Rainbow Dash sits alone on the soccer field at Canterlot High School. The starry night sky is lit bright above her and the moonlight casts a cool toned glow on the green beneath her. She shouldn’t be there. She shouldn’t be there at all, it's an hour past midnight on a warm Wednesday morning and she should be home. She should be asleep within the comforting embrace of her blanket and her parents should know exactly where she is. She’s tired of straining her neck to see the stars, she leans back to lay down. The green blades of grass tickle her neck as her thick, layered, ponytail fans out beside her head. The muddy soccer ball in her arms rolls away and into a ditch. Disloyal. She doesn’t bother to get up and grab it.
Her eyes start to glaze over like they’ve been doing every few moments, distorting the stars into a laser like light show. She blinks to set her sight right but it burns like the feeling of opinions to any pathetic moron. It’s an hour past midnight, that’s why. That’s why her eyes are watery. It’s late and she’s tired and she isn’t sleeping because she’s lying alone on CHS’s soccer field. It isn’t because she’s sad and it isn’t because she strongly cares about opinions. It’s because she’s tired.
Even if she was sad and down, which she isn’t, it’d be for a fair reason. Not something mushy and not for that reason. That’s because she doesn’t care about opinions. Sure she cares about some opinions, like if someone doesn’t like one of her friends--she will always be there to defend her friends against a poor opinion. She will do anything to change that loser’s mind and prove that her friends are the best because they are. That is not an opinion. It is a fact.
Rainbow sniffles away the cold air. The kind of opinions she doesn’t care about are the ones that say she’s anything less than amazing. She’s not an insecure coward who thinks of themself based on what everyone else thinks of them, so why would she care? She’s awesome and she knows it. She shoves it in everyone’s face at any chance she gets and just because people tell her it’s annoying all the time, doesn’t mean she’s going to stop. She doesn’t care what they think anyway.
Rainbow is tired of blinking and she’s irritated with lasers. She rolls over and the sleepy eye water melts down her cheek into small droplets on the grass like early morning dew. Her breath hitches quietly and she thinks about why she’s there in the first place. Despite how much she doesn’t want to be, perhaps she’s just a little sad, more like she’s confused and it's making her angry. She doesn’t understand why though. It’s annoying and stupid because she knows she doesn’t care about opinions and she knows she’s amazing and it makes her want to scream because the tears that are pathetically streaming down her face are lying to her.
They are supposed to be tired tears, they’re supposed to mean she is okay and simply sleepy after being awesome all day. But it isn't just the tears, she realizes. She seems to have the heavy kind of feeling that weighs down her chest with every beat of her heart. The one that causes sniffles and uneven breaths, the one that is the symptom of crying. She begins to wonder why it's there and why it won't go away. She goes back to opinions.
Thinking any less of herself because others do would be dumb of her, but she isn’t so dumb to deny the fact that she sinks further down every time someone tries to shatter the amazing image of herself she tries to have in her head. Applejack told her to be honest and this is what honesty is telling her. She tries to tell herself that honesty is lying but it just doesn’t work. Besides, If it did work, she’d be naive. Being naive is pathetic, then again, caring what others think of you is also pathetic by her standards.
Rainbow Dash buries her face into the grass, its fresh and summary smell makes its way to her lungs as she chokes on a sob. She doesn’t want to cry. She shields her head from the surrounding air with her arms, creating a fortress of solitude to make her feel a little less exposed to the no one that's around. She begins to shiver and clench her fists as holding back the tears behind her eyes gets difficult.
She isn’t awesome, she isn’t awesome, she isn’t awesome, she isn’t awesome. Her confidence is a stained glass window and what’s inside is a small little girl trying to gaslight people into liking her by lying to herself every day. They think she’s a joke and they only tell her she’s awesome because they pity her. Being pitied is pathetic. Rainbow Dash is pathetic.
Rainbow lifts her head up to take a breath. The lasers are zapping her with truth as truth goes imaginary and the things she’s thinking are slowly derailing off the tracks and she doesn’t know it. The truth is a stop that Rainbow found pathetic at the first thought of reality, but now as she goes deeper and deeper into the waters of ego, she’s no longer in the sky and she was never in the safezone. Her thoughts are the sharks in the deep, cold, brutal abyss of blue and she can’t get out of it.
Rainbow loses the battle to tears and denial as she lets herself cry. She hates losing, but this far down the path, there is simply no way to win. The face-framing pieces of rainbow lock become damp as teardrops drip and drip and drip and drip from her wilted rose eyes. She struggles to breathe as a mix of heavy sobs and tired coughs take over at this untrue belief that nobody likes her and she’s a naive and weak, little tryhard.
Her frame continues to shake and the grass continues to dampen as this is the beginning of Rainbow Dash’s inevitable spiral.
Author's Note
Sometimes I can’t tell whether I’m being confusing or not with the weird writing style I'm trying out with this. Basically, the premise is that Rainbow Dash is feeling upset, confused and angry during the night but is in denial about it. She decides to sneak out for a midnight training session to clear her head--when it doesn’t clear, she takes a seat to look at the stars and think. With her present and broad ego, she gets poked fun at sometimes whether it’s by friends or anyone else (which is to be expected, if you’re acting like you’re better than everyone lmao.) She begins to take this poking fun to heart and wonder whether people take her seriously or think she’s cool and whatnot, however she feels the need to convince herself that she doesn’t care either way because to her, caring and letting others break your ego is pathetic. “The truth” that I bring up within the story a lot but don’t address outright, is that people do love her and take her seriously, but they also know that her ego gets a little out of hand sometimes when she’s up in the sky, high on the thought that she’s better than everyone. Courtesy of tricking herself into thinking that the truth is oh so awful and covering up the fact that she’s sad about it, it morphs into something that is oh so awful within her head, that people don’t take her seriously at all, that they hate her, she sucks etc. It's like the product of bottling up her feelings and not letting herself feeling them all the time. Things being worse than they are in her head, of course shatters her ego even more which in turn, makes her feel more pathetic and she begins to spiral down a path. A path of feeling really bad about herself.
