*
“Okie dokie!” cooed Derpy, dropping her satchel by the closing door. “Shift’s done! Mommy’s home! Who wants to get baking!?”
Next door, the living room gave no response.
Odd. Derpy locked the front door behind her and drifted down the hall to poke her head in.
Amethyst sat up to the table, scowling at an abacus and two open stock books in front of her. She didn’t look up.
Dinky lay on her back on the sofa, scowling at a comic with a large enough “KABLAM!” on the cover to get Derpy worried about its violent content. She didn’t look up either.
“Girls?” said Derpy.
She sensed the distant rumbles, but wasn’t prepared to call it an earthquake yet. Maybe just a passing underground worm that’d bother no one. Yeah, that was it.
“It’s baking night,” she said. “Yay?”
Neither of them looked up.
“Hey,” said Ammy.
“Hi, Mom,” said Dinky.
Derpy waited for more rumbles. “Only I thought you’d love baking night. You usually do.”
Amethyst placed her executioner’s pencil carefully on the chopping block of numbers, and steepled her forelimbs together. All she needed were the glasses on a ribbon and her artfully scruffy mane tied into a strict bun.
“Baking, I don’t object to,” she said, opening a meeting. “However, in light of certain recent circumstances, I propose I do it solo.”
“What?” said Derpy.
Dinky threw her comic down and rolled onto her haunches, showing off her artlessly scruffy haystack of a mane in turn.
“I’m not doing it if she’s doing it,” she translated.
Derpy refused to sigh. Sighing meant giving up. She’d never give up. Never. Sometimes, she wished she could give up a little bit.
“Please tell me you haven’t been fighting again?” she pleaded.
“Fighting?” Amethyst’s face hardened, opening a meeting with no compromises and annoyingly not enough coffee. “Fighting implies blame on both sides. Dinky’s the one to blame. She raided our budget for food again, without permission.”
“Mom, please! It was just a one-off! I swear!” wailed Dinky. “Alula’s birthday’s on Sunday. I wanted to get a good cake. She’s my friend!”
“Hey!” Amethyst bristled like a cat gearing up for a hissing and spitting contest. “You want to change the budget, you discuss it with me first!”
“You always say no! And I’m not getting Alula some box of cupcakes. It’s supposed to be a proper cake from Sugar Cube Corner. The best I can get.”
“Then get it yourself. You’ve got your own money to dip into.”
“It wasn’t enough, OK?”
“Well, now it’s not enough to cover the whole week for the rest of us.”
“What about Alula?”
“What about her? It’s not the end of the world if she doesn’t get a cake she can swim in.”
“Party pooper!”
“Petty thief!”
“Stick in the mud!”
“Wild animal!”
Derpy flapped into the heat haze between both camps, wings flailing for peace. “Girls, girls, please! We can talk about that later, please. We’re not going to spoil a lovely day, are we? Please? Now, let’s go make things better by having a jolly family baking night.”
She caught each stare in turn.
“Please,” she added.
Amethyst’s chair scraped back. “All right. Mom. But we will be discussing this later.”
Dinky stuck her tongue out, then caught Derpy’s stern eye and hastily pushed it back in.
“Sorry, Mom,” said a small voice from Dinky’s knees.
“Right!” said Derpy, rubbing her hooves whilst the two of them stood not looking at each other in the kitchen. “Any suggestions for tonight?”
“Black Chocolate Gateau with Bitter Orange Filling,” said Amethyst to the oven.
“Banoffee Cream Pie,” said Dinky to the fridge. “With Custard.”
“Uh, uh, uh oh!” said Derpy in a way that would have left babies gasping at the wonder and mystery of it all. “We have a conundrum now, don’t we? See? I can’t possibly pick between two such perfect choices! That’s not going to help at all. Now, let’s decide which one we’ll do. I’ll start. So –”
“Ew, not black chocolate,” muttered Dinky. “And bitter oranges? Seriously? Aren’t desserts supposed to be sweet?”
“I’m not messing with bananas,” said Amethyst, with a sniff. “Nor custard. It’s clown food.”
“No, it’s not!” Dinky tapped her hooves together to count along the tip of one. “It’s creamy. It’s rich. It’s super-sweet. I like it.”
“I rest my case,” muttered Amethyst. “Clown food.”
“Well, that explains you then,” muttered Dinky back. “Sour food for a sourpuss.”
“I don’t know whose you’re going to take up, Mom,” snapped Amethyst as if Derpy had spoken, “but I for one absolutely refuse to bake anything as fake-soundingly cheerful as ‘banoffee’.”
“And I’m not baking her hoity-toity dark stuff,” added Dinky. “I don’t even like bitter oranges. She’s only suggesting it to get back at me.”
“Says you,” growled Amethyst.
“Prove me wrong, Sis! I dare you to prove me wrong!”
Derpy, close to a headache eruption, leaped in and forced their faces apart before they could ram into each other. “All right, enough you two. Look, how about we just do both? That’ll sort this out, right? Peacefully?”
Mutual glowers dimmed slightly. They sought refuge on the only common ground they’d currently call a truce on: Derpy’s smile.
“All right, Mom,” said Dinky.
“If you say so, Mom,” said Amethyst, shrugging.
“That’s better,” said Derpy, sunshine returning. “And if you’re not having fun, let me know and I’ll see what I can do about it.”
*
“Oh my,” said Velvet.
Derpy looked up from licking her plate. “Mmh?”
“They… fight?”
Derpy sucked her tongue in, sending ketchup drops flying. “I wouldn’t call it ‘fighting’. I’d call it a tiny bout of ‘not-getting-along’.”
Not for the first time in her life, Velvet found herself worrying about her own almost-too-perfect home life. Shining Armor had enjoyed every homefield advantage, as the big brother of the family, and Twilight always acted like she had a lot to prove – often by the shelf-full – but they’d never actually fought. Not so’s Velvet would notice, anyway.
In a way, the peace had been worrying too. Old schoolfriends had warned her about little ones going at it with claws and fangs, but Shining and Twilight seemed almost supernaturally happy with each other. It was as if the whole world had stored up the nastiness just so she could avoid it.
Times like this, she feared the whole world was going to ask questions about that arrangement. It was like finding crime avoided her house on a theft-and-murder-ridden street, and then opening the door and facing police officers with a search warrant. There was the sense it was all too neat.
“You’re very brave,” Velvet said, sounding as soft and sympathetic as she felt was owed.
Given that wandering eye, Derpy had the perfect face to look confused. “Am I?”
“Well, y-yes! I mean, putting up with all that fight– with all those ‘not-getting-along’ bouts?”
Derpy looked like a cop wondering why the one nice pony on this wretched street had called the innocent ‘Have You Seen This Pony?’ notice a search warrant.
“Brave?” she repeated. “Of course not. They’re not monsters, silly!”
“But –”
“Whyever would you say a thing like that?”
Velvet now had discovered that, where the cops were concerned, there were worse things than being mistaken for a covert criminal all along. Like being thought of as the upstanding neighbour, only to have your sanity suddenly called into question by your ignorant babbling about search warrants and crime-free houses and no officer I’m not hiding anything I swear. If she’d answered the door shaved naked, it might have been marginally less embarrassing.
She threw Derpy’s laughter a helpless look.
“Don’t worry, it gets better,” said Derpy, recovering. “You haven’t heard what happened next…”
*
What happened next – between Amethyst and Dinky – was something that could only be described as belligerent baking.
The kitchen wasn’t a large enough arena, so there was much bumping and glowering and wrestler-like cautious circling as each side wielded “excuse me” and “pardon me” and only stopped short of fouls under the watchful eye of the ref.
Where there were multiple implements – stirring spoons and whisks, for example – each side cautiously made sure to stop and pause so that neither took theirs at the same time as the other, for fear of starting another bout. Where there was only one available – say, one mixing bowl between them – there was a silent but determined shoulder-shoving effort to be the first to snatch it out the cupboard, forcing second place to make do with – this being Dinky – a plant pot scavenged from out the back.
Each side stirred as though offended the mix would dare to need any time at all.
The oven represented the closest thing to half-time, as there was nothing to do but wait. Both sides glowered at the orange hum, tensed and ready to grapple at a moment’s notice.
The oven pinged. Derpy almost sighed as the two scrambled politely yet firmly to extract their winning dishes first.
And there it was: Black Chocolate Gateau with Bitter Orange Filling, a swirling top hat of creamy whites and sinful darkness, ornamental at its peak with the shattered glass of fine cooking chocolate, all as monochromatically balanced as a Tao symbol.
Beside it: Banoffee Cream Pie. With Custard. Bursting with plump, Hearth’s Warming fat-bellied joy, bouncy and goofy in its heart of gold and timber-brown homeliness where banana and toffee got scrambled like a mad circus act, swimming in custard bulging generously over the sides like happy drunks.
Now they all sat at the table in the living room. Dinky on the left. Amethyst on the right. Derpy mediating.
“Girls, you’ve outdone yourselves!” she said. “Ooh…” She breathed deeply. Her mouth tried to pour itself out in its haste to taste. “So good…”
“My compliments, Dinky,” droned Amethyst behind crossed limbs. “Yours looks edible.”
“Well done, Ammy,” was all Dinky would say. “Yours almost looks tasty.”
Derpy wiped her brow. Peace brokered at last. Soon to seal the deal.
Even she spotted the problem eventually.
Around that time, Amethyst glanced at her. “Well, Mom?” she prompted.
“Whose dish are you going to eat first?” said Dinky, raising an eyebrow much older than she was.
Derpy stared at one. Derpy stared at the other. Dark chocolate gateau. Banoffee pie. Gateau. Pie. Ammy’s work. Dinky’s work. Ammy. Dinky.
The ironclad rule of motherhood as Derpy understood it was: don’t show favouritism.
No firsts. No lasts.
Gateau, pie. Gateau, pie.
“I could… try… both?” she said.
“What, with two spoons?” said Amethyst, and she screwed up her lips in grim contemplation.
“That’ll muck up the taste!” Dinky grimaced at the sheer horrible thought of that mix.
Derpy risked a lesser evil. “Neither?” she said.
Amethyst had no such restraint when it came to sighing. She even pressed a hoof to her forehead.
“You can’t keep saying ‘both’,” she announced in as reasonable a voice as ever walked a madmare off a ledge. “And expect it to fix everything. Sometimes, you have to pick.”
“Are you all right, Mom?” said Dinky, concern shoving spite aside.
Derpy’s wings folded and unfolded over and over, never getting comfortable. She forced herself to pick up a spoon, then glanced side to side. Gateau, pie. Gateau, pie.
“Er…” Her spoon hovered over the broken chocolate, then over the bubbling custard.
“It’s only a taste, Mom,” said Amethyst, nervously sensing the drop in temperature. “Look, you can have the other one afterwards. It won’t make a difference.”
“I don’t…” Derpy saw nothing but gateau and pie, gateau and pie, gateau and pie.
“Just pick one, Mom,” insisted Dinky, but gently. “Do it quick. Get it over with.”
“I, uh…” Back and forth, one spoon, two meals. “I can’t… I… I…”
Gateau, pie, gateau pie, gateau pie gateau pie gateau pie gateau pie gateaupie gateaupie gateaupiegateaupie-gateaupiegateaupie –
Whereupon Dinky and Amethyst leaped into action.
Amethyst was in and out of the kitchen with barely a rattle of the cutlery drawer. Dinky fielded her spoon and switched the desserts. Both sisters sat down, pulling each other’s desserts towards them and away from Derpy.
There was a simultaneous: NOM.
The shock was so fast in coming, so slow in leaving, that Derpy needed a while to see each of them with a spoon slurping out of each mouth. Each dessert had a chunk scooped out of it.
Silent chewing, and some squirming lips and flexing cheeks, followed.
Derpy said, “Well?”
Both sisters swallowed at once. Two separate stomachs splashed.
“It’s…” Amethyst felt around her mouth, shuddering. “Way too sweet.”
“Too…” Dinky screwed up her face and tried to inspect her tongue. “Sh’lour.”
Both of them offered squiggly frowns to Derpy.
“But nice,” said Dinky cautiously. “In its own way.”
“I could get used to the taste,” suggested Amethyst.
“Girls?” said Derpy, still trying to get over something mental.
Dinky shoved the gateau over. “It’s OK, Mom. You can try Ammy’s first. I promise I won’t be offended.”
“Or if you like,” piped up Amethyst, “you can try Dinky’s first. Really, it doesn’t make much difference to me anyway. I swear.”
Finally, Derpy let herself go. She leaned back. She stared up at the ceiling.
She sighed.
When she straightened up again, she was shaking her head at the pair of them.
“What would I ever do without you two?” she cooed. “And what would you do without me, you two utter nincompoops?”
Sighing became infectious: both sisters let out relief together.
“Now,” said Derpy, seizing on the agenda of the evening, “about this money problem…”
“I was gonna pay it back! Look!” Dinky rushed out of the room, thumped up and then down the stairs, and came back rattling a money box. “You can have it! And this week’s allowance, and next! I can handle it!”
“You still should have asked permiss–” Amethyst began, only to be silenced by a raised wing from Derpy.
“Ammy, if you please?”
Amethyst immediately pretended she hadn’t been about to say anything, tail twirling in feline annoyance.
“I’ll ask next time,” mumbled Dinky to the table. “I promise. I’m sorry.”
“You know why we don’t like you doing that, right?” said Derpy. “Why Ammy and I get upset about you not asking first?”
Tortured out of her guilty lips, Dinky mumbled, even more quietly, “Because we need to spend our money properly because we should talk about it together because that means we trust each other. I know.”
“Good girl.” Derpy ruffled her mane, ruining the haystack further. “Anyway, if Alula wants a big cake, she’s only got to ask.”
“What, you?” said Amethyst in sudden horror.
“No, don’t be daft! I meant ask us so we could ask the Cakes, or something.”
“Hm,” said Amethyst, unconvinced.
“Besides, it’s not a crime to want to give your friends a treat.”
“Well now, I didn’t say that.” Amethyst spoke as one faced with a legal nicety she hadn’t wanted noticed. “I only meant the means, not the ends –”
“Super! So you get why Dinky did what she did? It’s only fair, Ammy, to see things the way she does too.”
Amethyst shuffled as comfortably as a cornered tabby about to gets its fish yanked out of its jaws. Through tight teeth, she conceded, “I get that, sure.”
Speaking in a mock-haughty tone, Derpy stuck out her chest and said, “But it still doesn’t change what the little criminal did, now does it, now?”
Dinky giggled behind a hoof. “OK, Mom, I’ll give the money back. Just let poor Ammy go before she can’t stand it anymore, heehee.”
Derpy didn’t mind when Amethyst’s injured pride resisted her gentle kiss on the cheek. After all, Derpy held it’d be a funny old world if ponies were all the same, though possibly a much less funny one if the standard used was Ammy’s sense of humour.
“That seems reasonable to me,” said Derpy. “Right, girls! Let’s have whatever treat we want.”
“Aye aye, mon capitan! But seriously,” said Dinky, smirking. “Try mine first. It’s the best.”
*
“They grow up so fast.” Derpy wiped a tear from her eye with a wingtip.
Ah, there was the sweet spot. The calm haven against the rest of her life. Velvet relaxed again, resting on the reliable ground, welcoming the sun’s smile, admiring the shine of the brilliant clouds. No bobbing or sinking or drowning. Just everything safe, where it should be.
“What wonderful children,” she said. “You truly did a good job on them, Derpy.”
Derpy had to close her eyes against the sheer indulgent pleasure.
Once more, Savoir Fare materialized, achieving through servile dedication a feat that would make a teleporting unicorn retire in shame. “And now, mademoiselles, may Ai offair you dessert?”
“Ooh, yes please!” Derpy helped pile up the plates for him. “One Rainbow Sundae to share, please!”
“Aw, Derpy,” said Velvet. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to!”
“Very bon, Miss Dur-pee.” Savoir Fare turned to Velvet. “And what will you be ‘aveeng?”
Velvet sheepishly settled for a slice of tiramisu.