Pinkie Pie, and Nothing More
Pinkie Pie, and Nothing More
by Present Perfect
"How could I have forgotten my own birthday?"
Such a convenient excuse it was. You're so random, they'd say, then laugh it off and enjoy the party. The truth was, she'd been trying to forget. It was why she'd been on edge all day, so quick to suspect that her friends had wanted to ditch her.
"We should do this again soon."
It wasn't as though Pinkie hadn't known what was meant. But after seeing the calendar page and letting the date sink into her mind like a cold ice pick, hiding behind that 'random' interpretation of Twilight's casual statement seemed the best way to delay the inevitable. Fill the day with parties and you won't have to think about it so much.
And she really hadn't expected the surprise party. Sure, she knew everypony in Ponyville by sight, but that didn't mean she shared her intimate details with them. She hadn't even necessarily been real friends with Rainbow Dash or the others before Twilight came along, just the pink pony who always threw the best parties.
Everypony loves my parties.
They couldn't have known what would happen, of course. But now with the party over, her friends having long cleaned up Applejack's barn, she was soaking her pillow with tears, none but Gummy any the wiser to her inner tumult.
"Pinkie, we need to talk."
It was bad news when ma called her Pinkie. She had put on a smile, hoping for the best while bracing herself for... what, exactly?
"Your pa and I have been discussin' things, and... well, we feel it's about time ya left the nest."
"Leave the nest? C'mon, mama, I'm not a bird!"
Laughter had been her first reaction, playing dumb her best defense; they always expected obliviousness. Blood screamed through her veins like fire rushing through a dry forest.
"What yer mama's tryin' to say is... Er, well..."
Mutton Pie had cleared his throat, pawed at the ground. Neither of them had ever been any good at these talks, but her father was undoubtedly the worse.
"What your pa's tryin' to say is that you really don't fit in here, Pinkamina."
Her mother had winced as soon as the words had left her mouth; that must not have been how she'd wanted to put it. No doubt she'd been rehearsing this speech for... Hours? Days?
Pa had looked away. Pinkie felt her eyes grow watery. She tried to hold the emotions back, smiled wider; at that point, it only looked pathetic.
"What I mean is, well... We're afraid that you aren't comfortable here, that we're holding you back from what it is that you really want to do. Your parties, I mean."
She had cried. How could this be happening? What had she done wrong? Hadn't her parents and sisters always liked her parties? Even their neighbors and friends had said they'd enjoyed them when they'd been invited over! Were parties not enough? What could she be doing better? Why was it always her who wasn't good enough? Blinky was learning how to manage the farm; Inky was off studying at college. Pinkie, the youngest, was left at home, to be the continual disappointment.
Mutton had cleared his throat again, and continued to not look at her.
"We've, ah, set you up with a friend of yore mama's. She 'n her husband run a cake shop in Ponyville. They've offered to put you up and teach you their trade."
"It'll be a nice place for you to live, Pinkie. And you can... you can make new friends! You like doin' that, right?"
"So I don't get any say in this?"
It had come out harsher than she'd intended it to.
"Don't you speak to your father like that, young lady!"
"Roxy, please, this is hard enough."
Hard on whom, exactly? The words were just pouring right on out of him, after all.
"Pinkie, we're just tryin' to look out for you. We only want what's best for you..."
"What's best for me? How would you know anything about what's best for me?"
"Pinkamina Diane, now you just listen..."
"No! You're the ones who aren't listening! I'm happy here! Why can't you let me figure things out on my own?"
They didn't have an answer for that, or if they did they didn't share it with her. She'd always had trouble understanding the ways of the world. What worked best was just being left to tackle life at her own pace. Yes, she needed to be able to get a job and provide for herself, and hanging around the farm wasn't going to let her do that, but leaving wasn't going to make things any easier. She wasn't ready.
Understanding that hadn't made it hurt any less. Their sharp glares had softened to looks of pity.
"I just... I just..."
She was overwhelmed by sadness; forming sentences was out of the question.
"Pinkie, just go to your room and... think it over. Please."
Her mother's tone was appallingly gentle, for a mare who had always been anything but. The pitying looks bored into her. Poor, stupid filly.
Her vision blurred; she didn't know what was happening. She arrived at the staircase, stopped, turned back to them.
"But why did you... Why on my birthday?"
The look they'd shared had professed their sin of forgetting. She'd turned tail, fled upstairs, slammed the door, cried until her throat hurt, swore she'd never forgive them.
She'd moved in with Cup Cake and her husband, Carrot Cake, of course, but all the while she told herself it was in spite of what her parents had done for her, not because of it. She'd make new friends, throw bigger, better parties than before, and forget all about them. It didn't matter that she'd blossomed there into the pony she was today; she could never forgive them for what they'd done.
Nor could she forget the date on which it had happened.
On that day, as she had cried on her bed, something inside her had snapped, like a violin string that had been bowed too long. The frayed ends curled up and lashed at her, gouging her psyche until it cried for mercy. The strings kept snapping, kept digging, until they'd formed a trench, and then a chasm. And then all the hate and all the hurt that had been coursing through her welled up into one sticky glob and oozed across the gap, leaving a burning bridge in its wake.
She grew happier, then: not due to any great well of positivity inside her, but because of that measured partitioning of all negativity. It lived on within, inaccessible, until things started going wrong. The first time, some older colts had crashed one of her parties. Standing amidst the banner ruined with cake and frosting, the popped balloons, torn streamers and broken chairs, something inside her had whirled to life, like a switch had been pressed, and she had turned off. She still had no recollection of what had occurred that day. All she knew was what had been revealed in nightmares, and what little she could piece together from her schoolmates, who had become suddenly too nervous and busy to hang out with her.
The second time was shortly after that, a direct result of that debacle. This time, she did have memories, if only in flashes. A little pegasus had had to go to the hospital. The Cakes had sent her to Mister Hoofbender, the Ponyville school counselor, who'd helped her find ways to control the black oil frothing in her mind, to keep it from slipping away from her. At the very least, she could feel when it was coming on and get away from the triggering situation. There had been one or two slipups since then, but only minor. She hadn't had a "mishap" for years. She'd thought she had finally moved past it all.
Then came today, when her friends tried to throw her a surprise party. The rage had reared its ugly head and made a fool of her. The disappointment she felt for herself was unutterable. It could have been much, much worse, yes, and for that minimum of restraint she thanked the counselor. But what Rainbow Dash had seen, she could never live down, even if her pegasus friend had played it off as "just being Pinkie Pie".
What did that even mean, being Pinkie Pie? There was only her, and that other part of her that was still who she was, even if she tried to keep it hidden, keep it quashed beneath her mental heel, grinding its bones into the earth until they became dust. The dust had arisen on a furious wind, mixed with her tears and become living concrete. It had attacked her, and she hadn't even had a chair, let alone a whip, to fend it off. She was the one suffocating under the heel of her own id.
"Being Pinkie Pie" was no laughing matter.
Out of tears now, she stripped the pillow of its dampened casing, not bothering to fetch a new one. Dragging herself into the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face. It relieved the stinging in her eyes, if not in her heart. She looked into the mirror.
"Oh, Pinkie Pie, what are you so sad about?"
Hearing the words come out of her mouth shocked her.
I was rejected by my own parents! On my birthday! Why shouldn't I be sad?
"So your parents ruined one birthday. It's understandable that you'd be sad about that, maybe even for a few birthdays after. But crying because your friends remembered your birthday, even when you hadn't told them, is just silly. You should be thankful you have such great friends to enjoy your birthday with!"
But I acted like an idiot! My friends saw my worst side; they saw you.
"Did they see me? Or did they see you? Maybe they saw us, and that's what's so frightening."
I can never face them again.
"What, are you just going to stay locked in your room, hiding under your bed, never to see the sun? We'll be eating cockroaches and Sir Lints-a-Lot by the end of the week."
Stop saying 'we'! Who are you?
"That's not the right question to be asking, now, is it?"
Who is... am... I?
"I was thinking more along the lines of, who are you when all the parties are over, the cake is eaten, the punch has been drunk? Who are you when the rage comes? Who are you when it subsides? Who are you right now? Are you me?"
Am I me? That's ridiculous, who else could I possibly be? ...I'm talking to myself, aren't I?
"You're talking to me, and I'm making a distinction between me and you. What does that tell you?"
That I'm crazy.
"You're upset."
I'm not even in control of myself. How can I know which of us is the real me?
"That depends. Which do you want it to be?"
I don't know. Which is the good Pinkie, which is the bad?
"Does it need to be black and white when we're both pink? You're the only one who can decide."
I want to be the good Pinkie, I really do. But bad things keep happening...
"And whose fault is that?"
I don't know.
"Admitting you have a problem is the first step to solving it."
You sound like Mr. Hoofbender.
"And why not? He did a lot of good for us."
Did he? If you're still here, and I'm still here, I don't think that's very good at all.
"But things could have gone much worse. Let's not dwell on the negative. Instead, ask yourself, what went wrong? What can be done better next time?"
I can stay away from birthdays.
"I already told you that's not going to work. THINK. What is it you want?"
...I want them to forgive me. Can they ever forgive me for acting the way I did?
"What was that? I thought I heard you say something important there..."
Did I just take responsibility for my actions?
"Yeah, I guess I did. I've been avoiding birthdays, and avoiding these feelings, for so long because I didn't want to face up to that one day ever again, but now I have lots of friends, good friends who care about me."
They did their best to make sure we had the best birthday ever. And we don't ever have to be alone or disappointed on our birthday again.
"Celebrating your birthday with friends is the bestest thing ever! I even said so myself!" She blinked away tears. "Will that be enough to make the bad feelings stop?"
Maybe. Most likely not. This isn't really about birthdays, after all.
"But maybe we won't have to feel them as often. That would be so nice. I thought I was through with this... I don't want to feel that again if I can help it."
You'll never be through with me. I'll always be right here, you know that.
"I know. And I'll always be here, too."
Will you?
"Yup! We won't ever be lonely, right?"
Right, Pinkie Pie. Together forever.
"Together forever... That's the Pinkie Pie I know." She looked herself in the eyes and smiled. Behind the smile, something slunk back into the chasm and cringed.
Author's Note
I just turned 30, and, being someone who really hates birthdays in general, I was especially dreading this one. Leaving behind my twenties was hard, but it turned out that I had a great day, and that was made possible in part by lots of friends wishing me well. It sounds cheesy, but it was the power of friendship that made me not hate the one birthday I was all set to hate.
I wanted to give Pinkie some of that same friendship power, while answering the question, "How could she have forgotten her own birthday?" I mean, isn't she the sort of pony that would jump at the chance to have a party for any small reason, and doubly so for a big one like her birthday?
In answering those questions, I came up with this... and then it turned into a monster. This fic is frankly bigger than me, and I hope that, in the end, I've done it justice. Like Pinkie said, it's not really about birthdays anymore.
However it's turned out, I could not have gotten this far without input from the likes of Minty Rest, Pseudonym, Draco Dynasty, Mask of Data, and the unending support and encouragement of the inimitable Samurai ~~Jack~~ Anon. I'd also like to thank the Samurai for the title.
When I was done writing this, I went and made some damn cupcakes.
Thank you for reading!
