“Quibble? I’m back from the Wonderbolts Academy.”
“...”
“Quibble?”
“I said I’m in the kitchen!”
“Are you making dinner?”
“Does it smell like I’m making anything?”
“I probably would have seen the fire before I smelled the smoke. Wonderbolts-quality eyes, remember?”
“Har. Har. Har.”
“But yeah, what am I thinking? You never cook, except when you’re trying to spite me over something.”
“Hey, I can cook.”
“Sure you can. You just can’t cook anything edible.”
“Why do you care? Your idea of ‘haute cuisine’ is MREs from the Wonderbolts mess hall—”
“Not true.”
“—and dessicated sandwiches from the vending machines at pegasus express. And chips.”
“...”
“I’m right, aren’t I.”
“Shut up. You’re making dinner, aren’t you.”
“As a matter of fact, I was.”
“What are you making? Prepackaged spinach and cheese-in-a-can?”
“Peanut noodles in soy sauce, with chili paste and scallions.”
“What?”
“It’s a recipe I learned from my mom—”
“No, wait. You can actually cook?”
“...Yeah?”
“Okay, hold up. When you’ve said that you couldn’t really cook and you wanted to just go out to eat all the time—”
“I like going out to eat. I like not having to prepare my own food.”
“And I like not having hayburgers every single dinner! For crying out loud, Quibble, you could have said something!”
“You would have expected me to cook for you all the time. It’s not like I’m some sort of savant.”
“You have the time. It’s not like you don’t lay around the house all day—”
“Excuse me?”
“—while my salary keeps us in the gold.”
“No, wait, back up. Are you saying my editorials don’t make us money?”
“That’s what I’m saying, yeah.”
“Okay, why do you have to be like this? I keep telling you, we make a perfectly fine amount of bits over—”
“We don’t, Quibble. Not anymore. I’m sorry to break it to you, but we’ve got to start acting like responsible ponies.”
“You’re calling me irresponsible?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“Rainbow Dash. Rainbow Dash is the one calling me irresponsible.”
“Rainbow Dash has saved the world, like, fifty bazillion times, and is the head captain of the Wonderbolts, and is the personal friend and bona-fide confident of Daring Do—”
“Hey, I’ve helped her!”
“Pshhh. Like, once.”
“And who else do you go to when you need help figuring out puzzles?”
“...”
“I thought so.”
“So you’ve figured out how to solve a couple of glorified crossword puzzles. Good for you.”
“You’re right. That’s so much less brainwork than picking up a barbell and grunting like a pig.”
“You’re going to talk to me about grunting?”
“I wouldn’t have to if you let me cook dinner like a normal pony.”
“Stop.”
“Stop cooking dinner? Great idea. Let’s all just starve to death while we pour over one of your fanfictions—”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“What do you mean, me? What’s gotten into you?”
“I’ve had a rough day, okay?”
“You’ve had rough days for the past few months. Would it kill you to calm down for a change?”
“Yes. Yes, it would. Not that you seem to have any problem with that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t need any more excuses. You already have enough to sit on your fat butt all day, whining about—”
“Oh, you’re the one who’s going to accuse me of whining. Very fair.”
“I do not whine!”
“Then call it grousing. Griping. Grumbling. Complaining. Shall I go on? I’ve got quite the extensive list of synonyms that I’m positive you would just love to use.”
“Pfft. You’re one to talk about love.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that those synonyms probably apply to yourself, because the only thing you love is yourself. It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
“Said the pony who basically locks me up in my own house, then comes home and whines that I never go anywhere.”
“Don’t pretend that it isn’t what you want—”
“It isn’t.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“If it wasn’t a lie, then—”
“Because somepony had to do this, Rainbow Dash. Somepony has to stay home, and I knew that even if you said you wanted to do it, you really wouldn’t want to be cooped up in here forever.”
“I—”
“Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“...”
“I can’t hear you.”
“You don’t need to act smug about it.”
“I’m not trying to be smug.”
“Then would it kill you to at least not look smug?”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Well, you are.”
“Fine. Is this better?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“...”
“...”
“Look, getting angry about this is stupid—”
“So stop being angry-”
“You’re the one who was angry in the first place!”
“It’s hard not to be angry around you!”
“Why?”
“Do I really need to spell it out for you? You’re smug when you’re right and disdainful when you’re wrong. You get to sit at home---”
“Okay, look, I’m not trying to be smug here.”
“Horse apples.”
“Can you at least assume for the purposes of this conversation that I’m not?”
“Why do you care whether I think that or not?”
“You’re impossible, you know that?”
“This coming from Quibble Pants?”
“Okay, you know what? Fine. Yes, coming from Quibble Pants. Coming from the pony you’ve dragged out of danger more than once, literally speaking. Coming from the pony that essentially relies on others to save the world for him while he provides assistance that seems insignificant compared to their efforts. There. Are you happy?”
“No.”
“Wh- what in the name of Equestria do you want?”
“I don’t know!”
“And I thought that I was supposed to be the emotional one, here.”
“You are.”
“So are you!”
“Not as much as you!”
“Then why am I the one going out of his way to try to stop arguing with you? Is there actually anything that I could say to you that would help us come to some sort of less hostile consensus about our emotional states?”
“Yes!”
“What?”
“I don’t know!”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I mean, I should know! I’m sorry I don’t, okay? Or maybe I don’t need to have a reason other than—”
“Would it help if I left?”
“Left where?”
“The house. You’ve had a bad day, we both need to cool off, that’s fine. I get it.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. Grocery shopping, I guess?”
“Bull. You’re gonna go to the library, you’re going to read for...what, four, five hours?...until you get hungry. Then you’re going to come home and expect me to do the cooking for you.”
“Oh, like you ever have.”
“You’d complain if I did!”
“At least I’d know you tried.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look, for all your talk about being responsible, you’re never responsible at home. That’s always stuff you’ve expected me to take care of—”
“Quibble?”
“What?”
“You had better pick your next words very carefully, or - condition or no - I’m going to fling out out the window.”
“You think I’d say something like this without thinking about it? Do you not trust me, or something?”
“No!”
“...”
“I mean yes! Yes. Yes is what I meant.”
“No, no. It’s okay. You don’t trust me.”
“I…”
“Look. I get it. I don’t exactly look like a model father, here. You probably come home and think that the housework needs to be done, or that I spend all my time lazing around doing nothing—”
“Which you do.”
“—and you feel like I’m not trying to make things work when I need to make things work, and you feel like that’s not fair. Even though I’m trying to do all of the stuff that the doctor asked me to—”
“—and how am I supposed to know that, exactly? Every time I come home, it’s nothing but complaints.”
“Not true.”
“Wayyyyy more true than you want me to believe. Seriously.”
“And you’re going to begrudge me for doing what everypony asks?”
“Because you do nothing but complain about it!”
“Now, that’s the definition of hypocrisy right there—”
“Caring about our baby is hypocrisy?”
“Oh, stop implying that I don’t care.”
“Of course you care! You get all the time in the world to care! Caring is easy for you! I have to go out, bust my wings even when I’m not putting my life on the line, then I come home and see you loafing about and acting like you don’t give a whit and that it’s supposed to be my job to-”
“I thought the whole point of this was that it wasn’t supposed to be your job!”
“Well, too bad.”
“Why do you think this is easy for me?”
“Well, no duh—”
“No, stop talking. Stop talking and listen. You think you have it difficult because you have to go to work and then you have to come home and care? That’s fine, you do. That’s exhausting. But you have to worry for, what, however many hours it is between when you come home and when you go to bed? Well, guess what? Imagine that worrying, that...whatever from when you wake up until when you go to sleep. And then you have to go about pretending that everything’s fine, pretending that you feel blessed because you don’t have to do anything but write and rudimentary chores, and sometimes the shopping when you feel like letting me out of here—”
“Stop trying to pin this on me!”
“And when I do go outside, I’m always in this low-level state of panic that somepony’s going to ram into me on accident! That’s what you worry about, isn’t it?”
“...”
“Dash, I can’t even roll over in bed without worrying that I’m going to tear open my insides. I can’t reach for stuff on the top shelves of the bookcase without worrying that I could fall over and get both of us killed. Every single time I look in the mirror, I can’t look at…”
“...Quibble?”
“I can’t look anywhere but my stomach. I can’t think about anything but if today’s the day my body tries to reject the fetus and shuts itself down, if it starts to go into false contractions, if the stitchings in the stitched-up parts of my body come loose, if...if anything. Everything. You get to go to work and work yourself exhausted, and I get to stay here and exhaust myself with panicking about stuff that was completely mundane a year ago. A year.”
“Quibble, don’t—”
“I’m terrified, okay? I have to worry about whether this whole...everything isn’t going to work, about whether the money we spent and the time i spent under the knife and the medications and the hormone imbalances aren’t going to amount to anything. I don’t want to die. I don’t want her to die. I know this is what we were supposed to do to make things work, but that doesn’t make things any less terrifying, okay?”
“You could have said something.”
“I’ve been hinting at it ever since I started getting big. You’ve done a wonderful job of not bothering to pick up on it at all.”
“...I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to stop being a wonderbolt. I never wanted that. I’m not going to ask you in the future. I know how you get about stuff you’re passionate about, with your love for the worst sort of Daring Do novels and dumb racing garb—”
“It’s not dumb—”
“—and that’s what makes you likeable. It’s what makes me want to make this work. But that doesn’t mean that I’m the biologically correct gender for this sort of thing.”
“...”
“I don’t give a whit about looking bloated or anything like that. It’s that I feel so inexorably fragile, like I’m this sort of proverbial...proverbial glass unicorn that’s always a hair’s breadth away from breaking, and everypony knows it.”
“Come here.”
“What are you going to—”
“Stop talking.”
“...”
“...”
“You don’t have to hug me.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“...Thanks.”
“Mmm.”
“And here I was, figuring that you were going to make fun of me.”
“I mean, it’s not like I’m not going to make fun of you. Just not now. Not the right time for it.”
“Well, that’s comforting to hear.”
“Do you want to be hugged or not?”
“Nah, don’t stop.”
“Sure.”
“...This is nice.”
“Thought it might be.”
“We should do this more often.”
“Didn’t figure you for the hugging type.”
“Give me a few more weeks. I might not be one after that.”
“Bet you would be, though.”
“Not true.”
“You’re such a softie, Quibble.”
“Let me guess: that’s a fat joke. Clever.”
“Nah, it isn’t. It’s a compliment.”
“Huh?”
“You’re way cooler when you actually get rid of all that irony and stuck-upness and junk you normally have. Non-ironic, non stuck-up Quibble is awesome.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“Mmm.”
“I like this Rainbow Dash too, you know.”
“What, the mushy one?”
“The empathetic one. The conscientious one. The element of loyalty.”
“...Huh.”
“I get the feeling you aren’t going to try to remember that.”
“Nah. I can think of better things to try to not remember.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Shush.”
“...”
“We’re gonna make this work, okay? I promise that the operation’s gonna be fine. Nothing bad’s gonna happen. And, hey, after that? We’re a family.”
“And you’re cool with that?”
“Duh.”
“Heh. Same.”
“Figured as much.”
“...Right. Anyways, uh. Thanks for the hug, thanks for the talk, I probably should go make dinner.”
“Hold up.”
“What?”
“Peanut noodles in soy sauce, right?”
“With some other stuff, yeah.”
“...Want me to help?”
“Aren’t you tired? I can take care of-”
“I’m not gonna offer again.”
“...Sure. Thanks, Dash.”
“No problem.”
“Okay, so if you wanted to handle the scallions, the first step is…”
