"Can you believe this?"

The locker door that slammed in front of Fluttershy's face sent her backwards like a shot had gone off. Her eyes widened as she tucked her body into the smallest ball she could manage and huddled against the far wall of the hallway, waiting for the inevitable march of uniformed griffons that would surely come any minute, rampaging through the halls of the school with full combat regalia.

The voice had gone almost completely unnoticed as it was followed by the door-slam. Rainbow Dash, the pony responsible, leaned with one foreleg against the locker she had dented as she closed it in frustration and sighed.

Rainbow Dash, the perennial tomboy. While her rainbow mane and spunky attitude had gotten more than a few boys interested in her over the years, the rest of her practically screamed 'not interested'. Her body was nice enough; not curvy, like some of the ponies in her class, but trim and slender from the hours of workout practice. Her wings were short and well fitted against her body, with her brilliant blue feathers trained for maximum aerodynamic efficiency. She would have been a catch to any boy (or girl) in school – but right now, the look on her face reminded the few passerby why it was a good idea to avoid her most of the time, especially with the notion of a 'relationship' in hoof; that being, Rainbow Dash had a temper.

If Rainbow Dash was volatile multicoloured ink, Fluttershy was the opposite, a warm yellowy pastel. Even huddled in a quivering pegasus ball she was the picture of demure meekness. Her wings, despite their relative non-use at the academy (it was a mystery to anyone why Fluttershy was attending a school primarily known for flight graduates in the first place) were far larger than anypony would have expected from thoughts of her personality; Fluttershy's wings were larger than life, big enough to wrap around her whole body and then some, shielding her with butter-cream feathers against possible assailants and blocking out the harshness of the world in general.

She hadn't wrapped them around fast enough to avoid Rainbow Dash's shout and subsequent locker smash.

Fluttershy peeked out from a crack between the feathers on her right wing as Rainbow Dash walked up to her, rolling her eyes.

"Come on, Flutters, get up. You're embarassing yourself in front of everyone."

"D-d-din't anypony else hear that awful noise?" Fluttershy asked, nervously taking Rainbow Dash's hoof and allowing herself to be stood up on all fours. Her wings withdrew like a full-body cloak and collected into deceptively small bundles on her back. Despite her sudden astonishment, her hair had kept its composure through her tumble in the air, a perfect arrangement of cotton-candy pink strands cascading over her face like a waterfall of flower-scented beauty.

For the stares Rainbow Dash got, she could count ten times that many in Fluttershy's direction. She was a pony it was hard not to spend too long looking at.

Rainbow Dash sighed.

"That was me, dummy. I slammed the locker by your head? After I asked if you saw what happened after class just now?"

Fluttershy blinked and lowered her head, pressing her chin closer to her chest, as though she could remove her sudden embarassment by making herself smaller. It seemed to work, mostly.

"Oh, um... no, I didn't. Was it something exciting?"

"If you call having one of the worst teachers in the entire school 'exciting'," Rainbow Dash responded sarcastically. As she spoke, she gave a flick of her rainbow tail, twitching it in the air like a whip in her agitation.

"Oh... um?"

It was the best Fluttershy could manage without further context. She had tried to pay attention, but the slam that had sounded like an explosion had taken her out of her head for a moment.

"You tell me how the best flier in the entire school can get suspended from the cloudball team because of doing bad on one stupid weather test," Rainbow Dash mumbled, and kicked one of her hind legs into the air, angrily thrusting her hoof into nothing.

Oh. Was that what had happened?

"Oh, Rainbow Dash, did they really take you off the cloudball team?"

Rainbow Dash gritted her teeth and swung her right foreleg in a wide arc through the air, like she was punching an invisible pony in the mouth.

"Eep!"

Fluttershy was forced to duck her head away from a particularly hearty swing aimed more or less in her direction.

"Yes, they did! And now I have to do a stupid makeup test on Monday to get back in on 'double probation', whatever the flying buck that means." Rainbow Dash walked with her friend closer to another locker in the row through the hall and kicked it, hard. The metal of the compartment groaned as it crumpled inward, yielding a sizable Rainbow Dash hoof-sized dent in the aftermath.

Fluttershy swallowed nervously. She hated to see her friend upset, but she hated conflict even more, and she knew that someone at the school would not be happy if they found out about those lockers.

"Um. Well, maybe you should take the weekend to calm down. I'm sure if you just take a few days to relax, you'll feel much better about the whole thing–"

"Ugh. Don't remind me about this weekend." Rainbow Dash held out a hoof in front of Fluttershy, and the yellow pegasus stopped abruptly. She hadn't even realized she was walking – but here she was, down the hall. Rainbow Dash had gotten her walking away from her dorm into the wild unknown of advanced math classes.

"What's wrong with the weekend?" Fluttershy asked earnestly. She eyed the posters and stickers along the wall of the school she stood silently behind Rainbow Dash's hoof. Everywhere she looked, banners and pennants were plastered along the walls in the school colours; blue and yellow.

"Just this dumb party I have to go to.  You're going too, right?" Rainbow Dash brimmed with glee in what looked to be an unprecedented amount. She looked from side to side with shifty eyes before leaning in conspiratorially and whispering to Fluttershy, the only pony around to hear her secret. "I heard... there's gonna be... beer! Isn't that awesome?"

Fluttershy smiled and tried her best to fake an earnest enthusiasm.

"Oh, yeah... awesome."

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. She wasn't completely oblivious to her friend's dislike of social situations – if anything, she was only interested in bringing her along in the hopes that it might get her to spend her weekend doing something more exciting than rolling in the grass on the surface with squirrels.

"Come on, 'Shy. It's gonna be fun! You don't have to drink. You can just come and have a good time."

Fluttershy tilted her head to one side and grabbed a lock of hair between her forehooves. She began twirling it between them like a braid of twisted anxiety, looping the hair over and over on itself as she tried to look elsewhere.

"I dunno, Rainbow Dash... would there be boys there?"

Dash pressed a hoof against her face and ran it down to her chin with an exasperated sigh.

"Of course there'd be boys; it's a college party! We're not just gonna sit around in dresses drinking tea and playing dolls."

Fluttershy's eyes brightened at Rainbow Dash's imagined scenario, but she turned her gaze back down as she realized the suggestion had been a joke.

"Well... I'm not sure."

"Boys are nothing to be afraid of! Heck, you're in college now. You should be comfortable enough around the opposite sex that they don't scare you out of enjoying your weekend."

Fluttershy lowered the lock of her hair that was now twisted into an anxious looking swirl of pink.

"I don't know... they just always seem so... uncouth. And loud. And you know how I hate loud things."

"Not every boy is loud and obnoxious," Rainbow Dash countered. "Some of them are even fun to be–"

"Hey, Rainbow Crash! How'd you and Klutzersy make it down the hallway without crashing into those lockers?"

"–around." Rainbow Dash let out the last word in a sigh, interrupted by the obnoxious voice from down the hallway. She didn't have to turn around to see who it was.

Fluttershy chanced a peek out from behind her friend to get a proper view of the source of the clumsy taunt.

Standing further away than must have been comfortable to yell from, Fluttershy caught sight of the set of messy bangs hanging over the eyes of a brown-coated pegasus, leering at her from enough of a distance that Fluttershy couldn't even make out his cutie-mark.

"Is that–"

"Isn't it always?" grumbled Rainbow Dash in response. "Just ignore him, and maybe he'll go away."

"What's the matter, couldn't hear me? Did you trip over something this morning and make yourself deaf?"

"If you're going to blow hot air at us you could at least do it close enough that we can hear whatever dumb stuff you're saying!" Rainbow Dash turned and delivered her rebuttal with a glare behind the locks of rainbow mane hanging over her eyes.

Fluttershy gasped at the sudden escalation in conflict and sidled up to Rainbow Dash's side, nestling herself between the blue pegasus and a nearby locker, the door left open by a student in a hurry on the way to class, or maybe by a staff-member who had cleaned it out and left the empty vessel bare.

The colt at the end of the hallway smirked, though his grin was unseen by either pegasus opposite him, and fluttered down the hallway faster than was necessary. His wings threw up the odd piece paper on the ground here and there as he zoomed forward.

"Is this better, Rainbow Cra–"

The sound of the locker door as it hit his head was almost comically loud. It let out an ear-splitting 'twong' that rang down the hallway, a noise loud enough to draw attention to the newly forged dent that arose as a result of the door's impact with a particularly thick skull.

The pegasus colt didn't even have a chance to mumble out the rest of his taunt. His eyes closed behind his messy bangs and he fell to the floor, landing in a heap over his own limbs.

Rainbow Dash's mouth fell agape in shock. She took a moment to turn her head to the side.

"Ohmygoodness, I'm so sorry! I didn't think it would hit him that hard..." Fluttershy held up her forehooves to her mouth and widened her eyes, startled at the after-effects of her impromptu locker-door defense.

"Did you just knock him out with that locker?"

Fluttershy's eyes grew even wider and more distressed looking.

"I guess I did... I'm just so tired of him always needing to come up with something to say to us. I mean... it's not that upsetting anymore, but I don't want to stand here fifteen more minutes while he goes on."

Rainbow Dash blinked at her friend's explanation.

"Do you think we should take him to the nurse?" Fluttershy asked as she prodded the crumpled brown body with one of her forelegs.

"Uh... no, I'm sure he'll be fine. And you're right about us not having to stand around anymore... let's take that to heart and split, shall we?"

Fluttershy gave a nervous look in either direction, but seemed to have quelled the sudden panic that had arisen apparently only as a result of the fear of getting caught red-hooved in her relative self-defense.

"Okay," she said with a nod.

Rainbow Dash grabbed Fluttershy's hoof with her own, and the two of them flapped their wings down the hallway as fast as they could manage without looking suspicious.

On the floor, the colt with the brown fur and untidy bangs let out a low groan.

He'd be sure to feel that one when he woke up.

As they fluttered off, Rainbow Dash spared a backwards look to her and Fluttershy's mutual annoyance. A suddenly perplexed look washed across her face, and she turned back to Fluttershy, still flying.

"Why does a college even have lockers, anyway?"

Fluttershy nodded knowingly.

"Well, it's because it used to be a high-school, and I guess they were too lazy to convert everything."

"Oh."

And with that, the two of them carried on down the hall, on their way to a Friday evening of nothing in particular.