☢★★ Vinyl Scratch ★★☢
Vinyl Scratch bashed against the door, grumbling. “I. Will. Have. My. Booze!” she grunted, bucking against the metal door, again and again, slamming into the door and making it twist and bend within its frame. Above, a broken sign Vinyl presumed to be some form of neon back-lit panel blinked. The glowing alien letters presumably spelled out “Full Liquor Bar”. At least, that was the fan theory she was out to confirm.
Why this one door was locked onboard a downed UFO, Vinyl had no idea, but she knew she needed her fix while her blood was hot. It was actually nostalgic.
She once wrote a song called “Self Destruct”. It was prior to the whole Zebra conflict, the War, even before the Ministries, and definitely way before she’d become a ghoul. It’d been a pet song she’d written and worked on silently for months. She premiered it at a rave and had finished off the fast-paced, resonating song that sounded like an endless percussive scream by smashing her DJ set and hitting her speakers with a sledgehammer. Then, standing above the sparking mass of equipment, she’s smirked, flipped her mane out of her sunglasses, grabbed a vodka shot, and downed it before walking outside to the rave party’s perplexed bewilderment, smirking all the way and eyes slightly watery from the song’s final moments. All the while she screamed on the inside as every last bit of the 1200 bit equipment set she’d destroyed in the finale cut at her finances and general sanity.
Walking out of the rave with a fortune lost and one of the best songs she’d ever performed unrecorded made her heart freeze in a timeless state, torn between the moment of realization of her art and the reality of her financial gouging. Sometimes, drinking brought her back to that horrifically sublime moment where she’d lived and died inside as an artist simultaneously to the sparking echo of the only song she’d ever refused to record.
With another buck, the door creaked and hissed open as some emergency system decided to do its job after eons of sitting unused. The door indeed led to a bar, just as the old TV show foretold. Vinyl, as was tradition, required something deeply alcoholic to kill a few brain cells because by Celestia, the recent fighting had her blood running and she needed a self-destructive fix. These days raves weren’t viable, but space vodka definitely was. Or at least, hopefully, was. Should such a thing be a thing that exists.
More crucially, thank goodness a second time for Canterlot Ghoul’s resilience. Because whatever was behind the bar, Vinyl was going to drink it. A lot of it. Maybe all of it.
Vinyl barged in and froze even as her ghoulish heart skipped multiple beats.
Vinyl, over the years, had regrets. Any ghoul who lived long enough did. Most left them behind because the tide of years ensured nothing escaped the Wasteland, and the only way to live was forward, otherwise, you choked in the radioactive dust of the past. And yet, one of her greatest regrets was right. There.
“Oh bother, I thought I had the door locked? Seems as if I’m doomed to not even enjoy a drink in peace… Also nice to see you out of that silly Exosuit, Lyra. But where did you find the glow stick you've smeared over your face? You do know those are toxic, yes?” the mare said with a rich, refined tone only found in old Canterlot families. The mare looked like her old friend, sounded like her, and…
This was happening. Octavia was behind the bar. Not just a mare that looked like Octavia, Octavia, her best friend, her BFF, her...love, was right. Fucking. There.
Discord delivered.
“O-Octavia?” Vinyl, for the first time in over a century of life, squeaked.
Octavia’s head snapped up, eyes going wide and nearly bloodshot in an instant. Vinyl couldn’t read her. She seemed to go through dozens of emotions in an instant before her face twisted into a very specifically readable expression. One which clearly said: “I am not dealing with people I don’t know so this is my polite please fuck off face”.
“I...I suppose I should have expected this,” Octavia muttered into a half-empty margarita. “I did take over the bar and you were bound to head this way...In retrospect, it’s beyond silly a UFO would even have a bar, but here we are. Vodka shot, right?” Octavia said as she trotted around the bar then stooped to search for drinking supplies.
Vinyl could barely nod, her voice lost to her. Her mind was still struggling between two facets of her life. Her best friend was dead. Yet her best friend was alive. Was this a clone? Was Octavia a ghoul? A robot? A robot ghoul? A robot ghoul made from a clone? Or maybe a ghost in an organic shell? That last one felt surprisingly plausible given Desi.
A dark part of her mind suggested the disturbingly probable theory that she had finally snapped like a feral ghoul and was currently huddled in some corner of a crumbling building, imagining the last few weeks.
“Shut up me,” Vinyl muttered to herself.
The key to staying sane was to push the darkness back. Constantly.
Somehow she found herself at the bar. Part of her wanted to jump over and hug Octavia, but the shock of the situation kept her still. Octavia finally found a set of shot glasses, poured Vinyl six shots (her usual), and slammed the last shot glass down in front of her. Vinyl started to unseal her helmet to drink, then paused.
“Uh… Do you have RadAway? This glow isn’t a glowstick. I’m pretty radioactive right now.”
Octavia didn’t react. Her face was still the resting polite face. Vinyl took this as a no.
“Okay. I’ll drink this outside in a bit then.” She murmured to herself.
“How?” Vinyl asked.
“I suppose I could ask you the same.”
“Ghoul,” Vinyl croaked.
Octavia waited a moment, before sighing. “I suppose that is an answer in this world, isn’t it?” Octavia said, leaning at the bar.
Vinyl found herself reaching for Octavia’s hooves. Octavia noticed and scooched further back behind the bar. Vinyl felt as if she’d been stabbed, worse than the times she’d actually been stabbed. This...this wasn’t right, and the sheer wrongness of Octavia’s act left Vinyl feeling just like the day she’d felt the bomb’s drop on her world with nothing she could do about it.
“I had many things to say to you, you know,” Octavia said, examining her own drink-wine, obviously, an eternal contrast to Vinyl’s vodka. “Some experiment kept us prisoner here for four years...four years stuck in one building with few other ponies. We couldn’t even look out the windows, you know. We just saw a gray mirrored nothing stretching to infinity. We couldn’t even tell the world around us burned, and I found myself in Hell,” Octavia said.
“Octavia,” Vinyl said.
“I’m not finished!” Octavia snapped, before adopting her resting polite face. “The green world I knew is gone. I couldn’t see outside, but I know what balefire does! The fillies and colts we’d bake snacks for when they played in our yard are all dead. Whatever’s out there is just scared and hungry ponies trying to find anything they can to survive. That’s this world! What echoes in my head, what stays with me, is a simple realization. You had a stable to go to,” Octavia said, and for the first time, she glared at Vinyl.
“What? The stable, it wasn’t-”
“Oh it clearly failed, given you’re here. Let me guess-the stable probably suffered a catastrophic breakdown for some idiotically inane and obtuse reason? It wouldn’t surprise me. The Cutiemark Crusaders ran that company, and when did they ever make anything that worked in the history of, well, ever! But the fact of the matter is we had a spat over our art,” Octavia said.
Vinyl remembered. They’d both worked in the Ministry of Image writing “Equestrian Heritage Musical Stylings”. Rarity had seen the need, then, to drive spirits up in Equestria, to remind ponies of their loyalties, and who the enemy was. Vinyl had complied, even agreed to an extent. Octavia had thought her art was disappearing into a well dug from hate. They’d argued. Then they split, given each other a month so no more horrible things were said. Then the bombs dropped.
“You had a plus one voucher for that stable, didn’t you?” Octavia mused, swirling the wine in her glass.
“Yes. I did,” Vinyl admitted, puzzling over what other answers there could be to why she hadn’t let Octavia go with her.
She’d needed space. That was all.
Vinyl felt like her blood was turning to ice as a horrible realization dawned. She couldn’t. She didn’t think that, did she?
“I can’t think of any other reason you went to that Stable right then when we weren’t talking. If I hadn’t talked with Lyra, then…” Octavia trailed off.
Then, with a scream, she threw her bottle of wine at the wall, splashing the contents over the silvery metal, the wine dripping down like blood. Vinyl flinched. Octavia breathed heavily through her nostrils then had her polite, cold smile on once more. “I may have some anger to work through, given what you chose,” Octavia said.
“It wasn’t like that, Octavia,” Vinyl said. “I bucked up. Okay? But I would never hurt you,” Vinyl said.
“Somehow I don’t believe that,” Octavia said, not looking at Vinyl.
“I went to the Stable, but it was part of a test run. Just to see if that stable would work at all… It had an AI Overmare. They wanted to be sure that it would work. After the bombs—”
“Dropped, ruining all Equestrian civilization and most civilization on this side of the planet. I once said Equestria was killing art, but this went further than I ever thought it would,” Octavia said.
“Truth be told, I don’t know if I want to believe you. You could be telling me the truth. You could be holding onto me as the last connection to your old life. I thought we had something, but...well, four years is a long time for me to think.”
“Over two centuries for me,” Vinyl managed to say.
Octavia frowned. “What?”
Vinyl sighed. “Lot to fill you in on… That silver bubble warped time inside it. Some MoA tech made from some ancient wizard’s toy gone wrong. It’s been about two hundred and ten years,” she summarized. “I— The important thing is the stable. I left. Broke the seal on the door after the bombs hit. I wanted to apologize, make up… Or bury you… Wound up like this instead.”
“True. Maybe the bombs fell at just the worst possible moment in our relationship. Maybe you did choose Equestria over me. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. But...what we had? I don’t think it exists anymore,” Octavia says, softly.
Vinyl felt wetness trailing down her cheeks, and realized she’s crying. She didn’t even know she could still do that.
“I...I can prove it to you,” Vinyl said, finally finding her strength even as her vision blurred. “I hurt you. I hurt myself, with beer—”
Octavia blinked once. “Beer?”
“Yeah! Couldn’t let everything in that brewery go to waste. Turns out ghouls don’t get drunk easy so after the twentieth gallon—”
“Uh… Wouldn’t that… rupture your stomach?”
“Well the skin and muscle, yes, but the stomach itself can stretch pretty goo—” Vinyl paused, looked up at Octavia’s horrified expression, and laughed half-heartedly. “Uh… Long story short, I’m almost indestructible. I was also cutting those with stimpacks because I ran out of Stampede. It’s… complicated. Where was I? Right! Beer, drugs, with my song, but I would never hurt you. Octavia...I can’t imagine what you’ve been through any more than you can me, but...please. This doesn’t have to be the end.”
“Perhaps,” Octavia said, looking at Vinyl in the same way an Old World store’s clerk might have looked at an annoying customer. “A year ago I might have tried strangling you. My anger burned hot enough I would have ripped my own hoof off if it meant a chance at hurting you. But that idea seems silly, pointless now. Maybe we both bucked up, but…” Octavia trailed off, sighing.
“We can talk after the present crisis… Lyra radioed something about the Enclave and a megaspell, I’m somewhat up to speed,” she added. “Neither of us is liable to live long if the Enclave has its way. That is the most I can promise,” Octavia said, walking out of the bar. She paused by Vinyl, and for a brief moment Vinyl thought Octavia was going to hug her, pat her, do anything, but nothing came. All she caught was a tear-streaked face as Octavia left the bar, and Vinyl to wallow in silence that dug into her.
Most of her heart ached, longing for Octavia’s forgiveness. The rest… The rest hoped if Stardrop did blow up the planet that she wouldn’t be floating in space for eternity.