> Unrequited
>  by uosis
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Stars
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Fluttershy fell back against the grass, a small, girlish giggle escaping her elegant throat as she felt the ticklish stroke of the downy blades against her buttery yellow coat; she let her wings spread out to their apex, stretching them as she would her legs after a long day spent being rushed off her hooves by the demands of her animal friends, before tucking them back into their resting position by her sides. With her head tilted back, she let her bright beryl eyes drift upwards to take in the majestic vista of the night sky. “Princess Luna does a wonderful job, doesn't she?” Fluttershy said to her companion, her quiet voice wrought with naked awe. Her vision flicked briefly in the direction of her toiling alicorn friend who was much too busy to be astonished by the splendour overhead. There were some sights that just got better the more you looked at them.
“Luna doesn't arrange every aspect of the night,” Twilight Sparkle said, straining for a patience that had long since deserted her, not even bothering to make eye-contact with Fluttershy so engrossed was she in mending the telescope's deviated field lens … a telescope that she was about five seconds away from smashing with a hammer. “She raises the moon, just as Celestia raises the sun in the morning. Everything else is-” she waggled a grease-stained hoof in the general direction of the marquee of stars “-left to its own devices.”
“Oh,” the pegasus pony replied, sounding disappointed by this revelation. As much as she respected Twilight Sparkle's knowledge, sometimes she could be a little bit, well … dry. Intellect was all well and good, of course, but there had to be room for a little bit of romance, surely? Was there any harm in believing a small, inconsequential lie after all? Fluttershy rolled onto her stomach and sidled up to her friend, peering through half-lidded eyes at the instrument that she worked on with the curiosity of a filly. “Can I … I mean, is there anything I can do to help you?”
“Do you know anything about repairing telescopes?” asked Twilight shrilly, ignoring the look that Fluttershy was giving her while picking up another tool from the small but complete box that she had brought with her and bringing it to bear on the plethora of loose screws, warped gears and myriad other issues that the apparatus had developed following its extended storage in the basement of the Castle of Friendship. A sense of fatigue gripped her as yet another thing seemed to go wrong.
“Well, no,” Fluttershy replied, biting her lower lip ruefully, irrationally feeling as though the whole thing was her fault. Technically, the pegasus supposed, it is.
“Well.” The alicorn levelled a clenched hoof at the mount connecting it to the tripod. She gave it a firm poke, but not enough to knock it over. She immediately felt regret at having done so, knowing what the device had been through already. “Apparently, neither do I,” she said, frustration beginning to bubble over in her normally placid tone.
Fluttershy sat up on her haunches, her muzzle creasing to form a frown. “I'm sorry.”
“It's fine. It's my fault for not giving it a once-over before we left. I should've known that it was going to require more adjustments than I could actually do out in the field. But no, as usual, I rush into something without really preparing for it.” Twilight let out a world-weary sigh, tossing the gadget she clutched in her hoof to the ground with a soft thump. The telescope had been one of a precious few objects that she'd been able to retrieve from the remnants of the Golden Oaks Library following its destruction by Tirek. A small twinge of something tugged at her. She wasn't sure if it was guilt or sadness. Maybe both? Nopony had died, the library could be rebuilt and restocked, but … Twilight couldn't shake the notion that she'd somehow failed in her assignment. She cast an appraising mulberry eye at Fluttershy.
The pegasus always knew when a creature was in distress, no matter what it was; could it be that she'd sensed Twilight's anguish, and had suggested this little stargazing trip as a way of unwinding? She'd never known Fluttershy to have taken an interest in astronomy before, anyway. If so, it hadn't quite worked out that way.
“Uh, are you okay, Twilight?” asked Fluttershy, the empathy practically radiating from her as she placed a kindly hoof on her friend's withers. “You were spacing-out pretty hard there.”
“I'm fine,” Twilight replied, taking Fluttershy's hoof in her own and giving it a small squeeze. “I'm just annoyed at myself.”
“Don't be.” Fluttershy wished that there was something that she could do or say to comfort the alicorn, but Twilight's occasional small bouts of depression tended to be episodes that she needed to work out on her own at her own pace.
“Easier said than done,” replied Twilight, offering the pegasus a watery smile, wishing that she could just sleep and forget about her problems for a few hours. It had been so long since she'd had a decent night's shut-eye … not since the destruction of the library, in fact, and she'd been forced into the cool, impersonal walls of the castle.
The night air was warm, but not so much that it became an overbearing, smothering presence to the pair; the gentle breeze drifting in from the west was doing much to take the edge off, and Fluttershy's mind was filled with visions of her pegasi brethren – led by the irrepressible Rainbow Dash – stirring up the gale and directing it to where it needed to be. She did not envy them this task. During her formative years, she had been doubly terrible at both flying and weather manipulation. The concepts that the others in her flight school class had taken for granted had seemed like a foreign language to her. I should've been born an earth pony.
“Fluttershy, I'm so sorry.” Twilight's tired-but-contrite-sounding tone cut into her thoughts, shaking her out of her reverie.
“For what?” the pegasus asked, startled by the abruptness of the apology and pricking up her ears.
“For being such terrible company. For ruining what should've been a fun night for both of us. For yelling at you.”
“It wasn't really yelling,” Fluttershy replied in a low, almost gently amused, voice; she'd had entirely too much experience with ponies being angry with her, and though it bothered her, she wasn't prepared to let it change who she was. She favoured Twilight with a tiny smile. “It's always disappointing when things don't go according to plan, but … we're still here, together, and that's what actually matters.” She let her eyes turn toward the sky once more. “And we can still see the stars, telescope or not.”
“You're a very wise pony,” said Twilight, sitting by Fluttershy's side and looking upwards, too. On sudden impulse, she allowed herself get closer until their coats brushed together. “Fluttershy?”
“Mm?” The pegasus felt Twilight's muzzle against her neck, the hot breath from her nostrils caressing the sensitive flesh there. Once upon a time, this kind of close-quarters contact with another pony would've made her very uncomfortable. Her back stiffened of its own accord, but it wasn't the same type of discomfort that she'd experienced whenever somepony had tried to get near to her in the past. It was an altogether more personal sort of ache that racked her now.
“I'm glad that you asked me out here tonight,” said Twilight, closing her eyes and savouring the heat coming off of her friend with a sigh of contentment, unaware of or ignoring her friend's sudden tension. She was so used to the pegasus' skittishness that it didn't even occur to her to think of it as a problem. Twilight did not feel the cold, even as the breeze began to pick up in intensity, but it was a different sort of warmth that she sought from proximity to Fluttershy's body, anyway. “I didn't want to spend another minute in that castle feeling sorry for myself.”
Before Fluttershy could form any sort of a response, the slow, rhythmic exhalations kissing her neck and ear told her that Twilight had fallen asleep; with a wry smile, she carefully, tenderly lowered her friend's head until it was resting in her lap. The pegasus ran a hoof through Twilight's soft, silky mane, tracing the nearly invisible line where her purple and pink highlights met. The alicorn stirred, her legs jerking as they sought a more comfortable position, but did not wake, instead settling herself deeper into Fluttershy's abdomen.
Fluttershy let out the breath she had been holding gingerly, not wanting to wake her friend up, unsure whether to laugh or cry. “I hoped that tonight would be the night that I'd finally tell you, Twilight,” the pegasus said, a solitary tear tracing its way down the delicate curve of her cheek. She barely felt the wetness, though. Fluttershy brushed Twilight's mane aside and looked at her sleeping face; her heart stirred as she did so, and a curious tightness gripped her stomach. “You're so beautiful, and funny, and kind, and smart, and all the things that I'm not and never could be.” More tears fell. “Don't make the same stupid mistake I did and let a lack of confidence stop you from pursuing your dreams, whatever they are.” As if to prove her own words to herself, Fluttershy leaned down and placed the tiniest of kisses on the tip of Twilight's horn.
It wasn't long before the pegasus herself succumbed to tiredness; her last waking thought was, typically, one of acute embarrassment and she was grateful that her friend would not see the crimson blush break out across her muzzle: she'd hoped that by showing an interest in one of Twilight's hobbies, by being a little bit more open and expressive around her, that she might get the alicorn princess to … notice her. It hadn't quite worked out like that, but, with one last exhausted glance at the sleeping princess, she decided that this was enough.
When Fluttershy dreamed, she dreamt of brilliant, shining stars.
But not the ones in the heavens above.