//------------------------------// // The first day // Story: Going out with a boom // by Shaslan //------------------------------// Rainbow launched herself into the air, snapping her wings down with an audible crack and a stab of pain. She gritted her teeth and repeated the motion, again and again, praying she was flapping fast enough. The pain was threatening to overwhelm her — its heat filled her head, every nerve in her poor wings on fire. Tears pooled in her eyes and she jerked her head impatiently to flick them away. Again, and again — and at last, she was gaining some altitude! She forced all that pain down, folding it into a smaller and smaller bubble until it was compressed enough that she could think clearly again. She kept her mind focused on the task at hand; keep those wings flapping, no matter how stiff they are. She was well above the level of the treetops now. Rainbow flinched as the bones in her right shoulder audibly ground against one another. She tried to reassure herself that the hardest part was done now. The Wonderbolts Academy, its dark stone nearly purple in the hazy pre-dawn light, was receding beneath her. Nopony had seen her go. She looked up. A few wooly little clouds scudded overhead, and in the distance, an enormous grey shape loomed. Rainbow set her jaw. That one was the target. If she could reach something that size, she would be completely hidden. Another spike of pain down her back made her wings falter for a moment, but she caught herself. If she could reach a cloud that height, she could always walk the first fifty thousand feet. Glancing down once more, she saw the airstrip fall away. She was beyond the final cliff that marked the edge of the Academy grounds. Once, when she still flew regularly between the Academy and the farm, she would have cut downwards at this point. The Academy was at such a high point that it was basically one long glide from here to Ponyville. But nowadays even such a simple flight as that, one a pegasus foal could have done in their sleep, was against the orders of her physiotherapist. “Wing rest,” Rainbow muttered, shoving her wings down once more and trying not to hear the snap of her brittle feathers. “Buck wing rest.” Rainbow had been at Sweet Apple Acres just last week to visit Sugar Belle and Apple Tart. She had gone by train, of course, and had hated every minute of that ridiculously long, winding track. When you were ground-bound you had no choice but to laboriously chug your way up or around every single dang hill. Apple Tart was a stallion in his prime now, almost as tall as his dad had been. Pippin, the baby of the family, was off at college in Manehattan taking her masters degree in agriculture. Rainbow could remember holding Pippin just a few days after she was born. Funny to think that the same little pink bundle, all screams and hiccups and teething trouble, was a full-grown pony now. The wind dragged at Rainbow’s wings and she hissed in anger. “Keep flapping, damn it.” Her brain had a tendency to wander these days. Any little detail and she’d be off down memory lane faster than a runaway cart. It could be embarrassing, to realise you’d paused in the middle of a lecture on aerodynamics in order to spend ten minutes reliving something that happened forty years ago. Rainbow usually felt furious after forgetting herself like this, but today she felt like she needed to sink herself into her memories. Flying fricking hurt. She tried to recapture the memory she had been thinking of. Sweet Apple Acres. Sugar Belle had been almost pathetically thrilled to see Rainbow when she’d arrived. Sugar Belle had been wheelchair-bound for a few years now, and Apple Tart didn’t always have time to wheel her out into whichever orchard he was working in. “Tartie does his best, bless him,” Sugar Belle had confided in her as they had sat sipping tea on the porch. It was an activity Rainbow wouldn’t have been caught dead doing even ten years ago, but age snuck up on everypony eventually. Even her. And sometimes all her old arthritic limbs were good for these days was sipping tea on a porch. “But it’s just not the same,” Sugar Belle continued. “And every time I look at Tartie — and Pippin when she’s here — all I can see is their daddy.” Rainbow sighed into her tea. “I know. It's not the same.” Sometimes when she was alone she’d find herself calling out to AJ, wanting her to come here and look at something. And the house would be silent, and suddenly a little colder. No, it wasn’t the same at all. Rainbow’s left wing faltered and for a moment wouldn’t obey the commands she was screaming at it. For a second she was spinning, starting to fall, and she tried desperately to repack all those aches into the corner they had burst out from. Come on, come on — for Celestia’s sake! At last, she managed to wrench it out straight again. The slap of the air against it nearly pulled the damn thing from its socket, but at least she was stable again. The hulking grey cloud was much closer now. Cumulonimbus, unless she was much mistaken. Only a little further to go. Rainbow began to flap once more, clawing her way up, wingbeat by wingbeat, towards that giant grey target. Think about Zap. That usually helped during flare-ups. Zap Apple, her own little baby boy, was working in Appleoosa now, as a weather pony in Equestria’s only tornado division. He was as strong a flier as she’d ever seen, and AJ used to say he could buck harder than any earth pony she knew. Zap had surprised them; he had rejected both Wonderbolts training and a career on the farm, and had forged his own way. Heh. Yeah, that was Zap Apple alright. He’d liked his own way right from the beginning. Rainbow remembered that when he first got onto solids they had tried to feed him all kinds of different puree and he’d turned his nose up at every one. It had driven them both absolutely spare, and Rainbow had to have flown to half the specialist baby food shops in Equestria by the time they found something he’d eat. Before that she wouldn’t even have known that there were specialist baby food shops. But mango puree had finally done the trick, and from then on that was all he’d eat for months. The mango orchard at Sweet Apple Acres, planted there for over thirty years now, was Zap Apple’s stamp on the place. The ashy-grey cloud was close now, almost close enough to touch. It was gravid with water, every fold and bulge hanging heavy in the sky, ready to let its burden fall at the slightest change in the air pressure. Rainbow screwed her eyes shut and pumped her wings as hard as she could. Just count, Rainbow Crash, just count your wingbeats. Spitfire’s voice was almost audible, it was so clear in her mind. Rainbow did her best to obey — one-two-three — gah, the throbbing in her shoulders! — nine-ten-eleven — the pain was building to a crescendo, and Rainbow knew that once that wave broke, her wings would be little more than frozen lumps clawed rigid against her back. Sixteen-seventeen-eighteen — just count your wingbeats — the hurt was unfolding its bloody-red tendrils across her mind, and Rainbow was no longer sure if she was even flapping, she couldn’t feel anything but those thousand stinging pinpricks driving deep into her muscles. She must be falling now, she knew, but she kept counting — twenty-four, twenty-five — But then her muzzle collided with something soft, and her hooves were wet, and Rainbow opened her eyes and sobbed with relief to see that she was sprawled on the outermost edge of that wonderfully fat grey cloud. She let herself lie there for a while, dragging in one shaky breath after another as she waited for the pain to recede once more. Eventually it drew back — not a lot, but just enough for Rainbow to get her legs beneath her and haul herself back to her hooves. She looked ruefully at her wings; just as she had expected, they hung useless at her sides, every feather arched into a different agonising position and locked there. It would take her a few hours to recover from that, but Rainbow knew she didn’t have time to waste. She was a pony on a mission. She sighed and narrowed her eyes, squared her shoulders, and began to climb.