*BEEP*
*BEEP*
*BEEP*
You are completely blind, unaware of your surroundings. The only things you can comprehend are an annoying squealing, and a dull hum that won’t let up. You try and open your eyes, and find that your movement is completely uninhibited, like you’re floating in space. You look down at your hooves, but find you can’t see anything until a brief image flashes into your head:
“ANON!”
You see a stone floor, and a lot of pebbles. The scene is blurry, but you can see a prismatic burst approaching you, and something thick and red growing on the stone.
You shake your aching head, and try to clear your mind when another picture shoots in.
“Please live, don’t leave me with this...”
You see a white blur stretching and morphing into several blurs that gently cover you, and a small gray glob covers your mouth, and you relax from a tension you didn’t know you were feeling.
Slowly, you allow your eyes to close, blocking out the abyss that you were floating in.
“I won’t let your life slip out of my hooves, Anon. You. Will. Not. Leave. Me.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Time Unknown -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
You stir, your mind an incomprehensible haze of jumbled thought and overloaded senses. You feel the bed beneath your back before you see it, and all your vision can tell you is that you might be under attack from a wire monster as you see numerous tendrils jabbed into your legs, arms, and nose. Your headache increases thricefold, and you feel a bizarre warmth on your chest as your vision clears.
You find yourself in a dark room, and several bloody bandages cover the entirety of your body, leaving only small specks of your coat uncovered. Miraculously, you can still swivel your neck around, but it takes a lot of effort. Which might be for the better, as it hurts when you try to move it too fast.
You see Rainbow passed out in a chair across from you, and even though your sight is still blurred, you can see that her mane and coat are both ragged like she’d stayed up for hours. Out of nowhere, your throat decides this is the perfect time for you to cough.
*Ghoaph!*
You see a clump of white leap off your chest with a slurred scream, which you had no idea was even possible, and Rainbow jumps slightly in her seat before tiredly moving her eyes towards you. Once she sees you staring back through the bandages over your face, she lights up with a relieved smile.
“Anon! You’re finally awake!”
You tilt your head, as Dash hadn’t moved her lips, and you notice that the white thing that fell off of your chest was now standing beside your bed: beaming a wide smile that was more sincere than any you’ve seen before. Once your eyes finally clear, you find yourself lost staring into a pair of stunning blue orbs as deep and bright as the sky.
“R-... Redheart?” You ask, wondering how eyes as wonderful as those had remained unnoticed by you all these months. She silently nods, and you just now notice how the coat on her cheeks is matted down by tears long since spent. Her eyes were puffy, she had dark circles underneath them, her tear-stained cheeks shone, and her messy mane looked like she hadn’t brushed it in days. And yet, you find that your heart has jumped into your throat at the sight of her beauty.
Slowly, you shake your head to stir your mind from its stupor, and brush off the newfound emotion as a result of the drugs. “H-how long was I out?” You ask.
“Five days, six hours, ten minutes, and thirty-four seconds.” Redheart says shakily, obviously trying not to laugh or cry as she carefully pats your shoulder. “But who’s counting?”
Guilt punches you in the gut, and you lower your head. Of course she would be fussing over you if the stunt went wrong. Looking back on your calculations, how could the jump have gone right? You’d risked your life for nothing more than your own pride, and your closest friends were paying for it. Knowing them, they probably stressed more over the past five days than you could even imagine.
Getting slightly teary yourself, you glance over to Rainbow. All she manages to do is give a slight chuckle as she shakes her head, before falling asleep again.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Months Later -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
After a while of a liquid diet, supplied mostly through straws and the numerous tubes in your legs, the casts were ready to slowly be taken off. It took a few days, but soon you were resting in the hospital bed, completely free of any tubes or casts. You weren’t completely healed yet, but you’d learned your lesson about risking harm once you saw just how extensive the damage was. Apparently, even during the falls where you thought you were unharmed you were cracking your bones, and falling to the bottom of Ghastly Gorge shattered almost thirty-nine percent of the bones in your body.
Rainbow came over to hang out a lot during your ‘vacation’, and you mostly listened as she talked, enjoying her stories while waiting for your jaw to set. But the pony you saw the most of was Nurse Redheart herself, after she’d gone home for one day. You had heard from the nurse caring for you that day that Redheart was in charge of the operation that saved your life, and that both she and Rainbow hadn’t slept until they crashed three hours before you woke up. She barely even left your side, except to eat at the cafeteria.
Slowly, you felt your heart recede from Rainbow Dash, and grow towards Redheart herself as you talked with her more and more. With her as your nurse, the days turned into hours, and the hours into seconds. You barely believed it was even two weeks when they said you’d been in casts for three months.
Now, with the restraints removed, you are able to completely relax as the hospital bedding felt softer than you ever remembered. And since you’re feeling a little better, you figure that the next time you saw Red, you’d ask her the question that had been slowly nagging the back of your mind.
As if on cue, she skipped into the room like the little ball of sunshine she was, her hooves clicking cheerfully on the linoleum.
“Hello~!” She practically sang as she trotted up to your side, and fiddled a bit with the machines. “How’s my favourite patient today?”
“Almost as chipper as my favourite nurse,” you reply with a chuckle. She beams at that, though not directly looking at you yet, and you just barely catch the bridge of her nose turning a slight shade of pink. ‘Now’s as good a time as any...’ you think to yourself, before taking a deep breath.
“Uhh… exactly how bad was I?” You venture, immediately regretting the question as Redheart’s mood visibly dims as soon as the words leave your tongue. She slowly looks down at you, and smiled a gentle, calming, yet worried smile.
“Bad,” she sighs, “really bad. Dash had only just gotten you here in time before you bled out, and we almost lost you nine times in the first surgery.” Lowering her head, she chuckles slightly. “I was wrong, Anon. So was Plaster. We thought she was bad for you, and we never believed her when she said you were the one pushing yourself to these extremes.”
Her blush becomes apparent when she glances back up to you. “I suppose… I didn’t want to believe you were doing this to yourself. I wanted her to be the one demanding more and more of you, so that I could--...” she cuts herself off, lifting her head and taking a deep breath. “But I was wrong: she swooped in here screaming for someone to help you, and babbling on about how she should have stopped you. I’ve seen her fake pain before, and what I saw then wasn’t that. She’s… she’s good for you...”
You tilt your head slightly as you listen to her, there’s an odd tone to her voice that sounds unnatural for her. A sad sort of acceptance that confuses you, and her repeating the phrase ‘she’s good for you’ is only deepening your befuddlement. That is, until a light clicks in your head, and you reach your hoof out to hers.
“She might be good for me…” you offer slowly, “but I’m not sure she’s right for me.”
Redheart’s eyes shoot wide open, and her pupils almost disappear into pinpricks as her face turns bright red once your hoof touches hers. “B-but…” she stammers, but you don’t let her finish.
“Rainbow got me here, yes, but it was you who never gave up on me. I talked with the other nurse that day you went home: you weren’t asked to take over my surgery, but you immediately took charge. You knew every bone in my body, which medications I was allergic to, and even where most of the fractures were. You saved my life, personally, nine times in one surgery, and guarded my bedside like a bulldog until I woke up.”
Her jaw dropped as you snickered. “And I mean that last one literally, they showed me the security footage of how you reacted when a doctor brought in the wrong medication: all you had to see was the label before you started snarling, and standing in front of my bed like a mother pup.”
She mutters something about killing the night guard as her blush turns her face into a tomato, before returning her attention to you. “W-what about Rainbow Dash? Aren’t you two a thing?”
You shake your head. “As far as I can tell, we’re just friends.”
Slowly, you feel your own face start to burn as you decide to make a move. Hoping seven months is enough time to wait, you lift your hoof from hers, and reach towards her head. You touch her mane, gently, and start to draw her head close to yours. It’s plain she knows what is happening, and she doesn’t fight in the slightest. Halfway there, she closes her eyes and tilts her head, and you decide not to let her do all the moving as you lift your head to hers.
As soon as your lips meet hers, you feel a bolt shock through your entire being as your own eyes slide shut. It’s not the fireworks you’d always thought it would be, but it was something better. It feels peaceful and therapeutic, like a scented candle burning in the depths of your heart. As soon as you feel it, you know that this is what love truly is.
After what felt like seconds, you break the kiss, and smile at her as she opens her eyes. Her blush has diminished slightly, but she’s wearing a grin as dopey as yours. She starts to giggle, then laugh, and then cry as she snuggles her head under your chin, putting both forehooves on the bedside.
Just then, you notice a movement in the corner of your eye, and look to see Rainbow Dash standing in the hall just outside the open door, jaw slack and eyes wide as dinner plates.
“Rainbow…” You begin, before her face starts shifting. Her pupils grow at a leisurely pace until they swallow the whites of her eyes, and her mouth moves at equal speed until it forms a grin that couldn’t be any wider.
“FINALLY!” She booms, breaking into laughter. “I’ve been waiting for you two to kiss ever since the third time you were admitted!”
Redheart lifts her head from your chin, and glances back at Rainbow. “Was… was I really that obvious?” She asks, somewhat indignantly.
Rainbow takes a break from her laughing fit, and just stares at her with a flat expression. “The first time we were waiting for him to wake up from an operation, you were just staring at his face and blushing. It took three minutes for you to realize I was talking to you!”
You chuckle as the nurse rubs the back of her neck with a hoof, and reach over to pat her on the back.
“I hope the next time I see you won’t be in this hospital?” You ask, giving her a wink.
She glances back at you, and smiles. “As soon as you get out, dinner and a movie sound good?”
“Perfect, my tre--”
She silences you by gently stuffing her hoof in your mouth, and gives you a sideways smile. “And before you say it’s your treat, look at your checkbook to see if you can afford the hospital bills and dinner and a movie.”
You grin sheepishly. “Fair enough,”