Author's Note
Am in the midst of moving out of the flat and the process of packing and shifting boxes has left me so exhausted I am approaching delirium. So who knows, really?
All lesser parts serve a purpose in the greater whole. Which is to say everything that happens, happens for a reason. And that reason shall no-doubt become apparent.
In the meantime, suffering for my amusement. Hah!
Well that's not good
There had not been any way of Rainbow getting out of work again, much to her frustration.
Even for her there were only so many days off she would wrangle, and she had apparently reached her a limit. What followed then was a frustratingly mundane day of cloudbusting and shepherding and other myriad bits of weather-maintenance minutiae. From the ground it often looked pretty exciting. Up in the sky, it generally was a lot more tedious. Like all jobs.
Or at least it felt that way to Rainbow as she watched the sun makes it way across the sky, eating up the day she’d wanted to do something else with.
It seemed an age before she was done, even though by most standards she’d finished early. No sooner had she clocked off then she’d zipped back through the air and towards Ponyville, trailing colour.
Looking for him.
He was easy to spot most of the time. He stuck out, what with him being so tall and so weird looking.
Not, like, bad weird looking. Just different weird looking. Quite cute weird looking, actually. In a dopey, shabby, consistently oblivious and annoyingly dense sort of a way. But Rainbow rather liked that way. At least the dopey and shabby part.
The other bits she could take or leave, honestly.
She just liked spending time with him, that was all. It wasn’t her fault. He was just kind of cool in a new and interesting sort of a way. Didn’t come at her expecting anything. And he was nice. And he got her, and she was pretty sure she got him too.
What was the word he’d used yesterday? Clicked. They clicked.
So far though she seemed to be the only one of them who’d realised it, and the rate he was going he’d be dead before he got the hint. She could probably pin a note to his forehead and he still wouldn’t get it.
If it had been anything else she wouldn’t have been worried. If it had been anything else she would have just been her regular, awesome, up-front self and got on with it. But this was new and different and not something she really properly understood. She hadn’t felt this way about anypony else before.
Kind of...gooey. And fluttery. And sometimes tingly.
Which was lame! But true. And something she couldn’t ignore now.
At first she’d been able to ignore it. At first he’d just been that strange new thing that had appeared from nowhere and who Twilight was trying to help get home. Back then it had just been fun to bounce questions off him, like everyone else had been doing. Just asking him things whenever she and him happened to bump into one another. Nothing special.
But then they’d actually started talking. And she’d enjoyed talking. And he’d enjoyed it, too. Then they’d started making an effort to meet up to talk. Then they’d started making an effort to meet up just to hang around together.
Not long after that Rainbow found that she’d started thinking about those times they’d get to hang around more and more, until one day she realised she might have a bit of a problem.
Specifically it was when she caught herself staring dreamily into space at breakfast wondering whether he’d have any free time later and how best to sneak up on him if he did.
This was new for her.
Her experience with wooing stallions was limited to the point of being non-existent. She did not know how they ticked, at least not romantically. On top of which he wasn’t a stallion anyway! Not even a pony! Which just made it worse! Even if she’d had a clue about what to do it still wouldn’t have helped!
She was afraid of messing it up. She was afraid of freaking him out and ruining what they had already.
But she was most afraid of doing nothing and letting what she really wanted get away.
So there was that. It was ongoing. She had time.
Not like he was going anywhere anytime soon, from the sound of things. And if it did turn out Twilight was onto something about getting him back? Well, then Rainbow would figure something out. Probably.
If nothing else today would be another chance to try and get him to recognise the obvious. Another chance to get him to see what she was trying to make so desperately clear to him. Or what she thought she was making clear, at least. And if he didn’t? If he kept on being just as dense as he always was? Then just hanging around with him was pretty great too. And there was always tomorrow.
With all this in mind she swooped in and came to a jogging stop outside his house.
Previously abandoned, he’d asked to be allowed to live in it just so he wouldn’t have to rely on the kindness of anyone for somewhere to live. He’d then done his best to fix the place up. So far this hadn’t amounted to much, but at least now the front door wasn’t hanging off its hinges and the roof no-longer leaked. Which was something.
Trotting up the path, Rainbow paused for a moment - did he prefer “hi” or “hello”? Did he actually have a preference? Why was she only worrying about this now? And why couldn’t she stop worrying about it now that she’d thought of it? Snapping out of it she shook her head and knocked.
The house was silent. She knocked again. The house remained silent.
Impatiently, she wandered off to peer in through the front window but saw no sign of him there. Lifting off again she flew all around and looked in through every other window she could think of to see if he was hiding somewhere or eating or else flopped over in bed or on the sofa, his usual napping spots.
“Hellloooo? You in there? You asleep?” She asked, face pressed to the glass of his bedroom window.
But the house was empty. He wasn’t in.
“Huh,” she said.
Had he told her something about what he was doing today? Rainbow didn’t think so. If he’d been planning on going somewhere or doing something he would have told her. He would have wanted her there, too. That thought made her smile, which in turn made her wonder more about where he might have ended up.
Then she remembered. Twilight had told him yesterday that today would be a good day for one their getting-him-home meetings. It was as good a guess as any for where he might be, and if he wasn’t then Twilight might know. Grumbling to herself she zipped back the way she had come, into the middle of town.
If the meeting was still going on - which it might be, they could take a while - he probably wouldn’t mind if she butted in. Maybe he wanted her to butt in! Hanging around with Twilight all day being asked serious questions was probably pretty boring.
In fact, Rainbow was sure he’d told her just as much. So if anything she’d be doing him a favour!
Yes, She herself also asked him questions but those were cool questions that were fun to answer. Not boring questions. There was a difference. It was important.
Rainbow was so absorbed in this that it wasn’t until she’d landed that she noticed what was wrong. The door to Twilight’s was open, and a thin trail of smoke was winding its way out from somewhere deeper inside.
That couldn’t be good.
Landing, Rainbow gingerly stuck her head inside.
“Hello?” She asked, to no response. That just seemed to be the way her day was going.
The smell of smoke was much stronger from inside, but secondary to another smell Rainbow couldn’t quite identify. It was very similar to what the air smelt like around some of the more active lightning clouds, at least in her experience. A tang, of a sort. It made her coat stand on end.
The trail of smoke looked to be coming from somewhere deeper inside, and the sight of it winding its way off into the gloom made Rainbow shudder. She did not really want to have to follow it. She would if she had to, but she didn’t want to.
Backing away from the door she had a look around to see if anyone was there she might ask. The place seemed unusually deserted, now she came to look properly, with no-one in sight. Or mostly no-one.
“Granny Smith!”
The elderly pony was just making her way out of sight and Rainbow leapt over, skidding to a halt in the dirt and doing her best to play it casual.
“Uh, hi. Sorry for yelling. What’s the deal with the smoke? Is Twilight airing the place out or what?” She asked, pointing back over her shoulder.
This explanation for the state of things was unlikely, but Rainbow had tried and failed to think up any equally-harmless explanations. She was sticking with this one until told otherwise. Anything else didn’t really bear thinking about.
Granny Smith blinked at Rainbow while trying to work out what the hell she was talking about. Then she glanced past the pegasus to Twilight’s, the open door and the smoke. Then she got it, and her face darkened.
“Oh yes, terrible business. She had an accident, from what I heard.”
Rainbow’s blood froze.
“A-accident? What kind of accident?”
“Don’t rightly know, but it made an awful noise! Last I saw, she and that hoo-man were getting taken off to Ponyville General. Right quick, too! Roundabouts-”
Rainbow was already gone.
Panic like nothing she’d ever felt gripped her. She wasn’t even really having to think about what she was doing. She was just going. He’d been hurt and she had to get to him. That was all there was to it.
She practically exploded through the doors of the hospital, landing at a gallop, crashing into the front desk and promptly falling over.
“Twilight...human...where...he…” Rainbow gasped, heaving herself back up again and practically collapsing over the top of the desk. The hospital receptionist looked alarmed and at a complete loss but a passing nurse who had overheard this swooped in and and quickly led the way, though nowhere quickly enough for Rainbow’s liking.
Rainbow did not like hospitals. As a rule, you only ever went to them when something bad had happened. Something about them too just made her feel uncomfortable. And she wished the nurse would hurry up. The walk through the corridors was giving Rainbow far too much time to worry about what might have happened.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she’d turn and corner and find him standing there bemused, ruffled but otherwise totally fine. That was probably it. It couldn’t be anything serious. Please don’t let it be anything serious.
“He’s in here,” the nurse said, standing to let Rainbow pass.
Never had a doorway looked more foreboding. Steadying herself, Rainbow trotted around the nurse and peered into the room.
And there he was.
The hospital staff had had to push two beds together end-to-end to fit him on, and spread out two blankets to cover him. And under that...
“Oh no. No no no…”
He didn’t look good. He looked bad. Bandages covered most of what wasn’t beneath the blankets, and what bits didn’t have bandages had bruises. One arm was in a cast, held across his body. His eyes were closed.
“No!”
Rainbow lunged forward and ran smack into Applejack. Rainbow had been focused on him lying there she had completely failed to notice all the others were in the room as well, all looking deeply worried. Especially Twilight, who looked to be on the verge of tears - and who had obviously been crying already anyway.
“Whoa! Hold on there, don’t wanna hurt him anymore than he’s already hurt,” Applejack said as soothingly as she could manage while holding a squirming, struggling Rainbow Dash back away from the bed. In a second or two the sense of this penetrated the pegasus’s brain and she stopped fighting, Applejack letting go a moment after this.
“What happened? What happened?!” Rainbow asked, voice cracking.
Doctor Horse appeared, as though from nowhere, and cleared his throat. Everybody jumped.
“More visitors? Wonderful. Very helpful. Friends?”
This he asked seconds before Rainbow crossed the room and grabbed him by the collar.
“What happened to him?!”
Recovering from the shock of being grabbed so suddenly Doctor Horse pulled back from her grasp and cleared his throat, floating a clipboard over from the foot of the bed and flicking through the paperwork.
“An accident, from what I was told. Something to do with a malfunction. He was the only injured party. Some burns, nothing life-threatening. Broken arm. He doesn’t respond to magic in any significant way so we’ve just had to set it and let it heal normally, which is distressingly primitive. A lot of bruising, obviously, but no internal damage that we can detect. He’s in one piece. Hasn’t shown any sign of regaining consciousness, however.”
He said all this breezily, as though visitors from other dimensions were routinely showing up injured in his hospital. The clipboard was then returned to where it had been taken from. Rainbow just stared at him, dumbstruck.
“When will he wake up?” She asked, voice much smaller now.
“We don’t know. On the plus side he’s perfectly stable. Just non-responsive. All we can do is wait.”
Waiting was such an awful idea she couldn’t bear to think about it, so she decided to go for something else.
“But what actually happened? What kind of accident?” Rainbow pressed, but Doctor Horse was unmoved.
“I think you’ll probably want to talk to your friend. She was the other one there,” he said, jabbing a hoof towards Twilight, who flinched. And then he left, no-doubt to apply his stellar bedside manner somewhere else.
Rainbow turned to Twilight.
Apart from looking utterly shellshocked, Twilight appeared no worse for wear. She was shaking though, something she’d been doing since the accident. Her eyes were fixed on a point that seemed to be several feet below the floor she was staring at.
“I was tired and - and - “
She trailed off and did not finish.
“And what?”
“And - and I didn’t notice a bit was loose. Didn’t notice until - until he - “
“Start over! What was loose? What were you doing?”
“I think perhaps now may not be the best time for this, hmm? I think an explanation would be better delivered - and received - after a full night’s rest. We’ve all had long days and, well, yes,” Rarity said, appealing for calm and sort of losing her thread towards the end in the face of Rainbow’s furious expression.
“No, no it’s okay. I can explain. It’s not hard to explain,” Twilight said, dabbing at her eyes and blinking furiously.
There followed her explanation. She kept it fairly brief, given that the longer she talked the harder it was to keep her voice steady. There was an overview of the thing she’d made, this teleporter meant to get him home, how in theory it should have functioned safely and just sent the test object over without any fuss.
But then she started talking about the bit that had been loose that she hadn’t spotted, and about how the whole thing had gone out of control. Then her voice wasn’t steady at all.
“...and it wouldn’t - it wouldn’t shut down. And then...and then…”
Twilight could not finish, but she did not need to. What had happened next was pretty obvious.
Rainbow was shaking as well by the time Twilight’s explanation had finished, though not with worry. She was angry.
“This is your fault!” She said, jabbing an accusatory hoof. “If you - if you had made sure it was safe this wouldn’t have happened!”
Applejack again interposed herself between Rainbow and whatever it was she happened to be advancing on - Twilight, this time. Applejack was glaring.
“Rainbow! We’re all upset about what happened to him, but yelling and blaming isn’t going to fix anything!” She said in tones of thunder.
“But- but-!”
“Did you want Twilight to be hurt as well?”
That hit the spot.
Rainbow was appalled with herself. She realised now what it must have looked like, her yelling at Twilight. Ashamed, she shrank, utterly unable to look any of her friends in the eye.
“I’m sorry,” she said, voice tiny. “I didn’t - I wouldn’t want Twilight to be hurt! I just…”
The sudden rush of guilt crushed whatever it was she might have been trying to say. The weight of it was overwhelming. Seeing now how selfish she’d been. Not even bothering to ask how Twilight was when she’d been there too. What an awful friend.
“I’m sorry…” she burbled, tears falling. Twilight was crying too, she saw, and before Applejack could stop her this time Rainbow was over there hugging her lavender friend.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it! It’s not your fault!” She bawled, which p ushed Twilight over the edge from restrained tears to full-out blubbering.
“It is my fault! It is my fault!” She wailed. “I shouldn’t have rushed it! I should have waited! It’s my fault I’m sorry!”
“Not it’s not your fault!” Rainbow protested
“I could have killed him!”
“You could have died!”
This went back and forth a few more times until they stopped forming coherent sentences and were just crying loudly into one another. Then everyone else joined in the hugging and crying as well, the emotional strain of the whole thing finally reaching breaking point.
Everyone hugged it out and everyone felt much better. They were, after all, ponies. A turbulent and mercurial species.
But once they were done and the hug was broken up and tears were wiped away he was still there. In bed. Silent.
It put a damper on things.
“At least he’s alive,” Pinkie said, earning sharp looks from everyone. “What? He is!”
She wasn’t wrong.
Around this time a brace of nurse came in to change the dressings on his burns, something everyone else present took as a cue to leave. There wasn’t a lot they could do by sticking around, after all, other than get in the way.
Fluttershy was bringing up the rear of the group and - just before leaving - a scraping sound had her turn to look back. Rainbow was there, dragging a chair from one corner of the room over to the side of the bed, as close as possible without getting in the way of the nurses. The nurses were concentrating too much to comment, though seemed to be aware of her all the same. Fluttershy crept over.
“You can’t stay here all night,” she said softly, gently. She was good at soft and gentle, and normally it got results. This time though not so much, as Rainbow was too distracted to really notice. She was rocking in the chair enough to make it wobble, eyes fixed on the bed.
“But what if he wakes up and I’m not here?”
“There are nurses here all the time, Rainbow Dash, he’ll be okay,” Fluttershy said.
“But he might need me...” Rainbow said quietly.
As much as this wasn’t anything Fluttershy had experience of, she still knew enough to know that there wasn’t any use in pressing the issue further. Rainbow was going to be staying here no matter what she said. Standing up on her hindlegs she gave Rainbow a hug, which was about the best she could do right then.
“You tell me if you need anything,” she said. Rainbow just nodded, staying seated and silent as Fluttershy left.
A little after that the nurses finished up and left as well, filing past Rainbow without a word and leaving her alone with him.
Strictly speaking visitor hours were over, but no-one had the heart to press this. Rainbow wasn’t doing anyone any harm where she was, so they let her be.
Without anyone in the way Rainbow hopped down and pushed the chair flush against the bed, hopping right back up again. This close she could hear him breathing.
“You’ll be okay, won’t you?” She asked. No response. She laughed but it was forced. “Yeah. You’ll be okay. You have to be.”
The thought of him not being okay did not sit comfortably with her. It sat in the pit of her stomach like a stone and made her feel cold. So she ignored it and told herself he would be fine. But the feeling didn’t go away that easily.
Her stomach also rumbled, because at this time of day she would normally have had a snack and - with the shock of everything now having diminished - her body was wondering where food was.
Briefly torn about leaving him for even a moment, she figured that she could at least just stick her head out.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, muzzle by his ear, before nipping out of the room.
She didn’t really know what she expected to find but had just sort of hoped that if she’d looked she’d find food. She didn’t, but instead something else caught her eye. A trolley of books had been left just a little way up the corridor and Rainbow went over for a browse. She immediately picked something out: a well-read copy of Daring Do and the Abyss of Despair.
Hunger forgotten she returned to the chair and opened it up, flipping through the pages until about the midway point, a point she remembered.
Specifically, the bit with the actual Abyss itself. The first time it showed up and described in rapturous, chilling detail. It came in very heavy on the doom and gloom and made very sure that the reader knew this was not an abyss to be trifled with. She read that part out loud and then looked over at him again.
“You told me you like that bit,” she said, smiling as she thought back to it.
He’d actually come to try and find her after finishing the first book, he’d enjoyed it so much. The surprise on his face had made her laugh out loud, especially given how dubious he’d been about the books when she’d first recommended them.
There had been doubts on his part about their grittiness, he’d said, not expecting Equestrian fiction to be able to depart too much from Equestrian reality. The words ‘twee’ and ‘saccharine’ had been used and rainbow had pretended to have known what they’d meant and slugged him in the shoulder and he’d grinned.
Not that it mattered when he’d come crawling back to tell her her how right she’d been. The books were compelling, he said, in a way he had been unprepared for. After that he’d meekly asked if he could borrow the next one. She’d lorded this victory over him appropriately. ‘I told you so’ privileges had been hers for days. Blissful.
Her smile faded as she returned to the present and it disappeared completely when she saw he hadn’t so much as twitched. She swallowed. Her throat burned, her eyes prickled.
Setting the book down beside the bed she reached over and took one of his hands in both her hooves, pulling it over and pressing her head against it, screwing her eyes shut. His fingers were distressingly limp.
“Please wake up,” she whispered. “Please be okay, please wake up okay and be fine and laugh this off. Please don’t leave me like this.”
