Author's Note
Dear Readers,
"What's it like to fly?"
This is gonna be good.
—NotARealPonydotcom
P.S. Also this:
Defying Gravity
NotARealPonydotcom presents
FLIGHT
Starring Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash
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"Deep breath in."
In.
"Deep breath out."
Out.
"OK, now open your eyes."
The dark behind my eyelids gives way to the bright green and blue of the field we're in. There's a gentle breeze playing with the grass. It feels nice running through my wings. In front of me, Rainbow Dash is smiling.
"You ready?"
I look up at the sky. There are few clouds sitting nearby. Crash pads, if I need them. But I'm not gonna need them, because once I get up there, I'm never gonna crash. Never again.
I look Rainbow Dash in the eye and smile.
"Let's do this."
She smiles back and nods. Her wings unfurl, and in one simple flap she launches into the air—I can't help but feel a twinge of jealousy as I watch her glide upwards. Twenty hooves above me, she stops and looks down, keeping her eyes locked with mine. Just like she said she would.
"Come on, Squirt," she calls down. "I want you at eye level, stat!'
I blow a lock of my mane out of my eyes and let stretch my wings out as far as possible. Even with all the training I've gotten, they're still on the small side. It doesn't bother me as much anymore, but I still get angry whenever I see Bulk Biceps flying around with Fluttershy. I mean, his wings are, like, half the size of his head! How in Celestia's name can he do it so easily? I mean, my wings look huge when they're put up next to his, and yet I haven't ever been able to hold my own in the air!
But, you know, I don't let that bother me. Much. And after today, I'm never gonna be bothered by it again.
"I don't see flapping!" Rainbow Dash yells down at me. Time to go.
Okay, let's run through this again: wings out, at an angle that'll make the wind my friend, not my enemy; hooves touching the ground, but not pressing into it; fill your lungs up—the more air you get inside, the less there'll be keeping you on the ground (I still don't know how that one makes any sense); think of weightlessness, think of being a bird, or a feather. I can only manage that first one, and every time I do that I get panicky, because the only weightlessness I've ever felt is the feeling of plummeting to the ground. So I decide to skip that step.
"Hey!" Rainbow Dash shouts. "What's taking so long?" She pauses. "You're not scared, are you?"
Ignore her, Scoots. She's just trying to coerce you, goad you to get you up there. Come on, come on, don't lose your cool.
I flap my wings. My hooves feel like they're rooted into the ground.
"Oh good, you can flap them!" Her yells are totally breaking my concentration. "I thought a cockatrice had come along and frozen you when I wasn't looking!"
You're really starting to get on my nerves, Dash. But of course I don't dare tell her this. That'll only make things harder for me.
I give another flap. Then another. My hooves are still glued to the grass.
"Come on, don't you want to answer that prissy Diamond Tiara's question?"
WHAT.
My head snaps up.
"What did you just say?"
Dash smirks and replies, "Yeah, I heard that jerk. Don't you want to answer her?"
And just like that, my focus on flying slides onto the back burner.
It had been the smallest thing. No huge lead up, no high-pitched giggles when she trotted past me, none of that. She just passed by in the hallway, and the question came sliding past her lips:
"What's it like to fly?"
I froze when she said it. When I turned, she was still walking away, but she turned and gave me a smile, a tiny, evil smile that made me want to crush her stupid little crown and force the wreckage down her throat.
"Oops," she said, trotting away, "sorry." And that was it.
Rainbow Dash had apparently heard that. And just when I'd forgotten it, too. Darn.
My eyes shut, and my head points down at the ground. I ignore everything, absolutely everything, and put all of my mind, body, and soul into my wings. They flap, slowly at first, then faster. I concentrate harder, so much that I begin to feel parts of my body go numb. When colorful bubbles burst in my vision, I flap harder. When my lungs ache for more air than I'm taking in, I flap harder. When I can't feel anything besides the wind I'm making with them, I flap harder.
In my mind's eye, I see Diamond Tiara, showing off that tiny, impish grin like it's a new toy her Daddy bought her.
Oops, sorry.
Oh, I'm gonna show that—
"Scoots!"
I hardly hear her, I'm so focused on flapping. There are only my wings and my desire to rise, the absolute need to get up off the ground. I flap and flap and flap, and soon I'm feeling the burn that Dash told me means my body wants me to stop. I ignore it, and everything else, and keep flapping.
"Scoots!"
She sounds even further away than when we'd started. Maybe she's gone higher, trying to goad me some more. Or maybe I'm passing out and I don't even realize it. That seems more likely, but I still don't care. I just try harder, give more energy, flap wider flaps, spread those feathers, etcetera etcetera and on and on until I can't try any harder, no matter how badly I want to, and Celestia-dammit I still don't feel like I'm in the air. My hooves are still rigid against the ground, and I don't feel the weightlessness that Dash always talked about, and somewhere in the back of my head I knew that I wouldn't be able to do it, I just ignored it, and now I'll have to face Diamond Tiara without an answer and—
Suddenly, there are hooves on my face.
"Scootaloo!"
I open my eyes. Rainbow Dash is right there, staring at me with this weird, half-crazy smile.
"Stop flapping and look down!"
I do, and I almost don't believe what I see. But it's there, all of it, hundreds of hooves below me: the ground.
Wait, hundreds of hooves?
"You kept going, Squirt." It's like she knows what I'm thinking! "I tried to call you down, but you were in some weird trance. You were moving pretty fast, kid."
Rainbow Dash called me fast. I think I might faint.
"Scootaloo? Are you okay?"
I'm staring at her, with my mouth hanging open like a dummy. I want to shut it and act cool, but instead, all I can do is totally break down and start crying. Way to act professional, Scoots. Luckily, I can still answer her:
"I'm flying, Rainbow Dash."
"I know, Squirt." Wait. Is she—Are those... tears in her eyes? "I'm up here with you."
I look around, ignoring the totally not-sad tears running out of my eyes. There's blue and white all around me, and for the first time, there's no basket or hooves holding me up or keeping me from going wherever the buck I want to. I did it. I finally did it. I'm in the air.
I'm free.
"Dash?"
"Yeah?"
I wipe away the liquid happy in my eyes and smile at her.
"I'm never coming down."
And like that, I'm off.
My wings seem to have forgotten how hard it was to flap, because once I'm in the air and know it, the burning is gone. Maybe it's been drowned out by the adrenaline, or maybe it was all in my head, but one thing's for sure: it's gone. I have a feeling I won't be getting it anymore.
Without any more hesitation, I go where I've always wanted to be: up. Up, above each of the clouds Dash set up as safety pillows. I can see all of Ponyville now, all the way from Sweet Apple Acres to the Carousel Boutique. If I wanted, I could go to both of those places right now, and show Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. I could go anywhere, actually. Anywhere at all. Maybe I'll go to Diamond Tiara's house and answer her stupid little question.
No. Not now. That would be a waste. I want to feel this.
Up again, further into the big blue. At this height, the clouds are nonexistent, and everything has a blue tint on it. The apple trees I'd been next to only minutes before are ghostly green specks, and the rest of the town is see-through, an illusion hiding only more of the big, beautiful blue that I'm disappearing into. Looking straight ahead, I can just barely make out Canterlot Castle. I remember visiting it as a filly and being amazed at its size. Now, though, it just looks... tiny. Just another ghost in a world of phantoms beneath my hooves.
The air is thin now, and freezing cold. I slow down, staying as focused as possible on the feeling of my wings. Once I come to a stop, I realize that my whole body is shaking, from my chattering teeth to my shivering feathers. Am I cold? No, of course not—it's the adrenaline making me like this. I can't even think straight anymore. Everything's beginning to blur...
Oh Celestia, this rush!
The wind feels wonderful, blowing through my wings. My hooves don't feel rigid anymore—they hang at my sides and beneath me, useless off the ground. Well, except for when I want to—
Ohmigosh. I can finally move clouds.
I look down and pinpoint a cloud, the nearest one to me. My body twists in the air, spinning to point me at the greenish blur that I guess is the ground, and I shoot downward. The sky marshmallow I've chosen as my target grows from a dot to a brush to a blob of white as I accelerate, further and further, faster faster faster!
I hit it head on, blasting through it like a bullet. My hooves twist and latch onto something that feels like a big cotton ball. I pull up and head back up to my good old vantage point at the top of the universe, holding tightly to the cloud chunk. Once I reach the thin air again, I glance down at the me-shaped hole I've made, then at the piece in my hooves. My joy bubbles up my throat and comes bursting out in peals of laughter.
Oh, Celestia, it's so good. So amazingly, unbelievably, abs-utively good!
"Hey!"
I spin around, and there she is. Dash is a few cloud-lengths away, leaning back on nothing. She looks like she's lounging on an invisible recliner. Even weirder, she looks genuinely... bored?
"I wanna see something!" she shouts.
"You—"
"Show me something..." She waves her hoof in the air. "...radical."
I don't get it, for just a moment. Then I remember all those hours we spent talking about what I could do and what I would do when I finally made it up here, and the biggest smile I've ever worn or will ever wear breaks out on my face.
"Aye aye, Cap'n," I shout back. Then I fly, and let the energy and adrenaline building inside of me burst out.
Diamond Tiara asked me what it feels like to fly. I want to answer her, really, I do. But once I truly feel it, I know there's no way I'll ever be able to explain it to her. It's impossible to describe it, the feeling of the wind against you as you blast through it, with it, against it. There's no word for the tingle in your feathers as you spin off into the sky, twirling endlessly in the blue, or the sizzle in your wing bones as the sun, growing closer and closer as you go higher and higher, bears down on you. Feel its heat, its loving, life-giving heat, pressing against your stomach as you turn your back to the ground—unbelievable. I could never begin to properly describe the emotions that utterly consume you when you slow, slow, sloooooooowwww dowwwn and reach the apex of your climb, and the weight leaves your body, and for a moment you weigh nothing at all.
This is the weightlessness Dash told me about. No fear, no plummeting. Just a moment of remarkable, gravity-defying bliss.
My back arches, and with my stomach still catching the golden rays of Celestia's namesake, I let my head drop where gravity tells it to. Under me, the world turns, a faraway shimmer of green. It looks so lonely down there, where all the earthbound ponies are. Slowly, my body flips, and the sun beats down on my legs, then my hooves, then my flanks. I'm pointed like a unicorn's horn at the green splotch. There is no sound, no movement. Time, for a single second, stands perfectly and utterly still.
Then I fall, and my thoughts blur into a symphony of sensations.
Whistling wind. My breath, so loud and so quiet at the same time. A scream pierces the sky, and it's mine, but I'm not afraid—for the first time, I think I'm screaming with absolute joy. The adrenaline, the rush of absolute, pure excitement and ecstasy that burst in me, molten silver that makes me invincible, it's all so much, and it's all so real. I'm not waking up, I'm not fantasizing in the classroom again—I'm flying. Oh Celestia, I'm flying, with my own two wings, and it's the most wonderful thing in the world. I'm so happy, up here in the sky. So blissful.
Spin. Spin and twirl, and flap and fold and fling yourself into the atmosphere, the stratosphere, higher and higher into the air, until the sun is burning your coat and there's not enough air to breathe anymore, and it's still not high enough, because you want to see it all. See forests become little patches of moss, see lakes and oceans made into puddles by your massive height, see the world fade beneath you like a pebble dropped into the biggest, bluest ocean of all time. See it all shrink down and then let it all come rushing back up at you, let the ground come speeding up to meet you. Feel the elements—the moisture from the sweat beading on your skin and the vapor hanging in the air, the winds you create simply by existing in that moment, the heat pouring from your body as you move—feel them pushing against you, rushing past you, all around you. Let the ecstasy take hold, the total rush of electricity running up your spine as the world rushes forward as you fall, fall, fall until you're only hooves, no, inches from the ground and then pull up! Back into the air, and the world blurs as you turn, and your vision becomes nothing but blobs of dynamic, vivid color, and your turn makes the sky above a grassy plain and the ground below an endless blue sea, full of puffy, white islands. Soar all the way back, miles and miles down into that great big blue, and turn again and look at the tiny planet spinning on its own, and do it all again, this time with your eyes shut, and then maybe you'll understand how the feeling of flight. But only a little bit, especially if you compare yourself to me. Because I know what it is to have the power but not control it. And now...
Nothing will ever bring me down.
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I lie with Dash on a cloud, staring up at the stars and the moon. Hours of soaring in the sir with her, without a care in the world, and now it's ended with this.
"Was it good?" she asks. Her hoof wraps around my shoulders, and each time her wing brushes mine I shiver. That, I think, is never gonna go away.
"Good?" I look at her. "Good can't do it justice."
She chuckles. "Yeah, it's pretty sweet." The smile I like to call the Sisterhooves Smile (in honor of my dear friend Sweetie) appears on her face as she says, "I'm so proud of you, Scootaloo."
"It's because of you, you know. You never—never gave up on me." Aw, crap, I'm crying again!"
"What, you really think I'd do that to you? I'm the Element of Loyalty, for crying out loud!"
"You... I..." Oh come on, Scoots! You can say it! "I love you so much, Rainbow Dash."
There—now we're both crying.
"I love you too, kid." She kisses my forehead. "Good work today."
"And harder work t-tomorrow, right?"
She smirks. "Hey, that's a good one! Mind if I borrow it?"
I shake my head, feeling a huge blush hit my cheeks. I pull her close, and bury my muzzle in her shoulder.
"Woah! Take it easy with the snuggling, kid!"
But I don't care. This is how my day is gonna end. Not with a bunch of congratulations from Sweetie and Bloom. Not with an "in-your-face" answer for Diamond Tiara. Nope; it ends with my sister Dashie, struggling to get out of a grip that I'll never let her break.
That's how I end a perfect day.
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THE END
