The Two(ish) Doctors

by The Minister of Scones

Part Six: Auntie Pinkie

Pinkie Pie didn't stop bouncing until they reached Sugar Cube Corner. The Doctor, against his better judgement, had been following her all the way. Absently, he had allowed his gaze also to follow her, though only in the vertical direction, as she bounced up – down – up – down, and, as such, by the time he arrived he had a very sore neck. He had also been thinking over the logic of using Pinkie as some sort of agony aunt, and had decided that it was a service he could well do without, thank you very much. After all, in all the conversations they'd had during the few days they'd known each other, the pink pony had got the wrong end of enough sticks to build the wrong end of a large bonfire.

Sadly, any and every attempt to tell Pinkie so had been overridden after the Doctor had managed about two words of complaint with such chipper remarks as “Oh, look, balloons! I love balloons! Be right back!” and “Did I ever tell you about the time I got my cutie mark?” which was immediately followed by a detailed account of how Equestria was made. Cutie marks hadn't come into it at all.

Thus, the Doctor who arrived was a severely deflated one, grumbling about false advertising in storytelling, clutching a hoofful of balloons that Pinkie had somehow persuaded him to carry, and gloomily massaging his neck.

“Hey,” said Pinkie as she bounced through the door, “I bet you just love cupcakes! I sure do! How about some cupcakes?”

“No thanks. I've had far too much sugar these last few days. Chocolate with lime frosting, please.”

“Coming right up!” In a blur of pink, a small table in the back room was laid with tea-things, and a large teapot full of steaming Assam was set beside a tower of cupcakes.

“How did you make the tea so quickly?”

“Silly,” replied Pinkie, playfully jabbing the Doctor with a forehoof, “I can't give away my secret!”

“Fair enough. Hold on, don't you work here?

“Sure do!”

“But you don't seem to be… working.”

“It's my day off!” she said with a hint of pride. “It says so in my contract. Every third Tuesday after Saturday. Milk?”

“Wait… every third… never mind. No thanks.”

“One lump or two?”

“I said no milk, thanks.”

Taken aback, Pinkie glanced up at the Doctor – then noticed the slight smirk at the corner of his mouth. She burst into a fit of hysterical laughter, much to the Doctor's consternation.

“It wasn't that funny,” he assured her.

Pinkie's laughter abruptly ceased. “Oh, okay,” she said, simply. She began helping herself to sugar out of the sugar bowl, adding spoonful after spoonful to her cup. “Now, what seems to be the problem?”

“Well, for a start, this isn't Tuesday.”

Pinkie waved a nonchalant hoof in the air. “Details, details. I'm here to solve your obviously agonizing friendship problem which even now is eating away at your very soul like a canker in a hedge.” She beamed at him. “Am I right so far?”

“Miss Pie, I don't mean to be rude, but don't you think you ought to leave some space in that tea-cup for tea?”

Pinkie glanced down at her cup, already overflowing with sugar. “Oopsie!” she sang, raising the cup to her lips and draining the contents at a gulp.

“And I thought I had a sugar problem,” remarked the Doctor, then wondered why his voice sounded so muffled. It was because, without realising it, he had crammed two large cupcakes into his mouth. “Ah. Might still be a grain of truth in that, actually...”

“Now then, Doctor,” began Pinkie Pie, as she finished pouring the tea, “I've had enough of your evasion. I want answers and I want them now!” By the time she had finished this sentence, she actually sounded quite threatening – an effect that was only intensified by the fact that she'd incredibly quickly pulled down the blinds, grabbed a desk lamp and shone it in his face, and – seemingly from nowhere – taken out a wide-brimmed hat and rammed it as far over her eyes as it would go.

“Very well,” began the Doctor, understandably a little worried, “It seems I have no-”

“Wait a minute. Is it just me or is it dark in here?”

“I don't think it's you.”

“Okie-dokie-lokie!” So saying, she let the blinds retract to their original position and took off the hat. To the Doctor's annoyance, she left it to him to move the desk lamp back.

“Now, listen. You remember when Princess Sparkle told me about that other Doctor?”

“Uh huh, the Brown Doc.”

“Don't call him that. Well, I went looking for him, and I found out...”

Actually, you lot have already heard all that. Let's cut to something more interesting.

“I'm so glad you stayed, Doc.” Derpy lolled back on the park bench, and put a foreleg around Tarrant's shoulders.

“I really do think you should call me 'Tarrant' Derpy, it's only confusing, otherwise,” suggested Tarrant, who was sitting next to her on the bench, a little distractedly.

“Oh… okay.” Derpy looked a little hurt, and Tarrant knew perfectly well why. Derpy quite obviously just wanted things to go back to the way they were before, before she knew his true identity, before the real Doctor had intruded in their lives. Certain subtleties in her behaviour had informed him of this – like the fact that she refused to use his name, and kept going back to their old haunts with him, and kept going on and on and on about how easy it is to forget and how nothing should interfere in a friendship, and had even – Tarrant cringed at the memory – written a poem entitled 'One Doctor Is Enough for Me,' which, tragically enough, was too awful to bear printing. Derpy identified herself as 'a mare of letters,' but only because she didn't know what the term actually meant. She thought it was just a fancy name for a mailmare.

All the same, Tarrant felt guilty. “Please, call me what you want,” he said after a while. “I'm more used to 'Doc' anyway.”

“N- no. You're right, I guess.”

“Thank you.”

“Doc- I mean, Tarrant?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Why don't you tell me a little about yourself? I mean, if we're going to be honest with each other...”

“Is that really what you want?” He knew perfectly well it wasn't, but it was so like Derpy to make this effort. She was a selfless little pony, thought Tarrant.

“Yeah, sure!” smiled Derpy, but it was a bogus smile. One can always tell a real smile, if one knows how. Certainly, the mouth looks the same, curved up at either end, and all that, but that's not a smile, not really. If somepony – Derpy, for example – should ever smile at you, just look in the corner of her eye. There should be a single bright spark in there, dancing with joy and love and freedom. That's the smile. If you can't see one, you're not being smiled at. Try harder.

Tarrant looked. There was no spark. “Very well,” he said, resignedly, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “Ask away.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighty-four.”

“R- really?”

“Certainly.”

“You- you don't look it...”

“Well, I don't appear to you as I really am, but I flatter myself I'm quite spritely, for my age. It'll be time for me to discard this form in a decade or two.”

“Oh, right.” Derpy thought for a second. “Wait, what?”

“Well, we Galgonquans are rather like… like your caterpillar and butterfly. As we age, we assume new forms, until we die and ascend to a plane of pure energy. Actually, I don't think butterflies do that, do they?”

Derpy shook her head, wordlessly.

“Still, you see my point.”

She nodded.

“My dear, are you feeling quite well? You look a little pale.”

“Did you speak like this before?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Derpy took a deep breath. Obviously, this had been bugging her for a while. “You talk just like the Doctor, and you said you were trying to be like him. You actually are really like him. Did you always talk like you do now, or is that just part of the act?”

“Well… yes, to be honest, at first I faked it. But if one does something of this sort for long enough, it… well… it becomes a part of who you are.” Derpy looked sad, he realised. He reached out a hoof and put it round her shoulders, but for some reason this seemed only to make her sadder still.

“Tarrant?”

“Yes?”

“I'm not sure how to tell you this, but… since the first day I met you, I've… I've loved you with all of my heart, Doc.” He opened his mouth, but Derpy quickly overrode him. “And I don't just mean as a friend. I know it's silly and I know I shouldn't, but I can't help it. I...” She trailed off, sniffing. “I'm sorry.”

Tarrant was stunned. Despite his closeness to the pegasus, his sensitivity towards equine emotions had never been particularly well-tuned. Although an ordinary Equestrian might well have noticed Derpy's feelings for him, this was a complete shock to Tarrant. Derpy looked ready to cry, and he knew from past experience that he ought to say something, but he was at a loss as to what. It took him a few moments to find the right words.

“I'm married.” It occurred to him almost immediately after he spoke that these were not the right words.

Now it was Derpy's turn to fall silent. Tarrant stared directly ahead of himself, eyes wide with terror, his leg still around Derpy's shoulders. He didn't dare move a muscle. After about a minute, she looked up at him, eyes glistening with un-shed tears. “You never said,” she said, a little resentfully.

“It would have raised some rather awkward questions,” he pointed out.

“But still...”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Who is she?”

“Never met her.”

“Oh…” It dawned on Derpy what the Doctor had just said. “What?”

“I was betrothed at birth. It's how it's always done. When I reach the end of my first incarnation, I'll be mature enough to marry her properly.”

“I see...” Derpy was too dazed by the news to be properly upset. “So… if you don't go back, what will she do?”

“I'd imagine she'd just be… very very lonely. Oh, gosh.”

Derpy pushed on. “Do you have parents?”

“Yes...”

“What will they think?”

“Well, as I said, they all think I'm dead... oh, gosh.” Tarrant was beginning to look increasingly worried.

“Doc?”

“Mm?”

“I don't think you should have stayed.”

The Doctor should be about done by now. Let's pop back over to Sugarcube Corner.

“...so now he and Derpy are probably going around, as happy as anything, and I have to tell them it won't work and that I've got to send him back to his home planet. I'm not having a good day.”

Pinkie Pie was sitting forward in her seat, with her forelegs resting on the table and her head resting in her hooves; her eyes, wide as sympathetic saucers, had been fixed on the Doctor for the past ten minutes. “Hmm,” she thought aloud, in unusually measured tones, “Tell me if I'm being too hasty, but – having given it some thought – I think the wisest course of action would be to tell them you've got to send Tarrant back.”

“Miss Pie, I...” The Doctor broke off, realising he was almost shouting, and resumed more calmly; “What was the whole point of the story I just told you?” he asked, exasperated despite himself.

“Ooh, er… that you needed to tell Derpy and Tarrant that you had to send him back!” Pinkie completely ignored – or misinterpreted – the Doctor's unamused glare. “What can I say?” she went on, grinning proudly, “I'm a good listener.”

“Evidently.” The Doctor sighed. He had been quite right (as usual): trying to get any sort of advice from a sweet but apparently brainless pony had been a terrible idea. 'Although,' he thought, 'wasn't this Pinkie's idea? Well, there you are, then. Case in point.'

“But,” continued Pinkie, obliviously, “I guess the best way would be to make them think it was their idea.”

The Doctor, who had just begun to stare out of the window at nothing in particular and wonder when this would all be over, suddenly turned his gaze to Pinkie once more. “I beg your pardon?”

“Well, you know. Sometimes Gummy gets into one of his grumpy-grump-grump-pants moods, and won't agree to do anything, and that's sooooo boring! If I want to do some baking but Gummy's in one of his moods, I just leave a recipe book lying open on a cake recipe for him to find, and then he reads it and suggests we bake it, and I'm all like, 'What a good idea, Gummy!' and he's like,” – she squished her mouth so that it protruded slightly, making her look nothing like an alligator, but the Doctor could see where she was coming from – “'I know, and aren't you proud I thought of it?' and I'm like 'Yes, it was all your idea, I'm so proud!' and he-”

“Yes, I think I've picked up the ebb and flow of the conversation… Hold on, you mean Gummy can talk?”

“Well… no, not really. I have to do those bits for him. Didn't you see my alligator face?”

The Doctor, who, thanks to the complex telepathic translation-matrix in the TARDIS, could in fact understand every word Gummy said, couldn't really see him being very keen on baking – indeed, the scaly fellow had once described it within the Doctor's earshot as “a pitiful and ultimately futile attempt to impose equine notions of order onto innocent flour.” He decided to keep this fact from the excitable party pony, who had now launched into a long and detailed list of all the faces she could pull.

Shoving the last cupcake into his protesting mouth, the Doctor stood up. “Look, all this is very interesting, but I think I'd better be going.”

Pinkie abruptly stopped listing faces. “Oh! Okie-dokie! See ya, Doc!” She then went straight back to her list, apparently not at all put out at her entire audience being about to leave.

“Very well. Thank you for the advice. Good day, my dear.”

Once outside, the Doctor found himself rather relieved. Even for a pony with his sweet-tooth, being out in the fresh air after so long stuck in the sickly, super-sweet, sugar-soaked atmosphere of Sugarcube corner was nothing short of bliss. The Doctor inhaled deeply. It was a chilly afternoon, but the crispness of the air appealed to him. The pale orange tint in the horizon, caused by encroaching evening, took him back to his young days; climbing the mountain near his house to talk to his friend, the hermit.

What had happened to that hermit? Then the Doctor remembered, he had – like so many other Timelords deemed 'past it' – been retired; co-incidentally enough, to the same planet as the Doctor; sent to live in an isolated temple on the Eastern fringes. Come to think of it, he seemed to remember the old fellow cropping up as a side-character in a Daring Do book.

Sometimes the Doctor thought that his best friends were his memories.

Pushing such gloomy thoughts from his mind, the Doctor set off to find Derpy and Tarrant. They had to be around somewhere, after all. Best place to start was obviously Tarrant's house. He would have tried Derpy's, too, but he had no idea where she lived. At any rate, his grasp of Ponyville's geography was still a little sketchy, and-

Oh look, there was Quills and Sofas. He had been in there just the day before, looking to buy a new partridge-feather quill. Using a partridge-feather quill was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to the Doctor, and to nopony else, but he was still rather dismayed to find they were not stocked, and downright annoyed when the not-to-be-deterred salesmare added insult to injury by attempting to sell him a 'Sofa of Reasonable Comfort'.

And so proceeded the Doctor's errant mind to wander from one matter of no consequence to another, and his hooves, no longer under any direct instruction, began to wander freely, this way and that, but predominantly the wrong way altogether. Surprisingly, this proved a happy mistake, for it was merely by good fortune – and perhaps the timely intervention of the fates – that the good Doctor happened to wander into the park, and so to pass the very bench upon which Tarrant and Derpy were seated, deep in conversation.

As he passed them, they called out to him, dragging his mind away from thoughts of squirrels and depositing it firmly in the moment. “Oh, good afternoon,” he mumbled, a little dazed. “I could have sworn I was looking for somepony… now, who was it?” He screwed his face into an expression of deep concentration. “No, it's gone,” he said finally. “Oh well. Can't have been very important then, could it? Actually, I wanted a word with you two, anyway… about… oh dear…”

The Doctor, it should be clear, was now in one of the dreadful absent-minded moods to which he had been prey lately, especially while reminiscing. He had thus completely forgotten what it was he had wanted to talk to Tarrant about.

“Doctor,” interrupted Tarrant, “We've come to a decision.”

“Oh… well done!” The Doctor said this not out of irony, but merely out of uncertainty as to how to respond to the situation. He was still trying to remember what it was he had wanted to talk to them about.

“I have decided to return home.”

Derpy nodded solemnly.

“Oh yes,” said the Doctor, brightening up. “That was it.” He steeled himself for what he had to do. “Tarrant,” he said, bravely, “you must return home.” Then he paused. “Hold on a minute, wasn't that what you just said?”

“Yes, Doctor. I'm merely neglecting my duty by staying here.”

“Oh, good show! Knew you'd see sense!”

“I beg your pardon? It was you who first suggested to me that I stay.”

“Nonsense. It was Derpy's idea.”

Derpy turned crimson, and hung her head.

“Well,” admitted Tarrant, “that does make a little more sense.”

“I- I've changed my mind,” insisted Derpy. “He can't stay.” She gulped back a sob. “It wouldn't work out.”

“Right, then,” the Doctor replied, turning round to face the exit to the park, “we've got some work to do.” He paused, looking annoyed at something.

“What's the matter?” asked Tarrant.

“Oh, nothing much. I've just endured half-an-hour of the most inane conversation possible for absolutely nothing.”

Author's Note:

Next episode: To Catch a Wirdegen