Pinkie was awoken the next morning by the gentle chirping of birds and the faint rays of sunlight that flooded the room. Dash lay in her arms, still asleep, clutching the front of Pinkie's shirt. The bubbly girl smiled at how peaceful and admittedly cute her friend looked.

Pinkie then looked over to her pet miniature alligator Gummy's food bowl and saw that it was empty. She was about to get up to feed him, but heard Dash stir from her dreams with a low, groggy moan. She hugged Pinkie's arm, her eyes still closed. "G'morning, Pinkie." She said in a tired mumble.

" Mornin' Dashie!" Pinkie replied in her typical bubbly voice with a giggle.

Dash opened her eyes and smiled at her friend, then remembered what the two girls had done together last night. She blushed a lot, not knowing how to address it to Pinkie.

Pinkie noticed her discomfort. "Whats the matter, Rainbow?"

"W-Well..." Dash started, "About... Last night..." Her blush deepened as she looked away, hugging her arm tighter.

Pinkie cupped Dash's cheek, and smiled. "It's whatever you want to make of it, Dashie. On top of relaxing you, one of the reasons I did it was because I have feelings for you, but I'm not gonna force you to be with me. If you wanna forget it happened, I understand... But I really... Really like you."

"Pinkie, I.... I like you too..." Rainbow replied slowly.

Pinkie giggled and got closer to Rainbow. So close that when she spoke, their lips almost touched. "Pinkie promise?"

"Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick acupcake in my eye." Rainbow said softly.

That was all Pinkie needed. She slowly connected their lips, and locked Dash into a long, passionate kiss.

Their kiss lasted for a few minutes. Their hearts were both nearly beating out of their chests. They eventually had to stop the kiss to breathe, at which point Pinkie simply held Dash against her, running her fingers lightly through her new girlfriend's hair.

Pinkie giggled and began to speak after another minute. "You know what this means, right, Dashie?"

"What?" Rainbow asked, slightly alarmed and afraid that she had done something wrong. However, her fear quickly faded when Pinkie looked into her eyes with a smile and enthusiastically said, "You get to live with me now!"

Rainbow instatly grew a huge smile and began sobbing with joy as she hugged Pinkie tight. No longer would she have to live with her abusive drunkard of a father. She could live in an unbroken home, and with her girlfriend! Life was seeming to turn around completely for Dash.

Pinkie knew Rainbow was crying out of joy, not sadness, and held her close. After a few minutes, Rainbow had calmed down and stopped crying, but another bad thought had popped into her head. "But.. Pinkie..." She said, looking up into the sapphire eyes of the pink-haired girl, "What if... What if he comes after me?"

Pinkie's features turned dark and her hair fell straight as she replied in an uncharacteristically cold voice, "He won't."

Rainbow was still concerned, "How do you know? Pinkie, you don't understand. As strong as I am, my dad can throw me around like I'm nothing! If he finds me-"

"He won't." She repeated. "I promise. I won't let him hurt you. I won't let anyone hurt you..."

Dash smiled a little, knowing that Pinkie would keep her word, and protect her if she needed it. She kissed Pinkie's cheek. "Okay, Pinkie. I trust you. But I have one more favor to ask..."

"What's that?" Pinkie asked softly.

"Well... Since it's Saturday today... And we don't really need to be anywhere..." Dash blushed as she gripped Pinkie's shirt. "C-can we just lay here in bed for a little while...?"

"Of course, Dashie!" Pinkie replied happily as she kissed Dash's nose and her hair returned to its bright and poofy state.

Rainbow laughed a little and hugged herself as close as she could to her girlfriend. "Thank you..."

"No, thank you, Dashie." Pinkie smiled.

---------------
That same morning, Spike awoke to the sound of his sister, Twilight, vacuuming in his room. "Ugh..." He growled quietly as he covered his ears with his pillow. "Twilight, it's 7 am on a Saturday! Let me sleep in!"

"No, Spike! You have to get up!" His older sister said as she pulled the covers off of him.

Spike groaned and sat up in bed. "Fine!" He got up and put on a pair of sweatpants over his boxers, then went downstairs to make breakfast. Spike always insisted on making breakfast, because Twilight never acquired the skill of making things edible. In fact, the one time that Twilight DID cook, whatever she attempted to make came out of the oven in the form a charcoal-colored brick.

Spike started making pancakes and vegan sausage. Though Spike loved meat, Fluttershy had encouraged Twilight to go on a vegetarian diet for a few months, and as it turned out, Twilight loved it!

Spike, however, hated the fact that the only meat fix he got was occasionally in the unrecognizable slop everyone recieved on 'mystery' meat Monday at school. Nevertheless, Spike endured it, for his sister. He saw how happy this made her, which made him happy. It was the happiest the two of them had been in a long time. Neither of them smiled much anymore, ever since-

"Wow, Spike!" Twilight said as she came downstairs into the kitchen, "This smells great!"

"Thanks, Twi." Spike said automatically, trying to come back to his thoughts.

Twilight hugged her younger brother from behind as she took the plate he had made for her to the table, sitting down in front of her plate and pouring some orange juice into a tall glass, sipping it patiently as she waited for Spike to sit down as well and begin eating.

Spike sat down and dug into his meal, using his abnormally sharp teeth to easily chew through the vegan sausage and soft, fluffy flapjacks on his plate. Twilight was concerned for Spike because of how rushed his eating was. Usually when they eat breakfast together, they make a lot of conversation. As Spike was finishing his meal, Twilight spoke up. "Um, Spike? Is everything... Okay?"

"Yeah, I'm just really hungry." Spike answered with a dismissive hand gesture.

"Spike..." Twilight pressed again, but before she could continue, Spike dumped his empty plate in the sink and went back upstairs to his room, locking the door and quickly getting dressed. A minute later, he walked back downstairs dressed in his gray, baggy sweatpants, with a long white t-shirt over an even baggier black hoodie, and some converse sneakers.

"I'm going for a walk." He said in a low flat tone.

"Spike, wait-" Spike slammed the door, halting Twilights protests. She sat there, not knowing what to do. She sighed and looked out the kitchen window. "What's got him so upset?"

--------------------------------

Spike growled, pressing the barbell and all 180 pounds attached to it with relative ease. He decided to blow off some steam in Pipsqueak's rec room. After he finished his set, he sat up and thanked his friend. "Thanks for letting me come and work out at your place on such short notice, Pip."

"Oi, it's not a problem at all, mate." His friend said in his thick Trottingham accent. "I'm actually glad you came over. Needed some motivation to lift, myself." He grinned as he started a set of squats.

"Yeah, we need to really get ready for our last few games this year. We're gonna be going up against some tough schools. Not to mention Varsity is gonna be really rough if we don't get bigger fast. At the rate we've been going at, we'll be as good as waterboys. We've both been given a rare opportunity to play with the upperclassmen. We can't screw it up."

"Yeah, not to mention that school from down south. Their halfback, Garble, is one scary bloke, I heard. 250 pounds of muscle and almost legendary speed." Pip said, slightly worried that they would lose their first game next season to Garble's team as he finished his set of squats and racked the bar.

"Wait..." Spike started, "Garble?" He spat the word out, and the venom he laced in it fell off of his tongue so heavily that it could almost be felt throughout the room's atmosphere.

"Yeah... After he got expelled from Canterlot High last year he went down there to play football... Why?" Pip asked his friend, wondering why he was so interested in Garble.

"Me and Garble have... Some bad history." Spike answered slowly, the green irises his eyes seeming to look on thousands of feet past the walls of Pipsquek's home gym and his pupils shrunk down to slits in a reptile-like way.

His friend patted him on the back and sat down next to him on the weight bench. "Hey, don't worry about that, mate. He'll be sorry for whatever he did to you after we whoop those buggers in our first game next fall!" Pip said encouragingly, though not fully believing his own words. He heard that Garble was unstoppable in the pre-season.

"I guess." Spike said before slowly getting up from the bench to grab a water bottle from his friends mini fridge.

Though Spike hated Garble, it still beat talking about what happened to his-

"Oi, Spike!" Pip called from the door. "I'm gonna grab snacks from the kitchen, want something?"

"Yeah, just get me whatever you're getting." He responded plainly, then sighing as his thoughts were interrupted again.

Spike rested while Pip was getting snacks. They had both been pumping iron for three hours now, and needed a break before continuing. Spike had definitely gotten in shape. Before freshman year he was short and chubby. But puberty had been good to him so far since then, and he had grown tall, lean, and well-sculpted. His abs glistened with sweat as he breathed slowly on the bench, and he toweled off his forehead.

Pip handed Spike a small plate of chicken after walking back into the room, knowing that Spike loved meat so much. They ate quickly and continued working out after that for about a half hour with no interruptions. That is, until Pip asked Spike a question.

"Oi, Spike." Pip said to his friend as he finished a set of diamond push-ups.

"Yeah?" The other boy replied, wiping sweat from his brow, stopping halfway through his set of crunches to do so.

"What exactly happened between you and Garble to give you such bad history?" Pip asked slowly. He could tell it was a touchy subject, but, being the nosy guy that he was, wanted to know what had happened.

Spike sighed angrily, pupils turning to slits again, and craned his neck until he heard the bones of his vertebrae crack and pop, then answered his friend. "Well, Pip... Basically he tricked me into going things I shouldn't have done." The boy stated, sitting down next to his friend on the bench. "You see, back when I was in middle school, I thought Garble was a cool kid. I wanted him to think I was cool, so he put me to a test to be able to hang with him and his friends. He made me steal a bunch of stuff from an electronics store. I got caught by the store manager, but realized that what I had done was wrong and owned up to it, so he let me walk away scott-free. When I went back to Garble, I called him out on what he told me to do... And him and his friends beat me up, then threw me in a dumpster." Spike finished his story, clenching his fists and gritting his teeth. "Not taking football into account, That's the main reason why I wanted to become strong and fit... So that if there ever came a time where I had to protect myself, I could." He cracked his knuckles before continuing, "And if I'm able to use all this mass against him in the big game next season, all the better."

"Crikey, Spike..." Pip said, almost not believing what his friend has just told him. "I'm sorry that happened to you, mate..." He tried to comfort Spike by putting a hand on his shoulder, which was acknowledged by a smile from him as he calmed down.

"You don't have to apologize, Pip." Spike said, "it's not your fault, y'know? Anyway, I think I'm gonna go back home. Thanks for letting me lift at your place." He stood up and put his shirt and hoodie back on before going to Pip's front door.

"Anytime, mate. You're always welcome here." Pip said to his friend, giving him a parting fist-bump as he went out the door and headed home.

--------------------------------

As Spike walked home, he passed the town graveyard. He stopped in his tracks. Staring at the gate for a few minutes, biting his lip in frustration and indecisiveness before heading in. He walked for a few minutes through the graveyard until he came to a pair of withered tombstones, each adorned with a wilted bouquet of roses. He knelt in between the graves and put one hand on each cold slab of stone. Tears began to fall from his eyes as he whispered the words that tasted like ash rolling off his tongue. The ash that had filled the air of his old home in Eastern Canterlot so many years ago, on that day that he and Twilight lost them. That day that so many memories were burned away in the fire that had orphaned him and his sister.

"Hi, mom... Hi, dad... I... I miss you..." He paused and choked on a few tears before continuing, "I should have gone back in to save you... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

Author's Notes:

Hope you guys enjoyed this chapter. Next one is coming on Sunday. Stay tuned!