shitty octascratch might delete later idk

Vinyl would never forget the look on her brother’s face after she’d asked him that.

Long Play looked as if she’d just bucked him in the balls. “What?” he managed to get out. Voice strangled.

Just a little too close to her own voice for comfort.

“It was just a joke,” she said, in her horrible hoarse whisper. She gasped and gawked for words to say, for something else to carry this on with. For some way to convince him the new and sudden need for it to be humorous.

Long Play stared at her. Vinyl did not meet his eyes.

She continued on. “I thought it might be fun.”

“Fun? Fun to do what, Vi?”

“Y-Y’know—” She hated her voice. No wonder he was reacting this way. No wonder Long Play—

“You know, explore?” Swallowing her spit had made her voice sound worse, like she was gargling gravel and razorblades. “It’ll be fun.”

It sounded an awful lot like she was trying to convince herself and not just her brother, now.

Long Play looked like he’d just watched a zeppelin crash happen before him. “Vinyl. Stop. Get fucking help.”

Vinyl stepped forward. Her horn sparked. There was the whining hum of mana in the air.

Rewindwindwindwindwind

“C’mon. You’re bigger than me. What are you afraid of?”

You hate my voice don’t you?

Long Play opened his mouth to speak but he seemed beyond words.

It’s because I sound like a sixty-year old stallion who smokes like a chimney, isn’t it?

“Afraid you’ll like it?” Vinyl tried her best to croon, to sound seductive and demure. It was anything but. She reared up on her hindlegs, and placed one hoof on her brother’s chest. The other traced the edge of Long Play’s cheek.

“C’mon,” she grunted in that horrible mockery of allure. “Let’s have some fun~”

Crack!

Vinyl’s eyes were wide. She stumbled back, the hoof that had just been on her brother’s cheek now feeling her own. Where his hoof had just struck her.

Long Play shook his head as Vinyl’s vision became watery. “This isn’t fun,” she’d heard him say as if a million miles away and growing further every moment. “This is fucked.”

In her histrionics, Vinyl did desperately want to throw herself down the stairs. She wanted to tumble down step after step, a bone broken for each one she collapsed upon. And at the end of her fall, she wanted to lay there shattered and snapped, bleeding out on the cellar floor.

But none of that happened. She slumped against the wall beside the cellar door, weeping soft, wet, and goofy—her sobs the honking of geese.

~~~
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