Taming Rainbow Dash

Rainbow Dash trotted west towards the sunset: west towards the hotel and DaringCon. Adventure wasn’t out there: it was behind them, and for once, Rainbow Dash was glad about that. If she and Quibble Pants kept going, they might be able to make it back for some of the evening programming.

“…what if each puzzle that was solved, uh, unlocked a new karate move?” he said, trotting behind her as they brushed past some vines. “Think of it that way, right? And I mean I'm kind of a "Yearlite" myself, so I'm sure she'd be open to—”

“Uh... Quibble?” she said, stopping and turning around to look at him.

“Sorry!” he said, holding up a hoof.

She knew she couldn’t shut Quibble down for long. She didn’t even want to anymore. It was just his way of letting everypony know he was the best, because he was. She got that. It was cool with her, because he wasn’t trying to be the best at something she was best at, so she didn’t have to destroy him.

They made a pretty good team.

She hadn’t caught the last few minutes of his monologue and tuned in just in time to hear him say, “… cool adventure. And you were totally getting into being tied up back there, am I right? Which, that’s kind of unrealistic too, but I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it.”

She halted abruptly. “What?”

He snorted. “Oh, come on, now. It was obvious. You had loops and loops of rope around you when Cabelleron ambushed us. You still had rope on when the Cipactli attacked. You kept it on until Daring Do took it off you, and then you got harnessed up again right away…”

“To save your flank again!”

“I know that already. Thanks. And when I wasn’t screaming my head off because you and Daring Do are adrenaline junkies and have to do everything the hard way, I appreciated the view. Practically the only times when you weren’t tied up was when you were chained up. Face it, Rainbow,” he said, turning and putting a hoof on her shoulder. “At some point you have to admit to yourself, ‘Rainbow Dash, you are really into rope.’”

She shook his hoof off. “They tied you up, too!”

Quibble rolled his eyes. “Shyeah, they put a pathetic noose on for, like, five minutes,” he said. “They’re such amateurs. I hope Caballeron doesn’t pay them in real money. If they didn’t tie a slip knot, they tied a big roll, like thread on a spool, with an overhoof knot a foal could have gotten out of. Which I did, and you didn’t. So the logical conclusion,” he continued, sitting down, “is that you stayed tied up because you like being tied up.”

Rainbow Dash felt her face heating up. “Hey!” she shouted. “They tried harder to tie me up and barely bothered with you because you’re out of shape!” She poked him in the barrel with one of her hooves.

He shrugged. “I’m big-boned and I have a sedentary job. That’s irrelevant. Don’t change the subject.”

She leaned in so they were muzzle to muzzle. “I’m not changing the subject! I’m just telling you you’re wrong!”

But maybe—maybe there were things she still didn’t know about herself, like the way she’d fallen in love with the Daring Do books. She’d sworn that she so didn’t read, that reading was undeniably, unquestionably uncool. She’d had to be flat on her back, completely trapped and in pain, with her wing tied up, when an egghead pony had given her a copy of Daring Do and The Quest For The Sapphire Stone and said “I think you’ll like it.”

She didn’t know she loved reading, but she did. Twilight had been right about her after all.

And now another egghead pony was telling her that there was another thing about herself she didn’t know. And even though he wasn’t patient and nice like Twilight, and even though he was sort of a jerky know-it-all who she wanted to wrestle down into the ball pit again to show him what was what, Quibble was right about a lot of things, and maybe this was one of them.

Agh! What was she thinking? He had to be wrong. And she was going to tell him so until he got that into his thick skull.

“Just say it,” he was saying now. “Say ‘hi, I’m Rainbow Dash, and I have this thing about being tied up.’ Go ahead. You’ll feel better.”

“I don’t!” she insisted, and shot up off the ground. She hovered so that she was above him, still meeting him eye to eye. “You know what your problem is? You’re scared. You’ve got a …a…” What was that word Twilight used? “A phobia! A rope phobia! That’s why you’re in such a hurry to get it off you!”

He shook his head. “I don’t have an irrational fear of rope,” he said, in that irritatingly superior voice of his. “I like rope. A lot, in fact. I just don’t like being tied up with it, and you do.”

That was enough. She reared up with her hooves in fighting position. “Prove it!” she yelled, making little jabs at him, but he didn’t seem impressed.

“Is that a challenge?” he asked, lifting one eyebrow.

“Yeah!” she shot back. “And just so you know: I always win challenges. I’m, like, the winningest pony in Equestria.”

“Fine,” he said, and rolled his eyes again, “I’ll prove it.” He trotted over to a nearby tree and reached his hoof towards some vines.

“Those are snakes,” she pointed out, as she touched down on the ground.

“Eurgh,” he said, gagging and hurriedly withdrawing his hoof. “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” He moved away and tested the next set of vines by carefully poking them with a stick first. Nothing moved. Then he yanked down a liana that yielded, broke, and fell down from the rainforest canopy far above. He carefully measured it by pacing it out, and broke it short with a sharp blow of his hoof when it was about eight pony lengths long.

Her eyes widened. “Sheesh, Quibble, how many ponies are you planning to tie up with that thing?”

“Just one,” he answered. “Put your forelegs behind you.”

She couldn’t see what he was doing. “Hmm,” he mused, “never done this on a pegasus before. You’d better fold your wings flat. I don’t want to catch a feather in the knots by mistake.”

She folded her wings as closely to her body as possible and felt him place two loops on her, one around each shoulder. He pulled the loops together so that they were snugly but not tightly fitted around her front legs, holding them together behind her, and then she felt him make a knot.

He worked quickly and smoothly, working his way down her back, and finished with several coils around the last two loops on each side after securing both sides to the middle, just above the hock. “There,” he said, trotting back in front of her and sitting down, folding his front legs, “see what you make of that.”

She pulled against the bonds experimentally. They didn’t seem too bad. They certainly didn’t hurt. They were evenly spaced so that the pressure was well distributed, and none of the loops went around a joint or impinged on a nerve. As an athlete, she appreciated that. And they were much, much less uncomfortable than the sort of thing Caballeron’s goons usually tied on—no bulges or bumps, no squeezing against her stomach. This oughtta be easy. Then she’d show him.

That was before she figured out that she wasn’t going anywhere. The improvised ropes were too unyielding, and the knots were too secure. Try as she might, she couldn’t fight her way free, and she was fighting as hard as she knew how. She couldn’t use her wings for balance or bracing, and that was unfair. Maybe Applejack could have wrestled free. Applejack was stronger than her, though she hated to admit that. And Quibble was an Earth Pony. Maybe it was some kind of Earth Pony thing.

“It—feels like the harder I struggle, the tighter the ropes get!” she gasped.

“Book One, rrrright?” he said smugly. “And they’re not getting tighter. They’re completely stable. The ropes just feel as though they’re getting tighter because you keep thrashing around.”

“Nnngh!” She threw out her chest and shoulders, but Quibble was right: it just made the ropes feel tighter, even painful. She lashed out with her hind legs, but instead, she toppled over onto her side. If only her wings weren’t tied down—but they were.

“I’ll—wait till—argh!—you wait!” she snarled between gritted teeth.

She kicked out with her unbound rear legs, but as she pushed and struggled and flopped like a fish, she realized that the ropes weren’t going anywhere and neither was she. And instead of fighting harder, she started to relax. She wasn’t moving because she couldn’t, and that meant she didn’t have to. She wasn’t responsible for kicking flank and saving the world. The ropes felt like tight, warm blankets. She could let go…

She lay on the ground, panting hard, with her mane falling lankly against her neck and her coat stained dark blue with sweat. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, Quibble was standing next to her with his face dropped down near hers. He was panting hard, too, but that made no sense, because all he’d done was sit there.

“All right,” she said wearily. “Take them off.”

He went behind her, untied a few knots, and pulled. To her surprise, the knots popped themselves, one by one, and everything slid off smoothly. He helped her up, and she shook herself until the dirt matting her coat had fallen off.

“Well?” he said with a smirk.

“I don’t know,” she said, wobbling a bit. “It’s weird. Is this like that pillowcase back at the vendor room? Is that even a thing?”

His face froze, and then went absolutely blank. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Yeah. It’s a thing.” He dropped the long vine, which coiled itself into a neat pile, and started walking in the direction of the convention center.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s your problem?”

He turned back and looked her straight in the eye. “Dash, we just stopped fighting about Daring Do. We just decided that it’s cool and we’re friends. I don’t want to talk about it if this is going to end in ‘eewww, Quibble, that’s disgusting.’ I saw how you were acting with the ropes and the chains, and I thought, ‘hey, maybe this is something else we have in common, aside from Daring Do.’ Obviously, I blew it, so let’s drop it. Forget I said anything. Come on, let’s get out of here. I have a fanfic reading I’m supposed to go to.”

He trotted away before Dash had a chance to do anything. She could hear his monologue fading into the distance: “…of course, Farrier’s Law, almost all of it is going to be horrible, but I think some scathing but honest criticism is just what some writers need to…”

She took off, jetted past, and swooped in front of him in a matter of seconds, landing and blocking his path with her wings. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, cutting him off. “I never said anything about anything being disgusting or not being your friend. Some of my friends build shrines to other ponies, have things for furless bipeds, and give massages to bears. On the weirdness scale,” she said, ruffling her feathers and folding her wings up, “I’d say you’re right in the middle. I just never heard of this before. And that was kinda fun back there. And—well, anyway, I still want us to be friends.”

Quibble scrubbed one hoof through his gray mane and sighed. “Ok. You saved my life twice this afternoon. The least I can do is buy you dinner. I think that’s some kind of a rule.”