Two Down, Four To Go
John Cleese merely stared at his old friend for a long while. His old friend, back from the dead after so many years. Currently, the other horse—colt?—was pointedly avoiding John’s gaze and staring at the ground with a hoof rubbing his chin idly. He alternated between performing that motion and staring at the image of a scalpel emblazoned on his haunches—flank?
Eventually, John just had to end the awkward silence with a proper reserved utterance.
“I’m feeling rather peckish. I suppose we should go somewhere for lunch.”
The two of them cantered on through the unfamiliar streets, looking at every alien pony building and saturated pony person to avoid looking at each other. If they hadn’t met that Twilight lady who explained everything to them, they probably would have run around Ponyville screaming like little foals. Well, at least John would have. The other one would have stayed composed thanks to a little trick he picked up from a master anesthesiologist in hospital. (The trick was to drink heavily, or, failing that, hit your head with a suitably large anaesthetics textbook.)
Speaking of which…
The other stallion of the duo, nominally known as Graham Chapman, decided he had to break the tension somehow. True to form, he did so completely tactlessly.
“I believe that I am so hungry, I could eat a horse!” he proclaimed stiltedly to the air in front of him after a minute’s stroll with no conversation.
John just stopped at that and tilted his muzzle down to stare at his friend.
He asked, “What?”
Graham grinned and then gave a look of mock embarrassment as he contemplatively brought a hoof to his chin. “I suppose you’re right. I was rather beating a dead horse by making that joke, wasn’t I?”
John could only chuckle and scoff, though his eyes didn’t register any amusement. “I really must say, I’ve missed you these past thirty years, but I surely haven’t mourned your sense of humour.”
Real embarrassment and awkwardness crept onto Graham’s expression as he asked, “Too dark for me?”
John could only hoof-point with a good-natured scowl at his good friend. “I should ruddy well think not! Seeing as how you’ve been dead for thirty years by my count, you can say whatever the hell you bloody well want!”
“Well in that case,” Graham lowered John’s hoof with his own and started walking in the direction of the nearest food-place, “I think I’ll say the things that fit me, for certain values of ‘me’.”
John still just stood there, this time with mock astonishment. “Graham Chapman, having values? This is truly a first! Now, what exactly would those values comprise?”
“They consist solely of you shutting up and coming into this bakery with me for a bite to eat, since I haven’t seen a bar in this place since I’ve come here.” Graham held the door to Sugarcube Corner open for John. His face was truly tranquil for the first time.
“Colour me impressed. I should rather like this new, improved Graham Chapman…”
They walked into the strangely technicolor construction (and it probably wouldn’t cease being strange for a long time) with John leading the way in his big, scary, English-faced way.
There wasn’t anybody at the counter—anymore, since the pink pony that was just behind it appeared in front of the two newcomers in a flash.
“Omigosh! New ponies in Ponyville! We gotta get the Welcome to Ponyville party started for you two!” The pink pony took both of their hooves at the same time and started vigorously shaking.
“What are your favorite colors? What are your favorite flavors? Do you like sour or sweet tastes better?” She gasped and let go of them, John wincing and rubbing his hoof at her grip strength. “I just bet you’ll love the scones I baked up for everypony! Oh!” Pinkie started bouncing up and down rapidly at a rate yet unknown to British dimensional timey-wimey hoppers such as John and Graham found themselves. “My name’s Pinkie Pie, by the way! I’m the premier party mare and the bestest baker you’ll ever see in all of Ponyville!”
Graham found a smile starting to creep up his face every second he beheld Pinkie Pie. “Charmed, I’m sure,” he opined.
“Ooh! You’ve got a funny accent! Not that I mean that in a bad way,” she reassured the two of them. “Are you from Trottingham?” She gasped again, louder. ”Are you guys actors from the Spear Shaker Company? Are you famous? What are your guys’ names?”
Since John elected to gaze soundlessly into the distance with a glazed look coming over his eyes as he rubbed his aching hoof and tried to imagine a pony version of Shakespeare—and failing, Graham continued. “Our names are—”
“Now don’t tell me! Let’s see…” Pinkie gazed wide-eyed into the wonder duo’s souls. “You,” she pointed at John, his demeanour flattening due to Pinkie Pie singling him out, “are Sourpuss, and you,” she pointed at Graham, his demeanour curling up into a smug, warm grin, “are Party Boy! Partier?” She looked up at the ceiling in confusion. “No, Party Stallion!” She beamed at John expectantly.
“Erm… actually, our names are John and Graham, and we’re just popping in for a quick… pastry?” John uttered, glancing askance at his partner.
Graham was rubbing his square chin with his unwieldy hoof and really starting to regret the loss of his fingers. He supremely wished he still had them so he could stroke his chin and adopt a more wisened expression of amusement.
“Oh! Of course! You’ve come to the right place! Our bakery is the best in Ponyville, rated a whole six super-duper teevee stars out of five! No other bakery around has as many nummy treats for ponies to eat sweetly!”
Pinkie ducked down in front of them and appeared behind the counter. How unusual! Graham Chapman really wished he had a pipe to make the situation more silly, but for now he could only smirk like a schoolboy to achieve that effect.
Pinkie Pie’s expectant wide grin caught John Cleese rather unawares, but he ventured forth anyway. “Ah, yes, well,” he glanced at Graham for reassurance, which was given with a nod, and turned back to Pinkie, “we actually do happen to be rather peckish for some scones, I think.”
“Peck-ish? What the heck is that s’posed to mean?” Pinkie gasped and crossed her heart with her hoof. “You don’t want me to bake birds into pies, do you? I swear, I’ve stopped doing that ever since that one time it made Fluttershy cry! I Pinkie Promised I never ever would, ever again!” she pleaded, ears bent downwards.
“Er… rather, we’re hungry. For scones,” John explained slowly and deliberately. “Tea, too.”
“Well why didn’t you say so you silly fillyfooler?” Pinkie giggled, “We’ve got the bestest scones in the whole of Equus, no matter what Donut Joe says!”
“Very nice. We’ll take some blueberry scones,” John said.
“I’m afraid,” Pinkie unravelled, “we’re out of that kind. Sorry worry!”
“Oh, um, very well. What kind would you want, Graham?”
“Got any dragon fruit scones?”
Pinkie craned her ears towards Graham. “What was that?”
“You loony git, Graham,” Cleese admonished while attempting to pinch the bridge of his nose with his hoof and failing, “they wouldn’t make dragon fruit scones if they don’t even have the organised motorised transport infrastructure system to ship it here from… horse Africa—South America—whatever!”
Graham just gave him a look that stated quite clearly his experimental intentions. He spoke to Pinkie, “Oh, sorry, Miss Pie. My Equestrian accent is rather atrocious. Let me try that again.” He cleared his throat.
“Oi, lass,” he intoned blandly, “ave ye gotten any uvva wee summat draggin’ fruities fer I could of et-en a pint uv sconce?”
That got John to chuckle, in his heavily prejudiced-against-Scots-and-the-Welsh-and-generally-nice-people way.
Pinkie rolled her eyes to the ceiling and pulled out flags proclaiming Sugarcube Corner’s superiority.
“WELL, WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SO, SILLY!” she roared like a dragon quite convincingly. “Dragon fruit scones! Those’re our world-famous specialty! We’ve even got a special going on. Buy two scones, get seven more!”
“You really have some?” John asked seriously now, his eyes wide. “You know, I’ve never tried dragon fruit before. But I think I’d love to right now…”
“Sorry, Sourpuss! We never get it at the end of the weak,” Pinkie roared while lifting a two tonne barbell, “only on Mondays! (Those are our wing days! Leg day’s on Tuesday!)”
The barbell deflated like two balloons on a stick as she added, confused, “Anyway, they also just seem to run out so quickly somehow…”
“Bugger!” John hemmed and hawed. “Orange scones?”
Pinkie had the good sense to look suitably chastised.
“They’ve been in order from a gang by the West Side for two weeks now,” Pinkie decreed, “but they were lost when Screwball ratcheted them,” she whinged.
“Hmm!” Chapman took up the mantle. “Huckleberry?”
Pinkie took in a sharp intake of breath, busting out an inhaler, an orphan foal she adopted in the last week, a wrench, and a bandage to release it.
“Sorry! A wacky magistrate relative of mine outlawed them after he saw them and said they were, like, 'so delicious that they're criminal',” Pinkie related judgementally with a guilty look. "I mean, what the heck was that?"
“Strawberry?” John replied incredulously.
“Nope. We lost them in a telephone redundancy miscommunication involving my kid niece getting a dress at Carousel Boutique,” Pinkie recalled fitfilly.
Graham was starting to like this. “Peach?”
Pinkie threw up her arms, much to the astonishment of John, who followed the familiar appendages with his eyes as they splatted against the ceiling and stuck there.
"Fuck..." he opined.
“Ooh, sorry, we've got no peach scones in stock. They all got lost when an experimental airplane delivering them crashed,” she explained.
“Grape?” Graham continued.
“All smashed!” she whined.
“Raspberry?” Graham opined.
“Stampededed by a cow—from Denmark! A young prince in line for the throne!” she gave a little moue of disdane.
“Plain?” Graham riposted.
“Yes!” Pinkie exclaimed.
“Wait, really?” John pried his eyes away from the ceiling to stare.
“No, not really. Sorry. They got demolished by a convicted former lover of mine with a crowbar who said they were his before taking it back and hiding it when my magistrate relative saw him do it and, oh, yeah I just remembered he lied to me about it,” Pinkie exclaimed again, and exclaimed, and exclaimed.
“Damnit! Wait, you had a lo—”
“Oatmeal raisin?” Graham ventured.
“Blown up on an adventure spaceship,” Pinkie vented.
John and Graham simply looked at each other at that one.
"Erm... uh... Pear?" John looked around like he was lost.
"Sorry! A colony of bees got into my stock of pears,"—at this she got out a pear with a chunk taken out of it and a queen bee lazing about in it, buzzing discordantly—"and they've just been groaning and groaning and groaning after they gorged themselves on it!" she bemoaned.
“God damnit! Surely you must have some traditional English scones in stock!” John exclaimed. A vein on his forehead started to pop out.
“Yeppers! Trottingham-tested scones! The best in the business!”
“Great! Great!” John took a sigh of relief, starting to sweat and breathe heavily. “Graham and I will take some!”
Pinkie Pie just balked at that. “...They’re rather flaky.”
“That’s fine, we’ll take them anyway.”
Pinkie went back and forth for a bit. It made Graham a little dizzy. She said, “They’re a bit too flaky for the customers to eat…”
“We happen to like them like that,” John reassured Pinkie. “We’ll take them.”
Pinkie continued her waffling. “In fact, oopsie poopsie, they might be too flaky to sell…”
“Look, I don’t care how excrementally flaky they are, just give them to me! I had demanded it, I have demanded it, I do demand it, and I will always demand it, so just give it to me!” John shouted.
“Oh, wait, silly me,” Pinkie giggled and got up from the floor, “I forgot Mr. Cake bought them all up for his family! I can be such a doofus!” She sighed in contentment at the thought of his friendship with her and shook her head sweetly. “I guess you could say de man ded it.”
“Look, I’m starting to work up a cold sweat at this—” which was true, since he was starting to panic for no readily discernable reason, “—so, so do you or do you not, in fact, have any scones in stock at all, or are you just, just—oh god!”
John Cleese collapsed upright onto the nearest chair, wiping his brow with his hoof.
“John!" Graham blanched. "Are you alright mate?”
“Graham,” John gasped wetly, “do you realise, we’re in the bloody Cheese Shop sketch!”
Chapman sat down on another chair, in the comfortable proper Ponyvillian way. “I’ve had a feeling. Sorry for not saying so earlier." Graham stifled a giggle. "Intercoursingly good, isn’t it?”
John snapped, “Easy for you to fucking say since you’ve missed the last fourty years. I’ve only had to go through hearing it a thousand times, suffering through morons reciting it from memory like our show still stands as a bastion of what is right in comedy as opposed to a big imaginative gutter that we just pissed the night away in half-assing for fun in the seventies!" John put his hooves outward, "Honestly, can you even comprehend going through such a hellish experience as being forced to laugh at hundreds of the same, fucking, quotes for money was?”
“Well, there was this one time while I was laying on the hospital bed—but I see you are getting tired of those death gags and so I will stop with them,” he hastily assured John at the sight of his wild face.
“I fucking hate the Cheese Shop sketch,” John muttered.
Graham visibly considered his next words to his troubled confidant for a few moments as he shifted his barrel to not chafe on the chair. He sorely missed his wonderful pipe, that it might make his every action more socially acceptable.
Finally, Graham spoke. “I’ll tell you my full thoughts on the Cheese Shop sketch, and in being true to form, I shall do so in as long-windedly a manner as I wish, which is to say, completely straight.”
Pinkie Pie’s hoof came up from under the table with a pipe, which Graham accepted graciously.
“Thank you, Pinkie,” he opined, as Pinkie walked to the kitchen calmly with a subdued smile, him watching her leave for a moment to gather his thoughts.
“Anyway. Yes, I have had fans of our show recite it to me quite a few times over the years after that episode aired, but I really don’t mind it. Oh, sure, it could be a bit repetitive at times, but the sketch really means something to them on a subconscious level, which is why it enjoys the lasting power it has. It’s also just dumb, and funny as fuck, and I personally like it.”
“But,” John sputtered, “you’re missing the point! I don’t want this to just be how people remember me, by a bloody stupid sketch I didn’t even like performing! It’s so… inconsequential! So vapid!”
John pointed his hoof accusingly at Graham, his energy coming back. “Don’t you remember what that Twilight woman just told us a few moments ago? She said that the most significant objects and events from our lives would cross over to this universe first, yeah?”
John gestured wildly to the entire world at his table in Sugarcube Corner. “So then why in the pissing, bloody hell would the ancient Cheese Shop sketch be considered so damn meaningful by the fabric of reality that it would be the first thing we get to cross over? Not my recent lectures at various colleges, not Terry’s contributions to mediaeval lore, not Michael Palin’s globetrotting, nor Eric’s things, nor Gilliam’s wonderful Don Quixote film—not even your autobiography,” John stressed, “get so much as a bleeding hippie’s glance in all this!”
Graham forgot to take a draw from his pipe in his concern. He drew closer to John, his forehead wrinkled and his eyebrows closing together.
“You’re really bothered by all this… by being here, aren’t you?” he asked softly.
John’s muzzle muscles unclenched. His eyes grew dull. He talked in a low whisper.
“I just don’t get what it all means. Just… why? Is the universe just doing this to spite me? To punish me for not acting as I should have? I mean, if the universe itself is saying that’s the most significant event of our lives…” John was getting that wild look in his eyes again.
“Then it bloody well ought to be!”
John looked up at the blonde stallion’s outburst.
Graham averted his eyes in his embarrassment, and merely took a drag of his pipe. A couple of bubbles came out.
“Sorry. I don't know what came over me," he mumbled sheepishly. "It's just... well, I rather like all of this," he waved to the interior of Sugarcube Corner. "I like this being able to move from my damn hospital bed, this being with you guys again for the first time in years. Don't you?"
John looked shocked and muttered an apology. "Sorry,” he coughed, “I mean," he looked aghast, "It's not that I regret that I'm here and you're here and we're all here together in this peaceful place," he hastily said.
"Quite alright," Graham nodded. "Now... I know you were the one to always push for something better in our writing,” he expanded calmly, “to push for something more original, or more intelligent in our sketches. To try to make it something you could be proud of, as it were.”
Graham contemplated the inexplicable arms still stuck on the ceiling above the counter (you know, from when Pinkie Pie threw her arms up?) for a moment.
“But I just had fun writing with you guys. Writing the sketches with my mates, my drunk writer mates. I wrote the Cheese Shop sketch, you know. I had tons of fun just drafting it.
"You remember the fun? Isn't that important enough for us? Just pure fun all around, buying rounds of drinks from those awful hotels when we were all just poor artists. Pure connection. You remember that? Just having a good time writing some jolly old scenes for a show we wouldn’t have ever expected to get funded by the turgid old BBC in centuries?” Graham cracked a smile and caught a fleeting glimpse of a grin on his good friend’s face.
He went on. “You remember? You said you didn’t get the humour, that we should scrap it—right up until Mikey read it and he—he…snrk ! !”
That got a good laugh out of John. “Oh, god! He was laughing so hard he fell on the floor and drenched his face in that awful writer’s rum! He should have been here; he would have loved this!” John yelled to the heavens, good fun freely romping around his eyes.
They spent just a minute more reminiscing before Graham got back to topic.
“Heh heh… Well, that’s all I have to say about that, I suppose. Y’know… that we were just bonding over being silly with all of it. Still a pretty good philosophy for a cold, uncaring world, yeah?”
“Not the worst I’ve heard,” John demurred, still smiling.
“Well, good, and, er…” Graham looked pretty awkward, eyes down cast. ”Sorry about getting cross.”
“It’s all right. I forgive you, you old puppy-eyed widowmaker.” John sniffed into his chest as he lay into the native pony position, his muzzle feeling rather pleasantly warm on his brown fur.
He muttered into his floof, "I just would’ve liked to have a more positive influence, to have a legacy that would let others be just as creative as we were, y'know?"
Graham got up from the table feeling better and smiling goofier than he had in years—decades!—, as he said with a yawn and a crick of the neck, “Bingus. Now let’s get out of here and find a good pub to drown our putrid spinal columns in.”
“Hold it right there!”
Pinkie Pie was in their faces again, glaring at them before her face melted into a friendlier look.
“Now, I didn’t hear anything about what you two were chatting about but I did hear you say the name Twilight! Are you friends with her?” she asked.
John weighed the pros and cons of ignoring her and just decided to go with it. “Well, yeah. It’s a rather long and horrifying story, but we know her.”
“Oh goody goody goody gumdrops with chocolate whipped cream on top!" She beamed. "Now that I know you’re good ponies with insider connections, I can give you this!”
The this! was a full, round, luscious, chocolate chip scone.
“I was saving this for Twilight later today when I was gonna prank her by saying I didn’t have any scones left for increasingly ridiculously punny reasons,” (the two stallions looked at each other), “but I thought you should have it to relax, Sourpuss! Oh, and don’t worry about payment! It’s on the house! Not literally, though, because that’s just plain silly,” she stated solemnly.
“Why, thank you so very much, Pinkie Pie! Oh, and if it’s too not much trouble,” Graham conspiratorially lowered his voice and put up his hoof to his mouth to whisper to her, “could you teach me how you do that teleportation thing sometime?”
“Sure thing! Now, see ya later!” She waved her hoof far and wide to welcome them goodbye.
John Cleese and Graham Chapman thanked the pink pronking pony Pinkie Pie before going on their merry way through the sleepless summer streets of peculiar Ponyville.