How Bright Eyes got Derpy

     "Bright Eyes!" her mom shouted, "It's time for school! You don't want to miss on your first day, do you?
     The little gray Pegasus filly jumped right out of bed. "Coming, mom!" she yelled back. She sped downstairs and ate her apple pancakes, courtesy of Sweet Apple Acres.
     "You would think that they'd be too busy for us, with the new foal coming any day. I think it's that Big Mac colt doing it. He likes you, you know." Mrs. Hooves teased her daughter. Bright Eyes ducked her head, embarrassed.
     'Could he like me? I'm just a poor filly, and he already has a cutie mark and everything.' she thought to herself. Bright Eyes certainly hoped so. He was the most popular colt in Ponyville. Then her mother came out of the kitchen with a small brown paper bag.
     "Guess what I have!" she said tantalizingly.
      "MUFFINS!" the little filly guessed, correctly. Stuffing the muffins inside her converted mailbag she ran off to make her way to school.
     When she finally arrived the first thing she noticed was how ragged her school supplies looked compared to those of everypony else. Her family had always been poor, even before her father had walked out on them when she was just a foal. They always got by, however, often on the generosity of Sweet Apple Acres and the Apple Family, even when times were tough. Lost in thought on the topic she stumbled and bumped into the flank of a tall, red, colt.
     "Oh, ah, sorry?" she offered before running off, horribly embarrassed. She was crying softly in the corner when somepony tapped her on the flank.
     "Are you okay?" she asked
     Bright eyes blinked away tears and responded with a weak "Yes."
     The new filly, the same color as her own mane, introduced herself as Raindrops." I saw you run into Big Mac. I think he likes you"
     Bright was about to respond when the bell rang for class. She was driven to distraction all day, almost (but not quite) to the point of forgetting her muffins. After school she and Raindrops were talking about their hoped-for cutie marks. While Raindrops was hoping to be a weather pony like the rest of her family Bright Eyes wanted to make muffins for a living, like the Cakes. "Then I could have as many muffins as I want!" she explained as they passed by Sweet Apple Acres. They were stopped in their tracks by a certain red colt. "Hi, um, Ah was wonderin'''' if y'all would like to meet mah new lil sis. Maybe we could hang out for a while afterward."
     Bright Eyes joyfully accepted the invitation and Mac led her to his house. They were stopped by Granny Smith. "Mac, you can ogle at AppleJack after you do some of your chores."
     Sighing, he started to walk away, but at a whispered suggestion from Raindrops, Bright Eyes said, "I could help you if you want"
     At this the red Earth pony brightened up, but not after first muttering about how a lady shouldn't have to work, "It's Applebuck Season, y'all know what you're gettin' in to?"
     After a short time and a few quick lessons the little gray filly was collecting apples almost as fast as the seasoned colt. She was exhilarated at the prospect of herself, the blank flanked, poor, nondescript, Bright Eyes Hooves, working alongside Big Mac, the colt of her dreams. Then disaster struck. Big Mac was getting ready to buck at an apple tree with Raindrops and Bright Eyes ready with baskets. Mrs. Hooves caught sight of them and was about to call her daughter home. The already distracted Bright Eyes was caught off guard and turned to her mother, who was on the far side of Big Mac, and Big Mac's rear hooves caught her in the temple.
          The hospital bed was uncomfortable and the lights hurt her one working eye. The Doctor, a brown earth pony with an hourglass cutie mark, was explaining her condition to Mrs. Hooves. Bright Eyes listened with a small portion of her mind. The Doctor said she had suffered brain trauma in multiple lobes, a potentially disastrous combination, "…while we know the results will be serious, we do not know what they will actually be."
     In the months to come she recovered enough to return to school. The other fillies taunted her all the time for the appearance of her eyes and her mangled speech. Her caring mother took her out of school and tried to teach her herself, but she just wasn't cut out for it. Bright Eyes thought slower than she used to and sometimes her mother would wonder if she should just give up.
     One day Bright Eyes finally managed to convince her mother to let her go to flight camp in Cloudsdale. "Happy muffins with Raindrops by the fluffy!"* she had said, putting her hoof down once and for all.
     While at flight camp she thought to herself, 'I don't care if they make fun of me, I'm still gonna do my best to prove that stupid doctor wrong. I WILL learn how to fly!'
     The counselor didn't let her off easy, instead he made her work harder than anypony else. However, to her credit, she never gave up. She had a hard enough time getting into the air at first but soon she was flying around like everypony else, but she had one problem. Her eyes would play tricks on her and go out of focus without warning. She could fly well enough most of the time, but whenever she lost focus she would loose control and crash. She and Raindrops would try to hide it, but it was so frequent that Bright Eyes was kicked out and told that she could never get anywhere. She left in tears to the call of "Go make a mess of something else you derpy-hooved freak!"
     The name stuck. She never called herself that, and neither did her mother or Raindrops, but everypony else did and she learned to live with it.
     When she was older she applied for her mothers' old job as Ponyville's resident mailmare. She made it, mostly out of sympathy for her and her mother, and soon proved herself to be the hardest worker they had ever seen, except for one young pony born just before the fateful incident.
     Bright Eyes even had a little filly, Dinky, her little muffin and the only pony she could ever talk to besides Raindrops, her friend to the end.
     She had gone through allot, but Derpy, freak, retard, or anything else that other ponies thought of her, she knew who she was. She was Bright Eyes, the best mailmare the town had ever had, and she was Dinky's mom.





* "I would be happy there, and Raindrops would be with me in the clouds."