Paper Crows
The air was stuffy, hot, dusty and Jonathan had never quite laughed so much simply for breathing without feeling his body burn on the inside. He could take the deepest, fullest inspirations he had done in years and still not be racked with coughs and pains. It made his insides light, his heart fluttering, and he was using all of his self-control not to frolic because Ma'am's light still shone barely a few steps ahead of him.
She had insisted – reasonably enough – that Jonathan headed to the town as soon as possible so he could get himself a roof to sleep under tonight. And for that...
“You should head to the mayor's office first,” she told him. “There, you will be able to register and probably ask around for work and lodging.”
“Not my first time getting a job, Ma'am,” he grumbled under his breath.
The veils of light paused. When her voice caught up with him, it sounded a mixture of irritation and mischief. “Well, listening to you talk, I admit to being surprised any employer could tolerate you long enough to hire you.”
Jonathan tried rather hard not to smirk. Oh, if only she knew...
“I can be a lot more charming than you think, Ma'am. Besides, what would you know about this? Have you ever had a job?”
“What do you think this is?”
Oddly enough, she had not sounded dismissive. Merely curious. What did he think that this whole wish-granting was? Jonathan had to admit, he did not know.
He could admit that to himself, in secret, while no one was looking at him. He still had a reputation to uphold, even if this was indeed a whole new world. But deep down, really, he hadn't cared all that much what it was to the creature of light as long as it was real.
“You being bored,” he settled on.
Ma'am fluttered ahead. “I do not know boredom. I have seen towns being built and destroyed and in that same span, never once experienced boredom, Old Bones. Now, come. The mayor's house is the one at the end of the road, over there. With the red roof.”
A scowl on his face, Jonathan reluctantly looked in the direction she floated. He took little notice of the tall wooden farmhouses on each side of the road, despite their impressive shadows in the early daylight. A few signs depicting chickens, pigs or horses caught his attention, but even those were only filled to the back of his head. His eyes only settled when they found a bright, vibrant tomato red roof, perched atop of a stout wooden and stone house.
It made for a very interesting sight amidst the much older looking farms, he decided.
Then, he heard an angry yell, and saw a looming figure in a cloud of dust headed his way.
With a skip, he jumped away from a coming carriage pulled by a much bulkier brown stallion. Dazed, Jonathan did not even let loose the string of insults that he felt take place at the tip of his tongue. Further proof that he was completely out of it.
No matter, he figured while he readjusted his saddlebags on his flanks. He would have plenty of time to insult and yell at whomever he wished later. Years even. For now, settling down for the near future was more important.
Jonathan took a few steps to the side back in patches of grass as opposed to the hardened dirt road in the middle of town. This way, no pony would run into him unless they were drunk. And this way, he could run his gaze over the rows of farmhouses and barns that seem to be the backbone of this little town. These tall, wooden buildings brought back memories of his childhood in the countryside, moving to the rhythm of a busy life with plenty of little horses running around to their hearts' content.
He eyed a group of three children laughing and playing a game of tag through the street, darting and jumping around the empty porches bordering the road.
“Must be a weekday,” he said out loud, a bit too casually for anyone with a trained ear.
The Ma'am took the bait, hook and sinker. “How… how did you know that, Old Bones?”
“There's no stall set up anywhere in the main street. It's the same in every little town I saw. Producers like selling their produces. A shocking truth. But they have a lot of fields to tend to, so they set-up a day for all of them to sell and buy and gossip all over the market place. There's practically no one today, so I'm guessing it's one of the busy days.”
“Well, I guess you can't be only grumpiness and sourness incarnated...” Ma'am snidely commented under her breath.
“A real shame too.” The old man ran his tongue over his lips. “It's been years since I was allowed a good slab of beef. Even more so one that was fresh from the farmers.”
Too tough for his teeth. For his stomach. For his delicate pancreas or intestine or everything. At some point, it had really just sounded the nurses taking revenge for the sponge baths. An eye for an eye, degradation for degradation. But now, now that he was young, and healthy and free from his damn chair…
He noticed, with no small amount of distress, that Ma'am hovered silently at his side. He could not feel her gaze on his skin, not even a little.
“Yes, about you eating meat,” she began with a strange offset white color to her light. “You can't.”
His brows shot up right into his hairline. “Pardon?!”
A few blades of grass lifted in the air, as if cut one by one by a person needing something to occupy their hands. A person, or a child. “Ponies can't eat meat. It's just how it is.”
His lips curled into a snarl before he even processed the words. “That's a load of lies! I've seen horses eat little critters that got in their ways all the time when I was working on the railroad!”
“You're not an actual Earth horse, Old Bones.” The spirit's voice held a note of urgency and none of the previous teasing. It was enough to give her companion pause. “You're an earth pony.”
Jonathan's brows furrowed. “That's basically the same thing.”
“No, I meant, you're an earth pony, not an Earth horse. A… not the planet, but a tribe of ponies with a link to the earth, soil, dirt.” For a brief moment, the light dimmed and floated down, as if exhaling a long sigh. “Curse mortals and their confusing languages. You just can't eat meat. Even if the horses back in your old home could, the ones here can't. You can't.”
He had half a mind to find a steak and gobble it down just to prove that he could, but he wasn't quite that prideful. Oh, he had plenty of it, more than enough to make people pull their hair and scream, but his own health wasn't a thing he was willing to risk.
It would be so easy to think that he was back there, sitting, waiting with the drip in his arm and the pain in his legs. For the shortest instant, Jonathan's nostrils tickled with the sterile, dead smell of a hospital chamber.
Jonathan hurried his steps toward the red-roofed home, and muttered sullenly, “What can I eat?”
“Oh, vegetables, grains, most forms of sugar and pastries. Eggs are okay if cooked or in recipes. Some ponies can eat fish, but it's more of an acquired taste.”
A pair of ponies ahead of him wisely trotted out of his way.
Fish! Of course, he could eat fish, but not meat. The Ma'am truly felt a staggering hatred for him.
“So, horses, ponies… they can eat fish?” But no steak – was the very clipped undertone to his question.
“Pegasi do,” she replied with an invisible shrug. It took three full seconds for the spirit of light to stop, hovering in midair as if struck by a thought. “Well, that's probably something you should know as well. There are three sub-species of ponies in Equestria. Earth ponies like you, winged ponies called pegasi and horned ones called unicorns. They're the ones using magic. See those objects floating in the air? That's the unicorns using levitation spells.”
“Spells?” He knew he shouldn't be skeptical, he really knew that deep down, but the idea that people casually did what the Ma'am did… Oh, that didn't sit too well with his old bones. His tail, blasted thing, flicked to the side nervously, and Jonathan put on a neutral sour face. “Let me guess: the ones with wings can fly.”
Ma'am sighed. “You're a grump, Old Bones.”
Jonathan forged straight on ahead, and kept an eye out for the red roof. “I have been, and I quote, a good if colorful man in my days.”
She had nothing to say to that, and he considered it a point for himself.
Silence should have followed that. His hearing had been one of the few senses that had never deteriorated in Jonathan, but it seemed, as his ears twisted on top of his head, that even that meant little in comparison to that of a horse. So many little noises echoed around him, louder when his ears turned in the right – or wrong – direction. In the back of his mind, he could somehow think on their location in comparison to him. That was how he could hone in the two prim voices that suddenly caught his attention before he ever saw them at a house's window.
Two mares, mothers and good-thinking madams of this little village he would wager, exchanged worried looks while trying very hard not to glance in his general direction.
With a frown, he nodded toward the gossiping mares, “Why are they looking at me like that?”
“Nopony else can see me, Old Bones.”
“That explains that,” he grumbled low. “And stop calling me Old Bones, Ma'am. You know that's not my name.”
The light fluttered closer to his face, and he was certain she was impish behind those blasted veils of hers. “Well, you have to get used to it, don't you? It defines who you are and it's what other ponies will call you for the rest of your life.”
“Watch me.”
Jonathan stomped his way up the small stairs and through the half-opened doors of the mayor's house. And nearly stumbled to a grounding halt. A wave of dusty, inky old smell hit his nostrils with a strength that was quite unlike the crisp air outside. While the streets carried on the same hints of earth and wheat and horse, the hall he found himself in was all muted colors, pale beige paint that peeled off the walls in scales, monotone clicks of hooves over a typewriter and but the vaguest hint of mud on the floor.
It breathed and smelled and probably ate bureaucracy.
“That's some face you're making,” Ma'am said, a strange note of worry held within. “Jonathan?”
The old young stallion grunted. His brown eyes flicked to the hovering light for the span of a heartbeat, and in that time, they showed a deep annoyance. If he was the only one that could hear her, then he wouldn't reply and make a fool of himself.
At the desk, the only piece of furniture on the ground floor apart from a billboard sadly void of any offer, a petite mare with an outrageous cherry red coat looked up just long enough to see who had entered the mayor's house. Then went back to her typing.
Jonathan's ears and eyes twitched. The mare could have been a nurse, for sure. “I'm here to find some work,” he called, loudly clearing his throat. “Heard this was the place.”
The clicks of the typewriter continued.
“Anything in particular?” she asked with a dull, even voice. “We are first and foremost a farming community.”
With a wide confident grin, Jonathan puffed out his chest and gestured to the air. “Puh-lease, madam, I can do anything. I've been all over the world. There's no job that would be too hard, no task to scare me. Show me a field and it'll be blooming with whatever plants you want in three days.”
Her green, half-lidded eyes darted from left to right on her paper. “Mhmm.”
Now, Jonathan had new teeth. And he did not want to file them down too quickly. But he needed serious effort not to grind them together in the face of this soulless creature. Maybe if he spoke her strange language… “I brought my papers.”
Of course, that got the mare to look up, and hold out a hoof expectantly.
Oh, sometimes, he just wanted the world to prove him wrong. But alas, that never happened. With a long-suffering sigh, the old soul foraged through his saddlebags to pull out what Ma'am had told him were proper papers.
“Ah, I see, young stallion on the road, looking to make his fortune at the sweat of his hooves. Name is… Old Bones, correct?” the bureaucrat asked, one eyebrow slightly raised.
He kept on his proud confident smile, barely. “Call me Taylor.”
In the corner of his eye, he distinctively caught sight of Ma'am, huffing in indignation. The words 'no respect' and 'all that effort' were uttered, but clearly could not be more than mad ramblings.
“I'm afraid I cannot address ponies as anything but their proper, documented names.”
Jonathan wondered. Surely, there was a way to get the Ma'am to stop laughing. Surely.
But he doubted it would be discreet enough not to be noticed by the mindless servant of bureaucracy in front of him. So he endured. “Damned whippersnappers…” he muttered through his teeth.
“I see you left your special talent checkbox blank. So, what is it? Your cutie mark,” the clerk repeated, pointing a hoof toward Jonathan's flanks. “What does it represent? What's your special talent? Most employers will ask before considering your candidature.”
Clearly, the mare behind the desk had long since mastered the art of sounding bored out of her mind. Otherwise, the simple act of asking those questions should have at least changed the inflection of her voice. Perhaps then, it would have lost some of its hypnotic power.
Luckily for him, Jonathan had mastered the art of bullheading his way through problems. His chronic insomnia in his later years might have helped keep a clear head as well.
“My special talent is not asking so many questions.”
From Jonathan's left rose a deep, breathless chuckle. “Really? Sounds like an interesting talent.”
For the first time since coming into town, Jonathan truly startled. That stranger somehow entered through the same entry as him, without making a sound. And that, as Jonathan looked up, he could not quite understand. The stranger, a black stallion with a shining coat, looked down to Jonathan with amused marine eyes.
His head still full of that nonsense on special talents, Jonathan could not help himself and gazed as discreetly as possible at the taller stallion's flanks. At first, he believed there was nothing, for his croup seemed a full, unbroken black, but he then caught the way the light reflected differently on that spot. Vaguely, his eyes squinting, Jonathan made out the faint shape of a pair of crossed blueish feathers.
“Name's Scare Crows,” – Jonathan schooled his expression. Even if that name was properly ridiculous – “and my special talent is actually accounting, administration and booking, in case you were oh so subtly wondering.”
Pride won over decency, and Jonathan remained stoic. Though, now he searched that abyssal-black face for a hint of his age. He hadn't sounded too different from some of the younglings Jonathan knew... “So, why are you here now? Are you hiring?”
“Yeah,” the stallion replied, still breathless, looking around the near empty town hall, “at this point, I'll take pretty much any earth pony that wants the job.”
Jonathan's ears perked up, which he himself had no idea on how or why. He put it back to a little corner of his mind, stepping forth to better look at his prospective. Desperate employer offered good conditions, generally. However, there usually was a reason they were short-handed. He had learned that once. Once.
“You said your name was Scare Crows, right?” Ma'am had told him pony names were great indicator of who they were as a person. What was it suppose to tell him about a black stallion like that? That he stood in fields all day and shouted at birds?
“Why, yes. I'm the owner of the wheat and oat farm at the end of the road.”
“Inherited?”
The question obviously startled him. It was after all intrusive, with a very impolite undertone. Perhaps Jonathan should not have asked, considering how sour the meeting might turn if his question was ill-interpreted. Scare Crows had yet to speak up.
But the question registered, truly, and something changed in the way he held himself. A spark lit up in the stallion's dark blue gaze. His polite smile widened into a full-blown grin. “Nope. Started my own. And I'll be expending again next year.”
Pride. He recognized its shade in the youth's bearing. Hard-earned, fought for, pride. The best kind, in his humble opinion.
Jonathan whistled low. “Damn, Son, that's mighty impressive. Not many your age I saw with that kind of enterprising streak. Doing something with your life. Good. Keep it up.”
Scare Crows blinked, then shook his head and rubbed the back of his head. “Right, so I would need a farmhoof to help with the crops. It's bigger than expected, and my workers aren't quite keeping up. Shouldn't waste an opportunity is what I think.”
Jonathan could not help nodding along. “You're right. Seize the moment, Son. Every occasion is like an old friend wanting to reunite after long years apart. If you keep waiting till next time, eventually they'll stop knocking at your door. So, what is your crop like?”
“You know,” Scare Crows started with a chuckle, “you said you were good at not asking questions, but you've been quizzing me more than the opposite.”
Jonathan did not, even in the slightest, blush a nice tomato red. However, he might have heard Ma'am shocked gasp, and that wasn't any better.
It got worse when the black stallion's rich laugh rose in concert. “Ah, sorry, sorry, I wasn't serious or anything. I just thought that was funny,” he said, his pearly white teeth contrasting vividly with the rest of his appearance. “So, Old Bones, huh?”
“Taylor is fine,” Jonathan tried. He had to. Someone would pick him up on that offer eventually. Then Ma'am would see who was laughing snidely behind who's back.
“Ah, afraid I can't just go calling my employees by their nickname. It's not very professional.” To be fair, Scare Crows did look sheepish, one hoof rubbing at the back of his head, his grin turning into a smaller smile. “Anyway, I really need the extra help in the fields as soon as possible, so are you good to start today?”
Jonathan's every effort could not reign in a deadpan, “Son, I did this long before you were born. I can start anytime, anywhere.”
A firm black hoof snaked itself around Jonathan's neck and pulled him closer. Jonathan's brief bout of stuttering was muffled into the equally dark coat his mouth was pushed against, but he heard his new employer's grin. “Now, that's stallionly talk. Kind of old timey, and weird in your mouth. But still, stallionly. I love it, Old Bones. Come, I'll show you the fields and the work I want from you.”
Phew, finally got settled in the UK for a year-long job. THings got a bit hectic, and I suffered from a lack of wifi in ways I had not imagined I would.
But that's done. Hopefully, I'll be a bit more productive nowadays.
In the meantime, enjoy Mix-up's newest coverart. Praise be given. Here on fimfiction, or on dA for those of you that prefer that website.
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Interesting plot, can't wait to see how it pans out.
That's... actually a good question. Is she getting paid for this? Or is it more like community service? Now there's a question most stories certainly don't pose.
Heh. I just love how Old Bones keep calling people as if he's older then them while being the youngest one.
7772008 And yet, I was expecting something very mundane, like "Because I can".
I wonder how long she'll stick around, she's making a fine comedy duo with our main character.
7772048
Those two have some seriously great chemistry with each other.
It's why I made that crack on the first chapter about this being a really great setup for a stealth romcom.
I actually quite like this story. I hope to see new chapters, keep up the good work
7844340
I discovereded that already.
7868337 But the act of taking the life gives value to the one that took it, so the value of the actions that may have been is passed to the one that took the life.
7868835
I see you condone murder. Strange philosophy.