"Dad! I'm home!" Pride rang in the young filly's voice as she entered her cloud home. It was small, but had two stories. There was a staircase on the far wall despite its inhabitants' ability to fly.
"Whoopee… Why are you so happy?" A gruff reply came from a blue Pegasus sprawled out on a couch much too small for him.
"I got my cutie mark!" The blue filly shouted.
"I find that hard to believe." The larger blue Pegasus winced at his filly's volume. He blinked his bloodshot eyes to try to clear the haze, but didn't bother to look at what the younger Pegasus was so eager to show him.
"I did! I won the race today! I even made a Sonic Rainboom!"
The father pushed his dull grey mane away from his granite eyes and set it back behind his ears. He glared but couldn't focus. "Now I know you're lying." He tried to stand but stumbled back onto the couch. "Nopony's ever done that."
"I did make a Sonic Rainboom! And I got my cutie mark!"
"You know what happens to liars, don't you, Rainbow Dash?" The father shook his hoof in the filly's general direction. "Now be a good filly and shut up, let daddy get some sleep."
The filly hung her head low as she walked past the couch, on the way to the stairs leading towards her bedroom. "You sleep all the time," she mumbled.
A large blue hoof came down on the end of her rainbow tail, stopping her. "Smart mouths are just as bad as liars." The father's blurred vision locked in on the frightened face that turned towards him. His daughter knew what was coming, but it was too late for an apology. A second hoof connected with the filly's cheek. The filly screamed in pain instantly, prompting another blow to her side. "I said shut up!"
The filly began to cry, and her father lifted his hoof off her tail. "Go to bed. I don't want to hear a peep from you!" It didn't matter that it was still daylight outside.
A worried voice echoed from the story above. "What is going on down there?" The white Pegasus the voice belonged to ran down the stairs, her rainbow mane flowing behind her. Her violet eyes immediately landed on the filly's bleeding face. "Rainbow? What… Are you okay?"
The filly ran with a slight limp and sheltered herself behind the white Pegasus.
"You…" The previously worried voice seethed with anger. The Pegasus took a breath and regained her composure, if only temporarily. "Rainbow… You got your cutie mark! Why don't you run upstairs and I'll be right up to get you cleaned up and you can tell me all about it, okay?" The filly nodded and climbed the stairs. Once she reached the top and was out of sight, she heard her parents begin to argue.
"What is wrong with you? What business do you have hitting ANY filly? Especially our daughter?"
"Will you SHUT UP? You know I have a headache!"
"I don't care if you have a nail through your skull! How could you hit Rainbow?"
The filly climbed up into her bed and tried to cover her ears, but she couldn't reach without making her side hurt worse. She tried pushing her head under a pillow but she could still hear the arguing.
"That stupid filly was lying and mouthing off. She knows the punishment."
"You've hit her BEFORE?"
"That's none of your business!"
"How can it be none of my business? She's my daughter! All those times she said she flew into a wall… That was you, wasn't it?"
"Not all of them."
The filly had heard her parents argue before, but nothing like this. Heated words grew so close together that she could no longer make them out, nor did she care to. She couldn't stand to hear her parents fight. She knew this wasn't normal. Whether hearing these arguments boiled her blood or made it run cold in fear, it was always too much to take.
She just wished the fighting would stop. And with a sound she could not identify, it did.
Rainbow Dash snapped back to the present just in time to avoid a mid-air collision with a tree. She banked to the right and missed the trunk by inches, passing between two widely spaced branches. "Dang it, Twilight… Why did you have to bring up these memories now?"
She regained the altitude she inadvertently lost while visiting the past, and corrected her course. She wasn't far from Cloudsdale now. She'd be at least a half hour earlier than she planned. That would be enough time to mentally go over her planned routine a few times. Maybe it would be enough time to push the painful memories to the back of her mind. She couldn't afford to freeze up during this performance. She thought her performance was paramount last year, but if all went well, she would surprise even herself this time. All she had to do was focus.