Three Words

by Noble Thought

Chapter 1: City of Lights

“You can do this, Sapphire. You’ve got this.”

I love you.

I stopped myself from tapping a hoof. The show would start, and soon. I could feel the crowd’s roar through the cables. Up above, Showstopper would be waving the dancers onstage into their starting positions, signalling the show was about to start.

My earring gave a warning buzz.

Ten seconds.

Months of planning and practice, months of shuttling back and forth between Canterlot, Manehattan, and Ponyville for costuming, venue scheduling, and advertising. This would be a success. Aside from almost a year’s worth of groundwork, Princess Luna’s patronage and favor had been a boon, attracting more than the usual crowd.

My earring buzzed again, twice.

Five seconds.

I exhaled.

The butterflies in my stomach stilled themselves as the dance routine, practiced a thousand times, and the song, rehearsed a thousand more, tingled in my hooves and tickled my throat.

As the opening chord swelled and the platform began to rise, so did the crowd’s roar. The headdress swayed, steadied, and the dolphin stitching held, just as Rarity had assured me it would, all those months ago.

It was too bad I hadn’t had a dolphin dream since. Maybe letting myself get involved with Rarity’s family issues had been a mistake. Getting involved in family squabbles was always a mistake.

I hope you don’t hate me, anymore.

My mother’s phantom voice drifted through me again, setting my coat to standing on end under the tight outfit. But, as the platform steadied, and was locked into place, the beat rose and carried my soul into the joy of linking note, step, and word into a symphony of motion and sound, sweeping her voice away.

---

The ticking of beads on an abacus and a scritch of quill on paper. Showstopper, tallying up the losses from gifts given away post-show, and the take-in from the last-minute ticket sales.

The quiet murmur of conversation, muffled by the door, growing louder as the night wound on, and up. The crew, celebrating the end of another tour.

My little jewel. My mother, an unwanted voice in my head.

I rubbed a hoof at my brow, just between my eyes, where a phantom ache was already starting to spread. Why couldn’t she just leave me alone? It had been almost two years since our last visit had ended with both of us screaming at each other.

Over tea. Tea!

At least we hadn’t gotten tagged by the Ponyrazzi that time. My hoof curled against the smooth padding of the bed stuffed into the back of the wagon, and I forced myself to relax, let out the building tension between my shoulders. I rolled to my side, one foreleg curled over the edge.

I laid my head against a cushion, closed my eyes, and tried to lose myself in the murmur of everything but my mother’s presence. She was quiet, most of the time. Thankfully. But she had an annoying habit of breaking in when I was exhausted. To offer comment on our relationship, or how things used to be, or just to weep at me.

That’s how I knew it wasn’t really her. My mother demanded, or wheedled, or lectured. She didn’t ask, she did.

“You okay, Sapph?”

“Yes. Tired.” I studied Showstopper from under my forelock as she went about the business of wrapping up the tour. I was glad the tour was nearly over, that we could go back to normality, and be what we were in the off-season: friends, confidants… occasionally more. But, the last year had been dry for us—on tour most of the time, stopping at this or that larger village or town for a week or more to be seen, spreading the word, and letting the word carry ahead of us. A number of smaller troupes had followed behind, using our passing as an easy boost for attention.

Now that we had stopped, our first real stop in more than a month since the spring rains had made the back-roads a slog and pushed us behind deadline, things were starting to settle down. Mostly.

“And wishing the mail hadn’t caught up with us yet…”

She looked at me, stopping her tallying for a moment, her lips compressed into a thin line. “You should go see her.”

I opened my mouth, felt the words crawling up my throat, threatening to restart a years’ old argument again. I shook my head. “After the next couple shows. I will. I promise. I’ll try to get along with her, even.” If she would let me.

“You’ve never said that before,” she muttered. She shuffled the papers in front of her again, sighed, and set them back down. “She loves you, Sapph. I know she does. Every mother loves their children.”

“Not every mother!” I snapped.

The tick-tick of beads on the abacus started again, and the scritch of the quill on paper filled the rest of the silence. She didn’t frown at me, quite, but the way she never lifted her eyes from the paper, her ears folding back as the beads on the rails snicked and clacked rapidly back and forth, spoke her disapproval loudly enough.

I wasn’t even sure she was wrong to be upset at me.

She had a functioning family that loved her, and whenever we went back to Canterlot, she took a personal day, or three, to reconnect. She always invited me to go with her, and I always turned her down. I didn’t want to drag family drama into what we had.

“I’m sorry, Showy. I know… I know your parents love you.”

“And so does your mother.” Snick-snick. Scritch. “Not so sure about your father, though. Did you know he scalped the ticket you sent him?”

I sighed, shaking my head. “He’s just…” She shot me a look. That, too, was an old argument, and I had promised her I wouldn’t apologize for him anymore. I cleared my throat. “It was an attempt to get him to see me. I haven’t seen him in six years.”

“And the one parent who does try to get in touch with you, you ignore.”

“I’m not ignoring her!”

“Avoiding, then. It’s the same thing, Sapphire.” Tat-tat, snick. The abacus thumped to the table.

“We fight too much. I can’t even think straight when she starts in on my lifestyle. It’s always about how that one-piece makes me look… provocative. About how embarrassed she is for me, up there on stage. And how mortified she is every time she reads one of those smear jobs in the tabloids. It’s always about her and how she thinks I’ve gone wrong!”

“So she’s more traditional. A lot of ponies from her generation are. One of you needs to get over it first, and of the two of you, you’re more flexible. She’s in her late fifties, for pony’s sake! Try, Sapphire. At least try.”

“I do! But she never. Lets. Up!” I took a breath, let it out. “It’s gotten to the point that I don’t care anymore.”

“If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t let it bother you. The tabloids don’t bother you, because you don’t care about them. You laugh at them!” She reached over the desk to tap my foreleg. “Don’t you at least want to know how she’s doing? Why she’s being treated? Why she didn’t send the letter?”

“Oh, she—” I clamped my mouth shut. “Tomorrow, Showstopper. I’ll talk to you about her tomorrow, I promise.” Her lips firmed into that thin, disapproving line. “I’ll even schedule something. Please. I’m exhausted.”

Her horn glowed briefly as she shuffled the papers in front of her, and jotted down a short note. “Scheduled. Tomorrow morning.” She held up a hoof when I opened my mouth. “Not negotiable.”

“Fine. Tomorrow morning.”

The paper got tacked to the back of the door, and a gold star sticker attached to it.

“So… What does our ledger look like?” I asked, looking at one note, above all the rest.

“I thought you were exhausted.”

“Showy… I don’t want us to go to sleep angry.” I waved a hoof at the door, where a number of notes were pinned to it with various oddments, most of them purchased from local vendors along the way. One of them was a note to always end the day on a positive note.

Some days had stretched into two because of that note…

Her ears perked back up as she turned around, eyebrows raised. Numbers were safe. I held back a sigh, and turned it into a smile.

She smiled back. “Good. I think you were right. The grass-roots tour really did boost your numbers. You don’t think about it much, but ponies here really have a lot of relatives out in the countryside, and word of mouth travels faster than we do.”

“I didn’t realize it either, you know. Not until I left home to come out here and started talking to the pony on the street.”

I looked out the window of the wagon we shared, one of four for this final leg of our cross-Equestria Back to Basics tour. Most of our venues had been little more than a field and a stage, but it had been nice to see parts of the countryside that I didn’t see year in and year out. Spending almost a year touring the backwaters and bumpkin-villes of Equestria also meant the mail and I left my mother behind for a while.

“There’s a reason I like to have Manehattan as my last stop on any tour.” I waited for Showstopper to say something, but she only nodded and set her things aside to make room for her foldout. “There’s a lot of good memories here. Getting started with my first project, failing and having fun doing it, getting my own crew together… meeting you.”

“Mm. I thought you were crazy, going swimming in the bay at night.”

“It’s my inspiration.”

The Manehattan skyline flickered as it did in my almost forgotten dreams of swims taken under a full moon, with a seapony’s tail and nothing but the water and a pod of dolphins.

The reality wasn’t any less enchanting. I let myself sink into the nights I had spent at the bay, letting lyrics and choreography meld into one, the moon shedding its cool light over every wave. The nights Showstopper had waited for me on shore with a towel were my most cherished early memories of Manehattan. In those days it had been a dream to be one of the stars above us as we lay together, laughed, and talked and dreamt in their light, and the bright moon with the mare that watched over us.

That light never touched the city—it had a light and life all its own, with music and a rhythm that had inspired my first hits. But the bay, and the sea, were where my heart always called me back towards.

“It’s something to look forward to before we head back to Canterlot.”

“Back to civilized life, you mean?” She grinned as she finished folding down her bed.

Back to avoiding my mother.

“Yes.”

Comments

[Valiant Charge]

The story of almost EVERY celebrity that ever lived.

[Corejo]

This only has 116 views? That's a crime if I've ever seen one.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Sapphire Shores, a character that hasn't gotten much attention... but will be the subject of a Noble Thought.

[ColdGoldLazarus]

This is looking good!