Silent Ponyville: Reunion
Lost cause.
Part 28
------
"NO," Lance said as he tore the note off the wall and began trying to rip off the remaining tattered wallpaper with his hooves. "There was a door here! Put it back!" he demanded as though somepony were listening, finding naught but sturdy wood behind what little wallpaper he actually managed to remove. "Posey! Can you hear me?!"
Nothing.
"She was here....I just got her back!" His hooves grew still on the wall, his body trembling with the rage he was using to desperately fend off the familiar dread gnawing at his gut. It was like being torn in half. Part of him wanted to start moving that very second to try and rescue her. The other part could only remember the pattern that had played out twice now. It only ended with him and a corpse.
...
He ineffectually struck the wall once more out of spite and dropped back to all four hooves. Even if there was a script he was doomed to follow, the only alternative was doing nothing. Besides, there was no massive subterranean sprawl laid out before him this time. There was nothing more than his house, a single residential building of reasonable size. One could only fit so many surprises in so small a space. If he had managed to survive the hollowed out underground husk of Manehatten General, surely he could navigate his way through his own abode, no matter the obstacles.
"Be quick about it. She can't kill Posey if I get to her before she can even stand up," he muttered to himself as he started taking stock of his surroundings a bit more thoroughly. It looked about as destitute and abandoned as the boutique and the appliance store had been. Their furniture was gone. None of their pictures hung from the walls. Even the scraps of wallpaper looked unfamiliar. There was nothing left but the architecture itself to remind him of their once happy home and, owing to recent years, even that wasn't a very welcoming sight anymore. That was fine though. They had no reason to stay any longer than was absolutely necessary.
Having been through this process twice now he set himself to checking which doors weren't broken, a task that would be made much simpler by his already knowing their locations. Mindful to not step in the still fresh trail of clumsy blood spatters and crimson hoof prints the sovereign had left behind, he stepped into the hall. There were no planks or barriers or any other kind of obvious obstruction to clearly mark the impassable doors, but it was not as if there were many doors to check either.
Lance proceeded to make no progress at all as he was met with a series of rattling, useless doorknobs save for two. One of the hall closets was unlocked, and inside a health drink awaited him, sitting on the lone small shelf that hadn't been torn from the walls for whatever unfathomable reason. Though the presentation was suspect, he knew his pills were going to wear off sometime in the near future and took the bottle anyway. The other door that still worked was the one for their guest bedroom, but it hardly mattered. He was only able to force it open enough to peek inside and see that, much like their dining room, it was stuffed to the point of inaccessibility with boxes upon boxes of random baggage onto which only the likes of a compulsive hoarder would hold.
The lack of progress wasn't exactly encouraging but at least it had been quick so far. With the entire cloud level floor cleared he followed the sovereign's bloody trail over to the stairs and carefully made his way up to the second floor, his eyes downcast to make sure his hooves didn't accidentally step on the potentially slippery fluid while his watch started to buzz softly with the increased proximity. Strangely, when he reached the top the bloody trail didn't immediately lead out into the hallway like he would have expected. Instead it detoured along the upstairs hallway, going in and out of one door he could see before turning the corner out of sight and then doubling back toward the balcony. They had clearly only heard her stumble and collapse onto the balcony before, when had she gone into these other rooms?
In what was perhaps not the most well weighed decision, he poked his head out the archway that opened up from the hallway to the railed walkway leading over the living room and along the wall to the balcony. She was still lying there, catching her breath and looking quite worse for the wear. Despite her extensive fatigue she still seemed fairly aware of her surroundings, audibly straining as her metal covered head scraped along the balcony floor and came to rest looking squarely at him. Lance flinched back into the hallway, rather relieved when he didn't hear any iron clad hooves approaching. Fortunately there was no reason to ever try that again, leaving him to the doors that he assumed were the only ones unlocked.
A quick walk-through of the upstairs hallway confirmed his assumption with another series of rattling doorknobs. There were in total three remaining unbroken knobs attached to corresponding doors that looked a bit different than all the others. One at the end of the hallway just past the stairs looked to have partially burned by some strange kind of fire that had left everything else in the vicinity completely untouched. The second around the corner bore a series of cracks and dents as though somepony had taken a hammer to it. The last at the very far end of the hallway looked water damaged and moldy. Lance knew exactly which rooms laid behind each one...and because of that, he first chose the burned door.
There was no smell of smoke, nor was the doorknob hot in the slightest. With no reason to suspect any lingering fire on the other side, he opened the door. The sight that greeted him left him standing there dumbfounded yet again. Lance had been correct about there not being a fire on the other side of the door, but that had been the only thing he'd been correct about. Instead of his office, he was now looking into a burnt out version of the entryway of his house as though he'd just opened the front door.
"What?" he couldn't help saying. He took a step inside and saw that by all appearances it was an entire copy of his house attached to the side, unfortunately including the entirely inaccessible kitchen. Yet, he hadn't seen anything of the sort whilst he and Posey had been outside. While this wasn't the first time the place had taken liberties with basic physics, he couldn't recall any other occasion that had been quite as egregious. For that matter...the large blood trail that had led him inside was nowhere to be seen. It was not a case of simply being harder to spot on the burnt floor either, he couldn't see a drop anywhere.
He took a first cautious couple steps inside, the charred patches on the floor crunching only slightly beneath his weight but still holding together. Despite feeling solid enough, Lance didn't exactly trust them, and made note to keep his hooves on unburned floor whenever it was possible. Even at that, the unburned boards creaked worryingly beneath his hooves. It would have been a bad enough situation without his also having no idea what was beneath the floor boards of this spontaneously appearing side house.
In addition to the obvious fire damage, the living room had a markedly different arrangement of furniture. Rather than a lone chair and rusty safe, there was a charred bed frame and mattress sitting in the corner, and a metal bust of a mare sitting on top of a square, crack riddled, concrete pedestal. The bust was held together by a series of shoddy looking welding seams, and as he stepped closer he noticed two electrodes attached to the base at each side. Each one was hooked to a wire that traveled down along their respective face of the pedestal and then vanished into a pair of holes in the floor. Now that he was closer Lance also spotted a pipe on the back side of the pedestal that had been hidden by the bust at a distance. Near the top it bent inward, the opening pointed directly at the small metal statue. In defiance of the charred architecture around it, the pipe was covered in a layer of frost. A quick step around revealed that, like the wires, it went down and into the floor, leaving Lance with no readily available way to trace the source of either. That didn't strike him as a problem though. He knew well he'd find out soon enough.
It only took him a glance to write off the dining room. The ceiling high stacks of boxes filled with old newspapers were still there, only far blacker now. Without much reason to linger downstairs, he headed upward, pausing at the second highest step when his watch began to buzz softly. There was something up there but it was still a ways off yet. Now even more wary of his surroundings, he took the last step up and poked his head out to make sure there was nothing on the walkway or balcony. But something was on the balcony. Something still staring back at him, lying in the exact same position she had been back in the main house.
Lance swiftly retreated out of her sight just as before. "What the buck?" he muttered under his breath. There was still no pursuit. Following a confused few moments Lance decided it didn't matter. If the sovereign still couldn't even stand up, she could be in as many simultaneous places as she wanted to be and it wouldn't matter. "Just messing with you more Lance, move along," he urged himself as he placed his focus back on searching his 'house'.
His office door was unlocked, but he only pulled the door open a crack, very briefly, just to check that it worked. The hall closet's doorknob was broken, as was the bathroom's much to his relief. With every step down the corridor his watch buzzed a little louder but he paid it little mind knowing the source was on the balcony with a severe case of blood loss induced jelly legs. As he turned to check the door to their home library however, a familiar panting noise to his left proved that this assumption was dead wrong. The barbed nurse had been standing just past the door to Fluttershy's room, blocking his way to the master bedroom and putting her one good lunge away from giving him an assortment of puncture wounds.
A muttered obscenity preceded him barely managing to step back fast enough to avoid her embrace, turning tail and bolting for the nearest door he knew would let him in. He didn't know what was in that most likely burned crispy version of his office, but his watch had been quieter over there so he was reasonably sure it wouldn't kill him. Lance cast a glance over to the nurse to see she was nearly close enough for another attempted hug before hurrying inside and slamming the door shut. He kept his hoof on the knob to prevent anypony turning it from the other side, and within moments he heard the insistent scratching of the panting barbed nurse trying to get inside as his watch screamed bloody murder at him.
For a moment he thought this one would be more persistent than the others, but soon the scratching abated and he heard her limp away back to her post, his watch calming down. Lance let out the breath he'd been holding, then turned around to see an office surprisingly well lit and organized considering the location. It was 'an office' and not 'his office' because he instantly recognized the sight of the third floor office from Cloudsdale General that had so long ago been assigned to him. Things were made all the stranger by the version of himself over a decade younger seated at his desk, and another familiar mare wearing a pair of light blue saddlebags standing on the other side, facing toward his doppelganger.
"Hrm." The younger Lance inspected the mare closely as though looking for something, but couldn't quite find it.
"You don't remember me?" the even younger looking blonde maned pegasus mare asked with a hint of disappointment.
"I can't say I do," Lance replied with a shrug. "Should I be able to?"
"I can't say I blame you, it's been so long and all...oh, wait!" she said cheerfully as an idea popped into her head. She took a seat, spent a moment rummaging about her saddlebag, and then pulled a black framed pair of glasses out, putting them on before looking at the surgeon across the desk again. "How about now?"
This time there was a visible spark of recognition to his face. "Oh my gosh you're the teenage filly that asked for my autograph at my graduation," he said, hardly believing it even as he said it.
"Right!" she said with a bright smile before putting the glasses away. "I've been wearing contacts for years now but it's paid off a few times to still have these nearby for backup."
"So you're working here now?" he asked, still a bit dazed by such a small piece of his past seeming to come back out of nowhere.
"Yep, as a nurse to start. During orientation I heard somepony mention you were working on the third floor, so I wanted to come up and say hi before my first shift if you weren't busy," she explained, standing back up after latching her saddlebag closed.
"Ah, well then, welcome aboard," Lance replied with a polite smile, and then remembered his manners a little better. "And uh, I didn't catch your name?"
"Thank you Dr. Strongshy, and my name's Soft Cure. It's an honor to meet you again," she answered before turning to leave. Instead of stepping out though, she stopped, pausing a moment and then looking back at him again. "Uh...I know this is probably weird of me to ask but...are you free for lunch later?" she asked a bit hesitantly.
"I...um..." He looked over at his scheduled appointments and surgeries for the day, finding his usual gap of free time for lunch a bit late in the afternoon. "Sure, I suppose," he said with a bit of uncertainty of his own. None of the staff had ever come up to his office just to say hello before, much less asked him if he was free for lunch.
Then Lance, Soft Cure, and the entire office began to burn away in dark red smoldering flames that left not even ash behind. As Lance looked on, the reality of his home office replaced that of his workplace completely, the flames traveling from the ceiling downward until they coalesced into a glowing red number 303 on the ground that sizzled with heat and boiled away, leaving the unsettling scent of cooked blood lingering in the air.
The Lance of the present momentarily stood there looking at the spot the blood drawn 303 had occupied. Then he looked up to see his home office, just as charred as he initially assumed. His desk had been broken in half and had fallen to the floor, his chair was missing entirely, and his once stuffed shelves were now empty while the ashes that were undoubtedly the remains of his medical books laid scattered on the floor. He shook the daze from his head and then looked again, reasonably confident that this was real when the same incinerated office was there to greet him a second time.
"Did...she do this?" he wondered aloud, realizing that circumstances were somewhat implying it. The 303 on the floor had clearly been drawn in blood, there had been a trail of it leading into his office door in the uncharred version of his house, and there was currently only one pony in the house bleeding everywhere. But was the sovereign even capable of such, and if true, what had been keeping her from doing it all this time? Had she been simply enjoying herself too thoroughly to bother, or had something changed? Did it have anything to do with the restraints getting torn off?
Thankfully the sight of some kind of dial on the wall to his right distracted him from such troubling thoughts. His interest was further piqued when he noticed a pair of wires traveling down from the dial to the floor, insulated identically to the wires he'd seen hooked to the electrodes on the bust downstairs. Since he wasn't going to find out much else otherwise, he gave the dial about a quarter turn. It gave a click at the first movement, and then a quite audible electric hum began emanating from the wall behind it. The dial proved to be less of a dial and more of a timer, ticking back to its original position bit by bit until it clicked off again and the humming ceased.
The matching wires made him strongly suspect that it was doing something to the bust downstairs, so he turned the timer to the full duration and then peeked out to make sure the nurse was still safely around the corner before emerging and heading for the walkway where he'd be able to look down. It then struck him that wandering back into the sovereign's line of sight was a slightly less than ideal plan and he corrected course to the stairwell. Once he'd made his way down and back into the living room he found the welded together metal bust glowing red with heat from the electric current passing through it via the electrodes. For a split second he feared inadvertently starting a fire but then realized the obvious fact that there was nothing left that hadn't already gone up in flames.
The red glow of the metal slowly grew brighter as the electric current hummed relentlessly. But after a few more moments Lance heard the faint sound of a click upstairs. The current instantly cut off, and the glowing heat of the metallic bust began quickly dimming. As he watched it cool he couldn't help but notice how the front-most welding seam glowed just a bit brighter, suggesting it was going to give out far earlier than the metal it so haphazardly bound together. By now he was getting the distinct impression that there was something he needed inside, and that seam was surely going to be the key. But how was he going to take advantage of it? Even with full duration it didn't get hot enough to melt off, and he wasn't exactly eager to place his hooves on red hot metal to try and pry it open when it was at its most malleable.
Then he remembered the pipe hiding behind the bust. It was now free of frost thanks to the heat given off by the bust, but the icy coating having been there at all implied the pipe was supposed to carry something very, very cold. There was probably another switch, or dial, or button somewhere, something that would hopefully make the pipe cool off the back side of the bust incredibly quickly. If Lance could time it so that it happened when the bust was at its hottest, the entire back half contracting could potentially deform the still red hot front half and exert enough pull to bust the seam open. He'd never really done any kind of metal forming work before but he knew the basic concept of thermal expansion and it sounded plausible enough. Now all he had to do was find the switch or button in question.
The now strangely uncluttered dining room struck him as a good place to start.
He didn't waste time wondering where the stacks of charred boxes had gone. They were just gone, and that was that. The watch didn't buzz any louder as he approached but he was still cautious after the unexpected run in with the nurse upstairs. There was a light coming from the far left side of the room, and when Lance looked within he spent another moment befuddled at the sight in front of him before his recollection of recent events clarified the matter and he fully stepped in to get a better view.
About halfway in, the room abruptly transitioned into clean white tile flooring with just as clean white walls that he recognized as cloud construction. Against the wall was a familiar cafeteria table, two ponies seated across from one another with plates of salad in front of them, the blonde maned mare of the pair now wearing a brand new nurse outfit.
He had apparently walked into the middle of a lull in the conversation, as Soft Cure took a bit of salad and chewed peacefully while the older stallion across from her sat there awkwardly. The past Lance looked thoughtful for a while, as though figuring out the right way to ask something. Eventually he apparently concluded there was no polite way of asking, and waited until she'd swallowed to speak.
"Um...don't take this the wrong way but...have you been...tracking me...more than is healthy?" he asked, his words punctuated by several uncertain, eye averting pauses.
"Oh...stalking, you mean," she said, her ears lowering as she examined the table and her face turned a slight bit pink.
"It's not that I don't appreciate being asked to lunch, it's-"
"No no it's fine," she said while raising a reassuring hoof. "Celestia knows I've asked myself that a few times, I wasn't exaggerating back then when I said you were an inspiration and all. But, no, I don't have some Lance Strongshy shrine hidden in my closet," she joked.
He replied with a quiet chuckle, now amused at his own paranoia more than anything else as he managed a soft smile that set her a bit more at ease as she continued.
"You've been in medical journals so much that it's kind of hard not to know where you work if you have even a remote interest in the field, so I wouldn't have had to look far had it been my intention to arrange all this," she said with a motion of her hoof to indicate the general area. "But, the truth is, I'm just here because Cloudsdale needs well trained medical pegasi, and I didn't see much use in doing anything less than becoming one."
"Yeah...same here," he said with a nod of understanding. "It still feels really strange for a staff member to bother asking me to lunch, not to mention that staff member being somepony I talked to for a few seconds just once years ago who came back out of nowhere. I know I've just made things a bit...strange by asking that, but I would've felt worse not saying anything," he explained before taking a bite of his lunch.
"I understand, and I agree, clearing the air always helps. I know it sounds silly but um...part of the reason I asked is because you're the only familiar face in the whole building for me."
Lance shot her a raised eyebrow before swallowing. "Really?"
"Yeah, I was the only bookish pony in my group of friends growing up, so they're off on their own careers now. I don't really have any friends in Cloudsdale anymore, so I figured since I had approached you once before it would be easier a second time...or something," she said, pausing as though realizing the words didn't make as much sense as she had thought they would before saying them. Her mind moved on though, apparently to something that made her smile and laugh a bit. "You should've seen the reactions I got when asking about you. Apparently some of the other new hires think you have a glare that sears tumors right out of a patient."
"Huh...well, it's true I was looking rather intently at a tumor last week, but I'd probably give more credit to the twenty or so tools that were in my hooves during the surgery," he replied, a brief moment of curiosity as to what other ridiculous rumors about him were floating around passing through his mind before he dismissed it as inconsequential.
"Hehe, so um...if this still feels weird I'll understand if you don't want to meet up for lunch or anything again," she offered while trying not to sound disappointed.
Lance pondered this. He remembered when he'd first gone to Manehatten without a friend in the world and then been only further embittered by the struggles there. He recalled how things had opened up once Posey had convinced him to give other ponies another shot and get to know a few. Then there was the slight feeling of isolation he'd been detecting within himself lately. Between work and family he'd neglected to build any sort of social network for himself in Cloudsdale. He loved his work, and he loved his family even more, but after actually having friends in Manehatten it felt strange to have his only non professional conversations take place with his wife and his daughter. Lance decided that being available couldn't hurt.
"You know what? I'll get over it. We'll probably end up working together some days anyway," he said after a few silent moments. Soft Cure offered a smile and nod in reply before she was set alight in smoldering red flames that steadily consumed her and the rest of the scene in front of him. Rather than reveal the actual room and a sizzling 303 as before, the flames moved toward his half of the room. Not knowing what to expect, Lance hastily backed away toward the door until it became apparent the crimson fire wasn't coming after him. It began moving upward, inexplicably creating ashes from nowhere as it rose. Lance made out the shape of two ponies before the room was momentarily enveloped in an intense red glow that forced him to shield his eyes. When he opened them again he was looking at himself and Posey, eating dinner together on a night long before she'd started getting sick.
"I'm glad you managed to get the weekend off, Fluttershy will be really happy to see her dad in the morning, assuming they don't have to call you in," Posey mused with a tired smile. "So how was work?"
"Pretty much the usual operations and examinations, nothing too severe or complicated, and no emergency cases came in. It was a relatively calm shift all things told," he replied before taking a drink of water from his glass.
"Hrm, that's good," she said before a yawn occupied her for a few seconds. "I wish they'd let you go a bit earlier in the day though, I'm always so tired the day after nights I stay up late waiting for you."
"Nopony said you had to," he answered. "I don't mind coming home to a dark house if it means you're getting some rest Posey."
"I know, I just like being able to say hi before I hit the hay," she explained, silent for a few moments as she took a bite of the pasta dish she'd put together. "So your shift was three days long but nothing at all interesting happened?" she pressed, sounding skeptical. They often had differing definitions of 'interesting'. It wouldn't be the first time one of them would have had to press the other to apply a slightly different filter to their recollection of events. Lance paused, trying to think of something besides medical files, operations, and treatments, and then recalled the conversation he'd had just over three days ago at that point.
"Oh...I've got something," he said.
"Yeah?" she asked, her interest piqued now that it appeared they might discuss something that wasn't saturated with medical jargon that the untrained ear wouldn't wholly understand.
"We've got some new staff at the hospital, and do you remember that teenage filly that got my autograph at my graduation?" he asked.
"I vaguely remember trying not to give somepony else a death glare after I did it to Celestia," she replied. There was a quiet moment occupied only by mutual chewing until she pieced together the implication behind the two halves of his sentence. "No."
"Yep, she got through university and now she's working at Cloudsdale as a nurse getting her final bit of training and starting her career."
"Huh, well good for her. I didn't know you were involved in hiring though," she said, her voice shifting subtly as she examined him with a slightly more critical gaze that he failed to notice.
"I'm not, she actually came up to my office before her first shift to say hello, even asked me to lunch. Nopony at work has ever done that before," he noted fondly as he took another bite of pasta.
"...You don't say," she deadpanned, setting her fork down and watching him chew like a cat eying an unaware mouse.
He swallowed. "Apparently I have a scary reputation among the staff or something? I don't know. Anyway, she seems fairly competent at first glance. Hopefully we've got another reliable medical pony on hoof," he continued obliviously.
...
Posey waited until his eyes visibly widened, her husband having just then heard the click of the metaphorical landmine upon which he had just stepped. "So I know she's younger than me, but is she prettier too?" she asked with a menacing tilt of the head.
Lance's just as metaphorical squad mates took his dog tags and fled out of the blast radius leaving him alone and terrified. "I wasn't-I didn't-it's not like-I'm not-" he babbled as a veritable legion of denials all tried to force their way out of his mouth at once and only managed to come out as fragmentary nonsense.
She let him verbally flail a few seconds longer before she snorted, her face contorting into an amused grimace before she started laughing outright. Lance was stuck in uncertain blinking silence until she managed to recover. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just had to," she consoled him while wiping a laughter induced tear away. "It's fine honey I'm not angry, or jealous, or anything," she said, picking up her glass to take another drink. She wisely set it back down before she could manage to take a sip, another wave of the giggles overtaking her that would've made her spit it out.
"You're....fine?" he repeated cautiously.
"Mostly...I mean, I would have rather heard about you meeting an interesting stallion since I worry like anypony would, but I trust you more than enough by now, and besides, it's not like I didn't still have stallions for friends even after we got serious," she assured him, and then sighed. "They were all back in Manehatten though like the rest of my...our friends."
"..." Lance now set his fork down as well. "Are you okay here honey?"
She yawned again. "Just a bit of cabin fever I guess. Sometimes I really miss being able to go out and see friends, you know?"
"I'll be here tomorrow, you could go out and stretch your wings a bit while I take care of things here," he offered, but she shook her head without having to really think about it at all.
"No. You might have to be called in on an emergency for one thing, and for another, you're gone for long enough that I like to be home with you and Fluttershy when you're off. Thank you though." She gave him a smile, placing her hoof on his atop the table. "Don't worry about it, I know things will get better from here...and they're already pretty good as it is."
His moment of concern having passed, he turned his hoof upward and took hold of hers, returning her affectionate expression. "Thanks."
"You're welcome. While we're on the subject though...tell that new nurse of yours that your wife demands she make sure my husband takes care of himself at work if she's going to get the privilege of my allowing her near you," she replied in mostly teasing jest.
"Heh, I'll pass it along dear."
Before the two apparitions could resume their meal, the crimson flame returned to sear them out of existence. There was no transition to a third scene, only a charred, ashen room made to feel cavernous by the small table and chair for one, sitting isolated in the center with nothing but a curiously unburned gramophone sitting in the corner for company. Another bloody glowing 303 on the floor sizzled and evaporated, but it didn't hold Lance's attention nearly as well as the now completely unblocked back door. The doorknob was even functional, and for a fleeting moment he thought he had found a way out. His hopes were dashed when he opened it to see nothing but a fog filled void on the other side instead of their back yard. Out of curiosity, he picked up a decently sized chunk of charcoal from the floor, held it out the door, and dropped it, expecting to at least hear some kind of dull clang eventually. No sound came back to him even after a solid minute. He sensibly chose to close the door after that, muttering that he probably should have known better than to get his hopes up.
The lonely bit of furniture didn't have any apparent use, but the gramophone had a record ready to play. Knowing it wouldn't be there unless he had to listen to it, Lance gave the crank a few turns and then let it play.
There was silence initially, but soon he picked out the sound of ragged male breathing. Hoof steps followed, growing closer and then stopping, preceding what sounded like two bundles of papers being dropped.
"Who are you?" the voice of a young stallion asked, apparently the pony that had been catching his breath. "What am I doing he-"
"No," another stallion interrupted, his voice sounding much older and more rugged like the growl of an old wolf. "Let's go back to that first question, only lets ask it about you, because I don't know who the buck you are and neither does anypony else whose signature matters, and really, that's why you're here."
"What the hay are you talking about?" the young stallion asked, an uneasy edge to his voice. Lance could pick out the sound of chains being gently rattled like somepony were struggling.
"But I do know this pony," the older stallion continued, completely ignoring the question of the younger. "You know her too, right?"
"..."
"She's quite talented isn't she?" the older continued, audibly leafing through one of the paper bundles. "Why, if this service record is to be believed, there's not a target she could get eyes on and not be able to put a crossbow bolt right through it. Lives can be entrusted to this mare and she will deliver them from evil."
"..."
"She didn't that day though...because nopony with brass knew who you were and you just needed to stand out so badly," he continued, punctuating his sentence with the sharp sound of the dropped stack of papers landing on the table.
"My job is to make sure everypony walks away, and that's what I was trying to do!" he denied adamantly.
"Come on now boy, we both know better. If you had been doing your job you would've taken the situation for what it was and prioritized, but what you did instead was strut into a situation you couldn't handle with delusions of grandeur, fame, and promotion in your eyes. That's all he was to you."
"You're wrong!"
"No. I'm right. Look at all these promotion requests on your record, every one of them denied," the older said while leafing through what must have been the other bundle of records. "I look at this and I see some punk with a dangerous entitlement streak who thinks he deserves prestige without having to earn it, but you did so well at the academy that your superiors were willing to overlook it. You've actually done quite well up until now, to be fair," he confessed before another impact of dropped papers was heard. "But then here it was...the perfect situation. You pull it off and you get fame and fortune. You screw up and nopony says its your fault, because she was irreparably unstable and nopony would blame you for hesitating to order the shot on a mare. He dies and nopony gets the blame...and that is something I just can't tolerate."
"Wh...what are you going to do?!"
"I'm going to let you go."
There was a brief silence of disbelief from the younger. "What?"
"That's right...I'm going to let you go, forget all of this, completely let you off the hook, and turn myself in for kidnapping...so long as you can tell me his name."
The quiet that ensued was kept from yet more complete silence only by the steadily more panicked breathing of the younger trying desperately to remember the name and save his own life. But it was not to be. Lance heard a movement, and then a frightened exclamation that got cut short by a rope tightening painfully around a snout.
"His name was Kip."
The wince inducing snap of a pony's limb breaking and muffled screams preceded the needle reaching the end of the record, sparing Lance from having to listen to any more of the younger stallion's ultimate fate.
...
"What the hay did that have to do with anything?" he wondered aloud as he took the needle off the record and moved it aside. The scene he'd just heard wasn't the switch he was looking for, but he still knew it had to have some kind of purpose, so he mentally filed it away.
There was nothing left in that room worth looking at, so his thoughts drifted elsewhere. It was only his thoughts, and not his body, because he knew the only doors left to check were all upstairs being guarded by that nurse. He needed to get by her, but trying to dart past her was likely to end badly. A less direct method would be preferable if he could come up with one. Luring a monster into a room and then maneuvering around it with the extra space had worked once before with a drowning mare, but the barbed nurses were just a bit too fast for that to be a safe bet. Trapping her in the office wasn't a good option either, as he'd need to go back in there to twist the dial linked to the electrodes.
...
Finally, he recalled her scratching insistently at the door and got an idea that might just work. Lance made his way back up stairs intent on first double checking that the office door still worked, but stopped in his tracks at the top of the stairs when he heard that very door open. Somepony was panting for breath nervously as they emerged, and then Lance heard his own voice speak up. "What the HAY was that in there?!" his younger self asked harshly.
Realizing it was another vision of his past, he took the last step up to see himself in blood spattered surgical scrubs glaring at a visibly shaken orderly in the Cloudsdale General surgical wing.
"I...I don't know, I just froze, I don't know what-"
"You had better find out then before you set hoof in my operating room again, because if Soft Cure hadn't been there fix it, we'd be writing down the time and wheeling the patient to the morgue right now," he interrupted furiously as his eyes kept the orderly rooted to the spot with fear.
"I'm sorry, it, was just so...I didn't know what to...it was just a mistake," she plead, her eyes tearing up.
There was no pity waiting for her. "Just a mistake. You almost killed somepony and it's just a mistake. Would you honestly be saying that in defense of somepony else if they'd killed a patient, or do you expect to get special consideration just for being you?"
She opened her mouth to speak...but couldn't find one word to say. Her gaze lowered in defeat with an accompanying sniff.
"The pony on the table gets no second chances, so neither do we. If your nerves get the best of you right when the patient needs you the most, you'd best consider whether or not you belong here," he said with a note of finality before turning and trotting back into the operating room.
The Lance of the present stood there watching as the stress wracked, humiliated orderly bit back her tears and walked off down the hallway, slowly vanishing from sight as she left the apparent limits of the vision. He felt a deep pang of guilt. Not because he had been harsh with her, but because he was no longer the sort of pony who could tell somepony off for such mistakes. He'd lost patients before but they all had been either lost causes or the victim of the sort of unpredictable complications that the cruel randomness of life tended to dish out. Now he was the one who had killed a patient for stupid reasons. Why had he continued doing surgeries in his sleep deprived condition instead of saying something to anypony?
Soft Cure stepped out, followed by the rest of the team wheeling the patient to a recovery room. Lance lingered behind, standing beside her as she looked off in the direction of the fallen orderly with her ears lowered. "I didn't overstep my boundaries did I? Your hooves were already occupied, she was panicking, and I knew the patient would bleed out if nopony did anything."
"Technically yes, but my team and I aren't going to tell any of the higher ups if you aren't."
"I won't."
"Good. They hate unproven hooves on a patient's innards. Even if it saved somepony's life, there's likely to be litigation if word ever gets out. Now, can I ask you something?"
"Hrm?" She looked toward him, her ears perking up attentively.
"You do know it's not standard procedure to have the attending nurse scrub in and watch the surgery before they set the patient up in a recovery room, right?" he asked pointedly.
"..." She looked away from him nervously, expecting she would soon be joining the orderly in exile. "Yes."
"I've looked at your file Soft Cure, you're a tad bit overqualified for just being a nurse, care to explain that one?" he continued, maintaining an even tone.
She felt a small glimmer of hope at having not been yelled at yet. "I wasn't confident enough in my ability to handle pressure when it wasn't just a cadaver on the table, and then I heard the nursing staff here was a bit...below par, so I decided I'd be better there."
Lanced nodded. "Well it seems some part of you still aspires to more, but the bad news is you're too good at your job for me to recommend putting you elsewhere."
"I know," she said with a sigh.
"But the good news is nurse practitioners do exist. I could probably pull some strings to get you the training you need, and having a link between the surgical team and the nursing staff might ease some of the tensions there," he continued. "That is, assuming you're interested."
"..." She looked away and bit her lip uncertainly.
"I'm not going to make you do something you don't want to do though, but I can't let you keep sneaking into the OR without proper supervision and guidance either, so you have a choice to make. Now go prep the patient for recovery and find me when you've made a decision," he said in parting, the shadow of the past stepping past his present self and leaving Soft Cure behind. She hesitated a while longer before the restless look on her face resolved to a much more familiar expression of determination. But she didn't follow after him yet, trotting out of view to attend to her duties first.
The scenery burned away behind her, leaving a third 303 on the floor to sizzle out of existence...and something else that hadn't been there before. It was a trail of discarded clothing leading down the hall and around the corner. He recognized the bulk of them as parts of the nurse outfit that Soft Cure still wore during her shifts. The only exception was a familiar white lab coat lying near the corner. Lance felt the beginnings of another pang of guilt, but he mentally blocked it, having better things to do with his time now that there were no visions to impede his progress.
He opened the office door wide so he wouldn't have to waste any time opening it with the barbed nurse on his heels. This time when he approached the corner he was duly cautious, hugging the far wall to keep as much initial distance from the nurse as possible. Her panting resumed the moment they laid eyes on one another, and it only took until her very first movement toward him for Lance to turn and flee back to the office. Once safely inside he put a hoof on the doorknob, glancing to his right to double check that she was still interested before pulling the door shut and waiting, his watch growing louder by the second.
Once he heard her start scratching at the door, he turned the knob and shoved it open with all the force he could muster. The sudden push took her by surprise, and with only her back hooves on the floor she was knocked backward, leaving her to roll over and get back up while Lance galloped past. The clothes trail lead around the corner right to the master bedroom door at the end of the hall, but he still took a moment to check the doors to their home library and Fluttershy's room, both of which had broken locks. He reached the bedroom just as the nurse was rounding the corner behind him, and much to his relief the door took pity upon him and opened at his urging.
Lance gave another quiet thanks that the creatures couldn't operate doorknobs before realizing he'd once again stepped into his Cloudsdale General office, only this was a far different version from the first. There was a chalkboard completely covered in writing, with many lines of potential illnesses that had proven incorrect crossed out. Large stacks of medical books had practically buried his desk. But most striking of all were the walls. They were completely smothered in black inked notes held in place by a multitude of push pins. The chalkboard, the books, the notes, they were all leads that had gone nowhere. Every letter of every word was written in futility. The haggard doctor in the middle of the room served as the focus, every bit of hoof scribed failure pointing squarely at him as he stared mutely toward his desk. He took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder, raising a hoof to his eyes.
He flinched at the knock on his door.
"Lance? Lance are you okay?" Soft Cure's muffled voice came from outside.
...
The door opened and Soft Cure stepped in, frowning with worry as she closed it behind her. "Lance...you need to rest."
"No," he stated simply while not looking back at her.
She stepped closer. "You've been up for three days straight Lance, you need to sleep. You're not going to do her any good like this. Even Dr. Mandeus is taking time to make sure he doesn't become a mess."
"That's why I was valedictorian and not him," he answered with a growl to his voice as though his inability to keep his tone even and cold was enraging him. "Get back to your shift, nurse."
She stepped even closer, seeming to ignore the flippant failure to use her name. "Look, Lance, this isn't working, you're making no progress and you're hurting yourself."
"What makes you think I give a flying feather about hurting myself?" he said, his voice wavering noticeably as his head lowered. "Get out."
"And what makes you think we don't?"
"Why should you when I'm bucking useless, even at my best, at the time it counts most?!" he retorted, voice breaking, still not daring to face her. "Just. Leave!"
She didn't. His trusted head nurse and assistant instead dared to place a hoof on his shoulder. "Lance."
He flinched but didn't slap her hoof away. "Don't touch me," he attempted to command, his voice breaking again as his body shivered with a half restrained sob.
Soft Cure did quite the opposite. The beleaguered doctor found himself firmly in the grasp of a warm hug, and despite every professional instinct telling him to maintain his composure and remain the hospital's pillar, he couldn't do it anymore. Another painful sob escaped him as he sat there defeated in the embrace he would never admit to having so needed.
"I'll bring you a cot, pillow, and blanket. I don't care if you sleep in your office but for your family's sake get some rest. Will you do that for me?" Soft Cure asked as she nuzzled against the side of his neck and squeezed him pleadingly.
Lance attempted to answer but found himself only able to take a sharp intake of breath before shuddering in an attempt to at least keep his shameful weeping quiet.
"It's okay Lance."
The scene and the bloody 303 that had generated it burned away. Lance was standing in a bedroom again, but it wasn't the bedroom he and his wife had shared for so long. It was a fire scarred version of the bedroom he'd briefly ventured into at Soft Cure's apartment that one wine addled night. On the left wall there was a small insulation tank labeled 'LN2' linked to a familiar looking pipe by a ball valve complete with bright red handle. The bed she kept in the far left corner was cut in half lengthwise by a large metal wall marked by rust and char marks, the rightmost side giving way to iron bars spaced only just too close together for a pony's head to fit through.
He could hear Soft Cure quietly crying, like she was lying on the bed on the other side of the wall. The stab of guilt he'd fended off earlier came back full force as he trotted over to the bars and tried to look in to no avail. Lance knew better than to assume she was actually back there, but even that didn't help much. It still left him standing at those bars...pondering how much she had helped him over his career, how much she had been there for him as a friend, and all he'd done to repay her was leave her crying alone in her bedroom after something that should've never happened...then kept her at foreleg's length ever since.
Lance tore himself away from the bars. He had better things to be doing than wishing that an apology to a noise behind a wall could be valid. The small gallon tank of liquid nitrogen was clearly what he'd been looking for. From the occasions he'd used the substance before, it wouldn't have been his first choice of coolant because of how quickly it evaporated, but he could only assume the pipe was somehow insulated and cooled to prevent that happening before it struck the back side of the bust. It had to be under quite a bit of pressure too to be able to make it along the length of the pipe as well. He couldn't be sure how much of the tank was filled with the coolant and how much was filled with pressurized air, so he wasn't willing to test it out and potentially lose what was left.
There were unfortunate implications however. Now that it was apparent he needed to set the dial in the office to maximum duration, then gallop to the bedroom and open the valve, it was now also apparent that he would have to get past the barbed nurse two more times. He could no longer hear her scratching at the door so it he could assume she was back at her post. The door trick probably wouldn't work at the end of the hallway where she would likely either fall against a wall and remain on her hooves or back into his path where it would be easy to grab one of his legs. It didn't seem like he had any other choice than to try and move past her like he'd feared attempting before, but he could at least improve his chances of slipping past undetected.
Lance moved over to the door, placed his hoof on the knob, and then turned off his light. In the pitch black he slowly opened it, then took a few cautious, quiet steps out. His watch was buzzing a bit more loudly now, and he could hear the nurse's dramatically less severe idle breath ahead. Taking extreme care not to make a single sound, he pressed against the left wall and crept forward, the buzzing growing louder and the breath growing closer all the while. There was no way to look ahead and see if he had room to squeeze past so he was left to silently pray in the dark that he wouldn't feel barbs against his side as he closed in. The tension rose to near breaking point as he heard her exhale right next to him while his watch sounded like it was tearing itself apart inside. But there was no prick of a barb, and no puncturing embrace as he moved past unharmed. It took a great deal of effort not to sigh in relief.
Then one of the burned boards beneath his hooves cracked and he heard a sharp gasp directly behind him.
Without any spare time to switch his light back on he had to gallop forward into pitch black navigating on memory alone. He turned right, the lack of his suddenly running into a wall telling him he'd gone far enough prior to changing direction. Lance raised his right hoof and ran it along the wall, slowing himself a bit but giving him a way to tell where his office door was in the dark. The instant his hoof had nothing to touch he knew he'd reached the opening to the walkway across the hall from his office, and so turned left frantically feeling about for the doorknob as the panting closed in on him.
After a tiny eternity he felt it, pulling the door open and practically diving inside before trying to slam it shut. It didn't work, stopping before it could manage to close as the nurse let out a pained cry. An icy chill shot down Lance's spine as he realized the nurse had gotten close enough to hold the door open. He felt it being pulled open and redoubled his efforts to keep it closed and, more importantly, keep her pinned, as he had a feeling the pain of having a door slammed onto her repeatedly wouldn't be sufficient discouragement. His spare hoof felt about in a near panic before he felt the sharps tips of her barb covered hoof stuck in the door. He opened the door a bit wider and pushed it back, a pained grunt of his own escaping as the barbs pierced his skin before he finally managed to pull it closed. The amber pegasus stopped to catch his breath and turn his light back on, thankful that for all his trouble the dial was still there waiting for him.
There wasn't much time though so he cut his rest short. If he waited long enough for her to lose interest and stop scratching at the door he wouldn't be able to use it to bash her out of the way again. Lance turned the dial as far as it would go, restarting the electrical hum before returning to the door and repeating his earlier actions of turning the knob then putting all of his strength behind the outward push.
Unfortunately he had failed to note how the scratching noises had stopped after he had turned the knob.
The door flew open with no resistance and Lance was suddenly face to face with the nurse that had taken an anticipatory step backward this time. In that split second he knew he wasn't agile enough to move around her out of the way of the coming grievous embrace, and his momentum wouldn't let him retreat in time either. His only option was to go through her. With a second burst of power he slammed headlong into her just as she was about to grab hold of him. Lance shouted in agony as the rusted barbs covering her forelegs scraped along his back and gave him an array of shallow cuts, but she was still sent tumbling backwards out onto the walkway.
He didn't spare a second moving his flank back down the hallway as fast as he could manage, barely remembering to pull the bedroom door shut behind him before bounding to the valve and opening it. He was rewarded by the hiss of pressurized air pushing coolant through the pipe, and then the even more gratifying sound of the metallic snap of a weld seam rupturing in the room below soon after.
"Oh thank Celestia I was right," he said aloud as he stopped again to catch his breath. He could still hear the subdued sobs of his nurse from behind the wall on the far side of the room...and oddly enough even after waiting a couple minutes there was no scratching of barbs on door to interrupt it. While the barbed nurses were by no means the fastest creature he'd dealt with, he knew they weren't that slow. It occurred to him that she might have decided to stop scratching at doors entirely after it had gotten her in trouble the first time, but even as he approached the room's only exit there was no increasingly loud warning buzz from his watch. Stepping back out, there was still no sign of her. She wasn't hiding in his office either, nor was she still lying there on the walkway. He seemed to be alone upstairs...save for the sovereign on the balcony...now looking in his direction as she quite capably held her head off the ground.
The sight of his tormentor starting to visibly recover put a spring of dread in his step as he hoofed it back downstairs. Just as he had hoped, the bust had pulled itself apart, and something inside had fallen out onto the floor. It was a small triangular tablet bearing the engraved image of a pony tied to a stake over a large fire with the words 'The Faithful' carved below it. The other side was mostly blank save for a single letter L.
"Must be for the safe," he muttered as he slipped it into his saddlebag. That meant there were two more to find, probably one behind each of the other doors back in the real...well, closer to real version of his house. He returned to his 'front' door, glad to be free of the charred black mess around him.
Except that when he pulled the door open, he was greeted with more of the same. The fire damage had spread back into the house proper.