A pie and a half later however found Thorax leaning listlessly back in his seat, one hoof patting his disguised barrel. “…so full…” he mumbled but with a big and silly grin on his content face, his snout somewhat sticky with red cherry pie filling.
Spike leaned against the table, his head propped up with his elbow as he regarded his friend with a frown, rapping the claws of his free hand on the table edge in disapproval. “Think you might have overdone it now?” he asked aloud, then shook his head. “What happened to ‘just one more slice’ Thornton?”
“But it was made with love,” the camouflaged changeling repeated gleefully, as if this justified everything.
Fly could only regard him somewhat in surprise, looking between him and the two pie trays that lay on the table, the first one that he had emptied and the second he had cleared the large majority of, eating far more pie than either she or Spike had. “Well, at least I see the pie was a huge hit, nonetheless,” she remarked with a smile.
Thorax only hiccupped in response, still wearing his foolish grin.
“I…think we’ve had enough to eat for one night, Fly,” Spike intervened finally on the changeling’s behalf.
Fly fortunately nodded. “Agreed,” she said, standing up and beginning to collect the dishes. “Help me clean up?”
“Sure,” Spike said, standing up and collecting some dishes himself. He elbowed Thorax in the side. “C’mon bud.”
“Right away, my good friend!” Thorax responded with an almost sickly amount of good cheer. He then promptly flopped out of his seat and flat onto the floor. “Ow,” he added in an eerily sweet tone, more like it was an afterthought than anything.
Spike and Fly Leaf stood and regarded him lying on the floor for a moment.
“Then again, maybe I should get this useless lump upstairs first,” Spike amended with a sigh.
“Good idea,” Fly agreed, taking the dishes Spike had collected from him.
Spike bent down and heaved Thorax back up onto his hooves. “Up and at ‘em, Thornton,” he said, leading the wobbly changeling in disguise towards the exit. “I’ll be back down to help in a minute, once I’ve got him sorted.” he told Fly.
“Wheeee,” Thorax murmured aloud, holding one of his hooves in the air, still wearing that annoyingly sappy grin on his face as they headed for the stairs under Spike’s guidance.
“You are out of it,” Spike observed with some annoyance as they proceeded to slowly mount the stairs. “Just what led you to eat far more pie than you could clearly handle anyway?”
“It was made with love!” Thorax repeated with a sing-song voice.
“Not literally, you dummy!” Spike grumbled, and gave the changeling a light shove to keep him moving. He wondered if there was something in the pie that had clouded Thorax’s thinking, and inwardly he reviewed the obvious ingredients of the dish for a possible candidate.
After slowly stumbling up the stairs to their room, the two finally slipped inside, Spike turned to lead his friend towards his nest-like sleeping area, though Thorax didn’t seem to care at the moment. “Home sweet home!” he declared happily into the room as Spike led him across it.
“Yeah, yeah, great,” Spike murmured as he lowered Thorax down into the nest and stepped back to give him a look over.
Thorax, looking as content as could be, snuggled himself tighter into the cloak he had used to make the so-called nest, and let his disguise drop with a flash of cyan magic. No longer hidden behind it, Spike noticed Thorax’s belly was notably swollen; not enough to be alarming of course, but enough to see it was bloated. The changeling had clearly had more than he should’ve. But for the moment he seemed content to just lie there, so Spike waved him off and turned to go.
“Right, so you just stay there and sleep off…whatever this is,” he instructed as he exited, going back downstairs to help Fly clean up from dinner as promised.
By the time he came back some minutes later though, Thorax’s euphoric-like behavior had been replaced with one that looked notably more uncomfortable and unpleasant.
“Ugh,” Thorax groaned, rubbing at his tender and grumbling belly as Spike returned. “I can’t believe I ate that much pie.”
Spike, feeling a bit more satisfied with this, couldn’t help but look a bit smug. “It finally catching up to you, huh?” he remarked.
Thorax nodded slowly. “Bleh,” he mumbled. “It’s left the second chamber of my stomach feeling like it’s full of rocks.”
Spike raised an eyebrow at the changeling. “Second chamber?” he repeated. “Your stomach has two chambers?”
Thorax nodded again slowly, and vaguely poked his belly at where the supposed chambers would be located within. “Upper one’s for converting emotive energy into something the body can use, and the second one’s for processing it and any solid foods,” he explained weakly. This was followed by a belch when his poking of his belly upset something within. He groaned again.
“Well, I’m not too inclined to give you much sympathy over it,” Spike pointed out, folding his arms. “You know your own limits better than I do, so why did you let yourself gorge yourself like this?”
“It was good pie!” Thorax declared, his eyes bulging empathically over this point. “And it was made with love!”
“No it wasn’t!” Spike repeated.
“Yes it was!” Thorax pressed. “Food can be imbued with emotive energy too!”
Spike blinked, taken aback. “Oh,” he said. “Really?”
“If the pony or whatever making it is passionate enough about it, then yeah, it absorbs some of the bleed off!” Thorax pushed himself up a little. “So it wasn’t like it was all inedible for me!”
Spike regarded the changeling’s swollen middle skeptically for a moment. “And just how much of all that is actually going to be nourishing for you?” he asked, motioning to the changeling’s stomach.
Thorax averted his gaze and mumbled something incoherently.
“Thorax,” Spike repeated firmly.
“Only about a sixteenth of it,” the changeling finally admitted reluctantly. He let out another belch. “Ooh boy.”
Spike folded his arms again. “Sounds to me like the other fifteen-sixteenths are making you gassy then,” he observed in disapproval.
“Yeah,” Thorax admitted. He winced as his stomach gurgled for a moment. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me, you were the one who’s gone and done this to himself even—”
“No, no…I don’t mean sorry for that.”
“…then what did you—?” Spike’s snout wrinkled as a sour odor wafted up to it suddenly. “Aw, Thorax!” he groaned in disgust, clamping his claws over his nose as he quickly figured out what happened. “Talk about silent but deadly!”
“Sorry!” the changeling apologized again in a whine. “I couldn’t help it!”
Spike clambered up onto the window seat and opened the window so to ventilate the room a bit better. He was suddenly glad it was scheduled to be a warm and clear night tonight, because he was beginning to think he was going to need to keep the window open for the remainder of the night. “At least tell me you learned your lesson over this,” he said to his friend.
Thorax put on that silly and content grin of his again. “It was still worth it,” he mumbled, satisfied despite the discomfort he had put on his belly.
But the pie still got the last word in the end. By the following morning, Spike was awoken from sleep by Thorax suddenly springing up and urgently rushing for the restroom. Catching sight of Thorax’s face before he vanished from the room and quickly deciding he didn’t want to find out what was going to transpire next, Spike chose to depart the room himself, going to use one of the downstairs restrooms. Nonetheless, he was certain that whatever it was that did transpire…it wasn’t pleasant for the changeling.