Clover Patch and Thistle Down - After Story

The sun had moved. Long shadows now, the shed throwing a dark bar across the grass, crickets tuning up somewhere in the tall grass by the fence line. Clover Patch was still leaning against the crate.

He hadn't moved much. Couldn't, really. His hind legs were splayed in front of him, his cock stood flushed and hard against his belly, and Thistle Down was working him with the patient concentration of a mare who had all afternoon.

She'd licked him to full hardness and then paused. Sat on his thigh with her forelegs crossed, watching his cock twitch with each pulse of his heartbeat, letting him ache. When he'd whimpered her name she'd smiled, small and mean and pleased, and gone back to work.

She dragged her tongue along the underside of his shaft, root to flare, and his hips jerked against the crate.

"Thistle-"

She hummed against his skin. The vibration crawled up his spine.

She climbed him slowly, deliberately. Her tiny hooves finding purchase on the veins running up the underside, her wings idling to keep her steady. When she reached his medial ring she ground her cunt against the swollen band, coating it in her slick, and his cock flexed hard enough that she had to grab on.

She kissed the ridge open-mouthed, tongue tracing the swell of it. He made a sound that didn't have a name.

His forelegs stayed loose in the grass. His hooves stayed splayed. He could feel where his strength was, dormant, waiting. He could have wrapped his forehoof around her whole torso and moved her wherever he wanted. Could have pinned her. Could have used the tip of his cock like a plaything against her and taken his own pleasure without waiting for her to work him.

He didn't.

His whole body was open to her. Belly bared to the afternoon sun, cock throbbing in her grip, hind legs spread and trembling. A colt could hurt something this small without even meaning to. She could feel how careful he was being. He could see it in the way she watched him watching himself.

She positioned herself over his tip and sank.

His breath punched out of him. She took his flare in one smooth drop, her cunt stretching wide around the engorged head, and the heat of her was worse than he remembered. She was so tight, impossibly small around him, and he could see the shape of himself pressing against her belly from the inside.

She wanted him, his body specifically. She'd flown from the Everfree to Ponyville to find him. She'd waited while he sat behind a shed feeling sorry for himself. She'd climbed onto his cock in the sunshine because this was the body her body wanted, and the fact of it lodged behind his ribs like a knife.

His eyes stung.

She rolled her hips measured and deep. His medial ring caught against her entrance and dragged.

"Thistle-"

She clenched around him. Deliberate. A rippling squeeze that started at her entrance and rolled inward.

He whimpered, high and broken.

She looked up at him with those violet eyes and her expression was possessive in a way he'd never seen on a mare's face in his life. Ownership. Like she'd been thinking about him for three days and now she had him under her hooves and she was going to take her time about it because she could. Because he was letting her. Because the big lummox who could have thrown her off with a twitch was lying against a crate whimpering her name and staring at her like she was the only thing in the world worth looking at.

Her mouth curled at the corner.

She fucked him with her whole small body. Ground down against his medial ring with the ridge caught inside her, her cunt stretched taut, her belly distended and glossy with the shape of him. Her wings beat in sharp bursts that lifted her an inch before slamming her back down. Her hooves fisted in the fur of his belly. Every roll of her hips punched a sound out of him, whimpers, gasps, her name, and she took each one like tribute.

"Mine," she murmured against his shaft. Quiet. Almost to herself.

His cock pulsed at the word.

She felt it. Her eyes flashed. She said it again, louder, teeth against his skin. "Mine."

"Yes-"

"Say it."

"Yours-"

"Good colt."

He came apart under her.

His back arched off the crate. His hind legs kicked at the grass. The sound that came out of him was quiet. A long shaking exhale, a moan drawn thin across the whole length of it, her name repeated like he couldn't stop. "Thistle, Thistle, Thistle-" He spilled into her in hot shuddering pulses that filled her tiny body until his spend leaked around the seal of her cunt and traced a slow line down his thigh.

She clenched around him through every pulse. She milked him, wrung it out of him. Her own finish hit her silently, her whole body going rigid, wings splayed, and she rode it out with her forelegs wrapped around his shaft and her cheek pressed flat against the vein.

For a long time neither of them moved.

The crickets kept crickets-ing, and somewhere in Ponyville a bell rang, faint through the distance. His cock softened inside her. His breath came ragged. His hooves lay slack in the grass where he'd surrendered them.

She stayed draped along his shaft, possessive even in stillness, one hoof still gripping the base like she wasn't done.

Her wings fluttered once, weak, and folded flat.

She turned her head against his skin. Pressed her mouth to the vein.

"Good colt," she murmured.

He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face and didn't try to answer.

===

Thistle Down didn't move for a long time.

She stayed draped along his shaft, her cheek pressed to the vein, her wings folded flat. His cock softened slowly beneath her. She felt every stage of it. The hardness leaving in slow pulses, the flare deflating against her chest, the shaft going pliant under her forelegs. The heat stayed. That deep, banked warmth of a body that had just done something.

When he was fully soft she lifted her cheek and watched.

His cock lay against his belly, slick and spent, glossy in the afternoon light with the mess of the two of them. It twitched once, weakly, and then began to retreat. She watched, fascinated. She'd seen it come out. She'd never watched it go back.

The shaft drew inward in measured increments. The flare disappeared first, tucked up under the fold of skin at the top of his sheath, and then the length of him followed, sliding back inch by inch into the warm dark of his body. Clover Patch made a small sound in his sleep, eyes closed, breath steady, as the last of it retreated and his sheath settled back into its resting shape against his belly.

Thistle Down stepped closer.

His sheath. She'd never really looked at one. Not up close. All night in the hollow she'd been managing traffic and translating for mares who couldn't be bothered with pony anatomy, and afterward she'd been too spent to examine anything. Now, in the sunshine, with the colt asleep and his chest rising and falling in slow steady breaths, she had time.

She circled it slowly, ears forward, wings quiet.

It was soft. Loose skin, dark with the flush of what they'd just done, dusted with fine pale fur where it met his belly. The opening at the front was still slightly parted from where his cock had withdrawn, a small dark slit that she could see the pink edge of when she tilted her head.

She touched it. One hoof, light as anything, tracing the crease along the underside.

His hind leg twitched. He didn't wake.

She smiled.

Her hoof pressed to the opening. Just the tip. The skin there was warm and giving under gentle pressure. She could feel the softness of the inside. Silky, damp with residual slick, still heated from him. Her own body was still humming. The soreness of him inside her was a good soreness. This felt like an extension of it, exploring the place he lived when he wasn't hard, the hidden fold of him.

She pushed a little deeper.

Her whole hoof slid inside. Then her foreleg. The skin of his sheath yielded around her, warm walls closing loose against her fur, and she felt the shape of his cock resting soft along the inside. A warm firm ridge, pliant now, dormant.

She looked up at his face. Eyes closed. Breath steady. Trusting.

She kept going.

Her head fit. Her shoulders. Her wings folded flat against her sides. She slipped further in and the world went dim and warm and enclosed, the walls of his sheath brushing her back, her belly, her wings, and the length of him was right there beside her, a slumbering weight her body could press against as she settled.

She wriggled. Adjusted. Curled.

There was room. Barely, but there was. His sheath was small by pony standards and enormous by hers, and if she folded herself carefully she could wrap her whole body around his cock, her forelegs draped over the shaft, her hind legs tucked under, her cheek pressed against the warm silky skin of his flare tucked up at the top.

She fit.

She was inside him. Wrapped around him. Held on all sides by his body.

His cock was hot against her. She could feel the faint slow pulse of the vein along the underside, matching his heartbeat. The whole space smelled like him, like the two of them, musky and warm and alive. Above her, distantly muffled through the layer of him, she could hear his breathing. In and out. In and out.

She pressed her cheek harder against his flare. Wrapped her forelegs tighter around the shaft. Closed her eyes.

She'd found him in Ponyville. Chosen him out of every colt in town. Ridden him in a moss-lined hollow and taken his seed and then walked back to him three days later to take it again. And now she was tucked inside his body, curled around the part of him nopony else in the world would ever get to hold, and he was asleep and warm and hers.

His cock twitched.

Just once. A small pulse against her cheek. Some idle reflex of a body that felt something soft and warm near a sensitive place. She held very still, then it settled.

She smiled against him.

Mine.

She adjusted her wings, tucked her tail neatly along her hind legs, and let herself go still. The warmth was extraordinary. The dark was gentle. His pulse was a slow drum against her cheek and his breath was a distant tide.

She could rest here. For a while. Until he woke up and figured out where she'd gone.

The thought of his face when he did made her wings flutter once against the walls of his sheath, a small helpless laugh she couldn't quite suppress.

She settled deeper against his cock and closed her eyes.

Above her, in the sunshine, Clover Patch slept on with his hooves splayed in the grass and a breezie tucked inside his sheath, and the crickets kept crickets-ing, and the shadow of the shed crept a little further across the lawn.

===

Clover Patch woke up slow.

The sun had shifted again. The shadow of the shed had swallowed most of the grass around him and there was a warm bar of gold falling across his chest through the gap between the shed and the fence. His mouth tasted like sleep. His muscles ached in that pleasant scraped-out way that came from something well-earned.

He blinked at the sky. Tried to remember what day it was. Tuesday. He thought Tuesday. His mother would be expecting him for supper and he had no idea what he was going to say about where he'd been.

He shifted on the crate. Stretched his hind legs.

Something in his sheath moved.

He froze.

For a second his brain refused the input. His sheath was warm, warmer than it should have been, and there was a shape in there, soft and small and unmistakably alive, pressed along the length of his cock like it belonged there. Something with limbs. Something breathing.

His head snapped up. He looked down at his belly. His sheath was distended slightly, subtly rounded in a way it had no business being, and the shape inside it stirred at his sudden movement.

"Oh no."

He knew that shape.

"Thistle?"

A muffled sound from inside him. Contented. Sleepy. Almost a hum.

"Thistle. What are you doing."

The reply came filtered through skin, small and matter-of-fact.

"Getting comfortable."

He stared at his own belly. The bar of sunlight moved slowly across the fur. His sheath twitched, just barely, as she adjusted her wings against the inside.

"Getting- Thistle. Thistle, come out."

"No."

"No?"

"I live here now."

"You what?"

"Mm-hm."

She said it the way she said everything. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world and he was slow for not having figured it out already. Clover Patch stared at his sheath. His sheath stared back. Somewhere inside it a breezie the size of his frog was, apparently, taking up residence.

"You can't- Thistle, you can't just-"

"I fit."

"That's not the point-"

"I'm warm."

"Thistle-"

"You're comfortable too. I can tell. Your heart's going faster."

He put his forehoof over his face.

His heart was going faster. His body was catching up to what his brain was still refusing to process, which was that a mare was curled around his cock inside his own body, and every small movement she made, the flex of her wings, the shift of her forelegs, the press of her cheek against his flare, was registering directly on the most sensitive part of him with nowhere for the sensation to go.

He felt himself starting to stir.

No. No. No no no.

He clenched every muscle from the waist down. His sheath twitched. Inside it, Thistle made a small pleased sound like she'd felt the twitch and enjoyed it.

"Thistle. Please. You have to come out."

"Why?"

"Because you live in the Everfree."

"I live here."

"Because I have to walk home and I can't do that with you in my-"

"You can. Nopony'll see."

"Thistle."

He reached down. Careful, so careful. His forehoof hovered above his sheath and he could feel her inside, the exact shape of her, and he tried to figure out how to get her out without hurting her. Maybe if he gently pressed the base of his sheath from the outside. Squeezed a little. Enough to encourage. Like getting a cat out of a boot.

He pressed. Gentle. Very gentle. Just a nudge.

Thistle Down bit him.

It wasn't hard. It wasn't cruel. It was a firm deliberate closing of her tiny teeth around the underside of his cock, right at the base of his flare, and her jaw locked and she made a small sound that was unmistakably a growl.

"Mine."

Muffled by skin. Perfectly clear.

Clover Patch went very still.

His forehoof retracted. His breath caught. His cock, against his best efforts, hardened another degree in her mouth.

He stared at the sky.

The bar of sunlight had moved across the fence and was climbing the shed wall. Somewhere out in the field a bird was doing its afternoon call. Ponyville was going about its afternoon. Filthy Rich was probably closing up Barnyard Bargains for the day. Cheerilee was probably finishing her lesson plans. Somewhere at the fountain, Amber Dew and Lemon Tart and Freckles were probably still gossiping about somepony's cousin's colt-friend.

And Clover Patch was sitting behind an abandoned storage shed with a breezie living in his sheath, and she'd just bit him and claimed him and there was nothing, literally, physically, morally, that he could do about it.

He tried to think of a counter-argument. Anything. Any leverage.

His brain offered nothing.

Thistle Down released his cock with a small satisfied lick and settled back into her curl inside him, wings folding neat against her sides, and let out a slow contented breath he could feel through the whole thickness of his sheath.

"Good," she murmured.

He lay against the crate and looked at the sky and slowly, very slowly, started to laugh.

It was a small laugh. Weak. Half surrender and half hysteria. His chest shook with it and Thistle Down made a small annoyed sound about being jostled and then settled again.

His cock was throbbing gently against her. He was going to have to walk home with a breezie inside his sheath. He was going to have to sit down for supper with his mother with a breezie inside his sheath. He was going to have to figure out how to sleep, and bathe, and eventually explain to somepony why his sheath sometimes talked back to him.

I live here now.

He put his hooves over his eyes.

"Okay," he said, mostly to the sky. "Okay. Fine. You live here now."

Inside him, muffled and smug and very much at home:

"Good colt."

===

The first morning was the hardest.

Clover Patch woke up at dawn in his own bed in his own room with his own quilt pulled up to his withers and, for exactly four seconds, thought the whole thing had been a dream. Then he shifted his hind legs and felt a small warm weight readjust inside his sheath and let out a breath of pure resignation into his pillow.

"Morning," Thistle Down said, muffled.

"Morning."

"Your bed's nice."

"Thanks."

"Your mother's already up."

"How do you-"

"I can hear her. Downstairs. She's putting a kettle on."

He lay very still and listened. Faint, through the floorboards, the sound of Clover Bloom moving around the kitchen. He hadn't been able to hear it from his room in eight years of living in this house.

"You have really good ears."

"Small body. Big ears. It's how we survive."

He got up. Carefully. Thistle Down shifted inside him and made a small comfortable sound and went quiet again.

Breakfast was a test. His mother set a bowl of oats in front of him and asked how he'd slept and he said fine and she asked if he was feeling all right because he looked a bit flushed and he said he was fine and Thistle Down, unhelpfully, chose that exact moment to stretch inside his sheath. He nearly bit through his spoon.

"Sweetheart, are you sure you're okay?"

"Fine, Ma. Just, didn't sleep great."

"You sure?"

"Positive."

Under the table, muffled, wickedly delighted. "You're a terrible liar."

He kicked the table leg on reflex. The teapot rattled. His mother frowned at him and he apologized and shoveled oats into his mouth and stared at a knot in the wood grain until his cheeks stopped burning.

===

School was worse. School was so much worse.

Clover Patch was old enough that his schooling was down to a few advanced classes at the community hall three afternoons a week, mostly practical stuff. Accounting, land management, the kind of thing a colt his age was supposed to be picking up to make himself useful. The hall was small and quiet and the instructor was a serious mare named Ledger who did not tolerate distractions of any kind.

Thistle Down found this hilarious.

She was mostly quiet during the lesson itself. She'd shift occasionally, adjust a wing, press her cheek against his flare in a way that sent a soft warm pulse of sensation up his belly, and he'd have to grip his quill hard enough to make his fetlock ache to keep his face neutral.

The problem was between lessons.

The problem was Barrel Roll.

Barrel Roll was one of the confident colts. Big, easy-hipped, the kind of stallion who leaned against door frames like he was doing them a favor. He was in Clover Patch's afternoon accounting class and he liked to hang around after the lesson to chat with Ledger's assistant, a pretty young mare named Ink Blot who laughed at everything he said. Clover Patch typically packed his saddlebag quickly and left.

That day he was slow. He was slow because Thistle Down had, halfway through the second hour, decided to start purring.

He didn't know breezies could purr. It turned out they could, and it turned out the vibration transmitted directly through his cock into the base of his spine, and it turned out that this was extremely difficult to ignore while trying to calculate compound interest on a hypothetical loan.

By the time class ended he was flushed and jittery and his sheath was, embarrassingly, distended enough to notice if you were looking for it.

Barrel Roll was looking. Barrel Roll noticed everything.

"Hey, Clover Patch." Loud. Casual. The kind of loud that made everypony else in the room turn. "You all right there? You look a little, worked up."

Ink Blot giggled behind her hoof.

Clover Patch felt every drop of blood in his body relocate to his face. Inside his sheath, Thistle Down went perfectly still, which was somehow worse, because the sudden absence of her small movements made him hyperaware of exactly how present she was.

"I'm fine."

"You sure? Bit of a, situation there?"

He grabbed his saddlebag. Slung it awkwardly to cover his belly. Muttered something that might have been late for something and got out the door with his ears pinned flat and his heart hammering.

He made it two blocks before he ducked into an alley and leaned against a wall and breathed.

"Thistle."

"Mm?"

"You can't do that at school."

"Do what?"

"You know what."

A pause. Then, delighted. "The purring?"

"Yes the purring."

"You liked it."

"That is not the point-"

"It was cute. Your quill kept slipping."

"Thistle. I am begging you."

Another pause. Then, softer, almost tender. "Fine. Not at school."

"Thank you."

"But at home you have to make it up to me."

He closed his eyes and let his head thunk gently against the wall of the alley.

"Yes. Fine. Whatever you want."

"Good colt."

His cock twitched. She giggled inside him. He walked home with his saddlebag slung strategically and his ears burning and a small warm smug weight tucked inside him, humming to itself.

===

Nights were their own arrangement.

He learned the pattern within a week. Thistle would stay quiet through supper, quiet through his evening chores, quiet while he read in the sitting room and his mother did the crossword. Quiet while he brushed his teeth and quiet while he climbed into bed and quiet, quiet, quiet, until the house had been silent for a solid twenty minutes and his mother's breathing across the hall had settled into the deep slow rhythm of real sleep.

Then Thistle would move.

The first stir would wake him if he'd drifted. A small adjustment of her body inside his sheath, her weight shifting from one side of him to the other. Then her mouth, soft, deliberate, tracing the underside of his cock while it lay dormant. She'd found early on that if she used her tongue in a specific slow rhythm along the vein, she could bring him to full hardness from inside his own body, and she was extremely proud of this discovery.

He'd whimper into his pillow. Bite it. Try not to make a sound.

His cock would swell, filling the sheath, and Thistle Down would ride the pressure outward as he grew, until eventually his flare emerged into the cool air of his bedroom with her wrapped around it like she'd been waiting there the whole time. Which, technically, she had.

Then she'd climb.

She rode him in the dark. Every night. She was patient and quiet and ruthless, working herself down onto him with slow controlled sinks that made the mattress creak faintly beneath his flanks. When his sounds got too loud she'd clench around him sharp and sudden, a warning squeeze, and he'd bite his pillow hard enough to taste linen and try to swallow the rest.

He'd come biting the inside of his own cheek. She'd milk him through it with silent expert contractions and then, when he was spent and shaking and staring at the ceiling with tears in the corners of his eyes from trying not to make noise, she'd lift herself off him with a slow careful rise, let his softening cock slide free of her, and nuzzle the flare and murmur good colt against it before climbing back into his sheath and going to sleep.

Every night. Every single night.

He got dark circles under his eyes. His mother asked if he was sleeping all right. He said he was fine.

He was thoroughly, gloriously, completely wrecked, and he had never in his life been happier.

===

The strangest thing was how quickly it became normal.

He learned to sit a certain way at supper so Thistle could hear the conversation clearly. He learned to walk with a specific rolling gait that minimized bounce. He learned which of his mother's stories made Thistle laugh silently inside him (the one about the neighbor's chicken, always) and which ones made her go very still and thoughtful (anything about his father, who'd left when Clover Patch was small).

She was learning him. All of him. From the inside.

She knew the sound of his heartbeat before he was nervous versus after. She knew which teachers he liked and which he didn't by the pitch of his voice. She knew that he hummed to himself when he was reading something he enjoyed, that he tapped his hoof when he was thinking hard, that he sometimes talked to himself in the shower about arguments he wished he'd made.

She knew him in a way nopony had ever known him.

And he was starting to realize that he wanted to know her the same way. Her body he was becoming intimately familiar with in the dark, but he wanted her. Thistle Down. The mare who'd surveyed every cock in Ponyville and picked him. Who'd sat on his ear through the worst and most extraordinary night of his life. Who now lived inside him and giggled at his humiliations and rode him to pieces in the small hours and called him a good colt with such casual authority that he'd stopped questioning it.

He wanted to see her in the sun. In the grass. On a picnic blanket, maybe, with a tiny cup of tea in her tiny hooves, telling him about her colony and her mother and what she'd wanted to be when she was small.

He wanted her to be his and to be seen being his.

He didn't know how to ask for that yet. He didn't know if there was a way to ask for that, given that she was the size of his frog and lived in his sheath and their entire relationship had begun with him being the last statistical hope of a dying species.

But he was starting to want it. Really want it. And every night when she curled against him and murmured her praise where nopony else would ever hear it.

===

Thistle Down had, by any reasonable measure, upgraded her living situation.

Her old bed in the colony had been a woven scrap of dried grass lined with dandelion fluff, tucked into the base of a hollow acorn. It was fine. It was fine, what everypony had, cold in winter and damp in spring. And it occasionally had to be evacuated when the ants got ambitious.

Her new bed was warm.

Her new bed was always warm. The inside of Clover Patch's sheath held a body-heat that didn't fluctuate the way outside temperatures did. A steady, deep, mammalian warmth that soaked into her fur and stayed there. In the mornings she woke up with her wings loose and her muscles unclenched in a way she hadn't experienced since she was a nymph pressed against her mother's belly.

Her new bed was also her new mattress. And her new blanket. And her new pillow.

His cock, at rest, was exactly the right size for her to drape herself over. Warm, firm, pliant enough to conform to her body when she pressed against it. She'd taken to sleeping with her forelegs wrapped over the top of the shaft, her cheek against the soft skin at the base of his flare, her hind legs tucked between the underside of his cock and the wall of his sheath. Held on all sides. Held by him, specifically, the whole of him wrapped around the whole of her.

The sheath skin was the blanket. That was how she'd come to think of it. Loose, soft, giving. It moved when he moved, drew tighter around her when he lay on his side, loosened when he stretched out on his back. The fine fur along the inner walls was silky against her wings. When he was warm from being in the sun she could feel it through the skin like she was tucked under a quilt in front of a fireplace.

It was, without exaggeration, the best bed she had ever slept in.

And it was hers.

===

There were secondary benefits she hadn't anticipated.

She'd figured out the sex almost immediately. A cock she could rouse from inside its own sheath was an unprecedented arrangement, and she'd made full use of the novelty within the first three nights. She had discovered that if she pressed her tongue flat against the vein along the underside and dragged upward in slow patient strokes, she could bring Clover Patch from soft to fully hard in under two minutes, and that he would, at that point, be so overwhelmed by the sensation of being roused from inside his body that he would whimper her name into his pillow before she'd even climbed out to ride him.

That had become her nightly indulgence. Wait for the house to settle. Wake him gently. Take him apart slowly. Milk him dry. Curl back into her warm quilt with his softening cock cradled against her chest and drift off with the taste of him still on her tongue.

It was decadent, and she had no intention of stopping.

She'd also discovered, to her surprise, the other uses.

The hiding place, for instance.

She hadn't planned it. It happened by accident, three weeks in, when Clover Patch's mother had come into his room unannounced while he was still getting dressed. Thistle Down had been perched on his shoulder, casually, chatting to him about something inconsequential, when the door had opened without warning.

She'd dove into his sheath so fast her wings had snapped audibly against the skin.

Clover Bloom hadn't noticed the sound. She'd been distracted by the pile of laundry Clover Patch had failed to bring down for washing. She'd delivered a good-natured scolding and left. And Thistle Down had lain curled inside her son with her heart hammering against his flare and her wings half-folded and thought, quite clearly:

Oh. This is useful.

After that, she made a habit of it. Any time she was outside his body, resting on his hoof at the edge of the Everfree, perched on the sill of his open window in the mornings, riding on his ear on the walk home from school, she stayed alert for the sound of hoofsteps or voices. And if anypony came close, she dove.

His sheath had become her panic room. Warm, hidden, and safe. Nopony would ever think to look there. Nopony could look there without significant social violation. She was, effectively, invisible whenever she wanted to be, tucked inside the one place in Equestria that nopony would ever check.

She'd never felt safer in her life.

===

The realization struck her, quietly, one afternoon.

She was curled inside him during his accounting class. He was hunched over his ledger, quill scratching, and she was resting with her cheek against his flare and half-listening to Ledger explain the principles of amortization to a room of colts who mostly didn't care. She'd been idly running her hoof along the vein of his cock, just to feel it. The steady pulse of his heartbeat, the warm silk of the skin.

She was safe, warm, and fed. She was inside a colt who would rather die than let anything happen to her, whose entire body was arranged around the specific purpose of keeping her hidden and comfortable and unseen. Her cunt was pleasantly sore from the previous night. Her belly was full from the crumbs he'd slipped her at breakfast. Her wings were resting. Her mother, back in the colony, would have wept to see it.

She had never, in her entire life, been this comfortable.

She had never, in her entire life, been this cared for.

She thought about her old bed. The dandelion fluff. The ants. The winter cold. Her sisters bundled together in a wreath around the queen for warmth, wings pressed flat against each other, breathing shallowly to conserve heat.

And now this. Warmth and safety. A cock she could ride whenever she wanted and a sheath she could sleep in and a colt who whispered her name into his pillow and held very, very still when she was tucked inside him because he was afraid of hurting her.

She pressed her cheek harder against his flare.

Above her, through the layer of him, she heard him hum softly. That particular hum he did when he was concentrating on something he almost understood. She smiled against his skin.

Mine, she thought. It was both simple and true.

Mine, and I'm his, and I'm home.

===

That night she rode him slower than usual. Gentler. She took her time. She stayed low on his shaft where she could press her whole body flat against him, cheek to the vein, forelegs wrapped around as much of him as she could hold. When he came she came with him instead of milking him through it, and afterward she didn't climb back into her sheath-bed immediately.

She flew, unsteady, from his cock to his chest.

Landed in the hollow of his throat where the fur went soft and his pulse ran close to the surface. She folded her wings and settled there, cheek against the warm rise of his collarbone, and let him breathe under her.

"Thistle?" His voice, quiet in the dark. "You okay?"

"Mm."

"You don't usually stay out."

"Mm."

She could hear his heart. Slow now, satisfied, the deep resting rhythm of a body that had been given what it needed. Her wings were flat against her back. Her hoof was pressed to the soft fur under his jaw.

She thought about her mother. About the ants. About the way the colony had never quite felt like a home so much as a struggle to survive together. About the years, the many, many years, she'd already lived and the many more waiting for her. About the calculations she'd done, in the quiet part of her mind, before she'd ever flown to Ponyville. Which colt is small enough. Also which colt will last the longest.

She'd picked him for that too. Partly.

He was so young. His heart under her cheek was young. His hooves were young. His voice was young. Every part of him was still in the process of becoming, and she was going to get to watch every stage of it. The filling out of his chest, the settling of his jaw, the slow gathering of the years. When he was old and grey and worn thin she would still be here, curled inside him, warm and unchanged and grieving the shape of him before it was even gone.

She'd known that when she chose him.

She hadn't known it would feel like this.

His forehoof came up, careful as always, and one huge silky bristle of frog touched her back. The softest edge of him. The gentlest contact he was capable of. Even now, half asleep, he was thinking about how not to hurt her.

Her throat closed.

"Clover Patch?"

"Yeah?"

She couldn't say any of it. She couldn't tell him she was older than his mother. She couldn't tell him she'd been alive for the founding of Ponyville, that she remembered when the marketplace was three stalls and a fence, that she'd watched three generations of Apples work the same orchard. She couldn't tell him she was going to bury him.

She couldn't tell him she'd picked him partly because of how long he'd last.

She couldn't tell him she'd underestimated, catastrophically, how much it would hurt to have picked well.

"Thanks for being warm," she said instead.

A pause. Then a soft laugh, low and sleepy. His frog stayed against her back, a whole warm presence holding her in place.

"Anytime."

She burrowed her face into the fur under his jaw. Closed her eyes. Breathed him in.

Her old bed had been dandelion fluff. Her new bed was a colt who called her his and let her live inside him and touched her with the tenderest part of himself when she needed touching.

She'd stay. For as long as he'd have her.

Which, she was starting to understand, was going to be a very long time.

And also, she couldn't lie to herself about this, not nearly long enough.

He fell asleep first.

She felt it happen. His breathing went long and even, that deep tidal draw of a body letting go, and the frog resting against her back grew heavier as the last of his weight settled. His pulse under her cheek slowed to the slow drum of real sleep.

She didn't move.

She was small enough that his breathing rocked her, a little rise and fall with each pull of air, and she let it. She let him move her. His chest was warm. His fur smelled like him. Somewhere in the house a floorboard settled and outside the window a nightbird called once and went quiet.

She stayed awake.

Somepony had to.