Trash.demo

by dfkingerperson

Dead Air

After Vinyl’s Sandwich had arrived and Octavia had watched her eat every bit of it, Octavia had gone to the counter to pay for lunch and promised to meet Vinyl tomorrow at 12 sharp. She put in no uncertain terms that if Vinyl wasn’t in her apartment when she came by, then she would be tracked down and some rather unpleasant acts would be performed on her person. Vinyl watched Octavia walk back to her loft on the other side of the city before realizing she had nothing to do. Or, rather, nothing she was willing to do. A few minutes of standing outside the veranda, being given strange looks by patrons, convinced her to start moving. She had nowhere to go, but after finally getting out of her apartment returning was… unappealing.

Vinyl felt uncomfortable as she walked. She had eaten more in one sitting then she usually got through in a day, but she hadn’t even felt hungry until she had started eating. She supposed she just hadn’t noticed how little she ate lately, her portions shrinking too gradually for her to notice. Even as bloated as she felt though she could feel more strength inside her than she had in ages. Was it psychological, talking to someone that wasn’t herself giving her clarity, or was it just the food making her feel so much sturdier? Either way, she doubted it would last very long. Eventually the lethargy would return, coiling around her like a snake, leaving her trapped on the ground wherever she fell.

Wandering aimlessly she squinted as the afternoon sun shone into her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been outside in the daytime without her shades. The streets seemed to have a weird unnatural tint to it, which she supposed was just a natural occurrence after wearing her purple shades for so long. Still, it was strange how different the world looked. It definitely wasn’t an improvement.

Ponies passed her on the street, going about their days. They all had somewhere to go, something to do, someone to be. A weak flare of jealousy went through her, but it disappeared just as fast. There wasn’t a point to it, and she couldn’t summon up any strength behind the emotion. Part of her wanted to be jealous, to hate the random people that passed her as she walked. It was back, she could tell. Less than an hour ago she had felt like the pony she remembered being, or at least a fraction of her. But it was slipping away. Back to being the fondly remembered past she couldn’t reach anymore.

Bumping into another pony jolted her out of her daydream, but with a mumbled apology and she was on her way again. She was slipping into a fugue state or something. Cycling through her own thoughts, circling down the drain until the only thing left was herself. And she couldn’t deal with herself. Not yet. So she stopped thinking.

Listening to the background noise of the City, letting her body fall into a natural rhythm, Vinyl’s mind shut down. She had never really understood what her father saw in the walks he had taken every evening, but if his had felt anything like this she could finally understand why he took them so often. She had walked with him sometimes when she was a kid, but had never felt anything other than boredom. Now though things started to filter away, fading into the background like they didn’t exist. As long as she didn’t think she also didn’t have to feel, or not feel, or anything. She could just be… nothing for a while.

It felt faintly like music used to make her feel. Nowhere near as good, but a faint reminder. Composing music used to make her feel calm when she was stressed, pumped her up when she was mopey, and made her feel happy when she was sad. She had always enjoyed the work, building a song from the ground up. Taking a beat or a rhythm that was stuck in her head and propagating it beyond its humble origins. Finding roadblocks or things that didn’t work and doggedly chipping away at the problem until the perfect solution appeared on the horizon. Refining the score from a rough piece of coal into a diamond. Sharpening her skills and learning something new every day. Even more than the playing live or seeing ponies dance to her tunes, she loved the act of making.

Now it was just gone. She couldn’t honestly say what it was, but the one thing she was certain of was that she didn’t have it anymore. She wasn’t sure if she had lost the skill, or if her muse had decided to go and off herself before she did (I like this sentence for some reason). Maybe she was just dried up creatively? Maybe she was just a fucking failure of an artist, giving up and making excuses. She couldn’t make anything anymore because that was who the new Vinyl Scratch was. A pony who cried in bathtubs and went crawling to her friend to bother her with stupid, shitty, bullshit, fucking problems. If she just accepted that it would be easier and she could finally just stop trying and getting hurt. She could be the brand new shit Vinyl, self-pity included. She could move out of the city and go home or just be a hermit and, and…

If she didn’t have her music, her cutie mark, her, her existence, then what good was she? She was just a pony shaped waste of space. An empty dump, useless and embarrassing. She stopped in the middle of the road.

The apathy had slid away to reveal the fears.

And the fears slid away to reveal the hate.

She had slipped up again. Gone from the almost bliss of nothing to the reality of her life. She bit her tongue and kept walking.
She noticed buildings getting smaller and squatter, alleys turning from cramped slits between buildings into small streets of their own. The cobblestones had turned into dirt roads beneath her hooves and Vinyl realized that she had walked into one of the lower neighborhoods of Canterlot. And not just any neighborhood but her neighborhood. Or, DJ PON3’s neighborhood at least. Her hooves had led her here automatically, tracing the routes she had walked religiously a few years before. She could already see the warehouse where the DJ had been born.

The drab stone building sat abandoned, graffiti lining its walls. No one was around and the fence encircling it had a rusted sign claiming it was scheduled for demolition soon. Of course it had been scheduled for demolition ‘soon’ for ten years. Thick chains surrounded the fence posts barring the gates. Vinyl looked at the old heavy lock and risked a small headache to use her magic to enter the four digit number code. Fiddling with the thing with her hooves almost never worked anyway. A quick yank that came with a sharp stab of pain in her temple and the tumbler came loose, the lock and chain hanging loosely.

The first time Vinyl had snuck into the warehouse she had run around the fence five times, trying to observe every angle and imagining the wildest parties and raves, with her leading them like a goddess of sound and feeling. Finally she had a found a rusted portion of the fence at the back and a few bucks later she had a hole big enough to wriggle through, if only barely. Back then, as she had explored the warehouse she never saw an abandoned building. She saw the future, ponies dancing and shaking in ecstasy, the lights strobing and the air alive with the sound of music.

DJ PON3 had made that happen, turned a stupid kids’ dream into actual tangible reality. She had spent weeks cleaning it up and piecing together a show, spending some of her precious savings on a cheap generator to put in the back to power her second-hand and makeshift equipment. Plastering posters all over the city, printing up a thousand for the first batch and roping her friends into passing them out. Ignoring attempts to temper her expectations, lower her goals to the ‘believable’, laughing and joking and telling them to just watch her.

For her very first show exactly nine ponies had showed up. By her next one it had shrunk to five. But it didn’t bother her, even when Octavia sarcastically commented on it, or when Lyra had tried to tiptoe around the issue out of perceived awkwardness. It was less important than the fact that she had been there and played, even if almost no one was there to listen.

Careful not to step on the occasional abandoned beer bottle she picked her way across the overgrown weeds and discarded trash. Up close the dilapidated nature of the place was easy to see. Honestly from the outside it was wonder the unpainted, rough building hadn’t collapsed already and saved the city the effort of demolishing it. She went to the big sliding doors in front of the warehouse, braced herself, and heaved. The wheels gave a loud squeak but rolled almost effortlessly, so smooth she stumbled to the ground when the expected resistance failed to appear.
Picking herself up she noted that at least the place hadn’t been abandoned abandoned once she had stopped coming. She didn’t really know how she felt about it, it having a life of its own once she has left. Pride would be the obvious emotion, that something she had made had survived her. It was a legacy of sorts, not the only one she could admit but maybe the most important. But it was darker than that, deeper. Another stab of emotion, hate again, against whichever pony had oiled the hinges. Had kept the party going once she had stopped. Had taken what she had thrown away. And then it faded again.

The warehouse had been jury-rigged over the years as more and more ponies had come through. Ponies had certain standards when it came to which dive they would hang out at, and working lights and decent airflow were the bare minimums. A surprisingly diverse clientele had eventually trickled in over the years though there were ebbs and flows, times when it was popular to be seen at DJ PON3’s shows and times when it was social suicide. Then it was retro and they were back, cheering like always.

She looked around at the empty room. The afternoon light filtered in from the boards that had fallen off the windows, illuminating the large floor of the warehouse. There was a pretty good generator in the back and she knew where the breakers to turn the lights on were at. At maximum capacity maybe a few hundred ponies could fit inside, though they would feel packed like canned food. She had never really experienced it before though. She was always on the stage.

She took in the view, the place that had once been the Queendom of DJ PON3 and the true home of Vinyl Scratch. She tried to imagine the parties she had seen, had controlled. But all she saw when she closed her eyes was darkness, and when she opened them the only thing there was a room, dwarfing her in its vast emptiness and daring her to fill it when it knew she couldn’t.

The rafters were probably the most dangerous section of the building, rickety and rusty, almost begging to fall down as soon you stepped on them. She had spent mornings up there exhausted and sore and happy, looking at the trash littering the empty room that she would have to pick up before she went home. She went to the far side of the room and began climbing the stairs, watching as the golden light filtered through the holes in it and let her see the dust float around.

Reaching the middle of the rafters she looked out over her former kingdom and saw it like it really was. An old abandoned building that she had, for a while, made into what she always saw it as. Her own starry-eyed dream had become reality because she was too stupid to realize it was impossible. Now, having played out her fantasy countless nights, it seemed even more dreamlike than before.

She laid down on the metal grille, not worrying about the rust that was sure to stain her coat and rolled over. She looked at the dilapidated ceiling and concluded that she was, in the end, just a shadow of her former self. God, it sounded so fucking cliché when she thought about it. Her life wasn’t a trashy novel. Except it was true and it apparently was. She could remember being confident, being completely undefeatable. She could remember what it was like, but for the life of her she couldn’t feel it. It was like trying to swim with no hooves, wriggling and drowning and getting nowhere.

The more she tried to get the old her back the angrier she got. Why the hell was this so hard? She just wanted to sink into a fantasy, not for long but for long enough. To be the good her again instead of the shitty knock-off. But no, she was stuck. In every way possible.

Vinyl sighed. “I’m fucked, aren’t I.”

Author's Note:

Thanks to Triangle Man and Blahmman2816 for prereading and a bit of editing. As always any criticisms or interesting thoughts are appreciated.

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