The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

A Time For Memories

Some time later, after Valey and the others had finished their library meeting, Maple sat alone on the couch of Generosity Two, listening to the sounds of the shower and staring out the window. The sun was just high enough over the water that the sky hadn't started turning colors yet, and a small flotilla of sailboats idled in her view, their owners likely intending to watch the sunset too.

"I wonder how Grenada and Harshwater are doing?" she said, more to herself than anyone else. There was only the empty room to greet her, after all. "Or Gerardo and Slipstream, or everyone else who has their own place here."

"Unusual to be away from their familiar faces?" Felicity's voice asked.

Maple's ears twitched in surprise. "Felicity?"

"I was resting in the bedroom, darling." Felicity stepped out of the hall and into the living room, standing heavily and not making a move in any particular direction.

"Well, hello." Maple nodded passively, then went back to watching out the window.

Felicity hesitated. "...Mind if I join you?"

Maple patted the couch and quietly scooted over.

Felicity settled herself in, exhaling deeply, and for a moment, neither talked... but Felicity didn't stop watching Maple's eyes.

"You're looking to see where I'm looking," Maple eventually said, somehow knowing without making eye contact. "That's something a friend of mine once did a lot when I would have trouble saying what was on my mind." She turned to face her. "What are you looking for?"

"I..." Felicity's jaw hung, arrested. "Sorry, darling. You're perceptive. I was just trying to see if I was making you uncomfortable."

Maple shook her head. "Because of how you betrayed us in Stormhoof? If I was going to be uncomfortable, it would have happened while I was laid up in bed with you as my doctor. And I was. But I'm an optimist, so I was alright." She looked up. "Are you feeling uncomfortable around me?"

"Only for the prospect of doing likewise to you." Felicity hesitated. "Your... friends told me you had a history with my condition."

"Which condition?" Maple looked away again. "If it's anything to do with having to give up on your dreams, yes, I do. But do you really want to talk about that with someone you know as little as me? We haven't interacted that much."

Felicity glanced at herself, then straightened up. "I mean having children."

"Oh. That." Maple sounded detached. "Yes, I suppose I do."

Felicity limply ran a hoof through her coat. "If you don't want to talk about it, I apologize for breaching the subject. It's just, I'm likely going to be sticking with you for a while, and I'm friends with your friends, and it would behoove us to... well... I've noticed you don't start a lot of conversations with me, and I thought maybe I could clear the air."

"Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to," Maple replied. "Felicity... be honest. How did you feel when you found out you were going to have a kid?"

"This one?" Felicity sat more so that her belly was visible. "At the time, triumphant. They were... an important part of a long-running political ploy that's since been reduced beyond irrelevancy. But I felt like I had gained a valuable tool."

"And how do you feel about them now?" Maple pressed.

Felicity stared at herself. "I try not to think about it and usually get the opposite effect. It's very inconvenient. I've been told that's really not the way, but look at me, darling. Do you honestly think I'm cut out for this?"

Maple nodded coldly. "And how are you going to feel when they're stillborn, because you're weak and crippled by circumstances beyond your control? Do you really think you're in the right condition to have a live, healthy child?"

Felicity's face shadowed. "That's a question I was hoping none of you would think to ask."

"Well, I'm asking it," Maple said, tense. "Tell me how you'll feel."

"...I see where this is going," Felicity sighed. "I'm sorry. I don't want to lie, but I can't do this to you."

"Tell me!" Maple raised her voice.

Felicity dropped hers to a whisper. "...I want to say, relieved it's over. And it's the truth. But you're making me feel bad about it, darling..."

"So you won't miss them. And there's nothing you can do to change what will happen." Maple scooted slightly away. "Which might be for the best, so it doesn't hurt after you get attached. If you feel like I've been keeping my distance, that's why. I didn't want to get attached to your foal either."

"Well, don't I feel like a villain." Felicity shook her head. "I see why this conversation needed to happen, but I don't know what to say."

"There isn't a lot to say in the first place." Maple looked down. "What else are you going to do, get your hopes up? I'm not blaming you. I just know how I'll react if I start to care."

Felicity bit her lip. "Your tone suggests that not caring is already a bit of a struggle."

"It is," Maple replied. "I'm probably going to fail. But there's nothing else I can do either."

"If it's already a losing battle, you could tell me about it, if you don't mind?"

Maple shrugged. "I had a husband. I was happy. We were going to start a family. When he found out, he left. Probably because he had issues of his own. I'm sure he felt like I was a replacement for the wife in Ironridge he probably ran away from. Then I was sad. I couldn't care for myself. And whether from my state of mind or pure bad luck, my child didn't make it."

"I see."

Maple got off the couch and walked to the window. "I've recovered a lot since then, but I've always had issues. Children are fine. Newborns are fine. I love children. But ones who haven't been born yet? I get the most terrible sense of apprehension that cripples my mind. It doesn't matter how things are going or how healthy they are, I just... But then there's you. And yours already feels like a lost cause, so I'm just trying to stay detached. That's how I feel. Maybe we can be friends properly when it's over."

Felicity swallowed. "Well... perhaps we can." She closed her eyes and added, "Do you want me to tell you the odds?"

"It won't make much of a difference," Maple replied. "They'll be zero to me. But you can say them."

When Felicity didn't respond, she added, "What I really wouldn't like to hear is what you could have been planning that wouldn't have been thrown off when they didn't make it."

"...Given my age, species and roughly calculated exposure to the poisoned water." Felicity looked away. "They gave me a sixty percent chance, before I started the whole plan, that they'd be born normally, but would be sterile. Thirty-five that they wouldn't make it, either in the womb or before they were five. Five percent that they'd be normal."

"Ninety-five that you could get the nobility's hopes up somehow," Maple whispered. "Make them think their line is saved by your partner's indiscretion. And then it would all fall apart for them."

"I thought you didn't want to know," Felicity prodded.

Maple shook her head. "That doesn't stop my mind from being active."

"Well, you're right," Felicity sighed. "The whole point was to throw a wrench into the gears of the monarchy. One that someone, someday would be mad about, and when it happened I could point to Izvaldi and that foul mine spillage and say, 'There! That's what ended your line, sphinx!' Because the lord whose fault it was had already died, you see. There was nothing left to take revenge upon but their reputation. I couldn't hurt the ones who were responsible, but I could send them down in history... and that's what I was trying to do. Though it wouldn't have hurt to be the mother of royalty."

Maple sighed. "You don't get what children are at all, do you?"

"I'm aware that's an unhealthy way of looking at things," Felicity answered. "It doesn't necessarily mean I'm familiar with the right one."

"They're your hopes and dreams for the future," Maple said. "They're a promise to yourself that you're going to spend the next two decades of your life being everything for someone. They're a mirror that reflects everything you put into and give them... love and joy and happiness and knowledge, but bad things too, so you have to be careful and raise them wisely. They're the ponies who matter above everything else to you, and because you have something you can care that much about, because they depend so much on you, they make you matter, too."

Felicity quietly watched her.

"At least, that's everything I used to tell myself." Maple's ears fell. "It turned out to be too romantic for reality. I guess I wouldn't know either way, because I've never really had a kid now. And I never had true love, either. I could give just as big of a speech about what I wanted it to mean to be married."

Felicity nodded her along. "Don't let me stop you."

Maple sighed. "But what does it matter? All of my ideas about this came from Willow, anyway. She's like me and Amber's big sister. But it turned out that her husband... To him, she was just a replacement too. Because that's how things have been for the last ten years in Riverfall. So I have my wishful thinking, and have never even seen what they're based on in reality. I don't know if they exist."

"Well, you have Starlight, don't you?" Felicity pointed out. "I do have to say this marital structure of Riverfall sounds very messed up, but what about her?"

"Starlight is..." Maple smiled distantly at the window, but the smile soon fell. "She's different. I don't know what she is. Recently, she told me... that all this time, I've been treating her like my big sister. Not that I've wanted to. I want to be someone larger than life to her, who she can count on to fix anything, who she can come to when she's scared and who can make everything alright. And... I really have tried. Saving us from the mercenaries in the Ironridge Flame District? Keeping her alive even when I was paralyzed and she was about to disappear and die? In situations like these, no matter how much a normal family loved each other, they wouldn't have made it. The parents would have met their limit for what they could do for their kids, and... it would all be over. I'm not a metaphorical superhero. I'm an actual one."

Slowly, her demeanor trailed off, and she shook her head. "But that isn't what Starlight needs. Next to her, I feel tiny. I can do that, but she's saved me from that monster that beat Garsheeva. If I'm a superhero, she's... whatever is two steps above that. She's the one who's larger than life. And with children, it shouldn't be about what you are, but what they see you as. No one is perfect, but you can be perfect to them. And she'll say I'm perfect, and she'll mean it, but... she knows too much about what kind of place the world is to feel like I can fix everything. She's too jaded. I don't know what to do."

"...That sounds like quite the dilemma indeed," Felicity finally said. "You've given a whole lot of thought to this."

"I have." Maple nodded. "Once Willow started her family and I got to help raise her foals, and I started feeling like this was what I wanted to do with my life, well... I thought about it." She looked up. "Does that satisfy you, though? Does that explain why I'm being distant? I don't mean to hold you at length. I'm sure you're a fine mare. I just..."

"Apology completely accepted, darling." Felicity nodded in return, then went back to looking out the window. "And... thank you for telling me. I suppose I needed to hear that. Because whether you feel it's inevitable or not, the odds are two in three I will have to learn to care for this foal, and my head isn't quite far enough in the sand for me to deny that it's in the sand about this."

Maple looked sadly at her. "You really did have no plan for how to raise them beyond calling yourself the mother of royalty, did you?"

"That might be stretching it," Felicity admitted. "But you could say that. I didn't live long enough in Mistvale to get an idea of how their family units work, but in Gyre... your allies were your family, and vice versa. Ponies survived in villages that were like packs or clans. The lower-class ones, at least, and the ones who didn't go it on their own... Children were how you replenished your numbers when recruiting allies from outcasts or wanderers wasn't fast enough. There wasn't much of this husband-and-wife stuff. You just had children within your village or clan so you wouldn't die out within the next generation."

"You lived like that?" Maple whispered.

Felicity shrugged. "Not quite, but I saw a lot of it. We tended to be transient, in part because our mother wanted to keep us close instead of letting us be lost amid such a loose structure."

"Because she wasn't native to Gyre, right?"

"Her and myself were from Mistvale." Felicity shook her head. "She used to be a cleric of the Night Mother. Had her own ideas about how things should be done. Rarely had the opportunity to follow them, especially as time wore us further and further down. For a while, we traveled with a monk who left for the same reasons my mother did. He wasn't my father, but became Senescey's. After he died was when things went really downhill for us. It helped so much, having someone around who knew how to fight..."

Maple's face rose. "So you did have something resembling a family?"

"Well..." Felicity shifted in her seat. "It was an arrangement purely for the purposes of survival. I'm not entirely sure why he stuck with us, but it wasn't love so much as keeping each other safe. He was the one who taught me Mistvale arts, and he certainly didn't intend for me to use it to spare ponies' lives."

"But you said he was Senescey's father," Maple pointed out.

Felicity shrugged. "You've seen how I turned out."

Maple bit her lip. "...I'm going to make some tea and clear my head. You wouldn't mind if we continued?"

"Not at all, darling." Felicity waved a hoof. "It seems getting to know each other was long overdue."

Comments

[Phoenix Kitten]

...for some reason, I have the feeling that Felicity is not going to make it through foaling that Sphinx.

[Oberth Effect]

It's been a while since we've had some time with Maple. At least she isn't falling apart, although it seems she certainly could be doing better.

I didn't realize that was Felicity's plan. I'd feel pretty bad for the foal if it was born into that kind of circumstance.

Seems we may be learning a bit more about Felicity in the coming chapter(s)?