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Whenever she closes her eyes, she dreams of stars.
Applejack didn't care much for stars before. They were pretty, sure, glittering pinpricks that twinkled on the blanket of the countryside night. But when she had jobs to do outside of the farmhouse at night, stars really didn't provide much; compared to the glow of the full moon, or the steady flickering of oil lamps, stars might as well be nothing. In the city, this was truer than ever: even when the brightest star shone its hardest and broke through the haze of the dazzling electric sky, there was only ever one of it, and any illumination it might have provided in the brief period it could be seen was insignificant against everything else that could shine and would shine for perennity.
Rainbow Dash likes stars. Unlike Applejack, she has never grown up under a star-covered sky, which might be why she gets so darn worked up when she spies one in the foggy sky of Canterlot. Rainbow is a girl who's grown up in the big city and belongs in the big city. Her naturally brown hair is dyed six different colours, and her naturally blue eyes are tinted rose by lenses. She laughs loud and runs fast and always wants to be having fun. She laughs in the same way, when they're both waiting for the bus after dark and she, rocking back and forth on the bench they're sitting on, jabs an imperious finger at a lone star in the sky.
"Someday, I'm going to be flying amongst them," she says. Applejack doesn't really know what she means, until she does.
When they are fourteen, idling away time in a classroom waiting for lessons to start, Rainbow Dash tells her that she wants to be a pilot. An aerobatic pilot, she says, and she wants to join the national team, the Wonderbolts, and travel the world performing with them. Applejack laughs at her at first, thinking that it's an ambition so outlandish it couldn't possibly be anything but a joke. It was the kind of dream job that only a bright-eyed six-year-old could have, the kind to be outgrown with age and cast aside in favour of a sensible job that could make a sensible living.
"But why not, though?"
Pinkie Pie somersaults into view, squealing peppily. "You can do whatever you want, Dashie! Go for it!"
Around her, friends turn their attention to them, and more voices join into the conversation. Applejack soon realises that some people still, in fact, do have dreams. And for her friends, it's not the pretentious kind that people pretend to have when they're trying to show off to interviewers or woo someone at a club. These dreams are real and her friends speak about them with sincere adoration. Pinkie Pie, for example, wants to be a baker and run her own confectionery line. Twilight Sparkle wants to enrol in one of the most famous universities in the world and become a researcher. Rarity wants to become a renowned fashion designer, and Fluttershy wants to start an animal rescue and adoption agency.
Even Rainbow, Rainbow motherbucking Dash, is dead serious about her dream. Applejack looks into those rose-coloured eyes and knows. She has known Rainbow Dash for a long time, after all.
The laughter fades away, and though Rainbow must have forgotten that conversation immediately after, the threads of it still spin around in Applejack's mind now, leaving cobwebs in their wake. They curtain her naked green eyes, whenever she's staring into the mirror with roosters crowing in her ears, or when she glimpses the blue sky through the leaves of a tree, halfway up a ladder with fruit baskets balancing over her shoulders.
Applejack is happy with her life, but that doesn't stop her from wondering what it's like to live so freely—to choose as one's heart desires—to fly, as so many people around her do.
So she dreams, and she dreams of stars. Then she wakes, and continues on the path that she's meant for.
~~~