Ghost Lights

by Winston

Chapter 6

Ghost Lights

Chapter 6

---

Orders for deployment at the Seawall came through after about six weeks of Azure being absent, which was pretty well in line with the expected timeframe. I suppose that was really the last nail in the coffin of any questions about whether this would happen or not. At that point, nothing would stop it. It was exciting and a little more nerve-wracking at the same time.

There were, of course, some arrangements to be made for being gone. After I discussed the upcoming situation with my landlord, she agreed to give me half price on the rent for the six months I'd be away from my apartment, since I would basically just be storing my things there. It was a good deal, considering both the fact that all told it ended up being almost the same price I would have had to pay to move and store everything, and it saved me all the inconvenience and work of moving out, putting my stuff in storage, canceling my lease, and having to find a new apartment after I returned.

I don't have a lot of entanglements or commitments that are hard to walk out of, really, so everything was pretty easily handled with plenty of time to spare. The only accommodation that could have been tricky was such a small thing it actually made me laugh at how miniscule it seemed: finding somepony to take care of my plant. Fortunately, I knew exactly who to go to for that.

Bright Bloom is the earth pony friend of mine who runs a small flowershop on a Canterlot street corner not too far from Princess Twilight's palace. It's the same one where I'd bought the perfect roses I left for Captain Dash to give to Princess Twilight years ago, and she was the pony who'd found them for me. She'd been there ever since, her and the rainbow assortment of all the flowers that she sells, especially roses. I stop there sometimes, usually after the end of a shift or on a day off when I'm walking around the city with nothing much else in mind to do, and we talk about all sorts of things.

I think she's a bit of a solitary creature, like myself. She seems to like it when I come by, though. Maybe that's just because so few other ponies take the time to ever have a conversation with a flower vendor on a street-corner.

Once I'd gotten the deployment orders, I asked if she could help me out. She agreed to plant-sit for me, so I brought my plant to her in the morning shortly after she'd opened her little shop. She's a morning pony, always bright-eyed and ready to go. A lot of earth ponies seem to be like that. It must be a farmer thing. That day was no exception. Even at a distance I recognized her with her pale pink coat and deeper pink mane and tail, well groomed and curled at the ends into gentle bobs, moving around back and forth in the stand arranging displays of flowers.

I walked over and greeted her. "Good morning, Bright."

She looked up with a smile. "How's it going, Sunburst?"

"Pretty good," I answered her. I put my plant down on the counter. "I brought that plant I told you about. Here she is."

Her jade green eyes, the color a perfect complement to her pink coat and mane, were clear and shining as she looked at me and then my plant. I've always thought she has some of the prettiest eyes I've ever seen. I've never told her that. I'm not sure why. It just feels like maybe it might get weird somehow. I don't know. To tell the truth, I think it's mostly that I'm just too nervous to bring myself to. For some reason I can't explain, I feel a strange sense of discomfort about acknowledging feeling an attraction to another pony, so I tend to bury it. I know I shouldn't, it would be better if I could just say these things. I don't know what else to do, though. Sometimes... sometimes it makes me feel very awkward. I usually just push through it and move on as best I can.

"Oh! Interesting," Bright Bloom said. "Looks like an Equestrian Violet, I think."

"I think she is," I agreed. "The flowers are always purple, at least."

"That'd be it, then. Well, those are pretty much as simple as can be to take care of," she said. "Won't be any trouble at all."

"Been easy enough so far." I nodded in agreement. "All I ever do is water her and give her sun and she seems to do just fine on her own otherwise."

"Heh. Well, many pegasi wouldn't even do that much," Bright Bloom said. "So I guess you're alright."

"It was actually a gift from my mom," I told her. "She said a pony should always have something green where they live, so she gave me this."

"She sounds like a very uncommon pegasus," Bright Bloom commented.

"Guess you could say that," I said, without elaborating any further.

Silence settled in for a long moment, but a comfortable kind. I looked around Bright Bloom's stand and admired the multitudes of colors of roses she has. For a long time they've been my favorite flowers, and I always find them captivating.

"You know, uh... I notice you like to call your violet a her. I kinda hate to tell you this, but..." Bright Bloom looked sheepish, examining the plant and the pot she was in. "I'm pretty sure that in reality, 'she' is actually a hermaphrodite."

"Yeah, that figures. I've read that a lot of plants are," I shrugged. "But she's always just felt like a she to me for some reason. I guess it's just a habit I got into, and it's not like she has a tail I can peek under to make sure, so I just went with it."

"Well, on the plus side, whether you say he or she, you're still half right either way," Bright Bloom pointed out and smiled at me.

I smiled back a little bit, thinking about my plant. All this time and I'd never really given a thought to what she, he, whatever, actually is. I'd just gone with my own assumptions, and I thought about her according to those assumptions. It was funny and poignant in a way that made me pause, how something I spent so much time around was really something else inside, something completely different than what most ponies saw.

I suppose a pony sees things through the lens of her own experiences. Another perspective, another way of being, is always alien until she's walked in those horseshoes herself for a while. To be a hermaphrodite, both a boy and a girl at the same time, instead of just one or the other? No way could I ever imagine that. Just being female is enough for me, and most times it seems like I can't even be bothered to really be much of that.

I found a new respect for my potted little friend that day.

With that, I told my little Equestrian Violet that I would miss her, and left her committed to Bright Bloom's care. It calmed and reassured me to know that she was in good hooves.

In times that were to come, I would often find myself thinking back to this morning and pondering this feeling of realization about appreciating that other perspectives are so different and that sometimes we have to realize that the inability to fully understand them is something that limits ourselves.

---

Azure Sky came home with three days to spare before it was time to leave on the journey out to the Seawall. That seemed like just enough time to taunt Princess Twilight with a taste of getting back her student before she would be whisked away again to an even longer absence. It must have been torture. I wish there could have been an easier way.

The Dawn's Hammer detachment had worked and trained Azure as promised. She came back a little bit more fit and muscular looking, but it wasn't drastic, only a slight difference. Much more significant was that now she knew some basic military procedure and what would be expected of her in her role as the unicorn component of the Seawall team, and that she would have built up the endurance to be alright on the long walk out there.

Most of her first day home was spent resting. In marked contrast to the wakefulness she'd had before, she spent a long time sleeping. I can't exactly say I blame her. I remember when I went through basic training. Dawn's Hammer is considered the most elite corps of unicorn paladins, too, so it was probably even tougher on her. She deserved a break.

On the second day, having recovered a bit, she asked me for advice about what to pack for the trip.

"Remember that anything you want out there, you'll have to bring yourself and deal with carrying on your back the whole way," I told her. "It pays to choose pretty carefully and not load yourself down too badly."

Some items aren't really optional. A good blanket is a must-have. A chainmail armor shirt is required, even if not really expected to be worn out there, since this is a military posting. Being a flight scout, out of habit I also took two pairs of goggles and the standard grey colored light cloth flightsuit. Other than those clothes, the most important things I brought were a knife, a small whetstone, a first aid kit, and matches in a waterproof box. There were also a few other special-purpose odds and ends I thought would be worth it, such as an empty journal book and a couple bottles of ink, among other items.

I wasn't sure exactly what Azure packed, though I trusted her to be smart enough to bring all the important stuff I suggested she probably should. Whatever personal things she felt like bringing were her business so I didn't ask.

After we were done gathering up equipment and packing it up to get ready to go, Captain Dash accosted me and Azure that night after the sun went down. "Hey, you two," she said. "C'mon. We're going out into Canterlot. The three of us. All you can drink is on me tonight." She was off duty now, not wearing any armor, and she looked ready to have fun.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Azure asked.

"Oh, it's not a good idea..." Dash grinned. "It's a great idea! Old pegasus partying wisdom. You still have one more day, right? So we'll go out tonight, you can sleep it off and recover tomorrow, get a good night's sleep tomorrow night, and be nice and fresh for the next morning after that when it's time to move out."

"Hmm..." Azure pondered. She finally shrugged and assented to the plan. "Well... alright, I'm sold."

I can't say I really wanted to, but I didn't try to get out of it. As much as I don't usually like potentially ending up in loud, cramped social situations like bars, it didn't seem like there'd be any harm, and I didn't want to refuse Captain Dash trying to do one last thing for us before we had to disappear into the wild. Besides, she was pretty insistent. I didn't think 'no' was something she was going to take for an answer. She also rounded up three or four of the guards who'd just gotten off the afternoon shift and invited them to come with, too, which helped. These things are... never exactly easy for me, but not as intimidating if there's at least some familiar faces around.

We all walked out there as a group, to a bar called Ponyfeathers, with a mostly pegasus crowd. It honestly sort of surprised me that a pegasus bar could even be found in a mostly unicorn city like Canterlot, but leave it to Captain Rainbow Dash. I remember the first drink I had, a cocktail made with amaretto and orange juice. I guess it seemed fitting, since it was called a sun kiss and the bright yellow color of the drink pretty closely matched that of my coat. "A sun kiss for a Sunburst," Dash noted. "Yeah, that makes sense."

I have to confess, I'm a lightweight. I don't usually drink so I've never developed a tolerance to it. Combined with having the light build of a pegasus, it doesn't take much alcohol at all for me to really feel it. One decent sized shot is enough to make me pleasantly good and tipsy, which is usually about as far as I prefer to go.

No way was Captain Rainbow Dash going to let me get away with only having one, though.

Parts of that night are blurry, I can say that much for sure.

I was drinking mostly sweet cocktails, made with rum and fruit juice and things like that. I like sugar. Once I'd had a few and I was really feeling it, time seemed to work in a weird, pliable kind of way. Seconds seemed to drift by at a leisurely pace, one by one, individually, taking a while. The night as a whole, though, passed by in a way that retrospectively felt very fast.

I didn't get so drunk I couldn't remember what happened, but the exact sequence of events was a bit hard to piece together in what I could be sure is a completely accurate order. At one point I saw Azure using her magic to juggle several empty glass cider mugs at once, dancing them through the air in a complicated pattern while a number of other ponies circled around and watched the spectacle. At occasional intervals a pony would toss another mug into the air, which she would catch expertly and add to the parade of floating glassware. When she finally got tired of it, she ended the performance by stacking all of them on a table in a large pyramid, and basking for a few seconds in the cheers of her audience. She finished with a bow, then surprised everypony by teleporting herself to the bar for another drink.

At another point, Rainbow Dash told me to gulp down what was left of the drink I was working on, and then pulled me out toward the middle of the floor, where ponies were dancing.

"I... uh... I don't know how," I protested. I was just aware of myself enough to know I was well-intoxicated and I wouldn't be coordinated, which made me feel even more self-conscious than usual, even through all the alcohol.

"Ugh. Don't worry about that. Nopony actually knows what they're doing out there," Dash reassured me. "Just... I dunno. Keep your hooves moving and shake your flank. Nothin' to it."

I tried it, mimicking what I saw other ponies doing as best I could, though I never really got past feeling awkward. Rainbow Dash danced with me for a while, and she looked like she was having fun, at least, so I guess I didn't feel too bad. Eventually I got hot and sweaty and tired, so I dropped out to take a rest and drink some ice water.

Rainbow Dash also pulled Azure away from her magician's antics and made her dance, too. Despite how many drinks I knew she'd had, she still seemed pretty graceful, quite in control of herself. Apparently her liquor hadn't affected her very much.

At the end of the night I remember the walk back the palace, navigating the Canterlot streets on slightly unsteady hooves. The horizon seemed to tilt a little at funny angles. When we got back, Rainbow Dash had me and Azure both drink a large glass of water. "It'll help you not be so hung over," she said. Immediately after that, Dash led me to an empty palace guest room she said I could use, where I collapsed onto a comfortable bed and easily fell into a sound sleep.

Comments

[Mare Serenitis]

Really enjoying this.

Just one minor thing:

a small sharpening stone

I may be wrong here, but 'whetstone' seems like it might fit better.

[Winston]

5187875 Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, it does sound better. I think I'll go ahead and use that, in fact!

[wolfstorm56]

Finally getting around to reading this, and I wanted to comment about how much I love the understated way you bring up the more philosophical concepts. I'm probably phrasing this terribly, as I'm no writer myself, but a lot of what you bring up irt to not fully seeing people/ponies until you gain a new perspective really resonates with me.

Ok, now back to finishing this.

[SGDragon]

I always forget that Sunburst is a mare. Except for that one line in the previous story about her mother, I never would have guessed it. I keep imagining Sunburst as a male and have to make a conscious effort not to. There seriously needs to be a bit more femininity in her character; or at least refer to her as a mare more often.