On a clear spring night in Ponyville, when the chirping of early cicada and flutter of dandelion seeds gives way to the lovesong of crickets and the tantalizing elixir of jasmine and lilac, one can see clear to the spires of Canterlot high above. An ancient folklorist, whose words have long outdistanced his or her unknowable countenance, once coined the phrase “Luna’s Grace” to identify such nights. It is a reference to the gentleness of the moon; reaching down with pale tendrils of soft light to enfold each child of Equestria and bear them through their rest in comfort and safety. These are nights without fear, where boogeymen take the evening off to play at hackey sack in the thickets, and foals leave their bedroom windows open to giggle away their thoughts of tomorrow while the warm breeze kisses their cheeks goodnight.
On one such night, in the sleepy hamlet of Ponyville, a mare of happiness sings a lullaby to a pair of foals bound to her by nothing more than mutual affection. They are eager tots, prone to trouble and sleeplessness, but she has worn them well, and for her they cozy up together in a wide crib as they try in vain to banish sleep from their eyes.
Her words are thus:
“Hush your sighs, little foals
Shush your cries, little foals
Thy rest is here, shed not a tear
For whilst you sleep, know I am here
Off where led, little foals
Where light beams, little foals
The clouds steer you right; fly, have no fright
For whilst you sleep, know I am here.”
By the final words they are fast into distant landscapes, populated by the innocent wonders of their own minds. With bubblegum lips she places kisses upon each forehead, taking care to mind the tiny horn beneath the filly’s carrot top mane. She arranges their blankets, tucking the wings of the already snoring colt back in as she pushes the window open just enough to send a dulcet breeze through the gathering of falsetto wind chimes that live there.
She pauses, her cerulean eyes on the world beyond her adopted abode. In a smattering of homes a light or two still glows, and these residences she knows by heart. She can name each member of the families that live there, and arrives instantly at the reason for every insomniac living room. Some enjoy being up late, while others do so to keep time with the hours of their vocation. Still a few more are simply prone to sleeplessness. Her mind is a wealth of information about all of them, and she has run it sharp upon the whetstone until the need to consult her expansive physical records has become sporadic. Their birthdays she can recite by heart, alongside their favorite selections in color, decor, and cake frosting.
A lone crier beneath a burning streetlight calls the hour, and she is brought back to herself. This is not her time, and by rights she should be as unconscious as the little ones to whom she tends. With sleep on her mind she whisks back into the nursery, pausing only in the center of the room to take stock of herself.
She is not tired. The blood pulses between her ears with all the force of a cute-ceañera in full swing - this in spite of the haggard reflection that watches her from the mirror over the changing table. Her condition escapes her until the addled messages from her weary eyes reach the proper receptors in her brain.
Alphabet blocks upon the floor. She’s been staring at them without seeing them, and now that they’ve come into focus, there is a phrase is scrawled in crude, modern ponish:
luv yew, antee pingkee pi
Spelling should still be beyond the children, but from birth they’ve each shown progeny-level potential. The pegasus can already fly with keen precision, when his mind is on the task. The unicorn, with no knowledge of magic beyond her own instincts, makes nothing of ensorcelling herself and flying through the air without wings - a spell that challenges even the greats. Spelling seems a mere trifle in the face of such accomplishments, but the image of the blocks crystalizes before her anyway, as the light of the moon goes kaleidoscopic in her eyes.
Not a tear. Just something in her eye.
The night does not change, but for her, the nursery grows cold. A chill marches in lockstep along her withers, brushing her coat hairs in the wrong direction until they stand on end. It is a harbinger; a sign of ‘His’ return. He never truly leaves her, but she has learned to manage him over the years of her adulthood such that he is often left to prowl beyond the gates of her psyche, rattling at the wrought iron stakes carved in the shapes of balloons there. He breeches the perimeter on occasion, but seldom do his ravings pass into her core.
Tonight, he stabs her deeply. Knowing that sleep will be no escape, she flees to someplace...anyplace that is away from the young charges that love her so.
* * * * *
Cup Cake, the matron of the House of Carrot, can hear the sound.
They say that with age, one trades wisdom for a dulling of the senses. The keen edge rounds out, and the tempered steel of perception, while distinguished, finds it harder to slice its way through. The Lady of Sugarcube Corner has heard these theories, but to her they hold little meaning. In her previous life as Chiffon Swirl she would easily have slept through the night with hopes for a confectionary future dancing through her head, but there is power in motherhood. As a parent, one grows eyes in the back of their head and never truly sleeps.
Thus, she can hear the sound quite clearly, and though it is but a benign rustling from the refrigerator below, she knows she cannot let it be. She removes the frilly sleep mask Rarity gave her to assist with her rest and brings her eyes to bear on a world cast in pale relief. Her husband, perpetually by her side in the marital bed, stirs; she reaches out for him with a hoof, stroking with delicate affection the sore flank he developed from a day of hard deliveries.
“Shh,” she coos in a syrupy tone reserved for him alone. “It’s alright. Go back to sleep.”
His eyes do not open, but his amber brow furrows with automatic concern. “...s’alright…” he mutters from beneath the waves of consciousness. “...c’n gettup...s’my turn…”
“Shhhh,” she insists as she brushes back the ungainly mop atop his head. “The foals are fine. I’m just going for a glass of water. Go back to sleep.”
The immediate duties of fatherhood sated by words he trusts, Carrot Cake’s breathing evens out, signalling his acquiescence. She looks upon his sleeping face with an adoration that has only deepened with the passage of years, and places a gentle kiss upon his forehead.
The sound calls to her again.
She rises, dispelling her nightcap, and makes for the kitchen without fear. The scene there will be just as she expects it, though she had hoped, for her boarder’s sake, that the previous instance would be the last.
In the kitchen, lit only by the glow from the open door, a pink rump juts out from the fridge. A cotton-candy tail hangs limp, and in observing it Cup Cake knows her suppositions to be accurate. There’s no way to keep from startling the late-night snacker, so she takes the direct approach.
“Pinkie Pie? You’re still up?”
The crashing noise is expected, but Cup Cake winces anyway, hoping the ingredients she had planned to use for tomorrow’s prepaid strawberry layer cake weathered the storm. A high-pitched yelp is chased by a whine of pain, as Pinkie Pie emerges from the icebox with a hoof upon her head.
“Owwww...owowowowowowwwwie…”
Cup Cake stands by the counter, the patience of motherhood upon her brow. “I’m sorry for startling you dear, but...there’s really no way not to when you’re raiding the fridge. Believe me I’ve tried...many times…”
Pinkie Pie’s smile is the stuff of legends. She wears it like a carnival mask, hewn from years of practised poise to strike joy into the hearts of the many. Tonight she has it on, but the bags embossed under each eye rat her out. She chuckles with a rapidity approaching the beat of hummingbird wings and draws an amorphous blob of something brown from her lower lip into her maw.
“Oh, that’s okay. You know me! Head in the clouds, hooves on the ground!” She stamps at the floor, eliciting a disinfected clack, to illustrate her point. “Or is that hooves in the clouds head in the ground...on the ground…pegasus hooves could be on the clouds...”
Cup Cake stands, blocking the passage from the kitchen to the stairs. Her smile is benevolent but thin. “I don’t know dear, I can’t say I’ve heard that one before.”
“Oh, me either,” Pinkie Pie quips nonchalantly. “Because I just made it up! It sounded better in my head though, so I think it needs work. See, if you keep it the way it is you have your head in a cloud, which is kind of silly if your hooves are on the ground, but if you turn it around you’d have to be an ostrich...unless your hooves are on a cloud, but then you’d have to be a pegasus, so--”
Patience is indeed a virtue, and Cup Cake wonders if she is not the patron saint of it, between handling her young ones and her boarder. She allows the rambling to continue unabated until the proper time to release her ambush. When the moment arrives, she interrupts.
“Pinkie, was that chocolate on your lip just now?”
“--but then we’d have ponies walking around backwards on their heads, and that’s just--huh? Oh…” She tastes again, and though there’s no longer a trace, Pinkie Pie brightens. “Yes! It was delish!”
“You ate the entire bowl of ganache again, didn’t you.”
Pinkie’s expression changes. Her eyes follow the heavyset landlady as she casually locks the back door.
“...uh...gee, I guess I did. Sorry about that! I’ll totally make some more tomorrow, first thing!”
Cup Cake is at the stove, and says nothing while the kettle brews. Her companion moves not a muscle, like a filly waiting to see if their movements about the cookie jar have been detected. The whistle and subsequent odor of chamomile puts the Cake matron on cue.
“You like extra honey in your tea, don’t you dear?”
Pinkie checks her bare wrist. “...it’s almost midnight…”
“One lump or two?”
“I...I don’t want any sugar.”
Cup Cake snorts, the derisive sound reverberating from the hallowed walls. “Oh sweetie, the day you don’t want sugar is the day Princess Twilight burns her library and goes into show business.”
Two clattering noises ring out against a porcelain cup. The tray is complete, and it rides proudly on the frog of Cup Cake’s hoof without care. With it as her baton, she marches towards the breakfast nook where a cozy couch sits in the light of the moon. “Come and have a cup of tea with me.”
“I wanna go to bed, I’m sleepy…”
Cup Cake pats her hip. “Come along dear.”
Hooves fall into step, and soon there are two mares upon the couch. One works the tea set, while the other twiddles her hooves, glaring accusingly at them until a they go to work balancing a steaming cup that appears as if from the void. The fumes coil about Pinkie’s head and invade her senses like a cobra’s charm. She nearly succumbs, until ‘He’ draws phantasmal letters in the haze.
luv yew, mummy pingkee pi
The cup shatters against the tiled floor. It’s the cheap china, selected by its owner quite on purpose. With the public demeanor of Celestia, Lady Cake watches the quivering younger mare, who is staring down at the hot mess below.
“Do you want to talk to me, Pinkie?”
“...no. I-I’m sorry about the cup, it must have slipped. I’ll get a--”
“Pinkie Pie,” Mrs. Cake repeats without forming a question. “Do you want to talk to me.”
“NO!”
Pinkie Pie is at the door. She kicks, grinds, and gnashes, but the stubborn oak budges not.
“It’s locked, Pinkie.”
“Y-you can’t lock me in here!” The bubblegum mare cries out. “I wanna go home!”
“You are home, dear.”
“No! No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no!!”
With each syllable the door is subjected to a new assault. Once upon a time it would break down; days would be required to determine the whereabouts of its disgorged, living contents. Now it is triple-reinforced; subjected even to the bucking of the mighty Applejack, against whom it stood firm. Carefully erected insulation keeps from disrupting the house, until the pink pony inevitably crumples, vanquished, against her non-sentient foe.
“J-just...just open the door, please…”
Cup Cake stays the course. “Where will you go?”
“...d-doesn’t matter…” Pinkie Pie blubbers from beneath her own forelegs. “...away somewhere…”
“We’d miss you, if you went away.”
“...you’d get over it…”
Cup Cake raises her hoof to the ceiling. “They would miss you.”
At the door, Pinkie Pie stuffs her head beneath the flowery receiving mat. “I’m not even their mommy...they don’t need me.”
Cup Cake’s hoof recedes and gently pats the couch beside her. “You know that’s not true. You mean the world to them.”
Pinkie Pie, summoned by Pavlovian response, finds herself again upon the couch. Beneath her, the soft, portly tummy of a healthy pony shines in the cool light. She touches, and then clutches it, wincing as though taken with cramps.
“Maybe. But...what about me…?”
Cup Cake knows her words will be of no use. She sits, tasting her tea, and waits for her companion to confront ‘Him’ on her own. His name is ‘Regret’, and Pinkie cannot push him out unless she looks him in the eye.
“Why me…? What did I do wrong?”
Unable to resist, Cup Cake interrupts. “You didn’t do anything wr--”
“Yes I did,” Pinkie Pie insists, her eyes on the equine paunch under her caressing hooves. “I must have done something. My mom’s not broken...my sister Maud’s not broken. None of my sisters are. I should have stayed with them, and been like them. But I’m different, and I got punished for it.”
“That’s not--”
“Life doesn’t want there to be any more of me. So it made me broken.”
A blue hoof appears atop the pink, and Cup Cake draws near. “Pinkie, you’re not the only mare who can’t have foals. And you don’t even know that about your sisters. They’ve never tried.”
“I...I…”
The Cake matron sighs. This is not her place, but she cannot remain silent.
“...you should have told him, Pinkie. You should have told all of them.”
“...he needed to go. He wanted to travel Equestria. I can’t just take that away from him.”
Cup Cake’s brow furrows. “And if you had foaled with him? What then?”
“I-it doesn’t matter...I can’t foal...my mareparts don’t work right…”
“Pinkie, you didn’t even tell Cheese Sandwich that you loved him.”
“...h-he’s better off not knowing...what good would it do to hurt him like that…”
“He was an excitable young stallion, but a good one. If you had said something he would have stayed, and even without a foal, well…” the matron’s cheeks darken, “...I’m not innocent anymore Pinkie, and I saw the way he looked at you. He wanted more than a one-night stand.”
Pinkie Pie’s head shakes with a manic rhythm. “H-he wouldn’t have stayed if he knew...what good is a broken mare…”
“You didn’t give him a chance,” Cup Cake says with indignance. “You don’t give any of them a chance. What about Soarin the year before?”
Pinkie waves her hoof dismissively. “That was just a thing. It was a party. We were drinking.”
“You metabolize like an alicorn, and not a bit of the three quarts of ganache you just ate is going to go to your hips. He might have been out of sorts, but you weren’t. You wanted to be with him.”
“They both have lives outside of Ponyville!” Pinkie cries. “They don’t have to know! It won’t do them any good to know!”
“Then what about--”
Pinkie’s hoof looms before Cup Cake’s eyes, inches from her muzzle.
“Don’t. Don’t say it.”
Cup Cake falters. She stands at a crossroads between the road less traveled and the one she knows she must venture down.
She speaks.
“...what about Big McIntosh?”
Pinkie turns away. Her face is hidden, but her quivering shoulders speak for her.
“...I...I t-told you not to say it...I d-don’t wanna talk about that…i-it was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter now...he’s with somepony else...”
“He liked you, and you liked him. He could have been with you if--”
Pinkie bats the hoof atop her own away. “Stop it! Do you like making me feel awful all over!?”
Cup Cake pries, knowing her chance may never come again. “You do this with at least one stallion a year - sometimes two. You play with them at first, then you genuinely fall for them, but you don’t tell them how you feel. And then it all fades away.”
“Y-you’re making me sound like an awful pony…” Pinkie blubbers. Her eyes are again on the door. Her hackles are up, and the portal’s ability to stand up to an assault with true abandon comes into question.
Cup Cake acts. Her hoof is upon Pinkie’s chin, and she turns her face.
“Friendship is magic, Pinkie Pie. You’ve got lots of friends - everypony adores you as a friend.”
Pinkie’s eyes are darting. “...th-then...then that should be enough, right? Eh heh…”
“Is it enough for you?”
“I…”
“Is friendship enough for you?”
Pinkie’s expression breaks. Within ‘He’ leaps over the walls, dodging the sirens from the watchtowers, and steals into her core.
“I...wh...why can’t I h-have...little filles and colts...o-of my own…? Why...why can’t I be a mommy too…?”
“Pinkie--”
“I d-don’t want to be alone, either…”
“You’re not alo--”
“It’s not enough!” Pinkie shouts as she wrests herself from the elder mare’s grasp. “I...I love my friends, but I want...I want a somepony, too…!”
Unfettered, Mrs. Cake returns fire at equal altitude. “Then you have to allow a pony to love you that way!”
“But they won’t love me!”
“Why, Pinkie? Why won’t they love you?”
“B-because!!” She finds her hooves again, and standing before the couch she continues her tirade. “Because I can’t give them a family! I can’t be a mommy!”
Lady Cake offers no quarter. “There’s more to love than having foals, Pinkie! Do you really think that just because you have a scarred uterus that can’t support a fertilized egg that a stallion who falls in love with you will change their heart?”
“YES!!”
“If you’re that worried about it, then you have to tell them! Tell them everything! See how they still feel about you! You’re a wonderful mare, Pinkie Pie. You make everypony feel special all the time - any pony, a stallion or a mare, would be lucky to be loved by somepony like you. If you tell them the truth and they change their mind about loving you, then their love wasn’t worth having in the first place!”
“I don’t expect you to understand!” The bubblegum mare ripostes. “Your mareparts work, so you have a husband!”
SMACK
A blasphemous blow rings out through the sanctified halls of the sweetest kitchen in town. It is a strike that the venue has never known, and it leaves a welt upon the candy cheek of its target as it cleaves the air in twain before her. Quelled by shock, the child of Pie recoils from the heaving countenance of her opponent, cradling her wound; ears flat in supplication.
“How dare you say that to me,” the Cake matron seethes, her eyes aflame with molten fire and piercing ice, “I love you like my own daughter Pinkie Pie, but if you really think that Carrot married me just because I could give him foals, then you don’t even know what love is at all. We fell for one another ages before our little ones were as much as cupcakes in our eyes, and through all that time, we loved one another with everything we had. We still do it today; in every last minute birthday cake meltdown and every diaper explosion. Celestia help me for even thinking it--” she knocked on wood, “--but even if our little bundles of joy grow up to hate us someday, or even if we had never had any at all, I will love Carrot until the day he dies. And I know he feels the same about me.”
Pinkie’s poofy tail is in her grasp. She wrings it like a towel and hides beneath it as though from a cataclysm. “I just...I wanna be the mommy for once...not just the buddy...and I want to be more than the friend, or the roomie, or the party planner.”
Cup Cake stands. With a hoof upon the quivering pink shoulder before her, she offers a conundrum:
“You are a mommy, Pinkie Pie.”
The slivers of fuschia under the younger mare’s eyes have deepened unto vermillion. “Wh...what?”
The Cake matron squints. Behind Pinkie’s eyes, she can see ‘Him’. Regret rampages, but upon his rump is a cutie mark in the shape of a bullseye, and the Cake has zeroed in.
“Come with me.”
“I-I…”
“Pinkie. Come.”
It lives in the sideboard in the upstairs hall, amidst the other articles too boring to attract attention. Bills, deeds, ledgers of years past - under them all, in an unassuming beige manilla envelope, it rests; lying in wait for a nebulous future. Bathed in the light of the moon from the single window in the hall, Cup Cake draws it forth and places it in the oblivious upturned hoof of her companion.
Pinkie can find no identifying marks. “What...is it?”
“Open it.”
Within are a series of documents bearing the hoofprints of everyone from notary publics to the mayor of Ponyville herself. Passages known only from their use in fiction come to life:
“WHEREAS we, Carrot and Cup Cake, being of mutually sound mind, do hereby bequeath all our worldly assets and possessions to our children, Pound and Pumpkin Cake, in equal share. In the circumstance that our children, by reason of age and/or debilitation, are unable to take legal possession of our property, we name as our regent Pinkamina Diane Pie, in whom we trust will make proper use of our affairs posthumously. In the circumstance that our children, by reason of age and/or debilitation, lack the legal capacity to care for themselves, we name as their legal guardian Pinkamina Diane Pie, in whom we trust will faithfully execute the office of parent, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.”
Witnessed this 11th day of August, Year of the Sun Two-Thousand Fifteen
Signed in Faith:
Testator: Carrot Cake
Testator: Cup Cake
Witness: Mayor Mare, Mayor of Ponyville
Witness: Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship
Within, ‘He’ pauses. Without, so does she.
“This...this is…”
“That’s right,” Cup Cake confirms from out of sight. “We finally got around to re-writing it after the children were born. This is how we wanted it to read.”
“Twilight...signed this? But...she never told me…”
“It’s our will, Pinkie. Carrot’s and mine. Twilight has no business talking about it, and she knows that.”
Pinkie is silent. The words dazzle her; they lift from the parchment and swirl about the sea of her eyes, as though funneling her white sclera to Cloudsdale for snow production. Inside her, ‘He’ recoils and falls into uncertainty.
“I don’t...I don’t understand...why didn’t you tell me?”
A powdery hoof turned to the sparkle of sapphires in the moonlight is again upon Pinkie’s shoulder.
“Legally you don’t have to tell your beneficiary, but what would you have said, if we had?”
“No,” Pinkie replies instantly. “I would have said no.”
“Yes,” Cup Cake agrees. “That’s exactly what you would have said.”
Incensed, the pink pony whirls. “Then why did you do this without my permission??”
The Cake matron remains hewn from solid stone on her hooves. “Because you want to say yes, Pinkie. The reason you’re saying no is because you don’t think you’re worthy of being a mother, just because of this--” she prods Pinkie’s tummy unabashedly.
The Pink mare’s eyes wander, but the stubbornness of her tribe does not relent. “I’m broken because nature thinks there shouldn’t be any more of me. I know I make ponies happy, but that’s not enough to make a mommy.”
Cup Cake shakes her head. “Did you ever consider that maybe the reason you are the way you are is because you have a different purpose?”
Pinkie touches her stomach. “Like...what?”
Cup Cake’s hoof pushes open a door adorned with crude crayon art. Within is a familiar chamber, where two foals, lulled by an ode, still lie at rest.
“Like them. And other foals just like them. And other ponies who get crushed by life. They might not have the sense to realize it, but everypony needs you, Pinkie Pie. It might come so naturally to you that you think nothing of it, but you make them happy, and they all love you. You show them the way--” Cup Cake smiles, “--just like a mommy would. You’re a mother to us all in your own special way Pinkie, and I would trust you with my children’s lives. You’re worthy of being loved - even if you don’t think you are. Maybe what nature’s really telling you is that you already have enough children. Just because they don’t have your genes inside them, doesn’t make them any less your own.”
“B-but--”
“You’re going to the foals’ ward at the Ponyville Hospital tomorrow like you do every week, aren’t you?”
“Uh...uh-huh…”
“It’s ponies like you, Pinkie, who can give everything to a colt or filly who has nothing. Think about that.”
Unmoving, the bubblegum pony searches. She searches the guard towers and the walls; the iron pickets and the sculptures of balloons. She even digs through the primordial ooze of frosting from whence all her ideas emerge into life. But ‘He’ is no longer there. She cries for him with neither words nor sounds of any kind; challenges...epithets...finally merely to confirm his existence. In her mind she stands alone, but in the house and in the town without, she stands with all her children. The children, young and old, that she will never allow to suffer under the yoke of sorrow for long.
Cup Cake smiles.
“Go to bed, Pinkie. You need your energy for tomorrow…and for every day that comes after.”
Cup Cake returns to her mate, who loves her still with neither condition nor care.
In the moonlit hall, Pinkie Pie is by herself. ‘He’ has gone away from her, and though there is no more guarantee now than ever that he will never return, he has left her alone with thoughts less frightening than before. She wanders, thinking of the ponies she loved who in turn loved her as they waltz through her senses. Some of them are still out there, and among them there are possibilities she had never before allowed herself to consider.
“Ow! Owowowowowowowowowwwwwieee....”
A toy chest is hard against her knee. Beside her lie the foals she lulled to bed. They have a family, a home, and all the love they need. But they still need her - just as much as those who can boast nothing at all. Mounted upon their windowsill, she sings a song her mother sang to her before:
“Winged ponies fly above you
Soft moonlight carries you the whole night through
Deep echoes from the Everfree trees
Till the morning let it be.
I ever chance to kiss thee
In nightly moments missed by bird and bee
By light of day, toils never cease, (but)
Till the morning let it be.
Moon waning, but I live beyond fear
Wait-ing for my bliss
I’m pining to trot beside you, here
Just humming, this-s-s-s…
By day, you set your mind to
Daydreams that all the world assigns life to
But in our dreams it's just you and me, (so)
Till the morning let it be.”
Protected by her, they sleep. She watches Luna’s Grace move across the sky. In the morning, she will love again.
