Midnight Oil

by The 24th Pegasus

Rating: everyone
Tags: Rainbow Dash, Romance, Rarity, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 3048

In the middle of the night, Rarity forsakes sleep to work on a special project for a special somepony.

Rarity is no stranger to working late nights and burning her fair share of midnight oil to finish orders. Tonight is no different, except that her project isn't a last-minute order for some noblemare in Canterlot. It's for somepony far closer and far more important to her than any customer she's ever had, or ever will have, and for that reason, it needs to be perfect.

For her, she'll burn all the oil in the world just to do it right.

Cover art by Ruirik

Published 2015-11-07 00:00:04 UTC
Last updated 2015-11-07 00:00:04 UTC

The Things We Do for Those We Love

Midnight Oil

The 24th Pegasus

The sewing machine hums to life as I set my magic to work. Pressing the pedal has become second nature to me, and I feel a sense of satisfaction as it glides along on well-oiled hinges. There’s a sort of elegance to the antiquated machine as its needle bobs up and down, waiting for the fabric I’m about to feed it. It purrs with a careful precision, something that the new electric machines Twilight tried to buy me lack. Besides, this machine has carried me through some of my steepest and most important orders. How could I turn to anything else for tonight’s project?

My shadow flickers across rolls and rolls of fine fabrics imported from the far-flung reaches of Equestria as I collect what I need. I swiftly unspool a few square yards of blue and yellow spandex and section off a carefully measured amount. My magic simultaneously gathers everything I need from the tables lining the room and positions a mannequin opposite my sewing kit. I drape my measuring tape and the spandex over the mannequin’s back while I think. I bite my lip, brush my mane out of my eyes, and carefully subdivide my workspace in my head. In a blink, I draw the sewing machine front and center and set the lantern off to the side where it won’t be in the way. I notice the oil is low, so I set my things aside and trot off to the storage closet at the end of the hallway.

The boutique is dark and quiet this late at night. I can see sleepy Ponyville through the large windows with the ample light provided by Luna’s full moon; only a few candles remain lit in the neighboring houses, and not a soul wanders the dirt streets. Seeing all that makes me yawn and long for the warm embrace in bed that awaits me, but I shake the sleep from my eyes and slide open the closet door. My tired eyes wander up and down the seemingly numerous odds and ends filling its shelves before I find the flask of lantern oil tucked under a blanket. I pull it out and slosh the fluid around a little; I’m going to have to buy more soon enough.

As I trot down the hall, I pause by the bannister. Faint, faint snoring seemingly echoes in the stillness of the boutique. With a tired smile, I realize I left the bedroom door open. I return to my workspace and gently shut the door behind me, not wanting to make too much noise. Even then, I’m not too concerned about that. The antique machine is whisper quiet, and besides, it’d take a lot of noise to wake her up.

The tiny flame inside the lantern seems to grow larger as I feed it more oil. I set the flask aside and simply stare at the flickering light for several minutes. I’m not sure what I see in it. Inspiration? The future? Or simply the delusions of a tired mind after a long day’s work? At the very least, it’s comforting. The lively dance of the fire feels like the quiet yet supportive companionship of a friend.

My mane falls into my eyes once more. It’s already lost the tightness of its coils, coils I painstakingly twirled into it eighteen hours ago. I casually pull open a drawer from across the room with my magic and gather a few purple hairbands. En route, I notice that I’d accidentally grabbed an orange one with the rest. I frown and stick my tongue out at it as I send it back. It may be one in the morning, but Celestia forbid I ever make such a garish mistake with my appearance.

I pull exactly three-fifths of my mane back with my hooves and tie it into a ponytail with the hairbands. The weight of my hair tugs on the back of my skull instead of dragging my head forward, and it keeps my vision clear when I move my head around. I run a hoof through my mane to catch any loose hairs that might have escaped, and I levitate over the pocket mirror I keep in this room to get a good look at myself. A white mare with tired blue eyes stares back, but I’ll be wrong if I say she doesn’t at least look pretty.

With the mane situation taken care of, I bring my focus once more to my workspace. The familiar tingle at the tip of my horn takes hold as I pull over the folder of patterns I need from my filing cabinet. I only need to see the blue stripe I’d drawn across the folder to know it’s the right one. A smile makes its way to my face as I recall the fuss she made about it when she saw only that stripe adorning her folder. ‘Kind of missing its coolness,’ I believe her exact words were.

I shake my head and open the simple folder, pulling forth the patterns I need and laying them on top of the sections of spandex. I gently stretch the spandex around a flat wooden panel and clamp the edges down before I pin the torso pattern to it. Wonderbolt uniforms are supposed to be tight and form-fitting, so I need to make sure that her uniform is actually sized a size too small for her by stretching the spandex beforehand. I realize just how small that actually is. She’s not a large mare by any stretch of the imagination; on the contrary, she’s smaller than even poor Fluttershy. By the time I’ll be done with this uniform, it’ll look like it’s sized for a filly.

Still, I can’t say that she doesn’t completely own the look. It’s hard to find anything that doesn’t match her colors. Of course, when she got her first uniform, she spent a literal hour modeling it for me. I blush and pick up my scissors, make a tiny incision right next to the pattern, and begin to cut it out. Half of that hour was for taking measurements. The other half was for my own personal enjoyment.

I finish cutting and set my scissors aside. My magic deftly plucks the pins out of the patterns, and the spandex segments shrink to their relaxed size. I stare at my work for several seconds, wondering just where in Equestria the facemask had come from. I realize I must have cut it out without even thinking about it. Smirking, I set those pieces aside and direct my scissors towards the hoof covers. It’s good to know that I’ve made so many uniforms for her that I can make them in my sleep.

Which brings me to this uniform…

I finish cutting out everything I need from the blue spandex and set the pieces atop the mannequin for now. I repeat the process with the yellow spandex, stretching it across the board and clamping it down before pinning the patterns to it, and wonder just what exactly I’m doing up at one—one thirty—in the morning, carefully sewing a Wonderbolts uniform from scratch instead of getting some much needed rest.

I shoot a glance at the tattered remains of a uniform tossed on the back of an armchair. The story practically tells itself. What happens when you combine a daredevil pegasus, a challenge from a teammate, and the edge of the Everfree Forest? Celestia, the mare is just lucky she wasn’t hurt! Whipping willows are known to be very violent flora, and of course she thinks she can fly through them like nopony’s business! They could have maimed her, or much, much worse!

I take a deep breath and focus back on cutting the jagged yellow cuffs out of the spandex that go around the fetlocks. Somehow she’d managed to escape the willows with nothing more than a few lacerations and a shredded uniform. Of course, the Wonderbolts had sent her home early before her show in Ponyville tomorrow—today—and of course that meant she’d wandered into my boutique, freshly bandaged and her ragged uniform between her teeth. She looked like a cat giving her owner a dead mouse as a present, no matter how much she’s expressed her intense displeasure for rodents, dead or alive, to said feline before!

I realize I’ve cut one of the fetlock motifs in two. Frowning, I take a deep breath and toss the halves into the scrap pile. Sixty-two yellow spandex bit-cents nestle themselves amongst the other shreds of fabric I’ve saved from my mistakes over the past month. By now there must be forty bits worth of fabric in the pile. One of these days I’ll make something out of all the scraps. Just not tonight.

Scissors dans aura, I recut the fourth fetlock motif and move on to the chest fabric. Of course she didn’t offer me much of an explanation when she wandered into the boutique, gauze plastered to her neck and shoulder. I think she did that just to see me gasp… and gallop to her side… and worry over her as I checked her bandages and frantically asked what happened. It was only when I threatened to call Nurse Redheart that she finally told me what happened and showed me they were little more than scratches.

I rub my hoof. It’s like it remembers the slap I gave her. And the profuse apologies I stammered forth as I hugged her and cried.

But she’s tougher than she looks. She brushed it off like it was nothing. And then she had the gall to apologize to me, when I was the one who hit her…

Sighing, I lift the chest spandex off of the board and remove the pins in the designs. Sometimes, I don’t know how she puts up with me. She moves at… well, her pace, and there’s no way I can follow that quickly. Nopony can. But she always waits, and for some reason I can get away with things nopony else can. If Twilight wanted to see her in a dress for some formal ball, she’d say no and fly off before anypony can catch her. But if I ask her, then she can’t put the thing on fast enough. It’s… cute, honestly, and if I said that aloud, she wouldn’t talk to me for days.

This coming from personal experience.

With all the pieces of the flight suit cut out, I move on to stitching the thing together. My magic takes hold of the pedal and sets the machine running, and I start by making the largest stitches first, which means attaching the yellow chest piece to the rest of the suit. I slot a specialized attachment into the machine and adjust a few settings to set it for zig-zag stitching, pin the pieces of spandex together, and begin to run the fabric through the machine. There’s a slight tug of resistance as it struggles to get under the foot, but then the machine pulls it along for me and I only have to use my hooves to guide it and keep the feed steady. I keep a careful eye on my work and pluck out each pin a moment before it would slip underneath the foot. Sewing is so easy with magic, especially magic as precise as mine. No wonder Applejack had such a hard time during that whole ordeal three years ago.

I work through the night, taking extra time with each stitch and making sure the seams are meshed just perfectly. I check, double check, and triple check my placement and alignment, and I run the machine at its slowest setting for extra precision. Even still, more than once I go back and completely tear out a stitch and start over. There is absolutely no possibility of me providing her with a subpar product; this flight suit is going to be the best she’s ever had, and it will be the envy of all her teammates!

The sewing machine makes a pitiful hiss as the fabric bunches up under the foot. I stand there in shock for several moments before I find enough willpower to scowl at it. Of course, that’s what I get for taking my mind away from my work for even a second. Sighing, I mutter some profanities I reserve for well after Sweetie Belle is asleep and gently reclaim the fabric the machine stole from me. I spend five minutes on that alone just to prevent the spandex from tearing and pull out the stitching in that piece. My perfection demands that the stitch be done in one continuous length of thread; anything else is simply not a “Rarity” and will not be tolerated under this roof.

I take the time to double check the thread I have in the machine, and find that the bobbin is almost out. I breathe a sigh of relief as I exchange it for a fresh one. If the bobbin had run out of thread on me, I might not have noticed until I’d taken the suit off of the machine. Everything else looks good, so I run the suit back through the machine and manage to stitch the pieces together without much more hassle.

By the time I finish sewing the Wonderbolt patches on the flanks, it’s nearing three in the morning. I pull the flight suit off of the sewing machine and stretch it out with my magic. It looks fabulous at a glance, and I put on my glasses for my hyperopia so I can see the details up close. A few loose threads hang here and there, and I take a tiny pair of scissors and snip away all the loose ends and rough cuts of fabric. When I feel I’ve gotten them all, I slide the flight suit onto a mannequin in her size and take a step back to admire my work.

Stunning.

I take a deep breath. It’s finally finished, and better than ever. The jagged yellow details are clean and crisp, sharper than anything that the Wonderbolts’ own providers make them. And this one was all for her. Smiling, I tug here and there on the suit to get it positioned just perfectly, when an idea hits me.

I grab a bit of gold thread and pull back the left flank of the suit. Just inside the outline of the patch so that it won’t show through the spandex of the suit, I carefully stitch a message into the fabric. It takes all of a minute, and when I tie off the knot, I take a second to read the message again.

Rainbow,

When you’re up there, I’m always by your side.

Love, Rares

There. I smile and fold the fabric back against the mannequin. It’s all ready for when she has to report to the field in… five hours. I yawn and try to blink the sleep out of my bleary eyes, which threaten to cross on me. My work station is a mess, but that’s something I can deal with later. Right now, I really, desperately need some sleep, and a warm body to cuddle with.

Thankfully I can find both in my bedroom.

I yawn a little squeak of a ladylike yawn and grab the lantern in my magic. Leaving my work room behind, I cross the hall and peek into the open door of my bedroom. She’s stopped snoring—mostly. She doesn’t not snore when she sleeps, she only varies its intensity. I levitate the lantern out in front of me and set it down on the nightstand next to my side of the bed, stretch my aching limbs, and crawl in next to her. I wince as she starts to move and groan, and soon she tilts her head towards me. Tired ruby eyes reflect the tiny light the lantern offers, and she blinks once, twice at me. “…Rares?”

I smile, pry the hairbands out of my mane, and drop them on the nightstand next to me. In the same motion, I turn my head around and blow out the lantern, once more plunging the room into darkness. “Shh,” I whisper to her, slowly working my hooves around her shoulders. “Go back to sleep, Rainbow. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

“Mmmf…” she mumbles, and she buries her head into my chest. I pull her tight and nuzzle her forehead, planting a few loving kisses here and there. She giggles slightly and looks up at me. “Unfff… Stop it, Rares.” But I can see she’s smiling nonetheless.

I return the smile, and then I press my muzzle to hers. She’s slow to react at first—she can hardly move if she doesn’t get at least twelve hours of sleep a day—but she responds and wraps her forelegs around my waist. Our lips dance and flutter together, but I don’t push her when she’s this tired. After a few gentle kisses, we go back to nuzzling, and I kiss her forehead a few more times.

She yawns, and I brush her beautiful mane out of her eyes. “Get some sleep,” I whisper, slowly stroking her face. “You’re going to need it.”

Her eyes close and she snuggles in tightly against my warmth. “You’re gonna be there, right?” she murmurs, fighting to stay awake. I kiss her head in response and trace her jawline with a hoof.

“Of course, darling,” I whisper. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

She smirks as best she can. “Good. It’d be pretty sucky if you weren’t there.” Yawning again, she sighs, and I feel her body relax in my embrace. “Rares?”

“Yes?” I ask. I stifle a yawn myself and bury my nose in her mane. It smells of rain in the spring.

“I love you. You’re the best.”

I kiss her once more and try to find some way to hold her closer. “Thank you, Rainbow. I love you too.”

It doesn’t take long after that for her breathing to slow. She’s asleep in my forelegs with a smile on her face. Yawning once more, I flutter my eyelids shut and set off to join her with a happy sigh.