Played on Strings

by Sixes_And_Sevens


It Won't Be Long

It was only half an hour before curtain when Harpo finally showed up. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Beauty snarked. “Where’ve you been all this time, then?”
Octavia gave the harpist a rather more concerned once-over. “Harps, mate, you look like shit. What happened to you?”
Harpo, dripping wet and shivering, gave no response. He didn’t even meet their gaze, just headed over to the refreshment table and poured out a libation of whiskey. This he knocked back before settling down on the floor.
“...Harpo?” Octavia asked.
“Towel,” he said flatly.
“Er… I’ll check round for one,” Fred said, hurrying off.
Harpo barely acknowledged this, instead reaching up to undo his bow tie. He tossed it and his collar aside before pouring himself another whiskey.
“Harpo, mate,” Octavia implored. “There’s something wrong here. Tell us what’s been happening?”
Harpo took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well,” he said. “‘M not exactly sure, to be honest with you. I wasn’t -- I almost didn’t come?”
Beauty opened her mouth, her face tight and angry, and Harpo hurried to explain. “It was like, I really felt like I shouldn’t, you know? Like I’d be walking into something I couldn’t walk back out of.”
Beauty closed her mouth, her eyes suddenly abstracted. “I think I know what you mean,” she said. “It’s that pit in your stomach, innit. Like you’re about to do a drop on a roller coaster.”
Harpo nodded. “Yeah. Just like that. So there was that, and I reckon… I wanted to throw my weight around a bit. Show that you couldn’t do it without me. Show myself that I matter.”
“You been feeling like you don’t matter, Harpo?” Octavia asked.
“I… yeah. A bit,” he admitted. “Quite a bit, actually. That bloke I mentioned on the train -- he kept standing me up. Tried to go on three dates with him, and he flaked out every time.”
“Like when I was first tryin’ to court Vinyl…” Octavia murmured, rubbing her chin.
“And then, at the beach, Minor fed me a bunch of lines about how I was always fifth-wheeling and always looked alone,” Harpo said. “Made me feel like you lot didn’t care about me. Tartarus -- he made me feel like I didn’t care about all of you.”
Fred trotted back into the room. “Found one!” he said triumphantly, setting the towel down at Harpo’s side. He paused for a moment, studying his bandmate intently. “...Not sure you actually need it now, though.”
“Huh?” Harpo looked down at himself. The dirty water had vanished without a trace, leaving his coat clean and dry.
There was a moment of silence. “I don’t like this,” Beauty said. Harpo, what made you come here after all if you were so worried?”
“Well, I --”
The door swung open again, and Tapper swept in. “Harpo, you’re here at last. Not a moment too soon, either, you’re on in five.”
“What?” Harpo squawked. “I’ve not even had a chance to warm up yet!”
Octavia glanced around the room. “The way things are going,” she said, “I’m not sure that’s much going to matter.”


The ‘waiting room’, as Rita termed it, was a far cry from anything that would normally be in a hospital -- at the very least, not one that was remotely concerned with safe biomedical waste disposal. The chairs were chintzy and covered in a pattern of flowering vines. Romana had rolled her eyes when she had seen them and muttered something about the Faction going out of their way to break every Gallifreyan taboo, but Vinyl clung to them as an isle of sanity in a sea of terror. The walls were lined with monitors and cameras, showing scenes from all across Gaea. Each one was bordered by strange sigils in what Vinyl desperately hoped was brown paint. Most seemed to be showing movies of Octavia and her bandmates, but they were far from the only creatures shown -- from yaks to dragons to diamond dogs, Vinyl could see practically every sapient species she could think of depicted.
Then, of course, there were the bones. They were piled everywhere, arranged artfully into cairns. Objects sat before them like offerings -- drumsticks, guitar picks, LPs, strange silvery discs that Vinyl had never seen before, and more.
Romana and Vinyl sat on a couch, huddled together for the false sense of protection that it offered. Rita sat in the chair across from them, content as a spider in her web. “Can I offer you anything?” she asked. “Tea? Coffee?”
“Answers would be nice,” Vinyl said flatly.
Rita clucked her tongue. “Really. I try to be a good host, and for what?”
“Very well,” Romana said. “I’ll have some tea.”
“No, no, clearly you both want to cut straight to the chase,” Rita said, leaning back in her chair. “Very well. Ask away.”
“What are you doing to my wife?” Vinyl demanded.
A hint of a smile flickered beneath Rita’s mask. “Well, I suppose you could say that we’re providing… guidance. Isn’t that what everyone wants, really? To know exactly what they’re doing and where they’re going?”
Romana snorted. “That sounds an awful lot like predeterminism for a Faction agent,” she said. “And if I may say, it does seem quite banal for the Faction to bother with something like the music industry, especially if you’re only going to try and recreate something from Earth’s history.”
“You think you understand us?” Rita leaned forward. “You, in your glass boxes and ivory towers? You grew up so comfortable and controlled in your little bubble of the Homeworld. This is just a test run. See where it goes off the rails, find where the culture of this world diverges from what we’re familiar with. Wind it up like a toy car, let it smash against the wall, pick through the wreckage and find out exactly how it exploded.”
“I don’t get it,” Vinyl said.
“There was this band, back in our universe,” Romana explained. “Called the Beatles, very popular --”
“Beatlemania,” Rita said, savoring the taste of the syllables. “You couldn’t possibly imagine it, Vinyl, but try -- a whole world gone mad with desire, swept away in the zeitgeist. Stadium shows thousands strong, filled with screaming fans. Record deals, films, drugs, conspiracy theories, a murder or two, an oppressive and paranoid surveillance state mentality increasingly trained against them -- and in the middle of it all, four men who defined and were defined by the zeitgeist. It was truly the perfect storm.”
“They were fine,” Romana said. “I liked a few of their songs, I suppose.”
“Tell me, Madame President -- do you think it a good idea to try and antagonize me?” Rita asked lightly.
“I’m not the president of anything,” Romana said. “I never have been.”
“But you know that you could have been,” Rita mused. “That you were, down the other track of time. Does it ever bother you? Those sliding doors, missed connections…”
Romana’s jaw flexed ever so slightly.
“Hey, yeah, still here,” Vinyl said. “Can we get back to my wife? We’ve covered the what, and I guess… the why? But, like… what’s going to happen to her?” 
“She’ll live out the life of a rock star,” Rita said. “One in particular, really. Things will change. She’ll have to have never met you, for a start -- a little tricky to do retroactively, but not all that difficult.”
“Excuse me?” Vinyl said.
“You’re an outsider,” Rita replied dismissively. “Not part of the story. We might be able to tool you in as her first wife, but it would really be easiest just to retcon your relationship away.”
Vinyl could scarcely hear anything as Rita rabbled on, not over the blood rushing in her ears. Nearly two decades of marriage -- more than that of courting -- and this mare was talking about wiping it away like chalk. She forced her anger down. She couldn’t so much as touch Rita here, surrounded by shadow and bone. Learning more about her plans and hoping to derail them later would have to do.
“It’s a matter of ritual importance, really,” Rita was saying. “Your Octavia really shouldn’t have slipped out of alignment. The others are important too, naturally. The group wouldn’t be complete without all four. But in the end, it’s a matter of blood.”
“...Whose blood?” Vinyl asked.
“John Lennon’s, originally,” Rita replied. “Played, in this reality, by your wife. Ritually, it’s a very powerful ending, an assassination. None of the others had nearly such monumental finales. Well, unless you count Original Paul, but that whole thing was really more for shits and giggles than any special ritual purpose.”
“Assassination?” Vinyl repeated, incredulous. “Who the fuck would want to assassinate ‘Tavi? She’s… okay, she does have a knack for ticking ponies off, but that’s nothing anypony would kill her for!”
“Nopony. Yet. That’s still some way off in the future, and the details tend to work themselves out with this kind of thing. I imagine the inevitable backlash of tradition against the growing countercultural movement will be more than enough to produce a nice little assassin. Perhaps we can find a McCarthy to install in the government to really push against their ‘anti-Equestrian values’. Then the movement will have a martyr, and Equestria’s culture will skip the tracks onto an entirely different course.”
“And Octavia is… what, just collateral to you?” Vinyl demanded. “My planet is just some big experiment to you?”
“‘Experiment’ might be a strong word,” Rita mused. “I prefer to see it as a canvas.”
Vinyl’s face was getting redder by the second. Romana placed a hoof on her withers, warningly. “So,” she said, turning to face Rita. “You said there was a way we’d get out of this alive.”
“Indeed. My agent on the ground has gone rogue and risks jeopardizing my plans. He’s shielded himself against my most effective weapons, and therefore I need you to destroy him.”
Vinyl folded her hooves over her chest. “And why would we do that?” she demanded. “If he’s working against you, he sounds pretty alright to me.”
“As I said, there is the small matter of your lives being on the line,” Rita said. “What’s more, while I don’t know what he’s planning, I have reason to suspect that his schemes will have much more fallout than the fate of a few musicians.”
Romana leaned forward. “Exactly what makes you say that?”
For the first time, Rita hesitated. “He… hm. Well, let’s say that he isn’t exactly from around here, shall we? He made a deal with the Faction for the loan of his soul. We’ve been repaying him slowly ever since, but it has taken a toll on him.”
“His ‘soul’,” Romana said, leaning back in her chair, eyes lidded. “What’s that code for, exactly?”
“Memories,” Rita replied, her voice light. “Emotion, a certain amount of free will; the animating spark, if you will. I’ve been keeping him on a drip, addicted to his own past, but it would appear that some other power’s gotten their hooks in him.”
“What power?” Romana asked.
“Unclear. I suspect it’s tied to whatever you saw in that closet of his…?” She looked at Vinyl expectantly.
Vinyl just glared back at her. Rita huffed. “Look at it this way,” she said. “In my plan, Octavia stays alive for decades more. In Keys’... her lifespan, and that of the world, is likely to be far less generous.”
Vinyl took in a long, slow breath and let it out. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll work with you to get rid of Minor.”
“...And after that?” Rita asked.
“Then I’m coming for you,” Vinyl said. “And don’t try the shadow sword shit on me now, not when you just said you needed me.”
“Strictly speaking, you’re just an annoying attachment to securing her help,” Rita said, nodding to Romana. “But you are, unfortunately, largely correct. And you do have some useful information on the nature of Keys’ new master…” She trailed off, looking at Vinyl once again.
“Yeah. I do,” Vinyl said. 
Rita sighed. “Very well. Keep your secrets,” she said dismissively. “I’ll let you take your Ship back, so long as you allow me to tow it. Nothing personal, you understand -- I only wish to ensure that there will be no funny business.”
“Of course,” Romana said. “Shall we go?”
“...Not quite yet,” Rita replied, rising from her chair. “I want to ensure that you won’t run out on me at the first opportunity. So, I propose a little… insurance.”
“Such as?” Romana asked, leaning away from the skull-masked mare.
“An oath,” Rita said. “Sworn in blood.”
“No chance,” Vinyl said, crossing her hooves. “I’m not about to put my blood in your hooves after what you just said about Keys, not to mention the whole lab setup upstairs.”
“I assure you, this will be a wholly temporary arrangement,” Rita said, producing a small blade from her sleeve.
“I’m gonna need a little more than that to go on, thanks,” Vinyl said, rearing back.
“It will be a temporary merging of our biodata,” Rita said. “If any of us comes to harm, all of us will suffer for it.”
“In that case,” Romana said. “You really only need one of us to agree, don’t you? I wouldn’t do anything that would hurt Vinyl, and I don’t believe she’d do anything to hurt me.”
Rita tilted her head. “How very bold of you,” she mused. “Very well, I can accept those conditions.”
“And once Keys is out of the picture, you’ll break the bond?” Romana asked.
Rita wrinkled her snout. “Of course. I know your reputation for danger well enough, I don’t intend to risk my skin any longer than I need to.”
“Then it’s a deal,” Romana said, extending a hoof.
Rita laid the blade along Romana’s leg and made a slight incision. To her credit, Romana scarcely flinched.
Having done that, Rita took the bloodied blade and made an identical incision along her own leg. For a moment, the knife glowed a dull red. When it faded, the blood was gone, but the clear stone at the end of the hilt had turned into a blood-red bead. Rita plucked the stone off the end of the knife and affixed it to the front of her dress.
Romana inspected her leg. The wound had already healed, as though it had never been there at all. “Very good,” she said. “Are you now satisfied?”
“I believe I am,” Rita replied, tucking the blade away once more. “Let us away.”


Rita had parked her… time machine next to the TARDIS. At least, Vinyl assumed it was a time machine. It looked like some kind of mausoleum made of bones. The skull-masked mare waved a hoof just above the surface of the box, and a set of rib bones swung silently apart like doors. Vinyl barely repressed a shudder, and she noticed that Romana’s mouth was tight and drawn. “Come on,” the Time Lady said, opening the doors of the TARDIS. “Let’s get out of here.”
The homey light and warmth of the console room was almost blinding after the dim red light of the parallel Liverypool, so much so that Vinyl had to put her sunglasses back down to keep from cringing away. But the hum of the ship was a rock she could cling to, and she sank down in the nearest corner, trying not to hyperventilate. Romana stood at the console, seemingly waiting for something.
“Shouldn’t you be flying us out?” Vinyl asked. 
“We’re getting towed, remember?” Romana replied, something bitter in her tone. 
“Oh. Right.” Vinyl hesitated. “So, who exactly are these guys? The Faction Paradox?”
“Temporal criminals of the first order,” Romana said shortly. “They work to destroy all sense of rationality and reason in time and replace it with gaudy paradox.”
Something on the console dinged, and Romana pulled down a lever. There was a thud, followed by a sort of pulling sensation, though the time rotors remained unmoving. “They’re reactionaries against all Time Lord society, and while I can certainly understand that as a motive, I cannot agree with their methods.”
Vinyl let out a long breath. “So… when she said she could erase my life with Octavia.”
Romana froze. “Yes,” she admitted after a long moment. “She could. And I have no doubt that she will.”
Vinyl stifled a sob. “If we let her,” Romana said. “And I promise you -- we won’t.”
“I just -- I can’t. I don’t think I could go on,” Vinyl said. “She drives me nuts sometimes, but I literally can’t imagine life without her.”
“You won’t have to,” Romana said, face hard. “You won’t have to.”


Even through the thick canvas curtain of the stage, the Krikkits could hear the cheers of the crowd.
“Hear that?” Fred asked. “They’re chanting our names.”
“Where’d they even learn our names?” Beauty demanded. “We’ve had gigs where the bloody heads of the theater only knew us as ‘Oi, you’.”
“We’d better live up to expectations,” Harpo said. “They sound hungry.”
“I don’t reckon that’s gonna be a problem,” Octavia said. “They’re too loud to hear us as it is.”
A stagehoof waved at them, signaling ten seconds until curtain’s rise. Tapper raised her baton. Octavia shifted uncomfortably on her hooves, leaning into the microphone.
“Stallions, gentlemares, and friends beyond the binary!” the emcee called, their voice echoing through the speakers and reverberating strangely. Harpo’s strings began to hum in resonance. “Tonight, I am pleased to present -- The Krikkits!”
The curtain rose, and glittering golden light shone across the stage. If the roar of the crowd had been hungry before, it was primal now, a cry of joy and wonder and rage and lust and ravenous hunger indeed.
Octavia stared out with a stage fright like she’d never felt before. Somehow, she couldn’t quite communicate that to her relaxed and smiling face. Her hoof rose, independent of her will, to wave to the crowd, and the cheers rose to a deafening degree. She waved her hoof down to quiet them, and they faded to a dull roar. “Good evening,” she said, and the noise shot up again.
“Ah, we are the Krikkits,” she said when the thrill had abated slightly. “And to kick things off tonight, we’re going to play for you -- Meant to Be!”
As the roars rose again, Tapper counted off the beats and Octavia began strumming out a pizzicato melody.

Ooh, now girl, you’re my only one,
That’s all I have to say
Let’s go out and have some fun,
I’ll turn your night to day!


Tell me that you love me,
And I’ll tell you the same.
Together we can shine like shooting stars
Love that can’t be tamed.


Let’s get together
Hold forever
Just the two of us, babe,
We were meant to be!
We were meant to be!


There is another me, girl,
Hiding in my skin.
Open up the door, babe,
Let my love pour in.


We’ve only this one life, love
So why not go and live?
Take a chance on me, babe,
And all I’ve got I’ll give!


Let’s get together
Hold forever
Just the two of us, babe,
We were meant to be!
We were meant to be!
Just you and me!
We’re meant to be!

The rest of the concert was washed away as Octavia’s mind was subsumed into the roar of the crowd and the golden light.


Octavia’s vision swam as she stumbled up the stairs, and her brain was fluffy like candyfloss, and seemed just as prone to melting away.
Flashes of memory burst in her mind and faded just as quickly -- songs and applause, laughter and jibes, a screaming wave that tried to wash over the entire band --
“Have a nice night now,” said the policemare, walking away.
Had they been arrested? No. Protected? Octavia swayed on her hooves as images of screaming fans echoed in her head. 
The others still seemed out of it. Their manes were rumpled as they smiled and bumped against one another, celebrating a good night’s work. Octavia was tempted to say that their stares were empty, but that wasn’t true; it was only that the things staring out from their eyes weren’t her friends.
She said nothing. There was nothing to say, not here and not now. The memory of song after song being pulled from her lips like tissues from a box rippled through her mind, and she clamped her lips even tighter together as they all made their way up the stairs. She could almost feel the songs swirling in her mouth like toothpaste, trying to dribble out around the edges.
Octavia all but fell into bed, and was asleep before her head could hit the pillow. Her rest, however, was anything but peaceful.


Octavia woke with a start and fumbled for an alarm clock she didn’t remember setting. She groaned and rolled out of bed. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was, the carpet unfamiliar beneath her hooves. But this was her room, the one she shared with… her wife. Yes. It was perfectly normal not to remember your wife’s name first thing in the morning.
Octavia hauled herself to the bathroom and glared at the mirror as she dragged her comb through her mane. Satisfied with that, she headed downstairs for breakfast.
Her tea and toast was already sitting out for her. “Good morning!” she heard her… wife? call from the next room. “How are we today?”
Octavia gave an incoherent grunt and took a sip of tea. “You’d better hurry up,” her wife continued. “You’ll be late.”
“I only woke up!” Octavia griped, glancing at the clock. She blinked several times. Indeed, somehow nearly two hours had already passed. “Shit.”
She chugged her tea and picked up her toast in her teeth, barely pausing to grab her hat and coat before racing to get to the bus.
The bus itself was crowded today, and Octavia had to squeeze to get a seat, managing to snag a newspaper in the process. She paused, noticing that her picture was on the front page. She tried to read the headline, but the words swam before her eyes.
Flipping through yielded no further results. There was some picture of a pony who she thought might be in the House of Lords, plus some kind of war film. At least, she presumed it was a film. She realized that she was humming as she walked up the steps to the studio. When had she gotten here? The world seemed flat and grey today, like set dressing. She pushed open the door to the studio and
She was falling, now. Shapes and colors, strings and music, all tangled around her, a nexus point in a kaleidoscope’s nightmare. She ran her bow across her string, her own limbs guided in turn by strings of their own, golden gossamer things that wove strange patterns and hummed stranger melodies. Octavia was humming along. She had been for quite some time now.
Her body warped and stretched under the pressure, turning colors it had never been meant to, psychedelic shades of blood leaking from wounds she couldn’t feel. She was big, bigger than any pony she’d ever met, bigger than Celestia. Maybe bigger than the world.
Was she falling now, or running? Her wife was pulling her along now, farther and deeper. “Honey?” Octavia asked. She hesitated. “Vinyl?”
“Who’s that?” her wife asked, turning just a little. Her face was a mask of comedy, grinning blindly out into the world. Octavia tried to pull back, but the golden strings were wrapped around their hooves.
The strings were getting louder, weaving over and around themselves, and still the laughing-masked mare pulled her on and on through the twisting, resonating golden threads that she could hear now in her bones, guiding her down the garden path to a home that was theirs (but not yet, not a home and not a them) as the strings grew louder and louder until she thought her head would explode --
And with the twang of one last bowstring and a brief flash of pain in her back, Octavia fell to the ground. Above her, the diamond starlight twinkled as though in applause.


Elsewhere in the house, Minor Key was sleeping no less fitfully.
His dreams were foggy, the details blurred and the faces obscured, but the memory ran through his mind like a half-remembered song.

“You’re sure about this?” one asked the other.
“Positive,” she replied. “It’s a potent artifact in fan culture. Two, really, if we find just the right…”
Her words blurred into obscurity. He was walking in a hall, tile clicking beneath his feet shoes hooves as he walked with purpose. His mind didn’t know where to go, but that was alright, his body was taking care of it. There were stalls that lined the hall, selling things that reminded him of other things, but the meaning of both was lost. Hats and pipes and magnifying glasses at one, art at another, figurines at a third, things that once had been signifiers but now were stripped of cultural significance.
If he turned his ear right, he could almost hear the faint straining of strings in the distance, growing closer as he walked along, among crowds of costumed people. He was costumed too. No, this is what he always wore. He didn’t normally wear clothes. Nopony did. But he wasn’t a pony. He had always been a pony. He was now not a pony, his forelimbs swinging at his side, his rear legs bending in a way he had never known as his distended muscles worked almost effortlessly to propel him forward on a meandering trajectory with a certain destination.
He stopped in front of one of the booths. The faces here were as blurry as ever, but there was something familiar about the obscuring. He had seen something, something he had wanted. The final piece.
“The final piece,” one of the attendants agreed.
“A real rarity,” the other noted. “Not a lot of Lovecraft cosplayers around, especially not as anything but Cthulhu.”
What an amazing coincidence, he thought, and the sellers laughed and took his money and handed it over. There was a stinging sensation on his wrist, a bead of blood welling up at the point of entry, but even as he saw it it seemed miles away. As though it were happening to someone else. As though it were happening to someone. Was he a someone?
The weight of the instrument settled in his hand. It had been new then, but now made familiar by years of use (how long had it been? Had this body ever been young?)
He tucked the violin of (mock?) bone and (painted?) sigils under his chin, experimentally running the bow across the strings, his body walking away from the booth, drawn inexorably forward by a tune now pulled from his body, twisting and turning in his soul and tangling itself up in it, yanked free from his chest like a string of handkerchieves and it hurt it hurt he fell to his knees tears flowing down his cheeks and splashing onto the bone of the instrument that he could not stop playing even in his agony as the floor seemed to give way beneath him all of the hall falling away into the fog as the melody crescendoed to a peak and
He knew no more.