How to Disappear Completely

by shortskirtsandexplosions

Potential

Flash reached the mountains.

At least, he thought he did.

Sharp spires stuck out of the mists, dividing the horizon between glossy and glossier. The sky was a marble pool dripping all around him. He followed the streams that the music made and discovered glinting shapes, rigid peaks, and polished slopes. Trees clung to the summits with monk-like desperation, bent and bowing with the weight of ages. He navigated shadows within shadows, emerging in the moonglow beyond to discover even more layers of rolling topography: brimming with infinite possibility.

All the world was awash in a great hush. It allowed Vinyl's music to echo within him, to resonate with soulful vibration. Every time he suffered an errant thought or a whiff of nostalgia, he'd be immediately shaken back to the present—restored to the sights and sounds of a nocturnal glide within this sonic sanctum. He didn't smile. He hadn't the time to sob. He just flew, fast and furious and fateless.

The skyline rippled and bent until it was no longer distinguishable. All cardinal directions vanished. The only constant was the moon—and it hung directly overhead, throwing his silver shadow in every direction. So he went in the only direction that made sense anymore.

He ascended. He climbed skyward, putting as much distance between himself and the terrestrial landscape that housed the doorway through which he had limped a thousand thoughtless gasps ago. A necrotic existence lay far below him: a million regrets rotting away deep in some oceanic trench, being fed on by schools of fear, anxiety, and remorse. Memories of school, of disgruntled parents, of ugly politics and numbing technology and damning isolation—he shoved it all away and found the moon in its place. The light was soft, but persistent. He somehow knew that if he got close enough, the luminescence would cleanse him. It was made of far sterner stuff than the dust that had forged the young man and—surely—if he could just pierce the penumbra... if he could only get away by arriving...

It was then that Flash realized how empty his brief bouts of sleep had been over the past few months. The emptiness had been so thick, the numbness so persistent and permeating, that the only way to actually taste of dreaming was to throw himself through a mystical window and become one with the magic.

And now he was approaching the source of it at nearly a hundred miles an hour... so fast and with such ferocity that his senses lost track of how sharply the temperature had dropped. And—right about the time that Vinyl's composition had switched to a low tempo beat—he suddenly woke up to how damnably cold he was. After piercing the fifth or sixth cloud since he passed the mountaintops, a thin layer of frost had formed along his coat... and polluted the fibers of his feathers.

His wings grew stiff... heavy... useless...

...and Flash plummeted.

Hard.

Comments

[IceKitsune]

Stall out!

[Golden Rule]

The end
since that comment was made last chapter by Thought Prism I can't help but play the game of "what if this was the last chapter" with every addition.

[djthomp]

He's really going to disappear completely at this rate.

[Smjames]

Here's hoping he solves the icing problem.

[RaptorCalloftheShadows]

7895351 ...Gold-Titanium Alloys are useful for this. So I've heard. XD

[Czar_Yoshi]

Think, Flash! What would Rainbow do?

[Primarina]

This sounds like he's going east!

[link4]

sounds like someone used wax and plucked feathers to try reaching the sun

[Adam Jensen]

It's not the end of the world Flash, but you can see it from here.

[honeyhoneyhoney]

SQUISH

:o

[Icarus_Con_Queso]

It would seem Vinyl and Derpy have played the role of Daedalus for our orange Icarus.

[ShortestFuse]

7895351

Ah, Tony Stark is the best.