look at me still talking when there's science to do

Short. One of the previously promised My Little Pony drabbles. Don't ask me how my brain comes up with this, I have no clue. Posted here instead of the usual place especially for elynne and maladaptive and raventyde and all the other pony fanatics on my list.

I dated a girl in college who was into My Little Ponies.
Not my thing - even as a kid. I was more into digging too many holes in the backyard and hiding action figures in 'em and breaking dad's ankles. You know I did that once? Got grounded for half a summer. Wasn't my fault he wasn't paying attention where he was going. But yeah, the ponies came between us. Literally. She was in a sorority house - I forget which one, could've been I Felta Thigh for all I know, I don't pay attention to that shit. Her room was absolutely lousy with ponies.
They all had names like Coconut Swirl and Raspberry Slush and Lime Sorbet and Cranberry Banana Fudgemobile - or maybe that was the ice cream parlor down the block - or maybe it was mom's nail polish. They've all got the same kinds of names, you know. Flavours.
My parents got into a stupid argument when Sander and I were fifteen over car colours. Mom said they were the same kind of thing as nailpolish colours, and dad said they weren't, and off they were again. She didn't throw him out that time though.
I wasn't kidding when I said the ponies came between us. One morning I found one of those suckers in the small of my back. Rolled over, fell out of the bed, and this yellow plastic pony is just fuckin' staring at me with these glittery green things for eyes ... no way, man. That was it for the pony chick.
Those things are friggin' pointy.

(Jillia belongs to kay_willow and apparently has taken up residence in Tieunis' head, which means by extension in mine.)

On the way home from work it was raining; raining and dark, the water running hollow down the storm drains. And cold. I left my umbrella on the subway a few weeks ago and forgot to get a new one. Now if it were daytime there'd be a half a million people selling 'em on the corners, but it's late, even in New York, and so I walked home in the rain.
I don't mind though - I like the rain. It's nice. Even though not much is open at that hour where we live. The little boutiques in Sander's neighborhood are all closed, all the little restaurants are shut up after the late after-theatre dinner. Which is a drag. Dinner after work would be nice. I usually end up eating cheese by the cold light of a naked refrigerator bulb.
There's this little shop, somewhere in the east Fifties, I forget where - on my way home from work, anyway, between the subway and home. Sells little fragile things, tchotchkes - dust collectors. Mostly crap, but some of it's pretty. Glass vases - I guess I could buy mom one now, now that Sander and I aren't tearing up the place, huh? And they have those little wooden dolls - the Russian ones ... what the hell are they called ...? They were calling me, man, a row of little dolls sitting there with painted eyes and hair and happy patterned dresses.
There's a chick that sometimes comes into the coffee shop where I work. Works at the phone company, in a cube - god, the luckiest cube farm in the world, I fucking swear. Makes me want to quit schlepping hash and embrace the delights of Ma Bell, you know? A little let my fingers do the walking.
But it's not just a sex thing. It's a ... she's got this ... I guess you'd call it magnetism, you know? Something like that. You know how it is when people keep showing up in your head? You keep think you're seeing them on the corner buying flowers or down at the grocery store? That's what she's like, to me.
What the hell are those damn dolls called? I'm going crazy here.
New York is a really big small town, you know, that's the dumbest thing. She had cute braids the other day; I saw her at the little bodega when I was buying Twinkies and Scientific American. Cute little braids and a smile that just knew she was the center of attention. She was buying cat food ...
Matroushkas. That's what they're called.
I'm goin' back tomorrow. To get them, on the way to work. Who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky.

Mom and dad had - have - a relationship of convenience.
( short, but vaguely non-worksafe. )

Possibly to be continued at a later time. As soon as I figure out how.
Sander and Tieunis were thirteen when they first realized that there was a way to parley peoples' inevitable confusion at their mirrored faces to their own advantage. And after that, they never looked back.

Oh, sure, they'd been playing 'let's lie to dad' games since they were old enough to realize they could. Mom was harder to fool, but Mom was also of the opinion that life was summed up by the inevitable dilemma of sinking or swimming, and so she just sat back and smiled and took another bite of Chunky Monkey while Dad tried to figure his way out of how he'd managed to give out three allowances when he only had two children, and if he hadn't, what on earth had happened to that phantom twenty dollar bill?

It was pathetically easy to lie to teachers, to impersonate each other in math class; a simple game of one hand washes the other. Tieunis got Sander out of some creepy blind dates with girls he had less than no interest in; Sander spent the time doing Tieunis' algebra homework (complete with meticulously copied handwriting, down to his brother's peculiar habit of center-stroking the sevens). It was sweet revenge, in a way; after all, if the world couldn't be bothered trying to tell them apart, why should they try and make it any easier? They'd heard enough of "Sander-Tieunis-whatever" to last a lifetime before their age collectively hit double digits.

When they moved out it was harder, but the act was ready to go beyond the off-Broadway run of friends and family and overworked high school teachers to the grid-pattern streets of New York and the urban campus of NYU. Sander majored in political science (minoring in drama, his other passion besides making money and buying good suits); Tieunis majored in anthropology and minored in classics - he always preferred digging around in the dirt and picking up girls with the dusty silver tongue of dead languages.

And in this way they passed four years of college and two years of graduate school; sharing books, living space, occasionally a job (double shifts were for some reason not a problem); writing each others' exams and papers, taking phone calls and notes and making a complete mockery of the university's attendance policy, and in one remarkable case also a portion of the GRE.

Oh, sure, life was not without its difficulties. Tieunis had an interesting time adjusting to his brother's life out of the closet, and had a few creative moments when "Tieunis" was supposed to be in class and therefore he, "Sander", was alone in their room and ripe for the plucking by Sander's real-life potential boyfriend; Sander had to pull off one of the most dramatic saves of his life when he was picked out of "Tieunis"' Latin seminar to translate something on the fly, throwing himself to the floor in a remarkably accurate dead faint which he passed off later as low blood sugar.

But somehow these difficulties only added a little more spice to the game.