“It is beautiful.”
“Yes, darling. It is one of my favourite gems.”
“No, it really is beautiful.”
“I know, darling, I know. So bedazzling, is it not?”
“No, no! I mean it – it is too pretty!”
“Sweetie Belle! I know!”
“You’re not understanding! It is actually, truly beautiful!”
The mare’s eyes twitched. She was a unicorn with a stunning pearl-grey coat and a mane that was coiled elegantly, the shades of royal purple heaving in gentle contrast. Her eyes, a spectacular hue of cobalt blue, fixated on a piece of blue gem on the little ornate table – and the younger unicorn filly who was trying hard to suppress her giggles.
“Sweetie Belle,” she breathed, herself trying not to be angry, to the filly, “I realize it is lovely, darling! You needn’t repeat it.”
“You think it is lovely, Rarity but I know it is! It is so very pretty!”
“I didn’t say I thou–”
“So beautiful, so beautiful! You know?”
“Sweetie Belle! What in Equestria!?” cried Rarity, now aghast. Sweetie Belle tried to maintain a serious face but toppled on the floor, with her back first, bursting into a heap of giggles. Rarity took in a minute to fully comprehend the meaning of her sister’s ‘practical joke’ but she didn’t appear to have enjoyed it.
“Honestly, Sweetie, darling?” she scolded. Being rudely interrupted in the middle of her sentences was clearly not her sense of humor. “Was that rude behaviour supposed to be a joke?”
Sweetie Belle’s laughter came to a gradual halt.
“The proper lady does not play practical jokes on her elders – have you never heard of manners? What would Mother and Father say if they saw this uncouth behaviour of yours, darling?”
Sweetie Belle’s grin turned into a frown.
“Such actions deserved to be punished,” declared Rarity, using her magic to adjust the blue gem on the table slightly. “Therefore, as a punishment, I shall…” she loomed upon Sweetie Belle who looked rather repentant.
“– tickle you!” laughed Rarity as she jumped on Sweetie Belle, the filly breaking into peals of laughter as her older sister tickled her. “Oh yes,” Rarity chuckled between laughs, “I am going to tickle you so very hard, O unruly unicorn!”
“Rarity – oof! Hahaha! – Rarity, I can’t – hahahaha – Bwahaha!” Sweetie Belle rolled as she tried to get a hold on her uncontrollable laughter.
Both sisters fidgeted and laughed wildly, Rarity’s lady-like etiquettes and manners forgotten to winds. They were having the time of their lives – tickling and tickling and tickling! After five solid minutes of non-stop tickling and Sweetie Belle’s laughs-mixed-with-pleads, Rarity finally stopped and the two unicorns collapsed into a heap of quiet giggles.
Sweetie Belle was panting although her smile was big enough to light up any room. “I… I am sorry, Rarity.”
“Oh, darling, it is alright.” Rarity was panting too – tickling a squirming foal was exhausting – but she managed to get a hold on it. The lavender carpet under their backs was plushy and soft – all the carpets in Carousel Boutique were only of the finest quality – and Rarity would have hated it if she had to lie on some cold marble floor.
“So… the joke…” Sweetie Belle went on, “Ladies can play practical jokes, right?”
Rarity let out a single giggle. “Well, certainly, they can, darling.”
“And it was not uncouth?”
“Of course not. It was actually rather amusing, now that I think back to it… Lovely prank, darling.”
Sweetie Belle grinned for a moment but then it faltered. “You… you still love me, right, Rarity?”
“Darling!” gasped Rarity, “Of course, I love you, my little sister! I love you more than anything, darling!”
The grin on the filly’s face returned and she looked adorable. “Oh, thank goodness,” she breathed, closing her eyes. Then she opened one eye – so it seemed as if she were winking – and giggled, “Because that means I have your approval to prank you like this whenever I want!”
“My approval to do what!?” gasped the older unicorn and then shook her head amid chuckles. “I never said that, Sweetie Belle.”
Sweetie Belle laughed softly. She was getting… well, she was getting tired. Rarity had been working on a necklace – refined with elegant textures and studded with only the most dazzling gems, as Rarity had said – for the filly and Sweetie had stayed up all day with her to make sure it was absolutely to her liking. The day was ending; the dusk was upon them – and, instead of fixing gems in to the necklace, they had been playing around.
“Rarity,” she started, trying to keep her tired eyes open, “what about my necklace? We have to finish it!”
“Well, of course, we do, darling,” nodded Rarity but, when she cast a glancing at the exhausted little unicorn at her side, she added, “but that can wait till morning, can it not?”
“But we have to finish it!”
“Oh, pshaw, darling!” Rarity maintained a most lady-like scoff. “There is no deadline whatsoever – besides, you look terribly worn out, darling! I will finish it; you go to bed, all right?”
“You promised you’d do it with me – this was supposed to be our fun activity! Together!” protested Sweetie Belle.
Rarity ran her hoof on her sister’s mane gently and sighed. “Well, yes. Yes, darling, I guess it was…” she stopped to think and, when she did, she looked upon Sweetie Belle with a tender smile. “What say, we do it tomorrow, hmm? Together?”
A frown creased on Sweetie Belle’s forehead for a moment – she couldn’t be unreasonable and just carry on pestering; she had to make a choice. With her sister or not – that was the question. Exhaustion mounted upon her being and she let out a small exhale.
“Okay,” whispered she, letting her eyelids fall upon her eyes. Even though she wasn’t outside, she could smell the scented aroma of the evening air and it filled her with love… and sleepiness. She could hear the birds chirping as they made their way back to their nests.
“Darling, you look so very tired,” came Rarity’s whisper beside her.
“Mhmm.” Sweetie Belle’s lack of words and closed eyes defined her exhaustion well enough.
“Oh, my sleepy sister…” Rarity used a flick of her magic to delicately push away a couple of stray hair strands from her sister’s mane. “I know you worked hard with me today,” cooed Rarity softly, “and you deserve to rest.”
“Mhmm…”
There was a pause and then Rarity said, “Would you like me to sing to you?” It was just a gentle offer – she understood if Sweetie Belle was not in the mood for listening to songs in such a state of exhaustion and Rarity certainly wouldn’t mind if she refused.
“Uh…” a slight frown appeared on Sweetie Belle’s face. “Sure.”
“The Line of Light?” asked Rarity, making sure to keep her voice soft as to not disturb the filly.
“Uh-huh… sure.”
Rarity smiled. Sweetie Belle couldn’t have seen it – her eyes were shut – but she felt it.
Rarity began singing, her accented voice delicate and beautiful, “Whatever there is that life has to give, it is beauty. Looks can deceive; yes, it is true – but only outer beauty, not the real truth in you. Look at those eyes, look at the gait – outside in this world, false compliments await. Look in your heart, choose what you want to believe; loveliness of a pure soul or ugly looks that deceive. There is nothing keeping us from our true selves; nothing keeping you from me.”
The evening seemed to have grown quieter and so had Sweetie Belle’s mind. The comforting dark of her closed eyes and her sister’s care were everything she needed to lure herself to silent sleep. Noticing the quiet heaving of the filly’s chest, Rarity’s enchanting voice lowered to an ethereal eloquence, “If we all try to love each other, we can create harmony.”
Sweetie Belle had fallen into a quiet slumber and, with a loving smile, Rarity swiped a tender hoof to set another loose strand from her sister’s mane. “Oh, my darling Sweetie Belle,” she chuckled – almost whispered – softly.
Her horn fizzled with a glistening blue aura as she, her eyes still watching her little sister, used her magic to bring out a plushy pillow and a small pink blanket from a nearby closet and delicately pushed the pillow under Sweetie Belle’s head, covering her with the blanket.
With her magic, Rarity picked the blue gem on the table – the same one she and Sweetie Belle had playfully argued about – and smiled at it. She turned her head to the sleeping foal and whispered as if her sister were listening, “A very beautiful gem, you said, darling? Very well then. It shall be the pièce de résistance of your stunning necklace, darling.”
She smiled at the gem again and, with the gem hovering in the air by her side, trotted outside, her hoofsteps subtle and quiet. The door closed with a gentle clink but, almost immediately, it clinked open again, Rarity’s face whisking in with a tender smile at sleeping Sweetie Belle.
“Good night, Sweetie Belle,” she whispered, “I love you, darling. Sleep in beautiful peace.”
With that, she whisked her head back out and the room was quiet – and dark – once more.
Sweetie Belle’s eyes didn’t move but her mouth did.
“Love you too, Rarity.”
–––––––
The last chords rang in the air as the music died down. The only lasting symphony was the unicorn’s melodious voice; it was the only thing the crowd of listening ponies seemed to actually appreciate – even if their ‘appreciation’ meant whistling and hooting in the most rogue of manners. It was not an outdoor stage upon which the mare stood – on the contrary, it was inside a steamy, boisterous hall filled with hooligans for an audience.
Her almost-pure-white coat unsheathed from see-through layers of a short, translucent, violet dress; glittery, periwinkle eyeshadow lay above her light green eyes; soft curls of her pink-and-lavender mane were tied in a grossly sparkly band to form a high ponytail – the cheers of the ponies were nothing uplifting at all but Sweetie Belle had to go on. This was her life now. She had to pretend to be happy – she had to swallow her heart, her fear, her emotions – if she wanted to live.
The music had completely finished as Sweetie Belle sung her final words to the crowd, the uncomfortably sizzling yellow lights dimming. There were distorted cheers and chortles and somepony in the audience screamed her name in something of a dizzy frenzy. Faint but still disgusting odor of smoke and sweat culminated around Sweetie Belle but she smiled – they would kill her if she let her fear break her into tears instead.
Going out in the fresh air was calming but being hurled to stacks of metal was nothing short of being extremely painful. Sweetie Belle’s backbone nearly cracked with the force and she sniffed back a tear, shivering and meeting the gaze of the stallions glowering at her.
One of them, older than the others and shriveled but with a deadly glare and barking voice, stepped forward as the unicorn got back on her feet, trying not to quake with fear. “I thought,” he spat, “you said you would get me the money by today, Belle, eh?”
“I, uh, couldn’t just… the time, you know…” she couldn’t calm her breath as she spoke. Behind the black-coated stallion was a bench. On the bench were a variety of pony-mutilating tools – instruments of torture that she could only stare at weakly, praying to Celestia her life would be spared this once.
“You have lost enough money to pay the bloody rent of a Manehatten flat for a whole year, Belle! A whole bloody year!!” He waved angrily at Sweetie Belle and a bulky pegasus with a gold tooth and pale skin gave her face a violent strike, a scratch exposing raw skin on the far left of her face.
She coughed, falling to the ground. “Slayer, I j-just didn’t have the time,” she croaked out a lie as she got back on her feet, keeping her head low. She had time – that was true – but she had no money. The few bits she got by singing – for rather unpleasant audiences – were just enough to keep herself from starving – and she could not use those bits to help her in her lost gambles.
Slayer loomed towards her, his ugly face drawing dangerously near. “I’ve been letting you slack ‘bout for a wee too long, eh?” his barks resulted in specks of gross spit landing on Sweetie Belle’s face and mane. He grabbed her neck – and she was shaking to the core with thoughts of what would happen next – and made her look up at him, his grip terribly strong for a wrinkled old stallion. “I want my money, Belle; I want my money and nothing else!!”
“You… You’ll get it, Slayer,” she managed to squeak, a valiant effort judging how her throat squeezed. “Just give me a while to gather it up.”
“Three years!” he spat right in her face. Sweetie Belle knew better than to use her magic against her loaner – it could result in a penalty of gruesome torture or even death – and, with a heavy heart, she let the saliva mark her face again. “Three years,” Slayer repeated. “For three years, I have kept you out of my radar all ‘cause you said you’d pay me back – and here I am! And you! Without a single bit on you, you… you worthless wretch!!!”
Sweetie Belle tried not to cough on his face – a slight fragment of bad manners and she would be nothing more than a mess of bloodied entrails and sliced organs. “P-P-Please,” she muttered, “just a little more time, Slayer…”
With a snarl, the old pony tossed her on the ground. Wheezing for breath and lacking any energy to move, Sweetie Belle lay in a slumped heap, her chest bloating and shrinking rapidly.
“You have three days,” he barked with wrath that could only be rivaled by Kronos’ thirst for revenge.
“T-T-Three… Three days?” the words blurted themselves out weakly from the unicorn mare’s mouth.
“You’re lucky it is not three hours, Belle,” Slayer bellowed to the quivering Sweetie Belle as his assailants gathered up the death instruments from the bench, loading them in a sack. Sweetie Belle watched with a fearfully cautious eye, afraid one wrong word might result in her last breath, as she tried to push herself in a sitting posture, her tongue lolling out between her gasps for breath.
The gangster minions of Slayer started making their way out of the valley-like settlement at his gesture but he stayed behind to address his to-be victim one last time. He turned to look at a breathless Sweetie Belle, the moonlight hardening his menacing features significantly.
“Three days, Belle. If I don’t get my money then…” he stopped speaking and licked his rotten old lips, eyes slanted. “If you don’t pay your debt,” he rephrased, turning to face her completely, “I will make sure you die – in the most succulent ways of maiming known to the world of mutilation. Pray your money will save you from me, Belle. Pray.”
Croaking out the words, he turned and hobbled out with the rest of his goons. Sweetie Belle waited, still trying to regain a constant breath supply. The night air was cool and pleasant to breathe in, the moonlight was a spectacle to behold in the dark and the silence – the gradual fading sound of hooves – was too inviting for Sweetie Belle to yell her frustration out. All in the cold silence of the night – when Slayer and his henchponies were safely gone.
“DAMN YOU!” she screeched in the shrillest volume her lungs could manage. “DAMN YOU, SLAYER! I HATE YOU!”
Her voice rang out in the empty vastness of the ground, the wind carrying her words to far-off boundaries but she didn’t care. Boiling tears streamed down her reddened face in frustration and she didn’t even care to brush them off. This was her life and she was used to it – for the most part. “I HATE YOU, SLAYER!” she screamed to the wind again between squeaky but noisy sobs.
“I hate you so much…” her voice dropped, her energy gone, and she dropped down to her haunches, tears dripping on the rough ground under her. Insanity was something she felt herself associate with – insane was the only word she thought could possibly describe her.