The Siren

by McPoodle

Chapter 33

Sweet Apple Acres.

October 9. Saturday. Early afternoon. [October is rather starved for episodes.]

Cider Season was in two weeks and the back end of the orchard—where the juicing and the selling would take place—needed cleaning.

The shallow valley was full of twigs and underbrush that needed to be cleared, and this was a free weekend for Applejack.

All of her friends were there to help her and her family.

That family included Spike.

There were some stumps that needed to be ripped out. Big Mac could have done the job with a bit of work, but Spike really wanted to try out that “super strength” spell that Twilight had promised to put on his necklace one day.

“So, what do you think?” Spike asked Rarity, after yanking the third one out one-handed, nearly throwing out his spine.

“Nice spell work, Twilight,” said Rarity with an arch smile.

“Aw thanks,” Twilight replied. “It took an extra hour in casting time, but I really think the shortcut I came up with pulls the mana requirements down to levels that any unicorn can easily manage.”

Spike sulked.

Rarity removed her sunhat for a moment to wipe a microgram or so of swear from her brow. “Oh, this is hard work!” she said, waving a trowel around with her magic. “I must have cleared…” She looked into the pouch around her neck where she had been placing the weeds she had been digging up. “…Five whole weeds?”

With a roll of her eyes, Applejack walked over and looked into that pouch. “Okay, those are actually all weeds. This time. Why don’t you move on to working the dead leaves into the soil?”

“With my hooves? There are worms in that dirt! Eww!”

“That’s just Wendell and his brothers,” said Fluttershy. “Well…more like Wendell and the former parts of him that now are worms themselves.”

“…Eww! Sorry, Fluttershy.” She then screamed as she felt something wet drop down onto her back. “Worms from the sky! Worms from the sky!” she cried, running around in circles while she tried to use her sunhat to wipe the offending item off of her back.

It turned out to be a wet leaf.

Rainbow Dash burst out laughing at the successful outcome of her prank.

Applejack sighed. “Alright,” she said. “I think we’ve done enough for now. Follow me for lunch!”

“All right!” Rainbow cried, doing a barrel roll in the space above her friends.

Rarity looked around her at her friends. “I was thinking,” she told them. “We have our dresses for the Grand Galloping Gala, the accessories. Even the hats and the shoes. But we haven’t worked out the makeup. The last piece needed for the complete ensemble.”

“You do know that you don’t have to use the Prench accent for that word, right Rarity?” asked Pinkie Pie. “Because it’s the same word in both languages.”

“It’s for the effect, Darling. I propose a sleepover, at my shop. All six of us, next Saturday.”

“Can’t make it,” Applejack said over her shoulder.

“All five of us,” Rarity corrected.

“What about me?” Spike asked.

“Your suit is all done, Spike,” Rarity said. “And it’s going to be a no colts party. Sorry.”

“Oh,” said Spike.

Twilight was conflicted. She thought another sleepover would do a lot for her bonding with “the Girls”, but she was making an active effort to not leave Spike out of her activities.

Spike, seeing these emotions play across Twilight’s face, put a claw on her leg. “It’s OK, Twilight,” he said. “I can help out the Apples with their preparations, and then spend the night.”

“Are you sure?” asked Twilight.

Rainbow Dash, who had been thoughtfully watching this conversation play out, interrupted at this point. “Hey, Rarity? How about I make you a deal?”

Rarity stopped walking and turned around to face the hovering Rainbow Dash. “I’m listening.”

“I’ll come by the shop first thing Saturday morning. You’ll get hours of one-on-one time with me. I’ll even let you ‘fancy’ me up, just so long as I don’t have to wear any of that to the Gala.”

Rarity squealed and clapped her hooves. She had been dying to realize the “true potential” in Rainbow’s color palette for years.

“And in return,” Rainbow continued, “I don’t have to go to the slumber party. Instead, I’ll entertain Spike at my pad for the night. What do you think?”

“Oh wow, could I go?” Spike asked her two caretakers with sparkles in his eyes.

“OK,” Applejack said casually.

“That’s a wonderful idea!” exclaimed Twilight at nearly the same moment. “Spike has gotten on well with Applejack and I, but he really hasn’t spent much time around the rest of you! Of course, I didn’t want to make any of you feel obligated…”

“Well, I’m fine with it,” Rainbow said. “I think Spike’s a cool dude.”

“Really?” Spike squeaked, sounding a bit like Scootaloo. “I mean, sure. Whatever,” he added in a deepened voice.

Rainbow laughed. “Even when he’s being a dork.”

Spike rolled his eyes as “the Girls” laughed good-naturedly.

---

The mailbox under Rainbow Dash’s house.

Sundown on the following Saturday, October 16.

Spike knocked sharply on the wooden post of the mailbox. “RD? I’m here!”

“‘RD’?” Rainbow asked as she drifted down to land beside him.

“I wanted a cool name for you,” said Spike. “Pinkie Pie calls you ‘Dashie’, Applejack calls you ‘Sugarcube’—although that’s not saying much—and Twilight and Fluttershy call you ‘Rainbow’. Only Rarity insists on using your full name most of the time.”

“Well…‘RD’ is the name I was known by on the racing circuit. So sure, RD is fine. Now hop on so I can fly you up to my place…unless Twilight added a flying spell to that necklace on top of cloud walking.” Seeing a large carpet bag next to the dragon, she hooked it in one hoof.

"No, it only holds one spell at a time,” Spike said. Rather than clamber up her leg, Spike climbed up the mailbox pole, getting onto the box and then stepping onto Rainbow’s back. He sank down into her fluff. “Hey, you’re softer than Twilight,” he observed.

Rainbow bristled at having the word “soft” associated with her in any way, then slicked down her fur. “That’s a pegasus thing,” she said in an overly casual tone. “Keeps us warm in cold weather.”

“OK, that’s cool.”

“Darn right it’s cool! Now let me show you something else that’s cool!”

~ ~ ~

“WOW!” Spike exclaimed, taking in the elegant and the (frankly over-the-top) rainbow falls. The overflow passed through a cloud to become a mist that bathed a small grove of trees. “Did you design all this yourself?”

“The rainbows? Yeah,” RD said with a laugh as he let Spike off on the “front yard” of her house.

Spike stomped around a bit to get used to walking on the spongy clouds.

“The main part is prefab,” she continued. “I picked it out of a catalog.”

Spike walked over to the edge of the cloud and looked down, then looked around him. Several other clouds in sight sported the same fluted columns as RD’s house. He compared them with the cloud house before her. “Did you pay a lot for it? This looks fancier than those other ones.”

“Hmm?” Rainbow asked in a disinterested tone. “I guess. My parents got it for me as a going-away present. They’d spoil me rotten if I let them. Come on, let me show you the inside.”

Spike followed Rainbow into the ground floor foyer, which didn’t have much to see besides a statue of a Wonderbolt on a pedestal. “The delivery pegasi usually have their chariots parked on this floor,” Rainbow explained. She pointed to the object atop the pedestal on the opposite side of the door. “That’s the Best Young Flyer medal—I’ll take it over to my parents’ the next time I visit them. They hold all of my trophies and things.” She started flying up the staircase to the first floor.

“Don’t you like keeping your trophies around?” Spike asked as he followed her.

“Some of them,” Rainbow said with a shrug. “But I’m more about the future than the past.”

At the top of the stairs was the living room, with a large bay window looking out at the other pegasus homes, several couches, chairs and cushions made of solidified cloudstuff, and some glass-topped tables. A doorway in the back led to the kitchen.

Rainbow set the carpetbag down on the floor. “Everything inside here is treated so it doesn’t need magic to stay up,” she explained. “Now stay here while I make us some dinner.”

“I can cook, you know,” Spike said as Rainbow walked into the kitchen.

“I know,” said Rainbow, putting on a chef’s hat and removing ingredients from an icebox. “But I’m the host and you’re the guest, so stay there and entertain yourself.”

“Yeah, that makes perfect sense,” Spike joked. He hopped up onto a couch, pulled up the bag beside him, and fished out a comic book to read.

Rainbow came out a while later with some plates and glasses balanced on her outstretched wings. “A little help here?” she asked.

“Oh!” Spike exclaimed, hopping down from the couch to help Rainbow lay out the dinner: a couple of vegetable skewers. “Wow, pony shish kabobs,” Spike said, somewhat snarkily. “What, do you have a hibachi back there or something?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Rainbow said with a matching smirk.

Spike lost his smirk first. “Oh. That’s cool. You really have this sleepover thing down.”

“Yeah. Back in Cloudsdale I used to have Fluttershy over a lot when we were fillies, and vice versa. And then there was…”

She stopped with a frown. Breaking up with Gilda was four moons ago, she told herself. If she’s not going to apologize or even show up in all that time, I shouldn’t be wasting my time on her. “…never mind.”

"Are you alright?” Spike asked, holding out a claw.

“Yeah sure, no problem!” Rainbow said with a sudden grin. She picked up her skewer with the feathers of her wings, which succeeded in distracting Spike. “They taste better hot, you know.”

“Oh!” Spike exclaimed, before beginning to eat.

~ ~ ~

“Spike, I wanted to apologize about something,” Rainbow said after cleaning up their dinner. “You told me what was going on with Twilight the day after you moved to Ponyville and…” She allowed the sentence to peter out.

“And you didn’t believe me,” Spike said glumly.

“No!” Rainbow exclaimed. “Well, not exactly. I just didn’t know what to do with what you said. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I didn’t want it to be, because I really liked being friends with Twilight. So…I tried not to make a decision on what to do. Which looked exactly the same as me not believing you. So, I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Spike said. “What was going on wasn’t exactly normal.”

“I would have done something if you were a pony,” Rainbow said self-accusingly.

Spike shrugged. “I still forgive you. I, uh…hope that wasn’t the only reason you invited me over.”

“No,” said Rainbow. “I mean, I swear right here and now that I won’t ignore your problems again, and I’ll go right out and slug both Applejack and Twilight if I thought they were doing you wrong.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that,” Spike said with a grateful smile. “Although if that actually happened and you were wrong, Applejack would first re-arrange your anatomy, and then Twilight would zap you to the moon.”

“Eh, I’d just move into Nightmare Moon’s old place,” Rainbow joked. “She probably has a wicked prog rock collection.”

They both laughed.

Rainbow peered over into Spike’s bag. “I saw you reading something while I was cooking. Are you an egghead too?”

Spike pulled out the comic. “What, this? Comic books aren’t egghead material. Haven’t you ever read one?”

“I only read the bare minimum for my job, and that’s it.”

“Really?” asked Spike. He shook the cover in Rainbow’s face. “You’re really missing out.”

“Wait, what is this?” Rainbow asked, snatching the issue from Spike’s claws. The letters “SOARB” were written in a semi-circle around the figure of an brown earth pony stallion wearing a bronze helmet flying through a golden sky with the help of a rocket pack. “Wow, who’s he?” she asked.

“Cord Seacliff,” Spike explained. “Some spies accidentally left this experimental government rocket pack in his desk at school, and now he uses it to fight crime as the SOARB—Sound of a Rocket’s Blast.”

“That sounds pretty neat,” Rainbow said, clearly tempted to crack open the volume. “But I don’t read for fun.”

“That’s alright,” Spike said, grabbing the comic and putting it down on the table they had been eating on. “I’ll read it out loud. I’ve got voices for all of the characters—I must have read the first five issues a hundred times each.”

~ ~ ~

Issue #1 was the origin story.

“Hey, that’s a colt version of Wind Rider!” Rainbow interrupted at one point, pointing at the page. “He was a famous Wonderbolt.”

“Yeah. Like I said, the story is set a generation ago, and the artist sneaks in all of these famous cameos, to see who spots them.”

“Can she do that?” Rainbow asked. “Like, did Wind Rider give his permission?”

“No, the character is called Swift Rider instead of Wind Rider, and his wingtips are a different color, so they can get away with it. Wind Rider did say that he liked being in such a great story when he found out.”

“Ah, that’s neat.”

~ ~ ~

Issue #2 was SORB’s first big rescue.

“Oh no!” Rainbow exclaimed. “Now they’re both going to crash!”

Spike silently turned the page, and Rainbow quickly scanned it.

“Wow, they just made it!”

The issue ended soon after that.

“Yeah, that’s when I knew I had to buy the whole series,” said Spike. He looked over at a clock mounted on the wall. “But I think I should go to sleep. We’ll read the next issue tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah…tomorrow morning.”

~ ~ ~

Rainbow Dash read the other three issues in the SOARB limited series that night by the light of a flashlight. She thought she was being sneaky.

---

The next morning over breakfast Spike gave Rainbow Dash the names of a number of other great comics for her to check out.

“Well…alright,” Rainbow said, thinking she was being reluctant when in reality she was excited at discovering something new. “I guess I’m into comic books now. But I definitely draw the line at books without illustrations!”

Spike passed over the SOARB comics. “Here. You can keep these.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah, really,” said Spike, turning serious. “I got those two years ago, when I was dreaming about flying.”

Rainbow thought for a moment. “Because most dragons have wings?”

“Because all dragons have wings, Rainbow. Except for me. I figured that might be why my egg was abandoned—because my dragon parents knew that I wouldn’t ever have wings.”

“Oh,” said a sad Rainbow, who pulled Spike into a wing hug.

“But then I got that pegasus book on dragons,” Spike said. “Turns out all dragons are born without wings. They are considered adults the day they get them.” He smiled up at Rainbow. “If I get my wings before I get my cutie mark, then that means that I’m a dragon through and through, and I’ll probably never get a cutie mark. I decided the wings can wait.”

Rainbow hugged Spike even harder on hearing this.

Author's Note:

Notes for this chapter can be found with Chapter 35.