Ghost Lights

by Winston

Chapter 23

Ghost Lights

Chapter 23

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A few nights later, I woke up unexpectedly for no particular reason I could identify other than a sense of something being off. Nothing seemed wrong in a way I could put my hoof on, exactly, so I assumed it must have just been my imagination and decided to go back to sleep. I listened to my surroundings, hoping for some sort of soft white noise or something that would calm me.

Instead I found that it was quiet, more so than usual. When this hit me, I realized it was actually this lack of noise, a subtle missing presence, that had caused me to feel strange. Looking over to the other side of the room, I discovered that I was alone in the barracks building.

This was strange. What could Azure be doing at this late (or early) hour? With a sigh, I kicked off my blanket and headed outside, looking for my companion. I didn't think she'd be foolish enough to get herself into trouble, whatever it was, but so far in the time we'd been here it wasn't like her to wander out alone in the dark.

After I stepped outside, I looked around for any sign of where she might be. She wasn't far, it turned out. Almost immediately I saw her on top of the wall sitting silent and still, watching the sea. I flew up to join her. She looked over at me briefly as I landed, but then turned back to looking out at the water while I sat down next to her.

The night air had a slight coolness to it, and as I watched her I began to realize that Azure was pensive and uneasy. I had a feeling something was going on in her head. My warm blanket was calling and I wanted to go back to bed, but I couldn't. I felt a pulling urgency in this instead. Something told me if it wasn't addressed now, it would be too late. We would both just get up tomorrow and ignore that this happened. Even if I tried to say something about it then, she'd just shrug and tell me it was nothing, that she was fine. Worse on my part, I knew that I'd let her, even though I could tell that these things weren't nothing.

It would be the usual story. She would hide and I would run away. I always do.

Sitting there next to her on the wall, while the moment was still fresh, determination came over me instead. Not this time, I suddenly resolved. Not this time. I told myself that I wouldn't run, not if she needed me. This time... this time, we were going to talk about it, whatever it was. That last one in the sunset wasn't so horrible, was it? No. No it wasn't. I could do this.

Even as I decided that, though, the first problem presented itself, as always: how to begin. I waited a while for her to say something, in case she wanted to start. I suppose it was just wishful thinking to hope it could be that easy.

Eventually I realized I had to just make the first move. "What do you think?" I asked, waving out at the ocean we were watching. "Still like it now that we've been here a while? I never get tired of it, myself."

Azure nodded. "It's so pretty at night."

"Yes," I agreed. "It is."

"Tide's come in, too," she noted.

I just nodded. The moon overhead pulling on the water had indeed driven it to a high level. We sat there side by side and watched waves roll onto the sand, one after another. Their crests reached all the way up to the line of debris, the broken shells and strands of seaweed, that demarcated the furthest they would go.

"Thinking about anything in particular?" I asked, trying again.

"Mostly about how... nothing can stop that tide, can it?" Azure asked. She kept staring at the waves, almost as if hypnotized. "The water just creeps up and down and the whole world is helpless against it. The ocean is too big. All you can do is go along with its ebb and flow."

"Hmmm. Maybe," I said. I pondered the sea along with her for a moment, thinking about it.

"Unless, of course, you had a way to fly above the water," Azure continued. "Then you could go wherever you want. Then the whim of the tide wouldn't matter. You'd be the one who decides."

"You could just stay out of the water," I suggested. "Don't let it drag you around."

"What if that's not a choice, though? What if it's everywhere and what if I don't have wings?" Azure asked. "What if I can't stop from being swept away?"

"I guess that depends," I said. "Where do you think you'd be swept away to?"

"One of a few different places, I guess." Azure shrugged. "I just don't know if any of them are where I want to end up."

"Like where?"

"Wherever this mark on my flank takes me," she responded, "at least according to what everypony thinks it means."

"Oh, nonsense. Some stamp on your butt doesn't get to decide, and how would anypony else know the difference anyway?" I asked. "It's just a picture."

"Easy for you to say," Azure mumbled moodily. "You're a --" She caught herself. She stopped abruptly and her mouth snapped shut.

"I'm a what?"

A quick glance from Azure toward my wings said all it needed to about what she meant. "Well, aren't you expected to have that freedom? To just sort of... fly off and do your own thing, at some point?" she asked hesitantly.

"Oh, is that it, huh?" I smiled gently at Azure. "The old stereotype, the wayward irresponsible pegasus drifting the world on a whim?"

"Sorry," Azure said. She looked down contritely. "I'm just being dumb."

"No, it's alright," I said. "I guess... actually, I kind of did that. But I don't recommend doing it my way, just so you know."

Azure said nothing, but she looked at me curiously.

I took a deep breath. I had a feeling things were about to get uncomfortable, but there was no way around it. "I run away from things," I continued after a long silent moment. "If there's one defining way you could say I handle things that are hard for me, that would be it. I run."

"At least if you run, you get to follow your heart," Azure said. "You get to choose your own direction."

"That's less true than you'd think," I told her. "Just because you're following your heart doesn't always mean that it knows what it's doing. Just because it's running from what it doesn't like isn't the same as knowing it's running toward what it does. You remember that crow I told you about?"

"Yeah, I remember." Azure nodded.

"After... what I did to her... things were bad. It was never a really easy fit for me, when I lived in that town with my mother, but after that, it was like... a point of no return. I just couldn't deal with staying there anymore."

"It was that hard on you?" Azure asked.

"Yes," I said. "It was, because... my parents... let's just say they're an odd match. Mom was an earth pony farmer in a little town, and dad was a fast-flying pegasus from Cloudsdale. They met by completely random chance, and somehow out of the blue they just fell in love. It was crazy and I don't think either of them expected to, but they did. Next thing they knew they were pregnant with me and got married, so my dad moved down and they lived in my mom's house. They kinda had to. I mean, it's not like an earth pony could move up to Cloudsdale. It wasn't a perfect relationship by any means. To make a long story short, there were a lot of differences between them. They got divorced when I was about nine. My dad couldn't sit still on the ground. He had to fly, he had to be up there. It's in his blood, can't change that."

"He moved back up to Cloudsdale, then?" Azure asked.

"Yep." I nodded. "My mom had custody of me after they divorced, but they were still friends so my dad stayed in my life and visited us a lot. He dropped by all the time on weekends and days when I was off school in summer and stuff like that. I loved hanging out with him more than anything. It's pretty obvious that I'm my father's daughter. I picked up a lot of who I am from him, including being out of place down there. School was where most fillies and colts make friends, but not so much for me. There were a grand total of three pegasi in my entire grade. Three. Counting myself. The other two weren't much like me, either. Not nearly the kind of fliers I was."

"You didn't get picked on too badly, did you?" Azure asked.

"What?" I laughed a little bit. "No, not at all. It wasn't like that. They were nice to me, just... never really friends. But that was my doing. I didn't reach out much. I left them alone and they left me alone, and I guess we were all fine with that. There were a few incidents that sort of made me think it was for the best, anyway. I got in trouble sometimes for playing too rough - hip checking other little fillies and knocking them over, or getting yelled at for using my wings playing sports, that kinda stuff. I don't know if I was just an abnormal little pegasus filly who was that misplaced on the ground, or if that's typical for pegasi and the other ponies around there were on the softer side and not used to it. Whatever it was, after a while it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to fit in with any social groups, so I didn't try much.

"Anyway, it was like that until the end of my junior year in high school. I was just sort of alone doing my own thing. I liked it that way. That didn't bother me at all until that summer. That's the one when the crow showed up. After that happened and I felt like there wasn't anypony around who'd understand... I started to resent that. There was this big shift and all of a sudden that I felt like I was isolated with a bunch of strangers in an uncomfortable way that hadn't been there before, because there was nopony I could talk to. What I'd done was hard to live with on my own. It was frightening and I didn't know what it meant and I just wanted some help but there was no one. I started getting anxious and irritable because I had this secret weighing me down. So like stupid teenagers always do, I took it out on my mom. I couldn't stop feeling like it was her fault that the one pony I thought I could have told wasn't always there for me because they split up and he had to leave and live somewhere else."

"Your father?" Azure asked.

"Yep." I nodded.

"Did you ever tell him?"

"I did," I said. "It was very relieving to finally just spill it all out and have him listen. He understood, like I knew he would. He knew exactly how I felt. Unloading that was the biggest relief I've ever felt. It took a while to get the chance, though, and over time the whole thing had built up into a lot of negativity and resentment. Even afterward there was still that problem with my mother of the gap between us, the stuff I felt like I'd never be able to talk to her about, because I thought... she wasn't a pegasus, she didn't know what some of these things were like. Because of it, I didn't want to live there anymore. By that time I was easily flying myself back and forth up to Cloudsdale anyway, so I told my mom that I wanted to move to live with my dad and finish my senior year of high school up there. I think she realized, considering I have wings and she doesn't, it was probably not practical to stop me at that point. So she let me go and that was that. I just cut myself off from that place and ran to the cloud city. I mean, she's still my mom, I still love her and I still go back to visit... I just... couldn't live there. Couldn't be around her that much."

"But you turned out more or less okay in the end, right?" Azure asked. "At least as far as I can tell."

"Yeah, I suppose. I like where I ended up well enough, and... jeeze, I guess that story was kind of a lot longer than I'd intended," I said. "But the point is, it wasn't something I had much of a real choice about. Following your heart sounds romantic and all, but sometimes it's just another way of saying somepony's running away blind because they don't know what else to do and they can't help it."

"Still, there's got to be be something better than..." Azure trailed off.

"Better than what?"

"Nah." Azure shook her head. "Forget it. It's just a stupid unicorn thing."

"Hey. I know that I don't know what some things must be like for unicorns," I said, "just like there's things about being a pegasus I don't expect you to understand right off the top of your head, especially about pegasi from Cloudsdale. It's sort of a whole different world up there. But you know what I realize? That it's alright. It doesn't mean I can't listen. I might need to have it explained, and maybe I'll never get some things, but I can still listen. You can talk to me about anything you need to, you know?"

I scooted over a little more towards to Azure, then extended my wing and wrapped it around her back, pulling her closer. She settled in and leaned against my side. She seemed glad to have my company, even if she wasn't completely eager to say everything on her mind all at once. I didn't push any harder. I'd tried, at least, and I didn't think forcing it would be any good. Maybe just being there next to her was enough for now. Anything more would happen, or not, in her own time.

"It's just... I'm thinking about that thing you said the other day, the one about how you need to decide carefully about what kind of pony you want to be," she said after a few moments.

"Mmmhmm." I nodded.

"I'm worried about how much that's really possible, especially for a pony like me, a unicorn that a princess chose as a student," Azure said. She rested her head against my neck and we stayed there for a while, staring out at the sea. We both watched while the waves lapped up and down on the shore, listening to their gentle rhythmic noise in the night.

She finally let out a long, quiet sigh. "I can't stop worrying about the tide."

Comments

[Vic Fontaine]

Hmm, I sense some foreshadowing here... *du du dunnn*

[treaclewell]

Always happy to see a new chapter of this!

[Mare Serenitis]

Pegakin.

[SIGAWESOME]

That certainly was a dick move on Sunburst's Da's part. Knock up a mare, then divorce her a yew years later because she can't fly?!

You know, Azure is going about her transmogrification spell all the wrong way. Rather than enlist in the Home Guard in order to draw a posting at the Seawall arse end of Equestria to practice black-market magicks in secret isolation, she should have presented this suite of spells to Princess Twilight a a way to help blended race families like Starbursts'. She would have gotten the blessing from the Princess of Friendship and Harmony herself and received a generous research grant to boot!

Speaking of Seawall... if Starburst want to return to the sea stack towers, why does she not wait for a suitably overcast day and simply trot across the clouds (pegasus-Azure can tag along too)?

5654355

Hmm, I sense some foreshadowing here...

Same here.

Azure might as well used the Royal Canterlot Voice and created a magic neon billboard that proclaims to the whole western coast that she has issues.

[Winston]

5658085 As I'd intended it, their divorce wasn't just as simple as "because she couldn't fly", or any other one thing I could chalk to up to being the 'fault' of either of them. It was a complicated issue of a lot of personality and culture differences and a relationship they plunged into really quickly without examining those things first (because she got knocked up, yes, but I don't think either of them regrets it because the result was a daughter they both love). I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been in writing about that and maybe I could have worked at it slightly more to refine the picture, but Sunburst's story was already getting pretty long so I didn't want to go off on a total tangent and get too lost in it.

And yeah, that Azure has some things to work out has been presaged before, but now it's getting louder. We'll be seeing what becomes of that.

[Unbridled Dolly]

"Big Sister" Sunburst is adorable, I must say.

[Rayvinne]

Finally caught up! Woo!

[Meta Four]

5658085

Speaking of Seawall... if Starburst want to return to the sea stack towers, why does she not wait for a suitably overcast day and simply trot across the clouds (pegasus-Azure can tag along too)?

She mentioned before that the clouds drift inland, pretty quickly. So it would add time to her walk on the trip out to the tower, but cut time on the walk back to the mainland.

And I get the impression that the flight itself is half the appeal to Sunburst. That if she had a way to teleport to the tower, she would still want to fly out, just to prove to herself she could still do it.