//------------------------------//
// Chapter 6: Approaching the Grasslands. 
// Story: You Can't Take The Sky From Me 
// by FailcopterWes 
//------------------------------//

Chapter 6.

“Mister Squirrel!” Ditzy’s voice rang out through the trees. Always the same two words, again and again. The sound dislodged birds and disturbed rats within half a mile.
“Mi-ster Squirrel!” she yelled again, dragging out the words. Whilst she meant it to let the squirrel hear her better, all it did was irritate the ponies standing behind her. After a moment of quiet, Ditzy took a deep breath.
“MisterSquirrelifyoudontcomebackyouwon’tgetfedandthenyou’llgohungry!” she called.
Behind her, Rainbow rolled her eyes and went back to making sure Fluttershy’s corset-bandage was secure. It was still holding firmly, and Rainbow did not think that taking it off would be very beneficial to helping.
“What if... um ... the wound is .... infected?” Fluttershy asked when Rainbow voiced her observations.
“Ah ... that’s a good point” Rainbow admitted. “Um... I’m not really one to know about all that”
“You only have to... see if it’s all... you know.” Fluttershy said.
“Fluttershy” Rainbow said quietly, laying a hoof on her friend’s shoulder “I just think we should hope”
Fluttershy laid her head on the ground and sighed inwardly.
“Oh... alright then” she said.
Something in that sentence perturbed Rainbow. The blue pegasus removed her hoof ran through possible meanings of Fluttershy’s words in her head for half a second, before starting to protest.
“Hey, it’s not that I don’t want you better” Rainbow said, moving to look the mare in the eyes. “It’s just... I don’t know.” Rainbow searched for the right words. “Have you ever had, with the animals, the situation where it’d do more damage to interfere?”
Fluttershy gave a tiny nod in response.
“It’s kind of like that, see...” Rainbow trailed off. But she appeared to have got her point across. At her hooves, Fluttershy closed her eyes. There was a short moment of quiet between the two, which would have been complete silence were Ditzy not still yelling for her favourite squirrel. Rainbow began to watch the grey pegasus as she jumped between trees and tried to call up them. She made a point to stop Ditzy if she tried flying, especially as they didn’t know how badly her wing was damaged internally.
“Um...” Fluttershy began. Rainbow turned her attention back to her. “Thank you... I think”
Rainbow cocked her head.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Oh, it’s... nothing, nothing really” Fluttershy weakly insisted.
“Fluttershy...” Rainbow said, her voice lowering slightly.
“Mister Squirrel!” yelled Ditzy again.
“Oh for crying out loud” Rainbow rounded on the grey pegasus. “The little guy isn’t coming back, okay! Just pack it in for a minute would you? I’m trying to talk to Fluttershy!”
Ditzy stopped mid step and glared at Rainbow. Rainbow cleared her throat sheepishly.
“Sorry” Rainbow said quietly “Ditz, I just want a little quiet, then you can go back to your...shouting”
Ditzy lowered her suspended hoof and snorted dejectedly.
“They don’t care about Mister Squirrel” she muttered to herself as she trotted to inspect a wheat-like plant growing near one of the trees.
Rainbow shook her head and settled her eyes on Fluttershy again, silently chastising herself for getting worked up so easily. Before she began speaking to Fluttershy, a little thought appeared in her head, claiming that she had not been doing a good job as the de-facto leader of the group. She banished that thought, wondering idly what ‘de-facto’ actually meant.
“Fluttershy, what’s the problem?” she said, settling down on her belly in front of Fluttershy.
“It’s just that... um... ah... you never used to be... uh... careful with things like this” Fluttershy mumbled.
“What?” Rainbow said defensively “I’m always careful. Me, I’m the most careful pony ever!”
“You told Twilight to go for a run to work off a broken leg”
“Okay, so I’m not the most careful one out there”
“And... you bucked Scootaloo into a tree when... she crept up on you”
“I don’t like being startled!” Rainbow protested.
“She was in hospital for a week”
‘I wondered where she had vanished to...’ Rainbow thought, before opening her mouth again “So, I’m not that careful all the time, what’s the point?”
“I, um... I think that... Since we came here, you’ve been... different.”
That got Rainbow Dash’s full attention. The excuses and thoughts prepared in her head for any example Fluttershy could have brought up vanished. Unconsciously, she leaned in towards Fluttershy.
Nopony spoke for a second. Eventually, Fluttershy decided to elaborate.
“I, um... I think you’re... scared”
Rainbow rose to her hooves.
“What? Me? Scared? No, don’t be stupid. I’m not scared.” She said. “I mean, look at me, do I look scared to you?”
“Um... no?” Fluttershy guessed, her eyes focused on an area around Rainbow’s hooves.
“That’s right” Rainbow insisted with a triumphant grin on her face “And I” she continued, moving forwards to push Fluttershy up to a sitting position “am going to get us all back home, fright free, okay?”
Fluttershy looked up with a nervous  smile.
“O-kay?” Rainbow asked again.
“Okay” Fluttershy said. Slowly, her eyes began to look around the area behind Rainbow. “Oh... where’s Ditzy?”
Rainbow quickly glanced around, scanning the trees for her. After a moment, she called out the missing mare’s name, and when no reply came, the grin dropped sharply from her face.
“Ditz?” she called out, quieter.
“Yeah?” came a voice from behind her. Rainbow spun around to see Ditzy paddling in the river. She consciously  held in the sigh of relief she wanted to let out at seeing Ditzy. “Can I call for Mister Squirrel now?”
Rainbow heard a small snicker by her hooves. She glanced down, seeing Fluttershy smiling at her marefriend, and pieced together the situation.
“You saw her move, didn’t you?” Rainbow said accusingly.
Fluttershy nodded slightly. Rainbow let out a snort of discontent.
“You... you were scared though” Fluttershy pointed out.
“Ah,  I... No” Rainbow insisted. “I wasn’t scared. I was just... erm... curious. Wondered where she’d gone.” She chuckled nervously and turned away. “Anyway, we better get going again” She said, hurriedly changing the subject “I reckon we can get a bit further before the sun goes down”
Without waiting for a response, Rainbow began to heft Fluttershy into a semi standing position, in preparation to get her mounted upon Rainbow’s back. Fluttershy pawed ineffectively at Rainbow’s flank, trying to pull herself up, but to no avail. Rainbow quickly called Ditzy closer to help lift her on. Ditzy happily trotted over and helped lift her marefriend, and once she was secure proceeded to grab the bag of berries.
“Thus hip lihg” Ditzy said, trying to talk with the strap of the bag in her mouth. This earned her two confused looks from her companions. Eventually she got the idea they didn’t understand, and repeated her sentence.
Rainbow blinked twice quickly, before leaning towards her slightly. Ditzy rolled her eyes, each pupil moving in a different direction. 
“Ih hread ‘Thus hip...” she started.
“Ditzy, take the bag out of your mouth” Rainbow said. Ditzy obeyed, setting the bag on the ground before her. “Right, now say it again”
Ditzy took a deep breath. Rainbow rolled her eyes at the theatrics.
“I said ‘this thing’s light’” Ditzy said.
“The food bag?” Fluttershy asked.
“What? That had loads in earlier!” Rainbow squawked, she then cleared her throat before continuing. “I bet that little furbag ate a load of them before he took off”
“Mister Squirrel isn’t that mean!” Ditzy said defensively, as if Rainbow were accusing her directly of the berry theft “He’s not even big enough to hold all of them inside him or he’ll get fat and roll around and won’t be able to climb trees”
“Maybe he had friends visit while we weren’t looking” Rainbow growled “Ether way, let’s just go. If we see another berry bush or something else to eat we can have that”. She began to set off, again without waiting for an answer. Fluttershy sighed inwardly at this particularly irritating trait of Rainbow’s, and thought herself lucky that she her hasty mounting had placed her in a position that didn’t hurt when Rainbow stomped off. Ditzy swept the bag up in her mouth and quickly followed, trotting happily behind her.

Ditzy soon found that the best way to keep herself entertained on long walks was an inner monologue, as Rainbow was rarely in a mood to talk and was dashing on ahead, and Fluttershy was unwilling to talk. However, Ditzy often found her own thought’s irritating and ended up focusing on the environment around her. She let her eyes roll around freely, allowing her to observe a slightly more of the forest than most could from her position. Throughout her life, she had become used to the effect one of her eyes moving independently had on her eyesight, and naturally compensated for it. Surprisingly, this did not affect her ability to walk in a straight line. As long as Ditzy could see a particular object, in this case the gently bobbing tail of her marefriend, in one eye she could head in the general direction of it by simply not paying attention to the other eye and making a few course corrections. Of course, if she could see them in both eyes, even if only just, she didn’t have to focus as much, and so Ditzy found herself looking back rarely, in case she managed to get lost the moment she turned her head.
That sort of thing had happened before, and she wasn’t fond of it, despite the adventures it brought.
‘Finish this adventure before you go starting new ones’ Ditzy told herself ‘That’s what mummy used to say.’ She tilted her head as she tried to remember the exact line her mother had used, keeping an eye pointed at Fluttershy. ‘That’s it’ she thought ‘mummy said to not “go wandering off on your own so bloody often, and at least wait until you’re home after the last excursion before wandering off again!”’ At the time Ditzy did not know what excursion meant, but assumed it was relevant, and could not see how blood was related to the frequency of something, but nonetheless had taken the lesson to heart. After her mother’s advice entered her ears, Ditzy resolved to try and stay close to ponies she trusted, but first she had to find a dictionary and look up excursion.
Ponies like Fluttershy.
‘Five weeks’ Ditzy thought to herself. ‘That’s how long Flutty says we’ve been together. Seems shorter. Maybe that’s just something that happens with this kind of thing, maybe time goes silly when ponies love each other. Nah, that’s silly. But if a silly thing is silly, does that make it normal or super silly? But what if normal things are considered silly by silliness and so double silliness is silly to silliness too which makes it normal... my head hurts’

Fluttershy turned her head to check on Ditzy. She had mentally drifted somewhat, and had begun gazing upwards, except for one eye that was trained on Fluttershy’s rear.
This made her wonder just what Ditzy was thinking about.
“Ditzy!” she called weakly, as the grey mare’s path began to curve. Fluttershy saw the little twitch of the eye focusing on her that betrayed the fact it was being used exclusively, and smiled as Ditzy got back on course in time to avoid a tree. ‘Try not to think and walk’ Fluttershy thought, but wisely decided not to say it out loud, for fear of upsetting her. ‘Oh look at you, you’re barely even focusing. At least she hasn’t dropped the food bag’ Fluttershy continued internally, turning her head back to look where they were going, and trying to ignore Rainbow’s mane lightly flopping onto her face in the strong breeze. ‘Well at least you won’t be walking into any more trees’ she noted upon seeing that the number of trees decreased ahead of them, in a more pronounced manner than it they had been since they last stopped, possibly, Fluttershy theorised, because they had begun to move away from the river. Fluttershy could see the orange ball of the sun closing in on the horizon through the foliage to her right, and wondered when they were going to stop for the night. Rainbow advanced tirelessly beneath her, silent and determined to carry on until sight or limb failed her.
Fluttershy closed her eyes. She tried not to think, and just relaxed. The bamboo inside her felt like a numb lump dragging at her insides and her damaged wing still stung, but Fluttershy had learned to push these to the back of her mind. A lifetime’s experience of bullying had taught her to bottle her anguish and pain and carry on with head held low and avoiding eye contact. And now, her experiences helped her suppress her pain, the worst pain she had felt in her life at first, but now reduced to a hum in her brain and a sting that would not go away over the course of her time free of her almost sacrificial looking landing spot a few days ago. She assumed she must have done this near automatically whilst unconscious, as when she awoke there was surprisingly less pain than there was in the short time she was conscious and held above the ground on the bamboo.
‘That’s not good’ Fluttershy thought ‘Well, it’s good that I can do it, but I really shouldn’t be so used to this that I do it in my sleep. Oh my, I’m criticising myself again. Rarity told me to stop doing that. Bad Fluttershy, very bad Fluttershy. Oh, wait... I’m doing it again.’
She was eventually roused from her bout of self criticism and scolding by a strong wind against her head, and a small chuckle from Rainbow Dash.
“Hey Ditz, grab a look at this!” Rainbow called. Fluttershy heard Ditzy drop the bag. Interested, Fluttershy opened her eyes.

Ahead of them lay the open land. For miles in front of them was grass. Short in some places, head height in others, all of it swaying back and forth as waves of air rolled over and around the mounds and hills that filled the landscape, rolling gently up and down from the horizon to where the ponies stood. In the distance to the west, the river drifted away between the hills, obscured briefly between two mounds before opening into a great lake in the distance. The sun burned across the land, turning everything a peculiar shade of orange and casting long shadows in the dips and crevasses ahead.
They stared for a moment at the sight.
“It’s just like the hills outside Ponyville on a Saturday evening” Rainbow muttered with a smile.
“It’s... beautiful” Fluttershy agreed.
“It’s all movey” Ditzy grinned, leaning from side to side to try and match the grass’ movements. She soon began giggling and ran forwards.
“Where are you going?” Dash called after her, still smiling...
Ditzy’s reply was a high pitched laugh as she dived into a large path of tall grass and began rolling around in it. Fluttershy shifted slightly.
“Go join her” Fluttershy said. “I’ll, um... look after the bag.”
After a suspicious stare, Rainbow carefully removed Fluttershy, and then took to the air. Fluttershy’s mane whipped back in the updraft as Rainbow stretched her wings for the first time today. She soared into the sky, wheeling sideways at the peak of her ascent, before diving back down towards Ditzy, who received a shout of warning before certain blue projectile sent her rolling through the grass, both ponies laughing with glee.
Fluttershy watched on from by the tree line and smiled. The sight of her two friends darting at one another, occasionally taking to the air and wheeling around brought a smile to her face. Ditzy’s wing no longer seemed to be bothering her flight, and the thick grass softened any bad landing she made. The two shapes tussled playfully in the grass, like a pair of kittens practicing fighting and pouncing on one another. Whenever one took to the air, the other would either stare up and grin or give chase.
Reaching out with one hoof, Fluttershy hooked the food bag and pulled it closer, allowing herself to pull out a few berries. She popped them into her mouth one at a time, chewing slowly, and closing her eyes to concentrate on the taste. She swallowed and laid her head in the grass. It made a good pillow, supporting her head and bending gently away as she laid on it. Before long, there was a rustle, and Fluttershy felt something lie by her side. Opening her eyes revealed a golden mane and grey coat, which Fluttershy nuzzled affectionately, shifting a little closer to lay against her.
There was a moment of quiet between them, overlaid with the quiet sound of the wind in their ears.
“Did you have fun out there?” Fluttershy asked, barely audible.
“Uh-huh” Ditzy said “Dash is still out there, flying”
Fluttershy looked to the skies to see a dark dot circling above them.
“Why did you stop?” she said.
“You looked lonely” Ditzy replied.
“Well, I’ve got you now... to keep me company” Fluttershy whispered. From her position with her head across Ditzy’s neck, she saw the grin spread across Ditzy’s face at that, and shuffled a little closer in.
“I won’t leave you Flutty” Ditzy promised “Not even slavers’ll pull me away”
“Slavers?!” Fluttershy whispered, her eyes widening.
“Where?” Ditzy said, tilting her head up and looking around.
“Oh... nowhere, I just, um...” Fluttershy trailed off, before gently hitting Ditzy on the head with one hoof. “You got me all scared there”
“Sorry Flutty” Ditzy said.
“It’s okay” Fluttershy said “The meaning was there. And you’re here.”
“Yeah.” Ditzy agreed “Shame Mister Squirrel had to leave though”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s fine” Fluttershy reassured her “He’s lived out here all his life... he probably knows the forest like the back of his paw”
“Maybe he hasn’t lived here all his life.” Ditzy theorised “Maybe he got ran away from a home where a pony looked after him and now is lost and lonely.”
“If they looked after him, why would he run away?” Fluttershy queried.
“They didn’t do it very well, they forgot to feed him, and often left him alone for hours”
“Oh, well that’s not very nice at all” Fluttershy said, humouring her marefriend.
“Uh-huh, and when they go out, they leave traps for the squirrel to stop him finding the food”
“...What kind of traps...”
“Mousetraps, but with nuts in because squirrels don’t like cheese”
“That’s just mean... but if Mister Squirrel got caught in a trap, he wouldn’t have been able to run around and climb up on you” Fluttershy pointed out.
“Ah, see, that was because Mister Squirrel is secretly a spy squirrel, working for Canterlot” Ditzy said, grinning “But he has a bad memory and so he’ll never tell you anything about it”
“He can’t be a very good spy then, can he?” Fluttershy was visibly trying not to giggle.
“That’s why he got sent so far away from Canterlot” Ditzy claimed “So he never had to do another mission, and could live the life of the normal squirrel he thought he was because he kept forgetting he was a spy”
Fluttershy snorted and began laughing quietly.
“Okay, I made that last bit up” Ditzy admitted, which only made Fluttershy laugh harder. Before long, Ditzy joined in with her own chuckle, and soon the laughter died away.
Ditzy stared up at the sky as the sun finally dipped below the horizon. Above the sparse and wispy clouds, the stars came out, twinkling in their little patches of darkening sky. Ditzy tried to pick out a few constellations, trying to remember the ones Fluttershy had taught her. But for her this was impossible, she was simply distracted by the view. In towns like Ponyville, and even up in Cloudsdale, there had always been lights from nearby houses and required a trip outside town to get a clear look at the sky. Here however, there was no excess light, and in the sky shined more stars than Ditzy had ever hoped to see. She began to draw her own constellations in the sky: the donkey, the lamp, the cake, the Princesses and the burning tree were all images she found by connecting the shining dots. She liked these new constellations, but knew she would probably forget about them. Nonetheless, she smiled, because she had at least tried her hoof at constellation creation.
Once she gave up with the balls of light Luna had scattered across the night sky that evening, Ditzy began to admire the moon that had risen over the hills. Every now and then, a winged shape would pass in front of it for a moment, before darting back into the black of the night. Ditzy smiled at the sight, a reminder that she was not alone, along with the mare resting upon her.
“I love you Flutty” she said.
“I love you too Ditzy” Fluttershy replied.
And as they briefly touched lips in the grass, the fireflies ascended from the forest to light the grasslands with their mystical glow.