Town square was a full pond on the best of days, but today it was a feeding frenzy, filled with frantic ponies searching for the best bargain for their bit or the best bite within their budget. Applejack avoided the place unless it was apple-selling day, which was every other day, if she could help it; anything to stay out of a crowd of tunnel-visioned in-too-much-of-a-hurry ponies was a good idea.

Applejack tried to drift through the crowd like an unassuming fish, but the mass of bodies jostled her like a rock in the current, slamming her this way and that despite her best attempts to remain stable. She scanned the bodies and heads as they drifted past her, hunting for a sprig of desert-tinged mane or a brown hat to match her own. Hairstyles of all sorts jumped out at her, and outfits besides, but none of them were what she was looking for; none of them were Braeburn.

She had searched his room and found nothing. All the while upstairs and back down she had pondered what she’d said, or how she’d said it.

She had fumbled over her words, that was true. Applejack had never been the best speaker, public or otherwise, unless the matter came particularly strongly from her heart. Family was always held close to the core of meaning in her chest, but something like this was out the realm of her usual understanding.

What had he wanted her to say?

It wasn’t normal, really. Applejack knew of course that the idea of ‘normal’ was a bit odd in Equestria, what with the logistics of different races and species and the mismatch of gender that seemed like a cruel joke perpetuated by the state matriarchy. But she knew what made sense, and her cousin liking stallions... well, that didn’t.

Rarity had said such nice things about him too.

Applejack reminded herself to keep her eyes open. She had decided on the train station despite the suitcase of Braeburn’s things still open on his bed upstairs, figuring given the turn their conversation had taken that Braeburn might choose rebuilding his bathroom cabinet’s contents over stopping to talk. She might have been right, but she couldn’t see anypony that looked even remotely like Braeburn, and every second she stopped to look she was slammed into by another pony walking by not watching where they were—

“Oof!”

Applejack let out the air in her lungs involuntarily, resenting it as it left her chest, forced out by the impact of a hoof, heavy and hard into her stomach. She almost fell, but managed to keep her balance despite her body’s protest for more air. She closed her eyes for a second, opening them only when she was sure she could breathe well enough to scold whomever had run into her. The other body beat her to the punch.

“Why don’t you watch where you're going, you big dumb—Applejack?”

Applejack recognized that voice.

“Rainbow Dash?”

The sound of spunky enthusiasm and gravelly tomboyishness was hard to misplace. Sure enough, Rainbow Dash grinned back at her, rubbing a hoof on the back of her neck in an embarrassed gesture that translated universally to ‘oops’.

“Sorry about that AJ. I’m kinda in a hurry. Wasn’t really looking—”

“—where you were going? I noticed. No fuss, you just knocked the wind outta me.”

Dash laughed lightly, trying not to sound too enthusiastic about her impromptu stomach tackle.

“Yeah, my bad. You seem like you’re in a hurry too though. Off to somewhere important?”

Applejack considered her options. On one hoof, she wasn’t sure she wanted to make her cousin’s disappearance common knowledge. Awkward situations only lead to questioning, and family business was family business, not meant for every pony passing by to stick their nose in.

On the other hoof, Rainbow Dash was her friend—and besides that, she could fly, high and fast and with a pretty good eye on her surroundings. If Applejack keyed her in on the situation, omitting the awkward conversation, she might be able to get some much needed help tracking Braeburn down before he left town, or just disappeared entirely.

“I’m looking for somepony,” she settled on, trying not to give away details before they were necessary.

“Oh really? Who ya’ lookin’ for?”

Applejack bit her tongue before her honest inklings and subtle guilt made her give in.

“Braeburn. My cousin, from Appleloosa. He’s visiting for a week, and I... he, uh... well, he disappeared, and I can’t track him down.”

“Disappeared?” Rainbow Dash relaxed her stance. Though she had entered into minor small-talk, she had stayed crouched as though after exchanging pleasantries she may as well jump into the sky and fly off into the distance. Now she looked more settled, perhaps indicating that she’d be willing to stay still for a few minutes to hear what her friend had to say.

The crowd washed around the two solitary ponies like a rapid, with occasional bumps to both suddenly emergent obstacles.

They both noticed it—Applejack when a pony with a vegetable cart almost took off her tail, and Rainbow Dash as three ponies slammed into her side in sequence.

“Do you wanna move or something? Kinda hard to stand here and talk at the same time.”

Applejack nodded and scanned around the town square for somewhere that might be suitable for a conversation about awkward confessions and poor word choice.

The alley two stores from town hall caught her eye.

He had seen the church in the distance.

Even from far away it had caught his eye; a monument to a faded way of life that seemed somehow perfectly in place despite its anachronistic nature. The top of its steeple-tip and unnecessary lightning rod had shone at him in the sunlight like a beacon of forgetful interest, asking his attention and dismissing it just as quickly.

The doors had creaked when he pushed through them—not ominously, like a dilapidated house, but with as much well-meaning as they could muster, warm and hospitable like a grandparent welcoming their son or daughter’s bundle of joy into their house for the first time. Cookies were on the metaphorical table.

Braeburn almost resented the welcome. He was in no mood for friendly ‘hello’s.

He scanned the room past the entrance doors, looking for something to hate. His eyes had been thick with tears the moment he took off, blinding him like acid sweat earned in a runner’s race, which would have been more than perfect if they had stopped when his hooves had stilled. He’d run faster than he remembered ever running in his life, racing to get away from the epicenter of his anguish, but the sick, heavy feeling in his chest and stomach had come with him. As he entered the church, his emotions began pounding on his insides, threatening to bring up the contents of his stomach through his unwilling mouth.

In the church, he clenched his mouth shut and looked around.

Ponies had found no use for churches in years—more years than Braeburn could recall. He remembered the churches of his youth, meeting places on odd-days of the week, the site of family functions and the first chords he’d learned on his guitar—but worship had never entered the equation. There was only one deity, and that was Celestia, and she requested no reverence. Luna’s readdition to the Equestrian pantheon would have complicated things if any amount of structure had entered the equation, but ponies in Equestria had no use for format to their respect for their Princess; their Queen; their God.

There had been a time when improper justifications and wrongfully inspired enthusiasm had given weight to calculation in practice. Words like ‘Celestial Tenets’ and ‘Praise Her Solar Majesty’ had crept at one time into Equestrian vocabulary, and Celestia had been too perplexed and forgiving to bar them from worming into common usage. Only when she learned of the dictation attached to her name did she seek to prevent the association, and by then she had missed the mark, leaving her years to undo the damage of a stilled tongue, while ponies claiming to be her voice had wagged theirs all too readily.

He hadn’t thought about church since he had left for Appleloosa.

The church booths were worn. The backs of their once perfectly maintained seats were scuffed, gouges in the wood left by frolicking children irreverent for the damage they were causing to supposedly ‘holy’ upholstery. The catches on the backs of the pews that once held the commonplace edition of Celestial Tenets were empty, filled only now with dust and the laughs of congregations they had kept for themselves.

Braeburn ran his hoof over the grooved furniture, searching for some piece of it that might tell him why he had come. Why, bathed in the glow of the sun through stained glass windows and suffocating dust, he felt he was in the right place.

He had made one stop before he arrived, taking two things with him that he was surprised he had left in one place at all: the rope that he never went anywhere without, and a notebook coupled with its pen, hanging from the hinge of the book’s binding tied with a bright red string.

He came to the piano at the church’s far end and set the book down carefully, and the rope beside it, resting both of them on the bench in front of the ancient organ.

The rope slid from its place, falling off the stool and onto the floor. Braeburn let it fall.

He flipped open the book to the middle, finding an empty page unmarred by his scrawlings and the prepared speeches he had discarded minutes after writing. The pen dangling from the book’s top seemed to taunt him with its accessibility. He saw his cousin's name at the beginning of an unfinished sentence and, invisible, the hope in his heart that he'd let blot onto the paper as he'd written it.

All the sentences arranged there had come out on the train ride over. The colour of the pen matched the book’s binding, which made it feel like the whole way to Ponyville, he’d been pouring his heart out with every word.

No combination of sentences could put together what he felt he needed to say. It was so simple, at the outset. Just tell her. Tell her and that would be it.

Why did he need to tell her in the first place?

That was a complicated question. Why did he need to tell her, and no one else? Why couldn’t he tell ponies in what he felt like now was his hometown—his neighbours, his friends, acquaintances or closer than that, ponies that felt like they knew him and loved him and wanted him to be happy. Why, when he considered the words on his lips that he swallowed before speaking to them, did the thought feel so empty in imagining it to them?

It was because, in the long run, that they didn’t matter as much.

Not to say that they didn’t matter. Reducing anypony he cared about in that town would throw away his whole reason for being there—his whole reason for making the place his life, breathing it every day.

And still, there were things that mattered more.

He’d thought of the worst on the way to Ponyville. If she told him... There was no way. When family mattered more than anything else, there was a reason they mattered. So even though he’d given the idea more imagining that it deserved, he’d buried it in the back of his head, to rest with the perpetual doubt and insecurity that came from having to say that kind of thing in the first place. It could never happen, he’d assured himself.

The whole book was made for burning now. The bits of his heart he’d written down. He didn’t want to see a single word.

But he needed to write at least one thing more.

With salt on his lips from the tears that refused to stem their flow, Braeburn picked up the pen in his mouth and uncapped the tip with a wiggle of his tongue. The blank white page leered at him, as though daring him to make a mark.

For a pony who usually had so much to say, his mouth felt suddenly and permanently incapable of movement.

He managed a single sentence, scrawled in hasty script, before he let the pen fall back to its place. His interest turned elsewhere; he considered the rope at his feet and lifted it upward with his foreleg, raising the woven material underneath his nose and wishing he could smell it through the collecting impedance of his seemingly endless tears. Holding it to his mouth, he looked up, and stared toward the roof of the church through the water he couldn’t manage to clear.

A likely looking beam jumped out at him. It seemed low enough.

The book and pen fell to the floor, conjoined together, as Braeburn shuffled them sideways to make room for himself on the piano bench.