//------------------------------// // Truth // Story: Blossoming: Learning How To Fly // by nanashi_jones //------------------------------// “This is the purple room. Purple walls, purple ceiling, purple everything... You know the purple room. This is your purple room.” “Who’s saying that?” Blossom asked as we walked. “My tenth grade English teacher,” I replied. “Where’s Nanashi?” “She doesn’t come here.” Blossom gave me a look, then continued walking in silence next to me as the soothing voice went on. “Now you’re dropping into the blue room. Blue walls, blue ceiling, blue everything...” “January, I know I could just think about it and know why your tenth grade English teacher is talking about the rooms we’re going through- at a pretty freaky angle I’d like to point out-, but part of trust means I don’t just know things.” “So?” I asked. She rolled her eyes. “So why is your tenth grade English teacher talking about the rooms we’re going through at a pretty freaky angle?” “It’s... Something I did a long time ago that really should have been treated better than it was.” “Now you’re in the green room. This room is entirely green,” Miss Anderson continued from nowhere. “Green walls, green ceiling, green everything. Everything is green in the green room...” “Care to explain?” Blossom asked, an edge to her voice. “It was like... Low form hypnosis,” I said. “You fall through each room, through colors until...” “Down you go, down, down you go to the yellow room. Such a room, the yellow room...” “Until what?” Blossom asked. “Until you reach the last room,” I said. Blossom was quiet. We listened to Miss Anderson keep talking in her soothing voice. “Now you’re in the white room...” We kept walking. “January? January?” Blossom said, tripping in the dark. “Ponyfeathers,” she muttered. “I can’t see anything. Where are you...” When she saw the light in the distance, she turned so she was facing it. Picking her hooves, carefully, warily, she advanced. The room was huge. Vast. And only dimly lit from a source she couldn’t place. The walls were gray and craggy looking while high above she saw shadows and... Were those spikes of stone?  Her hooves clopped and echoed all through the gray and black space. She could also hear the trill of small creatures bouncing, rebounding around unseen in the deep shadows. Blossom realized she wasn’t in a room, she was in a cave. An enormous cave. “Luna’s mane...” I breathed. I wrinkled my nose. Why did that...? “You coming in?” I asked. Blossom blinked at the voice and located its source pretty quick. There was this... Wall of computer monitors and a chair in front of them. She could see a hand going out and typing on the massive keyboard beneath the monitors. Blossom walked toward the chair and computers. As she did, she noticed how the cave was decorated. Glass cases, arranged in no particular order, were sitting on what looked like black stalagmites spread out through the lowly lit space. Each glass case was smooth on top, displaying some item with a little light aimed at the item. Her blankie that she’d had since she was a baby. A pristine, paperback copy of a book by Tamora Pierce called Wild Magic. A costume with a white jacket, leather pants and black opera gloves around a blank dummy was in a freestanding glass case all its own. Besides the cases, there were pictures and photographs everywhere. Friends, acquaintances. Girls, boys. Memories, creations. Some things human, others almost. She even saw a picture of Nanashi. Full body and smirking. I giggled. And heard it come to my ears. “What?” Blossom asked. “You haven’t noticed the big things. Not yet,” said the voice from behind the chair. Blossom blinked and looked up past the cases and pictures and saw what the voice had meant. Embedded in the rock, acting as pillars throughout the cave were depictions of women. Specifically of one woman repeated over and over. She bore the weight of this cave again and again and while each statue or rendering was a bit different, Blossom recognized her with perfect clarity. “Jessica?” I breathed. “It’s not surprising. In this room, the temporary things like pictures and hangings are temporary to you. Maybe they’ll be taken down one day, maybe not. The stuff that’s a fixture...” A hand came from its hidden place and gestured to the cases, which I realized didn’t look like stalagmites, but actually were and grew up from solid ground to somehow become glass and transparent on the top. “That is a bit more permanent.” “What about Jessica?” Blossom said, looking at one sculpture from the earth rising beside the computer screens. She seemed more playful in this rendering with pointed ears and wings that were somehow translucent though still made of stone. “Now her...” I said, spinning around in the chair. “She’s the fact of my life.” I blinked at myself. She was January. Of a kind. She wasn’t a pony or some angry ice goddess in a white dress. She wasn’t some flavor of Nanashi or any other character Blossom had met so far. What she was, was tall. And almost perfectly androgynous. The soft face with dirty-blond bangs atop broad shoulders seemed to fuddle the memories Blossom carried of a woman who was more characteristic than typically beautiful. The deep, blue-purple cloak further muddled her perceivable gender. Quite purposely, Blossom considered. “Hello Blossomforth,” she said. I rubbed at my head. “What’s...?” “The final straw,” I replied. “Can’t you feel it? We’re rushing together and around each other like paint in a mixer! Like two words nearing a portmanteau! Like dirt and heat in a gravity well!” The cloaked figure grinned. “Like inevitability.” As Blossom worked out what she was describing, she realized she wasn’t simply working it out, she was keeping pace with this excitable creature and understood her. “How does your perspective feel?” the androgynous figure asked. Okay, almost understood her. Blossom blinked and realized she was looking at myself and myself. At the same time. “Uh... A little complicated,” Blossom replied. “That’s just because we’re clinging to identity. It’s familiar. It’s okay. We’re about to step into the great unknown, Blossomforth. I can’t tell you how excited I am!” She winked at me. “I’m sorry. You are January, aren’t you?” Blossom said. I nodded. “Not what you expected?” I asked. “No, it’s just...” “It’s how I see myself,” I replied. “But I’ve seen your memories and those pictures they’re...” Blossomforth felt the final piece click into place. “They’re affected by my perception, which is yours.” She nodded and rose. She was very tall. “Tell me, because this is all happening too fast for me to know everything I’m thinking,” she said. “Does Equestria have ponies who are born... Sexually different?” I cocked my head at her, my wings ruffling. “Like how...?” Blossom asked. “Are all the little girl ponies, girl ponies through and through and are all the little boy ponies, boy ponies through and through?” the cloaked person asked, her tone just this side of impatient. “As... Far as I know,” I replied. January’s image of herself nodded. “Humanity isn’t so cut and dry, my little pony.” She kneeled down and rested a hand on my wither. “I wasn’t always female.” Blossom blinked and suddenly all the memories she’d been going through rearranged and repositioned and she knew exactly who January was. “So you’re...” “Complicated,” January replied. “Born with girl bits in some places and guy bits in others and a brain that had some very interesting notions I had no purchase for.” She smiled a tired, old smile. “It took forever just to figure out if I wasn’t going to fall somewhere in the middle.” “Your medication- My medication was to balance my body.” “Remember the third day?” I nodded. I remembered it because it was the third day of taking my medication when my head cleared and all the noise stopped. It was like someone had turned off static I didn’t even know was there. I could think clearly for the first time in my life. “No wonder we were so blase about becoming a pony,” Blossom said. January shrugged and rose. With a step back, she fell and slouched into the chair. “My body and mind were already at cross purposes as far as I was concerned, getting wings and fur felt pretty minor in terms of my personal identity, which had mostly survived in my head anyway. Actually, I was glad that some things were finally lining up on the outside.” “But why were you so against me?” Blossom asked, stepping forward, feeling bolder than she had right to, but she was already facing someone bold. “I wasn’t,” January replied. “I welcomed you with open arms.” “Liar.” “Truth! I”m just... Complicated.” “Why?” “Because you don’t survive like I have and not get twisted up a bit,” January replied and Blossom realized how warm the other personality had been up till this point. The moment hung flat between them, until January reached a hand and parted her cloak near her waist, revealing a track of skin that had a lone tattoo on it. The ink had faded to the slight blue most black tattoos get after time, but it was still easily recognizable. It appeared tribal. An oversimplification of one eye closed and the other open. “I got my cutie mark before it was cool,” January said with a chuckle. Looking to Blossom, she said, “You know what this is, Blossomforth?” “It’s the tattoo I got on my right hip after I met...” January nodded. “She unlocked the door for me. Or she let me know there was a key I could use to unlock that door.” January pointed to the eye. “Hence the pooka with its eye and little bit of jester lines.” “Your cutie mark,” Blossom said. “My symbol. All who I am and what I represent, in one simple tattoo. Part of that definition was a liar. But not a cruel one. One that plays. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone to play with for a very long time and that’s a long time to build a labyrinth in your brain.” She traced the skin idly. “Not too heady, right?” She looked up, smiling at Blossom. “I think I’ll still be proud of this once I get fat and my belly sags and I’m a comfortable old bitty.” “That won’t happen,” Blossom chuckled. January’s smile became something different. Sadder, but a contented sad. “Because this is the end of January and Blossomforth, isn’t it?” she said in a far off voice. Blossom didn’t reply. The silence stretches, gains prominence and is heavy. A gong starts to sound from far off, but close enough the floor feels like it’s shaking. “Cloister bell. Really?” Blossom says with a half-smile. January shrugs; she couldn’t resist her own humor. “Are you scared?” Blossom asks. “No. This has been a long time coming. Many people like me yearn for this point. The end of all my little mechanisms and defenses. The end of division. The end of disharmony.” January smiles a tired smile and Blossom can now see the scars on her soft face. They are invisible scars picked up in an invisible battle that lasted the entirety of January’s life. They were earned in simple conversations and white-knuckle screaming matches. They were earned in trips to the bathroom, interactions with co-workers and haunting chat rooms. The battles were long and they had taken their toll. “You must be tired,” Blossom says, offering her hoof and a full, friendly smile. “So very,” January agrees, still slouching in her chair. “You won’t have to fight to be yourself any more.” January nods, grinning electrically. “Why else do you think I trust you? You see me.” January takes Blossom’s hoof and the room shakes, walls cracking. Holes open in the top as the pair stare at one another, sun beaming down into the once dark area. The pillars shift and rise, Jessica gaining wings and a mane.  New structures birth from the floor as color fills into the space and a new beginning is born. “Do you trust me?” I ask with the roar of creation in my ears. “Until the ends of all the universes and back again,” I respond. I wake.