Well Beyond Reform

by Ezrienel

Rating: teen
Tags: Human, Main 6, Applejack, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe, Rainbow Dash, Romance
Length: 43859

In a Catholic boarding school, Rainbow Dash must navigate intolerance and discrimination to learn to accept herself, and hope that others might come to do so too.

The constantly rebellious and audacious Rainbow Dash had never been fond of the Catholic all-girls boarding school she had been forced to attend. However, after abruptly confessing a personal secret in the middle of church Mass, she realizes that she had a lot more to fear than the nuns' wrath.

AN: I do expect negative reactions to the setting. This is just a test to see if you all are interested in this kind of story, if you are uncomfortable with Catholicism, you don't have to read. I myself had to do a lot of research on the subject but am no expert, so if I made any errors, feel free to correct me. Also, this is intended to be set somewhere ambiguously around the early half of the 1900's.

Cover image temporary.

Published 2014-04-09 22:30:03 UTC
Last updated 2016-10-05 01:00:56 UTC

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Author's Note

Heads up: this will be quite religion based, so if this offends you, please read no further. Also, I use a lot of British slang in this story, so if you want to know what any of it means, do ask.

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Well Beyond Reform

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"Black"

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“Incorrigible,” the black-clad woman repeated monotonously, interrupting the gently rhythmic tapping of a half-worn and dirtied eraser against the flat yet damaged surface of a desk. She went on after an irritated sigh, which was a direct response to the obnoxious and disrespectful beat playing across the table in the otherwise quiet room, “It means beyond help, correction, or improvement. It is derived from the—excuse me, but do you care to cease that racket and make me believe for a moment that you have been listening?”

“Hmm?” The girl who tapped her pencil seemed to catch the shift in tone and glanced back over at her professor rather than the much more interesting sunny day outside the classroom window. “Who, me?”

“Who else could possibly succeed so constantly at interrupting my class?” her pious professor asked rhetorically, and a couple of other students sniggered under concealing hands. “Now, considering you must be an expert on the subject, do you care to remind the class what the word incorrigible means?”

“What, you mean like my grades?” she cracked a joke, which caused several more giggles to squeeze through the silence.

“Among other things.” Placing her hands on her midnight-draped hips, the older woman glared down at the still bobbing end of the girl's pencil, which clacked against the wood with each twitch of her fingers. “I will not ask you again: stop that exasperating clamour at once.”

“That doesn't sound like a question, Sister. And I happen to enjoy my exasperating clamour, thank you.” She playfully spun the pencil over her thumb before returning to the tapping, galvanizing some other hushed voices to murmur about.

“There is no third warning,” the nun's voice dropped as she strode away from the desk, her habit's veil swinging as she turned so abruptly.

Mere seconds later, she had made it back over to her own bureau and reached into the second drawer on the right. While the rest of the class gasped and gulped at what they knew that meant, her one particularly rebellious student plastered a false look of apathy across her ivory features. With the click of her tongue and a roll of her eyes, she continued on with the clatter on the desk, her daring lips curling deviously into a hook at one sarcastic end.

Her professor stood menacingly over her once more, glowering unspoken threats as she held the object in her brittle, thin hands. As the beat played on tauntingly between them, the young girl's audacious, amaranth eyes flashed up to her superior's. A moment of conflicted silence dragged as the tension grew increasingly mounted, and as the clicking of the pencil prattled on, the professor turned the object in her fingers over. She looked down at the girl's hand dully and aimed, pinning the hard, edged wooden cane between her malicious thumb and fingers. Ready to strike, the nun reared back and raised her hand to the girl.

“Dash,” Instead of a harsh baton of corporal punishment, a soft and unfamiliar hand dropped over the disobedient girl's own, pausing the tapping of the pencil on the desk. Dash was surprised by the action, but more surprised as she realized who had done it, and the strange girl's low and husky voice went on to add, “Please.”

The two girls hardly knew each other, so the touch was odd and unfounded, but still it sparked some involuntary reaction from the both of them that caused their eyes to clash between them. Rainbow Dash recognized the other girl, of course, having gone to school alongside her for years, but the two were never really close. Her bedazzled speckled cheeks were distinct, if her enchanting gorgeous green eyes and subtly accented voice were not. Swallowing her pride, Rainbow Dash flipped her inappropriately (and often administration condemned) hair and fondled a sly grin with her cheeks.

“Pssh, it was just a little harmless fun.” She flicked her wrist and tossed the other girl's protective intercession off of her thankfully spared hand. “You know me, always pranking and pissing people off.”

“Watch your mouth.” The nun scolded her with a raise of the old warped cane in the air, and her student effectively went silent. Satisfied enough with the situation, she turned back to the chalkboard, which was still scrawled with several vocabulary words, including incorrigible, and spoke up, “Now then, shall we continue with the lesson?”

She hardly got through writing two more words across the board before the bell rang, and judging from the sunlight, that signalled the end of the school day. Over the shuffling of books and the clacking of buckles, the school teacher left her next vocabulary word unfinished and turned back around to face and address the class.

“All right then, we'll finish up tomorrow. But you are responsible for remembering these words for next class, no excuses!” she called over the chatter and conditioned gathering and putting away of supplies. “We have mass first thing in the morning tomorrow, don't be late, it's Ash Wednesday!”

Rainbow Dash scoffed and bounced her eyebrows as she slung her backpack over one shoulder, leaving the thing to sag as it may with the strap pulled out so loose. As she passed the chalkboard, she noticed the beginnings of the word her teacher had temporarily abandoned to talk to the class. There, scrawled in all capital and straight-edged letters, was the word HOMO.

Her lip twitched as she read it, and her step paused in the flow of her classmates. Several of them bumped into her but kept walking on as she stared at the word, and the longer she looked, the stranger it seemed to her. There it was staring her right back in the face, almost glaring at her with the accusative nature and similarly derogatory connotation. Fortunately, her stalling was cut short.

The nun went back to her writings and began to add on to the word, changing it from an often detested noun to a particularly fitting adjective: homogeneous. Rainbow Dash clicked her tongue again, shaking her head in contempt as she realized just how homogeneous a uniform-obliged all-girl's school could be. She carried on through the sea of similarly dressed girls, all of which prattled on about this or that, and walked past her without a second thought, even if she had been what their condescending little yammering was about.

In the crowd, Rainbow Dash could not help but pick out that girl who had stood up for her. With her long hair tied back and swaying bright blonde, an odd contrast to the mundane colourless shades the uniforms were drowned in, she was always easy to spot. With her done-up black blazer, pressed collar, tightly knotted tie, ironed black skirt and grey knee-highs, she was always impeccably dressed; matched only by Twilight Sparkle, the class pet who even wore her tie in the boarding rooms.

“Hey,” came out of Rainbow's mouth before she could even register it. Suddenly her feet took off from beneath her, and she found herself racing to the girl's side, naming her, “Applejack, wait up.”

“Yea'?” Applejack noticed her name being called and turned to face the girl, adjusting the strap on her old leather book-bag. “Oh, Dash. You need somethin'?”

“No... what? You think that's all I would care to talk to you about?” she spoke up defensively, slouching and shoving her free hand into the pocket in her slacks as she held her backpack strap with the other.

“It's all y'ever do talk t' me about,” Applejack chuckled lightly as she fell into step beside the aggressive young girl. “I'm kinda your go-to pencil loaner, y'know.”

“Well, yeah, sorry about that,” Rainbow grumbled as she looked away, feeling somehow awkward or shy in the girl's presence, though neither of those things were very like her at all. “I just wanted to say... like, thanks or something. It was valiant of you—the whole stepping in for me thing, not the pencil business. But, I suppose that too.”

“Don't mention it,” she humbly accepted the gratitude as she kept going along the halls, passing one or two of the nuns on her way towards the boarding housing. “For a second there I thought you liked gettin' smacked.”

“I sure get my fair share,” Rainbow mused in a hum, recalling all the several bruises and the tenderness of the tops of her hands from similar hits.

“An' then some,” the blonde added with a charming smile, and Rainbow could not help but fondly return it. She did have a wonderful smile, that girl. “An' what's with that crazy head o' hair on you? I've always wanted t' ask.”

“What, you like it?” Rainbow Dash reached up and tousled her namesake, feeling proud that she had attracted the girl's attention. So pleased she was in fact, that she answered, “This place is colourless enough, what with the women in black and the girls in white, I just thought I'd liven it up a bit. You know?”

“Y'do that in more ways than one, gettin' into trouble all th' time like that.” Applejack reminded her, but the way she looked over at her held no sense of discrimination at all. In fact, she seemed amused by it, but had to wonder, “Why do y'do that, any who?”

“I don't know, it's amusing or something.” Rainbow shrugged passively, and had to fix her backpack again as it slipped to an uncomfortable part of her shoulder as the two went down the cracked concrete steps into the yard.

“Or somethin'?” Applejack repeated sceptically, her eyes narrowing in sceptical accusation or as a wince to the sudden sunlight lathering Rainbow's scruffy white dress shirt. There was indeed something juvenile and jocular about the way Rainbow's uniform always hung too loose and was left un-tucked, her dark slacks bunching up at the ankles and fraying beneath the heels of her masculine, unpolished shoes.

“Look, I'm just usually in a bad mood lately. I feel restless or angry or... I don't know, like, stuffed-up. I can't really explain it.” she prattled on before she realized it, but managed to catch herself and flash a cheeky grin. With a huff of a snicker, she rolled her eyes and confessed, “Jeez, here I am spilling my guts to a total stranger.”

“We ain't strangers, I've sat beside you for years, 'member?” Applejack reminded her casually, swinging in front of her as if trying to make her remember her face.

“Oh what, you suddenly know all about me because you held my hand or something?” Rainbow Dash teased with a smirk, raising one eyebrow.

“Naw,” the blonde girl brushed the idea away, shifting and walking beside the girl again. With a pleasant little smile of her own, one which Rainbow realized she had always found endearingly charming, she went on, “I'm sure you're a lot more than those chewed-up nails and that bored expression you like t' try on.”

Rainbow reflected the smile as the two met gazes, and with a hint of a dare, Rainbow replied, “Wouldn't you like to know?”

“As a matter o' fact—” Applejack started to go on, but someone else interrupted her.

“Applejack, there you are,” it was an equally distinct voice, and the rest of the girl came into sight as she rounded the corner by the boarding houses. Applejack looked over at her casually, recognizing her by tone alone as she continued, “Lolly-gagging more than usual I take it.”

“Ahh sorry Rare, I was talkin' to Dash,” Applejack explained bashfully.

“To whom?” Rarity wondered as she peered beside her friend to notice the bright-headed girl beside her. Anyone could recognize that multi-coloured hair and curmudgeon expression she favoured when something bothered her; which right now was Rarity interrupting her and Applejack's conversation. “Oh, Rainbow. You're in my history class, aren't you?”

“You tell me,” Rainbow passively responded, avoiding eye contact adamantly as if it would hint for her to leave.

“Regardless, Applejack, you promised to meet me in the art room to help me move the props to the theatre, don't tell me you forgot?” Rarity reminded her with a questioning tone and a shift of her hip, which made her unacceptably short skirt ruffle a bit.

“I was on m' way, I swear,” Applejack grinned awkwardly, clearly lying.

“Yes well, you do seem a bit distracted,” the well-spoken young lady eyed Applejack's new companion dubiously, noticing her somewhat dishevelled appearance. “Rainbow dear, do you mind terribly if I steal her away for a spell?”

“Well I imagine that would be her decision rather than mine,” Rainbow grumbled in a particularly sarcastic and flavourful tone. Her raspy voice went on, “But do know, you will have to duel me for her.”

Rarity seemed somewhat taken aback by the comment, but responded just as promptly, “In that case, you may keep the little belle.”

“She's kiddin' Rare, I'll come along peaceful like,” Applejack accepted her request and took a step away from Rainbow Dash, though reluctantly. “It was nice talkin' t' you, Dash.”

“Yep, I am quite the conversationalist.” Rainbow flipped her hair intentionally over-zealously.

After a short and adorable little chuckle, Applejack waved and called back, “You're funny, Rainbow!”

Rainbow stood there another few seconds longer, an entranced smile melting over her features like crawling candle wax as she spoke aloud her pleased realization, “She thinks I'm funny.”

After gawking there like a lunatic, Rainbow Dash managed to get a hold of herself, realizing that potentially wooing a stranger was nothing to add to one's resume. She shook her head and looked around, noticing that she was just outside the boarding room building. With a downtrodden sigh, she remembered why she had been in a bad mood, though Applejack had temporarily taken that away from her with her distracting charm. She made her way up the stairs to her own room, knowing the way well enough she didn't even have to look up from the tops of her black-dress-shoe-covered toes.

Her room was the last room on the left, in the West wing; which was no surprise considering she was an upper fifth form student, the second year of high school. There were countless rooms, the students being assigned by their year in school. Rainbow Dash had been stuck in their elementary school just across campus from first to fourth form as well, so she knew the ropes well by now. She knew them well enough to not get kicked out yet, anyway.

As she made it to her door, she was stalled in front of it. The dull and monotone colour of the white painted wood was a bit daunting in its simplicity, the reflective nature of blankness or silence always striking her to look in upon herself. Still, she had to look in upon her room, as she felt like nothing more than taking a nap. As the door swung open, she noticed her room-mate already sitting on her bed, unpacking her things. Rainbow closed the door behind her without a word, and was perfectly content to leave that silence in the air. For once though, her room-mate was not.

“Oh, um, hello Rainbow Dash,” her room-mate peeped up, glancing shyly through her long bangs as Rainbow moseyed across the room.

“How goes it, Fluttershy,” did not sound much like a question, but Rainbow hardly cared enough to put the necessary raised-tone emphasis on the end that would make it sound so.

“Fine,” she meekly replied, even though a response was not necessary. Fluttershy watched as her room-mate flung her backpack onto the ground and flopped face-down onto her own bed, groaning into her covers irritably as she snuggled against it. “Um, are you okay?”

“I'm going to take a nap,” came her reticent words, muffled by the thin uniform blanket every bed in the institution was slapped with.

“Again?” Fluttershy squeaked in a concerned tone, tilting her head across the room at her friend's sorry state.

“I'm tired, get off of my shoulders,” she sighed dully, and though the words were rough her voice was calm.

“Dash, is something bothering you?” At the lack of response, Fluttershy went on softly, “You're very moody lately.”

“What's it to you? Maybe I'm on my rag or something.” Rainbow growled louder, curling up and turning her back to face Fluttershy. She was never good at talking about serious issues, especially when she had to look at someone while doing it.

“I don't think so,” she pressed on, and after another groan from the rainbow-haired girl, she got something more.

“I'm just angry, is all.” she started off slowly, her voice snagged on her teeth like she didn't want to spit it out. “This damn place is suffocating, with all its rules and restrictions and bullocks.”

“Well, if you don't mind my asking... what exactly are you angry about?” Fluttershy asked carefully, leaning closer off her bed to try and attract the girl's absent attention.

“Lots of stuff, I don't know,” Rainbow grumbled, twirling little circles on her bed with a restless finger out of sight.

“You don't know?” Fluttershy repeated in a curious tone, narrowing her eyes at how flimsy of an excuse that seemed to be.

“I'm just—what's with the bleeding third degree here, Fluttershy? Jeez, I don't want to talk.” Rainbow blew up aggressively, barking over her shoulder before curling back up to herself. Her eyes closed back up as the silence weighed heavily, tiring her more. As the mood settled back down, Fluttershy felt safe to speak.

“Well, I think that, um,” she tested the waters, and hearing no interruption, she went on, “That you're depressed. You're upset and you don't know why, you sleep all day and stay up all night doing nothing.”

“It's not nothing, it's thinking.” Rainbow corrected her simply, nuzzling against the cool blanket.

“Thinking about what?” Fluttershy wanted to know, tugging at the hem of her oversized uniform sweater nervously.

“Stuff,” she vaguely murmured. “I'm not depressed, Fluttershy. I'm just trying to sort a few things out, okay?”

“Like what?” another annoying question, and Rainbow bit her lip to keep from groaning in frustration.

“Like who I—!?” Rainbow stopped herself there, taking a deep breath in. “Look, this place teaches us a lot of things, and it feels like everything they approve of or don't approve of... it's all black and white, you know? And sometimes... sometimes it just seems like... the black stuff? It's all over my hands, in my head, between my...” She silenced herself abruptly, shaking her head and moaning some grouchy wails. “Nevermind, I'm blabbering.”

“No, you're,” Fluttershy wanted to hear her keep going, but she could tell that was all she would get from the way the girl's voice dropped back down in tone. “J-Just being honest.”

“Don't tell anyone about this, okay?” Rainbow Dash asked, glancing back at her friend pleadingly. “I get enough negative attention.”

“I know,” Fluttershy agreed, standing up to bring some of her notes over to the small desk in the corner she often worked on.

Glancing back over her shoulder, Fluttershy noticed the young girl shift a bit on her bed, curling up tighter in her little reclusive ball. The two had known each other for a long time, and shared a room for a good portion of it, so Fluttershy knew when something was up. Unfortunately, she also knew how obstinate Rainbow Dash could be. As she sat down to start her homework, Fluttershy remembered what day it was.

“D-Don't sleep too long, Rainbow Dash. It's Shrove Tuesday, we're having pancakes tonight in the mess hall, you don't want to miss that,” Fluttershy reminded her room-mate casually, and heard a small forced snicker from the girl's throat.

“Excuse me as I leap for joy,” Rainbow Dash sarcastically murmured. “I won't be able to after they fatten us up with all those starchy batter buns.”

“I hear they have home-made syrup again this year,” Fluttershy added with a sweet voice, not quite catching Rainbow's usual bitterness.

“Eureka!” Rainbow interjected with false enthusiasm before rolling back into her ball and closing up her eyes. She hissed a little laugh as she thought about what Fluttershy said, and whispered to herself, “Shrove Tuesday, huh?”

Rainbow Dash had been dragged along in the Catholic religion since she was admitted to the school, and she didn't hesitate to admit she found some objective appeal in it. But she was always uncertain about it personally, and increasingly so. As she crossed her arms and held herself, she thought over the reason for such a holiday as Shrove Tuesday. She had been taught of it very well, and knew it to be the last day before the Lenten season. Still, the name of the holiday itself was interesting to her. She remembered, as her arms slid apart so that her hands could touch each other and unevenly entwine, that the holiday's name had been derived from a word meaning confession.

“On this day, we take the time to examine ourselves critically and clearly. On this day, we consider those things that we have done wrong, are doing wrong, and will do wrong, and what amendments we can make to improve our lives and ourselves,” the older man's voice echoed through the silent mess hall, reverberating inside of Rainbow's listening ears.

Her eyes cracked open once more as she looked at her clasped hands, which were folded much more neatly atop the cheap cloth of the mess hall table. Her expression remained stoic and focused, hearing the words press their blind and inadvertent accusations against her sinful flesh. A frown tugged at her lips, but still she remained quiet and let the man speak to her school before their meal, feeling no better rested after attempting to nap earlier.

“Today, we ask God for his aid, so that he may help us transcend our shortcomings, our temptations, and our mortal sins,” he wound down, taking a long breath in as Rainbow thought over those condescending words. “Amen.”

“Amen!” the hall repeated, the word slipping habitually off the tongues of devoted followers. All those followers, except Rainbow Dash.

The clattering of utensils brought her back to reality, and she raised her head at last. The rest of the students around her feasted on their pancakes, snatching up gravy bowls of syrup and lathering their plates. She herself scooped up a pancake with a fork, placing it on her plate despite the harsh stab wounds left by the prongs of her silverware. Drizzling some syrup onto the cake, she noticed it seep into the wounds and likely bleed through, and somehow, the slick, invasive moisture of it seemed interesting to her. Interesting, that is, until she heard something that seemed to demand attention.

“I heard her parents pulled her out and have to home-school her,” a whisper spread across the table, and Rainbow Dash perked up to hear such a rumour.

“No, she got kicked out!” someone else called out, but a few more girls quickly hushed her down. As a nun passed, they were silent, but eventually carried right back along, “They don't let you do that kind of stuff in this school, they don't want a bad influence like that dirty slapper being around the rest of us.”

“Oh enough with the goody-two-shoes act, I bet you're jealous because she got laid,” another snotty voice broke in, and a couple of snickers accompanied it.

“Laid, yeah. But pregnant? No way.” Rainbow twitched as she heard the reason, and her hand froze with a fork full of soggy pancake hanging above her plate.

“She was pregnant? Tosh!” a few gasps asked and hissed aloud, while nervous gazes were exchanged.

“Yeah, that's why they kicked her out!” the second girl told them with certainty.

“They can do that?” the question was raised, and Rainbow waited to hear the answer patiently.

As she expected, it went something along the lines of, “Why not? It's a boarding school, they own us here.”

With a frown, Rainbow continued to stare at her food as it slipped off the utensil and split apart due to the saturated moisture of it. It made her uneasy, hearing stories like that. If something like a simple mistake could end in awful consequences, she really did have no chance living with the weight that sat upon her chest. To shut her often stupidly loud mouth, she crammed the sopping pancake between her lips, feeling herself salivate at the sweetness that similarly tantalized her. However, there would be times, like Ash Wednesday, when she would not have the luxury of food to keep her silent.

But silence was necessary as she and her peers lined up to receive their ashes that very next day during mass. She felt particularly uncomfortable, herded like sheep up to the alter like that. She could hear the uttered words of the man who stood before them, dipping his fat thumb into a shallow dish filled with some ash mix.

“Remember that thou art dust,” Rainbow raised her head and felt the priest's fingers touch her own bare forehead, finally reaching the front of the line of followers that stretched up between the pews. “And to dust thou shalt return.”

Rainbow glanced up as she felt the older man's thumb dragging across her forehead, the slightly damp and scratchy feeling of ashes lining her in a particular shape. She knew what the symbol signified, and swallowed hard as she recalled. It was the sign of the cross, a clear and boisterous indicator of her branding as a Catholic. She swallowed hard as the purpose of the mark rang clear with the priest's words.

“Repent, and believe the Gospel,” he told her, and he stared right into her anxious and uneasy eyes as if knowing what was on the tip of her tongue.

Ash Wednesday was a particularly morbid day in the Catholic church, as it served both to remind one of their mortality and call one to confess their sins and seek repentance. As a particularly self-aware individual, Rainbow Dash knew well what her transgressions were, but as she stood before this man being marked as one who should repent, she realized that she felt no obligation to.

As she turned past the priest and rounded the pews once more, she felt a rough hit against her shoulder which stalled her a step. She glanced over at the source of the familiarly unwelcome bump to see a classmate of hers, one she was never particularly fond of. The girl had often picked on Rainbow Dash for her brash and obnoxious attitude, which usually didn't bother her, but today she was feeling less than tolerant. Rainbow clicked her tongue at the annoyingly overdone-up ginger and blonde hair that tousled over the girl's prim and proper posture.

“I bet you've got an awful lot to repent for, Dash, what with all the trouble you start,” the girl noted with a snide tone, her sharp eyes passing over Rainbow's as she glanced down from the height of her pompous stride.

“Says the kettle.” Rainbow muttered grouchily as she twitched an eyebrow irritably. Her slumped shoulders served to make her feel even shorter and smaller than usual, as if the towering chapel arched roof didn't do a good enough job of belittling her.

“I'm just saying, you should take the opportunity to confess, perhaps amend your ill manner.” the girl continued, swaying her hair over a shoulder with a toss of her head as they turned to get back to their seats.

“Don't encourage her, she's gobby enough already,” another voice chimed in and made a remark at Rainbow's expense, which brought another growl from the lithe girl's throat.

“Oh belt up, both of you,” Rainbow spat back, slamming her fingers into the pockets of her slacks so hard she almost ripped the seams.

“It's not our fault you love making enemies, don't get me started on those silly pranks of yours,” the first girl whispered as they passed a nun, sliding down the pews towards their seats as assigned by their home-room class. “It was your fault we ate asparagus and cheese all week last week, and the broken washing machines were murderous for our outfits.”

“A bleeding tragedy, Shimmer,” Rainbow murmured sarcastically as she plopped back down in her spot, roughly kicking down the kneeler out from under the bench ahead of her.

“I'm just saying,” Rainbow rolled her eyes at the repeated use of those three words, as Sunset Shimmer often said them when she entirely meant to offend someone. “It's about time you contemplated your sins, Ash Wednesday is the perfect time to publicly confess and repent, remember.”

“Sounds like you just want me to embarrass myself,” Rainbow grumbled back as she knees hit the kneeler and her hands clasped together, her elbows on the back of the bench in front of her.

“Goodness, no,” Sunset Shimmer denied in a hoity-toity tone as she knelt just down from Rainbow Dash. “I'm just trying to help you through a tough time.”

“Tough time,” Rainbow repeated as she huffed a laugh and closed her eyes. “You have no idea.”

“What, are you going to play me some sob story?” she asked dully, smirking as she heard Rainbow Dash sucking on her teeth in annoyance.

“Like you'd care,” Rainbow responded, clenching her eyes tighter closed to try and forget about the antagonism that prattled on beside her.

“Oh, so what is it, then? Did your parents not send you cookies for Lent?” Sunset Shimmer's whining voice asked obnoxiously, and Rainbow twitched at the trivial accusation. “Or maybe they've finally listened to headmistress Celestia and pulled you out of school? Just like Rose, that girl who got pregnant. In fact, you have been acting rather odd lately yourself. You went home over Christmas break, didn't you? You wouldn't have gone and got yourself knocked up too, would you?”

“No,” was all Rainbow could say, feeling her body begin to heat up at the accusations as her forearms tensed and shook with rising rage.

“Well, I for one pray for you, Rainbow Dash,” Sunset Shimmer told her proudly, sitting up straight and rustling her hair over her shoulders.

“What a saint,” she hissed sarcastically, her knees creasing her dark slacks.

“I do, I pray for you.” Rainbow Dash's eyes cracked open and she glared at Sunset Shimmer incredulously as she continued to go on, “I pray for all you downtrodden people. All the immoral, all the whores or the abashed or the sinners, all the troublemakers. I pray for the self-loathing, the disabled, the misled, oh, and I pray for the gay—”

“I don't need you to pray for me,” Rainbow cut in suddenly, and Sunset Shimmer noticed the abrupt change of subject. “There's nothing wrong with me.”

“Pardon me?” Sunset Shimmer peered over at the smaller girl, whose sweating palms made the prayerful position of her hands quite uncomfortable. “Oh Rainbow, the hardest part is accepting that you have done wrong, that you need help.”

“I don't need any help,” Rainbow growled through her teeth, and the more uneasy she got, the more she noticed the curious stares and eavesdropping of the girls around her, who leaned nearer or peeked over.

“You seem to be getting agitated. Did I say something wrong?” Sunset Shimmer smirked at the reaction, hoping that Rainbow would storm out or get herself expelled somehow so that she might eat something besides asparagus.

“Yeah, you did. You said that people... that people like me, we should be prayed for.” Rainbow's voice began to raise as she felt her words spilling out, her cheeks brushed with a dry fluster. “Well I don't need your damned sympathy, okay? There's nothing wrong with us downtrodden people... nothing wrong with me.”

“I suppose it's up to you, to say that in the face of God, Dash,” Sunset Shimmer played innocent, sighing distastefully as she pretended to get back to her pious prayer.

“Maybe I will,” Rainbow flashed a serious glare at the girl, though she ignored the move completely.

“Confession is the first step to repentance,” Sunset Shimmer coyly teased, her slender fingers drumming over her folded hands.

“You want to hear a confession, Shimmer? Is that it?” Rainbow suddenly barked loudly, attracting even more attention than before. She noticed it right away, standing up suddenly and glancing around at the judgemental and critical expressions on the faces of the devoted followers around her, on their knees and whispering their shame to their fingers. With a deep breath, she went on despite the drowned-out protests of the nuns near her, “Do you all want to hear a bleeding confession?!”

“Rainbow Dash, sit down right now!” a woman in black called out, reached down the pews and gesturing though there was no way she could reach the girl with all the people kneeling in the way.

“No Sister. See, Ash Wednesday is a time for public confession, isn't that right?!” Rainbow's voice broke louder and cracked at the height of her vocal range. Several others silently agreed, but everyone seemed nervous in the presence of her outburst. “And if anyone here needs to repent, it's me. Right? Right?”

“Wow, she's really off her trolley,” Sunset Shimmer whispered loud enough to hear, and Rainbow resisted the urge to knock her off the kneeler.

“You all think I'm just some troublemaker, don't you? Just some little tramp who likes screwing around?” Rainbow asked loudly, turning and looking around the church as her eyes stung and her chest swelled up. “I wear your stupid dichotomous blacks and whites, done up tight around my neck like a repressive little noose, but I can't just stand here in your drone lines like a damn machine!”

“Dash! Sit down and be quiet, you're in the house of God!” another nun spoke up, and several others shifted to see what the commotion was all about.

“Well if he truly loves all his children, he'll accept whatever it is I have to say.” Rainbow stomped her foot loudly, shaking the kneeler. “God knows I've tried to be what you want me to be, but really, what was I so bleeding afraid of?”

“This is a little melodramatic, don't you think?” Sunset Shimmer said in a diminutive tone, acting bored by the display. “You're not going to go full Monty and on about how you never get any love or friendship, and so you have to act out, is that it?”

“No,” Rainbow Dash growled, stepping back up onto the bench she once sat on and looking to the stained-glass face of Jesus Christ which hung above the altar at the far end of the church. Her fingers slid under the hem of her sleeve cuff and she grabbed it tightly, bringing the white shirt to her face and scraping it over her forehead hard enough to grind the ashes off her flesh and leave them along the pure white threads. “You can all condemn me or pray for me or cast me to hell, but that won't change a damn thing. That won't change the fact," her trembling words solidified as she came to terms with the announcement, "I'm gay. Yeah, I'm gay!” She shouted twice, the second time raising her hands and slapping herself on the trousers. “I'm gay, and I don't care what closed-minded tripe you have to say about that.”

The silence that hung in her wake was mortifying, but all at once she decided she wouldn't stand for it. She took off down the bench in a full sprint, clearing the pew in a matter of seconds before leaping into the aisle and turning on a dime to face the old wooden doors at the entrance. Besides the sound of a bible or two dropping and the shuffling of Catholics crossing themselves silly, her clacking dress shoes stamped down the aisle between the grinding and incredulous glares and stares of her peers.

As she passed one particular pew, an individual stood up, grasping the back of a bench and watching Rainbow Dash leave it all behind her. Though she said nothing, Applejack swallowed hard and found her eyes caught in the scruffy and lopsided rear collar of Rainbow's dress shirt. It made sense to but her and one other girl, who was wound up in a horrified little ball near the other side of the church, why Rainbow Dash had been quite so wound up the previous day. Rainbow Dash gripped the old handles on the church and shoved them roughly open, letting the pure white light of the sun cascade into the dim shadows of the church.

“Cheers,” was her final word, trading in her dark denial for blatant honesty despite her better judgement.

“Heavens, a sign of the times. What world do we live in?” the priest cried out with a shake of his head as several of the nuns gathered around him and went to stop the murmurings and confusion throughout the church. “Her lack of moral sensibility is appalling.”

“It's a test, for all of us,” one of the nuns spoke up loudly, commanding the attention of all the inhabitants of the church. “To consider how we as Catholics should respond to the intrusion of the homosexuals in our lives. Father, what should we do?”

Raising his head slowly and taking in a deep breath, he recited as accurately as he could recall, “We look to the word of the Lord. If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them. Leviticus, 20:13.”

Blue

***

"Blue"

***

There was a time in which she adored the rain: the damp smell of precipitation, the nostalgic cool breeze saturated with an autumn mist, the looming yet crisp fog and clouds that hung low and heavy overhead, seeping so low sometimes as to distort and conceal the vicious and vindictive seeming spires and ridges atop cathedrals and boarding houses. And even in the wake of certain circumstances, the angelic lulling of raindrops slipping over the barred windows and tapping on warped wooden sills was something of a comfort for loneliness. Yet that evening, no intercession of weather seemed enough to sooth the uneasiness and reticent reclusivity of one withdrawn Rainbow Dash.

She had never known herself to be diffident in the slightest, but at the moment, her chilled legs seemed so very earnest to remain folded up against her beating chest. Instead of strolling or striding around as her usual confident self, she was resigned to her bedroom of her own volition. Her peers were of no concern to her, with their lack of understanding or sympathy, so she saw no need to go out and dance around for their closed-minded enjoyment.

Nuzzling her nose between her knees, she dropped her furrowed brows onto her eyelids and glared at the vacant bed on the other side of the room. Her room-mate, Fluttershy, was rather introverted herself, so it was odd that the girl was absent for so long. With a throaty groan, Rainbow Dash knocked the crown of her head against the wall behind her, leaving it there as she stared up at the familiarly distant roof.

It wasn't that she regretted spilling the beans about herself, she was certainly never shy enough to have kept many personal secrets for long. She was, however, somewhat embarrassed about the way that she had done it, shouting across the church like that. She had not even gone down for dinner that evening, though it was rare that the Sisters allowed someone to skip out on meal time; or classes for that matter, which too she had avoided. Their lack of concern to try and keep her in attendance was unnerving, as it had her guessing just how the administration might respond to her outburst.

“Yeah, in there,” a stifled murmur breached the thin white door just past the end of her bed, and Rainbow's head tilted in that direction unenthusiastically.

“I can't believe she's been like that, all this time,” could be made out among several other whispers and hushes. Another horrified voice continued, “Living with us.”

“Disgusting,” crawled between the door and the frame, and Rainbow's temper flared at the word.

“Well get used to it!” escaped Rainbow Dash's own tight throat as she gripped at the covers beneath her and raised herself to call back, “I'm not going anywhere!”

“She heard us! Shh!” accompanied scampering and scuttling of feet.

Rainbow Dash frowned as her body relaxed once more, and the thin frame of her bed accepted her similarly trim form comfortably once more. The rolling of distant thunder crept in between the thin gaps of her window, made from years of condensation eating away at any form of weatherproofing, and resonated in her pounding chest. Lowering her head, she wondered once more where on campus her sole supposed friend might have been.

Down the hall, a similarly perturbed and distracted young girl sat at her desk alone in her boarding room. As her own old pencil tapped along her unfinished homework, she listened to the somewhat comforting and familiar rhythm of the beat that was usually struck by a certain absent-minded acquaintance. Too anxious to continue her fruitless quest to complete her assignment, she pushed off the desk and scraped the chair back across the old worn floorboards. Her blonde hair once again fell into her face, and she tirelessly pushed it back behind her ear.

The constant drifting conversations about the girl who had outed herself aggravated the splinters in her boarding room door almost as much as it did her own freckled body. The door, however, did fine at completing its duty, as it swung open and revealed her arriving room-mate. She glanced up as Rarity strode in, and noticed immediately that she was not alone.

“Of course dear, Applejack and I would love to have you. It's the very least we can do,” the well-dressed young lady said in a courteous tone, opening the door wider to allow a shy girl to follow her inside, book-bag clutched to her chest.

“What is?” Applejack asked immediately, arcing one eyebrow suspiciously as she finished standing from her chair.

“Oh, Fluttershy here is the room-mate of, um,” Rarity paused as if the topic might seem sensitive, though it was the most common one floating around on that particular day. “That Rainbow Dash girl.”

“And?” Applejack awaited the purpose of that statement, tilting her head slowly.

“And, darling, she needs a place to stay. She really can't go back there tonight, after what happened at Mass today.” Rarity continued passively, rolling her wrist about as she spoke. “The Sisters said they understood, so she's staying here with us this evening.”

Applejack was silent for a moment as she looked over the two of them, who seemed somewhat uncomfortable yet set in their plan. Fluttershy nervously shifted her bag about in her hands as Rarity closed the door behind her and led the young girl to her side of the room. With a slow breath, Applejack analysed the situation as it fell before her.

“So, you're tellin' me,” Applejack began, catching their attention once more. “Rainbow Dash stood up in front o' all of us an' spilled her guts out—”

“Her proverbial guts, yes,” Rarity interrupted with ease, merely making room for some of Fluttershy's belongings.

“And now she's sittin' alone in her room with no one t' talk to about any of it?” she finished, her tone dropping as the statement rang true.

“Oh, hush with the faux concern, Applejack.” Rarity drolly laughed and flipped her bountifully wavy hair over her pressed collar. “She brought it upon herself. It's not my or Fluttershy's fault about it. We all know what happens when you openly make yourself a target around here. Just look at Rose.”

“That sounds like a darn flimsy excuse.” Applejack crossed her arms defiantly, frowning deeply to deny the charm of her usual smile from calming the air.

“I-I'm not,” Fluttershy spoke up suddenly, trying at a sentence as the other two glanced over at her. “I'm not good at dealing with this kind of thing, I-I'm sorry. I know it's not nice but... I don't know what I'd say to her any more.”

“I'm going t' go out on a limb here an' say,” Applejack cocked her head to the left as her hip swayed to the right in a particularly resolute stance. “That she ain't th' one who's changed here. I'm thinkin' that's y'all.”

“I don't quite know what you mean by that darling, and I'm aware that you've only been in this school a few years, but let me explain something to you,” Rarity started back up without reservation, striding over to Applejack and placing a hand over her own heart and black cashmere sweater. “In case the monochromatic uniforms were not clear enough, there's a certain sense of unity in this school. When someone like Rainbow Dash sets herself apart, she's inviting isolation onto herself. It's nothing personal.”

Applejack's expression fell solemn, realizing this was entirely the case. It was no surprise that the school would have nothing to do with her after such an announcement, and yet she felt so very wrong about it. She could not hope to understand Rainbow's feelings, and it made her feel terrible. Applejack was always the first to feel empathy and to step in if someone needed it, as evident by the fact she risked her own knuckles for Rainbow's merely one day prior. And this, she hoped, would be no different.

“Well y'all can sit here judgin' or feelin' sorry for her or not, but I ain't gonna be a part of it.” She shook her head and turned away, staving the urge to criticize her closest friend and someone she assumed was near to Rainbow Dash by gathering her blazer and satchel from their haphazard places on the end of her bed.

“Applejack, please,” Rarity spoke up in a sigh, knowing Applejack's usual tells that she was upset about something. “Where are you going?”

“Some place no one else is ballsy enough to,” Applejack replied firmly, taking hold of the boarding room door knob and yanking it open.

“Applejack!” Rarity called after her in vain.

Pulling the door closed behind her, she felt the nervous lump in her throat fall into her stomach. Even if she hadn't known the way to Rainbow Dash's room, the crowds of people glancing in its direction was telling enough. On her way there, she could feel the stares of her peers sticking to her and weighing her down, growing more frequent the nearer she came to the end of her determined path.

As she reached the similarly unremarkable door to the girl's boarding room, Applejack froze. She could hear the stifled murmurs as the rumours spread about, and for a moment, she wondered if the risks against her reputation were worth the dare. Of course, she felt silly about thinking such a thing at all, and in spite of it, rapped her knuckles hard against the door.

Inside, Rainbow Dash perked up at the unexpected sound. Her door had been avoided like some horrid disease by all except those who thought it funny to whisper about, and then suddenly, a knock. Conditioned already to expect no kind curiosity, she immediately jumped to her feet and stormed over to the door. Her hand grasped the knob like she had sharp talons, and with an equally sharp tongue, she barked back.

“What, come to see the freak-show too?!” Rainbow snapped as she pulled the door open abruptly, shocking the girl on the other side stone-stiff. The two of them stared blankly at each other for a few seconds, recognizing the similarly embarrassed and surprised expressions mirrored on their faces. “Applejack? What, uh... what are you doing here?”

“This ain't a bad time, is it?” Applejack carefully asked, uncertainty present in her voice.

“In the greater scheme, perhaps. In the day? No, not at all.” Rainbow casually bantered, leaning against the door frame with a shrug, crossing her arms loosely over her ill-fitted shirt.

“You mind if I, maybe,” Applejack started slowly, uneasily glancing around as she felt the judgemental stares of those around her. Brushing them off as best she could, she got back to the topic, “Mind if I come in?”

“You want to...” Rainbow's voice shakily faded out as she realized what the girl was asking, and her heart began to beat faster at the prospect. “Yeah—I mean no, I don't mind, but—yeah, come in.”

Rainbow Dash clumsily got out of the way, extending her arm out to gesture for Applejack to come inside. Nodding a thankful bow, Applejack followed her lead and stepped into the room, shuffling through the narrow doorway that pressed them nearly right together. As she entered and looked around, Rainbow's intrigued eyes flickered all over the girl's body, taking note of her toned arms and legs and her obviously firm stomach. She shook her head in self-loathing though, feeling just awful for gawking at the girl in such a foul way. Slicing the surprised and critical stares of their peers, the door closed shut behind them.

“So uh,” Rainbow swung her legs around as she strolled through the room, avoiding eye contact with the charming young girl who kept her company. “What brings you by?”

“I didn't see you at supper t'night,” Applejack evaded the real reason, instead pulling her book bag in front of her and rummaging through the largest pocket. Rainbow curiously peered over at her as she did, wondering what it was she had hiding in there. “Thought y'might be hungry.”

Generously, Applejack revealed a large, rounded bun wrapped in a napkin, something that she had swiped from the table during dinner when no one was looking. Despite her fit body, Applejack did always have quite the appetite herself, so she'd often sneak off with extra food if she could. Rainbow Dash blinked curiously at the full bun, and could feel her mouth salivating at the thought of it. With a warm smile, Applejack reached out farther, plopping it right into Rainbow's less than expectant hands. Rainbow Dash gratefully ogled it, before hurriedly unwrapping it and biting off an awful lot more than she could chew.

“Thanks Applejack,” Rainbow managed to mouth out over the pastry on her tongue.

“Don't mention it,” the blonde girl brushed off the gratitude humbly and buckled her book bag back up.

As Rainbow silently swallowed the mouthful she had nearly dislocated her jaw chewing, she stared down at the rest of the golden bun in her hand. Her eyes softened sadly, and as she sat down on her bed, she whispered, “You're always so nice to me.”

“Well,” Applejack started slowly, not certain how she was supposed to respond to that. Settling for keeping the mood light, she said, “Would y'prefer me t' be rude?”

“That's not it, it's just,” Rainbow tried to think up a better question, like why the blonde girl was standing in her room when the rest of the school was shunning or mocking or condemning her. She awkwardly took another bite, chewing her contemplation over the same as her bread. Perhaps she was just hoping to butter her bun in sentimental significance; hoping that Applejack was there for more than just to be friendly. “Ahh never you mind. Well don't just prop there all awkward, sit down.”

“Oh, yea'.” Accepting the invitation with a nod, Applejack proceeded to sit down on the bed beside her new friend, silently questioning how far or near she should have sat.

With a mere few bites left, Rainbow Dash decided to savour the rest, taking smaller bites and observing how she could make shapes out of the bite marks. Her solemn expression was clear, and seemed contagious as Applejack too fell silent in her presence. Neither of the two much knew what they wanted to talk about, but the mood and mutual knowledge hung heavy over their heads. Rainbow noticed Applejack's lightly freckled hands tense up in their place on her knees, wrinkling her navy-blue shorts just a little bit. It was not the first time Rainbow had seen Applejack out of her uniform, but it might have been the first time she bothered to really notice. Her head fell forward with her hunched back, causing the blue strands on the back of her head to fall over the other colours and veil her cheeks.

“Y'alright, sugar cube?” Applejack gently spoke up, taking Rainbow captive with those gleaming green eyes that were so carefully and attentively directed right at her. “You're lookin' a little blue.”

Applejack meant it as something of a prod or a jest, and she reached out and moved some of the girl's blue hair out of her face with a comforting smile. Turning to better face the freckled blonde, Rainbow attempted in vain to appear less melancholy. She ripped a piece of the bun off and balled it up between her fingers, tossing it lightly into the air and keeping the arc right above her head. Moving accurately, she followed the fall of the bread and caught it expertly in her mouth, proceeding to swish it from cheek to cheek as if playing with it.

“That'd be the dye, Applejack,” Rainbow casually responded with a flip of her long hair, though her oddly raspy voice betrayed her carefree exterior. As the two stared at each other, Rainbow Dash became more convinced that Applejack did not just stop by to shoot the breeze. Realizing she really had nothing left to lose, the subject rose up from her throat over doughy bits, “Why are you here, really? Didn't you hear what I yelled in church today? The whole school's talking about it. They all hate me, you know.”

“Y'never did really fit in much any who,” Applejack leaned back on the bed and kicked her feet out at the full length of her long and mostly bare legs, a part of her which Rainbow Dash found herself gazing at. “But if it's any consolation, I thought it was mighty brave of you.”

“Inarticulate? Yes. Blatant? Certainly.” Rainbow Dash fooled around with her vocabulary, rolling her eyes at herself obnoxiously. “But brave? Debatable.”

“Honest, Dash, it was real refreshing t' hear someone who ain't afraid o' bein' somethin',” Applejack shrugged and looked away, not sure how to discuss the subject matter appropriately, having never dealt with someone like her before.

“You must be the only one in this whole school who thinks so,” Rainbow dryly mentioned, poking at the last bite of her bun irritably. “What's got you coming around despite all that? Some silly desire to stick out from the conformity and otherwise mundane social stratosphere?”

“Looks like you've got that one covered f' th' both of us,” Applejack teased, and Rainbow couldn't stop the abrupt laugh that came from her throat. Once she contained herself again, Applejack continued, “I dunno. You're gonna get a heck of a lot of resistance an' hate comin' your way, y'don't need it comin' from me too.”

“You've got that right,” agreed the rainbow-haired girl firmly. Glancing over at her the gateway that joined the hall to other boarding dormitories—something that the rest of the school must have thought was hell—she added, “I may not be afraid of being gay, but I am a little nervous about what'll happen to me once I walk out that door.”

Falling silent at the reverberant sounds of such a taboo word, Applejack repeated the casual way in which Rainbow expelled it over and over in her head. Though she wanted desperately to accept her new friend, she felt quite uneasy in her solitary company, having grown up well-taught the negative connotation of her supposed condition. She had also, however, taken to heart the forgiveness and acceptance in the stories of the New Testament, and knew both their difficulty and worth. Her grandmother had always raised her to walk in those steps and do what was right rather than what was easy and popular, and she intended to honour her memory by continuing to do so.

“Whatever it may be,” Applejack took a breath as she gathered her thoughts, her shaky voice trying hard to convey her message. “I'll be there with ya. Got it?”

Applejack reached out and placed her hand right on top of Rainbow's, wrapping her fingers underneath the other girl's. Meaning it as a resolute and platonic gesture of support, Applejack had hardly anticipated the shift in Rainbow's expression as she looked down at their joined hands. Rainbow Dash, uncertain of her motives, felt a sincere warmth blooming between them, and was certain Applejack noticed the pounding of her heart in each filled and comforted wrinkle and bend of her fingers. Looking up at the beautiful blonde girl who sat beside her despite her disposition, and finding her lips particularly compelling, Rainbow could hardly stop herself from leaning slightly closer. Noticing a minuscule loss of distance between them, Applejack responded by pulling just that much away, her eyes widening in realisation.

“A-As a friend.” Applejack hurriedly added, pulling her hand away and blushing in embarrassment as she pretended not to notice any subtle hints at anything more. “I don't want to... t' lead you on, or-or anything.”

“Of course, I know that,” just as quickly, Rainbow agreed, nodding furiously. Sucking her teeth in a distant way, she went on to say, “Just because I'm gay doesn't mean that I like every girl around me, you know.”

“Right, right. I just... I thought I'd be clear,” she responded between pink-tinted cheeks as her embarrassment escalated, feeling silly for having expected the girl to suddenly develop feelings for her.

“Well,” Rainbow rolled her neck coyly until she faced Applejack directly, and a smile melted over her pristine features. After a taunting silence, she had to share, “I have to admit, you do have a certain charm. The whole Southern thing, it's pretty bleeding cute.”

“I-I, uh,” the blonde stammered awkwardly, trying to hide the blush on her face that always rose up when she merited a compliment such as that. Though she was flattered, Rainbow's cheeky grin reminded Applejack of the girl's femininity, and she brushed the mere inkling of curiosity out of her mind.

“I'm just teasing you, AJ,” Rainbow dropped a little nickname down to break the ice once more, her own charm adept at shifting moods about. With a rough nudge towards her companion, she chortled a quick snicker at Applejack's flustered expression.

“Sheesh! Does doin' that make you feel better?” Applejack chuckled back curiously, noticing that Rainbow's mood had noticeably lightened.

“You got me, I'm a little brat at heart,” the outgoing young girl shrugged her shoulders high up and left her heckling smirk hanging off her cheek.

“Naw, y'can be a bit of a punk, but you're a good kid, I know it,” the blonde agreed with a firm nod, feeling like she was finally beginning to understand this brazen girl.

“Do all good kids go around getting themselves whacked in class, making enemies out of peers and opposing the church to which they belong, Applejack?” Rainbow pondered aloud, letting her heavy-with-worry body fall to the bed, where she crossed her arms behind her head and flipped the darker parts of her hair. Applejack noticed the deep colours, which seemed to juxtapose the inherent inhibiting blankness of the white sheets beneath Rainbow Dash's small form.

“I dunno. Prob'ly not, you're sure th' only one whose hair reflects how blue she can get,” she brought up their old joke, moving Rainbow's hair a few fractions across the sheets with the top of her index finger. As the magnetic magenta eyes of the girl beneath her flashed up to her own, grasping an adorable look of thankfulness in them, Applejack's lips softened and curled up at either end, allowing a few more words to slip out, “Yup, I s'pose you're a special breed.”

“I could have told you that,” Rainbow played aloof once more, clicking her tongue and shrugging her relaxed shoulders against the hard mattress.

Their conversation fell out of the air for a measurable time, and was instead replaced with content gazes of understanding and appreciation. Rainbow Dash was usual quite adept at toying around with her expressions, she found nothing to display except an endearing smirk, which tugged at her cheeks and ached them. It faded, slightly, as Applejack broke the connection and looked away, finding the vacant bed where Rainbow's room mate should have sat. She swallowed uneasily as the truth of her location came to mind, and she noticed Rainbow look over obliviously at it.

“Don't worry, it's cool. My room mate wouldn't mind company, I bet,” Rainbow told her casually, and it became apparent by her demeanour that she had no idea her room mate had abandoned her. “I don't know where she's gotten off to, though.”

“I, uh,” Applejack struggled with breaking it to her, finding it somewhat more merciful to cushion the blow and tell her, rather than let her hang around waiting for someone who wasn't coming back. “I think she's studyin' with Rarity. Heard 'em mention somethin' 'bout a sleepover.”

“Oh, I see,” the mood dropped out of the girl's voice once more, as she easily put the puzzle pieces together and concluded why Fluttershy had chosen that particular day to be absent. Turning over and facing her back to the blonde, she murmured, “You don't have to hang around, you know. A duff bender like me can't be the best compa—ouch!”

She jolted as she had been slapped clean across the back of her head. Rainbow sat up abruptly after the ringing in her ears stopped, her incredulous eyes gawking at the surprising action done by the seemingly compassionate freckled girl. Though Applejack's frown appeared irate, her eyes sparkled with some intense determination and adoration, and Rainbow found her heart skipping a beat to notice how much she loved it.

“Enough 'o that down-on-y'self gob,” Applejack barked at her, and Rainbow froze up stiff, staring at the usually calm and charming girl's irritated expression. “We all gotta make th' most of our lot. Buck up, honey.”

“Jeez, you're bleeding crazy, aren't you?” she gasped as she rubbed the back of her sore scalp. A smirk cracked across her face, though, and the two of them gazed at each other knowingly. “I think we're going to be the best of friends, Applejack.”

As the slim bodied girl hissed to touch the tender spot, Applejack's stern expression melted. She leaned over and tried to have a look at the affected area, brushing Rainbow's lengthy hair to one side. Her concerned eyes sprang up into Rainbow's amused ones, and she spoke once more.

“I didn't hurt ya, did I?” the blonde asked tenderly.

“What do you think I am, a pansy?” Rainbow broke into a guffaw at Applejack's motherly nature, and even Applejack found herself chuckling. The next few words merited another smack, however, “Come on, you hit like a girl—ouch!”

Author's Note

Well, I decided to do up another chapter. I may get around to finishing this story after all. I know some of you may not like the exceedingly wordy and detailed way it's written, and lets not get started on the subject matter, but I have fun writing it, so... fuck it.
Also, it's unlikely this'll be as long as some of my other works.

Orange

***

"Orange"

***

Obnoxious laughter shattered the once peaceful breeze, which carried with it the calming brittle noises of rustling leaves and cicadas singing. The crunching of still moist grass beneath running feet scuttled over the field, and huffs of exhaustion rolled out of fewer mouths than did the ridiculing guffaws. Despite the usual focus displayed on the field, the girls who occupied it had their fickle amusement set on that which was not out in the bright sun at all. Beneath the shadow of the massive, looming branches of a winding old beech tree, the subject of their attention lay, portraying a similar expression of disdain scrawled across her face that mirrored their own.

Taunted by the thrum of the round football gnawing through the freshly cut turf, Rainbow Dash glared at the dichotomous orb that she was not permitted to knock about. She could see the blending tones—turning the black and white to a neutral tone each time the object was kicked, be the strike inaccurate and poor—clearly as she lay, propped up on her elbows and sprawled out on her rear over the gradually shifting shade-cast of the swaying leaves. Instead of joining her usual extracurricular team in a match of practice football, she had been cast beneath the grandmother beech.

The golden sun had, by then, crept over her feet and left her alone in the shadow, though she had been certain she had laid half under its rays when her practice had begun. She expelled an aggravated breath of air for perhaps the hundredth time, scornfully watching her fellow team members play on without her. She had been the captain of their squad for years, guiding them through the form-level teams as they advanced and aged. Yet suddenly, she was discarded to the sidelines, a mere spectator.

“We can't have her out here kicking about with us, the rugger-bugger's a delinquent,” was among the drifting excuses that reached Rainbow Dash's ears, and she continued to listen as if it didn't bother her. “No wonder she always plays sports, to get close to us all.” And, “Do you think she got the hint?”

Yes, Rainbow Dash had received the message clearly. She had approached the change room after school as usual, always the last one to get there. It wasn't as if she intended to be late every time, but it sure worked in her favour when she wanted to stay away from idle locker room gossip that may have been flung her way. That day, however, she had arrived to find the door locked on her. After knocking and kicking at it several times—which infuriated her since she could hear the stifled giggles and snickers from inside—she noticed that her team had removed her duffel bag from its usual location in her team's cubby, leaving it instead in a heap outside the change room door.

While first she had opted to ignore their discriminatory razing and change in the supply closet instead, she quickly found that such a thing would be futile. Once she crammed herself into the already cluttered closet, she tugged apart the sides of her knapsack to gather her clobber, only to find her football kit had been altered. Holding her fitted jersey out in front of her, she found that the back of it, which prior had displayed her name, now read 'Sappho'. Besides the reference to the ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, she noticed that her uniform shorts had been torn in the front, and the addition of a sports box was found, something that might have protected her masculine parts, if she had any of those. Though she had to admit the jests were somewhat clever, she was too insulted and frustrated to do much else but storm out and haunt her team's football practice.

Dropping her elbows out from under her, she laid flat down on her back and stared up at the copper-turning leaves that glistened in what few specks and shards of sun squeaked through the upper branches. Though the loose blades of grass tickled at her cheeks and ears, Rainbow Dash did nothing but lay still, looking past her tipped black dress shoes at something she had lost. There was a time when her team loved her, when she was the best of them, and they would never dream of playing without her. But it appeared that time had passed.

The wind kicked up her loose black tie just a flick, and it snatched her attention. She took it in her hands and looked at it, the dark colour contrasting the bright, sun-speckled daylight around her. Pulling the thinner, hidden end of the tie from under the larger part, she tightened it around her neck significantly, feeling her undone collar squeeze her throat. She made a face in response to the slight choke, but did not release the tension. Instead, Rainbow Dash took the tie in one hand and held it straight above her, perpendicular to her lazy position. Closing the one eye that caught the glare of the sun, she stared at the noose-like article yearningly. Pulling slightly more, she felt the tug at her neck that stalled her breath at the tie.

“That ain't how you're s'posed t' wear it,” a casually throaty voice told her, and Rainbow reopened her one eye to catch sight of the girl who had spoken.

Upon spying her, Rainbow's heart jumped up into her throat—which was troublesome, given that her tie was nearly choking her already. She swallowed hard, the saliva hardly passing the knot over her neck, and stared reverently at her friend. With stray beams of sunlight tangling into her loosened, brilliantly blonde hair, her stunning freckled face appeared to be framed by gold. Her glistening emerald eyes reflected the lively charm of the old beech tree, and her crooked, dimpled smile seemed affixed by the heavens. Despite all this, Rainbow tried to appear unaffected.

“Applejack,” she managed to growl out in a rasp, choking on the hard consonants that concluded the girl's name. As she set to tugging her tie out from under her chin, she tried for more words, “And who are you to delegate, exactly? All you tie is that simple four-in-hand knot.”

“Does th' trick, don't it?” Applejack replied with another intoxicating smile, shrugging at the easy tie that hung around her own neck. Waiting until Rainbow finished harrumphing and fixing her collar, Applejack casually nodded at the vacant space beside her. “This seat taken?”

“Yeah, the whole school's lined up across campus for a turn to sit next to me.” The eccentric girl opened her palm towards the stretch of unoccupied space beside her, and Applejack paused for a real response. “But they can wait.”

“I'll take that as an invitation,” the blonde agreed, stepping to the spot and turning around. Rainbow tried not to watch as Applejack reached back and pressed her skirt against her rear, holding it there as she sat down on the grass beside her friend. “So, why're you sittin' out today? I thought y'were the captain of the soccer team.”

“Nah.” Ignoring the unusual way that Applejack called the sport by its foreign name, Rainbow reached over and dug around in her duffel-bag until she grasped her old football jersey, pulling it out and holding it up for Applejack to see. “That'd be some dame named Sappho.”

Applejack took the article and pulled it open, reading the not-too-poorly stitched name that lined the back of the captain's jersey. With a chuckle, she lightly teased, “Sappho? That's kinda clever.”

“I know, it drives me right mad,” Rainbow Dash agreed in a groan, snatching the jersey back and jamming it into her bag. “I used to be the one who pulled pranks.”

“Well, at least this way, y'all won't be th' one getting' in trouble all the time, right?” Applejack tried to find the silver lining, but Rainbow scoffed at the attempt.

“Guess again, the teachers are out to get me more than ever, I swear. If I snap back or retaliate, I'm the berk to cock-up.” She let out a sigh and fixed her dull stare on some imagined point in the tress. She couldn't keep her eyes to herself forever, though.

“Yea', I can relate,” Applejack murmured wistfully, a small smile defying her solemn and pensive eyes.

Wondering what she could have meant by that, Rainbow patiently listened for more, her amaranth eyes sneaking over to peek at her friend. The light breeze snagged some hanging pleats on Applejack's skirt, ruffling and knocking it up just enough to reveal her tanned thighs to the attentive young girl beside her. As the sun skipped and pirouetted over her freckled arms and dove into her gently blowing locks, Applejack took in a full breath before standing up. Rainbow nearly jumped to see her move, afraid she was about to leave, and hurriedly propped herself back up on her elbows once more.

“Where are you—?” she could hardly bring herself to ask, and never thought up an end to the sentence.

As Applejack stood up, she was bordered by the many weaving branches. The sprawling tree hung above them with open arms, letting the seasons do their worst with no qualm or query. Few fluttering leaves broke from their roosts and flipped around in the air, catching on what seemed like just a breath of wind and twirling down to the golden-haired girl beneath. Their hazy andesine or citrine hues danced around her, their honey-soaked skin nearly matching that of the bronzed blonde. Even as her straw-coloured hair braided with the wind, Rainbow could not bring herself to think for an instant she looked anything less than gorgeous.

“As much as I love a nap out in th' sun, autumn's comin'; don't wanna be buried under the fallin' leaves,” Applejack made an excuse, glancing up at the dying foliage and hearing it rustle around. “Sure is beautiful, though. All golden an' orange an' all.”

“Yeah,” Rainbow agreed softly, absently watching the fragmented spessartine shards of the sun sway over Applejack's toned body. She flinched, though, as the blonde girl turned to face her.

“Well, how's about this,” the blonde girl pursed her lips as she thought something up. “You an' I head on over t' th' library, maybe have a look-see at some o' Sappho's poems. I bet if you learned one or two, that joke o' theirs might not bunch up your boxers s' much.”

“You think?” Rainbow contemplated the idea with a tilted head.

“Yea', an' I'll bet it'll turn them jerks off 'o callin' you that, y'know, spinnin' their joke right back at 'em and all.” Applejack explained with a wider smile. With that, she extended her hand right out in front of the rainbow-haired girl, palm-up and waiting for her to take it.

“Yeah, I like that,” she agreed with a firm nod, accepting the gesture by clasping her thin hand in Applejack's strong one.

Lifting Rainbow to her feet with relative ease, Applejack dusted some stray grass off the girl's shoulder as she patted down her own slacks. Rainbow bent over to grab her duffel-bag, and upon standing, felt Applejack's hand slide under her elbow. She was about to speak up when she felt a firm tug, pulling her into a stumble and guiding her in the right direction. It had been Applejack of course, leading her into the sun despite the way it may have stung their eyes. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, though the thing was large and bulky and awkward, Rainbow Dash willingly followed her new friend, feeling nothing short of warmth and acceptance from her touch.

In contrast, however, such a gesture was easily misconstrued, “Looks like Dash is on the pull, the randy little devil.” Rainbow heard, and glanced to her right to see one of her former team mates chuckling at the prospect. “Think she fancies Applejack?”

“I think Applejack's the one who fancies her,” another player stifled behind giggles, and Rainbow Dash noticed Applejack slow down significantly, having heard the remark.

The blonde girl glanced back at their connection, the way her hand held Rainbow's arm so tenderly. Normally she would have had no second thoughts about it, such a friendly gesture, but now it seemed criminal. Rainbow Dash pulled back and allowed Applejack's hand to release her, parting the two with something so insignificant as a step or two of empty space. The two girls looked at each other knowingly, and compliantly understood the need for distance, though neither seemed to like it, nor the fact that they obeyed potential trivial rumours.

She hated to admit it, but Rainbow noticed the bashful or shameful way in which Applejack hung her head. She gulped stale saliva, though her tongue felt rough in her mouth, and realized that perhaps Applejack would be sacrificing more than she had wagered by staying at her side. Seeing the charming girl seeming so uneasy, Rainbow realized that she had never felt quite so guilty.

From the field to the library, nothing rung louder than the quiet, mocking giggles and sniggers that followed them around. Though at first the pair strode by with barely a batted eye, it soon became clear that not one girl in the rest of the school seemed to sympathize. Applejack had always known better than to listen to idle prods or jests, but the more frequent they came, the more she questioned the value of her supposed good deed.

“Here comes Sappho and her lap-stamp,” was among the taunts, and Rainbow Dash had to try very hard to resist the urge to start a physical confrontation. “I saw them snogging under the beech tree,” escalated to, “I bet they're having it off in their dorms when the nuns are out.”

Rainbow Dash let out a low grumble as she pulled a chair out at some spare table in the library, ignoring what few other whispers sifted about. She gestured for Applejack to sit down before going around the table to her own seat, plopping down leisurely in it. It was clear that Rainbow Dash had rarely spent any spare time in the library, as she had no idea where to start looking for any books. It had been Applejack who sorted through the categories to find what they were looking for, and brought the ancient poetry book to their table.

Though Rainbow had no intention of flipping through the book, it seemed that Applejack needed such a thing to do to keep her mind off the wandering comments encircling her. Finding the correct pages and primary sources, she spun the book around under her fingers and slid it across the table, letting the multi-toned girl have a gander. She was never very good with source material, so Rainbow settled for skimming over the translations of a few of the poems, catching the themes of most. Applejack patiently let her read on, and listened carefully as the girl opened her mouth.

“I have not had one word from her. Frankly I wish I were dead, When she left, she wept a great deal; she said to me, "This parting must be endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly." ” Rainbow recited quietly, her lips curving around the words fondly.

“My, that's somethin', ain't it? Real lovely, but sad,” Applejack praised in a sigh, leaning back in her chair. She would not get a chance to hear much more, unfortunately.

“Listen to that angsty lesbian codswallop, those two are heathens,” hushed about the library, stomping on perceived literature.

The two girls at the table hardly pretended they did not hear such things, and silence screamed between them. Rainbow noticed the way Applejack's hands folded in her lap like she was holding herself in her seat, and Rainbow herself could feel her hands shaking the text under her thumbs. Suddenly, the words on the page seemed far less significant than those uttered or those racing through nearby minds.

“Applejack?” Rainbow spoke up in a squeaky, repressed way, a way that made the girl in question pay special attention.

“Hmm?” the blonde hummed her acknowledgement.

“You know, things are only going to get worse for you if you stay around me,” Rainbow admitted in a solemn tone, meeting her friend's comfortable gaze. “I dug my own grave around here. But you don't have to.”

“What d'you mean?” Applejack innocently inquired, her alluringly round eyes blinking once or twice.

“You'll be nothing but unhappy if you hang about, trust me,” she tried to tell the girl, whose expression softened worrisomely. “You're a good friend, Applejack. And as such, I can't be the one dragging you down. You understand, don't you? I'll regret it for the rest of my life if I'm the cause of any trouble for you.”

“You're not,” the girl denied, though her voice faltered. “This stuff'll blow on over, it's just schoolyard bullyin' and—”

“It's not,” Rainbow Dash cut her off abruptly, the speed and truthfulness of which seemed to silence Applejack's protests. “It'll be like this forever, you and I both know that well. Your support means a lot to me, honest. I just can't shoulder both this interminable torment and my guilt over you. I'd be gutted; it's selfish, really.”

“Dash, I—” she was interrupted by a much more feminine and gobsmacked voice.

“Applejack, darling,” a hurried whisper hissed between the two girls, and their attention shifted to the girl who stood before them yet leaned away as if one of the pair was about to combust. She was immediately recognized as Applejack's room mate, Rarity, who clutched a pair of books in one arm. “What in Heavens are you doing? Dallying about with this blooming punk, again? No offence, dear.” She added as if it was some concession.

“Taken.” Rainbow growled back at her, narrowing her eyes irritably as she turned slowly to face the well dressed girl.

“Err, yes, well,” Rarity merely shrugged off her concern and turned back to her room mate. “Listen, darling, if you set to spending so much time with this, uh...” Rarity looked at the girl up and down, and Rainbow merely raised an eyebrow, wondering what she would come up with. Finding nothing, she set to continuing her sentence anyway, “Anyroad, well, then people will talk.”

“People always talk,” Applejack tried, but neither Rainbow nor Rarity seemed at all eager to agree with her.

“I don't think you understand, 'jackie,” Rarity tried to make her point as quietly as possible, noticing the librarian eyeing the lot of them up from across the room. “Think of your reputation! Of my reputation, being associated with you.”

“She's right, you know,” Rainbow concurred with the much more feminine girl, who was astounded to hear it.

“I am?” accompanied Applejack's own statement of, “She is?”

“It's not just students who'll condemn you, Applejack. If the nuns think that you're anything at all like me, well,” Rainbow glanced over at some authoritative woman, whose gaze all but crushed them. Knowing what was best, she went on with, “You could be putting your grades—your education—in jeopardy. I'm sorry, but I can't let you do that.”

“That ain't—” Applejack tried to speak up once more, but Rarity grabbed her by the collar of her blazer and yanked her out of her seat.

“It's not like you'll never see me again,” she told her as she flipped her multicoloured hair, playing it cool. “Trust me.”

“You'll thank me for this, darling,” Rarity hissed in a low voice, dragging Applejack towards the library door.

“Uh, well, see y'later then, Dash,” Applejack called back, her expression worrisomely pinned to the nonchalant girl growing farther away.

She hadn't wanted to leave, but she knew that both girls had been right. They were both just trying to protect her, to keep her out of trouble. Still, she felt guilty and shallow for having listened. Frowning so deeply even her freckles seemed to drop, Applejack watched Rainbow Dash until she was no longer in sight. The last thing she saw was Rainbow casually looking back down at the book in her hands, and her lips quietly moving to recite the next verse.

“I said, "Go, and be happy, but remember (you know well) whom you leave shackled by love.”” Rainbow made a scrunched face at how the text read, and snorted rudely at the message. “Oh, brother.”

Rainbow clapped the book closed, glaring at the blank cover, one so old it seemed to peel at each edge. The rough fabric had runs in it, and she could already smell the dust on her fingertips. Still, as she looked at it again and again, she couldn't resist the urge to open it once more. Plucking between the pages, Rainbow drifted along the passages and verses in swoons, searching for something that stuck.

As her eyes shifted over the thick pages, the rest of the library seemed to go dark, unnoticed. That is, until a pair of hands slammed down on the table across from her, though not particularly loudly. Rainbow's dull eyes lifted as she met two, amethyst coloured orbs. With a wearisome raise of one eyebrow, Rainbow waited on the impending statement, which presently always came with some prod about her outburst.

“Are you that poofter?” the girl wondered in a curious whisper, her eyes wide and focused beneath her straight-cut bangs.

“No way, my hair's way poofier, Twilight,” another girl chirped up, poking at the voluptuous tumble weed that bloomed from her head.

“Not poofier, Pinkie Pie, poofter. You know, she's a gay,” the first girl clarified, poking her glasses up her nose with her index finger. Rainbow Dash scoffed at the way she used her sexuality as a noun, but didn't mention it.

“Ooh! You're that girl who was shouting in Mass, right?” The second girl, Pinkie Pie as she was named, bounded up and down to recall, pointing a finger into Rainbow's aggravated face. “That was so funny, I thought that was a joke!”

“I'm just jubilant that you find my circumstance so hilarious,” Rainbow grumbled lowly and sarcastically, flipping another page with a flick of her wrist and acting disinterested.

“Huh?” Pinkie quirked her head and made a confused face, stalling in her bubbly behaviour.

“My, my...” The first girl, Twilight, chuckled a bit in some incredulity. With a simple smile, she added, “Here I thought you were kind of daft.”

“What, is there some correlation between being gay and possessing lesser intelligence?” Rainbow Dash curmudgeonly asked, her raspy voice growling out.

“No, no, it's just,” Twilight hurriedly tried to correct her unintended insult, but in her nervous state, couldn't think up the right words. Pinkie Pie, however, had no such problem.

“You're a prank-pulling jock!” Pinkie squeaked, and the three of them flinched as they heard the librarian shush them from across the room. Following a few stifled giggles from the frizzy-haired girl, Rainbow decided to respond.

“... Uh, thanks?” she was unsure if that was a compliment, as it clearly didn't sound like one. “Look, I know I'm probably the most interesting gossip burning around school, but please try and contain yourselves and your intrigue by staying across the room like the other blokes, okay?”

“Oh, well I didn't mean to offend you,” Twilight tried to defend herself, holding up her hands. “I've just never met anyone like you before.”

“Well, you've met me. Fact, you met me before you even knew about my... gayness.” Rainbow waved her fingers around like it was some kind of taboo magical spell to say the word. “Are you satisfied? Because I've always been this way, nothing's changed and nothing will.”

“Oh Dashie, you make it sound like you can't be cured!” Pinkie giggled louder, and both Twilight and Rainbow looked over at her incredulously.

“Cured?” Rainbow repeated scornfully. “What do you mean, cured? I'm not ill.”

“Well, a sickness of the mind is still a sickness,” Pinkie Pie all but sung, twirling around Twilight, who did not protest. “Girls are supposed to like boys, silly. That's how it is. But don't worry, we'll find a way to straighten you out, Pinkie promise!”

“I don't want to be straightened out!” Rainbow shouted, standing up so forcefully she knocked the chair out from behind her and sent it tumbling to the floor. The rest of the library went quiet, including the now stunned Pinkie Pie. “There's nothing wrong with me, and it's none of your business even if there was!”

“Dash, be quiet!” the librarian called as she, too, stood up and glared at the lot of them.

"I was just trying to—" Pinkie tried to apologize, not realizing her attempt at help would be taken so offensively.

“Stay out of my life, both of you,” Rainbow looked around, noticing the expressions of contempt, disgust, but worst of all: sympathy. Condescending sympathy. That was when she truly realized it: her peers didn't just detest her, they pitied her. With a growl, she raised her voice even louder, calling, “All of you! Stay away from me, I'm not just some sinner waiting to be saved, all right?”

“Rainbow Dash, if you don't calm down, I'll—” the black-clad woman tried to intervene once more, but Rainbow's vicious temper boiled in her direction.

“You'll what? What could possibly be worse than what I already have to tolerate?!” Throwing her arms out wide, Rainbow glowered at the authoritative force.

With another resonating groan, which reverberated through the ascending staircase in which she stood, Rainbow Dash knocked her head against the old wooden wall. Her eyes opened slowly as she replayed the events in the library over and over, trying to convince herself that, were she to do it all over again, she would have remained calm. It didn't seem plausible.

“Why did I have to ask?” Rainbow grumbled into the corner, which she was confined to until supper time for her mouthing off earlier.

A calming sigh did little to sooth her pounding heart, which beat against her wrinkled dress shirt. She could tell the sun was nearing the horizon, as the sky darkened through the high windows and the light that did pour in was tired and caught on stray flecks of floating dust. The whole place felt so warm and lively, a stark contrast to the lonesome, discriminated way that Rainbow felt. Her eyes blurred on the siding as it was built before her; old, warped and knotted as it was, yet so brilliant in hue.

The tip of her index finger was dwarfed by the size, expert elegance and curvature of the wall, but she touched them together anyway. The stained and rustic wood felt so very rough to the tender flesh of her hand, which became increasingly apparent as she dragged the fleshy digit along the grain. Naturally vibrant and optimistic, the light brown of whatever wood—she didn't know enough on the subject to identify it—lined the stairwell.

The tolling of bells could be heard all across campus, and they echoed through the stairwell that Rainbow stood in. She glanced up as if she could see the instruments, though she could only audibly recognize them as the dinner warning bell. Her eyes clenched up and her head fell back in impending agony, knowing that the main stairwell was the route most all students followed to go to the mess hall to begin preparing for dinner.

“Bleeding hell,” she hissed exasperatingly, knowing just what ridicule awaited her.

It was a custom in the boarding houses for a girl who was being punished to be sent to stand in a corner of the stairwell. It was also customary that each passing girl either would ignore the punished delinquent or poke fun at her, so that she might learn her lesson. Being kind or sympathetic to the girl in such a condition could merit the same fate for one of the other girls, and knowing that Rainbow Dash was already a target, she could imagine just what was about to befall her.

As the doors throughout the levels of the stairwell swung open, muffled buzzing rolled down each step, swarming around Rainbow Dash. Fellow students flooded into the room, trampling about and sharing warm and friendly jokes. That is, until they spotted the corner-forced Rainbow Dash, whose punishment had just begun.

A few hushed jests and prods could be heard slipping through fingers and behind ruffled collars, things like, “What'd she do this time?” And, “Crazy bounder's in the time-out corner again?”

As Rainbow tried to strictly glare at the wall she was forced to stare at, her fists clenched up to hear, “I bet she tried something on her room mate, that's why they don't share a room any more.”

“Bite me,” Rainbow snapped back, narrowing her eyes over her shoulder.

She could make out many recognizable faces: those of friends, teachers, acquaintances, and among those who kept their heads down, she could even see Applejack. Their eyes met briefly, but they said nothing in accordance. Applejack swallowed anxiously, clutching her satchel against her as she nervously adjusted the strap and kept quiet, which is what Rainbow had told her to do.

“Maybe an exorcism would save her,” some worried voice called, and Rainbow made a disbelieving face. “She needs Jesus.”

Feeling her temper boiling up, Rainbow sucked on her teeth and tried to keep quiet. The constant ridicule seemed merciless and cruel, yet Rainbow was determined to endure it. Standing in that corner, she had never felt quite so alone and judged. Her sorry, solemn eyes softened on the hard wood, the only thing that consoled her.

“I hope she stays there forever,” another comment or two in that regard had Rainbow darned near in tears, but before that could happen, someone else intervened.

“Oh hush up, all o' you,” a familiar tone silenced several others, and Rainbow perked up to hear it. “Y'all're just jealous you don't got the courage t' admit what y'all're hidin'.”

“Applejack?” Rainbow glanced back at the girl, her watering eyes shining in the evening sun. “Applejack, you shouldn't—”

“I know what I'm doing, Dash. Now, the rest o' you. Y'all should be ashamed, I don't know one passage where Jesus ever insulted those he didn't agree with, no matter what sins they'd done,” Applejack, indeed. She stood next to Rainbow and glared at those around her, standing strong even as a nun descended the stairs and looked at her. “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. Peter, 2:23.”

“Miss Applejack,” it was a nun who uttered her name this time, and she twitched and stood straighter as she heard it. “Second flight corner. Now.”

“Gladly.” Applejack agreed, turning on her heel so swiftly her skirt kicked up at the back. Rainbow smirked as she watched, having to admit that she found Applejack's determination and defiant audacity quite admirable.

Peering over her shoulder, Rainbow Dash observed as Applejack stormed past a nun and found herself a corner of her own, just one flight above Rainbow's and in the same stairwell. She stood there adamantly, her tall posture holding her resolve up like a pillar. Soon enough, the rest of the girls cleared out of the stairwell, leaving the two delinquents standing alone, their backs almost facing each other. Even the nuns had gone to set up for supper, and until the bell for the meal rang, Applejack and Rainbow Dash were confined to their posts.

“That was rather bold,” Rainbow spoke in a low yet amused tone, raising her eyebrow over her shoulder at the girl who stood a little ways above her. She heard Applejack crack a chuckle before replying.

“Sorry, I didn't mean t' embarrass you 'r nothin',” she rubbed the back of her head sheepishly, and Rainbow found the habit kind of cute.

“Oh, I'm plenty used to chagrin by now.” The rainbow-haired girl cheekily grinned, shrugging about it. “But no, you didn't embarrass me. I thought it was kind of... valiant, of you.”

“Yeah?” Applejack's voice raised in wonder, glancing down at the other girl.

“Yeah.” Rainbow repeated, a more friendly smile melting over her features.

“Y'know I was picked on quite a bit when I moved here, don't you remember?” the blonde recalled, teetering from her heels to toes casually. “We were jus' little kids back then o' course, but this accent o' mine is plenty enough to spur on some teasin'.”

“True,” the other girl agreed, and admittedly, she added, “And if memory serves, I was just as bad as the rest of the girls, wasn't I?”

“Yea'.” Applejack nodded a few times, thinking it over herself. “S'al'right though, I don't hold it against you. We all grow up an' get past it, y'know?”

“So... why'd you do stand up for me, then?” Rainbow wondered aloud, staring at the girl who stood steps above her. “I thought you were a respectable girl, not one to go around stomping on her own reputation.”

“I don't really know what kinda girl I am,” the blonde murmured pensively. Looking over at Rainbow Dash with those gleaming green eyes, she admitted, “But I know I ain't the kind to leave a friend hangin', or the kind t' let somethin' go on that I don't think is right.”

“You're a really remarkable woman, you know that?” Rainbow Dash told her, reverently gazing at the charming young woman who stood above her.

“...Shucks,” Applejack shyly brushed off the compliment.

Flattered, Applejack's usual dimpled smile spread across her honey cheeks, shining brightly in the cast sunbeams that slid over the high windows. In the setting sun, her tanned skin appeared a persimmon orange, a colour which seemed so mature and optimistic against the judgemental blacks and whites that stained the rest of the boarding school. Rainbow's expression melted as she looked up at the girl before her, a fondness in her heart becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Shortly thereafter, the supper bell rang through the stairwell, and both the girls were released from their punishment. Following a curt and uneventful dinner, which went that way due to the presence of overbearing nuns in the mess hall, the girls went back to their dorms. Rainbow swaggered up to her own room alone, having lost Applejack to some appointment with the headmistress that evening. All the way up the main stairwell, she had this goofy grin on her face, quite pleased by what the vacant room had done for her. As she made her way up to her floor, she ran her hand along the umber-coloured wood.

She arrived at her old dormitory door, pausing at the knob to wonder if she would be alone again another night. Opening it up slowly, she noticed the darkness that lay inside. As she stepped inside and flicked on the light, she noticed just how empty the place had become. Her chest tightened as she realized that Fluttershy, along with all of her things, had left. The room was all hers now. She closed the door behind her, standing still in the silence that occupied her room mate's old space.

As she turned towards her own bed and sighed, she caught sight of a small book atop her wrinkled covers. She faintly recognized it, but had to reach down and pick it up to be sure. Turning it over in her hand, she glanced over the ripped fabric, letting a grateful smile creep over her face. She opened the book at once, running her fingers over the printed parchment gingerly.

Reading along the title on the first inside page, she identified it as, “Sappho: Collected Works.”

Smirking, she sat down on the end of her bed, crossing her legs and opening the book over her lap. She flipped through the poems once more, even the fragments, and tried to figure out the meaning of all of them. As her fingers flicked the parchment over, she stalled one one particular poem. Reading it over and over, another smirk sharpened the edge of her lips. Before she could read it aloud, a knocking came at her door. She raised her head and waited on another, wondering if she had heard it right.

“Dash?” it was Applejack's voice, and Rainbow perked up to hear it. The door swung open, and the girl in question leaned in, her golden hair falling over her shoulder, loosened casually. Her old pyjamas hung too long over her feet, Rainbow could tell, but found it just another cute quirk about the girl. In fact, all of her pyjamas seemed too large on her, and clearly old and well-worn. She didn't get much of a chance to keep observing, as the girl spoke, “Hey, you busy?”

“No—well, I'm just...” Rainbow stopped, merely holding up a smile and showing Applejack the book in her hands. “You know.”

“Oh, you're readin' it?” the blonde smiled hopefully, and if Rainbow didn't already think it was Applejack's doing, she knew then who had left the book on her bed. “Well, any who, I, uh, actually came here t' ask you somethin'.”

“Inquire away,” she rainbow-haired girl told her, nodding for her to go on.

“You wouldn't think it terribly forward—or, odd, maybe—if I, maybe... move into the free bed in here?” Applejack asked, and Rainbow Dash's expression shifted to surprise and disbelief. Hurriedly explaining her reasoning, she went on, “It's just that, well, Fluttershy an' Rarity have gotten real close, stayin' up late an' yammerin' an' all, I can hardly get a wink. So I thought, since she's movin' out... I'd just switch her beds. That's okay, ain't it?”

“Yeah—of course, yeah, go ahead, I don't mind,” Rainbow tried to act indifferent, but she was sure her excitement seeped out just a hint. “It'd be nice to have an ally nearby.”

“Well, good, then,” Applejack lent her another charming smile, drumming her fingers over the door. “I'll go get my stuff.”

“Excellent,” Rainbow replied calmly, forcing her smile to tuck under her pursed lips as she looked back down at her book, giving Applejack time to duck out.

Rainbow glimpsed again the ragged old ends of Applejack's pyjamas and smirked, shaking her head with a chuckle. Her expression lightened again when she was alone, and she felt a warmth she had not felt since she had once believed her friends were true. Yet, staring at the book in her hands, she couldn't help but realize the inkling of perhaps something more. After a pleasant sigh, she read aloud the poem on the page.

“That country girl has witched your wishes,
all dressed up in her country clothes
and she hasn't got the sense
to hitch her rags above her ankles.”

Author's Note

Another chapter so fast, and right after a Barmaid update? Who else could pull it off, but Ezrienel!

*ahem*

So? Responses?

Grey

***

"Grey"

***

It was a darling dance, the way her long, slender fingers looped around the page before her, a hypnotic sway of ink tangoing with the crisp crust of the paper. Rainbow Dash tilted her head in interest as she watched the girl's hand drag nearer and nearer to her. It was endearingly proper and surprisingly feminine handwriting, Rainbow noted, and slid straight across the ruled lines. Her rosy eyes shifted up the arm of the girl who sat right close beside her, gazing into her otherwise attentive emerald ones. Once or twice, as she wrote, she glanced up and the two met eye-lines, but each time, Applejack would return to her note-jotting just as readily.

Rainbow Dash's knees shifted under the desk, rubbing together once or twice to prevent from bobbing up and down, a habit that she had since she was a child. It was a tight squeeze under the desk, as Applejack's legs were under there too. Well, one was; the other was a foot or so away, her knees separated by the back of the chair she had swung around to sit in that odd backwards way that Applejack tended to sit. Rainbow found it terribly enticing, though she had said nothing about it, nor the way their knees met under the desk when she shifted just right.

Following her unspoken lead, Rainbow Dash looked back down at the page of homework that sat not-so-perfectly between them on her study desk. It was a good deal nearer to Rainbow than it was to her room-mate, but she was somehow pleased about that, as it forced the blonde to lean closer to scribble upon it. Applejack's own set of notes lay on her side of the desk, as the two shared the piece of furniture to study together. Rainbow could feel Applejack's breath clambering through the seams in her dress shirt as she hovered so near, and she could smell the fruity scent of her hair-wash clearly from such proximity.

Slouching over her desk slightly more, Rainbow permitted Applejack to write until the far margin, finishing writing out the previous definition as requested. She could feel the blonde's strong right hand resting on the top of her backrest, steadying herself as she peered over the back of her own chair and over Rainbow's left shoulder. Though it was apparent from long ago, Rainbow was particularly intrigued by the way Applejack wrote with her left hand, something that was usually corrected early on in her boarding school. It was a clear sign that Applejack had transferred in to the school late, if her charming accent hadn't made that apparent enough.

There was heat between their near bodies, and Rainbow found herself pursing her lips to hide a creeping smile, which threatened to breach the surface of her too-bored-to-care portrayal. Her audacious eyes trailed down the framed collar of Applejack's shirt, following the bent and wrinkled lines until finding the iron-clad bars of her done-up blazer and the pressing-against of her chest to the rear of the chair between her legs. Rainbow had always known trouble with keeping herself focused, but it was particularly trying when such a gorgeous young woman was trying to help her. It seemed to have the opposite of the intended effect.

“Trivial.” She snapped back to attention as she saw Applejack's lips move to make the word. Shifting back to look at the notes, she noticed the word had been written down at the start of another line, complete with a somewhat uneven colon and an underline.

“Trivial,” Rainbow Dash repeated as she nodded her head over and over slowly. With a smirk, she added, “That's an easy one.”

“It ain't just th' spellin' y'gotta look out for,” Applejack reminded the girl with a charmingly crooked smirk, that same captivating smile that Rainbow could not escape. Her bright eyes flickered up at met Rainbow's, bringing with them some flustering gaze and an explanation, “Remember, we gotta know the meanin' and origin too.”

“Brilliant.” Rainbow rolled her eyes and sighed. Trying for the answer, she went on, “It means insignificant, ordinary, useless. Yes?”

“Well, yea', that's half right,” Applejack agreed readily, shifting in her seat and leaning further over the back of the chair to point back at the word. “It's kinda funny when y'think about th' origin of it, though.”

“Ohh?” Rainbow feigned interest with a raised eyebrow.

“Trivial, it's derived from th' Latin word meanin' crossroads.” Applejack placed her fingers on her notebook and slid it across the desk, showing it to Rainbow Dash.

“Crossroads? Why is that funny?” Rainbow asked, her eyes jumping between the handwriting and Applejack's own elegant features.

“Don't ya think that when you're standin' at a crossroads, th' direction y'pick is kinda important? I mean, one road takes y'one way, but th' other one, somewhere entirely different.” She rocked back and forth on her chair a bit, tempting Rainbow to do more than sit quietly and listen. “A crossroads is an important decision t' be made. Don't sound all that trivial t' me, y'know?” Applejack went on, tilting her head to the side as her round eyes ran along Rainbow's thoughtful features.

“Hmm. Well, I take it you're right,” Rainbow agreed with a smile, reaching down and patting Applejack on the knee twice. “You're a smart girl, you know that?”

“Thanks, I guess.” Applejack just chuckled and got right back on topic, “C'mon now, we have a lot more t' get through,”

“The hard stop's on Monday, we've plenty of time,” Rainbow whined as she stretched her arms out in front of her before folding them lazily behind her head.

“And that, I'm guessin', is why y'ain't got higher than sixty percent all semester.” Applejack prodded with a teasing grin, and Rainbow jumped to defend herself.

“Sixty-five, thanks,” Rainbow corrected her adamantly. “But fine, fine. If you must make a decent woman out of me, have at it.”

“Beg pardon?” Applejack wondered with an oddly scrunched up expression.

Waving her hand up and down with a snicker, she went on, “I'm teasing again, go ahead and study.”

“Right, right,” the blonde shifted in her seat and leaned her whole arm around the back of Rainbow's chair, reaching out and picking up the pen again. “Next word, then.”

Rainbow watched Applejack glance over at her own work before repeating the strokes and scribbling the words onto Rainbow's page. Observing carefully as Applejack's hand moved across the paper, Rainbow noticed the smudged trails of ink that her palm faded the lines from a thick black to a dull grey. That sort of thing never happened when right-handed people wrote, but it was something so simple and overlooked that Rainbow thought was just as interesting as the rest of the girl. Noticing her knuckle miss the loop of a certain letter, Rainbow reached out and touched it with her index finger. She slowly dragged the ink out over the page, watching as the stark contrasts of shade blended into a beautiful grey gradient.

It was not as gratifying a blend when she smudged the mess of her dinner later that evening.

The dull colouring of the fresh-made lasagne smeared over the white plate, and Rainbow Dash stared blankly at it. Her appetite had been lessened over the last several days, which could have been due to the constant teasing or the fact that her attention had been elsewhere. Glancing up from her less than pleasing plate, she caught sight of Applejack just a ways down the table from her.

Upon seeing Applejack, she noticed a tightening in her chest. She had had that same agony squeezing her insides ever since she could recall, but lately it had become nearly unbearable. Rainbow Dash had never been one to get too near to her classmates, always pushing them away with her annoying banter or her roughness, but she did have several acquaintances. One of them, she had considered, was Applejack, the girl who always sat beside her and lent her spare stationary. The two rarely got a chance to spend time together alone until recently, as Applejack had always seemed busy. But now, as Rainbow watched her from across the table, she felt a good deal of jealousy flaring up.

Applejack was sitting beside her old room-mate, Rarity, and the two were chatting and getting along swimmingly, despite their dispositions and disagreements. She watched the blonde girl's attractive smile spread her features like curtains, and struggled to quell her urge to snort some rude remark. It bothered her, seeing Applejack smile towards another girl. She shook her head though, finding the thought entirely silly and ridiculous. Still, her hands squeezed and tensed around the corners of the plate, and she was too restless to sit by and idly watch Applejack live on in her normal, carefree life.

Standing up abruptly, Rainbow nudged her chair back across the floor. The noise startled some of the other girls who had been eating in peace, including Applejack, who instantly looked over at the rebellious girl. Cracking a smirk and shrugging, Rainbow turned to leave, only to be stalled once more.

“Rainbow Dash,” her name was called out, and said girl flinched to hear it said in such a belittling and annoying way. Glancing over at the nun, who had spoken, she waited for a reason for her addressing. “Finish your plate. You cannot leave until you have eaten your meal, you know the rules.”

Rainbow glanced over at Applejack, whose worried expression was set on her, waiting for her response. With a sigh, Rainbow obediently complied, “Yes, sister.”

Of course, Rainbow was never one to make nice, nor to follow instructions quite as thoroughly as most others. Picking up her plate, Rainbow lifted the edge up to her mouth, tipping the far end back enough to slide the soggy noodles across the flat surface and towards her lips. With a loud and obnoxious few gulps and bites, she finished off the rest of her lukewarm lasagne, exhaling a satisfied-sounding breath before dropping the dish right back onto the table.

“Happy? Golden.” Rainbow didn't wait for any answer, raising her hand to her mouth and rubbing the stray sauce off her lips down the back of her wrist and the top of her thumb.

Before turning to leave, she glanced over her shoulder, noticing the amused grin playing across Applejack's face. Hers was the only visage who seemed pleased and fond of the gesture, as everyone else seemed appalled or offended. Rainbow plopped her faintly saucy thumb into her mouth, sucking the taste off before sucking it out of her lips once more. She saw Applejack shake her head and huff something of a laugh from across the table, clearly quite taken by her remarkably nonchalant attitude. With a quick flirtatious wink left in her wake, Rainbow spun on a dime and made her way out of the mess hall.

“There goes Sappho,” someone muttered as Rainbow passed them, merely glancing over at them boredly. She had heard it all before, it was more of a nuisance than an insult by now.

“That's me,” Rainbow replied as she passed, flicking a quick two-fingered salute in the direction of the speaker, who looked confused by the move.

“Bet she's got a John Thomas in her knickers, that's why she always wears slacks,” someone noted, and as she heard it, Rainbow looked down at her loose fitting pants. She snickered a bit of a laugh, finding the idea somewhat funny or even appealing.

Being the first out of the mess hall was pleasant, Rainbow had realized a long time ago. The halls were vacant when the rest of the girls were eating, and she could jump and skip up the stairwell loudly without having to worry about getting a demerit or warning. Upon reaching her own floor, she realized that it, too, was desolate and empty. Sniggering to herself, Rainbow hurried over to the old, comfortable couch, flopping down on it with a grunt.

After a moment of sitting in the silence, bouncing her one leg lazily on top of the other by her ankle, she planted her feet well more than shoulder-width apart and sighed. It was nice and quiet, for certain, but it was also quite lonely. As her arms stretched over the back of the couch, she wished nothing more than to have someone sit in her casual embrace.

Her ears twitched as she heard some soft steps from down the hall, and leaned over one side of the couch to try and glance down at the noise. Seeing nothing, she relaxed against the couch and waited for more. Hearing the door to the staircase fall back into place, she noticed the steps get a bit quicker, and just after a small, thin shadow fell around the corner, a familiar peer followed afterwards. Rainbow Dash sat up straight as she noticed the girl, who had her head down as she crept through the hall as if it would keep her from being noticed.

“Fluttershy?” Rainbow gently spoke her name, feeling the word stick to her tongue in a foreign and tasteless way. Her voice almost faltered as she iterated it, feeling some pang of uncertainty and disappointment as she saw the look that her past room-mate gave her.

“Oh, um,” the girl stammered uneasily, flinching and twiddling her fingers unnaturally uncomfortably. “Hello... Rainbow Dash.”

“Surname and everything, hmm?” she realized with a solemn tone, nodding slowly. “How are you, anyway?”

“I'm... good.” Fluttershy did not seem in any mood to talk, but she stood by the corner as far from Rainbow as she could without seeming like she was running away.

“Ahh. Champion.” Rainbow was pleased to hear it.

As the two stood on opposite sides of the room, Rainbow Dash understood just how distant they truly were, by heart and by space. Something drastic had changed between them, turning them from good friends into strangers. Losing something like that was difficult to stomach, and Rainbow was quite remiss that she had eaten so much at dinner, as it almost made her nauseous.

“I...” Fluttershy started a sentence but paused, and Rainbow's attention jumped to her quivering lips. “I'm... sorry, Rainbow Dash.”

“For what?” the girl braved to ask.

“For... n-not being... not being, well...” Fluttershy coughed to try and hide the way she couldn't figure out her words, but they finally came out, “For not helping.”

“Helping?” Rainbow was not sure how to take that. She either meant that she was sorry for not helping Rainbow weather the storm that rained around her, or sorry she could not help her figure her way out of her supposed condition. “Well, thanks for the consideration, but I don't need the help. If it makes you uncomfortable, then I shouldn't expect you to stay around. Don't worry about it.”

“It's just,” the timid girl's voice broke high again, but she hesitated before going on, “Well, I-I feel like things h-have changed so much, suddenly. W-When I think about our friendship, I wonder... I, um, well, I feel like... like everything was... a lie.”

With a light-hearted snicker, Rainbow shook her head to realize how true that might have been, seeing as how she had been holding such a big part of herself. “It kind of was, hiding it all from everyone. But that's all.”

“But, being your room-mate, a-and your friend... I just wonder if... if, d-did you ever... uh,” Fluttershy had trouble spelling it out, but the mere suggestion of what she couldn't quite word was enough to infuriate Rainbow Dash.

“Wha—no, no, don't ask that bleeding bullshit.” Rainbow sat up straighter and scooted to the edge of her seat, pointing an accusation back at her former friend, “Why do you all just assume that because I'm gay, I'm some form of pervert who's always degrading and demeaning her friends in her head? I'm not a monster, Fluttershy.”

“I-I didn't mean t-to offend you,” she meekly explained, and tried another approach, “I just mean... well, perhaps you could have used some help, someone... someone to help you get through it. I-I couldn't be that for you.”

“Get through it? It's not something to manoeuvre through, to cure or to ignore. I was always this way, and I did just well and dandy. I was nothing but your friend, Fluttershy, and I never wanted anything more or less, understand?” Rainbow Dash went on telling her, finally pushing herself to her feet and walking a few steps nearer to the girl who shrunk under her gaze. As she seemed to cower and cover herself from any potential lascivious wandering of the eyes, Rainbow scoffed at the unspoken suggestion and crossed her arms. “Besides, you're not my type.”

“O-Oh, um...” Fluttershy struggled to speak, shifting towards the wall.

“See, I'm the type who isn't afraid of anything, the type who isn't shy about being who she is.” Rainbow Dash told the girl, her voice calm and strong. As the words came out, Fluttershy's gaze met her own. Rainbow was firm when she told her, with a thumb pointed to herself, “And that's the kind of similar strength I hope to find.”

“... I-I hope that you figure it all out, Rainbow Dash.” Fluttershy went on, not able to say anything too personal on the matter. She was still uncomfortable even seeing the girl, as it made her feel almost objectified, and hoped that somehow it would end. “Y-you don't have to be like this.”

“What do you think this is?” Rainbow Dash inquired in an offended and appalled tone, narrowing her eyes and frowning at the suggestion. “Everyone is saying the same thing. That I'm sick. That I need to be fixed. That something is wrong with me. Thing is? I feel fine, Fluttershy.” Rainbow shook her head and stormed right past Fluttershy, with but another few quiet words left in her wake, “It's people like you who are making me sick.”

And with nothing else but a disappointed shake of her head, Rainbow Dash left the girl who had abandoned her behind, and strode back to their previously shared room. She dared not look back, knowing that she would likely catch either a disgusted or disapproving look, the kind she had nearly grown accustomed to by then. But of course, one could never quite grow accustomed to that.

Slipping back into her dorm room, Rainbow sighed audibly, leaning her back against the door. Everything was so quiet in there; no passing insults squeezing beneath the door and soaking into the old knotholes, no scurrying by of happy peers enjoying their days in blissful ignorance, no rain knocking at her window. For now, her room was silent.

Rainbow Dash went over to her old familiar mattress, knowing that the inanimate nature of the thing would welcome her rather than cut her down. A peaceful exhale escaped her at last, and her sore shoulder muscles—wrought by the weight of the whole world, perhaps—gingerly relaxed against the firm cushion. She folded her arms behind her head comfortably, and with such a nonchalant position came the desire to rest. At first, her eyes merely closed as she bounced one foot over the other, but as the wonderfully dull solitude got to her, she hardly realized that she had fallen asleep.

Merely a wink or two later—as measured not by time, but by perception of it by a young girl—Rainbow Dash found herself stirred. At first, the touch against her chest felt so soft it might have well have been her own hand. However, as the grip increased, Rainbow's instincts were alerted to another presence, though she noticed no hostility. Peeking open one weary eye, Rainbow Dash locked gazes with an entrancing set of eyes, those which glistened like sunlit emerald in the now dark room.

She hardly had to glance down to notice that Applejack leaned right over her on her bed, and was firmly grasping her tie with one finger slipped over the knot and the rest holding it tightly. Stalled for a moment by dumbfounded misunderstanding, Rainbow just laid there staring for another few seconds, trying to learn how to speak again. Applejack's somewhat embarrassed expression made her want to smile, but she had to pose the question.

“What on Earth are you doing?” Rainbow asked blankly, propping one eyebrow up and making some attempt at a confused smirk.

“You'll wrinkle your uniform if y'sleep in it, y'dolt,” Applejack replied just as bluntly, proceeding to slide the knot over the thinner end until the tie came undone.

“Oh, Criminy it's late. Why didn't you wake me sooner?” she groggily asked, sitting up as her room-mate lifted the now loose run of fabric from around her neck.

“Y'all were nearly right outta it, I poked and prodded you three times. Besides, y'just looked s'darn peaceful, sleepin' there,” the blonde admitted with a smile, folding Rainbow's tie as she stood back up to place it on her night stand. “A happy change from all th' bickerin' y'do.”

“You adore it when I cock about, I know you do,” Rainbow teased, beginning to undo her shirt as she shifted on her bed. She was pleased to have heard Applejack say that she seemed peaceful, it sounded like something of a compliment that made her heart flutter once more.

“Get back t' sleep an' keep dreamin',” she chuckled as she tossed Rainbow's pyjamas over to her, intentionally hitting her in the face with them.

“Yeah, yeah, you're one to gob,” Rainbow retorted in a playful snicker, standing as she finished undoing her buttons and began sliding her dress shirt over her shoulders.

As she grabbed at the bottom hem of her white tank top and began pulling it over her head, she was stopped in her tracks by Applejack across the room. The blonde had begun doing the same without her noticing, as evident by the fact that her skirt dropped right around her ankles. Rainbow's eyes widened to watch the spectacle, which was her gorgeous blonde room-mate removing her clothes with her back towards her. It was somewhat hard to see, as the sun had clearly gone down, and Applejack had already turned the lights off. Leaning to one side, Rainbow Dash almost thought she might fall over, and it was worth it to fully inspect the girl before her.

Unlike her previous room-mate Fluttershy, Applejack had no qualms about changing right there in front of her. It both intrigued and taunted Rainbow Dash, but though she wanted to respect the girl and look away, she could not. In nothing but her white undergarments, Applejack looked so pure and untainted, which made Rainbow all the more enchanted. Swallowing her primal desires, she teetered a bit on one foot, lost in contemplation.

“You stuck?” Applejack's voice roused her to a start, and Rainbow's eyes snapped up to hers.

“Huh?” the rainbow-haired girl wondered dumbly, before realizing that she was still only about half way through taking her shirt off, and it was hanging over her elbows and around her neck. “Oh, no, I was just thinking.”

“Tha's dangerous territory,” Applejack mumbled a tease, and Rainbow hadn't even realized that the girl had pulled on a pair of loose shorts and a thin button-up shirt over her underwear. Noticing how Rainbow struggled to remember where she was in the middle of changing, Applejack chuckled and strode over to the girl. “Here, lemme help.”

Applejack took Rainbow's hands and gently unfurled them, leaving the thin shirt entirely in her own control. Gently, the blonde stretched the neck hole over her room-mate's head and pulled it over her somewhat messy, dyed hair. Her arms fell slowly back into place as Applejack kindly folded her shirt and placed it into the laundry hamper they shared.

It had her puzzled, Applejack's unfounded friendliness towards her. Certainly they had known each other for a good long while, but Rainbow was struck and impressed by how understanding she had been, and how close they had become. Her freckled companion in question picked up her pyjamas and held them out to her, which she gratefully took and began adorning with no spoken thanks.

“Get some rest, y'look a little off, sugar,” Applejack told her friend with a pat on the shoulder, before she walked over to her own bed.

“Brilliant.” Rainbow numbly responded, pulling her pyjamas on before sliding over to her own bed, watching Applejack get into her own bunk and mirroring the motions.

“Mmm,” Applejack hummed as she got comfortable in her bed, shifting around until the silence settled once more. She set to break it, though, “G'night, Dash.”

“Yeah,” she agreed with a quiet voice. “Good night.”

As they snuggled up under their respective covers, the sense of impending slumber settled over them. However, while Applejack drifted peacefully off, Rainbow Dash remained wide awake and rigid in her bed. Where once she had nodded off in merely a few moments, she now lay painfully aware.

Time seemed to crawl on, swaying back and forth in speed like some pendulum. And yet, each passing moment was another fraction of peace lost. As the hours rolled by, she could not hope to keep her eyes closed long enough that it might finally stay dark. No, for Rainbow Dash, there was something much more pulling than the sweet leisure of sleep.

The room was soaked in moonlight, saturated in silky streams of lunar paint strokes. Against the midnight canvas, the silver beams speckled the leaning, cast slivers across the cool room. Turning in her bed, Rainbow Dash gazed through the snow-like downy lacing and onto the pristine, porcelain-seeming skin of the young girl who captured her attention. Her sultry silhouette rose and fell such minuscule fractions against the stark dark walls, but even under the dim, dismal ambiance, her complexion remained beaming and breathtaking. It was particularly picturesque the way that the moon muted the normally vibrant and vivacious colours; the brilliant blonde of Applejack's hair turned to a shimmery silver, the auburn speckled freckles sank to a soot or charcoal dusting. The whole room, monochromatic beneath the ghostly gloom, appeared before her in haunting hues of grey.

Nothing in her life had seemed quite so pulling as this: as nearly nothing at all. A breath; abated, moderate, elementary in its common simplicity, a palliative, soothing ease that for just such a breath, seemed to quell all other burdensome sounds. A shuffle; some discreet and immeasurable movement that rustled the tormenting covers and sheets, breezes of fabric that barricaded a body from the innocence of lingering looks. A body; a warm, comfortable, tangible representation of a physicality so pure and loved it seemed divine in its mortality. A desire; floating, swelling, writhing and twisting through the air so tauntingly it seemed to burn at exposed flesh. These enticing and endearing little humanisms, these fragments of individuality belonging to someone whose unique self lay so near, these things were invaluable. These things were pulling and demanding and... entirely imagined.

She could feel it, and touched gingerly at her chest: the way her heart pounded so hard she could feel her ribs shake, the way her breath trembled as it escaped her anxious lungs, the way her cold hands tingled or twitched and longed for touches, the way she felt so void and empty, yearning for something so little as a passing graze or brush. And yet, she was struck still, overwhelmed by all her siren desires, tied tightly to the mast of her bunk. After all, she merely laid in her bed, and across a stale, slumbering dormitory, lay just another girl. Something that happened every night, something that was so unremarkable it hardly merited mention. It enthralled her to her very core, and deprived her of her own rest.

After several debates on the subject, which included countdowns in her head pushing her to move, she finally gathered the gall to toss the comforter off her body and sit upright. It was cold in the crisp evening air, and looking down at her own body brought about the sense of unfamiliarity, as her pigment-deprived skin appeared as colourless as the sheets beneath her. After a toned groan, Rainbow managed to roll off her cot, touching her bare toes to the cold hardwood floor.

Standing so far did not appease her restless spirit, so as quietly as she could muster with her weak muscles and her clumsy steps, she made her way to Applejack's bedside. Though she may have been perceived as startling just leaning over the girl's bed, she had trouble summoning the will to care. Watching the gorgeous blonde girl, even for just an instant, seemed worthy of any misconception.

Everything about her seemed attractive to Rainbow Dash: from the short length of her fingernails to the lengthy wisps of eyelashes that fluttered with perhaps a whimsical dream; from the few perfectly spattered freckles and moles on her exposed upper thigh to the feminine arc of her jaw. Even the way her collar fell crooked over her clavicle and showed just enough of her far-too-smooth-not-to-touch skin, which took all of Rainbow's will power to stave from caressing.

But what was particularly pulling was perhaps the silence that had wrapped around the girl in a tight embrace. It was intimate, in that settling quietude, when no mumbled or incorrect tumble of words from her silly mouth could ruin their comfortable moment. Even in her mere presence, Rainbow could feel her cheeks flush and her palms sweat, just thinking about how close she wanted to get, how much she wanted to gamble, how near she dared wager getting caught.

The daydreams lately had become just as awfully enjoyable as the night ones, and Rainbow only yearned that she could ever know for sure what it was like: what Applejack's rough hands might feel like, caressing her body; what the feminine dips along her waist might have measured against Rainbow's wanting hands; what their breasts might have felt like to come together in an embrace; what a kiss against her smooth and plush lips might feel like, might taste of. All these things were such demanding desires that Rainbow had indeed considered forcing them, but she could never truly imagine forcing herself upon someone so gentle and loving as her beautiful angel of a friend.

There was nothing more torturous than knowing you could never indulge in your deepest desires. If the object of her affection was indeed oriented in a different sexual nature, then Rainbow knew she could never be charming enough, funny enough, or attractive enough to win the girl over. And that realization was miserable. It hurt to even just imagine for an instant that there was a possibility, because when she came down off of that disillusioned cloud, she only felt worse for having wanted it so desperately.

She could not stay any longer, she could not look upon the face of love and tarnish it with her devious desires. So at once, still barefoot and clad in her old, loose pyjamas, Rainbow Dash crept out her own front door and stepped into the chilling vacancy of the dormitory hallway. She knew the way well enough without the need for direction or sight, and tiptoed her way to her destination.

It took a mere several moments to cross the building and sneak down the stairwell, exiting through the rear door that faced the hill upon which the campus church sat. The grass nibbled at her toes the whole way there, damp dew already beginning to settle onto the leaning blades. Stray thistles stung her, deterring her from her necessary confession, but she wavered not.

At last, she tore open the two great, heaving doors to the chapel, hearing the reverberant echo that sung about in the rafters. She had not been there since the day she had stormed out, and she had thrice promised never to return, but there she stood. Across the expanse lay an array of candles, all set out in rows of different heights and lengths, encircling the desolate altar. Slowly making her way between the pews, she found an equally unremarkable seat and knelt at the edge before sliding across it. It was a long few moments before she resigned herself to speak, and even in nearly a whisper, her voice sounded so loud and harsh against the wide worshipping walls that welcomed her.

“Uhh, hey... God, right?... Well, I really... I don't know how I'm supposed to start these things,” she began awkwardly, making an annoyed face at the way her words came out. Trying with the jumbled things once more, she spoke, “I mean, well, obviously you knew that already. I... I pray, I do. But I've never been good at anything other than repeating and reciting the usual words, telling you what I want—hell, usually just closing my eyes and pretending I knew what to think or do or say. But...”

Rainbow's words failed her, her own speech being flimsy and not sounding good enough to reach any idea of a Lord. Taking a deep breath, she nodded to herself and listened to what she had been taught, starting by sighing the cross over her head and heart. Clasping her hands in her lap, she tried once more.

“Forgive me, Father,” she pleaded with a scrunched up, worrisome expression, her fingers writhing in her hands and sweating just to admit it out loud, “For I have sinned.” She took a deep breath, figuring where she might begin with such a confession. Usually, one might confess to a priest, rather than the Lord himself, but Rainbow needed true guidance, she knew that much. “I know the scriptures, I know the passages well. I've been told them all, been made to learn and recite and understand them. I know what I'm supposed to do, and who everyone wants me to be. And yet, I am none of those things. I am broken, and lost.”

Her lip quivered as the words tumbled out, finding their way easily once she let it out. She cleared her throat to keep going, and changed the way her fingers entwined to try and find comfort. With her eyes falling shut, she admitted what she had feared most.

“My mind and my heart are tainted, Father. That's what they've all told me. I didn't believe it, I couldn't... but...” Shaking her head, she went on, “I'm confused. I'm so lost, Father, I'm so very lost. I have sinned, transgressed against myself, my better judgement, and... and I have sinned against her.”

With a grunt, she felt her chest tighten around the emotion that came as she even thought of Applejack. A snivel found its way out, and it sounded pathetic to hear it bounce back at her in the emptiness that the Lord's house left her with. Squeezing her palms tighter, she sat up and placed her hands out on the back of the seat in front of her, leaning forward to stare at her fingers as she remembered the words that she had read.

“Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully...” Rainbow Dash recited in words that were not her own, “Has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matthew 5:28.” Knowing it well, she admitted it, “I have coveted. Coveted the girl who's been nothing but a blessing to me. I have tainted her in my heart, and what's worse? Oh, Father, what is so much worse... I like it—I love it.”

And she did, she adored the way that Applejack made her feel, the way her heart raced when she looked upon her charming smile, the way her hands trembled as they touched, the way she loved her. She coveted Applejack, she wanted her, and she wanted to want her. But it all felt so wrong, as she cared so much for Applejack that she felt it was selfish to want to possess her.

“What am I supposed to do? Repent? Will that take the urges away, the thoughts, the dreams, the desires? I wish I could, I really, truly do. But I want her, Father, and I want to want her. That is so... that's so messed up!” She nearly burst into tears, but didn't know why. She felt more angry than sad, and that only grew stronger as her questions remained unanswered, as the Lord abandoned her alone in his dark temple. “Come on, you have nothing to say? Why are you still silent, Father? Why don't you speak to me, tell me what to do?” she found herself calling out, and rose to her feet at once. “Why did you make me this way? Why does no one struggle with this, no one except me? How can it be, that, that all these people, your people, they're taught and told to hate people like me—perfect strangers—to condemn them, to judge them? And you do nothing about it! Are you even listening?! Do you even care?!”

Still, not another sound was heard, nothing but the faint rumbling caused by her projected voice. She stood beneath the tall roof and peered at the stained glass, which appeared colourless as no light shone through. Her breath was heavy and loud after the outburst, but still she waited on something, some kind of sign or something.

“Sometimes the Lord is silent, so that we may find our way ourselves,” some voice replied, and it was certainly not who she had been speaking to. Turning around, Rainbow found herself face to face with her Headmistress herself. “So that we can hear our own voices.”

“I do enough of that already, thanks, Headmistress Celestia,” the young girl responded with a scoff, shoving her hands in her pockets and slumping back to her seat, staring at the ground.

“Rainbow Dash,” the woman spoke her name, and Rainbow did not answer nor move to indicate the name belonged to her at all. As she came over and sat beside the misguided young student, her midnight robes flowed over the dimly lit pews and settled over her feet. “We all have our transgressions to overcome. We all have confessions. It is what makes us human.”

“Being human sure can be troublesome,” Rainbow murmured with a shrug, glaring at her silly little toes.

“One of the greatest things about being human, though, is our ability to change. Our incomparable and interminable inherent ability to become greater than what we were, to strive to be someone worthy.” Headmistress Celestia looked over at her student, examining her slouched posture.

“How, though?” Rainbow found herself wondering.

“It's all right to ask for help, to know that you are mortal and flawed.” The Headmistress rested a hand on Rainbow's shoulder, and her voice was soft. “This is why we ask ourselves: what would Jesus do?”

“You think I should carry my burden through the streets for everyone to see?” the young girl teased lightly, a hint of her admirable nature coming to light in the darkest of nights.

“You already do that, Rainbow Dash.” the woman remarked with a smile, but went on, “But no, you should learn from those who are wiser. Ask for help, from Jesus... or from your congregation.”

Tilting her head to the side, Rainbow questioned, “My congregation?”

“Yes. Dash, if you would really like to change, to be someone who does not have to curse the Heavens to feel heard,” Headmistress Celestia told her, standing to her full height and holding out a hand. “I can help.”

“How do you mean?” she wondered innocently, her bright eyes shining in the otherwise monochromatic room, which was fogged with the dull grey moonlight and shadowed in sinking darkness.

“God gave man his intellect, and told him to watch over the rest of his creatures. He gave us the necessary tools to help his people pull themselves out of the grips of sin.” The Headmistress explained easily, as Rainbow took her hand and she led the young girl towards her doom. “There's a technique that has been developed for people like you, Rainbow Dash. It's called Aversion Therapy.”

Author's Note

Arby: "Grey... more like GAY, am I right?!"
Me: ... Just read it, fgt.

Sorry about the delay there folks, had a lot going on-- still do! Hopefully gonna finish up this and the Barmaid relatively soon. So, what do you think of this'n? The stuff with Rainbow Dash looking at AJ in her bed, soooo totally personal to me. I've been there so many times, and I tried to tell it how I feel it, but it seems like to do so, I would have to make that scene a hundred times longer, so... not gonna do that. Anyway, read on!

Yellow

***

"Yellow"

***

Her bed was left unmade, which by any normal standards would seem entirely common. But that morning, it haunted Applejack. She was accustomed to waking up finding her lazy-headed room-mate still fast asleep in the mountainous folds of her blanket, but that day, not even her pyjamas were left in her wake. It was eerie to have silence in the morning, and Applejack had trouble even moving herself from the desolate bedside at all as she stared into the cold wrinkles of sheets to where Rainbow Dash once lay.

The cascading morning sun often served to ignite some naïve motivation inside the blonde girl, but not that day. It reminded her that she would have to go to school, she would have to answer more accusatory questions—which usually she had grown accustomed to, but now she had no one to back her up, no one to look over at and share the same cynical thought about ignorance or juvenile behaviour. Lost as to where her lovable room-mate had vanished to, Applejack merely stared at the receding shadows of the window bars across the vacant sheets. Now, the creeping, yellow sunbeams gave her an uneasy turn in her stomach, a sense of unrest, of anxiety, of fear.

At once, Applejack turned on her heel and marched to her night stand, removing her folded up dress shirt and making room for it on her body by removing her sleeping shirt. The soft, thin fabric was replaced by the tight, ironed-still folds of conformity, and she folded her collar over the noose-like pre-tied tie that Rainbow would usually tease her about in that curmudgeonly raspy morning-voice she had. With an annoyed growl in the back of her throat, Applejack pulled on her pleated skirt and shifted it around her hips until she had it fitting just right. At last, she hardly bothered to pull up her knee-socks to the exact same symmetrical height before stepping into her holey shoes, snatching her blazer and book-bag off the bedpost and storming out the door.

With eyes that never strayed from the end of the hall, besides a quick sweep to scan for any familiar or guilty faces, Applejack strode through the common area and ducked into the stairwell. Glancing out the window to the dew-covered, sparkling soccer field, but finding no more evidence of her missing room-mate, Applejack continued to descend. She could not imagine what would have possessed the young girl to go out in her pyjamas—Applejack knew this because her uniform dress clothes had been left in their usual half-folded disarray while her sleepwear was absent—in broad daylight, without a word to her.

Making quick stops at the gymnasium, library, and the girl's first period classroom, Applejack hurried along to the Headmistresses office in haste. Though often the disciplinarian, the Headmistresses sister Luna, would better know a delinquent like Rainbow Dash's whereabouts, Applejack was determined to go right to the top of the ladder to find out. Catching the woman in the middle of a sip of fresh-brewed Earl Grey tea, Applejack nearly booted her office door right open as she barged in unannounced, something very unlike her.

“Where's ma room-mate?” Applejack demanded to know immediately, but from the surprised and annoyed look on her Headmistress's face, she knew she should have chosen a more diplomatic approach.

“I beg your pardon, Applejack?” Headmistress Celestia wondered in a perplexed tone, placing her pure white tea cup down on a little matching plate. “I know it's early, but where have your manners gone?”

“I'm sorry, Headmistress, but I really gotta know what happened t' my room-mate. Rainbow Dash, y'know her? She ain't in her bed, an' I know she ain't the most popular girl around, s' needless t' say I'm a little concerned.” her student explained more carefully, stepping further into the office and narrowing the wide open doorway behind her.

“Your concern will never rest, putting it on a girl like Dash,” Celesia murmured mostly to herself, but blew a cool breath on her tea before actually responding. “She's fine, Applejack. She came to me last night and requested my help.”

“You... your help?” Applejack repeated in an uncertain tone.

“Yes, while she intended to ask our Lord for forgiveness, it seems, she decided it would be best to allow me to do my due diligence to try and save her.” the older woman prattled on casually, sweetening her tea with a tip of a spoon.

“She don't need savin',” the blonde girl mumbled, crooking her mouth into a thoughtful frown.

“We have resources at this institution that could help change her attitude and perspective, so I intend to use them to her fullest advantage,” the woman went on to explain, and Applejack scoffed to hear anything about Rainbow's advantage when discussing something that seemed so very political. “Worry not, Applejack, she's in the best of care and will be returning promptly. Until then, you wouldn't mind gathering her assignments from her professors or taking some extra notes for her, would you?”

After cautiously staring at the woman before her, Applejack seemed to agree, “I s'pose.”

“Suppose, dear,” her Headmistress corrected, and Applejack felt like sucking her teeth irritably. “Thank you, you are most helpful. Now do get along to class, you cannot keep allowing Rainbow Dash to drag you down.”

She ain't, or Don't talk 'bout her like that, Applejack was about to say, but she stopped herself. Instead, she knew best when to hold her tongue and simply let it slide, reciting, “Yes, ma'am.”

“Brilliant. Dismissed.” The Headmistress dismissed her with the wave of her hand.

With an obedient and respectful bow, Applejack took her leave at once. Though she had indeed received answers, she was quite aware that nothing the Headmistress had said had made her feel any better at all. She was still worried, especially since Rainbow Dash had not even bothered to tell her any of it. Applejack had thought that the two of them were close friends, close enough to have shared any indecision or major choices, but perhaps that was some misplaced trust.

For the time being, she supposed, she should do what the Headmistress told her, to go to class. She knew better than to blindly doubt those who took care of them, those who supposedly did the work of God. Besides, she had plenty to do, be it studying or taking notes or gathering Rainbow's assignments for her classes.

Rainbow Dash herself, however, had very little to do. She had been made to wait in the counsellor’s office for hours. The Headmistress had some duties to attend to before she could get to the girl's therapy, such as contacting her parents and writing up waivers and liability statements. Besides, she would have to send her most faithful student into the bowels of the institution, particularly the old storage rooms and boilers rooms, to seek adequate tools. At last though, the counsellor’s office door creaked open, and Rainbow Dash looked up from her poor-postured seat on the old sofa.

“Finally. I've only been waiting for bleeding hours.” Rainbow Dash growled irritably, scratching her messy hair and glaring at the older woman.

“Watch your mouth,” she replied immediately, not in the mood for Rainbow's brash and obnoxious behaviour. Gathering the girl's files, she ushered her to move, “Now hurry along, we should get started.”

“Sooner the better,” the young girl agreed, getting to her feet immediately and stretching her arms above her head.

“Right this way.” Celestia led her along.

The halls were vacant, and not just because all the girls were in class. That part of the administration building was always quiet, especially since they had to pass through the nursing wing as well. Rainbow was rather unsettled the farther they went, as she had never been that deep into the building. Passing prohibited areas was usually exciting for the girl, but now it made her uneasy. A bright yellow sign hung above her head, warning her to go no further, but she did not heed it.

“Uh, where're we going, exactly?” Rainbow found herself asking at last as the Headmistress unlocked a door that led to a dark stone stairwell, and Rainbow shuddered to imagine what lay beyond.

“We need a room without too much light, as you'll be watching slides for part of the treatment.” Celestia started vaguely.

“Slides? I do enjoy a good slide show,” Rainbow played along, though her eyes ventured across the old, cracking foundation.

“Besides, we can't have you being interrupted,” came an addition, and it sounded somehow ominous, but again, Rainbow did not listen to her gut as she often did. “This area was originally a detainment area, and at one point, part of the school itself. It's partially underground, however, and has flooded in the past.”

“It just sells itself,” Rainbow murmured lowly, raising her eyebrow as she examined the water damaged walls and the furnace vents.

At last, they came to an old metal door, which did not have a lock, but took something of a shove to get open. Rainbow did the task herself, and found herself face to face with a small, isolated room. There was a small window along the rear wall, but it was barred and covered in some burlap to keep the light out. The lights on the roof flickered a bit, and illuminated some kind of long stretcher and two spectator seats. There was also a projector in the far corner, which seemed aimed at the blank wall to her left. The whole scene made her skin crawl, even if it was just an old basement in a Catholic all-girls school. She was never one to let her fears get the better of her, and swallowed the lump in her throat at once.

“Twilight Sparkle, did you have any trouble finding the slides or tools?” the Headmistress asked the other person in the room, who Rainbow had hardly even noticed as she was loading the projector.

“No, madam, but I haven't rolled the machine in yet.” Twilight responded as she finished organizing everything around the projector and walked over to a table that held several medical tools and such. She read some names aloud, “Insulin, metrazol, cardiazol. Just in case.”

“I'm sure it won't be necessary.” The Headmistress turned back towards her patient, holding out a neatly folded gown of some sort, pale in colour. “Dash, please put this on.”

“No one said I had to look like a dolt for this,” the young girl remarked, but noticing the look on the older woman's face, she agreed. “Fine, fine.”

“Thank you,” she thanked graciously, and Rainbow just shrugged as she turned around and began changing. Twilight Sparkle was too busy to even look up, as she was still going over a check-list on a clipboard she held up to her chest. Celestia, however, had something to say, “You've made the right choice, by seeking help.”

“I'm not quite sold on it yet.” Rainbow replied as she slipped the shirt over her head, tying a loose string around her waist before removing her pyjama pants and discarding them sloppily on the floor.

“I know you are afraid, but there is more to fear by remaining sinful.” her Headmistress tried to calm her, going through her file and taking out some necessary sheets.

“By whose standards?” the subject asked with a snarky tone, frowning.

“Would you rather spend your whole life being angry with God, having God angry with you?” Headmistress Celestia asked, though it was rhetorical. “Would you prefer to be judged, condemned, and trapped with your sinful desires? You'll hurt those nearest to you, Rainbow Dash.”

It seemed true, at the moment. The way that Rainbow Dash had been staring at her loyal and loving room-mate, it wasn't fair. She was afraid, afraid of hurting Applejack or being someone unworthy of her friendship.

“Besides, Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?” Twilight Sparkle spoke up, and both of the others looked over at her. “Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Corinthians 6:9-10.”

“Excellent passage, Twilight Sparkle.” Headmistress Celestia praised, and Rainbow snorted to hear it.

“Yeah, a regular Sally Soapbox, over here,” came her irritable grumble.

“Dash, do be polite, Twilight is my assistant, you'll want to be on her good side,” the older woman told her, and a sharp tone in her voice reminded Rainbow Dash to perhaps listen.

“That sounds like a threat.” Rainbow prodded carefully, meeting the woman's eyes as she was guided over to the long, raised cot.

“Friendly warning.” Celestia brushed the subject off, patting the seat for Rainbow to hop up.

Doing as she was silently requested, Rainbow Dash jumped up onto the edge of the cot and lazily kicked her feet back and forth over the side. She felt more than uncomfortable in such weird garb, but she had complained enough already. As she carefully watched her two stand-in nurses set everything up, she decided to do what she did best and talk some more.

“Why are you trying to fix me, anyway? Is there something so wrong with me you need to go through all this trouble?” Rainbow pondered, trying to catch her Headmistress's eye-line for answers.

“Rainbow Dash, you are a vile deviation,” came a very blunt statement, and Rainbow's jaw hit the floor. “This must be amended. If you ever want anyone to accept you or conceive you to be a valuable person, you must know that you have to become someone of value.”

“...Someone... of value?” Rainbow sadly repeated.

“Homosexuality is a perversion of the divine and natural law, as God gave us the gift of sexuality and pleasures to be used to populate his Earth. The purpose of sex is to reproduce, and clearly, homosexuals sinfully use sex to attain merely pleasure, a selfish deed.” Celestia explained, and Rainbow felt guilty and awful to know that she was exactly who they were talking about. “Your desires, Rainbow Dash, are not themselves sinful, as every man and woman is subject and slave to his or her desires, which often cannot be controlled. But to encourage them or act upon these desires? That is a sin. One that we are here to save you from.”

“So... what are you going to do to me?” she curiously asked, pressing her clenched palms onto her cold knees.

“Conversion therapy,” came the simple answer, from Twilight Sparkle. “Seeking to change sexual orientation through various treatments.”

“Is ambiguity one of them?” Rainbow Dash retorted with a playful smirk, but her jests were unwelcome.

“Must you always make jokes?” Twilight snapped back with a scrunched up expression, and Rainbow seemed pleased to have pushed her buttons.

“In Genesis 19, two angels descend to the city of Sodom in disguise, and were taken in by Lot. You know the story, yes?” the older woman began.

“I may have dozed off during Mass,” Rainbow admitted with a shrug.

“The men of Sodom arrive and ask Lot to give up his visitors, so that they may be taken away and engaged in homosexual activities. Upon his refusal, do you remember what the two angels do to the sinful men of Sodom?” Celestia paused for the answer, which Twilight knew, but would not say. “They blind them.”

“You're going to blind me?!” Rainbow Dash gasped in shock, suddenly feeling very defensive and uneasy.

“No, not quite,” she corrected, and the young girl seemed relieved. “You see, the men of Sodom lost their sense of sight, which permitted them to look upon other men with sexual desires, and punished them for their sins. We don't want to punish you, Rainbow Dash. We are merely going to condition you into understanding the sickness that you have, understanding potential consequences you could face at our Lord's hand. Teaching you to blind yourself.”

“And what, exactly, might that entail?” she tried for more details.

“Do you know much about psychology, dear girl?” her Headmistress asked as she straightened out a folder of files and slipped a few onto a clipboard that hung by the foot of the bed.

“Not particularly.” Rainbow admitted slowly, waiting for more.

“Well, let's begin by explaining a technique known as conditioning. Twilight?” she called upon her most faithful student.

“The most classic example of conditioning is provided by Ivan Pavlov's experiment, in which he made his dog salivate to the sound of a bell.” Twilight started matter-of-factly, raising her index finger and adjusting her glasses.

“Wait, I've heard of this one,” the subject interjected with a few nods, but Twilight went on anyway.

“Yes, by ringing a bell every time the canine was presented with food, the dog began to associate the sound of the bell with the acquisition of nourishment. Therefore, when the bell was rung on its own, the dog would still salivate, in anticipation of the food.” Twilight told her clearly. “Pavlov conditioned his dog to drool every time it heard the sound of the bell.”

“So, somehow, you plan to condition me to... not drool at the sight of another woman, is that about the gist of it?” Rainbow played around with the idea, grinning as it sounded naughty.

“Crude as always, Dash, but yes.” Twilight sighed, but went on to clarify. “However, with Aversion Therapy, you will not be given any treats. It is a different kind of conditioning.”

“How so?” she inquired.

“Aversion Therapy conditions a subject out of their desires or habits by exposing them to a stimulus while simultaneously subjecting them to a kind of unpleasant discomfort or irritation,” the spectacle-adorning student went on.

“I do think I can handle a bit of discomfort.” Rainbow casually agreed, shrugging her shoulders and making a face.

“Good, you'll need to.” Twilight mumbled, but before Rainbow could comment on it, the Headmistress cut back in.

“Now, we're just going to need your signature on this waiver before we can begin.” Celestia told her, handing the clipboard over to her student with a pen held by the metal clip.

“My signature? Why?” the delinquent subject questioned, though she plucked the pen up anyway.

“To permit us to conduct the treatment. We need your consent, as this sort of treatment is not regulated by any school board or church. This is science, experimental treatments. I should imagine that makes you even more willing,” Headmistress Celestia told her, pointing to a dotted line with a small mark beside it. Rainbow shrugged something of an agreement, but Celestia wanted more. “We've already contacted your parents, and they've agreed to leave the choice to you.”

“Ahh. I suppose so. Uninvolved as always.” Rainbow sighed sadly, knowing her parents would hardly bat an eye regarding her school or personal life. Tapping the pencil on the clipboard a few times as she skimmed the conditions far too briefly, she finally got to doodling a signature where required. “And... scribbled.”

“Excellent.” Celestia nearly tore the clipboard out of her hand, hooking it onto the hangar at the end of the bed without hesitation. As she started to leave the room, she called back, “Twilight? Commence readying the patient, I'll gather the necessary tools.”

“Yes, Headmistress.” Twilight agreed promptly, going over to Rainbow and nearly shoving her onto the table as orderly and properly as she always was.

“Criminy, relax, I can do it myself!” Rainbow struggled, slapping Twilight's hands away as she laid down on the bed herself, with a few more grumbled curses under her breath. Twilight allowed her to lay down, and sat herself on one of the chairs beside the bed.

“Let us commence with a basic physical and overview.” Twilight began as she adjusted her glasses and briefly looked over a form she had on her always-at-arm's-reach clipboard. “Patient's name?”

“... Seriously?” the girl blankly spoke, such a silly question irritating her. She then decided to screw with the system, and responded with, “Sappho.”

“... Rainbow... Dash,” Twilight wrote in her real name anyway, and the girl rolled her eyes wondering why she had asked at all if she was going to answer it herself. “We've already been through your medical history. Do you have any illness, aches, pains, troubles, anything we should know about that have not been reported?”

“Hmm... well, my stomach hurts when I eat too much,” Rainbow teased, and Twilight looked at her dully, but said nothing about the remark. “I tend to be the trouble, Twilight.”

“Right,” Twilight murmured as she scribbled something, and Rainbow wondered what. The information-gatherer's eyes flickered back up to Rainbow's and she seriously asked, “Are you on any drugs?”

After a moment of painful silence, Rainbow Dash responded with, “Metric boatloads of cocaine.”

Slamming the clipboard onto her lap, Twilight snapped, “Does anyone think you're funny?”

“Is that a question on your form?” Rainbow curiously asked, sitting up a bit as if to see. Twilight growled at her audacity, but let her speak again, “Because seriously Twilight, I do think we should keep on topic here. It is of great importance we accurately respond to all inquiries.”

“Fine, forget the form.” Twilight grumbled as she stood back up, placing the clipboard on her seat. “Headmistress Celestia will be back with the machine momentarily, we should get you ready for the first round of treatment.”

“Brilliant.” Rainbow whispered, running her hands absently along the wax-paper covered bed, feeling like she was some baked treat being prepared.

“Here, hold out your arm.” Twilight was by her side, holding a small medical instrument, a needle as Rainbow could identify it. “It's a muscle relaxant, it's procedure.”

“Somehow I don't trust that,” the patient mumbled, but uneasily extended her arm anyway, scrunching up her face in mild fear as she watched Twilight disinfect the area. “Be careful.”

“Maybe next time.” The supposed caretaker jammed the needle into the crook in Rainbow's elbow, causing her to hiss in discomfort and tense up. After putting great effort into remaining still, she allowed Twilight to inject the relaxants into her body, and felt a cool breeze wash over her.

“Sadistic, Sparkle. You should think of doing this as a career,” Rainbow Dash spoke, and her voice was somewhat soothed by the medication already.

“Perhaps,” Twilight smiled at the backhanded compliment, but removed the injection and patted the tender area with a ball of cotton.

Staring at the ceiling seemed comforting for Rainbow, and as her body grew heavier, she felt gently swayed by the way Twilight taped up the little hole in her arm and pushed the whole stretcher over a few feet. Rainbow's eyes followed her caretaker as she went around the slightly drugged young girl and began to pull out what appeared to be straps of leather from under each corner of the bed. With a started flinch, Rainbow yanked her hand away from Twilight's reach and she scooted to the other side of the bed.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's with the restraints?” Rainbow's voice cracked as her surprise became apparent.

“We warned you that it could be unpleasant.” Twilight told her firmly, taking hold of her hand and gesturing for her to lay back down.

“Yeah, but,” Rainbow Dash went quiet for a moment, and finally she heeded the commands. Laying back down and watching Twilight tie one restraint around her wrist, she shivered in anxiety and admitted, “They're making me a little nervous.”

“Again, it's procedure, we're not sure how you'll react to the stimulus, so we have to take extra precautions. It's necessary, Rainbow.” she told her, and her voice almost did seem sincere. With a small smile, she added, “If for nothing more than to combat that fighting spirit of yours.”

“That's comforting to hear,” Rainbow sarcastically replied, waiting as Twilight finished with her ankles and tightened all the holds.

Her head felt slightly fuzzy as the drugs continued to coarse through her, and she was unfamiliar with the sensation. Her body did feel a good deal more relaxed, but she was uncertain as to why it was necessary. Her arms twitched slightly, pulling at the binds accidentally. Perhaps she had not realized quite how vulnerable she would feel all sprawled out across an oblong stretcher like some dissection experiment. Though she tried to hide it, Rainbow Dash did feel a pang of fear as she realized just how helpless she was to Twilight and the Headmistress. She had hardly thought ahead when she allowed herself to be drugged and restrained, and now she had no say of her own in a thing, and that lack of control was terrifying.

The sound of wobbling wheels caught what little attention Rainbow did have, and she glanced over to the doorway to see a rather sizeable machine being rolled in. Her dizzy vision set on the end of the wheeled contraption, where a thick-bound copy of the word of the Lord sat. Huffing an amused laugh, Rainbow took in a breath before commenting on it.

“The Bible? What is this, an exorcism?” came a tired sounding joke.

“No, this is much more scientific.” Twilight corrected her easily, taking hold of the book and placing it on a desk instead, treating it reverently by running her fingers over it. “Intellectuals like psychoanalysts and neurologists developed this method, it's thus-far the most effective.”

“And yet, the Holy Book still remains at arm's length.” Rainbow Dash remarked, looking over the way a student of science treated religion. “For one so analytical, you certainly quote scripture like a champion.”

“I'm a scholar of all literature, the Bible is no different,” the scholar explained, and her Headmistress said no different. “God blessed me with my intellect, Rainbow Dash, I have to honour that.”

With a snort, Rainbow slumped back down on the bed and contemplated her own situation aloud, “God blessed me with a big mouth and a supposedly immoral disposition.”

“And a good deal more courage than you deserve,” Twilight Sparkle added, and it sounded something like praise. “And, hopefully, a strong will.”

Rainbow Dash met eyes with the straight-haired girl above her, and though they were so vastly different, somehow they seemed equal when she spoke like that. It hardly helped Rainbow Dash put any trust in the judgemental stranger, but it made the girl seem much more human to her, in a way. Twilight did not linger on their potential familiarity, and looked back over at her Headmistress for guidance, as usual.

“Are you ready, Twilight?” the older woman asked as she finished setting up the machine.

“Yes, Headmistress Celestia.” Twilight Sparkle bowed her head and agreed, taking up her clipboard and flipping to a new page, one which she underlined the title of twice.

“Are you certain this is going to work?” Rainbow meekly wondered, looking up innocently from her place on the oblong stretcher.

“Worry not, Rainbow Dash.” Headmistress Celestia comforted her, but it was with the word of the Lord who supposedly cared not for her. “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. Corinthians 10:13.”

“... Right.” Rainbow hesitated to agree, her face contorting a bit back into worry.

“Start the projector, Twilight.” Celestia commanded, and Twilight did as she was told and began to start the projector.

Meanwhile, the Headmistress adjusted the stretcher so that it sat upright and Rainbow could relax against a backrest. The bindings were loosened a bit so her arms weren't hung above her head. To replace the resistance, however, the Headmistress wrapped another strap firmly around Rainbow's forehead, affixing her to the backrest of the stretcher with ease. After testing to see if Rainbow could turn in any way, she deemed it suitable.

Rainbow's leg twitched as she felt the cold touch of aged hands, and she watched suspiciously as Celestia taped a round, metal thumb-sized marker to her upper thigh, somewhere uncomfortably close. With a disgusted frown, Rainbow cautiously looked at the detached expression of the woman in black. Another symmetrically placed metal marker was taped to her other thigh, and both had thin wire-lines leading to the machine that Celestia had rolled in. As several more markers were taped to Rainbow's temples, neck and abdomen, she thought it best to speak up.

“Is that some kind of monitor?” Rainbow asked, gesturing with a restrained nod towards the machine they seemed to be hooking her up to.

“Sort of.” was the vague answer, and it did not please Rainbow one bit.

Besides the little metal wires affixed to her, Celestia went over to the still fresh hole from the needle Twilight had injected Rainbow with and sized it up. After giving it a good inspection, the Headmistress wheeled over some IV drip and hooked it into Rainbow's already bruised and tender arm, despite her displeased grunt. Rainbow Dash curiously peered at the hanging bag of liquid, but could not make out what it would have been. At once though, the lights went dim.

As first, there was just white light cast onto the opposite wall. It seemed so bright in the otherwise dark room, which grew darker as the other lights were turned off. Rainbow tried to make herself comfortable in the stretcher, but that was a tall order. At first, the projector didn't work quite right, but Twilight did a good job of fixing it promptly and shifting it so it wasn't quite so crooked any more.

“Okay, feel free to tell us how you're responding, we are beginning now. You may feel uncomfortable at times, but this is supposed to happen.” Celestia told her patient gently. “Just relax, and let the therapy help you.”

The first slide had an immediate response with Rainbow Dash. It was all to familiar, a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, and Rainbow kind of scoffed about it but said nothing. His youthful brow still seemed judgemental, though she knew the man was hardly so. The common chestnut of his hair was a clash against her own rebellious and standoffish tones, and his gentle attitude made hers look all the more abrasive. The usual Catholic guilt made her feel slightly ill, or perhaps that was something else entirely. As she stared at it, his calming face did little but make her anxious, but soon enough, it switched once more.

The second image was a gloriously famous snap of a man and a woman, sharing a passionate and spontaneous kiss in the wake of a Great War. It was charming and romantic, and Rainbow Dash couldn't help but smile, adoring the simplicity of love in a time of chaos. She had no qualms with heterosexuality; to her, love was just love, and all of it seemed so rare and precious it deserved not to be captured at all by the injustice of film. Still, once more far too early, the picture switched again.

Sitting before her in a regal, curved old leather chair, was the Queen herself. She was brilliantly dressed up, each fold of fabric falling perfectly around her still very young visage. Yet still, there was an uneasiness in Rainbow's stomach, be if from the anticipation or something less natural. The slide changed again, and quickly, to an image of another woman, who was wearing less clothing. She had a smile on her face anyway, and it was alluring to the young subject, but she wondered why her Headmistress was showing her these controversial things.

Rainbow had to shake her head a bit, as her eyes felt moist and a lump in her throat seemed to be rising with each passing picture. Another few clicked into view, some with beautiful women, each time with less and less clothing on, until at last, Rainbow's heart nearly stopped to see a completely nude woman. She appeared like some Greek goddess, some work of art, some mystical being born out of time and not true or real at all. Close in her embrace, Rainbow definitely took notice of, was another woman, just as freely naked and encircled by her partner's love. But as she looked upon the women, her stomach flipped over time and again.

“Twilight, do it,” Celestia's voice was a hush, and Rainbow could hardly pay attention as she focused on keeping herself from whining about her discomfort.

“Yes, Headmistress,” came the reply, and at once Rainbow noticed what her supposed caretaker had ordered.

A piercing scream echoed through the room, and for a few stunning seconds, Rainbow was uncertain that it had come from her own throat. Little black dots floated around her hazy vision, and her labour and terrified breath escaped her in jolts. Pitiful whimpers drummed out with each twitch of her sore body, and a sensation of both burning and icy chills originated from each metal marking. The sickness had tripled by then, and she had trouble holding back the urge to vomit.

“What... what're you... doing to me?” her raspy little voice sounded like a lost child, and she helplessly looked at her black-shadowed Headmistress.

“You must look upon the images, Rainbow Dash. I do not want to use stricter measures.” was a cold response, but the subject obeyed out of little else but fear.

The photo had been changed, and it was that of a man. He appeared strong and proud, looking down at Rainbow like her father might have had he been there to see her pathetic display. There was no pain then, just a few seconds to rest before the slide switched again.

She could hardly gather the chance to look upon the beautifully symmetrical face of another lovely young woman when another stream of shock raced through her. Again, her faltering cry called out for help, and her body tensed up. It almost felt like she had blinked asleep for an instant, but once more she was roused by her very upset stomach. Noticing the fragile way that she shook in response to the therapy, Rainbow took a closer look at the machine they had her hooked to.

“Electro... shock... right?” she perceived, but no answer came right away. “Is this... the treatment for those of us... who... who do not conform? Punishment?”

“Electroshock is a perfectly safe procedure for conditioning someone out of rightly distasteful urges, small scars are hardly a price to pay for salvation,” someone responded, and though Rainbow pegged the analytical response to Twilight Sparkle, she could not be certain.

“And what's... what's really in that IV?” Rainbow Dash managed to ask, her piercing eyes wishing she could stab through the bag and let it spill to the floor.

“It's intentionally nauseating, to induce immediate responses of sickness.” another even-toned reply, and it was so perfectly spoken it felt unreal.

“That's why you didn't feed me before this... isn't it?” the subject questioned accurately, but the only reply she really got was the scribbling of pen across paper. “Didn't want me to make a mess?”

Instead of any assurance of humanity, a simple little yellow bucket was extended and placed on Rainbow's lap. It hardly looked secure or sanitary, and it made the girl chuckle a little to see it. She glanced back up at the image placed before her, and she knew what would be coming next. A gorgeously pure woman, clad in a white dress.

“Well... I happen to be the type who likes to make a mess of things.” Rainbow managed to murmur out before the shock struck her again.

Gasping for air seemed to be her only clutch on feeling any better, but even that hardly soothed her. Bile was already coating her now acidic and stinging throat, and she coughed bits of it up and spat it into the bucket as best she could muster. Still, sleek lines of sickness trailed down her chin and dribbled onto her gown. Not that her caretakers chose to do anything about it but measure her output.

“And... you tell me... that I am sick...?” Rainbow Dash whispered so quietly her own ringing ears could not pick up the sound.

Another pause was left for Rainbow to detestably look upon the face of another man. It was not the men that gave her a break, that she should have been conditioned to have loved. They were the reason she was being fixed, being changed and strung up like some puppet. Those men who made the rules, who looked into the minds of sinners and told them that they were broken, built machines to torture them and freely gazed upon their own desires without consequence. Those haughty men, who were too proud to accept others who would penetrate them, who were too selfish to share his greedy desire for women. Women like those who flashed before Rainbow Dash, and by no consent of their own, stood along the lit-up walls with still faces and watched her scream, watched her cringe and flinch and call out to the heavens in agony.

“S-Stop, stop, please...” she begged for pause, but none would come.

Each shock sent her mind reeling, stole away her sharp tongue, her wit and her resolve. Nude, natural women stood before her and tormented her. Instead of the burning lust she was blessed with, they cursed her with electric zaps shocking as near to her intimacy as a nun dared to place her tools of the devil. Rainbow Dash shuddered in the cold, exhausted by the nearly fading in and out of consciousness, by the stealing away of her will. Her weak, trembling arms pulled against the restraints, and whines for mercy rolled out of her dry lips.

Gut-wrenching pain raced through her once more, and another gag left her throat rotten with putrid taste. Staring into the little yellow bucket, Rainbow drearily watched the bubbling and shifting liquids, seeming so toxic it was as if she was expelling her impurities themselves, if it were only so easy. Each change of image, transitioned by a half-second of darkness as the slide switched, was marked by a flinch from the bound young girl, as fear grasped at her every bone and muscle.

It seemed to drag on forever and then some, and Rainbow Dash was desperate for release far too early into the procedure. Now her wet eyes blurred each woman to pieces, and each shock had her shouting and screaming for an end. At last though, the slides seemed to run thin, and Rainbow Dash begged and begged for some kind of clemency. Her burned arms, shoulders and thighs wept, and instead of the usual pleasure she was accustomed to when looking upon another woman, she was met with the scalding burns of electric fire followed by the glass-like scratch of icy air.

“Please... en-enou... gh... p-please...” was like someone else's voice, the whimper of an infant swaddled too tightly or smothered by its mother's breasts.

“Twilight, the guard,” came a command, which was followed precisely.

“Yes, Headmistress,” her student replied as she grabbed a small, yellow rubber bite from the table of medical tools and grabbed Rainbow's jaw. Roughly opening her mouth, she shoved the thick bite into Rainbow's mumbling mouth, which served to keep her silent and to keep her from chattering her teeth.

“You will struggle, Rainbow Dash, but your consent has already been given.” the Headmistress's voice was firm and not comforting in the slightest. As she removed the stack of slides, Rainbow's petrified eyes widened to see her grab a whole new deck and load them in. With a shaking head and trembling body, she heard the last few horrifying words, “We will not falter until we cure you.”

Author's Note

Aaaaaaaaaand shit just got REAL. Poor Dashie, I just love to torture her, don't I? Well, what do you think?

Red

***

"Red"

***

Shifting the stack of schoolbooks in her arms, Applejack carefully peered over some loose papers to be certain she was not about to trip over heaven-knows-what. She was still lugging around her room-mate's homework for the day, having not found a chance to drop this particular load back off in their room. Not that she ever enjoyed going back there now, it was far too quiet and lonesome in a room built for two. It seemed, somehow, that some others shared a similar opinion.

“The school's far too quiet now,” she overheard someone mention, and she listened in. “Without that gobby bender around.”

“She was nothing if not entertaining,” another agreed, and a few giggles followed.

“Indeed, she always did know how to direct a professor off topic,” came another voice, and Applejack recognized that one.

Peeking over her shoulder at the group, she noticed Rarity standing near a few other swish girls at the back of the library. Previously, Rarity would sit near Applejack, as back when they were room-mates they would do their homework together once in a while, or Applejack would half-listen to Rarity rant on about the lecturer's articulacy or lack there of. Now though, Rarity would often sit near the back and gab with some other students who's skirts were hiked up just as improperly high.

Applejack had grown weary of carrying such a burdensome load each day, especially since she had heard nothing of the supposed impending return of her room-mate. But Applejack was diligent and dependable, and she would not give up hope or let Rainbow Dash down. As such, she turned one last time to reach the usual table where she and Rainbow Dash would often sit alone and pretend to ignore the insulting or critical remarks from their peers. She would not make it without incident, however.

“Ahh—sorry!” Applejack heard the call before she actually felt the books tumble out of her arms.

Catching most of them with her adequate speed and strength, Applejack shifted sharply to the left to see what had run into her. There, with an open book pressed to her chest and several others scattered around, sat Twilight Sparkle, glasses half-fallen off her face. Applejack immediately placed her books on the corner of the nearby table and set to helping Twilight gather her scattered belongings.

“Sorry there Twi, I musta not've seen you,” Applejack apologized as she knelt next to the girl and plucked the now partially bent or folded book pages and notebooks.

“No, no, it was my fault, I was reading instead of walking,” the straight-haired girl fixed her tilted glasses and helped Applejack collect and organize the fallen debris.

“You're usually readin' instead o' doin' somethin', ain't ya?” Applejack teased playfully, and Twilight blushed as she realized it to be true.

“Well, yes,” she murmured with a small smile.

Most everyone knew Twilight Sparkle, since she was the student council president as well as the Headmistress's personal assistant, or she seemed like it. She always got the highest marks in the class, and her high regard for rules and regulations were unparalleled. Therefore, she never had the most active social life, but she did have a few close friends.

“Twilight!” one of them spoke up, and Applejack recognized it to be Pinkie Pie, as that frizzy-headed girl made a point of trying to be friends with everyone, including said spectacle-adorning girl on the floor of the library. “Are you all right?”

“Yes Pinkie, worry not,” Twilight called back with a wave, and as she was busy gathering herself, Applejack found something particularly interesting in the scattered pile of literature and notes.

Twilight Sparkle was the kind of girl to take great care with all her stationary and binders, and as such it was a known fact that she always used black notebooks, each colour-coded by subject by a sticker placed perfectly along the top portion of the front cover. However, when she had a book that did not pertain to her curriculum studies, such as her personal journal, that book was organized or coded differently. And there, laying innocently among black categorized curl-bounds, was a bright red notebook.

Applejack was immediately drawn to it and its suspicious predisposition to reminding one of blood. Her fingers found it immediately, and the blonde had but an instant to read something of a subject title in perfect cursive scribed along the front cover: Conversion Therapy in Adolescence.

Before she could adequately understand what that entailed, Twilight had snatched the notebook out of Applejack's curious hands and held it close under folded arms. Her protective reaction to Applejack's interest did little to stave it, and Applejack only grew more enticed by the prospect.

“Uh, thanks, for your help,” Twilight hurriedly stammered out, grabbing the rest of her books and standing abruptly.

“Yea', no worries,” Applejack absently responded, watching the girl scurry off to her own table and sit down with Pinkie Pie.

Watching out of the corner of her eye, Applejack placed the rest of her books onto her table and slid into her seat. Something had definitely irked her about the little red notebook she had seen, and it was all that ravaged her mind at the moment. She knew that Twilight Sparkle was the Headmistress's most faithful student, and it gave her chills to read the title of a notebook that seemed so similar to what counselling Rainbow Dash might have been going through. Applejack wasn't particularly well-read on psychology, as new as the subject was, but she knew something about how religion often dealt with tenancies to supposedly sin. But instead of asking the girl about it, Applejack played this one carefully, merely listening from afar. She would not have to wait long.

“What's this?” Pinkie asked immediately, grabbing the red notebook out of Twilight's grasps and flipping through it.

“Pinkie! Give that back, it's dearly important!” Twilight Sparkle argued, trying desperately to get it back while remaining quiet in the library.

“It is? Oh, tell me! Tell me!” the frizzy-haired girl squeaked out as she bounced in her seat.

“It's a special assignment that Headmistress Celestia gave me,” she whispered in near inaudible hush, and Applejack strained to hear it correctly. “I'm not permitted to tell anyone.”

“A secret?” Pinkie Pie replied in a gasp, still flipping through the pages until she paused suddenly. Twilight sighed as she realized that Pinkie had figured it out, but still went about grabbing it out of her hands.

“Pinkie, you cannot speak a word of this, it is the utmost imperative this remains hush-hush.” Twilight murmured in a calm voice, glancing around for any eavesdroppers, and Applejack paid crucial attention to appearing as though she was studying.

“I don't know what all that means—but this is a big deal, Twi!” the girl quietly spoke back, excitement in her eyes. “I'm so glad you're helping her out like that, your fellow student, your could-be new-best-friend—she really needs the help you know—God save her! I tried to tell her to straighten out, told her how to be and all, but the silly gay wouldn't—”

Applejack's eyes widened as she heard the word she had been waiting for, and immediately connected Twilight's notes to Rainbow Dash's supposed counselling. That little red notebook, it suddenly seemed much heavier than it appeared. Steadying her breathing and desperately trying to hear their hushed conversation over her pounding heart, Applejack glanced briefly towards the pair at the other table.

“Cease your havering, Pinkie,” Twilight had stalled her, and put a finger to her lips to gesture for silence. “It's not a simple experiment, you know, this therapy is far more complex than simply straightening her out.”

“How do you do it, then?” she curiously wondered, and Twilight had to gesture for quiet one more time before Pinkie got the message to keep her voice down. “How do you do it?”

“We're still in the preliminary stages, but she's surely a resistant one, undoubtedly,” Twilight huffed a little laugh at the remark, and Applejack found it quite probably true. “She's shown little progress thusfar, but we're hopeful. Celestia is upping her dosage in all aspects. It's... just too bad, about the scars.”

Flinching at the word, Applejack wondered just what kind of therapy could possibly yield positive results while administering scars upon the subject. It made her furious just to overhear, and her fists tightened to imagine the poor girl's thin and youthful body all torn up for something so inconsequential. Still, she knew well when to hold her tongue and merely observe.

“That sounds scary,” Pinkie spoke Applejack's own thoughts, though her innocent child-like voice was hard to take seriously.

“Well of course, but to assure a full conversion we must not pause. The devil surely never rests or gives clemency, and neither must we. That's what Headmistress Celestia says.” Twilight recited her commands like they were the Gospel. “It's a difficult procedure, we must condition her to loath anything that once gave her joy in such sick aspects, and needless to say that Dash is very opposed to such things. It is... difficult, again, to... to just observe, to listen to all those protests, all those cries.”

“Cries?” Applejack whispered weakly as her heart broke, and she was certain she was not heard, as Pinkie Pie asked about the same word at the same time.

“Perhaps one day we will have less barbaric means, but for now,” Twilight wistfully imagined, but she was grounded by her faith in modern science. “We must patiently and devoutly seek results. It's perfectly safe, we are careful for that surely. Discomfort is simply a rather irrational tool to explain to a troubled patient.”

“But you're fixing her, right?” Pinkie Pie asked, her hopes rising up obliviously once more.

“If that's what matters.” Twilight answered, but her thoughtful voice seemed less than convinced. “Celestia believes it will keep the school in good standing to keep her quiet as well, we cannot have this institution being marred by her big mouth.”

“Is that where you've been off to every day?” came another question, and as Applejack shakily gathered her things, she faintly continued to listen.

“Yes, the nursing wing is quite far, so it's been something of a pain getting there,” the girl answered with a sigh, and Applejack wanted to snap at her about what pains she must have been putting her friend through, but she said nothing as she left.

Her trembling arms shook and shivered the books in her arms, but she managed to get out of the library before she collapsed and lost them all together. Her hand immediately slapped over her mouth as she muffled the pathetic weeps she tried to keep inside. Whatever she was feeling, surely it was of no consequence compared to how Rainbow Dash must have gone through, wherever she might have been. Applejack felt awful that she had allowed it to happen, that she had not questioned her Headmistress or asked to see her room-mate.

But now it seemed too late, Rainbow Dash had been forced to suffer for whatever reason they dubbed, and Applejack had been deceived into ignorance, her attention had been directed into gathering her assignments as if they mattered at all. As her rarely-escaping salted tears squeezed through her tightly entwined fingers, which hid her face from the desolate hallway, Applejack's faltering, uneven breaths came out in sobs.

Sure, Applejack had been counting the moments since Rainbow Dash had left, even as the days had dragged on and the nights grew cold, but now, all that time seemed deadly and poisonous. Such seemingly long hours much have felt like eternity to Rainbow Dash, and the mere week or two she had missed of class would resonate in the girl's mind forever more.

However, while Applejack had been eagerly counting the days, Rainbow Dash had lost all conception of time altogether. With the burlap sack pinned over the narrow window, light was never certain at all, and Rainbow could seldom be sure when she should sleep or eat or vomit. Her tired, bagged eyes stared up at the brick ceiling, something that seemed thick enough to keep the hands of God out of her room. By then, the worn leather straps had began to erode her tender, youthful skin, and the marks from the shocks seemed scalded against her. She could count them, had she the light to do so, and perhaps it would make some sense to call them a number, marked onto her skin. But she had neither the drive nor energy to look upon the might-be-scars that ran up her legs and arms, that made her ashamed of her once gorgeous body.

“Dash?” her name was called to her, and she responded with but a hoarse hum, not even glancing at the speaker. “I asked how you were feeling today. It's for the chart.”

Rainbow paused to consider such a thing, but finding no word that could adequately describe the response she had to such an ordeal, she simply muttered her usual sarcastic remark, “Peachy.”

“Brilliant.” the Headmistress repeated her own usual response, and scribbled something onto the chart as her assistant finished organizing the tools and slides once more. “You have shown little positive response, Dash.”

“I'm a stubborn one indeed,” the subject murmured with a hint of pride, a weak smirk sliding over her numb features.

“That's nothing to gloat about. It simply means we must use more extreme measures.” Headmistress Celestia replied with a straight face, a hardened woman as she was. “We cannot have you traipsing around this school as you are, sexually degrading my students.”

“Is that what I'm here for?” Rainbow asked with a falsely curious tone, but her question would be ignored.

“We are here to fix you, dear, and to make certain you never look upon your peers with those perversely devious eyes.” Celestia calmly explained, sitting the stretcher up once more in the same manner she always did: abruptly.

“I have my father's eyes,” the tired girl corrected.

“Clearly,” came a disinterested response, and the woman finished strapping Rainbow's head into place and began adding more shock markers, which peaked her patient's attention.

“That's more than usual,” the subject noticed as metal rounds were placed on the tops of her hands and feet. “Have I bothered you?”

“We're simply keeping the procedure moving along, it seems you need a little more motivation.” the Headmistress told her easily, going over to the cursed machine that Rainbow loathed and taking up a new tool or two.

“Or any at all,” she murmured back.

Curiously, Rainbow Dash watched her Headmistress wheel some other contraption over to her from beside the torturous machine. It fit well behind the stretcher, with armrests wide enough to hug it and come up under Rainbow's wrists. Cautiously, Rainbow lowered her still bound arms onto it and felt relieved as it did not hurt her to do so. The rests were wrapped in a kind of tensor tape, fabric or rubber perhaps, and Twilight Sparkle set to strapping her wrists and elbows to it. Strangely enough, Rainbow noticed some kind of handlebar just past the ends of those rests, which were separate entirely and made of some kind of metal. Rainbow's fingers traced the rounded bars and felt the cold metal. Celestia would move them closer to her though, adjusting the makeshift contraption until the bars were nestled into her palms, but not touching them.

“What's all this?” Rainbow finally spoke up, her narrowed eyes already suspicious.

“Something to deter you from touching, instead of merely thinking lustfully. It's still experimental, but we should see more results from it.” seemed like a simple enough response from Celestia, but Rainbow knew better than to believe her.

Two prong-like metal clips were added to the far ends of each bar, and Rainbow stared at them uneasily. As she traced the thick, rubber-lined red wires, she found them hooked right into the very machine that she was. A shiver crawled up her spine, and she instinctively recoiled from the bars, but she could get no further than perhaps an inch away, which still left the bars inside her hand's reach. She made a point of keeping her fingers outstretched to keep them away from the bars, and glared at her caretakers.

“You cannot be serious.” it did not sound like a question, but no one would respond even if it had been.

“Do be careful with the voltage, Twilight.” Headmistress Celestia warned, and she watched Twilight adjust a dial or two on the machine until it seemed right.

“Yes ma'am,” her student agreed.

By then, the lights had sparked out once more, and Rainbow could see but a sliver of moon or sunshine peeking dully from beyond the burlap curtain, which seemed dark enough to have been dusk or dawn. The projector came to life again, and it was shifted to either side as the slides were placed inside and it was made to face the usual, somewhat cracked wall. Rainbow hardly noticed her caretakers change the IV drip she was still affixed to, as the hole in her arm was numb and cold and swollen already.

The usual sickness had already begun to sink in, or perhaps that was the anticipation that made her feel ill. Either way, Rainbow shook her head and tried to remain focused. A quick glance to the bars at her fingertips made her uneasy, as she knew what evils the teeth-like clips could produce for her.

Again, the face of Jesus Christ was the first that came to her, and the shadows of his eyes seemed dark and judgemental. Rainbow's teeth ground beneath her dry, cracked lips, but she dared not speak his name. As a purely beautiful woman glowed before her, made up from the shadows and lights of a machine, Rainbow swallowed and tensed up for her punishment.

At first, it was just her usual shock, which was by no means growing easier to take. Her screams were somewhat weaker and less frantic though, and she had better control of them, as she hated giving them the satisfaction of hearing her pains. But as the treatment ran on, Rainbow grew increasingly concerned about the bars at her hands, which taunted her fingers for rest but still merely remained cold and unchanging. Again and again, though her anticipation warned her, her body was shaken to the core with electroshock.

Her gasping breath was louder than the slides changing, and she felt proud to have lasted through the whole thing without heaving her insides out. As they switched over, though, Rainbow saw Twilight fiddling with the dials again, and shivered in fear. Her fuzzy, disoriented mind wavered over her own position, and she saw her darkened, marked skin as if it did not belong to her at all.

“Dash, do try to stay awake,” the woman's voice was by no means lulling, and it served to keep her aware when she might falter. “We're going to try something a little more difficult. But I assure you, you will be mended in time.”

“Once I lose... all feeling... in my... my body, a-and soul.” Rainbow struggled with words and her eyes rolled in her head.

The machine made a clicking noise, and Rainbow's fingers twitched in anticipation. Each time she felt the sting of the shock, her whole body tensed up and tightened. She knew what would happen if they dared put malice to the bars at her palms. The slides spat light across the wall before her once more, and her red eyes dully looked upon the image, but she did not recognize this one as one she had seen before in her treatments. It was a church, but not just any church, it was the one which she had run to when she had sought help. It was her church.

“... W-What?” Rainbow murmured in confusion.

“Your treatment must yield immediate results,” a voice told her, and Rainbow wondered what she might have meant. “They must relate to your real life, Dash.”

“So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you,” another recited, and perhaps that was Twilight's usual quotation. “Have nothing to do with sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires. Don’t be greedy, for a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world. Because of these sins, the anger of God is coming. Colossians 3:5-6.”

“It seems... his anger is already upon me.” Rainbow believed, a frown making its home on her face.

“It's ready, Headmistress,” Twilight told her superior.

“After your old room-mate moved out, it didn't take long until you found another, a beautiful, young blonde.” Celestia began to explain, and Rainbow made a face as she tried to piece it together. “But that girl who came to your side, you have been coveting her. I heard you, when you shouted for help from our Lord. And he sent me to save you both.”

“What do you...? N-No, no,” Rainbow knew what was coming, and squirmed in the restraints until her Headmistress tightened the bind on her forehead to hold her steady.

“The devil grasps you in her sweet, sweet hands, my child,” Celestia told her student calmly, and with that, switched the slide once more. “But the embrace is toxic.”

Rainbow's eyes widened as she realized what they were forcing her to look upon, whose face they would punish her for adoring. It was that same old charming smile she loved, that same old spread of freckles and those bright and vibrant eyes, which even in black and white struck her still.

“Y-You can't... you can't take her away from me!” Rainbow Dash shouted until her voice broke, and she struggled valiantly against her inhumane bindings. She couldn't stand to lose the only thing she had left. “I won't let you! Not her! Not Applejack!”

“The choice is hardly yours.” were the last words before Rainbow's senses erupted.

She had never cried out so loudly in all her life, so loud it sounded like her whole body was screaming. All the markers across her skin flared up at once, and those on her hands caused that same tightening in her muscles to occur, forcing her trembling hands to clamp down on the scalding bars, which coursed with the same murderous electric current that burned her. There was nothing so evil as that which sought to turn her to the Lord.

Her mind went black for a moment, but it came back to see her beloved Applejack's face once more. Disoriented by the treatment, her twitching body reached out for the only familiarity she knew, and in that movement, touched the bars once more. Her instinct to reach out for the girl who was always so gentle with her caused her immense pain, and she was reduced to sitting still and merely staring, knowing she could never do more, never show more, never think more.

It felt like she could not even breathe, her chest so tight perhaps it crushed her silly, cursed heart. Finally, she slumped against the stretcher, her dangerous eyes flickering in the dim ambience of the face of her closest and most dear friend. She could not stand it, the audacity of her supposed healers, to take away the only thing she had left to care about. It was unforgivable, and as another picture of Applejack flashed before her stinging eyes, she damned the name of a God who would abandon her to the hellish mercy of his servants.

“You... she, won't... ca-an't... Applej-jack,” her words fell out without sequence, and her damaged body fought a losing battle against the stretcher. Another loud scream rang out, before the shock was even administered, and she shook the whole stretcher with her violent strikes. “You c-can't do this!”

Again, her palms squeezed on the bars as the treatment forced her to, and the tough skin of her fingers fell to the fiery shock. Even after the jolts across her body had subsided, she defiantly held firm to the charged bars, shaking them back and forth while trying to keep herself aware enough to prove her point. She kicked against the bindings and rocked the table, which served to get her caretakers' attentions.

“D-Do your wo-orst!” Rainbow Dash barked as her vision was polluted by spinning black dots and her muscles felt like jelly.

“Twilight, turn off the machine and hold her down,” Celestia commanded with a firm voice.

“Get away from me,” the subject growled as her senseless hands were freed from their pain and she gathered her scrambled thoughts. “Get away!”

“Here we are,” Celestia held up a small bottle with a needle pierced through the top and slowly filled it with whatever was inside.

Rainbow's eyes widened to see the light catch the liquid in the needle, and she found back more violently, so roughly she nearly broke one of the legs off the stretcher. Finally though, Celestia took the IV from her arm and instead squeezed a very different substance into her polluted veins. Immediately, her head went heavy and her body grew weary. For an instant it felt like she was about to fall asleep, but she held on groggily.

“You'll never... take Applejack... away,” Rainbow found herself repeating, shaking her head slowly back and forth as the strap on her head was removed and Twilight began taking off the metal rounds across her body.

“If you ever want to inherit the kingdom of God, you'll have to abandon that defiant attitude.” Headmistress Celestia told her with a stern tone, “Proverbs 28:13: People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.”

“... Then let me rot,” Rainbow hissed in a hoarse tone, her voice tired from the screaming.

“Twilight, we should be on our way, we'll get no more progress today.” Celestia told her student, and she turned on her heel to leave while Twilight finished jotting down some notes and putting the machine away.

“Aren't you... going to untie me?” the subject wondered in a small voice, though she tried to remain strong in the face of those strangers.

Celestia was quiet for a moment as Twilight waited to see what she would command. Glancing over her black clad shoulder, her habit fell around her like a dark shadow, and she ironically replied, “There is no rest for the wicked, Rainbow Dash.”

And the doors were pulled back into place, leaving the young deviant in isolation. The echoes of her caretakers' fading footsteps crawled slowly around the walls like trip-mine-weaving spiders, and Rainbow merely smirked and chuckled to herself. For a moment, amused by the situation, she truly pondered whether she was sane at all. But suddenly, any sense of comical amusement was lost. There was no one, no one to look upon her or criticize, except herself. And for what seemed like days, she did nothing but wait for that elusive rest she knew she would never receive.

Wicked, that was what they called her. Wicked for thinking, wicked for wanting, wicked for loving. Wicked for not obediently betraying herself, betraying her beloved Applejack when they asked her to feel sick when looking upon her face, to feel pain when she thought of a touch. Yes, perhaps she was wicked, for all that consumed her defiant, devious mind were still those wicked, wicked thoughts.

Her body ached in her bed, often a place for rest, often a place she felt safe, often so near to her most beloved companion. Stretched out and sprawled to the edges not by any tossing or turning, but by forced binds and gnawing commands, she was restrained. She felt so awfully exposed, so open and so vulnerable, at the clemency of judges and juries of peers who had always detested her disposition. And there they left her, like any other criminal: crucified, damned for her supposed sins.

In the lingering darkness, Rainbow Dash lay, hauntingly still and distracted. In the solitude of her darkest hour, she was faced with nothing but how truly alone she was. Her loud mouth and carefree nature were absent, her playful banter and active lifestyle, entirely obsolete. Now, she lay at the mercy of the universe, of those clad in darkness that she had never for an instant thought to trust. Her flickering eyelids could barely keep her awake, not that she could find a comfortable position to sleep in anyway. Besides, they had left her without a blanket, and being restrained in such a way made it impossible to hold herself or curl up for warmth. With her legs so forcibly spread and bound, she felt entirely on display for the absolute infinity of the world she had hidden herself from and pushed away.

The bindings ate at her raw, wrought wrists, but she still writhed against them, even as burned flesh turned crimson at the grasps and sleek red streams of blood slithered down her forearms. Her fingers were going cold, her usually bright skin turning grey or purple at the edges as she trembled along the stretcher. She felt so confined, so captured and helpless and bridled. And yet, her mind and body raced the same as ever. Despite the conditioning, the therapy, the force and coercion, a swirling desire swelled in Rainbow's chest, and she could not fight it with what little strength or diligence she still bore. It was all she had left, it was her honest nature.

Her weak body shifted against the bed, her heels and shoulder blades scraping at the plastic lining left underneath her for sanitary and sadistic reasons. With a disillusioned and detached head, she could hardly hope to imagine what daggers of the mind were true or false, what was dreamed or imagined or contrived. Through the haze of melatonin, famine and whatever slow-dripping IV they had her strapped to, Rainbow could feel her desires floating about around her like ghosts, groping at her body and soul with no heed to her protests or menial struggles.

Like a hot smoke, her dreams burned her laboured lungs and crawled over her body in streams of tarnished lusts. Through cracked, daringly peeking eyes, Rainbow watched her illusions encircle her. Over her poisoned and positioned body, the agency of which was robbed from her, the young girl eagerly and sickly observed her own illness at work. There, out of the imagined emptiness of silence and shadow, came the form of a girl she so greatly admired.

“Applejack?” her trembling, tired voice croaked out, the sound so pathetic it hardly escaped her mouth at all.

At her feet, or where she perceived them to be, the blonde girl stood, calmly ravishing Rainbow's constrained body with her fading eyes. As if sifting like silky sands through the air, the dream-like Applejack placed her hands on either side of the end of the bed, leaning over so far as to taunt and temp Rainbow with a glimpse of the ivory rounds clasping to her chest, pulling a groan from the bound girl's throat as if yanked out by a hard-tied rope.

The bed hardly made a creak as the shade of Applejack lifted herself onto it, placing her knees between Rainbow's stretched out feet and inching a tormentingly slow pace nearer. Seeing her so barely clearly, Rainbow Dash found that wanted nothing more than simply more. She tried desperately to summon the girl faster, to pull her with her charm and allure that was so broken and faint as she could hardly keep her eyes open, but it hardly strayed or stirred her company at all.

As Applejack's thin, strong and careful hands lined Rainbow's thighs, hips and stomach, she felt an intense stirring in the pit of her abdomen, or perhaps lower. She could almost experience the welcomed touch of the girl above her, and moved her tongue around incessantly even imagining tasting the blonde. Her hips shifted over the thin bed liner, though as hard as she tried, she could not satisfy herself grinding against the gorgeous freckled dream nestled perfectly between her legs.

Even though she was so bound and belittled as but an ill patient, Rainbow Dash felt nothing but powerful and masculine as Applejack crawled over her. With a mere daring desire more, she could make Applejack straddle her, press against her, kiss her, if her command or will were strong enough after she had been intoxicated by whatever drugs laced her veins. Her victim, the blonde companion she so adored, looked so devout and submissive, at the mercy of her lust. Rainbow's fists clenched up, her wounded palms burning once more to grope at the imagined girl against her body. The cold air hardly bothered her at all any more, now there was a heat at her thighs, and scalding fire in her heart, and saliva coating her thirsty tongue.

All that medication, that treatment to cure her cursed sickness, it seemed to do little but push her further, allow her to experience all the had dreamed of. Still, the devilish and sinful thoughts that the preachers of her God strove to erase, those were so very clear to her now, they were so comforting, they could not be done out of her. All those tests and suppressors, they drove her on, and in spite of them, she allowed herself to want again.

“Goddamn, Applejack,” her throat moaned for more, and her whole body tensed with a scalding yearning.

Rising against her restraints, Rainbow forced herself up a few laboured and painful inches nearer, considering it a worthwhile venture to chase a fantasy if only for a moment longer. Though she knew how awful it was to want such physical and selfish things from even an imagined Applejack, Rainbow wilfully pushed on, tainting and polluting the innocence of the girl of her dreams. She inched tormentingly nearer, enchanted beyond control by the savoury sweet red of Applejack's luscious lips.

And then she knew it. She really was sick. She really was this disgusting perversion of what a good girl should have been. But willingly, she plunged into the darkness of her heart head-first.

“Dash?” the voice sounded truer and louder than she could have ever imagined, and so much sweeter it was. Rainbow then noticed the realistically warm hand gently touching her chin and jaw, and as if she had been sleeping before, finally opened her eyes.

“Applejack?” Rainbow repeated her name wantingly, the raspy gruff in her voice still apparent.

“Oh, thank God you're al'right!” it was indeed Applejack's voice, and she sounded so relieved and happy that it shocked Rainbow Dash.

Suddenly everything became real again, and in the small, solitary room: Applejack had come for her. She was, however, just at Rainbow's bedside, rather than where Rainbow had imagined her to be, but she was far too stunned to say anything more than a grunt as the blonde hurriedly and roughly embraced her. She would have awkwardly hugged her back, but with her arms bound to the bed, she could only snuggle closer and subtly breathe in the familiar and soothing scent of her neck and hair.

“I was so worried,” Applejack murmured into Rainbow's shoulder, rubbing her cheek fondly against the girl as they held each other.

The guilt was nearly unbearable, Rainbow noticed right away. Having to keep her mouth shut about what had just been running through her mind and stealing her away. Besides that, now that Applejack really was there, all she wanted was for everything she had just imagined to have been true. And with Applejack pressed so firmly against her, her mind was firmly set on the way that their breasts felt when they pressed up against each other. So plush, so comfortable, so intimate and naughty. It almost made her light headed with joy.

“Now, we have t' get you outta here,” Applejack told her firmly, pulling away and staring right into her wide, ruby eyes.

“W-We do?” Rainbow tried for words, but at the less than excited response, Applejack gave her a questioning look. Rainbow noticed how she had sounded and shook it off, going on to reply, “Well, yeah, sorry, you're right but, just—how did you find me? How did you know?”

“I overheard Twilight talkin' 'bout it in the library, she said somthin' 'bout the nursing wing,” Applejack began as she set to undoing to restraints. “An' since y'had t' be somewhere that there ain't no one gonna hear you, I knew y'had t' be somewhere underground, which led me to the boilin' room.”

“You are a smart girl, Applejack.” Rainbow praised again, and a loving smile filled her features to the brim.

“An' you're a stupid punk!” Applejack snapped at her, and Rainbow's expression turned to shock and confusion. “Y'all went lookin' for this, for fixin'? What's wrong with you, ya crazy little—?!”

“Hey, pardon me, but I didn't know exactly what their conversion tosh really entailed!” Rainbow barked back as her legs were free and Applejack began on her arms. “What do you take me for, a masochist?”

“I thought y'all were fine with the way you were,” the blonde reminded her in a softer voice, and Rainbow's arm twitched as she for once felt a gentle touch on the rough bindings. “No one deserves this, honey. I like you the way y'are. I mean... we all got bad stuff in our hearts, it don't make us bad people.”

“I just...” Rainbow's voice was like a whimper, and she stopped to watch Applejack start on the last binding. “I didn't want to keep being the cause of hurt, especially to... well, to you.”

“How d'you think I feel now? Lookin' at you like this,” Applejack calmly asked, finally releasing her friend from her brutal confines and helping her sit up.

Their eyes met at once while Rainbow gingerly massaged her sore wrists, and she could feel her heart racing at the ends of each finger and against the torn up flesh. There was a simple understanding shared between them, a comfortable silence she had not experienced since the night she slept so near to the lovely blonde girl. With eyes swelling with tears, Rainbow collapsed roughly into Applejack's strong arms. Though she wanted to cry her heart out, weep until the pain stopped, call out curses and complaints, she merely rested.

In a fond murmur, Rainbow Dash admitted, “I'm so glad I have you.”

“Then we best get outta here, b'fore someone comes back to check on you,” Applejack said in a cool tone, smiling at the affection she had missed.

“I don't know if I can,” the young patient replied sadly, “I gave my consent already, signed my freedom away.”

“Y'all signed something?” she replied in a dreading voice.

“Yes, a form, it's possibly still at the foot of the bed,” her quiet tone responded into Applejack's shoulder, when the girl carefully moved out of the embrace and went over to it.

“Lemme see this. We could just take it with us, y'know,” Applejack spoke in a hum as she fumbled through the files on the clipboard.

“I imagine they made copies.” Rainbow grumbled to her lap, but an amused laugh from Applejack snapped her out of her sorrow. The blonde continued to chuckle as she pulled a piece of paper out of the clipboard and shook her head at it, prompting Rainbow to ask, “What?”

“This waiver, Dash,” Applejack held it out in front of her with a familiar, charming smile, and Rainbow had a hard time looking away from her towards what she should have been looking at. “You signed it al'right... but you signed it as Sappho.”

“Oh yeah, I did!” Rainbow gleefully agreed, grabbing it and staring at the little scribble she had marked it with. “I suppose my snide wit has saved me.”

“C'mon, honey,” Applejack took her by her still stinging hand and helped her off the bed. A painful yet welcomed tug ushered her on, and Applejack continued, “Let's get you home, mkay?”

Rainbow dumbly nodded, following obediently. Her heart fluttered as she realized where exactly her home was: in her dorm, with Applejack. The blonde girl still smiled at her, and those adorably unsymmetrical dimples were just as captivating as ever, though her tortured body ached and warned her to look away, to anticipate a shock or sickness. The only feeling that came, though, was the burning fires of love.

The way that Applejack grasped firmly onto her hand and guided her out of the darkness was vaguely reminiscent of the way that prolific musician Orpheus led Eurydice out of the grasps of underworld. This time, however, Orpheus would trust his woman to devoutly follow him to the very surface, and never falter a curious or doubtful glance backwards and lose her to eternal damnation.

It was as though she was under a spell, completely captivated by the inviting ruby of Applejack's smiling lips, visible even through the all-consuming darkness and the crushing feelings of rage. Truly, love was a stronger tone of red. No blood nor hate nor hell-fire could compete.

Author's Note

Well, looks like things are getting a little better. Now, this is going to be a rather short story, unlike most of my others, so anticipate perhaps only another chapter or two after this. Short, sweet (bitter, moreso), and to the point. But... what did you think of this chapter, anyway?

White

***

"White"

***

Such a simple thing was remarkably soothing, especially after such an ordeal. She had always been something of a restless girl, but she had almost forgotten how much she loved being able to move around of her own accord. Besides that, being cooped up for days in a dank and damp old basement, she had sure missed the luxury of running water, something she took full advantage of even as she stood alone in the lavatory on the main floor of the academy.

Rushing the glacier-cold water over her features time and again with her eager palms, Rainbow Dash looked up at her reflection in the faded, rusty-edged mirror that hung before her. She could see and feel the cool drops sliding over her cheeks, nose and chin, and though it would have normally bothered her, she allowed it to drip several times and splatter against the scratched-up bathroom counter and sink.

Her sunken eyes still appeared worn and tired, though she had fallen asleep nearly as soon as Applejack had tucked her into bed the night before. In fact, she had somehow fallen asleep in the middle of some grateful rant she unloaded upon her room-mate, who chuckled through most of it and sat by her bedside with that charming dimpled smile she always wore. Rainbow Dash found herself looking into those love-struck eyes of her own as she stared at her slightly warped reflection, and huffed a solemn laugh to think about how silly she was to think such devoutly fond thoughts of her blonde friend.

An inadvertent flinch surprised her, and her body felt cold for a moment, and shaky. It bothered her more than anything, the way that she still felt afraid of some shock whenever she thought of even something so innocent as gazing upon the girl's loving face. It only got worse when she saw Applejack, but Rainbow shrugged that idea off in favour of wiping her face and getting out of the rotten old lavatory.

Ducking out of the water closet, Rainbow dug her hands deep into her black dress pants pockets and slouched towards the library, where Applejack had promised to meet her after Rainbow's appointment with Headmistress Celestia. She felt better now, that they had settled it all, or at least had come to terms with the situation as it stood.

It was promised that Rainbow Dash would not press charges for the less-than adequately consented (or clergically approved) therapy, if the Headmistress would tell no one of her miserable and pathetic response. She would also be receiving passing grades on the courses she might have missed instruction on, as she had been overcoming an unnamed adversity at the time. Even if Rainbow Dash had been the type to blab about the therapy, it wasn't as though any of the going-ons would have be believed, coming from the mere delinquent student that Rainbow had made herself out to be. But the Headmistress couldn't have any tarnish on the academy's reputation, nor her own. Besides that, all the professors and Sisters had agreed to back off about her disposition and leave her punishment up to the Lord, or so they had put it.

Though the unpleasant conversation was still fresh in her mind, Rainbow trod off to her destination. She would not have to search the library for her room-mate's familiar face, however, as the girl had opted to wait well outside earnestly, searching for Rainbow without falter. Upon catching sight of the blonde girl she had learned she adored, Rainbow was stopped dead in her heavy steps.

Her heart jumped up into her throat and nearly burst through her larynx in the form of a stunned whimper as she caught sight of the young lady, whose always gorgeous appearance seemed especially enchanting. There she stood, clad in her usual white dress shirt, pressed black blazer, and teasingly-long-enough black skirt, and yet she had never looked more beautiful. To Rainbow Dash, it was as though she was seeing her for the first time again. And it was the first time: the first time since she had been released from her supposed treatment, the first time since she had ironed out her fate and accepted it, the first time since returning to the old familiar life she once despised.

Never had she looked quite so divine, standing there amidst dozens of monochromatic blurs that Rainbow could once half-identify as peers. Her golden hair and sun-speckled skin seeming so rich and vibrant that Rainbow wanted nothing more than to taste it, her curious and seeking expression directed in an alternate direction; her enticing, God-given curves apparent even through a conforming school uniform. And yet, alongside the love-struck tingles up her spine and flutter of the heart, Rainbow Dash felt uneasily ill and shaky. Her eyes squinted as she recalled the painful shocks against her temple and she squeezed her fists up to recall the bars that had weakened her muscles to limp. As she ground her teeth together and furrowed her brow, she cursed every wonderful and terrible sensation that captivated her.

“Dash!” and then, from her beloved room-mate's lips, her name sprung forth. Even if hadn't been the given surname that it was, the way that Applejack's alluring tone embraced her from afar entirely hypnotized her with familiarity.

Rainbow Dash's bright and wide eyes immediately set on the blonde girl once more, and seeing the way she was waved over with a fond and pleased smile, she was powerless to stay away. Like she was controlled by some torturous addiction, Rainbow Dash followed the musing of her name even if it had led her back into the darkness. And even though her body still trembled as if anticipating some cruel smite or scold, Rainbow could not stave her own frantic heartbeat nor the habitual obedience she gifted to her truest friend.

“There y'are, I was lookin' all over,” Applejack hurried over to her side at once, shifting the books in her arms to one side so she could reach out and give Rainbow a one-armed hug, which riveted the young girl's absent mind. “Didn't your meetin' end like a half-hour ago?”

“Uh, yes, I just,” she struggled for words, clearing her throat and trying to hide the heat in her cheeks that flustered her whole body. “Sorry, I just doddled about as usual.”

“You goof-ball, c'mere.” The blonde chuckled a bit and ruffled her friend's hair playfully before taking her arm and guiding her towards the library.

For once in her life, Rainbow Dash was speechless. She wanted desperately to ask how long she had been waiting, but no words could form at all. Now that she contemplated it, she wasn't quite sure when Applejack had become so familiar with her, but suddenly it all felt right. It seemed like merely a few weeks ago that the two of them had been nothing but classmates, one of whom often neglected her stationary, but now she was a much dearer companion that Rainbow Dash had ever anticipated.

She blinked dumbly as she realized they had already reached the library, and tried to act aloof and unconcerned as Applejack led her around the groups of studious peers, who tried in vain to feign subtle as they glared at the passing pair. At last, they reached their usual table, and Applejack dropped the books onto the top without hesitation, grabbing the backrest of a chair and spinning it around as she always did. Rainbow smiled to see the charming and characteristic motion, curiously tilting her head to perhaps glance beneath Applejack's skirt before she adjusted it well enough to block any passing gaze. The blonde plopped down on the chair easily, her spread legs hugging the backrest in a rather classless yet becoming way.

Another unwelcome twitch cut Rainbow's enchanted observation short, and she touched her still sore fingers to the burn mark on her temple that she had tried to hide by not-so-playfully mussing up her bangs. Her sweat broke violently, but she merely shook her shoulders like a tag had scratched at her neck or something to try and hide her insecurity. Shaking it off as best she could, Rainbow went around the table and slid into the seat across from Applejack, knowing how difficult it would be to keep concentrated with the way Applejack's leg might brush up against her own had she chosen to sit beside the girl.

“Al'right, let's see,” Applejack began in a hushed voice as she shifted through the books and notes she had gathered, finding a particular stack and passing it across the table. “Here's all the homework y'missed.”

“What? Homework?” Rainbow's voice cracked and she blinked in shock, noticing how tall the pile already was. With a snort and frown, she prodded it back across the wooden top and murmured, “And here I thought you were my hero.”

“I am, I took real detailed notes and everythin',” she obliviously defended herself, taking two pencils out of her case and passing one across the table to Rainbow Dash, who had expectantly forgotten one. “And who d'you think is sittin' by your side until y'do it all?”

“Brilliant. I do suppose that my education shouldn't suffer as I have,” Rainbow Dash grumbled with a frown, cracking open the notes and dully looking them over.

“Dash.” Applejack's voice was soothing, but not as soothing as the feeling of her hand gingerly sliding over Rainbow Dash's. Rainbow was stalled by the touch, and her eyes trailed up the girl's well-dressed arm, along her usually-teased-about, poorly tied tie, and landed on her caring expression. It reminded her too much of the moment when they had crossed the threshold from acquaintances to dear friends, when Applejack had saved her for the first time. “We ain't gotta do this right now if y'don't want to. If y'ain't ready.”

For a moment, Rainbow Dash just stared at the girl across from her. The way she leaned one elbow over the backrest between her legs, the way she rested her cute little chin on her wrist and tilted it ever so slightly to the left, the way her gleaming green eyes sparkled under the white fluorescent lights, it was all so remarkably unremarkable and all so very Applejack. The gentle and loving caress of Applejack's fingers over Rainbow's own was warm and comforting, and Rainbow would do anything to keep the two of them near, even if that meant the bitter kiss of mere friendship and usually unwelcome studying.

“Reform,” Rainbow Dash read one of the words on her vocabulary assignment, as it seemed so truly imperative to her conception of the last few weeks. “The improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, or unsatisfactory.”

“A Middle English word, derived from Latin 'r French. The verb means to restore peace, the noun dates back t' the seventeenth century,” Applejack added, reading upside-down over the page her room-mate was looking at.

“Subordinate definition, to bring about a change in someone... so that they no longer behave in an immoral, criminal, or self-destructive manner,” Rainbow Dash finished, her voice falling quieter with each word.

A small squeeze on her palm reminded Rainbow Dash that she was still holding Applejack's hand. Glancing up at the girl who stroked her knuckles, Rainbow tried to hide the uncertainty in her expression. She found, however, nothing but that same old charming smile that drove her mad with envy and lust, just a few of the cardinal sins she seemed so very akin to whenever she was around the blonde belle.

“Don't go thinkin' what I know you're thinkin', honey,” Applejack told her firmly, though there was a playful edge in her voice. “You ain't somethin' that needs t' be reformed, even though you're probably stubborn enough to resit it any-who.” She added a wink.

“That's subjective,” she responded monotonously.

“Hey.” Applejack shrugged casually, adding a very simple statement to her argument, “Y'can't fix what ain't broken.”

As the heat between their held hands increased, Rainbow winced, feeling the need to pull back. Not only was she getting far too excited by something so clearly platonic, but her palms still stung from the burning shock they had been subjected to, which flared up from the heat of Applejack's comfort. Forcing an understanding and agreeing smile, Rainbow abruptly broke the hold and pretended to organize her papers. Though Applejack found her evasive behaviour unnerving, she said nothing on the subject.

“Thanks for all your help, Applejack,” Rainbow Dash's monotonous voice dragged itself across the table that betwixt them. “You're a diligent peer indeed.”

“A peer, that's my classification?” she hummed an amused tone to consider it for a moment, and Rainbow's eyes found her beneath the drop of her brows. “Or are y'just hesitant to pronounce th' word, friend?”

“I am careful with the term, yes,” she nearly whispered, but the cheerful perk in Applejack's allure had her particularly taken already, even if she did her best to resist it. “But if I must make the distinction, I would have to label you my most dearest of confidants. Truly. More than a friend, by my warped standards.”

“Shucks, you're makin' me blush,” Applejack laughed and pretended to fan the heat from her cheeks with a few flicks of her wrist.

She couldn't help it: Rainbow Dash cracked a smile. A small exhale of tightly held breath burst from her nose and she shook her head to hide the flush of her own cheeks. Though there was something awkward and unnerving about trying to return to the life she once knew, Applejack seemed to make it her mission to pretend that nothing had changed. But things had changed, for Rainbow Dash anyway. The small experience of laughter pained her swollen chest, and she had trouble keeping it up while fending off the looming distress.

Applejack noticed immediately, and her gaze softened upon the girl she felt so strongly about. She wanted to reach out and take her hand again—a very rare influx of physical attention she realized, but couldn't epitomize why it came about—but Rainbow Dash was too far away to permit the touch. As her words were merely half amalgamated, Applejack opened her worried lips and was about to try for either solace or query, but she would not get that far.

“So are you cured yet?” An obnoxious question breached the sanctum of their private table in the student library.

“Excuse me?” Rainbow Dash slowly churned out between the grind of her teeth.

“Pinkie Pie, stop it!” Twilight Sparkle hurriedly squeaked out as she tried to grab the eccentric girl's arm and pull her from the dialogue.

“You look really different—worse... but different!” Pinkie exclaimed again, though it was a strange mix of whisper and scream that no one knew whether to shush or listen harder.

“Thank you so dearly for your appraisal, I dare say that worse off, I am,” Rainbow Dash simply agreed, lightly tapping the bottoms of her homework sheets over the desk as to arrange them together more closely. “But that's of little concern to you.”

“Oh no, I am very concerned!” her voice breached audible pitch for an instant.

“Pinkie,” Twilight tried again, her voice becoming firmer as her bangs hid her eyes.

“You misunderstand! I am concerned for your immortal soul, as we all are. I know salvation can seem pretty hard, but,” she tried to rearrange the words, but did not seem to notice the growing annoyance in her company's expressions. “Well, we all find our way, somehow. I know we do. We all wrestle with the millions of things that the Bible tells us is right or wrong—heck, in the book of Deuteronomy it says that we should burn cities of people who worship other gods—even the animals! But the New Testament is different, just like our world now is different. What's that passage about love and sin and stuff?”

“... What?” Rainbow Dash thought she might have gotten lost along the way, as Pinkie's mouth moved so quickly, but it became more clear what she alluded to.

“... Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. 1 Peter, 4:8.” It was Twilight's voice, as she gently spoke a hush of something much greater than her voice could proclaim.

As Rainbow Dash and Applejack cast their glances at Twilight, it became apparent that she was utterly embarrassed, and reticent to speak for herself. She hid her scrunched eyes under the hang of her bangs and squished her books up against her chest, staring shyly at the far wall that bore what few modern novels had not yet been banned in their institution.

There was apparent tension between Rainbow Dash and Twilight, which neither of them explicitly addressed. It didn't appear that Pinkie Pie noticed much of it at all, beyond her fervent nods in agreement with the sentiment and a few shakes of her finger towards Rainbow Dash. Applejack was cautious as she allowed the interaction to play out, but her fingers felt tight as her fists taunted closing up or clenching the table that kept them all apart.

“Yup, yup! That's the one, or, close enough anyway,” Pinkie Pie slapped the table a few times until the Sister watching the library for the period glanced up over her reading. “I believe that God's doing what he can for you, Dashie—”

“Don't call me that,” Rainbow grumbled irritably under a smouldering breath.

“And everything will work itself out! You've got all this love around you, right? Right?” Pinkie roughly patted both Applejack and Rainbow on their backs loud enough to be audible to the whole room, causing both of them to stiffen and recoil from the unwelcome touch.

“Love, is that so?” Rainbow repeated dully, and her heart scrambled across the table to imagine the hearty pounding in Applejack's chest that she knew so little of.

“Rainbow Dash,” Twilight interrupted her tainted thoughts, and the girl in question could not even look over at the purple-haired girl who addressed her. She spoke anyway, albeit vaguely. “I'm sorry that things did not turn out better for you. I did what I could, in any case. Maybe one day, you'll understand that—”

“Hey Sappho,” Applejack's voice disturbed the whole conversation, and the screeching of her chair out from under her was a loud mar on the polite academy they attended. “Y'wanna escort me up to our room? T'practise lesbian... poetry, maybe?”

Rainbow Dash's jaw fell through the library floor and into the boiler room she presumed to be below that, or at least, she felt as though that must have happened, as she wasn't in the right mind to know any better after what Applejack had just said to her. A stammered exclamation fell out of her agape mouth like pebbles, but she had no understandable response. Applejack loved the reaction, and stifled another chuckle as she took Rainbow by her clammy hand and raised her from her chair clutching the unintelligible notes about which she realized she cared nothing. Guiding the rainbow-haired girl away from the dumbfounded library, Applejack pleasantly skipped towards their aforementioned destination.

“I get it: lesbian. Sappho, the lyric poet of the Isle of Lesbos, yes, very clever. Clever joke,” Twilight hurriedly remarked in a shaky voice as if to qualify the joke enough for it not to have been perceived any other way. Watching the two actually leave, she uneasily added, “... Applejack?”

“Let 'er wonder,” Applejack whispered with a compelling wink that stole away Rainbow's voice whether she had protest or not.

They were gone from the library at once, and half way up the stairwell that the two of them had once been confined to when they spoke out of turn. It was like a dream, like a dangerous, devious dream that she had perhaps imagined under the fog of drugs or torment, as as such, Rainbow was hesitant to fall so willingly into it. Applejack's hand was hard and tough, and she could feel the callouses from holding a pen or doing up buttons or retying the tie about which she was so often teased. Such marvellous detail, she couldn't have imagined in her hysterical mind. She allowed herself, for just a taunting instant, to believe that it was true.

She growled through bearing teeth as the images struck her haunted head, and Rainbow pulled away from the most desired attention to hold in the scolding shouts that filled her noggin. As her cool hands touched her hot face, they were reminded of their scars and nearly summoned a stifled shout from the cavities of her person. Applejack was right there with her though, and pried her clawing hands off her wounded temples long enough for her words to be heard.

“Okay... It's okay, honey, I'm here. You're safe, you're with me. You're free, I promise.” It was like a calming mantra that brought Rainbow's feet back to the ground.

A harsh intake of breath sounded too rough for sensibility, and Rainbow Dash shook her whole body to take hold of herself long enough to speak, “Goddamn, sorry, AJ. I lost myself there for a second. I must appear mad, surely I must.”

“Hey, from th' place I found y'curled up in,” Applejack's gentle hands caressed her pointed chin and raised it so that they stared into each other's eyes. “I'm just glad you're here at all. We'll get you through all this business and back to the you y'all were s'posed t' be, I swear.”

“Who even are you?” Rainbow Dash blatantly babbled in an exasperated voice.

“Your valiant ol' peer, Dash,” Applejack playfully recited the adjective and noun she had been dubbed by Rainbow Dash so very recently. “C'mon now, let's get y'back t' the bunk already.”

“Mhmm,” Rainbow eagerly nodded as she was carried back up to her floor on the steady beat of her heart and perhaps some angelic wings.

Stubbing maybe three toes on her sluggish steps, Rainbow made it over the ashy stairs and back onto the familiar floor of the fifth form rooms. Everything seemed so devastatingly similar, so dully dismal, that she almost wished things were as different as she had lately experienced... well, almost. It seemed quite humorous to her that Applejack, once a near stranger, was the one leading her and opening to door to the room that once Rainbow Dash had though she might be isolated in after her outburst.

The door closed quietly behind them, but from the way that Rainbow jumped it might as well have slammed. Applejack sighed in relief as she tugged at the knot in her tie and loosened it until it saddled up over her breasts—something Rainbow swallowed her notice of as she darted her eyes to the old water-damaged window frame. So very casually, Applejack strode over to Rainbow's bed and sat on the edge of it, leaning back on her arms and gesturing with her head to invite Rainbow to join her. After a thoughtful and repressed gulp, she obliged.

“Oh, Dash,” Applejack wasn't sure where to start, and Rainbow Dash wasn't sure where she was going at all. “This place was way t' quiet without you, y'know that? Th' whole school, I mean.”

“Peaceful, is how others might put it,” Rainbow corrected with a coy tone.

“I wouldn't,” she softly countered, crossing her mostly bare legs over one another. Rainbow Dash stared at the small distance between them, not certain if she wanted more or less. “Was it... well, was it real bad, th' place y'went? I can't stop thinkin' 'bout it.”

Rainbow Dash really thought about it, she truly did. It was difficult to do so, as most of it seemed foggy or lost, but she did consider what little she had knowledge of. With a solemn smile, she came up with an adequate answer, “Yes, yes it was.”

“They hurt you, didn't they?” Applejack pressed on, and Rainbow winced to remember long enough to make up an image in her head.

“I think they did. I'm not sure they agree,” Rainbow introspectively wondered, narrowing her eyes at the white ceiling that seemed far too near to her. “I'm sure, this too, shall pass. I'm sure. But... my hands still burn, and my legs are so tired. My head is dizzy and false, as though I'm not sure what really happened and what I dreamed up. My lungs, and my heart, they feel tight, weak... it's agonizing.”

Applejack stood suddenly, like she could not stomach any more of it. She trembled in the wake of the words, but did not leave or tell Rainbow Dash to stop. Instead, she turned around and roughly wrapped her arms around her small friend. It was a strange sensation to the both of them, being so informal and ferociously gruff, but it was so warm and compelling. With a strong heave, Applejack lifted Rainbow to her feet, though she stumbled a step or two to gather her balance. The longer it dragged on, the more intimate the embrace became, until it seemed to say more than intended that they clung to one another.

“Sorry,” Applejack gently spoke into her dear friend's ear, but at the same time, she nuzzled even closer.

It was a consuming silence that swirled around them, but it was exciting in all its simplicity. There between the dead, white walls, those two were vivid and vibrant. A gentle rhythm was shared between their protected chests by breath and beat, threatening to bind them together. But arms could not stay wrapped around bodies forever.

Pulling away as though they had to pry themselves apart, they carefully avoided eye contact. But it felt unnatural to keep them alone, so much so that Applejack forced it upon her roommate. Once their gazes clashed, it was fiery and telling. Applejack's hands slid compassionately over the bruised body of Rainbow Dash, so slowly that their skin might have been sewn together if she postponed motion any longer. The room was quiet, but their blood pumped so forcefully it could almost be heard in their flushed ears.

There was no warning, no spill to tell of what Applejack proceeded to do. Her shaking hands ran over Rainbow's dull white dress shirt and eagerly pried the buttons apart. Her tie was grabbed by the proper knot and shaken loosely until it came mostly undone and fell to the floor below them. As drawn as Rainbow was by the action, she did nothing but stave and starve herself from her desires, waiting patiently for Applejack to finish disappointing her fantasies.

Her hands—much more slender yet sizeable than Rainbow had pictured—touched her half bare chest, gingerly tracing the marks left from invasive conditioning. As her wrinkled dress shirt fell to the ground with her black tie, she felt just as exposed as when she had been bound to the stretcher. Yet this time, it was so sweet and gentle, so comforting and relaxing that she might have been drifted off to sleep by it. All those terrible metal conductors, they left traces along her neck, her chest, and her abdomen, though some of them were still hidden beyond that. Each one, Applejack curiously perused without halt. They had seen each other in such little modesty before, but this was very different.

“It's not as bad as it looks,” Rainbow Dash breathlessly lied through tight lips, leaning closer to the blonde girl as if to galvanize her to tilt her head ever so slightly towards her to permit a meeting.

Their noses brush against each other, their brows dusting up ideas between them. Rainbow's dissuaded hands twitched earnestly in their bound lust to reach out and sweep Applejack up into her warm embrace. She could feel her own want in her skin, and it blistered and boiled until she was sure her fingers would shatter from dissatisfaction. A yearning moan brimmed in her throat, and she pretended that looking up at the ceiling might bring the hands of God down to save her from her sick needs. But those prayers were not answered; instead, those sick infatuations were realized.

Applejack's virgin lips voluntarily met her own, and for an instant, she was sure she was still in a drug induced vision. But this was so much more real that she might have screamed into that lovely girl's mouth, if she wasn't so devoutly fond of such a fantasy. Applejack's tanned, freckled hands slipped up to cup and caress Rainbow's tender and tormented visage and head. It happened too quickly to adequately experience it, but Rainbow Dash was entirely swept away by the kiss she had been pleading for. An infant of a groan swirled between them as their lips parted for shared breath, and again the elusive kiss found itself in their mouths.

Entirely enthralled, Rainbow's fingers dug into Applejack's fitted shirt and clawed until she pressed her whole body against the other. Her body heat was much hotter than anticipated, but Rainbow's hands still shook like they were freezing for touch. She greedily shoved Applejack's black blazer off of her strong shoulders, revealing a shirt that matched her own; slightly wrinkled by the curves of her body and the grasp of lust. It was fast, unrestricted, and accepted. But that, too, seemed to pass.

“Wait,” the word went nearly unheard as it meekly slipped out of Applejack's own enticed lips between two vivacious kisses. She almost squeaked as she pushed the two of them apart, and struggled to catch up to the breath that had run away with her heart. “I-I'm so, so s-sorry. I just... I jus' couldn't help... m'self.”

“Me either,” Rainbow might have said if she could manage anything more than just keeping herself away from her intentions.

“I-I have to,” Applejack shoved away from Rainbow Dash and forced herself to the other side of the room, running her hands frantically through her tangled hair and breaking through the knots shakily. “I have t' get a hold o' m'self...”

“It's okay, I didn't mean to, to,” Rainbow tried to think of what she did wrong, and she couldn't verbalize any of her million faults that swirled around in her head. “Uh, you just wanted to make me feel better, didn't you?”

“Of course I did, but,” Applejack wasn't saying something, and she seemed just as confused and tormented as Rainbow was by all of her own demons. “But, well, what just happened?”

Rainbow's mouth hung open as she tried to think up a response, but there was nothing that could come to mind besides the way that it felt to finally release her urges with Applejack. She wasn't entirely sold on the fact that Applejack was thinking any differently, as the freckled young girl had her wide eyes still set on Rainbow's rosy lips while they were nervously licked and tried for explanation. She forced a huff of a laugh and tried on that old casual facade that made Applejack drawn to her in the first place.

“I'm a corrupting influence, it's the tragedy of the bleeding century,” she mused with a shrug, though she didn't have the confidence to make eye contact like she usually did to make the joke stick.

“Dash, that ain't it,” she weakly replied, her chest sinking with the absence of the words.

Rainbow's heart sunk into her bowels to see the darkened face of her dearest companion. Her normally bright eyes seemed like drained tide-pools, and the contagious smile she usually wore had flipped into a melancholy frown. She looked pained, confused, and guilty. She knew that she had to think up something of value to say, so she strummed together some gusts of air that sounded like they might be enough.

“I'm not upset with you, Applejack,” she carefully proposed, and that seemed to lift Applejack's shy expression. She carelessly gathered her shirt from the floor and tossed it over one shoulder like it bothered her not. “You're not hurting me, or taunting me, or anything. You don't owe me any explanation, or any further displays of affection. You are very dear to me, more so than anyone else, and I desperately need you with me. In any capacity that you can suffice: a peer, a pencil-loaner, a friend... or anything there after.”

“I didn't mean t' make things complicated, I swear,” Applejack pronounced truthfully, her watery eyes ripping Rainbow Dash apart.

“Complicated,” Rainbow drolly restated with the toss of her hair with a flick of her wrist. She clumsily strung to words together to try and sound like she had any idea what to say. “To... make something more difficult or complex; strangely enough, it's from the Latin, meaning to fold together. An odd choice of semantics, my dove.”

Such a statement brought a laugh from Applejack's throat, and she shook her head lightly in amusement before responding, “I'm glad you learned somethin' after all.”

“Hey.” She had initially meant it to sound offended, but it came out more like a plead, and Applejack just started at her until she gathered the gall to go on. “Do you think you could... just, perhaps, sit with me for a bit, or something? I just don't care to be alone right now.”

Applejack silently blinked at the request, but obliged and walked back over to Rainbow Dash's side of the room. Rainbow Dash plopped back onto the edge of her bed before shuffling and scooting up nearer to the top, not caring that the perfectly tucked sheets were pulled from their positions. Following closely, Applejack came around and placed herself on the side of the bunk, careful not to get too close. She wasn't quite sure that she could trust herself around that girl, but she didn't seem to mind trying.

“Brilliant,” Rainbow uttered as she draped her shirt back over her shoulders as to ease the tension between them.

In the wake of their actions, there was little to say. Rainbow Dash wanted to ask how that kiss had felt for Applejack, what she meant by it, if she remembered clear enough to identify the details like whose hands were where, or anything to feed her captivated mind. It was all consuming for the brash young girl. But she avoided the subject, as she did not want to scare away the woman who chose to stay so close.

“I don't feel badly, about being honest with you or with myself. I don't feel wrong, bearing such strong love and exposing it,” the rainbow-haired girl ranted a bit as she teetered back and forth as though she was enjoying a child's playground ride.

“Don't let 'em tell you y'should, love's a real great thing, Dash. God's got love for us hooligans, too,” she responded, glancing out the steamed window yonder. “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. That's St. Augustine, I think.”

“And yet everyone cites the most hateful quotes for their causes, awful.” Rainbow shook her head and expelled a long sigh.

“Not everyone's s'bad, I'm sure their reasons seem right 'nough t' them,” Applejack toyed with defending those she knew not enough of to condemn.

“In that dark place... they tried to take you from me, Applejack,” the mostly-clothed young girl stated suddenly, and Applejack looked over. “They wanted me to suffer so that I could be saved, or some trite tosh like that. To corrupt my love. They wanted it to hurt when I looked upon you in unseemly manners. So that it might cure me of my disposition.”

“Did it?” She shuffled uneasily like she did not want to know the answer. “I mean, does it hurt, when y'see me?”

Rainbow Dash smiled easily as she slipped her hand over the sheets until it met that of the girl next to her, and she quietly answered, “Not as badly as it hurts not to see you.”

The warm and loving arm of her freckled peer came around her small, slender shoulders and tucked her close against her plush chest. With an emotional breath, Applejack agreed, “That hurts me plenty, too.”

Their young bodies found each other in the vast emptiness of the stale room they had been locked together in. It was magnetic and heated, and they indulged so greatly in the company of one another that it seemed nothing had come between them. It was personal and sensual and wonderful, the way their expensive uniforms creased without concern. Her shirt, so pure a white and warm, smelled just like her, and Rainbow nestled closer and closer until she could feel the heat of Applejack's skin on her lips. It was perfectly soothing, and she never wanted to leave her embrace: as soft and ivory-white as the wings of an angel.

Author's Note

It is finished.

Yes, at last. Only took about 2 and a half years for them to get around to kissing (wow), but, well... you know how it goes. Thanks to everyone who was keeping track of this fic, and I'm glad I finally got it done. I had half written it forever ago... at a very different time in my life. But I tried to keep it close enough to the original plan.

Was there anything you wanted to see, but didn't, in this story? Were you happy with the ending, or not?