Speed was what being a Wonderbolt was all about, and yet it always felt to Spitfire that she was perpetually a wingbeat behind at every turn. She felt like a pony who was always playing by the rules as they were the day before, unable to think ahead to what they could, or should be.
Around her burned the skeleton of an outdated vanity project. Blackened cloudstone fell around her hooves. Cracked structural altocumulus threatened to give way. To Spitfire, little of that mattered. Her mind was barely registering her imminent death. Spitfire’s battleground wasn’t the disaster zone around her but the stream of thoughts within. Hounding her mind and biting at the back of her brain was yet again the barking beratement of her inner voice telling her that she was too slow, too little, and too late.
Bending across her back was a beam, heavy and metal. Rivets intact even as the steel itself was warped and smoking hot. One fraction of a second earlier and she wouldn’t have become trapped. One fraction of a second later and it would have only been the one life lost, not two. Mathematically it would have been a better outcome.
Spitfire couldn’t make out the face of the pony she was stood over, nor did she frankly care to check. Mare or stallion, young or old, pretty or gross, it wasn’t about who they were to her, only that they were a who. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t Spitfire’s destiny to arrive in the nick of time and save the day. She was only able to react, and always too late.
She had been too late to realise that Wonderbolts were arrogant, self-centred jerks like Wind Rider whose influence would have led her down a spiral of self-sabotage. Too late to realise that she had been treating her own ‘Bolts like disposable minions just because that’s how it had always worked. Too dim-witted to see them turned from something that provided true value to all of Equestria to a circlejerk of athletic prowess. At their best they were a Cloudsdale propaganda tool. At their worst, a toxic cesspool that ruined good pegasi.
Each time, Spitfire had been too blind. It had always been another who arrived to save her from herself.
The beam bent under the weight of an entire structure bearing down on it. Despite the imminence of Spitfire’s demise, she reckoned that it was a positive that she was uniquely resilient to fire and burning, otherwise this would probably hurt a lot more than it did. Or perhaps the beam had crushed her spine and she just couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. A question for the coroner, perhaps.
Perhaps, Spitfire mused, it was because she couldn’t help but calculate every move and overthink things to the n-th degree. A quality that made for a good captain, granted, but it was no small part of her that wondered if, had she just acted instead of calculated the risk-reward ratio, she might have saved the pony beneath her faster rather than become trapped in this collapsing bear-trap along with her.
That was her problem, Spitfire thought. She was a pony constantly at war with herself. One minute advancing the reputation of the Wonderbolts at any cost, the next sacrificing it to pursue advanced first-aid and rescue training (none of which endeared her to the Cloudsdale Bureaucracy, but in a minor quirk of irony, that too was currently burning down along with Spitfire’s own reputation there). One day ruthlessly throwing Soaring away to pursue new talent, the next taking steps to make sure her team could trust each other with their lives. She was a Frankenstein’s monster of a pony, part hero and part treacherous bitch. Constantly self-improving, but ultimately self-defeating.
“Are we going to be…” came a voice from beneath Spitfire. Through eyes blinded by smoke and tears, Spitfire tried to peer down at the pony she had failed to rescue, and failed.
“Probably,” she replied, not really sure how the question would have finished. “Don’t suppose you can get out from under me?”
“Leg stuck.”
Spitfire coughed. She could taste iron and smoke and little else. She bit back a retort about a leg being a little bit less than her entire spike and lower half. It would have been in poor taste.
“Can you move that beam?”
Spitfire coughed again, only just realising she had been trying to laugh. Interesting. She hadn’t been in many life-or-death situations, and she felt it was morbidly curious that it was only then that she developed a sense of humour. “It’s got... four stories of the Cloudsdale Bureau of Affairs on it.”
It was amazing that Spitfire was still able to keep it from crumbling onto the both of them. Then again, ponies and their cutie-marks could perform some truly incredible feats near death. Spitfire coughed again. Interesting also that she couldn’t stop herself from pondering abstract things like cutie-mark magic despite being about to get crushed. Or, actually, it would be the smoke that would kill her. Carbon monoxide was the true danger in a fire.
What would she give to be the action-mare type. Or maybe the sort that derived a sudden wellspring of strength when thinking about her friends. Or a destined pony determined by the stars to become an alicorn or something. Unfortunately none of those were true. Spitfire was a schemer first and foremost, didn’t appear to think about her friends when about to die, and most certainly wasn’t destined for anything but having a burning need to be more than she was and never living up to it.
Only heroes got to save the day in the nick of time.
Spitfire's vision dimmed. Good, she thought; she was right about the smoke being what would kill her. Being right felt nice.
From the corner of her eye, through the crumbling walls and columns, Spitfire saw a flash of light, and a rainbow arc crossing the sky.