Cheese took a deep breath. This was going to be very hard. Nearby, yellow and blue balloons twisted slowly, a mute tribute to Pinkie Pie. He swallowed, hoping his voice wouldn’t shake.
“I don’t think Pinkie had any idea how important she was to so many ponies. I’ve tried to tell her, and I don’t think she believed me. But I think Equestria’s always going to be a bit happier because of her, and it’s good to look back on her life and remember everything she’s done.”
He tucked a noisemaker into the corner of his mouth.
“And it’s especially amazing and super-duper awesometastic to do that on her birthday! Happy birthday, Pinks!”
He blew his noisemaker and spread his arms wide, a small puff of confetti exploding up and settling around him. But there were no answering cheers or party horns, no laughter or applause: nothing but silence.
Nopony else was there at all.
“Even if you’d been here earlier, there wasn’t anything you could have done.”
The last few hours had been a confusing fog: arriving home late, hoping Pinkie wouldn’t be too hurt, seeing the lights on at home, and then a succession of front legs thrown around his neck, feminine voices wailing that they were sorry, they were so, so sorry . . . and then the frantic gallop to the Ponyville Hospital, and more weeping, more hugs, and more cries of “we are so, so sorry.”
He didn’t really know what they were talking about. It wasn’t as though they’d done anything wrong. As for him, he wasn’t feeling sorry, or sad, or anything in particular right now. He was just standing in a hospital room so chilly that he’d had to keep his serape on. Besides, what he was looking at wasn’t Pinkie. He was looking at the silent dead body of a small pink mare with none of Pinkie’s Joy or laughter or spirit. He was looking at the absence of Pinkie. Nothing could be less like Pinkie than this.
He glanced up at the clock on the tile wall. 2 am. May 4th , the day after Pinkie’s birthday. He was just a little bit too late.
“I could have said goodbye,” Cheese said mildly. “I think she would have liked that. I would have liked that. That might have made a difference to her.”
Something deep inside whispered that he’d left her while she was asleep, that he’d never said goodbye at all, that maybe she’d died wondering where he was. But it was as though those were somepony else’s thoughts, and somepony else’s thoughts really didn’t concern him right now. They didn’t even make sense.
The intern, he noticed, was young—as young as Pinkie, in fact—shifting from foot to foot, and unable to look Cheese in the face. His nervousness was so extreme that in other circumstances, Cheese would have been forced to try to make him laugh. Cheese instinctively looked at Pinkie, because she always knew what to do to make ponies smile, and oh, right. She couldn’t do that right now.
The intern coughed. “Did you know she was carrying triplets?”
“Triplets? Really?” Now he knew why Pinkie wanted to pick out so many names for both fillies and colts, when he’d suggested that one of each was plenty. That had been a nice evening, before she started having to stay in bed all the time. Picking out names made everything much more real. She had lots of cute filly names, like Silly String, and for some reason, she absolutely insisted on a name with “Surprise” in it, so “Cheesecake Surprise” went on the list. He’d surprised himself and her by pushing strongly for “Sachertorte.” His grandfather Sachertorte had passed away quite a while ago, he’d explained, and if they had a colt, he would be the first one born in the family since his grandfather’s death. That’s how they did things in his family. Cheese rarely talked about his family, and almost never about family traditions, so Pinkie agreed that had to be the top pick for a colt. He shook his head to get rid of the memory.
“Triplets. No. No, I didn’t know.” But Carrot Cake guessed, he thought. That’s what he was trying to tell me.
“Well,” admitted the intern, “we can’t always tell, even with good screening equipment, and this was her first pregnancy, so I’m sure she can’t have known.”
Oh, no. She knew all right. Something inside him started to burn.
“A mare’s body isn’t really designed to carry multiple fetuses to term. There isn’t enough space and there aren’t enough nutrients to feed them. Twins are bad enough. They’re extremely risky, and most of the time, they aren’t both born alive.”
Cheese only really caught a few words and phrases—things like “reabsorption” and “malformation.” Carrot’s worried face and his cautions that Pinkie needed help kept getting in the way. He loved Pinkie almost like a daughter. He’s going to be pretty upset, he thought, and more of the numbness wore off.
“Fortunately,” continued the intern, clearly much happier now that he was able to stick to technicalities, “twins are also very rare, and triplets are nearly unheard of. There’s never been a live birth of three healthy triplet foals that I know of. I’m amazed that she was carrying triplets at all.”
“Oh, I’m not,” said Cheese, and more of the numbness burned off. “You didn’t know Pinkie. She could do some incredible things. And I’m sure she thought having triplets would be hilarious.” He began to shake, and something rose, and rose, and rose in his chest, until he erupted like a volcano.
“WAS THAT WORTH IT, PINKIE PIE? DOING THIS TO YOURSELF? THROWING YOUR WHOLE LIFE AWAY? FOR A PUNCHLINE? I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, rushing forward and placing a hoof on the velvety pink neck, which was already very slightly stiff. He rocked her back and forth. “You know I never yell at you, beautiful, I’m sorry, but you know—this just isn’t funny.”
He nestled his muzzle down in the curly mane. Cotton candy. Everything else in the room smelled like antiseptic and iodine, but she still smelled like cotton candy and strawberry sauce. The scent hit him in the gut as nothing else had. For just a moment he thought, this will be the last time. Then he pushed that thought away. He was trying to reach back for the numbness that was keeping him sane. He needed not to feel anything. At the same time, this would be the last time he could kiss her on the nose, and even if this wasn’t really Pinkie, as he kept telling himself, he’d be sorry later if he didn’t, because this really was the last time.
He pressed his nose to her neck, to her shoulder, to her withers, as he’d done hundreds of times just to say, “did you hear that? That was funny,” or “I’m glad you’re here,” or to remind her how beautiful she was. He reached the sheet covering the back half of her body. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see, but he was her husband and it was his duty to bear this.
Under the sheet, Pinkie was a wreck. Somepony had done her best to clean her up and make her look close to presentable, but he knew his wife’s body and this was not the way it was supposed to look. In the background, he heard the nervous chatter of the intern using words like “torsion” and “rupture,” but all he understood was that his Pinkie had suffered, had suffered badly, and that this was all his fault.
“She was heavily sedated,” finished the intern, “so as I said, even if you’d been here, I don’t think there was anything you could have done, even to say goodbye.”
Cheese ignored this so that he could inhale Pinkie’s mane some more. He’d always loved the way her mane smelled. Then a thought hit him.
“What about the foals?”
“What?” quavered the intern.
“The foals. Tell me about the foals.”
“Oh. Well, you have to understand, none of them were viable. The male probably hadn’t been for at least a month . . .”
A colt, he thought. One of them was a colt. Sorry, Grandpa Sachertorte. We tried.
“ . . . and they never breathed. But they were going to be two fillies and a colt.”
Something inside Cheese exploded for the second time.
“What do you mean, ‘they were going to be two fillies and a colt?’ They weren’t going to be. They are. They’re our foals, Pinkie’s and mine, and they don’t stop being our foals and Pinkie doesn’t stop being my wife just because they’re all dead. Where are they?”
“Well . . . well, I don’t know what the hospital policy is to . . .”
“WHERE ARE THEY?”
Nurse Redheart popped her head inside the door, alarmed by the shouting. One look at Cheese told her everything she needed to know.
“Go,” she hissed at the intern under her breath. “Just . . . make yourself useful somewhere else. So much for med school sensitivity training.” The intern almost ran out of the room. “I’m really sorry,” she said.
“Why does everypony keep saying that?”
The nurse sighed. “Because we don’t know what else to say,” she admitted. “There’s never anything good to say. Anyway, I was apologizing for Suture Thread. He’ll learn better with time, I hope, but that won’t do you much good now.”
She was calm, and at least somepony was making a little bit of sense.
“You can see the foals if you want to,” she said. “It’s up to you.”
He nodded. “I want to.”
“Well, they’re just down the hall, so—”
“I don’t want to leave her.”
She was quiet for a moment, and nodded. “Yes. I’ll have them brought to you. Take as much time as you like. And—and we do have grief counseling.”
“They never understand us, do they, Pinkie?” he murmured. “We never could be sad at the same time. And you asked me to make other ponies laugh for you when you couldn’t.” He sighed. “I guess it’s all down to me now.”
He looked up with a bright smile.
“Oh, that won’t be necessary.”
And Cheese Sandwich was never seen looking sad again. Not in public, anyway.
The funeral was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to live through. Everypony was so sad and miserable that his party pony instincts shrieked at him to cheer them up, and of course, that was what Pinkie had told him to do: make other ponies laugh when she couldn’t. At the same time, all he wanted was to crawl off by himself and grieve alone, but that wasn’t an option either. He had to force himself to keep his smile reasonable and not have it turn into a giant, manic grin, because otherwise everypony would have thought he’d gone mad, which sometimes he thought he really had.
He insisted on Silly String, Cheesecake Surprise, and Sachertorte being buried with their mother. To him, they were real little ponies with names and potential lives. It wasn’t their fault that they’d never had a chance to live them.
Even Maud wept, leaning her head against her sister’s coffin as tears streaked silently down her face, but Cheese didn’t. The worst was when everypony was asked to say something. Only Town Hall was large enough to hold all of Pinkie’s friends, and they spilled out the door and into the square. It was nice to see how many ponies loved Pinkie, but he knew that anyway.
Finally it was his turn. He dreaded this. Ponies assumed that it was easy for a performer to say things in public, but he rarely had to say anything as his private self without his accordion as his backup. He ended up saying, “I’m so glad Pinkie loved me and I’m glad that she was my wife, even if we couldn’t be together very long. Pinkie brought me nothing but Joy. And that makes me happy.”
They all walked up to Sweet Apple Acres. Applejack had insisted on offering a lovely spot on a hillside in the North Orchard, saying that as far as she was concerned, Pinkie was kin and belonged with her kinfolk. The Pies didn’t like taking charity from anypony, but they accepted. The rock farm was so far away and Applejack so sincere about calling Pinkie her cousin that they had to say yes. There were still blossoms on many of the apple trees, floating gently down and scenting the air, and Cheese thought that Pinkie would really have liked using them for party decorations. Then he walked back down the hill and left everypony he loved most up on the hillside. The next morning he opened up the joke shop he and Pinkie had bought from the previous owners and went on about his business, because Pinkie had left him a job to do, and by Gouda, he was going to do it.
It took months for reality to sink in. He noticed that Pinkie’s supply of bubble fluid was running low. Silly filly, she always forgot about things like that until the last minute. He was on his way to buy some more before he realized that, oh, right, Pinkie would never need more bubble fluid again, because she was dead. He stopped right where he was, in the middle of the street, sat down, tilted up his head, and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he got up, turned around, went home, bolted the door and pulled the blinds before he lost it.
“Ha,” he coughed, as the laughter stuck in his throat. “Ha-ha. Ah-ha-ha-ha.”
He learned how to fend for himself without Pinkie. He learned what baby alligators ate. The hardest was learning how to function in the kitchen without cutting himself, poisoning himself, or burning the house down. He never became a good cook, and nothing close to what Pinkie had been, but he learned enough to get by and even enough to bake a simple cake, which came in handy when her birthday rolled around.
He went out on the road whenever there was a party he had to throw, and when he wasn’t on the road, he came back home and opened up the joke shop. He didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t keep it open or why he shouldn’t just keep living in the flat they’d shared on the second floor. If he sold it and went back to living his old nomadic life, it would be as though Pinkie had never been in his life, and why would he want to pretend that when she was the best thing that had ever happened to him?
Fillies and colts loved the joke shop. He got to see Pound and Pumpkin Cake growing up and they brought their friends, and there were afternoons when the store was a riot of little ponies practically tearing the place apart or singing along to the accordion.
Pinkie’s friends didn’t forget her, or forget him. Nopony judged him for cracking jokes and throwing parties; nopony suggested he was heartless. They might not understand why Joy was so important and why he was killing himself trying to keep other ponies happy, but they gave him the benefit of the doubt. Ponyville missed Pinkie, but it did its best to love Cheese for her sake and then for his own, and he was grateful. They told each other that he was certainly adjusting well, and then they didn’t think about it at all anymore, except for one rainy evening when a mare in a purple hat and cloak came knocking on the door after the shop was closed. There were a few speculations about whether or not Cheese might be moving on, but since she left before midnight and never came back, everypony forgot all about it. He was happy to socialize or throw parties whenever he was asked, but not on May 3rd.
May 3rd belonged to him and his family, and to nopony else.
Every year, Cheese baked a birthday cake, put four candles on it, and threw a party for Pinkie and the foals. It was one of the few times when he allowed himself to talk to them. He didn’t do it much, as he was afraid he’d crack up and start doing it all the time. As long as the candles were still lit, he visited with them and caught them up on the news. He knew it was cheating to have extra-long candles this year, but he couldn’t help himself: he was feeling especially lonely, and it would have been the triplets’ tenth birthday. That meant—that meant he’d have been married to Pinkie for over eleven years by now. Eleven years married to Pinkie.
But he couldn’t allow his mind to wander to the life he could have had with her. He’d crack up if he thought about that too much, too. Instead, he played the accordion for them. After all, they’d seemed to appreciate it when Pinkie was pregnant, so it figured they would now.
“I can’t believe you guys are so grown up. I mean, you would be so grown up by now. Y’know, I was already pretty good at the accordion by the time I was your age.”
Yep, he thought, I would have started to sound like a boring grownup, but hey, I’m a boring grownup anyway.
“I was just about a total loss in every other way until I met your Mom, though. Yes, I was, Pinks. Well, you didn’t know me before I was cool. I was a total dork.”
“You’re still a total dork, Cheesie, but you’re my total dork.”
That was one good thing about the birthday party; he remembered things Pinkie had actually said to him. It was strange that it didn’t make him miss her more, but it didn’t. It felt almost as though she’d been there, even for just a second.
He remembered what they’d looked like, just in those few moments he’d been able to spend with them: Silly String’s two-toned pink mane and long legs, Sachertorte’s chocolate and pink mane, Cheesecake Surprise with her blue eyes like her mother’s. He could almost imagine what they’d have looked like, and he spent so much time with fillies and colts their age that he knew they’d already be bored by now.
“I don’t know what you would have done or what your cutie marks would have been; whether you would have been great in the kitchen like Pinkie or a disaster like me; whether you’d like singing and partying like us or just standing around staring at rocks like your Aunt Maud, but I hope you’d know this: that no matter what you did or chose to do, your mom and I loved you. All three of you were a surprise, but the best kind of surprise, and we wanted you. I’m glad you were almost in this world. I just wish you could have stayed. Now skedaddle, because I want to talk to your mom.”
He looked over at Pinkie’s chair. Ten years later, it was still Pinkie’s chair to him, and he still felt uneasy when anypony else sat down in it.
“I miss you so much, do you know that? Is there any way you can know? I don’t think so. You told me your Granny Pie left you laughter when she went away, and you left me yours, but I wish I could have had you instead. I’m not angry at you for wanting triplets. They would have been great. I hope you can forgive me for breaking you like that. I don’t think I’ll ever really forgive myself, but I’m trying. We were much too young and we took on too much, I guess, but I got carried away because I was so crazy in love with you and I still am.”
“Oh, by the way, Trixie stopped by. We’ve met on the road a few times, and I think she feels sorry for me. She wanted to say she was sorry for blowing me up and asked if there was anything she could do. Everypony says that, and it’s such a dumb thing to say. What am I supposed to say? ‘Sure! Can you bring back my wife and my children? Because that’s the only thing I want.’ Anyway, she meant well, and I thought I’d pass on her apology because you were much madder at her about it than I was.”
“I’m not you, Pinkie. I’ll never be you. I can’t make friends as easily as you did, and I can’t remember any birthdays except for yours, even when I try my hardest. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or what, but I totally blanked on Matilda’s birthday. I’m sorry. She was really nice about it, and I could tell she was thinking about you, but I wish I’d remembered.”
He rested his head between his hooves.
“I’m getting tired, Pinks. There’s still no new party ponies in Equestria. You’d think somewhere there would be a colt like me or a filly like you, wouldn’t you? Well, there could never be another filly like you, but you know what I mean. I wish somepony could take over making ponies happy. Then maybe I could just stop and try to do something else. But Ma Ponyacci says that being a party pony isn’t something you retire from, so I don’t know.”
The candles began to gutter and cast flickering shadows on the ceiling and walls.
“It always feels much too short. I’d give anything for it to be real—if you and they were really here with me—but I’m glad I can remember you, anyhow.”
“It’s time to say goodnight now. We’ll talk again on Hearth’s Warming Eve. Miss you. Love you. Forever.”
And then, in his mind, they were gone.
The first few years, he’d been so upset that he’d hurled the cake against the wall and let Gummy clean up the mess, but now he saved it for the fillies and colts who stopped by after school. It had been so long ago that most of them didn’t remember Pinkie and had no idea it was her birthday. They were just happy to have some cake and he was happy to let them have it, because he was never in the mood to eat it himself.
In a few minutes, he’d head upstairs to bed, hang his shirt in the half-empty closet, and go to sleep on his side of the bed. But first, he carefully snuffed each candle with his hoof. He never blew them out.
That would mean there was something still worth wishing for. And there wasn’t.
Author's Note
This fic has been in the back of my mind for a long time. When Pinkie Pride first aired and people began writing Cheesepie fics, a lot of people wrote stories about Pinkie dying and Cheese throwing her funeral. Cheese threw so many funerals that for a while, I began to think he was really a mortician. I thought, “I bet I could write a birthday party at least as sad as that!” and I’ve been planning Triple Slam ever since.
The other half of the idea came after I wrote Triple Threat. Adorable little fic about triplet foals, right? I got curious and looked up some stuff about multiple pregnancies in horses. It's depressing reading. Horse breeders just pray that their mares don't conceive twins and do everything they can to prevent it. Normally, the result is one or both foals being lost, but the mare can die, too. Triplets really are extremely rare: any foals or a mare that lives is even rarer. It wasn't hard to imagine that Pinkie might have bitten off more than she could chew.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I’m not trying to make some kind of political or moral point here. I’m just thinking about how sad this must be for people who have to go through something like this.
I was tempted to add a coda about how Cheese wakes up and it was a nightmare, but I hate those, so you can just consider that this is one way things could have gone after Great Expectations, and decide whether you like Triple Threat or Triple Slam better.
The chapter title is from Stop All The Clocks, a poem of the same name by W.H. Auden, one of my favorite depressing mourning poems of all time.
I commissioned the cover art from DragonFoxGirl, who allowed me to borrow her art for both Triple Threat and Great Expectations. (She did the silhouette at the bottom, too.) Now they really belong together as a suite, and the art for this is gorgeous.
Silly String belongs to PolkaHorse and Cheesecake Surprise to Batman Brony. The latter’s headcanon is that Surprise is actually Pinkie’s grandma. Both fillies appear in much happier conditions in Triple Threat.
I didn’t have a design for Sachertorte, but Carranzis has been working on one and the physical description is of her design.
And thank you so much for sticking with me through a fic that’s not quite as fluffy as the kind I usually write.
