Zephyr and the Real Girl

by CoffeeMinion

4: Hot and Heavy

Another wave of disorientation wracked Sunset as she fell through the space between worlds. A moment later, though, she landed hard on her butt.

She looked up and smiled at the throng of familiar faces surrounding her.

“Sunset!” It was Twilight—human Twilight—lowering a notebook and a pen.

An orange hand reached down toward her. “Y’all need a lift?”

“Thanks, AJ,” Sunset said, accepting the help up. She looked around Zephyr’s bedroom with a wan smile, taking in the concerned—or disgusted, in Rainbow Dash’s case, as she shuffled through some things on Zephyr’s desk—faces of her six closest friends.

Zephyr himself stood apart from them, and Sunset’s smile faded as she looked across the room at him. His shoulders were hunched, as if he was actively trying to make himself look as small as possible.

“Thanks for coming, girls,” Sunset said. “It means a lot that you’d drop everything and rush over here in case we needed you.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Pinkie said with a smile. “It’s not like every day you get to see a talking comic that’s stealing your friend’s boyfriend, amirite?!”

The room went deathly silent. No one wanted to meet anyone’s eyes.

“Well Pinkie, thank you for ripping that band-aid right off,” Sunset deadpanned. “Twilight, did Shy and Dash give you the rundown on the comic?”

“They did,” she said, looking at her notepad. “I’ve only been able to work up some preliminary hypotheses thus far, but—”

“Sounds great,” Sunset interrupted. She reached down, picked up the comic, and dropped it into Twilight’s arms, directly on top of the notepad. “So do you think you can keep it safe ’til morning?”

Twilight hesitated. “Y… yes, I suppose I’ve got a containment unit I can clean out for the night.”

“Fantastic. So, uh… not that don’t want to seem ungrateful that you all came, but…”

“All right, you heard the lady,” Dash broke in. “Everybody out! Shy, you were supposed to be hangin’ at my place tonight anyway, right?”

“Um, I guess, that’s what I told my parents.”

“Good enough! Rarity, c’mon… you can nod off all you want when you get back home. ¡Vamonos!”

Sunset watched her six friends file quietly out of the room, save for Rainbow Dash, who was still goading the others with a fury.

Then Dash pulled the door closed, leaving Sunset and Zephyr alone.

It took a minute for Sunset’s gaze to turn from the door to Zephyr’s still-shirtless, still-slumping figure on the other side of the room. His eyes were shifting about, and he was clearly breathing, but otherwise he could’ve been frozen in ice for all the movement he made.

“Hey,” she said.

The single word seemed to jolt him back to life. He straightened up, looked at her, looked down at himself, then walked over to a dresser and started digging around. “Uh, sorry, let me get… presentable.”

“Presentable?”

He pushed the drawer closed quickly, having failed to retrieve a shirt or anything else. Then he turned toward her again, wincing. “I know, I know… I should’ve told you. Or I should’ve just not done it!”

“Hold on, Zeph. I’m not here to go off on you. I just… I think we should talk about it. Please can we talk about it?”

He slowly made his way over to the bed and sat down on its edge. After a moment’s consideration, Sunset sat down next to him.

“I have…” Zephyr glanced back over at his desk. “That comic was just one of the things I have that I’m not necessarily… proud of. But it was the only one that had a life of its own.”

Sunset’s face contorted with uncertainty. “These… other things. Are they… legal?”

He was up and off the bed again in an instant. “Yes, absolutely. Here… let me show the whole thing to you!”

“No, Zeph, this really isn’t—”

She went quiet as he dropped a thirty-pound stack of magazines, printouts, and pages torn from various things onto her lap. It was all just an ocean of skin. Even a quick look at the top page suggested to Sunset that she didn’t really want to dig deeper.

Yet she did. She opened the first magazine, and did her utmost to let its photographs simply roll off her. She flipped through a few of the individual pages, and felt alternately perplexed and disgusted by turns.

“Geez, Fluttershy wasn’t kidding about the tentacle thing.”

Sunset glanced up at Zephyr, who hadn’t sat back down. His face had gone beet red, but he met her eyes and nodded. “Heh. Truth is, I haven’t been as much into that kinda stuff for a while. I guess I just kept some of it for… old times’ sake.”

They held each other’s gaze for several moments.

“Look, I don’t…” Sunset shifted the stack off her lap and onto the bed. “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be mad at you here, or… I dunno, realistic? I guess I get it, even if it’s… not the way I do things.”

Zephyr’s eyes went wide. “Really?”

Sunset shrugged. “I don’t know, Zeph. I’m not saying it’s great... it just makes me realize more that we’ve got a lot to talk about in our relationship, if we’re gonna really go past ‘light and fun.’ Things like intimacy, or sex… or even where we think this is going long-term, y’know?”

He lowered himself down onto the bed again. “Sunset, I’ll be honest: right now I’m just glad I have a long-term to be worried about. I thought I was gonna die back there, when she pulled me into the comic! And I guess I thought that you might kill me if you ever caught wind of my… shall we say, legendary stash.”

“Yeah, no, seriously, that was one of the first things Dash and Shy beat into my head after I agreed to our first date. I didn’t know how much I should believe about what they told me. But I guess… the truth is, I’ve been hiding some things, too.” She looked down at her hands. “It’s hard for me to touch people anymore, Zephyr. And when I do, I have to try really hard not to let my powers come out.”

“Shy told me you can read minds, sometimes. I guess I wondered… have you read mine?”

She shook her head. “No one person should have the power to just know someone else’s secrets. It takes away the meaning of sharing yourself with someone if they can just… look in your head and know, doesn’t it?”

Zephyr sighed, and cradled his head in his hands. “Maybe you should use it on me, though, to try to figure out what I was thinking messing around with someone like the Mane-Iac, when I’ve got you out here in the real world.”

Rather than engaging the offer, Sunset took a moment to think. “Honestly, I’d rather hear the version that you’re comfortable sharing. Maybe just… why didn’t you think to tell any of us about her? I mean, me and the girls deal with stuff like this all the time.”

“It… it’s embarrassing.” His eyes fixated on the floor near his feet. “At first I just thought it was crazy cool, having a talking comic book. You girls always get the cool stuff; well, here was mine. Then I… got to talking with the Mane-Iac more, and figured out we had something in common.”

“An interest in hair?” Sunset raised an eyebrow, looking askance at Zephyr’s man-bun.

“Well, yeah. She really got a kick out of talking about haircare stuff, and I did too, and… well, if I’m being honest… maybe it got so that it was working for both of us a bit on multiple levels, if y’know what I mean. But she wanted me for it, and her hair was just this crazy versatile canvas where I could create almost anything.”

“But she wasn’t real.”

Zephyr frowned at her. “See, that’s the thing. At first, she wasn't. But the more time I spent with her, the more it seemed like she was. The first time she could send her hair through for me to style… it was amazing.”

Hearing Zephyr talk about the Mane-Iac like this left Sunset feeling deflated, and weary. She recalled the moans and other sounds that had come from his bedroom before Rainbow Dash had broken in. It still unsettled her stomach to hear more of how he’d felt about it.

“I’m glad you’re telling me,” she said at length. “I don’t know what this means, though. I know there’s a sense in which she’s real; she can talk, she can… touch… but all of that’s fueled by her comic’s connection to Equestrian magic. My own…” Sunset squeezed her eyes shut. “My problem is almost the opposite. I am real, Zephyr; Equestrian magic or not, I’m a living, breathing girl. But I’ve got problems that none of the girls in your ‘stash’ are gonna have. Some of those… I wish I didn’t have. Others are just part of me, though.” She looked at him again, and smiled as she saw he’d been looking at her, too. “I wish the magic didn’t make it so difficult for me to touch. I wish I could get away from fighting monsters and saving lives sometimes, too. But I’m also proud of what I can do, and how I can use it to help people. And I’m not gonna stop, even if that makes things hard.”

Zephyr smiled, though it had a tinge of sadness in it. “I think you’re amazing, Sunset. You and all the girls, really; but especially you. You’re heroic, badass, and a lot more selfless than I’ve ever been. I guess… the Mane-Iac made me feel like I was the only person in her world, but that’s probably because I was. And I don’t think that’s all I want the Zephyr’s story to end up as, even if I don’t have everything all figured out right now.”

She gave him a playful smile. “So are you saying you’re ready for me to confiscate your stash?”

He gave her a choking laugh. “I… I don’t know. I guess maybe I can at least stop getting down on myself so much about never finding somebody, since maybe I already did.”

Sunset’s phone buzzed, breaking her out of the shared smile. She fished it out of her pocket and frowned at the rainbow lightning-bolt symbol showing on her messaging app.

Don forget his still an Idiot. Keep your pans on!! Make his but pay!!!!!!

“Thanks for the quality life advice, Rainbow Dad,” Sunset said, rolling her eyes.

“Somethin’ up, babe?”

“Yeah. Us.” Sunset stood, stretching. “It’s late, Zeph. Late enough that I don’t know if I’ve still got much in me for figuring out big stuff.”

“It’s cool, it’s cool.” He shrugged, and casually looked at his fingernails. “I suppose we’ve got time; we can always figure this out later.” But then he glanced at her, and a hairline crack appeared in his disaffected manner. “I figure breakfast might be a bit soon for that at this point, but I don’t suppose you’d be up for talking over lunch?”

Sunset smiled again. “All right, how ’bout late lunch, in the park? And how about you bring the picnic, since… y’know… kinda had to bail you out of a hot mess here.”

“No worries, babe.” And he winked, which made Sunset laugh at the sheer audacity of it.

Comments

[PresentPerfect]

Didn't break up with him, 0/10 worst fic

Okay, but Rainbow Dad though XD