘friends within the guard’, my mind wandered back to who I had been thinking of for most of the last seven hours: Starfall. The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how severe his misconduct had been. Regardless of his nighttime offenses, he had assaulted a subordinate guard in the middle of a crowded street in broad daylight. It was still too early to tell how many ponies saw it, but once the Farrington Times got its sticky hooves on that story, it would be months until the city heard the end of it.

I had several options available to me in regards to how I could deal with Starfall’s entire situation, but none of them were especially pleasant. The tricky part of deciding his punishment wasn’t even my friendship with Starfall; it was his family. There really was a difference between an earth pony and a pegasus without her wings; after Comet got out of the hospital, she had tried job after job, but she lacked the strength for industrial work and she didn’t have the stamina to work as a sales clerk in a store. I didn’t know the full extent of her work-related issues, but I had to assume that, if I fired him outright, I would be causing a great deal of financial stress for four ponies.

As Captain, I supposed that it wasn’t my concern what the effects of my punishments were. Still, I took them into account as I weighed them, and decided that, no, ruining his life would be too harsh of a punishment for attacking Gilda. Plus, he had eight years of good standing with the Guard; there were only two other times that he had needed to be disciplined. The more recent one was for insubordination; that had been the time that he had ignored my first order to stand down when Gilda crash-landed into the market square three years ago.

The first time he had broken the Guard’s rules, though, was officially labeled ‘undue apprehensive force’. The protocols for apprehending criminals were intentionally vague in order to place emphasis on the situational judgement of the ranked guard whose job it was to oversee the officer in question. However, when Officer Starfall had thrown the mangled heap of a colt onto the floor of the Guard’s quarters and spat on him before turning around and leaving the citadel without saying a word, there was no way to interpret the amount of force that he had used as anything but ‘undue’.

It was only during the court proceedings, when it came to light what that monster had put his foals through, that I realized the amount of restraint that Starfall had shown in keeping his knife out of the altercation. I had to admit that I didn’t know how I would have handled myself in that situation, and I didn’t even have any children of my own. One way or another, his sergeant saw it the same way, so Officer Starfall had been reprimanded with the lightest punishment that the press would allow.

Politics, I mentally rolled my eyes. There was something inherently wrong with having to appease a third party that had nothing to do with the situation other than to flood the citadel with angry letters from citizens who thought we were being either too harsh or too lenient on a suspect, depending on how much the media liked him or her. I figured it was a practical check against our power, though, and Farrington hadn’t devolved into a military state during the past two hundred years, so there was some benefit to it.

Even as I vowed to try and keep Starfall’s name out of the papers, I knew it would be futile. They would find out, and he would suffer nothing short of disgrace at their hooves. I sighed as I realized that he deserved it, too: his actions yesterday had been nothing short of disgraceful.

I spent the rest of the morning slowly walking Gilda’s patrol and worrying over the difficult choices that I had to make. Eventually, my thoughts returned to how I had conducted myself that morning, and though I couldn’t break from my upright guard’s posture, I wanted to hang my head in shame. Sherry was right, that had been out of line, at least on a personal level. She was also right that I had to choose one role or the other; Gilda didn’t have the type of personality that would fit the role of a subservient girlfriend.

I wouldn’t have liked her if she did.

I grinned softly to myself as I thought about all the things I liked about her. She had a blasé attitude towards most things, which I found to be equal parts humorous and, given her upbringing, pitiable. Even in regard to her hardships, she rarely dwelled on the darker aspects of her childhood, which I found admirable -- despite how much she wanted to return to her tribe, she was well-aware of the fact that she had to be self-reliant, which included taking responsibility for her actions and their consequences.

Personality aside, she was fiercely intelligent and attentive. Even during the previous week’s struggle to define what our relationship meant to her, she had still retained most of what I had been talking about. Moreover, I realized that most of the histories and legends that she told me were purely from memory; she had told me one of her regrets of leaving her home so abruptly was that she hadn’t taken anything from her tribe’s record-keeper, who I inferred was a librarian of sorts. Still, she was frustrated often enough by forgetting a small detail here and there to make me think that she was being honest when she didn’t remember something, and all things considered, the gaps in her memory were small.

In short, she was an interesting individual that I had grown fond of over the past month. Between Starfall’s prejudices and the fear of my sister finding out about us, I had become so wrapped up in getting past the fact that Gilda was a griffin to think about the other reasons that we shouldn’t be together. First and foremost, the difference in our ages wasn’t lost on me; I had helped her fill out enough paperwork to know that I was over seven years older than she was. Yet, for all the times I reminded myself that she was younger than my sister, I would be hard-pressed to make that call based on their personalities.

All that I could do was resign myself to taking a passive role in our relationship: the entire past three weeks, I had done precious little that wasn’t in a reactionary role. It was becoming increasingly noticeable that she didn’t like to be touched. Her first day on the job, I thought that I had misjudged my own strength or her stamina when I hit her on the shoulder and caused her to collapse. After a few more encounters like that, though, I learned that when it came to physical contact, she was timid and easily-startled.

Whether it was her nature or her upbringing, the irony of the situation was that I felt sorry for her because of it. Part of me wanted to draw her into a hug and tell her that everything would be all right. I was also aware of the fact that if she didn’t want a hug, I would probably end up in the hospital. At any rate, I felt that it would be predatory of me, to pressure her into deepening our relationship, so I resigned to let her warm up to me on her own time.

And then, even with all of that aside, there was still the fact that I was a captain and she was an officer. That was the issue that could break our relationship. It was a volatile situation, and I was caught in the middle of it. On one hoof, on a personal level, I didn’t want to end the relationship over something so arbitrary. On the other, on a professional level, I didn’t want to waive my authority over any officer. Sherry was right, though: one of the two sides had to give.

I just needed to decide which I liked more: a smooth-running Guard, or my relationship with Gilda.

By the time the bell at city hall struck one o’ clock, I had exhausted myself through all of my mental deliberation. I was ready to go to sleep, but I had five hours left on my shift, so I had to improvise a substitute. Gilda’s patrol was in the Residential district, which was where I lived, so I headed home for my break.

Maxie was still out on delivery to Stalliongrad, so my house was empty when I got there. I realized that, because of my busy morning, it had been more than a full day since I had properly cleaned myself. In order to make the most of my break, I set the coffeepot on before I headed to the bathroom and drew a cold bath. I took my armor off before I got in, and the temperature of the water made my breath escape me in a gasp.

Five minutes of frenzied scrubbing later, I was sufficiently clean to start the rest of the day. After I dried and re-armored myself, I brushed my teeth, went back to the kitchen, and threw a sandwich together. I poured the coffee into a mug, but on second thought, I decided that I wanted to take my lunch on the go. I found a sturdy bottle and transferred my beverage over to it, wrapped my sandwich in a napkin, and headed out the door.

I didn’t know what time it was when I got to the southern gate, but I had a good feeling that I had ten minutes before my break ended. I walked through the archway, in front of the booth, and Sherry looked up from her forms with a grin. “Afternoon. How’s your day going?”

“Complicated,” I replied. I undid the stopper on my bottle and drank some coffee before continuing, “I’ve got to figure out Starfall’s punishment and work out everything that I need to do between Gilda and myself.”

She looked at me sternly, “I already told you what you need to do with Gilda.”

I nodded, “Right, you did. But still, the less exceptions I have to make for her, the better. Things are already strange enough between us; I don’t think it would be fair to her to have our relationship turn into a scandal.”

Sherry raised an eyebrow. “Fair to her?”

I had been trapped by my own words. “Okay,” I replied, “I also don’t want to be made into a whipping foal by the papers.”

She shook her head rapidly before responding, “It won’t be any better if you try to hush it up. Hell, that’ll probably give them more fuel, if you act like you’re ashamed of her.”

Her words cut deep, but I didn’t think that was Sherry’s intent. Still, I repeated them mentally: Ashamed of her. I turned my head to the side as I deliberated on whether or not it was the case. It was true that there were some ponies in the city that I didn’t want to tell about my relationship; most notably, my sister would not handle that knowledge well. Starfall hadn’t really asked about how things were going, either; I had tried bringing it up, but he usually tried to change the subject fairly quickly. I got the hint, at any rate, that he didn’t want to talk about my romantic life, so I didn’t bring it up to him.

Still, though... I even took certain precautions when talking to neutral parties. Some of the restaurant managers that I was well-acquainted with, for example, only knew her as ‘my friend that I’m showing around town’. I looked back at Sherry with a bit of shock when I realized that, outside of Starfall, she was the second pony in the city that I had even told that I was dating Gilda. Sherry picked up on my turmoil and in a soft voice, she asked, “Iron... are you?”

“No!” I answered quickly. I’m better than that, I told myself.

She cocked an eyebrow again. Instead of directly calling me out on what I had said, she said, “Ask Starfall how well ‘denial’ works for the basis of a relationship.”

I felt a bit of defensive anger for my friend rise. Instead of responding to her accusation, though, I unwrapped my sandwich to buy myself some time. I held up one half to Sherry, but she held up a hoof and shook her head.

As I chewed my lunch, I thought over what she had called their relationship. She wasn’t as close to Starfall and Comet as I was, but Sherry knew about as much as I did about their relationship; they had come to Farrington together, so we had both been witnesses to the development of their notable lack of romance.

I didn’t want to end up like that. I shoved the rest of my sandwich in my mouth and chewed vigorously before I washed the mass of bread and vegetables down with a generous swig of coffee. With my mouth clear, I asked, “How do I deal with it if... I am?” It was a painful admission, and it almost stung to look Sherry in the face as I asked, but I didn’t let my gaze waver.

With a warm look, she asked, “Is it wrong for you to date her?”

It was a simple question with a complex answer. I felt that time was growing short, so I answered as honestly as possible. “Between age, rank, and race, I can think of perhaps a dozen reasons why we shouldn’t be together. But... no matter how many times I tell myself that, I still care about her. So... maybe,” I finished with a small, frustrated shrug.

Sherry tilted her head as she glared at me. “Race? You think that’s a reason to avoid dating her?”

I shook my head. “Dating? No. But,” I struggled to find a way to put it delicately, “I’ve seen her put scratches in glassware with her beak. I mean... glass is harder than skin, what does that mean for kissing?”

“Either practice tonguing a knife or ask her.” She seemed irritated, but she clarified, “I mean, damn it, Iron, you’re going to have to talk about physical stuff like that; otherwise, one of you’s going to get hurt.” I was about to protest why I hadn’t brought that up, but Sherry continued, “And don’t tell me ‘she’s too young, it’d be too forward.’ If she’s too young to fuck, she’s too young to date, and you’re horrible for grooming her like that in the first place.”

I blinked back the surprise I felt at how... abrupt her advice was. She gave me an apologetic look as she said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off so terse. It just bugs me, how ponies always come to me looking for relationship advice, and I always tell them the same thing: communication. Then, they go and ignore it.” She looked down and muttered, “They don’t know how lucky they’ve got it.”

The clock tower chimed the half hour, but I couldn’t just leave Sherry on that note. “Point taken, I’ll bring up some of these concerns.” I saw her start to say something, so I clarified, “When it’s appropriate. I don’t have much experience with dating, but I’ve got enough sense not to lead in with, ‘So, how are we going to kiss?’ on Friday.”

Sherry nodded, and I continued, “And... I guess all of this planning wouldn’t be worth it if I didn’t want to date her in the first place. I suppose that means I am willing to date her. Properly, not as a captain. I’ll take you up on your offer, then, and let you handle everything with her. Either way... I guess we’ve got some conversations ahead of us, huh?”

Sherry nodded again, and added, “Just remember, if you do right by her, there’s no shame in that. You know, as long as you’re not breaking any public decency laws in the process.”

I chuckled at the idea. “Thanks, Sherry.” Looking down at my half-empty bottle, I put it on her counter. “I can’t take this with me on patrol, so here you go.” She picked it up and drained it in a matter of seconds. She gave me a nod of thanks and a salute of farewell; I returned the latter and went back to my patrol.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a much easier manner than the morning had. Sherry had given me quite a bit of peace in regards to what I was going to do with Gilda. I couldn’t imagine that it would be anything but awkward to talk to her about the physical aspects of our relationship, but I also knew that I was somewhat of a pioneer in that particular area.

With my relationship problems more or less figured out, I instead turned my mind back to Starfall. After a short amount of deliberation, I came to the conclusion that, without understanding his mental state, any punishment I could think of would be arbitrary at best. I chuckled slightly, as Sherry’s advice about my girlfriend also carried over to my best friend: I’d have to talk with him.

When the clock tower finally struck five, I went back to the booth to relieve Sherry. Both of our shifts ended at six, but I figured that she would appreciate being able to sit down inside the Guard’s quarters for an hour. She didn’t say anything about our earlier discussions when I came by, but she was grateful that I was reclaiming my spot inside the southern guard booth.

As I was more or less forced to stare south for an hour, I felt myself hoping that I would see Gilda flying back to the city after her shift was over. I reminded myself, sadly, that even though I had received a bit of guidance as to where I wanted our relationship to go, I had still made a few grave mistakes that morning. I still had to work that out with her before we could continue dating.

At four minutes to six, I heard some familiar voices chattering as they approached the south gate. Comet spoke up to silence them, “Quiet, now, I’ve got to ask Uncle Iron a favor.”

I smiled at my nickname, and Starfall’s wife walked around to the front of my booth. “Good afternoon, Iron.”

“Hi Comet,” I replied with a small bow of my head.

She looked down at her legs, where I presumed her two children were out of sight. “Would you mind watching the kids for a while tonight? I’ve got... something... I need to take care of,” she almost sneered her clarification, but I knew it wasn’t directed at me. It didn’t take me very long to deduce what was going on. I knew Starfall well enough that he wouldn’t want his children to see him in any sort of injured condition.

I also knew that Comet was sensitive enough where she wouldn’t outright tell her children that, so I played along. I shook my head, “Not at all.” I realized that I needed more information if I was going to keep up her charade, though, so I probed a little deeper, “How’s Starfall doing?”

“He hasn’t gotten back yet, if that’s what you’re asking. He’d probably report back to you first, anyways, before coming home.”

I made an agreeing grunt as I nodded my head. So I sent him out of town on guard business, I decided the ‘official’ story was. “Well, you can leave Hailey and Moonshine here with me if you need to get going. My shift is almost over, at any rate.”

As if on cue, the clock tower struck six. I smiled as I turned around and went into the hallway that was inside the Farrington wall. When I exited into the archway, I was immediately jumped on by two pegasus foals.

“Uncle Iron!” they shouted in unison.

I sat down so I could manage hugging them without throwing myself off balance. “Hey, you two.”

They started to tell me about a new game they were playing, but their mother interrupted. “Quiet for a moment, please.” Looking back at me, she said, “They haven’t had dinner, but I figured you hadn’t either, so...”

I nodded, “That actually works out for the best.” She put a hoof into her saddlebag, presumably to give me some money for their meals, but I shook my head, “Don’t worry about it.”

She nodded gratitude, but she still pulled out her house key and handed it to me. As I took it, she said, “Well, I should get going. I shouldn’t be out past seven thirty, but you know when their bedtime is.”

I nodded back to her, and she bent down to hug her children. “Be good for Uncle Iron, okay? I’ll be back soon.”

“Bye mom!”

“We’ll be good!”

As Comet left us, I felt a bit of sorrow about the entire situation. As Hailey and Moonshine began respectively bouncing around me and fluttering circles around my head, though, I found it impossible to dwell on any negative emotions. I put a hoof on Moonshine’s back and gently pushed her back to the ground before I asked them, “So, where do you want to eat?”

They were unanimous in wanting to eat at Baker’s Dozen, a pastry shop. I figured that it would be rough on me for the next few hours if I gave them that much sugar, so I offered up Pizza’s Pie as a compromise. They liked that idea, too, so I stood up and led them north to where the pizzeria was located.

Throughout dinner, they asked me their usual battery of Guard-related questions, and I answered as honestly as I thought would be appropriate. I had had enough of thinking about the Guard that day, though, so I turned the questions around to what they did that day. I ended up getting an earful about a new comic book series they were both enjoying. Their passion for something so frivolous made me smile, but I reminded myself of how I used to enjoy childlike things when I was their age.

My smile turned somber when I realized that, if the worst were to happen to both Starfall and Comet, their uncle wouldn’t be as abrasive and uncaring as to put them out on the street to fend for themselves. My teenage years had been made incredibly difficult because of that colt, but it gave me a sense of closure to know that I had more or less escaped from it and come to a position where I wouldn’t perpetuate the cycle.

When we were finished with dinner, I took the foals back to their home. Inside I used Starfall’s armor stand to hold my own, and I played board games with the children for what felt like a short time until I realized that I had missed their bedtime by close to half an hour. Cursing myself, I put them to bed as quickly as I could without being outright stern with them. The process still took a while, so it was past nine when I went back to the living room to tidy up the mess I had helped create. By the time I finished, I was thoroughly exhausted, so I sat down to relax. As soon as I did, though, I realized that I had started an inner battle to keep from dozing off before Comet returned...

I woke up with a start when Comet finally came through the door at nine-thirty. She spouted about five different apologies, but even as she stood there, I figured that anything she and Starfall could talk about for close to three hours was more important than my catching up on sleep for one night. As I put my armor back on for the trip home, she gave me the shortened version about Starfall’s condition: he was stable, and the prognosis was good for his wings healing back to full strength.

“That’s good to hear,” I replied. In his home, though, my guilt over the situation that had developed between myself and Starfall became oppressive. That, combined with my exhaustion, led me to cut things short with Comet. “However, I should get going.”

She nodded, “Right, you’ve been up as long as I have.” Before she led me down the hallway, though, she threw herself on me in a hug and whispered, “Thank you.”

Tired as I was, I grinned and replied, “Think nothing of it.”

She broke away and showed me to the door. Once I was out in the street, I headed back home. It was about a fifteen minute walk to my house, but in my exhausted state, it took close to twenty-five minutes.

As I rounded my block, I thanked Celestia that Stalliongrad was over a day’s journey away from Farrington. I loved my sister, but I was in no condition to deal with any of her idiosyncrasies; hell, even her usual overbearing amicability upon returning home would have worn me out.

Inside my empty home, I took off my armor at the door and went straight to the bathroom to get ready for bed. Over twenty hours after I left it, my mattress was nothing short of luxurious. The pleasure I felt from it was ironically energizing, but even that couldn’t keep me awake for very long.

When I woke up in my cave on Thursday morning, the level of brightness filled me with a sense of foreboding. I glared over at my stupid rabbit clock, and read that it was several minutes after nine o’ clock. The bottom of my stomach fell out as I realized that, no matter what I did, I was going to be over an hour late for my shift.

I lurched to a standing position in order to get ready and rush to work. As soon as I did, though, I remembered why I hadn’t set my alarm clock the night before.

I was still ‘on suspension’, as the official term for it went.

The events of the previous day all came back to me: getting yelled at by Sherry, getting yelled at by Captain Bulwark, doing some errands, and heading home. I had been exhausted, but thanks to the coffee I had drunk, it had taken me over two hours to get to sleep.

I had woken up later on that afternoon, groggy, but thirsty enough to drive me out of my cave. While I was down in the forest, I also got dinner and cleaned out my wounds as best I could with water from the pond. Back in my cave, I redressed them with the supplies I had bought in Farrington before leaving.

Then, I went back to sleep.

Now that I was awake and refreshed, I wasn’t exactly proud of doing little else but sleeping for close to twenty hours, but I had to admit that it felt far better to have too much sleep compared to too little. Still, I was understandably hungry, so for the second time in a row, I left my cave with the sole purpose of getting something to eat. Down at the pond, I again cleaned out my stab injuries; they were almost completely scabbed over at that point, but I didn’t want to take any chances, so I re-bandaged them when I was back in my cave.

I looked at the clock; it was now nine-forty-three. With food and hygiene taken care of, I defaulted to my usual standby activity when I was home: sitting and glaring at a wall. It wasn’t the most thrilling of pastimes, but I didn’t have anything to read, and I had explored most of the caves in the area back when I was looking for one to live in. They were all pretty boring as far as rock formations went.

I supposed that I could’ve gone out and flown for a bit, but even after Dash more or less accidentally called me out on it during my visit to Ponyville, stunt flying was more trouble to me than it was worth. When I first arrived in the village, she had told me a few stories about how she had crashed into a friend or a tree or a hillside... it was all right for her, I supposed, because she had friends that would come look for her after a few hours.

If I crashed into the Everfree Forest and broke a wing or something, I’d end up dead at the claws of a bigger predator. Even though Farrington was less than an hour’s flight to the north of where I was, it would probably take anyone who wanted to come looking for me most of a day to assemble and begin the search. Even then, it’d take a while for them to even miss me in the first place; also, if they started up north where the lake was, it would probably take them several weeks of continuous searching to cover enough forest to even get close to where I was.

By then, of course, it would be too late for me.

I mused that I could fly just south of the city, and the guard on top of the wall would be able to see me crash. That option had an added measure of safety to it, but really, I didn’t feel like heading up anywhere near Farrington that day.

With a scoff, I shook my head at what had transpired between the captain and me. A day later, I was less angry and more... bitter about everything. He had started the conversation on a personal level, but when he personally annoyed me, he had more or less ordered me to shut up. It hadn’t been a simple case of officer insubordination, either; he had simply ended our conversation by calling me out on a technicality instead of dealing with the personal issue that he brought up in the first place.

It... hurt, I realized, and I felt a lump form in the back of my throat. I knew better than to completely absolve myself of any guilt in the situation, but I couldn’t help but feel betrayed by his response. For one reason or another, I had told Iron some things that were fairly personal. When push came to shove, though, he would rather order me around than actually deal with a problem we were having.

I broke my gaze from the usual crack in the rock wall I stared off into as I looked at the floor now. All of this drama is optional, I thought. I had to admit that I enjoyed being a guard, at least on some level: it was simple and it was something to do. One of the things that Iron told me during my first week was beginning to come true: ponies were getting used to my presence, so I was becoming less of a freak and more of a pillar of the community.

At the same time, though, I could get that in another city. Or, I could get any job I liked in any city. It wasn’t that I needed pony money to live: a majority of my spending in Farrington had come from when I bought my dinners during my various dates with Iron. Other than unsatisfactory meals with... him, there was nothing in that city that I really wanted to buy; the only thing I could even think about would have been a mattress, but those were incredibly expensive; I’d have to save up for a few pay cycles to even afford one.

And now, with my huge fine, I was down to practically no money for the next eight days. In the back of my mind, I knew I could sell some of my wing feathers to the quill store still, but the more I thought about that, the more I felt degraded by the whole prospect. From what I saw when I went there, there weren’t any pegasus feathers being used; it was mainly my feathers and those of the lesser birds. True, griffins shared a special kinship with eagles and hawks, with some of us keeping them as pets or hunting companions; our avian halves were also more or less the same anatomy, just scaled up to a larger size. Still, they were wild animals; despite the reputation that the Sterkergeist were giving us, the other two tribes at least had the potential to be civilized and cultured.

With a dark smile, I realized that my tribe was probably the most primitive out of the three that remained, at least in terms of living conditions. Sharfkral-Grat was the original nesting grounds of griffins: there was ample food in the Everfree Forest to the south, and more than three rivers had their origins in the mountain range on either side of the huge plateau that served more-or-less as a communal gathering spot.

Theoretically, it should’ve been enough for us to live by. But, well over a thousand years ago, smaller groups began to form in the tribe, and shortly after that, they started to cause friction with each other. The Sterkergeist were the first to leave, and they traveled the least amount of any of the dissident tribes: Bergfried, their massive fortress-city, was only about a six hour flight to the northeast of Sharfkral-Grat.

The Schnelfluge left at around the same time as the Grosfeder did, but the two tribes went as far from each other as physically possible. The Schnelfluge made their home far to the southwest, in the middle of a desert. In hindsight, that had probably been a mistake, but I figured it was a moot point to criticize the errors of the dead.

The Grosfeder went as far east as physically possible and built a coastal city, Erntving. Or, I supposed they called it Elpithasus; that was the name Iron has used for it, but it definitely didn’t sound like a pony name. Whatever they called their city, once the Grosfeder moved there, they more or less cut off all ties with the other three tribes; instead, it almost seemed like they preferred to trade with ponies. I had only ever actually seen members from that tribe twice while growing up, and I always got the vibe that they more or less looked down on the rest of us.

I shrugged and my eyes wandered to the roof of my cave. Griffin politics was a system that I wasn’t really a part of, anymore. Being forcibly expelled had effectively caused me to trade one set of woes for another. Instead of being constantly reminded of my race’s impending demise and the decline of our culture, now I was picking fights with racists and having relationship troubles with a member of another species.

I looked over to my money pouch with a mote of amusement: I also had financial troubles, according to pony society. I supposed that was going to make things difficult for my future dates with Iron, but frankly, his attitude was already doing a pretty good job at creating obstacles for us.

I turned back to the wall and sighed. I didn’t want to break up with him. One way or another, he was the first individual I had met that was interested in me, romantically. Part of me knew that it was a terrible reason for wanting to continue dating someone, but the other part of me thought back to Gerard and Stephen. From what I knew, they were the only couple of their kind, so more or less, they were forced together by obscurity.

They had their own obstacles to their relationship, too, even if one discounted the slow death that awaited them upon discovery. For starters, Stephen was four years older than Gerard; without knowing much about their relationship dynamics, part of me was disturbed to think about what age they had been when they changed from friends to lovers. At the same time, I doubted that Stephen had malicious intentions, and even then, Gerard wasn’t really the type of individual who would stick around for something he didn’t want to be a part of, so I had a hard time making a call on how I felt about that.

What worried me more was that the few times I had seen them together after I found out about their situation, they still acted fairly violent and caustic towards each other. Then again, they had a huge element of subterfuge to play in their public appearance, so when they knew someone was within earshot, they weren’t going to really be open with one another. Also... that sort of sentiment was at the base of most of the normal male friendships in my tribe, so it was tricky to try comparing them to a traditional romantic couple.

They weren’t really ‘tender’ with each other, but part of me guessed that was what a female would bring to the relationship. Males were notoriously brutal during mating season; even among couples that were deeply affectionate, with all of the sharp edges involved, it was fairly common for a new mother to start her four month incubation period with at least a set of eight stab wounds: three above each wing socket, one below. Or, so I heard when that particular subject came up in my class. I was never allowed in my parents’ chamber when growing up, nor had I ever actually seen a nesting mother firsthand.

Still, moving back to my brother and Stephen, they must’ve taken some sort of precautions against showing up with love wounds all over each other; I never really noticed any injuries that couldn’t be explained by usual male roughhousing. With all the planning that must have gone on behind the scenes with them, I didn’t find it too hard to believe that they would more or less forgo all sentimental emotions when dealing with each other in public.

Also, I remembered Gerard’s song, so I knew for a fact that there was something deeper behind his cold demeanor. He hated himself for loving Stephen, but given the circumstances, I couldn’t really fault him for being frustrated despite the depth of his affection. It was an irrational fear, but their situation always made me acutely aware of the level of personal hell it would’ve been for them if they actually hated each other, but were still more or less forced together by... whatever it was they saw in each other.

Coming back to my own situation, I had to admit that Iron was probably a member of a small minority that would actually entertain the idea of such a relationship. He was also a good deal older than I was, but that didn’t really bother me. Even with an abundance of females at or around the same age as every male, it wasn’t uncommon in my tribe to see a couple that had at least five years’ age difference between its members.

I shook my head in confusion: I didn’t know exactly how much the species difference bothered Iron. He respected my personality and didn’t condescend towards my culture, but even then, he was still afraid of me. In the course of our time together, I had watched several times as he had made a move like he was going to put a hoof around me or hug me or something, but every time, he seemed to think better of it. Granted, the two times he had accidentally touched me during a date, I had more or less freaked out. Still, I hadn’t been expecting anything at the time, and I had to be honest with myself: I didn’t like sudden, physical contact. Growing up and while in the Everfree Forest, that was usually the only indication I would get before something painful was about to happen.

Still, I wasn’t going to get over that overnight. Whether or not Iron was being wise for keeping his distance, I didn’t like that he was holding back around me. I supposed that the best thing to do would be to tell him that, but I couldn’t really think of a situation where that would come up naturally, and the few romantic silences we had held together would’ve been ruined if I had broken them to say, “You can hug me now.”

I chuckled at myself, and I reminded myself a second time of the futility of worrying about everything: there was nothing in that city I actually needed. I enjoyed my time with Iron, and being a guard was an interesting pastime, but again, I could find those luxuries in almost any other city. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I was fighting an uphill battle against sentiments that my father had helped instill in the citizens there; I figured that if I moved to a city that was farther away from the three griffin settlements, I might stand a better chance of fitting in.

I looked over at my guard’s armor, or more specifically, the armor that had been tailor-made to fit me. I had made an oath, but with all of the problems I had been creating and laws I had broken, upholding my word was creating a situation where I was becoming less honorable by the day. Still, I more or less had a sense of duty to the Farrington Guard; if anything, it made me want to work on upholding the law there instead of leaving it behind and starting over in a new city.

Turning my head right and deeper into my cave, I looked at Starfall’s knife. I knew that it had sentimental value for him; one way or another, his and his wife’s initials were engraved into the base of the blade. I had originally thought to keep it as a trophy of our duel, but thinking to my shoulder and hand, I was going to have the scars to give testament to that if I ever needed to.

Honor, the single word crossed my mind again. I wasn’t sure how I felt about breaking his wings to end the fight. Sure, it was better than killing him, but broken limbs were probably one of the worst injuries that my father had taught me how to inflict on someone -- or, something, rather; I didn’t really think that jaguars had personalities...

He had thrown the moaning, quivering beast in front of me before landing on my right. Blood was flowing freely from her four limb joints, so I knew that she couldn’t escape from her captor any more than I could. “Your instructor has told me that you have a ‘gift’ for learning facts. I suppose that is the best I can hope for from something as weak as you are.”

Most of my mind was still devoted to trying to figure out the situation; Father had ordered me to join him in the forest, and it was much less painful to follow his command the first time he gave it. Still, there was now a tortured animal in front of us, and... he had just come as close as he ever did in terms of paying me a compliment.

He began speaking, but I didn’t turn to face him. “I have long since given up on making you a competent fighter, at least from a physical standpoint. Even amongst your sisters, you stand out as weak,” he almost spat the word. “Still, you are my daughter, however much you embarrass me with your every action. If I cannot instill within you the strength of your race, I will at least show you a... passable method to victory.”

I frowned for a split second as I thought, Maybe if I didn’t have to deal with constant injuries, I could be ‘stronger’. Of course, I had made the mistake of letting my thoughts show on my face; my father’s fist was quick to remedy that error.

As I stood back up, he lectured, “Your honesty betrays your mind. What have I told you about disobedience?”

“That it is intolerable,” I said as neutrally as possible, staring him straight in the face.

He smiled viciously, “Good. You can learn.” Turning back to the maimed jaguar, he asked, “What is the difference between our feline halves and actual beasts?”

I didn’t like the spontaneous quiz, but I answered as truthfully as I could, “Mostly bones and reproductive organs, in females.”

“Bones?” he prompted me to continue.

“They’re slightly thicker in diameter, but the main difference is in density.” I had an idea where this lesson was going; it was more like a growing sense of fear in the pit of my stomach.

“Indeed,” my father said, clearly not displeased with my answer. “Unlike Masters of the Sky, beasts of the lands have solid bones. It makes them stronger, but... look in front of you if you think that strength is a match for our speed. Never make a fight last longer than it needs to,” he told me before pausing for emphasis. “I want you to feel why it is better to sever joint tendons than it is to break bones.”

The order was clear, but I was disgusted. I fought to keep my face neutral as I hesitated, but Father picked up on my misgivings. “Or, I could give you two of both types of injury; either way, my lesson still stands.”

I hadn’t wanted to be maimed for the next few weeks, nor had I known how to fix a broken tendon. I had had to force back tears as I walked forward and grabbed the jaguar’s hind leg with both hands. It took a tremendous amount of strength but... after a few moments, something had given way, and I had been rewarded with a wet, snapping feeling.

Back in my cave, I blinked a few tears out of my eyes. The sound that an already-pained animal had made was still fresh in my mind. Of course, she had had three other limbs, so my father hadn’t been content with just one injury; he taught me where the bones were weakest, though, so the rest of the lesson had been slightly easier, from a practical standpoint.

He had also taught me a technique of how to break a griffin bone with one hand; in a rare display of mercy, he hadn’t used me for demonstration. It had been close to seven years later and a different air-based race when I actually got to try it out for myself. And it worked, I realized, but I didn’t take any satisfaction from knowing that.

I curled up into a ball as I realized that, close to ten years apart, I had done more or less the same thing to Starfall as my father had done to his wife. True, I hadn’t ripped his wings off, but in my tribe, broken wings were almost always tricky to mend. Even in the best cases, it was the sort of injury that led to some sort of flying disability. In the worst cases, the victim of the injury wouldn’t ever fly again.

I rationalized that, at the very least, pony medicine seemed a lot more technologically advanced than my tribe’s, so Starfall would probably fly again; it didn’t really help the guilt that weighed heavily on my mind, though. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t heal properly, it was that I had given him such an injury in the first place. In retrospect, it had been overly brutal and completely unnecessary. I wasn’t a stranger to underhanded tactics in a fight; I had been pinned during my scraps with Gerard enough time to know that a heel to the groin was usually the best way to get him off of me. Still, my brother had usually gotten over that in a few minutes or so; Starfall was probably looking at a few months’ worth of healing.

It’s not even that, I thought, it’s that I always told myself I wouldn’t be like Father. It was disheartening to realize that, ever since leaving my tribe, I had been on my own, morally speaking, yet I still ended up injuring ponies around me like some sort of savage. With a wince, I remembered that the trend had started a little over a month before I was exiled: at Junior Speedsters’, I had broken a bully’s wings in order to get her to stop mocking Dash and me.

I uncurled and ended up lying on my back, staring at the ceiling of my cave. Stormglider had been relentless in her mockery of us, and it all came to a tipping point when she used pink fur dye to both dye my head pink and to write a slur on my side. In my juvenile wisdom, I devised a way to hurt her without leaving any obvious evidence: I tied her wings to her side and dropped her from a good height onto the ground. She landed on her back, and I remembered hearing later that her injures were permanent, so she would never fly again.

I cringed out of shame when I realized that I had actually injured more ponies than my father had. It was simple math, really, but it was the first time that I thought about it that way. The fact that he would probably be proud of my ‘achievements’ made me feel lower than dirt.

I spent the rest of my morning dwelling on that fact, and more importantly, trying to figure out how I really felt about that part of myself. Finally, biology got the better of me, so I flew down to the forest floor to relieve myself. With that finished, I took to the sky to scan the treeline for lunch. Within a few minutes, I found a squirrel, but... given how that morning had gone, I hesitated for a few moments. Even as I did, I knew it was futile: I had to eat eventually, and sparing a few creatures in the forest wasn’t going to absolve me of my past violence.

Either way, I was hungry but not in the mood for food. As I worked that one out, I resigned to fly back up to my cave. It was now a little bit after one, right about when I would usually take my lunch break. I thought back to Iron and wondered what he was doing right then. Well, actually, I figured he was standing in his stone box with a blank expression on his face; I was more interested in what he was thinking.

I thought about heading up to Farrington to ask him, but... going back to Wednesday morning, we had parted ways on some of the worst terms possible. Even before that, I realized that I had probably put him in a hell of a bind: not only did I create personal friction between him and his friend, but there was also the added level of the fact that, unlike my situation, Captain Bulwark had to punish Lieutenant Starfall.

I remembered the Sternwolf’s advice from the night of the duel: Fight and die. Live through peace. It was only two days later that I realized she was being metaphorical, and that if I had shown up in my armor, I would’ve only made the situation worse.

Then again, I figured that if I would’ve taken that advice in a more literal interpretation and stayed home, the worst outcome was that Starfall would have thought me a cowardly brute. Stupid gods, I blasphemed, you needed more than six words to convey all that information.

At any rate, I decided that I didn’t want to embark on a round trip that took an hour and a half just to find out that Iron was still angry at me. I still had my guard duties to attend to on Friday, so I figured I would find out how he really felt when I showed up then.

In order to prepare for the encounter, I spent the rest of the afternoon mulling over various different possible conversations and their outcomes in my head. It was tricky, because I didn’t really know Iron all that well: three weeks did not make us soulmates. Even in my limited capacity, though, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we had some deeper problems to address than our verbal spat on Wednesday.

By the time I got ready to go to sleep for the night, I knew that the only thing I could really control would be my own actions and responses to... whatever Iron did or said. At the very least, I set my alarm a good half hour earlier; if he wanted to talk, I wanted to give him that chance. If not, I would find something else to do until my patrol started.

As I drifted off to sleep, I reminded myself that in order for things to work out between Iron and me, it was going to take a lot of talking about the issues I had thought about, and I’d probably have to give a little ground on some other issues that I wasn’t aware of. I reminded myself that, even though I didn’t have any certainty what the next day would bring for our relationship, I was pretty sure I liked Iron enough to try and fix it.

*        *        *

Friday morning, I made good use of my early start, so even with the additional time spent changing my bandages one last time, I set off for Farrington well over half an hour earlier than I usually did. As I flew, I felt a sense of dread growing in the pit of my stomach, but instead of letting my nervousness get the better of me, I channeled it to my wings to give myself more speed.

As soon as I could make out the archway of the southern gate, I saw that, sure enough, a gold-armored guard was waiting under the archway. That ruled out the silver of a sergeant or the undecorated steel of an officer, at any rate, but I didn’t need to be frivolous with myself: I knew that it was Iron.

I slowed down as gradually as I could as I drew closer to the city. I didn’t know exactly how fast I was flying, but based on the time it usually took me to get to Farrington, I guessed my armored speed to be around eighty miles per hour. When I was rushing, I figured that I could break a hundred easily enough, but at any rate, I didn’t think that Iron would appreciate being tackled by me at those speeds.

I landed in front of him but... I didn’t know what to say. My gut instinct told me that he was mildly pleased to see me, but I had known him long enough to know that his expression could also be ‘neutral’. I thought it would be incredibly coy, to the point of hypocrisy, to start with something as banal as “Good morning,” so I decided instead to let him speak first.

A full thirty seconds passed before finally, he asked, “You can’t think of how to start, either?”

When I heard the warmth in the tone, relief washed over me in a sensation that was almost tangible. “No, I can’t,” I admitted. It came out kind of flat-sounding, so I tried warming up my tone with, “But... this is as good as any, right?”

A weak grin formed on one side of his mouth, and he shrugged. “I’d like to apologize for overreacting on Wednesday.”

I turned my head slightly to the side, but kept eye contact, “I... shouldn’t have been so confrontational.”

“No,” he shook his head, “I let things get mixed up between our two relationships. You were angry with me personally, and I took it out on you professionally. That... isn’t going to work, and I should have realized it sooner.”

His answer was foreboding, to say the least. “Isn’t going to work?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

He guessed what I was thinking, so he shook his head quickly. “I didn’t mean,” he paused mid-sentence, “Well, let’s just get on the same page right now. How do you want this conversation to end?”

I thought about how to word my answer, but it came out, “I like you,” smooth as a tree trunk. “I mean,” I turned back to face him head-on, “I know I screwed up, you know you screwed up... and I still want to keep going after this.”

What looked like relief crossed Iron’s face before he said, “Good. Well, I’m glad. Because that’s how I feel as well.”

I grinned back at him, but the expression left my face when I asked, “Well, how do we do it?” in a serious tone.

He nodded slowly before stating, “We’ve both had a couple of days to think about that. I’ll start with my idea: boundaries. I mean, something like this was going to happen eventually; Starfall just, more or less, acted like a catalyst for it. But I can’t be your captain and your romantic partner, at least, not directly.”

I didn’t think I liked how that sounded, but I didn’t say anything yet. Iron continued, “So, starting today, I’m going to delegate all authority to Sherry, when it comes to, well, everything. It’s not the smoothest way to run the Guard, but at least she’ll be able to be objective.”

She was already my sergeant, so I asked, “How is that... different?”

“It’s not drastically different from a practical standpoint,” he shrugged, “but the main difference is that now, I’m never going to give you a direct order, promotion, or punishment as long as we’re together.”

I definitely didn’t like the way that sounded. “Isn’t that going to break the whole chain of command? Like, what happens if Sherry and Lieutenant...” I blanked on his name, “and my lieutenant both have a conflict of interest over something?”

Iron shut his eyes and winced. “Okay, that’s an example of how this isn’t a perfect solution. But what else can I do? I care about you a great deal, but I’m sorry, I’m not going to resign over this. And I think it would be grossly inappropriate to ask you to do it instead.”

At first, I was offended at the face value of his words, but then I remembered he had been in the Guard for over ten years. Compared to the month we had known each other, I agreed: it didn’t make sense for him to quit. I didn’t want to quit if I didn’t have to, so I couldn’t judge him for not wanting to do it, either. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “I mean, I know you thought this through. I just... don’t like special treatment.”

“That’s just it,” he replied, “you won’t be getting special treatment this way. It’s the only way I could think of, and... it’s what Sherry suggested in the first place.”

I raised an eyebrow again. “You told Sherry about us?”

“Yes, and I apologize in advance if you wanted to keep it secret, but with Lieutenant Spade, she has experience in this area, so I thought it wise to ask her opinion.”

I still thought he should’ve told me before he told a mutual acquaintance of ours, but I figured I had told one of my friends that I wanted to date, so it wasn’t that much different. Let it go, I decided. Besides, compared to others in my family, I actually had it pretty good on the whole ‘need for a secret’ front. “Okay,” I replied, “I mean, we weren’t going to keep it secret forever even if we tried, right?”

“There are about a hundred different witnesses between all the restaurants,” he nodded frankly. His expression hardened as he continued, “And that reminds me of some other matters I wanted to discuss.”

“Go for it,” I replied. I had a few things left I wanted to talk about, but I figured there would probably be an overlap between us if we were discussing our problems.

An awkward, quizzical expression came over his Iron’s face as he asked, “How old do you think I am?”

I didn’t have to guess. “Twenty-seven.”

His eyes widened in surprise. “That’s... a bit high, but, doesn’t that bother you?”

I shrugged. “Growing up, the closest males to my age were either five years older or three years younger... so no, I guess.”

“I thought your br...” he shook his head. “Right, sorry. It’s just...” he shook his head again, “never mind.”

“What?” I asked. “Putting it under a rock won’t solve anything.”

He looked away, “It’s just I would feel strange dating a filly your age.”

“W... why?” I asked. It was a better question than the other one that came to mind.

“Because, when I look back to who I was seven years ago, I realize everything I didn’t know about... well, everything.”

I was still confused. “So... you’re calling me immature?” I asked with a hint of defensiveness in my voice.

“No... well, yes... well... maybe?” he finally shrugged. “I mean, you seem... remarkably well-adjusted for what you told me you’ve been through. So, part of me thinks you’ve more or less been tempered in fire, and that you’re old enough to take care of yourself. But I can’t be sure.”

I started to see where he was coming from, but it was a problem without a solution. “So... you’re uncomfortable because I’m younger than you are... I can’t fix that, though.”

“I know that,” he said with a twinge of frustration. “Just... I don’t want to end up taking advantage of you.”

I stared at him blankly until he continued, “It’s nothing you can fix, it’s just something that I have to do that I want you to know about while I’m working on it.”

That I could appreciate. “I’ll let you know if you cross any boundaries,” I said with a shrug, “but you’ve been...” It clicked in my mind. “Is that why you’ve been distant?”

“Distant?” he asked me to clarify.

“Like... you don’t tell me anything personal. Or,” the awkward words burned as I said them, “touch me.”

He looked shocked but then he nodded slowly, “I... didn’t realize that first part.” He turned his head to the side and thought about it some more before replying, “I guess I haven’t been as open with you as you have with me, huh?”

I nodded. “I guess the whole ‘take it slow because she’s a young griffin’ thing backfired?”

He tilted his head, “That doesn’t bother me, and you should know that by now. You’re just... jittery on contact.”

That was an almost cute way of putting it. I sighed and replied, “Okay, I’ll work on that if you stop treating me like I’m too young to date.”

He smiled. “I’ll work on it. And... I’ll try to think of you as a girlfriend first, instead of a subordinate officer.”

I nodded acceptance, “So, we agree to be more open with each other?”

He nodded back, and I felt a sense of accomplishment from his agreement. Sure, we had our problems that we had to work on, and there was still a lot of work left to do, but at the same time, I had this inexplicable sensation that we were starting out fresh. It was almost like there had been this wall between us before, and now, it was starting to come down so we could get to know each other better.

After a long pause, I said, “I’m glad we’re still, you know, dating.”

He smiled, “As am I. It would have been a shame for things to end so...” He didn’t finish his sentence, but I nodded again to show that I knew what he meant without him having to say it.

In response, Iron took a step towards me. I felt my neck instinctively shrink down, but I brought my head back up to where it was. He smiled down at me because his head was still a good half foot above mine, but he bent down slightly to rest his chin on one shoulder and a hoof on the other.

I pressed my neck into his and brought my arm up to return the embrace. I felt him chuckle, but I didn’t ask what about. There was warmth in our hug, and I could feel it every time Iron took a breath. I was content to just stay there for a while and relax.

He must have felt the same way, because we stayed like that, silently, for a few minutes until the clock tower chimed nine o’ clock. It was time for me to start my patrol, so I reluctantly broke away from him.

Iron bowed his head slightly before standing back up to his full height. “That was nice.”

I didn’t know how best to agree, so I just made a nonverbal sound of agreement. “I’ll see you on my lunch break, Iron.”

“Have a good morning,” he said goodbye.

As I left to start my patrol, I was filled with a sense of serenity. I knew that I still had hardships to overcome with Iron, Starfall, and even the Farrington Guard, but for the rest of the morning, all of those problems seemed to subside.

The only thing that I could really focus on was the glowing sensation that our hug had filled me with.

END CHAPTER EIGHT