Love Knows No...Uuhh...Wait, I know this!
Derpy swept up the shards of broken dishes. The clock read 10:34 PM...Or...Was it AM that was night? Oh well, whichever, it was nighttime and Dinky had gone to bed. Time Turner was working late tonight, she was pretty sure. Luna's moon was full tonight and so bright she probably didn't need the li-
Bump, crash, crack!
Okay, maybe she did need the light. As she shook off the ouch in her leg and made her way to the lantern, she counted her steps. One, two, three, four, five steps the the sink, and one, two, three steps to the wall with the lantern in the corner of the counter.
Her hoof reached slowly and carefully, making sure not to even press until she felt the lantern's dimmer. Derpy needed these steps because she had weird eyes that stopped her from seeing good.
Derpy didn't need to be lied to. She saw it every time she saw her reflection in something. All the other peonies had normal-looking eyes, but hers were just...weird. She couldn't see good, so she was really clumsy and stuff, and got in trouble a lot. That's why she missed the table and the glass fell to the floor. As a filly, it got a lot of ponies mad at her. “Just a little laps in judgment”, she could almost hear her parents' saying: “Just an accident, no need to cry.”
Derpy missed them. Perhaps she might pay them a visit sometime at the Ponyville Retirement Village. They were two of the few ponies who really knew. Quite a few ponies seemed to not get it about this stuff; that they were layers to this kind of thing. Just because she wasn't the sharpest tool in the drawer, ponies thought she was really stupid. As 'stupid' as she was when she was a filly.
There was no denying it, she was much worse in her fillyhood. She would pelt anyone she could with questions and still not understand anything, everything seemed weird to her no matter how often she saw it, and she was always confused.
The one thing she did understand was the other fillies and colts that would bully her. Calling her a freak and making her cry. Derpy couldn't remember too good, but she thought one of them might have hit or pushed her once, too, and her mom and dad got really angry at them.
As she grew older, though, Derpy developed this thing that Twilight called “awareness”. It meant she knew how everypony saw her and...wait, that wasn't it. What did Twilight say again? Oh well. Knowing her luck, she'd remember when she didn't need to. She knew more about certain things now, but she still felt...separated.
Ya know how ponies sometimes like to think certain things don't have feelings? How it's apparently really easy to ignore how little fillies and colts have feelings and some don't seem to think that their animal friends were even sentient.
Derpy didn't understand. Fillies and colts laughed and cried when they were happy or sad, and animals feel pain and joy just like them. They were like that with her, too. Talking about her like she was something else, something...less than them. “That pony is impaired,” they said, “she can't feel bad that we're talking about her” or “she doesn’t know what we're saying.”
Derpy usually didn't talk to other ponies other than her own family and a select group or personal friends like Rainbow Dash. The one time she did was at a parent-teacher thing at school. She overheard one of the fathers talking about her in the way she was used to. What made this special was what he said after that.
Derpy Hooves was 'retarded', so she was unable to love her daughter as much as a mother should.
Derpy marched right up to the stallion, focused her eyes as best she could, and told him in a slurred, muffled, but stern voice: “Shut...Up.”
She'd told Time Turner about the incident and what the stallion had said. It turns out that not only did they work together at the clock shop, but Time was his supervisor and was put on probation. He said the stallion would have been fired if it were really up to him. She hated when ponies thought that. That because she was different she had this limit (apparently a pretty tiny one, too) on her emotions.
Even her teachers, when those bullies made her cry as a filly, said they did something to upset something called Derpy's 'stimuli'. It never crossed their minds that they might have simply hurt her feelings. It was times like these when Derpy wondered: was she really the stupid one around here?
That was only one of the many reasons Derpy adored her husband. She and Time Turner went to school together. They'd met when he defended her from bullies and were friends from that point on. Sometime during their adolescence, there was some attraction. Time said her eyes, wonky or not, were beautiful and her 'nativity', as they called it then, was adorable.
Derpy also noticed Time becoming more and more handsome, and she loved him for being her best friend for years. They got married soon into adulthood, and two years later their daughter Dinky Doo was born. Lately, they'd also been talking about having another foal.
Despite what everypony else said, she couldn't fall in love because she didn't know that love is, Derpy knew she was in love with Time Turner. Even today, she occasionally felt like he settled for her or married her out of pity or something. It didn't help that that's what everypony always whispered whenever they went out together. Whenever she talked to him about it, he always found a way of assuring her otherwise. She always knew not to care what other ponies think, so why start now?
Derpy was ecstatic when she saw Dinky developing better than her, and even better when Time told her that this was completely normal development for fouls. Dinky was bright, vibrant, and saw and spoke clearly. And her eyes were normal. Derpy thanked Celestia every night for giving her a perfect, beautiful, normal daughter. A daughter that hopefully would never know the prejudices that made her own foulhood so unhappy.
As the filly grew older, Dinky found a magical mentor-type figure in a pony called Amethyst Star. She was a fine young unicorn, one of few ponies who didn't judge Derpy for her...impairments, and she got along wonderfully with Dinky. She didn't think she could ever express her thanks to Amethyst when she invited Dinky to attend the Sisterhooves Social.
Derpy smiled at the memory of her daughter barging into the house that afternoon with a blue ribbon around her neck that she won in a pie-eating contest. It was one of the happiest times she'd ever seen her daughter, and once the stomachache passed, she went on and on about how much fun it was and asking if she could go next year with Amethyst.
The glass was cleaned up and there was a plate of leftover dinner for Time Turner in the microwave. She felt tired. Ten steps to the staircase, seven steps, turn left. The first door caught Derpy's eye and she open it and walked in quietly. It was dark except for the window and the bright moonlight in the room. Derpy could just make out an overflowing toychest, a desk with what looked like an open notebook and a quill, a night stand with a lantern and a clock, and a bed.
Dinky slept under the covers, her arms around her favorite stuffed puppy that she kept in her bed. A hand-me-down from Derpy. She looked like Derpy aside from that she was a unicorn instead of a pegasus. Time Turner was from a mixed family, his father being a unicorn, a trait the filly inherited. Derpy reached out a hoof and gently stroked her daughter's hair.
The filly smiled in her sleep. How could anyone think that she couldn't love Dinky? The thought made her heart hurt, even though she was actually happy. Happy that Dinky could have the friends and the full fillyhood that she couldn't have.
With a gentle kiss to her cheek, Derpy left the room, closed the door gently and headed for bed. Four steps to the next bedroom, four more steps to the bed. She snuggled under the warm covers and thought back to visiting her parents, perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow was Saturday and Time's day off, too. It was always the default day for any family plans. Perhaps they could all go to see them. They'd always gotten along very well with Time and Dinky loved visiting her grandparents.
Derpy grinned in the warmth of the bed. She was drifting off and was almost asleep when she faintly heard hoof steps coming to her door, the door opening and closing, and a familiar body climbed into the bed with her and pulled her into a hug. She nuzzled into Time as he kissed her on the head and whispered.
“I love you.”