Ion-Sturm!BoltiCNPTw Mon, Apr 16, 2012 11:44 PM No. 97475
Why Rainbow Dash refuses to have anyone touch her hooves.
===========================================================
Rainbow Dash's medical record was reputed to be almost as prodigious as her collection of flight accolades. According to Ponyville Urgent Care's files, she'd been treated for twelve fractures, nine sprains, six potentially life-threatening lacerations, two concussions, and twelve lost or damaged primary feathers, all in only fifteen incidents. And those were only the ones she actually came in for. Despite the fact that she was often too stubborn to submit to treatment, Dash herself didn't mind the legendary status she had among Ponyville's nurses, and even seemed to find it flattering.
So it always came as a surprise to the nurses whenever one of them tried to give Dash a proper examination. As one Ms. Silver Cross described it, "It was like I had touched her with a live wire. She jumped a foot into the air and tried to stand on her fractured shins, mumbling something about how maybe she just needed to go home and sleep it off. Is there something we should know about her rear hooves?"
The answer wasn't to be found in Dash's medical records or psychological profile, but in her not too distant past. The scars on her ankles had mostly healed-- and of those that remained, nopony would see them underneath her hair. Nopony-- no pony, at least, had been around to see how she'd earned them, but she knew they were there. She remembered every tiny cut crisscrossing her skin, and when she looked at her own legs sometimes she thought she could still see the white lines where they had been, years ago.
None of her friends ever questioned her decision to fly over tall grass instead of walk on it. It was dumb luck that none of them ever noticed her violent reaction to the nurses touching her hooves, and even after seeing her reaction in the salon they just wrote it off as her being stubborn as usual. The occasional unfortunate tickle against her ankles was bad enough, but to have another living being working at her down there...? Every instant of every sensation came rushing back. The sheen of golden eyes in the sort of moonlight that can only be found above the clouds, fur and feathers dragging against each other in trembling rhythm, talons biting into blue-coated skin while a smooth beak probed and scratched and hissed with warm breath.
Rainbow Dash had never been a pony to forget parts of her life easily, and she intended to hold this secret close to her heart. She was a bad-flank, the toughest in Equestria, and those other ponies could just mind their own business.
AN: I have one regret about how I wrote this: Until the very end, it sounds like Rainbow Dash did this to herself with a boxcutter. I wanted to bait-and-switch the reader with the idea that it's an old wound, or at the very least I wanted to imply that breaking up with Gilda left a 'wound.' Now I wish I'd taken the darker route and made Dash a recovered cutter. Oh well.