Filling the Cracks

by Novelle Tale

Filling the Cracks

The late afternoon sun set the ocean’s surface ablaze, a beacon of sparkling white on choppy blue, and I breathed in, slowly, just like Dr. Lightscribe had taught me. My heart beat thrummed in my chest, a bird struggling to get free, and I shifted back half a step.

Thump-thump.

Do it, it beat.

Thu-thump.

Just jump, it said.

But no. I paused, taking the moment of hesitation to really, truly consider my next actions.

“Is this what I want?” I murmured. The strong ocean wind buffeted my words away almost before the whisper could pass my lips, ripping them away and off to lands unknown, but the question still lingered in my heart.

Did I want this?

I knew I couldn’t change my past, of course. Well, I knew that intellectually. That didn’t stop my heart from longing for it, my mind from asking the what ifs and what could have beens. But I could control my future. I could control where my hooves took me.

Those hooves clenched into the soft, sun-warmed sand beneath me. I glanced away from the mirror-like surface of the sea, down, far down to the rocky outcroppings jutting out of the tide a few hundred meters below me. Even smoothed down from the relentless waves violently crashing against them every day—even now—they seemed to point up at me like craggy teeth. Waiting.

I grit my own teeth, took one step back, two, three, five, ten. I took a deep breath, my thoughts deaf to anything but the roaring wind, waves, and my own heart.

And then I broke into a gallop, too fast to stop before I could run out of sandy cliff and exchange it for open air.

And I was falling.

“Tawny?”

The pause before I stood from my seat in the waiting room was longer than it should have been, but after only a few short moments, I snapped myself out of my daze.

“Doctor Lightscribe is ready for you,” the pegasus receptionist offered, holding the door for me to hurry through. She smiled prettily at me, like always, and I avoided looking at her, like always.

“Thanks,” I mumbled instead, hurrying past and into the doctor’s office.

“Ah, Tawny, you’re looking well,” Dr. Lightscribe offered as she lit her append—her horn, I reminded myself, and the heavy wooden door to her office shut with a barely perceptible thud before I could even finish taking up my usual seat on the couch.

“Thanks,” I said again, glancing up at the ceiling. It was a good ceiling, much better than the one I had grown up under—only three blemishes, two small cracks in the furthest corners and one miniscule dent.

The doctor returned to her seat, lighting her horn once more and magically shuffling a collection of papers before her.

“Alright, it looks like you’re making excellent progress physically,” she said, humming thoughtfully once or twice as she scanned the notes from the dietician and physical therapist I met once a week. “Oh! And you’ve already completed your GED?”

I finally tore my eyes away from the ceiling to meet Dr. Lightscribe’s eyes.

“What? Oh, um, I mean, yes.”

“That’s amazing, Tawny!” she chirped, her golden eyes lighting up in genuine joy as she grinned. The sight made my stomach clench, and the usual hollow ache filled my chest.

“It really wasn’t that hard,” I muttered, slumping back into the couch and hunching my shoulders forward defensively.

The doctor tutted. “You’re minimizing again,” she chided gently, and I grimaced, before managing to turn the expression into an almost-smile.

“Sorry,” I offered, still not meeting Dr. Lightscribe’s expressive eyes.

“You don’t need to apologize—but you know that, too,” was all she answered before continuing her gushing congratulations.

“You’ve been through a lot in your short life, Tawny, and this is an achievement. I want you to be as proud of yourself as I am, as your whole team is.”

I scoffed, muttering under my breath.

“What was that?”

Silence.

“Tawny, you know I’m just going to keep asking you.” Patience, not disappointed in the slightest. That almost made it worse.

I sighed.

“I said,” I bit out, my words halting. “That it’s really… not a lot. Because nothing much has happened in my life, anyway.”

The silence that followed wasn’t dangerous or angry, the way Father’s silences often could be, but it had me holding my breath just the same.

“You know that’s not true, Tawny.”

I glared down at the carpet, neutrally white and plush, if a little worn, and said nothing.

‘Tawny—”

“Will you please stop calling me that,” I rushed out, a question masquerading as a statement, voice barely above a strained whisper. The clock above the door ticked loudly in the pregnant pause.

“Tawny is your name,” Dr Lightscribe offered, not unkindly. A rustling of papers as she set the stack aside, focusing entirely on me. I squirmed, but still didn’t look up.

“Is it really, though? Half the time I don’t even think it’s mine,” I muttered back, biting my lip.

“You chose it,” she answered simply.

I shuddered, and finally looked up. I hadn’t wanted to see the disappointment in the Doctor’s eyes, but as always, she maintained her neutrality when I could barely keep my composure. Compassion lined her white face, and only a ghost of sadness hid in her eyes. I forced myself to keep looking, trying to feel anything other than self-loathing and numbness.

“Why do you not think your name is yours, Tawny?” she asked after several long moments, pointedly using the name again.

I looked away from the doctor, back to the very-safe-to-stare-at carpet. Clock ticking tried to fill the void as Dr. Lightscribe waited, but all I could really hear were my own buzzing thoughts, circling round and round in dizzying loops, trying to form into coherence but never quite succeeding.

“A name is… it’s something someone else calls you,” I finally answered.

Dr. Lightscribe just continued waiting. I could feel the itch of her calm gaze on my forehead. I shifted in my seat, side to side, front and back, as if that would remove the sensation. But I knew only one thing would.

“Since I chose it, it doesn’t feel like it’s really real,” I finally continued with a sigh. “It’s like… like this thing I read about, for my biology and anatomy course. A… a phantom limb.”

My wings, held tight against my barrel as always, fluttered slightly. As if they knew I was really talking about them. I glared down at one of the offending appendages, making sure to keep that gaze from wandering down my flank.

“Do you feel like your wings aren’t yours, either?”

Did I?

A tarry, sickeningly slick emotion, one I couldn’t quite place, seeped through my gut. I slammed my eyes shut to the nauseating onslaught, breathing in carefully one-two-three-four through my nose, hold for five, and out six-seven-eight-nine-ten through chattering teeth before the breath could be tainted further. The feeling in my stomach simmered, and I shivered. It was almost like panic, but lacking the urgency of anxiety. Like hatred or rage, but not quite hot enough. Like hunger, but sharper still.

I clenched my jaws together, hoping the sensation of my teeth scraping painfully together would distract me from the way my worthless wings hugged my sides, how they twitched and clenched in response to my emotions, asking for the attention I didn’t want to give, couldn’t bring myself to give, never wanted to even remember giving the last time I’d tried—

“I don’t know!” I finally cried, thrusting my body off of the couch and back onto my hooves so that I could pace. My heartrate picked up pace to match the rhythm, each beat another truth.

Useless.

Pointless.

Meaningless.

Lifeless.

Nothing.

“You say I’ve accomplished so much ever since Fath—ever since Widdershins ditched me in that park. You say that so much happened to me in my life, but that’s just it—nothing ever really happened to me!” I stopped short, snorting out a heavy breath and stamping the ground with my hoof.

“I got a Cutie Mark, the one thing that’s supposed to tell me who I am, what my path is in life, from a bucking broken wing! Because it was the most exciting thing that ever happened in my entire life!”

“Tawny…”

I stopped, facing away from Dr. Lightscribe with my head held low, snout almost pressed to the carpet. My brown hooves were dark against the white, like mud besmirching pristine sand, and the hanging lanks of my parchment-colored mane made that same carpet look dirty by comparison. But I knew that wasn’t the case.

I’m the dirty one, my mind whispered. I flinched, breaths coming in shuddering gasps.

“I’m a useless pony, with no past, and no future. I don’t deserve what I have. I... I can’t change my past. And I can’t change who I am, either.” A single, traitorous tear tracked down my cheek, and I sniffled, surprised my body had managed even the one.

The silence stretched on, longer than it ever had before. It felt like hours that I stood there, quivering under that too-perfect ceiling, with a doubtless disappointed mare to my back.

But our sessions were only ever ninety minutes, so I knew it couldn’t really have been as long as it felt. After a small eternity, I half turned and trudged quietly back to the couch. My slight weight on the cushions didn’t even make the coils creak.

“Tawny, I can’t confess to being an expert on Cutie Mark matters—especially in your case,” Dr. Lightscribe said quietly. I glanced upward, surprised at the admission.

“But… I do know someone who is.” Her words were hesitant, her voice hopeful. I’d never heard such a combination before.

“She’s part friend, and part colleague. Would you be willing to meet with her?”

I considered. Would I?

After hardly a moment, I nodded. It wasn’t like I had anything to lose. I already knew where I was headed anyway. What was one detour before I got there?

The cobblestone courtyard was cold under the overcast October sky, but the maple trees surrounding it brightened it considerably. I poked my hooves against the holes in the little metal table, taking care not to shift my weight too much in the equally spindly metal chair upon which I sat. It wasn’t entirely stable, but I couldn’t deny that it looked nice against the grey stones. Like a poem, waiting to be written, or a raindrop ready to fall.

I blinked once, twice. When did I become so maudlin?

“Thanks for waiting!” a voice called from behind me, the clip-clopping of hoof on stone heralding the owner’s approach. Two levitating hot chocolates preceded her arrival, each encased in a pale green glow that spoke of spring despite the autumn chill. I offered the unicorn in question a wan smile as she set a mug in front of me.

“Of course, Miss Belle.”

She was shaking her head almost before the honorific had left my lips. “Sweetie Belle or just Sweetie is fine,” she answered, settling into her own spindly chair and rewrapping the thick scarf wound around her neck.

I nodded, wrapping my hooves around the mug and letting my eyes fall into place gazing at the mound of whipped cream piled on top. There was no ceiling to look at here, after all, and the pristine white sky was too painfully bright to stare at for long. The mug was nice, though. It had a pretty pattern on it, irregular gold lines bisecting the smooth porcelain. It was almost like counting cracks, and already I could feel my mind calming.

“Hope—Dr. Lightscribe, I mean, she said you wanted to talk, about your Cutie Mark.” The unicorn shifted in her seat, waiting for me to fill the silence. I was starting to wonder if that was something all unicorns did.

Instead I just nodded. The unicorn across from me—Sweetie Belle, I forced my brain to say, that’s her name, so use it—gave a nod I felt more than saw, locked as my gaze was on the cup between my hooves.

“Why don’t I tell you a little about myself?” she finally offered. “You have no reason to know who I am, or why I might be able to help with your Cutie Mark problem, but thankfully you’ve come to the right mare!”

I glanced up in surprise at the quietly confident cheer in her tone. Usually, the ponies I met spoke to me in hushed tones; I was “the missing filly”, or “the kidnapped orphan”, or more often, “you poor dear”. It was, frankly, exhausting. But really, as I had learned in the last year, almost everything about life outside my old room was exhausting. Ponies expected things from you, and it felt like half the time I still didn’t know what.

“When I was just a filly, my best friends and I wanted our Cutie Marks more than anything,” Sweetie Belle began, casting her eyes down as they misted over with nostalgia.

And I listened. It felt like hours passed, but for the first time, the passage of time didn’t feel like a slog. Sweetie Belle told me all about her childhood—adventures with her two best friends, getting their Cutie Marks at the same time and just ever so slightly varied from one another, when they all three realized their calling. Her adventures in the dream realm, and then as a summer intern in Manehattan at her sister’s store, and then finally finding the path of music, her true calling, and starting her college education. Interspersed, like stars dotting the blackness of the night sky, she peppered in the tales of the ponies she had helped, of the lives she had changed.

Unbidden, a warmth started rising in my chest. I couldn’t place the emotion—it felt more like heartburn than anything I had experienced. But it was too pleasant to be painful.

“...and when I met Hope—sorry, Dr. Lightscribe—at the convention, we hit it off right away and she came back to our booth every day,” Sweetie Belle finished with a laugh.

“Convention?”

Sweetie Belle nodded, taking a sip of her cooling drink. She had talked long enough that the clouds had parted, the autumn sky a brilliant blue as the sun filtered through the leaves to dapple the courtyard with slivers of light.

“It’s a place where people with similar interests gather, usually for a week or maybe a weekend. The one where we met was for psychology and psychiatry, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders had a table in the main exhibition hall, to talk about what our organization does.” She settled the mug back down on the table, the large golden line bisecting the green porcelain catching in the sun. I looked away from it and back up to Sweetie Belle’s lively face.

“Cutie Marks aren’t an uncommon issue for therapists to handle,” she continued, gesticulating animatedly with her hooves. “We live in a society that says our Cutie Mark is our destiny, that it tells us what we should do with our lives and who we’re meant to be. But it’s not that simple.”

I frowned. “It’s not?”

She shook her head. “How could a single symbol tell you who you are?” the unicorn countered. “Sometimes I wish life could be that easy and straightforward, but when I think of all the nuance and beauty in the world, all the creatures I’ve helped… I’m honestly kind of glad it’s not.”

I couldn’t think of a response to that, so I didn’t try to give one. After a few beats of silence, her animated gaze softened.

“I know about your Cutie Mark—well, as much as I can as an outside observer. Your story was in the news for weeks.”

My face flushed, cold cheeks suddenly burning hot. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” I muttered, looking down at my mud-colored hooves resting against the table. To my surprise, Sweetie Belle reached out, her pristine white hoof bright against the brown of my own. I almost pulled away, not wanting to dirty it, to dirty her.

“I can’t claim to know what you went through, what you really experienced. Only you can,” she said quietly. “But I think I can understand your struggle, at least a little bit.” She pulled her hoof away, and I found myself foolishly missing its warmth.

As a replacement, she nudged her now-empty mug into my downcast line of sight. I frowned again, this time confused.

“I’m sure you noticed these cups,” she offered as an explanation, tilting the forest green mug from side to side so that the vein of gold caught the sunlight again. Unbidden, I found myself glancing up to meet her gaze.

“The truth is, they’re all thrifted finds, and every single one of them was either bought broken, broken over time while being used, or both.” Sweetie Belle sat back in her chair, leaving our mugs side by side.

“Broken?” I asked. She merely nodded.

“They were all mended by the owner of this cafe,” she said, gesturing a hoof behind her. “Kintsugi, the name of the shop and the name of the mending art. Mine just has one large break, but yours…”

I looked away from Sweetie’s eyes, down at my own mug. Spidery veins of gold lined the surface, inside and out.

“It looks… shattered,” I murmured. Sweetie Belle nodded.

“It was. But the owner took the time and care to fix it. Kintsugi is a philosophy from Neighpon, that treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object—history which should be celebrated, not disguised. The gold used to make the repairs often renders the object more valuable than it was originally,” she answered quietly.

The warmth rising in my chest bloomed into something intense and unreadable; unbidden, tears sprang from my eyes to drip onto the table, first just two, then three, until an entire flood tracked down each cheek. I raised a hoof to one eye, utterly shocked.

“Sometimes… we’re only as broken as we let ourselves be,” Sweetie Belle said, and there was a pain there, so deep and yawning that the strong mare before me suddenly looked more fragile than the cups spanning the space between us. Hesitantly, and to my utter surprise, I reached out my other hoof. To my utter amazement, Sweetie took it.

“You’ve been wronged, Tawny.” My shoulders jerked in surprise as the unicorn used my name for the first time. It didn’t sound so bad, coming from her.

“But you can take your power back. It won’t erase the crime, but you’ll be able to forge a new path ahead—your past is what makes you… you.” She gestured with her horn.

“And so do those wings. Locked away, kept from all joy and wonder, you still wanted to fly. And you did it.”

“But I fell,” I said, pulling my hoof back with a messy sniffle. “I fell, and I broke my wing, and because that was the most intense thing I ever felt, I got a Cutie Mark for it. Like some sick reminder.”

Sweetie Belle reached forward to grasp my hoof again, this time with both of her own, almost lunging across the table to do so. My gaze snapped to hers in surprise. Compassionate, determined jade eyes stared back.

“But you healed. You got up every day, before you were free and after, and you lived.” She glanced down to the broken wing stamped on my flank, almost blending into the brown fur around it.

“That Mark doesn’t define you. It’s just where you start. And you deserve to keep living. Your history is going to be beautiful,” she whispered, voice almost lost to the rustling breeze. “I can tell.”

The wind roared, the waves crashed, and I was falling.

Do I want this?

Do it, my heart thumped.

Am I deserving?

Make it so, my heart sang.

Seaspray in my mane, eyes barely open enough to see the waiting stony maw just thirty hooflengths away, I snapped my wings open.

And then I was flying. The ocean spread beneath me like a plush velvet rug dotted with foamy starlight, and I turned my face forward into the warmth of the sun as I flew towards the horizon.

“I’ve been broken,” I said to the sun, the sky, to no one and everyone, but mostly to myself. I banked left, glancing back at my own flank.

The broken wing marring my flank was still there, but now outlined in white to bring it into sharp relief against my brown fur, the broken bone veined over with golden ink that glimmered in the setting sun. Finding a tattoo artist willing to edit the Mark hadn’t been easy, but as I watched it gleam, I knew it had been worth it.

That it would be worth it.

I banked right, flapping once, twice, and then righting my flightpath back into the sun, my heart beating a steady rhythm in my chest as always.

I am, it murmured.

I am, it decided.

I am, it insisted.

I closed my eyes against the sun’s bright glow and revelled in the warmth, so much like hope. So much like life.

Widdershins may have stolen my childhood, but I didn’t have to let him take the rest of my life. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. If I’d learned anything in the last year since being found, broken and abandoned in a park at dawn, it was that progress was rarely linear.

But it was, I was starting to learn… worth it.

I smiled into the setting sun, letting it paint my spirit gold, inside and out, limning my soul over only to reveal the best of myself.

“I am,” I declared.