Octavia took another sip of her tea. Vinyl leaned closer.

“As a matter of fact Vinyl, I don’t think classical music is as dead as you would hope it was. But back to my family--”

“You’re just changing the subject!” Vinyl shouted.

It was winter in Canterlot now. If it were Spring, Octavia would be drinking a different kind of tea, something with less caffeine in it. With Spring came green and energy and joy and lust, and Octavia certainly did not need caffeine on top of that. If it were summer, she would be drinking something cool. If it were fall, she would be drinking peppermint tea or one of those silly pumpkin drinks from a coffee chain.

No, it was winter. She could hear it. Winter to her was a series of sounds connected by a foreground of haze. Life became more impressionistic. Outdoor walking of any kind left her focusing on the mixed-up snow on the ground. Snowy fogs blurred the edges of tall buildings. Indoor fires threw shadows into the corners. She and Vinyl danced in their dingy apartment to keep warm, blasting outlandish house music and laughing and drinking--oh, the drinking! Octavia could procure fine wines from thin air, a talent Vinyl seemed to share with her odd knack for getting bottles of moonshine from her second-something-cousin-howmanytimes-removed. The stuff could power an autocarriage, and they both loved it with cola.

When they walked outdoors, they had to look up sometime. When they looked up, they saw the blurred edges of tall buildings. When they got home, they lit indoor fires. When the flames rose, they moved the couch to the other room and danced like pagans. When they got to acting like pagans, they broke out the fine wine and gasoline moonshine. When they drank, they usually ended up somehow in the bedroom, and somehow always led to someone on top of the other.

So it was winter.

They were not walking, or dancing, or drinking, or--you know--but they were drinking tea and sharp coffee. The wind whipped outside like electric guitars.

Maybe the exact words weren’t so important, but it was the feeling that mattered. Imagine this: Octavia had a rough childhood. She grew up in a place called Crymia, a battered town named after a mare who lost her beloved on a caravan moving through the nearby Griffonian mountains to disease. According to legend, she wept for so long her tears soaked the earth and produced beautiful blue gemstones, which were later harvested by Octavia’s father for an unimaginable profit.

She grew up with mountains in her backyard and not much else.

Sometimes during winter, when she felt an unexpected chill from a nearby window or opened door, her mind would drift like snow back to Crymia, the mountains towering over her father’s mansion, the largest house she had ever seen or lived in.

It took a lot to get Octavia out of her clothes for this reason. She almost always slept with a scarf and baggy flannels, despite Vinyl cranking the heat up past its highest setting. Sex was a nightmare, and so was laundry. Vinyl understood, but it still bothered her. She was still only human. What she didn’t know was that this was another way of Octavia sealing herself off. Winter was cold, so she wore warm clothes. The edges were blurry, so she drank and danced until everything else spun too. She felt hollow inside, so she drank lots of tea. The point is, she found excuses.

What she didn’t know was that it was already too late for any of it--life, death, Spring, any of it. She had already plunged into the future. The past was lost. The mountains had all been eroded away. Her father’s giant mansion had been sold and dismantled. There was no way out but forward. Octavia knew it, though she wouldn’t ever admit it. She was scared.

Vinyl was scared, too. Scared about Canterlot’s financial bubble, scared about getting mugged, scared about the government collapsing, scared about dying, drug addiction, deterioration, pain, suffering, Octavia, loneliness, life itself for being so large and scary. She was scared. She knew it, and she knew Octavia was scared too, about the same things and maybe some other smaller stuff too because the gods knew as well as she did, Octavia Philarmonico was a hopeless worrier.

She knew Octavia worried about a great many things--her finances, winter, mares, stallions, whatever new plague was set to destroy the world this week--and she knew exactly how poorly she dealt with all that. She bottled it up inside and let it out slowly in ways she could control. Looking down while she walked. Lighting fires. Dancing. Drinking. You-know.

Vinyl couldn’t stand it when she saw Octavia get nervous and shut down, but those battles couldn’t be fought on the outside. She let them be at first, but somewhere along the line, maybe the seventh or eighth date, just when Vinyl was about to call it quits on the whole thing, she discovered something incredible.

It happened at some run-down pub in Ponyville of all places, the town where they first met. The beer special that day just happened to coincide with their taste, and their favorite hoofball team was suffering through the first half of their worst game of the season, and everyone in the whole place was getting into the loss, and it was Spring, and as one of the refs made a clearly terrible call against their beloved Canterlot Crushers, Vinyl brandished her empty pint glass like a gun at the television and shouted, “I can’t believe the league would ever hire a blind referee!”

And then the miracle happened. Octavia, clearly a little more drunk than Vinyl, leaned all the way over her shoulder so she was closer to the TV and yelled, “You belong in a nursing home, you old coot!”

The sensation was indescribable, like love. Beer spilling all over her nice team scarf, Octavia all over her, above her, on her, on top of her, screaming her lungs out at a boxy television set in a dive on the main street of Nowheresville, Spring outside, strings within.

So Vinyl shouted, yes--but she shouted with joy.