//------------------------------// // Chapter 2 - Scootaloo's bottle // Story: One or the Other // by Blind Alley //------------------------------// I blindly swatted at the alarm clock ringing away next to my bed. After a few false swings I finally hit the trigger and shut the thing up. I groaned into my pillow as the sounds of activity outside nagged at my ears juuust enough to keep me from drifting off again. Flattening them back helped but it was too little too late. I gradually pushed myself up onto my knees and elbows, letting my wings hang down along with the sheet draped over me from over the top of my head to my ankles. I really, really wanted to just faceplant right back down but I needed to get up if I was gonna meet Sweetie and Apple Bloom for lunch. I shifted myself around until I was sitting on the side of my bed, legs hanging over the side and sheet still draped over my head. Two years ago I would have already been out the window and flying. Recently I had to drag my naked rump out of bed every morning through sheer force of will. That's when I was waking up in the morning, anyway. The weather team works when the weather schedule says we work, day or night. Throw in random wild weather trying to sneak out of the Everfree every once in a while and you can kiss a regular sleep schedule goodbye. The really sucky part was that everypony else who sees us napping all the time thinks we're being lazy! Rainbow Dash used to make it look so easy. Of course… that may not have been the only thing that's been dragging me down. I threw off the sheet and finally opened my eyes to the same messy bedroom as always. Same laundry pile, same overflowing waste basket, same dusty old carpet, same old posters, same desk covered in receipts and bills, all around the same empty bed jammed into the same corner. Ever since I got my own apartment cleaning had stopped being any kind of priority. It's not like I was going to be bringing anypony home with me anytime soon. Not with my stupid luck. After a few minutes of rubbing my eyes and seriously debating blowing off lunch I finally dragged myself out of bed to stretch. I usually kept enough clear space on my floor to do my morning routine by kicking the laundry pile back into its corner where it belongs. At the very least I never skip my hamstring stretches. When you fly a lot there's a tendency to keep your legs a little bent, not to mention that you're just not walking as much, so you gotta stretch to stay loose. Plus, whenever we do a sleepover I catch Sweetie Belle checking me out when I do them. Especially the one where I cross one ankle over the other and bend waaay over. Not that she seems to notice me checking HER out. Or flirting with her. I get that Apple Bloom is probably just straight but I know I've seen Sweetie checking me (and Apple Bloom) out. Sometimes I could swear Apple Bloom was too, but that was probably just wishful thinking. It didn't stop me wishing, though. I could wish about her all day long. And I did, her and Sweetie both. I grumbled to myself while I reached down first one leg, then the other, keeping my wings extended and my tail high for maximum stretch. They have no idea what they do to me. What they've been doing to me for years now; ever since Sweetie had come home from that family vacation when we were sixteen. She'd only been gone for a month and a half so it couldn't actually have been as big a deal as my stupid brain made it seem like at the time. She was still Sweetie, still one of my absolute best friends, but she was just-- I felt like I couldn't breathe when I saw her. When she came in for the big Crusader-style hug all I could do was stand there and let it happen. That night I laid in bed on my back with my wings all splayed out, replaying it over and over in my head. She had just been so… stunning. I don't know if she'd somehow filled out to some magic tipping point or if I was the one who'd changed in my head but after that nothing had been the same. Not for me, anyway. She still does it to me, too. Whenever I go to the boutique and see her modeling something for Rarity she knocks the wind out of me. Sweet Celestia, the rack on that filly-- er, mare. She's eighteen now, after all. Eighteen and finally old enough that I can make a real move without getting in trouble. Okay, without getting in trouble with the law, family members are another story. I did NOT want to get on Rarity's bad side. Either Sweetie would say yes and confirm everything I was hoping for… or she'd shoot me down and I'd have ruined our friendship, the Crusaders, and maybe my life. …But that rack, though. And her legs. And hips and, well, everything else, too. I dropped down and braced my wings against the floor, tucked in my arms against my chest, and balanced on my toes for some wing-ups. This is one of the exercises I hate most. It's important for stunt flying because it works a few muscles that are hard to develop safely in the air without pulling something but anything that makes me have to think about or touch my chest sucks. “…seven, eight, nine, ten…” It's not so bad when I'm working out with clothes on because my binder keeps my stupid, ugly, lumpy, squashed-looking boobs out of sight and out of mind. It used to be that I pretty much never took my binders off but after most of them wore out I couldn't get away with that anymore without having to wash the only one I had left every day. It's wearing out too but it still does the job and keeps the stupid things flat, like they should have stayed in the first place. “…sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.” I got up and flapped my wings a couple of times to shake off the dust then picked my way over the trash patch to the chin-up bar braced in the door by the foot of my bed and started doing a set. Now this was something that Apple Bloom could kick my tail at any day of the week. She was, like, five or six inches taller than me and almost double my weight with all those curves and that dense earth pony muscle, but she could do a hundred chin-ups and barely break a sweat. “…four, five, six…” She can beat me at almost anything about pure strength. Hay, I've seen her do a hundred one-armed push-ups with a bushel of apples on her back for a bet. I lost five bits but it was worth it just to watch. She may not have gotten into rodeos like her sister but she sure seems to enjoy working on her strength. I like to swing by Sweet Apple Acres and hang out while she works sometimes just so I can watch. “…eleven, twelve, thirteen…” Apple Bloom never notices, either. I've run into Sweetie there sometimes and I swear she's doing the same thing but Apple Bloom is totally clueless. It's like she doesn't even get that she's hot. Or maybe she's just too straight to notice her completely gay and possibly gay (if I'm lucky) friends drooling over her. Thank Celestia that Big Mac had never noticed. They'd have to scrape me off the ground with a spatula. “…nineteen, twenty.” I dropped off the bar and did a big, back arching stretch with my arms up over my head as far as I could reach. A few pops in my back and a sigh of relief later I relaxed. That routine was really just a warm-up but it was good for waking up. I was still tired but I'd be good once I had my shower. I needed to be because Sweetie's birthday party was tonight. Not her real birthday party, we had that on her birthday with all her family and other friends, this was her “Crusader Birthday Party”. Just me, her, and Apple Bloom, celebrating that she was finally eighteen like us. Finally eighteen. Finally available and, as far as I or anypony else knows, still single. That meant it was time for me to finally do something about it. I made my way over to my dresser. A little digging through the clothes I'd actually put away at some point and I pulled out my “plan”, all one-eighth of a bottle of it, donated from Rainbow's kitchen over half a year ago. The moment I'd turned eighteen Rainbow had brought me up to her house and sat me down to have a mare-to-mare talk about drinking. “Everypony else is gonna say 'don't' and 'wait 'til you're twenty-one',” she'd said, “but... Look, let's face it, squirt, you're gonna do it sooner or later whether you're supposed to or not. So I'm gonna tell you how to do it right.” I'd listened closely while Rainbow Dash explained the ups and downs of adult drinks. What to drink, what wasn't worth the bits, how to avoid a hangover, how to handle the hangover when you messed up the avoiding part, everything. But the part that really stuck with me what was she told me about getting drunk. “All you really need for a good time with your friends is enough to break the ice. Get everypony to loosen up a little and take the sticks out of their rumps. Trust me, having one of your friends puke on you is not cool and puking on your friends even less cool. You don't wanna be that mare. Juuust… trust me on that one, kiddo. Point is, if you can't have fun with your friends with just a little of this stuff then it isn't the drinks. You either need cooler friends, or to be a cooler friend. Besides, where's the fun in a party you don't remember?” There was probably “just enough” right here. Just enough to get my friends, the coolest friends ever, to loosen up. Maybe enough to get them to “mess around” a little if either of them actually wanted to. After all, we're the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Doing crazy stuff is our thing. All I'd have to do was pull out the bottle and they'd go for it. It'd be so easy. I mean, I'd never had the guts to try it but… well, that was different. Dash had just given me this almost empty bottle and told me I'd know when I was ready. I don't know why but that made me more uncomfortable about drinking it than if I'd swiped it or something. Maybe that was why she did it. I stared at the bottle for a long time. Eventually, I carried it into the bathroom and stopped to look into the mirror over the sink with it still in hand. Slowly, I unscrewed the cap, turned the bottle over, and kept it that way until the last drop swirled away down the drain. "If your friends only wanna hang with you when you're bringing the drinks then they aren't really your friends.” I took the bottle out into my bedroom and stuffed it back in my drawer to throw away later. Not wanting to waste any more time, I went back to the bathroom so I could shower and beat my head against the wall because I was already regretting doing the right thing and was probably going to regret it even more when the party wrapped up and left me frustrated and alone afterward. Just like that stupid beach trip last summer. Being eighteen sucks.