//------------------------------//
// Second-Biggest Fear 
// Story: Dreamquestria 
// by TheBBofC 
//------------------------------//

	While Princess Celestia was briefing the Elements of Harmony on their mission; Selena was driving nervously to Stephen’s house.  The previous eight hours of picking up the slack for several coworkers that had suddenly quit had left her with tense shoulders and a need to vent her frustrations to someone.  But as she crossed an intersection, her stomach sank the same way it might in anticipation for a monster to grab a defenseless victim in a horror movie.  Why was the drive giving her this feeling?
A vision from twelve months ago played in Selena’s mind.  She’d never forget the way he contained his furiousness as he told her about how Damien had framed him at work.  Or how nervous he became as he explained how he might get demoted or even worse lose his job over this drama.  Time flashed forward and she remembered being as relieved as he was when the incident blew over with only the consequence of a delayed annual pay raise.  Then a couple months later when he told her of possibly being promoted should he do well at his next annual review.  Since then, he had doubled his efforts at work, possibly in an attempt to make up for the incident a few months prior.  
How can someone try that hard at something for so long and not get tired out?  He must be feeling so much stress right now.  The final piece of the puzzle snapped into Selena’s mind and the revelation caused her to gasp aloud.  Stress can cause someone to feel tired all the time or maybe even have bad dreams.  Then they might get a short temper or have trouble focusing – all of which had been happening to Stephen over the last week.
But the revelation came with a few new questions.  Such as how could she help if she’d never seen a problem like this before?  Would it be wise to confide her day’s frustrations to Stephen?  What if she accidentally added more stress to what he was already feeling?
Yes, it all made sense now.  It was because of these concerns together with Stephen’s crankiness that was causing being with him to lose its usual pleasantness.  Yesterday was the best example she could think of.  She played back the memory of arriving for her usual after-work visit to find him silent with an expression that made his eyes while facing possible unemployment look bold and courageous by comparison.  Although he acted like nothing was wrong, Selena could see through him and wanted to know what could have been bothering him so badly.  Why didn’t he give a direct answer when she asked?  As her mind remembered the way he distanced himself from her attempt to reach out, her adrenal glands remembered, in great detail, the shock and uncertainty of what to do next and her heart remembered the ache caused by being denied.
Perhaps she could have eventually found out what was wrong.  Unfortunately, their visit was cut short by her parents calling and asking her to come home and visit with some relatives that had just flown into town.  Or maybe it wasn’t unfortunate since it gave her a chance to separate herself from the situation and figure out if there was a way she could help.  Perhaps she just couldn’t handle seeing Stephen that way at all?
Selena attempted to suppress another churn in her stomach by reminding herself of the conclusion she had drawn last night.  Stephen just needed some time to himself to cool off.  She also had a plan.  First, she would have Stephen try some other video games with her.  Then she’d sit him down and briefly tell him about her day before moving on to getting whatever was bothering him off his chest while she made dinner.  Then they would cuddle with a movie and perhaps she’d spend the night and see him off to work in the morning.  It was a foolproof plan with a one hundred percent success rate in the past.  There was no reason to not have high hopes today would be better so there was no reason to feel nervous…hopefully.
As soon as she exited her car, she was startled by the sounds of growling, pounding drums and wailing guitars resonating from Stephen’s house.  What could possibly be going on in there?  Stephen didn’t like this type of music.  Some of his friends did, but Stephen’s was the only other car in the driveway so it wasn’t likely he had other visitors.  Even so, they never played music this loudly.  Something simply wasn’t right with this picture.
Selena made her way to the door with a pounding heart.  Reluctantly, she tested the knob.  The unlocked knob turned in her hand and the door cracked open.  She peered inside, hoping to see Stephen right away, but he was nowhere to be seen.  Forcing herself into the house, she slowly made her way from the mudroom and into the kitchen with the loud music vibrating through the floor.  
There was no part of this that made sense.  What if Stephen was in trouble?  What if someone was in his house unwelcome?  Selena shuddered to think about all the things that could imply and what could happen if she got caught interrupting whatever was going on.  She seriously considered turning around and coming back another time as her feet carried her to the living room, almost against her own will.  
The first thing she noticed was Stephen dancing erratically about the room.  He seemed to be favoring his right leg as he moved about.  “…When I awaken, discover that I’ve been damaged by your world!~…” Stephen tried to sing along with the song but horribly failed in his attempts to match the singer’s distorted growl.
The next thing Selena noticed was the state of the living room, which looked like the Tazmanian Devil had gone through it.  One of Stephen’s chairs and a couple lamps had been toppled over and the floor was littered with wrappers of various candies and protein bars.  Used plates, coffee mugs, and large energy drink empties covered every flat surface.  Scattered about the coffee table in front of Stephen’s sofa was a case filled with energy shots, half of which had been opened and emptied as well.
“Stephen, what’s going on?” Selena had to shout at him over the music.
Stephen snapped up straight and looked at her.  “Hey, Selena, how are you doing?  I’ve missed you.  How are you doing?” he stammered, talking abnormally fast.
His words just barely made it to her ears over the vicious music.  In an instant, she was forced to scrap her whole plan and replace it with…she wasn’t sure what.  But the first item on the new list was to rush over to the entertainment system and lower the music’s volume.  “Stephen, what’s going on here?” she asked once the floor had stopped vibrating.
“Just dancing.  Want to join me?”  Stephen’s eyes lit up and a grin came across his face.  “Oh!” he shouted.  “I learned a valuable lesson about my inner child the other night,” he said as he wandered to the other side of the room.  He was limping slightly.  
“Why are you limping?” Selena asked.
“Nevermind that,” he said.  “Check this out.  I went digging around in my old stuff and found this!”  He pointed to two towers of Marbleworks toys that he had set up, one much taller than the other.  The box was lying at an awkward angle on the stairs just a few feet away.  “Watch this!”
Stephen dropped a marble at the top of the taller tower.  It went through a couple of low resistance obstacles before dropping down a steep ramp piece.  Arching through the air, the marble landed cleanly into a funnel at the top of the left tower and continued to dance through a few, slightly more impressive obstacles before landing in the bottom tray.  “Isn’t that awesome?” Stephen brayed.  “It only took me one try to set that up.  I could probably do something cooler but I thought to myself ‘wouldn’t this be even more fun with the love of my life doing it with me?’  So I waited for you.  What do you think?  Want to give it a try?”
That’s when Selena noticed the pick stuck in Stephen’s afro.  Why was that there?  Granted, that might be a fashion statement for some people.  But Stephen had never done anything like that before.  Who was this man and what did he do with her boyfriend?  
The second action item appeared on her plans for the night as ‘stop your eyes from popping out of your head’.  Selena shook herself back to her senses and looked up at Stephen.  As calmly as she could, she said, “Stephen, I want you to settle down and tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong,” Stephen hastily replied.
As Selena made her way over to him, candy bar wrappers crunched under her feet.  “You’re really bad at lying,” she said as she reached up to put her arms around his neck.  Stephen must have confused the gesture for an advance because he went to put his arms around her hips.  Before he could get a grip, she pulled his head down a few inches to her eye level.  Thick, red and jagged lines were coursing through his corneas while his eyes carried stuffed suitcases.  A little grossed out, she let go of his head and grabbed the afro pick out of his hair as she took a step back.  “Gosh, Stephen.  When was the last time you went to sleep?  And why was this in your hair?” she asked, showing him the pick before setting it down on a nearby coffee table.
“Oh whoops!” he chuckled.  “I forgot I was doing that.”
Selena furrowed her brow with an unspoken question of how someone could forget that they were picking their hair while they were doing it.  “Okay…What about my other question?”
Stephen raised an eyebrow.  “What other question?”
Did he seriously forget?  She asked him not ten seconds ago!  “How long has it been since you last slept?” she repeated.
Stephen paused and Selena could see him trying to forge an answer behind the bloodshot eyes.  She could tell for a moment that he was going to try to lie again.  However, his silence remained and he considered other options.  By the length of the pause, there must have been a lot to consider.  Eventually he sighed and lowered head.  “I haven’t slept in over a week,” he said in resignation. 
“What are you talking about?  We fell asleep together twice last week.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t really sleeping,” he said reluctantly.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Remember those dreams I told you about?”
“Yes.”
“I figured out why I never feel like I’ve slept when I wake up.  It’s because I’m not really sleeping and they aren’t really dreams.”
“Stephen, you’re scaring me.”
“It’s all real, Selena.  Remember when I told you about how I got beat up?  I woke up that morning with bruises all over my body.”
“Bruises?  Are they still there?”
“They’re almost gone now because it’s been a week.”
Selena pressed her hands on Stephen’s chest, turned him around and walked him to the sofa.  After pressing on his shoulders, he sat down and she knelt in front of him.  “Let me see,” she commanded.
Stephen sighed and lifted his shirt.  “The biggest ones were here and here,” he said, pointing to some spots on his chest.  
Selena ran her hand up his torso.  She found two splotches where he had pointed.  But they were small and had such low contrast to his complexion that they took effort to see.  “These could have been done by anything.  You do realize you’ve been sort of clumsy the last week, right?  Maybe you bumped into something.  Plus, why wouldn’t you tell me if you woke up with bruises?”
“I didn’t want you to worry,” said Stephen.  “But they were much bigger than they are now, I swear!”  He lowered his shirt and lifted his left ankle up to her.  “There’s also the fact that two nights ago I fell out of a window and sprained my ankle.  When I woke up, this was sprained too.”
Selena, though she had no idea what to do, instinctually wrapped her hands around his left ankle.  She gently moved the joint in a circle, causing Stephen to gasp in pain.  She immediately released his foot and it fell back onto the couch.  Without touching it, Selena looked even closer.  She figured that an injured body part would have some sort of visible sign like a bruise, swelling or loss of flexibility.  That simply didn’t appear to be the case here.
However, the concern on Stephen’s face was real.  She had to think of something to say.  She bought herself some time by sitting up on the sofa with Stephen and pulling his head into her chest.  He seemed to relax a little while she held him there and tried to think of what to do next.  
The song on Stephen’s entertainment center changed to one with a very heavy drum solo opening.  “I didn’t know you liked this type of music,” she said.
“I don’t.  It’s loud, obnoxious and I can’t figure out why the singer is so angry.”
“Then why were you blasting it so loud?”
“Because I’ll never be able to fall asleep like that.”
Selena quickly stifled surprise and frustration before she said, “You’ve been keeping yourself awake?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Technically, since yesterday morning.”
“Are you nuts?” her voice shot up at Stephen before she could contain it.  “How the heck do you even do that?”
“It’s easy…Sort of…I just have to eat a lot.  Coffee stopped working so I found out that if I mixed it with energy drinks and energy shots…well it tastes absolutely terrible but it also makes me feel like the Energizer bunny for a couple hours.  I keep the music on really loud all the time and I’m always dancing or playing video games or watching a horror movie.  Then I discovered I still had Marbleworks.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?” A big smile contradicted the tears forming in Stephen’s eyes as he let out a painful sounding giggle.
Selena still couldn’t think of anything.  The only suggestion she could make was the same one that Stephen had so quickly shot down the last time she made it.  But she had to say something now or she might not be able to do anything at all.  “Stephen,” she said quietly as she ran her fingers through his thick hair.  “You need help…now.”
“I know,” said Stephen.  Selena felt hope for a moment.  “That’s why I’m glad you’re here.”
“What?”
“You can help me stay awake until I have my next doctor’s appointment and we figure out how to stop me from going to Equestria.”  With that, Selena was officially lost.  “It’s only a couple of weeks from now.  We can do that, right?  Then we can tell the Guinness Book of World Records about how much fun we had together.  The current record is eleven days.  I’m already at seven or eight.  Doesn’t that sound fun?” his faked optimism was reinforced by the return of his pain-filled chuckle that almost caused Selena’s stomach to turn over.
“Stop!” Selena shouted.
Stephen blinked a couple of times.  The water in his eyes cleared up and he seemed to be back to his usual self – for the moment.  “What’s wrong, babe?”
“That’s not what I meant by ‘help’, Stephen,” she said bluntly.
They were silent for a moment while the heavy music still played in the background.  After the long pause, Stephen shot back up to his feet.  “Oh no!” he almost shouted.  “I can’t do that right now.  My employee reviews are in two days.  I just have to do good until then.  If I go get help and tell them what’s been going on they’ll put me in a straight jacket.”
This was it.  All of the cards were on the table.  Even as afraid as she was, there was no choice but to get him to hear her out.  Otherwise…well she wasn’t certain what the alternate option was.  That bridge would simply have to be crossed when she arrived there.  “I don’t think they’ll commit you, Stephen,” she tried to reassure him.  “But we do need to get you help soon.  There’s no way this can be good for you.”  She grabbed one of the empty energy shots and held it up for Stephen to see.  “Look at this!” she dropped it.  “Look at all this candy and dishes,” she cried with her arms waving about, pointing to everything in the room.  “You’re already delirious.  You can’t do this for two more weeks!”
“Selena, I know it’s hard to believe but I’m telling you; Equestria is real.  You’ve got to believe me.  Think about the injuries I got.”
“The bruises could have come from anywhere.  Your ankle could be in your head.  You know?  You think something happened so you start feeling it.  Really, it seems fine to me.”
Stephen was silent for a moment.  Then his brow furrowed at her.  “Do you think I’m crazy?” he asked.
Now Selena knew what it felt like to have a knife go through her heart.  She almost answered right away but her throat choked up and stopped her from responding with her first thought.  Her stomach tied itself in knots and her hands started quaking as she finally found the words and forced herself to speak.  “I think…I think the stress at work has gotten to you…”  It was a compromise, but it would have to do for now.  “I’ve been telling you that you need to take a vacation.”	
“I know!” Stephen shouted, throwing his hands up in the air and turning around.  “That’s why I need to get through this without any interruptions!”  He paced around the sofa and towards the kitchen.  Selena followed him while he continued to talk.  “Think about it.  If I can get that promotion, I can take a vacation.  I could take you with me.  We could go to Hawaii and catch up on all the missed sleep without a single gosh darn consequence.  But in order to get that I really need your help right now.  I know I look out of it right now but believe me; I’m perfectly fine at work.  It’s when I’m home that I need all the help I can get to stay awake.  Just until I can get the tests done and the doctors can fix me.”
Selena reached out her hand to Stephen, stopping his pacing just at the threshold of the living room.  A smile came across his face as he reached out for it and she gently tugged him towards her.  “I’m scared, Stephen.  I’m scared for you and I don’t know what to do which only makes me more scared.  Please just come with me and we’ll get you help.”
Stephen’s eyebrows lowered and his eyes became glassy before pulling away from her grip.  “No,” he said plainly.  “I can’t do it.”  His voice started to raise again.  “Not when I only have a couple of days to go before I can make it all better.  I can’t risk going back to Equestria.  It’s too real and it’s too dangerous.”
“Stephen…” Selena begged.
“I know it’s hard to believe but you’ve got to think!” his voice continued to rise.  “I’ve never had any issues before!”
She had lost him.  “Stephen, please!” Selena cried out.
Stephen hunched over and held his head in his hands.  “No!”  He took two steps to his right and then doubled-back towards the wall.  “For the love of all that is holy I’m telling you I’m not crazy!”  Selena shrieked when Stephen’s fist cracked through his living room wall.  She covered her head and ears with her arms as the shake jostled a coffee table enough to knock over a small picture frame, shattering the glass as it collided with the floor.

The thick fog of exhaustion, fear and frustration cleared itself from Stephen’s mind when Selena’s fearful shriek rang through his ears.  His eyes were flooded with information on the current state of affairs such as the disaster area that was his living room and the sounds of the heavy metal mix CD he made that morning still screaming and cursing in the background.  A stinging sensation in his hand prompted him to pull it from the wall and examine the reddening scrape on his fore knuckles.  
All of that paled in comparison to the heart-ripping feeling of seeing Selena with her forearms clasped over her head, trying in vain to hold back the tears already streaming down her cheeks.  
She stuttered and gasped in between several sobs before croaking out, “I’m sorry.”  
“No,” he said as gently as he could.  “I’m sorry.”  He tried to reach out to her but she pulled away with a start.
“I’m sorry but I can’t handle it anymore.  I just don’t know what to do.  I can’t help you, Stephen.”
“What are you saying?”  Stephen tried once again to reach out to her but she continued to pull herself away.  His stomach churned and his knees grew weak when he realized what he had done and that he was about experience the second-biggest fear he had during this whole situation.  He knew he had it coming to him too after that fine display of how well he could control himself under this type of stress.  He had known he was susceptible to that.  Why wasn’t he able to stop himself now when it mattered most?  
“I’m sorry, I just can’t handle this new you.”
Stephen tried reaching out to her once again.  “Selena, please, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to scare you.  Please don’t do this.”
Selena practically leaped backwards to get away from him.  She covered her face with her hands but couldn’t hide the sobs in her voice.  “When you’re back to normal…” she choked out.  “…Come find me…Until then…I just don’t know what to do anymore…I’m sorry.”  Selena’s leaking dam burst.  Balling loudly, she sprinted out of Stephen’s house.
Stephen dropped to his knees.  The remnants of his sprain shot up his leg and were thoroughly ignored.  “Selena…please don’t leave…” Stephen repeated to himself as the sound of Selena’s engine revving and tires screeching down the street stung his ears.
“Madness has now come over me!”  Stephen’s stereo system blared.
Stephen shot to his feet and bolted to his CD player.  “You’re not helping!” he shouted, giving it a hard slap.  The disc protested the abuse by skipping the first two notes of the next song.  Stephen responded by going behind the entertainment center and simultaneously pulling every plug out of the wall, causing the outlet to spark.  With that, he threw on his shoes and set out his door for a long, painful walk.  Without Selena, it wasn’t nearly as relaxing or enjoyable.  Nevertheless, he didn’t return to his home until it was time to get ready for work.