Author's Notes:

Spawned from another thing that Robcakeran threw my way, and here turned into another excuse to indulge in my bad habit of taking what could be cute moments to throw into Johns and instead just having them as oneshots because I'm a lazy fucker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM95rhaz01A

Today was going to be a good day.

This much seemed clear and obvious to Celestia as she made her way along a palace corridor, two mugs of hot chocolate floating before her, happily trailing steam. What day when you were the bearer of hot chocolate could fail to be a good day?

Especially when the day in question was set to contain what she knew it was set to contain.

Canny juggling of royal duties and a happy, entirely coincidental lightness in her recent workload had left her with a pleasant, comfortable gap in her schedule, one she intended to fill with hot chocolate and snuggling.

How could it not be a good day?

And so with this in mind she arrived outside the door of Jim’s room, delicately worked the knob and quietly eased it open. All being as it should have been the local human would be in his bed, snoozing or else merely lazing as he’d been told to in expectation of her arrival, and the two of them could get started on doing very little for the rest of the day.

Instead, not.

His room was dark, his bed empty. Worse than empty, it was all neatly made - somehow that was worse. It just seemed to rub her nose in how empty and devoid of him it was. She growled a low growl, the low growl of the moderately annoyed and mildly disappointed.

“Right,” she said, stomping about in place before stomping off to go and track him down.

She did not have to stomp for long, as she found him more-or-less exactly where she first suspected he might be, doing more-or-less exactly what it was she first suspected he might be doing - single-handedly tending to the repair of a palace bathroom that had suffered severe damage in a recent friendship-related incident the details of which are far too tedious to delve into.

Jim had made returning the bathroom to working order something of a personal project, despite repeated insistences that the royal plumber would take care of it (they were simply delayed - many things required their tender touch and attention) and he had made considerable progress in a short space of time, largely at the expensive of sticking at it perhaps longer than he should have done.

Hence Celestia’s exhortations to take an easy day of rest and relaxation. With her.

Hence, perhaps, her annoyance at finding him grouting the tiles.

He did not hear her open the door and kept on merrily grouting away, humming to himself, only noticing that he was no-longer grouting alone when she cleared her throat. At this he glanced over, looked back to his work, flinched, then lowered his grout float by inches and turned her way slowly, with the look of a man who had been caught out.

“Ah, hello there lovely. You’re looking radiant today. Beautiful, even! I might go so far as to say gorgeous, if pressed,” he said with excessive brightness, trying to nudge his tools out of sight with his foot and achieving nothing.

Celestia’s expression did not change.

“You’re not deflecting me,” she said.

“Not even a little bit?”

“No.”

Jim’s brightness faltered and his shoulders slumped.

“Drat.”

Celestia’s eyes narrowed and some of her irritation showed through.

“You said you were going to rest today!” She said. Jim held his hands up, noticed he was still holding the grout float, tossed it to one side and then held his now-empty hands up again, placatingly.

“I am, honest! After this. And maybe one other thing, I’ll see. It’ll be fine!” He said, a moment later finding two floating mugs brandished under his nose.

“I made us hot chocolate! It is now cold chocolate,” said Celestia.

“Oh. Still chocolate though, so that’s good. If you think about it?” Jim asked.

He knew he’d put his foot in it even as he was speaking, he just couldn’t stop himself. His momentum thrust him forward even as he withered beneath the almost tangible levels of not-impressedness Celestia was radiating.

The look she was giving him could have stripped paint, curdled milk, wilted the plants and still had enough icy force leftover to lower the temperature in any room by at least three degrees.

“No,” she said. “It is not good.”

There came a bamf and a flash and in a burst of golden light the pair of them stopped being in the corridor and started being back in Jim’s room. The suddenness of this - and the odd sensation of teleportation - caught Jim off guard

“Oh I’ll never get used to that...” he said, patting himself down just in case anything was missing. Nothing ever was and he had been assured by Celestia that nothing ever would be, but it was still a habit that was hard to shake.

While he was doing that, Celestia went over and set the two mugs down to one side before trotting back to stand before him, continuing to look implacable and annoyed.

“Take off your clothes,” she said, flatly. Jim paused mid-pat and cocked one rakish eyebrow.

“I thought I was meant to be resting?”

She glared at him. He got the point. He took his clothes off.

Once down to his underthings Celestia pointed an imperious hoof at his bed.

“Get into bed,” she said.

“You know, you’re sounding more like my mother every day.”

That changed her expression. It got harder.

“In. Bed. Now.”

“_{Don’t know how I feel about that, really…}” Jim muttered as he did what he was told, slouching barefoot across his room to get into his bed, all under the watchful eye of Celestia, who was on-guard for shenanigans.

Jim knew better than to try anything right then anyway and so duly clambered in under the duvet and settled down, muttering about this was all a lot of fuss over nothing anyway and how he’d have been going back to bed on his own once he’d finished and really he couldn’t see what the problem was.

Celestia just watched, silently, and swooped in at the end to tuck him in properly, something he didn’t need but silently appreciated. It’s the little touches, really.

“Comfy?” She asked, voice softening just a tiny bit at the edges.

Jim, now just a head on a pillow poking out from beneath the duvet, grunted.

“Very,” he said, eyes closed.

“Good. I am going to go and make more hot chocolate and then come back. You are forbidden to leave this room until you are properly relaxed,” Celstia said, and Jim grunted again, this time in acknowledgement before thinking about what she’d said some more.

With a sudden, stark sense of clarity he realised what it was she was doing. His eyes snapped open again.

“Wait, I’ve heard of this. Is this grounding? Are you grounding me?”

She hadn’t thought about it that way before, but now he mentioned it she saw he wasn’t far wrong. She shifted her hooves about, stood up just that little bit straighter and stuck her nose just that little bit higher in the air.

“I suppose you might think of it that way,” she said. Jim just gawped at her.

“I’m a grown man! You can’t ground me!”

Even his actual mother had never grounded him! Celestia was now exceeding his mother in many ways! This was raising all sorts of questionable psychological issues! Freud would be deep-throating cigars in his grave while he burrowed his way through the earth with ferocious spinning, Jim was sure of it.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Celestia was just doing her best not to smirk at him and to maintain her unruffled facade. Since she had practise, this wasn’t that difficult to do.

“You are. I can. I have.”

He gawped some more and stammered, utterly wrong-footed by this move, unable to think of anything. It was only Celestia making moves towards the door that snapped him out of it. Flinging the covers aside he dashed, in his boxers, across the room to block her path.

This brought Celestia up short and she stopped, bemused.

“What are you doing, Jim?” She asked.

“You’ve been working far too hard lately as well, I’ve seen it. So until you’re properly relaxed you’re not leaving either. You too are grounded!” He said, his arms spread, his tone and stance both equally firm.

Celestia had no idea what to say to that. Not only was it not what she’d expected to hear, she hadn’t expected to hear it from Jim in only his underpants. The two things worked together to quite effectively short-circuit her brain, if only for a moment, but that was all it needed.

“You - you can’t ground me!” She said, foundering.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m a princess! And you’re not!”

Airtight. Not that Jim was going to let that slow him down.

“Hah! Well! I’ll have you know I happen to have a lot of power and authority back over there, you know, back in my neck of the woods, so I can certainly do this,” he said.

This was not in any way true, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was to continue to confuse and confound her and for this purpose what he’d said worked excellently.

“But-” Celestia started but whatever she might have been gearing up to say was cut short by Jim wagging a finger in her face.

“No but’s! Well, one butt - your butt. The butt that is going to be getting into bed and getting relaxed along with the rest of you,” he said, taking his wagging finger and pointing it first in the direction of her rear end and then the bed and then back to her face again, for warning purposes.

Celestia went briefly cross-eyed as she stared at the tip - just the tip - before looking at Jim proper.

“That’s awful,” she said.

“You’re awful. Now to bed with you, come on.”

“We’re in your room with your bed! You’re the one supposed to be in bed!”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to share! Come on!”

He then did his best to scoop Celestia up in his arms so he could carry her back across the room. This did not go well. While Jim was perhaps a smidgen bigger than her (she’d have claimed they were roughly the same size) and certainly strong enough to manage her weight, the weight was never the issue - the issue was that she was an awkward shape.

He could carry her, but there was nothing dignified in it. Especially when she started squirming.

“Jim! No! What are you doing!” She asked, wriggling as he strained and swayed and staggered.

“Carrying you!” He said with some effort.

“You’re not doing a good job!”

“That’s because you won’t hold still!”

“That’s because you’re not doing a good job of carrying me!”

This tiny argument lasted long enough for Jim to finish carrying her (badly or not) to the bed and dump her onto it. She landed on that lovely, comfy bed with an ‘oomph’ and in a heap, rolling onto one side with her crown skewiff.

In the time it took for her to correct it Jim had joined her on the bed and slithered in behind her, there to wrap around her, free arm working to pull across the duvet he’d flung away mere moments before.

Celestia continued to writhe, though her heart clearly wasn’t in it.

“This is completely ridiculous! You can’t just throw me in bed and grab onto me and expect to get away with it! Especially when you’re supposed to be relaxing!” She said, hooves waggling in a fruitless effort to escape.

“Ah, due some horrible punishment am I?” Jim asked, his face pressed into the back of her neck. Soft, so very soft...

“You’ll wish it was only as bad as horrible! You’ll beg me for horrible!” Celestia huffed. She was blushing, but not much, and Jim couldn’t see it anyway so it didn’t matter all that much anyway. He just snuggled all the tighter against her.

“Well there’s that to look forward to,” he said, then adding: “I thought the point of today was us being in bed together anyway?”

He wasn’t wrong.

But it was the principle of the thing!

“Yes, but the idea was I’d come to you already in bed and we’d go from there. You ruined the whole plan! The least you can do now is just lie still and stay put and let me go!”

He snuggled tighter still, wrapping his legs around her now and even going so far as to plant a kiss on her neck, of all things! What a statement of intent!

Celestia’s blush got worse.

“Nope, not letting you go. If I’m not allowed to leave the room then you’re not allowed to leave the room. That’s just how it is,” he said.

In something of a happy, smiling daze for a few seconds Celestia then made a snap decision and called out:

“Guard!”

Some seconds later a guard appeared through the door, for there was almost always a guard a few seconds and a shout away in the palace.

“Yes - uh - yes, Princess?” The guard asked, looking around and doing an admirable job of hiding their surprise on seeing Celestia trapped in bed with a human stuck to her. Not the oddest thing they’d seen, but still not what you often open a door expecting to find.

Both Jim and Celestia then shouted:

“Don’t let him out of the room until he’s relaxed!”
“Don’t let her out of the room until she’s relaxed!”

The guard blinked, thought about the correct order of things, thought about their future career, thought about the years left until retirement, thought about all the possible postings that might be worse than this, thought about what the safest thing to say in this situation might have been.

“...understood, Princess,” they said.

“We’ll take brunch here. Would you mind sending someone up?”

“Understood, Princess.”

“Thank you,” she said. The guard ducked out and was away, the door closing softly behind them.

The perks of being in charge.

“Weird how they said ‘understood princess’ when clearly they were obeying my orders,” said Jim and the sheer, wonderful absurdity of the whole situation finally cracked Celestia who couldn’t help but giggle, writhe enough to loosen his grip and then roll over so she was face-to-face with him.

Nose-to-nose, in fact. Very close indeed.

“So. Power and authority over there, you say?” She asked.

“Oh yes, lots. Lots and lots. No-one messes around with me. They even wrote a song about that, just for me,” said Jim, nodding seriously, his face utterly grave and sincere.

“Did they now?”

“Yes. Mean, they wrote it a few years before I was born but still, that’s just because of how important it was - and is - not to mess with me,” Jim said.

“Hmm,” Celestia hummed, kissing him before he could continue with his bit. This worked.

Kissing briefly graduated to smooching, which occupied both of them for a little while.

When the smooching concluded (before it had a chance to advance into severe smooching or - heaven forbid! - canoodling) the pair of them shuffled up so they were sitting with their backs to the headboard, having returned to simply cuddling.

Celestia floated the two mugs over from where she’d set them down earlier and, with another little blurt of ever-so-handy magic, got them both steaming against, passing one to Jim and keeping the other for her own sipping purposes.

Jim looked down at his mug.

“If you could heat them up why did you need to leave to make more anyway?” He asked. Celestia sipped some, daintily.

“Reheating it isn’t quite as good,” she said. Jim smiled. He couldn’t help himself!

“Your perfectionism will be the death of you,” he said and Celestia’s nose wrinkled.

“Don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of that.”

“When it comes to this sort of thing you have quite exacting standards.”

She would have disagreed, but he might not have been wrong. She gave half a nod, about as much of a nod as she felt she could allow him.

“Some things are worth getting just right,” she said.

And here the two tailed off into cozy, companionable silence for a bit, barring the occasional slurp or sip, waiting for whoever it was who’d be coming to see about brunch. The room got lighter and warmer. Celestia finished her hot chocolate ahead of Jim and put her mug down against so she could properly rest her head across his chest.

And there, ever-so-quietly, she sang to herself:

“_{You don’t tug on Superman’s cape…}”

Jim jolted.

“Wait, how do you know-” he started to ask.

“You’ve used the song line on me before.”

Jim blinked.

“Have I?”

“Uh-hmm.”

Celestia went back to happily resting on his chest while Jim stared blankly into space for a moment.

“Balls. Maybe I am working myself too hard…”