Clover Patch Saves Breezies With His Small Cock

The grass was warm where the sun still hit it, but the shade from the Everfree crept closer by the minute. Clover Patch didn't mind. Nopony came out this far. That was the whole point.

He sat with his hind legs stretched out, tail flicked lazily to one side, staring at the treeline without really seeing it. His saddlebag sat unopened beside him. He'd packed a book he wasn't going to read and an apple he wasn't going to eat. Props. Just in case somepony asked where he was going. Nopony had asked.

Good.

The marketplace had been unbearable today. Three fillies from his old school class, Amber Dew, Lemon Tart, and that loud one with the freckles whose name he kept forgetting on purpose, had been lounging near the fountain. They were doing what they always did. Talking. Loudly. About colts.

About their size.

Amber Dew had been the worst, leaning in with that conspiratorial grin fillies got when they thought they were being subtle and absolutely were not. She'd said something about the colt she'd been seeing, some pegasus from Cloudsdale, and made a gesture with her hooves that was anatomically unlikely but got the reaction she wanted. Lemon Tart had fanned herself with a hoof. Freckles had snorted her drink.

And then Clover Patch had walked past.

The giggles shifted. He knew the difference by now. There was the scandalized giggle, the one that meant a filly had seen something impressive and was pretending to be shocked about it. That giggle had a breathlessness to it, a flutter. It made colts puff out their chests and add a little swagger to their trot.

Then there was the other kind.

Short. Sharp. Bitten off behind a hoof but not fast enough. The kind that came with a sideways glance and a quick look away. The kind that said oh, Celestia, did you see-

Yeah. He'd seen. He'd heard. He always heard.

Clover Patch wasn't stupid. He knew exactly what he was working with. He'd done the comparison, because every colt did the comparison at some point, whether they admitted it or not. The showers after hoofball practice. The swimming hole south of Sweet Apple Acres where colts went in the summer. You didn't stare, obviously, but you noticed. You couldn't help noticing.

And what Clover Patch had noticed was that he'd drawn the short straw. Literally.

His cock, fully unsheathed, was... modest. That was the polite word. The honest word was small. Noticeably, undeniably, comparatively small. Less than the colts who trotted through town with the easy confidence of stallions who'd never had a filly suppress a laugh at an inopportune moment.

It's not about the size, it's how you use it.

He'd heard that one a hundred times. From his mother, of all ponies, after she'd caught him moping in his room one evening and gently pried the reason out of him. She'd meant well. She always meant well.

But the thing about it's how you use it was that nopony ever gave you the chance to demonstrate how you used it once they'd already decided you weren't worth the bother.

It's what's on the inside that matters.

Sure. Fine. Except ponies saw the outside first. Every single time. And the outside was what got you through the door. The inside was what kept you there, but you had to get in first, and Clover Patch couldn't even get a filly to look at him without that little hoof-covered snicker.

He sighed and pulled a blade of grass free, chewing on the end of it.

The Everfree rustled.

He ignored it. Wind, probably. Or a timberwolf too deep in the trees to matter. He wasn't far enough in to be in real danger, just far enough to be alone.

Then he heard it.

A sound so small it barely registered. A high-pitched chirp, almost musical, like somepony had flicked a tiny crystal bell. He flicked an ear toward it.

Nothing.

He went back to his grass blade.

Fwip.

Something brushed against his inner thigh, just above the hock. Light as a moth wing. He twitched, glanced down-

-and saw a breezie.

She was hovering just below his belly, wings a blur of iridescent blue-green, no bigger than his frog. Her mane was a wild tangle of something between lavender and silver, and she had the most intensely focused expression he'd ever seen on a creature that small. Her tiny hooves were reaching toward,

"What in the hay are you doing?!"

He scrambled backward, haunches hitting the grass hard, tail clamping down on reflex. The breezie tumbled in the air displacement, caught herself with an indignant buzz of wings, and planted her forehooves on her hips.

"Ach! Hold still, ye big lummox!" Her voice was a reedy soprano with an accent he couldn't place, something between Trottingham and a squeaky hinge. "I've been working up the nerve for three weeks!"

"Working up the- you were trying to get into my sheath!"

"I was measuring!"

"You were what?!"

She zipped up to eye level, hovering with an efficiency that suggested she'd had a lot of practice being at eye level with creatures fifty times her size. Up close, her eyes were enormous, a deep violet, fierce, and completely unembarrassed.

"Measuring," she repeated, slower, as if he were the one being unreasonable. "With my hooves. For scale."

Clover Patch stared at her. She stared back. Neither of them blinked.

"Why," he said carefully, "is a breezie flying around Ponyville checking out colts' cocks?"

She had the decency to flush, or at least, her tiny cheeks darkened a shade, which on a breezie could have been anything from embarrassment to determination. She folded her forelegs.

"Because my colony is dying," she said flatly. "We've got thirty-seven mares and two males, and one of those hasn't been able to perform since last winter's frost snap. Our numbers have been dropping for six generations. We need new blood, or more specifically, we need somepony who can actually fit."

"Fit," Clover Patch echoed.

"Fit," she confirmed. She gestured vaguely at all of him. "A breezie mare is... well, you can see how big I am. The average stallion's thing is..." She trailed off, waving a tiny hoof in a circle. "Architecturally incompatible."

"Archi- what now?"

"Would crush us, to be blunt."

Clover Patch opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"And you think I-"

"I know you." She jabbed a hoof at him. "I've been surveying every colt in Ponyville for the better part of a month. Do you have any idea how tedious that is? How many ponies I've had to observe at the swimming hole? At the spa? That one who sleeps with his window open on Stirrup Street- disgusting hygiene, by the way, I don't know how anypony-" She caught herself, refocused. "The point is, out of every colt in this town, you are the only one whose anatomy falls within viable parameters."

The silence that followed was vast and deeply uncomfortable.

"You're telling me," Clover Patch said slowly, "that my cock is so small it could fit inside a fairy pony the size of my frog."

"I wouldn't have phrased it quite like-"

"And that's a good thing."

She fixed him with those enormous violet eyes. "It's the only thing that matters. My colony survives, or it doesn't. Every breezie I grew up with, my sisters, my cousins, the mares who taught me to fly, they all go extinct within two generations. Unless we find a viable male who can breed with us without killing us in the process." She paused. "You, statistically, are it."

Clover Patch sat in the grass at the edge of the Everfree Forest, a breezie the size of his hoof hovering in front of his muzzle, and tried to process the fact that the thing he'd spent his entire colt life being humiliated for was, apparently, the sole hope of an endangered species.

"Huh," he said.

Clover Patch's mouth worked silently for a few seconds. His brain was running through reactions the way a pony flipped through a book.

Mortified. That was close. The hot prickle at the base of his ears was definitely something close to that. A breezie, a complete stranger, had just told him, as fact, that she'd checked out every cock in Ponyville and his was the smallest. The smallest. The bottom of whatever horrifying chart she'd been keeping.

But she hadn't said it to be cruel. That was the thing that kept tripping him up. There'd been no meanness in it, no suppressed laughter, no hoof-covered snicker. She'd said it the way a doctor would say it. His cock was small. That was simply the fact of the matter, that fact was what she needed.

Should I laugh?

Part of him wanted to. It was insane. Years of quiet humiliation, of avoiding the swimming hole, of walking past groups of fillies with his eyes fixed on nothing, of lying awake at night wondering what cruel joke the universe had, and the punchline was this. His small dick was a key. One that fit a very specific, very tiny lock.

There was a joke in there somewhere. He could feel it. Something about finally finding the right fit or every tool has its purpose or-

No. He couldn't laugh. If he started laughing he wasn't sure he'd stop, and it would curdle into something ugly halfway through.

Should I cry?

That was closer to honest. He'd spent so long wishing he were bigger, wishing he were normal, wishing he could trot through town the way Thunderhooves or Barrel Roll did, with that easy loose-hipped confidence that said yeah, I know what I've got. He'd wished for it so hard it had become background noise, an inadequacy he'd stopped consciously hearing but never stopped feeling.

And now a creature this size was telling him that everything he'd hated about himself was the precise thing an entire colony needed to survive.

His eyes stung. He blinked hard and looked at the treeline.

Or do I just... nod?

Maybe that was it. Maybe the only sane response was... to just accept it. Of course this was how it was going to be. Of course the universe's answer to why am I like this wasn't some inspirational speech about inner beauty or finding a mare who loved him for his personality. The answer was a math problem. Grim and merciless math.

His cock was too small for ponies. That was the fact he'd been living with since the fillies and colts in his class started noticing each other's slits and dicks. And the only logical conclusion wasn't somepony will love you anyway. It was: find a pony equally that small.

And the only pony equally that small was a fairy species that lived in the Everfree Forest.

He let out a long, slow exhale through his nose. It came out shaky.

"I don't..." He stopped. Started again. "I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this."

The breezie tilted her head. "About what part?"

"About any of it." He gestured vaguely with a hoof at her, at himself, at the general concept of everything. "You just told me I've got the smallest cock in Ponyville. Which, I knew that, but hearing somepony else say it is..." He trailed off. "And then you told me why."

"Yes," she said, like he'd just summarized a grocery list.

"So I'm supposed to, what? Be happy?"

"I don't particularly care how you feel about it, if I'm honest." She unfolded her forelegs and drifted a few inches closer. "I care whether you'll help. Feelings are your business."

He laughed. It came out strangled and weird, half a bark, and he clamped his mouth shut on it before it could mutate.

"What's... your name?" he asked, because it seemed insane that they'd gotten this far without that.

"Thistle Down." She said it like it was obvious, like he should have known.

"Thistle Down," he repeated. "Okay. Thistle Down. You're asking me to-" He stopped again, ears flattening. "To go and breed breezies."

"With breezie mares, specifically, yes. Starting with the ones in peak fertility, which at present count is eleven. Possibly twelve. Fern Wisp has been irregular, but she's been eating better since the last pollen harvest, so-"

"Eleven?"

"Potentially twelve."

Clover Patch put his muzzle in his hooves.

This was it. This was the shape his life had always been going toward. Every snicker, every filly who'd turned him down or turned away, none of it had been meaningless cruelty. It had been the universe narrowing his options, shaping him into the exact specific tool that one tiny desperate colony needed.

His cock was a rescue mission.

He dragged his hooves down his muzzle and stared at the breezie, at Thistle Down, who was watching him with those oversized violet eyes, steady and unblinking, waiting for an answer she clearly expected to be yes.

"When," he said flatly, "would this... thing start?"

Thistle Down's wings buzzed a fraction faster. The first crack in her composure. Relief, maybe?

"Tonight would be ideal," she said. "...If you're amenable."

He looked at the Everfree. At the shadows between the trees, into the places that ponies didn't go. Somewhere in there, past the timberwolves and the cockatrices and whatever else lurked in that ancient tangled dark, there was a colony of breezies with thirty-seven mares and a population crisis.

And they needed him.

More specifically, the smallest dick in Ponyville.

"Yeah..." Clover Patch said. "Okay."

===

The path wasn't so much of a path than it was a thinning of undergrowth that Thistle Down navigated by memory and Clover Patch navigated by stumbling. Roots caught his hooves. Low branches scraped his withers. The canopy thickened until the sky was just fragments, pale blue going amber, going grey.

"How much further?" he asked, for the third time.

"Close." Same answer as before. She flew ahead of him, her wings throwing off faint trails of pollen-light that hung in the air for a few seconds before dissolving.

Then the trees opened.

He'd expected a clearing of some sort, but it was more like a pocket. A depression in the forest floor where an ancient oak had fallen centuries ago and rotted into soft earth, and everything that grew in its place had grown small. Mushrooms with caps the size of buttons. Moss that looked like velvet. Tiny blue flowers he didn't know the name of, clustered along the edges of a pond no wider than a dinner plate.

And breezies. Everywhere.

They emerged from beneath toadstools, from inside hollow acorns, from little structures woven out of grass blades and spider silk that he realized were houses. Dozens of them. Muzzles appearing in windows the size of his thumbnail, peering up at him with enormous eyes.

He froze. His hoof was six inches from what he now understood was someone's front door.

"Don't move," Thistle Down said, unnecessarily.

She descended into the colony and spoke rapidly in something that wasn't quite Ponish, or even Equestrian. Faster, higher, with consonants that clicked. Other breezies gathered around her. He caught pieces. His name, or something close to it. A word repeated several times that might have meant viable or compatible or possibly just the big one.

A murmur ran through the colony. He watched a breezie mare near the pond put both hooves over her mouth. Her wings stopped beating for a second and she dropped an inch before catching herself.

Oh, he thought. They didn't think she'd actually find somepony.

Thistle Down flew back up to him. Her composure was thinner now. He could see it in the set of her jaw, the way her wings beat a fraction too fast.

"They want to meet you," she said. "Properly."

"I'm going to crush their little tiny houses if I take another step."

"Sit. Right where you are. They'll come to you."

He sat. Carefully, slowly, tucking his legs beneath him, hyperaware of every blade of grass and tiny structure within tail's reach.

They came.

One by one, then in small groups, breezie mares drifted up from the colony floor and hovered around him. Close enough to touch, if touching wouldn't have knocked them out of the air. They studied him with an intensity that made his coat prickle, but it wasn't the snickering stares he was used to. They were hopeful, like he actually mattered.

An older breezie, greying mane, wings that buzzed with a slight rasp, flew up to Thistle Down and said something he couldn't hear. Thistle Down responded. The older breezie looked at Clover Patch. Looked at him for a long time.

Then she bowed. A slow lowering of her whole body, wings dipping, forelegs drawing in. The kind of bow that cost something.

Others followed. In ones and twos, scattered through the hovering crowd, breezies who had been watching him with guarded, cautious eyes lowered their heads.

"What are they-"

"Thanking you," Thistle Down said quietly. "You haven't done anything yet, and they're thanking you."

"I haven't agreed to-"

"You followed me into the Everfree at dusk. You sat down in the middle of their homes without being asked twice. They know what that means."

Clover Patch swallowed. The lump in his throat caught him off guard.

The older breezie spoke again. Thistle Down translated, though her voice had gone rough at the edges.

"Elder Moss Wing says... the colony has discussed this for a long time. Since before I was sent to search. Many thought it was foolish. That no pony would agree. That we would simply..." She paused. "Dwindle."

The word sat in the air like a stone dropped into still water.

"She says if you do this, the colony will remember your name for as long as breezies tell stories. She says you would be giving them something they stopped believing they could have."

"What's that?"

"Foals," Thistle Down said simply. "Next spring."

===

The first mare's name was Petal Drift.

She was younger than Thistle Down, with a mane the color of clover honey and wings like a dragonfly's. She couldn't look at him. She hovered near his chest, facing away, her whole body trembling so finely that her wings produced a high, thin whine.

"She's frightened," Thistle Down said from her perch on his ear. She'd stationed herself there as translator, guide, and, he suspected, quality control. "Not of you. Of the size difference."

"I'm frightened too," he muttered.

"That's good. Means you'll be careful."

Thistle Down had explained the process with the same blunt efficiency she brought to everything. He would need to lie on his back. His cock, even at its modest size, was still much larger than anything a breezie mare had ever taken. A breezie stallion's cock was roughly the size of a grass seed. Clover Patch's was closer to the length of Petal Drift's entire torso.

"Proportionally," Thistle Down had said, "you're actually a touch big for us."

He'd laughed at that. A sharp one that startled half the colony. The first time in his life anypony had called his cock big and meant it.

But the risks were real and Thistle Down had been very clear about it. Slow. Gentle. Let the mare set the pace. Breezie mares were more elastic than their size suggested, something about the magic that let them survive wind currents and pollen storms also made their bodies super adaptable. But there were limits, and those limits were measured in centimeters.

He lay on his back in a bed of moss that the colony had prepared, staring up at the canopy. The last light was fading. Bioluminescent mushrooms along the hollow's edges had begun to glow, casting everything in soft blue-green. It would have been beautiful if he weren't so terrified.

His sheath had relaxed. The warmth of the moss, the stillness, the fact that he was lying down. His cock emerged slowly, half-hard, flushed pink against his pale belly fur. He closed his eyes. Opened them.

Petal Drift was looking at it.

She hovered beside it, wings barely moving, studying it the way a mason might study a boulder that needed to be moved through a doorway. Her trembling had stopped. Something practical had replaced the fear, the focused assessment of a mare who'd made a decision and was now figuring out how.

She said something. Thistle Down translated from his ear.

"She says it's warm."

"Yeah," Clover Patch managed. "That's... normal."

Petal Drift drifted lower. Her forehooves touched the shaft and he gasped, from the sheer alien sensation of something so small and so deliberate against skin that had never been touched by anypony at all.

This is my first time.

The thought hit him, and he had to blink hard and stare at the canopy again. His first time was going to be lying on his back in a breezie colony while a tiny mare figured out how to fit him inside her. If he told anypony this story, not a single soul in Equestria would believe him.

Petal Drift straddled the tip of his cock.

Her legs barely reached halfway around the girth. She lowered herself with a concentration so fierce that her wings went still, relying entirely on her grip and the slow flex of her hind legs. He felt heat. Impossible heat. Wet and tight and so far beyond anything he'd imagined that his brain simply refused name it.

She made a sound. High, thin, and filled with effort. The sound of a body accepting something right at the edge of what it could take.

"Slow," Thistle Down said. He didn't know if she was talking to him or Petal Drift.

Petal Drift sank another fraction of an inch. Her entire lower body was stretched around him now, her marehood spread wide, slick with arousal that glistened in the mushroom-light. Her belly expanded faintly. He could see the shape of himself inside her, a subtle ridge beneath her skin, and the sight of it sent a bolt of something through him that was equal parts arousal and horror.

"Is she-"

"She's fine." Thistle Down's voice was taut. "She's done this in practice with carved stems. She knows her limits."

Petal Drift began to move.

It was nothing like what he'd imagined sex would be. There was no rhythm to it, no rough movements, and none of the confident grinding that colts described in low voices behind the hoofball pitch. It was slow and deliberate and careful, every motion measured in millimeters, Petal Drift rocking her hips in tiny increments while her wings fluttered for balance. Her hooves gripped his shaft. Her breath came in small, focused bursts.

And it felt good. That was the thing he hadn't been prepared for. It felt good. The tightness, the heat, the way her body clenched around him in rhythmic pulses that might have been involuntary. His hips wanted to move. His body wanted to thrust. He locked every muscle from the waist down and didn't.

Don't enjoy this.

The thought came hard and immediate and he clung to it. This wasn't about him. This was a dying colony. These were mares who had spent years watching their numbers decline, who had buried the idea of motherhood so deep they'd stopped talking about it. If he enjoyed this, if he let himself moan, or thrust, or come with anything resembling enthusiasm, then it stopped being a kindness and became something else. Something transactional. Something where he was getting paid in sex for a service, and the payment was the bodies of desperate mares who didn't have another option.

He couldn't live with that. He couldn't walk back to Ponyville carrying that.

So he lay still. He breathed through his nose. He watched the canopy and felt Petal Drift work and tried very hard to keep his body experiencing pleasure.

It didn't entirely work.

When he came, it was quiet. A shudder that ran through him from tail to ears, his cock pulsing inside a space so tight he could feel every contraction. Petal Drift gasped and went rigid, her wings snapping open, and he felt the warmth of his spend fill her in a way that was visceral and immediate and far more intimate than he'd been ready for.

She lifted off him slowly. Her legs were shaking. Fluid traced a thin line down her inner thigh, pearlescent in the blue light.

She looked at him.

And she was crying.

Her muzzle was crumpled with something so raw and so desperately grateful that Clover Patch had to look away because if he didn't he was going to lose it entirely.

"Petal Drift says-" Thistle Down started.

"I know."

Thistle Down went quiet.

Somewhere below, in the tiny woven houses of the colony, Clover Patch heard a sound he hadn't expected. Cheering. Thin and small and reedy, like wind chimes in a breeze, but unmistakable. Breezies who'd been watching, who'd been waiting, celebrating something they'd been afraid to hope for.

He pressed the back of his hoof against his eyes and breathed.

Ten more. Possibly eleven.

He could do this. He could give them this.

He just didn't know if he could live with it.

===

The second mare was Dew Mist.

She was bolder than Petal Drift. Wider in the hips, with a dusky rose coat and a mane she'd braided tight against her skull for the occasion, practical as a soldier preparing for a march. She didn't tremble. She landed on his cock like she was mounting a saddle, forehooves gripping the subtle ridge of his medial ring for purchase, and lowered herself with a grunt that was pure determination.

Clover Patch stared at the canopy. Counted mushroom caps. Breathed.

Don't feel it. Don't feel it. Don't-

Her marehood split around his tip, hot and impossibly snug, the inner walls rippling against him as her body worked to accommodate something three times the girth of what it was designed for. He could feel every fold of her, every slick crease, the textured ring of muscle just inside her entrance that squeezed his cockhead like a fist before yielding, grudgingly, to let him deeper.

He bit down on his lower lip until he tasted copper.

Dew Mist finished faster than Petal Drift. She knew what she wanted and she took it, grinding down against the flared rim of his tip with short, punching rolls of her hips until he spilled inside her with a full-body clench he couldn't suppress. She sat there afterward, breathing hard, his cock still buried in her up to the medial ring, and looked down at the swell of her belly where his spend had nowhere to go in that tiny body.

She patted his shaft twice. Businesslike. Then flew off.

Nine more.

===

The third was Fern Wisp. The maybe-irregular one. She was nervous, chattery, talked the entire time in rapid breezie dialect that Thistle Down didn't bother translating. Her hips were narrower and she could only take the first inch and a half, his flare stretching her entrance into a taut pink ring that made his stomach drop every time he looked down. She came before he did, her tiny body seizing around him, wings buzzing so hard she actually lifted off his cock for a second before gravity and determination brought her back down.

When he finished inside her, she pressed her muzzle against his shaft and stayed there. Just breathing. Her cheek against the vein that ran along the underside, her wings folded flat, her whole body curled against him like he was something warm and safe.

He didn't move until she was ready to leave.

===

The fourth.

Their names blurred. His brain had started to fuzz at the edges, the way it did when you'd been awake too long and the world took on that soft, unreal quality. Each mare was different. Each body was different. Some took him deep enough that the ridge of his medial ring pressed inside them and he could feel the squeeze of it like a second entrance, a tighter band within the tightness. Others could barely manage the tip, and he'd come with most of his cock still exposed, slick and flushed and aching in the cool night air while a breezie shuddered through her own finish with his flare lodged just inside her opening.

And each time, when a mare lifted herself off him and rejoined the colony, the ones still waiting grew bolder.

He saw it happening. The first mares had approached him with solemnity, with ritual gravity. By the fifth, there was whispering. By the sixth, he caught what might have been laughter, bright and disbelieving, the sound of mares who'd been braced for something clinical discovering it was something else.

The seventh mare licked him.

Just once. Quick, furtive, her tiny tongue dragging a hot stripe up the underside of his cockhead as she dismounted. He sucked air through his teeth and his hips jerked, the first involuntary movement he'd made all night, and she darted away with a sound that was unmistakably a giggle.

Don't. Don't you dare make this-

The eighth licked him too. Longer, slower, tracing the rim of his flare with deliberate attention, her tongue finding the sensitive crease where the head met the shaft and pressing into it. His cock twitched. She made an appreciative sound against his skin.

The ninth nuzzled him. Rubbed her entire body along his shaft after he'd finished, coating herself in the slick mess of their combined fluids, and pressed what he could only describe as a kiss to the slit at his tip before leaving. The colony's cheering was louder now. Less restrained. Less afraid.

They're grateful. That's all it is. They're grateful and they're showing it and you are not going to-

The tenth mare said something as she sank onto him. Thistle Down translated from his ear, her voice carefully neutral.

"She says you feel good."

"Don't tell me that."

"She wanted you to know."

"I don't want to know."

But his cock was fully hard now in a way it hadn't been with the first few, flushed dark, the flare engorged and the medial ring swollen into a pronounced ridge that each mare's body had to stretch around. His balls had drawn up tight. His breath came through his mouth because his nose wasn't moving enough air. He was aroused, genuinely, undeniably aroused, and every mare who mounted him could feel it in the heat and the hardness and the way his cock pulsed against their insides.

The eleventh mare rode him with enthusiasm. She braced her forehooves against his medial ring and used it as a hoofhold, bouncing herself on his tip with a vigor that made her wings hum. When she came, she cried out, a thin sharp sound like a bell being struck, and her marehood clamped down on him so hard his vision whited at the edges and he came with a groan he couldn't swallow fast enough.

She licked him clean. Thoroughly. Every inch from the base to the tip, her tongue tracing the veins, pressing into the groove behind his flare, lapping up the spend that had leaked from where they'd been joined. He lay there with his foreleg over his eyes and his jaw clenched and his whole body vibrating with something he refused to name.

One more.

===

The twelfth mare finished. She was gentle, quiet, and when she left she touched his chest with one hoof and said something so soft even Thistle Down leaned in to hear.

"She says thank you. And that her mother would have liked to meet you."

Clover Patch's throat closed. He nodded without speaking.

The colony had gone quiet. The cheering had settled into something else, something low and warm. Conversations in tiny houses. The sound of mares who had something to talk about that they hadn't had before.

He lay in the moss, spent and wrecked, his cock still half-hard against his belly because his body had apparently decided that softening was optional tonight. Ten times. He'd come ten times. His balls ached with a deep, bruised throb and his thighs were trembling and his head felt stuffed with cotton. Every thought arrived late and blurry, like he was hearing it through water.

"That's twelfth," he managed. "Holy shit... Fern Wisp made the count. It's done... buck."

Thistle Down didn't answer.

He turned his head. She was still on his ear, but she'd gone still in a way she hadn't been all night. Her wings had slowed to a low idle. She slid off his ear and hovered in front of his muzzle, and the pollen-light from her wings caught the wet shine on her cheeks before she could wipe it.

"Thirteen," she said.

He blinked. His brain moved like syrup.

"What?"

"The count is thirteen." Her voice was doing something he'd never heard from it. Something raw beneath the authority. "The thirteenth was undecided."

The air changed. Even through the fog in his skull, he felt it.

"You," he said.

She didn't confirm. She just looked at him with those violet eyes, and the mask she'd worn all night, the brisk census-taker, the clinical handler, cracked straight down the middle.

She dropped from his muzzle to his chest without a word.

Her hooves hit his sternum and she walked. Down his ribcage, across his belly, every step deliberate. She was looking at his cock, still flushed and slick, lying against his thigh in a mess of spend and breezie arousal, and the expression on her muzzle wasn't clinical assessment.

It was hunger.

"Thistle, wait-"

"No."

One word. Her voice, his language. A command.

She reached his shaft and grabbed it with both forehooves. Pressed her open mouth against the skin and dragged her tongue up the underside in one long, firm stroke from the base to the ridge of his medial ring. His cock jerked to full hardness against her muzzle and she made a sound in her throat, low and wanting, that vibrated through the sensitive skin and up into his spine.

"Thistle-"

"I want this." She climbed his shaft, straddling the medial ring, and ground her cunt against the swollen ridge. He could feel how wet she was, soaking, her slick smearing across the band of flesh in a hot streak. "I've sat on your ear all night and listened to you whimper for ten mares and I want this."

He opened his mouth to say something. He didn't know what. His brain wasn't producing sentences anymore, just pieces, half-formed protests dissolving in the fog of exhaustion and arousal. She was already positioning herself over his tip, one hoof spreading her folds, and he could see the pink of her cunt, swollen and glistening, could see how small she was against the flared head of his cock, and he couldn't think.

She sank onto him.

Fast. Faster than any of the others. She took his flare in one controlled drop, her entrance stretching wide around the engorged head, and the sound she made was a hiss through clenched teeth, pure aggression, a mare taking what she'd decided was hers. Her internal walls clamped around him and his whole body seized, a full-torso spasm, because he'd come ten times and everything was raw and oversensitive and she was so tight and so hot and she was already moving.

"Give me a foal," she said.

His hooves dug into the moss. His hips tried to buck and his muscles wouldn't cooperate, trembling and spent, and she rode the weak thrust with her hooves braced on his belly and took him deeper. Past the flare, down the shaft, the ridge of his medial ring pressing against her opening, and she bore down on it with a grunt of effort and he felt it pop inside her, the swollen band of flesh squeezing through the tight ring of her entrance, and she cried out, wings snapping rigid, her belly distended with the shape of him.

"Thistle, I can't, I already-"

"You can." She rolled her hips. Grinding. Ruthless. His medial ring caught against her inner walls with every motion, the ridge dragging across textured flesh that gripped and squeezed and pulled. "You're still hard. You've got more."

He didn't. He couldn't possibly. But his cock pulsed inside her, a throb he felt in his teeth, and his balls tightened despite the ache, and she felt it too because her eyes went half-lidded and she bared her teeth in something that was almost a grin.

"That's it." She clenched around him, deliberate, a rippling squeeze that started at her entrance and rolled inward. "Good colt."

The words broke something in him. A whimper fell out of his mouth, high and pathetic and surrendered, and his head dropped back into the moss and his eyes lost focus. She was in control. She'd been in control all night, managing the colony, managing him, and now she was managing this, taking what she wanted from his exhausted body with the same fierce certainty she brought to everything, and he couldn't fight it. Didn't want to. His defenses were ash. Ten mares had burned through them and Thistle Down was walking through what was left.

She fucked him like she was angry at the years. Every roll of her hips had weight behind it, grief and loneliness and three years of watching her colony shrink compacted into the grind of her cunt against his shaft. Her hooves fisted in his belly fur. Her wings beat in sharp bursts that lifted her an inch before she slammed back down, driving him deeper, and the wet sound of their bodies was obscene in the quiet of the hollow.

"Cum for me." She leaned forward, pressing her chest against his shaft, her whole body wrapped around him, and her voice dropped to something intimate and fierce and shaking. "Give it to me. I want your foals, Clover Patch. Cum for me."

His name. She used his name.

He came apart.

It hit him like a seizure. His back arched off the moss, his hind legs kicked, and the sound that ripped out of him was raw and animal and loud enough to scatter things in the canopy above. His cock flared wide inside her, the engorged head swelling against her walls until there was no space left, and he felt himself empty into her in weak, shuddering pulses that she milked from him with deliberate contractions of her cunt, wringing, squeezing, pulling every last drop from a body that had nothing left to give.

She came on the third pulse. Silent. Her whole body locked rigid, wings splayed, and her marehood clenched around him in a rapid flutter that dragged a broken, sobbing sound from his chest because it was too much, everything was too much, he was hollowed out and shaking and she was still squeezing-

Stillness.

His cock softened inside her. His spend leaked around the seal of her body, trailing down his shaft in a thin pearlescent line. His chest heaved. The moss was damp beneath his back.

Thistle Down sat on him with her forelegs wrapped around his shaft, her muzzle pressed against the skin, and she was crying. Silently. Her wings folded flat. Her whole body curled into him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had been falling apart for years.

She said something. Quietly. In Equestrian, because it was for him.

"Thank you."

Two words. The first time all night she'd sounded small.

Clover Patch lay in the moss and stared at the stars through the broken canopy and felt something inside his chest crack along a fault line he hadn't known was there.

He'd tried so hard not to enjoy it.

He'd failed.

And he got called a good colt for it.

===

The sun was doing that thing it did in early summer where it made everything look clean. The cobblestones. The market awnings. The fountain in the square where the rearing Earth pony statue threw off little shards of light. Ponyville looked scrubbed and bright and painfully normal, and Clover Patch walked through it like a colt who'd come back from a war nopony knew had happened.

He bought apples. He said good morning to the mare at the flower stall. He nodded at a stallion he vaguely recognized from the cider line last autumn. Normal things. Things a normal pony did on a normal morning in a normal town where nothing extraordinary had occurred.

Amber Dew and Lemon Tart were at the fountain again. Freckles was with them. They glanced his way as he passed and the giggle started, that sharp bitten-off sound he'd memorized against his will, and he waited for it to land the way it always did. The hot prickle at his ears. The urge to look away. The quiet arithmetic of inadequacy.

It didn't come.

He kept walking. The giggle faded behind him, and he realized with a strange, dislocated clarity that it hadn't touched him. Like a spear thrown at a target that had quietly moved two feet to the left. The spear was the same. The aim was the same. He just wasn't standing there anymore.

I saved a colony.

The thought surfaced without permission, plain and factual, and he turned it over in his head the way you'd turn over a stone you'd found in a field. Unremarkable on the outside. Heavier than it looked.

Thirteen mares. Thirteen breezies who'd gone to sleep that night with something growing inside them. Thirteen chances at foals by spring. A population that had been nearing toward zero for six generations, nudged, however slightly, in the other direction.

Because of him. Because of the thing about him that every filly in Ponyville had laughed at.

He didn't feel proud, exactly. The feeling was... weirder than that. Something between quiet satisfaction and bone-deep strangeness, like discovering you'd been holding a map upside down your whole life and the destination had been behind you the entire time.

He turned onto Stirrup Street. Passed the joke shop. Passed Quills and Sofas, where Davenport was arguing with a delivery pegasus about a shipment of throw pillows. Passed the bookshop where he sometimes browsed on slow afternoons, reading the spines without buying anything.

His hooves knew the way home. His brain was elsewhere.

Thirteen foals.

The number hit differently now than it had in the hollow. In the moment, wrapped in mushroom light and breezie tears, it had been abstract. A count. A thing had to do. Now, three days later, standing in the sunshine with an apple in his saddlebag, the math resolved into something concrete and slightly terrifying.

He was going to be a father.

Thirteen times over.

To breezies.

His legs stopped moving. He stood in the middle of the street and stared at nothing while a cart trundled past and the driver gave him an odd look.

Mom is going to kill me.

The image arrived fully formed and horrifying. His mother, Clover Bloom, standing in the kitchen of their small house on the east side of town, wearing the apron she wore when she was stress-baking, flour on her forehooves, listening to her only son explain that he'd lost his virginity to thirteen fairy ponies in the Everfree Forest in a single evening because his cock was statistically the smallest in Ponyville and that made him the only viable breeding partner for an endangered species.

She'd be supportive. She was always supportive. That was the worst part. She wouldn't yell. She'd get that expression, the one where her eyes went very wide and very still and her mouth formed a shape that was trying to be a smile but was actually her soul leaving her body, and she'd say something like well, sweetheart, as long as you were safe about it and then she'd excuse herself to the pantry and he'd hear muffled screaming for about forty seconds.

He couldn't tell her.

He could never, ever tell her.

He could never tell anypony.

He resumed walking. Faster now. Head down. The apple in his saddlebag bounced against his flank with every step and the rhythm of it matched the pulse in his temples. Father. Father. Father. Father.

By the time he reached the edge of town, where the houses thinned out and the fields started and the Everfree was a dark smudge on the horizon, his breathing had almost returned to normal. He set his saddlebag on a crate outside the old storage shed that nopony used anymore and sat down in the grass and put his muzzle in his hooves and laughed.

It came out strange. Wet and ragged and not entirely sane. He laughed until his ribs hurt and then he stopped and just breathed and listened to the crickets and the distant sound of somepony's wind chime.

I made a difference.

I'm also a teenaged father of thirteen half-breezie foals.

These two facts coexist.

He leaned back against the crate and closed his eyes. The sun was warm on his muzzle. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn't feel small. He felt tired and confused and mildly terrified, but the smallness was gone. Something had filled the space where it used to live, something he didn't have a name for yet, and he was too exhausted to examine it closely.

The breeze was nice. The grass was soft. He could fall asleep here and nopony would-

Something touched his sheath.

His eyes snapped open. His hind leg twitched. The sensation was barely there, lighter than a blade of grass, but it was warm and deliberate and moving, tracing the rim of his sheath with a precision that was instantly, viscerally familiar.

He looked down.

Thistle Down.

She was perched on his inner thigh, one hoof braced against the fold of his sheath, the other tracing slow circles on the sensitive skin just above the opening. Her wings were folded. Her mane was loose, not braided the way it had been in the hollow. She looked up at him with those violet eyes and her expression was calm and certain and completely unapologetic.

"What are you-" His voice cracked. He swallowed. "How did you even get here?"

"Followed you. You walk slow." She didn't stop touching him. Her hoof dipped beneath the rim of his sheath, brushing the silky skin inside, and his cock stirred against her foreleg. "I need to make sure it takes."

"Make sure what-"

"Your seed, Clover Patch." She said it the way she'd say obviously. "One breeding isn't always enough. Especially cross-species. I consulted with Moss Wing. She recommended multiple sessions over the course of a week to maximize viability." Her hoof pressed deeper. He felt the tip of his cock nudge against her foreleg, warm and responsive, beginning to swell. "I volunteered to come alone. The others will rotate if needed."

"Rotate," he repeated faintly.

"Mm." She leaned forward and pressed her mouth to the head of his cock as it emerged from his sheath. A lick. Slow, flat-tongued, dragging across the sensitive tip of his flare, and his whole body went rigid against the crate. Her tongue found the slit and pressed into it, just barely, and a whimper crawled up his throat and died behind his teeth.

"Thistle, we're outside, anypony could-"

"Nopony comes out here." Another lick. Longer. Tracing the curve of his flare as it swelled free of the sheath, her tongue following the ridge where the head met the shaft, finding every nerve. "That's why you sit here."

His cock slid fully out. Small by pony standards. Perfect by hers. It stood flushed and stiff against his belly and Thistle Down wrapped her forelegs around the shaft and pressed her cheek against it, and the warmth of her body against the sensitive skin made his hind legs tremble.

"There he is," she murmured. She licked the underside of his flare, one long stroke from the ridge to the tip, and his hooves scraped against the crate behind him. His ears flattened. His breath came in short, uneven pulls.

"Good colt," she said.

Two words. Spoken against the head of his cock, her breath warm on the slick skin, her tongue following the shape of his flare like she was memorizing it. His hips twitched. His whimper made it out this time, thin and helpless and surrendered.

He stared at the sky above Ponyville. Blue and clean and impossibly normal. Somewhere behind him, the town carried on. Market stalls and flower carts and fillies giggling at the fountain.

Out here, a breezie licked his cock with proprietary confidence and told him he was good.

Yeah, he thought, as his eyes fluttered shut and his body stopped fighting and the warm, impossible absurdity of his life settled over him like a blanket. I can live with this.