“Whaaaaaaahhhhh!”
When the foal started crying for the seventh time that night, Rarity simply couldn’t take it anymore. “Quiet! Please for the love everything good, be quiet!” she yelled, ripping her sleep mask from her head and tossing it into a corner while she got up and stalked over to the crib. When she looked down at her foal, she felt the same rush of love she always felt when Fluttershy entered the room; in this case however, it was overshadowed by a lack of sleep that had been building up for nearly fifty hours and a desire to claw out her own eardrums so she wouldn’t have to deal with the constant blaring anymore.
In spite of that, she ever so gently lifted little Emerald from his supposed resting place with a gentleness that bordered on reverence. Perhaps if she aped Fluttershy enough, the little colt would quiet down enough for her to get forty winks. Usually that didn’t even cover the briefest of beauty sleeps, but right now she was willing to take whatever she could get.
She should have taken Pinkie or Twilight, or even Applejack up on their offers to look after the little one, but no, she had to be stubborn and imply that nopony could take care of a foal as well as their mother. Her own mother, though a little crude, had done a fine job with her, after all.
The problem was that she wasn’t a mother. Or she was, but not in the ‘eleven months walking around like a cow followed by twenty hours of the most excruciating pain known to ponies’ kind of way. “I beg of you, Emerald, please stop your incessant whining! What do you want? A bottle? A diaper change? More cuddles?!” Rarity grew increasingly desperate with each question.
Her knowledge about foals began with feeding them and ended with a diaper change. She simply did not possess the required amount of empathy to intuit what it was the little foal needed. “Hush! Quiet now, Emerald.”
Despite her harshness of tone, the little colt briefly stopped, swiveling his tiny ears in her direction. She let out a sigh in relief which was short lived when his cries began anew, seemingly even louder in volume than all the times before. She was about to snap and she knew it. After this, she was going to need an entire bathtub of ice cream to calm down herself, but such a thing could only happen once her living alarmclock finally went back to sleep.
What she heard next was like a blessing from Celestia herself; a set of hooves hurrying up the steps to the bedroom. Rarity all but flung herself towards the sound carrying her young foal along in her magic.
Fluttershy was exhausted. But for the first time in a long while, it was the good kind of exhaustion. After eleven months of feeling bloated, nauseous and generally sick, she had felt spent to the point of debilitation; not at all helped by the almost daylong labour which had brought their little bundle of joy into the world. When the girls had offered her and Rarity two first-class tickets to a luxury spa-resort, she had found it hard to refuse. Nevertheless, she would probably have turned it down were it not for Rarity; a foal needed their mother, especially in those early months when everything was new and big and scary. She had gone only because her marefriend had insisted, and it was ever so hard to say no to her.
The crying had reached her ears even before she entered the boutique, which had made her pick up the pace, worried that something might have happened. The crying briefly halted when she opened the door, but began anew shortly after. Fluttershy dumped her saddlebags in the hallway and almost flew up the stairs.
She found Rarity in the door opening, crying tears of joy, or perhaps relief. “Darling!” the hysterical unicorn exclaimed, hugging her tightly. “I was afraid you would never come back! You need to do something! ANYTHING! I have tried everything I could possibly think of, and even some things I wouldn’t have thought of, but I simply cannot get him to sleep and he has been crying without interruption. I can’t take this anymore!”
Rarity fell apart in her arms, crying as loudly as their young foal did, making him quiet down for a few seconds to listen to the cries that were so similar to his own. Fluttershy merely let out a soft breath, relieved that this was the extent of the damage. She had felt a little guilty about leaving Rarity behind, but everything was going to be alright now.
“Shhhhh,” she cooed, patting her crying marefriend on her back. “It’s okay, I’m home now.” She lead her still-sobbing marefriend to the bed and plucked her foal from Rarity’s magic with her wings. Rarity had curled into a ball upon the bed and Fluttershy lay down behind her, cradling Emerald close to her chest while wrapping her other wing around her marefriend.
With that settled, it was only a matter of calming them both down, for which she had just the thing.
She began to sing.
“Hush now.
Quiet now.
It’s time to lay your sleepy head.
Hush now.
Quiet now.
It’s time to go to bee~d.”
Emerald was more receptive to the song than his unicorn mother was, having heard it nearly every day while he was still in the womb. His wailing gave way to mere sobbing, which in turn gave way to hiccups and then finally content cooing.
"Drifting off to sleep.
Leave this trying day behind you.
Drifting off to sleep.
Let the joys of dreamland find you~”
“Hush now.
Quiet now...”
Slowly but surely, Rarity began to calm down as well, and by the time Fluttershy had repeated the refrain three times she was greeted by a pair of dainty snorts and snores. She smiled and gave her young colt a gentle nuzzle before placing a kiss on the tip of her marefriend’s ear. She scooted a little closer to the two ponies she cared about more than anything in the world before letting sleep claim her as well.