Chapter 1
For a single fleeting moment, the arc of the bottle’s path through the late-night sky brought it perfectly in sync with the full moon, the light refracting through the glass and forming rainbow auroras among the vapors still trapped inside. The two mares inside the fifth-floor penthouse of the Sea Spray Hotel weren’t quite in the mood to pay it much mind, but if they’d had the wherewithal to keep their eyes on the gently rotating object, they might have marveled at the brief yet beautiful collusion of natural beauty and equine inebriation.
As it happened, though, only one of the mares was even looking for the bottle—and given her current state, the most she could manage was to keep her wobbly gaze pointed in the general direction of the harbor across the street, where six seconds later the bottle splashed down with a barely audible spuh-loohk and vanished beneath the inky black waves.
“Son’uva... dammit!”
Defeated, the mare on the penthouse balcony slumped forward onto the railing, letting her hooves dangle out over the seaside boardwalk four stories below. For just a fraction of a second, her vision refocused, and her eyes darted towards the eighty-foot yacht anchored directly across from the hotel. Then the sea breeze blew back her hair and bent the floor back underneath her, and she slid back down inside the railing again. Her nose furrowed at the sound of somepony shouting in her direction.
“Celestia’s sake, Tavi, would you stoppit already?” the penthouse’s other occupant said, her voice muffled by her off-white hooves as she ground them against her eyes. “You’re gonna get us arrested.”
Octavia’s eyes narrowed and she stamped her hoof as she glared in the general direction of her friend. “Honor pre... recludes duty, Vinyl,” she said, gesturing with the same hoof at each of the three Vinyl Scratches staring back at her. “Duty demands sagrifices.”
Vinyl groaned again and fell back against the bed. She’d collapsed on it a little while ago, somewhere between Tavi’s second bottle of Mad Diamond Dog and her exposé about the lunar banishment conspiracy. “That was a sacrifice,” Octavia went on. “I sacrificed the bottle, and I got...”
Her forehoof fell to the ground and bounced off another empty bottle, one of several still scattered across the penthouse floor. She pushed it back and forth a few times as if considering its structural integrity, then let out a decisive sigh and gathered it clumsily into the crook of her ankle. “I got closer that time,” she said. “Next one’s gonna hit.”
She turned around to face the harbor again, a droning buzz echoing in her ears. Vinyl was complaining again.
“Tavi, dammit, seriously, what is wrong with you?” she said, her tone of voice awfully snippy for somepony with quite the salacious history with alcohol herself.
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Octavia sniped back. “I’m sticking up for myself, I... I’m being a mare! For once!”
“Okay, being a mare means having a couple hard lemonades and a Jell-O shot off a lounge singer’s chest,” Vinyl said. “You’re being a drunk.”
“Be thazz it... be that as it may, I...”
Octavia licked her lips and took a deep breath through her nose, the fresh air crystallizing her vision as she honed in on the yacht once more. “I’m gonna hit it this time.”
Vinyl grunted and cursed, sliding off the bed with a heavy thump and a few errant tinkles as still more bottles followed her to the floor. Octavia straightened and cocked her foreleg back behind her head.
“Tavi, no, don’t d... oh, for the love’a-”
Spuh-lookh.
“Fffffffffuck!”
“...re you kidding me right now?” Vinyl finished as the splash from Octavia’s second shot at the boat rejoined the marina that birthed it. Octavia whipped around with an exaggerated roll of her head—this time even managing to stay upright on her hind legs for a bit—and eyed Vinyl, who was now leaning against the molding of the balcony door with her blue mop of a mane hanging over half her face.
“You know what, shut up!” Octavia shouted, her forelegs spreading along the railing as resolution met reality and she slid back down to the floor again. “You know what that skeevy little fffffink did to me.”
“Yeah, except, uh, funny story: you never actually told me what you’re disturbing the peace and all over,” Vinyl said, her brow creased and her eyes blearily narrowed. “So, uh... no. No, I don’t know what he, she... it did.”
Octavia’s jaw quivered for a moment, then set firm beneath its owner’s simmering gaze. “Well, then,” she said, clamping her hooves down on either side of her hips and puffing out her chest as Vinyl’s eyebrow twitched back up. “Allow me to eraborate.”
“Please don’t elaborate,” Vinyl said, squeezing her eyes shut just in time to miss Octavia throwing her hoof towards the sky.
“Do you know, Vinyl Scratch,” she said, “what my single, all-encompassing desire in life has always been and will always be?”
“You’re elaborating.”
“First chair cellist, Manehattan Philharmonic Orchestra,” Tavi continued. “Ever since I was old enough to walk, I’ve dreamed of it, lived for it. Three hours of practice a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for twenty-three ye... for my entire life.”
Octavia shot up onto her hooves again, teetering back and forth for a second or two before her non-gesticulating hoof found purchase on the railing. “And finally, they notice me. Fff... finally, they invite me to audition. And I trek all the way up here, a hundred and fifty miles...”
“You took a cab,” Vinyl clarified.
“And I spend every bit I’ve got on the best hotel in the city. The penthouse!”
“This is my room!” Vinyl clarified a bit louder. A colossal hiccup threw Octavia off her stride, but only for a moment.
“And when I play for them? When I... grace them with my presence, what do they do? What do they call me?”
“The second-best cellist in all of Equestria?” Vinyl said. That part, at least, Octavia had taken care to mention. Several times. Every hour.
“Substandard!” Octavia shouted. Knocked off-kilter by the force of her accusation, her back legs fell out from under her and she collapsed again, her shoulder now the only part of her braced against the railing. “A failure!” she added, swiping at some unseen foe with her one hoof that wasn’t sloppily trapped under her uncooperative torso. “Unworthy of even the courtesy of a proper rejection from the only thing I’ve ever wanted. Wasting it, defiling it, on a two-bit, spoiled rotten daddy’s boy who’s the pride and joy of the conservatory his own father owns!”
After a brief pause and another few huffy breaths, Octavia turned her bleary eyes towards the balcony door. “I suppose that’s your ‘Stop being so bitchy, it’s just one rejection’ face?” she grumbled.
Vinyl grimaced and joined her friend on the ground, stretching her hind legs lazily out in front of herself as she leaned back on one forehoof and massaged the bridge of her nose with the other. “Actually, that’s my ‘I still no idea who the hell you’re talking about’ face, but I was working back up to the first one,” she said.
Octavia smacked her lips and hiccuped again, gathered herself into a rough sitting position and pointed a thousand-yard stare at the top of the door frame. “Strings,” she spat, each syllable that followed dripping off her tongue like acid mixed with Smirnhoof Ice. “Beauregard Stradivarius Strings. Star student, valedictorian, captain of the rugby squad, fraternity president and graduate summa cum laude at Pranceton, fluent in six languages and three instruments and, as the Philharmonic’s sponsors were so ecstatic to point out, an absolute Celestia-fucking prodigy at the cello.”
Vinyl bit her lip and nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, now describe him like you haven’t been stalking him for months.”
Octavia growled and kneaded at her temples. “Sky-blue coat, beige mane, big brown eyes and the face of a weasly, conniving sewer rat?”
Vinyl blinked, then furrowed her brow in surprise. “Wait, that’s Beauregard Strings?” she said. “Shit, all the mares I know told me he was supposed to be handsome.”
Octavia grit her teeth. Had any ice still remained in the rum drink on the dresser inside, the look in her eyes could’ve melted it. “All the mares you know don’t have particularly good taste,” she said.
“No, I mean, he seriously was handsome. Kinda gorgeous, actually,” Vinyl rambled on. Once she noticed the expression on Octavia’s face, she rolled her eyes and blew out a sigh. “Oh, now we’re going to start being judgmental? Right now?”
“How do you know what he looks like?” Octavia asked, dawning suspicion giving the question a razor-sharp edge. Vinyl glanced away from Octavia and shrugged.
“Cruised the boardwalk earlier,” she said, her attention now directed at the edge of her forehoof. “Ended up on somepony’s yacht. He seemed like a cool guy.”
In retrospect, Vinyl could’ve guessed Octavia wouldn’t take that particular revelation very well. She also could’ve done a little better of a job at acting guilty when she saw Tavi screw up her eyes and puff out her chest in fury.
“Traitor!” she shouted.
“Oh, come on, it’s not like I knew who he was or anything,” came Vinyl’s unfortunately non-retrospective response.
“You... turncoat!” Octavia’s voice grew higher and more hysterical with every slur. “Backstabbing, disloyal, jerkfaced, horrible...”
A stiff breeze rolled in through the window, and the flash of sobriety it ushered through Vinyl’s sluggish mind brought a spark of realization with it. “Are you...” she began to ask, just before the sight of her friend’s heaving chest answered her question before it came out. “Oh geez, don’t, please don’t start cryi-”
Vinyl’s request came too late; by then, the hole in the dike was too big for one pair of off-white hooves to plug. Octavia whimpered and practically threw herself back against the railing, her rump sliding out from under her as giant, glistening tears slid down her cheeks.
“‘S not fair,” she moaned, wrapping her hooves around herself and twitching each time an errant teardrop splashed off them. “I worked so hard for this. And all to lose it to some golden boy millionaire with sixteen private tutors and his own yacht.”
One last time, Vinyl ground her hooves into her eyes to try to drive out her headache. Sooner or later, she reasoned, it had to actually work. “Come on, t-that’s an exaggeration,” she mumbled.
Octavia hiccuped and shook her head violently. “No, it’s definitely sixteen this year.”
Or maybe it was time for a new tactic. After a deep, slow breath through her nose seemed to make decent progress, Vinyl tried to clarify. “What I meant was, this isn’t the end of the world. I mean, you’re still in the lineup, for Celestia’s sake. Just... not first. It’s not a big deal.”
But Octavia—of freaking course—was having none of it. “Just look at me,” she said. “Look at what he’s made me do: I’m filthy, I’m tired, my legs hurt, I think I threw my back out, I... I’m drunk, Vinyl. I’m a classical frigging cellist. I don’t get drunk.”
Another smart comment caught in Vinyl’s throat, this one focused on the current circumstances that seemed to disprove Octavia’s last claim. “But I still have my pride,” Octavia said, swallowing hard and pulling herself up as Vinyl edged around her to get a glimpse of the source of her anger. “I’m n-not crazy, I’m... I’m passionate. And I’m making a statement.”
“I don’t even think that’s his boat,” said Vinyl.
“It’s a statement,” Octavia repeated, even louder this time. “That I’m tired of being pushed around. I’m tired of being treated like I’m second-rate.”
Vinyl’s eyes dipped away from the harbor and down between her legs, and widened once they finally picked up on how crowded the balcony floor was. “Holy crap, how many of these have you had?”
“I’m not a pushover. I’m not a second-chair cellist,” Octavia roared, throwing her forelegs over her head. “I... am Octavia... and they will hear... me...”
Vinyl’s heart sank fast as she realized the inevitability of what was about to happen, only for that inevitability to rear its ugly head even faster. To be fair, there was a bit of truth to Octavia’s claim: she really didn’t have much of a reputation as a party animal. More specifically, she didn’t have one at all. And as Vinyl knew from very intimate and very unpleasant personal experience, Mad Diamond Dog 20/20 could tear up even the hardest of partiers. Two full bottles of the stuff plus a few healthy samplings of vodka and gin plus Celestia only knew how much honey whiskey was enough to wreck a professional drunk or a desperate frat colt for days.
And as the quivering of her legs, the bobbing of her throat, and the sheet-white look on her face so clearly indicated, Tavi wasn’t even close to either.
“Oh, shit. No,” Vinyl spewed before she could stop herself. “Not in here. Not my damage deposit!”
Octavia’s belly contracted, and she snapped her forehooves up to cover her mouth. The almost pathetic blend of misery and panic in her eyes pulled Vinyl back into focus. “All right, deep breaths, keep it together,” Vinyl said, half to herself and half to the mare just barely keeping her innards in order in front of her. “Just hold on a second and lemme get a bucket or...”
The last few words made it out of Vinyl’s mouth just a split second before they became irrelevant. The light in Octavia’s frantic gaze went dim, and with half-lidded eyes she threw herself towards the railing and heaved over the edge, releasing the contents of her thoroughly abused stomach into the four-story gap between the hotel balcony and the unsuspecting boardwalk below.
“Or you could...” Vinyl started to say, before a twinge of vertigo in her own gut forced her eyes mercifully shut. “Yeah, we’re definitely getting arrested tonight.”
After a few deep breaths and an even larger retch from Octavia, Vinyl forced her legs to carry her up to the balcony rail, where she gingerly laid a hoof along her friend’s back and surveyed the damage. Thankfully, it seemed to be as minimal as she could imagine it being: there wasn’t enough wind to divert any evidence of Octavia’s adventurous evening back towards the other balconies, and the street it ended up hitting was mostly empty by now anyway. Another silver lining: none of the ponies who were on the street now could possibly see their faces well enough to make a court-admissible statement about them. They were lucky Octavia had lasted this long into the night. Maybe there was something to be said for earth pony constitutions after all.
“‘S okay, everypony,” Vinyl slurred down in the general direction of a group of revelers near the entrance to the harbor docks, who were glaring up at her as they dodged around the growing puddle at the hotel’s front entrance. “She’ll be fine, she’s just... learning through experience that she won’t remember, so uh, that’s... we’re gonna have to work with that. Carry on, good people. Ponies. Whatever.”
She had a feeling the group wasn’t buying whatever it was she’d just said, but they were quick to move on after a third shower of cheap liquor and spirits hit the placement. Once the rubberneckers were gone and her guts seemed to be done stringing her out to dry for the time being, Octavia wiped away a few globlets of drool hanging off her lips, then sucked in a shuddering breath and let it off in a distinctly damp huff.
“You’re a shitty friend,” she mumbled.
“Irony, thy name is Tavi,” Vinyl couldn’t help but grumble in return, but still she kept rubbing her hoof along her friend’s back as said friend shuddered and ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth. “You all out?”
Octavia lifted her head a few inches, let it drop, then repeated the motion. Vinyl figured that meant yes, so she slipped her other forehoof under Tavi’s forelegs and guided back down into a sitting position against the railing. She couldn’t be sure how coherent the classical frigging cellist was, but she got a pretty good idea when the mare who never got drunk immediately pawed around for another bottle, sticking the whole neck between her lips once she found (a mercifully dry) one.
“Whoa-ho-ho, there, Ghostrider. Pattern is definitely full,” Vinyl said as she coaxed the MDD 20/20 away from Octavia and shoved it out of reach with her hind leg. “Bedtime for Tavi.”
Now came the most exciting and potentially maddening part of all: when Vinyl would at long last discover whether post-blackout Octavia was a lover or a fighter. To Vinyl’s great relief, she turned out to be the former, and didn’t resist in the slightest as Vinyl led her inside to the bathroom and started cleaning her up. Even when Vinyl ducked away to water down a sports drink for her, Octavia didn’t move an inch from the rim of the tub where Vinyl had parked her, except to obediently accept and then gingerly sip at the concoction Vinyl eventually brought back.
Then again, Octavia’s sudden turnaround didn’t come as a huge surprise. Even if she was a tempest in a teacup when the drinks were flowing, seeing all of them come back up tended to turn even the most fearsome lions into meek little kittens. That was even more true when the cat in question wouldn’t so much as scratch at an itch when she was sober. Tavi would probably sleep through a meteor strike once she got herself into bed.
Once the drink was gone and Octavia’s head started drooping against the shower wall, the tension finally drained out of Vinyl’s shoulders. The night, thank Celestia and Luna and every moondamned star in the sky, was finally over. With her own legs weak from exhaustion and the incriminating ache of intoxication pounding at her base of her horn, Vinyl half-guided and half-carried Octavia over to the king-sized bed that centered the larger of the penthouse’s two rooms. She was sure Tavi was dead to the world by the time her head hit the pillow, but as she started to pull the covers up under her chin, her eyelids fluttered back open.
“‘m I in your bed?” she croaked.
“Yeah. Figured you need it more than I do,” Vinyl answered honestly, flashing her friend a grin just in case she was starting to feel guilty. “Don’t worry about me. There’s a couch in the other room. I’ve crashed in worse spots. Just get some rest and be thankful I’m not as drunk as you are.”
Octavia ran her tongue over her lips and leaned back against the pillow. Vinyl trotted back into the bathroom to mix up another sports drink in a clean glass, keeping one eye on the bed the whole time. “I’m gonna leave this here,” she said as she came back into the bedroom and floated the glass onto the bedside table with her horn, “and I want you to drink as much of it as you can in the morning. For now, just... try not to fall out of bed.”
Octavia still didn’t say anything, but Vinyl chuckled anyway. Maybe this wasn’t over after all. “See ya tomorrow, ya nutjob,” she said with a shake of her head, knowing full well that Tavi’s awkward silence wouldn’t last the time it took her to get halfway through the door. Sure enough, Vinyl’s hoof had only just touched the knob when she heard the comforter rustle and Octavia’s mouth start motoring again.
“V-Vi-Vinyl, no, wait, j-just... don’t go. Don’t...” she stammered, her mouth seemingly crowded with a dozen different sentences she couldn’t bring herself to say. Vinyl smirked to herself and took a second to hide it before turning around. She’d expected this given how Octavia had reacted to getting sick, and understood the feeling perfectly to boot. Throwing up drunk could be pretty freaky the first time it happened. She wasn’t at all shocked to find that Tavi wasn’t quite ready to deal with it on her own yet.
Vinyl made her way back over to the bed and sat herself down on the edge, her tail splayed out over Tavi’s covered legs and their flanks separated by only a couple layers of bedsheets. Octavia rolled onto her side and gazed up into Vinyl’s eyes, seemingly gearing up to say something big.
“I’m sorry ‘bout what I said before,” she said, her voice even smaller than Vinyl was used to hearing from her on a normal day. “You’re not a shitty friend. You’re my best friend, Vinyl, and I just... I’ve been awful tonight, and now I’m in your bed and I think I threw up on your balcony...”
This time Vinyl didn’t get a chance to conceal her grin. “You’re gonna be fine, Tavi,” she said with a laugh. “Believe me, I’ve been this far gone before. I won’t envy you in the morning, but... you’ll live.”
Tavi nodded and cracked a smile of her own. A drunken giggle bubbled out of her throat soon after. “What’re you laughin’ at?” Vinyl asked playfully, already internally editing the version of events she’d share at the bar next week once she got back home. Octavia shrugged, and shifted her leg against Vinyl’s flank.
“You’re cute when you laugh like that,” she said, her tone warm and a little bit... inviting? Vinyl’s brain ground to a halt for a moment while she convinced herself she was being stupid, and she stretched her grin out a little bit wider.
“Am I, now?” she prodded back.
Another shrug. “I bet you get a lot of stallions’ attention when you laugh like that,” Octavia went on. Her voice had dropped a register between sentences, and dipped down even further for her next one. “I bet you get anypony’s attention you want.”
Vinyl’s smile began to hurt a bit; it was too wide at the edges, with too many teeth visible in between. “Tavi. You’re confusing your roommate,” she said slowly.
Octavia had looked like she was in a trance before, but hearing that snapped her back to reality fast. “Oh, n-no, this is... coming out all wrong, I...” she gushed, stumbling over her words again in her effort to get them all out quickly. “You said I’ll live tomorrow, but I feel alive now. For the first time in my life, I did something crazy and stupid and I screwed it up, but I feel even better now that I know I have.”
Octavia spread her hooves out over the rumpled comforter and let out whatever was left of her breath in a single exuberant sigh. She looked up at Vinyl with sparkling eyes, and Vinyl found herself unable to look away. “D’you know what that feels like?” she whispered. “To get things so wrong that they turn out right?”
“I’m beginning to feel like you should get some sleep,” came Vinyl’s firm reply. She patted Octavia on the shoulder and got up to leave again, only to have her foreleg that had just brushed against Tavi’s cheek refuse to come with her.
“Vinyl...”
Both of Octavia’s forehooves were wrapped around Vinyl’s with enough pressure to grab her attention, but not enough to hold her captive. Vinyl froze at first, but the dawning of unavoidable comprehension soon thawed her out. The tension in Tavi’s forelegs increased, and as it pulled her back towards the bed and then all the way on top of it, Vinyl didn’t resist.
“Don’t go,” Tavi repeated, her nose a few inches away from the pony who was now apparently a little bit more than just her best friend. Bolstered by that thought, Vinyl let herself chuckle again.
“You know, I’m not exactly in the best mental state right now,” she said, “but I seem to recall somepony who looked an awful lot like you telling me very clearly that she didn’t approve of the things mares in ‘my music’ did with other mares.”
Octavia chewed on her lip—a motion that sent an embarrassingly giddy shiver down Vinyl’s spine—and matched Vinyl’s smirk. “Maybe you’re a bad influence,” she suggested, and there was no mistaking the sentiment behind her words now. As much as Vinyl wanted to take that as all the permission she’d ever need, though, the functional portion of her brain was finally catching up with the rest of her body.
“Maybe in more ways than one,” she replied, one eye on Tavi’s love-struck face and the other on the pile of bottles still cluttering up the balcony. Truth be told, a lot of pretty scandalous things could be said about Vinyl Scratch: yes, she did have a tendency to sleep around when she was touring. Yes, she tended to not be picky about the gender of her nighttime partners. Yes, she’d kind of had a little bit of an extremely potent thing for her best friend Octavia ever since the first time her prissy, naïve, deliriously adorable face had peeked inside the door of the dorm room they’d shared in college.
With all that being said, the one thing she would never give anyone a reason to say was that she was one to take advantage of stallions—or mares, in this case—who’d gone a bit too heavy on the sauce. And there was no dodging around the fact that Octavia had pretty much rewritten the rule book on being drunk and disorderly tonight. So despite the urgings of her gut and a few other choice locations on her body, Vinyl took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down.
“Look, Tavi, I...” she said. “I know you’re confused right now and this doesn’t mean I’m saying no, but just... you don’t owe me anything, if that’s what this is about. So just take a second to think this through, and tell me you’re sure to want to do this before I do anything crazy like-”
It was a shame, really. She’d had a really good speech on moral righteousness and open communication all queued up, only to have Tavi cut her off right in the middle of it by hooking her hoof around the back of her neck and pulling their lips together before Vinyl could even suggest doing the exact same thing. Inexperienced as she undoubtedly was with this sort of thing, Octavia more than made up for it with a pinch of blind passion and a hearty helping of not giving a crap whether Vinyl was into it or not. Of course, that just meant that Vinyl got to sit back and relax as Tavi rolled over on top of her and went to town on her like a well-soused fish going after a bread crumb, so that approach had its perks too.
“Like that?” Octavia said once she surfaced a couple minutes later, out of breath and beet-red in the face. Vinyl placed the question next to her previous concerns about consent, and found the two seemed to answer each other quite nicely.
“If you puke on me right now, I swear to Celestia they’ll never find your body,” she warned Octavia, whose only response was to roll her eyes and dive back in to pick up where she’d left off. As the two mares’ legs intertwined and their chests rubbed together in time with the meetings of their lips, the last rational parts of Vinyl’s mind began to flicker. Once her hooves slid up Tavi’s legs and found their way to her flank, they went ahead and shut off completely.
Maybe this story wasn’t over yet. Maybe the night was still young. Maybe tonight would end up being pretty awesome after all.
• • •
The next morning, though? Not so much.
Octavia had witnessed plenty of hangovers in her life, most of them belonging to the mare currently snoozing away with her head buried under a pile of pillows beside her. She’d seen Vinyl suffer through splitting headaches and upset stomachs, heard her desperate promises to herself and to her roommate and to several individual gods and goddesses that she’d never ever do something that mind-blowingly stupid again. And now that dawn had risen on Manehattan and she was experiencing a hangover of her very own for the very first time, she couldn’t help but be a little bit peeved. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Vinyl had made it out to be.
In actuality, it was much, much worse.
Calling the pain in her head “splitting” would’ve been almost cute at this point. It felt like somepony had run a band saw through her skull and left the blade lodged in there overnight; had she been capable of opening her eyes or moving, she would’ve been shocked if the whole bedspread wasn’t covered in congealing blood and brain bits. And what was it Vinyl had called it? An upset stomach? Oh, no, her stomach wasn’t upset. This was beyond upset. The organ rattling against her ribs was volcanic, a furious, searing torrent of rage and hatefulness that made her finally understand why an otherwise happy mare might be inspired to pray for death. That was what her stomach was, thank you very much, and once she felt like inhabiting the mortal world was worth the effort again, she would definitely make a note to let Vinyl know about the difference.
For several minutes, that was how she subsisted: unable to die, unwilling to live, feverishly cursing bum wine and bartenders and her own savagely abused sense of better judgement, and most of all that insufferable little snake Beauregard Strings. It was his fault she was suffering like this. If he hadn’t bought his way into first chair, this never wouldn’t happened. If she’d just been given a fair hand to play with, everything could’ve been perfect.
But he did, it had, she hadn’t, and now this was the result: a vicious and unholy reminder of a nighttime romp she could barely even remember. And then there was the worst part of all, the inescapable reality that made even her current agony seem tolerable by comparison: at some point, very soon by all probability, she would have to get out of bed and deal with it.
Eventually, a decision was made—she had a sinking suspicion it had been by her—that the time to start rediscovering her basic motor skills was now. Or, to put things less succinctly: she had to pee. Bad. Keeping her eyes closed as much as possible, she flailed around with her hind legs until she’d managed to kick off the comforter, then scooted herself around until her back end was hanging off the bed enough to give her legs space to reach the floor.
Once that was done, she got her forelegs out from under her chest and pushed, slowly tottering backwards until only the tips of her forehooves remained on the bed. From there, it was a quick and simple trip from the bedside table fifteen feet from the bathroom to the carpeted floor eleven and a half feet from the bathroom, where she lied spread-eagled on the floor and gave voice to her feelings about her progress so far.
“Owwwwwwwww.”
A disjointed fit of shuffling and mumbling drifted up from the other side of the bed, and Vinyl cracked one eye open to find the bed beside her empty and the path to the bathroom blocked by a misshapen gray mass that seemed to be trying to make its way inside. “Crawling” was too strong a word for what Octavia was doing; “oozing” wasn’t much better, but was probably as close as conventional language could get to describing the halting, slipshod trip Tavi was making across the bedroom floor. In any case, she was moving, and that meant she wasn’t dead. Vinyl buried her head under the pillows again, and told herself she’d been responsible enough getting them all that far.
A few minutes later, though, the sound of the toilet flushing wormed its way through the makeshift barrier and deep enough into her ear to drag her back from the edge of slumber again. She dug her way back into the open air just in time to see Octavia nudge the bathroom door open and stumble back over to lean her forehead into the bedpost at her end of the bed, her mane sticking out in every direction and her bone-dry tongue hanging ever so slightly out of her mouth.
“Mornin’, stud,” Vinyl groaned, staring over at Tavi if only to avoid looking the other direction towards the searingly bright balcony. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Vinyl wasn’t sure if it counted as squinting if you only had one eye open, but if it did, that’s what Tavi did once she processed what she’d just heard. “It hurts, Vi’yl,” she informed her by way of a slurred, nasally moan.
“What hurts, Tavi?”
“Ev’r’thing.”
Vinyl sighed, and tried to think of something non-sarcastic to reply with. The fissures running up and down her skull made that more difficult than she felt was worth bothering with. “Join the club and call it membership dues,” she said. “I told you to take it easy last night.”
Octavia blew out a dismissive scoff and picked her way over to the dresser. Her trademark bow tie laid abandoned on top of it, next to a few scattered coins and a small box of toiletries provided by the hotel. Ignoring her daywear for the time being, she fumbled around with the box until a hoof-mountable hairbrush emerged from it, which she then spent a considerable amount of time attaching to her hoof before running it feebly through her mane.
“So what’s your plan for the day?” Vinyl asked after the hornet’s nest wrapped around Tavi’s head had been downgraded to a reasonably well-kept beehive.
“Water,” Tavi replied without turning out or opening her other eye. “Bed. Sleep. Forever.”
Vinyl was a split second away from agreeing with what sounded a pretty decent plan for surviving the day, but a niggling sense that she’d forgotten something important stopped her dead in her tracks.
“Don’t you have a... thing?” she managed to say before her roommate finally turned around.
“A thing?” Tavi repeated.
“Yeah, a thing. To do today.”
Tavi blinked—a long, laborious effort that seemed to knock her off-balance ever so slightly—and gave a tiny shake of her head. “What thing?”
“Y’know, for the orchestra,” Vinyl said. Octavia glanced up, slipped back into another one-eyed squint, then shrugged and turned back towards the dresser. “You said somethin’ about it last night, like a... ceremony or party or...”
The hairbrush hit a snag in Octavia’s mane. Tavi made no attempt to get it out.
“Reception?” Vinyl guessed as a last resort. Judging by the way Octavia’s back stiffened, though, that guess seemed to be right on target.
“What time is it?” she asked quietly.
“Uh...” Vinyl rolled onto her side and slapped at her alarm clock until it was facing her way. “Like, eleven-thirty.”
The brush strapped to Octavia’s forehoof quivered for a moment, then was violently yanked away and tossed aside as its operator sprinted back into the bathroom. Vinyl flopped back onto her pillow as the melodious sound of desperate retching wafted out from underneath the door, a symphony that only concluded once the door flew back open with an ear-splitting bang to reveal somepony that kind of resembled Octavia, but mostly just looked like a madmare.
“Well, your timing’s improving, at least,” Vinyl noted as Octavia gasped for air.
“The reception!” Tavi screamed, her scratchy voice matching up well with her widened, bloodshot eyes. “I’m gonna miss the reception!”
“Why, what time does it sta-”
“Noon!” Octavia dove to the ground and fell out of sight for a moment, then popped back up with the hairbrush back in place along her hoof. She explained herself a little bit more as she frantically drug it back through her hair.
“Every year after auditions there’s a reception with the orchestra’s sponsors where they get to meet the new members,” she said, “and it’s really important to make a great impression and make them like you and want to give you money because that’s the only way the organization can stay afloat, and I’ll be one of the youngest ponies there and I need to set a precedent and be a good role model and I’m gonna be late and I’ll look like death and my hair won’t stay down and this is all your fault!”
“My fault?”
“No, not you! Beauregard!”
Vinyl’s cocked eyebrow descended a bit, and offense gave way to confusion. “What the... hell does he have to do with anything?”
“Nothing! Just... everything! I don’t know! It doesn’t matter!”
Actually, complete bafflement might have been a better word to use just then. “Um...” Vinyl mumbled as Octavia whipped her head around again.
“And the reason it doesn’t matter is because the sponsors and the other musicians and especially the most esteemed conductor in the whole Equestrian continent are not going to care whose fault this is,” she said, pointing up to her still fairly terrifying face. “What would you think if you were a wealthy businesspony and you saw this walk into your concert hall?”
“The phrase ‘bat outta hell’ comes to mind,” Vinyl said after a moment of reflection.
“Exactly!” Octavia shouted, all the while rooting around the drawers for something Vinyl couldn’t even begin to guess at. What she eventually found turned out to be a small hoof mirror, and one look into it produced a anguished, pitiful moan that would’ve been hilarious had its source not been holding a heavy blunt object at the time.
“Stars above, I’m a wreck,” she whined. “Marziale’s gonna kill me...”
“That sounds painful,” came Vinyl’s muffled reply. She’d pulled a pillow out from her pile and slapped her it over her face.
“It’s not a disease, you charlatan,” Octavia snapped, discarding the brush in favor of clipping on her tie. “It’s a pony. Miss Marcia Marziale, the Madmare of Manehattan. And yes, she is painful.”
Off came the pillow again. “Please tell me you guys actually call her that.”
Tavi scoffed. “Not to her face,” she said. The bow slipped from her hooves and fell to the floor, and the noise in her throat extended into a growl. “She’s been the conductor since Celestia was a corporal, and she’s the most uptight, straight-laced, unforgiving and unbelievable tightwad in history.”
“So basically, she’s you.”
Her success at finally getting her tie fastened around her neck distracted Octavia enough that she seemed not to hear Vinyl’s remark. In any case, the scowl knit into her brow probably couldn’t have sunk a whole lot deeper anyway.
“She’s kicked ponies out of the orchestra for taking the Princesses’ names in vain,” she said. “If she sees me like this, she’ll probably slap me in irons and have me carted away to a labor camp in Stalliongrad.”
She paused in mid-speech and darted into the bathroom to splash water on her face. When she emerged dripping wet a moment later, her eyes did look a little less glassy, at the expense of the rest of her looking like a mangy street rat who spent the night in a drainpipe underneath the boardwalk. “Okay,” she said to nopony in particular. “I can do this. I just need to focus. I need to look professional. I... I need a towel.”
Her eyes lifted up to meet Vinyl’s, and the mare in bed realized that Tavi’s last remark had been directed at her. Wordlessly, she nodded over at a pile of linens sitting on an easy chair next to the balcony door.
“What she doesn’t know—ow—can’t offend her,” Octavia said as she rubbed at her face with a fluffy pink bath towel. “So she can’t know that I went out drinking last night. And she can’t know that I’m hung over now. And she can’t think that I’m blowing off the reception, which I’m not, because I’m not going to.”
Octavia dropped the towel and stood up, and surprisingly enough, she’d actually managed to make herself look like she’d just hadn’t slept at all last night. Which, Vinyl thought with a grin, was kind of true anyway.
“Might want to add the two of us sleeping together to that list too,” she commented as Octavia gave herself one last checkup.
“Huh?” Tavi aimlessly replied.
“What, you don’t remember what we did last night?” Vinyl teased.
Now Octavia was paying a little more attention, but the look on her face still wasn’t one of recognition. “What we...”
“Y’know... last night?” Vinyl went on. “Feeling alive? So wrong that it’s right? The reason why we woke up in the same bed?”
“What are you... I... we...”
As any performer surely knows, the mind can sometimes possess an alarming degree of control over the body. An athlete can cramp up a few seconds before his big race. An actor can flub a line she’s practiced a hundred lines under the heat of the lights. And a skinny, cloudy-gray concert cellist can feel her knees lock and her ribs crumple up into a tiny little ball in her chest as she begins to recall something that her brain finds itself both unwilling and unable to process.
Vinyl was just screwing around, right? She knew Octavia wasn’t interested in mares. Octavia knew Octavia wasn’t interested in mares. The conductor of the Manehattan Philharmonic Orchestra sure as salt knew Octavia was straight as a violin’s bow, because her knowing otherwise would lead to her knowing that Octavia’s position in polite society could be questioned and her knowing that such a mare had absolutely no place in her ensemble.
Right. All of that was right. All of that had to be right. So why could she remember Vinyl sitting astride her stomach with her forehoof clasped between her own? Why could she remember herself on top of Vinyl, with their wavering noses just inches apart? Why could she remember their chests meeting, their lips, their tongues? Why could she remember nuzzling into Vinyl’s neck, and her stomach, and her...
“Wait... oh shit, do you actually not remember what we did last night?” Vinyl asked, panic finally beginning to dawn on her as well. Except this wasn’t panic Octavia was feeling. This wasn’t fear. This wasn’t emotion. This was emptiness, impossibleness, a smoking hole in her head where her sense of identity should’ve been. She was Octavia. She liked stallions. She needed to earn the respect of a conductor that had every right to deny her the single dream she’d ever had for her entire life.
And last night, she had had hot, drunken lesbian sex with her best friend Vinyl Scratch.
Somehow, “oh shit” just didn’t quite seem to cover it.
“Okay,” Vinyl said very slowly, pressing her hooves together in front of her nose and speaking in a manner usually reserved for medical professionals and hostage negotiators. “First of all, I just want you to know that I have always considered you my best, closest, most dearest friend, and more to the point, you totally asked for it. Or... all right, imagine I made a different choice of words just now, and focus on the main idea, which is that there was consent given and demonstrated by both involved parties, sooo...”
“I remember...” Octavia said, the words tumbling out over her slackened jaw without it hardly moving at all.
“You... oh. Oh,” Vinyl sighed, the bed creaking as she fell back onto it in relief. “Okay, so this is just normal walk-of-shame type stuff. That’s... yeah, that’s fine, that’s totally cool. Geez, for a second there I didn’t know what I’d gotten us in-”
“I... remember.”
Vinyl paused with her lips still half-parted finishing the last word of her sentence. She flicked her eyes over Tavi—who hadn’t moved since her memory of the previous night had returned—then peeled her tongue off the roof of her mouth and continued. “Eeeeeeyeah,” she said. “Think you established that.”
“I... remember... u-us...”
“Yep. Definitely established. Getting a bit redundant now.”
Octavia’s jaw was working up and down, but only disjointed, nonsensical noises were coming out. “Uh... yee... his... this...”
“Uh... Tavi? Equestria to Tavi? You okay, buddy?” Vinyl finally asked. At first, she didn’t think Octavia was ever going to respond, but about a half-minute later, she brought her teeth together, closed her eyes, and swallowed hard.
And then she screamed.
“This is AWFUL!”
“Hey!” came Vinyl’s immediate reply. “I was not!”
“Th-th-this can’t be happening,” Octavia spewed, all her senses seemingly gone save for whichever one was making her heart rate break quadruple digits. “It can’t... you... I-I-I mean, I couldn’t have... but I did and now... it happened. It is happening. Oh stars above, how is this happening?”
Vinyl had started taking in a deep breath at the beginning of Octavia’s spiel, and only ran out of space in her lungs as it began to wind down. “”Kay, so hate to cut you off at the starting line here,” she said, “but since nopony else is here to ask this: what in Celestia’s freaking name are you talking about?”
“Marziale...” Octavia whispered a few seconds before sucking in more air and shouting the name again. “Marziale! Oh no, stars no, what if she finds out? She’ll think I... I’m... deviant. I can’t be deviant. Nobody in the Manehattan Philharmonic Orchestra is deviant. How many classically trained mares have you ever heard of that sleep with other mares?”
Vinyl wasted a good chunk of time trying to convince herself that Tavi was actually being serious right now, and found that eventually succeeding only made things worse. “Like... thirty?” she said, her tone similar to one she might have for somepony with slight brain damage. “Off the top of my head?”
“That’s not the point!” Octavia screeched.
“Then what the hell is the point, Tavi?” Vinyl snapped right back, finally losing her patience. “Seriously, why is this such a big deal? This isn’t the freaking Moonless Ages. Nopony’s gonna care who you spent the night with!”
All traces of Tavi’s hangover had vanished from her face, leaving behind only blind fight-or-flight instinct and an internal struggle over whether it would take out the door or through the window. As her eyes darted every which way around the room, Vinyl sat up in bed and crossed her forelegs, and waited until they inevitably leveled on her.
“Octavia,” Vinyl said, using her best friend’s full name for what she would later remember was the first time ever. “You can talk to me. Just tell me what’s freaking you out. What are so scared of?”
“I... I... I...” she stammered. Her eyes flashed to the window, then to the front door, then to the window again, and finally settled on the clock hanging over the dresser. The hands on its face read thirteen minutes to noon.
“I have to go,” she said. By the time Vinyl comprehended enough of that to feel like she should say something back, the front door had already slammed shut. For a moment, she thought about jumping out of bed and following her out, but when the idea made a second loop around her brain, it seemed much less likely that she’ll be able to catch up. Also, that she’d be physically capable of getting out of bed.
Her mind more or less made up, Vinyl scooted back down under the covers and let blissful darkness take her again. Tavi had always been a little on the neurotic side when it came to music, and the way she’d just acted had been a lot neurotic. That was still pretty close to normal for her, and as far as her throbbing head was concerned, that was enough for her. Whatever it was that was bugging Octavia, she’d be over it by the end of the week.
And if she wasn’t over it by then, it was going to be one hell of a long one.