“Let me know if this is too much pressure.”
Rainbow Dash pressed her hooves against her client’s back.
“It’s good,” the customer said. She took a long, calm breath in, and slowly sighed it out, smiling.
Rainbow Dash had set the proper ambience in the massage room. After seven months working as a spa pony, she had the routine down. Candles on the sideboard, half-dimmed light, soothing music playing in the background, and a fresh orchid next to the stack of fluffy white towels. She added her own personal flair as well, serving tea on a rainbow tray and tying a rainbow ribbon at the door.
“Oh yes, I can’t tell how much I’ve been waiting for this massage all week,” the client said. Raven Inkwell was her name, a mare not much younger than Rainbow Dash. “And I love my six-year-old to pieces, I swear, but he’s been driving me crazy, I tell you. Add that with my boss at work made us do overtime every day this week…”
Rainbow Dash just replied with a “mmm-hmm.” It was unusual to find a talkative customer. Most of her massage appointments were quiet for the whole half hour. A younger Rainbow Dash would’ve called it boring, but as she got older she found herself liking the silence. It gave her time to ruminate in her thoughts. And think. Think.
Think.
Think.
It’d been nine and a half months since the accident, but maybe if she hadn’t made that bad turn, she would be back in the skies, flying with the—
“Is this pressure okay?” she asked into the air, to stop herself from thinking.
“Yes, absolutely. Wow, my shoulder feels great,” Raven Inkwell mumbled.
Think.
Think.
Pain was not the thing that scarred Rainbow Dash. In fact, the day of the accident, she blacked out almost immediately after the impact. And during the next two days of hovering between life and death, she drifted in and out of consciousness. Mostly out.
The times she was conscious, she was in pain, and it stung. But that pain meant that she was still alive. So she bit her lip and treasured the brief moment of lucidity before the sedative kicked in and she was knocked unconscious for her own safety.
Rainbow Dash was lucky to even be walking, the doctors said. She sold her cloudominium and bought a one-story house in Ponyville, two blocks away from the Friendship Castle.
Nowadays, her legs would start quivering and aching after just a slow trot around the block. But she’d go back home and massage her legs (with the help of a windowsill to lean up against), and within ten minutes the pain would almost magically disappear. That’s what inspired her to take up a job at the spa, as a massage therapist.
Pain, on its own, was manageable. She could give herself a good massage, or pop a painkiller in severe cases. After all, pain without ramifications was nothing more than a little impulse traveling through her brain.
Pain was okay. It was what came with the pain that scarred her.
You see, even long after she was discharged from the hospital, she’d give herself a massage, pop two painkillers, and that crippling weakness in her wings was still there. Like the muscles pulling them had been unplugged halfway. They were barely strong enough to blow a dry leaf on the dusty ground. Let alone strong enough to fly.
That dusty, hard ground.
She was lucky to even be walking, huh? So she should be grateful for that?
But that big, soft blue sky, all the way up there, no longer within her—
She stopped herself.
That was her problem, actually. Rainbow Dash did too much thinking. These days, she had too much time to think, and too little time to do. Nothing took ten seconds flat anymore. Those days were gone. Now, if it took her two months to be able to walk again, maybe it would take her twenty months to gallop again, and twenty years to fly again. She might not live that long.
She looked up at the clock in the massage treatment room. Twenty minutes left in the session.
With every knead of her hooves, coated in scented massage oil, Rainbow Dash squeezed out her sadness. Every. Single. Knead—
“Erm…maybe it’s a bit too much pressure now,” Raven said.
“Oh…sorry,” the ex-Wonderbolt said.
After the accident, Spitfire had offered Rainbow Dash a special coaching position at the Wonderbolts, on account of her fourteen years of exemplary service. But when she asked Spitfire what her responsibilities for this “special” position would be, she said,
“Well, you’ll maybe watch over training sessions with me, and, erm…maybe give talks in the mess hall, and, maybe, erm…look, we’ll find something for you to do. Are you gonna take it or not?”
Even her archrival Lighting Dust reached out a hoof and offered Rainbow Dash a position in her Washouts group. “No flaming rockets or super dangerous stuff for you. I’ll make sure you’re kept safe, on account of your injury and all. I promise.”
Rainbow Dash declined both offers. She noticed a “help wanted” sign on the front door of the Ponyville Spa. The next day, she entered through the spa front door, and walked in on Aloe and Lotus folding and stacking towels onto a cart. At an appropriate moment, she interjected and said,
“Excuse me, Aloe, Lotus, can I apply for your job opening?” The words coming out of her own mouth.
She wasn’t the kind of mare that liked pity. Or "special" opportunities served up to her on a silver platter. And actually, it wasn’t really about the Wonderbolts. She didn’t want to go back to the Wonderbolts. (Or the Washouts, for that matter.)
The Wonderbolts was like her child. And it hadn’t even been one year. She was still grieving. Not because her child died.
But because the child had grown up, flown away, and left her behind.
Her weak, old, lame body behind.
“Ouch! Can you move a bit lower? That kinda hurts. In a bad way.” Raven exclaimed.
Five minutes left in the thirty-minute massage. Rainbow Dash began tapping down the muscles along the spinal column. In truth, she liked giving back massages. And she was a natural at it too. Many customers at the Ponyville Spa now asked for her by name: “Rainbow Dash’s Signature Deep Tissue Massage.”
Aloe and Lotus, the veterans of Ponyville Spa, welcomed Rainbow Dash as an employee. But Rainbow Dash suspected they were at least a bit jealous, that a rough-and-tough rainbow pony with absolutely no experience was suddenly giving the best back massages in Ponyville.
At first, she marketed her service as “Rainbow Dash’s Ten-Minutes-Flat Revitalizing Massage”, but the high volume was running her disabled body ragged, so she extended the massage time to half an hour. Also, she came to a realization.
“You can’t rush pampering. Speed isn’t always the most important thing.” She couldn’t believe the first time those words escaped from her lips.
Rainbow Dash went by “feel”—that was her secret to a good massage, whenever anypony asked. Whatever her clients felt, she imagined she was feeling it too.
During her convalescence, she liked to sit outside by the doorstep of her new ground-level home. She bought a secondhand rocking chair from Applejack solely for that purpose. It was all she had the strength to do to ease the boredom, other than reading. And thinking.
Think.
Think.
But she tried not to think as much as she used to.
Sometimes she would see the local pegasus foals horseplaying in the street where Rainbow Dash’s house was. They must’ve been a third of Rainbow Dash’s age or younger, and they were fluttering their wings effortlessly, way above the treetops. It took a while for her not to feel bitter.
After she cried a few times and (kinda) got over it, all she could do was just watch. And imagine. Imagining was all she could do. Imagine every little wingbeat. Every gust of wind shifting your course. Every pressure point. Every little scrape and bump. She attuned herself to it.
For example. Her client, Raven, had a knot in her upper shoulder. Perhaps from carrying something heavy around her neck. A collar, or a yoke, perhaps. And a twist at two points along her back, probably from saddlebag straps.
“You’ve been carrying something heavy on your back!?” Rainbow Dash blurted out in the massage treatment room. She was training her voice to sound more soothing like a spa pony should be, but sometimes she would lapse back into sounding like a drill sergeant.
Her client’s eyes widened. “How did you know? My boss had me haul a whole cart full of old papers down to the storage facility a few blocks away. Had to do that all week.”
Dash imagined herself pulling the cart full of papers. Her legs were too weak to pull a cart now, but somehow that made the memory of it even more vivid.
Pull.
Pull.
Every pressure point.
Every scrape.
Every bump.
Then, she repositioned her hooves a few inches up her client’s back. “Here, does this feel better?”
“Ohhhh, yes, thaaat’s the spot.”
Rainbow Dash smiled. She’d like to think that in the midst of all the loss, this was something that she had gained.
Rainbow Dash un-dimmed the lights as the massage concluded. “How was it?” she asked.
“Wonderful!” her client said. “I’d tried everything to fix my bad back—special soaks, an osteopath, yoga…but your massage seems to be the only thing that did the trick!”
“That’s awesome.” She smiled. (That was one thing that still stayed the same. The little squeal and rasp in her throat when she said “awesome.”)
Raven released a sigh of happiness. “You know, I’m so grateful to you, Rainbow Dash.” She experimented with the new range of motion in her spine. “Wow. It’s almost like a miracle!”
Silence.
Rainbow Dash quietly walked Raven out to the lobby, where Raven paid for the treatment, and Dash gave her the receipt with a seasonal yuzu hard candy on top.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
A miracle, huh? Rainbow Dash could make miracles, so it seemed. For others, she could make miracles. But where was her miracle?
Or maybe what she needed was more than a miracle.
Rainbow Dash smiled to hide the crippling weakness in her wing joint as she waved goodbye to her client.
“Have a good evening.”
Raven was the last appointment of the day. The bell tinkled, and the door clicked gently back into place.
Raven Inkwell would probably go home, re-energized, and have dinner with her family. She’d feel better about her job. She’d be able to play hide-and-go seek with her foals, no pain to get in the way of her joy.
Rainbow Dash let Aloe and Lotus to go home early; she’d close up shop. They were very grateful. Rainbow Dash would sweep up the treatment rooms, scrub the gunk out of the hydrotherapy spa jets, and count the takings in the till. She’d drop a little lavender into the air purifier, just before locking up.
On her way home, she’d stop by and visit Scootaloo's office at the School of Friendship, to give Scootaloo a little moral support before parent night. And then, she’d go to Sweet Apple Acres to teach Applejack a new mashed pea cake recipe that she discovered during her convalescence.
Five minutes after the bell tinkled, Rainbow Dash could still picture her client’s smile through the opaque front door. When she unfurled her wing this time—
it was still weak,
but she could’ve sworn she felt a knot release.
Author's Note
Alternate story title: 1900+ words of Pure Mica AngstTM 
If you see any typos, please inform me by PM. Thanks.
