The next afternoon....three hours down a certain railroad track...and on the outskirts of the concrete jungle of the city known as 'Manehatten', an alarm clock blared loudly. The time on this clock blinked rapidly, the current time being 3:45 P.M. The clock was resting on the soft padding of a futon which took up its residence in the middle of a trashed bedroom, dirt and dust coating the floor and empty Apple Cider bottles discarded randomly around the bed. The bedroom window was open with the blinds down, the rays of the afternoon sun divided and casting their glow on the dirty carpet as the gentle licks of cold, December wind gently lapped and pushed against a star-speckled cap and matching pointed-hat.
The sounds of soft moaning could be heard from the rumpled sheets and blankets that were covering the bed, a lump underneath their cotton walls shifting and moving around. Two hooves of semi-dark blue color reached out of the top of the sheets and gently pulled them down, revealing the closed-eyed face of a mare with a sort of partially bleached, blue color of a mane. A small colt plushie was pushed up against the jaw of the blue mare, her eyes flying open and staring towards the blaring clock. Her eyes were a depressing gray color, her horn lighting up with a dull blue aura of magic and silencing the clock. She sat up slowly in bed, her eyes partially narrowed and a grimace forming on her lips. She picked up an Apple Cider bottle from the top of her bed where she had thrown it the previous night. She sighed, blowing her bedraggled mane out of her face and shaking the Apple Cider bottle, its glass shell devoid of any comforting substance.
She frowned, dropping the bottle on the ground and pushing herself out of bed. She stared towards the ground with a hurtful expression on her face, her hoofsteps soft and quiet. She moved out into and across the small hallway outside her bedroom and straight into the living room, her eyes shifting up towards the wooden cupboard that lined the far wall. Hopping up on her hind legs, she opened the wooden door and grimaced, her eye twitching from the sight of a spider crawling over her mane-brush. Slowly looking away, her eyes followed the contours of the wooden planks and towards the other side of of the cupboard. With a quiet sigh, she looked upon the small bottle of pills that rested in the dark shadow of an unopened bottle of Apple Cider. With another twitch from her eye, she reached a hoof out and pulled the two items from their place in the cupboard, quietly shutting the door with a magic glow from her horn.
Trotting over, she hopped up on one of the wooden chairs and sighed, placing the two bottles on the table and propping her chin up on her hoof. She looked around the room lazily, the clock on the far wall ticking ever so slowly. As the clock struck 3:42, the mare's eyes widened. Whispers began to echo out from the hallway, gently bouncing off the walls and floating the mare's ears. With wide eyes, she quickly grasped the bottle of cider and popped the top, opening her mouth and chugging down the red-orange liquid down in one go. She let out a tiny hiccup as she put the bottle down, her eye twitching a bit more and a bitter grimace stretching across her lips. Still hearing the whispers, the shaky mare picked up the bottle of pills and magically unscrewed the cap, pulling out two pills and popping them quickly with a painful swallow.
The voices stopped almost immediately, a heavy sigh escaping the mare as she levitated a small stack of mail towards her, peering at the words with a general taste of cider-tinged medicine sticking to her tongue like a festering growth. She quickly discarded the first bit of mail, the title reading 'Grow your horn in just TWO WEEKS!'. She frowned at the next piece, a letter from her landlord demanding more bits and more rent. She sighed as she read through the next one, an 'URGENT' stamped bill payment for the wooden show-trailer she no longer owned...the memory of its splintering remains fresh in her mind from when an Ursa Minor had smashed it into nothing. As she looked over the last piece of mail, her eyes suddenly narrowed and she gritted her teeth. She quickly started to shred the mail between her hooves, seething with anger as the words 'The Great Fraud: Ursa story a lie!' disintegrated into shreds of paper, along with a picture of her standing on a small wooden stage. She banged her hooves on the table loudly, the shredded paper falling to the floor like snow.
She hopped out of the chair with a slight huff and trotted into her bathroom, magically opening the sliding door to her shower and pushing a hoof against the red square in the wall that would activate the warm water. It was of course cold at first, but it gave the mare enough time to trot out for a moment and return with a new bottle of Apple Cider. Holding a hoof under the watery stream, she felt the water reach a warm enough temperature that she could bear. Stepping into the shower, she sighed, the feeling of the water rushing down her mane and body making the stressed mare shiver. She slid down the wall of the shower and relaxed, her wide, staring eyes traveling over the expanse of her bathroom. She took a swig of cider and swallowed with another grimace, her eyes staring down towards the drain. She felt her eye twitch as she thought about her life....how it was so similar to that drain. All of it that she had left had run completely down it, into a black abyss where most ponies didn't care about learning or wondering about...wondering where the water goes once it disappears into that void of pain and loneliness.
She stayed in the shower for Celestia only knows how long before stepping out, wrapping a towel up around her sopping wet mane and drying the rest of herself off with a levitating towel. She dropped the cider bottle in the sink, the clinking of the other five bottles in the basin ringing int he mare's ears. Quickly leaving the bathroom, she trotted into her living room and pulled the nearest book off of the bookshelf and settled onto her couch, flipping it open and scanning the pages of spells that she had hoped to have mastered by New Year's. As she scanned down the pages however, her mind kept pulling itself away, distracting her with flashes and images of the life she had before this. That day in Ponyville...the mares who challenged her...and the mare who 'defeated' her, making a total fool out of her and running her completely out of town. The name of that mare escaped her, but it was just the image of her smiling face, her lavender coat, and her violet eyes that got the blue mare screaming. She chucked the book across the room, the bang from the wall it collided with only infuriating the mare more. She rushed over, pushing everything off of her table and flipping it over, her back legs kicking out and bucking her wooden chair into the wall.
Tears began to form in her eyes as she took a step forward and tripped over a bottle of cider, her body hitting the dusty ground with a loud 'THUD'. She started to weep, crawling forward on her belly as the tears from her eyes gently dripped to the ground, clearing away the grime as they fell. The whispers returned as she crawled out into the hallway, reaching for the front door weakly.
"Fat flank!"
"Orphan!!!!!"
"Fake!!! Faker!!!!"
"You're weak at magic! What is this, Magic Kindergarten?!"
She let out a furious scream, pushing herself up on her hooves and galloping at full speed through the front door. The door swung open with a loud bang, the frigid December air greeting the mare with a murderous embrace. Tears streamed down her face as she ran, ran away from her warm, depressing home. She let out a yelp as her hoof struck a rock and sent her into a front flip, the air being knocked out of her as her back collided with the ground. She gasped for air as her chest heaved up and downwards, the sun beginning to go down beyond the trees. She must have been in that shower for longer then she had thought, watching as stars began to blanket the sky and twinkle with supreme majesty. She didn't know if it was her eyes playing tricks on her, or just her sanity finally starting to shatter, but she swore she could see a name etched in the white speckled sky of darkness:
'Trixie'
Trixie let out a choking sob, holding a hoof up to the sky as her voice weakly rasped up towards the sky
"Twinkle Twinkle...Little Star....
...how I wonder...what you are...
...Please hear me now if you care...
...please give love to this poor mare..."
Her hoof dropped back to the ground, her eyes slowly closing as exhaustion took her in a tight hold and sent her into a world of painless sleep. It wasn't long after this that a shadow passed over Trixie, hooves of midnight blue gently picking her up and placing her on the back of dark-colored Unicorn with Pegasus wings.
The door to Trixie's house opened quietly, the sounds of soft hoofsteps shattering the thin silence that pervaded the desolate household. Being careful not to wake her, Princess Luna gently placed Trixie in her futon and pulled up the sheets, giving her head a comforting rub and placing a large bag of bits on her bed-side table. Along with the bag came a note, scribbled in her hand-writing 'You are not alone...'. With a final sigh, Luna quietly exited the room and went about fixing the trashed living room with a quick sweep of magic, seeing herself out shortly after that. The saddened Princess took too the skies, gently gliding through the frigid air that seemed to warm rather than cool her. Her thoughts ran over Trixie...the poor, cold, lonely mare who was forced to live such a wretched life. She wanted to do something...anything, but being on the moon for over 1,000 years had seriously taken its toll. She wasn't really sure how to deal with the situation, as she was more or less socially incapable. She needed a pony who knew a great deal about friendship, somepony who she could rely on, somepony Celestia could trust to see things through...somepony like...
Luna gasped as she whispered quietly to the wind "Of course!"
(I was actually inspired to write this chapter after hearing this PMV posted on DeusGear's Channel ---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1w9eoNC6ic&feature=related . It's not exactly the same but just the raw emotion of this video nearly had me in tears and I figured it was the perfect set-up for Trixie's character in this fic. Credit for the song and video go to their respective owners.)