Renewal

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

----

"Are you... Alright?"Twilight asked as Spike walked into the library for his tutoring session, looking more than a little bit green.

"Humans are disgusting."

She blinked at his statement. He wasn't wrong but she wasn't sure what brought on this revelation.

"Okay. Why are humans disgusting?" She asked, hoping for some insight as to why he sounded about ready to divorce himself from the concept of being human.

But that was just silly, right?

"I could have lived the rest of my long, long life without ever knowing how sick they could make themselves through mating." He seemed thoroughly disgusted.

Well, she couldn't really argue that. Still, it sounded weird how he said that as an outsider.

"Well, Sexually Transmitted Diseases certainly don't paint a pretty picture."

He turned a bit greener.

"But still! I've read that appropriate protection and abstinence can greatly reduce the risk of contracting any of these illnesses."

"Wait." He croaked out.

She cocked her head to the side in confusion as the green tinge in his sickly pale cheeks deepened.

"I thought the video on pregnancy was bad. You mean there are actual diseases people can get from... That?"

Oh.

Twilight stood up from her seat, leaving Spike to stare glumly at the table as she retrieved a book from the shelves. She flipped through the pages before dropping it in front of him.

"When you finish reading that, please feel free to ask me any questions you may have." She stared as he read a few lines before nodding.

Good. She'd expected him to ask 'What is it?' instead of figuring it out himself.

She sat back down and opened her own book, chewing into the methodology of pre-calculus.

"So..." He started a few minutes later, a finger trailing underneath a particular passage. "This says that symptoms aren't, err, equally present across genders? Does it mean male and female have different symptoms for some diseases?"

"Yes, that's what it means." Her tone was clipped, more so than she intended. He was supposed to ask questions after all.

"Oh." She glanced up, noticing that his eye was flittering around on the page. She looked down at the book, where he was moving his finger beneath lines at a decent clip.

Not as fast as her of course. Still, he was moving faster than most of her 'Peers'.

It was odd, she mused, for him to be so terribly ignorant yet seemingly so capable. His behavior was equally inconsistent.

He also kept a fair few behavioral quirks that she couldn't place. He was so desperately eager to please individuals that were socially superior to him, except for those who came from backgrounds of affluence and were implied rather than stated to be his betters.

"Alright. Let me repeat myself. Humans are disgusting." He shut the book, done with it.

In multiple ways.

"Do you have anything you didn't understand?" She tried to let her concern bleed into her voice. He was avoiding her gaze, likely embarrassed.

"Yeah." He got up and put the book away, exactly where she'd gotten it from.

Odd.

"Why do people bother doing... that... If it can get them sick with all of, ugh, that?" He sat back down and looked at her.

She averted her gaze down, looking at his teeth while he spoke.

"According to books" Lots and lots of books. "It's supposed to feel very good."

"So feeling good is worth a lifetime of bumps and warts and sores?" He leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. "I don't know if I buy it."

"I suppose that's why the schools attempt to promote abstinence in classes." Considering the number of girls who'd dropped out due to... Complications, she doubted that particular lesson was sinking in very well.

"Besides" she continued. "Recent health surveys suggest that only a small minority of the populace would be afflicted with these ailments, so it's not as prevalent as the book would suggest."

"Okay, I get that. But that's supposed to be for people who have reported it, right?" She nodded uncertainly. "So what about people who don't know? Or the people who do know but won't admit to it? I can't imagine everyone would be willing to say they've got, err, any of this."

She nodded again while looking down at the pre-calculus book in her hands. She shut it.

Inaccurate data. He was accusing the data of being wrong. And he made a good argument for it.

"Twilight?" She pulled a plastic box out of her backpack and opened it. There was a sticker of a penguin upside down on the side he could see.

"Human error." She was tapping away furiously. "I hate human error, Spike."

He glanced around the side of the box in front of him and saw light reflecting off of her glasses.

The tapping stopped and she shut the box.

"Spike."

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to join a nunnery."

----

Twilight Velvet hummed to herself as she pulled dinner from the oven.

A glance at the clock suggested she'd have more than ample time to finish cooking the vegetables before either her husband or daughter got home.

So she was quite curious when she heard the door slam shut and the pattering of footsteps going up the stairs.

An expert eye glanced over the vegetables, steaming over a pot of water. With a sigh she moved them to an empty burner and turned off the heat. By the time she got done talking to her daughter, the house would have probably caught fire if she didn't.

She made her own way up the stairs and knocked on her daughters door.

No answer.

She counted out to ten before she knocked again, this time opening the door afterwards.

"Mom, come-oh!" Twilight sat upon her bed, pulling her shoes off her feet. Her backpack lay open next to her and Garble was curled up in the middle of the floor.

"I wasn't expecting you home so soon. Is everything alright?"

"I guess?" Twilight Velvet sat down in her daughter's desk chair, pushing a graying bang out of her face.

"You don't sound very sure. Is something wrong?" She grinned as a thought drifted through her mind. She knew it was unlikely, but she could hope. "Boy trouble at school?"

"No. I guess?" Twilight Velvet beamed, her daughter was finally growing up! "I was helping Spike, the new student I'm tutoring, go over some material for health."

Velvet nodded, a dopey grin on her face. They were a bit old to be playing Doctor, she'd have to talk to Twilight about that.

"We were going over Sexually Transmitted Diseases" The grin fell off her face in a flash. "And we were uncertain about the statistics. So I looked them up. My initial assumption was that roughly one in twenty individual was a carrier."

Alright, not pleasant, but that didn't sound so bad.

"It actually comes closer to one in five." What?

"What?" Twilight Velvet felt like choking on her own tongue.

"So, mom, where's the nearest convent?"

"...What?"

Author's Notes:

Version Two. It was pointed out to me by Radical Dishonesty that the way I'd written it in the beginning was kind of confusing.