The Mare You've Always Been
Cherry Bread and Graham Cracker were wailing over the body like banshees. Chip was rocking the infant back and forth in between licking the dampness off of its – her – fur. The foul liquid tasted like her elder sister, like blood, and like something – Chip wasn't sure what to call it. It was something out of her experience entirely. Momma Crispbread had run off to collect the stallionfolk. She'd left while Sheet's blood was still steaming on the foaling-bed, almost before the rattling had ended.
Oh, Celestia, was the foal not breathing? Chip frantically turned the foal's tiny head back and forth, trying to figure out how to clear her air passage. Wait, no, there she went again, her angry little voice adding a counter-harmony to those of her wailing aunts. Why wouldn't they shut up and deal with the situation like proper ponies?
Chip looked down at the umbilical cord and the placenta. Should they be cutting and tying it off? She didn't know! Oh, stars, the pony method of making new ponies was so gross, so terrible, so – what were they going to tell Mr. Punch? The birth had come early, he was still at his folks' home place over in Canterlot, coaxing them out to the sticks to meet their grandfoal when she came.
Well she'd come, that was for sure. Chip nuzzled the magenta-furred little bundle of rage, getting ready to cry herself. Sheet Cookie hadn't lived long enough to even know she'd had a daughter, there had just been too much blood, too fast. She hadn't told Chip what she'd planned to call the little filly. Maybe Mother Crispbread would know?
Where was Mother Crispbread? The elder sisters were hanging on to each other, and mourning their youngest sister the old way, the earth-pony way. Chip's eyes strayed to the little horn sticking up out of the forehead of her elder sister's new baby foal. The same color as her coat, off-set by the darker magenta of her tangled, damp mane.
How long has it been since there was a unicorn in the Cake family? Chip knew that Mother Crispbread had encouraged Sheet Cookie's courtship with Rum Punch, despite his… issues. She'd cryptically muttered something about maintenance, and ponies she could control.
Chip would like to see Mother Crispbread keep control over that lush without a wife to corral him. Would he take the foal away to be taken care of by his parents?
Maybe they could hide the horn until the Rums went away.
Here came Mother Crispbread, with the Tacks, and Papa Pischinger. Chip watched in dawning confusion and horror as they rolled up the bloody sheets with the cooling corpse inside of them, and then the bedding underneath of it, until the four stallions had a bundle of bloodstained cloth like a – shroud.
They hurried off, not saying a word. Chip started following her elders to offer whatever help she could, forgetting she was holding the foal.
"Sheet Cookie!” barked Mother Crispbread, grabbing her older daughters by the scruff of the neck before they followed the corpse and the stallions out the door. "Where are you going? Put down the foal, and let your idiot sisters meet their new niece! We're going to get new bedding on this bedframe, and then you will get back in your foal-bed to rest!”
For once, Chip's elder sisters were even more baffled than she was. Their mother's utter callousness had shocked them out of their keening, and the two of them stared at Mother Cripsbread if she'd sprouted bat's-wings from her withers, or manticore fangs from her jaw.
Then Chip saw the birth of understanding in Cherry Bread's eyes, and she suddenly remembered that Cherry Bread hadn't always been an elder sister.
Nopony in the Cake compound liked to talk about Cherry Bread's actual elder, the one who had been disowned, the one that had run off with her new husband after rooking the family out of a fabulously expensive wedding. The Cakes were good at pretending away problems. Especially when those problems took themselves out of sight, out of mind. And Pink Cherry Loaf was well on her way to being pretended right out of the family register, leaving only the very-much-still-in-evidence Cherry Bread as an honorary 'elder'.
"Yes, you fool of a filly. The foaling has taken a lot out of you, hasn't it? In fact, you may be a bit forgetful for a while until you get over the shock of your early birthing. Didn't quite know what we were getting into, carrying a unicorn's foal to term, did we?”
"Mother Crispbread, I don't quite understand-"
"You are never to call me that again, Sheet Cookie. Come here, let's talk in the hallway. Cherry, Grammy, take care of your niece, see if you can't find some spare bedding for this damnable bed while I talk with my daughter.”
She called Chip her daughter. Mother Crispbread – what did she want Chip to call her now, if that was forbidden? The Cake matriarch never, ever claimed the 'little siblings', the mirror-clones as her children. They were always 'Sheet Cookie's girl', 'Hardtack's younger one', 'the other one'. She'd occasionally claimed Cherry Bread after Pink Cherry Loaf had abandoned the family, but that had always been in public. It was a matter of preserving muzzle, not a real family thing. As far as Mother Crispbread had been concerned, Cherry Bread was just a cheap replacement for the original equipment. Or at least, that was what Chip had always assumed…
"Now, you idiot foal. Wipe that miserable baffled look off of your muzzle. Today is the happiest day of your dimwitted life! Today is also the first day of your life, but you are never, ever to tell anypony that. Not the foal, not the neighbors, not even your foolish siblings. You should be thankful, thankful to the dead, and to the living. You just became a pony, Miss Sheet Cookie.”
"But, but Miss Sheet-"
"I won't say it again! Your name is Sheet Cookie! You're a new mother! You're a baker, from a family of respected bakers! You've always been Sheet Cookie! Yes, you lost a little sibling, but there are always more like Chip out there in the Everfree. We pass through the terrors of the forest, the horrors of the dark, and come out with help-meets to live our lives, do our work, carry our burdens. We are thankful for our little sibings. They are posterity's gift to us, Ponyville's own special, secret gift to herself, from herself.”
Crispbread got a distant look in her eyes, and looked through Chip into the past.
"The little siblings aren't ponies. They wear the shape, they speak like ponies, they think like ponies, they even act like ponies. But as long as their creators still exist, as long as the ritual wasn't botched, we're not ponies. We're – they're not real. It's a little trick that the original settlers invented to keep the line, to keep up our numbers. To outnumber what we couldn't face down by ourselves.”
The elder pony stomped her hooves in a fury.
"Do you think you're the first pool-clone to lose her progenitor? Do you think you're the four hundredth? The pool was made to make spear-fodder. To stop the timberwolves' jaws, until our creators could bring them down while they choked on our dead! And yes, occasionally, to replace one of the progenitors when they fell in the fray.”
"We?”
"Focus, girl! It happens! I tell you now something that will never go past our four ears – the founder of the family, they say he died five times before the he died the last death, of old age in the main house. Yes, the one that burned down just before you pulled Chip out of the pool.”
"Crumble Cake was a mirror-pool cl-"
"NO HE WAS NOT! Crumble Cake was a bona fide hero, a legend! And he was that same genuine hero, after every single death! The meat his followers returned to the mirror-pool was nothing but a shed hide, a mirror-clone who died for the family.”
"Your Chip, your brave, lovely Chip, died for your sake, and for your beautiful new daughter. Not every mirror clone can say they died so well. Mourn your little sister, Sheet Cookie, and give your new daughter a proper name, one that her Rum grandparents and your husband will be flattered by, and distracted by. What name will you give her?”
"I, I was thinking maybe – Berryshine? She's got the coat, and that mane. And she's so pretty…”
Crispbread – no, Momma – Momma backed off a little bit, and a bit of warmth entered her eyes. She looked at Chip – looked at Sheet Cookie like she'd never looked at her before. With something like compassion, and maybe even-
"That's good. Very good. You've already started bonding. You'll need that. Because you will need to dig deep, and try to remember how to be yourself for your stallion when he gets here. Good thing nopony expects a mother to have relations with her husband for a while after the foaling, it'll give you time to get used to the idea. Alicorns know, it took some getting used to Pischinger.”
"You're not saying that Papa Pischinger-"
"Just Papa! No using 'little sibling' words anymore, Sheet Cookie!”
"Papa was a, a little sibling?”
"Oh, moon and stars, no, what gave you – child, you're not the first Cake to die in childbirth. I lost my own little sister giving birth to Cherry Bread's ungrateful horse of an elder sister.”
"Momma, you were a –"
"I am your mother, as well as that of the other children. I'm even that miserable disappointment Pink Cherry Loaf's mother, although maybe she never spent any time in this particular body's womb like the rest of them did. Because I was always Crispbread! Just as you always have been Sheet Cookie!”
Then she cracked Sheet Cookie across the ears with a hard hoof.
"Now stop dwelling over the past, and get back in there, get under the sheets, and look wan! We need to get the milkmare in here to do her magic over your teats, the child has to be getting hungry. And speaking of which, you better work up an appetite, that placenta won't eat itself.”
