Prompt: Difficult Rice


Sweetie Belle was hiding something.

Rarity knew her sister. She knew a great deal about Sweetie’s idiosyncrasies, her habits and flaws. She knew about Sweetie’s schedule, how she spent her time, and where she spent her focus.

She knew, therefore, that Sweetie was sneaking about trying not to be noticed. She knew that Sweetie wasn’t spending as much time with her friends. And she knew that Sweetie had been dipping into the allowance her parents gave her, as well as the bits Rarity paid her to occasionally help in the Boutique. But she wouldn’t answer any of Rarity’s questions.

Breaking and entering, therefore, was the only good option.

Sweetie Belle’s room was a testament to foalish good intentions; every bit of wall decoration, furniture organization, and even color choice was the result of a maturing mind, developing her own style and identity even as she desperately tried to mimic her sister. Rarity knew all of this, as she frequently had to go into Sweetie’s room (against Sweetie’s wishes) in order to clear away the detritus of teenaged negligence; the odd forgotten dirty dish, or the laundry items left behind in the rush to reach whatever next misadventure she and her friends had planned.

And there were still misadventures. Anypony who had assumed that the Crusaders would slow down once earning their marks was a fool, and Rarity was no fool.

Well, at least not about this.

She was familiar with nearly everything about her sister, in some great detail. That was how she knew Sweetie was up to something.

Rarity stepped lightly as she entered Sweetie’s room. She was used to stepping over the mess, but it was clean. The carpet was clear of trash and clothes, the bed was made, the pillow was fluffed. Rarity’s keen eye even noticed the lack of dust on the framed picture of the Crusaders that hung from the wall.

It felt wrong. Uncanny, even. Sweetie was never this clean. Rarity had been hounding her for years, ever since Sweetie had moved to live with her above the Carousel, to get organized, to develop good hygiene habits, to pick up after herself. Sweetie… did her best. It was a constant source of conflict.

But now her room was clean. Immaculately so. For the first time in years, the room was up to Rarity’s standards.

And she didn’t like it.

“Sweetie, darling,” Rarity said out loud, her voice echoing in the colorful space. “Do please explain yourself. I’d ask if you’d been replaced by a changeling, but after the unfortunate dam incident and the molasses cleanup, Thorax has been having a word with his people about not doing that sort of thing.”

The room, of course, didn’t answer. It had no answers, just too-clean walls and floors, too-neat dressers and closets, a too-perfect bed with a too-fluffed pillow and too-dusted bookshelves.

Rarity couldn’t ask Sweetie directly, of course. That made no sense at all. Which, of course, left spying as the only option.

---

“Why don’t you just ask her?” Twilight asked, as the two of them trotted side by side through the orchard.

“Twilight, dear, don’t you understand? It would be utterly impossible.”

“I don’t understand,” Twilight said. “Wouldn’t directness be the best way? Especially if you really are going to keep making a molehill into…”

“I resent the implication that I am overthinking this, Twilight,” Rarity huffed, tossing her mane, ignoring the way Twilight rolled her eyes. “Sweetie is up to something.”

“Yes, you mentioned that,” Twilight said, amused and exasperated in equal measure. “A few times.”

“Well she is,” Rarity whined. “And I need to know what! You’re the only one in all Ponyville skilled enough with forensic magic to tell me what!”

“The only reason I agreed to come,” Twilight said, “is because Applejack’s been too busy with the new cider cellar to come visit. Who, by the way, would agree with me. Honest openness beats obfuscation every time.”

Rarity huffed. Sniffed. Snorted.

“Twilight, you simply don’t understand how these things work. Sweetie Belle is hiding something, which means she doesn’t want to be asked. She doesn’t want to tell me. She’s going to all this trouble to be secretive, it would be rude to ruin all that effort by simply…simply kicking down the proverbial front door and demanding the information! A social faux pas of this magnitude is quite out of the question. Sweetie wants me to investigate, or else she wouldn’t be sneaking around like she is!”

Twilight stopped, staring at Rarity with a raised eyebrow.

“So…you’re asking me to break into the clubhouse, and scan it with advanced forensic spells, violating not only your sister’s privacy but also that of her friends, and this is all somehow a favor to Sweetie?”

“Precicely, darling.”

Twilight stared at Rarity a few more seconds, then huffed. She looked as if Rarity had just said the craziest thing imaginable! “I’m going to visit Applejack. You do what you want. I’m not getting caught up in… whatever this is.”

Rarity stared, fuming, as Twilight turned to walk down the path again, towards the Apple barn in the distance. She stomped her hoof, but Twilight didn’t turn around.

The nerve of some ponies. She was making perfect sense, and Twilight just didn’t understand!

---

“No,” Rainbow said.

“But…”

“No,” she said again. “Rares, you’re being crazier than that time Pinkie painted her basement without opening the windows. You know, when she was accidentally huffing all of that…”

“I remember the insurance claim, darling. But surely you won’t…”

“No, Rares. I’m not gonna tell you what she’s up to. Why don’t you just… let it go?”

Rarity leaned over the cafe table to stare at Rainbow, who subconsciously shrank back.

“Let it go?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “When you so casually hint that you already know what my sister is doing?”

“Y-yeah,” Rainbow said. “I mean, I heard her and Scoots talking about it and…”

“So Scootaloo knows, too. Is there a conspiracy?”

“Rarity,” Rainbow said, her voice firm. She leaned forward herself. “There’s no conspiracy. You’re being ridiculous. Twilight would say something about squirrels digging holes or something.”

“I am not,” Rarity said hotly, tapping a hoof on the table with irritation. “Making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Oh, yeah, it was moles. Anyways, you really don’t have to worry about this. Sweetie’s just fine.”

“But she’s hiding something!”

“Yeah? So? Your sister’s not allowed to have secrets? Do you have secrets from her?”

“That’s hardly the…”

“Let it go, Rares. And don’t you dare corner Scoots about this either. It’s nothing. I promise you, you’re losing your mind about nothing.”

---

With Applejack busy, Twilight and Rainbow being frustrating, and Pinkie away on a trip to visit Cheese in Manehatten, that left Fluttershy as the only source of consolation and venting. Surely she would understand Rarity’s frustration!

But at their spa appointment, Fluttershy had utterly refused to help!

“Sweetie Belle is a sweetheart, and a good foal,” she’d scolded Rarity. “You’re being rude.”

But Rarity wasn’t meaning to be rude. She was worried, and perhaps a little eager to look into the mystery of it all. Perhaps there was a conspiracy! Especially if Rainbow seemed to know what was happening.

Her room had yielded no clues. The clubhouse had yielded no clues. And when she’d seen Applebloom in the market the other day, the filly had run away from her!

At dinner that night Sweetie was pretending nothing was wrong. She and Rarity ate together, at the kitchen table rather than the dining room, as was the habit when they had no company.

“This is really good!” she told Rarity eagerly when she’d taken the first bite; a rice pilaf, with a honey-marinated tofu and steamed vegetables drizzled in a light garlic-infused oil. Rarity had decided to ply her sister with food; Sweetie had seemed particularly interested and complimentary of Rarity’s cooking recently.

“I’m quite pleased with the outcome,” Rarity said proudly. She really was. Ulterior motive aside, it was always good to put your best hoof forward.

“The white stuff is all sweet and salty at the same time, and the rice is super yummy!”

“Have you been practicing your palate, like I suggested?”

“Yeah! The symphony metaphor, right?”

Rarity had heard, years ago, that refining one’s palate was like listening to a symphony. It was easy enough to appreciate a whole song as a single piece, interweaving melodies and harmonies, dozens of different instruments flowing in and out of the forefront. But a true master could isolate one sound, perhaps just the marimba, or only the trumpets, and hear just one note, in order to better understand what it was contributing to the whole. It was possible to do the same thing with food.

“Indeed. What notes are you picking up in the glaze?”

“You mean the gooey stuff on the white stuff?”

“Yes,” Rarity said patiently. “The glaze on the tofu.”

“Well, there’s honey,” Sweetie said. That was the loudest note, though, and they both knew it. “But there’s something kinda… spicy, too? And under that a different kind of sweet. It tastes… green?”

Rarity smiled. Even though she was worried, even though she was frustrated and upset at the way her friends were stonewalling her, she still had the presence of mind to be proud of her sister.

“That may be the basil and the rosemary you’re picking up on,” she said, and Sweetie nodded eagerly, before diving into the pilaf. “You’re getting much better at subtle nuance, Sweetie Belle. I’m impressed.”

Passive aggression had always been one of the more important tools in Rarity’s arsenal. But Passive aggression didn’t work when your target was oblivious.

“Thanks! I’ve been working hard,” Sweetie replied, and there was a note of something more in her tone, something that Rarity wanted to pick at like a loose thread, pick at until the whole thing unraveled.

“You have,” she said. “What can you tell me about the wine?”

Rarity had a collection of de-alcoholized wines that she had been sharing with Sweetie, to better help train the filly’s palate.

“I don’t like the unsweeter ones,” Sweetie replied, sticking her tongue out after taking a sip of the red.

“The term is dry, darling. ‘Unsweeter’ is not a word. And I want you to think about the bigger picture, how the wine fits into the meal as a whole, as if it were a mystery. You’re trying to discern how this piece of information, this clue, fits into a wider whole.”

Again the subtlety went right over Sweetie’s head.

“Oh, you mean like the white we had the other night! It went really well with the dessert!”

“Yes, Sweetie. Do you think a sweeter red would work with the meal as a whole?”

But Sweetie was already shaking her head. “I guess not. Too much sweet would be out of balance. Is that why you put a little lemon in the rice?”

Rarity beamed. The addition of lemon zest in the pilaf had been a last minute inspiration.

“Very well tasted, Sweetie. And you’re correct. The acid and brightness of the lemon balances the sweet and umami tofu. Well done!”

Sweetie practically glowed at the praise.

“So when are you going to show me how to start cooking?”

Rarity, if it was possible, would have gone paler.

“Well, about that, dear… perhaps when the school year is over, we can find some time to borrow the Apple’s kitchen?”

She didn’t have the budget to repair her own kitchen, not after the last time Sweetie had attempted to make an ice cream sundae. The Ponyville Bomb Squad had not been pleased at the call.

Sweetie deflated. “But…”

“Not everypony has a talent for cooking food, but it can be a talent to eat good food,” Rarity said soothingly. “And you’re well on the way to developing that talent.”

It seemed to assuage her for the moment, but Sweetie did finish the rest of the meal in relative quiet.

---

Rarity wouldn’t have noticed the window open in the middle of the night if Opalescence hadn’t just startled her awake by jumping on the bed. Jerking to her hooves, Rarity pulled her sleep mask off, ignoring the meows of an impatient and frustrated Opal (who had just wanted a bit of a cuddle) to dart to the window.

There, in the pale light of a crescent moon, she could barely make out Sweetie Belle, sneaking off down the road.

Rarity glanced at her bedside clock. It was half past midnight! There was no good reason for a filly to be sneaking out of the room at that time, and plenty of bad ones.

She would have to follow.

By the time she’d gotten out of bed, brushed her hair, and donned her dark dangerous mission outfit (to better keep her pale fur from being spotted in the moonlight, after all), there was no sight of Sweetie. Rarity tiptoed through Ponyville moving up and down streets, but she couldn’t see her sister anywhere. She even went as far as Sweet Apple Acres, to peek into the clubhouse.

There were no lights. The only ponies awake in Ponyville, it seemed, was the Princess of Night Owls herself, if the lantern still glowing in the castle window was any indication.

Disgruntled at the pointlessness and lost sleep, Rarity trudged back home, only to find something amiss.

Hoofprints. Dirty ones, leading to her front door.

With her horn blazing a bright blue in the dark night, Rarity yanked the door to the Carousel open, only to discover that whoever had tracked the dirt up to her front door had carefully cleaned after herself, so no evidence of ickiness remained on Rarity’s pristine carpet. A quick surreptitious investigation revealed that Sweetie was, in fact, back in her room, ostensibly asleep.

So Rarity went outside, following the hoofprints backwards. They led behind the house, to the garden. Rarity had torn out a row of tomato plants after several of them had scorched and withered, and she followed Sweetie’s hoofprints to the bare spot.

It had been dug up. When Rarity touched the soil, she recoiled.

Recently.

Sweetie Belle had snuck out of the house, done… something, then returned and buried something. In her garden.

---

“Just ask her,” Applejack told her the next day. “And no, I ain’t gonna tell ya what she’s up to.”

Applejack was in on the conspiracy too. Rainbow just laughed when Rarity asked again. Twilight refused to entertain the conversation. She didn’t expect a response from PInkie for at least a week. And Fluttershy…

…well, nopony could resist it when Fluttershy looked at them like that.

So Rarity decided to follow Sweetie Belle again. This night she was prepared. She was dressed, accessorized, and brushed when she heard Sweetie’s window open and shut.

Sweetie never looked to see if somepony was following her. The arrogance of the young? Or of experience? How long had she been taking these little midnight mystery walks? How long had she been sneaking out? Long enough to be confident that she wouldn’t get caught, at least.

Her path took her all the way out of Ponyville, to the edges of the White-Tail Woods. There, Rarity took up a position behind a clump of willow trees to watch as Sweetie levitated a large crate out from behind a giant rock.

Rarity’s curiosity burned as Sweetie opened the crate, lifting out…

…a projector? A filmstrip?

Rarity stared in awe as she watched her sister suspend a white sheet on a rope between two trees, set up the projector, carefully balancing the tripod legs with flat stones, and then loaded a filmstrip into the mouth of the machine. Then, in a spot a few feet away, retrieved from the same crate a horn-powered hotplate, several bowls and pots, and a bag full of what looked like cooking ingredients.

What in the name of Tartarus was Sweetie doing?

With a flick of her magic, Sweetie started the projector. The image of a vaguely familiar mule flickered onto the makeshift screen.

“Hello, this is Mulia Mild. Today we shall be cooking a fairly simple dish, easy enough if you follow the instructions. Rice pilaf!”

Sweetie’s magic glowed, filling the whole clearing with green light as she assembled utensils, pots, and ingredients.

Rarity stared with awe.

“We begin with cooking the rice,” came Mulia’s tinny voice from the projector. “Take two cups of rinsed white rice, and add them to a large cookpot. Cover them with four cups of water, and place them over high heat…”

---

There was a philosopher, an old pony of war, who’d once served as one of the generals for the ancient Kingdom of Unicornia, prior to unification. Old Hornblower had suggested that when a general lost a battle, it wasn’t typically a decision at the end of the fight that caused their downfall, but rather a succession of small decisions, tiny mistakes, each one changing the course of the battle, each one contributing to the disaster, each one so small that an unwise or unaware strategist would barely even notice.

Hornblower’s words were on Rarity’s mind as she watched Sweetie Belle’s midnight pilaf slowly turn into a gummy, glue-like mass of inedible-looking lumps. Even worse, though, was the growing frustration she could see, even at a distance, every time Sweetie had to stop and rewind the film strip, trying to catch what she’d done wrong.

Not enough water in the rice. Too much heat. Not enough salt. Overcooking.

There were no large mistakes. But dozens and dozens of tiny ones.

Rarity stayed silent as Sweetie Belle finally gave up in frustration, carefully packing away her hidden cooking supplies, cleaning up the evidence, before hauling the resultant mass of ex-food back towards Ponyville. She watched, awed, as Sweetie buried the evidence in the garden. And then her heart broke a little as Sweetie turned suddenly to see her there.

There were tears in her sister’s eyes.

“R-r-rarity!” she squeaked, hurriedly wiping her eyes, smearing dirt from her hooves all over her face. “I…um…er…well…uh…”

Rarity was still not sure exactly what she had witnessed, but she did know one thing. Whatever it was that was happening, it didn’t deserve tears.

“Sweetie Belle,” she said firmly. “I don’t have the foggiest idea of why you might be digging about in the garden in the middle of the night.”

She did, in fact, have several non-foggy ideas. But the drive to solve the mystery was over. She knew enough to make an educated guess, and all of her curiosity, the excuses she’d laid out for Twilight and Rainbow and Applejack, they seemed so petty now.

As her friends had pointed out. She couldn’t let them know. Rainbow and Applejack would be insufferable about it, and Twilight, while her grace and poise would keep her from gloating, would still have that pedantic glint in her eye that she got when she knew she’d been right.

“I was, um…”

“Whatever it is, though,” Rarity cut her off, “you come inside right now and wash up. Fillies should be in bed at this hour! Don’t you realize what this will do to your complexion? Exhaustion is terrible for your skin! Are those bags under your eyes?”

“Don’t you… aren’t you…”

But Rarity was already ushering her to the front door. Sweetie had placed a towel there already, it seemed, and Rarity was inwardly pleased at her preparedness. She kept the stern expression up as she helped Sweetie wash every speck of dirt off her hooves.

“You’re not asking,” Sweetie finally blurted out.

Rarity wiped a dirt-stained streak of tear from Sweetie’s face.

“Do I need to?” she asked gently.

And she realized she didn’t. She shouldn’t have. Whatever this was, it was something important to her.

It was important enough to bring the tears again.

“I… I… I’ve been trying so hard,” Sweetie began, sobbing.

Rarity clicked her tongue and sighed, pulling the mostly-clean filly into a tight hug. It was hard not to think about the dirt she was smearing into her coat, but she managed.

“Trying so hard at what, darling?”

“It’s just that…well, you’re so perfect! Everything you do is right, you get all the details right, you keep everything so clean, you’re always so smart and you know how to do everything, cooking and eating things and fashion and organizing and running a business and money and you’re even so much better at magic than me!”

This was, Rarity knew quite well, the stage of the Perfectly Reasonable Meltdown that required her to simply listen silently, perhaps only adding the occasional coo of support and sympathy. She was, after all, quite experienced at Perfectly Reasonable Meltdowns.

“Ever since I moved in you’ve been nothing but helpful and supportive! You put up with me and my friends when we were at our very worst, with all the property damage and chaos and stuff! You let me help even though I’m a disaster with fashion and frankly not the best at customer service! You give and give and give and never stop giving and I never give anything back! I’m… I’m a burden, I’m a leech, and I have been trying to be better, to be less of a burden, to clean more. I wanted… I wanted… I wanted… maybe at least once, maybe one time, I could do something nice for you!”

“So… sneaking off into the forest to watch cooking tutorials? And burying the mistakes in my garden?”

There must have been something in Rarity’s tone, some hint of amusement, that brought Sweetie up short. She pulled away from the hug, looking up at her sister with tear-filled eyes.

“I… well… it… seemed like a good idea when I talked it over with the girls.”

Ah. The great ongoing epitaph of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Rarity was helpless to the laughter that bubbled out of her throat, even as she crushed her sister against her with another tight hug.

“Sweetie, you have a way of overthinking things, don’t you?” Rarity said with a laugh. “Did you really need to go to this much trouble?”

“Applebloom says I make mountains out of molehills,” she said. “And… well, I kinda did. I don’t think you have the budget to rebuild your kitchen again.”

Sweetie grunted as she was hugged again.

“No, I don’t. And you’re very considerate. But in secret? And burying the mistakes in my garden?”

“I wanted it to be a surprise?”

Now there must have been something in Rarity’s expression, because Sweetie burst into her own laughter after that. The sisters sat, on Rarity’s doorstep, half-dirty and (at least in Sweetie’s case) tearstained, and laughed at the absurdity of it all.

“Very well. Consider me quite surprised. But we will come up with a better plan for all this, a better, perhaps safer and more convenient place for you to practice your cooking skills.

“Okay.” Sweetie sniffed, and wiped her muzzle on the towel. Rarity tried not to flinch, and failed. “Okay, yeah. That’d be nice. Maybe it’d be easier that way. Cooking rice is really hard.”

Rarity was, somehow, able to keep her opinion to herself on that subject.