Author's Note
"She knows where you've been, and knows what you've done.
The me in the mirror is ugly, but she's not the only one."
suoıʇɔǝןɟǝɹ uǝʞoɹq
Isolation. Loneliness. Whatever its name, Rainbow Dash was long accustomed to its company. It'd crept up on her every night she'd been without Tank. She had felt empty inside; as if she was missing a piece of herself. She knew it because her house didn't feel like home without him. For three weeks the tortoise'd been missing, and without the whirring of his engine, the silence that filled his spot quickly ate away at her.
That didn't mean she had to deal with it forever. No, she'd set up plenty of distractions to keep her mind off of Tank. Evening movie binges, pulling pranks with Pinkie, keeping the AJ-Dash rivalry alive, Thunderlane. Distractions, sure, but nothing was permanent. Nothing kept her from feeling the bitter emotion of solitude.
As she'd lay on her couch alone with naught but a novel in her hooves, these thoughts continued to wage a raucous in her mind despite her dismissive reading aloud. Her idol's latest venture: Daring Do and the City of Mirrors. It was almost idly, Rainbow Dash deigned to read to herself despite the crushing lonesome feeling reigning supreme in the back of her thoughts.
"... as Daring Do snuck back into the city, she'd come to quickly realize it wasn't the townsponies' lights she'd followed. No, the moonlight beamed down upon tens, perhaps hundreds of broken mirrors. Shards shattered, strewn about. A light literally shining in darkness. However, there was not a pony to be seen amidst the faded black of the town. She-"
"LiKe mE?"
"Hello?" She paused at an almost indecipherable mote of noise, looking up from the printed pages and into the hall that led to her room. Her head tilted forward, seeing nothing but darkened cloud that made up the walkway. "Hey, no, I heard that! Come on out or I'll whoop your flank!" She glared into the hall but receives no answer. Dash had shook her head as she'd rolled her eyes. Only a moment passed before she's decided to return back to the book. "Nevermind then, guess I'm going crazy or whatever." She licked the tip of her hoof before she'd thought to turn over to the next page.
Yet she'd stopped.
The noise that distracted her, whatever it may have been, proved too much a curiosity for her to continue reading. With a sigh, she threw her head back in contempt before she'd plant the book onto the free cushion to her left. "Seriously, I know I heard you. Come on, it'll just be a light beating or something." She continued to talk into the empty hall; to no avail. She leaned herself forward from the couch, extending her wings as she'd begun to distend them. She hovered in place above her loveseat before, silently, she debated searching for the source of the intrusion. A single 'hmph', and a sneer and she'd slowly taken off for it; over to her room beyond the hall. The shadows that'd clung to the cloudwalls deter her not as she'd passed by the small mirror she'd set up before Tank's disappearance.
A peculiar feeling of being watched sent a violently unwanted, uncontrolled shiver through the length of her spine before she'd turned around in a snap.
Stopped mid-flight just before her bedroom door, head careened over her shoulder, back into the living room; she'd swallowed an audible intake of air. A sense of wrongness permeated in the length of this hall. Yet she couldn't place it. Rainbow Dash ripped into the inside of her cheek as she gnawed on it almost subconsciously when her paranoia was greeted with nothing. She glanced back forward, at the opening of her pitch room, before she'd turned back to her couch. A weary exhaustion overlayed her thoughts. "Maybe I am going crazy..." she mumbled mostly to herself as she'd opted to return to her living room. She turned and was about to pass the mirror again, but that feeling of wrong prevailed.
She froze—against her will or not, she couldn't say—something distinctly spasmed in the corner of her eye; a movement that she didn't make. Slowly, her head turned to face her reflection, only to see the faded visage of herself staring back.
As she'd stared at this normal item, an unpleasant return of shivers startled her out of a breath she didn't know she was holding. Rainbow Dash visibly relaxed at the sight of normalcy, herself, before her gaze flickered around for whatever may have moved.
Her eyes wandered around her mirror-self for a moment, only to stop at her forehead. Beneath the leftward sway of her mane, she'd noticed a slight discrepancy; a sole strand of hair out of place, that had ran right between her brow. "Oh, now that's annoying. First, these noises, and now I can't keep my hair up? Figures." She scoffs. Both her and her reflection raise their right hooves to fix the misplaced fibre.
Rainbow lowered her forelimb back to her side; a click her tongue as she smirked into the mirror. "Lookin' good, RD. Lookin' real good." Her clone sneered back; not the face she'd thought she made, but oh well, beggars and choosers and whatnot. The cyan Pegasus turned away from her reflection, finally intent to settle back onto her couch.
However, she'd stopped short again, and she slowly turned her head back to the mirror–did she see that right? Her mane was never brushed that way. Was it? She squinted as she'd started to inspect herself or rather, her reflection.
What may not have seemed pristine at first glance, her mirror self's mane looked brushed over to the opposing side. Just as hers was. Rainbow let loose a sardonic, and uncharacteristically quiet laugh. The rasp in her throat the byproduct of an unfamiliar emotion. Dread. "Right, just tricks of the mirror," she mumbled under her breath, eyes having not left her own in the mirror. She shook her head, and she continued to the living room without another thought. Mind games, that's all it was. Just simple mind games and nothing but.
Dash figured she'd sleep on the couch for no particular reason.
