Another day, another mentally exhausting afternoon with Cozy Glow.

Although to be fair, Thorn may have overreacted during the first few days he spent babysitting. Sure, he was still bitter that his parents never asked him if we wanted to take care of Cozy, and he would always rather lay down in his bed all day long doing nothing except staring at the ceiling, but having Cozy around made things more… interesting?

That was beside the point right now, however.

After his training finished, he went to his locker and eyed everything inside a couple of times. ‘I must’ve left it back at home…’

He was about to triple-check, but his locker door was suddenly slammed shut.

Flinching, he turned to his left and saw none other than CHS’s bacon-haired bully.

“You… wouldn’t happen to know where Flash is, would you, Thorn?" Sunset Shimmer asked uncharacteristically coldly.

‘Oh no,’ Thorn thought while he gulped and backed away a few steps. “Who?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Thistle!” she exclaimed as she stepped forward in a characteristically fiery attitude. “Flash has been avoiding me, and I’ve been told you might have something to do with it!”

In the distance, Thorn managed to see Snips and Snails, a pair of freshmen he’s seen then and again, snickering at his ordeal.

Thorn’s mind raced while thinking of some way to manage the situation. Sunset, however, wasn’t in the mood to stand idly by.

“Well!? Answer me! Unless of course, you want to do this the other way.”

Thorn stood straight where he was, petrified. He was perfectly aware of what the other way meant. It was a hard thing to forget after all.

Thorn pressed his eyes closed, and sighed, “Just so we’re clear, I didn’t tell him to do anything. He’s the one who asked me for a hiding spot.”

“Where is he now!?”

“In the cafeteria. Lower floor… maybe.”

Sunset deadpanned.

“The cafeteria has a lower floor?”

Thorn nodded warily. “It’s not well maintained, though.”

Sunset turned around and walked towards the cafeteria, but stopped a few steps later. “I’m warning you, Thorn, don’t try anything. You know the consequences,” she said, glaring back from the top of her shoulder.

When Sunset walked closer to Snips and Snails, Snips smiled confidently and pulled his hand forward, probably expecting to receive something from Sunset Shimmer. When the girl ignored them, the pair of freshmen looked at each other in confusion and followed after her.

With Sunset and her apparent spies gone, Thorn sighed. Mildly relieved, but mostly… powerless.

He locked his locker and quickly left.

That lower floor existed all right, but, number one, Flash wasn’t there, and two, it was disgusting. Those two things might give Sunset the impression that it was some sort of prank or trick, so it was better to leave, ASAP.

…….

It was the same routine once he arrived back home; he’d greet his father, then Cozy Glow; Hardwood would leave, and Cozy would barrage him with questions.

Despite his current situation, Thorn decided to answer some of them. After all, he couldn’t straight-out ignore Cozy. Although that didn’t force him to pay attention to her.

Cozy quickly noticed that Thorn was distracted and looking for something. “What’cha looking for?” she asked. “Are you looking for your father’s silver watch?”

Thorn stood still, facepalming, “Uh, yeah, I should probably look for that too. But I’m looking for my staff, actually. You haven’t seen it around, have you?”

“Nope, not really. But I can help you search for it if you want.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I lost it, I should find it myself.”

“Well… okay!” She exclaimed, as she cheerfully retreated towards his parents’ room, where Cozy had been leaving her stuff ever since Thorn’s mom stopped coming around.

“Huh, that’s odd,” Thorn contemplated as Cozy left. “It’s usually very hard to get her to lea-“

Cozy quickly came back with her backpack and sat on the couch.

‘Aaand she’s back. Of course,” Thorn thought as he continued to look around.

Stared at the shelves, he noticed that the books, game cases, and other similar stuff were all organized in separate layers. Not only that, but they were also in the order of a color wheel Cozy had left above the shelf.

‘Impressive,’ Thorn said to himself. ‘I gotta hand it to that girl, she is very organized.’

Careful not to mess with Cozy’s work, Thorn began moving stuff, to check if Cozy had mistakenly placed his staff somewhere on the shelf.

His staff wasn’t there, and after looking at every other place nearby that anyone could have misplaced it, he went to the next most plausible place it could be.

And by place, he meant places. In plural. As in, a lot.

“Are you sure that you don’t want any help?” Cozy asked, seeing how he was struggling to move a piece of furniture, which also had the television on top. “I mean, I don’t think I could move that, but…”

“Nope,” Thorn said in-between breaths, “I got this.”

Cozy went back to her phone as Thorn managed to slip his hand behind the tv.

Withdrawing his hand, he obtained a soft ball, an odd rock, a sock, a tree branch, the cap of a lipstick tube, and a very dusty dinosaur toy.

“Wow, I haven’t seen this thing in ages,” Thorn said to himself, but Cozy managed to overhear it and peered at all the stuff Thorn withdrew.

“Is that a petrified donut?”

Thorn looked at the odd rock, and taking a clearer look at it, he realized it did indeed look like a donut.

“Huh.”

Thorn shrugged and placed everything back inside.

Questioning why there was so much random stuff behind the tv, Cozy raised a quizzical look, “Do you often throw stuff in there?”

“Not me. Whistle. And not just here.”

Thorn headed to a cabinet, kneeled, and opened the drawer at the bottom.

Thorn took out seven different balls, three bottles of water, twelve socks—all different from one another—, a cereal box, a long rubber band, and a ferret holding a phone.

Shocked, Cozy looked to her left, where her phone used to be, and realized it wasn’t there any longer.

“What? How!?”

As he answered Cozy’s question, Thorn struggled to make Whistle drop the phone.

“I like to think ferrets are like wild felines in a way. You do not turn your back on them. The only difference is that tigers want to kill you, whereas ferrets want to steal your stuff.”

Having successfully snatched the phone away from Whistle, Thorn cleaned the part of the phone his pet chewed, and after making sure no harm was made to the device, he handed it back to Cozy Glow.

Cozy Glow grabbed it by the edge as if it was contaminated and then dropped it inside of her backpack, closing it afterward.

“So, are there any other places where your rodent stores stuff?”

“Not a rodent,” Thorn corrected. “And yes, there are more.”

Thorn checked in a gap beneath the couch, and after not finding what he was looking for, he moved on to Whistle’s cage, underneath a chair, then to a gap between a shelf and the wall, and lastly, underneath his parents’ desk.

When it was clear Whistle was innocent, he moved on to other parts of the house in which Thorn might have left it by accident.

He checked the attic, his room, the living room…again, the roof. When it all proved fruitless, he tried the living room just one more time.

But as he moved everything back into position, he sighed.

Thorn stretched his arms and legs, fixed his hair slightly and then he plopped into one of the kitchen’s chairs.

“Oh well.”

“What!?” Cozy Glow asked. “That’s it!?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re just giving up on it? It seemed like it was important to you.”

“…it is.”

“So?”

“Do you remember how you said high school sounded sad?” He asked, rhetorically, as he didn’t wait for Cozy Glow to answer. “Well, it’s sad. I have homework to do, and don’t really have that much time to take care of the stuff I care about… I’d know.”

By the end of the next day, Thorn was practically crawling his way out of the school’s halls with exhaustion. With all the time he spent looking for his staff, Thorn had to stay up late completing the assignments. Cozy getting on his nerves by questioning his life choices didn’t help much either.

Not to mention that an average school day, a training session, and a minor argument with a certain blue-haired guitar player over the fact that his deranged girlfriend followed him home and now knows where he lives, was pretty exhausting on top of everything else.

He thought he’d never have this sleep-deprivation feeling ever again, but clearly, he was wrong. It felt just as draining and exhausting as he remembered it.

He was itching to lay down on his bed if only to rest a little bit, but a pink bush just outside the school entrance interrupted that thought when it called out his name.

Perplexed, Thorn rubbed his eyes and saw nothing but normal bushes.

‘Oh no, it’s worse than I thought,” he thought turning around, eager to get home and get some sleep.

“Psst, Thorn Thistle!”

Rapidly, he turned around once more, and as much as he rubbed his eyes, the pink bush sitting between all the other normal bushes didn’t disappear.

‘What the-‘ Thorn thought, astounded.

“Get over here!” the bush called.

At that moment, Thorn did what any other exhausted teenager would; obey the pink bush.

Thorn walked closer to the bush, and a pair of blue eyes popped from underneath, which caused him to flinch.

“Wow, you look awful!” the bush laughed, in a bubbly, energetic voice.

In his not-that-long life, Thorn had never been insulted by a bush before, but there was a first time for everything, apparently.

“Hey-!“ Thorn exclaimed but was stopped once again.

“I know just what’ll cheer you up! A party!”

The bush suddenly rose a few feet higher and revealed a fellow student he knew all too well.

Stumbling from the sudden movement, Thorn relaxed shortly after, “Oh, it’s just Pinkie Pie,” he reassured himself.

“Of course I am, silly,” Pinkie explained. “What did you think was going on? That a pink fluff of hair was telepathically speaking to you?”

“No.”

Pinkie Pie squinted her eyes and went suddenly quiet, staring at Thorn, while she scratched her chin with her hand.

“Uh… Pinkie Pie?” Thorn asked, backing away slowly.

“Your expression… it seems… familiar.”

“Uh-“ Thorn muttered but was once again cut short, this time by a loud gasp.

“Aha! I remember now! I made that expression, and I saw myself with it in the mirror!”

Pinkie Pie pointed at the statue in front of the school’s entrance, and it was at that moment that Thorn remembered that Pinkie Pie often trailed off, so he attempted to flee the scene.

“That’s nice, Pinkie, but I should really get go-“

“I don’t know if you knew this about me, but I’m a really good babysitter, heh, if I do say so myself.”

“Uh-huh, well, I sho-“

“But there was this one kid—”

As much as Thorn would appreciate the tips, he needed to get going, so he rolled his eyes, turned around, and walked away.

“—Cozy Glow! Yeah, that was her name!”

Thorn stopped abruptly and turned his head back towards Pinkie.

“Come again?” Thorn asked warily.

“Cozy Glow, a girl I used to babysit a while ago. It was awful! At first, she’s all sweet and caring. She organizes your stuff and it feels like you can talk to her like she’s a close friend, but then I suddenly lost my pet Gummy, and I realized Cozy had kidnapped him!”

Thorn was aware that Gummy was an alligator plushie, so he wasn’t thatconcerned. Little kids took toys all the time, even when the toys didn't necessarily belong to them.

‘Wait,’ Thorn thought, remembering last day’s ordeal.

“Then, things get more and more serious,” Pinkie continued. “You lose important stuff, you sleep less, when you manage to sleep you have nightmares about her, and before you know it, BAM! Your sister’s gone!”

“WHAT!?” Thorn asked, terrified.

“No, wait, wrong story. That’s when I got lost during last hearth’s warm… eh, forget the last part,” Pinkie explained.

Thorn took a sharp, prolonged breath, and calmed himself down.

“Well… as far as I remember, once someone gets to the paranoia part, it’s when the babysitters often quit.”

Still struck by the sister confusion, Thorn led his hand towards his forehead to calm himself down, if only a little.

“Hey! That’s the expression I made when I talked to one of her previous babysi- Oh no, Thorn! You’re babysitting Cozy!?”

Thorn nodded.

“You have to escape while you still can! Before it’s too late!” Pinkie yelled as she shook Thorn’s entire body back and forth. “And whatever you do, don’t tell her anything about your personal life! Everything went downhill for me when she knew about Sunset Shimmer. The worst part is when she starts messing with your-“

Pinkie stopped as her phone suddenly started chiming a bubbly, upbeat, happy tune, which made her drop Thorn, grab her phone and take a peek at the screen.

“Oh! I’m running late for my part-time job!” Pinkie exclaimed as she jumped back into the bushes, and immediately re-emerged wearing roller skates and a different outfit.

“K’ see ya, Thorn!” Pinkie called as she slid away as if nothing had happened, “I’ll text you the details for your party later!”

And then she popped out of visual range.

Author's Note

In another universe, parallel to ours, I decided to add a horror tag and elaborate on the missing sister part. :)