When Dash awoke the next morning, someone had pitched an umbrella next to her to shade her from the sun. She looked around to find she was on the beach, close to her cabin. Confused and still pretty groggy, she decided to sleep some more and let the situation play out.
Which it did about fifteen minutes later, when Rarity walked over with a picnic basket and a glare that sent Dash into fits of laughter.
“You could have gotten sunburned,” Rarity tried to say, though Dash kept on trying and failing to hold her amusement in.
“Your--your whole face! It was just like--”
“I brought lunch. Would that shut you up?”
The laughter stopped. “Depends on how much you brought.”
So for the next hour, they sat on the beach, and Dash ate every morsel of food in the basket.
Having nothing stuffed in her face, it fell to Rarity to make the majority of the conversation. Much to Dash's chagrin, she talked about work and fashion and gossip. The words sounded nice, but there was nothing to them. They fell right through the sand all the way to the wet clay below, or they got carried away by the birds for lunch, or the ocean scooped them up and pulled them down into the deep.
Dash never really struck herself as a deep person. Some ponies worried about the nature of things, or the scale of space, or the weight of experience. She worried about the frequency of meals and the patterns of the weather. She worried about air and the way it pushed her. She was like paper. All pegasi were. And the earth ponies were rocks and the unicorns were scissors.
Why was it now of all times she felt like grasping for something more? More was ridiculous. She already had more. She had a free vacation in a tropical island paradise with her friend--her friend, her friend, her friend--what more could she want?
She wished the feeling would go away. Maybe if there was just more food to eat, or more naps to take, or another island even further away from the rest of the world, maybe if there was even more of that, she could feel less of what she felt now.
“Hey, Rarity?” Dash interrupted. “Sorry, but--can we talk about something else?”
“Uhm--sure, of course. Was my story too much?”
She had been talking all this time? Dash was glad she hadn’t put on any sunscreen. Maybe the redness on her cheeks could be construed as a tan. “No, it wasn’t too much. I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
They sat in silence a few seconds.
Dash said, “I don’t know what I’m feeling, I guess. The ocean is--uh, it’s really pretty today.”
“Yes, very pretty.”
More silence. Where was that something more she wanted? Where was it? Beneath the sand? The waves? In the belly of the birds? Where? “Maybe I’ll try flying with the birds later.”
“Yes, just don’t scare them off with your speed.”
Lame humor. It slipped between the grains of sand and was lost forever. Good riddance.
“I just feel--ugh.” Dash let her head rest in the sand. Maybe if she was lucky she would sink too. “I don’t know what I feel.”
Rarity moved closer, and a strange clinging sensation came over Dash, like she should hang onto her friend for dear life or risk losing her to the sand. She didn’t, of course--that would be weird--but she still felt it all the same. Oddly nice. Warm and bright.
“Try not to think too hard, dear,” Rarity said. “You’re on vacation.”
So Dash closed her eyes and tried not thinking for a minute, and when she opened her eyes she found her head nestled in Rarity’s lap. She looked up at her, and in return she smiled down.
Rarity took her unkempt mane and ran her hooves through it. Nothing purposeful, just feeling the texture, that strange association between something so similar to your own yet so different.
Dash tried not to think about it too hard.