'Boris the Spider'
Rainbow Dash blinked the sun out of her eyes. She felt a tickling sensation at the end of her wing.
The spider scuttling along her pinions had to be the size of a hoof, at least.
“Yah!”
She flicked her wing, frantically trying to dislodge the horrible little monster, to no avail. When Rainbow stopped beating her wing to fling it off into the leaves, it started crawling up her wing towards her back, glaring at her with its many beady eyes.
“Ugh! Get-off-get-off-get-off!”
She was twisted her head, trying to watch it while brushing it away, and as a result she lost her balance on the limb she had been sleeping on. She landed on the ground with an impact she barely felt. Springing to her hooves, she spun around several times, checking that the spider hadn’t made the fall with her. Satisfied, she straightened out her wings. Rainbow was having second thoughts about her decision to not have taken a nap in a passing cloud.
“Um… Dashie? Are… you okay?”
And on hearing Fluttershy’s voice, she became quite sure that a cloud should have been the way to go.
“Yeah. Fine. Not a problem.” She leaned against the tree to show how fine she was, but it didn’t manage to change the look of concern on Fluttershy’s face.
“What was going on up there?”
“Up where?”
“In the tree.”
“What tree?”
“Rainbow…”
“It was nothing. Don’t worry about it.” She ran a hoof through her mane.
“It sounded like you were in trouble…”
Rainbow looked around to check there weren’t more ponies beyond Fluttershy in hearing distance. “Well, okay, but don’t like, freak out about it or anything.” She cleared her throat. “There was a spider.”
Fluttershy, instead of cringing in horror, merely looked at her as if she expected Rainbow to elaborate.
“A really big one! It must have been about this big–” She measured with her hooves. “–With fangs, and…” Rainbow trailed off. Fluttershy was flying up into the tree.
“Don’t go up there! It’s still there!”
Rainbow fidgeted on the tips of her hooves, debating if she should follow. Deciding (reluctantly) that she couldn’t let Fluttershy face the killer spider on her own, she shot up to branch level, ready to give any creepy-crawlies a well-deserved bucking.
Fluttershy was looking around the inner branches of the tree; not like she was on guard for the giant spider waiting to pounce, but like she was searching for something she dropped. Then she suddenly spotted whatever she was looking for, as she reached her hooves into a cluster of fresh leaves… and pulled them back with the spider perched on the end of one of them.
“Fluttershy…!”
She seemed to take no notice, and instead spoke in a soft voice. “Now, did Rainbow frighten you?”
“I wasn’t sca–” Huh, what? Wasn’t that question the wrong way around?
“Because Rainbow isn’t that scary, when you get to know her.” Fluttershy brought the spider extremely close to her face. “A little bit loud, but not scary.” She giggled.
“Fluttershy… are you talking to that spider?” Rainbow felt like she could barely keep her jaw from dropping open, but managed to keep it closed; she had heard spiders loved to make nests in dark places – including pony’s mouths – and she didn’t know how far this one could jump.
“Of course.” She said it as if it were perfectly normal. “His name is Boris.”
“It has a name?”
“Of course he has a name. Isn’t he just the cutest little thing?” Fluttershy held the spider up in front of her, presumably so Rainbow could get a good look at it. Boris’ furry legs bristled, and she looked into its dozen or so tarry black eyes.
Rainbow took a couple of quick flaps in the direction directly away from the spider. When she was finally able to tear her gaze away from it, she saw the curious look on Fluttershy’s face.
“Rainbow Dash… are you scared of spiders?”
“What? Pfft, no.”
Fluttershy lunged forward, pushing Boris and his alien eyes and hairy legs towards her. Rainbow veered away, making a completely involuntary high-pitched noise. Pulling the spider back towards her, Fluttershy smiled, her point proven. This needed some explanation.
“It’s not like I’m afraid afraid of spiders. They just gross me out. Mainly their legs. They have so many of them! Things shouldn’t have more than four legs. How can you stand that crawling all over your hooves, Fluttershy?” Boris looked like he was doing a thorough job of mapping out the territory of Fluttershy’s forelegs.
“Boris is harmless. Aren’t you?” If Boris acknowledged his status of being harmless or not, Rainbow couldn’t tell. “You should try to just touch him a little bit. He’ll be good.”
Rainbow imagined the feel of those thousands and thousands of bristles against her hooves, and recoiled. “No. No way.”
“He won’t bite.”
“No.”
“He’ll stay still.”
“No!”
Fluttershy glanced down at Boris, like she was conferring with him. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“But just so you know, he isn’t dangerous.”
Rainbow looked at the spider crawling between Fluttershy’s hooves. “I know.”
“And he isn’t going to make a web in your mane, or crawl in your mouth while you’re asleep, or lay eggs in your cheek, or–”
“Ew! Don’t say stuff like that!”
Fluttershy shrugged. “Some ponies have strange ideas about spiders.” She looked at Rainbow. “But not you, right? Because Rainbow Dash isn’t afraid of spiders.”
“Uh, right. Listen, Fluttershy…” Rainbow looked around. “If you could just kinda keep this to yourself…”
“Oh, I can keep a secret.” Fluttershy petted Boris’ bristly head. “But Boris might tell somepony.”
“I can live with that.”
Rainbow made a swift exit from the tree, looking for a comfortable cloud somewhere far out of the reach of spiders.
Author's Note
There's something odd about the way FIMFic counts words and the way Word counts words - I seem to have gained an extra 20 or so that needed to be trimmed out. Weird.
Also, I might have mentioned on my blog that I was working on another story. This isn't it; it's going through the editing process right now. Ironically, the impending end of season three might jibe really well with what I'd been writing - just want to see it before I hammer out the last couple of final details.
