At the tender age of ninety-six, Jonathan Taylor had seen, heard, smelled and touched most of what humanity had to offer. And yet, nothing could induce the sheer disgust that ravaged his shriveled heart quite like the sight of the insipid green hospital gown he had been forced into.
No good could have ever come out of wearing it. Not only were they a color just flashy enough to irritate his old eyes, but they matched hideously with the baby blue walls of his prison cell. He certainly didn't need to look like a giant peppermint to agonize in peace.
But no, the nurses ignored his concern for that minor evil in favor of telling him off for getting out of bed. And that, Jonathan quietly admitted, made him laugh more than a little. Their fear of him hurting himself on the way were perfectly justified, given that his legs and knees burned something fierce from those few meters of walk alone. But leaving his room? With an IV dripping into his arm?
Well, he had done it before. But to be fair, Jonathan had only been eighty-two at the time. It didn't hurt his lungs so damn much to walk back then. Even now, sitting in his armchair a good ten minutes after the fact, he could hear the slight wheeze flying past his lips.
“You're getting close, you blasted harvester,” he mumbled to the hums of the machines hooked up to his body. “Damn close...”
His bushy eyebrows lowered, sobering his expression until Jonathan's face was naught but a grim mask of wrinkles and two sunken eyes. Slowly, his thin arm trembling ever so much, Jonathan coughed, hard, rasp. The whole of his lungs and throat flashed ablaze from the irritation, and the old man did not truly recover until long minutes had passed with only the thrums and beeps of the machines clustering his room.
Jonathan sank deeper into his seat, rubbing out the thin trail of saliva dripping on his chin. This might be it, thought a darker part of his mind. Ninety-six. Quite a run. Older than more or less everyone he had known. It figured that Jonathan would be the last one left.
They had all been called back when their time had been up. Some had left more graciously than others. As if Death had been but a vacation for them, something to do until they saw their loved ones again. Those, Jonathan felt a strange envy toward. Were he that he could be serene and gracious… maybe the poor nurses wouldn't be straddled with him.
If he had had the dignity and wisdom to accept it. Yet, the second the doctor had given his diagnostic – and assured him that there were no mistakes –, Jonathan's pride had clamped down on his temper and hadn't let go since.
The sniffles... Someone upstairs must have been having a good laugh at his expense. He could not fathom it any other way.
He would survive, Jonathan decided right there and then for the seventh time. Spite would carry him through this stupid cold. Only the best die young. The Grim Reaper had missed him once; well, that was just too bad. It hadn't gotten a second shot. It could come back the next century, see if Jonathan Taylor had finally been bested by something worthwhile.
Something other than the God forsaken sniffles.
In the meantime, he would chew on the acrid taste of a boring afternoon, sitting in a slightly crooked chair by his hospital bed, with the sound of wind brushing the leaves of the trees before his window as conversation material. He had survived on little less for more than his share of years already.
Jonathan Taylor let his gaze wander over the shape of the branches poking the glass window. They really were as twisted as his own fingers, though thinner. Like the hands of death, trying to reach him even inside the one place that could pretend to keep him alive.
Ah! The proud old man snorted. It wasn't in his young days that he would have had such thoughts. He would have laughed, loud and clear, confident in his own invincibility. He didn't know much in those days, but he had the time to make mistakes, and learn. Now, Jonathan looked at the ticking clock on the wall, and he could not help guess a number every time.
“We will, of course, do everything to help you heal, Mr. Taylor. However, you need bed rest. A man of your age needs more time to recover.”
Time that, honestly, Jonathan knew he didn't have. It wouldn't keep him from trying out of spite, but no, he doubted he would see that fabled complete recovery Doctor McKenzie promised him. With a sigh, Jonathan mumbled that his siblings really would have a field day with his stupid last battle against the Reaper.
“That remains to be seen,” said a woman's voice.
Jonathan blinked. He knew each of the nurses by voice, face and name. Yet this near crystalline chime had not rung any bell in his memory. And when he turned to greet and grumble in the general direction of that intruding woman, he came face to face with a silhouette bathed in light, any and all traits obscured by white sparkles.
Had it been a new treatment, something for which he knew not of side effects, Jonathan would have been tempted to call the nurses and ask that they stop giving him whatever crazy pills had caused this hallucination. But, again, the sniffles. And the beginning of a pneumonia, if he had to guess, but mostly the sniffles.
The silhouette in the light wavered, rippling like the surface of a lake in which one had thrown a pebble. “You have been a good if colorful man in your days, Mr. Taylor. I have chosen to grant you a wish, to reward your deeds and ease your pain.”
Jonathan resisted the urge to pinch himself, as he really did not need to add to the pain he was in. He would have known if this had been a dream.
Dreams of his that conjured ethereal entities generally had them berating his stubbornness. Or his arrogance. Yet, she had called him a good man. Not many that knew him would use the word “good” to describe Jonathan Taylor. Bullheaded. Grumpy. Crazy old kook. Something equally accurate and even less flattering.
Ah, nurses, they sometimes forgot that he hadn't need of a hearing aid.
This one missy though, she seemed to know him from an older, better time. When things weren't just a slow and painful trickle of time down a drying river. So, maybe, just maybe, there could be some merit in it. And he could always pretend daydreaming if it failed.
Thus, licking his cracked lips, Jonathan forced the words to come out with the wish bleeding through his heart. “I wish to be young and strong again.”
“Very we– wait, what?” The light flashed suddenly, and floated closer to him. She spoke faster, the aura of mystics growing thin around her. “No, you can't wish for that. Why would you wish for that?”
Jonathan felt his brow furrow together, his eyes squinting to look upon the radiant entity. Clearing his throat, he tried, but failed to keep a little derision from his raspy voice. “Well, honestly, Ma'am, what did you expect, asking an old man what he wishes?”
Awkward silence stretched between them as the light turned a faint shade of pink.
“I was hoping for something closer to inner peace or healing sickness. Tender care in your last days.”
He wanted to laugh as much as he wanted to scoff. “Why wish for good last days when I would rather wish for more days?”
At his words, something seemed to shift in the air surrounding his visitor. A shiver, particles of lit dust shaking. And somehow, the impression that lingered in Jonathan's mind was that of a bird's ruffled feathers. “Mr. Taylor, pushing back death is a futile endeavor. The only way to defeat the fear of death is to accept it as inevitable.”
Jonathan's eye twitched.
With great calm, he asked, “Can you die, Ma'am?”
What had been shimmering air stilled. For the first time, Mr. Taylor could see a clear outline of the character speaking to him. Her shape had no resemblance to the kind young lady he had imagined from the sound of her voice. What little he did see reminded him of a bride's veil, long strides of white draping a flickering light.
And she hadn't breathed a word to reply. He took it as the answer it was.
Grunting, Mr. Taylor shifted in his seat and cursed his aching back. “Have you ever grown old, Ma'am? Because I have. All my life I've grown older. From the wee tender years to the best years, and then past that further and further without stopping. In my prime, I could carry three grown men on my back. Now, I feel the joints in my knees shift if I get up from my bed at a faster rate than a tortoise. I have been living with little hurts for thirty years, and bigger ones for seventeen. I used to have both hair and teeth. My sister and my brother have both died from the same illness, and it's only because I'm stubborn as a mule that I haven't croaked yet. Death has been taken a step closer to me everyday I lived, and that's a fearsome thing. Fearsome, I tell you. You? You don't feel that. You don't hear the clock ticking the same way I do. So, with all due respect, Ma'am, take your view on mortality and keep it in a quiet corner of your mind. I want to hear none of it.”
The spirit took him at his words and uttered none in return. Briefly, Jonathan wondered if she would leave, thoroughly embarrassed at being told off by an old man.
In slow tones, words trembling, she spoke up, “Is there nothing else you would wish for?”
“No. There is nothing an old man like me could wish other than that.” Then, without pity, because he was starting to feel like the entity might actually need it, “You asked. You granted it to me, assuming I would not go against your belief. I find, Ma'am, that it is far wiser to give restrictions before than after.”
Silence lingered longer than even before. Jonathan's eyes found it hard to focus on the lady, as her silhouette swayed as if balanced to the wind. The light flew from one corner of the room to another, each time with a greater flutter. And yet, throughout, Jonathan felt as if another pair of eyes watched his back.
Slowly, she lowered herself back to his level, floating by the curtains that hung from his bedside window. “...It will be a good lesson for the future, yes.”
“Yes, for the future.” He agreed on that much, but what she took of it, he didn't particularly care. “What about my wish now? Are you going to do it?”
“I… You do not understand, Mr. Taylor. There is not enough magic here to...”
The plea cut rather suddenly.
“Ma'am?” he asked when the words did not pick up again.
He might have asked more, had he not felt the sudden urge to cough both his lungs out. And then some. It left him shaking, fingers unsteady as they wiped the corners of his cracked lips. Mute pain radiated from his throat down to his navel. And she had expected some other wish from him?
Yet, she was still there, waiting. Politely. More so than he expected from the annoyance and irritation he had detected in her voice earlier. His ears caught the contrite tone she affected, and he narrowed his eyes in her direction. “I'm sorry, Mr. Taylor. My reluctance stemmed from my inexperience, but I believe I have found a way to grant your wish to your satisfaction.”
Jonathan would and still did say that he had experienced the full range of possible emotions, sensations and trials that any man or woman could. But this, he had to admit, in hushed tones and after copious amounts of alcohol, was new.
It was falling without gravity, unlike his three different parachute jumping experiences. It was the world spinning, without the dizzying pull of alcohol and fatigue after a good night of dancing. It was tingles in his limbs, over his skin and deeper beneath, and a swirl of colors that put even the hideous hospital gown to shame.
It was different, from even landing. It was suddenly standing, away from old creaking chairs, sterile scents and the incessant beeping of machines.
Jonathan picked up his jaw from the floor, slowly, as he gaze upon a sky bluer than it had a right to be, upon hills and hills of fresh long grass, shining under the midday sun. Upon a dirt road almost straight out of his childhood, leading to what seemed to be wooden houses and barns.
And he went to thank the Ma'am for her efforts, sincerely, when the idyllic painting first crashed.
Unless he misremembered the size of his nose in the good old days – and, from what everyone told him, most of those parts were supposed to have sagged with the later years –, the bump that filled the lower half of his sight couldn't be right. The overly respectful tone of the Ma'am made quite a good deal of sense now. A cold chill crept up on his spine, in a way that it hadn't since the encounter with the biker gang in 1964.
Jonathan stared at the stump that had replaced his hand. Then, up the curve of his arm covered in beige hair, to his shoulder and past it to his bare back and tail...What kind of ranch owner branded their animals with a bone-white cane on their flanks? And… now that he thought about it, how did one brand an animal in color? Then again, not important.
Some of the nurses and doctors in that place had thought he might have had some trouble remembering right, but Jonathan Taylor knew very well that his wish hadn't even included the word “horse”.
By the barely restrained snickers that rang light in the air, so did she. Why, the little...
“Ma'am,” he said slowly, a snarl on his face, “what is this?”
The ball of light flew off a few feet, to the top of the hill, and seemed to motion around him. “Welcome, Mr. Taylor, to the world of Equestria.”
Oh, now, what was this doohickey? Eques-what? A world?
“Beg your pardon?” he barked, glaring.
The veiled creature gave the impression of a shrug, and a mischievous one at that.
“You asked to be young and strong again,” she said, ripples of white light pulsing down to Jonathan's muzzle. Out of reflex, the young stallion snorted, a very unamused look on his face that reflected in her veil. “You should have added more restrictions if you wanted to be sure you stayed human. And on Earth.”
“And now she gets smart with me...” grumbled the teenager with a cracking voice.
A horse. On Pluto or some other planet-world-nonsense. Ridiculous! And, he thought ungraciously, it was the mark of a sore loser to be so vindictive and petty. For a wish-granting guardian angel, or whatever the missy was, she certainly did not act graciously. At all.
“I find it far easier to add restrictions before than after the fact, my dear Mr. Taylor,” she added, with an unmistakable mirth in her cheerful voice.
Oh yes, so much for the creatures of perfection he'd been told about for years. Petty and smug. Sure of her superiority after pulling a dirty trick.
…She would get along famously with his sister, that bitch.
“Have you ever been told you are insufferable?”
“Not in seven hundred years. It must be you. After all, you got what you wanted. Young and strong.”
Now the scowl on Jonathan's face faltered. Something ticked at the back of his mind. No wonder he hadn't noticed earlier. Absence was harder to notice than constant presence. Especially once someone got him worked up. But now that he thought back on the madam's words, he could feel it. The clock in his mind barely seemed to tick at all.
Jonathan scraped at the grass with the sole of his hoof, struggling not to marvel at the simple sensation. It had been so long…
Quite honestly? He could live with this. He had lived with arthritis, diabetes and increasingly severe farsightness for a few decades. Hard to really long for fingers when they had been as wooden and stiff as a hoof anyway. All the same for the rest. If his knees didn't hurt like tender little saplings in the storm anymore, he would not complain about them, even if they were backward and a bit twisted.
Jonathan Taylor lifted one of his front legs before him and flexed. A minute smile seemed to tug at the old soul's lips as he watched his muscles contract and relax, easily. Strong. He was strong again. How much could horses carry? Certainly more than three men.
“Well?” asked the spirit's chime-like voice.
“Well, what? I'm fine. This is fine.” Was it? His pride still prickled at the stunningly absurd idea. But he had far too much experience to let his doubt show on his face. “You said so, I got what I wanted, even if you are being childish about it.”
“You are coming to term with this faster than I expected,” she said, and Jonathan heard the frown she likely hid behind her veil of light. “Past experiences taught me that humans really don't take this kind of changes all this well.”
He snorted. “Disappointed?”
The blurred figure flinched, and seemed to take a lighter pink taint when she noticed Jonathan's grin. “Why would you think that?”
“Must be my imagination. You know how old people are. Always thinking that petty people are trying to one up them in some way or another, just to hide their wounded pride.”
He carefully forgot to mention that it took one to know one, but she would learn in time.
“… Worry not,” she said with a grand air that signaled an abrupt and panicked change of subject. “I have generously taken care of your papers. Since I am a professional at what I do, you will not have to answer embarrassing question on how you appeared out of thin air. Your new name is–”
“And what's wrong with my current name?” cut in Jonathan, one eyebrow noticeably higher than the other.
A loud 'pop' startled him, and he blinked as a pair of bags linked by a leather chord fell to the ground in front of his infuriatingly amused companion. Her light swung around the bags and a wind from nowhere made them tilt toward him.
The feeling that she wanted to laugh only strengthened. “Equestrians have different naming conventions than humans. Jonathan Taylor is a name that would never fly in front of most ponies you'll meet.”
So, ponies had names, and apparently papers. Ah, bureaucracy, the ultimate evil that seemed to exist through all the dimensions and universes. Wasn't that a sobering thought for a sullen old man?
With a roll of his eyes and a deep scowl, Jonathan took the bag of scrolls for himself and rummaged through until he found a very official looking square of paper. At the top, he found the words 'birth certificate' and underneath...
He nearly kicked the whole thing away. “No. You're not calling me Old Bones. That is stupid, and hurtful.”
“Too late,” said the spirit's voice with great cheer. “Here's your birth certificate and your social numbers. You'll want both when you apply for your first job.”
As if pulling teeth, Jonathan growled, “And if I don't want to apply for a job here?”
“I did not bring you any currency, Mr. Taylor. Silly me forgot. And pony society does have one, they're called bits. You'll need them if you want to sleep under a roof and eat cakes. Though I suppose there's always grass to eat...”
There was a passing moment of silence during which Jonathan considered the idea. Had he been less focused, he might have noticed his companion's shimmering veil flinching, shocked.
In truth, his thoughts hadn't focused on the mechanics themselves, but on the dizzying realization of food being so abundant. One glance left revealed fields of green for miles, stretching and stretching farther until they met the blue of the horizon. A horse needed only to lower its head, then open its mouth…
But he only needed to picture the faces his siblings would make in the afterlife, knowing that proud old Jonathan had lowered himself to graze simply to be contrarian. A name. Such a silly thing to fight about. Names didn't change him. They just irked a bit. So the choice spilled out of his mouth like venom.
“Oh, alright,” he said with a roll of his chestnut eyes, “you win this one, Ma'am, but mark my words. You haven't made a friend today, and I certainly wasn't born yesterday.”
“Biologically speaking, you would have been born about sixteen years ago.”
Sixteen. Sixteen was being born yesterday, as far as Jonathan was concerned. That tender age of new feelings and new things to discover and new looks on the world around you, and new, and new and nothing feeling quite old yet. “Youth is wasted on the young,” he said to himself. He had wasted more than a little time on frivolous pursuits, not that he would ever admit it out loud.
“What does that mean?” Ma'am wondered out loud.
“Hmm?” Jonathan turned toward her, not quite willing to talk yet.
“Youth,” she clarified, her light lingering on her companion's wrinkleless muzzle, “how can it be wasted on the young? I don't understand what that means.”
“Only old people do.”
“I am far older than you, Old Bones,” she told him, her voice tight.
“No, you're not.” Jonathan pointed a hoof at the drapes of light. “Ma'am, you might have been born a longer time ago, but you're not older. I know the difference.”
Sixteen. How old did horses live again? Whatever the number, he doubted it was seventeen, what's with how much strength seemed to just wait in his limbs. He could run for miles now, he knew. He knew and that made him grin wider than anyone had seen Jonathan do in living memory. Oh, what did he care about horses and humans?
It was stupid, but he was not going to give up on it so easily.