High Flyer always dreaded the ringing of his cloud home's front doorbell.
The sound, usually—thankfully—a rare one, always signified the coming of some random stranger vying for his attention and pestering him with something terrifying, like the census or the local baking competition. There was something that inwardly scared High Flyer about other ponies, something that he was pretty much too nervous to mull on. Maybe that's why he'd bought his house in the sky, when there were plenty of much nicer ground homes for considerably less prices. Up here, only Pegasi or incredibly resilient party ponies could bother him, which generally meant that he could spend most of his days in a relaxing bout of isolation, far away from anyone who could wish to bother him.
Why would anypony in their right mind want to talk to him anyway? He wasn't rude, per say, just... awkward...?
Talking wasn't something he was really, well, good at, whenever it came up. Not to say that he had different interests than the other residents of Ponyville—if he could even call himself a resident of the town—who loved talking about how proud they were of housing the legendary Elements of Harmony themselves, or how often their lives were in danger, but he had different... things to say about them. Weird things, apparently, if the odd looks and quiet whispers at his rare social events meant anything. Even if he hadn't said a word, ponies tended to turn their heads and murmur things to each other. Maybe they were just surprised to see the town hermit finally standing on the dirt. Maybe they wanted to be his friends, but didn't know how to approach him.
In the end, though, there was an underlying reason why he'd decided to buy a cloud house instead of a ground one, and that was because he didn't like to be around other ponies. The doorbell, and the door it accompanied, was his last connection to the outside world, and with its deafening ringing always echoing through his many halls, he remained attached to the world of Equestria no matter how much he didn't like it.
A small orange filly dressed in a weird skirt with a rainbow maned psycho next to her asking about cookies? He'd seen them.
A yellow mare with a pink mane asking if he'd seen her crows? He'd closed the door on her.
Some deranged goat thing with snapping claws and suddenly appearing chocolate milk? He'd hid in the closet from him too.
He'd like nothing else than to simply ignore his doorbell, but, well, he had to receive checks from his mother somehow.
Today was no different. It wasn't a check—no, he'd gotten that Sunday—so his normally swift step was much less so. He'd recently realized that he had enough money to buy one of those cool blenders that could mix whatever you threw in it into a smoothie, and so he'd scoured through his old Save More's catalogs to order one. To be honest, he thought that the whole idea of such a thing sounded super dumb, but, hey, he had leftover fruits and vegetables. Why not do something with them? If there was anything better than eating, it was eating a lot of things at the same time, and he could do that with one of those blenders.
So, scraping together the courage to go outside his front door, he stuck a check into an envelope, scribbled the store's address down hastily on top of it, licked it closed, and threw it into his mailbox. Already exhausted, with his mane and wings sweatier than a bulldog on a summer day, High Flyer returned to the inside of his home and waited for the mailmare or whoever to retrieve his letter.
A full week had gone by since that Tuesday, which meant that he'd be getting his new machine at literally any time. He'd prepared himself for the second he heard the ring ring ringing of his doorbell and devised a scheme so well rehearsed he was practically a member of the Canterlot Symphony, and when it finally came, he promptly forgot everything he'd planned and scurried carefully toward the front door of his house.
He pressed his back against the wooden closet containing all his food, inched to his left side, and peeked his head out to stare down the stairs. From behind the circle of glass embedded in the middle of his door, he could plainly see the blurred silhouette of the mailpony, who stood almost like a statue as if trying to look back at him from his front porch. His breath caught in his throat as the figure cocked their head to their left, and then to their right, before seemingly raising a foreleg and staring at it. Oh no, they were wearing a watch!
They had better things to be doing today, and here he was prolonging their busy schedule by hiding from their gaze like some meek house cat. He swallowed a lump down his throat and felt a chill crawl up and down his spine. Bearing his teeth, he felt his mind go blank, and he stayed rooted to the fluffy floor where he stood.
The figure suddenly disappeared.
He blinked rapidly. Where... were– were they gone? Had they flown off, unsuccessful at rousing him from whatever he was doing? Maybe they'd left his package on the porch. He gave a half-hearted, tried smile. That would be the best case scenario, if anything. He didn't have to talk to somepony, and he still got his box. The mailpony did their job, and could continue doing it without meeting him! Everypony wins!
Creeping out from behind the corner, he began to descend his steps with a chuckle escaping his wobbly lips. He'd done it! Now, he could go and start blending some stuff. If he remembered, he had some bananas and apples lying around in his fridge somewhere. He could probably start his blending frenzy with the most common of–
DING DONG!
He froze, his heart going into a crazed fever as his chest heaved and ho'd. His eyes grew wider than the dinner plates in his cabinet when the figure reappeared in the window of his front door.
From what little he could see of them, they leaned over to their right and... waved at him!
They saw him!
He turned about frantically, looking for a way out. Maybe he could pretend to be a statue, or, or, or, maybe he could pretend to be deaf! Blind? Maybe he was having a hard time finding the front door because he couldn't see! Then again, a blind guy wouldn't go and buy a blender now, would they? Unless they had a household aid or something like that. Somepony who came over everyday to help him do daily stuff like walk and brush his teeth. He'd seen commercials for–
DING DONG!
His voice, unrehearsed and heavily underused, came out in a terrified stammer. "I–I'm coming!"
He was in the middle of the staircase. There was no getting out of this. Sucking in a breath, he slowly trotted down the last few steps, raised a shaky hoof up to his doorknob, and cracked his door open just enough for his package to slide through. The least amount of skin he could show was the best amount, for both him and whoever was waiting for him on the other side.
High Flyer poked his head out, a quickly made-up excuse on his tongue, when his jaw dropped to the floor by his hooves.
The most... beautiful mare he'd ever seen in his entire life was sitting patiently before him, her mail bags bursting with envelopes and letters and her brown delivery hat tilted slightly on her heavenly, blonde mane. She cocked her bluish-gray head at him with a drop-dead cute smile tugging at her lips, then waggled her eyebrows with a little hum that caused his heart to stop. He'd never seen this mare before! It was usually the brown stallion with the thick beard, who looked at him with curiosity and talked up an unwanted storm! Was she new? Was...
...he shook his head and found the mare holding a large rectangular cardboard box in her hooves. It looked almost too small for it to be a blender. Maybe it was just in pieces, y'know, some assembly required.
The mailmare craned her neck to her right and bit down on the top of a clipboard, then placed it in her grasp and hummed at it.
"I think I'll need a signature..." she began, effectively ceasing High Flyer's train of thought with her Gods-sent voice that he swore was the first thing you heard when you died, "...but I'm not..." she trailed off again, narrowing her yellow eyes and scanning the paper in her hooves, "...really sure where..." She scrunched up her nose in obvious annoyance, her eyes going wobbly as she continued her aggressive search. High Flyer, realizing that he wasn't breathing, sucked in a breath of air with the unmistakable sound of a hot dog mortar. If he so happened to pass away at this exact moment in time, this angel of above fuming in front of him with his blender by her side, he wouldn't have made a huge fuss.
The mailmare, expression softening, tilted her head, let out a low note, then suddenly giggled and turned her clipboard completely upside-down. "Whoops!" She laughed sweetly, "I had it upside-down! Sorry!"
"It's alright, gorgeous," High Flyer tried to say.
"What, you, yeah, y-you too," High Flyer stuttered out instead. He pressed his lips against his cheeks as he realized his mistake, and was about to correct himself when the mailmare thrust the clipboard toward him.
"Alright! Just sign on the bottom, please!"
Reaching forward, a dumb, googly-eyed expression plastered on his face, High Flyer grabbed at the pen haphazardly taped to the side of the clipboard, tried his hardest to wrestle it free, and succeeded in doing so as the mare simply stared at him patiently.
Coiling his hoof around it, he brought its tip over to the paper...
...and suddenly dropped the pen to the floor.
"I'll–"
"I'll get it!" He claimed, bending over to retrieve it so that she didn't have to.
Feeling something hard contact with his skull, he ground his teeth together and grabbed at his head, recoiling back with a wince and a short, astute, "Ouch!"
Rubbing at his injury, he cracked open an eyelid and found the mare doing the same.
Oh Gods, he'd just hurt her!
"I'm sorry–"
"Sorry!"
They looked at each other in silence, still assessing their heads.
High Flyer sucked on his bottom lip, thinking up another, better, apology. The mailmare mirrored him.
She turned away for a few seconds, eyes still half-lidded in pain, before she straightened her back and gasped. "Oh no! I'm late again!" Scurrying to her hooves, she gathered up her clipboard, fluttered her wings, and stepped away from where High Flyer still sat in a dumbfounded daze. "Have a good day!" Flapping now, she lifted off his porch at a really weird angle, turned her head, and gave him a little wave and a smile, then flew away at a speed that definitely didn't show any sign of panic.
High Flyer continued staring at where the mare had disappeared from his sights, heart beating out of his chest.
His eyes flickered down to the ground in front of him, finding her pen still lying where it had fallen.
Bending over and finally picking it up, he gazed back to the sky with a goofy grin stretching to both his ears, chuckled, and spoke to the clouds.
"I love you."
Author's Note
Something different! Had an idea for this while on my way back from a hunting trip, blaring Mail It In in my ears. Let me know what you think! Thanks ! 
The Hardest Part Of Waking Up
High Flyer dreaded his front door's doorbell. That much was easy to say.
It was the scariest tether to the rest of Equestria that he still had. He could close the blinds on his many windows and shut away the sun and the other clouds floating routinely around him. He could grab the hammer from his closet and tear down his mailbox bit by bit until nothing but its small wooden post remained next to his porch. He could even grab some cumulus and stratus clouds and bury his entire house underneath them, effectively hiding his residence away under the very convincing disguise of a gargantuan cumulonimbus.
If he could muster up the courage to even grab hold of his door knob, he could go off and do all three of those right now, even.
But the door and its doorbell were a terrifying force, one to both cower and shy away from, in that exact order if he was able.
His wobbling, glazed eyeballs slowly focused on the lone item lying in front of him on his kitchen table.
This pen—this... daunting pen—with its dark blue exterior lined with golden lightning bolts and the title Ponyville Postal Service, was something else entirely. The horrifying beast with huge teeth and a taste for Pegasi that lived under his bed when he was a colt. The nightmares that woke him up every hour, on the hour, after his first day of school. The letters and reports, with their big red notices, filling his house after high school. He had been equally, gravely scared of each and every single one of them, and no matter how much he tried to fight them back, and no matter how many times he thought he'd succeeded in doing so, they still turned up right in front of him.
This was a more literal example, but he still shrank in his wooden chair and gulped all the same.
His height now reminiscent of his days as a child barely able to look over the counter of the local confectionary, High Flyer brought a shaky hoof up and inched it toward the writing tool now angrily glaring at him from its position next to his glass. Oh Gods, what if it had a tracer like those old spy movies?
High Flyer retracted the hoof with a breath of air sucking violently back into his troubled lungs. He turned his head and regarded the pen with a downturned flashing of his teeth. What if the post office knew where it was right now? He cleared his throat, not even realizing he was sitting up until he felt his leg press against his cheek. Their pens were pretty important to their jobs. It was the only way they could sign off packages. They couldn't just use any old pen. They probably had hundreds of these pens back at their headquarters!
What if they counted all of them? What if they had to take a tally of each and every one of these little itty bitty pens that came back day by day? What if they were checking off the pens for the day yesterday, humming along and waiting to get home and eat a nice bowl of ravioli, and when they reached Pen #36, they received nothing but a silent room and a shifting of beautiful golden eyes?
Oh Gods he'd gotten her in trouble. He'd dropped the pen and caused her to leave, and she'd left without getting it because he'd just hit her on the head and probably gave her a concussion or something and she wasn't thinking right. It was his fault. She was gonna get fired, or lose her week's pay or salary or whatever, and he was to blame. This one customer, this one shut-in with a dumb blender had been her downfall. She'd probably been working there for years, with not a single problem bothering her her whole career until the day she'd been sent to deliver a blender to one High Flyer in his isolated cloud house too high in the sky.
He flew back to reality when he realized he was touching the pen again. He shot back. Right. Tracking device. They probably had hoofprint detectors as well.
He decided that a monitor tiny enough to fit inside the pen would've been too expensive, so he craned his neck around, tilted his head, and simply stared at the writing—neigh, checkmarking—tool with a hint of anxiousness plaguing his brow. He could return it, couldn't he? He could go out and put it in the mailbox, couldn't he? He'd done it before with the blender form just last week, right? He could do it again!
Wait how was he gonna get it into the mailbox if he couldn't touch it.
Oh Gods.
He flicked his head around and stared into his kitchen.
Eyes narrowed when they landed on their mark, and so, hopping off his chair with a new mission on his mind, High Flyer walked toward the pair of tongs nestled peacefully inside the bucket next to his microwave, grabbed at them with his wings, missed, toppled the entire bucket to the floor, yelped a very girly yelp, stepped back, cleared his throat, looked at the nopony staring back at him in the microwave's reflection, bent over, grasped the tongs in his teeth, and promised he'd pick up the spatulas, scrapers, tossers, rubber chickens, and knives now littering his fluffy floor later.
Turning about, he walked back to his kitchen table with the tongs now tainting his tongue with a very gross taste of rubber. He opened his mouth and lulled his tongue out which, as expected, sent the tongs back to the ground where they honestly should have stayed. He stopped in his tracks, leaning over and picking it up in his teeth yet again, and finally reached the end of his table, where he now stood in silence.
His mane a horrible, stress tussled mess, his forehead matted with drops of sweat, his eyes wobbling violently in their homes, his hooves shaking on the spot, his mouth clenching down on a pair of rubber-tipped tongs, and his kitchen table bearing nothing but a small blue pen, High Flyer stared. His dining room seemed a lot larger than he'd thought right now. Since when did he make his current spot thousands of miles away from where he'd be eating? That was definitely gonna be a blinding headache—a lot like the one he was having now, actually—when he next made some mac 'n' cheese.
He wiped his brow with a hoof. He turned to the thermometer next to him on the wall. When did he crank it up to a thousand degrees? Was it getting hot in here? It definitely wasn't him, so he couldn't say that, but he was sure he would've noticed.
The pen lying on the table in front of him glared back with all the ferocity of the sun he didn't look at.
He shirked away, then realized he was about to run and hide from a pen.
He shot a burst of air out of his nose, cleared his throat, and leaned forward. As one would expect with a lack of opposable thumbs and the forced use of a mouth, using a pair of tongs to grab a pen on a table was looking to be a pretty difficult task. Only when he was in the most uncomfortable positions—his neck straining, molars crunching on the rubber tips, and his jaw surging with exhaustion—did he find success, and as he walked out of the kitchen, he realized all too late that he didn't know what the address for the delivery company was.
High Flyer halted, still in his position. Ponies came by and checked the mailbox though, didn't they? It wasn't magic that took his blender letter last week. Somepony had to fly by and get it, otherwise he wouldn't be not using it right now. They'd recognize their pen if he just threw it in there and left it. They had to. Their pens were one of a kind, with their own name printed right on it. Then again, he could very easily just get one at the actual building itself. He'd never been, but he was sure they had a little tin of them sitting on the counter for ponies to use if they needed them. People probably left with a lot of them by accident. He couldn't have been the only one to have one in his house. Maybe they needed a pen because they didn't have one at home. Maybe they had just forgotten they were holding it. He'd done that a few times with food. French fries especially.
He danced his eyes around and focused on the pen sitting crookedly within the iron grasp of his tongs.
Maybe they wouldn't take it. If it doesn't have an address, they can't take it. Return to sender.
He blinked. The pen reappeared in front of him each time.
He thought back to the mailmare in all her gorgeous glory. Her blonde mane and soft yellow eyes. Her cute little delivery cap with the company's logo sewn into it. The way she talked to him with the bubbly attitude and bunched-up grin of somepony who didn't know who he was. He didn't wanna get her in trouble. She obviously loved her job. You couldn't really enjoy talking to other ponies on a daily basis, because it didn't make much sense to him, but she clearly did. Maybe she liked the excited looks on a pony's face after getting letters from loved ones they hadn't talked to. Deliveries of flowers, or birthday presents, or food. Always with smiles, to and back.
She needed this pen.
High Flyer, very lightly, let go of the tongs and reached a hoof up to grab at them. Placing the cooking utensil onto his nearby couch, he looked at his coffee table and saw something that made his heart stop for longer than was considered still alive.
Trotting ever so slowly toward it, he knew exactly what it was and what it presented him.
Bringing up a hoof, he coiled his foreleg around and began staring at his Save More's catalog.
He could buy something else, and thereby have somepony to explain the whole situation to. They'd take the pen, and give it back to their boss, and she wouldn't be fired. He'd save her career, and feel good about himself.
What to buy, though? He wasn't really in a desperate need for something like he had been for the blender.
He blinked.
The catalog in his hold blurred as he looked behind it and at the table it had been sitting on.
Coffee.
Why did he even own a coffee table if he couldn't make coffee?
...
That's it!
Plopping his rear on his couch, he threw his available hoof against his catalog's pages, looking for a coffee maker. There had to be one! Save More's sold everything! Wait stop, there's one! Going back a few pages, he narrowed in on one such dastardly machine... and promptly felt his heart sink when he saw the price.
His mouth hung open and would begin attracting flies.
The catalog shook.
It didn't even take him a second before he took out an envelope and began scribbling down the address with her pen.
He was gonna save her, and he was gonna do it with nothing but paper, spit, and the courage of stepping out his front door.
