> Limits
>  by TheVulpineHero1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Heroes never quit. They fall.
~Anonymous


It's late. Too late, really. The constellations are already clear in the sky, peering down at us with no clouds to cover them. Of course, the fact that it isn't cloudy is why we're here in the first place. Not much point stargazing when the sky's full of stratocumulus. We've been here longer than we should have been – it's the dead of winter, and in a couple more hours the grass will be brushed over with frost, a little white relief carved on top of every leaf and branch. 

Warm, soft and heavy against my side, Fluttershy sleeps. She sleeps a lot earlier in winter, and for a lot longer, too. It's almost like she hibernates. I'm usually not enough of a jerk to wake her. She always looks so content when she's sleeping. Real calm, not like she usually is. She never even tosses or turns, or even snores; not like me, she says. Right now, I should really wake her up; it's too cold to stay out here any longer. But, I need just a little more time.

I haven't told her yet, and I don't think I will, but I was actually looking for something while we were stargazing tonight. Searching the skies for an answer. There's something I need to know, desperately. I need to know how things got this way, why I'm so tired all the time, why I feel so scared when I wake up next to her in the morning. Don't get me wrong; I love Fluttershy. But something's wrong with me, wrong with us, and there's a voice in the back of my head whispering what it is but it's like I'm too dense or too stubborn to listen to it. I need help.

But the skies have nothing up there for me, and the stars are keeping their secrets. If ever I could hear what that voice is saying, it ought to be here, in this lonely glade, where the only sound is the wind and our own breath. But I guess things just aren't that easy. I whisper something – more a sound than a word – to Fluttershy, and she wakes. Her eyes open, and suddenly widen when she realises she's not in her cottage, but soon enough she finds my face and her panic passes. She leans a little closer to my flank, and sighs.

“Oh, my. I'm so, so sorry, Rainbow Dash. I didn't mean to fall asleep, especially after you went to all the trouble of checking the forecast so we could do this,” she says, her voice still heavy from the nap.

I grin. She acts like it's some big thing for a full-time weather pony like me to know if there's going to be clouds scheduled. I tell her that I don't mind that she fell asleep, and that we should be getting back home before the frost hits; with a little reluctance, she disentangles herself from me and climbs to her hooves. As we start the walk back, she starts telling me how she'll fix me some cocoa when we get in, and how glad she is that we still have a little firewood stocked up; for a moment, it seems like all my doubts are for nothing, that I'm just being silly. But, deep down, I know they're not. Nothing has changed, and I don't have an answer. I hate to admit it, but I'm afraid.





When I wake up, I'm alone. That's just how it is in the mornings. Fluttershy will let me sleep past dawn, but the animals won't let her; even in winter, waking up early is a habit she can't kick. It used to bother me, but in the end I realised there isn't much we can do about it. She needs to get up early to do her work, and if I don't get the extra hour or so's sleep, I'm a wreck for the rest of the day. Usually, I can hear her downstairs making the birds sing when I wake up, but lately I hear her bustling around the kitchen, making pancakes, muffins, fried vegetables, anything to distract herself from the fact that her little friends aren't there.

I consider laying back and grabbing another hour's sleep. It's my day off, which means I only think about work instead of actually doing it. Kinda hard not to think about work when your office is the whole dang sky. But the bed's too big for me to fall asleep in it alone, and 'Shy always makes more food than she can eat, so I drag myself into the waking world. 

Our bedroom is pretty much the same as it was when I first started living with 'Shy – tons of pillows and cushions, with a bunch of hot water bottles under the bed. She's pretty big on pillows. Every so often she'll just buy some fabric and sew herself a new one. Either she keeps it and adds it to the collection (which is really more of a mountain than anything else), or she donates it to charity or something. I still don't know how she got that good at sewing – nopony in her family does it, Rarity didn't teach her and I've never seen her with any books about it. I guess it doesn't matter. She keeps asking if I want to add stuff to make the bedroom less hers and more ours, but I wouldn't know what to add. I never really spent too long at my last house since I was always out doing stuff, so I never bothered to decorate it more than I needed to. (It took me the longest time to get used to having real floorboards after I moved. With clouds, you can go through if you push hard enough, and I was in the habit of jumping out of bed, through the floor and diving towards ground level to wake myself up in the morning. All the moisture in the clouds makes it as good as a shower. My nose still hurts sometimes from trying to dive through solid oak.)

As I make my way downstairs, dodging around piles of fluffy pink bunny slippers (as well as slightly less fluffy Wonderbolts themed ones), I can already smell breakfast: porridge, probably with a little bit of the honey 'Shy kept back in the summer. She keeps bees, in a revelation that'll shock nopony. It's almost freaky how well she does it, though. She puts on her beekeeper's hat (or apiarist's hat, as Twilight keeps trying to tell me), opens up the box, and all of a sudden all of the bees just… stop. A thousand insects go silent, just like that, and all because Fluttershy wants a lick of honey to sell at the market. It's amazing. Since we're a little closer to the Everfree Forest than the rest of town, our honey always has all these weird flavours and nuances you can't get anywhere else.

I'm actually kinda surprised she kept any back at all, though. Usually we sell all of it to help pay for animal feed. Back before I was living with her she basically relied on selling jars of honey and berry jam for money, so she was pretty frugal when it came to cash. I think Rarity helped her out more than once. Then again, so was I when I lived alone. I got regular pay from weather duties (still do), but there just wasn't anything I wanted to spend it on. I mean, Pinkie'd bake me cakes if I asked her, and I got all my books from the library. I spent a little on the joke shop stuff, but that's pocket money prices. And eventually I just ran out of Wonderbolts merch to buy. At least nowadays neither of us is strapped for cash since we pool our assets, but old habits die hard.

I almost trip over Tank as I walk into the kitchen. He's like the most active tortoise in the world, so he wanders over to the door to meet me when I get up in the mornings. More like a dog with a shell than anything else. Angel's taken to riding him around the house lately, but Tank totally wears the pants. I think.

“Do tortoises eat porridge?” I ask 'Shy, who's sitting at the table in her dressing gown and blowing gently over her breakfast.

“Oh, no. Fruits and vegetables only, I'm afraid,” she replies. We don't really bother with 'good morning' too much any more. Any morning when we get a chance to sit down and have breakfast together before getting to work for the day is a good one.

“Sorry, Tank. The lady has spoken,” I mock whisper to him. He nods, but tortoises always nod. Fluttershy gasps once, twice, thrice, and then lets out the softest, quietest little sneeze you could imagine. “And has the sniffles, apparently.”

“It's my own fault. I shouldn't have fallen asleep outside,” she says, and allows herself another spoonful of honey from the little glass jar. “I, um, didn't know if you're be up this early, so I left you some porridge on the counter.”

Sure enough, there's a little earthenware bowl wrapped in a teatowel, the same way Pinkie sometimes wraps her bread in blankets. I can feel warm steam hit my face when I uncover it, and my stomach rumbles in anticipation. I shake in a little cinnamon from the spice rack, and sit down at the table to get stuck in.

“You have the day off today, don't you?” she asks, eating her breakfast in dainty little bites. “Do you, um, have any plans? I was thinking we could go shopping, maybe...” 

“I'm up for some shopping. But we also gotta plan our route for the trip.”

'Shy frowns. We agreed that we'd go on a trip since it's winter and we're not too busy, maybe let Applejack or somepony cover the animals while we're away. There's a map in the back room where I've been picking where we'll go, lines of black ink across tiny country roads. She agreed to go, but I guess she's still not that comfortable with leaving town. But then, it wasn't that long ago when she used to get worried about going out shopping… or was it? Hard to tell. Time's weird like that.

When we're done eating (I finish faster because I've got no table manners), she trades her dressing gown for a scarlet winter cloak and we step out of the house into a world of white. The night crew got a little enthusiastic with the cloud formations, I think; the snow's way above our ankles, and I instinctively take to the air to keep my hooves warm. 'Shy just pulls on the rubber boots she keeps outside the door for gardening work. I can't even walk in the things, myself; I always feel like I'm going to trip, so I end up just hovering along with my hooves just off the ground. Besides, it's always good to stretch my wings. I settle just above and to the right of her, close enough to talk to without shouting but not so near that we'll bump into each other. 

“I bet the lake is already frozen by this time of year… Do you suppose Pinkie has been ice-skating yet?” 

That's Fluttershy's tacit permission to off and really open up the taps for a while instead of hanging around at her shoulder like a songbird. (AJ always makes jokes about how I do that. She's taken to calling me Sparrow Dash lately.) Even when Pinkie isn't skating to break up the ice, she likes to cut patterns on the surface, like smiley faces or flowers; you can see them from high up, so it's easy to tell where Pinkie practices her one-hoof axles and her triple salchows, or whatever. Sending me off to check also frees 'Shy up to look up and down the hedgerows, and make sure none of the mice families have frozen.

I don't have to be told twice, and within a couple seconds I'm at cloud level. The wind's cold enough to sting my teeth when I grit them, but the sun's pretty bright so it should warm up pretty soon. I let my momentum tip me over on the vertical axis and make a controlled flip, testing out to see how well my wings are holding me today. I worry, sometimes. I don't train nearly as intensively nowadays, but I still keep an eye out for atrophy. I mean, I know it'll get me eventually – it gets everypony. Part of being an athlete is realising that your body's on a clock, and one day you're gonna wake up and not be able to do the things you could do yesterday. No reason to speed the process along, though. After all, I still wanna be a Wonderbolt someday, even if I'm putting other stuff first at the moment. Still got a few years on the clock yet. I hope so, anyway.

Satisfied that I'm still in good form (not peak, of course, but I could get back there in a couple weeks of heavy workouts), I start looking around for lakes. Some part of my brain starts to analyse the cloud formations, making sure nothing's too far out of place; I'd never live it down if my own hoof-picked day crew turned out to be idiots. I've got Cloudkicker covering for me, and she needs the leadership experience, but that's all the more reason to make sure she's not being a screw-up.

When I'm done scouting for ice-scribbles, I kick a few clouds a little more cleanly into place (taking a chunk of the northeast corner of each one as a calling card, so they know it's not just vandals) and head back to 'Shy. Since her winter cloak is blood-scarlet against the white landscape, I can pick her out a mile away. I'm pretty sure that's one of her reasons for wearing the thing, although the fact that it's lined with fur shed by her animal friends is probably another.

“Any new drawings?” 'Shy asks as I descend.  Out of the corner of my eye I can see some drowsy mice scurrying away through the hedgerows.

“She says that I smell.”

“Hee… Well, only sometimes,” she giggles. I give her a playful nudge. “Mr Tinwhiskers says hello.”

“Really? I must not have heard him 'cause he was running away so fast.”

She smiles comfortingly at me. “Oh, you know the animals like you. You're just a little big, and they're all so small.”

“Tell that to the bears,” I grumble, but I don't really mean it. The bears are actually pretty alright. They're crazy intelligent considering they're not magical beasts in any way. The picnics are pretty good, too. We don't ask where they got the food so they don't tell us, and everypony's happy.

It's difficult to believe, as we meander along the roads from the cottage to Ponyville, that there's even anything wrong with this, with us. Maybe there isn't, and it's all in my head – that nagging weariness that keeps me up at nights. I love 'Shy. I love being around her. I do. I just worry sometimes that I might not love her enough.
> Chapter 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ponyville is still the same as it ever was. It never really changes. Well, I guess that's not true. It changes all the time, but in such little increments and with such consistency that it feels like nothing ever changes at all. From a bird's eye view the town is static, but on street level it bustles and grows. That's true of a lot of places, though. A bench gets painted, a new shop opens, and then one day you walk into town and you realise it's a completely different place from the one you got used to. 

Whenever me and 'Shy go shopping, we never buy too much. We go through a lot of birdseed, I guess. I know AJ usually plants some corn in whatever land isn't fit for apple growing, and we buy her out pretty much every time she gets a harvest. Apart from that, we mainly buy little bits and pieces like bandages, cotton swabs, disinfectant – little things we need that we run out of or that get busted when we deal with the animals. There's usually enough bits left over for me to get a sports magazine without stretching our budget. I like to keep an eye on the up-and-coming stunt fliers.

As we wander our way through the shops and squares of Ponyville, we occasionally get hailed by the other villagers. It's a little village, so everypony knows everypony, but everypony knows me and Fluttershy. I tell them what the plans for the weather are, and 'Shy has a quiet word with them about their pets, giggling with them about whatever stupid thing their cat or dog has done this week and repaying them with a story about her otters. Angel's too clever to do anything funny, and Tank has a subtle, understated style of humour that only I really understand, but the otters are cute enough that ponies wanna hear about 'em, and ditzy enough to be hilarious once in a while.

…Even though it sounds dumb, I feel really proud of 'Shy at times like this. I still remember when she used to go super quiet whenever anypony spoke to us, and how she used to move around in a way that put me between her and them, like some kind of shield. Her being able to just stop and chat with whoever speaks to her on the street, without getting all worried and anxious like she used to, is like this huge achievement. They say she's not as talkative when I'm not around, but it doesn't matter. It just makes me realise how far she's come since we started living together.

I've changed too since I moved in. There was just something about living with 'Shy in that little cottage that made me quieter, I guess. AJ I always used to shout at, and Pinkie I always used to shout with, but there's never any need to shout when I'm with her. It's not like I need to compete with her, and I don't need to try and get her attention because I've already got it. When I stopped talking so loud, I started to learn how to listen – I mean, really listen. Listen like Pinkie listens, sometimes, how to listen to the pony and not just the words they're saying. And after a while, 'Shy learned how to talk a little louder. We changed each other, basically. We didn't quite meet in the middle, but we moved so close that it got hard to be apart.

When the shopping's done, we start to make our way home, laden with bags that smell of grain and medicine. We split them pretty much half and half, which always surprises everypony for some reason. They seem to think that I should be the one carrying all the stuff, since I'm the quote-unquote 'strong one'. I get sick of explaining that races and stunt-flying aren't the same as weightlifting, and that 'Shy used to carry all her own groceries for years before I moved in. 

“Um, Dash, would it be okay if I invited the girls over for supper tonight?” she asks.

I agree without even thinking about it. By 'the girls', she means the old Cutie Mark Crusaders. Well, I guess they're still the Cutie Mark Crusaders, since they still haven't gotten their marks yet. They're so close that even I can almost taste it, though. Twilight says that they probably haven't got their marks because, on some level, they want to keep having wacky adventures with each other, and once they get that they don't have to stop, the marks will appear just like that. 

Still, those three are crazy when you stop to think about it. I mean, back when they were fillies, it was pretty funny how they used to try stuff and fail all the time, but now that they're a little older, they try stuff and actually get good at it. I've got a suspicion that they're actually come of the most competent ponies in the whole town, and I honestly don't know how I feel about that. Sure, I'm happy for them, but the bit of me that's competitive always thinks, “Maybe they're slower than you, but they can beat you at practically anything else.” It's really weird.

The main reason I'm so pleased about having them over, though, is that I'll get a chance to talk to Scootaloo. Not that I don't like Sweetie Belle and Applebloom, but y'know. Scootaloo thinks I'm the best thing since sliced bread, and I'm pretty fond of the kid. She's a weak flyer, just like 'Shy is, so once every couple weeks we all go out and do some passes over the village together. I've also been teaching her the ropes of weather duty, so she can earn a few bits to keep up with those crazy hobbies she's always trying.

There was a while where we didn't get along so well. It was about the time I first moved in with 'Shy, actually. They say kids are perceptive, but… I think that Scootaloo realised I was starting to change, even before I did. I can only imagine what was going on in her head. She'd put me on this huge pedestal, where I was the coolest pony in the world who could do anything, and then suddenly I was starting to talk differently, and I wasn't doing as many stunts, and was just generally moving away from the image of me that had been her idol. For the longest time, she couldn't see me without getting this hard look in her eyes, and she never stayed in the same room as me if she could help it. She never said it, but I think she blamed 'Shy for the way things had turned out. That must've been hard for her. All three of those kids were really fond of her, and she was basically their aunt.

Even now, I still have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hoof, it wasn't my fault. You can't live up to everypony's expectations all the time, and if they want something from you that you haven't got, it's nopony's fault but theirs. But disappointing a kid like that? It just didn't sit well with me. It was like I'd betrayed her somehow. Nopony wants to feel like that.

Maybe if I were Pinkie or Twilight or AJ, we'd have gotten the whole thing worked out in a week, but I'm not. It was about a year before we managed to see eye-to-eye again. She was starting to grow up, and was in that awkward part of life where you're not quite a kid and you're not quite an adult. She hadn't got her cutie mark yet, and she had all the usual problems you get at that age on top of it. I guess she needed some help. I caught her sitting by herself, this big mess of gangly legs that she hadn't grown into and big ideas that she couldn't quite grasp, right after she'd had an argument with Sweetie and Applebloom. It was pure chance that I ran into her. So I said, “Hey. You wanna talk about it?”

She basically told me to screw off, but I sat down with her anyway and started telling her about all the stupid stuff I'd done when I was her age, like getting kicked out of flight school and all that mess. It took a while, but eventually I got her to open up about what was bothering her – which was pretty much everything, really. We've all been there. You've got problems like an adult, but you just don't have the options to deal with them that adults do, so you end up trapped.

We stayed out chatting for a while after that. Not just about what was wrong, but what we wanted to get out of life. She didn't know, and I didn't really know, either; I was still getting used to the idea of one pony being my entire future. Come to think of it, Fluttershy was pretty steamed when I got back that night. She though I'd gotten lost in the Everfree Forest, or blown away by a storm or something.  It was weird, having her be all protective over me; usually, it's the other way around.

Anyway, long story short, things started to get better between me and Scootaloo after we had that chat. It wasn't like somepony had just waved a magic wand and fixed things, but it was a start. I think we both started to realise that we couldn't really go back to the way things had been before – I couldn't be her hero again, because I was a different pony now. But maybe she didn't need a hero anymore. Maybe she just needed a sister, somepony who'd already done all the stupid stuff she was doing, who knew what it was like and that it'd get better. The old me could never have done that for her, but the new one? Time will tell, I guess.

“That's wonderful,” 'Shy says, back in the present day. “In that case, we should visit Sweet Apple Acres on our way back. I'm sure Applebloom will be there, and she can tell Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo.”

“You want to give me your half of the bags? I can drop them off at home,” I say, after a cautious half-second's silence.

“Don't be silly, Rainbow Dash,” she says in that tiny, heartbreaking voice she uses when she's hurt, or sad. “You know how I feel about this.”

I sigh. I do know how she feels about the whole thing with AJ. I just wish I could persuade her not to.
> Chapter 3
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

We run into AJ pretty much the moment we reach Sweet Apple Acres. The farm itself looks like a huge, freshly washed bedsheet with all the snow piled everywhere, although if you squint hard enough you can see hoofprints here and there. The sun reflecting off all that whiteness can get blinding while you're in the air, sometimes. Not that I'd crash because of that, obviously. I pick better reasons to have crashes. 

“Hello, Applejack. How's the farm work going?” Fluttershy asks. She and AJ get along well, although they don't see eye-to-eye about some things. Me being one of them, of course. 

“Not so bad, sugarcube. Ah just finished clearin' the snow for today,” AJ says, tipping her hat to 'Shy. She says she does that because it's good manners, but I think it's just probably to knock all the snow off it. I wonder if her hat gets heavy if she doesn't? I could imagine that. Applejack, strongest neck in the West. Heh.

“Wait, you finished clearing the snow? 'Cause, uh, I'm still seein' an awful lot of snow, AJ,” I remark, pushing over a stray watering can with a hoof. It lands in the snowdrift with a flumpf. I couldn't feel anything sloshing around inside, so the water's probably frozen.

“All the bits that matter, sparrow brain. Our apple trees are pretty hardy when it comes to frost, so we can leave 'em sit for a day or two. Ah'm just focusin' on keepin' the sprouts and the radishes clear.”

I nod, because saying anything will imply I'm interested and then AJ will start talking about plants all day. I don't get plants. I mean, animals, sure. I'm not Fluttershy, but when it comes down to it, animals are just like us – they like to eat, and they like to sleep. Well, I do, anyway. It's just a matter of remembering what eats what and who sleeps when. Plants don't make sense, you can't pet them and they die all the time. Twilight and AJ seem to know vaguely what makes them tick, but I sure don't. 'Shy might; I think she managed to get some mint growing behind the cottage last year, and she got into the habit of using the leaves when she made tea. Of course, that meant we had to go to the blacksmith to get a steel ring made to 'control the growth of the plant.' I mean, seriously – she'll suplex a bear without so much as a safety helmet, but then she needs to break out the ironmongery to do some gardening? I just don't get it.

“So, y'all just makin' a social call, or are we talkin' business? Either's fine, o'course, but if we ain't sellin' or buyin', Ah may as well get some of the upkeep done while we talk.” 

“Oh, no. We were just dropping by. Actually, I was going to invite the girls over for supper tonight, and I wondered if I could get Applebloom to pass on the message. Um, that is, if that's okay,” Fluttershy says, adding the last bit a good half-second after the rest. It's more like a verbal tic than anything else, nowadays. I mean, it's a polite one, so nopony minds, but she still qualifies pretty much everything she asks for like that.

“Well, Ah've had her mendin' fences for most of the day, so it won't do her no harm to relax a spell. She's gettin' awful good with a hammer and nail nowadays. She ain't so fast as me, but when she knocks in a nail she knocks it straight,” AJ says, proudly. Applebloom's been able to hammer a nail in straight for years now, but Applejack's still as proud as if she'd learned it yesterday. I guess that's just how AJ is, though. “She should be down in the west field. If you wait here, I'll go and fetch her for ya.”

“Oh, no. I can't let you do that, Applejack,” Fluttershy says, and this is the bit I've been dreading since we walked into the farm. “I'll go and tell her. Why don't you and Rainbow Dash catch up a little?” And before I can stop her, she's off. She can fly pretty fast when she wants to, I guess. Me and AJ share an embarrassed glance.

“She still worry about that?” AJ asks.

“Yup,” I say, and that's all that really needs to be said.

See, the thing with me and AJ is that we're not exactly platonic, if you know what I mean. I'd be lying if I said there was no attraction there, because let's face it, AJ's beautiful. Don't get me wrong, 'Shy's beautiful too and nopony can say she isn't, but AJ's got that lithe, athletic kind of beauty that I really appreciate since I'm an athlete myself. And AJ… Well, she's AJ. The moment she got it through her skull that she liked me, she came and told me about it straight-up. She did it a couple months too late, since I was already sorta dating 'Shy by then, but she did it to clear the air and put everything on the table.

It isn't just looks, either. When I'm around 'Shy, I feel at peace, but there's just something about living with her, in that quiet house with nopony else around, that's just… tiring, somehow. It's like you tiptoe everywhere, but you don't realise you're doing it until you stop. It makes you all lethargic after a while, like living in a daydream. But with AJ, I feel comfortable. It almost seems like I think more like my old self when I'm with her – I start wanting to show off, risk hitting the lows to get to the highs. I think faster, and I can make the witty comebacks that always used to be easy but don't seem to come readily anymore. Stuff like that.

Thing is, none of this matters by itself. I'd never do it – abandon Fluttershy for AJ. 'Shy knows I wouldn't do it, AJ knows I wouldn't do it, I know I wouldn't do it, and even if I tried, I trust AJ to smack me upside the head and send me back to 'Shy again. If we were all just logical about it, there wouldn't even be a problem. But emotions don't work like that. Love doesn't work like that. So what do we do? I try not to hang around AJ too much, because I worry that Fluttershy might get worried. Fluttershy tries to make me go see AJ more, because she's worried that I think she doesn't trust me. And AJ always makes sure not to get too comfy with me because she's worried she's driving a wedge between me and 'Shy. It's like this big old merry-go-round where we all realise we're being stupid and none of us is really happy, but we can't change it.

“So, how's married life?” AJ asks. Her shoulders begin to relax, which is good. It means she's not looking around for work to do while she's speaking to you.

“We're not married, AJ. Geez, did somepony replace your brain with an apple since last time we spoke?” I tease. It feels good. Normally the only pony I get to tease nowadays is Pinkie, and she doesn't realise I'm doing it half the time.

“Yeah, yeah. Y'all are passin' close, though. Who's your best mare gonna be?” she asks. AJ doesn't give two horseshoes about my teasing most of the time, but that kinda makes me want to mess with her even more.

“Quit it, AJ. You know I'm not big on the whole marriage thing.”

Which is true; she does. That's the nice thing about her. If AJ wants to know something she asks straight out, no matter how stupid it is. You get to a point where you've pretty much already talked about all the awkward stuff with her, or refused to talk about it in which case she doesn't ask again. I like that better than somepony like Rarity, who doesn't ask you straight out but keeps asking you in all these subtle ways for days and days after you've said no. 

Of course, it comes with its own downsides. Case in point: after I told her me and 'Shy were dating, it took all of ten minutes before she asked what the sex was like. I didn't tell her, obviously. That stuff's private. Not just because Fluttershy would literally die of embarrassment if I said anything, but because it's important. Because of what 'Shy does – who she is, basically – I have to share her with the animals for most of the time. I don't mind that, because I understand that that's the way it's gotta be. But it means that the times when we're in bed together are some of the only times I have her all to myself. As it is, I don't begrudge the animals for taking up so much of her time and attention, but if I didn't have those moments, I think I might.

“Ah know, ah know. Just messin' with ya. But y'all never answered m'question.”

“…Life's good, AJ. Life's good. I'm tryin' to set up a trip, get me and 'Shy out of the cottage for the winter. It's too quiet up there. But I don't think she's too excited about it, and I don't want to feel like I'm dragging her along with me against her will.”

AJ sighs, tips her hat again – I knew she was just dislodging snowflakes – trots over to a fencepost and kicks it. You can hear the entire fence shuddering, like tin cans connected by string, but the important thing is that it knocks the snow off. She leans against it, and motions for me to follow suit. “Plannin' a trip, huh. Y'all doin' it for her, or for you? Call me crazy, but Ah'm thinking it's the latter.”

“Bit of both,” I admit, taking my place next to Applejack. “That place doesn't do either of us any good. You can hardly breathe for the silence sometimes, AJ.”

She nods. She knows how it is. They call farming the lonely profession for a reason – long, unsociable hours, concerns about harvest patterns that nopony else understands, and the need to be a  ways away from populated areas so you physically have the land for it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Apples place so much value on family, or that AJ works herself ragged to help out her friends. I don't think it's a coincidence at all.

“Y'all are mighty quiet yourself nowadays, Dash. Ah ain't saying it's a bad thing, but Ah just worry that Fluttershy's winter blues are contagious. If the house bothers you so much, why not ask 'Shy if you can both stay at your old place in the cold season?”

“It's an idea,” I admit. It'd be a bit chillier, since my old house doesn't have a fireplace, but I still own the deeds and everything. It's a lot closer to town than the cottage, too, so we could just fly down and visit Twilight or Rarity or Pinkie at the drop of a hat. We'd have to think of a way to get Tank and Angel up there, but that doesn't sound like anything Twi couldn't handle. I wonder if Fluttershy would go for it, though. I mean, sure, she'd pack her bags in seconds if I told her it was getting to me, but...

For some reason, I can't even entertain the thought. It just doesn't work. I try and picture the conversation in my head, but all I get is static, some kind of white hiss where me and Fluttershy should be. As I realise that, it feels like a little something just slotted into place – like whatever wheels keep turning in my brain have finally found the right groove. 

“'Course it is. Most o' my ideas have got some sense in 'em. Ah just don't wanna catch you mopin' around, cause 'Shy relies on ya to keep her spirits up.” 

“Like I care what you think, AJ. If I want to mope, I'll mope,” I reply archly, but I'm posing and she knows it. That's how we work – I say things I don't mean, and I trust her to know I don't mean them. 

She nods lazily, and starts to tell me what Pinkie's been up to lately. That's helpful, really. When you ask Pinkie directly you get a totally different story, which usually has more space aliens in it. Before long we're talking in half-formed sentences and bits of old jokes that only we know, carrying on from stories we started telling weeks or months ago. That's the way things are between us. We talk quickly because we've got so much to say, taking time out to call each other idiots now and then, and whenever there's silence it's just a place to take a breath and spin out the next yarn in our heads. Sure, we're a little closer than friends, and a little further away than we want to be, but that's no reason to make things awkward between us. We pretty much agreed that.

We're having a lot of fun, so it isn't until 'Shy comes back that we realise (with a sudden, awful synchrony) that even if the fence doesn't have snow on it, it's still pretty dang cold. I blame AJ, AJ says she never said I had to lean with her, and Fluttershy fights the urge to giggle.

“Um, are we ready to go?” she asks, but only after I've knocked AJ's hat off. She knows I love doing that.

“Ah thought you'd never come back and get her off mah hooves. Good riddance,” AJ jokes, before falling still like a pool of water. “Y'all know you're welcome on the farm whenever you like. Both of ya, hear?”

Fluttershy looks at AJ, and AJ looks at Fluttershy, and maybe I don't understand them as well as I thought because whatever secret message they're passing makes no sense to me. But if 'Shy isn't telling me, it's probably nothing I need to know. That's my philosophy, anyway.

“Of course. And you're always welcome to stay over at the cottage,” Fluttershy replies, and her voice is softer and quieter than usual. Or maybe my ears are just used to AJ's volume. “We should, um, let you get on with your work.”

I shift the saddlebags with the shopping in them, the ones I forgot I was even wearing up till now. She's right, of course. Grain doesn't exactly like being out in the snow, and we have a dinner to set up. I'm happier now than before we went out shopping, though. I hardly feel tired at all. I make a mental note to ask her about my old place, and fall into step beside her as we leave. We speak softly to each other in half-formed sentences, and with that I feel content.
> Chapter 4
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I take a look around me, sigh, and stand up. Even then, I'm still knee-deep in cardboard boxes. Originally I was just packing stuff for our stay in my old place, but then I ended up boxing all the old stuff in the attic. I didn't even know we had an attic, but apparently we do. It was full of ancient, dusty stuff like standing harps, calligraphy sets, old watercolour pictures of sunsets and fish. All sorts of stuff, but none that I thought 'Shy would own. Makes me wonder who lived in this cottage before her – before us, even. Probably a family, since the place is big enough.

When I asked 'Shy about us staying at my house for the winter, I wasn't actually expecting her to say yes, never mind so quickly. I really wasn't expecting her to go out to my old place and start decorating it in advance. She's been in this cottage for ages, and I always thought she was totally attached to the place. But then, she had this weird look on her face when she said yes – like she was concerned for me or something. Maybe she figured I needed a break from here.

I don't know why, but… I find the thought of that terrifying. Like, Fluttershy being worried about me. I mean, I'm meant to be the tough one out of the two of us, the pony she leans on whenever she's feeling spooked. If I started cracking up, it'd be like I was pulling that rug out from under her again.

I guess it doesn't matter right now. What matters is the boxes. I'm almost done, but there's four or five left, and plenty of junk to fill them with. Looks like I've got another half-hour or so of tearing strips of tape with my teeth and coughing dust all over the place, but at least we'll be ready to leave by tomorrow. It won't hurt to stop for a little while and maybe have a mug of cocoa to soothe my throat. Usually I'd have coffee instead, but I already packed that. I take it black with three sugars, enough kick to jolt me awake in the morning but sweet enough that I'm not tasting it in the back of my throat all day. I know AJ takes her just plain black and with more coffee than you'd normally use. And Twi? I'm pretty sure that if you dumped Twilight's morning brew in the river, half the fish would be floating belly up by noon. The stuff could kill a minotaur.

I remember one time when we were all shopping in Canterlot, and because Rarity exists we just had to stop in at one of those fancy street cafés, the ones with the colourful umbrellas on all the tables even in the dead of summer. Of course, they had all the fancy coffees and pastries and stuff, too. I ended up having a mocha in this huge, round cup that you could have eaten cereal out of. It was actually pretty awesome, but you can't really get them in Ponyville. We have an all-night coffee shop somewhere around here, but I don't think they can afford the machines.

I start the kettle boiling on the stove, and decide to root around for snacks in the store cupboard as it slowly begins to rumble. It's a pretty old kettle, really, all dented from all the times when Fluttershy's been spooked and dropped it. By dropped, I mean 'attempted to hurl it straight through the floor and down into the molten core of the planet'. It's a nervous reaction, I guess. I want to get one of those whistling kettles that Pinkie's got one day, but I keep forgetting to ask her about it. I like 'em because they put a little noise in the house, but they're still pretty homely so I think 'Shy would go for them, too.

I'm halfway towards putting together a sandwich when there's a knock at the door. Whoever it is, they sound frustrated. Well, that's no surprise. We have a doorbell but it doesn't work, so most ponies who aren't close friends sit there pressing it for five minutes before they twig what's wrong. I consider just pretending to be out, because that sandwich is pretty tempting, but in the end I hover over my maze of boxes and answer the door.

The guy I find on the doorstep is nopony I've met before. I'd remember him if I had. He's wearing a bunch of goofy clothes that don't really fit together, like he just grabbed what he could and made do – a beat up hat, a pale blue neckerchief like the Appleoosans wear, with fancy shoes that don't match the rest of the outfit. He's also real thin, and not in the elegant way but the needs to eat a square meal way. Unicorns aren't normally big, but this guy's tiny.

“You would be Miss Rainbow Dash, correct?” he asks, and he sort've reminds me of that Pip kid in the way he speaks, but slower and quieter.

“That's me. What's your beef?” I reply.

“My name is Brandy Alexander, freelance journalist. Could I trouble you for an interview?” 

I bite my lip. Journalist, huh? I've never been one to turn down good press, but I don't remember doing anything interview-worthy lately. I mean, yeah, saviour of Equestria and all that, but that's like shared credit between the six of us, which usually means Twilight has to deal with it. If Fluttershy were here I'd send the guy packing, but... Eh, what the hay. I'm curious.

“Uh, sure. Come in. Mind the boxes,” I say, before some half-remembered nagging fit from Rarity pokes my brain. “I was just making cocoa. You want some?”

He shakes his head and picks his way around the boxes, leaping over a few of them where I've forgotten to leave walking space. Well, it doesn't matter if you can fly. I catch him casting his eyes around as he walks, drinking in the house.

“So, uh. You're a journalist, huh? What's your special unicorn magic? Anything cool, like reading minds for stories or something?” I ask when we've made our way to the sitting room.

“My unicorn magic? Oh, I spin things.”

I flop my ear down. “You, uh, spin things. How's that gonna help you at journalism? I mean… You sure you shouldn't be mixing drinks or something?” I ask.

“I'd be lying if I said I didn't moonlight as a bartender. But that's not what I want to do. I want to take that ability to spin things, and then apply it to stories,” he explains, taking off his hat and holding it in a hoof. He seems like one of those ponies who can't speak without gesturing.

“Uh-huh,” I say. Sounds pretty doubtful to me. Now that I think about it, what kind of interviewer is this guy? Seems like I'm the one asking all the questions. If I had to guess, I'd say he's either new, or just a dreamer who can't accept that he's not cut out for the job. “So what did you want to ask me about?”

“Oh, yes,” he says, taking out a notepad. “I was told to come and interview you because –”

“You were told? I thought you said you were freelance. Or was that just a fancy way of saying 'unemployed'?”

He frowns and puts his hat back on. I almost feel sorry for him. Some ponies can never catch a break. Ask Twilight, she knows. “Aha. Well, being a freelancer is an undesirable occupation in my current financial state. I'm trying to get hired, but for that I need a portfolio and some scratch work. This is the scratch work,” he says.

“Wow, way to flatter me. So, what were you saying?”

“I was told to come and interview the residents of this cottage for an equine angle story. Something about an ex-athlete who gave up her career in order to care for her disabled wife.”

Oh, boy. There goes any sympathy I had for the guy. Seriously, there's so much wrong with that sentence that I don't even know where to start. The words struggle to arrange themselves in my mouth as I try to decide what to set him straight on first.

“Fluttershy is not disabled,” I growl.

A look of discomfort flashes across his face as he realises what he just got himself into. “Ah, well, I'm sorry, that was just the information given –”

“And I'm not an ex-athlete. I didn't give up my career, I just put it on hold for a while some we could get set up. What, I'm not allowed to change my priorities? Is that what this is?”

“Well, I –”

“We're not even technically married,” I finish, although it's a little half-hearted. I can't really get too mad about that one, since AJ did it too. “Seriously, what kind of outfit are you trying to join?”

He doesn't try to apologise this time, and settles for looking sheepish. Probably because I cut him off. Well, good. He's probably a jerk in his spare time anyway.

“Tell you what. You go back to whoever's pulling the shots, and you tell 'em that they'll get an interview the day my hooves fall off,” I tell him.

Even ten minutes after the guy's good and gone, I'm still fuming. Seriously, disabled? They were probably gonna paint her out to be autistic or crazy or something. Sure, she's timid around other ponies. But she's way better nowadays, and besides, that's not crazy if you think about it. It's just logical. I can blow down a barn by just flying past it, AJ could probably punt a bear over the horizon, and nopony even knows what Twilight could do if she really set her mind to it. And that's without all the bullying and social backstabbing ponies can do. When you think about it like that, it makes sense to be a little cautious.

It honestly makes my blood boil whenever this kind of thing happens. I hate it when ponies try to make 'Shy out as less than she is for the sake of getting some cheap sympathy. They don't ever bother thinking how she must feel – they treat her more like a stray puppy than a grown up, capable pony. What, just because she's scared of things they're not, that makes her dumb somehow? Ugh. What kind of two bit rag was that guy planning to join, anyway? Probably one of those stupid glossy magazines, the ones I never see anypony buy except that unicorn with the funky sunglasses. 

After a little more time and a cup of cocoa, I finally let the anger pass. Well, most of it, anyway. I'm still kind've annoyed about the ex-athlete crack, but I can understand how somepony'd make that mistake since I don't do a lot of public shows anymore. I don't wanna be angry for when Fluttershy comes home, though, so I sit down as still as I can and just let it wash over me until I can't feel it any more. When I'm done, I feel sort've sorry for blowing up so hard and so suddenly, but that's in the past, I guess. Twenty minutes ago is still the past.

But then, thinking of the past… I think the last time I was this angry was when I first started living with 'Shy. Man, I was livid back then. I thought my throat would never stop being sore from all the yelling I did. It was about something that was pretty much none of my business, too. But then, that was just how I was. Now isn't the time to be thinking about it. I really ought to get back to packing those boxes.

About a half an hour later, I'm done. I took way longer to do the last few than the rest of them, since I was actually thinking about what to put in each one. Most of these boxes – all the ones we're not taking to my old place – are going back into the attic, after all. I honestly doubt they'll get taken down again, at least not in our lifetime. That's pretty much how attics work; you put stuff in there, and you still have the stuff, but you never see it again because you don't bother to open the boxes. I guess a lot of things are kinda like that if you think about it. I try not to. 

But some of that old stuff was pretty cool, so I made sure to save some of it. I found a music box, one of those tiny tinkly ones with the spinning ballerina inside, and I think Pinkie'd like it because she could show it to the Cake kids. Pinkie loves music boxes anyway, though. I think it's weird how grown-ups always seem to appreciate them more than kids do, but I guess there's just something about music boxes that makes nostalgia stronger. I never had one as a kid, but even I get tricked into feeling young by the sound. Dumb, I know. Nothing like sitting in your attic listening to 'Row Row Row Your Boat' on an ancient music box and getting all sappy about it. It's a little bit out of tune, but Twi or AJ will know how to fix it.

I also dug out an old set of crockery that I think might be interesting. There's some scrawly hoofwriting on little yellowing stickers at the back of the plates and on the bottoms of the teacups, but they're all pretty good porcelain… I think. Not exactly an expert on pottery. What really interests me is that they're got 'Princess Celestia: 950 Year Jubilee' on the fronts, along with a picture of her face, and the outsides have this laurel wreathe design but in like red and yellow, all phoenix colours. I'm a little surprised when I take a closer look, since it looks like Celestia wore her mane a little differently back then. A bit more reserved, like the ponies you see in old portraits, and her smile was a little more subdued too. I think maybe Twilight would like them, but wouldn't it be kinda weird to eat off of something with your teacher's face on it? She could just display them and not use them, I guess, but I never got the point of that. Rarity will probably take them if Twi doesn't. Her parents are into this kind of stuff.

The very last thing I do before calling the job done for the day is to pack away our map, the one I was using to plan the trip for this year. Since we're already uprooting ourselves a little to go and stay at my old place, it doesn't feel fair to ask 'Shy to come traipsing around the countryside with me. I'd still love to go sometime, since I'd really enjoy just travelling around with her for a while without anything to hold us down, but that's just not a shared desire, I guess. Stability's important too. It's not like we can't go next year. For me and 'Shy, there'll always be next year. I have a lot of faith in that. And it'll give me an excuse to go up into the attic and dig everything out again.

But something in my brain keeps whispering to me, and it's the part that remembers all the old mare's tales and proverbs that I don't listen to. It's the bit that always sounds like my mom's voice in the back of my mind. I ignore it, but it's still there; the words float between my thoughts and I can't forget them even though I try. “There'll always be next year,” my mom's voice says to me. “Right up until there are no more years left.”
> Chapter 5
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Rainbow Dash?”

I'm hovering between sleep and wakefulness when I hear Fluttershy's voice beside me, and it takes me a while to respond. I can still feel the sweat cooling on the insides of my thighs, the glow of peaceful exhaustion sinking into my limbs. Even though the room is cold, the bed is as warm as a cocoon.

We still haven't gotten used to living at my old place yet, although it's been almost a week. I guess that makes sense. We got up here to an empty house with empty cupboards, with only the few bits of furniture I'd bought back when I first lived here. The door frames and the arched windows and even bits of the walls had become fuzzy, indistinct slushy piles of cloud. That's the problem with sky-houses. They're not stable. They get pushed around and moulded by the wind, and they lose their form as time goes on and the clouds start reasserting their natural shapes. Sure, they're easy to fix, but they always need fixing. In Cloudsdale, there are teams of pegasi fixing things around the clock, pushing the streets back into place and making sure your cellar doesn't float over and merge with your neighbour's living room. The first thing I learned living there is that normal days don't happen – they're made, and somepony out there sweated to make them. You learn to value those days, whether it's by taking a peaceful nap or by working out.

Of course, we brought a bunch of furniture with us to make the place habitable. It's weird to see how sparsely I used to live when I was alone. I mean, I didn't even have chairs – I must have just sat on the bed whenever I needed to rest. We also threw away a ton of stuff I left that was no good – a bunch of tarnished cutlery, a few tattered posters, that kind of thing. I wanted to throw out my old Wonderbolts bedsheets, but 'Shy wouldn't let me. She said they were cute. They're a little too thin for this time of year, but there's other ways to get warm at night.

I finally roll over, and wrap my forelegs around Fluttershy. After a little nuzzling around in the dark, I find the spot I'm looking for: the very top of her spine, where her mane stops and her back begins. I dot it with gently with kisses, give her the softest of nips with tongue and teeth. “Yeah, I'm up,” I whisper.

“Ah...Hee. I noticed,” she says, and heaves a breathy sigh. She lets me carry on for a little while longer before carrying on with what she was saying. “Actually, Dash, can I… um… ask you to do something for me?”

“Like I'd ever say no,” I reply. “What did you have in mind?”

I'm kinda hoping she'll ask me to preen her feathers for her. She's real sensitive around the wingtips and the base of her primaries. Even the slightest touch can get her shivering. That's one of the reasons she still has trouble flying even though she's better with heights and her wings are strong; she feels the stress on her feathers a lot more than somepony like me. I either need a massage or a lot of gravity before mine start to ache.

For the longest time, though, 'Shy doesn't answer. When she does, it's not the one I'm expecting. “…No, no. I'm sorry. It was… silly. I was being silly.”

Alarm bells start to ring in my head, like when you've done something wrong and you don't know what it is. It's the same feeling as when somepony tells you that you need to talk, and you don't know what you need to talk about, but you know you're not going to enjoy it and that things will change after you're done.

“I don't care if it's silly, 'Shy. If you want me to walk into the centre of town tomorrow in a rubber nose and clown shoes, I'll do it. I can probably get Pinkie in on it too. So come on. If it's really that silly, you can tell me and then we'll both laugh about it, okay?”

“P-please, Dash. Don't… don't worry about it.”

“…Dummy. If you say something like that, of course I'm going to worry,” I say. Part of me – a very large part of me – wants to keep nagging until I've dragged it out of her, but even I know better than that. I decide, reluctantly, to drop the issue.

“I'm sorry… I'm not being fair. Let me sleep on it, and see if I want to tell you in the morning. Okay?” she asks, and leans into my body a little more.

“Okay,” I say, and kiss her once more at the base of her neck. “You can always ask me for anything, 'Shy. You know that.”

“Yes,” she says. “Um… Could you, um, do that a bit lower? I'm still a little… um… you know.”

I smile, and begin to draw a line of kisses all the way down her spine and towards her hind legs. We speak with actions for a while after that.





I can't remember the last time I did this – sat in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning, waiting for coffee to brew. 'Shy is fast asleep up in the bedroom. It's easy to tell when she nods off because she starts breathing slower and more deeply, like she's going to start snoring any second but never quite gets there. I know for a fact she can't fake it. I made sure to put an extra blanket over here before I went down, though. Big beds like that get cold with only one pony.

The only reason I'm down here is because, try as I might, I can't get to sleep. I keep… well, worrying. Worrying about what 'Shy was going to ask me. The worst thing is, I feel so dumb for doing it. A little part of my brain keeps saying, “what the hay happened to you, Dash? Since when do you let little things like this get to you so much? When did you change so badly?”

But another part of my brain is saying, “No, that ain't right. 'Shy has something on her mind. It's not just some 'little thing' that you can ignore. It's important. 'Shy's important.” But then, 'Shy told me herself not to worry about it. I just... ugh. It feels like I'm chasing my tail in circles around my head, and the bottom line is that here I am, sat alone in a freezing kitchen at three in the morning, all because I'm too bucking neurotic and frustrated to sleep next to the mare I love. 

And when I say the kitchen's freezing, I mean it's freezing. I can feel the ice crystals forming in the cloud under my hooves. If I tripped, I'd be treating Ponyville to an unscheduled hail shower. I had to de-ice the kettle! All I want right now is a cup of coffee, a hot shower, and to crawl back in bed next to Fluttershy and forget she ever mentioned anything. If I could somehow not wake her up with the chattering of my teeth, that'd be a great bonus. Fat chance of that happening, though.

By the time the kettle's boiled and I take the first sip of my coffee, I'm feeling a little better. Not, like, Pinkie Pie peachy-keen levels of happy, but I've got a hot drink and that's a step up so far as I'm concerned. I actually like being in the kitchen, when it's not twenty degrees below. It and the bedroom used to be the only two rooms in this house that I'd use. What can I say? A mare's gotta eat. I remember how when I first moved in, ages ago, I went shopping for cutlery for the first time and ended up making a total hash of it. I pretty much took the approach that bigger was better, which meant all I bought were those giant prongs you use at barbecues and those huge, serrated knives you only use for cutting crusty bread. Every time I sliced an apple, it looked like I'd attacked it with a hacksaw. About a week later I went back out and bought some actual normal-pony cutlery, but I still had all that stuff hanging around the drawer for years. Good times.

Slowly, I put my hooves on the table and then my head on my hooves. If I'm going to be down here the whole night, I might as well try and figure out what it is that has Fluttershy concerned. I watch my own breath fogging up the glass of our temporary breakfast table, and settle down to think.





The first thing I'm aware of is the click of my old kettle boiling. The second thing I'm aware of is that the breakfast table apparently got real soft and fluffy all of a sudden. The third thing I'm aware of is that I'm a moron and that I'm wrapped in a blanket I distinctly don't remember bringing down with me.

“Good morning, Dash. You must have been very tired,” Fluttershy says gently as I lift my head from the pillow she put under it. She's already dressed, in her winter coat and the thick, long scarf she knitted back at her cottage. She picks up the kettle and carefully pours the water into two mugs.

I groan. “Oh, horseapples. I'm sorry, 'Shy. I couldn't sleep, so I came down for a cup of coffee and...”And dozed off on my kitchen table, like a complete idiot. Slow clap for that one, me. “Uh, thanks for the blanket.”

'Shy looks at me sadly from under those long eyelashes, and I feel my stomach squirm. “You should be more careful about doing that when it's so cold, Dash. You were shivering in your sleep when I came down. Here.”

She passes over one of the mugs, full of warm cocoa. I almost scald my mouth trying to drink it too fast, desperate to get some warmth in me. I suddenly realise that I'm hungry. Ravenous, even. Then, I realise why.

“Fluttershy,” I say slowly, hoping against hope that I'm just being crazy. “What time is it?”

“It's almost noon.”

Work. I need to go to work. In fact, I need to go back in time four hours, and then go to work. I've already had a load of time off lately, and I don't know what I'd do if I got fired. I stand up way too quickly, upending the chair and almost spilling cocoa all over the table. Before I can take a single step, Fluttershy is at my side.

“Shh… Don't worry. I already went over and spoke to work about it. I told them you were sick. Scootaloo agreed to help cover for you as well. It's okay. It's all okay,” she says, in the same comforting voice she uses to speak to birds and hedgehogs when they're scared. There isn't a single living creature that can resist that voice, me included. Or maybe even me especially.

“You're a lifesaver, 'Shy. I'm sorry. Tomorrow, I'll have my head back in the game,” I say, and breath a sigh of relief.

Fluttershy looks at me, one eye hidden under her mane. She hasn't done that in a while. A feeling of dread starts to sink down into the pit of my empty stomach as I figure out that whatever happens next, it's going to be one of those serious, make-or-break things. “U-um, actually, Dash, could you sit down? Please?”

For a second – a long, horrible, aching second – I think, this is it. This is the moment 'Shy breaks up with me. It's irrational, crazy. She's just asking me to take a chair, to have a chat. But I can't… I'm so scared. I don't want to lose Fluttershy. I don't know what it is I might have done, or didn't do, or even if I did anything wrong at all. I can't lose her. I can't. 

“Rainbow Dash, please. It'll only take five minutes. It's nothing bad, I promise,” she says, so soft and gentle that I have no choice but to trust her. I take a deep breath, pause, pick up the chair, and finally sit down. She crosses to the chair opposite mine and follows suit.

“Um, do you remember what we talked about? Last night?”

I nod mutely. My heart is hammering in my chest, and my throat is dry as sand. Now that my head is full of worries about losing her, every flutter of her eyelashes and twitch of her wings seems magnified in my mind's eye. I have to stop being so jumpy. I have to focus. 'Shy wouldn't just up and leave me for no reason. I need to hold on to that. But the hissing 'what ifs' just keep chanting themselves in my ears. 

“Um,” she says, and pauses, searching for the right words. Her mouth stays open as she looks for them. “Dash, d-did you know there's a flying contest going on in about a month?”

“A flying contest? Uh, no. I don't think I heard about it. Must not be paying attention, huh? Did you want to go and watch it?” I ask, but even to me it sounds silly, like I'm just looking for an out. What am I so scared of?

“A-actually… Last night, I, um… I wanted to ask you…”

“'Shy?” I prompt her, as gently as I know how.

“I, um. I wanted to ask if you would enter it for me.”

At long last, my heart begins to ease up. I was convinced it was going to burst out of my ribs. This is nothing to be worried about. I'm not in trouble, and I didn't screw up. She just wants me to enter a contest. Okay. I'm cool with that. Super cool.
“Is that all you wanted? Man, 'Shy. You had me really worried there. I mean, really worried. Sure, I'll enter the flying contest. No problem. Uh… Do you mind if I ask what brought this on, all of a sudden?” I reply, and I can't quite stop the relieved smile from spreading across my face.

“… Um. Please. Listen, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy says. She lifts a hoof to her eye and pushes her mane back, making sure I can see all her face and that she has nowhere to hide. To me, in that moment, she looks so sad, and so beautiful, that it takes my breath away.

“…You've, um, been differently lately. You've, you've been so quiet, all of a sudden, and you stare into space all the time. You don't… you don't smile as much as you used to, Dash,” she begins, and her voice – no, her, all of her – seems to tremble as she speaks. “And, and, I know that something's troubling you, and that you're probably keeping it a secret from me because you're scared I'll worry about it. But I can tell, Dash, even if you try to act like nothing's wrong. I can tell when you're bothered about something, because I love you. And I spoke to Applejack, and Scootaloo, and Twilight, and all the others, and even they can tell that there's something up.”

“Shy, I–”

She holds a hoof up for quiet, and I can't bring myself to carry on. She gulps, and carries on, taking deep breaths as she does. She stutters and pauses, as if every word is a battle she has to fight. “I'm, I'm worried. Rainbow Dash. Because there's something wrong, and I don't know what it is, or how to help you fix it. But I thought, maybe I could cheer you up. You, you always used to love flying, and entering contests, but you never seem to do it anymore. And, and, I know that sometimes, you, um, worry about whether you're too old, and that you can't do all the things you wanted to do, and that you can't chase your dreams anymore because of me. So I thought, m-maybe now's, now's the time, and...”

I get up and go to comfort her, because I know that any second now, Fluttershy is going to cry. Because of me. That's the worst thing, the very worst thing that I can imagine happening in my world right now. I hug her tightly, spread my wings around her like a shield, whispering tiny sounds of comfort where the words won't come.

“It's okay, 'Shy. I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong, either. If I knew, I'd tell you, and we'd sort it out, and everything'd be fine. I'll enter the contest, just like you said. It'll be okay.”

“A-and if doesn't work, we'll just, just try something else. Oh… I'm such a silly pony, c-crying like this,” she whispers, and buries her head in my shoulder. She very quietly begins to sob.

“It'll be fine,” I tell her, over and over again, like I'm chanting a magic spell. “It'll be fine.” And even as I say it, I can feel my resolve hardening. Some way or another, I'm going to make sure I'm right. I'm going to find whatever it is that's screwing up my head lately, and I'm gonna fix it. Because, I can't do it. I just can't bear to see Fluttershy cry. 
> Chapter 6
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	I gasp, pulling thin air into my lungs as I scream downwards through a pink-and-orange sky. I'm flying, really flying, spiralling and soaring and slicing through the air, and every second I stay aloft is a second my body aches for relief. I can't think straight at all. My whole mind seems to be in my wingtips, making constant tiny adjustments so I don't plummet to my death. My ribs and my throat feel like they're about to collapse, and for a second I can't decide what I need more – adrenaline or oxygen, the thrill or the fall. How did I ever stop doing this, wean myself off the buzz? It's better than anything I've ever felt, an old friend and a passionate romance all at the same time. 

With a flicker of my wings I pull out of the dive just before I hit the ground, and the earth is so close I can almost taste it as it speeds by. My brain is still slow but my body remembers, and before I even know what's happening I'm curving back into the air again. I suddenly realise that I've been whooping and hollering all this time, but I couldn't even hear myself over the wind rushing past my ears. I keep climbing, almost totally vertical, and my eyes are watering so badly that the sky is just a smudged watercolour painting.

Then, with a strange and mechanical inevitability, things go wrong.

My gut realises it before I do. It feels like I'm being squeezed and all the air is rushing out of me. A primal part of me wants to stop right now, get back on the ground and come back later, but my brain still thinks it's last year and I'm in much better shape than I actually am. I know with an iron certainty that I can't do this but somehow I can't stop either; I keep climbing, fighting physics and my own body, wings beating furiously all the while. The world starts to darken, and I wonder stupidly if I'm so high that I'm in space. Then my mind finally brushes away the adrenaline haze and I realise, in a startling moment of clarity, that I'm blacking out and I can't breathe. Slowly, I bank and topple in that lonely place where the stars meet the sky, and then I'm falling back towards the ground once more. 

I can't describe the feeling of calm I experience then. I realise, very quietly and soberly, that there is a good chance I'm going to die if I hit the ground at the end of this fall. I also realise that there isn't much I can do to stop it. My head is still light, and blackness still clouds the edges of my vision; I can feel my wings, but there just isn't any strength left in them. I focus on breathing, sucking in lungfuls of air and willing my blood to move faster so I can get out of this mess. The ground closes in, so fast that it's like an abstract painting to me. There is a crack of thunder, and I am gone.





I wake up, gasping, my teeth chattering and my eyes streaming. My first instinct is to thrash around and jump straight to my hooves, but my whole body feels heavy and numb. I've been covered by a thin violet duvet, which at least means I'm in bed and not in a morgue.

“How do you feel, Rainbow Dash?”

The voice is Twilight's, and I feel safe to relax a little bit. If the whole world were on fire, you could count on Twi to bring a bucket. Unless she started the fire in the first place, of course.

“What happened?” I ask. It's the stupidest, most cliché question ever, but I ask it. Now that I'm calmer, I start to recognise the features of Twilight's library – huge bookshelves with half the contents out on loan, rough-cut oak ceiling beams with dark knots here and there in the wood. The smell of paper should have been a giveaway too. 

“You tell me. I was watching you fly, and then you just… fell. I ended up teleporting you to ground to break the momentum,” she says. The tone of her voice is weird. Not panicked, but kind of wry and annoyed and a bit worried all at the same time. It reminds me a little of how she talks to Spike sometimes.

Suspicion prickles my hide. Not the kind of suspicion you feel when you think someone's scammed you or anything, but the old, weary suspicion you get when you think you've been an idiot. “Uh, Twi? You didn't know this was going to happen before it did, did you? I mean, that's not the reason you insisted on watching my first practice, right?” I ask.

“Well,” she says, after thinking about what words she wants to use to avoid making me look like an idiot, “I thought you'd bite off a little more than you could chew, yes, but I wasn't expecting you to go quite as far as you did. It wouldn't be you if you didn't overdo it, I suppose. Would you care to walk me through what happened?”

Truth be told, I wouldn't. If you can't be embarrassed about almost falling to your death, what can you be embarrassed about? But Twi's got her responsible face on so chances of getting out of it are slim. I've tried to wriggle out of trouble with her enough times to know when the effort is wasted.

“I guess what was wrong is that my mind thought I could do it, and my body thought I didn't, and as it turns out my body won the discussion. I didn't realise my breathing had gotten so bad since the last time I really went for it, you know?”

If Twilight had eyebrows she'd probably have raised one of them. Maybe even gone the whole hog and raised both. She found out the hard way a couple years back that a new pair of fluffy wings and the body of a pudgy librarian does not a champion flyer make. Princess or no princess, the air's thinner up there and it takes time for the lungs to get used to it, especially if you've been leading a ground-bound lifestyle up to that point. She's better nowadays, but for a while she flew like a concussed mallard.

After a moment of lull, a cup of coffee so thick you could stick a flag in it floats over to the bed, and I realise that my brief post-accident respite is over and that the conversation is now going to turn to more serious matters. It says a lot that a narrow escape from death is considered light conversation in our bunch. Of course, drinking Twi's coffee is about as sure a way to get yourself to death's door as any, so I guess it loses some drama after a while.

“So, Dash. I heard – from Fluttershy, of course – why you suddenly got interested in stunt flying again,” she says, slowly and carefully, as if writing out a problem on the blackboard for a struggling student. “I also heard, from Applejack, that you've been having worries about your relationship with her.”

“Yeah?”

“What I would like to hear is the reason why you didn't come and talk to me about this. Or to Pinkie, or Rarity. Or to Applejack, sooner than you did.”

How in the hay do I answer that? There's about a trillion valid reasons I could give, and now I've got to condense them down into one tiny little ball of information for Twilight to mull over. Whenever she asks a question, it's always hard. Celestia help you if she asks what you want for lunch.

“A whole bunch of reasons, Twi. I mean, first off, I'm not even sure there's anything wrong. Maybe I'm just having a bad month or something? I don't wanna go around worrying everypony about something that might not even exist,” I begin. It's the first time I've actually vocalised my doubts about the whole thing, and it feels… false, somehow. A bad month? Really? Everypony I know is worrying about this, I just fell out of the sky, and three nights ago I had 'Shy sobbing in the kitchen because I couldn't even hold it together enough to get to work.

“Dash, it doesn't matter if there's something wrong or not. What matters is that you think there is, and that's affecting your feelings. From the top, please. Why didn't you tell anypony sooner?”

I sigh, and try to rearrange my thoughts. You just can't argue with Twilight these days. She was always one of those ponies who could be great at anything, so long as she put her mind to it, and in the end I guess she put her mind to us. Sometimes it's difficult to remember that under all that royal gravitas and acquired wisdom, there's a paranoid librarian who loves stuffed toys.

“I don't know, Twi. Maybe because I didn't want to admit there was something wrong in my head. Maybe because I didn't want 'Shy to feel worried. Maybe because I've got something against other ponies poking their noses into my relationship,” I say, and throw up my hooves. “I don't always have good reasons for the stuff I do.”

Twilight looks at me for a long moment, before deciding that it's a good enough explanation for now. I take a sip of coffee, and instantly regret it; the inside of my mouth tastes like charcoal, and I can't stop a shiver from running down my spine. How does she drink this stuff? Is she one of those ponies who willingly poisons themselves to build up immunity or something?

The silence goes on a few seconds too long, and the conversation begins to lull. All of a sudden, I don't want to let that happen. Call it instinct or craziness or whatever you like, but I get the feeling that if I let things drop now, I'll be losing something I might need later. “...Hey, Twi. Can I ask you an important question?” I start, and then instantly backtrack. “I mean, I don't know if it's, like, super important or anything, but it's been bugging me a little lately.”

Twilight pauses in between drinking a whole half of her coffee. “Mm?”

“Have I… I mean, did I really change that much? Since the old days?”

She moves to the table, and sits down; deliberately slow steps mean she's buying time to think. Almost by habit, she opens one of the books sitting on the table. She still hasn't bought new chairs, I notice. She got some wickerback ones a while ago as a gift from one of the villagers, but they're bad to sit in when you've got wings – the curved back means they get trapped behind you, and the little gaps in between the weave of the chair are really painful if you get a feather snagged in them. They're not too fun if you get your tail caught in them, either. “It depends what you mean by 'the old days'. Honestly, Dash, you could be talking about the last two months or the last two years.”

“I don't know. Just in general, I guess.”

“How helpful.” Ah, sarcasm. Twilight's default answer to anything not solvable by magic.

“I aim to please,” I reply. Honestly, I'm glad she's breaking out the wisecracks. It shows she's not treating me with kid gloves. You gotta be able to trust a pony to know you're messing with them before you mess with them.

“Well, it doesn't matter too much, I suppose.” She pauses for a second. “Why do you ask?”

Hoo, boy. There she goes again with her crazy armour-piercing questions. I remember a joke AJ used to tell me, back when we were closer: 'Twilight Sparkle goes to a shipyard and buys a boat. Before she leaves, she asks the shipbuilder, “What's the name of this ship?” The boat sinks.' Hey, it's not the dumbest in-joke me and AJ had together. What's Rarity's ideal birthday present? Two clownfish and a bottle of glitter glue. Classic.

Still, Twilight probably expects an answer, and my brain seriously isn't coming up with anything – maybe as revenge for almost cracking my head open and spilling it all over the pavement. At times like this, I tend to just let my mouth do stuff and then sort through the wreckage later. Not always what I'd call a safe social strategy, but what can you do? If you never say anything, nothing ever happens. I'm sick of nothing happening, and I'm sick of ruts and being stuck in them.

“I dunno, Twi,” I hear myself say, as though the words are coming from somepony else's mouth. “It's just that when I was flying up there, for the first time in ages, I felt like my old self again. The me before I started dating Fluttershy, I mean.”

Twi says nothing. She just listens. Come to think of it, there's the big thing she's learned in the last two years or so – forget the wings and the tiara and all that stuff. Before, she'd have been racking her brains for generic advice and yapping my ear off. Now she sits there, expecting you to go on and tell her the whole story, and expecting it so hard you don't really have a choice in the matter.

“I don't know, Twi. I mean… I don't like the pony I was back then. But I liked being that pony. It was fun to get buzzed on adrenaline and do reckless stuff every day of the week. It was fun to get away with it. Aw, hay. I'm not making any sense at all here.”

“You're making plenty of sense, Dash. Keep going,” Twi says. Wish she'd tell me how any of this makes sense. I'm pretty much saying whatever comes into my head next here, total free association stuff. I'm barely making any more sense than Pinkie does half the time, and Pinkie's got the laws of physics themselves to contend with.

“I feel like… I dunno. That if I keep flying like I did today, I might go back to being the way I was back then. Or something like that, anyway. I don't know if I like it or not.”

“Rainbow Dash?”

Hoo, boy. When somepony says your name and just leaves it hanging like that, it's never a good sign. They're just waiting for you to say 'yeah?', and then bam! It's like they've got your permission to say whatever crazy, emotionally draining thing they're gonna say next. But then if you don't say yeah, they just stop talking. Clam up. And you always wonder, huh, what were they gonna say? You know you wouldn't have liked it, but better the draconeus you know, right? Right.

So, like an idiot, I say yeah.

“Which you do you think Fluttershy likes best?”she says, and turns to me with an expression she could have stolen straight from Celestia's face. Her eyes are bright and clear and terrifying, as though she's something more than the pony, something so big and so wise that my problems are nothing before her gaze. “The you she fell in love with two years ago? Or the you she's still in love with now?”

The words fill the air for almost a full minute. There isn't much I can say, and even if there was I wouldn't want to; I'm a little scared of breaking the spell. I guess it's true what they say: if you go to a wise mare looking for an answer, what you actually get is a question. But it's a real good one.

“Horseapples, Twi. When'd you get so scary?” I ask, when the silence has finally stretched on longer than we're comfortable. I'm kidding, but not entirely. If she pulls that look on me again, I'm heading for the nearest window and nuts to her teleportation.

She takes a second to scowl at me, but cracks a joke all the same. “When I started hanging around with you, of course.” I guess that's actually half true, huh? Me, and 'Shy, and all the others… In the end, we were just as much a part of how Twi turned out as her parents, or even the Princess. You make friends, then your friends make you. Kinda hard to see where Twilight's influence on me went, though. Besides the book thing.

Which me would Fluttershy like best? To be honest, I never really thought about it. I've changed a lot, and I always thought I was changing to suit her better, but I wonder if that's really the case. Sure, I've gotten quieter, and it's easier to live together now, but what if that wasn't actually what she wanted? What if I've just been going off on my own, thinking she'd like it?

I roll over and mutter something under my breath about Twi and her stupid quizzes, but I'm just distracting myself from the actual point of the question. Between the me she fell in love with, and the me she's still in love with, huh? In that case, the answer's obvious.

“The happiest one,” I announce to Twi, who blinks like she forgot her own question. Humour me a little harder, why don't you? “That's the me that Fluttershy would like best.”

Twilight gets up, closes her book with a snap (I don't think she even turned a single page) and walks back over to the bed. “Good. If you've realised that,” she says, “then put a little more effort into being that pony, and a little less effort into worrying about it. And for goodness' sake, come and speak to somepony the next time you're having problems. Don't just sit at home in that cottage and sink into your own head. Remember the reason you moved in with Fluttershy in the first place.”

Why I moved in with 'Shy, huh? That's a big one, and I don't want to think about it right now – not after the day I've had. For right now, I've gotten a little bit of the solution to the problem, and that's enough. But I also don't want to spend all day lying in Twi's spare bed, trying to not catch my death from her coffee. 

“Hey, Twi?” I ask.

“Yeah?”

Wait, I got her into one of those hanging name things! Quick, gotta think of something really disturbing to say. What would ruffle Twilight, though?

“I'm getting awful sick of your ceiling.”

Really? That's what I said? Such a waste. That could have been the best prank ever. Pinkie would be disappointed with me if she knew. There's gotta be some way to salvage this, though.

“Really, now. You are just a bundle of charm, you know that?” Twi retorts.

“In fact,” I continue,” “I think I'm gonna go outside and get some more flying done.”

Now that has the desired effect. You can tell when you've really zinged Twi, because she stops for a second and her eyes twitch, like she doesn't quite believe it's happened and she's expecting to wake up any second. 

“No. No, Dash. That isn't going to be happening. Not after the stuff you pulled,” she says, after the shock has passed through her system.

“Hey, it's logic, Twi. If I'm gonna be reckless anyway, I figure I should get all the stupid out of my system while I've still got your crazy teleportation thing as a safety net.” I stop and think for a second. “Besides, you can't stop me anyway. I can fly faster than you.”

“I can teleport!” she objects, hotly.

“Yeah, but I can just fly–“

“No, Dash. I. Can. Teleport. There is no way I'm going to let you go outside and do dangerous stunts that I know you aren't ready for. I'm sorry to have to do this, but I'm pulling rank.”

“What? You can't pull rank on me,” I scoff.

“Last I checked, 'Princess' trumps 'weather pony'. You're staying in bed,” Twi replies finally. Not quite finally enough for my tastes.

“Yeah, well, I'm pulling rank too. I'm a wielder of the Element of Harmony, saviour of Equestria. How am I supposed to do my hero thing when the royal family's being obstructive?” I retort. I haven't actually been doing the hero thing that much recently, but that's besides the point.

“So am I!”

“So's Fluttershy. I'm pulling her rank as well. She'll back me up. It's a democratic majority, Twi.”

“You... You can't pull Fluttershy's rank to make me let you go out there and break your neck! She'd never agree to it.”

I flash her a cheerful smirk. “Well in that case, I'm pulling AJ's instead. And Pinkie's, come to think of it.”

“Then I'm pulling Fluttershy's, and Rarity's, and Spike's. So it's three elements of harmony versus three elements of harmony, one member of royalty and a dragon. You lose, Dash.”

“Yeah, well, all the ponies on my weather team–”

“All the employees in Canterlot Castle!”

“All the ponies in Cloudsdale!”

“Ditto Canterlot!”

“And Ponyville, and Apploosa, and wherever Pinkie came from–”

“All the subjects of the royal family in Equestria! Including you!”

For a moment, I'm stumped. It's fun to see Twi get all riled up, though. She's so composed nowadays that I can't help messing with her. I mean, sure, it's great that we have this crazy guru, but sometimes I want our socially awkward bookworm back.

“You're pulling my own rank against me? Wow, Twi. I think you've gone mad with power,” I retort, and add in some tutting to really sell it. I'm beat, and we both know it–I was beat from the moment the argument started, really–but that doesn't mean I can't have some fun.

She frowns, obviously nowhere near as amused as I am with the conversation. “As if you gave me a choice. Really, Rainbow Dash, I'd be a lot more comfortable if you'd just rest for the remainder of today. Until Spike comes how, at the very least. I sent him off to get some medical supplies in case you'd injured yourself, and he'll only worry if you're not here when I get back.” 

“And playing off my sympathy for poor baby dragon? You really are ruthless. I guess I can stay in bed until he gets back,” I say, with a theatrical sigh I cribbed from Rarity. “But after that, I'm going flying again, and you have to watch. I wasn't kidding about getting all the stupid outta my system.”

For a moment, Twi makes a face like she wants to argue further, but it softens into the expression she makes when she knows I have to do a dumb thing to know why it's dumb. “Agreed,” she says, glances to the side; shortly, a copy of the nearest Daring Do book floats over and deposits itself onto my head. I guess I did annoy her after all.

“You can read that while we're waiting. Oh, and Rainbow Dash?” she continues, with a smile so sickly it could scare off a minotaur. “Drink. Your. Coffee.”

Oh, horseapples. This is gonna suck.