Roses, Feathers, and Cancer
Roses, Feathers, and Cancer
Spitfire looked on in a determination fierce and unwavering, her mane flowing wildly in the hollering wind, her eyes burning with an intensity unparalleled. It was a double loop corkscrew with a bit of extra flavour and flare added, a flashy trick she had designed herself through meticulous plotting and mathematical evaluation. After a week of careful planning, it was time to set the stunt into motion. This would get her into the Wonderbolts.
She lashed her tongue out at her lips. She readied herself, raised her backside into the air, firmly planted her hooves into the cushion of the cloud and gripped it eagerly. Then, eyes closed, she breathed in a deep breath, and exhaled a calm sigh. She thought about the wind currents she had studied in excruciating detail. She thought about her plans, which by now were fried to the back of her mind. With a heavier sigh, she thought about her father.
Pause.
Go.
A flurry of cloud fluff was kicked up in her wake as Spitfire bounded away from the cloud in a magnificent showcasing of frightening speed. It began with a nosedive, a steep descent of approximately two-hundred metres into an endless blue wonder. Her mane was instantaneously glued to the back of her neck and the spine-tingling sensation of free fall tickled her nerves. Every fiber of her being was an active participant on this paralyzing journey into open space.
One-hundred metres.
Spitfire’s wings clung to her sides tightly, her form perfect, her body falling like a dart to the ever-nearing surface. Her face was expressionless, stoic, contemplative. Her goggles were pressing themselves firmly into her cheeks, and would inevitably leave the familiar redness she had grown accustomed to adopting after a good flight. Her trailing orangish-red tail and radiant mane that was to match combined to make her appear as if she were a falling ball of fire.
Two-hundred metres.
Spitfire’s wings flared outward, and suddenly her expression twisted something tenacious and confident. She pulled up as sharply as her sturdy but breakable frame would allow, grimacing at the stress exerted upon her fragile wings. Steadily, she leveled out. She had executed the transition with such perfection that she hadn’t lost much speed, and in fact, was still moving at ridiculous pace, right into the next part of the stunt.
Spitfire continuously barrel-rolled as she gradually turned herself upward. Her body tore a searing hole through the sky as she kept her forelegs tucked and her body straight.
From a distance, one could see a glorious golden loop, a mathematically perfect arc being traced behind the little cloud cover provided for this sunny afternoon.
Spitfire bulleted downward into the transition. She had completed her first loop in ideal fashion. She leveled out again, and at precisely the right moment, she started to beat her wings against the air, urging herself to go faster. And so, faster she went. She pounded through the sky with fearsome force.
When the correct speed had been reached, she swung upward once more, into the second loop. Spitfire had a cocky smirk spread thin over her lips, and even her eyes smiled behind a smeared pair of goggles. Once again, a perfect circle was drawn in the sky, identical to the first she had formed. This one seemed effortless, breezy, like a mare at play. Looks can be deceiving.
Spitfire spiraled back downward into the final transition. Using her wings to level herself out, she peered out into the sky ahead of her, and thus the focus that went into the many hours of scrutinous planning were splayed out in front of her. The blueprints she had designed came to life in her eyes, all she had to do was follow the dotted line.
She delved headlong into a gorgeous corkscrew, her elegant form spinning around an invisible cylinder, moving forward and sideways all at the same time. Spitfire grinned smartly, keeping her head level and her eyes ahead. Flight: it was freedom.
Spitfire, knowing no one was present to witness this, screamed in utter elation.
She rounded off her stunt with a fanciful little twirl, a trademark of hers, and fluttered down lightly onto a small cloud, unbelievably going from mach to rest in a matter of seconds.
She wiped away a bead of sweat from her brow. Her coat glistened in the vibrant sunshine, and she caught her breath only between hoots and hollers of excitement. She smiled. This would get her into the Wonderbolts.
Grace, speed, beauty and spunk. Spitfire possessed all of the makings of a Wonderbolt and then some. Years later, she would be asked what gave her the motivation to continue to be the first to show at the Wonderbolt’s practices, the first to offer a candid smile in the media room, the last to leave any event she ever attended. Years later, Spitfire would be surprised by the answer that trickled from out her lips.
Years later, Spitfire would reply, “My Father.”
In a small and unimpressive room, her father rested reclined upon a tiny twin sized bed. His mattress was lumpy and, yes, a hooflength too short for his frame; his pruny hooves stuck out from under the end of the sheets. His head was propped up atop a mountain of pillows. It looked quite uncomfortable. But it was perhaps no more discomforting than the various wires that protruded from her father’s skin, all hooked up to strange machines that hummed softly to themselves in the corner.
It was a cancer of the lungs, one that had ravaged his body, had left him a sickly and sad old stallion. He would soon die.
His breathing was raspy, and the oxygen for his lungs was administered through a tube jammed into a hole in his throat. A lovely bouquet of fresh roses was sitting on the nightstand, and seemed entirely out of place next to his dying body. Spitfire had reluctantly come to see him. She had received a letter in the mail about the unfortunate news, which had both regarded her father’s condition, and shockingly, her father’s death wish.
I want to see my daughter once more. This copied from the letter.
And so she had come, three days before her tryout for the Wonderbolts Flying Club. She was idling in a room with her dying father, a stallion whom she had never once admired, nor thought of as a fatherly figure, nor even thought of as a respectable citizen to society. Likewise, her father had never thought of her as a daughter. They had been separated for five years. Her father was in ill-health when she had left, but she hadn’t ever regretted her move.
I want to see my daughter once more. This made no sense.
She stood in the same room with the stallion that had tried to eradicate her thoughts of flying alongside her heroes. She stood in the same room with the stallion that berated her about any and all things when she was young, whether it was for her appearance or for her smarts. She stood in the same room with the same stallion that had never kissed her or tucked her in at night, nor hugged her when she felt blue or cooed softly to her ear when she needed a familiar voice to fall on.
Instead, he was the same chain-smoking, cider drinking stallion that she had abandoned five years ago. Mom would be proud.
Spitfire said nothing. The room was eerily silent, save the quiet humming eking from out of the machines kept in the corner. She could hear her father’s automated breaths, too, wheezy and sputtering like a young bird.
It didn’t feel right to be here, to come back home to honor her father’s dying wish, which in itself was a real mystery that she’d rather have left unanswered. He was undesirable.
Yet, against better judgement, Spitfire took two inaudible steps closer to the bed. Then a third. Her face was resolute, devoid of any emotion, in complete disregard of the many years of hatred she had spent with her father. Her brilliant amber eyes quickly scanned the figure lying pitifully on the bed. Not a peep was uttered from behind his cracked lips, and his body remained unmoving.
He was only playing games, even in his sorry condition. Spitfire’s father always had this uncanny ability to notice any and all things around him, and he carried with him an unbelievably adept memory. Some might marvel at this and think it a superpower, but to him, it had been a burden, thus the many nights spent a drunken imbecile. In any sense, the point is this: her father knew she was in the room.
“Gee, Dad, you look better than ever.”
She could see her father attempt to conjure forth a smile, but ultimately failed, as it ended looking despicably ghastly and inward. “You know me so well,” he warbled foggily from out his warped and deformed throat. “You always have, you know. I’m-” He coughed violently with the strain. After a small fit, he continued. “I’m awfully glad you could make it.”
“Charmed, truly,” Spitfire replied sarcastically. “You know I’m always there for you.”
Her father chuckled lamely and indifferently. “And you haven’t changed a bit, love... not a bit.”
Spitfire’s eyes were knives floating threateningly across the room, directly into the steely and glazed over eyes of her loathsome father. Those eyes were cold and glossy, near transparent. Spitfire could see right through them, into the pillows upon which his head lay.
“I don’t have the time to stay long-”
“Oh.” Her father interrupted her with a painful wheeze and, through a voice as flimsy as cardboard, said, “I know those eyes. Those eyes that lie. You’ve always been so good at them, but I know.”
Spitfire said nothing. She stared coolly through her father.
“I’ve seen those eyes,” her father continued. “I’ve lived my entire life looking at them and looking with them.”
“What do you want, Dad?” Spitfire asked, her father’s lowly personality already irking her to no end, her limbs already itching to up and leave.
There was no immediate response. The room was filled with her father’s unsteady breathing for a spell, coming and going like spectres phasing in and out of existence. Spitfire took the opportunity to gaze out the lone window in the room, which shown a magnificently sunny day, a stark contrast to the gloomy interior clad in plaster and furtive shadows.
Her father stirred miserably on the bed. She looked to him.
“I wanted to see my daughter,” he said.
Spitfire smiled disbelievingly. “You don’t have a daughter,” she stated coldly.
“I do, though,” her father replied, huffing pathetically between each word, “I do have a daughter. She’s stands before me a grown mare. And though I know that I had little to do with it, I-”
“Wrong,” Spitfire interrupted. “You had everything to do with it.”
Her father could only nod his head, or could at least perform something akin to the motion with considerable effort. Spitfire considered leaving. The door to the room was wide open, urging her out, and she could show herself out at any moment, her father could do nothing.
“I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes, Spitfire, I kno-”
Spitfire shook her thoughts of the door and took a step forward into the room. “A lot of mistakes? A lot? You’ve made more mistakes than anybody I’ve ever met. Don’t you know what you’ve done?”
“Yes, I do know what I’ve done.”
Spitfire could feel her voice rising in volume. This isn’t what she had come for. It was supposed to be come and go as quickly as possible. She was already picking fights with a stallion who was battling cancer.
“You really do!? You really think you do!? Because I can tell you what you’ve done if you’ve forgott-”
“I’ve shattered the childhood of a little girl!” her father half-yelled to stop her, and then fell into a terrible coughing fit. The tube in his throat bounced up and down. He struggled to breathe. Spitfire corralled her anger and bottled it up deep inside herself.
He gasped for air, and it came to him slowly, with great difficulty. Through the pain, he said “I’ve committed unspeakable crimes... ones that aren’t necessarily unlawful... but are moral, are not to go unchecked.” He inhaled heavily, and exhaled, though his breath didn’t appear to leave his body. “I will be reprimanded. I will be punished. But not before I wave bye to my daughter and tell her I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done.”
Spitfire shook her head in disgust. “Nothing you can do or say will ever make up for it, so save your breath. It looks like you’ll be needing it anyway.”
Her father frowned. “This is what is done after years of mishandling oneself.”
“You’re an ass,” Spitfire snarled in response.
He rose slightly, then fell backward, for the pain was too intense. “Listen, please,” her father begged. “I couldn’t handle it...” He coughed. “I couldn’t take the pressure... after your mother killed herself-”
“Killed herself?” Spitfire shook her head in disagreement. Then, she completely lost her composure. She sidled on up to her father’s bedside, where she loomed over him maliciously, darkly. “Killed herself!? Herself!? Guess what?” Spitfire’s voice cracked. The normally strong-willed and remote pegasus let a tear loosen and spill from her watery amber eyes. “You killed her, Dad! You killed her! Do...” she gulped, “do you think that she had forgotten the dosage? Do you think she just bucked up and took one too many?”
Spitfire wanted to strike her father and end it all, but, amazingly, stopped herself. He wasn’t worthy of death. Not yet.
“Buck you,” Spitfire said, and broke down uselessly.
The tears had not abandoned her father after so many years. His eyes, too, appeared to tear up at the corners.
“Buck you, you bastard,” Spitfire said again.
Spitfire let it all flow forth as her father watched; just like old times. She reminisced. She recalled the time when her father, intoxicated, screamed at her because she simply couldn’t get her wings to carry her. She was six. She cried, then. She recalled when her father, again intoxicated, guffawed at her flying technique when she had first learned how, normally a proud moment for any parent, not this one. She was eight. She cried, then as well. She recalled the time when she discovered her mother’s freshly deceased body, a tragic find for a nine year old mind, and how her father reacted to the situation, telling her that she’d get over it, that it wasn’t a big deal, that she shouldn’t very well fucking cry over it. The words stung something bitter. They had planted roots deep in her mind, where they grew and expanded until they had firmly taken a hold of her, helped her to ultimately realize that she despised the grotesque and unloving stallion that was her father. She was ten.
She cried, then.
Here she was, crying somberly over the stallion that had so enjoyed watching her do it. She was nineteen years old, but today, she was young again.
A delicate and fragile wing brushed up against Spitfire’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” Spitfire spat with venom on her tongue. “I don’t desire your consolation in any way, shape, or form.”
Her father pulled his wing back and tucked it under the sheets. “Love,” he said, “you’ve got an angel on your shoulder.”
“What?” Spitfire asked, brushing away a falling tear.
“She is here, your mother. She is with you... and I promise that when I go, I will not be.” Her father tried to lay a wing on her once again, but Spitfire waved it off. A sigh escaped his lips. Yes, a single tear trickled from his cheek, and landed on the pillow, where the soft fabric instantly soaked it up.
“Look at the roses, Spitfire.” Her father gestured to them in a wimpy fashion.
Spitfire looked. “They’re nice, Dad,” she said. “They’d look a lot more relevant to the situation if they were dead.”
“Come now, love.” Her father’s teal eyes flickered in the sunlight that barely shown through the window pane. “See who they’re from. Please.”
Spitfire’s hooves were trembling. She found herself sitting precariously on the edge of her father’s deathbed. She suddenly chuckled meekly to herself, as a funny thought occurred to her. What an honor it was to be here.
Spitfire did as her father said and leaned over to see from whom the roses were sent. The card was sticking out the top of the bouquet, and she carefully plucked it from the spot, so as not to disturb any of her father’s precious flowers.
The note read:
Dear Mister Falcon,
We are deeply saddened to hear the news of your condition. The Wonderbolts offer our sincerest of condolences. However, we look forward to seeing this daughter of yours at tryouts. May she be all that you say she is.
Regards,
Flash, Captain of the Wonderbolts Flying Club.
Appalled, Spitfire dropped the note to the floor. She mumbled something incoherently under her breath, something that only the air would ever know. Her father had thought that would put a smile on her face. Instead, Spitfire’s expression turned sour, somber, defeated. She turned to her father, teary-eyed once more.
“You... you... will you go to the ends of the earth just to break me? Is...” Spitfire swallowed hard. “Is that what you want?”
Her father frowned. “What? Did you- no, love, it’s real!” he cried. “The note is real!”
“It’s real,” Spitfire said, looking to the note on the floor. “My dying father received roses from the Wonderbolts, and now they want to meet me. Forgive me if I sound ungrateful, or in disbelief.”
“Spitfir-” He stopped mid-word to hack up a lung.
“Well, you did it, Dad,” Spitfire said as her father suffered his fit of coughing. “You finally broke me. I know it’s been a dream of yours, since I was little, but I never thought you’d call me back home just to do it. That takes dedication. I commend you.”
Spitfire got up from the bed, and reached down to grab the note. She brought it up to her father’s eye-line, and there, she ripped it to shreds, let the torn remnants fall gracelessly to the floor.
“Spitfire! It’s real! The note is real! I told them about you, and I knew that you would try out.”
“You’re sick.”
“No! It’s true!” Her father scrabbled for the words. “L-look at the back of the bouquet. He told me that that was his signature.”
“You’re...”
Spitfire brightened at this. There wasn’t any way possible that her father could know what Captain Flash’s signature was, and that signature was the plucking of one of his very own feathers to gift to somepony. He handed them out on rare occurrences.
Spitfire tentatively approached the vase with her father watching in dismay. Disheartened, she reached a hoof out, and, by painfully slow degrees, she turned the vase around. It screeched as it turned, leaving little marks on the nightstand; quite the bouquet. When Spitfire laid eyes upon the backside of the vase, her mouth dropped open and hung there, shocked, utterly flabbergasted.
“Wh- why... how did you...?”
“Please believe me,” her father begged once more, “I needed to see to it that my daughter got along after I left. You’re going to be a Wonderbolt, love. You’re going to be a Wonderbolt.”
Spitfire plucked the golden feather from out the vase. Yes... it was Flash’s signature. She could not lift her gaze from the feather that seemed to live and breathe in her grasp.
“You did this for me?” she asked.
“Yes,” her father said. “And you may laugh at this, and certainly, I hope that you do, but I brought you here for me to say this.” He shuffled his delicate frame about, readjusting himself on the lumpy mattress, trying to find that elusive comfortable spot. “I brought you here,” he continued, “to see if you would forgive me.”
He paused before adding. “I love you. You are a gorgeous young soul with a sharp wit about you, and I have total faith in you. Your mother would be proud as daylight.”
Spitfire felt a tear drop and hit the floor with a subtle thud. “You’re a funny bastard,” she said.
“Well,” he replied, “I knew it to be far-fetched, but at least you came, didn’t you?”
That she did, Spitfire acknowledged. That she did.
She smirked as she set the feather back down on the nightstand. “I won’t forgive you,” she said. “It’s just not plausible. Not after what you did. However,” she pointed to the feather she had set down on the nightstand, “I will leave you with this feather. It looks kinda like mine, no?”
Her father wheezed in a spurt of coughs that she supposed could have been taken for laughter, the laughter of an old stallion well past his prime, the laughter of a stallion that had foalishly squandered his prime, and was only just now making amends. It was far too late, but it was worthy of a tear or two.
“Think I can do it?” Spitfire asked to no one in particular, the dust that cluttered near the post of the bed.
“Spitfire,” her father said, “not only will you become a Wonderbolt, but Flash is getting up there in years. You’ll be captain, love, no doubt.”
“I hate how you keep calling me love,” Spitfire said simply. “You never called me that. Only mother.”
“I know,” replied the old, wretched stallion. “And I miss her. Very much so.”
Love was a word that Spitfire had never known. It seemed to float around in the air above her head, just out of reach, toying with her. Love was a word for ponies with a father and a mother, brothers and sisters, family and friends. Love was a word that was not for her... not yet. Love, curiously enough, was something she had missed, just as her father had.
“I... I have to leave, Daddy,” Spitfire said as she looked down at the remains of the note that lay strewn about the floor.
Her father forced a smile onto her lips. “You never called me Daddy,” he said.
“I know,” she said, “because I’m only meeting him just now.”
Spitfire leaned down and kissed her father lightly on the forehead, then pulled away in the next instant, her lips bittersweet and fluttering. She backed away from the bed, toward the door, where she would leave her father to rest. This... left her disappointed to some extent.
“I love you,” her father rasped as she got to the doorframe.
Spitfire paused there, smiled, and said, “Yes. I know you do.”
She left.
The room was silent once more, save the humming of the various machines that sat in the corner, lonely, isolated. But perhaps none of those sounds were more prominent than the constant, steady bleeping of the heart rate monitor, which, for the first time, had registered her father’s beating, bleeding heart.
Beep... beep... beep...
Years later, Captain Spitfire of the Wonderbolts entered the media room with poise and dignity. She took up a seat at the table near the front of the room, along with several other members of the famed Wonderbolts flying club. They had only just concluded practice, and were now scheduled for a media day before the Canterlot Grand Prix set for tomorrow evening. Cameras flashed and tapes rolled. Spitfire silenced the chatter buzzing about the room with a subtle hoof motion. In the next instant, the media were flailing hooves in the air wildly, begging to be called on.
It was the usual media day that Spitfire had always remembered. The boring, same old same old questions that were asked every single year, with the occasional “how is this injury healing up?” or “what do you see out of the talent pool this year?”. It was only when Spitfire began to feel just how mundane it all was when she called upon a skinny mare with glasses, who was furiously waving her hoof in the front row.
It was a question Spitfire had never been asked before.
“This question is for Spitfire,” the mare said as the audience died down to listen. Spitfire perked up. “Miss Spitfire, you’re always the first to show up at practice, and the last to leave. What gives you the motivation to continue to do so after all of these years?”
Spitfire grinned and drew closer to the mic, but as her mouth opened to give yet another trained answer, she snapped it back shut. She backed away from the question.
The eyes of the media were all glued to the mare who had been stumped by what they considered probably the easiest question to answer out of the rest that had been asked. What was she doing?
Spitfire turned her head to look at Soarin', her friend and co-captain of the Wonderbolts, who raised an eyebrow back and nodded his head in the direction of the press.
She faced the media once more. Trembling, she approached the microphone, and uttered into it two words that she would not soon forget.
“My father...”
The scrawny mare who had asked the question looked relatively relieved to have finally received a response. She scribbled the words down in a tiny notebook, then looked back up.
“And why is that?” she blurted out to follow up her question.
Why? Why indeed. The only thing that came to mind were roses, feathers, and cancer. Not exactly something that the media could take a firm grasp of. Spitfire pressed her lips into the microphone. They were bittersweet and fluttering.
“Because,” she said, and held the microphone with both hooves, “though he didn’t win the race, he tried his damndest. And... and I think that’s all that matters in the end. How you finish.”
The media all turned their heads down to scribble the phrase into their notebooks. “How you finish.” they wrote, and set their pencils back into their feathered caps. All at once, heads rose back up, hooves too, wavering in the air to be called upon. Then, curiously, all of those hooves abruptly stopped waving. They hung limply in the air, and the expressions juxtaposed to all of their faces were of bewilderment.
Soarin', co-captain of the Wonderbolts, called on a burly stallion in a red feathered cap.
“Yeah, uh,” the stallion said, scratching at his head. “Where’d Spitfire go?”
Soarin' chuckled politely. “I’m sorry friends,” he said. “Spitfire’s gone out for a drink, her throat was feeling a bit dry. I’ll be taking questions now.” He smiled casually. “Who’s next?”
Author's Note
Probably should have spent more time on this... but oh well. It isn't going to hurt anything. I guess.
