Octavia makes a decent living as a trained musician, performing all across the country and keeping up the image of a proper mare. She shares a house with Vinyl Scratch, who she's known for years now. Yet despite all this, how normal—even banal—her life seems from the outside, she hides something that she feels she can't tell anypony about. How does she cope with this secret?
And can she get Vinyl to forgive her?
My submission for the WriteOff round titled, "Cutting Corners."
Cover art by TheParagon.
Chapters (1)
I get the reference, but I hope the story is like the movie, only good.
I'm curious, why the non-con tag?
Intriguing story, even if I feel like I'm missing something here. Hard to work with such an extended monologue like this.
10004028
I was unsure if an implied breach of consent was worth a tag, so I played it safe.
This was an experiment to see what I could do with a story that didn't show much and implied a lot. Also trying to write what amounts to a one-sided conversation and give it some kind of structure.
10004062
A successful experiment, I think.
Though, tbh, if the thing they're both dancing around involves a nonconsensual act, then this story suddenly gets wildly darker. It feels to me like there's a tangible difference between a garden variety "Octavia screwed up" and the sorts of actions noncon implies, in a way that maybe there's not a whole lot of coming back from, to the point where it's less about the silent treatment and more about whether they should still be in the same house together.
10004474
It's sort of a dilemma, because we never find out exactly what Octavia did that caused Vinyl to become like this. Similarly, what Vinyl says at the end is left up in the air. It's implied that Octavia broke Vinyl's trust in a way that would be considered more than minor, but I thought that getting more specific would run the risk of making Octavia too unsympathetic, or likewise making Vinyl's silent resistance seem like an overreaction. It's a situation that requires a very delicate balance, which I don't think I've reached yet.