Duality
“Clear, fly, fall, complete.”
“Again?” Scootaloo grumbled, still out of breath from the two runs just before it.
“Your test is tomorrow, Scoots!” Dash snapped back. “You need to be prepared!” The orange filly groaned.
“I’ve been prepared for the past five months! How much more prepared can I get, it’s the easiest test ever!” Scootaloo huffed, pawing at the ground in annoyance.
“You can never be too ready, especially with your stunted wings,” Dash said. “This is important! If you don’t do well, they’ll--”she bit her tongue--”they’ll take you far away. We’ll never be able to see each other again.”
“At this rate I might just fail the test to get you off my back.”
“No-!” The blue pegasus jumped in front of Scootaloo, wings flared. “Don’t you dare--” She cut herself off. She closed her wings and squeezed her eyes shut, before looking back at the filly, tone soft. “You know I’ve been so hard on you lately because I love you, right? You know that…”
Scootaloo sighed, the almost alarming amount of fear in Dash’s eyes tugging at her heart. “I know… It’s just, it’s frustrating. So much training for one simple test, you’d think it was life and death. I’m not a baby foal anymore, I can do this course, easily.”
Rainbow Dash sighed. “I know you can, Squirt…” she said, gently putting a wing around Scootaloo. “Just promise me you’ll pass, alright? I know you’re upset with me for all this training, but I’ll get off your back about it as soon as you’re done with your test. You can hang out with that colt all you want, ride your scooter off into the sunset, after you pass. I just-- I can’t let this be the last time I see you.”
Scootaloo nodded slowly. “Alright. Alright, I promise. But I’m holding you to that.”
Rainbow huffed with a smile. “Good girl. Alright now, one more run.”
Scootaloo rolled her eyes, but walked up to the homemade starting ramp nonetheless. “Whatever you say, sis.”
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Scootaloo gradually blinked awake. Every part of her ached, some from injury, some from overexertion, and no doubt some from holding this position all night. She shifted slightly, stretching what she could, coming to--and her breath shuddered with a cold chill as she was faced by the fact that the day before was all true. Not some horrific nightmare of unrealized anxieties about failing the test, or fear of her sister’s wrath, but reality.
She had taken her test.
She had failed.
Orion was gone.
Rainbow Dash had ordered her death.
The filly mulled through her memories. She fled for her life only to run straight into the clutches of the Factory, waking chained above impending death, to face who she once called sister. She had looked Dash in those murderous rose eyes as the mare sickly asked for her last words, which the failure spent simply missing who her sister had been. Or, Scootaloo thought, who she thought she was.
And then… Dash called for the room to be vacated and locked up. In a mere minute, the room was silent, dark, and sealed away. Dash was the last one out, and even she didn’t spare a look back at the foal she’d left behind. The evacuation was so quick, so sloppy, Scootaloo wouldn’t have thought it final at all were it not for the sound of the padlock from the other side of the double doors.
The room still remained dark. The only indicator of how long it’d been since then was Scootaloo’s own body eventually shutting down into exhausted sleep, and the rising odor of the dead foals that were left uncleared. Scootaloo remembered the previous night and groaned. She feared for how long she’d be left alone here, with nothing to see or hear or do. Not that it was boring, but rather the opposite--so depriving she was left only with her thoughts, only being able to get completely absorbed in them. Her thoughts were no longer pretty things.
As if to answer her silent dreading, though, she heard the lock shift and rattle from the doors. Someone with a key, she thought as a door creaked open. She looked down at who this savior from the solitude was, doubting the company was good news at all.
Her fears were confirmed as the silhouette stepped in, the outline faint but enough to show the unmistakable colors of the rainbow in the pony’s mane. Emotions bubbled into her mind at the presence, muddied by exhaustion and their conflict with one another. She watched, unmoving, as the mare brought something through the door then closed it behind her with an echoing thud.
She had brought in with her a small candle-lantern, which she lit her way with as she made her way up the scaffolding. The two sit in silence, no sound but the quiet clop-clop of the pegasus making her way up towards Scootaloo. She finally came to the edge of the device and stopped, setting down the lantern. In the dim lighting the two could make out one anothers faces, and were both surprised to see internal reflections of them in the other; toiling emotions, conflicting feelings, all buried in exhaustion-induced apathy.
“I thought I was dead to you,” Scootaloo said.
“You are,” replied the mare. “I killed you with my own hooves.”
“Yet here we both are.”
The two were quiet for a moment, then Scootaloo continued. “Why?”
“Hm?”
“You said I was dead to you. You ordered my death. Why did you let me live, after all that?”
“Is that really a decision you want to challenge while dangling over a death machine?” asked Dash. Scootaloo shrugged, causing her to sway ever so slightly over the maw of the Pegasus Device. She looked down into it. It was an almost complete dark abyss, only the edges of the blades able to be made out in the candlelight.
“I suppose so. Far as I can see, it’s between being dropped in and left dangling here. I don’t know of anyone left alive who cares which it is. May as well ask some questions.” Scootaloo looked into the mare’s rose eyes. “That’s why you’re here too, after all, isn’t it?”
Dash’s eyes constricted to a suspicious glare for a few moments, before giving in quietly. She sat down fully, barrel to the floor and legs tucked up against it. Scootaloo looked into her eyes, trying to figure out what the mare was thinking. Avoiding eye contact, Rainbow Dash sighed, and finally spoke.
“Why’d you do it?”
Scootaloo was a bit taken aback. “Why’d I do it? Who’s the foal killer between us?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Dash replied flatly. “Why’d you fail your test?”
“What do you mean, why? I messed up, do you expect some ulterior motive for crashing into a cloud?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Dash said, the anger in her voice starting to break through. “You did that hundreds of times, for months. You could do that damn course with your eyes closed and hooves tied behind your back.”
“And I did, if I recall correctly,” said Scootaloo with a slight tinge of nostalgia, made bitter by all the context now flooding into those training memories.
“Exactly. You couldn’t have failed, not without meaning to, I made sure of it. So why did you do it? To spite me for my stringency? To join that celestia-forsaken colt in ‘exile’?”
“No, I just… messed up. I was just distracted, by…” Scootaloo hesitated for a moment, then looked Rainbow in the eyes. “By Orion. He was a hero. He gave up his test to help that little yellow filly, she hurt her wing trying to catch herself after the freefall.”
“He was an idiot, is what he was!” Dash growled. “I knew he was bad news from the moment he condemned Cloudsdale.”
“You’re still offended by that now? As you run a foal murder factory? You’ve only proven him right.”
In a quick blur, Rainbow Dash stood up, spun around, and kicked Scootaloo solidly in the chest, knocking the wind out of the filly and sending her swinging back on the chains as she struggled to catch her breath. Scootaloo limply swung back and Dash stopped her momentum with a hoof, glaring straight into Scootaloo’s eyes. “Don’t you dare follow his lead. Cloudsdale is the shining idol of all of Pegasus kind, and it relies on the CWC to stay that way. I play a grim but pivotal role in that cycle, and I wouldn’t change that for your life.”
“You’ve already proven that,” Scootaloo sputtered after finally catching her breath, voice still strained.
A long minute passed, through Scootaloo catching her breath and simply contemplating, before she spoke again. “So why are you here?”
Dash’s breath hitched, and her ears slowly flattened, letting out a deep, almost growly sigh, before looking up into Scootaloo’s eyes once more. “To say goodbye. To my little sister, and to the… disgraceful failure that’s taken her from me.”
The words slowly sunk in, and Scootaloo couldn’t tell whether or not she’d be alive by the time Dash left this room. Her questions were answered as the mare kicked a lever, causing the array of crisscrossing blades below her to slowly begin to spin up again, folding into each other, the maw of the Device bearing an almost eagerness to tear through the filly’s flesh.
“Wait-- Dash, no, please, I can do better! I will do better, for you!” The chains slowly lowered her towards the deadly blades, and Scootaloo began to squirm, desperately trying to get away, her pleading only growing more frantic. “Sister, PLEASE!”
All at once, just as the filly’s hoof made contact with the blades, the machinery whirred to a stop. Dash stood above her, hoof around the lever she’d just pulled back. Scootaloo panted with exhaustion and momentary relief, adrenaline still surging through her veins. “Rainbow… I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I… I’ll do better. I won’t let you down… just…” her voice was weak--defeated. “please, just let me try again…”
Dash took a shaky breath, silently pulling the control to lift Scootaloo back up on the chains, cementing that begging as the last sounds of life she ever heard out of the failure she once called sister. She turned away until she could barely see the orange filly in the corner of her vision.
“You had your chance.”
Scootaloo could only watch in heartbroken silence as the mare took flight, gliding down to the entrance and nudging her way through it.
“Goodbye, sister,” Scootaloo said weakly.
Her sister did not return the farewell.