Catching the Wind
by D. G. D. Davidson
Evening came on, but Rainbow Dash was too nervous to stay in her tent. As the light faded, she climbed over the boulders strewn across the low hill west of camp.
The sky darkened to purple as the sun went down, and, from the midst of the camp, Luna quietly rose into the air and raised the moon. It came up over the horizon large and full, marking the rocky badlands with wan, blue light.
The moon shone for only a moment, however: the black wall of clouds quickly eclipsed it, plunging the desert into darkness. The campfires cast small circles of flickering orange, in which silent silhouettes huddled. Heat lightning flickered back and forth in the sky.
Rainbow opened her wings, flapped, and crested the last boulder. She started at the sight of Big Macintosh sitting quietly on the hilltop, his sandy mane blowing gently in the cool wind, his large green eyes watching the sky.
He glanced at her. “Storm’s a-comin’,” he said in his quiet, deep voice.
“Yeah,” she answered, “and we’re bringing it.” She lowered herself to the ground. When the lightning flickered, she could glimpse some of the thousands of pegasi pushing the clouds forward, moving the front to Draconium. In the morning, they would use the storm in the first attack on the Earth Dragons’ stronghold. Before the battle, Rainbow and the other pegasi resting in the camp would relieve the ponies who had been working all night to keep the storm strong. She would fight in the first wave in the sky, and Big Macintosh would be one of the first soldiers on the ground.
She sat down next to him. He glanced at her again, but then returned to watching the sky.
“Are we doing the right thing?” she asked. “I know we’re planning to free the dragons’ slaves, and the stuff the dragons do to them really makes me mad, but I still wonder.”
He didn’t answer.
“Big Mac?”
“Eeyup.”
Frustration gnawed her, so she turned away from him. Trying to hold a conversation with Big Mac was like floating teeth. He’d visited her every day in the hospital after she’d injured herself while attempting a Sonic Stormboom, and he’d made his intentions clear, but she still couldn’t get more than ten words out of him at a time.
The wind rose and turned cold. Big Mac shivered. Unaffected, Rainbow opened a wing and allowed the breeze to play through her feathers.
He placed a forelimb across her withers, and she decided not to pull away; the cold no doubt bothered him more than it did her, since he didn’t have the benefit of a layer of down in his coat. His leg over her back felt solid and heavy, and she could feel his heart beating slowly against her shoulder.
Ducking her head, she rubbed her front hooves together. “Look, Big Mac, if we survive this, I really . . . I mean, I can’t promise I’ll still be around. I need to fly. I can’t hold still, and I never could. I know your ancestors were settler ponies, and I know your family’s been farming for generations. You’re all about putting down roots. But that’s not me. I don’t think it ever could be me. I don’t know if I can stay in one place forever.”
For a moment, she tried to envision living on the Apple farm and growing old there. She tried to imagine having foals running by her side, gamboling around her hooves, tugging on her teats. The vision was dim and vague; it seemed alien, impossible. She thought, too, of what it would mean if she had foals who couldn’t fly, a family with whom she would be unable to return to Cloudsdale.
She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. “Would you please say something, Big Mac? And I mean something besides ‘yup.’”
Big Mac took a deep breath and slid his hoof up to the back of her neck. As he stroked her mane, he spoke softly, and his deep voice rumbled in his chest.
“When I was a young colt, Rainbow Dash, I’d sometimes take one of ol’ Granny’s Mason jars, and on a windy day I’d run out to the back forty to a field where the grass was tall an' there weren’t no trees. There was a little hillock out there, an’ the grass’d wave all around it like a sea. I’d stand on that hill and imagine I was out in the ocean, an’ the farm was gone an’ there weren’t nothin’ around for miles but water full o’ long, snaking ripples made by the wind. I’d hold open that jar. In summer, the wind would blow hot and hard like a blast from an open oven, an’ I’d spread my lips and feel my eyes and gums dry out. In winter, it’d be so cold, it would feel like needles digging through my coat an’ into my skin, pricking me all over. It’d make my eyes water until my tears ran fast and turned to ice on my cheeks. I’d stand in that wind for an hour or so, holdin’ that jar, an’ then I’d clap the lid down tight, run on home, an’ hide that jar under the bed in my room.
“Then a day’d come when there weren’t no wind at all. The air’d be hot an’ thick an’ still, an’ at night I’d lie in bed, stewin’ in my own sweat, just wishin’ for some breath, some breeze. I’d climb out o’ bed, pull out that jar, an’ pop off that lid. I’d always hope that wind’d leap out, blow all around the room, push against my face, an’ make me feel the way I felt when I stood up on that hill, takin’ the full brunt of it.
“But it never did, o’ course. Every time I’d open that jar, I’d just stand there, holdin’ it, listenin’ to the crickets chirpin’ out in the fields, feelin’ that same heat an’ that same thick air, gettin’ no relief. No matter how many times I tried, there weren’t never a thing in that jar at all.”
His hoof stopped stroking her neck, and she looked up at him. His eyes reflected a faint glimmer from the campfires below, and white light flashed in the clouds above his head. He looked very solemn and a little sad.
“I’ve always known I couldn’t capture the wind, Rainbow Dash, but I’ll be durned if I can quit tryin’.”
He brushed her forelock back, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. She slid toward him and buried her face against his neck. There was no telling what tomorrow would bring, but, for the moment, there was this.
Before I discovered FIMFiction, I was working on a lengthy My Little Pony fic over at FanFiction.net. The second season thoroughly jossed the story, and, because I didn’t make a good outline, the story got bogged down by its own subplots, of which there were many. I currently have no intention of finishing it, but I’ve picked out some of its useful parts and recycled them in Princess Trinity. The present scene would not fit in Princess Trinity, but I found that I wanted to write it anyway, so here it is. It is an orphan.
