Silent Ponyville: Reunion
On Corticosteroids.
Part 14
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Perhaps, thought Lance, it would have been the wiser decision to stay out in the hallway and take his chances with the barbed nurse. The very instant he heard the familiar screech he whirled around and backed against the door in a bout of reflexive terror, hoping against hope that it was just some brace or beam settling.
But no, there she was.
The sovereign was currently lying with her hooves tucked underneath her in the center of what looked to be a large operating theater. Her plated neck brace gave one last groan as she finished raising her head to look at him, as though she had been asleep and had awoken at his intrusion. Lance stood stone still, eyes wide as dinner plates. Neither of them did anything for a few gut wrenching moments which allowed Lance's rampantly naive sense of hope to start clawing its way back into his brain bearing the idea that just perhaps she had forgotten about him.
But no, her wings promptly flared open, her jaw dropped with a hiss of steam, and she took to the air every bit as voracious for him as before.
Lance had no time to think of a plan of action, not that he could have possibly come up with one had he been given time. He'd only barely gotten away from the barbed nurse outside, what could he possibly do to get away from this monster? All he could manage was an instinctive move backwards that only accomplished pressing his rump back against the closed door. One might have expected their lives to flash before their eyes in such a situation but really, Lance had already been in a position of imminent death at the hooves of this abomination so many times now that his only thought in the fraction of a second that passed was a silent lament that there was no door 303 nearby to at least make his passing a bit less painful with a memory that would block his mind from the final ordeal he was about to endure.
Then she suddenly jerked to a stop and unceremoniously plummeted to the floor well short of her target with a loud series of clangs topped by a growl of frustration.
He was left standing there to blink in utter confusion before his frenzied brain managed to grasp the fact that he wasn't about to be annihilated. Then he saw the chains around her and the new, fairly fresh cuts that they had worn into her flesh as she had struggled to escape. They were keeping her bound to a thick iron plate that had been bolted into the floor in the center of the operating theater that would usually be occupied by an operating table. Chain, plate, bolts, and the area of the floor immediately around them were riddled with the familiar black vein pattern. Though any normal pony would have been more than adequately restrained by such measures, they didn't look like anything the sovereign couldn't power her way out of given enough time.
Yet even as she renewed her effort to struggle free now that he was right in front of her they held her back easily. She planted her hooves on the ground and pressed forward, only making the chains groan from the strain without snapping apart. She jumped back into the air and flapped her wings with all of her implacable might but merely remained hovering in the same spot for her trouble. She landed and finally turned on the chains, closing her steam powered jaw on them with more and more power until the jaw itself was the first to flinch, a chunk of metal chipping off and impacting against the wall. Nothing she could do was going to break the chain.
Lance stared on wide eyed. It couldn't be...it was impossible that it was that easy. He took a tentative step away from the door but immediately paid for it. The sound of his hoof hitting the stone floor got her attention again and no sooner had she looked back at him than the black tendril slid out from beneath her neck plates before heading straight for him. He let out a pitiable cry of terror and backed up even further this time, pressing his side against the door. The sovereign's newest bid at getting a hold of him proved be for naught though, as her tendril stopped just half a foot away from reaching him. He didn't move a muscle as she spent a final few moments straining to span the distance before realizing the futility and withdrawing the tendril as she began thrashing about with impotent rage.
Right then. As long as he stayed with his side pressed against the wall he was safe from her...not that he was planning on staying. All he had to do was move along the wall until his body was no longer holding the door shut, crack it open, and get the buck out of there as soon as the barbed nurse passed by again. He started to slowly creep forward but stopped after a single step as another impact of metal against stone rang out. A sideways glance revealed that the sovereign was lying down at the end of the length of her chains, watching him intently. He swallowed hard and resumed moving from his spot in front of the door.
Once the door was clear he spent a moment trying to choose between either risking turning around or trying to awkwardly turn the handle and pull the door open with his good leg before a glint of light on the floor just in front of the room's other, broken door caught his eye. A quick redirection of his light revealed that it was another key...another key he would probably need. Lance only hesitated a moment before starting forward along the wall again, every limp taking him farther from the exit that would get him away from her. Had he thought it over any longer he probably would've mentally talked himself out of it and taken his leave like some kind of sensible pony.
The nagging buzzing of his watch only barely avoided drowning out his slowly paced, uneven hoof falls as he moved along his narrow area of safety, and the lengthy, persistent creak of the sovereign's neck brace as she vigilantly tracked him. Even considering that his back leg was injured it still felt he was moving at an intolerable crawl, but he didn't dare to go any faster. All it would take now was just one errant step making him stumble only slightly to the side to ensure a bloody end for him. He kept his eyes forward, unwilling to let himself look at her any further. She may as well have been a precipice beneath a rickety bridge he was crossing.
Finally he was in hoof's reach of the key. Lance opened his saddlebag, plucked the key off the ground, and stashed it inside. Now he supposed he would have to do the same trip in revers-
He flinched as the door he had entered through opened behind him, causing his nerves to temporarily override his brain and force him to turn around. He was outside of the safe area and within reach of the sovereign's tendril for a fraction of a second too long, but fortunately she was just as distracted by the noise as he was...and unlike him she had a clear line of sight of the newcomer who was apparently still standing just outside. Judging from her reaction it wasn't the deaf colt, else she would have been struggling to get free of her chains for another shot if the way she had casually discarded Lance in favor of attacking him back in the apartments was any indication. But he wasn't left to wonder for long before their visitor took a tentative step inside.
Lance recoiled as he was suddenly looking at the same 'face' he'd been confronted with in the elevator when the mare poked her head inside. Save for her mouth, her face was entirely covered by a pair of angled, rusty metal visors, one above her snout and one below. Two leather straps kept them tight against her head, each one seeming to turn into living flesh that melded into the metal beneath at the threshold of each visor. Another two went around her head, though this pair remained normal, dead leather. They held her ears down, and were every bit as tight as those on the drowning mare had been. All four of the straps were connected to a central bit in her mouth that was held all the way back to her jaw bone, ripping into the corners of her lips and leaving her mouth permanently open in an agonizing faux smile. Blood was dripping from her mouth, and he quickly figured out why. From the inside of each visor protruded a metal rod, one had been punched up through her jaw, while the other had been forced right through the bone of her snout. Inside of her mouth each attached to a thick blood covered blade, turning her mouth into a hideous sort of bolt cutter. Her wounds were apparently not healing well, because from her mouth came slow but steady drips of blood.
His involuntarily grinning stalker looked at him a moment more before stepping further into the room. There was another trio of leather straps around her torso, one across her back with the other two traveling downward around her midsection. She had wings too. Their feathers had been plucked out and three bolts had been drilled through the joints in each of them. The stubby, featherless appendages were bound to her sides due to the bolts being attached to their counterparts on her other side by the aforementioned straps. Her wings gave a small twitch against their bonds periodically but other than that they remained still.
Despite all of this she was still the most normal looking creature he'd yet happened upon. Her movements weren't pained or sporadic even with all the excruciating work that had been done to her. In fact she actually carried herself quite naturally. She even had a normal beige colored coat with a light grey mane, though both were filthy with dirt and dust while her ragged mane and tail seemed to have had bits messily torn off. Aside from her somewhat strained breathing she didn't make a sound.
It was only then that Lance noticed she was strolling right toward the sovereign.
"Hey, wait, don't do that!" he advised. Despite her relative lack of deformity she was still without doubt a monster, but she was a monster he had come to depend on. Of the many lies he had fed Posey following her inexplicable revival, his trust in this creature had not been one of them. He was not eager to let her be smashed to death like one of the many drowning mares whose corpses the sovereign had left behind in the streets, or turned into a twisted bloody mass of flesh like the scavenger in the apartments.
His warning was unheeded. She was getting closer to his tormentor, who had gotten back to her hooves.
"Stop! You don't know what she'll-"
He was stopped mid sentence after failing to notice he had taken a step away from the wall in some ill considered bid to physically stop her. The feeling of a tendril merely brushing against his chest was enough to make him react as if struck, stumbling back against the wall again.
"Look at me! She did this! Don't get any...any closer to..."
Lance stopped pleading for her to retreat. It wasn't needed. His stalker was already in hoof's reach of the sovereign and had gone unharmed. Though he had only known the metal clad alicorn a short while he was fairly confident such a thing never happened unless she meant it to. All she did was spare the stalker a passing glance before turning her attention back to the amber surgeon cowering against the wall as he wondered what the hay was happening. The silent mare approached the chains that the sovereign had pulled taught, forced her jaws open with a painful effort, and bit down on one of the chains. For some reason the black vein pattern covering them retreated from the point at which the blood covered blades had closed down. Without that pattern covering it, the section of chain suddenly lost its supernatural resilience and succumbed to the encroaching blades, snapping apart.
A second wave of fear shot through him as images of the library and the blood covered chains that had been scattered about in the loft flashed through his mind; 'it' was about to get out again.
"What are you doing?! Stop it! You didn't lead me all this way just to get me killed did you?!" Lance shouted, his voice tense with terror and an edge of anger at this apparent betrayal.
The grinning stalker ignored him, taking another chain into her mouth and biting down until it snapped. With only two chains remaining the black pattern that seemed to lend the restraints their strength gave in to the futility of the situation and receded down toward the floor until it had vanished entirely. Her patience waning, the sovereign began pulling again, and this time the floor beneath the thick iron plate cracked as the bolts started breaking out. Lance wasn't going to stand around trying to convince his former friend to stop betraying him anymore, and was already limping toward the door when she starting biting into a third chain. By the time it snapped Lance had hobbled back into the hallway and closed the door behind him, as though that could stop his imminent pursuer. He of course knew better and was already trying to think of some way to escape that didn't rely on him having anything resembling agility.
It didn't take him long to remember what had happened out on the street, how she had become so fixated on him that the drowning mare had snuck up behind her. That had been sheer stupid luck, but this time he knew of a monster patrolling the very same hallways and almost exactly the path she would take. He turned to his right and began retracing the route he had seen the barbed nurse take, if he was lucky the sovereign would burst out, follow him, and not see the nurse approaching from behind. It had to work...he needed it to work.
He rounded the corner, still not hearing the telltale panting of the nurse. That was fine, she would need to be a ways away at first for his plan to work anyway. What did make him stop and briefly look back was the thunderous clattering of what sounded like hollow metal casings of some sort falling to the floor inside the theater. Lance was motivated back to motion again as soon as he heard the door he had just exited violently crack open behind him. This was it. He only hoped the barbed nurse wasn't just around the next corner ahead of him where she wouldn't possibly make it back around in time to save him. A glance over his shoulder rewarded him with the sight of the decimated door flying into the wall just before she galloped around the corner looking slightly different than before.
The armor plating that had covered the neck restraints between her muzzle and her mantle were now missing, allowing her deep sanguine colored mane to float free in the gaps of the metal framing. She was visibly faster and less burdened, her movements causing less of a cacophony of grinding, scraping and creaking. As though she had not been able to utterly destroy him easily enough before, now she was faster and would be able to get closer before he even heard her. Thankfully he didn't have anything akin to sufficient time to be properly terrified. Lance made it perhaps three more steps before he was roughly yanked off of his hooves by a familiar tendril wrapped around his midsection.
He quickly found himself held upside down with his hooves flailing uselessly up in the air, face to face with her, steam slowly seeping from the vents in her muzzle as she seemed to ponder what to do to him this time. As he felt his panic rising ever higher at being so utterly helpless in her grasp once more, he was able to keep just enough presence of mind to glance over her shoulder and see the barbed nurse moving into view behind her.
Oh no...the panting...she would hear her before she got close enough! Unless something else drowned it ou-
Lance let out a shout of pain as the sovereign suddenly tilted her head and closed her jaw down over the top of his snout before starting to squeeze, apparently having decided he didn't need half of his face anymore. In desperation he ineffectually struck at her with his fore hooves, only managing to tap her visor and perhaps ruffle a lock of her mane slightly thanks to the awkward angle. It was difficult to tell if the sound she made in response was one of annoyance, amusement, or both, but in any case he was given a brief reprieve from having his snout crushed in favor of being slammed into the wall before dropping to the floor on his side. Shortly thereafter her hoof was pinning him to the floor hard enough that he worried his ribs would crack. There was a flash of hope within him as he glimpsed the barbed nurse growing closer from his new low vantage point.
"Please! Let me go! Why are you even doing this?!" he plead as loud as he could to continue masking the sound of the approaching nurse's breathing. "You're smarter than these other ones right?! You can understand what I'm saying can't you?! Just bucking listen to me!"
She wasn't listening. As his entire attempt at talking to her was just distraction, that might've been just fine by Lance...save for the fact that her jaw was opening, her face was growing near to his, and he could hear somepony's breath quivering with anticipation inside of her muzzle. But then she stopped, her ear giving a telltale twitch of recognition. He noticed and began fumbling about in his mind for the first phrase that came to mind to shout but found his brain once more a blank slate. He may have been convincing while trying to escape but there was no way anypony would believe any attempt of his to attract her attention away from something else was genuine.
"Wh...why me?! Why do you kee-MMMMPH!" As her head moved away, her tendril wrapped around and held his mouth shut. She looked back over her shoulder and would be hard pressed to not notice what her prey had been trying to prevent her from spotting. Even though whatever face behind the visor was hidden, the look she gave as she turned back to face him made it clear she remembered the exact same incident that he remembered, and she was not going to be fooled twice.
Her tendril picked him up again and casually hurled him straight at the nurse attempting to interrupt them. Even if he had still had his wings, he had been thrown with such force that he would have never been able to change course in time. Whatever terrified noise he wanted to make in response didn't have time to make it from his brain to his mouth before hitting the intended target. His vision was a blur of darkened hallway and the occasional glimpse of light until his tumble came to a rough stop against the wall next to the Operating Room 1 door. While he tried to recover the breath that had been knocked out of him and shake the haze from his head, he was able to at least perceive two things. He'd clearly knocked the nurse for a loop, now bearing several puncture wounds as consequence, and said nurse now had a back leg stuck in the galloping sovereign's jaw.
His brain recovered about a second too late, his efforts to just get back to his hooves cut short by the same metal clad hoof pinning him down all over again. Lance winced at the loud hiss of steam before the nurse dropped to the floor, and despite the obvious danger she was still trying to get to him instead of escaping, dragging herself toward him as best she could with her fore hooves. Rather than simply pin her to the floor as well the sovereign contented herself with continually pulling her backwards with a tendril around her back leg. With much less patience than she had demonstrated with Lance, she grabbed hold of the nurse's hoof in her jaw and started slowly pulling back, forcing the joint to turn the opposite way for which it was designed. The nurse screeched in agony and tried to pull away but nothing stopped the metal clad alicorn save for losing interest once the bone snapped from the strain and moving onto another of her joints.
Lance looked on horrified, unable to escape from the torture he was being forced to watch. Fortunately the powers that were had some small pittance of mercy for him just then. He attempted to look away down the hallway, past the splintery ruins of the door to the operating theater, to door 303 that had appeared at the far end where no door had been in the first place...
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Why was it two in the morning?
Scratch that.
Why was he still conscious at two in the morning? The night before his graduation ceremony? He knew he needed sleep for such a surprisingly massive occasion, the bed was comfortable as always, and Posey was right beside him. So why wasn't he sleeping?
"Lance?"
Now he wasn't sleeping the night before his graduation ceremony and he'd woken his ten month's pregnant wife from sleep she could definitely use.
"Can you not sleep either?"
Oh...never mind.
"How could you tell I was awake?" Lance asked as he turned over to face her.
"Just the way you were breathing...it wasn't like the way you do when you're actually asleep," she replied.
He smiled for the first time that night. It was getting progressively more difficult to fool her about anything but he wouldn't have traded the sense of belong from being known so well by his loved one for the world. "I didn't wake you up did I?"
"No. I've just been...worried...all afternoon it seems like," Posey explained, looking away and pulling her half of the blanket closer. "I can't even sleep."
His first thought was that it was just hormones affecting her mood again, but experience had thoroughly taught him that dismissing her feelings just because they were resulting from chemical imbalances was never an option. Asking for some clarification though, that couldn't hurt. "Do you feel worried about anything specific or sort of just...worried?"
She had to think about that one. It had often been the case in the previous months that she would sometimes just begin to feel a certain away about nothing out of nowhere when there wasn't a more specific feeling to amplify at the time. This time however she was fairly certain she knew.
"I guess it's just because it's getting so close to my due date...ever since I went on maternity leave and left the shop to the girls I haven't had much to do and...it's kind of hard not to think about everything that could go wrong or...how many ways I could be a bad mother for her," she said while subconsciously placing a hoof on her by now quite swollen belly.
"You're still so sure it's a filly?" he asked in reply.
Posey blinked and lifted her gaze back to his face, smiling after a moment. He was obviously trying to change the subject, but thinking back briefly she concluded it was a topic that could use changing. It was sweet that he wanted to distract her, it really was. "I know I can't know for sure, but my friend Lilac has a little colt and she told me she was surprised he didn't break anything in there he was kicking so much. Our foal's been so gentle so my first guess is filly...well...that, or something's wrong..." The smile quickly faded, her mind once more pulled back into the pit of worry from which it had only begun to emerge.
"Nothing has happened that gives me any reason to think anything is wrong with our foal honey. All signs point to nothing being amiss," he gently assured her. It didn't seem to do much good though.
"But there are things that could be wrong and we wouldn't know it until she was born right?"
...
"Right?"
Lance opened his mouth to answer, but then closed it and looked away. Posey knew that look on his face. He had it whenever his medical knowledge was getting in the way of just saying the usual 'everything is fine's and 'it will be alright's that most ponies would just helpfully reply with. It had irritated her quite deeply a few times now but she had come to terms with the fact that he just hated telling lies and half truths to her when he knew better. The only problem was he simply knew better on more occasions than most ponies...and really that was very rarely actually a problem when she thought about it.
He finally sighed and looked her in the eye again. "Posey, I can't say there isn't anything that can be wrong with our foal. At this point there's only so many things that even could be wrong without us noticing though...and...well, none of them are anything we could've done anything to help with in the first place."
...
Posey's face grew even more concerned and she broke eye contact to look down at her belly again.
"The statistical chances of any of those happening though are maybe three percent at worst...most of them are even below one percent!" he quickly added as though that would somehow remedy the actual problem she had with those things even being possible in the first place.
Her only reply was another pause followed by closing her eyes and heaving a sigh, "Just please be okay..." she muttered to the little life almost done growing inside of her.
Well that was just great of him. Now she was feeling worse than ever because of him, and he was still awake at two in the morning the day of his suddenly important graduation ceremony. Perhaps her estranged mother's assessment of his worth as a husband hadn't been so far off the mark in some ways. "I hate that I'm getting so much worse at making you feel better," he confessed as he softly placed a hoof on her belly, right next to her own.
That seemed to snap her out of it a little. She was making him fight an unwinnable battle between his own pragmatic medical sensibilities and the nigh impossible to sooth worries of a soon to be first time mother whose imagination was running amok. The realization didn't make her worry any less, but she knew that wasn't quite fair to him.
"Lance, you're awake at two in the morning trying to make me feel better. That means a lot all on its own you know." She moved a little closer and gave him a small kiss of appreciation. "But I don't think it's going to work...it's just something I'm going to feel until our foal's in my hooves safe and healthy."
"You've still got a month to go though honey...I can never be completely and without a doubt sure that nothing is wrong in the slightest, but I do know it can't be good for our baby if her mother stops sleeping for four straight weeks."
...
"I'll be a good mother, right?" she asked in her own attempt to change to a topic that was a bit more inherently resolvable. She was thereafter pulled into a warm embrace at a somewhat awkward angle that accounted for her large tummy.
"You'll be a great mother, Posey," Lance replied without letting an ounce of hesitation into his voice. He didn't see the smile that came back to her face but he did feel her return the hug and snuggle against him as she decided to just accept his comfort with no second guesses this time.
"Thank you..." She didn't have to say anything more about it. They both knew why she worried in this case ,and also why it wasn't needed. Posey's mother had been a good, loving parent her whole life...up until the point where she had stood by and allowed herself to be removed from her daughter's life over an irresolvable grudge she couldn't let go. So many years spent being the best mother she could be and she had let if all go, betraying a lack of respect for her own daughter's decisions that may well have never truly been there in the first place. She desperately wanted not to do that to her own foal...ever.
But this time she was just able to give a mental shrug and think, 'So I won't.' Posey had something her mother had never had. Her lover hadn't galloped away in the night to become a regret that would shadow the rest of her life. He had stayed to become a husband and father. As long as Lance was there it was all the assurance Posey would ever need that she would be a better mother to her foal than her mother had been to her.
"I'm glad you were awake Lance...I would've-" She stopped mid sentence and blinked before pulling away from him just enough to look him in the eye. "Wait...no I'm not, what are you doing not sleeping just before your graduation!?" she gently scolded, her concern shifting from the foal inside of her to the stallion in front of her.
"Well...it's just..." He sighed and gave his forehead a brief rub with his hoof before continuing. "I don't want to ever call our foal an accident, but, it's just a fact that when I left Cloudsdale I always thought I would make sure I had a well established practice before I had kids. Now here we are a month off from being parents and I haven't been able to think of specific ways to adjust for it, and the more I think about it the worse it gets. The hours I'm going to have to put in to complete my medical training and convince the hospital staff that I'm worth attaching their reputation to as a doctor are going to be brutal, and I'll be making less than I do as a weather pony right now for a while at the same time you're having to pay other ponies to attend the flower shop for you.
"So...yeah, I'm graduating, that is great, no debating that. Magna Cum Laude. Valedictorian. I think the attention it's getting is becoming strange, especially after they announced that the princess herself would be attending for some reason, and I'm not exactly any better with public speeches in front of huge audiences than I was when I crashed into your garden, but those are their own problems and I can deal with them. I'm awake at two in the morning the night before my graduation because after that graduation I don't want to leave my wife and foal at home feeling deprived and neglected while all of her growing up happens as I'm someplace else advancing my career. You deserve better than that..." Lance gave her belly another soft pat, "...and so does she."
The little foal growing inside of her suddenly gave a gentle kick against her parents' hooves, eliciting a quiet gasp from both of them. After a silent moment they looked back to one another, smiled, and then shared a soft chuckle before turning their attention on their foal.
"Sorry we woke you," Lance offered in apology.
"So you think she's a filly now too huh?" Posey teased, always adoring when her husband would talk to their unborn child.
"Well...I obviously don't know, but 'it' was somewhat of a demeaning pronoun so I decided to just go with your guess," he replied, waiting until he felt another tiny kick before retracting his hoof. "Besides, she doesn't even know what we're saying. I doubt if she turns out to be a he that we're going to have to worry about some complex suffered from listening to his parents talk about him like he were a girl in utero."
"No, we'll have to worry about a complex suffered from listening to her father talk about how she's too dumb to understand us in utero," she said with a snicker and a playful bat at his shoulder.
"Hey, savor it, before we know it we'll be spelling words out when we don't want her to know what we're saying. Then she's going to learn how to read and we'll never be able to slip anything past her again," he mused in response before they settled into a brief, comfortable silence that began to wear away the two sets of individual doubts that had kept them from sleep.
...
"Lance...you're up at two in the morning worrying yourself half insane about your child's future. I think that's a good indicator you're going to be a good dad...even if you can't think of a solution right this very second," she assured him as she pulled up the blanket that had been nudged downward by their movements then nuzzled her head back into her pillow.
"Yeah...we won't be perfect, but I think we'll both make for good parents."
"Night...Poppa," Posey said with a tired smile before her ability to speak was decimated by a large yawn. Lance couldn't help but repeat the procedure, first feeling a new sort of pride at his new monicker, and then succumbing to the mysteriously contagious nature of yawns.
"Heh...night, Momma."
------
The nurses' neck was in the grip of her jaw now, producing a steady series of sickening pops as the pressure slowly increased. Her body was utterly broken, limbs bent in all manner of unintended directions, her breathing coming in even faster, desperate gulps of air. She was twitching uncontrollably, her brain clearly having been robbed of the means to coordinate her movements even the least bit. Black blood that continually seeped from a number of cuts and stab wounds pooled on the floor beneath her and covered the sovereign's horn. With one last gut churning crack the flesh and bone in her jaw gave up and collapsed against the unrelenting onslaught. The nurse's body gave one last hard convulsion and then she was still. The sovereign lifted up her latest kill by the neck, glared down at Lance for a moment, and then casually tossed the carcass aside as a final measure of rubbing the failure of his plan in his face.
Before he could even finish blinking the vision away he let out another cry of pain as her tendril wrapped around and picked him up by his mutilated back leg. He was left dangling in the air, letting out a muffled scream through his grit teeth as the whole of his weight pulled down on his leg. She was thinking again, having perhaps changed her mind about the removal of half his face. By now though...it didn't really make a difference to him. The nurse had shown him that just staying away from the monsters at all was now an almost impossible task in his condition. Even if whatever horrible thing she decided to do to him didn't outright kill him, he was sure to simply be killed off by another monster he couldn't escape from afterward. Lance just closed his eyes, and tried to bear the pain in his leg while a headache from all the blood rushing to his head steadily built. Whether he lived or died now wasn't in his control...perhaps it had never been in the first place. The sovereign would do whatever she wished with him and he was helpless to do anything about it at all. Somehow there was comfort in accepting this powerlessness.
Then she dropped him.
The brief free fall and the sharp impact served to snap him out of his resignation, the compulsion to flee and live suddenly able to reach his brain again. With a tremendous effort he was able to get to his hooves and attempt to take a step before falling back down the floor. After having been batted around, tossed into a monster, subjected to some sort of hallucinatory memory, hung upside down until his head hurt, and dropped to the ground again, he wasn't going to be just getting up and leaving. Just in case he was able to shake off the mental haze, there was also a metal clad hoof pinning his tail to the floor.
He felt the jagged edge of her muzzle press against his side before she forcefully rolled him onto his back. Lance looked up at her with eyes widened by confusion over why she had not just killed him and terror at the alternate possibilities that were all screaming through his mind as loudly as his watch was buzzing. She took her time, head moving slowly as her gaze traced a path over his body as though she were inspecting him. By the time his heart was about ready to burst out of his chest from the excruciatingly tense moments of nothing happening she had come to a realization she was none too pleased with, expressing as much with a angry snarl as she wrapped her tendril around his neck and slammed his back into the wall.
Lance choked and gagged for a moment before realizing he could still breathe, if only just enough to remain conscious. She took a step towards him as he gasped for breath, his lungs burning with need for oxygen to maintain his ongoing state of panic that was only made worse when she lowered her head and began moving her horn in the direction of his neck. Though he couldn't see the black blood drenched metal spike he most definitely felt its sharp tip press against his throat. It was all he could do to just suppress the urge to try and struggle free so that he wouldn't accidentally move his neck forward even the least bit and end himself. It didn't pierce his skin, but enough pressure was behind it to make it hurt as it moved downward. He could hear her again...the breath in her mask quivering with an unnerving delight as she drew out whatever mutilation was about to be inflicted upon him.
He once again screamed in agony through grit teeth as she applied enough pressure to begin slicing into his flesh as her horn continued to lower. Lance couldn't tell how deep it was cutting or if he was in danger of bleeding to death all over again. All he could feel as the white hot fire spreading outward from the progressively lengthier cut. One by one he felt the bandages around his chest go loose as they were cut through until finally he felt the blade pull away from him, leaving him once again with eyes clenched shut trying to stave off the pain. He reflexively pulled in a deep breath as the tendril withdrew and let him drop forward to the floor again. Before he managed to look up he heard her let out a strange sound that started off as a soft distorted moan but quickly turned into a frustrated growl. After he looked up he got a short glimpse of his red blood sharing space with the black blood on her horn and visor before she gave him another 'tap' across the face that immediately knocked one of his teeth loose.
By the time his head stopped swimming and his brain could comprehend what his eyes were seeing again, all that was left to see of her was an ethereally flowing, dark crimson tail that was almost immediately hidden around the corner with the rest of her. Then the pain came back full force. Lance groaned and fell over onto his side, weakly spitting his tooth out along with a the generous portion of blood that had accompanied it. He would need a mirror to see the full damage but a cautious feel with his hoof made him think the wound down his chest hadn't done any truly vital harm. It was just incredibly painful.
He didn't feel like he was at all in danger of passing out again, but at the same time he wasn't going to be getting up for a few minutes. Assuming nothing else dangerous came along he hoped to catch his breath and let the pain and bleeding ease up a bit. Lance had ample time then to ponder a question he had already asked dozens of times but that seemed just then to be more relevant than ever before.
What the hay just happened?