"Your movies suck."

Dusty disks flew through the air, found wings, then discarded them in favor of flopping to the floor.

"Vinyl!" Those are classics!"

"Yeah, well there's a reason ponies remake classics."

Another disk flew into the air like a frisbee, a sparkling sail catching on the humid air and landing in the lap of one peeved earth pony.

"Vinyl, please stop throwing my movies. We don't have enough space in here to warrant throwing things around, unless you want to paint over another set of scrapes in the wall--"

"I said I was sorry for that!" Vinyl turned on her hooves, narrowly avoiding grinding a copy of a Charneigh Chaplin anthology to nothing underneath her. Octavia winced once, then twice as Vinyl beat against the floor with a strained look of accusation. "I said I was sorry, and you forgave me." She turned around, stuffing her face back into the cabinet. "I don't like it when you bring old stuff up."

"Alright. I'm sorry."

The apology dulled Vinyl's sharp tone. "It's fine. It's not your fault. It's not my fault, either. It's the stupid apartment's fault for being so damn small."

"What have I told you about cursing?" Octavia knew that Vinyl had taken to ignoring lectures as a hobby and dropped the jest in favor of an issue much more pressing. "And what don't you like about the apartment?"

Vinyl turned again, this time conscious of the old Chaplin disk sitting perilously close to her hooves. She brushed it away into the center of the room. Octavia breathed a sigh of relief, but just as quickly found the wind stolen from her lungs by a violent inhale from her partner. "I hate," Vinyl began, "that I can't walk three feet without stubbing my hooves on a couch or coffee table or whatever that vase-thingy is in the corner. Everything's so close together, it's like we're suffocating ourselves in style."

"It's a vase, with a soft 'A'," Octavia murmured, more to herself than to her fuming friend.

"I hate that we don't have central air. I hate that it's so damn hot I can't breathe unless the door's thrown wide open, and that just invites bugs in. I hate that every time I turn around and try to find something I'm either knocking you over or sticking my rear end in your face--and I hate that there's no room for anything that hasn't been vacuum-packed and crushed by an anvil. I hate that I can't give my favorite coffee mug the decency of a cupboard because it's too tall to fit into any of the shelves we had. It's gonna grow mold if it sits in the sink for a day longer, and then I'll have lost two of the things that would have otherwise made this place a tiny bit more like home."

"Vinyl--"

"I hate that the walls are so thin! I'm terrified whenever we have to talk about something important because I think our neighbor's gonna overhear us talk about our finances or our social security numbers or--God forbid, something intimate. Who knows, they can probably hear us shouting now!"

"You're not shouting. But that doesn't mean you can't lower your voice--"

Vinyl's voice cracked as it flattened out at the top of her vocal register. "I hate that we didn't have enough space to keep my records, but we had enough room for that stupid vah-ze. I hate that between the both of us gigging our asses off for three months we couldn't even make enough money to keep the one place we finally had the nerve to call a home--"

Vinyl slumped into a thick seat of silence, her breathing the only sound in the room. The mare on the couch seemed an eternity away, pushed like a toy boat into an ocean by the strong arms of profanity.

"Fuck."

"Vinyl."

"No, really. Fuck." Vinyl threw her hooves up, spent. "We lost, Octavia. We tried our best, but hey! Our best wasn't enough. We're not even good enough to keep a steady roof over our heads. Nope, first we had to hop around every motel that took credit until we even found this stupid place and now we're here and there is never enough space and I'm gonna lose all my records and they're gonna sell them for two bits a bundle because nopony wants to buy records anymore. Really, I don't know what other word to use other than 'fuck'! Because that's what we are. We're fucked. We're fucked because we have to live in this ratty apartment even though we're rubbing hooves with ponies who have financial security through their fifth generation of grandfoals every day. We're fucked because even with all the scraping and the gigging, we might have to go back to motel-hopping, again. That's why we're fucked. Really, it's the perfect word for this exact situation. Profanity's got a messed up sort of eloquence to it."

"You could try a word that doesn't hurt me as much as that one."

Octavia's reply seared Vinyl's tongue with a hot poker, shriveling it in an instant. A long moment of nothing passed. Each droplet of humidity clinging to the air became an intangible horn, screeching and belting every symphony and sour note ever played at the same time yet still playing nothing at all. It transformed both of them into fuming fillies once more, filling their heads with malice and recycling it out in a mad effort to find words somewhere between the waves of hot air.

"You curse too much when you're angry, Vinyl." Octavia's tone carried no malice. Only stuttering sadness on the brink of being fully comprehended and given the gravity it deserved.

"I know."

"You scare me when you curse like that."

Vinyl's voice shattered. A broken, alien, "I know," trickled from her mouth.

"You don't curse unless you're really angry."

"It's just--" something vulnerable slid down Vinyl's cheek an instant too quick for her hoof. It brushed along her narrow cheeks before it had the sense to drop down towards the littered floor and catch it in its tracks, smearing a thin streak of grey on the bridge of her muzzle before she worked up the nerve to finish it off. "I bought a few of them with my allowance, back when I was a filly. My mom told me never to waste my allowance--she said it was important that I be careful with my bits, because money's gonna be a really important thing to manage when you grow up, and you gotta know how to handle money well if you don't want to end up sleeping in a motel for the rest of your life." She stiffened, but her eyes did not break from their stoic glare at the floor. "I don't want to waste them."

The room grew smaller, if that was even possible. The walls warped like plastic held over a fire, molding itself around the two mares and squeezing a sigh from Octavia's lips.

"We still have the records?" she finally asked.

"Yeah. You were gonna take them to the donation center tomorrow and sell them. I was gonna stay here and do... I don't know, something."

"We could put the records in a milk crate, then put the vase on top of it." Octavia cast a glance at the ornament. It seemed to throw its arms up in surrender to her compromise.

"We could do that." Vinyl's eyes never left the floor. "We would need to put something flat on top of the carton so the vase wouldn't fall."

"Like a pane of glass."

"But we'd need to be able to take it off, so we could actually get to the records."

"We could do that."

Vinyl shifted, this time pawing nervously at the disks still scattered about on the floor. A lump of indecision stuck in her throat and held her tongue, but she swallowed it in a moment. "Whose idea was it to watch a movie again?"

"Mine, Vinyl."

Vinyl nodded. "Did you want to watch Chaplin?"

"I'd prefer if we did, yes." The earth pony paused. "Though, if you still wanted to watch that new action movie with that handsome griffon on the cover you rented from the library, that would be okay--"

"No," Vinyl cut her off. "No, Chaplin's fine. Like your friends say, I need to get some culture into me if I want to make it as the marefriend of a refined lady as yourself, or I'll get culture-shock when I'm making out with you and die."

Octavia giggled. The walls burst into joyous smiles upon hearing the subtle laugh for the first time, straining to give the mares a few extra inches of space as a reward. "That's not what they said, you liar."

"Totally is. You have the weirdest friends."

"I know." Her forelegs stretched towards Vinyl, the call of a siren beckoning her lover towards her, a look sincere need on her face. "Get it started, and then come over here and keep me warm."

Vinyl saluted, mashed a few buttons on the television set. "Uh, the disk--"

"Left rear hoof, don't step too far back or you'll be buying a new one."

"Thanks."

In a flash, Vinyl had cleared the fog around her head and thrown the disk into the try. She beat it back to the couch, settling into the cushions and letting loose a contented wheeze similar to that of the couch underneath her.

Something, fragile like porcelain and obtrusive to the eye in such a casual closet as their apartment, still made Octavia's eyes sore. "Vinyl?"

"Mm?"

"Do you really hate the apartment? I know it's not the best. But, do you hate it?"

The question slowed Vinyl's frantic padding the couch as she tried to get comfy. "Do I hate it?"

"Yes. Do you hate it?"

"Yes," she replied without a second thought. "For all the reasons I stated earlier, I hate this place." She finally found a soft spot in the cushion, sinking into it with sigh. "But home is what you make of it. And I guess it's not entirely fair that I haven't been making very much of it."

Octavia leaned back from Vinyl, confusion written on her face. "But, to say that would be to imply you thinking--" Her eyes exploded with hope, frail yet growing quickly, nurtured by the opening credits bursting onto the screen before them in boisterous grey-scale. Without a sound, she leaned back into the center of the couch, pawing at her partner's side until she found a place to rest her head. As the opening credits retreated back into the top of the screen like a rising curtain, she felt the soft rhythm of drums accompany the new faces on-screen.

Counting a steady tempo to the movements on screen was the greatest conductor of all, the steady beating of home held secure in her partner's chest.