Author's Note

This one should probably be prefaced with a bit of context.

So a few months ago, I tried to participate in a writing contest, where the prompt was to take a line from a song we liked and write a fic inspired by it. I picked the following excerpt from El Tango De Roxanne:

Roxanne
You don't have to wear that dress tonight
Roxanne
You don't have to sell your body to the night

I wanted to write some first-person Rarity PoV, but as the story coalesced, I realized I was just writing Crimson Rarity, and I realized that I was spoiling the fic itself, so I chose not to submit the fic to the contest. So I've decided to put it here, my first attempt at writing from Crimson Rarity's PoV.

Amethyst Locks

A dear friend of mine once told me she didn't understand why I chose to sell my body for money.

She wasn't the first to do so, of course. There are many who don't understand my profession, and have no reservations about telling me so to my face.

Some, like the woman who had raised me, stated this fact with disgust and anger. She'd told me that we had money, that I didn't need to sleep with strangers for a pittance compared to our fortune. Those words had stung, certainly, but even as our screaming match over my life choices had devolved into objects being thrown, I hadn't truly cared about her lack of understanding. I had only wanted her to accept me, and to tell her that she still loved me.

Perhaps one day I'll hear those words.

Others, like my clients, said it with gratitude, like they had been graced with a miracle which they didn't think they deserved. Whether or not they were right would likely depend on your opinion of capitalism and the value of labour, as my dear friend would have said. Though, I am a miracle, certainly, and I cannot fault them for believing me an angel who had chosen to bless them with my divine beauty.

Oh, shush. Don't look at me that way. One doesn't become as in-demand in my trade as I was without merit.

Still, I was used to them saying all sorts of things in the throes of passion, and I paid it little heed. After all, when a man tells you he loves you once a week but won't even acknowledge your existence when you walk past him and his wife in the streets, you tend to become rather dismissive of his opinions.

And then there were my friends. Well, most of them were in the same profession as I was — it's rather hard to make friends elsewhere when you live in a brothel. My other friends were generally polite enough not to voice their lack of understanding, with the exception of Rainbow Dash, bless her soul. Despite working as a bouncer in the very establishment I plied my trade in, she couldn't quite wrap her head around why I was here, and had no compunctions about saying so out loud.

For her, it didn't really matter. She didn't truly care why we were here, as long as it was our choice to enter the sex work industry. And we all appreciated her for the positive energy and crass humour she brought into every room of our odd home.

Even my former beau couldn't comprehend why he had to pick me up from such a salacious locale for our dates, even though he promised me that he would never feel jealous over the many men and women who had partaken in my body. And in the end, he was true to his word, his faith in my fidelity never wavering even as I broke up with him over our other incompatibilities.

A shame, really. I think I could have been happy with him, if not for the fact that I was still pining over her.

My dear friend, Twilight Sparkle. A mage from the north who had come to our grand city to study under the tutelage of the great Lady Celestia. A woman who had grown up in a society so... traditional, that she hadn't realized that her romantic interests leaned towards the fairer sex unti she was fully an adult.

A brilliant scholar whom I had fallen in love with.

I'd hidden my profession from her, for many reasons. And when she had discovered the truth, she had ended our friendship just as it was on the cusp of blossoming into something more, telling me that she hadn't understood why I was a sex worker.

That was the only time that statement had ever bothered me.

More than bothered, really. Her words were like a sword, piercing me right through the heart. And it wasn't because she had wielded her rapier wit against me as a weapon instead of using it in a playful exchange between us, but because she had said it with such raw sincerity and pain that I had understood why we could never see each other again.

You see, Twilight Sparkle was a scholar, through and through. She was the kind of woman who sought to understand everything in the world, from the grand mysteries of life and death to the size and weight of a fictional dragon in a storybook she was reading. She couldn't accept something without understanding it first.

It was how she was, and in some ways, I loved her for it. Her curious mind was a font of fascinating conversation topics, and her insights often left me quite impressed at her intellect and cleverness. It gave her a certain charm, and allowed her to match me as I played my verbal games with her. Her constant search for knowledge ensured that we'd never grow bored, and pushed me to broaden my own horizons.

And then she told me she hadn't understood who I was.

And I knew, in my very soul, that we could not be together while this gap existed in her knowledge.

It would be too painful to spend more time with her after that, both of us desperately wanting what we could not have. And so, I had angrily told her to leave me, to abandon the connection we shared, and to enjoy the rest of her life with her close-minded ways and her closed-minded teacher who had once rejected me for trying to be who I was.

That should have been that. The end of our grand romance, culminating in a dramatic tragedy. Forevermore would the two of us wander this world, seeking out a happiness we could never achieve, haunted by the knowledge that we could have had it all, if only she had been able to understand.

And that was why, when the Lady had given me her research notebook, and I had seen the pages and pages of notes scrawled upon then, the analysis and cross-references and even the transcript of the interview she had conducted in secret with one of my colleagues, my heart soared, and I felt hope for the first time in far too long.

The carriage was taking me to her now, and even though I was prepared to say goodbye to her again, to have her tell me she had tried and failed to understand sex work, I knew in my soul how this conversation would go.

Because Twilight Sparkle was a brilliant woman, and when she put her mind to it, there wasn't any mystery that she couldn't solve.