"Have you put any thought into what you wanna do?" I asked.

The two of us had migrated to the bed a while ago, naturally the most comfortable place for two bodies not afraid of cohabitating with each other. Lyra was lying above the covers, sprawled out with her head at the foot of the bed. I was the opposite, shoulders propping me up on pillows.

Lyra raised her head and nodded, eyes wide and bright.

"Uh-huh. Pretty much all I've thought about, to be honest." Lyra tucked her head into the blankets, rustled around for a moment, and pulled out a small piece of notebook paper with pony handwriting on it. Pony, er... mouthwriting—hornwriting—whatever¹. "I started with a list of YouTube clips we could watch... then I got distracted and started thinking about prostate glands... and then I figured we should probably just get the sex thing over with. To make it easier."

"I was figuring that too. It's what everyone is going to be wondering about. Hell, I'm wondering it too."

"Ditto. That's the whole point, right? The whole reason anypony wanted a clone of themselves in the first place?"

"Well, let's address that first." I sat up on the bed and stretched my arms out over my head, cracking something-or-other as I did so. "How are you a clone of me if you're like... a small green pony. And wouldn't you just know everything I was going to do, and vice versa?"

"Well," Lyra said, sitting up herself with her forelegs in front of her chest, hind-legs splayed out just a bit. "No. Because I'm a pony, for one thing. So, like, whatever you would do as a pony... that's different from what you'd do as a human. And since I'm a pony, I don't have any idea what a human me is going to do..."

"Is this a spiritual thing? Like... our 'souls' are the same or something?"

"Maybe." Lyra stuck her tongue out between her teeth and crossed her eyes, as though she was doing difficult math. "I think... how could we tell if we were really the same or not?"

"I think that's the sex part."

Lyra uncrossed her eyes and stared at me rather intensely. Enough to make me say 'rather intensely', and not really know what to say after that, for starters.

"Aren't you interested in what my body is gonna be like?" Lyra asked, tilting her head slightly to the right.

"Of course I am. And I'd assume the interest is mutual. But that's the whole thing. We're already expecting—anticipating. The whole exercise is defunct."

"Why don't you just come shower with me, and when we get there, we'll discuss how I knew that's what you wanted me to ask you to do."

"What? I... but if we..." Big, long sigh. "Alright. I don't wanna question it. Lead the way."

"Why would I know where the bathroom was, genius?" Lyra hopped off the bed and shook her head, tousling her mane in that way I like.

"I dunno. If you're a clone of me, don't you have my memories?"

Lyra shook her head again, following me down the hallway towards the bathroom and questioning the sheer number of gerunds plundering their way through the text. She took a look around the bathroom as I started getting the shower ready, testing the temperature a few times, fighting with the hot water knob, wondering if your hand's sense of temperature is the same as the rest of your body's—you know, the usual.

"Nope. No memories whatsoever. Just woke up in a box, thinking "Huh, I'm a pony. Oh well, I'll probably let myself in in a second." And then you opened the door. And the crate, I guess."

"Huh."

The shower was hissing and steaming up the room now, so things weren't going to get any more suggestive or less awkward.

"What do you think everyone else is doing with their clones?" I asked. I started unbuttoning my shirt (yes, a button up shirt, for my first time meeting my Clone-a-Pone™, there was no such thing as overdressed) before realizing that Lyra was kind of, sort of, already naked. Or she didn't have any clothes to take off, anyway. I wondered if she—

Lyra looked to me, blushing. Crouching down a little, crossing her legs over each other.

"Uh," she said. "Yeah. Me too. Just now."

"Weren't you waving your butt at me like an hour ago?"

Lyra shrugged, her cheeks still flushed. I stepped into the shower, starting slightly at the sudden heat, then deciding whether or not it was really hot enough, or too hot, and finally after determining my skin wasn't boiling away, getting all the way inside and letting the water run down over my head and body. As most humans do, y'know.

"I imagine most of them are probably fucking," Lyra said nonchalantly as she followed me into the shower. Her horn glowed, sliding the glass door shut. Her mane, which touched the water first, dampened almost instantly, and hung down low over her neck, and forehead, just half-covering her eyes.

"Huh. I mean... yeah. Probably. That's what most people say they'd do with a clone, anyway."

"You mean a clone of them who's a squishable miniature equine with opposite equipment?"

"That's a pretty convenient alteration, when you put it that way." The shower felt nice. Easier than focusing on the foreshadowing.

It was time to look at Lyra. To try to describe what it is a naked pony in your shower looks like.

She was about waist-high. A little bit more than that. Her nose came up to my belly-button.

She was... she looked, or felt, maybe is a better way to say it, small. Like, if you imagine balancing her on your knee, or in your lap, she'd feel... kind of kid-sized. In a, not-really-sure-what-to-do-with-that sort of way.

"A kid?"

Lyra looked up at me in the shower from only inches away. Her eyes were as wide as she could make them, and her mane was swirling under the hot spray of water. Her bottom lip stuck out a bit too. Damn.

"I don't think it's exactly like that," I said, looking pointedly in any direction that did not contain Lyra. But it was too late. Damage had been done irreparably.

"So you like the thought of lil' ol' me getting up in your grown-up business—" Lyra nudged suddenly into my leg, causing me to buckle a little bit and brace myself against the shower wall. When I straightened out, she was even closer, her face basically right next to my, uh. Hard-on. "—because I'm tiny, and soft, and innocent-looking? Is that it?" Lyra smirked, letting her tongue loll out of her mouth just slightly. She had the looks down, for certain.

Tightening in my chest. A nod. Sudden inability to articulate myself in complete or meaningful sentences.

Lyra's hoof, on my stomach. Reaching up to my chest. Staring up at me with her big, begging eyes.

"It's okay," she said, lowering her voice to a volume just above the quiet hissing of the shower. "You're safe. 'We got this', remember?" Lyra smiled nervously and removed her hoof from my chest, holding it forward just a few inches away.

Deep breath. Feel the shower. The warm water is always a safe place. Happy place. Warm place. Everything is gonna be okay. Everything is gonna be alright. Breathe.

After making sure to wiggle my toes on the floor of the shower five times, I opened my eyes and extended a fist to bump Lyra's hoof. Her smile widened, still wavering slightly at the edges.

"I know it's difficult. You're putting a lot of pressure on yourself." Lyra tilted her head back and got a face-full of the warm water, closing her eyes and turning her head slowly from side to side to soak at every angle. She sighed loudly, then took a deep, slow breath through her nose. "This is new for me too. I just don't have to be the one to translate it."

"I'm scared I won'd do a good job. Or I'll... you're more beautiful than a bunch of words, probably."

"Probably." Lyra smiled still, opening her eyes and tilting her head back down to face me. "But so's everypony, probably. And don't get all nihilistic on me—we're showering. No nihilism in the shower."

"Okay."

"Kiss me. And then tell me what it felt like."

I am physically incapable of doing this.

Lyra's lips. They felt like... lips. Like the way someone else's lips feel against yours. Like they are another living conscious being that can move its mouth in all the ways you can and has in its mind its own expectation of kissing and how long it should last and what it should feel like and what should precede it and lead to it and all things from and to as a result of their unique collection of understandings. It is impossible to describe this in any capacity. There is an electric yes that is the only word left for it because there are so few elements that mean anything nowadays sensation of this other thing next to you being able to control all of reality, being able to do suddenly anything, and for them to be thinking, maybe hoping, that you, too, are a conscious agent, an operator, someone capable of guiding the encounter in any direction. And what a kiss begins to be to one of you is nonsensical between the two. Your part takes there part and what you have together is the sum of translation. You learn instantly. You can ignore everything. You can be swept away or suddenly an expert mimic. I recommend waiting as long as possible before lips actually touch lips.

How do you describe a tongue? Something absurd at a distance. You can intrude on someone. You can make them feel open, exposed, endlessly in or out of control, just by gesturing with a little muscle inside your mouth. You can escalate, de-escalate, you can provoke them to the throes of ecstasy just by communicating that there is a lot more than can be done with a tongue given the opportunity. Yes, this is impossible. We are living the impossible life. I will keep trying.

Maybe it is best to articulate the first sensation. You are there, and you can decide to kiss someone. You can decide to ask to kiss someone, or if consent is previously established, you can kiss someone on the presumption that it is welcome. When you decide to kiss someone, you are empowered. You get to tap them on the back, put your hands on their shoulders, pull them close, and kiss them. You get to see the anticipation of something they did not predetermine being visited upon them. You can detect their response to affection, spontaneity, you can have an encounter with them that let's you assess their response to any other stimulus throughout the day. You can make amends or offend someone. These are common traits of language. So what is kissing other than a metaphor for "come let me be the host of your disease"?

It's a weird by-product of evolution. It produces a chemical response that makes the body want to engage in sexual behaviour. Sexual behaviour is instinctually rewarded at a genetic level. Does that make any sense? That the more you have sex, the better your genes will do? Why would your genes care? Are they you? Do they experience the physical pleasure of sex? Is the 'physical pleasure of sex' literally just a card-trick programmed into the operational fabric of our DNA? The more and more I think about it, the more it seems like it is, and it makes me really pissed off every time I get turned on.

"Why would you be mad at getting turned on?" Lyra asked, pawing gently at my leg under the now-slightly-colder stream of water.

"Because it's something literally outside human control. Whether you can control what turns you on is debatable, but even further debatable is how much control you have over when you're turned on, and it's so regressive and primal and absolutely antiquated that it makes me feel like I'm a stupid ant marching in a parade about to be doused by a kid's garden-hose."

"And it's a metaphor for magic, probably, isn't it?"

"Probably. But I don't understand what that means. I don't even understand the purpose of metaphors. At one point they felt more true than anything else in the universe. Now nothing feels true."

Not anything?

Not the kiss?

Not me?

"I'm really sorry," I said, crouching down into a ball on the floor of the shower, wrapping my arms around my tucked in legs. "I knew this would happen the first time."

Lyra sighed, and hung her head, letting the water wash over her head like a downpour under a streetlight. "No, it's... I'm sorry too. It's just as much my fault."

"Can I turn off the water?"

"Yeah. Go ahead."

1: Can we include a list to the amount of times the show has referenced the word 'hands' here? Let's do that.

1.5: This was the best we could do.