When it rains, it pours.
It was an old saying. An apt one, especially for a postal worker. Neither snow nor rain… something something appointed speed. Derpy never was good with poetry.
Still, as Derpy looked down at the shards of pottery that had, a moment before, been a customer’s vase, the thought of trying to navigate Ponyville’s skies amidst a blizzard seemed so very enticing.
Neither snow nor rain nor angry customers.
Derpy glanced up at the horrified looking stallion and cracked a nervous smile. “Oops!” Her hooves busied themselves with the mess of dirt and broken ceramic. “I’m so very very sorry, Mr. Noteworthy! I can fix this!”
The stallion's mouth flapped wordlessly as he stared down at Derpy. His face had gone white, which was an accomplishment considering his blue coat.
It took a little effort, but Derpy managed to gather most of it up into one pile, still stammering out her apology. “I didn’t mean to drop it, b-but I am sure that I can fix this.” She picked out two of the shards and tried to fit them back together. This was never going to work. More of the dirt drizzled from her hooves. She dropped the shards and dove under the nearest counter.
“Wait! Okay, let me… I have some… aha!” She rose back up with a crusty tube of superglue in her mouth. “Don’t thyou worry, Mthr. Notewhorthy! I’ll fixth thith!” She grabbed the end of the tube in one hoof, the largest shard of the vase in the other. She worked the cap off as best she could, feeling the stallion’s eyes boring into the back of her head. She had to make this right, and before her boss got back from her lunch break. Derpy didn’t need another write up. “I’ll justh glue thith back together an-ack!”
The cap was surprisingly easy to remove. So were the contents of the tube when gripped tightly in the teeth of a very nervous mare. A sticky streamer of glue splattered across the piece of vase and the hoof holding it, turning the two into one. Derpy spat out the spent tube, allowing it to fall into the pile of dirt, while she tried desperately to free her hoof.
“Ah! Get it off, get it off!” She stumbled backwards before thumping into the sorting bin, causing mail to rain down onto the floor. There was the sound of falling boxes and breaking glass from the back room. Desperately she lunged forward, trying to catch some of the mail, but only ended up turning her hoof into a postal-themed palm tree, letters and postcards sticking out from the mass of grey dust and rapidly drying glue.
Every step brought the sound of crunching cardstock and ruined holiday wishes, but there was a glimmer of hope. In the corner of the room was her goal. The broom and dust pail, hanging neatly on the hook she’d installed so she wouldn’t keep forgetting where she’d put it.
“One more moment, please!” she told Noteworthy with another forced grin. He watched her, trembling, as Derpy made her way through the mess of broken pottery and crumbled letters with the grace of a three-legged cat trying to dislodge a bur from its paw. She paid it little mind. Looking like an idiot was old hat for Derpy. She needed to clean up this mess before things got worse.
It always got worse.
Broom in mouth, dust pan in hoof, she clomped her way back over to the stallion. The glue had dried, turning the palm tree on her “free” hoof into an impressively resilient – and painfully heavy – club of dust and destroyed presents. Derpy knew the cracks on the floor would come out of her paycheck, too.
Spreading her legs out like a giraffe trying to grab a drink of water, Derpy bent low and began carefully sweeping up the soil and pottery into the dust bin, only gathering a few letters into the mix. Her good eye found the stallion’s gaze and, instinctively, she tried to smile, despite the broom clasped in her teeth.
“I’m really sthorry about all of thith, misthter. Really, I promisth, I will make thisth up to you.” Derpy tipped the dust pail into the closest trash bin, kicking up a small cloud of dust, causing her to cough. She set back to work. “Tho... are you into gardening?” she asked with as much cheer as she could muster. It was her instinctive response, honed through experience: smile and apologize. Stay positive. Hide the fear. She bent back down to gather a second load of dust and dirt, trying to ignore the way her nostrils burned. She needed to sneeze. “Or ith that justht a Hearth’sth Warming gift for sthomeone elsthe? Maybe your sthpecial sthomepony?”
The once-blue-but-now-a-very-red stallion pointed a trembling hoof at the trash can. “That was my mother’s urn!”
Derpy gasped, coughed, snorted, and then sneezed, sending out a huge plume of grey ash.
Hearth’s Warming Eve. It might be the busiest time of the year, with ponies shipping more than their body weight in gifts, cards and fruit cakes to each other, but Derpy found the festive atmosphere contagious despite the long hours. Even the polar temperature and freezing winds couldn’t dampen her spirits for long.
Neither snow nor rain, she reminded herself as she looked out across Ponyville. She pulled her scarf tighter. Perched as she was on the edge of the Post Office roof, a cup of steaming cider in her hooves, the beauty of Ponyville was on full display. A blanket of snow covered everything. Not cold enough to force ponies to stay home, but chilly enough that everypony moved a little faster to get to their destination on time. Friends and neighbors, ponies she had known all her life greeted one another, their saddlebags filled with deliveries and supplies for their own festivities.
Derpy blew gently on her cider before she took a sip. Usually she took her lunch down in the break room, where she could chat with anyone who happened to come by while one of the other postal workers was manning the front desk. She liked meeting ponies, she told herself. It was just that there were days when she needed to spend her lunch break on her own. A little solitude helped keep things balanced and on an even keel. It was good for the soul.
It also meant that she could avoid awkwardly explaining how she had forgotten to bring her lunch to work again.
She took another sip of cider. It would be enough. She wasn’t a heavy eater anyway.
Ponyville had grown over the last decade. Not by much, of course. Derpy was confident it would never compare to Canterlot or Cloudsdale. Ponyville had a timeless small-town quality to it. It had existed for centuries and, despite the occasional issues with rampaging monsters or capricious spirits, it would be around long after she was gone. If all that last week’s troll attack could manage was to put the city park out of commission, then there was little to worry about. That, too, made her… well, content, at least.
Still, it was changing. From her perch, Derpy could see the distant outline of Twilight’s – Princess Twilight’s, she corrected herself – castle, and then even further beyond, almost hidden beneath the nearby hills, the School of Friendship. And the once-iconic Golden Oak Library had been gone for years.
Derpy still felt a pang of loss at that. She hadn’t been a keen patron, having trouble reading for long stretches of time, but it had been something she had always associated with Ponyville, a visual landmark like the Town Hall and Carrousel Boutique. Without it, the center of Ponyville still looked empty. Like the town had forgotten something.
She sighed and took another drink. No, that was her being stupid again and trying to wax some kind of poetic, when she had never been good at poetry. Derpy looked out over the ponies going about their business, solo and in small groups, and she tried to count how many faces she didn’t recognize. She gave up when she felt her heart rate start to climb. Mentally, she berated herself for still acting like a little filly. Things change. Even Ponyville could not remain stagnant. She could almost hear her mother’s voice when she told herself that she just needed to stop being so fussy and learn to accept all the new ponies she was going to meet, all the new eyes watching her, all the new voices whispering behi–
“Stop it,” Derpy muttered to herself, shifting from side to side to work a little warmth back into her backside. Things change, towns change, but Derpy was very familiar with how immutable her own anxieties were. The guilt, shame and embarrassment of the morning’s adventures were clawing at her, and Derpy wasn’t going to let them pull her down. Not today.
Not when she would be arriving soon.
Draining the last of her cider, Derpy stood up and shook a little bit of frost off of her body, working the blood back into her limbs. The uniform of a postal worker was surprisingly warm for what it was, but even with the assistance of one of Rarity’s scarfs, the chill breeze above the roof line still meant her extremities were nothing but pins and needles.
Ignoring the discomfort, Derpy took a few deep breaths, and then a few deep coughs as she tried to clear a snowflake that went down the wrong pipe. Thumping her chest a few times, she straightened back up, smiling on instinct as soon as she could breathe properly. Yes, she was glad she had taken her lunch outside today.
“Okay. You got this,” Derpy told herself, shuffling her hooves like an athlete before a race. As she had every fifteen minutes since awaking, she checked that her own envelope was still safely stowed in her pocket, then checked her watch to make sure she still had time, and then made a mental note to actually purchase a watch.
Derpy looked back out over Ponyville to the other town landmark, the one she had been pointedly avoiding. Sugarcube Corner. And right on cue, she could see a familiar pink shape step out of the pastry-shaped building with an unsteady mountain of packages swaying from side to side on her back.
She watched Pinkie Pie greeting every pony she met with a warm hello, even if they were too far away for Derpy to hear them. That didn’t matter. She had a goal. A plan. Life was about change – as terrible and frightening as that was.
“And today, Derpy is going to bring some change into her own life,” Derpy told Derpy, with all the conviction Derpy could muster. Her heart was still racing, her anxiety was still coiled around her brain and whispering into her soul, but Derpy felt… good. She could take confidence in all her preparations, found assurance in finally facing a deadline she couldn’t back down from, and was buoyed by liquid courage after she’d emptied her flask into her cider before lunch.
Derpy nodded, her cheeks flushed red. She pulled the letter from her saddle bag one last time, making sure it hadn’t gotten too scuffed up in the morning’s embarrassment. “This is it. You can do this. You can tell her how you feel. You don’t even need to talk to her for long, you can just give her this and let that do the talking for you.”
She ran a feather over the neatly printed To Pinkie Pie on the front of the envelope. Surplus from the office. Plain white stock, but sturdy. She’d written the letter a week ago, but today was the day. Hearth’s Warming Eve was a time of renewal and change, both metaphorically and literally. As Derpy held the envelope out in front of her, she took heart from the physicality of the letter. She took a few determined steps. It was no longer just something she could–
Derpy’s hoof hit a patch of ice and she tumbled from the roof with a startled squawk.
Her last conscious act was to tuck the letter up against her body with her wings like a mare protecting her foal.
Her last conscious thought was to curse using her wings instead of her legs as she plummeted to the ground.
Neither snow nor rain…
The words ran through Derpy’s mind as she slowly came to. But as she looked up into the faces of a half-dozen concerned ponies, she would have loved a little gloom of night.
And when she noticed a pair of very blue, very concerned eyes, framed by a mane of very pink curls, she found herself cursing whatever ancient poet had crafted those words, appointed rounds be damned.
“Are you okay?” Pinkie Pie asked, her voice like chimes in Derpy’s ears. It was so musical and high pitched and whistling and maybe that was just the brain trauma.
“I’m fine,” Derpy mumbled as she rolled over and rose to unsteady hooves, glad that Pinkie Pie couldn’t see the deep blush coloring her cheeks. Though from the ache in her back… and wings… and head… Derpy knew her body would be pretty discolored in a while anyway. It wasn’t her first fall, after all. She considered herself a connoisseur when it came to concussion-inducing collisions. Her palate was incomparable.
“Are you sure? That looked like a pretty nasty fall.”
“It’s okay. I’m okay! Pegasusesis are built to fall,” Derpy said with a definitive nod, making sure to look both Pinkies in the eye. Their wonderfully blue blue very blue eyes. “Blue.”
Pinkie blinked. “Blue?”
Derpy nodded, then shook her head, then stopped when it made the world spin and the ringing louder. “Sorry. I didn’t… Um.” Derpy clamped her disloyal mouth shut. She glanced around, watching as the crowd began to disperse now that she was up and moving. Brushing some of the snow and dirt off her damp uniform, Derpy mustered the courage to look back at Pinkie Pie. She knew what she was going to say. She’d gone over this very moment a hundred times. She took a deep breath.
“Welcome to the Ponyville Post Office! How can I help you today?”
The lines around Derpy’s smile tightened. Internally, her soul screamed as it withered and collapsed into a desiccated husk. Death by terminal embarrassment. Had she expected anything else? What in her life would have convinced her that she would ever, could ever, succeed?
“You’re funny.”
Good old wall-eye sticking her hoof in her mouth again. How stupid could one mare be? It was high school all over – wait, what?
Pinkie Pie chuckled. “I don’t even know if I could crack any jokes after taking a tumble like that. Although…” She tapped her chin thoughtfully before shaking her head as if clearing a tenacious cobweb, her curly hair bobbing and swaying in a way that Derpy found hypnotic.
“I bet you could,” Derpy forced out past dry lips. “In fact, I know you could.”
“Maybe. I mean, I’ve taken some mighty big tumbles over the years. Oh! Did you see what happened when those trolls attacked town last week?” Pinkie held herself up, hoof on chest, and adopted a look of exaggerated bravado. “That one big smelly fella sent me flying, but I like to think he appreciated my, mmhmm, witticism and showmanship. You know, before Twilight turned them into stone with that sun spell.”
Derpy nodded, nearly knocking her cap back into the snow. “Yeah! Telling him it was time to rock was perfect!”
“Personally, I think the delivery was a little flat, I missed my cue with the guitar, and I could have included more fireworks, but hey, the results speak for themselves,” Pinkie said, leaning against an invisible pole and blowing on her hoof casually before she dropped back down onto all fours.
The two of them turned to look towards the edge of town, where just over the roof of one house stood what looked like a particularly warty stone statue. It was sheathed in scaffolding, helping to mask a pose her mother would have described as ‘rude and unladylike’. Earth ponies with picks chiseled away at it, looking like they didn’t find much humor in the position themselves.
“I’m told they plan to have them removed by the end of the month.”
“That will be nice. The park really isn’t the same with that much frozen troll butt on display.”
Pinkie laughed. “I told you you were funny!”
Derpy smiled sheepishly. “I, uh, have my moments too,” she replied, though she ended up dragging out the last syllable until it sounded more like a question. This earned another chuckle, and Derpy’s cheeks began to turn crimson.
“In all honesty, it was Twilight’s show. I was more the opening act. I tell you, that mare might know her magical whatsits from her arcane thingamabobs, but she sometimes forgets the basics. Like making defeating some big horrible beasties fun.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Sure. But we all have a job to do, too. And I’m there to help my friends. Sometimes that means being a distraction, and other times it means making them laugh so they can focus on what’s important. After all, you have time to laugh, or time to be scared, but not both.” Pinkie frowned. “Unless you’re in a haunted house, I guess. Or there are evil clowns. Or it's a haunted house filled with evil clowns.” She shivered. “But if you laugh at your fears, you’ll find what scares you looks silly in hindsight. You know what I mean?”
“I do,” she admitted, despite herself. “Sometimes it is a little… hard to admit that you’re scared, though. Or worse, you might not want to let anyone see you being scared. You don’t want them to see that you’re… weak.”
Pinkie Pie didn’t tell Derpy she wasn’t weak. She didn’t tell her she shouldn’t feel that way about herself, didn’t crack a joke or try to shift the conversation to more comfortable territory. Instead, Pinkie did the last thing Derpy expected. She agreed with her.
“Yeah. We all have a mask we hide behind at times,” Pinkie said. “Sometimes it’s just easier to pull it down and pretend everything is fine so your friends don’t…” The words trailed off as Pinkie blinked, as if finally realizing what she was admitting.
Derpy blinked back at her, as surprised as Pinkie was.
The blink off lasted only a moment, before Pinkie Pie cleared her throat. Again, she surprised Derpy by adding, “There are times when you can’t just giggle at the ghostly and make everything alright. But I do my best to make sure my friends can laugh when it matters the most.”
Derpy nodded again, ignoring the slight headache it brought on. Beyond what Pinkie Pie was saying, she was finally realizing something so monumental and grandiose that it was making her heart race.
This was it. She was standing there and talking with Pinkie Pie. Not about the weather or business but something true. Something real. They were having a moment. Alone. This was her chance! Taking a deep breath (and wishing she had put something stiffer into her cider that morning), Derpy casually slid a wing into her uniform pocket.
Nothing.
She clapped her mouth shut as she checked her other pocket.
Empty.
Panic set in. The letter was missing. Where had it gone? She–
Derpy’s heart fell as fast as she had off the roof as she turned to look back at where she had landed. In a pile of slush, churned up by the now departed crowd, the corner of a crumpled envelope peeked out piteously.
“Are you okay?”
Derpy saw Pinkie Pie looking at her with a tilted head. With practiced ease, Derpy swallowed her emotions and fell back into the routine. Stay positive. Hide everything. She smiled back with the biggest grin she could muster, her eyes clenched and her jaw straining. “Yes! Everything is fine!”
“Did you lose a letter when you fell?”
Derpy’s eyes popped open. Pinkie Pie waved the soggy remnant of the letter around, trying fruitlessly to dry it off. Ink-stained slush and mud dripped off its crinkled corpse.
“Y-yes,” Derpy croaked.
Pinkie’s ear twitched. She looked back at Derpy, still fanning the letter. “Hearth’s Warming invitation?” she asked, a little quieter.
“Yes.”
“Mmm. First date?”
Derpy winced. She didn’t nod. She didn’t need to.
Finally giving up on her attempts at postal resurrection, Pinkie held out the remains to Derpy, who shoved them into a pocket with a squish. The two stood in silence together.
Outward silence, at least. Inside, Derpy was screaming. Or crying. Or both. The anxiety. The guilt. The shame. It was crushing her. Suffocating her. Her smile was gone. One eye drooped. It was her nightmare come to life. She’d screwed it all up. She’d somehow managed to make it worse. Why? Why did she think she could do something new, try something new?
Pinkie Pie cleared her throat and puffed herself up. “Well, I don’t want to intrude, but I was coming here to mail out some invitations to a Hearth’s Warming Party. It was Twilight’s idea, something for the staff of the school and to celebrate a successful semester. And you know Twilight, she wanted to keep things ‘low key’ and ‘relaxed’ and ‘not a total circus Pinkie, I mean it’.” She rolled her eyes and snorted. “Pfft. Like, what does that even mean? It’s supposed to be a party! You don’t make a good party by not having ponies to party with. But she’s the princess now and all that, and she told me I could only invite close friends and associates.”
Pinkie Pie leaned in closer, putting on a conspiratorial air that almost distracted Derpy from her inner turmoil. “Buuut since I’m good friends with everypony in town…”
Derpy looked down to see Pinkie Pie holding out two very pink, very bestickered envelopes very close to Derpy’s chest. “Why don’t you come to the party? I’ll even give you a nice plus one in case that other pony takes you up on your offer.” She winked.
The internal wailing and gnashing of teeth had stopped as relief flooded her. It was a miracle. She was being given an invitation to a party with Pinkie Pie. It… wasn’t exactly what she had wanted, what she had planned, but who cared? Even if she hadn’t managed to reveal all her feelings up front, she still had another chance to express herself. Far from work. Far from crowds. Far from icy ledges. And then Derpy made the mistake of opening her mouth.
“Why?”
Pinkie Pie paused, whatever joking response she had prepared dissolving. She looked at Derpy quizzically, but there was no judgement behind her brilliant blue eyes.
Derpy met her gaze as best she could, almost quivering as she fought to keep her attention on Pinkie. Inside, she should have felt something more coherent. Terror and fear, at least. Maybe some misguided anger, feeling like she was being mocked. But instead, she just felt empty. Flat. Her emotions had been thrown about as violently as she’d been when she’d slipped off the roof. She was scared. She was afraid. But she was also… something else. It didn’t even feel real anymore. She didn’t feel real anymore. Her stupid brain was asking a stupid question at the worst possible… but she had to know.
After a moment, Pinkie’s expression changed. It didn’t grow annoyed or frustrated like Derpy had predicted. Her eyes sparkled, but instead of another joke, Pinkie Pie just… spoke.
“You made me laugh.”
“Lots of ponies make you laugh,” Derpy replied defensively.
“Most ponies don’t fall off of roofs before doing it,” Pinkie noted with a wry grin, but it was subdued. Soft.
“You don’t have to invite me if you don’t want to.”
“And you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. But you’d be missing out on some amazing cake. And pie. And cupcakes. And piecakes. And cakepie.”
Pushing back on her mental unrest, Derpy took the invitations and carefully slid them into the driest pocket on her uniform. She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Thank you.”
As soon as they were secured, Pinkie Pie gave a little shake. Derpy swore she heard a pop as Pinkie burst out a broad smile. “Awesome! I can’t wait to see you there! I’d love to stay and chat but, uh, I have a lot of invitations to send out to Twilight’s Totally Small And Intimate Holiday Party Just With Close Friends And Family,” Pinkie said, gesturing behind her.
Looking back over her shoulders, Derpy could see a pile of colorful packages balancing impossibly upon a single box, the swaying mountain resting atop the singular dry patch on a nearby bench. Whistling to herself, Pinkie walked up to the bench and, with a single hard strike against the bench plank, sent the packages flying up into the air. She caught each of them, one after the other, rebuilding the tower on her back. She finished with a small flourish.
Derpy blinked. Not a single bow or tag was out of place. “Have you ever considered a career as a postal worker?” she blurted out.
“Naw,” Pinkie said with a wave of her hoof. “I like baking too much, and ovens are a fire hazard around that much loose paper. And I would literally die if all I could make was fruitcake.” She stuck out her tongue. “Blech.”
Derpy opened her mouth, and then closed it again.
“Get yourself warmed up and take a break for a bit, Derpy. I’ll have somepony else help me mail all of these,” she said as she trotted over to the Post Office. The pile swayed, but never toppled. “Just don’t tell anyone else about the party. Twilight wants to keep it quiet, so let's just keep it between you and me and a dozen good friends.”
“A dozen?” Derpy asked, eying the tower of invitations.
“A baker's dozen. Or three. Whatever. It’s a party! And you can’t spell ‘super awesome fun holiday party’ without ‘plenty of ponies’!” Pinkie said, turning back to look at Derpy. Her smile was there, but again that was something in her eyes that made it seem like she wasn’t looking at Derpy, but inside her. Through her.
Or maybe it was just the lingering effect from her near concussion playing tricks on the pegasus, because it vanished as soon as she noticed it. “See you there!” Pinkie said before kicking out behind herself, knocking the door open with the crack of hoof against wood and the tinkle of the doorbell. Stooping down and tilting the pile dangerously far, Pinkie backed up into the office without dropping a single item. The door swung shut, muffling but not hiding a boisterous greeting from Ponyville’s premier pink party pony to whoever was manning the desk while Derpy was away.
Derpy stared back at the Post Office with… well, something. She didn’t know what it was, but she sure was feeling a lot of it. Her hoof went protectively to the invitation in her pocket. Whatever dullness had gripped her was gone, and now Derpy didn’t know whether to scream, cheer, or hyperventilate. Or all three. Probably all three.
She contented herself by taking a seat on the bench that had once buoyed Pinkie’s packages. It still didn’t feel real. How could everything go so wrong, yet so right? And yet… She gave the invitations a squeeze.
She still hadn’t told Pinkie how she felt. How brave and confident and wonderful and kind she was. How Pinkie was everything Derpy wished she could be. It had taken her days to work up the courage to pen that confession, and it had ended up a soggy frozen ice ball in her pocket.
But Pinkie Pie had invited her to a party. Her. The clumsiest mare in Ponyville. The mare you wanted to tell off but didn’t because she had a messed-up eye. That meant something. It had to. Right?
Before she could fall down a tunnel of anxiety and unanswerable questions, Derpy forced herself to look out over the town. There was so much to love about Ponyville. It was a town of color and joy. But inevitably her gaze was drawn to the skyline and beyond, to the workers chiseling away at one of the former trolls. Her eyes tracked two stallions trying to manhandle a jackhammer into place so they could begin working on a particularly humorous, if unfortunately visible, portion of the troll’s anatomy.
“Neither snow nor rain nor… something something giant naked troll butt,” Derpy said aloud as she watched them work, silhouetted against the cold grey winter sky. She felt like being generous to herself and chuckled.
They were trying to restore the park to its former state. Return Ponyville to where it had been. But things were changing and, as much as it frightened her, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Life was changing, and wherever it was going, it would be different. She would be different.
And as she sat on that hard bench, the cold from the melting ice creeping into her flanks and up her spine, Derpy finally realized that she was trying to have a meaningful internal dialogue while watching two stallions jackhammer a forty-foot troll ass.
Derpy sighed. There was a metaphor there, but she couldn’t be bothered to decipher it now. Making sure one last time that the invitations were safe and secure, she rose to her hooves and set off to the rear of the Post Office. Break was nearly over, and her little crash was no reason to ignore her obligations.
“Neither snow nor rain nor falling off the roof like a fool,” she said to nobody.
She would just make sure to stop at her locker first, top off her flask, and put the invitations somewhere dry and safe. Derpy had a date to keep, now. And nothing kept a postal worker from her appointed rounds.
