The Lull That Comes After
The trunk was heralded by a muffled curse as it careened down the stairs and crashed into their little living room.
Lightning Dust followed after it, half flying and half running, still cursing. She was furious, frightened. Her golden mane was disheveled and her sky-blue coat covered in attic dust. Fiddlesticks, who’d gone flat as soon as the noise started, started to unwind on the couch. She took a hesitant sip of her cocoa.
“Damn.” Lightning stomped. The trunk was absolutely destroyed. The impact had broken its frame, hurtling a scrapbook into the wall and like a trebuchet and scattering medals she’d not seen in years on the floor. There’d be a mark from the flying lock and probably from the book, Fiddle knew, but that was less important than the fact that Lightning was obviously fine.
Lightning looked up at her, face full set in a scowl. Some of the tension drained out of her shoulder, but only a little bit. Fiddlesticks was glad not for the first time for her sanguine nature. Was it odd to feel an entire relationship in the space between breaths? Because she did—the old Lightning was back, just for a moment, the one she’d met at the supply depot years ago.
“Worried it was gonna go really off the rails,” she said. Fiddle sighed.
“Bad enough as it was. Be careful, would you?” she stood. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Lightning replied a bit too quickly. Only now did it become obvious that she was favoring one leg. The half-hover had been purposeful. Fiddle pursed her lips, patient, and finally the pegasus relented. “Fine. Yeah. I got a cut on my arm. Got caught on the metal framing. That’s what I was trying to fool with when I knocked it over. I uh.” she coughed. “I kind of bucked it. Like, with hooves. My hooves. I got mad,” she finished.
“You know, when I said you were gonna have to learn how to contain that temper, I was expecting you to do something dumb in a social sense, not a physical one,” Fiddlesticks drawled. She was already in the kitchen, fetching their first aid kid. “Now, sit your little butt down. I’m lookin’ at that.”
“Roger.”
Lightning Dust squirmed as he wife looked her foreleg over.
It was worse than Lightning made it sound, and she saw immediately why.
“Opened up an older wound,” Lightning said tightly. Guardedly, Fiddle noted.
“I can see it.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I know you will, hon. I’ve got no doubt about it. You’re the queen of bouncin’ back.”
“It’s my special talent! Sorta,” she said.
Fiddlesticks hummed.
“You know I’m not sure about that. I still think it’s something to do with lightnin’.”
It was an old game, one that Fiddlesticks found endlessly amusing and which Lightning endured as stoically as she was able. Which was to say, not at all.
“Just because I’m not one-hundred-friggin-percent…”
“I mean, racin’ is fine, but why a lightning bolt? Lightnin’ doesn’t race. Just hits the ground. Was your cutie mark in crashin’?”
“You know lightning equals fast!”
“Maybe to you.”
Lightning, despite herself, rolled her eyes.
“To like, every single pony who was ever born ever you boiled-brained hayseed. You alwa—OW CELESTIA!”
Fiddlesticks tsked, mostly to hide a smile. “See, I may be older but I can still get a nice scream out of you.”
“I hate you. Also, I hate this. Why does it hurt.”
“It’s alcohol. Don’t be grumpy, you know if I don’t distract you, you’ll act all snakebit about me cleanin’ the cut.”
“Why does it have to go on me?”
Fiddlesticks rolled her eyes. “Cause you gotta disinfect the wound, featherbrain. At least you gotta clean it. Medicine ain’t cheap these days, I’m not gonna have you walkin’ around with a rotten leg. I’ll have you wrapped up in a moment. I’m glad you’re alright.”
Lightning didn’t answer until she was done and she’d put her leg down on the floor. With a wince, Lightning walked back towards the trunk. “I’m glad you’re alright too,” she said quietly. I remembered you’d be down here and I maybe panicked a little.”
Fiddle was behind her, peering around her wings. “What’s the box?”
“Just… stuff. Was moving it around to make room.”
“For what?” Fiddle drawled, raising an eyebrow.
“Other stuff. Hearth's Warming decorations, okay? Red said he’d been cleaning out his ma’s place and was giving stuff away. Seemed kinda dazed. I offered to take something, anything, just to keep him talking. It was the box closest to us.”
“I, uh. Huh.” Fiddle swallowed. “That was awful kind of him. Of you, also, actually.”
“I know. I know what you’re thinking right now. I was worried about him too. He’s not doing well.”
Fiddle passed her wife, who was leaning against the stairs, and bent down in the ruins of the trunk. “Suppose none of us are doing peachy, exactly. Demobilization was only six months ago. You’d think it would be enough time but… not a long runway off. Full speed to stuck in molasses throws a pony. It threw you.”
“Yeah, well. I had someone used to being slow as molasses, and Red’s ma is dead.”
Fiddle picked up a picture.
In it, Lightning was smiling and had her wings around two other ponies. All three were pegasi, in pilot’s jackets. When they’d started introducing flying machines a few years ago, there’d been a pegasus navigator in every one. Hadn’t she mentioned—?
“It’s a nice picture,” she said, mostly for herself.
“It’s a picture,” Lightning corrected. “I uh. You mind helping me get this upstairs again?”
Fiddle considered for a moment saying something. Asking about the photo. Who were the two ponies in it she did not know? But Lightning, her Lightning, normally full of frantic energy and nervous flight, seemed heavy as a thundercloud. Her eyes were flat. They bored into Fiddle’s hoof on the picture.
“Sounds good,” she said at last, patience winning out over curiosity. “But you won’t be ‘helpin’ anybody. You’re gonna be watchin’ me do it. I may not be in the main family, but I’m not not an Apple, you know. And you’re all wounded.”
She was already carrying a large load of memorabilia up the stairs before Lightning could even finish her first wave of protests.
Lightning Dust wiped her brow and groaned. She was used to working in the sun, but this was different. The sun, for starters, was different—or at least, how it interacted with Equestria was changed.
She was proud of her work, but more than that she knew that their work was survival. The war had obliterated the magical balance that kept Equestria green and healthy, disrupted the active weather management and wreaked havoc on the naturally occurring patterns those interventions had been designed to gently sculpt. Generations of pegasi and their work undone in a couple of years. It was still a blow her tribe felt in their bones.
Even Lightning, not one for metaphysics, felt it. The air felt wrong. It felt almost hostile. The sun was too hot, and flying had gone from effortless to being a chore.
Perhaps part of the difficulty was that she was just more aware of her limitations.
She fished around the cloudcar for her water and pulled out the beaten canteen with a cry of triumph. Water! Blessed water!
“Hurricane’s tits,” she groused after the first breathless gulps. “I hate this.”
“The heat? The cloud?”
“Yeah,” she said, and took another round.
Her coworker for the day, a fat pegasus named Thunderhead, grunted. “No use in hating it.”
“Hating it is motivating,” Lightning replied. “You never felt a bit of spite in the back of your head, old man? Ever let it push you?”
“Sure. And I messed up when it did,” he said flatly.
Lightning winced.
“Yeah,” she said lamely, and then sank against the cloudcar. The hot metal hull was uncomfortable, but her legs were tired and her wings were going numb.
“It’s gonna take forever to build up a proper cumulo-index in this region,” she said softly.
The older pegasus, who had also taken a few sips from his own canteen, raised an eyebrow at her. “You a weatherpony? I’m surprised.”
“Uh, not exactly. I did a stint in the Cloudsdale volunteer corps, and I was in flight school.”
“Ah. The spartoi program.”
Lightning nodded. “Yeah. Helping in a new place every couple of weeks was fun. I learned a lot. Wish I had learned more.”
“I’m surprised. I figured you for too much of a hothead for the advanced courses. You ever think about the Bolts, before the war?”
Lightning had to laugh. What else was there to do?
“Yeah, the Bolts. The Wonderbolts.” A pause. “Why didn’t you, then, oldtimer?”
“Oh, I did.” Thunderhead spared her a rare toothy grin. He climbed in the back of the cloudcar and laid flat on the flatbed. “I tried, just as a walk-on. I was a slimmer buck back then. Full of piss and vinegar, convinced I was Hurricane’s right wing born again. I crashed out hard, but not until the end. Was in the top third of the class for most of training.”
Lightning stared out at the cloud they’d landed the car on and was absolutely silent. She did not want to be here. She absolutely did not.
“But that’s fine,” Thunderhead continued. “I wouldn’t say every young pony is entitled to a little bit of fire, but maybe they are. Life’s long, it was before the war. You need fire early or you’re not gonna make it to the end. Least,” he said with a chuckle. “That’s what I figure.”
Lightning didn’t really know how to answer that at first.
“I did try,” she admitted. “Still hurts. Stupid, I know.”
“Nah. Wounds heal as they heal. Sometimes we get better but don’t stop feelin’ sore,” her companion said. “Even when the bones are set, you still remember breakin a leg.”
“Maybe you would, on account of havin’ bones older than Hurricane.”
Thunderhead chuckled.
“Be that as it may, kid. I always figured somepony like you’d probably tried out. More of us in the service right now have than you’d expect. Probably for the best.”
Lightning reached back into the cloudcar and checked the time. “Five more minutes. Feels shorter every time.”
“It’s the heat,” Thunderhead said, perhaps for the dozenth time that day. “The damn heat. I’m glad we got kids like you out here. Need someone dumb enough to come sweat until we fall out of the sky, somepony as dumb as me and mine.”
Lightning snorted, but didn’t answer as she watched the time count down.
She got back home later than usual. Mournful violins whined over a jangling rambling guitar. It was nice, and she had to admit—Lightning had come around on her lover’s music step by step. Some songs were just better at night. Maybe they’d sit out on the back porch after she ate.
Fiddlesticks had made sure there was a plate waiting for her by the little microwave. Dust watched it with a dark sort of amusement. What a wonderful machine. The crystalline matrices that made it work properly were from up north. Things besides death blew down in the winter.
Fiddle herself was lounging on the couch. Or rather, she had been lounging, because as Dust passed her and opened her mouth to give thanks for dinner… she heard little snores.
Lightning smiled. “Yep,” she said softly. “Tried to stay up. The book was a good plan, but laying down? Losing your edge.” She kissed Fiddlestick’s head very, very gently and stood awkwardly in their living room. The music continued. She wasn’t sure what to do without Fiddlesticks to fill the time.
You always need her to do that, don’t you? So you don’t think too hard about anything.
Lightning took a deep breath. There was a grain of truth it, wasn’t there?
It wasn’t the first time she’d considered her own reluctance to be alone in silence. She’d heard once from an instructor that a pony’s worse and best ally in the air was the quiet. When no one was talking over the radio and there wasn’t anything to do but hold the stick or read instruments. She had never felt comfortable in the long absence of stimulus.
Silence begat memory, that was the problem. You get to thinking, and soon you end up reminiscing, and soon you’re out without wind under your wings over a great yawning maw of nothing.
She wandered into the kitchen, came back, dithered. Nothing to clean, nothing to put away. Nothing to do.
She thought, suddenly, of the luggage upstairs. She could finish what she’d started. Wouldn’t that be better? Go up stairs, and let the pictures be an anchor into the past. Some wind under her wings.
She climbed up as carefully as possible, hoping to avoid waking Fiddle below. This wasn’t for her—it couldn’t be, she hadn’t been there. She hadn’t been in the skies over the North, or over Acornage. It was like a burr stuck in her flank. Lightning had grown so used to sharing everything with her wife. It was how she’d gotten back in the saddle after leaving the service, how she’d settled down and gone back to flying work. How she’d kept going at all. Everytime she wanted to let a thing bounce around in her head she would just open her mouth and let it out and Fiddlesticks would be there to give it context and meaning.
She pulled the old photobook out and laid it on their bed and stared at the cover.
It was how she’d learned to handle stuff. Ponies thought you could solve the world like a puzzle, if you sat with it long enough. The pieces were all there, in the world, so they thought. A patient pony could turn them around until they fit. But Lightning knew she couldn’t do that. Maybe she just didn’t have the brains. Maybe she didn’t have the patience.
She cracked the book open.
The photos, the scraps of memos and notes, all of it was arranged dutifully. Page by page, a dull marching of time, and she reckoned with how loud each turn was.
Until a sleepy shuffling drew her gaze up. Fiddlesticks, rubbing sleep from her eyes, leaned against the door frame.
“Did you find dinner?”
The past fled, dark clouds blown back by the final, decisive gale. “I did. Thank you for that.”
“Of course,” Fiddle said and meandered over to lay next to her in bed, sprawling out. Lightning smiled at her as she continued. “You worked hard, I figured you should have a warm dinner when you got home. I’m—”
Her yawn cut off the words, but Lightning knew them by heart.
“Barely an Apple is still an Apple, I know.”
“You know it.”
She shifted, and noticed the book.
“What’s… Ah, that was from the trunk.”
Lightning swallowed, and then slid it over so that her wife could see. “Yeah, it’s from the trunk.”
Without comment, she flipped the page. Fiddle chuckled. “Your mane, hon.”
“I was, uh. I was experimenting.”
“It’s terrible, I’m sorry, but you absolutely cannot do that again.”
“And trust me, I don’t want to,” Lightning shot back, giving a mock pout. “I was foolish, and young, and I hadn’t met you yet.”
“No, we’d met.”
“Had we?”
Fiddle nodded. “Mhm. You don’t remember, but we met when I was fiddlin’ for the First Morale Brigade. I was playin’ in a band and you were in the canteen. You were in the back, throwin’—”
Lightning groaned and waved the story away. “Hurricane’s pinions, really? Yeah, I remember it, I think. I was balling up some of the programs and working on my aim. Thunderlane was so pissed.”
She pantomimed the whole story, and Fiddle laughed at her exaggerated windup. When Lightning settled, she snuggled close and continued. “You didn’t know me, but I knew about you. You’ll never guess why.”
“My heroic feats, I assume.”
“I actually heard about you from Rainbow Dash. Indirectly.”
Lightning felt… odd. It was years ago. She’d been awful. But every time was like the first time again. Stupid as it was, she felt the hurt and the disordered panic and the anger and…
“Really?” she managed.
“Yup.” A nuzzle, a kiss on the cheek. “I was at a reunion in Ponyville and Rainbow Dash was there for the cider, which I gather is pretty much the best way to get her to go anywhere. She might as well have been born an Apple. Some of the cousins were botherin’ her and Applejack about various misadventures while I was getting some cider between sets, and cousin Applejack bothered her into telling the story.”
“You’re kidding me. You’re not kidding me. Celestia. Really?”
“Yup. She was pretty reluctant about it. If it helps, she actually only mentioned your name once. You were just ‘my wingpony’ the other times.”
Small mercies. Lightning let out a little irritated grunt. “Sure.”
“Reminded me of a lot of good ponies I knew. When I met you, I expected a brave, dashing, maybe too reckless plane jockey.”
“And you got me instead?” Lightning said mirthlessly.
“Nope, I got a brave, dashing, reckless plane jockey,” Fiddle said firmly. “She was beautiful, and dangerous, and she carried around a little knot of hurt, but she was also good and strong. I knew that early on.”
Lightning turned the page.
“I don’t feel like it. I mostly feel like a fuck up, Sticks.”
“You’re not allowed to call me that! You know I hate that. You’re the only one,” Fiddle whined and pushed her.
Lightning stuck her tongue out. “I’m allowed, I get one time! I had to be in the sun all day, I sweated off like a couple of pounds!”
Fiddle laughed and laid on her back, and Lightning couldn’t help but lean in for a kiss.
“Fine,” her wife said, her turn to mock-pout for just a moment. “But, only if you admit that you’re not a fuck up. You do a lot of not fucking up. An awful lot of it. The whole damn world fell apart and there you were, silly. Maybe not always the smartest or the most cautious. But you made it, didn’t you?”
“Too stupid to quit,” Lightning said with a half-smile.
“Too cussed to die,” Fiddlesticks agreed. “You’re feelin’ unmoored. But I think the world needs ponies like you.”
“The fu—sorry, the what now?”
“Ponies too dumb to quit and too cussed to die,” Fiddle said, and then let out another long yawn. She adjusted to lay normally against her pillows. “Bring the book. I want to look at it with you.”
“It’s just old pictures,” Lightning said.
“It’s you. And I like you.”
Lighting Dust snuggled close and held the book of photos between them.
“I’m glad you do. I’m glad every day,” she said.
