Water.
It was always slipping and sliding against Pinkie, rippling her mane and ruffling her coat. So silky, like a dream. She could see the surface of the pool, so close and yet so far away.
Pinkie could never reach the surface. There was something up there, though...something perfect and wonderful, with sunshine and stars and friends...such good friends.
Who had her friends been? Why was it so hard for her to remember...
Pinkie fought with her hooves to rise up in the water and get to the dim light shining through the water, but the water resisted her easily. Why couldn't she swim? Pinkie had thought she knew how.
A flash of something came: working her hooves, gliding gracefully through a bright cerulean pond, feeling herself laugh as a blue pony burst up from the water. The pony had whipped her rainbow hair back and forth to dry it, grinning at Pinkie as she did so. Who was she? What was this blue pony's name?
Names came bubbling up. Celestia, Twilight, Fluttershy, Cadence, Applejack, Mrs. Cake, Rarity, Rainbow Dash. Each name came with a familiar pang, but the moment she tried to delve deeper into who they belonged too, the feeling slipped away. They were fading...
Rainbow Dash, Pinkie thought desperately, holding on to the name. Was she that strange mare, sopping wet and smiling happily in the sunlight?
No, no, she didn't think so...She couldn't recall the name or the pony now, couldn't know if they matched...
The cloudy memories twisted and faded.
Bubbles streamed past Pinkie's muzzle and mane, drifting effortlessly to the the surface of the water, the life Pinkie wanted to reach. She pushed harder, wanting to know more about the memories of what had happened before now, the memories of the life she could resume if she only reached the surface.
What had she done up there? Flashes came, all meaning something to her for minuscule second, but disappearing just as fast. Some stuck out; she felt an odd sense of cloudy recognition at seeing the blue pony again, and the same for a couple of others, though she could not find the names in her muddled mind. Squeezing her eyes shut, she remembered pulling the string on a black cannon, firing a compressed lump of shiny confetti at a black pony in front of her. The pony had widened it's vivid blue eyes and flailed it's legs, filled with gaping holes, before the confetti hit him, knocking him backwards and somehow positioning a festive party hat on his head at the same time. A strange, achingly familiar feeling rose up within her.
The feeling...it felt...nice. Warm and welcoming, like an old friend she had almost forgotten. Special, somehow. The feeling conjured up thousands of moments, of her throwing her head back and opening her mouth wide, producing an unearthly sound...a sound that rung with joy and happiness, reverberating endlessly and mirrored by those mysterious ponies that always surrounded her. The memory filled her up and made her want to...what was the word? Laugh.
The cold water pressed in again, shocking her back to reality. The urge, so fleeting, vanished.
Pinkie shivered; she couldn't imagine smiling, even, in the icy depths of the pool...
The time passed by like a dream. Maybe it was. Pinkie wasn't sure anymore. What was it on the surface that I wanted to get to so badly? Even the pale, washed-out memories she'd managed to keep were fading. She focused on the memory of that other pony...the dark one, purple-toned. There was something special to her, she was important somehow...Twilight had brought them all together, after all.
Pinkie's eyes opened wide as she tried to force the burst of recognition to stay with her. Twilight had...come to Ponyville...to set up the...the Winter Nights Celebration? No, that wasn't right. No, it had to be! It wasn't right, but it was all she had, and Pinkie fought to keep it her own.
But soon, just like all the others, the recollection slowly dissolved, leaving her with a hollow feeling.
Why couldn't she remember? Pinkie was openly crying now, but her tears disappeared so fast they were gone in moments, effortlessly mingling with cold water surrounding her. Why wouldn't the memories stay? Why wouldn't they stay? She wanted to remember so hard...didn't she?
The tears flooded out even thicker, though she couldn't see them, and barely even feel them, her skin numb as it was. She wanted to know! To know what was up there, what was it that she had left behind, and why had she left in the first place? She needed to know! She needed to!
I. WANT. TO. KNOW.
Please...
The mental walls preventing Pinkie from remembering resisted for a moment before collapsing into a muddled heap. One that Pinkie triumphantly sailed over.
Hundreds of thousands of memories abruptly came into focus, so fast it almost paralyzed her. Slowly she relived her life in her clear as day recollection, beating back the chill and smiling at many of the memories: her laughing and joking with her friends. She felt a warm glow at recognizing them, knowing their names and faces without a thought. She had taken the ability of simply knowing for granted all her life; now, just being able to keep close one fact about her friends felt better than a thousand brilliant sunrises.
Pinkie started to feel her lips involuntarily sliding upwards...only to freeze in confusion. A new memory had bubbled to the surface, fighting for her immediate attention and pushing aside images of Appleloosa and Discord. She was standing near...a pond?
A pond! Pinkie frantically looked around. The water surrounding her matched the color of that pool in her memory. So she had come here before...but why, and how did she get inside of it? Pinkie followed the memory onward, feeling a burning curiosity bordering on a need to know.
She was walking into the pool...No! She was walking out of it, instead, being pulled out by another Pinkie. The scenes zipped by even faster. More and more Pinkie Pies were jumping into the Mirror Pool-for that was what it was-and coming back out with a perfect duplicate. Bouncing into town with the rest of them, all feeling riotously happy. All except for one...her memories told her she had stopped to try to console a strangely sad Pinkie, who was sitting slumped at a cafe table, mumbling about how she didn't know if she was the "real" one. She had tried to talk to her, but had ended up being pulled along by the infectious joy of all the other Pinkie Pie's before she could figure out what was making that particular one so sad.
Then, suddenly, she was in a big room, the town hall. She was sitting happily in the middle, surrounded on all sides by other bright pink Pinkies. She had just managed to get into a silent stupor, staring unconsciously at the wall of paint while contemplating a new cake recipe, when a thundering whoosh noise came and broke her concentration. Confused, but still staring at the wall of paint, she felt her enthusiasm towards this silly contest morph into curiosity. She twitched, and finally resolved to turn around to see what was going on-
WHOOSH. The noise came in front of her this time; right in front of her. It had come from another Pinkie who had turned her head around, doubtlessly to see what was going on. Just like she had been about to do.
But what horrified her even more was what she had seen. The poor, hapless Pinkie Pie directly in front of had only a second to look behind her when a lavender beam of magic had blasted her. The lavender magic had seemed to dart into that Pinkie Pie through unseen openings, crumbling her from the inside out. In seconds, she had been crushed into nothing more than a thin stream of magic, which wisped out an open window.
Pinkie Pie, her, the one still floating in the Mirror Pool reviewing through her memories, dry heaved. That, that was her. But it wasn't. It had been another Pinkie. But it didn't matter; they were all Pinkie Pie, real, genuine Pinkamena Diane Pie, able to laugh and love and see and feel.
And they were all going to be crushed out of existence by this lavender aura...this magical signature...of Twilight's. Twilight. Twilight was doing this.
Instantly, she was paralyzed with fear. W-why was Twilight doing that? Every one of them was really, truly, alive!
Her head spun and her lungs burned for air. No...this couldn't be happening...not Twilight...
Twilight was her friend! Pinkie trusted her friends, right? She wasn't afraid of them.
And yet she felt like her heart was drowning in pure terror, and she could see the same fear and horror reflected back at her in all the pink shapes, tensely jittering but keeping their panicked eyes on the paint-covered wall. She could see the cold dread in all of them, the trepidation as they all came to the conclusion that there was no way out.
Behind her, the whoosh came again, twice, and Pinkie cringed, her eyes filling with tears. But still she kept her them wide open, plastered to the wall and filled with a desperate desire to survive. She still forced herself to stay silent, not protesting the rampant slaughter of the Pinkies around her.
Then suddenly her mind was clear.
She couldn't allow this to happen. Yes, they'd come from the Mirror Pool, yes, they'd only been born because of Pinkie's folly. But the lot of them could have been lifeless, soulless, copies, fulfilling only an existence without life, and she still wasn't going to let something like this happen! They were real, she didn't care whatever the others thought, what the Princesses thought, what all of Equestria thought. They were real. They deserved to live.
Her heart was thudding wildly, as if it in itself could feel the danger of the situation. The rush of blood was filling up her ears to the point where everything had became muffled and indistinct. But she still held on to the one thought dominating her mind.
Pinkie had brought them into this world. She was going to make damn well sure they weren't going back out.
Almost without plan, she furiously got to her hooves and turned around. This was it. The defining moment.
"Twilight! This is wrong! How could you-"
BOOM
The memory ended. It found Pinkie curled up into a ball, sobbing over this turn of events.
She'd failed. She had promised to save them if it had been the last thing she had done, and she had failed.
No wonder she hadn't been able to remember at first. She'd probably repressed the memories, forcing them down to avoid the wrenching guilt and horror. She knew she'd do anything right now to forget again.
The golden dream she had sustained, of reaching the surface and happily living with her friends, faded sharply, leaving only faint traces of harsh bitterness. Pinkie didn't want to even think of her former friends now, let alone rise out of the pool and look into their eyes knowing that four had condoned mass murder, and that one had committed it. That one had even cast the same spell on her without a thought towards what she had been trying to tell them.
She didn't want to reach the surface. She didn't want to stay here, underwater. She didn't want to see or hear or think. The pain...the pain was so much...it felt like a surgical tool, reaching inside her and pulling out the darkest, saddest, most wretched thoughts of her being. The thoughts swept across her, agony against her formerly happy soul.
Pinkie Pie had never understood why somepony would commit suicide. Life was so full of potential, for friends and love and laughter and smiles and surprises and everything-what pain, what despair, could ever overcome something so great and wonderful?
She understood now. She was feeling it right this second. And it was crushing her from the inside out.
She was cold. She was miserable. She was broken.
Maybe...it was for the best. Who knew? Maybe her friends and all Equestria could be happy without her.
And, who knew what the future held? Perhaps she could still get out of the pool. She could still forget again. She could still live...only half-alive knowing subconsciously what had happened, but she could live.
But she didn't want to.
She sunk down to the bottom of the pool, negating hours and hours of work straining to the surface in a second. Closing her eyes, she thought again...maybe it was for the best.
Pinkie Pie, lying still on the sandy floor of that pool that started it all...let go.