What do you do when you survive an experience so horrific, it changes your life forever?
In an alternate ending to Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), Rainbow Dash is saved from certain death at the hooves of the psychotic Pinkie Pie. However, she is left physically and mentally scarred by her experience, and must cope with what her onetime friend has done to her (and other ponies) and why. If she finds the answers she so desperately needs, maybe she can find a way to move on.
...Especially if she can no longer fly.
The Cupcake Chronicles is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic by milesprower06 and can be found here
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Has a sequel found here, focusing on Rainbow being tasked to find a new holder for the Element of Laughter, along with figuring out her relationship with Applejack and future with the Wonderbolts.
Tropes found in The Cupcake Chronicles:
- Apocalyptic Log: Pinkie's journal.
- BDSM: Is heavily involved in the side story "Learning to Laugh Again".
- Big Damn Heroes: Applejack shows up before Pinkie Pie can finish off Rainbow Dash and bucks her into a table covered with knives.
- Broken Angel: Rainbow Dash feels like this as she tries to get used to being an earth pony rather than a pegasus.
- Catapult Nightmare: Rainbow Dash has more than her share of nightmares about being in Pinkie Pie's torture chamber.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: This is a Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) fic after all.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Rainbow Dash had been bullied, expelled from Flight School, and thrown out of her house by her parents who refused to listen to her say. Applejack gives her temporary shelter from the rain that followed, but the pegasus absolutely washed her hooves of her relatives.
- Dark Fic
- Dream-Crushing Handicap: Since Rainbow no longer has wings, she's very upset about being unable to join the Wonderbolts (although they do make her an honorary member). Fortunately, after getting her wings back, she gets to join for real.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Rainbow Dash gets her wings back, she goes for her dream as a Wonderbolt, and has Applejack perform in it with Rarity helping make the costumes and Twilight making the effects as planned. Fluttershy would have joined, had it not been for her animals, but she was very kind to her childhood friend. Rainbow had to go through all sorts of ordeals, but the ending definitely makes up for it.
- Hurt/Comfort Fic
- My God, What Have I Done?: Stormcloud, Rainbow Dash's father, has this reaction when Celestia tells him why he and Firefly (Rainbow's mom) were wrong to force Rainbow to leave.
- Rape as Drama: In Pinkie's journal, it's heavily implied that her alternate self did this to Blues before murdering him.
- The Runaway: In Rainbow Dash's backstory, she ran away from home after getting into a fight at school with some foals who were calling her a "fillyfooler", and her parents forced her to either apologize to the bullies or leave.
- Shout-Out:
- In one chapter, Fluttershy warns Rainbow Dash not to go into her shed as it's a death trap, a nod to the Web Animation PONY.MOV.
- At the end of the epilogue, Stormcloud gives a tour of the Weather Factory for the benefit of foals, one of which is Scootaloo, on a field trip. He starts the tour with "you won't believe how the rainbows are made," a nod to the My Little Pony Dark Fic, Rainbow Factory.
- Slash Fic/Lemon: There are occasional sex scenes between Rainbow Dash and Applejack from Chapter 11 and onward. There are clean versions of some of these chapters on DeviantArt and FFN.
