“He’s coming too!”
I heard a muffled voice in the distance; everything was dark. I opened my blurry eyes, and they slowly began to focus. So many different colored faces surrounded me. The closest was a mint green one to my left. I couldn’t completely make her visage out, but I knew it was Lyra.
“Hey,” was all she said, and it was a shaky ‘hey’ at that.
“Hay is for horses, and cows eat it too. But I would not eat it if I were you,” I slurred out.
Her head cocked at an angle and she laughingly said, “What?”
“Nevermind,” I muttered.
“Hello down there,” another voice said to my right; it was the Doctor. I saw a blue light directly in front of me. “Follow the blue light.”
“That’s not going to melt my brain out, is it?”
“No, of course not!”
“Good,”
“That’s setting 1023,”
“Wait, what?”
“Excellent, you passed the test. Pulse is steady, cognition is normal. In short; excellent, all things considered.”
“All things considered?” I asked worriedly. I noticed everyone was silent. “What?”
Twilight Sparkle entered my now clear vision, her face was filled with fatigue and veiled sadness. “We chased after you when you left, and we found you right after your fight with the timber wolf. You were in bad shape; the timber wolf’s bite was laced with a poison, and you were bleeding and unconscious. I extracted all the poison, and the Doctor stopped the bleeding, but—but,” she stopped and began to tear up.
“Adam, be strong,” the Doctor said firmly, “You can do that for us, alright?”
“What’s wrong, Doctor? Give it to me!”
“..We couldn’t get the bleeding to stop in your left arm. There was something in the poison that if we hadn’t acted when we did, you would have bled out. So, we had to use a tourniquet.”
Tourniquet. The word rang in my head. “Oh,” was all I could say. I knew, but I couldn’t accept it with a meaningful string of words. It was the most pathetic display of vocabulary selection ever. “Oh,” I repeated.
“Yes,” the Doctor solemnly said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shut up.”
“What?” It seems I stirred something in the Doctor not many people got; surprise.
“I said, shut up. Don’t give me that ‘I’m sorry’ garbage. You told me not to be a victim of my circumstances, but to overcome them. So that’s what I’m gonna do.” I looked to Lyra and Bon Bon, and I simply asked, “Are you two alright?”
“Yes,” Bon Bon said quietly. Lyra silently nodded.
I looked down at my future for the first time. My arm was gone. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected, but I would find out later the Doctor had simultaneously removed the dead arm and cauterized the wound with a laser scalpel. I looked back to Lyra, “Then the sacrifice was worth it.”
Lyra reached as far over as she could and gave me a hug. It was a hug that carried meaning though; an embrace laced with sadness, but also with some degree of acceptance. I gave the best one armed hug I could manage.
As we held the embrace, the Doctor cleared his throat lightly, “I’m sorry to ask so much of you right now, but we have no choice: time is running out. We have a matter of hours before the Void collapse.”