“You have cancer.”
I said nothing. Silence settled between the doctor and I.
“I’m sorry.”
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes. My heart leaped as I lifted my hoof to my chest. I looked at the wall behind his head. A cold dripping sensation slid down my ears and back as if molasses was slowly dunked over my head. It consumed me.
“When…” I hesitated, barely swallowing, and tentatively asked, “When do I start treatment?”
A chill crawled down my legs as I clutched at the plastic chair I was sitting on. He was grimacing.
“You… don’t.”
I looked back at him, then away. The hollow in my hungry stomach grew deeper. A cool buzz sauntered in my belly. I evaded his eyes.
“I...,” I began. “Can’t you…”
“It’s too late for treatment,” he gently cut me. “I- I don’t want to give you false hopes, Drop. Can I call you that? Drop. It doesn’t mean we can’t help. Palliative care is a valid option. It's pretty advanced nowadays.”
I sunk slightly in my chair.
“How long?” I breathed.
“That’s the difficult question. It’s that…” He sighed, his breath departing with a fraction of my soul that clung at his words. “Two to three months. That’s my estimate. Maybe less.”
I looked down at the table. The radios strewn about showed a slice of my head. A distinctive white area in the middle taunted me.
"I don’t mind you going for a second opinion, by the way," he said but I didn't listen.
I was my own enemy.
Hours later, I walked down one of the few cobblestone streets left in the city. It buzzed with activities. Bars, pubs were opening to a coming clientele as the workweek came to an end. The local stores closed after a long day of trade. The smell of a fishmonger’s shop wafted at my muzzle as he scrapped the floor of melting ice, fish scales and invertebrate juices.
I turned left into a back alley and passed two hip’ food places where several ponies already lined up. Then I reached it, my bar. Not mine per se but the one I went to every week.
I opened the door, shook hooves with the owner, walked to the back where a couple of acquaintances sat along with two friends. We talked politics as we drained beer pints. A weekly ritual complaining about events we couldn’t change. Simple small talks. Not unlike the weather forecast.
“How you doin’, Drop?” one asked. “You seem barely on this earth.”
I smiled back.
“You know, nothing,” I replied. “Work and all. I’ve had a pretty rough couple of days at work; I’m already thinking about next week.”
“The ponies from the sales department still annoying you. Bunch of vampires, I tell you.”
I chuckled a couple of times and went back to my beer. I grabbed it from its coaster with my two hooves and stared at its content. I’d missed the happy hour and with how expensive it was in the city, I would only take another one after this.
As I sipped a mouthful, I lingered on the watery taste of it. At least the slice of lemon floating at the top of the brew camouflaged its taste.
“Hey, Drop,” Dièse, a leaden grey mare with a flute for a cutie mark, called from her side of the sofa. “Did ye bring the map?”
I frowned, taken aback by the question as I tried to rearrange my thoughts. My eyes widened as it fell into place.
“Yes… Yes, in fact,” I sputtered.
I looked around for my bag and after a quick search found it under my jacket. I unzipped its main pocket and rummaged through the heavy load inside. Papers, batteries, food and other things.
I pulled out a bundle of printed papers, shoddily taped together and protected from humidity with see-through duct-tape.
I tried to unfold the massive map, forcing everyone to remove their beer from the table. All in all, it was eight hooves by six.
Thereon lay a map printed in deep brown, still decipherable in the sifted light of the bar. Harder to see was the indigo fine print that was superimposed.
“Is that?” Omen pondered.
“Yeah,” Dièse confirmed. “Catacombs map. In brown, ye got the tunnels under the city. The other color is just the roads on the surface.” She frowned slightly as she searched for a specific place on there. “Where's the entry?”
She looked up at me with a quizzical expression on her face. I stared at her until she frowned hard back to me.
“Eh… ah!” I muttered as a new chill assaulted the back of my neck, allied with the void that nested under my sternum. “It’s not there. You gotta go through an entry in the cable tunnels of the state's telephone company.”
I explained it wasn’t far from here. Merely a thirty minutes walk before we could find a specific sewer entrance that wasn’t really one. Walking a mile underground would lead to a hole that somepony had dug in the concrete with an electric, portable jackhammer. We could crawl in a small bend in the ground and then voilà... Into the catacombs.
Dièse and I had decided to go a few days ago. We’d told nopony else so we wouldn’t have stragglers. So we could be together alone. I closed my eyes and breathed in. A long, deep breath.
“What’re ye afraid of, Drop? I know it’s not the first time you went in,” Dièse called, waving me in the catacombs’ entrance, having pushed aside the makeshift metal cover that hid it. “What’s wrong? Come on.”
“N-Nothing,” I sighed, swallowing a great deal as I contemplated the open hole crudely dug in the tunnel’s concrete wall.
I looked back at the dark and dusty hallway behind us. It echoed with Dièse’s breath and mine. The still water lingering the floor reflected my torchlight. Its rays glimmered over the littered, rusted copper cables strewn along ground and walls.
I closed my eyes as I took an erratic breath in, and let it go slowly. As I opened myself back to the tunnel's darkness, I switched my light off, set it at the bottom of my backpack and, only lit by Dièse’s own lamp, I contemplated the knife safely stashed in it. I nodded, swallowed, zipped it all up and turned back to my friend. I smiled faintly.
“I ain’t scared of living.”