pull up your knee-high boots, a my little pony fanfic

…Don't look at me like that.

I swear, I tried to resist the urge to write this fanfiction. But you know.

I've always been bad with impulsive urges.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd write mlp fanfiction. Shit, I can feel my friends judging me so hard.

Please rate and review!

Title: pull up your knee-high boots

Summary: In the aftermath of their destruction, this how the girls pick up the pieces. –– Adagio Dazzle, Sonata Dusk, Aria Blaze. Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks; the Dazzlings-centric. After-canon.

"I'm starving, Adagio," Aria says, frowning, hunched up over a booth seat in a cheap restaurant somewhere within a far corner of Canterlot two weeks after their world had ended, and Adagio glances at Aria out of the corner of her eyes, and doesn't say a word.

They'd come into the restaurant with their hoodies pulled down low and their eyes glued firmly to the ground, and they hadn't spoken to anybody before they'd escaped to the back of the dimly-lit restaurant safely out of everybody's view. It was already late into the night: the stars hung themselves low in the sky, the moon a pale smooth luminous orb suspended in the night, and Adagio looked out of the window and absolutely hated the world.

"What do you want me to do about it?" she snapped, with a haughty toss of her thick long yellow curls, still a queen, still supreme, even having been disgraced and kicked off her throne in the recent thrashing that had been the Canterlot High School's Battle Of the Bands.

They'd been close; so close to restoring their full power as sirens from the delicious negative energy that had been radiating off the entire school due to the uproar they'd caused and with the battle for the top, but those accursed Rainbooms just had to come along with their stupid magic-music of friendship and spoil it all.

And now this was what they had been reduced to: having to hide at the back of dingy dirty restaurants with their hoodies pulled over last show's outfits, they fallen stars in disgrace, outcasts with no face.

Adagio's small hands fisted on the table just thinking about it; she wanted to dig her nails into the Rainbooms' skins and tear them all apart.

"But Adagi, it's been two weeks and we haven't fed for days," Sonata whined, blue on blue-streaked hair trembling as she wriggled in her seat, forever restless, forever childish.

Adagio felt an eyebrow twitch at the nickname. Next to Sonata, Aria had put a hand to her mouth in order to muffle out her snickers as she laughed. Her head ducked as she did; her two long purple pigtails bounced, rebellious streaks of cool green running through them like a declaration of war, her purple-and-green bangs framing the sides of her face like scissor blades, cutting and edged and sharp. It was all Adagio could do but to sniff at them.

Idiots, the both of them.

(She doesn't know why she puts up with them, really.)

"I can't do anything about that," Adagio rolls her eyes, crosses her arms, leans backwards into the cracked cushioning of the booth seat as she stares at Sonata and Aria both straight in the eye. "Our pendants shattered, remember? When those idiotic Rainbooms defeated us during the Battle Of the Bands with their magic. Without those pendants, we can't feed, even if we wanted to."

Almost instinctively all three girls reached up to touch the hollows of their throats, at the black straps where all three of their red gemstone pendants used to be. Their fingers touched the emptiness of air, and they ached; the pendants had been a part of them, as much as their fingers and their legs and their hearts had been, and with them destroyed it was almost as if that part of them had been unceremoniously ripped away.

Like our voices, Adagio thought bitterly, fingers curling around the black strap around her throat as if she wanted to rip it off.

She tried a note.

It fell flat. Her voice was hoarse and creased and terrible even in her own ears, and Adagio only winced a little bit as she stopped. Sonata and Aria glanced at each other, before tentatively trying it out themselves. Their voices squawked and screeched, sounding nothing like Aria's former smooth alto and Sonata's silvery soprano, and it was only a little while before the both of them stopped trying too, Aria angry and upset, Sonata disappointed and sad.

Sitting together in silence, the three girls mourned.

"Adagi," Sonata said quietly, after a long while, pink eyes wide and honest and – for the first time Adagio had seen in years – terrified, "Are we going to die?"

Adagio swallowed, and looked away. The silence reigned.

She couldn't honestly answer that with a complete no.

"Of course we aren't," Aria spoke then, eyes narrow slats of purple, glittering and determined and dangerous as she glared hard at the both of them. "We're tough. We're tougher than this. And we're going to survive this, just see if we don't." Aria crossed her arms; her fingers, long and thin, pressed against the sleeves of her hoodie, her white-and-purple-striped fingerless gloves bright flushes of colour against it.

A remembrance of their fall. They hadn't had time to change; they'd bolted off the stage as quickly as they could and had grabbed their hoodies on the way out, the cries of the boo-s behind them resounding in their ears like a terrible melody. It had been humiliating, degrading, the worst thing they had ever experienced, and it may well have cost them their voice and maybe their lives, but Aria was right.

They were tough. They had survived on this planet for years after being banished here, living on nothing but the measly magic off of humans, and they had been fine. With their pendants shattered, they were nothing more than normal teenage girls, but maybe that was a good thing, right now, when everybody and their mothers knew their names, knew the Dazzlings who had come to Canterlot High and tried to wreck havoc but had ultimately failed, who had been chased off the stage in a wave of shame and fallen grace.

Adagio looked at Sonata and Aria each in turn; Aria's fingers were trembling, ever so slightly.

Maybe it was time to lay low, for a while. Lay off their ambitions, and take each day as it comes, just to see what happens next. A bit. Just for a bit.

In the dingy light of the restaurant, Sonata and Aria's eyes were glitter-in-the-dark, and they stared at their leader, waiting on what to do next.

And Aria was rebellious, rough, a snarling-shadow sinning in the dark, but her lips were curved into a sharp smirk as she stared straight into Adagio's eyes and waited. Sonata was wide-eyed, childish, and as she swung her legs forward and backwards in her seat, ponytail bobbing, she looked to Adagio as though she had all the answers to all of their problems in the world. They'd stuck together, all these years, and they certainly weren't going to stop now, and they were tough, they were fierce, they are the Dazzlings and they were going to get through this together.

Adagio felt something foreign and akin to an affection rush fierce through her gut, and she quickly pushed it aside.

Tossing her napkin down onto the table, Adagio got up, slow and graceful as a line of music, and she was all haughty grace and banished queen, a seduction slow and suave along one's bones, and she wasn't about to give up, like this.

"Let's go, girls," she said, tossing long curls over her shoulder, "we have things to do and things to see, and we'll have to start looking around for ways for us to get energy, if we aren't going to have to starve like this."

Sonata and Aria grinned at each other, teeth flashing knife-sharp in the light. Their leader was back. The three of them stepped out of the restaurant together with their heads held high.

Just then, Sonata's voice slipped out between her teeth, and both Aria and Adagio whipped their heads around to stare at her with their eyes round-wide.

It'd been in tune. It hadn't been perfect, and it was still whisper-hoarse, and it had sounded nothing like Sonata's past soprano, but it had been in tune.

The three girls stared at each other, before they grinned bright with all their teeth.

It was something. It wasn't much, but it was something.

It was a start.

Headcanon that the town is called Canterlot since the school is Canterlot High School so you know rollin' with it.

Also I'm assigning the Dazzlings their pitches mostly to their personalities and also what I've heard them sing and say. They're probably wrong but well, its up to interpretation.

I actually think the Dazzlings are interesting; they're characters worth investing in. And I wanted them to have semi-happy ending so there.

Please rate and review! (Eep, I can feel my friends judging, but I had to write this okay, you don't understand.)

… /puts this down as another thing in my list of things-I'll-regret-doing-but-had-to-do-anyway/

But do please rate and review! I love reviews, they'll make me happy.