Clop clop clop...
...clop clop clop...
...clop clop clop
Applejack trotted briskly into Twilight Sparkle's throne room late one night, whistling to herself. She took one look at the polished, crystalline interior...
...and she stopped on a dime.
Green eyes blinked.
Orange freckles... freckled.
A white lump of fluffy fuzz was draped over the edge of the round table. From afar, Applejack spotted a twirl of purple mane hair. It looped elegantly once or twice around a pale white horn, then dangled off the circular edge. There was a holographic flicker to the royal furniture—perhaps reacting to a certain fashionista's dormant leylines—but then all was silent yet again.
Applejack's head tilted forty-five degrees like a fuzzy-eared clock face. She squinted... then crept forward on silent horse feet.
Upon closer inspection, it turned out that Rarity wasn't dead—not even mostly. The unicorn in question had teetered off the edge of her seat in the midst of some errant wave of slumber. Judging from a motley assortment of pincushions, measuring tapes, scissors, and dress designs—the applepone could only assume that the marshmallowy mare had chosen to perform a creative crunch session at the Palace overnight... only to daze off from unmitigated exhaustion.
There was no snoring to be heard—not even the peepiest peep of a snarghl. Nevertheless, Applejack leaned even closer... as if to inspect whether or not her elegant companion had been inexplicably replaced by a statue. At long last, she spotted a foggy cloud of condensation forming, dissolving, and reforming across the tabletop surface just beneath Rarity's kittenesque maw.
Breathing more easily, Applejack leaned back. She pivoted slightly... then proceeded to backtrot... making each step slow, deliberate, and as delicate as her apple-bucking hooves could manage.
Then—in a powdery burst of horse hissing—Rarity jolted.
Bucky McGillycuddy and Kicks McGee instantly screeched to a halt. Applejack wobbled nervously in place like the hay-scented pendulum she was. Navigating a grimace, she kept both thin eyes locked on her somnambulist compatriot.
Rarity winced. Her eyes fluttered—almost as if pained by the luminescence that permeated the spacious interior of the castle above her. With a cold shudder, she stirred... then scrunched even tighter into the cranny between her seat and the table's edge. The fashionista's forelimbs curled inward, and her breaths echoed with a trilling sound—positively feline in its execution—and once again she was nothing but soft sighs and powder-white quivers.
At last, Applejack's pores could function again. The sweat bulbs formed... then evaporated instantly under a fresh wave of muzzle-scrunching determination. On firm—but soft—hooves, she shuffled back the way she came. She approached the slumbering Element of Generosity, towering over her with all of her dominant horse muscles and...
...removed her hat... only to plant it feathersoftily atop Rarity's head. The brim blocked the light out, giving Rarity's fluttering eyelids some much needed shadowy relief. It was evidently the divine act that such a time and place needed, for Rarity's body was even stiller than before. Her tail drooped and any signs of shivers stopped.
And Applejack smiled.
And it was good.
She was about to leave—when the hoof that sacrificed her hat accidentally brushed against the velvety softness of Rarity's left cheek.
If a jagged rusted shiv had eviscerated Applejack's bowels, she still would have shuddered less. The farm mare nearly fell on her apple butt, her every nerve rattled to the core. Swallowing a fruit-sized lump down her throat, she glanced at Rarity, then at her hoof.
Rarity continued to sleepily marshmallow away the pony pulsating moments as sleepy marshmallows are wont to do. Applejack's brown Stetson adorned her like a halo, christening the scene with some unwritten baptism of adorahorsey divinity.
This locked Applejack in place, among other things. She looked at her hoof again...
Then... reaching forward...
...she daringly graaaaze Rarity's cheek once again.
If Applejack was the author of the dictionary, there'd only be two words in it: “Apple” and “Fluff,” and she was quite certain she had just become acquainted with one of them right then and there.
The breath left her like smoke from a gun. Quite bravely, she reloaded it... this time leaning her muzzle in. She stole two glances around her, like a pensive fawn about to drink from the most delicious pond in the history of creekdom. Two suns were setting... or maybe it was just Applejack's cheeks, forming a rosy glaze that buffered the gasping space between a freckled hull and a marshmallowy iceberg.
And, like poetry, they collided. And the nuzzle was an absolute good. The nuzzle was life.
Applejack had to close her eyes or else she'd fall on her flank from the weight of them rolling back. Something chirped nearby, and it wasn't a cricket. Faeries danced inside a cranium that was so used to housing sawdust and countryisms. Entire empires had risen and fallen with far less excitement than this... this tingling... this molecular chain reaction of fuzz-induced cheekgasmatry. Applejack's ears rang by the time she recognized her own voice—a breath that was squeaking out of her at delicate, dainty decibels, as if hoping to achieve even a fraction of the fabulosity of that which she was so daringly muzzle-invoking.
It was with great alarm, then, that she suddenly and inexplicably felt her own mane cascading around her neck.
Applejack gasped. She flew back so hard that her neck nearly suffered pony whiplash... which is like regular whiplash but with more surprised neighing.
She raised a hoof to her head, feeling around. Silk-gold threads draped her skull like a picture frame. She felt hot, like she was under the grill. Her mind raced and raced for an explanation, and in the meantime her fetlocks confirmed the reality of the moment.
Her red hair ribbon had fallen loose.
Nervously, Applejack spun around. Her blondeness rippled behind her like a comet-tail. She panted and searched and sweated... but the ribbon was nowhere to be found.
It had vanished—much like her dignity.
Her cheeks reddened, but now for a different reason. Spooked, rattled, and suddenly believing in all manner of karmic ghosts... the mare turned and galloped as swiftly out of the throneroom as she could manage without making any offensive clopping sounds to awake her slumbering friend.
And...
...it was precisely thirty seconds after her exit that Rarity stirred. Fully awake, the mare peeked out from underneath her hat. Pale lips curved over a pale muzzle, and the fashionista's sparkling eyes darted aside to catch a peculiar red ribbon that dangled deftly in her purple telekinesis. Rarity made another trilling sound, this time of extreme and surmounting victory.
She rubbed the ribbon against her cheek. The scent of hayseeds and apples was as real as ever. With a tug of telekinesis, Rarity tipped the hat back over her head, encasing both her muzzle and the ribbon...
Preserving the heavenly scent until sunrise.
