//------------------------------// // Two // Story: Tired and Emotional // by Cackling Moron //------------------------------// Rhys woke up and immediately regretted it. His first impressions were that he did not feel great. The second - which took a few seconds of groaning and writhing and blinking to sink in - was that he was not somewhere he recognised. He was on a sofa, for one. That wasn’t right. He slept in a bed. A tiny bed that wasn’t made for him. A bed he hung over the edge of and could never get comfortable on. This sofa, at least, was comfortable but that didn’t answer the important question: why was he on a sofa?  And, more importantly still, whose sofa was it?  “The hell? Where - “ Rhys mumbled, wincing in the brightness of the world in general, trying to move away from it while also staying as still as possible. Obviously this didn’t really do much for him, practically speaking. Then it all came back to him. In bits and pieces. Like someone had thrown a handful of a jigsaw at his face. They weren’t really in the right order these bits and pieces but he could put it together enough for it to make sense. If he took it a step at a time. This was Rarity’s house. He was in Rarity’s house because he’d got drunk and wound up there...somehow. The exact details of that part were fuzzy, but that it had happened was not. It must had done because, well, he was. And now here he was on her sofa. Because she’d let him stay here for...some reason. And he’d got drunk because… Oh. Oh yes. That. “Fuck…” he groaned, closing his eyes. He was most certainly not going to think about that. There was just too much. Where would he even start? At the end, with the absolute, crushing weight of how pointless the whole thing had been? Or at the start, with how overwhelmingly hopeful he’d been on hearing that Twilight - a magical princess, no less - was on the case and adamant she’d be able to get him home?  Or in the middle, maybe? After he’d spent a year away from everyone he knew, surrounded by strangers who weren’t the right shape, dreading what he might find once he did actually get back home, worrying what they’d all say on finding he’d just appeared again. They’d be happy, of course, but they’d also be pretty damn angry. He’d have to get his story straight.  That had been his concern about a year in. Moot point now, obviously. No, no, no thinking about that. Not even thinking about thinking about it. It just made him upset. Already he could feel that prickling in his eyes again and he wasn’t having that. He’d cried enough last night. That he could most certainly remember. Embarrassing - humiliating! A proper man cried alone, if at all.  Certainly not onto the tiny shoulder of a technicolour stranger. “Fuck it,” Rhys said to himself. He then attempted to move again, this time properly, tried to sit up. A grave mistake. He very quickly stopped trying to move and his head took some further minutes following this to properly forgive him and settle down and stop spinning. This at least gave him something else to think about. Or not think about, rather. He did his best to think about anything other than vomiting, and so in doing thought about vomiting and how much it felt like he was just about to. Thankfully for everyone he did not. Yet. “Fuck...again…” he said.  The hangover had done awful things to his vocabulary as well as the rest of him, apparently. “Rhys?” Came a quiet voice from somewhere that seemed like up above, floating on downwards. “Are you awake?” He raised an arm, an action complicated by having it briefly tangled in a blanket that had at some point been laid over him. This seemed an acceptable level of movement, but was about as far as he was willing to risk it. He gave the arm a wave. “Yup. Awake. Morning. Uh, Rarity?” He still had his eyes closed and it sure sounded like Rarity and he could remember her from last night, but who knew what had happened since then? One time he’d woken up in a second-hand car dealers after having vaulted the fence for reasons that to this day remained obscure. Anything can happen during a rough night. The giggle that followed kind of confirmed who it was though, and there followed the sound of hooves descending a staircase. Rhys listened to her approach and she did so slowly, coming to a halt close enough to him that he could hear her breathing. He’d let his hand flop onto the floor after waving it about and a moment after she’d come over she put a hoof onto it. He didn’t bother pulling away. It would just hurt his head. “How are you feeling?” Rarity asked, softly. A good question, and one with a straightforward answer. “Everything feels...awful…but I’m alright though. Just - just gotta stay here a bit. And not move. At all,” Rhys said. Then, as an afterthought, as the consequences of what he’d said sunk in, he cracked an eye and added: “Uh, if that’s okay. I can go if you need me to.” He’d just have to crawl back to the house if this was the case. But so what? He could probably manage that in reasonable time and, really, worse things had happened, hadn’t they? As recently as yesterday in fact. It was all uphill from here for Rhys. Or just staying at the bottom forever. Whichever worked. Rarity giggled again, lightly, presumably in a fashion that was supposed to be reassuring and breezy. Surprisingly it actually did come across as pleasantly reassuring, at least as far as Rhys was concerned. Just sounded nice. “You don’t have to go anywhere, darling. You stay right there as long as you need to,” she said. As delightful as this was to hear Rhys still felt compelled to try and get her to change her mind and throw him out. She must have wanted to. Why wouldn’t she? He was being an imposition. She was just being polite. “I’m not in the way? Don’t you have, uh, a business to run?” He asked. “Not today, no. Today I am running errands,” she said, removing her hoof from his hand and stepping back smartly. “Oh. That’s lucky,” he said. Rhys could not work out if she was doing this just because he was there or if his timing had just been good. She wasn’t giving him any clues and he did not feel like asking outright. He wasn’t winning this one, he could tell. And so he gave up. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s quite alright, dear. Now, I will be back shortly. If you feel up to it before then, feel free to help yourself to water or anything you like. Do you remember where the kitchen is?” He had watched her go and get water last night, after all, but it paid to be sure. He hadn’t exactly been in the best of conditions for noticing or remembering things. Rhys thought a moment and then gestured vaguely towards where he thought the kitchen might be relative to the sofa.  “Over there?” He asked. He was mostly right. “Just so, dear. As I say, feel free.” “Cool. Cool cool cool. I’ll probably - just need to rest a while. Then I’ll go,” he said. “Whatever works best for you, Rhys,” Rarity said, giving him the most delicate of pats on the shoulder before turning and flouncing off.  She spent the next few minutes moving about the place, humming happily to herself and sorting out her saddlebags and bits and such. Rhys remained utterly motionless, eyes closed again, thinking about not throwing up. The humming helped, actually. Something to focus on. When he heard Rarity moving across the floor towards the door and away from him he piped up again: “Hey, uh, Rarity?” “Yes dear?” He swallowed, then: “I’m - I’m really sorry about last night. And this. You should have just sent me back to mine.” Rarity didn’t say anything to this and Rhys was deeply worried that what he’d said had landed badly. There came the creaking of the floor again and he risked opening up one eye once more, seeing Rarity approach, looking concerned. She did not actually say anything. Perhaps she felt she didn’t need to. Instead, she removed the bags she’d slung over herself and then, very delicately, rose up on her hindlegs and gave Rhys the best hug she could given his rather awkward position splayed across her sofa. Various ponies had tried hugging Rhys during his time away from home. None had done it for very long as it was not something he enjoyed on any particular level and so was something he often got them to stop as soon as possible. Most all had now learnt not to, not that they often got the chance anyway - his height typically made hugging impractical unless they felt like grabbing him about the knees.  Which worked for Rhys. The less the better. There was just something about it that made him deeply uncomfortable. Something he’d never given a whole lot of thought to. They just weren’t the right shape. It bothered him. Then though, right then that didn’t seem to happen. Just like last night, although then he’d the excuse of being blind drunk. Even when he noticed how warm Rarity was, and felt a hoof of hers just gently rubbing his back. And how she smelt, too. That was particularly strong. Impossible not to notice, really. Even then no discomfort or desire to gently but firmly remove her.  Maybe he was already uncomfortable enough, so it didn’t register? Maybe it was just the pounding in his head? Maybe, maybe. This hug held for a little moment and then Rarity, with a smile, extricated herself, picked the bags up again and left properly this time, all without a word. Rhys watched her go and watched the door close behind her. He didn’t really know what to make of that. Certainly had no clear idea why she’d thought it was the thing she should have done, but he would have been lying had he said it hadn’t been a pleasant experience and one that somehow just made him feel...better. Intangibly better, of course. Tangibly speaking he still felt Godawful. But you take what you can get. With one eye still open and the brightness of the day coming in through the windows seeming now not quite as agonising as it had been not that long ago, Rhys took a look around. Just to get an idea of things. The previous night he hadn’t exactly been taking notes. His position wasn’t exactly the best, and he couldn’t see a whole lot from it. Door. Rug. Windows. Mannequins? Not a lot he could work with, really. He also saw that, at some point, Rarity had put a bucket beside the sofa. He groaned and felt like a disgusting, vomit-packed millstone around her neck and the neck of everyone else but couldn’t really do much about it. He would have rolled over but he dared not risk it. Instead, he closed his eye again. Much better. “Just go back to sleep,” he said to himself through gritted teeth.” Back to sleep, back to sleep fucker, go on…sleep it off and wake up before she gets back and get up and go back hom-” Rhys cut himself off there and bit his tongue. “Back to the house,” he corrected. He’d been back home yesterday. It was how he’d ended up on this sofa. Never again. - As a matter of fact Rarity really did have things she needed to do in town, so her line about having errands to run was not one she’d just been feeding Rhys to keep him placated.  She pottered hither and yon, buying some bits and pieces and chatting here and there as was custom. This meandering path eventually led - not entirely by accident - around to Twilight’s, whereupon she knocked on the door. No response. She knocked again. Nothing. She tried the bell. More nothing. After what felt like long enough to consider leaving, the door finally opened, and there stood Twilight, looking a touch on the frazzled and sleepy side, like someone who’d just woken up and wasn’t sure they had woken up yet. “Oh, hello Twilight, I was rather expecting Spike to be the one to open the door,” Rarity said. “Right? Talk about dereliction of duty. He’s off somewhere,” Twilight said, yawning, rubbing her eyes. “That so? Doing anything exciting?” Twilight tapped her chin. He had explained it but in all honesty she might have been a tiny bit distracted at the time. She really couldn’t recall. “You know, I don’t know,” she said, stifling another yawn. One of those things. “I haven’t woken you up or anything, have I darling?” Rarity asked, far too late. Twilight waved her off. “No it’s fine. Overslept anyway. Tiring day yesterday. You here for…?” Twilight asked, squinting outward from the doorway. “Well, being out in town - just to run some errands, you see - I was passing and thought that I might have a word. There was something I rather wanted to talk to you about,” Rarity said. “Oh? What?” Rarity took a moment to glance at the bags she was carrying and then asked: “May I come in?” The answer to this was yes and so this was what Rarity did, shrugging off her bags once inside and settling in for a proper chat in more comfortable surroundings. Twilight picked a chair, Rarity a sofa for the sofa was the superior choice. Once settled and smoothed out Rarity said: “Well, as I was saying, last night I was lucky enough to, ah, enjoy an unexpected visit from a rather tired and emotional Rhys.” “Tired and emotional?” Twilight asked. She wasn’t familiar with the term. Well, she was familiar with those two words separately, but it was obvious that Rarity was using them here paired quite deliberately, and that was where the confusion arose. “Drunk, dear,” Rarity said. Learn something new every day. Twilight blinked, acknowledged this. “Oh, right. How’d that go?” She asked. Rarity thought she saw some fluff on one of her hooves and, frowning, flicked it off. Could have been imagining things, but it paid to be sure. Ponies might talk otherwise. Once satisfied all was as it should be once more she answered: “It was rather enlightening, I must admit. Certainly showed me a side of him I hadn’t really seen before. Or even imagined had existed, if I’m being honest. I’d always found his obsession with going home rather myopic, frankly, not to mention unconvincing. He never seemed to show any real passion for the place, he just talked about going there as though he was discussing the weather. I always thought if he had as much fun there as he does here then I could hardly see the point…” After all, had he seemed excited or animated on those occasions he spoke of home then perhaps she might have understood it. If he’d spoken fondly of any particular person there or any particular place. If he’d smiled when speaking about it, maybe, or given even the merest glimmer that he had actually been desperately missing the place. But he never had.  He’d always been the same, dreary, withdrawn Rhys he was whenever he was talking about anything else. It had just not seemed especially important, at least as far as Rarity could see. Just something he brought up out of a lack of anything else to talk about. Last night, though… Sniffing, straightening, Rarity resumed: “In vino veritas, I believe the expression goes, and certainly whatever reserved front Rhys felt he had needed to put up came away. I felt he was truly open with me. Maybe for the first time with anypony since he arrived here! I saw how much he’d been waiting and hoping for the moment he’d get to go home, and how distraught he was that he wasn’t going to be able to,” she said. “Got a feeling this is going to be linking back to me in a second,” Twilight said. She was not wrong. “On a related note, I hear from Rhys that that portal of yours was finally put into operation yesterday,” Rarity said. Twilight grimaced and rubbed the back of her neck.  “Ugh, yeah. That was - well that was pretty depressing, actually. Mean, I was prepared for a lot of things once we got through but I wasn’t prepared for that. Poor Rhys…” Indeed, Twilight had run all manner of contingency simulations through her head, accounting for a vast - frankly, unnecessarily vast - range of possible environments and scenarios they might have encountered. Lions? Tigers? Bears? All three, all at once? Oh my.  These and more she had considered and planned for until she was utterly convinced that she would have an answer to anything Rhys’s home universe might throw at them on their arrival.  The possibility that what they would encounter would just be, well, nothing, hadn’t really occurred to her. At least not at any great length. A hostile nothing? Sure. The absence of that which was required for life to exist? Certainly possible. Some kind of lifeless vacuum? Maybe. That’s why she’d gone through first and made that bubble for Rhys, just in case.  But they hadn’t needed it. The nothing they’d found had been perfectly mundane and non-threatening but it had also been absolute and all-encompassing, at least as far as the planet went. Rhys could have walked around for hours entirely unprotected in perfect safety. It just wouldn’t have got him anywhere. Because there was nowhere for him to go. “I don’t mean to criticise, darling, but how could you let him be on his own after seeing him go through such a thing?” Rarity asked, delicately. That brought Twilight back to the present with a bump. “He told me he was fine,” She said. Rarity blinked at her in abject disbelief and Twilight kind of got the feeling she was being tangentially accused of something here. She bristled. “He did! I asked him if there was anything I could do and he said no he’d be alright. Then he just went off. You know what he’s like, he’s always on his own. I just thought that’s what he wanted to do…” In Twilight’s defence she wasn’t wrong. He was always on his own. Barring those times when not being alone was foisted on him, obviously. And even then he only put up with it long enough so that everypony stopped watching him so closely, whereupon he’d slip away. This hadn’t done his reputation for friendliness many favours, and by this point most had stopped bothering.  Not that he seemed to care. Not that anypony had ever asked if he cared. “Since when are you concerned with how happy Rhys is, anyway? I thought you didn’t like him,” Twilight said, still feeling a touch prickly from what felt like accusations of carelessness and callousness. And this wasn’t ‘thought you didn’t like him’ in the sense of actively, out-and-out disliking him, more in the sense of not thinking especially highly of him and thinking him a little on the uncouth and unfriendly side.  In Rarity’s defence this time Rhys was uncouth and unfriendly, so that part was understandable. Still, Rarity was wounded by such harsh words. She put a hoof to her chest and flicked back her mane with the daintiest of huffing sounds. “I’m not. I don’t!” She said. “I didn’t, I mean,” she clarified. Twilight raised an eyebrow. Odd thing to feel the need to clarify. “But you do now because he woke you up drunk? And was open with you? Drunkenly?” She asked. “I’m concerned because he’s clearly very upset about what happened! As could only be expected. He was in a frightful state when I found him. And I don’t just mean drunk, of course. Poor boy was in bits. Understandably so! One can only imagine how he must have felt. And to have to deal with that all on his own! Well. I struggle to think of anypony who wouldn’t fall to pieces,” Rarity said, a hoof theatrically held to her forehead in all the right spots in her spiel. Twilight, used to this sort of thing, was unmoved. “Don’t think him arriving on your doorstep by mistake really constitutes you ‘finding’ him…” She muttered. Rarity narrowed her eyes. “The point is,” she said firmly. “I am concerned for his welfare. As concerned as I would be for the welfare for anypony else in town had they also received such dreadful news. That’s all.” Stranger things had happened, albeit not often. Twilight decided that it was too early in the day she’d had too little coffee or time awake to really feel especially strongly about it one way or another. It had happened, for whatever reason, and there it was. Rarity cared now. Fine. “Right, right. So what happened with him? Is he okay?” She asked, feeling they were perhaps drifting off topic or at least onto a portion of the topic that was away from the important bits, the important bits being whether Rhys was even still alive or not. Seemed important. “I gave him some water, let him get some of his melancholy out of his system and then put him to bed, as it were. A sofa, technically. Presently I imagine he is sleeping off the effects of last night,” Rarity said. “Where? His place?” “No, my sofa. The nice one.” They were all nice, but one was especially nice. Twilight knew the one and so this came as something of a surprise. She herself had once been holding a drink and had dared to move too close to the nice sofa. That Rarity had let a drunken Rhys sleep on it seemed unlikely. Perhaps she’d heard wrong. “You let him stay the night?” Twilight asked. Again Rarity made a teeny little huffing sound, cheeks momentarily puffed from the insinuation that she might have turfed out somepony so helpless. “Why wouldn’t I? I could hardly have sent him on his way. He couldn’t walk straight, certainly couldn’t have found his way back to his home in the dark. And what sort of pony would I have been, expecting him to? It was the least I could do in the circumstances.” Thinking about it, Twilight could see her reasoning. Still seemed a bit odd to her though.  “Suppose,” she said, scratching her chin again and then pausing, finding a piece of parchment stuck to it. How long had that been there? How had it been stuck there? Here the conversation faltered, as neither of them were really sure of where they wanted it to actually go. Sitting in her chair Twilight kicked her hooves a little while Rarity busied herself with more possibly-imaginary fluff. “So…” Twilight said, at length, just at the moment when Rarity asked: “Is there nothing else you can do for him?” Twilight wasn’t entirely sure what Rarity was getting at here. “For Rhys? Like what? Like about the portal?” She asked. Rarity nodded. Twilight blew out a breath. Not an easy proposition. Nothing was impossible, obviously, as evidenced by Twilight having already having managed to burrow through dimensions through nothing but grit, determination, ingenuity and applied magical theory.  But between possible and impossible lay vast tracts of varying levels of difficulty, and given where the portal had taken her and Rhys she had to imagine that succeeding in getting him to where and when he should have been was sitting somewhere in the ‘very difficult’ part of the tract. So to speak. “Mean, the portal was already some work on its own. Fascinating stuff, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t easy. I’d love to get him back home, I really would, but this time problem...it’s a big one,” Twilight said. “Surely not insurmountable?” Twilight gave Rarity some prime side-eye. “I can’t travel through time, Rarity,” Twilight said, but on reflection felt compelled to say: “Well, I can. I mean, I have. And so have a few others. Sometimes. But there are limits, not to mention a lot of unknowns. I mean I can always look into it.” “Could you?” Rarity asked, somewhere in the borderlands of pleading but not quite actually there. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. Still, Twilight hadn’t been lying, the problem of attempting to bridge the dimensional gap had been a fascinating exercise, and had brought up a lot of stuff that she wouldn’t have minded going back to because of the tantalising possibilities they presented and the juicy, juicy work involved in getting at those possibilities.  And the actually achieving any measure of success? With such an intractable, seemingly-impossible problem? To actually achieve it, even a little bit? To chip away at intractable issues that had baffled those who’d come before? To add just that little more to the gestalt of ponykind’s magical knowledge? Well... “Sure, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll look into it. But I can’t make any promises, okay? Don’t go getting your hopes up. Or going and getting his up, either,” Twilight said, mind already starting to buzz in that very particular way when it had latched onto something. And not getting Rhys’ hopes seemed a fair precaution. Not after what getting his hopes up the last time apparently did. “Of course not, darling! I shan’t even mention it to him, not until I’ve heard from you!” Rarity said, swiping a hoof across her lips to emphatically demonstrate that her lips were zipped - sealed!  Twilight didn’t really buy this, but there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it either way and besides, the buzzing had resolved now into half a dozen separate ideas and thoughts all vying for her attention, which made it difficult to focus. With that settled it was silently, mutually decided that the conversation had ended. Rarity slipped from her seat and picked her bags up again before accompanying Twilight back to the front door of the place. “And thank you again, Twilight” Rarity said on the threshold.  Twilight was already squinting in the daylight coming through the open door, but this made confusion add further to the squint. “Don’t know why you’re thanking me,” she said. “Because I asked you for a favour, darling! And you’re going to do your best to deliver on it. And it’s a nice thing you’re doing. Lots of reasons,” Rarity said with a titter and a waft of her hoof which did little to alleviate Twilight’s confusion. “Oh, right. Well like I say, there are no guarantees. This whole thing could fail before it even starts, so just bear that in mind. In the meantime should we, uh, check on Rhys or something?” She asked. Seemed like it might be a good idea, given what Rarity had said about his recent behaviour.  As aloof as he was and as robust as he liked to pass himself off as, everyone had a breaking point and, well, if learning that you couldn’t go home because your home and everyone in it was gone wasn’t one of them what was? “The state the poor boy was in I expect he’s exactly where he was the last time I saw him - on the sofa, probably asleep. I’ll make sure he’s alright and that he gets home safe,” Rarity said. Again concern from Rarity and, again, done with such breezy lightness. Twilight considered maybe pressing the issue, maybe insisting on going in and following up on Rhys - she had been the one to see his home as well, after all - but something in her waters told her that having two ponies come to check on him would just do more harm than good, make him feel like he was being ganged up on. Odd boy. “Hmm, if you’re sure,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I am I am, don’t you worry about Rhys, I’ll keep an eye on him! But I’ve taken up quite enough of your time, I’m sure you’ll be wanting to get back to bed, or, well, whatever you’d like. And thank you again, Twilight!” With that off Rarity went, humming to herself, happy as anything. Twilight watched her go until she was out of sight then stayed standing there a moment more, brain fizzing quietly to itself. “That was weird,” she said eventually, going back inside again. - By the time Rarity got back to hers, Rhys was nowhere to be seen. Or at least he wasn’t where she’d left him on the sofa. Where he should have been and where Rarity had been expecting him was instead the blanket that had been draped over him, neatly folded up. This came as something of a surprise. On a hunch she moved on through toward the kitchen, just on the off-chance that maybe he was at that very moment getting some water, say. But no, he was gone. Rarity had to admit to feeling unexpectedly upset about that. She’d rather been looking forward to telling him the good news. Or not out-and-out telling him - she had promised, after all - but maybe just hinting that good news was on the way. That would be vague enough to not qualify as having spilled the beans and would also doubtless cheer him up! Everyone would have won. But no, he was gone. Hmm. “Rhys? Hello?” Rarity called out, just in case, but no response. Not that she’d honestly expected one. She sighed. “I hope he got home alright, at least…” Her eyes then alighted on what appeared to be note, left out in a place where she would notice it. So far so successful if that was the case. Curious, she dropped her bags and moved over, levitating up the note and bringing it in for a closer look. A note it was indeed, and the note read: “Hello Rarity. I already said thank you but I want to say it again because I mean it. Thank you. You didn’t have to do what you did for me because I know you don’t like me but you did it anyway, so thank you for that. (Should probably have just written out ‘thank you’ twenty times, it’d be simpler.) I’m totally fine now so don’t worry about me. I owe you one. Not that I’m good for a whole lot, but I owe you one. You need a lightbulb changed, I’ll hook you up. Or something. That’s a joke. Batteries in your smoke detector. That’s another joke. Thank you. Again. And sorry for using this bit of paper I found. I hope it wasn’t important. Sorry. Rhys. (The human)” It was one of the more awkward things that Rarity had read but it did get the point across, she supposed. Poor boy didn’t need to apologise quite so much. Sighing, Rarity put the note back down again. She’d follow him up about how he was tomorrow. Assuming she saw him, of course. Didn’t want to crowd him after all.  He did say he was fine, for however much she actually believed him.