Twilight Sparkle bent lower, staring intently into the ruby eyes of the pegasus she had pinned to the crystal floor under her hooves.
Rainbow Dash tried to stay calm as she returned Twilight’s gaze, but found her breaths coming in shallow, nervous gasps. She could feel Twilight’s bangs brushing against her own disheveled mane, Twilight’s warm breath on her cheeks as her muzzle inched closer and closer. Rainbow’s muscles were tense, twitchy, aching to move, but she didn’t dare.
“T-Twi?” Rainbow whispered.
Twilight squinted. “Mmmhmmm?”
“What is it?”
“It’s definitely a splinter.”
Rainbow squirmed and let out a noise somewhere between a groan and nervous laughter. She slapped a hoof on the ground repeatedly and said, “Then pull it ou-how-howt!”
With a shake of her head, Twilight flapped her wings and lifted herself off of Rainbow Dash. “I told you, you should just go to the doctor.”
“But you have magic!” Rainbow rolled over, shook the tension out of her muscles, then held her eye open with a pair of wing feathers. “Can’t you just, like, teleport it out, or whatever?”
“I might take a chunk of your eye with it.” Twilight slapped Rainbow’s wing away from her face. “Your eye is going to dry out if you keep holding it open. You can blink. Just don’t rub it.”
“It hurts to blink!”
“Then just close your eye, and”—Twilight poked Rainbow in the chest with each word—”go. To. The. Doctor.”
“Ow, I—” Rainbow winced and brought a wing up to her eye. “Ow! It’s hard to keep just one eye closed. I keep blinking.”
“Well, hold on,” Twilight said as she turned around. “I know there’s a…”
Rainbow watched as Twilight began poking around the crystal palace. There was a brightly-colored bouncy ball beneath a potted plant, a whoopee cushion full of glitter beneath a seat cushion, and finally an eye patch hidden behind a curtain.
“Sweet!” Rainbow lunged forward and snatched the patch out of Twilight’s magic, looping it over her head and striking a dramatic pose. “I bet I look pretty awesome, huh? Pretty tough?”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Yeah. So tough you didn’t bother wearing safety goggles.” She tilted her head to the side. “How did you manage to get a splinter in your eye, anyway?”
“Well, Hearth’s Warming is coming up, you know,” Rainbow said as she let Twilight guide her towards the door, “and everypony is mailing gifts to friends and family, right?”
Snow crunched under their hooves as Twilight draped a scarf around her neck and tugged it tight. “Yeah?”
“With all the extra packages, the mail ponies were having a hard time keeping up.” Rainbow turned her head toward Twilight. “Hey, where’d you go?”
“I’m right here, Rainbow.”
Rainbow twisted her neck around, finally walking in a complete circle. “Can you walk on my right side? It’s kinda weird talking to you when I can’t see you. Like you’re gonna disappear and leave me talking to myself.”
Twilight smiled back and watched a puff of breath dissolve in the air between them. “I’m not going anywhere, Rainbow.” She chuckled. “Well, except for the doctor. I’m going there. But not, you know, without you. So, relative to your position, I’m not going anywhere. That’s what I meant.”
Rainbow gasped and grabbed Twilight’s shoulders with both hooves. “Oh no, Twi! What’s wrong? Why are you going to the doctor?”
Echoes of distant hoofsteps and warm laughter filtered through the snowflakes as they fell, illuminated by the orange streetlamps. Twilight tilted her head and pursed her lips, squinting at Rainbow for several long seconds. Finally she rolled her eyes and said, “There’s a pain in my flank that I’d like to get taken care of.”
Rainbow spun Twilight around and looked her up and down. “Your flank looks fine to me.”
Twilight ruffled her feathers and cleared her throat. “You were telling me about the mail ponies?” She resumed trotting with a glance back at Rainbow.
“Yeah, so they were super busy. Derpy asked for help with some of the bigger packages. And, you know, I’m super good at carrying heavy stuff ‘cuz of”—she popped out her wings and wiggled the feathers around—”these babies!”
Twilight yelped and jumped several inches into the air.
“What is it?” Rainbow pinched her eyebrows together and frowned at Twilight. “Is it the pain in your flank?”
“Yes,” Twilight growled, rubbing her flank with one hoof. “It certainly was. Watch where you’re swinging those babies. You managed to brush right across my cutie mark.”
“Eheheh, sorry. Didn’t realize you were so close.”
Twilight smoothed down the fur on her flank. “I-it’s okay. You just startled me, is all.” She turned down a side street and waited for Rainbow to follow her. “So Derpy asked you for help with the big packages?”
“Oh, yeah. So there was this really big wooden crate. I had one side, and she was holding the other one. Well, things went about how you’d expect.”
“Uh huh.” Twilight smiled as she lifted a wing to shield her face from the snow kicked up by a group of foals running past.
“So this gigantic crate is falling from the sky. Right. Toward. An orphanage.”
“Of course it was.”
“Yeah, and—”
“Probably full of hundreds of orphans, all waiting for overdue Hearth’s Warming presents.” Twilight raised one eyebrow and tried not to smile as she looked at Rainbow from the corner of her eye.
Rainbow just nodded and started talking faster. “Yeah, so I dove to catch it. I was going fast, and I mean fast! Not quite sonic rainboom fast, but still impressive, if I do say so myself.”
Twilight smirked. “It does sound like you’re impressed.”
“It takes a lot to impress me.” Rainbow winked – or maybe blinked, Twilight couldn’t tell – and bumped into a lamppost. “Gah! Twilight, could you help guide me? I didn’t realize how dangerous the streets of Ponyville are.”
“Sure,” Twilight said as she looked over at Rainbow. “Just walk closer to me. Let’s get you to the doctor before you hurt yourself.”
Rainbow stepped closer to Twilight, just far enough apart that their hips didn’t bump with each step. Close enough that she could feel an occasional tickle when the fringe on Twilight’s scarf caught a breeze. Even though pegasi were naturally cold-resistant, it was still nice to feel the warmth radiating from Twilight’s fur.
The street became quieter as more and more ponies headed into the whitewashed stucco homes that poured orange light across the snow-covered sidewalks. Twilight cleared her throat. “So, your heroics?”
“Y-yeah, that.” Rainbow shrugged and looked at the ground. “I caught the crate, but I guess I caught it a little bit too hard. The crate exploded.”
Twilight nodded her head as she listened, then said, “The impulse you gave it was too short.”
Rainbow twisted her muzzle and raised an eyebrow. “Buh?”
Twilight chuckled. “Physics. The crate’s momentum could have been negated by a smaller force acting over a longer period of time, and the smaller force wouldn’t have broken the crate.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“So what happened to the crate?” Twilight held open the door to the Ponyville Hospital. “Or, I guess, the stuff in the crate?”
“I dunno,” Rainbow said as she carefully navigated through the doorway. “I had a splinter in my eye.”
Nurse Redheart looked up from her desk and tapped a pencil on her clipboard. “A splinter, huh? It seems we have an epidemic.”
Rainbow looked up. “An epidemic?”
Redheart pointed toward toward a hallway where Derpy was standing with a sheepish grin. “Hi, Rainbow Dash.” She waved with a bandaged hoof.
“Wait,” Rainbow said, squinting her one good eye, “what are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry I dropped my end of the crate, Rainbow, but I got a splinter in my hoof. I flinched and…” She shrugged.
Rainbow smiled and pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I left you to clean up the mess on your own. I got a splinter, right in my eye.”
Derpy giggled. “Yeah, I think everyone in Ponyville heard you screaming about it.”
“Heh, yeah.” Rainbow rubbed the back of her head with a hoof. “I kinda did freak out. What happened after the crate broke? Nopony was hurt, right?”
“Everypony was safe, don’t worry. It was full of stuffed animals that rained down all over the orphanage. All the colts and fillies thought that we’d dropped them a bunch of Hearth’s Warming presents.”
“Wait,” said Twilight as Nurse Redheart stacked some papers onto a clipboard. “How are you going to get those toys back?”
Rainbow turned around slowly and regarded Twilight with a furrowed brow. “We’re not going to steal toys from a bunch of orphans, Twilight.”
“What! No! That’s not what I was—” Twilight facehoofed. “Don’t you still have to deliver them?”
Derpy smiled. “Yeah, the box was addressed to Barnyard Bargains, so I flew to Filthy Rich’s house and asked him about it. He said that just knowing all those foals are happy is the best Hearth’s Warming gift he could have had this year.”
Twilight smiled. “That’s really sweet.”
“Yeah,” said Rainbow with a lopsided grin, “everything I’m involved in seems to turn out that way.”
Twilight gritted her teeth in a twitching approximation of a smile as she turned to Nurse Redheart and took the clipboard in her magic. “About that pain in my flank.”