Farewell
© Scribbler, April 2013.
“It wasn’t meant to be like this.” The words came out jagged, like her tongue had been replaced by a cheese grater. It felt like it too. Her throat prickled and hurt and clogged with goo all at the same time. Grief was a messy business in every single way.
Someone put a gentle hoof around her shoulders. “It’s okay.” Fluttershy. Of course it was Fluttershy. Tactile, gentle, soft-voiced – suddenly it seemed like she was custom made for comforting ponies at funerals.
“It’s not okay and that’s a stupid thing to say.” More cheese-grater-voice. More aching throat. Rainbow Dash turned her face away but still felt the tremor in Fluttershy’s foreleg. It was a pale imitation of how she would have once reacted but it was there.
“I meant that it’s okay to cry,” Fluttershy replied. “You’re grieving. That’s natural. Don’t bottle everything up. We’re all here for you.”
They had all come and then some. The graveside was crowded with family from all over Equestria that she had never even met before, plus dozens of those she had. They all looked at her with the same tearful consideration and let her stand at the front without protest. She had wanted her friends to stand at the front too, part of her hoping somepony would object so she could kick up a stink. None of them had. No, they had all acquiesced like they were afraid not to give her exactly what she wanted today.
Exactly what she wanted? Now there was a joke with a rotten punchline.
“She meant so much to all of us,” Fluttershy said softly.
Suddenly Rainbow Dash wanted Fluttershy to kick and scream and be everything she wasn’t. She wanted her to be someone she wasn’t. She wanted to kick and scream herself, but it felt hollow without someone to bounce off her anger in response. Fluttershy had changed over the years but she would still back down from a fight. Especially today.
Rainbow Dash pushed the gentle foreleg off her shoulders and stood up, shaking water from her feathers. Of course it was drizzling. The head weather pony had refused to change the schedule for even one day. She had submitted the correct paperwork in triplicate but he had still said no, even when he saw the reason in the little printed box. She hadn’t given enough notice – as if she was supposed to have known on which day the funeral would eventually fall a month in advance. A month ago she had been at home on compassionate leave, soaking up every second of time they had left. If she hadn’t been reeling with disbelief when she submitted the paperwork, Rainbow Dash might have punched him on the nose.
Forget this. I’m outta here.
Flying in rain was awkward but not impossible. She took to the air in a few wingbeats and ignored her friends calling her back. She half expected at least one to fly after her but they let her go.
Speed and a bracing wind dried out her eyeballs quite well. She belatedly pulled up her goggles so she didn’t fly into a tree or something. Dramatic exits were much harder to pull off when you were lying in a heap and somepony was laughing their tail off at you.
That was how their first fight had ended. It was only the afternoon that she moved in and she had tried to win an argument by leaving dramatically. She didn’t even remember what they had been fighting about now, just that the bad feelings hadn’t lasted long after she landed in the dirt. She cringed at the unbidden memory and flapped harder, stretched further, went faster. She flew like she was trying to escape, but how could you escape time?
It always came down to time. There was either too much or not enough of it. Why had time been invented to follow such arbitrary rules, anyway? It telescoped when you had nothing to do and when there was too much to do, too much to say, too much feeling to cram into every hour of every day, it shortened until hours ticked by like seconds and the alarm clock on your happy little dream world went off and woke you to ugly reality. She had tried to smack that cosmic alarm clock and at least put it on snooze, but it hadn’t worked.
“I’m sorry, Rainbow Dash.” Twilight’s words spattered across her memory like raindrops on her goggles. The memory was a poor substitute for lying on the ground outside the farmhouse and watching a silhouette laugh uproariously from the bedroom window. “Becoming an alicorn depends on a pony’s innate magical ability.”
“So you’re saying not only do unicorns get the longest lifespans of all ponies, they’re also the only ones who get the chance to live forever? Well that’s fair.” She hadn’t used cheese-grater-voice that time. Nope, that time she had yelled like a foghorn and smacked Twilight’s workbench hard enough to leave dents.
“Not all unicorns get long lifespans –”
“Ponyfeathers they don’t! Quit trying to sugar-coat things, Twilight. The only unicorns who don’t live longer are the ones who do stupid stuff and get themselves killed in dumb accidents.”
“Rainbow, I don’t know what you want me to say. Longevity is linked to magic. The more a pony has, the longer they live. That’s just the way things are.”
“Yeah, I got that part when she needed a hip replacement and I’m still flying at ninety-miles-per-hour without a problem, and you’re still young while the rest of us are covered in wrinkles. Did you know Rarity’s only just getting crow’s feet? Pinkie’s hind legs are crippled with arthritis and Rarity’s worried about her eyelids sagging, while in the meantime …” Her throat had clogged.
“Rainbow Dash, I –”
“It’s not fair! We’re the Elements of Harmony. Doesn’t that make a difference? She may not be a unicorn or a pegasus but she’s not an ordinary earth pony either. Surely you can alicornify her for that? Or get Princess Celestia or Princess Luna to do it. Heck, bring Cadence down from the Crystal Empire for all I care! They’ve been alicorns longer than you. Surely one of them can do something.”
She would never forget Twilight’s expression at that moment: nervous, apologetic, somewhat remote and achingly sympathetic. She knew all too well what was making Rainbow Dash’s chest constrict and had made her ask when she already suspected the answer. Twilight was living that same emotion every day as she watched her friends grow old while she only got older.
“The Elements of Harmony contain that magic,” she had said softly. “Not the ponies who wield them.”
“So you’re saying there’s nothing you can do? No age spells you can cast? No time reversal spells? No rewind-the-clock spells?” Rainbow Dash barely understood the logistics of magic, despite spending so many years as friend to the most famous living magic scholar in Equestria. “You can’t give her a few more decades, at least?”
“There are those kinds of spells,” Twilight had replied cagily. “But I –”
“I don’t care. Whatever the risk, cast one.”
“But –”
“Cast one!”
“You should ask her first –”
“No! Just do it! Here and now, just cast a spell and make it … make it all … Take her body back to before ...” Words had failed Rainbow Dash as she threw them at the ball of emotion inside her, trying to get a few to stick. “I can’t … I can’t risk her saying no.”
“You think she would?”
She had looked away, knowing her answer would be written in her face.
“Why do you think she’d say no, Rainbow Dash?” Twilight had pressed.
“Because … because …” Words slid off her tongue in no particular order. “Sick. She’s … you’ve been in Canterlot … she didn’t … wouldn’t let me … in pain and … and it’s bad but she wouldn’t … it was fast … real fast … we thought we could tough it out, y’know? Get some fancy-schmancy doctor and it’s all … poof, it’d be gone but … the medicine didn’t … they said it’d spread too far before they caught it. Not even … not even magic could touch it, they said … so you’ve got to make her …” She had drawn a deep, shuddering breath and met Twilight’s eyes. “Cast. The. Damn. Spell. ”
“I can rewind her body to a time before she got sick, but that won’t erase it. It just means she’ll go through all this again.” Twilight had stared right back at her. It was the same stare she had used on Discord, Nightmare Moon, Cerberus, Chrysalis and dozens of other evil beings, but tempered with compassion and … something else. Something that didn’t become clear until she spoke. “You think I haven’t tried every spell I can to get rid of that … thing growing inside her? Anything more and I’ll scramble her molecules so badly she won’t …”
“You knew?” Rainbow Dash had gaped at her, aghast.
“I was in Canterlot, not the opposite end of the universe. I heard. I researched healing magic. I went to the surgeon general of Canterlot General Hospital and his best doctors taught me what to do. Then I came back to Ponyville and went to see her. You were in Cloudsdale asking Spitfire for time off.” Twilight gave something a little too long to be a blink. “We talked. She let me cast the spells I’d learned. Until she told me not to anymore.”
Rainbow Dash’s heart sank. “She did?” It was her worst fear confirmed. Well, not her absolute worst, but definitely up there with the big ones. The backs of her eyes had prickled and she had been filled with the near-uncontrollable urge to fly. As a filly, she had thought flying was the solution to all problems. As a mare, she knew it wasn’t. That didn’t stop the urge coming whenever one cropped up. Especially the big ones.
“She also said she thought you might come to me and ask as soon as you knew I was in town.”
“She told you to tell me no.”
Twilight had shaken her head, causing the filigree decorations on her tiara to twinkle in the light from the window. She was so used to dressing as royalty in Canterlot she was still dressing the part in Ponyville, where her humble surroundings made even stylish jewellery look overdone. “She told me to get you to understand why she said no more.” She had stepped forward then, still the Twilight they had befriended decades ago despite the wings and glittery bits. “But from what you just said, I think you already know why.”
“I know she wants the pain to go away but I don’t want her to go away!”
“Enough that you’d make her relive this a second time? Or prolong her life even if it means making her live with this longer too?”
“I … she … It’s not fair!”
The urge to fly came to a boil inside her, shot down her legs and forced her to buck the nearest object in frustration. She was good at bucking. She had learned from the best. Twilight’s workbench had tipped over, spilling official looking paperwork all over the library floor. An inkwell had smashed, spilling its contents across the documents. Yet instead of picking anything up, Twilight had advanced the few steps between them and wrapped her forelegs around her friend.
“No, it’s not,” she had whispered hoarsely. “None of it’s fair.”
“Get off. Twilight, get off me!”
Twilight had only hugged her harder. Her steadfast refusal to listen had popped the inflated balloon of anger and Rainbow Dash had cried like a new-born foal until she was drained and trembling on her haunches. Throughout her breakdown, Twilight did not let go of her once.
“We saved the world,” Rainbow Dash had choked out. “A lot. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“It counts.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“Would you rather have had a hundred years of just being friends, or fifty-four years together?”
“That’s a dumbass question.”
“But a legitimate dumbass question.”
“Do I really have to answer?”
“No. I already know that part, too.”
Rainbow Dash wondered whether Twilight had also known that she would run out on the funeral. She hadn’t looked back to see her expression. She continued to fly into the rain, angled upwards and burst through the cloudbank to the open sky above. Shaking herself and shivering a little in the colder air, she flew back to Sweet Apple Acres before descending below the clouds again.
The place was shut up tight. Well, it would be, since everypony was at the cemetery. She thought about going back but instead alighted in the tree outside their bedroom window. Leaves tipped water onto her as she rustled them but she barely noticed. Instead she looked down and imagined herself in a heap, tail in the air and splinters in her nose. No wonder she had provoked so much laughter.
“I miss you already,” she said aloud. Her voice was rougher than it had been fifty-four years ago when she performed that spectacular pratfall. Age and lots of shouting at new recruits had turned her throat to sandpaper. It probably would have been even worse if she hadn’t had such a ready supply of apple cider to wet her whistle.
“Sometimes I reckon you only fell for me because you were sick of missin’ out durin’ cider season.”
The words rose in her mind, accompanied by images of rumpled bedclothes and a crocheted blanket they threw on in winter whenever the boiler had packed up again. If she had moved into the Wonderbolts barracks when Spitfire offered accommodation she would have lived with working amenities as a matter of course and had no commute to work. She would never have spent a thought on whether the icy floor below her bed would take the fur and skin from any experimental hoof in the morning. Neither would she have had to throw open every single window in the thickest heat of summer, since the barracks had premium air conditioning. Yet she had opted for creaky floorboards, a roof in constant need of repair, draughty windows and walls that had to be repainted so often she felt like covering them in obscene graffiti to see whether anypony noticed as they slathered on the next coat.
And she hadn’t regretted one second of it.
“Nah,” said her memory-self. “The cider’s just a bonus.”
“Mm-hm, sure it is.”
“C’mere and let me show you why I really fell for you.” Her memory-self pounced, allowing recollections to emerge of just how creaky their bed was and how an unbolted bedstead could move across the floor.
There would be no more giggles in that big empty bed. There would be no more laughing silhouettes out of the window. There would be no more southern twang telling her to stop using the roof as a launching pad and presenting her with replacement tiles to lay when she didn’t listen. There would be no more late nights, no more ridiculously early wake-up calls, no more lessons on how to buck properly, no more races, no more cider with two straws, no more … anything. Today marked the end. Big Macintosh, Apple Bloom and their families would still work the farm but the room she had shared would be silent against the relentless pull of life moving on with one less pony in it.
A tear fell all the way from her perch to the ground below. Evidently her eyes had not dried out as much as she thought.
“I miss you, Applejack,” she whispered.
Her only reply was the wind, the rain and the ghost of laughter.
Fin.
