Chapter Text
A stubby little pegasus tumbled out of bed on a Sunday afternoon.
It was pre-determined: today wasn’t going to be a plain sort of day.
She wouldn’t be contented, or pleasantly bored, or calm today. Her cutiemark would make this it’s undying mission.
Aside from discovering that her new housekeeper had been waiting outside for 30 minutes for her to answer, or the fact she’d forgotten to change out of her sleeping shirt...she stubbed her hoof and went pin-balling down the walls of the staircase.
The house cleaner, sporting a high mane style and killer muscles in her eyebrow region, was very uneasy indeed.
“I’m sorry, Dusty,” Secondhoof mumbled around the cloth, the perpetrator of the fall, she’d caught with her mouth. “I’m not the most coordinated in the morning. This is for you.”
“It’s 12:43pm.” Dusty sighed, placing her bucket on the floor with crimson illuminated magic.
Once the housekeeper was buried in work to do, which didn’t take long, Secondhoof valiantly fumbled a banana for breakfast. She was doing as well as one could do with hooves, until the fruit ended up a smear on the roof. She mentally noted that her decision to put the peel in the bin was helping in one way or another, as she avoided the exasperated stare and retreated upstairs.
Mane brushed, she began to tie her bows in front of the mirror. One for her ginger and maroon manestyle, one for her apricot and cream coloured neck, and one for her tail. Her eyes fell to the sticky note plastered to her mirror, giving her just one ever important task. Smile.
She obeyed as she did every day, trying and failing to ignore her missing front tooth.
“Heading out?”
Secondhoof carefully stepped over a residual splatter of banana as she replied. “Oh, yes. Market day today, and then…then I think I’ll eat somewhere!”
Dusty gave her a tight smile. “I’ll let myself out.”
Secondhoof closed the bottom half of her front door, putting her muzzle over the open half. “Thanks, Dusty!”
—-
After she carefully picked, counted, and weighed all 65 purple grapes, the stall owner was flustered to discover she’d forgotten her money at home.
“I’m...truly sorry. Can you leave these here? You see, my name is Secondhoof...ah....never mind.”
Unable to ignore the tight winces on the faces around her, particularly the ones in line, she made herself scarce, trotting as fast as her short legs could carry her. Not fast enough, she would learn quickly, to miss the big box marked FRAGILE that was falling from the sky.
“Oh!” she gasped, her feathery wings popping out fiercely as though spring loaded. “I’ll got it-! I’ve get it-!”
Secondhoof, flying quickly now, rotated her body in mid-air, supplying her stomach as a platform for the package as it landed right on target. She’d been successful!
“Look out!” bellowed the mail pony from above. But it was much too late, she had accumulated momentum entirely out of her control, hurtling backwards and unaware of the obstacles behind, or rather ahead, of her. She was rowing a rowboat in a rapids.
KA-CLANG!
The mail ponies, and a few surrounding bystanders, swooped and galloped up to the stinking pile of chaos, gawking at the mass of dented garbage cans. Shakily, the unharmed package rose from the wreckage, supported by a filthy hoof.
“Hey, thanks kid,” the mail pegasus said, taking the parcel with a zeal that could only really add, without saying of course, ‘-for keeping me in my position at work’.
“My…pleasure,” Secondhoof replied, attempting to see the world without stars (and rotten banana peels) in the way. She slumped forward, cautiously moving different parts of her body to check that it was all in functional order. No breaks, no sprains.
“I’m okay,” she said, answering a question nopony asked. Certainly not the mail pony, who had returned hurriedly to his mail truck in the clouds with the straggling package in tow. The small crowd had dispersed, returning to their errands, as Secondhoof stumbled haphazardly out of the pile.
“Coulda been a lot worse than the garbage,” commented a voice behind her. She turned, tilting her head questioningly at the surveyor, who smirked. “I’m glad you’re not hurt.”
Secondhoof went to say something thoughtful, but was immediately interrupted by the banana peel that drooped from her mane onto her muzzle. She stiffened, feeling the eyes on her. “…thank you.”
The water from the tap behind the goose-necking stranger’s cottage washed away her newly acquired filth and undesirable odours no problem, but fluffed every feather on her wings involuntarily with the cold.
Few blow dryers could do what a swift fly through the clouds could do for her mane and fur, and as she took to the sky, Secondhoof could feel it beginning to work right away. It was a warm, breezy afternoon.
She closed her eyes, consciously feeling the cloud vapour as it whispered along her cheeks and lashes. Her feathers loosened, splaying like outstretched fingers, cutting gently through the little mists.
She hadn’t kept track of how long she’d been flying for, nor the surroundings she’d ended up in, for a while, and eventually this would prove precarious. Before she had returned to the waking world for long enough to realise it, she was on a trajectory downward, sharp but unnoticeable when you have your eyes closed. This might have been alright given the height she already had…only, the mailpony’s truck was sitting idle up there in the sky, with its square, flat, metal roof.
It wasn’t flat for long.
—-
Several profuse apologies later, Secondhoof lay exhausted on a small cloud, a very cold bag of fruit resting on her eye. Bad days weren’t new to her; on a good day, she wondered if there was somepony hiding behind the bushes, waiting to spring out and break the news that it was a prank.
Today, though. Today was what she would call a real prank, and the accidental loop of expectation she’d accomplished between very good and very bad days was making her more perplexed by the moment.
Instead of pursuing this complex train of thought any further, she gently left her cloud and began meandering after the scent of baking. Due to the morning’s unsuccessful breakfast, she was rather hungry. Placidly, it was Sugarcube Corner on the baking radar, and so she ducked in.
“What can I do you for?” asked a pink pony with curly hair and bright eyes behind the counter. Before Secondhoof could answer, the pink pony gasped.
Oh, thought Secondhoof, I forgot about my injury-
“Are you here for the sale?!”
Secondhoof, attempting not to appear thrown off, tried to match the energy and stumbled instantaneously. “Oh! Yeah! I went through the trouble of coming down- I-I mean I’ve had trouble, that is. Today I mean, not went through the trouble of coming here, this morning. Uhm, I mean, afternoon.”
The baker, whilst shuffling a large bag of flour from the lobby to the kitchen behind the pink pony, gave her an odd look. There was a momentary bout of silence, before the counter pony giggled. “I sure don’t know what that means, but can I interest you in half price personalised cakes anyway?”
Recovering awkwardly from the uncomfortable stillness surrounding the bubbly demeanour of the bakery’s cashier, Secondhoof smiled crookedly. “I’ll take one.”
The pony beamed, reaching for one of the boxes on an obscured shelf beside her. She tied an orange ribbon on top with experienced speed. “Super! We got a bunch here that got ordered custom this week, made and decorated and everything! But their orderers never picked em’ up, so now they’re practically free, cause they all say a bunch of context-based things like ‘Happy Birthday’, and ‘I’m Really Sorry I Got A Dog Without Asking First I Really Thought That’s What You Wanted I Promise I’ll Take Good Care Of Him And Buy His Kibble’, so. We can’t really sell em’ full price.”
Secondhoof peered at the cake shelf behind the counter, wondering how that particular pony managed not to collect that particular cake, if it was a real example and not just made up. She decided not to ask any further questions.
Turning to get a pouch that wasn’t there on her flank, an icy cold spike of humiliation trickled down her neck and spine and settled in her stomach. She made an odd noise when attempting to speak, and swallowed, trying again. “I-I’m so sorry,” she croaked, voice ever-smaller as she continued. “I forgot my saddlebags at home. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”
As she was turning to leave, numb with fear at the possibility of a line behind her (thankfully, there wasn’t one), the pink pony chirped, “Oh! That’s okay. We really gotta get rid of these things before tomorrow. Here!”
She bumped the cake box an inch across the counter in Secondhoof’s direction with enthusiasm, seemingly glowing with joy at the pegasus’s astounded expression. “Just make sure you slice it up and share it with all your friends, okay?”
—-
Watching the sky with weary, partially bruised eyes, Secondhoof made her way up into the air again with the cake box in her mouth. Up and up she flapped, further and further from Ponyville she glided.
Eventually, she accessed a small cloud hovering near the peak of a mountain plateau. Unfortunately, the cloud was so small in fact, it disappeared in a puff of vapour underneath her, and just as she’d settled. As she hovered in place, frowning, a duo of griffons watching from the nearby peak snickered amongst each other. “You’re Secondhoof, aren’t you?”
Secondhoof pondered for a moment if these were the aforementioned very bad/very good day pranksters, or if maybe the altitude was causing hallucinations.
She tried for a simple ‘that’s me’ but with a ribbon in her mouth, just as a strand of her mane sprung free and dislodged a morsel of breakfast and/or garbage can banana, as if to illustrate her point. The griffons shivered, their feathered crests puffing in sudden discomfort. “We were told to avoid you,” the short griffon grimaced.
The large griffon jutted his beak up. “We can see why.”
Secondhoof’s head dropped, defeated, as they flew off into the clouds. With a gentle, tired flutter, she landed on the mountain peak’s shallow plateau, gazing distantly at the mouth of a large cave. She recalled the dragon that used to sleep here, the one that caused a fuss in town all those moons ago. She hoped she wouldn’t cause a fuss from up here…like she did down there.
Picking a spot at the edge of the cave’s light and folding her legs beneath her, she softly tugged the orange bow from it’s knot on the surface of the cake box.
There was a tender reverb in the cave as Secondhoof cried, puddles and puddles watering the glowshrooms growing in the stone floor at her hooves. The sunset turned her head, easing her aching heartbeat, numbing her. It was getting darker in the deeper sections of the cave, and ever colder. Perhaps if she left right away to tell the housekeeper she’d done a good job, she’d be back by sundown.
No, no, she was sure she was told to avoid her too, just like the griffons had, by whomever told them to in the first place. Could it have been the fruit seller, the mail ponies, the bakers at Sugarcube Corner…? She feared each and every possibility, reliving all the individual moments of Secondhoof embarrassment they must have felt that week.
She curled into herself. Who could she face again?
Secondhoof startled at the sharp sound of a coin clattering noisily to the cave floor, somewhere deeper in. She turned her head toward the cave, sniffed her runny nose, and persistently struggled to adjust her eyes to the darkness, until she thought she saw a shape. A rock? A dragon? A...pony?
“Don’t hurt me.” Secondhoof wibbled, flinching.
For such a request, the stranger’s voice was confident sounding, non-menacing.
“I won’t.”