The Art of Falling

Rainbow Dash didn’t move. The floor didn’t move. The walls and the ceiling didn’t move. The bed didn’t move. The lamp shone with a dull, static, fluorescent glow. The window stayed closed so no breeze could drift in to stir the curtains or rustle her mane. The sheets moved, but only barely, in an almost imperceptible rhythm of rises and falls along with her chest. The room kept utterly still and quiet. No one talked, no one laughed, no one flew, no wings fluttered, and no wind blew. Trapped in that emptiness of sound and movement lay Rainbow Dash. Her broken hooves had shackled her to the silence. Her wings ached.

Dash heard hoofsteps outside the door. Her body froze and each of her muscles tensed. She perked her ears, straining to listen. She scarcely dared to breathe for fear of covering the sound of the hoofsteps.

The steps began far away. They came closer, grew louder, and then louder still. They came to her door. Dash’s heart stopped. Her breath caught.

But the door did not open. The steps did not stop. They continued on, away, fading and quieting.

Rainbow Dash sighed. Stupid doctor ponies. They shouldn’t have been allowed to prance in front of her door like that, like it was some kind of hilarious game, laughing at her all up and down the hallway.

She turned and looked out the window. It was dark out. Rainbow Dash scowled. She hated the night. Everyone went away and stole into their homes together as soon as the sun went down. The streets and parks and restaurants became quiet and empty. If Dash stayed out at night, she couldn’t talk to anyone or even just sit up on a cloud and hear them walking by below her. The only way to stave it off was to stay the night with a friend, but even they lay in bed and went quiet sometime, and she couldn't come over every night.

She heard hoofsteps again. She froze and her ears perked. The steps came to her door. They stopped. The door handle turned. Dash’s eyes widened as she watched the door swing open into the room.

A nurse stepped inside.

Rainbow Dash slumped down against the bed. She made herself very small underneath the covers, so maybe the nurse wouldn’t see her at all and just go away. Dash’s eyes were wet for some stupid reason. She wiped at them with her wings before the nurse could get a good look at her.

“Would you like me to turn out the light?” the nurse asked. “Most of the other patients are going to bed now.”

“Sure.”

The nurse walked up to the lamp, but stopped again and looked down at Rainbow Dash. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

The nurse lingered. “Your friends didn’t come over tonight?”

Rainbow Dash sniffled.

“Well, good night, then,” the nurse said. She turned off the light and walked back out of the room.

Rainbow Dash lay alone in the dark.

No, none of her friends had come back, even Fluttershy. Rainbow Dash had told them not to come back, and they had listened. Dash said the dumbest things sometimes. She wished no one would ever listen to anything she said. She had just been acting stupid and angry, and no one ever meant anything they said when they were stupid and angry.

But her friends still left and they didn’t come back. Rainbow Dash didn’t blame them. She couldn’t get angry at someone for doing something she told them to do. But she just couldn’t stop thinking. Dash thought, and she thought, and she thought. Not much else to do while strapped down to a bed for hours and hours and with hours and hours still to go. Particularly, she thought about what Applejack and Rarity had said to her that morning when she had been too angry to listen. She thought about the Wonderbolts, too.

No Wonderbolt had ever sustained an injury during a live show. Throughout the whole multi-century history of the Wonderbolts, it had never happened. Not once.

Rainbow Dash injured herself during her shows all the time. Not all the time, obviously, but often enough for ponies to notice. Often enough for her friends to worry.

Like Rarity had said, the Wonderbolts only hurt themselves when they had accidents, and they never had accidents outside of practice, when mistakes were allowed. Fleetfoot’s book said they practiced for hours. Every day of every week. They would practice a new routine again and again and again, starting with the simplest maneuvers and slowly working their way up to the advanced ones. They practiced a routine so many times they all got sick of it, Fleetfoot said. They practiced until each member could perform every stunt and maneuver flawlessly. Not just flawlessly, but safely. They practiced until they eliminated nearly all possibility of risk during their shows. They couldn’t ever eliminate all the risk. That simply wasn’t possible. But they still tried, and they didn’t get into accidents during shows.

When Rainbow Dash learned a new routine, she started with the most dangerous possible maneuver first, because those ones were the most fun. She showed off her new stunts to other ponies as soon as she could, because showing them off to other ponies was even more fun. She didn’t try to be safe, and she got into accidents. She hurt herself while her friends watched.

None of that was in Fleetfoot’s book.

She couldn’t blame it on flying. Flying did mean falling, but the Wonderbolts flew, too. They did the same kind of flying she did, sometimes even more dangerous. They didn’t fall, and she did.

Her friends had seen. It scared them. They tried to tell her, and she told them to go away. And worse than anything else, they had listened to her. Because that’s what good friends were supposed to do. They listened.

If Rainbow Dash really wanted to be a Wonderbolt, she couldn’t get into these kinds of accidents. The Wonderbolts weren’t reckless. They were controlled. A Wonderbolt couldn’t spend weeks at a time in the hospital, or they would never practice with the team. A Wonderbolt who never practiced couldn’t perform. A Wonderbolt who didn’t perform with the team wasn’t a Wonderbolt at all.

Rainbow Dash understood now. Once again, like she had so many times before, she had spoken and acted without thinking things through, and it was her friends who had to tell her that she was being an idiot and embarrassing herself in front of everyone. And once again, Dash still hadn’t listened. And now, once again, Rainbow Dash would have to tell them sorry and do whatever she had to do to make it up to them.

Except this time, she was strapped down to a hospital bed. Places to go and no way to get to any of them. She couldn’t go tell her friends sorry, because she couldn’t go anywhere. This time she had to sit and wait and hope.

She looked around the empty, quiet hospital room. She didn’t hear anymore hoofsteps outside her door. No one came back for her.

Rainbow Dash pulled the cover up over her eyes with her wing and tried to sleep, feeling the stillness and the quiet heavy on her chest.