"If Derpy can do it, I can too."

Scootaloo set one hoof up on the railing of the Cutie Mark Crusader's clubhouse.

Sweetie Belle retorted, "She's a full grown mare, and you're not!"

Scootaloo added another to the railing.

"Doesn't matter, Flurry is a baby. I'm way older than her."

Then Scootaloo clambered upon until she was precariously balanced on the narrow railing.

Applebloom corrected, "She's an alicorn, that's different!"

"Yeah, well, not all of us have magic parents."

Scootaloo's cheeks grew a hot, cherry red. She scrunched up her nose and forced the feelings down where they came from. She had to focus on the task at hoof.

"I'm not watching," said Sweetie Belle, covering her eyes.
"I'll get the bandaids ready," said Applebloom, turning to fetch them from the clubhouse.

Scootaloo scowled at her unsupportive compatriots.

"You two BETTER stay here and witness my moment of triumph. If you don't, who will tell anypony I actually did it?"

"Okay, but just this once and never, ever again,” said Sweetie Belle.
"You got less sense than one of Flim and Flam's customers,” critiqued Applebloom.

"One, twoooo, THREE!" said Scootaloo as she launched herself from the treehouse railing, wings spread wide, flapping and eager. She hung in the air. She coasted forward on the momentum of her jump. The air pressed back against her beating wings. Up, she was going up!

Then she reached the apogee of her jump. Her wings kept flapping, but no lift came. Too small. Too weak. Too useless.

Her vision blurred as she tilted downwards towards the ground. She could hear one of her friends shriek and the other shout. Droplets of tears streaked along the sides of her face as the ground rushed up to meet her.

Then darkness.

But only for a second.

She awoke some time later in Ponyville Hospital. Her head pounded and her mouth was dry. More than anything she wanted water. She reached out with a hoof and leaned forward. She felt along the table connected to the hospital bed. Shifting forward she stretched her right wing and agony shot through her spine.

She dropped back into the bed.

She began to cry. It wasn't fair. She had tried so hard. Why could so many others do what she could not? Even the Earth ponies were built for more than she was. She wept softly to herself, blubbering, wallowing.

Then she felt the squeeze of a hoof on her own, soon joined by another.

"Hey, don't cry, we're here, okay? You're gonna be fine," comforted Applebloom.

"Lemme get you something to drink." Applebloom pressed a glass to Scootaloo's mouth and the young mare choked back one last ragged snot filled sob before sipping from the glass. One of her eyes was swollen shut, but the other was not, and she saw her two best friends hovering over her.

"T-T-Thanks" she sputtered, taking another long draw and emptying the glass. Glug, glug, glug.

Rainbow Dash poked her head past the privacy curtain around the trio. "Hey, sport, you're awake. You gave us all a real scare. What were you doing?"

"I didn't make it. I couldn't make it. I just wanted to fly, like you Rainbow, like everyone else." Scootaloo turned her head into the pillow, hiding her one good eye from the world. The bruise around her other one gave it an angry, purple color.

Rainbow screwed up her muzzle. She was never good at things like this. She loved coaching foals, but what Scootaloo had wasn't something she could fix with some well placed words or a practice session. "That's okay, Scootaloo."

"That's easy for you to say. You're not stuck on the ground with the rest of us."

"H-h-hey that's not what I meant. I just think you don't need to push yourself so hard."

"Isn't that what you do? Push yourself? You and the Wonderbolts? How many hours do you practice?"

"I'm just trying to say..."

Sweetiebelle butted in, "That you can't fly Scootaloo."

Applebloom nodded and added, "There's no shame in it. Y're still our best friend. Heck there's some ponies who can't even walk proper and they get along just fine."

Scootaloo buried herself further into the pillow, "Doesn't make me feel better." She hugged the pillow, buried her face in it, and let out a muffled scream, before jerking violently in the bed. Every bit of her trembled, and one of the tables crashed onto its side.

Nurse Redheart came trotting, surveyed the four of them and whinnied in dismay. "I think visiting hours are over for today, ladies."

Rainbow Dash gulped, looked from Nurse Redheart back to Scootaloo and rubbed a tear from the side of her cheek, "I'm sorry, Scoots." She reached out to put her hoof on one of Scootaloo's legs but the filly just retracted it immediately upon contact.

Nurse Redheart looked sorrowfully at the trio, "Come back tomorrow morning, I'm sure Scootaloo will be happy to see you then. She just needs some rest."

The three of them departed and Nurse Redheart took a seat next to the bed. She sat there in silence for a long time, saying nothing. Everything slowed around her. The medical devices hooked up to other patients beeped. Clocks ticked. A hushed cough echoed through the quiet halls. It was getting late out and the hospital darkened around her and the young filly, but still she kept her vigil.

For her part, Scootaloo stayed locked in her fetal position, painfully disjoint wing jutting off at a strange angle. She didn't say anything, she just cried into the pillow which absorbed her anguish without complaint or pity. When she finally stopped crying, she rocked for a while holding the pillow to her face, just letting the tears burn on her hot cheeks before finally fading, completely absorbed by the fluffy companion.

Slowly she turned over and let out a long, painful sigh. The kind that came from deep. She unloaded a lifetime of disappointment in a single breath. Then she noticed Nurse Redheart out of the corner of her good eye, and seized up all over again.

Nurse Redheart placed her hoof on Scootaloo's side, "I just wanted to make sure you were okay, all things considered. Is there anything I can get you?"

Scootaloo looked at her half in anger and half in shock. She felt violated, exposed. How much had the nurse seen? Everything, probably. "I just wanna be alone." she said, in the most miserable voice she could manage.

"I understand Scootaloo, but would you talk with me, for just a little bit?"

Scootaloo weighed the words in her mind, looking at Nurse Redheart then back down at the bed. She felt bad for making the nice nurse wait there so long in silence. "Yeah, okay."

Nurse Redheart smiles gently, squeezing Scootaloo's thigh, holding her hoof there without moving away or towards. "I looked at your x-rays Scootaloo and was doing some research. Your wing will be fine. It's a clean fracture, nothing a little R&R won't fix. We'll get you fitted with a cast and in a month you can take it off and you'll be right as rain."

Scootaloo could feel the bad news sandwich being built, "But?"

"But... your wings are severely underdeveloped for a filly your age. Your friends, and they are your friends, are right."

Scootaloo gripped her bedsheets with both hooves and began to cry hard, painful tears, mixed with short sobs.

"And I want you to know it's not fair. And it won't be okay. It's going to hurt a lot."

Scootaloo sucked a big glob of snot back in, and when Nurse Redheart handed her a tissue, she overfilled it. The nurse took it gingerly, with a barely disguised look of disgust, and placed it in a receptacle.

"That's what I was TELLING THEM!"

"I know. And you're right. It's hard for them to understand how much you're hurting right now."

"Don't they get it?! I'm supposed to be a flyer. Just like Rainbow Dash. Better than Rainbow Dash."

Nurse Redheart moved her hoof to Scootaloo's and squeezed it gently, "Those are amazing dreams Scootaloo. Great big ones."

"Now they'll never come true."

"They never were, Scootaloo."

Scootaloo looked up at Nurse Redheart with her one good eye, red from crying, "That doesn't make me feel much better."

"It's not supposed to, sometimes you just have to sit with the pain for a while before you can let it go. I know you're a big, strong pony and you can handle it." She leaned forward kissing Scootaloo on the head. "Promise me you won't do anything like that again, okay?"

Scootaloo bit her lower lip and nodded. She didn't say anything.

Nurse Redheart sat there for a while longer, holding Scootaloo's hand until the filly drifted off to sleep, and then she tucked Scootaloo in, and got back to making her rounds.



Scootaloo left the hospital later that night.



It wasn't hard sneaking out. Nobody was on the lookout for patients bailing on medical care. Her wing was busted, but after resting and letting the medication they gave her kick in she felt well enough to walk at a slow canter. By the time dawn was breaking she had made it up the side of the mountain overlooking Ponyville. At one point in the long past a dragon had slept there and threatened Ponyville with its smoky snoring, but he was gone and she was all alone.

She sat at the cliff's edge and looked over Ponyville. It was a nice place. The sun looked especially radiant as it refracted through Twilight Sparkle's palace home. She wiped tears away from her eyes. She was going to miss the place, but she wasn't going to miss the pain. The knowledge that she could never fulfill her purpose. That she could never be useful. Not even in the way that Derpy delivered mail, half to the wrong address, but still, somehow, always on time.

She stood and leaned forward while peering down the cliff edge. The bottom was a long, long way down. She had no doubt this would work. She took a tentative step forward, her front hoof just off the edge of the cliff, making the sharp rock crumble.

She raised another hoof, holding it in the air. She spread her wings. The broken one tinged her with pain, but that would be gone soon. She looked down at the only escape she could imagine, and everything was rushing to her; the friends she had, the people that would be left behind, the life she wouldn’t live, but the only thing she could imagine is an escape from the pain of disappointment.

As she leaned forward the wind pushed against her, making her whole body tremble and shake.

"SCOOTALOO".

Called a voice from high above. She blinked her one good eye, and looked up. The sun was blinding. Beautiful. Radiant. And out of the center of it, wreathed by its corona, flew a large, white pony with a mane glittering the colors of the rainbow.

Then Scootaloo fell.

She didn't mean to. She hadn't leaned forward, hadn't meant to put her weight into it, but she was balancing on a knife's edge, and a second gust of wind, from an unfortunate direction, pushed her just enough to send her off the edge.

It was the clubhouse all over again, but this time she had no first leap, and simply fell. Her eyes opened wide with terror as the ground rushed up to relieve her of her pain. Her uninjured wing flapped uselessly, batting against the rushing wind and taking her nowhere but down.

Then suddenly, she hit something. Not a tree branch, she was too far up for that. Maybe a rock out cropping? It knocked the wind out of her. She couldn't breathe, and it made her wing ache like when she first woke up in the hospital.

Then, to Scootaloo’s surprise, the ground was rushing away from her. As Celestia’s large, regal body lifted Scootaloo back up to the mountain’s edge, she buried her face into the alicorn’s soft fur and wept.

Celestia sat with her, flank to flank, Celestia’s much larger figure curving around Scootaloo’s relatively tiny one. She looked quizzically at the young mare.

“Young one, why would you do such a thing?”

Scootaloo, brushing the last of her tears away from her muzzle. “I just wanted it to be over. I didn’t want to have to be so useless anymore.”

Celestia’s brow furrowed in confusion, “Useless? Why would you say that?”

Scootaloo scoffed, “I can’t fly. I’ll NEVER be able to fly. You know what that feels like? To lose the only thing you wanted to do? To be?”

Celestia nodded, “I do, child. More than most.”

Scootaloo’s cheeks flushed, “You do?”

“Do you know how old I am, child?”

“Uh, no, not really.”

“I have lived for over a millennia. A thousand years. Do you know the one thing I have wanted in all that time?”

Scootaloo shook her head, eyes focused on Celestia.

The great mare looked off to the sun, “A family. I tried twice, but after I watched my second husband pass of old age, bearing no heirs, I could not continue. The heartbreak was too much.”

Scootaloo considered that for a long moment, “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be, child. I wanted something I could not have. To be a mother. To be useful in that way, but now I am useful in another way. All we can do is find comfort in the opportunities afforded to us. I consider myself lucky, I raise the sun every day. It brings warmth and life to all of Equestria. I am, in some small way, the mother to everyone. It’s not exactly what I dreamed of, but it is what I have, and I’ve made my peace with that. And...”

Scootaloo leaned against the larger mare.

“I am happy.”

Scootaloo let out a short, guttural sob.

“I know someday you too will be happy, but you will not find happiness living in impossible dreams. You must rejoin the real world. You must embrace your truth, even if it is painful. The only way out is through.”

Celestia held Scootaloo close, and in that moment she knew everything was going to be okay. She didn’t know what her new dream was going to be, or how she would be useful, but she knew she would find it in time.

Scootaloo looked up at Celestia and smiled, really smiled, “Thank you.”

She nodded, touching her snout to the filly’s forehead, “Think nothing of it. I am just glad I could help.”

The dust trail kicked up by the galloping search party wrapped its way around the mountain’s contours, rapidly approaching.

“Who’s that?”

“Your many, many loved ones,” said Celestia with a smile.

The dust cloud came to a halt, and the mane six poured out. Followed by the other two Cutiemark Crusaders and finally Scootaloo’s parents. There was a cacophony of sound and confusion as all of them started speaking at once, but then Scootaloo’s mother galloped forward and grabbed her little foal, hugging her so tight. Scootaloo’s father was on her as well.

“Twilight teleported halfway across Equestria to get us, sweetie. I’m so glad she did. Thank Celestia we found you!” said Mane Allgood, before realizing Celestia was just a few steps away and smiled sheepishly at the solar princess.

“Celestia saved me!” said Scootaloo, hugging her parents back, “But I’m okay now.”

Celestia nodded, “Scootaloo here must have gotten more of a bonk on the head than she reckoned for. Found her up here a little dazed, and a little confused, but I think she’s doing okay now.”

Scootaloo looked back at Celestia, but the resplendent alicorn simply smiled, and Scootaloo did too, leaning back in to hug her parents.

“Can I go with you guys? You know, when you go back exploring?”

Snap Shutter gave his wife a confused look, “You want to go with us? To the outback? I didn’t think you were interested.”

Scootaloo shook her head, “I was just kinda distracted by other stuff, but I really wanna go. Maybe I won’t like it, but I’d like to at least give it a try. I hear beetles are pretty cool!”

Both parents smiled, hugged her, and exchanged a look between them, communicating in the silent mannerisms of a long married couple. Mane Allgood nodded knowingly to her husband and said, “Once your wing is back in shape we’ll get you fitted out with some proper adventuring kit.”

Scootaloo hugged her parents before mingling with the others; especially Rainbow Dash, Sweetie Belle, and Applebloom.

“Sorry I gave you guys such a scare. I was pretty upset, but I think things are going to be okay.”