If a Pony Catch a Pony

Before I left for the cafeteria earlier, I had let the fire in our room's little fireplace go out. By the time I got back, it felt like I was stepping into a cave in the Crystal Mountains or something. Once I got the fire going again, I paced around for a little while, completely failing to not think about what Amethyst and Vinyl were doing on their date. I spent some time starting to pack my things, but it wasn't really helping much. Finally, I decided that the only way to distract myself was to completely occupy my mind. I thought about practicing the cello, but I didn't want to walk back through the snow to a rehearsal room, and I always hated trying to play in the dorm, even though some of the music students did it. So instead, I started looking at Amethyst's composition again, and thinking about how to finish it.

What she had written so far was very basic stuff; just a simple chord progression in 3/4 time with a couple of alternating melodic figures. It had been months since I worked on composing anything that wasn't for a class, with very strict rules that I had to follow, so I let myself get a little caught up in it. All of a sudden, a piece that Symphony had written back when we were still at the Manehatten Performing Arts Academy together came back to me. It had been in a different time signature from Amethyst's piece, but the chords and the melody were similar enough that I could get them to flow together in my head. At first I was merging the two just to amuse myself, but then I really started to like it. Symphony's melodies had always been a little ornate, so I had to simplify them if I wanted there to be any chance of Amethyst's teacher buying that she wrote it herself. But once I did that, the combination of the two flowed much better than what Amethyst had written originally, and it was easy enough to end the whole thing on a simple resolution.

I hadn't even realized how long I had been working until I started to feel the room getting cold. The fire had almost gone out again, since I had completely forgotten about stoking it. I went over and worked the bellows for a minute to get it going again, then tossed on another log. Before long it was going pretty good, and I sat there kind of letting myself get hypnotized by it. Really, though, I was thinking back to this little park in my neighborhood in Manehatten that I used to go to sometimes when I was a filly. There was nothing much there, just a few benches and a really small playground, but I loved the way it looked at sunset. Everything would go kind of pink and orange, and it was one of the most peaceful places you've ever seen. The last time I had been was about three years before, when Symphony and I went one day just as a laugh. I was trying to remember the name of it, but before I could, I got interrupted by the door opening.

Amethyst came in, and even though I was sitting right by the fire, it immediately got cold again. At first, I didn't even want to look at her. I could feel myself kind of starting to shake, and I couldn't tell if it was because I was really angry, or because I was about to start crying. Since neither of those options appealed to me, I just stayed quiet and kept staring at the fire. Amethyst didn't say anything either, and trying to figure out why just made me feel worse. She normally came back from dates a lot later, but that wasn't any consolation.

The silence was getting oppressive--at least for me--by the time Amethyst went to hang her coat back up in the closet. Thankfully, she finally decided to say something.

"Hey, did you end up staying in?"

"No, I went into town to get dinner with Minuette and Twilight Sparkle." It took so much effort to keep my voice steady, I felt like I was speaking for the first time in years.

"Good. I was worried that you were going to sit here by yourself all night."

I heard her lay down on her bed. There was really only one thing I wanted to talk about. I still didn't look at her, though.

"So how was the date?" I asked.

Amethyst was quiet for a long time.

"Octavia, I don't really know what happened with you and Vinyl, but I wasn't trying to--"

Even though I had asked, all of a sudden the last thing I wanted in the world was to listen to Amethyst talk about Vinyl. For one thing, she didn't know her at all. And even if they had really hit it off on their date, she still wouldn't really know her. Even I didn't really know her, and I had spent a lot more time with her than Amethyst probably ever would.

"We lived next door to each other for a while," I interrupted, just to shut Amethyst up. "At first I didn't see her very often, though. She kind of kept to herself a lot back then. Really, I only saw her when she would go out to buy records--which she did pretty often. Then one day, I ran into her in the record store, and we kind of struck up a conversation because she was buying--"

It was Amethyst's turn to interrupt me, at that point. Admittedly, I deserved it. I was being kind of childish.

"Octavia, please. I told you, it was completely casual. I didn't think you would know her, and by the time I found out it was too late to back out. Really, I was mostly doing it for Lyra anyway."

"I know that! Do you really think that makes me any happier about it?"

"What was I supposed to do then?"

Instead of yelling at her more, I did something that was probably even worse. All of a sudden, I jumped up from where I had been sitting, and just ran for the door. I didn't even know where I was going, except out of the room, anywhere away from Amethyst, away from ponies I respected going on stupid dates with ponies that were only going out with them as a favor to somepony else. Once I was in the hallway, my first instinct was just to get out of the dorm entirely, but as I was going down the stairs I started to get some sense of reason back, and headed for the bathrooms instead. I was bawling by the time I got there; I tried to find some comfort in the fact that I had managed to hold it in until I got away from Amethyst; like that mattered given how I had left. I could barely breathe, I was crying so hard.

Once I kind of got a hold of myself, I went and washed my face in one of the sinks. My eyes were red, and my mane had gotten wet from the water splashing everywhere. I looked like I had been dragged me to hell and back, but I didn't really care. I was too busy thinking about how I was going to face Amethyst again.

As it turned out, I didn't have to. I decided that I would go back to the room and apologize and just say I wasn't going to talk about it anymore, but when I got there, Amethyst was gone. I didn't know if she went out looking for me, or just wanted to make sure she wasn't going to be there when I got back. Maybe she didn't know, either. But once I was there, I got a different idea. I had already started packing my things. Outside of my cello and my record player, that wasn't much. So I decided that I was going to get out of Canterlot right then. I thought I could still make it to the station in time to catch the last train, and even if I couldn't, sleeping on a bench there still sounded better than sleeping in my dorm room.

Outside of my cello and record player, I didn't have too much stuff, so getting it all to the station was no big deal. The dorms had these little carts that students could use when they were moving in or out. They didn't really keep them locked up or anything, and it was so late there was nopony to notice me grabbing one and heading out the front door with it. It was still freezing cold and snowing a little, so I put my scarf back on. Still, it wasn't that long a walk, and I was too happy to be getting out of town to even notice it that much.

As it happened, I made it to the station just in time to catch the last train. I hadn't noticed until I got there that the cart had "Property of Canterlot College" stenciled on the side of it, and I was so tired and unhappy that for a minute I got this crazy idea that someone was going to see that and force me to go back to the college to be...I don't know, interrogated or something. Of course nothing like that actually happened. Once my things were loaded on the train, I sat down and waited to board. No matter how hard I tried, all I could think about was Vinyl Scratch and what she was doing right then.