Nurse Redheart felt like she had been working through the day whilst on autopilot (as do many of us on a regular basis), and even though the business she had to attend to could not be considered orthodox by most, she still felt that dull end-of-the-work-day fatigue in her soul.

Truth be told, the whole thing was driving her nuts. The reporters would not let up; they had been utterly relentless for the past few days, and they were probably not going to stop being so for a few more at the very least.

Why me? she thought as a young mare with an all-too cumbersome camera dangling from her neck strap kept asking the same question everypony else had already been asking.

"But Doctor, how can we be certain the alien isn't hostile? Or maybe carrying a hostile agenda? Suppose he lost his memory along the way and then regained it, what could come of—"

"I'm not a doctor," Redheart said, not too concerned about the error but wanting to correct it anyway, "I'm a nurse."

"Sorry. You're still taking care of the thing, right?"

The thing, huh? "Yes. We've been trying our hardest to restore the alien to good health. It's quite clear to us that he's been through a lot, physically. The crash hurt him more than any of us."

Another reporter, a stocky stallion with thick glasses, stepped in with: "So you've, uh, identified its gender?"

"It didn't take long to come to that conclusion," Redheart said. "We almost immediately figured out what sex he belonged to, in spite of the fact that his physiology is quite different from ours."

"Sorry, but do you have to use that word?" another reporter said with a cracked voice.

"'Physiology'?"

"No, the other one."

Oh come on now. Redheart wanted to punch herself in the face. "I'm just saying that the alien's genitalia—a bit weird-looking, not gonna lie—corresponds with that of a stallion's. So therefore we've identified him as a he. It's possible that 'he' comes from a place where those of his kind who possess a penis—"

"Ew," the mare reporter said to herself.

"—identify as female, and vice versa and so on. But assuming that's not the case, and it's not exactly a lotteryesque assumption, then we can say he's male. Doctor Goodbody talked about it with me and the other nurses—"

"You're a nurse?"

Isn't it obvious? "Yes. Anyway, if you really want the completely official answer to whatever questions you have—yes, even and especially the ones you keep asking that have already been answered over and over again—then you can have a session with Goodbody when he is ready."

"But—"

"That is all for now. I still have work to do with the patient. Bye." And with that she practically shut the hospital door in all the reporters' faces, inwardly hoping it would hit one of them by (ahem) accident.

Sadly, the part about there being more work was very much true. Redheart sniffed and rubbed her temples before heading for Goodbody's office.

"The wounds appear to be healing normally," said Goodbody to himself, rather than Nurse Blackheart who stood beside him. "No pus and little way in the stitches coming undone."

"This job is making me come undone," said Blackheart dryly.

"I'm sure it is."

Goodbody had partly revealed a deep cut the alien had suffered just under his left shoulder-blade. Truth be told, the alien's body had practically been turned into a wad of Swiss cheese; there were cuts all over the creature's mostly hairless frame, and gauze and bandages could only do so much to cover it all up.

Now, doctors in hospital dramas have a knack for appearing too photogenic to be taken seriously, but Goodbody had almost the complete opposite problem; he resembled a clown more than anything, with lanky limbs that were simply too long for his body and a thick curly mane that seemed more fitting for a circus performer than a medical practitioner. Not that anypony who worked for him commented on it.

In the way of looking out of the ordinary, Goodbody and the alien shared something in common. Well, aside from being male, but that never counted for much.

Redheart opened the door and furrowed her brow at the doctor. "I thought you were in your office."

Goodbody, continuing to inspect the unconcious figure before him, said, "I thought I was too. And I would be, or at least checking in on a different patient, but this is just too..."

"Fascinating?" Redheart knew her boss was infatuated with that word.

"Yes!" Goodbody's eyes almost popped out of their sockets and he finally paid Redheart some mind. "I worried for my life that this man would bite the dust in no time, given our lack of knowledge about what his diet is or how susceptible he would be to infections and the like, but so far he has been recovering very nicely."

Blackheart, blowing some of her raven-feather mane out of her eyes, said, "If only he would not be so damn quiet..."

"Language," Goodbody muttered.

"Still hasn't said anything?" Redheart moved between her two co-workers and gazed at the alien's body, uncovered from the waist up. She couldn't help but pay attention to his lips and how narrow and delicated they looked. Can you really talk? What do your lips look like when they move? But who knows—we might never find out. "He's been awake before, you'd think he would've said something by now."

"Hmm," the doctor wondered. "I suspect he is still too injured to do much on his own. Or (let's all be honest here) he would have made a run for it from the beginning."

"But to where"" Redheart replied.

Goodbody breathed in as if about to say something, but a pack of foals in the doorway interrupted him.

"Is that the alien?" said a little colt with an icepack wrapped around his head. "I wanna see it!"

"Me too!" agreed the other foals, awfully spritely for being so sick.

The first to take action, Blackheart yelled, "PISS OFF, KIDS!" and pushed them all back into the hallway like a farmer rounding up unruly chickens. "Shoo! Shoo!" She gave a quick look at Goodbody and said, "I'll take care of them."

"Thank you," said the doctor. "Just mind your language."

"I'll try!" And with that she was gone from sight.

Redheart gave a sigh of relief. "She needs a raise."

"So do we all, Red." Goodbody straightened his glasses and made sure the gauze on the alien's wounds stayed tight. "I'll need to check in on a few other patients now, unfortunately."

Redheart frowned. "So it's my turn again?"

"Until Kindheart's shift." Before leaving he said with sympathy, "I'll be back later as well."

"Okay." And so they parted ways.

Looking after an unconcious patient quickly became a bore. Without fail. The worst part was making sure the alien didn't wet himself (or worse) in his sleep again, which Redheart only barely tolerated.

Yet it wasn't the patient's fault. He had almost died in that crash. Killed everyone else, apparently.

And what the heck is a man anyway? wondered Redheart as she sat beside said "man." What a strange being he was! He seemed to have hair only on his scalp, his face, his chest, around his genitals, and a few other small spots. And it was all scruffy dirt-brown hair too, not nearly thick enough to help protect against low temperatures no doubt. His arms and legs were these spindly, thinly muscled things, and (most weirdly of all!) he had two small nipples amongst the wiry hair on his chest. With skin almost as creamy as Redheart's coat, the "man" looked like he was a once-upon-a-time much hairier beast who had recently gotten a full-body shave.

As the sun set, Redheart continually switched between eating a cream-cheese bagel (whose carbs went straight to her rump—not that she minded packing a little extra heat in her trunk) and reading a dense volume of fiction about some teen colts in a tennis academy and some losers in a rehabilitation facility. She found the book to be too confusing and overly detailed, but she kept at it regardless; it was a gift one of her exes had given her some years ago, and she wasn't going to put all that paper to waste. Those trees died for a cause, gosh darn it.

So for a long time there was a deathly silence in the air. The crinkling of wrappers. The rustling of turning pages.

Until Redheart heard something that took her out of her trance.

"You..."

Huh? She put down her book and glanced at the patient. "Uh...?"

The man's eyes were open. A shimmering blue that made Redheart feel like she was having a dream. His right arm (which was closest to Redheart) raised half an inch off the bed, and he pointed at her. "You..."

"Me?" Redheart pointed at herself.

The man nodded. "Who are... you...?"

Is this for real? Redheart felt herself facing down a fork in the road at that moment. One path led to her running for Goodbody, or Blackheart, or Kindheart, anypony, and telling the news. The other path led to her giving into her own penchant for curiosity and talking to the man alone.

So she said uneasily, "The uh—um—I'm sorry. I'm the nurse here. Do you know what a nurse is?"

He nodded again. "Water..."

"For drinking?"

Another quick nod.

"Okay. I'll get you some." Feeling numb in her legs a bit, Redheart got up and filled a small paper cup from the water cooler nearby and gave it to the man. He flinched when Redheart's hoof almost touched his hand, but he accepted the drink nonetheless.

The man emptied the cup in one gulp, as if about the die of thirst if he didn't. He rested the cup on his belly and visibly winced from moving around even the tiniest bit. He said not another word.

Redheart didn't wanted to interrupt her patient, but now she felt there was something more for him to say. Well, he's friendly. I think he's friendly? He accepted the drink. Said some words I recognized. Does he speak our language? It'd be pretty weird if he did, but then what else could have happened there? She leaned forward in her chair like a student desperately wanting to ask a legitimate question to the teacher. "So can you... understand me?"

The man gulped and said methodically, "Yes."

"So we speak the same language."

"I... guess so..." The man's brow furrowed and he stared up at the ceiling.

"You have a name?" Redheart pointed at her face. "I'm Redheart. Just Redheart."

"I'm Jim," said the man. "But some people call me... Jim."

"Just Jim?"

"No." The man grew more confident in his speech, but he continued to avert his eyes from Redheart. "It's a bit more complicated than that." He then chuckled lightly, but even this action proved painful to him.

So the man called Jim started to tell the story of how he got his name. The tale was calmly and methodically told (on account of Jim trying to not cause himself more pain by accident), and Redheart did not understand a lot of the little details and references, but she found every word utterly engrossing.

The rest of Redheart's shift had gone by in a flash. She never got to finish her bagel, but she more-or-less forgot about it, and by the end of Jim's tale she got the impression that maybe her muzzle was a tad too close to his face. She had long since taken to sitting on her haunches by the man's bedside, her chin resting on her forelegs.

"Your parents were really something, huh?" She said this in a non-sarcastic way.

Jim looked like he wanted to chuckle, but instead Redheart got to see what a smile on his lips looked like. "They were a bunch of weirdos, yeah. It was a thing all folks in their generation had, I guess."

"That whole 'God' thing, though... do you still believe in that?"

Something horrible seemed to dawn on Jim. "I don't... know. Anymore."

"Sorry." Look at me, being all polite, she thought with a slight smirk. "It must be a pretty tough question to answer."

Jim turned his head a bit and gave Redheart a long weary look. "I feel like maybe I've ventured beyond His reach. If all this is real... then..."

"I'm pretty sure I'm real," Redheart said to herself.

Nothing was said between them for a minute or so.

Out of the blue, Jim said, "I'm pretty sure I have to pee."

"Oh," Redheart uttered. "I'll get the bucket. Give me a second."

Since trying to walk about made Jim ill to the point of vomiting (which was not a small mess, as everypony at the hospital found out the hard way), the bathroom had to be brought to him.

Just as Redheart was fetching said bathroom, Kindheart opened the door to the room and gazed inside, seeing Redheart with the handle of the bucket in her mouth and Jim sitting upright, nude and bandaged.

"Is this a bad t-time?" the kindly nurse stuttered.

"Uhhhh..." Redheart dropped the bucket and smiled too widely. "No! I'm just finishing up here."

Squinting, Jim took in every detail of Kindheart's figure and said, "Hello, Nurse."

A second later, Kindheart fainted. Dropped like a rock. And work for her hadn't even started yet.

The transition from bedridden to mostly bedridden proved to be tough on Jim's body. He could not quite stand on his own two legs, and so always kept a hand firmly planted on a wall wherever he went—though he had yet to travel outside of his assigned room anyway. On more than one occasion the whole experience became too much for his stomach, and he and the nurses paid dearly for that as a result.

Between Redheart, Blackheart, and Kindheart, though, the work involved wasn't entirely aggravating. When he felt able (which was at least once a day), Jim would converse with any one of them, although he always held talks with Redheart the longest. He was nice enough to ask Kindheart was feeling better after her fainting episode, and even though she could not seem to get past how different Jim looked, the two quickly made amends. Blackheart was not the friendliest of the bunch, but she took to making wisecracks with Jim like a swan took to water—and this of course came as good news to Redheart and Goodbody, who could now count as somebody new to deal with Blackheart's nonsense.

The foals who visited the hospital still made themselves known as real pains in one's neck, though. They simply would not let up with wanting to see "the alien," and naturally the older colts and fillies took interest once word spread around that Jim was almost entirely naked, with decently sized cock and balls to prove it.

"I bet he's as hung as my boyfriend!"

"You wish that loser packed that kind of heat!"

"Hey, that's me you're talking about!"

"Oh yeah?"

And so on.

The nurses didn't pay it much mind.

Redheart was reading her book (the one a bygone ex had given her) to Jim today, which he appreciated. Not to say he was like a child or anything, but in a kind of unspoken compliment he loved watching Redheart read something aloud. Seeing her lips moved and how they curled and formed sounds out of the depths of her throat.

"You know, the more I hear you read from that, the more I get the impression that it sounds familiar," Jim said coolly, sitting up against the wall in a makeshift robe of faux-fur (more for warmth than modesty).

Redheart raised an eyebrow at him. "How's that? I don't think you could have read it before."

"I know, but..." He cocked his head a bit. "It's like—most of the words are there, from when I read them, and yet some have been replaced by uh..."

"Give me an example."

"Like 'woman' would be replaced with 'mare,' and that kind of thing. And some terms would be different."

"A woman, huh?" Like a female man? Redheart sometimes wondered what a female of Jim's species looked like exactly, and she always had a hard time with him. Would they still have the hair on their chest and bellies? Did they have rounder rumps on average? Were their nipples bigger? Were their teats like little mounds or were they more pronounced? I need to stop thinking about nipples so much.

"Yeah, but now it's a mare instead," said Jim. "And also the drugs (their names) have been changed to other things."

"There are a lot of 'drugs' in this book." The author must've taken a lot of them.

"I know!" The burst of laughter made Jim grimace, but he didn't mind it too much.

Kindheart opened the door a few inches and glanced at Redheart nervously, "Could-could-could—" She paused and shook her head rapidly, her flowing grass-green mane obscuring one eye. "Could you come with me, Red?"

"What for?" asked Redheart as kindly as she could.

"Doc needs t-to see us in his office."

"I'll be right there." Redheart sighed. This always means good news.

The three nurses huddled in front of Goodbody's desk, the doctor himself with a half-frown.

Redheart sat as still as she could, trying to get a feel for what was about to happen with her eyes.

Kindheart had her hind legs curled up, tapping her forehooves together like she was pretending to be bored.

Blackheart sucked on a cherry-flavored lollipop, not giving a single solitary fuck about anything.

"Well," the doctor started, "the good news is that we've been able to find out a thing or two about Jim, now that he's been able to verbally cooperate—"

"Cooperate verbally," muttered Blackheart through her lollipop.

Goodbody gave her a I'm-going-to-make-sure-you-earn-your-orgasm-the-next-time-we-have-sex look before saying, "—with us, and that's all well and good. As far as his wounds he sustained from the crash go, he's almost completely recovered. Buuuut..."

"The bad news?" asked a slightly annoyed Redheart.

"The bad news is that since he is undeniably at this point a mentally autonomous adult of his species (albiet not much older than a teenager), he is free to leave the hospital whenever he so pleases. Except there isn't anywhere for him to go." He gave Redheart a hard look. "Does he have a house? An apartment? A condo?"

"No," she replied.

To Kindheart he asked, "Does he have any money? Or a bank account or even some bits stashed under his mattress?'

"N-no," said Kindheart, rubbing her shoulder.

And to Blackheart he asked, "Can he even go for a casual morning jog without puking up his breakfast?"

"Hmm," said Blackheart. "Lemme think about that..."

"The answer is no." Goodbody straightened his glasses. "I knew from the first day that we had to come to this, but now we have to come to a decision as to whom Jim will be staying with while he fully recovers."

A silence fell upon all of them.

Kindheart shyly raised a forehoof and asked, "I'm sorry, b-but... he has t-to stay with one of us?"

"Yes."

"In our home."

"Yes," Goodbody said. "Where else? He can't share my property with me, since I have enough of a busy schedule at home as is, and that is on top of the trouble I have to deal with here. So it should be one of you instead."

Hearing this, Blackheart's face screw up. "Nope. Not doing it. Sorry, Doc."

Nopony seemed happy with Blackheart's statement, but they didn't act surprised either.

"I can't t-take him in either. My-my-my... uh, my boyfriend's living with me, and he wouldn't approve," admitted Kindheart, biting her lower lip.

I wish I still had a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend, Redheart thought bitterly.

"Keep in mind," Goodbody said, "we just need to give him shelter until he can work things out for himself. He's a big guy, and from what I can tell more than intelligent enough. He will find good work at some point."

Another silence. One volunteer left.

"Uh..." Redheart started, already regretting it.

All eyes in the room gravitated toward her, and an unspoken agreement was made in that moment.

This is gonna be the death of me.

"Alright," Redheart said firmly. "I'll do it."

Despite what her name would indicate, Mayor Mare did not always think she was going to become the Mayor of Ponyville. There was a time, in fact, where she thought she wasn't going to be the Mayor of anything.

In her foalhood days, the Mayor was convinced by the adult figures in her life that she would grow up to be a farmer just like her parents and grandparents (on both sides). She was raised in a bitter and labor-centered hoursehold, mainly because her father was a chronically disgruntled stallion who worked all his life and yet died poor—mainly because of his father.

Mayor Mare's paternal grandfather was a sot-weed plantation owner from Vanhoover who for a good forty years made an absolutely obscene amount of money off of growing and selling the aforementioned crop. Business was booming, but then the old coot also had quite a bit of free time on his hooves, and so he ended up generating a lot of progeny (not all of them strictly legitimate) as well as material wealth. When the time came where everypony in the family knew the grandfather was going to die soon, he agreed to have his money and his land split among his several sons and daughters. The second youngest son, Mayor Mare's father, agreed to inherit the plantation and a hundred bits when he was but hardly a teenager.

The assumption was that Mayor Mare's father would make a fine living as a sot-weed farmer once he came of age.

But then cruel irony struck! Shortly after the grandfather's passing, sot-weed started to fall out of fashion among the ponies, and its value negatively corresponded with the newborn Ponyville's prosperity.

The plantation had become next to worthless.

After all that trouble, Mayor Mare came to appreciate the goodness behind the bitter veil her father possessed, and so she promised to him that she would one day make something of herself.

It took her most of her adult life to do that, but she did it.

"I feel even older than I already am just talking about it," the Mayor told Jim bitter-sweetly. "Nopony mentions all the things that happened back then anymore. And I was a little filly when it was all going on, so even I can barely remember."

The man was wheelchair-bound, sitting comfortably close to the Mayor in her office. Members of the Royal Guard could be seen outside the windows; Princess Celestia had ordered a dozen of them to keep a temporary eye on the town once it became clear that Jim would survive his injuries.

Redheart sat close to Jim, feeling somewhat protective of him as she noticed the guards making their rounds. She knew those boys held nothing against Jim, but Ponyville had been in a real collective funk for the past week or so.

"Come on, don't think of it that way," Jim said, a bit raspy. "You're lucky enough to have been around for that history, and to have even a decent recollection of it. I was just a baby when the World Trade Center got bombed by all those wackos, and way after the fact—when I was in elementary school—my parents would still talk about it. My mom would say something about how much of a national tragedy it was, and my dad would quip back with something along the lines of, 'Well, it can't get any worse!'" He smiled crookedly at that.

"The World Trade Center..." The Mayor rubbed her chin. "Was it like a tower?"

"Two towers, actually." Jim fussed with his robe and stared down at his navel. "I didn't understand any of it then. To know that we would never see those towers again."

The Mayor sensed her alien friend was feeling downcast again. "Well, it was lovely to see you again, James—" for she tended to call him by the name he was given at birth. "You look much healthier now. Why, the first day when you were carried into the hospital, you appeared near death!"

"Thanks," he said. "Although who's to say I didn't die back there?"

Both Mayor Mare and Redheart gave the man a funny look.

"Okay—bad joke," he said uncertainly. The Mayor assumed he seriously considered the possibility.

In the few conversations they'd had together, the Mayor and the man found that they shared a penchant for reminiscing on historical events in a melancholic fashion. They were also opportunities for Jim to talk to a public official like the Mayor about politics from his own world. About what his country was like and how self-loathing it was as a whole.

Seemingly ravaged by more tragedy than the Mayor thought she could ever deal with.

How could a country be so suicidal?

And it was at this moment that she thought of the aircraft wreckage on the outskirts of town. She gazed out her window and saw it in the distance, over the hills and far away, like a haunted sunset. After the bodies were tallied up, reports came out that over ninety "humans" were in that plane—the one that Jim was found in. The guards had set up a perimeter (a fence that—blessed with a unicorn's spell—formed a force field) around the crash site, and although the royal sisters had their schedules filled for the time being, they knew they had to come to Ponyville and try to sort the whole thing out.

Even as she was thinking of this, the Mayor felt tempted to hit Jim with the hard questions then and there.

Yet when she glanced at the man's meek form, she decided it'd better to wait on the dicussion of what was troubling them all.

What were the odds that Jim would be the only survivor of the plane crash, which had not only killed everyone else but left eerily minor wounds on his body? He was found like a mammoth carcass preserved in ice.

What were the odds that the plane in question, which had departed from Newark (a miserable city in a miserable region of the United States) and headed south, would land just outside a village that could not be found on any map known to humankind?

What were the odds that Jim, being the sole survivor of the crash, would be rescued by a race of highly evolved equines whose language and technology struck the man as simultaneously alien and familiar?

And so on.

These questions did not exactly enter Nurse Redheart's mind as she guided Jim out of the hospital in the middle of the night, about one in the morning to be more precise, but she did get this unnerving feeling in her gut that she was dealing with more improbabilities than she knew what to do with.

It was highly improbable, for instance, that, on top of the odds previously mentioned, a pack of reporters would ambush the pair as it was time to move the human, still robed and chronically nauseous as he was, to a new location. The discussion as to when and how the transfer would be conducted occurred between Redheart and her co-workers, and they decided to get Jim's approval of the course of action.

Although, given his state at the time, he couldn't say much more than, "Uuuuuuurgh..."

The uttered non-word was enough, apparently.

"We're very sorry about this, you know," said Redheart, hushed, keeping the front doorway of her house, an unassuming one-floor establishment on the edge of town, for Jim as he pushed himself in his wheelchair.

"Yeah, I've heard that before," he replied. "You don't have to feel sorry about anything."

Redheart turned on the lights in the living room, revealing how dusty and ramshackle it all really was. There was a sofa, appearing big enough to support maybe three ponies or two humans at a time, and it also seemed badly aged, like a tome of poetry in a used bookstore that some old man who use to live down the street had owned. There was a coffee table with some books on it, pressing on its dusted glass, and for some reason they were all ungodly blocks of paper—bricks you could knock someone unconscious with.

A mildly strange smell hung in the air, stagnant, not pungent but noticeable.

Oh, right, Redheart thought worriedly, I missed Cleaning Day again.

"I should feel sorry about this, though, right?" she chuckled awkwardly. "It's kind of a mess."

"It kind of is," Jim said plainly, looking around.

Redheart gave him a scornful glance, her cheeks flushing slightly.

Jim noticed this. "I mean, uh—" He started to get a bit flustered himself. "It reminds me of this girl I used to date. She never lived at her own place, or so I thought. The couple times I got to actually hang with her there it looked just like this."

"Was she nice?" asked Redheart as she headed into the kitchen to get a couple glasses.

"Huh?" Jim paused to think, reaching out a hand to touch the nearest arm of the sofa. "I guess she was. Pretty neurotic, though. She must've worked up to twelve hours a day if she could get away with it, just to keep her mind busy. Was always...?"

"Self-conscious?" as she searched around in her fridge, which was not what we could call luxurious. "What are you feeling thirsty for? Got some orange juice, raspberry, tropical punch, uhhh..."

"Some water would be fine." Jim uneasily raised himself out of his wheelchair, more like someone afraid of puking from dizziness than a case of weak legs, and rested into the sofa's cushion. "As long as it's cold. Some ice?" He pushed the palm of his hand into the cushion and found that, while it was not heavenly, at least it retained some malleability.

"Got it!" Redheart felt a smile creep across her lips as she poured a glass for him, then one of raspberry iced tea for herself. Despite the hour, she did not feel tired, or worn out, like she normally would have. Is this what I get for being a light sleeper? she wondered, and she inevitably returned to that preposterous and yet believable hypothesis that the light sleepers of the world were cursed from birth. Oh, what a deep sleep would be like! She couldn't remember the last time she experienced one of those, and anyway it was not a problem at the moment; she enjoyed the iced tea and the company of her patient as a reprieve.

Carrying each glass one at a time, seeing as how she did not want to stain the carpet even more than she already had on many past occasions, Redheart gave Jim his water. "Feeling tired? Because to be honest with you, I don't."

Jim, in return, gave her a funny look. "Not tired, huh? I thought you would head off to bed at the soonest opportunity." He took his glass weakly in one hand and raised the rim to his lips. "Thanks, by the way."

"Oh, it's okay," Redheart replied. "You're my patient, after all."

"Hmm," he hummed. "You're being paid to take care of me?"

"That's the deal." She jumped up onto the cushion and rested on her haunches, sitting a couple inches from her human patient. "At least for a while. Until you can do more on your own—when you can make some money for me." Her smile widened by an absurd fraction of an inch. "Instead of the other way around."

Jim took a sizable gulp from his glass and reclined back, stretching his back in a way that was almost reminiscent of a cat. "God knows I hate not working." He let out a single chuckle. "I'll get bored of being just a guinea pig for your physical therapy program before long. Gotta spend my time in a productive way."

God, huh? Redheart took a timid sip of her iced tea, her train of thought divided. "Say... what does God know?"

"What?" Jim rubbed his face, the nuances of his cheeks. "I mean... God is supposed to know everything."

"You haven't told me much about him, so I've been wondering about it from time to time." She made a motion with her forehoof. "My line of work leaves me thinking about about a lot of things."

"Same here," Jim agreed. "Although what's happened to me lately—I guess I've been left in the same position. Thinking about everything. Like, okay, for example, about God. Because I raised to believe in God. My parents weren't strict about it, but still, they named me after Pike for a reason. They really respected the guy, and so did their parents. In fact when my grandparents were alive, and they lived in California, right?"

"Right." Redheart still didn't know much about California, from what Jim had told her in their talks at the hospital, but it sounded like a horrid place. But she supposed she had enough of a picture of it.

"Right. So my parents and grandparents are liberal types: they went to church, they read from the Bible, and they respected Pike as both the Episcopal Bishop of California and as a generally cool guy. So it was like a generational thing that rubbed off, from my grandparents to my parents to me. This reverence for Pike."

It was a happy accident, if anything, that Jim's father's surname happened to be the same as Pike's. Aside from that, though, Jim Pike and James Pike, the Episcopal Bishop who claimed to have contacted the ghost of his dead son (his son had committed suicide, unfortunately) and who had eventually died himself while visiting Israel one day in 1969, had a pretty tenuous connection with each other.

Up until recently.

Now jim was here. But where was "here?" It certainly wasn't Earth. But it wasn't the afterlife either, was it?

Redheart gave the human a sad look, like she what he was thinking, like she knew that, for better or worse, Jim had narrowly and impossibly conquered death, unlike the man whom he got his name from. "You ever thought about becoming a religious guy like him?"

"Part of the clergy?" asked Jim, coming out of his introspection. "No. I guess it wouldn't matter if I did anyway, being where I am now..."

"Hey," Redheart said with sympathy, "you're here now, which is better than dead, right?"

"I like to think so." Jim poured the rest of his water down his throat in one big effort, as if he were stranded in the middle of a desert for a week and had just rediscovered that sublime liquid which gives all of us life. "What about your name, though?"

"Huh?"

"Since you're still curious about mine. I never asked about yours, I think. Which is weird—you ponies have pretty odd names, ya know? But that's coming from me."

"Oh." Redheart considered this. "You know how the nurses you've met so far have 'heart' in their names? As like a suffix. Hearts are visualized as red, and though it sounds redundant to have my name be 'Redheart,' I think it says something about how big my heart is."

"Literally?" Jim raised an eyebrow.

Redheart faux-pouted at him, but her smile wouldn't go away. "No—figuratively. I'm..." Her cheeks began to flush more, and she knew she couldn't hide her blush with her coat being the color it was.

"You're a big softy." Jim grinned devilishly, picking up one of the monstrous books on the coffee table and flipping through its pages in his hands rather absent-mindedly. "You like reading love stories?"

"No!" she shouted unexpectedly, but not too harshly. "I mean—well, actually, maybe the second part is true."

"But you're not a softy." Jim glanced at her skeptically.

"Correct." She sighed heavily, wanting to get some hot air out of her lungs, and the first signs of exhaustion made themselves known to her. "I like reading love stories. Or stories involving love, come to think of it."

"Not romance novels?"

She sighed again, starting to frown. "No. I tried, and they make me too sad."

"Why's that now?" Jim looked like he wanted to touch her shoulder, to caress it with the care of holding an infant, but he refused to go through with it.

"Because... in a romance novel, the main couple is too happy. Or maybe their relationship is dramatic, but not in realistic ways. They don't have realistic fights, fights that are like wars of passive-aggression; they don't deal with all the banal crap that comes with maintaining a day-to-day relationship with somepony you love; they don't doubt themselves like real ponies in love sometimes do." The muscles in her face tensed up. "Even at their worst, they have it all too good. They fight like they're on a stage, then they make up with some gifts or some sex and that's it."

As Redheart was saying all this, Jim was examining the book he had in his grip, and he realized at some point that it was a bastardized (ponified?) version of a novel he knew quite well: it was Anna Karenina, or rather something very much like it. A book of healthy romances and unhealthy romances.

The ending was bittersweet, to put it one way.

Jim had to concede, if only to himself, that the most realistically portrayed romances tended to be the ones that ended badly. Or at the very least they failed and ended peacefully, like in Annie Hall.

"Are you feeling okay?" he asked after Redheart finished, feeling a little unnerved and a little stupid. "Needed to get that off your chest? Or... actually, I don't know if I should call it that."

"I will." Redheart finished her drink like a calm before a storm, or maybe the aftermath. "It's just fiction, after all. Nothing to get too stressed about." Then, "And you can say 'chest,' by the way." Her cheeks remained almost crimson; an image of a pair of perky nipples flashed in her mind.

"You sound like you put a lot of stock in fiction."

"Maybe." She rubbed her eyelids. I need some physical therapy too. "It's pretty late, huh?"

Jim nodded in agreement, then let out a near-silent yawn. "Should I sleep on the couch?"

"Oh yeah," she responded. I forgot about that. "You fine with that for now?"

"Sure," said Jim, drained. He needed his rest for tomorrow.

She knew she had to get up early if work was to get done, but still Redheart could not fall asleep in her own bed, not too far from where she knew Jim was slumbering.

It must have been almost three now. I hate this. She hated a lot of things, truth be told, when she was like this, struggling to put her brain out of its misery. Redheart had a long history of insomnia, or what many folks without medical degrees would call insomnia, but it would be more accurate to say she was rarely ever contented enough to get those decent hours in. No, she could not get more than perhaps five hours of rest at a time.

What a lousy business.

She thought about the girlfriend that Jim mentioned—the human girl he said to have dated. Am I neurotic too? she wondered. Of course she was. It was plain as day, was it not? And to think that for a moment she even thought that Jim was referring to her instead of that girl.

Not like that meant anything. Jim was her patient, albeit of more intimate acquaintance than most.

"God..." she grunted to herself, not knowing who this God person was but wanting to have a word with him nonetheless.

God?