Promoted to Parent

ButtStuff, July 4, 2016; 14:29 / FB 39681
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Promoted to Parent

The red unicorn yawned and looked up at her mother, who shifted from hoof to hoof at the entrance of the safe place, which was a burrow a long gone herd of fluffies had dug out upon a time. Her mother hardly ever left the safe place, and when she did, the purple pegasus would only go outside long enough to defecate or urinate away from their little home and come right back. She never hovered at the mouth of the burrow, hopping from hoof to hoof like a dancing mommy. This wasn't like her at all.

“Wut Mummah doin'?” the red unicorn said as she shook away the sleep and trotted over. She looked up at her mother's face, which was all screwed up in a funny way and only made things stranger. “Whewe Daddeh?”

“Daddeh... Daddeh am outies,” her mother said. “Daddeh gone wong time. Nu can wait fo' Daddeh no mo'e. Mummah... Mummah go an' get nummies.”

“Bu', bu', bu' Mummah!” the red unicorn sputtered, absolutely appalled at the idea of being without both of her parents for the first time in her short life. “Babbehs nee' Mummah! Nee' wub an' huggies!”

“Mummah knu, talkie babbeh,” she said, reaching over and hugging her eldest child to her chest fluff. “Mummah knu babbehs nee' big fwuffy fo' wub an' huggies, bu' chirpeh babbehs nee' miwkies mostest. Wif nu nummies, Mummah nu make miwkies. Wif nu miwkies, chirpeh babbehs...”

The purple pegasus trailed off, unable to say the words aloud. The red unicorn was her oldest child by virtue of having been the only member of her litter to make it through the winter. The pegasus knew all too well what happened when chirpy babies went too long without milk, and she wasn't about to let it happen to her second batch of babies.

“Daddeh get nummies! Daddeh awways get nummies!”

“Daddeh... Daddeh nu hewe,” the mare said, hanging her head in a mixture of fear and defeat. As typically dim as her species was, even the mare knew the score. If her special friend hadn't come back from his early morning foraging by the time the sky-ball was so high and so hot, he wasn't coming back at all. “Dat why Mummah haf to go outies and get nummies. Mummah get nummies o' nu nummies ebah.”

“Who wook aftew chirpeh babbehs?” said the red unicorn as she looked over her shoulder into the leaf-and-pine straw nest where her three even younger siblings still slept, safe and ignorant to the troubles at hand.

“T-talkie babbeh am big babbeh,” the mare said with a quaver in her voice, knowing full well that if something got her special friend, then it could get her, too. “Talkie babbeh be good sissy an' take bestest cawe of bwudda an' sissies.”

“A-am onwy wittow babbeh! Babbeh nu take cawe of udda babbehs!”

“Nu!” her mother said with a ferocity and conviction that made the red unicorn shrink away and almost do bad poopies. But she made poopies last night and didn't have any new Daddy-delivered meal to fill her up again, which only illustrated her mother's point. “Am sowwy, talkie babbeh. Mummah nu mean to scawe you, bu' talkie babbeh nee' unnastan. Talkie babbeh nu be babbeh fowebah. Nee' be big fwuffy fo' bwuddas an' sissies. Be big an' stwong wike Mummah an' … an' Daddeh.”

“O-o-otay, Mummah,” the red unicorn said, her earlier fears forgotten by the fresh wave of euphoria that came with another hug. “Talkie babbeh be wike big fwuffy an' take cawe o' chirpeh babbehs 'tiw Mummah come back.”

“Das wight. Onwy 'tiw Mummah come back.”

But the red unicorn didn't have the maturity or the presence of mind to read the apprehension and sadness in her mother's voice, couldn't read the writing on the wall that her father was gone and her mother may never come back, would never dream of a world where she didn't have a big fluffy to care for and protect her.

So even as she waved a hoof goodbye at her mother's rump as it slowly disappeared into the forest around the burrow, the red unicorn didn't take her new job very seriously. She loved her siblings, but the notion of a world without big fluffs to take care of little fluffs was so bizarre, so foreign that it seemed like a joke. This was all a big misunderstanding or maybe some sort of game Mommy and Daddy were playing to see if she was reading to be a big fluffy.

Yes. That was it.

Mommy would come back with Daddy and food and love and hugs and everything would be alright again. She just had to wait a little while.

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Two days later, the red unicorn was still waiting.

“Shush, shush, wittow babbehs!” the red unicorn half-sang, half-screeched in a curious concoction of motherly affection and borderline panic. “Nu be woud! Babbehs be quiet! Mummah an' Daddeh say dat babbeh nee' be quiet o' munstahs find safe pwace!”

The babies continued their peeping uninterrupted. In spite of the summer seasons, they were cold without the familiar body heat of two adult fluffies in their fluffpile. Without their mother, they were starved of both food and affection. The red unicorn did her best, but she was too little for either. She didn't have such big legs to reach out and hug all three of the littler babies at once, and she didn't have the kind of tummy fluff that went on forever.

It wasn't fair. She couldn't take care her brothers and sisters yet. She wasn't big like Mommy and Daddy who came up with this stupid game.

The game wasn't fun anymore.

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Three days after mother left, the red unicorn understood what her mother felt.

She, too, now stood at the cusp of the invisible barrier between the safety and security of her home and the strange sights and smells of the outside world. It wouldn't be her first time leaving the burrow, but like her mother, the red unicorn had only left just long enough to make stinky poopies and peepees away from the safe place so as not to stink it up. The thought of going outside for more than a minute had an almost paralytic effect on the adolescent fluffy.

But what other choice did she have?

Her stomach was hurting and growling and grumbling and tumbling so bad, and it went on hurting no matter how much she tried to hug the pain away. More importantly, the babies were getting quieter. It seemed like a good thing at first. Less noise meant less chance of monsters finding them. But then the red unicorn realized the babies weren't listening to her. They were getting weak, sluggish. They barely walked as it was, but now all they could accomplish was a pitiful wiggling back and forth as their voices grew fainter with each passing food-less day.

Daddy was supposed to get food for the family, but he didn't. So Mommy had to go. Then Mommy was supposed to get food for the family, but she didn't. So now the red unicorn had to go.

“B-b-babbehs b-be g-g-gud babbehs,” the red unicorn sputtered between tears. “A-am g-gud sissie. Go fin' n-n-nummies fo' w-wittow b-b-babbehs. B-be back soonies.”

Maybe she would have better luck than her parents.

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The red unicorn didn't understand her mother's fear or her father's absence, and there was absolutely no chance she could understand what it meant to be a fluffy pony in a cold, indifferent world.

The red unicorn didn't know, for instance, that her parents had been young parents, as most feral parents are wont to be. Without a human to discourage mating or at least stave it off until the fluffy is fully matured, ferals get to humping as soon as they feel the urge. So the red unicorn's parents had been young parents, and they were left even less equipped to deal with their children when a thunderstorm had sent their wandering herd into a frenzied panic. Fluffies had run left, right, north, south and everywhere in between trying to escape what they perceived as a roaring monster.

A brown earthie colt and a purple pegasus filly had luckily stumbled across a long-dead herd's burrow to wait out the storm in relative safety. When it became clear the herd was long gone, the two fluffies did their best to make a home for themselves. As they grew a little older and made special hugs to pass the time, the mare gave birth just in time for one of the harshest winters in the region's history. The young couple lost all but one baby, a red unicorn filly, which was really a minor miracle in and of itself. Without any sort of foresight or critical thinking, the brownie earth and purple pegasus made another batch just in time for the height of summer to strike.

And with the heat seeping in, the humans in the fluffy family's area started flocking to Redneck Beach.

It was the collective name for two humble banks of sand bracketing a river where people went to swim without any of those regulations like no glass in the pool area and no public nudity. The locals pulled up their pick up trucks and showed off their gun racks and drank cheap domestic beer and swam and cooked out and had a wonderfully Southern time.

It was also a place where the drunken locals left all sorts of half-eaten boxes of donuts, bags of chip crumbs, heels of bread loaves, hot dogs dropped in the sand no human would eat, tubs of potato salad no one wanted and the like. It was a dirty, trashy place, and it was fluffy nirvana.

But the thing about Lady Luck is that she is fickle.

So while the young family had a string of serendipitous luck in finding a safe haven and a source of both water and food so close to home, that luck was bound to give out eventually.

Luck had already given out for the father and mother of a fluffy family living in a nearby burrow.

The red unicorn didn't know any of this, but she got a taste of it when she made the journey toward the water place her father had told her about.

She hadn't been able to appreciate how thirsty she truly was until she saw a babbling brook just past the green, leafy things. She didn't know how good food could be until she smelled the sweet, succulent meats roasting nearby.

She didn't give so much as a thought to the dangers either one could hold.

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“Huh, would you look at that?”

Earl looked up and over, following Clint's long, bony finger as it pointed toward a walking, talking (well, screaming) ball of cotton candy a little ways downriver. It was saying something about 'meanie, huwtie ground nu gif huwties to fwuffy!' Huh. One of those little cartoon horse things. This could be fun.

“Hey there, little guy,” Earl said, waving toward the distressed unicorn. “Why don't you come on over and let us take a look at you?”

The red unicorn, which hadn't noticed a group of humans not even thirty paces away, froze in terror.

Then she started sobbing and hopping around again, trying to keep her hooves on the hot sand as little as possible even as she stumbled toward the humans. The red unicorn hadn't had any experiences with humans, so the vestigial Hasbio programming lead her to assume all humans were good, helpful creatures.

If only.

“You thirsty there, little guy?” Earl said, reaching for his flask.

“Nu am boy-fwuffy, am giwl,” the red unicorn sniffed, a bit less sad now that these wonderful human things were giving her attention. “Am t'irsty. Haf biggest t'irst. Wat am dat shiny t'ing?”

“Oh, this is a magic...uh...water bottle! Yeah, that's it! It's full of the best, most special magic ever! It's extra-good for fluffies like you!”

“Weawwy!? Fwuffy wan dat wawa wight nao!”

Clint shoved a fist in his mouth to keep himself from laughin.

“Drink up, little lady!”

Earl reached out to grab the red unicorn by the scruff of her neck, dragging her toward the flash and forcing her head back so that she could get a nice, long gulp of moonshine.

“Bwaugh! Nu! Nu nu nu! Dat wawa am bad! Buwnie-wawa! Huuhuu! Wawa no buwnies! Wawa make buwnies go away! Huuhuu! Wowstest mouf and tummy buwnies!”

This outburst was punctuated by a tiny stream of vomit on the beach.

“Well, that's not very nice,” Earl drawled. “This is some high quality stuff, you know. Made it in my bathtub myself. I was going to share some of our barbecue with you, but if that's how you treat a gift, you can just forget it!”

“N-nu!” the red unicorn sputtered between wretches. “Nu be mean! Be nice fwuffy! Be nicey-nice to mistah fo' nummies! Nee' nummies fo' chirpeh babbehs! Babbehs nu have nummies in wong time!”

“Got yourself some brats back home, huh? Yeah, I know that feeling. Well, how about this. How about you give my special water another taste, and then we'll see about giving you some food, alright?”

The red unicorn's world was already one of burning, searing pain both inside and out thanks to the sun-baked sands underneath her leather hooves and the ridiculously strong alcohol now coursing through her veins. She didn't know it, but she was already drunk and working her way up to a monstrous hangover.

But that's just it – she didn't know it, so while she didn't like the big mister's burning water, she thought it was a small price to pay for her brothers and sisters.

She took another drink.

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It was the peeping and cheeping and woke her, and it hit her like a sledgehammer to her horned little noggin.

“Quiet, babbehs.”

The peeping and cheeping did not stop.

“Quiet time nao, babbehs,” said the red unicorn, trying to throw her hooves over ears. With the mother of all hangovers bearing down on her, even the tiniest twitch was torture. But so was that incessant racket. She just wished they would stop.

The babies did not stop peeing and cheeping.

“Sissy say be quiet wight nao!” she snapped, whipping her head around (oh, big mistake) to shoot the babies in the nest with the surliest glare her bloodshot eyes could muster.

In spite of her watering eyes, the red unicorn could make out three distinct shapes, only two of which were feebly moving and peeping desperately in spite of the slab of rib she had dragged all the way back to the burrow for them. What could they possibly want? They had food. Ingrates.

The third baby, a pegasus just like Mommy, lay perfectly still and quiet.

At least the pegasus baby knew how to be a good baby.

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The pegasus baby was a dead baby.

The red unicorn didn't realize this until the fourth day of her mother's absence, having spent most of the third day and all of the third night sleeping off the worst of her hangover. Even now, she ached, but the realization that her mommy's baby who looked just like Mommy had died struck her with all the sobering shock a bucket of cold water.

“Nu! Nu can be twue! Nu am foweva sweepy time, babbeh! Onwy foweva sweepies for biggest, owdest fwuffies wif wong, wong wives wif wots of wub an' huggies! Fwuffies nu s'pose to sweep foweva when onwy wittow babbehs!”

The red unicorn had no real memories of her four brothers and sisters, which was a blessing. The realization that her siblings were starving to death all over again would have been too much for her to bear. She would have broken, and she would have laid down to die like any good fluffy in the 'wan die' phase.

But she was still alive, and she still wanted to live. She still wanted something better for her two remaining siblings, who, she saw, had failed to eat the strip of meat she dumped by the nest before passing out the day before.

Of course. They were only chirpy babies. She had even told her mother as much. If she was too little to watch them, they were too little to eat big fluffy food.

There was really only one type of little fluffy good. Milk. Where does milk come from? Milky places, of course. And who had milky places? Girl fluffies like her.

That was it! It was right in front of her all along! She could feed her last two siblings!

“Come to fwuffy, wittow babbehs,” the red unicorn cooed in the best approximation of her mother. She had even flipped on her side like her mother used to do, presenting her teats to the weak babies.

They were so weak, in fact, that she had to scoot her hips closer, nearly body slamming the foals in an effort to get her teats close to their mouths. That she managed not to overcompensate and simply roll over them was another minor miracle and piece of good luck for the fluffy family, though it would likely be the last one any of them ever enjoyed.

But the red unicorn was just as ignorant of hormones as she was of humans. She didn't know that some very specific things had to happen before a female fluffy could produce milk and that her eureka moment had been nothing of the sort.

So when the two surviving foals sucked and sucked and sucked and couldn't get so much as a drop, the red unicorn decided it was just a matter of time before the milk came. Any second now.

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The entire endeavor had wasted everyone's time for the better part of an hour.

“Am sowwy, bwudda an' sissy,” the red unicorn sniffed. “Big sissy nu can make miwkies wike Mummah. Huuhuu. Am bad fwuffy. Nu can feed babbehs wike Mummah. Nu can fin' good nummies wike Daddeh.”

So she sat and cried for a time, joining the chorus of sorrowful sounds as the two remaining babies peeped without any real force behind their cries and a fly started buzzing over the dead one's corpse.

And that might have been the end of it if the earthie brown stallion hadn't once babbled to his family over breakfast about the human place on the opposite of the burrow.

He only went toward it a few times before deciding there were too many humans and barky monsters. So he went back to his usual haunt of Redneck Beach, collecting the spoils of the day before and doing so in the cooler hours of the morning. That part he hadn't had a chance to pass on to his daughter.

But he had handed his daughter that one kernel of knowledge – that there was another place nearby with humans. And where humans went, there were all sorts of foods and strange, sometimes scary, sometimes funny things.

The human at the river had given her the no-good, burning, hurting water (read: booze) from the shiny thing (read: flask). He said it was magic, which made sense. Only magic could make water burn like fire. So maybe, just maybe, there was another kind of magic in the other place, the kind of magic that could let the red unicorn save her starving siblings.

The red unicorn didn't like the idea of seeing humans again, but the idea of seeing her last two siblings sitting still was even worse.

Her mind made up, the red unicorn headed for the strip mall to the north.

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The strip mall loomed like a forbidden temple in the distance, but that was a bridge she would cross when she came to it.

In the meantime, the red unicorn had to cross the street.

This was a greater undertaking than one might assume.

For one thing, metal monsters vroomed and zoomed by. Like, a lot. And they didn't make sense either. Sometimes there were as many metal monsters as she had hooves. Sometimes there were only as many metal monsters as her horn. Sometimes there were more of them than anything she could conceive of. Sometimes there weren't any at all.

Then there was the ground. The hot, stinging sand was bad enough, but the red unicorn didn't know what to make of the big black ground with a little white. Was it a big black fluffy with white mane?

“Hewwo, big fwuffy?” the red unicorn offered tentatively. “Be nyu fwiend? Hewp fwuffy sabe bwudda an' sissy fwom tummy huwties?”

The road, which was not a fluffy, did not feel particularly inclined to help her. But it did feel incredibly, flesh-sizzingly hot.

Which the red unicorn only learned when she stepped forward with one, tender hoof.

“SSSSCCCCCCCRRRREEEEEEEEEEE!”

The red unicorn did not recoil so much as she backflipped in her pain and desperation, landing squarely on her back in the unshaded sand. More importantly, she landed on a tiny piece of gravel, which bent her back at the oddest angle.

A fluffy righting itself after falling on its back was already quite the undertaking. A fluffy doing that while suffering from second degree burns on its front right hoof, with a broken rib and splayed out on the baking dust and dirt of a desolate little patch of land next to the road is virtually impossible.

And so the red unicorn sat, baking in the sun, for hours.

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The red unicorn made the most inelegant 'haff, haff' sound as she stumbled blindly through the bush.

She thought the hot sand at the beach was bad. She thought the burning water was bad. Oh, those were nothing next to the pain she got trying to go to the strip mall.

Daddy was right. That place was dangerous. Far too dangerous. She should have listened.

She should have gone out looking for food earlier. She shouldn't have trusted the human. She should have saved the little pegasus sister who starved because she was too much of a dummy to be a good mommy.

Mommy should have been the mommy! Why did she leave!? Why did Daddy leave? It wasn't fair! It wasn't right!

Running on adrenaline and rage, the red unicorn somehow found her way back to the burrow, where she collapsed in a burning, weeping heap.

“So sowwy, babbehs. Sissy nu find hewp fo' babbehs.”

If she hadn't been so delirious with pain and hadn't passed out almost as soon as she flopped down, the red unicorn might have noticed the silence that hung over the burrow like a burial shroud.

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Five days after the purple pegasus left her little red unicorn in charge of the burrow, the entire family was dead.

It all started with the father's disappearance, and it continued with the mother falling victim to a redneck's bloodhound who was left off the leash and went chasing after the squealing, colorful thing making too much noise to stay hidden in the bushes. Then the pegasus baby starved, and the other two were dug out and swallowed whole by a predator drawn in by the scent of the meaty, saucy ribs the red unicorn had dragged back home.

On the fifth day, the red unicorn would die, but first, she woke up, aching and burning all over in ways she never could have conceived of while her parents were still alive, to see the bloodstained fluff splattered all over the burrow.

Her family was gone, and the burrow – her home – was no longer safe.

She would have cried, but she was too thirsty to put out even a drop.

Delirious and not knowing what else to do, she made her way back to the river, that terrible river, where her parents had died. It just so happened that in her stumbling and shuffling, the red unicorn wound up approaching the river from several yards upstream, and that made all the difference.

And there – by some random, horrible chance handed down by Lady Luck deciding it was time to give the fluffy family a bad run of luck to balance out the scales – there on Redneck Beach the red unicorn found her father.

He was there and there and there and there. The high-powered round had torn him apart and scattered him in bits and pieces all over the beach.

“D-daddeh,” the red unicorn rasped and shuffled toward his face, which was still mostly in tact. She moved to give the decaying remains a hug, already knowing it was too late to hug his pain away but unable to fight her fluffy instincts. If nothing else, she would have one last, peaceful moment with some part of her family.

She never got to give that one, last hug.

Across the water on the other side of Redneck Beach, the same liquored up hillbilly who shot her father to smithereens lined the red unicorn up in his sights and took her head off.