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// Winter 
// Story: The Birds Sang for Her 
// by HoofBitingActionOverload 
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Again, as she had so many times before, Fluttershy walked deep into Whitetail Woods. She walked along the same well-trodden path, but the path was different now. For the first time, it had been marked by hooves other than her own. Rainbow Dash had walked it as many times as Fluttershy had that year, and it would bear signs of her presence for many seasons to come.

The forest was white with snow, and snowflakes flittered down from the sky like countless daylit fireflies and nestled in her mane and coat and tail. Snow-blanketed trees stood along the path, their bare branches, encased in translucent frost, reached up into the falling white and towards the glowing gray clouds above. The snow on the ground was perfectly undisturbed and pure except for the craters left by Fluttershy’s hooves in a trail behind her, quickly filling with new snowfall. The forest was silent and still but for Fluttershy’s hoofsteps, her calm breath, and the whispering butterfly-wingbeat of snow resting upon snow.

Fluttershy was alone again. She had almost forgotten what it was like to walk that path alone. As she walked, she saw the ditch Rainbow Dash had once tripped over while talking excitedly about a horseshoe contest won against Applejack and sprawled head over hooves to the ground and stuck her tongue out when Fluttershy giggled at her. And Fluttershy saw, too, the tree where they had met the squirrel who clambered up their legs and tugged playfully at their manes and followed them all the way to the clearing. Along the sides of the path, Fluttershy saw a hundred, a thousand happy memories, and did not feel alone.
        
She soon arrived at the brook, and found its water stopped in ice. She crept across the delicate surface and into the clearing.

In the open air of the clearing, with no umbrella of tree branches, the snow piles had collected and risen higher than anywhere else in the forest. Fluttershy waded through snow until she found a spot on the ground where she knew she had lain down with Rainbow Dash in springtime. She dug into the snow and sat down, tucking her hooves beneath her and folding her wings at her side. In the ground, some small remnant of the warmth she and Rainbow had shared there must have remained, as she began to feel less cold.

Fluttershy always returned to the clearing in winter. She didn’t know why. Perhaps to re-feel the sun, and re-smell the blossoms, and re-hear the birds and the running brook, if only in memory. She had never been able to. She had never seen past the stiff, lifeless reality of winter. And with all of the animals away or asleep or hiding from the cold, she had felt more alone than ever. All she had on those previous winter trips were memories of lost opportunities, and almost-beens but never-woulds, and yearning and longing for a friend who would never be anything more, and of all the years and springs and summers Fluttershy spent never as close to that friend as she knew she could have been, if not for her fear and anxiety and want of courage.

But something had changed. Something in the winter air, or the frozen soil, or the slumbering trees, or in herself, she could not tell. Where before on all those previous winter walks she had only ever seen leafless branches, now she saw the flitting, singing birds and lively blossoms of spring. Where before she had only ever seen the white-covered ground, void of warmth, she now saw the soft, dewy green grass. Where before she had only seen the air empty but for falling snow, now she saw herself and Rainbow Dash, tumbling out of the sky, holding each other fast. She felt the down feathers of Rainbow’s wings at her flanks, Rainbow’s hooves around her withers, Rainbow’s lips on her own, and the heat and passion and heady rhythm of their bodies in motion together.

Fluttershy realized it was everything that had changed, and that would never be the same again. The regret and the longing and the disappointment were gone, and replaced with memories of time not wasted, and songs not unsung, and sweet nothings not unspoken.

Fluttershy drew into herself, and the cold fell away, and the snow melted, and the trees bloomed, and the clouds were swept away. Night fell, and she rested her head on Rainbow Dash’s chest and listened to her lover’s slow, sleeping breath, and wind passed over them and they pulled each other closer. And Fluttershy knew the scene and the clearing and the spring would forever be hers.