Fall had gone by slowly. Winter was sitting on top of the trees. Sooner than later, High School years would come to an end. Already, started reviews for the entrance examinations of Universities. Each had their own wishes though some hadn't made up their mind yet. Rainbow Dash's choice had always been clear - art in Canterlot Univesity. She had no other wishes. Her teachers wouldn't insist for her to try to apply for other Colleges, probably because they knew she didn't need it.
Pinkie Pie was part of those who couldn't decide and for her, future seemed to be rather uncertain. Of course, she had taken back a bit of her self-confidence since Starlight Glimmer's bullying had stopped but deep inside her, she was scared the girl was right. What could she hope for, with her lack of common sense?
"I'm sure you can at least take classes of typing," Rainbow Dash once suggested her. "No entrance exam, and you'll find a good job very quickly. Why not in advertisment?"
Pinkie Pie made no answer. Even this seemed to her to be too ambitious. She didn't thought she had enough intellectual skills to be in such a professional position.
It was a cold day and the wind blew hard, whistling through the windows of the old car Rainbow Dash now took to get to school. She always drove Pinkie Pie home, since they knew they lived rather close to each other. Sometimes, Pinkie Pie visited Rainbow Dash so she could get help in her homework or when she didn't understand a lesson. It was no easy task, especially as Pinkie Pie needed a lot of time and Rainbow Dash wasn't the patient kind.
Placing a wool hat on her head in order to protect her ear from the wind, she waved her friend goodbye through the misty windows of the 1935 Ford Phaeton. She drove, eyes on the road and shoulders clenched from the cold. This car had style and the necessary spirit for someone like her, but it had one annoying problem. Its age prevented it from having a good system of heating inside.
She thought about that time, right before last summer holidays were over, and she went back home on a dark night. At the last minute, Windy had to take a long-distance flight and Rainbow Dash was alone. A letter from her stepmother lain on the kitchen table next to a dish of pastas covered by a plastic film. It had remined her of the time when Windy and her son had went away to celebrate his birthday. The last time they ever celebrated anything together.
Caught unprepared and suddenly full of a sharp sorrow, she went out of the house and ran as fast as she could to Soarin's house. There were lights upstairs and she had a glimpse of Muffin reviewing. Despite her concentration, she seemed to bear a terrible pain down her shoulders. Her fresh-faced cheeks had lost the chubbiness of childhood.
Rainbow Dash collapsed down the ground in front of the house that meant so much to her once and that was now rejecting her despite the tenderness she could have lived there. Silent tears were running down her cheeks when she felt a presence behind her back. And so, she met face to face with the abandonned dalmatian, but with shiny hairs and a collar round his neck. The leg was still limping but had been covered with a bandage. Holding him by the end of a leach, a young girl with short purple hair, of about twelve, looked at her crying, her brows frowning from concern.
"Is it okay, ma'am?" the little voice asked.
It was the moment when she knew hope wasn't lost. Up until that night, strength had abandoned her little by little and she doubted of the goal she wanted to achieve. After this night, she had decided she would never give up, whatever happened.
When she went back to herself, she was home. She pushed the door and started to undo her shoes... but the house wasn't empty.
All smile and joy, Windy Whistles arrived at the entrance, her short orange hair freshly out of curlers.
"Hello, Dashie. Hurry up and leave your bag upstairs! We're going downtown."
"Downtown? Why? It's really cold outside. I don't want to go downtown."
"Oh, please don't be such a party pooper. You're a teenager, not an old lady. I've received money from dad. Come on, be a doll, you owe that to your poor mams."
"What if I refuse?"
"Well, you have no choice. You come with me and that's all."
Rainbow Dash gave up without a fight. It was impossible to make her change her mind when she had decided something. Always the temperamental type. And it was Rainbow Dash who had to give in to her every whim. One would wonder who was the adult of the house.
Putting her bag in her room, she had a glimpse at her reflection in the mirror. She knew... He had been gone for some time now but his ghost kept on haunting the walls of this house. And it would probably keep on haunting Rainbow Dash's body forever.
***
Soarin was wondering why he had accepted. Even Flash Sentry, who usually wasn't interested in this kind of things, was playing along with the others. His friends had been able to get a date with girls from a Catholic High School but that wasn't as reputed as CCHS. It already was a big victory for both Thunderlane and Silver Zoom.
In Soarin's opinion, this was a pure waste of time.
When he was working at the club, he never hesitated to play with his smile, to speak and laugh with the clients as if they were the oldest friends but this was his work. It was a role and each of the parts was perfectly aware of that. Dates were different. He didn't want to pretend he was excited. Especially as the girls they had chosen weren't his type at all. Moving his chair back, he leaned his back against the glass of the dinner's front window.
**
Escorting Windy always was a plague. Rainbow Dash hated those "girls stuff" her stepmother liked so much. It was only good for superficial fools like Starlight Glimmer and her favorite pair of sidekicks... Streets of Downtown Canterlot were swarming about with people. In the heterogeneous crowd, mine workers, secretaries, rich men in silk suits with briefcases, glamourous women mimicking movie stars and dressed with fur coats, teenagers in jeans or poodle skirts, couples kissing in public, all mixed and walked with one same goal; consumate. The only interesting thing about these outings was a chance to observe this sample of the human population.
Unfortunately, she had no time for this. All she was allowed to was wandering from shops to shops, waiting in front of the dressing rooms, waiting at the cashier... Uninteresting and deadly boring.
Of course, Rainbow Dash liked to go downtown, of course, she had been in those shops too but she only visited one or two of them, always the same and she never spent hours acting all snooty. It was all the more ridiculous that the subject of it all was an adult.
"Oh! I want to buy shoes here. They got beautiful pairs. Come on, Dashie."
"Sorry, you'll do this one without me. My feet hurt. I'm waiting here."
"Are you sure? I could buy shoes for you. What about new Oxfords?"
"No thanks. Which means I'm sure."
"Fine, do as you please. Wait for me here, it won't take too long."
Windy rushed to the shop. She definitely looked like she was the teenager here. It was almost sad. Sighing, Rainbow Dash leaned against the front window of a dinner with colorful walls where teenagers were dancing to the sound of Rock Around the Clock, took off her woolen hat and lit up a cigarette. She would wait here until Windy's current whim would be over.
**
Soarin looked at his friends trying to hit on the girls, with his arms crossed. Not that it was fascinating but there wasn't much else he could do. It turned out that they were so wrapped up in this activity that they hadn't even noticed that he no longer was sitting at the same table.
Someone had just leaned against the front window, thus suddenly blocking the light of the pale sun. He threw one more glance at his friends.
One of the four girls was alone. She shlyly glanced in his direction. It was the most common of them, though she wasn't ugly but she really had no charm, with her ponytail tied thanks to a scarf like it was in fashion. Even if she had been of an exquisite beauty, though, it wouldn't have changed a thing. He turned and tried to see who was the person blocking the sun behind him.
It was a girl. She was smoking a cigarette but he couldn't see her face. Her red coat with fake black fur at the collar didn't completely hide her cotton dotted black shortdress, stockings with a seam in the back and flat ballet shoes. Her hair was long and tied in a messy ponytail that reached the center of her shoulder blades. It had these colors that were so rare...
He couldn't help himself. He carefully observed her figure, her hands. With her back on him, the resemblance was unsettling. But it was nothing but an illusion. It had too. Because dead ones never came back to life.
**
Unsure of why, Rainbow Dash felt as if someone was spying on her from behind. That sensation was awkward. She didn't want to turn around, thinking it probably was nothing but a sudden attack of paranoia. Sometimes, it happened to her. Undoubtedly because of old fears that came back to the surface.
Yet she turned around, just so she could be sure...
**
The girl turned around...
**
No, it couldn't be. She was dreaming. This was only an illusion of her mind, trying to trick her but in no way could this be real.
**
Soarin felt colors leaving his face. Had he turned completely insane, to the extent that he had hallucinations? Rainbow Dash has jumped off the roof of her school and now she was dead and she couldn't be standing in front of him.
**
She blinked several times. The young man standing in front of her at the other side of the window looked exactly like Soarin. But it couldn't be Soarin - Windy told her he no longer lived in Canterlot. So, why...?
She put a hand against the window and took a closer look.
**
The girl was now staring at him, frowning. Her face was so close, and her hand rested against the front window. Soarin's heart pounded against his chest. He was dreaming, this was the only explanation. Muffin was distraught, she had cried, she had shook her head no. Rainbow Dash hadn't survived the jump. Unless...
**
It was Soarin. It wasn't some doppleganger, it was him, Soarin, there, in this dinner. Sitting a few inches away, close to a table with four girls and four boys wearing the same school uniform looking at him with concern, while talking to the girls. She could recognize the coat of arms on their sweater. Mountview, a non-coed school for boys, on the skirts of Canterlot's suburbia. She whispered his name...
**
She said his name... As unreal as it seemed, the girl truly was Rainbow Dash, the one he loved, the one he thought was dead for all these years, and she was here and she was standing in front of him. He put a hand against the window, at the same spot than she. This window that was a fence parting them.
As soon as she understood there was no mistake and he had recognized her as well, Rainbow Dash threw her cigarette and started to walk, her hand following her course along the window, until they both reached the door, that door that would finally get them back together.
Soarin followed her and did the same with his hand. His three friends now understood something was happening and they had stopped chatting with their dates. They stared at them, and especially at him, skeptical.
They finally reached the door. For a couple of seconds, they stared at each other, unable to submit to the obvious, that he never left Canterlot at all and that she never jumped off a roof.
Soarin stretched out his hand to get to the doorknob, and pulled it to him. Now the fence had fallen. They stepped towards each other.
**
Windy went out of the shop, satisfied, her face slit in a proud smile. It wasn't reasonable to act so childishly but she also could get compensation from time to time. It wasn't easy, educating a teenage girl while knowing she hated you. If she had been asked, she had thought twice about it before marrying her father. Although it implied that then, she would have never known the lie that had been her life for so long.
She looked for Rainbow Dash and saw her stepping forward, like about to enter inside the nearby dinner. She came her way. Through the window, a boy with midnight blue hair dressed soared up in front of the door in the same way. Rainbow Dash... A boy... Could it be... Soarin Skies?
Understanding her lie had chances to be discovered, she dashed towards Rainbow Dash and pulled her by her arm.
"Come on, Dashie. Let's go."
**
At the exact moment where she was about to fell on his neck, someone had pulled her back. Rainbow Dash, frowning, looked at Soarin's figure getting farther and farther as Windy dragged her out of the crowd. And she was too stunned to fight. She'd been lied to.
**
He'd been lied to. Rainbow Dash was alive... Why? Why such a horrible lie? Why knowing how much he would suffer afterwards? He held no grudge against the one who told the lie, though, because he new she surely had been forced to lie. The culprit were those who forced her to. And he knew exactly who they were.