“Alright. Let’s start from the beginning: the Summer Sun Celebration. You were married by then at least, right? I can see how I never put together the pieces when we literally just met, but what about after that? You didn’t even talk to each other!”
“Oh, we spoke to each other in detail on that night,” Rarity intoned, “If I recall…”
Angry, bruised, and desperate for answers, Rainbow Dash growled and took off towards the library, where that evil spy was hiding. At least, she tried to: until she was held back again.
“And where do you think you’re going, Rainbow “I run into the face of danger without telling my newlywed wife” Dash?!”
“First off, my middle name is just Danger!” Rainbow Dash groaned, once more pulled by her tail, but this time by Rarity, “Secondly, this evil alicorn named Nightmare Moon shows up right when the new mare, Twilight Sparkle does? Isn’t that a little suspicious? Seriously, it’s like one of your cheesy detective novels!”
Ptooey! Tail out of Rarity’s mouth, the fashionista gave an incensed scoff.
“Noir novels, love, and they’re not cheesy. I do agree that Twilight Sparkle must know more than she let on, but the girl reeks of, as you say, egghead! Maybe she’s a well-read scholar? She is from Canterlot, after all.”
“Well, maybe she’s a dark mage who used an evil book to resurrect the Mare in the Moon.”
“Dashie. Honey.” Rarity smiled that smile, and Rainbow Dash’s walls crumbled. She flapped back down to ground level and sighed.
“Hey, you can’t do that trick to me,” the pegasus murmured softly, “we’re both Dashie now.”
“Instead of rushing headlong into battle, let’s get some of our friends and confront this Twilight together slowly and surely, shall we? I’m sure a few fair townsponies would be willing to help us.”
“Way ahead of y’all,” Applejack grunted, trailing behind them. It took a few lassos and some convincing, but the Ponyville’s signature mass panic attack had been abated, and everypony had been sent home for safety. Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie followed behind her, with Pinkie bouncing ahead of the group towards Golden Oak Library, unperturbed.
Now joined by a motley crew of Ponyville’s finest, Rainbow Dash gave Rarity the point.
“Fine. But I get first dibs at interrogation!”
“Hm… and after that is when all of you showed up and Rainbow Dash accused me of being… a spy?!” Twilight growled, making an exaggerated impression of the weather mare. The rest of her friends giggled while Rainbow Dash blushed and hoofed the ground.
Feeling a little better with that joke, Twilight moved onto the next bit that she was confused about.
“But what about after that? You didn’t say a word to each other in the Everfree Forest, and I never saw you two interact during the party.”
“The Sun-is-Back-and-so-is-Princess-Luna Party?! That was one of my favorite parties!” Pinkie cheered.
“Come to think of it…” Fluttershy begun, eyes flickering between Rainbow Dash and Rarity, “I barely saw either of you at that party. Not that you had to stay…! But, uh, I’m good at noticing, erm, I guess you’d say wallflowers, unless that’s an insult…”
“No, no. I completely understand what you mean, Fluttershy.” Rarity poured herself a cup of tea. “The fact of the matter is that we left early.”
“Oh…! I see…” Fluttershy said. Pinkie, however, had a genuinely distraught look on her face. Somebody didn’t find her parties fun?
“I’m sure the party was super awesome, it’s just…!” Rainbow Dash snorted, talking with food in her mouth. “Ugh. Do we have to get mushy now? I’m halfway through my sandwich, here.”
“At least swallow, dear.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Gulp. “Anyways.”
“Never took you as an early sleeper,” Rainbow hummed, slipping under the covers with Rarity. The unicorn had been strangely silent ever since the sun came back, and it was enough to make a mare worry.
“Yes, well, eternal night excursions into the Everfree will do that to you.” Rarity grumbled, hogging the sheets and turning away from the pegasus.
It was a flimsy excuse: the eternal night happened a while ago, and they all had plenty of time to catch some shuteye after their crazy adventure. Enough time for Pinkie to throw a party. Enough time for Rarity to ditch it, thirty minutes in, and for Rainbow Dash to follow. There was something about her tone, though, that broke Rainbow Dash’s heart just a little. A bit of a voice crack, a shaky word.
She wrapped her hooves around Rarity’s beautiful white coat, sharing warmth.
“Talk to me, Rares.”
It was quiet for a bit. That was fine. After a while, Rarity spoke.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she shuddered. It was barely a whisper. “How you look your inevitable demise in the eyes and spit in its face daily.”
“I say it’s because I’m awesome, but you say it’s because I’m hardheaded and reckless,” she joked, trying to help the mood. It didn’t.
“We almost died so many times, Dashie. Kicked the bucket. Went to the farm. If it wasn’t the cliff or the manticore or… or anything else, it was the evil goddess threatening to kill us on the spot.” Rarity turned around and pressed closer to Rainbow Dash, and she was shivering, burying her head in the pegasus’s chest. “How do you do it? How do you shake that off so easily?”
Scared. She was scared, enough to make her entire body shake like it was the middle of winter. Applejack and Twilight were made of tough stuff, Fluttershy was okay enough to stay at the party, and Pinkie Pie was another breed entirely, but Rarity was still terrified just remembering it. Dash’s better half was trembling, and she wanted to fix it right now.
Rainbow Dash maneuvered her chin around Rarity’s horn to rest her head on her crown. She wasn’t nearly as precise, or wordy, or dictonary-brained to know how to answer that. “Eloquent”, would be the word Rarity would use, and it’d be something the pegasus wasn’t. So she’d just answer from the heart.
“Truth is, I don’t.”
There must have been something in her own voice that made Rarity look up to her. But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t, or else she’d clam up and try to play it off like she was unbeatable: it was a problem the both of them had.
“Every time I mess up a stunt, it goes through my head, y’know? I walk it off, but in my brain, I’m like… I messed up. I could’ve done it better. And sometimes, it sticks in my head for weeks. Or longer.”
“Then…?”
“What gets me through it is remembering that it could be so much worse. At least I didn’t crack my head open. At least Fluttershy was there to call for help. At least I caught you going down that cliff… got a kiss out of it too.” She smirked, and Rarity cracked a smile.
If they were talking about that night, though, there was something Rainbow wanted to get off her chest.
“Y’know, Nightmare Moon tried to recruit me,” she said, like it was a distant memory, “that’s why Twilight said I was the Element of Loyalty. She said I’d be the leader of her version of the Wonderbolts, if she took over Equestria.”
“I assume her argument was better than just that,” Rarity huffed, mostly confident that her wife wasn’t a bonafide idiot.
“She made it sound cozy. All the fame and glory I could ever want, if only I’d give her a chance to prove that she could rule just as good as Princess Celestia. Really played up the sympathetic angle: how unfairly she was treated, how much better Equestria could be with just a few changes. Talked about how I’d be making Equestria a better place. I almost believed her.”
Her magneta eyes looked forward into nothing, as she hugged Rarity just a bit tighter.
“Then I asked if my friends and family would be safe. She gave me a big maybe.” Rainbow swallowed something stuck in her throat. “Then I asked if you would be safe. And she only said maybe. And that’s what mattered to me. That’s what helped me… shake it off, I guess. To make sure you were safe.”
Rainbow Dash yelped as Rarity suddenly got up from her position curled up against the pegasus’s heart. The uncorn was now holding herself up on top of Rainbow’s body. At this angle, looking up at her, with her violet mane flowing down around Rainbow’s face…
“You always find a way to make me fall in love with you, all over again, Miss Loyalty.” Rarity whispered in that pretty accent she’d always had.
“Heh. It’s Mrs. Loyalty, actually?” She joked, and they both laughed.
“Dashie,” Rarity said, before kissing her wife, “thank you.”
Rainbow Dash swore, from then until the end of time, that there was never a better midday nap in all of Equestria.