t was early morning, after the party, and Applejack was just coming back from her chores. She was humming a tune, as she usually did. This time it seemed to echo faintly.
She stopped humming and blinked, confused as the tune continued. The music wasn’t coming from her, it was coming from the barn. She remembered the piano still there from the previous night and smiled as she quietly walked to the barn door.
Sure enough, Dash was sitting there tapping out the very tune AJ hummed each morning. It was a sweet tune with a slight hint of melancholy.
“Now where’d ya’ learn that?” Applejack spoke up as Dash finished the verse.
“Huh? Nowhere!” Dash turned around, blushing.
“That’s an old earth pony song. You been listenin’ to me hum it?”
“No way! I’ve known it forever, my dad used to sing it to me.” Dash blushed harder as Applejack smiled fondly. Trying to recover her coolness, she continued, “And it is totally not an earth pony song. That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You must not know all the words then,” Applejack said with a smirk.
“Um, yeah, I do. The words are what make it not an earth pony song.”
Applejack just kept smiling. “Hold on a minute. I’ll be back.”
She left and returned just a few minutes later with a fiddle case. She pulled out a beat up old fiddle, and quickly tuned it. “Go on and start.”
Dash played the tune again by herself. It was only after she finished that Applejack sang:
“In this world there's a whole lotta golden
In this world there's a whole lotta plain
In this world there's a whole lotta trouble
But a whole lotta ground to gain
Why take when you could be givin’, why watch as the world goes by?
It's a hard enough life to be livin’, why walk when you can fly?”
Then she took the bow in her mouth and played. Dash joined in on the piano, but luckily she could play the old song by heart, because she was just staring at Applejack as the earth pony fiddled with a smile on her face until the next verse.
Dash kept playing as Applejack dropped the bow and sang:
“In this world there's a whole lotta sorrow
In this world there's a whole lotta shame
In this world there's a whole lotta sorrow
And a whole lotta ground to gain
When you spend your whole life wishin’, wantin’ and wonderin’ why,
It's a long enough life to be livin’, why walk when you can fly?”
As Applejack took up her bow again and played, Dash kept playing but shook her head and said, “See? This totally isn’t an earth pony song.
Applejack paid her no mind, and when Dash thought the song should have been finished, Applejack dropped the bow and smiled at Dash, going into another verse that the pegasus didn’t recognize:
“In this world there's a whole lot of cold
In this world there's a whole lot of blame
In this world you've a soul for a compass
And a heart for a pair of wings
There's a star on the far horizon, risin’ bright in an azure sky
For the rest of the time that you're given, why walk when you can fly?”
Dash smiled, and Applejack picked up the bow again, smiling at her pegasus. The two played together for another few bars, and finished with a flourish.
When Applejack laid her bow down for the last time she walked over to where Dash was sitting at the piano. “That’s an old earth pony song my pa taught me.” She closed her eyes and nuzzled Dash’s cheek, and whispered, “I reckon you and him woulda got along.”