AN: You can blame this on lanna_kitty, and a drawing of Ashely as a My Little Pony. "Crack" might be an understatement. Also, it's unbetaed.
Rating: Kid friendly. There are ponies for cryin' out loud.
Spoilers: Absolutely none.
Disclaimer: I don't own this. I also don't own a pony. Somehow, life goes on.
Characters: Ashley Magnus, The Big Guy, Henry Foss, Helen Magnus, James Watson
Summary: One of the first things that Ashley learned when she started grade school was that girls liked ponies.
On The Subject of Ponies
One of the first things that Ashley learned when she started grade school was that girls liked ponies.
This made sense, she supposed. You could sit on a pony before you were tall enough to ride a horse, and her mother always told her it was important to practice. James had told her that before cars, people had used horses for transportation, and when he had casually mentioned that it was also possible to fight on horseback, Ashley had decided that it was probably something worth looking into.
But the sort of ponies her classmates liked to play with and draw weren't exactly what she had in mind. They were pink, or at least a lot of them were, to start with. And they all seemed inexplicably cheery. And they had long manes and tails for braiding flowers into that Ashley decided would be unsuitable for any fast chases in the pursuit of abnormals.
The ponies that Ashley drew were not pink. And some of them had prehensile hooves, in order to better hold the firearms she drew for them. The other girls were not impressed. Neither were her teachers, it turned out, because Ashley had to take a note home to her mother about it.
Helen was gone for the week, Berlin or Munich, Ashley thought. Somewhere in Germany, anyway, and at six years old, Ashley's concept of Europe was nebulous at best. So she gave the note to the Big Guy and went off to find Henry, who had, with the proper application of bribery and blackmail, promised to build her a working miniature stunner while her mum was out of town.
Henry suggested, as always, the library. Now that Ashley was better at putting words together on the pages, the library seemed a little bit more appealing. She was flipping through one of her mother's Bestiaries, one of the better illustrated ones, because a lot of her mother's books were full of words that James liked to use when he was showing off, and Ashley had enough problems saying most of them out loud, let alone reading them, when the Big Guy came in to talk about the note.
"Am I in trouble?" she asked before he sat down. It wouldn't be the first time.
"No," he said, and looked over her shoulder to see what she was trying to read. "See anything you like?"
"I like them all," Ashley admitted, and it was the truth. She understood that her mother liked abnormals because she wanted to know how they worked, but Ashley liked them because she wanted to know if she could work like they did.
"Hmph," the Big Guy grunted. "Not everyone would."
"Is that why I should stop drawing pictures of ponies with guns?" Ashley said.
"Yes," he answered. "And also because ponies can't hold guns anyway. You should always try to be as accurate as possible."
"Can I draw these instead?" Ashley said, gesturing casually at the pages.
"Maybe not that one." The Big Guy ran one gnarled finger along the picture of the Hrulgin, a perfectly normal looking horse that concealed a set of vicious teeth and a lust for blood to match behind it's otherwise mild seeming appearance. "But if you stick to pegasi and unicorns you should be okay."
"Do they have to be pink?" Ashley said in distaste.
"Accuracy, remember," the Big Guy said. "Unicorns are white and pegasi hare multicoloured with translucent wings?"
"What's translucent?" Ashley said the words before she remembered who she was talking to. James would explain it in a way she couldn't understand. Her mother would be less detailed and more practical. The Big Guy would make her find out for herself. "Never mind," she said, resigned. "Can you at least tell me how to spell it?"
The Big Guy laughed and wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper for her, then reminded her it was an hour until dinner and left.
The note still had to be dealt with, though, and by her mother, because the school wanted a face to face meeting. The Big Guy phoned to explain the situation, though obviously couldn't deal with the matter himself, and thus it was that when Helen returned from Germany, she found herself at Ashley's school before she was quite over her jetlag.
"I'm really sorry," Ashley said, and meant it, because her mother looked exhausted.
"It's all right, dear," her mother said. "It's an understandable mistake."
"The girls were just drawing what they wanted," Ashley explained. "So I did too."
"You want a pony?" Helen asked.
"Not really," Ashley said. "But if I had one, I would want it to be useful."
"That seems reasonable," Helen said approvingly.
They sat in silence for a few moments then, waiting for the principal to be ready to see them. Ashley took her mother's hand, because it had been a week, and because she understood that this was probably not the last time this was going to happen before she got old enough to understand what she wasn't supposed to do. Helen smiled at her.
"Do you want a pony?" her mother said. "I could at least get you riding lessons."
Ashley considered it. Henry had told her that ponies were actually quite mean-spirited and prone to biting. That might be useful. But at the same time, she'd rather have a motorcycle.
"No," Ashley said. "I've got other plans."
"I'm sure you do." Helen laughed.
"Did you have a pony?"
"We owned a few horses," her mother said. "But none of them were particularly important to me."
"Did you ever want one?" Ashley asked.
"No," Helen said, and then she leaned over to whisper what it was she'd had instead, because the receptionist was starting to look at them with an alarmed expression on her face. Ashley's eyes lit up.
"No way!" she said.
"James has one at the moment, actually," Helen said. "Perhaps we can go and see it the next time you have a school break."
It was not the last time Helen had to meet with one of Ashley's teachers and convince them that her daughter did not need counseling. In fact, it was only the beginning.
fin
Gravity_Not_Included, March 2, 2011