Sweetie Belle eased the kettle off the stove with her magic. She still struggled with heavy things. Though she had only partly filled it, the copper kettle was a strain. It gleamed in the curtain-filtered sunlight, reflecting her own face back at her.
She’ll be here soon. She’s always punctual. Professional, punctual, perfect –
A loud knock rang through the kitchen. Startled, she nearly dropped the kettle.
“Hellooooo?” trilled a muffled voice. “Sweetie Belle, I got your message. Are you there, darling?”
“Coming!” She gave up, dragged the cooling rack over with her hooves and dumped the kettle onto it with a hollow slosh. Jumping down from her stool, she scampered to the door. Upon throwing it open, a perfumed hug immediately consumed her.
“Darling!”
“Rarity!” Sweetie Belle pawed at her sister. “Can’t breathe!”
“Whoops.” Rarity set her down. “Let me look at you. Have you grown? I swear you’ve grown since I saw you last.”
“You’ve only been gone three weeks!”
“Yes, but it feels so much longer.” She outstretched a hoof, trembling theatrically. “Canterlot life moves so fast, one would think a whole year has gone by at the end of each week.”
“Would … would you like some tea to recover? You could tell me all about it?”
“That sounds like a perfectly excellent idea.”
“I bought some ginseng specially. I-I know it’s your favourite.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh!” Sweetie Belle pointed to the box on the counter.
For a moment Rarity’s eyebrows rose, creating fine wrinkles in her forehead. As if realizing this, she smoothed her expression into a beatific smile. “How thoughtful of you, darling. Um, how? The tea shop is … rather expensive”
“Mrs. Cake has been letting me do odd jobs around Sugar Cube Corner and Applejack paid me and Scootaloo to help Apple Bloom paint the new barn.”
“New barn?”
“Oh, yeah, you wouldn’t know. Last Thursday a wyvern accidentally knocked the old one down.”
“A wyvern?”
“Don’t worry, Spike called Ember and she chased it off but the barn got kind of smushed while they were, ah, talking.”
“Again? One would think by this stage the Apples would cut their losses and build an underground bunker.” One eyebrow quirked as if it wanted to rise but didn’t have the courage. “Then again, knowing their luck, Diamond Dogs would tunnel in and collapse the place.”
“Um, it’s really cold outside. You should come in so I can close the door.”
“Oh! Yes, how silly of me. Do forgive me, darling, the snow has made my boots all muddy. I’ll just leave these on the mat, shall I?”
Sweetie Belle looked down at Rarity’s hooves. Though the boots were fashionable their beauty was marred by a fine layer of brown ooze. A silent alarm wailed.
– whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“Could … could you use magic to wipe them clean first?”
“Yes of course, darling.”
Clearly thinking nothing of the request, Rarity levitated a towel off the hook and made quick work of the muck. The hamper in the corner of the kitchen opened to accept the offering. Sweetie Belle concentrated and swung the front door shut with a soft green glow of her own.
“Very nicely done, Sweetie Belle! Have you been practicing?”
“Every day. Cutie Mark Crusaders could be called on to do pretty much anything, so I’ve been working on all my skills.”
“Such dedication.” Rarity delicately inched onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Would you like some help prepa-”
“No thanks, I can handle it.” Sweetie Belled hopped up onto her stool again to finish the task.
Behind her, Rarity cleared her throat. “I must say, darling, your kitchen skills have certainly improved. You’ve barely made any mess at all and the ginseng smells simply divine.”
The kettle barely hitched.
Barely.
“Like I said, I’ve been practicing. Twilight says the only way to get better at magic is to practice it every single day. Mrs. Cake won’t let me pour hot drinks or anything but she lets me sweep up and Pinkie Pie lets me ice cupcakes and things, so that’s almost as good.”
“Twilight is quite right of course. Goodness knows I wouldn’t have nearly the fine control I do now if I hadn’t practiced as a filly. You should have seen my early stitch work; truly ghastly. Making mistakes is what motivates us to improve, though.” Her voice tilted upwards, as if she was imparting some nugget of wisdom to a student.
Sweetie Belle poured the hot water into the teapot. “How was Canterlot?”
“Beautiful. Elegant. Stylish. Magnifique.” Rarity did not manage to keep the wistful sigh from her voice. “I sometimes wonder whether I made the right decision, leaving Sassy Saddles in charge there instead of remaining myself fulltime. The city is so wonderfully chic. Ponyville will always be home but it seems so … well, dull in comparison.”
The kettle hitched again. This time hot water slopped out onto Sweetie Belle’s forehoof. She bit down on a squeal.
“Darling!” Instantly, Rarity was beside her. Sweetie Belle felt the kettle plucked from her aura by a much stronger one and her hoof grasped between Rarity’s own. “You’ve scalded yourself!”
“I-It’s nothing-”
“It most certainly is not! Come over here, quickly. We must run it under cold water.” Setting the kettle back on the cooling rack, Rarity picked up Sweetie Belle bodily with her magic and whisked her to the sink. A glittering sliver peeled away, twisting the faucet. “Put your hoof here. Don’t fight me please.”
Sweetie Belle stopped struggling. The cold water was indeed a salve to the pain.
“A little more practice, eh?” Rarity said with an obvious attempt at good humour.
“I … I guess so.”
Rarity shot her an odd look but didn’t comment. The next few minutes were taken up with treating the scald with a healing balm extracted from her travel bag – “A gift from an admirer – an alchemist stallion, very nice but a little too intense for me.” – and wrapping the injury in gauze. If she had not become a designer, Rarity might have easily become a nurse, such was the precision of her movements and confidence with which she acted.
“Thank you.” Sweetie Belle held the bandaged hoof to her chest. “Sorry, Rarity.”
“Whatever is there to be sorry about, darling? It was an accident.”
“I wanted to impress you … to make your homecoming special …”
“Oh, but you did! I’m positively touched at your efforts; and right now, some ginseng tea seems like a wonderful idea for both of us. Do you still take four lumps of sugar in your tea?”
“I … I …”
The odd look reappeared. Sweetie Belle didn’t have a name of it, nor the strange tone of voice that came from her sister when she spoke.
“Sweetie Belle, is everything all right?”
“S-sure.”
“You do realise that I abhor liars, yes?”
She nodded slowly.
“And yet you’re lying to me. And since I know you are not habitually a liar, that means that you have another reason for doing so. Therefore, shall we try that question again? Is everything all right?”
Even slower, Sweetie Belle shook her head.
“Am I to pry it out of you? Hm. I see.”
“Like I said, I wanted to make your homecoming special.” Sweetie Belle swallowed hard. “You always talk about how much better Canterlot and Manehattan are than Ponyville.”
“Well, in some ways yes, they are, but Ponyville has its charms too.”
She lowered her eyes. “What if … one day … that’s not enough?”
“Is that what’s bothering you? Darling, you’ve no need to worry! I have no plans to move away from Ponyville – at least not long-term.”
“Maybe not now but …”
Rarity angled her head to meet her eyes. “Sweetie Belle?”
“You’ve … never been away this long before. What if next time it’ a whole month? Or two months? Or six? Or –”
The wailing sharpened into words that slashed through her thoughts. Sweetie Belle squeezed her eyes shut. They didn’t go away. Whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“Sweetie Belle, you’re shaking!”
–whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“Sweetie Belle!”
Forelegs encircled her. Sweetie Belle did not open her eyes. She smelled perfume and felt the soft fur of her sister’s chest against her nose.
“Please don’t leave me, Rarity. I … I need you. I need Carousel Boutique.”
–whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
She nuzzled deeper. “Where will I go on bad days if you’re not here?”
Rarity stiffened. “Oh, my darling.” Her embrace tightened.
–whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“I thought she was seeing a therapist?”
“She stopped going. Daddy keeps trying to make her go back but she says it wasn’t helping. She said he was gossiping about her to ponies.”
“What? But she has to know he isn’t. patient confidentiality–”
“That’s what Daddy said but she didn’t believe him. She’s convinced the therapist was talking to the whole town about her.”
–whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“She … she stopped taking her meds.”
She felt Rarity’s gasp. It whispered confirmation of long-held fears. “But she promised that this time –”
“She was hiding them. Pretending to take them. She said they made her sleepy all the time. We … Daddy and I didn’t notice. She was acting normal.”
“Was?” Rarity paused before asking, “How bad is she?”
Sweetie Belle gulped. “She scrubbed a hole in my bedroom carpet when I spilled hoof polish on it. I didn’t mean to!” The protestation came easily and emphatically. “And it was only a little, I swear! But she got so mad…”
–whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“And when she couldn’t get the stain out … she cut the whole carpet out with scissors and threw all my hoof polish away while I was at school. Daddy got the carpet out of the garbage so I wouldn’t have bare floorboards but the hoof polish bottles were all smashed and he couldn’t save them and … and …” She gulped air so hard it felt like her windpipe might burst. She had saved her allowance for month for those bottles. “She was still scrubbing the floor when I got home. She wouldn’t stop. It was like she couldn’t even hear me. She just kept talking about the mess and he … h-he … he h-had t-to –”
“Breathe, darling. Deep breaths. Don’t try to talk.”
The words bubbled up anyway. “He had to p-pick her up because she w-wouldn’t s-stop cleaning. She was screaming. Like she used to when you still lived at home. She hasn’t done that in so long. R-Rarity … Rarity I was so scared.” The final word became a high-pitched whine buried in her sister’s chest. “She didn’t sound like her!”
–whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
“Her hooves were all raw from the cleaning products. She hadn’t diluted any of them. There was … she was … she’d burned the hair and skin off her own hooves and sh-she still wouldn’t stop.”
“Sweet Celestia…”
For a while just breathing became the most difficult thing in the world. Sweetie Belle’s throat seemed to close in on itself, restricting the amount of oxygen she could suck in. She tried to focus on inhaling and exhaling but her thrumming mind seemed to clog her airway with unspoken words.
– whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
- pleasetakeyourpillspleasetakeyourpillspleasetakeyourpills –
- MommyMommyMommyMommyMommyMommy –
– whatamesswhatamesswhatamesswhatamess –
As if reading her thoughts, Rarity held her closer. “It’s all right, darling. It’ll be all right.”
“It won’t.” Of all the words she could squeeze out, why did it have to be those? “She won’t. Daddy called the hospital. He’s there today. That’s why it’s just me here. She’s … she’s due home tomorrow. They’re r-releasing h-her …”
Rarity squeezed her tight. “Why didn’t he call me?”
“Because he doesn’t want you to knowwww.” The final vowel elongated, becoming a sniffling, snorting howl, like an animal in a trap trying to chew off its own foot and wailing at the self-inflicted pain.
“I have a right to know! She’s my mother!” Rarity coughed and her voice returned to a less piercing pitch. “I’m so sorry, Sweetie Belle. You shouldn’t have had to go through this.”
Sweetie Belle craned her neck upwards. Rarity had her eyes shut. “Can I … can I come stay with you for a while?”
“Of course, darling. And when Father gets home, he and I are going to have a few words.”
“Please don’t yell at him, Rarity. He did what he thought was right. He’s so proud of you. He didn’t want to pull you away from your work in Canterlot.”
Rarity sucked air in through her mouth, held it, then released it through her mouth in a thin stream that tickled her sister’s ears.
“I understand,” she said crisply. “It is possible that I ... might have done the same in his position. But I know now. And we must proceed in a manner that reflects the fact that I know what has been going on in my absence.”
“Please don’t yell at him!”
“I promise I will not shout at him. I do not promise I will not make him aware of my feelings on this matter.” Rarity brushed a hoof through Sweetie Belle’s mane in a gentle motion she had used since before she was even Sweetie’s age, when they both hid in corners and hoped their father could make normalcy return with kind words and empty gestures. “Mother is … very sick. It is probable she will require extended visits to … the facility again.”
Sweetie Belle did not need to ask why Rarity refused to use its real name.
“If that happens, you shall stay with me indefinitely. Carousel Boutique will be your home, not just your … your bolt-hole for … bad days.”
Sweetie’s eyes snapped up. “You mean it?”
“Yes,” Rarity said, soft enough to be nearly inaudible. Thoughts played across her face and she briefly bit her lip, but before Sweetie Belle could think to put names to them, she finished, “I do. You deserve to feel safe, Sweetie Belle. If I can facilitate that … well then, I will.”
“But –”
“No buts. I shall discuss the arrangement with Father. I may be his daughter and he may wish to keep things from me that he thinks will hurt me, but I am also an adult mare and I think sometimes he forgets that.”
The backs of Sweetie Belle’s eyes stung. Raw emotion clogged her throat. She suddenly felt sticky all over, like someone had poured honey over her fur and every time she moved it just rubbed in further. Her movements were stiff and jerky.
“Ruh–” The syllable was all she could manage.
“Shhhhh.” Rarity continued to pass a hoof over her mane. Her heartbeat under Sweetie Belle’s cheek was resolute and comforting in a way words were not in that moment. “Shhhhh. It’ll be all right, darling.”
It would not be.
But in that moment the kind words and empty promise were enough for Sweetie Belle.
Author's Note
I started writing this long before John Green wrote Turtles All the Way Down. In actuality it started in a rainy airport in Glasgow back in 2016 when my flight home from BronyScot was delayed. For reasons I'd rather not explicitly get into, this is quite a personal story and I finished it recently for that reason. It's maybe not as good as it could have been but it reflects my own perspective and the irresolution of living with someone who has problems they refuse to seek help over, and quite frankly that's good enough for me, too.
