***
"Truly ravishing, darling!" Rarity stalked around her boutique, eyes focused on the vision in show-white silk and lace before her. "I must say, Twilight, I may have caught the bouquet at your brother's wedding, but seeing you in a wedding dress, I'm tempted to give you the bouquet right now. The chance to see you prance down the aisle wearing my masterpiece, some lucky stallion at your side..." She circled behind Twilight, cooing as she sat down at her desk, quill busy scribbling notes on a sprawling design sketch.
Twilight rolled her eyes and smiled, holding dutifully still in the swath of alabaster fabric. "Don't get your hopes up, Rarity." She let her eyes wander the Boutique, body frozen in fear of wayward stickpins. "I'm just here because you needed a pony my size for some measurements, remember? And well, you know, if I..."
Rarity paused as a wolfish grin found her muzzle. "If you what, dear?"
"If I did walk down the aisle, it - Rarity, do I really have to say it?" Twilight could feel the predatory smile beaming from the desk behind her, and her ears drooped. "Fine. It - it wouldn't be a stallion."
"There, darling, now was that so hard?" Rarity sat back and hummed a little. "We're your friends, Twilight. It's not like we didn't already know, or at least suspect it. As they say in Prance, love is love, no?"
Twilight sighed and shifted her weight a little. A few long moments later the scratching of quill on paper stopped and she heard a thunk and a flapping. Her head snapped up as she heard a voice angelic and warm and most definitely not Rarity Belle speak up.
“She’s right, you know. You really are ravishing in a wedding dress.”
“Oh, no,” Twilight groaned, furrowing her brow.
“Oh yes, my faithful student,” Celestia purred as she circled around to face the diminutive unicorn. “Or more properly, ‘I do’.”
“I don’t.”
“But you’re already dressed for it, my darling Twilight! I even have flowers and a cake!” With a flourish of golden magic a bouquet of flowers appeared floating between them, and a towering tiered cake floated gently to rest on a nearby chair.
“The dress is Carrot Top’s, the bouquet is Cadance’s, which you must’ve taken from Rarity’s freezer, and the cake,” Twilight growled, “appears to have been licked.”
“Miss Top won’t mind if we borrow it, Rarity already offered you the bouquet, and I can confirm that the cake is definitely not poisoned.” Celestia licked her lips and shivered as her wings fluttered a bit.
Twilight tapped an impatient hoof. “Speaking of Rarity, where is she?”
Celestia scrunched her muzzle a bit. “Napping?”
“Why is she napping?”
Eyes darting side to side, Celestia squeaked, “Previously un-diagnosed narcolepsy?”
Twilight’s horn flared and the dress flew off in a tornado of taffeta and a cyclone of chiffon. “For the eighty-seventh time this month, we’re not married and we’re not getting married!” She threw her hooves up and yelled, “You don’t even have a preacher!”
With a practiced back-kick, Celestia’s hoof struck a supply cabinet against the wall with a resounding thud. Its doors sprung open and a wizened little grey pony tumbled out, mummified in a tangle of cloth and ribbons and beads. “So glad you could join us, Reverend Waddle.”
“AIR, GLORIOUS AIR!” he croaked, stumbling to his hooves as she straightened his clerical collar. “Dearly beloved,” he began as he brushed a pile of sequins off his wrinkled forehead, “we are gathered here today to join in holy… OOOFF!”
His sagging eyes blinked from under half a layer of cake as Twilight stormed out of the Boutique. “No! No! No!” she barked. “Not now, not today, not at all!”
“Drat,” Celestia sighed as she began munching on the bouquet.
The little stallion coughed and swallowed a hoofful of cake as he wheezed, “Do I still get paid for this?”