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1: The After Party756 words
2: The Rainbow Filly1,822 words
3: The Letter1,421 words
4: The Cutie Mark Crusaders1,569 words
5: Returning Home2,336 words
6: Rainbows and Turnips1,881 words
7: Family Meeting2,480 words
8: Father's Request1,603 words
9: The Party2,148 words
10: Rainbows and Tears3,096 words

10: Rainbows and Tears

We held the funeral the next day.

Mother was devastated as were both of my sisters. The doctor said that it had been natural causes – that he had passed away in his sleep. Mother had him buried besides a massive boulder that sat in the center of our farmland. She explained that it was Daddy’s thinking boulder. Whenever he wanted to take a moment to ponder life, worry about the farm, or just enjoy the scenery, he would do so while sitting upon that boulder. The pony who purchased the farmland had promised that he would not disturb that location. In fact, he promised to build a fence around it and maybe plant some flowers to give the gravesite a bit of color. Mother was so thankful that she had burst into tears.

As for me?

I haven’t moved from where I found him. Octavia and Granita both had tried to get me to leave the room but I found that I just couldn’t bring myself too. Mother had brought me dinner and breakfast but it just spoiled on the plates. I couldn’t pry my eyes from his bed. I don’t know what time it was, nor did I care.

My daddy was gone, taken from me just as we were finally bonding. It wasn’t fair. For the first time since leaving the farm, I was finally accepting my place amongst my family only to have the strongest member taken away from me.

I felt like I should be crying but the tears just wouldn’t come. Even my mane, so poofy and fluffy, was lying flat against my head, hiding half of my face. I remember that Grandfather had told me that if I were ever feeling sad or scared, that all I had to do was laugh and those terrible feelings would go away. I didn’t feel like laughing. Not now, not ever for how could any pony laugh when something had been ripped so violently from their hearts. I lost the only daddy that I had ever known and while our relationship was strange, we still loved each other.

It wasn’t fair.

The sun was setting. I think it was either Octavia or Mother who came into the room to light a candle so that I wouldn’t be left alone in the dark. Whomever it was, they didn’t try to offer me words of comfort or pry me from the room. It was as if no pony wanted to disturb me least I shatter into a thousand little pieces.

Who knows? Perhaps they were right.

I was afraid to fall asleep, afraid of the emotional reaction that would come when I wake up and discover that he is no longer there. There was a part of me who wanted to sleep, wanted this all to be a terrible dream. I wanted to wake up to see my daddy laying there, waiting for me to tell him another one of my stories. I wanted him to see just how good of a job that the Pie sisters did with the selling of his farm. More than anything, however, I wanted to hear his voice. I don’t care if it was that loud, booming voice that haunting my mornings, or the soft, tired voice that he had as of late. I just needed to hear it. Just one last time.

A tear slid out of the corner of my eye. I felt it trace the curve of my cheek before falling from my jaw to splash upon the floor.

“Daddy,” I croaked out and that’s when I lost it. I dragged myself over to the bed and buried my face against his pillow. It still smelled like him. I crawled into the bed and wrapped myself in his blankets, trying to hide myself in his scent, imagining that it were his arms holding me.

I don’t know for how long I lay there crying. I just clutched his pillow as tightly as physically possible as the tears continued to pour from my eyes. After a while the tears stopped coming but the pain was still there. I have never experienced a loss this devastating in my life, not even when I had thought my friends had abandoned me, for at least they were able to return to me, to comfort me, to remind me that they were still around. How could my daddy ever return to me? How could he ever comfort me now?

It was probably one of the longest nights in my entire life. Every time the pain seemed to go away, it would suddenly rip through my insides like a knife. It was during these instances in where I buried my face into the mattress and screamed as loud as I could. It just wasn’t fair! I want my daddy back!

I would give up everything, anything, just to see him on last time. My life in ponyville, my cakes and muffins...anything.

Daddy!

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, my body couldn’t handle the stress that I was putting upon it. I fell asleep still wrapped in his blanket while snuggling his pillow tight to my chest.

The dreams returned. The dreams of the farm, but these weren’t the nightmarish dreams where I was filled with a sense of dread and loneliness. Oh, the scenery was still the same – little me standing in front of a rock, using my forehead to try to push it through the field. I remember just how cold it was out there that morning. I remember how quiet both my sisters were as they pushed rocks of their own.

It was the same nightmare I had been having since leaving the farm…

I was all alone.

But I wasn’t alone. Instead of waking me up, my dream continued onward. I was struggling with the rock, pushing at it as hard as I could, only to slip in the dirt and fall flat on my face. I felt the tears stinging my eyes as the exhaustion began to take its toll when a long, shadow fell upon me. I looked u from the ground to see Father standing over me, that piece of straw clenched between his teeth, his mutton chops wafting lightly in the morning breeze, and that stove-top hat nestled tightly upon his head. Without a word, he put his nose under my belly and helped me back onto my feet.

“Use your back legs, Pinkamena.” He said. He stood beside me and nudged my back legs into position. “You need to bring your hooves in close. Then you dig them into the dirt and push forward. Use the traction and leverage of your body to push the rock; otherwise you will just be wasting energy.”

I did as I was instructed and sure enough, the rock moved forward with little to no difficulty. He nodded his approval. “Bring it over to the barn along with two others then come inside. You can help Mother with the cooking.”

I remember smiling. Even though he hadn’t said it, I could see it in his eyes that he was proud of me. Proud of his little girl working her hardest to help out on the farm. He wasn’t a stallion who smiled, but I could see it in his eyes whenever he was happy with my work.

The dream shifted. This time I was back in the barn, my mane a fluffy mess of curls and swirls, with decorations hanging all over the walls. I had worked my tail off to bring my vision of color and excitement to life. I had no idea how my family would react to the decorations but I knew that no matter what their reaction, this is what I wanted to do with my life. After growing up in a world of grays and browns, having all this color was a blessing.

Oh Celestia, the feeling that I had when my family first stepped into the barn to see what I had done was one I would never forget. It was the only time in my life where I truly felt afraid of what my parents would think of me. What if they hated it? Or worse, what if they forbade me from repeating this?

Then I was gifted with the most wondrous gift any pony could have given me. My parents and sister alike smiled. For the first time in my little Pinkie life, I witnessed my daddy smiling. And for that one, single day, I had brought excitement to the Pie family. This was not the random and very rare moments when my sisters and I played pretend; this was a party. A true party. My parents acted in a manner that I had never seen before; dancing and laughing, while my sisters hopped, skipped, and jumped around the barn. It was the happiest moment in my entire life.

Okay. I lied. It was the second happiest moment in my life.

The first came during the party. My father approached me. We stood side by side for several minutes, watching my sisters and mother enjoying themselves when he suddenly draped his leg around my shoulder and hugged me to his side. “You did good,” He whispered.

You did good.

I awoke with a start. His voice had seemed so real that it had awoken me. I looked around the room, half expecting to see him standing there besides the bed but, of course, he was not there. I rolled onto my back, expecting the sharp pain of heartache to rip through my core but was surprised that it did not. I stared at the ceiling as his voice rang through my head like a mantra.

You did good.

I gnawed on my bottom lip. My father had admitted to me that he had grown up in a time when fillies weren’t encouraged to share their feelings. He wasn’t encouraged to laugh or giggle, play or pretend. He wasn’t allowed to have friends and the majority of his life had been spent working but that morning after I had witnessed Dashie’s SonicRainboom, I had given him a moment of happiness.

I squeezed his pillow tighter to my chest, burying my face against its soft fabric in order to inhale his scent.

That is my job, I came to realize, to bring happiness and joy to those around me. Father wouldn’t want me to stay here in bed all day while mother and sisters were suffering. He would want me to pull another Pinkie-Pie miracle. He would want me to bring joy to the joyless, to find laughter in a world that discouraged it.

I sat up upon the bed to stare out his bedroom window. I looked out across the farm that he had worked so hard to maintain and took the slightest bit of comfort knowing that, in the end, he passed with a smile upon his face. His family had all come home to work together, to bond, to love one another. For these past three days, he had his entire family back.

“Daddy,” I whispered, my voice cracking ever so slightly. “I get it now. I really do.”

I looked upon my cutie mark. It wasn’t parties that I was good at, nor was it having fun. It was bringing happiness and joy to the sad and joyless and right now there were three ponies downstairs who needed to be reminded that Daddy’s life was not to be mourned, but celebrated and while it would be the most difficult and most painful party I would host, it would be one meant to celebrate someone who gave everything to his family, even if he was unable to show it.

“I won’t let you down,” I promised.

We celebrated my father’s life for one solid week. Mother told us tales on how they met, and how he used to court her. It turned out that Daddy was actually a hopeless romantic. He went as far as to travel on foot to the nearest town to buy her a bouquet of flowers only to have them wilt halfway back due to the heat-wave that was going on at the time.

Granita recounted the moments in where he taught her all about the family business and how there were moments where he lost his patience with her and had to go out back to smash a couple of boulders before returning to teach her more on how the farm was supposed to be run. She admitted, much to Mother’s shock, that she would purposely mess up just so she could watch him destroy a couple of boulders. “The strongest pony you’d ever meet.”

Octavia and I drank these stories in, quietly regretting that we weren’t able to spend more time with him but Mother reassured us that he would always recount how proud he was of his two city-slicker daughters who were brave enough to venture out on their own. It was touching but still did not fill the void in my heart knowing that I should have spent more time with him.

After the celebration was over, I returned back to Ponyville. I waited until it was late at night because for as much as I missed my friends, I did not really feel up to talking to any of them, or so I thought.

It was well past midnight when I left Mr. and Mrs. Cakes’ shop. I tiptoed through Ponyville as quietly as I could. It took me half an hour to arrive at her house, well, if you could call a floating cloud a house. I stared up at the sky, trying to spot her infamous cutie mark, or at the least, her blue wings. It took a while, but I finally found her, slepping upside-down with her head poking out from the bottom of the cloud. I wanted to smile at the sight of this, but I found that I could not. I was emotionally exhausted, having spent all my energy helping my family through this event.

I fetched the tennis ball that I had brought along with me out of my backpack and threw it up at the cloud. My aim was true and soon Rainbow Dash was falling out of her cloud towards the earth. I watched her plummet to the ground before she finally woke up. With that all-too-familiar scream, she twisted and turned in mid-air then extended her wings to catch herself just before hitting the dirt. She lowered herself to the ground, her red-rimmed eyes wide and her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. When she saw who it was that had woke her up, her eyes became hard as steel.

“Pinkie-Pie! What in the name of Celestia are you doing, waking me up like that! Why I oughta…”

“Dash?” I whispered. “Can we talk?”

She stopped in her rant. “Can’t this wait until morning?”

I shook my head, feeling the tears threaten my eyes. “I really could use someone to talk too and you’re the only one who knows what I’m going through.”

She frowned. “What are you talking about?”

I stared at the ground. It was a topic that no pony dared bring up with Dash and, to be honest, I was terrified, but deep down inside; I knew that she would understand. She had to understand. “I was visiting my family, I whispered, trying so hard not to lose it in front of Rainbow dash. “And during the visit…my father…he…” My voice cracked. Dash didn’t wait for me to finish. She looked around then walked on over to me, hugging me tightly to her shoulder. “Pinkie, I’m sorry.”

“How did you get over it?” I sobbed. “How did you get over the loss of your parents?”

I felt her body tighten up against me and for a brief moment I was afraid that she’d shove me away. She never talked about her parents. Never. The only reason I knew about it was because I heard another Pegasus mention it during Dash’s competition.

I felt her jaw tighten. She was mad. I just made her mad. Oh Celestia, the only pony whom I could turn too in all of Ponyville and I offended her. “Dash, I’m…”

“It wasn’t easy,” she whispered her voice soft but raw. “I was very young when it happened but that didn’t make it any easier.”

“But you got over it?”

“You never get over it,” She said, still not looking at me. “Not a day goes by where you don’t think about it. All it does is get easier to accept. That’s it.”

“How did you accept it, then?” I wiped the tears from my eyes.

“It was just something that happened as I grew up. I didn’t have anyone to turn too – this happened before I met Fluttershy and I didn’t really have any friends at the time.” She took a step back and flipped her rainbow-colored mane out of her eyes. She rested her hoof upon my shoulder. “But you are not me, Pinkie. You are not alone like I was and you have more friends than the sky has stars.” She offered me a half smile. “You’ll get through this, I know you will because, well, you’re Pinkie, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you deal with this alone. I didn’t have anyone to turn to, you do, and not to sound all mushy and sappy, but I’m here for you. Really.”

I threw my legs around her shoulders and buried my face against her shoulder. She was still for a second before returning my hug. Rainbow Dash was a lot like my daddy in the sense that she was uncomfortable showing emotion, but as of this very moment, she was willing to be here for me, to hold me, comfort me, and let me cry without judging and right now, that is all I needed.

She was right. I will accept it eventually but until I do, I can take comfort in knowing that I have someone out there whom knows what I am going through and is willing to be there for me.

And for that, I am grateful.

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