Chapter 20: Sing Your Song
The golden wash of the sun cresting the horizon stirred the birds from their sleep. It started with the first timid peep, which was answered by a tired chirp two trees away. A third joined the voices of its siblings, and soon a chorus followed it. Small, feathery bodies zipped to and from the trees, causing the branches to gently sway in a breeze that was not there.
A bluebird fluttered to the dusty ground. Its skinny legs kicked up dead leaves and flicked away tiny stones as it dug and searched for its morning meal. On bounding limbs, it hopped hopped hopped its way across the little hollow towards where two figures lay, slumbering in one another’s embrace.
The little bluebird stopped to examine the ponies lying before it. Its head turned from side to side in jagged little motions as it tried to figure out where one pony ended and the other began. Limbs entwined with wings and hair all but knotted together made that difficult. Cheek to cheek the two ponies slept, one blue, one brown, and neither restless.
The bird found this strange. Ponies didn’t sleep in the woods. They slept in big wooden nests with holes full of hard air. They groomed themselves with funny smelling pollen and dressed themselves in false feathers. They sung songs that were not songs, songs of pain and sorrow and despair. The bluebird did not like those songs. But they sometimes sang songs that it liked, songs of happiness and joy and love. Sometimes it was the quiet songs they sang, the songs from one pony to another, meant only for them, that the bluebird liked the most. And sometimes those songs didn’t have any words. Sometimes they sounded like happy breathing in a dirt hollow on the forest floor.
The bluebird turned its head to the side and kicked at the dusty forest floor. It liked this song. It was a fresh and beautiful song, and it didn’t want the song to stop. So it hopped a little further away and began turning over leaves at the edge of the clearing in the hopes it wouldn’t interrupt the song.
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Sunlight dancing on the surface of Rainbow Dash’s eyelids eventually tore her from the warm embrace of sleep. However, even as she moaned and blinked bleary eyes, the warm feeling didn’t leave her. Her ruby eyes found a coat of brown hair awaiting her and she smelled the musky, dusty scent of the pony it belonged to. Hawk Tail was still asleep with one wing wrapped around her shoulders and the tip of his muzzle pressed into her mane. Rainbow wanted to stretch her limbs, but she didn’t want to disturb Hawk. She could’ve tried wriggling out of his embrace… Rainbow decided to admit defeat before she even fully pursued that option. She guessed that there was no other option than to pull herself closer to Hawk and bury her face in his downy coat.
Not that the prospect of that had influenced her decision one way or another.
Nearly ten minutes passed before Hawk Tail began to stir. His wings twitched and slowly curled around Rainbow before his eyes even opened. Umber irises met ruby, and each blinked a few times before Hawk again buried his muzzle in Rainbow’s mane.
They laid like that for several minutes longer with nothing but each other’s warm company. The birds sang overhead, and the very faint morning breeze pulled at the loose strands in their manes. Leaves rustled in branches, and the occasional shadow cast by a cloud would drift over them.
“Rainbow?”
Hawk Tail’s single word slowly pushed the calm infinity of the world away and brought Rainbow back to the present. She tilted her head back and pressed her nose against Hawk’s so she could see his face. Their lips brushed, and Rainbow leaned forward to finish the contact.
It was slow, careful, and tender, but the kiss helped the two ponies feel a little more alive. To Rainbow, it helped reinforce the fact that last night wasn’t a dream. That was all she wanted.
Hawk was still looking at her though, so she cleared her throat and asked in a squeaky voice, “Yeah?”
“What time is it?”
Rainbow blinked, then remembered the pocketwatch lying on the ground a foot away. She groaned and rolled over to bring it just within reach and hauled it back with a hoof. Once it was in her grasp, she wrapped her hind legs around Hawk’s and pulled herself in as close as she could. Her blue hoof danced on the latch, and the face opened up.
“Erm… nine forty-seven?”
She glanced up to see Hawk purse his lips. He craned his neck to get a good look at the sun, as if he wanted to double check for himself, before he sighed and dropped his head back to the ground. “...Tits.”
Rainbow giggled. “Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” Hawk said, fluster slowly building beneath his cheeks. “We’re just… you know. Late.”
Rainbow’s squeaky giggling slowly died down into a happy sigh. There was silence between the two of them for a few moments longer, then Rainbow checked the pocket watch again. “…Oh.”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “We should, uh…” Rainbow stammered, tapping her hooves together. “We should get back on that.”
“Yeah…”
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By the time Rainbow and Hawk Tail finally returned to River’s Reach with the falcon, Matteo, the sun was setting behind them. The entire day had been nothing but flying back and forth for hours at a time to get the raptor trained to run his route, and each flight out was longer than the last. During the last few flights, Rainbow had remained at the Golden Glade to ease the burden on Hawk’s wings, and contented herself to alternating between speaking with Tilth and watching the ponies of the Glade carry on with their daily lives.
Even if he was a bit strange, Rainbow Dash liked talking to Tilth. The stallion was easily amused and loved to talk about himself, his family, his town. Rainbow found it relaxing to just hear about daily life in some place she’d never visited before. The Glade was like one big family, and for a moment, Rainbow had been privy to a slice of it.
Now, as Hawk Tail glided down towards his house, Rainbow saw River’s Reach laid out below her. It may have been twice as large as the Glade, and it may have been split in two by the river, but it was another family all the same. Everypony knew everypony, and everypony knew her. For the first time, Rainbow felt like she was a part of this big family as well. The feeling of belonging, of having somewhere she could call her home, put her restless and frightened nature at ease, at least for the time being. The shadows of her past continued to cry out to her at night, but now she could sing them to sleep with the lullaby of River’s Reach.
When they landed on the porch, Lanner was already waiting for them. She spat out a bit of string she held between her teeth that a hawk on her hoof had been playing with and waved with her free foreleg. “Hey! You’re back!” she exclaimed, and her hooves fidgeted like she was doing everything possible to not jump up and fly over to the pair of pegasi. Instead, she slowly collected the various raptors covering her body and set them on a long perch jutting out of the wall. “How was the trip?”
“Fun,” Rainbow Dash said, sliding off of Hawk’s back and stretching her limbs.
“Tiring,” was Hawk’s response. He rolled his shoulders and spent a few seconds gathering his breath. “A whole lot of flying back and forth.”
“And a whole lot of extra weight,” Rainbow admitted, rubbing her shoulder.
Hawk rolled his eyes. “You don’t weigh anything. You’re like a cloud.”
Rainbow stuck her tongue out at him, and then both ponies giggled. They nuzzled each other, and Rainbow slid under Hawk’s wing. Hawk held out his other wing, and Matteo landed on the crest, where he began preening and screeching softly to himself.
Lanner watched all this with wide eyes. She stuck a hoof up to her face to stifle an excited squeal and began to bounce on her three other hooves. Her wings snapped open and she took off, slowing for only a second near Rainbow and Hawk Tail. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! You two are so cute!!!”
The down stroke of her left wing nearly hit Rainbow on the forehead as the blue-gray mare fluttered past. Rainbow blinked and jerked back, nearly offsetting Hawk’s balance, and tried to follow the twirling, spinning flight of Lanner as she rocketed off towards the town. “H-Hey! Where are you going, girl?” When Lanner didn’t respond, she raised an eyebrow at Hawk Tail.
Hawk shrugged and began to move towards the house, his wing sweeping Rainbow along. “Do you really think anypony can ever understand what goes on in that head of hers?”
“Ehh…” Rainbow left that thought unfinished. She could never figure out Pinkie Pie either. A part of her wondered what would happen were the two ponies to ever meet in person. A tiny, morbidly fascinated part, that is.
The two ponies entered the house to the smell of vegetable stew and grilled zucchini. The enticing aroma immediately toyed with Rainbow’s senses, and before she could take two steps towards the kitchen, her stomach let out a loud rumbling roar. She stopped dead still, her eyes widened in surprise and staring at nothing. A second later, she sheepishly glanced at Hawk Tail. “Uhh…”
“Was that a bear?” Hawk teased, a slow smile breaking over his face. He shook his head and started trotting towards the kitchen. “Dad! We’re home!”
“I heard,” came Red Tail’s voice from around the corner. He emerged from the kitchen with a tray of soup bowls spread across his wings. “I figured you’d probably be hungry when you got back. Honestly, I was expecting you home earlier.”
Hawk rubbed his hoof through the crest of his mane. “Yeah… we got a little held up this morning.”
“Did you?” Red Tail set three bowls of soup down on the table and took the tray away. “You weren’t sleeping in, causing trouble I hope?”
Hawk’s face flushed and he cleared his throat with a soft cough. “No, of course not.”
Red Tail narrowed his eyes at him, and even Rainbow gave the stallion a curious look. But the older stallion shrugged and looked around the room. “Where’d Lanner fly off to?”
“Beats me,” Hawk answered him with a nearly inaudible sigh of relief. “She saw the two of us come home, ‘eeeeeeee’ed’, then dashed off.”
“Hmph,” Red Tail scoffed. “I thought that’s what I heard. Hopefully she gets back before her soup gets cold.”
He stepped past Hawk Tail and began to walk towards the door. “You’re not eating, Dad?” Hawk asked. His head angled to the side in confusion.
“Oh, I already ate while I was expecting you to come back,” he said. He reached for an old wool cap hanging from a peg near the doorway and donned it over his gray ears. “It’s Torsion’s birthday, so we’re meeting at the tavern to celebrate.”
“Ah. Have fun then.”
Red Tail nodded and placed his hoof on the door, but he stopped and fixed Hawk with a look. “Take care of her now,” was all he said. The door creaked open and slammed shut, with a maroon tail disappearing out of it in between.
All was silent for several seconds. Only when Matteo let out a pitiful shriek did either pony remaining stir.
Hawk Tail trotted away with a tense breath and dropped Matteo on a perch near the kitchen table. He dug his hooves through the larder and pulled out a few strips of mouse meat that’d been kept on ice and set them in the little bowl at the raptor’s talons. The falcon squawked and began to tear the meat apart, decorating its beak in crimson splotches in no time at all.
Rainbow, meanwhile, watched from the sidelines with a small frown on her lips. When Hawk sat down and squared his soup bowl in front of him, he raised an eyebrow at Rainbow. “What? Dinner’s getting cold.” A brown hoof gestured towards the bowl beside him for emphasis.
The mare sighed and slowly navigated around the table. She sat down by Hawk’s side and took a spoon between the feathers of her good wing and began to eat her meal in silence. Hawk Tail glanced at her for a moment, reached the verge of saying something, but bit it back and returned to his meal.
The silence lasted for several minutes. Both ponies ate their soup in utter quiet, save for occasional slurping noises from Rainbow. Hawk Tail glanced at her several times throughout the meal, but he couldn’t quite manage to catch her eye. Only when he finished his bowl did he set his spoon down and look directly at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Rainbow muttered, setting her spoon aside. She sat back in her chair, forelegs folded, and frowned at the rest of her meal.
Hawk Tail thought for a moment. “Was it something I said?” he finally asked, sliding a tick closer to her. The mare didn’t retreat, but she still tensed and pointedly avoided his eyes.
“Or something you didn’t,” she said.
“Something I didn’t…?” Hawk blinked. A soft gasp of realization left his lips, and he shook his head. “Oh… Rainbow, I’m sorry. I just wasn’t ready to say anything, not yet.”
“Why?” Ruby eyes finally sought his face. “I don’t get it. I would’ve loved to say something to my parents if I’d found my special somepony. Why not you?”
Hawk’s wing idly nudged the handle of the spoon around the edge of the bowl. “It’s… complicated.”
“Is it?” Rainbow asked. She cocked her head to the side and leaned in a little closer. “Or is it something you just don’t want to tell me?”
The stallion fidgeted as he tried to think of what to say. Eventually, however, Rainbow saw his resolve finally begin to break. “Don’t say anything about this,” he cautioned her. “But… well, my dad’s been suspicious of you for a while.”
Rainbow Dash blinked. That was probably the last thing she’d expected him to say. “Suspicious?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Hawk tried to reassure her. He waved his hoof like he was warding off some invisible demon. “He’s an old veteran; you get suspicious of everyone when you’re an old codger like he is.”
“Hawk…” Rainbow intoned. “What do you mean, ‘suspicious’?”
The stallion took a pensive breath. “When I first brought you home, we were trying to figure out where you were from. We knew you weren’t from any of the neighboring towns, so I wondered if you were from beyond the mountains.”
His eyes looked out the northern window, and Rainbow traced their gaze to the stony ridges that speared the horizon like a jagged set of dragon’s teeth. Exceptionally tall and formidable, they tore all but the highest flying clouds to pieces and dashed them against their snowy slopes. Only high altitude fliers would ever have any chance of clearing those craggy spires, and even then not without incredible difficulty.
“What’s beyond the mountains?” Rainbow asked.
Hawk Tail shrugged. “From what the few Nymeran expeditions that have ventured that far north can tell, nothing but badlands and desert. The land’s too dry and inhospitable for anything to survive. It took some of the army’s strongest fliers to even get up the mountain faces, but they didn’t want to go back down the other side. They wrote it off as inhospitable and… well, that was that.”
Rainbow’s eyes narrowed. “But your dad…?”
“Was a member of one of those expeditions,” Hawk said. When Rainbow’s eyes widened, he nodded. “He started out as an expendable scout for the army. Most new recruits do. They tasked him and his platoon with climbing the mountain and seeing what’s on the other side. Early on, they ruled out the possibility of unicorns or earth ponies making it up the slope, so it was just him and four other pegasi.”
Hawk Tail leaned back in his chair and gathered his thoughts, oblivious to the ruby eyes fixated on him. “It took them most of the day to get near the summit. There were incredibly strong crosswinds between the peaks that threatened to tear their wings off. They spent the next two days trying to crawl up on hoof and wing. Dad told me that they could hardly sleep at night because the roaring wind sounded like the screams of the dead.”
“Eeesh.” Rainbow shuddered. The gnarled teeth of the mountain range seemed much more menacing than they had just minutes ago. “What happened next?”
“Finally, they reached the summit,” Hawk continued. “There they stood, on the very top of the world, with everything spread out below them. They could see as far south as the emerald towers of Mymis, as far east as the Churning Ocean. The mountains continued westward and westward into the distant horizon. Dad said it was like staring at a map.
“But to the north, there was nothing. Dead trees. Dead earth. Dead rivers. Not a single sign of life, absolutely nothing, until the brown sand met the blue horizon…”
Hawk Tail’s voice trailed off. “Dad didn’t say much about what happened afterwards. They hung around for a while, tried to draw a few maps, then glided back down the mountain until they returned to camp. They told their superior what they saw, gave them the maps, and that was it. Nopony’s bothered trying to climb them ever again.”
“Huh.” Rainbow furrowed her brow in thought. Dangerous mountains with peaks so high that nopony could fly to the top? Unexplored land beyond, just daring for a shadow to flit across from high above? She smirked inwardly as she let her inner daredevil dream. She was in no condition to try it now, obviously, but maybe one day…
But there was still something that didn’t sit right with her. “But… what does that have to do with your dad?”
Hawk raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“Like… hmm.” Rainbow touched her hoof to her lips as she struggled for the right words. “If he just wrote it off as inhospitable and everything… why would he be suspicious of me? Wouldn’t he just think that it wasn’t possible for me to have come from beyond the mountains?”
“Errr… I guess?” Hawk shrugged and ran a hoof through his mane. “I’m not quite sure where you’re going with this.”
“What I mean is, what if there’s something more to your dad’s story?” Rainbow asked. “Something that he didn’t tell you? Something that makes him suspicious of me?”
Hawk Tail sighed and shook his head. “Rainbow, it’s fine. I think you’re looking too deeply into it. Trying to find things that aren’t there.”
“But…”
“Forget I said anything about it,” Hawk insisted. “We need to focus on finding things that’ll trigger your memories again. Maybe then we can figure out where you came from, and then we can take you back and see if that helps. Okay?”
“Yeah, but I…” The rainbow mare sighed and slumped forward. “Okay.”
Hawk smiled and leaned over to nuzzle Rainbow’s cheek. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you through this one way or another.” Then he kissed her jawline, drawing a red tinge to Rainbow’s cheeks.
“You…” she muttered. She fumed and stared daggers at her half-finished bowl of soup. Her lips moved, muttering something Hawk Tail couldn’t hear.
“What?” he asked, leaning closer. Rainbow’s lips moved again, and she shot him a glance out of the corner of her eye, but he still couldn’t make it out. “You’re gonna have to speak up, Rainbow, I—!”
Like a coiled snake, Rainbow sprung from her chair. Her muzzle met Hawk’s, and her tongue found its way between his open lips. Hawk flared his wings in surprise as he toppled off of his chair, and his limbs found nothing to grab onto except for Rainbow’s blue body. In one heap of feathers, the two pegasi crashed to the kitchen floor with Rainbow on top.
“Oww… Rainbow, one of these days you’re going to break something!”
“Meh. You started it.”
“I what?”
A giggle. “Shut up and kiss me.”
A sigh, soft moans, and nothing more.