Infected!AU: Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo

Another Infected!AU sketcharoo I had sitting around. This is the last one I finished before I got busy with school work, so after this I'll be working on the remaining Mane 6. o3o

This one is of Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. :3 I’ve always loved RD with short hair but this is by far the shortest I’ve drawn it. I just… I really like short hair styles. ;_; As for why she keeps it like this, it's for practical reasons.

In this AU Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo travel together as scavengers, or those who don’t run with any group or affiliation and has made the decision to live out in the post-outbreak Equestria outside a settlement. Scavengers only ever go into settlements to sell and trade items they find, but other than that it they remain on their own by choice. Rainbow stays away from settlements because she simply doesn’t trust them, especially “big named” ones, or the ones that have the most rumors floating around them about being a “save haven” for weary travelers. She’s generally distrusting of anyone that isn’t Scootaloo, to be honest, but eventually she’ll learn to trust the Mane 6 when she comes across them.

As for how she came to be Scootaloo’s guardian: during the first few years of post-outbreak, Rainbow Dash was a part of a Bandit group: bandits are soldiers of the Equestrian military that joined civilian rebel groups that tried to overthrow a military-ran settlement, and succeeded in taking the territory over, but eventually took to preying on other survivors once their own resources were depleted. Anyway, Rainbow; she was a part of a Bandit group and at some point she and a scouting party came across a mare in their territory. She was holding something in her arms and the group assumed it was something of use. While Rainbow herself didn’t pull the trigger, she watched as someone else in her group gunned the fleeing mare down, and she was the one to first approach the body.

Turning the corpse over revealed a young Scootaloo to be what she was carrying. Some of the group were clearly uneasy about just killing someone with a child while the rest were indifferent and debated on what to do with Scoots (some very disturbing suggestions popped up). The ultimate decision was to just kill the kid, but Rainbow spoke up and claimed Scoots before anything could be done to harm her. While Rainbow had stuck with the bandits out of thinking it was necessary in order to survive, she had been having doubts and growing more uneasy the longer she stayed. It was Scootaloo that was the tipping point for her and some of the other bandits, and she eventually escaped with Scoots in tow. Originally, it was more out of guilt than anything that made her keep Scootaloo with her, but she eventually grows to love the kid as if she were a little sister. Scootaloo was a little too young to actively remember what happened, but she knows, and sometimes she gets snippets of the memory in the form of a nightmare.

Scoots, given the way she lives, can take pretty good care of herself if she were to be left alone to her own devices. Like Spike she can handle a gun, but unlike Spike she hasn't actually killed anything other than the infected and animals. She carries on her a durable switchblade at all times; it used to belong to her mother (Rainbow managed to swipe it before leaving the bandits and gave the blade to Scoots), and given who she hangs with, she's kinda a potty-mouth. Scootaloo is a lot like Rainbow Dash in behavior although she's probably a bit more boastful and lets her mouth go faster than her thoughts, sometimes to the point where Rainbow has to tell her to "take it easy, kid". Unlike Rainbow though, Scoots still has some of that child-like optimism in her, and because of it she's a little more open to strangers despite her wariness. Truthfully, despite her being relatively happy with Rainbow as her adoptive big sister, Scoots is a little lonely, and kinda wishes she had others her age to speak to. I imagine them actually having Tank the tortoise in this AU (although he'd be much smaller) as a pet, a small cage and all. Sometimes Scoots would carry the little critter on her head, much to his delight.

Feel free to ask questions in the meantime, and I hope you guys like! :3

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