This is a sequel to Forget-Me-Not you don’t need to read it to know what happens in this one but there’s references to it.
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“Dis weawwy am nyu woom?” Barry’s newest little addition to the household asked. A yellow & purple mare, eyes somewhat showing the tell-tale shades of jaundice but nothing else indicating that something was most definitely wrong with her.
“Of course. All yours. You’re a special little mare, after all.” Oh, very special indeed. The shelter was full of hard-luck cases but he could think of few worse off than her. Once he saw her little information tag in front of the kennel she was kept in, it was obvious he had to have her.
‘Hi! My name is Tulip. I’m full of adventure and have lots of things I’d like to do. Sadly, it was discovered that I have terminal cancer upon intake here at the shelter. Will you please give me the best life?’
The best life? Of course he would. He’d spend all the money and time he had to make her little list of dreams come true before the unfortunate end. The list? Oh yes. She was actually quite aware of her condition. The shelter workers had gone over it with her and she seemed, well, quite brave given the circumstances. Though fluffies struggled with the concept of finality.
“Well Tulip. I’ve been going over your list of dreams. One: Have babies.” She gave a smile to him, a waggle of her tail. He returned the smile. “Two: Go to Fluffmart. Why, someone’s dreaming big aren’t they?” The mare gave a giggle, nodded with enthusiasm. “Three: Give your new owner the ‘biggest heart happies’. Awh.” The list, as he’d written it down when directed to him at the shelter, was folded neatly and tucked into his pocket.
They would begin working on the dreams. Not yet. There was still groundwork to lay down first. He’d picked up a few things before coming home and one of them was presented to Tulip: A blister pack full of yellow pills.
“Wha dat, daddeh?” She asked him, booping it with the nose of her nose. He smiled.
“It’s medicine! To help you feel better. You might be sick but you can be around longer with good medicine.” In truth it was something like a chemo treatment. Well, basically was. Yet it wouldn’t do jack shit to a human. The biology of a fluffy was quite different and Hasbio seemed to have all the solutions.
“Oh! Meddysins ‘fo Tuwip. Dank yew daddeh.” He nodded, popping one of the pills out of the packet and offering it to her. The mare gulped it into her mouth and chewed, Barry giving her head a little rub.
There would be no ‘feeling better’ with the medicine. It was a horrible thing. Prolong one’s life? Sure. The side effects weren’t worth the time clung onto though. Tulip was busy rolling around a ball in her safe room and watching FluffTV when she had a horrible spinning sensation come over her. The mare had her legs buckle, went down to the floor. All the kibble she’d eaten when she first got here came up out of her mouth in half-digested clumps and her stomach seized as a wave of diarrhea splattered to the floor. She hadn’t actually felt sick before, but now? It was horrible.
“W-Wowstest sickies…pwease hewp daddeh…!” She mewled helplessly from the floor. Barry came in, took a look at her, the mess she’d produced. Her daddeh was nice though. He scooped her up and gave her two more meddysins. One helped her stomach feel much better and made the spinnies go away. The other made…well, everything go away. It feel like her body was a cloud. After he placed her on the bed in the saferoom she just sat there, watching FluffTV in a sort of stupor and giggling every so often. Daddeh cleaned up the mess and didn’t give her the sorry-stick. Didn’t even yell at her. Meddysins were bestest.
This process continued on for awhile. Every day she had to take the bad medicine, but then she got the good medicine. In fact, she looked forward to the feeling of sitting there and feeling nothing much more than anything. The thought of it was constantly poking at her think-space.
Clumps of her fur began to fall out around the saferoom. It worried her at first, that she was becoming not-pretty, but daddeh didn’t say anything about it. That wasn’t all, either. Her teeth started coming out in blood-clot covered lumps, usually after she’d started coughing so hard it felt like her lungs would pop out her mouth. In response, Barry started feeding her softened food. Tulip began to not want to eat it though. Maybe knowing it’d be coming out either end anyways. With the fur loss and thinning out from eating very little, she started to take on an incredibly rat-like appearance. Especially given how her tail was bare of any fur now and her eyes practically bugged out.
“Daddeh. Tuwip nu feew pwetty. Feew sickies. Wowstest sickies. Pwease hewp Tuwip.” She begged him one day, walking out of her saferoom and nearly scaring him. By God she was ugly. Had he never given her a treatment she’d look the same, albeit be slowly dying.
“Oh? But today’s the day we go to Fluffmart. Don’t you want that?” He asked her. Her bulbous eyes sparkled, near-toothless mouth flapping.
“Yis! Tuwip wan! Pwease!” He nodded. Oh they were going to have quite the shock down there.
When Tulip walked through the automatic doors of Fluffmart, rail-thin body trembling from how cold it was, it was like all the air in the place had been sucked out. Some guy thrust an index finger at Barry’s biotoy:
“Buddy, what in the everloving FUCK is that!?”
A little kid started screaming from the upsetting sight. Honestly, he could have dragged in a fluffy flattened in the streets with it’s intestines spilling out and have had a better welcome. That would have at least been recognizable as a fluffy and not this…abominable thing. Tulip blinked in confusion.
“Wha? Daddeh?” She asked him, beginning to tear up. The mare still didn’t know what she looked like. A blue & orange unicorn stallion ran up to meet the pair, squaring up at Tulip.
“Gu way, munstah! Nu pwetty munstah! Smawty am gib yew WOWSTEST huwties!” He said threateningly, Barry looking down to Tulip with a neutral expression. The mare shook her head.
“Nu am munstah! Am mawe! Wub yew fwiend?” She asked, reaching out a hoof attached to a skeletal leg. The stallion knocked her away, and finally the clerk running the place would give Barry a stern look.
“Sir, please take…that…and go. You’re upsetting the customers!” Now normally talking that way about a cancer patient wouldn’t exactly be acceptable but this was a Fluffmart, after all. Barry nodded, tugging Tulip’s leash. She walked out from the store, bad poopies falling out behind her as she walked. Thing was, they were so frequent she didn’t even feel it anymore.
Once they were back at home, Barry sighed. “Well, that could have gone better. But you are quite ugly. Anyways, that’s one thing off the list. How about we get a stallion to put a few buns in that oven?”
Tulip was still grappling with the fact that she was so hideous that even walking into a Fluffmart was an impossibility. The thought of babbehs soon pushed that out from her head though!
“Wan babbehs! Bestest babbehs! Am…gib wub ‘n huggies!” Barry smiled to her. There was no way a stallion would touch her, and that was saying something.
In the end he had to do a bit of improvisation. He tethered her to the backyard fence with a short lead, thrown a bit of sackcloth over her head. A heavy wool blanket over her incredibly sad body. The only thing on display was her backside, but he thought any ferals roaming about wouldn’t care.
“Wewe speciaw fwend ‘fo Tuwip?” She asked curiously. Taking a bottle of pheromones from a Fluffmart bag, he’d toss the contents onto her rump with little care in the world for what might happen.
“Oh, they’ll be here.” He promised.
That promise was upheld. A gang of roving stallions smelled the pheromones on the wind, wandered onto his property. They formed a cluster around Tulip, each began taking turns with her. Barry didn’t watch. That’d be weird! Instead he just sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, taking sips of the bitter brew.
‘Dat am poopie-pwace! Nu ‘fo enfies! EEEEEEEEEEE!’
‘Daddeh, hewp! SU MANY HUWTIES!’
‘WAN SAFEWOOM!’
This carried on for awhile until he finally had to go out and stop the going-ons. The stallions had torn off the blanket and sack-cloth keeping her hideous form concealed and were in the process of trying to give her hoofies. Barry walked out, slammed one with the tip of his shoe. The stallion screeched and ran off, the others following suit. Looking down to the ravaged, wore-out mess of a mare he would sigh and go get the garden hose to spray her off.
“Babbehs…babbehs am make Tuwip happeh…” She said while in her saferoom a few days later. Still sore and traumatized over what had happened but honestly in better shape than one would consider, especially given her illness. She was a brave mare and wanted to give her babbehs happiness. The thought helped her carry on. So did the good meddysins. It made the hurties go away. Made her feel like a cloud!
Tulip did a lot more laying around than usual. She tried to eat more food to make bestest miwkies for her babbehs to be, but she could barely hold any of it down. She swelled up just a bit from pregnancy, looking as if she was possessed of a giant tumor more than anything. One night as she was laying in bed with the soft glow of FluffTV washing over her, she woke up with the worst pains.
“O-OWWIES! DADDEH! WOWSTEST POOPIES! OWWWIIEESSS!” The mare screeched, feeling a rush of wet warmth wash over the back of her legs. Even though it was late at night, Barry had walked into the saferoom and flipped the lights on.
“Congrats, Tulip! You must have had your babies. Let’s see them, huh?”
Tulip proudly looked at him before shifting over on her little cushion bed to examine her chirpies and give them wicky-cweanies so they would be pretty. Except…they weren’t chirping. There were five of them in all and all bore some kind of monstrous deformity. One had two fully formed limbs sprouting out from it’s back where wings would have grown on a pegasus. Another had a massive eye formed in the center of it’s face, it’s mouth nothing more than a crease. One may have been normal looking yet the birthing process had reduced it’s feeble body to nothing more than a tiny cluster of shredded limbs and innards. A side effect of the medicine keeping her alive. Had Barry known? Of course. He was greatly amused by all this.
“Dey…dey su pwetty. Mummah Tuwip wub yew, babbehs.” The mare giggled. Gave her foals a few licks to clean them up, flopped down to present her teats to them. “Bestest miwkies ‘fo pwetty babbehs. Teehee…mumma wub babbehs, babbehs wub mummah…” She tried to sing encouragement to them. They wouldn’t move though, of course. Barry left the room to get the jars of formaldehyde he’d prepared for this day.
“They’re dead, Tulip. Guess you didn’t love them enough. If you had, they’d be alive.” Tulip looked to him, shook her head.
“Tuwip wub babbehs! WUB BABBEHS! DADDEH NU SAY DAT!” She told him, showing a spark of life for the first time in awhile. He reached out, took one of the deformed foals and plopped it down into the fluid which would keep it preserved for future viewings. Tulip screeched, reached out and tried to bite his hand. Even if she had teeth, that wouldn’t hurt.
“Nu gib babbehs ba’ wawa! Dey mummah babbehs! Pwease…” She begged him but he kept adding them. He had no use for preserving the shredded remains, so he simply flicked them into a grocery bag to toss out.
“BABBEHS! MUMMAH AM HEWE!” She called after them as Barry screwed the lid back onto the jar, the foals bobbling around obscenely as the fluid shifted from side to side. He went to place the jar on a high shelf so Tulip could look at them.
After that, Tulip had lost a lot of her pep. Her foals was one thing, but Barry had decided to stop giving her the good meddysins. One being a pain pill which had a high risk of habits forming, and that habit was currently squatting on top of her ugly spine like a monster. The mare threw up whatever she ate, sat down, had to get up again because it felt like something was tearing at her skin. Like lots of little buggies. The fluffy paced up and down the saferoom, squealed with frustration, felt her heart pound as if it’d pop right out of her chest.
“WAN BABBEHS!
WAN GUD MEDDYSIN!
HAE DADDEH!
HAE’CHU!“
She sobbed, ran into objects, began to spike with fevers and hallucinations. When she’d finally gotten down to sleep one night, hooves twitching restlessly and screeching in her sleep, Barry had decided to erect long mirrors around the room. When she woke up, brain cooking with the fever of her sickness and the scrambling from addiction, all she saw was a row of monsters. The ugliest, most hideous thing that she’d ever seen in her life.
“Munstah! Daddeh! Dun hae’chu! Hewp Tuwip! Dewe am munstah! MUNSTAH!”
Running around the room in loops trying to escape her own visage, she lost track of where she was going. Skidded, rammed face-first into one of the mirrors. It shattered and left long shards impaled in her face, the mare toppling over and flailing her hooves in the air. The mirror wobbled and the last thing Tulip would see before leaving the world was it descending on her with a twinkle of glass.
“Ho-hum. Another fluffy, another hole.” He had dug out a nice patch out in the garden. Kicked Tulip’s pitiful body into it. She got a little gravemarker with her name etched onto it with a woodburner. A similar plot of disturbed soil was next to hers, though that gravemarker didn’t bear a name on it. And hey…she’d fulfilled her entire list! He had the biggest of ‘heart happies’ right now.
“I wonder if that Forever Foal is still at the shelter.” He mused to himself, whistling as he lugged the spade back over to his garden shed.
