Morning Tumblr. I put off answering this from yesterday.
The only time I’ve ever seen Pinkamina angry—really angry—is sort of the same moment I started living here. (This is part of the long story someone asked for.)
After Rainbow Dash adopted me, I got to know all the ponies she considered to be her friends a lot better; she would see them pretty much every day, and would usually drag me along (sometimes straight out of school, which was pretty cool at the time.) So, I started watching them, trying to work out what made them cool ponies in Rainbow Dash’s opinion. I noticed pretty much immediately that Fluttershy has this big thing for her, but will never, ever act on it; I think everyone knows that but Rainbow Dash herself. But I also noticed Pinkie Pie, and the end of Pinkie Pie, and the start of miss Pinkamina.
Everypony else had pretty much known her so long they didn’t notice anything changing about her, I think. I got to know her just as her old sense of self was falling apart. So I saw ponies talking about her, and around her, as if she was one thing, but I saw miss Pinkamina herself being something entirely different, and looking really frustrated, I guess because none of these ponies were really connecting to her any more. Nopony was actually talking to her. If she’d say something, they’d just call her “random” and go back to what they were doing. It was pretty sad.
I just observed this quietly at the time, though, because Rainbow Dash herself had told me earlier, in what I came to think of as my “initial briefing Re: How To Not Annoy Rainbow Dash,” that she thought Pinkie was air-headed and immature, and that it was only Twilight Sparkle and the others hanging out with her that kept her from just ignoring everything she said. I could tell she didn’t actually think of her that way—I mean, Pinkie’s really the only pony that I ever saw make Rainbow Dash laugh on purpose—but she seemed to think that I would like her better if I thought she didn’t care about things like that. So I didn’t care about things like that. But I watched.
And then the murders started.
It was all sort of taken with mild enthusiasm at first. Big news in a small town, nopony we knew, turned out they had been all sorts of screwed up; it looked like we had some sort of vigilante protecting Ponyville from evildoers. But as the bodies began to queue up in Ponyville’s tiny mortuary, the evidence linking each successive case to some big shocking scandal got thinner and thinner. Then there was nothing, just murders.
I thought, at the time: maybe the vigilante is asking us to trust her? Maybe there’s still just as much evidence, but she just doesn’t want to spend the time writing up a big package of notes and tying it neatly to the body, when there’re evildoers to thwart? Maybe she just has an intuitive sense of good and evil, and she can pick these ponies out by eye, or ear, or nose, or something, and the whole evidence-gathering thing is just her way of making sure she isn’t crazy?
But no. Pinkamina is crazy. That’s what I find strangest about all this. She’s crazy, and I don’t have a problem with that.
A few weeks later, the bodies stopped showing up altogether. Ponies were just disappearing without a trace now. The CBI were called in and did this big perimeter sweep, to make sure nopony left town for a whole week, but the murders kept happening. We were all scared by that point. Rainbow Dash wouldn’t let me leave the house unless I was with her, and then only to visit her friends in big public places, and only all of them at once. I don’t know why, but I think she suspected all of them of doing something or other.
But that’s when I noticed it. Miss Pinkamina wasn’t scared. All of Rainbow Dash’s friends were shaking and weeping and trying to comfort one-another, but miss Pinkamina was being, er, random. The same old Pinkie Pie. I could tell she was just faking it now; she had stopped being Pinkie Pie months ago. But she was faking it so well. There was no trace of fear or dread or hopelessness tinting her like it did the others. Just… nothing. She had no real emotion at all.
Miss Pinkamina stopped showing up to hang out with her friends soon after that. Nopony questioned it; I think they assumed she was too scared to leave her house, and had been hiding it really well until then. (They would almost be right, if that’s what they thought.) The murders started happening more quickly, with less time between each one.
As for Rainbow Dash, well… she had some other problems I’m not going to get into right now. She didn’t care about the murders very much. She figured nopony could really find us, living at an unlisted address so high in the air. Her home was really her own secret place; it just had walls and a bed and a couch and stuff.
It wasn’t quite secret enough either, because a mare from Foal Services eventually came right in and picked me up while I was watching TV and walked out the door. She took me down to the police station and asked me to sit quietly while she filled out some forms, then took me into a room and told me I wouldn’t be living with Rainbow Dash any more.
I didn’t know what to say to that. At the time, it hurt… not worse than any physical pain I had ever felt, but more acutely, more all-encompasingly, like there was nothing in the world but me and the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed to see Rainbow Dash any more. I think it felt like… like how I imagine it feels when you cut open a pony’s gut, and all their intestines push out from the pressure. Like falling out of the sky in pieces.
The mare took me to Rarity’s house. She’s registered with them as a caregiver: somepony a homeless foal can stay the night with whenever they need to. (Sometimes, when I had stayed with her before, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle would come over too, and we’d call it a sleepover; but sometimes it was just me.) Rarity squeezed her eyes shut really tightly, and looked like she was going to scream at something (probably at Rainbow Dash, now that I think about it), but she promised she would watch me until Foal Services could figure out what to do with me. But, she was busy like always…
So I got away. And I went to the one pony I thought wouldn’t get mad at me, or sad for me, or even be happy to see me. Who would just be nothing. Miss Pinkamina.
It was right about the time I knocked on her door when something clicked in my brain about the murders.
She yelled from what sounded like a few rooms away for me to go away. Not knowing what else I could do, I yelled back up at her, just the word “please.” First once, then several times.
I heard bumps coming down stairs. She opened the door with the strangest look on her face. (It’s her nervous look, mixed with her lustful look, and a bit of what I think must be coitus interruptus.)
She was also covered in blood.
Until that moment, I had been numbed from overload of anguish from before, even as the realization had been creeping on that I was knocking on the door of the Ponyville killer. Right there and then, though, all the pain I felt, about Rainbow Dash being taken away from me, first my dream of her and then for real; and about my own little self, like a burr in the fur of the world, not belonging or bringing pleasure, just causing pain by holding on… it all came flooding back to me. And I screamed, not in fear at the blood-covered mare, but in defeat, in torment, in negation. Miss Pinkamina later told me it was the worst scream she had ever heard.
Like I said before, I asked her to kill me then. On her doorstep, where anyone could see. That was kind of dumb, I admit.
She pulled me through the door and slammed it shut. She had no look you’ve ever seen on her, and I hope I’ll never see it again either. She said, in a completely neutral, flat, but really loud voice, “sit.” I fell off my feet onto the floor at the sound of it. Then she just stared at me.
It took her about two minutes to blink. Then she cried.
She told me she had been watching me while I was watching her. In fact, she had been watching me because I was watching her. And she had seen how Dash treated me, and she knew how I had been living before that, and she said she assumed it was probably worse than she even knew (yup.)
Then she sat on the floor beside me, looking up kind of nowhere into the air. She told me she used to live on a farm. I sort of wanted to tell her she had already told me this story, a long time ago, but I didn’t want to interrupt her. But it turns out it wasn’t the same story. It didn’t have a happy ending. She told me about how she moved away from it all, first to the city, then to this little town, and tried to use her talents in a way that made people happy. In a way that would make her happy. “But,” she said, “I just ended up feeling like a burr on somepony’s backside, you know? Not in control, not true to myself, not even really making anyone else happy on anything other than a superficial level. I had rejected a life of being nopony with a family to be nopony alone.”
Then it was my turn to stare at her. Not at the blood; I think I wouldn’t have cared at that moment if she was fifty feet tall and breathed fire. I stared at her eyes. They were sad. Searching. They were staring into mine.
Then she asked me—she has a habit of asking me things I think would have obvious answers; I think it’s a reaction to how her own family treated her—she asked me whether I still wanted to die. And, at that moment, I had no idea. I was completely engrossed in her; she had washed away everything I was thinking about. It felt good, not to think about anything. But she looked really sad still, so I tried to guess what answer she wanted to hear. “No…?”
“Good,” she said. “What do you want, then?”
I told her I would like some time to think about it. So she got up, washed her hands, and, still mostly bloodied, started cleaning the house. The whole house. I had never seen someone so focused on little tiny details until then; in a frenzy of activity, she wiped the doorknobs with disinfectant (they needed it), dusted behind the cabinets, untacked the curtains from the windows and put them in the wash (I noticed then that her eyes were this brilliant bright blue—sea blue; they’re alluring in the dark, but they’re like a poem, or a flower, or… some other beautifully-useless thing, in daylight. They shine for their own sake.)
By the time I stood up, I had a room.