No Equality in Desire

Starlight Glimmer looked up at the keen of the train whistle. She kept looking when she saw the mare.

The steam locomotive hissed into the distant terminal, tossing up a cloud of dust on the horizon. Not long after, she arrived at the edge of Our Town—bright and berry-coated amid the arid landscape. Strands of her thick, coily mane stuck to her throat, flyaways that escaped the elastic holding back her mulberry tresses under a pair of blue candy-like baubles. A rolling pin poked out from one of her heavy saddlebags.

“Welcome!”

Starlight Glimmer trotted down the thoroughfare. A meager procession followed: a monochrome white stallion, another in shades of slate blue, and a navy-coated pegasus mare who stood out against the stark landscape like a swooping buzzard. They arranged themselves in a neat row, baring their gums in a trio of grins.

Yet Starlight’s teeth remained concealed. She stared, expressionless, beholding the newcomer, a unicorn mare the color of raspberry sorbet, dusted in grit that sparkled like granules of sugar.

In a way that hadn't happened in a long time, Starlight’s voice caught as she asked, “What, ah, what brings you to our little village?”

The mare’s ears perked at the question, drawn forward with a weary sigh. She had a battered sturdiness about her, as though she once weathered the indignities of the unfair world beyond the town line with a clenched jaw behind closed lips. Starlight studied her flushed face, imagining the textured history her life certainly held, wondering about her secrets.

“I heard this was a place where everypony can be equal.” The mare’s voice was sweet, a coating of sugar in the back of her throat. She shuddered, hitching up her heavy saddlebags. “Is that true?”

Starlight approached, eye level with her. She extended a hoof—and the mare took it. Her grasp was warm on Starlight’s fetlock.

“Absolutely,” Starlight answered. “In fact, this is the only place in Equestria where that’s possible.”

Sugar Belle, Starlight would soon come to learn, smiled. The crisp, clean light played off her magenta irises, sweat glinting on her lashes. Starlight’s hoof quivered under her grasp.

“I’m so glad you found your way to Our Town,” she said.

Past the soft, rosy edge of Sugar Belle’s smiling cheek, something gold flickered. A trick of the sunlight, surely.

—

The fan creaked overhead, washing Starlight’s home in a weak breeze. It was hot in the flatlands of Our Town, even as the lofty surrounding mountainside remained snowcapped. Occasional clouds whisked above, untended by pegasi magic and never dense enough to staunch the harsh rays. Night Glider knew better than to rise and push the streaks of cirrus together when nopony else in the village possessed wings.

The high temperatures served a useful function, giving reason for the residents to crop their forelocks and tails into a sleek, uniform cut. Starlight had smiled through that first, blazing summer, watching as her three villagers merrily brooked the heat without complaint as they hoisted up the rafters of their burgeoning community.

Her soon-to-be fourth resident sat at her table, raising a clear glass of water to her lips. Sugar Belle had abandoned her heavy saddlebags to a heap on the floor, sighing with an air of beleaguered, mundane tragedy. She gulped from her glass with unabashed need, Starlight smiling placidly across from her.

“Thank you.” Sugar Belle breathed deep when she was finished, her snout wet. “I needed that.”

“Of course. I aim to provide for the needs of all my ponies here, no matter how small!” Starlight put on a cheery grin.

“That’s nice. You’ve been very nice to me. I hoped for that.” Sugar Belle tittered. Settled now with her thirst slaked, her eyes drifted about the room. “I like your house. It’s nice, too.”

Starlight’s curation of the interior was meticulous. She lived alone, but refused the unchecked habits that came from doing so, the impulse to allow one’s inner self to spill over into civil life. The floors sheened with wax and every corner of every shelf had been swabbed with the twisted point of a rag. Our Town’s flag hung framed on the wall, a brutal square of gray that demanded the eye’s attention. But that was not where Sugar Belle looked.

There was a portrait of Starlight on her bookshelf. A grinning filly at the time the snapshot was taken, her twin pigtails bushed above her ears. Crouched in front of her balmy green yard, lilac flank bereft of a mark—hooves outstretched in waiting for somepony to land between them. It was a stab of innocence. She kept it for the same reason she kept her fridge stocked with jugs of saccharine apple juice and that scuffed trio of painted wooden blocks at her bedside. Each was proof that her life had taken place before now. That the little filly still lived inside her, teeth bared.

Sugar Belle hummed. Giggled, maybe, as she parted her stare from the photograph.

“Well,” Starlight said, crossing her forehooves, “it makes me glad to know that Our Town has begun to develop enough of a reputation for you to seek it out. What brought you here in need of true equality?”

Sugar Belle’s posture canted into the table. “I’m lonely,” she said, a shaky blurt of feeling. “I’m… unfulfilled? I don’t know. I had friends, and then, I didn’t. We ran a bake shop together. And, well, our differing talents drove us apart.”

Starlight’s chin bobbed at a steady rhythm. “It’s so hard to lose friends. Especially when friendship is the purest expression of love. We all honor that in Our Town. Here, nopony favors you or believes they’re better than you because of something as arbitrary as a cutie mark. I’m sorry your old friends made you feel lesser as a result of their,” she flicked her hoof, “talent-flaunting.”

“Oh, you misunderstand.” Sugar Belle touched her throat, wiping at the slicked hairs of her mane. “They didn’t make me feel lesser at all. I wasn’t a bad baker, nothing like that. In fact, I’m really good at it. I was the best.”

The sweep of shadow from the rotating fan blades ambushed Starlight’s equilibrium. There was a jump in her belly.

“Oh,” she said. “Then, why…?”

“Because I shouldn’t be better than anypony else.” Sugar Belle’s jaw was set with a noble tilt upward. “I lost my friendships because of my talent. It caused the ponies I cared for the most to become bitter and miserable. And if it made them so unhappy, then I don’t want it anymore.”

Starlight’s heart thumped, elevating that jump in her gut to a frisson. She became conscious, then, of how she appeared, wondering if the humidity had brushed gray crescents of mascara under her eyes. Or, if her face betrayed an abrupt revelation of something hungry in her, the drag of her tongue over her teeth.

“That's very admirable of you, Sugar Belle.”

Sugar Belle’s lips curled in a shy smile. “Surely no more than any of the other ponies who've given up their cutie marks.”

“Right. That's right.”

—

No matter a pony’s willingness, peeling back a cutie mark was never painless.

Each of Starlight’s residents had shored up resolve on their trek along the mountainside, only for it to be burned away by some feverish, animal protest the moment the incantation began. Night Glider had kicked with ferocity, hooves chipping at the stone floor, teeth clenched in self-inflicted agony. Party Favor yelped, running for the corners of the cave even after the stark pink shape of his balloon animal had been pulled free. And Double Diamond had lain beneath Starlight’s Staff of Sameness with a numb death-ready glaze in his eyes, near unconscious by the time the fresh equal sign appeared.

But Sugar Belle went to her cutie unmarking with a clean dignity. Head lifted, hooves splayed in stalwart balance, she groaned when Starlight’s aura enveloped her, but gulped it down, like she was attempting to be polite.

Starlight stored her cherry cupcake mark in the topmost square of the vault. She gazed up at it as Sugar Belle panted behind her. Starlight didn’t witness the moment her bright colors bled out, seeping like melting sorbet. She turned only at the sound of the magical thrum, the sinking note that meant her mark of equality had appeared on that washed-out pink flank.

Sugar Belle wore it well.

—

“We’ll all start working on building your new home tomorrow. Once you’re settled, you’re going to love it here!”

Starlight helped Sugar Belle lay a clean sheet over the guest bed mattress, pulling it taut between them with equal force. She would be spending her first night in Starlight’s own cottage, as was customary.

“Wow, I feel like a guest of honor!” The aura surrounding Sugar Belle’s horn shimmered in time to her laughter.

Starlight beamed. “It’s merely an honor all of my residents deserve. You see, we all take turns with our tasks to keep the town running. There’s never any concern over who is better at their job than somepony else!”

“I really like the sound of that,” Sugar Belle said. She hung her saddlebags at the end of the bed, heavy with their pie tins and whisks—then stepped back from it, like a foul thing. “I guess I didn’t need all of this stuff after all.”

“Actually, Our Town doesn’t have a bakery yet,” Starlight blurted. “But if we did, we could use your supplies as a contribution. You’d be willing to share them for the good of the town, right?”

“Oh. Good idea.” Sugar Belle fluffed her pillow. She paused with a pensive head tilt. “But, why wouldn’t you have such good ideas?” She giggled.

“I’m… sure you have good ideas, too. Equally good as mine.”

The induction process proceeded as it had with the first three, enacted like a ritual. Sugar Belle perched on the edge of her bed with a guileless grin. She pulled free the bauble elastic from her mane, pushing the desaturated coils over her withers for Starlight to reach.

Starlight’s pastern brushed the pulse point at Sugar Belle’s neck as she swept her mane into her grasp. A light scent of spice was tossed into the air, cinnamon and clove. The springy hairs tickled the sole of her hoof. Breath catching, Starlight submitted to the briefest hesitation, stroking down the length of those curls with a gentle touch. She indulged the idea of that unique softness like a kept secret.

Soon after, her brush was raking through those fine hairs with a tempered aggression, flattening them under the grease of chemical relaxer.

Mane and tail clipped and soaking in alkali, Sugar Belle snuggled into her bedding. There was a sweet domesticity to her face. Her breath rasped from the pressure of the pillow on her snout, hooves twitching under the blanket to fight the fusty heat.

Starlight lingered on those details before she closed the door.

“You like her.”

She turned, facing Sunburst.

He sat, pert and exact, in the center of the wood-boarded floor. It was that irritating, self-serious posture he always adopted, white-socked hooves tucked beneath him. The color of his coat, a shade akin to a glass of cold apple juice, was grossly incandescent in her living room.

Starlight’s nostrils flared. His dumb colt face stared up at her, the short mop of his orange mane hanging over his eyes.

“Of course I like her. She came to me willingly. She’ll be a wonderful friend.”

Starlight crossed the creaking floor, stepping through Sunburst.

Beyond the window, the blue-dark of night chirred with locusts. A moth thumped the glass like a thrown stone. Starlight turned on the sink faucet, running her bristle brush under the hot flow of water. The steam carried a burnt chemical odor to her nose.

“She sure looks a lot like one of the fillies you had a crush on. The one with the curly mane?”

Sunburst perched on the edge of the counter, hind hooves pressed to the cabinet, an anxious leverage.

“Can you be quiet?” Starlight slapped the wet brush on the sink’s rim. “I’m busy.”

Sunburst’s teeth sunk into his lower lip. They sawed back and forth until it swelled. That nervous habit often left him with fine lines of chapping, as bright as the velvety blush of pink at the end of his snout.

“Knock it off,” Starlight groused, shutting the faucet. “You’ll give yourself a sore, or something.”

Sunburst’s wet lip popped free. He trotted behind Starlight, hopping to follow her ascent on the staircase. She closed the door to her bedroom and he melted through the paneling, entering inside.

There was a lilac smudge on Starlight's sheets. She brushed at it with a shaky hoof, twisting her hindquarters to peer at her flank. The dusted-on equal sign was intact. No whisper of turquoise poked out from beneath her heavy application of powder.

“You like baking,” Sunburstsaid. He perched on her duvet like a whimsical little cat. “Remember those peanut butter cookies we made? They didn't turn out very good.” His nasal giggles followed.

“I know. We were supposed to let the dough chill in the fridge.” Starlight's attention was fixated on her own reflection in her vanity mirror. She scrubbed her eyes clean of mascara with a cotton pad, blinking past the film of makeup remover. “And you were supposed to be in charge of reading the recipe. But of course you probably got distracted by some magical something-or-other. As usual.”

“My parents were fighting again that day. I came over because being with you always cheered me up.”

The gray-smudged cotton pad in Starlight's magic squeezed into a tight ball.

“Then you should know better than anypony how pointless romantic commitment is. It didn’t keep your parents together.” With a flick of her neck the cotton sailed into the wastebasket. “I gave up on it a long time ago.”

She turned off the light and slid into bed. Hooves ruffling the sheets, it was too warm. The insect hum outside was strident. Sunburst curled next to her, a bright beam in the enveloping dark. He blinked, a sheen of moonlight on his murky teal eyes.

So many sleepovers had passed under that honest gaze, the two of them giggling into the soft underside of their shared blanket, stomachs aching from mirth and the overindulgence of sweet things. They always lay side by side, their bodies forming equal divots in the mattress. Until the day came that Starlight reached out to find that space beside her was empty.

Starlight’s hooves dragged Sunburst near like a plush toy. In her grasp, he was supple as air. There was none of his brightness this close, none of that vexing cleverness in every degree of his face. There were his wet eyes, the fluff of his inner ears, the coltish pudge of his belly. His soft coat, fuzzed at the edges. The sun of his cutie mark.

Starlight threw him at the wall.

It was a noiseless act. No thump of hide or grunt expelled from lungs. Sunburst crumpled, his cheek squashed under his weight, limp hooves curling. The dark blur of his big pupils stared outward.

A horrible burning welled in Starlight’s eyes. Sheets tossed aside, her hooves clattered on the wooden floor. She crouched over him, shaking, her gut jerking with quick, tearful gasps. Her hoof touched his face, his chest, blunt gestures of remorse.

When she blinked, he wasn’t there. Wet dots darkened the floor.

Starlight’s head wrenched upward and she raked a hoof over her eyes. Her skin prickled; a heavy pulse in her neck throbbed. The room was empty. The shadows betrayed no hidden witnesses.

When she crawled back under her covers, she pulled the sheets over her head and thought of Sugar Belle. She was a floor below, a small distance of less than twenty feet. Deep in sleep, her eyes swiveling under her lids, head cradled by her pillow. The warm shape of her leaving a gentle impression on the mattress.

Starlight tucked a hoof under her belly, her own body’s pressure like the momentary weight of Sugar Belle’s grasp at the edge of town.

Her stomach growled.