Colors
Rainbow Dash lives for the loud.
The sound of the wind whistling past her as she flies. The whirling and twirling of Tank as he glides through the air. The loud music drifting through her room as she sings along to her heart’s content. The twinkling laughter of her friends as they meet up after yet another journey out to every edge of Equestria.
Yes, Rainbow Dash lives for the loud. That is to be expected of her. But she also craves the quiet moments.
It’s something that even some of her closest friends don’t know about her. They don’t know how much she loves the silence of nothingness in the final moments before sleep. How she loves the soft crinkling of a book page as she flips through the newest Daring Do novel. They don’t quite understand why she’s so content to drift off on a cloud, high above any noise.
But even more than the loud or the quiet, Rainbow dreams of color. The soft pink icing dripping down the side of a cupcake wrapper; the bright blue of the sky in the day and the darker navy during the night; the purples that run through Twilight and Rarity’s manes. To Rainbow, color is everything. Color is happiness. Color is a thing that accompanies both the loud and the quiet, togetherness and solitude, day and night. Color hangs around her friends; coats of lovely pinks and purples and yellows and oranges and even whites; purples and pinks and yellows flowing through manes, eyes of every shade watching her with something like fondness whenever she meets with those she loves. Rainbow Dash’s life is full of color, and she absolutely loves it.
Like most ponies, Rainbow believes that you should share the things you love. She believes the happiness that sings through your heart should be given out to anyone who dares to take it. But Rainbow is also a little bit selfish. She wants to hold onto the beautiful colors of her world and never let go of them.
So she shares them in a way that only she can see. The others cannot even begin to imagine how much she witnesses. They have no reason to wonder about the colors she holds onto. She likes it that way. She likes that they are unaware, because for once, Rainbow has a secret all to herself that she feels no guilt about keeping.
Rainbow keeps her colors a secret. She keeps them hidden in the depths of her closet, beneath dresses she would never dream of wearing and mountains of possessions littering the floor. It looks like a mess, chaos Discord would be proud of, but Rainbow knows exactly where everything is. She pushes through the curtain of satisfyingly colorful dresses; the stacks of brightly-spined Daring Do books swept across the floor, until she reaches the colors she craves. Beneath it all lies a small paintbrush and a pallet of the most outrageous colors Rainbow can dream of. She drags out a canvas coated in blues and oranges and purples swept across a white background in something halfway resembling a scene. It is a mess, but it is a beautiful one, and Rainbow takes pride in it.
She props the canvas on the easel and dips the paintbrush in the paints. She does not know what color she has chosen, and she does not care. She drags the brush along the canvas, creating swirls and patterns of a bright color until it seems complete. Then she places the brush in water and stares hard at the thing she created, admiring the newest coat of color. Though the canvas does not really hold a picture, it holds colors that remind her of a time long ago, and that makes her happy. She decides the painting represents the day of the Rainboom, when she and her friends got their cutie marks. Within the swirling depths of rainbow, she can see stars and diamonds and butterflies and balloons and even an apple woven through the colors. She titles the piece in her head and puts it aside to dry. She does not say the name aloud, because that would ruin the secretive feeling of excitement that sweeps through her. Saying the name aloud would tarnish the beauty of a colorful secret painted plainly against what was once a mere blank canvas. Saying the name would make it feel less private, as though she were shouting it to the world, rather than whispering it to the turtle sitting on her bed.
So Rainbow Dash sits and reflects on the painting she just created. She remembers the day she got her cutie mark, and the day she found out its connection with her friends'. She reflects on the colors she used, every one in the rainbow, and reflects on just what patterns she's painted on the canvas. She imagines the painting as the sky, and holds it up above her, and imagines her bed is the cloud that she lays on as she stares out into the sun's rays. She pretends it is evening, and the sun is setting, painting her colors across the sky, and then she pretends it is morning, and the colors are carrying with them a new day. She pretends she is flying, and the colors are the Sonic Rainboom behind her as she realizes that she's never felt so free in all her life, and she pretends the colors are her cutie mark as she stares at it for the first time. She pretends the colors are a chuckle coming from deep inside Applejack's throat, or a higher-pitched giggle from Rarity, or a full-on laugh from Pinkie Pie. She pretends the painting is the colors that seep into her dreams as she sleeps at night.
She decides this is her best painting yet, and hangs it on the wall until it dries. Once it is ready, she will hide it in the back of her closet with the rest of her secret colors, until it's time to bring them out once again.
Rainbow Dash dreams of color, and that is her best-kept secret.