Fluttershy Is Free

by Jordan179

Chapter 2: Caterpillar

The Sun was going down. They both built their fire, and then Rainbow started it with flint and steel. There were plenty of dry leaves and underbrush to serve as tinder, and the fall rains had fortunately as yet not started. Soon a nice red and orange blaze was crackling away merrily amongst their arrangement of dead branches in the circle of stones Rainbow had laid. Rainbow was careful; the last thing she wanted to do was burn down Fluttershy's special place.

The warmth of the fire felt good as the Sun set in the west, making of the horizon a multi-chromatic glory. The air was fresh and pure up here, and the breeze blew the smoke away from them. They had some nice fresh water from the cataract, and Fluttershy combined some of their supplies with some edibles she had found in the forest and began cooking a savory vegetable stew in the iron pot they had brought and hung over the fire on a makeshift frame. She seasoned it, stirred it, let it boil briefly, then took it off the fire and ladled out portions.

The stew was remarkably good.

"Oh, I do this a lot," explained Fluttershy, smiling at her friend. "For my animals -- though I have to be careful with them, they sometimes eat different things than ponies -- and for myself. Especially when I come up here."

"You're a really good field cook!" said Rainbow as she enthusiastically conveyed the stew to her mouth with a spoon held in the suckers of one hoof. "Heck, you were back in the militia, too, but you've improved!"

"Oh, well," said Fluttershy, blushing a little, "It's pretty easy. And I know where all the edible plants are around here," she explained. "I've been coming here for a pretty long time."

"Mmm," stated Rainbow as she ate more soup. "This is delicious." Then, as Rainbow saw Fluttershy starting to hide her face in her own hair, she decided to change the subject. "How long have you been coming up here, anyway?" Rainbow asked.

"Forever," said Fluttershy. "Well, since soon after I got my cutie mark, and realized I liked it down here on the ground," she said. "Over a decade, now. I followed the butterflies one day and found that a lot of them came here. So I kind of made it my special place."

"You must come here pretty often."

"Well," said Fluttershy, "I did when I was still a filly. It's peaceful here -- and my family never knew about it." Her face grew somber, and she stared into the fire.

"You didn't want to see them?" asked Rainbow.

"That's a terrible thing to say," said Fluttershy flatly. "That I'd want to avoid my own family, when they wanted to come see me." She did not meet Rainbow's eyes. "I'd have to be a terrible pony to reject them like that." Her ears, her body, everything drooped listlessly.

"I'm sorry, 'Shy," apologized Rainbow. "I didn't mean ..."

"It's true, though," she said. "I did want to avoid them. And sometimes," she said, " I can be a pretty terrible pony."

"That's not true!" said Rainbow, defending her friend against -- her friend? Other people's emotions could be so confusing sometimes. "I mean, not that you wanted to avoid them. That's gotta be true if you say it's true. I mean, you're not a terrible pony. You're the nicest pony I've ever known. Too nice, sometimes, for your own good!"

"Thank you," replied Fluttershy, smiling, her ears going back up a little bit. "But I'm not always that nice. When ponies don't like me," she explained, "I don't always try harder to make them like me. Sometimes I just ... run and hide. That's my way, really. I keep company with ponies who really like me, and I hide from the rest."

Rainbow was moved. Fluttershy's problem -- her whole philosophy of life, really -- was very alien to the way she herself did things. Rainbow just did what she felt was right, and it if someponies didn't like her for it, it was their problem, not hers. But she could see how life must be for Fluttershy, and she wanted to somehow make it better. She didn't know how, though.

"Well, I like you," Rainbow said. "A lot. I always have, since we've been small."

Fluttershy blushed. "That makes me very happy," she said. "Your friendship has always made me very happy. I could always feel how much you liked me. I know I'm weak -- but your friendship has always made me stronger."

Rainbow was overcome by a warm and happy feeling, of complete love for her friend. She didn't know quite how to express it, so she clapped her lightly on the shoulder with one hoof, nearly making Fluttershy spill her stew.

Fluttershy must have understood the sentiment, though, because she smiled.

"Why didn't your family like you, anyway?" Rainbow asked. "I mean, you're pretty cool. I've seen you face down a dragon! You've gotta admit that's awesome!"

"Thank you, Rainbow," replied Fluttershy, smiling at the praise. "Though really I was terrified through most of that, until the dragon hurt you. Then I guess I just lost my temper a little."

"Yeah, well even if you were scared at first, I think you made up for it by what you did at the end. So like I said, you're awesome and I'm surprised your family didn't know it."

"Well, Rainbow, to be fair to them, I hadn't really done anything all that 'awesome' yet."

"Yeah," said Rainbow, "but they're your family. How could they not like their own little filly?"

Fluttershy sighed, turned so that her mane was completely covering her face from Rainbow's view, hung her head low. "I never told you, did I? About my family ...?"

Rainbow thought back on it. She knew that she'd never actually met Fluttershy's family, which was actually a bit weird given how long she'd known Fluttershy. Come to think of it, they'd never come to see her at flight camp, or at any of the competitions. Which was odd, because even Rainbow's own parents, who mostly just let her wander around freely once she got old enough to fly, would come to see her at public events.

"No," reflected Rainbow. "You never have. What gives with that?"

Fluttershy looked up. "Well -- did you know that we're a very old family?"

Rainbow considered certain things. The way that, even though she didn't actually make a lot of money helping ponies out with domestic animals, she never seemed to actually lack for bits when she needed them. The way that Fluttershy always spoke in that very cultured voice, with perfect diction and the most proper language, as long as she was speaking audibly at all. The fact that she'd never caught Fluttershy doing anything even remotely coarse -- or was it that, when she did it, something like mucking out an animal pen or treating a bite wound looked like a scene from a play about the old nobility? The way that -- when she really cared about something -- she took command with an automatic ease that utterly belied her normal timidity. This all led her to one conclusion.

"You're an aristocrat," Rainbow said. "Aren't you? What, does it go back to the formation of the Realm, a thousand years or so?"

"Much older than that," said Fluttershy calmly. "Around three thousand years." She met Rainbow's gaze. "I am a direct matrilineal descendant of Commander Hurricane." It came out with neither pride nor shame, as if she were discussing what she'd eaten for breakfast that day.

Rainbow gasped.

"Wait, you mean the Commander Hurricane? The one from the old story ...?"

"Yes," said Fluttershy. "The one who led the Pegasi to Equestria when the Old Homeland was destroyed. Fifteen hundred years before the Realm was founded, five hundred before the Time of the Trickster." She looked sad. "So I think you can see why my family thinks I'm such a failure."

"Why --?" Then Rainbow Dash thought, really thought about it. Pegasus culture was a lot more relaxed in these peaceful days than it had been in the old times, but it was still essentially a martial one. The ideal Pegasus was a swift and strong flier, honorable in word and deed, and a highly trained fighter with hoof and weapon.

This had never bothered Rainbow much, as she herself was close to the ideal Pegasus, and indeed differed from such a standard only in being even more awesome. Indeed, awareness of the Pegasus ideal only served to increase Rainbow's own already-adequate healthy self-esteem.

But maybe, just maybe, a slightly unusual Pegasus like Fluttershy, might not seem all that excellent to a Pegasus not gifted with Rainbow Dash's own superior judgement of character. Perhaps such less discerning souls might even mistake gentleness for weakness, kindness for cowardice, beauty for fragility. Perhaps, they might even see her as some sort of "failure."

Especially if they had very high, if overly-narrow, standards.

"Oh," said Rainbow. "I see."

"The way my mother was didn't help," Fluttershy continued. "I don't know if I ever told you anything about her ...?"

Rainbow remembered scattered conversations with Fluttershy from the days of their youth. At the time she had been a small filly, and the revelations had merely been interesting. Now, her adult mind pieced them together.

"She was ... unusual," Rainbow allowed. There was no way she was going to insult Fluttershy's mother to her face.

"She was completely insane," said Fluttershy. There was not a trace of shyness in her voice now, though there was a quaver of something else. "She thought that dragons were going to attack any day and eat us all. She thought that there were monsters living among us that could take our forms, eat our souls. She thought I was a mythical creature myself."

Rainbow had not heard this. "Whoa," she said. "That's messed up."

"Also," said Fluttershy, "she said that I -- I was -- a bastard. That she'd cheated on her husband with someone she thought was an old love. Or was one of those shape-shifting monsters. Or the mythical creature she thought I was. The story kept changing, based on her mood."

"Double messed up," said Rainbow. Then, she considered the one part of it that sounded possible. "Wait, was any of this true?"

"I don't know!" confessed Fluttershy, and now the tears were starting to form. "I grew up half-believing her, and I never even knew which part of it to half-believe!" She lowered her face, let her hair hide it. "I think that maybe my mother's husband wasn't really my father," she said quietly. "Because I look a lot like my mother -- she's shorter and stockier than me but we have the same hair, the same coat. But I don't look at all like my ... well ... supposed father."

"Oh," said Rainbow. She'd been afraid of that, as it seemed more likely than mythical monsters. She also knew that this would be seen as more of a shame in the older families than it was among most Pegasi. And that families sometimes took such shames out on the innocent products of such illicit unions. "That must've been ... rough."

Fluttershy nodded, still refusing to show her face.

"My father ... hated me," she said. "The only way I could have made him love me was to be brave ... fast ... fearless ... all the things that you are, Rainbow. But the more he hated me, the more worthless I felt ... the more I just wanted to hide."

Rainbow saw tears dripping down beside the bowl of disregarded stew.

"You're not worthless, Fluttershy," she said warmly. "You're -- we would have taken some knocks trying to get past that manticore without you. And there's no way we could have handled that dragon. And ... well, you're my friend. You've never been worthless to me, not even when we were just little fillies together. I've always cared about you."

Fluttershy lifted up her tearstained face and smiled, but it was only a half-smile. "I know you care," she said. "I've always known."

"Right," said Rainbow. "You aren't worthless just because your mom wanted to cheat on your dad. That wasn't your fault -- you weren't even alive yet! And if anyone says it's your fault, then they're just dumb!

"And as for being some sort of hell-spawned mythical monster, well that's just silly! Your mom was just losing it -- she was living in a fantasy world. You're a pegasus, just like me, you're just a bit unusual. You have different talents than me. So what? Not everyone can be me -- if they could, there'd be a heck of a lot of me around!"

She grinned, and after a moment Fluttershy's strange expression turned into a genuine smile.

Then Fluttershy frowned.

"Actually," she said. "About the mythical monster part?"

Rainbow looked at her inquiringly.

"That part may be ... well ... a little bit true."

Author's Note:

Poor Fluttershy. She has ... parental issues.

Hmm, what lepidopteran life stage comes after "caterpillar?"

Comments

[Diamond Sparkle]

Hooves with suckers? It must be how Pegasui and Earth ponies evolved so they could pick up things. Do unicorns have the suckers too?

[Ardashir]

"You're a really good field cook!" said Rainbow as she enthusiastically conveyed the stew to her mouth with a spoon held in the suckers of one hoof. "Heck, you were back in the militia, too, but you've improved!"

Wait, sweet little Fluttershy was in the militia? Yikes. I can only assume it's a required thing for young pegasi because I just can't see her of all ponies joining voluntarily.

[superfun]

It's really weird reading this fic months after Flutter Brutter came out...

Also, it's kind of funny to me how in this series, you made Flutters the descendant of Commander Hurricane, when it's usually RD who's one of her descendants.