Author's Note

First NSFW chapter here, guys. It's honestly nothing explicit. More... implied. From here on out, I'll post which chapters are Work For Safe Not, just in case you guys really are at work when you're reading them. <_< >_>

Balitimare, 5 years ago, Winter II

Any pony who can find it in her to feel deep, painful, powerful sorrow should be respected. A pony who is capable of great sorrow is also capable of fantastic good.

—Luna, the Princess of the Moon

When they got inside, Applejack collapsed on Scoria’s couch from exhaustion. Scoria went into the upstairs bedroom to get a blanket, and when she came back down Willow was there, watching the young mare with concern.

“How is she?”

“Tired, mostly,” Scoria answered, covering Applejack with the blanket. She bit her lip, seeing the dark circles under Applejack’s eyes, the troubled crease of her brow, even in sleep. “I can’t imagine what she must be going through.”

“How are you?”

Scoria gathered her breath. “...Healing. Much better than this one, anyway. It was too… sudden.” She ran a hoof over Applejack’s forehead, brushing away the strands of blond mane, and then she stood straighter and turned to her wife. She walked past her and towards the mantle of the fireplace.

“She was my favorite niece, you know?” she whispered at the picture of her and Pinkie. “I don’t like to play favorites, but you kind of didn’t have a choice with her. She’s… was… everypony’s favorite. The entire family.”

“She had… three… other sisters?”

“Yeah,” Scoria said with a sigh and a smirk. “She was their favorite, too.”

“What do we do with Applejack?” Willow asked.

“She stays here as long as she needs to.”

“You know we can’t do that. She needs to be with her parents right now.”

“Its been months since the funeral. She’s had plenty of time with them,” Scoria said dismissively, turning from the mantle. Willow glared at her.

“They’re her parents Scoria. This isn’t a game,” she snapped.

“Look, the poor mare showed up here out of nowhere and cries for an hour on the beach with me. She’s just lost her fiancee, Willow. She obviously didn’t tell anypony where she was going for a reason.”

“She ran away from home, and I’m not letting her parents go without knowing where she is!” Willow shouted.

“She’s a grown mare, she didn’t run away from home,” Scoria said incredulously. “She has all the right to leave when she wants.”

“She still has a family that is worried about her right now! What if this was Pinkie? Wouldn’t you want to know if she was at the house of some strangers she’d met for one week in the summer?”

“I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore, mm?” Scoria whispered, her eyes growing blank and wet. She inhaled shakily. “I need you to leave,” she said slowly, looking away.

“Are you kicking me out?” Willow demanded.

“No. I just need you to leave so that I don’t have to say those words. Just… come back tomorrow.” Scoria closed her eyes when their roaming led to Pinkie’s bright face in the picture.

“Fine.”

Willow brushed past her, and on the way out she glanced once more at the slumbering mare on the couch, feeling a mixture of hate and pity for her.

“My parents are dead,” Applejack muttered as soon as the door slammed. Her gaze was stationary on the wall. “Have been, for more than ten years now.”

Scoria jumped and then looked at Applejack. “I’m… sorry to hear that,” she said, sincere.

Applejack didn’t reply. She looked even worse than before, but in a different way. All emotion seemed to have drained from her, leaving behind only a blank stare and a line for a mouth.

“How are you feeling?” Scoria asked. Applejack sighed and met the mare’s eyes briefly, only enough to let her know that it was a stupid question.

“Do you want anything to eat?”

Applejack shook her head.

“Do you want me to sit with you?”

She looked at the ceiling and nodded slightly.

“I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare, but it never ends,” Applejack whispered to the ceiling as Scoria sat down. Green eyes rolled to the picture on the mantle, and a few tears leaked out. They dried up quickly and no more came, victim of exhaustion.

“I really, really loved her. She… I can’t explain it. I don’t even know how she got me to fall in love with her, but she did.”

“Not a day goes by that I don’t miss her,” Scoria whispered.

“I wanted all of that.” Applejack jerked her head towards the wedding picture. “I don’t think I ever told her, but… the first time I saw that picture… I never had a chance. It wasn’t hard to imagine, you look so much alike.” She snorted, or maybe it was a hard sob. “I let myself think it for half a second, and it was over. So I fought her twice as hard the next time.” Her chest heaved with a silent sob. “I feel like I killed her.”

“Oh, Applejack…” Scoria sighed.

“I keep thinking, ‘what if we didn’t come here?’ ‘what if she hadn’t proposed, or I hadn’t accepted?’ She dove in after the ring. It was so stupid. Why didn’t I stay with her? Why did I let her get drunk?”

“Stop that,” Scoria snapped, not liking how wild Applejack’s wet eyes looked. As if she was on the edge of the ocean like before. “You can’t blame yourself for this. Her death was not your fault.”

Applejack laughed shrilly. “You don’t think I tell myself that just to get to sleep?” she hissed. “But every second I think about it and what I could have done and it doesn’t go away. I see her laughing and smiling and asking me to see the sunrise and it doesn’t go away.”

Scoria cradled her head in startlement when Applejack fell into her embrace. As she held her she rocked her back and forth, wishing to everything she could think of for those thoughts to go away.

Pinkie’s death broke Applejack’s heart, but it would be all the “what ifs” that would shatter her.

Two hours resonated with sobs and reassurances later Scoria sent Applejack upstairs. It was ten in the morning.

Applejack drifted up the stairs, unaware in a haze of pure exhaustion, but she paused before the door and memories slammed back into her.

She sighed, chuckled, bit her lip, wiped the tears from her eyes, and turned the knob.

The room hadn’t been touched. Applejack inhaled through her teeth as though she was in pain. It was tragically perfect and it would kill her.

There was still a mussed spot in the sheets where Pinkie had sat on the bed the last time they were in the room.

Applejack swallowed and walked to the bed slowly. She was afraid to get near it, afraid what it would do to her.

But the bed didn’t bite. It was a bed.

She stared at the bed for a long time, and it stared back at her. She sat carefully beside Pinkie’s imprint, but the dip of the mattress shifted the sheets and Pinkie’s ghost disappeared from the room. Applejack found her breath again as the memory let go of its painful hold on her heart, and slowly she laid down.

And Pinkie’s scent hit her like a train.

A whimper escaped her lips involuntarily and she closed her eyes. She breathed in again and shivered, biting her lip as memories flowed through her.

Their first night together, the day after, and, subsequently, every time after that. Every sensation and touch and kiss and hmm…

She frowned and opened her eyes.

Pinkie was dead.

It was the first time she’d thought that in this way.

What did it mean, exactly? Of course, Applejack wanted nopony else and she knew she wouldn’t for the rest of her life, so that meant…

Hm.

She looked around the room, as if making sure she was alone, and then she gathered her breath and held it.

She reached down and groaned.

Yes. Yes, it did mean.

It had been months, she realized with a stir, and then chuckled at the thought. It was a funny thing to suddenly realize that she didn’t have a sex life anymore.

She missed it already. She missed walking into her room, seeing her bed, and feeling images of Pinkie moaning beneath her pound over her. She missed walking through the kitchen, seeing the island, and feeling images of Pinkie laying her down flood over her.

She missed christening places and things.

She missed being wanted, and wanting in return. She missed being insatiable.

She growled out a moan, head dropping to the pillow to stare up at the ceiling through specs of color popping into fireworks behind her eyelids. She scrunched her eyelids tight to make them go away.

And then something hot and wet rolled down her cheek.

Was it even right to do this? How dare her body want this when the sole provider of its pleasure was gone?

“You’re being silly, AJ.” Pinkie giggled into her ear and Applejack mewled in surprise, back leg kicking out when she pressed down hard in her surprise. “Just relaaaax.”

She breathed the word, hot and moist on Applejack’s ear, and then she traced her hoof down to Applejack’s chest lovingly, agonizingly, to stroke little absent-minded circles in the short orange fur.

Applejack whimpered like a helpless foal. “You’re not real,” she half-sobbed.

“Shh,” Pinkie whispered like a summer breeze on the ocean, like the subtle hiss of fire or chemicals reacting together. “I can feel your heart. It’s racing.”

Not real.

She nibbled on Applejack’s ear and Applejack flicked it as tingles spread. “Do you remember our first night, Applejack?” A breathy giggle puffed again on the inside of Applejack’s ear.

“Ugh.” Applejack groaned, eyes rolling into the back of her head. “Luna, Pinkie.”

“Are you saying some other mare’s name while we’re in bed together?” Pinkie teased, voice perfectly melting to teasingly disapproving like chocolate on a hot summer’s day.

Applejack blinked and then a laugh punched out of her chest.

She’d not laughed in…

Her roaring laughs came and came, in waves of unabated relief and shock, until she was gasping for breath and Pinkie was giggling along with her. And then Pinkie nuzzled her and Applejack sighed the rest of her giggles away into contentment.

“I love you, Applejack. You know that, right?” Pinkie asked simply, and Applejack nodded silently, closing her eyes as the words washed over her in Pinkie’s voice for the first time in forever.

“I love you, too.”

Not real.

Oh, hush, you.

Applejack rolled her eyes, and Pinkie sighed and settled her decidedly more heated eyes and flirty smile on her.

“And now that the romance is out of the way,” she growled, “Were we not in the middle of something?”

Yes, yes they were. Her hoof traveled back down and she groaned.

“You’re soaked,” Pinkie commented, eyes glinting appreciatively and Applejack slammed her eyelids shut as her face flushed. Pinkie was so… unabashedly straightforward in bed.

She swallowed and forced herself to continue.

“You close?” Pinkie asked her breathily after a bit, and again Applejack flushed and stumbled.

All things considered, she was. Or perhaps it was because of the things considered. She was out of practice, she had to admit, but it had been a long time.

She nodded wordlessly and squirmed at Pinkie’s small moan in response to the admittance.

“That’s so hot,” she groaned breathlessly. “You’re so hot, Applejack. I need you to come for me.”

Her breath caught, released, and caught again at the words and she lost her rhythm to a sharp press instead, and came with an inhale that hissed through her clenched teeth. Her hips rolled smoothly as she came off the bed and threw her head back to pant and moan Pinkie’s name at the ceiling, and then they bucked jerkingly with aftershocks as she stroked herself slowly on the slow climb down from her peak.

Finally, she settled with a happy grin and a lightness to her brow, a hazy calmness to her dark thoughts.

“Mm, that was glorious, Pinks,” she hummed and bit her lip.

There was no response, and when Applejack opened her smoky eyes to look to her side she found nothing but sheets. Her throat tightened with tears and she swallowed once, twice, three times all the while contemplatively staring at the sheets where Pinkie’s ghost once was.

When the tears clouded her vision into a blur of shadows and colors she closed her eyes and slammed her face into her pillow, if only to muffle her wails.

And Pinkie’s scent only made her sob that much harder.

Told you.