It was only one word. One wrong word.
It was a glorious spring day. Foals laughed, birds sang, and the sun shone high in the sky. It was the kind of day that inspires songs, not poems. It was glorious... until Twilight Sparkle said The Word.
It had all been going so well up until then. Her friends were all talking and laughing together, Granny Smith was regaling ponies with tales of yesteryear off to the side, and Applejack and Rainbow – as ever – engaged in their perpetual epic battle of friendly rivalry.
Twilight had a mouth, though, and this mouth did a very bad thing. It said The Word.
It was innocent, it was harmless. It was supposed to be a compliment! ... But when Twilight Sparkle saw her rainbow-maned lover in a deadlocked quarrel over the outcome of her latest bout with Applejack, Twilight said the exact wrong thing.
“But Rainbow's the most macho pony I know!” she had said.
She didn't expect what happened next. Foals stopped laughing. Birds stopped singing. She was almost surprised the sun didn't stop shining. There was a silence, an awful silence, broken only by Granny Smith's “Oh dear.”
That was when Rainbow sat down on her haunches... when she turned her head, ever so slightly cocked to the side. She glared at Twilight through the forelock of her frizzy mane. Rainbow's mouth alone could have been mistaken for a friendly, though vaguely disappointed little frown... but her eyes... Those eyes bored into Twilight's soul. They weighed it, they measured it, and they found it lacking. Those eyes were there for all the world to see, their message for all the world to hear: 'You did not just say that.'
Twilight opened her mouth again. She thought better of it, clever alicorn that she was. She closed it again, pressing her lips tightly together. Her eyes slowly widened, and she stepped a few paces backward without even realizing it.
Her subconscious retreat was to no avail.
Rainbow Dash was right in front of her, barely a hair's breadth away. Only after seeing this did Twilight register the colorful blur, the sonic boom, of the pegasus pony's approach.
Rainbow Dash had only one word for Twilight, at first. It was a simple word, innocuous in most circumstances, overlooked by the average pony... but today, this word gained a magical power unlike any of its linguistic brethren. Today, this word became an alicorn princess among other words, a monolith, crushing the peasant-words with its terrible magnificence: “What?”
Twilight, clever alicorn that she was, knew better than to repeat her apocalyptic statement. She knew Rainbow's request for clarification was a trap – the silky-sweet honey to bait in the already-doomed fly. She settled for hissing her breath through flared nostrils, and she backed further away.
Withdrawal from the battlefield of Dashie's gaze was futile, of course. All was lost the moment The Word flew from Twilight Sparkle's lips. Rainbow Dash remained but a hair's breadth away from Twilight. With matchless speed, Rainbow would maintain this distance until the battle was won, no matter the casualties.
Twilight gulped.
Movement in the field. A bobbing Stetson heralded the arrival of a new combatant, reinforcements in Twilight Sparkle's doomed endeavor.
“Now, take it easy there, Sugarcube. Ah'm sure she didn't mean it like–”
Rainbow Dash exploded. It wasn't the sort of explosion that left ponies picking themselves out of a crater, nor even the kind that left them picking blue feathers out of their manes. It was the kind of explosion that left ponies futilely picking the image of pure rainbow-hued rage in its primal, raw form out of their eyes. No physical force had issued from the pegasus, no shockwave, sound, or blast of wind. Yet ponies shot away, thrown by the force of Rainbow's fury.
Rainbow Dash exploded again. The grassy ground under her hooves showed no disturbance not accounted for by the tramping of pony feet. The nearby tree lost no leaves. The fountain behind Twilight kept burbling merrily... yet, to see the ponies nearby, the epicenter of the explosion could not be doubted. All of them, stallion mare and foal, faced in one direction. They gazed over a circular no-mares-land at the spark of infinite, brilliant furor, afraid to look away, afraid to blink, lest they risk bearing witness to the world's end, and yet not seeing it.
Twilight Sparkle stood, doomed and alone, centered in this ring of emotional devastation. Her hooves stood in the calm and terrible eye of the storm.
“I am NOT!”
As if the crowd, indeed, the entire universe had been waiting for Rainbow's pronouncement, the ice thawed. The wind stirred the air once more. Ponies dared to breathe again. Some even blinked.
Rainbow rocketed around the circumference of her self-imposed prison, wheeling and whirling around Twilight. “How could you say that?” She bounced from one side to the other. “Look at my dainty hooves! Look at my wonderful rainbow mane! Look at my luscious, curvy flank!” She jabbed a hoof into her eye, disregarding any injury she may have caused it. “Look at these gorgeous, magenta-infused eyes!”
To see her, any pony would have thought there were a swarm of Dashies inside that circle, but there was only one. She stopped moving, again planted right in front of Twilight, and it could no longer be mistaken. There was only one, there could only ever be one Rainbow Dash. She was solitary, independent, the single focal point of all the universe.
“Do these look macho to you?”
There was a pause. This troubled Twilight Sparkle. Was she meant to speak, to answer the question? To speak would be an impossible curse. It was her mouth that got her into this trouble, could it get her out again? She did not dare to hope. Her struggle would be in vain, she was certain... yet, she seemed doomed to the attempt, the mockery of hope. “Um... well, what I meant to say was that the way you–”
“Oh!” This was no 'Oh' of understanding, nor a conciliatory one. This was an 'Oh' that swept far out to sea, leaving the beach high and dry as the impending verbal tsunami rolled in. “So it's what I do that's macho, huh?” She poked a hoof into Twilight's chest.
That contact struck her like lightning. Before, she could happily imagine there was some hair-wide barrier, a precious micrometer of protection between her and her impending doom. That hoof pierced her fantasy, stabbing all the way to her heart without ever breaking the skin.
“I am not macho. I am awesome!” Her wings flared. Terrible and mighty, they blocked out the sky. “I fly faster, fight harder, fuck better, and I never ever let my girlishness slip for one second!” She prodded Twilight's chest again with her electric hoof. “You've seen all four! How dare you call me that?”
Again, a question... a horrible, terrifying question. Twilight let it hang in the air, unanswered and unsatisfied. She would not be complicit in her own downfall, not again, not more than she already was.
“It's because of who I fuck, isn't it?” Rainbow's eyes narrowed. No longer were they broad beams of anger, the harbingers of doom here to shine their deadly light upon all the land. Now they were lasers, slicing into Twilight with all the accuracy of a thread through a needle, with all the gentleness of a freight train careening through a brick wall. “You! You think you can take me to bed and then call me a stallion? I know who I am! I know what I am! You're the one who can't stand her own self! You're the one who can't cope with fucking a mare! Is that what you do, imagine I'm a stallion? Well, too bad! I'm NOT!”
Rainbow strutted to the edge of the crowd. Each hoofbeat reverberated like the heartbeat of eternity. Centuries later, ponies would study the effect these twenty-six steps had on history... and they would shake their heads in awe, breathless at the spectacle before them, even as far-removed from it as they were.
Dashie stood next to a stallion, Big Macintosh. None dared to move.
Rainbow took Big Mac's hoof in her own. He was soft clay, molded by her hooves as he spun on the table of his own stupefaction. Nopony could have guessed how, or observed any intervening stage, but in the ill-timed blink of an eye, the two were pressed together, chest to chest.
She stared into the big stallion's eyes, but her words were not for him. “Maybe you'd call me a mare if I was with a stallion! Would you? Maybe I should kiss him? Maybe I should fuck him! Maybe he should fuck me!” She moved closer to him, their lips almost close enough to touch.
He stared down at the fiery blue pegasus. Hot though her fires burned, it couldn't melt the ice holding him in place. Fire burned in him as well. His cheeks glowed even redder, and drops of melting ice dripped down his face... but still, the force holding him had an insatiable appetite for quiet, jittering stillness.
Rainbow slowly neared. The two faces, one red and one blue, fought each other like opposing mountain ranges, brutally smashing each other, but over the course of untold centuries.
A tiny grimace flickered through Dashie's face. It was difficult to tell, watching from a distance, if she was moving toward Big Mac's lips, or away from them. A closer inspection might only reveal a superposition of both states.
Time passed. Leaves fell. Spring turned to Summer, then Autumn. Still, those two faces drew ever closer, yet never met.
Rainbow's eyes might have flashed toward Twilight. So like many of her movements, and so unlike her approach to Big Macintosh, the movement was too fast to see.
Yet more time passed. Civilizations rose and fell around them, always marveling at the immobile, yet progressively closer faces. Still, the two did not meet.
Finally, the world did end. It was a glorious, brilliant end. It was full of white fire and the warm, loving kiss of the sun's fury. “Are you going to pounce me or not?” Rainbow asked.
The end of all things before her, Twilight Sparkle saw that it was good. She pounced her lover, and they glomped down into the tender grass.
Again, blue wings flared, but this time they did not blot out the bright sky. This time, they embraced the rich earth, just as the lavender hooves embraced her.
“I love you, Macho Pony.”
“I love you, too, Egghead.”
THE END
Author's Note
I hope you've enjoyed my verbal onslaught. I tapped a new vein of inspiration in this one, and I'm anxious to have your reactions revealed to me.
