Clearing Skies: A Pinkie Promise
Chapter 13 – Clearing Skies: A Pinkie Promise
My name is Pinkie Pie and I am here to say
I’m gonna make you smile and I will brighten up your day
It doesn’t matter now if you are sad or blue
Because cheering up my friends is just what Pinkie’s here to do
The morning light was almost upon Ponyville.
Rainbow yawned. For the first time in a while, she’d slept soundly that night and now it was time to freshen up. Rainbow showered herself and brushed her mane. She made herself a nutritious, oaty breakfast and after washing up, she decided that she was going to clean her house. She hadn’t tidied it properly in weeks (it wasn’t like she spent that much time here) and the accumulation of mess was starting to get on her nerves. She wasn’t Twilight Sparkle, who seemed to view loose objects as some form of outrageous abjection, but there was only so much mess a pony could take before she started tripping over things.
So Rainbow Dash, being Rainbow Dash, collected every loose object she could find, stuffed them all under her bed and threw out everything that had mould on it. She was done in ten seconds flat, or thereabouts.
On her way out, she caught a glimpse of the metal rod she had brought back from the diamond dog cave. True to her word, she had placed it on her mantelpiece, but it hadn’t moved since then. She almost felt like asking it if it wanted to go for a walk, but of course, it was just an inanimate rod that had once been a torch.
Could it really have been Pinkie Pie? She wasn’t sure. Twilight Sparkle insisted that ghosts didn’t exist and that wherever Pinkie Pie was, she was somewhere far better than here. Rainbow Dash had accepted that at the time, but the more she thought about it, the way that rod had touched her face; the way it knew where she liked to be poked, touched and caressed. The way it seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. Whoever had been controlling the rod, and the keys for that matter, knew Rainbow Dash very well in ways that only Pinkie Pie did.
Rainbow Dash knew that had it not been for the rod, she would be dead, along with Scootaloo and possibly Applejack and Twilight too, and who knows how many other ponies and dogs would have got caught in the crossfire in a war between Ponyville and the diamond dogs.
Rainbow smiled at the rod.
“I know it was you, Pinkie,” Rainbow said softly. She got down on her knees. “Wherever you are, Pinkie, I hope you can hear me.” She breathed out slightly, “I hope you’re okay, Pinkie. I miss you every day, but you know what? I know you saved us all back there. I know that somehow, in some way, you’re still here. Maybe you’re a ghost or a vampire or something. But whatever you are, I want you to know that...” and then came the tears. But she continued to smile, “I want you to know... that I’ll always love you, Pinkie. With all my heart, I swear I will always love you and you’ll always be my best friend. My Pinkie Pie. And I’m going to stop feeling bad about everything that’s happened. I’m going to move on. I’m going to try and make the rest of my life count, and I’m going to do it for you, Pinkie! No,” she corrected herself, “for us, Pinkie. For us.” She stood up from her kneeling position, wiping away her tears, “Stay safe, Pinkie. I love you!” she kissed her hoof and blew it towards her door.
Rainbow Dash breathed out. It was like a tremendous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She needed to mark this moment.
“You know what, Ponyville?” she said as she looked out from her front door, “I think I’m going to give you a wake up call, Rainbow Dash style!” And for the second time that morning, she took off out through her doorway.
She didn’t see the pink spirit pony who was arranging some of the pebbles in Rainbow Dash’s collection into the shape of a heart on her bed. When she had finished, Pinkie Pie stepped away from her work and smiled. She looked out over Ponyville from Rainbow Dash’s house. “I heard every word, Rainbow Dash,” she said, “and you know what? I love you, too, more than you will ever realise.” Little did Rainbow know that Pinkie had slept beside the blue pegasus all night. She took one last look at Rainbow’s bed, where the two had spent many love-filled nights together before she entered that horrible period of depression. Then she made her way towards the door.
Rainbow Dash shot through the dawn sky, accelerating to the speed of a bullet in less than a few seconds. As she flew, her rainbow trail blazed behind her, filling the air with light. As she rocketed through the sky at blistering speed, the energy that flowed from the pegasus’ body was enough to ignite the water vapour in the air, evaporating all clouds in the vicinity. She was a ball of rainbow coloured fire, hurtling through the air like a shooting star. As her speed reached a critical point, she started to push against the sound barrier, bending it to breaking point. Any second now, it was going to give.
As Pinkie pie walked out into the day she heard the tremendous boom in the distance and looked over to see the huge burst of light in the sky that bathed Ponyville in a beautiful shower of rainbows. Ponies from all over stepped out to view the gorgeous sight, as brilliant waves of energy washed over the rooftops. Rainbow Dash was probably off in the distance by now, leaving her grief behind her, along with the Sonic Rainboom.
As the Sonic Rainboom slowly disipated into the air, so too did Rainbow Dash's sadness and grief. Today was a new chapter of her life.
Pinkie grinned her biggest grin, "that's my girl."
Because I love to make you smile, smile, smile
Yes I do
It fills my heart with sunshine all the while,
Yes it does
*
“Are you sure you’re ready for this, Twilight?” Spike asked his unicorn friend as she packed her lecture notes into her bag. Less than twenty four hours after the incident with the diamond dogs, and Twilight Sparkle had arranged to come back into work on a part-time basis. Today she was giving a lecture on Daring Do to a group of freshers.
“Absolutely,” Twilight Sparkle replied, “I figured that sometimes, you just have to face down what’s bothering you. Life’s too short to spend time worrying about insignificant aspects, like one of your students giving you a hard time.”
“But what if things start getting hard again?” Spike said as he passed Twilight a flask of tea.
“If things start getting hard, I’m going to talk about them to my friends and do whatever I can to try and change things,” Twilight said as she tucked the flask inside her bag, “I’m not going to bottle everything up inside. Rainbow Dash did that and look what happened.”
“Yeah,” Spike said, smirking slightly, “at least you didn’t break a student’s neck.”
“There’s time yet,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. She glanced at the clock and realised she was going to be late, “must dash!” She closed her eyes and used her magic to teleport out of the living room with a purple flash.
As the residual particles from Twilight’s teleportation dissipated into the air, Spike gave a hard shrug and decided to go back to bed.
*
When Twilight Sparkle entered the lecture theatre, she found her class already seated. She walked to the chalkboard with her head held high and wrote out the lecture focus in large, white letters – Daring Do in context. She laid her notes out on the lectern and took a deep breath.
Aaaaaand relax.
“Good morning,” Twilight said, a smile spreading across her face as she saw the students’ faces become attentive, “It’s lovely to see everyone here so early. The focus of today’s class is going to be an examination of the Daring Do books by AK Yearling...”
*
“Goodbye now!” Twilight said gleefully as her class departed. When the lecture theatre was finally empty, Twilight Sparkle breathed out deeply. After an hour of talking and asking questions, Twilight glanced wearily at her chalkboard. The entire thing had been filled with notes and drawings galore, and even a small score chart of the colts vs fillies pop quiz she had gotten her class to do. The fillies, unsurprisingly had smashed the colts.
Though she could not see her, the ghostly presence of Pinkie Pie had sat through the entire lecture with a beaming smile on her face. Not because she enjoyed the Daring Do books or because she had the faintest idea about any of the complex ideas Twilight was explaining effortlessly to her students. No, she was smiling because Twilight Sparkle was smiling. She was happy. She had given an amazing lecture that her students had enjoyed and gotten something out of. She could tell that the warm feeling in the pit of Twilight’s stomach was now reminding her of why she started teaching in the first place.
Twilight Sparkle wiped down the chalkboard and packed up her lecture notes. On her way out of the theatre, she brushed passed the place where Pinkie Pie was sitting and stopped.
Was that a cold chill, she felt?
Broken air con, she reasoned and smiled to herself. For the first time in months, she was looking forward to getting back into the classroom tomorrow.
Cos all I really need’s a smile, smile, smile
From these happy friends of mine
*
Pinkie Pie sat atop the cloud. She glanced at the invisible watch on her wrist and decided that the Gatepony was running late. When he eventually arrived, he was wearing the same black robes he had worn before, but was minus the sword.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, sitting on the cloud next to Pinkie Pie, “I was wandering around in another dimension.”
“You seem to do that quite a lot, mister,” Pinkie said. “Tell me more?”
“Well, one of the best things about working for the AMC is obviously dimensional travel. You have no idea how vast the universe is until you explore another dimension.”
“What was this one like?”
“Oh it was a post-apocalyptic world,” the Gatepony said, “all life had died out thousands of years ago, and I was walking a barren, mountainous wasteland where I was the only thing. Occasionally you saw a derelict monument to an ancient civilization, but for the most part it was red skies and a vast expanse of nothing.”
“There are dimensions where the world has ended?” Pinkie Pie asked.
The Gatepony grinned, “there will be a dimension out there where you are an evil genius who has enslaved all living creatures and become the supreme ruler of the entire galaxy.”
Pinkie’s jaw hung open, “I’d love to see that!”
“Yeah,” the Gatepony said, “about that. I need your answer, today. Are you going to the afterlife, or not? Because I want to see if I can find a dimension where I am still alive due to having discovered immortality.”
Pinkie pulled a serious face. Since becoming a ghost, she had stopped feeling so miserable, but she couldn’t deny that she had become more serious and sombre than she ever had been when she was alive.
“All I ever wanted was to make my friends smile,” Pinkie said. “My life, my purpose in life is to make other ponies happy. I think that... the reason I became so depressed was because I wasn’t able to do that. And the worse I felt, the worse I made everypony else feel.”
“That’s what you call a vicious cycle,” said the Gatepony, “Hard to climb back out of.”
“I wasn’t strong enough to climb out,” Pinkie said, “but I watched Twilight and Rainbow do it after my death put them there.”
“You need to stop blaming yourself for that, Pinkie,” the Gatepony said, “when you are in the mindset where you want to end your life, you aren’t thinking clearly. Atonement was never about making it right. It was about learning why it was wrong. You now know how your actions can affect others, a lesson that you should have learned in life, you’ve now learned in death. I believe your friend Rainbow Dash had also learned that lesson.”
Pinkie nodded, “I think there are more lessons still to learn.”
“You’re probably right,” said the Gatepony. He straightened his robe, “Now, about your answer.”
Pinkie smiled slightly. “I still have my cutie mark, right?”
The Gatepony looked at Pinkie’s shapely flank, “right.”
“So, that’s still technically my purpose, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” the Gatepony said, “why?”
“Because I can’t do that in the afterlife, can I?”
“You won’t need to,” the Gatepony said. “The afterlife is somewhere that none of that matters anymore.”
“But it does matter,” Pinkie Pie insisted, “it matters to me! I love seeing my friends smile. If I don’t get that in the afterlife, then maybe it isn’t worth it.” Pinkie Pie smiled. “I’ve made my decision.”
“Okay,” said the Gatepony.
Pinkie took a deep breath, “I want to become a Grim Reaper!”
The Gatepony raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure about that?”
“Yes indeedy,” Pinkie Pie said cheerfully.
“It’s not all fun and games.”
“I don’t care, I won’t be happy in heaven without my friends, even if it is supposed to be like paradise. I’m sorry, Mr Gatepony, but becoming a tree doesn’t sound like my idea of fun. I think I’ll have lots more fun as a Grim Reaper!” She pulled together some clouds and made them into a makeshift hood and scythe. “Don’t ya think?”
The Gatepony smiled. “Alright then, I’ll take you up to the AMC and they’ll sort you out.”
“I can’t wait to get started! Do I get to carry a scythe?”
The Gatepony couldn’t help but laugh, “yes, Pinkie. You can get to carry a scythe!”
“Weeee!” Pinkie leapt up and flew around a cloud. She bounced up after the Gatepony to join the Afterlife Management Committee in the sky.
She knew the life of a Grim Reaper wouldn’t be easy, but if it meant being able to see her friends, especially Rainbow Dash, then it was certainly worth doing. If Pinkie had learned anything from being dead, it was that not even death could stop love.
Epilogue
Dear Princess Celestia,
How are things? It’s been a while since I’ve written to you. I hope you are keeping well.
In the wake of Pinkie Pie’s suicide, a lot of things have happened. It’s been hard for everyone, but out of all of us, I think Rainbow Dash has had it the hardest. You probably heard about her little “rampage” as we’ve taken to calling it. After the funeral, she went out and mauled an entire pack of diamond dogs. It kicked up a storm here in Ponyville and we almost lost a foal because of it. We managed to sort everything out though. Don’t be angry at Rainbow: we all felt Pinkie’s death differently, and I think that this was her way of dealing with her anger. She’s not a very tactile pony, and she struggles with expressing her emotions, but I think she’s learning to work through her anger. Next week she goes back to the Wonderbolts Academy, which is good because we were all a bit worried she’d end up failing.
I’ve started teaching again after a short break. It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve found the passion that I came into the profession with. I figured that now would be a good time to seek some support and I’ve started seeing a counsellor to work through some of my own problems. It’s going really well and I feel like I’m making a lot of progress.
I can’t see myself finishing my PhD anytime soon, so you might want to try and fill that position at Canterlot University. I’m pretty happy here in Ponyville with my friends. It’s weird, but Pinkie Pie dying? I think it’s brought us all closer together. The best part is that over the past few weeks, I’ve learned something very important, not just about friendship, but about life; something that I think we should have all learned a long time ago. I learned that all of our actions have deep consequences. We can’t always foresee them, but they’re there. We all need to be a little more careful about the decisions we make.
As for Pinkie Pie? Well... I’m sure wherever she is, she’s having fun. Maybe she’s watching over us or maybe she’s been reincarnated as a tree. I’m not really sure what I believe. I just hope that wherever she is, she’s finally found peace.
I wish you all the best for the future,
Your faithful student,
Twilight Sparkle
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I loved your story^^ reminded me of a lot of things, and it had such a sweet ending too
Great work.
also...
“yes, Pinkie. You can get to carry a scyle!”
(Just thought I should point it out to you)
Aawwwhh what a sweet story I loved the ending it was so beautiful thank you for an amazing story
4299983
Thanks for that, wouldn't want an editorial oversight to offend someone who has the grim reaper as their avatar!
4300069
Thank you :)
4300418
Dont think anyone would be offended by something like that.
And hey, its a cute little reaper.
Just wanted to point it out to you because I really loved this story of yours.
4300435
Good to hear. it was nice just to be able to finish it, though I wish I could think of a better title for it.
It would be a more interesting twist of events if Pinkie Pie could trade her ticket to the afterlife for getting back to life again.
4301010 I actually thought about that, but if she could do that, it would defeat the point of having an afterlife at all, and would make her death seem less meaningful. Now she's a grim reaper, she'll be there to take the souls of her friends when they die!
Its official you my friend sure know how to write angst. I like angsty!pinkie even i enjoy writing that part of her because like pinkie i to suffer from depression and attempted suicide. Much like her i hide my feelings through laughter because i dont want to burden my friends.
BEST...STORY...EVER...ITS...20%COOLER
4301143 I thought that choising to go to the afterlife or not could be a hidden test itself. I thought that if she prefers her friends over the pure bliss of an afterlife, she would pass that test and deserve the second chance. It would be nice to see the couple Rainbow and Pinkie living happily and in love, after all.
4302596 Like I said, I'd toyed with that idea, but ultimately the story is about the consequences of your actions. I just think that if Pinkie returned from the dead, it would be 1. a little cheesy and 2. wouldn't do that message any justice. Pinkie's death is a punishment for everypony, especially Rainbow! :P
4303848 No I'm compelled to add dislike to my previous like... I really hate your last sentence.
4304721 well, each to their own.
4304806 In my opinion, the real life contains enough tragedy in itself. Why would someone need to produce even more, especially with our beloved ponies? The real life lacks happiness. It would be better to use fanfics to make up for that.
4305433 Aw now you're making me feel bad
Maybe it's just my morbid sense of humour but I would be happy as a grim reaper
But to answer your question of "why would someone need to produce even more" - sometimes reading about tragedy can help us understand our own. But with every tragedy (be it Shakespeare, Jackobean or even post-modern tragedy), there is usually hope for the future at the end, even after all of the bad things. That's why this story is a tragedy
Fantastic story my good writer! So sad, tears were shed at parts
. All in all this is definently going to be one of my favorite sad stories!
Made me cry
It's too beautiful!
Thank you...for creating this.
It made me day!
Wow, this was a nice story.
Well yeah, Pinkie's tragedy made me sad but it shows the consequences of what you did.
I Like it
What...... are these feelings you have made me feel!? You have finally broken my steel heart! Curse my 'emotions'!
4334032 Pinkie wrote it, not me :P
I remember reading that Grim Reapers can burn bodies if they are not buried or cremated. I can only imagine what Pinkie will do to them when she is in the
state.
4334345 Yeah but...
There were several parts I laughed at that were very sad... I feel like a horrible person for laughing at the ponies's suffering.
wait is this the end?
If you continue can pinkie come to get the main six's souls as a reaper!
4384619 i actually hope someone else writes a sequel where that happens.
4397577 I'm touched that you were affected this way. I too have suffered from depression in the past.
i truly have to say this is one of the best fanfics EVER
the one thing i didn't like but made me laugh was rd almost ripping the diamond dogs testicles off
but other than that it totally made me cry 
, laugh 
, and all out feel sick 
so that getting a like from me
I didn't cry fi wanted too. It is always nice to cry but when you have a dark heart which you laugh at fics that are labelled dark then it didn't surprise me. Still this fic was awesome.
Very nice fic-- not quite deserving of the 'Tragedy' tag due to the happy ending, but sad nonetheless. Feelings of depression and suicidality were captured accurately and, even better, you wrote about the impact of one's actions on others. This story was very wel articulated, enough so that this articulation was in fact one of its flaws: in several instances, dialogue felt choppy and unnatural due to the phrasing. It was not something you would expect from knowing Rainbow's speech in the show.
While the story did have its flaws, I am more than happy that I read it and would gladly recommend it to anyone interested in a good pony story-- regardless of whether or not they've suffered depression or the self-inflicted death of a close friend. The emotion was real in this, and that's what makes it fantastic.
4804390 Thank you for the very honest and genuine feedback. I think the emotion is one of the stronger aspects of this story but I would definitely agree with you about the dialogue.
4811600 many thanks for your comments. They made me smile :)
I am a native English speaker from the UK originally. I am also a sufferer of bipolar disorder and have been institutionalised twice after suicide attempts. I wrote this after my most recent bout of depression. Many of its influences come from Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, which is a play about mental health problems written in 2001. Sarah Kane herself suffered from depression and sadly took her own life at just 27, after producing 5 groundbreaking plays throughout the late 90's.
This story was absolutely amazing!
I have read your story and all I can say is I am amazed! 10/10 for effort and creativity. I can't stop thinking about it :D
Whoever wrote this deserves a fucking million dollar check. I felt so many emotions when reading this fanfic. I can't lie when I say this MADE me cry. sir have the biggest 100/100 i can give :)
My, this is a very lovely story.
Pinkie Pie would be very disappointed in you because you made her commit suicide in the story, but this is great!
In all honesty, I would give this story a 10/10 I couldn't find anyway any of this could've been written any better. Thank you for creating this wonderful piece of art.
I have what I would call mild depression but I'm good at masking it Except for the scars
This fic includes PinkieDash (my OTP) and I didn't notice until the end. I'm such an airhead. I loved this story so I faved it. I hope you publish more work soon, and hopefully a sequel for this story.
7240754 yeah
I have never read so much in my life
O M G
Here.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klUQVKkxysY
Sorry