sadfic)

Title: A Challenge Worth Taking: Part 3

Pairing: Noteworthy/Fleur De Lis

He had a poster of her on his wall. That was nothing unusual. She was one of the premier fashion models in all of Equestria. He held no illusions that he was special in how he felt about her. Just a crush, he told himself. It would only ever be just a crush. She lived in Canterlot, after all, and very few ponies of her calibre ever came to a podunk town like Ponyville. Even fewer fell for a podunk nobody like him. Stallions born in Ponyville didn’t get supermodels.

He had tried to get out and make something of himself. His dreams of playing saxophone in a smoky club in the capital, stringing nights away with jazz, fine wine and cigarettes had turned out to be the kind of dreams you woke up from before they were done. Lack of cash and lack of interest in what he had to offer drove him back to his hometown with his tail between his legs. He only tried Canterlot once, too burned to go back. He tried other places though. He wasn’t quite ready to give up on his dreams back then. Yet the constant rebuffs in other cities and towns turned his jaded as a green rock and eventually he pitched up back at his mom’s and moved into the attic to lick his wounds and feel sorry for himself.

He used to look at the poster of her covering the cracks on the wall and talk to her. She stared back at him coquettishly, looking over her shoulder as if to say: ‘Things won’t always be as bad as they seem now.’ He would lay on his bed and stare at her, wishing he was somepony else: somepony worthy of a mare like her, instead of a podunk nobody from Ponyville.

“You didn’t let growing up poor stop you.”

She was from some tiny backwater town in Prance. Like him, she had grown up without two bits to rub together but had dreamed big and followed those dreams to Canterlot. Unlike him, however, she had found success there. She was his inspiration after so many knock-backs.

“If I can’t play in clubs, I’ll play in other places. You started out small, right?”

He had seen the photos of her as a filly, modelling foalswear in a Prench mail-order catalogue. Her freckles and braids were the antithesis of her aquiline prettiness as an adult.

“Maybe it didn’t work out the way I wanted. But I shouldn’t let that stop me. I should keep trying, just like you did. Keep moving forward. Take a few risks. Yeah.”

So he picked himself up, dusted himself off and forged out into the world again. He placed ads in as many newspapers as he could afford and played birthday parties, weddings and public events in Ponyville until he saved enough to buy a wagon and took himself on the road. He played his beloved saxophone, but also strummed guitar, sang and could bash out a happy tune on a piano if presented with one. He started giving lessons, renting out his skills to parents eager for their children to learn how to sing and read sheet music. He journeyed from Manehattan to Baltimare, picked up a host of new skills and trotted home the next Winter with an enthusiasm in his step that hadn’t been there since he first set out for Caneterlot so long ago.

It was as he was pulling his cart through the farmlands around Ponyville that he caught sight of her. At first he thought he was hallucinating. Maybe that grass he had cropped for lunch had been covered in weedkiller or something, or maybe he was more exhausted than he had thought. He blinked rapidly, but there she still was, stepping through the apple orchard on the other side of the fence he was walking beside.

He gaped. His cart came to a stop. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He opened his mouth to call out to her, to make her respond and prove she was real.

And then the big red stallion he knew owned the farm came trotting up behind her, saddlebags slung over his sides and a picnic blanket bouncing on his broad shoulders. She turned and greeted the stallion with a giggle, planting a kiss on his nose. He couldn’t hear what they said to each other, but the chaste peck quickly became a deeper kiss, and the picnic blanket slid to the ground forgotten.

He stared until embarrassment forced him to look away. They clearly didn’t know they were being watched. Quickly, he trundled off down the track, wishing his cart was less squeaky. Suddenly it seemed so old, so worn and dirty that he wanted to buck it to pieces.

He hurried into town and fetch up at his mom’s house. She opened the door full of smiles – until he shuffled past her with no more than a grunted hello.

“Oh, Noteworthy. Didn’t it work out? Your letters had me believing things were going well.”

“They were,” he replied as he climbed the stairs to his tiny attic bedroom. “But I forgot something important.”

“What did you forget? Was it your toothbrush? Your health insurance card?”

“No.”

He slammed his bedroom door shut, crossed the floor and tore down her poster. He balled it up and tossed it in the trash. He could still see her eye staring at him, crumpled but visible at the bottom of the wicker basket. He stamped on it, grinding his hind hoof down on her beautiful face.

“I just forgot that I’m the podunk nobody who isn’t meant to get the girl in the end.”

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