Stellar

“An’ don’t ya dare come back till ya learn some manners ya hear!?” A burly pony with a grey coat and a hat that looks too small for his head growls as he tosses two seemingly younger colts out the door of the bar and into the pungent, grotesqueness of the alleyway, one of them hitting their face on the adjacent wall and the other landing on his stomach.

“Fucking  bitch!” Rumble curses between coughs, holding both hooves around his midsection.

“Fuck!” Shady snarls, holding both hooves over his nose, blood seeping from between them and coating the stone below.

“I don’t need you two insulting my customers let alone me. If you want to be assholes then go do it somewhere else.”  That is the last they see of the bartender before he shuts the door in their faces.

“Motherfucker!” Rumble howls, springing to his hooves and throwing himself against the door of the bar, liquid courage coursing through his veins, temporarily nullifying the pain of his broken ribs. He throws himself against the surprisingly sturdy make-up of the door two or three times before the pain in his ribs eventually completely cripples him and renders him a heap at the doorstep.

Shady, who’d been watching his friend’s mindless display of aggression while trying to stymie the steady flow of blood from his nose, decided that getting arrested and carted off to the station didn’t sound like an attractive prospect in the least.

“C’mon dude,” Shady starts, laying a hoof on Rumble’s shoulder. “You’ve clearly got some cracked ribs, I think my nose might be broken, and I don’t feel like spending the night in a holding cell.”

“Whatever, that guy’s a pussy anway,” Rumble coughs, clutching his midsection. Shady helps the battered Pegasus to his hooves and the two make their way out the mouth of the alleyway and toward Rumble’s house, Shady allowing Rumble to lean on him for support all the while.

The two make it to Rumble’s house with minimal difficulty despite their albeit minor injuries. Shady pushes the door open before making his way inside, still supporting Rumble with a foreleg. Shady navigates the pair to the couch in the living room and lays Rumble down. Almost immediately after the burden is lifted from his shoulders his mind goes back to his own injuries, a hoof running under his nose and consequently being covered in both fresh and dry blood.

“Do you have any painkillers dude?” Shady asks, eyeing his bloody hoof with a grimace; “and maybe some gauze or something?”

“I don’t know there might be something in the kitchen cabinets somewhere.” Shady scoffs at Rumble’s ignorance but nevertheless goes to the kitchen and begins digging aimlessly through the cabinets.

“Why do you need painkillers anyway, just break out the scotch,” Rumble remarks from his supine position on the couch; “always worked just as good.”

Shady simply rolls his eyes at Rumble’s usual cavalier approach to everything and goes back to spelunking for medical supplies.

After minutes of unsuccessful searching he finally comes upon a bottle of pain killers.  After fishing the bottle out of the cabinet and collecting the item in his mouth he trots over to where Rumble lie, spitting it out onto his friend’s stomach.

Rumble opens his eyes and peers down at the dusty bottle of painkillers then back up at Shady, his eyes narrowed and skeptical.

“Dude where did you even find this stuff?”

“It was in one of the cabinets above the stove.” Shady responds, wiping the blood from under his nose with a rag he’d found alongside the dusty bottle.

“This stuff has to be ancient,” Rumble said, inspecting the bottle with a critical eye. “Not to mention this is just aspirin. I bet you couldn’t even get high off this shit if you chugged half the bottle.”

“It’s probably better than lying there in pain,” Shady stated pointedly.

“If I’m gonna take this shit I’m gonna need a serious chaser.” Rumble’s eyes grow slit and impish and Shady immediately realizes that there is no trying to reason with him.

“There you go thinking with your liver again.”

Rumble pats a spot on his lower front side that he suspects houses the organ in question. “Cast iron liver baby.”

“Is that what your doctor tells you?”

“He tells me I am a stallion amongst stallions.” Rumble tries to flex his forelegs but the pain in his ribs forces him to keel over. Shady pats Rumble shoulder as though he were a mother comforting her foal.

“Don’t worry Rumble, I hear mares go gaga over the sickly.”

“Fuck you gaywad,” Rumble wheezed between pants.

“How many nights have you lied awake fantasizing about that?” Shady smirked.

“Only in your gay dreams,” Rumble countered.

“And how gay they are,” Shady giggled, making his way toward the liquor cabinet.

“You should see it Rumble,” Shady adds whimsically over his shoulder, standing atop the chair he’d pulled out so he could pluck the key from on top of the towering piece of furniture. “Stallions far as the eye can see, all oiled up and ready to…”

“Ugh c’mon dude,” Rumble cuts him off, putting his hooves up in an abating manner that succeeds in warding off the flamboyantly gay dreams of his best friend. “Spare me the details.”

Shady simply laughs and fishes a silver flask out of the cabinet before sealing it up and climbing back up on the chair to return the key to its rightful place.  After he’d climbed down and pushed the chair back in at the kitchen counter he trots back over to the couch and takes a seat next to Rumble.

Shady gingerly shakes the flask in his friend’s face. Rumble, seeing the silver bottle brandished between his Shady’s teeth, cracks a grin that would make the most morally reprehensible ponies uneasy.

“Yeah that’s the stuff!” Rumble hooted, his eyes alight as though he were a foal on Christmas morning.

“What the hell is it?” Shady questioned, eyeing the writing etched into the face of the bottle with a well-founded skepticism.

“That my friend is some of the highest quality scotch this side of Equestria,” Rumble boasted. “One sip a’ that’ll put hair on your balls guaranteed.” Shady spends another scant minute thoroughly analyzing the face of the bottle before giving up and shrugging his shoulders.

“Who knows,” Rumble continued with a shit eating grin; “it might even turn you straight.”

Shady sneers playfully at Rumble and screws the cap off of the bottle, giving its contents an experimental sniff. He wrinkles his nose slightly at the powerful stench, but surmises that he’s had worse and touches the lip of the bottle to his own lips before tilting it back and tacking a hardy gulp.

“I should warn you though, that shit kicks like a pissed off mule.” Rumble adds with a spiteful grin as Shady is swallowing.

Almost instantaneously Shady’s once content facial features contort into ones of disgust and revulsion as the prophesied kick hits him. He has to fight with every ounce of his willpower to keep what he hadn’t yet swallowed in his mouth so that he can get it down; and once he succeeds in getting the awful tasting liquid down safely into his stomach with no risk of it being propelled out his mouth and onto the adjacent upholstery, he immediately goes into a fit of coughing.

“Holy shit Rumble, there’s no way that was normal scotch. “Shady stares incredulously at the silver flask clutched tightly in his hoof. “Was this brewed in a fucking bathtub?!”

“Coulda been,” Rumble shrugged. “My parents get all their alcohol from that weird dude at the marketplace that smells like fish, who knows where that came from.”

“The guy that sets up his stall before the sun even comes up?”

“Yeah, that creepy guy.”

“This is probably mixed with some exotic shit then, knowing him.” Shady warily sets the flask to hips lips again and swallows another significantly smaller mouthful of the mysterious liquid, this second mouthful having much the same effect as the first.

“You feelin’ any less queer yet?” Rumble prods his friend in the side with a hind hoof, unable to hide how much he enjoys his friend’s discomfort.

“No, but I AM feeling sick now.”

“Damn, so it isn’t a cure for flaming homosexuality,” Rumble teased. “And I was so looking forward to the piles of bits I’d’ve been swimming in.”

“Maybe it’s meant to cure douchebag-itus,” Shady retorts, tossing the flask at Rumbe and hitting him in the chest.

“Thank Celestia, it was really starting to itch.” Rumble takes the bottle and tilts it back slightly taking three or four exorbitant gulps before his face contorts into a grimace, just as Shady’s had done when he braved the contents of the bottle.

“Woooooaaaa fuck!” Rumble snorted. “That shit’s strong!”

“Yeah, don’t overdo it.”

“Overdo it? Pssh. I wasn’t kidding when I said that stuff was the best medicine money can buy. In fact, I’m feeling better already.” Rumble moves to stand up from his supine position, but the familiar crippling pain in his ribs quickly puts a stop to his movements.

“Maybe you should just lay down until your parents come home and we can get you to a hospital,” Shady advises, his eyes softened in concern.

“Normally I’d argue but that sounds perfect at this point,” Rumble winces and readjusts himself on the couch so that he is putting the least strain possible on is supposedly broken ribs. The two don’t say anything for a scant minute until Shady chuckles and pulls Rumble's attention to him.

“Why do you even have a key for that thing if everyone in your house is legally allowed to drink?” Shady motions toward the antiquated liquor cabinet he’d fetched the bottle out of. Rumble looks over at the cabinet himself, then down at his hooves.

“The first time me and Thunderlane raided the liquor cabinet we drank almost everything in it, got completely wasted, and nearly trashed the whole house. Needless to say mom and pops weren’t too happy…”

“Lemme guess, you were grounded for months?”

“Heh, something like that…” Rumble grabs the flask Shady offers to him after he took another swallow of the swill swimming around in its recesses.

“They weren’t as mad as they probably should have been. I think they were more disappointed than anything. Rumble squirms awkwardly on his back. “They more or less told me and Thunderlane to get our shit together or they’d have us out on our asses faster than we could blink.

“Harsh,” Shady chimed as the flask was passed back to him.

“We did kind of drink all the liquor in the house. You should see my mom when she doesn’t get her afternoon spirits.” Both Shady and Rumble have a good chuckle before settling into the comfortable silence that comes in tandem with the incessant buzz of a good alcoholic drink. Rumble eventually speaks up; however his tone is devoid of the usual brass and self-confident inflection it normally carries.

“Thanks by the way,” Rumble begins, his eyes becoming uncharacteristically soft and compassionate. “For getting me back in one piece and shit.”

“Don’t mention it,” Shady smirks, the look on his friend’s face saying multitudes more than his words ever could. Shady then turns to Rumble and slaps him on the flank right over his cutie mark.

“Just promise me you’ll tone done the crazy shit yeah?” Shady extends a hoof in Rumble’s direction. Rumble extends his own hoof, a smirk playing at his lips. The two long-time friends bump hooves in a show of mutual understanding.

“Deal.”