In The Shadow Of The Storm

by Summer Knight

Caring

A scream that had been building since the Friendship Festival tore its way out of Starlight Glimmer's throat.

"That irresponsible—" she kicked over a small wooden chair, "shortsighted—" she telekinetically hurled a pillow across her bedroom, narrowly missing Trixie's head, "stupid. Bucking. Draconequus!" she shrieked.

"Uh, Starlight?" Trixie began, but her friend didn't seem to hear.

"All he had to do was snap his fingers and bring the princesses here, but no. Instead, he picks a fight with somepony who beat four alicorns at once!"

The rest of her pillows and blankets flew off of her bed in a tornado of furious magical energy.

"And he can't go back and try again, because now they're ready for him."

She threw herself onto the now completely unmade bed, and slammed her front hooves into the bare mattress.

"Well, I say send him back anyway. Let him fight Tempest Shadow, since that's apparently what he wants to do! It'd serve him right if he got killed!"

Starlight gasped and clapped a hoof over her muzzle. "I didn't mean that," she added in a hoarse whisper.

Trixie cleared her throat. "May Trixie speak now?" she asked.

"Uh." Starlight awkwardly cleared her own throat. "Yeah. Go ahead."

Trixie picked her way across the wreckage of Starlight's room to sit next to her on the bed. She sat there silently for several uncomfortable seconds. Once she reached out a hoof to stroke Starlight's mane, but stopped before she touched it. Finally, Trixie sighed.

"Trixie doesn't know what to say," she admitted. "She could use some help from a friendship student."

"Fine then," Starlight mumbled into her hooves, "first lesson: Figure out what your friend needs."

"Got it! So, what does my great and powerful friend need?"

"Somepony who's upset will usually want either solutions or distractions," Starlight answered mechanically, reciting something she'd heard from Twilight.

Trixie rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She couldn't see any solutions to Starlight's problems, but distractions were her specialty. But what to distract her with? Trixie's stage experience told her that fireworks and magic tricks wouldn't quite fit the moment.

No, this was a situation she'd never been in before; that meant she'd need to do something she'd never tried before. She only had one idea, and it was a risky one. Then again, what was life without a little risk? Besides, that orange one—Pumpkin Bumpkin or something—was always going on about honesty.

Trixie decided that she'd go for it: She'd speak from her heart.

"Starlight Glimmer, you are an amazing unicorn."

"I... huh?" Whatever Starlight had been expecting her friend to say, it certainly hadn't been that.

"Trixie means it. You're brilliant, and passionate, and the best magician Trixie knows."

"Trixie, what—?" Starlight sniffled.

"And you're kind, and caring, and so, so loyal," she continued, riding right over whatever Starlight had been about to say. "In fact, you love your friends so much that you go totally nuts when something gets between you and them."

Starlight choked out a sound that was somewhere in the middle of a laugh and a sob.

"Is that what's happening here?" Starlight asked with a half-smile. "Am I going totally nuts?"

"Well..." Trixie looked around at the bedding and furniture that her friend had thrown all over the room, "maybe not totally nuts," she said with a wink.

Starlight snorted quietly, and buried her head back into her forelegs.

"How do they do it, Trix?" she mumbled. "Even Spike's handling all of this better than me. And they're all acting like Discord didn't do anything wrong, but I don't see how I can ever forgive him. If I'm so amazing, why is this so hard?"

"Well, I'm still friends with you, Ms. Former Cult Leader." She playfully nudged Starlight.

Starlight rolled over to look at Trixie and arched an eyebrow.

"Back at you, Ruler of Ponyville."

"Mind controller!" Trixie fired back.

"Ursa-slayer fraud!"

"Timeline destroyer!"

"Arrogant...! Okay, you win," Starlight chuckled. "I get the point, anyway. We've both made terrible mistakes, but we're still friends. So Discord deserves another chance, too."

"Oh. I thought we were just bickering," Trixie replied.

Starlight laughed again and scrubbed her face with a foreleg. The fur under her eyes was matted and crusty from crying—but now, for the first time in days, she had a genuine smile on her muzzle. Struck by sudden inspiration, she levitated over a scrap of paper and a quill.

"That was an excellent application of both Honesty and Laughter. Well done." Starlight said in her best impression of Twilight Sparkle. She scribbled something on the paper, then floated it over to Trixie. It simply read, A+.

Trixie stared at the paper, and Starlight stared at Trixie. They locked eyes, and both broke down laughing.

"Oh, gosh, I needed this," Starlight said through her laughter. "Thanks for talking me down."

"Of course." Trixie bowed dramatically. "After all, is Trixie not the greatest talker-downer in all of Equestria?"

"Don't push it," Starlight muttered, still smiling. She rolled back onto her stomach and hopped down off the bed. "Anyway, I should really get back to work. We've still got a lot of preparations to make."

"Oh, alright then," Trixie sighed. "Ponies' lives, future of Equestria, et cetera." She slid down off the bed as well.

"Something like that, yeah," Starlight answered.

Trixie reached out one foreleg.

"Hug first?"

Starlight eyed her friend's hoof uncertainly for a moment. She'd never been terribly comfortable with displays of affection, but... well, there was nopony else around. And this was Trixie.

"Okay. Hug first."

Starlight stepped in and pulled Trixie close. She leaned her head into the powder-blue fur of her friend's shoulder, taking a moment to simply enjoy the warmth and the softness of it. With one ear pressed against Trixie, she faintly heard the other unicorn's happy sigh.

Starlight glanced up and froze. Trixie was looking back at her through half-closed eyes, a serene smile on her muzzle.

"Trixie?" Starlight asked uncertainly.

"Hmm?" Trixie's dreamy expression didn't change.

Starlight felt a faint heat rising in her own face, and hastily pulled away.

"Nothing! Nothing." She cleared her throat. "Just, I should... I should—" she disappeared in a flash of teal magic.

Trixie stood rooted to the spot, staring at where her best friend had been a moment ago. She slowly scratched one side of her head.

"The door was right behind you, y'know," she said to the empty air.

---

Rainbow Dash awoke to pain. Her wings hurt, her body hurt, her head hurt, even her feathers hurt. She tried to move and found herself tightly restrained.

"What the—aaagh!" A blinding flash of pain shot through one of her hind legs as she struggled. With the pain came panic; had she been captured?

Suddenly a firm but gentle hoof was pressing her back down.

"Easy, Miss," a deep male voice said softly. "You're safe here."

The ground gave slightly underneath her, and Rainbow realized that she was lying in a bed. Her wings and body were tightly bound with bandages, and her back right leg was elevated in a sling. The pony holding her down—a pony, not one of Tempest's monsters—was wearing a nurse's outfit, and had a stethoscope around his neck.

She was in a hospital.

"Where—" She cleared her throat and tried again. "Where am I?"

The pony, an off-white pegasus stallion, smiled down at her.

"You're in Lucent Hospital, in the Crystal Empire. I'm Nurse Cloudtail."

"Rainbow Dash," she croaked through a painfully dry throat.

"Oh, I know who you are, Ms. Dash," Cloudtail answered. "Half the Empire saw your Sonic Rainboom over the mountains. We saw you go down, too. After a crash at that speed, you're lucky to be alive."

Rainbow groaned. She certainly didn't feel lucky, but she was alive and in the Crystal Empire. Mission accomplished, more or less.

"Well," she said, making a futile attempt to sound nonchalant, "thanks for patching me up, but I've gotta talk to Shining Armor."

She tried again to sit up, and immediately realized that she had two problems. First of all, she was tightly strapped to the bed, probably so that she wouldn't hurt herself any further by moving around. Second, the restraints were hardly necessary; she was so exhausted and sore that she could barely have moved anyway.

Cloudtail, no doubt aware of both of those problems, lifted his eyebrows.

"Miss Dash, you'd need a miracle to even get out of that bed right now, let alone to the Crystal Castle. If you've got a message for the prince, I can see that it gets to him."

Rainbow shook her head, then immediately regretted it as the room spun around her. On top of everything else, she probably had a concussion.

"The message is top secret. I can't trust it to anypony else," she croaked.

"Then I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you," Cloudtail replied. "You've got a broken leg, three broken ribs, and too many other injuries to count. You're not leaving this hospital anytime soon."

Rainbow tried to think, to force her hazy thoughts into a plan of action. She closed her eyes to concentrate, but immediately opened them again as vertigo overwhelmed her. She settled for chewing on her lower lip instead.

"Okay, how about this?" she said after a minute. "I'll write a letter for Shining Armor and seal it myself. I'll say in the letter that if the seal's broken, he should arrest whoever gave it to him." It was both a plan for herself and a warning for Cloudtail.

The nurse's face turned even whiter, if that were possible, but he nodded slowly. "Yeah. That'll work. There's some paper and a quill in the nightstand next to you."

The nightstand was on Rainbow's left side, and thankfully her left foreleg was relatively unhurt—achy and bruised, but nothing seemed broken. After some fumbling, she managed to drag out a piece of paper and a quill to write with. She had to awkwardly balance the paper against her hoof so she could write using her mouth, and her writing came out even messier than usual, but at least it was legible.

Rainbow recognized that this letter wasn't a perfect solution, since whoever she gave it to could just neglect to give it to the prince, but it was as good as she was going to get. Besides, she reasoned, if all of this was somehow a setup by Tempest Shadow, it wasn't like her letter would say anything that Tempest didn't already know.

She finished the brief letter, signed it with her name and a crude sketch of her cutie mark, and folded it up as best she could.

"Wax?" she asked Cloudtail.

"I'll bring you some," he promised. The stallion glanced around nervously, then asked, "So, what exactly have I gotten myself into, here?"

"You? Hopefully nothing," Rainbow answered. "Just make sure this letter gets to Shining Armor, and we'll take it from there." She felt a twinge of guilt as she said that—it was the truth, but if those monsters decided to come through the mountains after her, then Cloudtail and every other pony in the Empire might find themselves involved.

It won't come to that, she tried to reassure herself. They wouldn't dare to fight a two-front war against Equestria and the Crystal Empire. She hoped.

Rainbow placed the folded letter on the nightstand to wait for its wax seal, then turned back to look at Cloudtail. She swallowed hard; now it was her turn to ask a question that she really wasn't sure she wanted the answer to.

"So," she started hesitantly, "when I was flying, right before I crashed, I felt... I felt something in my wing break. That was why I crashed, actually."

Cloudtail nodded grimly. "You've torn the tricep in your right wing, and broken bones in both of them. I wasn't going to bring it up until you'd recovered a bit."

The blood drained from Rainbow's face. That was a really serious injury.

"So, will it heal? I mean, will I... will I fly again?" Her voice was practically a whisper.

Cloudtail took a deep breath.

"Look, Ms. Dash, I'm not qualified to give a prognosis on that. Once you're up and about, we'll have you meet with our physical therapist."

"No, wait," Rainbow replied, her voice edging upward toward panic, "flying is my life. I mean, I'm a Wonderbolt, for pony's sake! I can't be grounded!" her voice cracked desperately.

"I'm not saying that you're grounded," Cloudtail answered firmly. Then he looked away. "But, between the muscle damage, the broken bones, and everything else, you might want to prepare yourself for that possibility."

Prepare myself... to never fly again?

She felt an impossibly deep chasm opening up beneath her—a chasm that she couldn't fly out of with her ruined wing. Her chest was squeezing in on itself; her breath came short and sharp as she struggled to fill her crushed lungs. Her heart was hammering like she'd just flown a hundred miles, and yet the blood didn't seem to be reaching her extremities—her hooves and wingtips were strangely numb and tingly. Some part of her distantly recognized the symptoms of a panic attack.

"Ms. Dash?"

Cloudtail's voice was a faint, distant echo through the rushing in her ears. He leaned over to look at her more closely, but she couldn't seem to make out any details of his face. He was just a formless, meaningless white blob standing over her.

"Rainbow Dash."

This time his voice was louder, firmer. The sound of her full name cut through some of her panicked haze.

"Rainbow Dash, look at me," Cloudtail instructed. "Listen to the sound of my voice. Focus on me, and nothing else."

The other pegasus's features slowly clarified in Rainbow's vision.

"Good. Now breathe as slowly and as deeply as you can."

She obeyed as best she could. It was still a struggle to get air into her cramping chest, but eventually her heart began slowing down. Her breath came a little more easily.

"Are you okay?" Cloudtail asked after a few minutes of deep breathing.

No.

"Yeah. I'm good."

The nurse nodded slowly.

"I'm sorry to have brought that up. I just think you should be ready for the worst. Just in case."

"Yeah."

There was a long moment of silence, finally broken when Cloudtail scuffed a hoof on the floor.

"I'll, uh. I'll get you your wax. Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

Rainbow knew that she should have been starving after so much exertion, but all she felt in her stomach was a cold ball of dread. She was desperately thirsty, though.

"Yeah, some water would be great."

"Of course. I'll be right back."

Nurse Cloudtail left and shut the door behind him, leaving Rainbow Dash alone with her thoughts and pains.

---

Starlight teleported herself into the Map Room; one of the few places that she and Spike had declared off-limits to the refugees. She'd been hoping for a moment alone, but Spike and the dusky-blue unicorn guard—Aurora, she remembered—were in there as well.

Spike, who'd spent his entire life around a powerful magician, didn't even look up from whatever he was working on when Starlight suddenly teleported in. Aurora, on the other hoof, leaped to place herself between Spike and the "intruder" before she realized who it was.

"Are you okay, ma'am—er, Starlight?" Aurora asked. "Is there trouble?"

"Wha—uh, yeah. Yes, I'm fine," Starlight stammered. "No trouble."

No trouble, she repeated mentally. Of course there was no trouble. Trixie hadn't been looking at her like... like that. And Starlight certainly hadn't felt a rising blush and a warm flutter in her stomach.

It was an emotionally charged moment—and not that kind of emotion! I was feeling vulnerable, not to mention exhausted. So I was imagining things. That's all that was. No trouble at all. She'd apologize to Trixie for overreacting, and that'd be the end of it.

Starlight gave herself a mental shake. She had a lot to do, and she'd wasted too much time inside her own head already.

"So," Starlight said to Spike and Aurora, "how are the preparations coming?"

"Not great," Spike grumbled.

"The refugees from Canterlot are settled in, more or less," Aurora elaborated, "and Pear Crisp arranged for a shipment of food and supplies from the town, but that's all we've got so far. Nothing extra to start stocking our fallback position in the Everfree Forest, and we've made no progress on categorizing and storing the magical artifacts in this castle."

"Leave the artifacts to me," Starlight said. "Spike, if you and the guards have things under control, I can get started on that right now."

"Good idea," Spike said, "just remember that we're meeting the others here in a few hours."

The Council of Friendship—as they were apparently calling themselves now—had planned to meet up each evening to discuss their progress and make plans.

"I know, Spike," Starlight answered with a hint of annoyance.

"Sorry," Spike replied, looking down at the ground. "I'm used to keeping track of these things for..."

For Twilight. Starlight took a deep breath and shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. I guess I'm a bit on edge."

"Don't worry about it. We're all on edge." He gave her an encouraging smile, then turned his attention back to the paper in his claw. "Get started on those artifacts, and I'll see you in a few hours."

Starlight raised an eyebrow, but Spike didn't even seem to notice that he'd just given an order to somepony many times his age; somepony who also happened to be on the ruling council of Equestria.

Just look at him, Starlight thought. Spike was saying something to Aurora about supplies—saying it confidently and competently. Some time apart from Twilight is giving him a chance to shine in his own right. He's thriving, while I'm— She shook her head as despair and self-pity threatened to creep back in —while I'm going to catalogue some artifacts, and not waste more time moping about it.

Starlight left the Map Room at a brisk trot.