Trixie, Great and Powerful, The
"Life," Trixie enunciated, letting the word linger in the air with what in her mind was all the gravitas of a general giving a rousing speech before a battle. It was actually closer to a soldier gargling his last breath in a puddle of mud, mostly on account of how slurred her voice had gotten around the third bottle of red wine.
The stallion next to Trixie, one of the few ponies there sober enough to still tell where sounds were coming from, stared at her for a few seconds. "Are you going to continue that or?"
"I don't expect a simple mind like yours to get it," Trixie said very snottily to the empty chair on her side opposition the stallion. A moment later the muscles in her barrel went on strike, and she found her front half resting on said chair.
The stallion stared at the emptiness where Trixie's top half wasn't. "Where'd you go?" he asked, once enough time had passed for his brain to register something was different.
"The Great and Powerful Trixie has bedazzled her audience yet again." Trixie did not come up from her position, as she lacked the presence of mind necessary to get her forelegs under her chest to push herself up.
The stallion stared dead ahead, his expression infused with all the intelligence of a dog begging its owner to play fetch with the knife held in their grasp. "Are you going to continue that or?" he asked, the still surviving shreds of his lucidity looking to his last stable thoughts for purchase in the wreckage of his drunken mind.
Lying sprawled on the two chairs like a whale lies sprawled on a beach, and speaking only barely more intelligibly than one, Trixie said, "Do you want to hear my story?"
The stallion fell. He was not sure which side he fell on, but he was out before he hit the ground, and the impact wouldn't hurt until the day after. At which point he would have bigger problems to worry about.
Trixie took the silence as a yes. It was a step up from her habit of taking no as a yes. "It all started when I was barely a foal. My mother always thought I was destined for greatness. She told me stories about my father, of how he would impress crowds with his disappearance acts and of how I took after him in my talent." Trixie's eyes went glassy as she reminisced. And because of the alcohol. It was about as hard to tell cause and effect apart as it was for her to tell up from down, or the past from the present as she sank into it.
"You're just like him!" Trixie's mother screamed. It was hard to tell if her voice was slurred because she was drunk or because Trixie was, or because Trixie would be. Trixie had been out all night, and only later that morning would either of them realise she'd bought a wagon to go along with her rambling about becoming a travelling showmare. "You're just going to break my heart and leave me all alone!" Trixie's mother got up in Trixie's face. "You and your stupid magic tricks and your light blue coat and your beautiful silver mane and your deep, wonderful eyes and-"
Trixie's flashback-induced makeout session with a mercifully empty bottle was interrupted by a pony yanking her tail as he stumbled on it, which was when Trixie realised she'd fallen to the floor. "Heh. Suck it, mum, look who's sucking now." She gave her best attempt at standing up, but gravity reclaimed her before she had a chance to trip over the stallion who'd tripped over her.
Instead she landed next to another mare, who woke up upon the impact. "Oh, Miss Trixie," she said. Judging by how lucid she was, she'd been out for a while. She was still drunk enough to let her tongue run like Trixie's father had. "I've been wondering, how come you can afford to offer everypony drinks like this when you live in a trailer?"
"The Great and Powerful Trixie does not need to pay housing taxes," Trixie replied. "And I sell Princess Twilight's toothbrushes to the black market." Trixie rolled to her side and stared at the ceiling. "My best friend used to say Trixie, don't kill yourself over a dyke. Your body might fall in the river, and we can't let the enemy know."
The mare stared, clearly just sober enough to contemplate how too drunk she was still. "What the hay does that mean?" her tongue asked, without consulting her first.
"It means there's a lot of ponies who'd pay a lot of money to have something that touched an alicorn's mouth." Trixie turned back onto her side. "You should see how many bits I made on those cups Princess Celestia used."
The bottle Trixie had spoken to did not reply. The mare she'd meant to talk to, on the other side of her, also did not reply. Her tongue had found itself a different occupation after noticing the stallion who'd fallen beside her.
Trixie sighed and lazily hit the bottle, sending it rolling into another pony's almost successful attempt at standing. She herself rolled until she was on her back again. "And who are you, beautiful?" she asked the ghostly image of herself her mind conjured floating above her.
"I am your conscience, Trixie," the vision said gravely. "You should cease drowning your sorrows in earthly vices and instead- Uh!" The vision spotted Trixie's undrunk glass of wine on the counter and downed it, then sat down and motioned the bartender for a refill.
Trixie sighed again. "Do you know why I drink?" she asked to no one.
"To forget?" asked the previous stallion, who'd awoken and crawled his way there.
Trixie blinked at the ceiling, where she thought the voice had come from. "I actually can't remember." And she slid a new bottle out of her hat.
Author's Note
"Starlight?"
"Yeah?"
"It looks like this one is from Trixie."
"Open it."
"Uh... It looks like it's a bill. A long one."
"Gimme."
"How much is it?"
"Hold on. Fifty ponies... bottles... drunk bouncer... broken sinks... parrot... pretzels... Ah, there it is. Fifteen hundred seventy-three bits, plus reparation costs."
"...How?"
"I'll go raid Twilight's bathroom."
"What?!"
