The third time the throat clearing rattled out from the foot of her bed, Dash finally opened her eyes just so she could glare at Discord, standing there all regular sized again. "You'll never get away with this, you know," he said, folding his arms.
She considered saying, "I don't know what you mean," then changed it in her head to, "I don't care what you mean," then decided to just roll over and close her eyes without saying anything.
He made a loud sniffing noise. "And it's no use taking that tone with me, young filly. I have committed to memory a vast repertoire of insipid pop songs from the last fifteen centuries, and I will show no hesitation about launching into the deadliest medley you or any pony has ever—"
"Will you just—!" Flinging off her blankets, Dash zoomed over to shove her snout against his. "Look, I'm sleeping in, all right? The day after saving Ponyville from whatever Hades was trying to do? Or is that too much to ask?"
His eyelids drooped. "You know what Hades was trying to do. And I know what you're trying to do."
"That's because I told you." She gestured to her pillows. "I'm trying to sleep!" Puffing a snort through her nostrils and into his face, she wheeled around and dropped back onto the blankets. "So how 'bout you get on with your life and let me get on with mine?"
"Oh, if only I could." A tap-tap-tap started like a slow leak from a rain gutter onto a tin roof. "Unfortunately, it's like you said when we parted in the daydream realm yesterday: I know the ponies in Ponyville by now. Fluttershy mostly, of course, but I seem to have become somewhat entangled with the rest of you candy-colored cream puffs as well. And from what I've seen, whenever any of you tries to stopper up your feelings this way, it only leads to upset tummies and doleful countenances all around."
The tap-tap-tap kept getting sharper and sharper, Dash wincing each time it jabbed her ears. "There aren't any feelings!" Grabbing a pillow, she wrapped it around her head to block out the sound. "Except maybe tiredness from not getting to sleep in the way I wanted to!"
"Oh, now, Strainflow," he murmured right into her ear, and she jerked her eyes open to see that she'd somehow managed to wrap him, all rough and scraggly, around her head instead of a pillow.
"Gah!" She flailed to get away, tangled her legs and wings in the blanket, and fell right off the edge of the bed, hitting the cloudy carpet with a dull thump.
"Honestly!" Discord grinned down at her from where he lay stretched over her sheets. "What does it say about your emotional state when Hades himself, the villain of our recent melodrama, came clean about his desire to utterly possess our buttery friend Stuttercry more readily than you do?" He gave a little shrug. "I mean, yes, Luna and Twilight and I had to give him a few stern looks before he fessed up, but now that he has, he's ever so sorry for what he did."
"Yeah, I'll bet," Dash couldn't keep from muttering.
Discord spread his front paws. "That's what I said! In fact, I voted to seal him up in Tartarus for a few centuries to consider the error of his ways, but no. Our various princesses decided to let him off with an apology tour." He sighed. "All day, Twilight, Luna, Cadance and yours truly have been following Hades around while he says he's sorry and performs a few middling tasks as a way of making amends to those citizens of Equestria whom he discommoded with his stunt." His voice and gaze took on an edge. "But what do you suppose happened when our little parade reached Fluttershy's?"
Dash tried to come up with a flip comment, but she found her throat had gone dry.
"She barely remembered meeting him!" Discord's gaze got even sharper. "She was almost entirely certain that she hadn't seen him since the party at her place on Nightmare Night! We all thought that a bit odd, but under gentle questions and with many a blush and a stammer, she did admit to having given him a role in one of her favorite daydreams while she'd been doing her chores yesterday: something about him locking her away in a midnight-encrusted tower where she pined away, waiting for her hero to swoop in and rescue her."
If Dash's throat had been dry before, it was an absolute sandbox now. "But...that's—" she coughed out but squeezed her mouth shut before the words 'my daydream' could pop from her lips.
Judging by Discord's sour expression, Dash wondered if he'd somehow heard them anyway. "And I thought to myself," he said, his voice low and gravelly, "'Didn't somepony of my acquaintance recently have power over daydreams?'"
It took some effort for Dash not to back away from him, now stretched as taut as a bowstring across her bed. "It wasn't—" she started.
But a slash of Discord's claws slapped a big piece of yellow tape over Dash's mouth; she peeled it away and blinked at the phrase crime scene printed on it in black letters. "So I excused myself," Discord was going on. "The princesses had begun discussing with Hades and a rather confused Fluttershy the proper ways to respond when one develops a sudden crush, but I hove myself hither to see if perhaps somepony might've confessed her fervent admiration for some other pony while traipsing through Hades's realm, then used her abilities to erase that information from said other pony's mind before exiting said realm."
"No!" Dash leaped into a hover. "I didn't! I wouldn't! That's not what happened, and I won't let you go around saying it is!"
"Indeed?" Everything flashed white, and Dash found herself sitting at a table in the middle of her bedroom, Discord in a blue police uniform on the other side, a notebook and pencil in his paws and claws. "Then maybe you could tell me what did happen on the afternoon in question?"
"Nothing!" Unable to stay still, Dash shot up to the ceiling and whooshed around the walls in a swift circle. "Hades told us we had to walk out, so we started walking out! Then we heard you guys bust in on him, but since we weren't sure it wasn't a trick, we kept going till we actually got out! And I thought that Eff didn't need the stress in her life of knowing that this jerk kidnapped her and locked her up 'cause he—" Her voice wanted to catch, but she pushed through anyway. "'Cause he fell in love with her or whatever. So I let her file the whole thing away under daydreams, and that was that."
The silence below made her look down, the table and uniform gone, Discord staring up at her with wide eyes. "You both have the same daydream," he said quietly. "You dream of being the hero who she dreams is rescuing her."
And as much as Dash wanted to shout and lie and tell him he didn't have any idea what he was talking about, the heat of her blushing cheeks made her face feel too weird to do any of that.
Discord folded his arms. "You know—"
"Don't even start," she growled, all the arguments she'd waged so often inside her head springing right into place. "I mean, can you imagine what it'd be like for Fluttershy if the two of us were, y'know, dating or whatever? I'm a Wonderbolt, a star, and that's not ego talking: that's just fact! I'm out there performing in front of thousands of ponies a couple times a week during the season, and she's here with her animals and her woods and her picnic lunches and her quiet sunsets and all that! She's like a soap bubble, and I'm like a bowling ball! Or look at our cutie marks! She's a butterfly! I'm a lightning storm! We don't mix! We can't!"
Saying it all out loud for the first time in her life made her chest get all tight; she swallowed against it but still couldn't quite get her voice to start listing all the other reasons she'd come up with over the years for why she and Fluttershy could never happen. The weight of those other reasons made it hard to stay airborne, though, and she let herself drift to the floor.
More silence lay spattered around the room, then Discord said, "And you don't think she deserves a choice?"
Dash shook her head, the image flashing through her mind the way it always did, the image even Hades had known well enough to throw into her face. "I kicked her outta her clouds once when we were foals. I'm not gonna do it again. And what does it say about me that I keep imagining her all helpless and locked up and waiting for me to bust her out? She deserves a pony who can see the real her, not some stupid daydream version of her." She shook her head some more. "Setting up her animal sanctuary: that's what the real Fluttershy wanted, and she did it, too, without some dumb cloud jockey crashing through the middle."
All the head shaking was making Dash dizzy, so she stopped and let her head hang down. But when Discord didn't immediately burst into a shower of sparks or start smelling like bananas and mayonnaise or make a noise like a hundred ducks waddlng past, she looked up.
He was just standing there with his arms still folded. "And if I tell her about these feelings of yours?"
"You won't."
His eyebrows arched. "And why exactly is that?"
Everything got blurry, not just Discord but the wall behind him and the posters on it, too; it took Rainbow a bunch of blinks before she could see him clearly. "'Cause I'm asking you not to." She had to swallow some more. "Please."
The smell of burning toast started jabbing at her nostrils, but— "Fine," he said, drawing the word out all slow and grumbly, then shaking a talon at her. "But let the record show that I disagree with this peculiar and unnatural course of action in every way that a creature as peculiar and unnatural as me can disagree with it." With a nod, he shimmered away like a reflection in a pond after somepony had dropped a rock into it.
Dash kind of felt the same way, only in her case, the rocks seemed to be sitting in her stomach. Dragging her hooves, she made her way across the room to her bed, crawled into the pile of blankets, shoved her head under the pillow, and refused to think about anything.
Whether she actually fell asleep or not, she had no idea, but when a tapping reached her from downstairs and she sat up, it was dark outside her window. Her eyes seemed as dry as cotton balls in her head, but at least the rocks in her stomach meant she wasn't hungry. She doubted she could even manage a glass of water right now...
The tapping drifted through the air again, and with a giant sigh, she rolled out of bed, stumped down the stairs to the front door, pulled it open with a snarl already twisting her lips—
And a pumpkin sat on her stoop: a carved pumpkin, but it took her a couple seconds to realize that the shape on the front—double curves at the top meeting in a 'V' with a point at the bottom—was a 'Hearts and Hooves Day' heart, the candle inside making it shine in the darkness.
Staring and frozen, Dash again had no idea how much time went by, but a quiet little "Ummmm..." hit her like an electric shock, her mane prickling along her neck and her head snapping toward the sound.
Fluttershy stood just off to the side, her blush almost as bright, Dash would've sworn, as the glowing pumpkin.
The rocks inside Dash exploded, a sandy, swirling tornado now filling her gut, but she refused to flinch. "Hey, Eff," she said, though the words sounded slow and foggy. "Nightmare Night was, like, yesterday. Or two days ago. Or, y'know, something..."
"Yes," Fluttershy said, her gaze fixed on the lumpy white steps leading from Dash's door to the edge of her cloud. "It's funny, but I'm not sure how long it's been, either." Her eyes darted up as quick as mice, and the intensity there hit Dash so hard, she almost did some more flinching. "I...I thought I'd had a dream or a daydream or something like that, but after Discord convinced Princess Luna and Cadance to take Hades back to Canterlot for more lessons instead of bringing him here to see you, I talked to Twilight and Rarity and Starlight and Spike, and..." Fluttershy flinched then, and ducked back behind a long wave of pink hair. "And I started remembering."
Spring into the sky right now, a part of Dash's brain was whispering all fast and hissing. Spring and slide and slash the air to ribbons with your wings, do Rainboom after Rainboom after Rainboom till you've crossed a couple or three oceans, then settle down under a phony name somewhere where the ponies all talk with funny accents and wear weird hats.
But instead, Dash just stood there thinking about how nice it would be if she had a glass of water. "I'm really, really sorry, Eff," she said, and it felt like she was coughing up nails.
"Sorry?" Her mane parted, and Fluttershy peered out. "For what?"
"For everything." And the floodgates burst. "You're not helpless and not simple-minded, but I like to think of you that way because I'm a terrible pony who doesn't deserve to have you in my life! You're so good and so pretty and so gentle, and when you're sitting there out in the woods with the birds and the squirrels and everything all playing around you and the leaf shadows dancing over your coat, I just...I wanna flap straight up and bring the clouds down so they can see it, too!"
Fluttershy's eyes had gone big and round while her mouth had gone small and round. But Dash couldn't stop: not now and not ever. "I wanna shout to the whole world how great you are, then come back and settle all quiet in a tree somewhere close by so I don't bother you but can still see you and be ready in case something bad happens or you need anything! And I—" Her throat tried to squeeze closed, but she wasn't about to let that stop her. "I want that bad thing to happen," she nearly screamed, "so I can swoop down, beat up the bad guy, and set you back in place being all cute and gorgeous again!"
"Cute?" The murmer fluttered against Dash's ear. "Gorgeous?"
"Always." Dash wanted to stomp a hoof, but, well, that was the problem, wasn't it? "And I'm the crash, the smash, the explosion that busts out the windows and makes the roof collapse." Keeping her eyes averted, she focused on the glowing pumpkin ahead of her on the stoop. "I'm trouble, so I'm always looking for trouble. You're sweetness, so you're always looking for—"
"Ummm..." Yellow and pink moved at the edge of Dash's vision, and one of Fluttershy's hooves reached out to touch the pumpkin. "I brought this here to you, Rainbow: not to anywhere else, and not to anypony else."
Wanting to but also not wanting to, Dash raised her head, slid her gaze along Fluttershy's long, shapely leg, across her chest, and up to that perfect face. "Like I said," Fluttershy went on, "I started remembering. I remembered you saying that I was the eye of your storm, and I...I want to be that, want to be surrounded by you and pulled places by you and shown the sorts of things I would never—"
"No!" Without even thinking, Dash surged forward and caught Fluttershy by the shoulders. "I'll wreck everything! That's what I do!"
"That's what I need." Fluttershy cocked her head with a smile, and Dash's heart felt like a squirrel trying to escape from her rib cage. "When you did your first Sonic Rainboom back in flight camp, it was you knocking me off that cloud that gave me the earth, that showed me the butterflies and the bunnies and the fish and the snakes." When her hooves touched Dash's chest as gently as a summer rain, everything inside Dash went completely still. "I found my destiny because of you."
"I bully you," Dash heard herself say, her mind still lost in the depths of Fluttershy's eyes. "I run over you. I disrespect you. I demean you." Her jaw locked with her teeth clenched, but Dash still pushed out, "I sold you for a stupid Daring Do book!"
"None of that's true." Fluttershy's shoulders shrugged under Dash's hooves. "I mean, yes, all right, that last one is." She slid her front legs around under Dash's, Dash unable to stop a shiver. "But you gave up everything you wanted to get me back. That's got to mean something, doesn't it?"
About to snort, Dash instead froze when Fluttershy gave a little lunge forward and pressed her head warm and soft and unbelievable into the crook of Dash's neck. "Once I started remembering," she murmured, "I realized that you didn't want to put me in the position of making an awkward decision. But, I mean, I'd already decided on my feelings for you a long time ago, and now that I knew you felt the same, I...I had to do something!"
More than once during her career as a weatherpony, Dash had kicked a cloud wrong, its lightning sizzling up her spine, rattling her teeth, and making her taste copper. Fluttershy hugging her and saying what she was saying, Dash quickly discovered, was both exactly like that and entirely unlike it in every single way.
"I was fretting and fretting and fretting," the tiny part of Dash's brain that could still think heard Fluttershy say. "And then Discord arrived with this pumpkin, and he said that sometimes, it's a straight shot to find out what a pony really wants, and sometimes it takes a little digging. So I dug the insides out of the pumpkin, carved my heart into the front, and brought it up here to give to you. If...if you wouldn't mind, I mean."
Setting aside for the moment the question of how hard she was going to kick Discord the next time she saw him, Dash let her eyes roll closed, let her forelegs pull Fluttershy closer, let her wings spread out to stroke through Fluttershy's downy feathers. "This can't work," that tiny sensible part of her whispered through her lips. "How could this possibly work?"
"I don't know." Fluttershy's breath raised goose pimples over every part of Dash's hide. "I'd like to find out, though."
"Yeah." Dash knew she wasn't flying, but she sure felt like she was floating. "Me, too."