//------------------------------// // Chapter 2: On a Downward Path // Story: Hitting Rock Bottom // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// Cheerilee, at twenty-five now much farther from innocence than she might have wished, struggled to her hooves -- which proved a remarkably difficult feat for her, compared to her normally-healthy condition. As she did so, pain stabbed through her head, and nausea twisted her gut. She realized that she had to go to the bathroom, and staggered through the unfamiliar apartment to where she imagined might exist that facility. Fuzzy memories were starting to return to her as the alcoholic haze began to dissipate -- enough to make her aware that the olfactory, gustatory and tactile information being conveyed to her by her senses were horribly and sadly quite correct in their implications. They were still just a series of disconnected experiences -- of her letting intimate things be done to her, and actively doing similar things herself, by and to complete strangers. The little she could remember made her devoutly hope to remember no more of it. She would have hung her head in shame, were it not for the fact that every time she lowered her head her innards squirmed in a manner which very much implied that her acquaintance with her current stomach contents were to be more abbreviated than was her normal digestive wont. She thus decided that any head-hanging was an activity best avoided until she had actually attained her lavatory goal. After a false turn and opening one wrong door, she finally reached the bathroom, only to find it occupied. This was less of a problem than it might have been, as both of the occupants were asleep. There was a mare in the bathtub, which would be convenient when she woke up and smelled herself. And there was a small skinny stallion on the tiled floor right outside the bathtub, where he may perhaps have attained after dismounting the mare, judging by the extent to which they smelled of one another, but been unable to progress any further. Normally, Cheerilee would have been quite disgusted by this situation, but it was impossible for her to adopt any attitude of moral or even hygienic superiority regarding their actions, given that she had already deduced that she had attained her sleeping-place on the rug due to a fairly-similar set of circumstances. Besides, at least the couple in the bathroom didn't smell like anyponies but one another. Cheerilee was pretty sure there had been multiple stallions in her case -- and probably at least one mare as well. None of whom had even been her friends. If anything, she had behaved far more disgracefully than had the bathroom sleepers. And Cheerilee really had to use the bathroom. So Cheerilee simply stepped over the sleeping stallion and sat on the toilet, relieving herself with a grateful sigh. The relief lasted only a moment, because now the upper end of her digestive tract then clamored for attention. She got up quickly, twisted around, being careful not to step on the small stallion, and finally hung her head, though whether or not it was in shame, or purely for practical reasons, would have been an interesting philosophical question, of the sort that in another mood Cheerilee might have enjoyed examining. Right now the only thing of concern to Cheerilee was her stomach contents, of which she promptly proceeded to rid herself, in the process demonstrating one of the more trivial superiorities of the Ponies over their Pre-Pony ancestors of some two million years ago, and one that had nothing directly to do with the more obvious one of their powerful sapient brains. It was, however, an advantage very personally important to Cheerilee at this moment. Unlike a true equid, Cheerilee could vomit. And did so, quite noisily and completely. Afterward, she felt a bit better. Her stomach ceased convulsing, the light stopped hurting her eyes so severely, her headache slightly lessened. She knew enough biochemistry to realize that she had dumped out toxins -- the alcohol and whatever else she had consumed -- and her whole body was relaxing from the previous stresses of having to process them. Her mind was not yet completely clear, but it was clearing. Cheerilee's throat was sore from the passage of her vomitus, and she was suddenly very thirsty. She did not bother to go to the kitchen, not when there was a sink right before her. She turned on the tap and simply lapped the water directly from it with her long and dextrous tongue. She did this for a long while, then turned off the water and stepped back with a gasp. She felt a lot better -- at least physically -- now. Cheerilee quickly washed her face in the sink, soaped her body in the worst-smelling places, cleaned herself as best she could without actually using the tub, which was occupied by the mare half of the slumbering bathroom couple. Then she sniffed herself quickly, checking her work. It would not pass close muster, but now she no longer smelled as much like a poorly-kept whorehouse. She would, at least, no longer be ashamed to meet other Ponies on the street. She went more gracefully back into the living room than she had left it, her steps now stronger and better-coordinated than before. Her memories, at least of the earlier part of the night, were clearing, and she located her saddlebags without difficulty. Nopony had been into them. These were college students having a wild party, not criminals or thieves. Most of them were probably good Ponies, most of the time. Better Ponies than herself, at any rate. Most of them were younger than her, too -- they were undergraduates, eighteen to twenty-two years old. Most had probably not the reasons she had to know and fear the dissolution that could come to a Pony who took to heavy drinking. Most had not seen happen to members of their own families what Cheerilee had seen happen to her own mother. They were behaving foolishly, but to them this was all new and exciting. Many of them knew nothing of how bad this could become. Compared to her, they were innocents. She had no excuse for her folly, for she had seen this path long before -- when she was but thirteen. It might have surprised somepony who did not know her well, but Cheerilee actually finished the rest of the day at school after that terrible schoolyard confrontation. But to Cheerilee, school had always been a place of achievement, acceptance, friendship -- and, for the last three and a half years, safe refuge from her mother's deepening madness. School was for sanity, for learning, for companionship. One bad experience did not change this stable rock that anchored her world. Inevitably, the day ended, and Play Write dismissed her charges. It was with regret that Cheerilee ended the school day and headed home. She knew that there was no way she could avoid a confrontation with her mother. Neither foolish nor naive -- she had been forced to grow up faster than did most fillies in late 15th-century Ponyville -- she had noticed the trend in her mother's behavior, and had been afraid for some months that Strawberry might sink further. Nevertheless, the reality was still a shock to her. She was but thirteen, and this was her mother. She would have felt as if the secure basis of her life was falling out from under her -- had not that already happened to her, in that terrible year of 1481, when her father Falcon Punch died over the Everfree, murdered by the very Pony he was supposed to be escorting to Canterlot from Appleloosa. That was when her mother had gone mad. That was when Cheerilee had been forced to become the mother to little Berryshine -- and to their own mother, who had never been entirely sane from that moment on. Cheerilee did not like this at all, but she had no choice. It was either cover for her mother -- do what she had to in order to maintain the illusion to the authorities that her mother was still sane, still able to be a mother -- or see her family broken. As she always would in her life, Cheerilee did what had to be done, took responsibility because somepony must. When she got home, her mother Strawberry was just preparing for her day. It had of recent years become Strawberry's habit to return home in the wee hours of the morning -- inevitably awakening Cheery with her drunken stumbling and bumbling about. Cheerilee would get up and help her mother to bed. Strawberry always reeked of alcohol and less pleasant odors at the time of these homecomings; when these were particularly bad, Cheery would bathe her. When Strawberry came home, it wasn't so bad. Cheerilee simply did her duty, and then lay back down in her bed, to snatch what sleep she could in the remainder of the time she had before it was time to get up fo school. She was young and strong, so it was easy. It was much worse when Strawberry didn't come home. Cheerilee was never sure where her mother went -- Strawberry would usually say that she had 'spent the night with a friend' -- but if asked, she would never be specific about just with which friend she had passed the time. Eventually, Cheery simply learned neither to ask nor to worry. She always came back the next day, and it was not as if she was much help to Cheerilee, in any case. Cheerilee had, of course, been aware that her mother was lonely, after the death of her father. Intellectually, Cheery understood that widows often remarried, even though from her own highly-biased emotional perspective, nopony could ever even begin to replace her Daddy. But she could see -- though she did not in her childhood fully grasp the reasons -- that her mother seemed to desire other male companionship. It had occurred to her, by the time that she turned ten, that her mother was looking for a new husband. By the time that she was eleven, she suspected that Strawberry was being none too choosy in her search, because Cheeilee could smell a lot of different stallions on her as time went by. By the time she was twelve, Cheerilee had realized that Strawberry was being sexually-intimate to a considerable degree with most of these stallions, conduct which Cheery's own older friends, such as Mare Ivory Scroll, would rightly have scorned as immoral, had they known of it -- though, of course, Cheerilee was careful never to let them know. By thirteen, Cheerilee understood enough of the mechanics of sex to be aware that her mother was probably letting them mount her. At each stage of Strawberry's descent into degradation -- or, as likely, Cheery's growing awareness of the depths of that degradation -- Cheerilee felt each new revelation as a kick to the guts; pain, followed by nausea and numbness. Each time, she learned something worse about what her mother was doing. Each time, she thought that this must, this time, surely be the worst; that the truth could not possibly become any darker. Each time, her fond hopes had been dashed by the next revelation. Cheerilee found it hard to imagine how things could get worse than her mother being a literal whorse. But then, she hadn't seen how things could get worse all the other times. And yet, they had. There was still one hope. Perhaps Raisin Cake was lying. Perhaps her own friends had believed lies. Or, perhaps, it was all some dreadful misunderstanding. Surely, her own mother could not really be selling herself for money. She could not truly have fallen so far. So, hoping that what she had heard was false, Cheerilee confronted her mother.