“It hasn’t always been about the Wonderbolts, you know.” Rainbow Dash looked up at the full moon, high above her cloud home. “Well… okay, not always just about them.” She chuckled slightly, snuggling up against the powerful form of her companion, resting her brashly colored mane against deep blue fur.
“I am not entirely sure what this has to do with my question,” Princess Luna chided her gently.
“Lemme think about this, okay?” Rainbow sighed. “I’m no good with words, y’know?” She looked back up at the moon, only the highest and thinnest clouds still drifting across its face.
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to be a Wonderbolt, but that wasn’t all,” Rainbow continued. “I wanted to prove I was the best flyer… not just in Ponyville, or in Cloudsdale, or even in Equestria. I wanted to prove I was the best flyer ever. And well, there’s more than one Wonderbolt, right? So just making it onto the team… it’d prove I was one of the best. But not the best. I think that’s when I started thinking about it.
“I wanted to do something nopony else ever did before. I’d pulled off a sonic rainboom, but somepony else must have done that, or how would we have legends about it, right? And then, one night, it just came to me. I wanted to fly to the moon.” Luna stretched out one mighty wing, wrapping it around the smaller pegasus with a gentle smile.
“I know, I know, you wouldn’t believe the lecture I got from Twilight when I let her know about it, right?” Rainbow laughed. “But… nopony had done it before, not without magic. And I wasn’t gonna cheat like that. I just thought that if I flew high enough, hard enough, I’d get there.” The athlete became more somber, resting her head against the Princess next to her.
“I tried, too. Not just once, either. I was only a filly then, y’know? Still hot off being the first pony in living memory to do a sonic rainboom too. The first time I tried, I got too tired and I kinda crashed when my wings gave out. I’m just lucky I landed in the yard, where it was all clouds. I was so mad at my wings for that one,” Dash admitted. Luna politely fought not to snicker as she pictured Rainbow Dash head-deep in what Cloudsdale called a lawn, tail flicking irritably above her.
“Yeah, yeah… just don’t ask my Mom about that, please? I think she still has pictures.” Rainbow blushed brightly, quickly trying to move on. “I learned my lesson though. The next time, and every time after that, I tried to get around whatever I’d done wrong the last time. I made sure I could make hops from cloud to cloud… brought a bag of trail mix and Nickers bars with me the time after that, for when I got hungry… worked out so I could actually carry the bag while I was flying so high… you know, that sort of thing. I promised Mom that I’d stop after the time when the booster rockets set my tail on fire. Didn’t help that they were really just Romane candles strapped under my wings like a belt.“
“Snrk!” Luna couldn’t help herself, picturing the little filly in one failed attempt after another, all leading up to the described incident. To her credit, she’d tried, but picturing Rainbow Dash flailing around the yard while fireworks sprayed everywhere was just too much. Rainbow grumbled something under her breath, pressing her head back down to the clouds beneath them until Luna had regained her composure.
“I am sorry, Rainbow, but that did sound hilarious,” Luna offered apologetically.
“Not until after my tail grew back,” Rainbow countered. “That wasn’t really the last time I tried though… just the last time I tried until I moved out. By then, I was older, and my wings were a lot stronger. And… well… I wasn’t just going to try and do it for glory anymore,” she admitted.
“Oh?” Luna’s ears pricked up at the suggestion of a deeper motivation, wondering what it might be.
“Yeah… not really a good time in my life, to be honest,” Rainbow admitted with a sigh. “This was when I was just starting to figure out… well, the whole ‘not into stallions’ thing. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that is not cool in Cloudsdale. I guess… I kind of understood where you’d been coming from.” Rainbow sighed deeply, remembering those years. “Everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever do, and none of it would really matter if anypony found out. All they’d see was the big, mean, scary filly-fooler!” She raised her forehooves in mock-menace, waggling them about in the air. Luna squeezed her tightly against her body, but let her continue.
“So I guess I thought I could see why you went and became the big, mean, scary monster that some ponies thought you were. I used to dream about following you up there, finding you on the moon… that we’d just be together there, two monsters, and maybe that we’d be able to....”
“…To stop being monsters, at least to each other?” Luna prompted after a long moment of silence. Rainbow nodded, closing her eyes to hide how they were watering just remembering the pain.
“The last time I tried, it was the night Gilda outed me for breaking up with her,” she continued after a long moment. “I’d been dropped out of flight school, my parents and I had just had a big, screaming fight about it, I thought they hated me. I was just standing there, at the edge of our lot, looking up at the moon and wishing I could be with you there, wishing I could just get away from my wreck of a life. I started flying, and this time, my wings didn’t give out. I kept going, higher and higher as the air got colder and thinner.”
Rainbow remembered that flight. She remembered the way her heart had hammered, fighting to keep her wings and brain going. The way her lungs had heaved, fighting for what little oxygen was left at those tremendous heights. The bone-numbing ache of the cold, deeper and more forbidding than anything pegasus magic could really stand against. The way her very fur had turned against her at the end, her sweat freezing into it and weighing her down as she struggled for each extra inch of altitude.
The exhilaration as she finally reached a point high enough in the sky where she didn’t need a cloud to rest, because she’d finally managed to outfly gravity itself. Just hovering there, at the very edge of space, free of the threat of falling.
And then the crushing realization that she still had a seemingly endless void to cross before she reached her goal.
“I should have died,” she whispered. “I think I maybe even wanted to, if I couldn’t get there, couldn’t reach the moon… reach you. But you wouldn’t let me, would you?”
Floating there, despair and triumph fighting each other inside of her head. Despair at having failed one last time, of never completing that one impossible task she’d set herself. And yet, triumph, because she knew she’d come closer than anypony else ever had, even if she’d never prove it. Closing her eyes, letting blackness take her as her heartbeat slowed to a crawl, fighting vainly to keep her alive.
And then, out of the blackness, a sense of warmth and love that she’d never felt before, and felt certain she would never feel again. A gentle push back towards the life she’d literally tried to leave behind, and a parting message she’d never be quite certain she’d actually heard, or if she’d hallucinated it in her feebly dreaming state.
“’One night, Rainbow.’ That’s what you said to me,” Rainbow murmured. Luna was looking down at her in shock, remembering herself, remembering one of the countless dreams she’d had while trapped inside of Nightmare Moon.
When she’d first seen Rainbow Dash as herself, she had thought it uncanny that one of her saviors had so resembled her dream-figment.
“That’s why I finally asked you out,” Dash concluded, looking up at Luna and leaning in close, touching their lips together tenderly. “Because I wanted one more chance to touch the moon.”
Their lips met again, hungrily this time. And somewhere far beneath their shared perch, a lavender unicorn smiled as the night sky seemed to be painted with the colors of far-off galaxies shining just a little more brightly.
Author's Note
The prompt asked for Rainbow to finally get a chance with somepony she's always looked up to. I was certain that Dash would be paired with Wonderbolts and others of the Mane 6 all you could want, but then I wondered... have I *ever* read a Dash/Luna fic?
After all - what's the greatest achievement in the history of flight, if not claiming the moon for your own?
