One Day, After Work
"—and then just like that, boom! Gone!"
She knocks over the bottle, waving her wings around. Luckily, the floor of the bar is covered in a thin layer of rolling cloud, and so the bottle just kind of bounces off rather than shattering and sprinkling us all in broken brown glass. Still, the noise is enough to cause almost everypony to look up. Unless they were already looking, in which case most of them now studiously look away.
"Look, miss," says the bartender, "I know you're upset, but don't you think maybe you've had—"
"I'll tell you when I've had enough," she snorts, and I can feel my look of surprise, even as I'm trying not to do it. She never sounds like that.
Yeah, I've seen her a few times now. More than a few, really.
Every weekend, her and a few of the others from the weather team come in here. You know the type; they're loud, and they're brash, and they tend to drink a lot, and punch each other in the shoulder, and make a lot of jokes at each other's expense.
She's... she's different, though. She stays mostly quiet. She takes the jokes, but she doesn't give them back out. She doesn't drink much. It's like she either doesn't realize they're making fun of her, or she just lets it roll off without a care. Either way, well, I've found myself coming here at the start of the weekend whenever I'm up in Cloudsdale. Maybe in the hopes of seeing her. Maybe I just like the ambience. I don't know. I like it here, anyway, and I figure I like it more when she's around.
But tonight's different. Tonight, she's sad. Tonight, she came in alone. Tonight, she sat herself straight down at the bar, and ordered a drink. Then another. And then another. And now, whatever story she's been telling the bartender, she's moved to shouting and waving her hooves and wings around, and he doesn't know what to do.
"Listen, miss," he says. Loudly. Sternly. He already knows she's not going to fight him. "You're always welcome in here, you know that. But I'm gonna need you to calm down. Do you want me to call you a chariot, get you home safe?"
"Heyyy," she says, a little slurred, and the volume of her voice seems to catch them both by surprise. "I'm not a filly. I'm not some... some... filly, okay? I'm a big pony now. I don't need help."
"Alright, miss," says the bartender, quietly moving the other empty bottles away. "Well, can I get a message to one of your friends, maybe?"
"I don't have any friends," she almost yells, and before I know what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it, I've gotten to my hooves and I'm walking over there.
"Excuse me," I say, wondering what words are about to come out of my mouth next. "Is, uh... Is this seat taken?"
"Who are you?"
"I'm... My name's Sandy Breeze."
"I'm Derpy," she says, with a goofy grin, before wincing and smacking her forehead with her wing. It looks like it hurt more than she was expecting, because she screws up her face for a couple of seconds before shaking her head and opening her eyes again. She looks at me, and I don't know where to look, because one eye fixes me like a griffon who's seen a mouse on the ground, and the other is looking at my rear hoof as I perch as suavely as I can manage on the bar stool.
I realise I'm staring, and I'm about to apologise, and she draws herself up as if she's going to get mad, but instead... she smiles.
My heart does an honest-to-goodness skip.
The bartender has been looking at me this whole time, sizing me up, and now he nods. "I'm gonna leave you two together while I serve these other customers," he says, warily. "Hey, buddy?"
We both look up, but he's talking to me. "Keep an eye on her, yeah? If there's any more trouble..."
"It's fine," I say. "We're fine."
She turns to look at me, still smiling as he backs away.
"My name's not actually Derpy," she says, offering her wing for a shake, narrowly avoiding knocking over a bowl of peanuts. "It's Muffins. But everypony calls me Derpy, and I started introducing myself like that, too."
"It... suits you?", I blurt out, stupidly, and she tilts her head to look at me. It's the other eye that's piercing me now, and I don't know which one I should look at.
"You're funny," she smirks. "Hey, I've seen you before, haven't I?"
"I don't—"
"In here," she says, gesturing over to the darker recesses of the bar, towards the corner where I normally sit. "Over there."
"Yeah," I say. "I mean, I like to come here after work, you know?"
"And what do you do, Sandy Breeze?"
"I work for the postal service."
"Oh, like a mailpony?"
"No, not really. I'm in admin... I work with the books, you know? Ledgers and accounts and all that boring stuff."
"I'm sure it's not boring!" she smiles.
"That's kind of you to say," I giggle, "but I think I'm the only one who finds it interesting. I don't think many pegasi grow up wanting to work in a backroom, or dreaming about making inspection visits to different towns..."
"Oh, no," she says, and she puts her hoof on top of mine, and my breath catches in my throat. "I think it sounds so much fun! You get to see where all those different packages and letters are going, and you get to make sure they go where they need to go! Like, if there's a foal that's waiting for a special toy that her mama says her papa sent her for her birthday, even though he works far away, it's your job to make sure it got to the right place! You make sure she's not left sitting by the mailbox every day, day after day, until her mama says it must have gotten lost, and if it did get lost, you'd be able to find it! That's as important as delivering it yourself!"
"I, uh... I guess? I never really thought about it that way," I say. She's still smiling, and she's still holding my hoof, and I don't want those things to stop, so I decide to try and keep the conversation going. "And what about you, what do you do?"
"...I lost my job," she says, matter-of-factly, and before I can say something asinine like "I'm sorry", she starts up again.
"The others, they're, well, they're all heading over to Las Pegasus this weekend, for a big birthday party for Mint Ripple. They, uh... They didn't invite me. Now I know why."
She bangs a hoof on the bar again, and from the corner of my eye I see the bartender wince and look over to make sure there'll be no trouble. I try to nod and calm him, without putting her off her stride as she continues.
"I was so... I mean, I was really excited! I never went to Las Pegasus before, it sounds like a fun place even though I hadn't heard of half the things they said they were going to do, but I kept asking Mint Ripple questions to try and figure out what it is she might like for a birthday present. And eventually I decided on this really pretty bow I saw in the store window and it kind of changes color in the light, so when it's bright and sunny it's sort of golden, and then when it's rainy it goes kind of a dark red, but it's still shiny. It was so pretty! But then they told me I don't work for the weather patrol any more and I'm not going to Las Pegasus at all."
This time, I do say it. "...I'm sorry."
"Oh, don't worry," she smiles. "I didn't get a chance to give it to her by hoof, so I just left it in her locker with a note saying I hope she really likes it! It will look so pretty in her mane!"
"Uh... that's lovely," I say, "but I meant... I mean, I'm sorry about, you know... the job."
"Ohhhh," she says, in a drawn-out sigh, and the smile fades from her cheeks, and I feel a stab of pain for being the idiot pony who made that happen.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you—"
"I'm not sad I lost this job," she interrupts.
"No?"
"No. I'm sad because I lose every job. I make mistakes. I get a job, and I make mistakes, and I try to fix those mistakes, and they don't let me fix them, and then... I look for another job."
"So you weren't always with the weather patrol?"
She snorts, and I shrink down into myself.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude!" she says, a look of alarm on her face. "I didn't mean to make you sad! It wasn't a silly question! No, no, I was laughing at me. I've had lots of different jobs. Lots and lots."
She looks up at me again, still struggling to focus, and I want to tell her it's alright, that she doesn't have to try and force it, that I just want to hear her story, but it seems important enough to her that she's really trying to look straight at me with both eyes, and I kind of want to give her a cuddle, except that would surely give the wrong impression. Or, well, the right one, but this isn't the time.
Eventually, she looks away, down at the bar, at my own empty bottle.
"I used to fly super fast," she says. "I mean, really fast. I was in the Junior Flappers Club, which was hard because I was living with mama in Ponyville and it was hard to get up here for the meets, but we did it, even when she had to work extra, and I won, and mama was so proud and my friends were so proud and I was so happy showing off my medals, you know? And then I moved up to the senior circuit... Do you know Rainbow Dash? Or Spitfire?"
"Captain Spitfire, sure. And Rainbow Dash... Rainbow Dash... She's Bow and Windy's filly? Won a bunch of local races?"
"That's her," she smiles. "Well, my first year on the senior competitive circuit, I won against both of them."
"Wha... really?"
"Cross my heart and hope to fly," she says, looking off somewhere in the distance, apparently reminiscing. "I mean, not for long - Rainbow Dash was moved up a couple years and Spitfire was just starting out like me - but still, I won."
I don't know what to say, and she takes my silence for disbelief. "You don't believe me? You can look it up. There are photos and everything! I mean..."
She pauses again.
"...sometimes, I think I wouldn't believe me, if there weren't photos, and everything."
I don't know what it is about her, but I get the feeling she's not making this up. "I believe you," I say, and the beaming smile I get in return is worth it even if she was to get up and walk out of my life there and then.
She doesn't get up.
"So, then a bunch of bad stuff happened, and I stopped winning," she continues, her smile fading away. "I don't know if you've noticed, but... I have this thing with my eyes."
I pause, not knowing what to say.
"That was me being funny," she says, brushing my shoulder with a wing. "It was a joke."
"What happened?", I say, and I immediately wince at my own insensitivity, but she either didn't notice or didn't care.
"So in my second year I was already talking to Wind Rider about maybe joining the reserves they were talking about setting up, and I was spending every weekend at the compound, and—"
"Wait," I interrupt. "The Wonderbolts compound?"
"That's the one," she says, ignoring my dropped jaw. "I was there all the time, just helping out mostly, folding uniforms, putting out cones, and I would get as many laps in as I could, and I would sometimes get to hang out in the gym, and get tips, and even sleep over instead of going back home, and eventually I just kind of stayed there... It was so much fun. But even then, my times were starting to get worse and worse, and I wasn't winning any more races, and one day..."
She takes the bottle in her hooves, makes to take a swig, notices it's empty.
"I mean, they were super nice about it. They were all such nice ponies. They didn't want me to be sad, but they couldn't keep a spot for me when my times were so bad now. 'We'll gather up your things, and lead you to the gate...', they said. And if I had the operation, then maybe I could come back."
"And what then?", I ask, leaning forward, chin on my hooves, listening.
"I had the operation," she says, quietly, rolling the neck of the bottle back and forth between her feathers. "I did the exercises."
She looks up at me, and by now I've stopped noticing her lazy eye at all.
"Months of exercises," she repeats, tapping her hoof on the bar to punctuate each word. "It was hard, you know? Like, really hard. They give you a book to read, that's meant to tell you what you need to do. Except, when you start out, you can't read. And they say 'it's alright because you can have a friend read the exercises to you', but I didn't have any friends now. The hospital found me a place to live and came to check on me and a nice pony came to do exercises with me each week but between those times I didn't know anypony, and it was really hard."
The bartender comes over.
"Everything okay here, folks?" he asks, cautiously.
"We're fine," I say, as confidently as I can. "Could we get two glasses of water, please?"
"Coming right up," he nods, looking much less anxious.
"Thought you might be thirsty," I say to her.
"...I wore an eyepatch," she says. She covers an eye with a hoof. "I must have looked real silly." She starts laughing to herself, out loud, a daffy, honking laugh, and the patrons are looking at us again, and the bartender gives us a frown as he sets the waters down on the bar.
I remember the first time I heard her laugh. So out of place and so completely free, she either didn't notice her workmates staring at her in disdain, or she just ignored them. A bunch of ponies huffed and tutted and rolled their eyes, but I remember being mesmerised, like the room literally lit up, like whatever she was laughing at must be the funniest thing anypony has ever said, like I wanted to laugh with her even though I had no idea what she was laughing at, I just wanted to feel that way too.
Like now.
"But... it didn't work," she finishes, with a shrug. "I never got to go back to racing. I definitely didn't go back to the Wonderbolts. I mean, I couldn't even bring myself to write to them for a really long time, until I needed a place to stay. So I wrote a letter, and what do you know? The next week I'm being offered a job in the weather factory, with my own bed, working in the lightning room!"
She laughs again, and now I laugh with her, and this makes her smile.
"Can you imagine? Me? In the lightning room?", she giggles. "Oh, I made so many mistakes and messed up so many manes and set so many things on fire. They started calling me Ditzy! And then Ditzy Doo! But it was always so pretty and when I made a mistake I'd go all tingly and make myself laugh! I mean, it wasn't a job with flying, which is what I really wanted, but I got to help ponies with the weather and I was so proud to be a part of such a big thing!"
She gives a cute little snort.
"But, uh... yeah, they said I couldn't do that any more, and they put me in the snow room. Well, they said I mustn't make the snowflakes heavy and cube shaped because ponies on the ground could get hurt, and I had to stop chewing them. And then they moved me to the laundry room for the weather patrol and I must have messed that up too because they said so many things got shrunk or lost that they might have to stop wearing uniforms."
She snorts to herself and takes a sip of water, before resuming playing with the empty bottle.
"And then finally I had enough money to get my own place to live, which was just as well because they didn't want me there doing that, they didn't say it was because of my eyes but I didn't know for sure. I mean, I've always been a clumsy pony, you know? But they had a job going in the actual weather team, where I could fly, just keeping out of the way, reading off a chart, telling them where to put clouds and things, not an actual weather pony but it was still flying, you know? And I wrote to them and said about my bad eyes and my operation and they said they'd give me an interview, and then the pony at the interview said I was a nice pony, and gave me the job, and I got to fly after all."
She sighs, happily, and my heart does that skipping thing again.
"Now, it wasn't the best job ever, because the ponies were all pretty mean to start with, and they called me Derpy, and laughed at me for messing things up, but I always laughed too, and they said that showed I was a good pony, and they said they weren't trying to be mean, it was just the way weather ponies are and I should learn to laugh at all of their jokes. And I thought maybe it was good that I wasn't a real weather pony, because if it meant I had to be mean, then no thank you."
Silence descends, and she starts to peel the label from the bottle.
"And that's what I was doing, until yesterday. The, uh, storm... the big storm? That was kind of my fault."
Time passes. The background noise of the bar, the low murmur of conversation, seems to get gradually louder. More ponies start to pull up stools at the bar, and I start to wonder if I should say something, but then she looks up at me again. Still trying to focus. One eye looking right at me, the other somewhere over my shoulder.
"...I kept up my exercises. I said sorry for my mistakes. I tried to make it up to everypony, each time I did something wrong. And I did something wrong a lot! But I always worked super hard to fix it."
She pushes the bottle away.
"I did all the things I was supposed to do. And I still messed up. I still got everything wrong, just like what always happens. I still lost."
"Hey," I say, and now I realize my hoof's on hers this time. She looks at it - at least, one of her eyes does - but she doesn't say anything.
"It's gonna be OK," I say, as reassuringly as I can. "You're not the first pony to lose their job. Maybe you'll find something even better!"
"Yeah!", she says, a little too loudly, and I worry the bartender will come over again. "Yeah, I'll get a better job!"
"That's the spirit. What do you want to do?"
"I don't know! Fly? Something where I get to fly? It's all I ever was good at. Flying around. I don't even know if I want to race, I was just... good at it! I mean, we live in the sky, pretty much everypony is good at flying, but I always liked to fly far away."
"Why's that?"
"Nopony laughs at me when I'm flying," she continues. "Or, hey, if they do, I can move away, so that I can't even hear them! And then the joke's on them, right?"
I nod in agreement. "Right," I say, and I'm going to add to it but she's off again, tapping her hoof on the bar.
"Mama always said mean ponies aren't worth paying attention. And I don't think those weather ponies were really mean ponies, they were just being mean as a joke, which I didn't really understand. And usually, when I'm up there flying, there's nopony to bump into and nothing to trip over and no carts of blackberry jam to knock over the side of a cloud so everypony gets mad even though I could have stopped most of them from falling if they'd not shoved me out of the way."
"Um..."
"It's a long story. But you can probably guess most of it."
"Well, so, what you want is a job where you're in the sky on your own for a long time?"
"I guess. I get to not think about things. Just watch the clouds as I fly above them, and through them, and under them, and look at the birds and the ponies so far down on the ground, and wonder what they're thinking about, and who they're meeting, and I watch the ground spin around and I stretch my wings, and all there is is me and the sky and the ground, and then I remember there's someplace I need to go. But who am I kidding? I look at the clouds and I think I can make it, and then I look in a mirror and remember I'm..."
She gestures at her face again.
"... Me."
I finish my water. Clear my throat.
"I think what you really need is some friends."
"I told you," she says, glumly. "I don't have any friends."
"No, no... I think you do. I mean, I know you've got at least one," I say, with what I hope isn't too cheesy a smile. "But what I mean is... I think you need to be somewhere else. Somewhere nice. Somewhere where your friends will bring you flowers and have tea and go places with you and just... be nice."
"Nopony's been nice to me like that since I moved back up here from Ponyville," she says, a forlorn expression on her face.
"Well then..."
(this is it)
"...well then, why don't you come back to Ponyville?"
She looks at me as if I've said the dumbest thing ever.
"How could I do that? What would I do? I can't just live down there for free. The weather patrol down there won't even have me. I wrote them a really nice letter and asked them about a transfer months ago, and they said no. Even without..." - she gestures to her eye - "...they have a waiting list, and not many jobs to do."
"I didn't mean the weather patrol," I said. "I happen to know... and I can pull some strings, if... Well, Ponyville is looking for a new mailpony."
"A mailpony?", she asks, tilting her head, blinking.
"Yeah. And a pegasus would be able to do it so much faster than an earth pony or a unicorn, and you know you've got speed..."
"But... I'll mess everything up!", she whines.
"No, Muffins, I don't think you will," I say, trying my best to sound inspiring rather than nagging. "You know Ponyville is like nowhere else in Equestria. You've probably met the mayor, seen how things work down there... The mail is important. Being friendly is more important. Everypony makes mistakes, but in Ponyville... if you work hard to fix it when you make a mistake, and smile when you hand over your letters, and take care to make sure nopony's parcel is lost forever and nopony ends up waiting by their mailbox... you'll make a friend."
"I don't know what to say," she murmurs, and I think she's about to cry, so I pull a card from my bag and thrust it into her hoof.
"Don't answer now," I said. "Just... keep this card. When you're ready, get in touch. The offer remains open, okay?"
She looks at the card some more, and I fill the space by talking some more. "And, hey... if I don't hear from you...? I'll write you a letter. And I'll make sure it gets to you."
She smiles, a huge, beaming smile, wider than I've ever seen before.
I'm going to get in so much trouble.
Worth it.