//------------------------------// // Sixth // Story: A Game of Hearts // by AugieDog //------------------------------// "No!" yelled Big McIntosh. Twilight leaped sideways as he barreled past; he somehow swerved to brush between Pinkie and Spike without breaking stride and skidded through the doorway, the rain crashing down over him in absolute torrents. "Dash!" he shouted, Twilight barely able to hear him even though he was only a few paces away. "It ain't Rarity! It's you!" "What?" Applejack leaped forward, grabbed her brother's bobbed tail in her teeth, and dragged him back inside. "You start talking, mister, and I mean now!" Water puddled the floor around him, his mane dripping down either side of his head. "I been thinking 'bout Dash a fair while, wondering if'n she'd be int'rested in, y'know—" how he managed to blush with his coloring, Twilight had no idea, but she could clearly tell that he was "—stepping out with me. I reckoned I needed advice, so I worked myself up to asking Miss Rarity yesterday what'd be the best way to let Dash know." "And today," Rarity said, her voice cracking, "when I saw how upset Dash was and realized she must have similar feelings for McIntosh—" "What?" Applejack shouted again. "You telling me that, not only has my big brother been nursing a secret crush on RD, but she's been doing the same for him?" Rarity gave a hollow sort of shrug. "It came as a shock to me as well, but I thought that would just make it so much simpler to get the two of them together. But—" "My fault," Big Mac rumbled. He lowered his head, everything about him drooping. "Dash is whip-smart and lightning-quick and purty as the first blue sky after a rainstorm, and I done wrecked it all afore it even started." "No," Twilight heard somepony say: her own voice, she recognized with a start. "That isn't going to happen." Tension gripping her chest and shoulders, she stomped a hoof, and everything she'd been thinking and feeling the past two days came bursting out of her. "I mean, as far as I can tell, love is only good for making ponies lie and scream and get so embarrassed, they hide things they really don't have any reason to hide! But I am not going to let all this stupid romance nonsense break up our friendships or our town!" She looked from wide-eyed face to wide-eyed face. "Now! We've got an Everfree storm out there! That means the Ponyville civil defense plan is in effect, and you all know your stations!" Stopping her gaze on Spike, she lowered her voice. "I'm afraid you'll have to get the castle's emergency shelter open on your own, but I know you can do it." Pinkie was rushing from pony to pony, pulling umbrella hats from her mane and slapping them onto their heads. Yellow rain slickers floated from a closet in the bluish haze of Rarity's magic, Spike's drifting into place around his shoulders. "On my own?" he asked. "Where're you gonna be?" With a swallow, Twilight looked at the open door, another bolt of lightning splitting the sky, its thunder shaking the whole boutique. "Rainbow Dash is key to resolving any storm situation, and if she's too angry or depressed, she won't be able to concentrate." Twilight flared her wings. "So I've got to find her and tell her what's really been going on here." "What?" It was Fluttershy this time, stopping with her slicker already cinched as she headed for the door. "Flying? In this storm?" She shook not just her head but her whole body. "Twilight, you can't!" "Actually?" Twilight gave her a smile she didn't quite feel. "I'm the only one who can. I mean, maybe the map doesn't think so, but I say this is a friendship problem. And that means it's up to me." "Whoo-hoo!" Pinkie shouted behind her. Turning, Twilight felt something slap down between her ears, a strap fastening under her chin, and she blinked at Pinkie Pie, the top of her friend's head blocked off by the red and green umbrella hat Twilight realized she was now wearing. "You be all princesscent at Dashie, and we'll take care of everything here!" Not letting herself think, Twilight nodded, leaped, flapped, and whisked through the doorway into the pelting rain. The wind grabbed her around the middle and threw her sideways; she couldn't help gasping, but her weekly drills with Rainbow flashed to the front of her mind as bright as the lightning that cracked the sky ahead of her. Bending her left wing just a bit, she let the gust wheel her around till she was facing into it, then she straightened her wings, dug at the air, and felt herself rising the way she was supposed to. Her vision was adjusting to the weather, too, the way Rainbow always said it would: "Us pegasi got, like, extra parts in our eyes for that," she'd told Twilight more than once, though when Twilight would start giving Rainbow the scientific names for those extra parts, Rainbow would just wave a hoof and scowl. "Whatever they're called, it means we can see better in the dark, and we don't get flashblind even if a lightning bolt smashes right past us." In fact, looking at the mass of black clouds tumbling in from the Everfree, Twilight could see a fair percentage of Ponyville's pegasi quite clearly now, brighter bits of shadow moving against the storm. Her ears pricked to the sound of their whistles, pitches and patterns that carried much better than speech under these conditions; she'd been learning them ever since she'd gotten her wings, and homing in on the command codes, she struggled through the blustery air in that direction. But the pony giving the command whistles a few hundred yards in advance of the bulging clouds was too stocky to be Rainbow, and the flattop mane told her it was Thunderlane. Coming up behind him, she gave her best rendition of the 'priority' whistle, and it must've been close enough because he snapped his head around to stare at her. Not even half an instant, and he shouted, "Nice hat!" "Never mind that!" She somehow managed to maintain something close to a hover. "Where's Rainbow Dash!" "Topside!" Thunderlane aimed a few more whistles at the ponies taking their positions around the storm's perimeter. "We're doing a squeeze play, all of us bucking the clouds straight up, then we usually have four or five smashers up there to bust 'em into pieces!" He shook his head. "She said we couldn't wait for any others, so she's up there alone, and that's just crazy! She okay, Twilight? She didn't look so good!" Her stomach tightening, Twilight gave the 'thank you' and 'carry on' whistles, flexed her wings, and propelled herself upward. The driving droplets stung her face. Flexing her neck, she positioned the brim of her umbrella hat to block as much of the rain as she could. The air flowed around her in ways she'd never even imagined it could, solid as a flashflood one instant, then dropping away the next to leave her wings flailing against an emptiness that gave them no purchase at all. Phrases like 'pressure differential' and 'wind divergence' rattled around in her head, but she pushed them all aside. Knowing what was happening wasn't going to help her fly through it, after all. She was still climbing, her inner ear told her, and every fifteen or twenty seconds—depending on when she could gasp in enough breath—she puckered up and gave the 'priority' whistle as well as the most basic signal for 'where are you?' Lightning gnashed its gnarled teeth through the thunderhead to her right, and she knew that in theory, she should be getting near the top. But of course, Everfree storms never seemed to quite follow the same patterns as regular, pegasus-made weather... More whistling, more flapping, her muscles pumping in ways that were going to leave her very sore tomorrow, and then, as she was sucking in another lungful of cold dampness, an answering whistle seemed to trickle out from behind a grumble of thunder. She puffed another 'where are you?' and added the patterns for Rainbow Dash's name at the end. Holding her breath and twisting her ears, she definitely heard the standard directional response followed by a less-standard and fairly brusque 'who wants to know?' Realizing that she didn't have an official Weather Central Whistle Designation, she was about to start puckering out the dots and dashes to spell her name in the Horse code they used on the railway lines when a gust of wind caught her from behind. It tumbled her upward, and she found herself surging over the lip of the darkest mound of cloud, roiling beneath her and stretching off into the murky light, gray misty tendrils swirling in all directions. A splash of blue to her right drew her attention. The only color in the whole place, it whooshed toward her till she could make out the rainbow mane and tail, those violet eyes narrow and not at all happy, that raspy voice screaming over the storm, "Twilight, are you crazy? You can't be up here! When they start kicking the cloud—!" "Listen!" Twilight wanted to grab Rainbow's shoulders and shake her to make sure she was paying attention, but she wasn't sure how to counterbalance if she did. So she just rammed her muzzle into Rainbow's ear and yelled,"Mac's in love with you! Not Rarity! He was only talking to her to find out how he should approach you!" The thrashing air pulled her away before she could go on, and by the time she could swing herself back into a position ahead of Rainbow, her friend's eyes were wider than Twilight had ever seen a pony's eyes go. "What?" Rainbow asked—or at least, from the motion of her lips, Twilight guessed that was what she asked. Opening her mouth to repeat herself, Twilight instead had to gasp when the whole sky seemed to rumble. "Fewmets!" Rainbow shouted, and she managed to grab Twilight's shoulders just fine. "Okay! D'you remember a couple weeks ago when I showed you how to buck clouds so they pop instead of letting loose their lightning and stuff?" Twilight managed to nod, the air thickening around her till it began feeling more like oatmeal against her wings. "Great!" Rainbow gestured to the storm bulging below them. "I'll be working down there! If any clouds get past me that're bigger'n, say, four ponies mooshed together, you've gotta buck 'em like I taught you!" "But what—?" Twilight started in as loud a voice as she could manage, but she could barely hear herself over the roar of the wind; Rainbow was giving her some blank-faced blinks, too, so she quickly came to the conclusion that she didn't quite have the lung capacity for words to be useful under these conditions. She gave the 'acknowledged' whistle instead, and that got a grin flashing over Rainbow's face. "You're a natural, Twi!" Lightning crashed behind Twilight, and in the sudden glare, she saw Rainbow's eyes wavering. "But...it's me? Mac and...and me?" Whistling 'acknowledged' with her throat tightening and her face trying to form a goofy grin was even harder than keeping herself airborne, but Twilight almost stopped flapping when Rainbow suddenly wrapped her in a hug. "Whoo-hoo!" Rainbow shouted, and Twilight was pretty sure every pony in Equestria heard it. Then Rainbow was pushing away and clapping her front hooves. "All right! Cloudchaser and those other lazy bums oughtta be along in a minute, but till then, how 'bout you and me get down to business and save Ponyville, huh?" She arrowed into a dive, and Twilight stared at the entire mountain of cloud surging upward like black lava. Rainbow smashed straight into it, and it shattered, bits scattering upward and making Twilight think of a geyser going off. The smaller chunks unraveled all on their own, but Twilight was watching the larger ones, her mind running through the checklist she'd put together for herself from the somewhat erratic instructions Rainbow had given her several weeks ago. Arcing into her own dive, she aimed herself at the largest of the cloud remnants, did the visual inspection necessary to determine its most vulnerable point, concentrated on the pegasus magic she'd gained with her wings, spun at what she deemed the appropriate time, and lashed out with her rear hooves: "If it feels like you've stomped on a rotten tomato," Rainbow had told her during practice, "then you've got it." This cloud was a lot bigger than the ones she'd smashed that afternoon—it felt more like stomping on a rotten pumpkin than anything else. Close enough, she figured, and setting her sights on the next biggest cloud, she sliced her wings into the wind and raced toward it. Flapping, spinning, and kicking filled her head for a timeless stretch after that, the incessant rain seeping deeper and deeper into her. The streak of blue that flashed back and forth among the lightning bolts below her kept her moving, though, till her ears again perked to whistles echoing up from the clouds: 'relief arriving' followed by some fancier trills that Twilight was too tired to decipher. She heard Rainbow's answering whistles, turned her attention away from the cloud fragments dispersing all around her, and— Fire lanced into her, her whole body going numb, and the air itself seemed to explode, whiteness blinding her eyes and a roar tearing her ears. Struck by lightning! echoed and re-echoed through her rattled thoughts, 'up' and 'down' disappearing from her world. She couldn't feel the storm battering her any more, either, and the one tiny part of her brain that wasn't as jumbled as the discharge from one of Pinkie's party cannons wondered idly if she was still flying or if she'd begun falling at this point. There wasn’t any good way to tell, not with her nervous system twitching random sounds and colors through her. She was almost sure she felt something grab her around the barrel, though, and she chose to take that as a good sign. The sudden thump of pain along her entire front from chin to pasterns was a little less reassuring, but it did seem to focus her scattered bits and pieces: she blinked for the first time in what seemed like days and found a jagged blackness taking shape beyond the fuzzy popping shapes she'd been seeing for a while now. "Hang on, Twi," a rough voice said somewhere. "I'll be back in, like, five minutes, and we'll get you outta here." But by the time she'd managed to raise her head— Raise? Was she lying down? Yes, the familiar pull of gravity had returned to tell her that she was lying sprawled on her belly, a mixture of sharp and sandy sensations poking and scratching against her. A splashing hiss told her the storm was still going on, so not a lot of time had passed, but since she wasn't quite sure where her hooves were, she decided that standing might not be the best idea. Besides, Rainbow had said she'd be right back.... Her vision cleared further with each blink, and she realized that the gray light was coming from behind her. Craning her neck, she saw what had to be the mouth of a shallow cave, a curtain of rain on the other side. That meant that she was inside. Pleased to find that her mental faculties were allowing her to draw conclusions from the data presented to them, she focused a little more on finding her legs, shifting and shuffling and slewing herself around in the pebbly dirt till she was facing the opening. How long this took her, again, she wasn't entirely sure, but she was feeling a lot less like a soap bubble about to burst by the time she'd finished. She was almost ready to give standing another try when something scuffled at the cave entrance, and a long, thin shadow began stretching down from the top of the cave mouth. Her first thought—snake!—nearly sent her scrambling backwards even though her hooves still wouldn't go she wanted them to. But a whistle whisked into the cave then, followed almost immediately by Rainbow Dash, skidding to a stop on the muddy soil. "Twi!" Her smile seemed to light up the whole place. "You're okay!" "Glab," Twilight said, her mouth suddenly feeling like it was full of uncooked cookie dough. Folding her ears, she gave a shrug and a nod. "I knew it!" Rainbow spun, grabbed the dangling thing in her teeth—a rope, Twilight realized with a start, hanging down over the lip of the cave mouth—and tugged it the three steps to Twilight's side. "A couple measly lightning bolts aren't even gonna make you blink!" "Yeah." Twilight blinked a few times, then nodded and grinned. "Looks like I still remember how," she managed to say, her tongue feeling almost back to its normal size. Rainbow laughed, her hooves moving around Twilight's middle. "Can you lift up a little?" Concentrating, Twilight found that she could, and lowering her head, she watched Rainbow wrap the rope in a big bow under her front legs. "Okay," Rainbow said, stepping back. "Hang on!" "To what?" Twilight asked, but Rainbow had already turned. She shot another whistle out into the rain, and the rope went taut. "To me!" Rainbow whirled back around, scooted under Twilight's chest, and before Twilight even knew what was happening, she was back out in the rain, the rope pulling her upward while Rainbow guided her out away from the cliff face that stretched up and down and from left to right till it vanished in the mists. Twilight just had time to recognize the place as Ghastly Gorge before the rope hauled her over the edge of the cliff. Rainbow's cheeks were puffing out with the effort of keeping herself and Twilight from smacking into the wall of rock, then solid ground was brushing the bottoms of Twilight's hooves, Rainbow sliding out from under her with a groan: "Yeesh! No wonder alicorns are so tough! How much do you weigh, anyway?" A rumbling laugh drew Twilight's attention to a large figure in a yellow slicker, a stallion uncoiling the other end of the rope from his front hooves. An umbrella hat hid his face, but when he looked up, Twilight saw it was Big McIntosh. "You both together don't weigh more'n a hooffulla thistledown." "Really?" Rainbow cocked her head, water slinging from drenched mane. "Guess you won't have any trouble carrying Twilight back to Ponyville, then, right?" She waved a hoof at the clouds, not quite as thick and nasty-looking, Twilight thought, as they'd been before. "Me, I've got a few things I still need to take care of, then you and me—" The catch in Rainbow's voice was so slight, Twilight almost thought she'd imagined it, especially with the big smile that was spreading over her face "—I understand we've got a little talking to do." "That's all I ask." Mac cleared his throat and looked away. "Just wish it'd be in a more romantic kinda setting, but—" "Are you kidding?" Rainbow leaped into a hover and spread her front hoofs like she was embracing the whole storm. "This right here? This is who I am, Mac, and there's nothing better in the whole wide world." She looked down at him, then, and something kind of hard seemed to come into her face. "So don't waste my time if you've got trouble with this, all right? You tell me right now, and you tell me true: you gonna be able to handle it?" Twilight was pretty sure she'd stopped breathing, but then Mac smiled as big as a summer day. "Eeyup," he said, and Twilight thought she could feel the ground shake under the weight of it. Rainbow's grin got so goofy, Twilight couldn't stop herself from doing a little dance. "All righty, then," Rainbow said. She waved at Twilight. "You two get inside, and I'll see you in—" Lightning raced in jagged bolts across the sky above them, and the thunder rumbled from low to ear-splitting like an approaching train. Rainbow didn't even blink: "About half an hour," she said, and with a quick loop, she burst upward toward the clouds again.