Developments
Caramel felt himself return to consciousness as he opened his eyes and a different house than his own came into view. He groaned as he felt the pain return, coming back almost blindingly as he rolled off the couch, trying to get to his hooves and call for help, although all that came out was a grunt. His head felt like it was about to explode yet again, and his back was alight with pain now as well. Might as well join the party, he thought.
"Caramel, wha-" Lyra ran up and stopped dead, turning around and yelling out. "Bon Bon, he's not alright, we gotta get him to a doctor!" She yelled, before helping the stallion onto his haunches. "Can you hear me Caramel?!" came her voice again, echoing slightly in his head as he tried to nod. His neck felt a little stiff, but that could have been from sleeping where he had been.
"I-" His voice cut out as another wave of pain washed over him, and he felt himself go rigid, gritting his teeth before his forelegs buckled and he found himself back on the ground. "Does my head look right?" He asked, trying unsuccessfully to raise a hoof to his forehead, where the pain seemed most acute.
"I dunno, you want me to touch it?" She asked, sounding panicky. "Bon Bon, hurry up!"
Caramel nodded again, shutting her eyes tightly as she carefully made contact, and his head lit up in new pain. He shied away from her touch, smearing sweat from his back onto the wooden floor as he tried to get away from the pain. Lyra jumped backwards, looking at her hoof guiltily. "Sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you!" She yelled back, as if she thought that was the only way he could hear her. Maybe she was right.
"It's okay," he panted, feeling the pain lessen ever so slightly. "I asked you to." Lyra looked like she was about to respond, a tear slipping down her face. He'd never seen her cry before, he realized offhandedly as Bon Bon ran in at a gallop. The cream mare shoved a bottle of pills into Lyra's hoof before she ran into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and a cookie.
"Can you eat this, Caramel? It's the best I have until they can give you something stronger," the cream mare yelled, her voice still sounding muted. Caramel slowly took the pills Lyra had measured out as he took a bite of the food. It tasted great, but then again all of her products did. Caramel practically inhaled the pills, chewing them up in the hopes of a faster effect before he took a swig of water and let his head flop back to the ground. That clearly wasn't a good idea, as his back and head lit up again in agony and he screamed out his pain.
"What happened, Lyra?!" Bon Bon asked, an accusatory tone absent from her voice.
"He just woke up like this!" she replied, another tear slipping down her cheek before she wiped it away angrily, "and there's nothing I can even do."
"That's not true, we need to get him to the hospital, Lyra! We don't even know what's happening, don't you think it'd be good to know?"
"Yeah, come on!" she yelled, gently grabbing one of Caramel's forehooves and pulling it over her shoulder, watching Bon Bon open the door and do the same. The trio stumbled outside into the bright, midmorning sunlight. A drip of Caramel's sweat dripped from his chin and onto the ground, soaking in as the wet spot moved out of his vision. He tried to walk along with them rather than let his hind legs drag, but every couple steps he almost seemed to forget how to walk and his legs would go limp again.
At some point the dirt turned to tile as they walked through a door, and a few minutes later the pattern changed as he was pushed into another room. His hooves left the ground for a moment as Lyra magically moved him to the bed, splaying out his limbs in a way that almost felt comfortable. And that meant a lot, considering the circumstances.
Caramel's ears rang for a moment, twitching and swiveling at the insistent hum, before it was gone just as suddenly. A few more ponies ran in and shoved Lyra and Bon Bon none too gently into chairs. For some reason, that made him rather angry, although he hardly even had a way to voice his problems at this point.
"Can you tell us where it hurts?" A mare asked, stretching latex over her hoof as she slid a mask over her muzzle.
"Urg." Caramel said, shifting slightly as his back arched in pain. "The sides of- my back and-" He grunted, shutting his eyes tightly. "My forehead."
A couple of the ponies exchanged looks, for some reason making him think that they assumed he was joking. Another was flipping through a thick binder as his horn glowed, and after what could have been a minute the same pony shook his head at the other stallion, who at this point Caramel could deduce was the head doctor of whatever operation they had going here.
He waved off the nurse and sent her towards his friends, before he saw a needle out of the corner of his eye, and tried to refocus. But by the time he looked over it was already imbedded in his shoulder, as the doctor's magic slowly depressed the syringe.
Caramel hated drugs, even when he was sick. He'd rather just ride out whatever he was going through, rather than use things that altered his perception of pain or something like that. Lyra always joked about how irrational he was, but he hadn't missed her slight worry when she'd seen him taking pills voluntarily yesterday.
The cold feeling that spread from his shoulder was nice though, as the pain in his back died down to a slight throbbing and he felt the slight cool of the examination table against his spine again, now that he wasn't arched to such a degree. It flowed up his neck and into his head, and the last image he remembered seeing as his eyes shut was that of his nervous friends, several tears on both of their faces as they watched anxiously.
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Caramel hadn't remembered any of his dreams for a while, not that it really bothered him. But he couldn't tell if this was a dream or not, with these masked ponies hovering over him as a thing fit in place over his muzzle. He felt tapping, reflexes and neurons firing as they checked him over.
Lyra came into focus, in the bottom of his view as his head lolled to the side. She looked frozen, growing in size before she took up the whole wall and covered up the painting of Bon Bon. Lyra shuddered for a moment, before the door busted in and the whole room filled with water. She shrank back down and became buoyant, floating towards the roof as the doctors continued to breathe, their blue scrubs turning orange as his head was pushed back upright.
He was a fish now; he could make out gills on the sides of his neck as they gasped and winked, pulling oxygen out of the water and making his head feel fuzzier. Caramel tried to duck as a carrot floated past his head, although his neck wasn't responding. It landed on his face, transforming into a snake and slithering down his chest and around one of the doctor's necks.
"He...not out cold." One of them said, waving a tentacle in front of Caramel's face. His eye almost shifted to focus on the doctor before he decided against it; he didn't want to jostle the eye people that were living inside.
There was a pinch at his shoulder again, and the world slowly deteriorated into darkness.
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"How is he?" Lyra asked, finally pushing herself out of the seat to look at Caramel's passed out form. He twitched and she cringed, reaching out to touch him before her hoof was none too gently batted away.
"We don't know what's wrong with him, there's nothing weird about his bloodwork and we can't tell what's causing the pain."
"There's a lump on his forehead!" Lyra yelled, watching Bon Bon lower her head sadly as the other mare kept herself constrained to the chair.
"That may be true, but we can't do anything for something inside his skull. All we can do is try to figure out what the problem is and fix it as best we can. And like I said, bloodwork's fine, and the tests say that it's not cancerous."
"How can you not know what it is then?" The aquamarine mare asked. "You're doctors, you're supposed to know this stuff!"
"I'll tell you what we know." The stallion replied cooly. "That pony there shows symptoms that can't be disease related, and we can tell that they aren't cancerous, like I said. As far as we can tell his mind seems unaffected to a large degree, which means his brain hasn't deteriorated. His heart rate is stable, and blood pressure is as high as to be expected. That's all we know." The doctor sighed, before he pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil, quickly writing down a few words. "The good news is, I know a specialist that may be able to shed some light on this." He handed her the paper, and she read it over.
"This is his address?" Lyra asked, watching the doctor nod. "How are we going to get him to manehattan? That's like eighty miles from here!"
"We can get a train lined up, move him there in an hour and a half tops." He threw some hoof signals towards the other ponies and they quickly started moving, a few leaving while others grouped up supplies.
"Do you think- does it look like he'll die?" Lyra asked, her throat seeming to close up.
"I wish I knew. But he's an earth pony, they're hardy things anyway. The thing most ponies forget is that besides the extra stamina as a race, they're born to be stubborn and take a lot more punishment. We've had ponies come in here with similar injuries, and if one of them dies, it's almost never the earth pony. That should really speak for itself."
"But there's still a point where it's too much..." She said sadly, hearing a quiet sob from Bon Bon as a wheeled stretcher rolled in and the doctor carefully picked up Caramel in his magic and moved him over to the thin pad.
"You're welcome to come with us, in fact I would recommend that you do. It's always good to for him to have friends i-when he wakes up."
Lyra's head drooped, and she refocused on the floor. "Okay, thanks for doing everything you could, at least." She turned around as the stretcher rolled back through the door, tapping Bon Bon's shoulder sadly.
"There's still somepony to go to, that's good, right?" The cream mare asked, taking Lyra's extended hoof and pulling herself upwards.
"Yeah, I guess." She sighed. "Why did this have to happen, just like this?" She asked. "We should've known sooner, what kind of crappy friends are we?"
"Lyra, he just said that they've never seen something like it, how could we have helped?"
"I don't know, I just- I don't want him to die when like this!" The mare turned and ran from the room, trying to stem her readily flowing tears. She galloped after the gurney, catching up with Caramel as he was stopped in the lobby. Doctors were rushing all over as one changed out an IV and several others speedily checked tables and charts, taking measurements before they moved a patient that might turn out to be unstable.
Lyra rested her head on his chest, despite the protests of the doctors, and stared up at his lidded eyes as her head slowly rose and fell. It was harrowing, seeing him like this so suddenly, when not even yesterday he'd been fine. Octavia didn't even know what had happened, she realized. They'd parted thinking it was something that would be fine in the morning, and she knew they had all had their doubts about that outcome.
It was getting hard to look at him like this, not just because of the tears clogging her eyes, but because of the sense of fear that seemed to grow and push away her usual optimism, like a malign cancer pushing out healthy tissue. Lyra jumped slightly as Bon Bon patted her back and the gurney started to move, forcing her to stand back up straight and walk alongside.
Maybe the part she hated the most about all this was how useless she really was, and how she knew that if things got worse, she would be unable to help. But she kept feeling that this was too much, like she felt too broken for him to be only a friend.
No, that was just the condition speaking, she'd never felt that way before. Caramel was handsome and she enjoyed being around him, but that was as far as it went. Lyra couldn't remember a time where she'd thought about him as more than her best and oldest friend, or a hard worker when he secluded himself to try to get things done early. Maybe this was all just hype, it's not like she'd known anypony this well when they'd ended up like this. Her grandparents came the closest, but she'd only seen them a few times anyway.
"Oh Caramel," she whispered, shifting his mane with her magic. "You better be okay after all this."