All The Leaves are Brown...
When she awakes that morning, it is with the sunrise. She furrowes her brow and sighs through her frown.
She’d been dreaming of Canterlot again.
Unhurried, she lets the sleep clear from her brain while she bides her time in bed. And then, still contemplative as to why she’d dreamt of the same place for the last few nights, she drifts to her curtains and opens them.
The sunrise stain grows deeper and blends into gold and crimson, orange and pink; it lifts the clear, opal spaces of luminous beauty into a gray, and then a lighter blue still, as the panoply of color spreads far along the horizon of the plane. It is a thing to make one look in awe, to hush the thoughts and bring peace to the heart.
Something of its calm and strength bleeds into her expression and relaxes the set frown and furrowed brow that she’s worn since sleep left her and she’d opened her eyes to the darkness of her mask and to another day.
In Ponyville.
She doesn’t know why she dreams of Canterlot. She glances at the glory of the sunrise and the second audible exhale of the morning whispers out from her. She thinks of closing the curtains.
It is an off morning. She’s not had an on morning for a while.
And once more her eyes stray betrayingly to the sunrise, her third since waking, as if the sunrise is the pinnacle of all of her problems, or maybe the solution to all of them. It is just as beautiful, just as inspiring and calming. The dawn of another day, other possibilities.
In Ponyville.
She shakes her head and turns to restore her bed to an unslept-in condition.
A bath beckons her with promises of relaxation and distraction from her distraction, so she takes a long soak.
And still the dream does not go away. It flits through her thoughts as the steam slowly drifts in the space of the bathroom, catches and holds the early sunlight rays that seeps through the bathroom window.
The mares are delicate in their makeup and dainty and refined in their dresses; dresses that she looks upon with a familiar sort of pride and possession. They are finely designs, more glamorous and daring than she could have thought herself capable. How accomplished she has become.
Movement is everywhere. Dancing, merriment.
Congratulations, compliments, and familiarities pass over her ears. La vie est belle.
She shakes her head, that undecided frown playing her lips again. Suddenly the bath doesn’t seem like such a good idea and she pulls the plug, her mind instead shifting to the agenda of the day as the water growls down the drain.
She has clients today. She cannot remember the time they would be coming, but hopes it would be sooner rather than later, lest she is left alone with her thoughts for most of the day. Also, lunch with Twilight. She hadn’t forgotten that, as it is to be the apogee of her week, it seems. Perhaps Twilight could figure this dream out for her. She is hesitant about the idea of telling Twilight, dubious of the prospect and outcome. Dreams were such messy, ambiguous dances of interpretation.
…But of course her friend has other issues besides a silly dream.
She walks from her bathroom and wanders into the kitchen. She considers fixing breakfast and then thinks better of it. Her stomach is tense, queasy, as if she is nervous or motion sick.
A sheet sits on the table, and she stares at it for a long, lingering moment, frozen in something like uncertainty, before sliding her eyes to the window above the sink and looking again at the starting day.
Time seems to be moving extraordinarily slow this morning. Perhaps she is moving too fast?
She shakes her head and inhales through her teeth sharply as if she’d accidentally pricked herself with a needle and then sets about making breakfast.
Her clients arrive at thirteen past eight, and by then it feels as though it is one in the afternoon. She welcomes them in with an almost overly gracious flourish, grateful for the distraction.
They prattle and tsk, coo and gasp, gossip and overall do nothing but rustle the dresses on her racks as if hiding behind the front of shopping for a social call.
There is to be heavy snowfall to make up for last year’s small ‘mistake’... Are the Cakes truly trying for another foal? The twins are barely yearlings!... You cannot sit here and tell me that anyone would run this town better than her; Mayor Mare has had the position for... Changes coming? Please, this is Ponyville... Such a shame, I really liked that shop…
By nine her cheeks hurt from her ever-present smile, or, or sympathetic frown... The pinched, tight lips of contemplation!... The bitten bottom lip of suspense, uh, worry?
The porcelain chinaware is decorated with bands of gold and robin egg flowers that bare immaculate detail in each petal. Heavy silverware twinkles like mirrors under the chandelier, glitters like the strings on the instruments of the quartet up on that raised platform over there. They play the background noise that make conversations unable to have awkward pauses.
(Hear those susurrations of gossip and responding murmurings, polite laughter spiking the mood. Comfortable, with a certain piquant of scandal. The ease at which they ruin lives. How fun it is; a slip of tongue, a slight of hoof. A game.)
Three fireplaces, one at each end of the room, with only coals and dying embers stirred back to life every once in a while by passing tuxedos with forgettable faces. Everything twinkles, everything glows.
(Feel the warmth; the presences that exhale heat when they speak their charming calumny. More than enough bodies crowded in—with layers upon layers of clothing worn on their bodies. Dresses of conceit. Tuxedos of deceit. How do they breathe under all the masquerade? No, no—there’s really no need for roaring ingles.)
Snow falls outside, drifts lazily down, down, and catches the light from the window: shines, displaces the stars.
Who needs stars?
She sighs, and ten o’clock accompanies it.
What is two hours?
She passes the thick sheet and its calligraphy on her way to the workshop, giving it but a cursory glance.
Her workshop brims with ideas that did not stick for more than a day, perhaps two. Fleeting moments of unholy surges of inspiration. Half-created, sagging and old, their visions gone. Distraction? Couldn’t hold on.
Why? They ask her.
She throws nothing away, so they are not truly abandoned. Perhaps their inspiration would find her again someday, she reasons, and then she could complete them, or make them into something better. An idea upon an idea. Like a landfill. A graveyard refurbished.
The writing desk is facing the window, a paper patiently waiting for her. She goes to it like she had yesterday and the day before. She gives it a long scrutiny and then looks outside where there is actually something to look at.
Light snow falls, thin snowflakes that were barely worth to be called such. The pegasi were testing the new shipment of clouds. Late and scrambling, unaccustomed to having to worry about such things. The loss, the change, the… absence… rings like a repetitive piano pattern in the great hall of her dream.
A scowl. A small, sad smile.
She turns from the window.
She’s worried her scarf will dim the mood of the confectionery, or, worse yet, stand out. It is the gloomiest gray in quite possibly all of existence. It had been all the craze in both Canterlot and Manehattan something like two months ago. Magazines had dedicated more pages to singing its praise than any scarf before its time, except for maybe the one around this time last year. But that was last year.
La misère exquise, they had swooned and fallen all over themselves about this particular scarf.
The Exquisite Misery.
How could she not buy such a thing? she’d thought with a smirk and an eye roll. She truly adored, sometimes, elegant nonsense of this sort. The freedom and privilege of fawning melodramatically over a scarf, a bracelet, a saddlebag—an accessory—and having ponies who agreed, or, better yet, disagreed with her.
C’est la vie.
The Exquisite Misery suffocates her now as it hangs loosely around her neck. She really should go back and change it, but the time had slid into ‘fashionably late’ five minutes ago and she knows better than to think that legitimately late is still considered fashionably late just because one is fashionable.
She knows not how the time had slipped out of its cuffs and from under her careful vigil. She’d not been doing anything particularly consuming of her attention all day. Perhaps it made its escape while she blinked through the endless wonder her mind had spun in dreamland. She could not force her mind from it. Could not force it from her mind.
How annoying.
She sidesteps the potholes and dips in the uneven road without thought. The air doesn’t penetrate what she wears but takes no pity on any exposed flesh. She likes the way it clears her head even as she bundles herself tighter. Winters in Ponyville have always been a little on the mild side. Apparently things are changing.
A woodpecker searches for a snack in the distance, hammering against one of the thick, tall pines on the outer edge of the park, no doubt. The river that weaves its way through Ponyville sings nearby. She smells dough and sugar—Sugarcube Corner—as her ears pick out the subdued bustle of the noon market in winter.
Memories flood her, but the clock swats them away. Her whimsical smile disappears. Her eyes pass over the town square where the wind swirls the tiny snowflakes into a convoluted dance to fill the empty space.
How cold it is outside.
She takes Exquisite Misery off as soon as she walks through the door of Sugarcube Corner, removing the only object that is offending to the cheer of the bakery. She balls it up in her hooves, not knowing what to do with it. Should she hide it?
Twilight sits in the corner, staring out the window with a small frown on her lips. It is hot inside, and the sudden temperature change makes her uncomfortable. Happy mediums seemed not to exist in winter.
She saunters carefully to Twilight’s table. Has she been there for a while? Food sits at both her place and in front of Twilight. She’d ordered for both of them. How thoughtful of her. What is she looking at? What distracts her so?
“Darling, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long.” She hides the scarf beneath the table, folding it over her lap, resting her hooves over it.
Twilight jumps slightly, recovers, smiles at her: fake and hasty. Something is bothering her, and she is hiding it. Had she really not heard Rarity approach?
Twilight says something back to her, probably reassures her that it is alright, or lies that she’d just gotten there, herself. Rarity looks around the bakery. Are they the only ones here? The bored help is blowing gum bubbles, leaning on the counter, watching the door. Pinkie must be off in Cloudsdale again. Harrumph.
She turns away with a frown. Twilight has stopped speaking, taken to fiddling with her food. What terrible company Rarity is being.
“How have you been, Twilight? It seems forever since I’ve seen you.”
“Ah,” Twilight mutters, “I’ve been well.” It is said as almost an afterthought.
Twilight repeats the question at her and Rarity smiles and lies that she’s been busy. Their conversation flickers, an unsteady flame. Back and forth they talk like strangers on the trolley, but they say nothing of substance. Nothing worthy of their long friendship; nothing worth putting any thought into; nothing worth mentioning.
“This place seems inordinately dead, doesn’t it?” Twilight muses after their duet of small talk fades and exhausts itself. Twilight looks around as though for the first time noticing the emptiness and baffled by it.
“Quite,” Rarity agrees mildly, and then hesitates. “She is probably in Cloudsdale.”
“Probably. Though she said nothing about it.” The fact does not seem to bother Twilight too terribly much. Silence stews, Rarity chews on her lip. How to phrase this...
“Do ever think about… Moving to Canterlot?” She asks carefully under a casual guise.
Twilight shrugs easily enough. “I spend enough time there as it is. I grew up there. To fully move there? I don’t know. I know ponies expect certain things since I'm a Princess, but there is the little trouble of the fact that I already have a castle here, and it is a Princess’s prerogative.” She rolls her eyes, smirking playfully. Unconcerned about the idea. Princess’s prerogative indeed.
Rarity laughs that second-nature, secondhand laughter of polite society—the fake one, the one she’s laughed for the better part of the leaves changing and then falling off. She misses hearing her real laugh, misses using it. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t use it anymore. She was sure the world was laughing at her, after all. Why not be like Pinkie and laugh along?
“Why do you ask?” Twilight says.
Rarity pulls away from the subject abruptly, takes a drink of her coffee to mask her jerky reaction to the separation. Twilight’s eyes follow her, ever inquisitive, as though she truly has no clue.
“No reason, darling.”
Author's Note
So here's a question for you guys: what do you think this story is about?
