Seashell
IX
From the journal of Sunburst, September 7, 1329 YS:
As sharp as my eyes are, they can't see until they're open.
It took a while to finally do that, but now that they are, I've had to make some decisions about this and some of my previous journal entries. I had to decide whether to keep them around, or get rid of them for good and forever hide and forget what I've written. It wouldn't be hard, I could just tear them out and toss them in the fireplace. I tried to convince myself that this would the safest thing for everypony.
In the end, though, I couldn't do it. I think I have to give up pretending to not see what I'm seeing. The lie won't work, it never has for me. It can never feel right, because that's not who I am.
I've experienced this the hard way.
One in particular comes to mind when I think about the situation I'm watching happen.
A few years ago, during a training exercise, I was flying low and evasive using tree canopies as cover. My right front leg didn't clear one of the limbs in a big gnarled old oak. It caught and wedged in a fork while my body weight kept moving forward at my pretty considerable (if I can say so myself) full speed. Two bones instantly broke. Actually, there's a better word for it - they didn't just break, they shattered. They snapped into long sharp little pieces, like icepicks and daggers inside my flesh. At least two of them broke the skin and stuck out at weird angles.
I remember falling to the ground but not much else, other than that I was severely incapacitated by the sheer overwhelming impact of the pain. I couldn't think, I couldn't see, I couldn't hear. That pain was my only reality. I was delirious with it. It was all I knew because it crowded everything else out completely.
Then I remember being in the hospital, waking up in post-surgical recovery. Everything was a fuzzy haze that would have been confusing, except that I felt too good about everything to care. My leg still hurt very badly, of course, and I could feel it, but the pain's ability to grab my attention so completely had all of its sharp edge taken off. It faded into the background, and nothing... Nothing really seemed to matter, because everything just seemed so damned fine and dandy. I was happy as a clam to just lie there and stare at nothing, or sleep all day.
That lasted a while, during which a unicorn doctor would show up at intervals and do something to my forelimb with her horn. After that haze started to lift off a little bit and I could think enough to ask her just what my situation was, she told me all about my bad break. She was working to monitor what was going on with all those pieces of bone and keep them in the right places so they could heal back together again. She also told me why I felt so good. They'd had to put me on a very powerful opiate painkiller, something many times stronger even than morphine. Apparently when I came in I was screaming and crying in such agony they couldn't do much else until that painkiller and sedation were able to take effect.
Because of that, I got to spend a few days high as a kite on the best narcotics the science of modern chemistry has to offer.
I hated it.
It seemed nice in a superficial blanket sort of way, a coating that smothered over everything. Underneath it, though, there was a sense that the feelings it created and the pony it made me into weren't me. It felt unsettling because the kind of good it had wasn't genuine and I knew it. It wasn't feeling good about something, it was just sort of there, forced on me and warping my baseline of who I was. For whatever it gave me, it also took away a lot: I couldn't function, I was slow and hazy and thoughts wouldn't hold a coherent thread.
Part of the really messed up thing of being in a state like that is that it's so easy to just go with. It's not a conscious process for the most part, and not a real choice. Just becoming what the circumstances dictate without much fuss is so much simpler that sometimes it's the only option a pony can see, even if it's not something true to what that pony really is.
I just laid there and they shot me up through my IV, and sweet Celestia, everything felt like lying on warm silk in the sunshine. I just let it happen, it seemed the inevitable course of things at the time.
I'm sure that the same kind of inevitability of circumstance making her somepony else is what Princess Twilight feels when she has to be the kind-looking but untouchable sculture that constitutes the public face of a princess, too. She has no choice, so she believes. I don't think she even knows it happens. For the most part, nopony else does either.
My eyes are open and I see it now. Am I the only one?
Most significantly, by contrast I see why that's not her real self. I see it in the little things where Captain Dash is involved. I saw it in the roses, and I saw it in the way they eat dinner together when they can find the time and privacy. I'm starting to see it just every so often in the tiny split-second glances in morning briefings, when the captain delivers them to the princess. I see it in passing in the hallways, in quick looks back over the shoulder.
It'd be easier if I didn't see it, but I do, so there's the truth about the princess. She sobers up around Captain Dash. In little glimmers another more real pony comes through - a much happier pony.
It's subconscious, she has no idea... But it's there.
What about Captain Dash, for her part?
It would be easy to chalk this up as just an unrequited longing by the princess, but I don't think it's simple and one-sided like that. Captain Dash's part in whatever is between them seems more complex and harder to figure out, but I can't say I think she's oblivious or not participating.
It's unambiguous that in her moments alone with the princess, she does sometimes tend to get pretty close. She drops her mask of being just a guard and opens herself up as something else instead.
Out in the open, there's the same little things as with the princess, the glances, but it's harder to catch - faster, sneakier, and even more hidden. She's good at it. Even with my scout's training to observe and pick out all the hidden details I'm hard-pressed to even say it's really there. Honestly, I'm not always sure. Sometimes I think so, sometimes I think I'm just imagining it.
I can't help the feeling, though, that she seems scared of it. She fights and resists revealing anything as hard as she can. I suppose that's necessary. A princess can get away with a few things here and there, a blind eye turned in an unspoken due paid to her status as royalty. If Captain Dash's very well-shaped flank happens to catch her eye for just a second, well... She can be forgiven. We all look at other ponies once in a while. It's a reflex, really, she can't help it.
The captain of the guard, on the other hoof, has no such luxury. She has to have discipline. She's the key that has to set the primary example for all the rest of us in the guard, and that means no unprofessional lusty eyes on another pony she can't have. It means nothing unbecoming or unsightly to her position, ever.
There's something so obvious she could never hide it, though.
Just her presence here and her service says it the most and the loudest, enough to overpower any amount of caution and secrecy and render them a moot point.
I know that she loves the princess.
The more I think about it, the more it begins to become obvious. Whatever life and home and ambitions she had in Ponyville, she left them behind to follow the princess to Canterlot. She accepted the princess's personal commission to serve, and pledged her own life to defend that princess against anything that might threaten her harm. She's made it clear to us all in her dedication that this isn't just her job, it's her personal calling. She gave the princess her life, to do what she would with it, just so that she could be here and stay with her. If there isn't love in that, of the highest kind, we might as well just all give up and stop looking because I don't know where else to find it in this world.
In all the little things I've seen and all the puzzle pieces that fall into place now that I know what I'm looking at, I'm realizing that Princess Twilight and Captain Dash bring out what's most real and most essential about each other, from deep down in their hearts under the masks they have to wear in public.
That's love.
I think... No, I know... They don't even see it themselves, because they can't afford to, not in their positions. But that's love.
I suppose this journal entry is my confession - my admission that, although I may not know much about love being as solitary as I am, I know what I see in them and I can't deny it any more. I'm ready to be honest with myself about it now.
That's enough about love for today.