//------------------------------// // [Side A] Vinyl Scratch: Silence and Motion // Story: Silence and Motion // by LysanderasD //------------------------------// Silence and Motion A My Little Pony fanfic by LysanderasD The first thought that crossed Vinyl Scratch's mind, when consciousness returned with all the subtlety of a piano dropped on her head from cloud height, was that whoever invented Stagner’s needed to be fed to a hydra. Oftentimes, in her more lucid moments, such as they were, she’d wondered if there was a way to make alcohol without the whole, you know, hangover bit. Surely there was a spell that would take the kick away. Well, there technically already was, but in that case it was more like forcing the hangover to move at a hundred times’ the speed it should have and... well, the pony usually came out worse for wear. No thanks. She tried to gather enough force of will to at least check herself over. Without moving. Or breathing, if she could help it. One, her head felt like it was shattered into exactly four-thousand, nine-hundred and forty two pieces, and her horn was absolutely on fire. Magic was out. Two, she felt stiff and sore and part of her was screaming move but she literally did not have the energy to even humor the thought, curled into a small shape, her legs tangled into a respectable imitation of a knot. Three, she was still encased in darkness. She was buried underneath a heavy comforter with a pillow planted over her eyes and very quickly she noticed, more by feel than anything else, that they were definitely not hers. Nothing she owned was this nice. Or smelled this good, for that matter. Although it didn’t really smell all that great anyway; she imagined that was because she’d been there all night. Well, buck it. She wasn’t in her own apartment. She hated waking up in somepony else’s apartment without sufficient explanation. Especially when she had a hangover. Buck hangovers. Buck last night. ... Yeah. Buck ‘em. The upside to hangovers was that she always had really really awesome hearing. Like, legit awesome. The downside was that as long as she was hung over anything louder than a pin drop made her head feel like it was being dunked in lava, or make her horn feel like it was being snapped off. She wasn’t sure which one would hurt more. She didn’t actually care, because she didn’t really want to quantify the pain that stabbed through her head when she heard a door open and somepony very delicately walk in. There were no thumps of hoof on wood. Okay, so the room had carpets. And she was definitely in somepony’s bed, not on a couch or anything. So it was somepony’s bedroom. That narrowed it down pretty far. She didn’t know very many ponies that would take her in for the night and then lend her their bed. Unless it was some weirdo stranger; you never knew who you were going to run into around Canterlot. Well, probably some snooty unicorn, because that described about ninety percent of the population. But other than that you could never really predict it. Something smelled good. Well, it smelled good up until the point where the scent ran up her sinuses and began poking at the back of her eyes. But if she ignored that it smelled pretty good. Omelette. Dandelion and...  pink rose petals. Who knew she liked pink roses? Only the cooks down at that one eatery on the south side of town and... She heard a plate being set down on an end table. Unlike the floor, the end table was made of wood, and the plate was made of glass, and the noise made her tremble, drawing her protesting body into a smaller shape. Buck hangovers! Vinyl felt the gentle tap of a hoof on her shoulder, through the comforter. She wasn’t sure if Octavia (and it had to be Octavia, because only Octavia knew that she really really enjoyed rose petals) could tell or not, buried as she was, but she tried to shake her head in protest, letting out a low, agonized-sounding grunt. Octavia poked her again, gently, but insistently. Vinyl Scratch was not hard to motivate; obviously Tavi was going to stand there and poke her until she got her way, so she might as well just give in now and spare herself the frustration. She moved her legs, rolling the comforter off of her body. Or... she tried to. Her mind told her legs to move. Her legs, however, decided to throw a hissy fit and cramp up in reply. Vinyl let out a whimper. There was silence and a lack of poking from Octavia for a second or two. Then the first of what she knew would be many exasperated sighs, and the bed rolled very slightly as Octavia placed her weight on it, using her mouth to pull the comforter up and over Vinyl’s still-protesting body. Her eyes, thankfully, were still covered by the pillow; all she knew was darkness and the pain split about evenly between her head and all four of her legs. Again, there was a pause. She could hear Octavia standing over her, probably looking down with that semi-irritated look that she always seemed to wear when dealing with Vinyl. Really, she couldn’t blame the Earth Pony. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. She wondered why the cellist kept pausing. Maybe she was trying to come up with some kind of witty snark over how pathetic she looked. It wouldn’t be the first time. Suddenly the pillow slid from her face. Still unable to move, Vinyl wrenched her eyes shut, prepared for the inevitable glare that... never... actually... came?... She opened one eye slowly, cautiously, and when she found that the room was still coated in darkness, or at least so dimly lit that everything seemed coated in grey, opened the other. She could make out Octavia standing over her, even see the ash-colored pony’s pale lilac eyes, a subtle frown on her muzzle. She grinned sheepishly. Octavia didn’t seem amused: she stood where she was, half-glaring down at Vinyl with that small not-quite frown on her face. Very carefully, the Earth Pony raised one hoof and braced herself on the bed, the other rising not long after, and Vinyl could feel it reaching up to wrap around the fetlock of her left foreleg. She knew what was coming, knew that it was for the best, but she was hungover and still tired and her whole body hurt so she tried whimpering one more time, putting on her best pity-face and staring pointedly at Octavia. The other mare looked back, her head tilted slightly, the half-angry expression on her face replaced now with one that told the DJ she knew that this was going to hurt and she was very sorry but it was better than letting her sit there with four very cramped legs. She pulled, insistently, probably not as gently as she should have. Vinyl let out a string of colorful vocabulary, most of which she probably wouldn’t have used under any other circumstances, because holy sweet Celestia that bucking hurt. Bucking hurt... She stumbled through the apartment's outer door blindly, uncoordinated and uncaring. She knew she was drunk, because the last thing she remembered was ordering one more bottle at the bar and the barcolt giving her a very pointed you’re-the-boss look but he slid it her way anyway. At some point between downing that bottle and now she had managed to decide to go home and had stumbled down the street, the only thing saving her dignity and possibly her life the fact that it happened to be late enough at night and early enough in the morning that not even the criminals were out. Not that she’d have remembered even if something had happened. The door was locked. For a while she’d tried turning the handle anyway, thinking that maybe she just hadn’t tried hard enough, but finally it crossed her mind to try keys. She’d gone through four when she finally remembered which one fit this particular door, but then it was a matter of seeing through her frustrated tears long enough to get it into the keyhole and by the time she was through the door she was bawling, stupid, foalish tears, really, but she didn’t care. She’d had a bad night. It had taken a good fifteen minutes of kicking and screaming and tinging the air blue for Octavia to get through stretching her legs out again. She didn’t hurt any more; well, her legs didn’t hurt any more. Her head still did, and it probably would for a few hours yet, but at least she could move. She didn’t want to move, because that would make her headache worse, but she could, and wasn’t it the thought that counted? She was still lying on the bed, her body creating a nice, conveniently Vinyl-sized and -shaped spot of warmth that she didn’t quite want to leave yet. She moved her legs, partly because Octavia had told her to and partly because she knew full well that if she didn’t they’d probably just cramp up again, and she was not going through that again, no ma’am. Octavia hadn’t left the room--her bedroom, Vinyl realized. Her own bedroom. Not the guest room. Though now that Vinyl thought about it, why did Octavia even have a guest room? It wasn’t like she ever got visitors, or at least the visitors she got never needed to spend the night. Except her. Even though she’d been trying to go home. But still, Octavia had sacrificed her own bed for her, when she’d done what she now assumed she had to have done, walking into the Earth Pony’s own apartment at some Celestia-awful time in the early morning, probably crying her eyes out. Vinyl wasn’t sure what to make of that. Currently the Earth Pony was in the process of cutting the omelette she’d brought in into tiny pieces. Vinyl had never understood that about her. Why did she have to put everything in tiny pieces? Didn’t that just make it harder to get it into your mouth? Oh, no, Celestia and Luna, no, now what was she doing...? Vinyl put on her skeptical face as Octavia held the business end of the fork out toward her, one of the annoyingly-precise small squares of omelette nestled very carefully on it. Her intent was very obvious. Vinyl had her pride, and she was not going to budge. No way. She could feed her own self, thank you very much, Miss Philharmonica. Octavia replied with her own skeptical face, before proceeding to turn around, dropping the fork back onto the plate as gently as she could, nudging the plate toward Vinyl, and glancing at her expectantly. Okay. Okay. She could do this. Challenge accepted, Miss I’m-So-Dextrous-Look-At-Me-Play-My-Cello. … Or was it a double bass? Buck it. She craned her neck forward, inching along the bed, trying to get her teeth to the plate so she could just... She had almost reached it when the strain of keeping her head up finally managed to send a memo to her headache, which realized it had been neglecting its duty and promptly split her head open. Whimpering, tears springing to her eyes, she let her head fall back to the pillow again. To her credit, and to Vinyl’s surprise, Octavia’s expression did not instantly spring to the smug, snakelike grin she usually wore when she had managed to prove Vinyl wrong, which happened far too often for her tastes. She was frowning, even, a kind of concerned, almost angry frown, before picking the fork up again and offering the bite to the DJ. Vinyl had her pride, and she knew when to budge. She was no amateur. Too often, she’d seen rookies doom their careers with their first set. A good DJ knows where to balance herself between aloof and active, between being an outside observer and being part of the crowd on the dance floor or the audience jammed up as close as they can get to the turntables, the speakers shaking the ground almost as much as the cheering and the stomping and the clapping. Rookies got too involved in their work, they focused too much on the music and not enough on the crowd. A DJ relies on the crowd. A DJ is nothing without the crowd. She knew the kind of expression the crowd wore, that she herself had worn a few times too many when watching some newbie set up his discs the first time, that meant ‘Buddy, you’re no good.’ There were other signs, of course; the crowd would move less, dance less, cheer less; the crowd would thin out, eventually, to nothing. A DJ is nothing without a crowd. She knew, then, she knew all too well, the expression on their faces as she set that new disc down on the table, that kind of subtle skepticism, that doubt, that... disinterest. And they were directing it at her. Just like last night. And the night before. Was she losing her touch? Was she really all washed up? Was that it? She felt uninspired, she felt depressed. The crowd was still there by the time she finished, but it was definitely smaller than when she’d started. Vinyl Scratch needed a drink. Octavia had left her alone after the omelette, carefully picking up the plate and walking out of the room. She’d left the door open, and Vinyl could hear her fussing around the kitchen, no doubt cleaning the plate and the stuff used to cook the omelette. It had been a very good omelette. She wasn’t about to tell Octavia that, though, not after she’d forced her to eat it from her fork like some... filly. It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t... oh, no, wait, yeah, it was. Well, damn. She wondered exactly what Tavi had put in it. More than she’d let on. Probably some magical herbal cure or something, because she was smart and knew about stuff like that. Must be an Earth Pony thing. What mattered was that Vinyl’s head hurt slightly less now; instead it felt fuzzy, lined with cotton. But that was better than what it had been. What she wanted to do was keep lying there, relaxing and resting and sleeping off the rest of this hangover. But along with a reduced headache had come the knowledge that yes, she was imposing on her best friend and this was still kind of Octavia’s bed and she should probably move. So what she actually did was roll onto her stomach, very slowly and carefully gathering her hooves underneath her without upsetting the sheets, because Octavia would literally split her head open if she messed up her sheets, the DJ finally managing to get to all four hooves. Octavia had kept the blinds shut, and she was grateful. Tremendously grateful, in fact. There were probably words bigger than tremendous that she didn’t know right now. Or maybe that she didn’t know at all. That was why the room was still dark, she found, and that was why the rest of the apartment wasn’t, a fact she found as she stepped out into the living room. She was there long enough to notice that the huge and expensive sound system that was almost always playing some ancient and dusty cello (bass?) piece was for once silent. Then she forced her eyes shut. Holy buck. Ow. Bucking hay. Blinking the spots away from her eyes, she turned away from the window and toward the windowless kitchen. This helped, but only marginally, because the kitchen, barring the cabinets and the dark grey shape of Octavia, was also very very bright. Part of her wanted to duck back into the bedroom, but she locked her knees, refusing to move. Well, she let out a yawn. But other than that she didn’t move. The noise was enough to make Octavia turn and notice her. When the Earth Pony found her, she had been reduced to a shaking, crying mess on the floor in the living room, because she had realized that this was not her living room and she’d just wandered into Octavia’s apartment in the middle of the night. Octavia was going to be so seriously bucking pissed off, and she’d yell, and scream, and Vinyl would feel like absolute horseapples, which she did already but this was just going to make it worse. Because that’s what she was. What she was. Worthless, wasn’t she? She wasn’t popular any more. She wasn’t the go-to DJ any more. Her time was over. She knew it. She bucking knew it, and there went her livelihood. There went everything. She’d be reduced to opening for two-bit bands and she’d be lucky if she managed to scrape together another album before Canterlot, before Equestria as a whole, just forgot she existed. But right now she was more worried about Octavia finding her and screaming at her about waking her up, and how she was an absolute mess, and how she was piss drunk and leaving tearstains all over the meticulously-cleaned carpet. She would most definitely not be coming up along side her, drawing her into a hug, and asking what was wrong. No, she wouldn’t, and that’s why it wasn’t happening, it wasn’t happening, it was... it was really happening. It was really happening. Octavia didn’t scream. Or yell. In fact, she cried too, when she saw how upset Vinyl was, when she’d finally managed to choke out some half-sensible explanation for what was going on, and then she’d just drawn her into a tighter hug, and she’d run her hoof through Vinyl’s mane just like her mother used to do and that made her think of her mother and their awful relationship and that just made her cry harder. The Earth Pony held her and stroked her mane and even as she sat there in the middle of her living room, shaking, sobbing, stinking of cheap beer, she cared. She countered all of Vinyl’s little self-deprecating insults with a compliment. No, Vinyl, you aren’t losing your touch, no, you’re just in a funk, you’ll get out of it, you always do. I’ve been where you are. I’ve been where you are. Sometimes the best musicians just need a little silence. Now come on, Vinyl, you need your rest. You’ll feel better in the morning. Once you get over the beer, anyway. Vinyl squinted over her shoulder, into the living room. The carpet looked freshly cleaned. She looked back to Octavia, her ears falling flat. The Earth Pony looked tired, now, she noticed. More tired than she should have been. Of course Vinyl had kind of interrupted her sleep, but... She opened her mouth, because she wanted to apologize, because she really had made an absolute mess of herself and Octavia had had to see her like that and she’d been a wreck and kind of made a mess and she’d made Octavia lose sleep and forced her to work harder and she was so sorry-- Octavia had drawn closer to her as she’d been contemplating the living room, close enough to reach up a hoof and close Vinyl’s mouth before she could make a sound. Then she stepped forward and laid her neck across the DJ’s. The hug took her by surprise. It took her a second to realize it was happening at all. It took her another second to return it, one hoof coming up to rest on the grey mare’s back. They stood like that for a few seconds, in complete silence. Octavia broke it first. Vinyl had known she would; the Earth Pony had never been one for intense physical contact. Which Vinyl thought was kind of weird for her race, but hay, ponies will be ponies. She stepped beyond the white unicorn, into the living room; Vinyl wanted to follow, but she knew her limits. Besides, she was still tired. She’d rather just lean up against this door frame and look at the dishwater. When Octavia returned, there was something in her mouth. Vinyl squinted, and Octavia tilted her head slightly and suddenly Vinyl’s world darkened and tinged violet. Her sunglasses. Octavia had gotten them for her. She didn’t even remember wearing them last night. But there was a lot she didn’t remember from last night. A lot she didn’t want to remember. The world looked different from behind her lenses. She saw things differently. Not just because things were darker and tinged purple, although that was a totally freaking awesome side effect. The world saw her differently when she wore them, and she looked back and smiled. The world always seemed to line up just right with these babies on. Just right. Everything would be fine. A beat began to play out in her head. One hoof gently tapped in rhythm. She tucked the track away in the back of her head, saved it for later. Right now... yeah. Right now was quiet time. Octavia walked past her again, into the living room. Her eyes protected, Vinyl could follow her, and she did, settling down onto the couch next to the grey mare. The couch was warm, but Octavia was warmer. Vinyl figured she’d probably hang around here a little while longer. Octavia certainly hadn’t voiced any complaints. Buck last night. … Yeah, buck it. Last night was noisy. Too much noise, really. She could barely think straight. Today was quiet. That was just fine with her. She probably needed it.