Not Ron Drawde

by Petrichord

2.1 "Above all, don't lie to yourself..."

“H-hap...happy birthday?”

Wispy lights flickered in front of Starlight Glimmer’s eyes. She blinked, trying to pinpoint the source, but everything was fuzzy. They looked like candles. She could have sworn they looked like candles, but there were shapes in the way, dark shapes…

“Doctor, she’s waking up.”

“Dose her again. We don’t want her conscious during the surgery.”

“What if she’s overdosed?”

“That’s why anesthesiologists exist. Page one over if you don’t think you can get the correct amount.”

Starlight Glimmer blinked again, but the lights refused to come into focus. Voices babbled around her, unfamiliar and strange. She tried to talk, but her mouth refused to cooperate with her; her tongue felt like tissue paper, her teeth cardboard.

“Whose...Whose birthday is it?” Starlight tried again. “M-m-m-mine?”

“Syringes?”

“Red tray. Do you know how much to give her?”

“Yes, doctor. Administering…”

Starlight felt a prick in the crook of her foreleg. The lights bobbed lazily, then darkened; the shapes in front of her eyes dissolved and spread until everything was black.

“Ha-appy birthday to me…”

************************************

Starlight Glimmer opened her eyes.

There was only one light this time, a blinding and all-consuming white. The dark shapes were still there, but smaller, lurking at the periphery of her vision.

“...Vitals…”

“...Get a sedative…”

“Hnnnnngh,” Starlight Glimmer groaned. “Nnnnnnnhh.”

“...Ministering…”

Everything went black.

********************************************

Starlight Glimmer opened her eyes. For a second, she wondered if her eyelids had been sewn shut. Panic welled up in her throat and her heart kicked into overdrive until she realized that she had opened her eyes, and that the shapes emerging in front of her were the outlines of objects in a dark room.

She waited for her eyes to adjust and her heart to slow down.

It wasn’t working.

Her heart didn’t want to slow down. As something unidentifiable and hard pressed into her back, from her skull to her hind hooves, Starlight Glimmer’s body refused to accept any of her conscious input at all. Her breathing stayed fast and shallow, sweat trickled down her neck and a dull thumping pulse continued to beat near her ears. Her brain grasped at disconnected sounds in an attempt to jumble them into words, and to attempt to jumble the words into sentences, and to jumble those sentences into a series of instructions on how to make her heart slow down and my breathing I can’t control my breathing what is wrong with me am I going to die.

Her brain wasn’t working properly. The words weren’t working properly, her heart wasn’t working properly, her nerves weren’t working properly, nothing-

Abruptly, her breathing slowed down. Her heart rate dropped two notches and set itself back into a normal tempo. The thumping went away. She didn’t have conscious control over any of this, and the idea that her problem had resolved itself without any of her input was as alarming as the idea that her problem had started without any of her input.

Starlight Glimmer felt perfectly fine, and also utterly afraid.

Part of her wanted to sleep. That part of her was the exhausted part, the part that had been relieved when her body finally stopped malfunctioning on her, the part of her that wanted to ignore that her brain wasn’t working properly and shut her eyes again.

The other part of Starlight Glimmer forced her to stay awake.

As she stayed awake, the shapes revealed themselves to her. Blocks connected to cylinders, little v-shaped joints linked squares to desk tables, cables threaded themselves between a nearly uncountable amount of nooks and crannies. The details continued to pick themselves out of the darkness, and eventually Starlight Glimmer could make out microscopes, monitors, a large rack of tiny vials.

She was in a hospital.

It took her a few more seconds to realize that the pressure on her back was actually a bed. A hospital bed. The hospital bed that she must have been lying down in.

She was a patient in a hospital, Starlight realized.

It was an odd sort of thing to take comfort in, Starlight recognized, but at least she knew why her body wasn’t working properly, why she had to decipher the shapes on her own, why her brain couldn’t articulate thoughts into sounds into speech into thoughts, ad infinatum.

Exhausted from piecing everything together, Starlight Glimmer passed out.

*****************************

Starlight Glimmer woke up.

A faint breeze blew through an open window as sunlight tickled her right cheek. The room around her was painted in warm green, not unlike a field of summertime clover. It was also filled with machinery that beeped and chirped and piped and buzzed like a horde of mechanical locusts, which ruined any calming effect that the paint job may have had.

In front of Starlight’s bed was a nurse, who appeared unfazed by this juxtaposition as she scribbled notes onto a clipboard.

Starlight cleared her throat.

This did a much better job of fazing the nurse, who looked up sharply enough that Starlight Glimmer winced, anticipating whiplash that never came.

A practiced smile bloomed onto the nurse’s pink face. “Good morning, Starlight Glimmer. How are you feeling?”

A cursory glance around the room revealed nothing else of particular notice. “I’m in a hospital, aren’t I? Just to make sure.”

“Golden Shield Central Hospital, Miss. Princess Celestia’s personal wing.”

“Canterlot?”

“Yes. Now, I understand that you probably have a lot of questions-”

Starlight tried to straighten up, and the world immediately threw itself out of focus. Gravity twisted in on itself as pain surged up to obliterate her skull. The beeping of the machines around her erupted into a full concerto, and Starlight’s eyes watered as she collapsed back onto the bed.

“Miss Glimmer!” The nurse stood up, hoof reaching for what was unmistakably a pager.

“Don’t.” Starlight gritted her teeth. “I don’t need a sedative. I get the message. Is there anything else I shouldn’t be doing?”

The nurse paused, swallowed audibly and slid her hoof away from the pager. “You understand that I’m supposed to follow procedure, Miss Glimmer?”

“Yeah. I was sort of wondering why you didn’t ignore me and page for help anyway.”

“I can still do that, if you need assistance-”

“I don’t. Really.” Sweat trickled down Starlight’s cheek. “...This must be one of those hospitals that has VIP treatment, or something.”

“It is Golden Shield Central Hospital, miss Glimmer. And like I said, this is Princess Celestia’s personal wing.”

“That...doesn’t mean anything to me. No offense. Honest.” Starlight fought off the urge to shake her head. “I’m not really part of the Canterlot area. I’m guessing that you mean “this is a really fancy hospital,” though. Right?”

The nurse nodded. “The best in the city, miss.”

“And I’m guessing that means that you can’t do things i tell you not to do.”

The nurse shook her head. “To some extent. But if you appear to be making decisions detrimental to your well-being, or if you don’t appear to be in the capacity to-”

“I get it. Look, I’m not interested in causing trouble. I’ve got…” Starlight paused. “...I’ve got enough questions that I don’t feel like counting them all up at the moment. But I know that you’ve probably got some sort of standard procedure script to read off to all of your patients. But I’d also like to believe that we’re both grown adults, so how about this: I won’t do anything stupid and get myself into trouble, and you do away with the script and engage me in some straight talk. Okay?”

The nurse hesitated.

“Honesty isn’t going to hurt my well-being, nurse. I know Twilight might have told you horror stories about how fragile my ego is, but I promise that it isn’t that fragile.”

“...I’m really not supposed to speak frankly to you.”

“But you’re not supposed to refuse the requests of the patients, are you?”

“You’re putting me in an uncomfortable position, miss Glimmer.”

“I’m not going to ask difficult questions, promise. I just want to make sure that I’m getting the unfiltered truth, okay?”

“O...kay. Sure. I’ll bite.” The nurse straightened up. “So what do you want to know?”

“Well, what’s your name?”

“Mine? Nurse Summer Poppy, miss.”

“Call me Starlight. Can I call you Summer, or would that be awkward?”

“I’m okay with it.” Summer Poppy smiled. “It’s a bit of a relief, really. We’re encouraged to ask patients to treat us casually, but some of them never refer to us as anything but ‘nurse’ or ‘doctor.’”

“You’re asked to do that so the patient will trust you, right?”

“Exactly.”

“So…Princess Celestia’s personal wing, huh? Is this her personal hospital bed, or something?”

“No. That’s just the name they use for this wing. The best wing in the best hospital in the city.”

“Very Important Patients?”

“Very Important Patients.”

“So who else is here? Is it just me?”

“No. Miss Fluttershy and Mister Soarin have also been admitted. They’re in separate rooms.”

“What happened?”

Summer Poppy shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”

“I thought I just-”

“Your friends wanted to explain it to you face-to-face. I was specifically told not to tell you.”

“Wonderful. So now I’ve got to convince Twilight to talk to me straight, and I get to worry about what happened to them.” Starlight paused. “So, uh. Speaking about that. You saw how I, like, tried to move more than my head, and how basically everything was utterly painful until i stopped trying?”

Summer nodded. “Please don’t do that again, by the way.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. What exactly happened to me?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Not the incident. Just the damage. Can you at least tell me about that?”

The nurse took a deep breath. “Severe abrasions all over everything from the neck down. Legs and ribs broken in multiple places, and fractured in virtually all the places that weren’t broken. Internal bleeding, but no severely ruptured internal organs, which is a miracle in and of itself. We had to sedate you for an extensive period of time while we performed major reconstructive surgery. It’s probably going to take you a while to recover, but your vitals are looking much better than expected, all things considered.”

“Anything to my heart?”

“No.”

“My spine?”

“No.” Summer frowned. “Why?”

Starlight sighed. “There was this...thing that happened last night. My heart started racing.”

Summer reached for a clipboard. “Any particular stimulus that might have caused it? Did you try to sit up?”

“No. I opened my eyes and tried to figure out where I was. It was completely dark, so i didn’t know exactly where, but I’m not scared of the dark in particular. Ask Twilight.”

“I believe you.” Summer grabbed a pencil in her mouth and scribbled down notes for roughly half a minute before dropping the pencil back on a nearby desk. “Your biochemistry’s trying to correct itself. We’ll have to change around your medication intake a bit and see if that helps.”

“So it isn’t my heart?”

“No.”

“And it isn’t my spine?”

“No.”

Starlight paused. “You know, uh. While my heart was racing, I tried to remember how to calm myself down, but I couldn’t think properly. Did something happen to my brain?”

“There’s no damage to your major neurological structure. Your arcanocerebral cortex suffered massive damage-”

“What?” Starlight’s eyes bulged as she fought back the urge to raise her hoof. “Oh, no. No no no no no. Did something happen to my horn?”

“I’m really sorry, Starlight-”

“Please tell me it’s okay. Please tell me things are going to be okay. Lie to me if you have to.”

“I won’t have to. You’re going to be okay. It’s going to take a while, is all.” Summer Poppy sighed. “It was really touch-and-go during surgery. Normally, a unicorn with magic at your caliber would be, uh…”

“The truth, this time.”

“...would be dead. Would have their brains liquified inside their skull. Whoever taught you how to rein in your magic reflexively and subconsciously did a commendable job. Like I said, though: touch and go. If everything goes perfectly from here on out, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of months for you to get some basic magical functions working again.”

Starlight exhaled. “So my horn…”

“Completely snapped off.”

Starlight Glimmer’s blood froze. “What?”

“A fair amount of your reconstructive surgery were attempts to reattach it to your skull and rewire it to your synaptic web. We believe we were mostly successful, but all we can do at the moment is wait for it to naturally heal. I’m really sorry, Starlight.” Summer Poppy smiled sadly at her. “If our optimal projections follow through, It should take a little over seven months for you to be at full magical capacity.”

“And...And under normal projections?”

“It’s quite likely you’ll never be able to use magic again. You might want to talk to your loved ones about that possibility, just in case.”