Considering how disconcerting a dream had just passed, it was with undue calm that Rarity awoke. Making neither moan nor whimper, the mare eased herself upright and looked around. From the color of the carpet to the partially open drapes, and even the cheval glass across the way, the room where she woke was exactly the same as where she had found herself in the throes of her nightmare, though upon waking, she recognized that she was back in Chai’s guest room where she had stayed the night before. Her heart rate was still elevated, and the lingering remnants of panic still murmured in the back of her head, but for reasons she couldn’t hope to understand, she found herself irregularly calm as she slid from the bed, took a few moments to gain her balance, and then slowly made her way across the room.
She stopped just shy of the mirror, taking a seat before it and looking intently upon her reflection. Contrary to what she seen, her mane showed signs of having been recently brushed, and a tentative sniff yielded the faint scent of lilac and lavender. Her coat had been scrubbed clean, and only a few stray grains of sand lodged in her hooves remained to remind her of her blind flight from the rock farm. Having not the strength to stand against Blinkie and convinced that she had decimated any bond that may have remained tethered between Pinkie and herself, she had run blindly into the sparsely vegetated plains the stretched for miles. The throbbing throughout her limbs that she hadn’t noticed until the memory returned confirmed her suspicion that she had likely run until her body couldn’t sustain the act, and somepony had found her and brought her back. That notion brought her little comfort, and she dismissed it as she leveled her gaze at the mirror and looked herself in the eyes.
“... You’re lying,” the mare whispered, dropping her gaze. “You’ve got it wrong. I’m not that clean.” There was no warning preceding the violent blow that she dealt the glass, driving her hoof though the mirror and into the wall behind it. Only able to do that for which it was created, the fragments that littered the ground continued to reflect the fractured image presented them, and it was with quiet confusion that Rarity regarded the trickles of red coursing down her hoof. “It isn’t… black?” she said softly, her hoof beginning to tremble. “But… I don’t…”
“Um, hello in there?” Startled by the voice and still attempting to separate hallucination from reality, Rarity snapped her head towards the door and stared, unable to ignore the sensation of blood trailing down her foreleg. “I’m not quiiite as much an expert on hearing as I am in smelling, but that almost sounded like you accidentally put your hoof through a mirror. But that would be silly,” the voice declared as the door was nudged open. Not having expected his wild hypothesis to hit home, Merry Mint went quiet as he entered, looked at Rarity, saw the blood, and bolted out of the room making extremely authentic sounding siren noises. There was, however, little time for Rarity to collect herself, as the nearing sound of sirens indicated the stallion’s swift return with a tidy little sewing kit and gauze.
“I knew that mean ol’ mirror could be ill-tempered, but don’t you think you might have gone just a teeny bit overboard?” Minty asked as he began tending to Rarity’s wounded limb with care and expertise.
“... Perhaps.” It was all that she could manage to offer the stallion. She had no real excuse for what she’d done, and the sting of disinfectant served to further clarify that she was back in the reality she didn’t want to face. “How did I get here?”
“Wull, thath a thlly qushn,” Minty mumbled around the needle, fortunately finishing the stitch work in a timely manner before continuing. “I could smell how bitter Chai had brewed your tea this morning. She only does that when she know somepony has something difficult ahead of them, and when you didn’t return after a few hours, she began to worry and sent me to go find you.”
“How did you manage that?” Rarity asked reflexively. “Wasn’t I rather out of the way?”
“Oh, you sure put some distance away from wherever you ran from, that’s for sure,” Minty agreed cheerily, beginning to wrap her hoof with gauze. “All I had to do was follow your scent into the middle of nowhere, carrying you back to the land of somewhere, and then let Chai wash you everywhere!”
“Every…”
“There are some places a stallion’s nose doesn’t belong.” It was spoken with such matter-of-fact bluntness that Rarity almost, almost cracked a smile. “Now, if you’re done inexplicably destructifying dangerous furniture, my sis would like to chat with you. She was really weally worried about her guest disappearing, and bringing you back all burnt and blustered didn’t quiiite help.”
“That makes sense,” Rarity conceded with decided neutrality. Given her temperament, she didn’t feel particularly inclined to entertain anyone with polite conversation, but by that same token, she already owed Chai a significant debt of gratitude, though what prompted her to stand wasn’t her sense of decency, but rather listlessness. She had no reason to stay put, no reason to stay in Dodge for that matter, and if at any point during her conversation with Chai, she could just burn yet another bridge and walk away; it seemed to be something she was getting good at. “Kitchen or living room?”
“Living room, big couch, can’t miss it!” Minty explained, wagging his tail. “Would you like help out?”
“I’m perfectly capable of-”
“Sounds good!” he interjected, sliding under the mare and lifting her onto his back with fluid movements. Again, too disinterested to put up much of a fight, Rarity said nothing as she was carted into the living room and deposited on the seat opposite that of Chai, who sat sipping on her tea with her expression ever consistently blank. “One express delivery of a pretty pony! That’ll be two cookies and a crumpet, miss.” Snagging the payment from a plate on the coffee table, Minty meandered away with all three of said items stored safely in pooched cheeks. Rarity watched with vacant eyes as the stallion traipsed off before slumping back into her chair, paying her host, who watched with ever mounting concern, with not even a passing glance.
“She’s fading fast,” Chai thought to herself, finding it difficult to mask her anxiety. “I’ve spent too much time listening and watching other ponies not to have known that her situation was more dire than she let on, but this…” Vanilla lifted her gaze from the tendrils of steam rising from her cup and looked upon the dispirited pony across from her. “She’s on the brink of giving up. On what, I can’t be certain, but it must be something of great importance. This kind of apathy only comes when a pony’s heart has been broken, or is on the verge of doing so…” Taking a long, deep draft to steel her nerves and shuddering as the potent brew sharpened her senses, Chai laid the cup aside, stowed her hooves in her lap, and looked out at the face of dejection.
“... Rarity?” she asked, her voice coming out softer than she had intentioned. Vanilla watched intently, attentive to even the smallest of movements or sounds, but Rarity might as well have been comatose for all the response calling her name had garnered. She didn’t bat an eye, didn’t shift a hoof, or even change the measure of her breaths. “Rarity?” Chai tried again after a time. Though she still didn’t lift her eyes, the slight twitch of the mare’s ears proved that Rarity could hear, but not whether Chai should continue or not; the mare didn’t seem particularly open to conversation. Vanilla knew that it was possible that attempting to do much of anything might only worsen a victim’s temperament, but if there was any chance that Rarity could be pulled from the brink before the final tear tore her heart asunder, then it was worth risking her guest’s ire.
“How do I confront this, though, that’s the question...” There was no question that whatever had happened, the wounds were still as fresh as those on Rarity’s hoof, and without any point of reference with which to start, Chai decided that the hoof would likely be the least painful way to start. “Would it… be correct to assume that you took issue with your room’s decor?” Violet eyes were slowly leveled in her direction, conveying vague annoyance and confusion with the statement. “You weren’t injured when Minty brought you here, and I recall hearing a crash not minutes ago, so I can only assume that you… ‘fixed’ whatever it was that you found distasteful?”
“...Your mirror could be in better condition.”
“I… see.” It wasn’t much for Chai to go on. As much as she would have liked to count it a victory that her guest was still willing to speak with her, the mare’s droll tone effectively dammed any comfort that could have been taken from that observation. “It’s… whatever has transpired is none of my business. I am, after all, merely some mare that she happened to make acquaintance with, but…” It didn’t sit right with Vanilla, ignoring her guest’s condition for the sake of social boundaries, but neither could she make any headway without probing. Her contemplation was interrupted by the sound of hooves clacking on the floorboards, and she looked up as Rarity stood.
“I should be going,” she stated flatly. “I’m sorry about your mirror.” Whether the dismissive mare realized it or not, Rarity’s words had brought more comfort and reassurance to Chai’s mind than she realized, and the thought of letting Rarity leave in such a fashion caused Vanilla’s stomach to lurch with every step.
“I know that I’ve no business butting in, but I can’t just-” “Wait!” The word had tore from her throat before her better judgement had time to call it into question, and Rarity halted just shy of the door. Her head slowly turned, casting listless eyes over her shoulder, and Chai swallowed hard as she too rose to her hooves. “What… what happened?”
“That’s none of your business,” Rarity growled after only a short pause, her expression rapidly darkening.
“B-but-”
“No, there is no ‘but’ here!” Rarity interjected, turning fully and glaring down her nose. “I do not wish to talk about, and that… is… final.” Reasoning that a timid mare like Chai wouldn’t even think of pressing the matter, Rarity turned once more towards the door, but the mare’s thoughts came to a halt as her injured hoof fell heavily upon the handle.
“Why did you come here?” Three times. Three times had Rarity been asked that damned question, one that she even still couldn’t manage to find an answer to, and it stung worse than the wounds on her hoof, even as they slowly soaked the bandages in response to her hoof slamming into the door frame. Recoiling as she watched cracks race from the point of impact in all directions, Chai shrank away from the mare whose once desirous features twisted into a feral snarl, and the full depth of her guest’s frustration came pouring from the wounds she held within.
“I don’t know why the hell I came here, alright?!” she bellowed, ignoring the pain racing through her foreleg as she brought it down hard. “I put up with months of that pathetic mare’s incessant prattle because I thought that I was her friend, that I held some meaning to her, but that clearly isn’t the case! I came out here to the damned mud hole because I wanted to help! I tried time and time again to reach her, and I was the one turned away! Me! I was the one that wasn’t good enough for her?” Fighting to remain focused, Chai swallowed hard and tried to ignore the tears welling behind her eyes as she sought to draw meaning from the tirade. Trembling as she braced for the tirade to continue, the mare bowed her head and looked back through blurry eyes, intent on weathering the storm for however long it might take for her to understand.
“In all my years, I have never met somebody so utterly ridiculous, so positively foolish that they would think to turn their back on my friendship!” Rarity continued to rant, so loudly in fact that the reverberations could be felt in the floorboards. “Oh, rest assured, it wasn’t just me that she turned her back on, either, but I was the one who spent the most time with her. My friends just couldn’t be bothered to keep that scatterbrain occupied long enough for me to work in peace, could they? Oh, no, I took it upon myself! And this is how she repays me?”
“H-How does she f-feel?” Slowly lifting her head as the question caused Rarity to fall silent, Chai stood tall in her frailty and faced the beast.
“Her? H-Her?!” Rarity sputtered with rage. “After all that has happened to me, the very first thing that pops into your mind is to ask about her? Oh, isn’t that just bucking grand! I’ll have you know that I haven’t the faintest idea what could possibly be going through her mind,” Rarity belted out as she stalked straight up to Chai and leaned close, seething, “and I’ll have you know that I don’t even care anymore!”
“Th-that’s a lie.” Wroth beyond words, Rarity’s mouth hung agape in sheer disbelief of Chai’s audacity. “Y-you k-” Chai faltered, choking back a quiet sob. “...you know full well what’s wrong here.”
“Oh, do I?” Rarity slowly replied in a mocking tone. “Well, aren’t you ever so clever! Go ahead, then! Enlighten me. Tell me what it is that I-”
“There.” Chai shuddered. Rarity bristled.
“What? I h-”
“And there.”
“How dare you interrupt like that! It’s incredibly rude, and I won’t stand for it!” Rarity bellowed. “Now stop playing these silly games and tell me plainly what’s wrong!”
Many years had passed since Chai had been subjected to the staunch sensation of sorrow twisting her stomach into knots, and it was only with strained effort that she managed to remain standing at all as memories long since buried filtered in like poison in the bloodstream. Desperation welled within her heart as Rarity grew tired of waiting for an answer, and it was at the sound of but a single fateful word, one letter, that Chai did the only thing she could think of to wrest Rarity from the grips of her own misguided anger. As Rarity once more began to speak with herself as the subject, another “I,” Vanilla yanked hard to dislodge one of her frozen forelegs, brought it back, and silenced the mare with a thunderous slap to the face.
The room went deathly quiet.
“L-Listen to yourself,” Chai whispered, whimpering as she withdrew her throbbing limb and cradled it to her chest. “Everything that you just said, it… everything was about you. ‘I’ this and ‘I’ that, even as you’re talking about a friend of yours that sounds like she’s having a really hard time. How- why would anypony take comfort in somepony so self-absorbed? Somepony that can take another’s sadness and make it about them?” Chai fell into a sitting position as the strain sapped what little remained of her strength as tears began their slow trickle towards the ground. “...You’re not here for her, Rarity. You’re here for you.”
Though the words should have stung like the alcohol that had cleansed her foreleg, there followed only stillness in Rarity’s heart. Her bandaged hoof slowly rose to her throbbing cheek, measuring the beats of a heart wrapped in an unexpected calm. For the first time that she could clearly remember since Ponyville had begun to shift, the clarity of mind and purpose that she had kept dear to herself returned, the quiet whisper of the pony she used to be lifted its voice one more. There weren’t any walls to damper the sound, nor noisome interference to draw her attention away, and it was with meekness that she began to understand the painful truth in Chai’s words.
Well before she or any of her friends had noticed the shift in Pinkie’s behavior, something had triggered a change within her own heart, one that ran counter to the core principles by which she proudly sought to display. Where once she had stood resolute in who she was, a mare that sought to counter the harshness of the world with giving while holding herself to a high standard of honor and purity, Rarity dropped her gaze in contrite acknowledgement of how far she had strayed. And there, in the deepest recesses of her heart, she found the virulent poison that had tainted her thoughts, corroded her heart, and transformed her into somepony that couldn’t even bear her own reflection: jealousy.
From the moment that Twilight had found somepony that accepted her in her quirks and loved her all the same, the seeds of discontent had been sown. Romance had been something that Rarity had fantasized about since long before any of her friends, spending hours dreaming of the perfect stallion that would sweep her off her hooves and carry her into the mystical happily ever after… and yet it was the modest shut-in that had found love first? Rarity cringed at the bitterness of the thought, one that had visited her more often than she would ever care to admit. She had watched as many of her friends found and fought for what she had long sought after herself, but the thanksgiving she had displayed for them become more and more of a front to hide the envy that slowly strangled her heart.
Unwilling to genuinely confront the problem and yet feebly trying to uphold some semblance of duty, she tricked herself into thinking that it would be best that she withdraw from her friends so as to not burden them with her sorrows, but that only allowed them to grow without interruption. With every “urgent” order that called her away from her friends, with every bottle of wine that she knocked back to forget, the following morning would invariably come, leaving her more empty than the day before. It was true, she remembered, that Twilight had attempted to reach out, but how could Rarity accept comfort from the one that had betrayed her?
“No, that isn’t right,” she told herself, stamping out the thought. “She wanted to help, but I… didn’t want help from her… or any of my friends. I wanted what I wanted, for somepony to come and whisk me away from all my troubles, and that’s all that I could think about…” Too stubborn to let her friends in because they were clearly where the problem lay, Rarity had allowed her heart to grow hard and continued to withdraw, burying herself in fashion even while unable to enjoy the success that she found. It was then that Pinkie had begun poking around the Boutique, and with her desperation growing equal to her resentment of her friends that had coupled, Rarity turned to the one friend who hadn’t also spurned her kindness and flaunted their happily ever after.
“No, that isn’t right, either…” she chastised herself. “They’ve done nothing wrong, and Pinkie…” Rarity’s gaze fell further as even thinking the name brought with it a torrent of emotion. Where once Rarity had largely found Pinkie’s shenanigans amusing, the weight that she carried had more and more led to annoyance with the mare rather than laughter. When she had first started coming by the boutique, Rarity found it an almost insurmountable task to keep her temper in check. Over time, however, desperation overrode her desire for a tidy shop, and Rarity’s perception of the mare shifted from that of an invasive jester to an easily manipulated mare who, more often than not, would do just about anything she was asked.
“There was nothing friendly about the way I treated her,” Rarity realized, grieved by the thought. “I was short-tempered, made her do chores for the sake of exerting authority… and only saw her as a means to an end…” Her thoughts drifted back to the morning when Pinkie had snapped. Had she actually cared about the questions that she pondered that morning, or was that nothing more than vague curiosity with the living anomaly? Even if she could claim that there was some genuine concern over Pinkie, Rarity realized that her actions proved beyond her powers of rationalization that she was far more concerned with herself than the one that had all but begged not to be sent away the night before.
“When she left that morning, I knew she was hurting; it was obvious, but I… I didn’t chase after her until…” Rarity didn’t want to finish the thought, but she had no right to refrain, no excuse not to accept the guilt the bowed her head low as the full weight of Chai’s words came crashing down. “...until I wanted something.” Three time had she been asked why she had come to Dodge, why she had chased Pinkie out into Equestria’s premier dust bowl, and three times she had found herself without answer. Now she knew. She had come for herself, and nopony else.
“It was little wonder that I couldn’t stand to see myself in the mirror… there wasn’t anything beautiful left to see.” Her hoof slid from her cheek so that she could look at the bandages, the brilliant white masking the wound on the otherside. “How long have I let the hurt in my heart hide behind a veil of beauty? Too long, now...” She glanced around her hoof at the Chai and felt something stirring within as she beheld the mare’s disheveled state.
“She looks as upset as I was when Pinkie was… questioning me, but she… she still stood up for what she believed.” The parallel was there, and it wasn’t lost on Rarity. “I… I can’t keep going like I have. I’ve drifted so far from where I want to be… who I want to be… but can I ever get back to where I was? It feels so far away…” Distant lay the goal, but as she dropped her hoof to the floor and met Chai’s distraught gaze with her own, the path from which she had strayed was once more stretched out before her. The journey to rediscover the meaning of true beauty would begin, quite literally, with a shaky step forward, but it was one that she was ready to take.
“Chai?” Rarity murmured, closing the distance between them. She looked deeply into the mare’s eyes and found them filled with fear, and it was with gentleness that Rarity drew the mare close, squeezing her fondly. “...Thank you.”
“Th-thank… what?” Chai stammered, confounded. Those words were among the least she expected to hear, having slapped a mare in the midst of her towering rage. Though Rarity hadn’t even realized it, when she had lowered her hoof and looked at it, Chai had taken a step back and braced herself for retaliation. Instead, she had received for her brutal honesty an embrace, one that she readily accepted and fair well melted into as Rarity tightened her hold.
“You can’t possibly know how… right you are,” she explained in quiet tones. “For a very long time now, I’ve been going about my life with myself as my only focus, and it’s robbed me of so many joys that I’ve taken for granted. I needed something to wake me up, and you,” Rarity explained, pulling back and flashing a weak smile, “were that something.”
“...I knew you weren’t really a bitch.” It was so unexpected coming from Chai and spoken with such matter-of-fact conviction that Rarity couldn’t help but laugh a little, dispelling some of the tension.
“I… rather have been as of late,” Rarity conceded ruefully. “It’s going to take time to clean up the mess that I’ve become. But..." Genuine warmth brought to Rarity a small smile as she remembered the letter that had sparked originally moved her to action. It had come from a city as rife with prosperity as it was fraught with turmoil, and she could think of no better place to be than somewhere to rediscover her passion than where there were many with needs to be met. Her hooves could never take back what they had done that day, but maybe, maybe they could yet reach out and touch somepony for good. "...I think I know where to start.”