A Faded Picture
The dormitories at Manehattan University were nothing spectacular: A single bed, a bathroom with a vanity, a small kitchen, some desk space, and two bookcases. Often times, students and roommates alike would argue about which side of the bed or room was theirs, and what posters would be plastered on the wall, or, hell, even what drapes would cover the windows. Other times, students would quarrel about who got to use the bathroom first in the morning; but usually it was the first one to get up; even then it spawned a dispute.
The hallways were jammed on the first day of university, with students finding their new residence for the year. A white unicorn with an electric blue mane was wobbling through the hallway of loud, unacquainted colleagues who had the same goal: To get the hell out of there and find their room. She was carrying a box of her belongings overhead, and a note with an indecipherable scribing, more than likely her room number. When she found it, she waltzed inside and saw her new roommate, a grey mare with a charcoal mane, unpacking a box of possessions. “Hey, there,” Vinyl said in the doorway. “I’m Vinyl Scratch, your new roommate.”
The grey mare looked toward Vinyl. “Oh. Hello, there.”
“Octavia?! What are you…?” Walking in and closing the door, putting the noise from the outside to an end, Vinyl placed her box down and glanced at her friend. “Are you telling me?”
“Evidently so.”
Vinyl smacked her face with a hoof. Facepalmed. “I thought I told her to get me somepony else,” she whispered to herself. “Ugh.”
“What was that?” Octavia said, placing her cello on its stand. “There a problem?”
“Yeah,” Vinyl said, opening her box and throwing a bunch of empty CD jewels and disks out on the floor. “I’m roommates with my best friend and rival. How else do you think I should react?”
Indeed, they were best friends. They became best friends on the first day of high-school, back when they were young and vacuous, thinking everything in life was as jejune as the media made it out to be.
Born to an alcoholic father, Octavia, with a now estranged father, had her fillyhood stripped because of that. And as a result, she rarely had the chance to experience life growing up, as she was too worried about her father’s next move. Her mother tried to do everything she could, but there was only so much she could do. Octavia bloomed deprived of making friends, socializing, and learning the curves of friendship. Rather, she leaned on music to help her through every day of her father’s unruly tyranny.
It wasn’t until high-school when Vinyl showed her the hoops of making friends. Since then, Vinyl had not only been able to help Octavia, but she also gave her the courage to convince her mother to leave him behind and go someplace else.
And now here they are, college roommates. How exciting.
“So how’re we gonna do this thing? Fight to the death? Draw straws? See who can take the most booze before one of us gets tanked?”
Octavia blinked mindlessly trying to understand where Vinyl was getting at. “What? What in Equestria are you talking about?”
“You know,” Vinyl said, closing in on her roommate, “who gets what side of the room, side of the bed, what posters are gonna go up on the walls. All that stuff.”
“Please tell me you’re not being serious. I don’t care who gets what side of the room or bed, or what posters get put up. Why worry about paltry things when you can do whatever you want? As long as it’s within reason, that is.”
“Wait…” Vinyl’s mind was trying to comprehend what she just heard. “So you’re telling me you don’t care about any of that?”
Octavia went back to rummaging through her boxes and put an empty picture frame on a bedside table, then looked back at her new acquaintance. “Why would I?”
“Because most ponies do?” Vinyl said, opening her own box and placing a collection of vinyl albums in one of the bookshelves.
“Well, Vinyl, I’m not like most ponies. Life doesn’t have to be perfect. It only has to be lived. You should know that about me by now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Vinyl said, placing her record player on the lowest shelf, before putting her shades out for everypony to see. “Okay…so you don’t care what side of the bed I sleep on?”
“I do not. The only thing I ask of you is to clean up after yourself around here. Does that sound fair?”
“Hell yeah!” Vinyl said. “Maybe this won’t be bad. Bunking with my best friend.”
“Good. So how about we stop talking about trivial things and get about our unpacking?”
“Sure! But I want to ask you something first.”
“Okay, wha—”
“Why do you have an empty picture frame? Thought you’d have a picture of me and you or something like that.”
It was very quiet. Something in the corridor chittered loudly, like a shriek. It rattled both Vinyl and Octavia, but neither said anything. And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out its own roar that pounded away in Octavia. Then sound. “I have it there, just in case I can find my special somepony during my years at university.”
“Oh…” Vinyl trailed off. A pause. Another pause. Then noise. “Who is gonna be in that picture?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Okay.”
“Just promise me—”
“Can I tell you a story?”
“Err, I suppose?” Octavia said.
Vinyl lifted Octavia up to the bed with her magic, and Vinyl was there shortly after. “I know it’s sudden, but whatever. But listen here. How’d the story go? Oh, right! Okay, so there were these two ponies who were stupidly in love. Like mad crazy in-love. Nothing could pull them apart. One day they got married and bought this kick-ass house somewhere in Las Pegasus.
“Over the years they made friends. Good friends. They became like family. But then one day, for some stupid ass reason, the husband decided to cheat on his wife with another pony. And one of their friends found out. But you know what they did? They told her that her husband was cheating on her. And you know what happened? Nothing. She forgave him because she didn’t believe it. She refused to. The dumb skank didn’t know what she was in for now.
“After that, he did it again. And she forgave him a second time because she still didn’t believe it. Then he did a third time, and she didn’t forgive him, and she believed it. Kinda hard not to when you walk in on that shit. So, she took the house, all his money, belongings, and threw his ass out.
“Basically, what I’m trying to say here, is be careful who you choose. They can stab you right in the back and you won’t even know it. Scumbags.” Vinyl stopped to catch her breath. “Not everything is black and white, Octavia. You gotta believe the truth with these things, trust me.”
“Why are you telling me this, Vinyl?”
“Because,” Vinyl said, getting off the bed, and opening the window to the east to let some air in, before making her way back, “I love you, and you’re my best friend. I’d hate to see you get hurt. God only knows how many times that has happened over the years.”
“Well that’s very thoughtful of you, Vinyl.” Octavia looked at her friend, smiled, then kissed her on the cheek. “I’m lucky to have you.”
Vinyl wrapped Octavia’s neck with a hoof and pulled her in while saying, “You bet your ass you are. I bet we’re gonna go on crazy adventures, and even stay up late, even though we got classes and shit.” While she was talking, her other hoof was making a rounded half-circle motion to emphasize her point. “What about nightclubs too?”
“Aha, well, I don’t know about that. Nightclubs really aren’t my thing. I’m more of the opera type. Did you forget?”
“Course not. Just telling you to open your horizons.”
“Mind if I tell you a story now? About something I’ve learned over the course of my little life, with you,” Octavia said, escaping from her friend’s grasp.
“Um, sure. So long as it isn’t about boring opera. Anything but that.”
A laugh. “Don’t worry, it’s not about opera. Come, sit with me.” The cellist was patting the bed with a hoof, and then she reached for the blank frame shortly after.
When they were both situated on the bed, Octavia began talking again while holding the blank picture frame. “Look. You see how this is an empty picture frame? Nothing in it?”
Vinyl nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“I want you to do something for me, Vinyl. Close your eyes, and picture me and you in this picture frame right now, okay? Everything I’m going to tell you isn’t real. At least for now. Got it?”
“Ooh, la, la. I like where this is going,” Vinyl said cheekily, and doing as she was told.
“All right. You got the vision in your head now?”
“Mhmm.”
“Good. Now I want you to picture that we’re living together as something more than best friends. Nothing akin to lovers, just past the point of best friends. We’ve both graduated from university, and you could say that we love each other, though not romantically or sexually. Got it?”
“I do,” Vinyl said, images in her head becoming a rich illustration of what Octavia was saying. For some reason, deep down—the most profound and austere ardor fluxed within her, setting off a chain reaction of subconscious thoughts that went hither and became hidden, but only until she realised she might be looking through the glass spectrum of her future. It was a curious feeling, akin to excitement and awe. It went without question that Vinyl did, in fact, dream about being with Octavia one day. It was something she had always yearned for.
And now it might be here.
“Okay, now picture, say, yourself going out to do something and not telling me what you’re going to do. You just do it. No notes, texts, nothing. You go out on a secret date with somepony you met at a mixer at a café.”
“All right got it. But I don’t see why, when I got you.”
“Err, just focus on this story for now.”
A sigh. “Fine.”
“Okay,” Octavia said, “now picture coming home after said date or night out and I’m sitting in our decorated living room and waiting for you to get home. When I see you walk through the door, that’s when I start to get nervous, anxious, and even mortified that you did something without me. And certainly you not telling me put a toll on me.
“You say all you did was go out for the night and nothing more. But you know that’s not true. You were seeing somepony else. Somepony that you could probably love in the long run. Somepony whom you can share your darkest and deepest secrets you can’t even share with me, your past and beyond best friend.” A pause to catch her breath. A gust of wind blew in, whistled even. Only made them tenser. Then a voice. “You go to bed, and don’t bring it up to me again.
“Then, picture you waking up the next morning and seeing the pictured frame of me and you on your bedside table. You see it every morning, and when you do it usually makes you smile. But this time it doesn’t. You just get up out of bed and go about your routine. Then you go out again and not tell me, leaving me behind to grapple with the idea that you’re with somepony else and not with me.
“Mind you I’m not in love with you, or even obsessed with you, even if that’s what it seems. I’m merely a best friend who has a connection with her best friend, that friend being you, Vinyl. I love you for who you are, I cherish you, the time we spent together, and I’m always there for you. I tell you everything. But you don’t. Sometimes you disappear without saying anything passively. Sometimes you’ll be working in your room with your headphones on, and when I try and call you for something you don’t respond, even though you can hear me. You just choose to ignore me.
“Eventually, you move out of our little house to be with the one whom you swear to love, leaving me in the midst of memories we shared together for almost a decade. You leave me the picture that was ours, told me to keep it. We’d stay in touch every now and again, but eventually we became nothing but a faded distant memory. I’d think of you every second I was in that home of ours.
“Now I want you to envision that the picture of us being together, as friends, has faded into nothingness.”
“Okay…” Vinyl said, concentrating her mind.
“Now open your eyes, look down at the picture.”
“What the…” The picture frame was glowing and some sort of magical force was controlling it now. It resided in the air, floating semi-aloft. It had a fading picture of Vinyl and Octavia smiling for the camera. Within seconds, it vanished and the frame placed itself back in Vinyl’s hold, leaving her to wonder what was going on. “What the hell was that?”
Tittering built up in Octavia’s throat. “That was a spell charm. The picture frame you hold can tell the future of what it will soon hold. That is, if it connects with whomever has hold of it.”
“So are you saying?”
“I’m afraid so,” Octavia said, her voice dry from all the talking she had done. She moved in closer to her friend. “But that’s not the main point of the story. There’s something to be taken out of it.”
“What is it?” Vinyl asked, affronted that she knew their friendship would come to an end in the near future.
“You know how in the story you didn’t tell me anything about your dates?”
“Yeah…”
“It’s because, well, we are the architects of our existence; it’s the only constant that makes us us. But sometimes we deify our normal characteristics for a greater reason that goes unadmitted, and we try and avoid the things we want to do, whether it be with others or ourselves, out of the pity we create and put upon ourselves.
“We should never feel obligated to do something with other people, even if marriage is in the question or even a best or true friend. We are our own masterminds of this gigantic universe, we choose what we do, and we accept it. But know this: There is always a consequence for everything we do: Every step we take, every breath we take, and what we do to others. No matter what. It’s the only thing that creates balance in this world.
“You make your choices, Vinyl, and I’ll make mine. If I choose not to be with you, or if you choose not to be with me, I can accept that. I’m a mare of logic, not emotion.”
Vinyl’s pupils were dilated, wide, and her mouth was agape. “That…was…so…deep! Did you come up with that? Holy smokes.”
“I did. Just know that I won’t hold anything against you for being you. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
“D’aww, how’d I get lucky to bunk with a kick-ass friend like you on my first day of University?” Vinyl pulled Octavia in for a hug.
And that was it: Octavia and Vinyl didn’t bring up the frame for the rest of the day.