Rarity returned to herself in a flash. She instantly felt sick.

"I'm sorry," she croaked, taking the water offered to her by Twilight in her magic. The cold glass and the equally cold water felt like bliss upon her lips. Her head throbbed from temple to temple, a raging, slamming train wreck behind her eyes. It took her a few moments of shakily sipping and keeping her eyes shut before she could work up the courage to meet Starlight's eyes.

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," Starlight replied, hovering Rarity's fashionable shades over, and, once Rarity gave a curt nod, let them gently float into place onto her muzzle.

"No, I do. That design was born of stress and fury, of frustration. It was raw negative emotion given form, and it was hideous."

"I think it's kind of... cool? In a sort of dark and gloomy way, I guess?" Starlight said, rubbing the back of her head with a hoof. "Sure, I get that it was an expression of your anger with me, but it's not like I wasn't the cause of that anger. Better you get your frustrations out through artistic expression than by, say, smashing my head against a table corner." Starlight tried on a smile, but Rarity didn't return it. It was hard to smile when it felt like you were having your skull renovated from the inside by a jackhammer.

"Regardless," Rarity replied after another sip of her blessed water. "You didn't deserve my unfiltered thoughts. They were uncharitable and cruel, no matter how... right it felt to bring them into existence. It was still unkind."

"But, you drew something new. Your muse isn't gone. It's a step in the right direction." Twilight commented, her horn's light fading away as she put away the last of the spell books. "We're on our way to fixing this."

Rarity sat in silence for a while, alternating between looking at the sketch she'd drawn under Starlight's concoction of a spell and the mare who helped bring it to life. Slowly, she brought a blank piece of paper and a quill up, her azure aura the only sound in the room.

It remained the only sound for a painfully long moment.

"It's still not there," Rarity sighed, letting the stationary drop with a quiet clatter. "I'm still broken."

The guilt was as bold upon Starlight's face as the icy water upon Rarity's lips.

"I'm sorry," Starlight said, her eyes downcast. "But maybe we should give it a bit? You're not exactly in the best shape to be concentrating." Starlight made a vague gesture to Rarity's head with a hoof. "You know, with the headache?"

"This isn't a headache, it's..." Rarity began, looking like she wanted to elaborate but simply couldn't, like the words to emphasize her point were sticks buried to the hilt in the thickest mud imaginable. She groaned, rubbing a hoof over a particularly foul spot of pounding near her horn. "It's awful, whatever it is. In any case, I've been able to work through headaches before. Migranes, even. No, it's still that blank slate. A void."

Starlight and Twilight frowned at each other as Rarity sat in silence once more, the room growing more tense with every passing heartbeat.

"I'd say I've got to go home, but there's nothing there for me right now. Nothing I can't do here. Sweetie Belle's fine on her own, mostly, and I can't stand being around my workspace while I can't, you know, work." Rarity growled, more so at the situation than at Starlight, though Starlight still flinched back. That made Rarity feel better, and the fact that it made her feel better subsequently made her feel guilty. Spite wasn't usually in her emotional repertoire.

"You're welcome to stay here, if you'd like. Goodness knows I've got way too many guestrooms and not nearly enough guests to fill them," Twilight replied. Rarity could tell she was trying to be jovial, but it didn't lighten her mood any.

"I'm going to have to go under that spell again, aren't I?" It was more a statement than a question, her shaded eyes staring bleary, bloodshot daggers at Starlight.

"... If we want to figure this out? Probably," Starlight gently answered, shuffling a bit in place.

"Grand," Rarity stated, that one single word as flat and heavy as a slab of granite. "This is going to ruin me," she added after a few moments of stiff quiet.

The tears were gone by this point, replaced with deadpan misery. Rarity was all at once resigned to her fate, and no amount of mental arguing with herself seemed to pull her out from beneath that resignation. It was difficult to hype oneself up when what felt like the core part of your mind was simply gone, or at least under a lock to which the key was inaccessible to you.

"Should we... get lunch?" Starlight offered, hitting Rarity with a forced smile that made her want to smash the other unicorn's head into a table corner.

"Why not," Rarity said with a heaving exhalation, her glasses sliding down her snout as her head dipped. She absentmindedly readjusted them with a hoof. "It’s not like if my sister messes up anything in my shop I'll be in any rush to fix it. I might not even notice she's changed anything. Nothing feels 'right' anymore."

Starlight winced again. Rarity's lip curled up ever so slightly.

It was a quiet restaurant. Low light, gentle but not boring music. Bitalian. Rarity liked Bitalian. It was a guilty pleasure. She felt every calorie pass through her lips and straight onto her flank, but at that moment she didn't care. The weighty, cheesy pasta was heaven in her belly after the day she'd had. It almost made the sledgehammer pummeling the back of her eyes manageable. The dinner rolls were good, too. Thick, buttery, just the right amount of garlic.

They all ate in relative silence, the only sound being the scraping of their forks and the combined shimmer of their magic. The wine Rarity picked was grandiose in price and she'd instantly chided herself after ordering it, but she'd had a horrid day - month, really - and so she felt like she deserved a treat. She had the money, too. That thought made her cringe. How much longer would the money last if she couldn't craft new designs? Sure, she could resell old ones, have Fluttershy sew them, but eventually they'd fade out of fashion, out of relevancy. On top of all that, though, she hated the idea of doing the same thing over and over again. It wasn't creatively fulfilling. All at once the rage and sorrow came flooding back.

"Rarity?" Twilight's voice cut through the dreadful cascade of negative thoughts tumbling through Rarity's head. She blinked behind her shades and realized she'd been carving a spot into her plate with her fork for the last few minutes. She forced her magic to relax, letting the fork clack, lifeless, into the plate.

"I'm fine," Rarity replied, trying her best to not let the two words turn into a snarl. She brought a napkin to her lips and dabbed away a bit of cheesy sauce, leaving her muzzle spotless once more. Really, though, the motion had been a way for her to hide the grinding of her teeth while she fought back the mean thoughts swirling through the miasma of pain that was her skull. "I think I'm full."

Her plate still had more than half a portion left. The wine, however, went down in a few unladylike gulps. It was satisfying to simply cut loose and drain the glass. Plus, there was no sense in wasting good, expensive wine.

She decided to go back home afterward. She didn't want to see Starlight's face, no matter how much genuine and deliciously satisfying guilt was smeared upon it.

Rarity slammed the door to the fridge closed with a furious huff. She heard things rattle and shake, but nothing fell, which was good because she was in no mood to clean up a mess. Especially not one she'd made as a result of foolish, unnecessary lack of control. She'd finish the pasta later. Maybe. She didn't know. She didn't care. Sweetie Belle could have it if she didn't. Again, she didn't care.

She found it hard to care about anything in that moment.

Upstairs she went, feeling like a stranger in her own home, feeling like an imposter. This was Rarity's home, the unicorn who'd built herself up from nothing. Rarity made dresses, beautiful, beautiful dresses. Who was she now if she wasn't Rarity? An Element of Harmony? Sure, saving the world was great, objectively, but being a heroine wasn't her passion. It wasn't her drive.

Not-quite-Rarity walked without purpose into her room. She spent a very long time in her bathroom; letting the near boiling hot water of the bath soak to her very soul. She sank in until only her head was above the surface, and even then she wanted to go further. sink beneath the steamy surface and sit there until all-consuming darkness overtook her. Dramatic? Sure, but in that moment, with the nigh scolding water turning the skin beneath her coat pink, she didn't care. That became the theme of the evening; not caring. It was, Rarity realized, somewhat liberating to not care.

She tried not to think, not to let the twisting, jagged glass shards of stress in her guts rip her apart. She tried to blank out her mind.

All she could think about was how good it'd feel to see Starlight suffer.

It felt good in the way she'd imagine cutting oneself with a knife would; hot, feverish, and wild. It'd hurt, but that was, Rarity thought, part of the appeal.

Something struck her then. In her mind. A vision. An idea.

She felt her heartbeat begin to ramp up, a tightening, fluttering feeling snaking through her guts. She shakily, nervously, ignited her horn and levitated a small book she kept on the back of the toilet over and the tiny pen that sat nestled within came out with a hush. It was her restroom ideas book; what she used when there wasn't anything else to do while taking care of things. Her mind, not too long ago, never shut off even when biology demanded she step away.

She flipped to a blank page and put pen to paper.

Author's Note

I'm flying by the seat of my pony pants here. I'm as much in the dark about where this story might go as you guys are. I'm just letting it all out piece by piece, seeing where things fit.