Like Sisters, Probably

The next day, I tried to track down Dash, but she was surprisingly difficult to find for a pony who literally left behind a trail with her name on it. At about ten o’clock I stopped in at Sugarcube Corner for a late breakfast. Pinkie Pie said she didn’t know where Rainbow Dash was, so I knew Dash was trying to avoid me. There’s no way Pinkie wouldn’t have been able to tell me where Dash was unless she was under Pinkie Pie swear not to, or something.

I ate my breakfast muffin without really paying much attention to it, and got up to go as soon as I was finished. I thought of just going home, but I’d probably do nothing but think about Dash if I did that, so I bought another muffin and headed off for Carousel Boutique. Sweetie probably wouldn’t even be up yet, but there was nowhere else I could think to go.

For a second I considered going over to Sweet Apple Acres to get Applejack to help me find Dash. I knew she would’ve helped me if I even told her half of what was up, and she could probably track her down without too much trouble. I didn’t really like asking AJ for stuff very often, though. I mean, she’s always really busy at the farm, and even though she would say it was no trouble at all, I knew it probably would be. At least, I felt like I’d be troubling her. Apple Bloom never seemed to worry about it, but with her away, I just felt weird asking AJ for things.

I walked through the door into Carousel Boutique. “Welcome to Carousel—oh, hello, Scootaloo,” said Rarity as she saw it was me. It wasn’t quite dismissive, the way she said it, but pretty close. “Sweetie isn’t up yet, but feel free to go wake her. She’s slept in quite late enough already.”

“Alright,” I said, already on my way upstairs. It wasn’t that Rarity and I didn’t get along—it’s just that, well, we didn’t really get along. I couldn’t ever figure her out, I guess, is what it came down to. On top of that, the fact that I’d obviously take Sweetie’s side no matter what the issue between them was—and with their relationship having been strained right to the limit after they’d been living under the same roof for almost a year, those weren't exactly uncommon—it managed to put a fair bit more distance between me and Rarity. She had tried to get me on her side, once, to try and get Sweetie to change something about the way she was living her life. I can’t even remember what it was about, but I know I had refused Rarity in a way that left little room for any kind of small-talk between us, after that.

I entered Sweetie’s room to find her lying mostly diagonally on her bed with the blankets crumpled up around her. One pillow was almost near her head, but the other was on the floor. Bloom and I always used to bug her about that at sleepovers and stuff. She went to bed with everything all neat and perfect, and somehow ended up like that. Don’t even get me started about back when we all would sleep in the same bed.

I picked the pillow up off the floor and tossed it at where I thought her head probably was. “Wake up, Sweets!” I didn’t throw it very hard or anything, but she gave an annoyed grunt and spun over to glare at me, even though her eyes were still mostly shut.

“What?” she snapped. She was great in the mornings.

“I brought you a muffin,” I said, and put the muffin down on her bedside table. She grunted at me and pulled the covers over her head. I picked up one of her comics—most she kept at my place, but there were a few lying around—and sat on the edge of the bed. I randomly flipped through the comic, which I’d already read, while Sweetie continued to not get up. I put the book down.

“So, yeah,” I started, “I want to know what you think of this: yesterday, Rainbow Dash—”

“Tell me you did not wake me up just to talk about Rainbow Dash.”

“What? No, I—” I totally had. “Whatever! Seriously though, this is actually bugging me—”

“Alright, alright,” said Sweetie, and she lifted her head up, still keeping her eyes mostly shut, though. “But go downstairs and make me a coffee and bring it up to me, then I’ll listen to Rainbow Dash stuff.”

“What? Hey, but—” I stopped myself and closed my mouth. She held my gaze evenly for another moment or two, then I sighed and went to make her a coffee.

I had to ask Rarity where pretty much everything was—I could hardly remember where I kept things in my own house—which was a bother. She gave a judgement-passing little frown at the fact Sweetie was making me get her coffee, and that kind of bugged me. I knew Sweetie didn’t care, but it bugged me anyway. And then I had nothing to do except stand awkwardly in the kitchen while I waited for the coffee to brew. It was probably a good idea to give Sweetie a chance to wake up a bit, though, before being in the same room with her for any amount of time.

When I got back up to Sweetie’s room with her coffee, she was sitting up and had started on the muffin.

“Thanks! Oh, it’s perfect!” she said after she took a sip. I knew just how much cream and sugar she liked—one of several important tricks to know for when you find yourself needing Sweetie in a good mood. I just sat and let her eat for a bit. When she finished the muffin, she sat back with her coffee.

“Alright,” she said.

“Alright?” I repeated.

“Talk about Dash now.” She could’ve just said that instead of “alright.”

“Okay, so yeah—she wouldn’t show me the new tricks she’s working on!” I waited for the appropriate reaction from her, but Sweetie looked at me as though she expected me to have to explain further. “She always shows me the tricks she’s working on. And when I called her on it, she bailed on me. Just took off! Twice!”

“ ‘Called her on it’?” Sweets looked at me skeptically. “What exactly did you say? You know, you can be a bit tactless sometimes. And by ‘a bit’ I mean—”

“What are you trying to say, that Rainbow Dash is sensitive, or something? Rainbow Dash? She’s the only pony more awesome about that kind of thing than I am!”

“Not all ponies can take what they dish out,” she said, as if she was explaining something to a little foal. She was getting hung up on things that had nothing to do with either Dash or me.

“Sweetie, which conversation are you listening to? The one where it’s me and Dash that we’re talking about?”

“What did you say to her?” She was really stuck on that.

“Jeez, alright. Well, yesterday I asked if it was because Lightning Dust was psyching her out that she didn’t want to show me her tricks. Oh, I also kind of asked her if she was too scared about the trial to show off her tricks—but that was just because she was going to clam up, and I had to say something to get her talking. She knew I didn’t actually think she was nervous, or anything. I told her so. I even apologized for suggesting she might’ve been nervous, and made sure to say that I knew she was way too awesome for that.”

“Did she say anything after you suggested she was nervous?”

“No, not exactly.”

“And she left right after that?”

“Well, yeah.”

Sweetie started at me for a few moments, her brow straight. “Maybe you should go ask her if she’s nervous about the Wonderbolts thing. And apologize about the Lightning Dust stuff, too, while you’re at it.”

“But—Lightning Dust is evil! Also, it’s Rainbow Dash! There’s no way she’s nervous,” I said.

“Rainbow Dash is just a pony.”

“Yeah, and Celestia is just an alicorn. Anyway, Dash is way older than us and everything! Like, mature and stuff. She’s way too awesome for any of that.”

“Rainbow is around the same age as my sister,” Sweetie said. I did not want to get Sweetie talking about her sister.

I just sat back and didn’t say anything else. Sweetie really wasn’t getting it, and I couldn’t think of any better way to explain it to her. It’s not like going up and asking Dash if she was nervous would be any kind of a good idea. Since the conversation was headed nowhere, I dropped it and started talking about the latest issue of Stables which I had read the night before, and which I knew Sweetie would still be wanting to geek out about. She was, and we ended up talking about that, and then other stuff like that for some time. She had been done with her coffee for a while when I asked if she wanted to go out and watch me do tricks, or even just walk around in the park or something. I felt like I was going to explode if I stayed sitting for any longer, and being alone to think about stuff still seemed like a bad idea.

Sweetie said going to the park sounded alright, so that’s what we did. We just talked about whatever. It was a pretty nice spring day, too. Everything had just gotten around to being grown-in, and it was almost starting to look like summer. I started to calm down a bit.

As we were walking through the park, we passed a sort of structure-thing in the middle of it where musicians played sometimes, and it was Lyra who was playing there. We stopped to listen for a bit, and after only a few minutes Lyra spotted Sweetie and got her to come up to do a song together with her. The Ponyville music scene was pretty small, so any pony that could hold an instrument or carry a tune not only knew each other, but probably had played together at some point.

It was a really casual kind of deal, with only a few ponies standing around, most just drifting by, stopping for a while to listen, then carrying on. It was nice, and I could sit just a few feet away from them. I loved hearing Sweetie sing, but I hated going to see her at those fancy kinds of concerts and stuff. It felt weird, somehow. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say to her after. “Yeah! It was awesome, you were great!” That’s just what everypony said, and it didn’t really feel like it meant anything. I still went to her concerts pretty often, but hearing her sing like this was way better—she could just look at me and tell I was enjoying it, or something, and I wouldn’t have to try and tell her so, after. I hardly ever got a chance to listen to her like that, though, and I could never get her to sing for me when it was just the two of us.

Then I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see a rainbow trail just a ways away. It couldn’t have been more that a few blocks. My heart leapt, and I glanced over at Sweetie. She had seen it too, and gave me a little smile and a nod, so I took off.

I spotted Dash just down the street from where the rainbow had ended, and she seemed like she was just walking nowhere in particular. She must have flown only to hop over a block or so. She really was avoiding me. I darted over and landed just in front of her.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” She was a bit shifty, but was mostly pretending like it was no big deal that I had tracked her down. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Yeah,” she said finally, “about yesterday—”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Show me those tricks?” I meant for it to sound like a suggestion, but I’m not sure how it actually came out. Either way, I was pretty sure whatever kind of excuse Dash’d make about yesterday would probably just piss me off. Suddenly, I didn’t really care about the exact reason she’d bailed on me. I didn’t want to hear her say how she wasn’t nervous, and I didn’t care that she was avoiding me. I just wanted to see the tricks she was working on.

Dash looked at me for a minute.

“Alright,” she said.

I followed her as she took off, and she flew us off quite a ways out of town. There were definitely no other ponies around, and I was pretty sure you couldn’t even see the spot from town. We landed, and she kept her back to me for a second. When she turned around, she had her normal cocky grin on.

“Ready to see some awesome stuff, kid?”

“Yeah!” I said. I was getting pretty excited.

She darted up into the air, and as I had thought, the trick she did was even more amazing than the one from a few days ago. I was still completely stunned as she finished it—expecting something and actually seeing it were different things.

However, usually during Dash’s tricks, she gave off this feeling of complete control. She made the tricks look ridiculously easy and effortless, and it was part of what made them so amazing. But during a few parts of the trick she had just performed, it almost felt like she barely managed to pull them off. She wobbled awkwardly at one of the transitions, and at another part I noticed she had had to take an extra split-second than what felt natural to get herself set up for the next part. It had been a long time since I’d seen one of Dash’s works-in-progress that was quite that sloppy, but at the same time it was definitely the wildest trick I had ever seen her pull off.

I could see why she had been so hesitant to show the trick to me, but that fact definitely just pissed me off even more. If anything, I thought she was more awesome for trying a stunt that was that crazy, but it was pretty clear she didn’t understand that. The trick really was crazy, though.

Above the fact that most of those moves should’ve been impossible to pull off in that sequence, a bunch of them were really dangerous, too. For a normal pegasus, I mean. Like, I knew that fliers were banned from even trying a few of those moves in flight school—Dash herself had told me so when she was teaching me to fly—and some of those were still off limits even to advanced stunt fliers. There was no doubt that Dash was flying with the big leagues.

Dash went immediately into her next trick. I could tell right away that it was going to completely blow away the other two tricks I’d already seen. It was mad. The sheer speed she went into some of the maneuvers with was staggering—the wing-strength it must have taken to keep some of those moves together floored me. I knew Dash was basically a super-pony, but this was unreal. I’ll admit that I was actually a bit worried. I’d be the last pony to ever doubt if Dash could pull something off—so if I was doubting her, I knew there wasn’t a pony anywhere that wouldn’t have been. She spun around as she went into the last part of the trick, and right away I recognized what she was doing. It was the start of an upside-down inside-out loop. Those were the hardest kinds of loops to do. I’d seen her do them before, but never one as large as the one she was going into, judging by her entry angle.

What makes upside-down inside-out loops so hard to pull off is the fact that you have to start them by diving downwards, and then continue curving down and around to get to the bottom of the loop with your belly up and back parallel to the ground, going the opposite direction that you started out going. Obviously, what makes it so impossible is the fact that a pony would need to somehow get enough lift while upside down to not only pull up, but come right back up and around to the top to complete the loop. Since a pony can’t exactly flap their wings while upside-down and expect that to do anything, the only way to pull off the stunt is to go into it with enough speed for your momentum to carry you through it.

That’s what makes it so dangerous—if you screwed it up, it meant you ended up shooting towards the ground at your absolute top speed with almost no way to pull out, on account of you being upside down. The only ones I’ve ever seen done were loops that weren’t much more than a meter or two in diameter. The smaller the loop, the less speed you’d need to go into it with in order to pull you through it. The one Dash was doing was huge. Like, ten times bigger than any I’d seen. And the speed she was going into it at was unbelievable—it was the kind of stunt where a pegasus could end up dead.

I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t make any noise come out of it. It seemed like Dash was looping around forever as she dove into the freefall, then pitched past straight downwards, curving back until she was inverted. She leveled out at the bottom, but with her belly facing up to the sky. Compared to the other times I’d seen her or different ponies pull off the stunt, it looked from the ground like she was doing it in super-slow motion due to the sheer size of the loop.

Dash gradually pulled up from the bottom of the loop, flying upside-down and without even flapping her wings once, and it looked like she was bending reality or something. This kind of stunt was supposed to be one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of tricks. The way Dash was doing it seemed to be breaking several different rules at once. The upside-down inside-out loop was typically a ridiculously showy maneuver—the kind a pegasus learns just so they can tell other ponies that they can do one. It’s not one you’d see in most competitions, because of the sort of infamy it’d picked up for being a go-to move for cocky pegasi who think they’re way better than they actually are. And Dash was making every single one of them look like a complete foal.

Dash reached all the way back to the top of the loop—her rainbow trail confirming she had returned exactly to the point where she had started it—and I dropped to my haunches. I was shaking all over. Just as I was about to cheer like I had never cheered before, panic shot through me. Dash wasn’t stopping there. She was going back down for a second loop.

Thinking about it now, I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course Dash wouldn’t settle for the largest upside-down inside-out loop any pegasus had ever pulled when she could go for the largest double upside-down inside-out loop any pony had ever even attempted. At that moment, though, I was panicking too much to be thinking about that. I found my voice and cried out to her.

It wasn’t that it just seemed impossible for her to pull off a second loop—it actually was. She didn’t have nearly enough speed left. I could tell from where I was sitting. I cried out again, but she didn’t bail out. Dash managed to get to the bottom of the loop, but as she started pulling up, she lost it and spun out of it. Though it looked like she had been doing the maneuver slowly, I knew she must’ve gone into it a hair short of rainboom speed to pull it off the first time.

Dash came tearing out, perpendicular to the part of the curve she was at—which ended up being not even forty-five degrees off of straight downwards. I had this crazy urge to go try and catch her or something, but that’d add my oncoming speed to hers, and it’d actually be worse than if she just hit the ground. It happened so fast, I’m not sure I’d even have made it, anyway.

At the last moment, Dash snapped out her wings, regaining control, and eased herself into the crash. She still hit the ground hard enough that I could hear the impact from where I was standing, and she must’ve skid along the ground for ten feet before coming to a stop, but she had turned a fatal crash into a rough landing. I nearly dropped right there, I’ll admit. Everything spun for a minute. It took me a few moments to pull myself together, and when I did, I realized I was already in the air and flying as fast as I could to where Dash had landed.

She was already back on her hooves by the time I got there. She winced as she stretched her wings and rubbed her neck. She looked up at me as I landed a few paces away from her and the trench she had dug. She was totally fine. I couldn’t believe that I thought for even a minute that she wouldn’t be. That didn’t keep me from shaking all over, though, but I put on a casual grin.

“Sweet wipeout.”

“That was nothing,” she said, returning my grin and only wincing a bit. “I didn’t even bounce once.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Dash wipe out. I’d almost forgotten how often she used to. There was a reason the library still kept its upper windows open during the day, though.

“I couldn’t believe that upside-down inside-out loop!” I gushed. “Seriously, that was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And you almost had the double!”

“But I didn’t,” she said. She stepped away from her trench. She barely limped or anything, but she still had the same look on her face. I realized it wasn’t from any kind of pain.

“Hey, come on! You were bucking close! You’re going to be able to—”

“Scoot, I don’t know if I’m going to be ready for the Alpha Squadron trial.” Dash sounded beat. It really worried me.

“What? So don’t do the double, then! The single was amazing enough on its own!”

“The single’s cool, but it’s not enough to get me that spot. It’s a spot with the absolute best of Equestria’s best I’m trying out for. I’m not sure if that trick is much better than some of the stuff Lightning Dust’s going to do.”

“Dash, what are you—?”

“She said something that got to me, alright?” she snapped.

There it was. I knew it.

Dash admitting that seemed to justify everything I thought about Lightning Dust. I had been right about her! But Dash turned away. She still had a look on her face that was really freaking me out. As much as I wanted to say it, I swallowed back my “I told you so.” That was really badly not what Dash needed right now.

“Well, if one loop’s not good enough, then get the second loop working,” I said. She looked up at me, an unimpressed look on her face. “Come on, why are you being all like this?” I continued. “Is it because you wiped out trying to do a trick that’s impossible? You used to do that trying things like that all the time!” I tried to sound reassuring or motivational or something, but even to me it just sounded whiny. “You always make impossible moves work. You’re just forgetting what it’s like to be trying something that challenges you so much, is what it is!”

She didn’t say anything, so I kept on. “Seriously, if it’s not hard, it means you’re just going through the motions without actually getting better. It’s because you’re failing that you know you’re doing something that’s making you more awesome!” I was just regurgitating stuff she had said to me in the past. Dash raised an eyebrow, a slight smile touching her face. She knew it, too.

“Come on, you just gotta try it again,” I said. An icy tingle of fear shot through me at the thought of watching her wipe out like that again. But she was Rainbow Dash. “How long until the Wonderbolts trial?”

“A week today.”

“Lots of time! You pretty much have it down, anyway.” The whole situation was pretty ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous for saying the stuff I was, but I couldn’t just stop and let Dash keep that look on her face. “Come on, just try running the loops once more. And your trick before that was pretty sloppy, so let’s see that again, too.”

Dash laughed.

“Hey, I’m being serious,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” said Dash. “That’s why it’s funny.”

“Whatever! You’re the one having some crazy kind of breakdown or something when you’re supposed to be showing off to your little-sister figure. Come on, are you a Wonderbolt or not? What did Dust say, that you were trying to pull off a move that can’t be done? Did you mention to her that they call you ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Dash’ for some kind of reason?”

“Alright, alright!” Dash said. She was still laughing at me a bit. “I’ll run them again, coach! Ease up on me!”

“Oh shut up and get in the bucking sky,” I grumbled, blushing, but I couldn’t help but grin a bit, too.

Dash tried the loops three more times, and wiped out on the second loop each time. Each time my heart went up in my throat and I felt like I was going to throw up or scream or start crying or something as she was about to crash. I didn’t, though, and each time Dash recovered before she crashed and wasn’t worse off than a few bruises and some swallowed dirt. After the third time, neither of us said anything, but it was kind of a given that we were both done for the day. I was a nervous wreck, so I couldn’t imagine how Dash felt.

After that we went to The Salt and Apple and we both ordered the stiffest drink the place could legally make for us. Neither of us really had anything to say, so we just sat in silence. Dash put her wing around me like she used to do back when I was a filly, and everything was fine between us again.