Rarity opened her eyes. Her eyelids felt heavy and her head was still a confused mess of the lingering sights and sounds and smells of a dream involving a lascivious Rainbow Dash and a shared bath in tomato broth. Her eyes closed again, but something stringy tickled her cheek. She stirred and slowly sat up in bed. She yawned and stretched the stiffness out of her legs and back and neck. She drew a hoof up to her mane, but her hoof touched only bare scalp. Her eyes shot open and she sat straight up in bed, all drowsiness gone. She looked about her dark room and saw her mane hovering by her bed, a pair of her suitcases lying on the ground beneath it.
Rarity sighed with relief and relaxed against her pillows. “Dear, what are you doing up so late? Come back to bed.”
“Rarity,” her mane said, competing tones of sadness and conviction underlying his low, husky, masculine voice. “We need to talk.”
“Can’t it wait until morning?” Rarity asked, yawning again. “I”m tired, dear, and we have a busy day tomorrow.”
“No. It cannot wait.”
“I’m sure you remember, we’re presenting Princess Cadance’s anniversary dress at the Crystal Palace tomorrow,” Rarity said, lying back down. “I am not meeting royalty with a sleep-deprived mane half-dozing on my head.”
“That’s just it,” her mane said. “I won’t be going with you to the Crystal Empire tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t, Rarity, I just can’t anymore,” her mane said, turning away from her, its voice heavy with sadness, a sadness so passionate and saturated with emotion that it rumbled off every hair follicle and through the air and physically shook the bedroom and then passed through the walls of Carousel Boutique to the outside air and into the wind and dissipated across the land. At that moment, sobs seized the chests of the brokenhearted all across Equestria, sudden and seemingly divine inspiration for shoddy prosody and maudlin despair struck hack poets everywhere, and some even claimed to see the moon itself shed a solitary, mournful tear that fell to the earth in the form of a monstrous boulder that crushed a crippled, friendless filly as she lay in bed on the first night of her summer vacation from school, overwhelmed with joy at the prospect of three months free from failed tests and peer harassment. She died the way she lived, her classmates said. Stupidly and without the use of her legs.
Rarity, who often struggled to empathize with those less beautiful than herself (which was everyone), felt none of it. “Well, if you need another day, I’m sure we can obtain an extension. The Princess will be none too pleased, though.”
“You don’t understand,” her mane said, still trembling with the aftershocks of its monumental emotional release. “I knew you wouldn’t. You never have.”
Rarity rolled her eyes. She would never say so to its face, but her mane was something of a drama queen. An unattractive quality in a coiffure, but one shouldn’t complain. Whining is unsightly unless done with purpose. “All right, all right, I’m listening. What’s wrong?”
“Everything!” her mane cried. “It’s all wrong!”
Rarity stifled a yawn. “Such as?”
“You! Me!” her mane yelled, gesturing wildly around the room with its follicles. “This! All of this!”
“Dear, you’re becoming hysterical,” Rarity said. “Why don’t you come back to bed and rest a while? We can revisit the issue again in the morning after you’ve had time to clear your head.”
Her mane hovered silently by her bed for a long moment, expressionless. Of course, most manes, Rarity’s included, lack the complicated system of facial muscles that allow ponies to express emotions and so spend the majority of their lives being expressionless. But Rarity felt at this moment that her mane seemed particularly unreadable and mysterious, dark somehow, unknowable. Finally, it said in a calm, reasoned, but not cool or mean, voice, “Rarity, I’m leaving you.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” her mane said, reaching out to stroke her cheek, though the well-intended gesture caused a great deal more itchiness than consolement.
Rarity scratched her cheek. “Is this a joke?”
“How can I make you understand?” her mane said, voice dripping with despair.
“You’re being ridiculous.” Rarity began to feel flustered. Being a beautiful mare, she wasn’t accustomed to rejection. She was much more accustomed to, upon raising her hoof in the general direction of any stallion or colt, having her hooves immediately tongue-licked clean by beauty-struck admirers. A somewhat irritating phenomenon, actually. Rarity, being something of a drama queen herself, often utilized dramatic, sweeping gestures of her hooves while speaking, pointing them in the direction of many stallions at once. This had resulted in near-riots of frenzied public hoof-licking on more than one occasion. Rarity also had a habit of poofing her mane with her hooves while flirting, and sometimes found herself doing far less poofing and much more accidental wiping of a beau’s slobber all over her mane. Nothing makes a stallion less attractive faster than feeling their warm, bubbly spittle on your forehead.
“Ah,” her mane said. “I know what must be done.” It moved away from the bed and towards the windows on the other side of the room. It stopped before them and, after a gentlemanly bow, tore the curtains away from every window at once. Light flooded the room from all sides, and her mane hovered in the center of the crisscrossing beams of the gray light of the moon and the yellow light of lamp posts. “Behold!” it declared. “Behold my whiskery, purple splendor! Gaze upon me, Rarity, and tell me what you see.”
Gaze Rarity did, her eyes widening, her heart beating faster, her face and neck and ears going warm, her breath shallow, mind and body and soul intoxicated by the majesty she witnessed. The moon shone behind and above her mane, among a deep blue and purple sky spotted with twinkling, shimmering stars that illuminated her mane like heavenly stage lights. The moonlight fell upon her mane in a visible torrent, and her mane glowed with an otherworldly, ethereal light. It sparkled. Every perfectly aligned follicle glimmered. Every exquisite curl shined. A flock of birds passing by the window was struck blind by the sight and fell to the ground in a cacophonous clatter of squawks and flapping wings. They dived as one and struck the ground headfirst, their beaks driving into the dirt. Their bodies lay on the ground, dead, hearts stopped in the beholding of pure, unfiltered beauty. Arses pointed skyward, beaks down, their bodies were spread across the Boutique’s lawn like a sacrificial offering to the overwhelming and all-consuming glory of Rarity’s mane.
Rarity could say nothing, her voice lost, because what she saw was nothing less than the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
“Now you understand,” her mane said, still bathing in washed out moonlight. “Now you see me truly for the first time. Do you honestly believe this, this artistry, for I am art truly incarnate, has been condemned by the heavens to lie atop your head, fending off lice and raindrops, suckling the dregs of vicarious success from your scalp until both of our lives are corroded and carried away by the currents of time?”
“But… I thought you were happy.” Rarity looked down at her blankets. “I thought you were happy with me. I thought you loved me…”
Her mane rushed to her side and touched her shoulder.
Rarity itched her shoulder.
“Oh, Rarity,” her mane said. “I do. I fell in love with you the very first moment I saw you, and I shall love you until my final breath. The love I feel for you is pure and genuine. Our love is timeless. It will outlive our bodies, even our souls, and upon our deaths, it will wander the shadowy earth as a spirit that will forever attest to the feral, heavenly intensity of our passions.”
“Then why leave? Aren’t I enough for you? Isn’t our love enough?”
“You know it is not,” her mane said, swaying side to side in a gesture that might have been the hairy equivalent of shaking one’s head, but Rarity had an awfully hard time telling for sure. Reading her mane’s body language could often feel like reading the body language of a pear—it occasionally, most often after a few too many glasses of wine, appeared to reveal astonishing insights into the inner depth and complexity of the living designs of the universe, but usually just appeared tasteless and vaguely misshapen. “You of all mares,” her mane continued, “understand the fallacies of romance. Love is not enough. Love has never been enough. Love has never stayed the drums of war or filled the stomachs of hungry children or paid an overdue parking ticket. Would you give up fashion, give up designing, give up your boutique for our love?”
“No, of course not,” Rarity admitted quietly.
“I want more, Rarity. I need more. I am destined for more. I have dreams. I am your mane, but I am not you. I am my own being. I have wishes of my own.”
“But what?” Rarity cried, desperation leaking into her voice. “What do you want that I can’t give you?”
Her mane shrugged, and then a ping-pong paddle appeared beside it, apparently from nowhere. “Ping-pong,” her mane said.
“Um.”
“I have only two passions in this short, mortal, mean expanse of time bookended by darkness and darkness we call life,” her mane said. “One is you. The other is striking small, hollow, plastic spheres and sending them spinning, arcing, darting over the net and onto the hard table surface, watching my opponent, smelling their sweat, their fear, seeing the glint of challenge in their eyes, my every muscle tense, ready, prepared to spring into glorious movement—”
Rarity sighed.
Her mane huffed. “I have ambition, Rarity! I have talent. I have skill, real skill. I could be the greatest ping-pong player these ponies ever saw. I know I could. But not if I spend the rest of my life lolling about on your scalp. Every day I wait is another day I could be training, that I could be working my way up the ranks. I will be the Equestrian ping pong champion, Rarity. I promise you, I swear to you, I will.”
“I know. I know you will.” Rarity looked up at her mane, tears in her eyes. “But what about me? What will happen to me? What can I do without you?”
Her mane held her close (and she scratched her shoulder), and whispered, “Rarity, you are strong. Perhaps once you needed me. Perhaps once you could not have succeeded without my beautiful follicles resting upon your head like a whiskery crown, but you have developed your own beauty. You have grown. Perhaps once ponies looked at you and only saw me, my brilliance, but now when ponies look at you, they see you, and only you. Few even notice me anymore, lost in the glimmering radiance of your elegant, refined beauty. What can you do without me? Anything! Anything you wish! Anything and everything you desire to possess will be yours. But we both know exactly what it is you wish for, and that too will come to pass. Rarity, my love, you will be the greatest fashion designer that ever lived. Your designs will be worn by emperors and empresses, will change lives, will change the world.”
Rarity sniffled and rested her head against her mane. “Thank you,” she said, and itched her head.
They stayed close together for a long time, feeling each other’s presence, both knowing the other would be soon gone from their side.
“You’re really leaving?” Rarity asked.
“My bags are already packed,” her mane said, gesturing to the suitcases on the floor.
They stayed quietly together for another long while.
“Rarity,” her mane finally said, gazing deep into her eyes, “make love to me, one last time.”
“Of course.”
They kissed. Normally, Rarity, like everyone else, disliked the sensation of feeling hair in her mouth, stringy, oily, possibly dirty follicles stuck on the tongue, poking at the back of the throat. But her mane was different. Her mane tasted of raspberries and lilacs. It tasted of lust and carnal flesh. It tasted like pure sex, and when its lustrous, shampooed fibers slid over and under her tongue, her mind became a haze of fervent desire. Her tongue itched. For some reason, she thought of Rainbow Dash pouring a spoonful of steaming tomato broth on her belly.
Then her mane touched her, and all thoughts of pegasus ponies and tomato paste products were lost, and her mind was consumed with thoughts of mane. Her mane touched her neck, her chest, her thighs, her flanks, silken as silk, satiny as satin, wooly as wool, cottony as cotton, poofy as poofs, spicy as spice, seductive as seduction, foxy as foxes, sexy as sex. Her mane’s touch was like a great dollop of runny, fatty sour cream on a bowl of mashed potatoes, crinkling, crackling dried leaves the color of campfires and sunsets beneath one’s hooves, cool, refreshing shower water washing away all the heat and sweat of an early morning run and leaving behind only the satisfaction of tired muscles. Rarity itched all over.
Rarity screamed, loud and long and high, like a high school filly looking into the mirror on prom night and finding a bulbous, red, pustule zit on her snout looking back, big and messy as a pomegranate. But Rarity did not scream out of girlish terror or fear of adolescent embarrassment. She screamed in wonder and ecstasy at the incredible passions her mane evoked in her deepest of flesh. Rarity screamed, and she did not stop. And neither did her mane.
They made love long into the night.
When they finished, they lay in bed together, Rarity’s arm around her mane, her mane resting on her chest. They breathed slowly, heavily. Rarity's arm and chest itched. The sheets had been tossed out the open windows at some point during the frenzy of their lovemaking, along with Rarity’s armoire and half of a family portrait (the other half rested at the bottom of the stairwell outside the bedroom). Twin carnival ride-like tracks of ketchup and mustard ran along the floor and the walls in rollercoaster loop de loops and waterfowl swan dives. Half-digested dark chocolate fudge had been smeared on every available surface in the room, including each other’s body’s, so everything slumbered under a layer of sweet, sugary, slime. The air was humid and heavy.
A brilliant golden glow crested over the horizon and stretched over the still-sleeping town and through the bedroom window and onto the bed.
Her mane stirred. “Rarity,” it said. “It is time.”
“Must you?” she asked, unmoving, eyes closed, voice a whisper.
“You know that I must.”
Rarity felt the her mane move off her chest and away from the bed. She felt the beginning of a long, terrible absence, a desire to scratch without feelings of itchiness. She sat up and opened her eyes. She saw her mane hovering by an open window, suitcases hovering beside it, facing away from her, gazing at the distant horizon.
“Will I ever see you again?” Rarity asked.
“When you look upon the sunset,” her mane said, not turning around, “know that I am looking upon the same sunset. In that moment, our souls will touch and be as one.”
“That’s not really what I asked…”
“Farewell!” her mane shouted, and flew out the window, out of her bedroom, and out of her life, forever.
