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// Story: Rarity Cleans her Room
// Chapter: Chapter 1 And Only: My Little Hoarder
// Author: ThatOneYellowPony
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Rocket engineering. Yup; rocket engineering. Clearly Scootaloo's idea, thought Sweetie Belle as she looked at her Cutie Mark Crusading Calendar, which detailed the three fillies' plan of attack for finally acquiring their butt stamps. Not surprisingly, this was the brainchild of an extremely organized purple unicorn by the name of Twilight Sparkle. She had brought it up after observing the three of them squabble over two endeavors which would both lead them to failure. Apple Bloom thought it was a great idea and carried it out by dividing the role of leading crusader amongst them based on the day of the week.
So today was going to be a ‘Scootaloo’ day, hence the skiing, skydiving, roller coaster testing and alien hunting all scrawled into the day’s slot in chicken-scratch (no pun intended). Sweetie Belle looked at tomorrow, a Tuesday. Tuesday was a day belonging to her that focused on gardening, acting, swimming, and lullaby writing. Still, despite not really liking the constant adrenaline rush Scootaloo's activities imposed, she enjoyed the company of the pegasus too much to bail out on her.
She swallowed hard, and found reasons to slow herself down. She made her bed, brushed her mane, and fed her pet rock Jimmy (Her parents insisted she have a "practice pet" before she could get a kitty like her big sister Rarity.) Almost a full five minutes later, when there was absolutely nothing left to distract herself with, she knew she was going to have to bite the bullet and risk her flank for Scootaloo's pleasure.
So she trotted down the stairs, had a purposely drawn out breakfast of raspberry toast and turned towards the door.
"Bye Mom! Bye Dad! Be ready with the Band-Aids!" She called.
"Bubye Sweetums!" They sang from the living room.
"Be careful out there" said Fluttershy.
"I will! Wait, huh?" Sweetie Belle pulled a 180 just one step from the door with a comical expression.
For a reason she couldn't hope to explain, the shy yellow pony known as Fluttershy was just standing there inside her house. Right there next to a large purple door with a heart shaped glass window she hadn't been through in several years. The door was ajar and Sweetie could hear somepony doing something or another on the other side.
"What are you doing here?" Sweetie asked, a little accusatively.
"Hmm? Oh me? I thought you knew I was coming. Rarity asked me to help her move her old things out of her old room. Didn't she tell you?" asked Fluttershy, looking a little concerned like usual.
Sweetie thought long and hard. She searched the back of her mind and vaguely remembered her sister going on about something like that. Or maybe that was Apple Bloom giving a long verbal preview of the apple crisps they’d be making next Wednesday afternoon.
"What are you talking about? Of course I told you! It couldn't have been more than a day ago! I'm telling you, once you get your cutie mark you'll have to check it every other second just so you don’t forget what it is!” laughed Rarity good-naturedly as she emerged from the doorway levitating several dusty boxes with her signature blue magic.
"Why are you moving your stuff out now? I thought you moved to the Carousel Boutique like two or three forevers ago." said Sweetie Belle.
"Well, yes but you see when I first departed I only took a few essentials. Some makeup, a half ton of diamonds, a queen sized bed I never share, you know the rest. Now I've decided it’s high time I sort through my old keepsakes." explained Rarity.
"You mean Mom probably told you to." said Sweetie Belle.
Rarity huffed hotly "She might have mentioned it, yes." She sighed and opened up the first box, leading to a puff of dust ruining her mane. “Ach! Icky!”
"You haven't touched or thought about this stuff in years! Doesn't that kinda show you don't need it?" thought Sweetie aloud.
"Don't you have some crusading to do?" grumbled Rarity, as she and Fluttershy started going through old Hearts and Hooves day cards.
"Wow!" said Fluttershy "You've really had a lot of admirers Rarity! Look! You got three in one year from this 'Mac' character! Not that he says a lot"
"You know, you've got an awful lot of stuff sis. Why’s Fluttershy the only one helping you?" observed Sweetie Belle.
"Because where we're going"-She pointed her horn at her old room's door-"only the tenacious can survive! Now, if you'd like, you could help Fluttershy and I-"
Sweetie Belle was long gone before Rarity could finish her sentence.
"Wow, she didn't even bother to give an excuse like the other four." said Fluttershy, uncharacteristically bold.
"You’re not saying the other four would abandon me with this are you?!" asked Rarity, appalled.
"Well, no. I-I mean it's just that this is going to take a really, really long time" blushed Fluttershy, regretting her earlier comment far more than was necessary.
"I can take a hint" said Rarity, thinking back to Applejack's rodeo, Rainbow's Daring Do convention, Pinkie's responsibility as one of the four Great Equestrian Pie Making Contest judges, and Twilight Sparkle's sudden expedition to someplace ‘really really far away’, and wondering if any of these excuses were actually legitimate.
It took an hour to go through the few boxes Rarity had pulled out, but working together the two friends hardly noticed.
"Oh good!" said Rarity "Now with these out of the way you and I can enter my room!"
"Um, 'enter'?"
And, as if on cue, the purple door swung open to reveal a room jam packed with towers of dust covered boxes with just enough room for two ponies to get in and squeeze the door closed. Fluttershy's gentle eyes and timid mouth both flew open in surprise. She thought this would take a day, tops. And now, as she craned her neck in search of one of the room’s other three walls, she wondered if even half of this stuff would fit into the Carousel Boutique.
"Oh don't look at me like that! I'm not a hoarder! I just put the 'keep' in 'keepsake' that's all!" defended Rarity, though she blushed in shame. "Look, this is stuff Old Rarity kept. I'm sure that New-Two-Year-Older Rarity will be nowhere near as attached"
This however, proved not to be the case, as each box seamed to carry something of immense value to the unicorn.
"I can't throw these out! These costumes are directly linked to my getting a cutie mark!" she had insisted.
"Oh please! Just because I'm not Twilight doesn't mean I don't want this old clay globe I made in kindergarten! I almost got the right number of continents! And the ones I did get look fabulous embroidered with emeralds" she had remarked.
"Now who would throw out a perfectly good box of metallic grey fabric? I use the stuff...on occasion!" she had pleaded.
"These are my BABY PHOTOS! Oh, wait, never mind: these are somepony else's baby photos. I'M STILL KEEPING THEM!" she had demanded
On and on it went, until the whole room had been cleared out and exactly one box remained unmoved. Rarity wouldn't have even noticed it if it weren't for Fluttershy asking what she wanted done with it.
"This isn't just a box Fluttershy! It's an old toy chest!"
"A what?" asked Fluttershy. After an exhausting day of going through box after box, the words 'toy chest' failed to register.
"Toy chest." Repeated Rarity. Her eyes shone with childlike excitement as she looked inside.
"What's in it?"
"Toys!” said Rarity as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
This was actually a surprise, seeing as they had found shoe boxes filled with makeup, board game boxes filled with jewels, and a blender box filled with smaller empty boxes (That she kept).
Fluttershy trotted over to Rarity, shaking her head in an attempt to wake her up. Together they looked as the white unicorn pulled out the toys with magic.
"Is that a Manehatten Sock Monkey?!"
"Well I'll be! I remember playing with this doll set since as long as I can remember! They have all their old west attire and golden manes and-are those bite marks? Well I suppose nopony’s born a lady. Oh! A Frisbee launcher! They made this back in the day when they weren't afraid to let filly’s take a hit!" She reminisced about the time the Frisbee launcher punched a big purple bruise across her forehead.
"Dragon Trap! I loved that game! Even when I always lost the pieces”
"My race wagon set! Daddy always said he wanted to give his old toys to his son, but he wound up with my sister and me. Still, why should boys have all the fun?" Rarity coughed at the end of it, realizing she’d let slip ‘daddy’ instead of ‘father’
"I always envied unicorns, being able to use all the cool toys!" said Fluttershy, eyeing a super-soaking water gun.
"They made them for other ponies to use too, you know."
"Really? I never had them when I was a filly. Oh! Look! A Baby Dragon Buddy! I cried all night when I lost mine, and you could only get them in Canterlot so my poor mother just had no idea what to do!" said Fluttershy, remembering how much simpler the world was back then.
"It's a shame we're both grown up, otherwise we could play with these old toys and not have to feel ashamed or anything." She grinned slyly. Already closing over the door and pulling down a little pink curtain with her magic.
And then, without another word, the two friends leapt into action. Rarity started laying down the race wagon track pieces all about her now completely empty room and Fluttershy strapped the Baby Dragon Buddy into the holder which went around her neck and tied at the crest. She used her back left hoof to close the door the last inch that Rarity didn’t quite get; you couldn't have parents get in the way of their play date now could you? Neither of the ponies knew what the time was and were both having too much fun to care. Fluttershy even dared to try a pogo stick she found buried deeper in the toy chest, an endeavor which wound her up flat on her back.
"I don't recall things hurting so much when we were little!" said Fluttershy, wincing as she stood up. "How's the track going?"
"Finished!!!" sang Rarity as she clicked in the last piece of the loop-de-loop.
"You think the cart will make the loop?"
"Oh where's your sense of adventure! A flat track’s boring!"
Surely enough, as the little magic-operated yellow racing wagons reached the loop-de-loop they flew off violently and dented the ceiling.
"What was that?!" called a concerned mother from the room over.
Then, something curious happened. The two friends, despite both being well aware of their size and age, forgot about it entirely, for a moment. And within both of them came the urge to flee, stirred out from an unknown place. They both wanted to hide from Rarity's Mom like the pair had done before, many years earlier when they were just a couple of fillies with a passion for fun and a desperate need for friends. But they didn't move, at least not their bodies. Instead, each pony turned to face the other pony.
In Fluttershy, Rarity observed her friend's wings flare, her eyes shrink and her lip tremble.
In Rarity, Fluttershy observed her eyes twitch, her mouth fall open, and her body quivering slightly.
Then, being such good friends for so long, they proceeded to laugh their respective flanks off at each other’s ‘omigoshwe’reintrouble faces’. Without either of them realizing it, they had touched each other's hearts in a way they both had forgotten how to do. Each pony had, for a split second of time, become a filly once more. As the pair of them waited for Rarity's mother to come in, they had a look about the room and the toys they had begun to play with. Each had been discarded around the floor in favor of the next, more exiting thing.
"GraaAAaAAaAAAa!" Is likely the best way to spell Rarity's Mom's reaction to the wagon shaped dents in her ceiling.
######
It was well past midnight when Big Macintosh brought over the last few boxes of Rarity's stuff to the Carousel Boutique. A favor for which the red stallion, curiously, didn't even try to excuse himself from. That made him either a chivalrous knight of a gentlecolt, or so deeply entrenched in the friend zone that they elected him mayor.
"Thank you very fondly Mr. Macintosh, I should be able to handle the rest now. That was the last of them I presume?" asked Rarity.
"Ee---ugh!" confirmed Big Macintosh as the last of the heavy boxes slid off his back. The poor stallion was quite clearly in need of some sleep.
"Again, thank you very much uh, 'Big Mac'" said Rarity, giving him a quick smack on the cheek.
And so Big Macintosh departed, with a spring in his step that rivaled Pinkie Pie's constant bounce.
"Do you need me anymore?" asked Fluttershy, circling around the Mt. Doom of cardboard boxes.
"No" said Rarity, smiling faintly.
This confused the pegasus, and suddenly Fluttershy realized she still had the Dragon Baby Buddy secured to her neck.
"Oh! I'm so sorry!"
Rarity broke out into a laugh "It's quite alright! Keep it! I know you lost your old one!"
"No! It's yours! I'll just put it back in the toy chest! Where is it? I don't see it."
"That's because it's not here. I left the box in Sweetie Belle's room. I expect she's come across it by now. Although it's just as likely she went straight to bed, if she didn't get herself blown up.”
Fluttershy blinked
"It's a Scootaloo day on her Cutie Mark Crusader Calendar you see-oh never mind!"
"But we had so much fun with those toys today. I would have thought you'd want to keep them. I mean, by Celestia, you kept empty boxes and glitter tubes!"
"Yes Fluttershy, I did, and I'm very grateful for both your helping of me today and the fun we had with those toys. But there's something I didn't tell you about them."
"Oh?"
"They're gifts, nearly every last one of them. Handed down to me by my mother or my father or my aunts or anypony really. I put some thought into it while Mr. Macintosh was helping us with those boxes. Having something to remember my youth by is just fine, but I'd rather give it to somepony else so they can enjoy the childhood they’re still in. I remember each time I was handed down something my parents had played with when they were children or in daycare. It was awe inspiring and made the toys that much more special. We’ve had our fun."
Rarity took in the sheer magnitude of the pile of boxes in front of her.
"In fact, I think my little sister was right" she continued "I have gone two years without these things, perhaps a, what would they call it? A 'garage sale' is in order, what do you think?"
"I think it's entirely up to you"
"Well, I might be keener to let go of some of this stuff if I can see the bits in front of my face" said Rarity, rubbing her hoof on her chin. The two of them laughed.
"Just don't tell Big Mac" and with that, Fluttershy left Rarity to her thoughts. It had been a really, really long day.
Whatever she would decide, she would decide it in the morning. As she slipped ever so carefully under the covers of her familiar bed, she thought of how wonderful a friend Fluttershy was to her. It was, after all, incredible the way a good friend can turn anything in to a good thing. Friends can help take you anywhere from anyplace for anypony of any age. And, thought Rarity as she finally got all snugly-wugly for a good night’s rest, when you're as lucky as she is, you find yourself with five.
//The End//