Beep. Beep. Beep.

The steady, metronomic precision invaded my thoughts. I wished they had put the machine on silent when they had left, but the young mare had other thoughts on her mind when she’d left me alone. At least she’d remembered the paper and pen.

I really shouldn’t have used my magic, but my hoof was none too steady anymore, and I had never gotten the knack of forming letters with a pen between my teeth. What use had a unicorn for her lips?

I stared at the blank page, pen hovering above the top left corner.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Dear Sapphire,

Was that how a mother should address her daughter? Did she think of me as her mother, anymore?

It has been a long time since we last spoke. Do you remember me? I can’t blame you if you don’t. It’s only lately that I’ve come to appreciate just what was missing from my life, and I wish that I could take back what I had said, so long ago.

My pen steaded on the period, resting as the memory came, as it often did, with a tired ache behind my eyes.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Three simple words was all it took. Three words to make her leave my life forever. All it took was three words and an accident. I hadn’t meant to hit her. I hadn’t meant to let my anger at her fester.

And my sweet Sapphire had left.

The sheet of paper under my hoof shook.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

These words are so hard to write. I should have worked harder to mend our relationship. I should have let you vent your anger at me without responding. I’m afraid that it’s only now that I feel like all that anger was meaningless. If I’d only let you work it out.

What else was there to say?

I love you, Sapphire. My little jewel. I hope you don’t hate me anymore.

Beep. Beep.

Sincerely,
Distant Shores
Love,
Your mother

I stared at the crossed out salutation, grimaced, and shook my head.

I balled it up and tossed it with the others in the waste basket.

Beep.

---

“Sapphire, you’ve got a package.”

I plucked the damp towel from my brow, sighed, and waited for Showstopper to go away. Maybe she would believe I was on set, or out with the crew, or anywhere but my wagon.

“I know you’re in there, hon. It’s not even eight o’clock yet.” The rapping came again.

“Fine! Come in. Just stop that noise.” The compress went back in place before the light from outside could get to me. I wished, for a moment, that I’d had the pleasure of actually indulging in enough drink. There might have still been some around, if I’d had. Something to drive the pain away.

“Good morning!” My manager’s hooves sounded like jackhammers on the thick carpeting inside the wagon.

“You are entirely too chipper. Tone it down or I’ll have you dock your pay.”

“Ha ha. You got a package from Canterlot General. It’s one of those To the care of things.”

I pushed the cloth up higher and cracked an eye at Showstopper. “From who?”

“Just says, Care of Sapphire Shores. From: Canterlot General, Office of Dr. Axon. It’s not very hefty.” Showstopper’s horn flared brighter as she lifted it to demonstrate. “Maybe a quarter stone.”

“Can you open it, please? I had another nightmare last night. Blasted woman can’t even let me sleep after all these years.” I pulled the towel back down and laid a foreleg over it, intending that it wasn’t going to come off until the ache went away.

“She hit you again?”

I rolled my head back and forth on the pillow. Even my mane hurt. “She kept on trying to tell me she was sorry.”

Showstopper’s snort told me exactly what she thought of that. “Honey, they all say that. They never mean it.”

“I know. I know. Celestia, the times I tried to make up with her over the years, and that stubborn woman just kept throwing it back at me.” My head pounded at me, berating me for making so much noise. “And now she can’t even let me sleep.” At the very least, her mother’s dream self could have offered some headache powder. I might have forgiven her everything had she shown up right that moment with a packet of something stronger than F&F’s Headache tonic.

The sound of packaging being opened and twine being snipped crackled like the rustle of a wire brush against my ear.

I waited, sinking down into blissful, silent darkness.

Showstopper’s indrawn breath brought me back.

“Oh. Oh, dear. Sapphy…”

“Showy… You know I hate—”

“She’s dead.”

“—that.”

I laughed. It set off a whole parade of agony through my skull as diamond dogs started hammering away at the space between my eyes. “She’s not. She’s faking it. She sent that letter, and she’s trying to get me to come back and give her another chance to screw it all up again. Throw it away.”

“Sapphy, it looks official. There’s a death certificate and everything.” She ruffled the letter so I could hear it. “Dr. Axon wrote that she had been in a coma for four weeks, and died without waking.”

The miners struck a vein of agony and dug away at it furiously. “She’s not dead. This is a last ditch attempt to get me to reconcile. She hates what I do because it looks bad for her! Her daughter, shaking her rump on stage. Her little jewel! How could I dare embarrass her like that!” I flung the towel at Showstopper and sat up into a blinding white haze. “She’ll beg me to look after her, to give up my career and look after her personally, because that’s what she does! That’s what those telegrams were these last few weeks. Her, trying to get me to come back home!”

Showstopper’s voice intruded on the haze briefly. I couldn’t even make out the words through the pounding ache.

I slammed my hoof against the wagon’s side. “She’s never going to die. She’s going to cling to life just to try and make mine miserable.” I threw myself back on the bed, holding the migraine close, like a lover. “Because that’s what she does. She makes everypony’s life miserable so she can feel better about herself.”

I didn’t know if Showstopper left, or simply went quiet.

“I won’t let her hurt me anymore,” I said.

Then she was with me, her lips on my brow, then a cooler, damp towel pressed down over my eyes. The weight of her body at my side, her warmth close by, her breath against my neck. It all pushed back the ache little by little.

My Showstopper fired the miners, and filled in the hole in my head they had so callously left behind with a kiss. It lingered, her warm lips resting just above the towel. Then another, and another to my cheeks. Her head came to rest on my barrel, one foreleg thrown over me like a blanket. It was enough to lay next to her as we hadn’t in so long.

“We can’t do this, Showy,” I told her after the pain faded enough for me to feel anything but rage.

“I’m not,” she replied. “You need me here, right now. So, I’m here.”

Any objections I tried to come up with fell away as her breathing slowed to match mine.

I drifted away as the pain slowed to a trickle.

“I love you.”

My little jewel.

---

Beep. Beep.

I opened my eyes, squinting against the glare.

White walls. White curtains. White floor, and white ceiling.

Even the bed was white, as was the small machine humming along at its side, emitting the faint beep.

Luna stepped out from behind the bed-curtain, her dark blue coat and mane standing out like a blueberry stain on my mother’s freshly laundered tablecloth. She hurt to look at, and her very presence set the room to wavering.

“Hello, Sapphire.”

I groaned. “Please tell me this isn’t another one of the dreams about my mother.”

“No.” Luna’s hooves shattered the dreamscape as she walked, dispelling the world around us until only the bed and a desk remained. “There will be no more dreams of your mother, unless they are of your own making.”

For a long moment, as the words wormed their way through my frozen thoughts, I stared at her, mouth agape. Thought connected to words. “How dare you intrude on my dreams! How dare you let that woman shove herself on me! I want nothing to do with her, Princess Luna.”

Blue eyes glittered in her patrician face. “Dare? I dared nothing, Sapphire Shores. How dare you accuse me of violating your will! I would never do such a thing!” She towered above me, her mane a wild lash of violent blues and radiant stars. “What I did was stand aside as your mother pleaded to be let go, to wander my realm unfettered. What I did was watch a mother expend the last of her life trying to apologize to her daughter. Nothing more.”

I held my ground even as her voice boomed through me.

“She did not know what she did. She only knew that she had to find some way to get you to accept that she was truly sorry for what she had done to you.” Luna shrank again, but her eyes were no less hard. “I tried to convince her to let it go, to go back to her body. That link faded nights ago, and the last of her self drifted away this morning.”

“Then… she really is dead?”

Luna dipped her head once, slowly.

“I can’t say I’m sorry to hear that. There’s nothing I want to remember her by.”

“Nothing?”

The bed and the desk vanished as Luna stamped a hoof, and I was standing in my old room, back in Canterlot. I stood in front of the mirror, an ice-cream cone strapped to my head, tears rolling down my cheeks. But I didn’t stand in front of the mirror. And yet… I saw myself again, and I knew when that had been.

I felt a shift, and I was torn free. Luna stood next to me, and my young self bawled as she battered the cone from her head and trampled it to dust and crumbs. My eyes hurt with a young child’s pain of rejection.

“The unicorn fillies made fun of me for being a mudpony,” I told Luna, hearing my voice creak as I watched myself curl up under a comforter. “They always made fun of me. Relentlessly. My mother… she comes in now.”

And I watched from without as my mother burst in, eyes wide, a scowl on her face that lightened as soon as she saw me on the bed. She took a moment that I didn’t remember to stamp on the remains of the cone, before crawling into bed with me to hold me.

She said nothing. She only held me until I poked my head out.

“T-they made me wear it!” I mouthed the words along with my younger self. They were the words of my childhood. “They said it was the only way they would let me play games with them!”

“My little jewel,” my mother cooed. “Those other ponies aren’t worth your time. Tell you what. I’ll take you out for a treat later, okay? Joe just opened a new restaurant over on Bridle Street. It’s not good for you. At all. I thought you might like that.”

I stepped into the scene, reaching out to touch my mother’s cheek. It was as warm and solid as I recalled as my young self’s tiny hoof reached up for a hug.

“There’s nothing you want to remember?” Luna looked down at me, blue eyes distant as she looked into my soul. “Nothing you wished to say?”

“Why did she have to change?”

In answer, Luna turned away and walked through the wall of my bedroom. The scene dissolved around me as my younger self clung to my mother, and I ran face-first into a wall.

No, I had been thrown into a wall. Or ran. I shook myself off and stood up to face my tormentors. Three unicorns stood around me, their horns glittering. One tugged on my tail again. The one to my right slapped at my foreleg with a branch.

I stamped on the branch, pulling it free of the other filly’s weak magic, and spun to present my hooves to the face of the one tweaking my tail. I connected soundly with a crack and cry, the impact jolting up both my legs.

Twin gasps sounded from my right, and I launched myself at their leader, Silvermane. She shrieked as I tackled her, both fore hooves planting on her ears, pinning her head to the ground.

“Leave me alone!” I roared, full in her face.

I had a moment to savor the look of sweet terror mixed with agony as I ground my hooves against the rough pavement before I was ripped away from her.

“Sapphire Cartwheel Shores!”

Abruptly, I was standing outside myself, breathing hard. The bullies fled, one limping with a foreleg held to her chest, Silvermane with her head hanging at an odd angle. Blood spattered the pavement where my hooves had pressed her ears into it.

My stomach heaved, and I stumbled to my knees as adrenaline left me weak, and the violence, and my joy at delivering it pounded at me.

“Young lady, what were you thinking?” My mother held me above the ground, her face… she was afraid, I saw. I remembered that day, clearly. She had been angry at me. Furious.

But she was also afraid.

“I wanted them to leave me alone,” I said an instant before my young self repeated them.

“You could have been hurt!”

“I wasn’t! I hurt them! I wanted to hurt them.” I swung at my mother. “Let me go! I need to make sure they don’t hurt me anymore!” I swung at her again.

“Stop.” I looked up at Luna. “Stop it.”

“I’m not controlling this memory. You are.”

“My little jewel,” my mother wept as she sat, drawing me into her forelegs. “You can’t hit everyone who—”

I hit her. I felt it in my right hoof again as if I had just done it, and I watched my young self run after the three bullies, only to be caught seconds later. My mother hauled me home, wordless.

I paced ahead of her, watching her as I had not remembered. I watched the quivering fear give way to tight-jawed determination, and then to loose-featured resignation.

“That wasn’t the first time I’d gotten into a fight with those fillies,” I told Luna. “It was the first time I was winning. Every time, my mother would lecture me about how it would make her look like a bad mother if I kept fighting. Always about her. Her her her.”

“I see.” She stamped her hoof, and the scene shattered before my mother had dragged me all the way home.

“You can’t keep doing this, Sapphire. You’ll get hurt. And it’ll only make things worse for you at school.”

“I don’t care! I hate them!” I glared up at my mother. What did she know about being bullied? She was a unicorn. She belonged. I was just a stupid mudpony.

She didn’t reply as she finished wrapping the bruise on my ankle, kissed it, and laid it back on the bed. For a long time, she just sat there, stroking my mane and looking out over nothing.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.” I stretched out my injured leg and tried to pull her in close. She resisted, shaking her head. “Don’t you love me, too?”

“Yes, my little jewel. I love you so much.” Her hoof never stopped stroking my neck. “But you’re hurting me. Every time you get into a fight, it hurts me. I wish you would come to me for help before you started fighting.”

“But dad says I should stand up for myself. Fight back.”

The hoof stopped. “Your father is a very smart stallion, but he doesn’t know what fillies are like to each other, Sapphire. You fighting back won’t solve anything. It will make it worse, and worse, and worse. Ignore them. That’s the worst thing you can do to them. Ignore it. Come to me, and I’ll take care of it.”

“But—”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then do it because you love me. I don’t want to get hurt watching you get hurt.”

I stumbled, shaking my head. “Is it always like that?”

“It’s your memory. I am simply striking the right strings at the right time to bring them back. No more, and no less.” Luna smiled thinly, and nodded back at the scene unfolding.

My mother paced back and forth in her room, her eyes red and puffy, her cheeks streaked with the remains of tears already shed. She stopped in front of the mirror, staring at herself.

She paced away again, and back. She went to the closet and threw it open. Her sob clawed at my throat. The closet was half-empty. My mother, the orderly neat nick, and there were gaps in her closet.

From the distance of age and years, I saw them as holes in her life.

“Where’s daddy?”

My voice came from behind me. The closet slammed closed.

“Gone, jewel. Gone. He left us.” She kicked a hindleg at the door, her hoof punching clean through the thin wood. “For that mare!” Her hoof slammed into the door again, and again, and again.

She collapsed.

I turned to see myself staring, wide-eyed at her, and then I was gone.

“Please don’t ever leave me, Sapphire.”

I waited around the corner, I knew. It was after the big fight, after I had sent a filly to the hospital, and caused another to get stitches in her ears. They had fought the night before, loud and violently. It hadn’t been the first time. My mother usually won. She had won that time, too.

“They fought over me a lot,” I said. “My dad wanted me to stand up, and he was proud I had done… what I did. My mother was ashamed of me, I’d always thought. I thought she was ashamed that I was a rowdy mudpony.”

“Was she?”

“Why am I still here? So what if there’s things I remember that are… that…” I set my jaw against the ache in my throat. “She wanted me to do what she wanted me to do, not what I wanted to do, and she tried to use everything in her arsenal to get me to do it. Including using her own child’s love against her! What kind of mother does that?”

Luna didn’t answer with words. She stamped her hoof again.

“I don’t care what you thought you were doing! It’s not right! Whatever your father said, he’s gone, and for the better. You’re grounded.”

“I hate you.” The words tore themselves from my throat before I could take them back. I cringed away from myself, and who I had been. I glared the words up at Luna.

She looked coolly back at me, then returned her attention to the scene. Unwilling, I did, too.

“Hate me! I don’t care. I’m doing this for your own good!”

“My good? You just want to drag me down to be like you! Do you want to know why he left you? Do you? It’s because you don’t care about anything except how the world looks at you. He told me himself. I’m happy for him. At least he’s with someone who cares about him! I wish I was her daughter!”

“You’re my daughter, and you will listen to me as long as you are under this roof. I will not have a child who fights, and carouses, and thinks she’s above everypony else just because she’s stronger than everypony else. You are becoming a bully, Sapphire. Is that what you want?”

My hoof rang with the remembered ache, the stunned shock on her face. Blood trickled from her lip, and tears welled in her eyes. I had struck my mother. I had hurt her. I hadn’t cared.

She’d said the truth. She’d dared to tell me the truth of things. I saw, again and again, her love for me turn aside, even as I cried in the future, watching what I had done.

I stared at her for long minutes as she sobbed, my conviction fading. I tried to go to her.

She pushed me away, feeble next to my strength. I tried to pull her closer. Then she hit me. Lightly, but it hurt all out of proportion to the strength of the blow. I reeled away, feeling the anger and hurt again flowing from my younger self to me as three sharp-edged words severed me out of her life.

“Get out. Now.”

There were tears in her eyes, still, as I left, slamming the door closed. I heard her wail, thinly, as if through a door, and saw her collapse on the floor even as my teenaged self galloped down the street.

Luna set her hoof to my shoulder, drawing me back from the nightmare.

We were back in the hospital room.

“I was wrong.” I looked up at her. “How could I have been so wrong?”

Her look said nothing to me, and held neither the contempt I felt for myself, or the condemnation I wanted from her.

“This is all that remains of your mother, here. I preserved it, as best I could, without changing anything.” She nodded at the wastepaper bin by the desk. “It was the most I could do for her without overstepping certain rules. I hope you can find the answers here.”

I reached for the topmost ball of paper, and it unfurled in my hooves.

Dear Sapphire,

---

The funeral was held on a cloudy day. Showstopper had cleared my schedule and booked no less than five fake tickets to other cities before we travelled in disguise to the small Canterlot cemetery where she would be interred.

She stayed with me the whole time, doing more than she needed to, as always. I’m afraid that I was little more than a piece of luggage. I had all of her letters in my mind. It was too much to comprehend. She had really loved me.

I hated Luna for days. And then I cried. And then I scheduled a train ticket to Canterlot.

I’m glad I went.

We were the only two ponies who came, aside from Princess Luna and the bearers.

I hoped she would know, somehow, that I didn’t hate her anymore.