Rarity spent her last day at the castle making sure all the fabrics, gems, and dresses she had bought up here were packed away in the appropriate bags for easy sorting when she returned home. The room was a sickening mixture of colors she was hoping would improve as more of the offending items disappeared into her luggage as she put them away. It was a habit that had grown on her from the time she’d spent with Twilight, but it did save her a great deal of time when she returned from a trip and served as an excellent distraction from any worries she might have, so she appreciated the ritual. Twilight was still busy with the letter she’d be sending to Princess Celestia about her trip when she got back to the library, so the day had been quite peaceful for her thus far, and judging from the rate she was proceeding down her checklist she expected to be done with her task sometime in the next hour and a half.
A gentle knock on the door brought her out of her musings. Thinking it must be somepony to bring her stuff down to the train station, she responded, “Come on in, dear. The door is unlocked.” Continuing with her examinations of her various bags and boxes, she heard the door open and close gently as a pony made it’s way over to her.
A voice came directly behind her left ear. “Do you still need a little more time to pack, Rarity?”
After years of maintaining a professional image in front of clients, she was happy to realize later that she only jumped one foot in the air before she shoved every one of her items, checklist included, into all her bags before shutting them all completely. “Princess Cadence! Wha-I mean, I’m sorry, Cadence, you startled me. What can I do for you?”
The offending alicorn had a hoof pressed to her mouth, hiding her laughter at Rarity’s reaction. “I’m sorry. You pick up some bad habits when you spend too much time around Aunt Celestia. I was just hoping to check in on how you were doing before it was time for you to leave.”
Rarity spared a quick glance at her mane, smoothing out a few misplaced hairs with a hoof, and took a deep breath to relax herself a bit. “Oh, I was just finishing up with all my packing, as you saw. I suppose I’ll check in with Twilight now that I’ve finished since I’m certain she’s overthinking her letter to Princess Celestia right now. That mare worries far too much over formal messages, I’m afraid.”
Cadence had wandered over to a nearby bureau as Rarity talked, and took a moment to adjust her crown in the three-fold mirror there as she spied on Rarity in the reflection. “That sounds like a good idea. I know she’s calmed down a lot since she was a filly, but she really needs somepony to look out for her so she doesn’t become her own worst enemy. However, I was hoping to talk with you a moment about the rock. Tom, right?”
Rarity stiffened a moment before she could force herself to stay relaxed. She turned towards her luggage and started moving items closer to the door so the carriers wouldn’t have to walk quite as far. “Certainly, Cadence. I know it came out of nowhere, and I understand that you’ll need to wait a few days before you make any announcement, but any quest-”
“I want to know why you really did this, Rarity.”
The luggage that Rarity was carrying wavered momentarily, but she otherwise gave no indication the question caught her off guard. “I know it seems strange, but it’s really not all that big of a deal. It was just a silly little thought I ha-”
“Rarity,” Cadence interrupted her yet again, “I’m not the best at reading ponies, but there are some things you can’t hide from me.” Cadence looked away from the mirror and started walking over to the unicorn, who had stopped moving entirely as she refused to look up at the alicorn. “Not from the Princess of Love.” When Rarity didn’t move, Cadence decided to continue. “I don’t know why you’re doing this - my connection to love lets me feel emotions, not read minds - but that’s enough for me to act.”
Rarity was biting her lip by this point, but since she was turned away from Cadence, the alicorn couldn’t tell. Not that the conflicting emotions she could sense weren’t enough for Cadence to tell she was affecting the unicorn anyway. “Look, I know I’m not the first pony you’d want to talk to about this, especially if you’re willing to keep it from Twilight, but maybe you don’t want to talk with your friends about it since they’d make more of a scene over it than you’d like.” The alicorn put a wing over the unicorn as she sat down, and brought her head closer to Rarity’s ear. “I don’t want to see Twilight’s closest friend fighting herself without any support, alright? We can keep this between us, and if you’d rather tell someone else instead, that’s fine too. As long as you don’t face this alone.”
By now Rarity had sat down as well, and was taking deep breaths as she fought back the tears she’d been trying to ignore this entire trip. She whispered, “It really wasn’t going to be such a big deal…” After several seconds of muffled crying following her statement, Rarity had enough control to finally talk to the waiting alicorn.
“We’re all going to die.” A bold statement for Rarity to start on, Cadence thought, but it was enough for her to know this was as serious as she thought. She drew a little closer to the unicorn as she let her continue unimpeded. “Some of us sooner than others. When we do, all that’s left of us in the ones who remain are the memories shared between us. Maybe that’s enough for most, but even those fade with time. And a few will have a lot more time than others. A lot more time to forget, won’t they?”
Thinking over who Rarity could be referring to, Cadence took a shot in the dark. “You’re talking about Spike, aren’t you?”
An almost imperceptible nod of the head was the only sign the unicorn gave that she heard the Princess. “It was during the lunch I had with Twilight back in Ponyville when it started to come to me. I was thinking over what I could bring over as a gift for Pinkie’s party for Twilight being an alicorn when she brought up Spike in her conversation. I don’t fully know how I made the connection. Something about alicorns, immortality, and gifts that don’t fade away, but for just a moment I thought to myself ‘Spike’s perfect gift is Tom.’ I was so surprised by the thought I just blurted out the name ‘Tom’ right in front of everypony. Since I couldn’t figure out exactly what I had meant with my thought, I just… came up with a different reason. Said it was about Twilight wanting to take the train instead of a royal coach. It just snowballed from there.”
Rarity had calmed down considerably in the time she’d been speaking, yet the tone of her voice hadn’t picked up at all from the dour state it had started in. Cadence chimed in, “But you’ve figured it out by now, right? Something about a gift for someone who will long outlive you. Something for them to remember you by.”
Another nod of the head. “He’ll be coming out of his teen years by the time all his friends right now move on. Barring Princesses Celestia and Luna, of course, but that’s hardly enough. He’ll want something to remember us all by, and…” she gestured over towards everything she had bought while up here in the Kingdom, “none of this will last long enough, assuming he can keep track of it throughout the years. No, if I want to leave a gift for him of our time now, it needs to be something that’ll last, something that can be protected without needlessly burdening him with trying to preserve his memories of us when he’s so young.”
It finally clicked in Cadence’s head. “You want Tom to be treated like a treasure so everypony after us will take care of it for him. A memento of your time together hiding in plain sight until he needs a reminder.” She furrowed her brow a moment as she thought further about the plan, though. “What about the Crystal Heart, though? Or the Tree of Harmony? There are still things already here that can help him remember the times he spent with you, far into the future.
Rarity shook her head, and her tone was surprisingly bitter. “That’s just me being selfish, I suppose. I want to give give him my own gift, something he’ll look at and remember only me when he does. I want him to know that I planned all this just for his benefit so he won’t ever forge-” Rarity’s words were lost as she finally succumbed to her tears, sinking to the floor as her sobs filled the room. Cadence laid down with her, pressing her side against Rarity as she let her self-loathing overcome what little defense she had remaining.
It was almost a minute before she started speaking again, tears still coming strong as she blubbered out all her words. “I’m not a terrible pony, am I? It’s just I don’t want to be alone or forgotten and I’m using his feelings towards me for my benefit, and that’s just so manipulative of me and I’m really just a fucking bitch that needs to crawl into a nearby gutter and d-”
Cadence’s horn lit up and the glow suffused the room, the calming magic in it gently silencing Rarity’s words and eventually her tears as well. Minutes later, as Cadence stopped her magic, the sound of sniffles was the only sound left in the room.
“You’re not a bad pony, Rarity. I know this,” Cadence said. “Even though we know that after we move on we can see everyone that went before us again, we worry about the impact we’ll leave on this world after it’s too late to affect it any further. In examining your friendship with Spike and how your friendship will affect both him and the world at large long after you’ve moved on, you’ve stumbled on those fears and let them get the better of you. There is nothing wrong with that.”
With Rarity still pressed against her side, the alicorn gave her a quick nuzzle. “You’ve shown forethought in considering the needs of someone who will live a life vastly different from yours. Tom might not have value like a rare historical document, or one of the dresses you make for your clients, but I know he’d trade the world for that rock when he knows the history behind it if he needed to. And if you ever think it isn’t a generous enough gift because you didn’t spend any bits on it, just remember that this gift involved rearranging a Princess’s travel schedule, shouting down a town that was getting in your way, bringing an object of questionable value to a formal event dedicated to royalty, deceiving the entire kingdom about the value of said object, getting a Prince and Princess to go along with your deception, and finally suffering an emotional breakdown from confronting some of your worst fears so large that one of the most powerful ponies in the land had to calm you down from it.” Cadence gave Rarity a smile, though the unicorn’s face was buried in her hooves and couldn’t see it. “This is no small gift, Rarity, and I’ll make sure Spike knows the full story someday.”
The two mares lied still for several minutes while Rarity recovered from her ordeal, each having got the important parts out of the way. Rarity had a growing blush on her face underneath her hooves as she thought over Cadence’s words. Sure, it sounds impressive when put like that, but it still didn’t feel like it. She also guessed Twilight must have heard her story to Applejack in Ponyville and told Cadence about it, because she was certain her voice didn’t carry up this far north.
There was just one last thing to clear up. “You won’t tell anypony else about this, right?” Rarity croaked. “It’s just that they don’t need to worry about this stuff yet, let alone worry about me for thinking about it so suddenly.”
Cadence nuzzled Rarity yet again, finally managing to bring her out of her hooves. “Well, I’ll be passing on some of the details of the plan here to my aunties. They’ll want to know about why I’m setting a rock up next to the Crystal Heart, after all, but only what they need to know to satisfy their curiosity. Besides, they can always share this story with Spike for you later on if you want - they’ll have plenty of time, after all.”
Rarity got a chuckle out of that. “Yes, I suppose that is the one thing they have plenty of. If he start’s worrying about it as we get older, I may tell him myself, but the idea is sound. Thank you for listening to me, Princess. I suppose I needed to talk to someone much more than I thought.”
Cadence tittered and smiled at the unicorn. “All that, and you’re back to calling me ‘Princess’? Here I was, thinking we’d bonded.” The smile dropped from her face for a moment as she considered Rarity seriously. “Can I ask you to be there for Twilight when she thinks about Spike’s future too? She’s panicked over it before as well, and while Aunt Celestia and I can help her when she sends letters to us, it’s better when someone is there to talk to her when it first comes up.”
Rarity’s eyes widened. She hadn’t been clear minded enough to think about it before, but it was obvious Twilight, of all ponies, would worry about how she was affecting Spike first. Rarity looked into Cadence’s eyes and spoke without a trace of levity in her voice. “I promise I will, Cadence.”
Knowing that she had Rarity’s focus, Cadence added, “Good. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the chance to get closer to Twilight too. Right, Rarity?”
The unicorn’s expression didn’t change in the least. “I have no idea what you mean.”
Cadence giggled. “I’m sure you don’t Rarity. How about we go check in on Twilight and see how she’s doing with her letter. She’s probably written at least two dozen of them by now.”
“Oh, much more than that, I’m afraid,” Rarity stood up as the alicorn did and, after a brief stretch to get her legs working again, started heading towards the door. “Did you know she spent three days working out her first address to Ponyville after becoming a Princess? I had to enlist a couple unicorns, Lyra and Minuette, to help me seal off the library while Applejack and Rainbow forced her outside to eat after Spike complained she leaving all his food untouched. We’ll be lucky if we don’t see papers taped on the wall as she tries to pull the best bits from each into a final draft!”
As Rarity told Cadence about some of Twilight’s most neurotic moments in her time as a Princess, complete with chuckles from the older alicorn at some of the more outrageous stories, Rarity felt herself truly unwind for the first time the entire trip. She was finally able to believe that this was a gift worthy of the time she’d spent with Spike thus far, for all it’s apparent uselessness. She’d give him another one at Twilight’s party, of course, and many more as time went on, but this one would remain hidden until he needed it most, long after the beautiful white unicorn was gone and the love-stricken dragon needed a reminder that his friends never forgot him, even after death.