Scootaloo awoke in a pile of rusty shrapnel.
“Nnngh...” she groaned as she stood up. How long had she been out? Was she even sleeping? Ghosts didn’t sleep as far as she knew, but she certainly hadn’t been here the whole time.
Memories were becoming increasingly difficult. She’d been underground, there were other ponies and a light... Then Rainbow Dash’s house, then black. Had she fallen asleep at Rainbow Dash’s house? Was that part of a dream? Was this part of a dream?
Stepping carefully over the scrap metal, she recognized part of a symbol of a ball of steam that had been painted on. “Steam tanks,” she said aloud, “from the weather factory. Steam tanks like...”
“It's all gone. Like it never even happened."
Scootaloo yelped in surprise. Across the room, behind a few strands of yellow tape, Rainbow Dash stared at a hole in the wall. The floor and walls around her were pristine, white and cloudy as every other part of the factory. As Scootaloo drew closer, she saw Rainbow Dash was crying.
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all," she said. She looked over her shoulder at Scootaloo, then turned back around. “I wonder if your mother follows me around too, and I just can’t see her.”
Words about her mother made Scootaloo stop short. Her face hardened, and she said, “I’m sure she wouldn’t be too happy to see you.”
Rainbow Dash said nothing for a moment. There was a long sigh, and then, “I was with her when she died, you know.”
Scootaloo had no words for that. Emotions swam in circles through her mind, first confusion, then anger, and finally a sudden sadness that gripped her and forced her to sit, head down. She sat motionless as Rainbow Dash continued.
“It was just after that big winter storm rolled in from the Everfree. Blizzards are always so much harder to control, and when you’re flying over so many gnarled branches and cliffs and rocks, and the wind knocks you down...”
She paused, taking a deep breath. “When we heard her screaming, it was through a hundred yards of wind and ice. There was no telling where she’d crashed, so we looked for over an hour beneath the canopy, in the canyon, even outside the forest, in case she’d been thrown there by the storm.”
Scootaloo shivered, feeling pressure behind her eyes. Could ghosts cry? That’s what she was, right?
“I found her at the forest floor,” Rainbow Dash continued shakily. “She’d gone down next to a ravine, where the rocks on the edges were all jagged. One of them had gone through her stomach, above her right leg. By the time I’d gotten to her it was t-too late. Snow was already building up on her, but even through it I could make out little f-furrows in the dirt, from when she’d tried to...” Her voice trailed off.
Both of them were silent for nearly a minute. Scootaloo felt tears when she blinked. Just as she opened her mouth to speak, Rainbow Dash began again, and she was silent.
“She was still kicking, even after I got there. B-Bleeding into the snow for over an hour, but still kicking.” She laughed, shaking her head. “Heh... Your mom always was a fighter.”
Scootaloo sniffed, feeling wetness on her cheeks. She stood up, taking a few steps towards Rainbow Dash, who kept staring at the ground as she spoke.
“Kicking little grooves into the m-mud with her heels, like the motion you’d use to slide under a table. I don’t think–” She paused, wiping her eyes. “I don’t even think she knew I was there.”
With a hitched breath, Rainbow Dash placed a hoof over the hole left in the wall by the metal fragment. “It doesn’t happen the way everypony says. You expect to see their spirit leaving their body, or feel them move on to the next life and leave this world with a smile. But that’s not how it goes.” She lowered her hoof and turned around, looking Scootaloo in the eyes. “One second she was moving, and the next she wasn’t. And you’d think the earth should bear some great scar to show the exact place she died, but there’s nothing. N-Nothing but frozen blood and those little trails in the dirt, and even those were buried by the snow...”
Scootaloo looked away, twirling her ponytail in front of her face in an attempt to hid her tear-stained cheeks. Rainbow Dash began walking towards her, still talking. “Maybe that’s why we have gravestones. To show the world we mattered to somepony, for however brief a time.”
“Rainbow Dash... Why are you telling me this?”
“I did a lot of thinking on the flight over here, Scootaloo. About you. About me. About those little trails in the dirt.” More tears welled up in Rainbow Dash’s eyes as she choked out the next words. “I-If I hadn’t looked in the wrong places, if I’d been f-f-faster...”
Scootaloo’s face tingled as tears slid down her cheeks. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Rainbow Dash. Not what happened to my mom, and not what happened to me.”
“But it is, don’t you get it?” Rainbow Dash cried. “I ruined your life twice and you still don’t see it?”
“You didn’t make me try to steal lightning.”
Her comfort fell on deaf ears. “But you wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t left for Cloudsdale! And you wouldn’t have had to leave if I’d j-j-j-just–”
Memories of a shouting match with this very same pony played in her head. Grimacing, Scootaloo found herself without any words of comfort for the pegasus that had abandoned her to solitude.
“I thought I w-was doing what was best for you,” Rainbow Dash sobbed. “I thought I–Celestia, how could I have been so stupid? I’d never even heard of that shelter, but I left you there to starve all the same, b-b-because I was so damn sure I’d never be able to t-take care of a filly!”
After that, both of them were silent, save for Rainbow Dash’s sobbing. Scootaloo pawed at the floor with a hoof, trying and failing to think of something to say.
“And now I’ve lost you for good,” Rainbow Dash whimpered, her tail flicking behind her. “Twilight’s right about trying to bring you back. She’s always right about everything. What's happening to you doesn't mean a thing."
“I don’t even know what’s happening to me, Rainbow Dash,” Scootaloo said. The tunnel, the black void, blinking around from place to place, none of it made any sense. Everypony was so certain she was dead, but this didn’t line up with any afterlife she’d heard of.
“Scootaloo, Twilight was also right about me not being well in the head,” Rainbow Dash said. “I don’t think anything’s been happening to you.”
“W-What? What do you mean? There was the tunnel! With all the other ponies, and the portal at the end!”
“I always imagined death would be like that,” Rainbow Dash spoke softly now, wrapping a wing around Scootaloo’s back. “A relaxing ride from the moment I died to the gates of pony heaven, wherever that is. But the more I think about it, I can’t even imagine dying.”
In the very back of her mind, Scootaloo felt some urge to push herself free of Rainbow’s wing, but found herself pressing tighter into the embrace. “Rainbow Dash, what’re you talking about?”
“Well, I mean... I can imagine dying. A crash, or a disease, or just being really, really old. Dying makes sense. I’ve seen dying before. But being dead? Nopony knows what that’s like, Scootaloo. We all have our own ideas of what’s on the other side, but nopony really knows.
“Y-yeah. I guess so,” Scootaloo said. A sudden exhaustion was sweeping over her, and she yawned softly. The room was so cold at this altitude, and Rainbow Dash was so warm. The more Scootaloo leaned in, the safer everything seemed. No lightning jars or blizzards or exploding steam tanks could reach her here.
“I guess it might be blackness, like an empty void. For a while, when I saw you after the funeral, that’s what I told myself to convince my mind that you weren’t real. But darkness is something ponies understand, something our minds construct to make sense of night and sleep. Being dead can’t be like that.
Rainbow Dash’s wing closed tighter around her, like she was tucking Scootaloo into bed. “Death can’t be a tunnel, it can’t be blackness. There probably isn’t a pony heaven, either." Rainbow Dash looked down at the filly under her wing, swallowed a tearful sigh, and said, “It’s probably just...”
She closed her eyes, blinking out a final teardrop, and sat there. She raised her head, opening her eyes to stare across the room at a hole in the wall.
“Nothing,” she said. She glanced down once more. Nopony was there.
“Absolutely nothing at all.”