Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt XVII
From the journal of Sunburst, September 25, YS 1329:

I hate trying to sleep during the day. It’s the one problem with rotating to the midnight shift. Getting used to it takes a few days (and a set of blackout curtains), and it always feels like by the time I’m really ‘there,’ it’s time to rotate out again to the next shift. No matter how hard I try, it’s never really the same as sleeping at normal hours. I don’t think it ever can be, not physically or psychologically. I toss and turn more. My brain thinks it wants to be awake, so it resists shutting down into a less active state. The dreams during those daylight hours are more intense and more real feeling than the dreams that come at night. They’re more bizarre and they hit harder.

Sometimes it can be a revealing experience. I’ve started to feel a lurking suspicion that some dreams, especially the ones that come from day-sleeping, are a kind of barometer for mental health.

If that’s true, I’m not sure I’m doing so great lately.

I dreamt yesterday that I was back at the Seawall.

It was everything I remember. It was more. There was more beach, and the wall was longer, so long it seemed endless. The fields of scrubland, with sandy soil and short stunted grasses and spiky ground-clinging shrubs, stretched out forever.

It was so empty, so completely empty and alone, under the overcast sky of rolling steel grey clouds.

I was so happy there. I've missed it so much more than I even realized.

I flew to the beach and landed, and just walked and enjoyed the heavenly feeling of the soft fine sand under my hooves and the music of rhythmic washing waves. I looked back over my shoulder now and then to see the trail of hoofprints stretching away forever behind myself.

After what felt like an eternity of beach-walking, the endless stretch of sand was finally broken by something new. I reached a rosebush growing along the wall.

They were white roses.

I went closer to them to investigate. They made my skin crawl with apprehension. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew roses shouldn’t be growing here.

Not here.

Of all places, not here.

Please. Not here.

Captain Dash shouldn’t be here, either, yet she was. Actually… actually, I think it was just Rainbow Dash, not Captain Dash. She wasn’t wearing any armor or any of her on-duty equipment. She was completely naked, as unshelled as any ordinary pony, a state I rarely ever see her in. It made her seem so exposed, so down-to- earth and vulnerable. A chain snaked out from inside the rose bush, attached to something somewhere in the middle of the wickedly thorny snarl of thick vine-stems. It was latched to an iron collar clasped around her neck, locked and keeping her leashed here near the white roses. She sat with her back turned to them, trying not to look. Her eyes were closed and she was hanging her head. She looked sadder than any pony I’ve ever seen.

I walked up to her. “You don’t belong here,” I said.

“Can’t get away. Been trying for years, but I just can’t.” She looked at me, briefly opening her eyes. They had more pain in them than I’ve ever seen. It hurt me to see her suffer so much. I wanted to hug her and tell her it would be alright, and let her cry on my withers however long she needed to.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t say such a thing when I knew it wasn’t true; when I knew that what hurt her wasn’t something that could ever be ‘alright.’ All I could do was watch in silence while she suffered. I writhed inside, powerless and upset with myself over not being able to do anything.

It was too much to take and I couldn’t stay there, so I started walking again. What else could I do but move on?

No matter how far I walked, no matter how I tried to run away, I couldn’t stop smelling the spring fragrance perfume of white roses on the wafting sea breeze.

The smell haunted me until I came to another bush, red roses this time: vivid crimson, as bright and as dark as the jarring color of blood. Princess Twilight was there. Like Rainbow Dash, I think she was just Twilight Sparkle now. She wasn’t wearing any of her regalia—once again she was totally naked.

But she wasn’t in an iron collar.

What she was held by was worse. Fine-linked gold chains wrapped around her head, covering her eyes like a blindfold, and into those chains were intertwined silvery steel artificial roses, dozens of them, on long, cruelly thorned stems of sharp metal wire. The spines dug into her flesh, into her eyes, shedding heavy drops of blood slowly running down her face in deep wet ruby trails.

I stared in sinking, prickling horror, and when I looked closely, I could see that the chains across her face were studded with bright purple gems, the same color as the ones that rest in the center of the crown she wears for the most formal of her appearances as Princess. I realized that she was wearing her regalia after all.

This was her symbol of office now.

And this is what it had done to her.

While I watched, she wandered. I started to realize she wasn’t entirely blind. Her steps were confident, deftly stepping around rocks and driftwood on sure hooves. By the way she moved, I knew that somehow, she could see. Binding up her real eyes had been a gristly trade, one that gave her a magic sight instead. She’d taken the gift, but it came at a price, a terrible, self-sacrificed price, and the trade was that now she could see everything—everything but what she was searching for. She wandered in circles around the red rose bush, feeling it was somewhere near, but never able to get close enough to find it. She was always just a little bit away, nearly within the reach of a hoof, but never knowing just where to reach out to.

I was suddenly reminded of Morning Mist, the unicorn I’d been posted here with, when I’d seen her staring off into the ocean, hoping to see something there. Except… except there was no hope in Twilight's longing, only sorrow.

“Princess…” I approached her hesitantly. She looked at me and I kneeled in front of her.

“No need for that here.” She shook her head and turned her blinded stare back to the roses, sweeping her eyeless gaze right past them without being able to find them, then turned to me. “No point. I’m the one who doesn’t belong here. This place is yours. I should be the one bowing to you instead.”

I walked up to the bush. I wanted to pluck one of those roses and bring it to her, so that she could finally have what she wanted so much. The importance of it seemed paramount. I knew suddenly, somehow, that if I could just get one of these flowers to her, one of these real roses, it would break the chains over her eyes and she'd be free. Then she could take another one back to Rainbow Dash, and it would break her free, too.

They would be free and they could leave together.

All she needed was a rose.

I opened my mouth to bite off one of the stems. I hesitated. The thorns seemed so huge, now that I was close to them. They were everywhere, more and more dense the longer I looked. I tried to find a spot where I could work around them, but there was no gap I could navigate. I had fevered visions of those thorns piercing my tongue, scratching me in the face, getting in my coat and ripping at my skin while I ended up getting more and more entangled in them like some kind of terrifying living barbed wire from Tartarus.

I panicked and backed up a few steps from the bush.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s alright,” Twilight said sadly. “It’s just something I can’t have. I knew I never would. That’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry!” I cried out as I ran away.

I ran and ran, down the beach, down the endless sand and scrubland, along that endless wall, but no matter how far I ran I couldn’t escape the feeling that Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle were still nearby, out there with me in a place where they don’t belong.

I woke up with a gasping shudder and a choked scream, my coat damp with chill sweat.

I turned on my side and cried with tears of frustration and shame because I can’t do anything. I can’t help them.

I’m a coward, and I can’t help them. I can’t do anything.

For a long time, I laid in my bed wide awake and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every detail ran through my head a million times, over and over, trampling my mind. I’m sick of it, but it won't leave me alone.

It nearly ate me alive from the inside over the midnight shift I had to work. I thought about it for hours, patrolling the palace hallways in the dark. At least I was alone. Trying to pretend everything was fine in front of another pony would have been impossible.

What I realize is that solitude is a wall. When a pony hits that wall, and finds they’re on the far side of it, I think they find one of two things. Some ponies find complete freedom. Some find a cage, made of open space instead of bars.

It’s the worst thing in the world, watching the wrong ponies end up here at this wall. Captain Dash and Princess Twilight and myself all have something in common: we’ve given our lives to service. We all volunteered for duty on the wall, each in our own ways—the different ways in which we serve Equestria. But those two are not like me.

I’m watching their hearts crying for each other, so distant when they’re so close every day. It kills me a little bit every time I see more of it. The princess and the captain are going through life alone, while the pony that they love is right here next to them. Princess Twilight lives and works every day in a palace she cares nothing for because all it is to her is empty lonely space. Captain Dash waits forever, haunted by ghosts from her past and serving in silence because she can’t have the pony she loves now, but she can’t leave her, either.

They haven’t done anything to deserve to suffer, they're just… just on the wrong side of a wall.

They built it with service, and with eagerness to please anything demanded from them, and most of all, with excuses and with rationalizations.

‘A lesbian princess will always just be too much of a controversy and get in the way of everything.’

Only it wouldn’t, not really. Would it be perfect, easy, conventional, traditional? No. I guess not. But would it be the end of the world? Laughable to think most ponies would even bat an eye, honestly. I’ve watched Princess Twilight preside over weddings for two mares, and two stallions, and a mare and a stallion. None of them were ever treated like something less. None of them were ever booed or shouted down during their vows.

They just need the excuse. They just need the wall. They just think they need the place they know. They just think they need their seashells to hide in, the beautiful mother-of-pearl sheen and shimmer to show the world as they present their façade.

I want to tell them they don’t have to be here. Sometimes I think I’ll be driven crazy by it. I want to go to one of them, either one would do, and grab her by the withers and shake some sense into her. I want to shout it right in her face—how can you be so blind? Don’t you see that you hold the heart of an amazing, smart, beautiful mare in your hooves, and it could be yours if you would just say something? If you would just talk to her and confess it? In fact, scratch that, you wouldn't even have to talk, just look into her eyes and kiss her the next time the two of you are alone together.

She would kiss you back.

As sure as I know anything, as sure as I know my own feathers, I know she would kiss you back.

I want to tell them the painfully obvious, that all it would take is one spark, but somepony has to start it. Somepony has to start it, otherwise the fire that could be the greatest warmth will always just be cold kindling waiting but never coming to life. It will never become what it should. They will never become what they should.

I don’t know how much longer I can take it.

I’ll hold out as long as I have to, I suppose.

What choice do I have?
 
 
Enough dreams for today.