Chapter Text
Blueblood awoke to the revolting feeling of being sober, and far, far too close to Pharynx, who was still busy sleeping on a log.
He was appalled to find that he could clearly remember the events that transpired roughly eight hours ago, because it had been a solid few hours before that since he had been steadily consuming copious amounts of alcohol. His skin was starting to itch from it, in fact, and he ignored it, because the itch had at some point in his life become the only reason he continued to drink.
The fire before him was now no longer a fire. Just a smoldering heap of wood on the ground that had cleared away a good patch of snow. He sort of missed the dancing ponies and the flute music. Now the world was a little stiller, and quieter.
Something stirred behind him in the midst of his poor attempts to stand. Pharynx. Dammit .
“Where do you think you’re going?”
It was a fair question. Where did Blueblood think he was going, exactly? So far, it was unclear. Did he think he could walk away from this the same way he walked away every morning from every mare he ever slept with before she woke up? Did he think he would round the next tree and find himself in the Crystal Empire, ready to catch the next train home? No. Of course not. That would make him stupid.
“Sit down, I got you something.”
“I don’t need anything from you,” said Blueblood, regretting it immediately afterwards. He thought before he said it that perhaps he’d have the excuse of feeling so, horrendously wrong about everything, which would give him some leeway to act like a bit of an ass. But unfortunately he just sounded like an ass. Especially after having slept against a log . Like a common insect . Which might make Pharynx think he probably had more grace to speak to him the same way he would speak to somebody in his disgusting hive and… Blueblood felt a little bad for thinking so.
“Yeah yeah,” said Pharynx. “You actually slept today.”
What? !
“What, you think I didn’t notice? Please. Here.” He handed him… well it looked like a rock. He handed him a bloody rock. It was lighter than it looked.
“Wow. Thank you. For this,” Blueblood said, with a face that said he very much did not want this rock he had just been handed. It was a very round, not very smooth rock, which he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with now that it was in his hands.
“Crack it open, smartass.”
“Crack it… what ?”
Pharynx rolled his eyes. Blueblood noticed because he was so close. Otherwise, Pharynx’s pupils tended to disappear into the rest of his eye, since they were so close in color. A very, very pretty violet color. And he rolled them at Blueblood a lot. Blueblood though the way the light shifted on them when he did was something akin to a glossed mosaic. They glittered, but not in the tacky way.
Pharynx took the rock in his hands and, holding it up to his head, rammed it aggressively onto his horn, puncturing a hole in it and making Blueblood think he was trying to give himself a bloody injury. And then he noticed that the rock really wasn't a rock - obviously, he didn’t quite know why he thought it was - but some kind of fruit, spewing a watery-looking liquid from the new hole Pharynx had just ungracefully punctured. It was all over his forehead, of course, because the oaf had just rammed his horn onto it. He handed the fruit back to Blueblood.
“Drink.”
“ What?!”
“It’s a cavern fruit, drink it.”
Blueblood, for the record, had never in his life been handed a rock and been told to drink from it. The simplest thing he had drunken anything out of past the age of twenty was a crystal whiskey glass without anything engraved on it. And now he was drinking. Out of. A rock. Good grief. What would his mother think of him now. Probably that he had squandered a good few months galumphing about like a hooligan delinquent and that this was all his fault, no doubt. His fault that he was drinking out of a rock. And lost in the woods with no food or direction. Lucky to ever see a paved road again.
“You,” said Blueblood, very afraid. “You noticed that…”
“That you don’t sleep? Of course I noticed.”
Dammit, was he that easy to read? Or was it just that Pharynx had some strange supersense from being raised in a hive of several thousand other changelings that - what, could they read each other's minds or something?
“Don’t know why though.”
Oh thank Celestia.
There was a silence, during which Blueblood desperately hoped Pharynx would not ask why - hoping to death, probably because if he did ask, he’d tell him without hesitation - and during which he assumed Pharynx was deciding whether or not he should ask why. It was a very painful few seconds. Minutes perhaps. Who knew, really.
“So… how’s the fruit?” Good.
“Better than coffee.”
“Hah. Right.”
“And also. All over your horn.”
“What?”
He didn’t even notice. It was bound to get in his eyes at some point.
“Come. Let me.”
When he became alright with stooping to such a level as cleaning up after somebody else when it was usually the other way around, he wasn’t quite sure, but there he was, cleaning Pharynx’s forehead - steering far too clear of his horn - with his hands, and cleaning his own hands in the snow. The cavernfruit water was sticky, despite looking basically like water. And tasting like a refreshing morning in Southern Prance*.
“Look this way.” He was facing down, and away, thought Blueblood could probably understand why. Everything felt very wrong at the moment. It had been feeling wrong since he woke up, and felt like it would continue feeling that way. They should be doing something right now, he was unsure what. But whatever. In the middle of the woods, lost and very cold, there were very little obligations to fill before it was time to do something else. It was never “time” to do anything out here. Just exist and probably find food, at some point, maybe. That seemed a little bit less important that this though. Right now, anyway.
“Red, look this way,” said Blueblood, vaguely realizing he had let “Red” slip without noticing and deciding to gloss over it swiftly before one of them went and made it a big deal when it wasn’t.
“Jeez. I can do this myself.”
“Yes, but you’re not. I’m doing it. So just sit there and look up .”
There was a tension in the air that Blueblood was acutely aware of and also acutely made the wrong feeling in his chest feel more wrong. Whatever this was, he felt like it was going to snap soon. He was very nervous about it. He didn’t like impending things. This was very impending. He started to take a little bit less care around Pharnx’s horn. Drifting around in his head, his thoughts. Minding his own business while also thoroughly not.
“Blue, you’re seriously- yyyy!!! Woah, Blue, watch the hands . You’re being real touchy lately-”
“Would you just! ” said Blueblood, removing his hands, and swiftly removing himself, from Pharynx’s general vicinity. He was on his feet now, which were wobbly because he’d just been sitting on his legs, but there he was, standing. And wobbling. And about to start shouting. “Shut it!” There. There it was, the shouting. Even thought this forest was the most open place he’d been in ages, he felt more claustrophobic than he’d ever felt in his life. This reminded him of something. An event. No, a series of events. Dammit, the wall of whiskey and mares wasn’t there anymore. He could see that series of events so clearly. What was it about this one stallion that made him want to think clearly? His stupid sincerity? His stupid eyes?
“Woah, Blue -”
“Shut it! You don’t get to just-! You don’t get to do this to me, alright?!”
“What- do what? ”
“ You don’t get to make me question everything I’ve ever known, ever been TAUGHT, since the very singular moment I GOT this stupid mark, ALRIGHT?”
“Blue-”
“ And STOP calling me that!! I’m not supposed to know you! We’re not supposed to be friends! We’re not! ”
“ ACCORDING TO WHO, BLUE? Look around! We’re in the middle of the woods, and you’re shirtless and it’s below freezing, and I’m one of Canterlot’s best generals and yet we’re still days away from civilization, NONE of this is SUPPOSED to be anything!!!”
Blueblood wanted to say something back, but everything that Pharynx said made so much sense to him, and his mind that had been awake for roughly a week straight before last night, that he couldn’t find a single thing that made much sense.
“I- you-”
“Just-! Look at me, right? Look at me. What you were taught, since the very singular moment you got that mark - right? - all of that is fucking useless.”
“What?”
Pharynx approached tentatively, like Blueblood was a scared, cornered animal. He very much didn’t want to be that. He shouldered off Pharynx’s coat so that he would stop having to hunch over just to keep it on.
“You’re a goddamn, grown ass stallion, for Celestia’s sake,” said Pharynx “You’re not your parents, you’re not some horrible conglomeration of Canterlot nobility, or high society, or some shit like that, right? You’re you.”
“Yes, I’m me. And all of those people you’re talking about are my reality. You talk like it’s so easy to just be here, in the middle of the woods, wanting to run off galavanting across the globe doing - what? - adventuring? ”
Why not, thought Blueblood
“Why not?” said Pharynx.
“B. Because.”
“Oh come on, are you a foal? Because why? Because you’re not supposed to? ”
It sounded much simpler when Pharynx said it out loud than when Blueblood thought about it.
Blueblood remembered a series of events very clearly.
He had been in the woods, a lot like he was now, actually, and he’d been on top of a snowy hill, and his two best friends had been beside him. Who they were was irrelevant now, they were hardly best friends anymore. But there he’d been, on a hilltop, looking out onto then-uncharted lands just beyond canterlot. And there they had been, fairly lost, but enjoying being lost very much. And Blueblood had managed on his own to guide all three of them back using some knowledge of the stars that was lost on him now. And when they had reached that hill, and looked out onto a forest of trees and potential for excitement, and they had all just taken a moment to be there , and then seen the faint glitter of Canterlot far off in the distance with the setting sun resting on the opposite side of the horizon, a flash of light and other such dramatics had revealed a mark on Blueblood’s flank. The golden star of a compass.
He’d been so excited about it, too. He’d loved it. It was beautiful, and it matched his mane. Look, mother, look, look at my cutie mark, isn’t it wonderful? No, of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t now and it hadn’t been then. Darling, I do hope you do not plan on - what was it? Adventuring? What nonsense, you haven’t time for that. You’re a Noble. Royal, you see? You haven’t time for that. Go on, now, malen'kiy, go practice your violin, da ? Yes, the violin. He’d forgotten how to play. He’d figured it was like riding a bike, and if he picked one up again, he could probably remember an aria or two. He’d always liked the celtic songs better anyway. Yes mama , of course .
Blueblood was now standing in the woods, without his two best friends by his side. He didn’t have any best friends now. Only people that he hated, and Pharynx, whom he figured did not fall into either bracket. He didn’t quite know where Pharynx fell, really. Pharynx probably had no clue either, and it was bothering both of them.
“Blue?” said Pharynx. Blueblood hadn’t spoken in a while.
And still, he didn’t say anything. Just thought for a minute, and then thought, fuck it , for the first time in his life, and moved to where Pharynx was, and placed his hands on either side of his face…
It wasn’t always this, but it was now, it was… what was it really? It was soft. Very soft. Softer than Blueblood could have honestly ever thought it could be. It was a very soft chorus of drums - thought that was probably his heart - and a violin and piano working very beautifully in unison to create a song in Blueblood’s head that was so clear he wondered if perhaps Pharynx could hear it too.
His kiss was nothing. A very small blink in time. But it was also everything. His kiss was everything . Perfect and caring and kind - all things he really wanted to make Blueblood believe he was incapable of - and pure and soft and promising. He wanted his lips there for so much longer than he got them. It was a tradeoff. He could stop kissing him to look at his eyes, which were almost just as wonderful.
“You’re very agreeable when you don’t think you’re better than everybody else,” said Pharynx. He had intended to be snarky, maybe a little bit humorous, but it was so quiet - a simple breath of a phrase spoken into Blueblood’s mouth, he was still so close - that it really didn’t come off that way.
“I never thought I was better than you. Maybe everybody else. A little bit,” said Blueblood, in a rather similar way, but with maybe a little breath of a laugh at the end. Maybe. He pressed his forehead as close to Pharynx’s as it would go, allowing their horns to touch. And when he got into this position, he suddenly became far too afraid to move. Why he had done it, he had no idea. It was rather presumptuous of him. Rather instinctual, and thus incredibly animalistic, which he hated was a word that he would even consider using to describe himself, but found that he didn’t quite care about it as much as he might have were he not in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere with only one stallion, whom he had just kissed with a passion that had not existed in his world before this particular time and place.
Or, no, it had. Once before. That passion for going out and seeing things. A passion - hunger - for going out and seeing everything, for going one place at a time and really, truly being there. He’d wanted that at some point. And he’d landed himself here in the woods on perhaps some very confused realization of that dream. He’d have been a sailor. An adventurer . All of those maps that were laying in his storage room where he didn’t allow asingle maid to enter and dust because he wanted to pretend they weren’t actually there, they had spent twenty odd years or so sitting there collecting dust. Every single one of them had something on it that when he’d first looked at it, he found that it was more beautiful than any piece of art he could view in a museum. It made him want things beyond Canterlot’s upper class social bracket.
He suddenly wanted to get back to that room. To pick one up and put it in his pocket, and then later on go dock that ridiculous yacht he’d been marooning around on and go to a marina and lay his eyes on a brand new, beautiful sailing vessel for two… for two . And take that vessel out and follow a map. Any map
His arms were still wrapped around Pharnx’s neck. Pharynx had taken some opportunity during Blueblood’s thinking to make the smallest, softest movements to make the smooth carapace of his own horn bump into the sleek indents of Blueblood’s. One by one. Every single one. He’d never done this before.
“Pharynx,” he said.
“Yah.”
“How are we going to get home?”
Home, he was aware, meant distinctly different things for the both of them. But, for some reason, probably because this was a very intimate moment that he did not want to shatter for the world , he had thought it meant just the one. Home . Obviously.
It was also a very important question that probably required answering a lot sooner than this point, but. Well. He was asking it now. Sometime closer to the middle of the day than the early morning.
“Well…”
Pharynx’s footing was only slightly thrown off by the incessant thumping in his chest, so he only slipped trying to tiptoe closer to the stream about twice before he got there.
He was about to teach Blueblood how to eat a plant. And this was only because Blueblood had refused to learn how to set traps for rats and lizards. Because he did not want to eat a rat or a lizard, he’d made that perfectly clear. So, Pharynx had resorted to plants. He wasn’t going to like it either. Blueblood probably thought he meant mint or cloves or something. And he was going to be extremely disappointed to realize how utterly bland ferns tasted, and even more disappointed when he realized that if he wasn’t going to eat a rat, or a lizard, ferns would be the one meal he’d be getting until they reached the Crystal Empire. On foot.
He contended that if he got to watch Blueblood drink cavernfruit syrup right from the fruit and then make out with him directly afterwards, he also got to see Blueblood react to eating a plant straight out of the ground in real time, and enjoy it immensely. Maybe he’d get him to eat a bug later. Anything was possible.
And so they got to the bank of the frozen river and Pharynx spent a while or two searching under the bent over caps of snow that roofed over the stream until he found a plant that Blueblood said resembled a tiny, flat Hearth's Warming tree, and then Pharynx told him he had to eat it, because it was the most nutritious thing around that Blueblood would even consider touching, let alone putting in his mouth. To which, of course Blueblood countered that no, that was mostly untrue, because he had absolutely no qualms putting Pharynx in his mouth. Pharynx had no reply to this, other than splitting the fern in half and shoving it, along with half his fist, into his mouth to keep an ungodly noise from leaving it.
“You know, I’m not very nutritious either,” he said, when they were both quite sick of looking for ferns and had begun meandering about looking for a way to cross the river without getting too wet. Blueblood had suggested this, and Pharynx was an inch away from rolling his eyes and telling him that he would have to deal with getting his perfect - perfect - coat dirty until they got to the Crystal Empire, until Blueblood then added that since he did not have any carapace on him like Pharynx did, he would rather not increase his chances of contracting hypothermia and dying, thank you very much.
“I know you’re not, stupid.” Blueblood was curiously admiring a berry bush. Pharynx was about to tell him not to, because it was poisonous, but he looked away and kept searching.
“You know… are you sure you’re cool with… uh… hanging around a ‘filthy changeling insect’ like me? You don’t seem to like us very much,” he said, very clearly not meaning to say “hanging around” as if he didn’t want to say the word “kissing,” like he was an elementary school filly.
Blueblood stopped moving to consider this. He seemed to be considering it very aggressively, too. And a little bit sadly, but that might have been Pharynx’s imagination.
“Yes I… I do recall saying something like that.” He turned himself to Pharynx, with only his head facing directly away from him. “I, ahm. I suppose I should apologize for all of that.”
Pharynx very much wanted to accept this… well he assumed that this was the apology Blueblood was referring to. He very much wanted to say “it’s alright” and “you didn’t mean it” but the more he thought about it the more he very much did not want to say those things, because as pretty as they sounded, none of them were actually very true at all. He had spent a fair few years being referred to as an insect by various other reich ponies and found that as much as he considered that he didn’t actually care what rich ponies thought about him , they weren’t really just referring to him, were they? And that… managed to sting a little bit. Maybe just a little bit.
“Hah yeah, you, uh. You’re just saying that because you just so happened to fall in love with one, that’s all,” said Pharynx, very much aware he was sounding very, very presumptuous by saying that Blueblood was in love with him. He was rather fixated on this until he spotted a very long fallen branch on the ground and busied himself trying to drag it back to the stream while Blueblood formulated what to say in response.
“It does seem that way, doesn’t it.” Blueblood sounded absurdly somber when he said this. It made Pharynx want to lie down and cry into the snow, which was strange, since Pharynx had never cried - or wanted to cry, really - a day in his life. He’d often wanted to punch things, to cocoon himself and stay there for a while, to go out to the countryside away from everypony else, but never cry.
Blueblood did not say anything more than this for a long while. Pharynx had managed to lay the large log across the narrowest part of the stream securely enough that he could walk across it to make sure it wouldn’t snap in half when Blueblood walked across it. His coat was starting to collect dirt and snow near his hooves, but his hands were still perfect. With the sun behind him, and his arms held out to balance himself like that, Pharynx thought he almost looked like a Canterlot Cathedral window. He would have almost heard the church choir singing in the back of his head, had he not thought of Blueblood as someone so truly and purely unangelic.
And that was not to say that he thought he belonged in Tartarus or anything. Pharynx wasn’t much of a religious stallion himself. Blueblood was, for all that he seemed to love to complicate his life, was a simple thing. Good simple. Pharynx watched him, simply, taking small steps across the branch, wobbling around, and realized that cathedral windows probably wouldn’t wobble like that. He reached out to offer his hand to him without imposition.
He took it, and planted his hooves on the other side of the stream, and took Pharynx by the face and kissed him again. Pharynx, in turn wondered distantly what this particular kiss was for, before he remembered again that Blueblood was a wonderfully simple thing, and who probably had never actually wanted to kiss somebody before, and was making up for lost time while he thought that there was a chance he would die before they reached the Crystal Empire.
It was short and sweet, just like him.
“Uh. You’re welcome?”
“Ugh. You’re the worst,” said Blueblood, not meaning it at all. “I was going to say… I liked you, before I kissed you.” He was trying his best to hide his face by holding it as high up as he could, and facing away from Pharynx. “I mean, I did hate you first,” he said, walking away, in the general direction of the mountains in the distance. Which was… actually where they were supposed to be going. Pharynx wondered if Blueblood was actually uninterested in his response, or if he just didn’t want to look back and see a bad one.
Apology accepted, Blue, he thought. Take your time unlearning all that crap they forced you to learn. I’ll be right here .
Pharynx observed Blueblood from the shortest distance behind. He was stumbling around, tripping over a lot of things, and occasionally smacking his horn on a low hanging branch. It was almost amusing to watch, like seeing a bird with a broken wing try to start flying again. He was a simple thing, Pharynx marveled. Underneath all of the clumped-up layers that got laid on him by his parents, and by rich ponies, and by himself sometimes too, he was simple, like all other creatures. And suddenly, with Blueblood now working his very hardest to peel all those layers away, slowly but surely, Pharynx found himself wanting to wait around for him.
Duke Vladimir Blueblood? No, not really, it didn’t suit him all that much anymore, did it? Vladimir Blueblood? Hardly even so. Not even “Blueblood,” really.
Blue . Now that was more like it.
Pharynx observed Blue, Blue , from a much shorter distance behind. He was starting to get the hang of watching for roots buried in the leaves and snow, and he stopped lifting his head so proudly to watch for branches above. He was still arrogant. He was still prideful, still very full of himself and very fanciful and majestic. And he was also new. And different. And - hah - and sober - at least for now.
Pharynx observed him from beside him. He was all that he could be where he was, and that was just fine with him. He was still himself. And as Pharynx observed him, he was only a little bit alarmed to find that all this time he had been slowly but surely falling in love with him.