The bedroom was mercilessly white. Gauzy white curtains with glimmering gold fringes framed the late afternoon sun. The wallpaper was a dappled white, the furniture white with gold trim. There were barely enough shadows to give it a third dimension. There was a snow-white bed and canopy, and two white mares, an alicorn and a unicorn.
Celestia, the alicorn, stood before the window, and her pelt was as white as the noonday sun. She kept a few paces back from the bed, as if she were afraid of burning its occupant, or being burnt. Rarity, the unicorn, lay in the bed breathing shallowly, and her pelt was as white as the caps on the bottles hidden discreetly in the bathroom cabinets.
“Oh, Celly!” Rarity gasped. “It’s perfect! I shall never take it off!”
The perfection at hoof was a small jade pendant. It had frills around its edges resembling the waves Rarity had until recently worn in her mane. The pendant would eventually end up in one of Rarity’s bureau drawers, which were full of other items also judged perfect and timeless at one time or another. But both ponies had read “Ode to a Frisian Urn”, and understood that Rarity did not like to tarnish the beautiful with the merely literal. Rarity cooed over the pendant a few more times before she did the clasp up and let the pendant fall around her neck.
“I know it’s not your usual color,” Celestia said, “and you’ve changed your manestyle since the carver began it…”
“Changed? Certainly not. I was merely airing out the roots. Now, it’s your turn. But for your present, we must go out on the balcony. Would you be a dear?”
“Gladly,” Celestia said. She wrapped Rarity in a cloak of magic and lifted the old unicorn carefully from the bed. Carrying Rarity before her, she walked between stone columns and out onto the balcony.
The weather, of course, was also perfect. They could hear the counterpoint between four stringed instruments and the voices of at least as many well-watered ponies, which still streamed from the open windows of the grand ballroom down below. There had been a great cake covered in white icing, with forty-three candles in its center and two ribbons of frosting braided together along its edges, one in all the colors of Celestia’s mane, the other Rarity’s indigo. Many of the party-goers were still unaware that the guests of honor had already retired to their chambers above.
Celestia set Rarity down gently on the red silk cushion of the divan that waited there, then turned her head to sniff curiously at an enormous oak table arranged alongside it. The table was covered with pictures of Rarity. Photos, portraits, even multiple copies of clipped newspaper articles.
“Oh, Spike!” Rarity called.
Spike’s great head rose above the balcony’s horizon like a second moon, and he stretched his neck over the balustrade, his body standing somewhere on the courtyard below.
“They’re all here?” she asked. “Every last one?”
“Every one we could find,” Spike rumbled. “Even the copies.”
“I don’t understand,” Celestia said.
“Oh, but I think you do,” Rarity said. “We both know you must already be trying to choose a picture of me. My present to you, dear, is that I will choose.”
Celestia took a step back from the table and stamped a rear hoof. “A picture?”
“For your room. Oh, stop pretending. The room.”
Rarity had discovered the room some forty years before, when their liaison had still been occasionally considered newsworthy. It was the only room in the palace Celestia had left locked against Rarity’s magic. Rarity was the only pony in the palace who could tell, from a watery sheen to Celestia’s eyes and a nearly-imperceptible stoop in her shoulders, when she had visited it.
The room was not locked to the keys of the Chamberlain. He was loyal, but overly trusting, and, in any case, a stallion. It proved to be a small room with one small window, its walls covered with paintings of ponies, and drawers filled with dozens more. Some were frightfully old.
In the bottom drawer she found a mosaic of a brown piebald. A stallion, she guessed from the roguish gleam in his eyes. It had been carefully chipped from a stucco wall. Rarity was just holding it up to the light for a better look when the door opened behind her and Celestia trotted in, then came to an abrupt stop.
Rarity dropped the mosaic in surprise. It shattered on the floor, its bright tiles rolling in a hundred directions.
“No!” Celestia cried.
“Oh!” Rarity said. “I didn’t mean…”
"You've killed him!"
Celestia had pushed past her and bent over the clods of dust and color, gathering the tiles, pushing them around, trying and failing to reassemble them. Then she’d let them drop on the floor and hung her head until her horn rested on the ground.
The pictures, Celestia had eventually told her, were of the ponies she had known. Emphasis Celestia’s.
Rarity picked a photo off the table. It showed a young mare, shining with vigor, her indigo mane in its signature curls. Rarity had seldom let her picture be taken since she’d started using concealer. She sighed, then set the photo back down.
“Spike, if you would. That favor we spoke about.”
Spike’s head loomed over Rarity and the table. He looked at Rarity. He looked at the table.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Please, Spike. Be a dear.”
Spike turned his head away.
“Oh, don’t be like that, Spikey-Wikey.”
Rarity was still admiring the emerald crenelations on the back of Spike’s head, and wondering if you called it a comb or if that was just with chickens, when there was a tremor and a rushing wind. Rarity felt a shock of ancient, instinctive terror rise up her spine before she realized it was exactly what she had asked for. It was the sound of an adult dragon taking a deep breath.
Spike turned his head back towards her, and with a terrible roar, a great flame rolled past her, not the friendly green magic flame but white hot balefire, and consumed portraits, photographs, and table in an instant.
Celestia stared at the ashes in horror. “You… you were going to choose one.”
“I was going to choose,” Rarity said. “I choose none. My anniversary gift, to you, dear.”
Celestia looked, for once, bewildered.
“I’ve been very happy,” Rarity said. “It’s enough. You don’t need to remember me forever. Live.”
But Celestia only bent down to wrap Rarity’s frail body in her forelegs, hide her face in the white fur, and weep.
“It’s for your own good, dear. Spike, tell her it was for her own good.”
Spike frowned and said nothing. Far below them, in a cave under the mountain, hidden in the pages of an old book, was one remaining photograph.
Author's Note
Thanks to Foxy E, horizon, Axis of Rotation, Ferret, PresentPerfect, Clearly Not, & GhostOfHeraclitus for editing! Especially to whoever it was who suggested cutting it from 3 scenes to 2.
I held this back for a long time, thinking I could combine this and Celerity into a single story. But I think they're incompatible. The full-length version of "Celerity" is a story in which Celestia is the one who is able to let the past, which will eventually include Rarity, go, and Rarity slowly comes to terms with that. This is nearly the opposite: it is Celestia who wants to hold onto the past.
