A short story.

This is a happy story.

It was a rainy autumn day when I told Twilight Sparkle I loved her. I believe it happened about a year before she became an alicorn. We’d been having dinner at a restaurant in Canterlot, and after a wonderfully expensive dessert, I told her and she refused to believe me.

“Really?” she’d asked me, stunned, flustered, delighted.

She was so stunned, this silly little scholar who’d assumed I’d never be romantically interested in a bookworm who knew about many things but not of love, or romance, or the social intricacies I was so fond of.

“Yes, Twilight,” I’d told her with an affectionate laugh, my heart swelling when she giggled like a filly. “I do in fact love you.”

This is a happy story.

A happy story about a happy seamstress desperately in love with the beautiful alicorn who loved her just as much.

Well… on second thought, that’s not exactly right.

Loving Twilight Sparkle is not what one might think it would be like. She is not one for grand gestures, not one for romance like the ones in the stories she read me (and then protested they were “cliché and overdone, Rarity!”).

To love Twilight Sparkle is to know she doesn’t love you back so much as she feels completely comfortable around you. At least, that’s how it was for us. Her neuroses and anxieties, perfectionism and intensity, these things that defined her for better or worse always came before you, and it was a fact you had to accept.

Only then would you have the privilege not of Twilight Sparkle loving you back, but of something entirely more unique.

You see, when I was a filly, a drunken uncle once told me: “In every relationship, there’s someone who loves, and someone who lets themself be loved.”

I loved Twilight Sparkle.

She let me love her.

Let me dote on her, and be with her, and see her how she deserved to be.

Happy.

This is a happy story.

“Daaaaaarling!” I whined on our bed, wrapped in her wings, as she pressed her lips against my neck, my cheeks, laughing as she did so, and ignoring my distress! The fiend! “How will I survive?! How will I live with you gone?!”

“Rarity. It’s just for six months,” she reassured, snuggling up against me.

“Six months?! Six months?!” I screeched, and I wanted to cry, because I loved her too much. “Six months of you being away in Canterlot, and only coming back during the weekends?! I will die!”

“No, you won’t,” she promised, and kissed me again, because she loved me. Stars, she loved me. I really thought she did. She bit down on her lips when I pouted at her. “It’ll make our weekends more special! More romantic!”

I met her gaze, and unintentionally, my voice fell to a whisper.

“Twilight…”

Her expression softened in the way it only did when she saw through the veil of my theatrics and detected something real and tangible. Twilight Sparkle was the only one who could do that. She saw right through me, like I was a book effortless to read.

She could see that I was sad. That I loved her. That I would miss her.

“Hey,” she whispered, and I tried to look away until her magic gently turned my head. She looked into my eyes and a silly, affectionate grin shone my way. “What was that saying about distance?”

“I don’t recall,” I said, half-heartedly. “Something about distance being a cruel thing to inflict on your beloved, I think.”

She laughed, and it made me smile, and I hated that it did.

“Noooooo.” She nuzzled me as I tried and failed to look mad. “Come on. I’m sure you know it.”

“I suppose I may have heard something or other about distance making the heart grow fonder in some occasions.”

“Right! And maybe this is one of those occasions, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” I conceded, if only because I knew there were very few things Twilight could do that wouldn’t make me love her more, regardless of that little saying about distance and love.

Which isn’t true, by the way. It’s a lie. Distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.

But that story is sad and this?

This is a happy story.

Not a sad story like the one where I left Ponyville on an extended year-long sabbatical after she broke up with me, having fallen in love with a noble she saw five days a week for six months. I left promising that it was simply because I needed worldly inspiration, not because I didn’t want to be in the town where Princess Twilight Sparkle lived with the stallion she’d chosen over me.

“I understand,” I said when she broke up with me, and I did not cry, which surprised us both. You’d think I’d be the one sobbing as she somberly said it was over, not that the opposite would be true.

But there we were! Rarity the unicorn, drama queen extraordinaire, smiling as kindly as ever, giving back a heart that was on loan as Twilight cried before me, almost as if I was the one who’d broken up with her.

She promised me that she’d tried to stop it, really; that she had loved me, but it wasn’t the same anymore, and she’d met him, and her feelings changed, and she was so sorry.

She was so miserably sorry.

“Darling,” I’d told her, placing a hoof over hers, because I loved her, and she didn’t love me, and that was that. I lifted my hoof and brushed back her bangs, saying words I’d repeat a month later at the train station, my life packed in my bags. “My darling dearest, there’s nothing to forgive.”

This is a happy story.

Which is why I told myself she’d change her mind, drowning my sorrows away with some expensive wine at some absolutely atrociously sketchy bar in Saddle Arabia’s capital.

This would be a happy story. Maybe not for that wretched noble who could fall off the face of the earth, but for me and for Twilight.

She would come back to me when I returned from my trip. Rush into my forelegs, tell me she’d found nothing but heartbreak and misery, nothing like what we’d had when she loved me and I loved her and everything was fine. She’d see she couldn’t be happy without me.

She would come back, I said, I thought, I hoped.

This is a happy story.

I admit I avoided her when I came back. Came back to find Twilight Sparkle was not how I had left her, not a blubbering guilty mess, but a deliriously happy mare.

It was too harrowing. Too hard because she was happy, and it made me unhappy, and I loathed that it did. I avoided being alone with her at all costs, too afraid that I’d fail to keep my true feelings at bay, and she’d find out I was a bitter jealous scorned lover.

Just the idea of doing that to her abhorred me beyond measure.

But I couldn’t avoid it forever, no matter how tactful and careful I was, and it was on an autumn day that it finally happened. We’d all been invited to lunch at Fluttershy’s cottage, and I made the mistake of staying there until Twilight and I were the only ones left.

Until I announced to them both that I had to go, and almost immediately Twilight declared she’d be leaving too.

“We can walk back together? Carousel Boutique is on the way to the castle, after all,” she said with such care and measure, it was obvious she was reciting something practiced.

Actually, I just remembered I need to stay to speak with Fluttershy, I intended on saying.

“All right, dear,” I said instead, because I’m a masochist, apparently.

She spoke eagerly as we walked, asking me questions that I replied only superficially. My trip had been fine, my clients too, and Saddle Arabia was lovely, and the weather there, too.

I could tell she expected more of me with every pause after I finished speaking, every stammered question she quickly shoved to fill the silence, every little teasing remark that was met with a polite laugh.

She was trying so hard, the poor thing, I’d almost felt bad. Maybe I did.

The heavens must have found the entire thing a sorry sight, however, and demonstrated as much when from out of nowhere, it began to pour rain, and I do mean pour. A great storm fell upon us and, soaking wet, we rushed for cover under the safety of a nearby storefront.

“For goodness’ sake, Rainbow Dash,” I muttered, even though she hadn’t been in charge of Ponyville’s weather for years. Old habits died hard.

I glared at the rain through plastered strands of soaking hair, irritated by it all. This wasn’t funny. It wasn’t dramatic or theatric or anything but annoying. If there was ever a time I’d wished to be caught with Twilight Sparkle in the rain, that time had long since died.

“Rarity.”

I turned to her, not so much because she’d said my name, but rather more because of how she’d said it. She sounded pained. Truly pained, and when I looked to her, I could see she was pained. How… Well, sad, she looked, her ears pressed against her head, her bangs plastered onto her forehead, and her eyes wet with tears that intermingled and danced with the rain.

She was absolutely soaking, my darling beloved, and I couldn’t help but fixate on the raindrops traveling down her coat and caressing her cheeks in a way I would never be able to do again.

That loathsome, sunforsaken rain that was closer to her that I’d ever be.

When I said nothing, she continued:

“Rarity, are you avoiding me?”

I needn’t say anything in reply. She knew, you see.

Her expression softened in the way it only did when she saw through the cracks of my mask and exposed something real and tangible. Twilight Sparkle was the only one who could do that. She saw right through me, like she’d done since we met and like no one would ever do again.

She could see that I loved her still.

I said nothing as she stepped back, suddenly overwhelmed with shame.

“I-I’m sorry. I thought that maybe.. I… I’m sorry. This was a mistake,” she blurted out, so stressed and contrite, it took all I had to maintain my position and not rush to console her. But she continued despite her contriteness. “I miss you.” The words pushed out, burning me with a sincerity the rain could not hope to extinguish. “I miss my best friend, Rarity… I… I know I’m in no position to ask anything of you—”

“You aren’t,” I interrupted, and as I saw her sink with shamed devastation, I made a choice. I looked away and sighed theatrically, placing a hoof over my forehead. “But I am a benevolent, magnanimous and generous mare, so I suppose I shall make an allowance for my best friend, mm? I do hope you feel lucky, Twilight.”

When I turned to her with a smile, the relieved smile she gave me shone in the rain.

“I do,” she said, and she meant it. “Thank you, Rarity. For still being my best friend.”

I cleared my throat. “And for being benevolent, magnanimous and generous, too, darling.”

“Those too,” she said, and her affectionate, friendly laughter scorched me like a thousand burning suns.

But it was perfectly alright.

This is a happy story.

Their engagement party happened about two months after I’d come back from my trip.

A grand party attended by ponies from all trots of life, laughing and celebrating the future wedding of Princess Twilight Sparkle and Duke Silver Blade. Despite it all, it was endearing to see the poor duke looking terribly flustered as he entertained Ponyville’s citizens, all of them insisting on making sure he was the perfect fit for their lovely princess.

And how Twilight watched him, utterly enamored, and how it hurt to know.

Know she loved this stallion who was letting himself be loved.

I remember how ravishing she looked.

How painfully lovely with a dress I’d designed and a heart I’d once had. I loved her so much, and she looked more content than I’d ever seen her. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have it any other way. My darling, dearest beloved deserved the world and then more, to have everything she ever wanted in a silver platter made of love and affection and all sorts of wonderful things.

So.

As I said, and will say ‘till death do us part…

This is a happy story.

Just not for me.