"This blows."
"That's funny - earlier you said it sucked."
"Yeah, well, it's so bad it does a little of both."
There was a snort of laughter from over by the bridge. Rainbow Dash stabbed her pokey-stick-thing into a nearby hay-fries container, now long devoid of any delicious cargo, and transferred it to the bag slung snugly across her middle. It was getting heavy again, but somehow going to empty it for the umpteenth time didn't seem all that appealing. It was slightly disheartening to see the hard work of the past hour or two disappear into the mass on the cart parked a few hundred meters down the road, only to be faced with the blank stretch of canvas that was the bottom of her bag once more. Just as she was contemplating lugging her haul back she felt a hoof sneak its way across her back and around her shoulder.
"Heya partner, figure it's time for a little break?" Applejack grinned at her hopefully.
Of course, the company was far from disheartening, so Dash figured that more than made up for it. “You don’t have to ask me twice.” Two nearly full trash satchels and a pair of pokey-sticks were discarded alongside the road, their owners trotting off to sit on a recently de-littered patch of grass beneath a large dappled willow tree. The breeze was steady but not overwhelming, and it made the long limbs of the willow dance almost hypnotically before them. Even Rainbow Dash could appreciate the serene beauty of it. In the spirit of things, she shifted closer to Applejack under the pretence of finding a flatter piece of ground. Applejack gave her a look that made it obvious she knew exactly what she was doing, but didn’t say anything, instead opting for a smile.
“Ya know, for community service, this ain’t half bad.”
Rainbow rolled her neck, giving it some much needed relief from the downward tilt it had been positioned in all day. “Meh, speak for yourself, fruit-flank. Garbage duty is, like, lower than last on my list of things I do not want to waste my time on.” She rubbed a hoof on her chest, examining it in a way that she hoped came across as nonchalant. She let the moment drag on just enough – dramatic effect was key – before continuing, “Buuut, the perks are pretty good. I mean, I get to rub shoulders with one of Ponyville’s top athletes, for one.” Applejack quirked an eyebrow, presumably at the words “one of” but her smile remained firmly in place, perhaps even softening at the edges. “And I get to – what did Twi call it? Build moral fibre? That’s gotta count for something. Hey – I can put community service on my resume! The Bolts’ll love that!”
“Will ‘the Bolts’ also love that yer only doin’ it because of charges regardin’ public displays of indecency, assault on a government official, and wilfully evadin’ justice?” Applejack smirked.
Rainbow’s face fell. “Huh. Well, scratch the community service plan, then. I’ll just tell them that I rescue fillies from wells or something instead.”
“Yer lucky ya did. Heck, we’re all lucky we’re upstandin’ members of the community, and Elements of Harmony to boot, or Mare and Long-Hoof coulda had us doing worse than pickin’ up garbage.”
Rainbow waved a hoof. “Ah, Mare’s a softy. Even if we were run of the mill townsfolk, and we’re definitely not, she probably woulda let us off with a slap on the hoof-joint.”
Applejack snorted, her smirk widening. “You could still always start up that Mayor Mare fan club you were wantin’ so bad. Maybe then we’d only have to pick up garbage and paint fences for another week, instead of two.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before Applejack met with a face-full of feathers. Her squawks of indignation and muffled curses brought Rainbow to belly-clutching, back-rolling hysterics, hysterics that were so engrossing that she didn’t spot the cowpony spitting out a single blue feather (that may or may not have been tucked into a hat to preserve for later) and rear up bearing a truly terrifying grin.
Her hooves came down, and Rainbow’s laughter crescendoed into a squeak, before starting all over again, this time with snatches of speech interspersed between the frantic guffaws. “Apple –ha – jack! S-s-stop! Ha – please, I’m gonna, I’m gonna pee myself!” This only made Applejack redouble her tickling efforts, making sure to get in the crook of the pegasus’s forelegs and underneath the wings.
“Don’t make me go fer the chin, Rainbow.”
Such a simple statement would seem innocent to any random citizen not well versed in Rainbow Dash’s tickle anatomy, but to a pegasus with dark secrets, secrets the mare on top of her was well aware of, it sent a tingle of terror shooting through her spine. “You wouldn’t.”
Applejack simply raised an eyebrow, smirk still firmly in place, hooves a flurry of movement over the blue fur beneath her.
Rainbow, now even more alarmed – though still laughing, which made the whole situation even funnier for her partner – looked up pleadingly. “We’re in – snktt haha - p-p-public!”
Applejack merely grinned wider, before going for the coup-de-grace. With one hoof still tickling for leverage, her free one roamed up and under Rainbow’s chin, right at the base of her jaw, where it slowly began to scratch. Rainbow’s giggles quickly dissolved into mewls of affection. Her back leg started to kick haphazardly. The hoof doing the tickling ceased its ministrations entirely, and Rainbow was left to catch her breath, practically purring.
Applejack looked down at her fondly, now running her other hoof through her multicoloured mane. “And to think ponies believe the wings’re the most sensitive spot on you flyin’ featherdusters.”
“Not – hmmm – fair, Applejack.” murmured Rainbow Dash distractedly. “You used…ah…my one weakness…against me.”
“One weakness, my flank. Yer a bundle of twitchy energy most of the time, you nap a ridiculous amount, and you have weird sensitive spots that turn you to putty…yer basically a cat, Dash, you should just admit it.”
Rainbow’s only response was an inarticulate grumble that turned into a hum partway through. “‘Sides, no one’s around, and even if they were it’d be mighty hard for them to see us through all these leaves. I got yer back, Sugarcube, even when I’ve got ya stuck on it.”
“That sounded really suggestive. Should we come back later?”
The two previously preoccupied ponies shot into the air, and presently neither of them had fully-functioning wings. “Twilight! I – uh, that is to say, we – we were just – ”
“Ha! Nice one Twi-Twi! Usually it's me who gets the jump on randomly canoodling ponies, but you really pulled it off! Just look at their faces! I give you a ten for execution, and a nine point five for word choice.”
“Thank you Pinkie, I – wait, nine point five? Where’d I lose that half a point?”
While the two newly arrived ponies bickered (or Twilight staunchly defended her choice of vocabulary as Pinkie beamed back at her wordlessly) Applejack and Rainbow Dash set about making themselves presentable. Meaning Applejack attempted to straighten out Dash’s feathers and brush down several fluffier-than-usual patches of fur that had bristled up in ineffectual defence against her hooves. The results were less than premium, leaving Applejack with a cockeyed cap and Dash looking like she’d come out the worse from a tussle with Winona’s industrial strength hair dryer.
“‘Should we come back later’ is a classic stock phrase for interrupting questionably occupied ponies! You can’t dock me points for originality if I refer to something everypony knows about on purpose – that’s the whole point!” Twilight seemed to notice her now captive audience from the corner of her eye, because she huffed and turned to face them directly. “Never mind. So, girls, we came to find you to ask if you wanted to break for lunch together. Pinkie and I have finished the garbage cleanup over on the West side,” here Pinkie struck a pose and made some indiscernible sign with her hooves, but given that none of the other three could parse out its meaning, they ignored it, “and we were going to help you finish the East side, if you hadn’t already, after lunch. Unless you wanted us to leave so you can continue, uh,” she regarded the conspicuously ruffled Rainbow Dash and sheepish Applejack carefully, “whatever it was that you were doing.”
“Nah, lunch sounds great!” interjected Rainbow quickly, still trying to flatten her flared feathers. “AJ here was just cleaning my coat up a bit. This job’s kinda messy, ya know?”
Applejack nodded emphatically, her hat bobbing on its precarious perch. The blue feather sticking up from the band around the brim didn’t do their argument any favours, but Twilight only raised an eyebrow with a slight smirk of her own when she noticed its presence. Pinkie, as usual, was still beaming as she trotted up to inspect Applejack’s new wardrobe addition.
“Ooh, pretty. And Rarity says you don’t know how to accessorize!”
“Acessor-what-now?” comprehension bloomed across her freckled face. “Oh, horse apples.”
Rainbow looked up to see what had distracted her friends from her own sorry state. As soon as her eyes alighted on the feather, her mouth split into a big, goofy grin. “Wow, AJ, that’s pretty forward of you.”
“Wha – what d’you mean? Was I not supposed to do that?” She looked around uncertainly, “It – it musta fell out when ya smacked me in the face with yer wing, and, well, I didn’t just wanna leave it on the ground or somethin’…”
“Pegasus ponies traditionally pluck one primary feather from their wings when they wish to propose to someone. By doing this, they exhibit the love and commitment they have for their partner, as it symbolizes their willingness to part with an integral part of their bodies, and more importantly, their culture, by removing a piece of what allows them to live in the sky. In fact, often when this gift is bestowed, the pegasus in question will recite the words, “a piece of the sky, for my life and my world” as a solemn oath to the individual they have chosen to spend their life with.”
Jaws were dropped all around as Twilight recited this information as if she were still speaking of their lunch plans. Except for Pinkie's, who simply nodded as if the revelation was common knowledge. “What?” said Twilight, still smirking uncharacteristically, “I live in a library, surely it's not a surprise to any of you that I actually read the books in there?”
Applejack felt her whole face burning as the implications of her actions hit her with the full force of a herd of stampeding buffalo. “Dash, I didn’t mean ta put ya on the spot or nothin’, I – ”
Rainbow’s colossal grin had been replaced by a much softer smile, one Applejack rarely saw when other ponies were present. “I know, AJ. That isn’t one of my primaries, anyway. Trust me, if I lose one of those babies, you’ll know about it.” She seemed to realize the double meaning of her words the second they left her mouth, her eyes widening slightly, “not that I’m trying to put you on the spot, either, or anything. Just that, it's uh, kinda really painful whenever you pluck one of those suckers out, especially if you do it yourself.” She walked over to the farm pony, close enough so that their coats were touching, and looked into her eyes, “But, you know, I don’t think I mind you having that one.” She reached up and straightened the hat, so that it framed Applejack’s face in the old familiar way. The feather sat proudly in a place of prominence on the left side, tilted at a jaunty angle. “There,” she leaned forward slightly, brushing their muzzles together and planting the lightest of kisses on the side of Applejack’s, “perfect.”
As Pinkie ‘Awwed’ and Twilight began leading the way back into town in search of a suitable restaurant, Rainbow Dash and Applejack could only look back on the ridiculous scenario that had brought them to this point. Life was made up of moments – some silly, some scary, and some downright stupid, but within all of the mess and muddle, throughout the commotion of every day life, sometimes there was room for a few that simply were, perfect.