The Anatomy of Aesthetics

by AltruistArtist

Fig. 6. — The Bones (of an Untold Story)

FLAIRE D’MARE TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

NEW WONDERBOLTS DESIGNER REVEALS TRAGIC ACCIDENT THAT LED TO HER EMPLOYMENT | PROMISING YOUNG AVIATOR SWIFT KICK IN EARLY RETIREMENT

The headline leered from newsstands and porches throughout Canterlot. Flaire’s name, written in ink, was the first thing anypony saw when they sat with their morning coffee, reaching for the paper.

“Flaire.” The textile shop cashier – Paisley Pincushion – waved at her from the door of the shop on her way home. She tilted her head. “Did you ever… end up mentioning my name to General Flash?”

Flaire tugged her hat over her eyes too late, already noticed. She lifted her cigarette from her lips. “No, Paisley. I didn’t.”

Paisley nodded. “That’s good. I’d actually rather he not know it. After today’s news and all.” She grimaced, shaking her head. “That poor stallion who fell… He must be just ruined now.”

Today’s news was just as platitudinous as its cousin, incident report. Today’s news was tomorrow’s gossip was yesterday’s tragedy. It paled to the reality of the stallion now trembling in bed at his parents’ home, staring out at the sky through his window, blue and open and free. A place that never should have been able to hurt him.

Flaire turned over the ‘Closed’ sign on her boutique door. She did what she always did. She doffed her hat and put a crackling record on. She nursed the inner wound with tea and cigarettes.

And she sat, waiting, with the expectation of General Flash to arrive.

The sun was setting when – “Oof!”– somepony grunted, just outside. Hooves clattered on the cobblestones.

Flaire pulled back her velveteen curtains. A dusky rose mare shook out her short shock of red mane. She lifted her head, meeting Flaire’s eyes through the glass.

“Lady,” Fairy Flight mouthed. “We gotta talk.”

—

“It was the only thing I could do,” Flaire said.

Fairy was pacing in her living room, the tip of a primary feather between her clenched teeth. “So, when you were talking about getting General Flash’s attention…?”

“Yes. And, I’m sorry Swift’s name was caught in the middle of it.” Flaire lifted her head. “Do you know him well? Is he all right?”

Fairy came to stop by the window, the view of the stage out beyond the glass. Her wing dropped. “Yeah. I visited him this morning, after the news broke. I don’t think he knows what to make of it being public. He’s just trying to… feel better, you know? Quietly, at home.”

“I want that for him,” Flaire insisted. “That’s part of why I did this. It shouldn’t be a secret, what happened to him. I think it should be talked about.”

“Yeah, but… through the Canterlot Chronicle? To be read by a bunch of snooty unicorns? Lady, non-pegasi just don’t get this sort of thing.” Her eyes were darting, jerking upward. Flaire knew she was fighting to not let her gaze land on her horn.

Flaire stressed, “I want things to change, Fairy. Same as you. I didn’t even know about fall-shock until Flash described it to me. And nopony knew about the accident. Nopony has ever known. I can’t recall a single story detailing the — the tradition of accidents the Wonderbolts have been built on.”

She rose to sit at the edge of her chaise, mane falling about her face, beseeching those youthful amber eyes above her. There was always something relaxed about Fairy’s attention, something about the soft droop of her eyelids, like life was this easy, unhurried thing that could be floated through — rather than endured with bared teeth.

“General Flash talks as though suffering accident and injury is normal,” Flaire said. “But it shouldn’t be. It isn’t normal at all to be hurt.”

“To get hurt,” Fairy corrected.

Flaire blinked. “Sorry — what?”

“You said to be hurt. You know, like it’s something you are. Hurt is something that can happen to you, sure, but it’s not you.”

Fairy took a seat on the green couch opposite Flaire. She rocked back on her haunches, fiddling with her forehooves. Her eyes fell askance. “You get where I’m coming from, right? I’m sure you do, lady; you put so much attention into how things look. Sometimes, when it comes to how things get spun in the paper about ponies who’ve been hurt, it can look, well, not great. Like the hurt ones are abnormal, rather than the ones allowing the hurt to happen. That’s what I worried about for Swift.”

Flaire’s ears drooped and a deft squeezing sensation grasped her heart. “You’re right. And, I’m sorry. It’s a miserable thing that he’s enduring. But… it isn’t him. He’s not lesser for it.” Her hooves threaded up through her mane, her chin tipping back with a wretched sigh. “I think I wanted ponies to see that, too. Even though I have gone about it with such an utter lack of grace.”

The backward tilt of her head completed its arc and she reclined on her chaise, hooves curling over her chest. And at the risk of sounding dreadfully appropriative, Flaire asked, “Do you think… anypony can get fall-shock? Even if they haven’t fallen? Maybe they’ve… seen somepony else fall. And they haven’t been well for a long time. And they know what being well should look like, because they know the name and shape of every part of the equine body. Just not the name for their own unwellness.”

Fairy’s brows knitted, processing. She crossed the floor, hopping up to sit beside Flaire. Fairy extended a wing, feathers running down Flaire’s shoulder, and it surprised her, even though this wasn’t the first time. It surprised her that another pony could just reach out and touch her. She was the one who did the touching, examining and adjusting bodies on her fitting platform, assessing. These moments of quiet, attentive intimacy just did not happen to her.

“There’s a lot you’re not telling me, lady.” A quick, sad grin pressed up Fairy’s dimple. “Something I bet that’s been going on in that clever mind of yours, all this time.”

Flaire swallowed, and said, breathlessly, “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about it. But, at the same time, I think it should be talked about.”

“Is it something you need to say to General Flash?”

“Yes.” Flaire’s ears pinned. “Never once have I been able to get him to listen to me in a way that matters. I did everything right, everything he asked, and still…” She snorted, weakly. “I expected it to be him who showed up at my door, after this morning’s news.” Her eyes lifted to Fairy’s face. “But — I’m glad it was you.”

Fairy’s brows furrowed. “Flash isn’t really the type to confront things like that. You know, the night after the Summer Sun Celebration, I was the one who convinced him to talk to you. So, I guess on more than one occasion, I’m glad it was me, too.”

The following silence was gentle, silken as a pegasus feather. It was imperfect, disturbed by the faint rush of Fairy’s breath, the rustle of Flaire’s coat as it was stroked by her wing. But that’s what made it soothing, the lack of absence.

“I need to talk to him,” Flaire said, still deliberating her choice even as she gave the statement life with her smoke-crackled voice. “Could you help me arrange a meeting with him? At the Wonderbolts barracks, or wherever I’d find him at this time?”

Fairy’s wing withdrew. She nodded, forced a smile, and said, “Future-Admiral Fairy Flight at your service,” performing a weak salute. “Given the time, and the circumstances, I doubt he’s at the barracks. I’m willing to bet he’s at a bar right now.”

Flaire blinked. “He drinks?”

“Yeah, pretty often I’d say.” Fairy tipped her head. “You seem surprised about that.”

Behind the soft, rosy edge of Fairy’s shoulder, a cigarette was crushed in Flaire’s ashtray, a meek smoke wisp still rising from the ash pile. She snuffed it out the moment Fairy arrived, maintaining Flash’s one request for the wellbeing of his troop. Staring at it now, Flaire realized she wasn’t surprised at all.

—

Canterlot bars catered to one type of drinker. They were upscale, dark oak gentlestallion clubs, walls hung with gilded portraits of long-deceased nobility. Flaire once haunted the various locales after long nights of coursework at the Canterlot Institute of Medicine, a white-faced ghost in a dim corner booth nursing her wounds. There was an art to sipping overpriced bourbon under the stodgy air of ennui that mired over the occupants like a cloud of smoke. An art that Flaire became very good at.

The Cloudsdale bar Fairy flew her up to was not designed for this art. Laughter and the click of billiards filled the space; a jaunty jazz arrangement turned under a phonograph needle. There was a brightness here, light as air, a place unsuited to Flaire’s grim face and determined stride. She had never been to Cloudsdale and expected the upper atmosphere of the floating city to have whisked away all her Equus-bound anxieties, same as rushing through the sky under Fairy’s wings. But her cloudwalking spell made the cloudfloor firm beneath her hooves, and with it, a bearing for the great weight of her disquietude.

Heads turned over shoulders as she passed, darting upward glances at her horn. Fairy Flight was beside her, a wing hovering over Flaire’s back.

General Flash had found the sole murky corner of the venue. He was seated at the bar counter, his deep teal cap spotlit under the amber lamp overhead, the silver in his mane aglow. A lowball glass of something dark rattled under his hoof.

All of Flaire’s anger came back in one hot rush. Her hooves clicked across the wood-paneled floor. She took a seat beside him, and Fairy murmured behind her. Flash did not look up.

A languid pegasus bartender drifted over. “What can I get you?”

Flaire glanced at the syrupy amber in Flash’s robust glass. “Whatever he’s having.”

The bartender nodded, turning to uncork a bottle. Flaire pulled a cigarette from her dress pocket, the tip of her horn clicking with a spark, and inhaled a long drag. Blowing out a thin cloud, she turned to Flash and asked, “Do I have your attention now?”

Flash’s ear flicked. He lifted his glass to his lips, his throat bobbing, the ball of ice rolling. Setting it back upon the bar counter, he glanced out of the corner of his eye. “Flaire. Why did you do this?”

She nickered. “I believe I asked you first.”

Flash sighed. “Then, yes. You have my attention.”

The bartender set a glass down in front of her. Flaire pulled her cigarette from between her teeth and downed her whiskey in a single belt. Her voice was rough. “Five years ago, I bought the property for my boutique on Canterlot city square. It was a premiere location, and dear Celestia was it expensive. But I was assured it would drive business traffic. Even if, from my living room window, was the view of a stage I still see in my nightmares.”

Fairy Flight’s hooves rocked on the creaky wooden floor. Flaire felt her questing presence over her shoulder.

“That first year at my boutique, I witnessed the Wonderbolts perform at the Summer Sun Celebration through that window. It ended, as it always did, with its traditional final act: a flashing explosion of magical lightning. I didn’t sleep that night. I cried like I did the day it happened.”

Flash’s eyes were sealed shut, his jaw tense. His ears were tipped backward.

“You were speaking in the square the next day. There was a line of foals there to meet you and I waited behind them. And when it was my turn, I petitioned you with a simple request. To stop performing the lightning act at the annual show. Because it can hurt ponies. Because it did.”

She inhaled fiercely on her cigarette, ash crumbling on the counter. Exhaling a long smoke stream, she said, “So tell me, why did I see that lightning through my window the following year?”

Flash winced. His stiff posture rocked into the table, swaying and sodden. “I remember you.”

“Oh, now?” The slow, incantatory heat of inebriation crept in. “How about at the start of this partnership? Is that why you commissioned me?”

The muscles in his throat contracted. “I commissioned you because you were skilled. Observant and intelligent. And you were…" he sighed, "close to the incident with Swift. I feared a third party would bring it to the paper.”

“How lovely! You dragged me in as a part of your damage control, then?” Flaire waved her hoof, beckoning the bartender for another drink.

“It seems we both had our motives.” Flash downed the remainder of his glass. “So what was your cause for getting close to us? Revenge? I’d understand that, if you hated us.”

Flaire’s hoof struck the bar counter. “I love the Wonderbolts! I loved you — she loved you. There is so much wonder and goodness you bring to Equestria but it cannot come at the endangerment of ponies' lives. All I wanted was to convince you that it does not have to be this way.” She bared her teeth. “But when I asked for change, what did you say?”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Flash, a guttural gasp.

“I’m asking you, Flash.”

“‘If it wasn't safe for her… your sister shouldn’t have come to the show.’”

The cigarette filter crunched under Flaire’s teeth, the paper damp and bitter. “And how was she meant to know? How was I? When there was no warning?”

"We've added them since. Because of her. Because of..." Flash was kneading between his brows. “When you spoke to me five years ago… why didn’t you tell me sooner?” He turned to her. The shadows under his eyes were pronounced. “Why not come to me after it happened?”

“Because I was nine years old.”

The bartender delivered her second drink. She drained it.

Flash was chuckling in drunk despair. “Do you know how much you horrified me? For over twenty years… I had been performing at the Summer Sun Celebration, never knowing the pain I caused. For over twenty years, our show concluded with the magical lightning. When you came to me that day and told me your story, all I could think was: how many others? How many others in that time might have…”

Flaire was breathing hard. “You added warnings. But you didn’t stop?”

“I don’t know how.”

The wet amber light of the bar throbbed in time to Flaire’s pulse. “You don’t know — what?” Her hoof fluttered at her temple. “What do you mean you don’t—?”

“It’s magical. It’s not something we can control. The energy of the crowd makes it appear. It’s their wonder that gives it life.” Flash rolled his empty glass underhoof. “There is nothing I can do.”

“Sir? What’s going on?”

Fairy Flight teetered behind them on her long legs. Her eyes were round and wide, golden-hot and insistent as freshly brewed tea.

Flash turned to Flaire. “But, I tried. I really did try.” His brows were upturned, his voice muted. “I tried to find ways to prevent it. I altered our routines, changed the performance. And it still appeared, every year. So, I tried something else.”

He glanced behind him. “Rather than fail to control the thing that had done the harm, I simply tried to do something good. I created opportunities for ponies who had gone overlooked, who hadn't been recognized, merely for having been born different. Like your sister.”

“Hey. General Flash. What’s this about?”

Flaire’s head wheeled over her shoulder. She met Fairy’s eyes, realizing it before she did.

Flaire’s necked tipped back. Her spine loosened, the pink waves of her mane spilling across her withers. She keened a shrill whinny. “Wow! So that’s how you played it, then? Just press a bandage to a gaping wound!” Her voice hitched with frantic laughter, the heel of her hoof pounding the bar counter. “Kill one disabled filly, promote another?”

“Easy.” Flash’s posture rose. His brows were low. “I didn’t kill your sister.”

Flaire hurt him.

She abandoned her ladylike grace, her erudite wits, and succumbed to the violence of prey-animal terror. The barstool scudded as she leapt at him with teeth bared. Flash’s head knocked the floor, his cap rolling. Flaire’s polished white hooves came down upon his throat, fitting under his hyoid bone like a fetching cravat, and pressed. Choking, his hooves pummeled her chest. Her mane lashed his face. His wing clocked her nose — a bright burst of pain. Cigarette flying from her teeth.

One… Two… Three…

“Stop it! Get offa him!”

Hooves clasped under Flaire’s forelegs, dragging her backward. Her chin struck her chest and she jerked her neck upward, mane tossing from her eyes. Blood was in her mouth, red runnels under her nostrils.

General Flash gasped, a track of spit below his chin. He supported his battered weight with a foreleg. A primary feather hung crooked from his wingtip. Voices rose around them, gasps and murmurs.

Flaire was hustled out through the door, draped over Fairy Flight’s lean withers. A slap of cold upper-atmosphere air rattled her like the abrupt strike from Flash. Her back met the white plaster of a Cloudsdale alleyway; the stink of rotting garbage raked the metallic sting in her nostrils. Blood pumped through her miserable, feeble heart.

“Lady.” Fairy’s voice beat down with anxious insistence. Her hoof was braced aside Flaire’s head, her face gray in the nighttime light. “You need to start talking. What is going on?”

Flaire gasped, a sound near to a laugh or a sob. Her ribs heaved under her silken dress and her magic slid into the pocket, withdrawing her lacy hoofkerchief and a fresh cigarette. She blotted the crust of blood under her nose and lit up, gulping smoke.

Fairy listed backward, dropping to her haunches on the downy cloudfloor. “This is so bad,” she said, lamely. “So I’m a Wonderbolt because of… All because something bad happened?”

“It’s aesthetics, Fairy. It makes him look good to have you in the Wonderbolts. It eases his guilt.” The tobacco was a bitter fug in the back of Flaire’s throat. “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve this.”

“Stars — I really didn’t!” She was laughing now, clutching her temples. Her hooves pulled down her face, raking her snout with a brisk sniff. Eyes sealed shut, she asked. “What was her name?”

Flaire’s head lolled. “What…?”

“Your sister.” Fairy gazed up at her. “You were talking about a sister. I’m sorry. I’m really…”

“Clarity.” Flaire’s chest hitched. “Clarity. That was her name.”

“All right. Clarity.” Fairy blinked. “Was she… Would she have been welcome in our squadron?”

Flaire’s jaw quivered. “More than welcome. She would have led it.”

“Hey, no fair.” Fairy cracked a sad smile. “Thought I was our Admiral.”

Flaire closed her eyes. She lost herself to that momentary unreality, a world where Fairy Flight led Flaire and her sister through the skies. Wingtips brushing, a flock in motion. No thunder, no lightning. Just blue and open and free.

Clarity was a filly in her mind, always. Even ideated. Even though she and Fairy were never alive at the same time.

"She wanted to be an athlete but she was also an artist. I based the first designs for your uniforms on something I made for her, a long time ago. Blue and gold flight suits, decorated with lightning bolts. They were her design, really." Flaire saw, in her mind's eye, the little chest filled with Clarity's drawings, all the vivid colors and imaginative shapes. "She made things; she inspired me. She probably would have gotten her cutie mark for that. And she was so good. She was brave and smart and stubborn and she... She was my best friend."

It was quiet. Empty, absent. The high winds of Cloudsdale swept through the buildings like moaning ghosts.

"I used to think I could protect her." Flaire sniffed. "As a filly, I'd practiced so hard to cast a protective spell on her flight suit, so it would catch her if she fell. I didn't learn until later that it wasn't that easy. The magic never took."

“What happened to her?”

Flaire opened her eyes. Fairy stood before her, no longer in hunched defeat. That secret gentleness had come out from behind her rascally, coltish face. And it was given to Flaire wholesale.

“Clarity dreamed of being a Wonderbolt. She loved them. And all she ever wanted was to see the annual performance at the Summer Sun Celebration, but Mom never let her go. So I… I made it happen.” Flaire began to speak, because how else could she stand the silence. Her voice stumbled, craggy with smoke. But Fairy listened.

“It was the eve of the five-hundredth year of Celestial Peace. Clarity… she had just turned eight. I was nine.”

It begins with Clarity’s face in the blue-dark, her velvety pink nose above the covers. Flaire crosses the floor of their shared room on hushed hoofsteps.

“Clarity, get up!” she whispers. “We've got to meet the train!”

“Getting the train tickets wasn’t easy. I stole bits from my mother’s purse and Clarity distracted her long enough while we were out on an errand so I could make the transaction at the nearest station. Two tickets for Canterlot. The train would arrive just before the Wonderbolts began their performance.”

Giggling, racing to the San Palomino station, the carpet of grass sweeps under their hooves. Clarity is low in the air, her wings stirring up the scent of the cool, gusty outdoors. She’s wearing her blue and gold flight suit, laughing with abandon. The golden lightning streaks along her sides seem to glow.

She naps on the train ride, struck drowsy from the late hour. Leaning on Flaire’s shoulder, her feathery mane tickling her snout. The big, dark sky rushes past in the windows.

“Nopony paid much attention to us. Two fillies, alone. I was nervous the whole time, worried we were going to get caught or questioned. But we just blended in with all the ponies heading to the city square. We ended up at the back of the crowd. It was the only place left for us and the show was about to start.”

The two of them are huddled in a square of manicured lawn, stomping their hooves in time to the rolling drumline. General Flash steps out onto the stage, young, fresh-faced, in his third year of leadership. His smile illuminates the nighttime sky. Clarity shrieks, her wings quivering. “That’s General Flash! I’ve got to go up higher! I want him to see me!”

“It was beautiful. The show was beautiful. The ideas I had. The inspiration that came to me when I saw the Wonderbolts fly. And Clarity… I think that was the happiest day of her life.”

She’s spinning, rising into the air. Confetti blasts from the cannons as though it's for her, blue and gold squares flaking beneath her ascent. The floodlight lanterns miss her, but she is spotlit by the moon, a full, pale circle — a doorway through which the Mare in the Moon bears witness to the Equus-bound from her heavenly heights. Her light kisses Clarity, higher than she’s ever flown. And Clarity laughs. A high girlish giggle, full of wonder.

“Back then, I didn’t know why Mom never agreed to take Clarity to the Summer Sun Celebration performance. I thought she was just being unfair, because that’s all a child can understand: the unfairness. But, it was unfair. Clarity never had it fair from the start.”

Twirling, the shiny gold material of her flight suit’s lightning bolt patterns glinting, catching the light. They are a quiet prelude to the final act of the show, the drums a rising crescendo of thunder. The Wonderbolts sweep through an elaborate formation, spinning above the stage, rushing past each other, near collision, never touching. And through their center, erupts General Flash. He exclaims, hoof outstretched, touching the stars: “Altius Volantis!”

The crowd wails. And the sky goes white.

So full of energy, so highly charged — magical lightning strikes down. Flashing and flashing and flashing and flashing and flashing. Entering through Clarity’s wide eyes and setting off an electrical storm in her brain.

“Clarity had epilepsy. She was born with it, perhaps inherited by our father. Who’s to say. He left when I was young. And I never knew what it was called as a filly. I just knew Mom was always so careful with her. So careful to keep her away from anything that would trigger a seizure. Like flashing lights.”

Her body judders; her wings splay. Her hooves kick like she’s running through the sky. And she falls.

Her flight suit doesn't protect her.

Clarity cracks onto the grass. An explosion of feathers. Convulsing, coughing tracks of spittle into her pretty rose coat. A lightning-strike brightness reflects in her blown pupils.

“I had seen Clarity have seizures before, even though I didn’t know what they were called, then. They were often atonic. She would go limp suddenly; her head would drop to her chest. Mom made her fly low to the ground in case she fell. But I never saw her have a seizure like this before.”

“Somepony help! Help! Mommy!” The crowd is roaring, stomping hooves and shouting mouths. Drowning Flaire’s cries. Clarity gagging, teeth clicking. Wet shining under her chin, the collar of her flight suit. Her neck and haunches jerking faster than the flashes of lightning.

“I didn’t know what to do.”

Flaire drops to her belly in the cold grass and shoves her hooves over her eyes. She begins to count, because that's what she did when the lighting came. Thirty seconds. If the the thunder booms after thirty seconds, she will know it's all right.

“One… Two… Three…”

“Nopony heard us.”

“Eight… Nine… Ten…”

“Nopony turned around.”

“Thirteen… Fourteen… Fifteen…”

“They were watching the lightning.”

“Twenty… Twenty-one… Twenty-two…”

“And why wouldn’t they?”

“Twenty-eight… Twenty-nine…”

“It was beautiful.”

“Thirty…”

It’s silent. Flaire never hears a thunderclap. She doesn’t hear the cheering, the crowd’s own atmospheric crash.

She hears only the absence of her sister’s voice.

And the sun rises anyway. Flaire opens her eyes.

A steady creep of warm light casts across a pair of motionless pink hooves.

The storm moves in.

—

“Clarity was declared dead later that morning at a hospital in Canterlot.”

That was the easiest part of it for Flaire to say, the clinical report.

“Some ponies at the show eventually saw us,” she continued. “She was unconscious and they brought her there. They sent for Mom; she was with her. But there were too many complications. Broken bones from the fall. Loss of oxygen. Things that were preventable.”

Flaire’s eyes sealed shut, her brows kneading. “I should have turned her on her side to open her airway and prevent her from aspirating saliva or vomit. I should have cleared out her mouth. I should have loosened the collar of her flight suit. I should have performed chest compressions when she stopped breathing. I should have… flown up and caught her.”

“Flaire,” Fairy said, her voice feather-soft, “you were a kid.”

“I know,” Flaire sobbed. And she ached with it, the burden of having been young, once.

Fairy took her hoof. Squeezed it hard. The honesty of the gesture embarrassed them both. But neither let go. Even though Flaire had been split nose to tail, the lovely silks of her dress having been pulled aside to reveal the gaping inner wound of her history, all the wet, twisting stuff behind her ribs on display.

“Mom blamed herself for what happened. She just… went away. She became distant. She never made a report, never attempted to change what happened." Flaire's voice was a trembling whisper. "I was the only one who ever tried to do anything to make up for it. I studied, I learned, I tried. Because I brought Clarity to the show. I’m at fault for that.”

“No. You’re not.” Fairy squeezed her hoof harder. “If you go by that logic, then my mom and dad are at fault for how I am because they got together twenty-two years ago and decided to have a foal.”

Flaire's breath hitched. “No, Fairy, you can’t… That’s not the same.”

“Sure it is.” Fairy smiled. Firm, but not unkind. “Ponies make choices all the time that can cause anything to happen.” She tossed up a wing. “You could say I’m at fault for what happened to Swift because I didn’t yank those stupid trousers off him after you warned us!”

“But, you aren’t.”

“But you warned us. And even then, I didn’t do anything. So, blame me. Right?”

Fairy met Flaire’s eyes. Her face was sad in a light, wistful way that was so unlike the permanent feature of detached misery Flaire knew affected her own.

"You were nine," Fairy said. "And your mom never told you anything you would have needed to know."

"She didn't," Flaire breathed. "When I look back, I think she always felt... powerless. Like there was this impossible thing she should have been able to do to help Clarity. But couldn't."

Fairy nodded. “You know, I think something kinda messed up happens to ponies when we feel powerless. We try to find a cause for it. As though the reason for us not having control over something bad that happened to us is something we’re responsible for finding the answer for. But, it’s not.”

Fairy’s eyes crimped; her jaw set. “Look, I tried to find the cause of everything about me for way longer than I wanna admit. I did the whole self-hating thing. I had all the ‘I’m no good’ and ‘There’s something wrong with me’ thoughts. But how can that be true when I’m not the only one like me?”

She chuckled, wiping a wing under her eye. “It’s pretty clear that Flash believed making me a Wonderbolt was the answer to the fact he’s powerless to control the magical lightning. But that hasn’t stopped him from becoming convinced that all the accidents in the ‘Bolts must be normal and just a part of our work — and all he can do is react when they happen. Because, if they’re not, what then? He’s supposed to be a hero.”

Again, she laughed, teeth chattering. “Lady, don’t get mad at me when I say this, but you and Flash are a lot alike. You both have been going around in circles all these years trying to make sense of something really, really painful that just can’t be made sense of. But when you go searching for answers, you’re always going to find a way back to yourself. And then it’s not an answer anymore, is it? I think it turns into blame. And you don’t deserve it."

Fairy stared hard into Flaire's eyes, her attention no longer relaxed, but still gentle. "You brought Clarity to that show because you loved her. And it should have been safe for her.”

Hoof in hoof, Flaire held tight to Fairy’s soft grasp. Her heart pounded. There were protests she wanted to make, a scream in her that was no longer accessible. And it hurt, down inside of her.

“It’s hurt for so long, Fairy,” Flaire gasped. “And there’s no correct name to write next to it.”

“I don’t think there has to be. Because, when something hurts, it doesn’t mean anything about who you are.” Fairy rocked her fetlock against Flaire’s. “It just means that it hurts.”

Somewhere in those last two kindred months, Flaire had underestimated Fairy’s capacity for wisdom. She pulled her cigarette from her lips, emptied her lungs of smoke in a slow sigh. And she asked a long held, helpless question.

“If I’m not to blame… then why is my sister dead?”

“I don’t have an answer to that,” Fairy said. “But, I do have this.”

She wrapped Flaire in a hug, her feathers sweeping upward to enclose her withers, holding tight to the place where Flaire’s wings would have been.

A sob punched Flaire in the gut. She clutched Fairy to her chest. She bowed her head and wept.

—

Somehow, Flaire made it back into the bar.

Without her full faculty of thought, her hooves stumbled over the wispy clouds underhoof, through the double doors, and onto the wood-paneled floor, Fairy’s wing grasping her shoulder the short way there. Flaire met Flash inside. He was back on the barstool, battered and remorseful, and she said a long string of apologies that ought to come after such a nasty scuffle. Words spilled out of her, over-honest and gasping, because she’d been opened up and all she could do now was bleed. She was as raw as an exposed nerve.

Flash apologized, too. Not just for tonight, but for five and thirty years ago. “I’m sorry,” he said — and that devastated her. Because he saw her.

And then Fairy spoke. She stepped up to her superior and said with unflinching certainty, “Do something to fix this. Find a way to make the magical lightning stop. Or I walk.”

Flash, weary and leaning against the counter, shook his head. “There’s no need to threaten me, Fairy. If there’s a real way to right this wrong, I will do it. I’ll do it gladly.” His blue eyes were sunken and so impossibly sad. “But… there simply hasn’t been.”

Fairy’s wing skimmed across Flaire’s withers, pulling her close. “Until now maybe. But we haven’t had Flaire’s clever mind and her fancy magic.”

Flaire shook her head. “Fairy… I don’t think this is the sort of thing magic can help.”

“Sure it is. The lightning is magic.” She took Flaire’s face in her hooves – before her nerves had her flinching away, yet it still surprised her – and said with earnest intensity. “Nopony thinks like you do. Nopony comes up with ideas like knitting fabric fibers together at a cellular level. And if a solution exists, I know you can find it. Because you’re good at what you do, Flaire. You aren’t powerless. You help ponies.”

It all became small, then. The sprawling world beneath Cloudsdale dropped away and she was in the air, flying over glimpses of every choice she had ever made. Every stitch she had ever looped through a dress, just to see somepony smile. Every word in her Neigh’s Anatomy textbook she had ever underlined, just to know how the body could be protected. Every long night studying magical protection spells until her horn ached. Every shared whisper with Clarity in their room, just to show her sister that her dreams mattered more than a life that told her she was too different to hold them.

Every half-drawn circle she completed, just for the hope of a glimpse into another, better world.

What had it all been for, then? If not to help.

Fairy went on. “You’re going to make our new uniforms, and they’re going to be your vision. Not Flash’s. And you’re going to test them until you’ve cracked the magical theory to making the lightning stop for good. And I know you’ll do this.” She took Flaire’s hoof in her strong grip. “Because I’ll be by your side every step of the way.”

“Okay,” Flaire said.

And she tried again.

Comments

[PaintedPony]

Even though I was expecting something like this. It was a emotional kick in the gut. Very well written and an excellent chapter. I feel for all parties involved and morn Clarity's tragic death so young, as well as it's effect on Flaire who only wanted to do something wonderful for her sister.