Sleepless Knights

Chapters

First Knight
Second Knight
Third Knight
Fourth Knight
Fifth Knight
????? ??????
Last Knight
Prologue

First Knight

Rarity had always had a knack for makeup.

Of course, fashion was her passion, and always would be—but really, fashion and makeup both fell under the broader category of making people look and feel good. How could she call herself a fashionista if she couldn't do that? So she'd learned to apply her makeup quickly, carefully, and perfectly every time, accentuating all of her best features and hiding all of the worst ones—not as if she had any worst features, of course—so that no one, nowhere, could doubt her sheer magnificence.

And as she sat with her friends on the grass around the portal statue at Canterlot High, she let herself smile a little inside, knowing that no matter what had happened overnight she would still be radiant.

“Wow, Rarity,” Rainbow Dash said, jogging toward her on the grass with a soccer ball in front of her cleats. “You look terrible.”

Or so she had thought. “I beg your pardon?” she said, fixing Rainbow Dash with a gaze that wasn't exactly begging. More like demanding Rainbow Dash kneel and beg her forgiveness.

Rainbow Dash didn't do that, and instead soldiered on: “You look like you got zero sleep. Like, wow. Those eye bags.” She idly kicked the soccer ball from foot to foot, not letting it touch the ground.

“Charming,” Rarity said. The eyes of her five other friends turned to her, and she couldn't help but notice that they didn't look quite as tired.

“It's like your eyes are kangaroos, and—”

“Rainbow Dash,” Applejack cut in, “I can't believe you're making me be the tactful one here. Cut it out.”

“What?” Rainbow kicked the ball over her head, and raised her heel for it to bounce off, and then paused because the ball wasn't coming down. “Hey!” she said, as the ball glowed with purple energy.

Twilight, who was sitting next to Rarity, grunted as she beckoned the soccer ball over to her with a finger. “I'm not giving it back until you apologize,” she said, depositing it in her own lap. She turned to Rarity. “That said, is something wrong? I know you're usually really good with your makeup, because you usually look really nice.”

“Thank you, Twilight.” Rarity managed a smile.

“So whatever the issue is must be really awful, if you look this terrible even after makeup.”

“Please learn to quit while you're ahead.” Rarity's smile faded, and Twilight blushed and looked off to the side. “No, I'm all right, it's just....” She sighed, rubbing at her eye with a knuckle. Words weren't coming as easily as they should have: it was like her thoughts were obscured by static snow. “I've been having these... dreams, lately. Not nice dreams, although I suppose that's obvious enough from context.”

Sunset piped up from her position on the statue's pedestal: “How long have you been having them?”

“I'm not sure,” said Rarity. The journal in her room said that she'd been having them for twenty nine days.

“Do you remember what they're about?” Fluttershy asked—quietly so as not to scare off the squirrel on her shoulder.

Rarity frowned: space, boutique, no pants, tow truck, abject failure. “Not exactly.”

“Rarity,” Sunset said, staring down at her. “You know I can read you, right?”

“What—but I trust you wouldn't,” Rarity stammered, “because that would be an invasion of privacy—”

“I mean, like, reading your face. I don't need to read your mind right now.” Sunset rolled her eyes. “It's bad, isn't it.”

Rarity felt herself deflate a little. She groaned and lay back in the grass, letting herself get a face full of the clear April sky. “Does anyone else get the feeling that we've been at this school forever? And I suppose it felt like we always would be here, but... graduation's coming up soon. I suppose you could say,” she said, sighing and tilting her head back accordingly, the grass brushing against her hair, “that I have a lot on my plate right now.”

There was some silence. Everyone had a lot on their plates right now, and Rarity could feel the resonance in the stillness.

“Why don't you talk to Vice-Principal Luna?”

Rarity sat up and looked at Twilight. “Hm?”

Twilight tapped her fingers together restlessly; she still wasn't looking at Rarity directly, but instead seemed to be studying the grass. “Well, she's kind of a school counselor, if I remember correctly. And also, her Equestrian counterpart is a pony princess who does something with dreams?”

Her gaze swiveled neatly around Rarity to focus on Sunset, and Sunset responded, “Yeah. She watches over the dreams of all of the ponies of Equestria and helps them with their nightmares.”

“Right!” Twilight was tapping her fingers together faster. “I mean, that's a little horrifying, the idea of an absolute monarch with the ability to see into the minds of her subjects, but you get what I'm going for.”

“Technically she's a diarch,” Sunset called out.

Rarity considered this—the actual important thing Twilight had said, not the unnecessary clarification from Sunset. “That... might work. Do you know if I would need an appointment?”

“Or... tetrarch, or something.”

“Nope!” Twilight smiled, and managed to look Rarity in the eyes again. “It's pretty much walk in!”

“Quintarch? Does Flurry Heart count yet?”

“Well,” Rarity said, standing up in a decisive motion, “thank you for the advice, Twilight. I'll go speak to Vice-Principal Luna, and listen to what she has to say with an open mind.”

“Absolutely not!” Rarity shrieked.

Luna looked at her quizzically from behind the desk. She was still sitting down, still looked serene overall: Rarity, on the other hand, had just jumped screaming from her chair. Once she realized this, she coughed. “I mean... I just don't think I can afford to do that.”

“Rarity.” Luna sighed, then reached down under her desk, whereupon Rarity heard the sound of a drawer opening. “Far be it from me to discourage a student from chasing their dreams—or their ambitions, rather—but there is such a thing as too much workload.” She took her eyes of Rarity to look down at the drawer, rather than continuing to fumble blindly, and before long she'd pulled out an envelope. “Do you remember coming in to talk about your résumé and portfolio, a few weeks ago? For your application to Roan Island School of Design?”

Rarity forced herself to sit back down. “I faintly recall, yes.”

Luna opened up the folder. “Rarity, this is the fullest portfolio I have ever seen, and the longest résumé.” And indeed, the contents of the folder were numerous. Luna flipped through the portfolio, letting Rarity get glimpses of the many outfits she'd created over the years, most of them within the last nine months. Then she reached the résumé itself, which was several pages on its own, and read aloud: “Part time vendor at an amusement park... keytarist and outfit designer for The Rainbooms... holder of a GPA in excess of four point oh, with multiple honors and AP classes... manager of an online fashion catalogue... occasional superheroine?”

She shut the folder and looked back up at Rarity. “And now you say you're having nightmares from the stress, and I must confess I'm surprised, Rarity. Not because there's no reason for you to be stressed. I'm surprised because having nightmares implies you have time to sleep.”

“I have plenty of time to sleep.” Rarity tossed her hair for emphasis. “Oodles of time, in fact! Simply oodles! And I do not need to give up any of my extracurricular activities.”

“Not even one?” Luna leaned forward, steepling her fingers. “Is there no way you could give yourself even a small break?”

“I'm afraid not.” Rarity smiled, letting some fierceness into the expression. She hoped, anyway. The static in her head was making it difficult to be sure. “The path of the fashionista is fraught with many dangers, but it is the path I have chosen to walk. And I swear to you, I will walk it!”

Luna sighed. “Then I don't think I can help you.”

With a dazzling smile and a wave of her arm, Rarity proudly welcomed all in attendance to the first ever Carousel Boutique… on the Eiffel Tower.

The press oohed and ahhed, and snapped many pictures. They were standing in front of her boutique, wearing berets, because they were also in France. The city shone beneath them, brilliant and nearly unobstructed. Rarity had the best view in all of Paris: she could see the Louvre from here.

She produced an oversized pair of ciseaux (French for scissors), opened them around the ribbon that wrapped around the building, and—snip!—cut the ribbon. With that, she declared the boutique open, and demanded that everyone enter and shop to their hearts’ contents.

The crowds rushed in—there hadn't been any and now there was a city full of them. They filled the boutique, packing into every available space and then into the spaces that weren't available, speaking excitedly about all of her fancy dresses and sharp suits and stylish shoes, and Rarity's smile shone like Paris. She'd done it, she'd accomplished her fashion ambitions, and—

“Zut!” someone cried out.

Rarity, with a sinking feeling in her gut, asked what was the matter. She felt like she'd done this before.

“You don't have any pants!” Except it was in French.

Rarity gasped and looked down—but her legs were covered. The voice continued, still in French, “There's no pants for sale! How are we supposed to shop if there aren't any pants?”

She found herself in front of the pants section, and gasped—there weren't any pants, just infinite rows of empty shelves. Panic rose in her throat, and it pushed empty words from her mouth: how she was certain she could resolve all of this if they would just give her a moment—

“There's no clothes at all!”

And the store was empty, and there had never been any fancy dresses, sharp suits, or stylish shoes. Rarity made noises like a dying poisson.

“And there's a—”

An earbusting whinny cut through all the tumult. Rarity found herself outside the store, and she and all the crowds were facing the same way: toward the stranger riding their way through the clouds.

They rode upon a brilliant unicorn, and they wore a sparkling suit of armor, adorned with stars, which obscured their appearance up to and including their gender. The horse galloped through the air as easily as if it were on a city street, and each time its hooves struck the invisible ground, sparks flew and tumbled down to the city, so that a rain of light seemed to follow behind.

Before long, the stranger had arrived upon the deck of the tower. “What's the problem?” they said, and their voice was indistinct, so that Rarity knew what they were saying but could hardly hear them say it.

She explained that the boutique had found itself in a state of catastrophe: it had opened without any pants at all.

“Really? Well, don't worry, Rarity.” The stranger smiled—somehow she knew they were smiling despite the helm—and dismounted their horse. They walked behind, back to what the horse had been pulling behind itself—except, hold on, Rarity had been pretty sure the rider had been riding alone?—and placed their hand around the handle of the carriage's door. “We have pants enough for everyone!”

They yanked open the door, and—it was as if there had been an explosion. Endless clothes burst through the door, all of Rarity's best designs and then others that she hadn't had the chance to make yet but would want to some day. Out they came, flying up into the sky, and then drifting down slowly to land on the customers, and now the customers were each wearing some of her clothes, each one perfectly matched and tailored.

“Three cheers for Rarity!” the stranger yelled.

“Three cheers for Rarity!” the crowd echoed, but still in French. “Hip hip—”

I'm in a dream, Rarity realized.

“—hooray! Hip hip—”

The same dream I've been having this past month, she thought, as the crowd tossed her up in the air past the peak of the Eiffel Tower, only to catch her in time for the next chant. But....

“—hooray! Hip hip—”

It didn't all go to hell. It turned out okay.

“—hooray!”

Up and up and up she went, past the Eiffel Tower, far enough up that Paris was no longer visible except as a single mote of light, and she was framed by the full moon. She drifted in the cool air, as pleasant as bathwater but with a brisk chill, and she was gloriously weightless—careless—free.

And the stranger was there in front of her, moonlight glinting off their armor. They stood, and for the first time looked kind of awkward. Like they were waiting for Rarity to say something.

“Well....” Rarity trailed off, unsure what to say now that she could hear her own voice. “I suppose you are only a figment of my imagination, but even so, I should be polite. So... thank you, whatever you are.” She curtsied graciously.

The stranger leaned back, ever so slightly, as if stricken. “Do you not... recognize me?” said the voice, and while it wasn't possible to see their eyes, Rarity could tell they weren't looking at her.

“Erm.” Rarity pursed her lips. “I'm really not sure, darling. Should I?”

The stranger looked around, and then looked at the ground, so many miles away. “Sleep well,” they said, and started tapping at their helm as they turned away.

“Wait!” Rarity stepped forward, hand reached out. “Who are you?”

And the stranger opened up their mouth—

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Rarity awoke with her hand outstretched beyond her face.

Her sheets weren't in a tangle around her legs. She wasn't gasping for breath. She felt... refreshed. But that accursed phone was still beeping. “I need,” Rarity muttered, fumbling to her side, “to pick a better alarm tone.”

Eventually she fumbled her way to turning off her phone alarm, and lay back in bed, letting her head sink into the pillow.

She'd never dreamed lucidly before, at least not as far as she could remember. And she had certainly never gone through any iteration of that dream, and had it end well. Had her benighted brain finally decided to give her a break?

And who was that stranger, and why did they seem so... familiar?

Author's Note

I had the idea for this story yesterday and wrote like a madman to try to get it into the first day of the RariTwi bomb. Hope you all like it!

Second Knight

Mr. Blue Sky played on repeat in Rarity's head, and as she walked toward her first class of the day, she stepped to the beat.

“Someone seems peppy,” said the voice to her left, and she looked that way to see Twilight. “You look nice—no bags.” Rarity could see the traces of a happy smile on her face. Was she trying to hide it? Rarity couldn’t really tell.

In any case, she had no such qualms about her own smile. “Nouveau jour,” she said, still keeping the beat as she walked, “nouvelle Rarity. I slept like a baby!” She reconsidered. “Well, judging by how Sweetie Belle was when she was little, not a real baby. But you know the saying.”

Twilight laughed at that. “I guess Vice-Principal Luna had some really good advice, then?”

Rarity smiled brilliantly, and turned the corner to the corridor with her locker. “She was completely useless!”

A pause. “Oh. Wow!” Twilight sounded outrageously surprised. “Then...?”

“It just...” Rarity flapped her hand before she continued, “worked out on its own!”

She stopped in front of her locker, humming along to the chorus as she twisted the dial on her lock. “All for the best, really. The vice-principal was speaking to me as if I were biting off more than I could chew. Me! When I've never taken too large a bite in my life!”

She snorted, and opened the locker. “The nerve, really, to suggest that I might be carrying an unreasonable load.” And with that, she reached in and pulled out about fifty pounds of textbooks, and wheezed.

Twilight grimaced, showing a lot of teeth. “This will probably sound crazy, but—” she laughed, then sucked in a breath “—are you sure she didn't have a bit of a point? And can I, like, get some of those for you?”

“Nonsense, dear,” Rarity said, laughing right back with immensely more humor in her voice than Twilight's laugh had had. She snapped her fingers, and a floating diamond shape appeared beneath the bundle in her arms. She released her grip, and the diamond from her geode kept supporting the books. Rarity slammed her locker shut, locked it, and walked away; the stack of books floated alongside her. “See? There's nothing that Rarity can't do!”

“Excuse me, Rarity?”

The voice was right behind her. Rarity flinched, and lost her concentration, and the diamond fizzled. The pile of books came down right on Twilight's foot. Twilight shrieked.

Mr. Blue Sky skidded to an abrupt halt in Rarity's head. “Twilight!” she yelped. “I am so, so sorry, are you all right?”

“My foot,” Twilight moaned through gritted teeth, grabbing her ankle and clutching it as close as her flexibility would allow. “My foot is flattened. It's two-dimensional.”

“Twilight, I am truly sorry, let me just—” Rarity gathered up the pile of books again, holding them in her arms this time. “Is there anything I can do to—”

“Just let me carry the books next time!” Twilight whimpered. “I gotta go take care of this.” And with that she hopped a hundred and eighty degrees on her good foot, and then started hopping toward the nurse's office.

Rarity glowered, and then she turned to the voice that had so barbarically broken her concentration, and possibly Twilight’s metatarsals by proxy. “Is there something I can help you with, Vice-Principal?” she said, ever so sweetly.

Vice-Principal Luna winced. “I was actually hoping to talk with you about yesterday.” Rarity didn't say anything, and after several seconds the older woman was forced to continue: “Specifically, when I said I couldn't help you unless you dropped one of your many extracurricular activities.”

“Well!” Rarity huffed. “I think you've caused me to drop quite enough, thank you very much. The answer is still no.” And with that she spun on her heel, or at least she did the best she could while lugging fifty pounds of paper products, and made to strut away. (Or, more realistically, lurch away.)

“I'm not finished.” Luna held up a hand, stalling Rarity's rotation. “I looked into it last night, and it seems I was wrong. There's something we might be able to try—it's called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy. It's a bit of a long shot, but I think it might be able to help with your nightmares. If you're willing.”

Rarity blinked. “Really?” That certainly sounded good—good enough that she forgot to be mad for a few seconds. However, her memory was pretty good, so she smirked and said, “How very kind of you to offer, but you may be interested to know—I slept like the grave last night. Not a single nightmare!”

“That's lovely news!” Vice-Principal Luna's smile, for all that it looked genuine, was there and gone in a flash. “Can you guarantee you won't have any more?”

As snarky as Rarity felt at that moment, she didn't have an answer for that.

Vice-Principal Luna frowned, glanced down at her watch, and sighed. “I shouldn't keep you from your classes. Look, I'm available to talk tomorrow at one o'clock PM, which I believe corresponds with a study hall of yours. If you think it might be useful, you can come by and we can talk about it. No pressure.” She smiled again. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

She walked away. Rarity grumbled, turned the other way, and staggered toward her classroom. After a moment, she frowned, and concentrated, and Mr. Blue Sky was playing in her head again. She did her best to lurch in time, and hummed along.

The sketches were crude. The handwriting was terrible. The design was gravitationally impossible.

Rarity had heard it said, time and time again, that the customer was always right. Staring at her computer's screen, trying to decipher this particular commissioner's intentions like an archaeologist poring over ancient runes, she wondered why anyone still repeated such a ridiculous phrase.

Her workroom was well lit but cramped. A couple of mannequins clustered in one corner, with partially-completed suits and dresses competing for personal space between then. Her keytar was in another corner, and above it were pages and pages of designs pinned to the walls, many of them for herself and her friends. There was a pile of college application stuff, and a separate desk just for homework... it wasn't quite chaotic enough to qualify as organized chaos, but it still felt hectic even when she was sitting still.

Not that she ever had the time to sit still. She stood and started pacing, back and forth in the square iota of free floor space she had behind her chair. All right, so there was no way that the gown could be made to do that, but she could get appreciably close. And she could bend the color choices... well, okay, calling them 'choices' probably was giving the commissioner more credit for thoughtfulness than they deserved, but the point was that she could rework them into something more harmonious and less... eye-melting.

A vision formed in her mind. The disorganized chickenscratch and blaring colors changed, flowed, morphed into something dashing: elegant but bold, sophisticated without pretension. Yes, she could see it! She ran to her desk, flipped open her notebook, grabbed at a pen—

Knock knock knock.

The vision vanished, like tissue paper in a gale. Rarity froze, took a deep breath, counted to three, and said, “Yes?”

The door creaked open. “Rarity, dear,” said her mother, “some of your friends are outside and they said something about band practice?”

“What in—oh,” said Rarity. If she'd been anyone else, she'd probably have felt like the color was draining from her face. As it was, she navigated over to the room's only window with a chill feeling in her body, pulled aside the curtains, and opened it.

“Yo, Rarity!” Rainbow Dash called from the sidewalk outside. She had her guitar slung around her shoulder. “You up for this or not?” Beside her, Pinkie Pie waved fast enough that her hand was a blur.

Rarity racked her brains, and found something worrying: an appointment to rock out with the girls for right about now. “I'm so sorry, the jam session completely slipped my mind!” she called down. “Um... I'm afraid I'm in the middle of some important work right now, so....”

“Boo, you suck.” Rainbow Dash kicked at some dirt. “Twilight said she couldn't make it either. You both suck.”

“What?” Rarity leaned further out her window, trusting her legs to counterbalance her. “Oh dear, did I really crush her foot that badly?”

“No, she's fine!” Pinkie yelled. “She just said she had stuff to do!”

Rarity breathed a sigh of relief.

“Don't worry about it, Rarity!” Pinkie waved again. “We know you're super busy and all! We'll just do an acoustic session this time!”

“Yeesh, all right.” Rainbow turned around and walked away, arms behind her head. “See you whenever, I guess.” Pinkie Pie skipped along behind her.

Rarity waved a goodbye, nearly overbalanced, and then pulled herself back in. She shut the window with a grumble, and then got back in her seat. What had she been thinking about, earlier? Something about how to fix this design, obviously, but how....

It was like trying to assemble a puzzle, except all of the puzzle pieces were blank, and also they were missing. She grimaced, screwing up her face in concentration, trying to recreate the specific mental images she'd had. Something about fixing the colors, and making it less absurdly poofy....

At last she felt like she had something. She raised her pen again—

Her phone rang. With a twitch of her eye, she grabbed it off her desk and answered. “Hello? Yes, this is Rarity. Yes, the suit will be available by the time we discussed. No, you don't need to keep calling me about it, because I can keep my commitments.” She tried not to think about the band practice she'd just turned down. “Yes, I'm sure the wedding will be lovely, do send me pictures. Have a wonderful day.” And she ended the call, and slammed the phone down.

“All right,” she muttered. She'd managed to keep most of the mental image in her head. After a bit more concentration, she had it, and she raised her pen....

And she held it there. “I'm waiting,” she announced to the universe at large. What was going to come barging in to disrupt her concentration this time? What metaphorical bull would wreck her china shop of thought?

After several seconds, nothing happened, and then after several more, nothing continued to happen. Rarity smiled, and began sketching. The curves would go like this and that, and the skirt would flare out like so, and the colors would be daring without assaulting the senses—

“Rarity!” yelled the high-pitched voice from outside the door.

Rarity slammed her fist on the desk. “What, Sweetie Belle!?”

“Opalescence got up a tree and I need your weird magic powers to get her down.”

Rarity took her arm, and pressed it up against her mouth, and screamed. Please, she begged in her head, if the waking world's not going to pull any punches, at least let me have decent dreams tonight.

“This is garbage!” the commissioner yelled. He pointed his finger at Rarity, and the dress lit itself on fire.

Rarity prostrated herself before him, even as the flames consumed her clothes, apologizing, begging for forgiveness: the dress just hadn't been physically possible, she'd done the best she could!

“Oh, really?” The man smirked: his features were indistinct, but he was heavyset and sneering even when he smiled. He spread his arms—

Rarity gasped. All around her and even below her, reproductions of the dress floated and bobbed and swarmed, like a fluther of jellyfish in the open ocean. They matched the original design exactly, including the captions and arrows pointing to various body parts. She sobbed, still wreathed in fire.

“And what's even worse, you never got my keytar out of the tree at my wedding!” The man's rage was no less overpowering for the fact that Rarity couldn't really make out his face.

Rarity bawled, and now the dress had stopped burning but her skin had started to char.

“At this rate you'll never make it into Roan Island—”

There was the neigh of a horse, and Rarity's head jerked up and to the right.

The stranger was back.

Their horse rode in from the side, through the tangled masses of impossible dresses, shredding them as they went by. The tatters fell to an invisible floor and disintegrated.

The figure had a lance. The horse surged forward, and the lance smashed into the side of the angry commissioner. It went right through him, and he popped like a balloon, and then there was nothing left of him at all.

The disintegrating effect spread, out and out and out unto infinity, so that instead of dresses Rarity was surrounded by gently falling ash, almost like snow. She stood, and she was wearing a simple design of her own making, and her skin was whole and unblemished, and she walked forward as the knight dismounted their horse. “You again.”

The knight nodded. “Yes.” Again, Rarity didn't hear a voice, but she knew exactly what they said.

“This is a dream,” Rarity said. “But... you aren't. You're not just part of my mind. I don't know how I know that, but it's true.” She stretched out her hand, and the ash parted around it, leaving her unsullied. “Who are you?”

They stared at each other for an infinite moment, as the dust settled all around them, drifting in a nonexistent wind.

And then the knight... groaned? “Seriously? I just spent all day fixing this! Hang on.” They raised their hand, as if grabbing at something above their head, and twisted. “Just... need to... adjust the transmitter....”

And it was the strangest thing. As they kept twisting, their voice changed. Which was to say, it changed into an actual voice. Rarity started being able to hear it, and it was starting to sound recognizable.

Moreover, the shape of their helm changed. Where before it had been a single piece of metal, it seemed to be morphing into a different design before Rarity's eyes. A design with multiple pieces and, most importantly of all, a hinge.

“There! Knew I was close.” The figure released whatever it had been holding onto and then, without any pausing for dramatic effect, yanked the faceplate open. And a beaming, sparkling face looked forth. “Ta dah! Pretty cool, right?”

Rarity gasped. She took a step back. “It's you.”

“Yup! It sure is me.” The former stranger looked down and seemed to notice her raiment for the first time. “A suit of armor? Wow, that's a bit on the nose.”

“You're... in my dreams....” Rarity held out a hand.

“Yeah! Wasn't easy.” The knight scratched the back of her head, chuckling nervously. “So, am I helping with the dreams, or—”

Rarity's outstretched hand slapped her across the face. “Get out!”

“Ow!” The knight staggered back. “Rarity, what the—”

“Get out of my dreams right now, or so help me I will wake up and slap you in person!”

“Rarity, I was just trying to help—” The knight raised her arms defensively “—I thought you would be happy about—”

Rarity sucked in all the air in the world, and then let it all out in a single ear-splitting scream: “GET OUT!”

Her eyes snapped open.

She sat up immediately. By the scant light that made it through her blinds, she could tell it was well before her alarm was set to go off, and a quick glance at her phone confirmed the time. A shame, really: her new choice of ringtone was much more calming.

But she was in no mood to be calmed right now. Her fists bunched up the sheets beneath her as she looked up at the ceiling and shouted, “TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”

Author's Note

Alternate chapter title: A Hard Day's Knight.

Special thanks to RoMS for giving this a quick sanity check before I posted it. (And sorry for the minor delay, but depending on your time zone this still counts as posting daily!)

Third Knight

“TWILIGHT, OPEN UP!”

“Gah!” Twilight, who had been lying in bed, yelped and flailed and fell off to the other side, out of Rarity's view. A few seconds later, she peeked out from behind the bed. “Er, Rarity! Hi! Good morning?”

She was wearing some sort of metal helmet on her head, and that was all the confirmation Rarity needed. “Open this window right now!” she yelled, pounding on the glass for emphasis.

“How are you even up there? This is the second floor!”

“Just open it!”

“Okay, okay!”

Twilight crawled over the bed, her limbs swinging like a dog wearing booties on an icy sidewalk, and she managed to stumble her way to the window. Once she pulled it open, Rarity stepped through the window and off her magical diamond, which she dismissed with a wave of her hand. It had been about the size of a skimboard, and she'd surfed it all the way here from her own home.

It had been about five minutes since she'd woken up. She had not calmed down one bit. “What,” she seethed, “did you do.”

“Me? What? No....” Twilight laughed nervously, backing up toward the bed as Rarity stalked toward her. “Why would you even think it was me in your dream?”

There was a beat. Twilight slapped herself in the face, saving Rarity the trouble. “I just said that, didn't I.”

“Twilight.” Rarity pointed her finger at the helmet on Twilight's head. It had lights and screws and dials sticking out of it, and generally looked like it had been cobbled together in a very clean junkyard. “Tell me what that is.”

“It's a... totally normal nightcap?” Twilight winced as Rarity's glare intensified. “All right! I built a thing to help you with your nightmares!”

Rarity stopped advancing. She took a step back, and crossed her arms. “Keep going.”

“I mean you were just having such a bad time and you're my friend and friends are supposed to help each other and I figured that this was how I could help you this time so I made this thing, it's called the Helm, it was really hard at first but I did some research on Equestrian dream magic and—”

“I don't care about the how, Twilight.” Rarity's foot was tapping. Her arms pressed against one another so hard that they seemed about to snap off. “I want to know why you thought this was an okay thing to do.”

“Because you need help, Rarity!” Twilight threw her arms up. “You need help and if you're not going to give it to yourself, someone else has to do it for you!”

“Twilight.” Rarity gritted her teeth. “Do you recall our earlier conversation about dreams? The one where you said that having the power to look into people's minds would be, oh, what was your word choice? Horrifying?”

Twilight pulled off the Helm, not meeting Rarity's glare, and dropped it on the bed. “Sunset does it,” she muttered.

“To villains, Twilight! And sometimes other people, when they give permission! Something which you did not get!” Rarity pointed her finger again. “You can't just go... go barging into the most private parts of people's lives like that!”

Twilight's expression turned sour. “What, like you barging into my bedroom?”

“Twilight?”

Twilight stiffened. “Yes?” she squeaked.

Rarity rubbed her forehead. She took a deep breath, counted to five, and let it out. “I appreciate,” she said through gritted teeth, “your desire to be helpful. But never, ever intrude into my or anyone else's dreams without express permission. Are we clear?”

She nodded.

Rarity flashed a smile. Her lips felt so tight that it was almost painful. “Perfect. Have a lovely day, darling.”

With that she walked past Twilight, opened her bedroom door, and walked out.

“And then she opened up her helmet,” Rarity fumed, “and it was Twilight! Twilight Sparkle, living rent-free inside my own head! Asking me if she was helping, as if she wasn't doing the most invasive possible thing!”

She sat on the bleachers outside school, burning through a lunch break because she had too much anger in her stomach to make room for any food. Fluttershy sat next to her, and her only contributions to the conversation—more of a monologue, really—had been nods and quiet “mm-hm”s. Right now, that suited Rarity just fine: Fluttershy was an excellent listener.

“And then, and then! I woke up and went to her house and she tried to deny she'd done anything!” Rarity's hands were telling at least half the story: she gesticulated, she shook her fists, she waved this way and that. “And when I got the truth out of her? She tried to say she was helping me! The unmitigated gall!”

“Mm-hm,” Fluttershy said.

Rarity slammed both hands down on the bleachers. “And it's not as if I don't appreciate some friendly support, no one could accuse moi of disliking friendly support! And it was a very nice idea of hers! But to just—just barge into my brain without so much as a by your leave!”

Fluttershy nodded.

“And I just—she just—URGH!” Rarity finally slumped forward. At long last, the ember of rage that had been fueling her since the morning had burned down to ash. She took deep breaths, and didn't bother to count them.

“Sunset looks into people's minds,” Fluttershy said, very quietly.

“You'll note, darling, that Sunset does it when we're trying to save the world from certain doom. Or if not the world, at least significantly populated metropolitan areas!”

“She used it on that mugger once,” Fluttershy said, very quietly. “He was just stealing some stuff.”

“Not,” Rarity continued, “when we're trying to save Rarity, from a problem that everyone but me seems to think I have!” She sighed. “I just... I don't get why everyone's trying to foist help upon me. Yes, there's the occasional sleep trouble, but I'm handling it. I promise I'm handling it.”

She looked over at Fluttershy, and asked, “Do you think I'm handling it, Fluttershy?”

Fluttershy didn't speak for several seconds, instead choosing to look away and nervously flex her fingers. Rarity let her: she knew Fluttershy found these sorts of confrontational questions stressful. “Um,” she began. “I... think that I'm not sure.”

Rarity waited.

“I mean,” Fluttershy continued, hands bunched up in her skirt, “if I tried to handle your workload, I'd probably... explode, or something. So you're definitely handling it better than I would. You're probably handling it better than a lot of people would.” She looked up at Rarity, smiling a little, and Rarity echoed the smile back.

“But,” Fluttershy continued, “now that I think about it, it does feel like you've been... not at your best this past month. Sorry,” she added, flinching as if Rarity had offered some rebuke: Rarity knew she would never retaliate like that, but she also knew that Fluttershy was wired differently than herself. Fluttershy mustered up the courage to keep going: “And it makes me think that maybe there's some things no one should try to handle. At least, no one should try to handle it alone.”

Rarity frowned, thinking for a moment. “I suppose I did have to miss band practice yesterday.” She sighed, blowing some hair out of her face. “I'll admit it now: I understand where Twilight was coming from.”

“Oh, that's good!” Fluttershy dared to smile a little.

“I'm still very angry at her.”

“Oh, that's... okay.” The smile wilted.

Rarity leaned in for a quick one-armed hug. “Thanks for listening, Fluttershy. And don't worry about me: I've already got other ideas for how to deal with the nightmares—sleep troubles.” Rarity smiled. “I just need to learn about something called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, and—”

Rarity and Fluttershy's phones shrilled out a noise simultaneously. It sounded like an emergency alert, which was because that was exactly what it was—only it wasn't from any government agency. Rarity stiffened at the noise.

Fluttershy was faster: she pulled out her phone and tapped it on. “Equestrian magic emergency by the... dam north of town. Sunset is there. She says it's urgent.”

“Oh, they're all urgent.” With a noise between a grumble and a groan, Rarity stood up and stretched her arms. “Let's just hope it's nothing overly serious.”

The Canterlot City Dam was the most important structure in the city or its suburbs, if you didn't count the statue with the interdimensional portal—and if you did count the portal, the vote would probably go to a tiebreaker. It wasn't just that the dam's hydroelectric generator provided enough energy for well over half the city's electrical needs: the dam held back its river from draining through the valley where Canterlot City had been established.

In short, the dam was the reason that Canterlot City existed. Therefore, if the dam were to not-so-hypothetically be destroyed, it would be the reason for Canterlot City to stop existing.

And thus, to Rarity's immense lip-curling displeasure, the raging floodwaters surging toward her qualified as “overly serious”.

“Who is this fellow, anyway?” Applejack stood on the dam with the rest of them. “And what does he have against our darn?”

The other girls looked at her. “I meant dam. Consarned self-censoring.”

Sunset shivered a little, looking sopping wet. “I dunno, he just showed up on one of Twilight's magic-detectors and I went snooping.” She held the detector up, and like a compass it pointed straight up the river, toward the flood. “I got to read his mind a little—something about how humans are perverting nature's course and he's trying to correct it?—and then I got washed away.”

The seven of them looked at the flood from their vantage point at the top of the dam. The waters were surging, heaving, coming closer and closer all the time, and Rarity could see demonic faces in it as it approached: that probably had something to do with whatever Equestrian Tchotchke of Doom had caused this, right?

By her estimate, they had less than thirty seconds. A less seasoned group of heroes might have looked scared, or even determined.

Mostly they just looked annoyed. “I'd better not miss soccer practice for this,” Rainbow Dash said with a yawn.

“I had better not miss my appointment with....” Rarity caught herself. “My appointment.” She looked along the line of her friends, down at Twilight, who had ended up at the other end.

“All right. All right.” Sunset closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Obviously we don't let the water get over the dam. So that means Rarity and Twilight, you're on containment. Fluttershy, get whatever animals are around to go somewhere safe. Applejack...” She shrugged. “Kick some trees down, try to block it? Everyone else, we need to get to the top of the river and stop this dude.”

“All right.” Twilight chuckled a little nervously. “Go go pony rangers, right?”

The seven closed their eyes, and a brilliant light shone, and they transformed.

And they got to work.

Rarity thrust out her hands, and a lattice of her strongest diamonds flared into existence. They extended from the top of the dam, up another fifty feet at least, and then turned at right angles at the end of the dam to create a sort of giant basin to hold the water. It was just in time: the flood slammed into her shields as soon as she'd raised them.

Rarity found herself jolted back by the force, but she gritted her teeth and held it. Sure, this was probably more magic than she'd ever expended at once before, but what was life without a challenge here and there? She could handle this, as long as she wasn't overly distracted—

“So I wanted to talk about this morning,” Twilight said.

Rarity blinked.

“I've been thinking, and on the one hand, you're totally right.” Twilight was twiddling her thumbs, floating unsteadily between Rarity and the flood barrier. A flood barrier which was starting to groan. “I messed up. I shouldn't have gone into your head without your permission and I wanted to apologize for that.”

“Really,” Rarity grunted.

“Yeah. So....” Twilight sighed. “I'm sorry.”

The floodwaters filled more of Rarity's diamond basin. At a glance, she only had about twenty feet of height left before it overtopped. “Remember!” she heard Sunset yelling from the distance, almost inaudible above the torrent. “We just need to talk him down! The Equestrian magic probably picked up on some sort of emotional issue—”

“Of course it's an emotional issue!” Rainbow's shout was much easier to hear. “It's always an emotional issue! We get it!”

Twilight laughed nervously and scratched the back of her head. “But... I kept thinking, and I wondered if it wasn't just the privacy thing you were worried about.” The wall behind her started to buckle. “And I really don't think it is, Rarity.”

A little leak sprung in the wall, spraying a jet of water out onto the top of the dam. The swirling, sneering faces in the flood seemed to laugh in approval, whereas Twilight yelped and plugged it with an index finger.

“Not the time, darling,” Rarity said, feeling the sweat gather on her brow.

“No, it is the time.” Twilight's expression was fierce, and absolutely none of her attention was focused on the city-ending catastrophe building up behind her. “Rarity, I know you want to achieve your dreams yourself, but so many people around you are trying to help you, and you're just putting up a lot of barriers.”

“Noticed, have you?” Rarity's teeth were gritted. She worried they might shatter.

The wall buckled a little more, and another leak sprung. “But you don't have to!” Twilight continued, stretching to plug the other hole with her other index finger. “You don't have to put yourself through all this pressure, Rarity, and we could help you with it if you'd just let down your walls!”

“I really can't do that.”

“Yes you can!” Twilight's eyes shone with passion, and the flood surged above her head, ready to escape its containment. “I know it's scary, but I promise it'll be okay! We're all here for you, Rarity, and with all of your friends together—”

“I mean literally, Twilight!” Rarity shook her hands at the nearly-overtopped barrier. “Now are you going to help me stop this thing or not!?”

Twilight looked up over her head, and blanched. “Oh! Right!” She yanked her fingers from their holes, flew away from the wall a few feet, and thrust her hands out like Rarity had done. “Hah!” A wave of purple force burst from her hands, passing through Rarity's barrier to smash into the flood, pushing it back.

The flood was fierce. The magic faces in the water snarled, and even more water came in. Rarity screamed, Twilight screamed, the flood screamed. The whitewater surface reached over the top of the barrier, only for Twilight's magic to shove it back.

Rarity and Twilight looked at each other, closed their eyes, and pushed. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—”

Rarity shoved open the door of Vice-Principal Luna's office and gasped, “Sorry! Bit of a dam emergency.”

“Language,” Luna said. She didn't look up from the papers on her desk: the words seemed to come automatically.

“No, I mean it was actually a—” Rarity groaned. “Nevermind.” She walked over to the room's other chair and sat down with a splat. They'd obviously saved the day, and some sort of important lesson had probably been learned, but Rarity's superhero outfit had gotten drenched in the process, and the water had been transferred to her civvies when she transformed back. How was that fair?

Luna looked up for the first time and frowned. “You have some....” She motioned at her own hair.

Rarity mirrored the motion, and found an empty bird's nest in her bangs; she growled and tossed it aside. “Thanks,” she muttered, slouching deeper into the seat.

“All right.” Luna nodded, and swept the papers on her desk to the side. “Before we begin, I just want to emphasize this one last time: if you ever want any help with reducing your course load, or any counseling on anything else going on in your life, my door is always open. I don't want to see you putting yourself through too much pressure.”

“Oh, but haven't you heard, darling?” Rarity managed to crack a smile. “Pressure is what makes diamonds.”

Luna stared levelly. “You can't bury all your problems beneath witty repartee, Rarity. But I did say ‘one last time’, so....” She reached down and pulled out a book from under her desk: Facing Your Nightmares. “Let's begin.”

It was time to sleep.

Rarity sat on the end of her bed, took a deep breath, and focused on what she'd been told about Imagery Rehearsal Therapy. The key was to imagine the nightmare, take its ending, and devise a better ending—one that wasn't nearly so stressful or frightening. After enough rehearsal, walking herself through the reimagined scenario over and over again, it would seep into her dreams and rewrite them, and she'd be able to sleep better again.

She stared down at the notebook in her hands. Every nightmare she could remember having over the past month had been jotted down in here, and she'd thrown together a better ending for each one with Vice-Principal Luna. For the rest of the day, she'd spent every spare moment—not that she had a surplus of those—going over the scenarios in her head, over and over again. By now, she had them memorized.

Surely, surely, this would be enough?

A buzzing from her phone caught her attention, followed a few seconds later by another. She put down the notebook, leaned back onto her bed, and grabbed her phone from the nightstand to read the texts.

There were two, and they were both from Twilight. The first was a picture: it was Twilight taking a nervous-looking selfie in her bedroom. Behind her was the Helm from that morning, and it was in some sort of translucent plastic box with a lock on it.

The second text had actual, well, text: Just letting you know, no dream excursions tonight! :)

Rarity smiled, wiggling her shoulders from side to side as she made herself comfortable.

After a few seconds more, she saw a little text-incoming icon, and then a third text: Sorry again. Hope you're not mad.

With a little snort, Rarity composed her reply. Apology accepted. I'm not mad.

She imagined Twilight sighing in relief, and let out a little happy sigh herself. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen, and before it could dim from inactivity, Twilight's response had arrived: Are you sure you'll be okay tonight?

Rarity sucked in a breath, rolled her eyes, and tried to figure out how to reply to that—but before she could, Twilight had continued. Sorry, I'm probably bugging you.

She pursed her lips. She'd expected to feel a little peeved, but now that she thought about it? No, darling, she typed, you aren't bothering me at all. After all, Twilight had promised not to use the Helm, so this was exactly the kind of friendly concern she could appreciate.

She hit send, and then kept typing: Thank you for being so thoughtful, in fact. I'm really

The sentence fragment hung on her phone. She was really what? Thankful, certainly. Touched? Probably. And yet neither of the words seemed to quite capture how she felt about Twilight right now, nor about the efforts—constant and repeated efforts, now that she thought about it—Twilight was going to, all for the sake of her own welfare.

Rarity laughed, or sighed; she wasn't sure which. What she was sure of was that it was late, and she was tired, and she literally did not have time to try to unravel her own feelings right now. So she typed, I'm really glad. Now I think we both need to get to bed, Twilight. Sweet dreams.

You too, was the quick response.

With a little smile, Rarity locked her phone, set it on her bedside table, and shut off the light.

The floodwaters roiled and raged. There were millions of gallons, billions of gallons, enough to drown the world, and all of them bearing down on her.

Rarity stood alone before them, a cocky smile on her face. She sucked in a breath, thrust out her palms, and yelled triumphantly.

And... fizzle. A ghost of a barrier flickered into visibility, and just as quickly flickered out. Rarity blinked, and she looked down at her geode. It was emitting a blinking red light, as if malfunctioning.

She thrust out her palms again, and yelled again triumphantly. And then she yelled uncertainly. And then she yelled pleadingly.

The flood was surging closer. Faces appeared in the water. They weren't demonic. They were familiar. “Because you need help, Rarity!” they cried. “You don't have to put yourself through all this pressure!”

Rarity looked down again, and the geode was gone. She wasn't even ponied up.

“Let down your walls!” cried the water faces. Well, Rarity thought grimly, she was certainly doing that.

The floodwaters smashed into her, and her mouth was smothered by the roiling surge before she could even scream. No one came to save her.

She awoke, drenched in sweat, to the dulcet tones of Satyr's Gymnopedie.

Immediately she clutched her head and moaned at the ache. Right now, dulcet tones sounded about as strident as a klaxon. Switching alarm tones hadn't helped at all.

And neither had the Imagery Rehearsal Therapy. She was back at square one.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Rarity groaned, letting her head sink back into the pillow. “I really, really can’t.”

And like it or not, that left one alternative.

Author's Note

Alternate chapter title: Ain't Even Done With The Knight.

Managed to get this one out within the same day I wanted, give or take seven minutes! I'm glad everyone seems to be enjoying it so far, and I want to extend my thanks again to Undome Tinwe for helping with this chapter!

Fourth Knight

“Vice-Principal?” Rarity peeked her head through the door to Luna's office, which had already been ajar, and then knocked on its inside for a little extra politeness. “Can we chat?”

Luna looked up from whatever papers she was working on. “Good morning, Rarity. How did you sleep last night?”

Rarity laughed, exactly once, and tapped at her cheek just under her eye. “Not superbly.” She hadn't even bothered to do most of her makeup this morning, and the bags were clearly visible to anyone who glanced her way. She fully entered into the room and closed the door. “Do you know, by chance, how long it was supposed to take for that Imagery Rehearsal process to work?”

“Hmm....” Luna reached for the Facing Your Nightmares book—which, Rarity noticed, had already been on her desk—and flipped it open to a bookmarked section. “The book isn't clear on a specific timeframe. As far as I can see, you keep rehearsing until you see results.”

“So what you're saying is that it could take weeks? Months?” Rarity slammed her hands down onto the room's other chair. “Years?”

Luna sighed. “Getting better isn't easy, Rarity. Trust me. It takes as long as it takes.”

Internally, Rarity screamed. Externally, she just managed to stop herself. “Thank you, Vice-Principal,” she said, forcing a cheery tone. “Have a lovely rest of your day.”

She turned tail and walked out the door. Once she was out, she found the nearest wall and slumped against it with a little, dramatic sigh.

It was the end of the day. It was also the first millisecond of free time Rarity had had all day.

(No it wasn't, said a little voice in her head. She'd just spent all her other milliseconds on getting homework done early, or brainstorming designs for dresses, or a dozen other productive ways to procrastinate.)

Regardless! The point was that she was here, now, and Twilight Sparkle was unloading her locker not ten paces away, happily unaware of her presence. And now all that Rarity had to do was change that, and....

“Give permission,” she reminded herself. It wasn't precisely asking for help, it was accepting the help that was being freely offered. Totally different.

She sucked in a breath, counted to seven, and released it. Then she walked forward, and knocked on Twilight's open locker door. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, in an amateurish approximation of a casual tone.

Twilight leaned back enough to look at her, and Rarity could see her sigh a little. “Oh, Rarity.”

“Yes, the bags, I know.” Rarity found her hand jittering, and forced it to stay still. “Twilight Sparkle, I have something to tell you.”

Twilight waited dutifully.

“I....” She took another breath. “I am hereby giving you permission.” A pause. “To do your... dream thing. For me.”

It took a few seconds, apparently, for the words to register. Once they did, Twilight's eyes lit up with stars. “Really! Oh, thank you, thank you! You won't regret it!” She leaned in to grab Rarity in a crushing hug.

“Darling, I'm the one who should be thanking you,” Rarity said.

“Thank you for letting yourself thank me! I won't let you down!” Then Twilight stiffened, still holding Rarity. She broke from the hug and scratched the back of her neck. “There's, uh, just one little thing I remembered just now.”

Rarity narrowed her eyes. “What little thing?”

“Hhhhhhhh... how about you come over and I just show you.”

“What do you mean, it's broken?”

They stood in Twilight's bedroom. The Helm lay on a desk in the corner, surrounded by and hooked up to various devices that seemed to be doing diagnostics, including Twilight's computer. “It doesn't look broken,” Rarity said, reaching out to tap it.

Twilight grabbed her wrist and pulled it away. “Okay, the visual aid isn't as useful as I’d hoped—but it really is broken, Rarity.” She sighed. “I did some tests this morning before school, just to pass the time, and... it's busted. I think it must have happened when you shoved me out of your dream two nights ago.”

“It looks fine!”

“What were you expecting? An exploded chunk of scrap, like some janky sci-fi movie prop?” Twilight slapped her own forehead. “Things can be broken without looking broken, Rarity.”

They stared at each other for a few more seconds, and then Rarity groaned and sat down. “So you can't help me.”

“No, no no no! Of course I can help you!” Twilight sat down beside her, her momentary exasperation forgotten. “I promise I can help you. But I gotta fix this, and I need you to do it.”

Rarity frowned at her, with an implied question behind her lips. Twilight answered it: “The connection between you and the Helm was really, really tenuous in the first place—that's why you couldn't even see who I was the first time. And when you pushed me away, there was a rebound effect that damaged the thaumic resistors, leading to a short-circuit between the....”

Rarity could feel her eyes glazing over, and thankfully Twilight noticed. “Look, to explain it I'd need to give you a crash course in technomancy, and neither of us have the time or energy for that—not if you want this thing fixed by tonight.”

“So what needs to happen?” Rarity asked, placing her hand on Twilight's.

“Besides just generally replacing the broken components? Well, like I said, the link between us was weak. So what we need to do is, you and I need to establish a stronger connection.”

They stared into each other's eyes for a moment. Then Twilight's ears caught up with Twilight's mouth, and she blushed furiously. “W-w-with the Helm. You and the Helm need a stronger connection,” she stammered, pulling her hand away from Rarity's and standing up.

Rarity pouted.

“So, like....” Twilight counted out on her fingers. “Some tissue samples, maybe some blood, brainwave readings, and analyzing your magic signature. And then I can feed all that into the Helm, and the connection with your dreams will be stable enough that it shouldn't backfire like that again. It shouldn't take... too long?”

That phrase—shouldn't take too long—grabbed Rarity's attention like an incoming missile on an army base's radar. “Twilight, dear?” she said, looking up at Twilight. “How long, exactly, is not too long?”

Twilight sighed. “Well, uh, you know... the rest of the day. You're going to have to stay here the rest of the day.”

Rarity scooted backward on the bed. “Bwa—Twilight—I don't have that kind of time!” she said, hands up, fingers splayed. “I need to get home, I have—I have commissions and keytar practice and homework and—”

“And I need these readings if you wanna get any sleep tonight!” Twilight slapped the desk. Not angrily, but she did seem frustrated. “So are you gonna stay here or not?”

Rarity sucked in a breath, held it, and closed her eyes.

She had, at least, gone back to get her keytar. But sacrifices, in the end, had to be made.

Rarity sat in Twilight's bedroom, trying to ignore Twilight's ministrations. Her focus was on her cellphone, and the visigoth on the other end.

“Look, I'm really flattered that you approached me with the commission. Really! It truly means a lot to me as an aspiring artist, but—” A torrent of abuse from the other end cut her off. “Well, I'm sorry, but I'm in a bit of a time crunch right now, so I have to decline.” Rarity kept her tone sweet, trying not to wince as Twilight rolled up her sleeve and wiped at her skin with rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball. “That being said, I wish you the best of luck with—”

Her efforts at politeness were rewarded with another spew of vitriol. Rarity gritted her teeth and turned off the customer service voice. “Well, maybe if you hadn't given me a doodle from a toddler, I might be more inclined to help you! And what's wrong with your handwriting? Did you write the captions during an earthquake?”

The commissioner didn't respond. Rarity kept going. “I will not be doing any more business with you, sir. Good day, and may heaven help the next artist upon whom you inflict yourself!”

With a vicious gesture, she ended the call and slammed her phone down. This was unfortunate, because Twilight had taken that moment to insert the needle. “Ouch!” Rarity yelped, flinching away and grabbing her shoulder. Twilight had nicked her skin in a place that was nowhere near the planned injection site. “Careful!”

“Don't move around so much, then!”

“I'm only clearing my schedule like you asked!”

They glared at each other. And then Rarity shook her head. “No, darling, I'm not upset at you, and I shouldn't have moved, and I apologize. But I am still very upset! Do you have a bandaid?”

Twilight reached into a nearby box of them, pulled one out, and got to work unwrapping it. “At that client? He sounded really rude.”

“That is part of it!” Rarity slammed her fist down on her own leg, and then willed herself to calm down. “But it's not all of it.”

“Really?” The bandaid was not open. Twilight was having trouble finding an edge, and her attempts became more frenetic.

“No, I suppose I'm mostly just... upset at myself.”

Twilight groaned, and her geode glowed, and the bandaid's wrapping paper ripped itself to shreds in a purple haze. “But you didn't do anything wrong,” Twilight said, as the bandaid floated itself toward Rarity's shoulder and attached itself. “That guy was just being a jerk. I'm pretty sure I saw him in your dream the other night, and he was a jerk there too.”

“It's not about him, Twilight. It's just....” Rarity held her breath as she tried to find the words. “I hate turning down work,” she finally said. “Anything. I hate feeling like there's something more I could be doing, some new achievement I could be striving for, that I'm not. It's like I'm... falling behind.”

Rarity laughed. “Gosh, that must sound silly, mustn't it? As if I'm not already doing enough? But it's like, like... like every moment I'm not doing something is a moment wasted. Even when I’m hanging out with the girls, it’s like an itch in my head, trying to get me back to work. Trying to have me make something newer, better, some achievement I can call my own.”

My own…. She pursed her lips. Was that why she’d so adamantly refused any help? Just because she was worried she’d have to put a second name on her achievements? Good gracious, she hoped that wasn’t it—

The train of thought was cut off when she felt a hand on her shoulder, covering up the bandage, and saw that Twilight had leaned closer. “I totally get it,” she said. “Not wanting to waste a second. Why do you think I'm always building stuff?”

Rarity smiled, and Twilight smiled back.

“Now hold still this time.” Like a switch being flipped, Twilight's demeanor turned professional, and the smile flickered off. She got another cotton ball, rubbed it in new alcohol, and got rubbing again, and Rarity tried not to shiver.

“Needle's coming again. Don't move this time.” Twilight positioned the needle at her shoulder, just above the injection site, and Rarity looked away. She wasn't exactly terrified of needles—that honor went to her little sister—but she didn't have to like them.

A moment later, there was a little pinching sensation, and a feeling of coldness. And then she felt the cold sensation go away, and felt another cotton ball where the pinch had been. “Is it done?” she said.

“Yes,” Twilight said, a hint of humor in her voice. Rarity looked over to see a syringe full of blood in one hand; the other was putting pressure on Rarity's cotton ball. “You were very brave.”

“Stop it,” Rarity said, snorting a little.

“Want a lollipop?” Twilight teased, her geode glowing again. A second bandaid flew from the box, unwrapped itself, and covered Rarity's wound as Twilight removed the cotton ball.

“Stahp, darling.”

“Well, we can't stop now.” Twilight placed the needle down in an appropriate receptacle, and then picked up another device, like a q-tip with a blue plastic shaft. “Now comes the cheek swab! Choo-choo!”

Rarity found herself laughing as Twilight leaned in, aiming the cheek swabber at her open mouth. “Stop it, stop iiiiit,” she whined, pushing out randomly with her hands. Her palms found Twilight's face, and she pressed.

“It's for your own good!” Twilight said, her voice muffled by Rarity's hands. She, in turn, fumbled blindly with the swabber. “And after this we can go get ice cream!”

Rarity shrieked out her giggles as the cheek swabber entered her mouth, rubbing along her gums in the most incredibly ticklish way. It was all she could do not to bite down on the device, or possibly on Twilight's fingers depending on what was in the way.

Finally it was done, despite Rarity's refusal to stop pushing Twilight's face. “All right,” Twilight said, finally pulling away. “We're done now! We're done. With the invasive stuff, anyway.”

Rarity pouted in the most performative way possible. “You had better have been serious about that ice cream.”

After a second or two, just long enough to stay in character for a bit, they both broke and started laughing in earnest. “Wow,” Twilight wheezed, leaning on the desk a little for support. “In retrospect, you probably could have swabbed your own mouth, but I knew the procedure, so....” She turned away. “I'll get started on this, and then we can do the brain wave analysis thing. That one's easy—it's just a headset, kinda like the Helm—but it takes a while.”

“Whatever you need, darling,” Rarity said, and then her laughter died away. She held out her hands, and turned them over to look at her fingernails, and then turned them back over to look at her palms. Her fingertips were stained purple.

She squinted at them for a moment, and then said, “Twilight, darling?”

“Mm?” Twilight was holding the syringe of Rarity's blood in her hand: in her magic, she had a half-dozen vials, each of which seemed to contain a different chemical liquid.

“Can you look over here for a moment?”

“In the middle of something right now, Rarity.” Twilight held the syringe out and floated each vial beneath it in turn, and squeezed out a droplet of blood into each. The chemicals started changing colors as they mingled with the blood.

“Twilight, seriously,” Rarity said, standing up and walking over, “just put that down for a moment and look at me.”

Twilight didn't. So Rarity reached out, and cupped her hand around Twilight's chin, and gently but firmly forced her head to turn the ninety degrees required for visual confirmation. Twilight's work slowed to a halt, the vials floating absently above the desk.

On Twilight's face, just below the eyes, she saw dark fingerprints. The kind that would only make sense if....

“It's nothing,” Twilight said, as Rarity raised her other hand. Slowly, with the lightest touch she could administer, she scraped one of her nails under Twilight's left eye, and removed a hefty amount of purple concealer—just like her fingertips had done before.

When it was gone, Rarity found herself crestfallen. “Twilight,” she said. “Oh, Twilight.”

“Don't worry about it.” Twilight flashed her a quick smile. But Rarity was worrying about it, because the circle around Twilight's eye was formidable, giving her a sunken appearance. If Rarity looked like she was part-raccoon, Twilight had to look like she was part-zombie.

“Darling,” Rarity said. The sadness in her voice had to make room for a competing emotion: annoyance. “So you're telling me that I'm the one having trouble sleeping?”

“What? No, no.” Twilight laughed, and the worst thing was, it sounded as genuine as the laugh they'd shared earlier. “This isn't, like, a stress thing like you have. This is just me being a dumb-dumb, and staying up late to make robot dogs and privacy invasion helmets and stuff. Nothing like your situation, don't worry.” She returned to her earlier work, spilling the last drop of blood into the last test tube.

“Nothing like my situation?” Rarity stared at the amount of concealer on her nail, before grabbing another cotton ball from Twilight's desk and wiping it off. “You've even been hiding it with makeup like me—I didn't even know you were any good at makeup. How did you get so good?” Her eyes widened a bit. “How long has this been going on?”

“Oh, I'm not that good at makeup.” Twilight flapped her hand airily. “I just have darker skin so it's easier to do. Seriously, you don't need to pretend I'm on the same level as you are, Rarity. You're—you're amazing, and I'm just....”

There was no speech for a few seconds. Rarity sat down upon the bed, and patted the space next to her, looking Twilight in the eye. After a few seconds, Twilight sighed. She set down the syringe, and the test tubes floated into a waiting rack. “Just what, dear?” Rarity said, with the distinct sense that the response wouldn't have anything to do with makeup.

Twilight sat down beside her, resting her chin on her hands and her elbows on her knees. “Just, you know. That you're always being so amazing, twenty four seven, and always making things and always dealing with everything, and you always look so, so cool. Not like Rainbow Dash cool, like unflappable. It feels like the world could be ending and you'd just, you'd just go out and deal with it like you always do, because you're amazing.”

She chuckled, looking Rarity's way without moving her head, and continued. “And then something, anything, happens to me and it feels like I'm just, like, just flailing. Like I'm constantly panicking just trying to deal with everyday life, and then I look over at you, and you're nailing it, Rarity. I wish I could do that.”

Rarity shook her head, a little rueful smile on her lips. “You can't possibly think I'm all that, after you've had a look in my head.” She tapped her temple for emphasis. “It's a bit of a mess up here, you'll recall.”

Twilight fully turned to look at her, and clasped her other hand in both of her own. “I think it more than ever now.”

Rarity held her gaze. Twilight blushed, at least as hard as she had before, but she didn't look away this time. They held the moment, drawing it out as long as possible.

And then Rarity tutted. “Now, Twilight, you mustn't say such things. I forbid it.”

Twilight's head tilted like a confused puppy's. “What? But I was just telling you you were—”

“Oh, on the subject of your wild accusations about my best qualities, I have no objections. After all, I am guilty as charged.” Rarity laughed softly to herself, but then narrowed her eyes. “However, you have said some deeply unkind things about a dear friend of mine, and I won't permit such slanderous talk in my company!”

“What?” Twilight flinched back. “But who was I... wait, you mean me?”

Now it was Rarity's turn, to hold one of Twilight's hands in two of her own. “I will admit, you can panic from time to time. I have seen you hyperventilate more than is probably usual. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that you're feeling nervous, and then you do it anyway. You save the day, just like the rest of us, and you pursue your ambitions at least as fervently as I do.”

“Stop,” Twilight said, and now she was bashful enough to look away. “It's not nearly as good as—”

“Not nearly as good? Twilight, look at me.” The command was sharp, and Twilight was forced to obey. “I make dresses. Very good dresses, yes, even exceptional dresses. You make devices that no one else could ever create, or even dream of. I don't think there's ever been anyone as clever—and as driven—as you in the history of the world!” Rarity leaned closer. “And when it comes to your future, the only uncertainty I have is which Stabel Prize you're going to win first.”

She squeezed Twilight's hand tighter. “So don't ever act like you're not amazing too. Understand me?”

Twilight smiled, and laughed a little in her throat. “Thanks, Rarity.” They leaned a little closer, and Rarity released Twilight's hand, but only so she could wrap the girl in a hug. She felt Twilight hugging her back, just as tightly. Her warmth was wonderful against Rarity's own.

“So!” Twilight said, not letting go. “I'm not rushing you, but we eventually need to stop hugging so I can put the brain wave scanner on you.”

Rarity pursed her lips in thought. “Mmmm... a few more seconds.” They didn’t move. “Maybe half a minute.”

Bedtime.

Rarity lay on the floor between Twilight's bed and the wall, in a sleeping bag that Twilight had pulled out for her. It wasn't quite as comfortable as her own bed at home, but Twilight had insisted that Rarity stay over with her to ensure a stable dream connection, just in case.

Whatever. Rarity was comfortable enough for one night, and it wasn't as if her bed at home would guarantee a good night's sleep in any event.

“Ready?” Twilight said, and Rarity looked up to see Twilight leaning over her from atop the bed. The Helm Mark II rested on her head, finally complete after hours of work (and the occasional half-hour break for food, or video games, or impromptu jam sessions with the keytar). “Just let me know when and I'll get the light.”

Rarity opened her mouth, about to say the word, and then stopped. “One second, dear.” She closed her eyes, and concentrated, and declared out loud: “I will have a good dream tonight. If I start having a bad dream, I will be able to have a much better dream instead.”

When she opened her eyes, Twilight was looking down in confusion. Rarity smiled. “Just covering all my bases, dear.” The Imagery Rehearsal stuff hadn't worked the previous night, but she might as well keep trying. It took as long as it took, right?

Twilight shrugged. “Well, you will. That's what this is for.” She tapped the Helm with a smile. “All right, ready?”

“Ready.” Rarity clapped twice, as if Twilight's light were sound-operated. “Sweet dreams, Twilight.”

Twilight nodded. “Sweet dreams.” Then she reached over and turned off her bedside lamp.

Rarity smiled as the light went off, and shimmied herself deeper into the sleeping bag. It had been a long time since she had had a sleepover.

With a dazzling smile and a wave of her arm, Rarity proudly welcomed all in attendance to the first ever Carousel Boutique… atop Mount Everest.

The press oohed and ahhed, and snapped many pictures. They were arrayed upon the mountain before her, and wearing heavy parkas, because it was really really cold. The Himalayas sprawled out beneath them, majestic and awe-inspiring and unobstructed. Rarity had the best view in the world: she could see all of Nepal from here.

She produced an ice axe, raised it above the ribbon that had frozen solid around the building, and—chop!—cut the ribbon. With that, she declared the boutique open, and demanded that everyone enter and shop to their hearts’—

Hang on.

Rarity blinked as the crowds rushed past her—staggering amounts of them, despite how empty the landscape had seemed before. She turned around and couldn't really parse what she was seeing: the boutique didn't look that large from the outside, but seemed to contain a space the size of a shopping mall, and it was full of customers. Customers browsing on the floors, walking on the walls, chatting on the ceilings....

I've been here before, she realized. Any moment now, someone is going to shout—

“Hey!” someone cried out.

And Rarity, feeling very rehearsed, asked what was the matter.

“You don't have any pants!”

She didn't bother to look down: her eyes remained firmly upon the inside of the boutique, even as space seemed to distort around her to bring her to the pants section. Before her eyes, all the goods there evaporated into nothing. “There's no pants for sale!” the voice continued, same as always. “How are we supposed to shop if there aren't any—”

And then came the sound she hadn't learned to expect, but had learned to hope for: the neighing of a horse, loud enough for every customer in the store to take notice.

Rarity looked out the front door and smiled. I'm in a dream. It wasn't a sudden realization, just the inevitable result of the pieces she'd been putting together. I'm in a nightmare, actually. The nightmare I always come back to. And I'm not scared.

Because Twilight is here. She rode in on her trusty, imaginary unicorn steed, cantering up the mountain in open defiance of the laws of physics. Twilight Sparkle, still in full plate armor—if the cold weather weren't fake, she'd probably be unable to move—reached the top and jumped off.

Rarity curtsied, and found herself in an elegant dress that was precisely suited to the gesture. “My dear knight,” she said, inclining her head.

“My lady,” Twilight said, trying to sound even a little serious. She wasn't succeeding very well. “Whatever seems to be the problem? Could it be a shortage of pants?”

Rarity gasped, hand over her mouth and everything. “Oh, it's terrible, darling, simply terrible! They say they can't shop without them!”

“Well, never fear!” Twilight walked back behind her horse to the carriage that had always been there, as long as Rarity didn't think about it too hard. “We have pants enough for everyone!”

And the pants burst from the carriage, and the customers were clothed in Rarity's best clothes, and they rejoiced, and threw her high into the sky in celebration, and Rarity found herself beaming all the while.

And then Twilight was there. Rarity reached out and opened Twilight's helm herself, and found that her loyal knight had a beaming smile to match her own. “Thank you so much,” Rarity said, pulling her in for a hug and closing her eyes. As she did, she felt Twilight's armor dissolve in her arms.

“Happy to help,” Twilight said. She pulled away from the hug, letting Rarity see that they were both back in their street clothes. “So I think we can confidently call this test of the Helm Mark II a success!”

“Hurrah!” Rarity lifted both arms in the air. The mountains were beautiful beneath her: snowcapped peaks and stark, barren ridges as far as the eye could see. She wondered, distantly, if the real Himalayas looked this gorgeous.

Well, that was a question for when she woke up. She smiled at Twilight again. “As you said, it was a perfect success. Thank you so much. And now I don't want to keep you from your own dreams, Twilight, so... you're free to go and sleep on your own.” She waved.

But Twilight stepped closer. “Wait. We're here, in your own lucid dream. You can do whatever you want right now. Isn't there anything you want us to do together?”

Rarity frowned. “Are you certain? I don't want to deprive you—”

Twilight was already shaking her head. “Trust me, Rarity. There is nothing in my dreams that I want to see more than this.”

So Rarity pursed her lips, and pondered, and then—snapped her fingers. “There is one thing that I've never been able to convince the girls to do,” she said, “when we're all together.” And she raised her foot, and tapped the heel against an invisible ballroom floor, three times.

Twilight jolted back, finding herself in a sparkling blue ballroom gown—backless, cinched tight around her waist, and shimmering like the sea—and then looked up to see Rarity tying her own bowtie. “Well, Miss Sparkle?” Rarity said, wearing a rather fetching tuxedo of her own design, with a complementary purple waistcoat beneath it. Beneath that was a tight white shirt that did award-worthy work at highlighting her figure.

Rarity bent forward in an exaggerated bow, and offered her hand. “If you would please me with this dance.”

She'd seen many a blush from Twilight over the past several days. This one trumped them all: she looked ready to combust. “I—I don't know how to dance!” she sputtered.

Rarity just smiled, and took her hands. “You do in my dreams.” She tapped her foot against the floor once more.

The waltz was slow, and simple, and played on only a piano. Rarity didn't know its name—she didn't know if it was even a real piece—but it was exactly what she had been thinking of. She held up Twilight's hand, guided the other to her waist before grabbing Twilight's own. Then, the two of them began to dance along the endless blue sky.

Twilight kept making little uncertain noises, like she was about to trip over her dress and faceplant, but Rarity didn't let her: her dress billowed out around her in defiance of gravity, remaining well clear of her feet. Besides, Rarity had a firm hold of her waist. Everything was okay.

Bit by bit, as they kept going, Twilight seemed to start believing it. The worry left her face, and she even started smiling, still following Rarity's lead as they danced. When Rarity let go of her waist to twirl her, Twilight responded enthusiastically, spinning at least two revolutions with a little peal of laughter. Good heavens, she was cute as a button—and Rarity knew some very cute buttons.

Rarity felt her face grow warm, and knew her physical body had to be smiling too. Of course, it was no more than she would do for her other friends—that was, if they would ever let her bring them to a ballroom; maybe Fluttershy would allow her, but the others wouldn't tolerate it. Just a friendly dance, between one friend and another... friend.

It didn't even sound convincing in her head. No, she realized, taking Twilight's waist again. I'm waltzing through the sky with Twilight, dressed in an outfit to complement hers, and we’re sharing a dream together. I'm not sure what this is, but 'friendship' doesn't quite fit the description.

Twilight leaned into her body, her head on Rarity's shoulder. “Thank you so much,” Twilight said. “This is wonderful, Rarity. I'm so lucky to get to experience this with you.”

Rarity snorted. “Oh, don't upsell me too much. Surely you can use that device to lucidly dream on your own? Why, I'd like to see what kind of dreams you can conjure up.”

“No, it's not....”

Twilight faltered, getting out of step with Rarity for a moment. “I can't do this,” Twilight said, and then something was wrong and Rarity wasn't sure what. “I can't do anything like this.”

Rarity looked around, trying to see what had changed, and couldn't see anything in particular. Maybe it was everything. Maybe it was the way the song didn't sound the same, or the sky didn't look the same, or Twilight didn't feel the same: she had been so warm and now she felt cold, so cold—

“You don't want to be inside my head,” Twilight said. Her smile was long gone. “You don't want to see that, Rarity. Just let me stay here, with you—”

She froze, and Rarity froze too. That was why the song didn't sound the same: on each beat, each second, there was a tick. A tick that reverberated through the universe. With each one, the sky grew a little darker, the endless blue transitioning to endless purple and heading toward endless black.

“I—” Twilight looked around frantically, and then looked down, and the color drained from her face. “Oh, no no no no no. Not here.”

“What?” Rarity said, looking down, and gasping. The invisible floor wasn't invisible anymore. She and Twilight stood at the center of an enormous clockface. She looked out, toward the horizon, and saw its massive hands, its massive numbers. 11:50, it read.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

“I have to go,” Twilight said. With a burst of effort, and before Rarity could respond, she freed herself from Rarity's grip. She gave Rarity a miserable look, and then ran away toward the giant twelve.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

“Wait!” Rarity held out her hand. “Dear, what's going on?” The clock read 11:56 now, and the sky was almost black as pitch.

Tick.

“There's no time!” Twilight called back. “Just—just sleep well!”

Tick.

“Twilight!” Rarity ran after her, but it was like the air was congealing; she could hardly move. Twilight was well ahead of her, and fading fast into the darkness.

Tick.

“See you in the morning!” Twilight yelled, and with that—

Tic—

Rarity stood there, lungs heaving, hand outstretched. The clock was gone, just before it could strike twelve. The ticking had vanished. The skies were blue again.

Twilight was gone.

Consciousness returned slowly to Rarity, as if rising through an ocean of water toward distant sunlight. When she blinked her eyes open, her first emotion was confusion: what was this grey lump around her that didn't look like her bed? Why had her walls changed color? Why was her back kind of stiff?

And then the memories came back. Coming to Twilight's house; the Helm; arguing and laughing together, praising one another; dreaming a shared dream. A dance among the heavens.

The darkness. The clock. Twilight, turning tail and fleeing.

“Twilight.” Rarity bolted upright. “Twilight, darling, wake up!” She fought with her sleeping bag, struggling to get it unzipped; once she'd been freed, she jumped to her feet.

Twilight lay unconscious in her bed, tangled in her sheets, with the Helm still upon her head.

And all Rarity could see were the bags under her eyes, as if Twilight hadn't slept at all.

Author's Note

Alternate chapter title: No More Lonely Knights.

Once again, a huge thanks to Undome Tinwe for looking over this. This time, with his help, I was able to actually publish the story before midnight in my own time zone! It's very exciting.

Fifth Knight

“Hello again, Rarity,” Vice-Principal Luna said. Her demeanor was professional, but her eyes looked a little tired. “Bad dreams again?”

“No... I mean, yes?” Rarity let herself into the room and closed the door, being careful that it wouldn't swing open again. This was a private matter. “The thing is, they weren't mine.”

“That's... confusing.” Luna steepled her fingers. “Were you, and I cannot stress enough that this is not a euphemism, doing strange magical things with your friends again?”

Rarity sat down on the chair. “Afraid so.” She sighed. There wasn't really a good way to ask this question, or a good place for it—but this place was coming close. As much of a standard vice-principal's office as it was—even complete with generic posters of one-word virtues beneath filtered landscapes—Luna's constant calm presence made it a lot easier to talk.

“I'd rather not get too far into specifics,” Rarity said, “but I am here for some advice. Let's say... let's say I have this friend.”

Luna didn't respond; she just kept up her serene gaze. Rarity continued. “And this friend is very very smart, even brilliant, but it only works when she's directing her mind at any problem other than herself. When her problem-solving skills are directed inward, she is incredibly, cosmically stupid.”

Rarity found herself leaning forward, hands on Luna's desk, talking faster. “And suppose furthermore that I've just learned that this friend has been having trouble sleeping, at least as bad as my own if not much much worse, and that she would far rather deal with my own problem than hers. And that she brushed off any attempt on my part to ask her about it this morning, and that now I think she's avoiding me, and—”

Luna held up a hand. “Let me save us some trouble. You're talking about Twilight Sparkle.”

Rarity processed that for a few seconds. Eventually she realized that at some point she'd stood up. “You shouldn't know that.”

Luna looked away, setting a hand on her chin to scratch at her cheek. “You know,” she said, and then stopped. Rarity was reminded of a chess grandmaster planning her next move—reaching out, almost touching a piece, halting at the last moment before she could be forced to commit.

Finally, the move. “You know, part of this job involves a certain level of confidentiality. If a student comes to speak with me about any concerns they might have—for instance, you coming here to talk about sleep, and repeatedly—” the words were spoken with unusual emphasis “—then that student, whoever she may be, is trusting me not to repeat what she says to other interested parties.”

Luna sucked in a breath, closing her eyes. “There are exceptions, of course. I can share information with other professionals, if it's in the student's best interest. And I can certainly act drastically if there is a clear and present danger to the student in question.” Her eyes opened, and she leaned forward somewhat. “Is there such a danger?”

Rarity took a moment to reply. “No, there isn't.”

Luna sighed—almost certainly in relief—and returned to a neutral position in her seat. “Then I couldn't share anything about this hypothetical student unless said student directly gave me permission. Even to a good friend of hers who truly cares about her, even if I have reason to believe that this friend would be able to help her—my hands are tied.” She held out the hands in question on her desk, close together. “I hope you understand.”

Rarity did understand. She perfectly understood, and that was why her hands were curling into fists, why her breaths were coming faster through her nose, why the only color she could see at that present moment was red.

“I can't believe her!” She was on her feet, and the chair was toppling over behind her. “After all the spiel she gave me!” She dropped a bit of the accent from her voice, just long enough for an impression. “Oh, you need help, Rarity! You have to let other people in, Rarity! All while she goes behind our backs, behind my back! All so she doesn't have to practice what she preaches, all so she doesn't have to let anyone else know there's an issue!”

She paced from side to side, barely even noticing the fallen chair or anything else in the office, really. “I mean, at least I talked about it! At least I consistently took advice, even if I was a little slow on the uptake! But her! How can she be so stupid?”

Rarity stomped her foot. “How can someone so smart, and clever, and kind, and lovable, and pretty, I mean actually very pretty, and altogether breathtakingly spectacular be so... so....”

She trailed off. Now that she'd run out of steam, there were a couple of things to notice. There was the chair, of course, which she leaned down and righted. And then there was Luna staring calmly at her, but now there was an element of—of waiting, as if for a penny to drop—

Smart. Clever. Kind, lovable, very pretty.

Breathtakingly spectacular.

The penny dropped. It had been in the air since her dance in that dream the previous night, possibly for even longer, and when it dropped it made a noise like the smashing of continents in Rarity's mind.

Her mouth opened in a capital O. Eventually she found enough self-possession to mumble, “I'll be back later,” and let herself out of the office. Whereupon she ran like hell.

“Sunset Shimmer!”

When Rarity found her, Sunset was sitting on the pedestal of the portal, doodling something in her notebook. Rarity ran out the front door of the school, down the front walk, and clambered up onto the pedestal. “I need to ask you something right now,” she panted.

Rarity caught a glimpse of what was probably some upcoming graffiti art, and then Sunset closed the notebook to give Rarity her full attention. “What's up?” Sunset smiled in a knowing way, and Rarity really really hated that.

Rarity pushed past it. “I need you to answer a yes or no question.” She stuck out her hand, ready to be grabbed. “Am I in love with Twilight Sparkle?”

Sunset stared levelly at her. Then she held up her hand, and plopped it down atop Rarity's. There was a brief glow in her eyes, and then she let go. “Yes.”

Rarity nodded slowly. “Oh.”

“Yeah, I don't think I actually needed the geode for that.”

“Oh.” Rarity turned away from her, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the pedestal, and held her head in her hands. Really, it was a bit redundant, but everything seemed so confusing right now that it was nice to have one sure thing. “Oh, no.”

A pause followed, and then Sunset said, “'Oh no?' That's not exactly the response I was expecting when you figured this out.”

“Well, it really makes things far more complicated than—” Rarity caught herself mid-word, and glared at Sunset. “When I what? Have you been expecting this?”

Sunset hummed under her breath. “Well, the short version is that Rainbow Dash owes me twenty bucks. Long version? I've kind of had a feeling about you two for a while.” She frowned. “Huh. Long version wasn't that long. Anyway, back on topic, you're looking pretty stressed out about it.”

“She's been sleeping worse than I have,” Rarity said, “and I don't know for how long.”

There had been a slight humor in Sunset's eyes for this whole conversation. It vanished.

After a few seconds, since Sunset didn't have a response, Rarity continued, “So obviously it would be nicer if I had to deal with one unexpected development, rather than two. And before you ask, no, I haven't just tried talking to her about it because she—”

Rarity cut herself off. A flash of purple had just become visible in the front hall of the school: Twilight herself, walking to a class like she hadn't a care in the world. She'd put her concealer back on, and didn't look the least bit tired.

After a moment, she glanced out the glass doors, seemed to notice Rarity, and stiffened. Then her gaze returned straight forward and she marched out of sight, like she had a lot of cares in the world.

“Because that happens,” Rarity said. “She's been avoiding me.”

“Yikes.” Sunset clicked her teeth and scooched closer on the pedestal. “So. What are you gonna do about it?”

“I don't know! I don't know.” Rarity slumped. “I don't know what I'm going to do about liking her, and I don't know what I'm going to do about her problem. Why must these things be so complicated?”

“They are?”

“Of course they are! I don't even know if Twilight likes me back!”

And Sunset just looked at her.

And Rarity thought about the past week, and how much of it Twilight had spent devoted to her, and of dancing through a clear blue sky. “Ah.”

“Yup.”

“That... is gratifying.” Rarity had always enjoyed a bit of understatement. A pleasant heat warmed her chest, and for the first time that day it seemed like she had some life in her. “And it answers one of my concerns, but not the other.”

“You don't know what to do about Twilight not getting enough sleep.” Sunset shrugged. “What's the best idea you've got, then?”

Rarity sat there for a while, feeling the sun on her face. “I... think my instincts are telling me to give her space. Not to try to push her to deal with this until she's ready. Whatever's troubling her, she deserves the freedom to confront it when she is comfortable with doing so.”

“All right.” The statement was halfway to a question.

“And that would be all well and good except for one teensy thing.” She sucked a breath through her nose. “My 'instincts' have been completely and utterly useless this entire week.”

Sunset frowned in thought, and didn't say anything. Rarity was suddenly reminded of Fluttershy in a way, but just as suddenly she realized there was hardly any comparison. When Fluttershy listened, it gave the speaker license to rant, rave, and monologue her heart out without having to think about it. And this was a very fine thing, but Sunset's listening was active, even probing. It was forcing her to pause, to think, to re-evaluate. To provide more than one side of the argument.

And so Rarity thought. “I would still be having my problem if Twilight hadn't very rudely barged into my dream to deal with it. I'd still be running on not enough sleep, burning myself out. And no,” Rarity added, “she should not have done it the way she did it, but she was absolutely correct to try to help. Even if I didn't feel like I was ready to be helped. Maybe sometimes you can't wait that long.”

Sunset kept looking at her, and then, at last, she smiled. Whatever test that had been, it felt like Rarity had passed. “Thank you, Sunset,” she said, pulling her close for a tight one-armed hug. “You know, sometimes I think you're the smartest person I know.”

“Eh, it's nothing special. Just good old fashioned horse sense.”

Rarity immediately released her grip on her former friend. “Boo. Boo, I tell you!” But Sunset's self-satisfied grin couldn't be denied, and Rarity found it infecting her own face. “I refuse to acknowledge that. I refuse!”

“You know you love it. Anyway, you did all the work. I just sat here and looked pretty.” Sunset winked. “So. What are you gonna do?”

Rarity swung her legs out, and jumped off the pedestal. It felt incredibly easy, like she was lighter than air. “I'm going to go find Twilight Sparkle, and give her a taste of her own medicine!”

Sunset leaned forward. “And if she keeps avoiding you?”

Rarity grimaced. “Then I just have to wait in the one place I know she'll be.”

The school hallways were winding, and twisted, and endless.

Rarity walked resolutely onward, calling out Twilight's name over and over again. How long had she been searching? Certainly long enough for everyone else to have gone on home, that was why everything felt so empty around her, but Twilight was still here. She could feel it.

But then where was Twilight? And where was Rarity? And why was it so strangely dark, and why could she feel the corridors shifting around her with every step, sending her deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lockers and classroom doors with no exit—

Mm, that didn't quite seem right, did it?

Rarity stopped, and squinted, and walked to one of the lockers. Usually, they were numbered sequentially. Right now, the numerals were quite as unreadable as if she were dyslexic, nearsighted, and concussed all in one. Hadn't she read somewhere, how you couldn't read in dreams?

And then she heard the familiar whinny, and whipped herself around at the sound of galloping hooves that echoed down the hallway. And then they stopped, and she heard a skidding noise, and then they started again. And then another skidding noise.

Rarity tapped her foot. After a couple of iterations of this, she heard an aggrieved shout of, “Why is this place so twisty?” A smile found its way onto Rarity’s face in spite of herself: even after a day spent avoiding her, Twilight still cared enough to find her in her dreams, just as Rarity had known she would.

At long last, Twilight in her armor, riding her horse, skidded around a corner and into view. “Rarity!” she said. “Sorry it took so long to get here, but I kept getting lost. This place is a nightma—” She cut herself off. “Well, obviously it is, but anyway. Hop on, and I'll get you out!”

“Twilight,” Rarity said. “You're just the person I've been looking for. Would you mind staying here for a moment?”

Twilight hinged her visor open. “I, uh... what?”

Rarity slapped the horse on its side, and it evaporated, forcing Twilight to fall to the floor. When she landed, she was out of her armor. “Darling,” Rarity said, taking Twilight's hand, “come with me.”

She led them through the nearest door, and the next thing Rarity knew they were seated at chairs inside a cramped office. Luna's office, maybe? Rarity was behind the desk, and Twilight was in front. “Now, Twilight,” Rarity said, steepling her fingers, “you know why we're having this discussion.”

“What?” Twilight's grin was a pretty terrible disguise, now that Rarity knew it for what it was. “I can't say I do.”

“Oh, I very much think you can.” Rarity leaned forward. Her voice wasn't playful. “How long have you been unable to sleep, Twilight?”

“No, I don't know.” Twilight shoved herself to her feet. “It looks like you're doing okay, so I'll be going now, have a nice—”

Rarity stood and grabbed her wrist. “Don't lie to me,” she said, very quietly.

Twilight turned around, and saw that there was no longer a door, and flinched. “I told you already,” she said, not meeting Rarity's eyes. “I stay up late building stuff. It's the truth.”

“And you can give it up any time you like, is that it?” Rarity's lip was curling. What a curious thing: she knew she loved Twilight, had emotional and even empirical proof, and knew she wanted nothing but the best for her—and the knowledge only made Rarity even more furious. “I believe you were building things while you were staying up. But you're not going to convince me that's the sole reason you weren't letting yourself go to sleep, Twilight.”

“I'm asleep now!” Twilight slapped her hand against the wall where the door had been. “Happy?”

“I'm not happy!” Rarity forced herself forward, through the space where the desk had been; she needed it out of the way and so it was gone. “I'm very mad at you, Twilight, because I don't think you're asleep at all! I saw you this morning, and you looked exhausted! And it makes me wonder if you're not getting any sleep at all while you use the Helm!”

“I'm unconscious in my bed! What do you call that other than sleep?”

“I don't know!”

They were face to face now, inches apart, close enough that if they had been breathing air, Rarity's breaths would be fogging Twilight's glasses.

Finally, Twilight growled and turned away, yanking her wrist from Rarity's grasp. “I can handle it.”

“You haven't been handling it.”

“It's not your problem.”

“Not my problem—Twilight, it's my obligation! When you've been neglecting yourself to help me?”

Twilight reached out a hand, and Rarity saw a glow, and then the section of wall ripped itself apart in front of her. “I'm leaving,” she said.

“But you don't want to.” Rarity laid a hand on her shoulder. It wasn't a grab. It was just a touch. “And I don't want you to either.”

Twilight laughed a little, as the dust cleared where the wall had been. “What's it to you, anyway? Why do you care so much?”

“Why do I—why do I care?” Rarity walked around her, and looked her in the eye, and said, “Twilight Sparkle, I love you!”

And the reaction Twilight had to that was to gape like a dying fish.

“I love you. And yes, I mean romantically.” Rarity reached down, held Twilight's hand in hers. “You made it very easy to do, being all gallant like that. Now all I want is for you to let me be the gallant one. Just let me in, Twilight.”

Twilight's jaw kept working uselessly. Finally she managed to say, “You... you?”

“Yes. It was very sudden for me as well.” Rarity smiled.

And Twilight looked at her, like a drowning woman at a life preserver.

And then she looked down and grabbed her head and said, “No. Oh, no, no, no.”

“Twilight?” Rarity remembered how she had said something similar after Sunset's confirmation. But Twilight's voice wasn't tired, or confused, or any such thing. Twilight's voice was panicked. “Twilight, what's wrong.”

“No, this is all wrong.” Twilight was talking to the floor: Rarity might as well not have been there. “You weren't supposed to—I didn't want you to—I mean I wanted it but this isn't right, you shouldn't—”

Tick.

Twilight froze. Slowly, she and Rarity turned their gazes toward the hallway.

Clocks. Everywhere, along the top of every wall, side by side by side. Clocks, all in time, all reading 11:50, and ticking away the minutes like they were seconds. Tick, and it was 11:51. Another tick, and 11:52.

“No,” Twilight said. “We need to—I need to—”

Tick.

“Twilight, stop!” Rarity yelled. Twilight was already running, right down the hallway, past the millions of clocks, but then another Tick, and the lights at the end of the hall shut off. Twilight skidded to a halt, and turned around, trying to run the other way, but she slipped and fell, and Tick, the lights at the other end of the hallway were off too. They were trapped in a prison of darkness.

“Twilight!” Rarity rushed to her, held her, got her to her knees. Twilight was hyperventilating, looking past Rarity, so Rarity grabbed her face—Tick—and forced her to focus. “I'm here for you, Twilight! I won't leave you!”

Tick. The darkness was closing in.

“It's happening,” Twilight gasped. “It's happening—I can't—”

Tick. Only one tiny patch of light left, barely large enough for the two of them. Only one clock remained visible, and it read 11:59.

“It's okay, Twilight!” Rarity grabbed her tight, the tightest hug she could muster. “It's going to be okay!”

Tick.

The light vanished. They were blind in the darkness, and Rarity clutched Twilight close with all her might, and Twilight and their panicked breaths were all there was in the world.

And then, a voice.

“Well, we all know that's a crock of shit.”

Twilight spasmed. Rarity felt that she was staring at something behind Rarity's back. And now, where there had been only inky blackness, there was a poisoned blue glow. Rarity saw their shadows in it.

Slowly, she turned her head.

And there was Midnight. “But then again,” said Midnight Sparkle, and she looked just like she had in Rarity's memories, “a lie that ridiculous is really what you deserve, Twily, isn't it? I mean, that's what you've been giving her. Acting all selfless, acting like a knight in shining armor?”

Her horn, her glasses, blazed blue. She glided toward them, wings beating with a span so broad that they would never have fit in the corridor—but Rarity could see now that the corridor was gone, and the only thing around them was darkness. “Twilight,” Rarity whispered.

“Pathetic.” Midnight sneered. “You and I—you and you—both know the real reason you attached yourself to her, like a puppy dog.”

“Twilight, look away. Plug your ears.” Rarity let go of Twilight and stood. “Close your eyes.”

Twilight didn't do any of those things. She just trembled.

“Ooh, here's the new girlfriend!” Midnight laughed, pausing for a moment in her slow approach. “Can't say I have high hopes for the length of the relationship, though. Not once you learn how badly she’s screwed up with you.”

Rarity snarled, “Get away from her, you thing!” and forced herself between Midnight and Twilight. She shook her hand, and imagined a sword in it—anything to defend herself, to defend Twilight—and nothing appeared. She raised her fist instead.

“Here’s an interesting factoid for you.” Midnight smiled. “Love didn't bring Twilight Sparkle into your head. The only reason Twilight ever went into your dreams, is because every second she spent in yours was a second she didn't have to spend in hers. With me.”

That was enough. “I said, get away!” And Rarity hauled back, and lunged forward, and punched Midnight Sparkle in her stupid lying face—

The fist went through, and then Rarity went through, as if Midnight Sparkle were nothing more than a ghost. “But now Twilight really screwed up,” Midnight continued, floating onward as Rarity tried to regain her balance. “Didn't you, Twily? Because it wasn't ever supposed to get this far.”

“Stop it,” Twilight whimpered. She was still breathing fast, still transfixed as Rarity looked around.

“Oh, you hoped she'd be happy. You even hoped she'd be grateful, that would have been great! But she wasn't ever supposed to fall for it—or should I say, fall for you.”

“Shut up,” Twilight said, a little louder.

“And now she's stuck with you. Like you're a pair of concrete shoes.” Midnight leaned forward and tapped Twilight on the nose, and Twilight didn't even flinch. “She could have been so great, but now she’ll be trapped trying to fix you till the end of time. Just another reminder of what happens when you get careless, Twily.”

“I said shut up,” Twilight said, and Rarity saw the tears in her eyes, heard her voice shaking.

“Actually.” Midnight hummed, and scratched her cheek. “On second thought, maybe she's not as great as you think. If she'd been that amazing, she'd have known better than to get tied up with someone broken. Someone—like—you.”

Rarity circled around, mind racing—what could she do to stop a foe she couldn't even touch?—and made it far enough to see Twilight's face. And then she stopped. Because Twilight didn't look panicked anymore.

Twilight looked enraged.

“I told you to shut UP!”

And she leaped forward and tackled Midnight to the ground, and wrapped her hands around Midnight's throat, a throat that Twilight seemed perfectly able to touch—perfectly able to crush. “Get out!” Twilight shrieked, her eyes bloodshot and staring like they intended to bore holes into Midnight's skull. “Get out of my head!”

Midnight made strangled, choked sounds. “Nowhere—else—to go,” she gasped. The blue of her glasses, of her horn, was getting brighter.

“GET OUT!”

And Midnight gurgled, and her eyes rolled back, and the glow grew brighter, and brighter, until Rarity couldn't see them, and then she couldn't see Midnight, couldn't see Twilight, couldn't see at all. She shielded her eyes with a hand and yelled, “Twilight!”

And then—

And then—

Rarity bolted upright, gasping in her first waking breath.

She was in her bedroom. And it wasn't her bedroom.

She looked around, bewildered. Parts of it were right for her bedroom—her bed, for instance—but on the other hand, there was Twilight's workbench in the corner. Some of the wall had her own floral wallpaper pattern, and then again there were blotches of the dark blue from Twilight's room, and blotches where there were inset bookshelves instead of wallpaper.

Mouth slowly falling open, Rarity stood from her bed and walked forward. She touched a boundary between the two wallpapers, and felt it—felt it ripple beneath her fingertips, like she'd disturbed the surface of a pool. “What,” she whispered.

“Rarity!”

She jumped. She looked around. Twilight was there, standing in front of the window, silhouetted by a strange glow that was not the morning light. “Twilight?” Rarity said. “Do you—are you seeing this?” She gestured at the patchwork wall, and another thought occurred to her: “Are we still dreaming?” She pinched at her arm, and it felt painful enough, but she didn't know if that was a reliable check or not.

It was hard to tell, but as Twilight looked at her, she seemed to be smiling—even beaming. “That's not as simple of an answer as you think. Come and see.”

“Come and see what?”

“Just come and see.”

Rarity walked obediently to the window. Twilight, who was absolutely beaming, winked at her and stepped aside, and let Rarity see her hometown.

What was left of it.

Author's Note

Alternate title: One of these Knights.

Undome Tinwe helped again with the editing, and Pearple Prose helped me figure out how it would go overall. A big thanks to both of them!

????? ??????

Canterlot City was in shambles.

At least, that was how it looked at first glance. But no, as Rarity kept looking with eyes as wide as they could go, she saw that it was far worse: Canterlot City was in scrambles.

Nearly every building she saw seemed to be a mismatch of at least two or three others, and those were the lucky ones: the unlucky ones seemed to be half themselves, and half nothing at all. They showed open rooms like exposed guts, sagging and threatening to collapse.

Lines crisscrossed the streets like the aftermath of some arcane earthquake. It took Rarity several seconds to figure out what she was seeing there, but finally she understood: parts of the city were plain old missing, and what was left had been joined clumsily together, as if by wrinkles in spacetime.

And the sky—the sky—was neither day nor night. It had a purple glow to it, as if the whole city was being bathed in a violet aurora, and the stars it held were nothing like Rarity had ever seen. There were far more of them, for a start, and they drifted as she watched.

She raised a hand, tried not to let it tremble, and slapped herself very hard.

“Ow,” she said. The pain in her face felt about right for what she'd feel if she were awake, and she certainly wasn't bolting to consciousness in a normal version of her bedroom. “So... I think we're awake,” she said, pulling her head back through the window, “and the world may have ended while we weren't looking.”

“Oh, Rarity.” Twilight chuckled. “Good guesses. Really good guesses, actually! But wrong on both counts.”

She grinned, and walked away from the window, twirling as she went. “Nothing's ended, Rarity—everything's just changed! The magic in my Helm seems to have merged dreams and reality! So we can't really say we're 'awake' or 'asleep',” she said, adding the air quotes herself, “because neither term has any meaning anymore!”

“How?” Rarity pulled herself away from the window to look at Twilight. “How on Earth did your Helm do this—where is it?” She froze, and looked around, and saw no evidence of the device.

Twilight flapped her hand. “Eh, don't worry about it. It'll turn up.”

“We need to find it, Twilight, it might be the key to fixing all this!”

“Fixing?” Twilight giggle-snorted. The sound was usually cute. Right now it sent a chill crawling down Rarity's spine like a spider. “What's there to fix? I mean, have you looked at this?”

She raised her hands, and—the building shuddered. Rarity yelped, bending her knees to brace for whatever this was, but Twilight just stared up at the ceiling with a gleeful smile upon her face. And after a moment, Rarity saw what was happening: the ceiling, and the whole roof, was hinging upward as if she were in an oversized dollhouse.

“Wow, this is a way better view.” Twilight smiled all the wider, staring up into an unknown cosmos. “Seriously, Rarity, look at it! It's incredible!”

And Rarity looked. She'd only glanced before, but the longer she watched, the more she saw. Comets blasting across her field of vision, almost audible as they sparkled and fizzled and burned. Actual lines drawing themselves between stars, forming constellations as if the sky were an astronomy textbook. As she watched, one of the stars winked out—and then exploded into a supernova a moment later, so that for several seconds there was a new sun in the sky, forcing her to shield her eyes.

“Doesn't it take your breath away, Rarity?” Twilight's voice was almost hypnotic. “What do you say? We could find a hill somewhere, and lay out a blanket, and lie down in the grass like it's the Fourth of July, and just watch this. Forever. Until the end of time.”

And heavens above, Rarity was considering it. The starfield above seemed to expand, as if her eyes were zooming in, letting them grab more and more of her vision, more and more of her mind—

She looked down and saw she was floating several feet above the floor. She yelped, and gravity remembered its job, and she landed awkwardly. “This is bad, Twilight, really really bad!” She took Twilight by the shoulders, trying to wrench her attention away from the stars. “I have no idea how your little invention caused all of this, but we need to find it and....”

Rarity trailed off. “Midnight,” she murmured.

Twilight cocked her head. “What?”

“Midnight! You were fighting her in the dream, and then there was this, this light, and then we woke up to this!” Rarity felt her knees tensing again, ready for action, and she tried to concentrate on the magic in her geode. “She's got something to do with this, I know she does—and if dreams are mixed with reality right now, then she could be—”

“Ssshhhhh.” Twilight laid a finger on Rarity's lips, staring intently into her eyes. “Ssh ssh ssh ssh sh. Just calm down and stargaze with me, Rarity. Everything will be fine.”

Rarity grabbed the hand and shoved it away from her face. “Everything is not fine! It's clearly terrible, and—and you should care!” There was that cold feeling down her back again. “You should care. Twilight would care. Twilight would be trying to fix this.”

And the Twilight in front of her smiled, in a way that the real Twilight never would in a situation like this. And now that Rarity was looking harder, she didn't have glasses. Her hair was neater and more lustrous, her eyes didn't have bags—everything about her was perfect. “Wow, that's a lot of negativity there. Like, didn't we just go over this? Nothing needs fixing!”

“You... what are you? Where's Twilight?” Rarity backed away, and looked all around the room, as if the real one were concealed somewhere.

Twilight didn't approach her. She just winked. “I am Twilight, silly. Precisely the best parts of Twilight, in fact, without all that icky disgusting Midnight—” she turned to the side and spat the word like it was the vilest, most vulgar, most disgusting curse imaginable—and then she was looking at Rarity again, a grin twisting her face “—gumming up the works. And let me tell you something....” She leaped into the air, ten feet high, maybe twenty, and hung there. “I've never felt better!”

Rarity kept backing up, bumping against her bed and nearly tripping. And then she looked at the bed, and gasped. It was like a strange, three dimensional magic eye puzzle: viewed one way, it was Rarity's bed, empty and with the sheets messy and unkempt. Viewed in another way?

It was Twilight, sleeping on Twilight's bed, the helm still upon her head. “Twilight!” Rarity yelled, leaping forward, and the apparition flickered and disappeared. She stopped, and screwed up her face, and concentrated, trying to see it the way she had before—

Twilight was back. “Twilight, wake up!” Rarity hurried forward, still concentrating, and grabbed the Helm and pulled with all her might—and was quite surprised when it came off as easily as any hat. She'd half-expected it to be magically affixed in some way.

But Twilight was still asleep, and the world was still shattered. “I don't understand,” Rarity said. “Why won't you wake up?” She reached out, tried to take hold of Twilight's shoulder—

Purple magic surrounded her, and slammed her backward into the wall opposite the bed. “Nuh-uh-uh,” the fake Twilight said, wagging her finger as Rarity wheezed from the wind leaving her. “This Sleeping Beauty isn't looking for a Princess Charming to wake her.” She snapped her fingers, and a translucent dome appeared around the bed. Then another one, and another one. They looked as solid as Rarity's magic diamonds, if not more so.

Rarity stumbled on her feet. “Twilight,” Rarity gasped, looking at her, “or whatever you are, this has to stop. We have to bring the world back to normal. Let me wake her—”

“Normal?” The not-Twilight leaned her head back and let out her longest, loudest peal of laughter yet. “Are you kidding? Normal for me is terrible! It's anxiety, and no sleep, and having a shoulder demon that never goes away. This is the new normal, Rarity, and if you're anything like me? You're gonna love it here.” She lowered her head, and fixed her gaze on Rarity. “No matter how long it takes me to convince you.”

Rarity turned and ran for the window, and then heard another finger snap, and saw yet another glass dome surrounding the house. She put her back against the open window, and saw that the bed didn't even have Twilight in it anymore, and the not-Twilight was walking closer. Rarity's breath hitched in her throat, and she backed up as much as possible, and she tried to activate her geode to make a barrier but it wasn't working, why wasn't it working—

Outside the window, something shattered, and someone yelled, “Jump! I'll catch you!”

Rarity didn't need to be told twice. She pushed herself out onto the window sill, and bent her legs, and jumped with all her might. In front of her, not-Twilight just kept smiling, but for the first time it looked strained. She reached the apex of her jump, and then started falling, her insides first and then the rest of her—

“Got you!” said the familiar voice, and a hand grabbed Rarity's wrist, arresting her vertical momentum in a jerky movement. Her own hand flailed for a moment before she grabbed her savior's wrist in return, granting her a modicum of security. Then they were off, and Rarity watched as they flew through the dome—or rather, through a shattered hole in the dome, like some vandal had tossed a boulder through it. The shattered pieces reconstituted themselves as she watched, and within seconds of her escape, the dome was whole.

“All right, Rarity, you're safe from Twily,” said the voice as they sped across the broken suburbs. Then there was a humorless laugh. “Oh, who am I kidding. Like anyone's safe right now.”

Rarity's eyes widened. For the first time, she looked at the hand that had grabbed her, and saw that it was purple. Then, her eye tracked up the arm, along the chest, and finally to the head—and she yelled, “You!” and twisted her arm free.

“Rarity!” Midnight yelled, as Rarity plummeted to the ground, wind whipping at her hair.

She landed hard on someone's lawn, but managed to roll to take some of the impact. When she came to a stop, she did a quick check around her body, and nothing felt broken, so she shoved herself to her feet.

Midnight landed in front of her. “Are you stupid?” she demanded. “What kind of idiot lets go of the person carrying them?”

It was just as she'd appeared in the dream: same glowing glasses, same deep violet wings. Same sneering expression. “Stay away from me,” Rarity said. She backed away once again, looking around. She needed a weapon. Any weapon.

“You need to listen to me, right now,” Midnight snarled, advancing upon her. “Do you have any idea what you two just made me do?”

“I said stay away!” And Rarity raised her hand, and there was a sword in it, and she swung it down at Midnight's head.

And Midnight shrieked, and cowered, and yelled, “I'm not Midnight!”

Rarity stopped. The sword was several inches from Midnight's face. She'd nearly slashed someone with a sword. Also, she had a sword, what? She lowered the blade, examining its keen edge, seeing her confused face reflected in its mirrored surface.

After a moment, she considered what the girl in front of her had said. “You're what?”

“I'm not Midnight,” said Midnight. She was still hunched over and cowering. “At least not the same Midnight you've seen defeated.” Then she frowned and reconsidered: “Well, okay, I sort of am, because that Midnight was still Twilight, and I'm still Twilight, and so by the transitive property of equality—”

Rarity angled the sword up again, just a few degrees. Midnight yelped and fell back on her rear. “Don't hurt me, it's not my fault!”

Conscience caught up with Rarity, and she shoved the sword into the ground. Then she sat down. “Explain. Are you the same Midnight that appeared in Twilight's dream last night?”

“I—” Midnight gulped, and looked up from the ground to just barely meet Rarity's eyes. Then she looked away, as if she'd been trying to stare at the sun without glasses. “I guess I am.”

“And you've been doing this for weeks? In her dreams?” Rarity found herself leaning forward.

“Longer than that....”

Despite herself, Rarity bolted to her feet. “Then how is this not your fault?”

She heard Midnight sputtering something behind her, but at this point, the question was rhetorical. Rarity huffed and turned around. “All right. I need a moment, so please be quiet.”

“It's what she made me for,” she heard Midnight mumble.

“Quiet!”

Rarity gesticulated with her non-sword hand, because the sword hand was still holding the sword, and the sword was still planted in the ground, and she was working very hard to make sure it stayed there and didn't do something she might not regret. And since she gesticulated with her other hand, she realized for the first time what she was holding in that very hand, which she had been holding since leaving Twilight's/her own house.

She stared at it.

Okay. All right. Deep breaths. She was supposed to be the one who could make it through any situation, no matter how stressful, with a dazzling smile and a stylish outfit to match. In fact, if she recalled correctly, the exact words had been, the world could be ending and you'd just, you'd just go out and deal with it like you always do, because you're amazing.

She turned around, thought about a pillow until one appeared on the ground in front of her, and then she picked it up and smushed her face into it and screamed and screamed and screamed.

Then she dropped the pillow and turned back around, and smiled at Midnight. “Right. I'm going to go save the world and look fabulous in the process. Are you coming?”

Midnight, on the other hand, wasn't looking back at her. She was sitting on the ground, knees huddled near her face, cocooning herself with her wings. She didn't respond, and when Rarity let out another prompting, “Midnight?” she still didn't respond.

Rarity snorted, and walked closer, leaving the sword behind. “Darling, this is not the sort of can-do attitude I'd expect from a destroyer of worlds.”

Midnight winced at that. “This is what she was afraid of, you know.” Her voice was so small that Rarity could hardly hear it.

Rarity kneeled down beside her, and after a little while, Midnight kept going. “This is what she made me for. I was supposed to criticize her, castigate her, wear the face of her greatest failure so that she'd never forget how much she screwed up. So that she'd never make that much of a mistake again.”

She sighed. “And then she shoved me out of her head, and look what happened—the magic of the Helm tried to inject a dream into reality, as if the two aren't completely incompatible. And now, reality's in tatters. Again. Why bother doing anything?”

Rarity squinted. “You were doling out that outrageous abuse because it... felt like the right thing to do?”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“No it wasn't.” Rarity sighed. “But for that she had you in her head, torturing her? All this time, and none of us ever knew?”

Midnight snorted, still not meeting her eyes. “Things can be broken without looking broken, Rarity. Remember?” Then she slumped in on herself. “It doesn't matter, since that's not my job anymore. Things are stuck like this forever now, and I might as well just sit here and feel sorry for myself.”

“As opposed to, just for instance,” Rarity said, suppressing an eye roll, “getting up and helping me fix reality?”

“How do you know you won't make everything worse?” Midnight hunched in tighter.

“Because....” Rarity took a few seconds to compose her thoughts. Then she reached out and took Midnight's hands, and started unwinding her arms from her knees. “I don't see how the situation can possibly get worse from this, but I'll admit that it could surprise me. This week has been full of surprises. But you know what?”

Rarity reached in, and gently took Midnight's head, and lifted it so that they made eye contact. “The world is broken, and Twilight needs help. So I don't care if things could get worse. They need to get better, and we're the only ones who can do it. The chance of failure is no reason not to try.”

“It's the best reason.” Midnight tried to avert her gaze, but since Rarity still held her head, all she could do was look down. “There's no point trying to fix anything right now.”

“Then why did you save me?”

Midnight stiffened.

“I know you're afraid. In fact, I know you're fear. Twilight's fear.” Rarity leaned closer. “But that just means you're part of Twilight, and the Twilight I know would want to save the world. Just like you saved me. Because you know there's still a chance.” Rarity put her hands on Midnight's shoulders. “What do you say?”

There was a pause. At last, Midnight dared to look up into Rarity—and then just as quickly averted her eyes. “It's still hopeless. I mean... look at that.”

She raised her hand and pointed back at the house they'd come from. From the outside, it was a mishmash of Rarity's and Twilight's houses, but more to the point, it was surrounded by at least a dozen translucent magical domes, and their combined opacity rendered it almost invisible.

Rarity stood and examined it. “Yes, I would say that Twilight has done quite a number—that is, not the real Twilight, the fake one....” She put her hand on her chin and cogitated. “Daylight! Yes, Daylight Sparkle. That's exactly the right name for her.”

“Whatever you wanna call her.” Midnight was speaking into her knees again. “I barely broke through one of those. I can't break through all of them, and you definitely can't. It's impossible.”

“Well, lucky us.” Rarity reached down, took Midnight's hand, and pulled her to her feet: to her credit, Midnight didn't resist. “I wasn't planning on accessing Twilight quite like that.”

Midnight frowned at her. “Then how?”

“Well, I had a more direct route in mind.”

And Rarity held up the Helm, smiling smugly.

“Where are we?” Midnight said, setting Rarity down on the ground.

Rarity took a moment to think about that. She'd had a plan in mind, obviously. She'd been about to tell Midnight to pick her up, carry her, and start flying around the ruined Canterlot City until they knew where to find someone who could work with magic and who wasn't Twilight. And then... it had just sort of happened.

A part of her was realizing that, oh yes, this was how movement sometimes worked in dreams: all about the destination, not the journey. The bigger, more dominant part of her was trying not to vomit.

“Oh,” Applejack was saying, “that is... that is not okay.” Next to her was Fluttershy. She was on the ground, fainted and stiff as a board. Somehow, in a reality where sleep no longer existed, she had managed to pass out.

“I just....” Rainbow Dash was scratching her head. “I don't get how it even, like, works? Like, whose half of the head does the thinking?”

Sunset and Pinkie were also there, but they didn't seem to have any input. Rarity, looking on from the side, covered her mouth.

The location was, more or less, Applejack's farm—although the barn seemed to have been cross-bred with Fluttershy's house, and Sunset's apartment, and possibly a couple of other buildings as well. The girls were looking out at the fields where the animals of Sweet Apple Acres spent their time. And, without going into too much detail—because Rarity was certain she might have a minor conniption if she thought about such details—what had happened to the houses had also happened to the animals.

“I mean, it's better than the other one,” Sunset said, dubiously. “Like, that pig we saw before Fluttershy blacked out. How was it not... you know....”

“You don't need to elaborate,” Applejack said.

“Spilling?”

“Aaaaand you elaborated.” Applejack put her hand on her face. It was unclear, from Rarity's perspective, whether she was simply facepalming or had seen more than a mortal mind could bear for the moment. “I just wanted to sit here and wonder how it balances on two legs, and then you had to say a thing like spilling.”

“What's the problem?” Pinkie Pie piped up. “I walk on two legs all the time—heck, sometimes on one leg!” She raised one leg and hopped in a circle. “And I never have any trouble with keeping my—”

She froze mid-turn. Specifically, the part of the turn that got her facing Rarity and, more pertinently—

“Oh my god! MIDNIGHT SPARKLE!” And Pinkie Pie reached behind her back and pulled out about a dozen party cannons, and every wick was burning down fast.

Midnight cringed back. Rarity took a step forward, raising a protective arm. “It's okay, I'm with her—”

“Oh my god! MIDNIGHT SPARKLE KIDNAPPED RARITY!” Another dozen party cannons appeared. By now, the rest of the girls had refocused their attention (except the still-unconscious Fluttershy) and some of them were entering fighting stances.

Rarity held her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Pinkie, shut up!”

The sound was titanic. The grass in the field actually blew back from the sound of her voice, and the wicks on Pinkie's cannons blew out. She, as well as the other girls, raised their hands to their faces in self defense.

When it was over, Rarity held out her hand toward Midnight. “She is not exactly who she looks like, and she is helping me to solve this nightmare scenario, so I would appreciate it if you didn't try to turn her into confetti, mm?”

Rarity glanced down at her. Midnight was cowering, hands hovering by her ears. “She's got really good control over the dream,” she said, glancing at Pinkie.

“Hold on a second.” With a movement as impossible as her previous movements, Pinkie stowed the cannons behind her back. Then she bounded forward, right up to Rarity. “Did you just say that this is a dream?” She frowned, then raised her hand, poised for a self-slap—

Rarity took her wrist and gently lowered it. “It's complicated. Twilight's dreams—” she nodded at Midnight “—got merged with reality somehow, and we need to undo it.”

Midnight stared at the ground.

Now Sunset was approaching at a light jog. She looked down gravely at Midnight, and then reached out a hand, opened and ready to help Midnight up. “She never got over you, huh.”

Midnight sneered and looked away from it. “Did you 'get over it'?”

"I guess I didn't...." Sunset sighed. “But I got through it. You can accept what happened, and learn and grow from it like any other painful lesson. Or you can let it fester.”

“Just call me Uncle Fester, then.” Midnight still wasn't meeting her eyes. “I knew you'd slip into moralizing mode. Can't you save it for someone who's not evil?”

Sunset knelt down in front of her. “I did.”

Midnight winced back. Sunset reached around her own neck, took off her necklace with the geode, and put it in her pocket—her gestures exaggerated almost to the point of pantomime, and very noticeable. Then she stuck out her hand again. “You're not evil—you're a part of my friend. Our friend. Even if it's a part that's hurting.”

Midnight looked away for a few seconds more. Then she forced herself to meet Sunset's eyes, if only for a moment, and took her hand. Sunset stood, pulling Midnight up with her.

“So,” Sunset said, looking at Rarity. “You said that the problem was that Twilight's dreams got out into reality, right? I think Princess Twilight had a similar problem a while back, with Princess Luna and something called the Tantabus.” As Rarity opened her mouth to ask, Sunset plowed ahead: “Long story, no time, but the point is that if my intuition's right, we need to get Twilight's dreams back into her head, right?”

Rarity nodded.

“So....” Sunset shrugged, and looked at Midnight. “Can't you just fly over to Twilight and get back inside her—”

She trailed off, and when Rarity saw what she was looking at, she understood why. The domed-off house over yonder, the one where Twilight was sleeping, didn't just have domes around it anymore. As they watched, earth and bits of buildings rose from the ground, enveloped in purple glow, and placed themselves around the dome like bricks in a giant tower. And the exterior magical dome was rising, up and up as the bricks kept coming, until it looked like—

“An observatory,” Rarity breathed. “She said she wanted us to watch the stars.”

“What?” That was Rainbow Dash, who'd run up beside them. “Twilight's doing that in her sleep?”

Midnight shook her head, still trying not to meet anyone's eyes. “I'm not the only one that came out of her head. Daylight's keeping watch over Twilight, making sure no one else interrupts.”

“Okay. Extra complications, that's fine. Okay.” Sunset pinched the bridge of her nose, sucking in deep breaths. “Contact Equestria via the journal, ask for help? Writing doesn't work the same way in dreams, it probably wouldn't work. Go through the portal, ask in person? No, god no, that might screw up Equestria just as bad as this if any of the dream got through too. Use our magic, somehow?”

“Dunno if you've noticed, sugarcube—” Applejack jogged up beside her “—but the magic's been a little unreliable just recently.” She held out her own geode, and there was a faint and flickering orange light, like a fluorescent without enough power.

“Of course it has.” Sunset's hand moved inward, from merely pinching her nose to clutching over her mouth. “Come on, Sunset, think, there must be some way to get through to her—”

Rarity ahemed. Sunset stopped rambling and looked her way. “I did actually have an idea already,” Rarity said. She smiled, then reached down and into a stylish leather purse she'd been carrying the whole time, at least the whole time she'd been thinking about it—and from it she pulled out the Helm.

Sunset leaned in, hand lowering from her face.

“It's what Twilight was using to get into my head. She called it the Helm.” Rarity held up the device. “If she can use it to get into my head, then I—” she turned the Helm a hundred and eighty degrees in her hands “—can use it to get into hers.”

“Uhhhh....” That was Rainbow Dash again, who was frowning. “So why are you telling us? Why not just put it on right now?”

Rarity sighed. “Twilight did something very complicated and, ahem....” She blushed a little, remembering an afternoon well spent. “Simply very complicated to make sure this Helm would go into my head, specifically. I don't think it'll be able to find hers right away....” She proffered it to Sunset and beamed. “But perhaps our resident magic expert might be able to figure something out, provided she had, just for instance, a bit of Twilight to work with?”

“What?” Midnight said. “Where's the bit of....” She trailed off, because everyone was looking at her.

Sunset took the Helm and frowned. And then she turned it over in her hand and frowned deeper, and sat down with it in her lap. She took her geode back out of her pocket, and she put it on, and then she placed her palm on the device, and she closed her eyes. Rarity thought she could see little fits and starts of flashes behind her eyelids, as her geode struggled to function.

And then she stood up. “I can't.”

Rarity took a step back. “I'm sorry, what?”

“I can't,” Sunset said, and stepped toward her, “because your magic signature is already in here, and it's locked in too tightly. I can't extract it to make room for Twilight's. No signature from Twilight, no way to get into her head.”

“But—but there must be something we can do!”

“Realistically speaking, there isn't.” Sunset paused. She looked around, at the strange landscape, at the stars crashing into one another, at the pigs that didn't bear description, at Twilight's observatory building itself higher and higher to the heavens. “But this is not exactly a realistic situation....”

She looked down at the ground, apparently struck with thought, and then looked at Rarity. “Sometimes magic can have... a mission. A goal it needs to reach before it dissipates. Maybe, just maybe, we need to achieve the goal, we need to... no. Not we.” She held out the Helm, right toward Rarity. “You. You need to put this on.”

“So I can get inside Twilight's head?”

“So you can get inside yours.”

Rarity blinked.

“The magical signature in this Helm was put there to help you. To deal with your issues. Maybe what you need to do is fix your own issues before fixing—”

Rarity held out a hand. “No, hang on. I am fixed. I've been doing quite all right, I've been getting excellent sleep with no nightmares, so it's pretty clear that Twilight is the one with the problem—”

“Did the nightmares stop?” Sunset had fixed her with one of those piercing glares. The kind of glare that affixed a person to a corkboard for examination. “Or did Twilight come in every night to end them?”

Rarity raised a finger, opened her mouth... and closed her mouth a few seconds later.

“So she treated the symptoms. You need to treat the cause.” Sunset stepped in closer, pushing the Helm right up against Rarity's front. “Come on, Rarity. You need this.”

Rarity looked away, gritting her teeth. “Pssh! I'm trying to help Twilight here, and, and I just can't believe you're trying to focus on my little problems!”

Sunset snorted. “Wow. You two really are perfect for each other.”

That felt like getting punched in the solar plexus. Rarity exhaled sharply, and then sucked in a breath through those gritted teeth. At length, she met Sunset's eyes, and then took the Helm. She turned it over in her hands a few times, rotated it, and at length she determined which part of the helmet was the front.

She lifted it over her head, and hesitated, and said, “Wish me luck?” to the group.

“Good luck,” said Applejack.

“Good luck,” said Rainbow Dash.

Fluttershy said nothing, because she was still out cold in the field.

“Good luck!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, waving.

“You're probably gonna screw it up and the Helm will explode and you'll die of exploded head,” Midnight muttered without looking at her.

Sunset rolled her eyes, and placed a hand on Rarity's shoulder. “You've got this.” Then she frowned and turned around. “By the way, Rainbow Dash, do you have a twenty on you? Because you just lost a—”

Before she could lose her nerve, Rarity yanked the Helm down onto her head—

“Make it big.”

It was like being in a hall of mirrors, except that every other Rarity was turned the wrong way. She gasped, and looked around, and saw the back of her own head over and over again, and other than that—darkness.

“I'm going to make it big.”

She looked down and saw much the same thing, and then she saw the reflective floor beneath her crack. And then she saw it shatter.

“I need to make it big!”

She was falling, falling, amid infinite other Rarities, and there was a sound like a jet engine around her as the infinite blackness changed, brightened, and then glowed brighter and brighter—

Rarity screamed. It was as if her head was being split wide open, and something as big as the world was being pulled out.

“Rarity!” someone yelled behind her. She didn't know who. She was clutching her head, trying to hold it together, failing. Someone was screaming. It was probably still her.

Then it was over. Rarity shuddered, and breathed heavily for several seconds before opening her eyes. The Helm fell off her head as she sat up and looked around.

She was back in the real world, as far as that meant anything right now. Her friends were all around, looking extremely concerned for her welfare. Midnight was just looking at the ground. “I knew there would be a recursion problem,” she was muttering, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it—”

What was new was the boutique.

Rarity stared at it as she slowly stood. Once upon a time, she and the other girls had taken an unusual detour through Equestria in the wake of yet another magical mishap—a cruise ship sinking, nothing major. She'd taken a little detour within that detour, just out of her way enough to see how her older Equestrian self was doing. The answer was quite well: she had her own line of shops, and her flagship in Ponyville was Carousel Boutique. At the time, the sight had filled Rarity with renewed vigor: if one Rarity could achieve her dream, so could the other!

Now she was looking at a second Carousel Boutique, here in the dream realm, and the sight wasn't filling her with anything other than a horrible, gnawing unease.

It was the paint, she realized as she walked closer. From a distance, everything looked in order: the blues and pinks and yellows complemented one another for an airy, chic facade. But as she approached, she saw that “facade” really was the only appropriate term. The paint was peeling, or running, or cracked everywhere she looked, and it seemed to be decaying before her very eyes. The awnings and curtains were frayed and sun-bleached. The windows were dirty and cobwebbed.

None of that, however, compared to what she heard as she reached the front door. It was a manic muttering from just inside the building: “Make it big. I'll make it big. I know I can make it big, I swear I can make it big—”

Which wouldn't have been so bad, except that it was her own voice. She grimaced, then reached into her purse and felt around until she found a certain steel hilt. Gripping it tightly with one hand, she pulled the door open with the other.

“I don't care what they say, I have it handled, and I can make it big.”

It occurred to Rarity, as she walked into the interior, that she had never seen the inside of the real Carousel Boutique. However, she could make some reasonable assumptions.

For instance, given that the exterior of the building had a radius of, oh, let's say twenty yards to be generous? And a height of two and a half stories? It was unlikely that the interior had a floor space you could fit a couple of football fields inside, and a roof that gave her vertigo just by looking up at it. A place large enough to be a hangar would be simply absurd, wouldn't it?

“I can do this. I know I can do this. Who says I can't do this?”

Also, she was sure that the other Rarity certainly sold a multitude of dresses, and sold them for people—well, ponies—of reasonable size. Not one gigantic, massive, unbelievable ballgown large enough for a mythological giant.

“I will make it big, I need to make it big!”

And one last thing: the Equestrian Rarity definitely didn't look like that.

“Hello?” Rarity called up to the other one of her. “Are you my... strange psychological doppelganger?”

The Rarity she saw froze. Then she turned away from the massive dress, and dove, and swept across the floor until she was hovering in front of Rarity's face. “Yes? Hello? What is it? I'm very busy but I'm sure I can pencil you in. Sometime in the next five years.”

“Um.” Rarity gave her a visual once-over. It was definitely herself, but with some changes... no, not changes so much as exaggerations. The hairstyle was that much curlier, the makeup was that much heavier, and Rarity was certain that if she were to wipe that makeup away, the bags under her doppelganger's eyes would be that much deeper.

But there was one big thing: her feet weren't touching the ground. She had wings on her back—

“Spit it out! What do you want? No time! Thank you for coming to Carousel Boutique, goodbye!” Before Rarity knew what was happening, her doppelganger was grabbing her by the shoulders, spinning her around, pushing her toward the door.

Rarity dug in her heels. “Just a minute! I wanted to see that lovely dress you've been making, dear. It's quite something.”

The shoving stopped. Rarity turned around and saw the other Rarity—she needed to come up with a name for her, if only her name were as easy to mess with as Twilight's—holding her eyes wide open. With the amount of mascara around them, they looked even wider. “Yes. My crowning achievement. Look.”

She pivoted around in midair, finally letting Rarity glance at her wings—four of them, sheer and transparent just like a dragonfly's, and vibrating madly—and then the doppelganger was flying away. “Just need to do this. This one more thing. I've got it handled. Then I'll have made it big.”

“Yes, it certainly is... rather large,” Rarity said, walking closer to the dress. She moved slowly, trying not to provoke any undue reactions. “I, um, I'm rather impressed.”

“It'll take me to new heights. I'm handling it. It's almost done.”

“Yes, dear, of course.”

This dress had some issues. Now that Rarity was close enough to see it, she could see all the yards of fabric that had been stitched together to make up the massive thing, all white like a bridal gown. The stitches were irregular, widely spaced, and far too visible against the fabric. On the whole, they looked like the work of an utter amateur—or someone cutting corners, someone pushing herself too hard against an unattainable deadline.

Rarity gulped, and a word came to mind: Vanity. That was the name she was looking for… and dear lord, did she really look like this from the outside? She really did have to start making some lifestyle changes, didn’t she?

“Dear,” she said, “I was wondering if I could talk about your work for a second.”

“Don't have a second,” Vanity called down from the top of the dress.

“I'm sure you feel that way, darling, but if you'd just take a moment to slow down and look at the stitches—”

“No!”

The shout filled the huge, hangar-like space, and left echoes after. Vanity zoomed back down, rage twisting her features, and jabbed a sewing needle toward Rarity's face. Her wings buzzed like a swarm of locusts. “Don't tell me to slow down. Don't tell me to lighten the load. Rarity can do anything she sets her mind to, and I am Rarity!”

Rarity took a nervous step back. “But, dear, you need to take care of yourself—” The wings, she realized. They were frayed, and bent, and looked to be on the verge of tearing themselves apart. It was a wonder Vanity was keeping herself aloft at all.

Vanity scowled. Then she flew back up, and made some more stitches, and cried out, “It's done!”

“Aha.” Rarity reached into her purse again, and grabbed the hilt of the sword. “What, exactly? What happens now?”

“It's done, it's finally complete, it's finished!” Vanity was screaming with joy, as she grabbed the upper back of the dress with both hands and both feet, and as her ruined wings finally slowed to a stop, folding against her back.“Thank you for coming to Carousel Boutique. Goodbye, forever!”

Rarity didn't have time to ask what she meant by that, because that was when the steam started coming out from the bottom of the dress. And that was when she heard a deep, booming noise, and looked up to see the top of the silo opening up to show the starry sky above.

That was when she heard the countdown. “Ten... nine... eight....”

The building wasn't just like a hangar, she realized. The building was a hangar.

“So long, cruel world!” Vanity was yelling at the top of her lungs, and she was only barely audible over the engine noises that were filling the room. “Rarity is off to new heights, and this time, the sky is not the limit!”

“Three... two... one... launch!”

The engines blasted on. Rarity was blasted back, straight through the door and out of the boutique, skidding across the grass on her back.

She forced herself up and looked. There was the outside of Carousel Boutique, and there was the gigantic hole in its roof. And after a second, there was the rocket-dress, lifting its way slowly out of the boutique.

If Vanity got out of there, if she made it out beyond the Earth—

Rarity jumped into action. She ran at the boutique, not at the door hole but at its wall. One jump—she was at the second floor, clinging onto the curving roof. Another jump—she was hanging from the upper cupola. But the rocket-dress was accelerating, and soon she wouldn't be able to go further without being blown back by the engines.

She pulled herself up, and found herself face to face with the dress. It was almost all the way out of the boutique now. She ran forward, she jumped—

And she reached into her purse, and pulled out her sword, and plunged it into the fabric just as the bottom of the dress cleared the roof.

The sword slipped a few feet, but at last it held. Rarity had both hands on the hilt, and it was a struggle even so to hold on, because the fabric of the dress was flapping around like clothes on the line in a gale. Nonetheless, she was holding on.

Which was more than she could say for the stitches. As she watched, the yard of fabric her sword was in was coming undone from its neighbors. The threads were pulling themselves loose from their holes, bit by bit.

Rarity gritted her teeth: the noise was tremendous, but she couldn't worry about that now. She pulled one hand off the hilt of the sword, and grabbed the fabric above her, and pulled herself forward with every bit of muscle strength she had and possibly a lot of strength she didn't. Then she pulled the sword from its hole, and plunged it yet higher still, and pulled herself further.

The yard of fabric was nearly undone. She kept climbing, ignoring the blast of the engines and the burning in her arms, and finally she reached the next yard—just in time. Just beneath her legs, the original yard of fabric gave way, and fell only a short distance before being shredded in the exhaust.

Rarity really wished she hadn't looked down. The ground below was already looking as distant as if she were on an airplane, and it was getting further and further. She gritted her teeth and focused her attention: this yard of fabric was coming apart too. The whole rocket-dress was falling to pieces all around her. She needed to keep moving.

The climb got less vertical, and therefore easier, as she kept moving; before long she had found a steady rhythm. Not long after that, she was at the dress's waist.

Her arms felt fit to fall off. She gritted her teeth, ignored it, and soldiered on.

Finally she reached the dress's breast. Heaving breath after breath, she pulled herself over the top—and there was her doppelganger. “Vanity!” she gasped.

Vanity was looking skyward, sheer unthinking joy on her face. And it was a face that looked far different from what Rarity had seen down below: the makeup had been blotted and smeared by air pressure, giving her an almost ghoulish appearance. Worst of all was the mascara: it streaked sideways across her face like tear tracks.

“Dear!” Wrapping her legs as far around the dress as they would go, Rarity reached out her free hand and roughly shook Vanity's shoulder. “We need to go!”

Only now did Vanity notice her. She looked down at Rarity, the joy in her face souring to cold disdain. “I don't need you in my dream!”

“This dream's unsustainable!” Rarity waved her hand down at the dress. “It's falling apart right underneath you. If you keep going it'll self-destruct!”

“I can do this! I've got this handled!” With terrible determination, Vanity turned her gaze skyward once more. “They'll see. They'll all see.”

Rarity chanced another glance downward. Nearly the entire dress below the waist had been reduced to tatters. The engine—whatever passed for an engine in this literal flight of fancy—was sputtering now, as if it had been critically damaged. “I can't let you do this to yourself,” she said, quietly enough that no one but herself could hear. “I...”

She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, took in a deep breath. The dress was beautiful, really. No matter how rushed it was, how frantic its construction, it was gorgeous. A work of art, daring in its simplicity: it was something approaching a masterpiece.

It had to die. “Forgive me,” Rarity whispered.

Then she pulled her sword from the dress, located the point where the heart would have to be, and stabbed.

Immediately, she knew she'd done something more substantive than chopping away at fabric: she'd pierced something solid at the end of her sword. Moreover, the engine was sputtering now like never before, and she heard a beeping sound start up. A prelude, if she knew her action movies correctly, to an explosion.

Vanity's expression turned to horror. “What have you done?”

Rarity left the sword behind and crawled back up. “Dear, we need to get off this thing right now!”

Tears filled Vanity's eyes, even as they narrowed in anger. “You've ruined everything! I was so close, I was finally so close—”

Rarity reached out, and put her hand on Vanity's face, and smiled tenderly.

Then she lunged forward, and tackled Vanity, and knocked the both of them off the rocket. It only took seconds for the two of them to fall beneath the bottom of its tattered remains. It only took a few seconds more for it to explode, lighting up like another supernova in the starry sky.

They were falling, and the ground was worlds away.

“I could have done it!” Vanity screamed. “I had it handled, I had finally made it big, I....” She wiped away her tears with a hand—tears that were already flying up above her face, above her mussed-up hair—and sobbed, “Why did you ruin this for us?”

“It was never going to work,” Rarity said. The wind was flapping insistently at her clothes, trying to get her to pay attention to what was coming from below, but it could wait. “It was all coming apart. You needed to slow down.”

“I can't slow down! I'm Rarity, I have to keep moving!” Her wings flailed helplessly against the overwhelming force of gravity, of the air rushing past them.

“But you're putting yourself under too much pressure.”

“Pressure is what makes diamonds!”

“It's also what shatters them!” Rarity snapped. Then she sucked in a breath. “I know. I know it's hard. I know you don't want to feel like a failure, and I know that whenever you're not pushing ahead it feels like you're falling behind.”

Vanity stared at her for a few seconds. Then she crumpled, chin onto her chest. “It's never good enough,” she said. “No matter what I make, I could always have done it better. No matter how much I do, I should always do more. It's never enough. I'm never enough.”

Rarity shook her head. She glanced down. The ground was getting a little unnervingly close. She looked back up at Vanity. “You are enough. You're a wonderful friend, a genius designer, and a beautiful person. Beautiful out here—” she let one hand glide over Vanity's face, and then lowered it to point at her chest “—and in here. You just need to go easier on yourself.”

“And what if that means I'm not trying hard enough?” Vanity looked at her through red-rimmed eyes. “What if I'm not doing my best?”

Rarity smiled. “Taking care of yourself is your best. Leaving enough time for your friends, for the people you love, and for your own self? That is the best that you can do. And I promise you, Rarity....”

She reached out, and clasped Vanity's hands and held them in her own. “You and I are going to make it bigger than anyone's ever seen.”

Vanity sniffed. Then she let go of Rarity's hands, only so that she could grab around Rarity's back in a tight hug, and bury her face into Rarity's shoulder. Rarity hugged her in return. “There, there. We'll be all right. We'll be all right....”

With her eyes shut, Rarity didn't realize what was happening at first—but the tactile sensation of Vanity was changing. She opened her eyes to see her doppelganger glowing brightly, and glowing brighter still until she was nothing but light. And then, right before her very eyes, the light flowed into her.

Vanity was gone, and Rarity felt whole.

Of course, she was also still falling to her death, which could be a slight problem, but one thing at a time.

She gulped, seeing the ground approaching very alarmingly fast, actually. Now, in dreams, you usually woke up before hitting the ground. In real life, not so much. What would happen in this strange in-between place?

It didn't really bear thinking about, so she strained, and concentrated, and tried to imagine the dragonfly wings she'd seen upon her own back—

And then her vision was all covered in violet haze. “Got you!” Midnight yelled, and Rarity found herself slowing down—just in time, since she was maybe fifty feet from the ground. Then forty feet, then thirty, twenty, ten....

She touched down as gracefully as a cat, tiptoes first. Midnight's flying form touched down a few seconds later. She was grinning nervously. “You did it,” she said. “And your head didn't explode.”

Rarity grinned back.

“Rarity!” Sunset was running up to grab her in a hug. Shortly after, she was followed by Rainbow Dash, and Applejack, and Pinkie Pie (Fluttershy must still have been out cold). “I was so worried!” Sunset said into her ear. “There was the rocket, and then it exploded, and you were falling—”

With a firm shove, Rarity managed to dislodge them. “You were right,” she said. “I did need that.”

Sunset smiled. Then her eyes widened. She looked around from side to side, and then ran over to the discarded Helm, and scooped it up. “It looks like....” She examined it as she had before, but with renewed urgency. “Yes. Yes. The magical signature is cleared, and it can be reset! Midnight!”

Midnight flinched back. Rarity shook her head, smiling, and took Midnight's hand. “It's all right,” she said, leading Midnight over to the Helm. “We just need your help again. And you've been doing a great job of giving it,” she added, as Midnight grimaced and looked off to the side.

Sunset pushed the Helm toward Midnight. “Infuse your magic into this, as much as you can manage without burning it out. Quickly!”

Midnight sighed, and took the Helm in both hands. A few seconds later, when she handed it back, it was glowing purple with all the magic it had absorbed.

“All right,” Rarity said, and took the Helm from Sunset's hands. “I'll put this on and talk to her. After a little while,” she said, turning to Midnight, “you need to find your way inside here as well. I mean, you came out of a head, so I hope you can find your way back into one.”

“I... think so.” Her expression was dubious at best.

“Okay.” Rarity glanced up at the observatory where Twilight was being kept: it was still growing taller and taller, and she had to crane her neck to see the top. Then she looked at the others. “Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a heart to heart with my girlfriend.”

“Wait,” Rainbow Dash said, “you're kidding, right?”

Rarity winked, and raised the Helm over her own head.

A hand on her shoulder stopped her, and she looked back over to Midnight, who seemed to be struggling to say something. “I don't think you can do this,” she finally said, but still seemed to be struggling. A few seconds later: “But I really hope you can. Good luck.”

Rarity nodded, and pulled the Helm down.

She was ready for anything. Perhaps some sort of never-ending, perpetually-shifting mirrored labyrinth. Maybe a realm of technological monsters, created from Twilight's unrestricted genius. Maybe some sort of magical hellscape, all cyan fire and arcane brimstone, raging inside Twilight's head?

Whatever was coming, Rarity was ready for anything.

She should have been ready for nothing.

All around her was darkness. Not even total darkness, either: just a boring, slightly-gray darkness, the kind that might have revealed more detail as the eye adjusted—except there was no more detail to reveal. Rarity's head whipped from side to side, and she could feel her hair bouncing against her head, and she could see her hands as she held them in front of her face, but—

There was a slight sound from behind her. The suggestion of a sniffle.

Rarity turned around, and saw the only two things in this mindscape. From some invisible source above, there was a dim light. Underneath it, hunched in on herself as if the circle of the spotlight was a prison, sat Twilight. No wings or horn, so it wasn't Midnight. And she didn't have the manic enthusiasm of Daylight, either. This was definitely Twilight. Her Twilight.

Rarity cleared her throat.

After a few seconds, Twilight glanced up at her. She looked so sad, and so so tired, with those puffy bags under her eyes. And then she looked back down and away.

Rarity frowned, and marched forward, reaching out a hand to place comfortingly on Twilight's shoulder—and then she found her hand bumping up against an invisible wall. Well, not invisible exactly: the wall was exactly where the spotlight ended. She walked around the circle to check, running her hand along the entire circumference just in case there was a break, but none appeared. It felt like an outside window on a freezing-cold morning.

Twilight still wasn't looking at her.

Rarity groaned in her throat. She reached her hand back, and pulled a sword from her imagination, and raised it in both hands—and drove it straight into the light.

Immediately, the invisible wall was visible as a network of fractures, and Twilight bolted upright in shock. Then, Rarity grunted, and wrenched the sword, and the whole thing shattered—the wall and the light. The shards crumbled away as they fell, and by the time they would have hit the ground, they'd been reduced to nothing at all. Now it was just Twilight and Rarity in the darkness.

Rarity dismissed the sword with a thought and bent down, crouching next to Twilight. “Apologies for being so bold, but I think we've both had enough of one another's walls by now.”

Twilight didn't look at her: her fingers were interwoven over her head, protecting her from an impact that wasn't coming. Rarity couldn't hear a sound from her but the whisper of her breaths.

So Rarity sat down, noting in the back of her mind that there wasn't any texture to the floor: it didn't feel like anything but a barrier against gravity. “I can sit here as long as you need,” she said, and reached her arm out to Twilight's far shoulder.

And she waited. Her full attention was on Twilight, because there was nothing else in here to be distracted by. So she saw every twitch of Twilight's face, at least the side of her face that Rarity could see. The several times she made to open her mouth, only to stop. The several times she turned away from Rarity, and turned back.

Every line under her eyes. Every quiver of shame. Every rise, every fall of her chest.

“I really screwed up,” she finally said. “Didn't I.”

The words came so suddenly, without preamble, that Rarity nearly jumped. She leaned in. “How much do you know?”

“Not much. Images, flashes from outside.” She closed her eyes. “It's enough. I broke the world again.”

“Well, it's not at its best—”

“Don't patronize me.” The tone was harsh, full of pain.

Rarity sighed. “All right, darling, you did basically break the world.”

All the anger went out of Twilight's pose in a moment: she slumped forward, head in her hands. “I knew it. I had to make the stupid magic artifact, didn't I? I knew what could happen if a dream got loose into reality, and I still made it because I was so selfish and stupid and, and short-sighted....” Her palms ground against her cheekbones. “I'm the worst person in the world.”

“Don't say that about yourself.”

“The math's pretty clear from a utilitarian standpoint. Who else do you know who’s doomed the world twice?”

“You're not stupid, Twilight, and you're certainly not selfish—”

“What do you call this!?” Twilight bolted to her feet, standing over Rarity. Her hands were balled up into fists, held at her chest level. “Building that stupid Helm, endangering the planet, for what? So I could build up enough nice girl points that you would actually like me the way I wanted you to? And then you—then you....”

Her hands lowered, but remained clenched. “Oh my god,” she whispered. “You actually did say you liked me, didn't you? And I handled it so badly that I broke physics.” She laughed, or at least made a similar sort of sound, looking away and to the side. “Look. Just... just do whatever you need to do to fix this, and then I'll be out of your hair. You won't have to see me again ever. I can drop out of school, they'd probably still give me the diploma—”

Rarity stood up and grabbed Twilight's hands. “And why would I want that?”

“Because I failed.” Twilight still wouldn't meet her gaze. “I wanted to ask you out and I failed.”

Rarity smiled. “And is that so bad?”

That was enough to get Twilight to meet her gaze. “It's literally as bad as it can be, Rarity! I can't fail. I'm not allowed to fail.”

She looked so raw in that moment, like every layer had been peeled away to reveal the core. “And don't,” she started, before sniffing and wrenching a hand free from Rarity's grasp to wipe her nose. “And don't say you get it, because you don't. No one gets it. You fail and maybe a dress gets made wrong, or you get into the wrong college. I fail and reality goes kaput. I'm not allowed to fail, and I just did.”

She looked away again. “Not like you ever fail. You're too perfect.” She snorted at that, like 'perfect' was an insult.

Rarity tried to ignore that, but she didn't have time to talk before Twilight plowed forward, her voice thick and wet even in its anger: “All right. Come on. Tell me whatever magic words are gonna fix me and friendship this problem away, until next time.”

Oh. Rarity really wished she hadn't said it like that. She really wished she didn't have this surging, vitriolic heat in her belly, clawing up toward her vocal chords like erupting magma. “Twilight Sparkle,” she said in a low tone. “Look. At. Me.”

Twilight looked. Rarity hadn't given her any other option.

“I don't have magic words,” Rarity said, stepping closer. “If I had had them, don't you think I would have used them on myself? Don't you think I'd have 'friendshipped' my own problems away if that were an option? It never was, and I don't have any magic words. All I have are my words, so I want you to listen to them.”

Twilight nodded slowly.

Rarity sat down, and Twilight followed her. She still held Twilight's hand. “I don't know what it's like to mess with reality,” Rarity said. “I'm not going to pretend we share that experience. But don't you dare tell me that I don't know what it's like to fail, Twilight, because I am always failing. I am always making things that are less than my ideal standards, I am always screwing up in some small way. And that's not healthy, that's not a reasonable way to think, but I still do think it.”

Even now, she thought. Even after having reconciled with Vanity, she knew there would still be some part of her that felt that way.

“But,” she said, to Twilight and to herself, “I take those mistakes and I learn from them, and I get better. Just like everyone does, and just like you do.”

“Well, I clearly haven't.” Twilight broke eye contact for a moment. “I mean... I just wanted to help, so much. I screwed up once and I've got to make up for it, and I felt like I was nearly getting somewhere—and now look at me.” She sniffed. “Back in the red. And you want me to believe you love that?”

Rarity clasped both hands around one of Twilight's. “You're not a tally sheet, Twilight. You're a person. A couple mistakes, no matter how grave, don't make you any less worthy of being loved. Platonically or... otherwise,” she added, leaning in closer.

Twilight, however, shook her head. “Then how about only doing the dream thing so you would like me? Does that disqualify me?”

“First of all, that's bunk and you should know it. I don't believe for a second your motivations were that selfish.” Rarity shifted, so that she was kneeling rather than sitting flat. Twilight, on the other hand, squirmed and hunched her back to render herself shorter. Rarity understood: there was nothing quite as embarrassing as being praised for something you saw as worthless.

“But secondly.” Rarity smiled. “Secondly, the more I think about it, the more certain I get. I was feeling something like this long before this week. And I've had a long time to see you, Twilight. I know what I'm getting into when I say how I feel about you.”

“No you don't—”

Rarity squeezed harder. “I do, and we both know it, Twilight! Your brilliance, the way you look, the way you always try to help—even your neuroses? I've had enough time to see all of them, and that's why I can confidently say I love Twilight Sparkle.” She leaned in, and rested her forehead against Twilight's. “Warts and all.”

Twilight sniffed. “I don't.”

“I know.” Rarity shook her head, feeling her hair grate against Twilight's fringe. “And it's not as easy as just saying it, but I'll say it even so. You need to try. You need to start loving yourself.”

And then—right on time—she heard a strange sound behind her, like a thousand people exhaling all at once. As if a lot of air had been displaced from a space the size and shape of a person. Rarity smiled. “And there's no time like the present.”

Twilight's forehead left her own, and she saw Twilight's eyes widen, the pupils contract. “No—but—”

Rarity moved forward, holding Twilight in a tight hug. “It's all right. I had a talk with her.”

Behind her, she heard slow, hesitant footsteps as Midnight drew closer. “H-hey,” she said.

Twilight was just staring, hyperventilating a little. Rarity squeezed her and whispered, “Breathe. I've got you.”

“So,” Midnight said. “This is... different.” Rarity didn't need to look at her to know that she was looking down and to the side. Twilight was Twilight, no matter who she was. And any second now, she'd gather her courage and look up, and say something like—

“I know you're thinking I'm about to call you a horrible person,” Midnight said, the words coming in a rush like a dam being overtopped. “Just like all our dreams. And believe me, it's all on the tip of my tongue, it's kind of hard not to say it actually—but Rarity's really smart. And I think she doesn't think I should say it, right?”

Rarity nodded.

“Yeah. Then... I think I want to stop this,” Midnight said, slowing down a bit. “I don't want to keep doing this. I don't want to keep making you think you're a failure.” There was a pause, and Rarity imagined how Midnight must have been fidgeting. “Is it okay if you stop making me think I'm a monster?”

Twilight's breathing was slowing down, Rarity noticed. She released Twilight, then stood and turned around to see that, yes, Midnight was twiddling her thumbs, maintaining eye contact with difficulty. Then, Rarity turned to Twilight, and saw she was doing much the same.

Slowly, almost unconsciously, Twilight took a step forward, Then another, and another. After a few seconds, Midnight mirrored her movements, and they were approaching one another. Twilight reached out a hand, and Midnight started glowing white—

“NO!”

Running footsteps, closing in fast. Rarity's head whipped around and saw another Twilight—Daylight—running at her, a light like a halo surrounding her, and sheer frenzied fury on her face. She was running at Rarity, running at Twilight—

Rarity raised her hand, and an infinite diamond barrier cut her off just before she could get to Twilight. She screamed and pounded at it with her fist. “No! What's wrong with you? You're letting her back in?”

She'd looked so perfect before. Now, as Rarity watched, split ends frayed from Daylight's ponytail, and her makeup started to run, just a bit. “Stop it!” she shrieked. “We were perfect! Just leave her behind, and we could be perfect! We could be—we could be—”

Rarity glanced back to see that all eyes were on Daylight. Then she looked back at Daylight herself. She was slumped against the barrier, and she'd stopped pounding, and she looked so, so desperate. “We could be okay,” Daylight whimpered. “I just want to be okay. Why can't I just be okay?”

Rarity sniffed, and found her cheeks rather wet—wet enough to be worth wiping. Then she waved her hand, and dispelled the barrier, and caught Daylight as she stumbled forward. “I know,” Rarity said. “I really do know.”

“I don't want to live like this,” Daylight said. “I don't want to live with her.”

She heard Midnight sputter at that—how utterly bizarre was it that, even as they shared a voice, she could tell every Twilight apart?—but Rarity just led Daylight forward. “I love all of you, Twilight. I just need you to believe that I've got the right idea. Can you trust me on that?”

Daylight looked up at her, and after several seconds, she nodded.

“All right.”

The three Twilights were together now—Twilight, Midnight, and Daylight. Twilight was the one to reach out her hand first, but the other two followed soon after.

“And, darling?”

All three of Rarity's girls looked at her.

“You're not going to just be okay.” Rarity beamed. “You're going to be wonderful.”

The three hands met in the middle. There was a light, glowing brighter and brighter—

Gymnopedie, by Satyr, was the first thing she heard.

After taking the few minutes she needed to recognize the tune, Rarity's consciousness decided that the next good idea would be to open her eyes. At length, she did, and found herself—strangely enough—in her own room. Everything was exactly as she had left it the night before, and ordinary sunlight streamed in through a crack in the curtains.

Strangely enough? She pursed her lips, reaching over to her phone to silence the alarm. Now why should such a thing be strange—

It was then, and quite rudely as well, that her consciousness decided to disgorge some details about what she had dreamed. Her phone slipped from her fingers and thumped onto the carpet below.

Oh, right.

She burst from her bed as if shot by a cannon, and pulled her clothes on as fast as shaking hands would let her. Then she ran to her window, shoved upward at its handle, and leaped out—and her magic activated, conjuring a diamond under her feet before she could fall. She leaned forward and surfed through the air, taking the direct route.

Her phone was dinging as she went, and she checked it. One from Fluttershy to a group chat: This may be a weird question, but did something happen last night? I had the strangest dream. One from Rainbow Dash, specifically sent to her: So was that real? Because I don't have twenty bucks on me right now.

Nothing from the one she was most concerned about.

Within five minutes she'd arrived at chez Twilight, and once again she levitated herself to the second floor window and hammered at the window. “Twilight! Twilight, are you okay!?”

Twilight was lying in bed, Helm on her head, but her eyes were open. At Rarity's voice she turned her head, then swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She hurried to the window, opened it, and stepped back so Rarity could jump in.

Rarity pulled the Helm off her head and tossed it back onto her mattress. “You're okay, aren't you? You're not hurt, or in pain, or something? Twilight, darling, speak to me.”

Twilight looked up at her. “Rarity,” she said. Then she slumped forward into Rarity's embrace, and started sobbing. “I think I need help, Rarity,” she said. “I think I really really need help.”

Rarity hugged her back, smiling as she rocked Twilight from side to side, as if slow dancing. “It's okay. I've got you. It's okay.”

Author's Note

Alternate chapter title: Saturday Knight's Alright For Fighting.

Once again, thanks to Undome Tinwe for prereading this, and a happy Halloween to everyone reading this the day it comes out!

Last Knight

It was another day of school—well, no it wasn't, not just another day, but that was a thought for another time—and as Rarity approached CHS, she wondered why so many people were just standing in front of the building.

Then she got closer, and she didn't have to wonder.

The whole front of the building had been graffitied. Rarity might have said it had been defaced, but that wasn't it at all—it was art, and it was beautiful, all three stories of it. A million abstract shapes competed for the viewer's attention, but as Rarity scrutinized it, she saw recurring themes start to emerge. A certain consistent color palette. Seven gems, located all around the periphery of the piece.

And then the whole of the piece struck her, and she took a step back. The whole thing was three giant words, and they formed one giant message.

THANK YOU CHS

Rarity found herself shivering. And then a hand interlaced with hers, and she looked to her left to see Twilight. “Wow, right?” Twilight said.

Rarity nodded. “Wow.” She glanced back at the art, and a memory slid past her consciousness: Sunset Shimmer, looking at this same school's front, drawing in a notebook. A wry smile found its way onto Rarity's lips. “Now I wonder who would do something like this?”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I guess it's just the anonymous Flanksy, striking again.”

“Of course.” Some movement caught Rarity's eye, and she saw a familiar red-and-gold mane of hair as its owner walked through the doors, seemingly indifferent to the crowd or the art. “Well,” Rarity said, “I suppose we'll never know.” She laughed, just once.

“Right.” Twilight chuckled.

And then neither one was laughing, or chuckling, or even smiling.

“It's our last day of high school,” Rarity said. “Ever.”

Twilight shivered, and Rarity could feel it in the hand she was still holding. “Yeah, I... it just hit me too.”

It was a strange feeling. Certainly not a good feeling, but not precisely a bad one either... maybe it wasn't a feeling at all. Maybe it was just a cold, solid fact.

Rarity breathed out. “All right,” she said, “let's get to work.” And she and Twilight walked through the doors.

They were both in Luna's office. It wasn't the first time that the two of them had done this together, but how strange it was to think it would be the last.

At least Luna finally had a second guest chair.

“So,” Vice-Principal Luna said, and she reached under her desk for a few moments. When she sat back up, she held two pieces of paper in her hand. “You two have made a lot of progress, now that you’re not having regular nightmares anymore… but I've done all I can for you. And frankly, I'm not exactly a mental health professional myself, at least not in any official way.”

She placed the papers on the desk, then slid them toward her two students. “So I've taken the liberty of compiling a list of professionals whom you can talk to, within a reasonable distance of your chosen colleges.” The paper in front of Rarity listed the ones near Roan Island School of Design, and Twilight's options were within a bus ride from Messarachusetts Institute of Technology. “They'll be able to talk to you about this, and if it comes to it, they can diagnose you and prescribe treatment.”

Both of them looked down at their papers, and then back up at Luna, who still gazed steadily at them. “I want you both to promise me—moreover, promise yourselves—that you'll get in contact with at least one of them before the summer's over. Can you do that?”

Rarity nodded smartly, took her paper, and folded it up to put in her bag. Then she looked over at Twilight, who had her hand hovering over the paper like it was too hot to touch. “Twilight?” Rarity said.

Twilight kept looking down at the paper. After a few seconds, she finally spoke. “I still hate this.”

Luna sighed. “It feels like admitting it, doesn't it? Admitting you have a problem, like you have to go to the place that 'crazy people' go to.” She raised her index fingers to supply the air quotes.

“No, that's not it.” Twilight shook herself. “I mean, it's kind of it, it's not fun, but I know I need help. I admitted it months ago. It's....” She let her hand fall to the desk, still not touching the list of names and addresses. “I'm scared. I'm still scared.”

Rarity reached an arm around her girlfriend and pulled her a little closer.

“I mean....” Twilight's shoulders slumped, and she leaned into Rarity's half hug. “What if it turns out that it's not just something that I can just fix, just get over? What if I've really got an anxiety disorder, or bipolar or multiple personality disorder or who knows what?”

“Dissociative identity disorder,” Luna murmured.

Twilight grunted. “You know what I mean. What if I'm stuck with this forever, dealing with this forever?” Her head slumped forward. “What if this keeps me from doing what I want to do with my life?”

There was a silence, and Rarity squeezed Twilight tighter. She opened her mouth to try to say something, give some kind of reassurance—but what was she supposed to say, when the same exact worries were bouncing around her own head too?

Then she noticed something a little odd: Luna was looking down and to the side, not straight at them like normal. Her jaw worked for a few seconds, although her lips did not open. At length, she resumed eye contact and spoke. “Well, I seem to have done all right.”

Twilight tensed. Then she looked up at Luna and leaned forward. “What?”

Princess Luna sighed. “One second.” Then she leaned down again, and opened up a drawer, and lifted a pill bottle up and placed it onto the desk. She unscrewed it, shook out a pair of capsules, and swallowed them dry. Then she put the bottle back and closed the drawer.

Rarity didn't stop watching for one moment, and she was sure that Twilight didn't stop either.

Luna exhaled, the kind of exhale a person would make after drinking a bottle of water while parched. “I usually do that between meetings, but it seemed appropriate to do it now.”

Twilight was leaning even further forward. “So... you....”

“Schizophrenia.” Luna shrugged. “I won't go into the details, but several years ago I was... let us say that I was in a bad place. It hurt me, it hurt my loved ones... my sister.” She took a deep breath, held it with her eyes closed, and let it out. “When you're deep in the trench, sometimes it's hard to see the way out.”

And then Luna smiled, just a little bit. “But. Right now, I'm the vice-principal of a wonderful high school, and I've had the chance to work with some of the brightest young minds I've seen in my entire life. It's exactly what I wanted to do.”

She nodded at both of them, but Twilight most particularly. “So trust me when I say: you're going to be okay.”

Twilight nodded back, and grabbed the paper.

And finally, the last day ended, and gave way to night.

“Are you sure you don't me to come over?” Rarity was saying over the phone, as she paced aimlessly around her room. “It's no trouble.”

Twilight's snort was the first response, followed by, “I thought you said your parents were taking you out to dinner?”

“Well, yes, but this is young love, darling! What's the point of young love if I can't blow off my overly restrictive, non-understanding parents in favor of a fling with my very cute girlfriend?”

“That... doesn't sound like your parents at all. I’m pretty sure they’ve been great.”

“Oh, absolutely, they've been fully supportive and I wouldn't trade them for the world.” Rarity rolled her eyes. “But you have to appreciate the genre conventions.”

Twilight laughed at that.

“Rarity!” That was Sweetie Belle's shrill voice, probably from around the front door. “Dad says we're gonna leave without you if you're not down in five minutes!”

Rarity groaned, and Twilight laughed a little more. “Look, aside from anything else, my parents are taking me out to dinner too. Shining Armor's gonna be there, gonna be bringing this new girlfriend I don't really know about yet, I'm kinda looking forward to it.”

“Oh, all right.” Rarity sighed and flumped herself onto her bed.

“Besides,” Twilight said, and here it sounded hopeful, “it means we can test the new systems! To make sure we can still get together while we're at, you know... college.” Some of the hope had wilted by the end of that sentence.

“Oh, Twilight, it's only going to be an hour's drive between us. Maybe an hour and a half with traffic.”

“The Mark IIIs will let us be even closer than that.”

“Quite.”

“Rarity!” Sweetie shouted again.“Let's go!”

“Oops, that's my cue!” Rarity laughed, and pulled out a hand mirror to do one final check. She looked spectacular. “See you tonight, darling?”

“In your dreams. Love you.” Rarity imagined a wink, just before the call ended.

That night, Rarity and Twilight both wore Helms as they slept.

And that night, across an endless sky, they danced.

Author's Note

No alternate chapter title for this one, but as you read the very end, I invite you to put yourself in mind of the opening bars of Daft Punk's Digital Love.

Thank you all for reading this story! It was a blast to write, especially in such a short timeframe, and I'm glad to have been part of the RariTwi bomb!

And another big thanks to Undome Tinwe for being such a consistent help with the prereading. Love you, dude!

Prologue

With a dazzling smile and a wave of her arm, Rarity proudly welcomed all in attendance to the first ever Carousel Boutique… in space.

The press oohed and ahhed, and snapped many pictures. They were floating in front of her boutique, wearing spacesuits, because they were also in space. The Earth shone beneath them, brilliant and nearly unobstructed. Rarity had the best view in the cosmos: she could see her house from here.

She produced an oversized pair of scissors, opened them around the ribbon that wrapped around the building, and—snip!—cut the ribbon. With that, she declared the boutique open, and demanded that everyone enter and shop to their hearts’ contents.

The crowds rushed in—there hadn't been any and now there was a universe full of them. They filled the boutique, packing into every available space and then into the spaces that weren't available, speaking excitedly about all of her fancy dresses and sharp suits and stylish shoes, and Rarity's smile shone like the Earth. She'd done it, she'd accomplished her fashion ambitions, and she was literally over the moon—

“Hey!” someone cried out.

Rarity asked what was the matter.

“You don't have any pants!”

Rarity gasped and looked down—but her legs were covered. The voice continued, “There's no pants for sale! How are we supposed to shop if there aren't any pants?”

“There's no clothes at all!”

And the store was empty, and there had never been any fancy dresses, sharp suits, or stylish shoes. Rarity made noises like a dying fish.

“And there's a better store right over there!”

Rarity rushed outside—no, she found herself outside—and saw that there had never been an unobstructed view of the earth: there was an infinitely larger and much much better boutique not twenty feet from her own, and the crowd was streaming into that one instead. Please, she found herself saying, if they would just give her a moment to find some pants?

A beeping noise filled her ears, and she whirled around to see a tow truck backing up, and hitching up her store to drag it away. She tried to run at it, but she couldn't run because she was in space, and then the space cops showed up to arrest her for opening the worst boutique of all time, and she was still trying to run as her store was towed away, and the beeping was getting louder, the beeping, the beeping—

Rarity awoke with a gasp.

Her hand scrabbled for her phone, which had been making the beeping sound, but only managed to push it off her nightstand. With an unladylike grumble, she freed herself from her tangle of sheets, swung her legs off the bed, and bent down to turn off her alarm.

As stress dreams went, that one had been particularly stupid.