Heroes never quit. They fall.
~Anonymous
It's late. Too late, really. The constellations are already clear in the sky, peering down at us with no clouds to cover them. Of course, the fact that it isn't cloudy is why we're here in the first place. Not much point stargazing when the sky's full of stratocumulus. We've been here longer than we should have been – it's the dead of winter, and in a couple more hours the grass will be brushed over with frost, a little white relief carved on top of every leaf and branch.
Warm, soft and heavy against my side, Fluttershy sleeps. She sleeps a lot earlier in winter, and for a lot longer, too. It's almost like she hibernates. I'm usually not enough of a jerk to wake her. She always looks so content when she's sleeping. Real calm, not like she usually is. She never even tosses or turns, or even snores; not like me, she says. Right now, I should really wake her up; it's too cold to stay out here any longer. But, I need just a little more time.
I haven't told her yet, and I don't think I will, but I was actually looking for something while we were stargazing tonight. Searching the skies for an answer. There's something I need to know, desperately. I need to know how things got this way, why I'm so tired all the time, why I feel so scared when I wake up next to her in the morning. Don't get me wrong; I love Fluttershy. But something's wrong with me, wrong with us, and there's a voice in the back of my head whispering what it is but it's like I'm too dense or too stubborn to listen to it. I need help.
But the skies have nothing up there for me, and the stars are keeping their secrets. If ever I could hear what that voice is saying, it ought to be here, in this lonely glade, where the only sound is the wind and our own breath. But I guess things just aren't that easy. I whisper something – more a sound than a word – to Fluttershy, and she wakes. Her eyes open, and suddenly widen when she realises she's not in her cottage, but soon enough she finds my face and her panic passes. She leans a little closer to my flank, and sighs.
“Oh, my. I'm so, so sorry, Rainbow Dash. I didn't mean to fall asleep, especially after you went to all the trouble of checking the forecast so we could do this,” she says, her voice still heavy from the nap.
I grin. She acts like it's some big thing for a full-time weather pony like me to know if there's going to be clouds scheduled. I tell her that I don't mind that she fell asleep, and that we should be getting back home before the frost hits; with a little reluctance, she disentangles herself from me and climbs to her hooves. As we start the walk back, she starts telling me how she'll fix me some cocoa when we get in, and how glad she is that we still have a little firewood stocked up; for a moment, it seems like all my doubts are for nothing, that I'm just being silly. But, deep down, I know they're not. Nothing has changed, and I don't have an answer. I hate to admit it, but I'm afraid.
When I wake up, I'm alone. That's just how it is in the mornings. Fluttershy will let me sleep past dawn, but the animals won't let her; even in winter, waking up early is a habit she can't kick. It used to bother me, but in the end I realised there isn't much we can do about it. She needs to get up early to do her work, and if I don't get the extra hour or so's sleep, I'm a wreck for the rest of the day. Usually, I can hear her downstairs making the birds sing when I wake up, but lately I hear her bustling around the kitchen, making pancakes, muffins, fried vegetables, anything to distract herself from the fact that her little friends aren't there.
I consider laying back and grabbing another hour's sleep. It's my day off, which means I only think about work instead of actually doing it. Kinda hard not to think about work when your office is the whole dang sky. But the bed's too big for me to fall asleep in it alone, and 'Shy always makes more food than she can eat, so I drag myself into the waking world.
Our bedroom is pretty much the same as it was when I first started living with 'Shy – tons of pillows and cushions, with a bunch of hot water bottles under the bed. She's pretty big on pillows. Every so often she'll just buy some fabric and sew herself a new one. Either she keeps it and adds it to the collection (which is really more of a mountain than anything else), or she donates it to charity or something. I still don't know how she got that good at sewing – nopony in her family does it, Rarity didn't teach her and I've never seen her with any books about it. I guess it doesn't matter. She keeps asking if I want to add stuff to make the bedroom less hers and more ours, but I wouldn't know what to add. I never really spent too long at my last house since I was always out doing stuff, so I never bothered to decorate it more than I needed to. (It took me the longest time to get used to having real floorboards after I moved. With clouds, you can go through if you push hard enough, and I was in the habit of jumping out of bed, through the floor and diving towards ground level to wake myself up in the morning. All the moisture in the clouds makes it as good as a shower. My nose still hurts sometimes from trying to dive through solid oak.)
As I make my way downstairs, dodging around piles of fluffy pink bunny slippers (as well as slightly less fluffy Wonderbolts themed ones), I can already smell breakfast: porridge, probably with a little bit of the honey 'Shy kept back in the summer. She keeps bees, in a revelation that'll shock nopony. It's almost freaky how well she does it, though. She puts on her beekeeper's hat (or apiarist's hat, as Twilight keeps trying to tell me), opens up the box, and all of a sudden all of the bees just… stop. A thousand insects go silent, just like that, and all because Fluttershy wants a lick of honey to sell at the market. It's amazing. Since we're a little closer to the Everfree Forest than the rest of town, our honey always has all these weird flavours and nuances you can't get anywhere else.
I'm actually kinda surprised she kept any back at all, though. Usually we sell all of it to help pay for animal feed. Back before I was living with her she basically relied on selling jars of honey and berry jam for money, so she was pretty frugal when it came to cash. I think Rarity helped her out more than once. Then again, so was I when I lived alone. I got regular pay from weather duties (still do), but there just wasn't anything I wanted to spend it on. I mean, Pinkie'd bake me cakes if I asked her, and I got all my books from the library. I spent a little on the joke shop stuff, but that's pocket money prices. And eventually I just ran out of Wonderbolts merch to buy. At least nowadays neither of us is strapped for cash since we pool our assets, but old habits die hard.
I almost trip over Tank as I walk into the kitchen. He's like the most active tortoise in the world, so he wanders over to the door to meet me when I get up in the mornings. More like a dog with a shell than anything else. Angel's taken to riding him around the house lately, but Tank totally wears the pants. I think.
“Do tortoises eat porridge?” I ask 'Shy, who's sitting at the table in her dressing gown and blowing gently over her breakfast.
“Oh, no. Fruits and vegetables only, I'm afraid,” she replies. We don't really bother with 'good morning' too much any more. Any morning when we get a chance to sit down and have breakfast together before getting to work for the day is a good one.
“Sorry, Tank. The lady has spoken,” I mock whisper to him. He nods, but tortoises always nod. Fluttershy gasps once, twice, thrice, and then lets out the softest, quietest little sneeze you could imagine. “And has the sniffles, apparently.”
“It's my own fault. I shouldn't have fallen asleep outside,” she says, and allows herself another spoonful of honey from the little glass jar. “I, um, didn't know if you're be up this early, so I left you some porridge on the counter.”
Sure enough, there's a little earthenware bowl wrapped in a teatowel, the same way Pinkie sometimes wraps her bread in blankets. I can feel warm steam hit my face when I uncover it, and my stomach rumbles in anticipation. I shake in a little cinnamon from the spice rack, and sit down at the table to get stuck in.
“You have the day off today, don't you?” she asks, eating her breakfast in dainty little bites. “Do you, um, have any plans? I was thinking we could go shopping, maybe...”
“I'm up for some shopping. But we also gotta plan our route for the trip.”
'Shy frowns. We agreed that we'd go on a trip since it's winter and we're not too busy, maybe let Applejack or somepony cover the animals while we're away. There's a map in the back room where I've been picking where we'll go, lines of black ink across tiny country roads. She agreed to go, but I guess she's still not that comfortable with leaving town. But then, it wasn't that long ago when she used to get worried about going out shopping… or was it? Hard to tell. Time's weird like that.
When we're done eating (I finish faster because I've got no table manners), she trades her dressing gown for a scarlet winter cloak and we step out of the house into a world of white. The night crew got a little enthusiastic with the cloud formations, I think; the snow's way above our ankles, and I instinctively take to the air to keep my hooves warm. 'Shy just pulls on the rubber boots she keeps outside the door for gardening work. I can't even walk in the things, myself; I always feel like I'm going to trip, so I end up just hovering along with my hooves just off the ground. Besides, it's always good to stretch my wings. I settle just above and to the right of her, close enough to talk to without shouting but not so near that we'll bump into each other.
“I bet the lake is already frozen by this time of year… Do you suppose Pinkie has been ice-skating yet?”
That's Fluttershy's tacit permission to off and really open up the taps for a while instead of hanging around at her shoulder like a songbird. (AJ always makes jokes about how I do that. She's taken to calling me Sparrow Dash lately.) Even when Pinkie isn't skating to break up the ice, she likes to cut patterns on the surface, like smiley faces or flowers; you can see them from high up, so it's easy to tell where Pinkie practices her one-hoof axles and her triple salchows, or whatever. Sending me off to check also frees 'Shy up to look up and down the hedgerows, and make sure none of the mice families have frozen.
I don't have to be told twice, and within a couple seconds I'm at cloud level. The wind's cold enough to sting my teeth when I grit them, but the sun's pretty bright so it should warm up pretty soon. I let my momentum tip me over on the vertical axis and make a controlled flip, testing out to see how well my wings are holding me today. I worry, sometimes. I don't train nearly as intensively nowadays, but I still keep an eye out for atrophy. I mean, I know it'll get me eventually – it gets everypony. Part of being an athlete is realising that your body's on a clock, and one day you're gonna wake up and not be able to do the things you could do yesterday. No reason to speed the process along, though. After all, I still wanna be a Wonderbolt someday, even if I'm putting other stuff first at the moment. Still got a few years on the clock yet. I hope so, anyway.
Satisfied that I'm still in good form (not peak, of course, but I could get back there in a couple weeks of heavy workouts), I start looking around for lakes. Some part of my brain starts to analyse the cloud formations, making sure nothing's too far out of place; I'd never live it down if my own hoof-picked day crew turned out to be idiots. I've got Cloudkicker covering for me, and she needs the leadership experience, but that's all the more reason to make sure she's not being a screw-up.
When I'm done scouting for ice-scribbles, I kick a few clouds a little more cleanly into place (taking a chunk of the northeast corner of each one as a calling card, so they know it's not just vandals) and head back to 'Shy. Since her winter cloak is blood-scarlet against the white landscape, I can pick her out a mile away. I'm pretty sure that's one of her reasons for wearing the thing, although the fact that it's lined with fur shed by her animal friends is probably another.
“Any new drawings?” 'Shy asks as I descend. Out of the corner of my eye I can see some drowsy mice scurrying away through the hedgerows.
“She says that I smell.”
“Hee… Well, only sometimes,” she giggles. I give her a playful nudge. “Mr Tinwhiskers says hello.”
“Really? I must not have heard him 'cause he was running away so fast.”
She smiles comfortingly at me. “Oh, you know the animals like you. You're just a little big, and they're all so small.”
“Tell that to the bears,” I grumble, but I don't really mean it. The bears are actually pretty alright. They're crazy intelligent considering they're not magical beasts in any way. The picnics are pretty good, too. We don't ask where they got the food so they don't tell us, and everypony's happy.
It's difficult to believe, as we meander along the roads from the cottage to Ponyville, that there's even anything wrong with this, with us. Maybe there isn't, and it's all in my head – that nagging weariness that keeps me up at nights. I love 'Shy. I love being around her. I do. I just worry sometimes that I might not love her enough.