“So,” the stallion began, looking over a clipboard, “Miss Rainbow Dash, is it?”
“Yeah,” Rainbow replied, not looking directly at him. Her attention was caught up with the room they were in. It was so perfectly boring, almost as if it had been designed with that specific purpose in mind.
“Great! So we’re here to discuss your actions on the 18th of May during a visit to Cloudsdale.”
“Right,” she answered, still looking firmly at anything that wasn’t the stallion.
“Miss Dash, I sense you’re nervous,” he said, not unkindly, “There’s really no need to be. You’re not in trouble, it’s just better for our records if we have a complete picture. I promise you the whole process is relatively painless.”
She looked at him for the first time. He was white with a black mane. Pretty unremarkable as ponies went. Nearly as unremarkable as the room, and he was only saved by the fact that he could talk back.
“Fine,” she sighed, finally stopping her nervous fidgeting, “It was a work training day. We were gonna go and… wait don’t you know this already?”
“Don’t worry about what I know,” he replied, not looking up from the typewriter he had started clattering away on, “Just go from the top.”
“Okay, so, as I was saying, it was a work’s training day at the Cloudsdale head office. Top brass wanted to make sure everyone on weather detail was more familiar with the whole process, you know? I thought it was stupid honestly. I don’t need to know the ins and outs of how clouds are made to know how to kick them away.
“And more to the point, I didn’t need to lose a whole day’s work, make the commute to Cloudsdale with my whole team and spend hours in boring lectures. The whole thing was a crock.”
“I could see why that would be frustrating,” the stallion agreed, though Dash sensed he was just saying whatever would make her the happiest. She pushed on regardless.
“So we’re going up there and the whole day is a waste of time. You’ve had work away days before haven’t you? No one likes them, it’s all either stuff you already knew or stuff you’re never gonna talk about again,” she grumbled, pausing to blow an errant strand of mane from out of her face, “But they at least had the good sense to do the talks in the morning and the tours after lunch when everyone was flagging. And they’re taking us around the cloud production site… say, I don’t know your name.”
He looked up at her, seeming slightly taken off guard. However, it was only for a fraction of a second before the mask of serene calm returned to him.
“Do you need to know my name?”
“Well, no, I suppose. But it’s just… a little weird, isn’t it? I mean all we’re gonna do is talk and I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Call me Scribe,” he offered.
“That’s it? Just Scribe?”
“It’s not my full name, but we like to keep things informal here.”
“This from the pony who’s been calling me miss?” Rainbow countered, making him chuckle.
“The rules aren’t always clear cut, I suppose. Would you prefer I not called you miss?”
“Just Rainbow is fine. So, Scribe, they’re taking us around the cloud production site and talking us through how they scale up the process. And you know, for a brief second things looked like they might be getting interesting. The factory was kinda cool,” she explained, until she suddenly trailed off.
“What happened then, Rainbow Dash?”
“I… uh… did you know that the stuff they scale clouds up from is so dense, one speck of it can make, like, a hundred square metres of cloud! It’s insane!”
“Rainbow, I sense you’re avoiding my question,” he replied, gently cutting off Dash’s nervous laughter.
“No! It’s just… you know what happened. I wouldn’t be here helping you with this report if you didn’t know. Do I really have to explain it?” she pleaded, the hint of a whine colouring her voice.
“With an incident like this, we really need to hear it from those who were present, it’s the only way to ensure we get a complete picture… what happened next, Rainbow?”
The pegasus stared at the ground for a while, twiddling her forehooves together.
“It exploded,” she finally said.
“What exploded?”
“I don’t know! It was… it was whatever they were keeping all the cloud stuff in. It just went off, no warning.”
“And what did you do?”
“I checked to see if my team were okay!” she exclaimed, seemingly offended at the implication she’d do anything else.
“And then?”
“We hid. It was all we could do,” she muttered, back to looking at the ground, “I know you have stuff written about me on that clipboard, Scribe. My job, where I live, all that stuff which you need to know but doesn’t tell you anything about a pony. The stuff that makes up a pony is everything that’s happened to them to make them who they are. If you knew any of that, you’d know how hard it is for me to say I hid.
“But I wasn’t lying about that cloud stuff, it’s dense. When it came out in the explosion it tore a whole wall of the warehouse down. Anyone who had been standing by it… just gone. What would you have done if you had seen that? What else could we do?”
“I don’t think you were cowardly to hide, Rainbow Dash,” he soothed.
“But you’re still gonna write it down, aren’t you?” she snapped, crossing her forehooves across her chest.
“What happened next?” he asked, the smile on his face never wavering.
“You know my friend Fluttershy would have hidden. And she’s so strong, stronger than anyone gives her credit for, but she would have hid. She would have been scared and it wouldn’t have been her fault. Everything that happened to her in her life made her like that. You know it terrifies me when I think about how much of what we do is because of our past.”
“Dash, what happened next?” Scribe asked again, more pressingly this time.
“I didn’t know her!” Rainbow shouted abruptly, “She worked at the factory, she wasn’t a member of my team. But… we all saw her. We had hidden in the cloak room and that had put us away from the danger zone. But she hadn’t, she was out in the open and the explosion had knocked one of the lighting fixtures down… it just crushed her leg.”
“That sounds awful, I’m sorry you had to go through that.” Scribe replied sympathetically, and much as Rainbow wanted to hate him, she couldn’t detect anything disingenuous in his voice.
“That wasn’t the worst of it. Up on the ceiling there some big metal thing, I think it was a hanging air-con unit? It had been damaged in the explosion as well and it was gonna fall. Cloudkicker shouted about it and we all looked up. It was gonna fall and it was gonna kill this mare under the light and she just went crazy. She was panicking but she couldn’t get her leg free by herself.”
“What did you do?” Scribe asked, sureptitiously sliding a box of tissues across the table for her.
“There were so many ponies in that room with me, bigger, stronger ponies that could have gone out to her instead. But I’m the team leader, so I had to do it, obviously. No one said that, but none of them even tried to go and help her. They all just looked at me and I…”
“Yes, Rainbow Dash?”
“You know what happened!” Rainbow screamed, “That’s why you need me to help you with your fucking report! I didn’t go and help… I couldn’t.”
“But you help ponies all the time, don’t you? Why not now?” Scribe pressed, sounding nothing other than genuinely curious.
“Because its a part of me, just like with Fluttershy. When I was young, my best friend was a griffon called Gilda. I went to visit her family in Griffonia over the February break, once. I loved it there. It was a totally different world. To a filly who loved adventure stories… well, it was like being in my own one. And I loved the food especially, all these weird things I’d never tried before.
“One night, I kept saying how much I liked the thing we’d had for dinner, and Gilda said we could go and see how it was made. I knew from the look she had that we were doing something mischievous, so obviously I agreed. We snuck out of the cottage and she took me down to this building. It was weird, it was the middle of the night but this place was fully lit up.”
Scribe was watching her intently. He made no moves to interrupt, and Rainbow noted he wasn’t writing anymore.
“When we got there, we hid in the bushes and Gilda pointed at some griffons out in the yard… and they had a calf with them. See, I’ve never told my friends this story because they had a run in with Gilda, and they’d just think she was trying to terrify me, but she really wasn’t. She didn’t get that meat, to us ponies, is awful. Neither did her parents. They were all just trying to be nice…”
“What did you see, Rainbow?”
“They took a knife and slit its throat. But the one who did it… I think he was new. He botched it. They’re apparently supposed to die pretty quick, but it screamed. And because it’s throat was all ragged, it was choking through its own blood, and they lost control of it. It took minutes to die, and me and Gilda watched it.”
Neither of them said anything for a second, until Rainbow piped up again.
“Have you ever pissed yourself, Scribe? Not like when you were a kid or something, but out of fear?”
“Thankfully I’ve never been in a position like that.” he replied carefully.
“It’s awful, you don’t even realise it happened until it starts to burn you. That’s when I snapped out of it, when we both did. My back legs started to burn and I realised what I’d done. Then I realised what they’d done. Then I saw the other calves, and that’s when Gilda dragged me away. Just when I started screaming. But I never went back, the second she pulled me away I ran with her, just desperate to be somewhere else.”
“And that’s why you couldn’t help her? Because it was like being back watching the calf?” Scribe asked delicately.
“Yeah, Scribe, normally I’ll be the first to help someone. But when she was screaming, trying to free herself, I was back in Griffonia, watching and doing nothing. I couldn’t move.” Rainbow sobbed, breaking down fully now, “Ever since, that night’s been a part of me. I just wanted to break the cycle and stop being the pony that the world made me.
“Maybe, if I’d been brave enough to go help her, everyone could be better? We wouldn’t have to be ruled by the shit that made us who we are, we would change and be someone better? Fluttershy wouldn’t be so afraid all the time, Twilight wouldn’t be so nervous about failing. Maybe I wouldn’t be crouched in a bush, covered in my own piss, watching something die.”
Dash huddled into herself in her chair, heaving with great, ugly sobs. Eventually, her stomach started to hurt so she tried to get into a less awkward position. Only, when she did this, her stomach didn’t stop hurting. It just got worse.
“Rainbow, let me ask you something,” Scribe began, getting up from his desk and walking around to her, “Your friend, Fluttershy, is she always scared? Does she never act brave?”
“Well,” Rainbow started to say, only to be cut off by a series of hacking coughs. She could barely catch her breath. When she finally stopped and looked down at her hooves, they were all wet and red.
“Your friend, Rainbow, remember?” Scribe urged.
“Yeah,” Rainbow continued, feeling strangely numb to this development, “She’s actually the bravest pony I know.”
“She isn’t just defined by everything that happened to her. She changed, for the better! Do you really think that you couldn’t do the same if someone’s life was on the line?”
Rainbow didn’t reply, she felt her mouth fill with more blood as she looked around the room. So boring, just like Scribe. Boring and normal, not a single remarkable thing about it.
“Is this… am I?” she asked, only to be gently shushed by Scribe as he pulled her into a tender hug.
“I think I’ve got my report Rainbow Dash,” as soon as his forehooves wrapped around her, the pain in her stomach went away until all she felt was warm, “I think you’re a lot more than the sum of your parts.”
“Did I do it?” she said distantly as everything went fuzzy, “Did I change?”
“You did great, Dash.”
Cloudkicker screamed. It was a wordless howl of agony. Pain transcribed into sound. She’d watched Rainbow, it was like she had been in a trance as she stared at that poor factory worker trapped under the light. For a moment Cloudkicker thought she wouldn’t go. And, in a sickening way, she’d been relieved.
Then, at the last second, Dash had bolted. She’d gotten the light off the mare and pushed her out of the way in time, and then the air-con unit had fallen. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Cloudkicker had seen enough crises in Ponyville to know everyone was okay at the end. Instead, the heavy metal had fallen on Dash, crushing the life out of her in seconds.
The weather team all bolted from their cover, heedless of the danger of the accident still happening all around them. That paled in comparison to the view of their team leader taking her last few ragged breaths, wings pulverised and mouth full of blood.
Cloudkicker didn’t look at the ponies around her, they seemed trivial. She looked over the scene in horror, realising there was nothing to do to save her friend. Still, she continued to scream for help over and over until it felt like her throat tore.
Rainbow, however, didn’t seem to notice anything that was happening. Not even her ruined body or gathered friends, weeping with shock and trauma. Instead, she seemed to look upwards at something none of them could see. Some kind of recognition danced in Dash’s eyes as her lips formed a wistful smile. And, when the life finally slipped out of her, her face looked for all the world like someone who had died in peace.
