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!!!!!! Warning !!!!! Warning !!!!!!

This story contains Mother/Son incest. If you don't want to read that sort of content then you will want to stop reading now.

!!!!!! END WARNING !!!!!!

For the rest of you who've decided to take this journey with me, Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy the story.

My name is Twister Darling. I'm an earth pony who came to live in Ponyville a good many years ago. I was fourteen, young and silly with thoughts of meeting and marrying one of the handsome royal alicorns, or even becoming friends with one of the fine court ponies and landing one of the coveted positions serving the princes and princesses in the castle. My family... we weren't the kind of ponies that anypony would write stories about or even think to include in important matters. We were the ponies who stood in the background of everyday life all over Equestria, doing our best to make ends meet and to find a life of meaning for ourselves.

When I met Storm Break, my pegasus; he was as good as any royal to me. We fell in love almost the moment we met. That blustery august twilight when I'd been walking back to the RV with bags of groceries and the wind had caught hold of my only good scarf and set it tumbling through the air, only to be grabbed up in a flash of dark fur and feathers as _he_darted in and snatched it from the air even before it could hit the ground and become sodden. He had the mark of a passing storm with a rising sun behind it on his dark gray flank that was almost black unless it was caught in the midday light. I can still recall how his dark purple mane caught and danced around him on the wind as he folded his magnificent wings and came down to land beside me. His lavender eyes met mine and a tingle of warmth spread into me from where his hoof touched me as he wrapped that scarf back around my neck.

From that moment, we were almost always together. I'd hated living in the RV with father, stepmother, and two stepbrothers. My older sister had been gone for a couple of years by then, and I hadn't heard from her at all in that time. That was why I began spending all my time at Storm's little apartment even while he spent a good deal of his time soaring up to meet the violent storms that came down from Mount Everhoof to threaten Ponyville and its surroundings. This was his calling, his first and truest love, and it was also the thing that took him away from me just before my seventeenth birthday while I was still heavy with foal and the wedding that we'd planned was still weeks away.

I'm not ready to write that part yet. But the fact is that the loss of Storm Break and his parents has little role to play in the rest of the story, except that its result was that I was left on my own in the aftermath. My family had moved on almost a year before, my father having to move constantly from place to place for his job and my stepmother and siblings having little desire to make their own way by up and leaving the way I did. One day I'd gone to deliver the groceries I brought for them every week when I got paid for my little part time job and found their spot empty save for a few scraps of discarded trash. I can't remember what job father had anymore. I know that seems strange, but so many years have flowed past like water through the floodgates of a dam. Some things just weren't important enough for me to hold tight to the memories. What it was that kept him constantly moving from town to town in that old RV has long fled, leaving behind only cobwebs and perhaps a little long held resentment.

After I'd born my son, and buried my pegasus and his folks, I went to live on the farm Storm's parents had owned. Since I knew nothing about farming, I had to look for other work and because I had no skills or experience to speak of I took what I could get, working odd farm jobs for a while, before getting hired as a waitress and short order cook at The Hayloft Diner in Mustang, a small town about an hour southwest of Ponyville and just fifteen minutes by truck from my farm. But I didn't have a truck back then, so I had to trot, which kept me in shape but took a good bit longer. Mustang was about as country as that word could imply. There was The Hayloft, a hardware store, and a used car dealer with only three used vehicles on the lot on any given day, all on one side of the main street, while the other side held the service station, the Piggly-wiggly, and the farmer's market, which filled up with farmer's and tourists most afternoons and weekends during the summer.

But this story isn't about me, or not really. It's about the greatest love of my whole life, Stormfeather, my son. He was born, as was proper for a pegasus of his father's lineage, during the worst summer storm that I can remember. His coat is dark gray, like his father's, but his mane and tail are golden like mine, and his eyes are a sparkling amethyst that glitter with a special light when there's lightning on the horizon. He has a broad muzzle that's a bit longer than usual. His chest is broad, and his wingspan is wider than the usual pegasus, though that's because he's also more heavily muscled across his chest, legs, and back, having inherited my earth pony build more so than his father's lighter pegasus frame. The cutie mark is a shooting star.

Stormy was a wonderful foal. We worked together in our little garden out behind the house and we always got a little spot at the farmer's market in town during summer weekends when the tourists were through the most. He was smart too; way smarter than I ever was. It was this realization, as he grew older and smarter, that eventually led me to realize that I just couldn't provide him with the kinds of opportunities that he deserved. That's why, when the invitation came just after he'd turned twelve, I decided to send him away. I loved him more than anything, but he'd progressed beyond my ability to teach, and the scholarship to the Wonderbolt Academy, one of the finest academies in Cloudsdale; was too good an opportunity for me to hold him back just because I'd miss him.

Putting him on that bus was the hardest thing that I'd ever had to do. He'd cried, one of the first time's I'd ever seen him cry that I simply couldn't sooth away the hurt, and I wanted nothing more than to wrap him up in the quilt that I'd made for him and carry him home where we'd never have to be apart. But I couldn't deny him the chance to show everyone else in Equestria what I already knew; that he was something special. And he was special, but not as a pegasus.

A mother's love and the rose-colored lenses that I wore weren't shared by the rest of Equestria, and it turned out that Stormfeather had too much earth pony in his blood, from my side, to be an exceptional flier like his father. He could make long lazy flights but he couldn't battle storms the way his father had, and so he never made much of an impact at the academy, and after graduating he ended up living much as my father had, bouncing from place to place, always in the background to the lives of more important ponies that were always grabbing headlines and making waves. He rubbed shoulders with royal guards, spoke to princesses and their friends, but he was never more than a side note in any of those stories.

We hadn't seen each other in years by the time circumstance, or destiny, or just coincidence, brought us back together. I'd lived alone on the farm ever since Stormy rode away on that bus, never having much use for stallions after Stormy's father passed. I had the occasional summer fling here and there. Choosing a customer from the diner, or a young farmpony who'd come to the market to sell their families produce, but these never went beyond meaningless dalliances. This meant that I had nobody around to help me when the front section of the porch that went around the entire exterior of the old farmhouse, collapsed under the combined weight of a late winter ice-storm and a slightly plump pony lady.

My rear left leg snapped in at least two places as I fell atop it while boards splintered and fell to the ground around me. I crawled out. It took what seemed like days but turned out to have been only a couple of hours after the collapse. The rural post pony delivery driver had spotted me lying, half conscious, in the drive where I'd finally passed out from the pain as I was trying to reach the road where some passerby might spot me.

I spent the next couple of days in the Ponyville General Hospital, my leg first set and splinted by a doctor and then wrapped in a plaster cast that went all the way up to mid-thigh.

It was there, in room twenty-two where this story really begins.

Mid-morning light splashed across the black speckled white tiles. A slash of yellow brightness cut between the almost, but not quite, drawn curtains. A nurse named Redheart clip-clopped in, her lips curled in her perpetual pleasant but professional smile as she came to check that I hadn't tried to leave the wheelchair again. The doctor had been quite clear that I'd be able to walk on my cast only for a few minutes at a time before it would start to pain me again, long enough to get in and out of the wheelchair basically. Once it started to hurt, I'd have to get off it again if I didn't want to risk making the injury worse. But I wasn't the kind of mare to just sit around, so I'd been up, pacing around, far more than was probably good for me. This hadn't exactly gained me any favorable feelings from Redheart, though she seemed more resigned to my inability to sit still than frustrated by it.

She gave a satisfied look at seeing me still confined to the chair. That made me want to frown a little, but I forced myself not to. She really was just concerned about my wellbeing, after all. "Twister Darling; are you just about ready to get back home?" She asked, giving me a slightly brighter smile than her usual one. "Your son is here to pick you up, so make sure you've got everything you came in with. We wouldn't want you leaving-"

"Stormfeather? Is here?" I asked, my breath catching and my voice quivering with surprise and excitement. I knew how Stormy felt about being sent away for school. He'd always felt that I'd abandoned him. In hindsight? Maybe I had. I'd thought that sending him to a good school with people smarter and better than me would make him rise like the star on his flank, but that had never happened. Instead he'd sputtered and guttered instead of burning bright, knowing that it was my fault. But why was he here? How had he found out that I'd been injured and would need help?

"Hi, mom." Stormy said, sticking his head around the open door and looking in. His expression wasn't one of happy greeting, which set the feeling of soaring gladness I'd just been feeling fluttering away in a wrenching of grief and regret from my heart that settled like tension into the muscles of my shoulders. "I hear you've gotten yourself into a bit of trouble?" He asked as he stepped into the doorway but remained just outside the room. His heavy wings were folded neatly along his sides, but he still had that farm horse stature like his mother, with the thickly corded muscles meant to pull a plow, pull up stumps from the fields, and spend hours trotting along after the sheep in the meadow.

"Stormy. I'm so glad you came." I said, forcing myself not to let any tears leave my eyes. I knew, from the last time we'd seen each other, just after his graduation from Wonderbolt Academy, that crying openly might send Stormy into a rage again. It wasn't my crying that had really been the issue, though I had no way to understand any of that at the time. It had been about a filly. A filly I believe that he really loved, who'd been his long-term fillyfriend for most of the four years at the Academy. But I hadn't known about her flighty, cheating, manipulations, her crying and pouting. I'd discovered those things only later, after I'd made the mistake of weeping and apologizing almost the moment that he'd sat down across from me, which he'd seen as only another attempt at emotional manipulation.

Storm turned to nurse Redheart and spoke in a low voice, "Thanks for calling me. Do I need to sign anything or talk to the doctor?"

Redheart shook her head. "No. The doctor already cleared her. But I hope you're prepared to stick around and look after her for at least the next sixteen weeks."

Storm glanced in my direction for a second, his gaze darting away as he avoided meeting my eyes, yet he looked back at Redheart and nodded. "Yeah. It seems I am."

"I hope it's okay that we contacted your son. He was listed by your insurance as your only medical contact, but we had no contact information. I had to have Doctor Horse use his unicorn magic to send him a letter, and he just showed up about half an hour ago." Redheart explained.

"I was already close. Just over Appleloosa way." Stormy said, interrupting to explain. "I'd just finished helping a rancher out that way with his herd of sheep and was just about to ramble on when I got the message." He went on. "So, don't worry about how long it'll take to recover. I've got nowhere to be anytime soon."

I couldn't help but feel the rekindling of a happiness in my chest at this revelation. My boy was back, and maybe this time I'd even be able to apologize properly for all the mistakes that I'd made. He didn't even seem angry or upset. It was more as if he were embarrassed, or worried that I'd start scolding him or something of the sort.

"Are you ready?" Stormy asked, to which I simply nodded as Redheart wheeled me into the hall and he stepped in behind to take over as she passed me into his care. We rolled down the long white hall into the light of a summer noontime which spilled in through the tall glass front of the hospital's entryway and received a friendly smile and wave of goodbye from the pony candy striper who was sitting behind the reception desk.

A few minutes later I was leaning my shoulder against the passenger window of one of the oldest rattle-trap trucks I'd ever seen. It wasn't exactly easy to get my cast into the truck, but we'd managed in the end, leaving me leaning sort of sideways with both rear legs extended at a strange angle.

The truck itself must have passed from farmhoof to farmhoof, being bought and sold, breaking down repeatedly until it had reached Stormy, who, despite his lack of impressive flying abilities, was quite talented with his hooves, or so he said, rambling as he helped me into the cab and loaded the wheelchair into the bed of the pickup. He'd fixed the vehicle up himself, and was proud that now, it would start up on the first crank despite its ancient appearance. It was a testament to his abilities that the truck did just that when he turned the key. The long bench seat that I found myself sitting on was more tape than fabric at this point, but most of the padding remained intact and no springs were poking into my rump. My own truck, left back at the house, wasn't in much better condition, though I'd been able to maintain the interior in a bit better condition than this. Its engine didn't purr like this one's though.

"Would you mind if we stopped for lunch?" Stormy asked suddenly breaking a silence that had gone on for several minutes as we approached the main part of Ponyville, not turning to look at me, his voice tight with some emotion that I couldn't quite place. "It's been a... while... since I've gotten the chance to eat, and it's a fair way back to Mustang yet."

I glanced around at the clean but threadbare and sparse interior. What caught my eye though was the level of fuel in the truck's tank. It was almost three quarters full. I smiled to myself, understanding that he wasn't asking if I could spare the time. He was broke. Likely all his bits had been put into the fuel tank to get him here from Appleloosa.

"Sure. I'm hungry too. I'll even treat, since you came all this way." I said, smiling and not caring in the least. Even if he was a penniless beggar, I'd welcome my boy with open hooves. "Burgers and Shakes sound good. Anything would be better than that hospital food though." I said, "No taste at all. I swear I don't know how they get all the flavor out of everything, but they manage somehow."

He couldn't help himself. He laughed, and I almost melted. It wasn't even a good laugh, but it was a genuine one, perhaps the first genuine laugh I'd heard from him since I'd put him on the bus for Cloudsdale.

The diner in Ponyville was bustling as we pulled into a space along one side of the diner, which had old fashioned carhops in roller skates zooming across the parking lot from car to car, taking orders, delivering trays of food, and smiling as they basked in increasingly warm sun that had already cleared the parking lot of ice and snow from the same storm that had collapsed my poor old porch. This was mostly because the storm hadn't dropped nearly as much ice and snow on Ponyville or the nearby Canterlot because of their weather pegasus, the same ones that my Storm Break had once worked with all those years back. They'd made sure that the storms greatest fury was diverted from the town. The country though? Where the farm was located? Well out there we just had to live with whatever bad weather came our way.

A red-maned pink bodied young unicorn filly wearing thigh high leggings and roller skates that laced up to her knees came up to the driver's window with a roar of skate wheels on pavement. Her cutie mark, predictably, was a pair of roller skates and some musical notes in bright red, for some reason, flying around them.

"My names Derby Dash! What can I get you?" She said, winking at Stormy, who seemed entirely uncomfortable with the interaction as she didn't wait for a response to her question but continued with her speech. "Remember that tonight, and every night this week, any profit from a dessert purchases will go to helping the Ponyville Filly's and Colt's roller derby league." She said, producing a pad and pen with a little flick of her magic horn. "So, what will you folks have?"

"Two double bale meals with sweet tea and apple pie." Stormy asked, looking to me for confirmation of the order. It wasn't what I'd have ordered for myself, but I nodded anyway, not interested in waiting for a second server to come back after I'd looked at a menu.

"Straight or curly?" she asked as the pen dashed across the pad, propelled by the magic of her horn.

"Pardon?" Stormy asked, not understanding the question.

She giggled, "Sorry. Your fries. Do you want them curly or straight cut?"

"Oh," he said, his ears twitching in the way I knew meant he was embarrassed. "Curly, I guess." He replied after a moment. The carhop rolled away and the silence between us drew out long, lasting through the meal until we were back on the road out of town. It lasted until just beyond the last of the buildings on Ponyville's main street drew to no more than a spec in the rear-view mirror. Then Stormy finally broke the silence.

"I hope it's okay if I stay with you for a while." He said, suddenly, fast, as if he'd been turning this statement over and over in his head and looking at it from every angle for some flaw in its presentation. He'd finally forced it out, and the sentence was laden with meanings that went far beyond the simplicity of its words. I could see from the look in his eyes that he knew all of them.

He was out of work again, with the job in Appleloosa behind and nothing ahead but more uncertainty. I remembered that sort of life. The one I'd led living in an old RV that only started half the times father tried to crank it. Stormy had fallen on a difficult time and found himself, for maybe the first time in his life, happy to have remembered that home was the place you could always come back to where someone had to take you in. For him, that was the farm where his father had grown up, where his mother lived, and from which he'd banished himself for the past ten years. But here was a chance to maybe earn back a place in this old life.

Not that I'd have asked him to earn it even if he'd just shown up on my rickety old porch before it had collapsed on me. I'd have taken him in gladly. But I sensed how he felt. That he needed this excuse to let himself return to me and to his past.

If that's what it took; then so be it.

"There's a lot of chores that need doing around the farm." I said, "I've tried to stay ahead of everything, but keeping up the garden, and with The Hayloft to manage, it doesn't leave much time left over for things like replacing the porch before it collapses." I said, first smiling but then grimacing as I recalled how long I was going to be dealing with my new wheeled circumstances, and all because I hadn't taken care of that problem sooner. Of course, I didn't know much about porches, so blaming myself for the collapse was pretty much twenty-twenty hindsight since the only warning I'd had was that the porch had been a little more creaky than usual for the past few months.

"I'll earn my keep." Stormy promised, giving me a look that said "thank you" as clearly as he was likely to be able to, at least for now.

I shook my head and looked out the passenger's window. "I'm really sorry." I risked saying, keeping my eyes averted so he couldn't see if I cried but looking at him through the slightly distorted reflection in the window glass. "I wish I'd never sent you to that place."

Stormy sighed and I could hear his hooves creaking as he gripped the steering wheel just a little tighter. "You don't need to apologize." He said, after taking some time to collect his thoughts. "It's me..." He continued, swallowing hard enough that I could hear an audible click in his throat as he did. "I'm the one who should be ashamed." He gave a bark of laugh without humor. "I was ashamed. Too ashamed of how I'd failed you." He began to shake and tremble, the bright, glistening line of wet tears beginning to stream down his face.

The truck rocked, the struts creaked, and lose pebbles that bordered the road popped under the trucks slowing tires as Stormy brought the vehicle to a stop. He slammed the truck into park and turned to face me, one hoof on the steering wheel while the other brushed uselessly at the trails of tears cascading down his face, trying to clear his vision.

I turned to face him as he continued to speak. "I spent years being angry at you for sending me away," he said, "but as I got older and saw the lives of the other Wonderbolts..." He sniffed and sobbed, shaking his head. "The ones who went on from flight school to do important jobs like dads. They were happy. Seeing their lives and accomplishments made me realize that I'd squandered that same opportunity. Opportunities you gave me." He told me, taking my hoof in his as my own tears started to flow, entirely outside of my control now.

I wanted to reassure him, to just tell him that everything was going to be okay, but I could feel that he was on an emotional knife's edge. I was afraid that anything I did or said, taken the wrong way, could destroy our fragile newly budding relationship before it even had a chance to take root, so I refrained from speaking and only allowed myself that single clasped hoof for the moment.

"I didn't understand then that I didn't have to follow in dad's hoofprints." He admitted. "Until it was too late. Even at flying, I wasn't the worst student, so I've been able to make my way, doing this and that, but I never really fit in the way I should with other pegasus. It took me years to realize that it was because I just wasn't where I really belong. I wasn't at home, on the farm with my hooves in good black soil." He said. "All the best times that I can remember were those spent in our little garden tending the crops that we'd grown and nurtured with our own hooves." He finished, sighing with a long-held longing that I'd have never guessed at.

I sniffled back my tears and gave him a smile. "So, you want to be a farmer, like your grandpa?" I asked, thinking of the gone-to-seed fields around the farm where I'd lived alone for the past ten years, unable to do much more than maintain my simple back yard garden. It was always enough to feed both of us when he was a colt though, and to provide some much-needed extra income from selling at the farmer's market in Mustang. If he wanted to farm, there was plenty of land there for it, but it was almost as raw as land could get. Entirely reclaimed by Equestria as wilderness. There would be years of work just turning most of it back into anything vaguely resembling working farmland.

Though the air coming from the trucks vents was warm, it felt chill on the tracks of the tears I just hadn't been able to hold back; hard as I'd tried. "Your dad would've loved that," I told him, but he gave me a skeptical look that hurt my feelings a little; as if he'd just outright called me a liar.

"You don't have to do that." He said, his tone on the verge of being really upset. "Dad was a flier. I know that. I've met a lot of his old Academy friends and their children. He'd never have wanted to be a farmer."

I couldn't help but give a small laugh in response as I nod enthusiastically, in complete agreement with that. "All quite true; for himself. But your dad wasn't the snob some of his fellow pegasus were. How else do you think he ended up with a simple earth filly like me?" I asked, continuing to chuckle at his look of surprise.

"He respected your grandfather." I went on, explaining after I'd stopped chuckling. "He might not have wanted to work the land, but he always respected it, and his dad. He loved this farm and he might even have settled down here one day if it hadn't been for..." I began, then butted up against the thing that had happened; the reason that my son had not only never met his father, but also had missed out on knowing his grandparents as well, a thing that I'd always had difficulty talking about to anyone.

It was my own namesake that did it. A twister came down one dreary afternoon and cut a line across the farm like the hoof of some giant. Storm Break had been visiting his parents, helping his father with some chores. I wasn't even sure what they really did. It was something that the pair of them shared together that wasn't for either me or Stormy's mom to know about. But I had no qualms about that since mares often had our own special secrets and activities that we didn't share with our stallions.

The storm was one of those freak things that just sometimes happens. One moment the sky was just a little gray and threatening maybe a light rain, and in the next moment, the barn they'd been working in was being torn apart around them and pulled up into the sky.

I quickly shook off those thoughts. I'd never seen any of that. I'd dreamed about it. For years I'd dreamed about it in my nightmares. The wind and the flying debris battering my Storm Break down again and again even as he attempted to lift into the sky and battle the storm. His mother rushing from the safety of her kitchen and being struck by a flying bit of farm equipment, and his father simply falling beneath a collapsing wall of the barn. I'd seen them all die in a dozen different ways more brutal even than what probably happened. But eventually, the nightmares had passed, and I was left with only the memories of what I'd really seen. That six-inch-deep trench. The splintered debris of red painted wood from the barn littering the fields for miles in all directions, and the three still forms that lay covered with blankets that had been brought out of the house, which had been almost entirely untouched by the storm. The only three people I'd ever really been able to call family.

I felt the words catch and clench in my throat, my heart ached in that way it did sometimes these days when I came across his old pictures in the attic or some little thing that lay around the house, sparking memories of his smile, his touch, his laugh. Aching still, but not burning the way it had back then. That was all long in the past now, and nothing could change what had happened. But the same wasn't true for Stormy. With him I still had a chance. We both did.

I forced myself to continue, knowing that I'd paused for far too long for the silence to be comfortable anymore. "If your dad hadn't died so young," I went on, my voice raspy with the lump that seemed to have taken up residence in my throat, "he'd be proud to see you following in his father's hoofsteps." I assured him.

He'd gotten himself back under control during my long pause to work through my own emotional baggage, and the tears from his admission were mostly gone, his eyes cleared, as he turned back to the wheel and put the truck into gear once more. He pulled back on to the old, cracked, cobble paved road with an audible whine from the mostly bald old tires.

We passed the rest of the drive silently. He was watching the road and seemed to brood, but maybe he was just planning, there was no way for me to know. But to me, at that moment, he seemed far away and unreachable, a distinct contrast from his earlier tearful admission that had seemed to bring us close for the first time in so long. I, on the other hoof, found myself too open and raw, torn by those old memories I'd uncovered. Even more than I'd been since the last time I'd talked to Stormy. A meeting that hadn't gone quite as well as this one had done.

Early summer had been a beautiful time in Cloudsdale. Puffy white clouds were everywhere, and the town was abloom with the small rainbow of colorful flowers that pegasus usually preferred for their gardens, Light, flowery plants that scented the air. I'd saved up enough money to go see my Stormy graduate from the Academy. Even if he wanted nothing to do with me; I'd still decided to go. I loved him; even if he'd grown to hate me for trying to do what I thought was best for him. Or at least that's what I'd told myself. When I'd arrived at his dormitory, he'd even seemed happy to see me, though he'd been distracted and busy with a dozen other things trying to get ready for the graduation ceremony.

He'd been a bit dismissive but generally kind with his words as he excused himself and asked if I'd have time to sit down and talk after graduation day. But that was better than the open hostility I'd almost expected. It gave me hope that we might reach some equilibrium in our relationship after that day and maybe he'd even find a way to forgive me for my failings as a mother one day. So, I'd agreed, told him that I was proud, and invited him to meet me the next day, for lunch, after he'd celebrated with his friends.

I didn't know that he'd be spending that night not with friends, since he had few of those in the Academy, being one of the worst performing graduates, who'd made it through, most said, on the strength of his father's name. This hadn't done him any favors in making friends, I later discovered. So, it wasn't friends that he spent that night with but instead his fillyfriend of four years named Rain Dancer, a rainbow tailed Pegasus with the lithe figure and light agile body of a true weather flier. Unlike Stormy, she'd received dozens of offers to take jobs in places as far away as Manehatten and Los Pegasus, while Stormy had only one opportunity. Or at least he'd thought it was one. He thought he'd follow his heart and go wherever Rain Dancer decided to go. He was sure that he'd be able to find work wherever they ended up together.

But Rain Dancer had other ideas. I didn't know most of this until many years later, even long after the events of this story, and it was even longer before Stormy revealed to me just what it was that she'd said to him that night, but when I eventually did find out' I was furious. It wasn't even that she was mean or hateful. That might have made things easier. It was that she did it only because she could. Because he'd been there and vulnerable, easy to manipulate. That was all.

Rain was good at manipulating those around her, as it turned out. She thought of ponies being just as changeable as the weather, under her guiding hoof, and she enjoyed manipulating the ponies in her life almost as much as she enjoyed pushing clouds around Equestria's skies. Stormy didn't understand any of that, at least not then. I'd spoiled him. I admit it. All my attention had been for him, and he'd done almost everything with me from the time he could walk. So, when he met Rain, he just couldn't understand that it might be any other way between them.

"Come on Feather head; we're not right for each other. You see that don't you?" She'd told him when she'd showed up at his dorm just long enough to say goodbye. Which I suppose, in her own strange way, meant that she did care about Stormy. Enough not to just ghost him entirely.

This had been her response to his question at seeing her luggage packed into the back of another pony's hatchback waiting with the engine running at the curb. "What's all that? Are we leaving already? I'm not even packed." He'd said, confused, or just not quite believing that what his brain was telling him, that this was really the way she was going to announce that she was leaving him.

"It was fun though." She went on, leaning in to nuzzle his throat just that special way he'd always liked the best. She was even crying, again, as if she were really hurting at their pending separation even though he'd had nothing at all to do with it.

It made him begin to look back through their long relationship with new eyes. He recalled all the long evenings she'd spent studying with other ponies that never seemed to be other fillies. He thought of all those times he'd been trying to save his meager bits; what little he could spare from his part-time job flying packages overnight from Cloudsdale to Ponyville and she'd always seemed to know just when he'd saved up enough to do something because she'd start asking for something. Dinner, dancing, tickets to a concert or play. There was always something. And he realized how often he'd bought those tickets or given her bits only for them to get used by Rain and her friends while he had to be at work.

"You were the best one of all my boyfriends." She told him, giving his lower lip a warm moist little lick from her delicate little pink tongue.

"What do you mean; of all your boyfriends?" He asked; his nose paling and his chest tightening with anger and fear. He'd already guessed, but it was different hearing an open admission and just thinking it in your mind. As hard as he'd ignored the truth, unwilling to see what was going on, it was now staring him in the face. "How many were there?" He asked, horrified that he'd even asked, both wanting the answer and wanting to run from it.

"Ten, eleven. Does it really matter." Rain said, sighing and rolling her eyes. She was growing exasperated enough that she even dropped the pretense of her teary emotional goodbye. "You were fun, okay, with all those earthy muscles." She told him. "But that's over. We're all grown up, and it's time for you to find a place with your own kind."

That hadn't been the end of the conversation. Many more hurtful things were said, but none covered any new ground. It was all rehashing earlier pain and humiliation and eventually Rain Dancer had just walked away, something that Stormy had found himself unable to do. He'd been left despondent, angry, brooding, and with no target for the rising loathing except himself as his emotions battered at him from the inside, his memories assaulting him with his own stupidity and blindness while he spent that night with no plans except to relive every manipulation, every lie, every intimate moment that had turned out to be only a play being acted out by others with him cast in the role of the buffoon, the jester of Rain Dancer's court. Oh, how they must have laughed behind his wings.

It was that Stormfeather who walked into the restaurant the next day. He'd looked rough, but I'd put that down to a night of carousing and celebration. He hadn't said a word. Just stood there and stared at the table, as if waiting for me to say something. I'd thought that he wanted me to start by at least admitting the mistakes that I'd made, so I finally broke and began to talk, and cry.

We hadn't even ordered when I'd attempted to make my apologies. I admitted that I felt like I'd abandoned him, that I knew I had but that I hadn't seen any other way, that I'd only done it because I wasn't smart enough, good enough, to help him towards the future that he deserved. The future he'd have now that he'd graduated. I told him how proud I was that he'd made it through.

But my apologies, my tears, and a night of letting bad feelings and rejection fill his every thought had stirred up his emotions into a storm that was as devastating as any twister. His feelings over being sent away were just too close, in his mind, to what Rain had just done to him. Abandonment. It was all just an act; a farce that meant less than nothing to me, and other fillies and mares like me. He'd let it all inside, where it was tearing him into strips of bloody emotional upheaval. In the end, he walked away; so angry that he'd given not even a single word of explanation, leaving behind only a broken chair that he'd kicked aside in his wake and me, sobbing with the certainty that I'd broken things between us for good and didn't even know how.

Somehow, I pulled myself back out of my memories and managed to stop dwelling on the past just about the time we pulled into the gravel lot in front of The Hayloft, the place where I'd worked for over twenty years now. It'd been maybe the fifth job I'd gotten after moving to the farm and realizing that crops didn't just magically grow themselves out of the ground and that I had no idea what I was doing. I'd started by going to neighboring farms and asking for any sort of work they had. I'd spent days tilling, planting, picking, mending fences, and I'd picked up just enough knowledge to make a go at our little backyard garden. It might have turned out differently had I not gotten the job at The Hayloft before spring planting came around. I might have ended up a real farmer myself. But I had, and so I hadn't.

"It's not mine you know," I told Stormy as he reached down and opened the driver's side door with a tug on the old silver handle. The door creaked and sagged back until It had almost closed as Stormy turned to look at me with understandable confusion at the sudden remark.

"The farm." I went on, "I don't own it. I never have." I told him, wringing my hooves, worried that I might be writing my own eviction notice. "Your father and I... never married; you see," I explained. "So, I couldn't legally inherit anything. You were his next of kin though. So, it all went to you. The farm. The House. Everything your grandparents built there. It's yours."

Storm let go of the door handle and leaned back hard against the seat, his eyes stunned. "Why... why would you tell me that now?" He asked, looking at me with disbelief.

I lowered my muzzle and shook my head. "Why wouldn't I?" I said, sighing. "It's not something I'd try to keep from you. It was just a subject that never came up before." I pointed out.

Storm took a long few seconds to think, then right himself, school his expression, and finally nod as he climbed out of the truck and made his way around to my side to pull the wheelchair out of the bed, in silence as he considered the revelation. He was gentle as he helped me into the wheelchair, offering me one hoof for support while the other held the chair steady, and I could feel that we'd broken through some unseen barrier that had been standing between us for some long time. There was still rubble there, a stone or two to stumble on maybe, but one day we might just clean that rubble away and have a beautiful thing left in the place of the ruins.

"Thank you for trusting me." He whispered into my ear as he pushed me along towards the doors to The Hayloft. "You should talk to your boss while I head over and price some things from the hardware store so I can fix up that porch." He said, smiling, even if it was only a small smile.

I shook my head and took the banking card I'd set up in the Friendship Trust Bank that had a branch office in the Piggly-wiggly. It was in my little vinyl pouch where I kept a few bits in cash and an identification card which had all been placed into a small canvas tote bag on the side of the wheelchair by Nurse Redheart when I was getting ready to leave the hospital. I passed him the little card. "There should be enough in my account to buy whatever it is you need. I've been living spare for years now; so, I've got a few bits saved." I assured him as he gave me a worried look that I waved away. "You're right though. I should get something arranged at the diner while you see about supplies." I agreed, patting his hoof and pointing to the hardware store just a little way down the block as we reached the doorway into the diner and stopped. "I'll wheel myself on over after I get done inside. Okay?" I told him, caressing his hoof gently.

Stormy gave me another questioning look, this time glancing at my broken and cast covered leg, but I swatted his shoulder playfully and frowned. "I'm not an invalid, even without the chair." I told him. "I'll manage." I promised, answering his un-voiced concern.

"Okay. But if you need me..." He began again, but I smiled and waved him off again as I wheeled myself through the doors and into The Hayloft.

My entrance drew the attention of the young round bellied farm filly who was standing behind the register dressed in one of the little, gingham, aprons I had everyone wear as a sort of uniform for the staff. Her name was Penny Horseshoe and she was an even more thickly built earth pony than I was. She was also hugely pregnant with her second foal despite her tender sixteen years. Farm-girl earth ponies out here in the country rarely made it much longer than their first couple of heat cycles before they managed to attract one of the local stallions. If they wanted to make sure it wasn't their fathers or brothers who knocked them up the first time, or second, they'd leave home as soon as the first signs of their heat came and find themselves a neighbor boy to do the deed and settle down with him.

That sort of thing was getting less common as civilization edged its way slowly across Equestria's back country little by little, with modern medicine replacing the old ways and a pill beginning to change everything. That almost magical little pill that a filly, or mare, could take each week, then once a day for the six days leading up to the beginning of her cycle, to stop the cycle in its tracks. It was cheap and effective, and yet some of these old farm families, who were used to relying mostly on their own home remedies and treatments rather than modern medicine, were still stuck in the days when their daughter's had to run off and hide in the woods every few weeks, or just go ahead, give in, and get pregnant the way Penny had done.

"Hey, Boss lady," Penny said, frowning when she saw the wheelchair. "I'd heard it wasn't that bad." She fretted, looking me over. "That looks pretty bad though."

There were no customers in the diner, just Penny and the cook Sizzle who was somewhere in the back where I could hear him clopping around but didn't see him. The lunch rush had already ended, and the dinner rush was still yet to come. Not that our regular crowd of perhaps fifteen locals could really be considered a rush. Such a small town couldn't support the businesses in Mustang, it was the racers that made the difference and kept Mustang and The Hayloft going. Ponies from all over came west to the flat country, especially in the summer. They'd rent out some farmers fallow field for the season and set up a track to practice racing away from the prying eyes of their competition. It was almost like a summer tradition, and what brought the city folks out to infuse much needed life into Mustang year after year.

"Hey Penny. How long is it before you pop," I asked, grinning. "Because the doctor says I'm going to be off my hooves for the next sixteen weeks. That means we're going to end up shorthanded if that foal is going to drop in the next couple of weeks."

Penny nodded. "That's about right. Field Sprout's grammy says she'll be comin along in about seventeen days," She confirmed. "But I shouldn't be out for more than a week after. I can't afford to miss more work than that."

"You don't have to worry about coming back too soon. You should take at least two weeks. Even if you feel fine. It's important to spend that time with your baby. You need to bond properly with her," I said, waving away the concern. "I'll make sure your checks don't change. But I need you to find someone we can trust to run The Hayloft for us in the meantime." The reason I asked Penny instead of doing interviews and calling applicants myself was because, unlike me, she'd been to a lot of the barn socials and events held by the farmers of the community. Which meant that she'd know all the most likely fillies and colts coming of age who'd benefit from earning a few bits for themselves away from the farm. That was where we'd be more likely to find reliable help. Tourists were well known, by the locals, to be flaky and apt to move on unexpectedly, sometimes in the middle of a busy shift.

Penny didn't even have to consider for very long before giving me a smile and a nod. "I think I've got just the filly. She's still a little young, but Jelly Bean, my younger sister is perfect for the job. And she could get on the pill before she starts her first cycle. I've taught her numbers and letters and she's at least as good at both as I am," Penny assured me. This was indeed an important consideration given the lack of proper education for ponies outside the big cities. "At the very least, she wouldn't have to take up with the first farm-pony she ran across in the woods," Penny added.

The fact that her arguments were not that the filly would be good at the job but that she needed it to get away from the life that Penny feared was coming for her, made my mind up for me. Even if she'd been completely illiterate and ignorant of anything beyond pulling a wagon or a plow across a field, I'd have given her the chance to better her lot if that's what she wanted.

I gave Penny a nod. "Get her in here tomorrow. You'll have to train her and make sure she's paired up with the right cook. We don't want her ending up trying to ride herd on Misty or Sizzle by herself until you're sure she can handle it," I instructed. Misty was a flibbertigibbet and her brother Sizzle was just as enthusiastic about racing as most of the racers who passed through. To the point that he'd sometimes forget that he was supposed to be working instead of reading the latest racing magazines.

Penny pursed her lips. "She'll be a better cook than waitress, and It'll be better to break up the twins anyway. You can't trust either of them to keep the other on task. Misty will just sit down and talk to her friends while Sizzle sits back there and reads one of those racing magazines while they both ignore any customers completely. Jelly Bean might be a bit younger than Misty, but she's a hard worker and she knows how to ride herd on the farmhooves we hire for harvest season. I think she'll do just fine, and with both of us gone, I'll need her to be able to handle at least one of those hellions."

I nodded, my approval more for Penny's good sense than because I knew whether her choice would turn out good or bad in the end. She'd been a rather timid filly when I'd met her the first time, riding into Mustang in the back of her daddy's pickup with her belly almost as swollen with foal as it was now. She'd only been off the farm a few times in her whole life save a few visits to neighboring farms, but I could see how intelligent she was, all that wasted potential, and so I offered her a job waitressing if she'd come in a few extra hours a week an let me teach her how to read, write, add, and subtract. She'd accepted, excitedly, and had started work not long after she'd given birth to her son Field Sprout, and she'd turned out just as smart and capable as I'd thought.

"Call me with reports every day, alright?" I told Penny, smiling. "Once the filly comes, I want to hear from you all the time. It'll be important that you don't feel cut off and trapped by the new responsibility. Remember that you're not alone. I'll always be there if you need me."

I left The Hayloft feeling good that I was leaving it in capable hands, but any good feelings I might have harbored were already beginning to eek away as I watched Stormy loading supplies into the bed of his truck and began wondering why I hadn't just gone ahead and told him that I'd bought the diner almost five years ago. It had happened when the previous owners, a couple who'd lived in Mustang for most of their lives, had retired and moved to Vanhoover to be with their grandkids. I missed Old Miss Berrygal and her husband Clopper, but they'd made me a fair deal when they'd decided to sell. I'd sent them half the diner's profits the first year, a quarter the second year, an eighth the third, and by the beginning of last year, I'd owned the diner free and clear. It was never going to make me wealthy exactly, but I didn't have to wait tables or run the grill for myself anymore, unless I wanted too, which I usually did four nights a week. Or at least I had before my broken leg.

As I rolled up in my wheelchair, feeling more tired than I would've expected from the days events so far, and looked over the collected supplies, I reached the decision that I'd tell him the truth as soon as we were on the way to the house, which was still another few minutes outside town along Route 69, which ran all the way to Baltimare, though only if you followed it for about three hundred miles across big, flat, open farm country first.

The next few weeks were filled with moments. Some were uncomfortable moments like when I found out just how difficult it was to use the bathroom with one leg in a cast up to my hip. Others were amusing moments like when Stormy tried to cook breakfast for himself, not wanting to ask me to do it and put me out. He managed to set off every fire alarm in the house before we were forced to open all the doors and windows to let out the smoke. There were even a few emotional moments like when I brought out the box of his old things I'd kept stored away in my closet. There were mother's day cards he'd drawn for me when he was a young colt, just learning to read, and a letter he'd written to his father just after I'd told him why he was different from all the other colts and fillies when he'd asked why he didn't have a daddy like any of his friends.

There were so many of these little moments that I couldn't do justice to telling them all, the nuances and shades of meaning both good and bad for Stormy and me. So, I won't even try to do the impossible, but there was one very special moment for me, and it came at the end of that first month, when we'd finally really started to get settled in together and were growing used to having each other around. We'd both been on tender hooves up to that point, trying to hide away our worst habits from each other. No farting at the dinner table, no toothpaste crusted on the bathroom sink, no stiff socks wrapped in the dirty linens, at least at first, but even those things were slowly beginning to slip back to normal. And yet neither of us had started calling the other out on our peculiarities. We'd both been rather solitary beings, living alone and with nobody to judge us for our bad habits for so long that we weren't even sure which habits were really the bad ones anymore.

We'd been growing slowly more and more used to having each other around, but that morning Stormy had been gone by the time I woke up, and I'd honestly just forgotten to wonder where he was. It was raining. The sounds of pattering on the roof, as usual, reminding me of one of my life's greatest loves and his loss. I both enjoyed and hated the sound of an early spring storm like that one, and I was lost in thoughts of old times, the caress of my love's wings tight over my side as we walked so close that our legs might as well have been lashed together, and the way I'd been able to feel his heartbeat against me while we lay beneath the covers and I was supposed to be asleep but instead stayed awake, listening to his breath.

I was sitting in my chair on the porch thinking of these things and humming happily when a figure stepped out of the dark, shaking droplets from wings turned almost black by the rain. He was smiling and looking at me with that all too familiar crooked grin of his, the one he'd always give to those who lost to him in a race. Slightly condescending but still somehow good natured. Almost as if he were challenging them to a rematch with just a glance. He wore that old familiar bomber jacket, the one he'd loved so much back when we were dating that I'd barely ever seen him out of it. It was dark leather with big silver buttons and at least a dozen patches along the sleeves, across the back, and on the breast.

It was Storm Break...

His lips moved, but I couldn't hear him. My head was too full of the pounding of my heart. The fear and joy mingled together inside me for that moment as I wondered if he'd come to take me to heaven. I thought that I'd died there, with the rain pattering down around the house in a gentle cascade, on the new porch that Stormy had built for me. But no, I realized as I felt droplets shed from his wings running off my mane. Ghosts didn't get wet. I couldn't have died. And that wasn't Storm Break's dark mane and tail. Even as sodden as they were, they were still a creamy golden color, the same as mine.

"Are you okay mom?" Stormy asked, stepping up onto the fine sturdy porch he'd built to replace the collapsed one. He'd even managed to salvage almost half of the original materials and reuse them in the new construction, and he'd managed it all using nothing but the instructions from a couple of books he'd bought at the hardware store in Mustang.

I was up and out of the wheelchair without any real thought, dragging my cast as I limped the two steps to Stormy and threw my hooves around him, my eyes streaming with tears as I clutched him; a stand-in for the pony I'd loved and had never been able to let go of, even enough to let anyone else into my life. I knew how screwed up I was. So afraid of being abandoned or losing someone else that I couldn't bring myself to let a new pony in. But here was a pony who'd been a part of me; and a part of the one I'd loved so much. And I realized at that moment that he'd found my heart once more. Through our son, I'd fallen in love with him all over again, or at least that part of Stormy that was so much like his father. I was in love with my son. It felt shameful and wonderful both at once. I tried to let go of his neck and retreat into the house, but my damned leg wouldn't allow such an easy retreat as that, and I was forced to let him help me back into the wheelchair instead.

My face felt puffy and sore from the intensity of my emotions, but I managed to snuffle back my sobs enough to answer his question. "Yes... and no... It's the jacket." I tried to explain, dashing away tears with both hooves. "It was your father's favorite. I... thought..." I sobbed again, my hooves stroking the old tooled leather that seemed just a bit stiffer after having been stored somewhere for the past twenty-five years or so. "I thought it was gone. They never found it after... after the storm." I explained.

Stormy's eyes glittered with regret and understanding as he took my hooves and began to explain, "There was a little workshop out on the edge of the farm near where the old barn was. It had some old furniture inside, an old wooden standing closet, a table with a broken leg, and a bunch of old woodworking tools. I found it while I was trying to decide if putting the new barn up where the old barn used to stand was really the best plan. The shed was almost completely overgrown, but I managed to get inside. The jacket was hanging in the standing closet along with a couple of pairs of coveralls and some dusty old canvas aprons," he told me, starting to pull the jacket off to give it to me.

I shook my head and pushed it back towards him. It was like magic. Not only was this old jacket somehow suddenly here, but it also fit Stormy, a pony whose shoulders were broader and whose chest was deeper than his fathers had ever been, which meant that it hadn't been just any jacket to Storm Break either. It had to have been passed down from his own father, who'd been built much more like my son. It had been Storm Break's mother who'd passed on the sleek body and fast wings that had made him such a good storm flier. Which meant that the jacket was an heirloom that would now pass to its third generation.

"You should keep it," I said, smiling. "It's like it was meant for you Stormy. I've walked the hillside where that barn was what must be a thousand times. But it was you who saw that shed," I told him, certainty in my voice. "It's not me that it was meant for, or at least not directly anyway." I put my hooves around his neck and pulled him in for one more long hug. "Thank you, Stormy. Just thank you." I told him, nuzzling his throat before finally letting him go again.

That was the night when everything changed for me. It was the night when I stopped looking at Stormy as my son and instead began to see him as... a stallion. He was so broken. I didn't know exactly what it was that he'd been through after he'd graduated and pursued his ex-fillyfriend down to Los Pegasus. She'd ended up working, not as a weather pony, but as a show filly, basically little more than a flying stage prop for acts with far more talent than she had. But that's as much as I knew. Yet I could see a look that I simply didn't understand every time he looked at almost any female. It was something akin to fear but with a healthy bitterness and anger mixed in. So, I decided that I had to help him. And I started to plan.

Several more weeks passed and I grew more used to the cast and the wheelchair, finding it easier to get around and do most anything I could before, though with a little extra effort. I also spent those weeks growing frustrated as thoughts began surfacing more and more. With Stormy and I living so close together, just down the hall from each other, there was nobody there to keep my mind from going wherever it wanted to go. I had nothing to take my mind away from my inappropriate thoughts, and so I started trying to come up with alternatives. If I couldn't make him happy the way my body suddenly wanted too, then I'd turn my mind to finding him someone that could.

I turned my thoughts to finding him a filly. But I didn't know all that many of the local farm daughter's, and soon decided that it was time to try to kill two birds with one stone when I realized that I knew of at least one mare who might be able to help me. Penny was due to go back to work, and I decided that it wouldn't hurt anything if I did too. It would certainly give me something to do to keep my mind away from... other matters, and I'd be able to consult Penny on any matchmaking possibilities she might know of.

I told Stormy, since planting season would be coming up soon and I didn't want to be left alone in the house all day long while he worked in the fields, that I wanted him to start dropping me off at the diner in the morning and coming to pick me up in the late evening, when he'd be nice and hungry from a day behind a plow. My plan, of course, was to hire any potential matches Penny might suggest and arrange for them to chat him up as often as could be arranged. But as it happened, there was no need at all to start the matchmaking or hire anyone new. Jelly Bean, was more than enthusiastic about the idea the moment she'd overheard me talking about it with Penny.

"You're trying to find someone to match up with that pegasus that just left?" She'd asked, not shy in the least about going after what she wanted. I'd soon discover that she was that way with just about everything. Straightforward and honest. "I wouldn't mind that at all, if you don't object."

And I didn't. Jelly Bean had outperformed all expectations since coming to work at The Hayloft, and despite Penny's hopes for her Jelly Bean had flatly refused any idea of taking the pill. She'd still wanted the job though, but so she could find the right colt to cuddle up to when her cycle came around the first time. She wanted to be a farmer's wife. This was doubly surprising because Jelly Bean was the most gorgeous filly that I'd ever seen. She was the epitome of earth pony beauty and grace, her legs long and delicate looking but strong from years of working her father's fields. She excelled at cooking. She could bake biscuits that were almost literally to die for. Our business on the days she worked mornings had increased, with the locals making any excuse to come in and converse with the pretty filly and buy a few of her fluffy hot treats smeared with butter and honey.

At first, Stormy's reaction to the filly was typical; at least for him. Despite her beauty and her clear interest in him, he hesitated to do more than exchange a word or two with her or to pass more than a few minutes near her. But soon the determined filly realized that his growing interest in bringing the farm back into order was his weak point and she'd managed to break through his hesitance with her knowledge and willingness to share everything she knew about farming and ranching.

Soon, Jelly had taken to her efforts with a gusto that I found endearing. Stormy had been picking me up from the diner every night for a couple of weeks, and I thought that things were going very well. Jelly Bean was always there to greet him, sit down across from him, and chat about farming, which she turned out to be a fountain of useful information about. He had so many questions that I often just let them keep talking even long after I'd finished clearing the register and doing the days tally, updating the books, and even doing a quick wipe down in the kitchen. Since he always picked me up at closing time; there were never any customers around, and the place was pretty much shuttered behind the drawn blinds while the pair waited for me to finish up whatever I was doing behind my closed office door.

Not only had their discussions improved his mood around Jelly Bean, but his interactions with her had become less stilted and more natural. They'd formed a very genuine liking for each other, but was it love? Maybe not; at least not yet, but it was an interest beyond mere acquaintance. Yet things had a way of happening, and soon they began to move much too fast; biologically speaking. They'd only been talking and spending time together for two weeks, and only for the hour or so I'd been able to create in the evening.

Jelly and I had made a whole plan spanning the next several weeks at least. We intended for her to visit the farm for the weekend in only a few days with the pretense of wanting to show me some new recipes she wanted to add to the diner's menu. This would give her the chance to cook for Stormy at home where he was the most comfortable and would be the hardest place to get him used to having a new pony. To help him ease into having her there more often, she'd go out and help him look over the fields which would let them spend hours talking about farming if they wanted.

It was a good plan. It was just too bad that it didn't end up going that way.

It was early morning when the call from Penny woke me up. She'd been keeping a close eye on Jelly Bean, knowing that this reprieve of her cycle couldn't last forever. She'd called to tell me that she'd spotted the early warning signs and that Jelly was finally coming into season for the first time. The swelling, the scent, the sensitivity; all were there when they'd been getting ready for work. Penny had sent her to bathe and sprayed her liberally with cover scent, but knew that they couldn't take her into town in her current condition, nor could they stay on the farm, since the block spray would help for no more than the next day, maybe two at the most, assuming the filly could remember to reapply it.

"What do you want to do, JB," I asked kindly; when Penny passed her the phone. "We're not without options. The farm is safe; even with Stormy there I can explain what's going on and he'll stay in the new barn for a couple of weeks until it's passed," I offered. "Or have you picked out another potential partner already?"

"I'd still like to be with Stormy; if he'd have me," JB admitted, the lines crackling with a bit of static and making her voice sound tinny and distant. "I'd hoped for more time, but maybe I can talk to him now before the scent block wears off; ask him if this is what he wants too," She suggested. "If he wants to be with me but isn't ready to breed yet; then we'll do it your way. I'll let my heat pass and keep seeing Stormy until he's ready. But if he's not interested-" she started, a little hint of worry in her voice.

"If he isn't interested; we'll do whatever you want. We can deliver you to any farmer's son you'd like, even if we have to plug Stormy's nose to do it," I promised. "Or you can wait it out and try again in a month or two when you come into season again. Your heat will come regularly through the summer and stop around the time the leaves start to change, assuming that you don't start using the pill," I added, hopeful that she wouldn't give up even if Stormy wasn't ready to admit that he wanted to be with somepony yet.

"Stormy," I called, hanging up the phone and rolling myself out onto the porch. "We've got a change of plans this morning," I called out across the field towards the barn. He was just finishing up his morning chores before taking me into the diner where he'd normally get his breakfast, at least on the days when Jelly Bean was going to be working. This was supposed to have been one of those mornings, and so it was unlikely that anyone was going to be eating breakfast today. We weren't even going to be able to open the diner on time until Penny could get away, which wouldn't happen until Jelly was safe and secure. Penny wasn't going to risk one of their brothers getting to Jelly the way one of them had with her.

Stormy waved a hoof in acknowledgment and tossed the last bale of hay from the truck into the receiving pen. I almost cursed, remembering what else was supposed to be happening today. I'd forgotten that this wasn't a day with nothing much to do. We'd arranged for the delivery of a half dozen ewes, and they were supposed to arrive around noon, with the pair of rams due an hour or so later. We'd need to get there and back in time to meet the delivery truck. I wasn't so much worried about the work interfering with anything between Stormy and JB, there would still be several days for the ever increasingly fertile Jelly Bean to get anything that Stormy might be willing to give, but the deliveries would restrict our ability to take the filly somewhere else if Stormy decided to tell her that he wasn't interested.

Stormy clomped up the steps and gave me a smile that brightened my day even with all the thoughts spinning through my head. I reached out and took his hooves between mine and sighed, deciding that the only way to handle this was to be entirely honest. "Honey; we need to help out a friend," I began. "You know little Jelly Bean; from the diner. Well, she's a bit of a late bloomer and now she's been caught in a delicate position with spring right around the corner. She's coming into season, which means that she needs a place safely away from her brothers, or father, or the neighboring farmers, and their sons," I explained. "I offered to let her stay here, and I know you'll be put out since she'll have to stay with me in the house and that means you staying in the new barn, which is why I wanted to make sure you're okay with the idea. If you aren't; then we'll just pick her up and figure out something else." I said, a bit lamely, knowing that I wouldn't have a lot of time to come up with the new plan if things fell apart.

Stormy gave me a confused look and frowned as he asked, "If you don't want her around any of those other stallions, then why would it be okay for me to be so close?" He asked, latching onto the major flaw in my suggestion.

"There are two reasons," I answered. "The first is; being in season isn't like a gas attack or some form of mind control. Your body isn't taken over by some uncontrollable force, but it just makes a stallion want to breed. It makes her want to breed too. When you put those two things together, it makes things much simpler, and physical," I told him, feeling my ears twitching madly and my face heating as I explained the finer points of pony breeding habits to him. I'd thought that academy I'd sent him to would have done a bit better at this part of his education than it apparently had. "The second is that Jelly Bean wouldn't exactly mind if it were you," I added, trying to be completely nonchalant about this statement.

It wasn't a long step of logic from there for him to realize a good bit about what had been going on over the last few weeks. "You've been trying to set us up," He realized, his eyes going wide as he thought about how often he'd been seeing her at the diner. It didn't take much thinking back to realize that she wouldn't have been working every single night, yet she'd always been there when he came to pick me up. He probably would have figured it out anyway, eventually, but this had clearly sped up the process.

I nodded, meeting his eyes defiantly, and refusing to apologize even with my gaze. After all, I only wanted to help him find someone who might make him happy. "If you'd hated her, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. She'd be hiding out in a neighboring farmer's barn waiting for one of his sons to find her and make her his farm wife," I pointed out. "That's how it's usually done out here in the country Stormy. So yes. I've meddled, a little. But only so you'd meet and get to know one another. Her coming into season like this wasn't part of the plan, I promise," I finished.

"So, there was an entire plan?" He asked, his eyes widening in amusement as the corner of his mouth quirked up, but despite his attempt to seem unconcerned, I could tell that he was filled with tension from head to tail, which was swishing nervously back and forth.

I nodded, then shook my head, then shrugged. "We had a schedule. A few visits to the farm, a few meetings so you could keep talking about farming and getting to know each other; hopefully growing closer. I can see that you like her. I saw it the first time you let her sit down across from you at the diner," I said, doing my best not to let him know that I saw the tension rippling across the muscles of his back and wings, causing them to rustle very gently. "We really should go to pick her up, before it gets too late," I added, "or we might not make it back in time to meet the truck delivering the livestock." I pointed out, giving him a good reason to start moving rather than to freeze up with indecision.

"Mom," he said, his voice no longer amused but almost frightened. "What if I can't?" He asked, his throat clicking as he swallowed nervously.

I kept my face as neutral as I could, as I asked, "What do you mean sweetie?"

Stormy lowered his muzzle in a gesture that was almost despair, if the look in his eyes was any guide to the way he was feeling. "I've had... difficulties with having relationships." He admitted. "I haven't been able to approach anypony as anything more than friends for almost five years, ever since Rain Dancer... well, she finally did come back to me. But it... wasn't the way I'd always dreamed," He told me, his hooves clomping nervously against the boards of the porch as he shifted his weight back and forth from one hoof to another.

"You can tell me about it." I told him very softly, trying not to scare him away from the topic that he was obviously in a sensitive place about, even five years later, if his timeline was right.

He gave me a frightened look. He wasn't scared of me, but of whatever he'd repressed along with this story that I was asking him to talk about. But I also saw that he wanted to talk about it. Maybe for the first time ever. So, I followed what I'd discovered to be the best advice when dealing with Stormy and any decision; and waited. After a very long pause, he began to speak, moving behind my wheelchair and pushing me towards the steps that led down into the dooryard. "We might as well get moving while I tell you the story, or we just might not make it." He said, his tone resigned and strained as he slowly pushed me towards where he'd left his truck parked beside the receiving pen.

"After graduation; I still wasn't over Rain. I didn't know how to let go of someone that I'd believed I'd shared a deep connection with for four years. So, I worked a few odd jobs, saved up a bit, and bought a bus ticket to Los Pegasus, following in her hoofsteps." He began, maintaining a trudging pace. "She wasn't pleased to see me. She'd been turned down for the job she'd originally wanted, which was to be a weather flier, but she'd decided that working as a stunt flier would do just as well, and to get started she'd taken a job as a backup flier in one of the big production stage shows called "Cirque du Solpony", but those ponies had been trained almost from birth as trick ponies, and Rain was finding breaking into stunt flying a lot more challenging than she'd imagined."

Stormy stopped speaking long enough to help me into the cab of the truck and lift the chair into the bed before jumping into the driver's seat and starting the engine. As he drove us towards the road, he continued. "She... had me removed from the set once and filed a restraining order against me for stalking a couple of weeks later, but I was only watching her I swear. I wasn't harassing or even trying to talk to her. I'd found a little work, but after the police picked me up and held me for forty-eight hours, I lost it, which meant that I ended up leaving Los Pegasus anyway." He told me as we turned west, towards Mustang and the dozens of farms stretching southbound along route 66, which, coincidentally, led almost straight to Los Pegasus, though it was still a good distance away. "I wandered for about six months, working odd jobs here and there, not looking for anything that might tie me down, make me want to stay."

"Until the restraining order expired," I asked, and got a nod of agreement as he continued.

"I went back and found her again, though she wasn't with any stunt show anymore. She was working as just another show filly, dressing in spangles, and little else, and flying over the crowds in the casinos while the real performers sang, or danced, or whatever it was that show pony was famous for." He sighed and shook his head. "And she was somehow proud that she'd worked with famous people without even realizing how far she'd fallen. She didn't take out anymore restraining orders, but she still didn't want me to stay. She was friendly enough for a couple of weeks, but then things between us soured, and I'm not even sure why. She told me to get out or she'd have some guy she knew break my wings." He grimaced. "As it happened, she probably could've. But I wouldn't find that out until another six months had gone by."

I couldn't keep the concerned look from passing over my face, but I did my best to keep my eyes averted towards the window and the passing scenery of fields being prepared for the early, cold-weather planting that would start soon.

"I'd thought the relationship was really done. Finally getting it through my head that she just didn't want me, or anything to do with me, and I hadn't planned to go back, but a job I got just happened to take me through there again. This time I didn't seek her out at all. It was her that somehow found me and showed up at the door to my hotel room." He said, his face already beginning to twist into a mask of pain as he recalled the meeting. "I couldn't help that I still had feelings for her; could I?" He asked, almost begged, and I had no answer. Not for this...

Or maybe I did... "I think that sometimes you don't have a choice, at least not once you've given yourself to another pony fully, heart and mind, the way I did with you... your father..." I finished and gave him a supportive smile.

He breathed a long sigh and gave a nod, closing his eyes for just a moment to calm himself, which was fine since the road we were on went straight for miles in both directions with no vehicles in sight from either of them. He opened them again as he resumed. "She had two broken wings, set in splints, but busted up bad enough that flying was never going to be a career choice for her ever again. She'd learned, she promised me, that she'd been wrong to use me, to lead me on the way she had, and told me that she'd tried the same thing with a bad-ass loan shark she'd been stupid enough to date, and that he'd taught her better when she'd tried to break up with him and leave town. He'd had both her wings crushed, and then, in addition to the thousands of bits in hospital bills she owed, he insisted that she would have to pay back more thousands of bits for the dinners he'd bought her, the shows he'd taken her to, or he'd make sure that flying wasn't the only thing she'd be unable to do ever again."

I was disgusted at the very idea of somepony who'd do that to another, even one as evil as I was starting to believe that Rain Dancer had been. If Stormy hadn't been able to see it back then, I could see it in every word that came out now. Yet these were evils of the past. Ghosts that I had no power over except to help to exorcise them, and to do that; I first had to listen. So, that's what I did. I listened in silence as he poured out all the hurt like a treasure of jewels too sharp to touch.

"She told me that she wanted to be with me, to leave with me, that she'd been trying to come find me when I never came back the last time, and that's how she'd gotten involved with this bad pony who'd hurt her." He sighed again, this one showing that he'd come to terms with the bad decision he'd made long ago, and which couldn't be taken back. "I agreed, and we talked all night, making plans about how we'd work and pay off her debts, saving a little here and a little there..." he went on, but then stopped. "It went on for almost two years. I sent her almost everything I made, or at least everything that I didn't have to spend on food. I took any job I could get, wandering from place to place, but never managing to find anywhere to settle down, probably because not settling down had become..." he paused and cocked his head in thought, "...my way; I guess is the best way to put it. It was familiar. Habit. So that's how I went along."

"She kept in touch. Sent me letters telling me about how we'd paid off the loan shark, and then how we'd paid off her debts at the hospital." He laughed humorlessly. "That's when I thought she'd leave me. When all her debts were paid. But I'd been prepared for that and had told myself for months that, if she did leave, at least I could feel good that I'd saved her, in my own pitiful way." He said, his tears dripping now onto the steering wheel. "Which is why it was so much worse that she kept sending me those letters. Touching words. Plans for the future." He went on, his voice hard; like he was forcing himself to talk through a throat full of river stones. "I let myself fall in love with her all over again in those letters. I kept sending money, believing that one day the letter would come telling me that it was time to come home." He hung his head again. "I was still such a fool." He admitted.

"I went back to Los Pegasus... just one more time." He told me. "To surprise her with a bonus I'd gotten; enough money to buy... well, a truck. Maybe only a used one, but one that I could get running well, which would allow us to hit the road together, for the first time. Together forever." He laughed again, stopping the truck on the side of the road just at the end of the driveway that would lead up to the farm where Penny and Jelly Bean would be waiting, probably hidden in the bushes somewhere nearby.

"She'd married the loan shark. They had three foals, and a big ranch outside the city." He told me, his voice so broken, so wounded, that I almost begged him to stop, to spare himself this last pain, whatever it was. "One of them.... Well she looked just like me," He told me, his teeth gritting as the tears washed down his muzzle in uncontrollable streams.

I didn't have to hear the rest, and wouldn't have asked him to talk about it more for the moment in any case since we could see the forms of Penny and JB moving towards us from a bit up the road, ducking out of the brush and stopping only long enough to spray a heavy mist of scent blocker over every inch of the filly. I thought I'd known how bad it could be, but I hadn't. I knew he'd tried to talk to Rain; to get her to tell him about his daughter, maybe even tried to meet her, but he'd been beaten by the loan shark's goons. I knew that he'd gone back and had been beaten again. I wondered how many times he'd suffered under the hooves of other ponies trying to get back the life he'd thought he was going to have, the one he'd dreamed he'd get. I knew it all; because its what I'd have done for him.

But there was one more thing that he had to say, and he was determined to say it, even as he washed the tears from his face and put on a neutral look for the pair of ponies that were coming.

"When I wouldn't stop coming. When I got a lawyer and demanded paternity tests. He had her... my daughter... killed. Run over by one of his men just outside her school." He finally said, putting away all that pain, and all the horror at this admission, behind a mask of calm that I couldn't even believe was possible, not even five years later.

A few minutes later there were four of us crammed into the cab of the truck, with me against the door since my cast made it difficult to shift any further along the bench seat, then Jelly Bean, sandwiched between us, with Penny on her other side and pressed tight up against Stormy. The cover scent was working, though imperfectly, but at least when combined with keeping my window open it was enough to allow him to concentrate on the road and not anything coming off the filly. It's lack of one hundred percent effectiveness was evidenced by the uncomfortable shifting and adjusting that Stormy had to do several times while we all tried to keep our eyes from drifting down and to the left while our ears twitched; well mostly. Jelly Bean's gaze didn't always drift away quite as quickly.

I wanted to address the bombshell that Stormy had dropped, but it wasn't the sort of thing that I could just start talking about with other people in the truck between us. I wasn't even sure if it was something that I should talk about. I wanted to ask questions, like, "how did you know he'd had her killed," but that would be ridiculous. It didn't really matter if he had; because Stormy would always believe it. Not even rock-solid proof would ever be enough to convince him. My instinct was to ask how he'd let the monsters get away with such a thing, but I'd already worked out logically that it had never been within his power to do anything about it. The police had likely ruled her death accidental. Having no proof to the contrary, and with no paternity test even to prove a possible relation to the victim, he'd had no hooves to stand on. He might have stayed around long enough to be put in jail once or twice more after a second restraining order, but the rest was predictable.

He'd eventually had to leave. He'd spent five more years wandering, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened, and terrified that making any connection with any filly or mare might lead to another pain so vast that it had taken five years just to cross it and realize that he just wanted to go back home.

Now I could only hope to make that home the best one that he could dream of. The one with more love and support than he'd ever imagined from that evil creature he'd been enchanted by. My mind was set. I was determined.

"You should go in and have a shower. Reapply that cover scent, and then you and Stormy could have a talk; if you want to." I said, turning a questioning look at Stormy.

"Can it wait until this afternoon?" He asked, glancing over to the enclosure that he'd been preparing for the delivery when I'd called out to him earlier.

Jelly Bean looked more than a little relieved at this suggestion, revealing just how nervous she'd been since pulling up to the farm. "I'd like that. We can talk over dinner. Maybe cooking will take my mind off things. Give me a little time to think," She said, giving me a slightly apologetic look that I took to mean that she was maybe having second thoughts. Were they about Stormy, or about the breeding in general?

I nodded. "Penny; you can drive my truck back to The Hayloft," I said, turning my wheelchair and shepherding them both ahead of me towards the house. This was mostly for Stormy's benefit, though getting JB under the cover of a safe, or at least relatively safe house, wouldn't do Penny any harm either, based on the overly protective aura she was trying to project over her little sister. For Stormy though, it was a more physical need, since he'd been stuck hiding behind the truck since we'd arrive, lest he revealed himself entirely to all three of us right there in the dooryard. The further away, and behind more doors, that Jelly Bean went, the better he'd be able to organize his thoughts. The less needful his body would become, and the easier concentrating would be.

I pointed to the keys for my truck, hanging on a hook beside the front door. "The one with the little wooden fob." I told Penny, who took them down and nodded to me in thanks. My truck wasn't much worse than the one that Stormy owned, and he'd done a bit of work on it in his spare time over the last few weeks, so it was running better than it had, pretty much since I'd bought it off the lot in Mustang. It was a light blue and a little smaller than a farm-all, with a narrow strip of silver edging, or maybe accent; I wasn't sure what it was called, running down either side.

"Do you want me back here tonight?" Penny asked JB, tossing the keys from hoof to hoof with nervous energy. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to Jelly. If you ask; I'll come back, and stand watch all night if I must," she told the filly.

Jelly gave her a smile and took the hoof not holding the keys between both of her own as we all stopped on the back porch near where my truck sat parked beneath an awning. "I love you, sis." She said, leaning in and giving Penny a peck on the cheek, rubbing her forehead against her sister's so their forelocks brushed together. "This is what I want, big sister. I might be nervous; for now, but I'm sure someone who's got a little more experience than the two of us put together will be able to help me through this." She assured, and both fillies turned and gave me an appraising look; as if I was supposed to suddenly impart some miraculous wisdom, or glow, or maybe just ascend into the heavens without the aid of wings.

After a long, uncomfortable minute, I nodded and did my best to give them at least some sort of reassurance. "I'll do my best to answer any questions you have. Even the embarrassing ones." I promised Jelly Bean, turning to Penny. "And I promise I won't let her get hurt. In any sense," I swore. "Not if I can prevent it," I added for her benefit.

Penny climbed into the truck and waved one last time before she backed up and finally drove off, heading to the end of the drive. I watched the taillights flicker and stutter for a moment as the truck pulled up to the road and turned west. Soon it disappeared behind the vegetation rising out of the western field just beyond the new barn and livestock pen and I was finally alone with Jelly. A situation that I was beginning to worry about after all those barely veiled hints that she wanted some sort of answers from me; though what those were remained to be seen.

"She's a good sister," Jelly Bean said, tossing her mane lightly as she shifted the weight on her back hooves from left to right. Fidgeting brought on by her current condition. It was like an itch in a place that she'd never be able to reach, and on the first day, it was as mild as it was going to get, I knew. "But I didn't want to talk to her about this. She doesn't like her life and her life is everything I've ever wanted. She tried to talk me out of what I decided every time that I asked for advice or guidance, so I eventually stopped asking."

She pushed my chair back inside and we went to make ourselves comfortable in the kitchen, me with a pot of tea and some teabags and with Jelly going through our ice box with interest, planning what she'd be making for dinner even as we started talking, her nerves settling a bit now that she had something to distract herself with.

"I'm still sure I want this life. That hasn't changed. But that doesn't have to mean getting pregnant right this second. I think Stormy and I have a real connection. He seems to love the earth and the soil as much as I always have. He's a born farmer, even if he's so green right now that he almost smells like freshly mowed grass," She said, chuckling as she chopped vegetables and put a pot of water on the stove, preparing to make a stew by the looks. Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, squash, okra, peas, and two types of beans were laid out on the counter ready to be prepped and added to the pot, set to cook all day on low heat.

"I think you'd make a good match for him; and if you care about him, all the better," I said, smiling, waiting for the tea to steep. "So why were you so nervous before? When we first got here," I asked, curiously. "It almost seemed like you were about to change your mind entirely." I pointed out.

Jelly Bean's ears twitched, and her fast accurate slicing paused for just a moment before resuming again. "I'm not sure..." she began, her ears laying back in her nervousness and embarrassment. "Is it going to hurt?" She finally asked, looking up with hopeful frightened eyes. "My friends all say something different. Magpie said she barely felt anything before it was already over, but Happyhoof told me she'd bled for almost a week after, she was torn up so bad."

JB stopped chopping and put a hoof up to cover her mouth and her eyes went wide as she told me something she probably thought of as one of her friend's biggest secrets. "Happy said that Clyde's thing was really big and that he wasn't as gentle that first time as he learned to be with her later," She went on. "Stormfeather's... thing... didn't look small, but I haven't seen many... um... firm ones before," She finally finished, her eyes glancing away.

"It shouldn't hurt," I reassured the filly. Not if the Stallion is doing things right and not just letting himself go entirely feral. Stormy's thing was a bit above average, at least in my experience. But there's nothing wrong with average, or even a little bit on the small side. It's more about how well the Stallion uses it and how much you want to feel good. That's important. If you can't let yourself feel good, there's not much your Stallion will be able to do to make up for that." I told her with a reassuring look that I hoped made me seem wise or at least as if I wasn't just making this all up, which was almost entirely what I was doing. My six lovers didn't exactly make me Equestria's most experienced mare, after all.

"It sounds like Clyde was far more excited and enthusiastic than experienced and maybe went about things a bit too forcefully their first time together," I suggested, trying to remain delicate about the topic. "That's a lot more likely to happen when they're young, inexperienced, and lacking in the self-control that maturity helps nurture." I went on. "But that being said. It's up to you to make sure that your lover knows what feels good to you and what doesn't. You should never be afraid to tell him that something he's doing hurts or even if it's just something you don't like. And on the other side of that coin; you have to listen to what he wants and doesn't and maybe sometimes make compromises." I explained, pouring out two cups of steaming dark jasmine tea infused with honeysuckle nectar.

The scent of the jasmine bloomed throughout the room as I slid one of the cups towards the filly, who picked it up and took a small delicate sip, her eyes opening a little wider in pleasure and surprise at the flavor.

"Were you scared your first time?" She asked, resuming her chopping of vegetables and doing her best to make the intensely personal conversation we were having seem normal.

I nodded. "Intensely." I admitted. "Especially since my mother..." I paused and grimaced, "pardon, my stepmother, never bothered to explain what was going to happen to me." I looked down into my teacup thoughtfully and then shook my head. "But then maybe she thought I'd already started my cycles by the time she met my father. He'd only been with her for a couple of years. My real mom... well, who knows. She just snuck off one night. Tired of my father's constant wanderings."

"That's... terrible," Jelly said, giving me a sad look.

I shook my head and waved a hoof dismissively. "That's all long in the past and over. I fell in love with Storm Break and was lucky enough that we were living together by the first time I came into season. So, he was able to help me through it. Explain what was happening, though that didn't help much since he only knew what he'd learned from his classes on pony health and wellness, which wasn't all that much." I admitted, grinning and sighing from the rather amusing memory that had been horrifyingly embarrassing at the time. "But he did it all with such kindness and love that by the time we actually got around to the breeding part..." I sighed again and shook my head. "Well... I suppose you'll see. Just try to go slow. That's my best advice for you."

"But what if he doesn't want me?" She asked, her voice more frightened even than it had been before. "I didn't think it would matter, but... I like him. So much that I stopped trying to find any other ponies. So now it's just him, but it's so soon. And I don't want him to take me the way some farm boy would. For the first time... I understand why I should want him to want me for more than just breeding," She admitted, her hooves working at the vegetables as she let all her worries, fears, and thoughts, flood out.

"That's why you want to cook for him tonight. You want him to see that you're not just a warm place to plant his seed." I said, smiling. "That's a good thing Jelly. It's okay to be wanted as a mare and a pony both, to be needed in a way beyond the merely physical."

"But the way I feel," Jelly said, her back legs shifting again in discomfort. That growing itch that I remembered well from before the days I'd been able to get on the pill myself. Only Stormy had been nearby, and being too young for such concerns, had been unaffected by the aphrodisiac of hormones I'd been giving off.

I swallowed and paused, considering for a long moment before finally giving her a nod, "If you two decide to wait. I'll help you. The same way mares have been helping each other get through their cycles for generations before the pills," I said, my own ears twitching a bit now. "Though only if you want me to," I added at the widening of the filly's eyes as the understanding of my meaning got through her embarrassment.

After that, our conversation fell back onto a more normal track, and both of us were happy to be able to have the diversion of each other's company as we talked and got to know each other, something that I was just beginning to realize that I'd neglected in favor of trying to put her together with Stormy. Maybe having a few days together, just the two of us, wouldn't be a bad thing.

The dinner was delicious. I ate my portion sitting in my wheelchair out on the back porch looking out at the milling ewe's in the pasture and the pair of rams strutting about the enclosure where they'd been confined. A small wooden table sat beside me holding half a pitcher of sweet iced tea on its narrow round top. I'd almost emptied the pitcher by the time JB called for me to come back inside. It seemed, whatever the future might hold, the pair had finished their meeting with a rather quick conversation. So that by the time I rejoined Jelly at the table in the kitchen I could see Stormy crossing the dooryard towards the barn with his bowl and half of a loaf of bread on a tray. Yet JB was beaming with happiness as I widened my eyes in question.

"I take it your talk went well?" I asked, rolling up to the table and giving her a hopeful smile.

She nodded. "He wants us to spend more time together. I'm not surprised. It's only been two weeks since we first met really. I can't fault him for not wanting to move quite that fast." She admitted, though her tone wasn't just hopeful but also purposeful and determined. It sounded as if she'd already decided what, and who, she wanted, and was already making her plan on how to get both.

Whatever those plans might have been, we had to get through the next two weeks, or thereabouts, without letting JB go mad from that itching feeling that was going to be crawling all over her body before it was through. We spent the next four days together, doing everything from telling stories to playing games while she progressively grew more sensitive and fidgety, her conversation often drifting off into pure distraction as she tried to get comfortable and failed over and over. To distract herself further, she spent an increasing amount of time baking, and with Penny to bring her ingredients from the diner every morning she baked enough that Penny could carry off anything Jelly had already made to sell to the customers every evening. She even managed to deliver tasty treats for Stormy each time she visited, making me sure that my son was going to be too fat to do his chores by the time the filly's heat ended.

With a day of baking ended and the night settling in, we had settled down to play a board game in the most comfortable place for me to stretch out. It was the fourth night. We were lying on my bed facing each other with a game of Monopony spread out between us, this made dealing with the cast much easier as I could just stretch out and get comfortable rather than having to hunch myself over the table in the kitchen every time I reached for something on the board. I still wasn't doing well in the game though. My proud collection of properties was almost fully mortgaged after an unlucky landing on Cloudsdale with the luxury hotel Jelly had managed to put on it just the turn before, making me wish I'd landed on the relative safety of luxury tax instead.

I rolled the dice and came up with a six, passing GO and landing on Ponyville with a sigh of relief. I collected my two hundred bits from the bank and immediately payed off the mortgage on both of my low rent properties. Neither one of us had gotten a Monopony on any of the other property colors except my two purple properties and Jelly's Canterlot Castle and Cloudsdale, the two most valuable properties on the board. That made it rather inevitable which one of us was eventually going to win the game, but that was okay. It had been fun, and it was getting late by then, so I wouldn't object to a reason to turn in for the evening.

I made it around the board only one more time before landing on Canterlot Castle. "Well," I said, grinning. "That's me done then," I said, handing over the last of my cash, which wasn't even close to the amount I needed to pay the rent.

"Maybe not," Jelly said, not taking the offered money but instead rolling slightly onto her side and giving me a look that I'd never seen from her before. It had gotten more and more difficult for her to concentrate on anything beyond that itch in her backside and the aching feeling that was tightening inside her, but she'd been handling it better than I remembered doing when I'd had the same problem. I'd been alone though, besides Stormy, so the best I'd been able to do for relief was to spend my nights rubbing up against the knobby bedposts in Storm Break's old bedroom while holding one of his old shirts against my muzzle to remind me of his scent.

"Instead... you could; maybe do that thing you said mare's sometimes do for each other?" She asked, her ears flattening back against her head as she flipped her forelock down over her eyes shyly.

I honestly hadn't thought it would come up. I'd been certain when I'd made the offer that Stormy wouldn't be able to resist this beautiful filly's body, yet he'd managed to stay away despite knowing that she was here, waiting for him if only he could admit that he wanted her. He'd shown an amazing amount of restraint so far. I was proud of him for that in a way, while disappointed in another. And now, for the first time, I had to consider the reality that I'd made a promise to this filly who was very likely to one day be my son's wife. Not that I wanted to renege on my promise, but I had to be honest before things went too far.

"I'm not sure... what to do... exactly." I admitted, my ears flattening back against my head as I was brought to the point of making good on my promise. "I've never actually helped another mare or filly like that," I told her.

I was beginning to recognize the look that she gave me since I'd seen it more than once. It was a hungry look. A look that she turned on me again as she licked her lips and her hooves twitched against the blankets on my bed, grasping and releasing them nervously. "But you'll try?" She pleaded. "We can figure it out, right?" She asked, licking her lips delicately. "Someone had to find out what to do the first time, after all."

"Just like the pioneer ponies," I said, giving her a small grin. "But first let's put away the game okay?"

Jelly Bean nodded, but rather than putting away the game the way I'd meant, she wrapped one hoof around the edge of the wooden board, the pieces, the money, and all the property cards and all, and swept it all right off the edge of the bed onto the floor, pushing herself in one swift movement across the bed and right up in front of me, her muzzle slightly parted, her lips glistening where she'd been licking them unconsciously while I'd been focused on the board game. Her eyes met mine and her hooves went to my muzzle and pulled me in, her lips meeting mine straight on, causing us not to kiss but to bump our velvety noses together awkwardly.

"Turn your head a little to one side. I'll turn mine a little to the other side." I whispered, feeling my heart pounding in my chest as I began instructing this young filly, even younger than I'd been my first time, on how to share a kiss with another pony.

It still took two attempts when we both tilted the same way on the first try, but the second attempt was soft, hot, and tasted of honeysuckle and jasmine.

We gently explored each other's bodies with our hooves, now that we were finally engaged properly in the kiss. Her hooves ran down the sides of my stomach and over my upper thighs to where the cast ended on one leg, then moved back along the curve of my, admittedly, plump backside before sliding up around my tail on either side of my spine.

I massaged her belly and sides before moving my hooves up to caress the sides of her throat, then her neck, and finally the thick flowing silkiness of her bright white mane. My lips parted as I grew more aroused by her body under my hooves and her hooves explored me in such a cute, tentative way that I was titillated despite her hesitant, testing, caresses. My tongue wiggled its way between her lips, and her entire body stopped moving for just a moment, all save the hitching of her breath and the thrumming of her heart at least, as her brain attempted to process this new thing we'd just done.

I withdrew my tongue and broke the kiss just enough to breath huskily into her open mouth, "was that too much?"

Jelly's only response was to pull me back against her lips, opening them and flicking her tongue over my own, seeking entry as mine had. We explore each other's muzzles for several long minutes, but I could sense that what we were doing was only inflaming Jelly's problem, not alleviating it. What she needed wasn't to be turned on with foreplay, it was to achieve a release that would alleviate her tension, for a while at any rate.

I pulled back from the kiss after several minutes, catching my breath as I held Jelly tight against me for a moment, panting until I could finally find the air to speak; to whisper instructions into her ear. "I'll have to lay on my back; with my leg," I told her, trying to think how I was going to reach the anatomical area I needed to get to. "Lay down on top of me, your belly to my belly with your tail towards me," I told her, putting pillows up against the headboard of my bed and then leaning back against them as Jelly turned her delicate, beautiful white body around and backed up towards me, her tail already raised and held far out to the side, clearing access for her stallion, or at least for her stallion's stand-in. Her vulva was a light pink, swollen, U shape split by a slit of flesh with a little darker pink button winking out every few seconds at the base of the divide.

When she'd backed up as much as she could, I wrapped my hooves around her thighs and pulled her back further, right onto my muzzle. My lips brushed the winking nub of flesh at the base of her sex entrance. The fact was, that I'd never really had a good look at a mare's rear entrance from this close before. I admit that I found it intriguing, even a little sexy, at least swollen and needful as it was on Jelly, but looking at it didn't stir that visceral feeling that I'd done my best to hide when I'd seen Stormy's cock earlier in the truck. Here there was just a desire to help, to give Jelly a bit of relief, and maybe some pleasure at the same time.

"I'm going to put my mouth on you," I told Jelly, rubbing my nose against the winking flesh lightly and eliciting a shudder of pleasure and several gasps from the filly. I stopped, not wanting to move too fast and accidentally hurt her. But soon it was clear hurt was not what had happened, as she cried out a moment later.

"Don't stop," she moaned, her sex seeming to flex open as her back arched in a pretty and somehow alluring way that almost drove my muzzle up inside of her before I could stop her hips from pushing her sex backward.

I managed to hold her there and instead pressed a bit harder with my nose up against her slit, the fluids from her sex beginning to leak down over my lip and into my mouth. I licked at my lips experimentally. Surprisingly there was very little taste. A bit of sweetness, a touch of something with a sour tang like garlic or cloves, for just a moment, then gone, leaving only the nectar. I knew that there would be more. I found myself wanting more of that taste, not the sweet nectar, but the sour taste that I suspected was lacing every drop of sweat and every runnel leaking from her swollen sexpot.

When I'd worked with the older farm mares, back just after I'd moved to the farm with Stormy and was trying to deal with coming into season again, they'd told me how they'd helped each other get through their heat, but what they hadn't told me, likely because none of them knew, was that my body would take in the hormones from Jelly's body like a sponge. A drop or two wouldn't do anything, but a mouthful, or more; would strip away any protection that the pills had given me and would drive me into season within a few hours. It was the same for mares even back then, I found out later, but they hadn't realized why their cycles had synchronized like that, they just been glad that they could rely on each other to get through it together.

For me though, it was different. I had no idea what risk I was taking by helping Jelly with her heat like this. I only knew that my body cried out for more of whatever it was that I'd tasted on my lips and had sent a tantalizing tingle over my tongue. I wanted more of it, and I saw no reason not to sate my sudden desire.

My long flexible tongue slid out from between my lips as I spread the pink velvety folds of her body and moved my flesh inside her, making sure to brush the base of my lip right up against the nubbin that had made her feel so good already.

Her fluid flooded my mouth, running down from inside her body in small runnels even as the walls of her hot sex-hole tried to clamp down on my tongue, attempting to pull it deeper inside where her wanting body needed... something. I couldn't give it quite what it was that she really needed, but I moved my tongue up and down her slit, in and out, listening to the sound of her breathing, where it caught, where it stuttered, where it picked up and turned into a moan or pant. I used every sound, and movement of her muscles to read what gave her the most pleasure and what was just useless movement.

Her tongue suddenly rasped over the nipples between my legs, the same ones that my son had fed from years before. I'd never realized how pleasurable and intense a mouth down there could be until Jelly's lips closed on me and began to nip and nibble with just her lips and tongue. I have no idea what had possessed her to do that, but I'll never be able to forget the experience either. The sound of her moans and cries, heard in my ears; but felt on my breasts with gusts of hot breath and the quivering of her hot wet lips filled both the room and my body. For the briefest moment I thought of how nice it would have been to have a bit of milk for her to suckle before my thoughts were forcefully drawn back to the pussy before me, which was quivering with the pleasure inside her that was rising to a crest that I just couldn't seem to get her over.

Her muzzle sucked in one of my hard nipples and made me gasp with pleasure, and I knew what I had to do. I wrapped my lips gently around that small knob that wasn't even winking anymore but instead just presented continuously as her body held tension along every muscle and tendon. Her body went rigid for three or four long seconds, then lurched as every muscle flexed and released almost as one.

Jelly Bean, it turned out, was a screamer. A loud screamer. The moment I sucked in her clit her body spasmed and bucked hard backward. The fluid sprayed from her opening in a jet that spattered across my muzzle and dripped down either side in small streamers of liquid that were far too viscous to be just water.

It took all my effort to keep the surprisingly strong filly's body from forcing my muzzle up inside her. I kept her in position, but I didn't pull my muzzle out from under her tail either, which was why, about a minute and a half later, Stormfeather burst into the room, a look of concern and determination on his face and a rope slung across his back, and caught us there still fully engaged.

"Where is he?" He asked, before he had a chance to get a good look at what was going on in the room, his voice angry and worried in equal measure.

He'd thought that some stallion, a brother or a neighbor of Jelly's, had found out where she was staying and had come looking for her. It was the only thing that made sense to him when she'd started making all that noise. Why else would there be screaming coming from the house? All he'd been able to think to do was grab a rope to hopefully bind the intruder long enough to get him away from the filly before he could... Well before things could go wrong.

What he burst in on though, froze him in his tracks. He sputtered, his mouth hanging open with his next words stuck in his throat like an apple he'd swallowed whole. Jelly bean's head was resting sideways between my legs, her eyes closed, and a long whinny of pleasure was continuing to issue from her open mouth, though not quite as loud as it had been to start with, as I startled and pulled my dripping muzzle from her clit.

My gaze met Stormy's. My first instinct was to tell him that he couldn't be here. That would have been the right thing, but that wasn't what my body told me to do, and my mind was a riot of confusion that just wanted to try to explain before he got the wrong idea about what was going on.

"Stormy," I said, pushing myself back up against the headboard, getting up where my muzzle, as wet and sticky as it was, wasn't buried in his prospective mate's backside quite so obviously. "Please don't get the wrong idea sweetie," I told him, meeting his eyes and begging him with my gaze and my words not to blow up and go running from the house, and possibly from my life and Jelly's entirely. "I'm just helping Jelly feel better."

Stormy nodded, averting his eyes. "I'm sorry," He said, his voice embarrassed at the huge blunder that he'd made. "I knew... mares sometimes have to do that for each other." He said, his ears twitching. "But I didn't..."

"You didn't think about that when you heard a filly crying out," I finished, nodding. I was so relieved that he wasn't going to react badly to finding us here that I hadn't noticed the larger issue that was quickly coming up until Jelly drew my attention to it.

"Oh my," Jelly said, climbing from the bed as she came to her senses enough to realize what was happening, "Stormy. You shouldn't be here." She said, looking down at Stormy's growing erection. The scent of heat was heavy in the room. It dripped from my muzzle, from the bed, from Jelly Bean's very pores. This wasn't the mild scent of sex and desire that had hung about her on the first day of her heat. It wasn't even the heightened odor of a receptive filly, it was like a sex bomb had been set off, and the condition that overcame Stormy was inevitable from the moment he'd opened the door. His sex almost throbbed as it reached its full eight inches in length and pulled up tight against his stomach as his nose twitched visibly, taking in the smells in the air.

"He's not going to be able to say no," I said, sliding myself to the edge of the bed and meeting Jelly Bean's eyes. "So, you have to," I told her, pointing to the door. "He wasn't ready, and he'd only resent you if it happened this way. You don't want that; right?"

She nodded, her face telling me that she was suddenly more than a little scared at the glazed look that had come over Stormy's eyes. He was shifting back and forth, keeping himself in check by some force of will that was enough to keep him rooted to the spot without speaking but wasn't quite enough to let him leave the room. Not that the erection swaying back and forth between his legs would've made walking anywhere particularly easy. "What are you going to do?" She asked, though she clearly already knew where this scene had to end. One of us had to satisfy that look in Stormy's eyes and we'd already decided together that it couldn't be her. Not yet. But I wouldn't put any of the weight of the decision on her.

"I love him more than life itself," I said simply, giving her a gentle smile. "If he needs this from me then I'll give it to him gladly." I gave her a curious look and couldn't help but ask. "Does that bother you? Will you refuse his touch if I help him the way I helped you?" I asked, knowing that many fillies might do just that. Jelly Bean though, just shook her head and reached out a hoof to touch mine gently, reassuringly. "Never;" she promised, then hurried around Stormy and slammed the door to my room firmly closed behind her. A moment later I heard the door to the bathing room click shut as silence descended on the house.

"Come here, baby," I said, drawing Stormy's attention away from the now closed door. He hadn't been able to tear his eyes from Jelly Bean's lithe form as she hurried by, yet he'd displayed a control I might have thought impossible by managing not to move over and caress her body as she'd passed within hooves reach of him. The temptation alone must have been enormous.

He looked in my direction, his eyes still glazed from the scent of heat and sex that permeated the room and would for hours yet. I'd been soaked in it, Jelly's cum on my muzzle and spilled across the pillows at the head of my bed.

"Momma," Stormy said, moving towards the edge of the bed. "I... can't. Not again." He said, his eyes leaking. "I can't survive being left behind again, lied to, abandoned," He admitted, his hooves coming down on the edge of the bed as he leaned in, his head hanging in despair that was clear in every line of his face and body. "I'm afraid."

"Oh Stormy," I said, reaching out to touch his hoof. "My wonderful, brilliant, love, I'll never leave you again baby," I said, shifting my cast closer to my stomach so my rear end could move to the edge of the bed and I could sit up, as uncomfortable as it was to do that, and cradle his muzzle between my hooves. "I love you. I will always love you," I promised him, rubbing my muzzle along his until I was nuzzling against the side of his neck and throat the way that had always made him smile when he was small. "I don't know if you'll find love with Jelly or no. But I can promise you that, even if you don't last forever, I'll still be here with you; for you, behind you in everything you do," I swore; meaning my words with every part of my body and soul.

He wrapped his hooves around me, holding me upright as he pulled my body against his, letting go of the iron will that was all that had kept him from simply mounting JB earlier. But now; it wasn't sex that overcame him, or at least not at first. It was his affection for me. Affection that I'd missed dearly for so long and had silently hoped to see again one day, even after all the years that he'd been gone.

We embraced and he nibbled my ears, first one side, then the other, before moving down to the side of my neck just like he'd done as a colt who'd liked to be picked up and held for hours. When I'd put him down, he'd whinny and stamp until I relented and held him again, rocking him in that old rocking chair that used to sit in the corner of his bedroom with the record player beside it. I relived those old memories as I clutched my son, finally my son again, home for real now, forever; I hoped.

After a long moment, Stormy pulled back and stroked my throat with one hoof as he locked eyes with me, his, no longer glazed, but now filled with a longing and a need that had only one mouth and one way to be satisfied.

"Is this really okay?" He whispered, and I could feel the hard length of his shaft pressing between us tight against our stomachs.

I nodded. "It's okay baby. Let me help you," I told him, reaching down and pushing his hard length between my legs which were pulled up almost to my stomach as I laid sideways with my rump protruding slightly off the side of the bed, pressed right up against him. "Be gentle for me; okay?" I whispered as I guided the tip of him to my hot wet mound.

"Ah..." he moaned as his tip slid between the already slick hot lips of my sex.

There were no more words for quite some time. Instead, we spoke with our bodies, every stroke from him was a love note, and every moan he drew from me a sonnet. He leaned over me, his hooves beneath my front legs on one side and behind my back on the other as he worked his hips slowly; sinking his thickness in, then drawing back in a smooth rhythm that continued again and again.

Being bred sideways was amazing. He was stimulating my sex in ways that I hadn't even imagined were possible. But it couldn't last for either of us. It had just been so long, and with the room and my body covered in hot filly cum, there was little chance that Stormy was going to last for more than a few wonderful minutes.

Yet he made it last. He slowed his body, stroking his hooves up to my shoulders almost pulling out fully as he did, then ran his hoof through my mane and looked me in the eyes, just sinking into my gaze for a time, sharing a wordless few moments that felt to me like one of the most profound connections I'd ever experienced. He straightened after a minute, his body almost shuddering forward with another couple of strokes, and I could sense that he was just about to pull himself out just before he finished. I let my body rule me. I admit it. I didn't even consider anything at all except what I wanted at that moment, and the instant that he attempted to pull back I reached up and put both my hooves around his neck, using his own strength as he pulled back slightly to drag his ear down to my muzzle. "No baby. Cum inside me. I want at least that little bit of you inside me all night." I whispered in his ear before clamping it lightly between my teeth so that it would be all that much more difficult for him to back away.

He didn't have time to ask if I was sure, or even to consider it for himself, so he just accepted and drove himself home with one final long stroke as the head of him flared inside me. I felt his cock sealing right up against my deepest parts; sending me suddenly over an edge that I hadn't even expected to reach.

I cried out in ecstasy as my muscles tightened and flexed with my sudden release, mine mixing with his grunts and pants as he pushed; in; and in; and in; against me, unable to even attempt pulling out now, his instincts wanting him to put his seed deeper and deeper inside my body, flooding my womb. A womb which was not, as I believed, safe, but would be just as hot and fertile as Jelly Bean's before I woke the next morning already flooded to the brim with years' worth of hot sticky fertile cum.

Jelly and I shared many more moments together over the course of the week and a half. Even though her heat was starting to ebb, and the urges were growing less pressing in the last four or five days, we still lay together those nights, pleasuring each other, though now able to give one another the proper attention and pleasure that we both deserved. It would never replace a good stallion, but in a pinch, it was a reasonable substitute. But more than that; it formed a bond between the two of us that I'd never realized could exist between two unrelated mares. We became something akin to sisters over those days. Or maybe she saw me more as a second mother; perhaps. But that was one of the beautiful things about it. We never felt the need to define it. It just was. A love that needed no reason. And I cherished it.

Stormy remained outside the house after that single night, trying to play as Jelly's knight in shining mane and tail. He was always vigilant, making sure that nobody got anywhere near the house that wasn't supposed to be there, but he wasn't immune to the sounds that emanated from the house every evening, and Jelly was just never going to be a quiet sort of lover. So, he spent at least part of the evening taking a long walk down the road and back, usually taking up about a half an hour. A nice quiet half an hour, except for the occasional scream of a night jar from somewhere across the fields.

Four more weeks passed, and I was happy to be heading back to the hospital to finally get the cast removed. I'd been feeling a bit nauseous, usually in the mornings, but I thought I just had a flu that was going around. Still, I mentioned the symptoms to Redheart, just in case they might mean something, and she postponed the x-ray long enough to ask me to do a little business in a cup for her. Just in case. She came back only ten minutes later with the unexpected news. Pregnant, which meant no x-ray for me for a while. Instead Doctor Horse removed the cast and did a manual examination. He also did a prenatal checkup and scheduled me for a follow-up visit to check on the baby in another six to eight weeks.

I stopped taking the pills just as soon as I'd found out. They weren't supposed to have any detrimental effects in a situation like mine, but even Doctor Horse had agreed that it was better to be safe and hold off taking the pills until after the baby was born.

I spent the whole day trying to figure out how, when I got home that night, I was going to give the news to my soon to be daughter in law Jelly Bean and my son Stormy, who was soon to be the father of his own little brother or sister. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't imagine their reactions as anything but good. I know that seems insane, and entirely backwards, but I was so happy that I couldn't make myself see it as anything but a blessing, almost a miracle. Of course, I'd told Doctor Horse how I'd gone about getting pregnant, because he wondered the same thing I did; how it had happened when I was taking the pills. He assured me that it wasn't any miracle but rather a known side effect of what Jelly and I had done that night before helping my son to release.

If Doctor Horse was disgusted or disturbed by how I'd gotten pregnant, he didn't show any sign of it by word, deed, or look. He just seemed relieved that the pills weren't to blame. Instead he explained to me why the pills had failed and warned me to avoid similar situations in the future.

My final decision was that I'd just tell them. They couldn't be too upset, since none of us had known anything about the pills failing under those conditions. Besides. I'd dreamed of carrying Stormy's baby ever since the day that I'd seen him come walking out of the rain wearing that old bomber jacket, and I wasn't going to let myself feel bad that I'd been blessed with exactly what I'd wanted.

If you doubt though, still, that fate was at work that day, bringing things together just right, then just know that that same day, as I'd ridden a bus into Ponyville alone, wanting to do one thing for myself, finally, after so many weeks, was also the day that Jelly Bean's body decided, almost a week earlier than it should have, to resume her heat and start an intimate relationship with Stormy. So, while I was in Ponyville, finding out about my own little bundle of joy, it turned out that they were back home, making another one at the very same time.

When I arrived back at the farmhouse, I came in to find them sleeping together peacefully, still damp with sweat and smelling of heat, cum, and sex. Stormy's wings wrapped around them both as they lay nuzzled together on the rug in the room Jelly Bean had been staying in for the past two weeks while she helped Stormy work the fields and tend the sheep. And it looked like they'd decided that she'd be staying for a good bit longer besides, hopefully forever.

If you've read this story, then you were interested to find out just where our family started. It's a rather large family now. With my son Stormy, my daughter's Music Bouquet, and Cream Puddin, my four grandchildren from Jelly Bean and Stormy, and another three either already here or on the way from Music and Cream. We all live and work on the Stormfront Farm, the largest in the area now, and providing good wool and fresh vegetables even to the richest ponies in Ponyville and beyond.

I'd like to say that there was some magic or mystical experience involved in finding our happiness here, together, but that wasn't the case. We found a different kind of magic for ourselves. It wasn't one of sparkles and wands or the mystical power of friendship the ponies in Ponyville are always going on about. It was one of hard work, love, and dedication to each other above everything else. No pony left behind became our motto. And yeah. Maybe I heard it in an advertisement somewhere once, but nobody out here in farm country would know it. Or care.

But they do care about one thing out here in the big empty country between the cities they call civilization. They care about family. And today we're adding a new member to that family. Penny's first-born colt Field Sprout is engaged to marry my little Cream Puddin, whose already about as round in the belly as she can be under that pretty white wedding gown. I find myself smiling an awful lot lately, and I think I know why.

It's because we stopped caring about being part of someone else's story. When we tried to be part of Ponyville and Cloudsdale, we were never more than shades of ponies in the background, getting in the spotlight for moments, or even less than moments. But when we decided to make our own story, tell our own tale about happiness, pride, and family, we got to be our own heroes.

Don't forget that. If you forget everything else that I wrote. Be the hero of your own story. Don't play a bit part in someone else's life.

Granny Twister Darling