Fallout Equestria: Once More with Feeling

by Solitair

Wake Up Time

Rainbow Dash tried her best to concentrate on the feeling of the ground beneath her head. It felt cold and uncomfortable, with several pebbles digging into her skin. Dirt and dust had settled into her coat, making her itch. Her muscles were so weak, so bloodless, that she couldn’t use them to scratch her cheek or lift her head, so the itch would remain. But there were several other, worse things she could concentrate on.

She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see. Everything in sight hurt her. She’d seen enough of the thick clouds covering the sky, from the horizon in the east to the one in the west. Their omnipresence felt suffocating, like they were weighing down and crushing her body. Looking away only brought other things into her field of vision, things like broken, barren, blasted trees, scorched earth with scant, withered grass, and a pair of bodies scattered apart, just at the edge of her blurred vision. Her only comfort was that a third, much closer body lay behind her, out of her eyesight. She’d never see what she’d done to Gilda, the last wound that finally killed her. Neither could she see what Gilda had done to her, and thankfully she started to lose all sensation of it entirely, all except for the smell.

Her breathing was shallow and ragged, hampered by liquid and producing a sickening combination of gurgle and wheeze. Despite that, the surrounding scents still hung in her nose, and she knew they’d never leave. She smelled an overwhelming aroma of blood mixed in with traces of burnt vegetation and carrion. A lot of the blood was hers - it made her neck and forelegs wet and sticky where they met the ground - but she didn’t doubt that Gilda’s body added to the smell. The thought that she couldn’t tell their scents apart made the corner of her mouth twitch, a brief facsimile of a smile.

She knew she would be gone soon, but it couldn’t be soon enough. And yet, no matter how much she thought, she couldn’t think of a place she’d rather be. Everywhere else had withered away. Everypony else had died, in her mind or in reality. If some good souls out there still needed her, she didn’t know them, and she never would. The memory of how she got here, alone, paralyzed, and bleeding to death, was the worst thing of all she could focus on.

So Rainbow Dash focused on the itch on her cheek and her dirty coat, trying to ignore the rattling in her throat. A few minutes later, the rattling stopped, and so did her heart.

---

“-nk she’s awake! Rainbow Dash! Rainbow Dash! Please wake up! Please!”

Rainbow’s body flopped like a doll beneath Pinkie Pie’s hooves. She felt so groggy and surprised that it took several seconds for her to react. Her muscles tensed up and she pushed Pinkie away from her.

The force of the shove pushed Pinkie onto the floor, making her grunt and roll until she came to a rest at Rarity’s hooves. Rainbow Dash sprang to her hooves and rushed over to Pinkie Pie as Rarity helped her up. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I-”

Rainbow blinked. Pinkie Pie looked different to her. If it weren’t for one meeting between them, so long ago that Rainbow Dash could barely remember it, she might not have even recognized her. The Pinkie Pie she knew, who’d always taken precedence in her memory in the worst of times, was an earth pony with a coat in a vibrant, bright shade of pink, a mane and tail that curled every which way in a chaotic frizz, and a cheerful, nearly omnipresent smile on her face, one capable of shining into a gloomy heart like a beam of light. Sure, Pinkie had more and more moments when her cheer seemed forced, grating, disturbing, but it wasn’t... this.

Now Pinkie Pie’s colors were muted and dull, her mane draping her face like a curtain, hanging limp and lifeless with no body or spring to it at all. Her face looked like a mask, a facade of energy covering up a deep pit of exhaustion. Rainbow looked into her eyes and saw lines of red creeping in around the edges, and bruise-colored bags under both of them. The wistful smile on Pinkie’s face wasn’t the usual beacon of good cheer, but instead a blend of resignation and reassurance. The only good thing she could say about how Pinkie looked was that the gray stripes in her mane had vanished. Did Rarity persuade her to get it dyed? “Well... you didn’t hurt me if that’s what you mean,” Pinkie told her.

Rainbow Dash looked up at Rarity. Her hair was bent out of shape, like she’d just gotten out of bed, and she had the same tired eyes as Pinkie Pie, but something else was different about her. Now that Rainbow thought about it, the soft ache in her eyes made her wonder if she looked just as weary. She didn’t feel-

The realization of what Rainbow Dash didn’t feel hit her like a ton of bricks. She yelped and rolled back onto her back, patting much of her body with her front hooves. No lacerations, no broken bones, no blood, no stench, no presence of any illness at all. Even the pain in the joints of her wings, a constant thorn in her side for the last few years, had vanished, and her coat felt lustrous and smooth to the touch, its blue shade so vibrant it almost hurt her eyes. There wasn’t even a single familiar scar on it. Her heart throbbed as she double-checked to make sure her body was in the shape she thought it was. Looking back up at her friends, she saw recognition and sympathy on their faces. We’ve been through that too, she knew they’d say, and we don’t know why, either.

So she got back onto her hooves and took a few deep breaths, trying to keep her cool. “Okay. I’m okay. I’m cool.” She looked around the room, trying to move on to something else. “Where are we?”

“You don’t remember this place?” Rarity asked her.

But she did. How could she forget Twilight’s library? She looked around the room, a hollowed out interior of a giant tree, feeling Rarity's eyes on her as she took it all in. The floor displayed the tree’s rings, and another, smaller stump somehow grew out of floor, serving as a resting stand for a large, thick atlas of Equestria. Most of the walls were hollowed out into shelves full of books, most of them filled with dry, dusty nonfiction books that Rainbow thought she would never, ever read. Since she’d picked up on the joys of reading, she wished that Twilight would make room for more exciting, accessible books, instead of stuff that only the most hardcore eggheads could ever read for fun. She’d read a few such books in her day - she had to in order to keep up with the ins and outs of running a Ministry - but every chapter posed an uphill battle for her.

Just as she began to see the silver lining of never having to read those boring wastes of time ever again, she saw a series of books with brightly colored dust jackets, the spines displaying the same name over and over again in embossed gold lettering: Daring Do. The golden lettering continued the titles after the heroine’s name and numbered them for convenience, but the name was easily the most eye-catching part of the spine, and for good reason.

Seeing that name made Rainbow smile. It had been so long since she’d gotten a chance to read about her hero again. Her ears swiveled, detecting nothing but the occasional shuffle or creak from Rarity and Pinkie Pie. The two of them could wait for a moment. Rainbow reached out and pulled the leftmost book out of the shelf, glancing at the front cover. It was still the masterwork she remembered from the first time Twilight had shown it to her, a gorgeous reproduced painting of a pegasus climbing up a vine, escaping the reach of a pack of hungry crocodiles. She wore a pith helmet and an olive-colored jacket, and carried a two-headed sapphire figurine of a jackal in one outstretched hoof. Rarity told her once that it excited her so because of the picture’s dynamic angle and the foreshortening used on the vine and Daring Do herself, to better convey a sense of danger. It looked like Daring’s grayscale tail had already come within reach of one alligator’s open jaw! For a moment, Rainbow felt the ghost of that first thrill she had reading Daring Do’s debut adventure.

Rainbow turned the book over in her hooves, feeling a strong temptation to look up all of her favorite passages and take a peek at them. If only she had the time to read the whole thing cover to cover again! As she thought of why she didn’t, trying to pin down the sense of unease she’d had ever since waking up from... since waking up, she noticed a stain on the top edge. She knew that stain, remembered kicking herself for letting a gift like that get wet with apple juice. Then she remembered what got her over it, and flipped open the front cover to look inside.

Rainbow-

I can’t imagine how you must be feeling right now! You do so well at keeping your cool, so I can’t imagine you’re as nervous and excited as I am. To think that out of all the ponies in the country, all of the experienced mares and stallions Luna could have appointed, she picked us! I have so many new ideas to share with the princess and bring to life, even if they do have to be used in war. It really is a pity that I couldn’t really cut loose with my research until we needed it to keep Equestria safe.

You’ve probably heard by now that we’re all going to have more hectic schedules than ever before. We probably won’t have much time to hang out like we used to. So just in case we can’t meet up for long, I wanted you to have this. It meant the world to me when you told me you loved this book, and I miss being able to talk about new Daring Do stories after you read them. At least we’ll always have the memories, right? Keeping this around your place should help keep them fresh in your mind.

Yours truly,
Twilight Sparkle

P.S.: Try to read more books that aren’t Daring Do-related, won’t you? I’d love to share more literary discoveries with you and see you broaden your horizons!

That was the message that should have been written on the book’s inside cover. It wasn’t. Rainbow saw only a blank white space in its stead. She stared at the space, mouth hanging open, wondering where it went. It had to be there. No other copy of the book with that same stain existed, only the copy that Twilight signed. Flipping through the book, most of the creased pages that she remembered getting irritated over were much smoother now, like they’d never been damaged at all.

Was that what happened? Had the damage done to the book and her own body just vanished somehow? Before she could think of why, she heard the sound of a limp pony being shaken again. “Please, not too hard, Pinkie darling!” said Rarity, from behind Rainbow Dash. Rainbow turned to see what was the matter, and the sight that awaited her made her yelp in shock. It stunned her enough to make the book slip out of her hooves and hit the ground.

Pinkie shook Applejack’s head, which lacked the stetson that usually adorned it. Said stetson lay abandoned on the ground between Applejack and Twilight Sparkle. Both of them lay still on the ground, and for one moment Dash felt like her heart clenched tight. She knew it had to happen, but not like this. Not in the library.

“They’re-” Dash yelled, cutting herself off when she saw Twilight’s barrel moving up and down. She blinked and looked over at Applejack, whose body also showed signs of life.

“Sleeping, Rainbow,” Rarity said, looking from Rainbow back to Pinkie. She lay on a pile of blankets and pillows. Judging by the star and moon patterns on the biggest, blue blanket, Rainbow had to guess that they came from Twilight’s bed. Her old bed in the library, that is. Rainbow had never seen her new bed in Canterlot, since Twilight had never invited her over thanks to their respective schedules. Rainbow could see a yellow pegasus collapsed on the pile with Rarity, a pegasus whom Rarity must have tucked in as if she slept in a normal bed. “As were you until a few minutes ago.”

Rainbow looked back at Pinkie and Applejack. She didn’t want to look at Fluttershy right now. “How did you wake me up?” she asked.

Rarity gave Rainbow a full pause before she answered. “We... didn’t,” she admitted. “At least, as far as I can tell. We were simply repeating ourselves out of desperation when you stirred.”

Pinkie Pie took out an airhorn from who knew where and pressed down on top. The sound caused Rainbow and Rarity to wince, but it failed to elicit a reaction from any of the sleeping ponies. Pinkie Pie looked over at Twilight and started sniffling, lying down and burying her face in the nearest pillow. It muffled the sound of her weeping, but not well enough. Rainbow walked over and put a hoof on her back. “Pinkie...”

Nothing came to her. What was she supposed to say? Even when things were normal she sucked at consoling her friends, and given how little she knew of anything at the moment, Rainbow thought she might get the urge to cry as well. “We’ll wake them up soon. I promise.” It was the least she could say in this situation, the one thing she knew she wanted, but she didn’t know how to make it happen. Twilight always knew the most about that sort of stuff, way back when.

Inspiration hit Rainbow Dash. Twilight did know more than anypony else back in the day, but that was then and this was now, wasn’t it? She also loved sharing her knowledge and educating other unicorns, right? “Rarity, did Twilight teach you any spells that can help? Anything at all?”

Rarity looked worried. Rainbow and Pinkie both stared at her, eagerly anticipating an answer. “I... nothing comes to mind offhoof...”

“Forget offhoof!” Rainbow told her, taking another step. “Think harder! You’re the only chance they’ve got!” She could barely keep her voice under control when lives that meant the world to her rested in one pony’s hoof. Just because they all wanted their friends to get better doesn’t mean they would. They’d all learned that the hard way. All six of them tried to make Equestria better during the war, and in return they saw too much death for them to count, let alone comprehend, as a reward.

She saw Rarity concentrate until her horn flared up and glowed pale blue. Rarity turned her head from one side to the other, looking, scanning, until she lowered her horn to point to one bookshelf in particular.

Rainbow needed no better reason to rush over and scan the spines of the books on the shelf. A Brief History of Zebra Piracy? The Anatomy of the Everfree? What did those have to do with finding a solution? “What am I looking for here, Rarity?” she asked. “We don’t have time for books like these!”

Rarity began to levitate the books out of the shelf, one by one, setting them down neatly on the floor again. “We want to look behind the books, Rainbow,” she said, eventually revealing a horseshoe-shaped button on the back wall behind the books. She pressed it, and the wall slid away, revealing a few old tomes lying flat, as well as something that Rainbow couldn’t identify. With extra care, Rarity levitated it over to the nearest table for the three of them to examine.

They saw a cylinder with thick glass sides and a material they couldn’t identify on the top and bottom. It didn’t look cold and shiny like metal, it didn’t feel grainy or earthy like stone, ceramic, or wood, and something told Rainbow that it wasn’t plastic. She suspected that there might not even be any plastic now. There were no engravings or decorations on it, nothing that could indicate what the cylinder actually did except a button on top in the approximate shape of a hoof. It had already been depressed, and it didn’t look like it could be raised again.

But that wasn’t what drew their eyes. The sides of the cylinders were made out of glass, or at least it looked like glass. It was thick and clouded, but a pony could see a distorted image of the inside, like the view had been refracted through a melted lens or the image had been warped by heat. They could see something indigo floating inside, radiating an intense light. It revolved so fast that Rainbow couldn’t tell anything more about what it was, so fast it produced a faint humming noise.

What IS this thing? Something in Rainbow’s gut told her that she’d seen it before, but where? She ran through all the tech that ran through the Ministry of Awesome’s hooves, every piece of equipment she looked over and approved for the Shadowbolts, and came up with nothing. It wasn’t a weapon, and she couldn’t figure out how it worked. Did it even have a spell board? Somehow this thing, whatever it was, figured into the comatose state of her old friends, and its origin hung just outside of her awareness, its closeness making the inside of Rainbow’s skull itch. As she thought and thought, she noticed Rarity had shifted her gaze from the thing in the jar to her face.

Her voice quavered. “Rainbow Dash, are you fe-”

“How did you know?” Rainbow barked. Rarity and Pinkie Pie both flinched, jumping away from Rainbow. “How’d you know it was there?”

“I... I detected the gemstone inside,” Rarity said, pointing at the jar again. “I cast the spell I used to find gems for my dresses. D-do you remember?” Rainbow turned and looked at it, and now that she thought about it, she could see that the thing inside could be a crystal.

Looking back at Rarity, Rainbow saw that she was frightened. Was Rainbow really being that scary? She could feel a spring inside her, coiled up so tight that she thought it would snap. A few deep breaths, and she managed to loosen it again, just enough to calm down. “Yeah, I think I remember. They... Twilight talked about it. Sorry I yelled at you.” She sighed. “I don’t know, Rarity. I don’t know what that is or where we are or why I’m not dead!” Her hoof slammed into the floor, making the jar rattle on the table.

Rarity and Pinkie Pie shared a glance, then looked back at Rainbow Dash. She could already feel the spring winding up inside her again, and she hung her head and stared at the floor, only raising it again when she felt hooves rest on her shoulders.

“I know, Rainbow,” Pinkie said. “It’s really weird and creepy and I feel like I just walked a tightrope and almost fell off a bazillion times! Everything’s upside-down and backwards, but...” She sighed. “I have the two of you. You have no idea how much I missed you girls. I w-was super gloomy and... and...” As her voice started cracking, Pinkie Pie stopped talking and sniffled again. “I’m really, really sorry.”

Rainbow pulled Pinkie Pie close and let her bury her head under Dash's shoulder. “It’s fine, Pinkie. We can talk about that after we get the others up and running.”

“Yes, Pinkie darling,” Rarity said, putting her arms around Pinkie and Rainbow. “Once we’re reunited, you’ll have our unconditional support.”

Those words. Rainbow had heard them before. The realization struck her like a lightning bolt. She rushed over to the jar, wrenching herself out of her friends’ hug, and stared at the crystal inside. Her brow furrowed and she gritted her teeth.

“Rainbow?” Rarity asked. “Do you have an idea?”

Rainbow’s eye twitched. She snatched the jar off the table. “Yeah, I got an idea, alright.”

---

“Man, Twilight, why’d you have to wake us up like this?” Rainbow asked, stretching her legs on the library floor. She still felt drowsy enough to curl up on the floor and relax, undoubtedly falling asleep again in a few minutes. “You know I have flight training in the morning! Spitfire’s going to cut some cadets from the roster and I gotta make sure I’m not one of them!”

“Oh, I completely agree,” Rarity said, examining her hooves and affecting the air of a haughty businessmare who wanted to convey her displeasure at her time being wasted in as few words as possible. “A lady like me should never be awoken and deprived of beauty sleep. You know full well that I have an image to maintain.” She sighed and raised a hoof to brush her mane out of her eyes. “And now I look positively dreadful.”

“Shucks, Rarity, ya looked worse after we bungled up our little fashion show, remember?” Applejack chuckled even as Rarity glared at her. She’d made herself at home, lying on her side, and yet she resisted the temptation to close her eyes. Rainbow probably couldn't, though her friends didn’t need to hear that.

Naturally, only Pinkie Pie, out of all the ponies in the room, displayed no sign of exhaustion whatsoever. She bounced up and down on the floor, hopping around the room and coming to a stop next to Twilight. “Ooh! Lemme guess! Surprise slumber party! Oh Twilight, you really should have told me about this! I could have gathered a huge pile of fluffy pillows for us to fight with and a bunch of party mix to eat and ooh, we could probably use a bunch of that fancy mud that Rarity likes to put on the face with those yummy cucumber slices-”

“Girls!” Twilight Sparkle yelled. All of her friends stood at attention and stopped talking. Only Fluttershy kept silent, too timid to raise her voice even when she wasn’t fighting to keep her eyes open. Twilight herself looked alert and awake, even though her mane and tail were disheveled from sleeping.

When she saw that she had their attention, she tapped her hoof on a box that, now that Rainbow noticed it, hadn’t been there before. It was small, about the size of one of those large jars of pickled eggs the Apple family kept in their pantry. She’d seen them once and couldn't believe that earth ponies would eat something that gross.

“This package just arrived on my door, six hours and forty-seven minutes before Ditzy Doo normally delivers the mail,” Twilight explained, “which includes the fifty-five minutes it took for all of us to congregate here.”

“So?” Rainbow asked as Twilight reached inside. “Express packages are a thing now. Big deal. You don’t need to wake us up just because there's a hair out of place in your life, you know?”

“It’s from Princess Celestia,” Twilight said, pulling a roll of paper from the box.

“Wait, what?” Rainbow asked. “Why wouldn't she just-”

“To my faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.” Twilight cut Rainbow off, reading from the letter.

“Please forgive the circumstances behind this letter. I could not risk sending it through Spike’s fire as I usually do. One reason why is because I am being monitored by dark forces who will wreak havoc on Equestria should they discover that I’ve learned of their plans. The other is that the device enclosed in the package is too large to safely transport through Spike's fire.

“The device inside the box contains far more detail on the threat that faces Equestria.” Twilight paused and lifted from the box a very sturdy-looking glass jar with a hoof-sized button on top, the top and bottom made of an unknown material. “It is not so simple a threat as Discord or King Sombra. It is more insidious and subtle, and will test your dedication as nothing ever has before. But you and your friends bear the Elements of Harmony, and it is my belief that no challenge is insurmountable for the six of you.”

Twilight's friends couldn’t help but smile at this simple statement. “Damn straight,” Rainbow muttered.

“I must insist that the six of you activate the device in the same room, once you've placed it in the secret panel behind your bookshelf.” Twilight glanced over at said panel, which she had opened before any of her friends had gotten there. The books that she’d cleared out to access it were still organized, stacked nearby on the floor. “Press the button on top, then conceal it. You should have three minutes to cover up the panel and hide its presence before it activates. Please hurry. The fate of Equestria lies in all of your hooves. Sincerely, Princess Celestia.”

All of the ponies in the room watched Twilight set the paper aside again. She stared into the jar, which contained an indigo crystal suspended in midair. Her eyes narrowed as she peered inside, scrutinizing its every facet. As she examined it, her friends moved their eyes from Twilight to meet each other’s gaze. Half a minute of silence passed before Pinkie broke it. “Come on, Twilight, press the button!” she said with an excited squeal.

Applejack walked up to the jar and gave the crystal inside a sidelong glance. “Ain’t much point in hesitatin’ now, sugarcube. You want one of us to give this here doohickey a whirl instead?”

Twilight finally looked up at her friends, looking each of them in the eye, then sighed and hung her head. “This doesn’t feel right. I don’t even know what this is or how it works, and Princess Celestia wants me to use it without any prior testing? This isn’t scientific, it’s reckless.” She frowned and looked back at the jar.

Fluttershy coughed, looking at a book on a shelf to the exclusion of all else. Her worried expression mirrored Twilight’s. Rainbow Dash just tilted her head. “Why would the princess send you something that doesn’t work?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Twilight said. “I wouldn’t even consider going through with activating this if it didn’t come from the princess herself.” She sighed and stared at the floating crystal. “What should I do?”

The rest of the mares in the room glanced at each other, before Rarity stepped forward. “Darling, I suspect you’re more qualified to make this decision than the rest of us. Whichever path you choose to take, you have our unconditional support. Right girls?” She glanced behind her and saw their friends nodding, though it took Fluttershy a moment to muster up initiative. Rainbow Dash nodded first, wishing that Twilight would just get on with it so she could go back to sleep.

“Alright,” Twilight said, levitating the jar and giving it a much closer examination. Rainbow guessed that Twilight used some sort of magic to scan it or something, but she didn’t know for sure. Just before Rainbow could blurt out her impatience, Twilight took the jar over to the secret compartment behind her bookshelf, tucking it inside and finally pressing the button.

Before Twilight closed the compartment and started piling books into the shelf again, Rainbow caught a glimpse of the floating gemstone starting to whir, glow and spin. “So what happens now?” she asked, stretching her legs and wings. “It better happen soon, ‘cause I’m gonna crash any minute now.

Rainbow yawned, and Applejack followed suit soon after. “I’m feelin’ mighty tuckered out myself,” she said, rolling onto her side.

“I... think that’s how it works,” Twilight said, rubbing her eyes. “There’s some kind of soporific enchantment on that device.”

“Whuzzat mean?” Rainbow asked. She could feel a twinge of pressure inside her head, like claws pushing it down to the floor, and judging by the sudden slump of a body hitting the floor, she wasn’t the only one.

“Oh, Fluttershy!” Rarity called out, following her concern with a yawn. Rainbow turned to see her lying down next to Fluttershy’s unconscious body.

Everypony looked barely awake, like a stiff breeze would make them fall over and sleep. Pinkie Pie didn’t even wait for that, rolling over onto her back and squeezing herself up against the wall. It looked like a good position for Rainbow to get into. Very comfortable. All of her thoughts about the letter and the crystal jar and the princess dashed out of reach before she could grasp them. She just needed a good night’s sleep, and then they’d be more cooperative.

---

“Rainbow Dash, where are you going?” Rarity shouted, looking up from outside the door to the library.

“To wake them up!” Rainbow Dash called back. She had flown out the door, the crystal jar tucked against her chest, and now scanned the environs of Ponyville for something suitably hard and pointed.

She noticed many things in those moments. She noticed that Celestia’s sun had risen, and as such the ponies of Ponyville, ponies who had no idea that anything was wrong, who acted like the last few miserable decades never happened, woke up and got settled into ordinary routine for an ordinary day. They looked so small and helpless from above the rooftops. It occurred to Rainbow that she didn’t know what this thing was. She could be dooming the ponies down below to a terrible fate if she cracked it open right then and there, in the middle of town. Besides, she didn’t know if anything in town could do the job.

“Hey, Rainbow Dash!” called out a voice Rainbow vaguely recognized. A brief glance confirmed the presence of Ponyville’s mailmare, Ditzy Doo. She fluttered in the air, adjusting her bag so that fewer letters stuck out and had an opportunity to fly off, though she seemed to be putting a new letter at risk for every one she successfully tucked away. “How was-” Rainbow sped off before she could hear any more.

Soaring above the clouds of Ponyville, she took a moment to marvel at the feeling of flying. The wind lifted her, flowing around her wings, and for a moment it felt amazing to take to the air again. It felt better than she remembered it being in a long, long time. No stiffness in her muscles, no aching or creaky joints, no blurred vision. Whatever happened, it put Rainbow Dash right back in her prime, it made her young again, and it brought a smile to her face.

Flying past Ponyville and Sweet Apple Acres to the surrounding plains, she spotted a rock on the ground, a tall stone as wide as her torso. Rainbow smirked. It looked nice and hard enough. Her wings spread out and she leaned back, coming to a stop in front of the rock. With a grunt, she raised the jar and brought it down on the top of the rock. The jar hit the rock with a loud smack, the impact wrenching it out of Rainbow’s hooves.

“Ow!” she said, flexing her legs. When she picked up the jar, she could only see a single hair-thin scratch on the glass. It wouldn’t work; it would take too long. Unless, Rainbow thought as she looked up into the sky, she could pull it off again.

A nearby thermal gave her a ride up high into the air. All around her she could see wispy, malformed clouds, the kind that form in the night when the pegasi sleep and leave the sky to its own devices. She brushed past one of them as she rose, feeling the soft, downy texture on her feathers. The comfort of clouds was beyond compare.

But then Rainbow Dash remembered that two thirds of Equestria's population would never be able to experience the joy of feeling clouds prop up their body. All her life, right up until the last day, she had never truly considered how unfair it all was. It got especially galling when it meant the difference between a comfortable life and a short, hellish one. Did they care? Of course not. Fucking Enclave. As Rainbow clenched her jaw, she felt herself wavering in the air, and tried to force those sons of bitches out of her head. All she could do was force them aside so that she could still fly. She had a job to do.

With a few powerful flaps of her wings she rose high into the air. Ponyville sat down below, looking like a toy model set with tiny little dots populating it. Up above floated the distant city of Cloudsdale, innocent, unsuspecting and pristine. For a moment Rainbow stared at it and wondered why it still existed. Then she remembered why she came there and dropped into a nosedive.

Vintage memories flooded her mind, brought to her through rejuvenated muscles. The lead-up to the big event felt fuzzy in her mind, the details obscure and confusing. She knew her friends came up to the clouds with her, and that Rarity tried to steal the spotlight by flying too, but she didn’t know what else they did or what Rarity wore while performing. Only the descent, the rescue, the rainboom stood out with burning clarity.

Rainbow felt wind whipping through her hair as she picked up speed. She’d called it the best day ever, and she wasn’t wrong. The grin that had spread so wide that it hurt her cheeks shrank when she realized how sad that was. The day her sonic rainboom won her the Best Young Flyers Competition should have been the start of an excellent career, but aside from joining the Wonderbolts, nothing else had ever made her that happy, that fulfilled ever again. Moments in the decade after came close, but that was it. One decade. Nothing else.

She started to see the air bend in front of her, coalescing into a wall for her to burst through once she picked up enough speed. Twilight had called it the sound barrier, expressing mild surprise that it was an actual barrier that Rainbow had bounced off of before, when unstable nerves kept her from pulling it off. For a moment she thought it would happen again. What if-

No! Rainbow gritted her teeth and pushed up against the barrier like a hoof pushing up against thick rubber. You’ve done this so many times before, it’s second nature! Your body is toned, your mind is sharp, you’ve never been this capable in your entire life! There’s no way you can fail, not when your friends’ lives are on the line! This will not beat you! You are Rainbow Dash, the best flyer who ever lived!

Her hooves split the barrier open. A kaleidoscopic rainbow of colors washed over her eyes, accompanied by a deafening crack. A split-second of silence followed, the most crucial moment of time in the entire stunt. Rainbow could see the ground and the spire growing out from it zooming up to meet her. One moment of hesitation and she’d smash every bone in her body onto the soil. But she didn’t worry. She’d done it before. At the last possible second, she released her death-grip on the jar and banked up into a sharp right angle.

As she pulled back and tried to slow down, she glanced back at the spire and heard the sound of smashing glass catch up with her ears. It worked! Her plan actually worked! She turned her eyes back to see the spire and saw the shattered remains of the jar on the grass below. Above the spire, she thought she saw some sort of blue wisp in the air above. Then her eyes drifted up to the rainbow pattern in the sky, the typical awesome result of the sonic rainboom. Except it wasn’t a rainbow this time. Every single shade in the pattern was blue, tinged with various other colors and shades of white and black.

Huh, weird. Rainbow hovered in place and stared at it, noticing that it wasn’t going away. Normally the rainbow would disappear like a delayed flash of light, but this dissipated at a much slower rate, almost like it was some sort of cloud or gas. But her friends took priority, so she rushed off to find them.

Most of the ponies who had woken up in Ponyville had stopped, staring at the blue cloud. Rainbow weaved through the crowd and flew over to the library, stopping right in her tracks as Fluttershy burst out the door and came within an inch of crashing right into Rainbow.

The two of them stared at each other for a few moments, each frozen by the other’s gaze. Rainbow thought she looked like a cornered animal. Her eyes were wider and more bloodshot than Pinkie or Rarity’s, she looked twitchy, and from her puffy face and runny nose it was clear that she had just finished sobbing. Looking at Rainbow Dash was enough to make Fluttershy cringe and cower. She bit her lip almost hard enough to draw blood. At the back of her mind, Rainbow realized she’d been glaring daggers at Fluttershy without even knowing it, and so she softened her face a little. Not too much, though, not enough to let Fluttershy think Rainbow forgot what she did.

“Darling, I’m afraid I don’t know any Crumble.” Rainbow heard Rarity’s voice from inside the library, and she shifted her gaze to look over Fluttershy’s shoulder, into the interior of the library. Past the door, she could see Rarity trying to console Applejack, who looked around the library in a panic, searching for something that clearly wasn’t there. Now that she thought of it, Rainbow could hear Pinkie Pie’s incessant, terrified babbling in the background, the words running together too quickly to identify.

“I just had her,” Applejack mumbled. “She was next to me an’ she was sleepy an’ I just put ‘er down for a nap.” Much like the rest of them, Applejack looked scary, like she’d just woken up from a nightmare. Her mane and tail flowed freely and unbound, some hair getting into her eye. But her posture was almost as broken as Fluttershy’s, and if Rainbow had to be honest, it scared her. She racked her memories for instances where Applejack had lost her cool, seemed like she had completely given in to panic, and she just got a headache for her trouble.

Rarity, meanwhile, looked like somepony had poured ice into her belly. “I... I’m terribly sorry, Applejack, but... well...” She gulped and averted her eyes from Applejack’s, coming to rest on Fluttershy. Rainbow felt Fluttershy trying to brush past her now that Applejack had distracted her, and with a frown she stepped to the side and let her flee. Rarity had raised a foreleg and opened her mouth, halfway to calling Fluttershy back and begging her to stay, but she wilted back into resignation once she saw her go.

“Rainbow, why did you-” Rarity said, before Rainbow Dash raised her hoof up in front of her.

“We’ve got enough problems worrying about our friends, okay?” Rainbow replied. She sounded exasperated.

Rarity looked aghast, gasping in her typical melodramatic manner. “Rainbow, Fluttershy is our friend as well!”

Rainbow bit back the temptation to tell Rarity to speak for herself. The last time Rainbow and Fluttershy had contact with each other, Rainbow practically bit her head off. She chose to be a traitor, giving aid and comfort to the enemy during wartime, and that was all Rainbow cared to know before she shut Fluttershy out of her life. But after every cowardly pegasus in the world slapped the “traitor” label on Rainbow, she felt bad about tossing the word around so much. It didn’t feel right to call Fluttershy that... though she was still an idiot.

A twitch worked its way across Rainbow’s face. “She’s all yours. I got Applejack.” Without waiting for any response, Rainbow pushed past Rarity and put a hoof on Applejack’s shoulder. The farmpony stayed alert, pacing around the room. Her eyes kept darting, giving Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie an occasional glance, before locking eyes with Rainbow again.

“She ain’t here,” Applejack mumbled. “My li’l girl’s gone.” It sounded like she could barely keep her voice steady herself.

“Yeah,” Rainbow said, looking at the ground. “Sorry.”

When Applejack leaned on her to give her a hug, Rainbow didn’t resist. She just raised a foreleg to pull her in and glanced over at Pinkie Pie embracing Twilight in much the same way. Pinkie squeezed the shellshocked unicorn tight and continued talking. When she focused, Rainbow could make out words like “missed you,” “treatment,” and “Mint-Als.”

She saw Twilight’s face pucker up in disgust, saw her wriggling out of Pinkie’s grip. “Ngh... gah! Let... go of me!” Her horn glowed, and transferred to Pinkie Pie’s hooves, tugging at them in an attempt to break her grip.

Pinkie fell silent and stared at her hooves. She let go of Twilight and took a step back, shaking her head to get hair out of her eye. “I’m super sorry, Twilight, I know what you said about personal space and everything but I was really worried about you! I thought you’d be sleepy forever and I just wanted to tell you-”

“It’s not working,” Twilight said. Her face grew stony and she backed away from her friends, eyes darting between them.

Rainbow looked Twilight over. The egghead looked the way Rainbow felt, minute twitches moving through her body, ready to flee at a moment’s notice. That is, unless she decided that turning her magic on them made a better plan. But why? Things got sour between all of them when Pinkie got addicted to those zebra drugs, but not this sour. Did Twilight really cut Pinkie off after that party, like Rainbow did with Fluttershy?

“W-what ain’t workin’, Twi?” Applejack asked with a sore voice, having finally gotten back on her hooves. She raised her head to look at Twilight, revealing her puffy face.

“This, this, this, all of this!” Twilight said, spitting out each word like a thorn. She waved a hoof around to encompass the library and the ponies inside. “I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do here. Get me to let my guard down? Bribe me with good memories? This is a new low for you. At least you were being honest with the trauma and torture!”

“What?” Rainbow yelled, completely baffled. Twilight said just about the last thing Rainbow expected to hear from her, and since she could almost see Pinkie’s heart being ripped asunder through her face, she couldn’t help glaring daggers at Twilight and her inexcusable language.

Pinkie gulped and reached up to Twilight with an outstretched hoof. “Twilight, it’s me,” she said. “I’m your friend, remember? I know we had bad times before, but I’m all better now! All better!”

“You are not Pinkie Pie!” Twilight shouted, making Pinkie freeze in her tracks.

“But... but I...” Pinkie Pie said, her voice rising in pitch.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Rainbow asked her. She flared her wings and marched up to Twilight, whose eyes widened as she backed up into a shelf. “Pinkie pours her heart out to you and you pay her back by shouting her down? Are you out of your mind?”

Twilight’s expression cracked, slipping into a look of doubt and uncertainty. She fell on her haunches and began to hyperventilate. “I... I... you’re...”

Rainbow sighed and shook her head. “Would it kill you to talk to her?” she asked, with a quieter voice. “To listen to her? That party happened ages ago! It’s ancient history and something tells me she’s sorry about it!” She jabbed a hoof out to point at Pinkie Pie, who watched the two of them with bated breath. “What possible reason-”

She stopped when she noticed Twilight’s horn starting to glow, a glow that quickly spread out to Twilight’s entire body. “No no no, don’t you dare!” Rainbow yelled, tackling Twilight to restrain her.

A bright flash of light went off in Rainbow’s eyes, and she only ended up hitting the shelf behind Twilight, causing a few books to fall on top of her. Twilight herself had already gone. Despite Rainbow’s efforts, she’d teleported away.

“Uuuuaaaaaauuugh!” Rainbow let out a groan and slammed her hoof into the floor. For a moment she stood there, panting and staring down at the floor, trying to unwind again. After her breath slowed down enough, she looked back up at her miserable friends and sighed.

A hoof rapped at the library door, breaking the silence. “Rainbow, are you in there?” a mare’s voice asked from the other side. It sounded familiar to Rainbow, but she couldn’t put a name or a face to it.

The three ponies inside the library looked up at the door, then each other again. Rainbow could feel a hesitation hanging in the air, ice to be broken. But nopony moved to break it again except the mare at the door, rapping louder than before. “Rainbow, I saw you come in. I saw that weird rainboom you pulled off. You mind telling me what that was all about?”

“Will you two be okay?” Rainbow asked Applejack and Pinkie. “I’ve got work and I... I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do this.” She scuffed the floor with a hoof. “I was never any good with feelings and junk, you know?”

“Go on, sugarcube,” Applejack said. She looked better, but not by much. Her eyes still looked bleary and her face still looked reddened, but she looked determined, like a pony trying to pull herself out of quicksand. “Think Pinkie an’ I can get our affairs in order.”

Her gaze met Rainbow’s as she got up to stand next to Pinkie, and they kept their eyes locked until the mare outside knocked again. “Rainbow!”

“I’m coming!” Rainbow flew over to the door and opened it, revealing a yellow pegasus with seafoam hair. Rainbow hovered for a few seconds until things fell into place and she remembered the mare’s name. “Hey Raindrops, what’s up?”
Raindrops stared at Rainbow’s face. Her look of stern annoyance melted into surprise. “Rainbow, you look terrible! What happened?”

They could barely hear Rainbow grinding her teeth. “Ugh. Pretty sure it was a nightmare,” she said. It might have been a lie. She could still be in a nightmare for all she knew. “Don’t tell me, I’m late for cleaning up the sky again, aren’t I?”

Raindrops stared at her, mouth open. “No,” she said after a pause of several seconds. “We have Wonderbolts drills in half an hour.”

“Oh.” Rainbow felt a chill spread through her body. She forgot that Raindrops joined Wonderbolts Academy at the same time she did. As far as Raindrops went, Rainbow only ever remembered managing Ponyville’s weather with her, day in and day out, the routine having burned itself into her mind. She spent much less time with Raindrops training for the Wonderbolts, since Raindrops didn’t make the cut. The fact that she now wanted to come to practice with Rainbow suggested that she hadn’t been dropped yet. Now she had her surroundings narrowed down to the year, even if she still had little idea as to why. “Ssssorry, I forgot,” she said, scratching her head and dusting off her sheepish look.

“You forgot?” Raindrops asked, looking like she’d just been slapped. “You spent every moment of our shift yesterday talking about how you were going to impress Spitfire with your super special awesome moves at training and now you forgot about training completely? Dash, did you hit your head on a branch when you napped in your last tree?”

Rainbow chuckled in spite of herself. She could never explain why she found it so easy to nap in trees. It just happened from time to time, sometimes ending with her falling into an awkward position. “Nah, I just had a rough night. Really rough.” She shut the door behind her and shook her head. “So... guess we should get going, huh?”

“If you’re really out of it,” Raindrops said, squinting and looking Rainbow over, “I’m sure Spitfire would understand if you called in sick. Are you sure you’re up for drills?”

Now that was a question for the ages. Rainbow sat outside the library door and tried to weigh the pros and cons. Physically, she felt more than ready, though she might not have the right muscle memory for some of the more advanced moves she’d otherwise blow the Wonderbolts away with. She knew she could still pull off a Sonic Rainboom and probably even more. Mentally...

She looked at Raindrops, really looked at her. It made the other pegasus back up a step, but Rainbow kept looking. Her mind drifted back to the black day of her trial, when the remnant of the pegasus race had deemed her a traitor. The anger she felt that day, at being judged by the most arrogant, self-righteous, deluded, unsympathetic, reprehensible ponies in Equestrian history.

Was Raindrop there? Was she one of the hypocrites who tried to make her a pariah? She couldn’t remember. All throughout the trial she focused so much on yelling at every single one of the pegasi who took an active part in that wretched show trial against her, she didn’t take note of any faces in the audience. So for all she knew, Raindrops didn’t agree with the decision to banish Rainbow, but she certainly didn’t try to stop it, either. Then again, maybe she was dead by then. How sad was it that this possibility felt most comforting to Rainbow?

“Okay, Rainbow, you need to calm down, right now,” Raindrops said, snapping her tail. “Spitfire’s not going to tolerate that attitude on the grounds, and if she catches a whiff of disorderly conduct you’ll be lucky if she settles on busting you back down to wingpony!”

Rainbow blinked. She had to calm down, had to be smart about this. One deep breath, another, a third. “Sorry,” she said, trying to smile again. “Nightmares. I shouldn’t have had that pickled egg before bed.”

That earned her a wary look from Raindrops. “Okay, if you’re sure,” she said, turning and taking off. “You really had me worried for a minute.”

“Eh, don’t worry about me,” Rainbow said. She flapped her wings and lifted her hooves off the ground. With wings as strong as hers, she overtook Raindrops easily, speeding off in the direction of the Academy. “I’ll be fine.”

Author's Note:

Many thanks to Seraphem, Sagebrush, and Snow for help in editing, and additional thanks to Sagebrush for creative consulting.

Comments

[DualThrone]

I'm DualThrone, and I approved of this AU of an AU.

I like how this is starting!

[Loeden]

Ooh, I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

[Deathpony]

Looks good so far

[RevelRomp]

Just read Chapter 1. It's neat. Mainly, it was Twilight's reaction to reawakening that got my attention. Sorta brings to mind Asylum's intro or the Happyhorns section of Project Horizons, and that bit of mind-screwy fish-out-of-water confusedness tends to be amusing for me, at least in parts and when it's not played for angst.

[Veradon Chimera]

Pretty cool so far. One thing I want to say though is either put a paragraph break after each paragraph or indent the very first line of each paragraph. Helps break up the chapter a bit, because the way I looks now is just intimidating.

[Bad Horse]

You should listen to 3589495. If only to convince other commenters (like me) that making comments is worthwhile, because that advice is the only advice you will ever get in writing that is 100% correct, and yet you haven't taken it.