Two pegasus ponies stood atop a stone shelf that jutted out from the sheer cliff in the rear of the box canyon, near the waterfall that cascaded into the settlement below. Though similar in some ways, both were as different as could be. This did not separate them though—far from it—their differences kept them together and the bond between them could be described as ‘unbreakable.’ It was a profound bond, one that went further than just mother and son; ‘twas the bond between pegasus ponies, the power of the flock.
The wind, playful, tugged on their manes, pulled at their tails, and ruffled their feathers. Off to the distant west, the sun crept ever-closer to the horizon, heading off to visit distant lands, and to bless all living things with glorious, warm light. Overhead, clouds rolled in from the north, but the breeze blew in steady from the south. Below, the industrious ponies of the Sunfire Barony made the most of the remaining daylight, which was treated as a precious commodity.
“I don’t know how you do it, Sunny.” Sunbeam Shimmer scraped some of the green moss from the stone with her hoof while speaking, and her tail flicked with her every word. “To be completely honest, I couldn’t live this way. No electricity? I like my creature comforts. To go without a freezer stocked full of ice cream is the worst fate I could think of.”
Though he wasn’t sure what to say, Sundance responded anyway. “It’s only temporary. Things will get better.”
“Sunny, this isn’t like fixing up a bad neighborhood in a city. This… this is… I can’t even say what this is. This is neolithic. I mean, you have caves and huts, Sunny. And everything smells like really bad eggs.” Lifting her hoof, she looked down, saw the green stain, and stuck her tongue out in disgust. “Ugh, nature is gross, so gross. It needs to be restricted to proper zoning, like parks and designated beautification buffer zones to raise property values.”
“Wait till you see how dark it gets,” he said to his mother, almost chuckling.
“We need to talk about the contents of your trunk.”
Sundance’s urge to laugh died with an alarming suddenness. He knew it was coming, it was expected, but to hear his mother say it still caused him some distress. Distracted, he thought of his time with Turmeric. He’d never been closer to understanding himself than he was right now and perhaps, if he was brave enough to face the moment, his mother might help him make sense of things.
“When I first opened it up, and saw what was in there, I laughed. I mean, it struck me as one of the most normal things you’ve done. But then I started looking through there… and Sunny… I have to say, some of those things I saw, they shocked me a bit. You gave your mom a scare.”
“I went through some confusing phases,” he said to his mother while he kept his eyes focused on the distant horizon.
“After seeing the evidence, I treated it like a crime scene—”
“Mom!”
“No, hear me out, will you?” Sunbeam’s hooves clopped against the mossy stone and her folded wings twitched and flapped against her sides, revealing her discomfort. “I treated it like a crime scene. Logic, reasoning, and deduction. I tried to see what I could learn from it. I asked Cameo from work to help me. Do you remember Cameo?”
“No, Mom, I’m sorry.” Extending one wing, Sundance closed his eyes and rubbed his brow.
“She’s a criminal psychologist. Trained under Princess Cadance herself. Without telling her who the magazines belonged to, I asked her to create as detailed of a profile as she possibly could based on what she found.”
Saying nothing, he kept rubbing his brow, kneading the skin with his wing knuckle. He thought back to all the times his mother asked him why he wasn’t dating, why he wasn’t looking, and worse, why he didn’t seem interested. This made too much sense; his mother was the analytical type and she needed reasons for everything. Of course, his mother would go off in search of answers after having a look at his confusing porn stash.
“I wasn’t sure if I could make rational, unbiased decisions to help you all by myself,” Sunbeam said to her son. She blinked a few times, stepped closer, and stared down at her front hooves. “This was a cry for help, right? I mean, it had to be. You sent me that combination, knowing what I’d find.”
Was it? Had he done so without realising it? He was lonely; it was only after meeting like-minded others that he had started to think about just how isolated he felt. In fact, it was right now, this moment, while standing here next to his mother did he realise just how alone he was, and it was a tremendous relief to have help. Taking a deep breath, his cheeks bulged while he held it, and he tried to hold himself together while his mind began racing.
“Yeah, you’re in trouble. No, I don’t mean you’re in trouble with me. You know what I mean, Sunny.” Sunbeam’s voice was as steady as the stone she stood on with her son.
“So, uh, what did, uh, your co-worker tell you?” Sundance licked his lips and prepared himself for whatever was about to be said next. His mother would tell it like it was, for good or for ill. Random muscles began twitching and his wingpits felt sweaty. His neck felt hot and prickly, while his heart hammered against his guts.
“A lot, actually.” Sunbeam avoided looking at her son. “It’s fascinating, really. The magazines have dates. They show wear and tear. A thorough examination shows and tells a lot about a pony. The earliest ones were pretty common stuff, the sort of thing you might find stashed in any colt’s room. You were about thirteen or so, based on the earliest date she found, which she mentioned was a late age to develop interests, but she also said that earlier magazines might not have been kept, so that wasn’t good evidence.”
Gulping, he took another deep breath.
“Things deviated quickly,” his mother continued while looking off in another direction. “A fair bit of gay porn could be found, and not just any gay porn. No vanilla gay porn to be found, just the really weird stuff. But this seems to be a phase that lasted for all of about two years or so and there were other interests during this phase of heightened curiousity. A lot of wear and tear though.”
For reasons unknown, Sundance thought of his phys-ed teacher, the stallion that had been his first real crush, the handsome, muscular fellow that he couldn’t keep his eyes off of. There had been all manner of confusing, involuntary reactions. The sound of his deep, commanding voice still echoed in Sundance’s ears, demanding more wing-ups and laps around the gymnasium.
“Mom, how did she know my age?”
“I presented you as a suspect,” his mother replied.
“Oh.” Sundance breathed a little easier and to calm himself down, he closed his eyes.
“Then came the bodybuilder phase. So many bodybuilder magazines. I must confess, those threw me for a loop, because you were never the musclehead type. But then I realised that you weren’t reading the articles… you had them for the pictures. That… that… well, I didn’t know what to think. They weren’t exactly pornographic… not explicit. It completely changed quite a number of my perceptions, let me tell you. Chiseled Mare Monthly made me feel a little inadequate, and I take really good care of myself. Those mares were ripped.”
Cringing, those were words that Sundance never wanted to hear his mother saying.
“After that, an overall theme of submissiveness pervaded everything. Lots of sadomasochism. Mares marehanding submissive, effeminate stallions. There was some weird, weird stuff about tea parties that I found pretty amusing, but also disturbing. Who’da thunk of a tea enema? Forcing a bad, bad, naughty stallion to drink his tea, one way or the other?”
Shivering, Sundance covered his face with his wings. As far as unbearable moments went, this was pretty much the worst. Tea was necessary to keep hooliganism away. It had to be drank regularly. The ritual, as well as his mother’s bold insistence, it had left its mark on him, it had somehow filtered into every aspect of his life, including his sexuality. And now, his mother knew. She knew about the steamy tea parties and he wasn’t sure if he could ever look her in the eye ever again.
“Cameo told me I was dealing with an extreme submissive deviant. Somepony with elaborate fantasies about domination. Somepony who probably had an over-domineering mother that controlled far too many aspects of their lives. She looked me right in the eye while she was saying that. She’s brazen, and bold, I’ll give her that.”
Taking a deep breath, Sundance hoped the worst was over.
“Which brings us to your father…”
Now, Sundance’s eyes flew open and before he realised what it was that he was doing, he was staring at the back of his mother’s head. His father? His mother did say that they needed to have a talk about him, but for this conversation they were currently having to segue into a discussion about his father, and with the way his mother had said it… Sundance’s eyes narrowed. Ears pricked, he waited for his mother to continue.
“In light of what I discovered from Cameo, you and I need to have a talk about your father. I feel like a failure, Sunny. I didn’t connect the dots… I think it’s denial. I wanted something different for you. For the past few days, It has consumed my thoughts. I mean, all the signs were there, and I was completely oblivious. I think I blinded myself. Or maybe love makes you blind. I don’t know. And that’s the thing, Sunny, I should have known.”
He watched his mother’s head turn and when their eyes met, he saw a tenderness in his mother’s gaze that he couldn’t recall seeing before. His mother was a hard mare, flinty, and there wasn’t much about her that could be considered soft—but he saw it now. It was as if she was a stranger that he was meeting for the first time. There was something else to be seen as well—fear.
“You look so much like your father right now. I need a moment.”
His mother turned away, wiped her eyes with her wing, shuddered a bit, and when she looked back at him once more, he saw a certain naked vulnerability that left him feeling embarrassed… uncertain. Nothing he had experienced in his life prepared him for this moment, seeing his mother this way. Not knowing how to act, or what to do, he stood there, unmoving, not knowing what was okay.
“Your father was that weird colt in school,” his mother began. “Soft-spoken. Didn’t say much. Was bullied by everypony because he wouldn’t stand up for himself. Even I did it. I picked on him and I pushed him around and I teased him mercilessly for being a quiet little sissy.”
Unable to believe what he was hearing, Sundance stood in silent, dumbfounded, shocked astonishment, staring at his mother. His mother didn’t care much for bullies, from what he had gathered. A detriment to society. And yet, here she was, confessing to having been one—to his father, no less.
“One day, I realised that Dapper liked me picking on him… he got some kind of thrill from that… and I didn’t understand it. That threw me. I made things worse for him, because how dare he confuse me and make me question everything. I was relentless… even turned cruel.” Sunbeam sighed, her feathers ruffled, and her gaze came to rest upon the waterfall.
His mother was now a stranger.
“For reasons I’ll never know, I started to like him. I liked him because he was different. To this day, I still can’t explain what happened, but I got a crush on him, and that was when my whole life changed. He was a sad little colt. There’s a reason why your grandparents on his side stayed strangers. His dad drank a lot and his mother, well, the less said about his mother, the better.” Shaking her head, Sunbeam sighed. “Coffee drinkers, the both of them. This is why you drink tea.”
Tossing her head about, she snorted in disgust.
“As I started to get to know Dapper, I came to understand what the bullying had done to him. You have no idea how guilty I still feel to this very day about my own part it in it. For the first time in my life, I gained some real awareness for the consequences of my actions. I couldn’t even figure out why he liked me, not after what I did. But all of this had a profound effect upon me as a filly. Did a complete turn around. Became a hall monitor and got my cutie mark. Worked real hard to make sure the defenseless were defended. I guess I tried to atone for what I’d done.”
This—this explained why his mother had gone into law enforcement.
“Your father continued to be a wet noodle, and even though I tried to be kind about it, I was pushy and bossy and demanding. He liked it. It made him happy. I’d smother him and he’d be beside himself. The way he was, he gave me a headrush. I was at large and in charge. But I was also mindful… that was the hard part, Sunny. Your father had trouble saying no or resisting me. So I had to be extra careful with everything I did and everything I said. See, I had it in my head that I had to protect him, on account of how he was. I was young and stupid.”
His vision blurry, Sundance blamed the sulphurous reek in the air.
“We were foals, Sunny. Nothing made sense in those days, and we didn’t care. By sheer dumb luck, by chance, by circumstance, we fell in love and everything felt wonderful. It was great, Sunny. As a filly, I didn’t have to worry about the pressure that a filly usually feels when dating. Your father never so much as made a single demand. I never had to worry about him being devious, or sneaky, or perverted. And my mother, she loved him. She loved him enough to let him sleep over and stay whole weekends with us. Which was good, because just as things got serious between us, his parents began their separation, and it got messy fast.”
A quivering smile spread across Sundance’s muzzle, even as he felt a little sad.
“I got curious and frisky. Things got complicated after that. Your father, he was happy to oblige me, but I never could tell if he was really into it. I told myself he had to be, he was a colt, how could he not be? But the doubt was always there. It made me careful… cautious. Taught me empathy. I had to try and read his moods, but that’s hard to do when you’re a teenager.”
He saw his mother squirm.
“When I got pregnant, my mama, she didn’t go after him, no… she came after me. Your grandmother tore into me like a vengeful tornado. She loved Dapper, so I reckon she was conflicted. But she laid down the law on me. I don’t think you’ve ever seen your grandmother truly angry, Sunny, and I pray that you don’t. You’ve seen her peeved, and maybe annoyed. What you don’t know is, she has a mean streak a mile wide when it comes to protecting sweet, innocent critters and the like. Dapper was a sweet, innocent critter, and I wronged the universe itself by taking advantage of him.”
With his trembling smile still on his face, Sundance listened.
“Like I said, your father was the nurturer and I was the disciplinarian. Dapper… was submissive. And that was fun for a time. A lot of fun. You were born, I joined the police academy, and everything was perfect… right up to the point where it wasn’t.” Sunbeam clucked her tongue, her eyes filled with both tears and longing, and she cocked her head off to one side.
“It started off with me being somewhat annoyed at constantly having to read him and his mood. Because there was no way that he’d come right out and say no. After a while, it got tiresome. I’d come home frisky and your grandmother would be working her shift and you’d be asleep. Dapper? A block of granite. He dropped out of school before completing his last year so he could take care of you. I could never get a clear answer out of him… ever. The problems started even before we were married.”
Though filled with questions, Sundance—content to listen—gave voice to none of them.
“Always getting your way gets tiresome real fast, Sunny. There’s never any satisfying sense of challenge. I wanted Dapper to tell me no. To fight me. To bicker and butt heads with me. But he made nary a peep. I’d get mad at him sometimes, I’d get real, real aggressive and I’d take my frustrations out on him… and he liked that. After that, he’d be super passive… he’d be so meek and submissive, because he knew that it’d push me over the edge. Things got complicated at some point, and the simplicity we once had departed.”
Reaching out with her wing, Sunbeam wiped her eyes. When she pulled her wing away, her feelings could be seen on her face, unfettered. She made no attempt to hide them. Turning off to one side, she began to pace, walking the length of the jutting rock, moving at a steady gait, her hooves making clip-clop sounds against the stone.
“I still love your father, Sunny. Please, remember that.” Clearing her throat, Sunbeam swiped at her eyes again with her wing while she continued to pace. “Sometimes, ponies are better off as friends, Sunny. Your father… he brought out the best in me. Because of him, I found my calling in life. I had you. I am what I am because of him. But he also brought out some bad parts of me. And you… you… well, you and your father have something in common, I think. Good luck ever getting him to talk about it, because he won’t. I don’t think he could even if he wanted to. I’m not saying that to be mean, mind you. He’s just… incapable.”
“The divorce,” Sundance said, breaking his long silence. “What happened?”
“Oh, that.” His mother looked him in the eye, sad, her expression one of profound regret. “That happened years before you were aware of it. It’s funny, because that was the only time Dapper ever told me no in any sort of meaningful way. We were about two years or so into our marriage and I brought it up while we were eating. You were with your grandmother.”
Wincing, Sundance made himself listen.
“Your father said it would hurt you. Told me no. I was shocked. What he said was so… well… the fact that he refused me… I jumped him right there on the table. Look, I know that you might not want to hear this, but it was the best sex we ever had, and even he said so. After that, things were better between us. Different. We were best friends with a shared purpose. A goal. Best friends who occasionally fronked one another. It’s weird, but after that… the bickering mostly went away. We had this agreement, we had each other, and we had you. I can’t say that life was perfect, but it was pretty damn good. It’s like… the pressure went away. I can’t explain it.”
“So… I’m like my father.” For Sundance, this wasn’t a question. He thought of his new friends and a part of him wondered what his father’s life might be like if he’d found some like-minded companions. His father, for better or worse, had been sucked into his mother’s wake, to put it in the most pegasusian terms possible. From the sounds of it, his father had coasted, rather than fly on his own.
“Yes,” his mother said, nodding. “And apparently, I’m in denial. I mean, I lived with you. I never booted you out. It was nice having you around, because you’re so much like your father. Always quietly there and never one to cause a fuss. And according to Cameo, my domination was such that I satisfied your need to be submissive. I suppose I’m somewhat to blame for how you are. I don’t know. Sundance, I’m still taking all of this in. Cameo said a lot of things. Like, a whole lot of things. I’m pretty sure that she knew those magazines were yours. She’s brilliant… and… I’m not. Not like her, anyhow. I’m guessing she saw right through my clever ruse.”
“Did Cameo think I was gay?” he asked, finally comfortable enough to just let everything out.
“No.” Sunbeam shook her head from side to side. “I asked. She said there was a chance, but the material was more to do with the themes of dominance and submission. That was the constant theme to be found in almost everything. But, Sunny, if you are gay, that’s fine. You’ll still be my little ray of sunshine. Well, my gay ray of sunshine.”
“Mom, sometimes, I wonder.” Brows furrowing, he cast his eyes skyward. “Sometimes, I’d think about… you know. There’s a part of me that wants to know what it’s like.”
“You and your father both,” Sunbeam said to her son while she too, looked everywhere but in Sundance’s direction. “Sunny, you find the right mare, and you can find out what it’s like—”
“You mean that’s real? That’s not just a porn thing? It’s actually a real real thing that really happens?”
“This is not the conversation I imagined having with my son,” Sunbeam said under her breath while shuffling about. “Yes, that’s real, it really happens, and honestly, Sunny, I thought you were smarter. Of course it happens in real life, how do you think it ends up in movies and magazines?”
“Mom, you told me that I can’t believe what I see in movies, because that stuff isn’t real.”
Sunbeam Shimmer’s expression turned deadpan. She stood there, still, unmoving, and even the wind had ceased to blow, as if respecting the sudden silence. A look of profound disappointment crept over the mare’s face as her nostrils flared. After several long seconds that felt more like minutes, she snorted.
“Yep, that one is entirely my fault. I said something, and you, being the good pony that you are, took me at my word. So this one is wholly and completely on me. I should not have done that. I had one job. One job. Be a good mom. Whatever you do, don’t tell your grandmother about this, she’ll twist my ear off.”
A profound sense of relief washed over Sundance, but it wasn’t something he could put into words. With relief came some embarrassment, because he had just revealed his naiveté to his mother. This embarrassment turned to relief as well, because his mother had not cast judgment—she had taken the blame for it, which left him just a little speechless. He wanted to ask what she had meant about his father, but there was no way that he could do that and not immediately chuck himself off the cliff.
“Sunny… don’t make the same mistakes your father did. I can’t imagine how hard it might be, but you need to communicate your needs. You’ll find the right mare… the right partner. But don’t be so passive that you leave them guessing. That’s only fun for a time, because it gets old real fast. Your father, he’d leave hints and play guessing games. I found clues of things he wanted to try… things he wanted me to do to him… he’d leave crudely drawn pictures of stick ponies inside my hat, or my coat pocket, or under my plate. That was as close as he came to making demands. Requests? As the years passed, his stick ponies showed a lot of improvement, let me tell you.”
Hating himself, he had to know. He had to know. “Do you and Dad…” His words trailed off and he wondered if his face might melt.
“Yes. Every chance we get. I’ve never been with anypony else and I can’t imagine being with anypony else. As for your dad… he’s too timid to go looking. I can deal with your dad in small doses. Honestly, things got better once we stopped living together. I stopped being so frustrated all the time. When I saw him, it was on my terms. Look, life is weird sometimes. Things don’t always turn out as you might expect. The story books, the movies, they deal in normal lives, but not every life is normal. You can’t shape your expectations on what you see in films and books. If you do, you’ll be disappointed.”
He thought about how his mother had just admitted that she had been wrong about movies. The breeze picked up, returning, and it was cold. Clouds swirled overhead and the skies had grown dark, though not from night. The scent of thunder was in the air and he could feel a faint electric tingle in his wings. During the whole of his life, he had never been closer to his mother than he was right now, and he was grateful for this chance to talk.
Was it better for his mom now that he had left home? Was he easier to deal with in small doses? Some questions were better left unasked, unsaid, unmentioned. Quite by accident, he had come to Canterlot, and found himself—at least some aspect of himself. Now, he was having this heartfelt conversation with his mother. But she seemed less his mother now, and more of… his friend? Something had changed between them, but what?
So much was still unknown.