Beneath Your Wings

Torque supposed that he should have been suspicious when the day started off peacefully. He actually overslept, but decided that it wasn't as though he had enough business to be overly concerned about that fact, anyway. Besides, his dreams were as often as not just more days at work, spent hoping that something would happen other than what typically happens in dreams, like conversations about the distant past, alternate dimensions, and the strange creatures inhabiting both with the ghost of his dear friend Ma'ė Nóho, who had taught him to appreciate the beauty and majesty of flight. The Great Out-Back eagle had been devoured by a quarry eel right before his eyes, leaving behind only the feathers that had gone into Torque's manufactured wings and a Cutie Mark in twisting things to the point of no return. Torque had been found outside the gorge and told that the quarry eel population had suffered grievously that day, but that was decades ago. They had probably made a comeback by now.

Trying to re-establish at least the illusion of routine, Torque brushed his teeth and then went about the business of his morning exercises, equal parts meditative for his magic and calisthenic for his body. He hadn't made a career the Guard, but he'd spent sufficient time in it to be drawn into the Captain's "Sound Soul = Sound Mind + Sound Body" philosophy, which last Torque had heard, had worked out extremely well for the Captain. So well, in fact, that not only had it gotten the lazy nerds like himself into physical martial arts, but it also got some of the jocks trying to find some deeper philosophical meaning in Ogres and Oubliettes. Torque kind of wished he'd stayed, at the very least to have personally borne witness to the trail Captain Shining Armor had left in his wake.

But Torque had mistaken himself for a cutting-edge business pony, which is why he was out here in basically the middle of nowhere, standing on his horn and forehooves and hoping the increased flow of blood to his brain would help him figure out how he could've made such a stupid move, and more importantly, how to make the most of it. Instead, his mind was filled with memories (though thankfully none of the repressed ones) and the increasing concern regarding how much of his body's blood the his head could take until both were shattered with what he was sure was the audible sound of breaking glass. It took him a moment to notice that the sound wasn't accompanied by the usual cracking sensation inside his head, and much less time to right himself and teleport into the lobby of his clinic.

He couldn't imagine that a burgalar existed with the will to put forth the effort to come all the way out here just to rob him. It would be vastly easier and probably more effective to just get a real job. Torque was sure that no thief was a candidate for Celestia's School, but even finding his clinic would be, for anyone stupid and lazy enough for the life of a criminal, an extraordinarily discouraging proposition. So it was that he was prepared to sardonically demand reparations for whatever was broken and leave it at that. That is, until he took in the full scope of what had just happened.

That was when he happened upon a enlightened form of pure, unbridled rage. One that he had not known for nearly twenty years.

* * *

Zephyr had been working on what he would say for the first hour he'd spent trying to find the jerk who would hurt his precious Dashie's feelings. And after all she'd done for him, making him a new stallion with a sense of purpose and everything! Once he realized that he couldn't do both at the same time, he decided to focus on the latter. He knew that it should be fairly easy to find a unicorn in Cloudsdale, let alone a brownie anywhere in Equestria, but that didn't excuse everypony he asked calling him an idiot!

He consoled himself with the idea that Rainbow would much rather be regaled with stories of the flank-kicking he'd doled out than with what he said by way of introducing it. Or he could just embellish it later. Ponies insist that the pen might be mightier than the sword, but if you win the fights, you also get to dictate what stories get told about them. After all, that had been the driving philosophy that had served all of pegasus-kind for thousands of years.

"Hey, Stupid!" A voice reached out down the block and seemingly grabbed Zephyr's head and whipped it around in the direction of its source, inspiring a trio of raucous laughs before the lanky stallion realized his mistake and tried to escape. He failed, soon finding himself surrounded by a hoofful of familiar and unpleasant faces. "Look, you already admitted what you are! There's no sense in trying to go chicken on us now!"

"He-he-hey... guys..." Zephyr replied awkwardly, terrified that he was about to get jumped. "Wh-what's shakin'?"

"You mean besides you?" Dumb-Bell asked, before laughing at his own joke and being joined by his flunkies as they orbited Zephyr like a trio of hostile satellites. "I just wanted you to know that you're an idiot, and the stallion who you're trying to get your flank ripped off by is on the ground. You know, where boneheads and mud ponies belong. Everypony's betting against you, by the way."

"He's what? Wait, what? Everypony?" Zephyr laughed nervously. He knew he wasn't as popular as he liked to tell himself, but surely he had to have at least some faith from his fellow winged ponies.

"Aw, go easy on him, Dummy, he's about to get turned inside out by an angry splinter-face." Score faux-protested, mocking the concept of brief mercy. He turned to Zephyr, who was trying to curl into the fetal position. "It's not everypony. You got 40-to-1 odds!"

"Look on the bright side, Zephyr Sleeze!" Hoops said amid another chorus of laughter. "At least you'll give him a new set of feathers for his gimpy fake wings!"

Zephyr's vision blurred as he felt some cosmic force hurling him out of the cloud city. It took him a moment to process that the blurring was from his tears, and that the "cosmic force" was actually just the bullies "helping" him in the direction of his proclaimed destination. His heart sank with despair at his impending doom until he remembered that he was the underdog fighting for a lady's honor in a noble duel. A new fire ignited in his soul. That was it! He was sure to win, just like in all the stories he read as a...slightly younger stallion.

Zephyr's awkward flailing cleaned up into a semblance of an intentional dive as he rocketed toward his earthbound destination. There were landing pads and runways set up all around the place for potential clients of varying levels of flight ability ranging from his big sister's pre-Cutie Mark to his crush's current capacity. Not being here on a courtesy call, the mane therapist of course ignored all of these as he detached one of his landing horseshoes and launched it ahead of him through the big glass storefront.

Now, Zephyr may not have been the greatest arm in any elementary school, but he had been traveling at his peak terminal velocity when he made his throw. And the horseshoe was made of a nice brass (he expected it to help him beat the unicorn's face in). It punched through the massive window pane like a hot knife through butter, leaving a mostly-intact wall of glass for the unfortunate stallion to smash through a tiny fraction of a second later. Were this a certain other universe, he would have come out the other side an uncased pony sausage with glass slivers sticking out of the meat while most of his bloody pelt hung from the window. Luckily for him, this was not that universe.

Instead, he slammed into the service counter, ringing both its bell and his own before knocking the whole thing over. There was a barely-audible splash as it landed in a pool of the former contents of a respectable number of bottles of spa "product" which had been destroyed by a brass horseshoe ricocheting around the lobby at slightly-greater-than its own respective terminal velocity. Which was around the speed of sound. Said horseshoe had eventually punched through the back door leading to Torque's lab where it struck and tore up the mechanical wings and ricocheted around some more through shelves, books, and equipment until burying itself halfway into the motor he was working on that he hoped one day would allow non-unicorn earthbound ponies to learn the joy of flight with more reliability than the hoofful of half-hearted spells that were available to them.

As Zephyr picked himself up and put himself back together, grateful that the need was not as literal as it could have been, he couldn't help but notice that the air pressure in the room was significantly greater than a room's air pressure ought to be, especially with as many holes in it as this one had. He had half a mind to demand to see the manager and complain to him or her up until he remembered what he was doing here.

"Well. Hello and welcome, I suppose I'm obligated to say," Torque replied trying to piece together when and why his aura had turned golden, and why he felt so calm, while he used his magic to repair what elements of his establishment he could. "I don't know what has motivated your arrival, but I have to say that your particular manner of doing so is not placing you on my 'preferred customers' list."

"Don't bother with the niceties, dirtbag!" Zephyr blustered, hoping he put on an intimidating image standing in the midst of the destruction he'd caused and pointing an accusing hoof at Torque, whose horn was producing a deceptively gentle golden light and a more honest tearing sound. "I'm not here to make friends! I'm here to make you pay for your cruelty to the mare I love!"

And just like that, the pressure was gone, as were the golden glow and the air-tearing sound. Zephyr watched the unicorn narrow his eyes, then look around for something the pegasus couldn't imagine. In fact, if he had to guess, he would have come to the conclusion that Torque had abandoned consideration for his presence entirely. Since Torque wasn't even looking at him, Zephyr did have to guess, and his conclusion infuriated him! It was almost as if the snobby unicorn hadn't taken his heartfelt declaration of vengeance seriously at all! He totally deserved the surprise punch he got, and Zephyr was actually quite proud of himself not only for remembering which forehoof still had a brass horseshoe, but also that he'd sent the arrogant bastard through the only intact door remaining in the lobby.

The mane therapist didn't know how long he'd been standing there, panting in exhilaration, but he tried to catch his breath once he figured out that he'd been doing it. He did it! He kicked the flank of the stallion who'd hurt Rainbow Dash's feelings! And it barely took him any effort, too, which was a double win against the neigh-sayers who all bet against him! Zephyr was elated. Rainbow was going to be so proud of him!

"You know..." a familiar voice began, sending chills not just down Zephyr's spine, but throughout his entire body in spite or perhaps because of its formal corporate pleasantness. It didn't help that the mysterious pressure was back and that the voice was accompanied by that unsettling air-tearing sound that Zephyr now realized reminded him of the torches used to cut pipes at the factory he haunted when Rainbow was giving tours. The voice's owner followed the pressure by a few seconds, entering the lobby from the back, rather than the first aid clinic section said owner had been launched into.

"I tried. I really did. When I saw the damage you caused to my shop, I was angry, because the stuff you destroyed was considerably expensive by finance or personal labor. I managed to keep myself in check by telling myself that a pony as weak as you couldn't possibly have caused this damage on purpose. Maybe you just really needed help and mistook my facility for a hospital."

In spite of the clear threat of Torque's horn, the dangerous new spark in his eyes, or the way his mane seemed to be trying to tease up in the breeze, Zephyr couldn't take his eyes off the unicorn's hooves. Every step he took made a wet crunching sound like bones being broken. The "spell" was broken when he reflexively backed away from the somehow frighteningly placid foe and noticed that his own hooves were making that sound, inspiring Zephyr to look down and notice that those particular sound effects were his own fault for scattering fluids and broken... everything on the floor. When he looked up, he saw Torque standing much too close to his face, and his retreat became a scurry.

"Then, when I heard you spouting your cliched lines, I thought 'Okay, this guy is just some poor stupid bastard who got suckered into somepony's sick idea of a practical joke. He's just as much a victim of this absurdity as I am.' and went about trying to find out who was really responsible so I could murder them, and not you."

Zephyr didn't know how long the monologue was about to go on, but he was very certain that he was royally screwed if the villain finished. Once he realized that no amount of pleading or rationalizing was going to save him now, he coiled up and prepared to do what he was best at: running the buck away from the problem he'd created. But he never uncoiled. The mysterious pressure and the golden glow both enveloped him like a selectively viscous gelatin, and he got to "enjoy" the relatively unique experience of being entirely bathed in another pony's rage.

"But then, you had to go and sucker-punch me." Torque continued, the welt from Zephyr's horseshoe seeming to materialize on the unicorn's lower right jaw as if cued. Zephyr wondered how he could speak at all, let alone so clearly. "Normally, I would have counted that as merely two strikes, but due to the personal attachment I had to some of the things your horseshoe destroyed, I find myself having to count it as having made its own strike."

Torque lifted Zephyr to his hooves, then pulled his front half down until his knees buckled and they were eye-to-eye, reminding the pegasus that he was actually almost a head taller than his opponent. Every part of his body from poll to pastern seemed to have its own idea of how to express its terror at their collective situation, and none of that mattered because he was effectively paralyzed.

"And I do hope you know what happens to ponies who pick up three strikes in The Old Ball Game..."

Zephyr swallowed hard and processed that Torque wasn't actually paralyzing him, raw fear was. He forced himself to straighten out, determining right then that if he was going to die, it would at least be with some pretense at dignity. After learning the value of effort, he couldn't allow himself anything less. That didn't stop his voice from wavering when he responded.

"I-I'm out?"

"Correct! But wow, you're sure sweating and shaking a lot. I think you could use some FRESH AIR!" Torque punctuated his three-liner by slamming Zephyr out through the window pane next to the one he had broken in through by using a move the airborne pony dimly recognized as Bruise Knee's "One Inch Punch". He didn't think that real ponies could do that with any real effectiveness until just now.

Zephyr watched in some wonder as the glass that was flying in his wake suddenly stopped, each individual piece surrounded by a now barely-visible golden glow and flew back to its source to be re-assembled into the window instead of following Zephyr's body on a quest to become a part of it. What an odd duck, he thought of Torque, to be pausing in the middle of a raging beat-down to fix something.

Also, he seemed to be using very little magic for a unicorn on a tirade. A flash of light and a bamf sound later, Zephyr decided that if he lived through this, he was going to find a way to give the analytical part of his brain a good kick for setting him up like that. As for now, he was expecting said kick to come from Torque during his descent, but the unicorn seemed content to watch him botch the landing all by himself. Which he did. Painfully.

Torque approached the fallen pegasus, the battle between mechanic and artist having gone about as anypony would expect if told about such a match-up. The unicorn fought clinically, despite being in a highly emotional state. On the other hoof, Zephyr's performance had been directly proportionate to his emotional dedication to the activity up until his opponent actually started fighting back. Torque lifted Zephyr with his teeth and tossed him over the river where he finally used his magic to suspend his opponent in mid-air.

It was only at this point that Zephyr realized that Torque was on some level as lazy as himself, and only the absolute minimum effort was going into his flank-kicking. It probably made for a boring show to any spectators. He didn't know how to feel about that. He didn't want to think about the fact that he was about to die at the horn and hooves of one of the few ponies that understood him and thus might ever have been his friend. He saw his enemy's mouth moving, but couldn't hear him over his own head pounding and the rushing water. That ceased to matter anyway when the aura suddenly vanished from around him. In the brief instant before he plunged into the icy river, he saw on his assailant's face an expression that did not look the least bit victorious.

* * *

It wasn't very often that a pony got to see the entirety of the territory he had staked out for himself because land out here was cheap and nopony contested him on it. He had enough space to start a farm were it not for the fact that the soil was worthless and could only grow the defiant grass and flowers he grazed from when times got super hard. Which was often, but he was too stubborn and proud to return to civilization with his head bowed and his tail between his legs. Much to his chagrin, he discovered that learning of his flaws didn't help him overcome them, because he had grown to feeling that he needed those traits to survive. So he tried to compensate by hyping his property to anypony who would listen. Which was virtually nopony.

"You may or may not know, but the Sapphire Spring here stems from an underground river in the territory in the Crystal Empire!" he was in the midst of belting out to his exclusive present company when he felt a sudden absence from his magic like a dropped wallet, and an instant later heard a loud splash as a pony-sized object plunged into the water.

Torque wasn't especially proud of the fact, but his telekinetic grip was a bit on the weak side for a unicorn of his caliber. He couldn't even move furniture with it, at least not without help. It was the kind of thing he dreaded another mage finding out about. He was grateful that he inherited his Earth Pony father's strong hooves and relentless stamina. He took great pride in the magical precision his mother's genes had granted him, but that only seemed to help him with things he wanted to do, not with things he needed to do. He tried to make them both work together in the form of his personal services and mechanical wonders, but few ponies seemed interested in buying what he was selling. A world of talent did an isolated pony little good, and Torque was one of those ponies who had just enough that everypony he met seemed to feel that he should have a lot more, a sentiment which steeped him in a constant sense of being a failure whenever he was around more than a few of them.

In spite of his only knowing the stallion by the same means he hated him, Torque shivered sympathetically when his mind returned to the idiot in the river. The only reason Sapphire Spring was liquid was because it was moving too fast to freeze at its temperature, even in early summer. He was on the fence about letting this be the idiot's means of death, since hypothermia would at least be a relatively merciful way to go, but drowning was most certainly not. A cannon exploding out of the water to slam against one of the dragon-tooth rocks marking the waterfall a few hundred cels downstream, and clinging to said rock and pulling its owner's head from beneath the water announced to Torque that his anger had passed; and that now he was going to have to save the moron who broke into his establishment and assaulted him or else he was going to be plagued by guilt for the rest of his life. Stupid guilt.

Torque teleported onto the rock, only to find that Zephyr was no longer attached to it. Growling at the still-increasing ridiculousness of the situation, he dove down, knowing that if he teleported, he wouldn't be able to find his feather-brained opponent while the latter was still in one piece. This whole ordeal would have been somewhat less of a problem if Torque still had his mechanical wings to help him control his descent. Instead, he had to find the other stallion and figure out how to stop both of them from dying in the scant few seconds it was going to take them to plunge hundreds of feet to their watery, rocky doom.

The unicorn didn't know or want to know how the pegasus had managed to slow his descent, but he caught up to Zephyr halfway down the waterfall and managed to get a force-bubble around each of them at three-quarters. Torque wanted to yell at him, but was somewhat inconvenienced by the roaring waterfall nearby and the fact that his quarry had lost consciousness and wouldn't register his words anyway. Instead, he had to focus on maintaining the bubbles as they bounced around the stalagmites that were supposed to kill the two of them until they ended up on opposite shores of the lagoon that was slowing the falling water's speed to that of a more mundane river current.

Torque teleported to Zephyr's side and dried the two of them by magically pulling the frigid water from both of their bodies, then tapped on Zephyr's chest with one hoof until he started coughing up water and sucking in the air that was supposed to be in his lungs instead. After pulling a fresh burst of should-be-frozen water from his face, Torque glared down at the pegasus.

"Now then. You want to tell me what the buck this was all about?"