Relieved

"Did you steal a bunch of airshow money?" Rainbow Dash asked inquisitively.

"No."

"Did you buck some dirty protester in the face?"

"No."

"Did you lose a bunch of expensive weather equipment?"

"No."

"Did you get it on with Soarin'? Cuz I totally wouldn't blame you if..."

"NO! Sweet Celestia, no." Spitfire interrupted sharply, shivering in revulsion at the suggestion.

It was to Spitfire's great chagrin and annoyance that Rainbow Dash had tailed her, loudly posing hypothetical situations that could've caused her dismissal from the Equestrian Royal Air Force. Spitfire stopped mid-flap and spun to face the curious if tactless young pegasus.

"Dash, please. I just want to get some groceries and head home. We can play professional development some other time, okay?"

Spitfire's sharp retort deflated Dash like a needle through a party balloon. For all her braggadocio, Spitfire thought, she's really still just an insecure kid looking for validation; I shouldn't be so hard on her.

"In fact, what are you even doing here, anyway? You're supposed to get three months of leave between candidate camp and reception phase; shouldn't you be home saving the world or at least partying it up with your friends?"

"No Ma'am. I waived it so I could start my training earlier. The recruiter said the assignment board would look favorably on it when I went to choose my assignment."

Spitfire facehoofed. "Y'know what, kid, groceries can wait. Follow me."

~~

Rainbow Dash wrinkled her nose as she pulled up a chair at Spitfire's unfinished maplewood kitchen table, wholly unimpressed by the aesthetics of her surroundings. Spitfire's cloud home was small and sparsely furnished; she had no pets and few personal effects, a symptom of a life spent training and touring the air show circuit.

"Cores Light? Appelveisen?" Spitfire queried from the kitchen.

"Naw, I'm good."

"Well, I'm having one." Spitfire replied as she slid her chair out and plopped down in it unceremoniously.

"So you want to know why I got cashiered, huh." Spitfire said as she deftly aligned the top of her hard cider bottle on the edge of the table and stomped.

"I can totally understand if you're embarrassed and don't want to talk about it, I just want to know so I don't..." Rainbow Dash stammered, taken aback at Spitfire's blunt approach. She searched in vain for a judicious way to complete the sentence, pausing for several seconds before Spitfire saved her the embarrassment.

"..Buck it up as bad as I did?" Spitfire grinned sardonically.

"No, I get what you're after. Basically, Dash, I got fired because a lot of bad things happened under my watch; there were some high-visibility incidents and as the Wonderbolts commander at the end of the day what happened or didn't happen in my unit was my responsibility. But, at the same time, in retrospect I think the only thing I could have done differently would have been to quit."

Dash cocked an eyebrow as Spitfire spoke.

"That seems a little, well, heavy on the drama, don't you think? I mean, how bad could it be going to airshows and showing off your slick moves all the time?"

"Dash, let me tell you what it's like. One morning, I'm sitting there at my desk just getting settled in and the Squadron Commander kicks the door open and starts screaming about how we've got to mobilize, there's a dragon on the loose. And I'm taken aback, gobsmacked really, because we're the Wonderbolts; we're an *aerobatics and recruiting* unit, not the Night Guard or a Magic Fires Brigade. We don't have weapons or armor, I mean, we don't even do actual combat training, and this guy's screaming in my face to mobilize a bunch of pegasi in fancy tights to go toe-to-toe with a rampaging dragon. So I round everypony up and we're buzzing around this wild bucking monster trying to figure out on-the-fly what we're supposed to even do about it."

Spitfire paused to take a deep draft from her cider. She wiped the foam from her mouth with her foreleg before setting the bottle down. Her leg started to jiggle nervously as she recounted the incident, her body tensing subconsciously as the memories came back to the fore.

"We're out there getting swatted out of the sky by this thing, and do you know why they had us out there? Because there hasn't been a conventional war in Equestria in a thousand years, and every senior leader from the Chiefs of Staff down are scrabbling for any reason they can to keep their slice of the defense budget or better yet take away part of somepony else's. The upshot? My squadron commander puts my flight's lives at risk to prove that we could respond to a threat faster than the other service branches so that HIS boss could ask for more money. And then, then to top it off, they had the gall to be furious with us when we couldn't stop the bucking thing."

Spitfire hadn't realized her voice was slowly but surely getting louder and angrier until as she finished she was nearly shouting and pounding the table with her hooves.

"I... I'm sorry." Spitfire scooted her chair back and scooped up the drained bottle to drop it in the trashbin. It clattered loudly atop the other empties. "I didn't mean to shout."

"Like I said, If I'd been a good leader, the day that happened I would have resigned. Everything that happened since then was just a continuance of a delusion I held that if I followed orders and played by the system's rules that I'd be okay. In the end, though, it wasn't. It ruined me."

Dash sat silent for a moment, absorbing the implications of her former commander's confession.

"So uh, what should I do, then?" Dash finally broke the silence that had settled over the room.

"Well, I think the question you're going to have to ask yourself is if it's worth the hassle."

"Whaddya mean, worth the hassle?" Dash asked tilting her head.

"The hassle of being held accountable when nopony else will take action, like the incident at the young fliers competition."

Spitfire opened the refrigerator and pulled out two more beers.

"No, really, I'm good." Protested Rainbow Dash.

"Itf cuftomary," said Spitfire, tilting her head to set the bottles on the table, "For an officer to buy a sister a beer when she's saved said officer's flank. I owe Fleetfoot two, I've lost count of how many Soarin' owes me, and by my math I owe you one. Drink up."

Dash shrugged and opened her beverage. "Thanks. Your welcome, I mean."

"So young fliers competition. Hundreds, maybe thousands of pegasi were there to watch and participate that day, and when your friend burnt her wings off, out of that crowd of thousands there were only four of us who moved to do anything. Not Princess Celestia, not her guards, not the event coordinators, not High Fade, just three Wonderbolts who were there ostensibly to hand out awards and one young flier."

"But that's what being a leader is about, isn't it?" Dash interjected, "Being the one to act when things go wrong?"

"That's true," Spitfire nodded in affirmation, "One of the things that separates us from regular ponies is that we run to the sound of trouble, not from it. The problem is though that as a pony who does, you'll always be subject to criticism from ponies who can't or won't."

"I'll give you an example. After you saved us, my boss called me into his office to chew my flank for getting knocked out while trying to rescue your unicorn friend. Can't say I was really surprised, being as how many people saw us fail, but what grated me was that he did nothing - sat there like a lump while we jumped in. And then, then he had the gall to try and tell me, get this, that I should have flown UNDER her to catch her. Swear to Celestia, he said that to me. You'd think he'd never been through a basic freefall school."

Rainbow Dash nearly spat out her drink. "Are you kidding me? She would have crashed right down on top of you like a load of bricks! Every schoolfilly knows that's what happens if you steal somepony's air..."

"And every schoolfilly knows that trying to catch a free-falling pony is a dangerous last-ditch maneuver doesn't always work," Spitfire said, intently fiddling with the label on her beer bottle, "But it didn't stop him from writing me a negative counseling statement, even after he personally sat there in the stands doing nothing as she fell."

Spitfire looked up from the tattered label. Dash couldn't help notice the pain in those tangerine eyes had been hiding.

"Some nights I even have dreams, yknow?" Spitfire paused, her lip quivering. "The howls of the wind mixed with her shrieks of terror and that horribly contorted alabaster face, eyes bugging out of her head and I'm trying to get in position and I can't, because of the turbulence..."

Spitfire's voice cracked and went silent as the words caught in her throat.

"Even as fast as I am, it was a close call; we were maybe twenty feet off the deck when I pulled out. We were all lucky that day." Dash offered quietly.

"That's my point, Dash. Suppose you'd been a hair slower in your dive. Suppose you'd mistimed it and we all augured in anyway. Do you think you'd be able to stand there and face the scrutiny of a bunch of armchair experts who sat there and did nothing? Because that's what happens."

Spitfire quickly steeled herself, dancing back from the precipice of breakdown. She coughed, surreptitiously wiping her eyes.

"Anyway, my advice? If you're still gung-ho for joining up, forget trying to get on active duty - join the reserve. You'll get to fly, but everypony in the reserves has civilian jobs, too. It's nice, because it means you're at least marginally less likely to serve under idiot careerist warhorses who're trying to make their next OER bullet on your back."

"So what's next for you? Do you have plans?" Asked Rainbow Dash.

"Long term, I don't know. This all happened so fast I didn't really have time to plan for an exit strategy, so I'm thinking I'll take some time and travel, visit my family maybe. I'll be selling this place, if you're still looking to buy."

"No... Probably not. I've got a lot of re-thinking to do." Rainbow Dash replied. "Thanks for the talk."

"I guess I needed to say those things as much as you needed to hear them. Thanks for listening, anyway."

Rainbow slipped her issue saddlebags on and made her way to the front door, leaving the former Wonderbolts commander alone with her thoughts.