Thunder crashed and, for a moment, the buildings were thrown into stark relief. The darkness lay thick and close, the fierce electrical storm knocking out street lights and blocking the gentle light of the moon. Wind screamed through the city, and loitered outside foals’ windows, moaning as ghoulishly as it could. It should have been raining. It wasn’t raining, but it was one of those nights when it really should have been raining.
In the darkness, a ghost-white shadow, arrogantly defying gravity (and optics), scaled the sheer side of the Canterlot apartment block. Hoof over hoof, she dragged herself up. A warm, lethargic satiety had replaced the predatory hunger of an hour before, and the climb was taxing both her muscles and her agility. In all honesty, Vinyl was starting to regret not taking the stairs. An ache was building in her shoulders, and she could feel a wobble starting to build in her legs. Her front was starting to rub raw in patches, where it was being dragged harshly over the rough concrete facade. Were she not supremely confident in her awesome power, she might even have despaired of completing her ascent before her strength gave out. As it was, she knew that she would collapse gratefully into her bed the moment she had slipped silently in through her window. By this point, however, the climb down would be worse than the remaining climb up. On top of that, her original reason for the choice still stood; she couldn’t possibly let her poor, innocent roommate see her come slinking home after feeding, a blood-soaked monster of the night. The respectable, proper, and innocently naive mare would probably die of fright. No, she had to keep on with this route. With a moaning grunt, she reached out for the next window-ledge. The predatory silhouette dragged on up through the night.
Eventually, finally, she reached her room. Pulling herself up to sit on the ledge, she lent against her window for a while, enjoying the cool press of the glass on her side, and gulping down frigid air. As a chill so cold that it almost burned scoured her nose and lungs, her scrapes and muscles bloomed with a bruised heat. It was far from an ideal end to the night, but her hunt had gone flawlessly, her secret was undiscovered, and she was home safe. She allowed herself a slight wolfish grin of satisfaction. Once her breathing had returned to normal, she sat up and wrapped the window’s handle in her magic, then twisted it open. Or, rather, she tried to twist it open. Then she tried again. Then she pressed her face back against the glass and gazed, unfocused, through her closed blinds. Finally, she began to mumble.
“You idiot. You bucking idiot. It’s locked, and you can’t see the key, and you can’t get in. And you’re going to have to climb all the way back down and use the bucking stairs, like you should have done in the first bucking place. Buck.”
Vinyl craned her head back to plot her route of descent. The moment her weight shifted, however, she felt her guts drop and the empty air start to tug at her back, shrieking in anticipation. She slammed herself back against the window, hammering and scraping against it with her hooves. “Buck! Oh, buck, Tavi, help! It’s so bucking high up!”
After hardly a minute of desperate screaming, the blind drew back to reveal a thoroughly unimpressed earth pony.
Author's Note
I started trying to write an OctaScratch sadfic (that ship being what brought me to Fimfiction in the first place, and why deliver long-overdue promised updates when you can just start yet another story, amirite?), but decided that I have nowhere near the talent to do it justice, and that I'd do a bog-standard OctaScratch vampire thang instead. That was four months ago to the day as of when I'm writing this.
But, hey, 170~ish words a month. Looks like I've finally broken out of my laziness.
Chapter 1: A Secret's Safety
Vinyl awoke and was immediately filled with dread. The thick blackout blinds made it impossible to tell day from light. It was usually impossible to tell the time in that dank, forbidding lair, but if the alarm clock making a noise like that of a suicidally masochistic sheep trying to get intimate with an active chainsaw was anything to go by, it was 8:30pm. That meant that soon she would have to go outside of her room and most likely run into Octavia. She desperately tried to work out what would await her when she did.
Last night's ending moments were completely unknown to her, washed from her memory by her terror. The lead-up to her return was there, right up until Octavia's face appeared in her window, but were so abstracted by fear that she could not be sure of any detail. She knew very little for certain, other than one horrifying fact: her secret was quite likely her secret no longer. Her pulse raced and her gorge rose, and she struggled to keep herself still, terrified of what further damage she could inflict upon herself if she acted out of this blind panic. Her skin crawled and images crowded her mind, of vampire hunters and lynch mobs closing in as she just lay there, neither fighting nor fleeing but letting her enemies approach as they wished. She heaved in breath and scrunched her covers around the sides of her head. Finally, the terrified thoughts gave way to apathy as her mind swiftly tired of the no-longer novel emotion. Upon reflection, she realised that her intact arrival into the next night had entailed her roommate not murdering her in her sleep. Given how often Tavi had threatened to do exactly that in response to her snoring, the vampire was under no illusions that she would receive a merciful reprieve in the case of her true nature being discovered. No, Octavia did not know for sure, for sure. A skillful tongue could be enough to allay any suspicion, and, as all vampire are, Vinyl was a master of seduction and persuasion. Hope rekindled in her breast. She could still salvage this situation.
As she cracked open her door, glaring resentfully into the floodlit kitchen, she spied the cellist's back in front of the hotplates. The sight was immediately followed by the smell of frying pork.
"Heh, hey Tavi," Vinyl started with an awkward chuckle, "You know, I never have got used to you eating meat. It's weird, you being the only pony I know who does."
"Are you getting preachy again?" The response held both a light, jokey tone and hints of a whip-crack of disapproval.
"N-no, no. Just thinking aloud, is all."
"Hmmm."
The moment yawned like a chasm in the space between them. Vinyl racked her brains for something to say, finally reaching the desperate conclusion that even a wordless shout would be preferable to this sensation of being judged for all her unspecified shortcomings. Her chest swole as far as she could fill it...
"Vinyl."
She deflated thankfully. "Yes?"
"You woke me up again this morning, Vinyl."
"Oh, Celestia, yeah, I'm sorry. You know, it's the club, the hours... I had to work an extra late rotation because the dude playing for the dregs until closing time didn't show up, and it took a while to disassemble all the kit, and I had problems getting home..."
"You were outside our window, Vinyl."
"Oh, buc... Uh, yeah. I was, uh, really high, you know. I took some stuff at the club, nothing weird, but it must've been stronger than I thought, or I must've taken more of it, or something. And, well, I thought it'd be cool to sit out on the balcony, but we don't have one, and I was really bucked, so I decided to sit out on our windowsill instead. Sorry."
"You were covered in blood again, Vinyl."
"Yeah, well, people were getting drunk at the club like normal, and drunk guys get into fights sometimes. You've seen the results plenty of times before. None of it was mine, so you don't have to worry about that."
"You don't work at the club on Tuesdays, Vinyl. The club doesn't open on Tuesdays, Vinyl."
Vinyl stared at the grey, unmoving back in front of her, mind scrambling for any excuse for her own lies, "I... .... uh ... I... I'm sorry, Tavi, you're right," she started to sniffle despondently, "you have a right to know. I was... I was cheating on you. There was this guy I met, and..."
"We're roommates, Vinyl, not lovers. Try again, Vinyl."
"Well, I'll tell you if you really want to know."
"I do, Vinyl."
"But I think that it'd be better if you'd just let it..."
"Tell me, Vinyl."
"Well, alright. I went out to town to get you a present for that birthday I missed last week, and Lyra saw me and pulled me into a place when I was coming back."
"You bought me a present?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Oh, how kind of you! Thank you. May I see it?"
"... It's all dirty from the blood, Tavi, you won't want it like that... I'll clean it up tonight, alright?"
"Oh, of course, thank you. I am so excited to see what it is. Coming from you, I'm sure that it will be absolutely fantastic. And a night's anticipation will only make me look forward to my brilliant present all the more tomorrow. You are such a darling friend." The earth pony finally turned around, flourishing a pan full of dead pig, "Want some?"
"Ewww, buck no," Vinyl pulled away, gagging. As she turned back towards her room, she grinned in triumph. Just as planned, she'd been able to wrap Tavi up in her hooves. Vampire against pony in such a battle of wits was so far from fair.
Author's Note
Eh, I'm taking the view that my writing needs a lot of practice and clearing of rust, so I'm practicing as much as possible. That means no time for re-drafts, error checking, editing, planning a plot beforehand, nada! \o/
One short sitting (well, not really, I'm lying down) of pretty much throwing up on a sheet of paper. I would say sorry, but I'm not really. My other stories won't get updated until I get over re-writing chapters I have issues with and never posting them, and the way to get over that is to practice releasing half-arsed crap (or something).
Anyway, criticism is welcome and encouraged, as always. It being constructive is preferred, but not required.
