Dashie and Clyde
Author’s note: This fic was written with background music in mind. Throughout it, you will see links which lead to music. The best way to go about listening to these links is simply to open them in a new tab, and close them when the next link is reached. The music is not meant to be heard in its entirety, and is intended to last only until the next link.
When you party like I do, waking up isn’t the most pleasant experience. It’s not just the massive headaches and the cleanup that I tend to get stuck with - that’s an occupational hazard. Besides, I’ve found that if I spend a few hours picking up plastic cups and broken pieces of furniture, it gives my head time to get back to normal, relatively speaking.
It’s not the stuff that other ponies said, or that you said. That stuff’s easy to deal with. When you’re drunk and you say dumb things, you tend to get forgiven a lot easier than you normally would. There was this one time, actually, when I nearly started a civil war while I was under the influence, but that’s a story for another time.
No, the worst part of waking up is the stuff that you did while you were out. Even worse, you usually do it with other ponies, which is just asking for trouble. Case in point: now. Honestly, if I’d known the kind of trouble that I was going to be in when I woke up, I probably would have slept for another few hours and let the Guards take care of things.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you what happened.
Slinger’s Song
A muffled noise woke me up, but my eyes were still closed. Not, of course, that it did much good - light shone painfully through my eyelids and into the back of my skull. I moved my head up a little bit, mumbled half a word, and raised my left foreleg across my eyes. The yellow glare softened into a pleasant black, and I leaned back.
My head hit something hard. Ow.
The sharp jolt of pain cut through my sleep, and I realized that I would have to actually wake up instead of sleeping off my hangover. Annoyed, I opened my eyes and looked behind me to see what I’d hit my head on. If I was going to wake up instead of sleeping, I was at least going to know what had caused it.
It was a brick.
Wait, why was it a brick?
Because I was lying down in a pile of rubble.
But why was there a pile of rubble?
The roof was missing. It must have come from there.
Ah, right. Of course.
Wait.
I sat up, causing some of the rubble to shift and wedge itself in areas where bricks and electrical wiring should not be wedged. I mean, unless you’re into that sort of thing, but, generally speaking, most ponies aren’t. I mean, I’m not. Well, most of the time, anyway. Well, okay, there was this one time at Vinyl Scratch’s nightclub, but I don’t remember most of it, and by and large, I wasn’t-
Not now. Focus.
Right. Okay, so. I was sitting on top and partly inside of this pile of rubble, which was mostly made of bricks, electrical wiring, and the odd pipe. Just my luck, one of the few intact bricks had decided to serve me as the world’s worst pillow. The rubble had fallen from a large hole in the roof - there wasn’t anything in the room that could have made the hole, so it must have been me.
Oh, great. I really hoped this didn’t end up landing me community service hours, which in turn lead to a journey of self-discovery and growth as an individual coupled with being injured as the result of a lightning-induced Sonic Rainboom. That would bite.
I rose to my hooves and looked around. What I saw was interesting, because it wasn’t the inside of a club or a bar.
It was a bank vault.
But it was a weird kind of bank vault, because it didn’t have any money in it. I mean, not that I make a habit of breaking into bank vaults or anything, but they’re generally supposed to have money or something in them, and this one didn’t. Like, at all.
I turned around and saw that the front door of the vault had been broken off of its hinges. It hung at a drunken angle, and I could see a bit past it into the bank’s lobby.
I sighed. I would have to face the music for this sooner or later, and better to make it sooner. Maybe if I was still drunk enough, they would take me down to the station and let me sleep it off.
I squeezed past the big metal door and found myself surrounded by Royal Guards.
Spike in a Rail
This must have been one hell of a party.
Seeing me, they tensed. There must have been about twenty of them, and they were in a big semi-circle around me. The leader (well, the one who was a head taller than the others and had more gold strapped to him) took a step forward.
“Stop right there, criminal scum!” he shouted.
“Hey, I’m not criminal scum! I’m Rainbow Dash! You know, athlete extraordinaire, saviour of Equestria, winner of the Best Young Flyers competition?” I puffed out my chest, letting them take in the radiant awesomeness that followed me wherever I went. Surely they’d see that this had been a big misunderstanding, we’d laugh it off and-
Well, I’m sure that’s what would have happened if he hadn’t tackled me into the ground. He was shouting something, and his volume at close range was really something impressive. “Nopony breaks the law on my watch! I’m confiscating your stolen goods, and then it’s off to jail with-”
Well, I’m sure that’s what he would have said if he hadn’t been tackled into the ground by Applejack.
I rose to my hooves in time to see AJ give the Guard a solid kick to the side of his helmet, and noticed that the twenty-0dd Guards around us had all gotten big, AJ-hoof-sized dents in the sides of their helmets and decided to sleep it off. Speaking from personal experience, that was a smart idea.
Applejack turned to me. “Rainbow! Thank goodness yer okay!”
“I didn’t need your help, you know.”
“Ah- . . . what?”
“I totally could have handled those guys myself.” And I totally could have, too. If they’d been smaller. And there had been half as many of them. And they had been pacifists. And I’d had a day off work.
AJ shook her head. “There ain’t no time for this - Rainbow, you’ve gotta get outta here!”
“What, why?”
“Yer wanted for robbery!”
Wait, what?!
“Robbery?! I’m not a bank robber!”
“Rainbow, look around yerself. D’ y’ know where y’ are?”
I looked around.
“It’s a bank.”
“And?”
“ . . . the vault’s been broken into.”
“And?”
“ . . . the money’s gone.”
“And?”
Um.
“Uh . . .”
Applejack rolled her eyes and looked pointedly at my side.
“And I have a sweet flank? Come on, AJ, I already knew that.”
Applejack buried her face in her hoof before pointing to my side again. I turned to look, though I didn’t see the point.
I mean, really, what did my flank have to do with oh I was wearing saddlebags and she was pointing to those. That made more sense.
And the saddlebags were stuffed with money. That made more sense wait WHAT?
Applejack was talking again. “Ah know yer not th’ type fer robbin’ banks, but the Guards don’t know that! They mean t’ arrest ya!”
“Yeah, I got that.”
There was a commotion near the bank’s entrance, and Applejack turned to face it. “Ah’ll hold ‘em off, but y’ gotta get t’ safety, y’hear?” She paused. “Rainbow?” Applejack looked over her shoulder, but all she must have seen was a (rather nice, if you ask me) view of my flank as I ran towards the side exit. I could have sworn I saw Applejack roll her eyes before turning back to face the Guards, whom I could hear yelling about criminal scum from the other side of the huge room.
Bynn the Breaker
I made my way out the side exit and started running through back alleys. The saddlebags were wound tightly around my wings, so I couldn’t fly. As I ran, I tried to make sense of the situation.
Okay. I woke up in a blasted-out bank vault with enough money on me to justify being counted in bills - at the least, I had a few thousand bits, but it felt much heavier. I had no memory of the events of the previous night, and my head was still kind of sore. In fact, the echoing of my hooves against the cobblestone still hurt.
Wait.
I stopped dead, then hit a hoof against the ground. The echo was painful, but there was a familiarity about the pain. The way it blossomed against the inside of my skull was something I’d experienced before.
I knew that pain. I knew what I had to drink in order to have a hangover like this, and I knew there was only place in town that served Diamond Dog Distilleries Special Reserve.
Vinyl Scratch’s club.
I didn’t know what that meant precisely, but it was the best place to start looking for answers.
By the time I staggered over the PON-3 CORRAL, it was noon. The sign, normally an electric blue, was unlit, and the bouncer outside looked more bored than usual in his black suit jacket. I couldn’t blame him - the day shift at a nightclub? Ouch.
He noticed my approach. “Hey, you’re that filly they want for-”
I opened one of the saddlebags and dumped half its contents on the ground in front of him.
“I need to talk to Vinyl. You didn’t see me.”
“See who?” he said, crouching and scooping up the money into his pockets as best he could.
Yellow Line
Vinyl’s club was everything you’d expect from a nightclub, but with more bass. There were actually speakers embedded into the walls at strategic points, and I honestly didn’t know what kind of magic-enhanced steel the building’s foundations must have been made out of to withstand it.
Vinyl herself was standing boredly on the stage, looking at the club’s lone remaining dancer.
“Look, Pinkie,” she yelled over the music, “You seriously have to go home now.”
“Crank up the bass!” cried Pinkie, gesticulating in time with the beat, and completely unaware of the outside world.
Before either of them could say anything, I ran up to Vinyl and her array of soundboards. “Vinyl, can I talk to you?” I yelled.
Vinyl just looked at me, pointed at her ears, and shook her head. I sighed and twisted the master volume dial, quieting the music. Pinkie kept dancing.
“Thanks,” Vinyl sighed. “You wanted to talk about something, right?”
“Yeah. What did I do here last night?”
“Many things, few of them legal.”
I rolled my eyes. “Vinyl, this is serious. I woke up in a bank vault this morning, and the Guards are after me!”
“What? Now this I have to hear.”
Vinyl was more cooperative after I told her about my morning so far. When I’d finished, she rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. There were a lot of ponies here, Dash. I can’t say I remember much of what you were doing.”
“Vinyl, I have absolutely zero memory of what I did, and I drank Diamond Dog Distilleries Special Reserve. There is no way you cannot remember what I did under the influence of that.”
“Oh, right! Now I remember! After you finished table dancing and singing dubstep karaoke, you were talking to this mare over in the corner there for a while. After that, you both flew out the door and I didn’t see you until now.”
“What did she look like? Did you recognize her?”
Vinyl looked apologetically at me. “She was wearing a trenchcoat. I didn’t really get a good look at her.”
I blinked.
“She . . . she was wearing a trenchcoat in a nightclub and you don’t remember much about her.”
“Hey, I just pay attention to the new trends in music! If the new clubbing getup is a trenchcoat, I don’t know anything about it!”
I decided not to say anything about how Vinyl’s auditory creations fit only the loosest definitions of “music.” Instead, I pursued the clue further. “Okay, what did this trenchcoat look like?”
“Grey.”
A pause.
“What, that’s it?”
“It was a trenchcoat. You know what they look like.”
I sighed angrily. “Was there nothing else about it?”
Vinyl scratched her head in thought. After a minute, she perked up. “Oh, I remember! It had the Skyguard insignia on it.”
Now that was interesting. Only pegasi who had reason to undergo extreme weather conditions were allowed to use Skyguard coats. These pegasi included the mail service, royal messengers, and the members of the weather service responsible for harsh climates.
“Thanks, Vinyl. That helps a lot, actually.”
“It does? Aren’t there thousands of pegasi in the Skyguard?”
“Yeah, but only a few of them get to wear coats like that, and only two or three of them live in Ponyville.” I frowned. “Of course, I can hardly go flying around questioning all of them. I barely made it here unnoticed.”
Vinyl started pondering the situation, brow furrowed. Pinkie, who had stopped dancing and noticed me, bounced over. “Hey guys, whatcha talkin’ about?” she asked.
“I’ve been framed for robbery and I’m trying to prove my innocence.”
“Cool!”
I sighed. “And the icing on the cake is I don’t even remember what happened. I just woke up in a pile of rubble and money.”
Pinkie blinked at me for a moment. Then she gasped loudly, hovering in the air. “Cake! Icing! Oh my goodness, I’m going to be late for the bake-off! Vinyl, meet me there! I have so much baking I need to do!” she cried before rushing out the door in a pink blur.
Vinyl sighed and shook her head. “I’ve been trying to tell her that all morning.”
I looked at her confusedly. “What bake-off is this? I didn’t hear anything about it.”
Vinyl started walking down from the stage and over to the bar. I followed her. “It’s a new thing this year, and they’re hoping to make it an annual thing. There’s gonna be a big event happening over in the park about baking - there’ll be judges and prizes, and it’s also an opportunity for some new bakers to promote themselves.”
I stopped. The coat, the bake-off, the bank robbery - it all made sense!
Sort of. It wasn’t much of a lead, or much of a motive, but it was all I had.
“Dash?” Vinyl said in a tone that indicated she’d said it more than once. “Equestria to Dash, you okay?”
“Oh, I’m very much okay, Vinyl. In fact, I’m so okay that I just figured out whodunit!” I leaped onto a table and posed dramatically. “I shall clear my name and bring the perpetrator to justice!”
“Oh, cool,” she said. “Before you do, though, one thing.”
I looked at her. “Yeah?”
“Um, when are you going to pay me back for that electrical wiring? Speaker A-7 hasn’t been working properly since you-”
I dumped the saddlebags on the ground at Vinyl’s feet, bills poofing up from them. “We agreed never to speak of that again,” I said, looking at Vinyl angrily.
She grinned back. “I know, but how was I supposed to hire a contractor? ‘I’m sorry, sir, but my friend Rainbow Dash had a few too many and decided to experiment with elec-’”
I didn’t hear the rest of what Vinyl said, because I was already out the door.
Confrontation
I knew where she would be, and I wasted no time in getting there. My flight attracted the attention of the patrolling Guards, but I didn’t care - they would get their culprit, and I would be free to go.
I landed heavily amongst the booths set up for the bake-off taking place today in Ponyville Public Park. The smells of warm bread and confectionery greeted me, and I looked around for the culprit. Not that row, not that row . . . there!
I could see the coat folded up on a box next to a portable oven, out in plain sight. I could also see who the pony making last-minute additions to a batch of baked goods was.
It was her.
I heard the shouts of a Guardsman behind me, and galloped over to the booth. I needed to make sure that the Guard could see who it was. Upon reaching the booth, I turned around and braced myself. The Guard who landed in front of me had a dented helmet, and I recognized him as the captain from the bank.
“Wait!” I called as he strode purposefully towards me. “I’m not the one you want, she is!” I pointed at the grey pegasus beside me.
The Guard looked over at her skeptically. “Ma’am, is what she says true?”
Derpy Hooves turned around and looked at us. She was carrying a tray of muffins and wearing a pink, flowery apron with the words Kiss me, I’m Fancy! on it. “Is what true, Officer?”
“This,” he looked at me, “individual claims that you are somehow responsible for the robbery of the Last National Bank last night.”
Derpy was silent for a while, looking down at the tray she held. She put the tray on the table between her and me and the Guard and dropped to all four hooves, head hanging. “Yes,” she said quietly.
Groose's Theme
“Of course you aren’t, sorry to bother- WHAT?”
“I was the one who got Rainbow Dash to break into the vault,” Derpy said, sitting on her haunches.
“But . . . but why?” the Guard asked.
“I needed a special ingredient for the bake-off to make my muffins extra-tasty, but it was really expensive, and I just didn’t have the bits to pay for it,” Derpy said, looked back up at me and the Guard.
“So you robbed a bank?” I asked. “How much could this ingredient have possibly cost?”
Before Derpy could respond, her daughter, Dinky Hooves, came running up, levitating a burlap sack behind her. “Mom, mom!” she cried, “I looked in our money jar and we had the money after all! I went to the store, and-”
Derpy picked up Dinky and drew her into a hug. “Oh, thank you, Dinky, but I managed to find the money another way.”
Dinky leaned back from the hug. She looked at me, then at the Guard, then back to her mother. “Mom, you didn’t rob the bank, did you?”
Derpy was silent.
Dinky sighed. “Mom, I told you that you don’t need to rob a bank to get 27 bits.”
“My hearing must be going,” I said, “because I think I just heard you imply that your mom robbed a bank and framed me over 27 bits.”
“No, that’s what I said.”
I paused.
I looked at Derpy, who met my eyes as best she could. “You . . . you . . . you were going to frame me . . . for bank robbery . . . for twenty-seven bits?” I tried not to yell, but it was difficult.
Derpy looked me as though I were a silly, silly filly. “Well I can hardly bake if I’m in jail! Besides, I needed somepony capable of breaking into the vault, and your Sonic Rainboom was the only thing I could think of.”
The Guard interrupted. “What was this ingredient that you needed, anyway?”
“Oh, I just needed some whole wheat flour. It just gives the muffins that extra-natural taste, you know?”
The Guard and I stared at Derpy.
“Oh, but where are my manners? Please, try one!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m not allowed to accept-” was all the Guard managed to say before Derpy shoved a muffin in his mouth. He took a bite of the top and held the rest in his hoof. He started to say something stern, but stopped when he tasted the muffin. The Guard chewed slowly, eyes wide open, as though he had been notified of a great and all-encompassing truth about life and the universe.
“No muffin is that good,” I said, picking one up and taking a bite out of it. I chewed, waiting for the taste to hit me. Admittedly, though, the texture was nice - thick, but not too thick - and there was a certain earthiness about it, but in a good way, not in an eating dirt way.
Then the taste started.
It was the single most beautiful thing I had ever tasted in my entire life.
I fell to my knees and wept, not wanting to swallow and end the experience.
Somewhere outside the euphoria of the muffin, I realized that Pinkie and Vinyl had shown up and were talking to me. I could only point at the muffin tray and bemoan the imperfection of the natural world.
After we had recovered from the muffins, the Guard started. “Now, Mrs. Hooves, as . . . enlightening as that was, there is still the matter of several hundred thousand missing bits from the Last National Bank.”
“Oh, that! I didn’t need all the money, so I just hung on to the extra.” Derpy produced a duffel bag from the booth behind her and swung it up onto the table. “It’s all here!”
“Uh, yes, I’ll take your word for it,” said the Guard, eyeing the bag warily. I doubted he was excited at the prospect of counting all of it..
“So I’m innocent!” I said to him.
“As soon as you return the money you fled the crime scene with, yes.”
I paused. I looked at Vinyl. She sighed.
“My bouncer isn’t going to be happy about this.”
“Would he - and you, for that matter - be happier about possessing stolen money?”
“Point taken.”
In my Dreams
Pinkie had, naturally, suggested that there be a super-duper-bake-off-celebration party as soon as my innocence had been secured and Applejack had been released from holding at the local precinct. The participants in the bake-off had been more than happy to oblige her with all the confectionery she needed. I had done my best to be impartial, but Derpy’s muffins were too good to pass up, and I had found myself wandering back near her table every time she had finished a batch.
By the time the sun set, signaling an end to the bake-off, I was stuffed with muffins, chocolate cake, cupcakes, eclairs, cinnamon rolls, and doughnuts. I lay back on the grass near Derpy’s booth as she packed the final baking items into the wagon she had used to transport them to the park. Before hitching herself to it, she walked over to me.
“Rainbow Dash?” she said.
I opened one eye, regarded her, and stood up. “Yeah, Derpy?”
She traced a hoof through the grass. “You’re not mad at me, are you? About the whole bank robbing thing?”
I chuckled. “Derpy, you know I couldn’t stay mad at you. Besides, it all worked out.”
“You’re not mad?” she said, lighting up. “You mean it? We’re still friends?”
“Of course we are,” I said, grabbing her into a hug. She hugged me back. We stayed like that for a moment before stopping. As Derpy went to hitch herself to the wagon, I called to her. “And, Derpy?”
She turned. “Yeah?”
“If you ever need a few bits or anything, you can just ask me next time, alright? You don’t need to turn to a life of crime.”
She giggled. “Don’t worry, I will.”
She back turned to the wagon, but I darted over to the harness. “Please,” I said, “allow me.”
“Oh, are you sure?”
“Of course. Besides,” I said, pointing to Dinky, who, tuckered out by the day’s events, was curled into a sleeping ball in front of Derpy’s booth. “I think there’s something you can carry.”
The walk back passed nicely. When we had reached her house and Dinky had been put to bed, I made to leave, but Derpy stopped me.
“It’s a long flight back to your house from here. Would you like to spend the night? The couch isn’t the best bed, but it’s really comfortable.”
I grinned. “Sure.”
