//------------------------------//
// philia 
// Story: Love Languages 
// by evelili 
//------------------------------//

It took Rarity longer than she would have liked to return the shirt to white, but she did it. 

(Eventually. And with many home-brewed solutions adjacent to bleach.)

But even after putting in those extra hours and going to bed well past noon, she still made sure to set her alarm clock for a quarter past six—plenty of time to get ready and get to the library for seven, even if it wasn’t exactly plenty of sleep.

Of course, the walk into town gave her even more time to think about it. Her thoughts had bounced back to the topic again and again while she’d washed, like some sort of twisted game of racquetball:

What kind of monster could Twilight Sparkle be?

Being human-passing took most options off the table, but Rarity thought she’d come up with a rather good guess for that evening. More probable than a vampire, more reasonable than a human, and something easy enough to verify without being obvious.

Yes, she thought to herself as she marched up the library’s footpath and raised her fist to the door. It’s a probable, reasonable guess.

She knocked on the door.

(After all, she knew some zombies once were humans. Before their second life, at least.)

She’d barely lifted her knuckles before a pair of footsteps pounded from inside, and moments later the door flew open to reveal a breathless and slightly-disheveled Spike.

“Hey, Rarity,” he wheezed, as if the both of them didn’t know he’d run all the way down from his room to get the door. He straightened up and tucked his tail behind his ankles before asking, “You, uh, doing well?”

It was adorable, in the same sense that Sweetie Belle was adorable if you didn’t look past her ‘brunch’ and into the kitchen. At least Spike had a leg up on her for that—Rarity didn’t know if cooking was a dragonborn thing or a Spike thing, but she appreciated his skill for it all the same.

“Quite,” Rarity answered, and smiled politely. “And yourself?”

“Oh! Yeah, I’m good. I’m good.”

“That’s lovely to hear.” She paused for a moment. When he didn’t move, she continued, “Now, shall we continue this conversation inside, or...?”

“Oh!” Spike repeated, and quickly scooted to the side. “Sorry, sorry! Come on in; you know where to put your shoes, and I can take your coat—” He blinked, remembered that the weather wasn’t cool enough for a jacket, and corrected, “I can take your bag, yeah, that’s what I meant—”

Rarity suppressed a giggle as she entered. “Thank you for the offer,” she said, and held up the parcel she’d so carefully packed that evening. “But I think it’d be best if I returned these to Twilight myself.”

Spike closed the door behind her, then shuffled back into view while she removed her shoes. “Huh. Did she forget something last night?”

Just her clothes, Rarity nearly said, but stopped herself for poor Spike’s sake. “I did a bit of cleaning for her as a favour,” she said instead. “Well, a favour to myself, really. Such a lovely shirt soiled—not beyond repair, mind you—and her first instinct was to have you burn it!”

She gave him a Look. Immediately he puffed out his chest and declared, “I would never.”

“Exactly. And, well, I’m nothing if not a miracle worker. Plus I know my way around blood better than most. So it’s a bit of a win-win situation: Twilight gets a clean shirt; I get the satisfaction of saving it, and maybe a nice meal too—”

“Oh,” Spike said suddenly, and Rarity could nearly hear a lightbulb ping above his head. “That’s why Twilight had me defrost those steaks.”

...Hm?

Spike chattered on as he led her to the dining room and got her settled in, but Rarity hardly heard him all the while. Because, what little she knew of Twilight was that Twilight cared little for food; that she preferred to survive on what was most convenient rather than most fine. In fact, Rarity would have bet her last bit that anything in the kitchen not canned or takeout was only due to Spike.

Calm, collected, and mostly uncaring. That was Twilight Sparkle—on life, on friends, on other living beings. She had every right to think of food the exact same way.

But only mostly, Rarity recognized, and felt the intrigue sleeping in her bloodstream rear its crimson head. Because tonight we’re having steak.

And no uncaring human—or monster—would ever have bothered to remember a friend’s favourite meal.







It took Twilight a bit of time to finish in her office that evening, but Rarity didn’t mind the wait. The kitchen and dining room were adjacent, and she was content to chat from her seat at the table while Spike started on dinner.

He was so responsible, Rarity found herself thinking time and time again. He could use the stovetop; the kettle; vegetable peelers; knives. All without Twilight’s supervision! Honestly, the kitchen might have been in more danger had Twilight been the one cooking instead.

...It was so terribly hard to not think thoughts, especially when they were true.

Of course, Twilight just had to come down to the dining room as Rarity was wrestling with those fully-formed thoughts she wished were easier to not-think. She raised one hand in a wave to acknowledge her and dearly hoped her face didn’t betray her brain.

Unfortunately, it did.

“I know that look,” Twilight said slowly. She sat herself down beside Rarity and turned to face her with her eyebrows barely raised.

“What look?” Rarity protested.

“Is it the one where you’re thinking something funny to yourself you know you can’t say out loud?” Spike chimed in, and popped his head around the corner to check. “Oh. Yep. It’s that one.”

“I have multiple looks?”

Twilight pursed her lips, painting herself with a Look that Rarity was sure meant something between ‘pondering politeness’ and ‘bluntly stated fact’. “It’s not an intentional categorization,” she said eventually.

“But I do have—”

“Do you think we have time for tea, Spike?” she continued over Rarity, and nailed their conversation back into its coffin before it could even come alive. “I could do with a hot drink.”

“Already got the kettle on,” he said. His head disappeared back into the kitchen, and Rarity heard a cupboard open and close before he called back, “What kind do you want?”

“Whatever we’ve got the most of,” Twilight started to reply, then stopped.

She turned to Rarity.

“Oh,” Rarity said, caught a bit off guard. “Er, would you have Darjeeling?”

Twilight turned back to the kitchen. “Spike, do we have—”

“Yeah,” he answered, “we do. I’ll put it on.”

“Thank you,” Rarity added, just in case Twilight didn’t. The same sort of odd sensation she’d had at the mention of steak washed over her again—another instance of a supposedly uncaring creature attempting to care.

It was awkward, and perhaps a bit unnatural, but incredibly earnest. And Rarity wasn’t sure what she was supposed to think of that.

So, rather than waste much more time thinking unsure thoughts, she pulled her parcel from the floor and held it out to Twilight with one hand. “White as the day you first bought it,” she said, if a little bit too proudly. “And you can verify that as fact for yourself if you’d like.”

“Hm?” Twilight switched her gaze from the kitchen entrance back to Rarity, then glanced down at the parcel with an expression of mild surprise—almost as if she’d forgotten the very reason for Rarity’s visit. 

(Almost as if she didn’t care—

—but no, she’d planned for steaks; she’d asked for her tea. In no good conscience could Rarity label her response uncaring, even if it stung.)

“Oh,” Twilight said after a second slipped past in silence. “Of course.”

She took the parcel.

It remained the rest of the night unopened at her feet.







The wait until dinnertime was nothing short of bland: Spike brought their tea, and then, after they’d had a half-hour of small talk filled with the warmest nothings, tabled dinner too. He was too modest to call it ‘fancy’, but Rarity couldn’t miss the proud glow radiating from his facial scales—a pride oh-so well deserved, she noted. The steaks bled rare, the greens blistered soft, the mashed potatoes held lovely pools of butter at its peaks, and the gravy at the centre of the table was thick enough to wobble when he took his seat at the table across from Twilight.

“It smells wonderful,” she told him, before she could take too large of a mouthful to talk, and his scales somehow beamed brighter in response.

Their conversation remained frivolous and sparse while they ate, until eventually Rarity mentioned the manticore offhand and the topic turned to their mission the night before.

“No way,” Spike breathed between bites. “All by herself?”

Rarity hid her smile behind a sip of tea. “All by herself,” she echoed, and shot Twilight a coy, sideways glance that wasn’t returned.

“You helped,” Twilight protested.

“With the cleanup, certainly. But I had nothing to do with the actual disposal of that beast, darling.”

“Tracking it down, then,” she tried, but once again Rarity shook her head.

“Don’t give a thought to any befores and afters,” she said firmly. Her hands sliced her steak to delicate slices as she spoke—if she was to occupy her mouth with words, at least the rest of her could do something useful in the meantime. “The mission was the manticore; nothing more or less than that.”

...That was how it always was, wasn’t it? She and Twilight were assigned partners on paper, but the meat of their missions always had her standing on the sidelines. And if Rarity thought about things long enough perhaps she’d have been able to come up with a time that she’d done the slaying instead—but nothing stood out in recent memory. It was always Twilight and magic and ferals and blood, then Rarity and cleanup and nothings and guilt.

“Befores and afters are still important,” Twilight said quietly, and the uncharacteristic softness of her voice broke Rarity out of her thoughts. “It’s like you said yesterday, isn’t it? I may make magic look easy, but I think you’re the same with everything else you do.”

Rarity blinked. Was that a compliment?

“Well, I bet I make cooking look easy,” Spike chimed in. He scraped the last of his potatoes into his mouth, then pushed his chair back and stood up with a mischievous grin. “But since you guys are so much better than me at dishes...”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she grumbled. “You’re excused.”

He gave both of them one last smile before bolting out of the dining room and up the stairs. A second later Rarity heard what she assumed was his bedroom door slam hard enough to shake the rest of the library.

“I usually do the dishes anyway,” Twilight explained. Her plate was still half-full, compared to Spike’s empty one and Rarity’s with only a bit of cut-away gristle remaining. “I think it’s a fair trade.”

“Mm,” Rarity hummed. “I suppose it is.”

Her eyes and mind wandered while Twilight returned to her meal, and eventually they landed on the pale, tattoo-marked skin peeking out beneath her sleeves. Now that she was closer she could see that the patterns didn’t end at the wrist like she’d assumed, but instead turned finer and fainter as they branched from hand to fingertip.

(And, she didn’t see any scars, or signs of stitching. Most zombies should have had at least one of those things visible throughout their form.)

“Why do you need those?” she decided to ask. “Those tattoos, I mean. What do they have to do with magic?”

Twilight frowned around her fork. “It’s a bit complicated,” she warned.

“And I’m a bit curious. I don’t mind.”

“...Alright. If you’re sure.” Still a bit reluctant, Twilight took one final bite of steak, then pushed her plate away and sat back in her chair. “I suppose potential isn’t too hard of a topic to grasp.”

“You mentioned that yesterday,” Rarity said slowly. “That each human is different, right? And that your potential is far above the average I’d assumed.”

“Right. Imagine the average is, um...” She glanced around the table and, once her eyes landed on the napkin holder, lit her hand with magic to pull four paper napkins from its grip. “Think of it this way,” she said. The first three napkins folded themselves midair to simple squares, hovering between her and Rarity in an evenly-spaced column nearly a metre tall. “Celestia’s at the top, and humans with no magical potential are at the bottom. But if the average is this middle one, rather than being exactly between...”

The middle napkin floated lower until it was barely an inch above the bottom one. To Rarity, it seemed the gap between the middle and top napkin had stretched to an imaginary mile.

“...it’s really more something like this.” Twilight gave Rarity a moment to process that, then folded the remaining napkin into a star-like shape. “Now, pretend this napkin represents me.”

“I can see the resemblance,” Rarity teased, then quickly backpedalled when Twilight’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Sorry, sorry. I’m listening.”

“Pretend this napkin represents me,” she repeated. Much to Rarity’s surprise, it floated down beside the middle napkin, then dropped half an inch lower than that. “This was my natural magical potential. My innate threshold.”

You said that in past tense, Rarity wanted to point out, but held her tongue.

“However, this obviously isn’t my threshold anymore. Today my potential is probably around...” The star moved up, and up, and then further up, until it stopped only a few inches beneath Celestia’s. “...here.”

“And that’s because of the tattoos?”

“Partially,” Twilight agreed. The star moved back down until it was an equal distance between the bottom square and the top. “On their own I believe they only raised my potential about this much. Which is already quite high,” she added, and flicked her finger to wiggle the bottom two squares as a reminder. “High enough to get accepted as Celestia’s student, at least.”

There was still so much missing information that Rarity hardly knew where she was allowed to start. But if Twilight kept going she also knew she’d have no chance of getting un-lost, so she grabbed the first question she could catch and quickly asked it: 

“Did they hurt?”

“Yes,” Twilight admitted, and her eyes took on a distant look for a moment that made Rarity think she wasn’t in the present any longer, but in the past. “I mean, I was also quite young. But kids are resilient, and the younger you can get your veins opened, the better chance you have of a higher thr—”

“Wait,” Rarity interrupted. “Veins?” She knew quite a bit of opening veins—and knew even more that in humans it wasn’t exactly something good for them.

“Not the literal ones,” Twilight corrected, and pushed one of her sleeves up to the elbow for Rarity to see. “Magical ones. The tattooing process releases them and maps out channels for stronger currents. See?”

Magenta light pulsed through her once-white tattoos, just as they had when she’d folded the towel the night before. Then, when she lit her other hand and lifted more objects from the dining table—Spike’s plate and cutlery, the gravy boat, the teapot and all their mugs—Rarity watched the light grow stronger and brighter still.

“And, now if I try to use magic with potential far beyond my natural threshold...”

She moved the teapot through the column of napkins between them and clenched one fist. Then—

Lightning snapped. Ozone sizzled across the air. Suddenly the magic running through Twilight’s skin turned pure electric—it hummed and crackled and hissed and spat and struck a sort of terror into Rarity’s nervous heart that screamed, humans aren’t supposed to sound like that—

The teapot’s lid clattered. Steam whistled out between the gaps and through its spout. Twilight finally relaxed her hand, and as soon as she did the magic died back down to its silent and deep-pink glow.

“I hope that was enough of a demonstration,” she finished.

And Rarity could only stare, awestruck, at the now-boiling teapot hovering midair. “Plenty,” she breathed. Oh, she had many unanswered questions and even more questions that probably didn’t have answers she’d ever understand, but in the moment all that mattered was the wonder and amusement and novelty of a magic she’d never have. “Shall we continue this discussion over tea?”

It took Twilight a moment to put the pieces of the question together. “Oh,” she realized, and moved their mugs between them as well. “Sure, I suppose we can—”

And once again Rarity cursed her element; cursed the blessing she embodied as much as she cursed herself, because at the same time Twilight moved to again drown their tea bags in their mugs, Rarity reached out on autopilot to take her own mug from the air—forgetting, of course, that Twilight didn’t need her help with tea any more than she needed her help with their missions.

Twilight went to fill Rarity’s mug first, and Rarity’s mug was no longer there. And with nowhere else to go but down, the boiling water splashed down in a scalding stream across Twilight’s lap.

(Her expression never changed even as burning water plastered her trousers to her thighs. 

Could she even feel it? Did it hurt?

Had she lied about feeling pain when she’d first gotten her tattoos?)

“Stake me now,” Rarity swore, and shoved her mug at the table so she had both hands free to figure out what to do. “I’m so sorry!”

And again in her forgetfulness she reached out to right the teapot—the metal, scalding-hot teapot held upright by magic and not skin. Immediately Twilight yanked it out of reach, but in doing so only splashed more water over herself: forearms, stomach, legs. “Don’t,” she warned. The evenness of her voice betrayed no amount of pain. “You’ll burn yourself.”

“You already have!” Rarity argued, and reached again—

“I hardly feel it,” Twilight said with all the truthfulness of someone who’d only stubbed their toe. She placed the teapot and everything else back on the table before releasing the remains of her magic, then got to her feet. “It’s alright. I’m fine.”

(Even if she couldn’t feel it, Rarity could see the blisters forming on her one bare forearm; had proof that Twilight Sparkle wasn’t a living corpse but a being with a beating heart.)

“I’m sorry,” Rarity repeated, mortified and distressed and guilty all at once.

“You don’t need to be.”

“But,” she protested, “you’re burned—”

“And you aren’t,” Twilight finished, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I don’t think you need to apologize for something like that.”







The next time Rarity had seen Twilight wearing the shirt she’d so carefully laundered, she couldn’t keep a bit of smoke from spilling with her words:

“Finally made sure it’s as white as I promised, have you?”

And Twilight Sparkle, in a voice as calm and collected as the rest of her unbothered self, had sincerely replied: 

“I never doubted you enough to check.”







zom·bie

1. the reanimated corpse of a human or mortal monster

2. not Twilight Sparkle