Chapters shitty octascratch might delete later idk
Every morning. Or afternoon. Or evening.
Whenever she wakes up.
Vinyl Scratch had a job to do.
Just these endless tasks that she has to repeat to keep herself together.
Keep up the endless party.
She could get drunk any time she wanted. She could play any music she wanted. As loud as she wanted.
She could get high any time she wanted. She could go to sleep any time she wanted. She could get fucked any time she wanted.
Isn’t that what I wanted?
“It’s really amazing Vi, that you can keep up like this!” Pinkie Pie had once complimented her. Vinyl had flashed her a shark-toothed grin from behind magenta shades.
She’d never once spoken to Pinkie Pie with anything more than body language. There were few who could claim the displeasure of hearing her voice. She preferred it that way.
Drink. Smoke. DJ. Fuck. Party.
That’s what she’d always wanted. To DJ the endless party.
It was a task. A boring and tedious chore. Anypony watching would be bored to tears by her mechanistic routine. Any movie of her life—even a porno, as she flopped industrially atop some cock or lifelessly ground her tongue into Octavia’s cunt—would be unwatchable.
Left on pause until a better film was found. Cassette ejected and thrown aside.
Magnetic tape torn out and degrading.
And yet there seemed one superfan of this bomb—Octavia Melody, always there to give comments and nitpick through the scenes. Always there to replay the tape, buy the sequel, follow the fandom.
Vinyl felt sick.
And day in and day out, she always thought to herself:
Now that I can do whatever I want, why would the party ever end?
Maybe one day she’d even find out what she wanted.
shitty octascratch might delete later idk
“Hey, Vinyl, can you play me that record? Y’know, the one I reeeeaaaally like~”
She didn’t talk for Pinkie, perhaps the pony who knew her best in all Equestria aside from Octavia. It was different, with her. It was a form of respect, really. Even if she was closer to Octavia, and Vinyl certainly respected Octavia Melody in her own ways, she didn’t offer her the same courtesies that she did to Pinkie Pie.
Funny that. The closer she got to ponies, the more damage she could inflict upon them.
So when there was a certain level of respect—an almost (almost...) professional respect, in the case of Pinkie Pie—Vinyl kept a degree of distance.
She gave Pinkie a nod, and she smiled back. Vinyl quite enjoyed how Pinkie seemed to so fluently read her body language. Sure, there were others who could sort of get the gist, but Pinkie somehow had the ability to pick up on the little bits and nuances nopony else did.
Well, almost nopony else.
Pinkie’s music taste was eclectic, and Vinyl wouldn’t have had it any other way. Really, anything with a fast enough BPM and suitable energy in the performance was enough to get the party going for her (Vinyl died inside a bit at the pun), but Pinkie’s clear favorites? Vinyl couldn’t say the mare lacked taste. She had a knack for finding the most infectious, blood-pumping, yet somehow lasting and simultaneously fresh records of the genres she dug, from polka to bubblegum bass. Fuck, she’d even turned Vinyl onto some gryphon pop punk she’d never heard before that was as visceral as it was flank-shaking.
Vinyl really had no trouble saying it to herself as she watched the bubbly mare sashay away off into the waves of the party: Pinkie Pie was certainly a taste-setter.
Vinyl, of course, did make sure she only said that to herself. Perhaps Pinkie could already sense her feelings in her vibe. Wouldn’t surprise her.
There was no need to go and ruin a good thing and get Vinyl’s voice involved at any rate.
Vinyl smirked as she picked Pinkie’s select of the night from her record bay. She’d updated her turntable setup recently to have a jukebox feature, with a little modern touch: a chunk of CRT screen that displayed her musical library, as well as joystick from a scrapped arcade cabinet she’d nabbed at a resale auction. With a bit of simple programming (and a LOT of typing), she’d managed a basic display of her catalog of most-used records in her turntable that she could navigate.
She dropped her hoof into the joystick knob, and piloted her way through her vast-and-ever growing music library to “party metal”. She smirked as she heard the click after pressing the red plastic button (scavenged from the same arcade cabinet the joystick had once belonged to) situated right beside that treacherous chunk of cathodes, and watched as the little metal claw inside her jukebox-top mount just to the right of her snagged a disc by the hole in its middle and slid it out through a tiny slot directly into her waiting hooves.
Really, sometimes, honestly, it wasn’t all that bad.
Everything was still very bright, gleaming a bit too harsh on her eyes—but hey, that’s okay. That’s what the shades were for.
She was chill. She could handle this.
The disc dropped into place, and Vinyl smirked as the roaring major-keyed guitars and thundering bass roared from the subwoofers on her deck. When the drums kicked, there was no way to describe the sensation emotionally. Her whole body shook, right down to the marrow. Fuck it, she could feel her blood cells themselves vibrating, every neuron trembling as her horn sparked and she cranked the volume.
She was almost equine, here.
Almost real.
But it never lasts.
She looked down
And here the record spun
Slip
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Few things pleased Vinyl Scratch as isolation with music did.
This was certainly to be expected—she was a musician, after all. All musicians desired intimate time alone with their instruments.
Vinyl’s instrument was uncommon in choice. Almost everypony and creature beyond had the means to her music-making. They had the keys to her composition. Any creature with a brain, an appendage, and a record player could make the music she did.
But only she did.
Or only she had —at first.
you’re not special anymore.
Which is exactly why she needed her isolation more than anything now.
Vinyl stalked through the apartment, claustrophobic in its empty clutter. The mounds of refuse from night after night spent locked up tight made it hard to breathe. The smell was overpowering, rotting fruit and dirty clothes and the stench of her unwashed going on a week now.
She wiped her hooves best she could on her own coat. They were still slick, grimy, oily with some putrid gunge that no doubt had originated from her at some point. She carefully held the vinyl between her hooves, not even bothering to use her horn. She needed to feel the plastic under her bare hooves.
Let me know I’m still here.
She carefully placed it on her personal player. This one was different from the deck she used to perform; it was smaller, more modest, and less flashy. Simple oak and rosewood; played 10 and 12 inch records depending on the setting.
Vinyl slowly dropped the needle on the plastic, and grinned like a madmare as she heard the fuzzy, staticy scratch. She could feel the hair on the back of her neck standing on end, and her tail swatted back and forth like a dog’s despite herself.
Fuck, that’s gorgeous.
And that was only the beginning. Of course Vinyl could never let even a solitary, personal listening session go without at least a smidge of her own personal flair. For this particular record, it made her feel all that much closer to the artist.
The first strings began to ring out from her speakers. They were the highest fidelity her endless supply of bits could find.
Vinyl collapsed in her stained and ripped recliner. It hadn’t changed position in the months since she’d upgraded to this apartment—a penthouse in Canterlot Heights, as it would happen, a click southbysouthwest of Princess Luna’s Cosmomancy Tower as the pegasus flies, and only just that little bit shorter—and it was hardly likely it ever would. Maybe when she’d ingested enough ethanol to kill a dragon and she tripped over it (which, by her accounts, could be anywhere between 4 and 7 nights a week if the blackouts were anything to go by).
She really couldn’t define her living situation as anything but squalor, to be honest. The recliner looked like a hand-me-down from her parents, but she’d actually bought it brand new when she’d moved into the penthouse. Living with Vinyl had a tendency to age both objects and ponies alike much more rapidly than they would otherwise.
Maybe that’s why she never wants to come over.
This was the only recording of its kind, too. Vinyl held a great pride in that, hollow as it was when she was at her worst. She’d been at the concert this piece was performed at, and recorded it herself. She didn’t even use any of the new digital shit, even though she could afford it easily. She’d done it all analog, with her very own tape recorder she’d built piecemeal over the past decade in order to best service her particular preferred sound.
Vinyl Scratch really did love Octavia Melody. Truly and honest to whatever horrible god let all this happen, she did. Octavia Melody was her reason for getting up and going to the party day in and day out.
Well, not the only reason.
“Yes, the only reason,” Vinyl growled over the slick and warbling bass notes.
She’s not even the only mare that keeps you getting out of—or into—bed.
“I don’t need to take this kind of abuse,” Vinyl muttered. She turned her attention back to the music—Octavia Melody’s music.
She let her head slam back against the recliner; she remembered this concert as if it were yesterday. It was the first performance of Octavia’s Vinyl had gone to see after the two had started “officially” dating. It had been transcendent—certainly the music was wonderful, but it had honestly been the indescribable elation of seeing that mare perform that way and know in her heart honestly that that mare loved her .
“Me,” Vinyl had found herself croaking out to Octavia after the show, letting her hear her vile voice for the first time. “Me , of all fucking ponies.”
And Octavia hadn’t run when she’d heard her voice, as rough and ragged and rancid as it was. She’d stayed. And she stayed.
There was always one thing about this piece that soured Vinyl. But it wasn’t even so much a sourness as it was a deep, aching bruise somewhere deep inside her abdomen that she couldn’t ever properly find.
I could never play like her.
Vinyl was doused in water. Clean, purifying water. Octavia’s strings soared through her. Her hind hooves twitched on the floor. Forehooves on the hoofrests.
I’m fucking useless.
She flopped off the recliner, the serenade still ringing in her ears even as the piece ended, nothing left but the hissing and popping of the needletip hopping over plastic.
Just another remix nopony wants to hear...
Vinyl rolled over and smacked against the turntable. She pushed herself shakily to her hooves, thrust the record needle up, and then picked the disc between her hooves before immediately losing balance and falling backward to slam her head off the hardwood floor directly next to a neglected plate of three-day old food. Mildewed rice and grey broccoli flew into the air from the resonance of her skull, and landed gracefully back to the plate.
I should drown in the lake Drown myself in the cellar, in the base—
Vinyl Scratch smashed the plate, and then the record, over her face.
“Degaussing is the process of decreasing or elimi—”
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SIDE_B_OCTV_MLD
Vinyl cried backwards up her cheeks, her tears sliding up to dry her coat and hide beneath her magenta lenses. She turned to face Pinkie Pie, who hopped back onto the bed. She’d just walked backwards across the room from the door to enter the scene.
“I don’t think you should come to any more of the parties,” she said to her in a voice unlike Vinyl had ever heard from her. The pep, the joviality, the pizzaz, the life —that was all gone.
Pinkie’s hoof hit Vinyl’s chest, and she felt herself dragged into her, her forelegs thrown around the other mare in a rough embrace. Vinyl’s hooves were dragging themselves across her body, pulling too tight. Pinkie thrust her closer, her legs pressing against Vinyl’s underside before curling back up against her body. Vinyl flew to Pinkie and landed atop her, Pinkie’s legs curling under her to take the brunt of the weight atop herself.
“Viny—ah! Vinyl! Stop, I don’t—”
Vinyl paused; she hadn’t even realized the amount of force she’d been using. Her hoof had gone numb.
“A-Ah! What—that hurts! Stop, that’s w-way too rough, Vi—”
Slap. Slap. Slap.
“V-Vinyl? C’mon, Vinyl, get off—”
Slap. Slap. Slap.
She found herself atop Pinkie once more, her hoof sliding out from between her pink legs to feel up Pinkie's gorgeous, perfectly pudgy curves.
“Vinyl?”
Pinkie closed her eyes and Vinyl kissed her. For a long, long moment, in which Pinkie Pie fell asleep, they shared the best kiss Vinyl Scratch thought she ever had. In her inebriation, she was able to conjure no comparison to the taste of her lips, the feel of her tongue, and the warmth of her breath.
Her lips left Pinkie’s, and her hoof slid out from under her cheek
Vinyl left the room with Pinkie Pie sleeping in her bed, peaceful, undisturbed, whole.
She knocked on the door in reverse, and then the tape paused for just a brief moment before it resumed, its rewind complete.
Vinyl stood at the door to Pinkie Pie’s room. Her hoof was just about to grab the knob.
But she’d already done that, hadn’t she?
She had.
The tape could only repeat what she recorded.
Vinyl hovered her hoof above the knob a moment. Then she knocked on the door.
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how somepony can just drop out of your life like that. how you can just make one mistake like that and it’s fucking gone foreverjust because i let her hear my voice once it’s over forever she’ll hate me forever i hate myself so muchdrowndrowning in the lakehatei fucking hate hhate thisi could have made her so happy doesn’t she know what she’s missing?
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I wanna kill myself most days
Run away
This is not my phase
All this running just to stay in place
What’s the BPM
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Vinyl Scratch was in a house.
There’s nowhere to go.
The house was a small stone cottage by the sea. Vinyl had lived here when she had been a very small foal. So had her parents, and so had her brother.
Nothing lived there now.
Least of all her.
She trailed, floated, glided like a ghost through her old home. Through abandoned rooms and neglected halls she paced in an endless circle.
She could hear the shorebreak echoing back to her, filling the otherwise empty ruins with a surreal ambience. It didn’t sound like the ocean so much as it sounded like she was trapped in some conch shell, entombed in a never-ending and ever-growing spiderweb of sound.
Almost soothing.
Nowhere to go.
The ocean had risen nearly a half foot since she was a foal. It didn’t sound like much, but the gradient of the sand rising from the shorebreak was only about five inches maximum. The cottage was situated in the dunes, which of course rose up to sometimes a full ten feet above the waterline—but the few inches of rise the ocean had gained was enough for high tide to flood the sand valleys between the dunes, transforming where Vinyl’s family had once lived by the sea into the very shorebreak itself.
The tide washed into the house. It went up to Vinyl’s fetlocks. The fur became damp, itchy, knotted and uncomfortable.
She stumbled through the rising water. Her ethereal presence was gone. She was grounded to the world once again, as clumsy as she’d been as a foal.
She was in their old parlor. She could remember being here all those years ago as if nothing had changed, empty and salt-soaked as it was now.
In the center of the room, suspiciously untouched by time, was her family’s old phonograph. It glittered and gleamed with an unnatural brightness, an unspoken and deathly comedy, an unreal veneer. It was just as old and beaten as it had been the last she saw it, and not a day older.
Vinyl slumped over the old phonograph on the table. Hoof fiddling with the record.
Nowhere.
“The music will drag the storm from the sea,” Vinyl mumbled to herself softly. Rain lashed at the house. The desiccated shutters clattered and clacked off one another. Moth-eaten tatters of what drapes were left either whipped into twisting wraiths or were torn from the windows altogether. “But it won’t take the hurricane from me.”
There was a roar that took her breath away, and the cellar door collapsed inward, the water rushing in a terrifying and unnatural cascade down the old steps.
Why had they left the house to begin with, again?
It wasn’t safe. That’s right. The rising water had made the basement unsafe to be in when they’d moved in, and they’d had to move away from the cottage all together when—
The house creaked on its foundations. The endless rush of water down the stairs into the old, abandoned cellar crashing in her ears made Vinyl feel as if she were down there, drowning in the silty tumult and torn to shreds by fragments of wood and mortar.
The wind shrieked through the house, piercing blasts of sand and small shells peppering the walls with shotgun force. What little was left of the thatched roof was blown off into nothing. The house creaked and whined, giving another ominous shudder.
And like this place, this ruin in the waves, Vinyl realized:wasn’t just the one thing. it takes time, and it takes dedication to fall apart piece by piece.
The waves roared in her ears.
Wasn’t just one mistake, it was one mistake too many.
The house by the sea collapsed in on itself into a great sandy and stoney sinkhole.
And nothing remained, not even the phonograph.
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Vinyl Scratch was getting fucked so hard in the bathroom stall her bones were creaking.
She’d braced herself against the grime-encrusted toilet, her face reflected back at her in the filthy water below. Her glasses were askew; tiny droplets of blood dribbled from her nostril and the corner of her mouth. They fell to create tiny ethereal roses in the foul murk below.
I’m not getting to heaven. The thought drifted into her mind as she blankly locked eyes with her off-chartreuse reflection in the water below. Each time her partner slammed into her, a few new dribbles of blood shook loose from her mouth or snout. I’m not even going to go to Hell.
A gryphon rode her. Vinyl couldn’t exactly recall what he looked like. It didn’t matter to her.
Death won’t be much of anything at all.
“Fuck me,” she growled, voice gutteral and grotesque. She didn’t care if the gryphon heard her; she was filthy, raw, and her voice reflected that. It was one solace, one companion, one little light in the night. And she could swing that light now, at anypony—anycreature —like a flaming sword, cut down anything in her path and set fire to everything around her.
“Come on, you’re not even trying,” Vinyl gasped at the gryphon as the barbed spines on his cock gripped and tore at her insides. She felt a warm drip of liquid down her leg, and she truly wasn’t sure whether it was blood or piss. Her clit gave a pitiful throb. “I can still talk. Bet you’d really like to shut me and my fucking annoying voice up right about now.”
“I actually kind of like it,” the gryphon said. Vinyl couldn’t see it, but he smirked, and his wings rustled.
“We’re already fucking,” Vinyl grunted. “You don’t need to flatter me.”
The gryphon let out a laugh, a harsh chirp. It pierced Vinyl’s ears, the sound brutal and chilling.
Obviously, she came.
“I mean it!” The gryphon thrust into Vinyl, who let out a weak hiccup as her shades danced on her muzzle. “It’s got a raw grittiness to it.”
“Must remind you of your sister.” Vinyl’s voice was a deadpan.
The gryphon smirked. “Well now, don’t get rude. Just because I’m being nice and fucking you gently now ...”
“Oh come the fuck on, don’t try and pull any teasing crap with me right now,” Vinyl said, rolling her eyes. “You probably wouldn’t know rough sex if it came up and hoofed you up the ass.”
“And you think you would?” Vinyl did not enjoy the condescending snark in the gryphon’s voice at all. He really was an entitled piece of shit; didn’t he know who she was?
Well, duh. The real answer was it didn’t matter.
“Smash my fucking face in,” she growled so low it hurt her scarred throat. “Slam it off the bowl and make me swallow every single one of my fucking teeth.”
The gryphon cocked an eyebrow, his thrusts slowing. “Damn. You really are looking for... that, aren’t you?”
“I knew you were a pussy,” Vinyl shot back, trying her absolute hardest to inflect true venom in her voice. “All you griffons half are, anyway.”
Another harsh chirping laugh. Vinyl grit her teeth as another pained orgasm struck her.
“No need to be racist.” The gryphon clicked his tongue and dug the claws of his talons into Vinyl’s flanks, leaving little thin lines that slowly turned red and oozed blood as each smack of his hips into hers forced them to open up just that much more.
“That’s the difference between you and me; you’re still doing shit you need to be doing. I get to do anything I fucking want.” Vinyl wrapped her hindlegs around the griffon’s middle, her thighs brushing up against the feathers on his middle. Her spine creaked audibly. “A-Ah...”
“You’re just fucking begging for it now, aren’t you?” the gryphon growled. Vinyl grinned; she could hear that mix of arousal and actual anger. That’s what she lived for.
Time to die for it.
Vinyl let out a coarse little yelp as the gryphon yanked her mane in his talon, forcing her already arched back further into its curve. She felt an exhilarating rush in her gut as her neck popped, and the gryphon slammed her muzzle down right against the curve of the toilet bowl.
CRACK!
Vinyl came so hard her mind blurred together like her entire brain had been thrown in a blender. She felt her teeth come loose in her gums, and the top and bottom molar on her left side caught her tongue just as her jaw clenched down, pulping the muscle through and through.
The gryphon wasn’t done. His talon unleashed her mane—dropped a rainfall of blue and white hairs—and then wrapped his talon around her horn, and slammed her face against the bowl once more.
Her glasses absorbed most of the impact—at first. The glass shattered inward into her eyes, which Vinyl had clenched shut on reflex. This did little to help, thin as her lids were, and the shards of her shades mashed into her sclera.
The thud of her skull as it slammed off the piss-stained metal reverberated almost as loud as the shatter of her lenses. The two noises rang off one another, soundwaves dancing and twirling off one another to create the sweetest song Vinyl had ever heard.
Wish I coulda sampled that.
Vinyl made an absolutely disgusting noise, her mangled tongue flopping from her mouth as she spat a bloody glob with a tooth inside onto the stained tiles below.
One of her eyes wouldn’t open anymore; there were simply too many fragments of her magenta lens piercing the lid, essentially stapling it to the eye underneath.
“Grab my horn and snap it off,” Vinyl begged, spitting viscera and tooth shards. She could barely see anything through the weak and bloody haze of her one good eye. “Use it to saw my fucking head off.”
This is my punishment, she thought to herself in pure elation. At long last, I am punished for my transgressions.
SNAP!
Vinyl’s horn broke free, her head jerking at an unnatural angle as droplets of blood and shards of glass flew free from her face. The gryphon let out a shriek only ascribable to a hawk, and plunged the tip of Vinyl’s horn into her jugular.
Vinyl sputtered and gagged, toothless and dehorned.
The gryphon held Vinyl’s head up for none to see, her blood still dripping from the stump of her neck. Her muzzle was mutilated and mashed, a single tooth still left among the popped gums and torn tongue.
“And now,” the gryphon declared in a distorted, clipping voice that wasn’t his, and indeed sounded very much as if some alien had just hijacked his body to use as an impromptu PA. “May i present: electronica extraordinaire, DJ-Pon3!”
The gryphon wiggled one of his lil’ claws into Vinyl’s toothless maw, popping her dislocated and shattered lower jaw ahinge. He leaned in, his beak open barely an inch, and he grabbed her tongue between a vicelike grip.
Jerked his neck. Kept a firm grasp on her mane.
Ripped it from her head, and swallowed it whole.
Vinyl woke up on the filthy bathroom tiles. Her lip was busted, her muzzle was numb and bleeding from both nostrils—but she still had all her teeth, and most disappointingly of all, her head was still very much attached to her body—her horn very much still attached to her head.
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“On behalf of Vinyl Scratch, who due to personal disabilities beyond her control, can not vocalize her own speech tonight—”
“When will you cut the shit, Vinyl?”
“...drinking will make your throat damage worse, so I would avoid that in the future...”
“—to know that it is the greatest honor to be held in such high esteem—”
“I can’t keep fucking doing this. It’s driving me insane, Vinyl. It’s driving me insane.”
“I love—”
“...and the damage to your balance and hearing will increase over time...”
“—her contributions to the genre remain unmatched—”
“All this—”
“I’m tired of being sick and worried every time I go out; I shouldn’t have to expect you to be dead or on the verge of death every time I leave you unsupervised. This isn’t—this isn’t a healthy way to live.”
“I love—”
“—and show that the art forms of electronica and sound manipulation can go hoof to hoof with traditional musical styles—”
“All this time—”
“...virus still remains within the scar tissue. Excessive stress, anything from substance abuse to excessive vocal performance...”
“I love—”
“And maybe this time I can get it through your head, Vinyl, maybe this time.”
“—you.”
“—and her contributions as a producer for a wide variety of other acts and artists—”
“Not a—”
“...erforate the lacera...”
“—you.”
“Fun? Fun to do what, Vi?”
“Not a—”
“...et into the bloodstrea...”
“All this—”
“—is unparalleled.”
“I don’t think you should come to any more of the parties.”
“—phase.”
“Get help.”
“I—”
“Get fucking help.”
“...d enter the brain...”
“—phase.”
“It’s not fair to live your life as if I—”
“...and induce psychosis.”
“—nating a remnant magnetic field. Due to magnetic hysteresis, it is generally not possible to reduce a magnetic field...”
“—this time—”
“...eeling of dissociation, depression, anx...”
“—you.”
“All this running just to stay in place.”
“I love—”
“...completely to zero, so d[ERROR]ng typically induces a very small ‘known’ field referred to as bias.”
“—ank you all so much.”
“—known—”
“...isplaced in time.”
“All this—”
“—bias.”
“I—”
“—don’t ever want to see you again.”
***APPLAUSE***
“—is time
“Vinyl? Are you feeling alright?”
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St__ _w_y
T_e gr_y gl__m_r _f h_r m_n_e...
I_’_ n_t fa_r
Fuck this.
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SIDE_A_VNL_SCRTCH
Trying to start
Vinyl put the record on the table
She was trying to
She was going to start to
Start the sto
Vinyl Scratch put the needle to the
Vinyl put her hoof to the record and slid
She put her hoof to the record and slid
Vinyl Scratch lifted her hoof from the record
Vinyl Scratch lifted her hoof. dropped the needle to the record
Skip
Water burst from the ceiling. Vinyl was sweating. Heart pounding in her tight skull.
She opened her mouth. Hoarse hissed, “Tell me it’s a dream
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Everything was bright and glossy. Vinyl fiddled with a tiny gap between her molars. Her heart was going to explode.
It was supposed to calm her down. That’s why they made those things. To calm ponies down.
Sweat shining through her coat. She panted softly. She couldn’t keep her jaw closed.
Tongue felt fat. It itched, stung, and she wanted to put it between the claws of a taffy puller and yank it straight from her head.
The idea did not strike her as exceptionally humorous. She felt a hiccup in her diaphragm, and she began to laugh.
It was a strangled, unearthly noise at first. Most vocalizations of Vinyl’s were ghastly and disturbing in sound alone. This sort of strained, unwarranted laughter would have sounded unhinged for a normal pony. From her it was nightmarish.
Writhing in her throat, her vocal chords a bed of snakes. They bit and nipped at old scar tissue. Only occasionally did she feel like vomiting. And all the while, she laughed.
Her abdomen hurt from laughing so much. Nothing was funny. None of this was funny. None of it.
She couldn’t breathe. Not even tiny ragged gasps could slip through her hideous and wheezed laughter.
She was growing dizzy from lack of air. Vibrating on the couch. Dissociating.
Dying.
She was leaving.
Am I there at last?
She was entering. Standing over Vinyl.
The grey glimmer of her mane was blinding. Her voice came to her in echoing waves.
“Vinyl?” it asked her while overlapping upon itself. “Are you feeling alright?”
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They flickered across the screen. Effervescent glowing lights organized as images of ponies laughing.
Reaching her hoof over to hit re
She watched them. Mocking her. Happy as they were.
Laying supine on the couch
Taxidermied in time. Reliving that moment of joy and elation over and over and over again.
Drowning in th
Belonging in this world.
Keep on make
Vinyl winced, her face pulled up into a pained mix of a scowl and a sob. What use was all this progress, all the ingenuity of innovation, if all it did was make her suffer?
Rewind the tape
At least here, alone, in the brief breaths the party took her into the safety of solitude—here Vinyl could belong out of place. At least here alone she could watch brighter days, as the sun slipped away, repeating forever and ever.
Rererererererere
Sound muted. Watched the white filly on the screen mouth words. She mouthed along.
Reeeeeeeeeeeeee
Went limp for the briefest of moments. Knocked the remote to the floor. The sound came unmuted. And they spoke to her.
“—ook Mom! Dad! Guys! Look! Look what Vinyl can do!” She’d never hear her brother’s voice that proud again. The happy little filly was the star of her very own movie even if just for the moment. She spun the record back and forth on the family’s gramophone, matching the hit of the mare’s crackled and swiped vocals as she notched the record back with her hoof expertly. She’d let the record play for a moment, but never passed the chorus, which she’d deemed the best part of the song. She’d skip back, never missing a beat unless it was intentional, and she turned a simple thirty second portion of somepony else’s song into a song all her own. Long Play, a colt forever on analog, turned to face the camera and its wielder. “Wasn’t that amazing? She can’t even use her horn yet and she learned how to do that with her hoof! I dunno how she can even do THAT with her voice!” The filly beamed. The camera jostled. A stallion’s voice she hadn’t heard updated in almost a decade spoke. “That’s amazing, Vi—”
rerererererere
Her hoof slammed against the shitty CRT. The thin crack in the glass burst into a spiderweb of damage.
Stuck in reverse
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.
~~~
END_SIDE_A_PLEASE_TURN_TAPE_OVER_TO_SIDE_B
shitty octascratch might delete later idk
Stories about my friends used to make me happy
She was standing on the bridge overlooking downtown Canterlot.
I can see them smile, hear them laughing
Reared up on her hindlegs.
I laugh and smile back but it’s just acting
Forehooves stretched out before her.
All the happiness that passed is all past me
Twirling and twisting over one another.
You must present yourself perfect
Watching them go blurry against the lights of the city night backdrop.
No one cares if you hurt if
It didn’t really matter.
The presentation’s not perfect
She left while it was still dark.
Attention on you’s so pertinent
And she was still drunk.
It’s all in the execution
Got home just in time to be alone.
All in the presentation
Octavia out at some stupid show.
All in the animation
Like she herself would be if she hadn’t fucking ruined her entire life.
All in the sensation
She stumbled through the mess of her apartment.
The way you execute yourself
Found her way to her turntable, hugged it tighter and with more love than she’d imparted on anypony in recent memory, and took the precious pressing of Octavia’s best performance in her fetlocks.
The way you telegraph your blood
The record slipped from her drunk grasp.
The way you play and throw the show
Tumbled to the floor.
The way you act all on your own
Vinyl didn’t mean to do it.
The way the needle hits the groove
Her hooves had just stumbled over themselves.
The way the hoof comes out the shoe
It’s fucking hard to balance on your hindlegs when you’re sober, let alone as drunk as she was.
The way the record skips and skips
Vinyl stared down at the smashed and shattered plastic beneath her hind hooves, blood pooling painlessly onto the floor around them.
The way you’re back to your old tricks
“Fuck,” she whispered to herself.
She slumped against the record table, her muzzle laying upon the disc mount; the needle poked against the side of her forehead.
She hoisted herself to a sort of supported slump, her forelegs locked as she lifted her head from the turntable.
And slammed it right back down against the oak and rosewood as hard as she could.
The table’s broke
SLAM
The needle clicks
SLAM
The record’s stuck
SLAM
It won’t get fixed
Crack.
Won’t go further past the end
She stumbled backwards, hardly able to stand. She lifted one hoof to her forehead, her vision aflush with static, mind swimming. She groped around in the space above her eyes, right where the part of her mane began. Her hoof came back damp, full of chunks and shards that sang with otherworldly electricity.
Never starts back up again.
Vinyl Scratch fell to the floor.
ERERERERERERERERERSTSTSTARARARTARARARTSTAR
